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Three centuries-the sixth, seventh, and eighth-were decisive in giving a distinctive shape to the spirituality of the Byzantine church: the distinctive spirituality that was inherited in the ninth and tenth centuries by the Slav nations as they embraced Christianity in its Orthodox Byzantine form. In this brief article I would like to outline some of the features of this spirituality by taking, in turn, a figure from each of these three centuries: Dionysios the Areopagite (c.500), from the sixth century; St Maximos the Confessor (580-662), from the seventh; and St John of Damascus (c.655-c.750), from the eighth. But first it might be useful to sketch in, very briefly, the history of the Byzantine church in this period.
The Byzantine empire thought of itself as the enduring part of the Roman empire. The term "Byzantine" is a very recent coinage. The sixth century saw the recovery of the Byzantine empire after the fifth century, in which the western provinces had slipped away from Byzantine control and become subject to various Germanic peoples, who formed separate kingdoms: the Visigoths in Spain, the Franks in Gaul, the Ostrogoths in Italy, and the Vandals in North Africa. The Byzantine recovery of the sixth century was imperfect-North Africa was recovered, as was Italy, after a long and bloody war, and the Byzantines established a toehold in Southern Spain-but nevertheless the reign of Emperor justinian I (527-65) saw a recovery of the ideal of the Roman or Byzantine empire, with this ideal now taking on a distinctively Christian form. Perhaps the greatest symbol of this recovery was the great church justinian built in Constantinople, dedicated to the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, which is still standing today. This church seemed like a microcosm, a miniature of the cosmos itself, its huge dome seemingly floating over the enclosed space of the church, itself flooded by light, as heaven forms a canopy over the earth. justinian's vision did not last long, however, for the seventh century saw both the Persians and then, more permanently, the Arabs invade the eastern and southern provinces of the Byzantine empire, leaving Byzantium little more than the capital city itself, with provinces in Asia Minor ravaged by Arab incursions and most of what we now call Greece settled by...