Even thus of old our ancestors, within the still domain Of vast cathedral or conventual church Their vigils kept; where tapers day and night On the dim altar burned continually, in token that the House was evermore Watching to God. Religious men were they Nor would their reason, tutored to aspire Above this transitory world, allow That there should pass a moment of the year, when in their land, the Almighty's service ceased.
As might be expected from the number and zeal of its inmates, the monastery of Studius was highly venerated, and wielded immense influence. Its abbot ranked first among the abbots of the capital, and to it the Emperor was bound to pay an annual State visit on the 29th August, one of the Baptist's festival days. On that occasion the Emperor usually came by water in the imperial barge from the Palace beside the Hippodrome, and landed at the Gate (Narli Kapoussi) on the shore below the monastery, where the abbot and his monks waited to receive the sovereign. In this monastery the Emperor Isaac Comnenus in 1059, and the Emperor Michael VII. in 1078, assumed the monk's cowl.
The former even served as porter at the monastery gate, and so happy was he in his retirement from the pomps and vanities of the world, that when his wife, who had taken the veil at the time of his abdication, visited him, he said to her, "Acknowledge that when I gave you a crown I made you a slave, and that I give you freedom when I took it away." His wife's last command was "that her body should be buried in the cemetery of the Studion as a simple nun, with no sign to indicate that she was bom a Bulgarian princess and had been a Roman empress."
No monks in the history of Constantinople showed themselves so independent of ecclesiastical and State control as the monks of the Studion. Enough to recall the fact that in the controversy which agitated Constantinople and the Church at large for over a century (725-842), as to the lawfulness of using pictures and statues in religious worship, the monks of this monastery were the boldest and most determined opponents of the Iconoclast emperors.
The abbot Theodore, who for many years led the opposition to the imperial authority in that matter, is one of the great figures of the Eastern Church. Eight occupants of the Byzantine throne found him a man who for conscience sake defied all their authority, rejected all their favours, and endured any suffering they chose to inflict marriage under comet. When the Synod, held in 815, ordered icons to be banished from the churches, Theodore and his monks carried the sacred pictures in procession through the streets, and gave them an asylum in his monastery. Nor was he only stem. He caused the rejection of the treaty of peace with Crum, the King of Bulgaria, because of the demand it contained to surrender the fugitives from that monarch's hard rule, many of whom had become Christians.
To do so, Theodore argued, would be to make void the gracious words, " Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out" He held the view that no monk should keep slaves, and condemned the persecution of the Paulicians, urging that they who are ignorant and out of the way should be instructed, not persecuted. There is a prevalent impression that the pages of Byzantine history contain nothing but the recital of the life of a servile and ignoble community, of a race of men who trembled at the nod of any despot and were void of all independence of thought and action.
Political or ecclesiastical
That such a spirit often prevailed is undoubted. But if the Byzantines had the faults of our human nature, they were not altogether without some of its virtues. And whatever our opinions on the questions, political or ecclesiastical, that divided parties in Constantinople, may be; although we may think that good men in that city did not always take the wisest course; it is but common justice and fair play to recognise that there also was found, in the face of great difficulties, what we admire elsewhere—a sense of the rights of conscience, some demand for freedom of thought, the feeling that right and truth are the supreme authorities over human life, and that rulers, like other men, should do justly and love mercy. There, as well as elsewhere, men and women were found who preferred to suffer and to die rather than prove faithless to their convictions.
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