Robert Nelson

Byzantium From the Inside Out

No matter how smart we are, we end up grappling with ideas that resist understanding. In this book, Byzantium is identified as the archetypical civilization that nurtured its innermost doubts. It shows how religious dogma was riddled with inscrutable quandaries, where the highest imaginable entity-God-is considered incomprehensible. Byzantine writers develop a doctrine of divine knowledge as a holy hiatus, and many of the features of Byzantine culture that look odd or irregular to modern eyes are expressions of a religious outlook that venerates a God who cannot be grasped.From this perspective, Byzantium From the Inside Out solves many puzzles. Why did Byzantine artists paint pictures where spatial recession points the wrong way? Why did they create mosaics and icons with a gold backdrop when it negates space? Why were the faithful so terrified of a worm that chewed their flesh in the grave after death? Why did Byzantine people sigh so much, and why did they speculate about what people did not say rather than what they did say? And why were they constantly reproaching themselves?Beginning with what is special about Byzantium, the book reveals how incomprehensibility became a dimension of later aesthetics. The study of this inside-out civilization gives non-Byzantinists a new reason to look back to Byzantium, where the aesthetics of incomprehensibility were born. Byzantium From the Inside Out uses philological methods to support its theories, but it does not demand a knowledge of Greek and is written in accessible language.