Un nuovo inizio. La nascita dell’Ortodossia dopo la restaurazione delle immagini (843)

The Restoration of the images in 843 is celebrated by the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, whose annual public reading constitutes both the triumph of the Orthodox and the condemnation, under the weight of anathemas, of the Iconoclasts. After a first part devoted to the Synodikon, the communication is devoted to another text for liturgical use, the Euchologion and its revision after 843. The chronological limit is represented by the second patriarchate of Photius (877-886). Looking at the entire period in the forty years, which elapsed from 843 to the second patriarchate of Photius, we can easily see that at the time, the affirmation of Orthodoxy is realized in positive on one side, but in negative of the other, emphasizing the differences, better the otherness, with the Iconoclasts in the first place, but very soon with other religious, sectarian, heretical or simply non-Christian forms. In this way a new reality emerges in black and white, in which grey areas are no longer allowed: there is only Orthodoxy versus error, heresy. In 16th-century Western Europe during the Counter-Reformation era, the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, and the clear differentiation of religious denominations, involved the repression and in some cases the annihilation of what was found “in the middle “, or “on the side”. In this way, old forms of “cosmic Christianity”, agrarian cults, superstitions (and on the other hand many manifestations of philosophical libertinism) are erased, under the accusation of heresy or witchcraft (I am thinking in this connection of the now classic studies by Carlo Ginzburg). Religious reality, and also what we can call “the heretical fact”, in Byzantium in the 7th-8th centuries and during Iconoclasm was characterized by obvious persistence, beyond the reading of heresiologists, of groups - especially in Asia Minor - that preserved archaic forms and systems, fossil remains, often with a Judeo-Christian flavour. We continually find names: Montanists, Quatordecimans, Sabbatians, Phrygians, all destined to disappear during the period that interests us here. For example, we find the last mention of the Quatordecimans in a homily by Photius, which deals with their reception in the Church. After the time that interests us here, these archaic religious forms seem to have completely disappeared. This Byzantine “old Catholicism” - to use the words of Jean Gouillard - seems, on the whole, to have hardly survived as such the religious restoration of the ninth century. Western religious Europe, after the conflict between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, moved towards the modernity by erasing the traces of more archaic beliefs and practices, Byzantium for its part had advanced towards its “modernity”, by operating from a very similar way