The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins (Illinois Medieval Studies)

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Summary: The Hate Literature of Medieval Byzantines
Review: This is a remarkable work by an eminent Byzantinist who has specialized in the anti-Latin polemical literature which was to have a profound effect in poisoning relations between medieval Latins and Byzantine Greeks and thereby impeding the union of the Churches.Such religious literature emanating largely from monastic circles and enumerating the abhorrent "errors" of the Latins proved to be far more influential in demonizing them than the works of professional theologians dealing with major dogmatic issues (such as the famous'Filioque'dispute) fueling the Schism between Rome and Constantinople. What were the "errors" which imbedded themselves so deeply in the Byzantine psyche that they caused such fanatical hostility towards Westerners and a massive resistance to the union of the Churches? The Latins were guilty of pillaging and looting during the first 3 Crusades and the horrific sacking of Constantinople, but pious Byzantines were further assured by religious propaganda that the Latin "heretics" were, in addition, vulgar barbarians, alien to refined manners, indecent, and "utterly filthy in their failure to distinguish between sacred things, people, actions, and profane ones". Byzantine grievances were many: Latins ate unclean foods, had contact with bodily excretions, spit near the altar, consecrated a new pope by laying the hands of a dead pope upon him, used icons for toilet seats, etc., etc. These Lists of Latin errors constituted a fascinating species of Hate-literature, but they had a special effect on the Byzantine masses in making them fear, despise, and contemn their conquerors as well as the Byzantine unionists seeking to overcome "cross-cultural misunderstandings" exacerbated by chauvinistic and xenophobic polemics. Not all Byzantines, of course, fell victim to such irrational propaganda but such Lists clearly manifested "the most extreme manifestation of anti-Latin sentiment in Byzantium". Interestingly, this scholarly study reveals that the Byzantine theologians who contributed to the Lists evidenced some serious confusion concerning doctrine and discipline and what constituted necessary and optional elements of the faith. Dr.Kolbaba utilizes the insights of cultural anthropologists and studies in the sociology of religion to analyze in some depth the psychology of medieval Greeks whose Byzantine orthodoxy and orthopraxis was fixated in liturgical and ritual forms regarded as sacred and immutable. Students of Byzantine history, and Catholics and Eastern Orthodox seeking to understand the dynamics of the Byzantine Greco-Slav Schism will find this an enlightening study that can only further genuine ecumenism.