Sailing from Byzantium
Brookhiser, Richard
............................................................................................................................................................................. Richard...
...In place of autocracy and Roman law, he would have to rummage among such notions as democracy, socialism, and natural rights...
...and the impact they are having on the nation's political life...
...America is the last, best hope of the earth we know...
...But we cannot truly share its life unless something of the era we seek to retrieve still lives in us—unless, in a sense, it is still a part of our present...
...The Constantinople of the Byzantines—or the Romans, as they styled themselves to the very end—lasted longest of all...
...Istanbul, like Rome, is an imperial city...
...There is a mosaic of him in the church today, wearing a bright, bulbous turban (in their final eclipse, the Byzantines adopted Turkish fashions...
...The Gothic succeeds by the use of light and darkness, 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 by the seeming defiance of gravity and the suggestion of vast spaces...
...Unlike Rome, the transitions between the phases of its past have been swift and violent, with little continuity between them...
...A Turkish army took it in 1453...
...Liberty, as we know it, would be extinguished, and the form in which it revived, unrecognizable...
...Savior is small and perfect...
...The interval of time between the two—eleven centuries—is almost in-comprehensible, as a measure of social duration...
...America is not, as Lincoln claimed, the last, best hope of earth...
...10 East 53rd Street, New York 10022 It is easy to examine the proportions of Hagia Sophia, since they are almost all that remains...
...Others—Arabs, Normans—took their bits and pieces before they were finally stopped...
...It is also the most interesting today...
...At its greatest extent, in the sixth century, the Byzantine Empire stretched from Spain to Egypt...
...Big Brother's victory, when it came, was total and final...
...The impulse to human freedom would revive, in some form or other...
...Byzantium is a way the West didn't go...
...The 'kirks did not whitewash them, as they usually did, but only covered them with wooden partitions...
...Hopeful words, writ-ten a few months before he began work on .1984...
...Savior depicts him, is a young middle-aged man in the fullness of his vigor, with stern eyes and brows—a dispenser of justice, not a sufferer of injustice...
...Instead of a Universal Patriarch and a Priest-Emperor, Peer of the Apostles, he would confront Jerry Falwell, Bishop Moore, and John Cardinal O'Connor...
...We can, by tremendous efforts of study and empathy, think our way back to parts of the past...
...The ground is strewn with a lit-ter of locks—the broken bonds of death...
...Their additions are as unsightly as their obliterations...
...Modern Istanbul has been for sixty years the chief city of a secular, nationalistic republic, kept in order by a business-like military...
...George Orwell's book, whose title has finally obsolesced, was also about extinction...
...The huge, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or, if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society...
...The crusaders dragged its icons in the mud...
...When this vision becomes too hypnotizing, you may retreat outside, where the Turkish Automobile Club has planted trees and painted the neighborhood...
...It is an adequate building, nothing more, with all the emotional force of a granary or an airplane hangar...
...In the space of an hour, the male captives were bound with cords, the females with their veils and girdles...
...The church of St...
...if our "values" are eternal things, like geometric theorems, or the spectrum of colors, which will persist whatever happens to the United States of America, or to "Western civilization...
...Constantinople suggests something in between...
...Outside the entrance to Hagia Sophia is a teahouse in a shaded garden, stacked with architectural rubble...
...If the Soviet system is mellowing, or converging with ours...
...He is a picture of power, love, and impatience...
...In this important new book, two seasoned political professionals provide the first full-scale assessment of these re-structured and re-invigorated parties: the forces that shaped them...
...So which is it...
...the Byzantines built...
...It was the cathedral of Constantinople, dedicated on Christmas Day, in the year 538, at the height of Byzantine power...
...Buildings may survive that long, or bristle cone pines—not human institutions...
...The emperor Constantine made the city capital of half his empire in 330 A.D...
...A long succession of enemies tried to whittle it away...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 23...
...The patron of the work was a statesman and dilettante, Theodore Methochides...
...He offers a model of the church, the size of a big toy, to the Virgin...
...the prelates with the porters of the church...
...Orwell the journalist was right...
...without Aristotle and Aquinas, or Guelphs and Ghibellines, or the wars of England and France and their nationalistic heroes—King Harry, Joan of Arc...
...This state of things, Burnham warned, was already upon us...
...What 'would be the result of a world, responding to the Soviet magnetic field (or the Third World's, or some combination" of both...
...Savior in Chora (still known to cab-drivers as Kariye Jami, or Kariye Mosque) lies in sight of the Theodosian walls...
...The park also has an iron gazebo, Victorian and absurd, a present from Kaiser Wilhelm II...
...No empire, not even a slave-empire, is immortal...
...BASIC BOOKS, INC...
...Between them strides Christ the resurrector, hauling them from their tombs with a firm, irresistible grip...
...It is a commonplace of Orwell scholarship that the idea of 1984 was not original...
...Savior dates from that midwinter spring...
...If you want to study a big building gone wrong, you can walk across a little park to the Blue Mosque...
...Major credit cards accepted...
...But the Byzantine Christ, at least as St...
...When Justinian the Great, who had commissioned it, first saw it, he is supposed to have exclaimed, "Solomon, Solomon, I have beaten you at last...
...Historical consciousness, which is a modern invention, has persuaded us to think of history as an enormous buffet, whose courses are always available...
...Its classical shapes—right angles and circles—are so perfectly proportioned and arranged, it can be grasped in one overwhelming glance...
...There must be beautiful mosques in the world, but this isn't one of them...
...Adam and Eve, who brought death into the world, come to life first—Adam a noble, ruined old man, Eve a failed Mary in red...
...Byzantium is our easiest access to real strangeness...
...The BASIC issue is POLITICAL PARTIES RE-FORMED A decade ago, political commentators across the spectrum were sounding the death knell of America's two-party system...
...This work will contribute to the revival of careful and sympathetic study of American party life:' –THEODORE LOWI, Cornell University $1795 at bookstores, or direct from the publisher...
...The irony of Orwell's Burnham borrowings is, of course, that when he had considered The Managerial Revolutionin his own persona, as a socialist journalist and reviewing hack, he had scorned it for its gloomy determinism...
...History, and men, never return to exactly the same spot...
...The building is desecrated, a shell...
...Between the Crusaders' sack in 1204 and the final Turkish siege, the Byzantine empire shrank to a mini-state, about the size and importance of Belgium...
...feel confident that the book will be equally useful and enlightening to the academician and the political practitioner' —CHARLES T MANATT former chairman, Democratic National Committee "Solid evidence for those of us who have long believed in the resurgence of political parties...essential reading for students of the political process:' –WILLIAM E. BROCK, III, former chairman, Republican National Committee A splendid performance...
...Arabic calligraphy can be a beautiful thing when it is hand-sized...
...The senators were linked with their slaves...
...Thrkish soldiers came in-stead, to lead them into slavery...
...But in that period of political impotence, it experienced a cultural renaissance...
...They seem surprised, maybe still half asleep...
...Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, is huge and perfect...
...Methochides fell from power in a court intrigue, and ended his days as a monk in the church he covered with splendor (it would be interesting to know whether the mosaic of himself was a source of joy or pain...
...We think of it, when we think of it at all, as a parallel Middle Ages—an eastern version of what was going on in western Europe...
...When the Sultan finally breached Theodosius's walls, after a 52-day siege, a remnant of the Byzantines fled to Hagia Sophia in the hope of a delivering angel...
...The most striking thing, to Western eyes, is the absence of a Passion...
...So with us, after our demise...
...Richard Brookhiser SAILING FROM BYZANTIUM A lesson in history's finality...
...How we deal with the Soviet Union depends, in part, on what is at stake...
...It is surely the most impressive non-Gothic church building in the world...
...It was an unimaginable afterlife of the Roman Empire, Christian and Levantine, which held off its barbarians until the fifteenth century...
...THE PARTY -GOES ON The P4:rsistence of the Two-Party System in the United States Xandra Eddie Kayden Mahe,Jr...
...Surprisingly little remains in the city Richard Brookhiser is the managing editor of National Review...
...Two churches, once mosques, have been turned again, into museums...
...Over them is one of the great resurrections...
...the nature of their centralized, professional, technologically sophisticated organizations...
...But this is an illusion...
...Some—the Persians and the pagan Bulgarians—were beaten...
...Huge, obvious pillars cut the space...
...But the substance and practice of modern beliefs would be as strange to him as his are to us...
...He borrowed the shape of its world from another book, James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution...
...Ottoman Constantinople was, for four hundred years before that, the hub of an oriental empire that started out crass and competent, and ended merely crass...
...Its hero saw himself as the last representative of pre-totalitarian culture...
...Here and there are columns, mostly toppled, and churches, turned into uninteresting mosques...
...This is one of the uses of Byzantine civilization: as a lesson in history's finality...
...There is a small park whose outline preserves the course of the chariot track of the Hippodrome, and which contains two characteristically imperial monuments—plunder from somewhere else: an Egyptian obelisk, and a broken trophy stand from the oracle of Delphi...
...There's no contest...
...Moslem Turks disposed of the husk...
...The glory of St...
...The mosaics that cover the outer rooms of the main church are mostly intact...
...But Orwell the artist, and Burnham, were also right...
...When it was erected, in the sixth century, it was in the countryside, like St...
...The corner of the managerial revolution was turned some while ago...
...It was a cousin, but it left no descendants, in us, or anyone...
...But the prize of the church, even more than its mosaics, are the frescos of the side chapel...
...Fortunately," Orwell wrote, "the 'managers' are not so invincible...
...But extinctions, when they come, are final...
...Endless night, or passing cloud...
...A few mosaics here and there, including one large Virgin—nothing else...
...Today, the major parties have re-emerged as the most important participants in electoral polities...
...Hagia Sophia is vast—75 yards from floor to dome—but almost doesn't seem so...
...In the modern world, only the papacy and the god-emperor of Japan have had a better run for their money...
...or Christianity...
...History is a thorough killer...
...The Pope, to his credit, excommunicated the crusaders when he found out what they had been up to...
...Burnham, writing in 1941, as an analyst, not an artist, predicted the emergence of three antagonistic world empires, engaged in constant warfare, despite the fact that their social systems would all be essentially similar...
...1984, if any-thing, made Burnham's world-picture grimmer, for it depicted the totalitarian era as eternal...
...Blown up fifty times, it looks like Coke billboards...
...A Byzantine resurrected in twentieth-century America would notice several current ideas at least formally similar to his own: concepts of law and the state...
...we may temper our behavior accordingly...
...In this common captivity the ranks of society were confounded...
...We are in some ways more remote from the world of Theodore Methochides than from that of Caesar or Socrates or Isaiah...
...In short, no Middle Ages at all...
...Catholic western Europe, in the form of the Fourth Crusade, sacked the city and gave the empire its death blow...
...WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, American Enterprise Institute 'A fine work...
...The authors are the first to examine this new and widely unnoticed development...
...It is easy to examine the proportions of Hagia Sophia, since they are almost all that remains...
...and young men of a plebian class with noble maids whose faces had been invisible to the sun and their nearest kindred...
...An aqueduct straddles one of Istanbul's main north-south roads, swirling with little Turkish Fiats and aged DeSoto limousine taxis...
...After eight hundred years, it was touched by a genius...
...The walls are now hung with Koranic inscriptions on huge medallions...
...They cannot...
...But it was a Middle Ages without barbarians and their vernaculars, without chivalry and feudalism...
...The Turks destroyed what was left...
...The rule of the Party is forever...
...Five hundred years later, it still covered an immense rectangle with corners in Syria, Sicily, Croatia, and the Crimean peninsula...
...There, for a quarter or so, you may sit among the shafts and capitals, and think of these, and other matters...
...The managerial revolution is not just around the corner...
...Martin-in-the-Fields in London, though the city soon swept around it...
...the ties of nature were cut asunder...
...By its position and its appearance—in the skyline, the two domes look almost identical—it invites comparison with Hagia Sophia...
...The discrepancy...
...There is a fine death of the Virgin, which must have elicited the same emotions of pity and terror...
...Under the dome at the end stands a row of church fathers, dressed in robes of black and white checks and stripes, stark as Mondrians...
...Toll-free (800) 638-3030...
...and the in-exorable soldier was careless of the father's groans, the tears of the mother, and the lamentations of the children...
...It was a strange civilization...
...Sly Gibbon described the scene, and for once, forgot to smile...
...The proletarians," Orwell's grand inquisitor explains, "will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million...
...It comes up constantly in our foreign policy debates...
...Which makes it particularly relevant in the years after 1984...
...In a small church with a low ceiling, they make a sumptuous and intimate feast...
...There are the walls of the emperor Theodosius, which were manned and maintained until the end of the nineteenth century, when developments in naval gunnery made them obsolete...
...The parties' transformation ...has important implications for American politics...
...is not simply a bookish quarrel, or a matter of literary biography...
Vol. 19 • March 1986 • No. 3
