The Mythical Constantinople | with Dr. Mario Baghos

so hello everybody i am here with mario bagus mario is a scholar in sydney he uh teaches at san andreas greek theological college um he is he sent me a book which in which he wrote about the symbolism of the foundation of constantinople but also based on ancient uh civilizations as well i found it very interesting his understanding constantinople and kind of its its place in world history and uh and mythical history which you you uh if you watch my last conversation with richard rowland you will see that we're kind of going in that direction so i was hoping to talk to uh mario a little bit and uh and explore the kind of the foundation of constantinople's place in how the ancients viewed the world and kind of its mythical position let's say so mario tell us a little bit about your own background you know how you kind of came to the subject and uh and tell me tell us a little bit about the impetus for your book uh jonathan i do like you for having me on it's a real uh blessing and a privilege um you're much loved here in sydney especially in the milieus that i that i'm moving so when i mentioned to some faculty and students uh that i would be speaking with you um the responses were oh the symbolism guy and also oh he spoke to jordan peterson i'm like yeah that's that's him so it's uh it's a real honor um the impetus for my book well it goes back almost a decade to when it's when i started my phd um and i i was kind of being geared up to teach history at the college that you mentioned where i'm teaching now in the disciplinaries and so i was interested in in symbolism which uh you know more than i do about symbolism but i was interested in in looking at how architectural symbolism imaged uh a particular civilization's uh image of the cosmos their view of the cosmos and uh you know honing in specifically on an orthodox christian vision of the cosmos as well so how did constantinople reflect an orthodox christian vision of the universe and uh that was a broad topic um too broad for uh my purposes so we basically had to have to look at the founding of constantinople um which uh took place in the fourth century of course in 330 a.d founded by constantine the great uh the issue was that at the time i wasn't really content with the sort of bricks and mortar approach that we were taking to the topic it was like an analysis of um you know the raw material of how the city was constructed and so i moved over to uh to sydney university to the department of religious studies where i was able to undertake an interdisciplinary approach that i took into consideration the role of religious symbolism in the city and how these symbols facilita participation into into the realities that they pointed to um but then i realized that you know when you're discussing the founding of a city like constantinople you have to look at the antecedents because uh these antecedents were actively let's say uh built upon by constantine and in fact it was inescapable for him he had to found a city in such a waste to um reflect the cosmos in a way that his predecessors had going all the way back to rulers in mesopotamia you know that's that's kind of how cities were built back then with a religious structure in the center whether it was a pagan temple or later a christian church so i i kind of i went back to city building in in ancient history and uh went all the way back to ancient samaria where the first cities emerged and that's where the kind of book comes out of because if you look at it the beginnings of um of city building that's what i start with in ancient mesopotamia and then it goes through ancient egypt where um things become more emphatic in terms of the way that the cosmos is recapitulated uh within their temple structures ancient egyptian temples of course reflecting the cosmogony of various ancient egyptian cities their respective cosmogony so how their visions of the universe function how the universe came to be in their midst and then i looked at greece and rome and greece and rome are very relevant for constantinople because constantine is going to do things like move the palladion or palladium from ancient greece and and put it in the forum in his city what does that mean what's the symbolism behind that you know he's modeling constantinople as a new rome based on the old rome so i had to look at the old rome and see how that was established it was founded on seven hills constantinople was going to be founded on seven kills later but then perhaps the most important aspect is the uh the christian dimension because constantine is uh founding his his city up upon let's say that ancient kind of pedigree of city founding and that involves pagan symbolism but he's also building churches in the city he's christianizing the topography of rome and judea and other places so that was all very interesting you know what how is this transitionary figure saint constantine the great managing to to found this city in a manner that's consistent with ancient civilizations going all the way back to ancient mesopotamia the egyptian connection at least is very clear because you have obelisks in the city so in case that wasn't clear um and uh you know and then also doing it in such a ways to incorporate his uh i think is an undeniable commit uh commitment to christianity which will become paradigmatic for this city for the next thousand years and will kind of set up the foundations for this bastion of orthodox christian civilization so uh you get you get that in this book i guess to the best of my ability i spent 10 or more years uh putting it together um and the kind of the more specific let's say themes that i address if we get into the nitty-gritty of it uh is how cities uh in the ancient world so ancient pagan cities up to the beginning of byzantine christendom so that's the span and it's a big one and i realize that there are deficiencies in that but but i did my best to make it work how they can be seen as um axis mundi centers of the world imagine is mundi or images of the world and axis mundi and imago mundi were heuristic concepts put forward by miraceliada the great romanian historian of religions in the 20th century um and also i tried to to link that to to the way that rulers represented themselves kings represent themselves because all of these cities were being founded by kings and they were in making these cities images and centers of the world and by image and center of the world we're including of course the heavenly dimension the terrestrial and the subterranean which is the let's say threefold manner generally speaking that that uh reality was conceived of at that time how these rulers were imitating their gods in shaping the cities in in this particular way uh because somehow uh at least in uh mesopotamia but also in egypt the city embodies the cosmogony yeah the creation of the world and i think for a lot of people some people who are watching this will think okay this is a pagan thing this is not uh you know this is just a pagan thing that entered into christianity but we have to remember that first of all the temple and jerusalem in the old testament had a had an exact same approach to reality the the the when moses goes up the mountain and receives the plan of the tabernacle he's receiving a cosmic image and then that cosmic image which is you know the garden of eden and and how the world lays itself out then becomes the way in which jerusalem is built and find its final reflection in the la in the heavenly jerusalem which ends up being kind of a final cosmic image of the city as cosmogony and you know with with everything there even the idea that the the outsider the ocean itself is dried up in the sense that it's as if the temple or the this ordered cosmos fills up the entirety of every possibility and so it's not just a pagan thing it's very much a christian a christian jewish and christian reality as well 100 100 i address that in the book as well we look at israel and and uh and how the temple becomes a recapitulation of of precisely that eden of eden and this feeds into the whole christian narrative and uh constantine you know i mean he's uh undeniably a christian undeniably in his founding of the city in this way what is he doing with this sort of pagan symbolism that is utilizing this trying to communicate an underlying message of the city as a cosmic center and that becomes replaced by emphatically christian imagery as time goes on exemplified in images like christ van der kradt or the master of all in the center of domes but even that and that's guided providentially i believe has its anticipants in how cities are first founded so it's all kind of yeah so tell us a little bit about let's say in the founding of the city what are some of the uh let's say decisions that constantine makes in order to to create this this cosmic this cosmic city well i mean constantine the great is one of those characters where you know depending on how you arrange and look at the sources you end up with a different representation of constant time so i'm committed to the church's vision of constantine you know saint constantine the great and um i think that when we look at constantine we can trust tradition to a large extent but if we're looking at some of the primary sources that address the founding of the city of constantinople we're looking at figures like eusebius of caesarea of course socrates of constantinople who's continuing you see this is the first church historian con socrates is continuing eusebius's history over a century after you see this completed in the 450s so if constantine's reign is let's say from uh as as emperor of byzantium i mean 300 to 337 let's say um he found constantinople in 330 uh as emperor of rome sorry 300 to 337 eusebius is a contemporary so he's writing around uh constantine's time and later we're looking at socrates over a hundred years after that into the 450s we've got southern epithelia and we've got phyllis storgis as well who's an aryan historian so all of these figures write about the founding of constantinople and they all agree whether the orthodox sources like socrates and sosa men uh there's semi-aryan ones like eusebius or the emphatically aryan ones like philosophers that the city was founded according to god's providence um eusebius is not really keen to talk about constantinople much he's more of a fan of the old rome so all he says about it is that he says in the life of constantine that the emperor consecrated the city to the martyr's god and that is indeed true the city was founded on the feast day of saint matthias who is a martyr of the city of byzantium which is the old name constantinople the name of the old city he was a martyr of byzantium under diocletian constantine's uh predecessor and the initiator of the great persecution against the christians so that's all he says then um you have the next chronologically speaking is to the storages and he speaks about the providential founding of the city thusly he says that constantine began his construction on the city at the place where the porphyry column stands and that paul free column was in the center of his forum in the city um and it was destroyed by a statue of the god apollo made to resemble constantine uh it also had christian relics embedded in its base including a flask containing the uh the nerve from the uh uh that it was anointed the feet of christ some of the loaves that the lord had multiplied and so on and so forth also parts of the true cross discovered by uh saint constance mother saint helen were embedded embedded in this this column so he says that constantine started there and that um he was with his retinue and they were marking out the boundaries for the city and he was walking ahead of his retinue with a spear in his hand almost like an august liturus you know uh kind of designating the sacred boundaries of the city and he's walking and he's walking they're all getting tired so someone who had uh let's say who was in a position to speak to him freely is what nostalgia says so somebody in the in a in a circle right runs up to him and says how much father lord and he goes on until the one who is in front of me stops so he was following an angel mocking at the boundaries of the city and then when um the apparition vanished he put the spear in the ground he said this far and that was uh the point at which the gate of constantine in his land walls was built of course constantinople is a promontory so it's surrounded by three bodies of water with land wood walls on the western side uh so that's what phyllis storcher says he also calls it a new jerusalem which is an emphatic motif it comes back later on in uh saints lives in the life of saint daniel the starlight saint daniel is on his way to the holy land and he encounters an angelic figure it's a monk who's later revealed to be an angelic figure who informs him that uh why why do you go all the way there um there are robbers on the roads these days and it's not safe if you go to constantinople you will find a sec in jerusalem so this is a motif that you can see must be kind of accruing to the city by the mid 400s early 400s when philosophies is writing because of the construction of churches incorporation of saints relics and so on and so forth uh socrates and sozomen they also discuss the founding of the city they speak about well some of the practicalities some of the great fountains that constantine has built in the city uh the um the racing circuit the very famous hippodrome and some of the spolia that will go into the hippodrome like the tripods from delphi um and all of this has underlying symbolism about what constantine wants to communicate about his new capital the tripods from delta the fact that he's put a senate in his city to match the senate of the old rome and so on and so forth that we're dealing with and that's generally what they say about the founding of the city that it's a providential let's say fact yeah and one of the things people need to remember or notice is that you know in a way constantinople is the first christian city that was founded you know in the in the conversion of rome and so despite some ambiguous symbolism as you mentioned the fact that he has himself displayed you know portrayed as the god apollo so there is a a transition period there is a kind of strange moment where i'm sure it's also that constantine himself is figuring out what this means you know he he has this kind of conversion moment or his conversion movement but he maybe doesn't completely understand all the implications of what of what this conversion is but nonetheless you see him founding what turns out to be the first christian city and what will end up being let's say the the glory of christendom for a thousand years that is the image of the city even in the west um of the of the holy city will be will be this vision of constantinople you know uh and also the refounding of jerusalem by saint helen as well those kind of two acts at the same time seem to be this this this marker of this new beginning or this this new kind of christian civilization that's right that's right and he's doing something similar as well in ancient uh in the ancient rome the old rome i mean it's both providential and also a mark of incredible let's say shrewdness that saint constantine built materia or churches shrines above the tombs of the martyrs who were because of the prescriptions regarding performing executions within the city itself and the fact that cemeteries were outside of the city um in the various necropolis outside of rome and that he built these material in a circle and i won't take credit for this it was once remarked to me by professor um is his name that it's like because i had i discussed it you know he's built say agnes saint sebastian saint lawrence saint paul outside the walls uh saint peter's on the vatican hill he's ringed rome in churches and he's built maybe one or two within rome itself not many within the city but that's that's fine and so it's like a new sacred boundary for rome where if you're coming into rome through one of its main let's say arterial roads you know all roads lead to rome after all um you encounter you'll encounter one of these basilicas because that's what he would have been building these rectangular sort of churches the first very first monumental christian architecture um so i mean we have a lot to be grateful for in relation to constantine's reign but could you imagine a conversation between uh you know um uh i don't know i've always thought of it like a couple of uh pagan soldiers riding into the city what's that new building and what's that image on top of it you know oh yeah that's uh what the christians believe in that you know and uh if they inquire further they'll discover the name of the saint that it's dedicated to and the saints the narrative of the saints life and so it's an incredible testimony in witness that takes place in rome in the holy land as you said on the places of christ's crucifixion and resurrection and his birth and also in constantinoples in constantinople it's towards the end of his reign so what we're seeing there is the beginnings of christianization that he didn't really get to to um to its let's say zenith the zenith is justinia it's yeah a couple of years later right but he started it off he built holy apostles in constantinople which was the mausoleum church where all future emperors would be interred again refurbished by justinian because saint justinian he basically rebuilt all of constantine's edifices in the city um so holy apostles and uh at least uh holy peace were built by constantine he began work on holy wisdom very certain but it wasn't completed until the reign of his son and he built new churches outside the city so you know all of these seasons how many things can you do in one lifetime as well or something like that for one statue that looks like apollo i mean come on that you know it's ridiculous but yeah he did a lot and the image that you had i wonder there may not be any sources of that but the image of that you uh described of constantine carrying the slants out you know and planting it in the ground really brings up that image of constantine's lance which found which supposedly found itself you know in in western europe in the hands of king otto and how it became kind of this image of the holy lands you know there because that that land supposedly that king otto had was constantine's lands and had supposedly relics of the of like the nails of of of christ which were embedded inside this this slant and so you know and just like when you said that image i just had this vision of of this relic that we've seen you know this kind of uh this holy land that we've seen uh in all kinds of all kinds of fictional stories as well yes spear of destiny and all that kind of stuff yeah yeah exactly well supposedly that's where that's the origin of it king otto had gotten it from it had belonged to constantine in the past and so like this whole and then it goes into germany and then it has a whole history uh in germany as well so it's like one of the things i want to bring up i guess the reason why i'm i'm talking about that is just how different events were that the way that we think of it like the way that we think of founding a city we don't think of augers we don't think of you know taking a lance out and following an angel in order to plant the land but this is really how ancients uh understood reality and this is really also i mean not just even before christian times you know there really was this sense of the of using augers and using a spiritual intuition in order to act it wasn't just this kind of cold cynical uh political action there was something there was something underlying it let's say there was a vision underlying what they were doing and that's what also let's say created the stability of the city for so long you know we we moderns we are so smart but we haven't yet made anything that's going to last a thousand years you know we we we let's see how history treats us you know it's not that simple i agree with you 100 and look i mean there's something about this um cosmos chaos dialectic that was really uh directly experienced by ancient and medieval persons that translated itself into this sort of city building and need to to cosmos size of the space to bring heaven down to earth in the space to respond to manifestations of the sacred in such a way that you dwelt near them well these are the things that people like eliade addressed in relation to uh religion uh die chronically or religions die chronically but it can also be seen in relation to uh to christianity to orthodox christianity now we build our churches upon the places where the martyrs are killed if we can we incorporate sacred relics into our churches um eliader spoke about higher off in these manifestations of the sacred in a very vague and general sense but we can speak about theophanies which we've seen the old testament you know the disclosure of the trinitarian god to prophets in the old testament to um to uh to saints throughout the history of the church and we honor that by wanting to dwell near that or to kind of you know be as close to it as possible to honor the spot to adorn it to recreate the circumstances in which that initial theophany took place so that we can partake of its blessing you know this is something that absolutely conditioned cities in ancient times and in medieval times the modern city uh tried to incorporate sunglasses i think with neoclassicism and everything else but ultimately as lewis mumford a great historian of cities uh said the fate of the modern city was to become a backdrop for advertising because you know our contemporary discourse is all about economy um now instead of temples or or churches in the centers of cities uh what we have are central business districts and that yeah times square is the holy place of uh you know of new york a hundred percent and you know ironically in times square i mean i i happened to to visit the us in 2013 and there's that um statue of honoring a catholic priest i think it is with the celtic cross behind him and i thought of the symbolism of that you know it's entirely dwarfed by coca-cola signs and you know all of that other stuff which on an existential level as well as problematic what's good about constantinople in medieval cities is the iconography and you're the expert on this uh the saints giving the blessing of peace are engendering this passion and constantinople was full of images like this not only in churches but in the public space in the thoroughfares all medieval cities were all medieval christian cities were but especially constantinople was the paragon um but today the opposite takes place in fact um because of the the need to market products to us our passions are exacerbated you know it's they associate the product with the semi-naked person or something like that it's very different it's not um we've lost that wisdom jonathan i think yeah indeed um and so i maybe you can tell us a little bit about because one of the problems of our historical perception is that the west has almost completely effaced the memory of constantinople and this is of course a a strange delusion that has come about and i sometimes struggle to see where it started um but definitely by the time we reach the modern age most people don't understand how important constantinople was how how important it was in terms of meaning you know not just in terms of commerce which it was not just in terms of politics which it was but also as this vision of a of a holy city of of a christian city um and so you were telling me a little bit offline uh about some of the some of the perceptions that you had of how important constantinople was in the middle in the middle ages and maybe you can expound on that a little bit for us well i mean you have the historical uh let's say uh impressions that we get out of the emissary sent by the kievan rush to constantinople when they reported back to prince vladimir they said uh something like after they had entered a year sophia and experienced the holy liturgy we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth i mean uh it was really considered to be um some kind of a mystical place constantinople could be said to be mystical um for several uh reasons the grandeur of its buildings i mean and this links back to what you said about the west not taking constantinople seriously obviously in the discourse uh in in western academia at least since the 1700s with the enlightenment there's um this let's say trajectory whereby you know uh tradition religion all of these sorts of things have to be either ignored or mocked when it comes to studying them in their past and their past manifestations so this is part of the reason why historians like um let's say edward gibbon and before him the french thinkers voltaire and others ignored byzantium mocked it decried it all these sorts of things and so that affected the scholarship because when people were going back and studying past civilizations it was all about the glory of ancient greece and rome but then they didn't want to acknowledge that rome continued in the east and with the continuation of rome in the east what you also have is the continuation of engineering practices you have the continuation of artisans and their trades you have the uh scholarship historiography uh playwriting all these sorts of philosophy and all of that feed it fed into constantinople there's a map at the back of warren tread gold's the early byzantine historians i believe the book is called which shows all of these it's all it's all the sources that we basically have about the uh byzantine period articulographical sources uh where these people were born these great historians and thinkers and where they all ended up in constantinople it's all these kind of lines heading towards constantinople right so it was the place to go um in justinian's time the kind of let's say monumental architecture was unsurpassed a year sophia was the largest building in the world at the time after he had finished construction in 332 a.d you know he had said something like solomon i have surpassed thee it's bigger than the temple in jerusalem right so uh he built maybe 50 churches in the city 50 churches in the city justinian to accommodate the population so we have that practical monumental christian architecture all of which is reflecting the christian vision of the cosmos cruciform churches to participate in christ's death on the cross the beginnings of domed structures in the fourth century are perfected by justinian with his dome in aya sophia by the time you get to the 9th century in spite of the islamic incursions in places like palestine and egypt and syria constantinople is still the jewel of the world uh the muslims want to capture it because they know that it's full of treasures and riches and bounty and everything else the west wants to kind of well you know it's at least in those centuries it's kind of like charlemagne's trying to marry empress irene yeah yeah yeah somehow you know it's like we want to be part of this somehow it's it's the envy of the world we also despise they despise the byzantines too it was this back and forth um eventually what you have in 1204 is the fourth crusade which sacked the city in and leveled it but all of these testimonies speak about a place which was unparalleled in terms of art architecture and spirituality if you read constantine por philo yenitos book of ceremonies uh this this book describes uh all of the um the public services and rituals that the emperor had to participate in and there were many i think there were 17 that he had to be part of and it describes them in detail and it's almost like if you have this this concrete space which is reflecting heaven on earth and in the public space you have images of christ in his saints um the ban here the mother of god everywhere everywhere right and the actualization of that symbolism with the rituals and the processions and the and the public worship you know it's it almost like seems like something out of a dream and i think that part of the reason why this city inevitably fell a thousand years later because you know it bounced back after the fourth crusade it also kind of um in those last centuries uh was able to do things in terms of spiritual achievements that are un they have no parallel i believe because you have the the most let's say uh deft refinements in hezekiah sarcastic practice in those last centuries so that's spirituality you have uh and you're the expert again here the best iconography project yeah yeah you reach the the apex you know that so many people recognize of iconography happens you know at the twilight of its political power why is all of this happening i mean it has to do with a certain mentality a certain disposition of course that mentality and disposition has been facilitated by centuries of church building and uh public processions and veneration of relics and and the commissioning of art and all these sorts of things theological controversies theological debates iconoclasm the victory and triumph of iconoclasm and then you reach the end of this civilization and you know you get stories like oh yeah the emperor andronicus paleologos was in a senate meeting and saint gregory balamassa's father was ecstatic so they didn't want to bother him exactly it's like it's it's still yeah like you said it's it the the holiness and the the uh the admiration of the saints and this kind of possibility of of just saying that it's like oh he was in an ecstatic state so we we didn't want to bother him well i mean we have that from the sources and i don't remember which one but it tells you a lot it tells you that both the saints you know was in that moment speaking directly with christ and it says that the emperor recognized it and so did the other senators so something very special is happening it's why the world fell in on that city in the end i believe and one of the reasons why at least uh was for the preservation of orthodoxy because part of the problem that was always there for the byzantines i mean the church within that framework both responded to challenges that the imperial court in constantinople kind of exerted itself against the church because there's always that risk that because of all this material wealth and everything else that would lead to pride and that this city was in fact god's kingdom on earth it reflected that kingdom it initiated participation into that kingdom which is what happens every time we go to liturgy but it wasn't that kingdom christ's kingdom is ultimately beyond the world manifested within the world through his churches right so um that hubris was there and the byzantines were let's say pedagogically humbled throughout their long history because of this hubris um and what we see at the very apex of the empire is the church reaching its destination let's say and transmitting to the orthodox church uh throughout the next centuries up until today um the the the treasures of orthodoxy the the individual establishments are finally dissolving um heroically with yeah the last game bro constantly in paleologos he's one of those um we're talking just before the recording he's one of those last emperors uh you know the marble king who will come back and and all that kind of stuff you know all of this stuff has its anticipates in constantinople all of these myths about uh great final kings who will um finally and decisively uh let's say become victorious over the enemies of god's people or of a particular nation and then will transfer their kingdom to the king of all kings christ that's all there in byzantium it goes all the way back to the apocalypse of methodius that you mentioned uh before yeah it's something that we that we're right now kind of bringing back to the fore i hope with people and people kind of understand that also this this eschatology and this universal history which was there in constantinople and this vision of of the world one of the things you told me before uh was your you met you one of the things that helped you see how important constantinople was was how you found it in scandinavian writing yeah and it's just i mean what's it doing there you know i thought there's no way that a when was snorri's jewelers and 13th century uh scandinavian uh yal and uh uh chronicler why would he have anything to do with troy you know i never thought or constantinople so he's uh writing in his prose edda uh about the uh beginnings of civilization there's some genesis there you know creation um narrative and he's mixed up uh scandinavian uh let's say pagan mythology with with emphatically let's say biblical motifs and then he ends up speaking about uh troy as uh the earliest let's say city where many of the heroes came from and then constantinople uh what was the name of constantinople uh in scandinavian uh mikkel gard or something like that well i i don't remember but you know i mean that that kind of shocked me so that the influence of this city extended all the way up until uh to scandinavia which is not surprising given the varangian presence you know yeah exactly that exchange that would have been happening between the between the prince of kiev the varangians and then the scandinavians there would be this this exchange of stories and information that would be happening uh amongst them amongst them it's the medieval world was not as closed off as people want to to portray it as at all absolutely not absolutely not and this connection with um with troy is very interesting i'm not sure if you're interested in exploring oh yeah definitely this is actually this is where i was going to go next in our discussion because one of the the elements that's important in terms of understanding constantine is almost like this mythical figure is how he leaves britain which in legendarium was founded by a descendant of the trojans you know this the descendants of the trojans is a roman were also descendants of the trojans and then goes all the way with his mother helen all the way to troy basically i mean constantinople isn't basically troy like where it is it's in anatolia it's it's right where troy would have people would have understood troy to have been a very long time ago and so it kind of bridges all these worlds together creates this christian city which is the resolution of the whole trojan ark from the time of troy into this city which joins both the christian and the pagan story together in this kind of amazing synthesis so i mean that's kind of how i see it but i don't know if you have some insight on that no i i think i never considered it in this reflexive manner and that just puts it all together wonderfully jonathan i mean certainly we have and i don't remember if it's southern or socrates it's one of those mid 5th century byzantine historians they say that constantine considered troy as the location of the the founding of the city but was told by god in a dream not to build a troy and that also in another scenario considered one of those cities that made up the the troad nexus of cities uh where ajax killed himself one of the heroes again from the trojan epic but again the association with suicide he didn't want that so he went into he went to byzantium so that's picked up in the historiography of the time but what constantine does do he he links constantinople to troy via the paladio palladium which according to apollodorus we know from his library it was a statue of the goddess palace uh who died uh in a in a kind of uh fight with athena zeus uh apparently uh you know as the myth goes intervened he imposed his ages his great shield as the girls were fighting and athena struck palace dead and she didn't mean to so being grieved for her she created a statue of palace tied uh zeus's uh shield to it and uh venerated her but then zeus uh uh at the time of electric violation it says in the texas with the myth concerning electra takes the palladium and throws it to earth and it lands according to this myth on the place where illus son of triass will build troy in honor of his father so it's uh that's that's the myth concerning the palladium uh in relation to the greek context that it lands on detroit what will become the city of troy and of course helium is a name of troy the troas is the dad ilus is the sun and you can call it either troy or ilion it lands on this spot and euless builds a city around this spot and scholars have theorized it could have been a meteorite or something like that that he built a temple around it and then so you know hate scholars so much sorry what's the point right yeah exactly my goodness all right sorry no no no no not at all and so uh yeah you know i agree um but uh what happens next is um that the uh it becomes associated with the destiny of troy uh when the city falls to the to the greeks that um odysseus and uh diomedes they take the palladium out of the city and that's why it falls so it's a stabilizing object and it's taken by them but by them or by aeneas it depends on the source to livinium livinium becomes uh uh the uh let's say antecedents for latium latium becomes eventually the background for rome and rome scandinavia wait so this the tradition of aeneas taking the palladium is that in is that in the greek sources or is that in the latin source is that in the in virgil or is that it was that even there before that's in latin sources oh yeah uh i i don't remember if it's in virgil virgil but you'll find cicero and others refer okay so it's scattered in references regarding the the description of the palladium because when it's taken to rome it is housed in the temple of the vessel virgins where the perennial fire is kept that symbolized rome's permanence so it's associated as an object that was meant to facilitate stability because it was that talismanic object in troy it's now helping to facilitate the stability of rome being placed right next to the perennial fire um and and the sources uh again various to what happens next it's either lost when the temple uh burns um uh is it the second century ad i'm not quite 1918 i think it burns then was it lost then wasn't it we don't know but it turns up again at constantine's forum in constantinople and again the sources vary procopius says oh he he was digging at the spot and there it was um you know other others say that he moved it there he probably had one constructed you know uh purpose built for for the um uh for the occasion this would have been this would actually have been like a big shield is that what would it look like it's a statue of athena so this is what it morphs into eventually a statue of athena holding a shield yeah okay here and you can see it uh there's there's one in athens um outside one of the uh museums in athens you can see like a modern replica so it's basically a statue of athena holding a shield and palace athena uh is one of the epithet's palace one of the epithets of athena because after she kills palace she takes on the name so um that's at the base of constantine's forum uh where that statue of him and the guise of apollo is at the very base the column is still there of course in modern-day istanbul you can go and see it uh so it was placed at the base of the forum um again stabilizing cosmic imagery not necessarily for worship or for veneration it's it's making a point the point is constantine if rome was considered the successor of troy and that was part of let's say the emperor augustus's narrative for rome that we have this ancient pedigree going back to troy and with the descendants of heroes and we're better than the greeks basically that's what augustus was trying to say constantine is saying well i'm going to take it one up a notch and it's constantinople that is now the successor of both rome and troy so you have this lineage yeah and one of i mean people are struggling with that symbolism i can understand but there that type of symbolism continues on in the church in this in the let's say the architecture of the narthex or the understanding of the north x or the the place of the secular and the the understanding of continuity within the church as being part of let's say the universality of the church and so if we understand christianity this is something i keep harping on with people that christianity is ultimately non-dual in its proposition that if we understand the man in which christianity can encompass all things then we need to have a hierarchy in how that happens and the idea of using for example uh spolia of this idea of having of recap of taking even these old statues of the greek gods and having them kind of out in gardens and you know having them in the forum let's say rather than in the church is can be understood also as this manifestation of this hierarchy of how everything is kind of contained together but there is a clear hierarchy in what it is like you said those statues weren't there to be venerated to worship they were there as a reminder and as a memory of of how we are still a continuation of the past just like in churches uh you know you'll find often find the greek philosophers that are represented in uh in the north x it's a little let's say it was refined with time like you would never in the church today find like an image of a greek god let's say in the narthex but the idea of like this kind of fully containing uh reality where things are organized hierarchically seems to be at least this is seems to be to me to be what uh constantine was kind of aiming for you know he wouldn't have put his his column of himself as apollo in a church he put it out in the forum which is a very different space in terms of understanding what its function is uh and it connects into the people and to the history into the past and all that i agree 100 and look i mean nothing happens in a vacuum constantine was founding a new city and an additional reason why the apollo imagery was used is that city founding was tied up with solar worship going all the way back to mesopotamia that doesn't make constantine and adept of the sun god he drops solar imagery from all of his mata he's his queens by the 320s it's all gone but he can't found a city otherwise it has to be done according to these prescriptions it would have compromised his whole project if he had not let's say undertaken this uh this kind of measure and it has to be seen in relationship to everything else he's doing and everything else is doing his pro church i mean legislation the council's uh church building that we discussed so but you know i mean there's no reason to be scandalized by it i don't think and i i think what we see with constantinople in in particular and i mentioned it in the book is uh the beginnings of a museum-like culture where these um well you still have pagans in the city but you have christians in the city as well constantine is a christian so he's bringing over this statuary it's part of the greco-roman inheritance the statuary stays until the end of the empire when it becomes emphatically orthodox it's looted by the crusaders in 1204 crusaders are ripping down a elizabeth statue of hercules a bronze one and cutting it to pieces which means it was there the 12th and 900 years and no one had a problem with it you know pagan texts were being taught in the curriculum um but not for their paganism for their stories for their artwork you know these texts were being read in a christian way they were being psychologized by even by saints of the church we know that with saint basil the great news address to the youth so you know all of these things have their place in a taxonomy in a hierarchy you're 100 correct they are part of the the inheritance of this civilization they can be used pedagogically but within churches what you have are images of christ and his saints and whatever motifs look similar to pagan motifs within churches because things were borrowed their meaning has changed you know it's like the form might be similar but the content is revolutionized in light of the christ experience it becomes very different so this is something that in orthodoxy at least can be traced very easily because of this emphatic emphasis on explicit christian imagery iconography within the ecclesial space yeah and it's interesting because you have two narratives let's say there's there's a protestant narrative which wants to represent orthodox christianity whether catholic uh you know or eastern orthodox as just being a massive synchro syncretic effort where they just basically took the the roman gods and replaced them with saints or whatever and they just had all these roman gods and everything so you have this one narrative then you have the other narrative which is like the the scholarly uh the kind of weird the more scholarly narrative which is that christians destroyed the temples they burnt down everything they wanted to destroy the ancient world and kind of get rid of it so you have these weird two narratives that kind of coexist the truth is that it's neither of those it's and that's why these two can exist is because it was more of a organic this kind of organic hierarchy like we're talking about where the the ancient world was still there was still let's say remembered at the level that it should be remembered appreciated at the level that it could and then but then everything was kind of placed in a hierarchy where we would you know at the summit would always be christ and the saints and you know the body the body of christ and you know lower down in the gardens and in the in the parks we could have these these old statues that remind us of where we're from and you know and it's kind of the old beauties of the ancient world that's right and and christ the pandora is the uh exemplification of that because he's the master of all uh represented in domes that are meant to symbolize the cosmos um within most churches in constantinople throughout the orthodox world that is our highest aspiration in yearning that is what we believe that christ is the master of the universe and his saints participate in that mastery of the universe by you know being endowed with his grace by being able to do what he does by grace and so on and so forth and that's why they're represented in close proximity to him first and foremost being his holy mother that's where byzantium uh ends up very early constantine sets up the parameters and they're filled in very quickly thereafter i mean in the 400s you have saint bucheria building churches to the mother of god everywhere by the 450s after the third ecumenical council you know which uh debated the issue of uh of the del dorcos there are churches dedicated to popping up everywhere and again understood that she is the main intercessor to christ our god uh with every new controversy new churches pop up uh giving witness to the christian worldview that christ is at the center of it all but that didn't mean that they couldn't appreciate you know a piece of literature or the art from the past it was literally outside in the thoroughfares so you'd walk down your collinated streets and there were your orators from ancient greece the statues there were some of your heroes like hercules and others but once he got to the imperial palace you had the hulky gate and what was on top of the hulky gate the bronze gate christ high above everything else even in the arrangement of the symbolism you would never have a statue above a saint you know even in the public space they would never do that it was all kind of spatially arranged in such a way as to give preeminence to to what their main meta narrative was which is the christian one and to enjoy honor respect whatever the stories of the past which they also read for i i presume they're read for enjoyment the way that we do and also for uh uh moral benefit uh even spiritual benefit they're written from a christian point of view no problem with any of that yeah exactly and one of the things people always this is also a strange deformation that has happened where people have this strange idea that all the traditional the ancient greek texts were preserved by the muslims and that this was the main source of of traditional texts back into the west it's like what a weird way of of seeing where this is really like the blind spot of constantinople you know obviously those most of the texts all the texts uh of aristotle that were lost in the in the uh in the west you know some of the texts of plato and then other philosophers they all came from constantinople that's where it's actually when constantinople fell or during the during the darker times that the scholars were leaving the city bringing the texts with them in order to save them and that's how they that's most of those texts that's how they ended up in the west not coming from spain where some of them did come from spain but most of them came from constantinople it's the big blind spot as you say it's the big blind spot and this is something i hop on about because people are like you know you still get it again and again in the academy you know you christians destroyed culture now we preserved it from the barbarian hordes coming from germany and scandinavia it was preserved by christian monks and copyists and scribes this is demonstrable evidences it's come out in the past century or so it's no longer just a matter of conjecture or christian apology it's fact you know so uh plato aristotle thucydides latin texts they were all there in byzantine and the tragedies all the tragedies all the the the plays they were all preserving constantinople to the point where some of the uh you know in the middle byzantine period some authors are doing very strange things like writing uh weird uh uh plays based on these ancient texts like you get the pumpkinfication of claudius by seneca influencing a text in constantinople called the timarion in the in the ten hundreds which is like the strangest text you'll ever read right about this guy who dies at the festival of saint um dimitrios in the and goes to hell have you heard of this text no i've never heard of it it's the most bizarre thing and you're reading it where would they have gotten because it's a i mean if there's a syncretistic text it's this one right you had that element of vicente but that element that element was not the overarching narrative that was on the level of subculture so you know people were doing um you know the using occult texts and all these sorts of things but that was always yeah well the hermetic texts were preserved in constantinople like a lot of people it's just weird like even some modern orthodox are super like that they're super uh aggressive against the occult like i get it you know i get it but they have this idea that the occult comes from the west that the cult doesn't come from the west those texts came from constantinople oh jonathan and then they were translated and that's what gave you know the the like 13th 14th uh and then midi uh renaissance uh occultism came from constantinople guys look you're right and i'll tell you what it's almost as if the byzantines were sitting on a powder keg that when it was transferred to the west in the renaissance because that's look i mean the byzantines not only do they play a large part in the renaissance in the west they basically sparked it it was people like plethanya mr ethan all of these they were neo pagans towards the end of the empire so before we spoke about the fact and again we should emphasize this fact is that towards the end of the byzantine empire constantinople was preoccupied with orthodox spirituality saw refinements in that spirituality had more monks and soldiers and more nuns than married women to produce children and that's why this the empire fell but you know all these people participated in god's kingdom so you know it's this kind of tragic glory that's that's mainly what's happening but you had renegades uh amongst them and um they were not uh really they were respected as intellectuals but they weren't really uh seen as representative of the byzantine mentality the orthodox roman mentality they went to the west they were hired by the medici and uh taught in their schools and one of those figures is uh plethorn he took his library with him and that's how all of this strange renaissance occultism began it's because that powder keg which the byzantines knew how to handle they didn't know how to handle it in italy in the west at the time uh yeah but it was that kind of organic hierarchy that was there where you know because people have this idea that christians you know immediately will just stamp out anything which is a little odd or little on the margins but rather if you have a stable hierarchy or intellectual hierarchy then you you're actually able to tolerate some weird stuff on the edge as long as it stays on the edge like as long as that weirdo doesn't like stand up at the altar and start reading his weirdo stuff then it's like okay you do your thing like just don't don't come and bother the the the you know the the actual normal hierarchy of being that we're participating in if you want to be on the fringe and do your fringe thing go ahead but don't bother us but like you said when it when it arrived in the west it's as if there was already a revolutionary thing that was set up there was already a revolutionary thinking that had been that had kind of been fomenting and so it uh it fed it in a different way let's say yes i think that's a good way of putting it and you know i i heard it once from mark or i read it somewhere that in relation to to witches you know the byzantines had their their foolish old women that they just kind of ignored uh the west had its um devil worshiping uh uh which is that it burnt at the stake a very different approach very different kind of but you're 100 uh uh right that the byzantines you know unless that person was at johnny talos or michael trying to shape the minds of the people in such a way that was anti-christian anti-christic would compromise the salvation of people then they were kind of tolerated to exist on the margins on the on the periphery um and this is not while discussing this with you we're not legitimizing these texts at all we're just talking about a reality a reality that points towards the soberness of the uh the orthodox christian byzantines centered in that city um you know another thing and this goes back i hope you don't mind i'm jumping back to our conversation about um christian and pagan imagery in the public space this is something that persists to this day this hierarchy and this uh let's say division between you know it's in orthodox countries today in within the churches icons are venerated outside of the churches they will build statues of saints but you don't see them in the churches you know and statues of let's say heroic figures that are venerated nationalistically that nations let's say defense of the faith you see this in russia you see it in romania you see it in greece you know you'll get your statue of constantine biologos outside of the church but not within the church within the church that's where we know that the the god revealed art form of iconography is and that we legitimately venerate yeah that immediately saw space outside you know they depict all sorts of things and there's there's an interesting in russia there's an interesting almost natural hierarchy which is setting itself up right now into inter this renewal of orthodoxy exactly what you're saying where we're not going to totally reject the romantic all of these uh movements where which you know did lead towards the end or the the breakdown of orthodox we're not going to reject them we're just going to have them in their place so in the church like you said we have these icons but then the statues we have romantic kind of neo-realistic statues outside and it creates this kind of powerful this more natural hierarchy of being that that was probably similar in constantinople well it's very similar to what was in constantinople i mean you see it in greece you see it in russia my wife is russian so we've been a few times we've seen it there it's a byzantine uh thing you know it's throughout the balkans romania bulgaria serbia they do this they they will kind of keep the good from the past outside you know uh there might be military heroes it might be you know uh mythical figures but it's just not in the church the church is a different space it's it's the sacred space and that transition between the secular and the sacred is made clear the moment you you enter into the gnathicks you know which is that liminal space let's say before you you go into the nave all right look look we've been going for a while i'm really enjoying this conversation um and so so everybody i will i will recommend that you check out mario's book let me put it up so you can see it um you can find it on amazon uh you know it's it's available and so thank you so much for for your time i hope this will spark people's interest and their fascination with uh constantinople as this mythical christian city my gratitude to you uh jonathan christ is recent thank you he has risen all right everybody so so thanks for your attention and i will talk to you very soon

Channel: Jonathan Pageau

Views: 37,058

Keywords: symbolism, myths, religion

Id: 3vGTGBW8CS4

Length: 60min 49sec (3649 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021