Between East and West

the byzantine legacy and Russia

Jurij Borodaj

Aleksandr Nikiforov

pp. 83-96

in: Gérard Delanty, Formations of European modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Most accounts of European civilization neglect the place of Byzantium. The Byzantine world is often dismissed as a chapter in the history of the decline of the Roman Empire, whose legacy in the conventional account was taken up by the western monarchies and modern Europe emerged from a path that supposedly goes back to Rome and Athens. In this account, which will he challenged in this chapter, the main offspring of Byzantine civilization—Orthodox Christianity—was given a marginal role in European civilization in general and hardly figures in discussions on the place and significance of Christianity in that history. The general representation of the Byzantine tradition has been one of decline and irrelevance (see Arnason 2000a).