(review)

<jats:p>.</jats:p>

of experience' to vexing post-War World II racial problems elsewhere (though is this true?). Certainly the antipodes produced none like Smuts to qualify as a 'man of the Commonwealth' except, perhaps, Deakin.
ITiis is just. Yet, in a sense, it is history which gives little scope to the losers. Relatively little is said of the imperial federation movement and its successors. Commonwealth history viewed through antipodean eyes would make rather more of the events discussed in Professor La Nauze's Alfred Deakin and The Colonial and Imperial Conferences by John Kendle (who shows that the origin of J. G. Ward's proposals in 1911 were scarcely, as Professor Mansergh thinks, 'somewhat obscure'). Deakin, Reeves, Seddon, Ward, Hughes, Menzies: their Commonwealth history, and the events in their countries which produced their policies, would look a little different.
An antipodean demur, however, does not diminish the author's achievement. To conclude, a few minor errors might be noticed. The map shows Burma in the Commonwealth in 1968. The Liberals did not introduce compulsory primary schooling in New Zealand -that came fifteen years earlier. G. E. should be G. S. Graham. Kiakoura is Kaikoura. W. P. Reeves did not, I think, join the Fabian Society. This is certainly history with the breadth and sweep, even certainty, of the old masters, but what gentleness, generosity and, above all, modesty distinguish it! The standards of scholarly accuracy and objectivity are never once likely to dismay even the most arduous and scrupulous backroomdelver, though he might have serious reservations concerning religion itself as a legitimate field of empirical inquiry. Not Runciman, however: 'The historian must attempt to add to his objective study the qualities of intuitive sympathy and imaginative perception without which he cannot hope to comprehend the fears and aspirations and convictions that have moved past generations. Those qualities are, maybe, gifts of the spirit, gifts which can be experienced and felt but not explained in human terms.'

University of Auckland
So inspired, Runciman sets forth the history of the Great Church, as the Greeks called their Orthodox Patriarchate, during the dark years of its 'captivity' from the fall of Constantinople to the establishment of the modern Greek Kingdom. It is a neglected, indeed practically virgin field, if for understandable reasons. Modern Greek historians have naturally evinced a much more lively concern with the period of modern nationhood since, for them, the four centuries of Turkish domination contain much that is melancholy for a Greek to recall. Other historians of post-classical Hellenism, still somewhat of a rarity, have been loathe to venture beyond Byzantium if only because in its civilisation they found at least some affinity and continuity with the familiar ancient world. Now, Runciman joins the mere handful of non-Greek historians who have delved into the Greek 'Dark Ages' which stretched from 1453 to 1821.
His analysis is concerned mostly with the realm of high politics and theology, involving relations between Church and State, both Byzantine and Ottoman, the differences between Latin and Greek Churches, the theology of mysticism which so infused and informed Orthodoxy and chiefly distinguished it from the more legalistic Catholism of Rome. Indeed, as a sometime diplomatist, Runciman is probably most comfortable in that part of his book dealing with relations between the Greek Church and the Roman, Russian, Anglican, Calvinist and Lutheran Churches. In each of these areas a vast amount of strikingly original material is introduced, showing that Orthodoxy never lost its oecumenical spirit and was far from the fossilized curiosity that it is so frequently represented as being. He has also dismissed once and for all the charges of Caesaropapism which Western historians have so habitually and absurdly levelled against Byzantium. Here, too, is the most pellucid exposition that I have ever seen of perhaps the most recondite of all theological controversies -that leading to, and stemming from, the schism between Latin West and Orthodox East.
I was vaguely disappointed (probably unjustly so, having regard to the confines within which he set out to work) that Runciman did not have more to say of the oecumene itself, the everyday life of the members of the Church, the trials and afflictions of the menu peuple, so to speak, under Ottoman rule, the ways in which they expressed a loyalty to their Church so tenacious that Orthodoxy eventually emerged as the very focus of modern Greek nationalism. 'So long as its members paid their taxes and did not cause riots or indulge in treasonable activity,' he says (p. 78), 'they were, at least in theory, left in peace.' However, one result of the devoted researches of a small band of scholars in the Greek universities today has been to bring us back almost full circle to the 19th century view which rather stressed the capricious savagery of Ottoman rule and the abject desperation of the subject millets. Since the evidence on this point is still accumulating, however, Runciman can hardly be accused of more, at this stage, than a pardonable error of judgment which in no way vitiates the magnitude of his undertaking or the excellence of his achievement. For here is an historian who combines unassuming but prepossessing erudition and unobtrusive yet impeccable scholarship with, dare I use the word, a beautiful prose style.