To a large extent, Byzantium inherited its educational practices from its Roman and Hellenistic past: it tended to be concentrated and elite, propagated via academies and private tutors, and the language of the learned was, as in pre-collapse Western Rome, Greek (closer to classical Attic Greek than it was to the common Koine of the New Testament- though as we near Constantinople's fall, we see Byzantine Greek edge ever closer toward something modern).

Rather early on, in the late first and early second centuries CE, traceable even to the Greek education of the apostle Saulus (Paul), Christianity, in so far that it began to spread a Jewish religion out of the isolated former client kingdom of Judaea, had the task of proving itself an intellectual heavyweight in a new philosophical arena.

Born at the turn of the second century CE, Justin Martyr, a self-described student of Pythagorean, Platonic, Peripatetic, and Platonic philosophy, converted to Christianity and became an apologetic scholar. In his First Apology, written as an attempt to convert the Roman emperor Antoninis Pius to the faith, he describes the ancient philosophers as unknowing Christians, witnesses to the Logos (as used in John 1:1) who failed to, lacking revelation, grasp the particularity of Jesus Christ as the Logos incarnate.

This same idea would be continued by Augustine in his Reactiones: "The very thing which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients also, nor was it wanting from the inception of the human race until the coming of Christ in the flesh, at which point the true religion which was already in existence began to be called Christian."

On a more practical level, but with same idea in mind, the fourth century Christian bishop of Caesarea Mazaca in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), Basil, wrote an Address To Young Men On How They Might Derive Benefit From Greek Literature (rolls off the tongue, eh?), a defense of the efficacy of a Classical Greek education toward understanding the Scriptures and living a Christian life: "Just as dyers prepare the cloth before they apply the dye, be it purple or any other color, so indeed must we also, if we would preserve indelible the idea of the true virtue, become first initiated in the pagan lore, then at length give special heed to the sacred and divine teachings, even as we first accustom ourselves to the sun's reflection in the water, and then become able to turn our eyes upon the very sun itself" (Section II).

Per Byzantine historian Francis Dvornik, Hellenism and Christianity saw further synthesis in the concept of "divine kingship," the notion of a unitary and universal ruler who reflected the dominion of heaven across the membrane between the physical and spiritual (Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy). This idea can be found referenced in the Institutiones Divinae of Lactantius, the advisor to the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine I; the Protrepticus and Stromata of Clement, 2nd and 3rd century theologian and philosopher of the Catechetical School of Alexandria; and the Historia Ecclesiastica of Eusebius, 4th century bishop of Caesarea Maritama.

As these defenses may demonstrate, however, "pagan" and Christian ideas frequently clashed and were oft-considered incompatible. The Iconoclasm of 726 to 842 CE, a controversy primarily over the use of icons, became a period of countercultural, reactionary "de-Hellenization" (Cyril Mango, The Oxford History of Byzantium). The rise of the Macedonian dynasty in 867 CE (until 1056), on the other hand, saw to a neo-Classical Renaissance of sorts, and this period's influence persisted for centuries, even as a post-Ottoman cultural memory. As 15th century Byzantine scholar Apostolis states of he and his people, "...we are the remnants of the Greeks" (Geanakoplos; Jeffrys, Haldon, and Cormack).

Geanakoplos, Deno. A Byzantine Looks at the Renaissance: The Attitude of Michael Apostolis Toward the Rise of Italy to Cultural Eminence. University of Illinois: 161.

The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, edited by Elizabeth Jeffreys with John Haldon and Robin Cormack. Published 2008 by Oxford University Press.