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The Byzantium that followed Rome in the East was the first large and stable
state formation in the medieval era. The peoples of Western and Central Europe
having experienced in the IV-VIIth centuries a period of intense geographical
movement (known as the ‘Great Migration’) spent much time on forming stable

state and cultural institutions. That is why the transitional period finished on the
brink of the VIII-IXth centuries when the imperial coronation of king of the Franks
of Charlemagne in Rome by Pope Leo III took place.

In the conditions of unstable states and unrest for centuries in the West the
Christian Church centered in Rome remained the only unifying and civilizing force
that gradually acquired pan-European characteristics and ambitions. It was named

the Catholic, that is universal. The emergence of the state of Charlemagne - the
first empire in the West of Europe – started rivalries between the Byzantine and
Western cultural and political state formations for the legacy of the Roman Empire,

namely, the right to be the only center of the Christian world. This competition
marked the beginning of the ‘Great Schism’ - the split in 1054 of the Christian
Church in the Eastern (Orthodox, led by the Patriarch of Constantinople) and
Western (Catholic, led by the Bishop of Rome called the Pope) which had

significant differences in dogma, rituals, organization. The Byzantium was the
source of the Christianization of Kyiv Rus in the late Xth century. After the fall of

the Byzantium in 1453 in the XV-XVI centuries Moscow kingdom took upon
itself the mission of the center of the Orthodox Christianity in the world, ‘Third
Rome’. The history of the Christian consciousness of two types (Orthodox and
Catholic) reflects the differences of historical experience and traditions of Eastern

European nations and western part of the continent. The impact of these
differences is felt even now but the basis of their vision can be considered more or
less common in the medieval world.

The medieval universe was the embodiment of divine light and perfection
model for the earthly world. The image of the divine world in medieval culture is
the Paradise conceived as the reunion of a man with his creator after earthly ordeal

and hardships. Instead, the image of Hell expresses the idea of the eternal human
guilt and sufferings on the earth that is the scene of the struggle of light and dark,
good and evil. In the face of long-term confrontation between two supernatural

universes the earthly world is doomed to fragmentation, imperfection and
becoming more distant from the creator. Cultural images of Heaven and Hell
translated verbally (in theological treatises, sermons and religious teachings),
visually (in the icon, temple sculptures and architecture), dramatic (in the liturgical

mysteries, theaters etc) made a universal binary opposition in the mind of medieval
Europeans. Relations between the two worlds of the medieval universe were quite

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