Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 1 1911.djvu/214

170 a leading part upon the political stage, the worthy task of philosophers and statesmen. That one scale should outweigh the other was perhaps inevitable in the first attempts, and it was at least instructive for future generations that the experiment of an over-strained allegiance to each of the two theories should have been given full trial in one part or another of Christendom.

To Byzantine churchmen the vision of the Christian State and the Christian Emperor proved so dazzling that they transferred to them something of the religious awe with which their ancestors had venerated the genius of Rome and Augustus. The memory of Constantine was honoured as of an mtottootoAx*, a “thirteenth apostle.” The resentment of the native Monophysite churches of Syria and Egypt against such of their fellow-countrymen as remained in communion with Constantinople—concentrated itself in the scornful epithet of Melkite or “King's man.”

The Latins were more moved by the sentiment of the Roman name, and less by its incarnation in the Emperor. As Romans and Roman citizens, they felt the majesty of the Roman Respublica to attach to place even more than to person. If Rome was no longer the abode of emperors, it was in their eyes not Rome but emperors who lost thereby. The event which stirred men in the West to the depths of their being was not the conversion of Constantine but the fall of Rome. When Alaric led his Goths to the storm of the City in 410, there seemed to be need for a new theory of life and for revision of first principles. The great occasion was greatly met. St Augustine wrote his twenty-two books de Civitate Dei to answer the obvious objection that Rome, inviolate under her ancestral gods, perished only when she turned to Christ. True it was that the City of the World had fallen : but it had fallen in the Divine providence, when the times were ripe for a new and higher order of things to take its place. The reign of the City of God had been ushered in.

It was a natural corollary of the principles of Western churchmen that the Divine Society could not possibly be bound to imitate the organisation of the earthly society which it was to supplant. Pope Innocent, in direct opposition to the practice of the East, wrote to Alexander of Antioch in 415 that the civil division of a province ought not to carry ecclesiastical division with it ; the world might. change, not so the Church, and therefore it was not fitting “ad mobilitatem necessitatum mundanarum Dei ecclesiam commutari.” Pope Leo refused his assent to the so-called 28th “canon” of Chalcedon, not merely as an innovation, but because its deduction of the ecclesiastical primacy of Rome from her civil position was quite inconsistent with the doctrine cherished by the popes upon the subject since at least the days of Damasus.

Here then we have a bifurcation of Eastern and Western ideas, leading to a clear-cut issue, in which both sides appealed to the truth of