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 SCHISM

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SCHISM

much about canon law as affecting patriarchs; he could not fail to notice that a travelling Latin bishop or priest celebrated the Holy Mysteries in a way that was very strange, and that stamped him as a (per- haps suspicious) foreigner. In the West, the Roman Rite was first affecting, then supplanting, all others, and in the East the Byzantine Rite was gradually ob- taining the same position. So we have the germ of two unities. Eastern and Western. Undoubtedly both sides knew that other rites were equally legiti- mate ways of celebrating the same mysteries, but the difference made it difficult to say prayers together. We see that this point was an important one from the number of accusations against purely ritual matters isrought by Ca>rularius when he looked for grounds of quarrel.

Even the detail of language was an element of sep- aration. It is true that the East was never entirely hollenized as the West was latinized. Nevertheless, Greek did become to a great extent the international language in the East. In the Eastern councils all the bishops talk Greek. So again we have the same two unities, this time in language — a practically Greek East and an entirely Latin West. It is difficult to conceive this detail as a cause of estrangement, but it is undoubtedly true that many misunderstandings arose and grew, simply because people could not understand one another. For during the time when these disputes arose, hardly anyone knew a foreign language. It was not till the Renaissance that the age of convenient grammars and dictionaries arose. St. Gregory I (d. 1604) had been apocrisary at Con- stantinople, but he does not seem to have learned Greek; Pope Vigilius (540-55) spent eight unhappy years there and yet never knew the language. Pho- tius was the profoundest scholar of his age, yet he knew no Latin. \^Tien Leo IX (1048-54) wrote in Latin to Peter III of Antioch, Peter had to send the letter to Constantinople to find out what it was about. Such cases occur continually and confuse all the rela- tions between East and W'est. At councils the papal legates addre.ssed the assembled fathers in Latin and no one understood them; the council deliberated in Greek and the legates wondered what was going on. So there arose suspicion on both sides. Interpreters had io be called in ; could their versions be trusted? The Latins especially were profoundly suspicious of Greek craft in this matter. Legates were asked to sign documents they did not understand on the strength of a.ssurances that there was nothing really compro- mising in them. And so little made .so much differ- ence. The famous case, long afterwards, of the Decree of Florence and the forms Kad dv rpbirov, qwenui/lmodum, shows how much confusion the use of two languages may cause.

These causes then combined to produce two halves of Christendom, an Eastern and a Western half, each distinguished in various ways from the other. They are certainly not sufficient to account for a separation of tho.se halves; only we notice that already there was a consciousness of two entities, the first marking of a line of division, through which rivalry, jealousy, hatred might easily cut a separation.

II. Causes of Estrangement. — The rivalry and ha- tred arose from several causes. Undoubtedly the first, the root of all the quarrel, was the a<Ivanceof the See of Constantinople. We have seen that four Eastern patriarchates were to some extent contrasted to the one great Western unity. Hafl there remained four such unities in the East, nothing further need have followed. What accentuated the contrast and ma^le it a rivalry was the gradual a.ssumption of au- thority over the other three by the patriarch at Con- stantinople. It was C<jnstantinople that bound to- f ether the p'.ast into one body, uniting it against the Vent. It was the persisUint attempt of the empfv ror'a patriarch to become a kind of Eastern pope, as

nearly as possible equal to his Western prototype, that was the real source of all the trouble. On the one hand, union under Constantinople really made a kind of rival Church that could be opposed to Rome; on the other hand, through all the career of advance- ment of the Byzantine bishops they found only one real hindrance, the ])ersistcnt opposition of the popes. The emperor was their friend and chief ally always. It was, indeed, the emperor's policy of centralization that was responsible for the scheme of making the See of Constantinople a centre. The other patriarchs who were displaced were not dangerous opponents. Weakened by the endless Monophysite quarrels, hav- ing lost most of their flocks, then reduced to an abject state by the Moslem conquest, the bishops of Alex- andria and Antioch could not prevent the growth of Constantinople. Indeed, eventually, they accepted their degradation willingly and came to be idle orna- ments of the new patriarch's Court. Jerusalem too was hampered by schisms and Moslems and was itself a new patriarchate, having only the rights of the last see of the five.

On the other hand, at every step in the advance- ment of Constantinople there was always the oppo- sition of Rome. When the new see got its titular honour at the First Council of Constantinople (381, can. 3), Rome refused to accept the canon (she was not represented at the council); when Chalcedon in 451 turned this into a real patriarchate (can. 28) the legates and then the pope himself refused to acknowl- edge what had been done; when, intoxicated by their quick advancement, the successors of the little suffra- gan bishops who had once obeyed Heraclea assumed the insolent title "cccumenical patriarch", it was again a pope of Old Rome who sternly rebuked their arrogance. We can understand that jealousy and hatred of Rome rankled in the minds of the new patriarchs, that they were willing to throw off alto- gether an authority which was in their way at every step. That the rest of the East joined them in their rebellion was the natural result of the authority they had succeeded in usurping over the other Eastern bishops. So we arrive at the essential consideration in this question. The Eastern Schism was not a movement arising in all the East; it was not a quarrel between two large bodies; it was essentially the re- bellion of one see, Constantinople, which by the em- peror's favour had already acquired such influence that it was able unhappily to drag the other patriarchs into schism with it.

We have already seen that the suffragans of the patriarchs would naturally follow their chiefs. If then Constantinople had stood alone her schism would have mattered comparatively little. What made the situation so serious was that the rest of the East eventually sidcnl with her. That followed from her all too .successful assumption of the place of chief see in the East. So the advance of Constantinople was doubly the cause of the great schism. It brought her into conflict with Rome and made the Byzantine patriarch almost inevitably the enemy of the pope; at the same time it gave him such a position that his enmity meant that of all the East. This being so, we must rememb(!r how entirely unwarrantable, novel, and uncanonical the advance of Constantinoiile was. The K(« was not Apostolic, had no glorious traditions, no reason whatever for its usurpation of the first place in the East, but lui accident of secular politics. The first historical BLsho]) of Byzant ium was Metrophanea (315-25) ; he was not even a metropolitan, he was the lowest in rank a diocesan bishop could be, a suffragan of Heraclea. That is all his succes.sors ever would have been, they wouUl have had no power to influ- ence anyone, had not Constantine chosen their city for his capital. All through thcnr progress they made no pretence of foimding tlieir claims on anything but the fact that they were now bishops of the political