Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/367

 Rh for the intervention of the Holy See; to open the question of the reunion of the two Churches, seeing it had been agreed that should be discussed when peace had been arranged, but, above all, without indulging in any great illusion as to the success of these two items in his programme; to carry on his mediatorial function; to intervene as to the difficulties arising out of the treaty of Iam-Zapolski; to make a fresh attempt to take Swedish affairs in hand; and in every case to appear, or make the Pope appear, the final arbiter accepted by both sides—such, seemingly, was the Jesuit's plan of action. Circumstances so fell out that this plan agreed fairly well with the state of mind then dominant at Moscow. Disappointed as the Tsar was with the power of the Pope's authority, he might still make use of it to mask the humiliation of his defeat to some extent; and it was well, for the sake of appearances, that the Pope's emissary should seem to have transacted the Tsar's business, and should continue to employ himself in the same fashion. Wherefore Possevino was to be made welcome at the Court of Ivan the Terrible.

The historical terms of the religious problem, the solution of which was to be the ostensible and principal object of this journey, are well known. The separation of the two Churches, prepared as early as in the seventh century by John the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople, who had assumed the title of 'Bishop Universal,' and then by the conciliable called in Trullo, or Quinisext (690), which authorized the marriage of priests, had been accomplished in the course of the ninth century. At that moment the Greek Church, during and after her war with the iconoclasts, reached the height of her glory and external development, gave birth to a pleiad of doctors, saints, and poets, and was called to the great work of evangelizing the Slav races, Photius, who carried the principle laid down by his predecessors, that the fall of the Roman Empire had involved the ruin of the spiritual sovereignty connected with it, to its extreme point, converted the schism into an actual fact. The union of the two Churches, re-established afterwards for a very short time, and in the most precarious manner, was finally severed by Michael Cerularius in 1054. Attempts to restore it were numerous, from the thirteenth century onwards. The Council of Florence (1439) only renewed the endeavour made at the Council of Lyons (1274). In 1518, Poland, contrary to her usual policy, seems to have favoured a fresh attempt (Fiedler, Ein Versuch der Vereinigung ... Sitzungsberichte der K.K. Akademie in Wien, vol. xl., 1862). But the idea of a third Rome,