Page:Lesser Eastern Churches.djvu/204

182 There are subdivisions and all manner of strange new heresies among the Monophysites themselves; one of these off-shoots of Monophysism falls into the worst abomination of which a so-called Christian can possibly be guilty—Polytheism; for there was a sect of people who at last plainly said there are three Gods (p. 208). The 6th century in Eastern Christendom offers a desolating picture of confused heresies. And all the time the Barbarians loom on the frontiers of the empire. Never had Roman citizens so urgent reason to stand together and keep off the common foe as at this time, when they were tearing each other, murdering, raising tumults, deposing Emperors for the sake of ambiguous formulas. And then in the hot desert of Arabia arose the little cloud which was to burst over the richest province of the empire. Now from the churches for which these sects quarrelled and fought the altars have been taken away; from their towers the mu‘eḏḏin proclaims that Mohammed is the Apostle of God. It is a dismal story; one can hardly deny that these preposterous Eastern Christians deserved the appalling disaster which swept over all their sects. Meanwhile, with the one exception of Pope Vigilius' incident (pp. 201–205), the whole West behind its Patriarch stood solid for Chalcedon and watched the turmoil in the East scornfully.

There is another general issue to be considered in the later Monophysite quarrels. Was the heresy their real motive at all? It is difficult to believe that the reason which drove crowds of Egyptian peasants and Syrian monks to wild acts of violence, to rebellion, fighting, burning soldiers alive, was an abstruse question about our Lord's nature. So most historians see in all this story really a political motive, working under guise of a theological dispute. Egypt and Syria were just the two provinces in the East which had never been really loyal to the empire. They had never been thoroughly Hellenized. Both kept their own languages, both had ancient civilizations of their own, totally different from that of the Greek court of the Roman Emperor at Constantinople. To Syria and Egypt he was a foreign conqueror. The governors and soldiers whom he sent to keep order in these provinces were foreigners, holding down unwilling natives by force. So these countries were always ready for revolt, always