Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/32

 schismatic struggle, nor predisposition to revolution of any kind. Nothing of the enthusiast or of the fanatic was to be found in him. He became head of his church, by means which Thomas a Becket might have used, while not possessing the ruthless and unsparing energy of the Englishman; a courtier of his emperor, he was the first of the Patriarchs to be rewarded with the mitre. His sympathies lay in the direction of old books and obsolete phraseology; his greatest pleasure was in preparing excerpts which would spare the future readers of those books which had claimed his highest interests, though his notes are confined to the historical and to faults of style. His « Bibliotheca » is a handbook on good writing. His physiognomy was that of an active French abbe of the 18th century, capable of being a theologian when his official position so demanded.

On the other hand, Michael Kerullarios as Patriarch differed little from many others. He has no biography, nor needs one. He was a mediocre figure as were many others like him who, by chance, occupied the See of Constantinople. His origins are obscure; the sole fact of interest is his Patriarchate. This only is known, that, just when Pope Gregory VII would have raised the dignity of the Roman Papacy higher than that of an emperor of pontifical choice and consecration, he proclaimed that ecclesiastical and laical powers were of the same essence; merely according the first priority over the second. How could this man, at a time when Eastern Europe, before the accession of the varrior Comnenes, needed the help of the West against the Turk in Asia Minor, provoke the occidental world by a forced separation of the churches? Photius had at least the strong oppositional feelings of Constantinople against the Ottomans, as the account of Liutprand shows.