Page:Orthodox Eastern Church (Fortescue).djvu/240

202 communication; out of a disorderly crowd of rebels each member must come back and be reconciled by himself, with the Eastern Churches corporate reunion is a really possible ideal. We express it all roughly, but quite well, when we call Protestants heretics and the "Orthodox" schismatics, and when we pray for the conversion of Protestants and for the reunion of the Eastern Churches.

The Western Church did not realize at once, in 1054, that a permanent rupture had now come. There were still relations in one or two cases before all intercourse came to an end. Pope Alexander II (1061–1073) sent Peter, Bishop of Anania, in 1071 to the Emperor Michael VII (1071–1078), apparently to discuss political questions only. The Emperor received Peter very kindly and entertained him for a whole year, but the Patriarch John VIII (1064–1075) and his clergy would have no communion with him. There were still some theologians in the Byzantine Church who saw no reason for schism, and who wrote to protest against the absurd fuss that was being made about harmless local Latin customs, such as Theophylactus of Achrida (successor of the Leo who had opened the campaign), who, about 1070, wrote an allocution defending the Latins, except in the matter of the Filioque. They were the first members of the Latinizing party that has existed ever since in the Orthodox Church. But gradually all friendly relations ceased and every one realized that a definite schism had now established two rival communions. And then, as always happens, the differences become fossilized, and the two streams, once parted, flowed farther and farther apart. At last some Latin writers, unfortunately, began making unworthy reprisals and, forgetting the dignified tradition of their side in this miserable quarrel, found fault with various quite harmless Byzantine customs in the same mean spirit as their charges against us.