Page:Orthodox Eastern Church (Fortescue).djvu/99

Rh the fall of Constantinople (1453) as the Byzantine period. By 527 the Patriarch of New Rome has become the unquestioned chief of all Orthodox Eastern Christians; the other Orthodox Patriarchs are now only his vassals. Byzantium is the centre of the Christian East (as far, at least, as the Empire is concerned); her liturgy is used almost throughout what is left of the Empire; the whole system of Byzantine Canon Law and the customs that accompany it (including the shameless subjection of the things of God to Cæsar that is the special note of this time) are established. After 1453 there is no Empire left and no Cæsar to lord it over his bishops. The Church that is only the despised religion of rayahs under the Sultan has entered upon a new period of her history. The history of that Byzantine time is cut sharply into two unequal portions by the great schism in the 9th century. But until that schism this Byzantine Church, in spite of an ever-growing ill-feeling against Rome among her bishops, accepted and believed in the Pope's Primacy. This belief was an inheritance left to her by the great Greek Fathers, as we have seen. She did not cast it off till the time of Photius. Some of the texts I have already quoted (Eutychius of Constantinople, the Bishop of Patara, Eulogius of Alexandria, Sergius of Cyprus, St. Maximus) belong to this period. Here are more quotations to the same effect:—

In 646 Africa was a province governed by an Imperial (civil) Exarch sent from Constantinople. In that year the African bishops write to St. Theodore (Pope from 642–649): "Father of Fathers! in honour of the most holy Apostle Peter, your Apostolic See has received, by divine decree, as a special and unique inheritance, the office of examining and scrutinizing the holy dogmas of the Church." And further in their letter: "It has been established from the beginning that the Pontiffs of the holy Apostolic See condemn evil and confirm good. It is a rule of ancient Canons that, wherever a question concerning the Church be moved, even in the most distant lands, nothing can be examined nor defined until the matter has been brought before the Apostolic See."