SCHISM
535
SCHISM
things the primacy of the pope, auricular confession,
ecclesiastical celibacy, the veneration of the saints,
and suppressed the Canon in their Eucharistic Lit-
urgy which they called the "German liturgy". They
gained recruits in small numbers until 1848, but after
that date they declined, being on bad terms with the
Governments which had at first encouraged them,
but which bore them ill-will because of their political
agitations.
(23) While this sect was declining another sprang up in antagonism to the Vatican Council. The oppo- nents of the recently-defined doctrine of infallibility, the Old Catholics, at first contented themselves with a simple protest; at the Congress of Munich in 1871 they resolved to constitute a separate Church. Two years later they chose as bishop the Professor Rein- kens of Breslau, who was recognized as bishop by Prussia, Baden, and Hesse. Thanks to official as- sistance the rebels succeeded in gaining possession of a number of Catholic churches and soon, like the Ger- man Catholics and schismatics in general, they intro- duced disciplinary and doctrinal novelties, they suc- cessively abandoned the precept of confession (1874), ecclesiastical celibacy (1878), the Roman liturgy, which was replaced (1880) by a German liturgy, etc. In Switzerland also the opposition to the Vatican council resulted in the creation of a separate commu- nity, which also enjoyed governmental favour. An Old Catholic faculty was founded at Berne for the teaching of theology, and E. Herzog, a professor of this faculty, was elected bishop of the party in 1876. A congress assembled in 1890, at which most of the dissident groups, Jansenists, Old Catholics, etc., had representatives, resolved to unite all the.se diverse ele- ments in the foundation of one Church. As a mat- ter of fact, they are all on the road to free-thinking and Rationalism. In England a recent attcmjjt at schism under the leadership of Herbert Bcale and Arthur Howarth, two Nottingham priests, and Arnold Mathew, has failed to assume proportions worthy of serious notice.
St. Thomas, Summa, II-II, (q-xxxix); Tanquerey, Synopsis th'ologiw, I (Rome, 1908); Funk, Patres apostolici, I (Tubingen, 1002); TixERONT. HUtoire des dogmes (Paris, lOCi-Q); Funk, Lehrb. der Kirchengesch (Paderborn, 1902); Albers, Enchirid. hint, eccles. (Nimeguen, 1909-10); Duchesne, Hist, ancienne de Veglise (Paris, 1907-10); Guyot, Did. unitersel des heresies
(Paris, 1847). J. Forget.
Schism, Eastern. — From the time of Diotrephes (III John, i, 9-10) there have been continual schisms, of which the greater number were in the East. Ari- anism produced a huge schism; the Nestorian and Monophysite schisms still last. However, the East- ern Schism always means that most deplorable quar- rel of which the final result is the separation of the vast majority of Eastern Christians from union with the Catholic Church, the schism that produced the sepa- rated, so-called "Orthodox" Church.
I. Remote Preparation of the Schism. — The great Eastern Schism must not be conceived as the result of only one definite quarrel. It is not true that after centuries of perfect peace, suddenly on account of one dispute, nearly half of Christendom fell away. Such an event would be unparalleled in history, at any rate, un- less there were some great heresy, and in this quarrel there was no heresy at first, nor has there ever been a hopeless disagreement about the Faith. It is a case, perhaps the only prominent ca.se, of a pure schism, of a brea(;h of intercommunion caused by anger and bad feeling, not by a rival theology. It would be incon- ceivable then that hundreds of bishops should sud- denly break away from union with their chief, if all had gone smoothly before. The great schism is rather the result of a very gradual process. Its re- mote causes must be .sought centuries before there was any suspicion of their final effect. There was a series of temporary schisms that loosened the bond and pre- pared the way. The two great breaches, those of
Photius and Michael Ca'rularius, whi(^h arc remem-
bered as the origin of the present state of things, were
both healed up afterwards. Strictly speaking, the
present schism dates from the Eastern repudiation of
the Council of Florence (in 1472). So although the
names of Photius and CtErularius are justly associa-
ted with this disaster, inasmuch as their quarrels are
the chief elements in the story, it must not be im-
agined that they were the sole, the first, or the last
authors of the schism. If we group the story around
their names we must explain the earlier causes that
prepared for them, and note that there were tempo-
rary reunions later.
the first cause of all was the gradual estrangement of East and West. To a great extent this estrange- ment was inevitable. The East and West grouped themselves around different centres — at any rate as immediate centres — used different rites and spoke different languages. We must distinguish the posi- tion of the pope as visible head of all Christendom from his place as Patriarch of the West. The posi- tion, sometimes now advanced by anti-papal contro- versialists, that all bishops are equal in jurisdiction, was utterly unknown in the early Church. From the very beginning we find a graduated hierarchy of met- ropolitans, exarchs, and primates. We find, too, from the beginning the idea that a bishop inhcTits the dignity of the founder of his see, that, therefore, the successor of an Apostle has special rights and privileges. This graduated hierarchy is important as explaining the pope's position. He was not the one immediate superior of each bishop; he was the chief of an elaborate organization, as it were the apex of a carefully graduated pyramid. The consciousness of the early Christian probably would have been that the heads of Christendom were the patriarchs; then fur- ther he knew quite well that the chief patriarch sat at Rome. However, the immediate head of each part of the Church was its patriarch. After Chalcedon (451) we must count five patriarchates: Rome, Constanti- nople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
The difference between the East and West then was in the first place that the pope in the West was not only supreme pontiff, but also the local patriarch. He represented to Eastern Christians a remote and foreign authority, the last court of appeal, for very serious questions, after their own patriarchs had been found incapable of settling them; but to his own Latins in the West he was the immediate head, the authority immediately over their metropolitans, the first court of appeal to their bishops. So all loyalty in the West went direct to Rome. Rome was the Mother Church in many senses, it was by missioners sent out from Rome that the local Western Churches had been founded. The loyalty of the Eastern Chris- tians on the other hand went first to his own patri- arch, so there was here always a danger of divided allegiance — if the patriarch had a quarrel with the pope — such as would have been inconceivable in the West. Indeed, the falling away of so many hun- dreds of Eastern bishops, of so many millions of sim- ple Christians, is explained sufficiently by the schism of the patriarchs. If the four Eastern patriarchs agreed upon any course it was practically a foregone conclusion that their metropolitans and bishops would follow them and that the priests and people would follow the bishops. So the very organization of the Church in some sort already prepared the ground for a contrast (which might become a rivalry) between the first patriarch in the West with his vast following of Latins on the one side and the Eastern patriarchs with their subjects on the other.
Further points that should be noticed are the differ- ences of rite and language. The question of rite fol- lows that of patriarchate; it made the distinction obvious to the simplest Christian. A Syrian, Greek or Egyptian layman would, perhaps, not understand
