EASTERN
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EASTERN
heretics, on the other. But it is not convenient to
start from this basis in cataloguing Eastern Churches.
Historically and archaeologically, it is a secondary
question. Each Uniat body has Ijeen formed from
one of the schismatical ones; their organizations are
comparatively late, dating in most cases from the six-
teenth anti seventeenth centuries. Moreover, al-
though all these Uniats of course agree in the same
Catholic Faith that we profess, they are not organized
as one body. Each branch keeps the rites (with in
some cases modifications made at Rome for dogmatic
reasons) of the corresponding schismatical body, and
has an organization modelled on the same plan. In
faith a Uniat Armenian, for instance, is joined to
Uniat Chaldees and Copts, and has no more to do with
schismatical Armenians than with Nestorians or Abys-
sinians. Nor does he forget this fact. He knows
quite well that he is a Catholic in union with the Pope
of Rome, and that he is equally in union with every
other Cathohc. Nevertheless, national customs, lan-
guages, and rites tell very strongly on the superficies,
and our Uniat Armenian would certainly feel very
much more at home in a non-Uniat church of his own
nation than in a Uniat Coptic, or even Latin, church.
Outwardly, the bond of a common language and com-
mon liturgy is often more apparent than what every-
one knows to be the essential and radical division of a
schism. Indeed these Uniat bodies in many cases still
faintly reflect the divisions of their schismatical rela-
tions. What in one case is a schism (as for instance
between Orthodox and Jacobites) still remains as a
not very friendly feeling between the different Uniat
Churches (in tliis case Melkites and Catholic Syrians) .
Certainly, such feeling is a very different thing from
formal schism, and the leaders of the Uniat Churches,
as well as all their more intelligent members and all
their well-wishers, earnestly strive to repress it. Nev-
ertheless, quarrels between various Uniat bodies fill up
too large a portion of Eastern Ciiurch history to be
ignored; still, to take another instance, anyone who
knows Syria knows that the friendship between Mel-
kites and Maronites is not enthusiastic. It will be seen,
then, that for purposes of tabulation we cannot con-
veniently begin by cataloguing the Catholic bodies on
the one side and then classing the schismatics together
on the other. We must arrange these Churches ac-
cording to their historic basis and origin: first, the
larger and older schismatical Churches; then, side by
side with each of these, the corresponding Uniat
Church formed out of the schismatics in later times.
A. ScHisMATir.\L Churches.
1. The first of the Eastern Churches in size and im- portance is the great Orthodox Church. This is, after that of the Catholics, considerably the largest body in Christendom. The Orthodox Church now counts about a hundred millions of members. It is the main body of Eastern Christendom, that remained faithful to the decrees of Ephesus and Chalcedon when Nestorianism and Monophysitism cut away the na- tional Chvirches in Syria and Egypt. It remained in union with the West till the great schism of Photius and then that of Ca-rularius, in the ninth and eleventh centuries. In spite of the short-lived reunions made by the Second Council of Lyons (1274) and the Council of Florence (1439), this Church has been in schism ever since. The "Orthodox" (it is convenient as well as courteous to call them by the name they use as a tech- nical one for themselves) originally comprised the four Eastern patriarchates: Alexandria and Antioch, then Constantinople and Jerusalem. But the balance be- tween these four patriarchates was soon upset. The Church of C'yprus was taken away from Antioch and made autocephalous (i. e. extra-patriarchal) by the Council of Ephesus (4-31). Then, in the fifth century, came the great upheavals of Nestorianism and Mono- physitism, of which the result was that enormous num- bers of Syrians and Egyptians fell away into schism.
So the Patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem (this was al-
ways a very small and comparatively unimportant
centre), and Alexandria, losing most of their subjects,
inevitably sank in importance. The Moslem con-
quest of their lands completed their ruin, so that they
became the merest shadows of what their predecessors
had once been. Meanwhile Constantinople, honoured
by the presence of the emperor, and always sure of his
favour, rose rapidly in importance. Itself a new see,
neither Apostolic nor primitive (the first Bishop of
Byzantium was Metrophanes, in 325), it succeeded so
well in its ambitious career that for a short time after
the great Eastern schism it seemed as if the Patriarch
of New Rome would take the same place over the
Orthotlox Church as did his rival the Pope of Old
Rome over Catholics. It is also well known that it
was this insatiable ambition of Constantinople that
was chiefly responsible for the schism of the ninth and
eleventh centuries. The Turkish conquest, strangely
enough, still further strengthened the power of the
Byzantine patriarch, inasmuch as the Turks acknowl-
edged him as the civil head of what they called the
"Roman nation" (Rum millet), meaning thereby the
whole Orthodox community of whatever patriarchate.
For about a century Constantinople enjoyed her power.
The other patriarchs were content to be her vassals,
many of them even came to spend their useless hves as
ornaments of the chief patriarch's court, while Cyprus
protested faintly and ineffectually that she was subject
to no patriarch. The bishop who had climbed to so
high a place by a long course of degrading intrigue
could for a little time justify in the Orthodox world his
usurped title of CEcumenical Patriarch. Then came
his fall; since the sixteenth century he has lost one
province after another, till now he too is only a shadow
of what he once was, antl the real power of the Ortho-
dox body is in the new independent national Churches
with their " holy Synods " ; while high over all looms
the shadow of Russia. The separation of the various
national Orthodox Churches from the patriarchate of
Constantinople forms the only important chapter in
the modern history of this body. The principle is
always the same. More and more has the idea ob-
tained that political modifications shouKl be followed
by the Church, that is to say that the Church of an
independent State must be itself independent of the
patriarch. This by no means implies real independ-
ence for the national Church; on the contrary, in each
case the much severer rule of the Government is sub-
stituted for the distant authority of the CEcumenical
Patriarch. Outside the Turkish Empire, in Russia
and the Balkan States, the Orthodox Churches are
shamelessly Erastian — by far the most Erastian of all
Christian bodies. The process began when the great
Church of Russia was declared autocephalous by the
Czar I^eodor Ivanovitch, in 1589. Jeremias II of
Constantinople took a bribe to acknowledge its inde-
pendence. Peter the Great abolished the Russian
patriarchate (of Moscow) and set up a " Holy Govern-
ing Synod " to rule the national Church in 1721. The
Holy Synod is simply a department of the government
through which the czar rules over his Church as abso-
lutely as over his army and navy. The independence
of Russia and its Holy Synod have since been copied
by each Balkan State. But this independence does
not mean schism. Its first announcement is naturally
very distasteful to the patriarch and his court. He
often begins by excommunicating the new national
Church root and branch. But in each case he has
been obliged to give in finally and to acknowledge one
more "Sister in Christ" in the Holy Synod that has
displaced his authority. Only in the specially difficult
and bitter case of the Bulganan Church has a perma-
nent schism resulted. Other causes have led to the
establishment of a few other independent Churches, so
that now the great Orthodox communion consists of
sixteen independent Churches, each of which (except
