The Orthodox Eastern Church/Chapter 1

by Adrian Henry Timothy Knottesford Fortescue

 

PART I

THE ORTHODOX EASTERN CHURCH BEFORE THE SCHISM

 

 

In this first part we may divide our account of the facts that most interest Catholics into three chapters: (1) Of the development of the order of the Hierarchy, and of the rise of the great Patriarchates. (2) Of their relations to the Latin Churches, and especially of their relation to the Roman Church. (3) Of their faith and liturgies during these eight centuries.

 

 

 

CHAPTER I

 

THE GREAT PATRIARCHATES

 

When the Apostles were all dead, and when the extraordinary offices of Prophets, Evangelists, Doctors, &c. (Eph. iv. ii; 1 Cor. xii. 28), had gradually disappeared, we find that there remains a fixed hierarchy in each local Church. This hierarchy consists of the three fundamental, orders of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. In each city where there was a Christian community the Bishop "presided in the place of God"^[1] in the town and in the country round. Assisting him in the liturgy and as a council, was a college of priests "in the place of a Senate of Apostles,"^[2] and then came the Deacons "who are entrusted with the ministry of Jesus Christ"^[3] to preach, catechize, baptize, and take care of the poor. This hierarchy is fully developed in the 1st century. The letters of St. Ignatius, the martyr-bishop of Antioch († c. 107), are full of allusions to the three-fold order. "Let every one reverence the Deacons as Jesus Christ, so also the Bishop who is the type of the Father, and the Priests as the Senate of God and Council of the Apostles."^[4] And, as far as the inner organization of each community was concerned, this hierarchy was sufficient.^[5]

But a further organization arranged the relations of the bishops to each other; and from the beginning we find some bishops exercising jurisdiction over their fellow bishops beyond the boundaries of their own dioceses. Now the most important example of the authority of one bishop over others is the universal jurisdiction exercised by the Bishop of Rome over the whole Catholic Church. But this question has been so often discussed, the evidences of the Roman Primacy during the first centuries have been so often produced, that we need not dwell upon them again here. We see the Roman Church in the 1st century sternly commanding the Christians of Corinth (a city far away from her own diocese) to receive back their lawful ecclesiastical superiors, and concluding with just such words as a Pope would use to-day: "If they do not obey what he (God) says through us, let them know that they will be involved in no small crime and danger, but we shall be innocent of this sin."^[6] We hear St. Ignatius greeting the "Presiding Church in the place of the Roman land," as the "president of the bond of love."^[7] We know that the Greek Bishop of Lyons, St. Irenæus († 202), finding it too long to count up all the Churches, is content to quote against heretics "the greatest, most ancient and best known Church, founded and constituted by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul, at Rome," because "every Church, that is, the faithful from all parts, most agree with (or 'go to')^[8] this Church on account of her mightier rule, and in her the tradition of the Apostles has always been kept by those who are from all sides." He then draws up the list of Popes from St. Peter to Eleutherius (177–189) his contemporary.^[9] But this authority of the Pope belongs to general Church History: and we shall come later to the evidence of the great Greek Fathers for it. Now we are chiefly concerned with the other cases of superior jurisdiction, especially among Eastern bishops.

From the beginning we find the bishops of the more important sees, of the chief towns of provinces for instance, exercising jurisdiction over the neighbouring Churches. There is no reason to suppose that this right had been formally handed over to them, still less was the arrangement an imitation of the Roman civil jurisdiction, at any rate in this first period. The reason of their authority was a very simple and a very natural one. It was to the great central cities that the Gospel had first been brought, it was from them that the faith had spread through the country around. The bishops of the chief towns ruled then over the oldest sees, in many cases they traced their line back to one of the Apostles, they had sent out missionaries to the neighbouring villages, and, when the time came to set up other sees near them, they naturally ordained the new bishops. Now the right or the custom of ordaining another bishop was for many centuries looked upon as involving a sort of vague jurisdiction over him. It produced the relationship of a "Fatherhood in Christ"; the new bishop looked up to his consecrator with gratitude and with filial piety.^[10] So before there was any formal legislation on the subject, the bishops and faithful of each province naturally looked upon the bishop of the oldest Church in the neighbourhood, from whom they had received the faith and holy orders, who was the connecting link between them and the Apostles, as their natural chief. They appealed to him in disputes, they followed his liturgical use, and they found it natural that, if there was a scandal among them, he should come to put it right. These central bishops were what we call Metropolitans or Archbishops.^[11] Thus, Carthage was the head of the African Church, Alexandria of Egypt, Antioch of Syria, Ephesus of Asia, Heraclea of Thrace, &c. These metropolitans visited the sees around, ordained the bishops and, when synods began to be called, they summoned them and presided over them. But the organization went further. Just as several bishops were joined under one metropolitan, so the chief metropolitan of a country stood as the head of his fellows. These chief metropolitans were in some cases afterwards called Exarchs; three of them long before the Council of Nicæa stand out from all others as the three first bishops of Christendom. These three are the Bishops of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. The name Patriarch, like nearly all ecclesiastical titles, was at first used more vaguely; even as late as the 4th century, it is still applied to any specially venerable bishop.^[12] Several reasons combined to give these three Patriarchs (we may already call them by what eventually became their special title) the first three places. Rome was of course always the first see, and both the others also claimed a descent from the Prince of the Apostles, St. Peter; Antioch was where he had first sat, Alexandria was considered as having been founded by him through his disciple, St. Mark. Moreover these three bishops stood at the head of three sharply divided lands; Rome stood for Italy and for all the Latin-speaking West, that she was gradually converting; Alexandria was the capital of the old kingdom of Egypt, which through all changes had kept its own language (Coptic was spoken there till the Arab conquest) and individuality; and Antioch was the head of Syria. Lastly, before Constantinople was built, these three were the three most important towns in the Empire. So when the first general council met at Nicæa in 325 it only confirmed what had already long been recognized: "Let the ancient custom be maintained in Egypt, Libya and the Pentapolis, that the Bishop of Alexandria have authority over all these places, just as is the custom for the Bishop in Rome. In the same way in Antioch and the other provinces the Churches shall keep their rights" (Can. 6 Nic.).^[13] The Canon goes on to say that if any one becomes a bishop without the knowledge of his metropolitan "this great synod declares that it is not meet for such a one to be a bishop."

This, then, is the first stage of the development. When the Fathers of Nicæa met, on every side were metropolitans ruling over provinces of suffragan bishops, and, high above all others, stood the three great Patriarchs of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch.

It will be convenient to add here something about these three greatest sees.

 

1. Rome.

We must first of all carefully distinguish the patriarchal dignity and rights from those the Pope has as Vicar of Christ and visible Head of the whole Catholic Church, that is, from his Papal rights. The distinction is really quite a simple one. The Pope is, and his predecessors always have been (1) Bishop of Rome; (2) Metropolitan of the Roman Province; (3) Primate of Italy; (4) Patriarch of the West; (5) Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church. Each of these titles involved different rights and different relations to the faithful: to the citizens of his own city he is Bishop, Metropolitan, Primate, Patriarch, and Pope all in one; to us in England he is neither local bishop, nor metropolitan, nor primate, but Patriarch and Pope; to Catholics of Eastern rites he is not Patriarch, but only Pope. It is true that the Papal dignity is so enormously greater than any of the others that it tends to overshadow them; it is also true that one cannot always say exactly in which capacity the Pope acts—in earlier ages especially Popes were probably often not explicitly conscious themselves. On the other hand, as soon as we begin to discuss the relations of the Eastern Churches to the Pope, the distinction between his positions as Western Patriarch and as universal Pope becomes very important. We shall hear of fierce disputes as to the limits of the Roman Patriarchate carried on by people who entirely admitted the Pope's universal jurisdiction as Pope:^[14] and now that the "Orthodox" Churches no longer acknowledge him as Pope they still recognize him as Patriarch of the West—indeed, still count him as the first of the great Patriarchs.

The Roman Patriarchate, then, as distinct from the Papacy, covered, at the time of the Council of Nicæa, the same territory as has always since been conceded to her by every one, namely, first Italy, and then all the undefined Western lands where Latin was spoken officially, all the tribes of barbarians who came immediately under the influence of Rome, whom she had converted or would convert in future. At Nicæa the Papal Legate, Hosius, Bishop of Cordova, signs the decrees in the name of "the Church of Rome, and the Churches of Italy, Spain, and all the West."^[15] It was only on the Eastern side, where the Roman Patriarchate touched the others (or, rather, the new one of Constantinople), that in after years her boundaries were disputed. We shall hear of the questions of Illyricum and the Bulgarian Church. Not only as universal Pope, but also because of his enormously largest territory, as successor of the Prince of the Apostles, as Bishop of the mighty city that was Queen of the world, that had given her name to all the Empire, was the Roman Pontiff always, without question, the first of the Patriarchs.

 

2. Alexandria.

Before the rise of Constantinople the second city of the Empire was the Port of Egypt. Her only possible rival would have been Antioch; but Antioch was inland, whereas all the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean poured into the great harbour of Alexandria. And behind that harbour lay the greatest, richest, and most civilized city of the East. In the time of the Ptolemies the number of her inhabitants reached a million;^[16] she had, besides her Greeks and native Egyptians, a large and privileged colony of Jews. Her museum (in Cæsar's time it counted seven hundred thousand books), her sumptuous palace, her three great harbours, with the famous lighthouse, her philosophical schools, combined to make Alexandria one of the wonders of the world. As soon as the Christian faith began to spread beyond Palestine, no city called to its Apostles more clearly than Alexandria; nowhere was the new teaching more eagerly discussed than among the crowd of scholars of every race who had flocked together to use her library. Tradition said that St. Mark the Evangelist had been the first missionary and first Bishop of Alexandria; and his successors boasted through him a connection with St. Peter, who had ordained him and sent him as his own representative. This descent from St. Peter, however, is a later idea, and a conscious imitation of Rome and Antioch. St. Mark's first successors were Anianus, Abilius, Cerdon, &c.

Many causes combined to give the Bishop of Alexandria the first place among Eastern bishops. Besides the fame of his city and his claim of succession from St. Peter, there was his great Christian school of philosophy. Pantænus († c. 212) founded at Alexandria a catechetical school that became the first Christian university; his disciple, Titus Flavius Clemens (Clement of Alexandria, † 217), and most of all Origen († 254), the greatest scholar and most wonderful genius of his age, both of whom were its presidents, spread the fame of their school throughout the Christian world. It was Origen especially who lent to Christian Alexandria the lustre of his almost incredible knowledge, the fame of his spotless life and of his heroic sufferings for the faith, and then, as a last legacy, the disputes about the orthodoxy of his works that lasted for centuries, until the fifth general council (Constantinople II in 553, Can. 11) declared him a heretic. It may be noted here that this Christian Neo-platonic school of Alexandria was never considered quite safe from the point of view of orthodoxy. Pope Benedict XIV, in his Bull "Postquam intelleximus" (1748), refuses to Clement the honours of a saint, because of the suspicion of want of orthodoxy in his works.^[17] Nevertheless, the school, and Origen especially, exercised an enormous influence on Christian, especially Greek, theology.

The Church of Alexandria had other great names to boast of besides those of her philosophers. Among her bishops she counted St. Dionysius the Great (247–264), Alexander (313–328), who excommunicated Arius, greatest of all his successor St. Athanasius (328–373), and then St. Cyril of Alexandria (412–444). Because of the fame of her learning the Church of Alexandria had the office of making the astronomical calculations for the Christian Calendar. Eusebius (H.E. v. 25) has preserved a fragment of a letter of the Syrian bishops in which they say that they calculate Easter according to the use of Alexandria. The last cause of the great position of the Bishop of Alexandria was the compactness, the strong national feeling, and the faithful obedience of his province. He was the chief of Christian Egypt. From his throne by the sea he ruled over all the faithful of the Roman provinces of Egypt, Thebais and Libya, from his city the faith had spread throughout the country; he ordained all the bishops; under him were nine metropolitans and over one hundred bishops.^[18] South of Egypt and outside the Empire were the two Churches of Ethiopia and Nubia, each of them founded from Alexandria,^[19] where their metropolitans have always been ordained, and who looked to the Patriarch of that city as their chief too. Egypt was also full of monks who were as ready as the bishops at any time to strike a blow for their Patriarch. And so in all the disputes in the Eastern Church, at all the councils the "ecclesiastical Pharaoh"^[20] appeared leading a compact band of Egyptians, ready to show the national feeling, which the Empire had crushed politically, by voting in Church matters like one man for their chief. Before Constantinople arose the successors of St. Mark were without question the mightiest bishops in the East.^[21] As their rivals on the Bosphorus were working their way up, the opponent they had most to fear was Alexandria. Whenever the See of Constantinople was vacant Alexandria was ready with a candidate to represent her interests, on whose side she could throw the enormous weight of all Egypt. Three times she deposed a Bishop of Constantinople—St. John Chrysostom in 403, Nestorius in 431, Flavian in 449; each time the other Eastern bishops meekly accepted her decision.^[22] Doubtless the Christian Pharaoh would have remained the head of the Eastern Churches, and all the development of their history would have been different, had not heresy broken his power and given Constantinople her chance. And then the flood of Islam completed his ruin. It was Monophysism that crushed both Alexandria and Antioch, to leave Constantinople without a real rival in the East. Monophysism to the Egyptians stood for a national cause against the Emperor's Court. They thought it had been the teaching of their national hero, St. Cyril. Dioscur, Patriarch of Alexandria (444–451), St. Cyril's successor, took up its cause hotly. But it was rejected by the universal Church; with it fell Dioscur, and with him the glory of his see. In 451 at Chalcedon he had to stand before the Fathers as a culprit and to hear the Roman Legate (Paschasius, Bishop of Lilybæum) pronounce sentence on him: "The most holy and blessed Bishop of the great and elder Rome, Leo, through us and through the holy Synod here present in union with the blessed Apostle Peter, who is the corner-stone of the Catholic Church, deposes Dioscur from the office of bishop, and forbids him all ministry as priest" (Chalc. Sess. III). The Patriarchate of Alexandria never recovered from that humiliation. Dioscur refused to accept his deposition, and his Egyptians, always frantically loyal to their Pharaoh, supported him. But it was at the cost of separation from the Catholic world. Dioscur was banished to Paphlagonia, where he died in 455. Proterius was appointed Patriarch, and was supported by the Emperor's^[23] soldiers. But Egypt hated equally Chalcedon and Cæsar. It was the old national feeling, the old hatred of the Roman power lurking under the dispute about one or two natures in Christ. As soon as Marcian died (457) the storm burst. They drove the soldiers into the temple of Serapis and there burned them alive; they murdered Proterius, and set up as Patriarch a fanatical Monophysite, Timothy the Cat.^[24] It is from Dioscur and Timothy the Cat that the present national (Coptic) Church of Egypt descends. It has been ever since the 5th century out of the communion of both West and East, Rome and Constantinople. Meanwhile the party of the Government carried on another succession of Patriarchs, forming the "Melkite"^[25] community in union with Constantinople and (until the great schism) with Rome, but bitterly hated by the Copts. Neither of these rival Patriarchs ever attained anything like the influence of the old line from which both claimed to descend.

In 641 came the Moslems under Amr and swept them all away. So greatly did the Copts hate the Melkites that they supported the Arabs in the invasion. But they gained little by their treason. They were just as badly treated as the Imperial Christians, enormous numbers of them apostatized to Islam; and when, after about a century, the rival Patriarchs reappear, the Melkite bishop has become a mere ornament of the Court of Constantinople, the Copt is the head of a local sect. The great days when the Christian Pharaoh was the chief bishop of the East had gone for ever.

 

3. Antioch.

The third great city of the Empire was Antioch on the Orontes. Just as Alexandria was the chief town of Egypt, so was Antioch the head of Syria. The city had been built in 301 b.c. by Seleucus Nicator, the founder of the Seleucid kingdom of Syria: before the Roman conquest (64 b.c.) it had been enlarged with three great suburbs, and was already the greatest and most famous city of Asia. At various times Emperors had lived there—Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Diocletian—and they built great temples, baths, and palaces. No less famous were the memories of the Christian Church of Antioch. It was here that we were first called Christians (Acts xi. 26); a very ancient tradition counted St. Peter as the first Bishop of Antioch;^[26] during the persecution this city gave to the Church a long list of martyrs. St. Peter's successor was Evodius, then followed the glorious martyr St. Ignatius († 107), who, on his way to be thrown to the beasts at Rome, wrote the seven letters that form the most valuable part of the "Apostolic Fathers." Constantine (323–337) built the "Golden Church" at Antioch, splendid with precious metals and mosaic, that became the type of one class of Christian church.^[27] When Julian (361–363) on his way to Persia went to the grove of Daphne by Antioch to offer sacrifice, he found that the Christian faith had so spread in the city that only one old priest was left to offer a goose to Apollo.^[28]

The Bishop of Antioch was the chief bishop of Syria. He was in the first period obeyed throughout Syria, Phoenicia, Arabia, Cilicia, Mesopotamia and Cyprus. But the people of these provinces with their different languages, customs and national feelings, never held together as much as the Egyptians. Antioch lost in the 5th century Palestine, that went to make up the new Patriarchate of Jerusalem (p. 27), and Cyprus, that became an autonomous province (p. 48). Just as the faith had spread out from Egypt beyond the Empire, so also to the east of Antioch, beyond the Euphrates, and therefore beyond the Empire, a Christian community had grown up in the kingdom of Osrhoene, whose capital was Edessa. The tradition of this Church told a pretty story of how King Abgar the Black^[29] once sent an embassy of his nobles and a notary named Hannan to Tiberius. On their way back they pass by Jerusalem and hear every one in that city talk about the new Prophet from Galilee. Abgar's embassy stayed ten days in Jerusalem, and Hannan the notary wrote down everything that he saw and heard. Then they go home and tell their king what has happened. He sends Hannan back with a letter beginning: "Abgar the Black, Prince of Edessa, sends greeting to Jesus the good Saviour who has appeared in Jerusalem," and asking our Lord to come to Edessa and to heal him from leprosy. Our Lord writes back: "Happy art thou who hast believed in me without having seen me; for it is written that they who see me shall not believe, but they that do not see me shall believe in me." He goes on to say that he cannot go to Edessa, because: "I must fulfil that for which I am sent, and must then go back to him who sent me"; but he promises to send one of his Apostles, who shall heal Abgar; he also promises that Abgar's city shall always be blessed, and that no enemy shall ever overcome it.

Hannan then painted a portrait of our Lord, which he brought to Edessa with the letter. After the Ascension, St. Jude sent Thaddeus (whom they call Addai), who of course at once heals and converts King Abgar, and dies in peace, succeeded by his disciple Aggai. So did the faith come to Edessa.^[30] This is the best known of the legends by which so many countries connected their Church immediately with our Lord and the Apostles. Eusebius tells it;^[31] the portrait of our Lord was famous all through the Middle Ages, and right over in England before the Conquest people wore a copy of his letter to Abgar as a protection "against lightning and hail, and perils by sea and land, by day and by night and in dark places."^[32] It seems true that the faith had been preached in Edessa before its conquest by Septimius Severus (193–211). As soon as these lands became part of the great Empire, their Church entered into closer relations with the Great Church. We hear of one Palut, who went up to Antioch to be ordained bishop. The authority for this early history of Edessa, the "Doctrine of Addai," is anxious to show the connection between its Church and the See of Peter. It tells us that Palut was ordained by Serapion of Antioch, Serapion by Zephyrinus of Rome, Zephyrinus by Victor, his predecessor, and so on back to St. Peter. From this Palut the bishops of Edessa traced their line. And so the Patriarch of Antioch counted these distant East Syrian Churches as part of his Patriarchate, too. From Edessa the faith spread to Nisibis, and when, after Julian's defeat and death (363), the Empire had to give up her border provinces to the Persians, the Christians of these lands still looked to the great bishop in Antioch as their chief, till the Nestorian heresy cut them off from the rest of Christendom.

Another daughter-Church of Antioch beyond the Empire was the Church of Georgia, or Iberia. The apostle of Iberia was a lady, St. Nino, who fled thither during the Diocletian persecution. The king Mirian was converted by her in 318 or 327. Mirian then sent to Constantine for bishops, and Eustathius of Antioch came with priests and deacons, and ordained a certain John as first Bishop of Iberia.^[33] In the 4th century the bishop turned Arian and the king turned pagan. But the Church of Iberia got over that, and all went well for a time. In 455 Tiflis was built, and became the seat of the Metropolitan. In 601 Iberia was recognized as a separate Church province, independent of Antioch. Then came the Persians, and in the 7th century the Moslem conquest. For the further history of this Church see pp. 304–305.

Like Alexandria, Antioch had its school of theology, which, however, did not represent so consistent a tradition; it was also less famous than its rival. Serapion the Bishop (c. 192–209),^[34] of whom we have heard as the consecrator of Palut of Edessa, wrote letters against various heretics (Montanists, &c.), of which Eusebius has preserved some fragments.^[35]

The notorious Paul of Samosata was Bishop of Antioch from 260 till he was deposed in 269. But the first important name of the Antiochene school that we know is that of Lucian, priest and martyr († 311). He revised the Septuagint according to the Hebrew text, but was suspected of subordinationism, and Arius, who had learnt from him, was believed to have imbibed his heresy from his master. Eusebius of Nicomedia, Eustathius of Antioch (a faithful defender of the faith of Nicæa, ejected by an Arian synod in 330), Diodor of Tarsus († 394), Theodore of Mopsuestia († 429), the original father of Nestorianism, and Theodoret of Cyrus († 458) were the chief leaders of this school, which further influenced St. Cyril of Jerusalem († 386) and St. John Chrysostom († 407). St. John was ordained deacon and priest in his own city, Antioch, and preached there from 386 till he became Patriarch of Constantinople in 398.

The character of this school, as opposed to that of Alexandria, was, as far as the interpretation of Scripture went, great soberness and literalness. Thus Theodore of Mopsuestia denied the Messianic character of many Old Testament texts, and rejected the Song of Solomon as being obviously not divine. The daughter-school of Antioch was at Edessa, where a line of Syriac Fathers flourished—St. Ephrem (Afrēm, † 373), Aphraates (Afrahat, † end of 4th century), Rabulas (Rabūla, † 435), Isaac the Great († c. 459), &c. But the Antiochene school, in spite of the fame of the Catholic Doctors who had belonged to it, was as suspect of unorthodoxy as its rival in Egypt. Theodore of Mopsuestia was a Nestorian, Theodoret of Cyrus was an opponent of St. Cyril of Alexandria,^[36] and the school in general shared at least some of the Nestorian ill-fame that, after the Council of Ephesus, attached itself to Edessa.

It was about the See of Antioch that the greatest schism of the first four centuries took place (Meletius, p. 90). There is a very remarkable likeness between the history of the two great Eastern Patriarchates. Each of the Macedonian cities, Alexandria and Antioch, remained, after Alexander's Empire had broken up (b.c. 323), an outpost of Greek civilization in the midst of barbarians. Rome had swallowed up the Ptolemies, (b.c. 30) and the Seleucids (b.c. 64), but still these two cities remained Greek. The citizens of both spoke Greek, while all around the old barbarian populations of the lands (Egyptians and Syrians) clung to their own languages and customs, and hated the Roman Emperor as much as they had hated Alexander's generals. Both populations found in Church matters an outlet for their national and anti-imperial feeling. And so just as the greatness of the Church of Alexandria came to an end through the schism of the Egyptians, so did Antioch fall when her Syrians adopted heresies that had, at any rate, the advantage of not being Cæsar's religion. Lastly Islam poured over Antioch too.

In Syria both the opposite heresies, Nestorianism and Monophysism, helped to ruin the Church of Antioch. After the Council of Ephesus (431) nearly the whole of the eastern part of the patriarchate remained Nestorian. The writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia had spread this heresy all around Edessa and Nisibis, the school of Edessa was its chief centre, and the Church that had grown up over the Persian frontier with a Metropolitan at Ktesiphon (near Baghdad on the Tigris) fell away too. So Antioch lost her Eastern provinces.

The kings of Persia, who had persecuted their Catholic subjects, were glad to encourage a form of Christianity that had no connection with the religion of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile the Emperor persecuted the heretics. In 489 Zeno (474–491) closed the school at Edessa, which was then reopened over the frontier at Nisibis, and large numbers of Syrian Nestorians fled to Persia.

But the other heresy, Monophysism, the extreme opposite of Nestorius's teaching, did still more harm to the Church of Antioch. Here what happened was almost an exact copy of what we saw in Egypt. A large proportion of Western Syrians would not accept the decrees of Chalcedon. Monophysism had one factor in common with its extreme antithesis, and a factor that commended it just as much—it was an opposition to the faith of the tyrant on the Bosphorus. For a time they succeed in getting a Monophysite appointed to the See of Antioch, then Justinian (527–565) tries to cut short their orders. Severus of Antioch (512–518) belonged to their party, but, after his death in 548 (he had been deposed and exiled in 518), the Government shut up all suspect bishops in monasteries to prevent them from ordaining any successors. But the Empress Theodora was their friend. At Constantinople she arranges for two Monophysite monks to be ordained bishop, Theodore and James Zanzalos. Theodore was to go to Bostra and have jurisdiction over all the Monophysites of Arabia and Palestine; James to Edessa for Syria, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor (543). Theodore disappeared without leaving a trace; James Zanzalos travelled all over the East, and built up an anti-Chalcedonian hierarchy. In Egypt he finds two Coptic bishops imprisoned in a convent. Secretly with them he ordains other bishops, among them Sergius of Tella, for Antioch. This Sergius begins the rival line of Monophysite Patriarchs. He has on his side nearly all the Syrian population: the Orthodox bishop rules over only the Government party of Greeks (called Melkites here, as in Egypt) in the capital. James had the honour of giving his name to the sect. He was also called James Baradaï because he went about in rags,^[37] and from the name James (Ia'qob) the Syrian Monophysites are called Jacobites (Ia'qobaie). These Jacobites have ever since been out of communion with the rest of the Christian world, only keeping up irregularly friendly relations with the Copts. So between the Nestorians and the Jacobites the Orthodox pastor at Antioch lost nearly all his sheep. Then came Omar with his Moslems in 637, and swept over all Syria and Persia. The Melkite Patriarch fled to Constantinople, where he was content with a subordinate place under the "Œcumenical Bishop." The Orthodox See of Antioch had fallen as low as that of Alexandria, and here, too, there was no one left to dispute the ambition of Constantinople.

We must now go back to the 4th century to trace the rise of other sees. We saw that at Nicaea in 325 the dignity of the three great patriarchal thrones at Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch was accepted as an "ancient custom."

It seemed for a time as if two other sees would also develop into great patriarchates. These sees were Cæsarea in Cappadocia, and Ephesus. But their career was cut short, and their bishops never became more than Exarchs or, as we should now say, Primates, the Bishop of Ephesus over Asia (that is, the Roman province of Asia), the Bishop of Cæsarea over Pontus. Now here it is impossible not to recognize a conscious imitation of the Roman civil divisions. Diocletian (284-305) had divided the Empire very skilfully when he shared the government with Maximian and the two Cæsars, Constantius Chlorus and Galerius. There were four great Prefectures, Gaul (i.e., Spain, Gaul, Britain) under Constantius Chlorus, Italy (Italy and Africa) under Maximian, Illyricum (Dacia, Macedonia, Greece, Crete = nearly all the Balkan lands) under Galerius; lastly, the Prefecture of the East (Thrace, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt) under Diocletian himself. Each of these prefectures was divided into civil "dioceses" under vicars (vicarii), the dioceses were divided into provinces under governors (præsides, Ἡγεμόνες). Undoubtedly this organization was a very convenient one for the Church to adopt; the dioceses formed compact and coherent divisions, each with a chief town where the Vicar lived, to which the main roads led. Nothing was more natural than to accept these boundaries and to give central authority to the bishops of the central towns. We shall see afterwards how this idea, that the Church must follow the State in her organization, became almost a first principle with the Eastern bishops.^[38]

The way it worked out then was this: Roughly each Roman province became an ecclesiastical province, to the Governor corresponded a Metropolitan, the civil dioceses tended to become ecclesiastically unions of Metropolitans under an Exarch or Primate, who would answer to the Vicar; and the Prefectures became more or less equivalent to Patriarchates. But the parallel does not really fit so exactly. All three Western Prefectures (Gaul, Italy, Illyricum) went to make up the huge Roman Patriarchate. There only remained the Prefecture of the East^[39] to divide among all the others. The five civil dioceses of this Eastern Prefecture were:—(1) Thrace in Europe, from the Hellespont to the Danube and westward to the border of Dacia by Philippopolis (chief town Constantinople); (2) Asia, i.e., Mysia, Lydia, Pisidia, and part of Phrygia (chief town Ephesus); (3) Pontus, i.e., Galatia, Paphlagonia, Pontus, and Cappadocia (chief town Cæsarea); (4) The Diocese of the East, containing Syria, Palestine, and eastward to the Persian frontier (chief town Antioch);^[40] and lastly (5) Egypt (chief town Alexandria).^[41] Of these five State dioceses two, Egypt and the "East," corresponded to the Patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch. There remained the other three, Thrace, Asia, Pontus. It seems, then, to have been the influence of the civil arrangement that caused the Bishop of Ephesus to be considered Primate over the Metropolitans of Asia, and the Bishop of Cæsarea to become Primate of Pontus. Thrace belonged at first to Heraclea, and then became the share of the Bishop of Constantinople, as we shall see.

In 381 the second general council (Constantinople I) accepts this hierarchy. Its second Canon says: "Bishops who are outside their diocese shall not go up (ἐπιέναι) to Churches outside their frontiers, and shall not confuse the Churches; but, according to the Canons, the Bishop of Alexandria shall only rule over Egypt, the bishops of the East shall only govern the East, keeping the Primacy (τὰ πρεσβεία) of the Church of Antioch, according to the Canons of Nicæa. And the bishops of the dioceses of Asia shall rule over Asia only, those of Pontus over Pontus only, those of Thrace over Thrace only."^[42]

The council means to stop bishops from wandering about outside their own diocese and then suddenly appearing at local synods of other countries and interfering in affairs with which they ought to have no business. It tells the Bishops of Alexandria and Antioch to stay at home and look after their own patriarchates. The Fathers do not, of course, think of speaking so to the Roman Patriarch, because they know that he is also Pope and has jurisdiction over the whole Christian world. But what interests us here is that they go on to mention the three other civil dioceses of the Eastern Prefecture, and so draw up a list of just these five divisions made by the Empire—Egypt, the "East," Asia, Pontus, and Thrace.

The Diocese of Thrace concerns Heraclea and Constantinople, to which we shall presently come back. A word may here be added about the other two, Asia (Ephesus) and Pontus (Cæsarea) before we finally lose sight of them. Both these Sees of Ephesus and Cagsarea had illustrious records. Ephesus kept the sacred memory of her first bishop, St. John the Apostle. In the seven letters at the beginning of the Apocalypse she saw a clear proof of his primatial authority over these seven Asiatic Churches. And so for a time the Bishops of Ephesus as Primates or Exarchs of Asia took the fifth place in the hierarchy (after Jerusalem). Only once did one of them receive a faint shadow of what might have become his dignity. In 475 Timothy the Cat of Alexandria, in order to win the Exarch of Ephesus for his campaign against Chalcedon, affects to give him the dignity of a Patriarch.^[43] Cæsarea in Cappadocia was one of the Apostolic Churches. On Whit-Sunday "those who dwell in Cappadocia" heard the Apostles speak their own tongue (Acts ii. 9); St. Peter greets the Elect of the dispersion in Cappadocia (1 Pet. i. 1). And Cæsarea (Mazaca) became a centre from which the Christian faith was propagated. The Church of Armenia was founded, or at any rate reconstituted,^[44] by St. Gregory the Illuminator (3rd century), a prince of the Armenian royal house, who had fled to Cæsarea, was converted there, and then went back home to be the apostle of his people. So Cæsarea also had a daughter-Church outside the Empire. Till the middle of the 5th century the Armenian Exarch (the Katholikos) was always ordained by the Exarch of Cæsarea. But the Church of Armenia, in a synod at Valarshapat in 491, rejected the decrees of Chalcedon, and she has ever since remained in schism with Cæsarea and with the Church of the Empire. The Armenian Monophysites could not even arrange a union with their co-religionists the Syrian Jacobites.

Firmilian, the friend of St. Cyprian and the sharer of his mistake about heretic baptism, was Bishop of Cæsarea from 232 to 269. But the greatest names among the bishops of this city are Eusebius (b. 265, Bp. c. 313, † c. 340), the Father of Church History, and, greater still, St. Basil (b. c. 330, Bp. 370, † 379), one of the most famous of all the Greek Fathers. But neither of these exarchates, Ephesus and Cæsarea, had a chance of developing into patriarchates; they were swallowed up by Constantinople, and sank back to the position of ordinary metropolitan Churches.

We now come to the other two sees that eventually made up, with the three older and greater ones, the classical number of five patriarchates. These sees are Jerusalem and Constantinople.

 

4. Jerusalem.

The position of the Bishop of Jerusalem was quite an extraordinary one. During the time of the Apostles his Church had been the centre of the Jewish Christian community. It was, of course, an Apostolic See, counting its bishops from St. James the Less, the "Brother of the Lord" (Gal. i. 19). But the Emperor Adrian (117–138) had expelled all Jews from the city in 135; the very name Jerusalem was to disappear—in its place stood the heathen colony Aelia Capitolina. The Christian Jews had to leave just as much as the others; already most of them had fled at the first destruction of the city (70) to the little Greek town Pella in Peræa. So in some sort the original Church of Jerusalem had come to an end. After Adrian's time we find only a small and poor community of Gentile Christians in Aelia Capitolina, still, however, governed by an unbroken line of bishops. Now Aelia was in the civil division of the Empire a town of no importance at all; it was not one of Diocletian's chief towns. The Governor of the Province of Palestine lived at Cæsarea (in Palestine), as he had when St. Paul was sent there to be tried by Felix the Governor (Acts xxiii. 23, seq.). So for a time the Bishop of Aelia was only a local bishop under the Metropolitan of Cæsarea in Palestine. And yet inevitably he was looked upon as something more than just the equal of any other bishop. Call the city Aelia Capitolina or what you will, to Christians it was always Jerusalem, Sion, the Holy City to them as much as to the Jews. This bishop ruled over the places where our Saviour had suffered and died, where the Holy Ghost had descended on the Apostles, where, as they thought, the Lord would soon appear again on the great day to judge the living and the dead. The eyes of the whole Christian world were turned towards the land still fragrant with the memory of that sacred presence, to the streets hallowed by his blessed footprints, to the hill outside the city that had been the one great Altar. And very soon they began to come from all sides to see the holy places for themselves. In the 4th century, Egeria,^[45] a Spanish lady, wrote a careful diary of all the rites she had seen at Jerusalem when she went on a pilgrimage thither; in St. Jerome's time (331–420) pilgrims came to the Holy Land even from distant Britain.^[46]

Jerusalem was naturally the first, as well as the chief, place to which people made pilgrimage. And when they were there they found themselves under the jurisdiction of the successor of St. James; they eagerly watched the rites of his diocese; it was no ordinary bishop whose Palm Sunday procession entered the gates of the real Jerusalem, whose Easter Mass was said over the Holy Sepulchre itself. So we find that the Bishop of Aelia Capitolina, very naturally, receives a sort of honorary primacy, a distinctive place due to the unique dignity of his Church, yet without any disarrangement of the order of the hierarchy. So the Fathers of Nicæa (325) in their 7th Canon: "Since custom and ancient tradition had obtained that the bishop in Aelia be honoured, let him have the succession of honour (ἐχέτω τὴν ἀκολουθίαν τῆς τιμῆς), saving, however, the domestic rights of the Metropolis (τῇ μητροπόλει σωζομένου τοῦ οἰκείου ἀξιώματος)."^[47]

The "succession of honour" means a place of honour, apparently next after the Patriarchs; nevertheless the Metropolitan (of Cæsarea, Pal.) is to keep his rights over the Bishop of Aelia.

But these bishops were not content with their "succession of honour"; they wanted to be independent of Cæsarea, even of the great Patriarch at Antioch.

When the Council of Ephesus met (431) the See of Jerusalem was occupied by Juvenal (420–458). He appeared at the council, and made a great attempt to have his see recognized as independent. But this first time he did not succeed. St. Cyril of Alexandria opposed him, and Pope Leo the Great blamed his ambition in a letter to Maximus of Antioch.^[48] However, he got the Emperor Theodosius II (408–450) on his side. Theodosius—it is one of the endless number of cases in which the Emperors usurped jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters—pretended to cut all Palestine, Phœnicia, and Arabia off from Antioch, and to give them to the Bishop of Jerusalem, to make up a new patriarchate for him. Of course the Patriarch of Antioch, whose territory was thus very considerably reduced, protested against the Emperor's action, and the dispute lasted for twenty years, till the next general council in 451 at Chalcedon. Here the Fathers in the seventh and eighth sessions at last arranged a compromise. Jerusalem was made a patriarchate, but only a very small one; Phoenicia was to remain under the jurisdiction of Antioch, Jerusalem was to have only Palestine and Arabia.^[49] The Council "in Trullo" (Quinisextum, 692) counted Jerusalem as the fifth see, that is, as the fifth and last of the patriarchates.^[50]

The bishops of the Holy City counted several great names among those of their predecessors since St. James; Macarius (313–333) found the true cross with St. Helen, St. Cyril of Jerusalem (351–386) was a Father of the Church whose Catechism is the most famous of its kind, Juvenal, as we have seen, succeeded in turning his see into a patriarchate, Sophronius (634–638) was a staunch upholder of the faith of Chalcedon, and the witness of the capture of his city by the Saracens. But Monophysism spread very rapidly in Palestine, as in Syria, and cut off many of the Christians of this little patriarchate from the communion of the Catholic Church. And then, in 637, came Omar the Khalifah (634–644). After the battle of Ajnadin, Jerusalem had no chance of holding out any longer against the Moslem. Sophronius begged to be allowed to surrender the city to the Khalifah himself; Omar agreed, travelled with one single attendant to Jerusalem, promised the Christians the possession of their churches and freedom of worship on the usual condition—a poll-tax, and then entered the city side by side with the Patriarch, discussing its antiquities. It is said that Omar refused to pray in the Anastasis (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) for fear that afterwards his followers might make his example an excuse for turning it into a mosque, in spite of the treaty. So the Anastasis has always been a Christian church, and the Moslem conquest of Jerusalem did not at first involve any great suffering. But the city that had been Aelia Capitolina now became the Mohammedan "Holy Place"; and when, after an interval of fifty years, John V (in 705) succeeded Sophronius, the Church of Jerusalem was reduced to a subject-community of Christians in a corner of the great Saracen Empire. The Patriarch of Jerusalem has ever since been the poorest of his kind,^[51] and for many centuries he was content to live at Constantinople as an official of that Patriarch's Court.

 

5. Constantinople.

We come lastly to the story of the rise of Constantinople. The most significant development among the Eastern Churches, indeed the connecting link of the unity of their history, is the evolution of the See of Constantinople from being the smallest of local dioceses to the position of first Church of all Eastern Christendom, so great that her bishops even ventured to think themselves the rivals of the Roman Pope, so influential that when at last they fell into formal schism they dragged all the other Eastern bishops with them. It is the most significant development and the latest: it was, moreover, this ambition of the bishops of the Imperial City that far more than anything else caused and fostered friction with Rome, so that if one looks for the deeper causes of the schism, one realizes that it was not the Filioque in the Creed, not the question of leaven or unleavened bread, not the rights of Ignatius the Patriarch that really drove a wedge between the two halves of the Christian Church. It was, long before the 9th century, the slowly climbing ambition of Constantinople that bred mutual jealousy and hatred; the thin end of the wedge was when, in 381, the Bishop of Constantinople was given the "precedence of honour after the Bishop of Rome."

But the first development of this see was not made at the cost of Rome, but at that of the Eastern Patriarchs around her. At first no bishop was smaller than the Bishop of Byzantium. He was not even a metropolitan. Centuries afterwards, when he had become the first of Eastern prelates, when he was jealously trying to rival the unquestioned Primacy of Rome, he tried to hide the humble beginning of his see. To be of any great importance a bishop had to count his diocese among the Apostolic Churches. There was really no question of anything of the kind in the case of Constantinople; all her greatness came from the presence of the Emperor and his Court. But in the 9th century especially, a story went about that the first Bishop of Byzantium had been St. Andrew the Apostle; his successor then was the Stachys mentioned in Rom. xvi. 9. This story is found in a forgery attributed to one Dorotheus, Bishop of Tyrus, and martyr under Diocletian. It served its turn in fighting Rome, but has now long been given up.

Really the first Bishop of Byzantium of whom we hear was Metrophanes at the time of Constantine (323–337). And he was a local bishop of Thrace under the Metropolitan of Heraclea. The bishops of this small city would no doubt have remained in that position, and Heraclea would have become an exarchate over Thrace, as Ephesus over Asia and Cæsarea over Pontus, but for one most important fact that changed the whole development of Eastern Church history. In 330 Constantine "turned the Eagle back against the course of heaven,"^[52] moved the seat of his Government to Byzantium, built the great and famous city that still bears his name, and carried off all the ornaments of old Rome that he could remove to decorate his new capital. Byzantium became Constantinople, New Rome, and was to be legally in every way equal to the old city. The bishop of the new capital soon began to share its dignity. In the first place, as we have seen (p. 21), there was a tendency to imitate civil divisions and civil positions in the hierarchy of the Church. If that were so, if the position of a bishop were to be measured according to the rank of the city where he sat, who would be so great as the bishop of the capital of the whole Empire?

The pastors of the little town in the Province of Heraclea had now indeed an intoxicating opportunity of advancement. Were they to remain subject to a metropolitan? Should they not be, at least, as great as their brothers of Alexandria and Antioch? Nay, since the laws of the State were apparently to be the criterion, no position would seem too high for their ambition. Might not Cæsar's own bishop—the honoured chaplain of his Court, who stood side by side with the highest ministers of the Empire before their master, the bishop of the city that was now the centre of the Roman world—might not he even hope to be counted as great as that distant Patriarch, left alone among the ruins by the Tiber? One can understand his ambition; and the Emperors encouraged it. Throughout this story we shall see that the Emperors, while they themselves dealt most masterfully with their Court bishop, still used every means to get his position raised in the hierarchy. It was part of their policy of centralization; it helped to rivet the loyalty of their subjects to their city, through their own bishop they could the more easily govern the Church. Indeed, nowhere does the tyranny of Cæsar over the things of God, which characterizes the policy of these Emperors, show so clearly as in their dealings with their bishops at Constantinople; nowhere is there a more degrading example of subjection to the civil government than the mingled contempt and furtherance that these bishops received from the Emperor. There was also convenience in this new position of the Court bishop. He had the ear of Cæsar, he was in some sort his private chaplain. When from distant parts of the Empire cases of Church discipline were to be presented to the Government for its support, the Bishop of Constantinople was there to push on the case. He became a sort of permanent agent at the Court, always able to transact business for others. His household of priests and suffragan bishops gradually became a permanent synod that the Emperor could always consult before issuing laws about Church affairs.^[53] Constantine had been content to let the Church govern herself and to remain only the "bishop of things outside,"^[54] but his successors continually pretended to determine questions of faith by Imperial decrees. In this policy they found an ever-ready helper in their Court bishops. During all the centuries in which these Emperors were trying to bring the Church under the same subjection as the State their most steadfast opponents were the Popes of Old Rome, their most servile agents the Patriarchs of New Rome. The story, then, of the rise of the See of Constantinople is not a creditable one. It had no splendid traditions from the earliest age; it had none of the lustre of Apostolic origin; its dignity could not be compared with that of the old patriarchates, Rome, Alexandria, Antioch; it had nothing of the sacred associations of Jerusalem. A new see, in itself of no importance, its claims were pushed solely because of a coincidence that had nothing to do with the Church. It was only because of the presence of the Emperor and through his tyrannical policy that the Church of his city managed to usurp the first place among the Eastern Churches, and at last to lead them all in a campaign against the See of St. Peter. We must now trace the steps of this evolution.

We saw that at the Council of Nicæa (325) the "ancient custom" was recognized by which the three great Sees of Rome, Alexandria and Antioch "kept their rights." At that time Constantine had not yet set up his new capital. Jerusalem was to have a place of honour, Byzantium was not even mentioned. It was still a small local Church under the Metropolitan of Heraclea. But fifty-six years later, when the second general council met at Constantinople itself (381), things had changed. Nectarius was Bishop, now no longer of Byzantium, but of New Rome, and already there was growing up among the Eastern bishops some jealousy of the Roman Patriarch. So they thought to make perhaps some counterpoise to his great authority by exalting their Greek fellow-countryman in the city of Cæsar. Now we must here first of all remember that of all the councils that we count as œcumenical, two became so only through the later acceptance of the whole Church and of the Pope. These two were the second (this one, Constantinople I in 381) and the fifth (Constantinople II in 553). The Council of 381, then, was œcumenical neither in its summoning nor in its sessions. It was a comparatively small synod of one hundred and fifty Eastern bishops, summoned by the Emperor Theodosius I (379–395). There were no Latin bishops present, the See of Rome was not represented; the presidents of the council were, first, Meletius of Antioch, then St. Gregory of Nazianzum, then Nectarius of Constantinople. At the Synod of Ariminium in 359, for instance, more than four hundred bishops were present. We must also note that the Church of Rome, and the West generally, only accepted the dogmatic definition of the Council of Constantinople^[55] and not its disciplinary Canons.^[56] The 3rd Canon, then, has for us Catholics only a historic interest, as a step in the process by which the claims of Constantinople were gradually accepted by the other Eastern bishops. Indeed, this 3rd Canon was quite specially rejected by the Pope. It says this: "The Bishop of Constantinople shall have the primacy of honour (τὰ πρεσβεῖα τῆς τιμῆς) after the Bishop of Rome, because that city is New Rome (διὰ τὸ εἶναι αύτὴν νέαν Ῥώμην). It is not quite easy to understand exactly what this Canon means. But whatever it may be that these Fathers meant to give to the Bishop of Constantinople, they made no pretence about the reason why they gave it, "because it is New Rome." It is for a purely political reason, because of the new civil rank of his town, that the bishop is to have this primacy of honour. But what is involved in his primacy of honour? It seems to mean, first, an honorary precedence like that given by the Council of Nicæa to the Bishop of Jerusalem (p. 26), only a higher one; the Bishop of New Rome is to take precedence even of the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, coming next after the Pope of Old Rome. It must also tacitly suppose that he is now no longer under the Metropolitan of Heraclea; the second bishop of the Church could not well submit to a metropolitan. So from this time we find that Heraclea steps down and Constantinople becomes the Metropolis of Thrace. Did the council mean to give to the Emperor's bishop more than this purely honorary precedence and metropolitan rights over Thrace? Probably not, although we find him very soon exercising real jurisdiction outside that province. It was Alexandria that felt herself most attacked by this Canon. For a long time the Church of Egypt would not accept the council in any way. Dioscur of Alexandria (444–451) in his synod in 449 (the Robber Synod of Ephesus) calls the Council of Ephesus (431) the second general council.^[57] Theodoret says that he bitterly reproached the Patriarch Flavian of Antioch, who was present at the Council of 381, as a traitor to the rights of both patriarchal sees, his own and Alexandria, for signing its decrees.^[58] Timothy of Alexandria, who was certainly present at the council with his Egyptians, seems to have been away when this 3rd Canon was drawn up, because he afterwards wrote that he knew nothing about it.^[59] Rome was not of course attacked by the Canon; her first place no one thought of disputing. Still the Popes, too, objected to this new position suddenly given to Constantinople. They disliked so radical an upsetting of the old order in the case of the other Patriarchs, perhaps they already foresaw something of the danger which the ambition of this new see would bring. Pope Damasus reigning at the time (366–384) would only confirm the dogmatic decree against Macedonius,^[60] not the Canons. St. Gregory the Great (590–604) says: "The Roman Church hitherto neither acknowledges nor receives the Canons and Acts of that Synod (Const. I), she accepts the same Synod in that which it defined against Macedonius."^[61] Boniface I (418–422) complains of the "new usurpation which is contrary to the knowledge of the ancients." "Study the sanctions of the Canons," he says, "you will find which are the second and third sees after Rome. Let the great Churches keep their dignity according to the Canons, that is Alexandria and Antioch" (Ep. ad Rufinum Thessal.).^[62] St. Leo the Great (440–461) writes to Anatolius of Constantinople: "You boast that certain bishops sixty years ago made a rescript in favour of this your persuasion. No notice of it was ever sent by your predecessors to the Apostolic See" (Ep. 106, ad Anat.).

The Canon was put by Gratian into our Corpus Iuris,^[63] and the Roman correctors added to it the note: "This Canon is one of those that the Apostolic Roman See did not receive at first nor for a long time." So the first step in the advancement of the new patriarchate was by no means received without opposition. Nevertheless its bishops, under the protection of the Emperor, succeeded wonderfully in their career of aggrandizement. St. Gregory of Nazianzum (329–c. 390) had for a time administered the See of Constantinople. But there had been much friction while he was there. His enemies said that he was Bishop of Sasima, in Cappadocia, all the time, and that he could not be bishop of two places at once. So he left Constantinople, and afterwards wrote ironically to the bishops who succeeded him: "You may have a throne and a lordly place then, since you think that the chief thing; rejoice, exalt yourselves, claim the title of Patriarch; broad lands shall be subject to you."^[64] The machinations he had seen among the Court prelates had not left a pleasant impression. Nectarius (381–397), who succeeded St. Gregory, already began to assert his lordly place over broad lands. In 394 there was a quarrel between two rival claimants to the See of Bostra in Arabia, NE. of Jerusalem. Nectarius settled in favour of one claimant, in defiance of the rights of Antioch, in whose patriarchate Bostra lay. After Nectarius came St. John Chrysostom (397–407). It is with great regret that one remembers the fact that the most sympathetic of the Greek Fathers also on one occasion used jurisdiction outside his province. He put down a number of bishops in Asia, who had been simoniacally elected, and his judgement was entirely just and right. Only the right person to give sentence was the Exarch of Ephesus. Under Atticus, his second successor († 425), began the dispute about Illyricum. The whole of the Roman Prefecture of Illyricum (p. 22) belonged to the Western Patriarchate. Atticus got the Emperor Theodosius II (408–450) to publish a law cutting off East Illyricum from the rest and joining it to his jurisdiction (421).^[65] But this first time the plan did not succeed. Illyricum became afterwards a very fruitful source of dispute between Rome and Constantinople. We shall come back to it later (p. 44). The same Theodosius forbade any bishops to be ordained in Thrace or Asia without the consent of the Patriarchate at Constantinople. This means jurisdiction over Asia. There was some opposition to the law, but from this time Constantinople gradually absorbs first Asia, then Pontus, and then the whole of what we now call Asia Minor. The Exarchs of Ephesus and Cæsarea, who, as we said (p. 25), under other circumstances might have evolved into great Patriarchs, were too poor, too weak, and too near the capital, to offer any effectual resistance. They now sink back to the position of ordinary metropolitans, and we must already reckon Thrace and Asia Minor as making up the Patriarchate of Constantinople, while both the Patriarch and the Emperor have designs on Illyricum. Things were in this state at the time of the Council of Chalcedon (451), whose 28th Canon was the most important step of all this development. The time was ripe for a bold stroke. The rivals of Constantinople were too weakened to be able to resist. Dioscur of Alexandria appeared at the council as a culprit, and was deposed by the Papal Legate (p. 14). Maximus of Antioch was himself suspect of Monophysism; moreover, he had been intruded into his see by the Patriarch of Constantinople, in defiance of the right of election of the Syrian bishops,^[66] so that he was only a creature of Anatolius, and was not likely to turn against his patron. Juvenal of Jerusalem had disgraced himself at the Robber Synod (449), and was now deposed in the second session. Then he dropped Dioscur and his former Monophysite friends, and was glad to get his own little patriarchate acknowledged in return (p. 27). But he was not strong enough to dispute the claims of the Emperor's bishop. So Anatolius, then Patriarch of Constantinople (449–458), need fear no rival in the East. At the council he sat next after the Pope's Legates, because the three other Patriarchs were in trouble, and he thought the time had come to get the place he held more or less by accident^[67] acknowledged as a right. Then the council was full of his friends. There were 630 Eastern bishops present; from the West came only the five legates and two African bishops. But before we come to the Canons in favour of Constantinople we must remember that, in spite of Anatolius's ambition and the almost exclusive presence of Eastern bishops, no ancient council so clearly acknowledges the primacy of the Pope as Chalcedon. The six Imperial Commissioners looked after the secular business, but were expressly shut out from the sessions. The five legates sent by St. Leo (Lucentius, Basil, Paschasius of Lilybæum, Boniface, and Julian of Cos) presided, Paschasius pronounced sentence on Dioscur in the Pope's name (p. 14), the Emperor (Marcian, 450–457) had summoned the council "guarding the rights and the honour of the See of blessed Peter the Apostle";^[68] St. Leo had sent "my aforesaid brother and co-bishop (Paschasius) to preside over the synod in my place";^[69] "the synod received the Pope's dogmatic letter to Flavian of Constantinople (447–449) as all the Fathers cried out: "That is the faith of the Fathers, that is the faith of the Apostles … Peter has spoken by Leo!"^[70] They finally wrote to Leo formally asking him to confirm their decrees, because "the enemy (Dioscur) like a beast roaring to himself outside the fold … has stretched his madness even towards you, to whom the care of the vineyard was given by the Saviour, that is, as we say, against your Holiness; and has conceived an excommunication against you, who hasten to unite the body of the Church."^[71] There is no doubt, then, as to the sentiments of this synod with regard to the Roman Primacy. Yet these same bishops are specially anxious to exalt the See of Constantinople, not of course to the level of Rome, but above all other Churches. It was in this spirit that they drew up the Canons that became so fruitful a source of dispute. The sixth session (October 25th) was intended to be the last, Marcian and his wife Pulcheria attended it, and the Emperor made an admirable speech; the decree of the council about our Lord's two natures^[72] was read out, the Emperor forbade any further discussion on the subject by any one.

Then Marcian thought he would like the Fathers to make some laws about discipline. So they held nine more sessions. At the fifteenth session (31st October) the Papal Legates were not present. In their absence the bishops drew up twenty-eight Canons, of which several were made to exalt Constantinople. The 9th and 17th Canons decree, that if any bishop or other clerk have a complaint against his metropolitan, he should bring the case before his Exarch, or to the Patriarch of Constantinople. As Exarchs they mean apparently to include the other Eastern Patriarchs. So Constantinople is now to have a sort of jurisdiction even over Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.^[73] But the 28th Canon is the most important one. It says: "Always following the rules of the holy Father and knowing the Canon of the 150 most God-beloved bishops which has just been read,^[74] we also define and vote the same things concerning the Primacy of the most holy Church of Constantinople, the New Rome. And, indeed, the Fathers wisely gave the Primacy to the See of the Elder Rome, because that city was the ruler, and the 150 most God-beloved bishops, moved by the same purpose, appointed a like Primacy to the most holy See of New Rome, rightly judging that the city honoured because of her rule and her Senate, should enjoy a like primacy to that of the elder Imperial Rome, and should be mighty in Church affairs, just as she is, and should be the second after her. Thus the single metropolitans of the dioceses of Asia and Thrace, as also the bishops of the aforesaid dioceses that are among the barbarians, shall be ordained by the said most holy See of the most holy Church at Constantinople, whereas of course each metropolitan in the said dioceses shall ordain the bishops of his province in union with the (other) bishops of the same province, as the holy Canons ordain. But the metropolitans of these dioceses shall be ordained by the Archbishop of Constantinople, as has been said, after they have been elected unanimously and after the election has been reported to him, according to custom."^[75]

That is the famous 28th Canon of Chalcedon. The second half (to begin with what is less important to us here) means that all metropolitans in Asia and Thrace are to go up to Constantinople to be ordained (this of course puts them under that Patriarch's jurisdiction), so also those bishops whose sees are overrun with barbarians (that is especially in Northern Thrace, towards the Danube, where the Slavs were pouring in). But, where there are no barbarians, the ordinary bishops are to be ordained by the local metropolitans. The Canon then repeats that these metropolitans must be themselves ordained by the Archbishop (Ἀρχιεπίσκοπος, the word is rare in the East at this time)^[76] of Constantinople, although they mast first be properly elected (by their suffragans).

This, then, entirely does away with any remains of exarchal power at Heraclea or Ephesus (they must have meant Cæsarea too). But it was the former half of the Canon that most displeased the Pope. First, they wish to renew the 3rd Canon of Constantinople (381), which Rome had never acknowledged. Secondly, they make the entirely false statement the "Fathers" had given the Primacy to Old Rome because of her political position. Where had these bishops ever seen a Canon giving the Primacy to Old Rome? That Primacy was given, not by the "Fathers" but by our Lord Jesus Christ to St. Peter, "who always lives and judges in his successors" (the legates at Ephesus, 431, p. 76), nor had the political importance of the city of Rome anything to do with an authority given at Cæsarea Philippi to a Galilæan fisherman. Thirdly, the Fathers of Chalcedon, on the strength of this false assumption, wish to confirm an ecclesiastical authority in the case of Constantinople because of her position as head of the State—an incorrect and dangerous position, that would, if consistently carried out, expose the Church's hierarchy to a share in every political revolution.^[77] They do not, however, think of making New Rome quite as great as Old Rome; New Rome is to be "the second after her."^[78] The sees they really wish to supplant are rather Alexandria and Antioch, and their idea seems to be to divide the whole Church into two great patriarchates, a Western one under Rome, and an Eastern one under Constantinople. But the Pope, whose honour consists in the firm position of his fellow-bishops,^[79] could not allow the other Patriarchs to be cavalierly deposed for the sake of so new an arrangement, and the reference to his own see was quite enough reason for rejecting this Canon. So it was never received into our Canon Law, and the Popes never ceased to protest against it. On November 1, 451, the Legates summoned a new session to examine what had been done in their absence. Lucentius protested against the 28th Canon as contradicting the Decree of Nicæa (Canon 6, p. 9). There was a debate in which Aetius, Archdeacon of Constantinople, the spokesman of the Greeks, kept appealing to Canon 3 of Constantinople, and Lucentius to Canon 6 of Nicæa. The Illyrian bishops, Eusebius of Ancyra, Metropolitan of Galatia, and others, had already refused to sign this 28th Canon.^[80] Nothing came of the dispute, except that the Legates' protest was added to the Acts. In the exceptionally respectful letter of the council to Pope Leo, the Fathers still hope that he will confirm their Canon. They have only confirmed (they say) the rule of the 150 holy Fathers, who ordered that "after your most holy and apostolic See that of Constantinople should be honoured, because she is placed second"; they are "confident that you often spread out the Apostolic ray that shines in you even to the Church of Constantinople, and without envy you are accustomed to enrich your domestics with a share in your own good things. Be pleased then to accept what we have defined, to order ecclesiastical ranks and to remove all confusion, as being right and friendly and most convenient for good order, oh, most holy and blessed Father! But the most holy bishops Paschasius and Lucentius, and the most reverend priest Boniface, who hold the place of your Holiness, have vehemently tried to withstand what we had ordered, doubtless wishing that this good arrangement should be begun by your own foresight. Whereas we, considering the most pious and Christ-loving Emperors, who are delighted with what we have done, as also the illustrious Senate and indeed the whole Imperial city, have thought it wise to confirm its honour by a general council, and we have presumed to strengthen what was really, as it were, begun by your Holiness, inasmuch as you are always anxious to benefit us, and we know that whatever is well done by the sons belongs to the fathers, who look upon it as their own. We beg you then to honour our decision with your decrees, so that just as we shall then add the consent of the Head, so your Highness may fulfil what your sons have done, as is right. So always will the pious Princes be pleased, who confirm as a law the decision of your Holiness."^[81] The urbanity of this letter is caused by the great wish of the council to have its Canon confirmed; incidentally, one could not wish for a more complete acknowledgement on the part of a general council that its decrees need the Pope's confirmation. But it was all of no use. St. Leo did not mean to allow what they wanted, and he was not a person to be persuaded by compliments. He writes to the Emperor Marcian that "the same faith must be that of the people, of bishops, and also of kings, oh, most glorious son and most clement Augustus!" "Let the city of Constantinople, as we wish, have its glory; and under the protection of the right hand of God may it long enjoy the government of your Clemency. But there is one law for civil affairs and another for divine things; and no building can be firm apart from that Rock which the Lord founded originally. He who seeks undue honours loses his real ones. Let it be enough for the said bishop (Anatolius of Constantinople), that by the help of your piety and by the consent of my favour, he has got the bishopric of so great a city. Let him not despise a royal see because he can never make it an Apostolic one; nor should he by any means hope to become greater by offending others. The rights of the Churches are fixed by the Canons of the holy Fathers, and by the decrees of the venerable Nicene Synod; they cannot be upset by any bad designs, nor disturbed by any novelty. And I, by the help of Christ, must always faithfully carry out this order, because the responsibility has been given to me, and it would be my fault if the rules of the Fathers, drawn up by the Synod of Nicaea under the guidance of the Holy Ghost for the whole Church, were broken with my consent—which may God forbid!—or if the wish of one brother were more important to me than the common good of the whole house of God. Wherefore, knowing how your glorious Clemency cares for concord in the Church and for the things that belong to peaceful union, I beg and urgently entreat you to refuse your consent to impious attempts contrary to Christian peace, and to wholesomely restrain the dangerous ambition of my brother Anatolius, if he persists."^[82] At the same time St. Leo writes to Anatolius himself. He praises his orthodoxy with regard to the Monophysite heresy. "But," he says, "a Catholic man, and especially a priest of the Lord, should not be corrupted by ambition any more than involved in error." He blames the uncanonical ordination of Maximus of Antioch (p. 36), insists on the 6th Nicene Canon, and adds: "The rights of provincial primates may not be injured, nor may metropolitan bishops be defrauded of their ancient privileges. The dignity that the Alexandrine See deserves because of St. Mark, the disciple of blessed Peter, must not perish; nor may the splendour of so great a Church be darkened because Dioscur falls through his obstinate wickedness. And the Antiochene Church, too, in which, by the preaching of the blessed Peter the Christian name first arose, should remain in the order arranged by the Fathers, so that having been put in the third place it should never be reduced to a lower one."^[83] He wrote in the same sense to the Empress Pulcheria,^[84] and all through his life steadily refused to acknowledge this 28th Canon. The result of the Pope's refusal was that the Canon was never inserted into any code of Canon Law, either Eastern or Western, till the Greeks revived it at the time of Photius's schism. It has never been the law of the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless from the end of the 5th century the See of Constantinople does gradually assume the second place after Rome. Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem went down in importance, as we have seen. The Emperors, indeed, deposed their own bishops and appointed new ones from laymen wantonly; the Patriarch was, after all, only a vassal of Cæsar, to whom he owed the place of his see. But the same Emperors were always ready to assert his place above other bishops. Zeno (474–491) was a powerful patron, Leo I (the Emperor, 457–474) had let the Patriarch crown him, and this custom, always followed afterwards, also helped to raise the dignity of the see. Justinian (527–565) put into his Code of Civil Law: "The most blessed Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, shall have the second place after the holy Apostolic See of Old Rome; he shall precede all others."^[85] At last John IV, the Faster (Νηστευτής, Jeiunator, 582–595), of Constantinople, thought he could assume the title "Œcumenical Patriarch." It is well known how St. Gregory the Great (590–604) sternly forbade him to use this name, which is not even used by the Pope.^[86] "Who doubts," he says, "that the Church of Constantinople is subject to the Apostolic See? Indeed the most pious Lord Emperor and our brother the bishop of that city both eagerly acknowledge this."^[87] Again: "I know of no bishop who is not subject to the Apostolic See."^[88] It is also known how in opposition to this pompous title he assumed for himself with proud humility the title borne ever since by his successors, "Servant of the Servants of God."^[89] Although the Patriarchs of Constantinople, encouraged again by the Emperors, went on using their sounding title till it became, as it still is, their official style, it is noticeable that even Photius never dared call himself Œcumenical Patriarch when writing to the Pope.

Rome, however, did gradually acknowledge Constantinople, first, as one of the patriarchates, and eventually even as the second. This same St. Gregory formally announced his election to the Bishops of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, although in his private correspondence he still cherishes the older system of three patriarchates only (Rome, Alexandria, Antioch). The second place was given to the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople^[90] by Innocent III (1198–1216) at the fourth Lateran Council in 1215. In 1439 the Council of Florence gave the same rank to the Greek Patriarch.^[91]

The territory over which they ruled went on growing after the "Œcumenical Patriarchs" had become the chief bishops of Eastern Christendom. Leo III, the Isaurian (Emperor, 717–741), separated his own fatherland Isauria (at the south of Asia Minor), with the Metropolis at Seleucia and twenty suffragan sees, from the Patriarchate of Antioch and gave it to Constantinople. But the greatest question of this kind was Illyricum. We have seen that the Roman Prefecture of Illyricum,^[92] together with Italy and Gaul, went to make up the great Western Patriarchate. But the Illyrians, at least the "Roman" inhabitants, spoke Greek. Illyricum covered Athens and Corinth, so the Patriarchs of Constantinople, who had become the chiefs of Greek-speaking Christians, greatly desired these lands. The Emperors were always ready to add to their jurisdiction; the more people looked to Constantinople in all affairs for guidance, the closer their interests were knit to the capital, the better, of course, for the central government. At the sixth general council (Constantinople III or Trullanum I in 680) and at the Quinisextum (Trullanum II in 692) the lllyrian bishops are still counted among those of the Roman Patriarchate. In 649 Pope Martin I (649–655) suspends the Metropolltan of Thessalonica, and says in his letter that this Church is "subject to Our Apostolic See," meaning clearly to his patriarchate. St. Gregory the Great (590–604) has left among his letters no less than twenty-one written about the affairs of Illyricum, and he sends the Pallium to the Illyrian Metropolitans. Now it should be noticed that, whereas in the East patriarchal jurisdiction is expressed by the right of ordaining, in the West the corresponding symbol is the sending of a Pallium. The Popes have never made a point of ordaining all their archbishops; on the other hand, they did not send Pallia to Eastern Metropolitans. In 545 Justinian put into his Authenticum a law about the Bishop of Nea Iustiniane (see p. 49); he is to have jurisdiction over a great part of Illyricum, but only as "holding the place (τὸν τόπον ἐπέχειν = representative) of the Apostolic See of Rome."^[93] And yet, inconsistently, the Codex contains a law of Theodosius II (408–450) placing Illyricum under Constantinople, and of course with the everlasting explanation "because that city rejoices in the privileges of Old Rome"; and on the strength of this law the Œcumenical Patriarchs continually put forth a claim to Illyricum.

One must say that the question was never agreed upon till the great schism. Old Rome had on her side antiquity (she had ruled over Illyricum before any one had ever heard of a patriarchate at Constantinople), custom and the sentiment of the Illyrian bishops themselves. New Rome appealed to a Civil Law made by her Emperor. At the time of the schism this question was one of the chief ones (p. 152); since then there has been unhappily no possibility of settling it. The Illyrian Christian is now, of course, either Catholic or Orthodox, and so obeys either the Latin Vicar Apostolic or the Orthodox Metropolitan.^[94] A like case was that of Magna Græcia, the old greater Greece, that is, Sicily and the south of Italy (Calabria, Apulia, &c.). The people here were nearly all Greeks by blood and language. Politically, these lands belonged to the Eastern Roman Empire from the time Justinian's army conquered Italy from the Goths (554) till the Normans gradually took them (1060–1138). As the people were mostly Greeks, the Greek rite (of Byzantium) was used generally, and they had Greek monasteries. But some bishops (for instance, the Bishop of Tranum to whom Leo of Achrida writes in 1053, p. 178) were Latins. In any case all Italy and Sicily belonged to the Roman Patriarchate even more plainly than Illyricum, and had so belonged for centuries before there was such a person as a Patriarch of Constantinople. But at last the Emperor thought he could cement the allegiance of these distant provinces to his own throne by joining them to the Byzantine Patriarchate. Leo III (the Isaurian, 717–741) made a civil law proclaiming this; and from that time the Byzantine bishops make fitful attempts to assert jurisdiction here too, as long as the land belongs to the Empire. But the Normans conquer Sicily from 1060 to 1091, and then gradually seize the mainland too, forming what was afterwards called the kingdom of the two Sicilies. The last Imperial city to fall was Naples in 1138. From this time no one any longer disputes the Roman Patriarch's jurisdiction in these parts, though the Byzantine rite lingered on and is even still used about here. Magna Græcia is an exception to the general rule that rite follows patriarchate.

This completes our account of the rise and evolution of Constantinople, the "Great Church."^[95] So we have reached the classical number of five patriarchates, in this order: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, that afterwards seemed, to Eastern theologians especially, as obvious and necessary in the Christian Church as the five senses to a man's body.^[96] We have now only to trace the rise of the one independent Church province in the Orthodox East, that eventually belonged to none of them.

 

6. Cyprus.

The island of Cyprus at first undoubtedly obeyed Antioch.^[97] The Gospel had been brought to the island by St. Paul and St. Barnabas on their first missionary journey. St. Barnabas was counted the first Bishop of Cyprus, his successor at Constantia (the old Salamis) was Metropolitan over three other Cypriote bishops. He went up to Antioch to be ordained just like the other metropolitans of the patriarchate. It was possibly the confusion of the Arian troubles, when heretics reigned even at Antioch, that first made the Metropolitan of Constantia think he would like to be independent and have an "autocephalous" province to himself. From the beginning of the 5th century, at any rate, the Cypriote bishops begin to assert their independence. Pope Innocent I (401–417) stood out for the rights of Antioch.^[98] The Council of Ephesus (431) was already ill-disposed towards that see (its occupier John^[99] was the chief supporter of Nestorius). The Bishops of Cyprus assured the Fathers of the council that their Metropolitan had always been ordained by his own suffragans, never at Antioch;^[100] and so the council in its seventh session acknowledged the independence of their Church, though only in as far as such was already an ancient custom.^[101] There seems to have been a feeling that an Apostolic Church should be not submitted to, but be the equal of the Patriarchal Sees; although this idea was never consistently carried out, nor applied to the numberless Pauline Churches. St. Barnabas was an Apostle, although not one of the twelve, and it was he who secured for his Church of Cyprus its exceptional position. In spite of the Council of Ephesus the See of Antioch was unwilling to let Cyprus go. In 488, Peter the Dyer (Γφναεφύς, Fullo, Patriarch from 470–488)^[102] made a great effort to assert his jurisdiction over the island. But Anthimus, Metropolitan of Constantia, who was resisting him, just at the right time in the middle of the dispute received a revelation telling him where St. Barnabas's grave was, quite near his own city. This seemed to enforce the Apostolicity of his see—it was not only founded by an Apostle, but it still possessed his relics. So from that time the independent ("autocephalous" is the technical word) character of the Metropolitan, or rather Exarch of Constantia and Cyprus was no more called into question.^[103]

 

[To face page 49.

 

The Island Church had one more interesting adventure, that has left its trace till to-day. In 647 Cyprus was ravaged by the Saracens; in 686 a treaty between the Emperor and the Khalifah settled that half its tribute should be paid to Constantinople and half to Damascus. Then Justinian II (685–695) thought he could manage to keep the whole of the tribute by shipping the population of the island to the mainland, out of the Khalifah's reach. So they all had to go to the corner of Asia Minor, near the Hellespont; and there he built them a city which he called Nea Iustinianupolis—the New City of Justinian.^[104] Their bishops came too; the Exarch of Cyprus sat at Nea Iustinianupolis, and the 39th Canon of the Quinisextum (692) transfers all the rights, privileges and independence of the See of Constantia to the new city; moreover, the Exarch now was given jurisdiction over the Metropolitan of Cyzicus and all the bishops of the Hellespont, to make up for his lost island. But it all came to nothing. Only one Exarch (John) reigned at Nea Iustinianupolis, then Justinian II died, and the Cypriotes went home again, taking their hierarchy with them. The Hellespont fell back into the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the only relic of Justinian's arrangement is that the Exarchs of Cyprus have added the purely honorary title of Archbishop of Nea Iustiniane to their names.

If, then, we make a survey of the Eastern Churches at any time from the 5th to the 9th centuries, we shall find, first of all, that already a very large number of Christians have left the union of the Catholic Church. Egypt is full of Monophysite Copts, Syria of Jacobites; Armenia has fallen off, the Nestorians have all escaped to Persia. On the other hand, we find established throughout the Empire one great corporate body, far greater than all the schismatical Churches put together, which, in spite of such nicknames as Melkite, Dyophysite, and so on, is always officially known as the Orthodox Catholic Church. Throughout this Catholic Church the Pope reigns as Over-Lord and Chief (we shall see this in the next chapter); it is divided into the five patriarchates and the autocephalous Church of Cyprus.

Except for the schism between the East and West, this remained the fundamental constitution of Eastern Christendom until the rise of independent national Churches almost in our own time. And our Canon Law still contains the 21st Canon of the eighth general council (Constantinople IV, in 869): "We define that no one at all of the mighty ones of this world shall dishonour those who occupy the patriarchal thrones, or shall try to move them from their sees, especially the most holy Pope of Old Rome, and then the Patriarch of Constantinople, and those of Alexandria, and Antioch and Jerusalem."^[105]

 

Summary.

We have seen then, that already in the first ages some bishops had authority over others; metropolitans ruled over bishops, exarchs over metropolitans, the first three sees were those of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch. This was already an "ancient custom" at the time of the first general council. That council (Nicæa I, 325) acknowledges it and gives an honorary rank to Jerusalem. The second general council (Constantinople I, 381) wants to give the second rank to Constantinople, "because it is New Rome," but the Canon is not accepted by the Pope. The third council (Ephesus, 431) makes Cyprus autocephalous. The fourth (Chalcedon, 451) changes the honorary rank of Jerusalem into a real patriarchate and enormously extends the power of Constantinople; but its Canon is again rejected by the Pope. Meanwhile two other sees, Ephesus and Cæsarea in Cappadocia, have their careers cut short by Constantinople. The Nestorian heresy produces a schism in the extreme east of the Empire, and then a national Church in Persia. Monophysism causes permanent schismatical national Churches in Egypt and Syria, and cuts off all Armenia. Islam overruns Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, completing the fall of their three patriarchates. Constantinople is left without a rival in the East, becomes the head of all the Eastern Churches, and already is very jealous of Rome. But the Canon Law both of East and West always recognizes the five patriarchates and Cyprus.

 

1. Ign. ad Magn. vi. 1.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ad Trall. iii. 1.
5. The only serious difficulty against the monarchical government of each diocese in the early Church is that St. Jerome (331–420) in one or two places (in Ep. ad Tit. i. 5; Ep. 146, ad Evangelum) says that a priest is the same as a bishop; that before the devil had sown discords among the faithful the Churches were governed by a council of priests; that bishops owe their superiority over priests rather to custom than to our Lord's institution. Against this notice: (1) St. Jerome is much too late to be of any value as a witness. Centuries before his time we find monarchical episcopacy everywhere set up, everywhere accepted as a divine institution. (2) He wrote at the time of a quarrel between the priests of Alexandria and their bishop, in which he, himself only a priest, with his usual vehemence, took the side of his own order. (3) He in many other places plainly shows his consent in this question with the rest of the Christian world, e.g., "Without leave of the bishop, neither priest nor deacon may baptize" (c. Lucif. n. 9); "What Aaron, his sons, and the Levites were in the temple, that are bishops, priests, and deacons in the Church" (Ep. 146). Even in the heat of the Alexandrine quarrel he asks: "What does a bishop do more than a priest, except to ordain?" (ibid.). Which is, of course, what makes all the difference.
6. 1 Clem. ad Cor. 59, 1, 2.
7. Ad Rom. Sal. These translations are not admitted by every one, but Funk's defence of them (Pp. Apost. ad loc. and Kirchengesch. Abhdlgen. i. 1) seems conclusive.
8. "Convenire" = συμβαίνειν (but the Greek is lost.) It seems impossible to settle which meaning is right: the word means either. Stieren (Op. omnia Irenæi, Leipzig, 1849), who has certainly no prejudice in favour of Rome, declares for "to agree with."
9. There is a careful examination of this famous passage (adv. Hær. III, 3) in Wilmer's De Christi Ecclesia (Regensburg, 1897), pp. 218, seq.
10. We shall see throughout our history how important the right to consecrate the bishops of any country was considered.
11. The name Metropolitan is first used as their specific title in the 4th century (Metropolis is the chief town of a Roman province). About the same time appear the synonyms Exarch and Archbishop. Since the 9th century Archbishop has become the regular name in the West, while in the East they are still called Metropolitans. The name Exarch has since changed its meaning: Cf. Aichner: Comp. iuris Can. (Brixen, 1900), pp. 385, seq.
12. St. Gregory Naz. († c. 390) says: "The older bishops or, to speak more suitably, the patriarchs" (Orat. 42, 23). The name is here only an application from the Old Testament, just as deacons were called Levites. In the West as late as the 6th century, we find Celidonius, Bishop of Besançon, called "the venerable Patriarch" (Acta SS. Febr. III, 742—Vita Romani, 2).
13. In our Corpus Iuris Can. D. 65, c. 6.
14. E. A. Freeman ("The Eastern Church," Edin. Rev. 1858) thought that one of these disputes (about Illyricum) is an argument against the Papacy. The Pope was fighting for a limited jurisdiction (whether Illyricum belonged to him or to Constantinople); how, then, says Freeman, could he have been claiming an unlimited one, as he does now? Of course, the limit of his Patriarchate no more affects the question of his rights as Pope than do the limits of the diocese of Rome.
15. Mansi, ii. 882, 927.
16. Diodorus Sic. 17, 52.
17. "Opera sin minus erronea, saltem suspecta."
18. Alexander could summon over one hundred bishops to his synod against Arius in 321.
19. Ethiopia in the time of St. Athanasius, Nubia in the 6th century.
20. This name is often given to the Alexandrine Patriarch in the 4th and 5th centuries, both as a compliment and in mockery. St. Leo I writes about the "impenitent heart of the second Pharaoh" (Ep. 120 ad Theodoretum Cyri, 2), meaning Dioscur of Alexandria.
21. Like the Bishops of Rome, they, too, were often called Popes (πάππαι).
22. The condemnation of Nestorius was confirmed in the Council of Ephesus in 431 by the Pope's Legates: St. Chrysostom and Flavian were always acknowledged by Rome, and were eventually restored.
23. Marcian (450–457) had accepted the decrees of Chalcedon as the law of the Empire, and everywhere enforced them by his civil power.
24. Τιμόθεος Αἴλουρος.
25. Malik (Heb. Melek) is the Arabic for king. It was used by all the Semitic peoples (like the Greek Βασιλεύς) for the Emperor. Melkite then means βασιλικός, Imperial. Melkites are Christians on the Emperor's side, Imperialists.
26. St. Jerome: de vir. ill. I, &c. St. Peter was said to have reigned at Antioch for seven years (37–44) before setting up his chair at Rome. Our feast of St. Peter's Chair at Antioch (Feb. 22nd) was at first only Natale Petri de Cathedra, kept on the day of the old Roman Memory of the Dead (Cara Cognatio). To call it the Chair at Antioch was an afterthought, to distinguish it from the other feast on Jan. 18th: Cf. de Rossi in the Bolletino of 1867, and Kellner, Heortologie, 1901, p. 173.
27. An eight-sided plan, with a gallery in two stories around and apses jutting out from the sides. On this model were built St. Vitalis at Ravenna, Charles the Great's church at Aachen, Essen, &c.
28. Misopogon, ed. Spanh. pp. 361, seq.
29. Abgar Ukkama.
30. The Syrian "Doctrine of Addai." I quote from Hennecke, NTliche Apokryphen (1904), "Die Abgar Sage," pp. 76, seq.
31. H.E. i. 13.
32. Kuyper's Book of Cerne, p. 205. The whole story is discussed in Burkitt: Early Eastern Christianity (1904), chap. i.
33. Rufinus, H.E. i. 10.
34. Harnack, Altchristl. Litt. (1893), p. 503.
35. H.E. V. 19. Cf. Hieron. de viris ill. xli.
36. He died, in 458, in the communion of the Catholic Church; but his writing against Cyril was the second of Justinian's Three Chapters, as the works of Theodore Mopsuestia were the first (pp. 82–83).
37. Barda'ta is a rag in Syriac.
38. It had certainly not been so in earlier times. At the end of the 2nd century the bishops of Cæsarea, Jerusalem, Ptolemais, Tyre, &c., meet in a provincial council (Eus. H.E. v. 23, seq.). But Tyre and Ptolemais belonged civilly to the province of Syria, Jerusalem and Cæsarea to Palestine: Cf. Duchesne, Orig. du Culté chrétien, p. 18.
39. Præfectura Orientis. The Prefecture of the East must not be confused with the Diocese of the East, which was one of its divisions (the fourth).
40. A Count of the East (Comes Orientis) ruled over this diocese at Antioch.
41. There is a good map of the Empire in prefectures and dioceses in the atlas to Freeman's Historical Geography of Europe, ed. by Prof. Bury (Longmans, 1903). Compare with this the map " Orbis Christianus, sec. i–vi." in Kirsch's new edition of Hergenröther's Kirchengeschichte I.
42. It should be added that this little council of one hundred and fifty bishops was only gradually recognized as œcumenical by the West, and that only its dogmatic decrees and not the disciplinary canons, which already show anti-Western feeling, are accepted by Rome. Nevertheless this Canon II is in our Corpus Juris, C. ix. ¶ ii. c. 8.
43. Evagr. H.E. iii. 6, seq. Cf. Duchesne, Églises séparées, p. 168.
44. The Armenian tradition says that four Apostles had brought the faith to this land—SS. Bartholomew, Thaddæus, Simon and Jude. There certainly were Armenian bishops before St. Gregory. Dionysius of Alexandria (248–265) wrote a letter about penance to Meruzan, "Bishop of the Armenians" (Eus. H.E. vi. 46).
45. She used to be confused with St. Sylvia of Aquitaine: Cf. Rohricht, Biblioihcca Geographica Palæstinæ, Berlin, 1890, pp. 2, 3, &c.
46. Ep, 44, ad Paulam; Ep. 84, ad Oceanum.
47. This Canon is in our C.I.C. dist. 65, c. 7.
48. Ep. 119, ad Maximum, 2.
49. Hefele, Konziliengesch. II, pp. 477 and 502. Arabia means that part of the peninsula that belonged to the Empire, i.e., Sinai.
50. Can. 36: "and after these he of the city of Jerusalem."
51. He is richer now, because the Russians send enormous sums of money to the Holy Land.
52. Posciachè Constantin l'aquila volse
    Contra il corso del ciel, ch'ella seguio
    Dietro all'antico che Lavina tolse,
    Cento e cent'anni e piû l'uccel di Dio
    Nell'estremo d'Europa si ritenne,
    Vicino ai monti de'quai prima uscio.

    Par. vi. 1–6.

53. This became the Σύνοδος ἐνδημοῦσα (Kattenbusch: Confessionsk. i. 86).
54. "You (the bishops) are for the interior affairs of the Church; I have been appointed by God the bishop of the things outside" (Eusebius: Vita Const. iv. 24).
55. That is the Nicene Creed, with the addition of the clause about the Holy Ghost, as we now say it, but of course without the Filioque.
56. The Greeks count seven of these Canons, but only the first four were really drawn up by the council: Cf. Lauchert, Die Kanones der wichtigsten altkirchlichen Concilien, p. xxiv.
57. Mansi vi., 626, 643. So he ignores Constantinople I.
58. Ep. 86, ad Flavianum.
59. To the Synod of Aquileia (Hergenröther: Photius, I, 34). This Timothy must not be confused with the Cat.
60. That is the Creed.
61. Ep. vii. 34. M.P.L. Ixxvii. 893.
62. Quoted by Le Quien, Or. Chris. i. 18.
63. Dist. xxii. c. 3.
64. Greg. Naz.: Carm. de Episc. 797, seq.
65. L. 45, Cod. Theod.
66. Pope Leo I only acknowledged him for the sake of peace. Ep. 104, ad Marc. c. 5: "He (Anatolius) has presumed to ordain a bishop for the Church of Antioch without any precedent and against the Canons; and We have ceased to protest for the sake of the faith and of peace."
67. The 3rd Canon of Constantinople I, which gave him the second place, after the Pope, had not been received by the universal Church.
68. Leonis M. ep. 93, ad Syn. Chalc. I.
69. Ep. 89, ad Marc.
70. Mansi, vi. 972, &c.
71. Ep. Syn. ad Leonem, inter ep. Leonis 98.
72. In Denzinger (1900, p. 34).
73. That is a voluntary jurisdiction at the discretion of the appellant, who may now choose between his own Exarch and the Patriarch of Constantinople.
74. These 150 most God-beloved bishops are the Fathers of Constantinople I 381), and the Canon that had just been read is their 3rd Canon (p. 32).
75. The text will be found in any collection of Canons. I translate from Lauchert, Die kanones der wichtigsten altkirchl. Concilien.
76. It has since become the official title of the Bishop of Constantinople, see p. 340.
77. Throughout this story one cannot help realizing that since 1453 the very basis on which the Patriarchs of Constantinople openly founded their claims has been cut away.
78. Still a certain animus against Old Rome shows in the contrast between their frigid reference to "the See of the Elder Rome" and the rapturous "most holy See of the most holy Church of Constantinople."
79. St. Gregory I to Eulogius of Alexandria: "My honour is the honour of the universal Church. My honour is the firm position (solidus vigor) of my brothers. I am really honoured when due honour is not denied to each of them" (viii. Ep. 30. M.P.L. lxxvii. 933).
80. Le Quien, Or. Chris. i. 30.
81. Ep. Conc. Chalc. ad Leonem (inter ep. Leonis M. 98).
82. Ep. 104, ad Marcianum Augustum.
83. Ep. 106, ad Anatolium, 5.
84. Ep. 105.
85. Nov. 131, c. 2.
86. Ep. Greg. Magni, v. 18 (M.P.L. Ixxvii. 738), &c.
87. Ibid., ix. 12 (M.P.L. lxxvii. 957).
88. Mansi, x. 155.
89. Joh. Diac. Vita S. Greg. II, i, M.P.L. lxxv. 87. It is not certain what John the Faster meant by the title "Œcumenical Patriarch" (there are instances of its use before his time), perhaps only "Imperial Patriarch." St. Gregory certainly understood it to mean that he claimed to be the only real Patriarch for the whole world, so that all other bishops should be his suffragans or vicars: "If one Patriarch is called universal, the name is taken away from the others" (Ep. v. 18, M.P.L. lxxvii, 740). In this sense he says that no one (not even himself) can be so called. Such has always been the teaching of the Catholic Church. All bishops who are ordinaries have "ordinary" and not "delegate" jurisdiction in their own diocese. The Pope is not Œcumenical Patriarch, and has never called himself so, although in addresses to him the title "universal Pope" has sometimes been used; he is Patriarch of the West. For the whole question see Hergenröther, Photius, I, 184–196; Kattenbusch: Konfessionskunde, I, 112–117.
90. A Latin Patriarchate of Constantinople was set up by the Crusaders together with their Latin Empire in 1204.
91. Rome has often accepted a fait accompli, as long as it does not injure faith or morals, even if it began by an injustice against which she had protested. She eventually acknowledged Napoleon Buonaparte and the Protestant succession in England.
92. Illyricum is, in modern language, Bosnia, Serbia, Western Turkey, Greece and Crete. At the time we speak of, the original population was Greek, with continual inroads of barbarians—Goths and then Slavs of various kinds. The Bulgars came in the 10th century.
93. Nov. 131.
94. See Duchesne, "L'Illyricum ecclésiastique," in his Églises separées pp. 229–279.
95. Ἡ μεγάλη ἐκκλησία has become its official title.
96. C. 1054 Dominic, Patriarch of Venice, wrote to Peter, Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, asking him, among other things, to recognize Venice as a patriarchate, also founded by St. Peter through St. Mark, and mentioning that he (Dominic) sits at the Pope's right hand. In Peter's answer he says: "Your honoured letter says that the most holy Church over which you preside was founded by the chief Apostle Peter and given to the Evangelist Mark, and that you sit at the right hand of the blessed Pope, and that therefore I should receive your letter as that of a Patriarch. But indeed, most sacred spiritual brother, my modesty received your letter with honour as if it had come, not only from a Patriarch, but from a mighty Pontiff of God equal to the Apostles. On the other hand, whereas from my earliest years till old age I have been taught holy letters (theology) and have always carefully studied them, never from any one did I anywhere hear or learn till to-day that there is a Patriarch of Venice. For there are in all the world by God's grace only five Patriarchs, the Roman, Constantinopolitan, Alexandrine, Antiochene and Hierosolymitan." Peter goes on to say that the Roman and Alexandrine Bishops should be called Pope, those of Constantinople and Jerusalem Archbishop; so that he himself is the only quite real Patriarch. Then: "Now listen to what I say. A man's body is ruled by one head, in it are many members, which are all guided by only five senses, so also the body of Christ," &c. The comparison is a favourite one. George of Trebizond, at about the same time, tells us which each one is. Rome is touch, Constantinople taste, Alexandria sight, Antioch hearing, and Jerusalem smell. His reasons, and the correspondence between Dominic of Venice and Peter of Antioch may be seen in Will: Acta et Scripta de Controv. Eccl. Græcæ et Latinæ.
97. Cyprus was part of the Roman civil diocese of the East, that became the Antiochene Patriarchate.
98. His letter in Jaffe's Reg. Rom. Pont. 310.
99. 428–441.
100. This may have been true, for some time at any rate.
101. Hardouin, i. 1620. Hefele, ii. 208.
102. He was a Monophysite, twice deposed and restored, who added to the Trisagion (Sanctus) the words, "Who was crucified for us." These words were thought to contain Monophysite venom and were, after much dispute, rejected by the Orthodox. They are still a speciality of the Jacobite liturgy.
103. It was again confirmed by the Trullanum II (the Quinisextum in 692), Canon 39.
104. The name was shortened into Nea Iustiniane.
105. C.I.C. dist. 22, c. 7.