From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

The Orthodox Churches

Just as it is not true to speak of an Eastern Church, so it is still less true to speak of an Orthodox Church. For, whereas the Eastern Churches we have considered are only seven in number, the Orthodox Churches are no fewer than sixteen. But in their origin a very marked difference is to be noted between the Orthodox and other Churches of the East.

The Nestorian and Monophysite Churches, as we have noted, originated in certain specific heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches. But the false doctrines of these heresiarchs, as has been observed, contributed less towards the separation of the Copts, Syrians, and others than did the intense nationalism of these peoples who wanted only a pretext under the guise of heresy for concealing their disloyalty to the Byzantine Empire. Few of the rank and file knew anything about the theological issues involved in the false doctrines of their leaders. The majority of them were almost as ignorant of their real bearing on Catholic dogma when the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon issued their famous decrees as they are to-day. With possibly a few exceptions not even the clergy or the bishops of the Eastern Churches are now aware of what was the cardinal issue of their schism or are able to give anything more than the vaguest and most shadowy reason for their continued separation from the Church of Rome.

The Orthodox Churches—which embrace those Christians who use the Byzantine rite but are not in communion with the Catholic Church—unlike the Eastern Churches of which we have spoken, had their origin not in heresy but in schism, pure and simple. Many and various were the causes of this schism but the chief of them were the jealousies and ambitions of the Emperors and Patriarchs of Constantinople. And these jealousies and ambitions began at an early date and gradually developed until they eventually culminated in the fatal schism precipitated by Photius and Cerularius. For

After that Constantine the Eagle turned

Against the course of heaven which it had followed,[333]

there was ever-increasing friction between the East and the West. Constantine, fully occupied with the affairs of his vast empire, had wisely allowed the Church to govern herself[334] but such, unfortunately, was not the policy of his successors. Continually interfering in ecclesiastical affairs and determining questions of doctrine by imperial decrees, they soon proved themselves the worst enemies of the Church’s freedom of action. This was particularly true during the Byzantine period which extended from the accession of Justinian to the throne to the fall of Constantinople under Mohammed II. During all this time the Emperors were unremitting in their efforts to make the Church a subject of the State. In this they had the ever-ready cooperation of the court bishops, whose subservience is easily explained. Their ambitions were great and they counted on their imperial masters to help them to realize their unholy aspirations. Nor were they disappointed.

When in 330 Constantine established his new capital on the banks of the Bosphorus and beautified it with all the artistic treasures he was able to remove from the old capital on the Tiber, the ecclesiastical head of Constantinople was but a simple bishop under the metropolitan of Heraclea in Thrace. But this position was far from satisfying the vaulting ambition of one who suddenly found himself the honored chaplain of the Emperor and his court, the bishop of the magnificent metropolis that was thenceforth to be the center of the Roman world. What was now to prevent his becoming a Patriarch—the rival even of the greatest of Patriarchs—of the successor of the Galilean Fisherman who ruled the Universal Church from his palace in the old capital of the Cæsars?

What indeed was to prevent him from making his dream a glorious reality? The Emperor, he felt sure, would not thwart his ambitious schemes. Nor did he. For it was in harmony with his policy of centralization to have his court bishop raised to the highest hierarchical position possible. It would add to his own prestige, it would stimulate the loyalty of his subjects, and would augment his power and influence in his dealings with the Church. Nor was he mistaken. For history does not furnish more glaring examples of the tyranny of Cæsar in the things of God nor of more ignoble subjection of bishops to civil power than were exhibited in the Emperor’s arbitrary and contemptuous treatment of those ecclesiastics—even the highest—who, in return for the encouragement he had given to their unholy ambitions, had become the willing vassals of the imperial government.

In the evolution of the See of Constantinople, barely fifty years were required for achieving the joint plan of Bishop and Emperor. For as early as the year 381 it was decreed by a council summoned by the Emperor Theodosius I, which was composed of only a comparatively small number of Eastern bishops, and at which the Holy See had no representative, that thenceforth the Bishop of Constantinople should have the primacy of honor after the Bishop of Rome, because that city—Constantinople—was New Rome. Thus, by a stroke of the pen, the Patriarch of Alexandria, who had previously held precedence after the Pope of Rome, was supplanted by the Bishop of Byzantium. The Pope and the Alexandrian Patriarch protested against this outrageous proceeding, but it was of no avail. The Emperor and his subservient bishops had achieved their ambitious purpose and had virtually divided Christendom into two dominant Patriarchates—that of the West, under Rome, and that of the East, under Constantinople.

It was this realization by the bishops of New Rome of their most cherished aspiration—the separation of the Church into two great Patriarchates—that engendered and fostered that jealousy and friction that ever afterwards existed between Rome and Constantinople and which, more than anything else, led to that ever-regrettable schism that still separates the East from the West. For the position of the Church of New Rome, as that of the “first Church of all Eastern Christendom, was so exalted that her bishops even ventured to think themselves the rivals of the Roman Pope, so influential that when at last they”—her bishops—“fell into formal schism, they dragged all the other eastern bishops with them.”[335]

Besides the jealousy and overweening ambition of sycophantic bishops and tyrannical Emperors, there were other determining causes of the estrangement between the Eastern and Western halves of Christendom and of the ultimate establishment of an autonomous Byzantine episcopate.

Not the least of these was the difference of language. For after Constantinople had become the capital of the Empire, the Roman Court became so completely Hellenized that the language of Virgil and Cicero was no longer heard and was understood by but few. Even Photius, the most eminent scholar of his time, was ignorant of Latin. For this reason, it is quite possible that, aside from Byzantine ambitions and aspirations, “the divergence of tongues, combined with the Hellenic contempt of the Latin race might have contributed to ... a grouping of the Eastern Churches around the See of Constantinople, and thus have brought about, more or less rapidly, the formation of a Greek autonomy. The Roman Empire had succeeded in overpowering and even in suppressing the tongues of all the other conquered nations—such as the Syriac, Coptic, Celtic, Iberian, Phœnician, Etruscan, and many others—but it had never attempted anything in the direction of the Greek language. The result was that Greek ranked side by side with Latin as a second official tongue and this cause brought about the division of the Empire. Nor was it merely a question of tongues. Latins as well as Greeks knew and recognized that all intellectual culture in the West had its origin in Greek antiquity; hence arose a superiority that, when once the Empire was divided, promptly gave to the Greek portion a preponderance over the Latin.”[336]

Nothing, however, was so calculated to stir up the rancor of the Greeks against the Latins as the Pope’s coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor of territory that was regarded as an integral part of the Byzantine Empire. For the Greeks then held the theory, which was subsequently so elaborated by Dante in his De Monarchia, that the cause of Cæsar was the cause of Christ and that the perfection of the Church presupposed the integrity of the Empire and harmonious relations between Pope and Emperor. When, therefore, the Roman Patriarch set up a rival Augustus in the person of Charlemagne and divided the Roman Empire, which, under Justinian, extended from the Euphrates to the Pillars of Hercules, he was in the estimation of the Byzantines guilty of high treason. Claiming that they alone had the direct line of imperial continuity they would never recognize Charlemagne as anything more than “a barbarian King of a barbarian people.”[337] To what extent the establishment of the Empire in the West contributed to existing friction and to the fatal rupture between New Rome and Old Rome, which occurred seventy years later, is a matter of speculation, but it can scarcely be doubted that its effect on the exacerbated temper of the Greeks was far greater than is usually imagined.

Although, during the first five centuries of its existence, the See of Constantinople had several times been out of communion with Rome, the “Great Schism,” as it is called, was not inaugurated until Photius, with the connivance of the Byzantine Emperor, iniquitously usurped the Patriarchate of New Rome. After the death of this intruder in 891 peace was again restored between the Eastern and Western Churches. But the schism that had been engendered by the misunderstandings and animosities, jealousies and ambitions, of centuries was healed only temporarily. For but a little more than a century and a half had elapsed after the mortal remains of Photius—who has been called “the Luther of the Orthodox Church”—had been moldering in an unknown grave when the Byzantine Church was again, in 1050, thrown into schism by the overweening ambition of Michael Cerularius, whom the Emperor Constantine IX had, in violation of the most sacred laws of the Church, foisted into the See of Constantinople as its Patriarch.

Neither Photius nor Cerularius, it must here be observed, instigated schism because of controverted questions of dogma. Photius caused it by his shameless usurpation of the See of the lawful Patriarch of Constantinople. Cerularius, in his opposition to Rome, was actuated by similar motives. But he was not, like his schismatic predecessor, satisfied to be Primate of the Byzantine Church. His pride and ambition led him to aim at something far higher. This was nothing less than the founding of a theocracy of which he was to be supreme head and in which the State was to be subservient to the Church. This theocracy was to be the antithesis of the Cæsaropapism which had flourished almost uninterruptedly since the death of Constantine. At one time, indeed, Cerularius thought seriously of uniting the imperial and the patriarchal functions and proclaiming himself the Emperor-Patriarch of the Roman Empire....[338] He began to wear purple shoes, one of the Emperor’s prerogatives, and to join royalty and the priesthood in his own person. Michael Prellos, who knew him well and who wrote a valuable history of this period, informs us in referring to Cerularius: “In his hands he held the cross while from his mouth issued imperial laws.”

But Cerularius’ ambition was the cause of his undoing. Like Photius he was made Patriarch by the Emperor. Like Photius he was deposed from his exalted position by imperial authority and sent into exile on the charge of high treason. But, although he failed in his stupendous scheme to make himself the Emperor-Patriarch of the East, he was successful where Photius fell short—in definitively separating the Greek from the Latin Church and by perpetuating the most disastrous schism which has ever befallen the Church of Christ. It was for this “unheard of offence and injury done to the Holy Apostolic and First See” that the Papal Legates in Constantinople, who tried to the last to prevent schism, pronounced Cerularius and his adherents Anathema Maran-atha.[339] Their last words after laying the bull of excommunication on the altar of Santa Sophia were Videat Deus et judicet.

These words in which they called upon God to witness and judge were uttered at nine o’clock in the morning, July 16, 1054. The Great Schism which—aside from a brief interval—has ever since continued unbroken was then a fait accompli.

No sooner had the schism of Cerularius become an accomplished fact, than God-fearing men of both the Eastern and the Western Church set to work to devise ways and means of closing the deplorable breach. The Popes especially never lost sight of their erring children to the east of the Adriatic. From the fateful sixteenth of July, 1054, until the present, they have made efforts innumerable to bring about a reunion between the tragically separated churches. With this object in view, two General Councils were convened, the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and the Council of Florence in 1439.

But since the outbreak of the schism, a new barrier had been erected between the East and the West, which seemed almost insurmountable. This was the result of the horrible sack of Constantinople by the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade. The cruelties, massacres, and wholesale destruction of the choicest works of art which attended this unpardonable outrage made it one of the most shocking events in the history of the capital.[340] Then, too, there was the establishment of the Latin Empire in Constantinople and the erection of Frankish States in Syria and Palestine. This ruthless ignoring by the Latins of the sovereign rights of a Christian power and all the wanton cruelty that accompanied it was still fresh in the minds of the Greek delegates when they convened at Lyons and Florence and this, added to all the causes of friction that had so long rankled in the hearts of the Byzantines, made a successful issue of the deliberations of the assembled fathers almost hopeless.

Notwithstanding, however, all the causes of rancor that existed, a reunion was effected by each of the Councils but in each case it lasted only a very short time. For no sooner did the people of Constantinople hear of the action of the Council of Lyons than, exercising what should now be called the right of referendum, they rose in insurrection against it. As a result, however, of the reunion brought about by the Council of Florence, the Byzantine Church remained, at least nominally, in communion with the Holy See for a period of thirty-three years—from 1439 to 1472. It was during this fateful time that Constantinople was taken by the Turks under Mohammed II.

The Conquest of Constantinople was almost as great a turning point in the history of the Byzantine Church as was the Great Schism of Photius and Cerularius. For the Sultan had scarcely taken possession of the city when he sent for the leader of the anti-Papal party, one George Scholarios, and, with a view of winning him together with the schismatic Byzantines over to his rule as against that of the Catholic Powers of the West, he had him made Patriarch, although at the time of his appointment Scholarios seems to have been a layman.

No sooner had the Sultan championed the cause of the Greeks against Rome than they at once exultingly rallied around their Patriarch and, in words of deepest hatred and wildest fanaticism, shouted: “Rather the Sultan’s turban than the Pope’s tiara.” They have had their choice but with what long centuries of degradation and ignominy!

Neither the Patriarch nor his followers had to wait long before the scales fell from their eyes. For no sooner had Scholarios, under the direction of the Sultan, been appointed to the See of Constantinople than Mohammed sent for him and handed him the berat-diploma[341]—which defined what were his duties and prerogatives as Patriarch under the Moslem Government. But this was not all. For scarcely had he been invested with the signs of his spiritual jurisdiction than the unfortunate Patriarch was given to understand that he was nothing more than a puppet in the hands of his Moslem master who could depose him at will. Each of his successors since that time in the See of Constantinople has been obliged to submit to the same humiliating ceremony of investiture.

To their intense chagrin the Patriarchs soon learned furthermore that their appointment had to be followed by a gift to the Sultan of a large sum of money; that their tenure of office would rarely exceed two years;[342] that they could be deposed to make room for others who were forced to pay similar exorbitant sums for their appointment; that they might be deposed and reappointed no fewer than five times and at each appointment to the office from which they had been deposed, they would be obliged to renew the enormous bribe to their arbitrary and rapacious overlord.

The result was simony of the worst kind, for, in order to obtain the money required by the Moslem tyrant for their appointment, the subservient Patriarchs resorted to the selling of benefices to priests and bishops and metropolitans. To such an extent had this sacrilegious traffic in the things of God been carried on that simony has long made the Orthodox Church “a reproach and a scoff, an example and an astonishment among the nations that are round about her.”

But the troubles and humiliations of the Œcumenical Patriarch—as the Primate of the Byzantine Church is called—did not end with his degrading investiture by the Sultan, or, as was more frequently the case, by his Grand Vizier and by the payment of an enormous bribe for his appointment. Owing to his subjugation to the Sublime Porte, he soon found himself confronted with untold difficulties based on racial jealousies and antagonisms. These were augmented by the subserviency of the Phanar—the Vatican of the Orthodox Church—and the readiness which Phanariote Greeks always exhibited to become the agents of Turkish oppression of their fellow Christians—especially those in the Balkans. It was because the policy of the Phanar was identical with that of the Porte that the enemies of the Sultan were unwilling to acknowledge any kind of dependence on the Byzantine Patriarch. This was strikingly evinced in the war of Greek Independence, as one of the first acts of the Greek Parliament was to declare the Church in Greece to be autocephalous.

The example of Greece was subsequently followed by the different states in the Balkans. For no sooner had they freed themselves from Turkish rule than they proclaimed their independence of the Œcumenical Patriarch.

This Philetism—love of one’s race—in things ecclesiastical, which the various nations of southeastern Europe so conspicuously exhibited during the last century was a great blow to the Phanar, but it was this same kind of nationalism that was the chief cause of the Great Schism. Greece and Roumania, Serbia and Bulgaria, and Russia, long before any of them, had done nothing more than had the Orthodox Church when it separated itself from communion with Rome. It was in vain that the Phanar announced Philetism as a heresy. It was but the reassertion of the national idea which had led the Œcumenical Patriarch to rebel against the Pope—the construing of it into the principle cujus regio ejus religio which met with such favor in the seventeenth century in Germany, according to which “each politically independent state should have an ecclesiastically independent church.” As a result of the frequent application of this principle the Orthodox Church has shared the fate that never fails to overtake schism and heresy. In consequence of political and ecclesiastical jealousies and antagonism; of excommunications and counter-excommunications by rival bishops; of divisions and subdivisions, the once great and powerful Orthodox Communion now finds itself divided into sixteen independent Churches whose jurisdiction ranges in extent from that of the Independent Church of the monastery of Mount Sinai to that of the once great Empire of Russia. There is now little left to the Patriarch of Constantinople but the primacy of honor, for he has no jurisdiction outside of his rapidly diminishing Patriarchate. Is there in all history a more striking case of poetic justice than that afforded by the gradual disintegration of the proud and ambitious Patriarchate of Constantinople?

Although the retribution which has visited Cerularius and his successors is fearful to contemplate, stern Nemesis still pursues the Œcumenical Patriarchs with unrelenting severity. For now these unfortunate hierarchs are trembling under the Damoclean sword, which the vengeful goddess has put into the hands of Russia.

In 1721 Peter the Great placed the Church of Russia under the Holy Directing Synod, where it has since remained. As this Synod was never more than the shadow of the Czar, the Church of Holy Russia was for two centuries the most Erastian Christian organization that has ever existed. For during all this time the Holy Synod was as much under the domination of the Czar as any department of the imperial government. Added to this is the portentous fact that the Russian Church counts eight times as many communicants as all the other Orthodox Churches together. Even in the famous monastic republic of Mount Athos—a supposedly Greek community—where in 1902 there were seven thousand and five hundred monks, the majority were Slavs and nearly one-half were Russians.

All this being the case, the Russians, who are fully as ambitious as were the Greeks in the time of Photius and Cerularius, are beginning to ask themselves whether the time has not arrived for the Holy Synod to assume the supreme headship of the entire Orthodox Church. Nor is the Phanar ignorant of the aspirations and purposes of the Holy Synod. It has read the writing on the wall and knows that as soon as the Russian Church shall find a leader with the towering ambition and intense national spirit of Photius, the fondly-entertained project of the Holy Synod will be quickly realized, that the primacy of the Orthodox Church will be transferred to Moscow or Petrograd, and that the power and the prestige of the Œcumenical Patriarch will then be little more than were those of his first predecessor when he was the humble suffragan of the Metropolitan of Heraclea. The Great Church—the official designation of the Patriarchate of Constantinople—will then have shared the fate of the Churches of Antioch and Alexandria which, in the days of their glory, were the rivals of the Mother Church of Imperial Rome. And then, too, will the aspiring Greeks be rudely wakened from the fantastic dream of their “Great Idea”—the idea of a great and reconstructed Hellas that shall embrace the Balkans and have as its capital the Queen City of the Bosphorus.

There are few things in the history of the Church, which the lover of Christian Unity and peace finds more saddening than the clandestine intrigues and open antagonism that led to the Great Schism; few things that are more discreditable than the incessant machinations of those politicians and ecclesiastics who were the cause of all those fatal dissensions which were so characteristic of the Orthodox Church during the nineteenth century and have led to that widespread disintegration which, there is reason to fear, is just beginning. While one can have no sympathy with the authors of these disastrous schisms in the just retribution which has been meted out to them, one cannot help pitying the countless thousands among the clergy and laity who, in spite of the unpardonable scandals caused by Church and State are, nevertheless, earnestly striving to further the cause of Christ and to reflect in their lives the teaching of the gospel of their Redeemer. In Russia, in Greece, in Asia Minor—wherever the Orthodox Church still retains a hold on her children—one cannot help being edified by the piety, the zeal, the deep religious spirit of innumerable thousands who are not only ignorant of the cause of the schism that separates them from the Church of Rome but are also ignorant that they have even been in schism. Of those, however, who are acquainted with the origin of the Great Schism there are many who ardently hope and pray that it may soon be healed. For they have learned by long and sad experience the truth of the words of St. John Chrysostom who—with the possible exception of St. Gregory Nazienzen—was the most illustrious prelate who ever ruled the See of Constantinople: “Nothing can hurt the Church so much as love of power.”[343]