Ever since the earliest days of Christianity Constantinople has been the seat of a Father of the Church. His importance increased as the Empire flourished, and he soon was styled Patriarch, a title which has never been relinquished, an office which has never been in abeyance but for those few days between the triumphal entry of Mohammed the Conqueror and the Patriarch’s reinstatement by that monarch.
The buildings which serve as head-quarters for the Patriarch of Greek Orthodoxy in Constantinople stand overlooking the upper reaches of the Golden Horn at the Phanar, and have no great beauty to distinguish them from their surroundings. The cathedral church is small, and the only thing which impressed me in it is the cathedra itself. Not long ago I had the honour of being presented to His Holiness the late Patriarch. A friend and I made our way to the Phanar, through picturesque streets, thronged with the usual crowd of leisurely wayfarers; vines festooned from one side to the other, and in places affording shade from the searching rays of the sun, but at the same time condensing the mingled, varied odours inseparable from life in the East, and which, no doubt, contribute to its indefinable charm. The Phanar is a quarter formerly occupied by those Greeks whose duties brought them in closer contact with the Imperial Court of Byzant; they lived in stone houses that clustered round the Phanar, the lighthouse, at the foot of the heights, where stood palaces of princes, churches, and barracks of the Imperial Guards, and whence the walls defending the City from attack by land draw their rugged lines down to the Golden Horn. We were shown into a long room, hung round with indifferent portraits of former Patriarchs, and introduced by one of the most prominent lay members of the Holy Synod, a gentleman to whom, I fancy, the Greeks of Turkey in Europe owe a debt of gratitude. His Holiness received us most graciously, conversed amiably on many questions, and all went very well till he had a look at the sketch I had taken of him. “As it has not succeeded I will give you a photograph of myself,” said His Holiness, and I am the proud possessor of a signed photograph of this the latest successor of a long line of ecclesiastical potentates. Nevertheless, I consider my sketch a good likeness, and my opinion is not based on conceit alone, but is endorsed by others qualified to judge.
It is sad to reflect that Christianity, even from the earliest days, has strayed so far from the leading precept of its Founder. The Church in all ages, among all nations, proclaimed Him “Prince of Peace,” then incited her followers to take up arms in defence of dogma, ritual, never dreamt of by the Christ. The different peoples which were enabled to divide into groups in accord with racial ambition were used as tools by prelates of the East and West to add to their own importance, to enhance their own prestige. The West drew to it strong Germanic races who, sword in hand, helped to gather the broken remnants of the Latin races into the fold of the Western See; these subtler Latin races, never quite freed from the worship of their forebears, never entirely abandoning the worship of the gods of old, of Isis and Osiris, gained for a space ascendancy over the simpler, purer Teutons, and made the power of the Roman Pontiff possible. Revolts there were many, when the strong, persistent Germanic intellect developed, and tried to free itself from spiritual thraldom. Until the days of Luther, such stirrings were countered by a short shrift and a blazing pyre for the offender. Luther’s theses, nailed to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, marked the straining of the cords that bound northern races to the Southern See, and led nations to give rein to their ambitions, striving to attain them throughout a war of thirty years. Even then the fight was indecisive, and the “Kultur Kampf,” against which Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, battled with but qualified success, occupies the mind and tends to check the spiritual development of modern Germany.
The people of the Eastern Empire centred in Constantinople in those days, far beyond the intellectual limitations of the West, could not be expected to submit to the spiritual authority of a Roman Pontiff, especially as the Roman Empire of the West had gone under before its barbarian foes, whereas the Roman Empire of the East yet held sway over many distant provinces conquered by Roman arms. The Eastern and the Western world were seldom in complete accord; the bonds that united them in earliest days were frail, and could only be made to hold when in the hands of a strong man like Constantine the Great. The Western Empire’s fall enhanced the greatness of the Eastern Empire, and thus was paved the way to separation in matters of religion. The intellectual pride of the Greeks would not submit to any dictation on the subject of Christian doctrine from the West, and Roman ambition would not allow outlying communities to formulate new doctrines nor to revise old ones. It needed a small pretext to bring about schism, and that pretext was not long wanting. About the middle of the ninth century Photius, a layman, Captain of the Guards, was promoted by merit and favour to the office of Patriarch of Constantinople. In ecclesiastical knowledge and purity of morals he was equally well qualified for this high office. But Ignatius, his predecessor, who had abdicated, still had many supporters, and these appealed to Pope Nicholas I, one of the proudest, most ambitious of the Roman Pontiffs, who welcomed an opportunity of judging and condemning his rival of the East. But the Greeks resented the interference, and after many intrigues Photius emerged triumphant, and reconciliation between the two Churches was made more difficult than ever. After about two centuries of unseemly wrangling and bitter recriminations, Papal legates came to Constantinople in 1054 and laid a bull of excommunication against the Patriarch upon the altar of St. Sophia.
It will be readily understood that the Crusades, organized under the auspices of the Church of Rome, were not looked upon with favour by the Eastern Emperors and Patriarchs who, however much they bickered between themselves, showed a united front to outsiders. It is therefore not surprising that the Eastern Empire lent but half-hearted support to the crusading Western nations, and that, when that Empire was in turn threatened from the East, its appeals to Western Christianity fell on deaf ears. This made the path of Osmanli conquerors all the smoother. To-day we are faced with a new crusade, Eastern Christians, members of the Orthodox Church, carrying the Cross against the Crescent. They have met with hardly any but that somewhat overrated “moral” support from Western Christians. Montenegrins came down from their Black Mountains, all available fighting men of a population of some 250,000, and fiercely fought for an ideal. Servia, out of a population of about 3,000,000, sent an army as strong and as well-found as the much-vaunted expeditionary force of Great Britain over the mountain-passes into Macedonia. Meeting with stubborn resistance, suffering checks, they pressed on, and now hold lands which once formed part of Servia when, for a short time, it was a great Empire, and had its capital at Üsküb, which King Peter’s army entered in triumph some short time ago. Then the Hellenes, under the Crown Prince Constantinos, name borne by several Greek Emperors, came up from the south, and smarting under the memory of former reverses, fought their way over the mountains into Macedonia, and have occupied Saloniki. Here, again, is a small nation of barely 3,000,000 sending an army of near 100,000 into the field. Then from the north, in irresistible force, came the hosts of Ferdinand, Tsar of all the Bulgarians. His forces were reckoned at 300,000 when they crossed over the border, and this number was taken from an industrious, thriving population of little more than 4,000,000 souls. Numbers as yet untold have fallen in battle, others have succumbed to disease and the hardships of war, but what remains are loudly clamouring for admission to Tsarigrad, the Castle of Cæsar, where all these sons of the Greek Orthodoxy, though of different nations, hope to reunite in worship at Santa Sophia.