From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

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.