From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

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]

Reunion of the Eastern Churches with the Holy See

During my wanderings in the Near East, as during previous travels in Greece and Russia, a question of ever-absorbing interest to me was that of the long-desired and often-attempted reunion of the Eastern Churches with the Church of Rome. When I contemplated the majestic temples of Petrograd with their surging multitudes of pious worshipers and examined the stately convents and monasteries of Moscow with their vast number of devoted, God-fearing inmates; when I marveled at the shiploads of Russian pilgrims who at great expense and with great discomfort annually visited the Holy Land and noted the sumptuous hospices and shrines that their government has there erected for them; when I beheld the desecrated temples of Hellas and Anatolia and recalled how the Greeks, during long centuries of oppression and degradation—when they had everything to gain by apostasy—preserved intact the faith of the Orthodox Church and augmented that vast army of martyrs who sealed their belief in Christ with their blood—when I saw and recollected all this, there was the ever-recurrent question, “Will the fateful schism of a thousand years ever be healed?”