CHAP. XVII. ablest sovereigns were of Slavonic, as still more were of Armenian blood. The pride of Constantinople might have refused to accept a barbarian king as Roman Emperor. Yet had it been possible for Simeon the mighty Bulgarian Tsar of the tenth century, himself, like the Gothic Theodorich, educated at Constantinople, or for Vladimir the Great who ruled the Russians eighty years later, to be crowned in St. Sophia as Charles had been crowned in St. Peter's, the Eastern Empire might have widened its foundation, and have received an accession of strength sufficient to enable it to repel the Latin Crusaders in 1204 and to hold Asia Minor against the Seljukian Sultans. Simeon did indeed take the title of Basileus, and did obtain from Pope Nicholas I a grant of the imperial crown, as the price of his adhesion to the Latin Church: but nothing came of this brief alliance. Or, again, had the men of the Eastern Empire been strong enough to conquer, to incorporate and to assimilate the Balkanic peoples, such an infusion of new blood might have given it a fresh and long enduring life. That events took a different course, that the Empire, the Serbs, and the Bulgarians weakened one another by incessant strife, that the destroying Ottomans were thus, and by the apathy of Western Europe, permitted to overspread these vast provinces, and hold them in cruel bondage for many centuries, may well be deemed to be, like the extinction of the Ostrogothic race in Italy, one of the great and unredeemed catastrophes of history. Driven within ever narrowing limits, with a population that had now become slender and impoverished, the Eastern Empire perished. The peoples to the North-Bulgarians, Serbs of Servia and Bosnia, and Roumanians, crushed beneath the Ottoman yoke, were left far behind in the march of European civilization. Only within the last seventy or eighty years have they begun to add that new culture CHAP. XVII. which the West has bestowed to the scanty relics of what they learned from Byzantium seven hundred years before. title of Church and Empire in the East and in the West. The Church was the mainstay as well of the Eastern Relations as of the Western Empire. In the latter it recalled the imperial title to life: in the former it kept that alive through many troublous centuries. But here the resemblance ends. In the West, the Latin Church found itself free to grow and develope without interference from the secular power. No Emperor after Constantine dwelt in Rome, and from A.D. 476 to A.D. 800 there was no Emperor at all in Italy. The bishop of the imperial city Even when strong men like had the field to himself. * The Emperor Constans II paid a brief visit in A.D. 663; he was disgusted with Constantinople, but found Rome no more agreeable, and spent his last years at Syracuse. Heraclius, when (A.D. 617) he thought of removing the seat of power from Constantinople, had meant to fix it not at Rome but at Carthage. Inferior position of CHAP. XVII. disputed the civil supremacy of the Emperor, never, as did his brother at Old Rome, attempted to claim the right of selecting or deposing the successor of Constantine. Even when the loss of Syria and Egypt had practically removed from him the rivalry of the three ancient patriarchates of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, the ecclesiastical head of the Eastern hierarchy could not pretend to the authority that belonged to the Latin Patriarch, who held the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. In his chair of Constantinople no apostle had sat of none of his predecessors had the fateful words been spoken, 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my Church.' the Eastern Patriarch. After the days of Pope Gregory VII, the Church of Rome was at least the equal, and sometimes almost the mistress, of the Empire. The Eastern Church was always the handmaid of the Eastern State.m The Teutonic Emperor was the shadow of the Pope, cast on the secular world. The Eastern Patriarch was the shadow of the Emperor, cast on the spiritual world. A truly National Church she was, and as a National Church she gave immense cohesion and vitality to the East Roman realm. She was less arrogant, less corrupted by wealth, perhaps less penetrated by political worldliness than the Western Church had in the thirteenth century become. The Emperors also gained by escaping those long and bitter struggles with the ecclesiastical power which lasted in the West from the 1 The claims of the Roman See are fully set forth in an interesting and characteristic letter of Pope Leo IX to the Eastern Emperor, which may be read in Mansi, Concil. vol. xix. col. 635. m Cp. Luitprand, Legatio Constantinopolitana, c. 63. The bishop of Leucas assured Luitprand that his church had to pay the Emperor 100 aurei every year, and all the other churches more or less according to their means. 'Quod quam iniquum sit,' says Luitprand, 'patris nostri Ioseph acta demonstrant': for when he taxed Egypt in the time of famine he left the land of the priests free. middle of the eleventh to the middle of the fourteenth CHAP. XVII. century. But the East Roman nation, both as a secular and a religious community, suffered by the subjection into which the Church had been brought. Its spirit was roused by no great conflict of principles like that which stirred and stimulated the thoughts and feelings of Italians and Germans, of Frenchmen and Englishmen, in the days of the mediaeval Popes, and which, never completely closed, found its later expression in the movement for religious. reform which rent the Christian community in the sixteenth century. It had not the glorious exuberance of emotional as well as intellectual life which illumines the annals of the Western Church from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. It could show no such names as those of St. Anselm, Peter Abelard, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, William of Ockham, John Wiclif, Gerson, Savonarola, Erasmus, Luther, Ignatius Loyola, Zwingli, Calvin. That the Orthodox Church of the East, whose fold contains more than a hundred millions of men, is to-day in all the countries that adhere to it, in Russia and Roumania, in Bulgaria, Servia, and Greece, so much less of an intellectual and spiritual factor in the life of the people than are the various branches of the Western Church, whether the Roman Catholic branch or the countless forms of Protestantism, is largely due to the heavy hand which the Eastern. monarchs laid upon their Patriarch and their bishops. Christianity. Other causes no doubt there were for the decadence Character of Eastern Christianity. As in the mediaeval West the of Eastern teachings of the Gospel and its appeal to the individual soul were overlaid, sometimes even obscured, by the conception of a Visible Church within which alone salvation can be found, because it is only by her ministers that the sacraments can be dispensed, so in the East the passionate theological controversies regarding the Trinity and CHAP. XVII. the Incarnation which had filled the minds of laity as well as clergy, from the fourth to the seventh century, led to the exaltation of doctrinal orthodoxy as the central and vital element in the Christian life. The Eastern Church no doubt also valued itself upon its catholicity, as the Western Church valued itself upon its orthodoxy. But just as the sense of membership in one great body organized under one Vicar of God upon earth is the characteristic note of the one, so the full acceptance in the exactly right sense of all the dogmas enunciated by the Church is specially and pre-eminently distinctive of the other. This fettering of the mind by the decrees of ancient Councils, this concentration of attention on abstract and sometimes scarcely comprehensible propositions, is doubtless accountable not only for a deficient sense of the duty of the Church to enforce morality in conduct (a point better cared for in the Latin Church), but also for much of the glacial torpor which the history of Eastern Christianity sets before us. But the control of the civil power and the nationalizing of religion until religion seems to become a sort of ceremonial function of the State have also been paralyzing influences. Thus the Eastern rulers failed even more conspicuously than the Catholic West failed, and than Protestant kingdoms have also failed, to solve the problem of maintaining a religious community in dependence on, or in legal connection with, the civil government without at the same time injuring its spiritual freedom, and rendering it less responsive to the changing currents of thought and feeling among its Respective claims of the two Empires to represent Rome. members. The enquiry which of the two rival imperial lines had, after A.D. 800, the better title to represent ancient Rome is one fitter to occupy the minds of controversialists in the tenth century than to be debated in the twentieth : |