The Orthodox Eastern Church

Front matter

THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY WISDOM AT CONSTANTINOPLE.

[Frontispiece

THE

Preface

PREFACE

This little book is intended to supply not so much matter for controversy as a certain amount of information about the Orthodox Church. People in the West have too long forgotten that enormous mass of their fellow Christians who live on the other side of the Adriatic Sea and the river Vistula, and now that Anglicans especially have begun to take an interest in what they look upon as another branch of the Church, it seems regrettable that English Catholics as a rule have only the vaguest and the most inaccurate ideas about the people whom they confuse under the absurd name of "Greeks." During the late war one saw how widespread were such ideas as that the Russian clergy were under the Patriarch of Constantinople and said Mass in Greek. It is chiefly with the hope of rectifying such mistakes that the book has been written. There is nothing in it that has not been said often and better before, and the only excuse for its publication is that there does, not seem to be yet anything of the kind from the Catholic point of view in English. As it is written for Catholics I have generally supposed that point of view and have not filled up the pages by repeating once more arguments for the Primacy, Infallibility of the Pope and so on, such as can be easily found already in the publications of the Catholic Truth Society.

The complete titles of the works quoted will be found in the List of Books. M.P.L. and M.P.G. stand for Migne: Patrologia latina and græca respectively.

Two points need a word of explanation. The first is the spelling of Greek names. There is really no reason for writing Greek names down to about 1453 as if they were bad Latin and then suddenly transforming them into the semblance of worse Italian; for making the same name, for instance, Hypsilantius if it occurs in the 9th century, and Ipsilanti when it comes again in the 19th. Undoubtedly the reasonable course would be to write them all out as they are, in our letters. But what is already a matter of course in Germany would seem intolerably pedantic in English. I began with some such idea. Then I found that it would lead to writing Gregorios, Konstantinos, even Athenai and Antiocheia. I have not the courage. So names that have an English (that is not Latin) form have been let alone—Gregory, John, Philip, Paul; names whose Latin forms are known everywhere are written in Latin—Athanasius, Heraclius, Photius. Only in the case of less known names have I ventured to spell them in Greek rather than form any more sham Latin—Anthimos, Nektarios, Kyriakos. Sometimes the same name belongs to different people, and then it seems hopeless to try to be consistent. For instance, the present Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria calls himself Photios, and I have left him so, in spite of his more famous namesake. Unless one goes the whole length and says that Iustinianos lived at Konstantinupolis, I do not know what else can be done. The Greek υ is y; and ου becomes u in any case. Of course this spelling is no sort of guide to the pronunciation. All the Greek words at any rate in this book should be pronounced as Modern Greek. The few Slav names that occur are not written according to any system at all, but are merely copied from various books in other languages that evidently follow different systems of transliteration.

The other point is the use of the word Orthodox. Since the schism I have called the people in union with the Œcumenical Patriarch so. Of course the name then has a special and technical meaning. Orthodox in its real sense is just what we believe them not to be. But, in the first place, it seems impossible to find any other name. Eastern is too wide, the Copts and Armenians form Eastern Churches, Schismatic involves the same difficulty, besides being needlessly offensive. We do not in ordinary conversation speak of Protestants as heretics. The name commonly used, Greek, is the worst of all. The only body that ever calls itself, or can with any sort of reason be called the Greek Church, is the Established Church of the kingdom of Greece; and that is only one, and a very small one, of the sixteen bodies that make up this great Communion. To call the millions of Russians, who say their prayers in Old Slavonic and obey the Holy Synod at Petersburg, Greeks is as absurd as calling us all Italians. There is no parallel with our name Roman. We use the Roman liturgy in the Roman language and obey the Roman Patriarch. They use the Byzantine liturgy in all sorts of languages, and the enormous majority obey no Patriarch at all. Byzantine Orthodox would more or less correspond to Roman Catholic, but the Byzantine Patriarch has no jurisdiction outside his reduced Patriarchate and occupies a very different position from that of the Roman Pope. And then courteous and reasonable people generally call any religious body by the name it calls itself. We have no difficulty in speaking of Evangelicals in Germany, the Church of England at home, and the Salvation Army everywhere. Of course one conceives these names as written in inverted commas, like those of the Holy Roman and the Celestial Empires. In the same way most people call us Catholics. Naturally all Christians believe that they are members of the Universal Church of Christ, and most of them profess their faith in it when they say the Creed. The way in which High Church Anglicans have suddenly realized this and have discovered that they would give away their own case by calling us Catholics is astonishingly naive. Of course they think that they are really Catholics too; so do all Christians. And we never imagined that we are called so except as a technical name which happens to have become ours, and which even Turks (whom, by the way, it is polite to call True Believers) give only to us. The body about which this book treats always calls itself the Orthodox Eastern Church, and in the East we call them Orthodox and they call us Catholics (unless when they mean to be rude), and no one thinks for a moment that either uses these names except as technical terms.

This book was intended at first to contain accounts of the other Eastern Churches too. Want of space made that impossible. It is proposed to make another volume some day describing the Nestorians, Armenians, Jacobites, Copts, Abyssinians, and, above all, our shamefully neglected brothers the Uniates. I fear that, in the last part especially, the account of the Orthodox would not please them. I am sorry that the racial quarrels among them loom so large; but it is true that these fill up nearly all their history during the last century. I have tried to write it all fairly, and have said what I think should be said in their excuse. In spite of this, in spite of the irony which is not mine but that of the circumstances, this little book has been written without any sort of rancour against and, I hope, without any want of due respect towards those great sees whose wonderful history and ancient traditions make them the most venerable part of the Christian world—except only that greater Western throne whose communion they have rejected.

Jerusalem, Low Sunday (Kal. Greg.), Jerusalem, Holy Cross Sunday (Kal. Iul.), 1907.

Introduction

THE ORTHODOX EASTERN CHURCH

The history of the Eastern Churches begins at the time of the Apostles. The native Christians of Jerusalem, Cyprus, Greece, the few communities still left in Antioch, or scattered through Asia Minor have not now much to boast of, in comparison with the far greater and more flourishing Churches of Western Europe; but they remember with just pride that the Gospel was preached to their fathers, not by unknown missionaries of the fourth or fifth centuries, not even by saints sent out from the great Roman Church, but by the Apostles themselves, and they read the names of their cities and of their first bishops in the pages of the New Testament. And during the first six centuries at least, these Churches play a leading part in the general history of Christianity. It was in the East that the great heresies arose, their chief opponents were Eastern bishops, and it was in the East that the first eight general councils were held. To write a history of any of the Eastern Churches during these earlier centuries then, would be only to tell over again the most important facts of general Church history. We will therefore pass over the great public events that are commonly known, and be content with an account of the domestic affairs of the most important of these Churches, that of the great body of Christians who remained Orthodox after the Nestorian and Monophysite heresies, over whom the Patriarchs of Constantinople gradually managed to assume the leadership, and who fell into schism with that see in the 9th and 11th centuries. This is the communion that calls itself the Orthodox Church.

Such an account will fall naturally into four parts, treating of: I. The period before the Great Schism, that is during the first eight centuries. II. The Story of the Schism. III. From the Schism to Modern Times. IV. The Orthodox Church at the Present Time.

1. The Great Patriarchates

PART I

THE ORTHODOX EASTERN CHURCH BEFORE THE SCHISM

In this first part we may divide our account of the facts that most interest Catholics into three chapters: (1) Of the development of the order of the Hierarchy, and of the rise of the great Patriarchates. (2) Of their relations to the Latin Churches, and especially of their relation to the Roman Church. (3) Of their faith and liturgies during these eight centuries.

CHAPTER I

THE GREAT PATRIARCHATES

When the Apostles were all dead, and when the extraordinary offices of Prophets, Evangelists, Doctors, &c. (Eph. iv. 11; 1 Cor. xii. 28), had gradually disappeared, we find that there remains a fixed hierarchy in each local Church. This hierarchy consists of the three fundamental orders of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. In each city where there was a Christian community the Bishop "presided in the place of God" in the town and in the country round. Assisting him in the liturgy and as a council, was a college of priests "in the place of a Senate of Apostles," and then came the Deacons "who are entrusted with the ministry of Jesus Christ" to preach, catechize, baptize, and take care of the poor. This hierarchy is fully developed in the 1st century. The letters of St. Ignatius, the martyr-bishop of Antioch († c. 107), are full of allusions to the three-fold order. "Let every one reverence the Deacons as Jesus Christ, so also the Bishop who is the type of the Father, and the Priests as the Senate of God and Council of the Apostles." And, as far as the inner organization of each community was concerned, this hierarchy was sufficient.

But a further organization arranged the relations of the bishops to each other; and from the beginning we find some bishops exercising jurisdiction over their fellow bishops beyond the boundaries of their own dioceses. Now the most important example of the authority of one bishop over others is the universal jurisdiction exercised by the Bishop of Rome over the whole Catholic Church. But this question has been so often discussed, the evidences of the Roman Primacy during the first centuries have been so often produced, that we need not dwell upon them again here. We see the Roman Church in the 1st century sternly commanding the Christians of Corinth (a city far away from her own diocese) to receive back their lawful ecclesiastical superiors, and concluding with just such words as a Pope would use to-day: "If they do not obey what he (God) says through us, let them know that they will be involved in no small crime and danger, but we shall be innocent of this sin." We hear St. Ignatius greeting the "Presiding Church in the place of the Roman land," as the "president of the bond of love." We know that the Greek Bishop of Lyons, St. Irenæus († 202), finding it too long to count up all the Churches, is content to quote against heretics "the greatest, most ancient and best known Church, founded and constituted by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul, at Rome," because "every Church, that is, the faithful from all parts, most agree with (or 'go to') this Church on account of her mightier rule, and in her the tradition of the Apostles has always been kept by those who are from all sides." He then draws up the list of Popes from St. Peter to Eleutherius (177–189) his contemporary. But this authority of the Pope belongs to general Church History: and we shall come later to the evidence of the great Greek Fathers for it. Now we are chiefly concerned with the other cases of superior jurisdiction, especially among Eastern bishops.

From the beginning we find the bishops of the more important sees, of the chief towns of provinces for instance, exercising jurisdiction over the neighbouring Churches. There is no reason to suppose that this right had been formally handed over to them, still less was the arrangement an imitation of the Roman civil jurisdiction, at any rate in this first period. The reason of their authority was a very simple and a very natural one. It was to the great central cities that the Gospel had first been brought, it was from them that the faith had spread through the country around. The bishops of the chief towns ruled then over the oldest sees, in many cases they traced their line back to one of the Apostles, they had sent out missionaries to the neighbouring villages, and, when the time came to set up other sees near them, they naturally ordained the new bishops. Now the right or the custom of ordaining another bishop was for many centuries looked upon as involving a sort of vague jurisdiction over him. It produced the relationship of a "Fatherhood in Christ"; the new bishop looked up to his consecrator with gratitude and with filial piety. So before there was any formal legislation on the subject, the bishops and faithful of each province naturally looked upon the bishop of the oldest Church in the neighbourhood, from whom they had received the faith and holy orders, who was the connecting link between them and the Apostles, as their natural chief. They appealed to him in disputes, they followed his liturgical use, and they found it natural that, if there was a scandal among them, he should come to put it right. These central bishops were what we call Metropolitans or Archbishops. Thus, Carthage was the head of the African Church, Alexandria of Egypt, Antioch of Syria, Ephesus of Asia, Heraclea of Thrace, &c. These metropolitans visited the sees around, ordained the bishops and, when synods began to be called, they summoned them and presided over them. But the organization went further. Just as several bishops were joined under one metropolitan, so the chief metropolitan of a country stood as the head of his fellows. These chief metropolitans were in some cases afterwards called Exarchs; three of them long before the Council of Nicæa stand out from all others as the three first bishops of Christendom. These three are the Bishops of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. The name Patriarch, like nearly all ecclesiastical titles, was at first used more vaguely; even as late as the 4th century, it is still applied to any specially venerable bishop. Several reasons combined to give these three Patriarchs (we may already call them by what eventually became their special title) the first three places. Rome was of course always the first see, and both the others also claimed a descent from the Prince of the Apostles, St. Peter; Antioch was where he had first sat, Alexandria was considered as having been founded by him through his disciple, St. Mark. Moreover these three bishops stood at the head of three sharply divided lands; Rome stood for Italy and for all the Latin-speaking West, that she was gradually converting; Alexandria was the capital of the old kingdom of Egypt, which through all changes had kept its own language (Coptic was spoken there till the Arab conquest) and individuality; and Antioch was the head of Syria. Lastly, before Constantinople was built, these three were the three most important towns in the Empire. So when the first general council met at Nicæa in 325 it only confirmed what had already long been recognized: "Let the ancient custom be maintained in Egypt, Libya and the Pentapolis, that the Bishop of Alexandria have authority over all these places, just as is the custom for the Bishop in Rome. In the same way in Antioch and the other provinces the Churches shall keep their rights" (Can. 6 Nic.). The Canon goes on to say that if any one becomes a bishop without the knowledge of his metropolitan "this great synod declares that it is not meet for such a one to be a bishop."

This, then, is the first stage of the development. When the Fathers of Nicæa met, on every side were metropolitans ruling over provinces of suffragan bishops, and, high above all others, stood the three great Patriarchs of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch.

It will be convenient to add here something about these three greatest sees.

1. .

We must first of all carefully distinguish the patriarchal dignity and rights from those the Pope has as Vicar of Christ and visible Head of the whole Catholic Church, that is, from his Papal rights. The distinction is really quite a simple one. The Pope is, and his predecessors always have been (1) Bishop of Rome; (2) Metropolitan of the Roman Province; (3) Primate of Italy; (4) Patriarch of the West; (5) Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church. Each of these titles involved different rights and different relations to the faithful: to the citizens of his own city he is Bishop, Metropolitan, Primate, Patriarch, and Pope all in one; to us in England he is neither local bishop, nor metropolitan, nor primate, but Patriarch and Pope; to Catholics of Eastern rites he is not Patriarch, but only Pope. It is true that the Papal dignity is so enormously greater than any of the others that it tends to overshadow them; it is also true that one cannot always say exactly in which capacity the Pope acts—in earlier ages especially Popes were probably often not explicitly conscious themselves. On the other hand, as soon as we begin to discuss the relations of the Eastern Churches to the Pope, the distinction between his positions as ĦWestern Patriarch and as universal Pope becomes very important. We shall hear of fierce disputes as to the limits of the Roman Patriarchate carried on by people who entirely admitted the Pope's universal jurisdiction as Pope: and now that the "Orthodox" Churches no longer acknowledge him as Pope they still recognize him as Patriarch of the West—indeed, still count him as the first of the great Patriarchs.

The Roman Patriarchate, then, as distinct from the Papacy, covered, at the time of the Council of Nicæa, the same territory as has always since been conceded to her by every one, namely, first Italy, and then all the undefined Western lands where Latin was spoken officially, all the tribes of barbarians who came immediately under the influence of Rome, whom she had converted or would convert in future. At Nicæa the Papal Legate, Hosius, Bishop of Cordova, signs the decrees in the name of "the Church of Rome, and the Churches of Italy, Spain, and all the West." It was only on the Eastern side, where the Roman Patriarchate touched the others (or, rather, the new one of Constantinople), that in after years her boundaries were disputed. We shall hear of the questions of Illyricum and the Bulgarian Church. Not only as universal Pope, but also because of his enormously largest territory, as successor of the Prince of the Apostles, as Bishop of the mighty city that was Queen of the world, that had given her name to all the Empire, was the Roman Pontiff always, without question, the first of the Patriarchs.

2. .

Before the rise of Constantinople the second city of the Empire was the Port of Egypt. Her only possible rival would have been Antioch; but Antioch was inland, whereas all the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean poured into the great harbour of Alexandria. And behind that harbour lay the greatest, richest, and most civilized city of the East. In the time of the Ptolemies the number of her inhabitants reached a million; she had, besides her Greeks and native Egyptians, a large and privileged colony of Jews. Her museum (in Cæsar's time it counted seven hundred thousand books), her sumptuous palace, her three great harbours, with the famous lighthouse, her philosophical schools, combined to make Alexandria one of the wonders of the world. As soon as the Christian faith began to spread beyond Palestine, no city called to its Apostles more clearly than Alexandria; nowhere was the new teaching more eagerly discussed than among the crowd of scholars of every race who had flocked together to use her library. Tradition said that St. Mark the Evangelist had been the first missionary and first Bishop of Alexandria; and his successors boasted through him a connection with St. Peter, who had ordained him and sent him as his own representative. This descent from St. Peter, however, is a later idea, and a conscious imitation of Rome and Antioch. St. Mark's first successors were Anianus, Abilius, Cerdon, &c.

Many causes combined to give the Bishop of Alexandria the first place among Eastern bishops. Besides the fame of his city and his claim of succession from St. Peter, there was his great Christian school of philosophy. Pantænus († c. 212) founded at Alexandria a catechetical school that became the first Christian university; his disciple, Titus Flavius Clemens (Clement of Alexandria, † 217), and most of all Origen († 254), the greatest scholar and most wonderful genius of his age, both of whom were its presidents, spread the fame of their school throughout the Christian world. It was Origen especially who lent to Christian Alexandria the lustre of his almost incredible knowledge, the fame of his spotless life and of his heroic sufferings for the faith, and then, as a last legacy, the disputes about the orthodoxy of his works that lasted for centuries, until the fifth general council (Constantinople II in 553, Can. 11) declared him a heretic. It may be noted here that this Christian Neo-platonic school of Alexandria was never considered quite safe from the point of view of orthodoxy. Pope Benedict XIV, in his Bull "Postquam intelleximus" (1748), refuses to Clement the honours of a saint, because of the suspicion of want of orthodoxy in his works. Nevertheless, the school, and Origen especially, exercised an enormous influence on Christian, especially Greek, theology.

The Church of Alexandria had other great names to boast of besides those of her philosophers. Among her bishops she counted St. Dionysius the Great (247–264), Alexander (313–328), who excommunicated Arius, greatest of all his successor St. Athanasius (328–373), and then St. Cyril of Alexandria (412–444). Because of the fame of her learning the Church of Alexandria had the office of making the astronomical calculations for the Christian Calendar. Eusebius (H.E. v. 25) has preserved a fragment of a letter of the Syrian bishops in which they say that they calculate Easter according to the use of Alexandria. The last cause of the great position of the Bishop of Alexandria was the compactness, the strong national feeling, and the faithful obedience of his province. He was the chief of Christian Egypt. From his throne by the sea he ruled over all the faithful of the Roman provinces of Egypt, Thebais and Libya, from his city the faith had spread throughout the country; he ordained all the bishops; under him were nine metropolitans and over one hundred bishops. South of Egypt and outside the Empire were the two Churches of Ethiopia and Nubia, each of them founded from Alexandria, where their metropolitans have always been ordained, and who looked to the Patriarch of that city as their chief too. Egypt was also full of monks who were as ready as the bishops at any time to strike a blow for their Patriarch. And so in all the disputes in the Eastern Church, at all the councils the "ecclesiastical Pharaoh" appeared leading a compact band of Egyptians, ready to show the national feeling, which the Empire had crushed politically, by voting in Church matters like one man for their chief. Before Constantinople arose the successors of St. Mark were without question the mightiest bishops in the East. As their rivals on the Bosphorus were working their way up, the opponent they had most to fear was Alexandria. Whenever the See of Constantinople was vacant Alexandria was ready with a candidate to represent her interests, on whose side she could throw the enormous weight of all Egypt. Three times she deposed a Bishop of Constantinople—St. John Chrysostom in 403, Nestorius in 431, Flavian in 449; each time the other Eastern bishops meekly accepted her decision. Doubtless the Christian Pharaoh would have remained the head of the Eastern Churches, and all the development of their history would have been different, had not heresy broken his power and given Constantinople her chance. And then the flood of Islam completed his ruin. It was Monophysism that crushed both Alexandria and Antioch, to leave Constantinople without a real rival in the East. Monophysism to the Egyptians stood for a national cause against the Emperor's Court. They thought it had been the teaching of their national hero, St. Cyril. Dioscur, Patriarch of Alexandria (444–451), St. Cyril's successor, took up its cause hotly. But it was rejected by the universal Church; with it fell Dioscur, and with him the glory of his see. In 451 at Chalcedon he had to stand before the Fathers as a culprit and to hear the Roman Legate (Paschasius, Bishop of Lilybæum) pronounce sentence on him: "The most holy and blessed Bishop of the great and elder Rome, Leo, through us and through the holy Synod here present in union with the blessed Apostle Peter, who is the corner-stone of the Catholic Church, deposes Dioscur from the office of bishop, and forbids him all ministry as priest" (Chalc. Sess. III). The Patriarchate of Alexandria never recovered from that humiliation. Dioscur refused to accept his deposition, and his Egyptians, always frantically loyal to their Pharaoh, supported him. But it was at the cost of separation from the Catholic world. Dioscur was banished to Paphlagonia, where he died in 455. Proterius was appointed Patriarch, and was supported by the Emperor's soldiers. But Egypt hated equally Chalcedon and Cæsar. It was the old national feeling, the old hatred of the Roman power lurking under the dispute about one or two natures in Christ. As soon as Marcian died (457) the storm burst. They drove the soldiers into the temple of Serapis and there burned them alive; they murdered Proterius, and set up as Patriarch a fanatical Monophysite, Timothy the Cat. It is from Dioscur and Timothy the Cat that the present national (Coptic) Church of Egypt descends. It has been ever since the 5th century out of the communion of both West and East, Rome and Constantinople. Meanwhile the party of the Government carried on another succession of Patriarchs, forming the "Melkite" community in union with Constantinople and (until the great schism) with Rome, but bitterly hated by the Copts. Neither of these rival Patriarchs ever attained anything like the influence of the old line from which both claimed to descend.

In 641 came the Moslems under Amr and swept them all away. So greatly did the Copts hate the Melkites that they supported the Arabs in the invasion. But they gained little by their treason. They were just as badly treated as the Imperial Christians, enormous numbers of them apostatized to Islam; and when, after about a century, the rival Patriarchs reappear, the Melkite bishop has become a mere ornament of the Court of Constantinople, the Copt is the head of a local sect. The great days when the Christian Pharaoh was the chief bishop of the East had gone for ever.

3. .

The third great city of the Empire was Antioch on the Orontes. Just as Alexandria was the chief town of Egypt, so was Antioch the head of Syria. The city had been built in 301 b.c. by Seleucus Nicator, the founder of the Seleucid kingdom of Syria: before the Roman conquest (64 b.c.) it had been enlarged with three great suburbs, and was already the greatest and most famous city of Asia. At various times Emperors had lived there—Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Diocletian—and they built great temples, baths, and palaces. No less famous were the memories of the Christian Church of Antioch. It was here that we were first called Christians (Acts xi. 26); a very ancient tradition counted St. Peter as the first Bishop of Antioch; during the persecution this city gave to the Church a long list of martyrs. St. Peter's successor was Evodius, then followed the glorious martyr St. Ignatius († 107), who, on his way to be thrown to the beasts at Rome, wrote the seven letters that form the most valuable part of the "Apostolic Fathers." Constantine (323–337) built the "Golden Church" at Antioch, splendid with precious metals and mosaic, that became the type of one class of Christian church. When Julian (361–363) on his way to Persia went to the grove of Daphne by Antioch to offer sacrifice, he found that the Christian faith had so spread in the city that only one old priest was left to offer a goose to Apollo.