Causes of Estrangement
It is certain that, for a long time, the Greeks possessed all the advantage. They boasted that they had been the masters of the Latins, and that they had taught them everything. The Gospels were written in Greek. There was not a doctrine, a rite, a mystery, a usage, which was not Greek; from the word "baptism" to the word "eucharist" all was Greek. No fathers of the Church were known except among the Greeks till St. Jerome, and even he was not a Roman, but a Dalmatian. St. Augustine, who flourished soon after St. Jerome, was an African. The seven great ecumenical councils were held in Greek cities: the bishops of Rome were never present at them, because they were acquainted only with their own Latin language, which was already exceedingly corrupted.
The hostility between Rome and Constantinople broke out in 452, at the Council of Chalcedon, which had been assembled to decide whether Jesus Christ had possessed two natures and one person, or two persons with one nature. It was there decided that the Church of Constantinople was in every respect equal to that of Rome, as to honors, and the patriarch of the one equal in every respect to the patriarch of the other. The pope, St. Leo, admitted the two natures, but neither he nor his successors admitted the equality. It may be observed that, in this dispute about rank and pre-eminence, both parties were in direct opposition to the injunction of Jesus Christ, recorded in the Gospel: "There shall not be among you first or last." Saints are saints, but pride will insinuate itself everywhere.
The rivalry and hatred arose from several causes. Undoubtedly the first, the root of all the quarrel, was the advance of the See of Constantinople. Four Eastern patriarchates were to some extent contrasted to the one great Western unity. Had there remained four such unities in the East, nothing further need have followed. What accentuated the contrast and made it a rivalry was the gradual assumption of authority over the other three by the patriarch at Constantinople. It was Constantinople that bound together the East into one body, uniting it against the West.
It was the persistent attempt of the emperor's patriarch to become a kind of Eastern pope, as nearly as posiible equal to his Western prototype, that was the real source of all the trouble. On the one hand, union under Constantinople really made a kind of rival Church that could be opposed to Rome; on the other hand, through all the career of advancement of the Byzantine bishops they found only one real hindrance, the persistent opposition of the popes. The emperor was their friend and chief ally always. It was, indeed, the emperor's policy of centralization that was responsible for the scheme of making the See of Constantinople a center. The other patriarchs who were displaced were not dangerous opponents. Weakened by the endless Monophysite quarrels, having lost most of their flocks, then reduced to an abject state by the Moslem conquest, the bishops of Alexandria and Antioch could not prevent the growth of Constantinople. Indeed, eventually, they accepted their degradation willingly and came to be idle ornaments of the new patriarch's Court. Jerusalem too was hampered by schisms and Moslems and was itself a new patriarchate, having only the rights of the last see of the five.
On the other hand, at every step in the advancement of Constantinople there was always the opposition of Rome. When the new see got its titular honour at the First Council of Constantinople (381, can. 3), Rome refused to accept the canon (she was not represented at the council); when Chalcedon in 451 turned this into a real patriarchate (can. 28) the legates and then the pope himself refused to acknowledge what had been done; when, intoxicated by their quick advancement, the successors of the little suffragan bishops who had once obeyed Heraclea assumed the insolent title "oecumenical patriarch", it was again a pope of Old Rome who sternly rebuked their arrogance.
Jealousy and hatred of Rome rankled in the minds of the new patriarchs, that they were willing to throw off altogether an authority which was in their way at every step. That the rest of the East joined them in their rebellion was the natural result of the authority they had succeeded in usurping over the other Eastern bishops. The Eastern Schism was not a movement arising in all the East; it was not a quarrel between two large bodies; it was essentially the rebellion of one see, Constantinople, which by the emperor's favor had already acquired such influence that it was able unhappily to drag the other patriarchs into schism with it.
The suffragans of the patriarchs would naturally follow their chiefs. If then Constantinople had stood alone her schism would have mattered comparatively little. What made the situation so serious was that the rest of the East eventually sided with her. That followed from her all too successful assumption of the place of chief see in the East. So the advance of Constantinople was doubly the cause of the great schism. It brought her into conflict with Rome and made the Byzantine patriarch almost inevitably the enemy of the pope; at the same time it gave him such a position that his enmity meant that of all the East.
The advance of Constantinople was entirely unwarrantable, novel, and uncanonical. The see was not Apostolic, had no glorious traditions, no reason whatever for its usurpation of the first place in the East, but an accident of secular politics. The first historical Bishop of Byzantium was Metrophanes (315-25) ; he was not even a metropolitan, he was the lowest in rank a diocesan bishop could be, a suffragan of Heraclea. That is all his successors ever would have been, they would have had no power to influence anyone, had not Constantino chosen their city for his capital. All through their progress they made no pretence of founding their claims on anything but the fact that they were now bishops of the political capital. It was as the emperor's bishops, as functionaries of the imperial Court, that they rose to the second place in Christendom.
The legend of St. Andrew founding their see was a late afterthought ; it is now abandoned by all scholars. The claim of Constantinople was always frankly the purely Erastian one that as Caesar could establish his capital where he liked, so could he, the civil governor, give ecclesiastical rank in the hierarchy to any see ne liked. The 28th canon of Chalcedon says so in so many words. Constantinople has become the New Rome, therefore it« bishop is to have like honor to that of the patriarch of Old Koine and to be second after him. It only needed a shade more insolence to claim that the emperor could transfer all papal rights to the bishop of the city where he held his court.
The rise of Constantinople, its jealousy of Rome, its unhappy influence over all the East is a pure piece of Erastianism, a shameless surrender of the things of God to Cosar. And nothing can be less stable than to establish ecclesiastical rights on the basis of secular politics. The Turks in 1453 cut away the foundation of Byzantine ambition. There is now no emperor and no Court to justify the oecumenical patriarch's position. If we were to apply logically the principle on which he rests, he would sink back to the lowest place and the patriarchs of Christendom would reign at Paris, London, New York. Meanwhile the old and really canonical principle of the superiority of Apostolic sees remains untouched by political changes. Apart from the Divine origin of the papacy, the advance of Constantinople was a gross violation of the rights of the Apostolic Sees of Alexandria and Antioch. No wonder that the popes, although their first place was not questioned, resented this disturbance of ancient rights by the ambition of the imperial bishops.
Long before Photius there had been schisms between Constantinople and Rome, all of them healed up in time, but naturally all tending to weaken the sense of essential unity. From the beginning of the See of Constantinople to the great schism in 867 the list of these temporary breaches of communion is a formidable one. There were fifty-five years of schism (3415-08) during the Arian troubles, eleven because of St. John Chrysoslom's deposition (404-15), thirtyfive years of the Acucian schism (484-519), forty-one years of Monothelite schism (640-81), sixty-one years because of Iconoclasm. So of these 544 years (323-807) no less than 203 were spent by Constantinople in a state of schism. We notice too that in every one of these quarrels Constantinople was on the wrong side; by the consent of the Orthodox, too, Rome in all stood out for right. And already we see that the influence of the emperor (who naturally always supported his court patriarch) in most cases dragged a great, number of other Eastern bishops into the same schism.
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