I. Church and Empire to A.D. 650

The Mother Church of Christendom was an Eastern and a Greek-speaking Church. It is this Church and this earliest period which is identified with the most fierce and perhaps the most critical struggle in the whole history of Christendom, with the possible exception of the recent struggle in Russia and Turkey. The real significance of the Christian Gospel was not long in revealing itself to the alert minds of the imperial rulers. Already in the Stoic philosophers there had been expressed some new and startling ideas as to the freedom or independence Of the individual person, ideas unknown to Plato or Aristotle. The Roman officials were perhaps cognisant of the existence of such strange teaching before the Christian Church became “a problem.” But such, conceptions as those of moral responsibility and of personal liberty became “dangerous” when taught by a vigorous, organised and growing body such as the Church was soon recognized to be. They required immediate and drastic handling—and this was efficiently and more or less consistently organized during the first three centuries.

It is necessary to examine the relation of these conceptions to Christianity itself. Scholars have shown us that neither the conception of liberty nor the conception of equality was new to the world in [3/4] the time of our Lord—but that these ideas received sanction and a tremendous reinforcement through his teaching. The Gospel, in fact, assumes them as the essential basis and foundation of true human life. A man must be responsible to his own conscience and to God, and not merely to the State or to the social group of which he is a member. This principle was from the beginning quite clearly characteristic of the Gospel. It was emphatically asserted by St. Peter and St. John before the Sanhedrin (see Acts iv. 19); “Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you rather than unto God, judge ye: for we cannot but speak the things which we saw and heard.”

But from the first this assertion of personal responsibility was qualified, of course, by social obligation or attachment, to the Church first of all—then to the State and other human associations. The Christian religion has never maintained or supported any conception of human life apart from fellowship; but on the other hand it lays the greatest possible emphasis upon an individual or personal relation to God. [On all this, see Dr. A. J. Carlyle. The Christian Church and Liberty (J. Clarke & Co., Ltd.).] It was the assertion of this principle, along with the doctrine that before God there can be no final difference between human individuals, which aroused the fierce hostility of the Empire, and was the cause of the organized persecution of the first three centuries. [Gal. iii. 28.]

Following upon the bitter opposition between Church and State in this early period, the conversion of Constantine and the granting of Imperial favour to the Church were events so astonishing as to dazzle [4/5] the eyes of the very elect. To the Church, or at any rate to the majority of its members, Constantine became a veritable hero.

Constantine was indeed lavish in his favours. He erected costly buildings, endowed the Church with all manner of worldly goods, and was munificent to the Clergy.

The extent of the authority which Constantine exercised over the Church is commonly exaggerated. Constantine said quite frankly that he had no jurisdiction over Bishops in spiritual matters. In any case the Church hailed him with joy and pride, accepted his gracious counsel and advice, and by degrees accepted the status of an established Church. For a time indeed all went well. Only by degrees did certain more sensitive souls begin to discern the actual direction in which things were moving. For long, the slipping away of spiritual and moral independence, involved in this close alliance of Church to Court, was almost imperceptible.

But the chains which bound the Church to Cesar’s throne were too much for Athanasius and his successors, and the inevitable reaction began. Step by step men found themselves forced to quit the very environment of officialdom, and to carve out a new existence, free from the restraints of throne and Court. Anthony had already led the way, and for the pure love of God had spent twenty years in the deserts in prayer’ and praise and mortification. Pachomius called the solitary hermits of his day into Communities, and by the middle of the fourth century his order counted nine monasteries of men and one of women. Basil gave form and order to Eastern Monasticism. [The Rev. Paul Bull. Revival of the Religious Life, Chapter II.] [5/6] Thus it is clear that the institution of Monasticism in the East was. from the first a silent spiritual protest against the secularisation of the Church, against its loss of independence, and, above all, against its fusion with the State.

Meanwhile the process of secularisation went on; and, while many Eastern Churchmen refused to recognize the authority of the civil ruler in spiritual matters, yet in practice there came to be the closest possible co-operation of Church and State, involving a clear subordination of the Church to the temporal power.

Of course in itself the State-Church ideal was a noble conception. Ideally it was a quasi-sacramental union of the spiritual and secular sides of life, according to which all legislation and all administrative affairs ought to be guided by the spirit of Christianity. It was indeed a conception of human unity more intimate and more impressing than any that had preceded it. “The ideal failed, not because it was an ignoble one, but because it was too noble for the human instruments, who strove to work it, to apply worthily; too great for them to hold in proportion with other truths.” [Dr. Wigram. Separation of the Monophysites.]

In practice it meant an attempt on the part of the Empire to assimilate the Church, making it a department of State, and, moreover, centralising its administration in the Imperial City of New Rome. The Patriarch of Constantinople proved to be not unwilling to accept the Imperial favour, bringing with it, as it did, immense prestige and importance to his own office. But, as we shall see, these developments were destined to issue in a series of deplorable results from which we suffer to this very day.

State interference, and, in particular, this attempt to centralize the Church at Constantinople (however well intentioned it may have been) did but accentuate disunion between the Patriarchates. To the Patriarch of the West, the creation of a new Patriarch at Byzantine was a menace all too serious. For in Old Rome, as early as the fourth century, the idea prevailed that the See of Peter inherited a pre-eminence above all other Sees. This conception was continually magnified, and soon became in effect a claim that the Patriarch of the West was the autocratic head of the whole of Christendom. On the other hand the Easterns never gave any sort of formal recognition to these claims, but were consistent in maintaining their “conciliar” theory of Church government.

In the same way, to the other Patriarchs—to Antioch and to Alexandria—the Bishop of New Rome was something of an upstart, and his official importance made him still more objectionable.

There were other and equally serious dangers involved in the new alliance of Church and State—although not evident at the time. The “distinctness” of the Christian way of life was liable to be obliterated when citizenship came to be identified with churchmanship. Inevitably, and in spite of every effort to the contrary, there was a tendency for the Church’s law to be merged in the civic law—(e.g. marriage) to the detriment of the former.

Most dangerous of all was the growth of the spirit of intolerance. The attempt to impose religious uniformity with the help of the secular arm was disastrous in its results. Heresy, like paganism, became an offence against State order, so that one of the first duties of a good bishop, as an active and [7/8] zealous officer of the Empire, was to round up the unorthodox and to see to their due suppression!

Moreover, the attempt to “Graecise” the whole of the subjects of the Empire, whatever their local loyalties or traditions might be, led to the saddest of rents in the Church’s body. The process of being “Graecised” was most cordially resented, especially in Egypt, Syria, and Armenia. The “Caesaro-Papalism” of the capital was not long in provoking serious trouble. Little doubt that among the Semitic peoples an age long and a deep-rooted prejudice for strict monotheism caused them to fight shy of the definitions of Chalcedon. But. above and beneath such differences of thought there was the inevitable recoil of national and racial instincts against the imperialism of the Church, and the revolt expressed itself in the formation of Monophysite and Nestorian vernacular Churches. Copts and Syrians found a recognition of their national existence and of their national faith, not within the Christian Empire, but under another rule and under another faith. Armenians maintained a semi-independent Kingdom and a wholly independent Church between the Black Sea and the frontiers of Persia.

II. Eastern Christendom and Islam
(The Byzantine Period—A.D. 650-1450)

So the City was Rome, New Rome; but a Greek Rome! Its citizens spoke of themselves as Romans, and they described their Greek as Romaic, a Roman language. Could there be a fusion of East and West? Had Constantine dreamed it?

Actually the process of fusion, or of intermingling, [8/9] made important strides. Out of this there emerged a distinct type of civilization, the Byzantine, one which endured for eight hundred years, and one to which Europe owes a good deal more than she has yet recognized. It used to be the fashion, under the influence of Gibbon, to speak with a certain disdain of Byzantine history, art and culture, but the researches of scholars in our own time (notably Professor Bury in this country) have quickened an. entirely new interest in the subject. We are coming to realize, as never before, the greatness of the debt which Europe owes to the Christian East, not only for protection and security from invasion, but in the spheres of art and of architecture.

In spite of all their efforts to intermingle and to understand one another, however, we cannot but detect a fundamental “mal-entendu” which seemed to separate eternally these two rival worlds. Only the strong obligation of unity, expressed in the sacraments and in the Ministry, succeeded in keeping the East and West in outward communion for a thousand years. There had been, as we have already seen, the earlier Schisms which left the Nestorian and Monophysite Churches in the East. One might have hoped that the menace of Islam as it grew more and more serious would have served to bring East and West into closer bonds one with the other. On the contrary the essential differences seemed to come more and more into the open in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries. Was it a difference of temperament or of interest? No doubt many causes contributed to the growing alienation. Then there were the doctrinal differences and the misunderstandings due to language. Above all there were the claims of the Papacy. Even the conversion of the Slavs, though [9/10] to some extent it was a joint effort of East and West, soon became a cause for contention. The Russians, and ultimately the Bulgarians and the Serbs, settled down as Eastern, Orthodox; while the Pole, Bohemians, Croats and Slovenes adhered to the Latin obedience.

Events were moving towards a crisis in the relations between East and West. The great Schism of A.D. 1054 marked the final stage in this lamentable separation; and the Re-union Councils of later times failed to heal the breach.

It is time that we took a glance at the rise of a new power in the East which threatened the very existence of the Church. By the middle of the seventh century Mohammed had stamped Islam upon Arabia. It was for his successors and their wild armies to stamp Islam upon the world, and we must endeavour to estimate the sources of this astonishing force.

It appears that Mohammed, as a boy with his father’s camels, had learned some smattering of Jewish monotheism and of Christian morality, and the religion which he taught, with its paradise of dainty food and pretty women, presented itself to the Arabs of his day with an attractive power that the higher faith could not exercise. The strong points of Islam are, first its simplicity of doctrine. Allah is one and Absolute, revealed through The Prophet. To the Moslem, the only sin is to transgress the arbitrary will of Allah or to deny his Prophet. The second strong point is the Community or Brotherhood of believers ; and the doctrine of the “sword” for those outside this community. And thirdly its simplicity of rule, according to which worship and conduct are regulated by exact prescription.

[11] It is not difficult to comprehend the success of Islam. Every soldier of the Crescent felt himself to be a divine instrument in the chastisement of mankind, and the Arab armies carried all before them. Like some irresistible prairie fire Islam spread within one century over Palestine, Syria, Persia, Egypt and North Africa, and from Africa it leapt across to Europe and established itself in Spain.

How did the Catholic Church meet this overpowering wave? Its early purity perverted, its unity shaken, and preoccupied as it was with its own controversies, it failed to unite the Byzantine Empire in any sort of adequate resistance. Province after province fell before the tide; and Christian folk were faced with the alternative of death or the acceptance of Islam. At best they were reduced to the status of rayahs; the very notion of liberty passed away: Thus began a series of brutal oppressions in the East, which Europe and the Western Church did little or nothing to relieve. The armies of Islam swept bare a great part of Christendom, destroyed the Church in Africa, and gradually pressed towards Constantinople.

What about the West? Was any help to come from this quarter? Later on, a fine and chivalrous impulse inspired the West to go and resist the tide of Islam and to save the Holy Places from defilement. Unhappily the Crusaders did nothing to help Eastern Christendom, and the ambitions of their leaders only served to widen the breach between Rome and Constantinople. The Crusaders set up their Latin kingdom in Jerusalem, under which the Easterns were treated as heretics and schismatics, and as a conquered population under endless disabilities.

The restored Empire of the Paleologi was to last for another two hundred years, but within narrowing [11/12] limits and with frontiers less and less secure against attack. The Osmanli Turks were extending their influence in the Balkans as well as in Asia. Both the Bulgarian and the Serbian Empires had broken. By the year 1450 the Sultan Mohammed II had seized everything, up to the very walls of the capital. On May 29th, 1453, Constantinople fell and the last traces of Christian government disappeared from Asia Minor.

The traditional Latin contempt for Eastern Christendom is only now breaking down among ourselves. We are almost wholly ignorant of the culture of the Eastern Church, of her splendid evangelism, and we ignore the protection which, for centuries, she afforded to the West. Alien and barbarous ideals, disgusting and demoralising to the Christian, were imposed by force upon the territories of the East. In resisting these ideals and rejecting the yoke of Islam, the Eastern Christians suffered themselves, but preserved us from a like fate.

III. Modern Period: The Phanar and the National Churches

The Turks were never distinguished for political wisdom. They formed a military clan wholly unskilled in administration, as well as in trade and commerce, and with no inclination for such things. And from 1683 their Empire began to disintegrate. The tide began steadily to recede and has been receding ever since, until the year 1922, when, by the Treaty of Lausanne, the Turks were restored to Europe and won a new lease of life.

Neither Mohammed II nor his successors desired to exterminate the Christian population. of [12/13] Constantinople. They were prudent enough to see the value of the “Rayah,” and their policy was to win the allegiance of the Byzantine people and Patriarch as a set-off to the independent spirit of the Bulgarians and of the Serbs. Before long an understanding was patched up, and this became in course of time a definite compact between the Phanar and the Porte. The Patriarch became a state official, the Millet-Bashi of the Roumi Rayahs. Thus he regained ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the whole of the Balkan Peninsula. The Patriarchate was given civil and judicial power, and was allowed to levy taxes for ecclesiastical purposes. Even the collection of taxes laid upon the Orthodox by the Porte was sometimes also in the hands of the Phanar. Thus there was established a “Millet,” a sort of “imperium in imperio,” and the same policy was applied by the Sultan to other bodies of Christians that did not acknowledge the authority of the Phanar, e.g. those who were themselves Orthodox, but were under the jurisdiction of Alexandria or other Patriarchates, to the separated Churches and to the Christian communities who owed allegiance to the Pope of Rome.

Much has been written about the exactions of the Phanariot Bishops during this period. But there are two sides to the question. While we cannot but deplore the domineering spirit undoubtedly shown by the Phanariots, yet it must be admitted that a serious wrong is always done when nationalism in Church affairs (“Phyletism”) is exalted at the expense of catholicity. This is specially the case when nationalism in Church matters involves the acceptance of State autocracy.

It was the Church of Bulgaria which kept alive the [13/14] national spirit. The Church of Bulgaria won autonomy for itself before the Bulgarian State came into being; but, having come into being, the State was able to direct and control the life of the Church all the more because this Church had lost communion with the Patriarchate at Constantinople.

Dr. Figgis has shown how, in order to have a healthy national life, there must be not simply the omnipotent State facing a mass of unrelated individuals, but a variety of “groups” or “associations” of men, each receiving its due place as a living member of the body politic and recognized as a real self-developing unit. Among such “groups,” or “associations,” the Church is all-important as the organ of the moral idealism and spiritual life of its members. [Dr. Figgis. Churches in the Modern State.]

The average Englishman who goes abroad is very apt to criticize adversely what he calls the nationalism of the Church life of the Near East. Such criticism is often made without a real understanding of the various sides to this question, and it is worth while to examine the accusation a little more closely.

Now, broadly speaking, there are two kinds of nationalism which may be attributed to the Eastern Churches, and it is important to distinguish between them. In the one case let us take a national Church under an alien non-Christian Government. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Near East has been the enslavement or keeping in bondage of higher races by an inferior people. It is the Church of such races which saves them from extinction, and in any case preserves their language, liberties, Christian traditions, marriage laws and faith. This is exactly what the Gregorian Church did for the Armenians in Turkey. If there were space to tell it, the story of the Armenian [14/15] Church ought to be told at length. It is a tale of heroism and devotion unrivalled in Christian history, and the same is true of the now small heroic Church of the Assyrians in Northern Mesopotamia.

There is another kind of nationalism which, in a free State, may involve (though not necessarily) prostitution of the Church or episcopate to political hands. Such charges have been made (for instance) against the Bishops in Czarist days in Russia, but such a state of things has been rare and does not exist to-day.

It is too often forgotten that the Russian Church was enslaved by Peter the Great. In 1721 he suppressed the Patriarchate of Moscow and invested its powers in the “Holy Synod.” Now we all know that by the very constitution of the Holy Synod, this institution was bound to act always in concert with or at the dictation of the Chief Procurator, the representative of the Emperor. And we, therefore, cannot hold the Church responsible for its governance since that time.

In the early years of this century, however, the movement for a Council and for the re-establishment of the Patriarchate became insistent. And then along with the Revolution of 1917 came, the opportunity and a desire for greater independence. The Council assembled (Aug. 15th, 1917) and proceeded to nominate Tikhon as the Patriarch of Moscow. Thus, if it had not been for the suppression of all initiative outside Bolshevik or Communist ranks, we might have seen in these days a Russian Church in all the glory of renewed freedom and influence: As it is, the Russian Church, is standing with consummate courage and devotion for the principle of a free Church.

[16] The charge of Erastianism in the extreme form has been levelled also against the Church of Greece. But what are the facts of the case? The battle of Navarino secured the liberation of Greece, but at the same time the Church of Hellas was placed in bondage to the new Kingdom, and a Royal Commissioner has until recently been obliged to attend every session of the Holy Synod. During the past few years, the Church people of Greece have put forward a claim for conservative reforms, and at last (1924) the Church has been allowed self-government. The new Synod is now at work, composed of all the Bishops of the Kingdom (not of five or six only, like the former Synod), and there is a probability that clerical and lay houses will be added in course of time.

Thus we begin to see the real significance of the present struggle. The real question of freedom in our day is the freedom of smaller unions to live within the whole. More and more must we have on our side all who are not dazzled by the cry of efficiency or sunk into unchristian materialism. “Freedom, if rightly pursued, is not a petty nor small clerical ideal; it is the noblest of all watchwords that appeal to man, because in the last resort it always means that man is a spiritual Being.” [Dr. Figgis.]