Adrian Henry Timothy Knottesford Fortescue

“ We want the communion of the Christians to whom St. Paul brought the faith at Ephesus and Corinth, the children of the men of Antioch who first were called by the name in which we all glory. And we need, too, the righter balance that would be restored by reunion with the Orthodox. In spite of our loyalty to our own rite, and in spite of our natural pride in being not only Catholics but Latins and members of the greatest Patriarchate, we have to realize that the Latin Church is not, has never been, the whole Body of Christ. ”

“ The Orthodox Church is the heir of all the Greek traditions. The old glories of the free Greek States, vague memories of Marathon and Salamis, the majesty of the Roman Empire, their cause against Persian and Arab, Frank and Turk—it is all gathered together and still lives in the Holy Apostolic Orthodox Catholic Church of the Seven Councils. So one can understand how they feel about a renegade from that Church: he betrays the true faith of Christ, and he betrays the cause of the Fatherland. And one can understand, too, how the Church resents attempts at seducing her children. ”

“ That an army, gathered together to defend the Christians against the Mohammedans, should, instead of doing so, destroy the very State that for five centuries had been the one bulwark of Christendom, is an unheard-of outrage. And when one remembers, too, the horrible cruelty and destruction of the sack of Constantinople, one is not surprised that even after many centuries the Greeks have not yet forgotten the day when a horde of Latin robbers so wantonly attacked their State, plundered their city, and massacred thousands of their forefathers. ”

“ The Orthodox hate any attempt at proselytizing among their people above measure. In the first place, like Catholics, they hold their communion to be the whole and only true Church. So to be an apostate from it is to them, as to us in our case, an infinitely greater calamity than the loss of members to the Protestant bodies, who all claim to be only a branch of the Church, although, of course, always the best and purest branch. And then, to the Easterns their communion is not only the true Church, it is their nation as well. ”

“ The old Greek builders had been content with the more reticent beauty of white marble. Justinian wanted a dazzling gorgeousness of gold, coloured marble, mosaic, precious stones. So from every corner of the Empire the governors had to send columns taken from old temples, marble, jewels, and incredible sums of money. Eight pillars of verde antico came from Ephesus, as many of porphyry from Rome. Egypt was the richest province of the Empire, and a year's taxes from the whole of Egypt went to pay for one ambo. The altar was of solid gold, gleaming with emeralds. ”

“ The most significant development among the Eastern Churches, indeed the connecting link of the unity of their history, is the evolution of the See of Constantinople from being the smallest of local dioceses to the position of first Church of all Eastern Christendom, so great that her bishops even ventured to think themselves the rivals of the Roman Pope, so influential that when at last they fell into formal schism they dragged all the other Eastern bishops with them. ”

“ He who seeks undue honours loses his real ones. Let it be enough for the said bishop (Anatolius of Constantinople) , that by the help of your piety and by the consent of my favour, he has got the bishopric of so great a city. Let him not despise a royal see because he can never make it an Apostolic one; nor should he by any means hope to become greater by offending others. The rights of the Churches are fixed by the Canons of the holy Fathers, and by the decrees of the venerable Nicene Synod; they cannot be upset by any bad designs, nor disturbed by any novelty. ”

“ St. Nilos at last built a home for his wandering monks, and there he died, looking out towards Rome. Through all the changes that have taken place since, Grottaferrata has stood unchanged; not only has no Pope ever tried to destroy or Latinize it, it has always been a point of honour with them to endow it and to protect it. Still, after ten centuries, it stands within sight of the Roman walls, and still its monks sing out their Greek Office in the very heart of the Latin Patriarchate, while outside the Latin olives shelter its grey Byzantine walls. [2] ”

“ But for all of us, for the children of dead New Rome as well as for us who stand around the fisherman's throne in the eternal Old Rome, there is a cause that does not die, there is a great city of God on earth whose foundations are laid too deep, whose towers are built too high for any change to destroy her ”

“ In the case of others, one sees so much that would have to be changed—false doctrine, reckless mutilation of the old faith, and rival conventicles. But the Eastern schism has still left us on both sides with the same faith in almost everything. Of course they would have to accept the whole of the Catholic faith. In that, no desire for reunion, no spirit of conciliation, can ever make the Holy See waive anything. There can be no compromise in matters of faith. But the Orthodox already have, and jealously keep, practically all that faith. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It would have been better to suffer anything rather than that the Church should be torn; nor would it have been less glorious to suffer even martyrdom rather than to tear the Church in pieces, than to suffer in order not to sacrifice to idols; indeed, in my opinion it would be even more glorious, for in the latter case one would suffer only for one's own soul, in the former for the whole Church." [6] The Bishop of Alexandria then agrees with our St. Augustine († 430) : "Nothing is worse than the sacrilege of schism, because there is no just reason for breaking the unity." ”

“ We have seen how the only national organizations they have under the Turk are the religious bodies. The Orthodox Church is the Roman nation, and every true son of Hellas must belong to that nation. It is their one bond; it has kept alive the sacred fire of Greek patriotism during the centuries of bondage ”

“ The other religious practices of Eastern Christians already had a markedly Eastern character. The morals of the Emperor's Court often sank very low; but there were continual revivals, and Constantinople succeeded in keeping off the Moslem for eight centuries. It was the leading city in Europe in the arts of civilization. Its architecture, painting, mosaic, form the bridge between classical Greek work and our mediæval art, while the unequalled splendour of the Court where the Roman Emperor still reigned made it the wonder of the world. ”

“ But the Western princes, who had almost forgotten the existence of the Eastern Empire, see in him only a poor Greek king who has come to beg their protection against his enemies.
The Greeks then come to Ferrara and the Emperor enters the city under a great canopy at the head of his retinue, all decked out as sumptuously as possible. But the Patriarch is told he must kiss the Pope's foot. He says he will not dream of doing any such thing; if the Pope is older than he is he will treat him as a father, if the same age as a brother, if younger as a son. ”

“ And no two races ever yet hated each other as the Serbs and Croats do. So to ask a Serb to become a Catholic is like asking him to turn Croat, look to Austria-Hungary for protection, and give up the Panslavist hope. That is why these ridiculous little Balkan States are so angry with Catholic missionaries, why they sometimes become active persecutors, and why one hears such absurd statements as that the question of the Catholic schools is one of "life or death for Bulgaria." The life or death of these Balkan States depends, not on the Catholic nuns who teach in these schools, but on Russia. ”

“ At any rate, one must expect the Holy See to believe in the Roman Catholic claims, and to complain of the Pope because he does not act according to theories which are the exact contrary of his faith is mere foolishness. ”

“ Peter the Great was tolerant to every sect except to the Raskolniks; he had them hunted down in the forests and massacred, shut up in their churches and burnt, tortured, flogged, and exiled. The whole Raskolnik movement forms the weirdest and most unsavoury story of religious mania in the world; not even the maddest Mohammedan sects have gone to such an extreme of lunacy as these Old Believers. When a Slav peasant gets religious mania he gets it very badly indeed. ”

“ We must confess that Rome had sometimes given these Eastern Christians cause for discontent. Of course nothing can justify schism; they had so often protested that at Rome still stood the Rock on which Christ had built his Church, they had so often acknowledged the Pope's right as Supreme Judge. Still, the most rightful judges have made mistakes; if we look for the cause of the anger against Rome which made the schism possible, we shall have to put at any rate some of it down to the account of Rome herself. It is not difficult to find examples. ”

“ Should they not be, at least, as great as their brothers of Alexandria and Antioch? Nay, since the laws of the State were apparently to be the criterion, no position would seem too high for their ambition. Might not Cæsar's own bishop—the honoured chaplain of his Court, who stood side by side with the highest ministers of the Empire before their master, the bishop of the city that was now the centre of the Roman world—might not he even hope to be counted as great as that distant Patriarch, left alone among the ruins by the Tiber? One can understand his ambition ”

“ A schism always becomes stronger by sheer inertia as the centuries pass; things get settled down in that state, prejudices and jealousies fossilize into principles that seem too obvious to allow discussion, immediate antiquity—the past that people know best because it is just behind them—is against reunion. The schismatical party, once reckless innovators, gradually seem to be the conservatives. It is true that, throughout the Orthodox Church, there always has been, there still is, a party friendly to Catholics, and really distressed at the schism. ”

“ The question then of who should have Bulgaria in his patriarchate very much embittered the quarrel between Photius and the Pope. The Byzantines had always wanted Illyricum to belong to them (pp. 44, 45) and they had been first in the Bulgarian field. On the other hand the Roman Patriarch had a much older claim to Illyricum; he had founded the Bulgarian Church by setting up the first bishops, and the Bulgars themselves were on his side. Indeed Bogoris, when the Latin bishops had come, promptly drove out all the Greek missionaries and refused to accept Photius's chrism. ”

“ This is the cupola that one may still see rising, a gleaming white curve, above the marble quays and the slender, dark cypress trees from the waters of the Propontis. No church is of such importance in the history of architecture, and no church has been so bound up with the history of a people as the Holy Wisdom. It was under this dome that seventy-four Emperors were crowned. Here Ignatius refused Holy Communion to Bardas ”

“ It was in this way that they met most Eastern Christians. Unfortunately, it was always the meeting of enemies. The Franks were astounded by the magnificence of Constantinople, but they thought the Greeks a very poor set: they were cowards, frightful liars, and stubborn schismatics. And the Byzantines thought equally ill of the Crusaders. All their old scorn for Western barbarians was now quickened by theological hatred against Latin heretics. The Franks came pushing in, noisy, quarrelsome, rude, and quite shameless Azymites; the Byzantines were frightened to death of them ”

“ Throughout that enormous Empire there must be thousands of village priests who stand for the cause of Christ among their people, who baptize the children, celebrate the holy liturgy, and bring the last comfort to the dying; who (when they can resist its temptations themselves) do at any rate something towards putting down the drunkenness that is the curse of the Russian peasant; and who, since they are married and so can never hope to become bishops, know nothing of higher Church politics, but lead simple godly lives in the care of souls. ”