Walter Frederic Adeney

“ Meanwhile the Greeks had been doing nothing for themselves. But a new day was now dawning. After more than three centuries of humiliation and oppression, once again Hellas was beginning to realise her national existence. It has often been shown in history that revolutions do not occur when the people who revolt are suffering most severely from oppression. In those dark and dismal days the power of tyranny is too great to allow of any hope of successful resistance, and the misery of its victims simply benumbs their minds and paralyses their energies. ”

“ Short in stature, unsociable in manners, living the life of a recluse in the patriarch's lordly palace, and so disappointing those who had enjoyed the princely hospitality of his predecessor, Chrysostom swayed the people of Constantinople as he chose, by the magic of his eloquence. Yet he was no flatterer of common habits and notions. He proved how the supremely great preacher can win the confidence of his congregation without ever stooping to the arts of popularity. ”

“ Now and again there appears a mystic, out of all relation to time and circumstance, as by its nature mysticism always is; and then we have a flash of light on the spirituality of religion realised by practical love. But in the main, the ideal of the Christian life all down the ages involved on one side renunciation of the world, castigation of the body, a crushing down of natural affections, and on the other side intense, whole-hearted devotion, stoical endurance, unflinching fidelity to creed and Church. Only a select minority seriously pursued this difficult aim. ”

“ The failure of the last important attempt to unite the Churches was inevitably followed by coolness on the part of the Western peoples towards the Greeks and indifference to their fate. This fact should be duly weighed when we are inclined to charge Europe with supine stupidity and heartless selfishness in permitting Constantinople to fall into the hands of the Turks. For generations that great city had been the bulwark of Europe, the one outstanding barrier against the rising tide of Asiatic barbarism, the only safeguard of civilisation against savagery, of Christianity against Islam. ”

“ The famous Cyril, a man of intense, fierce determination, now patriarch of Alexandria, took up the case against Nestorius. His record was not unblemished. Even if he had taken no part in the outrageous murder of the beautiful, learned, and refined Neo-Platonist lecturer Hypathia, when the monks seized her in the street, dragged her from her carriage, tore off her clothes, scraped the flesh from her bones with oyster shells, and flung her mangled remains on a fire, the cruel patriarch cannot be exculpated from acquiescence in the awful crime. ”

“ In point of fact this law of religious liberty was an imperial permit, emanating from the good pleasure of Constantine. It was only the law of the empire because it was the will of the emperor. Thus from the first it rested on a very precarious basis. The world was not only not ripe for complete religious liberty; no party in State or Church was really prepared to concede it to an opponent. We can scarcely look in the fourth century for what the greater part of Christendom is not yet within measurable distance of obtaining or even desiring. ”

“ Then the slumbering emotions of patriotism awake from their unnatural lethargy and the tyrant's slaves remember that they are men. Thus it was in Greece at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Already it seemed as though the Ottoman rule was on its decline, its vigour decaying, its power of mischief shrinking. There were isles of Greece that had become virtually self-governing. Even the mainland was certainly not worse treated than previously; its cruelest oppressors were not the self-indulgent Turks, but those disgraceful Greeks, nominally fellow-Christians—the Phanariots. ”

“ A cruel, self-willed, passionate tyrant, of great ability, energy, and prowess, successful to a remarkable degree in war, strong and wise in much of his civil government, rigorous in the observances of religion and enforcing the same rigour on those about him, Ivan is one of the most weird characters in all history—a mad genius, doing his worst to ruin the empire he had built up with magnificent ability ”

“ The most momentous fact in the history of Christendom during the Middle Ages is the separation between the Eastern and the Western Churches. When we look at the two great communions, each of which claims to be the one genuine Church, we see them to have so much in common that we may wonder at the absolutely irreconcilable attitude they maintain towards each other. In discipline, ritual, and doctrine they are much nearer together than Roman Catholics and Protestants, nearer even than High Anglicans and Evangelical Churchmen. ”

“ Only the strongest, finest natures could breathe the keen air of its lonely heights. The mass of the people never attained to it; and it had no power for recovering the failures. The world was not so utterly bad as the satirists Juvenal and Martial might lead us to suppose; nor must we judge it by the character of the court gossip Suetonius served up for a public eager to feast on scandals of high life, or the sardonic irony of Tacitus who wrote as the critic in opposition. Happily Rome was not the measure of the empire. ”

“ Never forget the poor. Nourish them. Do not bury your riches in the bosom of the earth. That is contrary to the precepts of Christianity. Serve as father to the orphans, judge to the widows. Put to death neither innocent nor guilty; for nothing is more sacred than the life and the soul of a Christian."
There grew up in Russia a curious parallel to the custom of clinical baptism in the earlier days of the Church in the Roman Empire, as in the case of the deathbed baptism of Constantine the Great. ”

“ Moreover, Greek merchants grew rich in spite of fiscal disabilities. But there was no intellectual originality, no literature of genius, no movement of distinction. In all this barren age there is just one name that has emerged out of the fog of oblivion into European fame, and that largely owing to the accident of Western connections. This is the name of Cyril Lucar, patriarch of Alexandria, and subsequently of Constantinople, who lived at the time of the Reformation, and became the courageous author of an abortive attempt to introduce the principles of Protestantism into the East. ”

“ At Rome the pope soon assumed a position which would have been impossible to him if the emperor had been residing there. While other cities—Trêves, Milan, Ravenna—subsequently became centres for the empire in the West, Rome was left severely alone, with the consequence that the pope was the first citizen and even came to take the place of the emperor as the chief centre of power and influence in the city. It would be grossly unfair to attribute the enormous power that has accreted to the papacy to nothing but the rapacity of popes. ”

“ But when we consider the fact that it was a war banner that the Prince of Peace was said to have inspired, and when we go on to look at the subsequent character of the man who is said to have been thus favoured and the whole effect of the patronage of Christianity by the empire, it is not easy to believe that all this indicates nothing less than the finger of God. When, however, we come down to the lower plane of simple history, it must be admitted that something strange did happen, and that this occurrence, whatever it was, became the occasion of stupendous consequences. ”

“ Michael Antorianus was elected to the patriarchate by the Greeks of Nicæa with as much ceremony as if it had been at St. Sophia; and so the Greek Church went on in its independence notwithstanding the boasted union of East and West at Constantinople, for which Pope Innocent was grateful.
When we plant ourself in imagination among the Greeks, we see how ridiculous the very idea of a Latin Empire at Constantinople must have seemed to them. There never was any Latin Empire in the East. ”

“ They will have nothing to do with icons. "God is a Spirit," they say, "and images are but idols. A picture is not Christ; it is but a bit of painted board. We believe in Christ, not a Christ of brass, nor of silver, nor of gold, the work of men's hands, but in Christ, the Son of God, Saviour of the world." ”

“ If we are to accept the story preserved by Nestor we must see that Christianity was not then unknown at Kiev, because it tells how the princess went to Constantinople for the express purpose of learning about the true God; there she was baptised by the patriarch Polyeuctes, having the emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, for her godfather. Olga became famous both for her wisdom and for her saintliness. "She was the forerunner of Christianity in Russia," says Nestor, "as the morning star is the precursor of the sun and the dawn the precursor of the day. ”

“ Unfortunately an immaculate character even when joined to an amiable disposition will not secure success in a ruler who lacks discernment and vigour. The emperor's spirit of toleration was intolerable to a society which clamours for violent polemics. Gradually he was driven to lean more and more to the Monophysite side. Wild stories were told of how monks and priests, archimandrites and patriarchs, behaved like dancing dervishes round the old man, some shouting "Anathema to the council of Chalcedon!" others, "Anathema to Eutyches—to Zeno—to Acacius!" ”

“ It was the most momentous subject of controversy during the fourth century, the age of the greatest Fathers of the Eastern Church, the age of its keenest polemics and most masterly theological literature. The Nicene Creed, the essential standard of doctrine for the orthodox in the East, was formulated for the express purpose of excluding and crushing this heresy, which at times held its head so high, encouraged by imperial favour, that it threatened to dominate the Church and supplant the rival orthodox theology. ”

“ Above all, from Persia came the worship of Mithra, who, from being the angel Messiah of the earlier Zoroastrian religion, having absorbed the Babylonian worship of Bel, became the great Sun-god, the chief divinity of Roman emperors for generations, so that even Constantine had his image on the reverse of coins which bore on the obverse the Christian labarum. So potent was this cult, that Renan has said, "If the world had not become Christian it would have become Mithrastic." ”

“ The Mongol invasion had swept much of this culture away, checked the course of national development, shut off the Sclavonic population from Greek and Teutonic Europe, and turned Russia into a semi-Asiatic country. It took many generations for her people to recover from so huge and crushing a calamity. The vastness of the territory of Russia, the thinness of its widely scattered populations, and the remoteness of most of them from the centres of enlightenment, have always resulted and must still result in great differences in the social conditions of the people. ”

“ Hitherto the Christianity of Edessa had been developing independently; and a very interesting course it was then taking. One could have wished, for the sake of freedom and variety, that it had been let alone altogether, so that we might have witnessed the profoundly instrucive spectacle of a Syrian Church, having its discipline and doctrine all to itself, working out its problems apart from the admixture of Greek philosophy and Roman methods of government which came in so early to modify primitive Christianity and translate it into the amalgam known as Catholicism. ”

“ It has been said that the Church that can produce no martyrs is doomed. There have been martyrs in the Greek Church under Turkish dominance all down the centuries. Treated as rayahs, as mere cattle, with no civil rights, the Christians have always suffered from disabilities and the infliction of unchecked wrongs. Yet they have remained true to their faith; and thus their conduct has testified continuously to a fidelity for which their brethren in the West, who have not had to endure their age-long trials, have been too slow to give them credit. ”