The Church and the Barbarians | Page 4

of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology, and its
results, so fertile, so vigorous, so intensely interesting as logical
processes, so critical as problems of thought. For the historian there is a
story of almost unmatched attraction; the story of how a people was
kept together in power, in decay, in failure, in persecution, by the
unifying force of a Creed and a Church. And there is the extraordinary
missionary development traceable all through the history of Eastern
Christianity: the wonderful Nestorian missions, the activity of the
evangelists, imperial and hierarchical, of the sixth century, the
conversion of Russia, the preludes to the remarkable achievements in
modern times of orthodox missions in the Far East.
Throughout the whole of the long period indeed {7} which begins with
the death of Leo and ends with that of Silvester II., though the Latin
Church was growing in power and in missionary success, it was
probably the Christianity of the East which was the most secure and the
most prominent. Something of its work may well be told at the
beginning of our task.
[Sidenote: The Monophysite controversy.]
The last years of the fifth century were in the main occupied in the East
by the dying down of a controversy which had rent the Church. The
Eutychian heresy, condemned at Chalcedon, gave birth to the
Monophysite party, which spread widely over the East. Attempts were
soon made to bridge over the gulf by taking from the decisions of
Chalcedon all that definitely repudiated the Monophysite opinions.
[Sidenote: The Henotikon.] In 482 the patriarch Acacius of
Constantinople, under the orders probably of the Emperor Zeno
(474-91), drew up the Henotikon, an endeavour to secure the peace of
the Church by abandoning the definitions of the Fourth General
Council. No longer was "one and the same Christ, Son, Lord,
only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures, without fusion, without
change, without division, without separation." But it is impossible to
ignore a controversy which has been a cause of wide divergence. Men

will not be silent, or forget, when they are told. Statesmanlike was, no
doubt, the policy which sought for unity by ignoring differences; and
peace was to some extent secured in the East so long as Zeno and his
successor Anastasius (491-518) reigned. But at Rome it was not
accepted. Such a document, which implicitly repudiated the language
of Leo the Great, which the Fourth General Council had adopted, could
{8} never be accepted by the whole Church; and those in the East who
were theologians and philosophers rather than statesmen saw that the
question once raised must be finally settled in the dogmatic decisions
of the Church. Had the Lord two Natures, the Divine and Human, or
but one? The reality of the Lord's Humanity as well as of His Divinity
was a truth which, at whatever cost of division and separation, it was
essential that the Church should proclaim and cherish.
In Constantinople, a city always keen to debate theology in the streets,
the divergence was plainly manifest; and a document which was "subtle
to escape subtleties" was not likely to be satisfactory to the subtlest of
controversialists. The Henotikon was accepted at Antioch, Jerusalem,
and Alexandria, but it was rejected by Rome and by the real sense of
Constantinople. In Alexandria the question was only laid for a time,
and when a bishop who had been elected was refused recognition by
Acacius the Patriarch of Constantinople and Peter "the Stammerer,"
who accepted the Henotikon, preferred to his place, a reference to
Rome led to a peremptory letter from Pope Simplicius, to which
Acacius paid no heed whatever. Felix II. (483-92), after an ineffectual
embassy, actually declared Acacius excommunicate and deposed. The
monastery of the Akoimetai at Constantinople ("sleepless ones," who
kept up perpetual intercession) threw itself strongly on to the side of the
advocates of Chalcedon. Acacius, then excommunicated by Rome
because he would not excommunicate the Monophysite patriarch of
Alexandria, retorted by striking out the name of Felix from the diptychs
of the Church.
{9}
[Sidenote: Schism between East and West.]
It was the first formal beginning of the schism which,--temporarily, and

again and again, healed,--was ultimately to separate East and West; and
it was due, as so many misfortunes of the Church have been, to the
inevitable divergence between those who thought of theology first as
statesmen and those who thought first as inquirers after the truth. The
schism spread more widely. In Syria Monophysitism joined
Nestorianism in the confusion of thought: in Egypt the Coptic Church
arose which repudiated Chalcedon: Abyssinia and Southern India were
to follow. Arianism had in the East practically died away; Nestorianism
was powerful only in far-away lands, but Monophysitism was for a
great part of the sixth century strong in the present, and close to the
centre of