The Church and the Barbarians | Page 4

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.
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[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 Church life. The sixth century began, as the fifth had ended, in strife from which there seemed no outway. Nationalism, and the rival claims of Rome and Constantinople, complicated the issues.
Under Anastasius, the convinced opponent of the Council of Chalcedon and himself to all intents a Monophysite in opinion, some slight negotiations were begun with Rome, while the streets of Constantinople ran with blood poured out by the hot advocates of theological dogma. In 515 legates from Pope Hormisdas visited Constantinople; in 516 the emperor sent envoys to Rome; in 517 Hormisdas replied, not only