THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 093

Of Church and Christian State

6-14. Of Church and Christian State

This conception summed itself up in the claim put forward on behalf of the see of Constantinople at the councils of 381 and 451. The bishops of these councils, deferring, perhaps not unwillingly, to the pressure of the local authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, gave to the bishop of Constantinople the next place after the bishop of Rome, on the ground that Constantinople was "New Rome," and that "the fathers had assigned precedence to the throne of Old Rome because it was the Imperial City."

Nothing was better calculated than such a claim to bring out the latent divergences of East and West. Both in Church and State the rift between the Latin and the Hellenic element had begun to widen perceptibly during the course of the fourth century. Diocletian's drastic reorganisation of the Imperial government gave the first official recognition to the bipartite nature of the Roman realm, and after the death of Julian in 363 the two halves of the Empire, though they lived under the same laws, obeyed with rare and brief exceptions separate masters. Parallel tendencies in the ecclesiastical world were working to the surface about the same time. The Latinisation of the Western Churches was complete before Constantine: no longer clothed in the medium of a common language, the ideas and interests of Latin-speaking and Greek-speaking communities grew unconsciously apart. The rival ambitions of Rome and Constantinople expressed this antinomy in its acutest form.

The right of the civil government to be in its own sphere the accredited representative of Divine power on earth, the duty of the Christian Society to preserve at all costs its separateness and independence as the salt of mankind, the city set upon a hill — these were fundamental principles which could both appeal to the sanction of the Christian Scriptures. To hold the balance evenly between them has been, through the long centuries since Christianity began to play a leading part upon the political stage, the worthy task of philosophers and statesmen. That one scale should outweigh the other was perhaps inevitable in the first attempts, and it was at least instructive for future generations that the experiment of an over-strained allegiance to each of the two theories should have been given full trial in one part or another of Christendom

To Byzantine churchmen the vision of the Christian State and the Christian Emperor proved so dazzling that they transferred to them something of the religious awe with which their ancestors had venerated the genius of Rome and Augustus. The memory of Constantine was honoured as a "thirteenth apostle." The resentment of the native Monophysite churches of Syria and Egypt against such of their fellow countrymen as remained in communion with Constantinople concentrated itself in the scornful epithet of Melkite or "King's man."

The Latins were more moved by the sentiment of the Roman name, and less by its incarnation in the Emperor. As Romans and Roman citizens, they felt the majesty of the Roman Respublica to attach to place even more than to person. If Rome was no longer the abode of emperors, it was in their eyes not Rome but emperors who lost thereby. The event which stirred men in the West to the depths of their being was not the conversion of Constantine but the fall of Rome. When Alaric led his Goths to the storm of the City in 410, there seemed to be need for a new theory of life and for revision of first principles. The great occasion was greatly met St Augustine wrote his twenty-two books de Civitate Dei to answer the obvious objection that Rome, inviolate under her ancestral gods, perished only when she turned to Christ. True it was that the City of the World had fallen: but it had fallen in the Divine providence, when the times were ripe for a new and higher order of things to take its place. The reign of the City of God had been ushered in.

It was a natural corollary of the principles of Western churchmen that the Divine Society could not possibly be bound to imitate the organisation of the earthly society which it was to supplant. Pope Innocent, in direct opposition to the practice of the East, wrote to Alexander of Antioch in 415 that the civil division of a province ought not to carry ecclesiastical division with it; the world might change, not so the Church, and therefore it was not fitting "ad mobilitatem necessitatum mundanarum Dei ecclesiam commutari." Pope Leo refused his assent to the so-called 28th canon of Chalcedon, not merely as an innovation, but because its deduction of the ecclesiastical primacy of Rome from her civil position was quite inconsistent with the doctrine cherished by the popes upon the subject since at least the days of Damasus.

Here then we have a bifurcation of Eastern and Western ideas, leading to a clear-cut issue, in which both sides appealed to the truth of facts. Which of them represented the genuine Christian tradition? Certainly the case of provincial organisation favoured the Eastern view, for it was taken over bodily from the State. But then it was relatively modern; a far higher antiquity attached to the privileged position of the greater sees, and it was upon the origin and history of their privileges that the answer really turned.

To obtain a deluxe leatherbound edition of THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE, subscribe to Castalia History.