By Bro Lucky Mandava Definition of an Eastern Church An accident of political development has made it possible to divide the Christian world, in the first place, into two great halves, Eastern and Western. The root of this division is, roughly and broadly speaking, the division of the Roman Empire made first by Diocletian (284-305), and again by the sons of Theodosius I (Arcadius in the East, 395-408; and Honorius in the West, 395-423), then finally made permanent by the establishment of a rival empire in the West (Charlemagne, 800). The division of Eastern and Western Churches, then, in its origin corresponds to that of the empire. Western Churches are those that either gravitate around Rome or broke away from her at the Reformation. Eastern Churches depend originally on the Eastern Empire at Constantinople; they are those that either find their centre in the patriarchate of that city (since the centralization of the fourth century) or have been formed by schisms which in the first instance concerned Constantinople rather than the Western world. Another distinction, that can be applied only in the most general and broadest sense, is that of language. Western Christendom till the Reformation was Latin; even now the Protestant bodies still bear unmistakably the mark of their Latin ancestry. It was the great Latin Fathers and Schoolmen, St. Augustine (d. 430) most of all, who built up the traditions of the West; in ritual and canon law the Latin or Roman school formed the West. In a still broader sense the East may be called Greek. True, many Eastern Churches know nothing of Greek; the oldest (Nestorians, Armenians, Abyssinians) have never used Greek liturgically nor for their literature; nevertheless they too depend in some sense on a Greek tradition. Whereas our Latin Fathers have never concerned them at all (most Eastern Christians have never even heard of our schoolmen or canonists), they still feel the influence of the Greek Fathers, their theology is still concerned about controversies carried on originally in Greek and settled by Greek synods. The literature of those that do not use Greek is formed on Greek models, is full of words carefully chosen or composed to correspond to some technical Greek distinction, then, in the broadest terms, is: that a Western Church is one originally dependent on Rome, whose traditions are Latin; an Eastern Church looks rather to Constantinople (either as a friend or an enemy) and inherits Greek ideas. The point may be stated more scientifically by using the old division of the patriarchates. Originally (e.g. at the Council of Nicaea, A.D. 325, can. vi) there were three patriarchates, those of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. Further legislation formed two more at the expense of Antioch: Constantinople in 381 and Jerusalem in 451. In any case the Roman patriarchate was always enormously the greatest. Western Christendom may be defined quite simply as the Roman patriarchate and all Churches that have broken away from it. All the others, with schismatical bodies formed from them, make up the Eastern half. But it must not be imaged that either half is in any sense one Church. The Latin half was so (in spite of a few unimportant schisms) till the Reformation. To find a time when there was one Eastern Church we must go back to the centuries before the Council of Ephesus (431). Since that council there have been separate schismatical Eastern Churches whose number has grown steadily down to our own time. The Nestorian heresy left a permanent Nestorian Church, the Monophysite and Monothelite quarrels made several more, the reunion with Rome of fractions of every Rite further increased the number, and quite lately the Bulgarian schism has created yet another; indeed it seems as if two more, in Cyprus and Syria, are being formed at the present moment (1908). We have now a general criterion by which to answer the question: What is an Eastern Church? Looking at a map, we see that, roughly, the division between the Roman patriarchate and the others forms a line that runs down somewhat to the east of the River Vistula (Poland is Latin), then comes back above the Danube, to continue down the Adriatic Sea, and finally divides Africa west of Egypt. Illyricum (Macedonia and Greece) once belonged to the Roman patriarchate, and Greater Greece (Southern Italy and Sicily) was intermittently Byzantine. But both these lands eventually fell back into the branches that surrounded them (except for the thin remnant of the Catholic Italo- Greeks). We may, then, say that any ancient Church east of that line is an Eastern Church. To these we must add those formed by missionaries (especially Russians) from one of these Churches. Later Latin and Protestant missions have further complicated the tangled state of the ecclesiastical East. Their adherents everywhere belong of course to the Western portion.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 09:29:25 +0000
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