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READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

 

HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH FROM THE APOSTOLIC AGE TO THE REFORMATION A.D. 64-1517

 

 

 

BOOK VIII. 

FROM THE DEATH OF POPE BONIFACE VIII TO THE END  OF THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE,  A.D. 1303-1418.

 

CHAPTER IX.

THE GREEK CHURCH—CHRISTIANITY IN ASIA— CONVERSIONS.

 

During the last period of the Byzantine empire, the relations of the Greek church with the papacy were mainly governed by political circumstances. The emperors, in their need of assistance against the Mussul­mans, who pressed continually more and more on them, made frequent solicitations to the Christians of the west, and, in order to recommend their cause, they professed a zeal for the reconciliation of the churches. But in this they were supported only by a small courtly party, while the mass of the Greeks held the Latins in abomination; and, as the material aid, for the sake of which the desire of unity had been professed, was not forthcoming, such concessions as were made by the emperors or their representatives were usually disavowed with abhorrence by their people. Such, as we have seen, had been the result of the reconciliation which had been formerly concluded at the council of Lyons in 1274; and, in their resentment on account of the subsequent breach, Benedict XI and Clement V encouraged Charles of Valois to assert by arms a claim to the throne of Constantinople, in right of his wife. Clement gave to the enterprise the character of a crusade, bestowed the privileges of crusaders on all who should take part in it, and assigned to Charles a tenth of the ecclesiastical revenues of France in order to furnish him with means. But nothing came of this project.

At a later time, Andronicus II and his grandson of the same name (who, after having been his colleague, assumed the whole government in 1328) were driven by fear of the Ottoman Turks to make overtures to the popes and to the western princes. In 1333 the younger Andronicus sent a message to John XXII by two Dominicans who were returning from the east; and in consequence of this two bishops were sent from Avignon to the court of Constantinople. But the Greeks, in distrust of the sophistical skill which they attributed to the western theologians, refused to have anything to do with what they styled the Latin novelties; and the mission had no effect. In 1337 Benedict XII, wrote to Andronicus for the purpose of confirming him in his desire of ecclesiastical unity; and two years later, Barlaam, a Basilian monk of Calabria, who had acquired great favour in the Byzantine court, appeared at Avignon with a knight named Stephen Dandolo, bearing recommendations from the kings of France and Sicily. The instructions of these envoys charged them to labour for the reunion of the churches, while the need of assistance against the Turks was mentioned as a secondary and comparatively trifling matter. But it was requested that the aid might be sent at once, because the emperor would be unable, so long as the war should last, to assemble the eastern patriarchs for the general council which was proposed as a tribunal for the decision of the questions by which east and west were divided. Even the Jews, said Barlaam, although the most ungrateful of mankind, after having been miraculously fed by the Saviour, wished to make Him a king; and, in like manner, assistance of this kind would prepare the minds of the Greeks to welcome the proposals of religious union. The pope, however, declined the project of a general council, on the ground that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s procession had already been settled by some of the greatest councils—even including (he said) the general council of Ephesus—and that he could not allow it to be again brought into question. The pro­posal of a compromise, by which each party should for the present be allowed to hold its own opinions, was rejected, on the ground that the faith of the catholic church could be but one. Other expedients suggested by Barlaam found no great favour; nor was any hope of aid held out, except on condition that the Greeks should first renounce their errors, and should send some of their number to be instructed in the west.

Barlaam, on returning to the east after this fruitless mission, became involved in a strange controversy with some monks of Mount Athos and their supporters. These monks, who were styled hesychasts (or quietists), imagined that by cultivating an ascetic repose they might attain to behold the light of the Godhead. They are described as fixing their gaze on the central part of their own persons, in the hope that through the contemplation both their spiritual and their bodily eyes would be enlightened by the divine radiance. Barlaam, it is said, designedly chose out one of the more simple monks, whom the imperial chronicler John Cantacuzene describes as little superior to an irrational animal, and, by affecting the character of a disciple, drew from him answers which showed a very gross apprehension of spiritual things; whereupon he denounced the whole community, as if the views in question were shared by all its members. At Thessalonica, where he first broached the subject, he was confronted by Gregory Palamas, a monk of Mount Athos, who enjoyed an extraordinary reputation for ascetic sanctity; and, having fled in fearof the rabid monks to Constantinople, where he persuaded the patriarch John to assemble a synod for the consideration of the matter, he there again found Palamas his opponent. The question of the light which the mystics of Mount Athos supposed themselves to see brought on a discussion as to the light which shone around the Saviour at His transfiguration. This light Palamas maintained to be uncreated; while Barlaam argued that, if so, it must be God, forasmuch as God alone is uncreated. But, he continued, since no man hath seen God at any time, the hesychasts must hold the existence of two Gods—one, the invisible maker of all things; the other, the visible and uncreated light. The decision of the council was adverse to Barlaam, who, according to John Cantacuzene, when he saw that the case was going against him, consulted the grand domestic (Cantacuzene himself), acknowledged himself to have been in error, and was joyfully embraced by Palamas. But if this account be true, his submission must have been insincere; for he soon after removed to Italy, where he joined the Latin church, and wrote some letters in its behalf, which contrast strongly with his arguments of an earlier time as a champion of the Greeks. Through the interest of Petrarch, whom he had assisted in the study of Plato, he was promoted to the bishopric of Gerace in 1342; and his equivocal reputation as a divine is combined with a more creditable fame as one among the chief revivers of Greek letters in the west.

The controversy begun by Barlaam was kept up by his pupil Gregory Acindynus; but repeated judgments were pronounced against their opinions, and at a great synod, held at Constantinople in 1350, it was declared, with a show of patristic authority, that the light of Mount Tabor was uncreated, although not of the substance of God, while Barlaam and Acindynus were cut off from the body of the church, and were declared to be incapable of forgiveness after death.

The death of Andronicus III, in 1341, left the empire to his son John Palaeologus, a boy nine years old, who was under the guardianship of the grand domestic, John Cantacuzene. After a time Cantacuzene, alarmed by the intrigues of a party which included the empress-mother and patriarch John of Apri, endeavoured to seize the empire, as the only means of securing his own safety; but he was driven into exile, from which he delivered himself by the fatal measure of calling the Turks into Europe as his allies—giving his daughter in marriage to their leader Orkan, on condition that she should be allowed to preserve her religion. The empire was now shared by John Palaeologus, his mother, Anne of Savoy, and Cantacuzene, who became the father-in-law of the young prince and held the chief power in his own hands. While Cantacuzene was in exile, the empress-mother had addressed a letter to Clement VI, expressing a strong desire to unite her subjects with the church in which she had herself been brought up, and entreating the pope to send her assistance in the meantime. Cantacuzene now sent ambassadors to the court of Avignon; and the reception which they met with from Clement led him to believe that a reconciliation was certain, and that a crusade was to be undertaken in his behalf. But, although he repeatedly protested to the envoys whom Clement sent to Constantinople that he would gladly give his life for the re-union of the churches, he declared that the guilt of the separation lay on the Latins, who had caused it by their innovations and assumptions; and that he would not submit his conscience to any less authority than that of a council fairly gathered from the whole church. The pope is said by Cantacuzene to have expressed his willingness to try this course; but the negotiation was broken off by the death of Clement, and by the forced abdication of the emperor, who spent his last years as a monk on Mount Athos, where he employed himself in composing an uncandid history of his own time.

But John Palaeologus, when thus rid of his guardian, was of all Greek emperors the most inclined to make concessions to Rome. As the son of a western princess, whose influence over him still continued, he felt nothing of the bigoted prejudice with which the Greeks in general regarded the Latins; and his dangers both from the Turks and from Cantacuzene’s son made him ready to seek for assistance from the west on any terms. In 1355 he made overtures to Innocent VI, offering to send his son Manuel to the pope, to have him instructed in Latin under the superintendence of a legate, and to establish schools for teaching Latin to young Greek nobles; and promising, if he should fail as to any of these proposals, to abdicate in favour of his son, who should then be wholly under the control of the pope. A Carmelite, Peter Thomasius, was thereupon sent to the Byzantine court, and made an easy convert of the emperor. In 1366 John subscribed in Hungary a form of faith agree­able to that of the Latin church, and professed homage to the pope; he renewed his assurances to Urban V; and in 1369, while Constantinople was under siege by Amurath, the pope’s return from Avignon was adorned by the presence of the eastern emperor as well as by that of the emperor of the west at Rome. John acknowledged the Roman supremacy, and the double procession of the Holy Spirit; he did homage to the pope in St. Peter’s by bending the knee, and by kissing his feet, hands, and mouth; he assisted at a mass celebrated by Urban; and he performed that “office of a groom” which the Christians of the west had been persuaded to connect with the memory of Constantine the Great. But all these compliances were ineffectual as to the object for which they were made. The pope’s exhortations to the knights of Rhodes, to the king of Cyprus, to the Venetians and the Genoese, that they should help the emperor against the enemies of Christendom, were unheeded. It was in vain that John endeavoured to enlist the great condottiere Hawkwood in his service. He himself, on his way homewards, was arrested for debt at Venice; and he found himself at last obliged to conclude a humiliating treaty with the Turks.

The advance of these assailants continued without check. In 1395 Bajazet, who from the brilliant rapidity of his movements acquired the name of Ilderim (lightning), penetrated into Hungary, and boasted an intention of subduing Germany and Italy, and of feeding his horses with oats at the high altar of St. Peter’s at Rome. The princes and nobles of France were roused by an embassy from king Sigismund of Hungary to hasten to his aid against the infidel invaders; and a brilliant array of 100,000 men set out, vaunting that, if the sky should fall, they would support it on the points of their lances, and indulging in visions of carrying their victorious arms even to the deliverance of Jerusalem. But the foolhardy confidence of these crusaders—their luxury, licentiousness, and want of discipline—proved fatal to the enterprise. Disdaining the advice of Sigismund, which was founded on his knowledge of the Turkish mode of warfare, they were utterly defeated at the battle of Nicopolis. Some of their leaders were slain; others, among whom was the count of Nevers (afterwards noted as John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy), were made prisoners, and were detained for ransom, before the arrival of which not a few of them had perished under the cruel usage of their captors. The failure of this expedition roused much indignation against the rival popes, whose pretensions distracted western Christendom, and made any combined action of its nations impossible.

In 1391 John Palaeologus was succeeded by his son Manuel, who was able to obtain the services of John le Maingre, one of the most distinguished soldiers in the late unfortunate crusade, and afterwards famous under the name of Boucicaut. By his advice Manuel, who had already applied by letter both to Boniface IX and to the French king, undertook in 1400 a journey into western Europe for the purpose of begging assistance. Both in France and in England he was received with great honours; but although Charles VI, in addition to bestowing a pension on him until his fortunes should improve, promised him 1200 fighting men for a year, and although Henry IV vowed a crusade, and taxed his people as if for the relief of the Greek empire, no effective aid was to be gained. Manuel, by adhering to his own religion, by refraining from all interference in the controversy between the popes, and by passing through Italy in the year of jubilee without visiting Rome, offended Boniface IX, who charged him with irreverence towards an image, and discouraged the idea of assisting him. He had been forced to submit to terms dictated by Bajazet; and but for the overthrow of that conqueror by Timur, at the battle of Angora, while Manuel was yet in the west, the fall of the Byzantine empire would probably have been no longer delayed.

During this time there was frequent correspondence between the popes and the Armenian church, and projects of union were entertained with a view to an alliance against the Mussulman power. But the Armenians failed to satisfy the popes entirely as to their orthodoxy; and the help which they obtained from the west was insufficient to protect them against their assailants. In 1367 Armenia fell under the yoke of the Mamelukes; and the Christians were soon after exposed to persecution at the hands of the conquerors.

In other quarters also, where the Mahometans extended their conquests, the Christians suffered severely, and many were put to death for their religion, while others apostatized.

The period which we are surveying was disastrous for the Christianity of the further east. Although the popes continually flattered themselves with the hope of gaining the Mongols, who were now pushing their conquests far and wide, these for the most part embraced the religion of Islam; and the hopes of conversion which from time to time were held out by the envoys of Asiatic princes, on condition of an alliance against their Mussulman or other enemies, invariably proved to be delusive.

In China, where, as we have already seen, the Fran­ciscan John of Monte Corvino laboured until about the year 1330, the propagation of the gospel was carried on with much success, chiefly by other members of the same order. But in 1369 the Chinese drove out the Mongols, and established a system of jealous exclusion of all foreigners; in consequence of which the Christianity of China soon became extinct.

The great Asiatic conqueror Timur (or Tamerlane) appears to have observed an equivocal policy in matters of religion, and is described by some as friendly to Christians; but, whatever his own belief may have been, he outwardly, and as a matter of policy, at least, conformed to Islam. At the end of the period, a few scattered communities, chiefly Nestorian, were all that remained to represent the Christianity of Asia.

In Europe the end of the fourteenth century witnessed the conversion of the last considerable people which had until then professed heathenism. Lithuania, under its great-prince Jagello, had by conquests from Russia become a kingdom in all but name. In 1382 Jagello, whose mother had been a Christian, made pro­posals of marriage to Hedwig, who by the death of her father, Lewis, king of Hungary and Poland, had become heiress of the latter kingdom. He offered that he and all his people should be baptized, and that his territories should be united with Poland. The advantages of this arrangement outweighed both the contract into which she had already entered with an Austrian prince, and her personal dislike of JagelloJagello was baptized by the name of Ladislaus. Bishoprics were established at Wilna and in seven other towns; and the king set vigorously about the fulfilment of his promise as to the conversion of his people. These were at first unwilling to change their religion; but when they saw temples and altars overthrown, the sacred groves cut down, and the serpents which had been objects of worship killed, their faith in their old gods was shaken, and they rushed to baptism in such multitudes that it was found necessary to lead them in companies to the bank of the river, where a whole band was sprinkled at once, and all the members of it received the same baptismal name. Ladislaus himself travelled about the country, teaching the Lord’s prayer and the decalogue; and the work of conversion was forwarded by the white woollen dresses, of Polish manufacture, which were bestowed on the neophytes. Although, however, the profession of Christianity thus became general in Lithuania, Aeneas Sylvius cites a Camaldolese monk, named Jerome of Prague, who visited the country in the beginning of the fifteenth century, as testifying that the worship of fire and of serpents was still widely kept up in it.

The conversion of the Finns and of the Laplanders is also referred to this period; but it would seem to have hardly reached more deeply than to the reception of baptism, and of the priestly benediction in marriage.

 

 

 

CHAPTER X.

SECTARIES—MYSTICS.

 

 

HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH FROM THE APOSTOLIC AGE TO THE REFORMATION A.D. 64-1517