THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG 74
apostles, by the Catholic Church everywhere. From this time onward, the ecumenical councils of the undivided Church assembled again and again to declare and reaffirm the orthodox Christian creed, to define heresy and denounce error, to decide disputes relating to the hierarchy, ritual, and discipline, and to enact canons and decrees for the general government of the Church throughout the Roman Empire. Preceding this conciliar period from 325 a.p. to 787 A.D., and continuing concurrently with it, the two historic complementing halves of the expanding Christian Church, the Church of the East and the Church of the West, were already acquiring unconsciously their later fixed characteristic forms. Both are originally Greek in language, and possess and use in common the same four apostolic fundamentals for the propagation of the Gospel, and for the pastoral care of the faithful.
The Eastern Church, influenced by an environment permeated with Alexandrian mysticism, and also by the philosophical problems of the Greeks, especially the origin of the material world, the existence and nature of the invisible creating Deity, and the hidden source of evil, concentrated more and
more consistently its theological'teach-
5. Grow- ing on the elucidation of the second
ing Differ- question, and thereby eventually com-
entiation pleted for the entire Church of all ages
Between the first part of the orthodox Catholic
East and dogma of the ecumenical Christian
West. faith, Christology, by developing cautiously and defining concisely the con-
nected doctrines of the incarnation, the person of Christ, and the Trinity. The Western Church was destined to become more and more different from its elder sister in the East through the influence of its own daughter, the Latin Church of North Africa, whose three illustrious teachers, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine (qq.v.), influenced irresistibly by the legalism of Latin life and civilization, developed successively those distinguishing Latin doctrines of soteriology and the constitution of the Catholic Church which were to transform slowly and steadily the Greek Church of the West into the theocratic Latin Church ruled by the popes of Rome during the coming centuries of strife and struggle. To these directing ecclesiastical influences must be added that potent political factor which has had such far-reaching consequences through the centuries to the present day. When the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (q.v.) became the victorious ruler of the West, and also the undisputed ruler of the entire East, his powerful personality as the historic convener of the Nicene Concil in 325, and the builder of the new capital of Constantinople in 326, could not fail to affect the ultimate destinies of both the eastern and western branches of that undivided Catholic Church which he now protected personally. While the existence of the successive bishops of Rome was obscured by the presence of the resident emperors, the ruler of the Roman Church was only one of the coequal heads of the confederated Christian communities constituting the Church of the West; and as long as Rome remained the imperial residence, the pope’s ecclesias-
tical authority was historically subordinate to the prevailing secular power of the Roman emperors. Constantine’s transfer of the center of all political authority from the old Rome of the Czsars to the new Rome of Constantinople, on the other hand, could not fail to result in the slow but steady increase of the ecclesiastical authority of the bishop
‘of Rome, that spiritual ruler now no longer ob-
scured by, and subordinate to, the departed emperor of the East and the West. From this time onward, the rapid rise of the bishop of Rome from the primacy over the city and over the suburbican bishops to the primacy first over the other bishops of Italy, and then successively over all rival primates of the federated but independent Churches constituting the collective Church of the West is historical. The persistent influence of ancient imperial Rome, its traditions, its customs, and its laws all tended to impress, through the power of the bishops of Rome, the subordinate ecclesiastical relation to him of the primates of the several national churches in the West, in marked contrast with the coordinate apostolic equality of all the primates of the confederated national churches in the East. During the period of the councils, this papal authority of the bishops of Rome became more and more evident, for not only did the invasions of the barbarians from the north, and other favoring events of those troubled times, tend irresistibly toward the accomplishing of the ambitions of these successive rulers of the Roman Church, but their increasing ecclesiastical influence inspired the confident assertion of their primacy over the Hast as well.
From this time onward, the eventual separation of the two historic, complementing halves of the one “ Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church ”’ was foreshadowed; and it actually occurred when Photius (q.v.), patriarch of Constantinople, issued, in 866, the famous encyclical declaring the Latin Church to be heretical, and in the following year, with the concurrence of an assembled synod of Eastern
bishops, formally excommunicated 6. The Final Pope Nicholas I. (q.v.). Although the Schism. two churches were later seemingly reconciled, the controversy was revived under the Patriarch Michael Cerularius (q.v.), 1054 a.p., and became final through the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 by the Venetians, followed, as it was, by the intrusion of Latin bishops into the historic sees of the Eastern Church by Innocent III. (q.v.). All later attempts to reconcile the two historic halves of the one Catholic Church, as at the Council of Lyons (1274) and Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-39), have finally failed; and Greek antagonism toward the Latin Church is more uncompromising than ever since the theory of the papal primacy has been expanded into its fullest possible form through the definite Vatican declarations in 1870, imposing on the entire Roman Church the doctrines of the universal episcopate of the pope, and his official infallibility when he declares ex cathedra any question of faith or morals.
The Eastern Church, in the course of its doctrinal development of the conciliar orthodox Christology, suffered the loss of several dissenting parts, most of