as œcumenical, and adds its Canons to the decrees of the fifth and sixth councils. The West has always refused to acknowledge it. St. Bede calls it the reprobate synod, Paul the Deacon, erratic;[1] it interests us here as an example of Eastern ill-feeling towards Rome and the Latins.
It was not the only example. When Maurus of Ravenna in 666 has the insolence to pretend to excommunicate his Patriarch (Pope Vitalian, 657–672), the Emperor Constans II (641–668) publishes a decree in support of the rebel, and affects to determine that the See of Ravenna shall in future always be independent of the Roman Patriarchate.[2] The Byzantines never cease making the most of Pope Honorius's case, till at last they persuade themselves that he, whose fault in any case only consisted in seeming to accept what their Patriarch, Sergius, had written, had been the original author and founder of the whole Monothelite heresy. From the time of his death in 638 till the sixth general council in 680 they admit the name of no Pope to their diptychs. In 649 Paul II of Constantinople (641–654) goes into the residence of the Roman Apocrisarius, sees a Latin altar there, and, in spite of the universal law by which an embassy is extra-territorial, has it overturned and destroyed.[3]
Lastly, long before the great schism broke out, the Byzantine bishops had become accustomed to a number of schisms against Rome, each of which was indeed eventually healed up, but each of which helped to weaken their sense of the need of union. The number of years during which the See of Constantinople was in schism from 323 to Photius's usurpation in 852, if added up, is a formidable one. This is the list: 55 years during the Arian troubles (343–398), 11 years because of St. John Chrysostom's deposition (404–415), 35 years during the Acacian schism (484–519, p. 84), 41 years because of Monothelitism (640–681), 61 years because of Iconoclasm (726–787). Altogether 203 years out of 529.[4] And in every one of these cases Constanti-
- ↑ Beda: de vi mundi ætate, Paul Diac.: Hist. Langob. vi, p. 11. Intolerance of all other customs and the wish to make the whole Christian world conform to its own local practices has always been and still is a characteristic note of the Byzantine Church; see pp. 153, 178, 191, 399, 436.
- ↑ Monum. Germ. hist. Script. Langob. pp. 350, 351.
- ↑ Mansi, x, 880.
- ↑ Duchesne: Égl. sép. p. 163.
