the Filioque.[1] Meanwhile, till the 5th century, the creed was exactly the same everywhere. And when the Filioque was added to it, first in Spain, eventually in Rome, the Easterns did not trouble about it—no one ever asked them to adopt it—till Photius found in it a convenient grievance against the Latins.
About the foundations of the Christian faith, then, the worship of one God in the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation of God the Son, our redemption through his death, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come, about these things there was not, there has never been any dispute.
The Easterns also agreed with us about the Catholic Church. That there may be Christians cut off from her communion was a fact as patent to them as to our fathers. We had Donatists and Priscillianists, they had many more schismatics outside their gates. But that in order to be a member of the Church of Christ one had to belong to the visible unity of the Church, this they knew as well as the Latins. In spite of passing schisms, in spite of all manner of unfriendly feeling, they never conceived the theory of a Church divided into mutually excommunicated bodies yet still mocked with the title of one.[2] Dionysius of Alexandria († 264) wrote to Novatian: "If you were unwillingly forced to do so (break away from communion with the rest of the Church), as you say, prove it by now willingly coming back. It would have been better to suffer anything rather than that the Church should be torn; nor would it have been less glorious to suffer even martyrdom rather than to tear the Church in pieces, than to suffer in order not to sacrifice to idols; indeed, in my opinion it would be even more glorious, for in the latter case one would suffer only for one's own soul, in the former for the whole Church."[3] The Bishop of Alexandria then agrees with our St. Augustine († 430): "Nothing is worse than the sacrilege of schism, because there is no just reason for breaking the unity."[4] But as long ago as the 3rd century schismatics made the same excuse that we still hear from their successors—they have returned to a more primitive faith; they find communion with
