Page:Orthodox Eastern Church (Fortescue).djvu/181

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THE SCHISM OF PHOTIUS
145

has come from Rome. He also quotes the 4th Canon of Sardica (pp. 68, 69) to the same effect. Finally, with a dignified protest against this mockery of a trial, he formally appeals from these miserable and corrupt Legates to the Pope himself. But the synod pronounces sentence on him all the same. They dress him up in a set of vestments, then the Sub-deacon Procopius (whom he in former days had suspended for immorality) solemnly takes them off and every one, Legates and all, cries out the old formula: "Ignatius unworthy!"[1] The Legates sign the acts of the synod, deposing Ignatius and acknowledging Photius; then they go back home, laden with still more gifts.[2] The council had drawn up some other decrees, against Iconoclasm, &c., as a sort of blind, and for a time the Byzantines tried to get it recognized as an œcumenical synod, an attempt which came to nothing.[3] Here, too, the fatal incapacity of Greeks and Latins to understand one another confused the issue. The Pope had written in Latin and they had translated his letter quite wrongly: the Legates in this case were probably in good faith because they could not follow the Greek version. Anastasius Bibliothecarius, the contemporary chronicler of all this story, says: "The Roman Legates could not understand what was being read."[4] The Pope thought that the Greeks had mistranslated his letter on purpose. He says: "Among the Greeks such an impertinence is common, as various writings at different times show." And again he quotes another letter of Adrian I that was kept in the Archive at Constantinople, and then adds: "unless it has been tampered with after the manner of the Greeks."[5] The Emperor sent his Secretary of State, Leo, to Rome immediately after the Legates with two more letters for the Pope, one from himself and one from Photius. He encloses the acts of the synod, which he praises as a most holy and blessed assembly, worthy to be compared with the first of Nicæa. He says that it has deposed Ignatius according to the holy Canons and has, together with the Legates, acknowledged

  1. Ἰγνάτιος ἀνάξιος.
  2. Herg. i. pp. 419–428.
  3. The synod that the Orthodox now call the eighth œcumenical one is not this but that of 879 (p. 163).
  4. Præf. in Conc. viii. (Mansi, xvi, p. 11.)
  5. Nic. ep. 9, cit.