he had given up the philosopher's stone he had developed a polite taste for spiritualist seances.) Also his language was so vulgar that he made people blush; in short he was "impious, tyrannical, murderous, sacrilegious, and unworthy." But Cerularius did not live to suffer the capital punishment that probably awaited him. While he was being taken, strongly guarded, to Madytos[1] he died (1059). At once, then, his apotheosis begins.[2] Now that he is no longer dangerous to any one the Emperor affects much regret for all that had happened. His body is brought with great pomp to Constantinople, and is buried in the monastery of the Holy Angels. And gradually the people forget everything evil that he did and transform him into a saint. A yearly panegyric is instituted in his memory, and the same Psellos who had brought the charges against him, preaching before the Emperor, describes his former victim as the wisest, holiest, most persecuted of men.[3] Cerularius had not succeeded in his plan of setting himself up as the head of a great theocracy; but he had done a far greater work and one that still lasts, he had definitely established the schismatical Eastern Church.
At the end of all this story of the schism one remark needs to be made. The sometimes almost incredible facts are not in dispute. Cornelius Will's Acta et Scripta are a collection of contemporary letters and reports, from which each step of the story is made plain, and from which, as a matter of fact, all this account has been written. And people who have studied the matter know it all. Philip Meyer's article on "Cerularius" in the great German Protestant Encyclopædia of Theology,[4] for instance, says of the quarrel between the Churches: "This time it was Michael who arbitrarily took it up again, just at a time when the Court of Byzantium and the Pope had enough reason for an
- ↑ In the Chersonesos on the Hellespont. There was a shipwreck on the way, and though he got ashore he died from its effects.
- ↑ As soon as he was dead he appeared to the Bishop of Madytos radiant in his patriarchal vestments, only (being a ghost) he had to flee away at daybreak (Fun. Oration, p. 374).
- ↑ This is the funeral oration already quoted.
- ↑ Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (Herzog u. Hauck), Leipzig, vol, iii. (1897), pp. 620–621.
