Page:Orthodox Eastern Church (Fortescue).djvu/242

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204
THE ORTHODOX EASTERN CHURCH

you not speak? Come, I beg you, help us to fight for your Mother and ours. Look at these Greeks who are trying to soil her purity by dragging us into their error." St. Anselm then goes up and stands by the Pope, and all the Fathers begin talking at once and asking who this stranger may be. Urban tells them to be quiet and explains to them Anselm's fame, his great holiness, and how he is now an exile for the faith. Then Anselm speaks and refutes all the difficulties of the Greeks. When he has done the Pope says: "Blessed are the words that came from your lips." Unfortunately Eadmer cannot tell us much about what St. Anselm actually said. Instead of listening to what was going on he had been staring about him. First he notices that the Archbishop of Beneventum was wearing by far the finest cope. Then he suddenly recognizes this cope as one sent to Beneventum by Egelnoth, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, in exchange for a relic. He is further surprised to see that the Pope is not wearing a cope but a chasuble with the pallium over it. However, Eadmer's distractions do not much matter, because St. Anselm afterwards wrote down all his arguments in a treatise "Of the Procession of the Holy Ghost," which is published with his other works.[1] This same Synod of Bari was about to excommunicate William Rufus of England, but St. Anselm persuaded the Pope to be patient with him yet a little longer. That is all that is known about it.

2. The Second Council of Lyons, 1274.

All through the 13th century, since the Crusaders had taken Constantinople in 1204 (p. 225), the Eastern Empire, now shut up in a corner of Asia Minor around Nicæa between the Latins and the Turks, was reduced almost to the last gasp. In their despair the Emperors saw the only hope in an alliance with the West. If the Crusaders, instead of attacking them, would join them against the Turk, there might yet be some chance for the old Empire. And they saw that the first step to such

  1. M.P.L. clviii. St. Peter Damian also wrote a book "Against the error of the Greeks touching the Procession of the Holy Ghost," M.P.L. cxlv.