refusing to submit to the pope's directions, the papal legates formally laid on the altar of St. Sophia a sentence of anathema denouncing eleven evil doctrines and practices of Michael and his supporters, and cursing them with the awful imprecation: "Let them be Anathema Maranatha, with Simoniacs, Valerians, Arians, Donatists, Nicholaitans, Severians, Pneumatomachi, Manichees, and Nazarenes, and with all heretics; yea, with the devil and his angels. Amen. Amen. Amen" (July 16, a.d. 1054). The schism was now complete.
The modern mind is naturally amazed that so huge a disaster to Christendom could be seriously promoted by so fine a point of controversy as the Filioque clause. We have seen that this was by no means the only ground of contention. It was but the last ingredient in a bitter cup which the Eastern Church refused to take from the hands of overbearing Roman prelates. Then we must remember that, all along, the deplorable mistake of substituting doctrinal orthodoxy for personal faith was maintained by both branches of the Church. Nor was the doctrinal point under dispute without what people thought to be serious consequences. Some have revived it in recent times. When the idea of the immanence of God has suggested that the Divine presence could be secured without the mediation of Christ, it has been argued that the Spirit of God comes to us from Christ; that otherwise the special Christian gospel would vanish. But this was not the question at the time of the dispute. It was not how we receive the Spirit; but how the mysterious existence of the Third Person in the Trinity comes to be in itself. The Greeks allowed that we receive the Spirit through Christ. Still their opponents thought that the honour of Christ was involved in the controversy. It was in the West, in St. Augustine and the Athanasian Creed, for example, that the absolute equality of the Son with the Father was emphasised. The Filioque clause seemed to agree with that equality, the Greek rejection of the clause to discredit it.
16
