him that Cyril was carrying on treasonable correspondence with the Cossacks. Anxious in the prospect of war, unable to investigate the charge at a distance, in hasty anger, Amurath ordered the patriarch to be executed. Cyril was strangled with a bow-string, and his body flung into the sea, on the 27th of June, 1638, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, and the thirty-sixth of his two patriarchates. Some fishermen found the body, and it was buried at night on an island in the bay of Nicomedia.
Professor Kyriakos considers that Cyril Lucar "must be numbered among the first scholars of his time."[1] Whether he should be admitted to that position in an era of encyclopaedic learning among the men of the new enlightenment in Germany may be doubted. But there can be no doubt that in the East he stood absolutely alone, the one brilliant star of his age. Better than that, he aimed at a genuine reformation, although this was on lines of Western theology for which his people were in no way prepared. It would be preposterous to look for reform of the Greek Church by means of its conversion to Calvinism.
Cyril was followed in the patriarchate of Constantinople by his namesake at Berœa, who summoned a synod within three months of his predecessor's death. This synod anathematised the confession and also Cyril Lucar, betraying no doubt that he was its author. It affirmed the duty of Christian priests to repress all heresy to the utmost of their power. Cyril Lucar was described as "an intruder into the throne of Constantinople, abounding with the poison of the deadliest heresy"; he was especially condemned for teaching "that the bread offered at the altar and also the wine are not changed by the blessing of the priest and the descent of the Holy Spirit into the real body and blood of Christ"; and anathematised as an "Iconoclast" and "worse than an Iconoclast." The decrees of the synod were signed by the three patriarchs, including Metrophanes of Alexandria, who had owed so much to the murdered patriarch—an instance of base ingratitude.
- ↑ Geschichte, p. 145.
