The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory IAllies, T. W. (Thomas William)
History
The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I
Allies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600
bishops of the emperor's city. We find two--the first and the
last--Gennadius and John, blameless. The second, Acacius, author of all the
evil in a schism of thirty-five years. The third, the fourth, and the fifth
shrink from the deed of Acacius; and two of them are deposed by the
emperor, while his people respect and cherish their memory. The sixth is a
mere tool of the emperor.
Four eastern emperors occupy the sixty years from Marcian to Justin. Three
of them are of the very worst which even Byzantium can show. Their reply to
the appeal of the Pope to "the Christian prince and Roman emperor" was to
betray the faith and sacrifice Rome to Arian occupation.
But when we turn from the bishops and emperors of the eastern capital to
the seats of the ancient patriarchs, to the Alexandria of Athanasius and
Cyril, to the Antioch of Ignatius, Chrysostom, and Eustathius, no words can
express the division, the scandals, the excesses, which the Eutychean
spirit, striving to overthrow the Council of Chalcedon, showed during those
sixty years. With this spirit Acacius played to stir up the eastern
jealousy against the Apostolic See of the West, and he found a most willing
coadjutor in the eastern emperor, the more so because that See was no
longer locally situated in his domain. The chance of Acacius lay
throughout in the pride of that monarch who was become the sole inheritor
of the Roman name, as Pope Felix reminded him, and who would fain see Nova
Roma the centre of ecclesiastical rule, as it was become the head of the
diminished empire. Anastasius, after Zeno, was still more swayed by these
motives than his predecessor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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