The intimate union of the Creator and the creature is not confined in Christian belief to the rational being of Man; it includes also his corporeal being and, through the latter, the material nature of the whole universe. The compromise of the heretics tried in vain to abstract in principle from the divine-human unity, first, the very substance of Man’s being, at one time by declaring it absolutely separate from the Divinity (in Nestorianism), at another by making it vanish completely into the latter (in Monophysitism); secondly, it tried to abstract human will and activity, the rational being of Man, by absorbing it into the divine operation (in Monothelitism); there only remained, thirdly, the corporeal nature, the external being of Man and, through him, of the whole of Nature. The denial to the material and sensible world of all possibility of redemption, sanctification and union with God; that is the idea at the root of the Iconoclastic heresy.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ in the flesh has proved that bodily existence is not excluded from the union of the human and the Divine, and that external and sensible objectivity can and must become the real instrument and visible image of the divine power. Hence the cult of holy images and relics, hence the legitimate belief in material miracles wrought by these sacred objects. Thus in declaring war on the images the Byzantine Emperors were not attacking a religious custom or a mere detail of worship so much as a necessary and infinitely important application of Christian truth itself. To claim that divinity cannot be sensibly expressed or externally manifested, or that the divine power cannot employ visible and symbolic means of action, is to rob the divine incarnation of all its reality. It was more than a compromise; it was the suppression of Christianity. Just as in the previous heresies under the semblance of a purely theological dispute there lay hidden a grave social and political issue, so the Iconoclastic movement under the guise of a ritual reformation threatened to shatter the social organism of Christendom. The material realization of the Divine, signified in the sphere of religious worship by holy images and relics, is represented in the social sphere by an institution. There is in the Christian Church a materially fixed point, an external and visible center of action, an image and an instrument of the divine power. The apostolic see of Rome, that miraculous ikon of universal Christianity, was directly involved in the Iconoclastic struggle, since all the heresies were in the last resort denials of the reality of that divine incarnation, the permanence of which in the social and political order was represented by Rome. It is indeed historically evident that all the heresies actively supported or passively accepted by the majority of the Greek clergy encountered insuperable opposition from the Roman Church and finally came to grief on this Rock of the Gospel. This is especially true of the Iconoclastic heresy; for in denying all external manifestation of the divine in the world it was making a direct attack on the raison d’être of the Chair of Peter as the real objective center of the visible Church.

The pseudo-Christian Empire of Byzantium was bound to engage in decisive combat with the orthodox Papacy; for the latter was not only the infallible guardian of Christian truth but also the first realization of that truth in the collective life of the human race. To read the moving letters of Pope Gregory II to the barbarous Isaurian Emperor is to realize that the very existence of Christianity was at stake. The outcome of the struggle could not be in doubt; the last of the imperial heresies went the way of its predecessors, and with it the circle of theoretic or dogmatic compromises which Constantine’s successors had attempted between Christian truth and the principle of paganism was finally closed. The era of imperial heresies was followed by the emergence of Byzantine “orthodoxy.” To understand this fresh phase of the anti-Christian spirit we must revert to its origins in the preceding period.

Throughout the history of the great Eastern heresies, extending over five centuries from the time of Arius to that of the last Iconoclasts, we constantly find in the Empire and Church of the East three main parties whose alternating victories and defeats form the framework of this curious evolution. We see in the first place the champions of formal heresy, regularly instigated and supported by the imperial court. From the religious point of view, they represented the reaction of Eastern paganism to Christian truth; politically, they were the declared enemies of that independent ecclesiastical government founded by Jesus Christ and represented by the apostolic see of Rome. They began by conceding to sar, whose protégés they were, unbounded authority not only in the government of the Church but even in matters of doctrine; and when Cæsar, impelled by the orthodox majority of his subjects and by the fear of playing into the hands of the Pope, ended by betraying his own creatures, the leaders of the heretical party sought more solid support elsewhere by exploiting the separatist and semi-pagan tendencies of the various nations which were free, or were aiming at freedom, from the Roman yoke. Thus Arianism, the religion of the Empire under Constantius and Valens, but abandoned by their successors, claimed the allegiance of the Goths and Lombards for centuries; Nestorianism, betrayed by its champion Theodosius II, was for a time welcomed by the Eastern Syrians; and Monophysitism, thrust out from Byzantium in spite of all the efforts of the Emperors, finally became the national religion of Egypt, Abyssinia and Armenia.

Here was the most violent, as it was the last, of the imperial heresies; and with its emergence all the indirect and disguised denials of the Christian idea were exhausted. After the condemnation of the Iconoclasts, the fundamental dogma of Christian orthodoxy — the perfect union of the Creator and the creature — was defined in all its aspects and became an accepted fact. But the seventh œcumenica1 council which achieved this task in 787 had been assembled under the auspices of Pope Adrian I and had taken a dogmatic epistle of that pontiff as guide to its decisions. It was again a triumph for the Papacy; it could not then be “the triumph of Orthodoxy;” that was postponed till half a century later when, after the comparatively feeble Iconoclastic reaction brought about by the Armenian dynasty, the orthodox anti-Catholic party finally succeeded in 842 in crushing the last remnants of the imperial heresy without the help of the Pope, and in including it with all the others under a solemn anathema.^[*] Indeed, Byzantine orthodoxy might well triumph in 842; the great Photius, its light and glory, was already making his appearance at the court of the devout Theodora, the Empress who caused the massacre of a hundred thousand Paulician heretics; before long he would be mounting the throne of the œcumenical patriarchs.

The schism initiated by Photius in 867 and consummated by Michael Cerularius in 1054 was closely connected with the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” and was the complete realization of the ideal which the orthodox anti-Catholic party had dreamed of since the fourth century. Dogmatic truth having been once defined and all the heresies finally condemned, they had no further use for the Pope; nothing remained but to crown the work by a formal separation from Rome. Furthermore, it was this solution which best suited the Byzantine Emperors; for they had come to see that it was not worthwhile rousing the religious passions of their subjects by doctrinal compromise between Christianity and paganism and thus throwing them into the arms of the Papacy, when a strict theoretical orthodoxy could very well be reconciled with a political and social order which was completely pagan. It is a significant fact, and one that has not been sufficiently observed, that from the year 842 not a single imperial heretic or heresiarch reigned at Constantinople, and the harmony between the Greek Church and State was not once seriously disturbed. The two powers had come to terms and had made their peace, bound to one another by a common idea: the denial of Christianity as a social force and as the motive principle of historical progress. The Emperors permanently embraced “Orthodoxy” as an abstract dogma, while the orthodox prelates bestowed their benediction in sæcula sæculorum on the paganism of Byzantine public life. And since “sine sanguine nullum pactum,” a magnificent hecatomb of one hundred thousand Paulicians sealed the alliance of the Second Rome with the “Second Church.”

This so-called “orthodoxy” of the Byzantines was in fact nothing but ingrown heresy. The true central dogma of Christianity is the intimate and complete union of the Divine and the human without confusion or division. The logical consequence of this truth — to confine ourselves to the sphere of practical human existence — is the regeneration of social and political life by the spirit of the Gospel, in other words, the Christianization of society and the State. Instead of this synthetic and organic union of the Divine and the human, the two elements were in turn confused or divided, or one of them was absorbed or suppressed by the other. To begin with, the Divine and the human were confused in the sacred majesty of the Emperor. Just as in the confused thought of the Arians Christ was a hybrid being, more than man and less than God, so Cæsaropapism, which was simply political Arianism, confused the temporal and spiritual powers without uniting them, and made the autocrat something more than the head of the State, without succeeding in making him a true head of the Church. Religious society was separated from secular society, the former being relegated to the monasteries, while the forum was abandoned to pagan laws and passions. The dualism of Nestorius, condemned in theology, became the very foundation of Byzantine life. Or again, the religious ideal was reduced to bare contemplation, that is, to the absorption of the human spirit in the Godhead, an obviously Monophysite ideal. The moral life, on the other hand, was robbed of its practical force by the inculcation of the supreme ideal of passive obedience and blind submission to power; that is to say, of an ideal of quietism which was in reality the denial of human will and energy, the heresy of the Monothelites. Finally, an exaggerated asceticism attempted to suppress the bodily nature of man and to shatter the living image of the divine incarnation — a logical though unconscious application of the Iconoclastic heresy.

This profound contradiction between professed orthodoxy and practical heresy was the Achilles’ heel of the Byzantine Empire. There lay the real cause of its downfall. Indeed, it deserved to fall and still more it deserved to fall before Islam. For Islam is simply sincere and logical Byzantinism, free from all its inner contradiction. It is the frank and full reaction of the spirit of the East against Christianity; it is a system in which dogma is closely related to the conditions of life and in which the belief of the individual is in perfect agreement with the social and political order.

We have seen that the anti-Christian movement, which found expression in the imperial heresies, had in the seventh and eighth centuries issued in two doctrines, of which one, that of the Monothelites, was an indirect denial of human freedom, and the other, that of the Iconoclasts, was an implied rejection of the divine phenomenality. The direct and explicit assertion of these two errors was of the essence of the Moslem religion. Islam sees in Man a finite form without freedom, and in God an infinite freedom without form. God and Man being thus fixed at the two opposite poles of existence, there can be no filial relationship between them; the notion of the Divine coming down and taking form, or of the human ascending to a spiritual existence, is excluded; and religion is reduced to a mere external relation between the all-powerful Creator and the creature which is deprived of all freedom and owes its master nothing but a bare act of “blind surrender” (for this is what the Arabic word islam signifies). This act of surrender, expressed in a short formula of prayer to be invariably repeated day by day at fixed hours, sums up the whole religious background of the Eastern mind, which spoke its last word by the mouth of Mohammed. The simplicity of this idea of religion is matched by a no less simple conception of the social and political problem: Man and the human race have no real progress to make; there is no moral regeneration for the individual and therefore a fortiori none for society; everything is brought down to the level of a purely natural existence; the ideal is reduced to the point at which its realization presents no difficulties. Moslem society could have no other aim but the expansion of its material power and the enjoyment of the good things of the Earth. The spread of Islam by force of arms, and the government of the faithful with absolute authority, and according to the rules of an elementary justice laid down in the Koran — such is the whole task of the Moslem state, a task which it would be difficult not to accomplish with success. Despite the tendency to verbal falsehood innate in all Orientals as individuals, the complete correspondence between its beliefs and its institutions gives to the whole of Mohammedan society a distinctive note of truth and sincerity which the Christian world has never been able to achieve. Christendom as a whole is certainly set upon the path of progress and transformation; and the very loftiness of its ideal forbids us to judge it finally by any one of its various phases, past or present. But Byzantinism, which was hostile in principle to Christian progress and which aimed at reducing the whole of religion to a fact of past history, a dogmatic formula, and a liturgical ceremonial — this anti-Christianity, concealed beneath the mask of orthodoxy, was bound to collapse in moral impotence before the open and sincere anti-Christianity of Islam. It is interesting to observe that the new religion, with its dogma of fatalism, made its appearance at the precise moment when the Emperor Heraclius was inventing the Monothelite heresy, which was the disguised denial of human freedom and energy. It was hoped by this device to strengthen the official religion and to restore Egypt and Asia to the unity of the Empire. But Egypt and Asia preferred the Arab declaration of faith to the political expedient of Byzantium. Nothing would be more astonishing than the ease and swiftness of the Moslem conquest were no account taken of the prolonged anti-Christian policy of the Second Empire. Five years were enough to reduce three great patriarchates of the Eastern Church to the condition of historical relics. It was not a matter of conversion but simply of tearing off the mask.

History has passed judgment upon the Second Empire and has condemned it. Not only did it fail in its appointed task of founding the Christian State, but it strove to make abortive the historic work of Jesus Christ. Having attempted in vain to pervert orthodox dogma, it reduced it to a dead letter; it sought to undermine the edifice of the pax Christiana by attacking the central government of the Universal Church; and in public life it supplanted the law of the Gospel by the traditional policy of the pagan State. The Byzantines believed that true Christianity meant no more than guarding the dogmas and sacred rites of orthodoxy without troubling to Christianize social and political life; they thought it lawful and laudable to confine Christianity to the temple while they abandoned the marketplace to the principles of paganism. They had no reason to complain of the result; they were given their wish. Their dogma and their ritual were left to them; it was only the social and political power that fell into the hands of the Moslems, the rightful heirs of paganism.