CHAPTER I
OF THE LESSER EASTERN CHURCHES IN GENERAL
The Orthodox Church is considerably the largest in the East. But it is by no means the only Eastern Church. The idea, which one still sometimes finds among Protestants, of one vast "Eastern Church," united in the same primitive faith, knowing nothing, never having known anything, of the Papacy, is the crudest fiction. There neither is nor ever has been such a body. Eastern Christendom is riddled with sects, heresies and schisms, almost as much as the West. In the East, too, if you look for unity you will find it only among those who acknowledge the Pope.[1] This, then, is the first thing to realize clearly. There are, besides the Orthodox Church, other Eastern Churches, which are no more in communion with her than they are with us. To the Orthodox Christian an Armenian, a Copt, a Jacobite is just as much a heretic and a schismatic as a Latin or a Protestant. Though no other Eastern Church can be compared to the Orthodox for size, nevertheless at least some of them (that of the Armenians, for instance) are large and important bodies. This book treats of these other separated Eastern Churches. Their situation is not difficult to grasp. All spring from the two great heresies of the 5th century, Nestorianism, condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431, and its extreme opposite, Monophysism, condemned by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. These two heresies account for all the other separated Eastern Churches, besides the
- ↑ Even the Orthodox Church itself (which is what these people probably really mean by the "Eastern Church") is torn by schisms, as has been shown in the former book.
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