PREFACE
This little book is intended to supply not so much matter for controversy as a certain amount of information about the Orthodox Church. People in the West have too long forgotten that enormous mass of their fellow Christians who live on the other side of the Adriatic Sea and the river Vistula, and now that Anglicans especially have begun to take an interest in what they look upon as another branch of the Church, it seems regrettable that English Catholics as a rule have only the vaguest and the most inaccurate ideas about the people whom they confuse under the absurd name of "Greeks." During the late war one saw how widespread were such ideas as that the Russian clergy were under the Patriarch of Constantinople and said Mass in Greek. It is chiefly with the hope of rectifying such mistakes that the book has been written. There is nothing in it that has not been said often and better before, and the only excuse for its publication is that there does, not seem to be yet anything of the kind from the Catholic point of view in English. As it is written for Catholics I have generally supposed that point of view and have not filled up the pages by repeating once more arguments for the Primacy, Infallibility of the Pope and so on, such as can be easily found already in the publications of the Catholic Truth Society.
The complete titles of the works quoted will be found in the List of Books. M.P.L. and M.P.G. stand for Migne: Patrologia latina and græca respectively.
Two points need a word of explanation. The first is the spelling of Greek names. There is really no reason for writing Greek names down to about 1453 as if they were bad Latin and then suddenly transforming them into the semblance of worse Italian; for making the same name, for instance, Hypsilantius if it occurs in the 9th century, and Ipsilanti when it comes again in the 19th. Undoubtedly the reasonable course would be to write them all out as they are, in our letters. But what is already a matter of course in Germany would seem intolerably pedantic in English. I began with some such idea. Then I found that it would lead to writing Gregorios, Konstantinos, even Athenai and Antiocheia. I have not the courage. So names that have an English (that is not Latin) form have been let alone—Gregory, John, Philip, Paul; names whose Latin forms are known everywhere are written in Latin—Athanasius, Heraclius, Photius. Only in the case of less known names have I ventured to spell them in Greek rather than form any more sham Latin—Anthimos, Nektarios, Kyriakos. Sometimes the same name belongs to different people, and then it seems hopeless to try to be consistent. For instance, the present Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria calls himself Photios, and I have left him so, in spite of his more famous namesake. Unless one goes the whole length and says that Iustinianos lived at Konstantinupolis, I do not know what else can be done. The Greek υ is y; and ου becomes u in any case. Of course this spelling is no sort of guide to the pronunciation. All the Greek words at any rate in this book should be pronounced as Modern Greek. The few Slav names that occur are not written according to any system at all, but are merely copied from various books in other languages that evidently follow different systems of transliteration.
The other point is the use of the word Orthodox. Since the schism I have called the people in union with the Œcumenical Patriarch so. Of course the name then has a special and technical meaning. Orthodox in its real sense is just what we believe them not to be. But, in the first place, it seems impossible to find any other name. Eastern is too wide, the Copts and Armenians form Eastern Churches, Schismatic involves the same difficulty, besides being needlessly offensive. We do not in ordinary conversation speak of Protestants as heretics. The name commonly used, Greek, is the worst of all. The only body that ever calls itself, or can with any sort of reason be called the Greek Church, is the Established Church of the kingdom of Greece; and that is only one, and a very small one, of the sixteen bodies that make up this great Communion. To call the millions of Russians, who say their prayers in Old Slavonic and obey the Holy Synod at Petersburg, Greeks is as absurd as calling us all Italians. There is no parallel with our name Roman. We use the Roman liturgy in the Roman language and obey the Roman Patriarch. They use the Byzantine liturgy in all sorts of languages, and the enormous majority obey no Patriarch at all. Byzantine Orthodox would more or less correspond to Roman Catholic, but the Byzantine Patriarch has no jurisdiction outside his reduced Patriarchate and occupies a very different position from that of the Roman Pope. And then courteous and reasonable people generally call any religious body by the name it calls itself. We have no difficulty in speaking of Evangelicals in Germany, the Church of England at home, and the Salvation Army everywhere. Of course one conceives these names as written in inverted commas, like those of the Holy Roman and the Celestial Empires. In the same way most people call us Catholics. Naturally all Christians believe that they are members of the Universal Church of Christ, and most of them profess their faith in it when they say the Creed. The way in which High Church Anglicans have suddenly realized this and have discovered that they would give away their own case by calling us Catholics is astonishingly naive. Of course they think that they are really Catholics too; so do all Christians. And we never imagined that we are called so except as a technical name which happens to have become ours, and which even Turks (whom, by the way, it is polite to call True Believers) give only to us. The body about which this book treats always calls itself the Orthodox Eastern Church, and in the East we call them Orthodox and they call us Catholics (unless when they mean to be rude), and no one thinks for a moment that either uses these names except as technical terms.
This book was intended at first to contain accounts of the other Eastern Churches too. Want of space made that impossible. It is proposed to make another volume some day describing the Nestorians, Armenians, Jacobites, Copts, Abyssinians, and, above all, our shamefully neglected brothers the Uniates. I fear that, in the last part especially, the account of the Orthodox would not please them. I am sorry that the racial quarrels among them loom so large; but it is true that these fill up nearly all their history during the last century. I have tried to write it all fairly, and have said what I think should be said in their excuse. In spite of this, in spite of the irony which is not mine but that of the circumstances, this little book has been written without any sort of rancour against and, I hope, without any want of due respect towards those great sees whose wonderful history and ancient traditions make them the most venerable part of the Christian world—except only that greater Western throne whose communion they have rejected.
Jerusalem, Low Sunday (Kal. Greg.),
Jerusalem, Holy Cross Sunday (Kal. Iul.), 1907.