The Lesser Eastern Churches

THE NESTORIANS

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. 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 Orthodox. Arianism was for a long time the religion of various barbarous races (the Goths, for instance), but it died out many centuries ago. There is now no Arian Church. The Pelagian heresy never formed an organized Church. Manichaeism made communities which afterwards disappeared. It is one side of a very great movement that produced all manner of curious sects in East and West till far into the Middle Ages — Bogomils, Paulicians, Albigensians, Bonshommes, and so on. All these too have practically disappeared, though in the West (Bohemia) the last remnant of this movement may have had something to do with the beginning of the Reformation. In the East, the Paulicians and Bogomils had a rather important history. But they too disappeared. Monotheletism formed a Church which has long returned to the Catholic faith, and is now the one example of an entirely Uniate body, having no schismatical counterpart.