st. john of damascus (676-749 - Cristo Raul

THE GREEK CHURCH IN THE EIGHTH CENTURY. 45
to it and its predecessor. Nearly a hundred years after
Heraclius had vainly striven to unite the disorganised
provinces of the empire by a compromise which
should satisfy the monophysites, we find the Emperor
Philippicus Bardanes (7 11-7 13) giving the ascendancy
to the monothelete party, an ascendancy only to be
wrested from them once more under his successor.
The subservience of the Greek bishops to the imperial
will is an unfavourable sign of the times : with few
exceptions, they appear to have changed their front,
and marshalled their subordinates in new positions,
at
the promulgation of an ecthesis, or henoticon, or type,
with the same readiness as officers at a review execute
the evolutions of their troops when their general has
given the word of command. Such independent
thought as there was seems mostly to have sought
the shelter of the cloister. Yet even here, how great
a difference is perceptible between the freedom and
progress of the West, and the ever-circling and unprogressive
disputations
of the East. We involun
tarily recall our own Bede, spending his last moments
in Wearmouth Abbey, dictating the closing verses of
his translation of St. John s Gospel, and compare
him with an Eastern counterpart, such as might have
been found in the solitudes of Palestine or Egypt,
on that same eve of Ascension Day, 734. It may
have been from a crushing sense of inferiority to the
ever-growing power of Islam, no less than from the
influence of writers like the so-called Dionysius, and
Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, that a mystic, con
templative, symbolizing habit of mind took possession
of the Greek Church at this time. The spread of