Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 15:59 (Jul 1858)
Article: The Greek Church
Author: J. M. Manning

BSac 15:59 (July 1858) p. 501

The Greek Church

Rev. J. M. Manning

In the year of our Lord 324, if we may follow the authorities quoted by Gibbon, it chanced on a certain night “that Constantine slept within the walls of Byzantium.” Amid the dreams of that night he beheld “the tutelar genius of the city, a venerable matron, sinking under the weight of years and infirmities, suddenly transformed into a blooming maid, whom his own hands adorned with all the symbols of imperial greatness.”1 The purpose of the monarch, as the chronicle relates, was formed before he left his couch; and but little more than a decade of years had elapsed, after that nocturnal vision, when the new capital, with its ample walls and blazing palace, its hippodrome, porticos, church of St. Sophia, triumphal arches, royal baths, and works of art gathered out of all the cities in the known world, stood complete on the right bank of the Bosphorus.

It is from the dedication of Constantinople that the history of the Greek church properly starts. Not that it had

BSac 15:59 (July 1858) p. 502

become a distinct body at that time; for the final separation between it and the church of Rome did not take place till after the middle of the eleventh century. Nor are we to infer that the elements which gradually became embodied in the Greek church, had no existence before the founding of the Eastern empire. Those elements can be traced back to the first ages of Christianity. Indeed we find them more abundant, and more active, as we approach the time and place of the advent of our Saviour. Not more than one, or possibly two, of the sacred writers were born as far West as the city of Constantine; and from thence it was more than a thousand miles on to the schools of Roman learning. The native genius of those writers, and the training which they received, were purely Oriental.2 Considering the isolation of nations in that day, we see that they could have been influenced only in a slight degree by Western mind. Their cast of intellect was thoroughly Eastern; and so also were their modes of thinking, and of expressing thought. The type of Christianity which they give us is the Greek, rather than the* Latin. Nor is this a point which needs to be established by argument, but simply a fact of history. God chose to reveal himself to man through Oriental symbols, and beneath the Oriental heavens. He gave us the divine word in an Asiatic rather than a European mould. It was no Western star, but “the star of the East,” that shone upon the birthplace of the Redeemer.

It is true that Christianity, so thoroughly Grecian in its earliest form, was modified somewhat by coming...