Period II. The Church From The Permanent Division Of The Empire Until The Collapse Of The Western Empire And The First Schism Between The East And The West, Or Until About A. D. 500

In the second period of the history of the Church under the Christian Empire, the Church, although existing in two divisions of the Empire and experiencing very different political fortunes, may still be regarded as forming a whole. The theological controversies distracting the Church, although different in the two halves of the Græco-Roman world, were felt to some extent in both divisions of the Empire and not merely in the one in which they were principally fought out; and in the condemnation of heresy, each half of the Church assisted the other. Though already marked lines of cleavage are clearly perceptible, and in the West the dominating personality of Augustine forwarded the development of the characteristic theology of the West, setting aside the Greek influences exerted through Hilary, Ambrose, Rufinus, and Jerome, and adding much that was never appreciated in the East—yet the opponent of Augustine was condemned at the general council of Ephesus, 431, held by Eastern bishops in the East; and at the same time in the East the controversies regarding the union of the divine and human natures in Christ, although of interest almost entirely in the East and fought out by men of the East, found their preliminary solution at Chalcedon in 451 upon a basis proposed by the West. On the other hand, the attitudes of the two halves of the Church toward [pg 420] many profound problems were radically different, and the emergence of the Roman See as the great centre of the West amid the overturn of the Roman world by the barbarians, and the steadily increasing ascendency of the State over the Church in the East tended inevitably to separate ecclesiastically as well as politically the two divisions of the Empire. As the emperors of the East attempted to use dogmatic parties in the support of a political policy, the differences between the Church of the East, under the Roman Emperor, and the Church of the West, where the imperial authority had ceased to be a reality, became manifest in a schism resulting from the Monophysite controversy and the attempt to reconcile the Monophysites.