The Biography of the Bible

of heaven." As early as the second century Pope Victor I had threatened to excommunicate the Eastern churches if they did not accept the Roman date for Easter, a festival which had taken over the old pagan holidays in celebration of the Spring. In the Athanasian Creed reference is made to "the Catholic Faith" and "the Catholic Religion" rather than to the "Christian" faith or religion. After the fall of the Empire in 476 the Papacy secured control of the city of Rome with vast estates elsewhere in Italy, Sicily, and Africa. Politics and religion became inextricable in a church which thus enjoyed both spiritual and temporal power.

Meanwhile, over in Constantinople its Patriarch, who had secured the primacy among the churches of the East, watched the growth of his western rival with jealous eyes. The secret enmity between the two heirs of the Empire came to a head in the ninth century when Pope Nicholas I and the Patriarch Photius excommunicated each other. Officially, the quarrel was over the Nicene Creed. In the form of that creed used in the Roman Catholic Church the word filioque—"and from the Son"—had been added to the description of the Holy Spirit as "proceeding from the Father." Photius, the greatest scholar of the age, declared that this

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