Marinus, was cast into prison; and when he was later raised to the pontificate, he remembered the outrage, and anew excommunicated Photius.  A.D. 886 saw the fall and imprisonment of Photius, and union might have been maintained but for the extravagant demands of the Roman pontiff, who required the degradation of all priests and bishops ordained by Photius.  The Greeks indignantly refused, and at last the great schism took place, which severed from each other entirely the Eastern and the Western Churches.

The ancient heresy of the Paulicians had not yet died out, spite of having suffered much persecution at Catholic hands, and under the Emperors Michael and Leo, a fierce attack upon these unfortunate beings took place.  They were hunted down and executed without mercy, and at last they turned upon their persecutors, and revenged themselves by murdering the bishop, magistrates, and judges in Armenia, after which they fled to the countries under Saracen rule.  After a while, they gradually returned to the Greek empire; but when the Empress Theodora was regent, during her son’s minority, she issued a stern decree against them.  “The decree was severe, but the cruelty with which it was put in execution, by those who were sent into Armenia for that purpose, was horrible beyond expression; for these ministers of wrath, after confiscating the goods of above a hundred thousand of that miserable people, put their possessors to death in the most barbarous manner, and made them expire slowly in a variety of the most exquisite tortures” (p. 212).

In addition to the heresies inherited from the previous centuries, three new ones, important in their issues, arose to divide yet more the divided indivisible Church.  A monk, named Pascasius Radbert, wrote a treatise (A.D. 831 and 845), in which he maintained that, at the Eucharist, the substance of the bread and wine became changed, by consecration, into the body and blood of Christ, and that this body “was the same body that was born of the Virgin, that suffered upon the cross, and was raised from the dead” (p. 205).  Charles the Bald bade Erigena and Ratramn (or Bertramn) draw up the true doctrine of the Church, and the long controversy began which is continued even in the present day.  The second great dispute arose on the question of predestination and divine grace.  Godeschalcus, an eminent Saxon monk, returning from Rome in A.D. 847, resided for a space in Verona, where he spoke much on predestination, affirming that God had, from all eternity, predestined some to heaven and others to hell.  He was condemned at a council held in Mayence, A.D. 848, and in the following year, at another council, he was again condemned, and was flogged until he burned, with his own hand, the apology for his opinions he had presented at Mayence.  The third great controversy regarded the manner of Christ’s birth, and monks furiously disputed whether or no Christ was born after the fashion of other infants.  The details of this dispute need not here be entered into.