The interest of the Laurentian schism, which broke out on the death of Pope Anastasius II in November 498, lies not in any doctrinal content but rather in the tensions with Rome that it reveals and the contribution it made to papal ideology and historiography by the propaganda it stimulated. The papal break with Constantinople in 483, the Acaian schism, has been advanced as an external factor in the schism because it caused many of the senatorial nobility of German-ruled Italy to look back with nostalgia toward the Empire and to oppose papal stands on doctrine. Furthermore, senatorial discontent did not die down during the pontificates of the masterful and contentious Gelasius (492–496) or the weaker Anastasius 11(496–498) who, the caput senatus Festus assured the Emperor, would be brought to sign the Henotikon. Attention has been directed towards the internal roots of the schism, among them the late-developing interest of senators in church affairs, specifically through their claims to influence in papal elections and over church revenues, drawn for the most part from endowments from their own class and families, just as a century earlier their predecessors had sought to retain control over the revenues of the pagan cults. These claims had been put forward on the death of Pope Simplicius in 483 at a meeting of the senate with a group of bishops under the presidency of the praetorian prefect Basilius but they had been rejected once by Gelasius, an opponent of several senatorial traditions and a reorganizer of the church's property administration, and again by Symmachus in March 502.1

It is well known that the spokesmen for the early Christian church were hostile to religious images.1 They regarded the Old Testament prohibition against images (Exodus 20:4, Deuteronomy 5:8) as binding upon Christians.2 But even though Christian apologists like Clement of Alexandria and Origen cited the authority of this prohibition,3 they defended the aniconic worship of Christians from pagan attack by borrowing heavily from pagan writers. The arguments they borrowed portrayed the cult of images as a ridiculously inappropriate form of worship, one that degraded the very gods it sought to honor by likening them to base material, shaped by mere craftsmen.4

The ecciesiological problem posed by the authority of the pope in the Roman church is almost as old as the church itself. Likewise, the bases for the exercise of authority by the pope have long been a matter of dispute not only among churchmen but also among scholars. However, it can be stated with certainty that during the most critical years in papal history, the period from the mid-eleventh to the late fourteenth centuries, the papacy gained, and then lost, a considerable measure of leadership in western Europe. Most of the gains came as the popes affirmed what they interpreted to be their spiritual prerogatives—mention may be made, for example, of the priestly power to judge a penitent even if that penitent were a German emperor or a king of England—in a world which called its states regni Christianissimi and imperii Christianorum and assigned to its rulers similarly religious appellations.1 The losses resulted from an increasing secularization of the affairs of state and from a loss of the urgency once attendant upon the appeals and protestations of the papacy.2

Georg Major was a reluctant controversialist. External events and his own theological concerns forced him into a controversy which he loathed but to which he gave his name, the “Majoristic controversy.” That controversy forced Luther's heirs to refine their definition of the relationship between faith and works, but it also wracked and plagued Georg Major's life for a quarter of a century in spite of his efforts to work his way out of the dispute.

King James I's reign was a landmark in the history of the Anglican Church. His religious settlement included the codification of the canons which gave definition and cohesion to the church and reformed her adminstrative machinery. But this touched off a pamphlet war as puritan propaganda sought to force a reappraisal of the settlement. They alleged that bishops harassed and deprived hard-working, conscientious, loyal clergymen who merely rejected the ceremonies. The bishops employed young apologists to discredit the opposition and plead for conformity. They claimed that only thirty to sixty puritan clerics were deprived.

Few movements have been so remarkably transformed within such a short period of time as nineteenth century American Unitarianism. In the 1830s, despite its recently acquired denominational independence, it remained theologically quite close its Congregational ancestry. Its most typical leaders of that period —Orville Dewey, John G. Palfrey, Ezra Stiles Gannett, and Nathaniel L. Frothingham—were all men of gentility and moderation, with little taste for theological revolution. Thus their Unitarianism differed from orthodox New England theology in degree rather than kind and still formed, as one contemporary put it, “the liberal side of the old Congregational body.” Men like Frothingham, who filled the prestigious pulpit of Boston's First Church, continued to believe in a supernatural deity revealed by miracles and divinely inspired Scripture. They placed only limited faith in man. Although not totally depraved, humanity was filled largely with evil and needed divine mediation for salvation. Jesus, who provided this mediation, was described as “the divinely inspired Son of the Father.” The social views of these men, based as they were on the assumption that God had ordained and established the social institutions of the day, were predominantly conservative.3 Within a generation, however, this Old Unitarianism had dissolved. Not everyone changed, of course. Some Conservatives maintained the traditional views until their deaths, but they quickly became a minority as a New Unitarianism emerged.

Not long before he died, Lenin told a French Catholic visitor that “only Communism and Catholicism offered two diverse, complete and inconfusible conceptions of human life.” Lenin's belief that Communism and Catholicism were incon fusible was probably shared by most Communists, and most Catholics, in France in the nineteen-thirties. When the French Communists offered an “outstretched hand” to Catholic workers in 1936 in an effort to achieve a tactical alliance to head off fascism in France and Europe and to promote social progress—ignoring the incompatibilities of world view as much as possible—a number of French Catholics sought to grasp it. But these Catholics were not, for the most part, the “Catholic workers, clerks, artisans, peasants” to whom Maurice Thorez had addressed his appeal, but rather Catholic philosophers, “social priests,” journalists, and cardinals. They grasped, or considered grasping, the outstretched hand with a variety of motivations, hopes, and intentions which were quite often different from the intentions of the Communists who proffered it.