Publisher's Synopsis
The οiκουμενη or world of the Roman Empire, being a compact mass, and consisting of the countries lying around the Mediterranean, was from the foundation of Constantinople or new Rome divided into two great halves or lobes, the " Eastern " and the " Western," Empires within an Empire, at first united, afterwards separate and even hostile; in one of which the Greek, in the other the Latin tongue predominated.The Christian Church converting and incorporating into itself the population of the Roman world, and triumphing openly in the time of Constantine, and thenceforth entering into close relations with the civil Empire, became itself also (ecumenical in the Roman sense, that is, the Church of the Roman world, (οiκουμενη) and with the Roman Empire came to be outwardly distinguishable into two great masses or lobes, the " Eastern " and the " Western," the " Greek " and the " Latin."The Western Roman Empire being overrun by barbarous nations came to an end; but its language, laws, and civilization, and the religion of its Christian inhabitants being communicated to those nations which overran it, it was in a certain sense restored and revived in the Frankish and in the German-Roman Empires of the Most. Thus the οiκουμενη or habitable world, instead of being curtailed, expanded with the changes of the West; and the Church which expanded with it, and which was in great measure the cause of its expansion, still preserved its aspect of I restem geographically, of Latin in ritual and language, and of Homan from the seat of its central government.From the middle of the ninth at the earliest, or of the eleventh century at the latest, the Churches of the original Eastern and of the renewed Western Empire, which had been before as two great lobes of one body, were separated in communion the one from the other. Still, the idea of there being but one οiκουμενη, or civilized world, consisting of the double Roman Empire, survived; and also the idea of there being but one Church, corresponding to the (ecumenicity of the double Roman Empire, and aspiring in principle to be also Catholic or universal in the widest sense, subsisted still on hath sides.
