Читать книгу Under the Turk in Constantinople: A record of Sir John Finch's Embassy, 1674-1681 онлайн

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It may be doubted whether a happier Englishman ever trod the soil of the Grand Signor than the Rev. John. He revelled in the rich colours and savours of the Levant. The ceremonies of the Turkish Court and the rites of the Greek Church were a perennial fountain of interest to him, while the noisy wrangles of theology touched a vibrant chord in his sympathetic breast. Did Eastern Christians believe that the bread and wine in the Eucharist turned into flesh and blood, or did they believe that it remained bread and wine? This riddle raged just then at Constantinople; and the reverberations of the controversy, expanding in wider and yet wider circles, reached Rome, Paris, London, stirring up everywhere suitably attuned minds to intense, passionate, and to us almost incomprehensible virulence. The Rev. John plunged into the transubstantial vortex with all the polemical zest of a theologian and with a vague notion of writing a big book about it one day. He discussed the holy and unwholesome question with everybody—Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant—he could lay hands on, always ending at the point whence he started—the creed of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Not less eagerly did our Chaplain plunge into the ecclesiastical politics than into the metaphysical polemics of the place. The age-long feud between Greek and Latin was then blended with the squabbles of rival Greek pretenders to the Patriarchal throne of Constantinople: Patriarchs arose and Patriarchs fell as Grand Vizirs did formerly; anathematising their predecessors cordially and being as cordially anathematised by their successors, to the Rev. John’s indescribable delight.ssss1 That was life, pardieu—the absorbing interplay of warm human hearts and even warmer human heads.