Volume 1, Chapter 10

THE TRADITIONAL FAITH AND THE IMPERIAL POLICY

Section 1: THE AFTERMATH OF CHALCEDON. 452-518

Section 2: JUSTINIAN. 527-565

Section 3: BYZANTINE CATHOLICISM. 565-711

THE AFTERMATH OF CHALCEDON. 452-518

IN the twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon were sown seeds of dissension destined to bear an immense fruit in centuries yet to come. The more immediate trouble was born of the circumstances in which its definition of faith was framed. Here the terminology of St. Cyril had yielded to that of St. Leo, and there were regions in the East too accustomed to St. Cyril's language to take the change easily. Just as there were Catholics after Nicea who dreaded the possibility that the Arians would interpret the homoousion in a Sabellian sense and exploit the misinterpretation against the defenders of the defined doctrine, and, more recently, Catholics after Ephesus who suspected the Apollinarian possibilities of St. Cyril's technical phrases, so now there were to be Catholics uneasy lest Chalcedon might be construed as a posthumous rehabilitation of Nestorius.

The first element to consider, in the resistance to Chalcedon which now began to show itself, is the opposition of those who cannot see truth except through the terminology they have inherited from St. Cyril. Nowhere, it is interesting to note, is Eutyches defended. These " Cyrillians, " [57] so to call them, condemn Eutyches equally with the council, but they will not condemn him as the council condemns him, since to do so is, they consider, an indirect condemnation of St. Cyril. Thus far the resistance is an academic affair, the conflict of theologians over terms, and its chief importance is perhaps that it explains the luke-warmness of many Catholic bishops in the East in the next few years. At Chalcedon they had whole-heartedly condemned Eutyches as they had whole-heartedly acknowledged St. Leo's claim to define the truth; but it was only after Rome's gesture of authority that they had consented to the definition in the terminology they suspected.

There was, however, another source whence trouble was much more likely to come. This was in the resentment, which it is hardly incorrect to call national, felt by the people of Egypt at the condemnation of their patriarch. Dioscoros, whatever his misdeeds, was Patriarch of Alexandria, and to the newly-reviving race consciousness of the Egyptians he was the head of his nation. For nearly a century and a half a succession of great personalities had filled that see, and for half a century one of them, backed by his people, had defied successfully all the efforts of the hated power at Constantinople to depose him. The later victory of Theophilus over St. John Chrysostom and that -- admittedly a very different affair -- of St. Cyril over Nestorius had also been, for the Egyptians, the triumph of Egypt over the Empire. In 449, at the Latrocinium, Dioscoros had gained just such another triumph in his deposition of St. Flavian. Now, in 451, his own degradation was felt in Egypt as a national calamity. Well might the bishops of Egypt, prostrate before the great council, beg and implore with tears to be excused from signing the condemnation of their patriarch. They knew their people, knew that in this matter forces far less judicial than those which ruled theological discussions, were moving. If they returned home, and the news spread that they had assented to the condemnation of Dioscoros, their lives would not be worth an hour's purchase. It needed but the interest of the few genuine Monophysite heretics to exploit this immense reserve of anti-imperialist feeling -- and organising it as the cause of St. Cyril they would secure the benevolent neutrality of the " Cyrillian" bishops -- and Egypt would be roused against Chalcedon even more easily than it had been roused for Nicea. The imperial government understood well enough what the immediate future might hold, and it gathered troops to protect the defenders of Chalcedon when the emergency should arise.

It was in Palestine that the trouble began, and the pioneers were people who feared neither Government nor council, the innumerable army of monks and solitaries. The news of its bishop's vote reached Jerusalem long before that prelate, with his new dignity of fifth patriarch, had returned. The cry went round that the faith was in danger, that in Dioscoros St. Cyril had been condemned. The whole city rose, monks and solitaries pouring in by thousands, at the head of the insurrection no less a person than the Empress Dowager, Eudoxia, widow of Theodosius II, and delighted in her exile to find this means of embarrassing the imperial sister-in-law whom she so little loved. New bishops, it was urged, must be chosen not for Jerusalem only but for all Palestine, to replace those who at Chalcedon had betrayed the faith, and the new Patriarch returned to find his city in the hands of half-mad fanatics, murder and outrage the order of the day. Order was not restored until the monks had been defeated in a pitched battle.

There were revolts of the same kind throughout Syria, and in Cappadocia too, but the scene of the fury at its worst was naturally Egypt. Here the first practical consequence of the council was the meeting to elect a successor to Dioscoros, and at the mere announcement the mob rose. Dioscoros was still alive, therefore still bishop. There could therefore be no need of a new election. Once again the troops had to fight the mob and the monks before the formalities could be gone through and the new bishop elected. Still the fighting in the streets continued, the troops were driven into the great temple of the old religion -- the Serapeion -- and held there until with the buildings they perished in the flames. The imperial government must evidently fight for its own existence. All Egypt was placed under military law and the pro-Dioscoros bishops everywhere deposed. So a certain external order was at last obtained. It lasted for an uneasy five years.

Its first shock was the news (September, 454) that Dioscoros had died in his distant captivity, when it took all the efforts of the government to prevent the Monophysites from electing a "successor" to him. When, three years later, the emperor Marcian followed Dioscoros into the other world the tumult broke out irrepressibly. Marcian had been orthodoxy's chief supporter. Chalcedon was his council, and to repress the Monophysite faction had been for him an elementary necessity of practical politics. Pulcheria had pre- deceased him, and in his place the army and officials installed the tribune Leo. The Monophysites did not wait to learn that the change of emperor meant a change of policy. They elected their successor to Dioscoros, Timothy surnamed the Cat, while the mob once more held the city and the Catholic bishop was murdered, his body dragged through the streets and savagely outraged. For the best part of a year the Monophysites were masters, deposing the Catholic bishops everywhere and re-instating the partisans of Dioscoros while the government looked on indifferently. From Rome St. Leo did his utmost to rally the new emperor to the support of Chalcedon, and finally the government made up its mind. Bringing in more troops, it deposed the Monophysite bishops and deported Timothy the Cat. Once more there was the peace of repression and it endured this time for sixteen years.

When the Emperor Leo I died in 474 he left as his successor a baby grandson, Leo II, and the child's father, Zeno, acting as Regent, was associated with him as Emperor. The baby died, another claimant to the throne, Basiliscus, appeared, and he was so successful that presently Zeno was an exile, and Basiliscus reigned in his place at Constantinople (January, 475).

One of the first acts of the usurper was to recall the Monophysite exiles. Their chief, Timothy the Cat, was still alive and at the news of his return the Catholic bishop fled from Alexandria and Timothy took possession without opposition, while the remains of Dioscoros were solemnly set in a silver shrine. To Antioch also there returned its Monophysite bishop, Peter called the Fuller, and the new emperor, hoping to establish himself securely on the basis of a re-united people, issued what was to be the first of a long series of edicts designed to undo the work of Chalcedon without express disavowal of the faith there defined. Monophysites and Catholics alike would sign the formula proposed and the religious disunion be at an end. This was the aim of the Encyclion of Basiliscus. It condemned Eutyches and it condemned Chalcedon, it approved Ephesus and it approved the Latrocinium. All the bishops were to sign it under pain of deposition, and laymen who opposed it were to suffer confiscation, of goods and be exiled.

The success of the measure was instantaneous. Almost every bishop in the East signed without difficulty -- Catholics because it condemned Monophysitism in condemning Eutyches, and because, if it condemned Chalcedon too, there was much in the terminology imposed at Chalcedon to which they objected. On the other hand, the Monophysites had never ranged themselves as supporters of Eutyches since the Latrocinium. They were delighted to have an opportunity, in once more condemning him, of affirming the orthodoxy of St. Cyril and of their own claims, and of course, of the orthodoxy of their own opposition to Chalcedon. For the Monophysites the future was now full of promise. They held the two chief sees of the East, and, thanks to the Encyclion, Monophysitism was no longer a bar to the promotion of yet more of the faction. Their one and only obstacle was the Patriarch of Constantinople, Acacius. He had refused to acknowledge Timothy the Cat when the exiles were recalled, and had locked the churches of the capital against him. Now, almost alone of the hundreds of bishops in the Eastern Empire, he refused to sign the Encyclion. His constancy, or obstinacy, would no doubt have brought his term of office to a speedy conclusion, but the short reign (twenty months) of Basiliscus ended as unexpectedly as it had begun.

In the September of 476 Zeno returned with an army and re- established himself. Basiliscus had seen defeat coming, and in a last wild hope of rallying the capital -- where Monophysites were few -- he had cancelled the Encyclion by the edict called the Anti-Encyclion, and the versatile Eastern episcopates signed this as easily as they had signed its forerunner, excepting always the Monophysites. Timothy the Cat's brief triumph was over, and the deposition of Acacius to which he looked forward as the fitting sequel to the Alexandrian defeat of 451, a fourth condemnation of Constantinople by Alexandria in fifty years, was not to be. Chalcedon was once more in the ascendant, and only the old man's death (July, 477) saved him from arrest and further exile. Secretly and hurriedly his chief lieutenant, Peter Mongos [58] was consecrated in his place and, consecrated, immediately went into hiding to avoid the coming storm. The Catholic bishop came out of the monastery where he had buried himself since 474 and, if the government would only put its troops at the disposal of orthodoxy, the Catholicism of Chalcedon might once more hope for peace.

The recent crisis had proved one thing very clearly. In the whole East the great council had scarcely a friend prepared to suffer in its defence. The bishops, evidently, would vote " yes " or " no " as the government bade them. Twenty-five years after Chalcedon it was on the Patriarch of Constantinople alone that, in the East, the defence of orthodoxy depended. Acacius was its sole bulwark against the energy and determination of the Monophysites. And now, whether from fear on his part that the task was hopeless, or whether the emperor, weary of the repression and turning to other means, won him round, Acacius changed his policy.

The occasion was the death in 482 of the Catholic bishop of Alexandria. As his end drew near this defender of Chalcedon grew more and more anxious that an equally zealous Catholic should succeed him, and that the government should not, upon his death, end the trouble by recognising the Monophysite, Peter Mongos, as the lawful bishop. He therefore despatched to the court a trusted member of his clergy, John Talaia, to urge the matter. Talaia chose his intermediaries badly -- high officials themselves under suspicion of treason -- and compromised his cause accordingly. However, the promise was made that the new patriarch should be a Catholic, and Talaia had in return to promise that he would not seek his own election. But when in the June of 482 the Bishop of Alexandria died, and Talaia was elected in his place, he ignored his engagement and accepted. The emperor, already planning some scheme of reunion, refused to acknowledge him, and, since no Catholic bishop could expect to live in Alexandria once the imperial government ceased to uphold him, Talaia fled to Rome. The government meanwhile had found its formula. Its officials sought out the Monophysite successor of Timothy the Cat and offered him official recognition as Patriarch if he would sign it and admit Catholics to the sacraments. Peter Mongos accepted and signed. This document is the Henoticon, and its author was the Patriarch of Constantinople Acacius.

The Henoticon is more subtly drawn than the Encyclion of Basiliscus which inspired it. It takes the form of a letter from the emperor to the bishops, and it proclaims his faith to be that of Nicea, of Constantinople, of Ephesus (431). It repeats the condemnation of Eutyches, and it accepts the theology of St. Cyril's famous twelve propositions against Nestorius. Of Chalcedon there is no mention at all, nor is there, in the reference to Eutyches, any mention of the Tome of St. Leo which is the official form of his condemnation. In the circumstances, and in the light of all that had happened since Chalcedon, the Henoticon was a jettisoning of the faith there defined, an implicit acknowledgement that Chalcedon was unimportant and henceforward not to be imposed, an equivocal surrender of St. Leo, without whom Chalcedon is a mere pageant and against whom all the Monophysite bitterness of thirty years had been directed. There was nothing in the document which a Catholic could not approve, but to approve the document at that time and in that place was undoubtedly to surrender the controverted point of faith. The issue of the Henoticon, whatever the hopes of its authors, was a triumph for the Monophysites.

Nevertheless it had a very mixed reception. In Egypt Peter Mongos accepted it, but the Monophysites generally refused it, as equivocal, and called for the logical term of its reasoning-an explicit condemnation of Chalcedon. Once more there were riots, and from the deserts an army of 30,000 monks converged on Alexandria to enforce the demands. The Monophysite Patriarch of Antioch too, Peter the Fuller, accepted, thereby winning recognition; and the Monophysites in Syria, generally, accepted it. The same thing happened in Palestine. The situation of 475 was repeated with this difference that the leader of the movement now was the very man who then had been the head of the orthodox opposition. The whole of the East had ceased to fight for the definition of Chalcedon, and on a basis of "silence where we differ" the Catholics there had received into communion those who declared that the definition meant heresy.

There remained Rome. It was the action of the pope St. Leo which in 458 had saved Catholicism in the East from Timothy the Cat, and when that personage returned in triumph seventeen years later the pope -- Simplicius now -- had immediately protested and called for his re-exile. He had been no less insistent, in 482, in his opposition to the emperor's acknowledgement of Peter Mongos as Patriarch, and had pressed Acacius to use all his influence to prevent that acknowledgement. Acacius ignored the letters, but before Simplicius could proceed further in the matter he died (March 10, 483).

His successor, Felix III, was once again the classical Roman, simple, direct, courageous, a man of action. Talaia had arrived in Rome while Simplicius lay dying and had laid a formal accusation against Acacius. The new pope thereupon sent an embassy to Constantinople with instructions to summon Acacius to answer the charges made against him by the exiled Catholic patriarch. When the legates arrived Acacius confiscated their papers and procured their arrest. They were put to the torture and presently went over to the side of Acacius. They, too, signed the Henoticon and assisting publicly, in their official capacity as the pope's legates, at the liturgy when Acacius pontificated, crowned his tortuous betrayal of the faith of Chalcedon with the appearance of the papal sanction. There was, however, one small group of faithful Catholics in the capital who guessed the truth -- the monks known, from the continuous character of their offices, as the "Sleepless" (Akoimetoi). They found means to inform the pope and when the legates returned their trial awaited them. In a synod of seventy bishops the pope judged both the legates and Acacius. They were condemned and deposed, and Acacius excommunicated for his betrayal of the faith. With him were excommunicated all who stood by him, and as the whole of the East that was not Monophysite supported him, the effect was a definite breach between Rome and the Eastern Church. It was to last for thirty- five years, and history has called it the Acacian Schism.

Acacius died, intransigent to the last, in 489 and two years later Zeno died too. He left no heir and his widow, influential as the Augusta, designated as his successor Anastasius, an officer of the civil service. The contrast between the two emperors could not have been greater. Zeno was the rough, uncultured product of a province where the only influential citizens were brigands, and he was the most notorious evil-liver of his Empire. Anastasius, already sixty-eight years of age, was the trained official, scholarly, scrupulous, so pious that in 488 he narrowly escaped election as Patriarch of Antioch; he had a pronounced taste for preaching, and he was an ardent Monophysite. The schism therefore suffered no interruption from the change of emperor. In Egypt the regime of the Henoticon, interpreted as hostile to Chalcedon, continued. In Syria, under the same regime, the bishops were pro- Chalcedon and the monks divided. At Constantinople, outside the court circle, Monophysites were rare and the new patriarch was as much a supporter of Chalcedon as he dared be, which was too much for the new emperor, and therefore he was soon replaced.

Felix III, too, died in 492. His successor, one of the great popes of the early Middle Ages, was Gelasius I and he continued his predecessor's policy in his predecessor's spirit. Constantinople must acknowledge the sentence on Acacius before it can be restored to communion. The successor of Gelasius, Anastasius II (496-98), used a somewhat gentler tone. He died before he was able to see what fruit this would bear, and the immediate result was a schism, at Rome itself, on the part of the more intransigent of his own clergy, and the beginnings of a legend concerning Anastasius that grew with the Middle Ages and won the peace-loving pope a place in the Inferno of Dante. With Symmachus, elected in 498, the party of Gelasius was again in control, but hampered for the next ten years by schism arising from a double election. The situation, after twenty-five years of the breach, was unchanged, except that the East was becoming accustomed to live in hostility to Rome; and then, in 511, change came. From the Catholic point of view it was change for the worse and its author was the emperor, still Anastasius and by this time close on ninety years of age.

The Henoticon had never been a success. It was one of those compromises which satisfy none. It pleased the radical Monophysites as little as it pleased the Catholics, Anastasius the emperor as little as Anastasius the pope. The emperor then, in 511, resolved on a more definitely anti-Chalcedonian policy, the imposition of Monophysitism generally throughout the Empire. His greatest difficulty lay in the fact that only Egypt was sufficiently Monophysite to welcome the policy whole-heartedly. But his purpose was stiffened, and his arm strengthened, by the appearance at this moment of the man who was destined to make a church of the Monophysite party, and to found it so thoroughly that it endures to this day -- the monk Severus.

Severus was a man who had suffered much for his opposition to the Henoticon -- opposition, of course, because that document, he considered, conceded too much to Catholicism. The business of an appeal to the emperor had brought him to the capital at the very moment when Anastasius was planning how best to depose its Patriarch for his anti-monophysite activities. The presence of Severus, whose most remarkable learning, and sufferings for the cause, had made him the leading personality of the party, gave new life to the dispirited Monophysites of the capital. The Patriarch, Macedonius, was deposed and a Monophysite installed in his place. Heartened by this victory the emperor turned next to purify the sees of the East. In Syria the monks were his willing agents and Severus the chief organiser. Within a few months the deposition of the Patriarch of Antioch, too, had been managed and in his place there was elected Severus himself. The bishops of Syria went over, almost in a body, to the strictly Monophysite interpretation of the Henoticon. At Jerusalem, however, Severus was refused recognition, and to reduce this last stronghold more summary measures still were adopted. The patriarch was deposed, banished and provided with a Monophysite successor by a simple order from the emperor. But, for all its appearance of completeness, the policy was far from successful. Monophysites did indeed occupy the chief sees, and the other bishops had accepted the Monophysite version of the faith. But in many cases it was only a nominal acceptance; the convinced Monophysites among them were a minority; the dissident radical Monophysites of Syria still held aloof; and at Constantinople the opposition of the Catholics-still of course divided from Rome and the West by schism -- to the whole Monophysite movement was as active as ever. The religious chaos after seven years of the new Monophysite offensive was greater than before. Affairs were going steadily from bad to worse when the death of the aged emperor (July 9, 518) suddenly changed the whole situation.

The new emperor -- the commandant of the guard, who had profited by his position to seize the vacant throne -- was not only a Catholic, but, what had not been known for a century and a half, a Latin. With the accession of Justin the end of the schism could only be a matter of time. Events, indeed, followed each other rapidly. Anastasius died on July 9. Six days later mobs were parading the streets calling for the acknowledgement of Chalcedon and St. Leo, and the condemnation of Severus. On the 20th a council of bishops reversed all the policy of forty years and more, recognising Chalcedon and St. Leo's teaching, and decreeing Severus' deposition and excommunication. More they were unable to do for, like a wise man, he was already flown. Everywhere, except in Egypt, the superiority reverted to the Catholics, and on August 1 the new emperor re-opened communications with the pope, Hormisdas.

It was not until the following March (519) that the legates arrived to execute the formalities which would bring the schism to an end. They were simple enough, and strict. Each bishop must sign the formula sent by the pope, and in this he acknowledged the indefectibility of the faith of the Roman Church, condemned Nestorius and Eutyches and Dioscoros, made explicit recognition of the decisions of Ephesus and Chalcedon, accepted the Tome of St. Leo and finally condemned along with Timothy the Cat, Peter Mongos and Peter the Fuller, Acacius too and all who had supported him. Furthermore, the bishop promised never "to associate in the prayers of the sacred mysteries the names of those cut off from the communion of the Catholic Church, that is to say those not in agreement with the Apostolic See., ' The formula was not drawn up in view of the present reconciliation. It had been devised in Spain, during the schism, as a means of testing the orthodoxy of visiting prelates from the East. Rome now made it her own.

Justin asked for a Council to discuss the matter, but the legates were firm. They had come for one purpose only -- to gather signatures to Pope Hormisdas' formula. They had their way. The patriarch signed and the other bishops, too, amid scenes of great enthusiasm. But outside Constantinople things did not go so smoothly. To begin with, there was an unwillingness to condemn the patriarchs since Acacius, especially those who, for their opposition to the Monophysites, had been deprived by the Monophysite emperor. At Thessalonica and at Ephesus especially was there resistance on this account. At Antioch, Severus having been deposed, there was once more a Catholic patriarch. He signed, and with him a hundred and ten out of the hundred and fifty bishops of his jurisdiction. The monks, however, held firm and nothing short of a wholesale dissolution of their monasteries and a general rounding up of hermits and solitaries reduced their opposition. This necessary work was entrusted to the army. Its immediate result was to loose on the East thousands of convinced, and none too instructed, apostles of the heresy, destined now to wander over the East for another twenty years preaching resistance to the bishops and to the Council of Chalcedon. Their sufferings at the hands of the imperial soldiery naturally added not a little to their eloquence and zeal. In Palestine the change had not been too difficult, but it promised to raise such storms in Egypt that the government, for the moment, left that province untouched; and to Egypt there began to flow in the full tide of the persecuted and dispossessed from all the rest of the Empire. Nor was Severus idle. From his hiding place he still directed and encouraged the whole vast movement, and to take the place of the priests and deacons now reconciled with the pope, wholesale ordinations were arranged and a new Monophysite clergy came into being whose pertinacity no power would ever shake.

JUSTINIAN. 527-565

The old emperor, Justin I died on August 1, 527, and his nephew, Justinian, who throughout the reign had been the chief adviser and the real ruler, succeeded. The uncle had been one of those rough, hardy Illyrians who had more than once shown themselves such capable administrators, endowed with a hard practical common sense and a natural shrewdness that compensated for their native illiteracy. But the new emperor added to what practical abilities he inherited, a wide and extensive culture, and -- sure menace for the newly-restored peace in things ecclesiastical -- a pronounced taste for theological speculation. Justinian, like his uncle, was a Catholic. He had played an important part in the negotiations which ended the schism, and in the measures taken since to dislodge the Monophysites from the vantage points they had come to occupy during those thirty-five disastrous years. His Catholic subjects were now once more in communion with their chief the Bishop of Rome, but the subsequent measures of repression, of deposition, and confiscation had by no means reconciled the Monophysites of the eastern provinces. At heart they still remained bitterly hostile to the Catholicism of Chalcedon, and the new conformity was very largely a conformity in name alone. One of the first tasks before Justinian was to transform this nominal submission into a submission of fact.

From the new emperor the Catholic Church had everything to hope, but he was not the only figure with whom it had to reckon. Justinian was married, and the new empress, Theodora, a personality indeed, was no mere consort but associated as Augusta with her husband's new rank. They were a devoted couple, and the imperial menage a model to all their subjects. It had not always been so; and long before the time when Justin's unexpected accession had raised Justinian too, Theodora had been already famous, notorious even, as a comedienne, for her feats of impudicity in the capital's less distinguished places of amusement. But whatever her origins, and however true the stories that circulated about her, Theodora had long since broken from it all; and she was already living in decent obscure retirement when Justinian, heir-apparent, found her, loved her, and, despite the opposition of the emperor, his uncle, married her. Like him, she was now a Catholic, but her own religious inclinations, less theological than those of Justinian, drew her to monasticism; more especially, it is suggested, to monasticism as it displayed itself in feats of unusual austerity. And the most celebrated of these spiritual athletes were, often enough, not orthodox. From their ill-instructed and undisciplined ardour, heresy and rebellion against ecclesiastical authority had drawn in the recent past only too many champions; and as Theodora's association with the monks she preferred increased, so, too, did her inclination to support and encourage the recently defeated Monophysites.

Her great influence brought it about that, in 531, the sentences of banishment were revoked; and the thousands of exiles, bishops, priests, and above all monks, now made their way back, none the less fervid in their hatred of Chalcedon and its teaching for the pain they had had to suffer in its name. They came even -- five hundred and more of them -- to Constantinople itself. Theodora procured them a common house and a church, and, blessed by her patronage, their church speedily became a centre for the capital's fashionable devotees. Justinian, ever perplexed by a religious division which, for the first time in the empire's history, was making the imperial rule a foreign thing in the chief provinces of the State, set himself, along theological lines, to find a reconciling formula. Under his auspices conferences were held between Catholic bishops and Monophysite bishops and, yet once again, the complicated discussion took up its ancient round.

To all the Catholic explanations the heretics made the old reply, that Chalcedon had reversed Ephesus, that its supporters were Nestorians. At all costs, then, if the dissidents were to be argued back to conformity, Chalcedon must be cleared of this charge. To make clear, beyond all doubt, the opposition between what was approved at Chalcedon and what was condemned at Ephesus, a new formula expressive of the Catholic doctrine was therefore prepared. If it was Catholic doctrine, in accord with the faith of Chalcedon, to say, "One of the Trinity suffered in the Flesh", no Monophysite could truthfully assert that Chalcedon had canonised the heresy condemned at Ephesus; for no Nestorian would ever assent to such a proposition, any more than he would accept the term Theotokos. Then, again, this formula would show that Catholics and St. Cyril were of one mind on the great question, that Chalcedon had in no way condemned the saint in whose name the Monophysites justified their dissidence, for the formula was St. Cyril's very own, devised by him for the very purpose of exposing Nestorius and used in the twelfth of the celebrated propositions of 430. It was as good Cyrillian theology as the most Cyrillian Monophysite could wish for. If it were officially announced as orthodox Catholicism, what further delay could prevent the Monophysite from accepting Chalcedon?

It was not the first time that, in Justinian's own experience, this formula had been suggested. The Akoimetoi monks had sought approbation for it from the legates of Pope Hormisdas in 519. To the legates it had too novel a sound to be welcome, and they were inclined to frown down a suggestion which promised to open new controversies at the very moment when the old ones were about to heal. Justinian was of the same opinion. The monks seemed wanton disturbers of the peace. Nor was the pope, to whom the legates referred the matter, anxious to decide, and despite the endeavours, at Rome, of a deputation from the monks, the matter went no further until Justinian, converted now to the monks's view of the formula's usefulness, made its adoption a matter of State policy. The monks, while in the West, had enlisted the support of a group of African bishops, exiled to Sardinia by the Vandals, among whom was St. Fulgentius reputed in the West the greatest theologian of the time. When in 534, then, the question was, in much changed circumstances, put to the Apostolic See the pope, John II, after consultation, approved it, quoting in his declaration both St. Cyril and St. Leo in support of his approval and once more condemning Nestorius insulsus along with impius Eutyches.

While Justinian drew up schemes for reunion, evolving formularies of reconciliation which should clothe the decision of Chalcedon in a terminology which the Monophysites could accept, showing that on the points at issue St. Leo and St. Cyril were at one, Theodora was left to deal with the more congenial business of ecclesiastical personalities. In 535 the Patriarch of Alexandria died -- a Monophysite elected years before, in the time of the Emperor Anastasius, whom Justin I had found it wiser to leave undisturbed at the time of the great change over. His people were violently divided, though Monophysites all, between the rival systems of Severus and Julian of Halicarnassus. Whence a double -- Monophysite -- election. There was no thought of a Catholic candidate, but thanks to Theodora the government influence secured the election of Theodosius the candidate of the milder, Severian, school.

The noise of the riots amid which Theodosius was installed had not yet died down when the Patriarch of Constantinople died too. Once again it was Theodora who decided the election. The new patriarch, Anthimos, was one of her own confidants, a man of ascetic life, who, though Bishop of Trebizond, had for long lived at court, and who was known to be a concealed Monophysite. At this moment, ending the resistance of years, Severus himself consented to come to the capital to assist, from the Monophysite side, at Justinian's theological conferences. The first result of his presence was the explicitly declared conversion to the heresy of the capital's new patriarch. It seemed as though the old days of heretical domination were about to return. The two chief bishops of the East known as heretics, and supported with all the prestige of the empress, while the arch-heretic himself lived in her palace as chief adviser, and director-general of the new restoration ! What saved the situation for orthodoxy was the accidental presence of the pope, Agapitus I, in Constantinople, and his energetic action.

It was no ecclesiastical business which brought the pope to Constantinople. He came as the ambassador of the Gothic King in Italy, in a vain attempt to stave off the impending imperial re- conquest of the long-lost western provinces. But the recent changes in the personnel of the great churches, and the new doctrinal positions they implied could not but be the main subject to occupy Pope Agapitus. The new patriarch, whatever his beliefs, had been translated to his present high position from the see of Trebizond, and translations were contrary to canonical usage. Hence the pope's first hesitation to recognise Anthimos. The emperor pressing the point, the pope asked next for satisfaction in the matter of the patriarch's orthodoxy. Upon which the patriarch took the simplest of all possible ways out of the approaching difficulty and disappeared. A priest of irreproachable orthodoxy was found to fill the vacancy, and on March 13, 536, the pope himself gave him episcopal consecration.

For the Catholics of the imperial city it was already a great encouragement to see their heretical bishop deposed and a Catholic in his place. Heartened thereby, they now demanded the expulsion of the other prominent Monophysites, and especially of Severus. The pope gave his own strong support to the requests and, though he died, suddenly, before the defeat of Theodora and her proteges was complete, it was only a matter of four months before an imperial edict ordered the writings of Severus to be destroyed, and himself and his associates once more to be banished.

That Theodora's plans had been brought to nought was due, chiefly, to the vigorous action of Pope Agapitus and to the amount of popular support which that action found because it was the action of the pope. For the success of any future schemes to reconcile the Monophysites the empress must in some way enlist the pope's good will. What better way could be found than by securing the election as pope of one of her own? And Agapitus dead in the moment of his victory, what more suitable moment to install a pro- Monophysite successor than the present? No emperor had, as yet, dealt so imperially with the first of all the sees, but the new policy should be the more easily carried out since, for nearly half a century, there had been a succession of scandals and innovations in the episcopal elections at Rome.

In 498, for example, at the death of the conciliatory Anastasius II, there had been the scandal of a double election in which, while partisans of the deceased pope's milder policy in the matter of the schism of Acacius had elected their candidate, the more powerful majority of his critics had elected the more generally recognised Symmachus. The tumults of this unhappy beginning troubled the whole of this pope's six years' reign. They were only appeased by the election of Hormisdas (514) who thus appeared as the healer of a schism at Rome itself before he achieved the greater task of arranging the schism between East and West.

Hormisdas died in 523; his successor, John I, more tragically three years later. He had been despatched to Constantinople by the Gothic king, Theodoric, who ruled Italy since 493, to plead the cause of the king's Arian co-religionists in the capital. Their churches had recently been confiscated and the Arians forcibly converted. The mission failed, and on his return the pope was thrown into prison and died there. Theodoric speedily followed him into the other world but not before he had had time himself to give the Roman Church its new bishop, Felix IV ex iussu Theodorici regis says the Liber Pontificalis. Felix IV, pope through this startling innovation, proceeded to introduce into the system a second innovation more startling still, for, as the end of his life approached he named to his clergy as his successor one of his deacons, Boniface. Felix died on September 22, 530. Immediately there was trouble from those of the Roman clergy who held the late pope's nomination invalid. They were in the majority and they elected, at St. Peter's, the deacon Dioscoros, while at the Lateran the late pope's nominee was likewise consecrated and enthroned. Luckily for the peace of the city Dioscoros died within the month, and his supporters recognised his rival. Boniface II now proceeded to imitate the unhappy precedent set by Felix IV, but more solemnly. In a synod at St. Peter's he, too, named the one who was to succeed him, the deacon Vigilius. The clergy agreed; but some time later, under what circumstances we do not know, the pope came to regret what he had done and, just as publicly, he revoked it as an action beyond his powers. Boniface II reigned for even fewer years than his predecessor, and when he died (532) the troubles broke out once again. Once more there were rival candidates, faction spirit running high, bribes from the interested parties till the treasury was exhausted, and a vacancy, long for the time, of four months. With the new pope, John II, came a wholesome decree against the abuses which had marked the recent interregnum and three years' peace. To him in 535 succeeded that Pope Agapitus whose death in Constantinople has been recorded.

Given the history of the papal elections during the previous forty years, Theodora's plan of interference had then, nothing more than usually shocking about it. Nor was any choice of hers likely to be disregarded. Her choice fell upon that deacon Vigilius who, as the nominee of Boniface II, had so nearly become pope in 532. Since then he had risen to be the archdeacon of the Roman Church, the leading cleric after the pope himself. As such he had accompanied Agapitus on his diplomatic mission, and he was still in Constantinople when that pope died. The news of the pope's death travelled to Rome more quickly than Vigilius, and he returned home to find the successor of Agapitus elected, consecrated, and in function, Silverius. Vigilius, with the assistance of the imperial officials, set himself to oust the pope as the necessary preliminary to his own election. The critical situation of public affairs soon gave him his opportunity.

The war of restoration was by this time in full swing, and for five years now the armies of Justinian had been marching from one victory to another in the desperate endeavour to win back for the imperial government the provinces of the West, lost to it in the disastrous fifth century. The Vandal kings had been dispossessed in Africa, and Sicily; the Goths driven from their hold on Southern Italy. Rome itself had become once more a " Roman " city when, at the moment of Vigilius' return from Constantinople, the Goths turned to besiege in Rome the victorious imperial army and its general Belisarius. Pope Silverius, summoned to an interview with the general, was suddenly accused of treasonable correspondence with the Goths. He was immediately stripped of the insignia of his office and, clad in a monk's habit, secretly shipped from Rome that same night. To the Romans nothing more was announced than that the pope had embraced the monastic life and that the see was therefore vacant.

The clergy were assembled to elect his successor. Belisarius presided, and, despite considerable opposition, Vigilius was elected. He had been privy to the forgeries that cost Silverius his place, and he had been the pope's sole companion in the momentous interview with Belisarius. Now, at last, he was pope himself -- at any rate pope in possession. The unfortunate Silverius did, it is true, thanks to the bishop appointed to guard him, succeed in lodging an appeal against his violent deposition. Justinian ordered his return to Italy and an enquiry into the whole affair. But Belisarius was still in charge, and through his wife, who dominated him, the empress maintained her protege. Silverius was once more condemned, and banished to the little island of Palmaria off the Neapolitan coast, and there soon afterwards he died of hunger. [59]

For the next six years all the religious troubles slumbered while Justinian, Theodora, and in Italy Vigilius, found all their energies absorbed by the terrible Gothic war. It was in a province far removed from the seat of that war, Palestine, that the disputes re-awakened. And the question around which they developed was not Monophysitism but the more ancient matter of the orthodoxy of certain theories attributed to Origen. Among the monks of certain Palestinian monasteries there had, for some time, been a revival of interest in these theories, in the old heresy of the preexistence of souls and a quasi-pantheistic teaching about the last end of man. The old theories daily found new disciples, and the "new theology" found, of course, a host of zealous opponents. Whence through the early part of Justinian's reign (530-540) an ever-increasing disorder in Palestine which was by no means confined to the peaceful solitudes of the monasteries concerned. When in 541 a great synod met at Gaza to enquire into certain serious disorders in the local churches and to try the chief person accused, the Patriarch of Alexandria, it was inevitable that the bishops and dignitaries present should discuss the new trouble and plan a common course of action. One of these dignitaries was the permanent ambassador (apocrisiarius) of the Roman See at Constantinople, the deacon Pelagius, an intimate friend and confidante of Vigilius. Pelagius did all his chance allowed to strengthen the abbots in their opposition to the Origenists, and he worked in the same sense upon the mind of Justinian. He was so successful that, in 543, there appeared an imperial edict condemning the theories, and promulgating a new profession of faith in which they were repudiated. This all bishops and heads of monasteries were now obliged to sign.

Justinian was not, of course, unaware of the trouble until the moment when Pelagius intervened. More than one deputation from the rival disputants had already appeared in the capital. One of these deputies, the Origenist Theodore Askidas, had found in his temporary mission the beginning of a new career. He was named bishop of the important see of Caesarea in Cappadocia, and, his learning gaining him a place in Justinian's confidence, he contrived to live on at court after his consecration. But now, great as the favour he enjoyed, he saw the emperor influenced against the Origenist theories, and his own prestige somewhat lowered through the action of Pelagius. To keep his place he signed the formula: and set himself to prepare a counter-stroke which would dislodge Pelagius.

It was never difficult to interest the theologically-minded emperor in religious matters, and where these touched a question of civil peace less difficult still; where they concerned the reconciliation of the Monophysites least difficult of all. The plan which Askidas now proposed was just such another as Zeno and Anastasius had attempted. But it was more subtle, in this, that it did not suggest even a tacit repudiation of Chalcedon, but merely the condemnation of three allies and friends of Nestorius, two of whom Chalcedon had re-instated. It would be yet another proof to the Monophysites that Catholics were not Nestorians if Catholics condemned these old opponents of St. Cyril, proof again that Chalcedon had not undone what Ephesus had settled. The proposed condemnations were of Theodore of Mopsuestia -- the master of Nestorius -- and all his writings; of those writings of Theodoret of Cyrrhus which had been directed against St. Cyril during the controversy about Nestorius; and of the letter which Ibas, Bishop of Edessa, wrote to a Persian bishop, Maris, telling, from his point of view, the story of the Council of Ephesus. These three items of the proposed condemnations are the Three Chapters which have given their name to the subsequent controversy. It was to drag on for a good eighteen years and more, to involve the most curious of all the general councils, and finally to issue in a miserable schism that divided Italy for a generation.

The three persons concerned had been dead now nearly a century, Theodore for longer; but then Origen had been dead longer still, and yet condemned only this very year. Askidas in his turn prevailed and in 544 the edict appeared, to the dismay in particular of the Apocrisiarius. Pelagius refused to sign it, and upon his refusal the Patriarchs of Constantinople, of Alexandria, and of Antioch would only sign conditionally, the condition being that the pope, too, should sign. Here truly was a difficulty. Chalcedon, more than most, had been the pope's council, and Chalcedon had reinstated both Theodoret and Ibas in their sees upon their express repudiation of Nestorianism. It had then, for the ordinary man, cleared them of any charge of heresy. More, the letter of Ibas, now imperially condemned, had been read at Chalcedon and the Roman legates there had declared that "his letter having been read we recognised him to be orthodox. " Were the pope now to condemn Theodoret at least and Ibas, for heresies they had renounced or heretical expressions which they had explained satisfactorily, it might easily seem, given the circumstances of the condemnation, that repudiating those whom Chalcedon had gone out of its way to protect he was inaugurating a policy that would end in the repudiation of the council itself. All eyes then turned to the pope. All would depend on his action - - and the pope with whom lay decision, in this tricky attempt to conciliate the Monophysites, was the creature of the pro- Monophysite Theodora. Truly her hour had come at last, as the emperor's commands went westwards to Vigilius; and, as Askidas saw the dilemma preparing for the Roman author of his own recent trouble, he, also, may have felt a like satisfaction.

Vigilius hesitated. For a time the pre-occupations of the Gothic War gave him an excuse for temporising; Totila, the Gothic king, had now taken the offensive and was preparing to besiege Rome yet once again. But finally, as the pope celebrated the feast of St. Cecilia (November 22, 545), he was carried off from the very church by Theodora's orders and shipped to Sicily and thence, after a stay of some months, to Constantinople, where he arrived in the January of 547. During those months in Sicily the pope had learnt of the violent opposition to the emperor's edict which was gradually showing itself throughout the West. He himself adopted the same attitude, and when the emperor refused to withdraw the edict Vigilius broke off relations with the unlucky Patriarch of Constantinople who had led the way in signing it. Little by little, however, the explanations of the court theologians had their effect. By the summer of 547 the pope was once more in communion with the patriarch, and had signed a private condemnation of the Three Chapters. This, of course, was insufficient for Justinian's purpose, and the pope pleading the dignity of his see against the attempts to wring from him a public declaration, he was allowed to assemble at Constantinople a council of bishops to give his new condemnation of the Three Chapters an appearance at least of freedom. At the council, alas, the eloquence of a young Latin bishop defending Ibas was so effective that Vigilius broke up the assembly. Private interviews between the various bishops and the emperor brought them all to a striking unanimity, however, and one by one they sent in to the pope their written opinions in favour of the condemnation. Finally, on Holy Saturday, 548, Vigilius issued his public condemnation, the so-called Iudicatum. Its text has perished, but we know that, in condemning the Three Chapters, it made such reservations to safeguard the essential teaching of Chalcedon that, so far as concerned the Monophysite reunion, it might just as well never have been issued.

However, issued it was and, despite its reservations, promptly misconstrued in the West, raising storms of condemnation wherever it was known. The whole of the West -- what West remained after the devastations of war -- deserted the pope. A council in Africa excommunicated him as the betrayer of the faith of Chalcedon, and in Rome his own deacons led the opposition and gave the lead in the furious war of pamphleteering which now broke out.

The West, evidently, did not understand. Had not Vigilius himself needed to come to Constantinople to be educated in the complex question? How natural that Latin bishops, too much occupied for a century in saving the elements of civilisation to be worried with such subtleties as those presented by the leisurely Monophysite East, should also fail to understand. A general council at Constantinople might smooth away all the misunderstanding. Meanwhile both the edict of 544 and the ludicatum would be withdrawn. So it was arranged between pope and emperor. Both pledged themselves to silence on the question until the council met; and Vigilius, privately, bound himself by oath to Justinian that he would at the council do his utmost to bring about the desired condemnation.

This was in the August of 550. The council did not meet for nearly three years more. The interval was filled with crises. First of all the emperor broke his pledge of silence and, in 551, urged by Askidas, issued a new edict condemning the Three Chapters. The pope protested energetically and excommunicated Askidas, and then, Justinian planning his arrest, he fled for safety to the church of St. Peter. Thither a few days later Justinian sent troops to effect the arrest; at their heels followed the mob of the city. The doors were forced, soldiers and mob poured in. The clerics who endeavoured to protect the pope were dragged out and the soldiery then laid hands on Vigilius himself. He clung desperately to the columns of the altar, until, as the struggle heightened, these began to give way, and to save themselves from injury the soldiers released him. So far the mob had watched, scandalised, at the outrage on the old man who, Latin though he was, was yet the chief bishop of their religion. Now, as the altar and its columns fell in a roar of dust, they turned on the troops who fled for their lives. That night the pope -- marvellous feat for an ancient of eighty years -- escaped over the roofs of the city to a waiting boat and crossed the Bosphorus. His new refuge was Chalcedon, and, of all places, the basilica where, just a hundred years before, the famous council had sat around whose decision still raged these violent animosities. From his retreat he issued a well-written encyclical describing the recent events, denouncing the forgeries put into circulation in his name, and excommunicating definitely Askidas and his associates.

Justinian had overshot his mark and he knew it. The excommunicated bishops were sent across the straits to make their submission. Processions of monks and influential citizens serenaded the pope with prayers that he would return. A kind of peace was patched up, the edict of 551 was withdrawn, Vigilius gave way and preparations for the council were resumed. They consisted chiefly, on the emperor's part, in eliminating from the bishops who were to come from the West all those who had given signs of opposition to his policy. As the council drew nearer and nearer the pope's perplexity increased. It was increasingly evident that, at this council which was to educate the western bishops and guarantee the condemnation against all chance of misunderstanding, the West would have scarcely any representatives at all. Vigilius would have preferred an Italian city for its meeting place. The emperor insisted on the capital, and as the bishops arrived, all from the emperor's own Greek East, the pope's anxieties grew. One day he seemed willing to take part in its proceedings, and then he would refuse even to speak of the matter. In the end he made it known that although he would not interfere with the Council he would take no part in its deliberations. His decision would be given independently. And so there opened, on May 5, 553, in the new Sancta Sophia, the strangest of all the general councils.

The number of bishops present varied. At the first session there were a hundred and fifty. At the last, a hundred and sixty-four. Save for the picked few from Africa, and a handful of Italians, all were Greeks. The first session was taken up with the solemn reading of the documents to he condemned. In the discussion which followed, the only difficulty before the Fathers was to choose sufficiently vigorous epithets to express their abhorrence. Vigilius meanwhile, with the assistance of Pelagius, was hard at work on his own decision. On May 14 it was ready for the emperor- the Constitutum. It contained a detailed condemnation of the errors of Theodore of Mopsuestia, but his person the pope did not condemn, alleging the traditional ecclesiastical usage that left heretics once dead to whatever judgment then befell them. The writings of Ibas and Theodoret, since they were approved at Chalcedon, could not now be condemned without such condemnation involving that Council.

Justinian refused to receive the Constitutum -- Vigilius"having already condemned the Three Chapters and having sworn to maintain the condemnation. any more recent retractation on his part was naturally not welcome. The Constitutum then was not presented to the Council. Instead, at its seventh session, Justinian laid before it all the documents in which Vigilius had condemned the Three Chapters, and a decree ordering the pope's excommunication for the way in which, ever since, he had shifted and changed, and for his refusal to attend the council. The Fathers obediently approved. One week later the council came to an end (June 2, 553) with a long final condemnation of " the wicked Theodore and his wicked writings, " his supporters, defenders, and apologists. Likewise, "if anyone defends the wicked writings of Theodoret against the first Holy Council of Ephesus, against St. Cyril and his twelve anathemata, and all the things he wrote on behalf of the wretched Theodore and the wretched Nestorius. . . and does not anathematize these things. . . " he is henceforward himself anathema. Still more definitely, " if anyone defends the letter which Ibas is said to have written to the heretic Maris the Persian. . . and does not anathematize it and all its defenders, and likewise all those who say it is right or right in part, and those. . . who presume to defend, in the name of the Holy Fathers or of the Holy Council of Chalcedon the letter or the impiety it contains. . . let him be anathema. "

The good work done, the bishops dispersed. There still remained Vigilius. Vigilius unconvinced, the council's work was incomplete. Whence a new siege of the unhappy pope. It was eight months before the emperor won him over. But in the end he yielded completely and on February 26, 554, in a second Constitutum, solemnly recognised the condemnation. Then, at last, the pope was allowed to return to his see, from which he had been absent now nine years. He was, however, destined never again to see it, for he had only travelled as far as Syracuse when death claimed him, June 7, 555. He was fortunate in his death in this, at least, that it spared him the inevitable trouble which awaited at Rome whoever had had hand or part in the alleged condemnation of Chalcedon.

Justinian determined that Pelagius should be the new pope. He was undoubtedly the ablest of all the Roman clerics, and for a good fifteen years now had been the pope's chief adviser. To pass over such ability and such experience would, in the then state of Italy, have been foolish in the extreme. Who could do more as pope for the new imperial re-organisation of the West, and especially for the reconstruction of Italy wasted by twenty-five years of savage war? Who, indeed, could do as much? There was this difficulty to overcome that Pelagius had been the very soul of the dead pope's resistance to the council. It was with his strength that Vigilius had armed himself in the conflict that followed the withdrawal of the ludicatum, and the Constitutum of 553 had been his very handiwork. The council over, Pelagius found himself separated from the pope -- as, moreover, were all the rest of the pope's advisers -- and in a monastic prison. From that prison nevertheless he had contrived to conduct a violent literary campaign against the council's condemnations, and the news that Vigilius had submitted drove him to write only the more violently. Vigilius, he explained, to the scandalised uncomprehending West, was old, senile, isolated from his advisers, the victim yet again of the imperial tyranny. That the leader of such an opposition would retract while the air around was still dry with the bitter violence of his polemic might seem the least likely finale of all. Yet so it happened. Under circumstances of argument or blandishment of which we know nothing, Pelagius withdrew his opposition and accepted the council's condemnation. Then, as the emperor's nominee, he set out for Rome to be there consecrated as its bishop.

A more unwelcome successor to Vigilius could hardly have been found, and, popularly considered to have surrendered his opinions as the price of his appointment, the new pope was more or less universally boycotted. In all Italy there could not be found more than two bishops to officiate at his consecration. A priest had to supply for the third. There was no attempt to elect another pope in opposition to him, but simply a cold sullen hostility. Pelagius was left to make the first move. He did it in the profession of Faith made on the day he was consecrated. He announced his faith to be the faith of Chalcedon, of St. Leo, and of all St. Leo's successors down to the last pope but two, Agapitus. All those whom they had held to be orthodox he, too, held as such, and especially did he hold to be orthodox. . . Theodoret and Ibas. In the whole statement there is not a reference to the recent council, nor to Vigilius, nor to the transactions between himself and the emperor which had resulted in his nomination.

For all its careful omissions the statement, none the less, availed little to help Pelagius. Nowhere did he ask the western bishops to acknowledge the council, nor to condemn what the council had condemned. The utmost of his demands was recognition of his own election, acknowledgement that he was the lawful pope. In his own metropolitan district he had scarcely any difficulty in this. But "Lombardy" and "Venetia", to speak more accurately the bishops of the great sees of Milan and Aquileia with their suffragans, would not enter into communion with him. Pelagius was helpless, for the imperial officials were little disposed to lend the troops for which he clamoured, and when the inevitable pamphleteering began now in Italy, he met with scanty success indeed, refuting as pope the position he had maintained so vigorously as a deacon. From Gaul there came a request that he should satisfy the bishops as to his orthodoxy. The declaration he sent, again made no mention of all the recent happenings that were the source of the anxiety, and as his classic writings against the council were now beginning to pass from one bishop to another in the West also, Pelagius wrote a final appeal for peace and unity. "Why all this recrimination? When I defended the Three Chapters was I not in accord with the majority of the bishops? I have, it is true, changed my opinion, but changed it along with the same majority. Did not St. Peter yield to the brotherly correction of St. Paul? Did not St. Augustine, too, write his Retractations? I was mistaken I allow. But then I was only a deacon and it was my duty to follow the bishops. Now the bishops have decided. Africa, Illyricum, the East, with its thousands of bishops, have condemned the Three Chapters. It would be extremely foolish to ignore such high authority and to follow in preference the guidance of these propagators of forgeries. "

Scholars of a later age, studying at their leisure the detail of these ancient dissensions, can perhaps distinguish easily between Chalcedon re-instating Theodoret and Ibas in their sees upon their giving guarantees of their orthodoxy at that moment, and the Council of 553, a hundred years later, deciding the wholly different question as to the orthodoxy of their writings at the time when, twenty years before Chalcedon, they were admittedly among the chief supporters of Nestorius. Chalcedon's approval, and the condemnation of 553, though affecting the same personages, were concerned with realities wholly distinct. [60] Between the two councils there is no contradiction. But the Latin bishops, hot and angered with ten years of controversy, always impatient of the theoretical subtleties in which their eastern brothers were so much at home, were in no mood to listen to such distinctions at the time. Hence, on the part of some, a refusal to acknowledge Pelagius, and a schism which lingered for another century, and on the part of others a suspicion of Pelagius which lasted as long as he lived.

Better than any other incident of Justinian's long reign does the story of the Council of 553 illustrate his conception of the emperor's role in religious matters. But it was no isolated incident, and to realise its full importance we must see it against the background of the Christian State as, under Justinian, this was conceived and ordered. Constantine's disestablishment of Paganism, the recognition by Theodosius of the Catholic Church as the State's religion, now receive further development. The emperor now lays claim to an initiative in Church policy, patriarchs and bishops are his lieutenants in religious affairs as his generals are for the army, his silentiaries for the civil administration.

Justinian's chief title to fame is his work of legal reform, the careful collection of his predecessors' laws, their "codification" and the elaborate official provision for the study of Law. It is a work that still influences the everyday life of the world. Like all the great emperor's undertakings, this, too, bears the impress of his piety and of his concern to be faithful to conscience in the high state to which God has called him. " Nothing, " he declared in the collection of his own laws, "should escape the prince to whom God has confided the care of all mankind, " and he legislated for churchmen and the Church as instinctively and as carefully as he legislated for everyone else in his world state. Church and State were but two aspects of the one reality, that Roman Empire conterminous with civilisation, over which Justinian, the divine vice-regent, presided. The system had its advantages. It furnished, perhaps prematurely, what had hitherto not yet developed in the Church itself, a system of continuous day to day control by which the religious life of the whole Church was centralised, with the minimum of local departure from an enacted common practice. Nor was the system either bred of servility in ecclesiastics or the inevitable begetter of such servility. For all the emperor's unrelaxing control there were never lacking Patriarchs of Constantinople -- to say nothing of popes -- who resisted him steadfastly when principles called for resistance. Nevertheless the system was extraneous to the Church. It did not spring from the Church's life and it could not live by what gave life to the Church.

Between the system -- even supposing the emperor a Catholic and friendly -- and the life it aspired to control there must inevitably be friction. The Church would either escape from the system or die under its oppression. History was to show the Church escaping from it as the empire rapidly ceased to be conterminous with the Church's world, while in what survived of the Empire the system remained, grew to perfection, and, under it, the Church disappeared.

The Roman Emperor, then, was now very definitely a Catholic, and an imperial policy in religious matters a duty of conscience for him. Pagans for example, were henceforward excluded from civil office; they lost all power of inheriting. Their last intellectual centre was destroyed when, in 529, Justinian closed the schools of Athens, and in the next twenty years an official mission to convert the Pagans was organised. Occasionally there is a record of executions under the law, and, more often, of mob violence lynching those known to be Pagans. In 546 an edict commanding Pagans to be baptized completed the code. The penalty for refusal was loss of goods and exile, whence, inevitably, a number of nominal conversions and, thereafter, clandestine reunions of these crypto-pagans, with floggings and executions for the participants when they were discovered. To the Jews and to the Samaritans Justinian was equally hostile. Synagogues were forbidden, the Jews lost all right of inheriting, the right to bring suits against a Christian or to own Christian slaves. A succession of bloody revolts, bloodily suppressed, brought the Samaritans almost to extinction and under Phocas (609) thousands of them were baptized by force. Heretics were pursued no less violently, Montanists, for example -- still after four hundred years awaiting at Pepusa the second coming -- Novatians, Marcionites, Macedonians and, once Theodoric's power was ended, Arians too. To convert the Pagans outside the empire missions were organised, the State taking the initiative and the emperor, often enough, standing sponsor for the Pagan kings and chiefs who were baptized. These missions were not of course without their political importance. The State's attachment to religion is shown yet again in the insistence on the religious character of, for example, the great war with Persia. For the Roman Emperor it was, in part, a crusade against the Sun Worshippers, and the Persian kings were no less clear in their antagonism to Christianity. So Chosroes II, in 616, replied to the ambassadors of Heraclius petitioning for peace, "I will spare the Romans when they abjure their crucified criminal and worship the Sun. "

The newly-enthroned Justin I, through whom in 519 Rome regained the obedience of the Churches in the East, was, it should be borne in mind, the heir to a line of highly successful emperorpopes. For a good forty years before him the emperor's word had been law in matters of religion all through the empire. When, sixteen years after the reconciliation of 519, Justinian's generals conquered the Vandals in Africa and the Ostrogoths in Italy, what, in theory, was the restoration of imperial rule in those provinces, was, in reality, the annexation of Italy and Africa to Byzantium. The new regime was no restoration of what had obtained before 476, but the introduction into the West of the uses -- Byzantine by now -- of the mid-sixth century East. The papacy, for example, had been independent of the old empire of the West in the days of Gratian and St. Ambrose, of St. Leo and Valentinian III, while in the East, during these last hundred and fifty years (381-536), Caesar had been supreme, and the four eastern patriarchs little better than his officers in spirituals. Italy now annexed to Byzantium, the pope came into the imperial system as a fifth, and senior, patriarch, to enter, despite protestations and reminders, on a new role of de facto subordination. There was of course no denial of Rome's primacy in the universal church, nor of its traditional prerogatives. These were indeed fully and explicitly acknowledged. The new Code described the pope as "chief of all the holy priests of God", and Justinian's own laws spoke of Rome as "the source of all priesthood, " and decreed that " the most holy pope of Old Rome shall be the first of priests. " But henceforward the emperors rudely assume that the primacy is as much at their disposal as the political loyalty of those to whom it is entrusted. Whence, inevitably, two hundred years of recurrent friction until the popes are set free.

Rome, then, is now to be broken in, as Constantinople has already been broken in. It is now that the bishop of the imperial city comes fully to the heights of his place in the Church. When, two hundred years before, Constantine transformed Byzantium into Constantinople its bishop was a mere suffragan of the Metropolitan of Heraclea. The role of the bishop in the Arian troubles (330- 381) gave the see a new importance. The Councils of Constantinople (381) and Chalcedon (451) recognised that importance officially, and, the Monophysites having by the time of Justinian's accession destroyed the Catholicism of Egypt and the East, Constantinople enjoyed, henceforward undisturbed, a very real primacy east of the Adriatic. Alexandria and Antioch had fallen below the capital in jurisdiction as well as in honour, and it was the Patriarch of Constantinople who now consecrated the bishops of these more ancient, apostolic sees. As the sixth century developed, Alexandria and Antioch lost steadily in real importance, Catholics were few, Monophysites many in the territories subject to them; and so while Constantinople kept all the fullness of Catholicity in the provinces immediately subject to her -- thirty metropolitans and four hundred and fifty bishops in all -- the Patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria shrank to mere titularies resident at the court, without flocks, without clergy, without suffragans. Legend, finally, forged for the see of the capital a pedigree of apostolicity. The first Bishop of Constantinople, it was now discovered, was St. Andrew.

The Byzantine bishop is a man of many occupations. He has a place and duties, because a bishop, in the hierarchy of the civil administration. He is already responsible for the care of vast church properties, responsible for the numerous monasteries, for the hospitals and charitable institutions. He is the ordinary judge in all suits to which clerics, monks, and nuns are parties, and in all suits where both parties are willing to take him as judge. Hence a whole legislation de vita episcopali in Justinian's Code and the Novellae. Qualifications for elegibility are minutely laid down, age, condition and character. The bishops are still elected, but only the better class are allowed a say in the proceedings, and these have only the right to present a list of three names. It is for the metropolitan, or the patriarch, thence to choose the new bishop. In practice it is the emperor who chooses, for the imperial candidate is never rejected. Rome is a notable exception to this "reform. " The election of the popes remains free, but it is subject to the emperor's ratification, and it is a testimony to the prestige of Eastern Catholicism in the sixth and seventh centuries that for seventy-five years almost every one of the popes was Greek or Syrian.

The civil law requires bishops to live in their dioceses, it orders an annual provincial synod, and it forbids bishops to come to court unless they have, in writing, the permission of their superior -- the bishop of his metropolitan, the metropolitan of his patriarch. Each patriarch is represented at the court by a permanent ambassador, the Apocrisiarius. In practice there is, of course, always a crowd of bishops at court, a more or less permanent synod whose personnel is continually changing. This, the so-called synodus endemousa, was an important, extra- constitutional, engine of the politico-ecclesiastical government.

As the law regulated the life and conduct of the bishops, so it provided for the clergy, and for the monks who flourished in the sixth century as never before. It was perhaps the golden age of monasticism in the Eastern Church. Since the reforms of St. Basil monasticism had grown to be an immense power in the empire's religious life, perhaps the greatest force of all. Whoever had the monks on his side had the people too. Hence the close alliance between the ecclesiastical princes of Constantinople or Alexandria and the heads of the vast religious congregations. Hence, too, the repeated occasions where the monks have been the principal means of the defeat of Catholicism. They played a great part in the scandal of the Latrocinium, and ever since Chalcedon their adherence to the patriarch there condemned, and to his successors, had been the very life of the Monophysite party. But although so many of the monks had gone over to heresy, they accepted the decrees of Chalcedon in sufficient numbers for monasticism to continue to be the main driving force in the religious life of the Catholics too. Monasteries abounded. In 536 there were no fewer than 108 in Constantinople and its suburbs and, apart from the army of Cenobites, the solitaries were still numerous. Each monastery was autonomous. Nowhere, except in the convents descended from the foundations of St. Pakhomius, is there trace of a religious order in the later western sense. All monasteries were, moreover, since Chalcedon, subject to the diocesan bishop. Exceptionally -- by the imperial favour -- they are directly subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople. The law fixes the duration of the novitiate at three years, and the Cenobite is forbidden to leave the monastery for which he is professed, whether it be to join another community or to become a wandering monk. With the Mohammedan conquests of Egypt and Syria, in the early seventh century, the number of solitaries diminished notably, and henceforward the hermit was very much the exception. The rule that the monk or nun shall never leave the enclosure of the monastery became ever more strict, and the bishops of the great synod of 692 insisted, too, that the monk should be decently clothed, and that the scandal of the bedraggled beggar monks of the cities should cease.

One abuse of monasticism is familiar to every student of the political history of these times. The monasteries offer a convenient solution for the victorious usurper embarrassed by the survival of his predecessor. More than one emperor -- to say nothing of lesser dignitaries -- escapes death by taking the monastic habit, as others are despoiled of their chance of a return to power by being forcibly ordained and consecrated. The monks again were the popular preachers and spiritual directors, and from their ranks came most of the great bishops and the ecclesiastical writers.

BYZANTINE CATHOLICISM. 565-711

Justinian died, an old man of eighty-two, in 565. In the half century or so during which he had ruled the Roman world he had been amazingly successful in his ambition to restore the imperial authority in the lost provinces of the West. Rome, Ravenna, Carthage were once more the seats of Roman government. Italy, Dalmatia, Africa, the islands of the Mediterranean, the southern half of Pannonia, the south of Spain had been recovered. If much remained to be won, much had been won already.

But the cost had been too great. It had exhausted the resources of the treasury and it had exhausted the emperor himself. Nor was the reconquest in any sense final. Huns, Slavs and Avars continued to raid the recovered Illyricum. Thessalonica, and the capital itself, more than once were threatened, and the hordes only bought off by the pledge of an annual pension. To Italy, in 568, there came the last, and worst, of her plagues -- the Lombards, and by the end of the century they had wrested from the imperial officials three fourths of the peninsula. On the eastern frontier the war with Persia was almost a habit of life. In all Justinian's long reign there were scarcely ten years of peace, and less than ten in the thirty years which followed his death. To carry through successfully this war, which must be waged simultaneously on every frontier, and to maintain the complex administration of the empire was more than ever an impossible task for the one man with whom, as the superhuman autocrat, all initiative traditionally lay. It is little wonder that after eight years of the strain Justinian's successor, Justin II, lost his reason. Nor that, within half a century of the great emperor's death, with Constantinople beset simultaneously by Avars and Persians, the empire's last hour seemed at hand. It was a general from Africa, Heraclius, who staved off the end and after years of patient and laborious effort -- reconstructing the administration, restoring the finances, rebuilding the army -- finally dictated peace to the Persians in their own capital (628).

In those sixty years of crisis and calamity which separate that victory of Heraclius from the death of Justinian (565-628), the Monophysites are still one of the main problems of domestic policy. More than ever is it important that Egypt and Syria shall remain loyal, now that the empire is faced with this renaissance of Persia. And loyal they can never be so long as between them and the emperor there lie those decisions of Chalcedon which to the East register a Greek imperialist victory over Syrian and Egyptian. Whence, after a hundred and fifty years, it is still the great aim of the imperial policy to find a reconciling formula which, without repudiating the definition of faith of 451, shall convince the Monophysites that St. Leo is there in agreement with St. Cyril, and that the supporters of the great council are not Nestorians. Whence also, with each scheme for reunion, new trouble between the emperor and the Catholics, and, since one such scheme is based on a new theological theory which conflicts with the tradition of faith, very serious trouble with the Roman See.

Justinian's immediate successor, Justin II, was friendly to Monophysitism and so, too, was his wife, a niece of the old empress, Theodora. The exiled bishops were recalled, the old business of conferences and discussions was resumed. Once more it was the emperor who offered concessions, and this time he offered everything short of an implicit repudiation of Chalcedon. The Monophysites, themselves rent by now into hostile factions, could not agree. Nor, even if the bishops had been able and willing to accept, would their monastic allies have supported them. The fanaticism of the Monophysite monks was proof against all the imperial diplomacy and at last, after six years of fruitless negotiations, the emperor returned to the policy of coercion. Two years later and the policy changed again. Justin II was now out of his mind (574) and the new ruler, Tiberius II, brought the persecution to an end. The Monophysites took advantage of the truce to elect a new Patriarch of Alexandria -- there had been none for ten years -- and the new patriarch, in preparation for future emergencies, consecrated, at once and in the one ceremony, seventy new bishops (576).

For the remainder of the century the persecution was intermittent, and although the Monophysites fought continuously among themselves -- divided, united, then divided yet more bitterly -- they all of them held firmly to their refusal to accept Chalcedon, and with every year the chances of reunion grew fainter. With the new century came the murder of the Emperor Maurice (582-602) and the rule of the worthless Phocas (602-610). It was now that the Persian offensive began under the great king Chosroes II (590- 628). Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor were overrun. Antioch fell in 611, Damascus in 613, Jerusalem -- after a siege where 57,000 were killed -- in 614, Alexandria in 617. The Monophysites did not indeed, play the traitor. But they were anti-imperialistic, and the Catholics, identified by the invaders as the party of the emperor, were dispossessed to the profit of the Monophysites. By 620 Chalcedon had not an adherent in the whole of the eastern provinces which had fallen to the Persians. Also, an unlooked-for coincidence, the Monophysites now patched up their own quarrels, the Copts of Egypt and the Jacobites of Syria combining. When, ten years later (629), Heraclius was once more master of Egypt and the East, he was faced immediately with the necessity of reuniting these provinces, still lost to him by the more fundamental division of religion, provinces where a century or more of religious persecution had bred a tradition of hatred for Constantinople, for its emperor as for its patriarch.

Along with the political restoration Heraclius, then, had no choice but to attempt something in the way of religious restoration too, nor would coercion serve any longer.

Once more the theological subtlety of a Patriarch of Constantinople came to his assistance. He devised a new exposition of the eternal problem. It had the merit that, from the new point of view, it involved neither St. Leo nor St. Cyril, nor did it mention Chalcedon. The Monophysites shrank from contact with the Catholics because these, so they alleged, divided Christ as Nestorius had done. The Patriarch of Constantinople, Sergius, offered as new proof that Catholics were just as anti-Nestorian (and therefore in the Monophysite sense as orthodox) as the Monophysites themselves, their belief that in Our Lord there is only one source of action (energeia). To his own Catholic people this could be explained as in conformity with Chalcedon, since action is of persons and therefore the singleness of the source of action in Jesus Christ derived from the single Person -- the Logos-active in the two natures. Ephesus, defining the singleness of Person, Chalcedon defining the duality of nature, and the Monophysites protesting against any division of Christ, were, then, all three here conciliated. On this basis, which satisfied everyone, reunion could now go forward. As with the faculty of action so was it with other faculties, for example, the faculty of choice, the will. Catholics, it was explained again to the Monophysite critic, did not consider Christ to be two beings mysteriously united, for they believed that in Christ there was but one will. The application of the new theory to the question of the will gave it its most popular development, and also the name - - Monothelism -- by which the whole movement is, somewhat loosely, known.

It was while the East still lay in the hands of the Persians that Sergius elaborated his theory, and it was only after the reconquest that it passed into politics. By then Heraclius had been won over to it, and the Monophysite, Cyrus of Phasis, recently (631) elected to fill the long vacant (Catholic) see of Alexandria (617-633), adopted it as an instrument of negotiation with the Monophysites. The conferences, for once, ended in agreement, and in 633 an Act of Union was signed at Alexandria which ended, after a hundred and eighty years, the feuds and divisions of the Christian East. The discovery of their common agreement in Monothelism had revealed to Chalcedonian and anti- Chalcedonian alike the unimportance of the details which had kept them too long apart. But unfortunately if, for the Monophysite, the new theory was simply an extension of what he had always professed, the Catholic's acceptance of it was not merely a surrender of the point, so long debated, that, whoever refused to acknowledge Chalcedon was out of accord with the Tradition, but it involved recognition of yet another heresy. The theory was simply a radical form of Monophysitism in another guise. And there were Catholics, more acute mentally than Sergius, or perhaps less preoccupied with the hopes of political peace which the theory presented, who saw this from the beginning and who urged their objections. One such critic was the monk Sophronius.

Sophronius was one of the most learned men of the century, and he had an equally wide reputation for holiness of life. He had travelled much, was well known through the East, in Rome, too, which he had visited, and especially well known in Alexandria where he had lived for many years. He was now eighty years of age, but still vigorous in mind as in body and he knew the detail of the long controversy with the Monophysites as perhaps no one else knew it. He was in Alexandria when the Union of 633 was signed, and immediately he set himself to point out its implications to those responsible. Cyrus refused to be convinced, and took shelter behind the authority of Constantinople, whereupon the ancient Sophronius set out for the capital. There, too, he found little but polite obstruction, Sergius giving him no more than an explanation in writing of the reason for his action. Palestine, where Monophysites were fewer, and where the political preoccupations of Alexandria and Constantinople did not exist, was the monk's next objective, and thither, with Sergius' letter, Sophronius then went. He arrived to find the see of Jerusalem vacant. He was himself elected Patriarch.

This sudden and surprising election changed immediately the nonchalance of Sergius towards his critic -- and towards a more important personage still, the pope. So far, the whole business of the reunion, with its tacit abandonment of Chalcedon, had been carried through without any reference to Rome. Now, obviously, Rome would hear it all from this new Athanasius unexpectedly become Patriarch of Jerusalem. Sergius determined to forestall him. He wrote to Rome himself, and with his letter he sent the explanations he had given to Sophronius. In his letter he gave his own account of the reunion, and of his discussion with Sophronius, and he ended by the suggestion that further discussion as to whether there were one or two "energies" was impolitic; silence was now the wisest course.

The reply of the pope, Honorius I (625-638), is curiously interesting, because he fails utterly to grasp the point of the patriarch's letter. Sergius had before him the Monophysite contention that since Catholics repudiated the Alexandrian phrase "union in one nature, " they must believe that in Christ there are two beings united by a moral union. To disprove this he urges that Catholic belief accords to Christ Our Lord one only faculty of action. This point the pope wholly overlooks or, more truly, misunderstands. Not the singleness of the faculty, but the unity in action between the divine and the human, is the subject of the pope's reply. Certainly, Honorius answers, Christ always acted with the two natures in harmony, no conflict between them being possible, the unity of action being perfect. As to the number of ways in which He acted no man can count them, much less say they were one or two. Questions of grammatical subtleties should be left to grammarians, and he agrees with Sergius that the discussion should be left where it stands.

Obviously Sergius and Honorius are at cross purposes. They are not discussing the same thing at all. But the consequences of the misunderstanding could hardly have been more serious. How far Honorius was from approving the new theory can be gathered from what he wrote to Sophronius. The new Patriarch of Jerusalem, following the custom, wrote to the other patriarchs and to the pope a letter -- the synodal letter -- notifying his election and testifying to his acceptance of the traditional faith. The synodal letter of Sophronius is a long and elaborate criticism of the new theory, which it exposes and refutes as a development of the heresy condemned at Chalcedon. The pope thereupon wrote to Constantinople, to Alexandria and to Sophronius. The first two letters are lost, and of the third only fragments survive. We do, however, possess an earlier letter to Sophronius, written before the latter's synodal letter had been received. Three things definitely emerge from the pope's letter and the fragments. The pope deprecates all discussion as to whether there are one or two "energies, " for, whichever expression is used, misunderstanding is certain. We must, however, hold that Jesus Christ, one in person, wrought works both human and divine by means of the two natures. The same Jesus Christ acted in His two natures divinely and humanly. Finally -- again the fatal ignoratio elenchi -- we must acknowledge the unity of will, for in Jesus Christ there is necessarily harmony between what is divinely willed and what is humanly willed. That Honorius held and taught the faith of Chalcedon is clear enough, despite the muddle. It is equally clear that he failed to grasp that a new question had been raised and was under discussion; clear, also, that he assisted the innovators by thus imposing silence alike on them and on their orthodox critics; and clear, finally, that he definitely said, in so many words, that there is but one will in Christ. It was a patronage of heresy no less effective because it was unconscious.

The next move lay with the emperor, and in 638 appeared an edict, the Ecthesis, which put forward the teaching that in Our Lord there is but one will as the Church's official doctrine.

Sophronius died that same year; Honorius, and Sergius too. A few months later Heraclius died, in 641, and Cyrus of Alexandria in 642. The principal actors in the controversy were gone then within four years of the appearance of the Ecthesis, and in those same few fateful years there had disappeared too -- and for ever -- the provinces whose pacification had been the original cause of all the trouble. It was in 629 that Heraclius had triumphed over the Persians, and, while the ink was still wet on the treaties, the power was already preparing which was to destroy both victor and vanquished. The new religion of Mahomet, slowly developing in Arabia for the last thirty years, was about to begin its epic conquest of the East. In 633 Damascus fell to it, Jerusalem in 637, Alexandria in 641. The actors gone, the provinces gone, it might be thought that, necessarily, the whole wretched business of this imperial patronage of dogmatic definition was at an end. Alas, the real fury of the Monothelite heresy had not even begun. The dogmatic question once raised must be settled. Honorius, failing to see the point raised, had set it aside. Sooner or later there would come a pope who, more understanding, could not follow that precedent. Rome must teach, and definitely. On the other hand the imperial prestige was bound up with the new theory. If Rome condemned it the emperor must either submit or fight. No emperor yet had surrendered his patronage of heresy at the bidding of a pope. All the emperors who had once adopted heresy had died ultimately in the heresy of their choice -- Constantine and Valens in Arianism, Theodosius II compromised with the Monophysites, Zeno and Anastasius in actual schism. Now it was the turn of the family of Heraclius, and once again, heresy, for forty years, finds in the Christian Emperor its chief and only support, while the traditional faith is proscribed and the faithful persecuted.

The first sign of opposition from Rome came when the envoys of Honorius's successor reached the capital, with their petition that his election should be confirmed. Presented with the Ecthesis and asked to sign it, they would not do more than promise to present it for signature to the newly-elected, Severinus. Shortly afterwards (August 12, 640) this pope too died; and in his place was elected the equally short-lived John IV (640-642). To John IV, Heraclius did indeed write, in the last months of his life, disclaiming all responsibility for the Ecthesis, and naming Sergius as its author. Nevertheless it was not withdrawn and John IV wrote vigorously to Heraclius' successors, Constantine III and Heracleonas, demanding its revocation. At the same time he protested against the use of Honorius' name in support of the heresy. Honorius, he recalls, had written to Sergius that "in our Saviour there can by no means be two contrary wills, that is in His members since He was free of those weaknesses which result from Adam's fall. My aforesaid predecessor, therefore, teaching on this mystery of Christ's incarnation, declared that there were not in Him what is found in us who are sinners, to wit conflicting wills of the spirit and of the flesh. This teaching some have twisted to suit their own ends, alleging Honorius to have taught that there is but one will to His divinity and humanity which is indeed contrary to truth. "

John IV died in October, 642. His successor, Theodore (642-649), continued the policy of protest, condemning the Ecthesis anew, and sending to the Patriarch of Constantinople a declaration of the true faith to be posted in its place. The patriarch refused, protested the orthodoxy of his attitude and invoked Honorius among his patrons. Finally, in 646, the pope declared him deposed. The sentence was never carried out. Instead, on the patriarch's advice, the Emperor Constans II (642-668), issued a new edict in place of the Ecthesis. This was the Type [61] promulgated in 648. The Type was not merely a profession of faith, as the Ecthesis had been, but an edict forbidding, under heavy penalties, all discussion of the subject. Whether the Monothelites were right or wrong, the pope and those who stood by him must be content to be silent. Bishops and clerics who defy the law are to be degraded, monks to be expelled from their monasteries, laymen to be stripped of their property if nobles, and the ordinary citizens to be flogged and exiled, "in order that all men, restrained by the fear of God and respect for the penalties rightly decreed, may keep undisturbed the peace of God's holy Churches. " It was a warning against interference. Was it meant for Rome too? Events were shortly to show. Pope Theodore died about this time (May 14, 649), and the responsibility of decision fell to his successor, Martin I.

No better choice of pope could have been made. Martin had been his predecessor's ambassador at Constantinople, and had been entrusted with the delicate task of warning and excommunicating the patriarch three years before. He knew the problem thoroughly and he also knew well the personalities opposed to him, the Patriarch Paul and the young Emperor Constans II. The new pope made no attempt to obtain the emperor's confirmation of his election, but, planning a courageous defiance of the Type, he summoned a synod of bishops to meet in the Lateran basilica for the October of 649. One hundred and five bishops answered the summons, and the sessions occupied the whole of the month. All the correspondence and documents of the twenty years' controversy were read, the complaints of the persecuted and their protestations. Finally, in a series of canons, the Type and its promoters were condemned, and an official declaration given that in Jesus Christ Our Lord there are "two natural wills the divine and the human, and two natural operations the divine and the human. ', Nor did Pope Martin rest content with his great council at Rome. Its decisions were transmitted to every part of the Church, to missionary bishops in Holland and Gaul as well as to Africa and Constantinople. Local councils were to be organised to support and to accept the Roman decision.

The emperor replied by action. A high official arrived in Rome with instructions to force an acceptance of the Type on the pope and all the bishops. He could not, however, rely on the loyalty of the soldiery. Pope and clergy and people were too united for intrigue to have any chance of success, an attempt at assassination failed and finally he came to an understanding with the pope and proceeded no further with his mission. Four years later arrived another envoy of a different stamp (653). The pope, a great sufferer from gout, foreseeing trouble, had his bed carried before the high altar of the Lateran and there the troops found him when they broke in. The envoy brought an imperial decree notifying him that he was deposed and ordering him to be arrested and dispatched to Constantinople. Another pope was to be elected in his place. The pope forbade any attempts at resistance and, surrendering to the officers, was straightway carried off.

It was more than a year before he reached the capital, and during all that length of time he suffered greatly from the brutality of the soldiers. When, finally, the convoy arrived at the quays of the imperial city the old man, helpless and confined to his bed, was left on deck for the best part of a day to be the butt of the populace. Then for three months he lay in the dungeons until, on December 19, 654, he was brought before the Senate to be tried for, of all things, treason. The cruel farce of a State trial, with the usual apparatus of trained official perjurers, dragged on and the pope was found guilty. They took him next to a balcony of the palace, and, to the acclamation of the mob, went through the ritual ceremony of degrading the pope, stripping him of his vestments and insignia. Then, half naked and loaded with chains, he was dragged through the streets to the prison reserved for wretches awaiting execution, the executioner, bearing a drawn sword, marching before him. This sentence, however, was not carried out. Constans II, who had enjoyed, from behind a grille, the scene he had so carefully arranged, went from his triumph to recount it in detail to the patriarch, ill at the time and thought to be nearing his end. The recital struck terror into the prelate. "Alas, yet another count to which soon I must answer, " was all he could say, and it was at his earnest entreaty that Constans commuted the sentence for one of exile. Three months later (March, 655) the unhappy pope, half dead with his privations and sufferings, was shipped off to the Crimea where new hardships speedily put an end to his life (September 16, 655).

St. Martin I, in whom the incompetence of Honorius was so gloriously redeemed, was not the only martyr to Constans II's barbarity. The abbot Maximus, a one time secretary to Heraclius, and two monks, one of them the pope's late ambassador to the imperial court, were likewise put on trial. The skill of the one time secretary had no difficulty in stripping the trial of its pretences and in forcing an admission that the real cause was loyalty to the Roman decisions. The three were exiled, horribly tormented, mutilated even, and in the end, like the pope they had defended, they, too, died from the results of their ill-treatment.

One very unpleasant feature of this episode is the attitude of the Roman clergy to their persecuted bishop and his supporters. It is also illuminating testimony to the hold which, in this new Byzantine Catholicism, the emperor had managed to gain even on the clergy of the supreme see. Before St. Martin had been tried, before even he had arrived at Constantinople, the wretched Roman clergy had obeyed the imperial order and given him a successor. Hence, in his prison at Constantinople the old pope waited in vain for help, for even the support of friendship from his own Roman people. The election of Eugene was a sad disillusioning of the valiant soul who had expected that something of his own spirit would keep his clergy loyal. Worse still was the news that the ambassadors sent by Eugene to petition for the emperor's confirmation of his election had gone over to the heretics, and, if they had not accepted the Type, had fraternised with them to the extent of concelebrating with the patriarch. This was one of the new facts thrown in the teeth of St. Maximus as he protested that he had for his warrant the teaching and practice of the Roman See. In desperation he turned to prayer that the divine mercy would somehow make manifest the gift of truth with which It had enriched the see of Peter.

He had not long to wait. The new pope, Eugene -- really pope since Martin's death -- was already, by 656, a source of anxiety to those who had contrived his election. The new patriarch at Constantinople had sent to Rome the synodal letter announcing his election. It was read with the wonted ceremony at St. Mary Major's before a great assembly of clergy and people, and its language on the crucial point of "energies" was considered too obscure to be orthodox. Cries of opposition broke out. The pope tried diplomatically to calm the tumult, but was forced to promise that he would never acknowledge as patriarch the author of the letter. Then, and then only, was he allowed to proceed with the mass. At Constantinople the news of this rejection of the new patriarch roused the official world to new fury, and one of St. Maximus' judges referred to the incident "Know this, Lord Abbot, as soon as the Barbarians leave us a breathing space we shall treat as we are treating you this pope who dares now to raise his head, and the rest of those folk in Rome who cry out so loudly, and your own disciples with them. We shall bury the lot of you, each in his own place, as we did for Martin. " However, Eugene I died before the emperor's hands were freed (June 2, 657), and his successor, Vitalian, made his peace and recognised the new patriarch unasked.

Six years after Vitalian's election political affairs brought Constans II to Rome, the first emperor to appear in the ancient capital for more than two centuries. Whatever the orthodoxy of his belief, he was the sovereign, the pope was his subject, and pope and clergy headed the citizens in the demonstration of loyalty which greeted the tyrant who had sent St. Martin to his death not ten years before. From Rome the emperor went south and he was still in Sicily when (668) the dagger of an assassin put an end to his life. His sudden death so far from the capital seemed likely, for the moment, to be the prelude to civil war. That his son, Constantine IV (668-685), succeeded peaceably was due in no small measure to the activity of Pope Vitalian, and, possibly in gratitude for the pope's service, with the new reign the Type, though not disavowed, disappeared into the lumber rooms of history. There was henceforward a kind of peace, but neither of the popes who succeeded Vitalian -- Adeodatus 672-676, and Donus 676-678 -- were recognised by the patriarchs at Constantinople, nor were the patriarchs John V (669-675) and Constantine (675-677) recognised at Rome. It was the initiative of the emperor which brought the estrangement to an end, and from his letter to Pope Donus asking him to send representatives to a conference, there developed the sixth general council of 680-1 (Constantinople III).

Two years of delays followed the imperial invitation. To begin with, the pope to whom it was addressed died before the letter arrived. Then his successor Agatho (678-681) decided, before he replied, to consult the western episcopate generally. His acceptance should go to Constantinople bearing the signatures of as many Latin bishops as possible. There was at Rome the usual council of the pope's own immediate suffragans, in which an English bishop, Wilfrid of York, took part. There was a council at Pavia, and other councils, apparently, elsewhere, following the procedure of St. Martin I in 649. As his principal legate the pope would have liked to send the Greek monk who at the time occupied the see of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus. The difficulties which prevented this, delayed the mission yet further. Finally, in the September of 680, the delegates reached Constantinople and an emperor who had almost despaired of seeing them. They were eleven in all: two priests and a deacon representing the pope himself, three Italian bishops -- the emperor had asked for twelve -- a priest of Ravenna and, as the emperor had desired, four monks chosen from the Greek monasteries of Southern Italy.

The legates presented to the emperor a letter from the pope, the three bishops the profession of faith which the western bishops had signed -- a hundred and twenty-five of them. On November 7 the delegates came together under the presidency of the emperor. The project had grown since he wrote to the pope, and with the mission from the West there were present the bishops of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and what could be gathered to represent the three other patriarchates where, thanks to Monophysitism and the fifty years of Mahometan occupation, Catholicism as an organised thing had practically disappeared. In all one hundred and seventy- four bishops were present.

The sessions of the Council -- eighteen in number -- did not end until the following September (681). [62] The Monothelites were allowed to state their case, the whole vast literature of manifestoes and synodals was read, with the acts of the previous councils on which the Monothelites based their new claim to orthodoxy.

Agatho's letter to the emperor was read to the council. Like the Tome of St. Leo, two centuries earlier, it is a simple statement of the belief as traditional that in Christ Our Lord there are two wills and two operations. As St. Leo at Chalcedon, so now Agatho, was acclaimed as Peter's successor "Peter it is who speaks through Agatho. " In the eighth session the emperor intervened and demanded that the two patriarchs should give their opinion as to the doctrine of Agatho's letter. The Patriarch of Constantinople declared it to be the Catholic faith and the immense majority of the bishops agreed. His colleague of Antioch -- a patriarch in partibus these many years -- held firmly to his Monothelism. Sergius, Cyrus, Sophronius, and Honorius, dead now half a century, came to life again in the debates. Sophronius was hailed as the defender of the true faith, the rest condemned; Sergius as the pioneer of the heresy, Cyrus and the successors of Sergius as his supporters, all of whom, the decree notes, have been already condemned by Agatho, "the most holy and thrice blessed pope of Old Rome in his suggestions to the emperor. " Tothis list, sent on from Rome, the council added the name of Honorius "because in his writings to Sergius he followed his opinions and confirmed his impious teaching. " The emperor accepted all the council decreed, he presided at the closing session, and by an edict gave the definitions force of law.

The council, following immemorial tradition, wrote also to the pope, begging him to confirm what had been decreed. At the moment the Roman See was vacant. Agatho had died (January, 681) before the council was half way through its labours, and his successor, Leo II, was not elected until nearly a year after the council had ended (August 17, 682). To acknowledge its synodal letter and to send a reply was one of his first duties. This he did in a letter to the emperor. The pope confirms the decrees, and re-echoes the condemnations of his predecessor, and in even more indignant terms, he makes his own the council's condemnation of Honorius "who did not make this apostolic Church illustrious by teaching in accord with the apostolic tradition, but on the contrary allowed its spotless faith to be sullied by a sacrilegious treachery. " He used a similar hard phrase in a letter to the King of the Visigoths. But it is in a further letter to the bishops of Spain that this pope, in a sentence, most clearly describes the fault for which Honorius merited these condemnations: "Honorius who did not extinguish the fire of heretical teaching, as behoved one who exercised the authority of the apostles, but by his negligence blew the flames still higher., ' The condemnation of Pope Honorius does not seem greatly to have moved those who witnessed it. It was recorded in all solemnity in the Acta of the council, it appears in all the correspondence which notifies the decision of the council to the rest of Christendom. In the archives where these rested, his memory, too, slept until, centuries later, controversial archaeologists, straining every resource to embarass the champions of the Roman primacy, turned to the record of the sixth general council and with more ingenuity than good faith tried to put on the decrees a meaning they were never meant to bear. Much more singular than the inclusion of the negligent and misunderstanding Honorius among the condemned of 681, is the entire absence of any reference in the council's proceedings to the memory of the story's heroic figures, St. Martin I, St. Maximus and the rest. The ingenuity of Constans II, condemning for treason where he dare not proceed on a cause of faith, was successful to the end. No council, no pope, under this Byzantine regime, would glorify the criminal convicted for treason, any more than it would condemn the emperors who had fostered and encouraged the heresy, opposition to which was the martyr's real crime. The memory of Heraclius and of Constans II was officially undimmed, while that of St. Martin and his companions remained officially infamous.

In the council of 680 Rome and Constantinople came together after a breach of relations that had lasted thirty-five years. The acknowledgement of the Roman primacy then made was as full, and as spontaneous, as at the time of Hormisdas, or at Chalcedon, two hundred and thirty years before. Nevertheless in those two hundred and thirty years a new world had slowly been coming to birth. It is always difficult to draw the dividing lines of historical periods, but certainly by the end of the seventh century the world into which the Church had come had definitely given place to another. That world had been a civilisation, Roman politically, Hellenistic culturally, imposed on and adopted by a score of peoples, overlaying, in East and West alike, older cultures still. By the time of the Council of 680 the West had long since slipped from the grasp of the one-time world State. For nearly three centuries now, Gaul, Spain and Britain had been outside its boundaries. Italy, too, which Justinian had recovered, was by 680 once again "barbarian", save for Sicily, Calabria and a few scattered vantage points along the coast. Africa had recently (695-698) fallen to the Arabs, who, as has been noted, had, sixty years earlier made themselves masters of Egypt and the East. The Slavs were now established south of the Danube. The State, which had not been a Roman empire for three centuries, was by this hardly an empire at all. More and more it was become a Greek- speaking nation, whose strength lay in the peasantry of Asia Minor; and if it still retained in Constantinople a European capital, it was to the East that its capital looked for inspiration, to the lands and the traditions of those ancient cultures whence had derived that non-European conception of the semi-divine despotic ruler whose influence, since Diocletian, had done so much to make the Empire a new thing. The lands had vanished, the culture had changed, the inspiration of life was other, and it was in a world already changed that this last great controversy between the Roman See and the Roman Emperors was fought out. Nevertheless, since the affair of the Monothelites is the last chapter of the history which begins with the Edict of Milan it is best told here in order to complete that history. To show in what degree the world in which the controversy ended was a different world, and how truly a new age had begun with Constantinople's pride of place reinforced by the consciousness of its cultural and even "national" superiority to Rome -- a consciousness now characterised by deep anti-Roman feeling -- it remains to say something of another council at Constantinople, summoned twelve years after the council of Pope Agatho and Constantine IV. This is the famous synod in Trullo [63] -- so called from the place where it met, the great domed hall of the imperial palace at Constantinople.

It was summoned by the son of Constantine IV, the youthful Justinian II (685-95, 705-711). This emperor's reputation has left him the very type of that treachery and sadistic cruelty which, for so long, was all that the world "byzantine" conveyed to western minds. He was, however, no friend to the defeated Monothelites, and he needed little encouragement to busy himself, after the pattern of his great namesake, with the Church's internal discipline. It was represented to him that neither of the last two general councils (553 and 680) had occupied itself with questions of discipline, and to supply what was wanting Justinian called the Council of 692.

It was a purely Byzantine affair. The pope was not invited, and there was no East to invite. Two hundred and eleven bishops attended, and the papal ambassadors at the imperial court were present too. The council did little more than publish once more, in collected form, laws which had come down from earlier councils. There were, however, some new canons and, bearing in mind the emperor's aim of elaborating in this council a common ecclesiastical observance for the whole empire, their anti-Roman character is very significant. The famous 28th canon of Chalcedon is, of course, re-enacted, and the eastern discipline in the matter of Lent and of clerical marriage is extended to the whole Church in language designedly insulting to the Roman See. Equally significant of a new, aggressive anti-Roman spirit was the fact that, among the avowed sources from which this code was drawn, were councils which Rome had never recognised, and others which Rome had definitely rejected. The code went through, however, without a protest, and the pope's ambassadors to the imperial court signed with the rest.

It remained to be seen what the pope himself would do, and so much importance did Justinian attach to his signature that six copies of the decrees were sent to Rome. Each of the patriarchs, as well as the emperor, should have his autograph copy of the papal submission. The pope, Sergius I, was himself an oriental, Syrian by blood though Sicilian by birth. He refused the council all recognition.

Straightway the old tyranny began to function, officials coming from Constantinople with an order to drag the pope in chains to the capital. But it was not so easy now as it had been fifty years before in the time of St. Martin. The troops mutinied, the mob drove the high officials out of Rome with appropriate indecencies, and shortly afterwards a revolution at Constantinople drove out Justinian too -- his nose slit in the latest fashion of mutilation. Ten years later, wearing a new nose of gold, he returned and, once securely established, his thoughts turned again to the decrees of his council still lacking the pontifical signature. Once more this half-crazy fanatic addressed himself to the task. The pope, John VII, was asked to note the canons to which he objected, and to sanction those he approved. The poor man was not only himself a Byzantine but the son of an official of the imperial service. Obedience to the emperor was in his blood, and yet he was pope. Something of the tradition triumphed despite the "human frailty" of which the Liber Pontificalis speaks. He did not dare to pick and choose, but sent back a kind of vague and general approbation. Justinian found it lacking, and sent orders for a fuller and more definite assent. Pope John was dead by this time. It was his successor, Constantine, who had to face the difficulty and an order to proceed himself to Constantinople. The pope was received everywhere with the utmost ceremony and reverence. The emperor too, most astonishingly, threw himself at his feet, begged the privilege of assisting at his mass and receiving Holy Communion from his hands. And thanks to the diplomatic skill of the future Gregory II the affair of the Council of 692 was left as it was. The emperor asked no further approbation. The pope abstained from further condemnation. To this day the place where the pope's name should show is blank. After which happy ending to what had promised to be so tragic, the pope was allowed to return to Rome. Two months later the mob rose once again, and this time the emperor and his son died in torments at its hands (December, 711).

Here ends the story of the Church and the world into which it was born. But the regime of Byzantinism under which the Church's ruler had been so oppressed, continued still. It was to last -- so far as it affected the popes -- just something short of fifty years more. Then a liberator came, in the person of the Catholic king of the barbarian Franks. He beat off from the nominally imperial lands the Lombards who menaced St. Peter, and "for love of St. Peter and the remission of his sins" made over his conquests to the pope (754). St. Peter is thenceforward no longer the subject of the successor of Augustus and Constantine. The alliance of the Papacy and the Franks has most momentously begun. It is a warning, if warning is needed, that the Middle Ages are upon us, that the Roman Empire is already a matter of history. Just two hundred years had passed since Justinian's re-conquest of Italy. For so long, and for no longer, had (Caesar imprisoned the Papacy in his Byzantine State.

Endnotes

57: It is a dangerous thing to coin new names. I retain this unfortunate example in order to correct it by saying that " ultra- Cyrillians " would have been nearer the fact (for St. Cyril assuredly would have disowned them they are the " wild men " of his party with whom he had his own difficulties after the settlement of 433). Actually these are the Monophysites of the first generation. [back]

58: i.e. The Stammerer [back]

59: His feast is kept as Pope and Martyr on June 20 [back]

60: As Pelagius endeavoured to make clear [back]

61: tupos peri pisteos: i.e. outline of the faith. [back]

62: Forty three bishops were present at the opening session; 174 signed the final act. [back]

63: Also called Quini-Sext, because intended to supplement (by canons about discipline) the Fifth and Sixth General Councils (i.e. those of 553 and 680-1). [back]