Chapter 9: ROME AND THE CATHOLIC EAST. 381-453

THE PRIMACY OF HONOUR. 381-419

To anyone who had understood the forces which blighted Catholic life in the East all through the fourth century, the evolution of Constantinople's new primacy would have seemed merely a matter of time; and just as much matter of time the resulting conflict between Rome and Constantinople. The fifty years between the Council of 381 and the next of the general councils-Ephesus — are in fact filled with the din of that strife, and the fight ranges round one of the greatest personalities of all church history, St. John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople from 398 to 407.

Nectarius, the elect of the Council of 381, died on September 27, 397. More than one candidate was put forward for the vacant see, and at last, to put an end to the intrigue and the tumult, the emperor — it was Arcadius, for Theodosius had died two years before — named the new bishop. His choice fell on John, a monk of Antioch, a man of saintly virtue, learned, and reputed the greatest preacher of his time, whom after ages were to call the Golden-tongued — Chrysostomos. At the time of his consecration he was close on fifty years of age. He had been a monk — a solitary — until his first patron, Meletius, called him into the clergy. The successor of Meletius, Flavian, ordained him priest, and at the time of his election to Constantinople he was one of the outstanding personalities of Eastern Catholicism. His appointment was, none the less, an imperial appointment. His early associations, too, were with that imperial Catholicism which had shaped the re-organisation of 381. His nomination represented, even more than that of Nectarius, an Antiochian gain at Constantinople. One of the candidates whom the appointment ruled out had been supported by Antioch's great rival Alexandria, whose bishop was now Theophilus (382-412) a proud man, able and unscrupulous, a sinister figure indeed, in whom there seems re- incarnated something of Egypt's ancient dark mystery. John's election was a defeat for Theophilus — a defeat which, no doubt, he resented all the more, in that he was compelled to submit by threats of a criminal prosecution for his misdeeds.

The new bishop was to secure from Rome recognition of the successor of Meletius. The succession of Paulinus had died out. His followers had accepted Flavian; and St. John's intervention removed the last trace of the long unhappy schism. Rome, Alexandria and Antioch, the three chief sees, were once more in communion — the first time for nearly seventy years. With St. John Chrysostom the bishop remained the monk. He showed himself as zealous in reforming evil as, in his days as priest at Antioch, he had been eloquent in denouncing it. And since much of the evil he wrought against was the affair of those in high places, he soon made powerful enemies.

Nor was his zeal confined to his own city or province. From the beginning of his reign he follow d the custom his predecessor had inaugurated of using the prestige of the primacy of honour to settle disputes which, by the strict law of the Council of 381, really lay outside his competence. So he crossed into the neighbouring civil diocese of Pontus, in 398, to depose the Bishop of Nicomedia and, despite opposition from the populace, appointed his successor. More seriously still, a year later, on the authorisation of a handful of bishops whom chance accident brought together in the capital, he undertook to judge between two bishops of the neighbouring civil diocese of Asia. Nectarius had similarly broken through the canon of 381 when, a few years earlier, with the tacit consent of Alexandria and Antioch, he had judged a case between two bishops from Arabia. The ingenious machinery which would secure order in the East without reference to Rome was already ceasing to function. Three years later it broke down altogether, under the weight of the two-fold plague which still oppressed the Eastern Church — imperial interference and unrestrained episcopal ambition. It is to be noted that all sides tolerated, were willing to use, invited and welcomed the imperial intervention; and that, turn by turn, all the great sees of the East were guilty of these manifest usurpations of jurisdiction. The difference in kind between the jurisdiction they ambitioned and usurped, and that which, turn by turn, they acknowledged or disobeyed in Rome — none denied it — is, once more, equally evident.

The aggressor this time was Alexandria, the victim Constantinople; the means of the aggression was the imperial hold on ecclesiastical obedience, bought now by Theophilus at a great price. Theophilus had never loved St. John, and disappointed to see Antioch installed at court in his person, the Egyptian had filled the capital with spies who might, it was hoped, furnish matter for its bishop's trial and deposition. In the calumnies spread by the wretches whom St. John's reforms had exposed and dislodged, the spies found of course a wealth of material.

Towards the end of 401 there appeared at Constantinople a number of monks expelled from Egypt by Theophilus for, as he alleged, their heretical opinions. They came to appeal to the emperor against their bishop, and they sought the patronage of St. John. Without prejudging the case, he charitably wrote to Theophilus to intercede. For reply Theophilus dispatched some of his clergy with a wealth of "evidence" against the alleged heretics. The newcomers were, in turn, accused of calumny by the monks, convicted and, the bribes of Theophilus alone saving them from the executioner, sent to the mines. Then followed, at the demand once more of the alleged heretics, the first steps in a suit against Theophilus himself.

The emperor, since the accused was a bishop, refused to judge the case himself. He named as judge the Bishop of Constantinople, and sent a summons to Theophilus to come, and to come alone, for his trial. Theophilus obeyed, but brought with him twenty-nine of his suffragans and the ever-useful Alexandrian gold, and he came, as he said in his farewells to Egypt, " to get John deposed. " His trickery, his gold, and the mentality of Eastern Catholicism assisting him, he was successful.

St. John, most correctly, had refused the emperor's commission to judge the Bishop of Alexandria. That, by law, was a matter for the bishops of Egypt. Theophilus, three weeks later, was asking the emperor for leave to judge St. John — accused, it appears, of all manner of wickedness. The Bishop of Alexandria, whose three weeks at court had been usefully employed, was by now in residence across the Bosphorus, at Chalcedon, in the summer palace known as The Oak. There, in July 403, with his twenty-nine suffragans and half a dozen other bishops, fortified with the imperial favour, he opened what, impudently enough, he called his council and summoned St. John to appear and take his trial. St. John is to suffer from that very imperial usurpation which he had himself refused to use against the man now wielding it. All is done by virtue of it, and in its presence Church law, even the canon of 381, is null — and all the bishops concerned are Catholics and the emperor too. Under such a regime how is religion more safe than under Arian princes? Now, as then, it is the emperor's bishop alone who is secure.

St. John once more behaved admirably. He refused to acknowledge the usurpation of Theophilus by appearing. "It is not right that bishops from Egypt judge bishops from Thrace. " The emperor insisted, but the saint stood to his resolve. In his absence he was at length "condemned, " deposed, and by imperial edict ordered into exile. Three days later, through a city whose excited populace looked only for a sign from him to raze all to the ground, he obediently followed his escort to the waiting ship and the distant coast of Bithynia.

The emperor was a weakling. The excitement in his capital shook him from his opposition to St. John, the exile was recalled; while the clerics whose malevolence had functioned at The Oak, took to flight, Theophilus at their head. The emperor next made a show of revising the iniquities, but within a couple of months the old intrigues were once more at work, and finally, thanks to Theophilus and the gang of like-minded bishops whom he led, the emperor, at their petition, confirmed anew the sentence of 403 and ordered St. John's arrest. This time the exile was definitive, and distant. First to Nicea, thence to Armenia, and further still, the saint was harried until, worn out by privation, he died at Comana on September 14, 407. Theophilus was revenged for the election of 398, Alexandria had prevailed against the creation of 381. Clerical disorders in the capital, the intrigues of the disaffected, intrigues of bishops come to the capital from heaven knows where, the corruption of the court, the chance whims of the emperor, " I leave you the lot, " cried St. Epiphanius to the bishops who bade him good-bye on his last visit in 403, " the city, the court, the whole hypocritical farce. " They were still in the East, these things, what they had been for three generations, what they were to be more than once again, an important engine of ecclesiastical government.

Happily for the Church in the East the supreme authority lay elsewhere. This last great treachery of eastern bishops was to reveal that authority's different nature in very striking fashion. Rome's first news of the new crisis was through Theophilus whose messenger simply announced to the pope that "John has been deposed. " This was, apparently, towards the end of May, 404, nearly a year after the " council " at The Oak, and in the last weeks of the semi-imprisonment in his own palace which preceded St. John's exile. Three days later came St. John's messengers-four bishops with a letter for the pope, a letter sent likewise to the bishops of Milan and Aquileia.

Here the whole story is told, the "trial, " the exile, the recall. Theophilus and his set are blamed for the outrage, there is not a word against the emperor, and the letter ends with the request for a declaration that the acts of the "council" at The Oak are null and that its bishops have broken the law. To a properly constituted court St. John will gladly submit the proofs of his innocence.

The pope — St. Innocent I (401-417) — replied to both the bishops. He condemned the "council, " of The Oak, and acquiesced in St. John's request for an impartial council of bishops from West and East. The reply had hardly been sent when, from Theophilus, there came a fuller account of the transaction with the minutes of his "council. " The pope answered with a renewal of his proposal for a general council. Then came, from the bishops faithful to St. John, the news of the second banishment, the news too, of the imperial edicts threatening with deposition any bishop who supported the exile and with confiscation of goods whoever sheltered such bishops. Once more from the East the tide of refugees began to flow in to Rome.

The pope's reply to the edicts was to write to St. John assuring him of support, and to write in the same sense to the bishops who had remained faithful. He wrote also to the clergy and people of Constantinople — a refusal to acknowledge the bishop set up in St. John's place, a strong reasoned protest against the uncanonical proceedings which had driven him forth, and, once more, a plea for a general council to clear the whole affair. At the pope's petition his own sovereign the Western Emperor, Honorius (395-423), joined him in the demand to Arcadius for a joint council of East and West. An embassy of bishops and clerics conveyed the imperial request, but no sooner did they cross the frontier of the Eastern Empire than they were arrested and their papers taken from them. They refused to be bribed into a recognition of the new bishop, and thereupon, were summarily deported. The refugees who had returned in their company were exiled (April, 406).

Once more the East had bidden the West leave Eastern affairs to Easterns. Before Rome passed to the only measures of protest left to her — the excommunication of Theophilus, of the new Bishop of Constantinople, Atticus, and of all their supporters-St. John was dead. It had been a quarrel between Easterns and a quarrel on a point of discipline; Rome had intervened, and was to stand by her decision until the unwilling East submitted. Theophilus stood out to the end, and refusing the amends to St. John's memory on which Rome insisted, was still outside her communion when he died (October 15, 412). At Antioch when the new bishop Porphyrios, who had accepted the communion of Atticus, wrote to Rome, too, for letters of communion, the same Roman intransigence refused them. Porphyrios' successor in 413 restored St. John's name to its place among the recognised bishops commemorated in the Mass, and the pope thereupon restored him to communion. "I have made diligent search, " the pope wrote, " whether all the conditions in this case of the blessed and truly religious bishop John had been satisfied. Since what your envoys affirm accords in every particular with my wishes, I have accepted to be in communion with your church. . . . " And he makes the Bishop of Antioch his agent for the reconciliation of the other bishops of the East.

Atticus made more than one attempt to obtain recognition, but so long as he refused to comply with the pope's conditions it was refused. Again St. Innocent's authoritative phrases give life to the routine formality. "Communion, once broken off, cannot be renewed until the person concerned gives proof that the reasons for which communion was broken off are no longer operative, and that what is imposed as a condition of peace has been fulfilled. We still await a declaration from Atticus giving us assurance that all the conditions which at different times we have laid down have been fulfilled. We are willing to renew our communion with him when he makes fitting petition therefore, and when he proves that he merits the favour. " In the end Atticus, too, complied with the pope's demand and was received back into his communion.

Last of all Alexandria humbled herself, the successor of Theophilus — his nephew Cyril — submitting in his turn.

In the East whether the bishops are Catholic or heretic, saints or courtiers, the emperor's good pleasure is law for them. Rome, whatever the civil prestige of the city, remains mistress of herself, and to Rome's primacy even the state-ridden churches of the East ultimately bow, rather than lose that communion which is hers uniquely.

EPHESUS. 427-433

The crisis of 403-408 had centred around questions of ecclesiastical discipline. All those concerned in it, Theophilus, St. John, Atticus, St. Innocent I, had been united in Faith. There had been no repetition of discussions such as those which the Council of 381 had closed. But within twenty years of the death of St. John, and when all the personalities of that crisis had passed away, the peace of his see was troubled more violently than ever by far-reaching discussions on a fundamental point of faith. In the fourth century Arius had striven against the tradition that the Logos is truly God. Now the discussion shifted to the question of the relations between the Divine and the Human in Jesus Christ. Was there, for instance, a real distinction between the Human and the Divine, or had the Divine absorbed the Human? If the Divine and the Human are really distinct in Him what was the nature of His earthly activities? Was it God acting, or the Man mysteriously and wonderfully united to God? or was the activity sometimes divine and sometimes human?

The practical effect on Christian life of divergent reasoning here cannot, of course, be exaggerated. If the activity is not divine then the gospel loses its chief claim to a hearing, the ecclesia its one claim on the absolute attention and obedience of mankind. It becomes straightway nothing more than the masterpiece of human idealism, in life and in moral teaching. If the Divine and the Human are distinct how can the activity be divine? And if the Divine absorbs the Human how can our vitiated humanity be reintegrated by the mysterious Incarnation of the Logos? Such reintegration demands a full complete humanity in Him Who is thus to restore it. Such a full complete humanity there cannot be in Our Lord if, in Him, the Human is not distinct from the Divine.

One school of theologians, concerned to safeguard the all important truth of the real distinction between the Human and the Divine, pressed the distinction so far that in Our Lord they were inclined — some of them — to see two realities, united truly enough, and harmoniously one in action, but united with a union that was no more than a moral union. This was the teaching of the so-called school of Antioch.

The Alexandrians, approaching the problem from its other pole, anxious above all to safeguard along with the Divinity of Christ the unity of His activity, and especially of course the Divine character of His action as Saviour of mankind, stressed the union of Human and Divine in Him, until in some cases, the two seemed for the thinker united in such a fusion that the Human reality ceased to be real. In God the Son incarnate, they urged, there was but one incarnate physis.

This, in words at any rate, was flat contradiction of the thesis of the Antiochians, for the Antiochians used this very term physis to describe each of the realities whose real distinction they were so concerned to defend. In Christ, they taught, there were two physes — the Human and the Divine. Physis, for this school, meant what the Latin theologians were to call Nature; while the same word, with the Alexandrians, was equivalent to the Latin Person. Both schools thus used the one term physis, and they each used it to express a different reality. The matter of the debate was, then, fundamental. More fundamental matter of debate between members of the Church there could not be. Those who debated it were only too well aware of their subject's vast importance. Each school had worked out its theory as a defence of truth against a particular heresy — and as the heretics differed, so the viewpoint of the defenders differed too. Hence high feeling and passion in the polemic. Again they were debating the matter for the first time, and without an agreed technical terminology to express even their common ideas, much less their individual differences. Hence, not infrequently, misunderstandings and confusion. A final point to note is that the disputants were, almost all of them, Easterns; Greeks by culture, Egyptian or Syrian by blood, subtle of speech with a subtlety far beyond that of anyone then bred west of Alexandria, and endowed with a tropical luxuriance of rhetoric in the expression of their passionately held ideas, which sometimes did little to help on the work of agreement.

Another factor, too, quite untheological this, played its part in the event, influencing the circumstances of the great decisions if it left the decisions themselves untouched. This was the rivalry now traditional between the three great sees of the East. Alexandria, until the unhappy exaltation of Constantinople in 381, had been unquestioned leader of the East. Her bishop it was who, for nearly half a century, had held fast to Catholicism while Antioch and Constantinople had fallen to the Arians. Then, at the council which organised the restoration of orthodoxy, Alexandria had seen her prestige sacrificed to the profit of Constantinople, parvenu see as parvenu city, creature of the Court, heretic and Catholic by turn as the emperor chose. But the council's decision was law for the East, and Alexandria had had to bow to the fait accompli. And as the years went by after 381 another interesting development had revealed itself. The predominant influence in the new imperial see was Antiochian. From Antioch, and not from Alexandria, were its bishops taken, and Antiochian theories rather than Alexandrian usually guided its teachers. Alexandria, for the fifty years that followed the restoration council of 381, was, despite its ancient prestige, its services to orthodoxy, and its wealth, decidedly out of the fashion.

In the history of the next two general councils all these elements play their part. The traditional faith is asserted, — each time by the see which, ever refusing to philosophise, reserves to itself a role of decisive authoritative teaching — but asserted after a strangely complex exhibition of passionate contending humanity. The story is simple enough, so long as the traditional faith and the traditional procedure for resolving doubts are alone in question. The story only begins to be involved when there enter in these extraneous elements, rival systems of theology, hereditary rivalries of the great sees, the novelty of appealing to Caesar to assist the settlement — this last above all, for as a result of such appeals, Caesar is fast becoming to the Church in his dominions as omnipresent and paralysing as was ever the old man of the sea.

Atticus, the intruded successor of St. John Chrysostom, died in 425, his peace with Rome made long before. To him succeeded Sisinnius who reigned only for a year and ten months. Whereupon, to cut short the intrigues of interested parties in the capital itself, the emperor, Theodosius II (408-450), decided, like his father Arcadius in 397, that the new bishop should be chosen from outside. And once more, as in 397, it was a priest of Antioch who was elected. His name was Nestorius and already he had made a name for himself as a man, of ascetic life and a notable preacher. He was a pupil of the most celebrated of all the Antiochian theologians, Theodore, now ending his life as Bishop of Mopsuestia.

Theodore, a friend of St. John Chrysostom, had with the saint been the pupil of Diodore of Tarsus (394) whose ideas he had developed, making for himself a name that quite eclipsed his master's. Diodore had been in his time a mighty controversialist. His especial foe was Apollinaris, the Alexandrian Bishop of Laodicea (360-377). Apollinaris, a powerful opponent of Arianism, insisting on the unity of Our Lord's salvific activity, and its divine character, had resolved the main difficulty in the way of his theory by teaching that the humanity which the Divinity associated to itself was incomplete — a true human body indeed but lacking a human soul. Against these theorisings, condemned often, and condemned most solemnly at Constantinople in 381, Diodore insisted on the truth they denied, namely that in Our Lord there are two natures, really distinct, complete, true natures. Unfortunately he so isolated them that a duality of nature, as he conceived it, was not compatible with any unity of personality. Theodore, Bishop of Mopsuestia (392-428), developing his master, speaks of the two natures as though they were each complete persons, failing, like Diodore, to understand all that is implied in the notion of "one person, " and that a duality such as he constructs is not compatible with that unity.

Nestorius was not so clear as his master. Like Theodore, while he admits in theory the unity of person, he speaks of the two natures as though these were two independent persons. Again, for Nestorius, the one person is not conceived as the active divine person of the Logos associating with itself the created humanity, but the personality is taken as the result, the effect, of the union of the divinity and the humanity. The Logos and the humanity, anterior to the union, have each their proper person; in the union there is still but one person — the person of Christ, to which the person of the Logos and the person of the humanity are in a kind of subordination.

Such intricate and involved theorising might have gone the way of much other like speculation had not Nestorius worked it out to the practical conclusions of everyday spirituality, and attempted to impose it as the true tradition of faith upon his clergy and people. What brought the Bishop of Constantinople to this, was the need, now become urgent, to provide in a popular way, some refutation of the many heresies about the divinity of Our Lord that troubled the peace of the capital, and especially a revival among the Arians and Apollinarians. Constantinople was indeed, at the moment, full of militant heretics. Nestorius had had much to say about this in the inaugural address that followed his appointment to the see in 427. One result of his zeal was a new imperial law against heretics (May 30, 428) and a great campaign to convert them or drive them out. In that campaign the truth of the faith was to be set out cleared of the misrepresentations of it circulated by its enemies. And so it came about that one of the bishop's intimates, the monk Anastasius, announced the " new theology " of the Incarnation in a popular sermon on the Mother of God. "Mother of God" she had always been to the ordinary faithful. It was a title consecrated by long usage and it expressed succinctly the traditional belief that He whose mother she was, was not merely man but also truly God. But the monk, Anastasius, explained that this title " Mother of God, " Theotokos, should only be used with the greatest care, had better in fact not be used at all. Mary was " Mother of Christ " rather than " Mother of God. " The ambiguity of the new teaching, its implication that somehow Christ was not fully divine, were not lost on the audience. A tumult began, a noisy appeal to the bishop to depose the preacher. Nestorius, however, not only refused to do this but took the opportunity himself to preach against the traditional cult. The monks and many of his clergy objected and he excommunicated them, deposed them, even had some of them scourged and imprisoned. Whereupon they appealed to the emperor (428).

But before the emperor acted another power had intervened. This was the Bishop of Alexandria, St. Cyril. Among the excommunicated at Constantinople were monks. Egypt was still the centre of monasticism and its chief bishop the patron and protector of monks wherever found. The news of the excommunications and of the novel teaching in whose name it had been inflicted was, then, not slow in reaching Alexandria. It roused against the unhappy Nestorius the great man of the day. It was not merely that St. Cyril, like his uncle and predecessor Theophilus, disposed of vast material resources, and a highly organised and well-disciplined following of bishops, nor merely that he was a capable organiser gifted with tremendous energy. He was the most powerful theologian the Greek- speaking Church had yet known, a thinker whose subsequent effect on the definition of doctrine was to be greater than that of any other eastern, except perhaps his predecessor at Alexandria, St. Athanasius.

St. Cyril, informed of the difficulties, studied the whole matter systematically and wrote to Nestorius (February, 430). He wrote also to the emperor and the empress. He wrote, in the third place, to Rome (Easter, 430). To the pope he communicated the whole dossier of the case: the sermons of Nestorius, his own letters to him, a catalogue of the alleged errors, another of extracts from the Fathers that bore on the matter, and a Latin translation of all these. "The ancient custom of the Church" he wrote "admonishes us that matters of this kind should be communicated to Your Holiness. " The matter was too grave for him to act on his own authority. "We do not openly and publicly break off communion with [Nestorius] before bringing these things to the notice of Your Holiness. Deign therefore to prescribe what you feel in the matter, so that it may be clearly known to us whether we must hold communion with him, or whether we should freely declare to him that no one can remain in communion with one who cherishes and preaches suchlike erroneous doctrine. "

Rome's reply was startling, not in its acceptance of the appeal, but in the peremptory arrangements it made for judgment. The pope, St. Celestine I (422-432), already knew something of the controversy. Nestorius himself had sent him some of his sermons; and one of the deacons of the Roman Church, Leo, had had them examined by John Cassian. Only one verdict was possible. The new theories were not in accord with the traditional faith. When the dossier from Alexandria arrived, the pope called a synod and the whole matter was carefully considered: not only St. Cyril's letters, but also the letters which Nestorius himself had sent to the pope enclosing extracts from his sermons to illustrate his theories. After which the pope wrote to all the parties concerned — to Nestorius, to St. Cyril, to the other eastern patriarchs and to the church of Constantinople: but to the emperor, from Rome, not a word. Nestorius was told that St. Cyril's faith was in accord with the tradition, that St. Cyril's remonstrance should have been a warning to him. This was his last. Should he not, within ten days of being notified by St. Cyril, renounce his impious theories, St. Cyril had it in charge to dethrone him. The Catholics of Constantinople were congratulated on the stand they made against the heresy, consoled for the persecution Nestorius had inflicted on them, and bidden to trust in Rome, always the refuge for persecuted Catholics. All the sentences of Nestorius were annulled, and finally it was announced that since, in so grave a matter, the pope himself must judge, and since the distance forbade his personal presence, " we have delegated our holy brother Cyril in our place. " To St. Cyril himself the pope sent detailed instructions. Acting in the pope's name he was formally to summon Nestorius to recant, and, should he not do so within ten days, to excommunicate and depose him. All these letters were sent through St. Cyril. The emperor the pope had ignored, or overlooked. A decision in a matter of faith, a dispute between bishops was, by all Roman traditions, matter for episcopal action exclusively. But east of the Adriatic another tradition held. Nestorius had appealed to Caesar, and on Caesar's action much would depend. Much also would depend on the manner in which the Roman commission was executed by Rome's Alexandrian commissioner.

The Emperor Theodosius II was still a young man, thirty years of age, cultured, pious, amiable and vacillating, his judgment always very much at the mercy of his last adviser. The monks and clergy excommunicated by Nestorius had appealed to him. St. Cyril had written from Alexandria in the same sense. But in the end it was Nestorius who prevailed; and before St. Cyril's ultimatum had arrived — what delayed it all this time, August to November, 430, we shall see presently — the emperor had decided that the whole affair should remain untouched pending the meeting of a general council which he now 47 convoked to meet at Ephesus on the Whit- Sunday of the following year 431. This council, Nestorius wrote to Pope Celestine, would deal with a number of charges brought against St. Cyril and his administration. Had Nestorius, by now, heard something of the Roman reaction? We may well think it, for in this letter he begins to qualify his objection to the expression Theotokos.

The imperial couriers carrying to Alexandria the announcement of the forthcoming council crossed a deputation coming thence en route for Constantinople, and Nestorius. They were four of St. Cyril's suffragans, deputed, by the synod he had called, in November 430, to carry to Nestorius the letters of Pope Celestine as from the pope's commissioner. 48 St. Cyril had chosen, before acting, to summon a council of his suffragans and to give the papal decision the setting of their support. Whence, from the bishops of Egypt, a synodal letter admonishing Nestorius, and attached to it twelve propositions for him to sign and accept. Whence a certain delay, and, because of these twelve propositions, a new source of discord. At the outset let us note that for the consequences which followed from the accidental setting in which Rome's ultimatum was presented, none is to be blamed but the author of that setting, not St. Celestine but his commissioner.

The twelve propositions were the work of a skilful theologian drawn up to provide against any chance of equivocation on the part of the man who was to sign them, and whose sincerity was naturally suspect. Whatever hope Nestorius might have had of retaining both his see and his heresy by a simple acceptance of Pope Celestine's demands, would not survive his reading of this formidable requisitory. Unfortunately, with all their wealth of detail and distinctions, and despite their evident usefulness for nailing down a slippery opponent, they were an addition far beyond what the pope himself had demanded. Nestorius might be well within his rights in ignoring them. More seriously still, as compromising the pope's action, they presented the papal decision about the faith in St. Cyril's own special terminology, a terminology which could be explained in an heretical sense as well as in a Catholic sense, a terminology very like what had been condemned in Apollinaris 49 and what was again to be condemned in Eutyches, a terminology by no means beyond criticism and one to which no Antiochian, Catholic or not, was likely to give assent. That the Roman decision should have been presented in what appeared as the trappings of party theology, at the very moment when party feeling ran so high, was a great misfortune. Rome apparently knew nothing about the twelve propositions. St. Celestine never mentions them. They were designed as a personal test for Nestorius, and for that only. Unfortunately they raised the whole Antiochian school against their author, the Bishop of Antioch leading the denunciation of St. Cyril as himself a heretic — an Apollinarian who believed that in Our Lord there is but one nature. At the request of John of Antioch another great man took up his pen to criticise the twelve propositions, Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus, a greater scholar than St. Cyril and almost as great a theologian.

So the winter passed and the spring (November, 430-May, 431). The pope agreed to the council (beginning of May, 431) and appointed legates to represent him. They were the bishops Arcadius and Projectus, and the priest Philip; and the pope, in their credentials, wrote to the emperor that the legates would explain his decision, to which he made no doubt the council would adhere. The legates themselves he instructed to co-operate with St. Cyril and to follow his lead throughout. To St. Cyril himself, who had written asking, logically enough, whether Nestorius was to be considered already excommunicated since the ten days of grace had long since run out, the pope wrote a reminder that God wills not the death of the sinner but his repentance. It is the salvation of Nestorius that now concerns the pope. Let not Cyril be numbered with those of whom Sacred Scripture speaks "swift to shed blood. "

The council was summoned for Pentecost, June 8, 431. Nestorius had arrived, with his supporters, by Easter. St. Cyril came just before the feast, accompanied by fifty bishops from Egypt; the shifty Bishop of Jerusalem five days later. They sat down to wait for John of Antioch, whom the emperor had appointed to preside, and the bishops of his " patriarchate. " They waited a full fourteen days — two weeks for both sides to organise, and for their supporters to battle in the streets of Ephesus — and then, thanks to St. Cyril's urgency and despite numerous protests, on June 22 the council opened with something like 159 bishops present. St. Cyril presided, no doubt in virtue of the commission of 430 deputing him to judge Nestorius. After a formal protest, from the Count who represented the emperor, against the council's meeting before the arrival of the Antiochians, the assembly passed immediately to the business of Nestorius and his theories. The notaries read the charges and Nestorius was formally summoned to appear, summoned three times as custom required, and, of course, he refused. The council proceeded without him. The creed of Nicea was read and hailed as the profession of orthodox faith. St. Cyril's letter to Nestorius 50 was read too, and approved as conforming to the creed of Nicea. It was then the turn of Nestorius' reply to St. Cyril. This too was read out, and when the question was put "Whether or not it accorded with Nicea?", the bishops, by acclamation, unanimously anathematised the letter and its author. Next, at the demand of the Bishop of Jerusalem, Pope Celestine's letter to Nestorius was read out, the letter of St. Cyril to Nestorius which contained the twelve propositions, and the report of the four bishops sent by him to Nestorius. Extracts from earlier writers to show the orthodoxy of the term Theotokos were presented, and after them the passages from Nestorius to illustrate his theories. Finally the council "urged thereto by the canons and by the letter of our most holy Father and colleague Celestine, Bishop of the Roman Church, " declared Nestorius deposed for his contumacy, and for the errors publicly proclaimed in his sermons, his letters, and his speeches even here at Ephesus. A report was drawn up for the emperor, and the bishops dispersed to their lodgings, escorted by the enthusiastic populace, through a city illuminated in honour of the victory of truth over heresy, of the Theotokos over her would-be traducer.

But the history of the council does not, by any means, end with the story of its first laborious session. Nestorius, for example, appealed from its sentence to the emperor, alleging that the council should not have begun while so many of the bishops had not yet arrived. And the emperor, irritated by the bishops' independence of his lieutenant, the Count Candidian, lectured them for their disregard of his orders and ordered the council to sit once more and not to disperse until it was unanimous in its judgment (June 29). This perhaps was a reference to the hitherto absent Antiochians, who had arrived (June 24) two days only after the great opening session, and before even the report of this had gone in to the emperor. Upon hearing what had already taken place these bishops had straightway formed themselves into a council apart; the Count Candidian, reporting the events of June 22, renewed his protest before them; and the bishops excommunicated the other council and its president: the council for proceeding in their absence, St. Cyril for his twelve " heretical " propositions. So far had events progressed when, finally, there arrived the legates from Rome. They joined themselves to St. Cyril and on July 10, in their presence, the second session of the council opened — nearly three weeks after the first. There were present the bishops who had assisted at the first session and those only, St. Cyril still president, still "holding the place of the most holy and venerable archbishop of the Roman Church Celestine. "

It was the Roman legates who now took the initiative. They demanded that there be read the letter of Pope Celestine to the council, the letter of May 7 which narrates the pope's decision and invites the council to adhere to it. More, when the bishops broke into acclamation of the agreement the legates were careful to interrupt them and to stress the point that, less important than the fact of the pope's decision being in agreement with that of the council, was the pope's demand that the council should execute his decision. The council having reached that conclusion in its first session, it remained only for the legates to confirm what it had done. First of all they must examine the minutes of its proceedings; and the council adjourned to give them the necessary time. It reassembled for the third session the next day, and one of the legates, the priest Philip, in a striking speech notable for the assumption of the Roman primacy that underlay it, declared the proceedings of the famous first session valid and good in law. The minutes were then formally read, and the sentence decreed against Nestorius.

A report of this new session was sent to the emperor, and, an effect no doubt of the more independent Roman spirit, it contained no reference to his recent edict, no apology for the flagrant contravention. Five days later, after repeated unavailing summonses to John of Antioch and his followers to appear before the council and explain their conduct, the council excommunicated them also; to the number of thirty-four. And once more they sent to the emperor an official report, and to the pope an account of all that had happened since June 22.

The emperor in his reply took a truly unexpected line. He declared his approval of the condemnation of Nestorius, and also of the sentence passed by the Antiochians on St. Cyril. To assist in the restoration of unity he now sent one of his Ministers who could explain to the bishops "the plans our divinity has in mind for the good of the faith. " The day that saw the new functionary arrive with this letter 51 saw also the arrest of the excommunicated leaders — St. Cyril as well as Nestorius was in prison. John of Antioch had called in Caesar, and Caesar had acted.

The history now becomes a confusion of protestations and counter protestations, of intrigues at the court, of backstairs influence and bribes to officials. St. Cyril knew the court, knew the only means which at times influence those whose influence in such places is paramount. He had the means to influence the influential: he made lavish use of them. The emperor slowly gave way. In a joint conference at Chalcedon (September 11, 431) he received delegates from the two councils, and although he refused St. Cyril a hearing, he refused equally to listen to suggestions that the famous twelve propositions were anti-Nicene. He accepted moreover the deposition of Nestorius and he allowed the return of St. Cyril to Alexandria. The council he declared at an end, the bishops might now return to their churches. Nestorius was to go into exile.

But between the rival deputations the division was as wide as ever. The Antiochians the emperor had been powerless to win over, yet " because before us none has been able to convict them" he would not condemn them. The council ended, then, with Nestorius condemned and isolated, but with a new division between Alexandria and Antioch and the bishops of the two "patriarchates". "For all the tactlessness of Cyril, and the obstructions of John of Antioch, it was with the solution which Rome had from the beginning prescribed that the conflict came to its end. It was the Roman See, and that alone, which came through the violent and confused crisis that we call the Council of Ephesus with its prestige undiminished, nay even greater than before. " 52

But far more than to the mistakes of St. Cyril and John of Antioch, the responsibility for the confusion is to be laid to the general willingness of the Easterns to make Caesar the arbiter in the things that are properly God's. The monks and clergy persecuted by Nestorius appeal to him, and Nestorius appeals too. The simple ecclesiastical procedure of the Roman See, the traditional procedure for charges against high ecclesiastics, is disregarded again by the emperor, when, to settle between the contending parties, he summons the council. Again he intervenes — at the demand once more of a bishop, John of Antioch — to quash the council's proceedings and to order a re-hearing (June 28, 431) and if, at the end, he accepts the solution first proposed by Rome, his acceptance is no more than an act of grace. The emperor's interference had simply increased the confusion and magnified the bitterness in which the affair was conducted, and his interference had been sought and welcomed by all the ecclesiastics concerned, turn by turn, excepting, only and always, one, the Bishop of the Roman Church.

With the meeting between the emperor and the delegates at Chalcedon, in the September of 431, the history of the council ends. Not so, however, the history of the relations between Alexandria and Antioch, and of the theories associated respectively with each. When Pope Celestine replied to the synodal letter of the council he necessarily made reference to the council's condemnation of John of Antioch. He is most anxious that John, too, shall subscribe to the council's decision, although he evidently looks upon him as a Nestorian in his views. He does not, however, endorse the council's excommunication, that matter being too weighty for any authority less than his own to decide. But before Pope Celestine could proceed further with regard to the Antiochians he died, July 27, 432. His successor, Sixtus III, was however of the same mind and, in a letter to the Orientals, he insisted on their submission, since it was to a decision of the Apostolic See that submission was demanded. John of Antioch was not a Nestorian, but he looked askance at the Cyrillian terminology in which the orthodox faith offered for his acceptance was formulated. Before he could accept St. Cyril as a fellow Catholic, St. Cyril and he must mutually explain themselves. In a happier atmosphere than the antechambers of any council could have provided explanations were made and an accord reached, both parties signing the formulary which expressed in terms acceptable to each the faith they had always held in common. John, the formulary signed, accepted the definition of Ephesus, the orthodoxy of the term Theotokos, and the deposition of Nestorius (433).

The celebrated formulary was the work of Theodoret. It is important because it sets out the points of the faith both parties held in common, and is evidence of the sacrifices of individual preferences in terminology, sacrifices made mutually for the sake of peace. The sacrifices were chiefly on the side of St. Cyril. His favourite phrase, "one incarnate nature of God the Word, " disappears, and in its place he consents to use the Antiochian term, "the union of two natures." Also, by this time, he had explained away the difficulties occasioned by his twelve propositions, especially the phrase " a natural union " used to describe the union of the Divine and Human in Our Lord. Theodoret had criticised this especially, for it seemed to leave loopholes for the theories which considered the union as an absorption of one nature by the other. St. Cyril explained that "natural" was used in the phrase in contradistinction, not with "person," but with "moral" or "virtual." Nestorius had taught that the Divine and Human were, practically, distinct existences, only united morally. To make his heresy clear St. Cyril, in the third of the propositions, asked him to say the union was real, not moral merely. The word to which Theodoret objected was simply chosen to express the union's reality. It has to be allowed to Theodoret that St. Cyril did not make very clear the distinction he drew between " nature", (physis) and "substance" (hypostasis), and while what St. Cyril called " a natural union " was, in his mind, something very different from an Apollinarian and Monophysite use of the words would have conveyed, there was certainly room for misunderstanding.

For the moment, however, misunderstanding was at an end, although Theodoret seems never to have been convinced in his inner man of the sincerity of the Alexandrian explanation, or, to speak more truly, of the Alexandrian terminology's being patient of such explanation. St. Cyril as long as he lived could explain to objectors, and decide between the rival interpretations of his terminology, and he could keep his own followers loyal to the agreement of 433; as long as he lived there was peace. He died in 444. John of Antioch had predeceased him, as had Pope Sixtus. Of the chief actors in the drama of 431, three alone were left, the emperor at Constantinople, Theodoret in his great diocese of Cyrrhus, and, away in the distant oasis of the Thebaid, almost at the limits of the known world, Nestorius his friend. The peace endured yet three years longer, and then, in a fiercer heat than ever, the old rivalries flamed yet once again.

CHALCEDON. 446-452

In the theological crisis of 448-451 which draws to a head in the Council of Chalcedon, the rivalry of Alexandria and Constantinople again plays its part. For the third time in less than forty years the Egyptian primate is to sit in judgment on the "primate of honour. " But while the Alexandrian is, this time, as much in the wrong as was Theophilus in 407, the issue is not merely personal. As in 431 it is a question of the faith, and it is the successor of Theophilus and St. Cyril who now patronises the heresy.

This time it was the Bishop of Constantinople who was the Catholic, and when, worsted, and obstinate to the last in his heresy, Dioscoros of Alexandria fell, his people, save for a tiny minority of court officials and imperialists, chose to follow him out of the Church. Not that they would so describe their action, nor Dioscoros himself. They were the Catholics, the rest were Nestorians, and Nestorian too that Council of Chalcedon which condemned Dioscoros; while, for the orthodoxy of their faith, the Egyptians appealed to the theology of St. Cyril ! The story of the events of which the Council of Chalcedon in 451 is the centre, offers many points of very high interest. Its definitions brought to a finish the debate on the fundamental theology of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and the council's proceedings were the occasion of the clearest testimony to the Roman Primacy as a primitive Christian tradition, which the collective eastern episcopate, acting freely, ever made. On the other hand, the circumstances in which the definition was adopted by the council produced effects which reacted on the relations between Church and State for centuries. The last long stage now began in the struggle between Rome and the Catholic Emperor for the control of the Church within the Empire — the struggle which only ended with the destruction of the Church there, with its transformation into a State institution from which, actually, Rome was excluded. Chalcedon is incidentally an important stage in the long road that leads from the Council of 381 to the schism of 1054. We can note, once more, in the history of the intrigues and debates which preceded, accompanied and followed the council, all the features that appeared twenty years earlier at Ephesus. Not one of them is missing: the innovator with his theory, the bishops, condemnation, the appeal to the emperor, the court's policy of expediency, the pope defining the Faith, the definition disregarded so long as the court bishops are in the ascendant; finally comes the council — which is not a means of the pope's choosing, but of the emperor's — and, resulting from the accidental circumstances of the council, a long aftermath of religious feud and civil disorder.

At Ephesus St. Cyril had been the great figure. Twenty years later that role fell to his one time adversary Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus. Theodoret has his place in ecclesiastical history and a great place again in the history of Catholic theology. Theodore of Mopsuestia had been his tutor, as he had been the tutor of Nestorius, but Theodoret had revised his master's theories, expurgated them of their errors and heretical tendencies, and if ever he had leaned to Nestorianism he was by this time most assuredly Catholic. His terminology, judged by the more exact use of later times, is, like that of all these pioneer thinkers, loose and faulty. But he was a more exact scholar than St. Cyril, and if he lacked St. Cyril's intellectual power and depth, he was a useful counterbalance to the Alexandrians, as he was also a barrier against the heretical tendencies of some of his own associates. He was, too, a great bishop, a true shepherd to the vast diocese he ruled for so long, a model of pastoral zeal and charity. St. Cyril's death in 444 left Theodoret the greatest personality in the Eastern Church.

Such was the man whose opposition a monk of Constantinople, Eutyches, now drew down on himself. Eutyches was himself a highly influential person in the religious life, not of the capital only but of all the Eastern Empire. He was the head of one of the city's largest monasteries — it counted three hundred monks — and by reason of his great age, and the repute of his ascetic life, a kind of patriarch of the world of monks, while at the court the all-powerful official of the moment was his godson, the eunuch Chrysaphius. Eutyches, then, had the means to impress his ideas on a very large world indeed and in theology his ideas were Apollinarian. Whence bitter opposition to Theodoret and all who shared his opinions, and a long campaign of mischief-making throughout the East designed to undo the union of 433, to destroy the remaining chiefs of the Antiochian school and to impose on all, not only the Alexandrian theology as alone patient of an orthodox meaning, but also the heresy that Our Lord was not truly a human being. To this Theodoret replied in a work — Eranistes (The Beggar-man) — in which, in dialogue form, without naming Eutyches he exposed and attacked the peculiar form of Apollinarianism he professed. At the same time the Bishop of Antioch, Theodoret's superior, appealed to the emperor to suppress the new heresy.

How great was the influence of Eutyches at court was revealed immediately. An edict appeared snubbing the Bishop of Antioch for his intervention, while Irenaeus, Bishop of Tyre, another of the party, was deposed and ordered to resume his lay status-an unprecedented usurpation on the part of the State; whereupon, heartened by these signs of imperial patronage, the intrigues spread ever more widely. One of the most notable of the Antiochian survivors of the crisis of 431 was the Bishop of Edessa — Ibas. He, too, had been a pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia and a friend of Nestorius. He had turned from Nestorius in irritation and disgust, upon his refusal to accept the Theotokos unreservedly, but, true disciple of Theodore, Ibas, while himself orthodox enough, remained the sworn enemy of the Alexandrian mode of theologising in what concerned the Incarnation. Towards Ibas, too, the intrigues were then directed, as they were directed, once more, against Theodoret and against the bishop who was their superior and the nominal leader of their party, Domnus of Antioch.

In this new offensive Eutyches found a powerful ally in the new Bishop of Alexandria, Dioscoros. Dioscoros comes down to us painted in the darkest of colours, a kind of ecclesiastical brigand and blackmailer, to whom no crime came amiss if it furthered his immediate ambition and greed for money. When, later, Flavian of Constantinople died as the result of the injuries received at the council where Dioscoros presided, tongues were not lacking to say that he died at the patriarch's own hands ! Be that as it may, he had already, in the four years since he succeeded St. Cyril, won a name for carrying things with a high hand, with a cruelty and unscrupulousness that seemed to show a complete absence of heart. For some time, now, this sinister personage had been in close relation with Eutyches. The monk had done him good service at court. Now it would be for him to return the obligation; and how eagerly he welcomed the opportunity !

He began by an imperious letter to Domnus questioning the orthodoxy of Theodoret, and that of Domnus for tolerating Theodoret. Theodoret received an order from the court to confine himself in Cyrrhus. Everything seemed to threaten a crusade of Eutyches against the Catholics of Syria and Asia Minor. Eutyches had even taken the step of seeing what Rome would do for his party, representing his Catholic victims as Nestorians, of course, when (November 8, 448) the whole situation suddenly shifted. Eutyches was formally denounced to his own bishop, Flavian, for the heretic he undoubtedly was. The tables were turned. The hunter was now himself in the toils.

But a much more anxious man than Eutyches was the Bishop of Constantinople! He had much to fear if he betrayed the faith, but more — in this world — if he condemned the all-powerful monk. So far, all through the crisis, he had striven to ignore the crisis. Now he must act, particularly since the denunciation was the work of the bishop who had been the first to denounce Nestorius, and who made every sign that, once again, he would hold on, Eusebius of Dorylaeum.

Eutyches was cited to answer to the charge. He refused to come, repeatedly. His health, his age, his vows, his holy rule, all were alleged in turn, and when at last he did appear it was with a letter of protection from the Emperor and with the highest officers of the court for escort. He refused to give up his theory. There were not, in God Incarnate, two natures, for a humanity such as ours Christ Our Lord had not. And he quoted as his defence the formula dear to St. Cyril "One incarnate nature of God the Word. " He had taken this formula in its monophysite sense, and had developed it in his own way, for whatever the consequences of St. Cyril's use of the term physis, the substantial error of Eutyches is his own. It finds no warrant in St. Cyril, nor did the Egyptians who, after Chalcedon, broke away in the name of St. Cyril claim Eutyches, too, as a patron. They were indeed as anxious to condemn him as was Chalcedon itself.

Flavian's council — thirty-two bishops in it — made short work of Eutyches once they had forced him into the open. Since he would not consent to admit the two natures they deposed him, from his office and from his orders, and declared him excommunicated. Given the circumstances it was an act of very high courage. Flavian was to pay for it with his life.

Eutyches of course appealed, first to Alexandria and then, the emperor also writing on his behalf, to Rome. Dioscoros acted immediately. Without even the formality of an enquiry, beyond the reading of Eutyches' exposition of his belief, he declared the sentences passed on him null and received him into communion. With the court, too, Eutyches' good favour continued. He petitioned for a council to try his appeal, the emperor consented. The council was summoned (March 30, 449) to meet at Ephesus for the following first of August. Dioscoros was summoned to it, and the pope was invited also.

It was the good fortune of the Church that at this moment the Roman See was ruled by one of the only two of its bishops whom all later history has agreed to style "the Great. " This was St. Leo I. He had, at this time, been pope a matter of nine years and was a man close on fifty years of age. He was gifted in the handling of men, and possessed of a vast experience. For years before his election he had been employed in important diplomatic missions by the emperor as well as by the popes. He was the traditional Roman character at its best, the natural instinctive ruler, and he added to this the less usual happy circumstance that he was a skilled theologian, and for knowledge of the merits and the history of this latest question in no way dependent on the learning of others. But here, too, the Roman genius showed itself in his leaning towards simple formulae to express what could be expressed, and in his silence about matters which lay beyond human powers of elucidation. It is also worth recalling that St. Leo wrote a Latin of singular strength and clearness in which the whole man is admirably mirrored. Of Eutyches he had already some knowledge, from the attempt to trick him into patronising the heresy in the preceding year. Now he had the monk's account of the trial, and the emperor's recommendations too. Finally, but very tardily, as the pope reprovingly noted, he received a report from Flavian.

St. Leo fell in with the emperor's plan for a council and appointed three legates to represent him. To them he entrusted a series of letters (June 13, 449). To the emperor he wrote that in a letter to Flavian he was going to expound " what the Catholic Church universally believes and teaches" on the matter. To Flavian he wrote the dogmatic letter ever since famous as the Tome of St. Leo. It is written with all his own vigorous clearness, and marked by that consciousness of his office that is so evident in every action of his twenty-one years, reign. Our Lord, it states, is only one person but possesses two natures, the divine and the human. These natures are not confused, not mixed, though the singleness of personality entails a communion in the acts and properties of each distinct nature, the only Son of God having been crucified and buried as the Creed declares. There is, in this historic document, nothing whatever of speculative theology, nothing of ingenious philosophical explanations to solve difficulties. The pope shows no desire to explain the mystery, none at all to discuss rival theories. He makes a judgment, gives a decision, re-affirms the tradition, and all in his own characteristic style which fitted so well the office and the occasion.

The council met — a week late — and in the same basilica which had seen the condemnation of Nestorius in 431. There were a hundred and twenty bishops present, and, by command of the emperor, Dioscoros presided. St. Leo, to judge from his letters, although he had consented to take part in the council had not expected very much from it. But there developed immediately such a transformation that in the end the pope could not see the council for the episcopal bandits who composed and directed it — - in illo Ephesino non synodo sed latrocinio to quote his own lapidary phrase. And as the Latrocinium, the den of thieves, of Ephesus it has gone down to history.

The Latrocinium lasted a fortnight, the second session being held on August 22. The first move of Dioscoros was to exclude forty-two of the bishops, some because they had been judges in the previous trial of Eutyches, others because they were suspected of being unfavourable to his theories. What little opposition threatened to show itself Dioscoros quelled with terrible threats of punishment to come, deposition, exile, death; and to give the threats reality paraded the soldiery placed at his disposal.

The pope's letters were ignored, the legates, Julius of Pozzuoli weakly making no protest. 53 Next Eutyches was allowed to make a vague profession of faith in which there was no sign of his heresy. His accuser was not allowed to speak, and the sentences on Eutyches were all annulled. He was rehabilitated and restored to his monastery. Finally there came what might be called the trial of Flavian. It could only end in the way Dioscoros and Eutyches had planned when they worked the summoning of the Council. He was deposed, condemned and marched off to prison. All the bishops present signed the acquittal of Eutyches and the sentence on Flavian, except St. Leo's legatees. In the second session it was the turn of the Antiochian theology. St. Cyril's famous propositions, which had slept since the peace of 433, were brought out once more, and confirmed and officially accepted as Catholic doctrine. Ibas and Theodoret, like Flavian, were deposed and excommunicated — in their absence, for, needless to say, they had been most carefully kept away from Ephesus. Luckily for themselves, perhaps, for such was the ill-treatment to which Flavian was subjected that he died from it. The legates managed to escape.

Once more in the East, then, heresy was supreme, the heresy of a faction, of a small minority, and it was supreme because the heresiarchs had the emperor's ear, and because that influence seemed to a group of bishops themselves not heretical (as yet) an instrument for the subjection of a rival group. The days when Eusebius of Nicomedia "managed" Constantine seemed for the moment to have returned.

There remained, however, Rome, and St. Leo. Flavian, before he died, had managed to draw up an appeal. Theodoret also wrote one in truly magnificent style as became the great stylist of his time. There was, too, the report of the legates when, ultimately, they had made their way back. St. Leo did not lack for details. This was his opportunity to write to the emperor, October, 449, protesting vigorously against the mockery of the recent council, "an insult to the faith, a blow to the entire Church" and demanding a truly general council in which bishops from all over the world should sit, and in which Flavian's appeal could be heard. He wrote also to the sister of Theodosius, the Empress Pulcheria. From the emperor, two months later even, the pope had had neither reply nor acknowledgement. At Christmas therefore he wrote once more, and in the February of 450, at his urgent request, the emperor's western colleague Valentinian III wrote, too, and Valentinian's mother the Empress Galla Placidia. Finally, March 17, St. Leo himself wrote yet again, and once more to Pulcheria. In April the emperor at last replied. His letter is a defence of what was done at Ephesus, pointedly ignoring the fact of the appeals from its victims to the pope, ignoring, too, the reminders of Valentinian III's letters that the Roman See is supreme in all matters of religion. Theodosius more or less suggests that the East can regulate its own disputes in these matters. Let the most revered Patriarch of Rome — a new title he coins for the Roman Bishop — keep to the things that really concern him.

Meanwhile a " successor " to Flavian had been appointed, one of the Bishop of Alexandria's henchmen, and had sent to St. Leo notice of his election. It gave the pope a last opportunity to plead with Theodosius. The pope explained that he could not enter into communion with "him who now presides over the Church of Constantinople" until he is satisfied of his orthodoxy. Such satisfaction he can give by notifying his assent to the letter recently sent to Flavian — the Tome. The two bishops who bear the letter will receive his submission. This letter bears the date of July 16, 450. Whether or not it would have had any more success than the previous appeals no one can say, but before the two bishops reached Constantinople the long deadlock was ended. Theodosius II was dead, killed by a fall from his horse.

The situation changed immediately. The new ruler was the devotedly Catholic Pulcheria, and the man she married shortly afterwards and associated with herself in the Empire, Marcian, was Catholic too. The exiled bishops were immediately recalled, the body of Flavian brought back to Constantinople with all manner of solemnity. Eutyches was placed in retirement, and gradually, one by one, the bishops of the Latrocinium went back on their acclamations and votes. In all they had done, they now explained, they had yielded only to fear. The council for which St. Leo had pleaded, a truly universal council, would be summoned and St. Leo was asked himself to preside (August to November, 450). The edict convoking the council is dated May 17, 451, and the place and date are Nicea for September I following. St. Leo had already decided how the servile bishops of the Latrocinium should be dealt with. The rank and file were to be received back on easy terms, if they acknowledged their wrongdoing. The case of the leaders, Dioscoros notably, he reserved to himself. Now, accepting the plan of a new council, St. Leo named four legates to represent him. One of the legates is to preside. The council is not to discuss the matter of faith involved. It is simply to accept the letter to Flavian and the definition of faith it contains.

There were the usual delays. There was a change in the place of meeting. The council finally opened at Chalcedon on October 8, 451, with between five and six hundred bishops present — so far as mere numbers went it was easily the greatest council of antiquity, and the greatest of all councils until that of the Vatican fourteen hundred years later. Among the members of the council the Roman legates had the first place. With them lay the initiative. They led the council. But the actual presidency was in the hands of a body of eighteen high officials of the court. Upon them lay the responsibility for maintaining order within the Council. They were, compositely, the Speaker of its discussions. The council's first care was to revise the proceedings of the Latrocinium. Dioscoros was removed from the seat he occupied as Bishop of Alexandria, and, as one of those to be judged, placed in the middle of the floor. Theodoret, reinstated by St. Leo's orders, was next introduced and his appearance gave rise to the council's first "scene. " Curses and execrations from the Alexandrians, cheers and acclamations from his own supporters, greeted him as he took his place. Then the minutes of the Latrocinium, amid further demonstrations of emotion, were read out by the notaries and the question being put by the presiding officials the council declared Flavian's condemnation of Eutyches in 448 to have been in accord with the traditional faith, and its own.

But the emperor's representatives were not content with this. They asked the council for a new declaration of faith. Upon which the bishops declared that the Tome of St. Leo was sufficient. The Tome was then read, in company with the creed of Nicea and St. Cyril's two letters to Nestorius. The bishops cheered and cheered again the successive declarations, and the perfect accord between the two theologians, Roman and Alexandrian, between the Tome and the definitions of Ephesus 431. When the Tome itself was read their enthusiasm broke all bounds. "Behold the faith of the Fathers! the faith of the Apostles! So do we too, all of us, believe, all who are orthodox believe the same! Anathema to whoever believes otherwise! Thus through Leo has Peter spoken! "

Dioscoros, in the next session, was tried and deposed. He had protected the heretical Eutyches, had suppressed at the Council of 449 St. Leo's message to the council, and, latterly, had excommunicated St. Leo himself. St. Leo had left it to the council to sentence Dioscoros, and the council now left it to St. Leo's representatives. " Then, Paschasinus, with his fellow legates, Lucentius and Boniface ' holding the place of Leo the most holy and blessed Patriarch of Great Rome and Archbishop' solemnly recited a summary of the crimes of the Bishop of Alexandria and concluded: ' Wherefore the most holy and most blessed archbishop of great and elder Rome, by us and the present most holy synod, together with the thrice-blessed and praiseworthy Peter the Apostle, who is the rock and base of the Catholic Church, and the foundation of the orthodox faith, has stripped him of the episcopal and of all sacerdotal dignity; wherefore this most holy and great synod will vote what is in accordance with the canons against the aforesaid Dioscoros. ' " 54

In 431 Rome had deposed the Bishop of Constantinople, and a General Council had carried out her decision. Now, twenty years later, Rome had similarly deposed a Bishop of Alexandria and a second General Council had once more, unanimously, accepted the decision because of the see whence it came.

The fifth session was marked by a striking protest against imperial interference in matters of Church discipline. "We are all of the same opinion, " the council made known to its lay presidents "that government of the Church by imperial edicts must cease. The Canons are there. Let them be followed. Upon you lies the responsibility. "

The work of the council was now finished, the Tome of St. Leo solemnly accepted, the outrage of 449 made good, the chief criminal punished. The bishops might have dispersed, but the emperor still wished for a declaration of faith, a new creed, a new rule by which to measure orthodox and heretic. To this the council objected; the Tome of St. Leo, the bishops declared, was a sufficient statement of the true doctrine. As for the legates, it was in their instructions that they were not to consent to a reopening of the discussion about the point of faith. But the emperor's representatives insisted, and a profession of faith was drafted, and put to the council at its sixth session, October 22, 451. Most of the bishops liked it well enough, but the bishops of the East — the Antioch group — protested; so, also, did the papal legates. The draft had, in fact, omitted all reference to the Tome of St. Leo, and in place of the Roman formulary, "in two natures", it contained the ambiguity favoured by Dioscoros, "of two natures". The new creed was, seemingly, as carefully ambiguous as all the creeds of State manufacture since the days of Constantine. It was designed no doubt as a statement of Catholic doctrine, but designed also to avoid any provocation of Monophysite 55 opposition, a creed which Catholic and Monophysite might sign together. St. Leo's legates would have none of it. Either the Tome of St. Leo — or they would go back to Rome, and another council there would decide the matter. Whereupon a tremendous eagerness to conciliate the legates, and a commission to arrange a compromise. Finally there came forth a lengthy formulary indeed. The creeds of Nicea and Constantinople (381) to begin it, then an acceptance of the letters of St. Cyril to Nestorius so that no Alexandrian could say that Chalcedon in condemning the heresy of St. Cyril's successor had condemned St. Cyril himself, and finally, for the theological dispute which had occasioned the Council, an explicit acceptance of the Tome of St. Leo, now declared to be "in harmony with the confession of the great apostle Peter, a barrier against all evil thinkers, the bulwark of orthodox faith. " Then followed the formulary stating the faith — it was in the terminology of St. Leo's letter.

Rome then, in St. Leo, had triumphed once more, the faith over heresy, thanks to Rome; and it was in the clarity of the Roman phraseology that the belief was proclaimed. But this had not been achieved easily, nor was the majority in the council wholeheartedly enthusiastic about the last part of the business- which involved the victory of a non-Alexandrian manner of speech over the terminology dear to St. Cyril. The greater part of the bishops had been, for a lifetime, too sympathetic to St. Cyril's way of describing the mystery to accept another way easily or wholeheartedly — even though they accepted that it was a true way of describing it. Already during the very council, in this spirit in which so many of the bishops accepted the formulary of the faith, the dissension was evident that was presently to inaugurate two centuries of acute disturbance and the loss of whole races to the Church. It was only at the emperor's insistence, that these bishops had finally consented to promulgate, in a terminology so repugnant to them, the faith which they held in common with the rest. Had it not been for the emperor, the question would never have arisen; the doctrinal work of the council would have ended — as the pope intended — with its acceptance of the Tome as the Catholic faith.

In a lengthy letter to St. Leo the council gave an account of its work. Our Lord, they said, had commissioned the Apostles to teach all nations. "Thou then hast come even to us. To us thou hast been the interpreter of the voice of the blessed Peter, to 211 thou hast brought the blessing of his faith." Five hundred and twenty bishops were met in Council; "Thou didst guide us, as doth the head the body's limbs. " Dioscoros has been fitly punished. Who more criminal than he, who, to the wickedness of reinstating Eutyches, "dared in his folly to menace him to whom the Saviour made over the care of His vineyard, Your Holiness we mean, to excommunicate him whose charge it is to unite the Church's body."

St. Leo had seen orthodoxy vindicated and the privilege of his see proclaimed as never so strikingly before. But not all the council's proceedings were likely to please him. And the council knew it. The council had, once more, following the unhappy precedent of 381, set itself to heighten the prestige of the see where now the imperial capital was established. To the famous "primacy of honour" voted Constantinople in 381 Chalcedon recognised considerable extensions. By its ninth, seventeenth and twenty-eighth canons the council gave legal consecration to all the jurisdiction which had accrued to Constantinople, since 381, though the illegal usurpations of its bishops. The bishops of Constantinople had for seventy years been the spiritual pirates of the Eastern Church. One after another the different metropolitan sees had seen their rights of jurisdiction invaded and captured. Now Chalcedon ratified all that had been done, blessed the spoiler, and gave him, for the future, the right to spoil as he would. The new rights, too, would develop; and to Constantinople would accrue, on this unecclesiastical principle of the city's worldly importance, such an importance in the Church that, by the side of it, the ancient traditional apostolic prestige of Alexandria and Antioch would be as nothing, and the Roman See, in appearance, hardly be more than an equal.

It had clearly been law since 381 that suits between a bishop and his metropolitan should be judged by the primate of the civil diocese in which the litigating prelates lived. The innovation was now made that the judge was either the primate or the Bishop of Constantinople. This was to hold good for the three (civil) dioceses of Thrace, Pontus and Asia. The "primacy of honour " was now recognised as one of jurisdiction in all those regions where the perseverance of the capital's bishops had already established this as a fact.

The twenty-eighth canon begins by confirming the canon of 381. It goes on to say that Rome owes its traditional primacy to the city's one-time civil importance, and that Constantinople being now the imperial city, to that see too certain privileges are due. Wherefore the council grants to the see of Constantinople the right to ordain the metropolitans of the (civil) dioceses of Pontus, Asia and Thrace, and of all the missionary bishops depending on them. Constantinople is to be in these regions what Alexandria is in Egypt, what Rome is in the West, the effective supervisor of all the other sees. The Roman legates protested, but the council approved, and in its synodal letter to St. Leo made a special request for the confirmation of the novelty. The emperor wrote in the same sense, and the Bishop of Constantinople too.

But St. Leo held firm. In a series of letters to the emperor and to the empress, to the Bishop of Constantinople too, he complained sadly of the spirit of ambition which bade fair to trouble anew the peace of the Church, and suggested that the Bishop of Constantinople should be content that his see, "which no power could make an apostolic see", was indeed the see of the empire's capital. The new canons are contrary to the only rule the pope knows, that of Nicea, and he will not consent to any innovation so injurious to the rights of ancient, undoubted apostolic sees such as Antioch and Alexandria. Let the Bishop of Constantinople obey the Law as he knows it, or he too may find himself cut off from the Church. The innovations then are void, of no effect and "by the authority of blessed Peter the Apostle, in sentence altogether final, once and for all, we quash them. "

Nor was this the end of the pope's protests. To safeguard ancient rights against further encroachment on the part of the parvenu authority at Constantinople, and to keep himself informed as to the reception of the faith of his Tome throughout the East, St. Leo now installed at the imperial court a permanent representative. This was Julian, Bishop of Kos, skilled in both Latin and Greek, Italian by birth, Roman by education, Bishop of a Greek see.

Finally March 21, 453, St. Leo replied to the synodal letter of the council. He notes the work accomplished by the council as twofold. First of all the acceptance of the defined faith and the revision of the outrages of 449. This was the purpose for which the council had been called and to the council's proceedings in this respect the pope gives all possible confirmation and praise. But the council had gone further, taken upon itself to make other decisions and regulations. Now no matter what the authority invoked to sanction these proceedings, no matter what the council, anything in them that contravenes the canons of Nicea is null and void. Of these canons as implying a derogation from the rights of his own see, there is not in all these letters a word: not a hint that St. Leo so construed the innovations. But such innovations are inspired by worldly ambition, and this, if not checked, must open the way to endless new troubles among the bishops. Therefore St. Leo stands by the old order, the traditional rule. The emperor assented, and finally, by a disavowal of his own share in the measure, and by a letter which implied submission to the papal ruling, the Bishop of Constantinople, too, made his peace. " Better certainly had the Bishop of Constantinople said plainly 'We'll say no more about the decision of Chalcedon which the Apostolic See will not confirm. ' He does not say it. He contents himself with the protestation that he has done nothing in this matter to deserve the reproach of insincerity or ambition. St. Leo believed the cause safe for which he had battled so gallantly, so tenaciously: he asked nothing more, neither of the Bishop of Constantinople whose disavowal seemed to suffice, nor of the emperor whose sincerity was beyond doubt. " 56

Notes

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