1. 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, " [1] 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 [2] 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.
1 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.
2 i.e. The Stammerer
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, " [1] 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 [2] 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.
1 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.
2 i.e. The Stammerer
