2. JUSTINIAN. 527-565
The old emperor, Justin I died on August 1, 527, and his nephew, Justinian, who throughout the reign had been the chief adviser and the real ruler, succeeded. The uncle had been one of those rough, hardy Illyrians who had more than once shown themselves such capable administrators, endowed with a hard practical common sense and a natural shrewdness that compensated for their native illiteracy. But the new emperor added to what practical abilities he inherited, a wide and extensive culture, and -- sure menace for the newly-restored peace in things ecclesiastical -- a pronounced taste for theological speculation. Justinian, like his uncle, was a Catholic. He had played an important part in the negotiations which ended the schism, and in the measures taken since to dislodge the Monophysites from the vantage points they had come to occupy during those thirty-five disastrous years. His Catholic subjects were now once more in communion with their chief the Bishop of Rome, but the subsequent measures of repression, of deposition, and confiscation had by no means reconciled the Monophysites of the eastern provinces. At heart they still remained bitterly hostile to the Catholicism of Chalcedon, and the new conformity was very largely a conformity in name alone. One of the first tasks before Justinian was to transform this nominal submission into a submission of fact.
From the new emperor the Catholic Church had everything to hope, but he was not the only figure with whom it had to reckon. Justinian was married, and the new empress, Theodora, a personality indeed, was no mere consort but associated as Augusta with her husband's new rank. They were a devoted couple, and the imperial menage a model to all their subjects. It had not always been so; and long before the time when Justin's unexpected accession had raised Justinian too, Theodora had been already famous, notorious even, as a comedienne, for her feats of impudicity in the capital’s less distinguished places of amusement. But whatever her origins, and however true the stories that circulated about her, Theodora had long since broken from it all; and she was already living in decent obscure retirement when Justinian, heir-apparent, found her, loved her, and, despite the opposition of the emperor, his uncle, married her. Like him, she was now a Catholic, but her own religious inclinations, less theological than those of Justinian, drew her to monasticism; more especially, it is suggested, to monasticism as it displayed itself in feats of unusual austerity. And the most celebrated of these spiritual athletes were, often enough, not orthodox. From their ill-instructed and undisciplined ardour, heresy and rebellion against ecclesiastical authority had drawn in the recent past only too many champions; and as Theodora's association with the monks she preferred increased, so, too, did her inclination to support and encourage the recently defeated Monophysites.
Her great influence brought it about that, in 531, the sentences of banishment were revoked; and the thousands of exiles, bishops, priests, and above all monks, now made their way back, none the less fervid in their hatred of Chalcedon and its teaching for the pain they had had to suffer in its name. They came even -- five hundred and more of them -- to Constantinople itself. Theodora procured them a common house and a church, and, blessed by her patronage, their church speedily became a centre for the capital’s fashionable devotees. Justinian, ever perplexed by a religious division which, for the first time in the empire's history, was making the imperial rule a foreign thing in the chief provinces of the State, set himself, along theological lines, to find a reconciling formula. Under his auspices conferences were held between Catholic bishops and Monophysite bishops and, yet once again, the complicated discussion took up its ancient round.
To all the Catholic explanations the heretics made the old reply, that Chalcedon had reversed Ephesus, that its supporters were Nestorians. At all costs, then, if the dissidents were to be argued back to conformity, Chalcedon must be cleared of this charge. To make clear, beyond all doubt, the opposition between what was approved at Chalcedon and what was condemned at Ephesus, a new formula expressive of the Catholic doctrine was therefore prepared. If it was Catholic doctrine, in accord with the faith of Chalcedon, to say, "One of the Trinity suffered in the Flesh", no Monophysite could truthfully assert that Chalcedon had canonised the heresy condemned at Ephesus; for no Nestorian would ever assent to such a proposition, any more than he would accept the term Theotokos. Then, again, this formula would show that Catholics and St. Cyril were of one mind on the great question, that Chalcedon had in no way condemned the saint in whose name the Monophysites justified their dissidence, for the formula was St. Cyril’s very own, devised by him for the very purpose of exposing Nestorius and used in the twelfth of the celebrated propositions of 430. It was as good Cyrillian theology as the most Cyrillian Monophysite could wish for. If it were officially announced as orthodox Catholicism, what further delay could prevent the Monophysite from accepting Chalcedon?
It was not the first time that, in Justinian's own experience, this formula had been suggested. The Akoimetoi monks had sought approbation for it from the legates of Pope Hormisdas in 519. To the legates it had too novel a sound to be welcome, and they were inclined to frown down a suggestion which promised to open new controversies at the very moment when the old ones were about to heal. Justinian was of the same opinion. The monks seemed wanton disturbers of the peace. Nor was the pope, to whom the legates referred the matter, anxious to decide, and despite the endeavours, at Rome, of a deputation from the monks, the matter went no further until Justinian, converted now to the monks's view of the formula's usefulness, made its adoption a matter of State policy. The monks, while in the West, had enlisted the support of a group of African bishops, exiled to Sardinia by the Vandals, among whom was St. Fulgentius reputed in the West the greatest theologian of the time. When in 534, then, the question was, in much changed circumstances, put to the Apostolic See the pope, John II, after consultation, approved it, quoting in his declaration both St. Cyril and St. Leo in support of his approval and once more condemning Nestorius insulsus along with impius Eutyches.
While Justinian drew up schemes for reunion, evolving formularies of reconciliation which should clothe the decision of Chalcedon in a terminology which the Monophysites could accept, showing that on the points at issue St. Leo and St. Cyril were at one, Theodora was left to deal with the more congenial business of ecclesiastical personalities. In 535 the Patriarch of Alexandria died -- a Monophysite elected years before, in the time of the Emperor Anastasius, whom Justin I had found it wiser to leave undisturbed at the time of the great change over. His people were violently divided, though Monophysites all, between the rival systems of Severus and Julian of Halicarnassus. Whence a double -- Monophysite -- election. There was no thought of a Catholic candidate, but thanks to Theodora the government influence secured the election of Theodosius the candidate of the milder, Severian, school.
The noise of the riots amid which Theodosius was installed had not yet died down when the Patriarch of Constantinople died too. Once again it was Theodora who decided the election. The new patriarch, Anthimos, was one of her own confidants, a man of ascetic life, who, though Bishop of Trebizond, had for long lived at court, and who was known to be a concealed Monophysite. At this moment, ending the resistance of years, Severus himself consented to come to the capital to assist, from the Monophysite side, at Justinian's theological conferences. The first result of his presence was the explicitly declared conversion to the heresy of the capital’s new patriarch. It seemed as though the old days of heretical domination were about to return. The two chief bishops of the East known as heretics, and supported with all the prestige of the empress, while the arch-heretic himself lived in her palace as chief adviser, and director-general of the new restoration ! What saved the situation for orthodoxy was the accidental presence of the pope, Agapitus I, in Constantinople, and his energetic action.
It was no ecclesiastical business which brought the pope to Constantinople. He came as the ambassador of the Gothic King in Italy, in a vain attempt to stave off the impending imperial re-conquest of the long-lost western provinces. But the recent changes in the personnel of the great churches, and the new doctrinal positions they implied could not but be the main subject to occupy Pope Agapitus. The new patriarch, whatever his beliefs, had been translated to his present high position from the see of Trebizond, and translations were contrary to canonical usage. Hence the pope's first hesitation to recognise Anthimos. The emperor pressing the point, the pope asked next for satisfaction in the matter of the patriarch's orthodoxy. Upon which the patriarch took the simplest of all possible ways out of the approaching difficulty and disappeared. A priest of irreproachable orthodoxy was found to fill the vacancy, and on March 13, 536, the pope himself gave him episcopal consecration.
For the Catholics of the imperial city it was already a great encouragement to see their heretical bishop deposed and a Catholic in his place. Heartened thereby, they now demanded the expulsion of the other prominent Monophysites, and especially of Severus. The pope gave his own strong support to the requests and, though he died, suddenly, before the defeat of Theodora and her proteges was complete, it was only a matter of four months before an imperial edict ordered the writings of Severus to be destroyed, and himself and his associates once more to be banished.
That Theodora's plans had been brought to nought was due, chiefly, to the vigorous action of Pope Agapitus and to the amount of popular support which that action found because it was the action of the pope. For the success of any future schemes to reconcile the Monophysites the empress must in some way enlist the pope's good will. What better way could be found than by securing the election as pope of one of her own? And Agapitus dead in the moment of his victory, what more suitable moment to install a pro-Monophysite successor than the present? No emperor had, as yet, dealt so imperially with the first of all the sees, but the new policy should be the more easily carried out since, for nearly half a century, there had been a succession of scandals and innovations in the episcopal elections at Rome.
In 498, for example, at the death of the conciliatory Anastasius II, there had been the scandal of a double election in which, while partisans of the deceased pope's milder policy in the matter of the schism of Acacius had elected their candidate, the more powerful majority of his critics had elected the more generally recognised Symmachus. The tumults of this unhappy beginning troubled the whole of this pope's six years' reign. They were only appeased by the election of Hormisdas (514) who thus appeared as the healer of a schism at Rome itself before he achieved the greater task of arranging the schism between East and West.
Hormisdas died in 523; his successor, John I, more tragically three years later. He had been despatched to Constantinople by the Gothic king, Theodoric, who ruled Italy since 493, to plead the cause of the king's Arian co-religionists in the capital. Their churches had recently been confiscated and the Arians forcibly converted. The mission failed, and on his return the pope was thrown into prison and died there. Theodoric speedily followed him into the other world but not before he had had time himself to give the Roman Church its new bishop, Felix IV ex iussu Theodorici regis says the Liber Pontificalis. Felix IV, pope through this startling innovation, proceeded to introduce into the system a second innovation more startling still, for, as the end of his life approached he named to his clergy as his successor one of his deacons, Boniface. Felix died on September 22, 530. Immediately there was trouble from those of the Roman clergy who held the late pope's nomination invalid. They were in the majority and they elected, at St. Peter's, the deacon Dioscoros, while at the Lateran the late pope's nominee was likewise consecrated and enthroned. Luckily for the peace of the city Dioscoros died within the month, and his supporters recognised his rival. Boniface II now proceeded to imitate the unhappy precedent set by Felix IV, but more solemnly. In a synod at St. Peter's he, too, named the one who was to succeed him, the deacon Vigilius. The clergy agreed; but some time later, under what circumstances we do not know, the pope came to regret what he had done and, just as publicly, he revoked it as an action beyond his powers. Boniface II reigned for even fewer years than his predecessor, and when he died (532) the troubles broke out once again. Once more there were rival candidates, faction spirit running high, bribes from the interested parties till the treasury was exhausted, and a vacancy, long for the time, of four months. With the new pope, John II, came a wholesome decree against the abuses which had marked the recent interregnum and three years' peace. To him in 535 succeeded that Pope Agapitus whose death in Constantinople has been recorded.
Given the history of the papal elections during the previous forty years, Theodora's plan of interference had then, nothing more than usually shocking about it. Nor was any choice of hers likely to be disregarded. Her choice fell upon that deacon Vigilius who, as the nominee of Boniface II, had so nearly become pope in 532. Since then he had risen to be the archdeacon of the Roman Church, the leading cleric after the pope himself. As such he had accompanied Agapitus on his diplomatic mission, and he was still in Constantinople when that pope died. The news of the pope's death travelled to Rome more quickly than Vigilius, and he returned home to find the successor of Agapitus elected, consecrated, and in function, Silverius. Vigilius, with the assistance of the imperial officials, set himself to oust the pope as the necessary preliminary to his own election. The critical situation of public affairs soon gave him his opportunity.
The war of restoration was by this time in full swing, and for five years now the armies of Justinian had been marching from one victory to another in the desperate endeavour to win back for the imperial government the provinces of the West, lost to it in the disastrous fifth century. The Vandal kings had been dispossessed in Africa, and Sicily; the Goths driven from their hold on Southern Italy. Rome itself had become once more a " Roman " city when, at the moment of Vigilius' return from Constantinople, the Goths turned to besiege in Rome the victorious imperial army and its general Belisarius. Pope Silverius, summoned to an interview with the general, was suddenly accused of treasonable correspondence with the Goths. He was immediately stripped of the insignia of his office and, clad in a monk's habit, secretly shipped from Rome that same night. To the Romans nothing more was announced than that the pope had embraced the monastic life and that the see was therefore vacant.
The clergy were assembled to elect his successor. Belisarius presided, and, despite considerable opposition, Vigilius was elected. He had been privy to the forgeries that cost Silverius his place, and he had been the pope's sole companion in the momentous interview with Belisarius. Now, at last, he was pope himself -- at any rate pope in possession. The unfortunate Silverius did, it is true, thanks to the bishop appointed to guard him, succeed in lodging an appeal against his violent deposition. Justinian ordered his return to Italy and an enquiry into the whole affair. But Belisarius was still in charge, and through his wife, who dominated him, the empress maintained her protege. Silverius was once more condemned, and banished to the little island of Palmaria off the Neapolitan coast, and there soon afterwards he died of hunger. [1]
For the next six years all the religious troubles slumbered while Justinian, Theodora, and in Italy Vigilius, found all their energies absorbed by the terrible Gothic war. It was in a province far removed from the seat of that war, Palestine, that the disputes re-awakened. And the question around which they developed was not Monophysitism but the more ancient matter of the orthodoxy of certain theories attributed to Origen. Among the monks of certain Palestinian monasteries there had, for some time, been a revival of interest in these theories, in the old heresy of the preexistence of souls and a quasi-pantheistic teaching about the last end of man. The old theories daily found new disciples, and the "new theology" found, of course, a host of zealous opponents. Whence through the early part of Justinian's reign (530-540) an ever-increasing disorder in Palestine which was by no means confined to the peaceful solitudes of the monasteries concerned. When in 541 a great synod met at Gaza to enquire into certain serious disorders in the local churches and to try the chief person accused, the Patriarch of Alexandria, it was inevitable that the bishops and dignitaries present should discuss the new trouble and plan a common course of action. One of these dignitaries was the permanent ambassador (apocrisiarius) of the Roman See at Constantinople, the deacon Pelagius, an intimate friend and confidante of Vigilius. Pelagius did all his chance allowed to strengthen the abbots in their opposition to the Origenists, and he worked in the same sense upon the mind of Justinian. He was so successful that, in 543, there appeared an imperial edict condemning the theories, and promulgating a new profession of faith in which they were repudiated. This all bishops and heads of monasteries were now obliged to sign.
Justinian was not, of course, unaware of the trouble until the moment when Pelagius intervened. More than one deputation from the rival disputants had already appeared in the capital. One of these deputies, the Origenist Theodore Askidas, had found in his temporary mission the beginning of a new career. He was named bishop of the important see of Caesarea in Cappadocia, and, his learning gaining him a place in Justinian's confidence, he contrived to live on at court after his consecration. But now, great as the favour he enjoyed, he saw the emperor influenced against the Origenist theories, and his own prestige somewhat lowered through the action of Pelagius. To keep his place he signed the formula: and set himself to prepare a counter-stroke which would dislodge Pelagius.
It was never difficult to interest the theologically-minded emperor in religious matters, and where these touched a question of civil peace less difficult still; where they concerned the reconciliation of the Monophysites least difficult of all. The plan which Askidas now proposed was just such another as Zeno and Anastasius had attempted. But it was more subtle, in this, that it did not suggest even a tacit repudiation of Chalcedon, but merely the condemnation of three allies and friends of Nestorius, two of whom Chalcedon had re-instated. It would be yet another proof to the Monophysites that Catholics were not Nestorians if Catholics condemned these old opponents of St. Cyril, proof again that Chalcedon had not undone what Ephesus had settled. The proposed condemnations were of Theodore of Mopsuestia -- the master of Nestorius -- and all his writings; of those writings of Theodoret of Cyrrhus which had been directed against St. Cyril during the controversy about Nestorius; and of the letter which Ibas, Bishop of Edessa, wrote to a Persian bishop, Maris, telling, from his point of view, the story of the Council of Ephesus. These three items of the proposed condemnations are the Three Chapters which have given their name to the subsequent controversy. It was to drag on for a good eighteen years and more, to involve the most curious of all the general councils, and finally to issue in a miserable schism that divided Italy for a generation.
The three persons concerned had been dead now nearly a century, Theodore for longer; but then Origen had been dead longer still, and yet condemned only this very year. Askidas in his turn prevailed and in 544 the edict appeared, to the dismay in particular of the Apocrisiarius. Pelagius refused to sign it, and upon his refusal the Patriarchs of Constantinople, of Alexandria, and of Antioch would only sign conditionally, the condition being that the pope, too, should sign. Here truly was a difficulty. Chalcedon, more than most, had been the pope's council, and Chalcedon had reinstated both Theodoret and Ibas in their sees upon their express repudiation of Nestorianism. It had then, for the ordinary man, cleared them of any charge of heresy. More, the letter of Ibas, now imperially condemned, had been read at Chalcedon and the Roman legates there had declared that "his letter having been read we recognised him to be orthodox. " Were the pope now to condemn Theodoret at least and Ibas, for heresies they had renounced or heretical expressions which they had explained satisfactorily, it might easily seem, given the circumstances of the condemnation, that repudiating those whom Chalcedon had gone out of its way to protect he was inaugurating a policy that would end in the repudiation of the council itself. All eyes then turned to the pope. All would depend on his action -- and the pope with whom lay decision, in this tricky attempt to conciliate the Monophysites, was the creature of the pro-Monophysite Theodora. Truly her hour had come at last, as the emperor's commands went westwards to Vigilius; and, as Askidas saw the dilemma preparing for the Roman author of his own recent trouble, he, also, may have felt a like satisfaction.
Vigilius hesitated. For a time the pre-occupations of the Gothic War gave him an excuse for temporising; Totila, the Gothic king, had now taken the offensive and was preparing to besiege Rome yet once again. But finally, as the pope celebrated the feast of St. Cecilia (November 22, 545), he was carried off from the very church by Theodora's orders and shipped to Sicily and thence, after a stay of some months, to Constantinople, where he arrived in the January of 547. During those months in Sicily the pope had learnt of the violent opposition to the emperor's edict which was gradually showing itself throughout the West. He himself adopted the same attitude, and when the emperor refused to withdraw the edict Vigilius broke off relations with the unlucky Patriarch of Constantinople who had led the way in signing it. Little by little, however, the explanations of the court theologians had their effect. By the summer of 547 the pope was once more in communion with the patriarch, and had signed a private condemnation of the Three Chapters. This, of course, was insufficient for Justinian's purpose, and the pope pleading the dignity of his see against the attempts to wring from him a public declaration, he was allowed to assemble at Constantinople a council of bishops to give his new condemnation of the Three Chapters an appearance at least of freedom. At the council, alas, the eloquence of a young Latin bishop defending Ibas was so effective that Vigilius broke up the assembly. Private interviews between the various bishops and the emperor brought them all to a striking unanimity, however, and one by one they sent in to the pope their written opinions in favour of the condemnation. Finally, on Holy Saturday, 548, Vigilius issued his public condemnation, the so-called Iudicatum. Its text has perished, but we know that, in condemning the Three Chapters, it made such reservations to safeguard the essential teaching of Chalcedon that, so far as concerned the Monophysite reunion, it might just as well never have been issued.
However, issued it was and, despite its reservations, promptly misconstrued in the West, raising storms of condemnation wherever it was known. The whole of the West -- what West remained after the devastations of war -- deserted the pope. A council in Africa excommunicated him as the betrayer of the faith of Chalcedon, and in Rome his own deacons led the opposition and gave the lead in the furious war of pamphleteering which now broke out.
The West, evidently, did not understand. Had not Vigilius himself needed to come to Constantinople to be educated in the complex question? How natural that Latin bishops, too much occupied for a century in saving the elements of civilisation to be worried with such subtleties as those presented by the leisurely Monophysite East, should also fail to understand. A general council at Constantinople might smooth away all the misunderstanding. Meanwhile both the edict of 544 and the ludicatum would be withdrawn. So it was arranged between pope and emperor. Both pledged themselves to silence on the question until the council met; and Vigilius, privately, bound himself by oath to Justinian that he would at the council do his utmost to bring about the desired condemnation.
This was in the August of 550. The council did not meet for nearly three years more. The interval was filled with crises. First of all the emperor broke his pledge of silence and, in 551, urged by Askidas, issued a new edict condemning the Three Chapters. The pope protested energetically and excommunicated Askidas, and then, Justinian planning his arrest, he fled for safety to the church of St. Peter. Thither a few days later Justinian sent troops to effect the arrest; at their heels followed the mob of the city. The doors were forced, soldiers and mob poured in. The clerics who endeavoured to protect the pope were dragged out and the soldiery then laid hands on Vigilius himself. He clung desperately to the columns of the altar, until, as the struggle heightened, these began to give way, and to save themselves from injury the soldiers released him. So far the mob had watched, scandalised, at the outrage on the old man who, Latin though he was, was yet the chief bishop of their religion. Now, as the altar and its columns fell in a roar of dust, they turned on the troops who fled for their lives. That night the pope -- marvellous feat for an ancient of eighty years -- escaped over the roofs of the city to a waiting boat and crossed the Bosphorus. His new refuge was Chalcedon, and, of all places, the basilica where, just a hundred years before, the famous council had sat around whose decision still raged these violent animosities. From his retreat he issued a well-written encyclical describing the recent events, denouncing the forgeries put into circulation in his name, and excommunicating definitely Askidas and his associates.
Justinian had overshot his mark and he knew it. The excommunicated bishops were sent across the straits to make their submission. Processions of monks and influential citizens serenaded the pope with prayers that he would return. A kind of peace was patched up, the edict of 551 was withdrawn, Vigilius gave way and preparations for the council were resumed. They consisted chiefly, on the emperor's part, in eliminating from the bishops who were to come from the West all those who had given signs of opposition to his policy. As the council drew nearer and nearer the pope's perplexity increased. It was increasingly evident that, at this council which was to educate the western bishops and guarantee the condemnation against all chance of misunderstanding, the West would have scarcely any representatives at all. Vigilius would have preferred an Italian city for its meeting place. The emperor insisted on the capital, and as the bishops arrived, all from the emperor's own Greek East, the pope's anxieties grew. One day he seemed willing to take part in its proceedings, and then he would refuse even to speak of the matter. In the end he made it known that although he would not interfere with the Council he would take no part in its deliberations. His decision would be given independently. And so there opened, on May 5, 553, in the new Sancta Sophia, the strangest of all the general councils.
The number of bishops present varied. At the first session there were a hundred and fifty. At the last, a hundred and sixty-four. Save for the picked few from Africa, and a handful of Italians, all were Greeks. The first session was taken up with the solemn reading of the documents to he condemned. In the discussion which followed, the only difficulty before the Fathers was to choose sufficiently vigorous epithets to express their abhorrence. Vigilius meanwhile, with the assistance of Pelagius, was hard at work on his own decision. On May 14 it was ready for the emperor-the Constitutum. It contained a detailed condemnation of the errors of Theodore of Mopsuestia, but his person the pope did not condemn, alleging the traditional ecclesiastical usage that left heretics once dead to whatever judgment then befell them. The writings of Ibas and Theodoret, since they were approved at Chalcedon, could not now be condemned without such condemnation involving that Council.
Justinian refused to receive the Constitutum -- Vigilius"having already condemned the Three Chapters and having sworn to maintain the condemnation. any more recent retractation on his part was naturally not welcome. The Constitutum then was not presented to the Council. Instead, at its seventh session, Justinian laid before it all the documents in which Vigilius had condemned the Three Chapters, and a decree ordering the pope's excommunication for the way in which, ever since, he had shifted and changed, and for his refusal to attend the council. The Fathers obediently approved. One week later the council came to an end (June 2, 553) with a long final condemnation of " the wicked Theodore and his wicked writings, " his supporters, defenders, and apologists. Likewise, "if anyone defends the wicked writings of Theodoret against the first Holy Council of Ephesus, against St. Cyril and his twelve anathemata, and all the things he wrote on behalf of the wretched Theodore and the wretched Nestorius. . . and does not anathematize these things. . . " he is henceforward himself anathema. Still more definitely, " if anyone defends the letter which Ibas is said to have written to the heretic Maris the Persian. . . and does not anathematize it and all its defenders, and likewise all those who say it is right or right in part, and those. . . who presume to defend, in the name of the Holy Fathers or of the Holy Council of Chalcedon the letter or the impiety it contains. . . let him be anathema. "
The good work done, the bishops dispersed. There still remained Vigilius. Vigilius unconvinced, the council’s work was incomplete. Whence a new siege of the unhappy pope. It was eight months before the emperor won him over. But in the end he yielded completely and on February 26, 554, in a second Constitutum, solemnly recognised the condemnation. Then, at last, the pope was allowed to return to his see, from which he had been absent now nine years. He was, however, destined never again to see it, for he had only travelled as far as Syracuse when death claimed him, June 7, 555. He was fortunate in his death in this, at least, that it spared him the inevitable trouble which awaited at Rome whoever had had hand or part in the alleged condemnation of Chalcedon.
Justinian determined that Pelagius should be the new pope. He was undoubtedly the ablest of all the Roman clerics, and for a good fifteen years now had been the pope's chief adviser. To pass over such ability and such experience would, in the then state of Italy, have been foolish in the extreme. Who could do more as pope for the new imperial re-organisation of the West, and especially for the reconstruction of Italy wasted by twenty-five years of savage war? Who, indeed, could do as much? There was this difficulty to overcome that Pelagius had been the very soul of the dead pope's resistance to the council. It was with his strength that Vigilius had armed himself in the conflict that followed the withdrawal of the ludicatum, and the Constitutum of 553 had been his very handiwork. The council over, Pelagius found himself separated from the pope -- as, moreover, were all the rest of the pope's advisers -- and in a monastic prison. From that prison nevertheless he had contrived to conduct a violent literary campaign against the council’s condemnations, and the news that Vigilius had submitted drove him to write only the more violently. Vigilius, he explained, to the scandalised uncomprehending West, was old, senile, isolated from his advisers, the victim yet again of the imperial tyranny. That the leader of such an opposition would retract while the air around was still dry with the bitter violence of his polemic might seem the least likely finale of all. Yet so it happened. Under circumstances of argument or blandishment of which we know nothing, Pelagius withdrew his opposition and accepted the council’s condemnation. Then, as the emperor's nominee, he set out for Rome to be there consecrated as its bishop.
A more unwelcome successor to Vigilius could hardly have been found, and, popularly considered to have surrendered his opinions as the price of his appointment, the new pope was more or less universally boycotted. In all Italy there could not be found more than two bishops to officiate at his consecration. A priest had to supply for the third. There was no attempt to elect another pope in opposition to him, but simply a cold sullen hostility. Pelagius was left to make the first move. He did it in the profession of Faith made on the day he was consecrated. He announced his faith to be the faith of Chalcedon, of St. Leo, and of all St. Leo's successors down to the last pope but two, Agapitus. All those whom they had held to be orthodox he, too, held as such, and especially did he hold to be orthodox. . . Theodoret and Ibas. In the whole statement there is not a reference to the recent council, nor to Vigilius, nor to the transactions between himself and the emperor which had resulted in his nomination.
For all its careful omissions the statement, none the less, availed little to help Pelagius. Nowhere did he ask the western bishops to acknowledge the council, nor to condemn what the council had condemned. The utmost of his demands was recognition of his own election, acknowledgement that he was the lawful pope. In his own metropolitan district he had scarcely any difficulty in this. But "Lombardy" and "Venetia", to speak more accurately the bishops of the great sees of Milan and Aquileia with their suffragans, would not enter into communion with him. Pelagius was helpless, for the imperial officials were little disposed to lend the troops for which he clamoured, and when the inevitable pamphleteering began now in Italy, he met with scanty success indeed, refuting as pope the position he had maintained so vigorously as a deacon. From Gaul there came a request that he should satisfy the bishops as to his orthodoxy. The declaration he sent, again made no mention of all the recent happenings that were the source of the anxiety, and as his classic writings against the council were now beginning to pass from one bishop to another in the West also, Pelagius wrote a final appeal for peace and unity. "Why all this recrimination? When I defended the Three Chapters was I not in accord with the majority of the bishops? I have, it is true, changed my opinion, but changed it along with the same majority. Did not St. Peter yield to the brotherly correction of St. Paul? Did not St. Augustine, too, write his Retractations? I was mistaken I allow. But then I was only a deacon and it was my duty to follow the bishops. Now the bishops have decided. Africa, Illyricum, the East, with its thousands of bishops, have condemned the Three Chapters. It would be extremely foolish to ignore such high authority and to follow in preference the guidance of these propagators of forgeries. "
Scholars of a later age, studying at their leisure the detail of these ancient dissensions, can perhaps distinguish easily between Chalcedon re-instating Theodoret and Ibas in their sees upon their giving guarantees of their orthodoxy at that moment, and the Council of 553, a hundred years later, deciding the wholly different question as to the orthodoxy of their writings at the time when, twenty years before Chalcedon, they were admittedly among the chief supporters of Nestorius. Chalcedon's approval, and the condemnation of 553, though affecting the same personages, were concerned with realities wholly distinct. [2] Between the two councils there is no contradiction. But the Latin bishops, hot and angered with ten years of controversy, always impatient of the theoretical subtleties in which their eastern brothers were so much at home, were in no mood to listen to such distinctions at the time. Hence, on the part of some, a refusal to acknowledge Pelagius, and a schism which lingered for another century, and on the part of others a suspicion of Pelagius which lasted as long as he lived.
Better than any other incident of Justinian's long reign does the story of the Council of 553 illustrate his conception of the emperor's role in religious matters. But it was no isolated incident, and to realise its full importance we must see it against the background of the Christian State as, under Justinian, this was conceived and ordered. Constantine's disestablishment of Paganism, the recognition by Theodosius of the Catholic Church as the State's religion, now receive further development. The emperor now lays claim to an initiative in Church policy, patriarchs and bishops are his lieutenants in religious affairs as his generals are for the army, his silentiaries for the civil administration.
Justinian's chief title to fame is his work of legal reform, the careful collection of his predecessors' laws, their “codification" and the elaborate official provision for the study of Law. It is a work that still influences the everyday life of the world. Like all the great emperor's undertakings, this, too, bears the impress of his piety and of his concern to be faithful to conscience in the high state to which God has called him. “ Nothing, " he declared in the collection of his own laws, "should escape the prince to whom God has confided the care of all mankind, " and he legislated for churchmen and the Church as instinctively and as carefully as he legislated for everyone else in his world state. Church and State were but two aspects of the one reality, that Roman Empire conterminous with civilisation, over which Justinian, the divine vice-regent, presided. The system had its advantages. It furnished, perhaps prematurely, what had hitherto not yet developed in the Church itself, a system of continuous day to day control by which the religious life of the whole Church was centralised, with the minimum of local departure from an enacted common practice. Nor was the system either bred of servility in ecclesiastics or the inevitable begetter of such servility. For all the emperor's unrelaxing control there were never lacking Patriarchs of Constantinople -- to say nothing of popes -- who resisted him steadfastly when principles called for resistance. Nevertheless the system was extraneous to the Church. It did not spring from the Church's life and it could not live by what gave life to the Church.
Between the system -- even supposing the emperor a Catholic and friendly -- and the life it aspired to control there must inevitably be friction. The Church would either escape from the system or die under its oppression. History was to show the Church escaping from it as the empire rapidly ceased to be conterminous with the Church's world, while in what survived of the Empire the system remained, grew to perfection, and, under it, the Church disappeared.
The Roman Emperor, then, was now very definitely a Catholic, and an imperial policy in religious matters a duty of conscience for him. Pagans for example, were henceforward excluded from civil office; they lost all power of inheriting. Their last intellectual centre was destroyed when, in 529, Justinian closed the schools of Athens, and in the next twenty years an official mission to convert the Pagans was organised. Occasionally there is a record of executions under the law, and, more often, of mob violence lynching those known to be Pagans. In 546 an edict commanding Pagans to be baptized completed the code. The penalty for refusal was loss of goods and exile, whence, inevitably, a number of nominal conversions and, thereafter, clandestine reunions of these crypto-pagans, with floggings and executions for the participants when they were discovered. To the Jews and to the Samaritans Justinian was equally hostile. Synagogues were forbidden, the Jews lost all right of inheriting, the right to bring suits against a Christian or to own Christian slaves. A succession of bloody revolts, bloodily suppressed, brought the Samaritans almost to extinction and under Phocas (609) thousands of them were baptized by force. Heretics were pursued no less violently, Montanists, for example -- still after four hundred years awaiting at Pepusa the second coming -- Novatians, Marcionites, Macedonians and, once Theodoric's power was ended, Arians too. To convert the Pagans outside the empire missions were organised, the State taking the initiative and the emperor, often enough, standing sponsor for the Pagan kings and chiefs who were baptized. These missions were not of course without their political importance. The State's attachment to religion is shown yet again in the insistence on the religious character of, for example, the great war with Persia. For the Roman Emperor it was, in part, a crusade against the Sun Worshippers, and the Persian kings were no less clear in their antagonism to Christianity. So Chosroes II, in 616, replied to the ambassadors of Heraclius petitioning for peace, "I will spare the Romans when they abjure their crucified criminal and worship the Sun. "
The newly-enthroned Justin I, through whom in 519 Rome regained the obedience of the Churches in the East, was, it should be borne in mind, the heir to a line of highly successful emperorpopes. For a good forty years before him the emperor's word had been law in matters of religion all through the empire. When, sixteen years after the reconciliation of 519, Justinian's generals conquered the Vandals in Africa and the Ostrogoths in Italy, what, in theory, was the restoration of imperial rule in those provinces, was, in reality, the annexation of Italy and Africa to Byzantium. The new regime was no restoration of what had obtained before 476, but the introduction into the West of the uses -- Byzantine by now -- of the mid-sixth century East. The papacy, for example, had been independent of the old empire of the West in the days of Gratian and St. Ambrose, of St. Leo and Valentinian III, while in the East, during these last hundred and fifty years (381-536), Caesar had been supreme, and the four eastern patriarchs little better than his officers in spirituals. Italy now annexed to Byzantium, the pope came into the imperial system as a fifth, and senior, patriarch, to enter, despite protestations and reminders, on a new role of de facto subordination. There was of course no denial of Rome's primacy in the universal church, nor of its traditional prerogatives. These were indeed fully and explicitly acknowledged. The new Code described the pope as "chief of all the holy priests of God", and Justinian's own laws spoke of Rome as "the source of all priesthood, " and decreed that " the most holy pope of Old Rome shall be the first of priests. " But henceforward the emperors rudely assume that the primacy is as much at their disposal as the political loyalty of those to whom it is entrusted. Whence, inevitably, two hundred years of recurrent friction until the popes are set free.
Rome, then, is now to be broken in, as Constantinople has already been broken in. It is now that the bishop of the imperial city comes fully to the heights of his place in the Church. When, two hundred years before, Constantine transformed Byzantium into Constantinople its bishop was a mere suffragan of the Metropolitan of Heraclea. The role of the bishop in the Arian troubles (330-381) gave the see a new importance. The Councils of Constantinople (381) and Chalcedon (451) recognised that importance officially, and, the Monophysites having by the time of Justinian's accession destroyed the Catholicism of Egypt and the East, Constantinople enjoyed, henceforward undisturbed, a very real primacy east of the Adriatic. Alexandria and Antioch had fallen below the capital in jurisdiction as well as in honour, and it was the Patriarch of Constantinople who now consecrated the bishops of these more ancient, apostolic sees. As the sixth century developed, Alexandria and Antioch lost steadily in real importance, Catholics were few, Monophysites many in the territories subject to them; and so while Constantinople kept all the fullness of Catholicity in the provinces immediately subject to her -- thirty metropolitans and four hundred and fifty bishops in all -- the Patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria shrank to mere titularies resident at the court, without flocks, without clergy, without suffragans. Legend, finally, forged for the see of the capital a pedigree of apostolicity. The first Bishop of Constantinople, it was now discovered, was St. Andrew.
The Byzantine bishop is a man of many occupations. He has a place and duties, because a bishop, in the hierarchy of the civil administration. He is already responsible for the care of vast church properties, responsible for the numerous monasteries, for the hospitals and charitable institutions. He is the ordinary judge in all suits to which clerics, monks, and nuns are parties, and in all suits where both parties are willing to take him as judge. Hence a whole legislation de vita episcopali in Justinian's Code and the Novellae. Qualifications for elegibility are minutely laid down, age, condition and character. The bishops are still elected, but only the better class are allowed a say in the proceedings, and these have only the right to present a list of three names. It is for the metropolitan, or the patriarch, thence to choose the new bishop. In practice it is the emperor who chooses, for the imperial candidate is never rejected. Rome is a notable exception to this "reform. " The election of the popes remains free, but it is subject to the emperor's ratification, and it is a testimony to the prestige of Eastern Catholicism in the sixth and seventh centuries that for seventy-five years almost every one of the popes was Greek or Syrian.
The civil law requires bishops to live in their dioceses, it orders an annual provincial synod, and it forbids bishops to come to court unless they have, in writing, the permission of their superior -- the bishop of his metropolitan, the metropolitan of his patriarch. Each patriarch is represented at the court by a permanent ambassador, the Apocrisiarius. In practice there is, of course, always a crowd of bishops at court, a more or less permanent synod whose personnel is continually changing. This, the so-called synodus endemousa, was an important, extra-constitutional, engine of the politico-ecclesiastical government.
As the law regulated the life and conduct of the bishops, so it provided for the clergy, and for the monks who flourished in the sixth century as never before. It was perhaps the golden age of monasticism in the Eastern Church. Since the reforms of St. Basil monasticism had grown to be an immense power in the empire's religious life, perhaps the greatest force of all. Whoever had the monks on his side had the people too. Hence the close alliance between the ecclesiastical princes of Constantinople or Alexandria and the heads of the vast religious congregations. Hence, too, the repeated occasions where the monks have been the principal means of the defeat of Catholicism. They played a great part in the scandal of the Latrocinium, and ever since Chalcedon their adherence to the patriarch there condemned, and to his successors, had been the very life of the Monophysite party. But although so many of the monks had gone over to heresy, they accepted the decrees of Chalcedon in sufficient numbers for monasticism to continue to be the main driving force in the religious life of the Catholics too. Monasteries abounded. In 536 there were no fewer than 108 in Constantinople and its suburbs and, apart from the army of Cenobites, the solitaries were still numerous. Each monastery was autonomous. Nowhere, except in the convents descended from the foundations of St. Pakhomius, is there trace of a religious order in the later western sense. All monasteries were, moreover, since Chalcedon, subject to the diocesan bishop. Exceptionally -- by the imperial favour -- they are directly subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople. The law fixes the duration of the novitiate at three years, and the Cenobite is forbidden to leave the monastery for which he is professed, whether it be to join another community or to become a wandering monk. With the Mohammedan conquests of Egypt and Syria, in the early seventh century, the number of solitaries diminished notably, and henceforward the hermit was very much the exception. The rule that the monk or nun shall never leave the enclosure of the monastery became ever more strict, and the bishops of the great synod of 692 insisted, too, that the monk should be decently clothed, and that the scandal of the bedraggled beggar monks of the cities should cease.
One abuse of monasticism is familiar to every student of the political history of these times. The monasteries offer a convenient solution for the victorious usurper embarrassed by the survival of his predecessor. More than one emperor -- to say nothing of lesser dignitaries -- escapes death by taking the monastic habit, as others are despoiled of their chance of a return to power by being forcibly ordained and consecrated. The monks again were the popular preachers and spiritual directors, and from their ranks came most of the great bishops and the ecclesiastical writers.
1 His feast is kept as Pope and Martyr on June 20
2 As Pelagius endeavoured to make clear
The old emperor, Justin I died on August 1, 527, and his nephew, Justinian, who throughout the reign had been the chief adviser and the real ruler, succeeded. The uncle had been one of those rough, hardy Illyrians who had more than once shown themselves such capable administrators, endowed with a hard practical common sense and a natural shrewdness that compensated for their native illiteracy. But the new emperor added to what practical abilities he inherited, a wide and extensive culture, and -- sure menace for the newly-restored peace in things ecclesiastical -- a pronounced taste for theological speculation. Justinian, like his uncle, was a Catholic. He had played an important part in the negotiations which ended the schism, and in the measures taken since to dislodge the Monophysites from the vantage points they had come to occupy during those thirty-five disastrous years. His Catholic subjects were now once more in communion with their chief the Bishop of Rome, but the subsequent measures of repression, of deposition, and confiscation had by no means reconciled the Monophysites of the eastern provinces. At heart they still remained bitterly hostile to the Catholicism of Chalcedon, and the new conformity was very largely a conformity in name alone. One of the first tasks before Justinian was to transform this nominal submission into a submission of fact.
From the new emperor the Catholic Church had everything to hope, but he was not the only figure with whom it had to reckon. Justinian was married, and the new empress, Theodora, a personality indeed, was no mere consort but associated as Augusta with her husband's new rank. They were a devoted couple, and the imperial menage a model to all their subjects. It had not always been so; and long before the time when Justin's unexpected accession had raised Justinian too, Theodora had been already famous, notorious even, as a comedienne, for her feats of impudicity in the capital’s less distinguished places of amusement. But whatever her origins, and however true the stories that circulated about her, Theodora had long since broken from it all; and she was already living in decent obscure retirement when Justinian, heir-apparent, found her, loved her, and, despite the opposition of the emperor, his uncle, married her. Like him, she was now a Catholic, but her own religious inclinations, less theological than those of Justinian, drew her to monasticism; more especially, it is suggested, to monasticism as it displayed itself in feats of unusual austerity. And the most celebrated of these spiritual athletes were, often enough, not orthodox. From their ill-instructed and undisciplined ardour, heresy and rebellion against ecclesiastical authority had drawn in the recent past only too many champions; and as Theodora's association with the monks she preferred increased, so, too, did her inclination to support and encourage the recently defeated Monophysites.
Her great influence brought it about that, in 531, the sentences of banishment were revoked; and the thousands of exiles, bishops, priests, and above all monks, now made their way back, none the less fervid in their hatred of Chalcedon and its teaching for the pain they had had to suffer in its name. They came even -- five hundred and more of them -- to Constantinople itself. Theodora procured them a common house and a church, and, blessed by her patronage, their church speedily became a centre for the capital’s fashionable devotees. Justinian, ever perplexed by a religious division which, for the first time in the empire's history, was making the imperial rule a foreign thing in the chief provinces of the State, set himself, along theological lines, to find a reconciling formula. Under his auspices conferences were held between Catholic bishops and Monophysite bishops and, yet once again, the complicated discussion took up its ancient round.
To all the Catholic explanations the heretics made the old reply, that Chalcedon had reversed Ephesus, that its supporters were Nestorians. At all costs, then, if the dissidents were to be argued back to conformity, Chalcedon must be cleared of this charge. To make clear, beyond all doubt, the opposition between what was approved at Chalcedon and what was condemned at Ephesus, a new formula expressive of the Catholic doctrine was therefore prepared. If it was Catholic doctrine, in accord with the faith of Chalcedon, to say, "One of the Trinity suffered in the Flesh", no Monophysite could truthfully assert that Chalcedon had canonised the heresy condemned at Ephesus; for no Nestorian would ever assent to such a proposition, any more than he would accept the term Theotokos. Then, again, this formula would show that Catholics and St. Cyril were of one mind on the great question, that Chalcedon had in no way condemned the saint in whose name the Monophysites justified their dissidence, for the formula was St. Cyril’s very own, devised by him for the very purpose of exposing Nestorius and used in the twelfth of the celebrated propositions of 430. It was as good Cyrillian theology as the most Cyrillian Monophysite could wish for. If it were officially announced as orthodox Catholicism, what further delay could prevent the Monophysite from accepting Chalcedon?
It was not the first time that, in Justinian's own experience, this formula had been suggested. The Akoimetoi monks had sought approbation for it from the legates of Pope Hormisdas in 519. To the legates it had too novel a sound to be welcome, and they were inclined to frown down a suggestion which promised to open new controversies at the very moment when the old ones were about to heal. Justinian was of the same opinion. The monks seemed wanton disturbers of the peace. Nor was the pope, to whom the legates referred the matter, anxious to decide, and despite the endeavours, at Rome, of a deputation from the monks, the matter went no further until Justinian, converted now to the monks's view of the formula's usefulness, made its adoption a matter of State policy. The monks, while in the West, had enlisted the support of a group of African bishops, exiled to Sardinia by the Vandals, among whom was St. Fulgentius reputed in the West the greatest theologian of the time. When in 534, then, the question was, in much changed circumstances, put to the Apostolic See the pope, John II, after consultation, approved it, quoting in his declaration both St. Cyril and St. Leo in support of his approval and once more condemning Nestorius insulsus along with impius Eutyches.
While Justinian drew up schemes for reunion, evolving formularies of reconciliation which should clothe the decision of Chalcedon in a terminology which the Monophysites could accept, showing that on the points at issue St. Leo and St. Cyril were at one, Theodora was left to deal with the more congenial business of ecclesiastical personalities. In 535 the Patriarch of Alexandria died -- a Monophysite elected years before, in the time of the Emperor Anastasius, whom Justin I had found it wiser to leave undisturbed at the time of the great change over. His people were violently divided, though Monophysites all, between the rival systems of Severus and Julian of Halicarnassus. Whence a double -- Monophysite -- election. There was no thought of a Catholic candidate, but thanks to Theodora the government influence secured the election of Theodosius the candidate of the milder, Severian, school.
The noise of the riots amid which Theodosius was installed had not yet died down when the Patriarch of Constantinople died too. Once again it was Theodora who decided the election. The new patriarch, Anthimos, was one of her own confidants, a man of ascetic life, who, though Bishop of Trebizond, had for long lived at court, and who was known to be a concealed Monophysite. At this moment, ending the resistance of years, Severus himself consented to come to the capital to assist, from the Monophysite side, at Justinian's theological conferences. The first result of his presence was the explicitly declared conversion to the heresy of the capital’s new patriarch. It seemed as though the old days of heretical domination were about to return. The two chief bishops of the East known as heretics, and supported with all the prestige of the empress, while the arch-heretic himself lived in her palace as chief adviser, and director-general of the new restoration ! What saved the situation for orthodoxy was the accidental presence of the pope, Agapitus I, in Constantinople, and his energetic action.
It was no ecclesiastical business which brought the pope to Constantinople. He came as the ambassador of the Gothic King in Italy, in a vain attempt to stave off the impending imperial re-conquest of the long-lost western provinces. But the recent changes in the personnel of the great churches, and the new doctrinal positions they implied could not but be the main subject to occupy Pope Agapitus. The new patriarch, whatever his beliefs, had been translated to his present high position from the see of Trebizond, and translations were contrary to canonical usage. Hence the pope's first hesitation to recognise Anthimos. The emperor pressing the point, the pope asked next for satisfaction in the matter of the patriarch's orthodoxy. Upon which the patriarch took the simplest of all possible ways out of the approaching difficulty and disappeared. A priest of irreproachable orthodoxy was found to fill the vacancy, and on March 13, 536, the pope himself gave him episcopal consecration.
For the Catholics of the imperial city it was already a great encouragement to see their heretical bishop deposed and a Catholic in his place. Heartened thereby, they now demanded the expulsion of the other prominent Monophysites, and especially of Severus. The pope gave his own strong support to the requests and, though he died, suddenly, before the defeat of Theodora and her proteges was complete, it was only a matter of four months before an imperial edict ordered the writings of Severus to be destroyed, and himself and his associates once more to be banished.
That Theodora's plans had been brought to nought was due, chiefly, to the vigorous action of Pope Agapitus and to the amount of popular support which that action found because it was the action of the pope. For the success of any future schemes to reconcile the Monophysites the empress must in some way enlist the pope's good will. What better way could be found than by securing the election as pope of one of her own? And Agapitus dead in the moment of his victory, what more suitable moment to install a pro-Monophysite successor than the present? No emperor had, as yet, dealt so imperially with the first of all the sees, but the new policy should be the more easily carried out since, for nearly half a century, there had been a succession of scandals and innovations in the episcopal elections at Rome.
In 498, for example, at the death of the conciliatory Anastasius II, there had been the scandal of a double election in which, while partisans of the deceased pope's milder policy in the matter of the schism of Acacius had elected their candidate, the more powerful majority of his critics had elected the more generally recognised Symmachus. The tumults of this unhappy beginning troubled the whole of this pope's six years' reign. They were only appeased by the election of Hormisdas (514) who thus appeared as the healer of a schism at Rome itself before he achieved the greater task of arranging the schism between East and West.
Hormisdas died in 523; his successor, John I, more tragically three years later. He had been despatched to Constantinople by the Gothic king, Theodoric, who ruled Italy since 493, to plead the cause of the king's Arian co-religionists in the capital. Their churches had recently been confiscated and the Arians forcibly converted. The mission failed, and on his return the pope was thrown into prison and died there. Theodoric speedily followed him into the other world but not before he had had time himself to give the Roman Church its new bishop, Felix IV ex iussu Theodorici regis says the Liber Pontificalis. Felix IV, pope through this startling innovation, proceeded to introduce into the system a second innovation more startling still, for, as the end of his life approached he named to his clergy as his successor one of his deacons, Boniface. Felix died on September 22, 530. Immediately there was trouble from those of the Roman clergy who held the late pope's nomination invalid. They were in the majority and they elected, at St. Peter's, the deacon Dioscoros, while at the Lateran the late pope's nominee was likewise consecrated and enthroned. Luckily for the peace of the city Dioscoros died within the month, and his supporters recognised his rival. Boniface II now proceeded to imitate the unhappy precedent set by Felix IV, but more solemnly. In a synod at St. Peter's he, too, named the one who was to succeed him, the deacon Vigilius. The clergy agreed; but some time later, under what circumstances we do not know, the pope came to regret what he had done and, just as publicly, he revoked it as an action beyond his powers. Boniface II reigned for even fewer years than his predecessor, and when he died (532) the troubles broke out once again. Once more there were rival candidates, faction spirit running high, bribes from the interested parties till the treasury was exhausted, and a vacancy, long for the time, of four months. With the new pope, John II, came a wholesome decree against the abuses which had marked the recent interregnum and three years' peace. To him in 535 succeeded that Pope Agapitus whose death in Constantinople has been recorded.
Given the history of the papal elections during the previous forty years, Theodora's plan of interference had then, nothing more than usually shocking about it. Nor was any choice of hers likely to be disregarded. Her choice fell upon that deacon Vigilius who, as the nominee of Boniface II, had so nearly become pope in 532. Since then he had risen to be the archdeacon of the Roman Church, the leading cleric after the pope himself. As such he had accompanied Agapitus on his diplomatic mission, and he was still in Constantinople when that pope died. The news of the pope's death travelled to Rome more quickly than Vigilius, and he returned home to find the successor of Agapitus elected, consecrated, and in function, Silverius. Vigilius, with the assistance of the imperial officials, set himself to oust the pope as the necessary preliminary to his own election. The critical situation of public affairs soon gave him his opportunity.
The war of restoration was by this time in full swing, and for five years now the armies of Justinian had been marching from one victory to another in the desperate endeavour to win back for the imperial government the provinces of the West, lost to it in the disastrous fifth century. The Vandal kings had been dispossessed in Africa, and Sicily; the Goths driven from their hold on Southern Italy. Rome itself had become once more a " Roman " city when, at the moment of Vigilius' return from Constantinople, the Goths turned to besiege in Rome the victorious imperial army and its general Belisarius. Pope Silverius, summoned to an interview with the general, was suddenly accused of treasonable correspondence with the Goths. He was immediately stripped of the insignia of his office and, clad in a monk's habit, secretly shipped from Rome that same night. To the Romans nothing more was announced than that the pope had embraced the monastic life and that the see was therefore vacant.
The clergy were assembled to elect his successor. Belisarius presided, and, despite considerable opposition, Vigilius was elected. He had been privy to the forgeries that cost Silverius his place, and he had been the pope's sole companion in the momentous interview with Belisarius. Now, at last, he was pope himself -- at any rate pope in possession. The unfortunate Silverius did, it is true, thanks to the bishop appointed to guard him, succeed in lodging an appeal against his violent deposition. Justinian ordered his return to Italy and an enquiry into the whole affair. But Belisarius was still in charge, and through his wife, who dominated him, the empress maintained her protege. Silverius was once more condemned, and banished to the little island of Palmaria off the Neapolitan coast, and there soon afterwards he died of hunger. [1]
For the next six years all the religious troubles slumbered while Justinian, Theodora, and in Italy Vigilius, found all their energies absorbed by the terrible Gothic war. It was in a province far removed from the seat of that war, Palestine, that the disputes re-awakened. And the question around which they developed was not Monophysitism but the more ancient matter of the orthodoxy of certain theories attributed to Origen. Among the monks of certain Palestinian monasteries there had, for some time, been a revival of interest in these theories, in the old heresy of the preexistence of souls and a quasi-pantheistic teaching about the last end of man. The old theories daily found new disciples, and the "new theology" found, of course, a host of zealous opponents. Whence through the early part of Justinian's reign (530-540) an ever-increasing disorder in Palestine which was by no means confined to the peaceful solitudes of the monasteries concerned. When in 541 a great synod met at Gaza to enquire into certain serious disorders in the local churches and to try the chief person accused, the Patriarch of Alexandria, it was inevitable that the bishops and dignitaries present should discuss the new trouble and plan a common course of action. One of these dignitaries was the permanent ambassador (apocrisiarius) of the Roman See at Constantinople, the deacon Pelagius, an intimate friend and confidante of Vigilius. Pelagius did all his chance allowed to strengthen the abbots in their opposition to the Origenists, and he worked in the same sense upon the mind of Justinian. He was so successful that, in 543, there appeared an imperial edict condemning the theories, and promulgating a new profession of faith in which they were repudiated. This all bishops and heads of monasteries were now obliged to sign.
Justinian was not, of course, unaware of the trouble until the moment when Pelagius intervened. More than one deputation from the rival disputants had already appeared in the capital. One of these deputies, the Origenist Theodore Askidas, had found in his temporary mission the beginning of a new career. He was named bishop of the important see of Caesarea in Cappadocia, and, his learning gaining him a place in Justinian's confidence, he contrived to live on at court after his consecration. But now, great as the favour he enjoyed, he saw the emperor influenced against the Origenist theories, and his own prestige somewhat lowered through the action of Pelagius. To keep his place he signed the formula: and set himself to prepare a counter-stroke which would dislodge Pelagius.
It was never difficult to interest the theologically-minded emperor in religious matters, and where these touched a question of civil peace less difficult still; where they concerned the reconciliation of the Monophysites least difficult of all. The plan which Askidas now proposed was just such another as Zeno and Anastasius had attempted. But it was more subtle, in this, that it did not suggest even a tacit repudiation of Chalcedon, but merely the condemnation of three allies and friends of Nestorius, two of whom Chalcedon had re-instated. It would be yet another proof to the Monophysites that Catholics were not Nestorians if Catholics condemned these old opponents of St. Cyril, proof again that Chalcedon had not undone what Ephesus had settled. The proposed condemnations were of Theodore of Mopsuestia -- the master of Nestorius -- and all his writings; of those writings of Theodoret of Cyrrhus which had been directed against St. Cyril during the controversy about Nestorius; and of the letter which Ibas, Bishop of Edessa, wrote to a Persian bishop, Maris, telling, from his point of view, the story of the Council of Ephesus. These three items of the proposed condemnations are the Three Chapters which have given their name to the subsequent controversy. It was to drag on for a good eighteen years and more, to involve the most curious of all the general councils, and finally to issue in a miserable schism that divided Italy for a generation.
The three persons concerned had been dead now nearly a century, Theodore for longer; but then Origen had been dead longer still, and yet condemned only this very year. Askidas in his turn prevailed and in 544 the edict appeared, to the dismay in particular of the Apocrisiarius. Pelagius refused to sign it, and upon his refusal the Patriarchs of Constantinople, of Alexandria, and of Antioch would only sign conditionally, the condition being that the pope, too, should sign. Here truly was a difficulty. Chalcedon, more than most, had been the pope's council, and Chalcedon had reinstated both Theodoret and Ibas in their sees upon their express repudiation of Nestorianism. It had then, for the ordinary man, cleared them of any charge of heresy. More, the letter of Ibas, now imperially condemned, had been read at Chalcedon and the Roman legates there had declared that "his letter having been read we recognised him to be orthodox. " Were the pope now to condemn Theodoret at least and Ibas, for heresies they had renounced or heretical expressions which they had explained satisfactorily, it might easily seem, given the circumstances of the condemnation, that repudiating those whom Chalcedon had gone out of its way to protect he was inaugurating a policy that would end in the repudiation of the council itself. All eyes then turned to the pope. All would depend on his action -- and the pope with whom lay decision, in this tricky attempt to conciliate the Monophysites, was the creature of the pro-Monophysite Theodora. Truly her hour had come at last, as the emperor's commands went westwards to Vigilius; and, as Askidas saw the dilemma preparing for the Roman author of his own recent trouble, he, also, may have felt a like satisfaction.
Vigilius hesitated. For a time the pre-occupations of the Gothic War gave him an excuse for temporising; Totila, the Gothic king, had now taken the offensive and was preparing to besiege Rome yet once again. But finally, as the pope celebrated the feast of St. Cecilia (November 22, 545), he was carried off from the very church by Theodora's orders and shipped to Sicily and thence, after a stay of some months, to Constantinople, where he arrived in the January of 547. During those months in Sicily the pope had learnt of the violent opposition to the emperor's edict which was gradually showing itself throughout the West. He himself adopted the same attitude, and when the emperor refused to withdraw the edict Vigilius broke off relations with the unlucky Patriarch of Constantinople who had led the way in signing it. Little by little, however, the explanations of the court theologians had their effect. By the summer of 547 the pope was once more in communion with the patriarch, and had signed a private condemnation of the Three Chapters. This, of course, was insufficient for Justinian's purpose, and the pope pleading the dignity of his see against the attempts to wring from him a public declaration, he was allowed to assemble at Constantinople a council of bishops to give his new condemnation of the Three Chapters an appearance at least of freedom. At the council, alas, the eloquence of a young Latin bishop defending Ibas was so effective that Vigilius broke up the assembly. Private interviews between the various bishops and the emperor brought them all to a striking unanimity, however, and one by one they sent in to the pope their written opinions in favour of the condemnation. Finally, on Holy Saturday, 548, Vigilius issued his public condemnation, the so-called Iudicatum. Its text has perished, but we know that, in condemning the Three Chapters, it made such reservations to safeguard the essential teaching of Chalcedon that, so far as concerned the Monophysite reunion, it might just as well never have been issued.
However, issued it was and, despite its reservations, promptly misconstrued in the West, raising storms of condemnation wherever it was known. The whole of the West -- what West remained after the devastations of war -- deserted the pope. A council in Africa excommunicated him as the betrayer of the faith of Chalcedon, and in Rome his own deacons led the opposition and gave the lead in the furious war of pamphleteering which now broke out.
The West, evidently, did not understand. Had not Vigilius himself needed to come to Constantinople to be educated in the complex question? How natural that Latin bishops, too much occupied for a century in saving the elements of civilisation to be worried with such subtleties as those presented by the leisurely Monophysite East, should also fail to understand. A general council at Constantinople might smooth away all the misunderstanding. Meanwhile both the edict of 544 and the ludicatum would be withdrawn. So it was arranged between pope and emperor. Both pledged themselves to silence on the question until the council met; and Vigilius, privately, bound himself by oath to Justinian that he would at the council do his utmost to bring about the desired condemnation.
This was in the August of 550. The council did not meet for nearly three years more. The interval was filled with crises. First of all the emperor broke his pledge of silence and, in 551, urged by Askidas, issued a new edict condemning the Three Chapters. The pope protested energetically and excommunicated Askidas, and then, Justinian planning his arrest, he fled for safety to the church of St. Peter. Thither a few days later Justinian sent troops to effect the arrest; at their heels followed the mob of the city. The doors were forced, soldiers and mob poured in. The clerics who endeavoured to protect the pope were dragged out and the soldiery then laid hands on Vigilius himself. He clung desperately to the columns of the altar, until, as the struggle heightened, these began to give way, and to save themselves from injury the soldiers released him. So far the mob had watched, scandalised, at the outrage on the old man who, Latin though he was, was yet the chief bishop of their religion. Now, as the altar and its columns fell in a roar of dust, they turned on the troops who fled for their lives. That night the pope -- marvellous feat for an ancient of eighty years -- escaped over the roofs of the city to a waiting boat and crossed the Bosphorus. His new refuge was Chalcedon, and, of all places, the basilica where, just a hundred years before, the famous council had sat around whose decision still raged these violent animosities. From his retreat he issued a well-written encyclical describing the recent events, denouncing the forgeries put into circulation in his name, and excommunicating definitely Askidas and his associates.
Justinian had overshot his mark and he knew it. The excommunicated bishops were sent across the straits to make their submission. Processions of monks and influential citizens serenaded the pope with prayers that he would return. A kind of peace was patched up, the edict of 551 was withdrawn, Vigilius gave way and preparations for the council were resumed. They consisted chiefly, on the emperor's part, in eliminating from the bishops who were to come from the West all those who had given signs of opposition to his policy. As the council drew nearer and nearer the pope's perplexity increased. It was increasingly evident that, at this council which was to educate the western bishops and guarantee the condemnation against all chance of misunderstanding, the West would have scarcely any representatives at all. Vigilius would have preferred an Italian city for its meeting place. The emperor insisted on the capital, and as the bishops arrived, all from the emperor's own Greek East, the pope's anxieties grew. One day he seemed willing to take part in its proceedings, and then he would refuse even to speak of the matter. In the end he made it known that although he would not interfere with the Council he would take no part in its deliberations. His decision would be given independently. And so there opened, on May 5, 553, in the new Sancta Sophia, the strangest of all the general councils.
The number of bishops present varied. At the first session there were a hundred and fifty. At the last, a hundred and sixty-four. Save for the picked few from Africa, and a handful of Italians, all were Greeks. The first session was taken up with the solemn reading of the documents to he condemned. In the discussion which followed, the only difficulty before the Fathers was to choose sufficiently vigorous epithets to express their abhorrence. Vigilius meanwhile, with the assistance of Pelagius, was hard at work on his own decision. On May 14 it was ready for the emperor-the Constitutum. It contained a detailed condemnation of the errors of Theodore of Mopsuestia, but his person the pope did not condemn, alleging the traditional ecclesiastical usage that left heretics once dead to whatever judgment then befell them. The writings of Ibas and Theodoret, since they were approved at Chalcedon, could not now be condemned without such condemnation involving that Council.
Justinian refused to receive the Constitutum -- Vigilius"having already condemned the Three Chapters and having sworn to maintain the condemnation. any more recent retractation on his part was naturally not welcome. The Constitutum then was not presented to the Council. Instead, at its seventh session, Justinian laid before it all the documents in which Vigilius had condemned the Three Chapters, and a decree ordering the pope's excommunication for the way in which, ever since, he had shifted and changed, and for his refusal to attend the council. The Fathers obediently approved. One week later the council came to an end (June 2, 553) with a long final condemnation of " the wicked Theodore and his wicked writings, " his supporters, defenders, and apologists. Likewise, "if anyone defends the wicked writings of Theodoret against the first Holy Council of Ephesus, against St. Cyril and his twelve anathemata, and all the things he wrote on behalf of the wretched Theodore and the wretched Nestorius. . . and does not anathematize these things. . . " he is henceforward himself anathema. Still more definitely, " if anyone defends the letter which Ibas is said to have written to the heretic Maris the Persian. . . and does not anathematize it and all its defenders, and likewise all those who say it is right or right in part, and those. . . who presume to defend, in the name of the Holy Fathers or of the Holy Council of Chalcedon the letter or the impiety it contains. . . let him be anathema. "
The good work done, the bishops dispersed. There still remained Vigilius. Vigilius unconvinced, the council’s work was incomplete. Whence a new siege of the unhappy pope. It was eight months before the emperor won him over. But in the end he yielded completely and on February 26, 554, in a second Constitutum, solemnly recognised the condemnation. Then, at last, the pope was allowed to return to his see, from which he had been absent now nine years. He was, however, destined never again to see it, for he had only travelled as far as Syracuse when death claimed him, June 7, 555. He was fortunate in his death in this, at least, that it spared him the inevitable trouble which awaited at Rome whoever had had hand or part in the alleged condemnation of Chalcedon.
Justinian determined that Pelagius should be the new pope. He was undoubtedly the ablest of all the Roman clerics, and for a good fifteen years now had been the pope's chief adviser. To pass over such ability and such experience would, in the then state of Italy, have been foolish in the extreme. Who could do more as pope for the new imperial re-organisation of the West, and especially for the reconstruction of Italy wasted by twenty-five years of savage war? Who, indeed, could do as much? There was this difficulty to overcome that Pelagius had been the very soul of the dead pope's resistance to the council. It was with his strength that Vigilius had armed himself in the conflict that followed the withdrawal of the ludicatum, and the Constitutum of 553 had been his very handiwork. The council over, Pelagius found himself separated from the pope -- as, moreover, were all the rest of the pope's advisers -- and in a monastic prison. From that prison nevertheless he had contrived to conduct a violent literary campaign against the council’s condemnations, and the news that Vigilius had submitted drove him to write only the more violently. Vigilius, he explained, to the scandalised uncomprehending West, was old, senile, isolated from his advisers, the victim yet again of the imperial tyranny. That the leader of such an opposition would retract while the air around was still dry with the bitter violence of his polemic might seem the least likely finale of all. Yet so it happened. Under circumstances of argument or blandishment of which we know nothing, Pelagius withdrew his opposition and accepted the council’s condemnation. Then, as the emperor's nominee, he set out for Rome to be there consecrated as its bishop.
A more unwelcome successor to Vigilius could hardly have been found, and, popularly considered to have surrendered his opinions as the price of his appointment, the new pope was more or less universally boycotted. In all Italy there could not be found more than two bishops to officiate at his consecration. A priest had to supply for the third. There was no attempt to elect another pope in opposition to him, but simply a cold sullen hostility. Pelagius was left to make the first move. He did it in the profession of Faith made on the day he was consecrated. He announced his faith to be the faith of Chalcedon, of St. Leo, and of all St. Leo's successors down to the last pope but two, Agapitus. All those whom they had held to be orthodox he, too, held as such, and especially did he hold to be orthodox. . . Theodoret and Ibas. In the whole statement there is not a reference to the recent council, nor to Vigilius, nor to the transactions between himself and the emperor which had resulted in his nomination.
For all its careful omissions the statement, none the less, availed little to help Pelagius. Nowhere did he ask the western bishops to acknowledge the council, nor to condemn what the council had condemned. The utmost of his demands was recognition of his own election, acknowledgement that he was the lawful pope. In his own metropolitan district he had scarcely any difficulty in this. But "Lombardy" and "Venetia", to speak more accurately the bishops of the great sees of Milan and Aquileia with their suffragans, would not enter into communion with him. Pelagius was helpless, for the imperial officials were little disposed to lend the troops for which he clamoured, and when the inevitable pamphleteering began now in Italy, he met with scanty success indeed, refuting as pope the position he had maintained so vigorously as a deacon. From Gaul there came a request that he should satisfy the bishops as to his orthodoxy. The declaration he sent, again made no mention of all the recent happenings that were the source of the anxiety, and as his classic writings against the council were now beginning to pass from one bishop to another in the West also, Pelagius wrote a final appeal for peace and unity. "Why all this recrimination? When I defended the Three Chapters was I not in accord with the majority of the bishops? I have, it is true, changed my opinion, but changed it along with the same majority. Did not St. Peter yield to the brotherly correction of St. Paul? Did not St. Augustine, too, write his Retractations? I was mistaken I allow. But then I was only a deacon and it was my duty to follow the bishops. Now the bishops have decided. Africa, Illyricum, the East, with its thousands of bishops, have condemned the Three Chapters. It would be extremely foolish to ignore such high authority and to follow in preference the guidance of these propagators of forgeries. "
Scholars of a later age, studying at their leisure the detail of these ancient dissensions, can perhaps distinguish easily between Chalcedon re-instating Theodoret and Ibas in their sees upon their giving guarantees of their orthodoxy at that moment, and the Council of 553, a hundred years later, deciding the wholly different question as to the orthodoxy of their writings at the time when, twenty years before Chalcedon, they were admittedly among the chief supporters of Nestorius. Chalcedon's approval, and the condemnation of 553, though affecting the same personages, were concerned with realities wholly distinct. [2] Between the two councils there is no contradiction. But the Latin bishops, hot and angered with ten years of controversy, always impatient of the theoretical subtleties in which their eastern brothers were so much at home, were in no mood to listen to such distinctions at the time. Hence, on the part of some, a refusal to acknowledge Pelagius, and a schism which lingered for another century, and on the part of others a suspicion of Pelagius which lasted as long as he lived.
Better than any other incident of Justinian's long reign does the story of the Council of 553 illustrate his conception of the emperor's role in religious matters. But it was no isolated incident, and to realise its full importance we must see it against the background of the Christian State as, under Justinian, this was conceived and ordered. Constantine's disestablishment of Paganism, the recognition by Theodosius of the Catholic Church as the State's religion, now receive further development. The emperor now lays claim to an initiative in Church policy, patriarchs and bishops are his lieutenants in religious affairs as his generals are for the army, his silentiaries for the civil administration.
Justinian's chief title to fame is his work of legal reform, the careful collection of his predecessors' laws, their “codification" and the elaborate official provision for the study of Law. It is a work that still influences the everyday life of the world. Like all the great emperor's undertakings, this, too, bears the impress of his piety and of his concern to be faithful to conscience in the high state to which God has called him. “ Nothing, " he declared in the collection of his own laws, "should escape the prince to whom God has confided the care of all mankind, " and he legislated for churchmen and the Church as instinctively and as carefully as he legislated for everyone else in his world state. Church and State were but two aspects of the one reality, that Roman Empire conterminous with civilisation, over which Justinian, the divine vice-regent, presided. The system had its advantages. It furnished, perhaps prematurely, what had hitherto not yet developed in the Church itself, a system of continuous day to day control by which the religious life of the whole Church was centralised, with the minimum of local departure from an enacted common practice. Nor was the system either bred of servility in ecclesiastics or the inevitable begetter of such servility. For all the emperor's unrelaxing control there were never lacking Patriarchs of Constantinople -- to say nothing of popes -- who resisted him steadfastly when principles called for resistance. Nevertheless the system was extraneous to the Church. It did not spring from the Church's life and it could not live by what gave life to the Church.
Between the system -- even supposing the emperor a Catholic and friendly -- and the life it aspired to control there must inevitably be friction. The Church would either escape from the system or die under its oppression. History was to show the Church escaping from it as the empire rapidly ceased to be conterminous with the Church's world, while in what survived of the Empire the system remained, grew to perfection, and, under it, the Church disappeared.
The Roman Emperor, then, was now very definitely a Catholic, and an imperial policy in religious matters a duty of conscience for him. Pagans for example, were henceforward excluded from civil office; they lost all power of inheriting. Their last intellectual centre was destroyed when, in 529, Justinian closed the schools of Athens, and in the next twenty years an official mission to convert the Pagans was organised. Occasionally there is a record of executions under the law, and, more often, of mob violence lynching those known to be Pagans. In 546 an edict commanding Pagans to be baptized completed the code. The penalty for refusal was loss of goods and exile, whence, inevitably, a number of nominal conversions and, thereafter, clandestine reunions of these crypto-pagans, with floggings and executions for the participants when they were discovered. To the Jews and to the Samaritans Justinian was equally hostile. Synagogues were forbidden, the Jews lost all right of inheriting, the right to bring suits against a Christian or to own Christian slaves. A succession of bloody revolts, bloodily suppressed, brought the Samaritans almost to extinction and under Phocas (609) thousands of them were baptized by force. Heretics were pursued no less violently, Montanists, for example -- still after four hundred years awaiting at Pepusa the second coming -- Novatians, Marcionites, Macedonians and, once Theodoric's power was ended, Arians too. To convert the Pagans outside the empire missions were organised, the State taking the initiative and the emperor, often enough, standing sponsor for the Pagan kings and chiefs who were baptized. These missions were not of course without their political importance. The State's attachment to religion is shown yet again in the insistence on the religious character of, for example, the great war with Persia. For the Roman Emperor it was, in part, a crusade against the Sun Worshippers, and the Persian kings were no less clear in their antagonism to Christianity. So Chosroes II, in 616, replied to the ambassadors of Heraclius petitioning for peace, "I will spare the Romans when they abjure their crucified criminal and worship the Sun. "
The newly-enthroned Justin I, through whom in 519 Rome regained the obedience of the Churches in the East, was, it should be borne in mind, the heir to a line of highly successful emperorpopes. For a good forty years before him the emperor's word had been law in matters of religion all through the empire. When, sixteen years after the reconciliation of 519, Justinian's generals conquered the Vandals in Africa and the Ostrogoths in Italy, what, in theory, was the restoration of imperial rule in those provinces, was, in reality, the annexation of Italy and Africa to Byzantium. The new regime was no restoration of what had obtained before 476, but the introduction into the West of the uses -- Byzantine by now -- of the mid-sixth century East. The papacy, for example, had been independent of the old empire of the West in the days of Gratian and St. Ambrose, of St. Leo and Valentinian III, while in the East, during these last hundred and fifty years (381-536), Caesar had been supreme, and the four eastern patriarchs little better than his officers in spirituals. Italy now annexed to Byzantium, the pope came into the imperial system as a fifth, and senior, patriarch, to enter, despite protestations and reminders, on a new role of de facto subordination. There was of course no denial of Rome's primacy in the universal church, nor of its traditional prerogatives. These were indeed fully and explicitly acknowledged. The new Code described the pope as "chief of all the holy priests of God", and Justinian's own laws spoke of Rome as "the source of all priesthood, " and decreed that " the most holy pope of Old Rome shall be the first of priests. " But henceforward the emperors rudely assume that the primacy is as much at their disposal as the political loyalty of those to whom it is entrusted. Whence, inevitably, two hundred years of recurrent friction until the popes are set free.
Rome, then, is now to be broken in, as Constantinople has already been broken in. It is now that the bishop of the imperial city comes fully to the heights of his place in the Church. When, two hundred years before, Constantine transformed Byzantium into Constantinople its bishop was a mere suffragan of the Metropolitan of Heraclea. The role of the bishop in the Arian troubles (330-381) gave the see a new importance. The Councils of Constantinople (381) and Chalcedon (451) recognised that importance officially, and, the Monophysites having by the time of Justinian's accession destroyed the Catholicism of Egypt and the East, Constantinople enjoyed, henceforward undisturbed, a very real primacy east of the Adriatic. Alexandria and Antioch had fallen below the capital in jurisdiction as well as in honour, and it was the Patriarch of Constantinople who now consecrated the bishops of these more ancient, apostolic sees. As the sixth century developed, Alexandria and Antioch lost steadily in real importance, Catholics were few, Monophysites many in the territories subject to them; and so while Constantinople kept all the fullness of Catholicity in the provinces immediately subject to her -- thirty metropolitans and four hundred and fifty bishops in all -- the Patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria shrank to mere titularies resident at the court, without flocks, without clergy, without suffragans. Legend, finally, forged for the see of the capital a pedigree of apostolicity. The first Bishop of Constantinople, it was now discovered, was St. Andrew.
The Byzantine bishop is a man of many occupations. He has a place and duties, because a bishop, in the hierarchy of the civil administration. He is already responsible for the care of vast church properties, responsible for the numerous monasteries, for the hospitals and charitable institutions. He is the ordinary judge in all suits to which clerics, monks, and nuns are parties, and in all suits where both parties are willing to take him as judge. Hence a whole legislation de vita episcopali in Justinian's Code and the Novellae. Qualifications for elegibility are minutely laid down, age, condition and character. The bishops are still elected, but only the better class are allowed a say in the proceedings, and these have only the right to present a list of three names. It is for the metropolitan, or the patriarch, thence to choose the new bishop. In practice it is the emperor who chooses, for the imperial candidate is never rejected. Rome is a notable exception to this "reform. " The election of the popes remains free, but it is subject to the emperor's ratification, and it is a testimony to the prestige of Eastern Catholicism in the sixth and seventh centuries that for seventy-five years almost every one of the popes was Greek or Syrian.
The civil law requires bishops to live in their dioceses, it orders an annual provincial synod, and it forbids bishops to come to court unless they have, in writing, the permission of their superior -- the bishop of his metropolitan, the metropolitan of his patriarch. Each patriarch is represented at the court by a permanent ambassador, the Apocrisiarius. In practice there is, of course, always a crowd of bishops at court, a more or less permanent synod whose personnel is continually changing. This, the so-called synodus endemousa, was an important, extra-constitutional, engine of the politico-ecclesiastical government.
As the law regulated the life and conduct of the bishops, so it provided for the clergy, and for the monks who flourished in the sixth century as never before. It was perhaps the golden age of monasticism in the Eastern Church. Since the reforms of St. Basil monasticism had grown to be an immense power in the empire's religious life, perhaps the greatest force of all. Whoever had the monks on his side had the people too. Hence the close alliance between the ecclesiastical princes of Constantinople or Alexandria and the heads of the vast religious congregations. Hence, too, the repeated occasions where the monks have been the principal means of the defeat of Catholicism. They played a great part in the scandal of the Latrocinium, and ever since Chalcedon their adherence to the patriarch there condemned, and to his successors, had been the very life of the Monophysite party. But although so many of the monks had gone over to heresy, they accepted the decrees of Chalcedon in sufficient numbers for monasticism to continue to be the main driving force in the religious life of the Catholics too. Monasteries abounded. In 536 there were no fewer than 108 in Constantinople and its suburbs and, apart from the army of Cenobites, the solitaries were still numerous. Each monastery was autonomous. Nowhere, except in the convents descended from the foundations of St. Pakhomius, is there trace of a religious order in the later western sense. All monasteries were, moreover, since Chalcedon, subject to the diocesan bishop. Exceptionally -- by the imperial favour -- they are directly subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople. The law fixes the duration of the novitiate at three years, and the Cenobite is forbidden to leave the monastery for which he is professed, whether it be to join another community or to become a wandering monk. With the Mohammedan conquests of Egypt and Syria, in the early seventh century, the number of solitaries diminished notably, and henceforward the hermit was very much the exception. The rule that the monk or nun shall never leave the enclosure of the monastery became ever more strict, and the bishops of the great synod of 692 insisted, too, that the monk should be decently clothed, and that the scandal of the bedraggled beggar monks of the cities should cease.
One abuse of monasticism is familiar to every student of the political history of these times. The monasteries offer a convenient solution for the victorious usurper embarrassed by the survival of his predecessor. More than one emperor -- to say nothing of lesser dignitaries -- escapes death by taking the monastic habit, as others are despoiled of their chance of a return to power by being forcibly ordained and consecrated. The monks again were the popular preachers and spiritual directors, and from their ranks came most of the great bishops and the ecclesiastical writers.
1 His feast is kept as Pope and Martyr on June 20
2 As Pelagius endeavoured to make clear
