3. BYZANTINE CATHOLICISM. 565-711
Justinian died, an old man of eighty-two, in 565. In the half century or so during which he had ruled the Roman world he had been amazingly successful in his ambition to restore the imperial authority in the lost provinces of the West. Rome, Ravenna, Carthage were once more the seats of Roman government. Italy, Dalmatia, Africa, the islands of the Mediterranean, the southern half of Pannonia, the south of Spain had been recovered. If much remained to be won, much had been won already.
But the cost had been too great. It had exhausted the resources of the treasury and it had exhausted the emperor himself. Nor was the reconquest in any sense final. Huns, Slavs and Avars continued to raid the recovered Illyricum. Thessalonica, and the capital itself, more than once were threatened, and the hordes only bought off by the pledge of an annual pension. To Italy, in 568, there came the last, and worst, of her plagues -- the Lombards, and by the end of the century they had wrested from the imperial officials three fourths of the peninsula. On the eastern frontier the war with Persia was almost a habit of life. In all Justinian's long reign there were scarcely ten years of peace, and less than ten in the thirty years which followed his death. To carry through successfully this war, which must be waged simultaneously on every frontier, and to maintain the complex administration of the empire was more than ever an impossible task for the one man with whom, as the superhuman autocrat, all initiative traditionally lay. It is little wonder that after eight years of the strain Justinian's successor, Justin II, lost his reason. Nor that, within half a century of the great emperor's death, with Constantinople beset simultaneously by Avars and Persians, the empire's last hour seemed at hand. It was a general from Africa, Heraclius, who staved off the end and after years of patient and laborious effort -- reconstructing the administration, restoring the finances, rebuilding the army -- finally dictated peace to the Persians in their own capital (628).
In those sixty years of crisis and calamity which separate that victory of Heraclius from the death of Justinian (565-628), the Monophysites are still one of the main problems of domestic policy. More than ever is it important that Egypt and Syria shall remain loyal, now that the empire is faced with this renaissance of Persia. And loyal they can never be so long as between them and the emperor there lie those decisions of Chalcedon which to the East register a Greek imperialist victory over Syrian and Egyptian. Whence, after a hundred and fifty years, it is still the great aim of the imperial policy to find a reconciling formula which, without repudiating the definition of faith of 451, shall convince the Monophysites that St. Leo is there in agreement with St. Cyril, and that the supporters of the great council are not Nestorians. Whence also, with each scheme for reunion, new trouble between the emperor and the Catholics, and, since one such scheme is based on a new theological theory which conflicts with the tradition of faith, very serious trouble with the Roman See.
Justinian's immediate successor, Justin II, was friendly to Monophysitism and so, too, was his wife, a niece of the old empress, Theodora. The exiled bishops were recalled, the old business of conferences and discussions was resumed. Once more it was the emperor who offered concessions, and this time he offered everything short of an implicit repudiation of Chalcedon. The Monophysites, themselves rent by now into hostile factions, could not agree. Nor, even if the bishops had been able and willing to accept, would their monastic allies have supported them. The fanaticism of the Monophysite monks was proof against all the imperial diplomacy and at last, after six years of fruitless negotiations, the emperor returned to the policy of coercion. Two years later and the policy changed again. Justin II was now out of his mind (574) and the new ruler, Tiberius II, brought the persecution to an end. The Monophysites took advantage of the truce to elect a new Patriarch of Alexandria -- there had been none for ten years -- and the new patriarch, in preparation for future emergencies, consecrated, at once and in the one ceremony, seventy new bishops (576).
For the remainder of the century the persecution was intermittent, and although the Monophysites fought continuously among themselves -- divided, united, then divided yet more bitterly -- they all of them held firmly to their refusal to accept Chalcedon, and with every year the chances of reunion grew fainter. With the new century came the murder of the Emperor Maurice (582-602) and the rule of the worthless Phocas (602-610). It was now that the Persian offensive began under the great king Chosroes II (590-628). Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor were overrun. Antioch fell in 611, Damascus in 613, Jerusalem -- after a siege where 57,000 were killed -- in 614, Alexandria in 617. The Monophysites did not indeed, play the traitor. But they were anti-imperialistic, and the Catholics, identified by the invaders as the party of the emperor, were dispossessed to the profit of the Monophysites. By 620 Chalcedon had not an adherent in the whole of the eastern provinces which had fallen to the Persians. Also, an unlooked-for coincidence, the Monophysites now patched up their own quarrels, the Copts of Egypt and the Jacobites of Syria combining. When, ten years later (629), Heraclius was once more master of Egypt and the East, he was faced immediately with the necessity of reuniting these provinces, still lost to him by the more fundamental division of religion, provinces where a century or more of religious persecution had bred a tradition of hatred for Constantinople, for its emperor as for its patriarch.
Along with the political restoration Heraclius, then, had no choice but to attempt something in the way of religious restoration too, nor would coercion serve any longer.
Once more the theological subtlety of a Patriarch of Constantinople came to his assistance. He devised a new exposition of the eternal problem. It had the merit that, from the new point of view, it involved neither St. Leo nor St. Cyril, nor did it mention Chalcedon. The Monophysites shrank from contact with the Catholics because these, so they alleged, divided Christ as Nestorius had done. The Patriarch of Constantinople, Sergius, offered as new proof that Catholics were just as anti-Nestorian (and therefore in the Monophysite sense as orthodox) as the Monophysites themselves, their belief that in Our Lord there is only one source of action (energeia). To his own Catholic people this could be explained as in conformity with Chalcedon, since action is of persons and therefore the singleness of the source of action in Jesus Christ derived from the single Person -- the Logos-active in the two natures. Ephesus, defining the singleness of Person, Chalcedon defining the duality of nature, and the Monophysites protesting against any division of Christ, were, then, all three here conciliated. On this basis, which satisfied everyone, reunion could now go forward. As with the faculty of action so was it with other faculties, for example, the faculty of choice, the will. Catholics, it was explained again to the Monophysite critic, did not consider Christ to be two beings mysteriously united, for they believed that in Christ there was but one will. The application of the new theory to the question of the will gave it its most popular development, and also the name -- Monothelism -- by which the whole movement is, somewhat loosely, known.
It was while the East still lay in the hands of the Persians that Sergius elaborated his theory, and it was only after the reconquest that it passed into politics. By then Heraclius had been won over to it, and the Monophysite, Cyrus of Phasis, recently (631) elected to fill the long vacant (Catholic) see of Alexandria (617-633), adopted it as an instrument of negotiation with the Monophysites. The conferences, for once, ended in agreement, and in 633 an Act of Union was signed at Alexandria which ended, after a hundred and eighty years, the feuds and divisions of the Christian East. The discovery of their common agreement in Monothelism had revealed to Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian alike the unimportance of the details which had kept them too long apart. But unfortunately if, for the Monophysite, the new theory was simply an extension of what he had always professed, the Catholic's acceptance of it was not merely a surrender of the point, so long debated, that, whoever refused to acknowledge Chalcedon was out of accord with the Tradition, but it involved recognition of yet another heresy. The theory was simply a radical form of Monophysitism in another guise. And there were Catholics, more acute mentally than Sergius, or perhaps less preoccupied with the hopes of political peace which the theory presented, who saw this from the beginning and who urged their objections. One such critic was the monk Sophronius.
Sophronius was one of the most learned men of the century, and he had an equally wide reputation for holiness of life. He had travelled much, was well known through the East, in Rome, too, which he had visited, and especially well known in Alexandria where he had lived for many years. He was now eighty years of age, but still vigorous in mind as in body and he knew the detail of the long controversy with the Monophysites as perhaps no one else knew it. He was in Alexandria when the Union of 633 was signed, and immediately he set himself to point out its implications to those responsible. Cyrus refused to be convinced, and took shelter behind the authority of Constantinople, whereupon the ancient Sophronius set out for the capital. There, too, he found little but polite obstruction, Sergius giving him no more than an explanation in writing of the reason for his action. Palestine, where Monophysites were fewer, and where the political preoccupations of Alexandria and Constantinople did not exist, was the monk's next objective, and thither, with Sergius' letter, Sophronius then went. He arrived to find the see of Jerusalem vacant. He was himself elected Patriarch.
This sudden and surprising election changed immediately the nonchalance of Sergius towards his critic -- and towards a more important personage still, the pope. So far, the whole business of the reunion, with its tacit abandonment of Chalcedon, had been carried through without any reference to Rome. Now, obviously, Rome would hear it all from this new Athanasius unexpectedly become Patriarch of Jerusalem. Sergius determined to forestall him. He wrote to Rome himself, and with his letter he sent the explanations he had given to Sophronius. In his letter he gave his own account of the reunion, and of his discussion with Sophronius, and he ended by the suggestion that further discussion as to whether there were one or two "energies" was impolitic; silence was now the wisest course.
The reply of the pope, Honorius I (625-638), is curiously interesting, because he fails utterly to grasp the point of the patriarch's letter. Sergius had before him the Monophysite contention that since Catholics repudiated the Alexandrian phrase "union in one nature, " they must believe that in Christ there are two beings united by a moral union. To disprove this he urges that Catholic belief accords to Christ Our Lord one only faculty of action. This point the pope wholly overlooks or, more truly, misunderstands. Not the singleness of the faculty, but the unity in action between the divine and the human, is the subject of the pope's reply. Certainly, Honorius answers, Christ always acted with the two natures in harmony, no conflict between them being possible, the unity of action being perfect. As to the number of ways in which He acted no man can count them, much less say they were one or two. Questions of grammatical subtleties should be left to grammarians, and he agrees with Sergius that the discussion should be left where it stands.
Obviously Sergius and Honorius are at cross purposes. They are not discussing the same thing at all. But the consequences of the misunderstanding could hardly have been more serious. How far Honorius was from approving the new theory can be gathered from what he wrote to Sophronius. The new Patriarch of Jerusalem, following the custom, wrote to the other patriarchs and to the pope a letter -- the synodal letter -- notifying his election and testifying to his acceptance of the traditional faith. The synodal letter of Sophronius is a long and elaborate criticism of the new theory, which it exposes and refutes as a development of the heresy condemned at Chalcedon. The pope thereupon wrote to Constantinople, to Alexandria and to Sophronius. The first two letters are lost, and of the third only fragments survive. We do, however, possess an earlier letter to Sophronius, written before the latter's synodal letter had been received. Three things definitely emerge from the pope's letter and the fragments. The pope deprecates all discussion as to whether there are one or two "energies, " for, whichever expression is used, misunderstanding is certain. We must, however, hold that Jesus Christ, one in person, wrought works both human and divine by means of the two natures. The same Jesus Christ acted in His two natures divinely and humanly. Finally -- again the fatal ignoratio elenchi -- we must acknowledge the unity of will, for in Jesus Christ there is necessarily harmony between what is divinely willed and what is humanly willed. That Honorius held and taught the faith of Chalcedon is clear enough, despite the muddle. It is equally clear that he failed to grasp that a new question had been raised and was under discussion; clear, also, that he assisted the innovators by thus imposing silence alike on them and on their orthodox critics; and clear, finally, that he definitely said, in so many words, that there is but one will in Christ. It was a patronage of heresy no less effective because it was unconscious.
The next move lay with the emperor, and in 638 appeared an edict, the Ecthesis, which put forward the teaching that in Our Lord there is but one will as the Church's official doctrine.
Sophronius died that same year; Honorius, and Sergius too. A few months later Heraclius died, in 641, and Cyrus of Alexandria in 642. The principal actors in the controversy were gone then within four years of the appearance of the Ecthesis, and in those same few fateful years there had disappeared too -- and for ever -- the provinces whose pacification had been the original cause of all the trouble. It was in 629 that Heraclius had triumphed over the Persians, and, while the ink was still wet on the treaties, the power was already preparing which was to destroy both victor and vanquished. The new religion of Mahomet, slowly developing in Arabia for the last thirty years, was about to begin its epic conquest of the East. In 633 Damascus fell to it, Jerusalem in 637, Alexandria in 641. The actors gone, the provinces gone, it might be thought that, necessarily, the whole wretched business of this imperial patronage of dogmatic definition was at an end. Alas, the real fury of the Monothelite heresy had not even begun. The dogmatic question once raised must be settled. Honorius, failing to see the point raised, had set it aside. Sooner or later there would come a pope who, more understanding, could not follow that precedent. Rome must teach, and definitely. On the other hand the imperial prestige was bound up with the new theory. If Rome condemned it the emperor must either submit or fight. No emperor yet had surrendered his patronage of heresy at the bidding of a pope. All the emperors who had once adopted heresy had died ultimately in the heresy of their choice -- Constantine and Valens in Arianism, Theodosius II compromised with the Monophysites, Zeno and Anastasius in actual schism. Now it was the turn of the family of Heraclius, and once again, heresy, for forty years, finds in the Christian Emperor its chief and only support, while the traditional faith is proscribed and the faithful persecuted.
The first sign of opposition from Rome came when the envoys of Honorius's successor reached the capital, with their petition that his election should be confirmed. Presented with the Ecthesis and asked to sign it, they would not do more than promise to present it for signature to the newly-elected, Severinus. Shortly afterwards (August 12, 640) this pope too died; and in his place was elected the equally short-lived John IV (640-642). To John IV, Heraclius did indeed write, in the last months of his life, disclaiming all responsibility for the Ecthesis, and naming Sergius as its author. Nevertheless it was not withdrawn and John IV wrote vigorously to Heraclius' successors, Constantine III and Heracleonas, demanding its revocation. At the same time he protested against the use of Honorius' name in support of the heresy. Honorius, he recalls, had written to Sergius that "in our Saviour there can by no means be two contrary wills, that is in His members since He was free of those weaknesses which result from Adam's fall. My aforesaid predecessor, therefore, teaching on this mystery of Christ's incarnation, declared that there were not in Him what is found in us who are sinners, to wit conflicting wills of the spirit and of the flesh. This teaching some have twisted to suit their own ends, alleging Honorius to have taught that there is but one will to His divinity and humanity which is indeed contrary to truth. "
John IV died in October, 642. His successor, Theodore (642-649), continued the policy of protest, condemning the Ecthesis anew, and sending to the Patriarch of Constantinople a declaration of the true faith to be posted in its place. The patriarch refused, protested the orthodoxy of his attitude and invoked Honorius among his patrons. Finally, in 646, the pope declared him deposed. The sentence was never carried out. Instead, on the patriarch's advice, the Emperor Constans II (642-668), issued a new edict in place of the Ecthesis. This was the Type [1] promulgated in 648. The Type was not merely a profession of faith, as the Ecthesis had been, but an edict forbidding, under heavy penalties, all discussion of the subject. Whether the Monothelites were right or wrong, the pope and those who stood by him must be content to be silent. Bishops and clerics who defy the law are to be degraded, monks to be expelled from their monasteries, laymen to be stripped of their property if nobles, and the ordinary citizens to be flogged and exiled, "in order that all men, restrained by the fear of God and respect for the penalties rightly decreed, may keep undisturbed the peace of God's holy Churches. " It was a warning against interference. Was it meant for Rome too? Events were shortly to show. Pope Theodore died about this time (May 14, 649), and the responsibility of decision fell to his successor, Martin I.
No better choice of pope could have been made. Martin had been his predecessor's ambassador at Constantinople, and had been entrusted with the delicate task of warning and excommunicating the patriarch three years before. He knew the problem thoroughly and he also knew well the personalities opposed to him, the Patriarch Paul and the young Emperor Constans II. The new pope made no attempt to obtain the emperor's confirmation of his election, but, planning a courageous defiance of the Type, he summoned a synod of bishops to meet in the Lateran basilica for the October of 649. One hundred and five bishops answered the summons, and the sessions occupied the whole of the month. All the correspondence and documents of the twenty years' controversy were read, the complaints of the persecuted and their protestations. Finally, in a series of canons, the Type and its promoters were condemned, and an official declaration given that in Jesus Christ Our Lord there are "two natural wills the divine and the human, and two natural operations the divine and the human. ', Nor did Pope Martin rest content with his great council at Rome. Its decisions were transmitted to every part of the Church, to missionary bishops in Holland and Gaul as well as to Africa and Constantinople. Local councils were to be organised to support and to accept the Roman decision.
The emperor replied by action. A high official arrived in Rome with instructions to force an acceptance of the Type on the pope and all the bishops. He could not, however, rely on the loyalty of the soldiery. Pope and clergy and people were too united for intrigue to have any chance of success, an attempt at assassination failed and finally he came to an understanding with the pope and proceeded no further with his mission. Four years later arrived another envoy of a different stamp (653). The pope, a great sufferer from gout, foreseeing trouble, had his bed carried before the high altar of the Lateran and there the troops found him when they broke in. The envoy brought an imperial decree notifying him that he was deposed and ordering him to be arrested and dispatched to Constantinople. Another pope was to be elected in his place. The pope forbade any attempts at resistance and, surrendering to the officers, was straightway carried off.
It was more than a year before he reached the capital, and during all that length of time he suffered greatly from the brutality of the soldiers. When, finally, the convoy arrived at the quays of the imperial city the old man, helpless and confined to his bed, was left on deck for the best part of a day to be the butt of the populace. Then for three months he lay in the dungeons until, on December 19, 654, he was brought before the Senate to be tried for, of all things, treason. The cruel farce of a State trial, with the usual apparatus of trained official perjurers, dragged on and the pope was found guilty. They took him next to a balcony of the palace, and, to the acclamation of the mob, went through the ritual ceremony of degrading the pope, stripping him of his vestments and insignia. Then, half naked and loaded with chains, he was dragged through the streets to the prison reserved for wretches awaiting execution, the executioner, bearing a drawn sword, marching before him. This sentence, however, was not carried out. Constans II, who had enjoyed, from behind a grille, the scene he had so carefully arranged, went from his triumph to recount it in detail to the patriarch, ill at the time and thought to be nearing his end. The recital struck terror into the prelate. "Alas, yet another count to which soon I must answer, " was all he could say, and it was at his earnest entreaty that Constans commuted the sentence for one of exile. Three months later (March, 655) the unhappy pope, half dead with his privations and sufferings, was shipped off to the Crimea where new hardships speedily put an end to his life (September 16, 655).
St. Martin I, in whom the incompetence of Honorius was so gloriously redeemed, was not the only martyr to Constans II's barbarity. The abbot Maximus, a one time secretary to Heraclius, and two monks, one of them the pope's late ambassador to the imperial court, were likewise put on trial. The skill of the one time secretary had no difficulty in stripping the trial of its pretences and in forcing an admission that the real cause was loyalty to the Roman decisions. The three were exiled, horribly tormented, mutilated even, and in the end, like the pope they had defended, they, too, died from the results of their ill-treatment.
One very unpleasant feature of this episode is the attitude of the Roman clergy to their persecuted bishop and his supporters. It is also illuminating testimony to the hold which, in this new Byzantine Catholicism, the emperor had managed to gain even on the clergy of the supreme see. Before St. Martin had been tried, before even he had arrived at Constantinople, the wretched Roman clergy had obeyed the imperial order and given him a successor. Hence, in his prison at Constantinople the old pope waited in vain for help, for even the support of friendship from his own Roman people. The election of Eugene was a sad disillusioning of the valiant soul who had expected that something of his own spirit would keep his clergy loyal. Worse still was the news that the ambassadors sent by Eugene to petition for the emperor's confirmation of his election had gone over to the heretics, and, if they had not accepted the Type, had fraternised with them to the extent of concelebrating with the patriarch. This was one of the new facts thrown in the teeth of St. Maximus as he protested that he had for his warrant the teaching and practice of the Roman See. In desperation he turned to prayer that the divine mercy would somehow make manifest the gift of truth with which It had enriched the see of Peter.
He had not long to wait. The new pope, Eugene -- really pope since Martin's death -- was already, by 656, a source of anxiety to those who had contrived his election. The new patriarch at Constantinople had sent to Rome the synodal letter announcing his election. It was read with the wonted ceremony at St. Mary Major's before a great assembly of clergy and people, and its language on the crucial point of "energies" was considered too obscure to be orthodox. Cries of opposition broke out. The pope tried diplomatically to calm the tumult, but was forced to promise that he would never acknowledge as patriarch the author of the letter. Then, and then only, was he allowed to proceed with the mass. At Constantinople the news of this rejection of the new patriarch roused the official world to new fury, and one of St. Maximus' judges referred to the incident "Know this, Lord Abbot, as soon as the Barbarians leave us a breathing space we shall treat as we are treating you this pope who dares now to raise his head, and the rest of those folk in Rome who cry out so loudly, and your own disciples with them. We shall bury the lot of you, each in his own place, as we did for Martin. " However, Eugene I died before the emperor's hands were freed (June 2, 657), and his successor, Vitalian, made his peace and recognised the new patriarch unasked.
Six years after Vitalian's election political affairs brought Constans II to Rome, the first emperor to appear in the ancient capital for more than two centuries. Whatever the orthodoxy of his belief, he was the sovereign, the pope was his subject, and pope and clergy headed the citizens in the demonstration of loyalty which greeted the tyrant who had sent St. Martin to his death not ten years before. From Rome the emperor went south and he was still in Sicily when (668) the dagger of an assassin put an end to his life. His sudden death so far from the capital seemed likely, for the moment, to be the prelude to civil war. That his son, Constantine IV (668-685), succeeded peaceably was due in no small measure to the activity of Pope Vitalian, and, possibly in gratitude for the pope's service, with the new reign the Type, though not disavowed, disappeared into the lumber rooms of history. There was henceforward a kind of peace, but neither of the popes who succeeded Vitalian -- Adeodatus 672-676, and Donus 676-678 -- were recognised by the patriarchs at Constantinople, nor were the patriarchs John V (669-675) and Constantine (675-677) recognised at Rome. It was the initiative of the emperor which brought the estrangement to an end, and from his letter to Pope Donus asking him to send representatives to a conference, there developed the sixth general council of 680-1 (Constantinople III).
Two years of delays followed the imperial invitation. To begin with, the pope to whom it was addressed died before the letter arrived. Then his successor Agatho (678-681) decided, before he replied, to consult the western episcopate generally. His acceptance should go to Constantinople bearing the signatures of as many Latin bishops as possible. There was at Rome the usual council of the pope's own immediate suffragans, in which an English bishop, Wilfrid of York, took part. There was a council at Pavia, and other councils, apparently, elsewhere, following the procedure of St. Martin I in 649. As his principal legate the pope would have liked to send the Greek monk who at the time occupied the see of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus. The difficulties which prevented this, delayed the mission yet further. Finally, in the September of 680, the delegates reached Constantinople and an emperor who had almost despaired of seeing them. They were eleven in all: two priests and a deacon representing the pope himself, three Italian bishops -- the emperor had asked for twelve -- a priest of Ravenna and, as the emperor had desired, four monks chosen from the Greek monasteries of Southern Italy.
The legates presented to the emperor a letter from the pope, the three bishops the profession of faith which the western bishops had signed -- a hundred and twenty-five of them. On November 7 the delegates came together under the presidency of the emperor. The project had grown since he wrote to the pope, and with the mission from the West there were present the bishops of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and what could be gathered to represent the three other patriarchates where, thanks to Monophysitism and the fifty years of Mahometan occupation, Catholicism as an organised thing had practically disappeared. In all one hundred and seventy-four bishops were present.
The sessions of the Council -- eighteen in number -- did not end until the following September (681). [2] The Monothelites were allowed to state their case, the whole vast literature of manifestoes and synodals was read, with the acts of the previous councils on which the Monothelites based their new claim to orthodoxy.
Agatho's letter to the emperor was read to the council. Like the Tome of St. Leo, two centuries earlier, it is a simple statement of the belief as traditional that in Christ Our Lord there are two wills and two operations. As St. Leo at Chalcedon, so now Agatho, was acclaimed as Peter's successor "Peter it is who speaks through Agatho. " In the eighth session the emperor intervened and demanded that the two patriarchs should give their opinion as to the doctrine of Agatho's letter. The Patriarch of Constantinople declared it to be the Catholic faith and the immense majority of the bishops agreed. His colleague of Antioch -- a patriarch in partibus these many years -- held firmly to his Monothelism. Sergius, Cyrus, Sophronius, and Honorius, dead now half a century, came to life again in the debates. Sophronius was hailed as the defender of the true faith, the rest condemned; Sergius as the pioneer of the heresy, Cyrus and the successors of Sergius as his supporters, all of whom, the decree notes, have been already condemned by Agatho, "the most holy and thrice blessed pope of Old Rome in his suggestions to the emperor. " Tothis list, sent on from Rome, the council added the name of Honorius "because in his writings to Sergius he followed his opinions and confirmed his impious teaching. " The emperor accepted all the council decreed, he presided at the closing session, and by an edict gave the definitions force of law.
The council, following immemorial tradition, wrote also to the pope, begging him to confirm what had been decreed. At the moment the Roman See was vacant. Agatho had died (January, 681) before the council was half way through its labours, and his successor, Leo II, was not elected until nearly a year after the council had ended (August 17, 682). To acknowledge its synodal letter and to send a reply was one of his first duties. This he did in a letter to the emperor. The pope confirms the decrees, and re-echoes the condemnations of his predecessor, and in even more indignant terms, he makes his own the council’s condemnation of Honorius "who did not make this apostolic Church illustrious by teaching in accord with the apostolic tradition, but on the contrary allowed its spotless faith to be sullied by a sacrilegious treachery. " He used a similar hard phrase in a letter to the King of the Visigoths. But it is in a further letter to the bishops of Spain that this pope, in a sentence, most clearly describes the fault for which Honorius merited these condemnations: "Honorius who did not extinguish the fire of heretical teaching, as behoved one who exercised the authority of the apostles, but by his negligence blew the flames still higher., ' The condemnation of Pope Honorius does not seem greatly to have moved those who witnessed it. It was recorded in all solemnity in the Acta of the council, it appears in all the correspondence which notifies the decision of the council to the rest of Christendom. In the archives where these rested, his memory, too, slept until, centuries later, controversial archaeologists, straining every resource to embarass the champions of the Roman primacy, turned to the record of the sixth general council and with more ingenuity than good faith tried to put on the decrees a meaning they were never meant to bear. Much more singular than the inclusion of the negligent and misunderstanding Honorius among the condemned of 681, is the entire absence of any reference in the council’s proceedings to the memory of the story's heroic figures, St. Martin I, St. Maximus and the rest. The ingenuity of Constans II, condemning for treason where he dare not proceed on a cause of faith, was successful to the end. No council, no pope, under this Byzantine regime, would glorify the criminal convicted for treason, any more than it would condemn the emperors who had fostered and encouraged the heresy, opposition to which was the martyr's real crime. The memory of Heraclius and of Constans II was officially undimmed, while that of St. Martin and his companions remained officially infamous.
In the council of 680 Rome and Constantinople came together after a breach of relations that had lasted thirty-five years. The acknowledgement of the Roman primacy then made was as full, and as spontaneous, as at the time of Hormisdas, or at Chalcedon, two hundred and thirty years before. Nevertheless in those two hundred and thirty years a new world had slowly been coming to birth. It is always difficult to draw the dividing lines of historical periods, but certainly by the end of the seventh century the world into which the Church had come had definitely given place to another. That world had been a civilisation, Roman politically, Hellenistic culturally, imposed on and adopted by a score of peoples, overlaying, in East and West alike, older cultures still. By the time of the Council of 680 the West had long since slipped from the grasp of the one-time world State. For nearly three centuries now, Gaul, Spain and Britain had been outside its boundaries. Italy, too, which Justinian had recovered, was by 680 once again "barbarian", save for Sicily, Calabria and a few scattered vantage points along the coast. Africa had recently (695-698) fallen to the Arabs, who, as has been noted, had, sixty years earlier made themselves masters of Egypt and the East. The Slavs were now established south of the Danube. The State, which had not been a Roman empire for three centuries, was by this hardly an empire at all. More and more it was become a Greek-speaking nation, whose strength lay in the peasantry of Asia Minor; and if it still retained in Constantinople a European capital, it was to the East that its capital looked for inspiration, to the lands and the traditions of those ancient cultures whence had derived that non-European conception of the semi-divine despotic ruler whose influence, since Diocletian, had done so much to make the Empire a new thing. The lands had vanished, the culture had changed, the inspiration of life was other, and it was in a world already changed that this last great controversy between the Roman See and the Roman Emperors was fought out. Nevertheless, since the affair of the Monothelites is the last chapter of the history which begins with the Edict of Milan it is best told here in order to complete that history. To show in what degree the world in which the controversy ended was a different world, and how truly a new age had begun with Constantinople's pride of place reinforced by the consciousness of its cultural and even "national" superiority to Rome -- a consciousness now characterised by deep anti-Roman feeling -- it remains to say something of another council at Constantinople, summoned twelve years after the council of Pope Agatho and Constantine IV. This is the famous synod in Trullo [3] -- so called from the place where it met, the great domed hall of the imperial palace at Constantinople.
It was summoned by the son of Constantine IV, the youthful Justinian II (685-95, 705-711). This emperor's reputation has left him the very type of that treachery and sadistic cruelty which, for so long, was all that the world "byzantine" conveyed to western minds. He was, however, no friend to the defeated Monothelites, and he needed little encouragement to busy himself, after the pattern of his great namesake, with the Church's internal discipline. It was represented to him that neither of the last two general councils (553 and 680) had occupied itself with questions of discipline, and to supply what was wanting Justinian called the Council of 692.
It was a purely Byzantine affair. The pope was not invited, and there was no East to invite. Two hundred and eleven bishops attended, and the papal ambassadors at the imperial court were present too. The council did little more than publish once more, in collected form, laws which had come down from earlier councils. There were, however, some new canons and, bearing in mind the emperor's aim of elaborating in this council a common ecclesiastical observance for the whole empire, their anti-Roman character is very significant. The famous 28th canon of Chalcedon is, of course, re-enacted, and the eastern discipline in the matter of Lent and of clerical marriage is extended to the whole Church in language designedly insulting to the Roman See. Equally significant of a new, aggressive anti-Roman spirit was the fact that, among the avowed sources from which this code was drawn, were councils which Rome had never recognised, and others which Rome had definitely rejected. The code went through, however, without a protest, and the pope's ambassadors to the imperial court signed with the rest.
It remained to be seen what the pope himself would do, and so much importance did Justinian attach to his signature that six copies of the decrees were sent to Rome. Each of the patriarchs, as well as the emperor, should have his autograph copy of the papal submission. The pope, Sergius I, was himself an oriental, Syrian by blood though Sicilian by birth. He refused the council all recognition.
Straightway the old tyranny began to function, officials coming from Constantinople with an order to drag the pope in chains to the capital. But it was not so easy now as it had been fifty years before in the time of St. Martin. The troops mutinied, the mob drove the high officials out of Rome with appropriate indecencies, and shortly afterwards a revolution at Constantinople drove out Justinian too -- his nose slit in the latest fashion of mutilation. Ten years later, wearing a new nose of gold, he returned and, once securely established, his thoughts turned again to the decrees of his council still lacking the pontifical signature. Once more this half-crazy fanatic addressed himself to the task. The pope, John VII, was asked to note the canons to which he objected, and to sanction those he approved. The poor man was not only himself a Byzantine but the son of an official of the imperial service. Obedience to the emperor was in his blood, and yet he was pope. Something of the tradition triumphed despite the "human frailty" of which the Liber Pontificalis speaks. He did not dare to pick and choose, but sent back a kind of vague and general approbation. Justinian found it lacking, and sent orders for a fuller and more definite assent. Pope John was dead by this time. It was his successor, Constantine, who had to face the difficulty and an order to proceed himself to Constantinople. The pope was received everywhere with the utmost ceremony and reverence. The emperor too, most astonishingly, threw himself at his feet, begged the privilege of assisting at his mass and receiving Holy Communion from his hands. And thanks to the diplomatic skill of the future Gregory II the affair of the Council of 692 was left as it was. The emperor asked no further approbation. The pope abstained from further condemnation. To this day the place where the pope's name should show is blank. After which happy ending to what had promised to be so tragic, the pope was allowed to return to Rome. Two months later the mob rose once again, and this time the emperor and his son died in torments at its hands (December, 711).
Here ends the story of the Church and the world into which it was born. But the regime of Byzantinism under which the Church's ruler had been so oppressed, continued still. It was to last -- so far as it affected the popes -- just something short of fifty years more. Then a liberator came, in the person of the Catholic king of the barbarian Franks. He beat off from the nominally imperial lands the Lombards who menaced St. Peter, and "for love of St. Peter and the remission of his sins" made over his conquests to the pope (754). St. Peter is thenceforward no longer the subject of the successor of Augustus and Constantine. The alliance of the Papacy and the Franks has most momentously begun. It is a warning, if warning is needed, that the Middle Ages are upon us, that the Roman Empire is already a matter of history. Just two hundred years had passed since Justinian's re-conquest of Italy. For so long, and for no longer, had (Caesar imprisoned the Papacy in his Byzantine State.
1 tupos peri pisteos: i.e. outline of the faith.
2 Forty three bishops were present at the opening session; 174 signed the final act.
3 Also called Quini-Sext, because intended to supplement (by canons about discipline) the Fifth and Sixth General Councils (i.e. those of 553 and 680-1).
Justinian died, an old man of eighty-two, in 565. In the half century or so during which he had ruled the Roman world he had been amazingly successful in his ambition to restore the imperial authority in the lost provinces of the West. Rome, Ravenna, Carthage were once more the seats of Roman government. Italy, Dalmatia, Africa, the islands of the Mediterranean, the southern half of Pannonia, the south of Spain had been recovered. If much remained to be won, much had been won already.
But the cost had been too great. It had exhausted the resources of the treasury and it had exhausted the emperor himself. Nor was the reconquest in any sense final. Huns, Slavs and Avars continued to raid the recovered Illyricum. Thessalonica, and the capital itself, more than once were threatened, and the hordes only bought off by the pledge of an annual pension. To Italy, in 568, there came the last, and worst, of her plagues -- the Lombards, and by the end of the century they had wrested from the imperial officials three fourths of the peninsula. On the eastern frontier the war with Persia was almost a habit of life. In all Justinian's long reign there were scarcely ten years of peace, and less than ten in the thirty years which followed his death. To carry through successfully this war, which must be waged simultaneously on every frontier, and to maintain the complex administration of the empire was more than ever an impossible task for the one man with whom, as the superhuman autocrat, all initiative traditionally lay. It is little wonder that after eight years of the strain Justinian's successor, Justin II, lost his reason. Nor that, within half a century of the great emperor's death, with Constantinople beset simultaneously by Avars and Persians, the empire's last hour seemed at hand. It was a general from Africa, Heraclius, who staved off the end and after years of patient and laborious effort -- reconstructing the administration, restoring the finances, rebuilding the army -- finally dictated peace to the Persians in their own capital (628).
In those sixty years of crisis and calamity which separate that victory of Heraclius from the death of Justinian (565-628), the Monophysites are still one of the main problems of domestic policy. More than ever is it important that Egypt and Syria shall remain loyal, now that the empire is faced with this renaissance of Persia. And loyal they can never be so long as between them and the emperor there lie those decisions of Chalcedon which to the East register a Greek imperialist victory over Syrian and Egyptian. Whence, after a hundred and fifty years, it is still the great aim of the imperial policy to find a reconciling formula which, without repudiating the definition of faith of 451, shall convince the Monophysites that St. Leo is there in agreement with St. Cyril, and that the supporters of the great council are not Nestorians. Whence also, with each scheme for reunion, new trouble between the emperor and the Catholics, and, since one such scheme is based on a new theological theory which conflicts with the tradition of faith, very serious trouble with the Roman See.
Justinian's immediate successor, Justin II, was friendly to Monophysitism and so, too, was his wife, a niece of the old empress, Theodora. The exiled bishops were recalled, the old business of conferences and discussions was resumed. Once more it was the emperor who offered concessions, and this time he offered everything short of an implicit repudiation of Chalcedon. The Monophysites, themselves rent by now into hostile factions, could not agree. Nor, even if the bishops had been able and willing to accept, would their monastic allies have supported them. The fanaticism of the Monophysite monks was proof against all the imperial diplomacy and at last, after six years of fruitless negotiations, the emperor returned to the policy of coercion. Two years later and the policy changed again. Justin II was now out of his mind (574) and the new ruler, Tiberius II, brought the persecution to an end. The Monophysites took advantage of the truce to elect a new Patriarch of Alexandria -- there had been none for ten years -- and the new patriarch, in preparation for future emergencies, consecrated, at once and in the one ceremony, seventy new bishops (576).
For the remainder of the century the persecution was intermittent, and although the Monophysites fought continuously among themselves -- divided, united, then divided yet more bitterly -- they all of them held firmly to their refusal to accept Chalcedon, and with every year the chances of reunion grew fainter. With the new century came the murder of the Emperor Maurice (582-602) and the rule of the worthless Phocas (602-610). It was now that the Persian offensive began under the great king Chosroes II (590-628). Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor were overrun. Antioch fell in 611, Damascus in 613, Jerusalem -- after a siege where 57,000 were killed -- in 614, Alexandria in 617. The Monophysites did not indeed, play the traitor. But they were anti-imperialistic, and the Catholics, identified by the invaders as the party of the emperor, were dispossessed to the profit of the Monophysites. By 620 Chalcedon had not an adherent in the whole of the eastern provinces which had fallen to the Persians. Also, an unlooked-for coincidence, the Monophysites now patched up their own quarrels, the Copts of Egypt and the Jacobites of Syria combining. When, ten years later (629), Heraclius was once more master of Egypt and the East, he was faced immediately with the necessity of reuniting these provinces, still lost to him by the more fundamental division of religion, provinces where a century or more of religious persecution had bred a tradition of hatred for Constantinople, for its emperor as for its patriarch.
Along with the political restoration Heraclius, then, had no choice but to attempt something in the way of religious restoration too, nor would coercion serve any longer.
Once more the theological subtlety of a Patriarch of Constantinople came to his assistance. He devised a new exposition of the eternal problem. It had the merit that, from the new point of view, it involved neither St. Leo nor St. Cyril, nor did it mention Chalcedon. The Monophysites shrank from contact with the Catholics because these, so they alleged, divided Christ as Nestorius had done. The Patriarch of Constantinople, Sergius, offered as new proof that Catholics were just as anti-Nestorian (and therefore in the Monophysite sense as orthodox) as the Monophysites themselves, their belief that in Our Lord there is only one source of action (energeia). To his own Catholic people this could be explained as in conformity with Chalcedon, since action is of persons and therefore the singleness of the source of action in Jesus Christ derived from the single Person -- the Logos-active in the two natures. Ephesus, defining the singleness of Person, Chalcedon defining the duality of nature, and the Monophysites protesting against any division of Christ, were, then, all three here conciliated. On this basis, which satisfied everyone, reunion could now go forward. As with the faculty of action so was it with other faculties, for example, the faculty of choice, the will. Catholics, it was explained again to the Monophysite critic, did not consider Christ to be two beings mysteriously united, for they believed that in Christ there was but one will. The application of the new theory to the question of the will gave it its most popular development, and also the name -- Monothelism -- by which the whole movement is, somewhat loosely, known.
It was while the East still lay in the hands of the Persians that Sergius elaborated his theory, and it was only after the reconquest that it passed into politics. By then Heraclius had been won over to it, and the Monophysite, Cyrus of Phasis, recently (631) elected to fill the long vacant (Catholic) see of Alexandria (617-633), adopted it as an instrument of negotiation with the Monophysites. The conferences, for once, ended in agreement, and in 633 an Act of Union was signed at Alexandria which ended, after a hundred and eighty years, the feuds and divisions of the Christian East. The discovery of their common agreement in Monothelism had revealed to Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian alike the unimportance of the details which had kept them too long apart. But unfortunately if, for the Monophysite, the new theory was simply an extension of what he had always professed, the Catholic's acceptance of it was not merely a surrender of the point, so long debated, that, whoever refused to acknowledge Chalcedon was out of accord with the Tradition, but it involved recognition of yet another heresy. The theory was simply a radical form of Monophysitism in another guise. And there were Catholics, more acute mentally than Sergius, or perhaps less preoccupied with the hopes of political peace which the theory presented, who saw this from the beginning and who urged their objections. One such critic was the monk Sophronius.
Sophronius was one of the most learned men of the century, and he had an equally wide reputation for holiness of life. He had travelled much, was well known through the East, in Rome, too, which he had visited, and especially well known in Alexandria where he had lived for many years. He was now eighty years of age, but still vigorous in mind as in body and he knew the detail of the long controversy with the Monophysites as perhaps no one else knew it. He was in Alexandria when the Union of 633 was signed, and immediately he set himself to point out its implications to those responsible. Cyrus refused to be convinced, and took shelter behind the authority of Constantinople, whereupon the ancient Sophronius set out for the capital. There, too, he found little but polite obstruction, Sergius giving him no more than an explanation in writing of the reason for his action. Palestine, where Monophysites were fewer, and where the political preoccupations of Alexandria and Constantinople did not exist, was the monk's next objective, and thither, with Sergius' letter, Sophronius then went. He arrived to find the see of Jerusalem vacant. He was himself elected Patriarch.
This sudden and surprising election changed immediately the nonchalance of Sergius towards his critic -- and towards a more important personage still, the pope. So far, the whole business of the reunion, with its tacit abandonment of Chalcedon, had been carried through without any reference to Rome. Now, obviously, Rome would hear it all from this new Athanasius unexpectedly become Patriarch of Jerusalem. Sergius determined to forestall him. He wrote to Rome himself, and with his letter he sent the explanations he had given to Sophronius. In his letter he gave his own account of the reunion, and of his discussion with Sophronius, and he ended by the suggestion that further discussion as to whether there were one or two "energies" was impolitic; silence was now the wisest course.
The reply of the pope, Honorius I (625-638), is curiously interesting, because he fails utterly to grasp the point of the patriarch's letter. Sergius had before him the Monophysite contention that since Catholics repudiated the Alexandrian phrase "union in one nature, " they must believe that in Christ there are two beings united by a moral union. To disprove this he urges that Catholic belief accords to Christ Our Lord one only faculty of action. This point the pope wholly overlooks or, more truly, misunderstands. Not the singleness of the faculty, but the unity in action between the divine and the human, is the subject of the pope's reply. Certainly, Honorius answers, Christ always acted with the two natures in harmony, no conflict between them being possible, the unity of action being perfect. As to the number of ways in which He acted no man can count them, much less say they were one or two. Questions of grammatical subtleties should be left to grammarians, and he agrees with Sergius that the discussion should be left where it stands.
Obviously Sergius and Honorius are at cross purposes. They are not discussing the same thing at all. But the consequences of the misunderstanding could hardly have been more serious. How far Honorius was from approving the new theory can be gathered from what he wrote to Sophronius. The new Patriarch of Jerusalem, following the custom, wrote to the other patriarchs and to the pope a letter -- the synodal letter -- notifying his election and testifying to his acceptance of the traditional faith. The synodal letter of Sophronius is a long and elaborate criticism of the new theory, which it exposes and refutes as a development of the heresy condemned at Chalcedon. The pope thereupon wrote to Constantinople, to Alexandria and to Sophronius. The first two letters are lost, and of the third only fragments survive. We do, however, possess an earlier letter to Sophronius, written before the latter's synodal letter had been received. Three things definitely emerge from the pope's letter and the fragments. The pope deprecates all discussion as to whether there are one or two "energies, " for, whichever expression is used, misunderstanding is certain. We must, however, hold that Jesus Christ, one in person, wrought works both human and divine by means of the two natures. The same Jesus Christ acted in His two natures divinely and humanly. Finally -- again the fatal ignoratio elenchi -- we must acknowledge the unity of will, for in Jesus Christ there is necessarily harmony between what is divinely willed and what is humanly willed. That Honorius held and taught the faith of Chalcedon is clear enough, despite the muddle. It is equally clear that he failed to grasp that a new question had been raised and was under discussion; clear, also, that he assisted the innovators by thus imposing silence alike on them and on their orthodox critics; and clear, finally, that he definitely said, in so many words, that there is but one will in Christ. It was a patronage of heresy no less effective because it was unconscious.
The next move lay with the emperor, and in 638 appeared an edict, the Ecthesis, which put forward the teaching that in Our Lord there is but one will as the Church's official doctrine.
Sophronius died that same year; Honorius, and Sergius too. A few months later Heraclius died, in 641, and Cyrus of Alexandria in 642. The principal actors in the controversy were gone then within four years of the appearance of the Ecthesis, and in those same few fateful years there had disappeared too -- and for ever -- the provinces whose pacification had been the original cause of all the trouble. It was in 629 that Heraclius had triumphed over the Persians, and, while the ink was still wet on the treaties, the power was already preparing which was to destroy both victor and vanquished. The new religion of Mahomet, slowly developing in Arabia for the last thirty years, was about to begin its epic conquest of the East. In 633 Damascus fell to it, Jerusalem in 637, Alexandria in 641. The actors gone, the provinces gone, it might be thought that, necessarily, the whole wretched business of this imperial patronage of dogmatic definition was at an end. Alas, the real fury of the Monothelite heresy had not even begun. The dogmatic question once raised must be settled. Honorius, failing to see the point raised, had set it aside. Sooner or later there would come a pope who, more understanding, could not follow that precedent. Rome must teach, and definitely. On the other hand the imperial prestige was bound up with the new theory. If Rome condemned it the emperor must either submit or fight. No emperor yet had surrendered his patronage of heresy at the bidding of a pope. All the emperors who had once adopted heresy had died ultimately in the heresy of their choice -- Constantine and Valens in Arianism, Theodosius II compromised with the Monophysites, Zeno and Anastasius in actual schism. Now it was the turn of the family of Heraclius, and once again, heresy, for forty years, finds in the Christian Emperor its chief and only support, while the traditional faith is proscribed and the faithful persecuted.
The first sign of opposition from Rome came when the envoys of Honorius's successor reached the capital, with their petition that his election should be confirmed. Presented with the Ecthesis and asked to sign it, they would not do more than promise to present it for signature to the newly-elected, Severinus. Shortly afterwards (August 12, 640) this pope too died; and in his place was elected the equally short-lived John IV (640-642). To John IV, Heraclius did indeed write, in the last months of his life, disclaiming all responsibility for the Ecthesis, and naming Sergius as its author. Nevertheless it was not withdrawn and John IV wrote vigorously to Heraclius' successors, Constantine III and Heracleonas, demanding its revocation. At the same time he protested against the use of Honorius' name in support of the heresy. Honorius, he recalls, had written to Sergius that "in our Saviour there can by no means be two contrary wills, that is in His members since He was free of those weaknesses which result from Adam's fall. My aforesaid predecessor, therefore, teaching on this mystery of Christ's incarnation, declared that there were not in Him what is found in us who are sinners, to wit conflicting wills of the spirit and of the flesh. This teaching some have twisted to suit their own ends, alleging Honorius to have taught that there is but one will to His divinity and humanity which is indeed contrary to truth. "
John IV died in October, 642. His successor, Theodore (642-649), continued the policy of protest, condemning the Ecthesis anew, and sending to the Patriarch of Constantinople a declaration of the true faith to be posted in its place. The patriarch refused, protested the orthodoxy of his attitude and invoked Honorius among his patrons. Finally, in 646, the pope declared him deposed. The sentence was never carried out. Instead, on the patriarch's advice, the Emperor Constans II (642-668), issued a new edict in place of the Ecthesis. This was the Type [1] promulgated in 648. The Type was not merely a profession of faith, as the Ecthesis had been, but an edict forbidding, under heavy penalties, all discussion of the subject. Whether the Monothelites were right or wrong, the pope and those who stood by him must be content to be silent. Bishops and clerics who defy the law are to be degraded, monks to be expelled from their monasteries, laymen to be stripped of their property if nobles, and the ordinary citizens to be flogged and exiled, "in order that all men, restrained by the fear of God and respect for the penalties rightly decreed, may keep undisturbed the peace of God's holy Churches. " It was a warning against interference. Was it meant for Rome too? Events were shortly to show. Pope Theodore died about this time (May 14, 649), and the responsibility of decision fell to his successor, Martin I.
No better choice of pope could have been made. Martin had been his predecessor's ambassador at Constantinople, and had been entrusted with the delicate task of warning and excommunicating the patriarch three years before. He knew the problem thoroughly and he also knew well the personalities opposed to him, the Patriarch Paul and the young Emperor Constans II. The new pope made no attempt to obtain the emperor's confirmation of his election, but, planning a courageous defiance of the Type, he summoned a synod of bishops to meet in the Lateran basilica for the October of 649. One hundred and five bishops answered the summons, and the sessions occupied the whole of the month. All the correspondence and documents of the twenty years' controversy were read, the complaints of the persecuted and their protestations. Finally, in a series of canons, the Type and its promoters were condemned, and an official declaration given that in Jesus Christ Our Lord there are "two natural wills the divine and the human, and two natural operations the divine and the human. ', Nor did Pope Martin rest content with his great council at Rome. Its decisions were transmitted to every part of the Church, to missionary bishops in Holland and Gaul as well as to Africa and Constantinople. Local councils were to be organised to support and to accept the Roman decision.
The emperor replied by action. A high official arrived in Rome with instructions to force an acceptance of the Type on the pope and all the bishops. He could not, however, rely on the loyalty of the soldiery. Pope and clergy and people were too united for intrigue to have any chance of success, an attempt at assassination failed and finally he came to an understanding with the pope and proceeded no further with his mission. Four years later arrived another envoy of a different stamp (653). The pope, a great sufferer from gout, foreseeing trouble, had his bed carried before the high altar of the Lateran and there the troops found him when they broke in. The envoy brought an imperial decree notifying him that he was deposed and ordering him to be arrested and dispatched to Constantinople. Another pope was to be elected in his place. The pope forbade any attempts at resistance and, surrendering to the officers, was straightway carried off.
It was more than a year before he reached the capital, and during all that length of time he suffered greatly from the brutality of the soldiers. When, finally, the convoy arrived at the quays of the imperial city the old man, helpless and confined to his bed, was left on deck for the best part of a day to be the butt of the populace. Then for three months he lay in the dungeons until, on December 19, 654, he was brought before the Senate to be tried for, of all things, treason. The cruel farce of a State trial, with the usual apparatus of trained official perjurers, dragged on and the pope was found guilty. They took him next to a balcony of the palace, and, to the acclamation of the mob, went through the ritual ceremony of degrading the pope, stripping him of his vestments and insignia. Then, half naked and loaded with chains, he was dragged through the streets to the prison reserved for wretches awaiting execution, the executioner, bearing a drawn sword, marching before him. This sentence, however, was not carried out. Constans II, who had enjoyed, from behind a grille, the scene he had so carefully arranged, went from his triumph to recount it in detail to the patriarch, ill at the time and thought to be nearing his end. The recital struck terror into the prelate. "Alas, yet another count to which soon I must answer, " was all he could say, and it was at his earnest entreaty that Constans commuted the sentence for one of exile. Three months later (March, 655) the unhappy pope, half dead with his privations and sufferings, was shipped off to the Crimea where new hardships speedily put an end to his life (September 16, 655).
St. Martin I, in whom the incompetence of Honorius was so gloriously redeemed, was not the only martyr to Constans II's barbarity. The abbot Maximus, a one time secretary to Heraclius, and two monks, one of them the pope's late ambassador to the imperial court, were likewise put on trial. The skill of the one time secretary had no difficulty in stripping the trial of its pretences and in forcing an admission that the real cause was loyalty to the Roman decisions. The three were exiled, horribly tormented, mutilated even, and in the end, like the pope they had defended, they, too, died from the results of their ill-treatment.
One very unpleasant feature of this episode is the attitude of the Roman clergy to their persecuted bishop and his supporters. It is also illuminating testimony to the hold which, in this new Byzantine Catholicism, the emperor had managed to gain even on the clergy of the supreme see. Before St. Martin had been tried, before even he had arrived at Constantinople, the wretched Roman clergy had obeyed the imperial order and given him a successor. Hence, in his prison at Constantinople the old pope waited in vain for help, for even the support of friendship from his own Roman people. The election of Eugene was a sad disillusioning of the valiant soul who had expected that something of his own spirit would keep his clergy loyal. Worse still was the news that the ambassadors sent by Eugene to petition for the emperor's confirmation of his election had gone over to the heretics, and, if they had not accepted the Type, had fraternised with them to the extent of concelebrating with the patriarch. This was one of the new facts thrown in the teeth of St. Maximus as he protested that he had for his warrant the teaching and practice of the Roman See. In desperation he turned to prayer that the divine mercy would somehow make manifest the gift of truth with which It had enriched the see of Peter.
He had not long to wait. The new pope, Eugene -- really pope since Martin's death -- was already, by 656, a source of anxiety to those who had contrived his election. The new patriarch at Constantinople had sent to Rome the synodal letter announcing his election. It was read with the wonted ceremony at St. Mary Major's before a great assembly of clergy and people, and its language on the crucial point of "energies" was considered too obscure to be orthodox. Cries of opposition broke out. The pope tried diplomatically to calm the tumult, but was forced to promise that he would never acknowledge as patriarch the author of the letter. Then, and then only, was he allowed to proceed with the mass. At Constantinople the news of this rejection of the new patriarch roused the official world to new fury, and one of St. Maximus' judges referred to the incident "Know this, Lord Abbot, as soon as the Barbarians leave us a breathing space we shall treat as we are treating you this pope who dares now to raise his head, and the rest of those folk in Rome who cry out so loudly, and your own disciples with them. We shall bury the lot of you, each in his own place, as we did for Martin. " However, Eugene I died before the emperor's hands were freed (June 2, 657), and his successor, Vitalian, made his peace and recognised the new patriarch unasked.
Six years after Vitalian's election political affairs brought Constans II to Rome, the first emperor to appear in the ancient capital for more than two centuries. Whatever the orthodoxy of his belief, he was the sovereign, the pope was his subject, and pope and clergy headed the citizens in the demonstration of loyalty which greeted the tyrant who had sent St. Martin to his death not ten years before. From Rome the emperor went south and he was still in Sicily when (668) the dagger of an assassin put an end to his life. His sudden death so far from the capital seemed likely, for the moment, to be the prelude to civil war. That his son, Constantine IV (668-685), succeeded peaceably was due in no small measure to the activity of Pope Vitalian, and, possibly in gratitude for the pope's service, with the new reign the Type, though not disavowed, disappeared into the lumber rooms of history. There was henceforward a kind of peace, but neither of the popes who succeeded Vitalian -- Adeodatus 672-676, and Donus 676-678 -- were recognised by the patriarchs at Constantinople, nor were the patriarchs John V (669-675) and Constantine (675-677) recognised at Rome. It was the initiative of the emperor which brought the estrangement to an end, and from his letter to Pope Donus asking him to send representatives to a conference, there developed the sixth general council of 680-1 (Constantinople III).
Two years of delays followed the imperial invitation. To begin with, the pope to whom it was addressed died before the letter arrived. Then his successor Agatho (678-681) decided, before he replied, to consult the western episcopate generally. His acceptance should go to Constantinople bearing the signatures of as many Latin bishops as possible. There was at Rome the usual council of the pope's own immediate suffragans, in which an English bishop, Wilfrid of York, took part. There was a council at Pavia, and other councils, apparently, elsewhere, following the procedure of St. Martin I in 649. As his principal legate the pope would have liked to send the Greek monk who at the time occupied the see of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus. The difficulties which prevented this, delayed the mission yet further. Finally, in the September of 680, the delegates reached Constantinople and an emperor who had almost despaired of seeing them. They were eleven in all: two priests and a deacon representing the pope himself, three Italian bishops -- the emperor had asked for twelve -- a priest of Ravenna and, as the emperor had desired, four monks chosen from the Greek monasteries of Southern Italy.
The legates presented to the emperor a letter from the pope, the three bishops the profession of faith which the western bishops had signed -- a hundred and twenty-five of them. On November 7 the delegates came together under the presidency of the emperor. The project had grown since he wrote to the pope, and with the mission from the West there were present the bishops of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and what could be gathered to represent the three other patriarchates where, thanks to Monophysitism and the fifty years of Mahometan occupation, Catholicism as an organised thing had practically disappeared. In all one hundred and seventy-four bishops were present.
The sessions of the Council -- eighteen in number -- did not end until the following September (681). [2] The Monothelites were allowed to state their case, the whole vast literature of manifestoes and synodals was read, with the acts of the previous councils on which the Monothelites based their new claim to orthodoxy.
Agatho's letter to the emperor was read to the council. Like the Tome of St. Leo, two centuries earlier, it is a simple statement of the belief as traditional that in Christ Our Lord there are two wills and two operations. As St. Leo at Chalcedon, so now Agatho, was acclaimed as Peter's successor "Peter it is who speaks through Agatho. " In the eighth session the emperor intervened and demanded that the two patriarchs should give their opinion as to the doctrine of Agatho's letter. The Patriarch of Constantinople declared it to be the Catholic faith and the immense majority of the bishops agreed. His colleague of Antioch -- a patriarch in partibus these many years -- held firmly to his Monothelism. Sergius, Cyrus, Sophronius, and Honorius, dead now half a century, came to life again in the debates. Sophronius was hailed as the defender of the true faith, the rest condemned; Sergius as the pioneer of the heresy, Cyrus and the successors of Sergius as his supporters, all of whom, the decree notes, have been already condemned by Agatho, "the most holy and thrice blessed pope of Old Rome in his suggestions to the emperor. " Tothis list, sent on from Rome, the council added the name of Honorius "because in his writings to Sergius he followed his opinions and confirmed his impious teaching. " The emperor accepted all the council decreed, he presided at the closing session, and by an edict gave the definitions force of law.
The council, following immemorial tradition, wrote also to the pope, begging him to confirm what had been decreed. At the moment the Roman See was vacant. Agatho had died (January, 681) before the council was half way through its labours, and his successor, Leo II, was not elected until nearly a year after the council had ended (August 17, 682). To acknowledge its synodal letter and to send a reply was one of his first duties. This he did in a letter to the emperor. The pope confirms the decrees, and re-echoes the condemnations of his predecessor, and in even more indignant terms, he makes his own the council’s condemnation of Honorius "who did not make this apostolic Church illustrious by teaching in accord with the apostolic tradition, but on the contrary allowed its spotless faith to be sullied by a sacrilegious treachery. " He used a similar hard phrase in a letter to the King of the Visigoths. But it is in a further letter to the bishops of Spain that this pope, in a sentence, most clearly describes the fault for which Honorius merited these condemnations: "Honorius who did not extinguish the fire of heretical teaching, as behoved one who exercised the authority of the apostles, but by his negligence blew the flames still higher., ' The condemnation of Pope Honorius does not seem greatly to have moved those who witnessed it. It was recorded in all solemnity in the Acta of the council, it appears in all the correspondence which notifies the decision of the council to the rest of Christendom. In the archives where these rested, his memory, too, slept until, centuries later, controversial archaeologists, straining every resource to embarass the champions of the Roman primacy, turned to the record of the sixth general council and with more ingenuity than good faith tried to put on the decrees a meaning they were never meant to bear. Much more singular than the inclusion of the negligent and misunderstanding Honorius among the condemned of 681, is the entire absence of any reference in the council’s proceedings to the memory of the story's heroic figures, St. Martin I, St. Maximus and the rest. The ingenuity of Constans II, condemning for treason where he dare not proceed on a cause of faith, was successful to the end. No council, no pope, under this Byzantine regime, would glorify the criminal convicted for treason, any more than it would condemn the emperors who had fostered and encouraged the heresy, opposition to which was the martyr's real crime. The memory of Heraclius and of Constans II was officially undimmed, while that of St. Martin and his companions remained officially infamous.
In the council of 680 Rome and Constantinople came together after a breach of relations that had lasted thirty-five years. The acknowledgement of the Roman primacy then made was as full, and as spontaneous, as at the time of Hormisdas, or at Chalcedon, two hundred and thirty years before. Nevertheless in those two hundred and thirty years a new world had slowly been coming to birth. It is always difficult to draw the dividing lines of historical periods, but certainly by the end of the seventh century the world into which the Church had come had definitely given place to another. That world had been a civilisation, Roman politically, Hellenistic culturally, imposed on and adopted by a score of peoples, overlaying, in East and West alike, older cultures still. By the time of the Council of 680 the West had long since slipped from the grasp of the one-time world State. For nearly three centuries now, Gaul, Spain and Britain had been outside its boundaries. Italy, too, which Justinian had recovered, was by 680 once again "barbarian", save for Sicily, Calabria and a few scattered vantage points along the coast. Africa had recently (695-698) fallen to the Arabs, who, as has been noted, had, sixty years earlier made themselves masters of Egypt and the East. The Slavs were now established south of the Danube. The State, which had not been a Roman empire for three centuries, was by this hardly an empire at all. More and more it was become a Greek-speaking nation, whose strength lay in the peasantry of Asia Minor; and if it still retained in Constantinople a European capital, it was to the East that its capital looked for inspiration, to the lands and the traditions of those ancient cultures whence had derived that non-European conception of the semi-divine despotic ruler whose influence, since Diocletian, had done so much to make the Empire a new thing. The lands had vanished, the culture had changed, the inspiration of life was other, and it was in a world already changed that this last great controversy between the Roman See and the Roman Emperors was fought out. Nevertheless, since the affair of the Monothelites is the last chapter of the history which begins with the Edict of Milan it is best told here in order to complete that history. To show in what degree the world in which the controversy ended was a different world, and how truly a new age had begun with Constantinople's pride of place reinforced by the consciousness of its cultural and even "national" superiority to Rome -- a consciousness now characterised by deep anti-Roman feeling -- it remains to say something of another council at Constantinople, summoned twelve years after the council of Pope Agatho and Constantine IV. This is the famous synod in Trullo [3] -- so called from the place where it met, the great domed hall of the imperial palace at Constantinople.
It was summoned by the son of Constantine IV, the youthful Justinian II (685-95, 705-711). This emperor's reputation has left him the very type of that treachery and sadistic cruelty which, for so long, was all that the world "byzantine" conveyed to western minds. He was, however, no friend to the defeated Monothelites, and he needed little encouragement to busy himself, after the pattern of his great namesake, with the Church's internal discipline. It was represented to him that neither of the last two general councils (553 and 680) had occupied itself with questions of discipline, and to supply what was wanting Justinian called the Council of 692.
It was a purely Byzantine affair. The pope was not invited, and there was no East to invite. Two hundred and eleven bishops attended, and the papal ambassadors at the imperial court were present too. The council did little more than publish once more, in collected form, laws which had come down from earlier councils. There were, however, some new canons and, bearing in mind the emperor's aim of elaborating in this council a common ecclesiastical observance for the whole empire, their anti-Roman character is very significant. The famous 28th canon of Chalcedon is, of course, re-enacted, and the eastern discipline in the matter of Lent and of clerical marriage is extended to the whole Church in language designedly insulting to the Roman See. Equally significant of a new, aggressive anti-Roman spirit was the fact that, among the avowed sources from which this code was drawn, were councils which Rome had never recognised, and others which Rome had definitely rejected. The code went through, however, without a protest, and the pope's ambassadors to the imperial court signed with the rest.
It remained to be seen what the pope himself would do, and so much importance did Justinian attach to his signature that six copies of the decrees were sent to Rome. Each of the patriarchs, as well as the emperor, should have his autograph copy of the papal submission. The pope, Sergius I, was himself an oriental, Syrian by blood though Sicilian by birth. He refused the council all recognition.
Straightway the old tyranny began to function, officials coming from Constantinople with an order to drag the pope in chains to the capital. But it was not so easy now as it had been fifty years before in the time of St. Martin. The troops mutinied, the mob drove the high officials out of Rome with appropriate indecencies, and shortly afterwards a revolution at Constantinople drove out Justinian too -- his nose slit in the latest fashion of mutilation. Ten years later, wearing a new nose of gold, he returned and, once securely established, his thoughts turned again to the decrees of his council still lacking the pontifical signature. Once more this half-crazy fanatic addressed himself to the task. The pope, John VII, was asked to note the canons to which he objected, and to sanction those he approved. The poor man was not only himself a Byzantine but the son of an official of the imperial service. Obedience to the emperor was in his blood, and yet he was pope. Something of the tradition triumphed despite the "human frailty" of which the Liber Pontificalis speaks. He did not dare to pick and choose, but sent back a kind of vague and general approbation. Justinian found it lacking, and sent orders for a fuller and more definite assent. Pope John was dead by this time. It was his successor, Constantine, who had to face the difficulty and an order to proceed himself to Constantinople. The pope was received everywhere with the utmost ceremony and reverence. The emperor too, most astonishingly, threw himself at his feet, begged the privilege of assisting at his mass and receiving Holy Communion from his hands. And thanks to the diplomatic skill of the future Gregory II the affair of the Council of 692 was left as it was. The emperor asked no further approbation. The pope abstained from further condemnation. To this day the place where the pope's name should show is blank. After which happy ending to what had promised to be so tragic, the pope was allowed to return to Rome. Two months later the mob rose once again, and this time the emperor and his son died in torments at its hands (December, 711).
Here ends the story of the Church and the world into which it was born. But the regime of Byzantinism under which the Church's ruler had been so oppressed, continued still. It was to last -- so far as it affected the popes -- just something short of fifty years more. Then a liberator came, in the person of the Catholic king of the barbarian Franks. He beat off from the nominally imperial lands the Lombards who menaced St. Peter, and "for love of St. Peter and the remission of his sins" made over his conquests to the pope (754). St. Peter is thenceforward no longer the subject of the successor of Augustus and Constantine. The alliance of the Papacy and the Franks has most momentously begun. It is a warning, if warning is needed, that the Middle Ages are upon us, that the Roman Empire is already a matter of history. Just two hundred years had passed since Justinian's re-conquest of Italy. For so long, and for no longer, had (Caesar imprisoned the Papacy in his Byzantine State.
1 tupos peri pisteos: i.e. outline of the faith.
2 Forty three bishops were present at the opening session; 174 signed the final act.
3 Also called Quini-Sext, because intended to supplement (by canons about discipline) the Fifth and Sixth General Councils (i.e. those of 553 and 680-1).
