| ### CHAPTER 8: THE CATHOLIC RESTORATION. 359-382 ###  |

| #### INTRODUCTION |

| #### #### JULIAN'S reign was of short duration. With his death the unity of rule disappeared once more, and under the dyarchy of the brothers Valentinian I and Valens the sequel to the debacle of Rimini-Seleucia was, in West and East, widely different. Valentinian (364-75) was a Catholic and his return to the religious policy of the Edict of Milan put no hindrance to the restoration of Catholicism in the States he governed. " The heads that had been bowed were raised, movements once more became natural. " Liberius had indeed judged more accurately than St. Jerome when he described the action of the bishops at Rimini as a material surrender to external pressure. The advent of Julian removed that pressure, and spontaneously the West returned to its old allegiance to Nicea. #### The Arian victory at Rimini was the culminating point of the policy which, for thirty years, had ignored the Roman primacy, had attempted to substitute for it the patronage of the Christian Emperor. It is not surprising that the reaction after Rimini produced strong and explicit declarations of the special prerogative of the Roman Church and, in St. Ambrose, the first theorist of the relations between the Church and the Christian State. "My will is Canon Law, " Constantius had told the Gallic bishops at Arles, and henceforward while, in the East, Caesar continued to rule the Church until his interference became an accepted institution regularly obeyed, there developed in the West -- thanks especially to St. Ambrose -- a clear understanding of the relations between Church and State, and a clearer appreciation of the role of the Roman primacy. For seven years (353-360) the West, unwillingly, had borne the yoke of Caesaro-papism. Its liberty once restored, it rebuilt its strength in a more conscious adherence than ever to the authority of the Bishop of Rome, recognising in loyalty to his teaching rather than to the password of any council howsoever sacred, the touchstone of true faith and membership in the Church. #### St. Ambrose, however, a young man of twenty, was as yet only a catechumen when the coup d’etat of Julian's army emancipated the Latin churches from the Arians of the East. The first leaders of the restoration in the West are the three bishops Eusebius of Vercelli, Lucifer of Cagliari and Hilary of Poitiers, who were exiled under the late regime for their loyalty to Nicea. The first place where the reaction dared to make a public demonstration was, naturally enough, Paris -- Julian’s late capital. Here in 360 a council of bishops, led by St. Hilary, excommunicated Saturninus of Arles, Constantius II’s ecclesiastical henchman, and sent a letter of sympathy to the deposed Catholic bishops in the East, the victims of the policy of Rimini-Seleucia, in which they confess their late error of tacitly ignoring the testword – substance -- of the whole dispute. A similar feeling showed itself in Spain and in Africa, but in the Danubian provinces, thanks to the convinced Arianism of the leading bishops, the regime of 359 still held. In Northern Italy, too, the Arians were still in possession of the see of the imperial city, Milan, which remained theirs for yet another fifteen years, the Western Emperors during this time being either Pagan or, Valentinian I, liberally unconcerned with church disputes and so in no way to be relied on to coerce unorthodox prelates. #### In 362 Julian's mischievously inspired amnesty to the exiled bishops began to bear fruit. Liberius had issued a formal condemnation of what had been done at Rimini, and he had sent out to all the provinces regulations concerning the bishops who had there betrayed Nicea. His policy -- the policy also of St. Athanasius in Egypt -- was that the bishops who disavowed the signatures extorted by force should retain their sees. With the sudden return from the East of Lucifer of Cagliari the peaceful carrying out of this policy was at once disturbed. Lucifer, one of the three bishops who had bravely withstood Constantius to his face at Milan in 355, was by nature an extremist. His exile he had spent in writing furious tracts against the Emperor. Their titles throw some light on his methods, No Peace With Heretics, Apostate Princes, No Mercy for God's Enemies. He came back, fresh from his unhappy and uncanonical interference in the domestic troubles of the Catholics of Antioch, [ ] to campaign against the laxity of the Roman settlement and presently, preaching that the Church had ceased to exist except in his own diocese, he retired to Cagliari. #### St. Hilary of Poitiers had all Lucifer’s courage and all his gift of blunt, direct speech. With him Catholicism in the West comes for the first time to a clear understanding of the nature of the Church's independence of the Christian State -- and this within less than fifty years of the Christian State's first coming into existence. It is the State which is the new thing, the State which creates the problem. The solution lies in the traditional belief that the belief is essentially a tradition. The Faith begins to be in danger, St. Hilary writes, as soon as "definitions of the Lord’s teaching are enacted by a human judge, by the prince. " In his book, Against Constantius, he breaks out violently against the emperor, exposing the novelty of his usurpation and its danger, painting for all time the picture of the Caesaro-papist prince who allows himself to define the faith, to distribute sees right and left to whom he chooses, to call councils and override their decisions with his soldiery, while at the same time his munificence covers the churches with gold, his piety embracing the bishops and humbly bowing before them for their blessing, inviting them to his table, and showering privileges upon them. #### St. Hilary died in 367. It was not until eight years later that the writer who turns these controversial protestations into a consistent theory was consecrated Bishop of Milan. Nor certainly, in 367, had the thought of being St. Hilary's continuator ever come to St. Ambrose who was then in the early stages of his chosen career in the imperial civil service. It had been his father's career too, and in it, at the time of St. Ambrose's birth, his father had risen to the highest post of all under the emperor -- Pretorian Prefect of the Gauls, with Britain, Gaul and Spain under his jurisdiction, and his residence at Treves. Hence it was that the Roman Ambrose was himself born in the distant provinces. He was, however, educated in Rome, and by 374 he had risen to be Governor of the Province of Emilia-Liguria. When the old Arian Bishop of Milan at last died in that year, the Governor, a Catholic but as yet a catechumen only, foreseeing the inevitable riots which the election of a successor would cause, took personal charge of the policing of the ceremony. It resulted, through the accident of a child's acclamation and the mob's instant appreciation of a rare suitability, in his own election. He accepted, was baptized, consecrated, and immediately set himself to the acquirement of his office's technique. Ruler and diplomat he was already by nature, and by the training of long experience. In the twenty-three years that remained to him he showed himself of the first rank as the Catholic bishop -- preacher, writer, poet, ascetic, and such an unfearing rebuker of evil-doing in high places as to be ever since the very type and pattern of the heroic virtue of episcopal courage. #### Since Valentinian I's accession the court once more resided at Milan, and on Valentinian's death (375) the new bishop found himself the guardian and tutor of the two young sons who succeeded, Gratian, aged sixteen, and Valentinian II, a child of five. In this, as in his presence at the emperor's council and in his frequent employment as an ambassador, St. Ambrose sets yet another precedent for the coming new age, creating the familiar role of the patriot prelate, statesman and diplomatist. But his independence survived the atmosphere of the court and the complications of his high civil importance. When in 384, after Gratian's death, the Pagans, still a force in Rome, demanded the restoration of the idol of Victory to the Senate House, and hoped easily to win it from the Arian empress-mother now the regent, St. Ambrose held firm. While the court hesitated the bishop was urgent that the matter lay beyond its jurisdiction, being a matter of religion -- causa religionis est. In such the Church must be heard. #### Two years later, the petition of the Arians of Milan that one of the churches of the city be granted to them gave St. Ambrose yet another opportunity to demonstrate the duty of episcopal independence of the State. He refused to make over the basilica they sought, and, cited before the court, was bidden remember that the emperor was but using his rights since all things were in his power (eo quod in potestate eius essent omnia). He agreed; but insisted on the exception that what belonged to God was beyond the emperor's jurisdiction (ea quae sunt divina imperatoriae potestati non esse subiecta), and in a sermon shortly afterwards he developed the theme for his people, summing up the whole matter in one of his own beautifully cut phrases ad imperatorem palatia pertinent, ad sacerdotem ecclesiae (palaces are matter for the emperor's concern, but churches belong to the bishop). The next stage in the affair was a summons to Ambrose to appear before the council to answer for his refusal to hand over the basilica. Once again his reply was a refusal, and in a letter to the emperor he explained his reason. In matters of faith bishops alone have authority to judge. That laymen, in such a cause, should sit in judgment on a bishop is a thing unheard of. "In cases where matters of faith are in question it is the custom for bishops to judge emperors when the emperors are Christians, and not for emperors to judge bishops. " Bishops who allow laymen to trample under foot this right of the episcopate (ius sacerdotale) are, as the emperor will one day realise, rightly considered contemptible. This astonishingly outspoken letter the bishop followed up by yet another sermon in which he explained to his people the latest phase in the struggle. He was not acting in ignorance of the imperial practice where episcopal independence was inconvenient to the State. He remembered, and in his sermon and letter recalled, the tyranny of Constantius II. Valens, dead only eight years, was a more recent memory still. None the less the bishop personifies Christ, and "in the imperial council Christ should be the judge, not the prisoner at the bar. " To Caesar, by all means, the things that are Caesar's -- the bishop will pay the taxes levied on the Church's property, and if the State should confiscate its property he will not resist. But the basilica is God's. No temple of God can belong to Caesar. Then, two wonderful phrases which cover all the differing mentalities which are already preparing the schism between West and East, and which point unerringly to the origin of all the mischief, " The emperor is within the Church, and not above the Church" (imperator enim intra ecclesiam, non supra ecclesiam est): it has been the crime of the Arians, the crime which stamps them as the worst of all heretics, that “they were willing to surrender to Caesar the right to rule the Church ". (Isti imperatori volunt dare ius Ecclesiae). The emperor abandoned his project. #### Valentinian II was a minor in whose name the Arian empressdowager ruled. He was barely past the years of tutelage when, in 392, he was murdered, and Theodosius who had ruled the East since 379 and, only a year before, had restored to Valentinian the states which Maximus had usurped, was left sole ruler of the Roman world. Theodosius was, as emperors went, an exemplary Catholic. But the Bishop of Milan continued to claim from the mature and experienced Theodosius the same complete independence, the same autonomy and authority in spirituals, for which he had fought in the time of his child predecessor. #### Even before Theodosius succeeded to the rule of the Empire in the West he had had experience of the saint's limitless and courageous solicitude for the rights of religion. In distant Osroene a synagogue had been destroyed in a riot. Theodosius ordered that it should be rebuilt at the expense of the local bishop, and the news of this reaching Ambrose he immediately protested. Once more he is concerned that, in a matter which concerns religion, the emperor should act without the advice of his bishops. And since it touches the emperor's conscience, and therefore his soul’s salvation that he should act in these matters as God directs, charity demands that the bishop should instruct and warn him -- privately first, as by this letter, but, should it be necessary, publicly before all the Church. The emperor ignored the letter, and Ambrose, true to his word, made the affair the subject of a sermon. Theodosius he compared to David, set by God in the place of the worthless Saul (Valens). God had sent Nathan to rebuke David when, in turn, he, too, promised to be faithless. So Ambrose spoke to Theodosius. And Theodosius present at the service heard the rebuke. As the bishop came down from the pulpit the emperor stood in his way. The bishop insisted. If the emperor would not withdraw his order that Christians should rebuild a house of impiety, the bishop would not offer the sacrifice. Theodosius submitted. #### Twelve months later a still graver matter produced a second crisis. A serious riot at Thessalonica, in which a high official had been murdered, had been punished, on the emperor's orders, by an organised massacre. Ambrose waited, resolved, at the last extreme, to do what hitherto no bishop had dared, to threaten the Roman Emperor with expulsion from the Church. As before he first of all wrote to Theodosius. The emperor is only a man. He has sinned. Sin is not taken away but by tears and penance. Until the emperor acknowledges his wrong-doing and submits to penance, in no church, while he is present, will the holy sacrifice be offered. Once more religion triumphed, and Theodosius, his insignia laid aside, publicly confessed his crime and asked God's pardon. #### St. Ambrose is, very literally, an epoch-making figure. Thanks to his personality, to the accident that made the very centre of the world's affairs the stage on which his personality was displayed, to his gifts as writer and speaker, his life set the pattern for all the next thousand years of the relations between the Catholic bishop and the Catholic prince. In these few years at Milan he laid the foundations, in his careful demarcation of the rights of religio and respublica, of all the public law of the respublica christiana of the coming Middle Ages. Theodosius, though neither emperor nor bishop realised it, was to be the last emperor to rule effectively all the lands between the Atlantic and the Adriatic. Slowly increasing and inevitable chaos was to descend upon that vast heritage. One of the few things to survive was the Catholic episcopate, and it survived formed in the mould of Ambrose of Milan. #### He has, however, another and more particular importance from his role in the restoration of Catholicism in the Arian- ridden Europe of the years after Rimini, an importance deriving from action once again, and, still more, from his clearly expressed teaching on the nature of the Church, and on the Church's relations to its own rebellious subjects, be they rebels against its government -- schismatics, or, like heretics, rebels against its teaching. In 379 St. Ambrose had to preach the funeral sermon of his own brother Satyrus. He recalled, in testimony of the dead man's Catholicity, how a few years earlier, shipwreck had thrown him on to the coast of Sardinia and how, being thought near to death, Satyrus had sent for the local bishop to baptize him. But for Satyrus not any baptism could suffice. He must assure himself that the bishop was truly of the Church. "He made diligent enquiry, ', the preacher explained, "whether the bishop was in agreement with the Catholic bishops, that is to say with the Roman Church. " Satyrus knew about the schism of the fanatical Lucifer of Cagliari, understood that though Lucifer's belief was in accord with Nicea, nevertheless -- and for this St. Ambrose commends him -- “he did not think he could find the Faith in a schism" (non putavit fidem esse in schismate). Accord with Nicea was not of itself sufficient to make a Catholic. The root of Catholicism lay elsewhere, in the approval of the Roman Church. #### Two years after this sermon the Council of Aquileia gave St. Ambrose a better occasion still to repeat that teaching. It was a council of the bishops of the civil diocese of Italy, and though the pope -- Damasus I -- was in correspondence with St. Ambrose regarding the council’s business, he was not represented at its meetings. Of that council St. Ambrose is the inspiration and its synodal letter to the Emperor Gratian is his work. The council, the emperor is informed, has just tried and deposed the two last survivors in the West of the Arian bishops. The prospects of unity and harmony are improved. The bishops assembled at Aquileia beseech the emperor therefore to be on his guard against the intrigues of Ursinus, the anti- pope, "lest the Roman Church, the head of the whole Roman world, be troubled and its most holy apostolic faith, since it is from Rome that the right to communion flows to all the rest. " Ursinus had been a trouble in Rome since the pope's very election. Riots, deaths, and a criminal suit against the pope, from which he emerged, acquitted, had marked the struggle. Ursinus had been condemned and exiled. The bishops still fear his resources and hope to anticipate his wickedness. How literally their declaration of the nature of the Roman Church's importance was meant to be taken, and was in fact understood, we can gather, curiously enough, from an attack on the council, in which that declaration is criticised, by one of the two bishops whom the council had deposed -- the solitary protest of "a prisoner under sentence cursing his judges. " This was Palladius, Bishop of Ratiaria. In his attack he denies that the Bishop of Rome has any rights other than those common to all bishops, and claims that every bishop is as much Peter's successor as the pope, that Peter himself had no superiority over his apostolic colleagues. Therefore he condemns the council for its connivance at Damasus' assumption that he is "The prince of the episcopate" (princeps episcopatus) -- Damasus who has not even deigned to attend the Council! #### The Catholic reaction in the West is then associated with the direct activity of the popes, with Liberius until 366, and Damasus after him, with renewed assertions of the Church's independence of the State and with renewed recognition of the Roman See's peculiar function as the touchstone of orthodox Christianity. The popes, during this time, are personally overshadowed by the genius of St. Ambrose, the greatest ecclesiastical personality the Church in the West has so far produced; but the whole effort of that genius is given to strengthening the tradition of Rome's hegemony -- potentior principalitas -- to a more explicit reference of it to the practice of ecclesiastical life, and to the demonstration in word and in act of the Christian theory of the State. Such a personality the East never knew, and the tradition of the Roman Supremacy, lacking as yet any systematic organisation of detailed control, was to suffer there accordingly. #### In the East the new sacrosanct autocracy created by Diocletian, baptized in Constantine, Catholic at last with Theodosius, was related to instincts too deeply rooted in the oriental mind for any Eastern, even the Catholic bishop, not to reverence it as a thing half divine, against which even criticism partook of sacrilege. Where, in the West, the Church, in closer relation with the Roman See, clung desperately to the tradition of its self-sufficiency and independence of Caesar, in the East it tended little further than the ambition of securing Caesar's orthodoxy. Granted an emperor who was Catholic in faith, the Church in the East was always willing to trust its destinies to his direction. Should such an emperor prove anti-Roman, the Eastern episcopate, fascinated by the fact of the semi-divine's acceptance of Christ, would follow him -- logical result of its abandonment of the tradition for the novelty of the imperial patronage -- would follow him in all his patronage of heresy, and into schism itself. How often this happened, and how regularly it was to the intervention of the Roman Primacy -- lacking every resource except the belief in its traditional authority -- that orthodoxy owed its salvation, the next few chapters must tell. #### To the Church in the East the death of Julian the Apostate (June 26, 363) and the accession of Jovian brought not only its first experience of the rule of a Catholic prince, but, for the first time almost in sixty years, real peace. Those sixty years (303-363) had been for Catholicism in the East years of continual, breaking strain -- strain mercifully spared to the Church in the West. There had been the terrible years of the Great Persecution -- in the West a matter of months only. There had been the insecurity of the reign of Licinius, ending in a renewal of the persecution and civil war. Constantine's victory had been followed only too speedily by the thirty years of Arian disorders; and, after Rimini-Seleucia, the East had had to bear the brunt of Julian's sour hatred of the faith. The harvest of those years was an indescribable anarchy in every church, good men desperate at the sight of the disorder, a chaos from which the memory of normal, peaceful, Christian life and its tradition of ordered administration had almost disappeared. The Church in the East, at that moment, was as a battlefield from which the armies have scarcely yet retired. #### Then, just as the Church, uneasily, dared to breathe once more, Jovian died, after a reign of seven months (364). Valentinian was hardly named in his place when he made over the East to Valens; and Valens, an Arian, proceeding to show himself another Constantius II, inaugurated yet another stage in the agony of Catholicism in the East. Not indeed that Valens was an Arian of intimate personal conviction. His support of Arianism, thorough indeed, was in itself simply political. The East was in a state of incredible confusion. Half a dozen schools of thought battled for recognition as the true Church; everywhere rival bishops claimed the same see; and beyond the main division of this unhappy Christianity, there were, inevitable legacy of the last forty years of trouble, local schisms, local religious feuds whose interaction on the main complications sometimes made the same combatants simultaneously adversaries and allies. To Valens, a soldier, vigorous in decision, brutal in manner, successful, where successful, through a policy of violence and force, it was an obvious policy to make one of the contending theories his own, and impose it on all. The theory he adopted was not the Catholicism of Nicea but the vague political Arianism which had triumphed at Rimini. It was the religion of the reigning bishop of his capital see -- a fact which no doubt determined its adoption. For all the rest, for the supporters of Nicea in particular, bad days were in store, a renewal of the days of Constantius II. #### An incident of the very first days of the new reign revealed the spirit that was to guide its religious policy. In the repression which followed the Council of Rimini-Seleucia, the party of Basil of Ancyra had suffered equally with the avowed defenders of the Nicene formula. The death of Julian and the succession of the Catholic Valentinian encouraged them to ask for a Council. Leave was given, and at the council -- held at Lampsacus -- they issued a condemnation of what had been done at Rimini, and republished, with a Nicene interpretation, their homoiousion formula. By this time Valens was in command in the East. It was to him that the council’s delegates had to report, and not to Valentinian. He simply ordered them to come to an agreement with the Bishop of Constantinople -- with one of the chief supporters of the Council they had just condemned. A few months later, in 365, an edict appeared reviving all the sentences of exile enacted under Constantius II. From one see after another, accordingly, the anti-Rimini bishops were tumbled out. The Church in the East was again where it had been at the accession of Julian, at the mercy of the Arians. #### For the moment, however, Valens had more urgent problems than this of ecclesiastical uniformity. First the defeat of a rival to the throne, installed in Constantinople itself, and then a critical phase of the never-ceasing war with Persia, occupied all his energy. Meanwhile the bishops of the Council of Lampsacus, defeated at home, looked to the West for aid. Valentinian I, indeed, ignored their appeal like the liberal Gallio he was. From the pope -- Liberius still -- their delegates had a better reception. They gave the pope satisfying assurance that they accepted the creed of Nicea, and rejected the Council of Rimini. Whereupon Liberius received them into communion and wrote to the sixty-four bishops in whose names they had come. The delegates returned to the East after a series of encouraging receptions from the Catholic bishops all along their journey. All now promised well for the desired union with those Easterns who had never, even nominally, rejected Nicea. A new council was planned to meet at Tarsus which would seal the re-union. But once again Valens, inspired from Constantinople, intervened. The council was forbidden. #### By 370 Valens, free of his wars for the moment, was in a position to impose the planned religious uniformity. As in his predecessor's reign, the sacred formula was taken round from town to town by imperial commissioners. The bishops were called on to accept it and to sign. Where they refused, sentences of deposition and exile rained down plentifully, and their churches were taken from them and handed over to the docile conformists. Often there was a spirited resistance, whence often, also, sieges of the churches, sacrilege, and massacre. The temper of the new tyranny showed itself when, upon the emperor's nomination of yet another Arian to Constantinople (370), a deputation came to protest against the new bishop. Its members were ordered into exile, and as the ship on which they sailed, eighty-four of them, passed into the open sea, the crew, under orders, fired it. #### So the new desolation spread through Asia Minor and Syria and, after the death of St. Athanasius (May, 373) through Egypt too. Even Valens had not ventured to match himself against the aged saint's prestige, but once he was dead, the Alexandrian churches were witness of horrors that recalled the worst days of George of Cappadocia. In all the Eastern Empire one see alone, where the bishop remained firm, was spared. This was Caesarea in Cappadocia, the see of St. Basil. #### Thanks to the number of his letters that have survived we know much more about St. Basil (329-379) than the mere facts of his career. When elected Metropolitan of Caesarea he was just forty years of age. He came of a distinguished family which had suffered for its faith under the last Pagan Emperors, and he could pride himself that it had been equally constant through all the years of the Arian troubles. His fine mind had enjoyed every chance of cultivation that the time offered, and at Athens, with his friend Gregory of Nazianzen, he had had for a class fellow Julian the Apostate. His studies finished, Basil had turned to monasticism, and he had come to be familiar with the ascetic life in all its forms. He had travelled much, and it was his wide experience of monasticism in different lands which went to make him, what he remains to this day, the Patriarch of monks in the East as St. Benedict is of monks in the West. Inevitably he was drawn into the theological controversies of his time. He was the friend of Basil of Ancyra, and friendly always to the group of Homoiousians whom scruples whether its test word was expedient alone separated from a simple acceptance of Nicea. Of his own full and loyal acceptance there was never any question and when in 360 his own bishop, through fear, accepted the ambiguities of Rimini, Basil broke with him. With the next Bishop of Caesarea he was on better terms, and was the real ruler of the diocese. With St. Athanasius, too, he was in high favour, and his appointment to Caesarea in 370 was hailed in Alexandria as an important gain for Catholicism in that East where Constantinople had, for forty years, been in Arian hands and Antioch was at the mercy of schism. #### Basil was of the type with whom to exercise authority is second nature. Thinker, organiser, man of action he ranks with St. Ambrose and St. Leo as one of the bishops whose influence did much to mould all subsequent Catholicism. Inevitably he came into conflict with Valens. He met the aggression with all his own firmness, yet with tact; and with so overwhelming a display of personality that the savage Arian for once was halted. More, the emperor even assisted at the offices in Basil’s cathedral, and munificently eased the strain of the bishop's extensive charities -- for all that Basil, to his very face, denounced his impiety and faithlessness unsparingly. Characteristically so great a mind and heart did not rest content with the measure of peace secured for his own see. The desolation of the East called imperatively, and from the first days of his episcopate he set himself to the work, to unite the broken and dispirited faithful and to bring them something of aid and comfort from the West and Rome. The task occupied all the life that remained to him. Its pursuit brought him the greatest sorrows his life knew, and he died, prematurely at fifty, his end still unachieved. #### The insurmountable obstacle was the schism which divided the adherents of Nicea in the see of Antioch and which, because of Antioch's ecclesiastical primacy in the East, reacted upon every stage of ecclesiastical development there. Antioch, ever since Eusebius of Nicomedia had procured the deposition of its Catholic bishop of 330, had been ruled by Arians of one school or another. [ ] #### When the see fell vacant in 360, by the translation of its Arian titular to Constantinople, the bishops in whose hands the election lay, chose as his successor Meletius, Bishop of Sebaste, a Homoiousian of the school of Basil of Ancyra. It was a brave demonstration of Nicene sympathy to make on the morrow of Rimini; and within a month Constantius II had expelled the new bishop, exiled him, and installed an Arian of satisfying type in his place. Meletius returned with the rest of the exiles whom Julian recalled in 361; he was again exiled by Valens in 365, and exiled yet a third time two years later. This last exile lasted until 378. Thus of his first eighteen years as Bishop of Antioch, Meletius spent twelve in exile for the faith of Nicea. Whence, throughout the East, he won a great name as a confessor and, titular of the East's ecclesiastical capital, he ought to have been the rallying point for Catholics in the period of restoration. #### Unhappily not all Catholics would acknowledge him as Bishop of Antioch; many, despite St. Basil’s guarantees of his perfect Nicene orthodoxy, continued to suspect him -- the elect of bishops themselves none too orthodox -- as an Arian. The chief of these anti-Meletians was the Bishop of Alexandria, first St. Athanasius, and then, and with even greater zeal, his successor Peter (373-383). A more serious consequence still was that, in this matter, Alexandria influenced Rome; and for the popes too, Liberius and Damasus I (366-384) Meletius to whom the Catholic East, St. Basil at its head, looked as to its primate, was simply an heretical intruder. [ ] #### The uncanonical interference of a Western bishop, Lucifer of Cagliari, in 362, made matters worse; and however right Rome and Alexandria may have been in the matter of Meletius, when they accepted the fruits of Lucifer's illegal action they put themselves, on that count, as much in the wrong in the eyes of the East, as Meletius and St. Basil were in their own. What Lucifer had done was this. There had always been at Antioch, ever since the deposition of the last undoubtedly Catholic bishop in 330, a tiny minority who refused all contact with his Arian successors and with the Catholics who tolerated them. At the moment of the election of Meletius, the leader of the group was a priest Paulinus. He refused to accept Meletius as his bishop because of the Arian antecedents of his electors, and because his consecration had an heretical pedigree. It was a renewal of the ancient condemned theory that heresy in the minister, invalidates the sacraments which he gives. It was Lucifer's great fault that, without any authorisation beyond his own impulse, and without the assistant bishops whom custom and law required, he consecrated Paulinus as Bishop of Antioch. It was Paulinus, in turn, thus unlawfully consecrated whom Alexandria recognised as Bishop of Antioch; and if Rome hesitated to be equally explicit, it was yet Paulinus who acted as Rome's man of confidence for what related to the Catholic East. A greater tragedy, in the circumstances, and a more complicated one, it is hard to imagine. #### From the first year of his appointment to Caesarea, St. Basil set himself to reconcile Rome to Meletius, and Meletius to Athanasius. To the East, if peace were ever again to be its good fate, Rome was necessary. Basil’s letters express this clearly. "One solution alone do we wait for, that your mercy would consider a little our terrible plight. " Rome should send someone with authority who, taught by actual knowledge of Eastern conditions, would realise the need to recognise Meletius and realise also the need for Rome to be more explicit in her condemnation of the heresies into which some of her Eastern allies had fallen during the fight with the great common enemy. Here we touch on yet another complication in the story. Rome's supporters in the East had, in more than one case, fallen under suspicion as heretics, and the Arians had not neglected to profit by the misfortune. So, for example, it had been with Marcellus of Ancyra thirty years before. So too, now, Apollinaris Bishop of Laodicea, while-orthodox on the point at issue with the Arians, was teaching erroneous novelties on the relation between the human and the divine in Our Lord. So Paulinus; and so, too, Rome's latest messenger, Vitalis, whom neither Meletius nor Paulinus would accept and who had therefore launched yet a third anti-Arian claim to be Bishop of Antioch. #### St. Basil’s solution was simple. Meletius was orthodox-none more so. His election was according to form, therefore he was the Bishop of Antioch. Rome should declare for him, and, condemning explicitly the allies whose company had done so much to lessen her influence, rally all the Eastern Catholics to Meletius. Then, and then only, would the restoration really begin. At Rome the pope was willing enough to condemn the new heresies as he was to condemn again the old. But he refused to condemn by name the alleged heresiarchs before they had been tried. And, in 375, he recognised Paulinus as Bishop of Antioch. #### St. Basil had written to Rome as to an ally -- a most powerful ally, and, truly enough, an ally of superior rank. The reply was that of authority instinctively conscious of its own power. Community of faith, he was told, was not by itself sufficient condition for intercommunion. Canonical observance was just as necessary; in other words submission to the Bishop of Rome with whom it lay to decide who was Bishop of Antioch, and who should not be asked simply to ratify a fait accompli. Meanwhile, nominatim, Apollinaris was condemned. The decision was a bitter one for St. Basil. Before he could renew his appeals with the knowledge experience was bringing him of Rome's wider cares, death came to him -- January 1, 379. It came at a moment when he promised to be of greater usefulness to the Catholic cause than ever. For Valens had pre- deceased him, slain in battle with the Goths (378). The new emperor, Theodosius, was enthusiastically Catholic. A restoration of Catholicism, imperially aided now, was certain; and since, despite Rome's recognition of Paulinus, the East adhered to Meletius, the restoration, now that St. Basil was dead, would be guided by this bishop whom Rome would not recognise but who was now, none the less, in the eyes of the East and its new Catholic sovereign, Nicene orthodoxy's greatest champion. #### Events moved quickly. In the autumn of 379 Meletius gathered a great council of his bishops at Antioch -- a hundred and fifty-three of them -- and on his suggestion they accepted the profession of faith lately published by the Roman council of Pope Damasus. In February, 380, Theodosius, by imperial edict, ended the State's connection with Arianism. The test of Catholicity was to be acceptance of the Faith “given to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter. . . the faith clearly taught by the pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria. " All other beliefs are heresy, and heretics are to suffer as the law directs. The State, for fifty years at the service of Arianism, was now for the first time to be at the service of Catholicism. The restoration so long over-due had come at last. But political power was to be its foundation. The circumstance was calamitous, and calamitous, too, the surely related circumstance that Rome was not consulted in the procedure adopted; and also that Meletius of Antioch was the president of the Council summoned by the emperor to carry into effect his good will towards the Church. The council which met at Constantinople in 381, and over which Meletius presided, was hardly likely to be enthusiastically concerned with any practical acknowledgement of the primacy of Pope Damasus. Nor was it favourably predisposed towards that other see, which, Rome's ally through all the disastrous half century which was closing, had been rewarded for its unshaken fidelity to the Roman homoousion by all Rome's confidence, and which had become the pope's natural adviser for all matters oriental. The council was not more likely to over-exalt the power of Alexandria than it was to over-proclaim the primacy of Rome. #### The Arian bishops who had accepted the invitation, there were thirty-six of them, repelled all the attempts, whether of the Catholic bishops or of the emperor, to persuade them to an acceptance of Nicea and, faithful to their heresy, left the city before the council began. #### When finally, in the May of 381, the Council opened, its first business was to elect a Bishop of Constantinople to supply the place of the Arian who, rather than conform, had gone into exile. Gregory of Nazianzen, Bishop of Sasimos, the life- long intimate of Basil, friend and ally of Meletius, was chosen. Within a few days Meletius himself died and it now lay within the council’s power to end the schism by electing Paulinus in his place. Such would have been the solution preferred by St. Gregory, now the council’s president. But the anti-western spirit was too strong. If the East had returned to the faith which the West had never lost, it still preferred to settle matters of discipline as though the West did not exist. So St. Gregory notes and laments. The council left the election to the bishops of the civil diocese whose capital Antioch was. They chose, to succeed Meletius, one of his priests, Flavian. The next crisis arose with the arrival of the Bishop of Alexandria. He protested against St. Gregory's election to Constantinople, citing the ancient canon, a living thing in Egypt and the West, though by now a dead letter in the East, which forbade episcopal translations. The council which had elected St. Gregory failed to support him. The emperor, too, was silent. Gregory resigned. In his place, both as bishop and as president, they chose a retired dignitary of the civil service, Nectarius, an old man of blameless life indeed but not as yet baptized. #### The council had no difficulty in framing a statement of the faith upon which, as a basis, the bishops proposed to restore Catholicism throughout the East. After fifty years of controversy and discussion they ended where they had all begun, with the unamended formula of Nicea, the much disputed, much criticised, and altogether necessary homoousion. And, following for once the precedent of western-inspired councils, they refrained from publishing any new creed, any gloss on the invaluable talisman they re-accepted. But the canon which expressed their allegiance went on to condemn severally the various types of Arianism and the heresies into which more than one opponent of Arianism had tripped -- Anomoeans, Pneumatomachi, Marcellians, Photinians, and Apollinarists alike. #### The council’s next work, with an eye to the future peace, was the stricter regulation of the bishop's extra-diocesan activities. Except the imperial interference in church matters nothing had been so productive of lasting mischief as the interference of bishops in the spiritual affairs of neighbouring sees and neighbouring provinces. Legislation which would confine episcopal zeal to its own well-defined territory should stave off, for the future, one of the plagues which had most grievously affected the past. Henceforward, then, so the council decreed, the bishops of each civil diocese were to confine their activities within its limits; nor were they to interfere in the affairs of any other civil diocese unless specially invited to do so. The canon goes on to explain in detail what this means for each of the five civil dioceses which made up the Eastern Empire: the bishops of the East [ ] have authority over the churches in the East alone (while the privileges of Antioch which Nicea recognised are to be preserved); the bishops of Pontus have authority over the churches in Pontus only, those of Asia and Thrace over the churches of Asia and Thrace alone; for Egypt there was the special arrangement that the competent authority was not the bishops of the diocese of Egypt but the Bishop of Alexandria -- a recognition of the special character of that see's Egyptian hegemony; and his authority was limited to Egypt only. Furthermore, the Nicene rule was recalled that the affairs of each province were subject to the control of the bishops of each province. #### Never again, if the new rule is observed, will bishops rich in Caesar's favour wander about the Empire, a peripatetic council, deposing at will whoever opposes them. Against that, a remedy is provided in the equilibrium of these five autonomous, self-contained groups. But whatever chance there might be of this new arrangement's success as an antidote to the civil influence of any one particular leading see, the council in its next canon sanctioned an innovation which, in effect, was to neutralise that arrangement. This is the famous third canon, which runs “The Bishop of Constantinople should have the primacy of honour after the Bishop of Rome because Constantinople is New Rome. " The canon, though it tacitly admits the new unheard-of-principle that the honour should be according to the civil importance of the see-city, offers, it is true, no more than a title of honour. It does not make any exception for Constantinople in the matter of jurisdiction as settled by the preceding canon. For all his new honour the Bishop of Constantinople remains, in jurisdiction, the simple suffragan of the Metropolitan of Heraclea, with no authority beyond the limits of his own see. The council had merely done for him what Nicea had done fifty years earlier Jerusalem. But for the Metropolitan of Heraclea it had created the embarrassment that one of his suffragans was now, in honorific precedence, not only his own superior but the superior of every other bishop in the Church save the Bishop of Rome. And the embarrassment, inevitably, was to affect a very much wider sphere than the province of Heraclea. Two of the chief causes of the fifty years chaos in the East, now happily ending, were the continual interference of the emperor in church affairs, and the hardly less continual interference of the Bishop of Constantinople in matters outside his own jurisdiction. The basis of this new uncanonical, ecclesiastical thing was the mere accident of Constantinople's civil importance. Now, in the council called to organise the Catholic restoration, that accident was given legal recognition; the uncanonical novelty, whence had come so much mischief already, was built into the very foundation of the new regime. The primacy of honour was bound to develop into one of jurisdiction. #### The work of the council completed, the bishops sent an official report to the emperor, praying him to confirm and seal all they had accomplished. Whereupon an imperial edict published officially the formula of orthodoxy, and indicated for each civil diocese the bishop, communion with whom was to be, for the officers charged to return church property, the proof of a bishop's Catholicism. " Facing the West whose disciplined unity has been in these last years the envy of the East, the Council of 381 has set up an East, harmonious and organised: Theodosius has succeeded in imposing upon the Easterns, in appearances at all events, a quasi-western discipline. Are not the Easterns, in return, turning their backs upon the West?" [ ] The council, which itself made no claim to be a general council, made no report to Rome. There, as late as Chalcedon (451), its canons were still unknown. But, thanks to the energetic protestations of St. Ambrose the East was to give a sign of its fidelity to the tradition, real enough if only made at the eleventh hour. An embassy of high officials was sent to the pope to announce the election of the new Bishop of Constantinople and to ask letters of communion in recognition of it. |