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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.
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