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To anyone who had understood the forces which blighted Catholic life in
the East all through the fourth century, the evolution of
Constantinople's new primacy would have seemed merely a matter of time;
and just as much matter of time the resulting conflict between Rome and
Constantinople. The fifty years between the Council of 381 and the next
of the general councils-Ephesus -- are in fact filled with the din of
that strife, and the fight ranges round one of the greatest
personalities of all church history, St. John Chrysostom, Bishop of
Constantinople from 398 to 407.
Nectarius, the elect of the Council of 381, died on September 27, 397.
More than one candidate was put forward for the vacant see, and at
last, to put an end to the intrigue and the tumult, the emperor -- it
was Arcadius, for Theodosius had died two years before -- named the new
bishop. His choice fell on John, a monk of Antioch, a man of saintly
virtue, learned, and reputed the greatest preacher of his time, whom
after ages were to call the Golden-tongued -- Chrysostomos. At the time
of his consecration he was close on fifty years of age. He had been a
monk -- a solitary -- until his first patron, Meletius, called him into
the clergy. The successor of Meletius, Flavian, ordained him priest,
and at the time of his election to Constantinople he was one of the
outstanding personalities of Eastern Catholicism. His appointment was,
none the less, an imperial appointment. His early associations, too,
were with that imperial Catholicism which had shaped the
re-organisation of 381. His nomination represented, even more than that
of Nectarius, an Antiochian gain at Constantinople. One of the
candidates whom the appointment ruled out had been supported by
Antioch's great rival Alexandria, whose bishop was now Theophilus
(382-412) a proud man, able and unscrupulous, a sinister figure indeed,
in whom there seems re-incarnated something of Egypt's ancient dark
mystery. John's election was a defeat for Theophilus -- a defeat which,
no doubt, he resented all the more, in that he was compelled to submit
by threats of a criminal prosecution for his misdeeds.
The new bishop was to secure from Rome recognition of the successor of
Meletius. The succession of Paulinus had died out. His followers had
accepted Flavian; and St. John’s intervention removed the last trace of
the long unhappy schism. Rome, Alexandria and Antioch, the three chief
sees, were once more in communion -- the first time for nearly seventy
years. With St. John Chrysostom the bishop remained the monk. He showed
himself as zealous in reforming evil as, in his days as priest at
Antioch, he had been eloquent in denouncing it. And since much of the
evil he wrought against was the affair of those in high places, he soon
made powerful enemies.
Nor was his zeal confined to his own city or province. From the
beginning of his reign he follow d the custom his predecessor had
inaugurated of using the prestige of the primacy of honour to settle
disputes which, by the strict law of the Council of 381, really lay
outside his competence. So he crossed into the neighbouring civil
diocese of Pontus, in 398, to depose the Bishop of Nicomedia and,
despite opposition from the populace, appointed his successor. More
seriously still, a year later, on the authorisation of a handful of
bishops whom chance accident brought together in the capital, he
undertook to judge between two bishops of the neighbouring civil
diocese of Asia. Nectarius had similarly broken through the canon of
381 when, a few years earlier, with the tacit consent of Alexandria and
Antioch, he had judged a case between two bishops from Arabia. The
ingenious machinery which would secure order in the East without
reference to Rome was already ceasing to function. Three years later it
broke down altogether, under the weight of the two-fold plague which
still oppressed the Eastern Church -- imperial interference and
unrestrained episcopal ambition. It is to be noted that all sides
tolerated, were willing to use, invited and welcomed the imperial
intervention; and that, turn by turn, all the great sees of the East
were guilty of these manifest usurpations of jurisdiction. The
difference in kind between the jurisdiction they ambitioned and
usurped, and that which, turn by turn, they acknowledged or disobeyed
in Rome -- none denied it -- is, once more, equally evident.
The aggressor this time was Alexandria, the victim Constantinople; the
means of the aggression was the imperial hold on ecclesiastical
obedience, bought now by Theophilus at a great price. Theophilus had
never loved St. John, and disappointed to see Antioch installed at
court in his person, the Egyptian had filled the capital with spies who
might, it was hoped, furnish matter for its bishop's trial and
deposition. In the calumnies spread by the wretches whom St. John’s
reforms had exposed and dislodged, the spies found of course a wealth
of material.
Towards the end of 401 there appeared at Constantinople a number of
monks expelled from Egypt by Theophilus for, as he alleged, their
heretical opinions. They came to appeal to the emperor against their
bishop, and they sought the patronage of St. John. Without prejudging
the case, he charitably wrote to Theophilus to intercede. For reply
Theophilus dispatched some of his clergy with a wealth of "evidence"
against the alleged heretics. The newcomers were, in turn, accused of
calumny by the monks, convicted and, the bribes of Theophilus alone
saving them from the executioner, sent to the mines. Then followed, at
the demand once more of the alleged heretics, the first steps in a suit
against Theophilus himself.
The emperor, since the accused was a bishop, refused to judge the case
himself. He named as judge the Bishop of Constantinople, and sent a
summons to Theophilus to come, and to come alone, for his trial.
Theophilus obeyed, but brought with him twenty-nine of his suffragans
and the ever-useful Alexandrian gold, and he came, as he said in his
farewells to Egypt, " to get John deposed. " His trickery, his gold,
and the mentality of Eastern Catholicism assisting him, he was
successful.
St. John, most correctly, had refused the emperor's commission to judge
the Bishop of Alexandria. That, by law, was a matter for the bishops of
Egypt. Theophilus, three weeks later, was asking the emperor for leave
to judge St. John -- accused, it appears, of all manner of wickedness.
The Bishop of Alexandria, whose three weeks at court had been usefully
employed, was by now in residence across the Bosphorus, at Chalcedon,
in the summer palace known as The Oak. There, in July 403, with his
twenty-nine suffragans and half a dozen other bishops, fortified with
the imperial favour, he opened what, impudently enough, he called his
council and summoned St. John to appear and take his trial. St. John is
to suffer from that very imperial usurpation which he had himself
refused to use against the man now wielding it. All is done by virtue
of it, and in its presence Church law, even the canon of 381, is null
-- and all the bishops concerned are Catholics and the emperor too.
Under such a regime how is religion more safe than under Arian princes?
Now, as then, it is the emperor's bishop alone who is secure.
St. John once more behaved admirably. He refused to acknowledge the
usurpation of Theophilus by appearing. "It is not right that bishops
from Egypt judge bishops from Thrace. " The emperor insisted, but the
saint stood to his resolve. In his absence he was at length "condemned,
" deposed, and by imperial edict ordered into exile. Three days later,
through a city whose excited populace looked only for a sign from him
to raze all to the ground, he obediently followed his escort to the
waiting ship and the distant coast of Bithynia.
The emperor was a weakling. The excitement in his capital shook him
from his opposition to St. John, the exile was recalled; while the
clerics whose malevolence had functioned at The Oak, took to flight,
Theophilus at their head. The emperor next made a show of revising the
iniquities, but within a couple of months the old intrigues were once
more at work, and finally, thanks to Theophilus and the gang of
like-minded bishops whom he led, the emperor, at their petition,
confirmed anew the sentence of 403 and ordered St. John’s arrest. This
time the exile was definitive, and distant. First to Nicea, thence to
Armenia, and further still, the saint was harried until, worn out by
privation, he died at Comana on September 14, 407. Theophilus was
revenged for the election of 398, Alexandria had prevailed against the
creation of 381. Clerical disorders in the capital, the intrigues of
the disaffected, intrigues of bishops come to the capital from heaven
knows where, the corruption of the court, the chance whims of the
emperor, " I leave you the lot, " cried St. Epiphanius to the bishops
who bade him good-bye on his last visit in 403, " the city, the court,
the whole hypocritical farce. " They were still in the East, these
things, what they had been for three generations, what they were to be
more than once again, an important engine of ecclesiastical government.
Happily for the Church in the East the supreme authority lay elsewhere.
This last great treachery of eastern bishops was to reveal that
authority's different nature in very striking fashion. Rome's first
news of the new crisis was through Theophilus whose messenger simply
announced to the pope that "John has been deposed. " This was,
apparently, towards the end of May, 404, nearly a year after the "
council " at The Oak, and in the last weeks of the semi-imprisonment in
his own palace which preceded St. John’s exile. Three days later came
St. John’s messengers-four bishops with a letter for the pope, a letter
sent likewise to the bishops of Milan and Aquileia.
Here the whole story is told, the "trial, " the exile, the recall.
Theophilus and his set are blamed for the outrage, there is not a word
against the emperor, and the letter ends with the request for a
declaration that the acts of the "council" at The Oak are null and that
its bishops have broken the law. To a properly constituted court St.
John will gladly submit the proofs of his innocence.
The pope -- St. Innocent I (401-417) -- replied to both the bishops. He
condemned the "council, " of The Oak, and acquiesced in St. John’s
request for an impartial council of bishops from West and East. The
reply had hardly been sent when, from Theophilus, there came a fuller
account of the transaction with the minutes of his "council. " The pope
answered with a renewal of his proposal for a general council. Then
came, from the bishops faithful to St. John, the news of the second
banishment, the news too, of the imperial edicts threatening with
deposition any bishop who supported the exile and with confiscation of
goods whoever sheltered such bishops. Once more from the East the tide
of refugees began to flow in to Rome.
The pope's reply to the edicts was to write to St. John assuring him of
support, and to write in the same sense to the bishops who had remained
faithful. He wrote also to the clergy and people of Constantinople -- a
refusal to acknowledge the bishop set up in St. John’s place, a strong
reasoned protest against the uncanonical proceedings which had driven
him forth, and, once more, a plea for a general council to clear the
whole affair. At the pope's petition his own sovereign the Western
Emperor, Honorius (395-423), joined him in the demand to Arcadius for a
joint council of East and West. An embassy of bishops and clerics
conveyed the imperial request, but no sooner did they cross the
frontier of the Eastern Empire than they were arrested and their papers
taken from them. They refused to be bribed into a recognition of the
new bishop, and thereupon, were summarily deported. The refugees who
had returned in their company were exiled (April, 406).
Once more the East had bidden the West leave Eastern affairs to
Easterns. Before Rome passed to the only measures of protest left to
her -- the excommunication of Theophilus, of the new Bishop of
Constantinople, Atticus, and of all their supporters-St. John was dead.
It had been a quarrel between Easterns and a quarrel on a point of
discipline; Rome had intervened, and was to stand by her decision until
the unwilling East submitted. Theophilus stood out to the end, and
refusing the amends to St. John’s memory on which Rome insisted, was
still outside her communion when he died (October 15, 412). At Antioch
when the new bishop Porphyrios, who had accepted the communion of
Atticus, wrote to Rome, too, for letters of communion, the same Roman
intransigence refused them. Porphyrios' successor in 413 restored St.
John’s name to its place among the recognised bishops commemorated in
the Mass, and the pope thereupon restored him to communion. "I have
made diligent search, " the pope wrote, " whether all the conditions in
this case of the blessed and truly religious bishop John had been
satisfied. Since what your envoys affirm accords in every particular
with my wishes, I have accepted to be in communion with your church. .
. . " And he makes the Bishop of Antioch his agent for the
reconciliation of the other bishops of the East.
Atticus made more than one attempt to obtain recognition, but so long
as he refused to comply with the pope's conditions it was refused.
Again St. Innocent's authoritative phrases give life to the routine
formality. "Communion, once broken off, cannot be renewed until the
person concerned gives proof that the reasons for which communion was
broken off are no longer operative, and that what is imposed as a
condition of peace has been fulfilled. We still await a declaration
from Atticus giving us assurance that all the conditions which at
different times we have laid down have been fulfilled. We are willing
to renew our communion with him when he makes fitting petition
therefore, and when he proves that he merits the favour. " In the end
Atticus, too, complied with the pope's demand and was received back
into his communion.
Last of all Alexandria humbled herself, the successor of Theophilus --
his nephew Cyril -- submitting in his turn.
In the East whether the bishops are Catholic or heretic, saints or
courtiers, the emperor's good pleasure is law for them. Rome, whatever
the civil prestige of the city, remains mistress of herself, and to
Rome's primacy even the state-ridden churches of the East ultimately
bow, rather than lose that communion which is hers uniquely.
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