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IN the twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon were sown seeds
of dissension destined to bear an immense fruit in centuries yet to
come. The more immediate trouble was born of the circumstances in which
its definition of faith was framed. Here the terminology of St. Cyril
had yielded to that of St. Leo, and there were regions in the East too
accustomed to St. Cyril’s language to take the change easily. Just as
there were Catholics after Nicea who dreaded the possibility that the
Arians would interpret the homoousion in a Sabellian sense and exploit
the misinterpretation against the defenders of the defined doctrine,
and, more recently, Catholics after Ephesus who suspected the
Apollinarian possibilities of St. Cyril’s technical phrases, so now
there were to be Catholics uneasy lest Chalcedon might be construed as
a posthumous rehabilitation of Nestorius.
The first element to consider, in the resistance to Chalcedon which now
began to show itself, is the opposition of those who cannot see truth
except through the terminology they have inherited from St. Cyril.
Nowhere, it is interesting to note, is Eutyches defended. These “
Cyrillians, " [ ] so to call them, condemn Eutyches equally with the
council, but they will not condemn him as the council condemns him,
since to do so is, they consider, an indirect condemnation of St.
Cyril. Thus far the resistance is an academic affair, the conflict of
theologians over terms, and its chief importance is perhaps that it
explains the luke-warmness of many Catholic bishops in the East in the
next few years. At Chalcedon they had whole- heartedly condemned
Eutyches as they had whole-heartedly acknowledged St. Leo's claim to
define the truth; but it was only after Rome's gesture of authority
that they had consented to the definition in the terminology they
suspected.
There was, however, another source whence trouble was much more likely
to come. This was in the resentment, which it is hardly incorrect to
call national, felt by the people of Egypt at the condemnation of their
patriarch. Dioscoros, whatever his misdeeds, was Patriarch of
Alexandria, and to the newly-reviving race consciousness of the
Egyptians he was the head of his nation. For nearly a century and a
half a succession of great personalities had filled that see, and for
half a century one of them, backed by his people, had defied
successfully all the efforts of the hated power at Constantinople to
depose him. The later victory of Theophilus over St. John Chrysostom
and that -- admittedly a very different affair -- of St. Cyril over
Nestorius had also been, for the Egyptians, the triumph of Egypt over
the Empire. In 449, at the Latrocinium, Dioscoros had gained just such
another triumph in his deposition of St. Flavian. Now, in 451, his own
degradation was felt in Egypt as a national calamity. Well might the
bishops of Egypt, prostrate before the great council, beg and implore
with tears to be excused from signing the condemnation of their
patriarch. They knew their people, knew that in this matter forces far
less judicial than those which ruled theological discussions, were
moving. If they returned home, and the news spread that they had
assented to the condemnation of Dioscoros, their lives would not be
worth an hour's purchase. It needed but the interest of the few genuine
Monophysite heretics to exploit this immense reserve of
anti-imperialist feeling -- and organising it as the cause of St. Cyril
they would secure the benevolent neutrality of the " Cyrillian" bishops
-- and Egypt would be roused against Chalcedon even more easily than it
had been roused for Nicea. The imperial government understood well
enough what the immediate future might hold, and it gathered troops to
protect the defenders of Chalcedon when the emergency should arise.
It was in Palestine that the trouble began, and the pioneers were
people who feared neither Government nor council, the innumerable army
of monks and solitaries. The news of its bishop's vote reached
Jerusalem long before that prelate, with his new dignity of fifth
patriarch, had returned. The cry went round that the faith was in
danger, that in Dioscoros St. Cyril had been condemned. The whole city
rose, monks and solitaries pouring in by thousands, at the head of the
insurrection no less a person than the Empress Dowager, Eudoxia, widow
of Theodosius II, and delighted in her exile to find this means of
embarrassing the imperial sister-in-law whom she so little loved. New
bishops, it was urged, must be chosen not for Jerusalem only but for
all Palestine, to replace those who at Chalcedon had betrayed the
faith, and the new Patriarch returned to find his city in the hands of
half-mad fanatics, murder and outrage the order of the day. Order was
not restored until the monks had been defeated in a pitched battle.
There were revolts of the same kind throughout Syria, and in Cappadocia
too, but the scene of the fury at its worst was naturally Egypt. Here
the first practical consequence of the council was the meeting to elect
a successor to Dioscoros, and at the mere announcement the mob rose.
Dioscoros was still alive, therefore still bishop. There could
therefore be no need of a new election. Once again the troops had to
fight the mob and the monks before the formalities could be gone
through and the new bishop elected. Still the fighting in the streets
continued, the troops were driven into the great temple of the old
religion -- the Serapeion -- and held there until with the buildings
they perished in the flames. The imperial government must evidently
fight for its own existence. All Egypt was placed under military law
and the pro-Dioscoros bishops everywhere deposed. So a certain external
order was at last obtained. It lasted for an uneasy five years.
Its first shock was the news (September, 454) that Dioscoros had died
in his distant captivity, when it took all the efforts of the
government to prevent the Monophysites from electing a "successor" to
him. When, three years later, the emperor Marcian followed Dioscoros
into the other world the tumult broke out irrepressibly. Marcian had
been orthodoxy's chief supporter. Chalcedon was his council, and to
repress the Monophysite faction had been for him an elementary
necessity of practical politics. Pulcheria had pre-deceased him, and in
his place the army and officials installed the tribune Leo. The
Monophysites did not wait to learn that the change of emperor meant a
change of policy. They elected their successor to Dioscoros, Timothy
surnamed the Cat, while the mob once more held the city and the
Catholic bishop was murdered, his body dragged through the streets and
savagely outraged. For the best part of a year the Monophysites were
masters, deposing the Catholic bishops everywhere and re-instating the
partisans of Dioscoros while the government looked on indifferently.
From Rome St. Leo did his utmost to rally the new emperor to the
support of Chalcedon, and finally the government made up its mind.
Bringing in more troops, it deposed the Monophysite bishops and
deported Timothy the Cat. Once more there was the peace of repression
and it endured this time for sixteen years.
When the Emperor Leo I died in 474 he left as his successor a baby
grandson, Leo II, and the child's father, Zeno, acting as Regent, was
associated with him as Emperor. The baby died, another claimant to the
throne, Basiliscus, appeared, and he was so successful that presently
Zeno was an exile, and Basiliscus reigned in his place at
Constantinople (January, 475).
One of the first acts of the usurper was to recall the Monophysite
exiles. Their chief, Timothy the Cat, was still alive and at the news
of his return the Catholic bishop fled from Alexandria and Timothy took
possession without opposition, while the remains of Dioscoros were
solemnly set in a silver shrine. To Antioch also there returned its
Monophysite bishop, Peter called the Fuller, and the new emperor,
hoping to establish himself securely on the basis of a re-united
people, issued what was to be the first of a long series of edicts
designed to undo the work of Chalcedon without express disavowal of the
faith there defined. Monophysites and Catholics alike would sign the
formula proposed and the religious disunion be at an end. This was the
aim of the Encyclion of Basiliscus. It condemned Eutyches and it
condemned Chalcedon, it approved Ephesus and it approved the
Latrocinium. All the bishops were to sign it under pain of deposition,
and laymen who opposed it were to suffer confiscation, of goods and be
exiled.
The success of the measure was instantaneous. Almost every bishop in
the East signed without difficulty -- Catholics because it condemned
Monophysitism in condemning Eutyches, and because, if it condemned
Chalcedon too, there was much in the terminology imposed at Chalcedon
to which they objected. On the other hand, the Monophysites had never
ranged themselves as supporters of Eutyches since the Latrocinium. They
were delighted to have an opportunity, in once more condemning him, of
affirming the orthodoxy of St. Cyril and of their own claims, and of
course, of the orthodoxy of their own opposition to Chalcedon. For the
Monophysites the future was now full of promise. They held the two
chief sees of the East, and, thanks to the Encyclion, Monophysitism was
no longer a bar to the promotion of yet more of the faction. Their one
and only obstacle was the Patriarch of Constantinople, Acacius. He had
refused to acknowledge Timothy the Cat when the exiles were recalled,
and had locked the churches of the capital against him. Now, almost
alone of the hundreds of bishops in the Eastern Empire, he refused to
sign the Encyclion. His constancy, or obstinacy, would no doubt have
brought his term of office to a speedy conclusion, but the short reign
(twenty months) of Basiliscus ended as unexpectedly as it had begun.
In the September of 476 Zeno returned with an army and re-established
himself. Basiliscus had seen defeat coming, and in a last wild hope of
rallying the capital -- where Monophysites were few -- he had cancelled
the Encyclion by the edict called the Anti-Encyclion, and the versatile
Eastern episcopates signed this as easily as they had signed its
forerunner, excepting always the Monophysites. Timothy the Cat's brief
triumph was over, and the deposition of Acacius to which he looked
forward as the fitting sequel to the Alexandrian defeat of 451, a
fourth condemnation of Constantinople by Alexandria in fifty years, was
not to be. Chalcedon was once more in the ascendant, and only the old
man's death (July, 477) saved him from arrest and further exile.
Secretly and hurriedly his chief lieutenant, Peter Mongos [ ] was
consecrated in his place and, consecrated, immediately went into hiding
to avoid the coming storm. The Catholic bishop came out of the
monastery where he had buried himself since 474 and, if the government
would only put its troops at the disposal of orthodoxy, the Catholicism
of Chalcedon might once more hope for peace.
The recent crisis had proved one thing very clearly. In the whole East
the great council had scarcely a friend prepared to suffer in its
defence. The bishops, evidently, would vote " yes " or " no " as the
government bade them. Twenty-five years after Chalcedon it was on the
Patriarch of Constantinople alone that, in the East, the defence of
orthodoxy depended. Acacius was its sole bulwark against the energy and
determination of the Monophysites. And now, whether from fear on his
part that the task was hopeless, or whether the emperor, weary of the
repression and turning to other means, won him round, Acacius changed
his policy.
The occasion was the death in 482 of the Catholic bishop of Alexandria.
As his end drew near this defender of Chalcedon grew more and more
anxious that an equally zealous Catholic should succeed him, and that
the government should not, upon his death, end the trouble by
recognising the Monophysite, Peter Mongos, as the lawful bishop. He
therefore despatched to the court a trusted member of his clergy, John
Talaia, to urge the matter. Talaia chose his intermediaries badly --
high officials themselves under suspicion of treason -- and compromised
his cause accordingly. However, the promise was made that the new
patriarch should be a Catholic, and Talaia had in return to promise
that he would not seek his own election. But when in the June of 482
the Bishop of Alexandria died, and Talaia was elected in his place, he
ignored his engagement and accepted. The emperor, already planning some
scheme of reunion, refused to acknowledge him, and, since no Catholic
bishop could expect to live in Alexandria once the imperial government
ceased to uphold him, Talaia fled to Rome. The government meanwhile had
found its formula. Its officials sought out the Monophysite successor
of Timothy the Cat and offered him official recognition as Patriarch if
he would sign it and admit Catholics to the sacraments. Peter Mongos
accepted and signed. This document is the Henoticon, and its author was
the Patriarch of Constantinople Acacius.
The Henoticon is more subtly drawn than the Encyclion of Basiliscus
which inspired it. It takes the form of a letter from the emperor to
the bishops, and it proclaims his faith to be that of Nicea, of
Constantinople, of Ephesus (431). It repeats the condemnation of
Eutyches, and it accepts the theology of St. Cyril’s famous twelve
propositions against Nestorius. Of Chalcedon there is no mention at
all, nor is there, in the reference to Eutyches, any mention of the
Tome of St. Leo which is the official form of his condemnation. In the
circumstances, and in the light of all that had happened since
Chalcedon, the Henoticon was a jettisoning of the faith there defined,
an implicit acknowledgement that Chalcedon was unimportant and
henceforward not to be imposed, an equivocal surrender of St. Leo,
without whom Chalcedon is a mere pageant and against whom all the
Monophysite bitterness of thirty years had been directed. There was
nothing in the document which a Catholic could not approve, but to
approve the document at that time and in that place was undoubtedly to
surrender the controverted point of faith. The issue of the Henoticon,
whatever the hopes of its authors, was a triumph for the Monophysites.
Nevertheless it had a very mixed reception. In Egypt Peter Mongos
accepted it, but the Monophysites generally refused it, as equivocal,
and called for the logical term of its reasoning-an explicit
condemnation of Chalcedon. Once more there were riots, and from the
deserts an army of 30,000 monks converged on Alexandria to enforce the
demands. The Monophysite Patriarch of Antioch too, Peter the Fuller,
accepted, thereby winning recognition; and the Monophysites in Syria,
generally, accepted it. The same thing happened in Palestine. The
situation of 475 was repeated with this difference that the leader of
the movement now was the very man who then had been the head of the
orthodox opposition. The whole of the East had ceased to fight for the
definition of Chalcedon, and on a basis of "silence where we differ”
the Catholics there had received into communion those who declared that
the definition meant heresy.
There remained Rome. It was the action of the pope St. Leo which in 458
had saved Catholicism in the East from Timothy the Cat, and when that
personage returned in triumph seventeen years later the pope --
Simplicius now -- had immediately protested and called for his
re-exile. He had been no less insistent, in 482, in his opposition to
the emperor's acknowledgement of Peter Mongos as Patriarch, and had
pressed Acacius to use all his influence to prevent that
acknowledgement. Acacius ignored the letters, but before Simplicius
could proceed further in the matter he died (March 10, 483).
His successor, Felix III, was once again the classical Roman, simple,
direct, courageous, a man of action. Talaia had arrived in Rome while
Simplicius lay dying and had laid a formal accusation against Acacius.
The new pope thereupon sent an embassy to Constantinople with
instructions to summon Acacius to answer the charges made against him
by the exiled Catholic patriarch. When the legates arrived Acacius
confiscated their papers and procured their arrest. They were put to
the torture and presently went over to the side of Acacius. They, too,
signed the Henoticon and assisting publicly, in their official capacity
as the pope's legates, at the liturgy when Acacius pontificated,
crowned his tortuous betrayal of the faith of Chalcedon with the
appearance of the papal sanction. There was, however, one small group
of faithful Catholics in the capital who guessed the truth -- the monks
known, from the continuous character of their offices, as the
"Sleepless" (Akoimetoi). They found means to inform the pope and when
the legates returned their trial awaited them. In a synod of seventy
bishops the pope judged both the legates and Acacius. They were
condemned and deposed, and Acacius excommunicated for his betrayal of
the faith. With him were excommunicated all who stood by him, and as
the whole of the East that was not Monophysite supported him, the
effect was a definite breach between Rome and the Eastern Church. It
was to last for thirty-five years, and history has called it the
Acacian Schism.
Acacius died, intransigent to the last, in 489 and two years later Zeno
died too. He left no heir and his widow, influential as the Augusta,
designated as his successor Anastasius, an officer of the civil
service. The contrast between the two emperors could not have been
greater. Zeno was the rough, uncultured product of a province where the
only influential citizens were brigands, and he was the most notorious
evil-liver of his Empire. Anastasius, already sixty-eight years of age,
was the trained official, scholarly, scrupulous, so pious that in 488
he narrowly escaped election as Patriarch of Antioch; he had a
pronounced taste for preaching, and he was an ardent Monophysite. The
schism therefore suffered no interruption from the change of emperor.
In Egypt the regime of the Henoticon, interpreted as hostile to
Chalcedon, continued. In Syria, under the same regime, the bishops were
pro-Chalcedon and the monks divided. At Constantinople, outside the
court circle, Monophysites were rare and the new patriarch was as much
a supporter of Chalcedon as he dared be, which was too much for the new
emperor, and therefore he was soon replaced.
Felix III, too, died in 492. His successor, one of the great popes of
the early Middle Ages, was Gelasius I and he continued his
predecessor's policy in his predecessor's spirit. Constantinople must
acknowledge the sentence on Acacius before it can be restored to
communion. The successor of Gelasius, Anastasius II (496-98), used a
somewhat gentler tone. He died before he was able to see what fruit
this would bear, and the immediate result was a schism, at Rome itself,
on the part of the more intransigent of his own clergy, and the
beginnings of a legend concerning Anastasius that grew with the Middle
Ages and won the peace-loving pope a place in the Inferno of Dante.
With Symmachus, elected in 498, the party of Gelasius was again in
control, but hampered for the next ten years by schism arising from a
double election. The situation, after twenty-five years of the breach,
was unchanged, except that the East was becoming accustomed to live in
hostility to Rome; and then, in 511, change came. From the Catholic
point of view it was change for the worse and its author was the
emperor, still Anastasius and by this time close on ninety years of
age.
The Henoticon had never been a success. It was one of those compromises
which satisfy none. It pleased the radical Monophysites as little as it
pleased the Catholics, Anastasius the emperor as little as Anastasius
the pope. The emperor then, in 511, resolved on a more definitely
anti-Chalcedonian policy, the imposition of Monophysitism generally
throughout the Empire. His greatest difficulty lay in the fact that
only Egypt was sufficiently Monophysite to welcome the policy
whole-heartedly. But his purpose was stiffened, and his arm
strengthened, by the appearance at this moment of the man who was
destined to make a church of the Monophysite party, and to found it so
thoroughly that it endures to this day -- the monk Severus.
Severus was a man who had suffered much for his opposition to the
Henoticon -- opposition, of course, because that document, he
considered, conceded too much to Catholicism. The business of an appeal
to the emperor had brought him to the capital at the very moment when
Anastasius was planning how best to depose its Patriarch for his
anti-monophysite activities. The presence of Severus, whose most
remarkable learning, and sufferings for the cause, had made him the
leading personality of the party, gave new life to the dispirited
Monophysites of the capital. The Patriarch, Macedonius, was deposed and
a Monophysite installed in his place. Heartened by this victory the
emperor turned next to purify the sees of the East. In Syria the monks
were his willing agents and Severus the chief organiser. Within a few
months the deposition of the Patriarch of Antioch, too, had been
managed and in his place there was elected Severus himself. The bishops
of Syria went over, almost in a body, to the strictly Monophysite
interpretation of the Henoticon. At Jerusalem, however, Severus was
refused recognition, and to reduce this last stronghold more summary
measures still were adopted. The patriarch was deposed, banished and
provided with a Monophysite successor by a simple order from the
emperor. But, for all its appearance of completeness, the policy was
far from successful. Monophysites did indeed occupy the chief sees, and
the other bishops had accepted the Monophysite version of the faith.
But in many cases it was only a nominal acceptance; the convinced
Monophysites among them were a minority; the dissident radical
Monophysites of Syria still held aloof; and at Constantinople the
opposition of the Catholics-still of course divided from Rome and the
West by schism -- to the whole Monophysite movement was as active as
ever. The religious chaos after seven years of the new Monophysite
offensive was greater than before. Affairs were going steadily from bad
to worse when the death of the aged emperor (July 9, 518) suddenly
changed the whole situation.
The new emperor -- the commandant of the guard, who had profited by his
position to seize the vacant throne -- was not only a Catholic, but,
what had not been known for a century and a half, a Latin. With the
accession of Justin the end of the schism could only be a matter of
time. Events, indeed, followed each other rapidly. Anastasius died on
July 9. Six days later mobs were parading the streets calling for the
acknowledgement of Chalcedon and St. Leo, and the condemnation of
Severus. On the 20th a council of bishops reversed all the policy of
forty years and more, recognising Chalcedon and St. Leo's teaching, and
decreeing Severus' deposition and excommunication. More they were
unable to do for, like a wise man, he was already flown. Everywhere,
except in Egypt, the superiority reverted to the Catholics, and on
August 1 the new emperor re-opened communications with the pope,
Hormisdas.
It was not until the following March (519) that the legates arrived to
execute the formalities which would bring the schism to an end. They
were simple enough, and strict. Each bishop must sign the formula sent
by the pope, and in this he acknowledged the indefectibility of the
faith of the Roman Church, condemned Nestorius and Eutyches and
Dioscoros, made explicit recognition of the decisions of Ephesus and
Chalcedon, accepted the Tome of St. Leo and finally condemned along
with Timothy the Cat, Peter Mongos and Peter the Fuller, Acacius too
and all who had supported him. Furthermore, the bishop promised never
"to associate in the prayers of the sacred mysteries the names of those
cut off from the communion of the Catholic Church, that is to say those
not in agreement with the Apostolic See., ' The formula was not drawn
up in view of the present reconciliation. It had been devised in Spain,
during the schism, as a means of testing the orthodoxy of visiting
prelates from the East. Rome now made it her own.
Justin asked for a Council to discuss the matter, but the legates were
firm. They had come for one purpose only -- to gather signatures to
Pope Hormisdas' formula. They had their way. The patriarch signed and
the other bishops, too, amid scenes of great enthusiasm. But outside
Constantinople things did not go so smoothly. To begin with, there was
an unwillingness to condemn the patriarchs since Acacius, especially
those who, for their opposition to the Monophysites, had been deprived
by the Monophysite emperor. At Thessalonica and at Ephesus especially
was there resistance on this account. At Antioch, Severus having been
deposed, there was once more a Catholic patriarch. He signed, and with
him a hundred and ten out of the hundred and fifty bishops of his
jurisdiction. The monks, however, held firm and nothing short of a
wholesale dissolution of their monasteries and a general rounding up of
hermits and solitaries reduced their opposition. This necessary work
was entrusted to the army. Its immediate result was to loose on the
East thousands of convinced, and none too instructed, apostles of the
heresy, destined now to wander over the East for another twenty years
preaching resistance to the bishops and to the Council of Chalcedon.
Their sufferings at the hands of the imperial soldiery naturally added
not a little to their eloquence and zeal. In Palestine the change had
not been too difficult, but it promised to raise such storms in Egypt
that the government, for the moment, left that province untouched; and
to Egypt there began to flow in the full tide of the persecuted and
dispossessed from all the rest of the Empire. Nor was Severus idle.
From his hiding place he still directed and encouraged the whole vast
movement, and to take the place of the priests and deacons now
reconciled with the pope, wholesale ordinations were arranged and a new
Monophysite clergy came into being whose pertinacity no power would
ever shake.
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