Jesus Wars
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This ethical component was strongly marked in theologians of the school of Antioch, who would be on the front lines of the Jesus Wars. Although they rejected any crude ideas of the separation of the natures, they fought to retain the notion of a human will in Christ. In their view, Christ actively resisted temptations and did good until he atoned for sin both through his death and by the example of his good works. By so doing, he showed ordinary people the way of salvation and offered the potential for human nature to be raised to the level of the divine. To use the title of one of the most famous Christian texts ever written, the Imitation of Christ is not just possible but demanded. When modern liberal theologians protest that the exalted divine image of Jesus places his ethical teachings beyond attainable reach, they are reviving one of the oldest debates in Christendom.15
Theology apart, the debates had powerful outcomes for what we term the real world—although theologians of the time would undoubtedly have argued that such a title could only be applied to the heavenly realm and not this transient life. The memory of a human Jesus has throughout Western history repeatedly driven men and women to imitate him, through social activism and political reform, not to mention the mystical quest and the arts. In recent times, liberation theologies have portrayed a Jesus who so utterly empties himself of his divine privileges and honor that he walks the earth as one of the very poorest and most marginalized. He is at once an exemplar for the poor and their leader in struggles for justice. As Charles Sheldon famously argued in his 1897 novel of sweeping urban reform, In His Steps, Christians must always ask, “What would Jesus do?” Of course, myriad blunders in the history of the churches prove they have not always asked that question, or produced an appropriate answer. But at least the aspiration never died.
To raise another ethical issue, how do we know how much weight to attach to the words of Christ recorded in the New Testament? Just who do we hear speaking? Assume for the sake of argument that the scriptural text accurately records Jesus’ sayings, which, of course, it may not always do. When Jesus tells a parable or utters a pronouncement, do those words come directly and literally from the mind of God, or are they the thoughts of an individual bound by the constraints of his time and place? To take a specific example, if Jesus really was speaking with divine authority, then believers need to take very seriously the radical division that he proclaims between light and darkness, together with a literal belief in the devil and demons. To assert Christ’s humanity is not to undervalue or ignore his teachings, but it must make later believers think more carefully about the authority those words carry and how they can be applied to modern circumstances.
Christ the divine, or Christ as divine-and-human? The best way of understanding the two approaches is to think what each side thought it would lose if its opponents triumphed. For each, the central idea of the faith was the title Emmanuel, God with us. Each in its way feared any theology that would impair human access to the fullness of the divine, but each viewed the solution in quite different ways. For Antiochenes, a One Nature creed that made Christ thoroughly divine uprooted him from humanity and removed him from any sense of human identification. Such a statement also raised the monstrous absurdity of God the Creator suffering and dying, of being “passible,” in theological terms. One Nature believers, in contrast, wanted to guarantee the intimate solidarity linking God to humanity. This linkage must be a total union, rather than just a conjunction or association. They feared weakening the image of Christ so that he became anything less than a manifestation of God within us. Aspiring to the same goal, the two sides chose very different roads.16
Living Christ
In other ways, too, preserving the human aspects of Christ prevented the divine withdrawing to an alien and unimaginable supernatural realm. If Christ was the human Jesus, he was born in a specific time and place and was a Jew. Even Leo, who so despised Jews and Judaism, stressed that Jesus was absolutely rooted in his Hebrew ancestry and in the world of the Old Testament. The genealogies quoted in the Gospels, those long lists of begats that send modern readers to sleep, decisively proclaimed Christ’s human status. Chalcedon wrecks any attempt to de-Judaize Jesus.
Each side, likewise, offered a different way of reading the Bible. Alexandrians worked from a Greek philosophical tradition and used the scriptural text to illustrate their conclusions. Every word and line of the Bible became an allegory bearing a spiritual truth, which might or might not have any connection with actual historical events in first-century Palestine. Nestorius, in contrast, had his roots in Antioch, which read the scriptural text in terms of historical events, to be expounded and commented upon. When you read the Gospels in that way, it is hard to avoid the idea of a human Christ, the man who wept. The definitions of Chalcedon reasserted the real rather than symbolic nature of biblical truth.17
Just as central to the story is the struggle to preserve the feminine face of the divine. Driving much of the fifth-century controversy was the astonishing rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary and the boast that she was literally Mother of God. Pagans mocked these claims to create a new goddess, but many Christians, too, were offended. Some thought that the concept of Mother of God was absurd—as Nestorius asked, shockingly, was God really present in the world as a two-month-old infant?—while others rejected any attempt to undercut the deity of Christ at any stage of his earthly life. On this point at least, One Nature believers agreed wholeheartedly with the Orthodox/Catholic church, and Marian devotions flourished. Egyptians especially had a potent devotion to the Mother of God, who is the subject of a magnificent tradition in early art, and the Coptic Monophysite church has had a long love affair with Mary.18
Stressing the human Jesus also permitted the development and growth of Christian visual art, and thereby of much of Western culture. We easily forget just what an extraordinary phenomenon this visual tradition was. Monotheistic religions are often deeply suspicious of visual art, whether of sacred figures or of the human form as such. Partly, this reflects a fear of idolatry, but it also shows reluctance even to attempt to reproduce holy forms. Although that restraint is not universal—at various times in history, both devout Muslims and Jews happily painted human beings—it is widespread. Christianity could certainly have followed a similar path, and various movements through the centuries have practiced iconoclasm, the smashing of images. Yet Christian visual art survived, with the overwhelmingly rich depictions of Christ’s humanity, all the images of the child with his mother, of the teacher, and of the crucified victim.
Losing Half the World
The way these councils are remembered tells us a great deal about how Christian history is written and, by extension, the history of other great causes or movements. We often hear the complaint that winners write history, but the situation is in fact worse than that. In practice, historians write retroactively from the point of view of those who would win at some later point, even if that victory was nowhere in sight at the time they are describing. That is certainly what happens when we identify Chalcedon as the final triumph of orthodoxy.19
Accounts of early Christianity make the year 451 a decisive break, a vital transition from the ancient origins of the faith to its medieval millennium. But such an account ignores the century or so after Chalcedon when that particular school of thought might easily have been reversed. Between 451 and the 540s, Chalcedonians and their enemies rose and fell in their power at the Roman court, and there were periods of several decades when Monophysites controlled not just the empire but most of the main bishoprics and patriarchates. Focusing on 451 misses the long centuries after Chalcedon had secured recognition as the empire’s official creed, but when in many lands—in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine—Chalcedonians were at best a suspect minority. Debates over the nature(s) of Christ were still vividly active in 650 or 800. And in much of the world, those battles ended in crushing victory for Chalcedon’s foes. The result wasn’t even close.
Despite the theological slogans of the time, Christ was not divided; b
ut the Christian world certainly was, irreparably. Now, Christian divisions as such were not new. At least since the apostles left Jerusalem, at no point in Christian history has one single church plausibly claimed the loyalty of all believers to the exclusion of rival institutions. In the mid-fourth century, perhaps half of all Christians belonged to some group that the Great Church regarded as heretical or schismatic, and new splits continued to form.20 Viewed historically, a denominationally divided world is not an exceptional circumstance for Christians, but the conventional norm. Dilemmas of interchurch conflict and cooperation go back literally to the foundation of the faith.
But post-Chalcedonian splits were on an unprecedented scale. Sustained resistance to official doctrine spawned two vast and enduring movements that the winning party would call heretical, respectively the Nestorians and Monophysites, and each has left remnants up to the present day. In terms of historical tradition and continuity, those churches have a far better claim to a connection with the ancient sources of the faith—in terms of geography, culture, and language, not to mention ethnicity—than do the upstart communities headquartered in Rome and Constantinople.21 Within a century or so after Chalcedon, the Christian world fragmented into several great transcontinental divisions—Orthodox/Catholic, Monophysite, Nestorian, and Arian. Although each church agreed fully with its neighbors in essentials, each declared itself to be the one and only true church and did not acknowledge the credentials of other bodies or share communion with them. Already by 550, Christendom was quite as divided as it would be during the great early-modern split between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox.
Back to the Catacombs
The history of these dissident Eastern churches makes us rethink what we assume about the political trajectory of Christianity. According to a familiar cliché, Christianity changed utterly after it made its great alliance with the Roman Empire under Constantine, the devil’s bargain in which the church sacrificed principles for earthly power and wealth. But in fact, Chalcedon forced the historic mainstream core of the church to forsake that Roman alliance, and it rapidly reverted to the antistate opposition that is perhaps the natural state of Christianity. After the twin shocks of 431 and 451, much of the most advanced and sophisticated Christian thought and culture in the East went underground politically.
Egypt illustrates this story. Alexandria—and the realm of Egypt beyond it—had an excellent claim to a dominant role in Christian life and thought, as the source of much of the faith’s intellectual strength and growth. It would be quite feasible to write an Egypt-centered history of the first five or six hundred years of Christianity. Christians there lived under a hostile state apparatus from apostolic times until the grant of toleration in the fourth century, and they shared state power from 312 until the 450s. But the Monophysite majority coexisted peacefully with Roman regimes only sporadically over the next century or so, and imperial Christian forces often persecuted them. Those Christians who followed Chalcedon were slightingly dismissed as Melkites or Emperor’s Men, apostates and time-servers. And although Egypt’s churches enjoyed peace from the seventh century, that was only within the constraints of a Muslim-dominated state. At no point over the last fourteen centuries has Egypt’s Coptic Church enjoyed much more than grudging toleration.22
Looking back at its long history, Egypt’s Christians only knew state favor for a fleeting interval, and a similar story could be told of Syria, that other ancient center of the faith. From 542 to 578, the greatest leader of the Monophysite church was Jacobus Baradaeus, whose nickname refers to the rags he wore to escape the attention of imperial authorities constantly on the watch for this notorious dissident. Translating his name as “Hobo Jake” would not be far off the mark. Instead of living in a bishop’s palace, he remained ever on the move, wandering from city to city. He roamed between Egypt and Persia, ordaining bishops and priests for the swelling underground church. His career, in other words, looked far more like that of an early apostle than a medieval prelate, and there were many others like him. Numerically, Jake won far more converts than Paul of Tarsus, and he covered more ground. The heart of the Christian church never left the catacombs, or if it did, it was not for long.23
That story tells us a great deal about the nature of Christian loyalties in the centuries after the Roman Empire’s conversion. If your emperor or king was formally Christian, then self-preservation alone dictated following his lead, so that we need not think that church members actually had any high degree of knowledge or belief in the new faith. But if the church was itself in deadly opposition to the state, and faced actual persecution, then people had no vested interest whatever in belonging to it—quite the contrary. Why risk your life by following Hobo Jake? Through most of the Middle East, and for long centuries after Constantine’s time, then, people followed these dissident churches for exactly the same reasons that their ancestors would have adhered to the beliefs of the earliest Christian communities. They followed because they thought they would obtain healing in this world and salvation in the next; because they wanted signs and wonders; and because the ascetic lives of church leaders gave these figures a potent aura of holiness and charisma. Ordinary Christians followed not because they were told, but because they believed.
Winning New Worlds
Besides its religious significance, the fifth-century crisis changed the shape of global political history. Chalcedon gave an enormous boost to the power and prestige of those growing parts of the church in new and emerging areas—roughly speaking, in Europe—at the cost of the older heartlands of faith. A new emerging Christian world broke away from an older Christendom, the two separated by what critics saw as troubling theological innovations. Modern observers might draw parallels to the contemporary movement of the Christian center of gravity from Europe and North America to the global South.
The ancient geographical shift dramatically increased the power and prestige of the popes of Rome, slowing efforts to raise other centers to equal or greater status. Chalcedon and its aftermath consecrated the power of the Roman church, crippling potential rivals elsewhere, above all at Alexandria. Chalcedon, in fact, marks the real beginning of the medieval papacy.
The political victory of faith made-in-Rome meant that Europe’s emerging Christianity would develop in intimate alliance with the Roman Empire and with the Western successor states, rather than (as in the East) returning to the catacombs. In consequence, Europe’s churches kept alive the vision of a Christian empire, an intimate church-state alliance. This would be a political manifestation of the City of God, which they repeatedly tried to recreate in practice. So wedded were Westerners to the vision of a Christian empire that, when the real Roman Empire lost influence, the popes invented a whole new structure in the form of Charlemagne’s Frankish regime. Europeans had to live with the consequences of that decision for a thousand years.24
The split within ancient Christianity prepared the way for outside powers who would exploit intra-Christian divisions—first the Persians, and eventually the Muslims. Without the great split, the rise of Islam would have been unthinkable. Without the religious crisis, Islam could not have stormed into the political near-vacuum it found in the seventh century, into an empire where most Eastern subjects—Monophysite and Nestorian—rejected their Orthodox/ Catholic emperors. So alienated were the Christian dissidents that few were prepared to resist Muslim invaders, who promised (and practiced) tolerance for the diverse Christian sects. In its earliest phases, the new faith offered a clean break from the historic cycle of violence and persecution that had so disfigured late-antique Christianity. Islam, in contrast, offered toleration, peace, and an enviable separation of church and state.25
A modern observer might see in this process a warning about the dangers of mixing church and state. The Christian world could only know peace when government was definitively removed from the business of making and enforcing religious orthodoxy, after which competing churches could coexist happily under a regime that despised its
subjects impartially. Yet dissident churches ultimately paid a catastrophically high price for their freedom from Orthodox Christian control. Whatever dissident Christians thought initially, the new Muslim power had its own very different values and objectives and worked effectively to implement them.
Although the process took centuries, Christianity ultimately faded in the lands that fell under Muslim power. To illustrate the scale of the ruin that overcame the ancient churches, we recall that the fifth-century struggles involved a war for dominance between the sees of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople, and that war had clear winners and losers. Yet today the last three of those cities are now in countries overwhelmingly Muslim in population and tradition, with Christian minorities barely hanging on. Ephesus itself now stands in the western portion of the Muslim land we call Turkey, which is almost Christian free. Chalcedon and its aftermath so divided the Christian East that its ruin was inevitable.26
Modern believers should take from this historical experience quite different lessons, and certainly not simplistic alarms about the supposed threat from Islam. Communities should not become so obsessively focused on their internal feuds that they forget what they have in common and fall prey to far more substantial external dangers that they have been too blinkered to notice.
Imagining Other Worlds
What ultimately became accepted as Christian orthodoxy was hammered out in a process that was painfully slow, gradual, and often bloody. This conflict was marked by repeated struggles, coups, and open warfare spread over centuries. It is easy to imagine another outcome in which the so-called Orthodox would have been scorned as heretics, with incalculable consequences for mainstream political history, not to mention all later Christian thought and devotion.