We might even say that the later history of Christianity depended not just on any one person, but on one horse, the one that stumbled in 450, causing the death of the pro-Monophysite emperor Theodosius II. Only forty-nine at the time of his death, he could easily have reigned for another twenty years. That “might have been” is intriguing because, had he lived, the history of the world would have been quite different. If Theodosius had not died, there would have been no Chalcedon, and in that case, the Western, European, Catholic part of the empire might have been the one to slide into secession over the following century. That was the direction in which events so often seemed to be moving.27
We can imagine a counterfactual universe in which the schism between Rome and the East occurred in the fifth century, not the eleventh, and papal Rome never recovered from subjection to successive waves of barbarian occupiers. By 450, much of the old Western empire was under the political control of barbarian warlords who were overwhelmingly Arian Christians, rather than Catholics. Perhaps the papacy might have survived in the face of Arian persecution and cultural pressure, perhaps not. In the East, meanwhile, the Monophysite Roman Empire would have held on to its rock-solid foundations in a faithfully united Eastern realm that stretched from Egypt to the Caucasus, from Syria to the Balkans. This solid Christendom would have struggled mightily against Muslim newcomers, and conceivably, they would have held the frontiers.
Later Christian scholars would know the fundamental languages of the faith—Greek, Coptic, and Syriac—and they would have free access to the vast treasures surviving in each of those tongues. Latin works, however, would be available only to a handful of daring researchers willing to explore that marginal language with its puzzling alphabet. Only those bold Latinists would recall such marginal figures of Christian antiquity as Saints Augustine and Patrick. In contrast, every educated person would know those champions of the mainstream Christian story, Severus of Antioch and Egypt’s Aba Shenoute.28 In this alternate world, the decisive turning point in church history would have been not Chalcedon, but Second Ephesus, which we today remember as the Gangster Synod, the Council That Never Was. And the One Nature would have triumphed over the noxious errors of the Dyophysites, the Two Nature heretics.
If only because of the other paths that could so easily have been taken, these debates give the mid-fifth century an excellent claim to be counted as the most formative period in the whole history of Christianity. Much recent writing stresses the earlier Council of Nicea (325) as the critical moment in defining the beliefs of that faith, the critical dividing line between early and medieval Christianity. In reality, the struggle even to define core beliefs raged for centuries beyond this time and involved several other great gatherings, any one of which could have turned out very differently.
In many modern accounts, too, the church’s history is portrayed as a steady move toward the otherworldly aspects of faith, toward seeing Christ as a heavenly redeemer rather than a prophet or a mystically minded social teacher. For Elaine Pagels, for instance, part of this process involved replacing the cryptic gospel of Thomas with the incarnational text of John (“In the beginning”). Thomas, she suggests, is for seekers and mystical inquirers, while John is for the devoutly unquestioning faithful. Meanwhile, some think, the canon of the New Testament became more rigidly defined in order to support Jesus’ steady ascent to Godhood. In this scholarly vision, the democratic, egalitarian, and Spirit-filled Jesus movement of the earliest times atrophied into the repressive, bureaucratic Catholic Church of the Middle Ages: Christ pantokrator overwhelmed the human Jesus. For many writers, Nicea marks the tragic end of a glorious phase in the history of Christianity and the commencement of something grimmer.29
The more we look at the two hundred years or so after Nicea, though, the shakier this perception must become. Arguably, fourth-century councils like Nicea marked the point When Jesus Became God, to quote scholar Richard Rubenstein—but that was the easy part. The fifth and sixth centuries had to tackle the far more stressful task of preventing Jesus from becoming entirely God. Many lives would be lost in the process, and at least one empire.30
By What Authority?
The Jesus Wars tell us much about how Christianity has developed over time and, by extension, how other world religions evolve as they confront new circumstances. Many of the issues are perennial, not least the enduring question of how churches determine the acceptable limits of Christian belief.
Assuming that people disagree over matters that seem essential, just how do they decide which side is right, which is closer to the mind of God? How does the church make up its own, all-too-human mind? Societies change, circumstances change, ideologies change, especially within a global church that contains so many separate cultures and political traditions and which is in daily contact with other faiths. It’s natural for a church living in a particular society to accept the standards prevailing in the wider community, whether these involve issues of gender and sexuality, property and slavery, war and peace, religious tolerance or bigotry. Christian teaching in one part of the world evolves according to the standards of the wider society, while believers elsewhere fear that the faith is being compromised beyond recognition. Over time, churches in different nations and continents inevitably draw apart.
So how does a church ensure conformity, at least to the extent that each regional entity acknowledges the full Christian credentials of its counterparts elsewhere? This kind of question remains very much alive in modern-day disputes over gender and sexuality within various denominations, in the global Anglican Communion, but also among Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians.
For a modern audience, used to centuries of religious diversity and toleration, the stress on maintaining conformity seems unnecessary. Today it seems obvious that when different sides are thoroughly estranged, they should agree on an amicable separation. They should form their own denominations, agreeing to differ peaceably, and live in mutual respect. Yet that option was just not available in the early church, and not simply because Christians then were in any sense morally inferior to their descendants. Central to Christian thought—Catholic, Monophysite, or Nestorian—was the concept of the church as the undivided body of Christ. If a body was not united, then it was deformed, mutilated, and imperfect, and such terms surely could not be applied to the body of Christ.
The Eucharist was the material symbol or sacrament of this united body. However much worship practices differed around the world—and the differences were spectacular—one could only share communion with fellow Christians who held a correct view of Christ and the core of theological truth. If colleagues deviated from that, then they suffered anathema or condemnation, followed by excommunication. The word anathema was very potent, and it even had violent implications. Greek translations of the Old Testament use this term to describe the total condemnation or annihilation of a city, such as Jericho, where God commands the Israelites to massacre “everything that breathes.” A person under anathema was equally cut off from both the church and civil society.
To be “in communion” meant sharing a basic core of assumptions that drew the line between being a true member of the body of Christ, and not being. This issue resurfaces regularly today, when many liberal Christians see no problem in taking communion in other churches as a sign of good will and fellowship but are dismayed by the rigidity of some churches. This kind of restriction is a running source of grievance at Catholic funerals, where liberal priests will invite all comers to participate fully in communion, to the horror of more orthodox believers. But in this matter, it is the harder-line churches who reflect the views of the ancient church, with their exalted view of communion as the symbol of belonging and unity. You are who you eat bread with.31
The Church’s Mind
Pressures toward uniformity grew after the empire officially accepted Christianity in the fourth century. Just as all limbs and organs formed one human body, so there must be one organic church, one hierarchy, with its
different regions operating in harmony and sharing communion—or so ran the theory. Over time, though, disputes and new questions arose within the Great Church, and doctrine needed to develop and advance in such a way that different factions did not condemn one another for forsaking the faith.
No one individual or group had the power to settle such disagreements: no single church leader or patriarch held universal authority. Conflicts rending large sections of the Christian community had to be resolved by general statements of the whole body of the church, in the form of councils, an idea that first appears in the Jerusalem gathering of the apostles described in the book of Acts. If the church was a body, then these councils served, however imperfectly, as its rational mind.
Through the early Christian centuries, local councils met regularly at diocesan and regional levels, but by the fourth century we see the first gatherings that sought to be universal or ecumenical. The idea presented many challenges. In the very earliest days of the church, it might just have been possible to gather all Christian believers together in one setting to decide an issue, but that option was simply not feasible when Christians ran into the millions. Instead, there had to be an assembly of some broadly representative gathering of bishops and higher clergy, drawn from as wide a sampling of the Christian world as was feasible. That has something in common with the principle of a modern opinion poll or survey, although with a supernatural justification. Councils represented the voice of the church as guided by the Holy Spirit, and once an assembly had spoken definitively on given issues, its pronouncements claimed absolute authority.32
In reality, councils rarely bore much resemblance to the intended pattern of collective holiness and usually looked more like the very worst of American political-party conventions. In studying the church councils of this era, certain themes come to mind, including Christian charity; restraint; common human decency; a willingness to forgive old injuries, to turn the other cheek. None of these featured in any of the main debates. Instead, the councils were marked by name-calling and backstabbing (both figurative and literal), by ruthless plotting and backstairs cabals, and by a pervasive threat of intimidation.33
Human sinfulness apart, several specific reasons ensured that the councils would be so messy, so violent, and, ultimately, so divisive. One structural problem was that no commonly accepted principle determined who should or should not appear at councils, no guideline that gave a right of attendance to Bishop X or Bishop Y. Even if such a plan existed, it would have been made almost useless by the infrequency with which councils met and the rapidly changing circumstances within the empire that made some areas more or less powerful over time. Between 325 and 680, only six councils were acknowledged as ecumenical, or possessing worldwide authority, far too few and infrequent for any individual or group to develop any kind of institutional memory.34
A council should be large in the sense of at least some hundreds of participants—318 bishops reputedly attended Nicea—but no written constitution specified a minimum number of participants, or how they should be chosen. Nobody even knew how many bishops held power at any given time. A common guesstimate in the 440s was that the Roman Empire contained 1,200 bishops, a number that usually surfaced rhetorically in a sentence such as, “How dare you, one man, set yourself against 1,200?” But as some regions, particularly North Africa, massively overproduced bishops in terms of the overall population, that rough figure was an underestimate. Nor did it include bishops from beyond the Roman realms, for instance from Ethiopia or Persia. So was a council legitimate if it had 200 members? 150? What about 50? No official quorum existed. Did the council have to include representation from every region of the Christian world, or just those for whom travel was geographically feasible? That last factor really mattered in an age when the roads and sea routes were playgrounds for barbarian raiders, for Huns, Vandals, and Goths.
Nor did any established plan explain just how the Holy Spirit would make his or her intentions known through the voices of the gathered bishops. The idea of voting and claiming a majority was as familiar an idea in the fifth century as it is today, but voting commonly took the form of acclamation. Groups of participants shouted for particular causes, probably with slogans and chants prearranged in caucuses. No definite lines separated a church council from a street demonstration. Moreover, it was never clear whether Christology was to be settled on the basis of a simple majority or some kind of supermajority. Even after a decisive vote was taken, the council still had to seek ratification from the emperor, which introduced splendid new opportunities for lobbying and influence peddling.
This infuriating lack of precision explains the generally chaotic nature of proceedings, when respective parties mobilized large numbers of their own followers, while disqualifying rival delegations. Even if a council voted in a particular way, dissidents were quite capable of establishing a rival minority council of their own, voting as they thought fit, and sending that decision to the emperor for approval. Decisions generally involved condemning rivals or subjecting them to anathemas, and after some councils—especially First Ephesus—an observer needed flash cards to trace who exactly had excommunicated or deposed whom.
That process—or rather, lack of process—gave quite as much power to the imperial family and to imperial officials as to patriarchs or bishops. Any account of the Jesus Wars would begin with the great patriarchs, with pivotal church figures such as Leo of Rome or Cyril of Alexandria and their counterparts at Antioch and Constantinople; but making the final decisions were the emperors, Theodosius II and Marcian. And besides them, at least as important would be the empresses and princesses of the day. This meant, above all, the empress Pulcheria, whose alliance with a succession of barbarian generals gave her effective control of the Eastern Empire for thirty years, while Galla Placidia long dominated the West. Hardly less significant was Eudocia, a poet and rhetorical genius in her own right and the sponsor of the Monophysite movement after its defeat at Chalcedon. Without these and other royal women, neither side could have long existed or competed. Pulcheria, above all, was vital to defining what became Christian orthodoxy. Without her personal and constant intervention, the struggles at First Ephesus and Chalcedon would certainly have taken different courses. The church was giving her no more than her due when it proclaimed her a saint. On the other side, the freestanding Monophysite church could not have survived without the patronage of the sixth-century empress Theodora.35
All the theological rows had immense political consequences. All the great councils involved a confrontation between the great patriarchal sees, each represented by a prelate who went on to become either a great saint and father of the church, or a condemned heretic. Several of these church leaders, also, represented a particular tradition of political power, and indeed of monarchy. As the Roman Empire crumbled, older patterns reasserted themselves, so that Alexandrian patriarchs like Cyril thought of themselves and acted like—literally—ancient pharaohs or Ptolemaic god-kings. Leo and the Roman popes saw themselves as successors of the ancient Roman emperors, the patriarchs of Constantinople as leaders of a Christian theocracy. The theological rows make no sense except in terms of this clash of self-images, as the shades of monarchies past and future tried to secure their supremacy as the legitimate successors of a fading regime. Ephesus and Chalcedon were battles for the political future as much as a war for eternal truth.
Violent Faith
Bishops debated theological points in the incense-filled back rooms of the councils, but their decisions had a deadly impact in the streets and villages, where ordinary lay people were convinced that the essential core of Christian belief was at stake. What might to us seem like philosophical niceties drove ordinary people to the point of wishing to kill, torture, or expel their neighbors. The potential for violence and persecution existed at a far earlier stage of Christian development than many believe, certainly in the time of the early church rather than the Middle Ages. The councils led to outrageous violence in many parts of the
empire—to popular risings and coups ’d’état, to massacres and persecutions. Only with difficulty did imperial forces maintain their hold on whole regions of the empire, especially such prosperous but disaffected territories as Egypt and Syria.36
Nor was violence confined to intra-Christian struggles. Historians have often commented on the growth of intolerance in the church after it achieved official status within the empire, how it became ever more hostile toward heretics, pagans, and Jews. But it is especially in the years of the great councils, between 410 and 460, that the level of intolerance rises frighteningly. This story is both a direct outcome of the theological debates, and its natural outcome. Pulcheria, who saved orthodoxy in 451, was also the driving force in a violent campaign against Jews, which foreshadows the anti-Semitic persecutions of the European Middle Ages. Adding to the “medieval” feel of some of these events—the religious violence and bigotry, the anti-Semitism and fanaticism—the ruling dynasty through the era of Ephesus and Chalcedon, including Pulcheria herself, was of Spanish origin. While no one would suggest any kind of ethnic determinism, it is curiously appropriate that the Christian world of the fifth century looks so much like the time of Torquemada, the notorious Grand Inquisitor.37
When historian Edward Gibbon described the turbulent response to the Council of Chalcedon, he expressed astonishment that such savagery could erupt “in the pursuit of a metaphysical quarrel.” But powerfully justifying violence was a factor that moderns often ignore and which goes far beyond mere metaphysics. It also makes nonsense of attempts to distinguish religious from non-religious motivations. The vast majority of people at this time, educated and ignorant, believed in providential views of the world. They believed that wrong conduct or heretical belief stirred God to anger, and that such anger would be expressed in highly material terms, in earthquake and fire, invasion and military defeat, famine and pestilence. Unless evildoers or wrong-believers were suppressed, society might perish altogether. In order to destroy those malevolent groups, activists took steps that look worldly, political, and cynical, but we can never truly separate those political acts from their compelling underlying motivation, which was supernatural. However historians may use the term, no “secular world” existed independent of church and religion, and the Roman state, pagan or Christian, never was secular in any recognizable modern sense. Nor was there any such thing as “just politics.”
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