Jesus Wars
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Cyril’s church had a powerful tradition of hands-on direct action, with several distinct constituencies available to break the heads of rivals. Alexandria itself was notoriously rowdy, and the church historian Socrates noted that, “The Alexandrian public is more delighted with tumult than any other people: and if at any time it should find a pretext, breaks forth into the most intolerable excesses; for it never ceases from its turbulence without bloodshed.” That is actually a good summary of the city’s church history. Once Christianity was legalized and churches became widespread, lower clergy used their sermons and homilies to disseminate the official patriarchal line throughout the city. They mobilized urban factions against the church’s rivals—against pagans, Jews, or imperial officials. Through sermons, processions, and devotions, the church controlled the media through which urban opinion could be manipulated. If they chose, the church had the means to promote demagoguery, and it had a willing audience. Athanasius was certainly willing to use mob action when needed, to the point of beatings and kidnappings. In 361, a mob lynched a rival bishop who claimed his diocese. Even Cyril’s election in 412 was only achieved following a “tumult” in which his followers overawed a rival faction that had the support of the Roman military commander on the ground.25
The patriarchs could also count on still more fearsome supporters from beyond the city limits. At least by the third century, Christianity had penetrated deep into the Egyptian countryside, where followers used native Coptic rather than urban Greek. These rural believers provided recruits for the booming monastic movement that originated in Egypt and then spread throughout the Christian world, especially in Syria and Mesopotamia. Neither for the first time nor the last, Egypt acted as a primary incubator of change within the churches.
Egypt’s emerging native Christianity was a profoundly impressive phenomenon. Its most famous product was the pioneering monk St. Antony, who died at an advanced age in 356 and whose biography—written by Athanasius—served as wonderful publicity for Egyptian faith around the Christian world. Antony, incidentally, seems to have thought and worked entirely in Coptic. His spiritual successor was the awe-inspiring Aba Shenoute, who died in 466, allegedly at the age of 118. He led the White Monastery, a huge community several thousand strong, which included many nuns in addition to the male monks. Like other smaller settlements, his monastery became the center of life for neighboring lay communities. Ordinary Christians turned to the monks for spiritual sustenance, but also for social services, education, and disaster relief. Shenoute’s vast body of writings and correspondence made him one of the very greatest figures of Coptic literature and faith. He made Coptic the basis of a proud new Christian tradition that defined itself aggressively against a Greek language that was tainted by paganism and, increasingly, heresy.26 When all other resources failed them, the Alexandrian patriarchs could rely on the passionate faith of these native Christians.
Monks were, in theory, monachoi, solitaries, utterly detached from the world, but many became passionately engaged in worldly politics in the defense of orthodoxy. The most militant and active were those of the Nitrian Desert, the venerated Holy Desert that contained hundreds of houses and where Cyril himself had studied for several years. Egypt’s monks served as a reliable clerical army. Most obviously political were the parabolani, a brotherhood sworn to perform charitable tasks such as the burial of the dead, and who enjoyed clerical privileges. By the fifth century, though, they served as a personal bodyguard for the bishops. In 416, an imperial law tried to fix their numbers at five hundred, but the patriarchs recruited these enforcers as they thought they needed them. Monks supported the powerful political machine that was the Egyptian church.27
The Egyptian church had an uneasy relationship with civil authority, if and when that authority ran contrary to enforcing what was seen as God’s will. In constantly stressing the superiority of church power, the patriarchate was staking out a theocratic position. This tension became obvious in about 414–15 in a series of events that reveals much about the radical political aspirations of the church less than a century after the empire granted toleration to Christians. The affair also foreshadowed many of the wider church confrontations at the great councils.28
At this time, Cyril was the new patriarch of Alexandria. His main opponent was Orestes, the Roman prefect, a Christian, but one who still held traditional Roman notions about religious or ethnic diversity. According to this view, religious practices should generally be tolerated provided that their followers acknowledged imperial power, obeyed the law, and paid taxes. Toleration did not apply when groups became seditious or flouted the law, and in such cases Roman vengeance could be frightful. Until that point, though, it really was no business of Roman power to pick and choose between rival schools of thought. Cyril, in contrast, wished to destroy rival faiths and competing currents within Christianity, by force if necessary. Orestes was nervous about the growth of church power at the expense of imperial jurisdiction and had personal reasons for concern. He knew that Cyril had set spies to watch him, to note any slip from orthodoxy, or to find anything that could damage his reputation.29
The crisis began when Orestes issued regulations for the popular dances and theatrical shows held by Alexandria’s large and old-established Jewish community. Jews protested the agitation of one Christian activist, “a very enthusiastic listener of bishop Cyril’s sermons,” and Roman authorities agreed that this troublemaker deserved silencing, and indeed torture. Orestes was sending a clear signal to Cyril about the bounds of this authority, but the attempt backfired. As relations between the patriarch and the Jews deteriorated, mob violence ensued. Cyril led “an immense crowd” to raid the synagogues, to rob and expel the Jews whose roots in the city dated back some seven hundred years. Although Orestes complained directly to the emperor, he could not reverse a patriarchal coup against civil authority.30
Several hundred Nitrian monks now stormed into the city. They denounced Orestes as a pagan idolater persecuting their beloved patriarch. As Orestes’s military guard fled, the monks stoned and wounded the prefect in an outrageous act of rebellion that in other times and places would have persuaded a Roman emperor to sack an entire city. Orestes ordered the ringleader to be tortured to death, but once again, Cyril was not intimidated. Instead, he ordered the executed monk recognized as a martyr for the church, canonizing him on the spot—to the disapproval of mainstream Christians who otherwise supported their spiritual father.31
The conflict now claimed another victim. This was the woman philosopher Hypatia, a venerated thinker and teacher, who now suffered because of her alleged friendship with Orestes. (The recent film Agora makes Hypatia as glamorous as she is brilliant.) Taken in the streets by a Christian mob, she was dragged to a church where she was mutilated and dismembered and her remains burnt. While no direct evidence connects Cyril to her death, he had not tried to calm the mob fury that was its immediate cause. And criticisms of Cyril’s conduct do not just arise from modern hindsight, which fails to take account of the different standards prevailing in the distant past. In the words of a near contemporary critic of the patriarch’s conduct, “surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than allowing massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.”32
By Cyril’s time, then, Alexandria’s patriarchs looked to a tradition that was royal in its aspirations, and near absolutist in its willingness to overwhelm opposition. Cyril presided over an impressive Egyptian hierarchy of a full hundred bishops, organized under ten metropolitans. The patriarchs even had an imperial role, as their ecclesiastical power extended deep into Africa, into the kingdoms of Ethiopia and Nubia, and Alexandria largely determined the beliefs and practices of these churches. This southward reach stretched much farther than that of any earlier pharaoh. This issue, incidentally, contributed still further to rivalries with Constantinople. While Alexandria naturally dreamed of an African empire, the imperial capital now claimed jurisdiction over all churches established beyond the frontie
rs.33
Looking at the church of Alexandria around this time, a modern observer is bound to ask whether the fervor inspired by Athanasius or Cyril was in some sense nationalistic, whether the monks and mobs were fighting for a concept of Egyptianness, and against Roman conformity. Certainly, Cyril and his followers were keenly aware of the dignity of their city and region, and Egypt’s historic role in defending orthodoxy. At the same time, terms like nationalism would be anachronistic when applied to this early era, and there really is no evidence of secessionist feeling. Rather, the patriarchs saw themselves as effective rulers of Egypt within the context of a Christian empire, and their goal was not to leave the empire, an idea that was as unnecessary as it was bizarre. Instead, they wanted to use their homeland as a secure base from which they could spread the historic truth of Egypt throughout the Christian world. And the experience of Nicea above all had shown how useful church councils could be in this process. Athanasius had largely established Nicene orthodoxy throughout the empire, despite serious opposition from within the imperial family itself.
Constantinople and Antioch
Alexandrian ambitions faced two obstacles, which proved to be closely linked. One was the see of Antioch, with its rich apostolic traditions. It was here that the word Christian was first applied in apostolic times, probably as a dismissive term or insult within the Jewish community. The city also claimed St. Peter as its first bishop, before the fisherman had traveled to some strange city in the far west. In later centuries, Antioch earned more fame as the home of the martyr Ignatius, while its bishopric was one of the handful of leading patriarchal sees that held the highest places of honor within the church. Adding to its political pull within the Christian empire, Antioch dominated the rich land of Syria. Just as the Egyptian church looked south into Africa, so Antioch influenced the Syriac-speaking worlds of the Near East, reaching into Mesopotamia and beyond. Antioch was in its way quite as imperial as Alexandria.34
Culturally, Antioch was at least a match for Alexandria, however much the ideas the city produced disturbed or repelled the Egyptians. It was natural for emperors to look to Antioch’s alumni for the monks and scholars who would fill the episcopal sees, and especially that of Constantinople. Antioch’s weak point lay in its theology. If Alexandrians could portray Antioch as heretical, as less than totally devoted to the divinity and glory of Christ, that gave an opening for subversion. An Antioch-trained bishop in Constantinople would stand in real peril.
Constantinople itself suffered all the blessings and curses of direct imperial patronage. The see would not have existed if not for the imperial presence and certainly would not have held a rank second only to Rome. As the choice of a bishop was such a politically sensitive matter, emperors and leading courtiers played a key role in the selection, so that bishops should in theory have begun their tenure with the intimate support of the most powerful figures in the empire. These same lay people also had a powerful vested interest in developing the city’s Christian credentials, beautifying its churches, and stocking them with dazzling collections of relics. They worked to build up Constantinople as the special holy city of an empire under the protection of the Virgin Mary. And unlike the other great sees, this city was a purely Christian creation, with no need to purge the sins of a pagan past. The holier the city, the greater the prestige of its bishop.35
But having said that, leading the church in Constantinople did pose special dangers, as external forces found it easy to build and exploit factions within the imperial family and court. Through most of the fifth century, Alexandrian patriarchs ran a substantial and effective network for lobbying and intelligence-gathering in Constantinople. They backed up their efforts with gift-giving and bribery undertaken on an epic scale, a lavish generosity that suggests the vast wealth that Egypt could still produce. This Alexandrian manipulation shaped imperial religious politics.
By the fifth century, too, Constantinople was a sprawling, turbulent center with a strong history of riot and civil disorder. As many emperors found, controlling distant frontiers was not much use if they lost control of the streets within a mile of the palace. The centrality of religious issues in politics also meant that the bishops were likely targets of mob action. Constantinople had many prestigious monasteries, which the Alexandrians targeted for their diplomatic efforts. These monks easily became militant activists and potentially the dangerous leaders of a restive crowd. An unpopular bishop could rapidly find himself in a position that would make even a sympathetic emperor reluctant to defend him.36
The Fall of John Chrysostom
Long before the christological battles of Ephesus and Chalcedon, this interchurch rivalry brought down one patriarch in an affair that closely foreshadows later events. The main figure in this drama was John Chrysostom, one of the greatest saints of Christian antiquity and a legendary preacher: his name signifies “Golden Mouth.” At every stage, his career exemplified the glories of Antioch. He was born in Antioch, and he studied under its last great pagan teachers, where his fellow pupils included Theodore of Mopsuestia. He was an early pupil of the new Christian school led by Diodore of Tarsus. Antioch was, naturally, where he was ordained a priest. In 398, against his better judgment, he agreed to become archbishop of Constantinople.37
Within five years, his career was in ruins, due to the machinations of Alexandria’s patriarch Theophilus. Theophilus was engaged in a typical controversy with some dissident Egyptian monks, and he responded with the standard operating procedures of an Alexandrian patriarch, namely organizing a heavily armed force to destroy the monks’ dwellings and maltreat their sympathizers. When the monks protested the persecution, the bishop was summoned to Constantinople to explain himself. But Theophilus turned the tables on his accusers, presenting both the exiled monks and John Chrysostom himself as fellow supporters of a notorious heresy based on the works of Origen. Theophilus also found a key ally in court, in the empress Aelia Eudoxia. Whatever she thought about the theological issues, she had come to loathe Chrysostom personally. She took personally his puritanical denunciations of excessive feminine luxury and vanity. Also at issue were the rituals that the Christian empire devised to celebrate the regime, which seemed to borrow from older pagan rituals. John expressed his horror when a statue of Eudoxia was dedicated with public festivities.38
With such powerful foes, Chrysostom’s fall could not be long delayed. In 402, Theophilus arrived in Constantinople backed by an impressive phalanx of twenty-nine of his suffragan bishops—and reinforced by Alexandria’s legendary capacity to dole out bribes. This show of force helped him assert his position against John, who was duly deposed at a provincial synod, the Synod of the Oak (403). In fact, John’s abasement did not last long. The urban crowd admired him, while an earthquake convinced some of his enemies that they were struggling against a man beloved of God. Also foreshadowing later events, John Chrysostom found a powerful friend in the Roman pope, Innocent, who tried to call a council to restore the ousted patriarch. John himself maintained his resistance, comparing the empress to Herodias, the evil inciter of the death of John the Baptist. Chrysostom was briefly restored, but was once more deposed shortly afterward and died en route to exile in 407.39
Every aspect of this affair reappeared in some forms in the later councils, which were notionally so concerned with issues of Christology rather than church order. In later years, too, the patriarchs of Alexandria would play the role of ecclesiastical vigilantes, dabbling mercilessly in the affairs of other dioceses. Then, too, they would back up their authority by the massed presence of allied bishops, reinforced by extravagant bribes and gift giving. Theophilus’s secretary on this occasion was Cyril, the later patriarch, who learned much about the art of politics in church and state.
By the 420s, then, Cyril’s experiences had taught him some basic lessons about achieving policy goals. He had learned about the judicious use of violence, real or threatened; about the need to win favor at court; and about how councils and synods could be expl
oited to produce desired results. But if he learned one thing above all, it was that few problems or conflicts were so stubborn that they could not be resolved by enough bludgeoning and buffaloing.
But all the patriarchs always had to bear in mind one critical fact: however independent they might appear, however much they ruled as petty kings—often not-so-petty—they still, in fact, operated within a still-flourishing empire that had more than enough power to stop them in their tracks. If and when they forgot this fact, they could steer their patriarchates on the road to ruin. Throughout the fifth century, the outcome of church debates depended absolutely on gaining the favor of the imperial family—and especially the royal women.
4
Queens, Generals, and Emperors
That new heresies have not prevailed in our times, we shall find to be due especially to Pulcheria.
Sozomen
If patriarchs acted like kings, then emperors behaved like popes. Through all the christological debates, the empire acted as a force within the church, far more than merely an honest broker seeing fair play between contesting sides. Church leaders struggled to win the favor of courtiers or members of the imperial family, but many princes and empresses needed no encouragement to participate. The government was absolutely involved in church debates at all stages.1