Theodosius I left a powerful inheritance for fifth-century church leaders, when they faced churchwide theological warfare. They recalled how mighty a threat Arianism had been before a great and determined emperor had joined the battle, and how successfully a few decades of persecution had reduced the Arians to insignificance—at least within the bounds of the empire. This offered an encouraging precedent for the extermination of the deviant creeds of their own day. And like Constantine before him, Theodosius had pursued his fight for orthodoxy by calling a great ecumenical council, at Constantinople in 381.41
Also during the 380s, the Christian church witnessed an ominous first, namely the official execution of a dissident heretical thinker. The protagonist was a bishop called Priscillian—another Spaniard—who formed a hyperascetic and puritanical sect that looked dubiously on marriage and the material world. He attracted the outrage of a warlord who had set himself as a rival emperor against Theodosius I and who wanted to prove himself a faithful son of Christian orthodoxy. Accordingly, the pretender had Priscillian beheaded. In this case, we can blame neither Theodosius I nor the church for the actual killing. The most visible and prestigious Western leaders of the time—including Pope Siricius, Ambrose of Milan, and St. Martin of Tours—all condemned both the trial and the execution. Nor, technically, was Priscillian punished for heretical belief, but rather for magic, a familiar criminal behavior in Roman law. But the precedent was set: the Christian state had killed a heretic. In terms of future religious debates, the ratchet had just turned several notches.42
In 390, clerical power grew alarmingly when Theodosius I made a remarkable submission to the church, of the kind that we associate more with the medieval heyday of papal power. The affair began when rebels in Thessalonica killed a Roman commander and, in the best imperial tradition, Theodosius replied by ordering his forces to sack the city. Appalled by the violence, Milan’s bishop Ambrose refused to grant the emperor admission to the church and its communion, calling on Theodosius to submit to God’s penance. The historian Theodoret then tells us that, “Educated as he had been in the sacred oracles, Theodosius knew clearly what belonged to priests and what to emperors. He therefore bowed to the rebuke of Ambrose, and retired sighing and weeping to the palace.” For centuries, faithful Christians recalled the story as a telling example of the secular state recognizing its proper place in the divine order, and artists presented the story in great paintings. Modern observers though—including many Christians—are as likely to be alarmed by the aggressive ecclesiastical usurpation of state power. After doing public penance, Theodosius was restored to the church. Soon afterward, he issued new restrictions on pagan rituals and approved the destruction of pagan temples, initially in the cities. The order to destroy rural temples went out a few years later.43
This rigid Theodosian inheritance survived into the new century. Besides the tough new measures against pagans and Jews, the scope of state action expanded to competing Christian communities, to schismatics as well as heretics. Schismatics were believers whose faith was broadly orthodox, but who were separated from the official church hierarchy by disagreements of various kinds. Such differences could be personal or factional, or might involve some specific point of doctrine. Schism was a common fact in church life, and reasonable church leaders knew that such breaks came and went. At various points in the fourth century, no less than four rivals contested the see of Antioch. While schismatics might temporarily be out of communion with other believers, normal relations would likely be restored at some future point.44
Increasingly, though, as the fifth century progressed, the fact of being out of communion with the mainstream church meant that a schismatic was not just a principled opponent but an active enemy of the true faith, deserving the sternest sanctions. Such for instance were the Novatians, an otherwise orthodox group who maintained a separate hierarchy. By the 430s, though, in Rome, Alexandria, and elsewhere, the orthodox seized the Novatians’ churches and forced them underground. Even being a Christian was no longer enough. One had to follow precisely the correct form of faith, as laid down by the church and the empire—assuming that any distinction could be drawn between those terms.45
Why Hate?
The religious world was becoming a much chillier place, but not entirely due to the hard-line ideas of the Theodosian family, or of individuals like Pulcheria. However important the imperial family might have been in driving religious politics, they could have had nothing like the impact they did unless their policies channeled powerful trends in popular belief and culture. In fact, some emperors found themselves trying not to encourage intolerance, but rather to moderate the persecuting whims of church leaders. Even without the Theodosian house in power, then, the empire’s rulers probably could have done little to limit the pressures toward greater church activism in political life, and to an ever greater hostility toward rival faiths and creeds.46
Theology goes a long way toward explaining the strength of feeling, and supplying a cosmic dimension to intra-Christian battles. According to the beliefs of the time, some issues were so critical that any deviation from them meant not just falling into error, but actively leaving the Christian sphere. When dissidents lapsed into errors that seemed pagan or Jewish, they thus entered the service of the devil, and surely a Christian society should not tolerate Satan’s wiles? The Old Testament contributed powerfully to deterring tolerance. Throughout those scriptures, prophets and priests repeatedly urge the duty to struggle constantly against false religion and to use the state to enforce true doctrine. A righ teous king was a king who suppressed error. The same texts offered dire warnings about what befell the overtolerant.
Despite the empire’s conversion, Christians had not lost their traditional sense of being engaged in warfare against the world. Even in the unprecedented atmosphere of political security, Christians were thoroughly used to expecting violent conflict and persecution, of seeing martyrs being faithful unto death. When the prefect Orestes opposed Alexandria’s Cyril—on excellent grounds, most would think—the monks naturally accused him of being a pagan persecutor, on the lines they knew very well from the past three or four centuries of experience. Why else would anyone go against a holy Christian bishop? The popular cult of martyrology reinforced this suspicion of the civil power.47
Christians also still lived in a world where paganism was an everyday reality, and perceptions of external danger and internal subversion always supply a formidable boost to religious intolerance. Ramsay MacMullen has suggested that by 400, “the entire Levant from the Euphrates south to Egypt was not much more than half converted.” Pagan survivals still abounded, in terms of evocative temples, and semiclandestine rituals. As late as 541, the emperor dispatched the famous cleric John of Ephesus to clean up paganism in western Asia Minor, an area that had first been exposed to Christianity in St. Paul’s time. But despite all the Christian efforts in the previous five hundred years, John still found seventy thousand pagans to convert.48
In 430 or so, then, many Christians would still have been first- or second-generation converts, and they dreaded any relapse to the old faiths. In such an environment, church leaders were still trying to determine the acceptable limits and boundaries of faith on a daily basis. There were constant struggles over how much of these older beliefs and practices could safely be imported into the churches. (As so often, debates in that fifth-century world closely foreshadow conditions prevailing in modern-day Africa). It was devastating to claim that some theological stance was not Christian at all, but a version of pagan or Jewish teaching being smuggled into the churches. Fifth-century theological debates regularly featured charges of pagan revivalism.
The largest single mental marker separating the premodern or medieval world from our own was the belief that earthly error had cosmic implications. For a modern audience, the obvious question is why a church could not have tolerated a wide variety of beliefs and doctrines, allowing different schools of thought to contend, so that ultimately the trut
h would prevail. This liberal doctrine, after all, had scriptural warrant in the book of Acts. The Jewish sage Gamaliel reportedly warned against persecuting Christians, on the grounds that if their ideas were false, they would fail, but if they were true, they should not be opposed. But once in power, the church had a rather different answer to the question of “What harm could it do?” If, as they believed, errors arose from sinful pride or diabolical subversion, then tolerating them attracted God’s anger, as expressed through different forms of worldly catastrophe: famine, drought, plague, floods, and earthquakes, or defeat in war. In the ancient world, it was not difficult to point to some event of this kind taking place somewhere, and in the fifth century, catastrophes erupted with a frequency guaranteed to give ammunition to the most moderate-minded preacher.
A regime that tolerated heresy, immorality, and error would suffer, and nobody could complain against this fulfillment of God’s essential justice. But suppressing these horrors meant prosperity and victory for the regime, and the people. As an imperial representative declared at Second Ephesus in 449, “The demon who is the originator of evil can never relax in his war against the holy churches. The most pious emperor always opposed his unrigh teous warfare, rightly realizing that he will have a defender for his empire if he himself takes up arms in the battles for religion.” Nestorius himself urged the emperor, “Give me, my prince, the earth purged of heretics, and I will give you heaven as a recompense. Help me destroy the heretics and I’ll help you conquer the Persians.”49 The other implication is obvious: tolerate the heretics, and God will give victory to the Persians, or the Huns. Being the great Christian empire was an enormous privilege, but it carried dire responsibilities.
Part 2
Councils of Chaos
My inclination is to avoid all assemblies of bishops, because I have never seen any council come to a good end, nor turn out to be a solution of evils. On the contrary, it usually increases them.
Gregory Nazianzus
5
Not the Mother of God?
Cyril presided: Cyril was accuser: Cyril was judge! Cyril was bishop of Rome! Cyril was everything.
Nestorius
The name of Nestorius has become attached to some of the most impressive chapters of Christian history. Through the Middle Ages, a great polyglot church carried out Christian missionary efforts across much of Asia, and historians recall this body as “Nestorian.” Many eastern Christians venerated Nestorius as a brilliant teacher who had suffered grave injustice at the hands of the Roman Empire. Even today, the Assyrian Church of the East—the direct descendant of the great Nestorian church—still uses a liturgy credited to that founder, the so-called Hallowing or Consecration of Nestorius. But Nestorius himself was both greater and lesser than his legend claims. He was not, in fact, a heresiarch, one who would split both the personality of Christ, and his church, and he undoubtedly was a victim of double-dealing and intrigue. At the same time, his own acts of rigidity and intolerance make it hard to portray him as a passive Christlike victim: he gave as well as received.1
The career of Nestorius is a perfect example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Knowing as we do the religious alignments of the time, it is hard to see how his story could have ended except in disaster. When he became archbishop of Constantinople in 428, he was in the position of a thief entering a bank vault in which any movement is bound to activate some kind of alarm, and the only question is which sensor will go off first and loudest. Nestorius held the teachings of Antioch, at a time when those ideas were bound to draw fire from the church of Alexandria. He was dubious about the cult of the Virgin Mary, when any attack on that devotion was guaranteed to infuriate the empress Pulcheria, not to mention angering many monks and ordinary believers. And he was doing all this in Constantinople, where only a generation before an empress had allied with Egyptians to evict an obstreperous Syrian bishop. The precedents were awful. All in all, his destruction seems like just a matter of time.
Less predictable, though, was the outcome in the longer term. What should have been a faction feud in Constantinople itself generated an escalating series of theological wars that ultimately consumed many of Nestorius’s enemies as well as his allies.2
Patriarch
Nestorius himself was a Syrian, born in the far south of what we would today call Turkey. He was an alumnus of the distinguished school of Theodore of Mopsuestia and became famous in his own right for his eloquent sermons. These roots in the Syrian church made him a friend of John, the new patriarch of Antioch. His move to Constantinople in 428 could only have been granted with the favor of the imperial family, and particularly of the first sister, Pulcheria.3
Nestorius was chosen as an outsider who could rise above the city’s bitterly divided church factions, but he disappointed any such hopes. From his earliest days, he laid out an aggressive policy agenda that called for the elimination of non-Christians and heretics, ideas that would have delighted his royal patrons. Just five days after his ordination, he was busily destroying an Arian chapel, inciting a riot and an outbreak of arson in the process. Within months, he was striking out generally at deviant Christians, against Novatians, Quartodecimans, Macedonians, any and all remnants of long-defeated heresies and schisms, as he ordered the seizure of churches and the suppression of services. While he believed that these blasphemous rivals needed silencing, he also had other motives. He was an alien intruder in a great city, where many of the clergy did not want him in the first place, and he could only assert his position by demonstrating strength.4
Crisis
The irony of this story is that Nestorius himself would soon find himself labeled an archheretic. The crisis stemmed from a controversy over the correct term of address for the Virgin Mary. On the one side, powerful forces in Constantinople favored the term Theotokos, God-Bearer or Mother of God, which had been in circulation for perhaps two hundred years but which now became a standard form of praise. Favoring this usage were Pulcheria herself and important church leaders like Basil and Hypatius, who were archimandrites—superior abbots ruling over several monasteries. Other supporters included some bishops close to Pulcheria, such as Eusebius of Dorylaeum, and Proclus of Cyzicus. Adding to the likelihood of conflict, Proclus had been one of the candidates for the archbishopric when Nestorius was chosen, and his disappointment rankled.5
The Marian language troubled Nestorius’s chaplain, a presbyter named Anastasius, and the other clergy that Nestorius had brought with him from Antioch. The logic behind Theotokos seemed perfect: if Jesus was indeed Christ, and Christ was God, then the Mother of Jesus was, in fact, the Mother of God. But that straight identification of the human Jesus with God seemed Apollinarian and ran flat contrary to Antiochene teachings.6 The critique of the Marian language must be seen as a direct sequel to Nestorius’s recent attacks on the leftover remnants of heresies. In this case, though, he was targeting a much more formidable enemy, namely the Apollinarian beliefs that were still so popular in Constantinople.
In a sermon preached in November 428, then, Anastasius cautioned, “Let no one call Mary Theotokos, for Mary was but a woman; and it is impossible that God should be born of a woman.” The remark caused a sensation. If Mary had not given birth to God, who or what had she borne? Was Anastasius really saying that the child born to Mary was human, but not really divine? Or Jesus was perhaps a mere human being who later became God? Another supporter now threatened “Anathema, if any call the holy Mary, Theotokos.” So horrible did this last warning seem that some listeners ran from the church, and many—especially monks and secular magnates—withdrew from communion.7
Nestorius now faced an impossible dilemma. Had he chosen, he could have publicly repudiated Anastasius and the others and avoided the theological firestorm, but that would immediately send an embarrassing message about his still-new regime and his choice of subordinates. Alternatively, he could justify Anastasius, with all the dangers that implied of himself being linked to heretical doctrine. And t
hat is what he decided to do, in a series of lectures that condemned any failure to distinguish between humanity and divinity. For Nestorius, Christ’s divine and human natures did not exist in total union (henosis), but rather formed a lesser union, a kind of conjunction (sunapheia). The two natures combined to form a common prosopon, a person, but in a much weaker sense than the hypostatic union that Cyril would advocate. Reporting to Pope Celestine in Rome, Nestorius complained that those who spoke of the Theotokos suffered from a grave theological sickness “akin to the putrid sore of Apollinarius and Arius. For they mingle the Lord’s union in man to a confusion of some sort of mixture.”8
Mother of God
In attacking the term Theotokos, Nestorius went to the heart of the Christian paradox. We today find the word less shocking than it properly is because memories of the Hail Mary prayer have made the words “Mother of God” so familiar in most Western languages. Pursued to its logical conclusion, though, Theotokos meant that the teenaged girl Mary, from a remote village on the fringes of the Mediterranean world, was the mother of the God who had created the world out of nothing, who made the sun and the stars, who had made his covenant with Abraham and Moses, who had appeared in fire and smoke on Sinai. The logical mind revolted.
So did the minds of many Christians who had grown up in a world dominated by images of the great and terrifying Mother Goddess who predated the gods, and who reigned with them, deities like Egypt’s Isis and the Cybele of Asia Minor. Must not the Mother of God be a Goddess in her own right, even a greater figure than her son? As Nestorius preached, “Has God a mother?” Then how can we blame pagans for inventing all those mothers for their gods? No, he insisted: “The creature did not bear the Creator, but she bore a man, the instrument of deity.”9
Jesus Wars Page 14