Not long after, Pope Leo would make his condemnation even more brusque. Eutyches’s followers were in practice allied with Manicheans in denying the Incarnation: like them, they “maintain that all His bodily actions were the actions of a false apparition.” Leo would make this allegation again in other forms. Eutyches, he wrote, “crosses over into the mad view of Mani and Marcion, and believes that the man Jesus Christ, the mediator between God and men, did all things in an unreal way, and had not a human body, but that a phantom-like apparition presented itself to the beholders’ eyes.” Eutyches was reviving heresies that should have died out a century or more before.36
Leo’s Tome found one interesting reviewer at the time of its publication. Nestorius, the exiled heretic, wrote that “when I found and read this account, I gave thanks to God that the Church of Rome was confessing correctly and without fault, although they were otherwise disposed towards me myself.” Although Nestorianism was still listed as an awful heresy, most of what Nestorius actually believed now stood an excellent chance of being publicly reaffirmed.37
Gangsters
The Second Council of Ephesus met in August 449, again in sultry weather that did nothing to reduce tensions. Today, temperatures in that region would certainly be in the nineties at that time of year, and air conditioning was fifteen hundred years away. Present were 127 bishops, a much lower number than at Nicea (notionally 318) or First Ephesus (some 250 in all). And again, they met in the Church of the Theotokos, so that the notion of Mother of God would never be too far removed from their minds.
Dioscuros presided, just as Cyril had in the first council, although on this occasion the papal legates could not offer any moderating force. The bishop scheduled to lead the Roman delegation had died, while the others spoke little Greek and were accordingly ignored. Although Rome had sent a personal legate, the council refused to seat him. Dioscuros, in contrast, was very much present together with his Egyptian phalanx, including ten powerful metropolitans. And this time, Alexandrians did not have to face the rival threat of a powerful secular armed force. Bishops old enough to remember Candidian’s interventionist role at First Ephesus probably thought longingly of the fairly peaceful debate he had managed to supervise. But this time, the emperor had no wish to intervene.38
When the council began on August 8, Dioscuros exercised his full powers as president to rig the event in his favor and that of Eutyches. The council in theory had one simple question before it, namely, whether the previous November gathering had justly deposed Eutyches for his refusal to admit Two Natures. But in practice that meant that bishops who had participated in the verdict were excluded, and that promptly removed Flavian and six other bishops from any anti-Alexandrian voting bloc. As Syrian bishops later recalled, “Flavian went in as if already condemned.”39 Moreover, the emperor had specifically forbidden Theodoret from attending, which kept Syria’s best theological mind out of the fray.
While Rome had no effective representative, Dioscuros was careful to include the archimandrite Barsaumas, a monk whose hostility to anything that sounded vaguely Nestorian was fanatical even by the standards of the time. But several things made Barsaumas a very unlikely participant, not least the question as to how good his Greek was: he did best in his native Syriac. The decision to admit him at Ephesus also broke precedent in admitting to such a council a monk who was not a bishop. But he was not invited because of either his eloquence or the charm of his personality. He was there primarily because of the armed strength he provided, and he had no compunction about using his militias. The bishops he targeted complained that he had “destroyed all Syria. He incited thousands of monks against us.” And although Dioscuros was responsible for his presence, it remained open to question whether the patriarch—or anyone—could actually control Barsaumas’s actions.40
With the outcome clearly determined, the council proceeded quickly to its decision. It read the documents relevant to the case, but Dioscuros carefully selected what was admitted to the proceedings. The Romans, naturally, wanted to read Leo’s Tome, the definitive Western statement on the issue, but this was refused. Dioscuros excluded the symbolic presence of Rome and of papal authority.
At least according to the council’s proceedings, the hearing then moved easily and logically—but a great deal of selective rewriting and bullying went into creating that record. Eutyches spoke, declaring his orthodoxy and his loyalty to the principles of Nicea and First Ephesus. He quickly won the support of an overwhelming majority, 114 bishops, and some of those who had originally condemned him now changed their minds. Vindicating Eutyches segued into a defense of his doctrines and a furious attack on anything that suggested the Two Natures, or the ideas of Nestorius (chants of “Burn Nestorius!” erupted from time to time). Once the council had officially proclaimed correct doctrine, then it followed that opponents of this belief must themselves be wrong and unfit to hold high office in the church.41
At that point, the campaign turned against Eutyches’s critics, Eusebius and Flavian. Dioscuros here arranged a skillful parliamentary maneuver. He first asked the council to confirm the canons of First Ephesus, which condemned anyone who brought in new teachings contrary to the Council of Nicea. Once this was established, Dioscuros asserted that Flavian and Eusebius had violated that rule and must be deposed. Dioscuros silenced the restive crowd, while “crying aloud in his unruliness: ‘Be silent awhile; let us hear also the other blasphemies. Why do we blame only Nestorius? There is many a Nestorius.’”42
Neither Flavian nor Eusebius was permitted to speak in his defense, and pro-Eutychians rigidly controlled the final record. When the bishops looked back at these events two years later, they repeatedly expressed surprise at what had been noted down. “During the reading, the most devout Oriental bishops and those with them exclaimed ‘We didn’t say this. Who said this?…Let [Dioscuros] bring in his notaries, for he expelled everyone else’s notaries and got his own to do the writing.’” Dioscuros and Juvenal denied the charge, until Stephen of Ephesus explained how his own followers had taken notes, “but the notaries of the most devout Bishop Dioscuros came and erased their tablets, and almost broke their fingers in the attempt to snatch their pens.”43 And that was the treatment received by the bishop of one of the church’s oldest and greatest sees. Overwhelming censorship of that sort explains just why the actual surviving record is such a neat affair, a story of simple adulation for the Dear Leader Dioscuros. If we go by the doctored record, the council swelled into messianic mood, with cries of “To Archbishop Dioscuros, the great guardian of the faith.” When the great man spoke, he was greeted with “These are the sayings of the Holy Spirit!…The fathers live through you. To the guardian of the faith!”44
Those exclamations give no idea of the gathering’s real fears and concerns. The move against Flavian was an arrogant and near-revolutionary act. Particularly after the insult to the Roman pope, Alexandrian high-handedness alarmed even those bishops who were prepared to go along with virtually anything Dioscuros wanted. The meeting degenerated into a riot, marked by mass intimidation. Seemingly, 101 bishops agreed to vote for Flavian’s deposition, but violence and threats persuaded another thirty or so to sign the final document. Probably, they signed a blank sheet of paper, the actual details to be filled in later. Looking back at the event, “the bishops of the Orient, Pontus, Asia and Thrace exclaimed ‘We signed blank sheets. We suffered blows and we signed…we were threatened with deposition. We were threatened with exile. Soldiers with clubs and swords stood by.’”45 Other bishops describe being held in the church the whole of a long torrid day, not being allowed out for any reasons—reading between the lines, including for toilet visits.46 But even after they had signed, the bishops remained unconvinced. Some went on their knees to beg for mercy toward Flavian.
Now, it should be said that when the bishops in question described the atrocities to which they had been subjected, they were struggling to explain votes that seemed hard to justify in the light of subsequent polit
ical changes. They had good motives for exaggerating the degree of intimidation at Second Ephesus, and similar behavior manifested itself at other, more reputable councils. But the accumulated evidence of bullying in 449 was unusual and pervasive. We hear of one bishop, Atticus, who had signed the condemnation of Eutyches at Constantinople. Now he faced a ferocious cross-examination, in which Dioscuros treated him like a naughty child. The conversation proceeded in a tone of “Have you stopped beating your wife?” or rather “Have you now abandoned that frightful heresy you used to hold?” Ultimately, a browbeaten Atticus was led to go along with what Dioscuros suggested, denying his earlier signature and allowing the assault on Flavian to continue. What Nestorius terms “the wickedness and the wiles of the Egyptians” triumphed.47
At this point, someone also launched a direct physical attack on Flavian himself. Different sources suggest that Dioscuros and Barsaumas themselves were responsible, and either version is quite possible, but in the melee it could equally well have been someone from the Alexandrian retinue or Barsaumas’s monks. Later witnesses reported hearing Barsaumas utter the words “Slaughter him!”48 Worse maltreatment followed. Once Flavian was deposed,
he was carried off as if by bears and by lions by the counts…. And he was isolated and perturbed by all of them, and his spirit was vexed. And they delivered him up to the soldiers and commanded them to lead him away and remove him from the holy places. They led him away and incarcerated him, a man who was fainting, in prison. And before he came to himself and was revived, and was breathing fresh and pure air, and taking nourishment that strength might be a little restored in him, they delivered him up to the officer and threatened to send the man away, bruised. And he was unable to endure the hardship of the journey.49
Flavian died three days later. Orthodox churches list him as a martyr as well as saint.
As that day’s session would up in chaos, the pope’s legate Hilarius managed to yell the single word Contradicitur, objecting to the sentence against Flavian in the name of Rome.50 At the time, though, the gesture seemed desperate, not least because he said the dread word in Latin, a language that virtually no other participant understood. It was almost as if he had spoken at the meeting of a modern-day U.S. denomination. A few erudite participants would know what he meant, but otherwise he would meet only baffled stares. Yet the move had important legal consequences. Although precedent held that the pope had to have some representation in order for any council to be truly universal (ecumenical), Dioscuros now decided to dispense with even that show of legality. Immediately after his brave intervention, Hilarius fled in disguise.
The Eastern Front
Although the council would seem to have accomplished more than enough damage, they went on to enact more decisions in their second session, on August 22. The council deposed several other key Eastern bishops in what was intended as a clean sweep of anyone who had failed to be sufficiently outspoken against Nestorius. These included Domnus of Antioch himself, as well as Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Ibas of Edessa, and Irenaeus of Tyre. And then the council went on to start deposing the friends and relatives of Irenaeus and other enemies on charges that included magic, heresy, bigamy, and everything a fevered mind could produce on a sultry Mediterranean afternoon. The council reaffirmed Cyril’s Twelve Anathemas, condemning in the most demanding terms any backsliding toward the idea of Two Natures. New men were appointed to enforce the new Alexandrian order. At Constantinople itself, Flavian’s successor, Anatolius, would not have held office had he not been acceptable to Dioscuros and Eutyches. He was himself an Alexandrian by birth, and he had served Dioscuros as apocrisarius or envoy to the court. Anatolius then (illegally) ordained one of the Constantinople clergy as bishop of Antioch.51
As well as attacking Constantinople, the council struck at the see of Dorylaeum, so that Eusebius was deposed and imprisoned. He managed to escape and found his way to Rome, where he joined the swelling anticouncil faction surrounding Leo. Besides Dorylaeum, the council had now acted against Antioch and Edessa, Tyre and Harran, Byblus and Tella—this was beginning to sound like a gazetteer of historic churches and cities of the Roman East. The diocese of Cyrrhus alone included eight hundred parishes. Then, Dioscuros—or rather, the council through which he acted—circulated a statement of the council’s decisions to the Eastern churches, demanding that they sign on pain of becoming the next targets. The main exception to the Eastern purge was Juvenal of Jerusalem, who supported Dioscuros and would venture more or less anything to see his beloved city raised to patriarchal rank. Second Ephesus granted him this, as well as allowing him to carve territory out of Antioch’s jurisdiction for himself.52
The attempted sweep of Eastern bishops was not as rash as it might appear. Most of the Eastern sees had strong One Nature factions, which would over the next half century or so come to dominate those regions, even in Antioch itself. Dioscuros had plenty of allies who could provide a foundation for later growth. The problem was the means by which he and his allies were proceeding, which trampled rules of procedure and fairness.
Although modern Americans sometimes apply the word McCarthyism to relatively minor acts of political maltreatment, it is difficult to think of an alternative here. At Second Ephesus, bishops’ names were cited on the grounds that they were friendly with bishop X, who had just been deposed and must therefore be deposed, in their turn, without even knowing that they were being accused. As Theodoret complained to Leo,
Me, too, [Dioscuros] murdered with his pen in my absence, without calling me to judgment, without passing judgment on me in person, without questioning me on what I hold about the Incarnation of our God and Savior. But even with murderers, tomb-breakers, and ravishers of other men’s beds, those who sit in judgment do not condemn until they either themselves corroborate the accusations by their confessions, or are clearly convicted by others. But us, when thirty-five days’ journey distant, he, though brought up on Divine laws, has condemned at his will.53
The case against Ibas illustrates the amazing fury of this event and how far its mood had degenerated into what a modern audience thinks of as the spirit of the Inquisition or the witch hunts. In several theological controversies over the previous year, Ibas had been accused of various misdeeds, mainly financial in character, although his alleged Nestorianism also featured. Domnus acquitted him. His enemies then demanded that the emperor grant a new trial, which again went in his favor.54 The new council at Ephesus therefore became a kind of triple jeopardy. As the report was read, the episcopal mob responded with well-drilled rage. At one point, responding to the reading of a letter by Ibas, bishops protested variously, “These things pollute our ears…Cyril is immortal…Let Ibas be burnt in the midst of the city of Antioch…Exile is of no use. Nestorius and Ibas should be burnt together!” Somewhere in the previous decade or so, the idea of burning heretics had entered the commonplaces of ordinary discourse.55
After such a stormy month, Dioscuros really had only one bridge left to burn, which he did as he and his Egyptian clergy made their royal progress to Constantinople in 451. Stopping at Nicea, a place rich with symbolic associations, he joined his Egyptian metropolitans in judging and excommunicating Pope Leo.
Leo himself was appalled by the events, all the more since they were so unexpected. In the lead-up to the council, his main recommendation to Flavian had been to exercise mercy when—not if—Eutyches saw the error of his ways and repented. Now, the new arch-heretic had overcome his enemies, backed by the full weight of the empire. And the means by which this was all accomplished stunned a Roman with any sense of decent order. Leo now heard the full testimony of his envoy who “[escaped] the violence of the bishop of Alexandria who claims everything for himself.” At Eutyches’s demand, many had been forced to sign an unrigh teous document, “knowing they would suffer harm unless they obeyed his commands,…that in attacking one man, he might wreak his fury on the whole Church.” The papal delegates would never have agreed to what was proposed, “since the whole mystery
of the Christian Faith is absolutely destroyed…unless this abominable wickedness, which exceeds all former blasphemies, be abolished.”56
Leo duly denounced the Latrocinium, the synod of robbers or thugs. His response would have been even more forceful had he known that Flavian was actually dead, a horror that did not reach the West for some months afterward. He would summarize these evils in a letter to Pulcheria. This was a meeting
not of judges but of robbers, at Ephesus; where the chief men of the synod spared neither those brethren who opposed them nor those who assented to them, seeing that for the breaking down of the Catholic faith and the strengthening of execrable heresy, they stripped some of their rightful rank and tainted others with complicity in guilt.57
In Leo’s eyes, Dioscuros’s followers were actually more cruel to those they forced over to their side than to those they beat and persecuted. At least when they attacked Flavian and Eusebius, these victims gained the glory of having suffered for the faith. Much sadder was the situation of those who compromised the faith through intimidation or bribery, who had been “divorced from innocence.”58
Leo urged Theodosius to hold a new council safely far removed from all the plotting and conniving. Let it take place in Italy, where such violence can be avoided. All the Eastern bishops could come there, so that they could be duly reconciled to the church if possible and cast out if not. He followed up with a separate appeal to the imperial women, Pulcheria and Galla Placidia.59
By the end of 449, One Nature believers had carried off an astonishing putsch that potentially transformed the whole Christian world. Not only had the council proclaimed their ideas as the absolute foundation of correct belief, but the movement had removed from office anyone who threatened its supremacy. One Nature adherents now sat as bishops in Antioch and Constantinople. Eutyches was vindicated, Dioscuros ruled supreme, and Pope Leo was left to organize a desperate rearguard action, holding on against a potential Monophysite challenge in Rome itself. It was not far-fetched to imagine Rome as the last refuge of an embattled minority, in a Monophysite-dominated Christian world, in which the seat of power within the church had shifted definitively to Alexandria. However much such a radical reorientation might appall the churches of Italy or Syria, little could be done to stop it as long as the emperor reigned and as long as the Monophysite faction dominated his court.
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