Jesus Wars

by John Philip Jenkins

  Many in Egypt and the Near East viewed Chalcedon with quite as much disgust as the Catholic/Orthodox saw the Gangster Synod of Ephesus. The resentment detonated a civil war within many churches, as lower clergy, and particularly monasteries, rebelled against compliant bishops. The Life of St. Peter the Iberian summarizes these reactions:

  It was then that the apostasy of all those schismatic bishops, sanctioned by the godless Tome of Pope Leo, and attended by the adoption of the scandalous doctrine of Nestorius, resulted in Dioscorus, chief of the bishops of Egypt and a zealous fighter for truth, being driven into banishment; while Juvenal, who bore the tide of bishop of Jerusalem, signed the act of apostasy, and thereby assumed the role of the traitor Judas.40

  Some of the monks who had been at Chalcedon returned to Palestine and Egypt determined to stir up trouble. Juvenal might have made his peace with the regime, but when he traveled to Constantinople, opponents staged a coup in his Jerusalem diocese, appointing one Theodosius as rival bishop. Hard-line anti-Chalcedonians like Peter the Iberian served other Palestinian sees. Alarmed at the emerging schism, Marcian urgently sent Juvenal back to restore order.41 Or as Peter’s biographer interpreted matters, the problem could be traced back to Satan, “that prince of renegades and arch-counselor of apostates,” who could not bear to see the church making such progress.

  Accordingly he entered into the monarch who now held the reins of government, the Emperor Marcian, who readily listened to the devil’s commands, and he incited him to issue a decree deposing the righ teous bishops who had been appointed throughout the towns of Palestine by the apostolic patriarch Theodosius. In case of resistance, they were to be forcibly expelled from their sees and killed, while the patriarch Theodosius was condemned to death.42

  Marcian—or Satan, as we choose to read it—succeeded in keeping control, but at a huge cost to public order.

  Alexandria Burns

  Chalcedon had its worst effects in Egypt, where Dioscuros’s fall disrupted the near-pharaonic regime painstakingly constructed over the previous 150 years. Not just in titular precedence, Constantinople now established itself as the second patriarchate, taking the lead over Alexandria, and that dominance grew ever more apparent over the coming decades.

  Alexandria itself plunged into political and religious turmoil. Even a simple list of the patriarchs suggests the acute contrast to the long stability of the previous era, when incumbents held their posts securely for decades, able to avoid any and all challenges. From then until the end of the century, the story of Alexandria’s patriarchate was a lengthy series of depositions and insurgencies, exiles and reinstatements. The only constant was the fundamental battle between the Chalcedonian views of the empire and its agents, and the One Nature faith of the mass of Egyptians.

  The growing crisis is recounted in The History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, compiled by the Coptic Church. According to this official record, the “holy patriarch” Cyril was followed by Dioscorus who

  endured severe persecution for the orthodox faith at the hands of the prince Marcian and his wife; and they banished him from his see, through the partial action of the council of Chalcedon, and their subservience to the will of the prince and his wife. It is for this reason that the members of that council and all the followers of their corrupt creed are called Melkites, because they follow the opinion of the prince and his wife, in proclaiming and renewing the doctrine of Nestorius.43

  Dioscuros died in exile in Paphlagonia (Asia Minor) in 454, but his sympathizers—the Coptic or Egyptian party—never lost hope. Several Egyptian bishops had gone over to the imperial side at Chalcedon, and they now tried to elect a Chalcedonian patriarch, one Proterius. But the imperial loyalists represented only a minority, and the election was seen as an attempt to impose an unpopular outsider. The consequence was “a very great and intolerable tumult” that exhibited Alexandria at its worst.44 One protest erupted from a demonstration at the theater, as factions started shouting slogans: “‘Up with Dioscorus and the orthodox! Bum Proterius’ bones! Throw out the Judas!’ They demanded the return of the pious Dioscorus from his unjust exile, and the expulsion of the ravening wolf and anti-Christ Proterius, the new Caiaphas. Soldiers intervened, killing many in the crush.”45

  A visitor described the scene on another occasion, as Egyptians tried to defend the central tenets of Christian truth: “He saw the populace advancing in a mass against the magistrates: when the troops attempted to repress the tumult, they proceeded to assail them with stones, and put them to flight, and on their taking refuge in the old temple of Serapis, carried the place by assault, and committed them alive to the flames.”46 The emperor responded by sending two thousand soldiers, a major commitment at a time when they could have been put to much better use on the frontiers. But even this intervention only stirred new troubles, as the soldiers behaved as if they were in a conquered city, with unrestricted rights of rape against local women. The military ran a tightly repressive regime, restricting food supplies and denying access to the baths and public shows that were the basis of all social life. The state of siege eased after a while, but grievances remained.47

  From 454, the Copts maintained a separate patriarchate and a parallel hierarchy, choosing as their head the monk Timothy. He was a small-framed man known as Aelurus, which may mean “cat” but in this case probably suggests “weasel.” His roots were also firmly in the Alexandrian tradition, as he had been ordained by Cyril and had accompanied Dioscuros to Second Ephesus. But the Weasel was an extraordinarily powerful figure in his own right who exercised influence far beyond Egypt itself and who set the stage for the creation of the later independent Monophysite church. In different circumstances, he would certainly have been as famous as either of his predecessors in the wider Christian world.48

  When Marcian died in 457, Alexandrians rose against Proterius, as “the God-fearing populace breathed again, and gave thanks to our Redeemer Christ.” They found bishops to proclaim Timothy the Weasel as patriarch, and try as they might, the military could not keep order. Imperial forces stormed the church that was the headquarters of the opposition, where they “murdered many laymen, monks and nuns. Since the multitude could not endure this, they were inflamed with the zeal of martyrdom and daily resisted the soldiery with all the bloodshed of civil war.”49 This time the army could not save Proterius from receiving the divine gift of martyrdom:

  Some of the Alexandrians, at the instigation of Timothy…dispatched Proterius when he appeared, by thrusting a sword through his bowels, after he had fled for refuge to the holy baptistery. Suspending the body by a cord, they displayed it to the public in the quarter called Tetrapylum, jeering and shouting that the victim was Proterius; and, after dragging it through the whole city, committed it to the flames; not even refraining themselves from tasting his intestines, like beasts of prey.

  By another account, “they left him lying in the road like a pig or a dog, which he resembled in his manners and ferocity.”50

  Chalcedonians were shocked both by the time of the murder (Easter) and the place. Even barbarians and savages, they wrote, respected the baptistery. Although pagans might not understand the theology of baptism, they certainly recognized its spiritual power. The roots of the crime were not hard to find. “Of all these transactions Timothy was the guilty cause, and the skilful builder of the scheme of mischief.” Pope Leo never forgave Timothy for the murder. He compared him to Cain and called him a parricida, a father-murderer, who was sacrilegus or impius—in Roman thought, both terms of ultimate condemnation and eminently deserving the death penalty.51 Copts, of course, had a quite different memory of the matter and glorified the Weasel as a virtuous sufferer for the faith. According to one tale, a governor who maltreated him “was eaten of worms and died,” a phrase that recalls the death of King Herod. That was what happened to worldly lords who persecuted God’s apostles.52

  Just how far the Weasel was prepared to go remains open to debate, but in 458—the year
after Proterius’s murder—Anatolius of Constantinople died violently, probably assassinated by diehard supporters of Dioscuros and Timothy. Alexandrians loathed Anatolius as a native son who had betrayed his home church. Worse, Timothy himself had once described him as a “brother,” which need not be taken literally but suggests how close the relationship had been prior to a violent split. Anatolius had betrayed their common father, Dioscuros. Whether or not Timothy was actually responsible for the killing, he would not have condemned it. Alexandrian blood feuds recognized no geographical limits and knew no expiration dates.53

  The new emperor Leo deposed the Weasel, replacing him with another, orthodox Timothy, who held on to his office with interruptions until his death in 481. Yet the new Chalcedonian patriarch was always conscious of his tenuous position. His name Salofakiolos means something like Wobbly Cap, with the suggestion that just as a hat does not fit on somebody’s head, so he did not belong in that job. His weaselly Coptic rival, Timothy, was always waiting in the wings as “secret patriarch.”54

  Rome

  If the councils ruined the see of Mark, they hugely strengthened the successors of Peter. Few figures of late antiquity enjoyed a more active life than Leo, or one that touched great events at so many points. In October 451, he had secured an overwhelming political victory, but perhaps his greatest triumph was still to come. However terrifying Dioscuros or Eutyches might have been, neither was on a par with Attila, who threatened to pay his own visit to Rome. Shortly before Chalcedon, and unknown to the participants, Roman and allied forces had defeated Attila at the battle of the Catalaunian Fields, probably at modern Châlons in France. This battle was all the more historic because, for the first time in history, an overwhelmingly Christian force struggled against a pagan invader. Legend turned the battle into a precursor of the medieval Crusades, with the great general Aetius lauded as a warrior for Christian civilization. But Attila was not destroyed, and the following year he launched an invasion of Italy, still using the excuse of his marriage invitation from the princess Honoria.55

  At Marcian’s request, Leo joined a delegation to Attila to plead for the city. For whatever reason, Attila turned away, a withdrawal that has gone down in legend and art as the result of a miraculous intervention by heavenly powers, summoned by Leo: during the Renaissance, Raphael painted the scene to commemorate one of the greatest moments in papal history. Attila, reportedly, “was so impressed by the presence of the high priest that he ordered his army to give up warfare and, after he had promised peace, he departed beyond the Danube.” We need not believe in the saintly apparitions to be impressed by Leo’s courage, and his determination to defend his city and church, against overwhelming odds. Although he was not the only man in the delegation, history remembers Leo as the savior of the city.56

  Rome’s salvation lasted for exactly three years. Leo, unfortunately, never held the position of Western emperor, a job at which he would have excelled. The incumbent at that time was the worthless Valentinian III, whose regime survived only through the loyal service of generals like Aetius. However, Aetius had rivals at court, and the favorite Maximus persuaded the emperor that his faithful general was becoming dangerously popular. Accordingly, Valentinian personally stabbed Aetius to death. One courtier dared to rebuke him, with the words, “My lord, I don’t know what exactly made you do this, but I do know you have acted like a man who has used his left hand to cut off his right.”57

  That murder set off a sequence of events that deserves reporting if only because it gives an idea of the utter political chaos in Italy at this time, amongst which Leo stood out as such a beacon of sanity. Maximus himself killed Valentinian, taking his predecessor’s wife Eudoxia as his own (she was the daughter of the recent Eastern emperor Theodosius II). Maximus reigned as emperor for a couple of months, struggling to fight off other claimants before he was himself murdered. Meanwhile, Eudoxia took her own revenge by inviting Gaiseric to invade Italy, which he was happy to do. (The connection made some sense: Licinia Eudoxia’s daughter was betrothed to Gaiseric’s son). As before, disaffected empresses proved very useful to ambitious barbarians. Once again, Romans begged Leo to save their city, and he did his best to plead with Gaiseric. On this occasion, though, in 455 the best he could achieve was a kinder and gentler sack, in which churches and places of refuge were respected, while the barbarians concentrated on their primary task of carrying off everything of value that remained in the eternally vulnerable city. When, some years later, the Eastern emperor tried to punish Gaiseric by a massive naval/amphibious assault against Carthage, the Romans suffered one of the worst military disasters recorded in the ancient world.58

  Nestorius was quietly triumphant. Although he approved of most of Leo’s theological views, he could not forgive the failure to rehabilitate him together with Flavian and the other victims of Egyptian malice. Leo, he wrote, “has indeed held well to the faith but has agreed to the things which these have unjustly committed against me without examination and without judgment.” Nestorius, or a later editor, portrayed the second sack of Rome as God’s vengeance for this slight. He phrased his account in the form of a prophecy:

  Yet there will however be in the first place and at no longer distance of time a second coming of the barbarian against Rome itself, during which also Leo…will deliver up with his own hands the divine vessels of the sanctuary into the hands of the barbarians, and will see with his own eyes the daughters of the emperor who is reigning at that time led into captivity.59

  Yet Leo’s prestige did not suffer from this failure: two miracles in such a short time was too much to hope for. To the contrary, he continued to exercise authority—primacy—over the church throughout the surviving Roman world, up until his death in 461. He left a stunning heritage, in terms of the reputation of the Roman church, and a series of precedents that the papacy would cite over the next millennium to establish its supremacy over other churches. Nor were Roman claims likely to be any less ambitious under Leo’s successor, Hilarius, or to be expressed more timidly. This was the same man who had vainly tried to silence the anti-Flavian lynch mob at Second Ephesus and who had been forced to escape in disguise. Even through the worst humiliations and scandals of Dark Ages Rome, the memory of Leo and Hilarius survived to lay a solid foundation for the future papacy.

  Part 3

  A World to Lose

  No son of a Roman emperor will sit on the throne of his father, so long as the sect of the Chalcedonians bears sway in the world.

  Severus of Antioch

  8

  How the Church Lost Half the World

  If any one of them says that the council of Chalcedon is true, let him go; but drown in the sea those that say it is erroneous and false.

  Emperor Heraclius, c. 635

  In 653 the soldiers of Roman emperor Constans II stormed into Rome’s Lateran Palace. They arrested the current pope, Martin I, together with Maximus, one of the great Christian scholars and mystics of the age. Both men were carried off into exile and suffered the horrible abuses that the Romans inflicted on those who spoke or wrote against the emperor. Torturers cut off Maximus’s right hand and tore out his tongue. Martin died two years later in exile in the Crimea, Maximus a few years later in Georgia. On the strength of their heroic defense of Christian truth at the cost of their lives, the Orthodox/Catholic churches regard both men as martyrs: Pope Martin is a saint, Maximus a confessor.1

  The two men suffered because they opposed the emperor on one of the most critical and most divisive issues of his reign, the so-called Monothelete (One Will) position. Two hundred years after Chalcedon, two hundred years after Marcian had demanded an end to “profane wrangling,” the empire was no closer to a settlement.2 Church and court were grasping for some kind of solution that could conceivably satisfy both sides, the adherents of One Nature and Two Natures. In the 630s, a solution seemed at hand: whether Christ had one nature or two, he operated with one will. Surely that could provide some kind of basis of agreement, enough o
f a common ground to hold the loyalty of Egypt and Syria, Africa and the West? But it did not, as the imperial raid on the Lateran suggests. Martin and Maximus suffered because they held firm to Chalcedon.

  The imperial violence is not too surprising, but what is really remarkable is the late date, which points to the limitations of Chalcedon and its achievement. Long after 451, it was not obvious that the Chalcedonian regime was going to triumph. Over the next 150 years, there were some periods when blue orthodoxy reigned at court, but there were long spells—several decades at a stretch—when regimes either tolerated Monophysites or were actively sympathetic. The bishops and patriarchs they supported made every effort to spread and enforce their views. People learned hopeful lessons from recent history. Chalcedon itself had been a countercoup against Second Ephesus, so why should it not be reversed in its turn? By 510 or so, in fact, Chalcedon looked as if it was on its way to becoming a dead letter. Not until well into the sixth century did the Chalcedonian cause decisively gain the upper hand.3

  Even after Chalcedon achieved political victory, the same issues keep being debated over and over, endlessly erupting anew in new forms. Schisms between major regions and jurisdictions become normal and almost accepted, even between Rome and Constantinople. Depositions and purges were a regular fact of church life, while extreme violence and rioting split cities and provinces. And gradually, dissident jurisdictions took the once unthinkable step of establishing alternative parallel churches.4 Table 8.1 suggests a rough chronology of the ups and downs of the Chalcedonian order.