Monophysite power reached its height around 511–12, with aggressively anti-Chalcedonian leaders appointed to key offices—Timotheus to the patriarchate of Constantinople, Severus to Antioch. Egypt’s stubborn Copts now found that their views were becoming the church’s mainstream. Severus himself wrote to Alexandria’s patriarch, John, confirming that he, too, followed “the same faith of Pope Cyril and Pope Dioscorus.” Alexandrian church scholars believed that God had “raised up royalty and priesthood together for the Church, in the persons of the prince Anastasius, the pious believer, and the patriarch Severus, the Excellent, clothed with light, occupant of the see of Antioch, who became a horn of salvation to the orthodox Church.” In Antioch, crowds urged Severus to move further, to the outright condemnation of Chalcedon: “For a long time,” they urged, “we have wanted to partake of the holy mysteries. Set our city free from the council of Chalcedon! Anathematize now this council that has turned the world upside down! The cursed Tome of Leo…. Whoever will not do so is a wolf and not a shepherd.”27
Constantinople itself, though, was very difficult to control. When Anastasius tried to add the words “who was crucified for us” to the Thrice Holy, the move provoked a bloody riot in the capital, showing the popular support for Chalcedon. Leading the insurgents were the monks of the Akoimetai, the “unceasing” ones whose liturgies and prayers continued every day and night, without interruption. Not for the first time, protesters turned to a Theodosian woman for help, namely Anicia Juliana, a granddaughter of the Western emperor Valentinian III. Using the suicidally daring slogan “Another emperor for Rome!” anti-Monophysites tried to bring in her husband as the successor to Anastasius, but he wisely refused the offer. The repression that followed was unsurprisingly brutal, given the scale of the emergency and the narrowness of the regime’s escape. “Many perished under torture and many were thrown into the sea.”28
By 500 or so, the churches were in absolute doctrinal disarray, a state of chaos that might seem routine to a modern American denomination, but which in the context of the time seemed like satanic anarchy. This is the account of the church historian Evagrius:
the synod of Chalcedon was neither openly proclaimed in the most holy churches, nor yet was repudiated by all: but the bishops acted each according to his individual opinion. Thus, some very resolutely maintained what had been put forth by that synod, and would not yield to the extent of one word of its determinations, nor admit even the change of a single letter, but firmly declined all contact and communion with those who refused to admit the matters there set forth. Others, again, not only did not submit to the synod of Chalcedon and its determinations, but even anathematized both it and the Tome of Leo.29
Stern mutual acts of exclusion and excommunication divided the Christian world:
the Eastern bishops had no friendly intercourse with those of the West and Africa, nor the latter with those of the East. The evil too became still more monstrous, for neither did the presidents of the eastern churches allow communion among themselves, nor yet those who held the sees of Europe and Africa, much less with those of remote parts.30
Religious violence could break out seemingly at any time and place. To suggest the tone of conflict in this era, we might take a story from Syria. Around 512, Antioch’s patriarch, Flavian, came under heavy Monophysite pressure, which eventually forced Anastasius to depose and exile him. Decades later, some old eyewitnesses reported the horrors surrounding the conflict. One firebrand was the Monophysite bishop Philoxenus, an old disciple of Peter the Fuller. Philoxenus galvanized the monks from many miles around to storm Antioch. They “rushed into the city in a body with great noise and tumult, trying to compel Flavian to anathematize the synod of Chalcedon and the Tome of Leo.” But the invasion appalled the city’s people, whether out of loyalty to Flavian or simple disgust at these savage attackers. The citizens “made a great slaughter of [the monks], so that a very large number found a grave in the Orontes, where the waves performed their only funeral rites.” We don’t know what “a very large number” would mean in this context, but the phrase must at a minimum refer to some dozens of fatalities.31
Just as it seemed that nothing could save the settlement proclaimed at Chalcedon, once again, political accident came to the rescue. In 518, Anastasius died, to be succeeded as emperor by the illiterate general Justin. As Justin favored Chalcedon, the regime once again began its game of musical dioceses, purging bishops who refused to conform to the new order and appointing or restoring loyal Chalcedonians. Justin also ended the schism between Rome and Constantinople. Monophysites remembered him as Justin the Terrible.
Saving Chalcedon
At the time, the change of 518 looked like just another phase in a game that really need have no ending. It seemed quite plausible that Orthodox and Monophysite emperors might replace each other randomly through the centuries to come, and any religious believer who was temporarily out of sympathy with one regime knew that the best response was patience, to await the rise of a new, friendlier court. Only long after the event could it be seen that Justin’s accession marked the beginning of a long-reigning dynasty, one friendly to Chalcedon. From 518 through 602, this Justinianic dynasty ruled long enough—and asserted the principles of Chalcedon strongly enough—to create a sense of inevitable imperial support for that particular version of orthodoxy.
Also different in scale was the repression that the new regime was prepared to use to secure its position. Securing the armed forces was a vital first step, and soldiers had to agree to Chalcedon as a precondition of receiving rations. Then it was the church’s turn. Over fifty bishops were deposed or exiled in Syria and Asia Minor alone, including the holders of some of the greatest sees. In Syria, anti-Chalcedonians were persecuted in 519, 532, and 536, leaving an obvious sense that this pattern would recur. Monophysite writers noted grimly the appearance of a comet in 519, a cosmic harbinger that accurately foretold the dreadful events to come. God’s vengeance against the persecutors was still more explicit in the great Antioch earthquake of 526, which reputedly killed hundreds of thousands. Anyone who failed to read God’s anger in such tokens and wonders simply did not understand the principles of scientific observation.32
Paul the Jew, who succeeded Severus as patriarch of Antioch, was a notorious persecutor of Monophysites. One Nature believers “had to leave their monasteries, were robbed, captured, put in irons, locked up in prisons, brought before courts and subjected to various tortures.” They were forced to hide in the countryside, to take refuge on exposed hillsides and caves, always in danger of being hunted down.33 Other bishops were even more savage, acting in ways that foreshadowed the pogroms and heresy hunts of the High Middle Ages. In the great eastern city of Amida, the new bishop, Abraham, burned and crucified those who defied him, using his soldiers to force communion bread into the mouths of the reluctant. One priest who resisted even these efforts was remembered ever after under the heroic name of Cyrus the Spitter—although Cyrus himself was burned alive shortly afterward.34
The Great Schisms
In the face of these persecutions, Monophysites acknowledged a sense of permanent exclusion, and restructured accordingly. By the mid-sixth century, vast sections of the once-united Christian church had seceded from the Great Church allied to the empire. The Christian world was now a patchwork of rival churches, each regarding itself as the only authentic body of Christ.
The first grouping to achieve independent status was the Church of the East, commonly known as the Nestorian church, which refused to accept the decisions of First Ephesus. The Church of the East maintained its loyalty to Nestorius, who it regarded as a maligned Father of learning and holiness. As one later disciple commemorated Nestorius,
So you undertook the labor of a long voyage from the East to the West to give light to the souls that were plunged in the darkness of the Egyptian error, and intent on the smoke of the blasphemy of Apollinarius. Men, however, loved the darkness more than the light, since the eyes of their minds
were dimmed by personal prejudice.35
The church kept alive scholarly works that were suspect in the Roman Christian world.
What allowed the Nestorians so much freedom of action was that their most important centers were in the Eastern Syriac world, in eastern Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia. These regions were either wholly independent from imperial control or at worst only occasionally under Roman influence. As the old Antiochene theology fell under ever greater suspicion within the Roman world, scholars and theologians retreated further east, particularly to Edessa, where Ibas had founded a prestigious school. In 489, though, the emperor Zeno tried to destroy the movement as part of his attempt to win Monophysite sympathy. The school now relocated from Edessa to Nisibis in Mesopotamia, an ancient Christian center. Its followers were thus under the power of the Persian Empire, the rival superpower of the day, and by the late fifth century the movement enjoyed a fair degree of toleration. In 498, the church’s head was officially declared patriarch of Babylon, although his actual seat was at the Persian imperial capital of Seleucia/Ctesiphon. In the early seventh century, the great scholar and mystic Mar Babai was able to use this independence from Rome to undertake a systematic rethinking of Two Nature theology, while reorganizing church structures. Although scarcely known in the West, Babai the Great was intellectually on a par with any of the famous church fathers.36
Although they remained a minority within an empire that officially followed the Zoroastrian faith, this Persian context gave the church the potential for huge geographical expansion, with missions deep into Central Asia—into Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan. By the start of the seventh century, the Nestorians were pushing into China, and other missionaries followed sea routes to India and Sri Lanka.37
But the Nestorians were not the only church that evolved free from the power of Constantinople and Rome. Other open schisms followed, fulfilling the worst possible nightmares of the era of Ephesus and Chalcedon. Egypt was already operating in de facto independence, and the Western Syriac churches were not far behind, as Monophysite clergy appointed by Anastasius established lasting power bases. And although the long period of imperial sympathy for Monophysite thinking ended in 518, that theological school adapted to changed circumstances rather than simply fading away.38
By far the most important figure in the new movement was Severus, patriarch of Antioch from 512 to 518, who became the patron saint of the Monophysite cause. Historian W. H. C. Frend reasonably calls him “one of the great figures of the religious history of the eastern Mediterranean,” which is quite a claim when we think of the people he is being compared with. We may recall him for his absolute rejection of any and all worldly comforts, including beds, or any food that might please the palate. Severus’s career illustrates not just the extraordinary dedication of the Monophysite cause, but also the creation of whole alternative structures. Born in Pisidia, in Asia Minor, he become a monk near Gaza, in the heart of the territory dominated by Peter the Iberian. Severus joined a house founded and run by the most rigid followers of Eutyches and One Nature belief.39 So extreme was Severus that he rejected the Henoticon and denounced Alexandria’s Peter Mongus for accepting it. Bloodshed generally followed in Severus’s wake, initially at Alexandria, where he stirred violence between Orthodox and Monophysites, and then similar events followed at Constantinople. As patriarch of Antioch, he systematically persuaded or forced his inferior clergy to follow his line. Severus created another precedent in his policy of strictness (akribeia), which meant prohibiting his followers from taking communion at the hands of Chalcedonian clergy.40
When Justin took power in 518, Severus fled Antioch rather than face arrest and worse: Justin ordered his tongue cut out for sedition. Significantly, his followers continued to regard him as the legitimate patriarch until his death in about 538, creating yet another schism in a great jurisdiction. So influential was he that the empire decreed that anyone possessing Severus’s writings must burn them immediately, and those who did not would lose their right hands. In later years, Severus achieved a transnational position something like that of the pope among the Catholic churches. It is mainly due to him that by the 530s, the Monophysites in various lands and speaking different languages were beginning to act in concert. They were coming to look like an alternative global church.41
During the last years of Anastasius, Egypt, too, was becoming a liberated zone for One Nature dissidents, and it was the obvious place for Severus to seek exile. One watershed occurred in 516, when the Monophysite-leaning emperor appointed a like-minded patriarch of Alexandria—but the mob there still rejected him just on the grounds that he was the representative of the corrupt archontes, the rulers. In the context, the word refers to Roman imperial authorities, but there were precedents for reading it as the diabolical forces ruling the material world. Between the emperor and the devil, there did not seem to be too sharp a line drawn. The events of 516 amounted almost to an open declaration of independence by the Egyptian church, which adopted Monophysitism as a national religion.42
Justinian
In 527, Justin was succeeded by his nephew Justinian, who would rule for almost forty years. He began his reign anxious to soothe tensions between the pro-and anti-Chalcedonians and gave some favor to Monophysite clergy. From the mid-530s, though, he swung decisively toward the Chalcedonian side. Partly, this was because his great wars of reconquest were restoring Roman power over substantial areas of the old Western empire—Italy, North Africa, even southern Spain—so that the empire once again had to take account of Western sensibilities. Under pressure from the Roman pope, Justinian deposed the Monophysite-inclined patriarch of Constantinople, Anthimus. He followed up with a purge of the great sees “so that from that time forward, the synod at Chalcedon was openly proclaimed in all the churches; and no one dared to anathematize it; while those who dissented, were urged by innumerable methods to assent to it.”43
Justinian’s actions in Alexandria marked a historic break. Ever since Peter Mongus’s time, the patriarchate had been united in a single office controlled by Monophysites, ruling over pro-and anti-Chalcedonians. The last person to hold this united post was Theodosius, but Justinian deposed him in 536, and the patriarch spent decades imprisoned in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Coptic and Chalcedonian patriarchates would never again be unified, and the two churches would have different, competing successions.44
But Justinian’s position was rather more complicated than this account might suggest, and once again, court women played a pivotal role. If Justinian was committed to defending Chalcedon, his queen, Theodora, was just as sympathetic to the Monophysite cause. This split mattered so much because Theodora was such an extraordinarily powerful figure in her own right, virtually a coemperor. Personally brilliant, she was a very influential figure at court and a wonderful asset for dissident church leaders.
So balanced between the two positions was Justinian’s court—so much was it, so to speak, a union between two distinct persons and two natures—that we might ask whether this division was a matter of accident or policy. Perhaps Theodora was just a strong figure in her own right, who refused to be cowed by her husband, but conceivably, the two agreed to maintain their differences for political reasons. While Justinian ruled as the most orthodox emperor, attracting the faithful support of all Chalcedonians, Theodora provided a useful safety valve, a friend at court to whom Monophysites knew they could turn. That reduced the need for dissidents to venture into rebellion or plotting coups. However unlikely such a calculation may seem, the historian Evagrius actually implies such a conscious policy choice.45
The Fifth Council
In other ways, too, Justinian tried to keep open avenues of communication with the Monophysites. In the 540s, the emperor was concerned about the continuing popularity of the radical and mystical theological ideas of the third-century Alexandrian father Origen, whose theories enjoyed a long afterlife. But attacking Origenism promised a political bonus for an emperor with his particula
r religious difficulties. Just suppose that Origen’s ideas could be linked to some of the fifth-century theologians who had been the main exponents of Two Nature theory, to Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Ibas of Edessa. What better way to win over the believers in One Nature than to denounce their oldest and most loathed enemies?
Accordingly, in 543, Justinian proposed a statement denouncing the Three Chapters, a highly selective collection of texts that expressed the most daring and controversial ideas of these theologians. All three, of course,—Theodore, Theodoret, and Ibas—had been the recurring bugbears of the Cyrillians, who saw them as Nestorians. The appearance of Ibas and Theodoret at Chalcedon had incited a near riot. Finally, almost a century later, Justinian would strike at the memory of the long-dead trio, and particularly the writings in which they attacked the sainted Cyril. He would show the Monophysites once and for all that a strong wall of separation existed between Chalcedon and the Nestorians. Ideally, it would be a splendid gesture of reconciliation.46
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