But Justinian had failed to learn the most basic lesson of church politics in this era: let sleeping councils lie. When he tried to enlist the current pope Vigilius in this cause, he found the pope nervous about what amounted to a posthumous trial of men who could no longer defend themselves. Vigilius also knew that two of the three had been vindicated and restored by Chalcedon, and he had no wish to revive that argument. The popes saw the defense of Chalcedon as an absolute principle, fighting any attempt to weaken even its most marginal provisions, and most Western churches agreed with that position. The thoroughly unnecessary religious dispute rapidly evolved into a quarrel between emperor and pope. The battle included, in 547, the pope’s forcible detention in Constantinople and his later exile.47
In 553, the emperor convened a gathering at Constantinople that was recognized as the Fifth General Council, the successor to Chalcedon. The gathering attracted some 160 bishops, overwhelmingly from the East, as Justinian’s prolonged wars had devastated what remained of Roman society in Italy and Africa. Eventually, the council gave Justinian what he wanted and restated the hypostatic union in even more clearly Cyrilline terms. But the victory gained him next to nothing in the East, and even cost him a new schism of some Italian provinces.48
Remarkably, this affair did nothing to quench Justinian’s thirst for religious quarrels. So bizarre did his behavior become, in fact, that it lends support to the contemporary view of the historian Procopius, who saw the emperor as a flaky megalomaniac who governed soundly only when he listened to his wife. Theodora died, however, in 548, and from that point onward Justinian became visibly older and crazier. In his last years, he adopted his own particular heresy, an extreme fringe of Monophysite belief that was too outrageous for most One Nature believers and even harked back to Eutyches. This was the school of the Aphthartodocetae or Incorruptibles, who held that Christ’s body was always incorruptible. Fortunately, the emperor died just as he was on the point of trying to impose the weird doctrine on the whole church and of inciting further chaos.
The New Monophysite Church
Although Chalcedon triumphed under Justinian, Theodora’s court became a refuge for Monophysites and a center for organization. She fostered monasteries and convents for the hundreds of religious expelled from religious houses across Syria and Asia Minor, establishments that survived untouched for decades. She was reputedly responsible for appointing Anthimus as patriarch of Constantinople in 535, although he was associated with the ultra-hard-line Severus. After Anthimus was deposed the following year, he took refuge in her palace for twelve years. She protected Severus himself, and she hosted Theodosius, the exiled patriarch of Alexandria, who made Constantinople the seat of a virtual government in exile well into the 560s.49
The religious division became more rigid and formalized from the 540s, partly because of the cumulative disasters striking the civilized world. The year 541 marked the onset of a wide-ranging plague comparable to the notorious Black Death of the fourteenth century. Reportedly, three hundred thousand died in Constantinople alone. Over the course of several decades the disease killed millions across Europe, Asia, and Africa, weakening empires already stretched to the breaking point by decades of warfare. This was a catastrophic moment in the history of the ancient world, one of the critical transition points to the much poorer and more localized world of the Middle Ages.50 It also had its religious consequences in a society thoroughly used to reading divine signs. Each side, Chalcedonian and Monophysite, recognized how offended God was by any tokens of religious compromise. Further polarizing the two sides was Theodora’s death, which destroyed the last hopes of the Monophysites. By this point, even optimists could no longer deny that the empire had abandoned what they saw as true Christianity.
The main activist was the Syrian Jacobus Baradaeus—Hobo Jake—who succeeded Severus as the builder of the Monophysite church in Syria and the East. Early in Justinian’s reign, Jacobus and some colleagues had gone to Constantinople to plead with Theodora on behalf of Monophysite clergy exiled or imprisoned throughout the East. From the early 540s, he operated as a bishop based in Edessa, which he used as a missionary center. He evangelized far and wide for what was in effect a new or reborn church, which is commonly known as Jacobite. By some accounts, he ordained literally thousands of clergy and created a new church hierarchy. When he consecrated a new patriarch of Antioch in 544, he ensured that that city, too, would have a permanent schism between rival hierarchies, favoring or opposing Chalcedon, just as had occurred at Alexandria. At Ephesus in 558, he appointed as alternative bishop, one John, whose fiercely partisan writings are a major source for the period. After Theodosius of Alexandria died in 566, John became effective head of the Monophysite party.51
By the end of that century, a Jacobite church extended its power over much of Syria and the East, besides the great church of Egypt. And besides the celebrities—the bishops and patriarchs—many lesser monks and clergy were forming what would become a thriving Monophysite culture, a whole world of alternative Christian writing and thought. This world cultivated such familiar expressions of devotion as the lives of saints and martyrs and a whole separate tradition of Christian history writing. They glorified heroes of the faith like Severus and Peter the Iberian. Just as the founding fathers of Christian historiography commemorated the sufferings of martyrs in the face of pagan power, so their successors told of the atrocities inflicted on the saints by the wicked pseudo-Christian empire. The new church also evolved new linguistic patterns. While Greek remained the core language of Christianity, Syrian Monophysites moved heavily to Syriac as the natural language of their church, just as Egyptian Monophysites relied ever more on Coptic.52
These organizations also freely extended their power beyond the notional frontiers of the Roman world. Just as Egyptian Christianity dominated neighboring African kingdoms, so Syrian believers had their own distinct sphere of influence in the East. In Armenia, two councils of Dvin (506 and 554) officially rejected Chalcedon and brought that church within the now vast Monophysite network.53
Repression
Given the theological views of the time, it would have been unthinkable for the Christian Roman Empire to tolerate separate denominations, but individual emperors varied greatly in how strictly to enforce Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Conditions for the Monophysites grew harsher under Justinian’s successor, Justin II. He was a deeply troubled individual who fell ever deeper into insanity: reputedly, he sought to soothe his agonies by having the palace filled constantly with blaring organ music. Long before that stage, however, he tried to eliminate the Monophysite issue once and for all, using as his chief agent the patriarch of Constantinople, John Scholasticus. A learned man, John struggled to find a formula that would satisfy both sides. Briefly, he seemed to have squared the circle, and in 571 he actually achieved a kind of reunion and reconciliation. Tranquility lasted precisely a year, until the Monophysites condemned Chalcedon once more.54
According to Monophysite accounts, John then became a savage persecutor, and in that tradition his memory took on demonic form.
In an angry decree, he commanded that all the places where the [Monophysite] believers assembled should be shut up, the altars in them razed, their priests and bishops seized and cast into prison, and all who met there for worship driven away and dispersed, and commanded never to enter them again.55
Monophysite historian John of Ephesus listed the persecutions inflicted upon his fellow believers in these years, the bishops deposed or forced to conform. In one incident, the patriarch demanded the conformity of Stephanos, bishop of Cyprus. The story may or may not be true—John had no interest in writing fair or objective history—but it gives an idea of what the different sides believed of their enemies. Somehow or other, Stephanos had to be forced to take the communion bread that would show his adherence to Chalcedon. Allegedly, the patriarch sent clergy and guards
with orders to beat him with clubs, until he vomited blood, or consented to their communion. Twelv
e of them accordingly beat him until he fell down speechless in the midst, and lay apparently dead. But on seeing him lie motionless, and dying as it seemed, they ran, and brought four pails of water, which they dashed over him, and so after a long time his soul returned to him again, and he returned to life as from the dead. And thus by force he was compelled to submit to communion with them.56
Persecution reached the stage of invalidating the clerical orders of the Monophysites, who had to be reordained if they wished to continue in the priesthood. This was a serious step indeed, a frightening legal innovation that struck at the principle of apostolic succession. However wrong they might be theologically—or at least however far removed from the views of the establishment—Monophysite clergy clearly stemmed from the same church and looked back to the same sequences of venerated saints and clergy from whom they derived their authority. Was this now to be invalidated by imperial command? If so, that represented an irrevocable breach between the two sides. As Bishop Stephanos protested, “Woe! woe! Christianity is ruined! The regulations of the Christian church are overthrown. All the constitutions and canons of the church of God are confounded and trampled under foot, and are undone!”57 Although Stephanos had been canonically ordained and had served as bishop for twenty years, he was now to be “deposed from the priesthood of the orthodox” and reordained. Ultimately the patriarch stepped back from this extreme measure, but the affair left a bitter legacy of ill-feeling.
Not all emperors ruled with anything like this degree of ferocity, and some were reluctant to treat Christians in ways that should only be confined to the church’s enemies. When the patriarch tried to continue the persecutions under the new emperor, Tiberius II, he found a frosty reception. If they were Christians, said Tiberius, he would not act against them: “Why,” he asked, “do you urge me to persecute Christians, as if I were a Diocletian, or one of those old heathen kings? Go, sit in your church, and be quiet, and do not trouble me again with such things.” But Tiberius was exceptional. From the 560s onward, the “true orthodox Christians”—or the Monophysites, as their enemies called them—were the regular targets of persecution and discrimination.58
The Threat to the East
One hundred fifty years after Chalcedon, the Christian world seemed to be at an impasse. While the Monophysites knew that realistically they could never win over the empire, the Orthodox also knew that they could not eliminate the dissidents, who were not just going to wither away.
Religious divisions on this scale were deadly dangerous politically when dissidence was concentrated in eastern portions of the empire that served as heavily garrisoned military frontiers. Roman rivalry with Persia was not new. In 260 the Persians had captured the emperor Valerian, whose stuffed body long remained on exhibit as a trophy at the Persian court. Wars persisted over the following centuries, with the advantage swinging sometimes to Rome, sometimes to Persia. But the intensity of conflict escalated mightily during the sixth century, and so did the prizes at stake. Instead of just battling over debated border provinces like Armenia and Mesopotamia, the two empires were engaged in an epic struggle for survival. Throughout the sixth and early seventh centuries, the Persians pressed hard on the heart of the Eastern empire—on Syria and Palestine, Asia Minor and even Egypt. The wars had an explicitly religious quality, as the Persians grounded their claims for expansion in their Zoroastrian faith; each side fought for the greater glory of its God. Conquests were often accompanied by acts of destruction and massacre explicitly directed against the other side’s faith, against (respectively) churches and Zoroastrian fire temples. Politically and religiously, this was an endgame.59
Bitter wars raged during 502–5, 527–32, and 540–45, and fighting was endemic from 572 through 591. Generally, the Persians did a superb job of maintaining and expanding their position. They fought as an advanced state with the best technology of the day, all the latest engineering and siege machines, and they had the advantages of discipline and strategy that Western barbarian forces generally lacked. Foreshadowing the knightly warfare of the Middle Ages, the Persians also made devastating use of their massed heavy cavalry, the riders, cataphractarii, clad in effective armor.60
Some Persian successes caused real panic around what was left of the Roman world. In 540, the Persians ravaged Syria, sacking and looting some of the greatest centers of early Christianity. They utterly destroyed Antioch, carrying off tens of thousands of its residents. This was only a few years after the city was crippled by a great earthquake. Although Justinian sought to rebuild Antioch after the Persian conquest, it never recovered fully. In ruining Syria’s traditional outlet on the Mediterranean, the disaster also turned the area more toward the east, in terms of culture and economy. In so doing, it reoriented the Syrian church toward the harder-line Monophysite regions of the interior.61
The Roman situation all but collapsed early in the seventh century. When Heraclius took the throne in 610, he had to confront what looked like a near-terminal crisis, with the Persians pressing hard on the eastern frontier. Meanwhile, the barbarian Avars—kin to the Huns—were sweeping through the Balkans. In 614, the Persians captured Jerusalem, which was subject to a horrendous massacre: “the evil Persians, who had no pity in their hearts, raced to every place in the city and with one accord extirpated all the people.” Men, women and children were mowed down “like cabbages.”
Holy churches were burned with fire, other were demolished, majestic altars fell prone, sacred crosses were trampled underfoot, life-giving icons were spat upon by the unclean. Then their wrath fell upon priests and deacons; they slew them in their churches like dumb animals.62
Persians even carried off what was believed to be the True Cross itself, the most precious relic in all Christendom. They overran Syria and Asia Minor, reaching as far west as Chalcedon itself, and they invaded Egypt. At the height of the crisis, Constantinople was besieged by tens of thousands of Avars, supported by the Persian navy. The Persians were coming close to supplanting the Roman Empire.63
If not for the military genius of Heraclius, the Roman story would have ended at that point. As it was, he succeeded in decisively rolling back Persian power and restoring Roman rule over most of the Middle East by the late 620s. Heraclius was arguably the greatest Roman leader and general since the height of the united Empire. But just as he looked back to the most potent Roman values, so he behaved like a medieval crusader king, pledged to the service of the Mother of God.64
This was, then, a desperately dangerous time for Roman power in the East, and specifically for Christians. Apart from the impact of prolonged war and plague, the Christian world was entering a frighteningly bleak era of shrinking opportunities and intense strains. Although Persia was defeated, large portions of the Eastern world were economically devastated and depopulated, with a crushing tax burden on surviving communities. It was a very bad time indeed to have most of the population of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia in varying degrees of disaffection from the empire, verging on open revolt.65
Failure of the Will
In a last-ditch attempt to reunite the empire’s factions, Heraclius sought a new solution to the ancient dispute over Christ’s nature. No obvious answers presented themselves. Theologians had wrestled exhaustively with the question of persons and natures, and almost any formulation or compromise was guaranteed to infuriate somebody. All that remained was to sidestep the basic problem. Put in simple terms, the empire now proposed new grounds for agreement that ignored the issue of One Nature or Two Natures. But could not everyone agree that Christ had just one will? Or as Constantinople’s patriarch Sergius declared, Chalcedon was right in defining the hypostatic union: the person of Christ really did unite two natures, one divine and one human. But after that, Christ had only one will, which was divine: one will, and one energeia or operation.66
About 626, Heraclius raised his new scheme with Bishop Cyrus, who would become a principal ally in the attempt to win back Monophysites. Hearing that the new theologi
cal compromise had Sergius’s support, Cyrus offered his backing, and so did the Roman pope, Honorius. In 630, Cyrus was sent to Egypt as both patriarch and prefect, and he enjoyed remarkable success in winning over Coptic bishops and clergy. As later Coptic historians complained, “a countless number of them went astray, some of them through persecution, and some by bribes and honors, and some by persuasion and deceit.” The Coptic patriarch Benjamin went into hiding.67
Monotheletism had staying power, backed as it was by two of the most powerful and ambitious late Roman emperors: Heraclius himself and his grandson and successor Constans II. Heraclius had saved the empire, and his prestige allowed him to declared the new doctrine formally in his Ekthesis (the “Exposition” of the Faith) of 638. Constans was another strong ruler, who in 663 became the first Eastern “Roman emperor” in two centuries actually to visit Rome.68
Soon, though, both Chalcedonians and Monophysites denounced the new doctrine as yet another unsavory new heresy. Mennas, brother of the Coptic patriarch Benjamin, led a revolt in Egypt, precipitating some of the worst persecutions in a long and bloody story and helping to ensure Chalcedon’s place in the Coptic annals of infamy. Mennas was duly martyred. Imperial forces
caused lighted torches to be held to his sides until the fat of his body oozed forth and flowed upon the ground, and knocked out his teeth because he confessed the faith; and finally commanded that a sack should be filled with sand, and the holy Mennas placed within it, and drowned in the sea.69
His death was suitably trinitarian, a kind of execution by baptism. Three times he was submerged and half-drowned, and each time he was asked if he would concede the truth of Chalcedon, until finally he perished. “Thus they were unable to vanquish this champion, Mennas, but he conquered them by his Christian patience.”70 Cyrus’s regime seized many Coptic churches and gave them to loyal believers.
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