If the new synthesis failed to win over the Monophysites, it was sufficiently friendly to One Nature theory to appall the Orthodox. For one thing, the new school traced its origins to the work of Severus of Antioch, the ultimate Monophysite role model. From 633, the monk Sophronius campaigned against the Monotheletes, and he gained a powerful platform for his views the following year when he became patriarch of Jerusalem. Like the Henoticon before it, a policy designed to provide a platform for union proved only to create wholly new divisions. In 648, Constans’s Typus tried to forbid further discussion of the natures of Christ. In modern American terms, the age-old war was to be ended by a simple policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The chief opponent of the new policy was Maximus, a former imperial official who had retired to a monastery. In 626, however, the Persian invasion drove him to seek refuge in North Africa, where he became a disciple of Sophronius and learned the evils of the Monothelete argument. How, he asked, can we possibly speak of any kind of human nature without a human will? Maximus now went into public opposition, debating the new patriarch of Constantinople so effectively that the patriarch recanted his position. Maximus then moved to Rome, where he mobilized support against One Will teachings. In 649, a council held in the Lateran condemned Monothelete beliefs, although that condemnation ran flat contrary to the wishes of the empire. That action, which the emperor saw as ecclesiastical mutiny, was what precipitated the attack of 653 and the deaths of Martin and Maximus.
And yet again, an imperial attempt to create harmony would collapse in ruin. Finally, in 680, a new emperor called yet another council—the sixth, held once more in Constantinople. This gathering rejected the Monothelete position and reasserted Chalcedonian orthodoxy. In the process, it also condemned a number of heretics who had advanced Monothelete positions, or given in to them, including Cyrus of Alexandria. Another of the names subjected to anathema was the Roman pope, Honorius, who had died in 638. This condemnation had lasting implications for future debates over papal power, as a clear example of a pope being not merely in error but in outright heresy, and moreover the Roman church acknowledged this fact. This precedent would cause real problems for nineteenth-century advocates of papal infallibility. But that was a debate for another millennium.71
Islam at the Gates
The year 681 marked an important anniversary, as it was exactly three hundred years since the Council of Constantinople, which had initiated the long series of debates over the natures of Christ. And after three long centuries of running arguments and mutual denunciations, all the schisms and defections, it might well have seemed that such internal fights would never end, that the old debates would return endlessly in ever more intricate recycled forms. But the cycle was, in fact, about to be broken decisively. The sixth council gathered in Constantinople to debate natures and wills only very shortly after the new force of Islam had literally been at the gates. From 674 through 678, Constantinople had been subjected to yet another siege, this time by Muslim forces.
While the empire was sunk in its religious feuds, other forces were stirring in the Middle East, especially in the Arabian peninsula, then an undesirable no-man’s-land between Rome and Persia. About 610, a Meccan named Muhammad believed that he had received prophetic visions demanding that all peoples acknowledge their submission (Islam) to the one almighty God. Those people who accepted the creed of Islam were known as Muslims. Following his divine mission, Muhammad sent proclamations to the world’s most powerful leaders, including Heraclius, who found the new faith quite appealing—or so later Muslim legend claimed. Muhammad, in turn, strongly sympathized with the Romans against the Persians, whom he regarded as pagan enemies, and he was shocked when the heathen Persians took Jerusalem.72
After Muhammad’s death in 632, his followers launched a mighty series of wars against the great empires of the day, which were, of course, exhausted by decades of warfare. Within a spectacularly short period of just twenty years, Arab Muslim forces had absorbed Persia and Mesopotamia to the east, while in the west they had conquered Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. In itself, this firestorm did not necessarily mark a radical new phase in history. Other states and barbarian tribes had previously overrun large portions of the Roman Empire, before being either defeated or themselves being absorbed into Roman culture, religion, and society. Even direct sieges of Constantinople were nothing new. But by the 680s, it was obvious that this movement was indeed something different, a new kind of religion and civilization that seemed set to rival the Roman Empire, and quite likely to supplant it.73
The story of Islam’s rise is familiar enough, but, in fact, it is difficult to understand except in the context of the Christian divisions of the time. For one thing, Islam developed in a society pervaded by Jewish and Christian influences, and “Christian” in this context was overwhelmingly likely to mean Monophysite or Nestorian. Early Muslim traditions recalled Muhammad’s interaction with Christians and Christian clergy, while Christian propaganda against Islam presented Muhammad as a crude plagiarist who freely stole his ideas from the older religion. As it stands, such an idea is wildly oversimplified, but some curious Christian themes do appear in the Quran’s treatment of Jesus. While absolutely denying the divinity of Christ, the Quran presents a Jesus who looks very much like the figure familiar in the Syriac-speaking churches. The Quran follows the Docetic view that the crucifixion of Jesus was an illusion: “They did not slay him, and neither did they crucify him, but it only seemed to them [as if it had been] so…God exalted [Jesus] unto Himself.”74
Christian divisions also go far toward explaining the swift collapse of the Roman position in the Middle East, where popular sentiment leaned so heavily toward either the Monophysite and Nestorian churches. Repeatedly, writers from these traditions describe the relief with which local inhabitants greeted the Arab conquerors, who promised an end to the heavy-handed regime of the Roman Empire, and the Chalcedonian order. Even as they bemoaned the bloodshed associated with the conquest, most Egyptians were happy to see the back of the defeated governor, Cyrus, and the restoration of the exiled Coptic patriarch Benjamin.75
Some Christian writers—Monophysite and Nestorian—saw the Arabs as God’s scourge, the weapon he chose in order to punish the empire for its theological blunders and its brutality toward its true-believing opponents. The History of the Alexandrian Patriarchs comments that “the Lord abandoned the army of the Romans before him, as a punishment for their corrupt faith, and because of the anathemas uttered against them, on account of the council of Chalcedon, by the ancient fathers.” John of Nikiu recorded the defeats suffered by “Heraclius, the emperor of the Chalcedonians.”76
At least in the early decades of the new order, most Christians saw little reason to change their opinion. Muslims cared nothing for the sectarian divisions among their Christian subjects, provided they respected Muslim authority and paid their taxes on time. Moreover, the Muslims needed skilled Christians of every kind—scribes and notaries, architects and metalworkers. The first century or so after the conquest marked something like a golden age for the Christian communities, who were now free of Roman oppression.
Egypt’s Coptic church now achieved everything it had been fighting for since the time of Cyril and Dioscuros. One great patriarch, Benjamin, reigned from 622 to 661. In his time, the Chalcedonian church collapsed, and its properties reverted to Coptic control. Remaining Chalcedonian believers faced a desperate dilemma, having either to accept Coptic authority or abandon Christianity altogether. Some at least took the second option, accepting Islam as the only way they had left of continuing the fight against their ancient Monophysite foes. Once they had “accepted the detestable doctrine of the Beast, that is, Mohammed,” they “took arms in their hands and fought against the Christians. And one of them, named John, the Chalcedonian of the Convent of Sinai, embraced the faith of Islam, and quitting his monk’s habit he took up the sword, and persecuted the Christians who were faithful to our Lord Jesus Christ.”77 The C
opts triumphed—but at what a cost!
In Syria and Mesopotamia, Jacobite and Nestorian churches enjoyed peace and prestige. By the eighth century, the Jacobite church included perhaps 150 archbishops and bishops. Under Muslim rule, the different anti-Chalcedonian churches moved to create more formal alliances and mergers. In 728, a council formally established communion between the Armenian church and the Jacobites, who formed a solid anti-Chalcedonian front.78
But political salvation came at an exorbitant price. For centuries, Christians survived and even flourished in Muslim-dominated societies, but steadily, the Muslim share of the population grew, while Christian communities became ever smaller minorities, subject to harsher and more discriminatory laws. Christian Alexandria increasingly became Muslim Alexandria, until thoroughly Muslim Cairo appropriated much of its wealth and glory. From the thirteenth century, a series of political and military disasters combined with economic and climatic change to create an intolerable environment for minorities, some of which were eliminated altogether.79
By default, then, the future of Christianity lay elsewhere. It lay in those shrinking regions still subject to the Roman Empire, which no longer had any need to conciliate the opinions of an Egypt or a Syria that it no longer tried to control. In the long run, though, the Christian future would be in those regions of Western Europe that had never defied Chalcedon. Chalcedonian ideas triumphed not because of the force of their logic, but because the world that opposed them perished.
9
What Was Saved
We shall never cease to return to this formula [of Chalcedon], because whenever it is necessary to say briefly what it is that we encounter in the ineffable truth that is our salvation, we shall always have recourse to its modest, sober clarity. But we shall only really have recourse to it (and this is not at all the same thing as simply repeating it), if it is not only our end but also our beginning.
Karl Rahner
At the end of the sixth century, a Byzantine writer told the story of a holy monk named Cyriacus, who lived near the Jordan River. The pilgrim Theophanes visited him, seeking advice, and was so impressed that he would have stayed to study and learn. The obstacle was that in his home region, Theophanes was in communion with the Nestorians. Cyriacus was appalled. How could his visitor follow such a dreadful set of beliefs, which denied the Mother of God? Well, said the pilgrim, that’s all very well, but all the different groups say the same thing: unless you are in communion with us, you’ll be damned. How should I know which version of the truth is correct?
Cyriacus, fortunately, was in a position to help. Come and sit in my cave, he invited, and God will reveal his truth. After long prayer, Theophanes was granted a vision of “a dark and stinking place throwing up flames of fire, and in the flames he saw Nestorius, Eutyches, Apollinarius, Dioscuros, Severus, Arius, Origen and others like them.” An angelic guide warned him frankly that this was the place reserved for heretics, blasphemers, and those who followed them. If Theophanes hoped for a better, cooler eternity, he needed to return at once to the one true mother church, the holy Catholic and apostolic Church that followed the doctrines of Chalcedon. “For I tell you,” said the angel, “even if a person practices all the virtues there are, unless he believes rightly he will be crucified in this place.”1
Later generations of believers must envy Theophanes. However stern the warnings he was given, the choices he had to make were transparently clear. Not only did he live in a world in which theological right and wrong were starkly obvious, but he was given irrefutable evidence of which set of opinions was objectively correct. His angel, at least, did not bother to explain any of the intervening stages by which the church had reached its definitions. Why, for instance, were Dioscuros and Nestorius burning in hell, and not Flavian or Leo? In more recent centuries, in contrast, these issues of process look much more troubling—so troubling, in fact, that they must raise questions about why the churches believe what they do.
Looking at history, the process of establishing orthodoxy involved a huge amount of what we might call political accident—depending on the outcome of dynastic succession, on victory or defeat in battle, on the theological tastes of key royal figures. Throughout, we are always tempted to say: if only this event had worked out differently, or this, or this. It is a story of ifs, and matters might very easily have gone another way.
For later generations of Christians—and, by implication, for other religions—that conclusion is humbling. The Christian experience includes an immense variety of different strands, different interpretations, and most find at least some justification in Scripture or tradition. Over time, a great many of these alternative forms have been labeled as heretical or actively excluded from the Christian worldview altogether, but it is not obvious why one current triumphs over another. Try as they might to develop institutions or structures to determine truth, by trusting historical authority or by seeking consensus, churches have never found a path that avoids the powerful pressures of individual ambition and political interest. If nothing else, that experience argues strongly for being tolerant about the diversity of nonessential expressions of faith. Viewed historically, we know that other versions might have succeeded, and might yet do so in times to come.
At the same time, stressing these external forces is not a simple acceptance of cynicism, a crude assertion that “might makes faith.” Try as they would, many powerful secular rulers struggled to enforce their wills on the churches, to little avail. Outsiders—even those as strong as Constantine—could never twist the church into their own image unless their wishes coincided with those of sizable factions within the Christian community. For all the political intrigue involved, the fifth-century churches settled their doctrinal issues by battles and compromises fought between fellow members of those churches, clerical and lay. Christians struggled with Christians until they established what they believed to be truth.
Also, from a Christian perspective—or for other faith traditions—chance is not a valid concept. Deeply embedded in Jewish and Christian Scriptures is the idea of Providence, of God’s intervening in history, often through highly improbable agents. Chalcedon offers powerful ammunition for those who accept such an interpretation, if only because the outcome of the religious debate was, in worldly terms, so very unlikely. In the context of the time, the forces pushing to make Christ a purely divine figure seemed overpowering, not least because a god-man was such a familiar concept to a society in transition from paganism. Devotional practice and iconography supported such a move, with the glorification of Christ as divine all-ruler, and his goddesslike Mother. And belief in One Nature found its strongest advocates in the oldest and greatest centers of the faith, the sources of its finest scholarship. Looking at the world fifty years or so after Chalcedon, with an empire weighted ever more heavily toward the East, only a foolhardy prophet would have given Chalcedon any chance whatever of staging a political comeback. Despite all this, though, the memory of Chalcedon revived, and its definitions prevailed, after long decades in which they seemed destined to oblivion.
Somehow, amazingly, the church preserved its belief that Christ was human as well as God. And today, that belief is the standard, official doctrine for the vast majority of Christian institutions—all Catholic and Orthodox believers as well as virtually all Protestants.
Resurrections Without End
Despite this victory, the battles of Ephesus and Chalcedon continue to be refought among people who perhaps know nothing of those original events. That is typical of Christian history, in that ideas and beliefs continue to resurface long after they have supposedly been defeated or killed. Sometimes they might survive as clandestine underground traditions, or might be rediscovered through reading and scholarly research, as we see in the modern Western revival of Gnosticism. Or perhaps the same impulses that gave rise to these movements in ancient times, the same ways of reading Scripture, still survive in later communities. Long centuries after the Roman Empire thought it had destroyed t
he last Arians, similar ideas reappeared in the Western world in the form of Unitarianism. Any society in which Christian believers read the historic texts of the faith and study its history, however casually, will at some point rediscover most of the ancient views of Christ and his role. The history of Christian belief is a story of resurrections without end.
For whatever reason, then, ideas and beliefs never perish utterly, and that is certainly true of the strands of belief that dominated fifth-century debate. Even when no conceivable connection exists between ancient and modern thought, the same ideas resurface unbidden. To see an example of this, look at a work by the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, by common consent one of the greatest pieces of devotional writing in the English language. In his “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward,” Donne imagines that the rising sun that stands behind him as he travels becomes a vision of the crucified Christ. But what must strike anyone who knows the ancient christological debates is how Monophysite Donne’s poem sounds in thought and language. With a couple of doctrinal exceptions, it is the sort of language that Alexandria’s Dioscuros and Severus of Antioch would have loved. Had they known the poem, they would probably have insisted that church members sign on to its doctrines before being admitted to communion.
But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die;
What a death were it then to see God die?…
Could I behold those hands, which span the poles
And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes?
Could I behold that endless height, which is
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