A.D. 381

With the reassertion of Nicene orthodoxy in 383, Theodosius moved more resolutely against the Eunomians. On 25 July 383, Eunomius was placed first in a decree that forbade Eunomians, and other named congregations, from assembling or building places of worship; six months later, another decree called for the confiscation of any existing property and the expulsion of all Eunomian clergy. One of his admirers, the historian Philostorgius, recorded that Eunomius was now forced to teach in secret: his church had become an underground organisation. Remarkably, Eunomius still had his contacts within the court of Theodosius himself, and while Theodosius was dealing with Valentinian and Maximus, he seems to have turned a blind eye to their presence. But when news reached him in Milan that there were Eunomians among the eunuchs of the imperial bedchamber, the emperor reacted with a further law in May 389 that treated these men as traitors. In the summer, Eunomius himself was arrested and exiled to Caesarea, the capital of Cappadocia, where he was allowed to live on an estate outside the town. After Theodosius’ death, there were further laws against the Eunomians, and their documents could be searched for and burned. Eunomius was moved to a monastery, where he died in 396.

The use of the law to provide a respectable cover for the isolation of dissidents is familiar to us today, but it breached some very ancient conventions of the Greek and Roman worlds and marked a new departure in Roman law. As Caroline Humfress has demonstrated, in traditional Roman law there was no category of ‘wrong belief’.² There were, however, laws against astrologers and diviners, and those accused of maleficium, sorcery: emperors were deeply suspicious of those who might foment unrest through foretelling the future. The Manicheans, for instance, had always been regarded with suspicion because reading the stars was an important part of their ritual. If heretics could be accused of maleficium, then they could be dealt with within existing law.

A key case in the development of a new approach was that of the Spanish Christian Priscillian. Priscillian set himself up as a prophetic leader who enjoined strict asceticism on his followers and who held independent and original ideas on the origin of the soul. Like so many charismatic figures, he soon built up an enthusiastic following, especially among upper-class women. He even gathered enough support to be ordained as Bishop of Avila in 380, despite having been condemned by Church leaders. Although a journey to Rome to gain the backing of Bishop Damasus ended in failure, Priscillian’s return to Spain via Milan gained him some influence at court among those who opposed the growing power of Ambrose, who had sided with the Spanish bishops in rejecting Priscillian. In Spain he also had the support of the emperor’s deputy, the vicarius. Priscillian might have been an outcast from the Church, but with the state on his side his position appeared impregnable.

Then everything changed. When Priscillian was condemned once more by a council of bishops meeting in Bordeaux, he appealed directly to Maximus, who had seized power in Gaul and set up court at Trier, in the hope that the new ‘emperor’ would offer him support. But the bishops launched their own prosecution of Priscillian before Maximus, which was taken up by one of Maximus’ court prosecutors with the charge of offences associated with sorcery. The maleficium consisted of showing an interest in magical studies, holding nocturnal meetings with women and praying naked, but these flimsy charges could hardly conceal the fact that Priscillian was being targeted because he threatened the Church’s authority. Maximus, uncertain of his own status, and wanting to attract the goodwill of Theodosius, chose to support the bishops, and Priscillian was found guilty and executed. This was the first time since Constantine’s grant of toleration that a secular court had condemned a Christian to death primarily for his religious beliefs. It was only the beginning. ‘By the end of the fourth century,’ writes Caroline Humfress, ‘the charge of maleficium had become a convenient category under which crimes relating to heresy could be subsumed.’³

But there still remained the problem of knowing what was and what was not heretical. In 395 the proconsul of Asia, Aurelianus, was presiding over the trial of a bishop, Heuresius, who was accused of being a follower of Lucifer, Bishop of Caglieri, who had been excommunicated. Completely out of his depth, Aurelianus wrote to the emperor Arcadius, Theodosius’ son, who had succeeded him, asking for an imperial rescript on the definition of heresy. The response was uncompromising: ‘Those persons who may be discovered to deviate, even in a minor point of doctrine, from the tenets and path of the Catholic religion are included within the designation of heretics and must be subject to the sanctions which have been issued against them.’⁴

In the years that followed, the definition of heresy and the treatment of heretics absorbed most of the energy of the government. The very complexity of Christian debates meant, however, that it was impossible to create a secure boundary between heresy and orthodoxy and at local level personal rivalries could easily be transformed into accusations of heresy. One such case involved the Bishop of Synnada in Phrygia, Theodosius, who travelled to Constantinople to ask for imperial help against heretics in his diocese. While he was away, these ‘heretics’ declared that they had converted to ‘orthodoxy’ and seized his churches. The advantages of holding on to the assets of a Church, its land and its buildings, made charges of ‘heresy’ or proclamations of ‘orthodoxy’ for material advantage highly attractive.

In 428, Theodosius II, the grandson of Theodosius I, was forced to put in place a more rigorous definition of heresy. As the preamble to his law suggests, it was the struggle over Church assets that was the problem. ‘The madness of heretics must be so suppressed that they shall know beyond doubt, before all else, that the churches which they have taken from the orthodox, wherever they are held, shall immediately be surrendered to the Catholic church, since it cannot be tolerated that those who ought not to have churches of their own should continue to detain those possessed or founded by the orthodox and invaded by such rash lawlessness.’⁵ There followed a list of heresies. First came the Arians, Macedonians and Apollinarians, then Novatianists and Sabbatians, followed by another grouping of sixteen heresies, and finally the Manicheans were listed as ‘at the lowest depth of wickedness’. The silencing of theological debate followed. When, in 457, the emperor Leo I (457-474) asked the Bishop of Melitene, in Armenia, whether he wanted a council to discuss theological issues, the bishop shrewdly replied: ‘We uphold the Nicene creed but avoid difficult questions beyond human grasp. Clever theologians soon become heretics.’⁶ A hundred years earlier such a reply would have been an insult to the tradition of free thought, which was intrinsic to Greek culture. The very concept that there were ideas ‘beyond human grasp’ that should be avoided for that reason would have been incomprehensible to anyone with an educated mind.

One irrevocable loss during these years were works of theology. A law of 409 targeted at the books of heretics required their codices to be burned. (A codex was a bound book, which had by now largely replaced scrolls of papyrus.) ‘If perchance any person should be convicted of having hidden any of these books under any pretext or fraud whatever and of having failed to deliver them [for burning], he shall know that he himself shall suffer capital punishment, as a retainer of noxious books and writings and as guilty of the crime of maleficium.’⁷ This shows how elastic the ‘crime’ of maleficium had become: it could now be extended to cover even the possession of heretical books. How these books were selected and tested for orthodoxy is unknown; it is likely that the libraries of heretics were simply confiscated or destroyed.

Other laws of the first half of the fifth century document the continuing assault on paganism. Pagans were easy to isolate, and their sheer variety of deities, spiritual beliefs and philosophies made them vulnerable to the forces of organised monotheism. However, as Theodosius I had realised, there were dangers here. Although in principle the emperors supported the closing down of pagan temples, they were worried that this could lead to disorder. So when Porphyry, the Bishop of Gaza in Syria, arrived in Constantinople in 400 to petition the emperor Arcadius for armed support in his campaign against local pagans and temples, the emperor urged caution. He told the bishop that he preferred a more gradual elimination of temple activity. However, according to the account given by Porphyry’s biographer, Mark the Deacon, published after the bishop’s death in 420, Porphyry won over the empress Eudoxia, and when she gave birth to a son, the future emperor Theodosius II, this was seen as a sign that God himself supported the campaign. The baby even apparently nodded his assent to the plan and Arcadius capitulated to the bishop’s demands. Soldiers were provided for Porphyry, and when he returned to Gaza, the pagan temples were duly burned to the ground and their contents ransacked. To add to the humilation of the pagans, stones from the most sacred part of the sanctuary of the Temple of Marnas, which is reported to have burned for days, were repositioned as paving stones, so that they would be walked on by human and animal alike.⁸

By 423, however, there are signs that supporting or turning a blind eye to locally inspired attacks on paganism was becoming counterproductive. It was clear that Christianity was being used by opportunists as a front for the destruction of their rivals and that looting was taking place under the pretence that it was God’s work. Theodosius II issued a law in an attempt to restrain the disorder. ‘We especially commend those persons who are truly Christians, or who are said to be [sic], that they shall not abuse the authority of religion and dare to lay violent hands on Jews and pagans who are living quietly and attempting nothing disorderly or contrary to law. For if such Christians should be violent against persons living in security or should plunder their goods, they shall be compelled to restore not only that property which they took away, but after suit they shall also be compelled to restore triple or quadruple that amount which they robbed.’⁹ It may be that this law was issued as a result of specific outrages, for by 435 the state had renewed its campaign against the resilient pagans. It was ordered that ‘All persons of criminal [sic] pagan mind we interdict from accursed immolations of sacrificial victims and from damnable sacrifices... and we order that all their shrines, temples, sanctuaries, if any even now remain intact, should be destroyed by the magistrates’ command and that these should be purified by the placing of the venerable Christian religion’s sign [the Cross].’¹⁰ But even this did not have its effect, and in a letter to the praetorian prefect of the east issued in January 438, Theodosius opined: ‘We must exercise watchfulness over the pagans and their heathen enormities, since with their natural insanity and stubborn insolence they depart from the path of the true religion. A thousand terrors of the laws that have been promulgated, the penalty of exile that has been threatened, do not restrain them, whereby, if they cannot be reformed, at least they might learn to abstain from their mass of crimes and from the corruption of their sacrifices. But straightway they sin with such audacious madness and Our patience is so assailed by the attempts of these impious persons that even if We desired to forget them, We could not disregard them.’¹¹ Although paganism had virtually disappeared from cities by now, it remained strong in outlying areas, and petitions to the emperors from bishops and new attempts by the authorities to quell traditional beliefs continued.

Similar examples are recorded of the marginalisation of Jews. The diatribes launched by John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople between 398 and his deposition in 403, against the resurgence of Judaism in his diocese are a vivid reminder of how entrenched Christian attitudes had become. Just as Ambrose had forced Theodosius I into condoning the destruction of the synagogue at Callinicum, so ‘holy men’ would challenge the emperor if he was seen to be lenient. The Syriac Life of Symeon Stylites, for instance, includes a threat of divine retribution to the emperor for his apparent favouring of the Jews. ‘Now that you have become a friend and companion and protector to unbelieving Jews, behold suddenly the righteous judgement of God will overtake you and all who are of the same mind of you in this matter. You will lift up your hands to heaven and say in your affliction, “Truly this anger has come on me because I broke faith with the Lord God.”’ Whether as a result of this threat or others, or even his personal inclination, Theodosius responded in 438: ‘We finally sanction by this law destined to live until all ages that no Jew, no Samaritan... shall enter upon any honors or dignities; to none of them shall the administration of a civil duty be available, nor shall they perform even the duties of a defender of a city... with an equally reasonable consideration also, We prohibit any synagogue to arise as a new building.’¹² Although Jews were still free to exercise their religion in their existing synagogues, they were losing their opportunity to participate in government, and the long process by which they were segregated from ‘Christian’ society had begun.

The power of the state over aberrant Christian, Jewish and pagan activity was strengthened by the integration of the bishops within the judicial system. As early as 318, Constantine had allowed cases to be transferred from municipal to Church courts. By 333, any one party to a case could ask for the transfer, and it was stipulated that the testimony of bishops should be privileged over that of any other witness. This meant in effect that a Christian could arrange for his affairs to be settled by a man of his own faith, an undoubted advantage if his adversary was a pagan. There is a case from Syria in the 380s where, as reported by Libanius, a band of monks had dispossessed some peasants of their land on the pretence that it was sacred to a particular saint. When the peasants protested, they were dragged by the monks before the Church court, where the bishop ruled against them. By this period, sitting in court was a regular part of most bishops’ lives. A bishop’s court had the same rights as secular courts to order the torture of witnesses of low status, the imprisonment of the accused and the administration of corporal punishment, although there seem to have been some restraints on the practice. One fifth-century Syriac rule for clerics reads: ‘Do not scourge anyone, but if there is a reason because of which you are compelled to scourge, either scourge to frighten, or send the guilty ones to the judges of the world [e.g. the secular courts].’¹³

The evidence for the work of episcopal courts is surprisingly fragmentary. Bishops had held jurisdiction over their own communities well before Constantine’s law gave them access to other cases, and there had already been an established tradition of Christian law. A document known as the Apostolic Constitutions of 380 gives guidelines under which bishops should operate. Their role for violators of Christian conduct, the Constitutions notes, was to be like a good physician who removes afflicted parts of a body to restore the whole to good health. This, of course, gave them the freedom to deal with heretics, who could be defined as ‘diseased flesh’.¹⁴ The bishops appear to have adopted those laws of the state that specifically concerned religious issues. These included the laws of apostasy, for instance, which condemned Christians who turned to pagan rites, to altars or temples, to sacrifices or idolatry, to Jewish rites or ‘the infamy of the Manicheans’. The bishop’s court now became the forum where such cases were settled, and even seem to have developed their own case law. Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa are known to have broadened the definition of apostasy given by imperial law to include the practice of magic. In short, the ecclesiastical and secular courts were working in conjunction with each other in the upholding of Christian orthodoxy, a process that was to continue and reach its climax in the eastern empire in the reign of Justinian in the sixth century. In the west, it is evident that Augustine conducted the major campaign he waged against the Donatists largely through his court.

While free discussion of the issue was now limited, the premature ‘settlement’ of the Trinity by Theodosius in 381 had left important questions unresolved. The one that was to consume the eastern Church for many years to come was how to relate the fully divine Jesus, one in substance with the Father, to Jesus as a human being as he appeared in the gospels. What was the nature of Jesus’ divinity while he was on earth? Was it somehow suspended at the moment of his birth and taken up again at the Resurrection, or did it persist throughout his earthly ministry? Could he, for instance, have a divine soul, of a different quality from that of an ordinary human being, in a human body? When Mary gave birth, what did she give birth to - a man or a god? In his everyday life, did Jesus pass backwards and forwards from divinity to humanity, acting as divine when he carried out miracles and as human when he ate and drank with his disciples? Were his teachings to be allocated to either his divine or his human capacity according to their content? Did his divinity affect the degree to which he could endure the suffering he apparently underwent for the saving of mankind?¹⁵

When the problem had been discussed in the early Church, two opposing parties emerged. The Adoptionists, on the one hand, believed that Jesus was fully human but had been ‘adopted’ by God, at either his birth, his baptism or his resurrection. But the ‘divinity’ conferred on him by his adoption in no way compromised his humanity and he suffered for mankind on the Cross without any lessening of the agony that other humans would feel. At the other extreme were the Docetists, who argued that while Jesus went through the motions of being human, he was actually divine all the time. Clement of Alexandria, for instance, claimed that while Jesus appeared to eat and drink, he did not actually digest the food or have any need to excrete waste! It somehow just disappeared. The problem this approach left was whether he could actually suffer on the Cross if his body was not subject to human feelings and pain. Without any pain, the Crucifixion was hardly an impressive act of salvation.

There was a great deal of open ground, one might say, in the bitter debate that followed, a hotly contested ‘no man’s land’ between these extremes. After 381, the debate was made more, rather than less, difficult by the need to reconcile a definition of Jesus’ humanity with Nicene orthodoxy. Arius had avoided the problem simply by saying that Jesus was a lesser divinity and that his divinity was never so great as to deprive him of the pain of suffering. Now this option was no longer open to orthodox Christians, and the debate reached a new level of intractability as a result. The wrangling that followed was intensified by the rivalry between the bishops of ‘upstart’ Constantinople and of Alexandria, which still festered at the loss of its ancient status in 381.

A new Bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, took office in 428. He claimed to be a scourge of heretics, and in his inaugural sermon before Theodosius II he asked for imperial support in his crusade, in return for which he promised victory in war: ‘Give me, king, the earth purged of heretics, and I will give you heaven in return. Aid me in destroying heretics, and I will assist you in vanquishing the Persians.’¹⁶ Such, however, was the confusion over what was or was not orthodoxy and the personal and political antagonisms of the period that very soon it was Nestorius who was declared the heretic! He had, perhaps unwisely, entered the debate over the humanity of Jesus by suggesting that the redemption of mankind might be threatened if the human side of Jesus was submerged and that Mary could hardly be called the mother of God, not least because this risked making her into a goddess herself. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria from 412. to 444, saw his chance to challenge the diocese of Constantinople through its bishop. Cyril wished to emphasise the divinity of Christ, notably by according Mary the title theotokos, ‘bearer of God’. The Alexandrian preference was for a Jesus ‘of one nature’, with a divine soul and a human body, in other words, the divinity of Jesus having a much higher status than the humanity. Cyril launched bitter accusations of heresy against Nestorius, unscrupulously misrepresenting his views in the process.

Theodosius responded to this dispute in 431 by summoning a council to Ephesus but he neglected to provide sufficient imperial supervision. Cyril and his supporting bishops arrived early and bullied their way to success not least through bribery of Theodosius’ court; this was so extensive that Cyril’s own clergy in Alexandria complained their diocese had been reduced to poverty. The emperor deposed Nestorius, but when faced with immense outrage from Nestorius’ supporters, he backtracked and forced Cyril to accept a statement that Christ was both perfect god and perfect man and as the latter, ‘one in substance’ with humanity. The title theotokos was allowed to stay, with the result that this statement, accepted by Cyril in 433, was somewhere between Cyril’s original position and that of Nestorius.

Even so, Nestorius remained condemned. His was a new ‘heresy’ - the difficulty lay in pinning down what it was. To give some legal status to the condemnation, Theodosius defined it through classifying it. Nestorius was declared a follower of the first-century ‘magician’ Simon Magus, regarded by some as ‘the father of all heresy’. In 435, a law decreed: ‘Since Nestorius, the leader of a monstrous teaching, has been condemned, it remains to apply to those who share his opinions and participate in his impiety a condemnatory name, so that they may not, by abusing the appellation of Christians, be adorned by the name of those from whose doctrines they have impiously separated themselves. Therefore we decree that those everywhere who share in the unlawful doctrines of Nestorius are to be called “Simonians” ... We also decree that no one should dare to possess or read or copy the impious books of the said lawless and blasphemous Nestorius concerning the pure religion of the orthodox, and against the doctrines of the sacred synod of the bishops of Ephesus. These books it is required to seek out with every eagerness and burn publicly ...’¹⁷

Nestorius’ triumphant adversary, Cyril, was unscrupulous in many ways, but he was an able theologian. Rather than supporting his beliefs with texts from scripture, however, he relied on selected Church fathers, notably Athanasius, to whom he credits the title theotokos.¹⁹ As we have noted, the Nicenes had found it difficult to refute the many sayings of Jesus that suggested he was subordinate to God the Father; now, a hundred years later, theologians were substituting later authorities for the gospels. In 448, a small synod of bishops met at Constantinople to deal with Eutyches, a monk who was accused of heresy as one who claimed that Christ had only one nature. When Eutyches said that he accepted the teachings of the Holy Fathers at Nicaea but preferred to rely on scripture for his beliefs as it was more trustworthy than the Church fathers, his statement was met with ‘disturbance’. Everyone knew by now just how intractable an issue would become if the scriptures had to be consulted for elucidation. This shift to reliance on later sources, and authorities, marked an important development in the history of theology that was to reach its culmination in the declaration of the Council of Trent (1545-63) that scripture itself is not to be interpreted ‘in any other way than in accordance with the unanimous agreement of the Fathers’.

When Cyril died in 444, his successor as Bishop of Alexandria, Dioscorus, attacked the concessions he believed Cyril had made to the Nestorians in accepting that Jesus had two natures. Dioscorus wished to emphasise the divinity of Christ in line with the declaration of Mary as theotokos, and claimed to support the ‘one nature’ of Jesus formula that Cyril had held before his concessions of 433. Tension rose when it was discovered that Nestorians, including Irenaeus, were regaining their influence in the area around Antioch, where Nestorius had been exiled. After successful complaints to the emperor, a new law was issued in 448 that reveals how Theodosius saw his role as the representative of God on earth: ‘We think it appropriate to our kingship to remind our subjects about piety. For we think that thus it is the more possible to gain the goodwill of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ when it is the case both that we are zealous so far as is in our power to please him and we stimulate those subject to us to that end.’ In practice this meant that ‘Since it has come to our pious ears that certain men have written and published teachings which are dubious and not precisely in accord with the orthodox faith as set out by the holy synod of holy fathers who assembled at Nicaea and at Ephesus and by Cyril [of Alexandria] we order that any such writings, coming into existence, whether formerly or now, should be burned and committed to complete annihilation, so as not even to come to public reading, with any who can bear to own or read such compositions in books being liable to the extreme penalty.’²⁰ Such a sweeping law could be interpreted to include virtually any writing defined by the state or a local bishop as unorthodox. It is impossible to know how many works actually were burned, but the historian Averil Cameron notes that, in the east, ‘Books ceased to be readily available and learning became an increasingly ecclesiastical preserve; even those who were not ecclesiastics were likely to get their education from the scriptures or from [orthodox] Christian texts.’²¹ It marks a major blow to the literary culture that had been so deep-rooted among Christians and pagans alike.

In 449, Dioscorus masterminded his own council in Ephesus to which the Bishop of Rome, Leo, contributed a compromise formula. But his episcopal statement, pleading for a two-nature formula under which Jesus would be seen as divine when he was performing miracles and human when he showed any form of weakness, came close to Nestorius’ original proposal and Dioscorus would not even allow it to be read. The council then degenerated into violence and intimidation. The Bishop of Constantinople, Flavian, was beaten up and died soon afterwards; Leo, furious at his rejection, denounced the fractious assembly as ‘a robber council’.²²

Theodosius II died in 450, after the longest reign of any emperor, some forty-two years. Pulcheria now took as her consort one Marcian, a soldier, who was elevated to emperor. He was keen to win the political support of the alienated Leo, not least because he needed to shore up the west from collapse at the hands of the Germanic invaders. So Marcian summoned yet another council, which eventually met in 451 at Chalcedon. The acta of the council are remarkable for being headed not by the names of church leaders but by that of the emperor and a list of his senior officials. Marcian began by asking the bishops to provide their own statement, but when it arrived, his legal advisers condemned it as muddled and not much different from what had been agreed at the ‘robber council’. The imperial officials now drew up their own document, which, in order to reconcile Leo to the process, incorporated his tome as well as some of Cyril’s assertions.

The ‘Chalcedonian formula’ that the officials produced acknowledged that Jesus was both truly God and truly man, of the same substance with the Father in the Godhead but also in one substance with ‘us’ in manhood, except as regarded sin. Mary was confirmed as theotokos, the bearer of God. Yet within the single hypostasis - person - of Jesus, there were two natures, human and divine, which existed as distinct, ‘without change, without division, without separation’. This explained nothing. As Christopher Stead puts it: ‘The Chalcedonian definition was a fairly limited achievement; it was a statement of the conditions that had to be met, within a given horizon of thought, for a satisfactory doctrine of Christ; it did not amount to a positive solution.’ ²³ It remained unclear whether the two natures had existed before the Incarnation - if so, would not this make it less likely that Father and Son could be called ‘of one substance’? - or whether the human nature of Jesus was grafted on, as it were, at the moment of his birth, which would make Mary’s title of theotokos less easy to justify. It was hard to imagine how one being could combine human and divine natures without the divinity, especially as defined by Nicaea, not dominating the human. Again how could Jesus’ humanity be of ‘one substance’ with the rest of humanity if he was also distinct from the rest of humanity in being unable to sin? The bishops, either as a result of imperial pressure or because they felt the text adequate, accepted it, even though the ‘two natures’ formula smacked of Nestorianism. To underline the point that Christian belief was now firmly integrated into the state, Marcian insisted that his army officers swear allegiance to the new creed.

In the west, the Chalcedonian settlement was seen as a triumph for Leo. It was, in fact, the very first time a Bishop of Rome had successfully intervened in the making of Church doctrine. Leo was a determined and forceful man and he cleverly linked the formula to his own papal authority. The debate had never been as heated in the west, and the declaration of a Christ of two natures was soon accepted. But no proper theological explanation was produced, and when in 513 a Greek bishop asked a later Bishop of Rome, Symmachus, for an authoritative untangling of the problem, the philosopher Boethius reported that the request caused great consternation. It was regarded as a settled matter, upheld by the papacy as part of Christian doctrine and thus not open to further discussion.²⁴

In the east, however, the council proved to be, in the words of Patrick Gray, ‘a monumental disaster’.²⁵ The Alexandrian clergy could not believe that the council had accepted a formula that was so close to Nestorius’ belief, and in Egypt and Syria hardline factions emerged that firmly rejected Chalcedon. Again monks caused disruption and in 452 Marcian had to respond: ‘Your outrageous behaviour, in violation of the rules laid down for monks, has brought on a regular war levied against the common good order, has collected crowds of gangsters and other such habitual criminals; has stirred up arms for slaughter and devastation and every ill among those resident in the countryside.’²⁶ Moreover, Marcian insisted that the monks were not capable of discussing theological issues. But those who believed in a single nature of Christ, the Monophysites as they later came to be known, claimed that they stood for the true Church and insisted that they would eventually triumph over the Nestorians as the Nicenes had done a century before over the machinations of the Arians. In the next sixty years, emperor after emperor tried to find a formula that would reconcile them to the Chalcedonians, but without success. With time, their intransigence became more and more deep-rooted, and even the masses became conversant with every word of the debate. In the 490s there were riots in Constantinople when a new liturgy contained a phrase that appeared to tend towards Monophysitism.

In 527, the greatest emperor of late antiquity, Justinian, came to the throne of the eastern empire. He was backed by his determined wife Theodora, whom he had raised from a dubious past as a circus artiste. Justinian had his bad moments, especially during the Nika riots of 532, when only the resolution of Theodora, who sent in the troops to massacre the insurgents, saved his throne, but he showed immense resilience in his plan for the regeneration of the empire. The western empire had fallen with the abdication of the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in 476, but Justinian reconquered northern Africa and, after a protracted and destructive campaign, much of Italy. He now had extra grain supplies from Africa in addition to those arriving in Constantinople from Egypt. Unlike the fledgling successor states of the west, the Byzantine Empire was able to sustain its trade routes, and some areas, such as the hinterland of Antioch and Gaza, are known to have become prosperous on the export of oil and wine. City life continued, though at a reduced level, whereas it disappeared almost completely in the west. In short, Justinian was able to maintain a secure border, guarded by fortresses on the eastern frontier, and still have the resources to create one of the finest buildings of late antiquity, the church of Santa Sophia, at a time when church building in the west had virtually ceased.

Justinian also tried to find a solution to the theological controversy that was splitting his empire. He was not a theologian but, like his predecessors, he believed in religious unity under the auspices of an emperor appointed by God. His famous law codes (promulgated between 529 and 534), which brought together a thousand years of Roman law into a coherent body of interlocking texts, were issued in the joint names of Lord Jesus Christ and the emperor himself. In one of his laws of the 530s, he ordered all to come forward for Christian baptism. ‘Should they disobey, let them know that they will be excluded from the state and will no longer have any rights of possession, neither goods or property; stripped of everything, they will be reduced to penury, without prejudice to the appropriate punishments that will be imposed on them.’²⁷ The death penalty was decreed for all who followed pagan cults. In 526, the last Egyptian temple had been closed down, and in 529, the philosophers in Plato’s Academy, which had survived for 900 years, were dispersed.²⁸ ‘The sixth century is a period in which the philosophical glory that was Greece is wearing thin,’ writes one scholar. ‘Philosophers, and especially pagan ones, are rare birds indeed, flocking together for shelter and survival in various parts of the empire.’²⁹ A great intellectual tradition had withered.

This determined attempt to create a unified Christian state was marred by the continuing debate over the Chalcedon formula. When he came to power, Justinian originally accepted Chalcedon. He knew its Nestorian features would earn him the support of the people of his capital, Constantinople, Nestorius’ own see, and that it would also keep open a channel to the Church in Rome. He was unwilling to jettison Chalcedon in search of a new settlement, but he thought it might be possible to find a way of getting the intransigent Christians in Egypt and Syria back into the Chalcedonian fold. His first manoeuvres to draw them in failed as miserably as those of his immediate predecessors, and by the 540S he had hit on another approach: if he could condemn Nestorianism outright, notably the Three Chapters, the works of three key Nestorian theologians, then the anti-Chalcedonians might soften. It was a tricky strategy because these theologians, Theodore of Mopsuestia, the historian Theodoret, an opponent of Cyril, and Ibas, Bishop of Edessa, had been considered orthodox in their day. Justinian desperately needed the support of the Bishop of Rome, Vigilius, and the western bishops if he was to make any progress. Vigilius was summoned to Constantinople, where Justinian bullied him into supporting the condemnation of the Three Chapters. But the emperor’s action had the opposite effect. By now the Chalcedonian formula had achieved a sacred status in the west, and there was no support there for changing it, especially as this meant condemning works by those who had been assumed to be orthodox Christians. The western bishops were furious that Vigilius had betrayed them, and the North African bishops even united to excommunicate him. When Justinian called a council to Constantinople in 553, it proved a disaster. Pope Vigilius, caught between the emperor and the western bishops, found an excuse for not attending. His absence was concealed in the final edition of the Acts of the Council so that his opposition to Justinian was not made public, but the Three Chapters were condemned at the council. The hapless Vigilius later announced that he did support the condemnation, but he had misjudged the anger of his fellow western bishops at his betrayal. After he died, on his way back to Rome, his body was refused burial in St Peter’s. In response to the council’s decision, the anti-Chalcedonians now set up their own Churches, resulting in the Coptic Church in Egypt and the Jacobite Church in Syria. They preached that Jesus had only one nature, even though this contained both divine and human elements, in contrast to the ‘two nature’ formula of Chalcedon.³⁰

Although the Council of Constantinople of 553 had failed in its aim of bringing peace between the factions, among its acts was a statement of how Christian orthodoxy was to be judged. The council pledged its allegiance to ‘the things we have received from Holy Scripture and from the teachings of the Holy Fathers and from the definitions of one and of the same faith by four sacred councils’. In addition, all these so-called councils - the Council of Nicaea of 325, the Council of Constantinople of 381, the Council of Ephesus in 431 and the Council of Chalcedon of 431 - which had been subject to imperial pressures and in many cases had been unrepresentative of the Church as a whole, were now given special status as ecumenical, i.e. of the whole Church, councils. By 600, in Rome, Pope Gregory the Great was equating these four councils with the four gospels as the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy.

But with the possible exception of Ephesus in 431, when the machinations and bribery of Cyril shaped the proceedings and led the way to his desired outcome, it was the emperors who had actually defined Christian doctrine. This definition was then incorporated into the legal system so that orthodoxy was upheld by both secular and Church law, and heretics were condemned by the state. It is important to reiterate just how radical a development this was and the degree to which it diminished intellectual life. There were still those who stood apart from the Church - the Monophysites in the east, the Donatists and the Arian Goths in the west - but these could be treated as outside the law, as were pagans and Jews. The legal codes of Justinian reiterated the suppression of the rights of Jews in civic, economic and religious spheres, and they were subject to continued abuse in theological tracts as well as assaults on their synagogues.³¹

With orthodoxy enforced, the Greek mind turned inwards. The most influential religious thinker of the age was Dionysius; his works were claimed to be those of Dionysius the Areopagite, who was described in the Acts of the Apostles as a follower of Paul. This gave him unrivalled status, even though the evidence now suggests that his works date not from the first century but from as late as AD 500. Dionysius was a mystic, and he described how the human soul could ascend towards deification to become lost in the mystery of God. As he put it in his Mystical Theology:

‘My argument now rises from what is below up to the transcendent and the more it climbs, the more language falters, and when it has passed up and beyond the ascent, it will turn silent completely [sic], since it will finally be at one with him who is indescribable.’³² Otherworldliness and a reluctance to have any reasoned debate on the nature of the Godhead now pervaded the Byzantine world. ‘Even knowledge and discourse themselves are limited to the dim perceptions allowed in the human world, through the signs and messengers that God chooses to vouchsafe.’³³

Justinian stands in a direct line from Theodosius’ laws of 381 and brings them to their logical conclusion, the creation of an empire based on a single monolithic faith. Even those laws of Theodosius that had been applied to a single prefecture were now extended in the Code to the whole of the rest of the empire. But, as this chapter has shown, heresy and orthodoxy were defined largely as the result of power struggles within the Church, with the opposing factions competing for imperial support. The state, in its turn, often had to intrude simply to restore order. Once the state had decided to intervene in support of orthodoxy and in opposition to heresy, the outcome was an authoritarianism based on irrational principles, which presided over the demise of ancient traditions of reasoned debate.³⁴