Download PDF | Byzantine Christianity: Emperor, Church and the West, By Harry J. Magoulias (Author), Wayne State University Press 1982.
210 Pages
Of interest to students of the Middle Ages, of the Byzantine world, of religion, and of art, this book describes the transformation of the Roman Empire from paganism into the Christian state of Byzantium.
In the fourth century, Roman imperial ideology was consciously recast into the official state religion of Christianity. Byzantine Christianity —all-embracing in its wedding of church and state in Christ and one of the most remarkable and unique religious systems in history—was Byzantium’s greatest creative contribution to mankind. Byzantine art became the handmaiden of theology.
This book is directed particularly to college students who have little background in these theological disputes and their profound historical consequences. It describes the development of theological doctrine and the factors leading to the fall and destruction of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204.
Harry J. Magoulias is professor of history at Wayne State University. He holds the Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, has been a research fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, and is the translator of Doukas’ Historia Turco-Byzantina, published by Wayne State University Press as Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks.
Preface
Byzantine studies in the United States are just now coming into their own. Countless numbers of Americans have never heard of Byzantium, and those who have frequently use the adjective Byzantine to connote intrigue of the worst and most sinister kind. When I went to high school no history teacher ever spoke of Byzantine culture and civilization. Indeed, they seemed to be as ignorant of the Byzantine empire as their students. Perhaps they had read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but they were convinced that in an empire of despotic and cruel emperors, corrupt eunuchs, benighted monks and cantankerous theologians forever engaged in abstruse religious controversies much too subtle to be useful, there was nothing that merited serious historical study. Even Byzantine art, with its blatant disregard of the most elementary principles of classical composition and perspective, only confirmed the general estimate of Byzantine civilization. It is now admitted that perhaps no other religious art in history has so well portrayed the miracle of the incarnation of the spiritual and the divine in material form.
In this work I have not tried to enumerate all the major contributions of Byzantium to the course of Western civilization. I have limited myself instead to a survey of Byzantine Christianity, Byzantium’s greatest creative contribution to mankind. The final chapter attempts to show how the fortuitous fusion of opposing religious, political, cultural and economic aims culminated in the destruction, by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, of the Byzantine state, the greatest and most enduring Christian empire the world has known.
In an age suddenly and rudely awakened to the need for ecumenism in political as well as religious affairs there is, I believe, a lesson to be learned from the mistakes and the successes of societies that, although separated from us in time and space, are still akin to twentieth-century society in the crucial problems posed by “alien” ideologies and in the desperate search to find the necessary condi-tions of coexistence. The failure to solve this problem has led, as this text shows, to the murder of some societies.
It is my hope that students of medieval history, political science and theology, as well as those hosts of students in the nation’s colleges of liberal arts, will find something of value here to enable them to better understand the world in which they live.
The extensive quotations of the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates, as well as the briefer portions of the historian Doukas and the mystics, St. Symeon the New Theologian and Nikolaos Kabasilas, have been translated by me. The sources of all other direct quotes can be found in the bibliography.
Harry J. MAcOovLias
Byzantine Christianity and The Imperial Cult
And thus, by the express appointment of the same God, two roots of blessing, the Roman empire, and the doctrine of Christian piety, sprang up together for the benefit of men. Eusebius of Caesarea, Tridecennial Oration (a.p. 335)
In the fourth century of our era Christian theology was to transform the pagan Roman empire into the Christian state of Byzantium. It was not only that the church was favored by the Emperor, Constantine the Great (324-337), but the imperial ideology itself was consciously Christianized and, consequently, Christianity soon became the official state religion. Byzantine theology, as it evolved, was all-embracing; the state and the church were wedded in Christ. As a result, the imperial cult had its own theology, ritual and iconography. In fact, it formed a close parallel to the divine cult of Christ, and in discussing their respective institutions it is often difficult to tell which came first. In any case, they mutually influenced each other. Therefore, a discussion of the Christian emperor is a must if we are to have an adequate understanding of Byzantine Christianity, one of the most remarkable and unique religious systems in history.
If one were to ask what was the cornerstone of the Byzantine state, the dominant element that set it apart in world history, the answer would be the role of the Christian emperor. To early and medieval Christians he was the central and harmonizing source of law, order, power and civilized life. Byzantium had no written constitution, and the special fascination of the study of its history is how this complex society adapted itself to ever-changing conditions while remaining in essence unchanged.
But to begin: How does a pagan empire become Christian? Unlike Islam, whose founder created a new society under Allah's law, Christianity emerged in a Greco-Roman world with extremely sophisticated legal, social and cultural institutions. If its political framework was Greek and Roman, its unique religious life was rooted in Palestine. With the conversion of Constantine the Great, the Greco-Roman and Jewish tradition had to be somehow amalgamated, a task successfully undertaken by Constantine’s contemporary, Eusebius.
PRE-CHRISTIAN BACKGROUND
Actually, the Roman emperors assimilated and developed ideas taken from the Hellenistic kings of the Near East, who in turn were influenced by Hellenic and Asiatic concepts. The Egyptians, the Mesopotamians and their successors the Persians had, from ancient times, looked upon the ruler as a father and shepherd to his people. For Homer, the king was a demigod, standing midway between gods and men. The Greeks had deified their heroes also, considering them to be godly men since one of their parents was a god; as demigods they were worshipped, and statues were erected as a part of their cult. Many of them were honored as founders of city-states.
When Alexander the Great conquered Greece, the Near East and parts of India, thereby creating a universal empire, it was natural for him and his successors to combine these ideas and to introduce the deification of the ruler as a political instrument aiming at the unification of such diverse subjects as Greeks, Persians, Syrians, Egyptians and Indians. Alexander was proclaimed by the Greek philosopher Callisthenes as the son of Zeus. Not only did the priest of the oracle of Ammon, god of Cyrene, announce at Siwah that Alexander was Ammon’s son, but as he had been crowned pharaoh in Egypt he was believed by the Egyptians to be the incarnation of Amon-Re, or Horus. If in Persia the king was not a god incarnate he was nonetheless endowed with the radiant spirit of Ahura-Mazda, the supreme God of Light whose indwelling brilliance dazzled ordinary men.
In the autonomous Greek city-states the critical problem was how to find a legal basis for the monarch’s exercise of extraconstitutional authority. As kings the Hellenistic rulers had no such authority, but as gods they had to be obeyed. Thus deification was the answer to the question of how to legalize absolutism. Democracy was feasible in the small, circumscribed, self-sufficient Greek polis, but no form of government other than an absolute monarchy could control vast territories whose populations were so heterogeneous and dissimilar. It was Ptolemy II (273-270 s.c.) who proclaimed himself and his consort Arsinoe gods and demanded worship from his subjects. While the ancient Greeks had declared deserving heroes gods after their death, the Hellenistic monarchs demanded deification in their lifetime. Aristotle, Alexander's teacher, gave support to this practice by claiming that that individual in the state who is incomparably preeminent in virtue and political capacity “should be rated as a god among men.”
Plato’s ideal ruler was the philosopher-king, who would be both an original scientific thinker of the first order and a moral saint whose personal life would set the standard for the rest of society. Succeeding Greek scholars of the Hellenistic period further developed the theory that the king is to his people as the supreme deity is to the world. To them, the king was also the incarnation of the Logos, the divine spirit of universal reason, and consequently had the unique power to become mankind’s benefactor, shepherd, savior, preserver, god-manifest, father. If the king is a god he is also animate law (empsychos nomos), the source of all law in the state. As the animate constitution, the king was the unifying and binding element of the state.
The Stoics also supported the idea that monarchy is the best form of government and that the ideal monarch is he who rules in accordance with the Logos. They believed that such a king would rule in accordance with law for the benefit of all men as common citizens in an ecumenical state.
The Old Testament view of kingship is expressed in the Biblical verse, “I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee” (Ps. 2:7). The king is the “anointed of God” (Christos) and God is his father because the ruler personifies the Jewish nation. The New Testament picture of Christ as the king of all men reflects that view and those held by Jewish and Greco-Roman society at that time. Christ, as the anointed of God, is also god-manifest, savior and shepherd of his flock.
The position of the pagan Roman emperor as first developed by Augustus (27 B.c.-a.v. 14) was also subject to evolution. Because of Julius Caesar’s tragic failure to make himself a monarch, Augustus was compelled to maintain the fiction that he was preserving the Roman republic. His constitution was based on the sovereignty of the Roman people, which was then delegated to two agents, the princeps (Augustus as the first citizen) and the senate. The princeps was constitutionally a magistrate despite the extent of the dictatorial powers and divine honors accorded him. His dignity was for life and was not hereditary. Not only could it be revoked by the senate, he could theoretically be put to death and subjected to a damnatio memoriae, in which case his name would be effaced from all public monuments.
Legally, the princeps’ authority was based on the combination of the several magistracies he held: The imperium, bestowed either by the army by acclamation or by the senate by decree, made him imperator, the supreme commander of the army. Tribunician power, conferred by senatorial decree and confirmed by the assembly of the people in Rome, enabled the princeps to convoke and preside over the senate and to veto its decisions. As censor he could modify the membership of the senate to his liking, and as pontifex maximus he presided over the official cult. Since theoretically the princeps’ power was transmitted to him by the people, he also became the source of law.
Once again deification became an instrument of political expediency. Augustus had the assassinated Julius Caesar proclaimed divine. Tiberius (14-37) did the same for Augustus after his death, and this remained the custom until] Domitian (81-96) assumed the title of lord and god in his own lifetime.
By the third century one disaster after another overtook the Roman empire, and almost by necessity the Augustan principate evolved into a military despotism. Civil wars convulsed the empire.
and its once vaunted unity was lost temporarily. Invaders swarmed over the defenseless frontiers along the Rhine, the Danube and the Euphrates. As if this were not enough, plague decimated the empire’s population from seventy to fifty million.
Only a thoroughly militarized state with absolute authority could save the empire. Recovery finally began during the reign of Aurelian (270-275) who was justly called “Restorer of the World” because he defeated the barbarian Germanic tribes along the northern frontiers, recovered Gaul and reconquered the East. Aurelian attributed his victories to the invincible sun-god (Sol Invictus) and erected a temple to this supreme god, the new “lord of the Roman empire.” Sol Invictus, believed to have given military victories to the Roman troops, was now claimed to be the source of the emperor’s authority and his divine protector. Coins were minted with an inscription declaring Aurelian “born lord and god.” The doctrine of the divine right of kings had come into being.
The idea that the emperor had a divine companion (comes) was a traditional element of great importance. Those mortals whom the Greek gods in Homer favored were protected and guided, but the emperors of the third century claimed to have come to power in the first place through the providence of a god. Diocletian (284 305) adopted Zeus as his guardian deity, while Constantine, before his conversion, claimed Apollo.
THE CHRISTIAN EMPEROR
One of the most momentous events in history was the conversion of Constantine to Christianity. Although it has been argued that the Roman empire had to become Christian and some emperor had to be converted, no historical law admits to such a necessity. In the empire of Persia Christian churches were established. There, as in the Roman empire, persecutions provided the same opportunity of increasing rather than diminishing the number of the faithful. Yet no Persian king was ever converted. Without royal favor the Christians remained a small minority, and Persia never became Christian although it turned Muslim as the result of Arab military conquest. Within three to four hundred years after the Christian lands of Syria, Egypt, Palestine and North Africa fell under Muslim domina-tion in the seventh century, Christians had become an insignificant minority once more (merely by social pressure, for persecution was rare in Muslim lands). Moreover, when Constantine chose Christianity the Roman senate, the army, and the vast majority of the population in the western parts of the empire were devoted pagans. To the title Peer of the Apostles (Isapostolos), which the Greek Orthodox Church has bestowed upon him, Constantine had a certain claim, for his career profoundly influenced the history of the church and the future of Christianity.
Obviously, the conversion of the pagan emperor Constantine to Christianity posed a peculiar problem to Christian political theorists. The pagan emperor, as we have seen, was finally regarded as one more deity in the pantheon, but one who ruled under the special auspices of the supreme god. What was to be the role of the Christian emperor in this scheme? Christians worshipped only one God, the supreme ruler of the universe, whose kingdom extended over both heaven and earth. The conversion of the Roman emperor required a new definition of his position and function as the ruler of the state. Only a Christian scholar who had studied the pagan philosophers and who, as a result of personal experience, had valuable insight into political questions could provide this definition. Such a man was Eusebius, the metropolitan bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and a close friend and adviser of Constantine. Fortunately, the oration Eusebius composed on the occasion of Constantine’s thirtieth anniversary as emperor was preserved for therein we find the fullest and most important single statement of the new Christian political theory. By Christianizing pagan political concepts Eusebius created a unique ideology.
The Platonic ideal, the Hellenistic Logos and the Roman comes were all fused with the concept of the Christian God. In the theory of Hellenistic kingship, the ruler was both an imitation of the supreme deity and the incarnation of that deity’s guiding spirit. If the supreme deity was the archetype of the true king, the Logos was the ruler’s necessary guide. It is not at all difficult to adapt this Hellenistic framework to Christian political ideology. The Christian God simply replaced the pagan supreme deity as the ruler of the universe; as such he was regarded as the source of imperial power. The Stoic Logos had already been adapted in the Gospel of St. John to designate Christ as the Word (Logos), the second person of the Holy Trinity. The Logos of the Christian Trinity was equated with the comes, the emperor’s divine companion who gives him both power and responsibility.
Eusebius next resorted to the Platonic world of ideas to establish the proper relationship between the Kingdom of Heaven and the earthly kingdom and between the King of Heaven and the earthly king. Thus the earthly kingdom is but the mirror-reflection of the Platonic reality, which is the divine kingdom in heaven. The function of the Christian emperor is to prepare his subjects on earth and then to lead them into the Kingdom of God. “And so adorned with the image of the kingdom of heaven, Constantine looks up at the archetypal form [in heaven] and governs those below in accord with it. He is strong in his conformity to the divine monarchical power,” writes Eusebius in his Oration.
Eusebius then goes on to delineate the emperor's function from the perspective of the divine. God, he maintains, directly teaches and discloses to Constantine the mysteries of His sacred truths and secret wonders. It is true that God alone is perfectly good and strong, “the begetter of justice, the father of reason and wisdom, the spring of light and life, the treasurer of truth and virtue, and the author of kingship itself and of all rule and authority.” Since the emperor, however, is the mediator between God and man, he possesses all these virtues automatically. Eusebius stresses that the emperor “moulds his soul by means of royal virtues to a representation of the kingdom above.” What Eusebius is saying is that the emperor, as vicegerent of God, has universal power and universal responsibility. The earthly ruler, beloved of God, “bears the image of the highest kingdom. By imitation of the greater king [God], he steers in a straight course all things on earth.” Almost a Messiah figure, the emperor singlehandedly defeats the earthly forces of evil. The emperor is the elect of God because the empire represents the divine plan, God’s ultimate victory over evil. Theoretically, the Christian empire is coextensive with the inhabited civilized world (oikoumene); outside the empire there is nothing but disorder, chaos and barbarism.
The Kingdom of Heaven, like its counterpart on earth, is governed by the supreme monarch, God “the Almighty King,” and has a pyramidal, hierarchical structure. Outside it is the chaotic domain of Satan and his demons. Monarchy, consequently, is the ideal form of government. A democratic government on earth would be as unthinkable as a heaven governed not by God but by a parliament of angels. Democracy, in these terms, represents anarchy and chaos.
ATTRIBUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN EMPEROR
After the extinction of the Theodosian dynasty in the fifth century a religious coronation was introduced to enhance the prestige and legitimacy of the emperor. The first instance of a religious coronation recorded is that of Leo I (457-474) who was crowned by the patriarch of Constantinople in 457. Following the outdoor military ceremony during which Leo received the diadem from the hands of a representative of the army, the new emperor proceeded to the Great Church of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom). Taking the diadem from his head he placed it on the holy altar; after a passage from the Holy Gospels was read, Patriarch Anatolios (449-458) placed the diadem back on the emperor’s head. In Byzantium, it should be noted, ecclesiastical consecration, a usage that became sanctified by custom, followed the assumption of full imperial power by the emperor.
Whatever the means of access to the throne, whether by election, association or revolution, the emperor was elevated infinitely higher than simple mortals. In acclaiming him the army, senate and people were merely ratifying the divine will; the emperor was “crowned by God.” This superhuman relationship of the emperor to God, his divine election, is no better expressed than in the preface of the De administrando imperio, written by the Emperor Constantine VII (913-959) for the instruction of his son Romanos II (959-963):
And the Almighty shall cover thee with His shield... .Thy throne shall be as the sun before Him, and His eyes shall be looking towards thee, and naught of harm shall touch thee, for He hath chosen thee and set thee apart from thy mother’s womb, and hath given unto thee His rule as unto one excellent above all men, and hath set thee as a refuge upon a hill and a statue of gold upon a high place, and as a city upon a mountain hath He raised thee up, that the nations may bring to thee their gifts and thou mayest be adored of them that dwell upon the earth.
The Byzantine conviction of the interpenetration between heaven and earth was so profound that acclamations frequently stated that the emperor reigned jointly with Christ. Also the emperor occupied only the left side of his throne, as the right was left empty for Christ, his co-ruler. Because of the emperor's unique relation to God, with whom he shared the government of the world, the emperor was described as sacred and divine. Everything connected with his person partook of this sanctity—the palace, his vestments, the imperial properties. Those persons who received gifts or insignia of office from the emperor had to do so with covered hands (a custom borrowed from the Persians) to avoid imperial contact with the hands of ordinary mortals. With Diocletian it became obligatory for all persons approaching the sacred emperor to kneel in adoration before him. It was Justinian, however, who insisted on prostration and kissing of the feet. At the same time he required for himself the title of despot which denoted the relationship of master to slave as did the physical act of prostration.
It was Emperor Heraclius (610-641) who first adopted officially the Greek title of basileus to designate emperor. The only other sovereign who was allowed the title of basileus was the king of Persia. However, after the Muslim conquest and the disappearance of the last Persian monarch, the Byzantine emperor remained the only basileus on earth. In general the Byzantine chancellory refused to use this form of address for any foreign prince, preferring in its relations with the West to use the neutral title rex while all other tulers were styled archon or governor. The Greek titles basileus, despot and autokrator all point to the autocratic and absolute power of the Byzantine monarch.
Constantine the Great called himself the “bishop (episkopos ) of those outside the Church” while other emperors were honored with the liturgical titles of priest and high-priest. Indeed, the Byzantine emperor had certain liturgical privileges. He had the right to enter the sanctuary reserved for the clergy and for those in minor orders; he could preach to the congregation; he gave himself communion in the manner of the clergy; he censed the icons and the congregation with the censer and blessed the congregation with the three-candle and two-candle candelabra (symbolizing the Holy Trinity and the two natures of Christ), a prerogative of bishops. However, it must be remembered that the emperor was not ordained to the priesthood. Only priests and bishops could celebrate the sacraments of the church. The boundary was clearly defined and could not be crossed: although the emperor was not an ordinary layman, he was also not a priest.
Thus the conviction in the interpenetration of the heavenly and earthly kingdoms, the joint reign of emperor and Christ, the indivisibility of empire and church assured the emperor that in his struggle to defend the Christian state against the barbarian enemy divine assistance would never be lacking. On his way to give battle to the usurper Maxentius in 312 at the Milvian bridge, Constantine was promised victory as the result of a divine vision. Eusebius, who records this famous incident in the Life of Constantine, assures us that he heard this story from Constantine himself.
He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens against the sun and bearing the inscription “In this sign conquer.” At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also, which followed him on this expedition, and witnessed the miracle.
This is a most revealing passage. The cross is called a trophy, a monument or military symbol of victory, and the emperor is promised victory if he uses the symbol of the cross. Constantine also told Eusebius that the same night of the miraculous vision “the Christ of God appeared to him with the same sign he had seen in the heavens, and commanded him to make a likeness of that sign which he had seen in the heavens, and to use it as a safeguard in all engagements with his enemies.” The cross was called the victory-giving symbol. If the cross symbolized Christ’s victory over death, the prince of darkness, it also signified the emperor’s triumph over the barbarian enemy. This idea was also conveyed in the many representations of the emperor showing him holding the orb of the earth surmounted by the cross.
By Christianizing another pagan principle the Byzantine emperor was to secure added assistance on his military campaigns. The pagan Roman emperor was always accompanied by Victoria, the goddess of victory; Victoria was merged with Venus Victrix. These feminine principles were easily replaced by the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God (Theotokos), who became associated with the imperial victories. In 610 when Heraclius appeared before Con-stantinople at the head of a fleet determined to overthrow the tyrant Phokas (602-610), he had attached icons of the Virgin Mary to the masts of his warships. Henceforth, the Theotokos became the patroness and protectress of Constantinople.
All subsequent victories were attributed to the Blessed Virgin who, it was believed, would never abandon the city of Constantinople in which she actually dwelled. Together with the cross, the holy icon of Theotokos called the Hodegetria, meaning the leader, became the trophy of victory par excellence. Thus the pagan Roman belief in the emperor’s divinely predestined victory was Christianized and remained an essential aspect of the imperial mystique.
When the Emperor John II Komnenos (1118-1143) returned victorious from his campaign in Anatolia against the Turks, he decided to celebrate his victory with a triumphal procession into Constantinople. He ordered a chariot fashioned of silver and embellished with semiprecious stones. This historic event is described by Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates.
On the day that the triumph was to take place, purple-bordered and gold-embroidered veils adorned the boulevards. Nor were the likenesses of Christ and the saints, as many as were embroidered by the hand of the loom on frames which, as it was said, appeared to be alive and not inwoven, missing from these places. These things were worthy of wonderment as were the wooden scaffolds and platforms set up on either side of the triumphal way. The regions of the city, prepared in this fashion, extended from the eastern gates of the city to the Great Palace itself. And indeed the exquisitely fashioned chariot was pulled by four beautifully maned horses whiter than snow. Having given up his own place on the chariot the Emperor mounted on it the icon of the Theometor [God’s Mother] in which he rejoiced ...and ascribing the victories to her as the unconquerable general, and having given the reins to be held by his most powerful officials. And having directed his relatives to attend the chariot on either side, he himself preceded, holding in his hands the Crucifix and travelling over the route on foot; and having entered the Church named for the Wisdom of God [Hagia Sophia] and having rendered thanks to the Lord God before all the people for his achievements he thus directed himself to the palace.
The festivities were then continued with chariot races in the hippodrome. The hippodrome was actually the center of the imperial cult. All public life, in fact, gravitated here. The Blue, Green, White and Red stable factions, called demes and representing the popular parties of Byzantium up to the ninth century, were officially incorporated by the imperial government to participate in all state ceremonies, and their stations and functions in the hippodrome were spelled out in detail in the Byzantine ceremonial code. In the ritual of the imperial cult they chanted special hymns on behalf of the emperors.
Whether it was an audience for foreign ambassadors, a procession to the Great Church of Hagia Sophia and the celebration of a special feast day, a magnificent banquet given in the Hall of the Nineteen Couches or games in the hippodrome, every gesture of the emperor was minutely prescribed, as were those of all who participated.
The intricate, complex, colorful and magnificent court ritual was the externalization of the imperial majesty and served as a propaganda mechanism. The emperor's daily life had to conform to the strictest regimen. “For just as a body that is not elegantly formed but consists of disproportionate members may be justly described as disorderly, so the emperor's conduct, if it is not carried out in an orderly fashion, will not differ at all from the life of a private individual,” writes the Emperor Constantine VII in the preface of the De ceremoniis (Le Livre des Cérémonies), his compilation of court ceremonies. By collecting the proper rituals, he goes on, we may “represent the harmonious motion of the Creator’s universe; the imperial dignity will appear nobler to the subjects and therefore sweeter and more admirable.”
There was a prescribed ceremony for every important event in the life of the imperial family from birth to death. For example, on the birth of a son and successor in the purple chamber of accouchement, special prayers of thanksgiving were offered. Eight days later, when the newborn infant received his Christian name, the imperial couple sent blossoming branches to the nobility as a special invitation to attend the solemn occasion and the banquet that followed.
The sanctuary of the imperial cult, of course, was the sacred palace. The main audience hall, the Chrysotriklinos, was built exactly like a church, with a cupola over a cross-in-square foundation. Instead of an altar in the east end (apse), there stood the emperor's throne. In the case of an audience meant to impress and awe foreign ambassadors, the emperor was enthroned under a canopy like the ciborium standing over the altar of a church. It is worthwhile to cite here the description of such an audience granted to Liutprant, Bishop of Cremona (described in his Works), who came to Constantinople in 949 as the envoy of Berengar II:
Before the emperor’s seat stood a tree, made of bronze gilded over, whose branches were filled with birds, also made of gilded bronze, which uttered different cries, each according to its varying species. The throne itself was so marvellously fashioned that at one moment it seemed a low structure, and at another it rose high into the air. It was of immense size and guarded by lions, made either of bronze or of wood covered over with gold, who beat the ground with their tails and gave a dreadful roar with open mouth and quivering tongue. Leaning upon the shoulders of two eunuchs I was brought into the emperor’s presence. At my approach the lions began to roar and the birds to cry out, each according to its kind.... So after I had three times made obeisance to the emperor with my face upon the ground, I lifted my head, and behold! the man whom just before I had seen sitting on a moderately elevated seat had now changed his raiment and was sitting on the level of the ceiling.
The splendor and opulence of the imperial palaces, the awesome imperial! audience, the colorful processions and impressive and complicated church ceremonies, the hippodrome games, the lavish imperial banquets, the exquisite beauty of official costumes and the refinement and sophistication of Byzantine etiquette all had but one end: to demonstrate the superiority of Byzantine civilization to the rest of the world, to show that the emperor, God’s vicegerent on earth and the sun around which Byzantium revolved, was far superior to all the other kings and rulers of the civilized world.
THE PROBLEM OF CAESAROPAPISM
As a Christian emperor Constantine believed himself responsible for keeping the peace within the church; perversion in doctrine might lead to God’s wrath and result in the physical ruin of the state. This was a problem with which the pagan emperors never had to deal.
Christians were periodically persecuted by pagan authorities, but this was because their refusal to accept the political ideology of the Roman state by recognizing the emperor as a deity was construed to be an act of treason. The revolutionary introduction of the concept of orthodoxy, the insistence on the “correct” and “true” faith as opposed to all other “corrupt” faiths made the state vulnerable to the disrupting ills of heresy. Although the Roman pantheon had no difficulty welcoming and including one more god, the exclusion of all deities but the one true God created new problems and required a radically new attitude toward the world and man’s role in history.
Constantine was soon made aware of the new ramifications of his function as a Christian emperor. In a letter concerning the Donatist controversy in North Africa, a dispute over the validity of the sacraments of those clerics who had surrendered church books and holy vessels to the pagan authorities during the persecutions, Constantine wrote:
And all these quarrels and wrangles might well rouse God not only against the human race, but also against me, to whose rule and care his holy will has committed all earthly things. ...I shall never rest content or expect prosperity and happiness from the Almighty’s merciful power until I feel that all men offer to the All Holy the right worship.
The pagan Roman emperor also had been both the chief religious functionary of the state (pontifex maximus) and the secular ruler, but there had been no question of a pagan church and pagan orthodox doctrine. The Constantinian Peace, however, brought with it a new dimension to the supreme responsibility of the emperor on earth. The Christian monarch, as Constantine clearly understood, was also responsible for the well-being of the Christian church; and the welfare of the church was viewed as inextricably bound to the destiny of the state.
Heretofore, Christian society had been alienated from the Roman state—at best ignored and at worst persecuted for treason. With Constantine's conversion, Christianity became the norm, a unity embracing all aspects of Greco-Roman civilization. The tables had been turned and paganism was on the defensive.
As vicegerent of God, if no longer a deity himself, Constantine looked upon his function vis-a-vis the church as comparable to that of the bishop; he was charged with the conversion of non-Christians in the empire. This new Christian political ideology was to have far-reaching consequences for the future development of churchstate relations. The point here is that the fourth-century church, emancipated and favored by the emperor, officially recognized his responsibility in church affairs. The Christian Roman empire was a unity, and no firm division between church and state was conceived. The church was bound by its great debt to the emperor and honored him for his great services to the Christian cause.
This brings us to one of the most controversial topics of medieval history. Some Western scholars, whose attitudes have been colored by their Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic backgrounds, have accused the Byzantine emperors of being guilty of Caesaropapism. The term itself was coined in the West and discloses a special bias, implying that the Byzantine emperor exercised absolute control over the church, even in matters of doctrine. The claim that the Byzantine emperor was both Caesar and pope is misleading. No pope, in the course of Byzantine history, had the authority, outside an ecumenical council, to pronounce alone on dogma. When certain emperors did interfere in church affairs they did so because they conceived such action to be their prerogative as supreme ruler and vicegerent of God, and not because their authority usurped that of any pope. The foremost duty of the Byzantine emperor, as we have seen, was to lead his subjects to God and to guard the purity of the true faith.
It is undeniable that the emperor appointed and deposed patriarchs, altered the boundaries of ecclesiastical jurisdictions and legislated on behalf of good order and discipline concerning clerics, monks and church institutions. But could the emperor, on his own authority, pronounce on dogmatic truths? This alone is the crucial issue because the church accepted his power to do all the rest.
Dogma is based on what the Greek church calls Holy Tradition. Holy Tradition, as distinct from the many and varied local traditions, includes the Holy Scriptures, the authoritative theological writings of the great church fathers, and the elements of faith set down and formulated by the first seven ecumenical councils. In this crucial sphere of the formulation of dogma, it was not the emperor who was charged with this prerogative but the bishops in ecumenical councils under the infallible guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Even the despotic Justinian, when trying to formulate dogma on his own, was finally compelled to convoke the Fifth Ecumenical Council to confirm his pronouncements. “It has always been the practice of our orthodox and imperial forefathers,” he writes in a letter to the Ecumenical Council of 553, “to counter every heresy as it arose through the instrumentality of the most zealous priests assembled in councils and to keep the Holy Church of God in peace by sincere preaching of the true faith.” The authoritarian iconoclast emperors also felt the need to convoke councils (albeit packed ) to give the semblance of official sanction to their dogmatic views.
The first seven ecumenical councils, it must be understood, were convoked neither by the pope nor by the eastern patriarchs but by the Byzantine emperors. The emperor or his representative, in fact, presided over the proceedings, a usage inaugurated by Constantine himself. These councils of bishops were regarded as a kind of ecclesiastical senate, and the same procedure was applied to them as was followed in the Roman senate. It should be recalled that the emperor did not vote with the senators and that it was this limitation that saved the principle that the definition of faith, the formulation of dogma, is solely the prerogative of bishops. The emperors, however, signed the decisions of the councils and proclaimed them law binding on every Christian throughout the empire. Again, the validity of the ecumenical council depended upon the presence of the patriarchs of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem or their representatives.
The emperor, it is true, might exercise undue influence and pressure on the bishops who sat in the church councils. But the views of the majority of both clergy and laity could not be defied by even the most authoritarian emperor, and more than once the will of the people overturned the decisions reached by the bishops. When at the end of the empire’s life two emperors packed the Council of Lyons in 1274 and the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439 with Greek bishops who agreed to vote on union with Rome, the masses in Byzantium, both churchmen and laymen, refused to accept the councils’ decisions subjecting the Greek church to the papacy. In the fifteenth century the true defenders of the faith, the repository of orthodoxy, proved to be neither the emperor nor the bishops, but the laity and the clergy, who together constituted the conscience of the church. The emperor, we may conclude, could not formulate dogma ex cathedra.
Chapter 2
Byzantine Christianity and The Heresies
In the Greco-Roman world, the problem of how best to rule an extensive empire, composed of heterogeneous populations, was finally resolved in favor of divine monarchy. In the fourth century, as we have seen, the role of the Christian emperor was conceived as a mirror image reflecting God in the Kingdom of Heaven. On earth, the Christian basileus was God’s vicar.
The idea of a universal government appointed by God for the benefit of all men was paralleled by the concept of one church and one faith established by Christ for the salvation of all mankind. In other words, the church and the empire were coextensive. If the empire had to defend itself against its external foes, the barbarians, the church also had to deal effectively with her enemies, the heretics, the dissenters or sectarians. Should the purity of the faith be jeopardized, the consequences would be fateful for the destiny of the empire. As Constantine I was soon to learn, the question what constitutes “right worship” had no easy answer. The heated political controversies of the classical Greeks were succeeded by incandescent theological disputes in the Greek East.
A true or correct opinion had always been the ideal of the ancient Greeks. They were the first people on the stage of history to use reason (dialectic) to scrutinize, classify, criticize and evaluate all existing political and ethical systems. From the Greek ortha dokein comes the concept orthodox, all-important to the Christian empire.
To transgress the proper limits of anything was considered to be the sin of hubris for the ancient Greeks, and nemesis, its punishment, was sure to follow. For the church, theological hubris became heresy, transgression against the true faith, which was punished by anathematization or excommunication in church councils. For the Christian empire whose material well-being depended on orthodoxy, heresy was tantamount to treason.
Latin and Greek Christians, however, began early to diverge in matters of theological emphasis, customs and usages. The critical question was soon raised: What is the exact relationship between Christian faith and Greek reason? The Latin Tertullian (ca. 160230) had asked rhetorically: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” Evidently, he thought, nothing. The fathers of the Greek East thought differently. They contended that the divine revelations unfolded in Holy Scripture needed to be probed and interpreted in order to give them their full meaning. The monumental task set before the church was to define clearly the limits bounding the essence of the Christian message within which reasoning may move freely without ceasing to be Christian. This is what the Greek fathers accomplished.
Indeed they sought to raise faith to knowledge with the use of Greek philosophy. A valuable source for this attitude is St. Basil’s short treatise, How the Young Can Profit from Greek Literature. “Just as we avoid the thorns when we cut the flower of the rosebush,” he writes, “in like manner we must protect ourselves from that which is damaging, picking only the beneficial fruit of Greek literature.” St. Gregory of Nazianzos adds:
Thus we have retained from pagan culture whatever is the study and theory of truth; whatever, however, leads to demons, to deceit and the abyss of destruction we have repelled. But all, even their deceits, are useful to our piety, for they make us know the good by antithesis with evil, for with their weakness they strengthen our teaching. We must not condemn knowledge, therefore, because some would have us do so.
Thus, in the Greek East from the fourth century on, the classics became the possession of both pagans and Christians.
Two important theological schools had very early emerged: one in Alexandria and the other in Antioch. The question on which they were most divided was: “Where ought we to seek the essence of religious faith—in the spirit or the letter of Scriptures?” Alexandria opted for the spirit and Antioch for the letter.
The Catechetical School of Alexandria, which was elevated to a theological school by Pantainos (died 202) at the end of the second century, was characterized by freedom in thought, the elevation of faith to knowledge through philosophy and use of the allegorical method in the study of Scriptures. These methods, of course, were not new; the Stoics had used them in interpreting Homer, and Philo of Alexandria (30 B.c.—a.p. 50) had employed them in his attempt to use Greek philosophy to interpret Judaism to his contemporaries.
Allegory, one of this group’s major tools, goes beyond the immediate meaning of a word to its deeper, hidden meaning. This comprehension of Holy Scriptures in their “ineffable and mystical and difficult meaning” is no easy matter. Origen (died 254), a successor of Pantainos, concluded that there are three levels of meaning in the Bible: first, the somatic or literal (this is the body, so to speak, of Holy Scriptures); second, the psychical or ethical; third, the pneumatic or mystical and prophetic. These levels can also be used to represent the three categories of Christians, proceeding from the simple believer to the perfect Christian who fully comprehends the spirit of scripture. To understand fully both somatic and psychical levels, however, one must work back from the highest (pneumatic) stage. Here is an example of how Greek philosophy is used to give a Christian interpretation to an Old Testament text. Clement of Alexandria (died 220), who also followed Pantainos, writes: “Moses, certain that it will never be possible to know God through human wisdom, cries out, ‘Appear unto me my God,’ and the Divine Voice is quickly lost in the darkness from whence it came.” But what is this darkness? Clement says, “It is the ineffable and formless idea of being, for indeed God is not found in darkness or in space but beyond space and time and the quality of things.” Thus does Clement describe the appearance of God to Moses in the burning bush.
As opposed to the theological school of Alexandria, which favored the interpretative method, the School of Antioch, founded in 260, adopted the grammatico-historical approach. Staying as close as possible to the letter of the text, the followers of this school rejected allegorical meanings and concerned themselves with the immediate meaning of words. They sought the moral, historical and human elements in Holy Scripture, preferring to eschew the mystical aspects of the Christian faith. Their methodology, in fact, led to rationalism. It is important to note that with the exception of the Alexandrian Origen, all the great heretics of the church came from the theological school of Antioch. The most complete interpretation of Scriptures, one might add, requires the combination of both methods, textual criticism and allegory.
The originality of Byzantine culture is that it gave a new content to every element borrowed from Greek philosophy. There was a mutual influence: the Christian chose certain propositions from Greek philosophy, and these acquired a new content in their Christian synthesis. At the same time, these propositions opened new horizons of thought.
The pivotal issue of Byzantine Christianity was the person of Christ. All the major Christian heresies dealt with by the first seven ecumenical councils centered on the second person of the Holy Trinity, the Logos, or the Word, that became incarnate as Jesus Christ. What was the exact relationship between Christ’s humanity and his divinity? Was Jesus a deified man, a humanized god or perfect God and perfect man at the same time? For several centuries this cardinal problem of definition convulsed the church. Consequently, the one church was fragmented.
Sectarians, it must be remembered, are always “orthodox” in their own eyes. And when emperors joined them and gave them their official support and delivered over to them the major episcopal sees, they constituted, for a time, the established church. To avoid misunderstanding, however, by “orthodox” we shall mean that party which adhered to the definitions and doctrines formulated by the seven ecumenical councils beginning in 325 and ending in 787. Thereafter, we shall distinguish between the Greek (Orthodox) Church of the Byzantine empire and the Roman or Latin Church of the West.
ARIANISM
The first great religious crisis in the fourth century was initiated by a priest in Alexandria whose name was Arius (256-336). His doctrine was therefore called Arianism. A speculative thinker, Arius put forward a teaching that led to a quarrel with his bishop, Alexander. If God is a divine unity with no parts, no passions and emotions, how can Christ be divine also? If Christ is the incarnate Word of God, argued Arius, he must be a radiation from God— divine, in a sense, but not as divine as God. Christ must be subordinate to God since his nature must of necessity differ from the nature of God.
Arius was a well-trained theologian; he had been the student of the founder of the theological school of Antioch, St. Lucian, a martyr in the persecution of 312. His doctrine caused rioting in the streets, and the brilliant Athanasius (ca. 293-373), Bishop Alexander's archdeacon and protégé, opposed Arius by contending that Christ’s nature is the same as God’s. God is man (Christ) who is fully God. Compromising his former position, Arius emphasized not the differences in the natures of Christ and God but their similarity. Arius introduced the term homoiousion, meaning that Christ is of like essence or substance with the Father. The Athanasians used the term homoousion, meaning that Christ is of the very same essence or substance as the Father.
Constantine I was scandalized by the quarrel; the unity of the church was too important to allow this division to continue. The emperor dispatched his personal chaplain, Hosius, Bishop of Cordova in Spain, to Alexandria with a letter exhorting both parties to become reconciled for the sake of church unity. After all, or so thought the emperor, it was only a minor matter. It is all right for philosophers to discuss such issues, but they should not introduce them to the public. Constantine, no theologian himself, could not understand the issue’s implications, and his advice was rejected by both sides.
Let us now take a closer look at Arius’s teachings. Arius contended that “there was a time when Christ was not.” In other words, Christ was not eternal. Christ, he explains, was created out of nothing but before time. Since this is so, he was subsequent and inferior to God the Father; thus God was not always the Father. God cannot be a progenitor, said Arius, since this involves passion; God is impassible. Arius preferred, therefore, to think of God as a creator who brought Christ into being out of nothing as the first fruit of all creation. Christ was made of matter and consequently could not be of the same nature or essence as God. Such a Christ, who was not of the same substance as the Father but created out of nothing, could never know God perfectly. Jesus is only figuratively “the son of God.” Christ can be thought of as God only by participation and as such he can be worshipped, but the essence of divinity Arius reserved for God alone.
The Athanasian party contended that Arius’s teachings were inconsistent and illogical. If Christ were a created being, then the Arians, by according him worship, were guilty of idolatry. If Christ is not of the same essence as God, then the Arians were guilty of destroying monotheism by worshipping him. By claiming that at the Incamation Christ had assumed a human body and soul and that the place of human reason was taken instead by the Divine Logos, the Arians had, in effect, repudiated the belief that the second person of the Holy Trinity had truly become man. The Arian Christ was neither perfect God nor perfect man. The emperor insisted on conciliation and wanted unanimous approval of the council's decision. He himself put forward the homoousion formula, supporting thereby the Athanasian party as orthodox. The doctrine that Christ is of the same essence as the Father preserved monotheism by declaring that the persons of the Holy Trinity shared in the divine essence. The bishops of the Council of Nicaea drew up a creed repudiating Arius’s propositions and stating the orthodox teaching of the church concerning the person of Christ. Those who refused to sign the Creed were exiled, and Arius’s books were ordered burned. The decisions of the Council were confirmed by the imperial signature and became a part of imperial legislation; heresy was now treason to the state.
Eusebius, a moderate Arian, described the Council as a unique episode in the history of the church. The Council of Nicaea, he claimed, was the work of God; it was a new Pentecost.
Unfortunately, the problem of Arianism was not definitively resolved at Nicaea. Constantine himself fell under the influence of the Arian bishop of Nicomedia. The emperor believed that peace could be restored to the church only if Arius were reinstated; it seemed as though Arius was finally to triumph. But while on his way to his acquittal, he died in a latrine from an intestinal rupture—a death, say his detractors, befitting his foul teaching! Paradoxically, Constantine, “Peer of the Apostles,” a saint of the Greek church, was baptized on his deathbed by Eusebius, the Arian bishop of Nicomedia.
Thanks to the Cappadocian Fathers—St. Basil the Great (ca. 330- 379), Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, St. Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 332-398), his eminent philosopher brother, and St. Gregory of Nazianzos (ca. 329-390), also called “the Theologian’—the orthodox finally won out. The Cappadocian Fathers, as they are known, used the “club of Greek philosophy” to beat down the Arians.
St. Gregory of Nyssa put a series of paradoxes before Arius’s successor, Eunomios (died ca. 393), Bishop of Cyzicus. The paradoxes are an example of St. Gregory’s extremely sophisticated logic. The Arians, as we have seen, claimed that God, as Father, must be prior to the Son who must logically come after; the Son cannot exist before the Father. In other words, there must be an interval of time between the two, Father and Son. The paradox then is this: if there is an interval of time between Father and Son, then God as Father must have a beginning in time and cannot be eternal. For example, if man was created five days after the creation of heaven, then five days prior, heaven did not exist; or again, if two roads are unequal and we place one on top of the other it becomes clear that one is longer than the other; the longer one has a beginning at a certain point and therefore must have a beginning in time. To maintain the eternity of the Father, however, we must eschew the idea of a beginning for the Son. In eternity, as in the Holy Trinity, there can be no beginning or end; there is no time in eternity; ideas of before and after are contingent upon time. Time and space, the created world, all came into existence simultaneously; there was no space or time prior to creation. Eternity is uncircumscribed, unlimited and not subject to the categories of space and time. In eternity all things are equally present, coeval. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot be divided by time and space. The Arians, however, admitted that Christ was not created in time but before all other creatures. They fell into irrationality, and Gregory won on a point of logic.
Eunomios also claimed that God, being unbegotten (ungenerate), could never be of the same essence as that which is begotten. St. Gregory replied: Adam was unbegotten since he was created; Abel was born of Eve and yet both Adam and Abel were men of the same essence or substance; hence, the Father is of the same substance as his only-begotten son Christ. Again, Eunomios was defeated by a master of logic.
Arianism did not have either social or nationalist overtones, but it did kindle, even in popular circles, this keen and almost allconsuming interest in theological subtleties that was to persist throughout Byzantine history. St. Gregory of Nyssa refers tartly to how the controversy of Arianism permeated all levels of Byzantine life: “If you ask how much something costs, they tell you about the Begotten or the Unbegotten. If you ask the price of bread, they reply, ‘The Father is greater and the Son is subordinate to Him.’ If you ask, ‘Is the bath ready? they reply, ‘The Son was made of nothing. ”
MACEDONIANISM
The Arian party next shifted its attack to the Holy Spirit. Macedonius, Patriarch of Constantinople (342-346; 351-360), whose heresy was called Macedonianism, challenged the orthodox regarding the third person of the Trinity. Is the Holy Spirit begotten or unbegotten? If either, how does he differ from the Father or the Son? To resolve this problem the orthodox resorted to the scriptural text: “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me” (John 15:26). Thus the Holy Spirit is neither a creature nor a son, since he is neither fashioned nor begotten. The Holy Spirit's mark of distinction is procession, which in itself is incomprehensible since it defies human thought. To use an inadequate simile, the Holy Spirit is comparable to the rays emanating from the sun. Travelling to earth they give off heat and promote life. At the same time, the rays are distinct from the sun, yet they are one in essence with it. So does the life-giving Spirit proceed from God the Father. The inter-relationship between the persons of the Trinity have now been defined. The Father is ungenerate or unbegotten and proceeds from no other source; he begets the Son before all ages and the Holy Spirit proceeds from him eternally. The paradox is that each of the three persons is fully God and, while distinct, contains the wholeness of the Godhead.
APOLLINARIANISM
Contemporary with Macedonianism was another heresy called Apollinarianism for its founder Apollinarius of Laodicea (died 390) who taught in Antioch. According to his doctrine, man is constituted of three distinct parts: body (soma), animal soul (psyche), and mind or reason (pneuma, nous). Christ, he contended, had no human mind and reason which could lead to sin and corruption. Its place was taken by the Logos. Thus Christ was the divine mind incarnate, a flesh-bearing God. He was a mean between God and man, neither wholly God nor wholly man but a mixture like that of black and white, which produces grey.
The attributes of both God and man according to Apollinarius are not destroyed or lost, just as mixing water and wine does not destroy their own peculiar qualities. The energy of the Godhead may operate either separate from, or in combination with, the flesh. Christ felt hunger only when the Godhead did not operate on the flesh. To explain how it was possible for Christ’s deified flesh to undergo the human experiences of birth, growth, hunger, crucifixion and death, Apollinarius resorted to the New Testament doctrine of kenosis. “[Christ Jesus], who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God but emptied himself, and took on him the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:67). Thus the Incarnation was an emptying out of God; Christ imposed limits upon himself.
Apollinarius refused to say that Christ was God dwelling in a man, because this would have meant there are two persons in Christ—God and a man. The doctrine of kenosis explained how the Godhead came into contact with human flesh; it was not a conversion of the flesh into divinity or a confusion of the two, but a voluntary limitation. The Godhead can never be contained within the body or reduced to corporeality. Even while on earth, Christ continued to be everywhere; his divinity was unimpaired but permitted him to yield to human modes of existence. The union is so complete that even though we can distinguish between divine and human attributes it is proper to associate them with one another. There is a sharing, an interchange of attributes. The body that the Logos assumed became part of the Lord, and the body’s properties also became the Lord’s, but neither is the divinity transformed into the flesh nor the flesh into the divinity. It is comparable to fire being applied to iron; the iron becomes red hot like fire but does not change its essence. The interchangeability of the divine and human attributes of Christ became the orthodox view.
It is true that Apollinarius’s system did preserve monotheism; it explained the unity of Christ’s person and it seemed to make salvation possible. If Christ had been merely a man in whom God dwelt, he could not have saved man from sin and death. Instead, Christ retained his full divine power and was not bound to a human mind chained to passion and emotion. The Divine Logos directs Christ in sinlessness; the conquest of sin in Christ could not have been effected had the Logos not acted in place of the human mind.
Thus Apollinarianism seems logical, but it too had serious defects. The humanity of Christ, as the orthodox party was quick to show, is completely compromised; Christ is less than human if he lacks human reason; consequently, Christ could not have redeemed man. St. Gregory of Nazianzos stated the orthodox position succinctly: “What Christ did not assume he could not redeem.”
Apollinarius, moreover, claimed that Christ had always been “the son of man”; he descended from heaven in the flesh and was not really derived from Mary. The flesh, therefore, existed before the Incarnation; the man Christ existed before all creation and before all ages. Yet Apollinarius insisted that the flesh of Christ is not consubstantial with God but is true human flesh. Having foreseen Adam’s sin, God provided for the incarnation and future sacrifice of his Son for man’s redemption.
Apollinarius introduced a monophysite view of Christ by holding that Christ was “one incarnate nature of God the Logos,” thereby rejecting the orthodox dyophysite position that Christ had two perfect natures, one divine and one human. He felt that the dyophysite view destroyed the unity of Christ’s person, splitting him into two persons. For Apollinarius “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14) meant only that God had assumed flesh, not that he had become true man.
Both Macedonius and Apollinarius, together with their heresies, were condemned by the Second Ecumenical Council, convoked in Constantinople in 381 by Emperor Theodosius I (879-395). The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed was then published and received the full weight of the emperor's authority.
The Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople also took an extremely important step concerning church administration. The third canon states: “The bishop of Constantinople shall rank next to the bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is New Rome.” It is important to note here that the ecclesiastical preeminence of both old Rome and new Rome (Constantinople) hinges not on their being apostolic foundations but on the fact that Rome was the capital of the empire in the past and that now Constantinople is the capital. It was the emperor's prerogative to alter the boundaries of ecclesiastical jurisdiction that allowed him to place the bishop of the imperial residence ahead of both Alexandria and Antioch in the hierarchical lists of precedence. The latter might chafe, but the emperor’s wishes had to be honored. The sees of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch were also raised to patriarchates at this council.
NESTORIANISM
While Arius contended that Christ was the first creature of God, deified but nonetheless inferior and subordinate to the Creator, Apollinarius taught that Christ was the Divine Logos who had voluntarily assumed an imperfect human nature. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, formulated by the First and Second Ecumenical Councils, vindicated the orthodox position that Christ was eternally begotten of the Father and not made, that he was true God and consubstantial with the Father. To counter Apollinarianism it specified that Christ was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man. Thus the dyophysite position won out over Apollinarius’s monophysite teaching. However, the exact relationship of the two natures in the one person of Christ, divine and human, had not yet been adequately worked out and defined.
For some fifty years following the Second Ecumenical Council there was relative peace in the church. During that time, the theological school of Antioch, in an attempt to clarify dyophysitism, concluded that the Christ who was born of Mary and who died on the cross was the man Christ and not the Divine Logos. As a result, a new period of turbulence was to embroil the church. The ensuing dispute, while doctrinal in essence, was also centered around the rivalry between the patriarchate of Alexandria and the upstart Constantinople, which had replaced Alexandria as second in rank next to Rome. At this time, the great theologian Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria (412-444), ruled his see as if he were a pharaoh.
In 428 Nestorius was elevated to the see of Constantinople; he was trained at Antioch and was a very subtle and acute theologian. He was also a man of violent temperament who made many enemies, among them the powerful Pulcheria, sister of Emperor Theodosius II (408-450) and the real power behind the throne. Nestorius began to teach that the Virgin Mary could not be called Theotokos, “Mother of God,” but should be referred to as Christotokos, “Mother of Christ,” the,man. Unfortunately for him, his views offended public piety and gave Cyril of Alexandria the excuse he needed to interfere in the affairs of Constantinople. Cyril first appealed to Celestinus I, Bishop of Rome (422-432), who joined forces with him. Then the Bishop of Alexandria accused Nestorius of cleaving Christ asunder and proclaimed his own doctrine that the two natures in Christ were fused into an indissoluble unity. At the Third Ecumenical Council in 431, Nestorius was accused of having taught that there were two sons, the Son of God and the Son of Mary.
Nestorius was probably misunderstood. He contended that every being has an ousia, or essence, which gives him life and being and every essence has a physis, or nature, which consists of attributes that make it distinctive. Essence and nature are correlative terms implying each other. To be known in its fullest sense the essence also has a prosopon, or undivided external appearance.
Both the man Christ and the Divine Logos have their own ousia, physis and prosopon. This is not like the soul and body; the body needs the soul that it may live and the soul needs the body that it may perceive. Humanity and divinity are whole natures independent and complete in themselves. They can neither change nor add to their being without altering it. How then can the union of the divine and human in Christ be adequately defined? Nestorius understood the Incarnation to mean that the human nature of Christ formed a distinct ousia alongside God the Word. His opponents took this to mean that there was no real unity between the two and accused him of creating a Quaternity in place of the Trinity. Repudiating this, Nestorius insisted that no one but He who was in the bosom of the Father came to earth and dwelt among men. The two natures, human and divine, existed without confusion: the divine nature, or Logos, begotten of God the Father, and the human nature, born of the Virgin Mary. But what kind of union is this when there are two essences, two natures and two persons? From the very moment that Mary conceived through the Holy Spirit, the man Jesus was united with the Divine Logos. The two prosopa merge and become identical. Nestorius flatly denied that there were two distinct persons. Man is known by his human prosopon or bodily form, but God is known by his name, “Creator,” and is confessed by man as God. When we put the two together, the divine and human prosopa, one person results, not two.
Perhaps Nestorius’s major fault was that he was too abstruse. The truth remains, however, that his teachings did offend the masses because of what seemed to them an unwarranted and unpardonable attack against Mary. As we have seen, Nestorius adamantly refused to call Mary Theotokos, “the Mother of God”; it is true that God passed through the womb of Mary but He certainly did not take his being from her, he logically argued. Mary gave birth to the man Christ and therefore must be called Christotokos, “the Mother of Christ.” It was not God but the son, Jesus, who was born; it is improper to speak of Mary as the “Mother of God”; after all, God was! Mary did not conceive God in her womb and give him his being. It is not right that one should say of God that he was suckled and was born of a virgin. We cannot say that God was two or three months old. Man is born and grows old, but not God! These are qualities of human nature; the ousia of God cannot be changed into the ousia of man. God is unchanging. The birth of Christ from a woman was a human birth; his generation from God the Father, however, is without beginning and therefore eternal. If this appears wholly reasonable the real difficulty was that Nestorius refused to admit that such was the intimacy of the human and divine natures that one could predicate of the human nature what is divine and vice versa; this latter was the orthodox position. It seemed that Nestorius was repudiating the doctrine of the “transfer of attributes.”
Cyril of Alexandria now moved in to condemn Nestorius for not accepting the “hypostatic” union which he himself advocated. This was due to a confusion of terms that at this early period were still ambiguous in the minds of theologians. The Greek term hypostasis was sometimes defined as ousia, essence or substance of the divinity, and sometimes as prosopon, the term for the individual persons of the Holy Trinity. The Cappadocian Fathers taught that there are three persons, or prosopa, in the one hypostasis of the divinity. Although Nestorius preached a prosopic union of the divine and human natures and Cyril taught hypostatic union, probably they both were talking about the same things.
To resolve the new religious crisis that had befallen the church, Theodosius II (408-450) convoked the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431. It was a complete shambles. Nestorius found himself outnumbered by Cyril's party, which was joined by the Bishop of Ephesus, Memnon, and by many of the bishops of Asia Minor. Nestorius was summarily condemned and deposed by about two hundred bishops in all. His own party, supported by John, Bishop of Antioch (428-441/2), and consisting of only forty-three bishops, made itself an anti-council and excommunicated Cyril and Memnon. Complete anarchy reigned in the streets of Ephesus. Theodosius II was on the side of his bishop Nestorius, but Cyril cunningly strengthened his position at court by a massive distribution of bribes to high officials and prominent ladies; he even borrowed 1500 pounds of gold to achieve his goal. In the end Nestorius was compelled to resign while Cyril returned to Alexandria with great pomp; the Church of Constantinople had been humbled.
Cyril of Alexandria accepted the view of the two natures in Christ, but there followed a curious forgery of documents with telling consequences. The followers of Apollinarius of Laodicea, whose teachings had already been condemned, now began to circulate their doctrines under the name of the great hero of Nicaea, St. Athanasius. Their special formula, as we have seen, was “One incarnate nature of God the Logos”; this had originally been rejected as seeming to deny the reality of the two natures. Cyril fell into the clever trap of the Apollinarians and espoused the alleged Athanasian formula. In order to make it acceptable to the orthodox, Cyril had to resort to some tortuous reasoning. He explained the formula as meaning that the two natures, divine and human, were fused into one incarnate nature. Cyril insisted that Mary be called Theotokos, since the human and divine natures were unified in one hypostasis; this is what he meant by the hypostatic union.
Cyril of Alexandria died in 444 and was succeeded by his nephew Dioscorus (444-451). At the imperial court in Constantinople, Dioscorus had his own partisan, the aged archimandrite Eutyches, the abbot of a monastery outside the capital. Eutyches used the formula adopted by Cyril and Dioscorus: “Before the union there were two natures; after the union there was one nature.” He also contended that the body of Christ is the body of God. “But I do not say,” he argued, “that the body of God is the body of Christ the man.” The body of Christ, moreover, according to Eutyches, was not consubstantial with our physical bodies. Eutyches’s teaching seemed heretical and totally unacceptable to the orthodox party. As before, Constantinople and Antioch made common cause; Alexandria, however, was winning the support of the monks of Syria and of Juvenal, the Bishop of Jerusalem (422-458), who wanted to liberate his see from the authority of the metropolitan bishop of Caesarea in Palestine.
In 448 Eutyches was summoned by the patriarch of Constantinople, Flavian (446-449), before a local council and was called upon to repudiate his false doctrines. He refused and consequently was pronounced a heretic for his admission that the two natures of Christ had become one after the Incarnation. Eutyches’s godson was the powerful court chamberlain, the eunuch Chrysaphios. The latter prevailed upon Theodosius II to convoke another council at Ephesus, but under the presidency of Dioscorus of Alexandria. In the meantime Flavian had won the support of the Bishop of Rome, Leo I the Great (440-461). In 449 Leo sent to Flavian his famous Tome in which he claimed that the Pope was entitled to resolve doctrinal quarrels by himself. He condemned the Alexandrian doctrine and stated that even after the Incarnation two natures ought to be distinguished in Christ.
In that same year the Council of Ephesus, called the Robbers Council, was attended by about one hundred forty bishops. It was an easy victory for Dioscorus and his forces. The papal legates were not even allowed to read Leo’s Tome; Eutyches was reinstated and Flavian was beaten and deposed and died shortly thereafter as the result of his mistreatment. It was a sad day for those who believed in the divine inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit. Pope Leo I protested and demanded the convocation of another council in Italy, but Theodosius II refused. In 450, however, the emperor was killed in a fall from his horse, and the imperial court policy changed radically.
The only surviving member of the Theodosian dynasty in the Greek East was Theodosius II’s sister, Pulcheria, then fifty-one years old and eager for power. She elevated Marcian (450-457), a retired army Officer, to the throne as her husband pro forma since she had taken a vow of chastity. A devout dyophysite, Pulcheria now reversed her brother's religious policy.
The Fourth Ecumenical Council was convoked in 451 at Chalcedon, located opposite Constantinople, where its proceedings could be strictly supervised by government officials and where imperial notaries could draw up the reports of the sessions. Nearly six hundred bishops were present and the council no longer had need to fear the attacks of fanatic monks. Dioscorus and a few of his partisans were deposed. The council, however, could not accept Leo’s Tome as a sufficient definition, as the papal legates had required. A compromise formula was accepted, based both on the Tome and on Cyril’s letters to Nestorius. To avoid the charge of Nestorianism the condemnation of Nestorius was repeated and a.clause was inserted in which the Virgin was expressly called Theotokos.
Christ is said to be perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body. He is begotten for all ages of the Father according to the Godhead and born of the Theotokos in latter times according to manhood. His two natures exist in his one person unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly and inseparably. The property of each nature is preserved, concurring in one person and not divided into two persons.
It was at Chalcedon that the title of patriarch was officially granted to the incumbent of the see of Jerusalem. Canon twentyeight of the Council of Chalcedon gave “equal privileges to the most holy throne of New Rome, rightly judging that the city which is honored with the Sovereignty and the Senate and enjoys equal privileges with the old Imperial Rome should in ecclesiastical matters also be magnified as she is, and rank next after her.” Not only did this canon place the patriarch of Constantinople on a footing of complete equality with the pope of Rome, it also granted him patriarchal rights in the provinces of Thrace, Asia and the Pontus. Leo I rejected this canon while accepting all the others. The importance of Constantinople, however, could no longer be seriously challenged.
The humiliation of the patriarch of Alexandria incensed not only the monophysite Copts, who were descended from the ancient Egyptians, but also large numbers of the Greek-speaking populace in Alexandria. The exiled Dioscorus was now replaced by the orthodox Proterius (451-457), but it took military force to install him on his throne. When the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Juvenal, was removed for the monophysite Theodosius the army again had to intervene and restore the orthodox patriarch to his throne.
In 457, the same year as the coronation of Emperor Leo I, a bloody monophysite revolution broke out in Alexandria. On Good Friday a raging mob assassinated the orthodox patriarch Proterius and installed in his place the monophysite Timothy the Cat (457460; 475-477). In the very same year the monophysite party took forceful possession of the Church of Edessa, and the Nestorian theologians who had settled there were forced to flee to Nisibis on the Persian frontier, where they founded the celebrated Nestorian School of Theology.
In Antioch in 469 the monophysite Peter the Fuller managed to seize the patriarchal throne from the Chalcedonian Martyrios (459-470), but only temporarily. Peter the Fuller popularized the monophysite creed by introducing into the liturgy as part of the Trisagion, the “Thrice-Holy Hymn,” the phrase “who hast been crucified for us.” The divine liturgy now became a battleground of the two theologies. Although the emperor continued the Chalcedonian policy, the monophysites continued to make progress during his reign.
In 474 the Isaurian Zeno (474475; 476-491) came to the throne. He realized that the divisive nature of the religious controversy posed a grave problem to the unity of the empire. Egypt and Syria and parts of Palestine and Asia Minor had grown in monophysite strength, while Italy, the Balkans, Constantinople, and most of Asia Minor were Chalcedonian. Henceforth, until the Arab conquests of the seventh century, the Byzantine emperors devoted all their energy to solving this singular problem in the vain attempt to find a compromise solution.
The orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, Acacius (472-489), and Peter Mongus (477; 482-489), the monophysite patriarch of Alexandria, now came together and made a joint effort to find a suitable compromise formula that might bring an end to the perilous dissension within the church. Emperor Zeno optimistically adopted their proposal and in 482 issued the famous “Act of Union” (Henotikon), which was addressed specifically to the churches subject to Alexandria. This document simply avoided mentioning the issue of the two natures in Christ. It declared that Christ was “of the same nature with the Father in the Godhead and also of the same nature with us in the manhood,” but the pronouncement made at Chalcedon concerning the exact definition of the two natures was bypassed. The Henotikon endorsed the first three ecumenical councils and condemned both Nestorius and Eutyches, but as for Chalcedon, the stumbling block, it merely stated that “Anyone who has taught otherwise, whether at Chalcedon or elsewhere, let him be anathema!” The creed of Chalcedon was not expressly rejected; neither were those who condemned Chalcedon. As often happens, this attempt at compromise satisfied only the moderates. The extremists of both parties rejected it outright.
There was one especially ominous consequence of the Henotikon, however. At Rome, Pope Felix III (483-492), dissatisfied with the Act of Union, called a council and excommunicated Acacius, the patriarch of Constantinople; in retaliation Acacius ceased to commemorate the pope in the diptychs of the church. This was the first serious breach between Constantinople and Rome and is known as the Acacian Schism; it lasted from 484 to 518. At this time both Antioch and Alexandria were occupied by pure monophysites.
Zeno’s successor was Anastasius I (491-518), who proved to be an ardent monophysite. The kind of monophysitism he professed was not, however, the extreme doctrine of Eutyches, but a moderate version preached by Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (512-518), the most outstanding religious figure of his time. Severus was neither an Egyptian, nor a Syrian, but a Greek from Pisidia; and he wrote his theological tracts in Greek. His doctrine was essentially the same as that of Cyril; for him, too, Christ was not conceivable as a Savior if He had not suffered as a man. But he also confused the concepts of physis and hypostasis and accused the orthodox of dividing the person of Christ, which appeared very persuasive to the common masses. Anastasius’s steady support of the monophysites alienated the orthodox populace of Constantinople, and several bloody revolts broke out.
In 518 Justin I (518-527) succeeded Anastasius as emperor. Justin was a dyophysite, and one of the very first acts of his administration was to terminate the Acacian Schism. Union with Rome was obtained on the condition that all monophysite bishops be expelled from their sees. Moreover, the names of the emperors Zeno and Anastasius as well as those of the Constantinopolitan patriarch Acacius and his successors were erased from the diptychs of the church. The fortunes of the patriarch of Constantinople depended always on the religious persuasion of the emperor.
Justin I was not only illiterate but he soon became senile, and the administration of state affairs fell to his brilliant nephew Justinian I (527-565). In 527 Justinian succeeded his uncle as emperor. More than any of his predecessors, Justinian took seriously his role as defender of the church. His major concern was to find some way to reconcile the dyophysite and monophysite parties. He thought that his adoption of the Theopaschite (God-Suffers) formula “One of the Holy Trinity suffered in the flesh” might be the answer, but he was to be disappointed. With some difficulty he managed to obtain the pope’s approval, but the formula did not touch the main issue and the monophysites rejected it.
Theodore Ascidas, Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, now convinced Justinian that all he needed to do to reconcile the monophysites with the orthodox was to issue, on his own, an imperial edict condemning certain writings that were particularly offensive to the monophysites. The Edict of the Three Chapters was issued in 546. The person and works of Theodore of Mopsuestia (died 428), considered to be the father of Nestorianism, along with certain writings of Theodoret of Cyrrhus (died 460) against Cyril of Alexandria, and the letter of Ibas, bishop of Edessa (died 457), censuring Cyril, were publicly condemned.
To have his way Justinian resorted to pressure tactics, and the events that unfolded cover a very sad page indeed in the history of the church. The emperor began by compelling the four eastern patriarchs to sign his edict, but the western clergy, protected by distance, opposed it. In 547 Pope Vigilius (537-555) was summoned to Constantinople to add his support to the imperial cause. Vigilius, unfortunately, was not much of a theologian and apparently did not understand the merits of the controversy. Not only did the pope begin by opposing the Edict of the Three Chapters, he also excommunicated Menas, patriarch of Constantinople (536-552), exacerbating the relations between the two most important sees in the empire.
Persuaded finally to read portions of the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Vigilius changed his mind and concluded that they were dangerous. He refused, however, to sign the edict, preferring instead to issue his own independent judgment in which he condemned the Three Chapters while defending the decisions of Chalcedon. This created an outcry among the western clergy, who proceeded to excommunicate the pope in a council in North Africa. Vigilius now became alarmed and insisted on the convocation of an ecumenical council as the only means of averting a schism. He assured Justinian that he would exert his full powers to have the edict confirmed. While in the capital the pope managed to alienate the Greek clergy, and once more he excommunicated Patriarch Menas, along with Theodore Ascidas. His actions so incited his hosts that on one occasion Vigilius had to seek asylum in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul.
When finally the Fifth Ecumenical Council—a Council the em- peror had not really wanted—sat in Constantinople in 553, Vigilius refused to attend. Afraid his prestige would be injured in the West should he officially condemn the writings of Theodoret of Cyrrhus and of Ibas of Edessa, which had been defended at Chalcedon, he decided to issue another judgement. One can only imagine the consternation of the Greek clergy over the pope’s incredible behavior. Confronted by this impasse, the council was forced by the circumstances to condemn Vigilius for his unbecoming conduct. Finding himself now alone, the pope changed his position once more and yielded to Justinian’s wishes.
The Fifth Ecumenical Council was attended by only one hundred sixty-six bishops, almost all of whom came from the East. Not only did it fail in its purpose of uniting the monophysites and the orthodox, it caused a schism in the western church because both Milan and Aquileia rejected its decisions. It was not until the papacy of Gregory the Great (590-604) that the Latin Church officially recognized the conclave of 553 as the Fifth Ecumenical Council. Actually, the latter differed significantly from the previous four in that it dealt not with a new heresy that had divided the church, but with a question that had been artificially created by the emperor himself. The Council, in fact, did no more than confirm an imperial edict. The results were nil. Not only did the monophysites remain aloof but, thanks to the energetic Jacob Baradaeus (490-577), monophysite Bishop of Edessa, they acquired a strong organization. Baradaeus spent his life wandering through the imperial provinces of the East disguised as a beggar and ordaining bishops and clergy. The monophysite church of Syria became known as the Jacobite Church from his name.
The problem of monophysitism was to remain the major obstacle to church unity and political stability in the Byzantine Empire until the convocation of the Sixth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 680-681. Monophysitism simply took on new forms and the emperors continued to look for new formulae of compromise and conciliation. The next important chapter in the religious controversy began during the reign of Heraclius (610-641). In 629, when the Emperor was in Hieropolis (Baalbek), Athanasius, leader of the Jacobites, came to see him. Heraclius promised to appoint him patriarch of the vacant see of Antioch if he would accept the Council of Chalcedon. Athanasius replied that he was willing to accept the doctrine of the two natures united in Christ, and then he shrewdly asked the emperor what one ought to believe concerning the energies (operation) or wills in Christ. Are they single or double? Thus the stage was set for the final definition of Christ’s person.
At this time the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Armenia had monophysite incumbents. To win these back, a new formula of conciliation had to be found. Not knowing what to reply to Athanasius, the Emperor wrote to Sergios, the Patriarch of Constantinople (610-638); in the meantime he also sought the opinion of Cyrus, Bishop of Phasis in Lazica. In 630, Cyrus was elevated to the patriarchate of Alexandria. Sergios, who was a Syrian by birth and whose parents were Jacobites, wrote back that one must confess one natural will and one energy or operation in Christ. Both Cyrus and Athanasius concurred with the patriarch; the monophysites were content that where one energy or operation is found, only one nature is acknowledged. Cyrus was now sent to Alexandria as patriarch of that important see with the aim of achieving a union with the monophysites. Cyrus was supported by another eminent theologian, Theodore of Pharan, and in 633 they both proclaimed their agreement over the one energy in Christ in a doctrine called monoenergism.
The Jacobites claimed that the victory was theirs: “Not we with Chalcedon, but Chalcedon has communicated with us, confessing in the one energy the one nature of Christ.” What was now needed was a theological formula that would express an idea of unity in Jesus Christ capable of satisfying both monophysites and dyophysites. The point of contact hit upon was the single energy. “Jesus Christ has two natures” (this was Chalcedonian), but “these two natures have only one energy” (this was an attempt to win over the monophysites ).
The most acute thinker on the side of monoenergism was Theodore, Bishop of Pharan, a see located in the Sinai peninsula. His formula was “the one theandric (God-man) energy.” The bearer of the one energy, the operant, is the Logos or the one Christ. A single, invisible energy represents the operation of the Logos. “From beginning to end, the whole Incarnation and everything in it, both small and great, is in fact one supreme and divine energy.” This was very close to the Christology of Cyril of Alexandria. If Theodore of Pharan was the author and intellectual power behind monoenergism Patriarch Sergios was the real organizer and promoter of the doctrine. He and Heraclius shared the view that the integrity of the church and that of the empire were interdependent.
When Sophronios, Patriarch of Jerusalem (634-638), raised a cry against the Alexandrian Union of 633, Sergios maneuvered to try to save it. In 634 he wrote to Pope Honorius I (625-638) urging that the formula of “two energies” be dropped. The formula invited the impious notion that in Christ there were two contrary wills, contended the patriarch. The will was to be attributed rather to the Logos, since he was the subject of both natures. Pope Honorius replied by disapproving of “two energies” and of “one energy” on the grounds that the former implied Nestorianism and the latter, Eutychianism (extreme monophysitism). Honorius maintained that Scripture teaches equally that God has suffered in Christ and that the humanity has come down from heaven. “Therefore, we also acknowledge one will of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is why Honorius was anathematized along with Sergios by the Sixth Ecumenical Council. Thanks to the pope, monoenergism was now transformed into monotheletism, belief in one will. It was Honorius’s authoritative assertion of one will in Christ that led to the Ekthesis (Exposition) of 638 drawn up by Sergios and posted in the narthex of Hagia Sophia.
The truth is that both Sergios and Pope Honorius were theologically unsophisticated. They were Chalcedonians, but they assumed that Christ could not have had a human will because it would have opposed the will of the Divine Logos. The change in emphasis from monoenergism to monotheletism marked a major turning point in Christological development. The crucial point in the orthodox stand as it was developed against monotheletism was an insistence upon the will as representative of nature. Orthodoxy regarded the capacity to will as an essential and characteristic feature of human nature as well as of divine nature. In other words, human nature is incomplete without the capacity to will.
It was St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662) who championed and elucidated the orthodox doctrine of dyotheletism (two wills). His teachings became a basic reservoir from which the Sixth Ecumenical Council drew its definitions. Key words in the early phase of monotheletism were “voluntary” and its adverb “voluntarily.” According to Philippians 2:8, Christ suffered voluntarily: “...and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”
The patriarchs of Constantinople, Pyrrhus (638-641; 654) and Paul II (641-653), concluded that this volition had to be ascribed to Christ’s whole person. The will could not be ascribed to nature because all natural things happen according to necessity, not according to choice. Only the Logos possessed the freedom requisite for volition. St. Maximus replied that the completeness of his humanity required not only that Christ really suffer, but that he suffer voluntarily. Voluntariness demanded the recognition of self-determination, said Maximus, and this demanded the separate status of the human will from the divine will; therefore, Christ’s human nature had its own will.
Pyrrhus objected to dyotheletism on the grounds that more than one will implied more than one willer. But, he argued, Christ was only one willer—that is, one person, one hypostasis. St. Maximus went to the heart of the difficulty and explained that will belonged to nature and not to hypostasis. He illustrated his point by referring to the Holy Trinity: even though they are three persons, they have but one will because they are of one divine nature. Since there were two natures in Christ there must have been two wills also. Furthermore, the will, like the natures, had nothing in common save the hypostasis of the Logos. The monotheletes, as we have seen, assumed that Christ could not have had two wills because they would have opposed each other. The dyotheletes simply declared that the two wills did not need to oppose each other, for they could concur. Pyrrhus argued that concurrent wills were really one will.
St. Maximus resolved this problem by distinguishing two kinds of wills. On the one hand, there is the “will of the one who wills,” which renders one a “willful” person. On the other hand, there is the “will that has been willed,” which renders a thing “willed.” The “will of the one who wills” belongs to a nature, and it is the kind of will of which Christ has two, one for each of his natures. Moreover the agreement of Christ’s human with his divine will was not merely a oneness, but the product of the hypostatic union. In other words, the hypostasis made use of each nature’s capacity to will.
This clear distinction between the capacity to will and the result of willing tended to disarm monotheletism. But a further explication of dyotheletism needed to be made. Obviously, Christ's divine capacity to will was in some sense superior to his human capacity to will, because the former belonged to the divine nature, to the Logos himself, who assumed the human nature. The problem was to state in exactly what sense the divine will was superior.
St. Anastasius of Sinai, a younger contemporary of St. Maximus, held the view that the divine will surpassed the human in authority, and to this superior authority the human will was obedient. St. Maximus, however, maintained that the human will was in a causal relationship, and hence, the object of the divine will. In this connection St. Maximus distinguished two aspects of the ordinary man’s capacity to will. First, there is a “gnomic will,” which weighs different possibilities and then decides among them. Second, there is a “self-determined motion,” which executes decisions once they are made, Christ’s human nature was unique in that it was without sin. This meant that Christ had no human “gnomic will” according to St. Maximus. Christ had a divine “gnomic will,” which distinguished immediately and unerringly between God’s will and its opposite. As for the human “self-determined motion,” the Logos made it his own. The Logos worked “the human things divinely because by willing mightily, but not under compulsion, he was subjecting himself to the trial of human sufferings.” In short, Christ’s human nature was self-determined and yet motivated by the Logos; it was possessed of free will and yet able to do only the will of God. This paradox is almost eliminated when we realize that Christ’s human nature, being perfect, was completely free from the constraint of sin; the only person behind his human will was the Logos. Insofar as the paradox is not eliminated we are confronted with the mystery of God become man.
To put an end to dissension, Emperor Constans II (641-668), Heraclius’s son, returned to the tactics of Zeno’s Act of Union. In 648 he published the Typos (Type), which simply and naively forbade “all Orthodox subjects being in immaculate Christian faith and belonging to the Catholic and Apostolic Church, to contend and to quarrel with one another over one will or one energy or two energies or two wills.” When both Pope Martin I (649-655) and the great Byzantine theologian St. Maximus violently opposed the Typos, the Emperor had them seized and convicted on grounds of treason to the state. The Pope was exiled to the Cherson in the Crimea where he died in 655; St. Maximus’s tongue was mutilated and his right hand was amputated.
To resolve the issue of monotheletism, Emperor Constantine IV (668-685) convoked the Sixth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 680-681. The creed of this Council proclaims that Christ had two natural wills and that his human will follows the divine and all-powerful will and is subject to it without resistance or opposition.
Strangely enough, the Council refers to the notion of Christ’s human self-determination, but only in the address to Constantine IV delivered at the last session after the Definition of Faith had been signed. It declares: “For nothing constitutes the completeness of the human nature, except the natural will, through which the power of self-determination in us is also characterized; let it hold thus for the natural energy too!”
Actually, monotheletism forced the church to take a fresh look at the person of Christ. The church, because of the concern over Christ’s will, was forced to consider his inward psychology as well as his outward activity. Christ’s being was given added depth, and a new criterion for characterizing his human nature was identified: it possessed a human will with accompanying voluntariness. This sequence of events marks the Christological maturity of the undivided church.
ICONOCLASM
Iconoclasm, the conscientious attempt on the part of certain Byzantine emperors to uproot the popular cult of the sacred portrait, called an icon, was the last great theological controversy to convulse the Byzantine church until the official break between the Latin and Greek churches in the schism of 1054 and the subsequent attempts to compel the subjects of the empire to submit to the supremacy of the pope in Rome.
Since earliest times there had always been iconoclastic proponents in the church; this Judaistic heritage, which denounced the making of images of any kind, was later reinforced by the powerful influences exerted by Islam in the eastern border provinces of Byzantium. The iconoclast emperors came from the eastern parts of the empire. Moreover, in the matter of church art, the controversy between monophysitism and dyophysitism was to take on a new direction.
The question that was now raised was this: What is the function of art, especially representational art, in the life of the church and the man of faith? The question has been answered differently in different periods of church history. The primitive church, a small island in a sea of idolatry was, of necessity, opposed to art. Most converts to Christianity came from pagan backgrounds and the existence of statues and representational art of any kind would have tempted the less sophisticated to revert to their old ways. The first examples of any kind of Christian art are to be found in the catacombs dating from about a.p. 200. It is significant that the representations found in the Roman catacombs are either purely ornamental or symbolic depicting examples from the Old Testament such as Noah and the Ark or Jonah and the Whale, which are prototypes of the Christian belief in the resurrection and life in the hereafter. The artists of the catacombs were reluctant to portray Christ, who is often represented as Orpheus beckoning mankind to salvation.
With the Constantinian Peace, church buildings were adorned with exquisite mosaic patterns and animal figures. At the same time there is evidence that the impulse to possess portraits of sacred personages became intensified. Constantia, Constantine the Great's sister, desiring a portrait of Christ, wrote to Eusebius who refused her request saying that he had taken away from a woman portraits of St. Paul and the Savior. Such portraits, therefore, existed even though the church disapproved of them. The church’s fear of idolatry and opposition to images, however, did not stop in the fourth century when Christians borrowed the whole apparatus of pagan representational art, but remained a constant undercurrent, manifesting itself at different times and in diverse places. There is, nonetheless, a great abyss between the existence of sacred portraiture in the fourth century and the very special role it assumed in the sixth and seventh centuries.
When Christian painting began to be openly encouraged in the latter half of the fourth century, especially by the Cappadocian Fathers, their argument was based on the usefulness of pictures as educational tools, and the fact that the contemplation of saintly persons was an incentive to noble deeds. This was, until the invention of photography, a most natural, and indeed a universal, attitude.
When we consider the rapid expansion of Christianity, which until the fourth century was a minority religion presupposing actual dedication, but which from this time on became first a privileged religion and soon thereafter the mandatory religion; when we consider that conversion became a practical necessity to hold any office, it is not surprising that pagan customs penetrated Christian practices.
One of these was the need for a palpable object of veneration. The cult of relics and the adoration (proskynesis) of the cross both became intensified in the fourth century. Emperor Julian the Apostate (361-363 ), who renounced the Christian faith and espoused paganism, ridiculed the Christians for worshipping corpses and the wood of the cross. The special adoration of images followed; St. Augustine was the first to mention picturarum adoratores, and eventually the icon overshadowed even the cult of relics in the East.
Prostration or proskynesis before images is first attested to in the sixth century. Up to that time references to the worship of images are scanty, but in the second half of the sixth and in the seventh centuries it was intensified to the point of becoming the central religious phenomenon. At the same time in the Latin West, Pope Gregory I the Great (590-604), in response to the iconoclastic attitude of Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles, supported the didactic value of the image while insisting that it should not be worshipped. Why the icon became the object of a special cult in the Greek East at this time is hard to tell; but it is unmistakable that at the death of Justinian in 565 there was a complete change in the religious mood, which most likely was connected with the crisis of the empire. We begin to hear of various devotional practices performed in front of icons: lighting of candles, burning of incense, kissing, kneeling, and images carried in procession with all the rites that were reserved earlier for imperial portraits. Such practices could be justified as marks of respect, but there can be no doubt that in the eyes of the faithful the image was identified with its prototype, whose habitation it was. This is apparent by a great number of fascinating miracle stories belonging to this period: images are made to speak, make promises, bleed when stabbed, defend themselves when attacked, cure the sick, and so on. This magical aspect was very acceptable to the common folk, who had inherited similar beliefs from paganism; it was also acceptable to the educated classes, thanks to the neo-Platonic doctrine of the sympathy existing between image and prototype. It must be remembered that the line between magic and true religion is an extremely thin one. Another magical feature was the use of images in an apotropaic capacity: images were placed over doors to ward off the evil eye; they were installed over gates and walls to defend cities from attack, and were carried into battle to protect the armies and bring them victory.
Equally characteristic of this period was the appearance of acheiropoietai (images produced mechanically or by means other than human). The most famous of these were the images of Edessa and Camuliana. The image of Edessa, an ancestor of the Veronica of Turin, was an impression of Christ’s face on a napkin, which in turn produced an impression on a brick. All these acheiropoietai appeared almost simultaneously in the second half of the sixth century and the beginning of the seventh. Apart from their miraculous qualities, the icons also served another purpose—that of providing a genuine portrait of the sacred personage. By virtue of their exactitude, they certainly influenced iconography and imposed a given type of face. This purpose they shared with images purportedly painted in the lifetime of Christ and the Virgin, such as the one of Christ at the Praetorium of Pilate or the famous icon of the Virgin supposedly painted by St. Luke.
Throughout this period, which saw the ever-increasing popular devotion to the icon, an undercurrent of iconoclasm was discernible, especially in the eastern provinces of the empire. Then in the eightysecond canon of the Quinisextum Council of Troullo, which sat in 692, the church proscribed the symbolic representation of Christ as a lamb and required that he be represented as a man in order to emphasize “his life in the flesh, his passion, his saving death, and the ransom for the world that was won thereby.” Following this pronouncement the image of Christ appeared for the first time on Byzantine coinage.
With the deposition of Emperor Justinian II in 695, the empire was convulsed by a new “Time of Troubles.” For some twenty-two years anarchy beset the empire; six emperors came to the throne and were toppled. The Slavs had overrun the Balkans, and the Arabs, at the zenith of their military power, threatened the very existence of the already tottering empire. In 717 the strategos or military governor of the Anatolikon theme (province) seized the reins of government and, as Emperor Leo III, defeated the Arabs at the gates of Constantinople in one of the most decisive battles in history. The emperor, commander of the eastern troops, whose family came from Syria, was an iconoclast. In 726 Leo III initiated his campaign against the icons by publishing an edict and ordering the removal of Christ’s image from above the Bronze Gate of the Great Palace. Unable to win the adherence of pope and patriarch, the emperor published a new edict in 730; the prohibition of icons was now a law and persecutions of iconophiles were undertaken.
Iconoclasm reached a high point under Leo III’s son Constantine V (741-775), who attacked the icons more systematically and unleashed a violent persecution against the monks who opposed his program. The emperor’s fanatical agent, Michael Lachanodracon, strategos of the Thracesion theme, on one occasion gathered all the monks and nuns in an open plain at Ephesus and threatened: “Those who wish to obey the Emperor and myself will put on white garments and take wives immediately. Those who will not do so will be blinded and exiled to Cyprus.” There were many martyrs that day, but many defected too. In Constantinople, St. Stephen the Younger, the abbot of a monastery in the vicinity of the capital, was dragged through the streets of the city and torn to pieces by the mob. Constantine V paraded monks in the hippodrome, each of whom was forced to hold a woman by the hand while the populace spat on him. The emperor’s death in 775 put an end to the violent period of iconoclasm.
Constantine V was followed by his son Leo IV (775-780), an iconoclast much less dedicated than his grandfather and father. He was married, however, to an Athenian, Irene, who was a devotee of the icons. At the death of her husband in 780, Irene became regent to her son Constantine VI (780-797). It took her some seven years to prepare the ground for the convocation of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 that restored icon veneration. During the reigns of Irene (797-802), who blinded her own son and had him deposed, and of Nikephoros I (802-811) and of Michael I Rhangabe (811-813), the empire suffered disastrous defeats. The iconophile emperors, unfortunately, compared unfavorably with the great victories and triumphs of iconoclasts Leo III and Constantine V. In 813, Leo V (813-822), strategos of the Anatolikon theme, of mixed Syrian and Armenian descent, came to the throne. He decided to return to the iconoclastic policies of the victorious emperors, and explained his decision as follows:
Why are the Christians suffering these ills and being subjugated by aliens? I think that this is because the icons are venerated, and for no other reason. So I intend to destroy them. You see that the emperors who accepted and worshipped icons either died in exile or fell in battle. It is only those who did not worship them who died a natural death as emperors, and each one of them was buried with honor in the imperial mausoleum at the Holy Apostles. So I too want to imitate them and destroy the icons, so that both I and my son may live for a long time and that my family may reign down to the fourth and fifth generation.
In 815 a council was held in Hagia Sophia that repudiated the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787 and confirmed the Iconoclastic Council of 754 convoked by Constantine V as the Seventh Ecumenical Council. In 820 Leo V was assassinated at the foot of the altar in the palace chapel. The subsequent emperors, Michael II the Sta.amerer (820-829) and his son Theophilus (829-842), continued the policy of iconoclasm.
Like Leo IV before him, Theophilus also married an iconophile. On his deathbed in 842 he made his wife promise that she would not alter his religious policy, but the promise was made in vain. The throne passed to Michael III, who was only six years old, and Theodora assumed the regency. During the next year, she laid careful plans for the final liquidation of iconoclasm. To protect the memory of Theophilus, Theodora claimed that he had repented on his deathbed. On March 11, 843, the icons were officially restored in a church ceremony that involved a procession of icons and the reading of a text that subjected the leading heretics of the past and present to anathema. This event is commemorated in the Greek Orthodox Church as the Feast of Orthodoxy which always falls on the first Sunday in Lent.
Let us now return to a brief exposition of the iconophile and the iconoclast positions so that we may have a better understanding of the unique meaning of the icon in the Byzantine world. On what grounds were images opposed, and what arguments were used for their defense? The arguments to be presented here were not all produced simultaneously; many had been worked out before iconoclasm developed. The systematic elaboration of a complete theory of images was not achieved until the eighth century, and was further elaborated in the ninth century. Moreover, it also stands to reason that there were different shades of opinion in both parties. Some of the milder iconoclasts objected only to the adoration, not to the existence of icons, which, they conceded, had a certain commemorative value. The main body of the iconoclasts, however, objected both to the adoration and to the manufacture of icons. The most extreme elements, it would appear, considered the abolition of icons as only the first step toward a sweeping religious reform. For the sake of simplicity, each party will be regarded as presenting a common front. The controversy itself may be considered under four headings: appeal to tradition, the image and the beholder, the image and its prototype, and Christology, the central issue.
Appeal to Tradition
The iconoclasts took their stand on the second commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4). From the New Testament their chief text was: “God is a spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). They also claimed the authority of John 20:29: “... blessed [are they] that have not seen, and yet have believed,” and Romans 1:23 and 2:56: “And [they] changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image like to corruptible man...and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator.” The culmination of the iconoclast argument was that the icons had no authority, either Biblical or patristic.
The iconophile party, of course, had its own texts. Had not the Almighty ordered Moses to place images of the Cherubim in the Tabernacle? Was not man himself made in the image of God? In answer to the second commandment they contended that the prohibition of images was caused by the prevalence of idolatry. Man was then in his infancy, now he was mature. Grace had replaced the Law. There was, of course, no lack of patristic texts of the fourth century and later to justify the use of images.
The most interesting part of the iconophile argument was based on “progressive revelation.” True, images were not explicitly mentioned in Holy Scripture, but how about such concepts as the homoousion, the “two natures and one hypostasis of Christ,” and the Theotokos? All these are implicit in the Bible.
The Relationship of the Image to the Beholder
The charge of idolatry was, of course, a cardinal one. The iconoclasts insisted that images were made by hand of base matter. The reply was that it is not the wood or the paints that are honored, but the sacred person represented. The didactic element was mentioned, but this argument was more a feature of the earlier rather than the later stages of the controversy. More crucial was the anagogical value of the image, the idea that it leads man from the visible to the invisible, from the material world to the spiritual cosmos. This was not a new point; in fact it went back to pagan apologies of statues, but it was more specifically rooted in the sixth-century system of Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite, which exerted an immense influence on theological circles. According to the Pseudo-Dionysian texts, the physical and spiritual worlds formed two superimposed hierarchies, and the soul ascended step by step from the confusion of matter to the unity of spirit: “We are led up, as far as possible, through visible images to contemplation of the divine.” In the same century, Hypatius of Ephesus put it this way:
We leave material adornment in the churches... because we conceive that each order of the faithful is guided and led up to the Divine in its own way and that some are led even by these (i.e., the material decorations ) toward the intelligible beauty and from the abundant light in the sanctuaries to the intelligible and immaterial light.
St. John of Damascus (ca. 674-749), the outstanding apologist of icons, wrote in the eighth century:
For as we are composed of soul and body, and our soul does not stand alone, but is, as it were, shrouded by a veil, it is impossible for us to arrive at intellectual conceptions without corporeal things. Just as we listen with our bodily ears to physical words and understand spiritual things, so through corporeal vision we come to the spiritual.... And baptism is likewise double, of water and the spirit. So is communion and prayer and psalmody; everything has a double signification, a corporeal and a spiritual.
The Relationship Between the Image and Its Model
Constantine V is represented as saying that the true image must be of the same substance (consubstantial) as the person represented. This led him to state that the only permissible image of Christ was the Eucharist, the elements of bread and wine, after consecration being of the same ousia as Christ. Here we have a fundamental difference between the two parties. The iconophiles argued that images were of two kinds: natural and artificial. The first is precisely the same as its archetype, both in essence and in similitude. Thus, Christ in his divinity is consubstantial with the Father, and in his humanity, consubstantial with the mother. The second kind, however, reproduces the similarity, but not the essence; in other words, it is different as to ousia, but identical as to person. An artificial image can only express personal characteristics.
The cult of the image follows from its nature. In spite of the difference of ousia, the homage rendered to the image and to its prototype is one, since the image does not have a person of its own. There is, however, a sharp difference between homage or veneration (proskynesis) and worship (latreia) because the latter is appropriate only to the Holy Trinity.
The link between image and prototype is very close, and if the prototype is holy, the image partakes of his holiness. This may be considered the converse of the anagogical argument: in descending from God to saint, and from saint to the saint’s image, there is a certain continuity since each successive step is an image of the one above. St. John of Damascus explains: “The saints in their lifetime were filled with the Holy Ghost and, when they are no more, his grace abides with their spirits, and with their bodies in their tombs, and also with their likenesses and holy images, not by nature, but by grace and divine power.” Just as in the Acts of the Apostles the shadow of Peter falling on the sick lying in the streets could work miracles, so the icon, which is the shadow of the person represented, can perform miracles.
Christology
Most crucial to faith was whether or not it was permissible to represent Christ. The iconoclast position was that Christ consists of two natures in one person, and that these admit neither separation nor confusion. Painting, therefore, would either have to represent the divine, to circumscribe what is uncircumscribable, or, if it limits itself to representing the bare man, it must divide the inseparable, the human from the divine nature of Christ. The latter would be the heresy of Nestorianism, the former, the sin of monophysitism.
The orthodox answer to this argument was that if Christ cannot be represented, the completeness of his humanity is denied; he cannot be said to have lived and suffered like other men, and the Incarnation was a useless act. To use the formula of St. Theodore the Studite: “Christ is not Christ if he cannot be represented.”
The controversy over the meaning and use of the icon, although echoed in the West, was primarily a Byzantine phenomenon. As we have seen, for the primitive church, representational art threatened the purity of the worship of the one God. The demands of a Christian faith in a pagan society outweighed the claims of culture. This was Semitism and stark asceticism breaking through the aesthetic reality of Hellenism. Perhaps it is closer to the truth to say that iconoclasm was a movement in favor of a “Judaized” Christianity. Semitic Islam followed Judaism in rejecting GrecoRoman art of the human form. In the contest between two opposing cultural forces in the Byzantine Church, Greek representational art won out. Christ was a historic reality and no symbol of him as a lamb could suffice. What was to become the greatest achievement of religious art with its emphasis on the spiritualization of the flesh and matter was now permitted to evolve in the unparalleled art of the mosaic, fresco and portable icon. Theologically, the Byzantine church triumphantly proclaimed the true humanity of Christ, the sanctification and redemption of matter as the Divine Logos himself had assumed human flesh, and the rehabilitation of the icon as a vehicle for the transmission of grace.
After the long crisis of iconoclasm, which raised so many profound theological questions, there was a general belief that perfection had been attained in the Christian faith. Patriarch Photios (858-867; 877-886 ), the most learned scholar of the ninth century, called a council in 867, which condemned all the heresies of the past; the council was intended to inaugurate a new era. The word “new” occurs throughout the writings of the period. Further ecumenical councils seemed unnecessary. At another council in 880 it was stated, with regard to the definition of faith, that:
any subtraction or addition, as long as no heresy is stirred up by the Devil, only casts reproach on what is irreproachable and inflicts an inexcusable insult on the Fathers. ... To cut away or to add would mean that the confession of faith concerning the holy and consubstantial Trinity, transmitted to us from the very beginning, was incomplete.
Orthodoxy, wrote Photios, could not tolerate the slightest blemish. As even a small] defect is noticeable in a beautiful body, so in an exact science and especially in theology, the tiniest mistake or modification is at once apparent and leads to great inconvenience.
POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE CHRISTIAN HERESIES
Arianism, rejected by the orthodox church, was to survive nonetheless, as a political factor of some significance for several centuries. Constantine J, the promoter of the orthodox homoousion formula, ironically was baptized on his deathbed by Eusebius, the Arian bishop of Nicomedia. This same bishop was entrusted with the religious education of the emperor's sons. With Constantine’s death in 337 the empire was divided among his three heirs, Constantine II (337-340), Constans (337-850) and Constantius (337-361). By the year 350, Constantius’s two brothers were dead as the result of internecine struggles, thus leaving him as sole monarch. The tyrant Constantius was an ardent Arian and he doggedly persecuted followers of the orthodox church.
In 341, at a council of Arian bishops in Antioch, a certain Ulfilas (ca. 311-383), of mixed Cappadocian and Gothic descent, was appointed missionary bishop to his pagan Germanic countrymen. Having invented an alphabet for the Gothic language, based primarily on Greek and partly on runic letters, he translated the Holy Scriptures into his native tongue, a monumental achievement. Ulfilas, it should be noted, happened to be propagating the faith of the Byzantine emperor who was an Arian at the time. Consequently, the Germanic Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Lombards, Burgundians and Sueves, who were subsequently converted to Christianity, adopted Arianism. The Arian Ostrogoths occupied Italy, the Visigoths took Spain and the Vandals settled in North Africa.
By the end of the sixth century, however, Arianism was abandoned by the Germanic peoples for the orthodox faith. Clovis, king of the Franks (481-511), was the first Germanic chief to be baptized into the established church, and thereafter all those northern Germans who were to be absorbed into the Frankish kingdom followed suit.
The semi-Romanized Arian Vandals and Ostrogoths were un-fortunately crushed and uprooted by the armies of Justinian in the sixth century, and the Visigoths in Spain adopted orthodox Christianity at the Council of Toledo in 589 under their king Reccared.
The Nestorians, condemned by the Third Ecumenical Council, migrated to Edessa. Persecuted by militant monophysites they were compelled to flee to Nisibis on the Persian frontier where they founded the celebrated Nestorian School of Theology. By the seventh century Nestorian missionaries had carried their sectarian beliefs to parts of India and China. Nestorian communities still survive in south India and northwestern Iran, but the Mongols destroyed those in western China.
Despite the claims made by many modern historians, monophysitism was not an example of a burgeoning nationalism that opposed Greek culture, language and the emperor reigning in Constantinople. There is no literary evidence to support the allegation that when the Persians and Arabs occupied Egypt, Syria and Palestine in the seventh century, the alienated monophysites welcomed them with open arms as liberators.
Many Greek and Greek-speaking Christians were ardent monophysites. The intellectual leaders of the movement were Greeks. Several Byzantine emperors supported the monophysite cause, and the emperors, in general, deserve sympathy for devoting their energies, albeit in vain, to seeking some basis for theological compromise between the contending factions.
The Armenian church, however, by way of exception, originated as a national church. King Tiridates III and his subjects were converted to Christianity in 314. Subsequently, however, Persia occupied the greater part of Armenia. Consequently, not only were Armenian Christians persecuted by the Zoroastrian clergy, they were also unable to send representatives to the crucial Third and Fourth Ecumenical Councils. As a result, they were ignorant of both the Nestorian and monophysite crises. About 506, however, persecuted monophysites fled from Persia to Armenia where they were embraced by their fellow-sufferers. Again, it so happened that at this critical juncture in Christian history, a monophysite emperor, Anastasius I (491-518), sat on the throne at Constantinople. The Armenians gladly accepted the doctrinal views of the monophysite advocates of the imperial faith, and later refused to abandon them when orthodox emperors reigned. However, the Armenians always supported Byzantium against the common enemy, the Persians and later the Arabs. Today, monophysite Christians survive in the Egyptian Coptic, Abyssinian, Syrian Jacobite and Armenian churches.
The extremely important political consequences of iconoclasm shall be discussed in the last chapter of this book dealing with Byzantine and Latin relations.
MANICHAEISM, MASSALIANISM, PAULICIANISM AND BOGOMILISM
The Christian heresies of Arianism, Macedonianism, Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, monophysitism, monoenergism, monotheletism, and finally iconoclasm dealt with problems of the Holy Trinity, specifically with how to maintain monotheism while formulating the doctrine of the three persons in the one Godhead. Christology was crucial in these controversies. Besides these, however, there were other religious movements within the empire—equally dangerous to the stability of the state—that were anti-Christian. These were Manichaeism, Massalianism, Paulicianism and Bogomilism.
A common denominator of these sects was Marcionism. Marcion, a sectarian reformer of the middle of the second century, claimed that there are two gods. The just god of the Old Testament, the creator of the world, and the good God revealed by Christ. The creator of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” introduced evil into the world and therefore could not be considered a good god. For this reason, Marcion rejected the whole of the Old Testament as well as the Incarnation of Christ. He also favored the writings of St. Paul, which he purged of their Jewishness, and despised those of St. Peter.
Manichaeism
The most abhorred of the anti-Christian sects was Manichaeism. There was no greater opprobrium in Byzantium than to be called a Manichee. So detested were they that Emperor Justinian inflicted the death penalty on them. Manichees who obstinately refused to abjure their doctrines were gathered on ships that were then set on fire so that they might be buried in the waves.
The term Manichaeism derives from its founder, Mani, who was born about 216 in the Median capital of Hamadan. Mani travelled to Ghandara in northwestern India, where he was greatly impressed by Buddhism. He was also familiar with Christianity, but in the heretical forms of Marcionism and gnosticism. Their esoteric, revealed knowledge, showing the way to salvation, included a cosmic drama and fall and a corresponding historic drama and fall; a good God and a demiurge who creates the evil world; the repudiation of the Old Testament; the absorption of light by darkness and its restoration; and the need for the soul and spirit to be separated from the evil body. Essentially, however, Mani’s religion was rooted in Iranian religion, specifically in Zoroastrianism. The Christian and Buddhist aspects of Manichaeism were meant to make the faith acceptable to Christians in the West and to Buddhists in the East.
The appeal of Manichaeism was strong indeed. Communities were established in Alexandria, and St. Augustine (354-430) became a member of the cult in North Africa. By merging Zoroastrian, sectarian Christian and Mesopotamian religious elements, Mani hoped to replace these conflicting faiths with his own universal religion. The threat he posed, since he was favored by the Persian king Shapur, forced the Zoroastrian clergy to establish a state church; once this was done, the fate of the Christians and Buddhists in Iran, as well as of the Manichees, was sealed. Convicted by the Zoroastrian clergy, Mani was seized and fettered. After great suffering he died in the reign of Bahram I (274-277).
Faithful to Iranian religion, Mani based his belief on conflict dualism. But whereas in Iranian conflict dualism the two primary principles of Good and Evil, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, were twins of equal status, Mani rejected with revulsion the contention that good and evil could be brothers. For him the two primary elements were God and Hyle, the Greek word for matter. He taught that both are eternal, without creation, but once again, the good element, God (who is called Light and Truth), shall ultimately triumph over evil Matter (also named Lie and Darkness).
The body of the Godhead is comprised of the realm of light, that is, of the entire light of the earth and of the heavens. The tetrad of God, his light, his force and his wisdom, is seated upon his throne and has four sides or faces. The three faces of God are infinite, but the light side on the south is bounded by finite darkness. At some time in the past the Prince of Darkness and his demons caught sight of the beauty, peace and harmony prevailing in the realm of light, and they became obsessed with the longing to possess it themselves. Armed for battle, they invaded the realm of light; to ward off the onslaught, God, who could not himself enter the fray because he was pure, called into being the Mother of Life; and she, in turn, gave birth to primaeval man to give battle to the forces of darkness and evil. Air, wind, light, water and fire were the five light elements comprising primaeval man’s armor; voluntarily he descended into the darkness, but he was defeated and his light elements were devoured by the enemy. Divested of his light elements and stunned, primaeval man, the redeemer now in need of redemption, called for help. Extending his right hand, the Living Spirit (Mithra) drew him up out of the pit of darkness and back to his celestial home of light.
The Passion and the Redemption of primaeval man, however, is only part of the story. The light elements which have been devoured by the forces of darkness must also be redeemed. This task was given to Mithra. Mithra proceeded to create the earth out of the bodies of the vanquished demons of darkness: the sky was made from their flayed skins, the mountains from their bones and the earth from their excrement. The sun and the moon were fashioned out of the purified particles of light, and the stars were constituted of partially sullied light particles.
To counter Mithra’s creation, Matter fashioned ASqualun and his female companion Namrael. ASqualun and Namrael now gave birth to Adam and Eve. The story of the earth’s creation and man’s origin is important for understanding the revulsion for matter and the flesh felt by the Manichees and all those heresies that were influenced later by their ideas.
If primaeval man had been redeemed on the macrocosmic level, Adam, in whom was found the greatest portion of the remaining imprisoned particles of light, had to be redeemed on the microcosmic level of the individual. Adam, too, was sunk deep in slumber, and, having been born deaf and blind, he had no awareness of the light within him. The Third Messenger, the incarnation of redemptive intellect, was dispatched to redeem Adam’s soul. Roused from the sleep of death and freed from the demons of darkness by exorcism, Adam was shown that his body was derived from evil while his spirit originated in the celestial realm of light. Finally, Adam was instructed in the redemptive knowledge called gnosis, “the comprehension of what was, what is and what will be.”
The evil material body, then, is the prison of the celestial soul. Not only the human body but the animal and plant world also contained particles of light. This led Mani to preach transmigration; to destroy a plant or to kill an animal meant that the guilty party would return in the form of the vegetation or animal life against which he had sinned. All trees, since they contained large amounts of light particles, were considered by the Manichees as crosses of Christ.
In organizing his church, Mani followed the Buddhist pattern. In Buddhism the monks comprise the core of the communities and the lay members are only supporting elements who provide sustenance and protection for the monks; so in Manichaeism there are two groups whose functions and way of life differ greatly. If in Buddhism there are the monks and the laymen, in Mani’s church there are the elect or righteous, and the hearers or auditors. The elect must refrain from all blasphemy of thought and word; meat derived from evil matter was forbidden as a food; water, a material substance, was also to be avoided in large quantities, and fruit juices were to be preferred. The elect must also have a reverence for all life and must never destroy plant and animal life. As procreation retarded the reassembly of the light particles, the elect must abstain from marriage and sexual intercourse. The hearers, however, were not expected to follow these difficult precepts; it was their Jot to provide the elect with the necessities of life. The hearers were allowed to marry and even eat meat, but on Sunday they abstained both from meat and sexual intercourse. The elect fasted on both Sunday and Monday and for an entire month, a practice that may have been copied by the Muslims, who fast the whole month of Ramadan.
There was a kind of baptismal ceremony before death, a ritual of the laying on of hands on the novice. There was also a kind of sacramental meal during which the elect ate bread provided by the hearers and then sprinkled their heads with olive oil.
If in Manichaeism we see how all matter and flesh were deemed of evil derivation, the significant contribution of Byzantine Christianity, which resulted from the victory over iconoclasm, was that matter was proclaimed as a vehicle of sanctification; by assuming human flesh and becoming a true man, Christ, the son of God, redeemed all flesh; the resurrection of his body was the great divine truth that the body is not evil but in fact sanctified in Christ. Thus, the relics of saints, the True Cross, the instruments of the Passion, were all vehicles of grace.
Paulicianism
In the second half of the seventh century another anti-Christian sect, Paulicianism, was to emerge in Armenia and the Asiatic provinces of the Byzantine Empire. The Paulicians constituted a serious military threat to the empire. Chrysocheir, the leader of the Paulicians based in Tephrike in Armenia, led his armies through Byzantine territory all the way to Nicaea and Nicomedia, and in 867 captured and plundered the city of Ephesus, where he turned the church of St. John the Evangelist into a stable. Finally, in 871-872, the Byzantine Emperor Basil I razed Tephrike, killed Chrysocheir and destroyed the military power of the Paulicians. The Paulicians perished by the thousands.
It is from Peter of Sicily, the imperial ambassador sent by Emperor Basil I (867-836) to Tephrike to negotiate with Chrysocheir, that we learn of Paulician doctrines in some detail. Peter says that Paulicianism began with Kallinike, a Manichaean woman, who sent her two sons, Paul and John, to convert the inhabitants in the vicinity of Samosata on the Euphrates. It may be from Paul of Samosata that the Paulicians derived their name. Originating in Armenia, this sect may only have appeared to contain Manichaean elements.
Constantine, an Armenian from Mananali on the upper Euphrates, was instrumental in propagating Paulicianism in the second half of the seventh century by cleverly using the New Testament to support its doctrines. To avoid suspicion, the Paulicians also used accepted Christian terminology but gave it their own interpretation, which only the faithful understood. By confessing the “orthodox” faith they meant the “Paulician” faith; by “cross,” which they spurned denying the real crucifixion of Jesus, they meant Christ, with his arms outstretched; they interpreted the “Mother of God” to signify the “heavenly Jerusalem,” and when the body and blood of Christ were mentioned, they understood this to mean his words; baptism for them meant that Christ was the giver of the living water of life.
Peter of Sicily analyzes Paulician doctrine as follows. Of the two principles, Good and Evil, it is the evil principle that is the creator and ruler of this world. The good principle will create the world to come. Thus the Paulicians rejected the Old Testament because it relates the creation of the world by the evil Yahweh. The prophets who spoke for the creator of this world were deceivers; the God of the Old Testament was a cruel and unjust God, completely different from the God of love and compassion of the New Testament. To claim that Christ took on human flesh was blasphemy, because this would have meant that his body was an evil creation of the material world. Actually, Christ was of heavenly origin and only appeared to have taken on human flesh, a doctrine called docetism. If this be true, then both the maternity and the virginity of Mary had to be rejected. Significantly, in view of later Protestant developments, the Paulicians rejected the Eucharist as being the true body and blood of Christ and interpreted the bread and wine given by Christ to his disciples at the Last Supper symbolically to be his words. Again, they rejected the concept of the visible church with its priesthood and, like certain radical Protestant reformers, considered churches to be merely meetinghouses for prayer. Again the Protestants rejected icons and relics, Paulicianism, as we can see, was less sophisticated than Manichaeism and differed from the latter in certain important respects. The Paulicians, as described by Peter of Sicily, were not enjoined to abstain from meat, wine and sexual intercourse; there did not seem to be an elect who must live a life of rigorous asceticism. Far from being monastic in their ways, the Paulicians were men of action and war. In fact, it seems that the Paulicians derived their doctrines from other sources, such as Marcionism. Mani, as you recall, opposed God to matter, while Paulician dualism was between the good God and the evil creator of this world.
Massalianism
The Paulicians were also impressed by Massalianism. In Syriac the term means “those who pray, and in Greek they were called euchitai. The Massalians, who originated in the fourth century around Edessa, were condemned in 431 by the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus. Their doctrines are of interest because some of them found their way later into the West among the mendicant movements of the twelfth century as well as among the Protestants.
Not only did the Massalians reject the Christian church and its priesthood, they also interpreted the New Testament in an indi- vidualistic way. They partook of the Eucharist, but only to deceive the authorities, since they denied the real presence of Christ in Holy Communion. They emphasized prayer as the only way of exorcising the demon that dwells in man, and their claim was that they alone knew the true meaning of the Lord’s Prayer. Prayer, by bestowing the gift of the Holy Spirit, purifies the soul of all passions, thus enabling the faithful to contemplate the Holy Trinity while in this prophetic state. Since the vision of God can be achieved by prayer alone, they rejected the sacraments as powerless and unnecessary. This visionary state resulted in the soul’s possession by a sacred delirium characterised by jumping and dancing, symbolizing thereby that the vanquished demon was being trampled under foot. Because of this divinely inspired physical agitation the Massalians were also called enthousiastai (inspired, possessed of the god) and choreutai (dancers).
The Massalians held no possessions and were wholly dependent on charity for the necessities of life; they were the first “mendicant friars.” Since manual labor was an obstacle to fulfilling their duty to prayer and contemplation, they renounced all forms of work. Finally, their most fascinating doctrine was that those who had reached perfection through the rigors of asceticism and self-denial no longer had need to observe these restraints. Once the evil demon was driven out of man there was no longer any possibility of sinning. Beginning with extreme asceticism they ended in extreme immorality and the worst sexual excesses. While the Paulicians were noted for their aversion to monks, the Massalians had a particular predilection for the monastic life. In fact, it was as monks that they were able to penetrate orthodox monasteries and disseminate their heretical teachings.
Bogomilism
In the latter half of the eighth century thousands of Armenian families were transferred from Asia Minor to European Thrace in order to stem the invasions of the menacing Bulgars. In 813 the Bulgar Khan, Krum, transported the entire population of 10,000 inhabitants of Thracian Arianople to the northern shores of the Danube; later Sardica and Philippopolis and Macedonia were annexed. The result was that great numbers of Paulicians were incorporated into Bulgarian territory and Paulician missionaries were spreading their doctrines at the same time that Byzantine Christianity was penetrating Bulgaria. The introduction of Paulicianism into Bulgaria became a serious menace to orthodox Christianity and gave rise to the important and dangerous heresy of Bogomilism.
In the 860’s Bulgaria became the battleground of Roman and Greek Christianity; missionaries of both churches were accusing the other of introducing heretical practices into that country. Finally, Khan Boris opted for Byzantine Christianity, but the unedifying contest between Christians of the one church probably contributed indirectly to the advance of Paulicianism in Bulgaria. Then by the middle of the tenth century, the teachings of the Paulicians and the Massalians coalesced, and the resulting heresy of Bogomilism assumed specifically Slavonic characteristics. The first important text that survives describing the doctrines of the Bogomils is the treatise Sermon Against the Heretics, written about 969 by the priest Cosmas. Cosmas gives us the name of the founder of this sect and the approximate time he began his work of proselytizing. “And it came to pass that in the land of Bulgaria, in the days of the Orthodox Tsar Peter (927-969), there appeared a priest (pop), by the name of Bogomil, but in truth ‘not beloved of God’ (Bogynemil).” Cosmas then goes on to enumerate Bogomil doctrines. “They call the Devil the creator of man and of all God’s creatures; and because of their extreme ignorance, some of them call him a fallen angel and others consider him to be the unjust steward.” The creator of this world then is the fallen angel Satanael. No longer do we have two equal or nearly equal principles, Good and Evil, confronting each other. Satanael is clearly inferior to God and ulltimately dependent on him. The Bogomils, according to Cosmas, rejected the Incarnation of Christ and consequently refused to venerate his mother Mary. Like the Paulicians before them, they also reviled the Mosaic Law and the Old Testament in general because it was the work of the evil creator, the Devil. “Although they carry the Holy Gospel in their hands, they interpret it falsely, and thus seduce men.” The Bogomils had also learned the trick of outwardly accepting the New Testament in order to avoid suspicion and then interpreting it in their own way.
Since the visible world is the creation of Satanael, it followed that union with God could be achieved only if all matter and flesh were avoided. Meat, wine and marriage, the triad of evils, were renounced as abominable. Bogomil legend states that the very tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, whose fruit was the cause of the downfall of Adam and Eve, was actually the vine planted by Satanael himself. This would explain why wine was so abhorrent.
Like the Paulicians, the Bogomils rejected the sacraments and denied the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, interpreting the sacrament allegorically. Cosmas says: “They felt an aversion to baptized children,” and whenever they encountered a child they would “turn away and spit.” Not only did they abhor Christian baptism in water, they held John the Baptist to be the forerunner of anti-Christ.
The Bogomils saw no virtue in the cross, even in a cosmic sense, as did the Manichees, as Cosmas says:
About the Cross of our Lord ... they say: how can we bow to it, for on it the Jews crucified the son of God? The cross is an enemy of God. For this reason they instruct their followers to hate it and not to venerate it, saying: if some one were to kill the son of a king with a piece of wood, is it possible that this piece of wood could be dear to the king? So is the cross to God.
Since church buildings, icons and relics were all of material origin, and hence evil, the Bogomils were repelled by them. Churches, in fact, were viewed as the dwelling places not of God but of the evil creator Satanael. “The heretics,” says Cosmas, “do not reverence icons, but call them idols ... the heretics mock [relics of saints] and laugh at us when we reverence them and beg help from them.” As for miracles, the Bogomil arguments were the same as those of the Jewish authorities in the New Testament against the miraculous powers of Jesus: “They say that the miracles are not wrought by the will of God, but that the Devil performs them to deceive men.” Consequently, the whole cult of saints was rejected by the Bogomils. Not only were the orthodox feast days of Christ and of the Christian martyrs not celebrated by them, the Bogomils both fasted and worked on Sunday, the Lord’s day.
Like the Massalians, the Bogomils stressed the significance of the Lord’s Prayer. “Shutting themselves up in their houses, they pray four times a day and four times a night. ... When they bow they do not make the sign of the Cross.” Another Massalian trait the Bogomils adopted was their aversion to manual labor. Cosmas criticizes them as parasites on society and idlers with no fixed abode.
While rejecting the order of priesthood and the sacraments in general, the Bogoinils did confess their sins to one another, suggesting thereby the concept of the general priesthood of the laity. This idea, together with their individualistic and rationalistic interpretation of the Gospel, found its way later into Protestantism.
Finally, Bogomilism was a serious political threat to the Bulgarian state, since it preached outright civil disobedience. “They teach their own people not to obey their masters, they revile the wealthy, hate the tsar, ridicule the elders, condemn the boyars, regard as vile in the sight of God those who serve the tsar and forbid every serf to work for his lord.”
By 1050 Bogomilism had spread to the western provinces of Asia Minor. The fullest and most systematic account of the Bogomil doctrines is found in the Dogmatic Panoply composed by the theologian Euthymios Zygabenos. Briefly these were as follows. Satanael was the first-born son of God the Father and the elder brother of the Son and Logos. The compound name Satanael means God’s adversary. Second to the Father in dignity, Satanael was clad in the “same form and garments” as the Father and sat on a throne at His right hand. Stricken with the sin of pride, however, Satanael decided to rebel against the Father and succeeded in persuading the “ministering powers” to shake off their yoke and follow him. As a punishment for their rebellion, they were cast out of heaven, and Satanael’s place and seniority rights passed to his younger brother. Exiled from his celestial abode, Satanael decided to create the visible world in imitation of the heavenly one over which he would reign as the Father reigns in Heaven. It is the creation of the visible world by Satanael that is described in Genesis. The Christians falsely attributed the creation of this world to God the Father.
Next, Satanael created Adam’s body out of earth and water, but when he set the body upright, the water flowed out of the big toe of Adam’s right foot and assumed the shape of a serpent. Then Satanael breathed into the body, hoping to animate it, but again the breath escaped by the same way, animating instead the serpent, which now became a minister of Satanael. Thoroughly frustrated at his attempt to bring his human creation to life, Satanael tumed to his Father and begged him to send down his Spirit on Adam; in retum Satanael promised that man should belong to both of them. God agreed, and Adam came to life, a compound of a divine soul from the Father and a body created by Satanael. After creating Eve in the same manner, Satanael proceeded to seduce her; as a consequence of this union, Eve bore Satanael a son, Cain, and a daughter, Kalomena. Abel was born later of Eve and Adam. Satanael’s seduction of Eve had a serious consequence for him: he was divested of his creative powers and beauty, and God abandoned to him the government of the earth with the hope that the divine soul in all men would resist evil, but this was not to be.
The ministering powers who fell with Satanael now felt betrayed by their leader; taking the daughters of men as wives, they begot the race of giants who rose up to fight Satanael on behalf of mankind. Incensed by this open rebellion, Satanael sent down the flood to destroy all living flesh with the exception of Noah, who had no daughter and who consequently remained faithful to Satanael.
Finally, in the year 5500 from the creation of the world, taking pity on the divine soul imprisoned in the human body, the Father brought forth from his heart the Logos known by the names of Archangel Michael, because he was “the messenger of the Great Counsel,” Jesus, as healer, and Christ, since he was “anointed with the flesh.” Christ, however, did not really assume human flesh but only appeared to do so (docetism). He entered the world merely by passing through the right ear of the Virgin, and in his nonmaterial body he performed his mission of teaching. Although he appeared to be crucified and to rise from the dead, Christ’s redemption actually consisted only in his teaching aimed at liberating man’s divine soul from his material body. Descending into Hell, Christ cast aside his mask and bound the enemy Satanael with heavy chains. It was at this time that Satanael lost the “el” from his name, together with all his divine attributes, thus becoming “Satan.” Having succeeded in his mission, Christ returned to the Father into whom He was resolved. In other words, Christ was not the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal Word who was incarnate as true man in history, but only the spoken word of God manifested in Christ’s oral teaching. Thus, Christ entered the world through the right ear of the Virgin just as the spoken word enters the ear of the listener.
In view of these doctrines it becomes understandable why the Bogomils rejected the Old Testament, which, they taught, describes the works of Satanael as the creator. The Mosaic Law, the law given to Moses on Mount Sinai, was the work of Satanael. The only Old Testament figures who were saved were the ancestors of Jesus. In this regard, however, the Byzantine Bogomils differed from their Bulgarian coreligionists: the Bulgarian Bogomils rejected both the Mosaic Law and the Old Testament prophets, while the Byzantine Bogomils accepted the Psalter and the sixteen Books of the Prophets from the Old Testament, and the New Testament in its entirety. This also explains why the Byzantine Bogomils recognized the ancestors of Christ and the sixteen Prophets of the Old Testament as saints. Rejecting the cult of icons, they revered the iconoclasts, whom they considered “alone Orthodox and faithful.” With the exception of these, the Bogomils rejected all other Christian saints, whose relics they believed were inhabited by demons. Their view of demonology according to Zygabenos was that “the demons fly from them alone like an arrow from a bow; they inhabit all other men (non-Bogomils) and instruct them in vice, lead them to wickedness and after their death dwell in their corpses, remain in their tombs and await their resurrection in order to be punished together with them.”
The chief residence of Satanael in the past had been the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, but after its destruction he took up his abode in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The special habitat of demons, however, was water, the element from which Satanael created the world. Thus, the Bogomils detested the idea of baptism by water. Nonetheless, the Bogomils called the ceremony of initiation into their own sect the Baptism of Christ, which, however, was consummated through the Spirit. After a period of severe asceticism and spiritual preparation, the baptized candidate was fully initiated by the higher ceremony of Perfection.
Since the body, fashioned by Satanael, was evil, at death the bodies of the Perfect were believed to dissolve into dust, never to rise again; instead, the divine soul put on the immortal garment of Christ and entered the Father’s Kingdom.
The Bogomil community imposed a severe discipline on its members by demanding that they recite the Lord’s Prayer seven times a day and five times a night and that they fast from meat, cheese and eggs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of every week until the ninth hour of the day.
Uprooted from Byzantium by Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118), Bogomilism returned to its original stronghold in Bulgaria, enriched and fortified by its evolution in the empire.
The increasing intercourse between the East and the West fos- tered by commerce and the Crusades introduced these Bogomil or neo-Manichaean ideas to western Europe. In 1167 a certain Niketas of Constantinople presided over a meeting of the Cathars or Albigensians at Saint-Felix de Caraman near Toulouse. This infection of Eastern heresy introduced new “protestant” ideas to the Catholic West and caused grave dislocation in southern France and northern Italy.
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