THE CHURCH IN CRISIS: A History of the General Councils: 325-1870

Msgr. Philip Hughes

Nihil Obstat: 
James A. Reynolds, Ph.D.
Censor Deputatus  

Imprimatur:
+ Francis Cardinal Spellman
Archbishop of New York
September 28, 1960  

The nihil obstat and imprimatur are official declarations that a book or 
pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is contained 
therein that those who have granted the nihil obstat and imprimatur agree 
with the contents, opinions, or statements expressed.  

REVERENDISSIMO IOANNI K. CARTWRIGPT ET SUIS
AUCTOR AMICUS PLENO CORDE

Salve, Umbria verde, e tu del puro fonte
nume Clitumno! Sento in cuor l'antica
patria e aleggiarmi su l'accesa fronte
gl'itali iddii.  

             *    *    *

Tutto ora tace. Nel sereno gorgo
la tenue miro saliente vena: 
rema, e d'un lieve pullular lo specchio
segna de l'acque.  

Ride sepolta a l'imo una foresta
breve, e ramaggia immobile: il diaspro
par che si mischi in flessuosi amori
con l'amestista.  

E di zaffiro i fior paiono, ed hanno
de l'adamante rigido i riflessi,
e splendon freddi e chiamano a i silenzi
del verde fondo.
                            Carducci.  

Notre Dame du Lac
April 26, 1960


CONTENTS:

Introduction: On Councils and General Councils

1. The First General Council of Nicaea, 325

2. The First General Council of Constantinople, 381

3. The General Council of Ephesus, 431

4. The General Council of Chalcedon, 451

5. The Second General Council of Constantinople, 553

6. The Third General Council of Constantinople, 680-81

7. The Second General Council of Nicaea, 787

8. The Fourth General Council of Constantinople, 869-70

9. The First General Council of the Lateran, 1123

10. The Second General Council of the Lateran, 1139

11. The Third General Council of the Lateran, 1179

12. The Fourth General Council of the Lateran, 1215

13. The First General Council of Lyons, 1245

14. The Second General Council of Lyons, 1274

15. The General Council of Vienne, 1311-12

16. The General Council of Constance, 1414-18

17. The General Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence, 1431-45

18. The Fifth General Council of the Lateran, 1512-17

19. The General Council of Trent, 1545-63

20. The First General Council of the Vatican, 1869-70

Appendix

Index


Introduction: On Councils and General Councils

The history of the General Councils of the Church is a fascinating subject, 
and to those unfamiliar with the history of the Church a subject which 
bristles with difficulties of all kinds. This, I think, ought to be 
understood from the beginning. Some of the problems raised by this or that 
particular council will be considered in the chapter devoted to it. About 
difficulties general to the subject I would like to say something in this 
Introduction.

It is hardly possible to write the history of these twenty General Councils 
as though they were sections hewn from the one same log. They are not a 
unity in the sense in which successive sessions of Congress are a unity. 
Each of the twenty councils is an individual reality, each has its own 
special personality. This is partly due to the fact that each had its 
origin in a particular crisis of Church affairs, partly to the fact that 
they are strung out over fifteen hundred years of history, and that, for 
example, the human beings who constitute the council can be as remote from 
each other as the victims of the persecution of Diocletian in the fourth 
century from the victims of Bismarck in the nineteenth. It is not through 
any mechanical, material similarity of action, then, that the history of 
such an institution, and its significance, can be understood. Where the 
total action is spread over such vast spaces of time, and is discontinuous, 
whoever attempts to relate the whole of the action is faced with problems 
of a very special kind. And this speciality is, of course, bound up with 
the fact that the body which threw up this device called the General 
Council--the Church of Christ-- is itself unique in this, viz., its 
possession of a recorded, continuous activity of nearly two thousand years.

Some, perhaps superficial, consideration of this vast timetable, 325-1870, 
may be helpful at the outset, even to the reader who is not, by nature, 
chronologically minded. Reading the list of the General Councils we can see 
immediately two obvious groupings: the first eight were all held in eastern 
Europe or in Asia Minor; all the rest in western Europe, in Italy, France, 
and Germany. The eastern councils were Greek-speaking, the others Latin. 
General Councils are frequent in some ages, and in others the centuries go 
by without a single one. Thus, for the seventy years 381-451 there are 
three General Councils, then one every hundred years down to 869. For 254 
years there is now not a single General Council; then, in 190 years there 
are seven (1123-1311). Another century goes by without a council, and in 
the next hundred years (1414-1512) three are summoned. The Council of Trent 
is called less than thirty years after the last of these three, and then 
306 years go by before the twentieth council meets in 1869 ninety-two years 
ago nearly.

Each of these councils has a history and a character all its own. The 
history of the next council--how matters will go once the bishops meet--can 
never be foretold from the history of the last. The powers and the 
authority of the new council are, it is recognised, the same as its 
predecessors possessed. The procedure may, and will, vary. One thing is 
never constant: the human reaction of the council's component parts.

The first General Council met in 325. The Church had then been an 
established fact for nearly three hundred years. How did councils begin--
i.e., meetings of bishops to discuss matters of common interest? When and 
where did the first church councils take place? And what about the 
beginnings of the "prestige" of these councils? That is, of the idea that 
what bishops collectively agree is law has a binding force that is greater 
than any of their individual instructions to their own see.

To begin with the last point, it is a safe statement that from the moment 
when history first shows us the Church of Christ as an institution, the 
exclusive right of the Church to state with finality what should be 
believed as Christ's teaching is manifestly taken for granted. To bring out 
a theory of belief, or to propose a change in morals which conflicts with 
what the Church universally holds is, from the very beginning, to put 
oneself fatally in the wrong. The immediate, spontaneous reaction of the 
Church to condemn thinkers with new and original views of this kind is 
perhaps the most general, as it is the most striking, of all the phenomena 
of the Church's early history, so far back as the record goes.[1]

When it was that bishops first formed the habit of coming together in 
council, we do not know. It is such an obvious act, on the part of 
officials with like problems and responsibilities and authority, that to do 
this was second nature surely. What we do know is that as early as the 
second century (100-200 A.D.) it was the custom for the bishops who came 
together for a bishop's funeral to take charge of the election of his 
successor. Here is one likely source, it is suggested, from which came the 
council of bishops as a recurring feature of ordinary Christian life.

About the year 190 a furious controversy as to the date at which the feast 
of Easter should be kept, shook the whole Church, and the pope, St. Victor 
I, sent orders to the places most troubled that the bishops should meet and 
report to him their findings. And a series of councils were then held, in 
Palestine, in Asia Minor, and in Gaul. Sixty years later when, with the 
great career of St. Cyprian, the mists clear away from Roman Africa, we 
perceive that the bishops' council is already a long-established practice 
there. The bishops of Africa meet in council, indeed, twice every year. 
What they decreed on these occasions was law for the whole of Christian 
Africa. These councils were well attended; in 220 there were seventy-one 
bishops present, and at another council, ninety. At St. Cyprian's council 
of Carthage in 256, there were eighty-seven. There was a similar, 
systematic conciliar action in Egypt and in Syria and Palestine.

In the early years of the next century we have records of councils in Spain 
(Elvira, 300) and in France (Arles, 314) with the names of bishops present 
and a list of the laws they enacted. The Catholic Church may, indeed, be a 
Church made up of churches (i.e., dioceses) but never, so this history 
seems to show, of dioceses where each bishop acts without any reference to 
the rest.

When the emperor Constantine publicly became a follower of Christ (312) he 
was immediately faced with the grave African problem known to history as 
the Donatist Schism. Necessarily, and in a very brief space of time, he was 
familiarised with the function of the council of the bishops, as an 
instrument of church government. It was natural, inevitable indeed, that 
when a few years later the Arian crisis arose, all concerned, the emperor 
and the bishops, should think of a great council as the first move in the 
restoration of order. The novel feature in 325 was that not only the 
bishops of the locality affected were convoked, but the bishops of the 
whole Catholic world.[2] This was to be not a regional or provincial 
council, but a council for the church in general--a General Council.

The universal belief that the Church of Christ, in its day-to-day business 
of teaching the doctrine of Christ, is divinely preserved from teaching 
erroneously, entailed the consequence that (to use a modern terminology) 
the General Council is considered infallible in its decisions about belief. 
If the official teachers as a body are infallible as they teach, scattered 
about the world in their hundreds of sees, they do not lose the promised, 
divine, preserving guidance once they have come together in a General 
Council. And once General Councils have taken place we begin to meet 
explicit statements of this truth. The councils themselves are explicitly 
conscious of it when, making their statement of the truth denied by the 
innovator, they bluntly say of those who will not accept their decision, 
Let him be anathema. St. Athanasius, who as a young cleric was present at 
Nicaea, can refer to its decree about Arianism as something final, the last 
all-decisive word: "The word of the Lord, put forth by the Oecumenical 
Council at Nicaea is an eternal word, enduring for ever."[3] Eighty years 
or so later than this the pope, St. Leo I, warning the bishops assembled at 
the General Council of Chalcedon to leave untouched the decisions of Nicaea 
about the rank of the great sees of the East, speaks of Nicaea as "having 
fixed these arrangements by decrees that are inviolable," and says, "These 
arrangements were made by the bishops at Nicaea under divine 
inspiration."[4] This was in the year 451. His successor, St. Gregory the 
Great, writing about 594 to the patriarch of Constantinople, has a
reference to the special prestige of the first, doctrine-defining General 
Councils which equates their work with that of Holy Scripture: "I profess 
that as I receive and venerate the four books of the Gospels, so I do the 
four councils," which he proceeds to list: Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 
381, Ephesus 431, Chalcedon 451. These, he says, "are the four squared 
stone on which the structure of the holy faith arises."[5]

Nowhere in these early centuries, in fact, do we find any member of the 
Church questioning the truth as the General Councils have defined it. What 
they teach as the truth is taken to be as true as though it were a 
statement of Scripture itself. The question was never raised, seemingly, 
that the greater or smaller number of bishops who in response to the 
summons attended, in any way affected the peculiar authority of the General 
Council; nor the fact that all but all of these bishops were from the 
Greek-speaking East.

How these fundamental, primitive notions developed, how all that they 
seminally contained matured and expanded through the centuries, this is the 
very subject-matter of the chapters that follow. And here will be found, in 
its due place, some account of the controversies that later arose as to the 
relation (the constitutional relation, so to speak) of the General Council 
to its president the pope. What the role of the pope has been in the 
General Council is, necessarily, a main topic of all these chapters. But it 
may be useful to say a word about this here, and something also about the 
nature of the bishops' role.

The General Council is then a purely human arrangement whereby a divinely 
founded institution functions in a particular way for a particular purpose. 
That divinely founded thing is the teaching Church, i.e., the pope and the 
diocesan bishops of the Church of Christ. The teaching is an activity of 
the Church that is continuous, never ceasing. The General Council of the 
teaching Church, in all the sessions of the occasions on which it has met, 
in the nineteen hundred years and more of the Church's history, has sat for 
perhaps thirty years in all, at most. It is an exceptional phenomenon in 
the life of the Church, and usually it appears in connection with some 
great crisis of that life.

Ever since the popes were first articulate about the General Council, they 
have claimed the right to control its action and, to take their place in it 
(whether personally or by legates sent in their name) or by their 
subsequent acceptance of the council, to give or withhold an approbation of 
its decisions, which stamps them as the authentic teaching of the Church of 
Christ. Only through their summoning it, or through their consenting to 
take their place at it, does the assembly of bishops become a General 
Council. No member of the Church has ever proposed that a General Council 
shall be summoned and the pope be left out, nor that the pope should take 
any other position at the General Council but as its president. The history 
of the twenty General Councils shows that the bishops--a section of them--
not infrequently fought at the council the policies of the popes who had 
summoned the council, and fought even bitterly. But in no council has it 
been moved that the bishop of X be promoted to the place of the Bishop of 
Rome, or that the Bishop of Rome's views be disregarded, and held of no 
more account than those of the bishop of any other major see. There are, 
indeed, gaps in our knowledge of the detail of all these events; the mist 
of antiquity, at times, no doubt obscures our view, but through the mist at 
its worst the general shape is ever discernible of a Roman Primacy 
universally recognised, and submitted to, albeit (at times) unwillingly--
recognised and submitted to because, so the bishops believed, it was set up 
by God Himself.

To the General Councils of the Church there have been summoned, in the last 
850 years, as well as the bishops, other ecclesiastics of importance, the 
General Superiors of religious orders, for example, and abbots of 
particular monasteries. But these are present by concession. The essential 
elements of the General Council are, in addition to the pope, the bishops 
ruling their sees. And the bishops are present as the accredited witnesses 
of what is believed throughout the Church. This is the traditional, 
standard conception of their role on these occasions. And for typical 
modern statements, contained in well-known textbooks used throughout the 
Church today in hundreds of theological classrooms, this from Christian 
Pesch, S.J.,[6] may be quoted: "The bishops do not come together in order 
to think up something new out of their own minds, but in order to be 
witnesses of the teaching received from Christ and handed out by the 
Church"; and this too from Fr. Dominic Prummer, O.P.: The bishops gathered 
in a General Council are not mere counsellors of the pope, but real 
legislators; which is why each bishop signs the acta of the council as 
follows: 'I, James, bishop of X, defining have subscribed my name.'"[7]

As to the role of the General Council vis-a-vis any controversy about the 
Christian Faith, in connection with which it may have been summoned, this 
has never been more luminously stated, in a single sentence, than by John 
Henry Newman, with reference, indeed, to the first council of the great 
series, but, as history alone would show, a statement true of them all. ". 
. . it must be borne in mind that the great Council at Nicaea was summoned, 
not to decide for the first time what was to be held concerning our Lord's 
divine nature, but, as far as inquiry came into its work, to determine the 
fact whether Arius did or did not contradict the Church's teaching, and, if 
he did, by what sufficient tessera[8] he and his party could be excluded 
from the communion of the faithful."[9] And Newman's own great hero, St. 
Athanasius, writing only thirty-four years after Nicaea, has a similar 
thought when he draws attention to the different way the Council of Nicaea 
spoke when it was making laws about ecclesiastical discipline and when it 
was facing the problem of Arius. "The fathers at Nicaea speaking of the 
Easter feast say 'We have decided as follows.' But about the faith they do 
not say 'We have decided,' but 'This is what the Catholic Church believes.' 
And immediately they proclaim how they believe, in order to declare, not 
some novelty, but that their belief is apostolic, and that what they write 
down is not something they have discovered, but those very things which the 
Apostles taught."[10]

This little book of mine--"little," surely, for it surveys twenty General 
Councils and fifteen hundred years of history--has no claim on the reader's 
notice beyond its purpose to say how each of these councils came to be, and 
what each achieved. Many questions about General Councils as such, and 
about particular General Councils, are inevitably not even alluded to. I 
have no ambition to write a survey course in which everything is mentioned 
and nothing taught. Nevertheless there are some serious matters that cannot 
be omitted, and yet can only be dealt with summarily--the new theories 
which became heresies, for example, and the orthodox statements of the 
truth which the theories perverted. In summary accounts of such things the 
impression is easily conveyed that these disputes are a mere war of words. 
Actually, what any study of the voluminous writings on both sides reveals 
is that the conflicting minds are of the first order, that the points at 
issue are the fundamentals of revealed truth, and (a very important 
circumstance that often has escaped the historian's notice) that the 
contestants are passionately in earnest, not as rivals in scholarship or 
philosophy, but as pastoral-minded bishops, anxious about the salvation of 
men's souls. A master mind, reviewing a situation we shall shortly be 
studying, affords an illustration of this.

"Cyril, it may be, was overharsh in the words he used, words used without 
enough reflexion. Deep within him his passionate attachment to the truth 
that Christ is a single being was intertwined with the innermost strands of 
the mysticism of the East. For the disciple of Theodore of Mopsuestia, as 
for the disciple of Pelagius, the question of the relations between man and 
God is, above all, a question of merit and no-merit. In the great book of 
deserts each man's account is kept in two columns, debit and credit. As a 
man's merits pile up, as he lessens his faults, so does his situation 
improve. At the end God balances the account, and places us according to 
the excess of credit over debit. Moralism pure and simple, this way of 
looking at things, and not religion at all. Where, in such a system, does 
the Incarnation come in? or the cross of Christ? Here, Jesus Christ is our 
model, nothing more. Here we never meet our true saviour, our redeemer, He 
who by His divine presence purifies everything, lifts all to a higher 
plane, consecrates all, makes divine beings of us so far as the limits of 
our nature allow this communication of divinity.

"Very, very different is the spirit that gives life to the theology of St. 
Cyril. Here, Jesus Christ is truly God-within-us. The Christian makes a 
direct contact with Him, by a union of natures, a mysterious union indeed, 
under the sacramental veil of the Eucharist. Through this body and this 
blood he comes to make the contact with God, for these have, in Jesus 
Christ, a union (equally a union of natures ) with divinity. . . . To the 
poor peasant working in the fields of the Delta, to the dock labourer at 
the port of Pharos, Cyril gives the message that, in this world, he can 
touch God. And that through this contact, whence springs a mystical 
kinship, he can receive an assurance about the life hereafter; not only the 
guarantee that he is immortal, but that he will be immortal joined with 
God."[11] Such can be the practical importance of "abstract theological 
thought."

And, with reference to the stormy history of the first eight councils, 
events of a thousand to sixteen hundred years ago, we may remind ourselves 
that the actors here are Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians; their natural 
temperament and sense of nationality was not a whit less ardent than it can 
show itself to be in their descendants of this mid-twentieth century.

And now, to bring these introductory remarks to an end, it will perhaps be 
helpful to draw attention to one feature particularly of the history of the 
first seven councils. This is not so much the serious differences of 
opinion as to the interpretation of the basic mysteries of the Christian 
religion, which is their main concern, but rather the way these 
differences, at times, seem to turn so largely on different ways of 
understanding the terms used to express or explain the doctrine. Since all 
this is likely to be unfamiliar to the general reader, to him I would say 
some words of the great authority I have already made use of, a writer who 
all his life was ever conscious that the course of true historical study is 
strewn with difficulties.

"First of all," says Newman, "and in as few words as possible, and ex 
abundanti cautela: Every Catholic holds that the Christian dogmas were in 
the Church from the time of the Apostles; that they were ever in their 
substance what they are now; that they existed before the formulas were 
publicly adopted, in which, as time went on, they were defined and 
recorded, and that such formulas, when sanctioned by the due ecclesiastical 
acts, are binding on the faith of Catholics, and have a dogmatic 
authority....

"Even before we take into account the effect which would naturally be 
produced on the first Christians by the novelty and mysteriousness of 
doctrines which depend for their reception simply upon Revelation, we have 
reason to anticipate that there would be difficulties and mistakes in 
expressing them, when they first came to be set forth by unauthoritative 
writers. Even in secular sciences, inaccuracy of thought and language is 
but gradually corrected; that is, in proportion as their subject-matter is 
thoroughly scrutinized and mastered by the co-operation of many independent 
intellects, successively engaged upon it. Thus, for instance, the word 
Person requires the rejection of various popular senses, and a careful 
definition, before it can serve for philosophical uses. We sometimes use it 
for an individual as contrasted with a class or multitude, as when we speak 
of having 'personal objections' to another; sometimes for the body, in 
contrast to the soul, as when we speak of 'beauty of person.' We sometimes 
use it in the abstract, as when we speak of another as 'insignificant in 
person.' How divergent in meaning are the derivatives, personable, 
personalities, personify, personation, personage, parsonage! This variety 
arises partly from our own carelessness, partly from the necessary 
developments of language, partly from the defects of our vernacular tongue.

"Language then requires to be refashioned even for sciences which are based 
on the senses and the reason; but much more will this be the case, when we 
are concerned with subject-matters, of which, in our present state, we 
cannot possibly form any complete or consistent conception, such as the 
Catholic doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. Since they are from the 
nature of the case above our intellectual reach, and were unknown till the 
preaching of Christianity, they required on their first promulgation new 
words, or words used in new senses, for their due enunciation; and, since 
these were not definitely supplied by Scripture or by tradition, nor for 
centuries by ecclesiastical authority, variety in the use, and confusion in 
the apprehension of them, were unavoidable in the interval.... Not only had 
the words to be adjusted and explained which were peculiar to different 
schools or traditional in different places, but there was the formidable 
necessity of creating a common measure between two, or rather three 
languages--Latin, Greek, and Syriac."[12]

NOTES

1. For a succinct, popular account of which cf. my own History of the 
Church, vol. I, chaps. III, IV, passim. For an authoritative, documented 
account cf. Pierre Batiffol, L'Eglise Naissante (the whole book). This has 
been translated into English as Primitive Christianity.

2. The Greek word for "the whole world" is oikoumene, whence our modem 
adjective "oecumenical," which is used with reference to councils of the 
Church as an equivalent for "general."

3. Letter to the Africans, in Rouet de Journel S.J., Enchiridion 
Patristicum, no. 792. The full titles of all books quoted will be found in 
Appendix II.

4. Ibid., no. 2185.

5. Ibid., no. 2291.

6. Praelectiones Dogmaticae (5th ed., 1915) vol. 1, p. 313. The footnotes 
in this book do not give the authorities for the statements in the text, 
but only the source of the quotations.

7. Definiens subscripsi. The passage I have translated is in Prummer, 
Manuale Theologiae Moralis, 5th ed., 1928, I, 119.

8. Testing token.

9. "Apostolical Tradition," an article in the British Critic, July 1836, 
reprinted (1871, and many times since) in Essays, Critical and Historical, 
vol. I, 125.

10. Epistola de Synodis, par. 5, in Rouet de Journel, S.J., Enchiridion 
Patristicum, no. 785.

11 Monseigneur Louis Duchesne, Les Eglises separees, 38-40. I came across 
this passage in Bardy, Les Luttes Christologiques apres le Concile de 
Chalcedoine, i.e., Fliche and Martin, vol. 5, 273, n. 1.

12. J.H. Newman, On St. Cyril's Formula (1858), reprinted in Tracts, 
Theological and Ecclesiastical (1874), pp. 287-90.


CHAPTER 1. The First General Council of Nicaea, 325

It is more than sixteen hundred years since the first of the General 
Councils of the Church met. This is so long ago that the very names of the 
places connected with its history have quite disappeared from common 
knowledge and the atlases. They have about them an air of the fabulous; 
Nicaea, Bithynia, Nicomedia, and the rest. The very unfamiliarity of the 
sounds is a reminder that even for the purpose of the slight consideration 
which is all that these pages allow, a considerable adjustment of the mind 
is called for. We must, somehow, revive the memory of a world that has 
wholly passed away, that had disappeared, indeed, well nigh a thousand 
years already when Columbus and his ships first sighted the coasts of the 
new continent.

The business that brought the three hundred or so bishops to Nicaea in 325 
from all over the Christian world was to find a remedy for the disturbances 
that had seriously troubled the East for now nearly two years. The cause of 
these disturbances was a new teaching about the basic mystery of the 
Christian religion.

Let our expert summarise the position, and say what it was that the new 
leader, Arius by name, had lately been popularising, through sermons, 
writings, and popular hymns and songs. "It was the doctrine of Arianism 
that our Lord was a pure creature, made out of nothing, liable to fall, the 
Son of God by adoption, not by nature, and called God in Scripture, not as 
being really such, but only in name. At the same time [Arius] would not 
have denied that the Son and the Holy Ghost were creatures transcendently 
near to God, and immeasurably distant from the rest of creation.

"Now, by contrast, how does the teaching of the Fathers who preceded Arius, 
stand relatively to such a representation of the Christian Creed? Is it 
such, or how far is it such, as to bear Arius out in so representing it? 
This is the first point to inquire about.

"First of all, the teaching of the Fathers was necessarily directed by the 
form of Baptism, as given by our Lord Himself to His disciples after His 
resurrection. To become one of His disciples was, according to His own 
words, to be baptized 'into the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
the Holy Ghost'; that is, into the profession, into the service, of a 
Triad. Such was our Lord's injunction: and ever since, before Arianism and 
after, down to this day, the initial lesson in religion taught to every 
Christian, on his being made a Christian, is that he thereby belongs to a 
certain Three, whatever more, or whether anything more, is revealed to us 
in Christianity about that Three.

"The doctrine then of a Supreme Triad is the elementary truth of 
Christianity; and accordingly, as might have been expected, its recognition 
is a sort of key-note, on which centre the thoughts and language of all 
theologians, from which they start, with which they end."[1]

Examination of a chain of pre-Arian writers, from every part of 
Christendom, reveals that "there was during the second and third centuries 
a profession and teaching concerning the Holy Trinity, not vague and 
cloudy, but of a certain determinate character," and that this teaching 
"was contradictory and destructive of the Arian hypothesis."[2] And from 
all this literature the fact emerges that, from the beginning, "some 
doctrine or other of a Trinity lies at the very root of the Christian 
conception of the Supreme Being, and of his worship and service": and that 
"it is impossible to view historical Christianity apart from the doctrine 
of the Trinity."[3]

It was round about the year 323 that the Arian crisis developed. The 
struggle between the advocates of the new theory and the Church authorities 
who stood by the tradition was to continue thence onward for a good fifty 
years and more. And now, for the first time in the history of the Church, 
the State intervened in what was, of itself, a dispute about belief. A 
second point to note is that the State, on the whole, sided with the 
innovators, and was hostile to the defenders of the traditional truth.

The history of those fifty-six years (325-41), that followed the Council of 
Nicaea and closed with the next General Council (Constantinople I), is part 
of the history of both these councils. And its complexity defies any 
summary simplification. If we turn to Newman for a clue to the meaning of 
it all, he will tell us that this long and stubborn struggle is nothing 
else than a particular passage in the conflict that never ceases between 
the Church and the secular power. "The same principle of government which 
led the emperors to denounce Christianity while they were pagans, led them 
to dictate to its bishops, when they had become Christians." Such an idea 
as that "religion should be independent of state authority" was, in the 
eyes of all these princes, contrary to the nature of things. And not only 
was this conflict "inevitable," but, Newman continues, it might have been 
foreseen as probable that the occasion of the conflict would be a 
controversy within the Church about some fundamental doctrine. Newman's 
last remarkable words may usefully warn us that in Church History things 
are not always so simple as we expect.[4]

Even the full history of a General (i.e., world-wide) Council called in 
such circumstances, the first council of its kind--which had no precedents 
to guide its procedure, or to instruct the generality about the special 
value attaching to its decisions--even this would inevitably present 
difficulties to minds sixteen hundred years later; minds bred in a 
detailed, centuries-old tradition about the kind of thing General Councils 
are, and furnished with definite ideas about their nature, procedure, and 
authority.

But we are very far from possessing anything like a full history of this 
first Council of Nicaea. Of any official record of the day-today 
proceedings--the acta of the council--there is no trace. The earliest 
historians, from whose accounts our knowledge must derive, were in large 
measure partisan writers. And of the two writers who were present at the 
council, the one who was a historian[5] was an ally of the heretics and the 
quasi-official panegyrist of the emperor Constantine who called the 
council; and the other,[6] though he has much indeed to say about the 
council, does not anywhere profess to be writing a record of its acts.

Nowhere, of course, is our knowledge of the history of these first 
centuries of the Church anything like so complete as is our knowledge of, 
let us say, any part of it during the last eight or nine hundred years. In 
the matter of Nicaea, as in other questions, scholars are still disputing--
and not on religious grounds--whether, for example, certain key documents 
were really written by the personages whose names they bear. About the 
details of the history of all these early councils, because of the 
insufficiency of our information, there is inevitably much confusion, great 
obscurity. Yet there are compensations for those who study it. "History 
does not bring clearly upon the canvas the details which were familiar to 
the ten thousand minds of whose combined movements and fortunes it treats. 
Such is it from its very nature; nor can the defect ever fully be remedied. 
This must be admitted . . . still no one can mistake its general teaching 
in this matter, whether he accept it or stumble at it. Bold outlines, which 
cannot be disregarded, rise out of the records of the past, when we look to 
see what it will give up to us: they may be dim, they may be incomplete, 
but they are definite; there is that which they are not, which they cannot 
be."[7]

The state, or political society, in which the Arian troubles arose and 
developed was that which we know as the Roman Empire. This state, for its 
inhabitants, was one and the same thing as civilisation, and not 
surprisingly. As the accession of Constantine to the sole rulership, in 
324, found the empire, so it had endured for three hundred years and more. 
History does not record any political achievement even remotely parallel to 
this. For the empire took in, besides Italy, the whole of Europe west of 
the Rhine and south of the Danube and also the southern half of the island 
of Britain. In the east it included the whole of the modern state we call 
Turkey, with Syria also, Palestine, and Egypt, and the lands on the 
southern shore of the Mediterranean westward thence to the Atlantic.

Races as varied as the peoples who today inhabit these lands, with just as 
little to unite them naturally, lived then for some four hundred years 
under the rule of the emperors, with a minimum of internal disturbance and 
in almost entire freedom from foreign war. The stresses and strains of the 
internal life of the empire were, of course, a constant menace to this 
marvellous unity. The supreme ruler, with whom lay the fullness of 
legislative power, who was the final judge in all lawsuits, and the head of 
the national religion, was the ruler because he was the commander in chief 
of the army: his very title imperator, which we translate "emperor," means 
just this.[8] And for the imperator, it was one of the chief problems of 
government to maintain his military prestige with the vast armies. No man 
could long rule the Roman world who did not first hold the legions true to 
himself by his own professional worth. All the great rulers who, in the 
course of these four centuries, developed and adapted and reformed the 
complex life of the state, its finances, its law, its administration, were 
in the first place great soldiers, highly successful generals: Trajan, for 
example, Hadrian, Septimius Severus, Decius, Diocletian.

And Constantine, the first emperor to abandon the pagan religion and to 
profess himself a Christian, stood out to his own generation primarily as a 
highly successful soldier, triumphant in a series of contests with rivals 
for the supreme place. Such wars, fights between rival generals for the 
imperial throne, were the chief curse of Roman political life, and 
especially so in what we reckon as the third century, the century in the 
last quarter of which Constantine himself was born. He would have been a 
little boy of nine or ten when the great Diocletian became emperor in 284, 
who, to put an end to these suicidal wars, immediately associated another 
soldier with himself, as joint emperor, the one to rule the East, the other 
the West. In 293 Diocletian took this devolution of power a step further 
With each emperor there was now associated a kind of assistant emperor, 
with the title of Caesar, the actual ruler of allotted territories and 
destined to be, in time, his principal's successor. The soldier chosen in 
293 as the first western Caesar was Constantine's father, Constantius, 
commonly called Chlorus (the Pale) from his complexion. His territory was 
the modern countries of Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and England.

These details of political reorganisation have a direct connection with our 
story. The reader knows--who does not?--that one feature of the history of 
this Roman state was its hostility to the Christian religion Scarcely a 
generation went by without some serious persecution. And Diocletian ended 
his reign with the most dreadful persecution of all (303). This was largely 
due to the influence of his colleague, the Caesar, Galerius who, in 305, 
was to succeed him as emperor in the East. And of all the territories, it 
was Egypt that provided most of the victims in the eight years the terror 
lasted--Egypt which was to be the principal scene of the Arian troubles 
and, par excellence, of the Catholic resistance to them. In the West the 
persecution was, by comparison, mild, and in the domains of Constantius 
Chlorus there was no persecution at all. This emperor's personal religious 
history, and his attitude towards the Christian religion, is full of 
interest. His views were also the views of his son Constantine, and they 
perhaps provide a clue to the strange and baffling story, not only of the 
long successful Arian defiance of the decisions of the Council of Nicaea, 
but of that first Christian emperor's seeming unawareness of the defiance.

Constantine's own character is, of course, an element of the first 
importance in the history of the council he convoked; and so also is the 
kind of thing which his "conversion" to Christianity was, some twelve years 
before the Arian problem arose. At the time of the council he was nearing 
his fiftieth year, and he had been emperor for almost twenty. History seems 
to reveal him as intelligent indeed, but passionate and headstrong; a bold 
campaigner and, as an administrator, "magnificent" in the Aristotelian 
sense. That is to say, he loved great schemes, supported them always with 
princely generosity, improvised readily, and delighted to dazzle by the 
scale of his successes. It was a natural part of the character that he was 
ambitious, confident of success, and--a less obvious trait--his ambition 
was linked with a "mystical" belief that he was destined to succeed, and a 
sure, if confused, notion that the heavenly powers were on his side. Be it 
remembered here, once more, that this man was omnipotent in public affairs, 
as no ruler has been even in the recent revolutions of our own time; for 
the Roman emperor's omnipotence was universally accepted by his millions of 
subjects as his right, as something belonging to the very nature of things.

It is less easy to say exactly what Constantine knew or believed about the 
religion of Christ, twelve years after he had, as emperor, publicly made it 
his own. Certainly it would be a gross error to consider the business of 
his mystical dream on the eve of his victory at the Milvian Bridge (312), 
that made him supreme master of the West, as parallel to what happened to 
St. Paul on the road to Damascus. His own personal religion at the time was 
that of his pagan father, the cult suddenly promoted to the supreme place 
as the official religion about the time that Constantine was born, by the 
then emperor, Aurelian (269-75). This was the cult of Sol Invictus (the 
Unconquered Sun), the worship of the divine spirit by whom the whole 
universe is ruled, the spirit whose symbol is the sun; a symbol in which 
this spirit in some way specially manifests itself. Under Aurelian this 
cult was organised with great splendour. The temple of the Sun which he 
built at Rome must have been one of the wonders of the world. Aurelian's 
coins bear the inscription The Sun is the Lord of the Roman Empire. The 
whole cult is penetrated with the idea that there is a single spirit who is 
supreme, with the idea of an overruling divine monarchy. Moreover, the cult 
was in harmony with a philosophical religion steadily growing, in the high 
places of the administration, throughout this same century, the cult of 
Summus Deus--the God who is supreme.

Constantine's father remained faithful to this cult of Sol Invictus even 
when his seniors, Diocletian and Maximian, reverted to the old cults of 
Jupiter and Hercules. And once Constantine--no more than Caesar on his 
father's death (306)--felt himself really master in the West, Hercules and 
Jupiter disappeared from his coinage, and Sol Invictus was restored, while 
the official panegyrics laud "that divine spirit which governs this whole 
world." This in 311.

What Constantine gathered from his famous dream in September 312 was that 
this supreme divinity was promising him salvation in this military crisis, 
had despatched a messenger to assure him of it and to tell him how to act, 
and that this messenger was Christ, the God whom the Christians worshipped, 
and that the badge his soldiers must wear was the sign of Christ, the 
cross. He did not, on the morrow of his victory, ask for baptism, nor even 
to be enrolled as a catechumen. Constantine was never so much as even this. 
And not until he lay dying, twenty-five years later, was he baptised.

It was, then, an all but uninstructed, if enthusiastic, convert who now, 
with all the caution of an experienced politician, set his name to the 
Edict of Milan ( 313 ), set up the Christian religion as a thing legally 
permissible, endowed its chief shrines with regal munificence, showered 
civic privileges, honours, and jurisdiction on its bishops, and even began 
the delicate task of introducing Christian ideas into the fabric of the 
law. It was an all but uninstructed convert who, also, in these next ten 
years--and in the turbulent province of Africa--plunged boldly into the 
heat of a religious war, the Donatist Schism, with the instinctive 
confidence that his mere intervention would settle all problems. Between 
the truce with the Donatists, 321, and the appearance of Arius in Egypt the 
interval is short indeed. What had Constantine learned from the Donatist 
experience? What had it taught him about the kind of thing the divine 
society was in which he so truly believed? Very little, it would seem.

The great see of Alexandria in Egypt, of which Arius was a priest had for 
many years before his appearance as a heretic been troubled by schism. One 
of the suffragan bishops--Meletius by name--had accused his principal of 
giving way during the persecution; and, declaring all the bishop of 
Alexandria's acts invalid, had proceeded to consecrate bishops in one place 
after another, in opposition to him. Nor did Meletius cease his activities 
when this particular bishop of Alexandria died. In many places there were 
soon two sets of Catholic clergy, the traditional line and the "Meletian"; 
the confusion was great and the contest bitter everywhere, the faithful 
people as active as their pastors. "It was out of the Meletian schism that 
Arianism was born and developed," one historian[9] will tell us. Arius had 
been a "Meletian" in his time, but the new bishop, Alexander, had received 
him back and had promoted him to an important church. And here his learned 
eloquence and ascetic life soon gave his novel teaching as wide publicity 
as he could desire.

The bishop's first act, as the news spread, was to arrange a public 
disputation. In this Arius was worsted. He next disobeyed the bishop's 
natural injunction to be silent, and began to look for support outside 
Egypt. Meanwhile the bishop called a council of the hundred bishops subject 
to his see; ninety-eight voted to condemn Arius; and his two supporters, 
along with a handful of other clerics were deposed. Arius fled to 
Palestine, to an old friend generally regarded as the greatest scholar of 
the day, Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea. And from Caesarea the two began 
a vast correspondence to engage the support of bishops expected to be 
friendly to the cause, as far away as the imperial capital, Nicomedia.

Already there was a bond between Arius and many of those to whom he wrote. 
They like himself were pupils of the same famous teacher of the last 
generation, Lucian of Antioch, whose school--and not Alexandria--was the 
real birthplace of this new theological development. And Arius could 
address such prelates as "Dear Fellow-Lucianist." Of all those to whom he 
now wrote, none was so important as a second Eusebius, the bishop of the 
imperial city itself, and a possible power with the emperor through his 
friendship with Constantine's sister, the empress Constantia, consort of 
the eastern emperor, Licinius. The Lucianist bishop of Nicomedia rose to 
the occasion, "as though upon him the whole fate of the Church depended," 
the bishop of Alexandria complained. For Eusebius, too, circularised the 
episcopate generally and summoned a council of bishops, and they voted that 
Arius should be reinstated, and wrote to beg this of the bishop of 
Alexandria.

Arius' bishop, meanwhile, had been active also. We know of seventy letters 
which he wrote to bishops all over the Christian world; amongst others to 
whom he wrote was the pope. And since all these episcopal letters were 
copied and passed round, made up into collections and, as we should say, 
published, the whole of the East was soon aflame, fighting and rioting in 
one city after another. Few indeed of these enthusiasts could have 
understood the discussions of the theologians, but all grasped that what 
Arius was saying was that Christ was not God. And if this were so, what 
about the saving death on the Cross? And what was sinful man to hope for 
when he died? When the bishop of Alexandria stigmatised his rebellious 
priest as Christomachos (fighter against Christ), he clinched the matter in 
such a way that all, from the Christian emperor to the meanest dock hand in 
the port, must be personally interested, and passionately.

During these first months of agitation Constantine had, however, other 
matters to occupy him, and, to begin with, the agitation was none of his 
business. At the moment when the great movement began, none of the lands 
affected came under his jurisdiction. But in that same year, 323, war broke 
out between himself and his eastern colleague, his brother-in-law, 
Licinius. In July 324 Constantine, invader of Licinius territory, defeated 
him heavily at Adrianople, and in September he gained a second victory at 
Chrysopolis.[10] Later Licinius was put to death. When the victor entered 
his new capital in the ensuing weeks, there was in his household a Spanish 
prelate who had dwelt with Constantine for some years now, Hosius, bishop 
of Cordova. It was to him that Constantine, with the new Arian crisis 
confronting him, now turned.

Arius, by now, had returned to Alexandria, fortified with the vote of the 
council at Nicomedia and of a second (more peremptory) council at Caesarea, 
to demand the decreed reinstatement. His arrival, and the campaign of 
propaganda now launched, set the whole city ablaze. And Constantine 
despatched Hosius to make a personal investigation of the affair. When he 
returned to make his report, Alexander and Arius soon followed. The crisis 
next moved to the third great city of the empire, Antioch. The bishop there 
had recently died, and when the fifty-six bishops subject to Antioch came 
in from Palestine, Arabia, Syria, and elsewhere to elect a successor 
(January 325, probably), they took the opportunity to notice the Arian 
development. All but unanimously (53-3) they condemned the new teaching, 
and excommunicated--provisionally--the three dissidents. One of these was 
the bishop of Caesarea.

And now, sometime in the early spring of 325, it was decided to summon a 
council representative of all the bishops in the world. Who was it that 
first put out this grandiose, if simple, plan? We do not know. Within a 
matter of months--not indeed simultaneously, but with impressive nearness 
in time--councils had been held at Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea, 
Nicomedia, in which a good half of the bishops of the East must have taken 
part, i.e., a good proportion of the vastly more numerous half of the 
entire episcopate. Whoever it was to whom the idea of a council of the 
Christian universe first occurred, it was Constantine who decided it should 
be held, and who chose the place and sent out the invitations to the 
bishops, offering to all free passage in the imperial transportation 
service.

The council opened, in the imperial summer palace at Nicaea,[11] May 20, 
325, with something over three hundred bishops present, the vast bulk of 
them from the Greek-speaking lands where the trouble was raging, Egypt, 
Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor. But there were bishops also from Persia 
and the Caucasus, from the lands between the Danube and the Aegean, and 
from Greece. There was one from Africa and one from Spain, one from Gaul 
and one from Italy, and since the great age of the Bishop of Rome forbade 
his making the journey he was represented by two of his priests.

Eusebius of Caesarea who has described the great moments of the council was 
evidently moved, as we too may be, by his recollection of the scene when, 
the bishops all assembled in the great hall of the palace, some of them 
lame and blind from the tortures undergone in the persecutions, the 
Christian master of the whole Roman world entered, robed in scarlet and 
gold, and before taking his place at the throne, bade them be seated. 
Constantine came with a minimum of pomp, and in his brief address he did no 
more than welcome the bishops, exhort them to peaceful conference, and 
admit that the spectacle of "sedition" within the Church caused him more 
anxiety than any battle.

The little we know of the actual history of the council is soon told. The 
theology of Arius was condemned unanimously--though he is said to have had 
twenty-two supporters among the bishops. But if it was a simple matter for 
the episcopate to testify to its belief that the Divine Word was truly God, 
it was less easy to agree about the best way to phrase a declaration of 
this faith, i.e., to construct a statement to which no subtlety could give 
a heretical Arian meaning also. One section of the bishops was anxious that 
no terms should be used which were not already used in Scripture. But the 
Scriptures had not been written for the purpose of confuting 
philosophically minded heretics. It was now necessary to say that the 
accepted Scripture meant just "this" and not "that" as well. And if this 
were to be accomplished, the technique must be adopted of coining a special 
word for the purpose.

The statement as the council finally passed it--the creed of the council of 
Nicaea--states: "We believe . . . in one Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God, 
born of the Father, the sole-begotten; that is to say, of the substance of 
the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; born, 
not made, consubstantial with the Father [in the Greek original, homo-
ousion toi patri],
through whom all things were made, which are in heaven and on earth . . 
."[11a] The word homo-ousion is the special non-Scriptural word which the 
council adopted to characterise the true, traditional belief, a word it was 
impossible to square with any kind of Arian theory, a test word that would 
always make it clear that any Arian theory was incompatible with the 
Christian tradition, and which would serve the practical purpose of 
preventing any further infiltration of these enemies of Christ within the 
Church, and defeat any endeavour to change the belief from within.

Who it was that proposed to the council this precise word, we do not know. 
An Arian historian says it was the bishop of Alexandria and Hosius of 
Cordova. St. Athanasius, who was present at the council, says it was 
Hosius. What seems clearer is that the bishops, solidly determined that the 
heresy should be rooted out, were yet by no means happy about the means 
chosen. The word homoousion was known to them already. Since long before 
the time of Arius and Lucian it had a bad history in the East, as will be 
explained. But Constantine definitely declared himself in favour of the 
uniquely useful instrument, and the council accepted it, each bishop rising 
in his place and giving his vote. Two bishops only refused their assent. 
With Arius, and a few priest supporters, they were promptly sent into exile 
by the emperor's command.

The bishops then passed to other problems. In the first place the twenty-
year-old Meletian schism. Its leaders had appealed to Constantine, and the 
emperor left it to the council to judge. The bishops supported their 
brother of Alexandria, but offered the schismatics very easy terms, 
restoring Meletius himself to his see of Lycopolis. But he was not, ever 
again, to confer Holy Orders, and all those whom he had unlawfully ordained 
were to be reordained before again officiating. Moreover they were to be 
subject henceforward to the true, i.e., Catholic, bishop of the place. 
Those whom Meletius had made bishops might be elected to sees in the 
future, as vacancies arose--always with the consent of the bishop of 
Alexandria, the traditional head of this extensive episcopate.

A second practical problem, that had teased the eastern churches for 
generations, was now finally solved, viz., how the date of the Easter feast 
should be calculated. "All our good brothers of the East[12] who until now 
have been used to keep Easter at the Jewish Passover, will henceforward 
keep it at the same time as the Romans and you," so the bishops of Egypt 
announced in a letter to their people.

Finally the bishops promulgated twenty laws--canons--for general 
observance. Like the solution proposed for the Meletians they are notable 
for a new mildness of tone, a quality more Roman than Oriental, it may be 
said. They are, in great part, a repetition of measures enacted eleven 
years earlier in the Latin council held at Arles, in Gaul.[13] Five canons 
deal with those who fell away in the recent persecution. If any such have 
since been admitted to ordination they are to be deposed. Those who 
apostatised freely--that is, without the compulsion of fear--are to do 
twelve years' penance before being admitted to Holy Communion. If, before 
the penance is completed, they fall sick and are in danger of death they 
may receive Holy Viaticum. Should they then recover they are to take place 
with the highest class of the penitents--those who are allowed to hear 
mass, though not to receive Holy Communion. Catechumens who fell away--
i.e., Christians not yet baptised--are to do three years' penance and then 
resume their place as catechumens. Finally, the Christians who, having once 
left the army, had re-enlisted in the army of the persecutor, the lately 
destroyed emperor Licinius, are to do thirteen years' penance, or less if 
the bishop is satisfied of the reality of their repentance, but always 
three years' penance at least.

There are two canons about the readmission of heretical schismatics. First 
of all there are the remnants of the schism begun in Rome by the antipope 
Novatian, some seventy-five years before the council. Novatian was one of 
that fairly numerous class for whom the rulers of the Church deal far too 
mildly with repentant sinners. He ended by denying that the Church had the 
power to absolve those who fell away in times of persecution; and his 
followers, self-styled "the Pure," extended this disability to all sins of 
idolatry, sex sins, and murder. They also regarded second marriage as a sex 
sin. At this time there were many Novatians in Asia Minor, and the council 
offered generous terms to those who wished to be reconciled, recognising 
the orders of their clergy, and the dignity of their bishops, but exacting 
written declarations that they will regard as fellow Catholics those who 
have contracted a second marriage and those doing penance for apostasy.

To a second class of schismatics the same generosity was shown. These were 
the sect that descended from the notorious bishop of Antioch, Paul of 
Samosata, deposed in 268 by a council of bishops, for various crimes and 
for his heretical teaching that there is no distinction between the three 
persons of the Holy Trinity. But these "Paulinians," so to call them, are 
to be rebaptised. Those who had functioned as clergy may be reordained if 
the Catholic bishop to whom they are now subject thinks fit.

On various aspects of clerical life there are as many as ten canons. No one 
is to be ordained who has had himself castrated, nor anyone only recently 
converted to the faith. "Yesterday a catechumen, today a bishop," says St. 
Jerome; "in the evening at the circus and next morning at the altar; just 
lately a patron of comedians, now busy consecrating virgins." It is the 
canon itself which speaks of ordination, and episcopal consecration, 
following immediately on baptism. Bishops are not to ordain another 
bishop's subject without his consent. No clerics--bishops, priests, or 
deacons--are to move from one diocese to another. Clerics are forbidden to 
take interest for money loans, and for this offence they must be deposed.

Finally there are two canons regarding three famous sees: Alexandria, 
Antioch, Jerusalem. The council confirms the ancient custom that gives the 
bishop of Alexandria jurisdiction over the bishops of the civil provinces 
of Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis. And likewise the ancient privileges of the 
see of Antioch and of [the chief sees] of the other provinces. Jerusalem is 
a city apart, the Holy City par excellence, and although its bishop remains 
as much as ever the subject of the metropolitan bishop at Caesarea, he is 
allowed what canon 7 calls a precedence of honour, without a hint to say in 
what this consists.

All this variety of business was rapidly despatched, for the council held 
its final session barely four weeks after it opened, June 19, 325.

As the date all but coincided with the celebrations that marked the 
twentieth year of Constantine's reign, the emperor entertained the prelates 
at a banquet in full imperial style, and as they passed before the guards, 
presenting arms in salute, they asked themselves, says Eusebius, if the 
Kingdom of Heaven on earth had not finally come to pass.

Save for the letter of the bishops of Egypt, mentioned already, and two 
letters of the emperor, the one general, announcing the new rule about 
Easter, the other telling the people of Egypt that the bishops had 
confirmed the traditional belief and that Arius was the tool of the devil, 
we know nought of what might be called "the promulgation" of the council's 
decisions. But the breakup of the great gathering was by no means followed 
by the silence that accompanies peace perfectly attained. The real troubles 
had not yet begun.

NOTES

1. Newman, Causes of the Rise and Successes of Arianism (February 1872) in 
Tracts, Theological and Ecclesiastical, pp. 103-4.

2. Ibid., 116. For Newman's "examination," 103-11.

3. Ibid., 112.

4. Ibid., 96, 97 for the passages quoted.

5. Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (?265-338).

6. St. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria ( 328-73); born ?295.

7. Newman, The Development of Christian Doctrine, 1st ed., 1845, pp. 7, 5; 
with one sentence ("Still no one," etc.) from ibid., rev. ed., p. 7.

8 A standard Latin dictionary will give as a first basic equivalent, 
"commander in chief."

9. J. Lebreton, S.J., Histoire de Eglise, edited by A. Fliche and Msgr. V. 
Martin (henceforward referred to as F. and M.), vol. 2, p. 343.

10. The modern Scutari, on the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus.

11. A city 60 to 70 miles from Constantinople, on the Asiatic shore of the 
Bosporus, at the head of Lake Iznik. It was about 25 miles south from the 
then capital, Nicomedia.

11a. Denzinger, Enchiridion, no. 54, prints the Greek text; Barry, Readings 
in Church History, p. 85, gives a translation.

12. The word has here a special meaning as the name of the (civil) diocese 
of which Antioch was the chief city, Oriens: the modern Lebanon, Israel, 
Jordan, Syria, the coast of Turkey thence north and west for a good 200 
miles with a vast territory in the interior that went beyond the Euphrates.

13. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils (1937), prints 
the text and a translation. This note serves for all the councils down to 
the Fifth Lateran of 1512-17. Barry, no 16, gives a translation.


CHAPTER 2. The First General Council of Constantinople, 381

The second General Council of the Church, which met at Constantinople in 
the year 381, was summoned primarily as a solemn demonstration of the 
unshaken loyalty of the eastern bishops to the faith as set forth at 
Nicaea, a demonstration that the church of the East had never gone over to 
Arianism, that the Arians were no more than a heretical faction--had never 
been anything more, despite their power--and were now finally discredited. 
Why was such a declaration necessary, fifty-six years after the bishops of 
the East, with the enthusiastic support of the all-powerful emperor, had 
condemned Arius as a falsifier of the truth and had provided, in the homo-
ousion, a sure touchstone to test the orthodoxy of future bishops? The 
answer to this question is one of the strangest an most involved chapters 
in all Church History. The simplest way perhaps, to set out as much of it 
as is essential to the story of the General Council of 381, will be to list 
the turning points of the story, and then attempt some explanation of the 
"why" of it all.

On the morrow of the Council of Nicaea three bishops revoked their 
signatures to the condemnation of Arius--the bishops of the neighbouring 
sees of Nicaea, Nicomedia, and Chalcedon. They were promptly banished by 
the emperor, and others elected in their stead (325). In 328 the bishop of 
Alexandria died, and the young deacon Athanasius, who had been his main 
advisor at the great council, was chosen to succeed him, and despite the 
active hostility of the Meletian faction, he was consecrated. That same 
year Constantine recalled the exiled bishops and reinstated them--why, we 
do not know; it may have been for personal reasons only. From the moment, 
until his death in 341, the ex-Lucianist, Eusebius of Nicomedia, becomes 
the leading figure in the movement to undo
the work of Nicaea. After the emperor founded his new capital city, 
Constantinople, Eusebius became its bishop.

Eusebius never openly attacked the achievement of 325. His line was to work 
for the destruction of the leading bishops who had supported the homo-
ousion, on the plea that they were heretics, but of a different kind, i.e., 
men who did not really believe in the Trinity, who by the word homo-ousion 
meant that the Father and the Logos were one. The first victim of this 
campaign was the second greatest prelate in the empire of the East, the 
bishop of Antioch, Eustathius by name. It was, possibly, he who had 
presided at Nicaea. A carefully chosen council of bishops now met at 
Antioch, condemned and deposed him. And, once again, the emperor followed 
up the ecclesiastical judgment by a sentence of exile. Nine other leading 
bishops were similarly removed in the course of the next year or so (330-
32). In 332 the intrigue to remove Athanasius began. The agents of this 
were the Meletians of Alexandria. The point of attack was not the orthodoxy 
of his belief but his loyalty to the emperor. Athanasius was summoned to 
the court, and cleared himself easily, returning home with a letter of high 
commendation from Constantine. Two further attempts to disgrace him, in the 
next two years, also failed.

Then, in 334, Constantine did the most astonishing thing of all--
astonishing to us who know, really, so very little of the day-to-day 
history of these events. He recalled Arius from banishment, and received 
him at court. And while a council was ordered to "investigate" what we may 
call "the Athanasius problem"--why it was that the greatest city of the 
eastern world had never known peace since this young prelate had been its 
bishop--Arius persuaded the emperor that he was as orthodox as the best, 
and on the strength of a formula drawn up by himself (in which the homo-
ousion did not appear) he was received back into the church, 335. As to the 
council, it was held at Tyre, and it deposed Athanasius; and the emperor, 
after a personal hearing, banished him to Trier, in Germany, as far almost 
as a man could travel from Alexandria and still be in the emperor's 
territory. It was now ten years since the farewell ceremonies at Nicaea.

In 336 Arius died, on the eve of a solemn ceremony of rehabilitation 
prepared in the cathedral of Constantinople, and in 337 Constantine, too, 
died.

Constantine's death brought the Arian party a still greater freedom of 
action. He was succeeded by his three young sons as joint emperors, and to 
none of these could the upholding of Nicaea be the matter of personal 
prestige it was to him. Certain it is that it is from this time that the 
party begins to propose alternatives to, or substitutes for, the Nicaean 
formula; more or less innocuous substitutes in the first years--had they 
not been put out by known opponents of the homo-ousion, and by men who were 
the declared foes of the bishop, Athanasius, who had become the very symbol 
of all that the categorical test word stood for.

And here it needs to be said that there were many bishops, as little Arian 
as Athanasius himself, who, nevertheless, had no love for the famous 
Nicaean word--as there had been many such bishops at Nicaea. These Catholic 
bishops, supporting the various alternatives of the kind described, played 
the Arian game of course, albeit unconsciously. Their dislike of the test 
word arose from the fact that, in the East, as has been said already, the 
word homo-ousion had a bad history. Its first use, by Clement of Alexandria 
and by Origen too (around 230-50), was seemingly in the Nicaean sense; and 
when a bishop of Alexandria, answering heretics, seemed to critics so to 
defend the distinction of persons in the Holy Trinity, that he obscured the 
truth that there is only one God, it was made a point against him that he 
had not explicitly said the Logos was homo-ousion with the Father. And this 
bishop, Denis, explains to his namesake, the pope, in his defence, why he 
had not used the useful word: it was a word nowhere found in Holy 
Scripture. This was about the year 257, nearly seventy years earlier than 
Nicaea. But eleven years only after this interchange between the two 
Denises, when the bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, was condemned (268) 
for the heresy of teaching that the Father and the Logos are one person, he 
actually used the word homo-ousion to express this oneness, and so his 
condemnation gave the word an ill sound in the East.

Whoever first proposed the use of the term at Nicaea, it was surely not any 
bishop from the East. To these it stank of heresy, ever since the council 
of 268, even when it had, so to speak, been disinfected by the Council of 
Nicaea, and given an undoubtedly orthodox employment. Sabellianism, the 
denial that there is a Trinity, was the great scare heresy of the East to 
the generation upon which Arianism came, and homo-ousion had been the 
heresy's shibboleth, in eastern ears.[1]

Again, there is latent a first class difficulty in the Nicaean council's 
formal condemnation[2] of those "who say that the Son is of another 
hypostasis or ousia [substantia, in Latin] than the Father"; and this was 
fully exploited in the troublous years after Constantine's death. The 
latent difficulty is that to Greeks these two terms did not necessarily and 
always mean exactly the same thing, as they did to Latins. Hypostasis to 
the Greeks came to mean what the Latin call "person"; ousia meant "nature" 
rather. The sentence "The Son is not of another hypostasis than the 
Father," a Greek might take to mean, "Father and Son are one person"; while 
the Latin understood by it, "are of the same nature."

All this is set down to convey something of the causes that held quite 
orthodox minds in doubt about their practical action during these 
controversies--a state of doubt which for years played into the hands of 
the radically unorthodox. This was an especially dangerous condition of 
things, seeing that it was these radicals--the real Arians--who had the ear 
of the court, and who stood to the world of officials and administrators 
for the ideal type of Christian believer, the kind that should be 
officially supported. For in this first generation that followed the 
personal conversion of Constantine, the official world was very far from 
being Christianised in belief. Though the emperor, especially after he had 
become sole emperor, turned his back very definitely on the pagan rites, 
these were by no means forbidden. The whole life of official paganism went 
on as before. And the cult of Sol Invictus and Summus Deus still held very 
many of its adherents. To these enlightened monotheistic foes of 
polytheism, the Arian version of the Christian idea of God naturally 
appealed. On a first view it was simpler, more logical--terms meaning just 
what they appeared to mean--its language non-mysterious, rational.[3]

It is not, of course, suggested that there was a carefully worked out plan, 
in all this, on the part of high officials. But the two tendencies existed 
side by side in these years, and it was this accidental coincidence that 
did much, so it is suggested,[4] to make Arianism the highly dangerous 
threat it proved to be, and to give it a toughness out of all proportion to 
the number of its real adherents.

As to its quality as a danger to Catholicism, let Harnack's judgment be 
recalled, that Arianism, had it been victorious, must have ruined 
Christianity completely, emptying it of all religious content, leaving it a 
mere system of cosmology and ethics. It was, in the circumstances, one of 
the greatest dangers that true religion has ever had to face, and this 
despite the fact that, in the critical fourth century, Arianism was never a 
popular thing. "The laity, as a whole, revolted from it in every part of 
Christendom. It was an epidemic of the schools and of theologians, and to 
them it was mainly confined.... The classes which had furnished martyrs in 
the persecutions were in no sense the seat of the heresy."[5]

The only one of Constantine's sons who really favoured the anti-Nicaean 
party was Constantius II, and once he became sole master of the empire 
(350) the Radicals really threw off the mask, and Arianism proper--the 
explicit renunciation of the doctrine that the Logos is truly God--was now 
propounded in councils and, with great violence and persecution, imposed by 
the emperor. And it was in these years (350-61) that the heresy was first 
thrust upon the bishops of the still largely pagan West, of Illyricum, 
Italy, and Gaul. In council after council, in the west and in the east, 
whether perplexed by the confusion of the issues, whether terrified by the 
threats of the emperor and the knowledge that bishops had been murdered who 
opposed him, whether overcome by the specious argument that it was all, in 
reality, a matter of ridding the Church of Athanasius, "whom they were 
taught to consider a restless, violent, party-spirited man, and of his 
arbitrary formula"[6]--in council after council the bishops gave way 
wholesale, at Arles (353), Milan (355), Sirmium (357), and, most 
spectacularly, at the simultaneous councils of Rimini-Seleucia[7] (359) 
about the morrow of which St. Jerome wrote a celebrated phrase, that the 
whole world woke up one morning, lamenting and marvelling to find itself 
Arian.

In 361 Constantius disappeared, baptised (just in time) by an Arian. He was 
followed by Julian the Apostate, who set about a systematic revival of 
Paganism. Then came Jovian, a Catholic, and after him Valentinian, a 
"liberal," with Valens, his brother, co-emperor for the East. Valens (365-
78) a true Arian, of the political type, returned to the policy of 
Constantius, and a real persecution of Catholics followed. But the 
cloudiness of the early period had been dissipated. The issue was now clear 
to the bishops, that only by insistence on the homo-ousion could the Church 
rid itself of the crypto-Arians whose influence meant death. And when to 
Valens, killed in a war with the Goths (378), a Catholic general, from 
Spain, succeeded--Theodosius--the way was at last open to a real 
restoration of the traditional belief. Nicaea, for the first time in fifty 
years, was to come into full operation in all the sees of the East.

The General Council of 381 is an epilogue to a drama just concluded. It 
does little more than register a fait accompli, and its essential 
importance is its demonstration to the world that the Christians of the 
"East," after more than fifty years of continuous disturbance and of 
oppression on the part of their rulers, remain Catholics, are not Arians; 
it is a demonstration that the council of Nicaea was no mere ecclesiastical 
pageant, but a source of strong and unfailing leadership.

No two general councils follow the same historical pattern--not even when a 
bare fifty years separates them, and when the matter of their discussions 
is the same. In this council Rome, the West, was not represented at all--
was not so much as invited. The same problems had for years now vexed the 
churches of the West. The same political revolution--the appearance of 
sovereigns who were wholeheartedly Catholic--was to be their salvation 
also. And they, too, demanded a council, and it took place, at Aquileia 
some weeks after the council we are dealing with. And why the council which 
met at Constantinople came, in after years, to be regarded as a General 
Council is something that may puzzle the legists and the theologians.[8]

The bishops who sat in the council were 150 in all. There were none from 
Egypt, only half of them from Thrace and Asia. Almost one half of the 
bishops came from the vast (civil) diocese called the East, Oriens, whose 
chief see was Antioch. And it was the bishop of Antioch, Meletius, who 
presided at the council.

Once again the crosscurrents and misunderstandings of these much troubled 
years had borne strange fruit. At Antioch there was a rival claimant to the 
see, Paulinus. And it was Paulinus whom Rome (and Alexandria also) 
recognised as the lawful bishop. But the Catholic East was solidly behind 
Meletius, and this meant the support (among others) of the three great 
Cappadocian bishops, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, and St. 
Gregory of Nazianzen, the greatest theologian of the day and one of the 
greatest preachers of all time.[8a]

Meletius died before the council had been long in session, and it was the 
last named Gregory who was elected president in his place. The actual 
business before the council was slight, and now, with the see of Antioch 
vacant and seventy-one bishops of its "jurisdiction" already assembled (to 
say nothing of the no less interested eighty bishops from other provinces 
), it is not surprising that the question of the successor of Meletius took 
the first place in the minds of all. The president of the council had the 
happy idea that the bishop whom Rome and Alexandria recognised, Paulinus, 
should be chosen, and so the schism be ended. But of this the bishops would 
not hear. And then there arrived the bishop of Alexandria himself, the 
successor of Athanasius, with some of his suffragans, and he made such a 
bitter attack on the president because he had consented, being already 
bishop of Sasima, to become bishop of Constantinople,[9] that Gregory, 
already discouraged by the revelation of what ecclesiastical politics could 
be at a high level, resigned both his see and his presidency.

The council closed on July 9. What it had accomplished was, first, to issue 
a statement of belief which explicitly renewed the homo-ousion definition 
of Nicaea, and then, naming the many varieties of Arianism, to condemn each 
and every one of them as heretical. The bishops next published (what has 
long been lost) a detailed statement of their faith in the 
consubstantiality of the Divine Logos with the Father, in the distinctness 
of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, and in the reality of the 
Incarnation of the Second Person. These statements about belief involved 
the condemnation of two other theories related to Arianism, namely, the 
denial, by Macedonius and his followers, that the Holy Ghost is really God, 
and the theory of Apollinaris, bishop of Laodicaea, that in the Logos 
Incarnate--in the God-man, Jesus Christ--the Divine Logos functions in 
place of a human soul: Christ, who is truly God, is not truly a man. This 
last heresy was to have a famous history in the next seventy years, to be 
the occasion of two later General Councils, and, ultimately, in one form or 
another, so to divide the Catholics of the East as to paralyse their 
resistance to the assault of Islam.

There are four canons enacted by this council.[10] The first is the 
declaration renewing the work of Nicaea, and condemning these various 
heresies. The second, between the lines of which can be read much of the 
history since that council, forbids bishops to cross the frontiers of 
another [civil] diocese, or to interfere in another bishop's 
administration. The bishop of Alexandria, it is explicitly laid down, is to 
confine himself to Egypt; the bishops of the East (i.e., Oriens) shall 
confine their joint action to the East, with the reservation that the 
bishop of Antioch keeps the rights acknowledged at Nicaea; and statements 
no less explicit restrict the bishops of Asia, Pontus, and Thrace to those 
three [civil] dioceses, respectively. The bishops are reminded of the 
Nicaean rule that the affairs of the sees of any given province are to be 
regulated by a twice-yearly meeting of the bishops.

About the time that St. Gregory Nazianzen was invited to become bishop of 
Constantinople, the efforts of the bishop of Alexandria, Peter II, had 
brought about the "election" of an Alexandrian philosopher, Maximus, and 
his unlawful, clandestine consecration. The council (canon 4) now declared 
that Maximus was not a bishop, and that whatever ordinations he had ever 
performed were worthless, and the candidates "in truth not ordained at 
all."

There remains the third canon, the most famous action, in its historical 
effects, of this council: "The bishop of Constantinople shall have the 
primacy of honour after the bishop of Rome, because [Constantinople] is New 
Rome."

NOTES

1. Cf. Newman, Tracts (as before), p. 100 "We cannot be surprised then that 
the homoousion, which perplexed the Western bishops, should have irritated 
the Orientals, the only wonder is, that East and West had concurred in 
accepting it at Nicea."

2. As a conclusion to the creed.

3. See Newman, Tracts (as before), p. 102: "It must be added that to 
statesmen, lawyers and military chiefs, who had lately been Pagans, a 
religious teaching such as Arianism, which was clear and intelligible, was 
more acceptable than doctrines which described the Divine Being in 
language, self-contradictory in its letter, and which exacted a belief in 
truths which were absolutely above their comprehension."

4. See Msgr. Pierre Batiffol, La Paix Constantinienne et le Catholicisme 
(1914), p. 310.

5. Newman, as before, pp. 97-98.

6. Newman, as before, p. 100.

7. Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, for the bishops of the West; 
Seleucia, then the chief city of Isauria, is the modern Turkish port of 
Silifke on the Mediterranean.

8. The first stage in the development of its recognition as oecumenical was 
the unanimous vote of the General Council of Chalcedon, 4th session (451), 
taking as the rule of faith, "that fixed by the council of Nicaea, and 
which the 150 bishops of the council assembled at Constantinople by 
Theodosius the Great confirmed."

8a. Barry, no. 17, prints a translation of his speech to the council.

9. A breach of the law enacted at Nicaea.

10 Schroeder, op. cit., prints the text and a translation.


CHAPTER 3. The General Council of Ephesus, 431

One of the minor activities of the General Council of 381 was to provide a 
new bishop for the see it thought worthy of the second place in the Church, 
in place of Gregory of Nazianzen who had been forced out. The bishops chose 
an old retired veteran of the high places of the imperial administration--
Nectarius. He ruled for sixteen years, and gave general satisfaction. And 
it is recorded that, in his quiet and peaceful way, this practiced 
administrator began to turn the new primacy of honour into something very 
like a primacy of fact. It gradually became the fashion to send appeals of 
various kinds to Constantinople, and for the bishop there to deal with them 
as though to do so were part of his jurisdiction. When Nectarius died, in 
397, the question who should succeed him was, then, something to interest 
the whole East.

The personage who moved immediately was the bishop of Alexandria, 
Theophilus. He had a candidate, one of his own priests, one of his chief 
confidants in fact. But the court had a candidate also--the court being no 
longer the emperor who had called the council in 381, Theodosius,[1] but 
the minister Eutropius who governed in the name of Theodosius' youthful 
successor, Arcadius. The court had its way, and brought from Antioch an 
ascetic personage, the monk John, famed as the great preacher of the day, 
known to later ages thereby as Chrysostom, the man with the tongue of gold. 
He was consecrated, by Theophilus, in February 398. But Theophilus went 
home bitter, it is thought. Alexandria had failed to place its man in 397, 
as it had failed on the like occasion in 381, in the time of its late 
bishop Timothy; and it was only the threats of Eutropius--that there were 
serious charges on file against Theophilus--that had brought that bishop to 
accept the appointment of the monk from Antioch.

A few words about the actual power of the bishop of Alexandria will revive 
some of the faded colour of the tragic history that is to follow. He was, 
first of all, more absolutely lord, in all matters of daily life, of the 
bishops dependent on him than was, at that time, any other bishop in the 
Church; and of these dependent bishops there were something like one 
hundred. He chose them all, and he personally consecrated them, the 
metropolitans no less than their suffragans. He was also, whether himself a 
monk or not, a kind of supreme patriarch of the monks, in this country 
where the monastic life had begun--and he thereby enjoyed unique prestige 
in the whole monastic world. He was immensely wealthy, with revenues coming 
from such extraordinary sources as his see's monopoly of the right to sell 
salt, and nitrates and papyrus, and all the various lugubrious 
paraphernalia needed in funerals. Alexandria, until Constantinople rose to 
the fullness of its promise, was the wonder city of the whole Roman world, 
the greatest of all trade centres, the queen of the Mediterranean. And of 
nothing was the great city prouder than of its see. The bishop of 
Alexandria moved in an habitual popularity and power that made of him a 
kind of native king, with mobs willing to demonstrate in his favour at a 
moment's notice. For forty-five years the see had had in Athanasius a saint 
for its bishop, a saint whose endless contests with the never much loved 
imperial government, whose many exiles, and inflexible fidelity to Nicaea, 
had achieved for his successors a position the like of which has probably 
never been known. This, in the hands of a saint! But Theophilus was far 
from being a saint. The saint, now, was at Constantinople, and in a world 
of Theophilus' kind he was soon to be hopelessly lost.

These considerations, the space given to them, rather--and to the story of 
St. John Chrysostom--in a study of the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, 
is due to the simple facts that rivalry between the two sees, Alexandria 
and Constantinople, ceaseless after 381, mattered very greatly in the 
history of these councils; that Alexandria sought endlessly to control 
Constantinople; that at Ephesus in 431 and again in 449 a bishop of 
Alexandria was the very willing agent of the deposition and excommunication 
of a bishop of Constantinople; and that at Chalcedon, in 451, the all but 
impossible happened and a bishop of Alexandria was deposed and 
excommunicated; and Alexandria--civic, popular Alexandria no less than the 
clerical world and the monks--never forgot this, and never forgave it. And 
it being the fifth century and not the twentieth, the more human side of 
these grave ecclesiastical contentions ultimately brought down to ruin the 
wealthiest province of the empire.

Chrysostom, as he is commonly called, the first effective bishop his see 
had known for many years, found abundance of employment for his zeal, and 
inevitably made as many enemies as friends; wealthy enemies and highly 
placed, clergy among them, and even the young empress. The first occasion 
of his clash with the bishop of Alexandria was the kind reception he gave 
to alleged victims of Theophilus' harsh rule. This was some three years 
after his appointment. On the heels of these fugitives there came other 
monks, sent by Theophilus, with counter-accusations of heresy. But they 
failed to prove their case, before the emperor, and were themselves 
condemned. And the fugitives brought it about that Theophilus was summoned 
to answer their charges in person. He arrived (403 ) with a cohort of 
twenty-nine of his bishops in attendance, blaming Chrysostom for all that 
had happened, and swearing openly that he had come to the capital "to 
depose John."

And this is what his familiarity with the great world, his political skill 
and his lavish expenditure, actually achieved. John, when bidden by the 
emperor to summon a council for the trial of Theophilus had refused: 
Alexandria lay outside his jurisdiction. He now, in turn, was bidden by the 
emperor to take his trial, Theophilus his judge with his twenty-nine 
suffragans and a chance half-dozen visiting bishops picked up in the 
capital--the group called the "Synod of The Oak," from the country seat at 
Chalcedon where these bishops met.

John again refused to acknowledge an uncanonical jurisdiction. Whereupon, 
for his refusal to appear, he was condemned and deposed. The ultimate 
outcome of these proceedings was his exile to the farthest limits of the 
empire; and his treatment was so harsh that he died of it (407). Theophilus 
celebrated his victory by composing a book against John filled, it would 
seem, with all manner of hideous calumnies. And in John's place there ruled 
one of the priests of Constantinople whom the saint had had to censure.

These bare facts, which seemingly all writers accept, are sufficient 
witness to the existence of malevolence at Alexandria, and to the 
corruption of life at the court of a Christian emperor. The other feature 
of this story is the action of the pope,[2] when the full account of these 
deeds reached him--letters from Theophilus (wholly misleading), from John 
(a full account, down to the day he wrote) and the minutes of the Synod of 
The Oak. This last the pope refused to accept as a council at all. Its 
sentence on John was mere words. He took John to be still the lawful bishop 
of Constantinople, and when he was asked to recognise Atticus, put in 
John's place, he refused, and broke off relations with both Alexandria and 
Antioch who had recognised him.

Theophilus was still out of communion when he died (412). His successor, a 
nephew, Cyril, began his long career as bishop equally under the ban. 
Antioch was the first see to surrender and make the symbolic submission, by 
restoring John's name "to the diptychs"-placing him in the list of deceased 
bishops officially prayed for. Then Atticus did the same, explaining 
fearfully to Alexandria that he really had no choice but to do this. Cyril, 
very young, as self-confident and absolute as was ever his uncle, 
stubbornly--even passionately?--refused. "You might as well ask to put 
Judas back in the company of the Apostles," he wrote. Cyril had been with 
his uncle at The Oak. But in the end, he too restored John's name. It was 
fifteen years or so since these terrible scenes of episcopal 
vindictiveness. But the saint's body had now been brought back with honour 
to his cathedral, and in a kind of public "amende" for the crime of the 
emperor Arcadius in banishing him, his son, Theodosius II, knelt before the 
coffin and kissed it. And between Rome and all the major sees of the East 
there was communion and peace.

The new troubles came then, as it were, out of a blue sky. Alexandria and 
Constantinople had long made their peace with Rome. And when Atticus died 
in 424 the new bishop, an elderly civil servant, managed the affairs of the 
turbulent capital so as to please all parties, his clergy, the monks, and 
the court. But with the appointment of Nestorius as his successor, in April 
428, the peace was suddenly, and very rudely, broken. Like St. John 
Chrysostom the new bishop was a monk from Antioch. There he, too, had been 
a famous preacher, whose appointed task was the public explanation of the 
Scriptures. And he began his new career with a great oration, in which he 
called on the emperor to root out the remnants of the many heresies, 
pockets of which still existed in Constantinople.

In the new controversy which this sermon heralded, the natural characters 
of Nestorius and of Cyril of Alexandria play a great part--not more so 
perhaps than the personalities of such chiefs always play, but for once we 
are well supplied with evidence about this. As to the precise point on 
which Nestorius soon fell foul of all his world, he is himself our earliest 
witness--in two letters to the pope, Celestine I (422-31), written in the 
early months of his administration. He is explaining to the pope the 
difficulties he has to face in his war against the heretics, and he 
proceeds to say that one very serious matter is the unconscious heresy of 
good Catholics, of monks and even some of his clergy, about the meaning of 
the belief that Christ is God. They are confused in their minds about the 
great mystery that Christ is both God and man, and they speak as though 
what is human in Christ was divine. They talk, for example, of God having 
been born, and of God being buried, and invoke the most holy virgin Mary as 
the "God-bringing-forth," the mother of God (using the Greek word that 
expresses this so succinctly, Theotokos). They should, of course, be more 
careful in their speech, and say she is Christotokos--the one who brought 
forth Christ, the mother of Christ. "The Virgin," he told the pope, "is 
certainly Christotokos: she is not Theotokos." In speaking and acting as 
they do these Catholics are reviving, says Nestorius, "the corruption of 
Arius and Apollinaris," heretics notoriously condemned long ago. And 
Nestorius speaks feelingly of "the fight which I have to put up over 
this."[3]

By the time Nestorius had written these letters, his public support of 
preachers whom he brought in to "correct" his ignorant clergy, and his own 
sermons, his prohibition of the use of the word Theotokos and the 
punishments he meted out to the disobedient, had set the capital in an 
uproar. And the trouble was crossing the seas. For the news of his ill 
treatment of the monks had spread to the land which was the centre of the 
monastic movement, Egypt, and when the Egyptian monks laid the theological 
problem before their bishop, Cyril--the accusation that the traditional 
Catholic piety towards the God-man and his mother was heretical--there 
entered the field the very unusual combination of a first-rate theologian 
who was also a finished man of affairs and an experienced politician. Cyril 
wrote, for his monks, a theological defence of the tradition which was 
necessarily a severe denunciation of Nestorius.[4] This was sometime after 
the Easter of 429, and the "reply" was presently circulating in 
Constantinople. And Cyril also wrote to Nestorius.

In the events of the next two years the natural man in Cyril was to reveal 
itself fairly often. What of the same in Nestorius? What was it that so 
suddenly moved him to attack what was not a local piety peculiar to the 
city where he had just begun to live but, as the event showed (and as 
Nestorius must have known), a general, traditional way of regarding this 
doctrine? His own first letters on the subject are a curious mixture of 
orthodoxy and of novel statements, "startling to pious ears," as a later 
day would have said; statements capable indeed of being explained as in 
harmony with the tradition, but until so explained, and especially when set 
out in criticism of current practice, justifiably causing real suspicion 
that the speaker was himself a heretic--a man, that is to say, out to 
propagate a new, personal, antitraditional version of fundamental belief. 
What prompted all this? The vanity of the learned man who has found out 
something the generality do not know? the possession of key-knowledge that 
will "make all the difference"? the desire of a gifted man, promoted 
suddenly from obscurity to one of the highest places in the world of his 
time, to make his mark, to set all things right? For his point that, 
although Theotokos, rightly understood, is perfectly orthodox, it is better 
to use his own new word Christotokos, the suitable place to air this--a 
first time--might have been a conference of theologians or bishops. But 
Nestorius chose to do it in sermons to the multitudes that filled his 
cathedral, and not in terms of learned, anxious speculation, but in blood-
and-thunder denunciation of universally practiced piety. There is a levity 
about the action which, given the gravity of the issue, is itself surely 
scandalous. And was Nestorius a really honest, straightforward type? In his 
first correspondence with the pope, when he tells of his problem with 
Pelagian refugees from Italy, he is even naively devious, and the pope in 
his reply points this out very bluntly. And once the major forces had been 
brought in against him, Cyril of Alexandria and the verdict of Rome, he 
certainly shows himself, in his manoeuvres with the court, a twister of the 
first order: Trop habile Nestorius.[6]

When Cyril wrote directly to Nestorius, in February 430, seemingly, he said 
how surprised he was that he should disturb the peace of mind of the 
faithful by such very controvertible statements. Nestorius in return 
attacked the explanation Cyril had given the monks, called it 
untraditional, and said explicitly that it was the Apollinarian heresy all 
over again. Cyril had given him the news that Rome considered his views 
scandalous, and Nestorius ended his letter with a hint that the court was 
on his side. Cyril was not unaware that at Constantinople there were 
clerics from Egypt, gone there with a case against their chief bishop, and 
that Nestorius was taking care of these enemies. It was with reference to 
this situation that Cyril wrote to his agents in the capital, about this 
time: "This poor fellow does not imagine, surely, that I am going to allow 
myself to be judged by him, whoever the accusers are that he can stir up 
against me! It will be the other way round. I shall know well enough how to 
force him back to the defensive."[6] The temperature is rising rapidly, on 
both shores of the Mediterranean.

It was now that Cyril first approached the court on the matter of 
Nestorius, sending explanations of the point at issue to the emperor, his 
wife and sisters.

The next move was a council in Egypt, sometime after Easter 430, and an 
elaborate report to the pope on the part of Cyril--his answer to the Roman 
query whether certain sermons that have come to the pope were really 
Nestorius' sermons.[7] Cyril's reply was a "skilfully written letter"[8] 
describing the situation at Constantinople, saying that all the bishops of 
the East are united in their anxiety about these errors of Nestorius. He is 
quite isolated in his denial that the Virgin is Theotokos, but flatters 
himself that he will bring the rest round, "so greatly has the power[9] of 
his see infatuated him." The bishops will not publicly break off relations 
with Nestorius without consulting the pope. "Deign then to make known to us 
what seems good to you, and whether we ought either to remain in communion 
with him or to declare publicly that no one should remain in communion with 
a man who thinks and teaches so erroneously." The pope's reply, Cyril 
recommends, should be sent to all the bishops of the East.

With this letter went copies of Nestorius' sermons (and a Latin translation 
of them ), then the Cyril-Nestorius correspondence, then a list drawn up by 
Cyril of the errors said to be taught by Nestorius, and a compendium of 
texts from the classic theologians of the past on the doctrine called in 
question.

When this dossier reached Rome, Pope Celestine set it before a specially 
summoned gathering of bishops, and on August 11, 430, he wrote his 
judgment. This he sent, in the first place, to Cyril. In this letter the 
pope speaks of Cyril's communication as a consolation amid his grief at the 
sermons Nestorius had been preaching. Already, that is, before receiving 
Cyril's letter, the pope had handed over these sermons to one of the great 
scholars of the day, the bilingual John Cassian, to be the basis of a book 
against Nestorius. But Cyril's letter, the pope continues, suggests how to 
cure this terrible evil. To the question about remaining in communion with 
the bishop of Constantinople, the pope replies that those whom Nestorius 
had excommunicated because they opposed him remain, nevertheless, in full 
communion, and those who obstinately follow the path that leads away from 
the apostolic teaching cannot be "in communion with us," i.e., the pope. 
Nestorius, he instructs Cyril, is to be summoned to make a written 
recantation of his errors, and to declare that his belief about the birth 
of Christ is what the church of Rome believes, the church of Alexandria, 
and the universal church. And Cyril is charged with the execution of this 
decision. He is to act in the pope's place, and, speaking with all the 
authority of the pope's see, is to demand this retraction of Nestorius, to 
be made in writing, within ten days of the notice given. If within this 
time Nestorius has not complied he is to be declared expelled from the 
church.

To the bishops of Antioch, Jerusalem, Thessalonica, and Philippi[10] the 
pope also wrote letters which follow the same line as that to Cyril, but 
make no mention of the commission to act which the pope had sent him. The 
pope merely says, with great gravity, "The sentence we pronounce, which is 
even more the sentence of our master Christ who is God, is..." and so on, 
as in the letter to Cyril.

We possess, besides the letter to Cyril, the letter which the pope wrote, 
that same day, to Nestorius. In this Celestine explains that lack of 
scholars who could translate the bishop's letters and sermons had delayed 
his reply, then came the dossier sent from Alexandria, which has been 
studied. The pope tells the bishop of Constantinople that his letters are 
"full of evident blasphemies." The sermons, for all their obscurity, 
plainly teach heresy. What a dreadful mistake it was to make Nestorius a 
bishop! The sheep have, indeed, been handed over to the wolf. And now, 
those whose lack of foresight brought this about are calling on the pope to 
help them out of the difficulty. The pope does not point out to Nestorius 
the particular places where he has gone astray, list any of "your many 
impious declarations, which the whole church rejects." But, as he tells 
him, this present letter is a final warning. The bishop of Alexandria is in 
the right, in this controversy. "Brother, if you wish to be with us... 
openly show that you think as we think." "Our sentence is this," and the 
letter ends with a demand for a written declaration that Nestorius believes 
the very thing he has repudiated, with a notice of be ten days allowed, and 
a warning that noncompliance means immediate excommunication. Celestine 
then tells him that all the papers concerning the process have been sent to 
Alexandria, that he has commissioned Cyril to act in his name and to inform 
him, Nestorius, and the other bishops what the pope has decided.

A letter, in much the same terms, also went from the pope to the clergy and 
faithful people of the capital. But the pope did not write to the emperor.

What the normal time was for a public letter to go from Rome to Alexandria, 
in the fifth century, and thence on to Constantinople, a business involving 
sea-journeys of something like a thousand miles, it is not easy to say. But 
it is surprising that not until December 7 was Nestorius officially 
summoned by Cyril to recant. And the bishop of Alexandria did not carry out 
his task in person--as, presumably, the pope designed. He sent the 
ultimatum by four of his suffragan bishops. Nor did he content himself with 
sending the pope's letters of commission, his own credentials in the 
matter. Before moving, he had called a synod of the bishops of Egypt, and 
he now sent on to Nestorius their synodal letter condemning his teaching. 
Finally, to make the expected retractation doubly sure, Cyril had drafted 
twelve statements about the heresies Nestorius was alleged to support, 
statements all of which ended: "Whoever believes this, may he be anathema," 
i.e., accursed.[10a] These Nestorius was to sign.

But in the long interval between August 11 and December 7 much had happened 
at Constantinople and elsewhere. Nestorius had had a correspondence with 
the bishop of Antioch, who urged him, in very plain language, to do as he 
was asked, and not to cause trouble merely about a word he disliked 
(Theotokos) but which he admitted could bear an orthodox meaning, and to 
which many saints and doctors of the past had given sanction by themselves 
using it. "Don't lose your head," wrote the Antiochean. Ten days! "It will 
not take you twenty-four hours to give the needed answer.... Ask advice of 
men you can trust. Ask them to tell you the facts, not just what they think 
will please you.... You have the whole of the East against you, as well as 
Egypt." Nestorius, in his reply to this surely good friend, hedged. He gave 
no explicit answer, merely saying he had not been rightly understood, that 
if his book forbade the use of the famous word it was because heretics were 
using it, with an heretical meaning. And that now he will just wait for the 
council,[11] which will settle this, and all other problems. As to Cyril, 
it is he who is the troublemaker. "As to the Egyptian's insolence, it will 
scarcely surprise you, for you have many evidences of it, old and new."[12]

On November 19, the emperor had summoned a General Council of the Church, 
for certain vaguely described purposes, the summons said, but actually, no 
one doubted, to settle this controversy between Constantinople and 
Alexandria and--in the expectation of Nestorius--to be the scene of the 
trial for heresy (Apollinarianism) of Cyril. The council was to meet at 
Ephesus, at Pentecost (June 7) 431.

When Cyril's four bishops reached Constantinople, December 7, Nestorius 
refused to receive them. John of Antioch, in the letter just mentioned, had 
passed on to Nestorius copies of the pope's letter condemning him, and also 
of a letter he (John) had received from Cyril. Long before Cyril's four 
bishops walked into the sanctuary of the cathedral at Constantinople, that 
December Sunday, to hand over the ultimatum, Nestorius had known all about 
it. And he had not been idle. It was from Nestorius, it is often said, that 
the council idea had come. And in the emperor's letter inviting Cyril to 
the council there was much to make it evident that the glorification of 
Alexandria was no part of the programme. Cyril's writing separate letters 
to the emperor, the empress, and the princesses was here declared to be an 
attempt to divide the imperial family, and the bishop was ordered--not 
invited--to attend the council, under severe penalties.[13] On the other 
hand, the emperor's act had changed the whole situation for Nestorius. In 
summoning the council Theodosius had forbidden all and every ecclesiastical 
change, no matter by whom, until the council had concluded. And when 
Nestorius now wrote to the pope of the crimes that were to be brought 
against Cyril when the council met, he made light of the theological 
controversy, gave not a hint that he knew of the pope's judgment, but wrote 
that Cyril, he hears, is preparing a "Faith in danger" campaign, in the 
hope of distracting the council from his own anxieties.

The pope made no difficulty about the emperor's plan to call a council, nor 
about the prohibition which--in fact--had called a halt to the summons to 
Nestorius. And when Cyril wrote to ask whether Nestorius was now to be 
treated as excommunicated, for the ten days had long since gone by, the 
pope in reply quoted the Scripture that God wills not the death of a 
sinner, but rather that he be converted and live. And Cyril is exhorted to 
work for peace with the rest of the bishops.

The date of this letter is May 7, 431--one month before the day appointed 
for the council, five months from the day Cyril's deputation tried to 
deliver the ultimatum to Nestorius. And in those five months the twelve 
anathemas of Cyril, so to call them, had time to circulate; and--in the 
vast territories where the influence of Antioch was strong--they had raised 
issues which now quite overshadowed the differences between Cyril and 
Nestorius, or between Rome and Nestorius even. In the eyes of these 
Antiochean theologians the language in which the bishop of Alexandria had 
framed his statements revealed him as a pure Apollinarian. And John of 
Antioch had organised a party to make this clear at the council, and had in 
the meantime induced two bishops--one of them held to be Cyril's equal as a 
scholarly writer, Theodoret of Cyrrhus[14]--to come out with public 
refutations of the Alexandrian's "heresies." And this group wrote to the 
bishops of the West for support, to Milan, for example, to Aquileia, and to 
Ravenna.

How much of this was known to Pope Celestine, when he wrote his letter of 
May 7, we do not know. But he surely knew that minds were inflamed, and as 
he gave Cyril the news that he was not himself able to make the journey to 
Ephesus, he urged "the Egyptian" to be moderate, to remember that what the 
pope wanted was that Nestorius should be won back. We must not, said the 
pope, again scripturally, be of those "swift to shed blood."

The day after this letter was written the pope signed the instructions for 
the three legates who were to represent him at the council. They were told 
to act throughout with Cyril and to watch carefully that the authority of 
the Apostolic See was duly respected. And, finally, the pope sent a letter 
to the council. It is a moving document, in which Celestine reminds the 
bishops of the beloved apostle St. John, whose remains lie in the church at 
Ephesus where they are meeting, and reminds them that they are the 
successors of the twelve apostles, privileged to preserve what their 
labours had established. The pope speaks plainly about the Nestorian 
novelties: they are treason to the faith. He exhorts the bishops to 
unanimity, and to be courageous in act. Then he presents his legates, who 
will take part in the council and will tell the bishops, "the things which 
we decided at Rome were to be done." "Nor do we doubt your assent to all 
this," the pope goes on, "when it is seen how all that is done has been 
ordered for the security of the whole church."[14a]

To the legates the pope entrusted a letter for the emperor, announcing that 
he would be represented at the council by legates, and praying he would 
give no encouragement to these novel ideas now causing such trouble, the 
work of men who would reduce the idea of God to the limits of what a finite 
intelligence could explore. The pope leaves it in no doubt, in this as in 
the other letter, that Nestorius is already condemned; if the pope consents 
to the case being discussed once more, this is in the hope that the 
unfortunate man will retract.

The emperor had not convoked every single bishop of the empire to the 
council, but only a certain number from each of the fifty-nine provinces of 
his own jurisdiction, the choice being left to the metropolitans. In all, 
something like 230 or 250 ultimately arrived at Ephesus. Cyril came in a 
few days before the appointed date. He found Nestorius already established. 
He had been at Ephesus since Easter, with a small group of sympathetic 
prelates. Cyril had brought with him fifty Egyptian bishops. Sometime after 
Pentecost the (anti-Nestorius) bishop of Jerusalem arrived with fifteen 
supporters, and later came news from the Antiocheans, forty-six in all, 
that they had been delayed by accidents. This last group had chosen to 
travel by the land route, a thousand miles and more of difficult and--as it 
happened--famine-stricken country.

The most numerous group at the council was the bishops of what we, today, 
call Asia Minor, the nineteen provinces that then made up the (civil) 
dioceses of Asia and Pontus, and the district called Proconsular Asia which 
was subject to the emperor's direct rule. It was in this last that Ephesus 
itself was situated. In Asia Minor there were, in all, something like three 
hundred sees. It was the most Catholicized territory of all the empire. 
Something like a hundred of these bishops came to the council. The bishop 
of Ephesus, Memnon, acted as their leader, and they were to a man anti-
Constantinople--the question of the Theotokos apart. The repeated attempts

14a. These three letters are in Jaffe, nos. 377, 378, 379.

Of successive bishops of the capital city, since 381, to turn the primacy 
of honour then voted it into an effective hold on the only territory not 
already dominated by Antioch or Alexandria, made the bishops of Ephesus 
allies of the foe of Constantinople in all these disputes.

Meanwhile the Antiocheans did not arrive, and the bishops waited, for a 
good two weeks after the appointed day, June 7, in the great city, two 
hundred of them nearly, each with his retinue, in the scorching latitude of 
38 degrees north. Disputes were frequent, fights and riots with the 
Nestorian minority, in which the town naturally took an interested 
part.[15] But Cyril made no attempt to meet Nestorius. The two prelates 
avoided each other. Each, to the other, was a wicked heretic, awaiting his 
trial and deserved condemnation. And while the bishop of Ephesus forbade 
the churches of the city to Nestorius, Cyril was free to preach on 
Nestorius as the enemy of truth, the outcast already condemned by the 
pope.[16]

On June 21 the long wait was broken. Cyril announced that the next day the 
council would hold its opening session. Immediately there were protests. 
From the imperial commissioner, in the first place, Count Candidian, who 
was charged with the safety of the council, under orders to prevent any but 
the bishops from entering the church where the meetings would take 
place,[17] and with keeping order in the council itself, i.e., to see that 
every bishop who wished to speak was allowed to speak, and to reply to 
attacks made on him; also to see that no bishop left Ephesus until the 
council had ended its business. Candidian demanded a delay until the 
Antiocheans arrived. So did no fewer than sixty-eight bishops, in a written 
protestation. And Nestorius, with his party, made their protest too, saying 
the council was no council until all the bishops were assembled. But Cyril 
stood to his announcement, and on June 22 the council opened--a memorable 
first session in which much was enacted, and in which still more lay 
mischievously latent, suppositos cineri a doloso indeed.[18]

The question has been raised by what authority Cyril thus opened the 
council, acting as though he was its acknowledged president. That the mass 
of the bishops at the time accepted the fait accompli without any sign of 
protest--even the sixty-eight signatories--is certain. It was also 
traditional that Alexandria was the first see of the East. Its bishop being 
present at a General Council, and neither pope nor emperor having named 
another to preside, he was surely its inevitable president. Nestorius, in 
the memoirs he wrote, many years later, says: "We expected that he who 
exercised authority (the emperor, through Candidian) would have chosen the 
president. No one thought you would have taken it for yourself." But from 
the 159[19] bishops who were in the church as the day's work began there 
was not a sign of objection to Cyril.

The first, unallowed-for incident was a protestation, to the council this 
time, not to Cyril, from Candidian. It was the emperor's will, he said, 
that there should not be any "fragmentary councils."[20] He was asked to 
show his instructions and did so. But the bishops stood firm, and begged 
him to leave, which he did, after a final plea to wait for the absentees, 
upon whose arrival Nestorius and his party would join the council.

The council then settled down to its business. A notary read a summary of 
the case against Nestorius, told how Cyril had intervened at 
Constantinople, and then at Rome, and how "the most holy bishop of the 
church of Rome, Celestine, has written what it behoved." And the notary 
announced that all the documents were here and at the disposition of the 
bishops.

Nestorius was then sent for. Three times--as the Law demanded--he was 
officially and personally summoned, a deputation going from the council to 
the place where he lived. He ignored all three citations, and the council 
passed to the study of his case.

The next act was the reading of the creed of Nicaea, and then of Cyril's 
letter to Nestorius. Cyril then rose, acknowledging the letter, and to put 
it to the bishops to vote whether the theology of his letter was in accord 
with the creed of Nicaea; 125 of the bishops followed him, each making 
profession of the Nicene faith, and affirming that the letter accorded with 
Nicaea. A demand was made for Nestorius' reply to the letter. When it was 
read, and the question put as to its accord with Nicaea, thirty-four 
bishops had individually answered in the negative when the patience of the 
assembly gave out. There was a call for a mass vote, and without a 
dissentient they shouted their views in a series of acclamations: "Whoever 
does not anathematize Nestorius, let him be anathema. Curses on him. The 
true faith curses him. The holy council curses him. We all say anathema, to 
his letter and his views. We all say anathema to the heretic Nestorius.... 
The whole universal church says anathema to the wicked religion taught by 
Nestorius."

The bishop of Jerusalem now asked that the pope's letter to Nestorius be 
read. So far not a word had come from the president to say that Rome had 
condemned Nestorius already, and looked to the council to ratify this. It 
was in the name of Nicaea that Nestorius had been condemned. The council--
or Cyril--had not merely begun the business before the Antiocheans had come 
in, but before the arrival of the pope's representatives also. The 
Jerusalem proposal, so to speak, was adopted and the pope's letter was 
read--and listened to as a matter of routine, one would say, without a 
single acclamation. Next was read the letter delivered to Nestorius by the 
four bishops, the letter of the Egyptian synod. But not the now famous 
twelve anathemas which Cyril had composed in order to stop every retreat 
for his wily opponent--or perhaps they were read? Historians do not agree. 
Then, after an account by one of the four bishops of their mission to 
Nestorius, the notary read out a long collection of texts from all the 
classic theologians of past days justifying the orthodoxy of the term 
Theotokos; and followed this with a long selection of passages from 
Nestorius that were evidence of his errors. Finally, in a solemn resounding 
sentence, the council deprived Nestorius of his bishopric of Constantinople 
and ejected him from the ranks of the episcopate; 198 signatures of bishops 
were attached to the sentence.

In all the day's proceedings not a single voice had been raised to say that 
the views of Nestorius were what the faith really was. All that long day 
crowds had stood round outside the great church, while the interminable 
routine had slowly worked to its inevitable end, echoes from within making 
their way to the streets, no doubt, in the more lively moments. When the 
result was known there were scenes of the wildest joy, and Cyril, in a 
pastoral letter written on his return to Alexandria, has left a vivid 
picture of it all.

"The whole population of the city, from earliest dawn until the evening 
stood around, in expectation of the council's decision. And when they heard 
that the author of the blasphemies had been stripped of his rank, they all 
began with one voice to praise and glorify God, as for the overthrow of an 
enemy of the faith. And as we [the bishops] came forth from the Church, 
they led us with torches to our lodgings, for it was now evening. 
Throughout the city there was great rejoicing, and many lighted lanterns, 
and women who walked before us swinging thuribles."[21]

The Council of Ephesus was now over? No, its history had hardly begun, 
although, without a shadow of opposition, it had carried out the task for 
which, in the eyes of all, it had been summoned; and although the justice 
of what it had done was not questioned, and no move was ever made to 
reverse the decision. These strange words promise a complicated story. 
There were to be six more sessions of the council, spread through the month 
of July, and then, for the mass of the bishops, a long dreary wait of 
weeks, while, at the capital, rival delegations argued before the emperor 
about the orthodoxy of Cyril. It was late September, three months after 
this night of triumph, before the council was dissolved, and the bishops 
free to begin the long journey back to their sees.

The morrow of the celebrations was taken up with the task of notifying the 
decision to all the interested parties: letters from Cyril and his bishops 
to the emperor, and to the clergy and people of Constantinople; a report 
from Candidian to the emperor; and from Nestorius (who had been officially 
told his sentence at the conclusion of the session) a complaint about the 
way his friends had been dealt with.

The next day, June 24, the Antiocheans arrived. They speedily learnt all 
that had happened, and were soon officially notified of the sentence 
against Nestorius and ordered, by Cyril, not to communicate with him in any 
way. Their immediate reaction was to form themselves into a council--along 
with some of the bishops who had held aloof from the great session of the 
twenty-second They gave Count Candidian audience and he, as well as 
protesting against what was then done, gave a full account of all the 
events of the week. It was then the turn of those bishops to speak, against 
whom Memnon had closed all his churches, shutting them out in this way from 
the liturgy at the great feast of Pentecost. There was speech of Cyril's 
autocratic conduct, of the heresy which his twelve anathemas contained and, 
finally, John of Antioch who presided over the gathering proposed a 
sentence that Cyril and Memnon be deposed as the authors of the heresies 
contained in the anathemas, the heresies of Arius and Apollinaris, and all 
the bishops be excommunicated who had allowed themselves to be led away by 
these chiefs. Notice of this sentence was served on all concerned, and once 
more the elaborate business gone through of officially informing the 
emperor and all the ecclesiastical world of the capital.

When these letters were despatched, whether June 26 or 28, the previous 
despatches to the emperor can hardly yet have reached Constantinople. His 
answer to Candidian's report on the session of June 22 is, in fact, dated 
June 29. It is a severe condemnation of all Cyril's proceedings. The 
emperor regards all that was done as of no effect, and orders the bishops 
to meet again, in accord, this time, with the instructions given to the 
count. None is to leave until this new discussion has taken place. And one 
of the highest officials of the court, it is announced, is on his way to 
regulate matters.

By the time this communication had reached Ephesus, something else had 
happened: the three Roman legates had arrived, the two bishops Arcadius and 
Projectus, and the priest Philip. In accord with the instructions given 
them, ten or eleven weeks before, they joined themselves to Cyril. On July 
10, all the bishops who had taken part in the act of June 22 came together 
once more in session. The difference in the procedure is evident, notable, 
significant. Cyril presided,[22] and the session opened with a demand from 
the legates that the pope's letter to the council, which they had brought 
with them, should be read. This was done, and one of the legates then said, 
"We have satisfied what custom demands, namely, that first of all, the 
letters from the Apostolic See be read in Latin." They were next read in 
Greek--a translation brought by the legates.[23]

And now there were acclamations from the council. The papal sentence had 
anticipated the bishops' own vote. The counteraction of John of Antioch 
against themselves for their support of Cyril, the emperor's gesture of 
repudiation, were, perhaps, the lighter for this wholehearted confirmation. 
"Celestine," they called, "is the new Paul. Cyril is the new Paul. 
Celestine is the guardian of the faith. Celestine agrees with the council. 
There is one Celestine, one Cyril, one faith of the council, one faith of 
the world-wide church." And then one of the papal legates intervened to 
point out that what Celestine's letter had said was that it was the 
council's business to carry out what he at Rome had decided should be done. 
And another legate, acknowledging the acclamations, said in a terse phrase, 
"The members have joined themselves to the head, for your beatitude is not 
ignorant that the head of the whole faith, and furthermore of the Apostles, 
is the blessed apostle Peter." And then this legate, the priest Philip, 
asked for the official record of what had been done on June 22, So as to be 
able to confirm the sentence passed, according to the instructions of "our 
blessed pope."

At the session of the following day the same legate pronounced that the 
judgment of June 22 had been made "canonically and in accordance with 
ecclesiastical learning"; and, "conformably with the instructions of the 
most holy pope, Celestine," the judgment was confirmed. Whereupon the 
minutes of the session and the sentence against Nestorius were read, 
following which the legate Philip made a speech in which occurs this 
passage, that has never ceased to be quoted since: "No one doubts, nay it 
is a thing known now for centuries, that the holy and most blessed Peter, 
the prince and head of the Apostles, the pillar of the faith and the 
foundation on which the Catholic Church is built, received from Our Lord, 
Jesus Christ, the saviour and redeemer of the human race, the keys of the 
kingdom, and that to him there was given the power of binding and of 
loosing from sin; who, down to this day, and for evermore, lives and 
exercises judgment in his successors."[24]

In the report of these last proceedings made by the bishops to the emperor, 
the principal part which the Roman see has played in the condemnation of 
Nestorius, "before the present council was summoned," is stressed, and the 
fact that Cyril had been charged by the pope to act in his place. But the 
bishops do not excuse themselves for--once more--ignoring the emperor's 
commands as to what they shall do and how. In their letter notifying again 
to the clergy of Constantinople the deposition of their bishop, the next 
signature, after Cyril's is that of Philip, "priest of the church of the 
Apostles,"[26] then comes that of the bishop of Jerusalem, and next of the 
other two Roman legates.

It remained to resolve the council's situation vis-a-vis the Antioch group 
who, now nearly three weeks since, had declared these two hundred or so 
bishops excommunicated, and no council. John of Antioch and his adherents 
were now, three times, formally summoned to appear before the council, and 
upon their final refusal they were all solemnly excommunicated (July 17). 
And, once again, pope and emperor were formally notified of all that had 
been done.

At Constantinople there were general rejoicings at the news that Nestorius' 
reign was over. But the emperor still refused to recognise the work done as 
it had been done. He did not reprove the bishops for ignoring his orders of 
June 29, and he wrote as though all the bishops then at Ephesus were one 
body--a single letter addressed to all.[26] But he confirmed all three 
depositions, i.e., of Nestorius and of Cyril and of the bishop of Ephesus. 
All the other acts he condemned. The faith as defined at Nicaea sufficed, 
he said. His new envoy, Count John, who brought the letter, would further 
instruct the bishops about "our divinity's plan for the faith." And the 
bishops were bidden return to their sees.

When the count arrived, with this somewhat confused, and confusing, decree, 
it must have been the beginning of August. He had all the bishops brought 
together in a single assembly to hear his news, their leaders with them. 
The effect was a general riot, Nestorius and Cyril had to be removed before 
order was restored. That evening they, with Memnon of Ephesus, were placed 
under arrest. "If I see the pious bishops to be irritable and 
irreconcilable (though what causes their rage and exasperation is a mystery 
to me), and if I find it necessary to take other measures, I shall as soon 
as possible give your majesty news of this"; so the count reported to 
Theodosius.

There were, of course, protestations to the court from the council. And 
Cyril, who knew well the world of Constantinople, made immediate use of the 
vast wealth of his see. "At the court every man had his price, and Cyril 
did not stop to count the price."[27] We have a list of the valuable 
presents that flowed in, carpets (of various sizes), furnishings, valuable 
silks, jewels, ivory chairs, ostriches, and good plain golden coin. Of this 
last, one group of fifteen high personages "touched," between them, the 
equivalent of nearly a million dollars. "Il est certain que Cyrille a paye 
tres cher."[28] No less effectively, he influenced the monks, and an abbot 
who in forty-eight years had never left his cell headed a great 
demonstration, that all the town turned out to cheer as it made its way to 
the palace. And the abbot solemnly warned Theodosius of the sin he 
committed when he interfered with the council's action.

What the emperor decided was to hold a conference, which both sides would 
attend. Eight delegates from each party came to the palace at Chalcedon, 
the town directly across the Bosporus from the capital. The legate Philip 
went with the party of the council. John of Antioch led the other group. 
Cyril was still under arrest; nor did any pleas on his behalf at Chalcedon 
overcome the emperor's determination not to see him. The conference began 
on September 4.[29] There were five meetings in all, and we have no record 
of what took place except what has survived of letters to the bishops still 
kicking their heels at Ephesus from their friends in the delegations--or 
rather in the delegation of John of Antioch's party, one of whom was the 
great Theodoret. The emperor's decision--presuming it was his office to 
decide--was sensible enough. He refused to condemn Cyril for his twelve 
anathemas, would not even have them examined; refused to accept the Antioch 
policy that no more needed to be said than to repeat the definition of 
Nicaea; and he utterly refused to reconsider the personal question of 
Nestorius. "Don't talk to me of that fellow," he said. "He has shown the 
sort he is." As to the excommunicated John of Antioch and his party "Never 
so long as I live will I condemn them," said the emperor in his edict. 
"When they appeared before me none were able to prove anything against 
them." Cyril and Memnon were tacitly allowed to keep their sees. The 
bishops were allowed to go home The great council was over.

NOTES

1 He had died January 17, 395, the last man to rule the whole Roman world 
as sole emperor; and he died a man in the prime of life.

2. St. Innocent 1, 402-17.

3. Batiffol, Msgr. Pierre, Le Siege Apostolique, 359-451, 343.

4. Whom, however, Cyril does not name.

5. Batiffol, as before, 361; also, 343.

6. Batiffol, as before, 348, n. 5. St. Cyril's Letters, no. X. Also quoted 
Bardy, Les debuts du Nestorianisme, F. and M., vol. 4, p. 172, n. 2.

7. Batiffol, as before, 349, n. 1.

8. Bardy, 172, fort habilement redigee.

9. The word translated by "power" is dunameis. When the pope passes to 
state his decision to the clergy and faithful of Constantinople (August 11, 
430) and says, "The authority of our see has decided," the noun used is 
authentia--i.e., supreme authority, where the other term dunameis is "high 
rank," or "resources."

10. In the province of Macedonia (and therefore directly subject to the 
Holy See), 70 miles east of Thessalonica, 240 due west of Constantinople.

10a. Barry, no. 18, prints a translation of the synodal letter and the 
anathemas.

11. Announced since John of Antioch's letter.

12. For this correspondence, Batiffol, as before, 361-62.

13. Cf. Newman on the emperor, "distrustful of Cyril": "'Theodosius 
disliked Cyril; he thought him proud and overbearing, a restless agitator 
and an intriguer and he told him so in a letter that has come down to us." 
Trials of Theodoret, in Historical Sketches, II, 348. It seems safe to date 
this essay, first printed in 1873, in the 1860s.

14. Whom John had already called in to induce Nestorius to admit the 
orthodoxy of the use of the word Theotokos.

15. The leading prelates brought each his own bodyguard; Cyril, sailors 
from Alexandria, Nestorius, gladiators from the circus.

16. Newman, as before, 349-50.

17. The great church called Maria Theotokos.

18. "Beneath ashes deceptively cool." The reference is to Horace's famous 
warning to historians, Odes, II, 1.

19. "Round about 160," says Bardy, F. and M., 4, 180. The exact figure is a 
matter of dispute.

20. Nolle particulures quasdam synodos fieri. Batiffol, as before, 371.

21 The text of this letter, Greek and Latin, is printed in Kirch, 
Enchiridion Fontium Hist. Ecclesiasticae Antiquae, pp. 461-62.

22. And the official record of the proceedings notes that he does so 
"taking the place of Celestine, the most holy and most reverend chief-
bishop of the church of the Romans."

23. The term used by the legate for his native Latin tongue is interesting-
-Romana oratio. Mansi, IV, p. 1288.

24 Text, Creek and Latin, in Denzinger, no. 112.

25. The Roman basilica of this title.

26. To fifty-three, rather, by name, belonging to all parties; to the pope 
and the bishop of Thessalonica, also, who did not attend the council; and 
to St. Augustine, dead now eleven months.

27. Batiffol, Msgr. Pierre, Le Siege Apostolique, 359-451, p. 388.

28. Ibid., p. 389. See also Bardy, p. 188.

29. Bardy says September 11, p. 190.


CHAPTER 4. The General Council of Chalcedon, 451

"What Nestorius had endangered by his rash sermons and his erroneous 
formulae ... was the central doctrine of the Christian religion. This fact 
is enough to explain the intensity of St. Cyril."[1] And the bishop's 
belief about the Antiocheans, as he made his way home to Alexandria, was 
that they still stood by Nestorius. Their excommunication by the great 
council the pope did not, however, confirm, despite an increasing severity 
of tone towards Nestorius himself, and despite a real uneasiness about the 
situation at Antioch. So long as there was hope that John of Antioch would 
conform, the Apostolic See would follow its practice of careful patience. 
"In cases of this kind," the pope wrote to the bishops who had assembled at 
Constantinople for the consecration of Nestorius' successor, "there are 
many things to be taken into consideration, which the Apostolic See always 
has had regard to."[2] And the policy--the traditional Roman habit, parcere 
subiectis--brought its reward, though not in Celestine's time, for on July 
27, 432, he died, a bare four months after this letter.

How to reconcile John and Cyril? John no less fervently believing that 
Cyril was a heretic, an Apollinarian, who had striven, in his twelve 
theses, to insinuate, or impose, on the Church a heresy as grave as that 
which Nestorius had patronised. Both parties, luckily, really desired an 
understanding. And there was an intermediary whom both could trust, whom 
all the world venerated, the aged bishop of Boerea, Acacius. To him both 
sides had recourse. The emperor also begged him to undertake the 
peacemaker's part, and the new pope, Sixtus III, sent him a letter of 
encouragement. John and Cyril interchanged letters whose tone revealed to 
each the truly apostolic spirit of the other, and on April 12, 433, 
eighteen months nearly after the dissolution of the council, the accord was 
complete. John made an explicit declaration that Nestorius was a heretic, 
and that he had been rightly deposed and was no longer bishop of 
Constantinople. He also signed a statement of his belief in the Incarnation 
of Christ the Divine Logos, an explanation in which he used the terms 
traditional in the region dominated by his see of Antioch. And Cyril 
accepted the statement as wholly orthodox, as the belief of the Catholic 
Church. John was not asked to make a similar statement about Cyril's twelve 
anathemas. They were never so much as mentioned, by either side. And why 
should they have been? In the intention of the theologian who had framed 
them they had never been meant as a public statement of doctrine. They were 
merely a special formula, drawn up for a special occasion, the testing of 
the meaning of phrases used by a notoriously slippery controversialist.

To the agreement of 433 Theodoret of Cyrrhus sent in his adhesion in the 
following year; and, after much hesitation, he too consented to 
anathematize Nestorius and to admit that he was rightly and lawfully 
deposed. And now once again, after six years of tumult, there was peace--
among the chiefs, at any rate. The bickering did not however cease 
altogether, and one incident calls particularly for notice because it was 
the beginning of a dispute that was seriously to harass the Church in later 
years, and to be the occasion of the summoning of the strangest of all the 
General Councils, that which met at Constantinople in 553. This skirmish 
arose from the fact that, in the schools of the kingdom of Armenia, there 
had developed a keen interest in the teaching of two Antiochean 
theologians--both of them now dead--who had been the (unconscious) first-
begetters of the Nestorian heresy. These were the bishops Diodore of Tarsus 
(370-?92) and Theodore of Mopsuestia (392-428). Their works were now 
translated into Syriac, and a certain amount of enthusiasm was growing for 
their ideas, when two neighbounng bishops, of an Alexandrian cast of mind, 
intervened. The Armenians sought counsel at Constantinople and the bishop, 
Proclus, after some study of the texts of Theodore, condemned his 
(undoubtedly) erroneous teaching, but set out his own exposition of the 
orthodox teaching in a terminology that threatened to undo the work of the 
Union of 433. Moreover, Proclus sent round a letter for the bishops of the 
East to sign, in which they explicitly, by name, condemned the dead 
Theodore, and he, furthermore, procured from the emperor a letter which 
transformed this into an imperial order. John of Antioch, in return, flatly 
refused to condemn as a heretic a man who had died in the peace of the 
Church. This was a thing never done before. And the flames would, no doubt, 
have spread as rapidly as in 428 but for the intervention of Cyril, who 
pointed out to Proclus that the Council of Ephesus had left the memory of 
Theodore of Mopsuestia in peace, never so much as mentioning his name 
although it had condemned a creed attributed to him. Proclus ceased to urge 
his demands, and now there was really peace (437).

John of Antioch died in 440, Cyril in 444, Proclus in 446. Of the great 
figures of the council of Ephesus, Theodoret survived--with Nestorius; and 
with one who had played his part behind the scenes at Rome, Celestine I's 
deacon, Leo, who was now, since 441, pope. Theodosius II was still emperor. 
Such was the personal setting when, in 448, the theological controversy 
about the true meaning of the mystery we call the Incarnation broke out 
afresh, and more violently than ever. It was this crisis that led to the 
General Council of Chalcedon, held in 451.

The protagonists in the new controversy were a monk of Constantinople, 
Eutyches by name; the bishop of the capital, Flavian; and the bishop of 
Alexandria, Cyril's one-time deacon, Dioscoros.

The disputes arising from the theories now to be brought before the 
judgment of the bishops were destined not only to survive the condemnation 
of the next council, Chalcedon, but b be the occasion of the most serious 
defection from Christian unity which the Church had yet experienced, a 
defection that still endures in organised form after fifteen hundred years. 
The history of this, and other defections, is in no way the subject of this 
present book. But the account of the council would be untrue as to the 
facts if it were told without reference to this history. It must also again 
be said that the theological questions raised were far from simple, hardly 
to be understood without some training in technical theology. Finally, 
truth demands that we make clear that the human beings on the orthodox 
side, in the course of their fight to protect the traditional faith against 
the new errors, made mistakes in their attitude to the innovators.

From the beginning, to instance one major theological complication, the 
party of Eutyches claimed to be nothing more than loyal disciples of St. 
Cyril, one of whose favourite theological dicta became, as it were, their 
watchword and (for them) the touchstone of orthodox belief about the 
Incarnation of the Divine Word--"There is only one physis, since the 
Incarnation, of God the Word"; where (for St. Cyril) the Greek word 
italicised stands for what the Latins call "person"; but, the old trouble 
all over again, to a vast number of the Greek-speaking theologians of this 
time, the word meant not "person" but "nature." Cyril himself, in the 
settlement of 433, had recognised that the Antiochean way of expressing the 
doctrine--that spoke of two physes--seemingly the contradictory of his own, 
was just as orthodox as his: that the other side was using the same word to 
mean something else. But, to the men who claimed to be carrying on Cyril's 
work, the Antiocheans held the heresy that there were two persons in the 
Word Incarnate.

What now began, within two or three years after Cyril's death, was a 
movement, at Constantinople, on the part of a highly influential monk, of 
great austerity of life, to spread a doctrine--seemingly based on the 
Cyrillian formula--that made heretics of all but the Alexandrian party, the 
one-physis (Monophysite) party as they came, eventually, to be called. 
Popular sermons on any of these fundamental doctrines, that condemned as 
heresy other ways of expressing them, could very soon (as the events of 
twenty years before had shown) bring great cities to a state of chronic 
disorder. And so it was to prove yet once again.

The pope, St. Leo, was to say that Eutyches went wrong from his lack of 
skill in these matters rather than from malice.[3] Newman notes[4] that the 
early writings of the party "display ... unction," rather than logic; that 
the Eutychians "write devotionally, rather than controversially," and that 
"Eutyches in particular refused to argue, out of reverence, as he said, 
towards our Lord. Whenever his inconsistencies were urged upon him, he said 
the subject was beyond him." His first leading idea, it would seem, was 
that Christ was not, as man, man in the fullness of what we mean when we 
use the word of the rest of the human creation. Christ, he said, was not of 
the same substance (homo-ousion) as we are. What made Him different was 
that He had not a human soul (i.e., a spiritual, intellectual soul; a human 
mind). In Christ our Lord it was the Divine which functioned, where, in us, 
it is the mind.[5]

Eutyches was an old man, close on ninety, but very influential--he was the 
head of a monastery of three hundred monks, the leading personage, after 
the bishop, in the religious life of the capital; he was friendly with, and 
in constant touch with, like-minded followers of St. Cyril in Asia, in 
Syria, and in Egypt; the emperor venerated him for his long ascetic life, 
and the emperor's chief minister, Chrysaphios, was his godson. Eutyches saw 
himself as fighting a revival of Nestorianism, and he said this, in so many 
words, in a letter to the pope, some time in the spring of 448.

As the new teaching spread, opposition grew among those who saw this 
activity as an attack on the settlement of 433. Soon, from the bishops of 
Antioch, there came complaints to the emperor, and from Theodoret, in 447, 
a popular kind of dialogue called The Beggarman (Eranistes), between a 
"Eutychian" and a Catholic, in which, however, Eutyches was never mentioned 
by name. The emperor's reaction to the accusations was an edict (February 
16, 448) which renewed all the laws enacted against the Nestorians, and a 
law against all books which did not conform to the faith of Nicaea, and 
Ephesus, and of Cyril's twelve anathemas. As to Theodoret, he was bidden 
never to leave his diocese for the future, not even to come to the council 
which the emperor had it in mind to summon. The appeals against such 
bishops as Theodoret had also gone to Alexandria as well as to 
Constantinople, and a bitter correspondence passed between the two bishops. 
Then in November, there came an unexpected flash of lightning to clear the 
sultry atmosphere. A synod of bishops, at Constantinople, was considering 
some local problem when one of them, Eusebius, bishop of Dorylaeum,[6] 
producing a dossier of evidence, denounced Eutyches as a heretic, and 
demanded that he be summoned before the synod to explain himself.

The bishop of the capital city, Flavian, was very reluctant to credit the 
accusation. In the end, however, the accuser carried the day, and a summons 
was duly sent. It was fourteen days before it was obeyed--fourteen days 
spent in arguments and pourparlers. Meanwhile the synod put out a 
declaration of belief--a repetition of that of 433--accompanied by such 
works of St. Cyril as the letter to Nestorius demolishing his heretical 
theses, and the letter of 433 making his peace with John of Antioch. The 
declaration stated that since the Incarnation there are two natures [of the 
Divine Word] in one single person, the one only Christ, one only Son, one 
only Lord.

When Eutyches finally consented to appear, he arrived with a high official 
of the court, sent by the emperor, as his protector, and with an escort of 
hundreds of monks. He was heard, there was a vast amount of argument, and 
even the court dignitary did his best to win the old man over. But he would 
not agree that there are two physes in God incarnate. The synod proclaimed 
him a heretic, deposed him from his post in the monastery, forbade him to 
exercise his priesthood, and ordered that none should have any access to 
him for the future. Thirty-two bishops put their names to this sentence, 
and twenty-three heads of monasteries endorsed it.

There were two highly placed personages, however, who did not accept the 
synod's deposition of Eutyches--the emperor, and the bishop of Alexandria. 
When the monk appealed to Rome against his sentence, the emperor sent a 
letter supporting him. Dioscoros, to whom also an appeal had been sent, 
called a synod of his own and annulled the deposition. The pope's reply 
(February 18, 449) was a complaint that from the bishop of Constantinople 
he had not yet had a word about these proceedings, regarding which he 
ought, long since, to have notified the Apostolic See. And, as well as to 
Theodosius, Leo wrote that same day to the bishop, saying he was astonished 
that no information about the Eutychean affair had been sent, whereas Rome 
should have been the first to be told. "We desire to know the reasons for 
your action, and that all the documents should be sent.... Would you then, 
beloved brother, hasten to tell us the whole story as fully and as lucidly 
as possible, as you ought to have done already ... to say what this new 
thing is that contradicts the old belief, and which you have seen fit to 
punish with so severe a sentence."[7]

Sometime after this--we do not know exactly when--Flavian's report arrived 
at Rome. It left the pope in no doubt that Eutyches was in the wrong, and 
he confirmed the sentence passed on him. Then, on March 30, the emperor 
summoned a council--in his intent a General Council of all his own 
states[8]--to meet, once again, at Ephesus, on August 1. The pope was 
invited to be present. He agreed to be represented by three legates (as 
Celestine had been represented in 431), and in this reply to the emperor, 
he stated his view that Eutyches had been justly condemned, and said that 
in a letter to Flavian, written that same day,[9] he had set out "that 
which the Catholic Church universally believes and teaches about the 
mystery of the Incarnation of our Lord."

This letter to Flavian[10] is a different kind of production altogether 
from the writings whether of Cyril or Theodoret, or any of the contending 
theologians. It is not, in tone or form, a work of theology at all, but a 
judgment, a decision, an authoritative statement that "this is the Catholic 
faith." Incidentally it is a model of Latin style, of the way the Latin 
language can be used to set out Christian doctrine. The pope also wrote to 
the council itself, accrediting his legates, a letter which makes it clear 
(while he left it to the council to decide the fate of Eutyches) that the 
doctrinal issue has been decided in his letter to Flavian, and that he 
expects the council to accept this. From this last letter it would seem 
that the pope expected Eutyches to submit, and he urges that he be treated 
mercifully. Leo, nevertheless, had no great hopes that the council would 
bring peace, nor had Theodoret, safely locked up at Cyrrhus, seven hundred 
miles away. But neither can ever have anticipated what actually was to take 
place, proceedings such that the pope was moved to say, in a phrase that 
has stuck, non iudicium sed latrocinium.[11]

The council opened on August 8, with some 130 bishops[12] present, 
Dioscoros (by the emperor's command) presiding. After the edict summoning 
the council had been read, the legates called for the pope's letter to the 
council, but Dioscoros passed to the emperor's letters authorising the 
presence of the monk Barsumas. Eutyches then appeared, to read his appeal 
against the sentence of the synod of the previous November, and the legates 
made a second effort to have Leo's letter read. They were again ignored, 
and after Eutyches had read a statement of his belief, the votes were taken 
amid great uproar. The name of his accuser, Eusebius of Dorylaeum, was 
greeted with cries of "Burn him alive," "Cut him in two, the man who wants 
to divide Christ," "Anathema," and so forth, while 114 bishops agreed that 
Eutyches' theory was good Christian doctrine. By the emperor's orders no 
bishop who had taken part in the condemnation of Eutyches was allowed to 
vote. This decision of the council was thus quasi-unanimous, of those with 
votes.

Dioscoros had already done what little needed to be done to excite his 
brethren, and now he passed to propose the punishment of Flavian and 
Eusebius--deposition. After an inflammatory harangue, which provoked 
reprisals from the supporters of these two, with Flavian interjecting an 
appeal and the Roman legate Hilarius protesting also, Dioscoros cried out 
that his life was in danger, and on his appeal the imperial officials threw 
open the doors of the church, and a mob of soldiers, seamen, monks, and the 
general rabble poured in. Flavian took refuge in the sanctuary, and clung 
to the pillars of the altar. In the end he was dragged away, and taken to 
prison. The bishops then voted his condemnation, 135 of them signing the 
decree, many of them through sheer fear, and unable to escape.

Flavian was exiled, and after three days on the road he died, apparently 
from shock or from injuries received in the dreadful scene.[13] But he 
managed to draft an appeal to the pope, and to get this into the hands of 
the all but helpless legates.

Two weeks went by, while the emperor considered the reports sent him and 
then, August 22, the second, final session of the council took place--the 
papal legates not present: they had, by this time, made their escape. The 
business was simple enough, the deposition of a number of bishops, leading 
members of the Antiochean party, some of whom had been under fire since the 
first stirrings of Eutyches. They were Ibas of Edessa, Irenaeus of Tyre 
(the close personal friend of Nestorius), Domnus of Antioch (who had been 
pliability itself in this latrocinium), and Theodoret. The bishops solemnly 
accepted the twelve anathemas of Cyril, and then, with acclamations that 
should be remembered--"Hail Dioscoros," "God has spoken through Dioscoros," 
"the Holy Ghost has spoken through Dioscoros"--the council of 449 came to 
an end.

Between the end of the Latrocinium and the meeting of the General Council 
of Chalcedon there is an interval of two years and two months nearly. The 
period is fairly evenly divided by the death of Theodosius II, and because 
his successor, Marcian, a man who knew his own mind, was a loyal Catholic 
also, the religious history of the two halves of the period is as unlike as 
may be.

The situation could not have been more serious than the scandal of Ephesus 
left it. Except that Dioscoros had not excommunicated the pope, he had all 
but arrayed the East in open opposition to Rome and the West, the dividing 
line being the principle that the only true exposition of the Christian 
faith was not Leo's Tome, but the Alexandrian formula of Cyril as used by 
Dioscoros. A faction of bishops, powerful because it had the full support 
of the state, dominated all the churches of the East, as, one hundred years 
earlier, in the worst days of the Arian terror.

To Rome the inevitable appeals came in, as soon as the victims found a 
means to make contact; very moving letters from the now dead Flavian, from 
Eusebius, and from Theodoret, who, fifteen hundred miles away from Rome, 
managed to send two of his priests to support his case. And the pope had 
the story from his legates also. He now wrote a protest to the emperor, 
saying that what had happened at Ephesus was "an insult to the faith, an 
injury to all the churches of the world." A more authoritative council was 
needed, to which the bishops of the whole church should be invited, and it 
should meet in Italy. The fact of Flavian's appeal to Rome, made at Ephesus 
and brushed aside, is the basis of this demand, and brings from Leo a 
strong reminder that the right of bishops to appeal to Rome is something 
fundamental in the church; recognised by Nicaea and by a decree of the 
whole body of the bishops, it is a custom of the church universal.

From the emperor there came not a word of reply, and he left unanswered 
also the letters sent by the pope on December 25, in which the request for 
a new council was repeated, and in which the emperor was warned not to 
allow himself to be the tool of intriguers, a reference to the corrupt 
regime of Chrysaphios, the real patron of Eutyches. In February 450 the 
emperor's western partner, Valentinian III, left Ravenna to reside in Rome. 
With him came his mother, the empress Galla Placidia, and his wife Eudoxia, 
the daughter of Theodosius. The pope promptly enlisted the prestige of 
these imperial personages, and once more letters went to Constantinople. 
All three stress the same point: this is a case (i.e., Flavian's appeal, 
which is the foundation of the pope's demand for a new council) where all 
law and all precedent demand that the pope shall be judge. Is he not 
Peter's successor? they say, tenant of the see in which he to whom the 
heavenly keys were given set up the supreme episcopal authority? The pope 
also wrote to the sister of Theodosius, Pulcheria (driven from the court 
these ten years by Chrysaphios), and to the clergy of Constantinople, 
encouraging them to stand firm despite the manoeuvres of the wicked 
minister.

To his imperial equals Theodosius had no choice but to reply. In April he 
blandly explained that the excellent work done at Ephesus, and especially 
the deposition of Flavian, had brought peace at last to the religious 
world. What need was there of another council?

Meanwhile, Theodosius had appointed new bishops in place of those deposed. 
The successor of Flavian was Anatolios, who had been the agent of Dioscoros 
in the capital. This appointment was the occasion of the pope's last letter 
to Theodosius. It is an explanation that he has not yet acknowledged the 
new bishop, because he is not sure of his orthodoxy. In order to remove all 
doubts, Anatolios is to make a written acceptance, in the presence of his 
clergy and the people, of the decrees of Ephesus 431, and of Leo's own 
doctrinal letter to Flavian, the Tome. It was on July 16, 450, that this 
was written. The letter crossed the news from Constantinople that 
Theodosius had died (July 28) after an accident with his horse, that 
Pulcheria had taken the throne, and that her first act had been the 
execution of the wicked Chrysaphios. She also offered her hand to the 
senator, Marcian, and on August 24 had him proclaimed emperor. Overnight, 
as it were, a new world came into being, a world in which religion could 
again breathe freely, and the private fancies of "mystics" and the feuds of 
theologians no longer tyrannise over the ordinary believer.

It was, then, Marcian who replied--towards the end of August--to the last 
of Leo's letters to Theodosius, announcing now his own elevation. It was 
fitting, he said, that he should begin his reign by writing to the man who 
"held the supreme place [principatus] in the episcopate of the divine law"-
-the writer knows well what principate means, he is the holder of that 
principate in the temporal order to describe which this term was first 
coined, centuries before. As to the council Leo has asked for in Italy, 
Marcian[14] would prefer it in the East, with Leo presiding in person. 
Should the distance seem too great, let the pope suggest some other place, 
and Marcian will summon to it all the bishops of the East, of Thrace and 
Illyricum.[15] Other news from Constantinople strengthened the good 
impression thus created. At the new emperor's command the body of Flavian 
had been brought back to the capital and buried alongside his predecessors 
in the church of the Holy Apostles. Anatolius had duly signed his 
acceptance of the Tome. The bishops exiled after the Latrocinium had been 
recalled.

What of the bishops who, through sheer fear, had submitted to the 
usurpation of Dioscoros, and voted all this iniquity? They now desire to be 
readmitted to the communion of Rome. At Constantinople, with the approval 
of St. Leo's legates,[16] a partial reconciliation has been allowed, to be 
followed by a restoration to full communion later. This the pope confirms 
(April 13, 451). But he excepts from this boon Dioscoros, and also the 
bishop of Jerusalem.

And now (June 9) the pope announced a change of plan. Sending a new 
delegation to the emperor, with powers to settle finally, in consultation 
with the bishop of Constantinople, the fate of the repentant bishops, he 
writes that these measures will, he thinks, suffice. The council asked for 
is not really necessary. But the pope was too late.[17] Already by the time 
he had come to this conclusion, the emperor had acted, and sent out the 
summonses for the council (May 17). It was to meet on September 1, and at 
Nicaea. On June 26 the pope wrote accepting the arrangement. He asked one 
thing only, that none should be allowed "to call in question the belief 
which our fathers received from the Apostles, as if there were any doubt 
what this is." The pope will not come to the council, but be represented by 
his legates; and of these, Paschasinus, bishop of Lilybaeum,[18] in Sicily, 
"it is fitting, shall preside over the council in my place."

The pope also wrote to the council,[19] a blend of good wishes, 
information, and authoritative instructions. The emperor has called the 
council but "with due regard to the rights and honour of St. Peter," as 
shown by his invitation "to us also to lend our presence" to the venerable 
assembly. But neither the critical situation at the moment,[20] nor 
precedent allows us to accept. The presence of the legates will be a 
reminder that it is really the pope who is presiding. Passing to the 
business before the bishops the pope reminds them that he has already 
stated, in his letter to Flavian, what is to be believed about our Lord's 
Incarnation. As to the question of reconciling, and reinstating, the 
repentant bishops, the pope leaves this entirely to the council, and the 
question also about restoring the exiled bishops to their sees, now 
provided (thanks to the late emperor) with "successors." But--no bishop is 
to be degraded from his episcopal character. It is in this letter that the 
famous phrase is found that has for fifteen centuries blasted the council 
of 449 as the Latrocinium.[21]

By the appointed September 1 the bishops had assembled at Nicaea, but 
matters of state kept the emperor occupied, and he finally decided that it 
would be more convenient if the council took place, not at Nicaea, forty 
miles away, but at Chalcedon just across the Bosporus from the capital. And 
it was there that on October 8 the opening session was held. The delay at 
Nicaea, with the papal legates still at Constantinople--they did not leave 
until the emperor left[22]--gave Dioscoros his last opportunity to 
manoeuvre, and he used it to arrange an excommunication of the pope--his 
last fling, as it turned out. Something like five hundred bishops had come 
to the council, an attendance never seen again at one of these assemblies 
for another seven hundred years. To keep order during the debates, to see 
fair play, and to be the emperor's channel of communication generally, 
Marcian had appointed a body of no less than eighteen commissioners, 
various high officers of state. The council met in the great church of St. 
Euphemia, the commissioners and the legates and such principal figures as 
the bishops of Alexandria and Constantinople sitting in line before the 
sanctuary balustrade, the bishops placed on either side of the nave, 
probably in two blocks facing each other, as in the English parliament.

It was the pope's senior legate, the bishop Paschasinus for whom Leo had 
demanded the actual presidency of the council, who opened the proceedings, 
explaining as he said, the instructions sent to the council by "him who is 
the head of all the churches." And, in the first place, Dioscoros was not 
to be given a place among the bishops. If he resists this ruling he must be 
expelled. Such are our instructions, and if Dioscoros is allowed to sit as 
a bishop, we leave. Dioscoros, said the second legate, is here only to be 
judged. To treat him as a father of the council would be to insult the 
rest. Dioscoros then left his seat and was given a place in the nave of the 
church. And another bishop with him, Eusebius of Dorylaeum, to whom fell 
the role of formally reciting the Alexandrian's alleged offences. Next the 
commissioners demanded that Theodoret--freed by the new emperor from his 
confinement--should be given a place, and his entry was the occasion of the 
first "scene" at the council, the "Orientals" and the bishops from Asia 
Minor applauding and crying, "Out with Dioscoros the murderer," the 
Egyptians shouting anathemas to Theodoret and acclaiming the emperor who 
had destroyed Nestorius. It was a storm that only the lay commissioners 
could have controlled, with their guards in support. At their suggestion, 
Theodoret, for the sake of peace, also took his seat in the nave, but as a 
member of the council. The commissioners had already made clear his rights, 
"because the most holy chief-bishop Leo has restored his episcopal rank, 
and the most divine emperor has commanded that he take part in the 
council."

Eusebius then opened the case against Dioscoros, by readings from the 
minutes of the Latrocinium, and of Flavian's synod that had condemned 
Eutyches in 448, in Greek and again in Latin. Dioscoros interrupted to say 
that it was at the command of Theodosius II that he had presided at 
Ephesus, and to name the two other bishops who had shared the 
responsibility with him. At Ephesus, he said, the bishops had unanimously 
agreed to all that was done, and the emperor had confirmed their decisions. 
Whereupon tumult again, reminders from all sides of the violence used to 
extort consenting votes, and a strong intervention from the commissioners.

The day ended before the readers had got through to the full tale of the 
doings at Ephesus. It was concluded two days later. And then a message from 
the emperor interrupted the business. Marcian, hoping to end, once and for 
all, the theological conflict, proposed to the council that it should put 
out a solemn definition of the church's belief about the Incarnation, 
something that both Alexandrians and Antiocheans would accept. The council, 
however, thought another creed unnecessary. In the earlier session they had 
acclaimed Flavian's statement of 448 as orthodoxy itself. Not a voice had 
protested that the truth lay with Eutyches.[23] And now, when one bishop 
said, "The pope has given us a ruling about Eutyches, we follow the pope, 
we have signed the letter," the rest called out in agreement. And to clinch 
the matter the classic documents were again read out, the bishops 
applauding each: the creeds of Nicaea and of the council of 381,[24] the 
letters of Cyril to Nestorius (on his heresy) and to Antioch at the 
conclusion of the peace of 433, and (this time) the letter of Leo to 
Flavian, the Tome. And at this last the bishops called out, "It is Peter 
who says this through Leo. This is what we all of us believe. This is the 
faith of the Apostles. Leo and Cyril teach the same thing." And so went by 
the second day of the council.

On October 13 the bishops retumed to the case of Dioscoros. He did not, 
this day, come to the council. Though three times formally summoned he kept 
away. He was judged contumacious, and the council asked Paschasinus to 
pronounce the sentence.[25] And this he did, saying explicitly that he was 
acting in the place of the pope. What Dioscoros had done was recalled: the 
reinstatement of the heretical Eutyches, despite the just sentence of the 
monk's own bishop and his persistence in the condemned belief; the holding 
up at the Latrocinium of the Tome of Leo; the excommunication of Leo; the 
refusal to stand his trial. Wherefore the pope, "through us and through 
this holy council, in accord with the thrice blessed apostle Peter, who is 
the foundation stone on which the Catholic Church is built, the foundation 
of the orthodox faith, has stripped him of his rank of bishop and of all 
his episcopal functions." Then the bishops began, turn by turn, to stand up 
and deliver their judgment. They had got as far as the 187th, each of them 
declaring his agreement, in a variety of phrases, when (seemingly) a block 
vote was taken. Not a bishop opposed the sentence, not even the terrified 
Egyptians (who were, however, to make a great scene a few days later).

Dioscoros was immediately notified of his fate, and the reports went off to 
Rome and to the emperor, not an hour's distance from the scene. Marcian 
confirmed the sentence and promptly banished the Egyptian to Gangra, a town 
250 miles away[26] in the mountainous country of southern Paphlagonia.

On October 17, the council took up the case of the five bishops who had 
been the principal aides of Dioscoros at the Latrocinium. It was decided, 
unanimously, to reinstate them in their sees. Then the commissioners 
revived the emperor's demand for a creed. Paschasinus replied. He went once 
more through the classic list, Nicaea--Leo's Tome, and said, once more, 
nothing need be added to this; and, once again, the council unanimously 
agreed--or all but unanimously. For a group of thirteen Egyptian bishops 
now demanded to be allowed to say no more than that they accepted "their 
traditional faith," meaning by this "the faith of St. Mark, of Nicaea, of 
Athanasius and Cyril." The bishops shouted them down. "It's a trick," they 
cried. "Let them sign Leo's letter." But the Egyptians threw themselves on 
their knees. "When we get home we'll be murdered," they protested, "if we 
have done anything else than be faithful to our own chief bishop. It is our 
custom that we obey the bishop of Alexandria, as Anatolios knows well.[27] 
And at this moment we have no chief bishop. We do not want to seem to 
disobey the council. But kill us here if you like. We are willing; rather 
than to return to be killed at home, for betraying the chief see of Egypt."

The council persisted in its demands that the Egyptians sign. The Egyptians 
persisted in their refusal. It was the commissioners who solved the 
problem. The Egyptians should wait at Chalcedon until the successor to 
Dioscoros was appointed. "C'est une comedie!" is a modern historian's 
comment.[28] But was it not rather a foresign of the bloody scenes 
presently to be enacted at Alexandria, once the council had broken up?

In the next session, October 20, various disputes between bishops and 
metropolitans, appeals from sentences, were heard and settled, and the 
useful principle was voted that no imperial interference with the canons 
regulating episcopal elections was valid. It was the new emperor himself 
who was the cause of this unlooked for bold independence among the bishops. 
"The emperor's will," said the commissioners, "is that in all business 
between bishops, the pronouncements of the court shall have no force if 
they are contrary to the canons laid down by the councils."

And then, two days later, quite unexpectedly it would seem, the plan for a 
new statement of belief made its appearance yet a third time. In the 
interval since its rejection on October 17, there had been busy work behind 
the scenes, the centre of which was the (Alexandrian) bishop of 
Constantinople, Anatolios. The commissioners, this time, came forward with 
a creed already prepared. What it contained we can only surmise from the 
ensuing dispute, for the text did not survive. It seems to have been yet 
another attempt to state the doctrine in terms that would offend neither of 
the extreme parties, terms that (experience surely shows) will not have 
sinned through any excessively clear meaning. When the formula was read, 
the majority of the bishops were in favour, a minority (Antiocheans) were 
opposed, and the papal legates would have nothing to do with it. Their 
instructions were simple. The Tome of Leo had been set for the council's 
acceptance as the official teaching about the Incarnation, the final word 
for Alexandrians and Antiocheans alike, the Catholic Faith. And now 
Paschasinus said, "If you will not accept the letter of the blessed pope, 
Leo, make out our passports, that we may return to Italy and the General 
Council be held there."

Here was a crisis indeed, before an ultimatum evidently meant.

The commissioners proposed that a committee be chosen to revise the 
formulary. "No! down with Nestorians," from the bishops. "Mary is 
Theotokos, Christ is God." Then the commissioners, "Do you accept Leo's 
letter?" "All of us; we have signed it." "Then add to the formulary what 
Leo has written." "No! no change in the formulary. The formulary is 
sufficient; it confirms the letter. Leo says what Cyril says. Celestine, 
Sixtus, agree with Cyril." And the baffled officials sent for direction to 
the emperor.

Marcian came down on their side--and the side of the legates. If the 
bishops refused to have the formula amended, the council should go forward 
in Italy. Even now a nucleus still clung to the text as it stood. "Those 
who don't like it can go back to Rome," bishops from Illyricum cried; "they 
are Nestorians." The commissioners cut to the root of the matter, asking 
point-blank, "Do you follow Leo, or Dioscoros?" "We believe what Leo 
believes" was the answer. "Then add to the formula what Leo says, namely 
[we believe] that, according to the decision of our most holy Leo, in 
Christ there are two natures united, inconvertible [natures], inseparable 
[natures]." The bishops agreed. The committee was chosen. A new formulary 
was written.

It is a lengthy statement, for, acknowledging belief in the teaching of 
Nicaea and the council of 381 it repeats these two creeds verbatim; it 
passes to the two famous letters of Cyril, and then to the Tome, which it 
greets with a world of compliment enshrining the statement that the letter 
"is in harmony with the confession of the great apostle Peter,[29] and is 
for all of us a landmark against ill thinkers, a protection for orthodox 
teaching." And then the formulary comes to the point, a statement of faith 
on the point in dispute. It is written in the terminology of Leo's 
Tome.[30]

To the next session (October 25) the emperor himself came. He spoke words 
of praise to the bishops. Thanks to them all the peoples of his empire 
would henceforth have no other belief about the Incarnation but what the 
Holy Apostles had taught, the faith of Nicaea and of Leo, beloved of God, 
who rules the Apostolic See. And the bishops applauded, and then all set 
their names to the formulary, the three legates in the first place.

What remained to be done, in the week that followed, was the enactment of 
twenty-eight canons, or disciplinary laws.[31] The first of these is very 
important for it gives universal force to an existing collection of 104 
canons, the work of five previous councils, of which only Nicaea was a 
General Council.[32] Bishops, clerics, and monks are the chief objects of 
the new legislation. One only of the new canons has reference to the laity-
-prescribing penalties for all those concerned in abductions.

Bishops are given authority over all the monks of their diocese, and their 
permission is needed for new foundations. They are not to receive clerics 
who have left the diocese to which they belong. They are to appoint a 
priest to administer the temporalities of their sees. Disputes between 
bishops are to be decided by the synod of the bishops of the province--
which synod, they are reminded, is to meet twice a year; this last rule is 
too often neglected, says the canon. Disputes between a bishop and his 
metropolitan are to be settled either by the exarch,[33] i.e., by the 
bishop of the chief city in the (civil) diocese, or by the bishop of 
Constantinople. Bishops are to be consecrated within three months of their 
election, and those who ordain for money are to be deposed. Bishops must 
not ordain candidates not provided with a livelihood.

As to the clergy: they can belong to one diocese only, and must not leave 
it on their own authority; they are not to take up any secular employment, 
or join the army; in those places where certain orders of clergy are 
allowed to marry they must not marry heretics, nor give their children in 
marriage to heretics, Jews, or pagans; strange clergy who arrive without 
appropriate introductions are not to be allowed to officiate; in disputes 
between themselves clerics are not to seek remedies in the civil courts 
without first consulting the bishop; accusations brought against the clergy 
are not to be listened to until the bishop is satisfied of the accuser's 
good character; clerics fall under the penalty of deposition if they have 
any part in an abduction.

Monks are warned that they are not to wander about outside their 
monasteries, nor are they to marry--both classes of offenders are to be 
severely punished. Like the clergy, secular employments are forbidden them, 
and they must not become soldiers--or they risk excommunication. About both 
the monks and the clergy it is stated that far too many of them drift to 
Constantinople, and spend their lives there in disedifying idleness. To end 
this, such desoeuvres are now handed over to the officials of the see of 
Constantinople, who are to arrange their expulsion from the city.

No woman is to be accepted as a deaconess before the age of forty. And if, 
later, she marries she is to be deposed from her office. If a nun marries 
she, too, is to be excommunicated.

In canon 12 there is an indirect reference to the state. Some bishops 
desiring to achieve metropolitan status have gone so far as to induce the 
state to divide the civil province where they live, so that their see-city 
is now the metropolis of the new province. The civic authority treats the 
bishop now as metropolitan and he acts as such towards the other bishops of 
the province. Such successful adventurers on the high seas of clerical 
ambition are now reduced to their real status, although allowed to keep the 
honorific title they have procured.

Much more serious than the nonsense thus proscribed in canon 12 is the new 
place in the ecclesiastical firmament contrived at Chalcedon for the bishop 
of the capital. At Nicaea when, for the first time known to us, the bishops 
faced the situation that not all sees were equal in dignity or powers, 
there is reference to two eastern sees by name, Alexandria and Antioch. 
Nicaea does not add anything to whatever it is that distinguishes these 
sees. It records--and records as traditional, as "the ancient custom"--
their present status, as super-sees; their bishops have rights over the 
other bishops of the (civil) diocese of which these two cities are the 
capitals. By the time of the second of these General Councils, 381, the 
eastern bishops had before them the experience of half a century of trouble 
caused largely by bishops of every rank crossing the frontiers of their 
neighbour's jurisdiction. Moreover, a new city had come into existence in 
330. The small town of Byzantium had been transformed into the imperial 
capital, Constantinople--a town which, from its unique geographical 
position in the empire and its wonderful harbour, was as inevitably 
destined to outstrip all other cities, as ever, from its foundation, was 
New York. And the bishops of this eastern council of 381 were determined to 
give the new city a kind of practical blessing, an ecclesiastical 
recognition of the marvellous place it had already become after a mere 
fifty years' existence. Constantinople, they said explicitly, is New Rome; 
and, in the church, it shall have the second place, shall come next after 
Rome, with a "primacy of honour." Now, after another seventy years, the 
bishops at Chalcedon take up the matter once more.

There are two incidental references to the capital in these canons, and one 
canon deals with nothing else. In the new law about disputes between a 
bishop and his metropolitan, and in that about disputes as to which see 
rural parishes belong, it is said that the case must go for judgment to the 
exarch of the (civil) diocese or to the bishop of Constantinople. Was this 
meant to the detriment of the jurisdiction of Alexandria and Antioch? 
Apparently not. The bishops whom it concerned are those of the two (civil) 
dioceses, Asia and Pontus, that took in the whole of Asia Minor, and that 
called Thrace,[34] in Europe.

If the option to choose Constantinople were usually taken, it would mean 
that this bishop now enjoyed (as a judge of appeals) a jurisdiction akin to 
Alexandria and Antioch, but over a still larger territory, over four 
(civil) dioceses, whereas theirs extended, in each case, over one alone.

The 28th canon of the council carries the matter much further. And all this 
seemingly petty squabbling for place between prelates, in the excited 
atmosphere of a General Council in 451, fifteen hundred years ago, still 
matters. What we are considering is, in fact, one of the fundamental acts 
from which derive the divisions to consider which the coming General 
Council seems principally summoned. Here is one beginning of troubles that 
have lasted for a thousand years or so, to the great detriment of religion, 
and of our common civilisation.

In this 28th canon the bishops begin by recalling the act of the council of 
381, and they confirm it. They then speak of the see of Rome, and of how 
"the Fathers" always recognised its special privileges, as something due to 
that city's imperial state. "We therefore define and declare the same about 
the privileges of the see of Constantinople, New Rome. The city now 
honoured with the presence of the emperor and the senate, and which enjoys 
the same [state] privileges as the old royal Rome, should be as great as 
she in what relates to the church, and rank second to her." And for the 
future, all the (26) metropolitans of the three (civil) dioceses of Thrace, 
Asia, and Pontus are to be consecrated by the bishop of Constantinople--he 
is to be definitely their overlord. And likewise it is he who will 
consecrate the bishops of the churches among the barbarian peoples beyond 
the frontier.

The legates were not present at the session of October 31 when this canon 
was voted, nor the imperial commissioners. But the next day, Paschasinus 
protested strongly. He was answered that these were domestic affairs, in 
which it was thought the legates were not interested. Another of the 
legates said that the bishops had voted the canon under duress. But they 
denied this violently. He then said--it was the bishop of Ascoli, 
Lucentius--the canon went contrary to the relevant law of Nicaea. Upon 
which he was asked whether this matter came within the legates' mandate. To 
which the third legate replied trenchantly, by reading out the passage that 
bade the legates not to allow anything that violated what the holy fathers 
decreed (i.e., Nicaea) or that lessened the dignity of the Roman See. 
Should any bishop, relying on the importance of the capital, attempt any 
usurpation, he was to be opposed.

The commissioners decided that the previous declarations now in conflict 
should be produced. Paschasinus read the canon of Nicaea--in a text which 
opens with the words "That the Roman See has always held the first place." 
It was then read in Greek by one of the emperor's officials, and with it 
the canon of 381. The bishops were formally asked by the commissioners 
whether their votes had been forced. They unanimously answered they had 
been free, and various speakers explained that the new arrangement about 
the consecration of bishops merely stated in law what had been the practice 
now for some years. Eusebius of Dorylaeum--the "prosecutor" of Dioscoros, 
it will be remembered--then told of how he had read the canon of 381 to Leo 
when he was a refugee at the papal court, and that the pope had assented to 
it. (And, of course, in this very council Paschasinus had given the first 
place after the legates to Anatolios of Constantinople.) When the 
commissioners turned to the bishops who had not voted for the new canon, to 
ask their views, the metropolitan of Ancyra said that not wanting to do any 
more consecrations he had left it to the bishop of Constantinople to 
consecrate his suffragan the bishop of Gangra, but for himself he suspected 
that money played too great a part in consecrations done at the capital. 
Whereupon, as may be guessed, there was a really hot discussion, which the 
commissioners broke up by declaring the canon carried. The rights of the 
bishop of old Rome, they said, have been safeguarded, but it is only right 
that the bishop of New Rome should have the same rights and honours, and 
also these rights to consecrate in the three civil dioceses mentioned. And 
the bishops again applauded.

But the last word fell to the legates. "The Holy See," said Lucentius, 
"ought not to be basely treated while we look on. And therefore, all that 
was done yesterday, in our absence, to the prejudice of the canons and 
laws, we demand of your highnesses [this to the commissioners] to order 
that it be annulled. Otherwise, let this our appeal in law against the 
canon be attached to the minutes, that we may know what it is we must 
report to the apostolic bishop who is the first personage in the whole 
church, so that he may be able to pronounce sentence on the unjust act 
against his see, and on this overthrowing of the canon law." One of the 
bishops called out to the presiding officials, "We still agree with you." 
And they said, "The whole council approves our position." And with this 
rupture between the bishops and the pope the council came to an end.

And the end of the story?

The bishops, before they separated, addressed a letter to the pope. They 
were grateful, they said, that he had been faithful to the command given to 
the Apostles, "Teach ye all nations ... to observe all things whatsoever I 
have commanded you."[35] Five hundred and twenty of us were at the council, 
"and you led us as the head guides the limbs of the body." Dioscoros has 
been punished as a man deserved who in his madness had struck at him to 
whom the Lord had confided the care of His vineyard, the one whose mission 
it is to give unity to the church. They make the smoothest of references to 
their "confirmation of the canon" of 381; enacting their new canon, they 
say, in the persuasion that "since in you the apostolic light shines in all 
its splendour, you will often, with your customary care, see that 
Constantinople benefits from that brightness." They beg the pope to confirm 
this arrangement which they have presumed to think would please him, being 
confident that the head will allow to his children what is for their good.

The bishops, in this letter, have dropped the language about the imperial 
importance of the new city, and about recognition of the pope's primacy as 
related to the like importance of Rome. It is to him as primate because 
Peter's successor that they address their plea--the one sure concrete 
reality beneath their wealth of insinuating compliment.[35a] And with their 
letter they send the minutes of the council's proceedings. The legates also 
brought with them letters from the emperor and the bishop of 
Constantinople--a somewhat uneasy production, this last, from "the see of 
Constantinople to its father, your own Apostolic See."[36]

Leo's reply to Anatolios is grave. This council called to strengthen the 
faith seemed to you, he says, a useful opportunity to cause Alexandria the 
loss of its traditional second place, and Antioch its rank as third, so 
that, these put below you, all metropolitan bishops would lose their 
special privileges. As to the canon of 381, "this vote of some bishops or 
other, given (as you brag) sixty years ago now, and never notified to the 
Apostolic See by your predecessors--this affords no support to what you are 
doing." ... Dioscoros may have disgraced Alexandria, "but the bishops of a 
see are one thing, the see itself another."[37]

The emperor, congratulated on his share in bringing about this triumph of 
the true belief, is told of the sorrow felt at the news of Anatolios' 
usurpation. How prosperity has fanned his ambition! That the sacred 
guarantees of Nicaea should be jettisoned, and this new rank created, all 
to increase the importance of a single see, and that not an apostolic see. 
Let Anatolios be content with his see's imperial importance, for it is not 
possible to turn it into an apostolic see. Let him not covet more than his 
predecessors enjoyed. And let him keep to the rules,[38] if he does not 
wish to find himself cut off from the church universal. Everything done in 
contravention of the Nicaean rules "we dismiss as without legal effect.... 
By the authority of the blessed apostle Peter we quash it utterly by a 
general sentence."[39]

Finally the pope replied to the council, March 21, 453. He renews, by this 
letter, the approbation already given by the legates to the council's 
execution of the task for which it was called--the case concerning the 
faith, the case for which alone the council, he reminds them, was called. 
As to the work which the bishops then took it upon themselves to do--the 
reorganisation of sees--the pope says he prefers not to know anything about 
it. For it violates "the inviolable canons of Nicaea." Whatever is not 
according to these is null and void.[40]

The emperor, distressed at the evident breach between the pope and the 
bishop of his capital, wrote to Rome, some months later, pleading for 
Anatolios (? November or December 453). Leo replied, and Marcian read the 
reply to the bishop. The pope's letter said that a reconciliation would be 
welcome, but that Anatolios must first "make satisfaction to the 
canons."[41] The only way to a peace and charity that are genuine is "by 
keeping to the Catholic faith and the canons of Nicaea." And Anatolios, 
after his interview with Marcian, wrote his submission to the pope (April 
454). He declines all responsibility for the new canon which has exalted 
his see. He himself is a lover of peace and lowliness of life. It was the 
zeal of the clergy of Constantinople, it was the eastern bishops who worked 
this for their own profit. And, he goes on to say, "Whatever was thus done, 
all its worth and the confirmation of it was reserved to the authority of 
your holiness."[42] All this is so much hot air until you choose to ratify 
it!

The pope took the reply as made in good faith, and the matter closed with 
his writing to Anatolios that he looked to find in him a worthy successor 
of his great predecessors, and to find him a useful guardian against all 
attempts against the Catholic faith or the laws of Nicaea (May 29, 454). 
This was two years and seven months almost since, at Chalcedon, the bishops 
had voted the canon in the teeth of the legates' protests. The crisis was 
really closed that opened with the speech of Eusebius of Dorylaeum at the 
synod of November 448.

NOTES

1. Bardy, 196.

2 Batiffol, 397; the letter, dated March 15, 432, is in Jaffe, no. 385. A 
more familiar fact, to most of us, about St. Celestine I is that he was the 
pope who commissioned St. Patrick for the conversion of Ireland.

3. Epistles, no. 31.

4. The Heresy of Apollinaris (1835), printed in Tracts, Theological and 
Ecclesiastical (1874), p. 260. The notes in square brackets to this "tract" 
were seemingly added in the 1870s.

5. To quote Newman once again, this was equivalent to saying that for the 
sacred purpose of the Incarnation of the Divine Word, there was brought 
into existence a unique creature, a human body animated with an animal 
soul: "That He had united Himself to what, viewed apart from His presence 
in it, was a brute animal." Tracts, as before, p. 270.

6. It was he who, in 429, had made the first open move, at Constantinople, 
against Nestorius.

7. Batiffol, 503-4, quoting Jaffe-Wattenbach, no. 420.

8. I.e., not of all the bishops of the Church.

9. June 13, 449.

10. Always known by its Greek name the Tome of St. Leo (tomos, i.e., 
"volume"). Barry, no. 19, prints a translation of it.

11. "Not a council at all, but a 'get together' of bandits."

12. As so often, authorities are not agreed as to the figures.

13. The accounts of what happened in the church are conflicting. According 
to one story Flavian was set upon by Dioscoros himself and the monk 
Barsumas. At the ensuing Council of Chalcedon, Dioscoros was greeted with 
shouts of "Murderer!"

14. This is his letter of November 22.

15. Three of the civil dioceses that make up Marcian's imperial 
jurisdiction.

16. Sent June 16, 450.

17. Letter sent June 16, 450.

18. The modern Marsala.

19. As in 431 and 449. This is the third time we see the system at work. 
Did the legates to Nicaea in 325 go uninstructed, and without any word for 
the council? No record survives certainly.

20. It is the year, of course, of Attila's famous invasion of the West.

21. In illo Ephesino non iudicio sed latrocinio are the pope's actual 
words. Jaffe-Wattenbach, 473.

22. For his palace at Chalcedon.

23. Nor any, one may add, had cried, "Cyril rather than Flavian."

24. It is now, at Chalcedon, that we first hear this council spoken of as 
though regarded as of the same class as Nicaea and Ephesus, 431.

25. From this session, whose business was the trial of a bishop, the 
commissioners were absent.

26. That is, as the crow flies. It is the modern Cankiri, fifty miles N.E. 
of Ankara (Turkey).

27. This successor to Flavian being himself an Alexandrian cleric.

28. Batiffol, as before, p. 546, n 1.

29. "Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God." Matt. 16:16.

30. For the text, Greek and Latin, see Denzinger, no. 148. Barry, no. 20, 
prints a translation.

31. For the text and a translation of these, see Schroeder.

32. The others were Ancyra (Ankara) 314, New Caesarea 315, Gangra 340 and 
Antioch 341; all Eastern councils, it will be noted.

33. The exarchs for the three (civil) dioceses concerned, Thrace, Asia, and 
Pontus, were the bishops of Heraclea, Ephesus, and Caesarea.

34. Thrace meant, roughly, European Turkey, Bulgaria, and the strip of 
Greek territory to the east of the island of Thasos. The bishops of Greece 
(the civil diocese of Achaia) and of the western Balkan lands (the civil 
diocese of Macedonia) were still directly subject to Rome. The pope's local 
agent for these sees was the bishop of Thessalonica.

35. Matt. 28:19.

35a. The bishops' letter is no. 98 in the collection of St. Leo's letters.

36. Anatolios' own words in this letter.

37. Aliud enim sunt sedes, aliud praesidentes. For the letter, Jaffe, no. 
483. The date is May 22, 452.

38. An allusion to the fact that Anatolios had gone so far as to consecrate 
one who is his superior in rank, the new bishop of apostolic Antioch, the 
third see in the church.

39. These last two quotations are from Leo's letter, of the same date, to 
the empress Pulcheria, joint ruler with Marcian, her husband. Ibid., 482.

40. Ibid., 490.

41. Satisfaciat canonibus, Jaffe, 504.

42. The letter of Anatolios is in the collection of St. Leo's letters, no. 
132 (April 454). For the whole of this see Batiffol, as last, 562-81.


CHAPTER 5. The Second General Council of Constantinople, 553

I. THE DELICATE SITUATION

The fifth of the General Councils met at Constantinople, in May, 553--just 
one hundred years after the date of St. Leo's final letter to the fathers 
of Chalcedon (March 21, 453). To the minds of many contemporaries this 
council of 553 was to seem a flat repudiation of Chalcedon, and it was to 
be the occasion of numerous schisms in the Latin sees of the church, the 
most widespread (non-doctrinal) revolt which the papacy has ever had to 
face. It was a council whose strange history was very closely related to 
the hundred tense years of controversy that preceded it, controversy partly 
theological, partly political, partly nationalistic.

More particularly, this council was the crowning effort of a Catholic 
emperor's policy to reconcile the Monophysites; an emperor who came in 
after some fifty years of Monophysite domination, and at the end of a 
period of thirty-five years when even the pro-Chalcedon party had been out 
of communion with Rome; thirty-five years when, in law, there had been no 
Catholics at all within this empire of the East. That emperor was Justinian 
(527-45), the restorer par excellence, the ruler who set himself to halt 
disintegration everywhere, and by no means unsuccessfully who brought back 
under imperial control Italy and Africa and even part of Spain, the last 
great emperor who can be called Roman. His leading idea, in this stage of 
his religious activities, was to make it clear beyond clear to the 
Monophysites that the Catholics, faithful to the Council of Chalcedon, were 
as orthodox as themselves, that there was no difference, in fact, between 
what each party believed. It was the policy of a sincerely religious 
Catholic that had nothing in common with the attempts of his predecessors, 
through the previous fifty years, to heal the breach through dishonest, 
ambiguous formulae which each party could sign with its own meaning in mind 
as it did so.

The differences that separated Monophysite from Catholic were undoubtedly 
as subtle as they were real. The Church has never used any other form of 
expressing the doctrine of the Incarnation than that of St. Leo's Tome. It 
has, on the other hand, never condemned the formula of St. Cyril--which, as 
he used it, is a wholly Catholic formula; and that he used it in a Catholic 
sense is shown by the whole body of his writing on this great truth. Nor 
did the Monophysite leaders--the bishops and theologians--understand the 
formula in any other sense.[1] None, at Chalcedon, supported the views of 
Eutyches, or asserted that Eutyches and St. Cyril were at one in their 
belief. And this loyalty to the real St. Cyril characterises the main body 
of the party throughout the next hundred years and more after Chalcedon. 
Where the party and such of its great leaders as the patriarch of Antioch, 
Severus, went wrong, and put themselves outside the communion of the 
church, was in their constant assertion that the language of St. Leo's Tome 
did not have a Catholic meaning, could not have a Catholic meaning; that it 
showed, on the contrary, that he was a Nestorian. And Chalcedon, they 
persisted, was a council to be held accursed, for, according to them, it 
had reversed the decision of the truly Catholic Ephesian Council of 431 
where St. Cyril had triumphed.

If this seems now merely a tale "of old forgotten far-off things"--an 
especially pitiful tale of violent disputes between people substantially in 
agreement--let it be remembered that in the next eighty years after 553 the 
differences had so undermined the stability of a good half of the empire in 
the East, as to lose forever to the emperors the loyalty of Egypt and 
Syria, and reduce the numbers of the Catholics there to a handful, and the 
jurisdictions of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem to all but nought. 
These lands were the original strongholds of the Catholic faith, Egypt, 
Syria, and the rest, names which whatever they now bring to mind do not 
suggest the triumph of the religion of Christ our Lord. Islam, of course, 
has for a thousand years and more dominated them. But the break with the 
Catholic Church, and its destruction in these lands, goes back earlier 
still, to long before Mahomet was born, to the Monophysite reaction 
following the Council of Chalcedon. The emperors who, in the two hundred 
years after Chalcedon, showed such a passionate anxiety over the various 
pacts by which they sought to end the division, and who treated the 
opponents of their endeavours with such ferocity, were by no means despots, 
half-crazy through their determination that all men should believe as they 
believed about these high mysteries. What prompted them was their 
realisation that a continuation of the division meant the end of their 
empire and, as we should say now, of civilisation.

As to the great council itself, taken as a whole it has never inspired 
historians with any excessive affection. Le malentendu de Chalcedoine is, 
with many of them, the impression they seem to retain most vividly. The 
reason for this is, perhaps, that "The Council of Chalcedon had drawn up a 
doctrinal formula: it had not produced a union of minds or of hearts."[2] 
It was a council occasioned by a serious and long-standing theological 
quarrel about the interpretation of technical keywords. That this initial 
misunderstanding survived the council is the tragedy of its history. What 
the council needed to have done, it was impossible that it could have done-
-given the passions of the disputants; given, especially, the feelings 
engendered on all sides by what had happened at the Latrocinium. Given, 
what all knew, the fact of these two quasi-permanent theological factions, 
Cyrillian and anti-Cyrillian, and their mutual ferocity, there ought, 
ideally, to have been some specific act of the council showing that its 
statement of the faith did not conflict with the decisions of Ephesus (431) 
nor condemn Cyril's theology of the Incarnation; saying plainly what it was 
that the Antioch party found faulty in the Alexandrian's terms and why[3]; 
showing how there was yet no conflict between these last and the formula in 
which St. Leo had expressed the doctrine. But could such a reasonableness 
in these actual bishops of 451 have been expected?

One thing alone seems to have controlled them, the words of him whom, 
whether joyfully or reluctantly, they acknowledged to be a peculiarly 
privileged authentic witness to the truth. In this acknowledgment by these 
passionate, mutually hostile men, there lies whatever is glorious in the 
conciliar action of 451. These Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians may not like to 
yield their minds to the papal authority as a concrete factor of life; they 
may with all possible ingenuity avoid and evade it; and once returned to 
their sees they may disregard and flatly disobey; but their homage at 
Chalcedon to what is greater in the papacy than any pope is indeed 
"L'apogee en Orient, du principatus du Siege Apostolique."[4] And it is 
this that has survived in the popular memory as the great glory of the 
council--its acceptance, that is to say, of a statement of the true belief 
about the Incarnation on the authority of the bishop who, so they believe, 
is Peter's successor and heir.

From these simplicities we turn to the jungle of events. The opposition to 
the Council of Chalcedon's acceptance of St. Leo's teaching showed itself 
as soon as this was known. A Syrian monk, present at the council, made his 
way home, to Jerusalem, and began a campaign of violent preaching on the 
theme, "Chalcedon has betrayed Cyril." He speedily had the city aflame, and 
the empress-dowager heading a plot to bar out the bishop--not yet returned-
-and set another in his place: a successful plot, for the bishop fled 
before the insurrection. In town after town in Palestine and Syria the same 
thing happened. It took the whole force of an army to get the lawful bishop 
of Jerusalem back into his see.

Egypt received the news of Chalcedon's deposition of Dioscoros--and its new 
chief bishop, Proterius--no less badly. Troops had to be used to get him 
safely through the streets of Alexandria. The vast mobs then turned on the 
soldiery, and when these took refuge in the great temple of Serapis, burned 
it down and the troops with it. The government reprisals were, of course, 
terrible--but efficient, and it was amid a military occupation that 
Proterius ruled. Until 457; when the emperor Marcian died, and without 
awaiting the news of his successor's policy the Alexandrians rose again. 
The bishop was murdered, and his naked, mutilated corpse dragged through 
the streets in triumph. In his place a leading Monophysite, Timothy, was 
elected.[5]

The new emperor, Leo I, was so impressed by all this that his first thought 
was to call a council that should repudiate Chalcedon. Those bishops he 
consulted gave no support to his plan, and advised that Timothy should be 
banished. The strong arm once more operated, and as long as Leo reigned, 
another sixteen years, the surface calm was unbroken. It was after Leo's 
death (474) that the real trouble began, not the mere matter of rioting 
mobs and fanatical clerics, but of the state proposing its own official 
solution of the great dilemma, to which every bishop had to set his 
signature. It was a usurper, Basiliscus, hoping thus (it may be) to make 
his throne safe, who inaugurated the new policy: the policy that reached 
the heights of its mischievous possibilities eighty years later, when the 
General Council we are now about to deal with (the fifth) was summoned, for 
no other purpose than to accredit an imperial reconciliation scheme. 
Basiliscus sent to all the bishops of the empire an encyclical letter, 
setting forth what that faith is which "is the basis and foundation of 
mankind's happiness." It is, he states, the faith of Nicaea, of the council 
of 381, and of the Council of Ephesus that condemned Nestorius. But "we 
decree that all the bishops of the world shall anathematize, and give to 
the flames, the Tome of Leo, and all that was done at Chalcedon in the 
matter of defining the faith."[6] Every bishop was ordered to set his 
signature to the letter, as testimony of submission. It was an eventful 
twenty months[7] in which Basiliscus reigned. Throughout Egypt, Palestine, 
and Syria, especially, the bishops signed by hundreds. Then the lawful 
emperor, Zeno, managed to regain the throne.

Zeno was a crude type, from the mountains of Isauria, the first Asiatic to 
rule at Constantinople, a soldier, and notoriously one of the great 
blackguards of his day. Religious affairs he handed over to the bishop of 
Constantinople, Acacius, almost the only bishop who had stood firm against 
the Encyclical. This Acacius had done, apparently, from policy--Zeno might 
soon be back; and Acacius had a Monophysite past. He was the real author, 
it seems, of the next attempt to settle the problem by imperial edict.

The problem had not, in fact, diminished as the years went by, and it was a 
practical problem; for example, every time a new bishop was appointed in 
Egypt or Syria the chances were that there would be a miniature civil war 
for some days or weeks or for longer still. Zeno had closed his eyes to the 
fact that Timothy had returned to Alexandria during the usurpation, and 
after Timothy's death he recognised a second leading Monophysite as 
bishop.[8] The new edict, called the Henoticon,[9] was, in form, Zeno's 
letter to this personage, Peter Mongos (i.e., the hoarse). It was to have 
the most disastrous consequences. Once already, a bare twenty years after 
Chalcedon, the all but entire episcopate of the empire had repudiated the 
council at the bidding of the state. Now, six years later, it was to repeat 
the performance and, in doing so, to fall foul of the Apostolic See.

The Henoticon of 482 was more subtly contrived than the short-lived edict 
of Basiliscus. It spoke of the traditional faith in which alone all 
Christians are baptised, and upon which the preservation of the state 
depends, and proceeded to say that this faith was that of the councils of 
Nicaea, of Constantinople (381), and Ephesus. It anathematized, by name, 
Nestorius and Eutyches also, and it accepted the twelve anathemas which St. 
Cyril had drawn up against Nestorius. Then came a summary of the doctrine 
of the Incarnation to which no Catholic could object, and, in the closing 
words, a casual back-kick at Chalcedon which ruined all: "Whoever believes, 
or has believed, otherwise, now or at any time, whether at the council of 
Chalcedon or at any other council, him we anathematize." The implication of 
this is clear enough. But the rest was orthodox, and so Catholic bishops 
signed it freely. The last clause dispenses from any need to reverence 
Chalcedon those who thought the council accursed, and so gave the 
Monophysite all the freedom he desired. There was no mention of Leo's Tome, 
nor of his terminology, "two natures."

The mass of the bishops rallied to the new formula, those who were 
Monophysites having trouble with their own extremists. The pope--Felix III-
-excommunicated Acacius for accepting the Henoticon, and deposed him from 
his see, and with him excommunicated all who remained in communion with him 
(484). Acacius in return struck off the pope's name from the diptychs of 
the church of Constantinople. For the first time, there was now open 
schism, separating the whole Catholic East from the Roman See. It was to 
continue for thirty-five years.

Acacius died five years after his condemnation, still bishop and still 
unsubmissive. His successors made as full profession of faith in Chalcedon 
as could be desired. But they would not retract their signatures from the 
Henoticon, nor recognise the excommunication of Acacius. A new emperor came 
to the throne in 491, an elderly official, Anastasius. He was himself a 
Monophysite. Once he had completed his careful reorganisation of the state 
he, too, turned to solve the great problem, and called in leading 
Monophysites as his advisors--two very notable personages, Philoxene bishop 
of Mabboug[10] and the monk Severus whom, in 512, the emperor made 
patriarch of Antioch.

It was during this period of the reign of Anastasius that the first signs 
were given of what was to be the storm centre--the whole business indeed--
of the General Council of 553. This was a Monophysite crusade against three 
bishops--writers all of them--now long since dead, who had once been 
friends and associates of Nestorius: the bishop of Mopsuestia, Theodore; 
the bishop of Cyrrhus, Theodoret; the bishop of Edessa, Ibas. These three 
personages and their writings, a trinity of subjects for controversy 
henceforward inseparable, the three topics, items kephalaia in Greek; 
capitula in Latin), headings; the Three Chapters, of the English-speaking 
historians.

It was Philoxene who, around 506-7, began this campaign against them, 
denouncing them as heretics, Nestorians, at Antioch, the metropolis with 
which all three were associated. Five years later, in the same city, he 
again raised the question of their orthodoxy, in his endeavour to bring 
about the deposition of his superior, the bishop, Flavian--a strong anti-
Monophysite. Monophysites traditionally detested Theodoret and Ibas as 
leading critics, in their own day, of St. Cyril's theology of the 
Incarnation. Catholics, on the other hand, stood by them as victims of the 
Alexandria-managed Latrocinium, who later were restored and pronounced 
wholly orthodox at Chalcedon. From now on, with both Catholics and 
Monophysites, to be against or for their condemnation was a sure way of 
proclaiming oneself for or against the Council of Chalcedon. "The Three 
Chapters" was, for the next hundred years, to be a watchword and a battle 
cry through all the churches from Spain to Arabia.

Severus ruled Antioch for a brief six years. In 518 his emperor died, and 
the general to whom the throne now came, Justin, was a convinced Catholic, 
a Latin, whose first thought was peace with the Apostolic See. Once again 
Roman legates appeared in the capital and, as the condition sine qua non of 
restoration to communion, the emperor and the bishop--and all the bishops 
of the empire-- signed the formulary drawn up by the pope, Hormisdas.[11] 
No discussion of the terms was allowed, the pope was as firm as St. Leo at 
Chalcedon. The signatories admitted that the first rule of salvation was to 
keep the rule of belief, with regard to which the promise of Christ to St. 
Peter[12] had been marvellously fruitful since, "in the Apostolic See the 
Catholic faith has ever been kept spotless." They therefore, desiring and 
hoping never to be separated from this faith, anathematize all heresies, 
and, by name, "Nestorius, once bishop of Constantinople and condemned by 
Celestine pope of Rome and Cyril bishop of Alexandria." Likewise they 
anathematize Eutyches and Dioscoros, "condemned by the holy council of 
Chalcedon which we follow and embrace," a council which, "following the 
council of Nicaea, taught the apostolic faith." The bishops declare their 
detestation of the "murderous Timothy the Cat" and his successor Peter; and 
they also condemn with these "Acacius, the bishop of Constantinople whom 
the Apostolic See condemned," and all who had remained in communion with 
Acacius. Returning to Chalcedon, the signatories accept the Tome of Leo, 
because "in all things we follow the Apostolic See and preach as it has 
decided." Here, "in this See," is to be found "the whole, true, perfect 
strength of the religion of Christ." And, for the future, they promise 
never to recite in the sacred mysteries the names of those who "have been 
cut off from the communion of the Catholic Church, that is of those who are 
not one in thought with the Apostolic See."[13] "If I attempt to vary from 
this my profession, I acknowledge I should make myself the accomplice of 
those whom I have condemned."

This root and branch condemnation of Acacius and the hundreds of his 
episcopal accomplices, all now deceased, was a stiff draught to swallow. 
But if the bishops were serious in their statements about the unique 
privilege of the Apostolic See as the standard of belief, what choice had 
they but to drink it down?

But it was a long generation since, in these lands, the pope's name had, 
publicly, been allowed to matter. At Thessalonica there were riots when the 
commissioners arrived to reconcile the bishop, riots which he organised. In 
Thrace generally the changeover went through fairly peaceably, and in Asia 
Minor too. But in Syria there was violent opposition in many places. The 
recusant bishops were ejected and, as of old, troops were needed to secure 
the installation of their successors. Egypt the emperor let alone.

And in Syria, in some places where the anti-Monophysites came into their 
own again, the Three Chapters made an ominous reappearance. At Cyrrhus 
there were feasts in honour of Theodoret, and at Mopsuestia in honour of 
Theodore and his master Diodore of Tarsus--and, also, of "St. 
Nestorius."[14] Pro-Chalcedon enthusiasm of this sort augured ill for the 
new emperor's hopes of a real peace. Was it now that the first seeds were 
sown in the mind of his nephew Justinian, soon to succeed to the throne, of 
a deep aversion for these Syrian heroes as symbols of strife, and bound to 
provoke it everlastingly?

In April 527, at the age of forty-five Justinian began his reign--or, to 
speak according to the realities, what began was the joint reign of 
Justinian and his accomplished and really capable wife Theodora. And 
Theodora was a Monophysite. While, for the greater misery of the years to 
come, her husband was, among many other things, a talented amateur 
theologian, who studied under the best masters of the day.[15] Justinian 
regarded himself as personally responsible to God for the well-being of his 
empire, and in nothing more awfully responsible than for the maintenance of 
the Church. Hence the constant support his laws gave to bishops in their 
disciplinary tasks, the care to provide good bishops and a determined, 
never ceasing war on the enemies of the Church--the pagans, the Jews, the 
heretics. But the austere emperor did not, ever, think of the Monophysites 
as heretics. These were, to him, victims of a profound misunderstanding, 
and it was one of his most rooted convictions that he had a mission to 
reconcile them to the Church.

II. THE QUESTION OF THE THREE CHAPTERS, 527-44

The reign began, then, with overtures to the Monophysites. The exiles were 
recalled, preachers of the party were heard once again in the churches, and 
the empress set up a monastery of five hundred of their monks in one of the 
imperial palaces. In 533 Justinian called a conference of Catholic and 
Monophysite bishops and theologians to discuss the vital questions. He 
himself presided. And at this conference the question of the Three Chapters 
came up. According to one account the Monophysites accepted the Catholic 
explanation of their relation to Chalcedon and Ephesus. But another story 
relates that the conference broke down on this very point.

This same year also witnessed the emperor's first attempts to make official 
declarations about Christian doctrine; an edict, for example, which settled 
the orthodoxy of the latest attempt to state Catholic belief in language 
usually held by the other side. This was the statement, "It was one of the 
Trinity who, in the flesh, suffered for us"--a mode of speech no Nestorian 
heretic could possibly use, and therefore useful on Catholic lips as 
convincing evidence that the pro-Chalcedon party were not Nestorians. The 
statement however grieved the most Chalcedonian of all the Catholics of the 
capital, the monks called Akoimetoi,[16] and thereupon Justinian appealed 
to the pope, John II. Back came an assurance (March 534) that the formula 
was wholly orthodox, and also, among other testimonies in its favour, the 
pope cited the anathemas of St. Cyril[17]-the first time in a hundred years 
of controversy that a Roman document had quoted them. If Leo, through John, 
was now quoting Cyril, what became of the Monophysite case against 
Chalcedon? But, of course, men (even ecclesiastical men) are not purely 
rational animals. And there was always the empress, whom no one has claimed 
as a theologian.

On February 8, 535, the patriarch of Alexandria died, and on June 8, the 
patriarch of Constantinople. Between these deaths came that of Pope John 
II, May 8. Through Theodora's activity both the new patriarchs were 
Monophysites--after street fighting in Alexandria, where the rival 
candidate was also a Monophysite, of the straiter sort. And now the emperor 
thought the moment opportune to invite to Constantinople the arch-
Monophysite of the day, Severus, whom he had been, in part, responsible for 
depriving of the see of Antioch, sixteen years before, and who, in all 
these years, had been a proscribed exile. The ex-patriarch was now lodged 
in the emperor's palace, and no doubt Justinian fully enjoyed his unique 
opportunity of talking over these questions with the monk who, to all 
seeming, must be counted one of the really great theologians. One effect of 
the presence of Severus in the capital was to confirm the new patriarch--
Anthimos was his name--in a resolute anti-Chalcedon spirit.

Such was the position when political events in Italy--the threat to the 
Gothic king of Justinian's army, now master of Sicily--brought to 
Constantinople the unlikeliest person of all, the new pope, Agapitus I. He 
arrived on February 2, 536, and was given a stupendous reception by the 
imperial court. At the thought of the other guest lodged with the emperor, 
the Catholics recalled the story of St. Peter and Simon Magus.[18]

The pope had come on a political errand, to plead for the Gothic king. But 
he had first to settle the problem of his own relations with Anthimos--whom 
he must meet at every turn, at the court no doubt, and above all at the 
sacred liturgies. It was a weak point in the patriarch's position that he 
had previously been bishop of Trebizond, in an age when translations were 
most stringently forbidden. The pope opened with this objection, and when 
the emperor overruled it, he asked whether Anthimos admitted the two 
natures in the incarnate Son. Anthimos saw the game was up. His only reply 
was to cast off his patriarchal robes and disappear. He was an extremely 
pious ascetic, still the monk through and through, happy to be back in his 
cell, and his "cell" the empress provided for him--in the upper stories of 
the vast palace; and he occupied it peacefully for the next twelve years or 
so, when he died.

At a lower level, the election of his successor went forward, whom the 
pope, assured this was truly a Catholic, consecrated on March 13.

The Catholics, heartened by this great demonstration of power, petitioned 
that all this world of important Monophysites should now disappear. The 
pope was already negotiating this with the emperor when, April 22, he 
suddenly died. But the council he had asked for was held, and all the 
excommunications and expulsions of the leading Monophysites were renewed 
and carried out. It was the beginning of a general purge throughout the 
empire, and the beginning of a new chapter in Justinian's religious policy, 
of a change that lasted for seven years or so.

The defeated empress turned to explore the chances offered by the vacancy 
of the papal see. From Rome the late pope had brought with him an elderly 
official of the Curia, Vigilius, who once already had all but been pope--
had been appointed pope, in fact, five years before by the reigning pope, 
Boniface II; a strange innovation which public opinion caused the innovator 
to renounce very speedily. It is Vigilius--who, very soon, will really be 
pope--who is the pope of the fifth General Council. Here is the leading 
actor in the incredible, stormy scenes of the year 553.

At this moment Vigilius is the confidant of the empress, and she is 
promising him the papacy, on condition that once elected he will ... what? 
The stories, and the guesses, of the details of this intrigue are as 
difficult to summarize as they are to reconcile one with another. But in 
some way Theodora thought she had bought Vigilius, and he ultimately became 
pope through her influence--this seems certain.

His present task was to go with all speed to Rome. When he arrived, 
however, it was to find the election over. The new pope, Silverius, had 
been chosen, June 1 (or 8).

In Italy the armies of Justinian slowly made their way north from the toe 
of the peninsula. They were besieging Naples while Silverius was being 
elected pope, and next it was the turn of Rome. On December 10, 536, the 
ancient capital was once more really in the power of the Roman emperor, 
after eighty years' subjection to "Barbarians." But the Goths rid 
themselves of their incompetent king, and the imperialists soon found 
themselves, in turn, defending Rome. And it was now that Vigilius acted, 
Theodora's other instrument being the great commander of the armies, 
Belisarius. What it was that Silverius, supposedly, refused to do for the 
empress, though warned of the retribution this would bring, we know not. 
The pope was summoned to the palace of Belisarius, accused of intrigues to 
deliver the city to the Goths, declared to be deposed, stripped of his 
insignia and, clad in a monk's dress, hurried off to Greece. A few days 
later, March 29, 537, Vigilius was elected in place of the man who, it was 
announced, had abdicated in order to become a monk.

Silverius found a protector in his exile, the bishop of Patara,[19] who 
made a most indignant protest to Justinian. Whereupon Silverius was taken 
back to Italy and an enquiry there ordered--despite the protestations of 
the empress, and the endeavours of yet another cleric of the Roman Curia, a 
friend of Vigilius, the deacon Pelagius. His, too, will be a curiously 
ambiguous role in the events of 553; and, succeeding Vigilius as pope, he 
will have to face the storm which his predecessor's tergiversations had 
raised. Meanwhile the enquiry went against Silverius--thanks to the 
machinations of the new pope; and, despite the commands of Justinian that 
he should be allowed to live, as a bishop, in some other city than Rome, 
Silverius was hurried off to the tiny island of Palmaria,[20] and there 
perished miserably, of starvation, some months later.[21]

Pelagius acted in Constantinople as the pope's permanent legate at the 
court, apocrisiarius was the title. He was an extremely able personage, an 
experienced diplomatist, and well skilled in theology. In the next few 
years he was, perhaps, Justinian's chief advisor in the difficult business 
of keeping the peace in these eastern churches.

But he had a rival, an eastern monk, Theodore Askidas, whom the empress had 
procured in 536 to be bishop of one of the greatest sees in the church, 
Caesarea in Cappadocia, once the see of St. Basil. Theodore belonged to 
Palestine, really. What had brought him to the court was an appeal arising 
out of clamour caused among the monks by a revival of interest in the often 
condemned theories of Origen, belief in the transmigration of souls for 
example, and the final return of all things to the Creator. Askidas had 
been a leading Origenist, and from the court, which continued to be his 
residence, he lent his new prestige, secretly, to his erstwhile associates.

Next when, in 540 or so, matters wholly unconnected with this dispute took 
Pelagius to the Holy Land, as commissioner for the pope, the Roman legate 
could not be indifferent to these new noisy troubles that were the scandal 
of the day in Jerusalem and elsewhere. He returned to Constantinople the 
natural ally of the anti-Origenists, and induced the emperor (in 543) to 
put forth as an edict what was, in fact, a tract on the errors of Origen. 
All bishops were required to sign their adherence to this, and it was sent 
to Rome for the approval of the pope. There was no resistance anywhere 
among the bishops--were any but a handful of them, at any time, adepts of 
this semi-pantheism?

Among the adepts, in 543, was Askidas of course, but he signed. And to be 
revenged on Pelagius he revived the idea of a condemnation of the Three 
Chapters, the three reputations whose rehabilitation in 451 had been for so 
long a striking witness in the East to the Roman primacy. It was Rome 
again, in Pelagius, that had brought down Origen. To bring down Rome's 
prestige in the East, through the condemnation of the Three Chapters, would 
be an appropriate riposte. Does this sound too childishly fanciful? It was 
apparently thus that the mind of Askidas worked. And he won Justinian round 
to the plan--most probably because, of all moves to reconcile the 
Monophysites, this public condemnation of leading "Antiocheans" seemed the 
one most likely to succeed. And the move was heavily backed by a more 
powerful counsellor than Askidas, the empress. Also Pelagius had, by this 
time, been recalled to Rome, and the deacon Stephen sent in his place. The 
new edict appeared in 544.[22]

The trouble began when, as with the edict against Origen, this condemnation 
was sent for signature to the patriarchs and the pope. The legate Stephen 
immediately refused to sign and, impressed by this, the patriarch of 
Constantinople hesitated. When, finally, he signed, the legate broke off 
relations with him. At Antioch, also, the patriarch at first refused but 
then yielded to threats. It was the same story at Jerusalem and at 
Alexandria. Though all signed they did so against their judgment and, even 
so, only conditionally. The officials who brought the edict explained that, 
by the emperor's orders, the pope was going to be consulted. At 
Constantinople the patriarch, as he signed, reserved his right to withdraw 
his signature should the pope refuse to sign. None of these bishops was 
willing to seem to reverse Chalcedon and St. Leo. In view of the coming 
debacle in the eastern episcopate this initial attitude is of high 
importance.

Meanwhile it was Vigilius who was cast for the spectacular part. All these 
signatures were provisional. They would not have any value until Vigilius 
had signed.

Vigilius it seems, was not a popular figure in Rome. The stories current 
about him might be guessed even if, in all their improbability, they had 
not come down to us. Some of them cast doubts on his faith. He was said to 
be leagued with the Monophysite chiefs, for example. But Vigilius by no 
means gave in to the request that he sign the emperor's edict. It was the 
expressed belief of Pelagius, now in Rome as his chief advisor, that the 
aim of those who had inspired the condemnation was simply to destroy the 
dogmatic effect of Chalcedon.

The pope's delays provoked the emperor to a singular act of violence. As 
Vigilius was celebrating the feast of St. Cecilia, November 22, 545, in the 
church that is her shrine, he was kidnapped, hurried the few yards down to 
the Tiber and a waiting ship, thence to Ostia and the open sea, and so to 
Sicily. As the ship made its way down the river the crowds who lined the 
banks called out, some of them, insulting remarks, and others were 
encouragingly indignant; and others shouted, "Don't condemn the Three 
Chapters." What none realised, of course, was that what they were 
witnessing was the beginning of a ten years' captivity. Vigilius never saw 
Rome again.

The pope remained in Sicily until the end of the year 546. Then new orders 
came, and he was once more embarked, his destination Constantinople, where 
he arrived January 25, 547.

Once again, as in 535, there was a pompous ceremonial, and vast external 
deference, under cover of which there began a theological siege of the 
pope. He steadfastly refused to lend his authority to a dogmatic 
pronouncement put out by the state, and he broke off relations with the 
patriarch who refused to withdraw his support. Then, after months of 
harassing discussions to prove that the Three could be condemned and 
Chalcedon not involved, Vigilius pledged himself, in a secret writing given 
personally to Justinian and to Theodora, to condemn the Three Chapters, 
June 29, 547. It was his first defeat, and almost the only one in the six 
years of continuous warfare that now began.

Nine months after this promise, the pope sent his judgment to the emperor; 
it is known as the Iudicatum (April 11, 548). The text has only survived in 
fragments, quoted in the ensuing controversies, but it was a condemnation 
so written as to make clear that it in no way involved Chalcedon. It suited 
the emperor, seemingly, and all the professional clerics who surrounded 
him. But the whole of the West, all the Latins, spontaneously rose in 
rebellion as the news reached them. That the Latins were fairly solid 
against the plan to condemn the Three, Vigilius had already learned during 
his stay in Sicily. Scarcely any Latin bishop had signed the emperor's 
edict. But the Iudicatum, the pope had expected--had taken for granted?--
would win them round. This first revolt of the Latins against Rome was a 
fearful surprise, and it did not die down for nearly fifty years. And so 
from Illyricum, Dalmatia, Italy, and Gaul came news of councils and 
protestations, but nowhere more violent news than from Africa, where a 
council at Carthage excommunicated the pope. And at Constantinople his own 
curial staff, so to call it, boycotted him.

The letters that came in, the controversial exchanges, showed that many of 
the indignant prelates in these distant lands did not really know what the 
famous dispute was about--they were in no condition to take sides, far too 
ill-informed to see that it was possible to condemn certain things in the 
three Syrian bishops and yet cast not a shadow of blame on the great 
council of 451. And the idea developed, at Constantinople, of a General 
Council where the whole thing could be made clear, and a universal 
condemnation be achieved more readily than by sending officers all round 
the Roman world, to each individual bishop. So the emperor consented that 
the pope withdraw the Iudicatum, the council plan was accepted by both, and 
both agreed to keep silent on the whole question until the council met. And 
Justinian wrung from the pope a most solemn oath that he would really 
condemn the Three Chapters and do nothing that would work against their 
condemnation; all this in August 550.

The preparations for the council now began, on the part of the emperor. One 
important item was to see that only well-trusted bishops should be sent 
from such places as Africa. From this desire to be certain before the 
council met how the verdict would go came the idea of another imperial 
edict making the theological problem clear. All would be thus instructed by 
the time the council met, and at the council could accept the edict or, as 
the emperor entitled it, the Confession or Declaration of Faith.

To this plan the pope, immediately, gave a firm refusal, and spoke of 
excommunicating all who set their signature to the Declaration. Then, as 
the air grew sultry with threats he took sanctuary in the neighbouring 
church of St. Peter. On August 14 the emperor ordered his arrest, and the 
church became a battleground, soldiers fighting their way through the mob 
that fought to protect the pope, who clung to the altar while soldiers took 
him by the feet. Vigilius was an old man, by this time, but tall, well 
built, and forceful. He resisted manfully, and finally, as the columns of 
the altar fell in under the strain of the conflict the crowd began to 
prevail, and the soldiers fled.

The pope returned to his home in the palace of Placidia which, now filled 
with spies, became a close prison. After some months, in the week before 
Christmas, he made his escape, clambering over the roofs of neighbouring 
buildings, and so to the shore where a waiting boat conveyed him to 
Chalcedon, and in the very church where the council had sat, just one 
hundred years before, he found a refuge (December 551).

In the basilica at Chalcedon the pope remained for the next eight months--
to the fury of Justinian, as well aware as any ruler of the prodigious 
"loss of face" all this entailed, and of serious possibilities that any day 
the mob might rise against him with "religion" as its war cry. The emperor 
began negotiations.

It was now six years since Justinian had kidnapped the pope, and how much 
nearer was he to his goal?

The pope busied himself with an encyclical letter in which he related the 
full story of Justinian's outrages and deceptions. To the deputation of 
high officials who came across the Bosporus from the emperor, Vigilius, 
ignoring the new wonderful promises, made only one request, the restoration 
to the church of the freedom of action it had once enjoyed; and he bade 
them beg Justinian to avoid the company of the excommunicated. This brought 
threats of new violence from the tyrant, and the pope replied with a copy 
of his encyclical. The letter, February 5, 552, ended with a profession of 
faith, as explicit as a pope's should be. It declared his fidelity to 
Chalcedon and made no mention of the Three Chapters.

The emperor now arrested all those who had joined the pope at Chalcedon. 
Some of the Italian bishops he put to the torture; Pelagius (the pope's 
chief intelligence officer, as ever) he threw into prison. Vigilius 
retorted with strength, by publishing the deposition of Theodore Askidas 
from his see, and an excommunication of all who had signed the emperor's 
Declaration of Faith, the patriarch of Constantinople notably. And he 
contrived to have these sentences posted in various places of the capital. 
It was a bold act that, once more, rallied the city to his side. Justinian 
bade his bishops make their submission, and in the basilica at Chalcedon 
they did so, very fully if something less than sincerely. And the pope 
returned to Constantinople (August 552).

III. THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF 553

And now the summonses to the General Council were sent out. It was to meet 
not, as Vigilius had desired, in Italy or Sicily, but at Constantinople, 
and while the bishops assembled, indeed when most of them had already 
arrived, the conflict with the emperor took up again.

As the months had gone by and almost no bishops from the Latin sees were 
arriving, the pope's anxieties grew. He was willing to condemn the Three 
Chapters, but in his own way--the way of the Iudicatum--in a way that would 
not lose the Latin west to the unity of the church. And so, while his Latin 
advisors were strong that he should refuse utterly to have any part in the 
council, the pope wavered, now of their opinion, now hoping against hope, 
through the council to keep the East and not lose the West. At last he 
announced that the council should go its own way. He would not be present, 
nor be represented, but would let the council know his decision. Justinian 
replied that his decision would be ignored. And with affairs in this state 
the council, 145 bishops in all, held its first meeting, May 5, 553.

Almost all these bishops were Greeks. There were none from Gaul or Spain. 
The dozen or so Italians who had been with the pope these last eight years 
were there, but no bishops from the Latin provinces of Dalmatia and 
Illyricum. The only bishops from Africa--six--were a chosen few already 
engaged to follow the emperor's lead.

The council lasted four weeks (May 5-June 2). There were eight sessions. On 
the first day the emperor sent a long message about the historic role of 
the emperor as defender of the faith, noting how the decisions of the great 
councils had been enrolled among the laws of the state. His criticised 
Declaration of Faith had been simply an imperial consultation of the 
bishops of the empire, its purpose to root out what remained of the heresy 
of Nestorius. Hence his questions about the Three Chapters. The bishops had 
unanimously condemned these, but since there were yet some who defended 
them, he had thought it good that the bishops should be given the chance to 
express their views as a council. As to "the most religious pope of Old 
Rome," he too had been consulted, and had condemned the Three Chapters. His 
definitive judgment, he had told the emperor, would shortly be forthcoming.

The council voted that the pope be asked to preside, and on May 6 an 
imposing deputation waited on him with the invitation, the three patriarchs 
of Constantinople, Antioch, and Jerusalem leading. The pope pleaded his 
present sickness--he was now a chronic sufferer from stone--as a reason for 
not deciding. The deputation came a second time, on May 7, with one of 
Justinian's chief officers of state in attendance. Vigilius now boldly said 
he would not appear at the council until more Italian bishops had been 
brought over. The next day the report of this was made to the council--its 
second session. The third session was taken up with the council's formal 
declaration of its orthodoxy--it held to the faith of the previous "four 
holy councils" of the Fathers.

The next three sessions, May 12, 17, 19, dealt with the case against the 
Three Chapters, the reading out loud of the writings held against the three 
bishops, in full or in extracts. There were seventy-one passages from 
Theodore of Mopsuestia, for example, and also the creed he had drawn up, 
which already had been condemned at Ephesus in 431. About the letter from 
Ibas, bishop of Edessa, to the Persian bishop Maris, there were differences 
of opinion. The point was raised that at Chalcedon this particular document 
had been definitely declared to be orthodox. It was Askidas who steered the 
majority around this formidable obstacle, and the day ended with the 
condemnation voted.

Meanwhile, May 14, the pope had made his own judgment about the Three 
Chapters. It had been sent to the emperor, who had refused to receive it. 
What he thought of the judgment his action twelve days later, at the 
seventh session of the council, was to show. In the interval the text of 
the document, known to us as The Constitutum of Pope Vigilius about the 
Three Chapters,[23] was no doubt known all over the town. It is a very 
lengthy piece, a good hundred pages such as this, and "one of the finest 
works, as literature, that have survived from the fifth century."[24] Upon 
the emperor's careful arrangements by which the council was to be all and 
the pope a nullity, it fell like an unexpected bomb. We shall see the 
unheard of violence it drove Justinian to enact. Meanwhile, here is the 
pope's decision.[25]

The message falls into three sections. In the first he gives the profession 
of faith made to him by Theodore Askidas and by the patriarch of 
Constantinople, Mennas, at Chalcedon in 552, and also the profession lately 
made by Mennas' successor, Eutychius, January 6, 553. There follows a 
resume of what has happened down to the council's first meeting. The main 
part of the Constitutum is the pope's examination of the three accused 
bishops--for that was, in fact, their status at this moment.

As to Theodore of Mopsuestia, the pope had before him the list of seventy-
one extracts from his writings that was to be put before the council, a 
list supplied by the emperor. He accepted that twelve of these were 
certainly heretical and added a thirteenth--against all these he placed the 
mark anathema. But, pointing out that Theodore's case had never been before 
the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, and that it is not the Church's 
custom to condemn the dead, the pope, while condemning the errors in the 
writings, refused to cast a stigma on their author. And he forbade that 
others should stigmatise him.

As to Theodoret, the pope refused to condemn him too. He had been received 
as orthodox at Chalcedon, and as a test he had there been asked to 
anathematize Nestorius, and had solemnly done so before the whole assembly. 
As to the insulting language about St. Cyril with which he was charged, in 
part he had denied that he was the author of these words, and St. Cyril had 
never raised this against him. This had satisfied St. Cyril and the 
council, why should men now be demanding more than they? Wherefore the pope 
strictly forbade anyone to condemn now any work or writing of Theodoret's, 
or any writing as though it were his. At the same time, he solemnly 
condemned all propositions contrary to the faith whether found in 
Theodoret's writings or in any other author. To strengthen this, the pope 
quoted four Nestorian theses, and to each fixed the note anathema.

As to Ibas of Edessa, the Constitutum recalls, first of all, that at 
Chalcedon the papal legates said, "The letter of Ibas having been read we 
have decided that he is orthodox," that the then patriarch of 
Constantinople agreed that he was clear of heresy, and the patriarch of 
Antioch too. Other bishops there had spoken in a like sense. None, at 
Chalcedon, rose to denounce him as a heretic. Not that the bishops had 
approved of the insults he had lavished on St. Cyril, but when Ibas 
accepted to be in communion with Cyril, recognised solemnly, that is to 
say, that Cyril's teaching was the orthodox faith, he, as it were, recalled 
and withdrew these insults [e.g., that St. Cyril was an Apollinarian 
heretic]. With the warning
to the council of 553, that to go back on the judgment of Chalcedon was 
dangerous, the pope came to his conclusion: the verdict that Ibas was 
orthodox should stand, and stand so far as the letter to Maris was 
concerned, a verdict, Vigilius said, based in part on this letter exactly 
and rightly interpreted.

Wherefore, summing up his decision, the pope forbade any cleric to make any 
change whatever in what Chalcedon had decided, and--no matter what the rank 
of the cleric--to write or teach anything against what this Constitutum 
laid down, or, in the face of this decisive sentence, ever again to raise 
the question of the Three Chapters. The document was signed by the pope, 
and countersigned by the sixteen bishops with him and six clerics of his 
household, one of them Pelagius. It was probably he who was the actual 
author of the piece.

The emperor showed his hand at the next, seventh, session of the council, 
May 26. His representative, the quaestor of the imperial palace, appeared 
with the dossier of all the pope's iniquities, and to the council he read 
out document after document. There were letters of Vigilius going back four 
years, when he defended his earlier judgment against the Three Chapters, 
the so-called Iudicatum, and there were the two written promises given to 
Justinian and Theodora that he would condemn the Three Chapters; and there 
was the signed statement made on oath, August 15, 550, to the same effect, 
the pope pledging that he would not act against the emperor's wishes, and 
would do nothing to defend the incriminated three. Vigilius, then, was a 
perjured liar, and his name should be struck off the diptychs. Not, the 
emperor craftily argued, that any wickedness of a particular pope could 
blemish the Apostolic See. This was not a breach with Rome, but only with 
Vigilius. For seven years he had condemned the Three Chapters, and now he 
had repudiated obligations of the most solemn kind. In defending the Three 
Chapters he shares in the wickedness of Nestorius, and has put himself out 
of the Church.

The council listened, and it did as the emperor intended, declaring the 
pope's name should be put out of the sacred liturgy; but not decreeing a 
sentence of excommunication, and using Justinian's distinction between the 
sedes and sedens--the chair of Peter and the one now sitting in it. "The 
council, sitting so far despite the pope, was now in session against him. 
It was in full schism."[26] One week later to the day the council held its 
final session. The task before it was to put in form its condemnation of 
Theodore of Mopsuestia and his writings, of Theodoret's writings against 
St. Cyril, and of the letter of Ibas of Edessa. The decree took the form, 
first, of a resume of the council's proceedings, and then, fourteen 
statements calling down a curse on whoever did not accept the council's 
judgment regarding various heresies and their authors, and supporters.

These fourteen sentences reflect, very clearly, the mind of a disciple of 
Leontius--they are evidently the work of an author very concerned to show 
that the decisions of Ephesus and Chalcedon are not contradictory. In the 
first, the doctrine of the Trinity is set out, in the second the two births 
(in eternity and in time) of the Divine Word. The third declares the 
identity of the Word and Jesus Christ, one person, God and man at the same 
time; it was the one same person who both wrought the miracles and suffered 
death. In these last two sentences the student will recognise echoes of the 
theological conflict of the previous hundred and fifty years, the flames of 
which, of course, were still flickering brightly in 553.

Theodore of Mopsuestia makes a first appearance in sentence 4 of the 
series, described as a maniac for his particular theory of the manner of 
union between the divine and human in the Incarnate Word, and condemned 
along with the Nestorians, Apollinarians, and the followers of Eutyches. He 
is again the subject of a condemnation in sentence 5, and Nestorius with 
him, for saying that the union is but a moral union that unites two 
persons. Supporters of these theories now calumniate the Council of 
Chalcedon when they interpret its decree of the unity of person to mean 
just this, and this travesty is met by another condemnation. This sentence 
5, in part, is repeating the sentence of Ephesus on the Nestorians, and 6 
also repeats the same council when it condemns those who say that the ever-
virgin Mary is not truly Theotokos, but only the mother of a human being. 
And once again the later heretics are condemned who falsely say that this 
heresy was allowed by Chalcedon--this, the heresy "invented by the 
detestable Theodore." Sentence 7 condemns those who, when they distinguish 
the two natures, do so in such a way as to convey that these are two 
persons--again the repetition of the old condemnation of Nestorius.

With the eighth sentence the council comes to grips with the Monophysites, 
for it quotes verbatim the much controverted formula of St. Cyril,[27] and 
determines the, Catholic, sense in which he used it, a sense that fits with 
Ephesus as well as with Chalcedon. This formula, it is now said, should not 
be understood to mean that the unity by which Christ is one being is the 
effect of a fusion between the divine and the human natures; the two 
natures remain two natures in the union, and the union is a union in a 
single person. Those who thus fuse the natures are as erroneous as those 
who speak of them as separate beings. Both are condemned by this sentence 
8. It is the turn of the Nestorians again in 9--their practical direction 
is condemned, that Christ should be worshipped with a double worship 
simultaneously directed, first to the divine in Him, and then to the human. 
To balance this the single adoration of Christ in the sense of Eutyches--
i.e., as though before the adorer there were present God alone and this 
being, neither man nor God, who cannot be adored--is also condemned. The 
doctrinal decision of Pope John II, twenty years ago now, is repeated in 
sentence 10; it is correct to say, "One of the Trinity suffered in the 
flesh for us." The eleventh sentence strings together a list of heresiarchs 
from Origen to Eutyches, and with all others condemned already "by the four 
holy synods"[28] condemns them and their supporters anew. We then come to 
the explicit condemnation of the Three Chapters, sentences 12,13, 14.

"If anyone defends the wicked Theodore of Mopsuestia," so the twelfth 
sentence is framed, "who said ... and also ... and what is worse still ... 
If therefore anyone defends the aforesaid wicked Theodore and his wicked 
writings ... and does not anathematize him and his wicked writings ... let 
him be anathema." The errors of his teaching--unmistakable Nestorianism--as 
set out run to a good page of print.

The judgment on Theodoret is somewhat different. Nowhere is he himself 
anathematized, or the good Catholic ordered to anathematize him. It is "the 
writings of Theodoret, against the true belief, against the council of 
Ephesus, and against St. Cyril and his twelve chapters" that are the 
target; and "all that he wrote on behalf of the wicked Theodore and 
Nestorius and of others who smacked of the same [ideas] as these two 
aforesaid--writings defending them and their wickedness and, to this end, 
stigmatising as wicked men those ecclesiastical teachers who professed" the 
true doctrine about the oneness of God the Word. All, therefore, who do not 
anathematize these writings and those who savour of the like ideas, "and 
especially all those who have written against the true faith, or against 
St. Cyril and his twelve chapters, and who remained to the end in this 
wickedness," let them be anathema.

The condemnation, in the case of the third of these bishops, is even more 
circumscribed. "If anyone defend the letter which Ibas is said to have 
written to the Persian heretic Maris ..." The letter is said to deny that 
God the Word took flesh of the ever-virgin Mary and was born of her, so 
that God the Word was one thing, the man the other. It says also that St. 
Cyril, who set out the true Christian belief, was a heretic of the sect of 
the wicked Apollinaris, and it blames the first (sic!) council of Ephesus 
because it condemned Nestorius without a hearing. The letter also is said 
to stigmatise St. Cyril's twelve chapters against Nestorius as "impious and 
contrary to the true belief," and to defend Theodore and Nestorius and all 
their wicked doctrines and writings. So then, all who defend this wicked 
letter, and do not anathematize it and those who defend it, who say it is 
right, or part of it, those who defend either the letter or the wickedness 
it contains in the name of the Council of Chalcedon) and persist to the end 
in this, let them be anathema.

Nowhere is it said that Theodoret or Ibas is a heretic, nor are those who 
have defended "the aforesaid wicked Three Chapters" denounced or threatened 
as heretics. To this final act of the council, June 2, 553, 164 bishops set 
their names.

The council over, Justinian ordered that every bishop in the empire should 
endorse the condemnations. In the East there were no difficulties about 
this, but the Latins everywhere resisted. At Constantinople the pope's 
chief counsellors were arrested; some were exiled to the depths of the 
Egyptian deserts, Pelagius (the real force behind Vigilius) was once more 
thrown into prison. Was the pope, too, imprisoned? It is not certainly 
known. But whether in prison (in the technical sense) or not, he was the 
emperor's captive still. What it was that, as the months went by, brought 
him to change his mind no one knows. But by December 8, 553, the pope had 
accepted the council's condemnation of the Three Chapters.[29] And we 
possess a second document, dated February 23, 554, in which the pope argues 
at great length that the condemnation is justified, and that it in no way 
conflicts with Chalcedon. This document, generally known as the second 
Constitutum of Vigilius,[30] was possibly meant to persuade the Latin 
bishops.

The pope was now allowed to make his journey homeward--it was all but ten 
years since he had been carried off--but when he reached Sicily he fell 
ill, and at Syracuse he died, June 7, 555.

Chalcedon was not in conflict with Ephesus. The fourteen "chapters" of the 
council just dissolved seem to have established this clearly, with, if 
anything, a little more favour for the Alexandrian way of speech than that 
of Antioch. But had one alleged conflict been extinguished only for another 
to spring from its ashes? Was the council just dissolved at cross purposes 
with Chalcedon? The West seems to have thought so, and the action of those 
who for years deprecated the condemnation of the Three Chapters had been 
compromised by this fear that Chalcedon must, thereby, be compromised 
inevitably. And certainly Askidas and his party--the crypto-Monophysites of 
the court--hoped that Chalcedon must, thereby, be so compromised. But this 
was never any part of the emperor's plan. How could he have intended such a 
wholesale surrender? Nor, among the great majority of the eastern bishops--
better equipped to deal with these matters than their Latin brethren--did 
the name of Chalcedon suffer. As to the Monophysites, they already, and for 
a hundred years, had the worst possible opinion of Chalcedon. Moreover--as 
we, with what is called "hindsight," can so easily see--the Monophysites 
had by now washed their hands of the Catholic Church, and what its councils 
decided would no longer have any interest for them.

The subsidiary questions apart--for example, should councils condemn men 
dead long ago, who died in the peace of the Church?--what had the bishops 
of 553 done, in their list of reprobations, except condemn yet once again 
the Nestorian theology (as Vigilius had condemned it in his own message to 
the council) whether this heresy showed--as it certainly did--in the 
writings of Theodore, or of Theodoret and Ibas? The last two had, of 
course, corrected themselves long before they died. Even their 
controversial language about St. Cyril had been, as it were, apologised for 
and the amende accepted, in the reconciliation of 433. This did not, of 
course, alter the fact that they had, once upon a time, written 
erroneously. But the condemnations of 553, in so far as it touched these 
writings, was little better than spite. And the spirit that so moved the 
bishops in 553 was, obviously, not that of the bishops who at Chalcedon had 
welcomed Theodoret and Ibas back to their sees. Other conflict than this, 
between the councils of 553 and 451, there was none.[31]

Vigilius and Justinian had had a grave difference about an important 
policy. The emperor's tyranny, and the shiftiness of the pope had no doubt 
aggravated it--but nowhere had they differed as to what had been defined 
about the Incarnation by the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, or denied 
that what these councils had defined was the divinely given truth of the 
matter.

NOTES

1. "... the great Monophysites who claimed that their doctrine was his 
[Cyril's] were Monophysite in language, rather than doctrine." Tixeront, 
Histoire des Dogmes, 111, 75 (72) (the figures in parentheses refer to the 
English translation). It has to be added that there were soon divisions in 
the party, and many of these were certainly heretical in their theories 
about the Incarnation.

2. Tixeront, Histoire des Dogmes, III, 104 (99).

3. Of the saint's classic formula that "Christ is the unique incarnated 
nature of God the Word," the last named theologian can say, "It is true ... 
that if one looked only to the words, Cyril is a Monophysite." Ibid., 73 ( 
70 ) .

4. Batiffol, Le Siege Apostolique (1924), 543.

5. Called, from his elegant figure and dainty carriage, Ailouros, the Cat.

6. Kirch, Enchiridion, prints extracts from this document, 542-46.

7. January 475-September 476.

8. June 482.

9. I.e., Act of Union. Kirch, as before, prints extracts, 546-48.

10. Hierapolis, in Greek; a town from miles east of Cyrrhus, 100 miles from 
Antioch.

11. It is printed in Denzinger, nos. 171-72.

12. The formula quotes Matt. 16:18, "Thou art Peter and upon this rock I 
will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

13. Id est non consentientes Sedi Apostolicae.

14. Following this there was a government inquiry, and the bishop was 
deposed.

15. For example, Leontius of Byzantium (485-543), called the first of the 
Scholastics, because one of the first to give his books a rigorous 
demonstrative pattern; one of the first to use, in the exposition of 
theology, Aristotle's logic; he had a deep knowledge of the theologians who 
had preceded him, was the principal antagonist of the great Monophysite, 
Severus, and it was his life's work to show the perfect harmony of the 
definitions of Ephesus and Chalcedon.

16. The Unsleeping, so called because in their church the service of prayer 
went on ceaselessly, day and night, the community being divided into relays 
for this purpose.

17. Denzinger, nos. 201-2, prints the relevant part of the letter. It is 
the twelfth of the propositions of St. Cyril that is quoted.

18. "Naturellement les Monophysites les voyaient tout autrement." Duchesne 
L'Eglise au VIme Siecle (1925), p. 95.

19. The town in Lycia (Asia Minor) to which the pope had been taken. The 
nearest approximation to its position on a modern map is the coast of Asia 
Minor (in modern Turkey) due east of the southern tip of the island of 
Rhodes.

20. It lies in the Mediterranean, some 7o miles west of Naples. It is now 
called Palmarola.

21. November 11, 537. The church keeps his feast as a martyr-pope, June 20.

22. The date is an approximation. The text of the edict no one knows, it 
has long since disappeared, and no writer of the time quotes it in any work 
that has survived.

23 The text is in Mansi, IX, cols. 61-106; also in Migne, Patrologia 
Latina, vol. 69, cols. 67-114.

24. Tixeront, as cited, III, 143 (137).

25. This resume follows very closely the account in Tixeront, III, 143-45 
(137-39).

26. Tixeront, III, 146 (140).

27. There is [but] one incarnate nature of God the Word.

28. Nicaea, Constantinople 381, Ephesus, Chalcedon.

29. The letter to Eutychius, patriarch of Constantinople. It is printed in 
Mansi, IX, cols. 414-19, and Migne, P.L., vol. 69, cols. 122-28.

30. "The Constitutum of Pope Vigilius for the Condemnation of the Three 
Chapters"; such is its title. The text is in Mansi, IX, cols. 457-88, and 
Migne, P.L., vol. 69, 143-78.

31. I do not forget the difficulty that, at Chalcedon, the papal legates 
explicitly said the letter of Ibas was orthodox.


CHAPTER 6. The Third General Council of Constantinople, 680-81

What this sixth of the General Councils achieved was to reconcile the 
churches of the East with the Roman See, and to condemn a heresy. And yet 
again was the adage warranted that once a General Council meets the 
unlikeliest things may happen--for this sixth council was to treat a pope 
as the fifth had treated the Three Chapters. The sixth General Council was, 
in the intention of the emperor who called it, a "peace conference" that 
terminated sixty years of grave disorders. And, yet once again, those 
responsible for the beginnings of the disorder had been conscious rebels in 
part only. As had happened with Justinian, what had moved a seventh-century 
emperor to act as a theologian--and had he not so acted the heresy would 
never have had any importance outside the schools of theology--was the hope 
of uniting his people to fight, this time, for the empire's very life 
against an all-victorious enemy, the Persians.

This seventh-century heresy is traditionally called Monothelism: the heresy 
that Christ our Lord did not possess a human will, or ever act with a 
force--an "operation"--that was human, but that, in Him, all that in us 
comes from our wills came from His being God. If this were true, then 
Christ was not really a man. It was the Monophysite claim all over again, 
and the theory was the outcome of the strongly felt need to tempt the 
Monophysites back to the spiritual unity from which they had been separated 
now nearly two hundred years. The practical plan to restore religious unity 
in the harassed state along these lines had for its authors the emperor 
Heraclius (610-41) and Sergius, the patriarch of Constantinople.

Heraclius was a man of Armenian extraction--that is to say, sprung of a 
family from Monophysite territory--but born in Africa, where his father, 
another Heraclius, was commander in chief of the imperial army in the 
opening years of the seventh century. The ruling emperor, Phocas, was a 
barbarous and incompetent tyrant, under whom the state seemed about to 
disintegrate, at the time the Persians, led by a very able king, Chosroes 
II, were executing a successful invasion of the Roman East. The elder 
Heraclius declared against Phocas, and set his son in command of the 
armament he sent from Africa against the capital. The rebels were 
victorious, and the younger Heraclius was crowned emperor, by Sergius the 
patriarch, October 5, 610. He was thirty-five years of age, and was to rule 
for thirty years.

Nothing could have been more desperate than the situation the new emperor 
faced: an empty treasury, a nation impoverished and embittered, hardly any 
army, and the Persians advancing without any hope for some years of 
checking them. The list of their uninterrupted victories recalls the events 
of 1939-41. In 611 they took Antioch, in 613 Damascus, in 614 Jerusalem, 
and in 617 Alexandria. Meanwhile Heraclius, ably assisted by the patriarch, 
kept his people from despair and slowly prepared for the offensive. A holy 
war was preached, for the invaders had taken the Holy Land and had defiled 
the sacred places; they had captured the most sacred of all possessions, 
the very Cross on which Christ died. As to military plans, Heraclius 
proposed to fight his way through Asia Minor and Armenia to the Euphrates, 
and then down the rivers and across to the heart of Persia. Once the 
Persian monarchy was destroyed, the recovery of the provinces Rome had lost 
would not be difficult. The task occupied the emperor a good six years 
(622-28). But the day came when he dictated terms to the Persians in the 
heart of their own land, and he had the happiness of escorting the Cross to 
Jerusalem in 629.

In all these years Heraclius had been busy with theological conferences, 
binding to the imperial cause--as he hoped--some of his most embittered 
subjects, the Monophysites of Armenia (622) and the Caucasus (626) very 
notably, and of Syria (631). At Phasis, a city on the shores of the Black 
Sea, the modern Poti, he had a long conference with the bishop, Cyrus, whom 
he found it difficult to persuade that the new point he was urging, about 
the "unity" of action in the Divine Saviour,[1] was in harmony with the 
teaching of St. Leo and Chalcedon, that was still, of course, the religion 
of the State. The emperor advised him to consult Sergius of Constantinople. 
Cyrus received, in reply, a dossier of literature to support the orthodoxy 
of the new idea. It included a letter--later proved spurious--of a former 
patriarch of Constantinople to Pope Vigilius. Cyrus was won over. When, 
five years later, the see of Alexandria fell vacant the emperor thought of 
the able bishop he had met in fabled Colchis, and Cyrus was brought the 
thousand miles or so to sit in the seat of St. Cyril and St. Athanasius 
(631). And, as patriarch he brought about, in Egypt of all places, a 
reunion of Catholics and Monophysites--all on the strength of the new point 
that since Catholics believed there was but a single source of the acts 
done by the saving Christ, there was no reason why Monophysites should 
anathematize them as though they were really Nestorians. The date of this 
union was 633.[2] Monothelism was now, as a fact of public life, some ten 
years old.

It is a curious thing to us, perhaps, that the new system had lived as long 
as this and never attracted any comment from the Roman See. But in that 
far-off seventh century, "the Roman See, well-established as was its 
supremacy, did not in fact ... exercise within the [four] Eastern 
patriarchates ... that authority which today it exercises everywhere. Then 
it was only rarely that it intervened in the affairs of these other 
churches, in moments of crisis; and even so, Rome usually did not intervene 
until appealed to."[3]

At the time of the Act of Union of 633 there happened to be living at 
Alexandria a monk, Sophronius, learned and reputed a saint, who from a 
lifetime spent in scholarly travel, was well known throughout the East, and 
at Rome also. His trained mind saw at once that Cyrus had brought peace at 
the cost of truth. The treaty with the Monophysites had concluded with a 
number of agreed doctrinal statements, and the seventh of these has been 
described as the very definition of the new heresy. It condemned and 
anathematized whoever denied that "there is but a single Christ and Son, 
whose divine acts and whose human acts are done by a single divine-human 
operation, as St. Denis[4] says."

While Cyrus and the patriarch of Constantinople were exchanging messages of 
joyous satisfaction--Sergius going out of his way to say (with a deft 
touching up of the quoted text) that this is the very teaching of St. 
Leo[6]--Sophronius prepared his criticisms. But Cyrus referred the monk to 
Constantinople, and Constantinople bade him be silent, and not start a new 
controversy, viz., whether in the Word Incarnate there were two 
"operations" or only one, but keep to the acknowledged teaching that the 
single person Jesus Christ works acts that are divine and also acts that 
are human. And with this command laid upon him, the monk returned to 
Palestine, his home--to find the patriarchal see vacant, and himself, 
presently, elected. Commands to be silent lost all their authority, of 
course, by the fact. In the official notification of his election, sent to 
the pope and to the patriarchs, Sophronius exposed the new heresy, with a 
wealth of learning[6] and an abundance of strong language about shepherds 
who were really wolves.

And now Rome comes into the action, through a letter from Sergius of 
Constantinople to the pope, Honorius I (625-38). This letter will, nearly 
sixty years later, figure in the proceedings of the sixth General Council, 
and with it the pope's reply; and for this reply that council will 
anathematize the pope. Had Sergius guessed what line the new patriarch of 
Jerusalem would take, whom he had so lately dismissed with a certain bland 
insincerity? Did he hope to put himself right with Rome before Rome heard 
from Sophronius? or was he not that kind of man at all, but just honestly 
puzzled by the criticism which a professional theologian had made of his 
move for peace, and anxious to know what Rome thought of it? Both 
"interpretations" have found favour with the historians. Whatever the 
truth, the certain thing is that at the highest level there was not too 
much understanding of what was afoot in the East, and that the pope's 
professional advisor was incompetent--the man who put the pope's reply into 
appropriate form. What happened was this.

Sergius, in his letter to the pope, described his interview with the monk, 
and his command not to make trouble by starting a new controversy, and said 
that he had written to Alexandria, in the same sense, i.e., not to use the 
expression "one operation" because there were people whom it would startle, 
for all that some of the Fathers had used it already; and not to use the 
expression "two operations," because this was a novel way of speaking and 
would scandalize very many. This last phrase might suggest that in the 
Divine Saviour there were two wills, which could be contrary the one to the 
other--an outrageously wicked idea, said the patriarch. After some further 
argument, Sergius comes to the point. All this discussion, he says, we have 
determined to set aside, and to keep to the traditional way of speaking. 
Sophronius has agreed to this, and so has the emperor, to whom our advice 
has been to keep away from either of the controverted phrases. He concludes 
by asking the pope, "if there be anything wanting in what has been said ... 
with your holy syllables and with your desirable assistance to signify your 
opinion on the matter."[7]

The letter sent in reply to this by Honorius is something unique in the 
vast series of papal letters. The reader will have noticed that in Sergius' 
letter a second term has now come into controversy--there is question of 
"one or two wills," as well as of "one or two operations." The pope begins 
by saying, you tell us about "certain discussions, and new controversies 
about words begun by one Sophronius, a monk (who now, so we hear, has been 
made bishop of Jerusalem), against our brother Cyrus the bishop of 
Alexandria, for preaching to those converted from heresy 'the one operation 
of Jesus Christ, our Lord.'" He repeats Sergius' summary of his own action 
and says of the reply he gave to Sophronius that it was prudent enough and 
careful,[8] adding, "We praise your doing away with this novel vocabulary 
which could be a scandal to the uninstructed." Then follows a correct 
statement about the way in which the Divine Saviour works divine acts and 
human acts, a statement innocent of any reference to the new dispute "how" 
this happens, about which the pope's advice is asked. From this the pope 
passes to the statement that in our Lord there is one will. This, he says, 
is what we believe; and in his exposition of the reason for the belief the 
pope reveals that he and the patriarch are not talking about the same 
thing. Our Lord's nature, Honorius says, being free from the taint of 
original sin, there can never have been in Him that conflict which all of 
us experience between the two wills, the will to execute the law of the 
spirit and the will to serve the law of the members. Sergius' "two wills," 
on the other hand, were not these human contrarieties experienced by sinful 
man, but (i) a divine will, said to be the source of the operations that 
are divine, and (ii) a human will, the source, likewise, of the operations 
that were human. The pope has missed the point, the point which is the 
centre of the whole controversy. The answer he gives to Sergius, his 
decision, is in regard to something altogether different. After this came 
some healthy generalities about avoiding the pitfalls and traps of heresy, 
and then a warning to "certain babblers" (who, to win over their hearers, 
give themselves the airs of doctors) that they are not to set forth their 
theories as though these were the teaching of the Church--theories on 
subjects which no council or lawful authority has seen fit so to explain 
that men have the right to teach that there are either one or two 
operations in the Lord Christ. The Scriptures tell us plainly that He 
worked both human and divine things. The question whether, because He so 
worked, we are to understand He did it through one or through two 
"operations" is no concern of ours. It is a question we may leave to 
grammarians and to tutors who earn their living by drilling schoolboys in 
quibbles of this sort. As for ourselves, we (that is the pope) discover 
that our Lord and His Holy Spirit worked not "one operation nor two .. . 
but a great variety."

The pope ends by a warning that the new controversy will revive the old, 
and that the contending parties will be taken to be either Eutychians or 
Nestorians, and the faith of ordinary simple people be disturbed. Let 
Sergius follow the pope's example and impose silence about these matters on 
all, keeping to the old way, the truth about the one person and two natures 
of the Incarnate Word

"The result of the pope's letter was the so-called heresy of Monothelism, 
which up to this point can scarcely be said to have existed, except as an 
opinion under discussion."[9] Was Honorius indeed the begetter, albeit 
unwittingly, of the new trouble? Certainly it is not in the pope's letter 
that we first meet the topic "one or two wills," and since this was a 
logical next point in discussions about "one or two operations"--the will 
being the source of operations--it could only be a matter of time before 
the controversy shifted to the question of the wills. And this now 
happened. Again, as to Honorius' personal responsibility, the General 
Council that later dealt so drastically with him--and the pope, Leo II--
condemn him, the council only because "in all things he followed the mind 
of Sergius,"[10] and the pope because Honorius "by his negligence blew up 
the flame of heresy,"[11] and because he "consented that the spotless 
tradition of Rome should be soiled."[12]

All this was fifty years or so later. To complete the story of Pope 
Honorius, it needs to be said that he wrote to Sergius, a second letter of 
which a few fragments only are known. There is nothing retracted from, or 
added to, the statements in the first letter. Silence is recommended on the 
thorny question--the foolish question, Honorius now says, almost violently. 
The letter relates that the pope has written to Alexandria and to Jerusalem 
in the same sense,[13] and that the priests who have brought the synodal 
letter of Sophronius have promised that he will say no more about "two 
operations" if Cyrus will engage to cease to speak of "one operation."

The next news of the affair to survive is that Sergius now prepared an 
imperial edict in which the policy of silence should be made obligatory for 
all. The emperor, once more, was away with his armies in the East, and 
Sergius, as so often before, was acting as regent. Only when Heraclius 
returned, three or four years later, was the edict published (638). It is 
known as the Ecthesis, or Declaration about the Faith.[14] What it does is 
to give force of law to the policy of "prudent silence" devised by Sergius 
once the reaction had begun against the reconciliation movement, the policy 
for which he had ingeniously secured the patronage of Honorius. Silence on 
the whole dispute about "operations," lest the reunited Monophysites take 
fright and race off once again, silence and oblivion. But the Ecthesis took 
a different line about the question, "will" or "wills." To avoid the danger 
of people thinking that in the Incarnate Word there could be strife between 
the divine and the human, said the Declaration, "we profess that there is 
but a single will."

Sophronius had died before the Ecthesis was published, Honorius also 
(October 12, 638). Sergius lived long enough to give it the solemn approval 
of a synod, and then he too died (December 638).

Throughout the East the bishops signed the new creed, so to call it, 
without difficulty. As to the West, after the death of Honorius the action 
of the Holy See was sterilised for a good eighteen months by the fact that 
the pope-elect, Severinus, could not obtain confirmation of his election 
from the emperor--a formality without which (since the time of Justinian) 
he could not be consecrated. Then, four months after his consecration, the 
new pope died. With the election of his successor, John IV (December 24, 
640) the Roman See reverts to its traditional ways, for John's first act 
was to hold a council and condemn as heresy the new theory that in the 
Incarnate Word there is but a single will. This decision he sent to the 
emperor. Heraclius replied that he was not the author of the Ecthesis, he 
had but signed it, and the Declaration had been the cause of troubles 
innumerable. This must have been one of the emperor's last acts, for on 
February 1 l, 641, he died.

His eldest son and successor, Constantine III, a young man in his twenties, 
was already dying of consumption, and a dispute about the succession lay 
ahead when John IV's letter arrived, acknowledging him as emperor, and 
dealing with the slanders already in circulation that charged Honorius with 
heresy. The letter ended with a demand that the Ecthesis be withdrawn. To 
this the emperor replied that already the text had been taken down from its 
place in the church of St. Sophia. Then, May 25, Constantine III died, and 
for the rest of the year the rival factions within the imperial family 
fought it out. By November the faction that supported the heir of 
Constantine III had won, and his eldest son reigned as Constans II, a child 
of eleven. It was in his name that an answer was now sent to John IV's last 
letter to Constantine III[15]--a resolute statement of the emperor's 
resolve to defend the new Monothelism and the Council of Chalcedon. 
Whereupon the pope--not John IV but his successor, Theodore[16]--condemned 
the Ecthesis, and expressed his surprise that the promises of Constantine 
III had not been kept.

The pope had changed, the policy remained firm.

The new pope had the unusual experience of receiving the patriarch of 
Constantinople, come to Rome to abjure his heresy and seek reconciliation. 
This was Pyrrhus, successor to Sergius and part author of the Ecthesis. It 
was by a strange route that Pyrrhus had come to Rome. He had, in 641, been 
deposed by the new emperor for political reasons. When his successor, Paul, 
applied for recognition to the pope, Theodore explained that since Pyrrhus 
had been uncanonically thrust out he could not recognise Paul. Meanwhile he 
would be obliged if the emperor would despatch Pyrrhus to Rome, to clear 
himself of the charge of heresy. At this stage Pyrrhus fled from 
Constantinople to Africa. This province was a boiling hot centre of 
opposition to the new heresies, the heart of which was the Greek abbot 
honoured today as St. Maximus the Confessor.[17] He immediately engaged the 
fugitive patriarch in controversy, and converted him. So it was that 
Pyrrhus made his way to Rome and Pope Theodore (645 or 6).

Councils of bishops began to be held in various parts of Africa, denouncing 
the heresy, begging the patriarch Paul to return to the traditional faith, 
and the emperor to suppress the Ecthesis, and calling on the pope to make 
use of his great authority vis-a-vis the patriarch, who, if he will not 
submit, they say, should be cut off from the Church by the pope, "like a 
diseased limb." To the pope's summons, sent to Constantinople by a solemn 
embassy, the patriarch replied with a renewal of his heresy, in which he 
claimed Honorius as one of his patrons! Whereupon Theodore excommunicated 
him.

And now, once again, the emperor intervened with an edict--not this time a 
mere statement, but a rule, imposed under severe penalties for the 
disobedient, varying from deposition for bishops to fines and floggings for 
the ordinary public. The rule (typos is the Greek word, so that historians 
call this edict the Type of Constans II ) was a simple prohibition of all 
discussions, lectures, sermons, writings on both the question of the 
"operations" and that of the "wills." This appeared in the last months of 
648.

On the part of the emperor or his advisors (Constans II was now a youth of 
18) it would seem to have been a police measure pure and simple, behind 
which was the fear of what such movements as the Catholic reaction in 
Africa, for example, might bring about. Already there had been in that 
province a widespread revolt, led by the emperor's commander in chief, the 
exarch. Only the accident that he was killed in a battle with the Arabs had 
halted its progress. It was not yet forty years since the hero of a similar 
revolt in that province had won through to the imperial crown--the present 
young emperor's grandfather, Heraclius. As it was, Africa was to be quasi-
independent for the next ten years or so.

To the pope the new law initiated a persecution, the drastic punishment of 
all who protested that it was vital that Christians be taught and believe 
the truth about who and what the Divine Saviour was; or that error had not 
the same rights as truth; or who objected to the official government thesis 
that the difference between truth and error, in this fundamental belief, 
was of no importance. The truth was to be stifled, because Caesar had so 
willed. And Caesar had so willed--to placate the Monophysites? Hardly, for 
except for the fashionables, the intellectual mystics, the self-segregated 
elect who shunned the vulgarity of being as the rest, except for these the 
Monophysite had disappeared. Rather the lands where he dwelt by the million 
and flourished, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Armenia, had now, finally and 
forever, been wrenched from the imperial rule; had lapsed, after a thousand 
years, from Hellenism too. Barely recovered by Heraclius in 628-29, these 
countries had become, in the next ten years after his triumph, the spoil of 
a power whose very name the victor of 629 had never heard--Islam. Once 
again a brief list of dates and places with the note "lost irrevocably," 
will show the world of the emperor at Constantinople as remodelled more 
drastically than any internal revolution could have changed it.

Mahomet died June 8, 632--three years or so after Heraclius had 
triumphantly restored the Cross to Jerusalem. In 634 his Arabs began to 
raid Syria. Damascus fell to them in 635. The next year the last imperial 
forces capable of containing them were wiped out. In 637 they took 
Jerusalem, in 638 Antioch, in 639 Caesarea. Other Arabian forces, in 637, 
overthrew the Sassanid empire of Persia. In 639 they began their drive 
towards Egypt--the economic heart of the Roman Empire for centuries. 
Babylon fell to them in 641 and, in 642, Alexandria. By 651 other Arab 
armies had reached the frontiers of India.

It was a new pope who had to meet the new edict, Martin I (649-55). He was 
thoroughly versed in the controversy, and knew well the personalities 
opposed to him, for he had spent several years as the pope's representative 
at the imperial court. His reaction to the appearance of the Type was 
immediate and vigorous. Within a few weeks of his election--for which no 
confirmation was asked at Constantinople--the pope sent out summonses to a 
council to be held at Rome, under his own presidency, that should 
definitively sum up all that the various local councils throughout the West 
had been declaring. This Lateran Council of 649, to which 105 bishops came, 
is the most spectacular demonstration of the Roman principatus since the 
Tome of St. Leo, just two hundred years before. And it was staged with the 
State already arrayed in opposition. This pope was to pay for his boldness 
with his life.

The council sat for three weeks (October 5-26) and the results of its 
deliberations were twenty canons,[18] which yet once again state, point by 
point, with great clarity, the fundamentals of the faith regarding the 
mystery of the Incarnation, as tradition and the five General Councils set 
it out, introducing, in its proper place, a condemnation of the novelties 
about "one operation" and "one will" (canons 10-20). Those who have 
propagated the new ideas are in each case stigmatised as, "the wicked 
heretics." In the canon (no. 18)[19] that lists the heretics whom the 
various general councils have condemned, a place is found--"rightly, since 
they are similar to all these"--or Cyrus of Alexandria, for Sergius of 
Constantinople and his two successors, Pyrrhus and Paul (all by name), and 
for all others who hold what they held or hold; condemned also is "the most 
wicked Ecthesis which the emperor Heraclius put out against the orthodox 
faith, at the persuasion of Sergius." Along with all these the canon 
condemns also "the most wicked Typos, lately published by the serenissimus 
emperor Constans, [a law] hostile to the Catholic Church, namely by 
promulgating that a like silence and refusal shall bind [all], in respect, 
both of what the holy Fathers have preached and what the heretics are 
wickedly venerating--thus deciding that the wicked heretics shall, against 
all justice, be freed from blame and condemnation; which is as much as to 
cut away from the Catholic Church its definitions and its rules."

The decision of the council, addressed in its final letter to "all our 
spiritual brethren, bishops, priests, monks ... and to the entire sacred 
fullness of the Catholic Church," was sent broadcast over the West by the 
pope's orders, to places as various as Africa and Holland. The news of what 
was afoot reached the emperor, of course, and orders were sent to his chief 
officer in Italy, the exarch at Ravenna, to march on Rome, seize the pope, 
and force the bishops to accept the Type. But the exarch arrived with his 
army to find the council in session, and the feeling in Rome so strong 
against the emperor that he conceived the idea of setting himself up as 
ruler of an independent state. It was to be charged later against the pope 
that he had a hand in this scheme. Actually he gave the pretender less than 
no encouragement, and the exarch passed on to try his fate in Sicily, where 
the plague eventually carried him off.

But in the year 653 the emperor struck again. This time the pope was 
kidnapped, carried bodily from before the high altar of St. Peter's, loaded 
with chains and shipped as a common criminal to Constantinople. When the 
ship arrived Martin was thrown on the deck, half starved, in rags, and 
exposed for some days to the derision of the scum of the town. After three 
months in a dungeon he was brought to trial--not for anything done or 
spoken in the council, but for high treason, for plotting to deprive the 
emperor of his Italian lands. He was condemned, and then unceremoniously 
degraded of his rank by the public executioners, the young emperor looking 
on from behind a lattice. The pope was not executed, but thrown into the 
gaol, chained with the murderers and the rest. Meanwhile the emperor went 
to relate his triumph to the patriarch Paul, then seriously ill. The 
terrified prelate begged him to cease the persecution. "I am so soon to 
answer for so much," he said. And the pope was exiled to the wilds of the 
Crimea. There, worn out by his sufferings, he died September 16, 655.

Simultaneously with the pope's ordeal, Constans II had ordered the arrest 
of Maximus and two of his associates. They, too, were brought to the 
capital to face the like accusations, but at one stage the true reason for 
the trial was forced from the court by the abbot. In the end they were 
sentenced to be flogged, have their hands cut off and their tongues torn 
out, and to be imprisoned till they died.

Constans II had exceeded the worst of his predecessors.

Between the martyrdom of St. Martin I[20] and the sixth General Council 
there lies a more or less uneventful quarter of a century--for the Church. 
For the empire, these were years of continuous crisis before the ever 
closer menace of the now Mohammedan Arabs, culminating in the famous siege-
-or succession of sieges--of Constantinople, for the Arab fleets returned 
every spring for five successive years. Constans II was by this time no 
more. Wearied of life, and of a capital that hated him for his morbid 
cruelty, he spent his last years in Italy and Sicily, and here in 668 he 
had met his death, murdered by one of his officers while he took a bath. 
His successor was his eldest son, Constantine IV (668-85), who at the time 
of the first siege was twenty.

Between the court and the Holy See there had never been any formal 
reconciliation. Both seem tacitly to have agreed to say nothing about the 
past. The long-lived pope Vitalian (657-72) did not open his reign by 
condemning the Type anew. And with the new emperor it seemed banished to 
the attic. The patriarch Paul was long since dead, and Pyrrhus his rival 
also. Their successors had ceased to mention Monothelism in their inaugural 
letters. Constantine IV, admittedly grateful for the pope's support in the 
first years of his reign, when Sicily seemed about to be lost to the 
empire, was no sooner free of the terrible menace from the Arab fleets than 
he turned to Rome with proposals to end the long misunderstanding (August 
12, 678).

It was from this letter that the sixth General Council developed. There 
ensued first, of course, one of the incredible delays of those times. The 
pope to whom the letter was addressed had died four months to the day 
before it was written. His successor, Agatho, had been reigning since June 
27. He was a Greek, born in Sicily. And before he accepted the emperor's 
invitation--to send representatives to a kind of conference which should 
work out a reconciliation between Constantinople and Rome--Agatho proposed 
to consult the whole Latin episcopate, much as had been done before the 
Lateran Council of 649. At his bidding councils were held in various 
places--one we know at Hatfield, under the presidency of the Archbishop of 
Canterbury--and their findings were studied and put into the shape of a 
reply to the emperor, at a gathering of bishops at Rome at Easter (March 
25) 680; a year and a half since the emperor had written, considerably 
less, perhaps, since his letter had reached the pope. The delay had caused 
some anxiety at Constantinople and, on the part of the patriarch, Theodore, 
a revival of antipapal feeling, for he took the opportunity of removing 
from the diptychs the name of the last pope who figured there, Vitalian, 
dead seven years now. For this the emperor deposed him.

The final results of Pope Agatho's consultation of the bishops, and of the 
work done in Rome, was a profession of faith signed by the pope and 125 
bishops,[21] and a letter to the emperor from the pope accrediting his 
representatives to the conference, three bishops, two priests, and a 
deacon--specialists from the Curia Romana, these last three, and sent as 
legates personally representing the pope--and four Greek monks from Greek 
monasteries in Sicily and Rome (the emperor having especially asked for 
this).

This convoy reached Constantinople in September, and the emperor forthwith 
ordered his new patriarch to summon all the metropolitans and bishops 
subject to him to attend a conference where the theory of "one operation" 
and "one will" would be examined. This conference, which held its first 
session on November 7, in the emperor's palace, developed insensibly into 
the sixth General Council.

The council held, in all, eighteen sessions, concluding its work September 
16, 681. The number of bishops present varied. At the first session there 
were only forty-three present, at the last 174. The young emperor presided, 
in person, at the first eleven sessions, with the pope's personal 
representatives in the place of honour, on his left.

It was the legates who opened the proceedings. Beginning with a reference 
to the dissensions of the last forty-six years--since the time when Sergius 
wrote for advice to Pope Honorius--all these, they said, had been due to 
the acts of various patriarchs of Constantinople. They asked therefore what 
justification, it was thought, these prelates had had for the novel views 
whence all the troubles had come.

It was the patriarch of Antioch, Macarius, who replied. "We did not publish 
any new expressions," he said. All they had had to say was what they had 
been taught by the General Councils of the past, and by saintly bishops 
like Sergius, and Cyrus, "and also Honorius, who was Pope of Old Rome." 
Whereupon the emperor asked for proofs of this, from the synods and the 
Fathers; and from now the council hall became something of a university 
classroom. The official records of all the proceedings at Ephesus, 
Chalcedon, and at the council of 553, with all the documentation--letters 
of popes and so forth--were read out, a business that occupied the bishops 
for some days. During the reading of the acta of Justinian's council of 553 
the papal legates interrupted. Three of the documents read out did not 
figure in the official proceedings, they objected; they were forgeries 
interpolated many years later. These three documents were an alleged letter 
from Mennas, patriarch in 553, to Pope Vigilius, and letters from Vigilius 
to Justinian and to Theodora, in all three of which there was mention of 
"the one will," and a recommendation of this as orthodox teaching, i.e., 
plain Monothelism, eighty years before Sergius. Archivists and 
palaeographers were brought in, the actual originals of the proceedings of 
553 were taken from the library of the see of Constantinople and examined. 
It was discovered that, in these authentic originals, the sheets on which 
the three letters were written were indeed of later date than the council, 
and had at some time been surreptitiously slipped into the genuine acta.

At this stage (November 15, the fourth session) the patriarch of 
Constantinople asked that the letter of Pope Agatho to the emperor be read, 
and the profession of faith which the 125 bishops had signed. This was 
assented to, these bulky treatises[22] were read out, and Agatho's 
authoritative statement of the traditional faith, modelled on the Tome of 
St. Leo, was greeted with shouts that recall the triumphs of 451: "It is 
Peter who is speaking through Agatho."[23]

The unanimous, spontaneous applause with which the bishops--halfway through 
Macarius' defence--hailed this statement of the belief which the 
Monothelites had laboured for fifty years to destroy, may have been 
discouraging, but in the next two sessions (December 7 and February 12) 
Macarius took up his task again of proving, this time from the Fathers, 
that the primitive belief of the church was indeed "one operation" and "one 
will." Again the legates interrupted. His quotations were not what the 
originals said. The texts had been altered to make them prove the 
Monothelite theories. Passages were quoted as applying to the Incarnate 
Word which, in the originals, referred to something else altogether. When 
Macarius had finished, the emperor ordered all his papers to be locked up 
and sealed. And he made the same order the next day (February 13) about the 
dossier read out by the legates, from the councils and the Fathers and from 
the Monothelite writers also. All these papers were then taken away to be 
compared with the originals, or the standard copies in the Patriarchal 
Library.[24]

This task took time. It is not surprising that it was three weeks before 
the council met for the next--eighth--session, March 7. The emperor, on 
this day, put the question point-blank to the patriarch of Constantinople, 
whether the doctrine of the passages, as actually found in the Fathers and 
in the General Councils, tallied with the letter of Agatho and the 
profession of faith of the western bishops. The patriarch answered that all 
this mass of testimony did indeed bear out that what Agatho taught was the 
truth of the matter, "and so I profess and believe," he said. And all the 
bishops present, save a handful, assented likewise. The pope's name was 
then restored to the diptychs. The schism of recent years--whatever that 
had amounted to--was ended.

When the other patriarch present, Macarius, was asked whether he now agreed 
that Agatho's teaching was that of the councils and the Fathers, he bluntly 
declared himself a Monothelite. "I do not say two wills or operations in 
the mysterious Incarnation of our Lord, Jesus Christ, but one will and a 
single divine-human[25] operation." The council then demanded that Macarius 
justify himself. He thereupon read a declaration which asserted that those 
who held to the two wills, revealed themselves thereby as Nestorians; and 
to the list of the heretics of the past whom he anathematized he added the 
name of Maximus, for "his dogma of division" of the Incarnate Word, a 
dogma, he said, "rejected before our time by our blessed Fathers, I mean 
Honorius and Sergius and Cyrus ... and [to the emperor] by Heraclius of 
pious memory, your own great-grandfather." Never, he said, would he 
acknowledge there were two wills or two operations, not even if he were to 
be torn limb from limb, and cast into the sea. It was next proved against 
Macarius that he had garbled the testimonies he was quoting, upon which he 
admitted he had quoted them in this way in order to prove his own belief. 
At which bold defiance the bishops shouted him down, with cries of 
"Dioscoros again," "Another Apollinaris." He was immediately stripped of 
the badge of his patriarchal rank, and placed standing in the midst of the 
council--for trial. And the following day, March 8, the council deposed 
him.

Two weeks later, at the twelfth session, yet more of the documents put in 
by Macarius under seal were examined and read out. Among them was the fatal 
reply of Honorius to Sergius. On March 28 (thirteenth session) judgment was 
given on the letters read on March 22, and on the writers. The letters of 
Sergius were condemned as against the true faith and heretical, and, as 
though they were still alive, the council voted that "the names of those 
whose wicked teaching we execrate shall be cast out of the holy church of 
God, that is, Sergius, Cyrus of Alexandria, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter, 
patriarchs of Constantinople ... persons, all of them, mentioned by Agatho 
in his letter and cast out by him." Then came one whom Agatho had not 
named. "And in addition to these we decide that Honorius also, who was Pope 
of the Older Rome, be with them cast out of the holy church of God, and be 
anathematized with them, because we have found by his letter to Sergius 
that he followed his opinion in all things and confirmed his wicked 
teaching." Grim moment in the history of the councils when the presiding 
Roman legates put this sentence to the bishops! At a later stage of the 
council (sixteenth session, August 9) a group of bishops, led by the 
patriarch of Constantinople, made a move to annul the anathematizing of the 
dead patriarchs Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter. This, if accepted, would 
have saved the name of Honorius too. We do not read that the legates 
welcomed the opportunity thus given. The council voted that the sentences 
stand, and the legates made no objection.

The session which followed the stern business of these condemnations saw a 
strange sight indeed, when the bishops transferred themselves into one of 
the public places of the town for the spectacle of a leading Monothelite 
essaying a miracle in proof that the doctrine was true. This was a priest, 
Polychronius, who claimed that the Monothelite profession of faith would 
raise the dead to life. A corpse was procured, and the Monothelite, in the 
presence of an immense crowd, laid the document upon it. For two hours he 
was allowed to pray, and to whisper in the dead man's ear, but nothing 
happened except the jeers of the spectators--not even the recantation of 
the would-be wonder worker, and the bishops added him nominatim to the list 
of the condemned. This was on April 26.

At the seventeenth session, September 11, the text of the council's 
profession of faith was settled: "We teach that in our Lord, Jesus Christ, 
there are two natural wills, and two natural operations, indivisibly, 
inconvertibly, inseparably, without any fusion, as the holy fathers have 
taught, and that these two natural wills are not contrary, as wicked 
heretics have said."[26] On September 16 it was solemnly voted and signed 
by 174 bishops. The sixth General Council was over.

It had been a novel feature, in this particular council, that at the 
initiative of the papal legates, the heresy, to condemn which the council 
had been called, had been given a full hearing. This was new. No Arian 
expounded his theories at Nicaea, no one spoke for Nestorius at Ephesus, or 
for Eutyches at Chalcedon. At each of these councils the bishops, before 
they came together, were all but unanimously opposed to the new theories 
and set on their condemnation. And so it was at Constantinople in 680. It 
was to an audience in no need of being persuaded that Pope Agatho's letter 
was read out--a letter not indeed addressed to the council, for at the time 
it was written there had been no thought of more than a small conference of 
bishops. It was to the emperor that the pope addressed his statement of the 
true doctrine, and his message that this was the doctrine of salvation, and 
that this is what the patriarch of Constantinople must profess, if there is 
to be peace. Whether or not the pope understood the realities of the 
eastern situation, this teaching was in fact what all already believed, 
there also; it was what, if untroubled by imperial interference or the 
manoeuvres of the patriarchal diplomacy vis-a-vis the Monophysites, all the 
bishops had always professed, as well after the fatal year 634 as before. 
Whence the spontaneity of the applause that greeted Agatho's categoric 
statements and his strikingly phrased reminder of the special privilege of 
his own see, the privilege now in very evident operation.

Something of what the pope said to the bishops, and of the words they used 
in their gratitude to him, ought to find a place here, not because this is 
a history of Catholic doctrine--for it is not that of course--but for the 
reason that this particular interchange is an important event in the 
gradual development of that new, "post-Persecutions" institution of the 
Church of Christ, the General Council.

It is today a thousand years and more since a General Council last met at 
the summons of an emperor, since any emperor played any part in the conduct 
of a council. The emperors have gone, the empires too, and the very 
conception of empire which then gave cohesion to the state; all this has 
gone. And in that thousand years twelve General Councils have been held. 
The very term suggests to us an institution whose life derives from some 
pope's fiat, an institution where the pope's action is all-important, and 
the suggestion that an emperor has, or ever had, a role to play is 
incredible, save to the ecclesiastical archaeologist. But the pope was 
always all-important in the General Council, from the beginning. From the 
time of the first council whose history is at all really known to us in 
detail--Ephesus--although the emperor may call the council, and the pope 
assent to and support his initiative, it is the pope who, before the 
council meets, decides the point of belief, who directs the bishops of the 
council that this is the truth, and that it is not to be called into 
question: Celestine I in 431, Leo I in 451, Agatho in 680. So instinctive 
is this papal action, with regard to the General Council facing a revolt 
against the traditional belief, that were it one day to be discovered that 
Silvester I sent with his legates to Nicaea the famous phrase homoousion 
toi patri for the council's acceptance, we should scarcely be surprised at 
the news--it would be so perfectly in keeping with the rest of the history.

Never, so far, had this doctrine of the role of the pope been set forth, to 
a council itself, so completely and so explicitly, by the pope himself as 
in the letter of Pope Agatho. It is thereby a main landmark in the history 
of the development of the General Council, and since (from lack of 
translations) this vital documentary source is all but unknown, outside 
ecclesiastical circles, I make no apology for the extensive quotations that 
follow.[27]

In the first place, to show exactly how the letter of Agatho was received, 
here are quotations from letters of the council of 680, and of the emperor 
Constantine IV. There is, first, the letter of the bishops to the emperor, 
written at the close of the council, congratulating him on the victory of 
the true faith. In this victory the pope's action was all-important, they 
proceed to explain: "Assenting to the letter of our most blessed father, 
and most high pope, Agatho ... we have followed his teaching, and he the 
Apostolic and Patristic tradition, and we have found nothing that was not 
consonant with what they have laid down.... Who has ever beheld such 
wondrous things? The spiritual lists were arrayed, and the champion of the 
false teaching was disarmed beforehand, [i.e., by the pope's letter], and 
he knew not that he would not obtain the crown of victory, but be stripped 
of the sacerdotal crown. But with us fought the Prince of the Apostles, for 
to assist us we had his imitator and the successor to his chair, who 
exhibited to us the mystery of theology in his letter. The ancient city of 
Rome proffered to you a divinely written confession and caused the daylight 
of dogmas to rise by the Western parchment.[23] And the ink shone, and 
through Agatho it was Peter who was speaking."[29]

The bishops also wrote to the pope. Their letter makes clear what these 
Easterns believed his place in the universal church to be: "The greatest 
diseases demand the greatest remedies, as you know, most blessed one. 
Wherefore, Christ, our true God, has revealed your Holiness as a wise 
physician, mightily driving away the disease of heresy by the medicine of 
orthodoxy, and bestowing health on the members of the Church. We therefore 
leave to you what is to be done,[30] since you occupy the first see of the 
universal Church, and stand on the firm rock of the faith, after we have 
dwelt with pleasure upon the writings of the true confession sent from your 
fatherly blessedness to the most pious emperor, which also we recognize as 
pronounced by the chiefest head of the Apostles, and by which we have put 
to flight the dangerous opinion of the heresy which lately arose...."[31]

The same ideas about the unique role of the Papacy in the Church, with 
regard to disputes concerning doctrine, are found in the edict by which the 
emperor published to all his people the findings of the council: "These are 
the teachings of the voices of the Gospels and Apostles, these the 
doctrines of the holy Synods, and of the elect and patristic tongues; these 
have been preserved untainted by Peter, the rock of the faith, the head of 
the Apostles; in this faith we live and reign...."[32] And again the 
emperor says, in his letter to the pope,[33] describing the events of the 
council: "We ordered the letter of Pope Agatho ... to our majesty ... to be 
read in the hearing of all ... we perceived in it the word of the true 
confession [i.e., of Peter] unaltered. And with the eyes of our 
understanding we saw it as if it were the very ruler of the Apostolic 
choir, the first chair, Peter himself, declaring the mystery of the whole 
dispensation, and addressing Christ by this letter: 'Thou art the Christ, 
the Son of the living God'; for his holy letter described in word for us 
the whole Christ. We all received it willingly and sincerely, and embraced 
it, as though the letter were Peter himself ... Glory be to God, who does 
wondrous things, Who has kept safe the faith among you unharmed. For how 
should He not do so [with regard to] that rock on which He founded His 
church, and prophesied that the gates of hell, all the ambushes of 
heretics, should not prevail against it? From it, as from the vault of 
heaven, the word of the true confession flashed forth, and ... brought 
warmth to frozen orthodoxy."

And in his letter to the 125 western bishops, the emperor wrote, "We 
admired the writing of Agatho as the voice of St. Peter, for nobody 
disagreed save one."

And now, what was the message of Pope Agatho[34] which aroused so much 
enthusiasm in the churches of the East? As what did the pope propose 
himself to them? and take for granted that he would be listened to?

Let it first be recalled that Agatho is writing not to Constantine IV 
proposing a General Council to celebrate union and peace, but to 
Constantine IV proposing a conference on the present situation, a 
discussion of differences with a view to peace. Agatho's letter is, in 
itself, a reply to this invitation of the emperor. His first business is to 
explain the long delay in answering and to accredit those whom he has sent 
as his representatives. In doing this, Agatho tells the emperor that the 
function of his legates is to explain what the Roman Church teaches. They 
do not come as learned theologians, but as bringing testimony of what is 
believed, charged to state "the tradition of this Apostolic See, as it has 
been taught by our apostolic predecessors." And they have been commanded 
not to presume to add or take away or change anything. It is in a plain 
statement, a kind of creed, that the pope sets out the tradition, "We 
believe one, holy, undivided Trinity", and so forth. At the appropriate 
point he sets down as part of the belief the doctrine of the two wills and 
the two "operations," and then proceeds to say: "This is the true and 
undefiled profession of the Christian religion, which no human cleverness 
invented, but which the Holy Ghost taught by the Prince of the Apostles. 
This is the firm and irreprehensible doctrine of the apostles....

"And therefore, I beseech you, deign to stretch forth the right hand of 
your clemency to the apostolic doctrine which Peter the Apostle has handed 
down, that it be proclaimed more loudly than by a trumpet in the whole 
world: because Peter's true confession was revealed from heaven by the 
Father, and for it Peter was pronounced blessed by the Lord of all[35]; and 
he received also, from the Redeemer of us all, by a threefold commendation, 
the spiritual sheep of the Church that he might feed them. Resting on his 
protection, this Apostolic Church of his has never turned aside from the 
way of truth to any part of error, and her authority has always been 
faithfully followed and embraced as that of the Prince of the Apostles, by 
the whole Catholic Church and all Councils, and by all the venerable 
Fathers who embraced her doctrine, by which they have shone as most 
approved lights of the Church of Christ, and has been venerated and 
followed by all orthodox doctors, while the heretics have attacked it 
[i.e., the authority of Peter's Apostolic Church] with false accusations 
and hatred. This is the living tradition of the apostles of Christ, which 
His Church holds everywhere, which is to be loved and cherished above all 
things and faithfully preached....

"This is the rule of the true faith, which in prosperity and adversity this 
spiritual Mother of your most serene Empire, the Apostolic Church of 
Christ, has ever held, and defends; and she, by the grace of Almighty God, 
will be proved never to have wandered from the path of the apostolic 
tradition, nor to have succumbed to the novelties of heretics; but even as, 
in the beginning of the Christian faith, she received it from her founders, 
the princes of the apostles of Christ, so she remains unspotted to the end, 
according to the divine promise of our Lord and Saviour Himself, which He 
spake to the prince of His disciples in the holy Gospels: 'Peter, Peter,' 
saith He, 'behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as 
wheat; but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not, and thou being 
once converted, strengthen thy brethren.'[36] Let your clemency therefore 
consider that the Lord and Saviour of all, to whom faith belongs, who 
promised that the faith of Peter should not fail, admonished him to 
strengthen his brethren; and it is known to all men that the apostolic 
pontiffs, the predecessors of my littleness, have always done this with 
confidence.

"Woe is me, if I cover the truth in silence, when I am bidden ... to 
instruct the Christian folk therewith.... Wherefore also my predecessors, 
of apostolic memory, being furnished with the teachings of the Lord, never 
neglected to exhort the prelates of the Church of Constantinople, who tried 
to introduce heretical novelties into the immaculate Church of Christ, and 
to warn them with entreaties to desist from the heretical error of teaching 
falsehood at least by their silence.

"Consequently, the holy Church of God, the Mother of your most Christian 
Empire, must be freed from the errors of teachers like these, and in order 
to please God and save their souls, the whole number of prelates and 
priests, and clergy and people must confess with us the formula of truth 
and Apostolic tradition, the evangelical and Apostolic rule of faith, which 
is founded upon the firm rock of blessed Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, 
which by his favour remains free from all error."

The pope concludes by declaring that "if the prelate of the Church of 
Constantinople shall elect to hold with us, and to preach this 
irreprehensible rule of the Apostolic teaching of the Holy Scriptures, of 
the venerable Synods, of the spiritual Fathers, according to their 
evangelical interpretations, by which the formula of the truth has been 
shown to us through the revelation of the Holy Ghost," then there will 
indeed be peace. But if he should refuse, "let him know that of such 
contempt he will have to make satisfaction to the divine judgment of Christ 
before the Judge of all, who is in heaven, to whom we ourselves shall give 
an account, when He shall come to judgment, for the ministry we have 
received."

NOTES

1. I.e., that there is only one "action" or "operation" in Him.

2. "If this is really Catholicism," Duchesne represents the Monophysites as 
saying in their hearts, "Chalcedon and Leo will soon be going the way of 
the Three Chapters." L'Eglise au VIme Siecle, p. 401.

3. Ibid., 268-69.

4. "St. Denis" being the sixth century theologian who passed (and for many 
centuries to come) as St. Paul's disciple, Denis the Areopagite, Acts 
17:34.

5. Tixeront, III, 163 who gives the passage.

6. This synodal letter runs to 24 folio columns, Mansi, XI, 461-509, Migne, 
P.G., vol. 87, pt. 3, 3148-3200.

7. Abbot John Chapman, The Condemnation of Pope Hononus, 15.

8. Satis provide circurnspecteque fraternitatem vestram scripsisse. The 
letter is printed, in part, in Denzinger, nos. 1057-64.

9. Chapman, 17.

10. Kirch, no. 1084.

11. Ibid., no. 1087, letter to the bishops of Spain.

12. Ibid., no. 1085, letter to the emperor, Constantine IV.

13. These two letters have not survived.

14. The text is in Mansi, X, 992-97. Kirch, nos. 1070-73, publishes 
extracts from it.

15. This letter of John IV did not reach Constantinople until the summer of 
642. The emperor to whom it was addressed had been then dead a year or so. 
When the official correspondence of popes and emperors could suffer such 
delays, misunderstanding was likely to be a permanent factor of life, and 
the action of any central authority ineffective Another fact to be borne in 
mind is the short reign of the average pope, in these sixth and seventh 
centuries. In the 182 years from 526 to 708, there were 34 popes. Eight of 
these had "long" reigns, the other 26 averaged three years each.

16. John had died, October 12, 642. Theodore was consecrated November 24 
following, without awaiting any imperial approval of his election. He was a 
Greek, born in Jerusalem. Theodore (642-49) is one of the "long-reigned" 
popes of the period.

17. This great saint, one day to pay with his life for his defence of true 
doctrine, had many years before this been a secretary of the emperor 
Heraclius. He was personally acquainted with the two chiefs, Sergius and 
Pyrrhus, and had been keenly critical of the "one operation" theory since 
its first appearance. The sack of his monastery, in the Persian invasion, 
had driven him to Africa, and here he met Sophronius, his senior by a good 
forty years perhaps. For his high place as a theological writer, cf. 
Tixeront, III, 188-92 (180-84). It was the publication of the Ecthesis that 
brought Maximus into open opposition.

18. Denzinger, nos. 254-74 for the text. Chapman, as quoted, gives a good 
general account of the pope's speeches at the council.

19. Denzinger, no. 271.

20. Both the Catholics and the Orthodox keep his feast on the same date, 
November 12.

21. One of these was St. Wilfrid, bishop of York.

22. For the texts, the letter of Agatho to Constantine IV, Mansi, XI, 234-
86, the profession of faith of the 125 bishops, ibid., 286-315.

23. Something more must be said of Agatho's letter later.

24. As were the letters of Agatho and the western bishops which the legates 
had brought.

25. Theandric.

26. Denzinger (nos. 289^93) prints a six-page extract from the decree, the 
Greek text and the Latin. It is from this, no. 291, that my quotation is 
taken.

27. The translation is taken from Chapman, op. cit., whose language I have 
occasionally simplified.

28. The profession of faith, signed by Agatho and the 125 bishops of the 
west.

29. Chapman, 100-1.

30. With Macarius and other heretics left to the pope's discretion.

31. Ibid., 102.

32. Ibid., 104.

33. To Leo II, successor to Agatho, who died before the council ended. The 
translation is Chapman, 105-6.

34. For the text see Mansi, Xl, 286-315; the extracts here are Chapman, 77-
82.

35. He said to them, "But whom do you say that I am?" Simon Peter answered 
and said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Then Jesus 
answered and said, "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood 
has not revealed this to thee, but my Father in heaven." Matt. 16:15-17.

36. Luke 22:31.


CHAPTER 7. The Second General Council of Nicaea, 787

The seventh General Council, the Second Council of Nicaea, was summoned in 
order to settle a controversy which "to a great extent was a domestic 
controversy of the church of Constantinople and its immediate 
dependencies."[1] And the subject of this controversy was a matter "in 
which the peculiar character of all the nations concerned played a large 
part."[2] It was a controversy about the lawfulness of venerating holy 
images and relics, and about prayer to the saints. Why these controversies 
arose, towards the year 725, historians still can only make guesses, as 
they can also only guess what it was that led the emperor, Leo III (717-
40), to lead the anti-image party, so to call it.[3]

Leo III was one of the great emperors, a ruler under whose government "the 
empire not only ceased to decline, but even began to regain much of its 
early vigour."[4] Yet at the time he was proclaimed emperor, the empire was 
threatened with immediate ruin. "Six emperors had been dethroned within the 
space of twenty-one years. Four perished by the hand of the public 
executioner, one died in obscurity, after being deprived of sight, and the 
other was only allowed to end his days peacefully in a monastery, because 
Leo felt the imperial sceptre firmly fixed in his own grasp. Every army 
assembled to encounter the Saracens had broken out into rebellion. The 
Bulgarians and Sclavonians wasted Europe up to the walls of Constantinople; 
the Saracens ravaged the whole of Asia Minor to the shores of the 
Bosporus."[5]

The new emperor's first task was to save his capital. He was crowned on 
March 25, 717, and just four months later the siege of Constantinople 
began; huge armies of Mohammedans on the land side, and a vast fleet in the 
sea of Marmora and the Black Sea. The siege lasted just a year. In the end 
it was the besiegers who starved, and little by little their fleet was 
destroyed. For the next twenty years the empire had nothing to fear from 
the Saracens, and the prestige of the great defence was perhaps Leo's main 
resource in his unexpected career as a religious reformer.

"Unexpected" would seem to be accurate. For while we can fix the date when 
the emperor first published his views on these religious practices, the 
years 726 and 727, none can say whence these ideas came to him. But one of 
the historians best versed in the story gives him credit for a sincere 
desire to purify religion from an ever increasing superstition.[6] Images--
paintings, that is, mosaics, reliefs, statues--are in part the decorative 
furniture of a church; they are reminders of holy personages now no longer 
in this world, or of past incidents of religious history, and they are a 
means by which the devout can pay honour to Christ and the saints, 
honouring these by honouring their images; by using precious woods, 
ivories, gold, and silver, out of which to make the image; by clothing it 
in costly silks, ornamenting the figure with jewels and so forth; most of 
all by a certain ceremonious use of the image, burning lights in front of 
it, offering incense to it, and especially by kneeling before the image 
when one is praying to the personage it represents. According to the 
personal taste or temperament of the believer, these practices can vary 
indefinitely from what seems mere gesture to what, no less certainly, can 
seem the very extravagance of passion. But, even at the very extreme, 
devotion to the image for the sake of the saint represented is, of course, 
a different kind of thing altogether from the act of the ancient heathen 
who thought the image itself a god, itself actually able to reward the 
devotee or work him harm, and who addressed his prayer to the image itself 
for the image's own sake--the image thus being, in his case, what we call 
an idol.

What exactly the mentality was that underlay Leo III's anti-image policy we 
shall probably never know. That he was a great reorganiser of the whole 
machinery of the state is certain. Inevitably, in this particular state, 
the Byzantine Empire, this meant a deep interest in the welfare of 
religion. Was it as part of the very necessary regeneration of the state 
that the question of the religious exercises of the ordinary man came under 
the emperor's notice? somewhat as (just one thousand years later) they seem 
to have fascinated another emperor, Joseph II?

The historians of the religious arts will tell us that round about the time 
when Leo III grew up, religious art was passing from a state where the 
pictures were repetitions of "typical" figures (saints in hieratic 
postures, symbolised according to a rigid convention), to a very different 
condition of things, where the pictures were more like those of ordinary 
human beings. They speak of a new, naive, crude realism, especially in the 
pictures of the martyrs, where the artist's imagination revelled in the 
delineation of horrific tortures. And once the taste for pictures of the 
saints in action grew, there began to appear, as well as their authentic 
deeds, pictures of what they had never done except in pious fairy tales--
miracles and other wonders that had, in fact, never taken place at all; and 
this even in the pictures of the Blessed Virgin and of her Divine Son. In 
other words, legend was being given the same credence as truth--which is 
one of the most direct routes, of course, to superstition. There seems to 
be no doubt of these developments, particularly in the matter of icons 
properly so called--that is, the pictures, in metal, wood, ivory, or 
painted, made for private devotion. We read of icons alleged to have worked 
miracles, and held especially sacred or valuable because of this 
reputation, and of others not made by human hands, miraculously conveyed to 
this earth. And all this with little or no supervision from the authorities 
in the church. In a word, grave abuses, long tolerated.

We do hear of bishops who protested against these developments--it was with 
three bishops of sees in Asia Minor[7] that the movement began which Leo 
III was to take up. But we have not anything like sufficient detail about 
episcopal action in general to judge the bishops as a whole. Later, the 
emperors--Leo's son and successor, Constantine V, at least--were to take up 
the position that image-veneration is simple idolatry. But was this the 
original position? Or was it something like this: "Too many people pay 
reverence to images in such a way as to make it seem that they are actually 
idolaters"? Or did anyone assert: "Too many people have become idolaters 
through the custom of venerating images"? Even today, strange to say, one 
occasionally finds educated men, whom the Catholic use of images repels, 
hard to convince that Catholics do not believe the actual wood or plaster 
statue is a being capable of doing what is asked. I have never had reason 
to think these non-Catholic friends of mine thought myself an idolater, but 
every time they see a seemingly less educated Catholic (whom they presume, 
of course, to be a less intelligent being than themselves) kneeling in 
prayer before a statue, or lighting a candle to burn before it, their 
suspicion is aroused that here is idolatry. Given the fact of the never 
ceasing war of the Church on superstition in all its forms, the unanimous 
violence of theologians and preachers, at all times, against even the 
quasi-superstitions of social life,[8] the presumption is dead against the 
accusation. The American Catholic can be just as startled as his non-
Catholic friend, at the spectacles he sometimes sees in the churches of 
latitudes far to the south, at the way statues are dressed, bedizened with 
jewellery, paraded around and apparently treated, at times, as though they 
were the central feature of religion. A little experience shows that this 
is but an instance of that general truth upon which Montaigne so loved to 
dwell: "It is the common weakness, not of the lower classes only but of all 
mankind almost, to form their judgments and their plans according to the 
way of life where they were born."[9] Who will ever persuade the image-
loving Italian or Spaniard that the teen-age maidens of the United States 
do not suffer from the freedom with which their parents allow them to run 
around with the boys of their choice?

The point where the Iconoclasts roused against themselves the general 
feeling of the Church was not that they said, "There is too much of this 
image devotion in the religious life of the day," or "This if not checked 
will lead to superstition,"[10] but the openly expressed principle of the 
whole campaign: "Image devotion is idolatry." And, at a later stage in the 
controversy, they protested that all prayer to the saints is superstitious 
and sinful.

Leo III's first "iconoclastic" act of which we have certain knowledge was 
the removal of the image of Christ from over the principal gate of the 
palace at Constantinople. This caused a riot and there were some deaths, 
and arrests, and punishments. Next there were mutinies in the armed forces 
as the orders went round that images were to be destroyed. The emperor 
endeavoured to win over the patriarch, Germanos, to approve the new policy, 
and he also wrote to the pope, Gregory II. These letters are lost, but we 
do possess the pope's replies, and we can learn that the correspondence was 
an interchange of doctrinal treatises, the pope explaining to the emperor 
that the Old Testament prohibition was about idol worship, and explaining 
how idols and the Catholic images are different kinds of things. The 
emperor's threat that unless the pope submitted he would be deposed had no 
effect except to cause a revolt in the Italian provinces, and then, 
February 11, 731, the pope died.

Gregory II died without knowing that on January 17 the emperor had called 
together his senators and chief officers of state and the patriarch to put 
before them an imperial declaration that whoever refused to destroy any 
images he possessed, or whoever paid honour to images, was a rebel against 
the state. The patriarch refused to put his name to the declaration. He 
took off his badge of office and went away, not to the official palace he 
had occupied for so long, but to the family home. The emperor appointed one 
of his officials to succeed him, who signed willingly; the declaration 
(thus fortified with the approval of the Church) was published, and the 
first persecution began.

It was the newly elected Gregory III[11] who received the new patriarch's 
demand for recognition as lawful bishop of Constantinople in a profession 
of faith, made up, in part, of the edict or manifesto he had just signed. 
This pope, like the emperor, was a Syrian by birth. He replied by refusing 
the recognition asked for, and threatened the petitioner that unless he 
returned to orthodox ways he would be cast out of the priesthood. Gregory 
III was a man of great determination, and his "reaction" to the emperor's 
violence was to call a council that sat at Rome from November 1 to the end 
of the year--very much as Martin I had acted in 649. As many as ninety-
three bishops attended. The pope published a sentence of excommunication 
against all who, "despising the ancient practice of the church," set 
themselves against the veneration of images, destroyed or profaned them. 
The emperor, on receipt of this news, prepared an expedition to punish the 
Italian bishops and to arrest the pope. But the fleet was wrecked by 
storms. Only the remnant of it reached Sicily. All that Leo could do was to 
confiscate the vast papal domains in Sicily, upon whose revenues the popes 
had depended for their administration of Rome and for their traditional 
care of the poor.

Leo III died in June 740. His son, who succeeded as Constantine V, was to 
reign for thirty-five years, and to show himself as capable as his father 
had been. Such a succession--nearly sixty years of continuous, good, strong 
government--was without precedent. The great event of the new reign, from 
the point of view of religion, was the council called by Constantine in 
753, for the purpose of solemnly condemning the cult of images. For this 
emperor was much more of an Iconoclast than Leo III. In a treatise which he 
wrote, and circulated to the bishops on the eve of the council, he 
explained that all images of Christ were heretical, since they must portray 
Him as merely human, i.e., as though He had but one nature. At the same 
time that he thus, indirectly, seemed to reprobate the ancient Monophysite 
heresy, he used its terminology to explain himself; and as well as this, by 
refusing to the Blessed Virgin the name of Theotokos, by asserting her to 
be no more than Christotokos, he aligned himself with the Nestorians. It 
was at the first real breathing space of his reign--which had begun with a 
civil war, in which the rebels held Constantinople--that Constantine V held 
this council.

It met in the emperor's palace called Hieria, near Chalcedon, February 10, 
753, and it sat for as long as seven months, with 338 bishops attending. So 
far as numbers went, this was one of the
greatest of all the councils so far. The pope was not invited to it; the 
see of Constantinople was vacant; Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were 
now well and truly sees in partibus infidelium. The president was that 
archbishop of Ephesus who, nearly thirty years before, had been one of the 
first promoters of iconoclasm. What took up the time of so many bishops for 
so many months was not the proposal to forbid the veneration of images. 
Here all were agreed. But the bishops resisted the emperor steadfastly when 
he proposed to go back on the earlier, acknowledged General Councils. They 
refused to endorse his heresies about the nature of Christ, the Theotokos, 
and her role of intercessor for mankind, the practice of prayer to the 
saints, the veneration due to their relics. So that the final summing up of 
the council does no more than speak of the images as being idolatrous and 
heretical, a temptation to the faith that originated with the devil. No one 
is to possess or venerate an image, even in the secrecy of his home. All 
who disobey are to be excommunicated, and also to be punished by the law of 
the emperor, for their disobedience is also a crime against the state.

It is now that the real persecution began. The names of several illustrious 
martyrs have survived, some of them beheaded, others flogged till they 
died. Especially did the emperor rage against the monks, against whom as a 
class he organised a campaign of slander, whose dress and celibacy he 
ridiculed in pageantry and shows. At one moment a law enacted that all the 
emperor's subjects should swear never again to venerate an image, and the 
first to take this oath was the patriarch of Constantinople, publicly, 
holding up the relic of the true Cross, in the pulpit of St. Sophia. The 
minority who refused suffered cruelly. And now the emperor went beyond his 
council of 753. All prayer to the saints was forbidden, and all veneration 
of their relics. These were to be destroyed. From the great basilica at 
Chalcedon the body of the martyr to honour whom it was built, St. Euphemia, 
was thrown into the sea. And so the reign of terror continued until 
Constantine V died, the feast of Holy Cross, 775.

His son, Leo IV, lasted only five years, and then, as regent for the child 
Constantine VI, Leo's widow, Irene, ruled. She was a devout Catholic; that 
is to say, she had always been opposed to the whole iconoclastic business; 
and once the winter was over (Leo IV died in September, 780) a Byzantine 
embassy once more appeared in Italy. It was bound for the court of 
Charlemagne, to negotiate a marriage for the young emperor. And it was an 
augury of coming recovery, the first sign of the future seventh General 
Council of 787.

In May 784 the patriarch Paul of Constantinople, without a word even to the 
sovereign, suddenly went into retirement. Death was coming, he explained, 
and he must repent, and make reparation for his bad oath to work for the 
destruction of the cult of images. To the empress, he said, further, that 
the church of Constantinople was in schism, and that the only remedy for 
the evil was a General Council. Nothing but the unsettled state of the 
empire after her husband's death had delayed Irene's plans to reverse the 
policy of the last sixty years, and now she acted with decision. On August 
29 the empress wrote to the pope (Adrian I, 772-95) that she had decided to 
summon a General Council and, inviting him to take part in it, she said, 
"It is God Himself, wishing to lead us to the truth, Who asks you to come 
in person, in order to confirm the ancient tradition about the veneration 
of images."[12] If Adrian could not come himself would he send worthy men 
to represent him?

Shortly after the despatch of this letter the patriarch Paul died 
(September 784). To fill the vacancy the empress chose a layman, one of the 
highest officers of the state, Tarasios. To a great meeting of bishops and 
state officials, he made a speech explaining exactly the present position 
in law and fact of the see of Constantinople and the hundreds of sees 
dependent on it. Ever since the time of Pope Gregory III, fifty-three years 
before, all these had been cut off from the universal church. This state of 
things could not be borne any longer. A General Council was the only way 
out of the complex difficulty. If the assembly agreed and would support 
him, Tarasios would accept the empress' nomination and consent to be 
patriarch. There were some objections and a discussion, but in the end the 
meeting pledged its support. On Christmas Day, Tarasios was consecrated.

His first act was to send to the pope the official notice of his election, 
which, as was the usual form, took the shape of a detailed profession of 
faith. Tarasios also frankly explained how he came to acquiesce in the 
unusual (not to say irregular) business that he, a layman, had been chosen 
to be the new bishop. With this so-called synodical letter, there went the 
official announcement of the election and consecration from the empress.

It was many months before these letters reached the distant pope. His 
replies are dated October 29, 785. Adrian was ready, he said, to be 
represented at the council, if such a council was the only way to bring 
about the restoration of the images. But, even so, on conditions: the 
coming council was to anathematize the gathering at the Hieria of 753, and 
this in the presence of the papal legates,[13] the empress was to guarantee 
full freedom of action to the council, and that the legates would be 
allowed to return to Rome. Adrian's conditions were accepted and so, from 
the outset, by virtue of this initiatory letter, the pope's position vis-a-
vis the council is that of Agatho in 680 and of St. Leo in 451.

The summonses for the council--ordered to meet at Constantinople--went out 
in the summer of 786, and on August 1 the bishops assembled in the basilica 
of the Holy Apostles. But the proceedings had scarcely begun when the 
church was invaded by a regiment of soldiers, and despite the presence of 
the empress and her son, Constantine VI, the bishops were put out of the 
church. The army was, notoriously, one of the chief strongholds of the 
Iconoclasts--loyalty to the religious peculiarities of the great soldier-
emperors, Leo III and Constantine V, was a thing seriously to be reckoned 
with. Irene resigned herself, sent the bishops home to their sees, and 
turned to the task of securing for the garrison of the capital troops on 
whom she could rely.

This took time, and it was May 787 before the call to the council was again 
issued. This time the bishops were not convoked to the capital, but to 
Nicaea, fifty miles away, and separated from the turbulent city by the 
waters of the Bosporus. There, on September 24, with memories no doubt of 
the other council held there centuries before,[14] the seventh General 
Council held its first session, with something like three hundred bishops 
in attendance.

The council opened with an address by Tarasios. Then the letter of the 
empress was read, guaranteeing freedom of speech to all, and ordering that 
the pope's letter to her should be read. The remainder of the session was 
taken up with the question of reconciling the handful of iconoclastic 
bishops who appeared--and a discussion whether they should then be allowed 
a place in the council. It was made a condition sine qua non that each 
should renounce and anathematize the council of 753.

At the second session (September 26) the pope's letter was read. It began 
with the statement of the powers divinely given to St. Peter to bind and to 
loose, and that this power was the inheritance of his successors. Now 
Peter's successors had never wavered, in this matter of the devotion to 
images, and with regard to the controversy of the last sixty years, the 
pope recalled all that had been done since the reign of Gregory II in 
protest against the innovations, and what the popes had done to defend this 
pious practice from the charge of idolatry. Adrian cited such well-known 
Biblical facts as the figures of the cherubim in the Holy of Holies, and 
the brazen serpent. He quoted the long line of authority for the practices 
as it is found in the Greek Fathers of the Church. And then he passed on to 
matters of a different kind, where the late emperors had grievously wronged 
the Roman See, matters where he demanded that injustices should be righted. 
This part of the pope's letter was not read out to the council. Were the 
legates aware of the omission? It is hardly likely. The matter of complaint 
was Leo III's confiscation of the papal properties in Sicily, and, what 
mattered still more, his adding to the jurisdiction of the see of 
Constantinople the sees of Calabria[15] and Sicily. Adrian also reproved 
the elevation of a layman--Tarasios--to the patriarchal see.

When the letter was read the legates rose and demanded that the patriarch 
declare his acceptance of the doctrine as there stated. Tarasios did this, 
and the legates next asked that each bishop should rise and personally make 
the same declaration. This also was done, and the monks present also 
professed this as their faith.

It was after this act of submissive faith that the council, in its fourth 
and fifth sessions (October 1 and 4), went into the theological case for 
the practice of venerating images and praying to the saints. For two days 
long extracts were read from Scripture and the Fathers and explained and 
commented by various speakers, and stories were told of marvellous 
happenings in one diocese after another that proved the duty of honouring 
the saints through their images. The writers who had taught otherwise were 
condemned, among them such leading Monophysites of bygone years as Severus 
of Antioch and Philoxene of Mabboug. The fifth session closed with the 
solemn enthronement of an image, in the church where the council was held; 
this at the proposition of the legates.

Two days later, at the sixth session, the prescribed condemnation of the 
council of 753 took place. The decree of that assembly was read out, and 
after each clause there was read a lengthy refutation of what it stated, a 
reprobation worded, as to the bishops of 753, in language too coarse to 
reproduce. It is more interesting that one reason given for denying that 
council's claim to be oecumenical was that the pope was not represented at 
it; and it was boldly stated that it was just not possible that the Church 
of Christ should ever fall away into idolatry.

At the seventh session the final dogmatic profession of the council was 
drawn up. It followed the now traditional fashion of a declaration of 
faith, beginning with the creed of Nicaea and anathematizing all past 
heretics--Pope Honorius among them, but not (curiously) the Three Chapters. 
Coming to the crucial point, "We define," the decree states, "that, as with 
the priceless, life-giving cross,[16] so with the venerable and holy 
images, they may be set up in their various forms in the churches, on the 
sacred vessels and vestments, on the walls; likewise in private houses, and 
along the wayside.... The more often we look upon them, the more vividly 
are our minds turned to the memory of those whom they represent ... to give 
to them, the images, an adoration of honour, but not, however, the true 
latria, which, as our faith teaches, is to be given only to the divine 
nature ... so that, like the holy cross, the gospels, and the relics of the 
saints, to these images offerings of incense and lights may be made, as was 
the pious custom of our ancestors. For the honour rendered to the image 
passes to that which the image represents, and whoever adores[17] an image 
adores the person it depicts. For in this way, is the teaching of the holy 
Fathers strengthened, that is to say, the tradition of the holy catholic 
church, receiving the gospel, from one end of the world to the other.... 
Those, therefore, who dare to think or to teach otherwise, or, as the 
wicked heretics do, to spurn these traditions of the church ... if they are 
priests or bishops, let them be deposed; if monks or laymen, let them be 
excommunicated."[18] And the decree ends with words of praise for the two 
bishops who had been leading opponents of the heresy, Germanos of 
Constantinople and George of Cyprus, and for the great theologian whose 
writings had been the heart of the resistance, John Mansour, John of 
Damascus, our St. John Damascene.

With regard to the words here italicised in the decree, it may be noted 
that Honorariam adorationem is the Latin translation given of the original 
Greek timetiken proskynesin, where the second word, a noun, means literally 
"a paying obeisance to," "a prostrating oneself before"--a gesture of great 
respect, obviously; the degree, or kind, of respect intended being 
something in the mind of the doer, primarily; and the significance, as it 
is done, a thing known only to himself. A Christian in front of an image, 
and an idolater in front of an idol, each gives the same salute--with a 
wholly different meaning in each case. The newly appointed Anglican bishop 
(in England), clad in his robes, kneels before Queen Elizabeth II, his 
hands joined--he is not adoring her, nor praying to her, but taking an oath 
of allegiance. It is folly to judge by appearance what we have never 
experienced personally, or have studied in the declarations of those who 
have had the experience. Which said, we may be allowed to regret that, from 
so early a time, the one Latin word adoratio was used officially to mean 
acts wholly

As to latria: the Latin does not here translate, but takes over bodily the 
actual Greek word, whose original meaning "hired service, servitude," came 
to be restricted to the special meaning "the service of the gods," and so 
to "worship," the act by which we publicly recognise that God is the 
creator and sovereign lord of all that is--the uniqueness of His being, and 
of the dependence of all upon Him. As a technical term in theology, latria 
denotes the reverence especial to God, reserved to God--what the English 
word "worship" nowadays usually means and only means; although, a survival 
of other ages, the mayor of an English town is still "Your worship"; the 
bridegroom in the marriage service still says to the bride, "With my body I 
thee worship"; and in recent English translations of papal documents, the 
pope's address to the bishops, Venerabiles fratres has been rendered 
"Worshipful brethren." But neither mayors, nor brides, nor bishops are 
therefore regarded as divine!

In addition to this definition of faith, the council also enacted twenty-
two disciplinary canons. They are of a routine character, reminders to the 
bishops and clergy of existing laws; a reminder to the modem reader that 
the council marks the beginning of the restoration of order, after sixty 
years of persecution and a regime of emergencies.[19]

The fathers of this General Council of 787 did not ask the pope to confirm 
its decrees, nor did the pope ever do so of his own initiative. Indeed, 
seven years later Adrian took great pains to explain to Charlemagne that he 
had not done so, and why. Here we are brought up against another of those 
strange sequels that would suggest that not every one of these twenty 
councils was, at the time it took place, regarded by all concerned as what 
we understand as a General Council.

But first of all, the appearance of the great name of Charlemagne suggests 
the usefulness of recalling to the reader the revolutionary changes in the 
"political" state of Italy and France which the hundred years had witnessed 
that separated the council against the Iconoclasts from the council against 
the Monothelites. These changes had a great influence upon the relations of 
the popes with the emperors at Constantinople in the eighth century (715-
95); and they were to influence powerfully these same relations for the 
hundred yeas that followed, the century in which the eighth General Council 
(869-70) took place, the council conventionally regarded as marking the 
beginning of the breakaway of Constantinople from Rome that still endures.

Briefly, within a matter of months after the death of Justinian (565), the 
emperor who at such a cost had restored the imperial authority in Italy, 
there came into that much ravaged land, from the north, the last and least 
civilised of all its invaders, the Arian Lombards (568). Throughout the 
century of the Monothelite troubles, of Pope Honorius and St. Martin I, 
there was constant petty warfare between the various Lombard chiefs and the 
imperial officials at Naples and Ravenna--this last being the central city 
of the new Byzantine-governed Italy. Very slowly, but very surely, in the 
course of 150 years the invaders established themselves, and in that time 
they gradually gave up their heresy and became Catholics. By the time of 
Pope Gregory II (715-31), whom we have seen threatened with deposition by 
the Iconoclast emperor Leo III, the real bulwark of the empire in Italy was 
no longer the exarch at Ravenna and his little army, but the prestige of 
the pope as the heir of St. Peter. Time and time again, armed only with 
this, the popes of the eighth century persuaded the Lombards to retreat 
from new conquests--this in the time of the persecuting Iconoclasts, Leo 
III and Constantine V. The day was to come, however, when a Lombard king 
grew tired of thus "obeying St. Peter as his son" for the benefit of the 
distant Byzantine czar. And the popes then turned for help to the Catholic 
barbarians north of the Alps, to the Franks. How their appeals were finally 
heeded, the pilgrimage of Pope Stephen II to the court of Pepin in the 
winter of 753-54 (the winter following Constantine V's pseudo-council at 
the Hieria), how Pepin agreed to expel the Lombards from the territories 
around Rome and to convey the conquest to St. Peter in sovereignty, and how 
the pope ratified Pepin's hold on the Frankish crown by anointing him king 
with the holy oils, Pepin and his two sons, Carloman and the future 
Charlemagne--this is what every textbook tells at length.

Pepin was a great ruler (741-68) as his father Charles Martel (716-41) had 
been before him, and as Charlemagne was to be after him (768-814). Pepin 
not only defeated the Lombards, and mocked the demand of Constantine V that 
he reinstate Byzantium, but he watched with care over the apprenticeship of 
the popes as temporal sovereigns. And Charlemagne was no less interested, 
that they should be firmly established and rule in peace the far from 
peaceful lay lords who, all but independent each in his own fortress, 
resented the notion that priests were now their masters; and who, if the 
chance offered of seizing the supreme place, would make light of 
sacrilegiously going through the ritual formality of ordination and 
consecration in order to attain it.

All which is recalled to explain the harsh statement that the first twenty 
years of the new papal state were a bloody chapter indeed of Italian 
history. The election of Adrian I in 772, the pope of this seventh General 
Council that is our subject, brought a beginning of statesmanship. He ruled 
for all but twenty-four years--the longest-reigned pope hitherto--wisely 
and firmly and humanely, with the young Charlemagne as his protector and 
counsellor, and yet without subservience to him: for all that Charlemagne, 
in a rather attractively naive way, made it ever evident that if it were 
his duty to protect the pope, it was the pope's duty to accept that 
protection, e.g., to hearken to the protector's advice, and carry it out. 
The two great men, however, managed together marvellously. The findings of 
the General Council of 787 were the greatest test to which their relations 
were put.

Charlemagne, by this time, had utterly destroyed the Lombard kingdom. It 
was he who was now, in title and in fact, King of the Lombards, the ruler 
of all Italy to the north of the little papal state as well as of the whole 
of what we call France, and over the Pyrenees to the Ebro, and east as far 
as the Rhine. The Holy See, not yet realising it, is now facing a pattern 
of potential dangers from the powerful protector which will be repeated 
century after century for the next thousand years--which, however, is none 
of our business just now. But the pope and his protector met in what 
promised to be a head-on collision a propos the decrees of this Second 
Council of Nicaea.

What we would first like to know, as we study this crisis, is how much 
information Charlemagne had about the council of 787 at the time it took 
place. This may seem an odd remark, seeing who Charlemagne was, and what 
his relations with the pope were, and given the undoubted fact that 
Charlemagne was in Italy from January to Easter of that year. But the 
suggestion is that the pope took care not to inform Charlemagne of the new 
rapprochement with Constantinople, and its sequel the council. And that 
politics were the reason for Adrian's deliberate silence: Byzantium (still 
in 787 master of Sicily and southern Italy) being the secret sustainer of 
resistance to the Franks of certain Lombard "pockets" in central Italy. And 
in the spring of that same year Charlemagne broke off the long-drawn-out 
negotiation for the marriage of his daughter to Irene's son, Constantine 
VI.[20]

Such was the situation, ominous for the papal state, in the weeks while the 
bishops of Asia Minor were journeying to Constantinople and there convening 
with Adrian's legates, under the aegis of Irene. Charlemagne, in this same 
autumn, was occupied with the business of destroying a treacherous vassal, 
the duke of Bavaria. On October 3 the rebel surrendered--the council was 
now busy examining the dossier of Scriptural authority for the cult of 
images. In the spring of 788 Charlemagne's diplomacy won the Lombards from 
their alliance with Constantinople. Irene's countermove was a command to 
her generals in Italy to destroy the Lombard duchy of Benevento. But the 
Lombard had now the Franks on his side, and it was Irene's forces that were 
destroyed, and the Byzantine frontier pushed back to the south.

These few details are set down to show the reality of the Charlemagne 
versus Constantinople animosity in these years, its importance to the great 
papal problem of political security as the protection of the independence 
of religion. The pope, needing the Frank most urgently, was walking on thin 
ice when, in these years of war, he had to be friendly with the Byzantines. 
Which is why not too much was said--if anything was said--to Charlemagne 
about the negotiations that produced the council. This may also raise the 
question whether the council was, in Adrian's mind, anything more than a 
council of the bishops of the Byzantine empire which, under his direction, 
was re-establishing Catholic belief and practice after sixty years of 
disorder.

Charlemagne's first news about what had been happening elsewhere while he 
dealt with Bavaria was the arrival of a Latin translation of the acta of 
the council of 787. The date of his receipt of this we do not know[21]--
most likely it was around 791. This translation--an incredibly bad one, by 
all accounts, and to judge from what has survived--perished long ago. When 
the scholars in Charlemagne's council came to examine it they were 
seriously disturbed, and by the king's command they prepared a lengthy 
systematic refutation of the council's decrees--the so-called Caroline 
Books.[22] The essence of what so moved the Frankish world was a statement 
that images are to be given the very same veneration that we give to the 
Trinity itself--the arch-mistranslation of the whole masterpiece of 
illiteracy. Now what historians have, for centuries, called the Caroline 
Books, was, in form and fact, an official state paper, a law of the King of 
the Franks. In this Charlemagne reviews the history of the two councils, of 
753 and 787, and he condemns both, criticising in detail, and with biting 
sarcasm, the evidence for the lawfulness of image-veneration officially set 
forth by the council of 787, a council convoked and animated by a woman, 
over which a woman had presided. And such a body as this is to impose its 
erroneous ideas on all the churches of the world, the bulk of whom have 
never even heard there has been such a council? Are these Greeks orthodox, 
even on the fundamental doctrine of the Trinity? Do they not believe that 
the Son proceeds from the Father alone? No wonder they blunder about the 
right and duty to venerate images. And so the long indictment rolls on.

But there is in it not a word of criticism for the pope. The document is 
written as though he had had no share in the council at all, and it 
contains the remonstrance that "Whenever a dispute arises about matters of 
belief, we must consult the holy, roman, catholic and apostolic church, 
which is set in authority over the other churches"[23]; understand, 
perhaps, "and not a synod of Greek bishops." For the note that sounds 
through all this polemic "is not so much one of hostility to the doctrine 
set out at Nicaea, as to the fact of these Greeks sitting in council and 
giving forth as though they were the infallible rulers of Christendom."[24] 
The trouble is that there is now a second empire in Christendom, although 
its chief as yet only calls himself king--and this chief is a genius, and 
as passionately interested in culture and religion as in politics and war, 
and this new western potentate will not tolerate that questions of doctrine 
shall be decided for the whole church by a council of those churches where 
his Byzantine rival is lord. That the force behind the Caroline Books and 
the law called the Capitulary About Images, and behind the action, 
regarding the council of 787, of the council about to meet in 794 at 
Frankfurt, is a political force is what no man can easily deny.[25]

The great council which met at Frankfurt in the summer of 794 was not 
called merely in order to deal with the situation just summarily described, 
but with a serious heresy about the Trinity that had arisen in Spain. There 
had been appeals about this matter to the pope, an intervention from Rome, 
and a refusal to accept this; then a council at Ratisbon, and the trial of 
a leading Spanish bishop for heresy. It was to a council whose task was to 
settle this Spanish affair that Adrian agreed to send legates, and a 
dogmatic letter stating the true belief on the point at issue.[23] It was 
an imposing assembly, three hundred Latin bishops from every part of the 
West, the equal, in this material sense, of any of the General Councils, 
save the exceptionally large gathering at Chalcedon three hundred years 
before.[27] All that concerns our present subject is that the criticism of 
the council of 787, as made in the Caroline Books, was now put before the 
three hundred bishops at Frankfurt, and that they thereupon condemned the 
idea that images were the lawful object of adoration properly so called, 
and that they condemned the council of 787 for encouraging this heretical 
notion. The evidence, for this last serious charge, upon which the Latin 
bishops acted is explicitly stated--it is the mistranslated extract from a 
speech made at the council by one of the Greek bishops.[28] It is worth 
noting, first, that to these Latins the council they are rebuking is merely 
"the recent Greek synod at Constantinople," and next, that none of the wild 
language of the Caroline Books and nothing of the erroneous teaching just 
noted[29] appear in the proceedings of the council.

To strengthen the impression which the council of 794 might make upon 
Adrian, Charlemagne now sent to him the famous Capitulary About Images, 
eighty-five extracts from the Caroline Books. The pope examined the 
indictment, and patiently refuted the eighty-five, point by point, 
patiently and with studied moderation, correcting the vast series of 
misunderstandings and ignoring the impudence and malice.[30] As to the 
alleged difference in belief between the two councils, of 787 and 794, the 
pope says very simply, "With regard to images, the belief of St. Gregory 
[the Great][31] and our belief are the same; and so the Greek bishops 
themselves, in this very synod, accepted the definition, [namely] to 
reverence images with salutations of honour, but by no means to give to 
them that true worship which, according to our faith, we give to the divine 
nature alone.... And therefore it is that we have accepted this said 
synod."[32] This, so far as the pope was concerned, was the last word. A 
few months later he died, December 25, 795.

NOTES

1. Jalland, 370.

2. Tixeront, Ill, 482 (467).

3. More formally, and, by a universal convention for centuries now, the 
Iconoclastic Movement.

4. Finlay, The Byzantine Empire (Everyman's edition), 3.

5. Finlay, 14.

6. Louis Brehier, whose La Querelle des Images (1904) is still a classic 
text. The quotation is from the similarly titled Chapter XIII of his 
Gregoire le Grand, les Etats barbares et l'Invasion Arabe (590-757), p. 
441, n. 1. This book is vol. 5 of the Histoire de l'Eglise, ed. A. Fliche 
and Msgr. V. Martin (1947).

7. Constantine of Nacolia, Thomas of Claudiopolis, Theodosius of Ephesus. 
From a letter of the patriarch of Constantinople, Germanos, whom 
Constantine had consulted, we learn that the bishop's difficulty was the 
explicit prohibition in Exodus, 20:4, 5.

8. For example, belief that it is dangerous to sit 13 at table, or to spill 
salt, general belief in "charms, omens, dreams and such like foolery."

9. Essays, Book I, Chap. 49, "The Customs of the Ancient World." The reader 
will recall the half-contemptuous amusement with which Newman compares his 
Protestant conviction of Catholic abuses with his Catholic knowledge of the 
facts in later years

10. Giving to created things what is due to God alone.

11. Elected March 18, 731.

12. There is a dispute among historians whether this letter was sent in 784 
or 785.

13. "That pseudo-council which took place without the Apostolic See is to 
be anathematized, in the presence of our legates ... that the words of our 
Lord, Jesus Christ, may be fulfilled, 'The gates of hell shall not prevail 
against it' [the Apostolic See] and again, 'Thou art Peter' [Peter] whose 
see, holding the first place, gives light to the whole world, and is the 
head of all the churches of God." This passage Denzinger quotes, no. 298.

14. The space of years between the two councils of Nicaea is roughly what 
separates us from the discovery of America by Columbus, or the death of 
Savonarola. The second council of Nicaea took place just a thousand years 
before the fall of the Bastille. These are staggering distances of time, in 
the record of an institution still as active as it was in 787 and 325, with 
Pope John XXIII, at this moment, preparing exactly as Pope Adrian I was 
preparing in 785.

15. Southern Italy.

16. From all the teaching and proscriptions of the Iconoclasts images of 
the cross and its relics had been carefully excepted.

17. Adorat in the Latin translation, proskynei in the Greek original. For 
this difference see the explanation about to follow.

18. From the text printed (with Latin translation) in Denzinger, nos. 302, 
303, 304.
different in kind. It is only in our own time that it has ceased to be used 
for the veneration of the Cross in the liturgy of Good Friday.

19. The canons are listed fully in Mansi. Schroeder, somewhat routed by 
their verbosity, offers only a summary in his translation, pp. 144-56.

20. Or Byzantium broke them off; crisis and unpleasantness in either case, 
whichever story is the truth.

21. Historians have had to tax their brains to set these events in a 
chronological order that is also logical. For a comparison of results cf. 
Amann, L'Epoque Carolingienne, 1947 (F. and M., vol. 6), 127, n 2. It is 
Amann's "solution" that I am following.

22. The piece takes up some 120 pages of the Patrology of Migne (P.L, vol. 
98, cols. 991-1248).

23. Quod sancta romana catholica et apostolica ecclesia caeteris ecclesiis 
praelata, pro causis fidei cum quaestio surgit omnino sit consulenda . Book 
I, Chap, 6; quoted Amann, 123, n. 2.

24. Amann, as quoted, p. 123.

25. So Amann, 123, "On n'en saurait disconvenir." It also needs to be said, 
with Tixeront, III, 474 (459), that "in Gaul, not only was it denied that 
images should be given adoration, in the proper sense of the word [the 
adoration with which we adore God as an act recognising He is God] but 
denied also that images could be given a relative honour [i.e., that the 
image could be honoured for the sake of the being it represented, an honour 
related to the living original]. This was an error in no way fostered by 
mistakes in the Latin translation sent by the pope."

26. Once again, the reader must be warned, there are problems about dates 
and the true sequence of events.

27. The official record of the proceedings--the acta--has not been 
preserved. We know nothing at all of the debates. Only the decrees of the 
council have survived.

28. See before, p. 161.

29. See before, ibid.

30. "Answers as subtle as the objections are futile," Tixeront, III, 477 
(461). The text of the Capitulary has perished, Adrian's answer, in so 
columns of close print, is in Migne, P.L., vol. 98, cc. 1247-92, a text 
"crawling with mistakes," says Tixeront.

31. The reference is to a letter from this pope to Secundinus, saying what 
is and what is not lawful in the veneration given to images--a classic text 
in these controversies, and one now cited against the second council of 
Nicaea's misunderstood teaching.

32. Mansi, XIII, 808; P.L., vol. 98, c. 1291.


CHAPTER 8. The Fourth General Council of Constantinople, 869-70

The empress Irene came to a bad end. She could not bring herself to step 
aside as her son came to man's estate. She so lusted for power that she 
organised a plot against him--he was now approaching thirty--overthrew him, 
and had him blinded in the very room where she had given birth to him.[1] 
For four years Irene ruled supreme, then she also was overthrown, banished, 
and died miserably. Charlemagne, meanwhile, had become an emperor, created 
such (if this is the right term) by Pope Adrian's successor, Leo III, on 
Christmas Day, 800--one of the dates that every schoolboy is expected to 
know. He was then fifty-eight, and he lasted another fourteen years. Then 
came the first weak ruler the family had produced, his son Louis, called 
the Pious; and an affectionate partitioning of power with his sons, and 
presently chronic civil war, and the destruction of Charlemagne's 
achievement.

The Byzantines were not so unlucky as this, but generals fought one another 
for the supreme place, and one emperor was dethroned and another murdered 
before stability was attained.
With the accession of Leo the Armenian in 813, the Iconoclastic trouble 
revived, for the new ruler was himself a passionate Iconoclast, and in a 
great campaign of more or less learned propaganda he strove to put the 
clock back sixty years and restore the regime of the council of 753. In the 
debates which the emperor arranged in order to give some prestige to his 
jejune ideals, the Catholics were easily victorious, and one of them, 
Theodore, abbot of the Stoudion monastery, carried the argument well beyond 
all hairsplitting about the meaning of Old Testament quotations, by 
asserting that these religious questions lay wholly outside the emperor's 
sphere of authority. The patriarch of Constantinople was forced out, for 
standing by the tradition, and in his place a married layman was installed-
-an unheard-of novelty. He faithfully carried out the emperor's orders, and 
called a council of bishops to sanctify the revolution. Here there were 
bloody scenes, when the Iconoclasts battered their Catholic opponents into 
insensibility. From the church the victims were taken off to the emperor's 
prisons or banished, and it was announced that the council had quashed the 
decrees of the General Council of 787.

In the persecution that now began, there appeared this novelty of a 
Catholic leader, Theodore, who strove to unite the Catholics around the 
twin ideas that the state has no rights in questions of belief, and that 
the survival of the true tradition of Christian belief lies in the union of 
Catholics with the Apostolic See of Rome. Never before had these truths 
been stated so explicitly by a cleric subject to the Byzantine power. 
Theodore now became the chief target of the emperor's fury, but everywhere 
bishops, priests, monks were arrested, tortured, banished. As so often 
happens in persecutions that are systematic and ruthless, thousands gave 
way--a shocking fact, of course, to the pious whose safety has never been 
threatened, and who see themselves as instinctively resisting tyrants to 
the bitter last. Then in 820 the Iconoclast emperor, Leo V, was murdered, 
and the general who (to save his own life) had organised the deed, took his 
place; this was Michael II (820-29).

There did not now follow a general reversal of religious policy, but the 
active persecution was halted. The new ruler hoped for a compromise that 
would satisfy both the Iconoclasts and their victims. And he strove to 
enlist, as his ally in the task of winning over the pope to these views, 
the man whom he now acknowledged as "Emperor of the Franks and the 
Lombards," Louis the Pious. The imagination easily takes fire as to what 
might have been the history of the papacy in the next two centuries, 
striving to maintain its authority in a world where there were now two such 
blocs of imperial authority--had they both endured--and where the 
Mediterranean sea was a Saracen lake.

Michael II died in 829, his problem unsolved, and the empire heaving 
uneasily with religious conflict. He was succeeded by his son Theophilus, a 
conscientious Iconoclast, under whom, for the best part of twelve years, 
the business of arrests, imprisonments, floggings and exiles took up once 
again. All to no real purpose--the mass of his subjects remained at heart 
faithful to the tradition Among these were the emperor's wife and all the 
womenfolk among his kinsmen.

When Theophilus died, prematurely in 842, leaving a child of three to 
succeed him, the great men of state--realising that Iconoclasm was a 
chronic irritant that no empire endlessly troubled by hostile neighbours 
could, during a long regency, endure--made common cause with the empress-
mother. Together they got rid of the main obstacle to internal peace, the 
Iconoclast patriarch, John the Grammarian; a council saw to all the 
formalities of a restoration of the General Council of 787; and in a great 
new liturgical feast--the Feast of Orthodoxy[2]--March 11, 843, the 
restoration of the cult of the images and of the saints was solemnly 
inaugurated. Never again did Iconoclasm lift its head.

The imperial church was now just a quarter of a century away from the 
eighth General Council, and in those twenty-five or six years no new heresy 
disturbed its peace. Crisis, when it came, would be largely a matter of 
personal rivalries, conflicting jurisdictions, and resentment at 
subordination; no longer a matter of self-willed imperial theologians, but 
of "turbulent priests"--and tactless handling of the situation generally, 
to say nothing of misunderstandings that were inevitable in an age when 
means of communication had all but disappeared, and Rome might wait twelve 
months before it received replies from Constantinople.[3]

The eighth General Council, Constantinople 869-70, was about the 
consequences of the expulsion of an intruded patriarch, Photius, and the 
restoration of the rightful patriarch, his predecessor, Ignatius. The 
situation, as the legates left the papal chancellery in the summer of 869, 
was complicated by the fact that the intruder had been in undisturbed 
possession for nine years; that, in a council called by him, in 867, he had 
excommunicated the pope, anathematized him and declared him deposed from 
his see; that he had had on his hands a serious quarrel with Rome of 
another sort altogether, about missionary activities among the Bulgarians; 
and, final complication, that the rightful patriarch, Ignatius, agreed with 
the usurper Photius about this last matter.

Ignatius, a man of seventy at the time of the council, was the youngest son 
of the emperor Michael I, dethroned in 813 by Leo the Armenian. He was then 
forced into a monastery, professed, ordained and as an abbot was a champion 
of the faith in the days of the Iconoclastic reaction. In 847 he became 
patriarch of Constantinople. It is regrettable to say it, but he was 
something of an episcopal czar, and he presently fell foul of the Roman See 
through his highhanded deposition of the Archbishop of Syracuse, for Rome 
refused to confirm this until it had heard the archbishop's side of the 
story. Then, while Ignatius was still making his stand, a palace revolution 
swept him away. The child successor of Theophilus the Iconoclast was now a 
young man of 19, Michael III (soon to be known as Michael the Drunkard ), 
and he had just succeeded in getting rid of the chief counsellor of his 
regency days, by murder, and of promoting in his place his own uncle, 
Bardas, a capable man but of foul morals, whom Ignatius had to forbid to 
receive Holy Communion until he amended his notorious life. It was this 
offence, and a refusal to force the empress-mother and her daughters into a 
convent, that was punished when, in November 858, Ignatius was summarily 
arrested and deported, and the announcement was made that he had returned 
to the monastic life.

Photius, who was now promoted to be patriarch, has a high place in the 
history of culture as a miraculously learned man, a scholar, one of the 
great bibliophiles, through whose works a great deal of the bygone 
classical antiquity has been preserved. He was, at this time, in his 
forties (perhaps), and in the service of the emperors he had climbed very 
high, as administrator and diplomatist. Between this accomplished 
statesman, whose life was a model of decorum, and the joint rulers of the 
empire there was nothing in common, of course, but Bardas (among other 
feats) had personally re-created the University of Constantinople, and 
could really appreciate the rare quality of the man he now set on the 
patriarch's throne.

Was he really the lawful patriarch? It is not certain that he was not. 
Ignatius resigned, but did he do so freely? These are questions still 
discussed, but the general verdict is that Ignatius executed an abdication 
that was valid, and it was not until this was done that Photius was 
consecrated-by that Archbishop of Syracuse whom Ignatius had endeavoured to 
depose.

Whatever the sentiments of Ignatius, his friends in the episcopate 
organised against Photius, declaring his election null and void, and 
drawing upon themselves the inevitable reprisals. At a council in 859 
Ignatius was declared deposed, and others also; bishop after bishop was 
soon toppling from his see. The great monasteries were divided.

Photius notified Rome of his election and consecration, in the customary 
manner, not hiding, of course, the fact that his predecessor's reign had 
been ended by an act of state. The letter found at Rome a newly elected 
pope, Nicholas I--who was soon to show himself, in event after event, one 
of the greatest popes of all. He was the last man ever to take such a story 
as the whole truth of the matter, without asking many pertinent questions. 
And so, inevitably, between these two first-class intelligences, there was 
conflict. Nicholas would not send the expected, due recognition until he 
had a report from Constantinople made by his own men. He sent two Italian 
bishops to find out the facts. The legation made the long journey, 
delivered the apostolic letters, to Photius and to the emperor, and then 
forgetting they had been sent as mere observers, joined with Photius at a 
second council before which Ignatius was brought to be judged (and deposed) 
once again--by (as it now seemed) the papal authority also. This was in 
April 861. The prisoner put his finger on the weak place in this parade. "I 
cannot be judged by you," he said to the legates, "for you are not sent 
here in order to judge me." And when the legates returned with their story 
of these events the pope broke them, and at a council of his own he quashed 
the proceedings of April 861. This was just one year later, and the pope 
dismissed Photius' plea that in the East the rule forbidding laymen to be 
elected to sees was a dead letter, by reminding him that what the pope 
decides, in the exercise of the primacy he has inherited from St. Peter, is 
final; even in matters of discipline there is no appeal possible from it. 
And then, some months later, there came in at last to Rome the appeal of 
Ignatius against his deposition--the whole story of events, from the 
disciplinary admonition about Holy Communion made to Bardas.

The sequel to this was yet another council at Rome, April 863, in 
possession, at last, of the whole tale. There was a general deposition of 
Photius and his friends, Gregory of Syracuse, the legates he had seduced 
from their duty, all those he had ordained or consecrated. Ignatius was 
proclaimed the lawful patriarch, and Photius ordered to surrender his see 
to him. All those bishops deprived and exiled in 859 for their loyalty to 
Ignatius were likewise restored. No more spectacular sentence had ever been 
laid upon the life of the splendid capital from this backwoods village in 
Italy that somehow managed to survive amid the ruins of the great days of 
long ago. And the pope turned from the problems of Byzantium to the 
conflict with the Carolingian king, Lothair II, who had taken to himself a 
second wife while the first was still living, "divorced," on his behalf, by 
complacent local bishops.

Upon this mighty sentence of Nicholas I there fell a long silence. Our next 
date, indeed, that of the Roman letter that answers Michael III's reply, is 
two and a half years later, September 28, 865. The emperor's reply is 
described in this as "a mass of blasphemies." What else it contained we do 
not know, for it has not been preserved. But something there was that 
brought about a change in the pope's line of action, for he now, as it 
were, reopened what he had settled, and again invited Photius (turned back 
into a layman in 863) and Ignatius to appear in Rome, personally or by 
proxy, to put their case. It was a deliberate gesture of conciliation: "We 
have moderated our sentence," the pope wrote, "and we have promised peace, 
and to restore him to communion with the church."

And now follows another long silence, not a word that has come down to us 
from Constantinople, or from Rome, for more than a year. It is broken--
i.e., for us--by the fierce blast of Pope Nicholas' letters of November 13, 
866. Evidently he has received no reply to his previous letter. The emperor 
is again severely castigated for the letter "full of blasphemies," and told 
that unless he makes amends by burning it publicly, the pope will do so "in 
the presence of all the bishops of the west." Did the emperor, and the 
patriarch, ever receive these last letters? We know nothing, except that 
the legates who brought them were stopped at the Byzantine frontier, whence 
they made their way to another band of legates sent by Nicholas to the 
court of the Bulgarian king, Boris. And with the mention of this personage 
we touch the hidden conflict between Rome and Constantinople which burned 
more fiercely than all the disputes about Photius and Ignatius.

This race of warlike barbarians had been, for a hundred and fifty years 
now, the great standing menace of the empire on its European side, as the 
Saracens were by sea and in Asia. The Bulgarians had long ago possessed 
themselves of the territory still called by their name--the ancient Roman 
province of Thrace--and they commanded what is now the southern part of 
Yugoslavia, well nigh to the Adriatic. At some undetermined date during 
these controversies of which Photius was the centre, Michael III had 
offered to make peace with the Bulgarians, on condition that their king, 
Boris, become a Christian. He agreed, and was baptised, the emperor 
standing godfather, and giving him his own name, Michael. Whereupon, from 
Constantinople, a flood of missionaries set out to convert the Bulgarians. 
How, it may be asked, could all this have offended the pope?

Very simply--too simply, perhaps--it may be stated that much of this 
territory had, in times gone by, been under the direct control of the 
popes, i.e., its bishops supervised as those in Italy, let us say, and not 
as in Syria or in Asia Minor. When the emperors, at various times, drew the 
line that marked where the western and eastern empires divided, they cut 
across territories directly controlled in spirituals by Rome. Thessalonica, 
for example, which had stood to Rome as Ravenna or Milan, was now a city 
that belonged to the empire whose capital was Constantinople. Would it not 
be logical that it one day passed to the direct spiritual control also of 
Constantinople? All through the fifth and sixth centuries this question 
sputtered continually between the two great ecclesiastical points--the 
question of eastern Illyricum, to speak technically. Then, as has been 
told, the Iconoclast emperor, Leo III, had formally annexed all these lands 
to the domain of the patriarch of Constantinople, as well as Sicily and 
Calabria. To the popes--whose rights never die, especially when they are 
seen in relation to the maintenance of their vital, divinely given primacy-
-the appearance of Byzantine missionaries in their own ancient Illyricum, 
was an affront, and much more than an affront. And while Nicholas I 
observed what was going on, there was suddenly a break between Boris and 
his new spiritual guide, Photius. And Boris turned to Rome. How tempting 
here, to wander away in the reverie that the Balkans never change, to speak 
of attraction to St. Petersburg or Vienna, to Moscow or London!

What Boris really wanted was a church under his own control--his own 
patriarch. Photius, of course, could not oblige him here, and he seems to 
have said his "No" without any of those pleasant accommodating offers that 
sometimes soften such inevitable refusals. Rome, also, could only say "No," 
but it offered him an archbishop. Rome too, Boris may have thought, was 
farther away than Byzantium--a good year or more away, once embarrassing 
questions developed.

More important than this kind of speculation is the fact that the neo-
Catholic king now was made aware that, in the Catholic Church, there are 
indeed many mansions; and that life in the Latin mansions differed 
considerably from life with the Byzantines. And the new Latin missionaries, 
now despatched by Nicholas I under one of his leading men--the cardinals of 
later centuries--namely Formosus, bishop of Porto,[4] were only too happy 
to point out where the superiority lay. Boris, thereupon, sent back the 
Greek missionaries to their chief, the patriarch Photius. As to the time 
when all this happened, Formosus and his band had formed part of the same 
cavalcade as the legates who took to Constantinople the strong threats of 
November 866 and, when stopped at the frontier, as has been told, it had 
been to Formosus at the court of Boris, that these legates betook 
themselves.

Need it be asked how the happenings in Bulgaria might seem--or be said to 
seem--to Photius and his emperor? The patriarch certainly rose to the 
occasion. In an encyclical letter to the bishops of the East, he set out 
all the points where Latin ways differed, and condemned them all roundly; 
and in one point he denounced the Latins for heresy--they believed that the 
Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and the Son, and they had corrupted 
the ancient creed by adding these last words to it.[5] Therefore a council 
would shortly be held at Constantinople to discuss these matters, to 
publish the joint condemnation of the churches of Constantinople, 
Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. This sentence would have its effect in 
the West also, for said Photius, people were getting tired of the tyranny 
"of him who now, at Rome, is in power."[5a]

The promised council met in the summer of 867, with a great attendance of 
bishops, and it: assented to Photius' sentence of deposition and 
excommunication against the pope. Also it called on the emperor in the West 
to carry out the sentence and expel the pope from Rome. This is the high-
water mark of the centuries-old restiveness of New Rome. But, whatever the 
impudence, or even malice, it is not a denunciation or denial of the Roman 
claim to be, by divine appointment, the head of all the churches.

Nicholas I never knew to what lengths Photius had gone. The pope had been 
ailing throughout the summer of 867, and on November 13 he died--long 
before the news about the sentence came to Rome.

And somewhere about the time the pope died, Photius had ceased to be 
patriarch. For a good two years now the young emperor had been fostering a 
mightier personality than himself, Basil, called the Macedonian. In April 
866 this man had brought about the murder of the all powerful Bardals--the 
creator of Photius. Now, on September 24, 867, he had Michael III murdered 
too, and took his place. In the general sweep-out of the old regime, 
Photius went with the rest, November 867. And since Ignatius was still 
available, and willing, he now reappeared on the patriarch's throne in St. 
Sophia. The new emperor wrote to inform the pope of these changes, and in 
this letter (December 11, 867 or 868) is the suggestion which developed 
into the General Council of 869-70.

As so often before, to solve the problems by a council was the emperor's 
idea, in the first place, and his solutions were not what was in the mind 
of the pope. Basil I, the successful murderer of his predecessor, meant to 
unite all parties, to do away with all possible reasons for "lawful" 
discontent, and in the ecclesiastical sphere to unite the rival parties of 
Ignatians and Photians. Hence, to say nothing at all about the councils 
which, on the very eve of the fall of Photius, had presumed to depose a 
pope. If in the new council these "old issues" could be passed over, and in 
the blessed presence of the Roman legates the factions be reconciled, how 
happy it would be for all.

But although the new pope, Adrian II, was not in stature a second Nicholas, 
he was none the less a pope. And, preparatory to the council proposed by 
the emperor, he did as Adrian I had done in 787 and Agatho in 680. He 
called his own council in Rome, June 10, 869, and the sole subject of the 
debates was precisely the Byzantine council of 867 that had anathematized 
his predecessor. The acta of this council were produced and ordered to be 
burned. The proceedings of the earlier Photius councils of 861 and 859 were 
likewise condemned. Photius himself was cast out of the church once more, 
with the special proviso that even should he repent he was never more to be 
anything but a lay member. The bishops who, at his impious council, had 
assisted in the excommunication of Pope Nicholas were to be forgiven upon 
repentance, but those consecrated by Photius were never again to perform 
any of the sacred rites. Finally the legates were appointed to represent 
Adrian II at the coming restoration council, and given their instructions, 
and letters of credence.

The question of Photius v. Ignatius had been solved, it will be seen, 
without any reference to their mutual rights and wrongs. The unprecedented 
outrage to the papacy had overshadowed all else. The legates' task was 
simple. The council was not to reopen past questions, but simply to confirm 
the decisions expressed by the pope in this council of June 869. In this 
coming council at Constantinople no bishop consecrated by Photius was to 
have a seat. Those consecrated previous to his usurpation in 858 were to be 
allowed a place, provided they signed the retractation brought by the 
legates--it was the formula drawn up by Pope Hormisdas three hundred and 
fifty years before,[6] for the reconciliation of the bishops after the 
schism of the patriarch Acacius. These were Adrian's express orders to 
Ignatius.

It is evidence how general had been the support of Photius that it was 
scarcely possible, on the arrival of the legates, to collect enough bishops 
to make up a council--bishops qualified, according to the orders of the 
pope, to sit in the council. Nor did the situation greatly improve in the 
six months the council lasted. At the first session, October 5, 869, there 
were present, besides the legates and Ignatius, no more than eighteen 
bishops. This and the next three sessions were spent in examining whether 
bishops who came were excluded altogether, because ordained by Photius or, 
if reconcilable, were willing to sign the formula of Hormisdas. By the 
eighth session (November 8) the numbers had crept up to 38, by the ninth 
(February 12, 870) to 65. At the final session (February 28) 102 were 
present, 37 of them metropolitans, i.e., archbishops, to whom other bishops 
were subject. There were ten sessions in all, and between the eighth and 
ninth a mysterious interval of three months.

The main event of the council was the trial, so to miscall it, of Photius 
and his associates for the crime of 867--the council, in the mind of the 
pope, had been called for nothing else. It occupied the fifth, sixth, and 
seventh sessions (October 5 to November 7). Despite the high officers of 
state whom, in accordance with the practice since 431, the emperor had sent 
to keep order in the council, the legates of the pope had their way: this 
was not to be a trial, but an acceptance of the decisions already reached 
at Rome. There was to be no debate on the rights and wrongs of Photius, or 
on the value of the arguments he had used to persuade the bishops to join 
him in his excommunication of the pope. Whatever Photius might have said, 
in other circumstances, as things were he made no attempt to defend himself 
or to explain. Still less was there, from him, a single sign of regret or 
repentance. He appeared on October 5, to hear the charges made against him, 
and on November 8 to be sentenced. And he said never a word. Others of his 
party tried a defence that greatly interested the emperor. Popes, they 
said, were not above the canon law, and history showed that some of their 
decisions had later been revoked. But the legates objected to these 
dissertations. What the bishop who spoke was summoned for, they said, was 
to say whether or not he would sign the formula--repudiate, that is to say, 
his schismatical conduct--and acknowledge he had done wrong. The legates 
held firm, and they had their way. And just a week after the condemnation 
of Photius, there was a solemn bonfire--as the pope had ordered--of all his 
antipapal writings and of the proceedings of his council of 867.

The real business of the eighth General Council was now over. All that 
remained was to put its achievement into shape for the record--to formulate 
it in twenty-seven canons.

There are two versions of these canons, the Greek and the Latin, of which 
the Latin set contains thirteen canons not included in the Greek. Ten of 
these thirteen deal with duties of metropolitans and bishops; their right 
to dispose of church property by sale or lease, for example; that 
metropolitans must not burden their suffragans with taxes, nor, giving 
themselves to public affairs, leave to their suffragans their spiritual 
tasks. Three canons deal with the choice of bishops. First, promotions in 
the see of Constantinople are to go to those already eminent by their long 
service to it, and not to outsiders, to men brought in after a great career 
as laymen. There is no mention of Photius in the canons, nor any need to 
mention him. Bishops appointed through intrigues, or imposed by arbitrary 
action of princes, are to be deposed, as men who have willed to receive the 
gift of God through human acts. No prince or lay authority is to have any 
part in the election of bishops, metropolitans, or patriarchs. The choice 
of these is the exclusive business of the college of bishops, who may, 
however, invite the ruler to assist in the choice of a suitable successor 
to the late occupant. Rulers who thrust themselves in uninvited fall under 
the anathema of the council.

There is a canon restating the right of appeal from the judgment of lower 
courts to higher, and another to the effect that it is sacrilege for any 
authority to take away property once given to the church and in its 
possession for thirty years. A lengthy canon speaks of the sacrilegious 
debauches of the late emperor, Michael III. Michael is not indeed named, 
but the phrases, "Certain laymen of senatorial rank, in the time of him who 
lately reigned," and "If any emperor," in the clause about punishment for 
future offenders of this sort leave no doubt who the chief culprit was. If, 
in the future, a patriarch of Constantinople does not suitably correct such 
offenders he is to be deposed.

Finally, there are two canons where Photius is named. The first recounts 
how, in the days before he was patriarch, presumably when he was the 
extremely successful university professor, Photius had gathered written 
promises of fidelity from these disciples, then learning from him the 
wisdom which in God's sight is folly. The council declares that these 
pledges are null, that they are to be collected and burned, that those who 
hold any such are to surrender them. The second canon declares that all 
those ordained or consecrated by Photius' two predecessors, Ignatius (847-
58) and Methodius (843-47), and who have taken Photius' part, and who have 
not joined with "this holy and universal council," are deposed, and 
suspended from all their priestly functions, "as, not long before, the most 
blessed pope Nicholas[7] decided." Nor are they ever to be restored to the 
catalogue of clergy even when they repent; no more is to be allowed them 
than to receive Holy Communion, and this as a most merciful concession on 
our part, say the bishops. For they do not deserve to be restored to their 
former state, even though they do penance, even though they plead with 
tears. They are like the detestable Esau.

Of the fourteen canons common to both texts, one is a general renewal of 
previous laws, one repeats the teaching about images of the council of 787, 
and a second dogmatic pronouncement condemns a new heretical theory, viz., 
that man has two souls. Three canons deal with bishops and their affairs: 
they are rigorously to observe the law about the intervals between 
ordination to the various ecclesiastical degrees, i.e., one year to be 
spent as lector, two as subdeacon, three as deacon, and four as priest. No 
one is to be made a bishop until at least ten years after his first step in 
the clerical life. The decree speaks plainly of some who, being of 
senatorial rank and after a career as laymen, become clerics solely to 
qualify for appointment as patriarch. "Especially do we forbid," say the 
bishops, the practice of ordaining without observance of these intervals, 
in cases where the person to be ordained is being promoted by the authority 
of the emperor. Plainly enough the circumstances of Photius' election are 
censured here, and his condemnation on this account by Pope Nicholas is 
endorsed. Lay princes, says another canon, are to give bishops the honour 
due to their office, and a third canon regulates the wearing of various 
episcopal insignia.

Next there is a group of canons that deal with the rights of the 
patriarchs--the first time this term occurs in the laws made by a general 
council. They are forbidden to exact from the clergy, or from the bishops 
subject to them, written pledges of fidelity. This has been the practice of 
orthodox and legitimate patriarchs of Constantinople, as well as of 
usurpers. It must now cease: and the canon states a severe penalty for the 
disobedient--deposition from their dignity. Patriarchs have the right to 
compel their metropolitans to attend the synods which they summon. It is 
not a valid reason for staying away that the metropolitan has held his own 
synod, nor that the patriarch's synod cannot be held unless the emperor is 
present. Temporal princes have no place in any synod, except in the General 
Councils of the Church. A further confirmation of the patriarch's position 
is the canon which declares that no one, not even a bishop, is to withdraw 
his obedience from his patriarch or cease to make public prayer for him 
(even though he thinks he knows the patriarch is guilty of some serious 
crime) until the case has been judged by a council and a sentence given 
against the patriarch.

Finally, with regard to patriarchs, the council enacts that no lay 
authority is to depose a patriarch, "and especially the most holy pope of 
the older Rome ... nor to get up movements against the pope, and to set in 
circulation writings that suggest he is guilty of serious misconduct, as 
Photius did recently, and as Dioscoros did long ago. Whoever shall again 
treat the pope with the impudent arrogance of a Photius or Dioscoros, 
heaping insults (whether in writing or otherwise) upon the see of Peter, 
prince of the Apostles, let him receive the same punishment as was given to 
them." If any lay prince "attempts to drive out the aforesaid Pope of the 
Apostolic See, or any other patriarch, let him be anathema." And if, in any 
General Council, there is a dispute about the holy, Roman Church, the 
matter must be discussed with all the respect and reverence due to it, and 
some solution found and put forth, "but let none presumptuously give 
sentence against the supreme pontiffs of the elder Rome."

Photius' name has at last appeared, in this summary. It may end with 
reference to the three canons directed explicitly against him. First we 
have a canon which enacts that, for all time, the sentences are to be 
observed which "the most blessed Pope Nicholas, whom we hold as the 
instrument of the Holy Spirit, and the most holy Pope Adrian his successor" 
have in their synods decreed for the preservation of the see of 
Constantinople, namely, about its "most holy patriarch Ignatius, and about 
the expulsion and condemnation of the latecomer[8] and usurper Photius." 
Secondly, it is decreed that Photius was never a bishop, is not now a 
bishop, and that none of those whom he ordained or consecrated are what he 
promoted them to be. The churches which he, or they, consecrated are to be 
reconsecrated. Finally, since it has appeared that Photius (after his just 
condemnation by Pope Nicholas for his wicked usurpation of the see of 
Constantinople, and for other wicked acts), picking up from the streets of 
the capital certain evil flatterers, whom he put forth as vicars of the 
three other patriarchs, began an action against Pope Nicholas and declared 
him to be anathema, the council now anathematizes the said Photius, as the 
man responsible for all this wickedness, and with him all his helpers and 
collaborators, according to the synodal law of that most courageous 
champion of true piety, the most holy Martin, pope of Rome.

The eighth General Council was now over. But the legates' troubles were not 
at an end. To the final meeting, the ceremonial closing of the great 
affair, there had been admitted as spectators an embassy from the Bulgarian 
king, that had just arrived in the capital. Boris had once more changed his 
mind. When the pope promised him an archbishop of his own, he asked that 
the legate Formosus should be appointed, and when it was answered that this 
could not be, for to translate a bishop from one see to another was 
unlawful, Boris' brief affection for Latin ways ended. The embassy had come 
to ask the emperor and Ignatius to take over the Bulgarian mission. The 
last act of the legates was to warn the restored Ignatius, under the most 
serious penalties, that he must do nothing of the kind, and to hand him a 
letter from the pope, which, in anticipation of this precise situation, had 
been sent with them. Ignatius, it is recorded, put the letter aside without 
opening it, and replied with an evasion. The legates set off on their 
journey to Rome, and the next news was that Ignatius had consecrated ten 
bishops for Bulgaria.

That the eighth General Council should leave a critical situation in its 
wake was nothing new in the history of these institutions, but the sequel, 
this time, was the strangest of all the series. More strangely still, it is 
only within the last thirty years--more than a thousand years after the 
events--that the true story of what happened has been discovered.

The legates of Pope Adrian II had a most adventurous return journey, in 
which they were shipwrecked, captured by pirates, and lost most of their 
papers. It was not until the June or July of 871 that they reached Rome. 
They found the pope already prepared for what they had to report, for the 
most cosmopolitan figure of the time, Anastasius (called the Librarian), 
who had been at Constantinople as ambassador for the emperor Louis II, had 
got to Rome months before, and he had brought with him a full report of the 
council's proceedings. On November 10, after hearing the legates, the pope 
wrote to the emperor a letter which was, in a way, an approbation of the 
work the council had done, but principally it was a list of complaints 
about the negligent way the legates had been treated, the attitude of 
Ignatius to the Bulgarians (with threats about this), and an 
excommunication for the Bulgarian king. As to the emperor's plan to 
reconcile "Photians" and "Ignatians," the pope declared that, unless an 
enquiry held at Rome brought out some new evidence, the decisions already 
arrived at must stand. And there the matter remained for the next four or 
five years.

Meanwhile (December 14, 872) Adrian II died, and was succeeded by a still 
more resolute personage, John VIII, whose first care was to renew the 
demands about Bulgaria, and to remind Ignatius that it was only on his 
promise to withdraw the Greek missionaries that the pope had restored him 
to his see. Unless he now made good his promises, he would be deposed. John 
VIII's mind was very clear about this problem. It was not the matter of 
prestige that moved him, but the obvious danger that if the new convert 
nation was so closely related to the Byzantine patriarch, it would be 
everlastingly in danger of schism and heresy. The pope said this 
explicitly.

Finally, in April 878, the patience of the pope gave out before the endless 
delays of Ignatius, and two legates were despatched to Constantinople to 
give him a final admonition. If within thirty days of this he had not 
acted, the legates were to excommunicate him, and next to depose him. When 
the legates arrived, some time in the summer of that same year, they learnt 
that Ignatius had been dead nearly a year, dead six months already when 
John VIII was drafting this sentence against him. Such are the hazards of 
international relations, in the centuries when no letter goes more quickly 
than a post horse can run, and when, with the winter, all transport ceases 
on the stormy Adriatic. What, no doubt, astonished the legates even more 
than the news about Ignatius was that it was to Photius that they were 
presented. Without the least trouble in the world, as though indeed he had 
been coadjutor cum iure successionis,[9] Photius had immediately taken 
Ignatius' place--to the almost entire satisfaction of the whole 
patriarchate.

It seems that, for some years now, Ignatius and he had been on the best of 
terms, both collaborating wholeheartedly with the policy of the emperor 
Basil, "No religious faction fighting, at all costs." The legates just did 
not know what to do, save to report these strange events to their distant 
master and await what new instructions he chose to send.

In the framing of these papal directions, political considerations played 
an important part. One of the tasks for which the legates were sent, as 
well as the Bulgarian trouble, was to put to Basil the pope's urgent plea 
that he would do something to halt the seemingly impending Mohammedan 
conquest of Italy. Already the Saracens were masters of Sicily and of 
various places on the mainland. The wretched remnants of the house of 
Charlemagne, the potentates whom all mankind mocked as Charles the Fat, and 
Charles the Bald, "transient embarrassed phantoms" indeed, could do nothing 
but hasten the steady political and social decomposition. Constantinople, 
or so the pope thought, was the only hope. When Basil's embassy of the 
spring of 879 arrived in Rome to negotiate the peaceful recognition of the 
fait accompli of Photius, they were certainly in a strong position.

The outcome was a second council at Constantinople, to which 383 bishops 
came, with Photius as the central figure--but where he presided, and to 
which the presence of three papal legates gave the full outward sign of the 
pope's approval. John VIII had accepted the fait accompli, and also the 
emperor's plea that "bygones be bygones." Photius was to acknowledge his 
great crime, the excommunication of the pope in 867, and at the new council 
express his sorrow. And the pope agreed to quash all that the eighth 
General Council had enacted against Photius. The remnants of anti-Photians, 
at Constantinople and elsewhere, were now told by the pope that he was 
their lawful patriarch, and that they were not to oppose him in the name of 
the council of 869, for the former things had passed away. All things were, 
indeed, made new; for, said the pope, the Apostolic See that can impose 
such sentences can also remove them. And this it had done. And to mark the 
pope's satisfaction, the legates at the council presented the patriarch 
with a magnificent set of patriarchal insignia, the gift of John VIII.

Of what happened in the next ten years or so this is not the place to 
write. This is no more than the story of the eighth General Council, and 
with a reference to the papal act cancelling the council's principal work, 
a bare ten years after it had been achieved, the story may end. The reader 
will notice that it ends as it began--a matter of personalities in 
conflict, and not ideas, still less doctrines.

NOTES

1. Finlay, 79.

2. Still one of great annual feast days in the church presided over by the 
patriarch of Constantinople, and its daughter churches.

3. Cf. Amann, 475, n 4, on "la lenteur des communications entre Rome et 
Constantinople. Cette lenteur explique bien des choses."

4. This is the Formosus who will, thirty years later, be pope, and the 
subject (after death) of the most revolting action of all these barbarous 
centuries fished out of his tomb, robed and enthroned while a council sat 
in judgment on him.

5. In Latin, Filioque.

5a. Barry, no. 59A, prints a translation of Photius' letter.

6. See p. 100 supra. Amann, 485, n. 3, notes that in all this the Roman 
Curia followed very carefully the precedent of 519.

7. Vere, Adrian II (867-72), whose command to the council this was.

8. Neophyte, is the exact word used, whose literal meaning is "newly 
enlightened," a common expression in ecclesiastical literature for the 
newly baptised. The reference here is not to baptism, but holy orders--the 
rapid translation, at so late a time in life, of the Secretary of State 
into the Patriarch.

9. A happy "mot" I steal from the great work of Father Francis Dvornik. See 
Appendix.


CHAPTER 9. The First General Council of the Lateran, 1123

In the five hundred and fifty or so years between the first of the General 
Councils and that whose history has just been told, there has never been 
more than 130 years without a General Council being summoned.[1] But 
between this eighth of 869-70 and that we are now to consider, there 
stretches an interval almost twice as long--time enough for some revolution 
to have called a new world into being, and for this new world to have 
forgotten that the old had ever been; an interval slightly greater than 
that which separates Luther from Napoleon, or Elizabeth II from Queen Anne. 
In that long space, 870--1123, revolution there had been, and the Catholic 
Church greatly affected thereby. The General Council of 1123 is, in fact, a 
kind of victory celebration, proclaiming unmistakably that the Church has 
survived the revolution, has pulled itself clear of the all but fatal 
dangers inseparable from the long generations of social crisis. It is as 
part of the history of this age when "the Church was at the mercy of the 
lay lords,"[2] that the First General Council of the Lateran must be 
described, or we shall be left wondering what there was, in its achievement 
of a score of routine legal enactments, to cause its memory to survive 
where so much else has perished.

First, the political system that historians call the empire of Charlemagne 
had crashed--it was all but over by 870--leaving Italy, France, and Germany 
a welter of petty states with the strongest man's will everywhere law. From 
the north there had then descended upon this Christendom in ruins the 
fierce pirate pagans of Scandinavia; from the east came the no less 
aggressive pagan Slavs and Magyars; to the south the Mohammedans were all-
powerful and the Mediterranean sea a Saracen lake. The siege lasted through 
a good hundred years and more, that "century of iron" (888-987) when it 
really seemed as though the last remnants of civilised ways must be 
engulfed in these brutal and barbaric tides. A great warrior king emerges 
in Germany, Otto I (936-72), around whom the resistance begins to make a 
permanent gain, and the anarchy subsides; and a generation later the same 
good fortune comes in the West with the appearance of Hugh Capet, king of 
the French from 987.

In these afflicted generations nothing suffers so horribly as religion--the 
delicate, barely adolescent Christianity of the still semi-barbarous 
Carolingian times. Here, too, the will of the local strong man--the 
chieftain of the local resistance in the long fight with invaders, and the 
most powerful of the local petty kinglets--is law. The church system, above 
all the appointments to abbeys and sees, these potentates, half-hero, half-
scoundrel, take to themselves. Pillage, murder, general brutality of 
living--the prelates appointed by such princes are too often 
indistinguishable from the baronage whence they are taken.

And, of all the sees of Christendom, it is Rome that provides the most 
spectacular of the horrors, where for a hundred years and more the savage 
barons of the surrounding countryside intermittently make themselves 
master, and elect, depose, restore, depose again, and murder the popes 
according to their own political plans. And some of these popes are as 
wicked as their masters. These are the classic "bad popes" indeed, and even 
stripped of the customary rhetorical decoration the story of what they did 
is truly terrible.

But the tide of goodness that had gone so far out that it seemed to have 
gone forever turned at last. The northmen were gradually converted, and the 
Magyars and the Slavs. The chaos of petty rulers began to give way to the 
better ordered rule of a dozen or so greater lords, dukes, and what not, 
vassals of the new kings of France and Germany--and the German king being, 
since Otto I, the emperor, the Roman Emperor, either in lawful claim or by 
the accomplished fact of papal acceptance and coronation, the better day 
had arrived for Italy too.

It was through German kings who were the Roman Emperor that the Roman See 
was delivered from its tyrants; on two occasions very notably, in 963 and 
again in 1046. But the good German who appointed good bishops and abbots 
wherever he really was master, and who now, 1046-56,[3] himself appointed a 
succession of good German popes--this good emperor was for the good popes 
the beginning of a new problem, and good men, at Rome too, were divided by 
it: the problem how the Church could profit by the unlooked-for phenomenon 
of emperors and kings who were good men and yet manage to be independent of 
them in the control of church life, especially in the vital business of the 
choice of its rulers, the bishops, and of its supreme ruler the pope.

The solution of that problem took years to work out. It took still longer 
to win acceptance for it from the Catholic kings. The ninth General 
Council, with which this chapter is concerned, has been described very 
truly as "the conclusion and the synthesis of what a whole half century of 
hard struggle had brought about."[4]

The two most flagrant, universally visible evils that afflicted religious 
life as these new-style popes began their great task were simony and 
clerical immorality. The kings and princes were taking money (or lands or 
property) as the price of appointing a man to be bishop or abbot; the 
bishop or abbot was taking money, etc., from men who wished to be ordained, 
and from priests who wanted parishes, canonries, and so forth; the priests, 
in their turn, were only ministering for a price; such is simony, and 
church life, by the testimony of every writer, every reformer, every saint 
of these times, was saturated with the poison, and had been so for 
generations. Clerical immorality: it had been, from very early times 
indeed, the rule in the Latin church (though not in the East) that no 
married man could receive Holy Orders, and that no man in Holy Orders could 
marry, i.e., no subdeacon, deacon, priest. This ancient rule had suffered 
heavily in the transformation of social life from a system where cities 
dominated, with systematic education, easy supervision, and a good 
tradition of manners, to a rural economy--the life of the backwoods--where 
"civilisation" went little further than the individual man's ability to 
fend for himself. With bishops more baron than Father-in-God, and priests 
as rude as the illiterate serfs to whom they ministered, such a refinement 
of ecclesiastical discipline as the mystic celibacy was exposed to 
altogether unheard-of losses.

From the time when the first "Barbarian" kings became Catholics, the sixth 
century Franks, semi-Catholics in all but their good intentions, church 
life suffered an increasing brutalisation. St. Gregory of Tours, who saw it 
all, has described it in pages that are a classic collection of horror 
stories. Gradually, through the seventh and eighth centuries, matters 
improved. The genius of Charlemagne offered, for a brief space, the 
illusion that the bad times had gone forever. With the breakup of his 
system, and the new most terrible invasion of all, the devils returned--but 
sevenfold. One of the devils was the bad-living priest. And here we need to 
distinguish, as we look at the problem before the reforming pope or bishop. 
It was the law that the man in Holy Orders must not marry. But if he did 
so--and if there was no impediment, say of kinship--the marriage was a real 
marriage. He did wrong in marrying, for marriage was most strictly 
forbidden him. But he and the woman he married were man and wife. There was 
also the matter of the priest living with someone to whom he was not 
married. And who was to say whether the pair living in the church house 
were of one kind or the other--clerical marriages being, inevitably, 
clandestine affairs, as often as not without a witness? The scandal to the 
faithful people was as bad in the one case as in the other--where scandal 
was given.

That the scandal was less, in these backwoods, than we might at first 
suppose seems to be suggested from the incredibly violent language which 
the reformers used with regard to these unfortunates, lurid and horrific to 
a degree; from the universality of the evil in every country of 
Christendom; and from the long campaign of a century and more, when so many 
good men needed to give so much of their lives to the restoration of the 
Church's normal ideal of clerical continency. That it was precisely this 
restoration of an ideal that moved them, their very exhortations show; but 
there was, too, a relation between clerical marriage and the appointments 
system--another main object of the reformers' zeal--which must be 
mentioned, that is to say, the tendency for the priest's son to become a 
priest, forming a clerical caste within the Church; and for the ordained 
son to take over his father's benefice, church property becoming a family 
endowment--never, of course, promising such a crop of evil as when the 
benefice was a see. And there were efforts in these tenth and eleventh 
centuries to make some of the greatest sees hereditary.

The third of the chronic evils which the reformers fought--lay investiture, 
as it was called--was not, at first, seen by all of them as a thing evil in 
itself, or even as the main reason why the other evils had been impossible 
to reform. "Investiture," the word, signifies pretty much what we who have 
been to college or who belong to a fraternal order of one kind or another 
mean by "initiation"--the becoming something one was not before; the 
acquirement of a new status, with its rights and duties, together with the 
ritual by which this is acquired, and which symbolises what is acquired. 
The feudal lord proposes to make over his manor of Beauseigneur--land, 
buildings, village, mill, serfs, woods, streams, fish, game, hunting--to 
one Smith, or Le Marechal. Smith agrees and, kneeling before his 
benefactor, becomes his "man," i.e., swears to be faithful to him, to be at 
his side in all disputes, and to render the customary services of a vassal. 
The lord, in visible sign of the grant, then hands Smith maybe a piece of 
turf, or a stick. Smith is now possessed of his fief--the manor aforesaid--
and has become a lord in his turn, by virtue of the ceremony of 
investiture. Such pacts, their oaths and their investitures, were going on 
daily in hundreds of places throughout western Europe, for centuries before 
the grace of God raised up our ecclesiastical reformers and for centuries 
after they had passed away. Here was the basis of all social organisation--
the sworn relation of lord and vassal.

By the time our reformers were born, this was also, pretty universally, the 
relation of the ecclesiastical ruler to the temporal prince--to the state, 
we should like to say, except for the risk of a score of misunderstandings 
generated by the anachronistic term. New bishops and abbots, before any 
ceremony took place regarding them in church, knelt before their prince, 
made their oath, and were then invested--the prince putting on a finger of 
their right hand the episcopal ring, and into their left hand the episcopal 
crozier. Smith was now bishop, of Chartres, or of Mainz, or of Winchester. 
And then he went into his cathedral where his metropolitan, or some other 
bishop, performed the sacred rite of consecration, the final step in the 
sacrament called Order. And the original, and permanently influential, 
reason for this royal investiture was the same reason as of all such--these 
prelates held, "of the king," vast lordships, and it was vital to the 
stability of the country that the king be assured of the competence and the 
loyalty of the prelates to whom they were granted. And it had come to be, 
by long practice, a matter of course that it was the king who actually 
chose, with finality, who should be bishop or abbot--and, by long abuse, 
how much the cleric should pay for the favour. Not all kings were bad men--
Henry III, the father of the emperor whom Gregory VII fought so hard, was 
an excellent man, an appointer of good bishops (and popes); so too was 
William the Conqueror, held almost in veneration apud Curiam Romanam if 
only for this, that he never in Normandy or in England sold an 
ecclesiastical appointment, in all his forty years of rule. In lay 
investiture, however, the stricter school of the reformers discerned the 
root of all the evils. They decreed its abolition, a root and branch 
extirpation. The ninth General Council was the confirmation of their 
victory.

The great reform began at Rome itself, and the primary agent was the 
emperor Henry III (1039-56). At the Council of Sutri (1046) he despatched 
all three rival "popes," and appointed one of his own good German bishops, 
Clement II. This pope soon died, and his successor also, and then in 1049 
came the emperor's third nomination, Bruno, bishop of Toul, who took the 
name Leo IX, and became in his life, his outlook and methods, the pattern 
for all the good men that were to follow.

The method was simplicity itself, the summoning in place after place of 
councils of the local bishops, presided over by a trusted ecclesiastic sent 
from Rome, clad with all the fullness of the pope's powers. At these 
councils all that was wrong locally was investigated, the bishops were 
reminded of the kind of men they were supposed to be, indeed obliged to be 
by God's law, the old regulations about simony and clerical continency were 
renewed, incorrigible prelates were deposed, and a general revival of 
religious life inaugurated. And, most prominently, the appeal of the legate 
was constant to the reality that he spoke with the authority of him who was 
the successor of Blessed Peter, and must therefore be obeyed 
unquestioningly. Unpalatable as the reminder must have been to the 
recalcitrant, unwelcome as the resurrection of this too long ignored 
fundamental fact of life may have been--and miserable the mere lip service 
rendered it--nowhere was it challenged. With Leo IX it was the pope himself 
who thus "went on circuit," through Italy and in France and in Germany. And 
other popes were no less constantly "on the road" through the seventy years 
that followed, very notably Alexander II, Urban II, Pascal II, Honorius II, 
all of whom had been previously active for years in this conciliar movement 
as papal legates in one country or another.

This is indeed the true age of the councils--the church council in its 
traditional sense, viz., a gathering of the local bishops to plan a common 
action in furtherance of religious life; the tradition that went back, 
through the Eastern churches, so much older in organisation than the West, 
to the days of Constantine and even before then. That three generations of 
such constant, and successful, conciliar action should give rise sooner or 
later to a revival of the idea of a General Council, and then to the 
practice of summoning these fairly regularly, was very natural. The break 
of 250 years between the eighth and the ninth of the General Councils is 
followed by a similar period in which there are no fewer than six General 
Councils.

To restore the past in black and white--which is what all historical 
summaries must do--is to risk, at every step, not only serious 
misrepresentation, but also an unintelligible puzzle for the reader where, 
continually, the second chapter seems either to be about a different 
subject from the first, or to be based on the assumption that there never 
was a first. The story of the investiture controversy is extremely 
complicated, and the increasing attention given in the last fifty years to 
the vast polemical literature of the time, to the developing Canon Law 
treatises, and then to restudy the official documents and the 
correspondence in the light of the new knowledge, all this has led to a new 
representation of the story--to say nothing of the effect of the new type 
of scholar who is only interested in the event for its own sake.

It has always been known that the Concordat of Worms of 1122, in which pope 
and emperor finally came to an agreement, was a compromise. And those of us 
whose initiation into these mysteries antedates the arrival on the scene of 
the re-creating genius of Augustin Fliche, can recall the miserable figure 
poor Calixtus II was made to cut (for his "signing" the concordat), by the 
side of such stalwarts as Gregory VII and the Cardinal Humbert. Nous avons 
change tout cela. The reformers started out united in zeal, devoted, to the 
very last, to ends that were purely spiritual, men of prayer all the time. 
But not all were equally clearheaded as to the theology they made use of, 
or the implication of the sacred party cries. Not all had, in the requisite 
degree, what is called a political sense, the gift to do the right thing in 
the right way, to distinguish the essential from the rest, and to avoid 
stressing equally the essential and nonessential in their thesis. The first 
pioneers of the ideas that finally triumphed at Worms were not always 
welcome to the chiefs of staff. The war was on, and against bad men, and it 
was the cause of Christ against these, and after twenty years of suffering 
and loss it was no doubt hard to be asked to reconsider any part of one's 
case!

The war against the princes' control of ecclesiastical appointments began 
in the principal see of all, at Rome itself. It was the emperor who had put 
an end to the bad popes, and now the Roman clergy themselves put an end to 
the emperor's hold on papal elections. When Pope Victor II died, in 1057, 
their leaders did not wait for any news of what the German overlord 
proposed, but straightway, within four days, elected a pope, the cardinal 
who was abbot of Monte Cassino, Frederick of Lorraine, Stephen IX. And when 
Stephen died, very suddenly, seven months later, the new pope, Nicholas II, 
again was not the mere nominee of the court. This new pope was hardly 
installed before he settled, once and for all, the legitimate manner of 
choosing popes. This was the law enacted in a council at the Lateran in 
1050, which restricted the election to the cardinals.[4a] To them alone it 
belongs, henceforth, to elect the pope, and a majority of their votes is 
essential and sufficient. The law makes no reference whatever to the 
emperor's approval or confirmation.

The first pope elected under the new system was Alexander II (1061), the 
second was Hildebrand, Gregory VII, in 1073. It was he who, two years 
later, issued the challenge to the whole system of lay investiture, the act 
that started the long war whose end the General Council of 1123 celebrates. 
This challenge was the prohibition, in the Lateran Synod of 1075, to clergy 
of all ranks to accept an ecclesiastical appointment from the hands of a 
layman. If a bishop, for the future, has accepted a bishopric from the 
prince, the archbishop is not to give him consecration. Gregory VII makes 
no distinction between the bishopric considered as a cure of souls and as a 
feudal status. He has nothing to say of any claims the prince may make to 
share in the appointment because of the temporal possessions of the see. 
These are church property, given to the bishopric for the sake of God's 
poor, something sacred therefore. The bishopric is considered as a unity, 
and since it is a sacred unity the state must not touch it in any way. Free 
election of a good man by the lawful electors, confirmation of the election 
and sacramental consecration by the archbishop--this is required, and is 
all that is required.

The law does not provide penalties for offending princes. It is really no 
more than a restatement of the primitive ideal, the ideal for all future 
development. Nor did the pope send official notification of the law, as a 
kind of warning or threat, to the various kings. And in practice, his 
application of the law varied considerably, according as the abuses it was 
designed to check were more frequent or less, or non-existent. What the 
pope was fighting was simony, and the only way (in some places) to put an 
end to this was to end all connection of the prince and ecclesiastical 
appointments. William of Normandy, a wholehearted supporter of the reform, 
with Lanfranc, the model archbishop of the century, at Canterbury, Gregory 
VII left wholly untroubled. Even for the German sees of the emperor, Henry 
IV,[5] a bad ruler, the pope did not take the aggressive line to which the 
root and branch declaration might have seemed the prelude. It was with the 
great sees of northern Italy, that looked to Henry as patron, and 
especially Milan, that the trouble began.

At Milan the bad men organised and fought back, supported by the emperor, 
and the good were extremely militant also. Whence a long history of rioting 
and, in 1075, half the city burned down, and the cathedral with it. The 
great events now follow rapidly: the emperor procuring the consecration of 
his nominee as archbishop (against the pope's express prohibition); the 
pope's severe reproof; the emperor's bishops, in synod, depose the 
pope[5a]; and the pope replies with a sentence deposing the emperor, an act 
without any precedent in history. The extremes had at last collided. The 
emperor's bishops elected a new, carefully chosen, imperially minded 
"pope"--the lately deposed archbishop of Ravenna; the emperor came with an 
army to instal him in St. Peter's; and for years Gregory VII was besieged 
in Sant'Angelo. The Normans rescued him, in the end, and twelve months 
later he died, an exile (May 25,1085), his soul and purpose unshaken. For 
three years the Holy See remained effectively vacant.

War, imprisonment, exile--we are seeing in operation, yet once again, the 
old tactics of the Catholic tyrant: Constantius against St. Athanasius, 
Constantine IV against St. Martin I, Justinian against Pope Vigilius, Leo 
III (had he been able) against Gregory II; no repudiation of the spiritual, 
but violence until the spiritual consent to be an instrument of the 
tyrant's government. And what the present tyrant, Henry IV, desires is a 
continuance of the bad system where he is absolute master of the Church, 
free to choose whom he will for bishops, and to fix their price, what time 
the revival of religion may take its chance.

At the election of Gregory VII's first effective successor, Urban II, in 
1088, the end of the war is thirty years away and more--years in which 
popes could make serious mistakes in what they said and what they did: the 
costly, mischievous vacillation of the far from clearheaded Pascal II 
(1099-1118), for example, who moved from one extreme position to its very 
opposite. Meanwhile the trouble in France and in England had been ended by 
a logical, agreed solution where the true interests of both Church and 
State were protected, though the condemned investiture ceremony was given 
up. It was from the French intelligence that the ultimate solution came for 
the conflict with Germany, from the theologico-legal genius of Ivo, bishop 
of Chartres, and the realist sense of the newly elected French pope, Guy, 
archbishop of Vienne, Calixtus II (1119-24), a one-time extremist, and the 
bitterest of all the critics of his predecessor Pascal II, when that pope 
(under pressure) made his fatal wholesale surrender.

Ivo of Chartres (1035-1115) and his pupils drew attention to the fact that 
simony is not heresy, and that no one had ever regarded the royal 
investiture as a sacrament. He stressed the reality of the distinction 
between the bishop's religious authority and powers and his temporal 
rights, duties, and properties; in all that belonged to the feudal side of 
the bishopric the king had rights, in what belonged to the spiritual side 
the king could have no right at all. It was this way of looking at the 
embittered problem which had produced the pact of 1106 that had ended the 
conflict in England between Henry I and his archbishop St. Anselm.

This new pope was a noble, from Burgundy, and kin to the emperor.[6] He had 
been archbishop of Vienne for thirty years and in all that time a leading 
reformer. He took up the great task where his short-lived predecessor, the 
strong-minded but conciliatory Gelasius II,[7] had left it, who had died at 
Cluny, on his way to a meeting with the French king. The first appearance 
of Calixtus II as pope was at a great council of the bishops of the south 
of France at Toulouse. A second council was summoned to meet at Reims in 
October, 1119. Meanwhile, the pope and the king of France met, and the 
emperor called a meeting of the German princes at Mainz, at their request, 
to consider how best to end the long civil war, and make a lasting peace 
with the Church. To this meeting came the messengers with the official news 
of the new pope's election, and the invitation to the German bishops to 
take part in the council at Reims. The emperor and the princes decided to 
await the council before making any decisions.

The pope, encouraged by these unusual signs of grace, sent two French 
prelates to the emperor, who could explain to him how, in France, the king 
enjoyed full feudal rights over the bishops and abbots as vassals without 
any need of an investiture ceremony. The emperor replied that he asked no 
more than this. Whereupon the pope sent a delegation with greater powers, 
two of his cardinals. An agreement was reached, formulae found, and a 
meeting arranged between pope and emperor at which both would sign. The 
emperor was now willing to say, explicitly, "For the love of God and St. 
Peter and of the lord pope Calixtus, I give up the whole system of 
investiture, so far as concerns the Church." And now came a hitch, owing to 
the pope's adding new conditions on the eve of the meeting, refusing to 
allow the emperor additional time to study these and, although the two men 
were actually on the ground, so to speak, refusing to meet him. More, the 
pope was so irritated that the emperor had failed to submit, that he 
renewed the excommunication.

What there was, in all this, besides personal temperament is not known. But 
the incident occurred while the great council was in session at Reims, with 
Calixtus presiding, seventy-six bishops from France, Germany, England, and 
Spain. It was between sessions of the council that he blundered into the 
new rupture, and it is recorded that when he returned from the adventure he 
was too worn out to proceed with the council business and took to his bed. 
Maybe the thought possessed the pope that the grim and treacherous emperor 
was about to repeat the treatment meted out to Pascal II, eight years 
before, whom this emperor had carried off a prisoner, and forced to sign 
away his cause.

It was only after another two years of war that the two parties came 
together again, when at a peace conference in Germany the princes asked the 
pope to free the emperor from the excommunication, and to summon a General 
Council, "where the Holy Spirit could solve those problems that were beyond 
the skill of men" (September 1121). The pope now sent to his imperial 
kinsman a kindly letter, the gist of which is the phrase, "Let each of us 
be content with his own office, and those who should show justice towards 
all mankind no longer strive ambitiously to pillage each other."

It was at Worms that the envoys of these high contracting parties met, and 
on September 23, 1122, they produced the two statements, papal and 
imperial, which, together, constitute the Concordat of Worms. The war about 
investitures was over, after forty-seven years.

At Worms the emperor, "out of the love of God and of the holy Roman 
church," said explicitly, "I give up ... all investiture with ring and 
crozier and I promise that in all the sees of the realm and of the empire 
elections and consecrations shall be free. I restore to the holy Roman 
church the properties and temporal rights [regalia] of blessed Peter which 
have been taken away since the beginning of this quarrel, whether in my 
father's time or in my own.... I guarantee true peace to the pope Calixtus, 
to the holy Roman church and to all those who took that side...."

The pope, for his part, "I Calixtus, the bishop, servant of the servants of 
God grant to you Henry, my dear son, by the grace of God emperor of the 
Romans, Augustus, that the election of bishops and abbots of the German 
kingdoms shall take place in your presence, without simony and without 
force ... that the personage elected shall receive from you his regalia by 
the [touch of the] sceptre, and shall fulfil all those duties to which he 
is bound in your regard by the law. As to other parts of the empire, the 
bishop being consecrated, shall receive his regalia ... by the sceptre, 
within six months and that he shall fulfil all those duties [etc., as 
above].... I guarantee true peace to you and to those who belonged to your 
party in this quarrel."

The documents were duly signed, the cardinal bishop of Ostia--the pope's 
chief agent in all this--sang the mass, the emperor was given the kiss of 
peace and received Holy Communion. The usual ceremonies of humiliating 
public submission were, for once, dispensed with.

The great act had its imperfections--a certain vagueness in important 
matters, the king's share in the election for example. There was room for 
new troubles to grow out of it. But the great principle was safe that the 
king had not what he had claimed was his lawful right, the choice and 
appointment of his people's spiritual rulers and teachers. As to the 
settlement itself, as a whole, we may agree with the leading authority, "It 
was the common sense solution."[8]

This General Council of 1123 was, beyond a doubt, the grandest spectacle 
Rome, and the whole West, had seen for hundreds of years. Bishops and 
abbots together were reckoned at something like a thousand, there was a 
host of lesser ecclesiastics, and the vast train of knights, soldiers, and 
other attendants of these ecclesiastical lords, as well as of the lay 
notabilities who attended. So much we learn from the contemporary 
chroniclers. As to the proceedings of the council, what method was adopted 
for proposing new laws, for discussing them, for voting--of all this we 
know nothing at all, for the official proceedings disappeared long before 
the time when there was such a thing as posterity interested in the past. 
It is not even certain whether there were two or three public sessions. But 
the council opened on the third Sunday of Lent, March 18, 1123, in the 
Lateran Basilica, and the final session took place either on March 27 or 
April 6. The emperor had been invited to send representatives, and one of 
the acts of the council was the ratification of the concordat. The canons 
promulgated at the council, which cover all the social and religious 
problems of the day, are hardly of a nature to provoke discussion--
remedies, sternly stated in the shape of prohibitions, for the various 
moral ills of public and private life. If Calixtus II adopted the simple 
method of announcing these canons, and asking the assembly to assent, it 
would be no more than what a series of popes and their legates had been 
doing, in one country after another, at all the councils of the last 
seventy-five years. There was nothing to surprise or provoke the bishops of 
that generation in thus following the practice that had been the means of 
so much improvement, in morals and in religious life. Calixtus II was no 
despot ordering submission to novelties now decreed, but the victorious 
leader of the episcopate, and the representative of other leaders now 
departed, thanks to whose intelligence and fortitude the episcopate 
everywhere had been liberated from the thrall of tyrants indeed, its 
dignity restored and its spiritual prestige renewed.

The twenty-two canons listed as the legislation of the council of 1123 are 
a curiously mixed collection. They indiscriminately treat of general 
matters and local matters; there are permanent regulations mixed up with 
temporary, set out in no kind of order; and almost all of them are 
repetitions of canons enacted in the various papally directed councils of 
the previous thirty years. With regard to the long fight against the lay 
lords' control, simony is again condemned, bishops not lawfully elected are 
not to be consecrated, laymen are not to hold or control church property, 
parish priests the bishop alone can appoint, they are not to take parishes 
as a layman's gift, the ordinations performed by the antipopes (and their 
transfers of church property) are declared null. A special canon renews the 
indulgence given to all who assist the crusade, and renews the Church's 
protection, with the sanction of excommunication, of the absent crusader's 
property. There is a law to excommunicate coiners of false money, and also 
(a reflection of the chronic social disorder) the brigands who molest 
pilgrims. A general rule is made about the new practice called "The Truce 
of God"--a practice designed to lessen, for the ordinary man, the horrors 
of the never ceasing wars between the local lords. By Urban II's law made 
at the council of Clermont in 1095, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were the 
only days on which fighting was lawful, and this only between Trinity 
Sunday and Advent. The rule of 1123 only deals with the bishop's duty to 
excommunicate those who violate the truce. There are two canons about 
clerical marriage. The first (canon 3) renews the ancient law that those in 
Holy Orders must not marry. The second (canon 21) repeats this in so many 
words and adds that "marriages already contracted by such persons are to be 
broken, and the parties bound to penance."[9]

This law--which may not be a law of the ninth General Council at all, but a 
regulation of one of Urban II's provincial councils that appears in the 
list of 1123 by some confusion--is often regarded as the first beginning of 
the new rule in these matters that makes the contracting of marriage 
impossible for clerics in holy orders. At the next General Council this 
will be more explicitly stated.

NOTES

1. Second Council of Constantinople, 553--Third Council of Constantinople, 
680.

2. Cf. the title of Monseigneur Amann's classic work, L'Eglise au pouvoir 
des Laiques, 888-1057 (1945), pp. 544. This is volume 7 of F. and M.

3. The emperor, Henry III.

4. Fliche, in La Reforme Gregorienne et la Reconquete Chretien, 1057, 1950, 
i.e., F. and M., vol. 8, 394.

4a. Barry, no. 45, prints a translation of this decree.

5. Son of Henry III, emperor 1056-1106.

5a. Barry, no. 47, prints a translation of the letters of the emperor and 
his bishops to the pope.

6. Henry V, since 1106; the son of Gregory VII's adversary.

7. Pope from January 24, 1118, to January 28, 1119.

8. Fliche, as before, 389. Barry, no. 48, prints a translation of the 
concordat.

9. Contracta quoque matrimonia ab huiusmodi personis disjungi ... 
iudicamus.


CHAPTER 10. The Second General Council of the Lateran, 1139

The tenth General Council, the Second General Council of the Lateran, took 
place only fifteen years after that just described. It was a council of 
much the same kind, in its procedure, in its legislation, and in the vast 
interest it aroused, and it should be seen as complementary to the council 
of 1123. As the reader may guess, it would never have been summoned but for 
a new crisis in church affairs. The crisis, this time, was a double papal 
election, at Rome, made by the cardinals, and an ensuing schism when for 
some years two rivals, each claiming to be the lawful pope, divided the 
Church.

When Calixtus II died, in 1124, there was elected in his place, the 
Cardinal Lambert who had negotiated the great concordat, a veteran of the 
papal service and one of the last survivors of the band who had stood 
around Urban II in the grim years that followed the death of Gregory VII. 
He took the name Honorius II, and lived out all his pontificate in Rome--
the first pope to live continuously in Rome for nearly a hundred years. It 
was by no means a peaceful city. The old baronial feuds had revived during 
the years when it so rarely had a resident ruler. Here was the source of 
the double election after the death of Honorius in 1130. The Pierleoni 
brought about the election of one of that family--he took the name 
Anacletus II. The Frangipani faction elected Innocent II. That the better 
man of the two was Innocent seems certain. But which was the lawfully 
elected? Neither had been elected precisely as the somewhat vague law of 
1059 prescribed.

Anacletus, however, the scion of a wealthy Roman clan, was master of Rome, 
and Innocent fled for support beyond the Alps. Thanks to Louis VI of 
France, and above all to the spiritual genius who towers above all the men 
of this age, St. Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, he soon had the support of 
France and the empire, of England, and of the Spanish kingdoms also. But, 
except intermittently, Innocent was never master in Rome--the Norman king 
of Sicily being the staunch supporter of his rival--until 1138, when 
Anacletus died and his successor, yielding to the influence of St. Bernard, 
made his submission to Innocent. Once again the spectacle of a wandering 
pope had been turned to the profit of the reform movement, and four great 
councils are associated with Innocent's presence, Clermont in 1130, Reims 
in 1131, Piacenza in 1132 and Pisa in 1135.

Rid of the burden of the schism, the pope now summoned the General Council 
of 1139, but in no such amiable spirit towards his late adversaries as 
Calixtus II had shown. St. Bernard pleaded for them, but in vain. Innocent 
showed himself a singularly un-Roman pope when he dealt harshly with the 
subjected foe.

There were more than five hundred bishops present at the council and, it is 
said, a thousand abbots--the mention of St. Bernard's role in the schism is 
a reminder that this is the century of the most remarkable sudden expansion 
of the monastic orders ever known, the Cistercian century. Again the acta 
of the council have perished. We know that it was opened on April 4, 1139, 
in the Lateran Church, and that there were three sessions. All that remains 
to us are the thirty canons enacted, and a chronicler's story of the pope's 
fiery reception of one of his recent opponents. This bishop made his way to 
the papal throne, and laid down his mitre at the pope's feet, in token of 
submission. But the pope arose, and kicked the mitre down the church, 
calling out, "Away, henceforth you are no bishop of mine."

The canons of this council, or the list as we possess it rather, is the 
same kind of omnium gatherum as the list of 1123. Of the thirty canons a 
half merely repeat the canons of that list, and a half of the remainder do 
little more than repeat verbatim the canons enacted by Innocent in the 
great provincial councils of 1130-35.

There are five new canons about clerical life. With regard to the old 
trouble of clergy who marry, there is the highly important declaration that 
these unions are not true marriages.[1] The faithful people are forbidden 
to attend mass said by such married clergy, whose sons are not to be 
ordained unless they become monks or canons regular. All are warned that in 
the Church there are no such things as hereditary benefices. Clerics who 
put forward claims of this sort will be severely punished for their 
impudence. Clerical dress must be seemly, no riotous colours or the 
indecent fashions of the day. And the cleric is protected by a law which 
strikes with an ipso facto excommunication whoever maliciously assaults 
him--an excommunication which the pope alone can remove.[2]

In what concerns the Catholic's relation with the world in which he lives--
the virtue of social justice in the large sense--the council has six laws 
to propose. The ancient custom that the populace pillage the house of a 
deceased bishop is to cease. Usurers, i.e., those who--in this day when 
money is a nonproductive piece of metal, useful only in exchange for goods-
-charge a borrower interest for the convenience he has enjoyed, when he 
brings back the gold piece borrowed, are to be held (says the council) as 
they have always been held, as infamous and to be shunned by all. They are 
forbidden the sacraments, and if they die unrepentant are not to be given 
Christian burial. The "Truce of God" is now set out for the whole of 
Christendom in the detail of Urban II's law of 1095,[3] and the bishops are 
warned that slackness in excommunicating for breaches of the truce may cost 
them their place. There is a special prohibition against molesting 
merchants, country people engaged in agriculture and their stock, as well 
as the clergy. Another class of criminal (about whom there are three 
canons) is the incendiary. Those who repent of this crime are not to be 
absolved without heavy penance, i.e., a year's service with the Crusade, in 
Spain or in the Holy Land. Tournaments are most stringently forbidden. 
Knights killed in these "detestable jousts" are not to be given Christian 
burial. And the new military weapon of the catapult, that hurls immense 
masses of stone at the walls of besieged castles and cities, and over the 
walls, is condemned as a thing "detested by God." It is never to be used 
against Christian men under penalty of excommunication.

There are two canons that have to do with a Christian's belief. In one of 
these (canon 22) bishops are commanded to instruct their people that the 
outward acts of penance are of no avail with out true inward repentance. 
Practices of this sort are the straight road to hell. The second (canon 23) 
condemns a whole series of anti-Christian notions, the undercurrent that 
never ceased to affect medieval life. Those who hold these ideas present 
the appearance of great zeal for true religion, says the council, but they 
reject the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, the baptism of infants, the 
priesthood, and marriage. Those who hold these heretical beliefs the state 
must coerce. Those who defend the heretics are excommunicated along with 
them.

NOTES

1. Huiusmodi namque copulationem, quam contra ecclesiasticam regulam 
constat esse contractam, matrimonium non esse censemus. Qui etiam ab 
invicem separati pro tantis excessibus condignam poenitentiam agant (canon 
7). This is a repetition of a canon enacted at Pisa, 1135.

2. The earliest example of a papal reservation of a censure by statute.

3. See preceding page 196.


CHAPTER 11. The Third General Council of the Lateran, 1179

One of the disappointments as one studies the history of the Middle Ages is 
the scantiness of personal information about the great men whose acts, and 
effect upon subsequent ages, are yet really well known to us. Only too 
often is the personage himself a mere silhouette against the gold and 
scarlet of the event. Pope Alexander III, who summoned the eleventh General 
Council, is an instance in point, for in the history of the Church, by his 
effect, he stands out as one of the six or seven greatest popes of all, one 
whose laws and creative institutional work still influence the life of the 
Church. His reign, again, is one of the longest of all, close on twenty-two 
years. And yet, much as we know about his career, the man himself escapes 
us utterly.

As to what this pope accomplished, a French scholar of our own time, the 
author of the most complete study yet made of Alexander III, can say that 
he "is one of the chief founders of the Roman all-powerfulness over the 
clergy of the Church, with a very high idea of his office, ruling the 
clergy by the aid of trustworthy assistants, and thanks to means of 
government that are steadily being improved, intervening everywhere 
throughout the Church by his legates, setting in order and controlling the 
jurisdiction of the archbishops in their provinces and the bishops in their 
sees, and everywhere seeking to strengthen the links that bind the Holy See 
to the various local establishments"[1]; such is Alexander III, the first 
pope effective on the grand scale in the whole daily life of the universal 
church.

When, eighty years after his death, and after the more recent pontificates 
of Innocent III and Innocent IV, an ambassador writes from Rome to his 
sovereign of the newly elected Urban IV, it is not to these famous men that 
he goes for a comparison. "Men here are saying," he reports, "that the new 
pope will be another Pope Alexander."

There was a special reason for this spectacular achievement of this great 
pope. He was one of those who, at a crucial moment of history, sometimes 
appear in the high places of government, with the very personality the time 
requires, and with the trained competence to make this effective. This rare 
combination is writ large, for the trained observer at least, in the laws 
of Alexander's General Council of 1179. These laws are the work of a legal 
genius; and they are but a fraction of what passed directly from him into 
the fundamental law of the Catholic Church.

Gregory VII, anxious to bring home to a world reluctant to be reformed, 
that what he demanded was not a perfection hitherto unheard of, but simply 
a return to what had always been, set in motion a great movement of 
research into the past legal history of the Church. And the age when, in a 
score of able legal-minded writers, these discoveries were attaining 
something like completeness, knew a still wider legal renascence, the 
rebirth of "the divinely reasonable" law of ancient Rome. Here was 
something that was a collection of laws, and a philosophy of law, and 
almost Law itself as a living creation, before which the reasonable man 
gladly bent in reverent acceptance, something than which nothing could be 
more welcome to rulers everywhere.

Also the age, the early years of the twelfth century, produced the man we 
know as Gratian, a monk who was a lawyer? a lawyer turned monk?--a legally 
trained mind, author of a book that was the first complete, scientifically 
planned epitome of the Church's law. On this scholar's work the whole 
magnificent fabric of the Canon Law was to be built--in his spirit and 
following his pattern. And the first part of the great work called the 
Corpus Iuris Canonici, which was the Catholic Church's law book down to 
1918, is the Decretum of Gratian. Alexander III--Roland Bandinelli--was the 
pupil of Gratian, and the first of the hundreds of lawyers who were to 
publish commentaries on Gratian's book. And then, as pope, sitting in 
judgment on appeals of every kind that poured in from every part of Europe, 
he was so to decide the cases that, in judging them, he developed law, 
created law. It is simply not possible to exaggerate the influence of his 
twenty-one years of legal activity in the highest place of all. And yet, 
outside this work, and his other public activities as pope, we scarcely 
know the man.

The other public activities--a seventeen years' struggle against the 
determination of the emperor Frederick I (called Barbarossa) to make 
himself master of the Church, and reduce the papacy to an imperial 
dependency.[2]

This extremely serious affair was for Alexander III an inheritance from the 
days of his predecessor, the English pope Adrian IV. The emperor, young, 
ambitious, warlike, and crafty as a fox, allowed by two weak popes to do as 
he liked with the Church, now meant to make himself even more completely 
master of Italy than he was of Germany. Against the vast military power 
which he could assemble, the pope's main hope was the Norman king of 
Sicily. His own state, effectively, was little more than the city of Rome 
and its environs, and the city had for some time been enjoying the status 
of an antipapal republic. The only protection to the north was the fragile 
hope that the cities of Lombardy, Milan and the rest, would unite against 
their common foe. But upon Frederick's invasion in 1158 the cities 
everywhere had to yield, and submit to be ruled by governors he appointed. 
Lombardy was still seething with discontent, and Adrian IV meditating an 
alliance of the Lombards and Normans when September 1, 1159, he died, most 
unexpectedly.

And now the tragedy of thirty years before was repeated--a double election. 
The details of this affair are fairly well known, and what case can be made 
out for the lawfulness of the election of the cardinal who received only 
four votes, where Roland Bandinelli received twenty-two, depends in part 
upon a current idea that the election, to be valid, had to be unanimous, 
and in part upon the principle that the majority needs to be not merely the 
greater part, but the morally better part--a principle whose end is surely 
anarchy, but which then had its place in the general law about 
ecclesiastical elections, and had been successfully invoked by St. Bernard 
in the affair of 1130. But it was to matter much more that Roland 
Bandinelli had been Adrian IV's right-hand man in the contest with 
Barbarossa, and that his rival was the emperor's man.

Frederick did not now make the mistake of marching on Rome, with what 
troops he still had in Italy. His policy was rather to suggest a kind of 
congress of princes before whom the rivals could state their case. The 
princes--Frederick, in his own mind--would then decide. To this Alexander 
III, from the first, opposed a blunt refusal, and from this position he 
never moved. His rival, who called himself Victor IV, accepted, and became 
henceforth all but a part of the imperial machine.

The schism lasted eighteen years nearly, "Victor IV" being followed by 
"Pascal III" (who, to make still more evident the sacredness of the 
emperor's cause, canonised Charlemagne for him in 1167) and he by "Calixtus 
III." For only two of these years was Alexander III able to live in Rome. 
The contrast between his masterly ruling of the Church, of which we have 
spoken, during these years, and his own personal insecurity is most 
striking. For years he lived in France, and then in the country to the 
south of Rome, close to the frontier of the friendly kings of Sicily, 
constantly in movement. At Rome the antipope was lord, and in St. Peter's 
he crowned Barbarossa and his empress.

This coronation was in 1167--the emperor's third or fourth invasion of 
Italy, and a highly spectacular success until, on the very morrow of the 
sacrilegious rite the plague struck his army, and troops and notables died 
like flies. The hated emperor had to disguise himself to get out of the 
country alive. Seven years later, after long preparation, Frederick 
returned, to meet at Legnano (in 1176) with a surprising and wholly 
disastrous defeat at the hands of the Lombard League. Of this league of 
city states Alexander III had been the real inspiration, and its steadfast 
counsellor in matters of alliance and diplomacy. The freedom of the Italian 
cities and the freedom of religion had become one thing in these tense 
years. For Frederick, Legnano was the end. He tried, of course, to make 
peace with the pope without the league, and with the league at the expense 
of the pope. But Alexander was loyalty itself. A peace congress came 
together at Venice, in 1177, terms were agreed, and the emperor made his 
submission to the pope--not, however, with the spectacular gestures of the 
frescoes that, at Siena and Venice, commemorate the event, for such was not 
Alexander's nature. The bad precedent of 1139 was not followed, and when 
the last of the antipopes came in to make his submission, in the following 
year, Alexander received him as a guest and provided for him. After all, in 
the distant days when Adrian IV was pope, had they not been cardinals 
together?

The General Council of 1179 was the outcome of these Venetian events, and 
it needs to be seen as such: as the council then promised to the emperor, 
in which, as will be understood, a whole world of reorganisation had to be 
faced--for example, Germany had, in a way, been out of the Church for 
nearly twenty years. And as well as reorganisation, there was the ever 
needed exhortation to reform, and the restraint of the abuses, 
ecclesiastical and lay, that are the perpetual scandal of church life.

Of the council itself we know all too little, for its acts have not 
survived. It opened March 5, 1179, and there were three public sessions, 
but whether the second and third were March 7 and 19 or March 12 and 23 is 
not certain. The number of bishops who attended was about three hundred. 
The greater part came from France and the various Italian states, but there 
were 19 from Germany and as many from Spain, 6 from Ireland and another 6 
from the England of Henry II, with 12 from his French dominions. A 
Hungarian is mentioned and a Dane, and there were 7 bishops from the 
various Latin states of the Holy Land. Abbots and priors were still more 
numerous, and the bishop of Assisi in his sermon at the opening was able to 
say that the "universal assembly" could be seen to have been brought 
together from almost the whole of the world. There was even an observer 
from those Greek churches of the East with which, for generations now, 
there had been so little direct contact. "The senate of the whole Christian 
republic was come together," as the preacher said, "to consider and to give 
judgment to the universe. To Rome alone, of all the royal cities [Antioch, 
Alexandria, Byzantium, Jerusalem were the others] had it been given to rule 
with supreme power over all the other sees, with the power of the keys, the 
power to judge; Rome alone had the power to summon a General Council, to 
make new canons, to abrogate the old." As for the reigning pope, the 
benefits of his rule were felt as far away as the Indies.[3]

In this rare sermon we are given, for a fraction of a second, a glimpse of 
the particular and personal. We could have exchanged it for some slight 
knowledge of how the council transacted its business. For of this we know 
just nothing at all. One of the chroniclers who treat of the council speaks 
of twelve canons proposed which the bishops rejected, and that is the only 
hint that has survived of all the discussions of those three weeks of March 
1179. Were there no critics among the bishops? Was the pope's new system 
the very thing all of them desired? A passage in Alexander's letter 
convoking the council has been taken as a hint to the bishops that their 
presence was chiefly required in order to give the decrees a more rapidly 
effective publicity. Another critic was the English humanist John of 
Salisbury, present at the council as bishop of Chartres. He wondered 
whether there were not enough laws already. Was not the Church staggering 
under their weight? Would it not be better to keep to the simple Gospel, so 
long neglected these days by so many? Will our Lord not say to us also, "Ye 
let go the commandment of God and hold fast to the tradition of men"?[4] 
This curious anticipation of the simplist solutions of Erasmus is hardly 
likely to have influenced the world-weary and experienced old pope, who had 
twenty-seven canons[5] to propose to the bishops, practical regulations in 
all conscience, with appropriate punishments provided for those who ignored 
them. For the most part they concern the clergy, and especially bishops. 
Eleven are new laws, the rest repeat and renew canons already enacted.

The pope's first thought, naturally, is to amend the law of 1059 about 
papal elections. There must be no uncertainty about the meaning of such a 
law. As Alexander III now rewrote it the law has lasted until this present 
day.[6] Nor were there ever again disputed elections of the type of 1130 
and 1159. What this first canon of 1179 decreed was as follows. Should the 
cardinals, through the malice of the devil, be unable to achieve a 
unanimous choice, and there be two thirds in agreement and the other third 
unwilling to join them, or presuming to choose another, then the one chosen 
by the two thirds is to be taken as the pope. Should it happen that, 
relying on his choice by one third only, a man usurps the name of pope (for 
he cannot take the reality), both himself and all who take him as pope are 
excommunicated, and deprived of whatever ordination has given them, so that 
communion is denied them except as Viaticum at the hour of death. Should 
they die unrepentant their lot is that of Dathan and Abiron.[7] Moreover, 
if anyone receives a majority of the votes but less than two thirds, let 
him not dare to take on himself the office of pope, or he falls under all 
the penalties just mentioned. The law states that it does not affect the 
principle about "the morally better part" which rules in other 
ecclesiastical elections, for if disputes arise about these there is a 
superior who can decide the matter. "But in the case of the Roman see there 
is a special arrangement, since it is not possible here to have recourse to 
a superior."[8]

"Following the example of our predecessor Innocent [II]," all ordinations 
made by the antipopes, and by those whom these ordained, are quashed, and 
the benefices which these schismatics granted are to go back to their 
rightful owners. All who, of their own free will, took oaths to uphold the 
schism, are suspended from their orders and their dignity.[9]

As to bishops, no one is to be made a bishop who is under thirty years of 
age, of legitimate birth and demonstrably suited by his life and education. 
Elected, the election confirmed, the new bishop having taken over the 
administration of the see and received consecration, the superior whose 
duty it is will then fill the benefices vacated by his promotion. 
Archdeacons, rural deans, parish priests [i.e., pastors] are not to be 
appointed if under twenty-five, and the first named must at least receive 
deacon's orders and the rest the priesthood, within the time fixed by law. 
Clerics who elect contrary to this law lose all future right to elect, and 
are for three years suspended from their benefices.[10]

One never ceasing complaint is that bishops' official visitations tend to 
be ruinously expensive for the places they visit. Their train--officials, 
guards, servants--is now cut down: archbishops to a maximum of 40 to 50 
horses, according to the country and its resources, cardinals 25, bishops 
20 to 30, archdeacons 7; deans are told to be contented with 2. No hunting 
dogs, no hawks and falcons. "And let them not demand sumptuous feasts, but 
gratefully take the seemly sufficiency set before them." Bishops are not to 
burden their subjects with taxes. Parents, as Scripture says, should enrich 
their children, not children their parents. What has been said about the 
prelate's train is, of course (sane), said as the maximum that is to be 
tolerated, something allowable in well-to-do places, parishes with ample 
revenues.[11] Should a bishop ordain anyone priest or deacon who has not 
any legal right to an ecclesiastical income, the bishop is to maintain him 
until he is placed.[12]

No cleric is to be appointed to a place which is not yet vacant, or to be 
promised appointment at the next vacancy--lest men begin to wish for the 
death of others. Promises of this kind were forbidden in the pagan laws of 
old. How shameful, and inviting the wrath of God, that there should be such 
expectations in God's Church. Bishops are to fill vacancies within six 
months. If they neglect to do so, the canons of the diocese are to appoint. 
If all concerned are negligent, the archbishop of the province is to 
act.[13]

There are "bitter complaints," says canon 9, from bishops about the way in 
which certain religious orders make a mockery of penitential discipline by 
so using the privileges granted them by the popes as to provide influential 
sinners with loopholes--they gladly accept from the lay lords grants of 
tithes and benefices, admitting these personages to the sacraments although 
excommunicated, giving them Christian burial, and where the order was 
allowed during times of interdict to have mass said once a year in that 
country, taking this to mean once in each of the monasteries of the order. 
The orders moreover had confraternities of laymen associated with them, and 
to these it was conveyed that such membership took them out of the bishop's 
jurisdiction. The new military orders, the Templars and the Knights 
Hospitalers, were especially complained of, regarding these gravely 
scandalous practices. The canon insists that in all these matters the 
bishop's authority holds good, over the priests who serve the parishes 
which the order "owns" and over the members of these various fraternities.

Two canons (16, 17) rule that in differences between the canons of 
cathedral chapters and others the will of the maior et sanior pars[14] of 
the chapter is to prevail, and that where there are several patrons of a 
church the candidate who has the majority of the patrons for him is to be 
appointed: never are there to be as many pastors as there are disputing 
patrons.

Abuses in the matter of appeals from the lower ecclesiastical courts are 
corrected by canon 6. The legal trick of suddenly excommunicating the man 
thought to be about to appeal, is forbidden and, on the other hand, the man 
charged with an offence is not allowed to appeal before his case has been 
tried. Especially are monks and other religious not to adopt such a tactic 
as this against their superior correcting them according to the rule, "but 
let them humbly and devoutly receive what has been commanded for their 
spiritual good."

Canon 18 has a more general interest, and it touches on a problem of 
medieval history that has been all too little explored--the way in which 
the rank and file of the parochial clergy were trained. In order that all 
may have a chance of education, even the poor who cannot expect their 
parents to pay school fees, every bishop is to arrange that among the 
members of his cathedral chapter there shall be one who will teach gratis 
the clerics of that church and poor students too, and the same shall be 
done in other churches and in monastic churches. No one who is qualified to 
teach shall be denied permission. From the general terms of the canon, this 
is not the foundation of a system so much as an order for its restoration. 
There are as yet no universities in the formal sense of the word, but one 
has only to recall such a name as that of Abelard, dead now these thirty 
years, to be aware that in one cathedral city after another there were 
already remarkably flourishing schools of the liberal arts, and theology. 
This reforming pope sees no reason why there should not be at least the 
beginnings of such a school in every diocese.

Of the remaining canons which mostly renew the old laws, we may note how 
the clergy are now forbidden to accept offerings from the accursed gains of 
the usurer. Clergy who have accepted such offerings, or given a usurer 
Christian burial? are to be suspended until they have returned what they 
accepted.[15] Neither Jews nor Saracens are, on any pretext, to have 
Christian slaves. Christians who live with them are excommunicated. In all 
suits a Christian's word is to be preferred against the testimony of Jews, 
and whoever does the reverse of this is to be excommunicated, for Jews 
should be subject to Christians and be kindly treated by Christians from 
human kindness merely.[16]

There is a long and very detailed decree about the restraint of heretics,' 
declared to be numerous in Gascony, and around Albi and Toulouse, "Cathars 
as they are called," who make no secret of what they are and openly work to 
make converts. Both the heretics and those who protect them are 
excommunicated; no one is to give them shelter, or allow them in his 
territory, or to do business with them. If they die in their sin mass is 
not to be offered for them, nor are they to receive Christian burial. As to 
the wandering bands of marauders and plunderers, they are to be treated 
like heretics, and the pope calls on all good men to associate and, meeting 
violence with violence, destroy these pests of society; and to those who 
thus manfully organise all the indulgences are granted which the Crusaders 
in Spain and the Holy Land enjoy. The canon ends with an exhortation to the 
bishops to be brave themselves, in supporting this movement to protect the 
community from these powerfully organised hordes. Cowardly bishops and 
priests are to be deprived of their office.

The last of these laws that regard the social, as well as the spiritual, 
life of the Catholic, treats of the lepers--an increasingly large section 
of society since the crusades. Clergy are not to prevent lepers from having 
churches of their own, and cemeteries, and their own priest. And from the 
lepers no tithes are to be asked, whether of produce or of their 
beasts.[18]

NOTES

1. Marcel Pacaut, Alexandre III, Etude sur sa conception du pouvoir 
pontifical dans sa pensee et dans son oeuvre, Paris, 1956, p. 301.

2. These are the years, also (1163-70), of the dramatic contest of St. 
Thomas of Canterbury with King Henry II.

3. Abyssinia rather, we should say, the mysterious land of Prester John, 
who had written to the pope about his desire to be better instructed in the 
Christian religion, and to whom Alexander had replied (1177). For all of 
which see Rousset de Pina, Le troisieme Concile Generale du Latran, in F. 
and M., vol. 9, part 2, p. 160, n. 1.

4. Mark 7:8.

5. They are translated in Schroeder, pp. 214-35.

6. With a minor change introduced by Pius XII.

7. For whom see Numbers 16:1.

8. In Romana vero ecclesia aliquid speciale constituitur, quia non potest 
recurus ad superiorem haberi. Canon 1.

9. Canon 2.

10. Canon 3.

11. Canon 4.

12. Canon 5.

13. Canon 8.

14. "The greater and morally more respectable part."

15. Canon 25.

16. Canon 26.

17. Canon 27.

18. Canon 23.


CHAPTER 12. The Fourth General Council of the Lateran, 1215

The long reign of Alexander III was followed by a period of seventeen years 
in which the Church saw a succession of no fewer than five popes--the 
faithful if aged coadjutors of the great legist. When the last of these 
died, January 8, 1198, the cardinals, that same day, elected the junior 
member of the college, Lothar, son of the Count of Segni, thirty-seven 
years of age. He took the name Innocent III. His reign of eighteen years is 
conventionally regarded--even by historians--as the summit of the papacy's 
achievement as a universal power, religious, social, political. The reality 
is a little more complex--or the true meaning of that remarkable hegemony. 
For our purposes, in this little book, Innocent III is the pope of the 
Fourth General Council of the Lateran, the greatest of all the councils (in 
its general effect) before Trent; in the pope's mind, no doubt, the most 
important event of his reign.

That reign had never for an instant been anything but eventful. There had 
been kings of France and Castile who had repudiated their wives and 
"remarried"--with public consequences of the first order; there had been 
the English king's rejection of the pope's appointment to Canterbury of the 
great cardinal, Stephen Langton--and the years of a papal interdict which 
followed; there had been in Germany the calamity of a double election to 
the empire, civil war--and the famous reasoned decision of the pope; there 
had been the crusade of 1204, which--partly because of the Venetians, 
partly because of the German prince against whose claims Innocent had 
declared--had never reached the Holy Land, but turned to the conquest of 
the empire of the Christian Greeks; there had been the foundation, upon the 
ruins of this, of the Latin empire of Constantinople, and a "reunion" of 
the churches in these lands under Latin bishops; there had been, in the 
south of France, the great drive to root out the deadly antireligious, 
antisocial revival of the organised, "mystical," pessimism of the 
Manichees, and growing out of this the long bloody war called the 
Albigensian Crusade; there had been the appearance of two great saints, 
Dominic and Francis of Assisi; there had been the "foundation" of the 
University of Paris In every one of these great affairs Innocent III had 
played a leading role. Six thousand of his bulls survive to attest the 
universality of his interest, the effectiveness of his highly trained 
lawyer's mind, and the reality of his own spiritual life whose guiding star 
was his obligation as pope to forward everywhere the reign of Christ.

Innocent III had not been everywhere equally successful. Some of his plans 
had gone disastrously astray. Not always had his in formation been 
adequate. His coadjutors had more than once failed him badly. No historian 
has, so far, so completely studied the vast achievement in all its parts as 
to be able to strike the balance of success and failure with anything like 
finality.

In the opening months of his reign, and again at the great council held at 
its close, Innocent III declared that the two chief tasks before him were 
the recovery of the Holy Land and the reform of Catholic life. One clear 
evidence, in 1198, of the need for reform was the fact that great 
territories in the south of France seemed about to slip away from the 
Catholic faith. This menace of the growth of Manicheism, of the coming 
triumph of the Albigenses, was the occasion of the pope's main personal 
effort, and of a tragic failure also. For although, after several years of 
bloody warfare, all danger of a Manichee supremacy in the heart of 
Christendom was ended, the Catholic princes had behaved as all princes 
behave in wars of conquest, and so too had their armies. Nothing of 
Innocent's personal clemency was reflected in the crusade. And the remnants 
of the heresy went underground, to fester for centuries yet to come.

This grave peril conditioned two of the council's chief acts, its statement 
of Catholic belief and the law about the repression of heresy. What these 
heretics taught, whose organisation in France and Italy went back to the 
early twelfth century, was roughly as follows. Two supreme beings are at 
the origin of all things--and one of these is Evil. It is the evil 
principle that is the creator of the material world, of man's body for 
example. The Old Testament is a legacy from the evil principle, the New 
alone is from the good. Christ, the greatest creation of the good 
principle, was man in appearance only. He did not really suffer or die. The 
main duty of the believer is to avoid all possible contact with matter--
food, for example, the possession of property, the exercise of sex. These 
heretics were organised in churches, where they formed two sharply divided 
classes. There were those called the Perfect, who lived with great 
asceticism, and acted as guides to the rest, and the ordinary believers who 
lived as they chose, but in what Christians called sin, as preferable to 
marriage--marriage, being a stable affair, was a greater enslavement to 
matter than promiscuous sex relations. The procreation of children was an 
evil and so, also, was life itself. For life is the imprisonment of the 
spiritual soul in the material body. To assist, or bring on, death is to 
perform the good work of liberating spirit from matter. And the sect had a 
kind of ritual suicide by starvation, called Endura, where during the long 
process the patient was surrounded by the Perfect, to prevent any fatal 
relapse once the decision was made. In order to be sure of a happy future 
life it was necessary to undergo the rite they called the Consolation. But 
this entailed the obligation to live as the Perfect--absolute continency, 
and an asceticism so strict in the matter of food that it amounted to 
semistarvation. And any falling away, after this rite, was irreparable: the 
rite then lost all its value, and it could not be repeated. With the vast 
majority the rite was put off until they were obviously dying, or else they 
were urged to the process of the Endura. As with almost all these medieval 
heresies the manual trades furnished disciples everywhere, the weavers, 
tailors, shoemakers. And they also recruited among the wealthy merchants.

By the time it fell to Innocent III to deal with them, these neo-Manichees 
had for many years conducted a successful propaganda, in which (apart from 
their attractively simple solution of the great question of evil) the 
ascetic lives of the Perfect and the organised charity of the brethren 
played a great part. The various counts and viscounts who governed these 
regions, themselves semi-Orientals in their way of life, given over often 
enough to the systematic dissolution of the harem system, made no effort to 
check the heretics. Along with the innumerable Jews and Saracens they were 
becoming a permanent feature of the exotic life of the country. The 
Catholic clergy were ignorant, and their prelates often corrupt. This, and
the great wealth of the prelates--rarely loved by their subjects--offered 
the Manichee apostle one of his best openings. Innocent III himself 
testifies to all this.

The bull convoking the fourth General Council of the Lateran is dated April 
19, 1213. It was to open on November 1, 1215. All bishops were to attend, 
save two in each province, exempted in order to attend there to the general 
affairs of the Church. As many as 412 bishops went to the council, with 
some 800 abbots and priors of the monastic orders. There were also present 
ambassadors from the Latin emperor at Constantinople, from the kings of 
Germany, France, England, Aragon, Portugal, Hungary, and Jerusalem, and 
from the various Italian states.

Once again, it has to be said, we know all but nothing of the way the 
council was organised, for the official proceedings have long since 
disappeared. We have the pope's inaugural address, accounts of one furious 
discussion at a public session, the text of the seventy canons voted, and 
of the decree organising a new crusade. And this is all. Of what 
discussions went on between the bishops in the intervals between the three 
public sessions, held on November 11, 20, and 30, we know nothing, nor have 
we any knowledge how the canons were drawn up or proposed to the council.

We do know that three matters of public policy were laid before the 
council: Innocent III's choice of Frederick of Sicily as emperor; his 
suspension of Cardinal Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, for 
refusing to publish Innocent's bull rebuking the barons of England for 
forcing their king to assent to Magna Carta, and quashing the charter; the 
claims of the victorious leader of the crusade against the Albigenses, 
Simon de Montfort, to the territories of the Count of Toulouse, their great 
protector. In the first two of these matters the council readily ratified 
what the pope had done.

The commander in chief of the crusade, de Montfort, had been as much 
interested in the spoil it brought as in the destruction of a heresy. His 
powerful personality had dominated the legates whom Innocent had sent to 
control the great affair. They were soon little better than his 
accomplices. It was soon very evident that the pope had let loose forces he 
was unable to control. Historians friendly to Innocent describe what now 
happened as the pope's having no choice but to submit to the fait accompli-
-the fait being de Montfort's triumph over the Count of Toulouse, blessed 
as a religious act by the legates who had entirely disregarded the pope's 
mind.[1] All that Innocent was able to do, in the end, was to endeavour to 
save a part of Count Raymond's domains for his undoubtedly guiltless heir. 
At the council, when the pope's decision came up for confirmation, there 
were violent scenes between the partisans of de Montfort among the French 
bishops and those of the Count of Toulouse. But a part of the great 
inheritance was saved for the heir from de Montfort's fangs, as Innocent 
had hoped.[2]

Innocent III is usually held to be, with Alexander III, a "cofounder" of 
the Canon Law system as this has existed in the medieval and modern ages of 
the Church. The famous Lateran Council, regarded as a declaration of church 
law in all its universality--and of reforming laws--is in importance second 
only to Trent, among the twenty General Councils. For many generations to 
come it is "the General Council," referred to as the last decisive word on 
disputed points. What of its seventy canons?[3]

The first canon is a statement of belief, drawn up as a counter to the 
heresies of the time, of the Albigenses, Pantheists, and so forth. It 
stresses that there is only one true God, the one creator of all things, 
and that Christ our Lord is truly God and truly man. Also that in eternity 
there is a reward for the good, and for the unrepentant evildoer 
punishment. In this creed's exposition of the Holy Eucharist there occurs 
the first official use of the word henceforth famous, when the creed states 
that the bread and wine are transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of 
Christ.[4] Only priests duly ordained can bring this about. Baptism, by 
whomsoever administered, if it is rightly administered in the Church's 
form, is profitable to salvation, to little children as to adults. Sins 
committed after baptism can be made good by sincere repentance. Not only 
virgins and those who lead a life of continency can attain eternal 
happiness, by true faith and a good life, but married people also. The 
council then turns to review the life of the Church, to denounce the 
weaknesses and the wickedness of its members, and to provide punishment for 
the obstinate. It begins with the clergy.

Clerics living in sin are to be suspended and, if they ignore the 
suspension, are to be deposed. Bishops who allow such scandals to continue-
-and especially if they allow this for the sake of money or some other 
advantage--are also to lose their office forever. The council makes laws 
against drunken clergy and those who never say mass--bishops amongst them. 
Hunting and fowling are forbidden, and to keep hunting dogs and hawks. 
There is a long catalogue of things which clerics must not do: civil 
employments, trade (especially if it is dishonest), miming, acting, 
frequenting taverns (absolutely forbidden save for the necessities of 
travelling), dicing and even looking on at games of chance. Clerics are to 
be soberly dressed, their garments neither too long nor too short, and 
fastened up to the neck, not of red or green cloth, no embroidery on gloves 
or shoes, no gilt spurs, bridles, saddles, or harness. Bishops are to wear 
linen unless they are monks, in which case they are to keep the habit of 
their order. Clerics are not to have any part in trials that involve the 
punishment of death. They are forbidden all military employment. They are 
not to act as surgeons. They are not to bless ordeals. This last 
prohibition, since it removed the one thing that gave the ordeal its value, 
was the beginning of the end of that superstition.

As to clerical appointments: Sees are not to be left vacant. If the chapter 
concerned does not elect within three months, the right (and duty) of 
providing the new bishop passes to the metropolitan. Whoever accepts 
election by favour of the lay power is not elected, and loses all right to 
be elected, to any post at all, in the future. Those who elect him are also 
to lose both office and income for three years, and to lose all electoral 
rights. If the metropolitan (whose duty it is to confirm the election) 
confirms an unsuitable choice, the confirmation is invalid, and the 
metropolitan is himself suspended until the pope absolves him.

The bishop's action in all such matters is supervised by the annual 
provincial council. There, bishops who have made unsuitable appointments 
are to be admonished, and if they do not act they are to lose all rights of 
patronage. If the negligent bishop is the metropolitan himself, he is to be 
denounced to the Holy See. The disability laid on such bishops, no one but 
the pope can remove.

The new papal centralisation gives the clergy protection against rapacious 
prelates. Bishops are warned that they must not rob the clergy who serve 
those churches which are in the gift of the bishop. The pope has heard of 
unfortunate priests who received only one sixteenth of the revenue due to 
them, the episcopal patron retaining the rest. Bishops are told that it is 
their duty to preach. If the diocese is too extensive, they are to choose 
suitable priests to assist in this work. It is the bishop who is 
responsible for the education of the future clergy, and the decree of 1179, 
about a school in each cathedral having, the present council states, been 
entirely ignored, is now re-enacted, and a lectureship in theology ordered 
to be founded in every cathedral. The bishop is specially warned to see 
that the clergy are trained in the administration of the sacraments.

Laws against clerical avarice follow. Bishops are forbidden to receive 
offerings of money from those they absolve from excommunications, or on the 
occasion of consecrations, blessings of abbots and ordinations. Convents of 
women are ordered for the future not to demand a premium, under the plea of 
the convent's poverty, from girls who wish to become nuns. The same is to 
apply to communities of men. Bishops are not to take advantage of a parish 
priest's death to tax the church beyond what the law allows, nor to enforce 
the payment of such taxes by laying an interdict on the church. For moneys 
thus obtained double restitution is to be made. With regard to the fees 
customary at funerals and marriages, while the clergy often ask too much, 
the laity as often offer nothing; but the sacraments are to be given 
absolutely without charge. On the other hand, the custom of the laity 
making a free offering is to be encouraged.

Complaints about clerical greed will be heard for centuries yet. And with 
them complaints about superstition. Here are three matters which will play 
a great part in the propaganda of the Protestant reformers--they are 
already a source of anxiety. A canon regulates the use of relics, and to 
check the trade in spurious relics orders that no new relics are to be 
exposed for veneration without the Holy See's authentication of them. 
Collectors of alms, again, are not always genuine or truthful. The canon 
gives a specimen of the letters of credence that for the future must 
guarantee them not to be frauds. The dress of such collectors is regulated, 
and they are to live religious lives. Bishops are warned not to grant 
extravagant indulgences.

A vast amount of Innocent III's time had been spent judging complaints of 
bishops against the religious orders. Several canons deal with this matter. 
It is now forbidden to establish any new orders. Those who wish to found a 
new house are to choose an existing approved rule. No abbot is to rule more 
than one monastery. Abbots are forbidden to judge marriage cases, to grant 
indulgences, or to allot public penances. Monks must respect the rights of 
parishes in the matter of funerals, and those privileged to give burial 
within the monastery to laymen who are oblates are told that an oblate is 
one who lives in the monastic habit, or has made over his property to the 
monastery; a mere annual subscription is not qualification enough. Monks to 
whom land charged with tithe has been given are not exempt from the payment 
of tithes. Still more important for the future of monasticism was the 
command to all monks to hold a triennial chapter, after the fashion of the 
Cistercians. All abbots and priors will attend this and thoroughly review 
the state of the province, and decide where reforms are needed.

The laity's sins are not overlooked. They are not to farm out benefices at 
a starvation rate, and are reminded that lay alienation of church property 
is null and void. They are warned against abusing their office of patron of 
a benefice to their own personal profit. Clergy are not to be taxed without 
a licence from the pope. Those rulers who levy such taxes without his 
permission are excommunicated, and all their acts are legally null. Should 
their successors not repeal such taxes within a month of assuming office, 
and give satisfaction for the wrong done, they fall under the same 
penalties. Another canon deals with evasion of tithe, and recalls that 
tithes have precedence over all other taxes and must be paid first.

The once famous law Omnis utriusque sexus now lays down that every 
Catholic, under pain of being debarred from church while alive and being 
denied Christian burial when dead, shall at least once a year confess his 
sins to his parish priest, and, if only at Easter, receive the Holy 
Eucharist. This canon concludes with a warning to confessors about the 
spirit in which they should receive confessions, and of the obligation not 
to reveal what is confessed to them. Offenders against this last 
prescription are to be thrust into a severe monastery, there to do penance 
for the rest of their life.

Three canons concern the sacrament of matrimony. Clandestine, i.e., secret, 
marriages are severely condemned and the clergy forbidden to assist at 
them, under pain of a three years' suspension. The impediments of 
consanguinity and affinity are notably restricted: henceforward they 
invalidate marriage only as far as the fourth degree, i.e., between those 
related through common great-great-grandparents. The tense business of the 
relations between Jews and Christians is also dealt with. Christians are to 
be protected by the State against the rapacity of Jewish moneylenders. 
Jews--and Saracens too--are to wear a special dress so that no Christian 
shall come to marry them in ignorance of what they are. During Passiontide 
Jews are to keep indoors; there have been riots caused by their mockery of 
the Christians' lamentations on Good Friday. No Jews or pagans are to be 
elected or appointed to a public office; it is contrary to the sense of 
things that those who blaspheme Christ shall hold authority over Christ's 
followers.

Seven canons deal with procedure in trials of one kind or another. Other 
canons regulate excommunication, rights of appeal, and the rules for the 
trial of clerics, the rights of chapters to correct their own members, and 
the rules for resignation of benefices. The clergy are forbidden to extend 
their jurisdiction by encroaching on that of the civil courts.

The most elaborate item of this part of the council's work is the third 
canon, on the pursuit of heretics. All who profess heresies contrary to the 
faith as this is set out in the first canon of the council, are condemned, 
and are to be left to the state to be suitably punished,[5] the officers of 
the state being present at the trial. If clerics they are to be first of 
all degraded from their orders; all their goods are to be given to the 
particular church they served. If laity, their goods go to the State. Those 
suspected of heresy are to prove themselves innocent. Should they neglect 
to do so they are excommunicated; if they continue in the excommunication 
for twelve months they are to be condemned as heretics. Princes are to be 
admonished, and if necessary compelled by threat of excommunication or 
interdict, to swear that they will banish all whom the Church points out as 
heretics. This oath, henceforward, all rulers must swear on first assuming 
power. If within a year they have not sworn, they are to be reported to the 
pope, that he may free their vassals from their allegiance, and offer their 
territories to Catholics who will drive out the heretics. Catholics who 
take up arms against the heretics are given the privileges of the crusaders 
in the Holy Land.

All who, in any way, support heretics are excommunicated. If within twelve 
months they have not made their submission, they lose all power of 
testifying in lawsuits, and of holding public offices; they cannot make a 
valid will nor inherit; if they are judges their sentences are null and 
void; if notaries, the instruments they draw up are invalid; if clerics 
they lose both office and benefice.

As to the detection of heretics, bishops are now bound to visit, at least 
once a year, places where heresy is rumoured to exist. They are to take the 
sworn testimony of witnesses of good standing--if necessary the whole 
population is to be put upon oath. Those who know anything of heretics, or 
of any who differ in life or manners from the generality of the faithful, 
are to report at these visitations. The persons accused are to prove their 
innocence. If they refuse to take the oath they are to be presumed to be 
heretics.

There is nothing revolutionary in this law. It is, substantially, no more 
than what was decreed by Lucius III, in conjunction with the emperor 
Frederick Barbarossa, at the council of Verona in 1184, and what Innocent 
himself had been enforcing. As to the phrase about the "suitable" 
punishment (animadversione debita puniendi), this from 1184 is common form 
in all these laws, never defined but universally understood in the same 
sense. The first western legal text to prescribe burning at the stake is a 
law of Peter II of Aragon in 1197. It does no more, in effect, than revive 
a law about the Manichees that is as old as Diocletian, hardly a model for 
the Christian lay sovereign, but the beginning of the idea that fire is the 
fitting punishment for Manichees. Alexander III would never, it seems 
certain, have departed from the traditional papal policy not to proceed so 
far as the sentence of death for heresy, and Innocent III himself did 
nothing to encourage this particular development.[6]

The laws were made. How could the council secure that they would be 
observed, that the bishops, once retired into their distant sees, would put 
into practice all that they had voted? The sixth canon is an attempt to 
provide the means. It lays down that the bishops of each ecclesiastical 
province are to meet annually, for the correction of abuses--clerical 
abuses particularly--and for the express purpose of maintaining the 
discipline which this council establishes. Official investigators are to be 
appointed for each diocese, who shall report to the provincial council 
whatever they have found needing correction and uncorrected. Negligent 
bishops are to be suspended from office and from income, and the decisions 
of the provincial council are to be published in every see through the 
annual diocesan synod.

NOTES

1. Fliche speaks of the "political piece of double crossing" (cette louche 
combinaison politique) to which the legates lent themselves.

2. The vast question that obviously palpitates behind these halting phrases 
is best summarised in the (somewhat apologetic) pages of A. Fliche, La 
Chretiente Romaine 1198-1274 (i.e., F. and M., vol. 10), pp. 112-37, 201-2.

3. Schroeder prints the whole of these and (pp. 237-96) translation. Barry, 
no, 76, translates a selection of them.

4. Transsubstantiatis pane in corpus et vino in sanguinem.

5. Animadversione debita puniendi.

6. So Fliche, in F. and M., vol. 10, p. 201, "Innocent III who never 
envisaged the penalty of death for heretics would, no doubt, have 
disapproved of the [later] Inquisition." Readers interested in the story of 
the way in which public opinion gradually influenced ecclesiastical 
authority in the business of the repression of heresy, will find a 
documented summary in F. and M., vol. 7, p. 462; vol. 9 (part 1) pp. 95-96; 
vol. 9 (part 2) pp. 343-51; the work of A. Dumas and Raymonde Foreville.


CHAPTER 13. The First General Council of Lyons, 1245

The vast achievement of the General Council of 1215--the fourth in ninety 
years--might have been expected to make further councils unnecessary for 
some generations. But General Councils have always been the product of 
historical accident. And who shall foretell when accidents will happen? The 
thirteenth General Council was to meet, in fact, just thirty years after 
the Fourth Lateran, and at Lyons in France. The purpose for which the pope 
called it together makes it a council apart--the trial of the emperor.

The emperor was Frederick II, that King of Sicily whom, as a child of 
three, his dying father, Henry VI, had made a ward of the pope; and whom, 
as a young man of twenty, Pope Innocent III had called to be emperor. 
Within four or five years of this, Frederick was launched on his great 
career as chief antagonist of all that the popes had been striving for 
since Hildebrand--the papal control (for protection's sake) of the papally 
reformed church, its total independence of the lay power, and the 
subjection of the lay sovereign, in regard to the morality of his rule, to 
the teaching of the Church, i.e., to the pope as teacher. Crises, all 
crises, develop character, and these long conflicts had developed a papal 
mentality vis-a-vis the empire, as surely as they had developed a "mens" in 
that corps of law-trained counsellors through whom princes were now 
governing their states. As well as personalities, rival doctrines of law 
were now in conflict, irreconcilable claims to supremacy, to independence 
of control, vested interests hostile by tradition. Frederick II, ward of 
Innocent III, was locked in conflict for a good thirty years with 
Innocent's three successors, Honorius III, Gregory IX, and Innocent IV. It 
was the last-named who called the first General Council of Lyons.

To understand the degree of the menace, we need to recall that Frederick 
was a unique figure, as a man and as a ruler, in all these years; "the 
world's wonder man," said the contemporary chronicler, Matthew Paris. And 
we need to say something of the kind of place Sicily was, where Frederick 
II was born and bred and where he lived for as much of his life as he 
could, of Sicily the kingdom and Sicily the island of that name. The 
kingdom then meant the island and all the Italian mainland from Sicily to 
about 80 miles southeast of Rome on the Mediterranean coast, and to about 
130 miles northeast of Rome on the Adriatic. For the best part of two 
hundred miles the King of Sicily and the pope had a common frontier. 
Potentially, Sicily was the chief permanent menace to the pope's 
independence. All this territory, the island certainly and a good part of 
the southern mainland, had been for centuries, and until about the time of 
Hildebrand, a part of the Byzantine empire. In the eighth and ninth 
centuries it had been the object of continual Mohammedan raids, and the 
Saracens had settled there in great numbers. Then, halfway through the 
eleventh century, Norman adventurers had gradually wrested the whole from 
Saracens and Byzantines. Frederick II was, on his mother's side, the 
descendant of these Normans.

The social effect of this extraordinary history was to produce, in the 
island of Sicily especially, a culture richly diverse. Here, religiously, 
were Latin and Greek, Christian and Moslem and Jew; the Levant, the 
Mediterranean, the north of France; and eastern manners of life as deeply 
rooted as western, eastern vices and western vices, the culture of Syria 
and Egypt as of Italy and France. Frederick II grew up all but inevitably 
only half a western European, it might be thought; and even more 
orientalised by his own tastes than by the chance of the milieu where he 
was bred. He was extremely intelligent, interested in the arts, active, 
virile, ambitious, a strong ruler, utterly unscrupulous, and an 
accomplished man of pleasure. He was as much at home with Moslems as with 
Catholics, and lived in a half-Moslem court. Such was the prince on whom 
the popes chiefly relied, in the years that followed the council of 1215, 
to lead the great crusade that would reverse the long series of Saracen 
victories and once more restore Jerusalem to Christian hands.

Left to himself, and no pope interfering, what would Frederick II have done 
with the crusade? what would he have attempted? To make himself master of 
the eastern Mediterranean and of Italy, as his father before him had 
planned? The despotic ruler of a great state? And the Church in his 
dominions? with no rights, no property but what the state allowed it? the 
state controlling its whole life? With the papacy left at Rome in full 
independence? What actually happened has often been told, and for the most 
part has best been told by writers whose sympathies are not with the pope.

It was in 1211 that the German princes elected the seventeen-year-old 
Frederick as "King of the Romans," that is to say, emperor-to-be. Innocent 
III acquiesced. But he demanded that Frederick, who as King of Sicily was 
his vassal (a feudal relation, pure and simple), should now make over that 
kingdom to his infant son: the all-powerful lord of Germany should not 
simultaneously be the lord of the realm which geography made the chief 
threat to the pope's independence. This arrangement was ratified by the act 
called the Pledge of Eger (1213), in which (among other matters) the 
suzerainty of the Holy See over Sicily was explicitly acknowledged. And 
Frederick, on the occasion of his receiving the crown of Germany, solemnly 
took the crusader's vow, before the tomb of Charlemagne at Aachen.

The crusade set on foot by Innocent at the Fourth Lateran Council was a 
fiasco. Frederick II took no part in it. He now began the most unusual part 
of his complicated policy, the dissolution of all the royal power that his 
father and grandfather[1] had built up in Germany, by surrendering to the 
multitude of ecclesiastical princes, archbishops, bishops, and abbots, all 
claim to control their temporalities, pledging himself to champion them 
against any usurpation by the lay princes. This was a preliminary to 
securing the election of his son, the nominal King of Sicily, as emperor-
to-be. A massive violation, indeed, of the pact made with Innocent III. To 
the pope, Honorius III (1216-27), Frederick explained that the election had 
been made without his knowledge and that, moreover, the arrangement secured 
that Germany would co-operate more easily in the next crusade. He also 
asked that he might now be crowned emperor by the pope, and when this took 
place (1220), Frederick renewed his crusader's vow, fixing August 1221 as 
the date of his departure.

For six years Frederick continued to delay the sailing date, and each time 
the pope accepted the excuses he made. But in 1227 this pope died, to be 
succeeded by one of the toughest popes who have ever reigned, a relative of 
Innocent III who called himself Gregory IX. He immediately began to put 
pressure on Frederick, who responded by assembling a great army and a fleet 
of transports at Brindisi. On September 8, 1227, he sailed, but two days 
later put back into port--the plague had caught his troops, they were dying 
by the hundred. The pope simply ignored his explanation and excommunicated 
him for breaking his vow (September 29). Frederick replied by a violent 
attack on the pope. The Church, he said was a stepmother, not a mother. He 
would leave for the Holy Land in May next year. To which the pope retorted 
by renewing the excommunication, with the severe addition that wherever the 
emperor went an interdict would fall--for as long as Frederick stayed in 
any place the churches would close, there would be no mass and no 
sacraments, except baptism and the last rites for the dying. If he insisted 
on mass being said and was present (Gregory had already rebuked him for 
doing this), he would be treated as a heretic, and the Sicilians be freed 
from their allegiance to him.

Frederick organised his partisans in Rome, and soon Gregory IX was a 
fugitive. On June 28, 1228, the emperor sailed for the East.

There was nothing religious about this expedition, and it was (in one 
sense) completely successful, a diplomatic triumph. The emperor persuaded 
the sultan to cede Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth and the route from 
the coast leading thither, with all the villages through which it passed. 
The Mohammedan inhabitants were to remain the sultan's subjects and have 
the free exercise of their religion. Also the great mosque of Omar, in the 
Holy City, was to be theirs and remain in use. Frederick, on the other 
hand, pledged himself to prevent any attack from the West during the next 
ten years. And in the church of the Holy Sepulchre the excommunicated 
emperor crowned himself King of Jerusalem, before an audience of his own 
soldiers and the Moslems. It was, indeed, wonderful. The Crusade principle, 
the Christian reconquest of the Holy Land, had disappeared. The Christian 
no longer planned to drive out the infidel.

By June 10, 1229, Frederick was back in Sicily. He had been away all but 
twelve months.

It would be a pleasure now to tell the story of the sixteen years between 
the hero's return and his excommunication at Lyons, in some detail. But our 
business is merely to record the stages in his duel with the popes.

What Frederick II wanted to be, it seems agreed, was the Roman emperor of 
old, but a "Catholic" Roman emperor--claiming that the empire was created 
divinely, and that he was divinely commissioned to bring about the reign of 
justice and peace, and also to spread the gospel everywhere. The Church, as 
an institution wholly self-controlled (existing for the purposes of very 
much the same divine mission) and the pope as its single supreme ruler, 
could scarcely find any place in this fantasy. Which is why historians can 
say that Frederick could not have succeeded and the Church survive, except 
as a corps ministering and receiving sacraments within the four walls of 
the basilicas. So long as this man was in power there must be war-unless 
upon the Holy See there fell the misfortune of a succession of weakling 
popes, too simple to be able to read the signs of the times.

The emperor returned from the East to find the war already on in his 
kingdom of Sicily. He managed to drive out the papal army, punished his own 
rebels with shudderingly cruel executions--we are told of men he had 
skinned alive. Then he made a peace with the pope in which he conceded 
almost everything, and was re-instated in the Church--an essential need, if 
his gains in the Holy Land were to be maintained.

For six years after the treaty of San Germano (July 23, 1230) there was a 
kind of truce. Frederick in his kingdom of Sicily ruled pretty much as if 
he were already emperor and pope in one, building up his ideal of a strong 
central despotism, and in Germany bribing the princes with lavish 
surrenders of imperial rights; while the pope could barely maintain himself 
in his own ever turbulent capital, and was quieted (to some extent) by the 
emperor's exemplary, not to say bloody, repression of heretics, in Italy 
and in Germany too.

Presently Frederick was ready, and in 1236 he returned from Germany to make 
himself as truly master of Lombardy as he was of Sicily. The pope's 
diplomacy was of no avail, nor the armies of the Lombard cities. At 
Cortenuova, near Bergamo, the emperor routed them utterly (November 27, 
1237), reversing his grandfather's defeat at Legnano of sixty years 
earlier. To the Romans he announced his victory as a monarch writing to his 
own capital city. He reminded them, in fact, that Rome was just this, and 
spoke of celebrating a "triumph" there, in the antique fashion. Yet once 
again the emperor was to govern the empire from his capital, they were 
told; the ancient offices were to be revived and the Roman nobles be called 
to fill them. From Rome the proconsuls, once again, would go forth to 
govern the provinces, and to "infuse the blood of Romulus." The slender 
hold of the pope on the city and the surrounding lands was almost the only 
obstacle to the emperor's dream being realised.

But Gregory IX had already made clear his own conceptions of the relations 
between pope and emperor--conceptions just as extreme as those of 
Frederick, and presented with no less assurance that they were divinely 
willed. So long as he lived there would be no weakening. He listed 
Frederick's crimes against religion and once again excommunicated him with 
a personal interdict (March 24, 1239). Frederick had not waited to be 
attacked. He had already done his best to rouse the cardinals against 
Gregory, telling them that the pope was no more than a kind of chairman of 
their college, and appealing from his judgment to theirs. And his diplomats 
worked to bring into combination against the pope Henry III of England and 
St. Louis IX of France. All princes ought to unite to protest against a 
pope who had gone so far beyond the limits of his real powers. And the 
emperor also suggested to the cardinals that they call a General Council, 
and he would offer his case for the judgment of all the bishops of the 
world.

In reply to these manoeuvres the old pope replied in the tones of a very 
Lear:[2] "A great beast has come out of the sea ... this scorpion spewing 
passion from the sting in his tail ... full of the names of blasphemy ... 
raging with the claws of the bear and the mouth of the lion, and the limbs 
and the likeness of the leopard, opens its mouth to blaspheme the Holy Name 
... behold the head and tail and body of the beast, of this Frederick, this 
so-called emperor...."[3] Frederick was a heretic for his denial of the 
pope's authority, for his mockery of the virgin birth, and his declaring 
that nothing is to be believed that cannot be proved by the natural reason.

Frederick replied like a Father of the Church, pained at the pope's lack of 
charity--"the pharisee who sits on the plague-stricken seat, anointed with 
the oil of wickedness." He makes a most dutiful profession of faith and 
retorts that the pope is a liar. It is he who is the sole cause of the 
trouble, and the emperor too quoted the Apocalypse: "And a second horse 
came out fiery-red, whose rider was empowered to take away all peace from 
the world, bidding men slay one another."[4]

But if England and France held aloof from Frederick's invitation, they did 
nothing to protect the pope from what his power could do. Moreover all 
Germany--the ecclesiastical princes with the rest--stood by the emperor. By 
the summer of 1240 the pope was fairly isolated. But on August 9 he issued 
a summons to a General Council, to meet at Rome the following Easter. There 
was only one way for the bishops to come--by sea. Gregory negotiated with 
the Genoese for transports and protecting galleys. Frederick retorted by an 
alliance with Pisa, and at the sea fight of La Meloria (May 4, 1241) the 
Pisan fleet defeated the Genoese and took prisoner two cardinal legates and 
a hundred bishops en route for the council. It never met, and Frederick, 
moving ever closer to Rome, was all but prepared for the final assault 
when, August 21, Gregory IX died. For nearly two years the Holy See was 
vacant.

Gregory IX left twelve cardinals. Two of these were prisoners, a third, 
Colonna, had gone over to the emperor. The official who actually ruled 
Rome, the Senator Matteo Orsini, rounding up Colonna with the rest, locked 
them all up in the ancient Septizonium with the announcement that none 
should go forth until they had elected a pope. In this ruin they endured 
the horrors of a semi-imprisonment for a couple of months, then elected 
Celestine IV and--a number of them--immediately fled from Rome, as from the 
plague. Celestine was dead within the fortnight, from the effects of the 
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