The Church and the Barbarians | Page 9

of the rest
of the Catholic world was only a question of time. But the time was
long. In North Italy there was for long a practical schism, which was
not healed till Justin II. issued an explanatory edict,[6] and the genius,

spiritual and diplomatic, of Gregory the Great was devoted to the task
of conciliation. Still it was not till the very beginning of the eighth
century[7] that the last schismatics returned to union with the Church:
thus a division in the see of Aquileia, by which for a time there were
two rival patriarchates, was closed. Already the rest of Europe had
come to peace.
[Sidenote: The Aphthartodocetes.]
The last years of Justinian were disturbed by a new heresy, that of those
who taught that the Body of the Lord was incorruptible, and it was
asserted that the emperor himself fell into this error. The evidence is
slight and contradictory, and the matter is of no importance in the
general history of the Church.[8] But it is worth remembering that little
more than a century after his death his name was singled out by the
Sixth General Council for special honour as of "holy memory." His
work, indeed, had been great, as theologian and as Christian emperor;
there was no more important or more accurate writer {22} on theology
in the East during the sixth century; and he must ever be remembered
side by side with the Fifth General Council which he summoned. There
were many defects in the Eastern theory of the relations between
Church and State; but undoubtedly under such an emperor it had its
best chances of success.
[Sidenote: The work of Justinian.]
Justinian has been declared to have forced upon the Empire which he
had reunited the orthodoxy of S. Cyril and the Council of Chalcedon,
and the attempt has been made to prove that Cyril himself was a
Monophysite.[9] The best refutation of this view is the perfect harmony
of the decisions of the Fifth General Council with those of the previous
Oecumenical assemblies, and the fact that no novelty could be
discovered to have been added to "the Faith" when the "Three
Chapters" were condemned.
With the close of the Council the definition of Christian doctrine passes
into the background till the rise of the Monothelite controversy. When
its decisions were accepted, the labours of Justinian had given peace to

the churches.
[Sidenote: and his successors.]
From 565, when Justinian died, to 628, when Heraclius freed the
Empire from the danger of Persian conquest, were years of comparative
rest in the Church. It was a period of missionary extension, of quiet
assertion of spiritual authority, in the midst of political trouble and
disaster. Gibbon, who asserts that Justinian died a heretic, adds, "The
reigns of his four successors, Justin, Tiberius, Maurice, and Phocas, are
distinguished by a rare, though fortunate, vacancy in the ecclesiastical
history {23} of the East"; and the sarcasm, though not wholly accurate,
may serve to express the gradual progress of unity which marked the
years up to the accession of Heraclius. The history of religion is
concerned rather with those outside than those within the Church. That
history we need not follow, and we may pass over this period with only
a brief allusion to the development of independence outside the
immediate range of the ecclesiastical power of New Rome. [Sidenote:
Rise of separated bodies.] Heresies grew as an expression of national
independence. The Chaldaean Church, which stretched to Persia and
India, was Nestorian. The Monophysites won the Coptic Church of
Egypt, the Abyssinian Church, the Jacobites in Syria, the Armenians in
the heart of Asia Minor. In the mountains of Lebanon the
Monothelites--of whom we have to speak shortly--organised the
Maronite Church; and in Georgia the Church was aided by
geographical conditions as well as historical development to ignore the
overlordship of the Church of Antioch. So in Europe grew up with the
new States, the Bulgarian, the Serbian, and the Wallachian Churches.
[Sidenote: Missions and failures.]
It was thus that, alike as statesmen and Christians, the emperors were
devoted advocates of missions. Their wars of conquest often--as
notably with the great Emperor Heraclius--assumed the character of
holy wars. Where the barbarians of the East made havoc there too often
the Church fell without leaving a trace of its work. Without priest and
sacrament, the people came to retain only among their superstitions, as
sometimes in North Africa to-day, usages which showed that once their

ancestors belonged to the kingdom of Christ. Much {24} of the
missionary work of the period was done by Monophysites; the record
of John of Ephesus preserves what he himself did to spread Christianity
in Asia. And it would seem that even the most orthodox of emperors
was willing to aid in the work of