The Church and the Barbarians | Page 6

the bishops came to be political leaders, to plot against governments, to found a political power of their own. At Constantinople the patriarchs, recognised as such by the Emperor and Senate of the New Rome, sought not to intrude themselves into a sphere outside their religious calling, but developed their claims, in their own sphere, side by side with those of the State; and their example was followed in the Churches which began to look to Constantinople for guidance. There was a necessary consequence of this. {13} [Sidenote: Nationalism of the Churches.] It was that when the nationalities of the East,--in Egypt, Syria, Armenia, or even in Mesopotamia--began to resent the rule of the Empire, and struggled to express a patriotism of their own, they sought to express it also on the ecclesiastical side, in revolt from the Church which ruled as a complement to the civil power. Heresy came to be a sort of patriotism in religion. And while there was this of evil, it was not evil that each new barbarian nation, as it accepted the faith, sought to set up beside its own sovereign its patriarch also. "Imperium," they said, "sine patriarcha non staret," an adage which James I. of England inverted when he said, "No bishop, no king." Though the Bulgarians agreed with the Church of Constantinople in dogmas, they would not submit to its jurisdiction. The principle of national Churches, independent of any earthly supreme head, but united in the same faith and baptism, was established by the history of the East. Gradually the Church of Constantinople, by the growth of new Christian states, and by the defections of nations that had become heretical, became practically isolated, long before the infidels hedged in the boundaries of the Empire and hounded the imperial power to its death. Within the boundaries the Church continued to walk hand-in-hand with the State. Together they acted within and without. Within, they upheld the Orthodox Faith; without, they gave Cyprus its religious independence, Illyricum a new ecclesiastical organisation, the Sinaitic peninsula an autonomous hierarchy. More and more the history of these centuries shows us the Greek Church as the Eastern Empire in its religious aspect. And it shows that the division between East {14} and West, beginning in politics, was bound to spread to religion. As Rome had won her ecclesiastical primacy through her political position, so with Constantinople; and when the politics became divergent so did the definition of faith. Rome, as a church, clung to the obsolete claims which the State could no longer enforce: Constantinople witnessed to the independence which was the heritage of liberty given by the endowment of Jesus Christ.
Such are the general lines upon which Eastern Church history proceeds. We must now speak in more detail, though briefly, of the theological history of the years when Justinian was emperor.
[Sidenote: Early controversy in Justinian's reign.]
Justinian was a trained theologian, but he was also a trained lawyer; and the combination generally produces a vigorous controversialist. It was in controversy that his reign was passed. The first controversy, which began before he was emperor, was that, revived from the end of the fifth century, which dealt with the question of the addition to the Trisagion of the words, "Who was crucified for us," and involved the assertion that One of the Trinity died upon the cross. In 519 there came from Tomi to Constantinople monks who fancied that they could reconcile Christendom by adding to the Creed, a delusion as futile as that of those who think they can advance towards the same end by subtracting from it. After a debate on the matter in Constantinople, Justinian consulted the pope. Letters passed with no result. In 533, when the matter was revived by the Akoimetai, Justinian published an edict and wrote letters to pope and patriarch to bring the matter to a final decision. "If One of the Trinity did {15} not suffer in the flesh, neither was He born in the flesh, nor can Mary be said, verily and truly, to be His Mother." The emperor himself was accused of heresy by the Vigilists; and at last Pope John II. declared the phrase, "One Person of the Trinity was crucified," to be orthodox. His judgment was confirmed by the Fifth General Council.[1]
The position which the emperor thus assumed was not one which the East alone welcomed. Rome, too, recognised that the East had power to make decrees, so long as they were consonant with apostolic doctrine.
[Sidenote: The Monophysites.]
Justinian now gave himself eagerly to the reconciliation of the Monophysites. In 535 Anthimus, bishop of Trebizond, a friend of the deposed patriarch of Antioch, Severus, who was at least semi-Monophysite, was elected to the patriarchal throne of New Rome. In the same year Pope Agapetus (534-6) came to Constantinople