الهرطقة المونوثيليتيه THE HERESY OF THE MONOTHELITES
.
4. In the year 622, according to Noel Alexander, (2) or 630, according to
Fleury, (3) the Monothelite heresy sprang up; and this was its origin:—some
bishops who had received the Council of Chalcedon, recognizing two natures
in Christ, still asserted that as both natures were but one person, we
should only recognize in him one operation. (4) N. Alexander (loco cit.)
says, that the founder of this error was Sergius, Patriarch of
Constantinople; he communicated his opinions to Theodore, Bishop of Pharan,
in Arabia, and he answered him that his sentiments were the same. It
happened also about this time that the Emperor Heraclius was in Gerapolis in
Upper Syria, when he was visited by Athanasius, Patriarch of the Jacobites,
a crafty and wicked man; he gained the Emperor’s confidence, who promised to
make him Patriarch of Antioch, if he would receive the Council of Chalcedon.
Athanasius pretended to receive it, and confessed the two natures; he then
asked the Emperor, if, having received the two natures, it was necessary to
recognize in the person of Christ two wills and two operations, or one
alone. This question posed him, and he wrote to Sergius, Patriarch of
Constantinople, and asked also the opinion of Cyrus, Bishop of Phasis, and
both persuaded him that he should confess in Christ one will alone, and only
one operation, as he was only one person. The Eutychian Athanasius was quite
satisfied with this false doctrine, because if we recognize in Christ only
one operation, we should, according to the Eutychian system, only recognize
one nature also. Thus, Sergius, Theodore [the] Bishop of Pharan, Athanasius;
and Cyrus, joined together, and as, on the death of George, Patriarch of
Alexandria, Cyrus was raised to that dignity, and Athanasius was immediately
appointed Patriarch of Antioch, three of the Eastern Patriarchs embraced the
heretical doctrine, that there was but one will in Jesus Christ; and on
that account, this sect was called the Monothelites, from the two Greek
terms composing the word, and signifying one will. (5) Sophronius, Patriarch
of Jerusalem, remained faithful to the Church, and never could be induced to
embrace the heresy.
5. Cyrus, being now Patriarch of Alexandria, formed a union there of all the
Theodosians, a very numerous Eutychian sect. This act of union was concluded
in 633, and contains nine articles; but the seventh is the one that contains
all the poison of heresy. This asserts that Christ is the Son himself, who
produces the divine and human operations by means of one theandric operation
alone; that is, we may say, a human-divine operation, both divine and human
at the same time—so that the distinction exists not in reality, but is only
drawn by our understandings. (6) Cyrus gave these articles to be examined by
the monk Sophronius; but when he read them, he threw himself at the bishop’s
feet, and, with tears, implored of him not to promulgate them, as they were
contrary to Faith, and conformable to the doctrine of Apollinares. Cyrus,
however, would not listen to him, but published the act of union, and
Sophronius, seeing he could make no impression in Alexandria, betook himself
to Constantinople, to lay the affair before Sergius; but he being one of the
firmest supporters of the error, refused to see him, and, under pretext of
re-uniting all the heretics of Egypt, approved the doctrine of Cyrus. (7)
6. Sophronius returned again to the East, and was elected this same year,
633, Patriarch of Jerusalem, much to the displeasure of Sergius, who
endeavoured to blacken him in the estimation of Pope Honorius, to whom he
wrote a long letter filled with deceit and lies. He pretends to have been
ignorant altogether of the question of two wills, until Cyrus of Phasis
wrote to him, and laid great stress on a pretended work of Menas, formerly
Bishop of Constantinople, written to support Monothelism. Some of the
Fathers, he says, teach one operation in Christ, but not one of them ever
speaks of two, and he then falsely reports that St. Sophronius, when he was
made Patriarch of Jerusalem, entered into an agreement with him not to say
anything about the controversy at all. The Pope, ignorant of the artifices
of Sergius, answered him, and commended him for putting a stop to this novel
doctrine (the two operations in Christ, maintained by Sophronius), as only
calculated to scandalize the simple, and he then adds: “We confess one will
alone in Jesus Christ, for the Divinity did not assume our sin, but our
nature, as it was created before it was corrupted by sin. We do not see that
either the Sacred Scriptures or the Councils teach one or two operations.
That Jesus Christ is one alone, operating by the Divinity and humanity, the
Scriptures prove in many places; but it is of no consequence to know whether
by the operation of the Divinity or of the humanity we should admit one or
two operations. We should leave this dispute to the grammarians. We ought to
reject these new expressions, lest the simple, hearing of two operations,
might consider us Nestorians, or perhaps might count us Eutychians, if we
recognize one operation alone in Christ”. (8)
7. Not alone the heretical, but even some Catholic writers, have judged,
from these expressions of Pope Honorius, that he fell into the Monothelite
heresy; but they are certainly deceived; because when he says that there is
only one will in Christ, he intends to speak of Christ as man alone, and in
that sense, as a Catholic, he properly denies that there are two wills in
Christ opposed to each other, as in us the flesh is opposed to the spirit;
and if we consider the very words of his letter, we will see that such is
his meaning. “We confess one will alone in Jesus Christ, for the Divinity
did not assume our sin, but our nature, as it was created before it was
corrupted by sin.” This is what Pope John IV writes to the Emperor
Constantine II., in his apology for Honorius: “Some,” said he, “admitted two
contrary wills in Jesus Christ, and Honorius answers that by saying that
Christ—perfect God and perfect man—having come to heal human nature, was
conceived and born without sin, and therefore, never had two opposite wills,
nor in him the will of the flesh ever combated the will of the spirit, as it
does in us, on account of the sin contracted from Adam.” He therefore
concludes that those who imagine that Honorius taught that there was in
Christ but one will alone of the Divinity and of the humanity, are at fault.
(9) St. Maximus, in his dialogue with Pyrrhus, (10) and St. Anastasius
Bibliothecarius, (11) make a similar defense for Honorius. Graveson, in
confirmation of this, (12) very properly remarks, that as St. Cyril, in his
dispute with Nestorius, said, in a Catholic sense, that the nature of the
Incarnate Word was one, and the Eutychians seized on the expression as
favorable to them, in the same manner, Honorius saying that Christ had one
will (that is, that he had not, like us, two opposite wills—one defective,
the will of the flesh, and one correct, the will of the Spirit), the
Monothelites availed themselves of it to defend their errors.
8. We do not, by any means, deny that Honorius was in error, when he imposed
silence on those who discussed the question of one or two wills in Christ,
because when the matter in dispute is erroneous, it is only favoring error
to impose silence. Wherever there is error it ought to be exposed and
combated, and it was here that Honorius was wrong; but it is a fact beyond
contradiction, that Honorius never fell into the Monothelite heresy,
notwithstanding what heretical writers assert, and especially William Cave,
(13) who says it is labor in vain to try and defend him from his charge. The
learned Noel Alexander clearly proves that it cannot be laid to his charge,
(14) and in answer to the great argument adduced by our adversaries, that in
the Thirteenth Act of the Sixth Council it was declared that he was
anathematized—“We saw before that Honorius was condemned, the fact that we
found through his writings, which were by him to Sergius, that in all he
followed his mind and confirmed unholy teachings.”—replies that the Synod
condemned Honorius, not because he formally embraced the heresy, but on
account of the favor he showed the heretics, as Leo II (Optimo Concilii
Interprete, as N. Alex. calls him) writes to Constantine Pogonatus in his
Epistle, requesting the confirmation of the Synod. In this letter Leo
enumerates the heretics condemned, the fathers of the heresy, Theodore of
Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter, successors in
the See of Constantinople; he also anathematizes Honorius, not for embracing
the error, but for permitting it to go on unmolested: “Who enlightened this
Apostolic Church with a doctrine not of Apostolic Tradition, but, with
profane betrayal, allowed the immaculate [Church] to be spotted.” He also
writes to the Spanish bishops, and tells them that Theodore, Cyrus, and the
others are condemned, together with Honorius, who did not, as befitted his
Apostolical authority, extinguish the flame of heretical doctrine in the
beginning, but cherished it by negligence. From these and several other
sources, then, Noel Alexander proves that Honorius was not condemned by the
Sixth Council as a heretic, but as a favorer of heretics, and for his
negligence in putting them down, and that he was very properly condemned,
for the favorers of heresy and the authors of it are both equally culpable.
He adds that the common opinion of the Sorbonne was, that although
Honorius, in his letters, may have written some erroneous opinions, still
he only wrote them as a private doctor, and in no wise stained the purity of
the faith of the Apostolic See; and his letters to Sergius, which we quoted
in the last paragraph, prove how different his opinions were from those of
the Monothelites. .
**************************
THE CHURCH IN
CRISIS: A History of the General Councils: 325-1870
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.
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