Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (14 page)

For in the years immediately after Gregory’s death, the empire was hemmed in by terrifying enemies. From north of the Danube, Slav hordes, above all the Avars, swept through the Balkans, driving the Greek-speaking population before them to the fringes of the Aegean and the Adriatic. At the same time, the Persian King Chosroes II was hacking out a Zoroastrian empire at the expense of Constantinople. In 613 Antioch was taken by Persian armies, in 614 Damascus and then Jerusalem. The Christian world watched in horrified disbelief as a pagan army destroyed the Holy Places and carried off the relic of the True Cross. By 619 all the Holy Land was under Persian control, and Constantinople itself was under siege in 62 6. The very survival of the Roman way of life seemed threatened.

With the help of massive gifts of silver and gold plate from the Eastern churches, the Avars were bought off, and the Byzantine armies rallied. The Persians were decisively defeated in 627, Chosroes murdered, and the True Cross recovered. It was a breathing-space, however, not an end. Eight hundred miles to the south of Constantinople, in the cities of Medina and Mecca, a new force was rising. It was the creation of a former merchant and camel-driver who in the 620s had become a visionary. His revelations, written in verse in the form of
Qur’an
, ‘recitations’, became the basis for a great new religious movement, Islam, which swept the Arab world. The Prophet Mohammed died in 632: by 637 Arab armies, fired by his vision of a world under the judgement of the one undivided God, had captured Antioch. By 642 Alexandria had fallen, by 698 Carthage. One by one, the ancient cradles of Christianity were wiped out, and the Mediterranean ceased to be a Christian lake.

Out of this continuing crisis in the East arose a closer identification
than ever between Church and empire. The battles of the emperors were seen as holy wars, their victories the finger of God himself. In highly charged ceremonies in 626 and 627 the Emperor Herakleios processed with icons of Christ and the Virgin round the walls of Constantinople, and was blessed by the Patriarch Sergios with the recovered relic of the True Cross. In such rituals, the distance between Church and State disappeared, and the Emperor seemed as much priest as prince.

As priest-emperor, Herakleios had to address the question of the religious disunity of his empire. The ambivalence of Christian attitudes to the faith set out by Chalcedon persisted, and divided Christendom when it had never more desperately needed to speak and act from a single heart and mind. Imperial support for the monophysite denial of the two natures of Christ had proved a disastrous cul-de-sac, creating more division than it resolved, driving wedges not only between East and West, but within the churches of the East. Any solution to the problem of the identity of the Saviour, it was clear, must start from acceptance – or at any rate non-denial – of the teaching of Chalcedon.

Herakleios’ Patriarch Sergios came up with just such a solution. He suggested that the difficulties felt by many in confessing that Christ possessed two natures, divine and human, would be eased if it could be agreed that these two natures were united by a single energy. This ‘monoenergist’ theory was eventually refined to the notion that Christ had indeed two natures, but only one will. This divine will, shared by all the Persons of the Trinity, had dictated Jesus’ human actions. This theory had wide appeal, not least because Sergios suggested that it offered an escape from the war of words’ about Chalcedon which threatened to tear the Christian empire apart. He urged that from now on all discussion of Christ’s natures should be banned. It was a suggestion that seemed to offer peace, and men of all parties rallied to his solution.

They included the Pope, Honorius I (625–38). A gifted and energetic pro-Gregorian who took an active interest in the English mission, Honorius was also anxious to promote unity within the empire. He was a loyal supporter of the Byzantine Exarch in Italy, and followed Gregory in managing the resources of the Church’s patrimony for secular as well as strictly religious purposes, repairing aqueducts, paying for supplies of corn for the people, and helping fund the imperial army in Italy. He was a vigorous church-builder and
restorer, and in an eloquent pro-imperial gesture he consecrated a church in Rome in honour of St Appolinarius, the patron saint of the exarchate at Ravenna.

Honorius was delighted by the apparent success of Sergios’ attempts to secure unity among Christians, and immensely relieved that Eastern attacks on Chalcedon would now be banned. In his enthusiasm he wrote two letters to the East approving and elaborating the ‘one energy’ formula of Sergios, and speaking of Christ as having only one will. In 638, encouraged in part by Honorius’ positive response, the Emperor issued a decree known as the ‘Ekthesis’, imposing ‘monothelite’ (one-will) teaching as the official doctrine of the empire.

The initial warm welcome for monothelitism, however, soon cooled down. It was rapidly realised by supporters of Chalcedon that the one-will doctrine, while appearing to preserve the Council’s teaching on the unity of the divine and human in Christ, in fact subverted his human nature. What sort of human being could Christ be if he lacked a human will, and therefore could not make truly human decisions, take truly human risks? How could human beings be enabled to practise virtue, how could they be purified from a crooked and sinful will, if the Saviour who was their medicine and their model himself lacked a human will?

Anti-monothelite feeling rapidly took hold in Rome and the West generally, and it became clear that Honorius had compromised the doctrinal purity of the papacy. That conviction set Rome and Constantinople once more at odds. Honorius’ successor, Pope Severinus (640), was elected in the autumn of 638, but he refused to accept the Ekthesis, and for twenty months the Emperor witheld the mandate necessary for his consecration. Roman opposition to imperial religious policy was maintained through the 640s, especially under the Greek Pope Theodore (642–9), who excommunicated and (in theory at any rate) deposed two patriarchs of Constantinople for supporting the Ekthesis. In retaliation, imperial troops looted the papal treasury in the Lateran, the papal Apocrisiary at the imperial court was arrested and exiled, and the altar of the papal residence in Constantinople was desecrated.

Theodore died in May 649. He was succeeded by a former apocrisiary in Constantinople, Martin I (649–53). Martin at once demonstrated his courage and his commitment to Theodore’s policies by refusing to apply for the imperial mandate confirming his
appointment as pope: he was consecrated without it two days after his election. Preparations had begun under Theodore for a synod at the Lateran to condemn monothelitism, and Martin went ahead with it. The Lateran synod was attended by 105 Western bishops, and by a crowd of Easterners resident in Rome, mostly monks, many of them refugees from monothelite persecution. One of the largest and, thanks to the Eastern presence, one of the most theologically sophisticated councils ever held in the West, it was a deliberate and formidable repudiation of the Emperor’s religious authority. Pope Martin took steps to publicise the Synods proceedings throughout the West, and to secure subscription to them by important absentees, like the Archbishop of Milan.

Not surprisingly, all this was intolerable to the court at Constantinople. The Exarch of Italy, Olympius, was ordered to persuade the bishops of the West to support the imperial moratorium on discussion of the question of the two wills. Failing that, he was to assassinate the Pope. Olympius was able to achieve neither part of his commission, and ultimately himself led an unsuccessful revolt against the empire. In June 653 his replacement, Theodore Kalliopis, succeeded in arresting the Pope in the Lateran basilica, where Martin had had his bed placed for sanctuary in front of the altar. Chronically ill and savagely maltreated by his gaolers (at one stage, while suffering from dysentery, he was held for forty-seven days without being allowed to wash), Martin was taken to Constantinople. There he was jostled by a hostile crowd, and charged with supporting Olympius’ rebellion and even of corresponding with the forces of Islam. The real reason for Martin’s arrest, his defiance of the Emperor over the monothelite question, was kept out of the show-trial proceedings, since the regime wanted to avoid raising dangerous issues of theological orthodoxy. With the whole weight of the empire against him, only one verdict was possible, and the Pope was duly found guilty of treason. He was stripped of his vestments, dragged in shackles through the streets and publicly flogged. Separated from the small band of clergy who had travelled with him from Rome, he was deported to the Crimea where he died in September 655 from the hardships he had endured.

Nevertheless, the imperial idea remained strong in the West. One of the worst elements in Martin’s suffering was the knowledge that while he still lived the Roman Church had bowed to imperial commands,
and had elected a new pope. Loyalty to the empire had been strained to the uttermost, however, and the relationship would never again be innocent or easy. Martin’s successor, Eugenius I (654–7), was a saintly nonentity chosen for his readiness to please Constantinople. Despite that, he was shouted down and threatened by his Roman congregation when he tried to accept an ambiguous declaration of faith by the Patriarch of Constantinople on the monothelite question. Pope Martin’s sufferings had not been entirely in vain, and Rome stood firm to the teaching of Chalcedon.

This underlying doctrinal hawkishness was softened by anxious deference to the Emperor’s office. In 663 the Emperor Constans II himself spent twelve days in Rome. He was received with rapture, Pope Vitalian (657–72) tactfully saying nothing about Constans’ brutal treatment of Pope Martin or the Emperor’s continuing tacit support for monothelitism. Constans’ visit was the occasion for an orgy of papal ceremonial, in which the Emperor and his soldiers were heaped with honours, and brought gifts in a candlelit procession to the tomb of Peter. The chanting in the Roman basilicas must have been drowned out, however, by the deafening clatter of Constans’ workmen, who were busy stripping the bronze tiles and fittings from the great imperial monuments of the city, to be melted down or reused in Constantinople. This dismantling would hasten the decay of many of the noblest buildings in the city. Constans took Rome’s imperial glory with him when he sailed away Unsurprisingly, the
Liber Pontificalis
summarised his reign as one of oppression and disaster for the West: ‘He imposed such afflictions on the people … by tributes, poll-taxes and ship-money, as had never before been seen … [He] also took away all the sacred vessels and equipment of God’s holy churches, leaving nothing behind.’ The papal chronicler’s satisfaction in recording the Emperor’s murder in his bath in 668 is undisguised.
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Constans’ successor, Constantine IV, slowly came to recognise the futility of all this. Support for monothelitism had alienated the West, and it had not pacified the East. He decided therefore to reverse the religious policy of the last fifty years, and to abandon monothelitism. In 680 he summoned the Sixth General Council, which opened at Constantinople in November. Pope Agatho (678–81) was represented by a party of Greek clergy chosen from the many now resident in Rome. The Council was a complete victory for the
Chalcedonian doctrine of two natures, and therefore for the papacy, though the victory was tempered from Rome’s point of view by the Council’s solemn condemnation of Pope Honorius among the other founding fathers of monothelitism. Rome prided itself on an unbroken record of fidelity to the truth, and papal claims gained credibility from the fact that Rome, unlike the great primatial sees of the East, had never fallen into error. Its orthodoxy was arguably partly due to sheer lack of imagination. Roman theologians were conservative, and had none of the sophistication and subtlety of their Greek counterparts, and so they were less vulnerable to the seductions of new ideas. Yet whether dullness or apostolic fidelity lay at its roots, Rome’s proud tradition of dogged adherence to the ancient faith was acknowledged even in the East: a heretic pope was therefore a bitter pill to swallow. Honorius’ condemnation was a price worth paying for the acceptance of Roman teaching in general, however, and the Council in its final address compensated by paying explicit tribute to Rome’s age-old fidelity to the apostolic preaching.

Over the next ten years the benefits of reconciliation with the empire became apparent. The claims of the church of Ravenna to independent status, which had been endorsed by Constans, were now abandoned, the archbishops agreeing to submit to consecration by the Pope. The requirement that the popes should wait for confirmation of their appointment from Constantinople before they could be consecrated was waived, the Exarch at Ravenna being empowered to issue the necessary mandate. The crippling burden of imperial taxation on Church lands was eased.

But this accord was fragile, and the benefits of Byzantine rule were often less in evidence than its drawbacks. In 692 the Emperor Justinian II summoned a council to complete the disciplinary work of the Fifth and Sixth General Councils. This new Council, oddly known as the ‘Quinisext’ or ‘Fifth-Sixth’ Council, was an exclusively Eastern affair, and the 102 canons or regulations it eventually authorised contained a series of measures based on Eastern practice but absolutely unacceptable in the West. The Eastern Church, for example, permitted priests and deacons a normal married life, while the Western Church had long insisted on celibacy. The Eastern Church did not permit fasting on Saturdays, the Western Church required it. The Quinisext Canons also outlawed a number of devotional and iconographical conventions popular in the West, such as the symbolic
representation of Christ as a Lamb. Finally, the Council re-enacted the 28th Canon of Chalcedon, giving the Patriarch of Constantinople equal privileges with Rome, and precedence over all the other patriarchs immediately after Rome.

All these measures were calculated to offend Westerners, and Constantine’s successor, Justinian II, rubbed the Pope’s nose in it by sending him the Canons, demanding his signature. Pope Sergius (687–701) refused, would not permit the Canons to be read or circulated, and instituted a number of pointed devotional gestures designed to underline the Roman Church’s absolute rejection of the Council. He ordered the singing of the ‘Agnus Dei’ at the breaking of the bread at Mass. This was a series of petitions addressed to Christ as the Lamb of God, and he renovated mosaics at St Peter’s and in the apse of the church of St Cosmas and Damian near the Forum, in which Christ was portrayed in the forbidden form of a Lamb.