Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (18 page)

In Antioch, Severus was very active theologically, doing work heavy with political implications. He dogmatically defended the doctrine of the
Edict of the Union,
considering it a tool for the possible reconciliation of Christians. On the one hand he derided Nestorius’s position minimizing the divinity of Christ, but he also attacked the writings of Euthyches, the historical leader of radical Monophysitism. He used his talent as a brilliant polemicist—he was skilled with classical rhetorical forms—to argue with the positions of practicing pro-Chalcedonians. He stripped Monophysitism of the extremist positions that might have troubled the unity of the Church that he sought (provided it was on
his
terms).

He also attacked a fellow Monophysite, Julian, bishop of Halicarnassus (now Bodrum in Turkey). Severus had called him and his followers “phantasiastae” (visionaries) because they did not attribute a real human body to the Incarnated Christ, claiming instead that Christ’s body was specifically divine and that it succumbed to human passion, weakness, and suffering only as a result of an ongoing miracle. This position seemed particularly weak to Severus’s stringent mind, for it denied Christ’s humanity. To him, this error was the diametric opposite of the equally wrong ideas of Nestorius and Arius, who were fundamentally opposed to Christ’s divinity.

Severus the Monophysite fully accepted the humanity of Christ, the topic that aroused so many disputes. He accepted it as long as that humanity was not reduced to one, specifically human, nature. His
sophisticated philosophical studies made him unable to accept that a
person
and a divine one at that, could have more than one
nature.
To preach that Christ had two natures—as had Leo the Great, the Roman pope from 440 to 461, and the Council of Chalcedon—would mean embracing the abhorred Nestorian heresy. Therefore, the Dyophysites, from the Roman see and the pope on down, were all heretics and were anathema.

Severus was a virtuoso of theology who used all his great learning in Greek philosophy, but his Eastern followers did not think at his level of elegance. One of the leading clerics under him was the bishop of Bambyx, a city strategically located along the road between Antioch and Mesopotamia in northern Syria. This bishop was sometimes known by a Greek name, Philoxenos, but he claimed not to know Greek even though he held such a powerful position in the empire.

Subject to these ecclesiastical authorities were even less cultivated monks who represented and defended Christianity in the lands between Antioch and the Euphrates. They tended to radicalize every complex theological issue in terms that sound strangely familiar to our modern ears: theirs was the true faith, against the diabolical heresy of others—especially in Rome but also in Constantinople, since both the patriarch and the emperor were moving toward Dyophysitism. Clearly, the situation was ripe for a “nationalistic” turn of events, similar to what was happening in Egypt.

A rapprochement between Monophysites and Dyophysites seemed politically unlikely, even impossible, but Severus, with his full faith in the humanity of Christ, could have been the man to lay the theoretical and cultural foundations for it. (Indeed, scholars stress that he had many substantial points in common with Roman orthodoxy: they refer to his Monophysitism as being merely “verbal.”) And yet the slightest verbal or theoretical nuance was enough to spark relentless civilian conflicts, such as the one in 513–15 that brought General Vitalian right up to the gates of Emperor Anastasius’s capital.

One stormy night in July 518, a few years after Anastasius repulsed Vitalian, the emperor died. The new emperor, Justin, was a military man from Illyricum, a Roman province in the Balkans, and was therefore
a subject of the papal Church of Rome. After thirty-five years of schism, he immediately sought a reconciliation with Rome, to the detriment of Monophysites such as Severus. Vitalian asked Justin for the head of Severus, and the theologian was deposed in September 518. Under the benevolent protection of Timothy, who had been patriarch of Alexandria since 517, Severus settled in a suburb of that city, which he chose partly because he had studied there as a young man and partly because it was the historical cradle of Monophysitism. Any imperial move against him would have led to riots, maybe even endangered Constantinople’s vital annual shipment of wheat from Alexandria. The capital needed the grain, as did the new emperor. Even as he lost the patriarchal throne, Severus kept his theological head and continued to write (for scholars and for the learned clergy) and give lectures interpreting the scriptures or—drawing even larger crowds—confuting his theological opponents. He lectured in lavish mansions that served as cultural centers, or at convents and monasteries. The lectures were always attended by women, and Theodora, who had once been a theatrical star, might have now become an audience member, absorbing and approving of the theology. It is easy to picture Severus’s audience; they must have shared the alert and solemn look of the touching faces that still gaze at us from the vibrant Fayyum funerary portraits.

Thus the traveling former actress and the great deposed theologian crossed paths in Alexandria. But Severus was not the only star that shone for Theodora. Her other lodestar, as noted before, was Timothy, patriarch of Alexandria since 517, practically a local pope. Although he reported hierarchically to Rome and Constantinople, he was already the highest religious authority in the region, with a large following in Egypt among the Copts,
⁴
who had split from the assembly of Christians because they believed that Christ had only one nature. (The split might also have been based partly on the ancient idea that Egyptians were “different,” though the difference was not clearly defined.) Timothy’s position was most delicate, and he was the most appropriate person to fill it.

He may not have had Severus’s theological subtlety (or he may not have had the leisure to develop it), but he had great pastoral qualities and an innate authority over his difficult, unruly flock. Although he remained a Monophysite and widened his “national”—specifically Copt—grassroots support, he was enough of a politician to maintain contact with the other Latin- and Greek-language patriarchs in Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, and Jerusalem. He was also an exceptional administrator who could manage the era’s most complex structure of urban welfare: an army of thousands of men and women devoted to caring for the sick and assisting the needy. But Timothy did not wish to be seen as a Christianized version of a public health secretary. In his dialogues with Severus, he dealt with the fine points of deep dogmatic mysteries. And he also had other interests, outside of the city.

He paid frequent visits to the Egyptian desert beyond the Valley of the Nile, which in the third century
A.D.
gave birth to Anchoritism, one of the most extraordinary of Christian phenomena. The anchorites (from the Greek
anachôrêsis
, literally “flight from society”) were hermits, all originally Egyptian; the first of them, Antony (250–356), had believed that Christianity was incompatible with civil life. After him, “a lonely multitude” had opted for a life eating berries and roots in the desert, hiding in tombs, or even buried in the sand, offering themselves up in a direct, almost savage way to the fire of divine love. The text of the life of Antony is attributed to the Alexandrite patriarch of the time, Saint Athanasius, which indicates the link between such radical asceticism and the structured, institutional Church of Alexandria; indeed, the two enjoyed a long tradition of complicity and solidarity, a counterpoint to the power of the Roman state that was perceived as oppressive, greedy, arrogant, and distant.

Timothy and his circle visited the hermits, prayed with them, and gave them the Sacrament. Although they were “laymen”—or perhaps precisely because they were laymen: they were the humblest of the humble, without even the pride that a priestly habit encourages—the monks were believed to be the most perfect mediators between man and God. Their visions, their prophecies, and their words were law. And though they neglected what we call hygiene, the old texts say that
they always gave off the sweet scent of Paradise.

+ + +

For Theodora, Severus and Timothy made Alexandria into a city where anything was possible. Saint Mary the Egyptian had lived there: after working as a prostitute for seventeen years, she had spent the same number of years in total solitude in the desert, in a state of indomitable ascetic ardor. As she was dying, a lion had meekly left his lair to offer her an eternal resting place. Alexandria really was a transformative place.

In this city of over half a million inhabitants, the immense daily work of the patriarchate ranged from cultural activities to concrete assistance to the needy, under the protective shield of the faith-healing monks of the desert. This effort had to be maintained and defended, not only against Rome or against the new Dyophysite throne of Constantinople, but against self-inflicted deterioration as well. While Severus admonished the “phantasiastae” strictly, a new kind of Monophysites, the Agnoetes, arose. They believed that Christ’s having been human meant that he had also experienced ignorance (
agnoia
in Greek) about many things, including the future. Timothy’s task was to reestablish the truth.

Theodora was neither a theologian nor a philosopher. She was not a new Hypatia, the laywoman martyred by Christian fanatics, and maybe she could not fully grasp the subtle disquisitions of the two theological luminaries of Alexandria. But Monophysitism had a special meaning for her, for she owed a lot to her body. She could not be unaffected by the theological perspective of a body (Christ’s) completely redeemed by Monophysitism as divine, without abstract distinctions that might limit or undermine the experience of the faithful. She was profoundly moved by the gravity of figures such as Severus and Timothy, especially in juxtaposition to her memory of Hecebolus. How could the new emperor of Constantinople persecute or banish them?

These elements—some conceptual in nature, most of them personal—figure into what some have interpreted as Theodora’s religious “conversion” in Alexandria, which was primarily an inner revelation, a
personal experience even more than a conviction or the acceptance of a dogma. She was seeking salvation for herself and, at the same time, she felt loyal to these admirable men. Nor did she change her view once she ascended the imperial throne. She always believed that Timothy was her own spiritual father, the one who knew how to touch her heart, and that Severus was the light of theology, the beacon flashing into the darkness of ignorance.

There was nothing scandalous about the former actress frequenting and maybe even getting close to these religious luminaries. We should not see her interior revelation as insincere, nor imagine that her presence made these men act intemperately. On the contrary, the strength of the early Church was shown especially by such unexpected encounters, such apparent contradictions, such impossible bets on an ecumenical scale—such as the beginning of the seventh eon demanded.

(Theodora had a conversion, a revelation, and even an initiation into an illustrious group. Although the cultural, multiethnic crucible of Alexandria was not the Egypt of the deep hinterland, thanks to Alexandria and the champions of Monophysitism Theodora joined the list of those who, in legend or in fact, were transformed by Egypt, the land they recognized as the mother lode of wisdom: Homer, Pythagoras, Herodotus, Alexander the Great, even Julius Caesar, and now Theodora, a woman, who took the final spot, at the end of antiquity.)

Theodora was forever grateful to Alexandria, but she did not settle there. She did not take the monastic veil, nor did she retire to the arid desert, which, like an ocean bursting with blessings, beckoned to so many men and women. Among them there may have been a Caesaria, a woman from Emperor Anastasius’s family; it has been conjectured that Theodora met her here, and that their encounters were later useful to Theodora in Constantinople.

Like her widowed mother, who had been presented with similar opportunities to flee from society, Theodora remained faithful to her nature and chose not to retire. Eventually, she began to arrange to return to her native city. Because the new emperor in Constantinople had eliminated the Monophysite structure in the other patriarchal sees
and bishoprics, it was difficult for Timothy and Severus and their circle to help Theodora with any more than a blessing and a little money. In practical and logistical terms, Alexandria and Egypt had become Monophysite islands in a Dyophysite sea.

Besides, in Alexandria Theodora had been able to renew her connections with the Blue faction. They had saved her once, long ago, in the Kynêgion of Constantinople. They had supported her career as an actress in that city. And they were also active in Alexandria, where they organized theater shows and performances and kept in touch with their correspondents in the other cities of the Levant that were rife with public baths, hippodromes, and circuses (the signs of Roman colonial power, sites offering entertainment to anyone worn out by exhausting theological debates). One particular stronghold of the Blues was the pleasure-loving city of Antioch, the magnet of the entertainment industry of late antiquity.

The
Secret History
offers us a glimpse of this reality in a passage that describes Theodora’s meeting with a dancer named Macedonia, who had gained “great influence”
⁵
with the Blues of Antioch. She had become a privileged informer for the palace. The fact that Macedonia went to “greet Theodora as she came from Egypt”
⁶
confirms that the faction had built intercity assistance and support networks. The fact that Theodora kept up her contacts with the Blues hints at a different, perhaps more correct, interpretation of Procopius’s words about the “trade” that Theodora plied during her “infamous” return trip. She must have worked as an actress, and this was again interpreted caustically by our denigrator, who identified actresses with courtesans. But the time spent in Alexandria had changed Theodora’s soul; she had become more sober and measured in her “otherness,” though Procopius failed to mention it.