Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (50 page)

Finally, Justinian told Theodora that he had developed a new strategy. He thought it would resolve the problem, but it turned out to be the start of a complex chain of actions and reactions, the bitterness of which would be so problematic that within ten years another ecumenical council, the fifth, would be called in Constantinople to address it.

Justinian’s solution was the publication of the
Edict of the Three Chapters,
issued in the winter of 543–44, condemning three theologians. The men in question had all died peacefully, years earlier, in the embrace of the Church. Yet it appeared that they were infected with Nestorianism, a doctrine condemned at the Third Council of Ephesus (431) and opposed particularly strongly by the Eastern Monophysites for its rationalistic approach to the issue of Christ.

The anathemized authors were Theodore (350–428), who had been bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia and was considered Nestorius’s teacher; Ibas, bishop of Edessa from 435–39 to 457; and Theodoretus (393–458), who had been bishop of Cyrus in northern Syria from 423 until his death (he was a well-known writer of tracts and a clear-eyed chronicler in an extreme camp of Syrian asceticism). Although he had been one of Nestorius’s early sympathizers, he had later condemned him before the fathers of the Fourth Council of Chalcedon.

Justinian was convinced that he could undermine the credibility of the Chalcedon Council by attacking the three theologians; even though one of them (Theodore of Mopsuestia) had not been at issue in Chalcedon, the other two had been rehabilitated at the council. He hoped to undermine it and thus support Monophysitism without attacking the council directly (which might have led the Dyophysites to abandon their support for him). It was a move partially inspired by the old
Edict of the Union
of 482, because it sought to align Monophysites
and Dyophysites against their common enemy, Nestorianism. But that “enemy” had already long since faded from the empire; it was expanding only outside, along the great commercial routes that linked the Mediterranean to Asia.

Menas, patriarch of the second Rome, approved of Justinian’s edict, but other reactions were uncertain, lukewarm, or outright negative. The attack on Chalcedon was not strong enough to satisfy the Eastern Monophysites. Other critics recalled that the three theologians were in the bosom of the Church when they died. Many wondered about the emperor’s interference with the Church, especially in the Western bishoprics who considered the Roman pope, not the secular Augustus of Constantinople, to be the successor of Christ on Earth.

Although he owed his position as pope to the imperial couple’s scheming, Vigilius refused to accept the edict. The papal nuncio in Constantinople excommunicated Menas—the patriarch who had been appointed because he was a Dyophysite—for supporting Justinian’s document. In spite of everything, the emperor’s latest move in favor of reconciliation and unity created only opposition and fragmentation.

In keeping with the new spirit of the time, Justinian avoided an instinctive, irritated reaction. He and Theodora had learned from their experience with Silverius: they continued to be patient and, despite their theological differences and disappointments, they kept showing Pope Vigilius great formal deference. This was particularly important given the military situation in Italy, where the Gothic king Totila was preparing his siege on Rome, and the papal seat (discussed in the preceding chapter), and the generals Belisarius and John—Vitalian’s nephew—were failing to collaborate.

Then, on November 22, 545, Constantinople scored a masterful diplomatic success. Under the pretense of protecting the pope from an imminent enemy attack, imperial soldiers kidnapped Vigilius as he was celebrating mass before the faithful in the church of Saint Cecilia in the Trastevere section of Rome. The pope suddenly saw soldiers marching in; then an officer handed him an imperial order summoning him to Constantinople. Vigilius interrupted the mass, hurried to
the banks of the Tiber, and boarded a ship for Portus (Rome’s ancient port, now Ostia). He blessed the crowd from aboard the ship, but the Roman citizens immediately understood that the pope’s kidnapping meant that the other “Romans” (in Constantinople) were abandoning them to the Gothic siege. Instead of answering him with prayers of their own, they shouted insults and hurled stones at the representatives of that empire and that Church.

Pope Vigilius did not reach Constantinople until January 547, more than a year after his hasty kidnapping. Perhaps Justinian wanted to give him ample time to prepare for their confrontation, but some sources say that the entire episode was a cover-up designed to waste time and save face. Finally, the ship carrying Vigilius docked at the port of the second Rome. Sixty-five-year-old Justinian, in person, gave the pope an official welcome, as he had done with his predecessors. (At the time, the popes visited Constantinople more often than the emperors traveled to Rome.) The two men discussed the past. They talked of the fact that in 536 Pope Agapetus had excommunicated Anthimus, patriarch of Constantinople, and replaced him with Menas because the pope preferred his Dyophysite views. Now the
Edict of the Three Chapters
had made the current pope, Vigilius, excommunicate Menas, too. Moreover, Vigilius had promised Theodora years before that he would rehabilitate Anthimus, but he hadn’t done so. There’s no doubt that Theodora suggested the heavy pressure that was brought to bear on Vigilius: the pressure was a shrewd mix of formal honors and unbudging firmness about principles. The empress knew that Vigilius was easily influenced by his surroundings and circumstances, and too attached to his office to forcefully defend theoretical positions that perhaps he did not fully comprehend.

Finally, the pope seemed to give in to Justinian and Theodora’s pressure. In May 547, he reconciled with Patriarch Menas, and in April 548 he sent to him a judgment—called
Iudicatum
—on the Three Chapters. In keeping with Justinian’s edict, it roundly condemned the three theologians. But in a contradictory move, Vigilius reiterated his faith in the Council of Chalcedon. The ambiguous document forever undermined Vigilius’s prestige, even in the West that he cherished so much.

The empress was finally getting her revenge, albeit indirectly. Although her body was growing weak, she didn’t weaken her struggle against her enemies, and she was no more indulgent in her treatment of traitors. Vigilius had been deceiving her for more than ten years now, since the spring of 537: despite all his promises he had yet to rehabilitate Anthimus the Monophysite. Finally, the Augusta managed to wound Vigilius’s treasured self-respect and his honor as a Western aristocrat, not just as pope.

While this was happening, a new situation was emerging that would represent a radical antithesis to Justinian’s ideal of one empire united and at peace under one Church. Although it was emerging thousands of miles from the diatribes in the capital, and people were talking of it in a language other than the pope’s Latin or the Greek used by the Mediterranean urban elite, still it all led back to imperial power—more precisely, it led back to Theodora.

Immediately after the plague (in 542 or 543), an important Eastern authority appealed to the empress. Byzantine sources refer to him as Arethas (al-Harith in Arabic), a
phylarch
or one of the chiefs of the Arab auxiliary forces allied with the empire. More precisely, he was the king of the Christianized Arabs, the Ghassanids, who inhabited the northwestern Arabian peninsula and did lively trade in both the Red Sea and the Mediterranean with close political and military ties to the Roman Empire of Constantinople. This Ghassanid
phylarkhos
, decorated with the highest court titles, was an ardent Monophysite Christian. He had come to inform the merciful empress that the local authorities were persecuting his coreligionists in the outer territories of the empire. Justinian was probably in the midst of revising his authoritarian Dyophysitism (as the Three Chapters would show), but his harsh anti-Monophysite measures were still in force, and were still applied energetically at the local level. The most observant Monophysites, especially the monks, were dying in the imperial prisons as “confessors.” The rest of the faithful Monophysites were left without sacraments, without new clergy being ordained, without priests, in lands that had been devastated by the plague. In the words of the
prophet, it was the “horrible abomination … of desolation.”
²
How could the devout empress tolerate such a situation?

Justinian devoted much of his energy to intellectual research in the hope that it might lead to unity, albeit a theoretical and speculative unity; but Theodora felt that an immediate signal of support had to be sent to Arethas and his kingdom, and in general to the Monophysite subjects of the distant imperial provinces. She felt obligated to them not just because their beliefs about Christ coincided with her own, but because she had seen the whole Levant, the outpost defending the empire against the Persian enemy, in her early travels. Even before ascending the throne, she had understood that the survival of the empire in the East would depend not only on military fortifications and the valor of soldiers, but also on the survival of Christianity in its Monophysite version. Without bishops to ordain priests and to proselytize, a precious heritage and a long-established reality would crumble.

Such a state of emergency called for someone who was willing to live dangerously and talk convincingly. A monk named Jacob was in the city at the time, an exceptional individual who epitomized the two faces of Monophysitism. He combined Timothy’s, Severus’s, and Anthimus’s proper, official styles with the rigor of the radical ascetics who were strengthened rather than weakened by renunciation. These were men of moral strength such as Mār the Solitary, the monk “athlete of God” who was stronger than “ten criminals,”
³
the same one who had refused to accept money from the empress. These were men who knew how to mobilize the faithful in the East; they were heroes such as Simeon the Stylite, the fifth-century Syrian saint who had lived for thirty-seven years atop a column (the pilgrimage site is now the tourist attraction of Qal‘at Sim‘ān).

For a long time, Theodora had followed the development of Jacob’s great theological mind, which was housed in a body that had the strength of an adventurer and the resistance of a fakir. After the anti-Monophysite measures of 536, the Augusta had duly sent him into hiding, but she continued to hear reports of his ascetic exploits and of his ease with languages, especially Syriac. It was crucial that he spoke
Syriac, for his future interlocutors were not literary sophisticates; in those deserts, some past bishops had even boasted of not knowing any Greek at all. Classical, “Roman,” or imperial virtues were needed less than what we might simply call ethnic, local virtues. The same was true of Egypt, where the people choosing Monophysitism were increasingly Coptic-speakers from deep inside Egypt. Conversely, the official (imperial or melkite) Dyophysite version of Christianity was already shrinking down to include only an elite network in Alexandria and a few other Hellenized cities, a network that would not resist the impending onslaught of Islamic expansionism.

In that year, 543, Jacob was secretly ordained bishop against all canon rules; he was probably ordained by Theodosius, the exiled Monophysite patriarch of Alexandria (he can be considered a Copt) who lived under Theodora’s protection in a country villa in Thrace.

While Arethas’s specific request was satisfied by ordaining an Arab bishop (his name was Theodore), Jacob was formally appointed to a nominal office as bishop of Edessa on the empire’s border with Persia, in the heart of Syrian Christendom and of the agricultural Fertile Crescent (the town is now Urfa, in southeast Turkey). Edessa held precious relics of Christ, including a sacred image that some have identified as being the Holy Shroud of Turin. The ordination reaffirmed and institutionalized the Monophysite presence in the Near East, which, along with Egypt, had been its historical cradle and the heart of its resistance. At the same time, the new bishop had a supraregional dimension that made him a sort of patriarchal vicar.

There was already a bishop in Edessa, and he was a strict Orthodox Catholic who espoused Dyophysitism. Jacob never attempted to undermine him. Was this a contradiction? For Theodora, it was part of a providential design acting through her. She might have believed that in time the opposition would be settled, especially when she considered the parallel developments regarding Vigilius and the Roman papacy. According to the earliest Christian sources, the bishop represents the unity of the Church. But Bishop Jacob, appointed under the auspices of the imperial couple, embodied duplicity, if not outright deceit, a deceit
that tainted not only the Church but the empire as well, the very center of power that so forcefully preached for and demanded unity.

In the Syriac language, Jacob was called the “Baradeus” or “beggar”; since he had no real seat, the only way for him to preach freely was to disguise himself in rags like a wandering beggar. The imperial soldiers were chasing him, and if he was identified they would have to arrest him, for they had undoubtedly sworn to serve “the divine and most devout rulers Justinian and Theodora his consort.” In keeping with this oath, they pursued a man who paradoxically was protected by the very rulers in whose name he was being persecuted.

Reports say that Jacob used to hide during the day and walk dozens of miles each night. His theological conviction was as strong as his migratory spirit. A circle of acolytes served as his bodyguards, preparing the ground in Arabia, Asia Minor, Armenia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. We read that he consecrated eighty-nine bishops and two patriarchs, and ordained eighty thousand priests; these are doubtless exaggerated figures, but he was undeniably responsible for the birth and organization of the “Syrian Orthodox” Church; to this day, it is called “Jacobite” in his honor.

A vast number of anecdotes describe Jacob as a healer and a performer of miracles. These powers were accepted and interpreted as the proof and the result of his true faith, yet a historian would say the miracle he performed was quite different. He was responsible for the persistence of a strong Christian identity in the region: it survived the decline of the imperial Orthodox presence, especially in the wake of Islam’s spectacular successes, and it lives on today despite all sorts of nationalistic and fundamentalist intolerance. For more than sixteen centuries now, millions of the faithful have been members of the Jacobite Church (they are known as “old Syrians” or Orthodox Syrians); their spiritual fortresses are the monasteries that they built on the parched hills of Tur Abdin (in present-day southeast Turkey).