The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History by James J. O'Donnell

Author:James J. O'Donnell [O'Donnell, James J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Ancient, Europe, History, Rome
ISBN: 9780061982460
Google: MEd-_14ZZmEC
Amazon: B001F76U10
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-09-03T03:00:00+00:00

This anticipates Justinian’s prescription for the council that he would hold at Constantinople two decades later: sacrifice the reputation of named individuals left and right as a way to agreement. To a connoisseur of the debates of these decades, this is an ingenious, thoughtful, and possible compromise. But it didn’t work in 532. And it didn’t work two decades later, either.

In the absence of such compromise, Justinian the stubborn amateur theologian was willing to insist on unity. This is the moment at which a Christian emperor can first be seen using his authority effectively, consistently, and deliberately to bring all his followers into one religious tent. The natural effect of such employment of authoritarian power is to encourage and promote disagreement, and that is what happened.

The year 536 was a turning point. In that year, the deposed Severus and Jacob Baraddaeus, the two leaders of the monophysite community, accepted that they would not prevail at court and so began consecrating a hierarchy of bishops of their own. Over the next forty years, traveling relentlessly through all the provinces between Asia Minor and Egypt, Jacob would ordain hundreds of bishops, including a patriarch for Antioch in the 550s. On one occasion, at Tralles in 541, he carried out the consecration of his bishop in the gallery of the cathedral while the Chalcedonians conducted their service downstairs, ignorant of what he was doing. The Jacobite church that survives to this day in the Middle East and elsewhere takes its name from him. Justinian’s fellow Chalcedonians had to regret that he let the consecration happen, but in the moment he had few choices.

In 536 Pope Agapetus I visited Constantinople and refused to take communion with Justinian’s patriarch, Anthimus I, seeing him as too tolerant of eastern aberrance. Justinian was embarrassed and deposed Anthimus shortly afterward and replaced him with Menas, who turned out to be the hardheaded, outspoken Chalcedonian that monophysitism needed as a pretext for declaring independence. Severus, the hero of a generation of monophysites, died in exile only two years later, but by then the pattern was set. Constantinople remained faithful to Chalcedonian orthodoxy, and could count on support from Jerusalem (grateful that Chalcedon had raised the city’s ecclesiastical status), but in the main the sympathies of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were lost. The insistent formation of a fiercely Christian Roman empire made the unity Justinian most wanted impossible to attain.

So the Christian empire of Justinian and his successors took a particular shape. On the one hand, official ideology prevailed, with an official clergy, heavily subsidized and performing ritual duties in the imperial churches of the capital city. On the other hand, stubborn hostility and resistance grew among those whose religious sentiments were not respected by such practice. Justinian as a religious monarch resembles Stalin, and as a political monarch he favors Miloševíc: outwardly in control, using ideological purity as a weapon to ensure control, and in the process inadvertently fueling the sympathies and ambitions of all those who simply did not agree.

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