by Eamon Duffy
This was not the sort of language Anastasius was accustomed to hearing from the docile court bishops of the East. Gelasius, however, set the tone for imperial-papal relations in the decades that followed. Anastasius was a devout amateur theologian, and had once even been considered as a candidate for the vacant bishopric of Antioch. He did not take kindly to these papal harangues, and in 517 told Pope Hormisdas (514–23), ‘You may thwart me, reverend sir, you may insult me: but you may not command me.’2
For the Gothic regime at Ravenna, tension between Rome and Constantinople was good news. King Theoderic was an Arian, but he was also a wise and indulgent ruler to his Catholic subjects, and he cultivated good relations with successive popes. These overtures got a mixed reception in Rome, where the Senate and the wealthy Roman families longed for reconciliation with Byzantium and the restoration of the empire in Italy. Divisions between pro-Gothic and Byzantine factions within both Senate and the clergy came to a head after the death of Pope Anastasius II (496–8), and led to the election of rival popes. The Archpriest Laurence was the candidate favoured by the aristocratic laity, anxious at all costs for reconciliation with the Emperor, and willing to make doctrinal concesssions to achieve it. The clergy’s candidate was the deacon Symmachus, unusually at this late date a convert from paganism, and a stern upholder of Roman doctrinal purity and papal claims. The population of Rome took sides on the issue, and to end the ensuing bloodshed the rival candidates presented themselves for arbitration in Ravenna before King Theoderic. According to the papal chronicler, Theoderic ‘made the fair decision that the one who was ordained first and whose faction was found to be the largest should hold the apostolic see’, but it can hardly be a coincidence that this turned out to be the anti-Byzantine, pro-Goth Symmachus (498–514). Laurence was bundled off to a consolation bishopric at Nuceria. The spectacle of a heretical barbarian arbitrating a disputed papal election did not bode well for imperial authority in Italy.
But pressure was building at Constantinople for the resolution of the breach with Rome. Theology dominated the public imagination in fifth-century Constantinople, as football or baseball does that of modern Manchester or New York. Even the circus teams, the Greens and the Blues, adopted theological slogans. Though the Emperor was an ardent monophysite, most of the population of Constantinople supported the teaching of Chalcedon. When monophysite additions were made to the liturgy in the chapel royal and in the cathedral of Hagia Sophia, bloody riots broke out. Rampaging mobs terrorised the city in support of the two-natures theology. Anastasius was forced to seek a reconciliation with Symmachus’ successor, Pope Hormisdas, inviting him to preside over a synod in Thrace to sort out their differences. Neither the Pope nor the Emperor was prepared to compromise, however.
The deadlock was broken by Anastasius’ sudden death, and the proclamation of a Latin-speaking peasant soldier, Justin, as his successor. Justin was a no-nonsense Chalcedonian Catholic with a simple faith: he had little patience with fine theological distinctions. Riding a tide of popular support, he forced the Eastern bishops to accept a formula drawn up by Pope Hormisdas, condemning Acacius and his teaching and acknowledging the authority of Chalcedon. The formula, which cited Christ’s words to Peter in Matthew 16, Tu es Petrus, recognised the primacy of Rome, as the apostolic see in which the true faith had always been preserved, and made communion with Rome the essential test of membership of the Catholic Church. It was a tremendous coup for the papacy, and thirteen centuries later the ‘Formula of Hormisdas’ would be cited by the First Vatican Council as proof of papal infallibility.3
Predictably, this settlement caused consternation in the East, but it marked the beginning of a real reconciliation between empire and papacy. Justin, and his nephew Justinian, who dominated his uncle and succeeded him in 527, were determined to restore imperial direct rule in Italy. Reconciliation with the papacy was fundamental to this plan. Theoderic recognised what was happening, and in the years before his death in 526 became paranoid about anything that smacked of pro-Byzantine feeling, which he interpreted as treason. In 524 he had his trusted adviser the philosopher Boethius garrotted in prison for alleged treasonable correspondence with Constantinople.
Theoderic thought of himself as the protector of Arian Christians everywhere. He watched with rage as the Emperor Justin’s zeal for the Catholic faith overflowed into a campaign against heresy in the East. The Emperor confiscated Arian churches and had them reconsecrated for Catholic worship. Arian Gothic populations under imperial rule were forcibly converted to Catholicism. Determined to stop this policy, the King summoned Hormisdas’ pro-imperial successor, Pope John I (523–6), to Ravenna. The Pope was ordered to lead a deputation of senators and ex-consuls to Constantinople. He was to persuade the Emperor to end the persecution, return the confiscated churches and allow the forcibly converted to resume their Arian beliefs.
This mission was a deep humiliation for the Pope, who felt acutely the contradiction of his position, the teacher of orthodoxy forced to act as apologist for heretics. With considerable courage, John flatly refused to ask the Emperor to allow converts to revert to heresy. He did however agree to seek toleration for existing Arian populations, and to ask for an end to the confiscations of church buildings. Despite his great age and failing health, he set off for Constantinople early in 526, arriving there just before Easter (19 April), the first Pope to make the journey to Constantinople.
Once there, what had begun as a humiliation turned into a triumph, for the Pope was received as a hero. The whole city came out to the twelfth milestone to greet him, and the Emperor treated him with ostentatious reverence, prostrating himself on the ground before him in a gesture which would have gladdened the heart of Pope Gelasius. On Easter Day John was installed in Hagia Sophia on a throne higher than that of the Patriarch, he celebrated Mass before the Emperor in Latin, not Greek, and using the ritual customs of Rome, not Constantinople: he was allowed to place the Easter crown on the Emperor’s head, an honour normally reserved for the Patriarch. The clerks of the papal chancery, hardened to Eastern rejection of Rome’s Petrine claims, recorded ecstatically the honours heaped on the Pope by the Emperor, and the gratitude of the Greeks for being able ‘to receive in glory the vicar of St Peter the Apostle’.4
Justin agreed to suspend hostilities against the Arians and return their churches, but the Emperor refused to allow the forcibly converted Arians to return to their damnable errors. This, however, was the element of the embassy which mattered most to Theoderic. The Pope and senatorial party returned to Ravenna to find the King convinced that they had not seriously attempted to secure real concessions from the Emperor, and maddened by accounts of the Pope’s triumphant reception and the Roman party’s delight in it. Worn out by the journey and shattered by the King’s furious hostility, John died within days of his arrival in Ravenna. His body, carried in state back to Rome for burial in St Peter’s, immediately became the focus of miraculous healings.
Yet popes retained their uses for the Gothic kings. As preparations mounted in Constantinople for a campaign to reclaim the West, the court at Ravenna looked for ways to buy time. The shortlived Pope Agapitus I (535–6) seemed a likely ally. Agapitus was an aristocrat from a distinguished Roman clerical dynasty, and a scholar deeply read in the Church Fathers. He was a stern disciplinarian, who risked offending the Emperor Justinian by taking a hard line over the rehabilitation of the Arian Goths of North Africa, now being forcibly recatholicised in the wake of Count Belisarius’ triumphant imperial reconquest there. From Ravenna, Agapitus looked like a pro-Gothic pope, andTheodohad, the last Gothic King of Italy, sent him to Constantinople to try to deflect Justinian’s preparations for the imminent invasion designed to restore imperial rule in Italy.
Justinian soon made it clear to the Pope that the reinvasion of Italy was not negotiable, and it is doubtful if Agapitus tried very hard to dissuade him. On the theological front, however, the Pope swept all before him. Justinian’s forceful wife Theodora was an ex-ac
tress with a lurid sexual reputation for wearing out relays of athletic young courtiers. She was also a devout monophysite, who kept a monastery of heretical monks in the imperial palace. Theodora exercised enormous influence over Justinian, and had secured the appointment of a monophysite, Anthimous, as patriarch of Constantinople. Pope Agapitus determined to have nothing to do with this man, refusing to hold communion with him, and, when threatened by the angry Emperor for his truculence, he was unintimidated. He had long wanted to meet the devout Justinian, he declared: instead, he seemed to stand before the pagan persecutor Diocletian. He demanded a public debate with the Patriarch, at which he had little difficulty in demonstrating Anthimous’ suspect opinions. Overawed, Justinian ‘abased himself before the apostolic see, prostrating himself before the blessed Pope Agapitus’. He agreed to the deposition and exile of the Patriarch, and invited the Pope to consecrate an orthodox replacement, who testified his faith by signing an expanded version of the formula of Pope Hormisdas. The Patriarch of Constantinople bowed to the superior doctrinal purity of the Pope of Rome.
Agapitus, however, did not survive long to enjoy his triumph. Six weeks into his visit to Constantinople he sickened and died: his body, wrapped in lead, was taken back to Rome for burial. But his mission to the imperial capital had demonstrated once again Rome’s unflinching defence of orthodoxy, and, in the reverence of the Emperor and the papal consecration of a new patriarch, the Pope’s primacy over the whole Church, East and West.
The suddeness of Pope Agapitus’ death threatened to undo all these gains. Vigilius, the papal Apocrisiary (ambassador) in Constantinople, was an aristocrat whose father and brother were consuls. Consumed with ambition, he had lost no time in ingratiating himself with the real power in the court of Constantinople, the Empress Theodora. Posing as a monophysite sympathiser, he won her support for his candidacy for the papacy. In return, he promised to reinstate the banished monophysite Patriarch Anthimous, and even to repudiate altogether the teaching of the Council of Chalcedon. Laden with bags of Theodora’s money for bribes, he raced Pope Agapitus’ body to Rome. But he was too late. The Gothic King Theodahad had pre-empted any imperial candidate by forcing through the appointment of Pope Hormisdas’ son, Silverius (536–7). The papacy seemed to have slipped through Vigilius’ fingers.
Vigilius, however, was not a man to be trifled with. In December 536 the imperial General Belisarius ‘liberated’ Rome on Justinian’s behalf, and established himself on the Palatine as governor. His wife Antonina was Theodora’s closest friend and confidante, and together she and Vigilius persuaded Belisarius to arrest Pope Silverius, on a trumped up charge of plotting to open the gates of Rome to the Gothic army. Demoted to the status of a monk, the Pope was banished to an obscure town in Anatolia, and the see was declared vacant. The clergy now obediently elected Vigilius (537–55) as pope.
Worse was to follow. The bishop of the town in Anatolia to which Pope Silverius had been deported took up his cause. He secured an audience with Justinian and impressed on him the enormity of what had been done. There were any number of earthly kings, he pointed out, but only one pope. Rattled, Justinian had Silverius returned to Rome for a fair trial, to be reinstated if found innocent. Vigilius, however, now firmly in charge, was having none of this. The wretched Silverius was arrested again as soon as he arrived, and bundled off to a second exile on the island of Palmaria. There, a few months later, he died of malnutrition. To all intents and purposes, one pope, and he the son of a pope, had been deposed and murdered by another.
For Vigilius, however, chickens now began to come home to roost. Justinian badly needed to find ways of conciliating monophysite opinion in the empire, and in 543 his advisers came up with a scheme designed to do just that. They singled out for condemnation the writings of three long-dead writers, all of whom had supported a ‘two-nature’ Christology, and each of whom was a special target of monophysite loathing. The writings in question, known as the ‘Three Chapters’, provided Justinian with a way of distancing himself and his regime from Chalcedon, without actually repudiating the formal teaching of the Council.
With some reluctance, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the other Eastern bishops signed the condemnation of the Three Chapters. But feeling in the West was violently against anything which threatened the authority of Chalcedon, and Vigilius, whatever his private opinions, did not dare comply with the imperial demand. Here, with the imperial campaign to recapture Italy in full swing, was potential disaster. Justinian simply could not afford a pope at odds with the rest of the empire. In November 545 he had Vigilius arrested while he was presiding over the ceremonies for St Cecilia’s Day, a major festival in Rome, and put aboard a ship for Constantinople via Sicily.
There were few tears shed for Vigilius in Rome. According to the Liber Pontificalis, the crowd threw stones and yelled abuse at the Pope as his ship pulled away from the dock, for they blamed the many misfortunes of the city on the sordid way in which he had become pope. He was honourably received by Justinian on his arrival in January 547, however, and once again his ambition ran away with him. After a show of firmness, he resumed communion with the ‘heretical’ Patriarch Menas, and in April 548 he published a solemn ludicatum, or judgement, condemning the Three Chapters, only preserving a fig-leaf of consistency by stating that this condemnation in no way impugned the authority of Chalcedon.
Reaction in the West was volcanic. Vigilius was universally denounced as a traitor to Roman orthodoxy. The bishops of Africa solemnly excommunicated him, and many of his own entourage repudiated him. In the face of this hostility, which threatened to pull the empire apart, Justinian allowed the Pope to withdraw his ludicatum. He extracted a secret undertaking from him, however, to renew his condemnation of the Three Chapters at an opportune moment. Pope and Emperor agreed that a council was needed to settle the whole matter, but Justinian was not a man to wait on events. In 551 he published a long edict of his own once more condemning the Chapters.
Even Vigilius’ capacity for accommodation to imperial pressure was now exhausted. He was determined to salvage whatever shreds of credibility remained to him in the West, and he organised resistance to the imperial decree. He summoned a synod of all the bishops then in Constantinople, and once more excommunicated the Patriarch. In the ensuing conflict, the Pope fled from imperial troops and sought sanctuary in the palace church of Sts Peter and Paul. Onlookers were treated to the sight of the elderly Pope clinging to the columns of the altar (which gave way and collapsed), while the palace guard attempted to drag him away by his hair, beard and clothing. The scandalised crowd forced the soldiers to leave the successor of St Peter alone. Public feeling obviously ran high, and next day the Emperor sent Belisarius himself to apologise. The Pope knew he was no longer safe, however, and, escaping by night across the Bosphorous, symbolically sought refuge in the church in which the Council of Chalcedon had met.
Had Vigilius died at this point, the scandals of his earlier career might have been forgiven him, for the sake of this heroic stand in defence of the Chalcedonian faith. Instead, he patched up a reconciliation with Justinian, and in May 553 the promised General Council, the fifth, met in Constantinople. Proceedings were dominated by imperial pressure, there were hardly any Westerners present, and no one was left in any doubt about what was required of them.
The Pope boycotted the Council, and issued a careful theological manifesto of his own, condemning some but not all of the writings included in the Three Chapters. Justinian, however, had no longer any need to walk on eggshells in respecting Western sensibilities. His troops had defeated the Gothic forces in Italy, and Rome was safe in Byzantine hands. He therefore decided to neutralise Vigilius once and for all. This he did by sending to the Council a dossier of Vigilius’ secret correspondence with him, exposing for all to read the Pope’s repeated promises to condemn the Three Chapters. Vigilius was totally discredited. The Council condemned not only the Three Chapters, but also the Pope, and Justinian formally broke off communi
on with Vigilius, while emphasising that it was the man Vigilius, and not the See of Rome, he was rejecting: non sedem, sed sedentem (‘not the see itself, but the one who sits in it’). The disgraced Pope was put under house arrest, and his clerical entourage were imprisoned or sent to the mines. Broken in spirit, he published a series of humiliating retractions, before being finally permitted to leave Constantinople in 555. He never reached Rome, however, dying from gallstones on the journey at Syracuse.
The Vigilius affair dealt a series of shattering blows to the papacy. The prestige and leadership gained for Rome over the previous century had been frittered away, the papacy’s reputation dragged through the mire. And the actions of Vigilius cast long shadows. His successor in Rome, Pelagius (556–61), was an elderly aristocrat, who had played a very creditable role in stiffening Vigilius’ theological resistance to imperial pressure over the Three Chapters. He was, however, determined to become pope by hook or by crook, and turned his coat on Vigilius’ death. To secure the Emperor’s support, he suddenly accepted the Fifth General Council’s condemnation of the Three Chapters.
Pelagius’ conversion may just possibly have been genuine – he was perhaps influenced by the fact that both a general council and the previous Pope had ruled on the matter. His action, however, was universally denounced in the West as self-seeking treachery. His acceptance of the condemnation of the Three Chapters confirmed the failure of Vigilius, and left papal prestige in the West in ruins, especially in northern Italy and the Adriatic provinces. The sees of Milan and Aquilea, and all the bishops of Istria, broke off communion with Rome. It would be fifty years before communion was restored between Milan and Rome, and the Istrian schism was to persist for a century and a half. In Gaul, too, the Catholic bishops looked on him with suspicion, and the close links with Rome established through the papal vicariate at Aries were eroded. Fifty years later, the Irish monk Columbanus in a letter full of Irish wordplay would remind Pope Boniface IV (608–15) of the fall of Vigilius, and warn him of the need to preserve the orthodoxy of the apostolic see: ‘Watch [vigila] that it does not turn out for you as it did for Vigilius, who was not vigilant enough.’ Otherwise ‘the normal situation of the Church will be reversed. Your children will become the head, but you … will become the tail of the Church; therefore your judges will be those who have always preserved the Catholic faith, whoever they may be, even the youngest.’5
