Constantine to the reign of Justinian

Of all the councils and confabulations that took place from the reign of Constantine to the reign of Justinian, the few that emerged as authoritative were understood—or at least argued—to have had a privileged access to the truth and to have left behind concise formulas that could stand beyond controversy and time and guide right belief. Reciting a proper creed with heartfelt assent was the Christian shibboleth, the phrase whose utterance revealed and ensured identity and loyalty. God’s power frowned so heavily on insincere assertion that no one would utter a creed he disbelieved—or so men thought. Why did God require the assertions of his creatures to capture so accurately and precisely his own nature and report it back to him? No one asked that question loudly enough to unsettle the obsession with definition.

Public compromise and private coercion both played a part in Justinian’s strategy. One way to go forward was to rewrite history, and so in the 540s, Justinian began to throw historical baggage over the side.

Intellectual Christianity

The first victim was an astonishing one: Origen, the greatest scriptural interpreter in the history of early, and arguably of all, Christianity, had always been slightly suspect. His name was a code word for a style of intellectual Christianity that had partisans but was also easily sacrificed to make a political point. Barsanuphius of Gaza, for example, had no time for these elite intellectuals: “These are the speculations of the Greeks; these are the dreams of people who fancy themselves to be something.

But these doctrines do not lead those who believe them to the light, but rather to the darkness.” The teachings of the monastic innovator Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399) had shaped the way Origen’s ideas integrated with monastic pride. But Origen had written things that could embarrass even his followers, such as his defense of “apocatastasis,” the doctrine that at the end of all things even hell would pass away and the damned would be rejoined to their benevolent creator. What Origenists had in common by the sixth century was resistance to the emperors, attachment to freedom of thought, a mystical impulse, and Platonic intellectualism. They were too smart, too well read, too independent, too little attached to party politics for their own good.34

Jerusalem

There were monks around Jerusalem who invoked Origen’s name in support of positions too far outside Justinian’s comfort zone to be tolerated, and so in 543, Justinian himself condemned Origen and his works. This condemnation went far afield in several ways. For one, it led loyal believers to destroy most of the surviving works of Origen himself in Greek. (We depend for our knowledge of his contributions on surviving fragments and on works translated into Latin by 400 or so.) For another, it let the emperor be seen and known as the arbiter of theology in his own voice and his own name kukeri carnival.

This imperial ukase ran afoul of deep conservative traditions. Living theologians could find their work and doctrine disputed, controverted, and praised, but once they had died, their fate and the approval or disapproval of their teaching was traditionally to be left in the hands of God. To condemn the dead because of their teaching seemed dangerously arrogant. But Justinian knew what others had not fully internalized, that books were now forces in their own right, and there was no necessary difference in authority between the books of the dead and the books of the living.

A deeper strategy animated Justinian. By attacking the dead, he could implicitly attack the living at little cost. Firing over the heads of the monophysites to attack Origen was one thing, and turning then to attack Theodoret, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Ibas of Edessa—the authors condemned in what came to be called the “Three Chapters” of an edict—brought the extreme Chalcedonians within firing range. Attacking the three extreme “dyophysite” (“twoish”) authors would frighten any contemporary sympathizers, who may have been few enough in number, except for those who rightly venerated the contributions of Theodore of Mopsuestia, but it would also reassure the monophysite (“oneish”) faction that attention was being paid to their concerns.