A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

§ 2. The Cost of Orthodoxy

The constant law of theological development was that all stirrings of reason were anathematized as heresy, and that dogmas became orthodox in the ratio of their extravagance. Paganizing and polytheistic heresy such as that of the Collyridians of Arabia (4th c.), who worshipped Mary as a Goddess and offered her cakes (collyridæ) as their mothers had done to Ashtaroth, ran little risk: their heresy in fact was on the way to be orthodoxy. Saner heresies fared differently. Late in the fourth century we find the Italian monk Jovinian opposing asceticism, urging a rational morality, and explaining that Mary ceased to be a virgin on bringing forth Jesus; for which offences he was condemned in Church Councils, flogged, and banished to a desolate island. A little later, Vigilantius, a presbyter from Gaul, ventured to oppose the growing worship of relics, prayers to saints, the use of sacred tapers, vigils, and pilgrimages, as well as to decry many current miracles. So furious was the outcry of Jerome in his case that he had to hold his peace if he would save his life. No leading churchman said a word for either reformer: Ambrose and Jerome both condemned Jovinian; and the language of Jerome against Vigilantius is a revelation of the new possibilities of intellectual malice created by creed. On this side, human nature had reverted several degrees to Hebraism.

Later still, the heresy of Pelagius, also a western, aroused a bitter orthodox opposition, led by Augustine. Pelagius (a name probably the Grecized form of the British name Morgan) and Cœlestius, an Irishman, both monks in Rome about the years 400–410, drew up a systematic argument against the doctrines of human depravity, predestination, and salvation by grace; denied the damnation of unbaptized infants and virtuous unbaptized adults; rejected the Biblical teaching that Adam died in consequence of his sin or entailed sin on posterity; and taught a relatively rational ethic. Flying from Rome on Alaric’s invasion, they went, Cœlestius to Carthage and Pelagius to the East; the former to be condemned by a Council at Carthage (412), the latter to be for a time supported against attacks, but later to be condemned likewise. Henceforth the half-suppressed vestiges of Pelagianism (chiefly in the hesitating form of semi-Pelagianism, according to which God foreordained good but merely foreknew evil) were the only signs left in the West, apart from Arianism, of the spirit of critical reason, till the first stirrings of the medieval renascence.

In the West, it will be observed, spontaneous heresy had run to questions of action and ethics, partly following a Roman tradition of concern for conduct, partly expressing barbarian common-sense. To such thought, Christianity was alien, and it was cried down by voluble theologians like Augustine, backed, doubtless, not only by the average obedient priest, but by some who saw that the principles of Pelagius, logically carried out, made an end on the one hand of the whole Christian scheme, and on the other of the conception of an omnipotent God. Such reasoners must equally have seen that the Augustinian dogmas of predestination and grace made an end of human responsibility; and this was urged by some Pelagians, but with no effect. The irrational dogma best consisted with the functions and finance of the church, and it was ecclesiastically established accordingly.

In the East, though there also Pelagius found followers, spontaneous heresy, as we have seen, was usually a matter of abstract dogma, as in the schisms of Praxeas, Sabellius, Paul of Samosata, Arius, and the Gnostics. What critical thought there was continued to follow the lead given to it by the older Greek dialectics. Aërius, who raised in Asia Minor in the fourth century an agitation against episcopacy, fasts, prayers for the dead, and the ceremony of slaying a lamb at Easter, is an exception among eastern heretics; and the dogmatic-dialectic tendency persisted. In the fifth century, Theodorus of Mopsuestia, a voluminous writer, taught rationally that most of the Old Testament prophecies applied by orthodoxy to Jesus had reference to events in pre-Christian history. Needless to say, this was heresy. But the chief new schisms of the period were those of Nestorius and the Monophysites. Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, a pupil of Theodorus, but a zealous persecutor of heresy, became embroiled in the second stage of the endless wrangle as to the nature of Christ. In the latter half of the fourth century, Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea, a strong anti-Arian, holding that the dogma of a God-Man was monstrous, had taught that Jesus was without a human soul (or mind, as distinguished from mere animal life), having only a divine one. This was to “confound the two natures”; Apollinaris was condemned; and the Syrian orthodox rectified matters by insisting that there were two, while the Egyptians, recoiling from the risk of a theory of two Christs, insisted that the two were nevertheless one.

Nestorius stood with his fellow-Syrians, and sought to crush the Apollinarians as he had helped to hound down Arians, Novatians, and other misbelievers. The Apollinarians, however, had a stronghold in their deification of Mary, whom they called Theotokos or Deipara, “the mother (bearer) of God”; and when the Nestorians denounced the common use of this term they incurred the wrath of the multitude, who, wont in the past to worship Goddess-mothers with a special devotion, and wroth at the attempt to put Mary lower than Isis and Cybelê, naturally sought to exalt Mary as they had exalted Jesus. A general Council (431) was called at Ephesus to denounce Nestorius; and he, the heresy-hunter, was convicted of blasphemy, classed with Judas, and banished for life. Thenceforth, orthodox Christianity was for all practical purposes a worship of a Goddess and two supreme Gods; and Nestorian Christianity, flourishing in Asia, where its adherents were known by the old label of “Nazaræans,” became a hostile religion. Thus in the East as in the West the State was riven in new religious factions at the very hour when it needed above all things unity. Persia was at that very time beginning the acquisition of half of Armenia, as the Vandals were beginning the conquest of North Africa. To Persia the Nestorians were driven; and there, declaring themselves the friends of the enemies of the Byzantine empire, they were fostered, while the orthodox Christians were persecuted, massacred, and expelled.

To a thoughtful pagan, viewing the course of things, it must have seemed as if the Gods had given over the Christians to madness. Among the chief enemies of Nestorius was Eutyches, an abbot of a Constantinople monastery. In the year 448, by way of making an end of Nestorianism, he explicitly taught that Christ had only one nature, the divine. Instantly this was in turn denounced as a return to the Apollinarian heresy, and Eutyches was cast out of the church by a hostile council. Another council, skilfully packed, acquitted him, and caused his accuser to be flogged and banished; but a third, that of Chalcedon (451), again condemned him. Thus was the Christian dogma fixed in the form of maximum arbitrariness and unintelligibility. The Council of Nicæa (321) had determined against Arius that Christ was truly God, co-equal and co-eternal with his Father, separate and yet one; the Council of Constantinople (381) had determined against Apollinaris that he was also truly man; that of Ephesus (431) had established that the two natures were indivisibly one; and that of Chalcedon (451) that they were nevertheless perfectly distinct. All four dogmas became fixed constituents of the Christian creed. To this length had men evolved a myth. And there were still developments to come.

The condemned Eutycheans, modifying their position, but still calling themselves Monophysites, became in turn a force of fatal cleavage. The emperor Zeno, in the year 482, conciliated them by an edict called his Henoticon (“unifying”); but the orthodox only opposed them the more; though all the while the Monophysites professed to regard the “one nature” as a union of two, “yet without any conversion, confusion, or commixture.” On this absolutely unintelligible difference the sects finally sundered their very nationality. Late in the sixth century, under a new leader, Jacobus Baradæus, they became known as Jacobites; and when in the next century the rising movement of the Mohammedan Arabs broke upon Egypt, where they abounded, the hatred of Jacobites for Catholics was such as to make them welcome the anti-Christian enemy, as they and others had previously welcomed the Persians in Syria.

It is not to be supposed, indeed, that the creed of Christianity was the sole or primary cause of such a miserable evolution. The very insanity of the strifes of Christians over meaningless dogmas is primarily to be traced to the fatal constriction of life and energy represented by the imperial system. It was because men had no rational interests to strive over if they would that they strove insanely over abracadabras of creed, and made war flags of the two colours of the charioteers of the circus; even as in Egypt the abject populations of the old cities, down to the time of Julian, fought to the death for their respective animal-Gods. But it is essential to note the absolute failure of Christianity to give to the decaying civilization any light for its path. It flourished by reason of decadence, and it could not arrest it. What ultimately preserved any section of the Christian empire was the pagan heritage of law and system, applied to a State shorn of all its outlying and alien provinces, and reduced to the homogeneity and the status of a kingdom proper with a commercial and industrial life. Justinian was fain to set a non-Christian lawyer—Tribonian, a pagan or atheist—to frame the code of laws by which Byzantium went on living. Himself we find fulminating against revived heresies, anathematizing the long-dead Origen, and latterly enouncing heresies of his own which, had he lived longer, would have wrought fresh convulsions in the State.

Such is the note of Greek-Christian life down to the very hour of the supreme catastrophe which tore from the warlike Heraclius the provinces of Syria and Egypt (632–639), and, engulfing next North Africa, overthrew Christianity forever in the lands in which it had been built up. Heraclius, struggling to save a shaken empire, had early realized, as did Maurice before him, the madness of driving myriads of Nestorians into the arms of Persia; and after his triumph over Chosroes he sought to conciliate both Nestorians and Monophysites by a decree (630) to the effect that, while there were in Christ two natures, there was only one will, as was admitted by the Nestorians. For a time all seemed well, and many Monophysites in the outlying provinces returned to the Church. But in a few years an orthodox zealot, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, reopened the eternal debate, and declared that the new formula was a revival of the Eutychean heresy. In vain Heraclius, striving to save the remnants of the empire, sought to enforce his solution (639) by an ecthesis, or formula, which forbade further debate on the subject. The Catholics decided that there were two wills, though they always coincided; and the doctrine of one will—the “Monothelite” heresy—at length became a ground for the repudiation of the rule of Constans II over Italy, a hundred bishops anathematizing the typus or formula in which he endorsed the ecthesis of his grandfather. Finally, Constantine II (681) accepted the doctrine that in Christ two wills were harmonized, and one more orthodox countersense was added to the definition of the God-Man who never was. The so-called Athanasian creed—really a product of the Latin Church some centuries later than Athanasius—is a parade of the whole series. To this much had Christianity attained after four hundred years of indescribable strife. The one clue through the chaos is the perception that in every stage the dispute logically went back to the original issue of monotheism and polytheism. The church, holding by the Hebrew sacred books as well as its own, was committed doctrinally to the former, but practically to the latter. Every affirmation of “one” tended to imperil the separate divinity of the sacrificed Jesus; and every affirmation of duality gave an opening to the polytheists. The one durable solution was, at each crisis, to make both affirmations, and so baffle at once reason and schismatic fanaticism.