The history of this venerable church may be said to reach back as far as the first selection of Byzantium by Constantine as the new capital of his empire. Originally, the pretensions of Byzantium to ecclesiastical rank were sufficiently humble, its bishop being but a suffragan of the metropolitan of Heraclea. But, from the date of the translation of the seat of empire, Constantine's new capital began to rise in dignity. The personal importance which accrued to the bishop from his position at the court of the emperor, was soon reflected upon his see. The first steps of its upward progress are unrecorded; but within little more than half a century from the foundation of the imperial city, the celebrated fifth canon of the council which was held therein in 381 not only distinctly assigned to the Bishop of Constantinople "the primacy of honor, next after the Bishop of Rome," but, by alleging as the ground of this precedence the principle "that Constantinople is the new Rome," laid the foundation of that rivalry with the older Rome which had its final issue in the complete separation of the Eastern from the Western Church.
The dignity of the see was represented in the beauty and magnificence of its churches, and especially of its cathedral. One of the considerations by which Constantine was influenced in the selection of Byzantium for his new capital, lay in the advantages for architectural purposes which the position commanded. The rich and various marbles of Proconnesus; the unlimited supply of timber from the forests of the Euxine; the artistic genius and the manual dexterity of the architects and artisans of Greece—all lay within easy reach of Byzantium; and, freely as Constantine availed himself of these resources for the embellishment of the new city in its palaces, its offices of state, and its other public buildings, the magnificence which he exhibited in his churches outstripped all his other undertakings. Of these churches by far the most magnificent was that which forms the subject of the present notice. Its title is often a subject of misapprehension to those who, being accustomed to regard [{644}] "Sophia" merely as a feminine name, are led to suppose that the church of Constantine was dedicated to a saint so called. The calendar, as well of the Greek as of the Latin Church, does, it is true, commemorate more than one saint named Sophia. Thus one Sophia is recorded as having suffered martyrdom under Adrian, in company with her three daughters, Faith, Hope, and Charity. Another is said to have been martyred in one of the latter persecutions together with St. Irene; and a third is still specially venerated as a martyr at Fermo (the ancient Firmum). But it was not any of these that supplied the title of Constantine's basilica. That church was dedicated to the
,—the HOLY WISDOM; that is, to the Divine Logos, or Word of God, under the title of the "Holy Wisdom," borrowed by adaptation from the well-known prophetic allusion contained in the eighth chapter of Proverbs, and familiar in the theological language of the fourth century.
The original church, however, which Constantine erected in 325-6 was but the germ out of which the latter St. Sophia grew. The early history of St. Sophia is marked by many vicissitudes, and comprises, in truth, the history of four distinct churches, that of Constantine, that of Constantius, that of Theodosius, and finally that of Justinian.
Thirty-four years after the foundation of St. Sophia by the first Christian emperor, his son, Constantius, either because of its insufficient size, or owing to some injury which it had sustained in an earthquake, rebuilt it, and united with it the adjoining church of the Irene, or "peace" (also built by his father), forming both into one grand edifice. And, although the church of Constantius was not much longer lived than that of his father, it is memorable as the theatre for several years of the eloquence of St. John Chrysostom, while its destruction was a monument at once of the triumph and of the fall of that great father. It was within the walls of this church that his more than human eloquence was wont to draw, even from the light and frivolous audiences of that pleasure-loving city, plaudits, the notice of which in his own pages reads so strange to modern eyes. It was here that he provoked the petty malice of the imperial directress of fashion, by his inimitable denunciation of the indelicacy of female dress. Here, too, was enacted that memorable scene, which, for deep dramatic interest, has seldom been surpassed in history—the fallen minister Eutropius clinging to the altar of St. Sophia for protection against the popular fury, while Chrysostom, in a glorious exordium on the instability of human greatness, [Footnote 129] disarms the rage of the populace by exciting their commiseration for their fallen enemy. Nor can we wonder that those who had hung entranced upon that eloquent voice should, when it was silenced by his cruel and arbitrary banishment, have recognized a Nemesis in the destruction of the church which had so often echoed with the golden melody of its tones. St. Sophia, by a divine judgment, as the people believed, was destroyed for the second time in 404, in the tumult which followed the banishment of St. John Chrysostom.
[Footnote 129: Horn, in Eutropium Patricium. Opp. tom iii., p. 399 et seq. (Migne ed.)]
The third St. Sophia was built in 415 by Theodosius the Younger. The church of Theodosius lasted longer than either of those which went before it. It endured through the long series of controversies on the Incarnation. It witnessed their first beginning, and it almost survived their close. It was beneath the golden roof of the Theodosian basilica that Nestorius scandalized the orthodoxy of his flock, and gave the first impulse to the controversy which bears his name, by applauding the vehement declaration of the preacher who denied to the Virgin Mary the title of mother of God. And it was from its ambo or [{645}] pulpit that the Emperor Zeno promulgated his celebrated Henoticon—the "decree of union" by which he vainly hoped to heal the disastrous division. The St. Sophia of Theodosius was the scene of the first act in the long struggle between Constantinople and Rome, the great Acacian schism; when, at the hazard of his life, an impetuous monk, one of the fiery "Sleepless Brotherhood," pinned the papal excommunication on the cope of Acacius as he was advancing to the altar. And it witnessed the close of that protracted contest, in the complete and unreserved submission to Rome which was exacted by the formulary of Pope Hormisdas as the condition of reconciliation. The structure of Theodosius stood a hundred and fourteen years—from 415 to 529, but perished at length in the fifth year of Justinian, in a disaster which, for a time, made Constantinople all but a desert—the memorable battle of the blue and green factions of the hippodrome, known in history as the Nika sedition.
The restoration of St. Sophia, which had been destroyed in the conflagration caused by the violence of the rioters, became, in the view of Justinian, a duty of Christian atonement no less than of imperial munificence. There is no evidence that the burning of the church arose from any special act of impiety directed against it in particular; but it is certain that the ancient feuds of the religious parties in the east entered vitally as an element of discord into this fatal sedition; and even the soldiers who had been engaged on the side of the civil power in the repression of the tumult, and who were chiefly legionaries enlisted from among the Heruli, the most savage of the barbarian tribes of the empire, had contributed largely to the sacrilegious enormities by which, even more than by the destruction of human life, the religious feelings of the city had been outraged.
The entire history of the reconstruction exhibits most curiously the operation of the same impulse. It was undertaken with a large-handedness, and urged on with an energy, which bespeak for other than merely human motives. Scarce had Constantinople begun to recover after the sedition from the stupor of its alarm, and the affrighted citizens to steal back from the Asiatic shore to which they had fled in terror with their families and their most valuable effects, when Justinian commissioned Anthemius of Tralles to prepare the plans of the new basilica, on a scale of magnificence till then unknown. On the 23d of February, 532, within forty days from the catastrophe, the first stone of the new edifice was solemnly laid. Orders, to borrow the words of the chronicler, [Footnote 130] "were issued simultaneously to all the dukes, satraps, judges, quaestors, and prefects" throughout the empire, to send in from their several governments pillars, peristyles, bronzes, gates, marbles, and all other materials suitable for the projected undertaking. How efficiently the order was carried out may yet be read in the motley, though magnificent array of pillars and marbles which form the most striking characteristic of St. Sophia, and which are for the most part, as we shall see, the spoil of the older glories of Roman and Grecian architecture. We shall only mention here eight porphyry columns from the Temple of the Sun at Baalbec, which Aurelian had sent to Rome, and which, having come into the possession of a noble Roman widow, named Marcia, as her dowry, were presented by that pious lady to Justinian, as an offering