The Age of Justinian and Theodora: A History of the Sixth Century A.D., Volume 1 (of 2)

by William Gordon Holmes

The Christian Church from its inception gradually unfolded itself as an anarchical association, consisting of affiliated branches scattered throughout the Empire. At first all members possessed equal rank, and the status of each one as a presbyter or propagandist was limited only by his natural capacity for the work. Enthusiasm prevailed in the secret assemblies, and the excitable, whether male or female, relieved themselves by impassioned utterances which were accepted by the listeners as prophetic inspiration.[1022] Subsequent history relates the development of a hierarchy with the consequent formation of two parties in the Church, clergy and laity, and the ultimate suppression of all spiritual assumption by the latter.[1023] Rites and ceremonies of increasing complexity were instituted, rules of discipline were elaborated, and proselytes were no longer admitted hastily to the congregations, but were previously relegated for a course of instruction to the class of catechumens or probationers. About the end of the second century Christianity assumed some importance in the eyes of the educated and wealthy,[1024] so that its doctrines began to be scrutinized in the spirit of Greek philosophy. A catechetical school was founded at Alexandria (c. 170) for the training of converts of higher mental capacity; and learned teachers, notably Clement and Origen, essayed to prove that the new religion could be substantiated theologically by reference to Plato and Aristotle.[1025] At the same time the Church began to discard the policy of stealthiness under which it had grown up, and to indulge the expansive vigour which pervaded its constitution. Soon the conventicles ceased to meet under the cloak of secrecy; and by a few decades public edifices were erected with an architectural ostentation and a treasure of ornaments rubric which roused the indignation of those who frequented the Pagan temples in the vicinity.[1026] From that moment the encroaching temper of Christianity and its uncompromising antagonism to polytheism became manifest to the government, and zealous officials prepared themselves for a determined effort to overthrow the upstart power which was undermining the old order of society.[1027] The futile struggle of Paganism against Christianity was terminated by Theodosius the Great, who promulgated edicts both in the East and in the West for the abolition of the pristine religion of the Empire.[1028] During more than half a century previously the battle between the two faiths had been open and violent; and the mild Christians of earlier times often appeared in the light of ruthless fanatics more conspicuously than had their heathen adversaries in the heat of a legalized persecution.[1029] The Church triumphant now entered on its career of quasi-political predominance; wealth and honours were showered on those who attained to its highest offices; and the precepts of the poor carpenter, whose constant theme was humility, were inculcated by a succession of haughty prelates who equalled the magnificence and exceeded the arrogance of kings.[1030]

From the day of its birth almost to the present hour the Church has been agitated by internal dissensions generated by the efforts of reason to understand and to define those inscrutable mysteries, to a belief in which every supernatural religion must owe its existence. The primitive religion of the ancients was a natural growth, accepted insensibly during a state of savagery and maintained politically long after it had been repudiated by philosophy, but Christianity was offered to a world already advanced in civilization, and had to pass through a process of intellectual digestion before it could take its place as an unassailable national belief. The Church, before it stands clearly revealed in the light of history, had been inspired with the conception of a Trinity by a contemplation of the Platonic philosophy; and the problem as to how this doctrine could be expounded as not inconsistent with monotheism occasioned the first of those great councils called Oecumenical. It met in 325 at Nicaea of Bithynia, and there formulated the Nicene creed, which branded as heretics the presbyter Arius and his supporters for asserting that the Word, the Son, the man Jesus, had not eternally existed as of one substance with the Father, but had been created out of nothing at some date of an inconceivably remote past. Under the emperors who succeeded Constantine, however, the Arians returned to power in the East, and for long oppressed their opponents, the Catholics, until they were finally reduced to impotence by the orthodox Theodosius I.[1031] But centuries were yet to elapse before the Church could desist from weaving those subtleties of dogma as to the inexpressible nature of the Godhead, in the study of which later theologians discover an exercise for their memory rather than for their understanding.[1032] Numerous other councils were convened before the opening of the sixth century, but of these only three were allowed to rank as Oecumenical, that of Constantinople in 381, that of Ephesus in 431, and that of Chalcedon in 451. The first of these did little more than to confirm the decisions of Nicaea, but it won from Theodosius a tacit permission to proceed to extremities against Paganism.[1033] The second anathematized the heresy of Nestorius, Patriarch of the Eastern capital, who wished to deprive the Virgin Mary of the title of Theotokos, or Mother of God. The bishops who assembled at the Asiatic suburb of Chalcedon, under the supervision of the Emperor Marcian, were less successful in producing concord in the Church than those who composed any of the previous councils; and their resolutions were debated for long afterwards by dissentient ecclesiastics throughout the East. On this occasion the orthodox party delivered their last word as the mystic junction of the divine and human in the Incarnate Christ, and repudiated for ever the error of the Monophysites that the Saviour was animated only by a celestial essence.[1034] This was the first instance in which the new Rome triumphed over her great rival in the East, Alexandria, which had previously trampled on her Patriarchs, Chrysostom, Nestorius, Flavian; as the doctrine of the one nature was peculiarly dear to the Egyptian Church. But the spiritual peace of the Asiatic and African provinces had been too rudely disturbed for an immediate settlement to ensue; and more than thirty years later the Emperor Zeno was forced to issue a Henoticon, or Act of Union, in which he sought to induce unanimity among the prelates of his dominions by effacing the harsher expressions of the Chalcedonian canons.[1035] The measure, however, was ineffectual; the conflict of doctrine could not be quelled; and even Anastasius was branded as a heretic by the Byzantines for not adopting a hostile attitude towards the Monophysites.[1036] The state of religious parties under that Emperor may be summarized briefly as follows: Europe was firmly attached to the Council of Chalcedon, Egypt was bitterly opposed to it, whilst in Asia its adversaries and adherents were almost equally divided. Of Arians there were not a few, but they were everywhere severely repressed. Nevertheless, in the capital itself a handsome church was reserved for those addicted to that heresy, St. Mocius in the Exokionion. But this was an indulgence conceded exclusively to the Gothic soldiery, all bigoted Arians, with whose faith no emperor ever dared to tamper.[1037] At the same time polytheism appeared to be extinct; the Pagan temples were everywhere evacuated, and for the most part purposely ruined.[1038] After the murder of Hypatia the Neoplatonists deserted Alexandria and betook themselves to Athens, where they were disregarded as a merely philosophical association without the privilege of public worship.[1039] Manichaeans were numerous within the Empire, but could only exist in secret as a proscribed sect subject to severe penalties, confiscation, loss of civil rights, and relegation to the mines, if convicted.[1040] Relics of minor denominations, more or less obscure and impotent, need not be more particularly alluded to in this place.

Nothing in this age accelerated the social descent towards barbarism so much as the illusion that bliss in a future state was most positively assured to those Christians who denied themselves every natural gratification whilst on earth. By the end of the fourth century the passion for the mortification of the flesh had risen to such a height that almost one half of the population of the Empire, male and female, had abandoned civilized life and devoted themselves to celibacy and ascetic practices.[1041] By choice, and even by legal prescription,[1042] they sought desert places and vast solitudes to pass their lives in sordid discomfort, at one time grazing like wild beasts, at another immured in noisome cells too narrow to admit of any restful position of the body or limbs.[1043] Some joined the class of stylites, or pillar saints, who lived in the air at a considerable altitude from the ground on the bare top of a slender column.[1044] Such were the anchorites or hermits, who arose first in order of time and claimed for their founder an illiterate though well-born youth of Alexandria,[1045] Anthony, the subject of familiar legends. A little later, however, Pachomius,[1046] also an Egyptian, instituted the coenobites, or gregarious fraternity of ascetics, whose assemblage of cells, called a laura, was generally disposed in a circle around their common chapel and refectory. The extensive waste lands of Egypt greatly favoured the development of monachism; and within half a century the isle of Tabenna in the Nile, the Nitrian mountain, and the wilderness of Sketis, became densely populated with these fanatic recluses.[1047] From Egypt the mania for leading a monastic life spread in all directions, and religious houses, on the initiative of Basil, began to invade the towns and suburban districts.[1048] One of the most remarkable of these foundations was the monastery of Studius, erected at Constantinople (in 460) for the Acoemeti, or sleepless monks, whose devotional vigils were ceaseless both night and day.[1049] After the promotion of Christianity to be the state religion, one emperor only, the ordinarily ineffective Valens, assumed a hostile attitude towards the monks.[1050] He denounced them as slothful renegades from their social duties and dispatched companies of soldiers to expel them from their retreats and reclaim them for civil and military life. A considerable number were massacred for attempting resistance to the decree; but under the successors of Valens monachism flourished as before with the Imperial countenance and the popular regard.[1051]

The supersession of dogmatic religions founded on prehistoric mythologies by the success of modern research, confers the right of free speculation on contemporary philosophers, and urges them to construct, from the ample materials at their command, an intellectual theory of the universe. In proportion as experimental physics teaches us to apprehend more profoundly the constitution of matter, reason advances impulsively from the outposts of knowledge to suspend itself over the abyss in those dimly-lighted regions where science and mysticism seem to hold each other by the hand. The atomic conception of nature, first broached as a phantasy by the Greeks, derives an actuality from the growth of chemical and electrical discoveries at the present day, which goes far to establish it as an immediate, if not the ultimate, explanation of phenomena. Our mind has thus been prepared to realize the vision of swarms of atoms in the possession of limitless space, each one of which is instinct in the prime degree with all the attributes of life: with consciousness, will, motion, the bias of habit, and an unquenchable desire for association and aggregation.[1052] They become conjoined, numerically and morphologically, in progressive grades of complexity, originating by one kind of alliance the chemical elements which constitute the organic world, and by another the vital elements, which form the protoplasmic basis of animal and plant life.[1053] The organic kingdom rests upon the inorganic, and preys upon it, evolving itself throughout endless time into more highly differentiated forms by its incessant appetite for material acquisition and sensuous stimulation in its environment.[1054]

Whilst the records of ages assiduously collated from every quarter of the globe exhibit the irrepressible folly of undisciplined human thought and the immeasurable credulity of ignorance, the boundless expansion of our intellectual horizon compels us to reject as irrational, the belief in an almighty and intelligent Father, who regards with equanimity the disruption of worlds, but is capable of being delighted by a choir of fulsome praise emanating from their ephemeral inhabitants.[1055] From the earliest times the infertile efforts to approach and win the favour of such a being have constituted the heaviest drag on civilization and progress; and, as man rises in the sphere of rationality, the highest lesson he can learn is to discard definitively all such dreams. He must convince himself that there is nothing divine, nothing supernatural, no providence but his own, that prayer is futile, piety impossible; and the sage may postulate that humanity is God until some higher divinity be discovered. The mythological terrors of antiquity are effete in the world of to-day, and any citizen who has learned to live uprightly should be above all religion, and free from the bondage of every superstition. By self-reliance and his own exertions alone can man be led upwards; his advancement depends on the extent to which he can penetrate the mystery of, and subdue the forces which surround him; and to preach the dominion of man over nature is the work of the modern prophet or apostle.[1056] By a retrospect of the past he is justified in cherishing the hope of a brighter future for his descendants; no obstacle appears in view to bar their journey along the upward path; the illimitable capacity of protoplasm for physiological elevation may triumph over the universal cycle of birth, maturity, and decay; and in humanity as it exists we may see the progenitors of an infinitely superior, perhaps of an immortal race, the ultimate expression and end of evolution and generation.[1057]

The student of European civilization cannot fail to wonder what sociological manifestation would have taken the place of Christianity had that religion never seen the light, or failed to win a predominant position in the Graeco-Roman world. Was the disintegration of the Empire, he must ask, and the retreat of its inhabitants almost to the threshold of barbarism a result of the prevalence of the Gospel creed? or was the new faith merely a fortuitous phenomenon which became conspicuous on the surface of an uncontrollable social cataclysm? No decision could be accepted as incontestable when dealing with such far-reaching questions, but with the wisdom which follows the event we may recognize that contingencies not very remote might have altered materially the course of history. The dissolution of powerful political organizations was no new feature in the ancient world; in Egypt, in Asia, dynasties with their dominions had periodically collapsed, but in Europe the Roman supremacy was the first to consolidate the principal countries into a compact and homogeneous state. Civil wars, however, had been waged on several occasions; princes unfit to reign had been the cause of serious administrative perturbation. Did these vicissitudes, we may inquire, herald the break-up of the Empire, unassailable as it was by any civilized adversary? Had the national genius and vigour so declined that armies could not be recruited to repeat the successes of Marius, of Trajan, of Diocletian, against hordes of barbarians ill-disciplined and ill-armed? The proposition cannot be entertained; the individuals were as capable as ever, but the purview of life had changed. Religious dissension had engendered personal rancour, neighbour distrusted neighbour, and the name of Roman no longer denoted a community with kindred feelings and aspirations. The Persian and the Teuton beyond the border were not more hostile to the subjects of the Empire than were they among themselves when viewed as separate groups of Pagans, of Manichaeans, of Arians, and of Catholics. This disseverance was not, however, quite permanent; after a couple of generations had passed away a partial reunion was effected by the submission of all classes to Christianity; and strife was limited to controversies between differing sects of the same church. But in the process mankind were led to break with all past traditions; the world became effete in their eyes; and to be released from it in order to gain admission to the celestial sphere was preached as the sole object of human existence. Civilization succumbed to the despotic influence of religion, a new field of effort was opened to the race of mortals, and all the genius of the age was exhausted in the attempt to advance the pseudo-science of theology. That genius was as brilliant as any which has hitherto been seen upon the earth. The administrative and literary powers of a Tertullian, an Origen, a Cyprian, a Eusebius, an Athanasius, of the Gregories, of Basil, Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, and many others might have raised the Empire above the level of the most glorious period of the past. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that these ecclesiastics founded a dominion which surpassed that of Rome in its widest extent; but it was a dominion over men’s minds which precipitated material progress into a gulf out of which it was not to rise again for more than a thousand years. Their success was facilitated by the confirmation of despotism and the abolition of free institutions under the first Caesars; but without Christianity there would probably have been no exacerbation of religious fervour more intense than was involved in Neoplatonism. That new departure in polytheism was not likely to have caused a serious drain upon the energies of the state. Julian, its most impassioned votary, was not less imbued with the spirit of a conqueror than were Alexander and Trajan.[1058] Neoplatonism, and especially Manichaeism, borrowed Christian elements and might not have aspired to more than a passive influence but for their rivalry with that religion. From these considerations we may draw the inference that only for the Palestinian capture of the psychical yearnings of the age history might never have had to record the lapse of social Europe into the slough of mediaevalism; and the experience of a terrestrial hierarch who should give laws to kings and incite the masses to rebel against their political rulers would have been lost to Western civilization. That the Empire would have subsisted until modern times is inconceivable; the tendency to disruption of the vast fabric soon became apparent, and its unity was only restored by reconquest on several occasions; notably by Severus, by Constantine, by Theodosius. Under Diocletian it was virtually transformed into a number of federated states; and by the sixth or seventh century a somewhat similar partition might have become definite and permanent. With the maintenance of sociological institutions at the original level, barbarism would have been repelled and civilization would have penetrated more rapidly the forests of Scythia and Germany. The spirit of scientific inquiry which was manifest in Strabo, in Pliny, in Ptolemy, in Galen, might have been fostered and extended; and many a leading mind, whose vigour was absorbed by the arid waste of theology, might have taken up the work of Aristotle and carried his researches into the heart of contemporary science.[1059] The condition of the proletariat was not elevated by the diffusion of the Gospel after their wholesale acceptance of it had been assured by coercion. Whatever ethical purity may have adorned the lives of the first converts, Christianity as an established religion was not less of a grovelling superstition than Paganism in its worst forms. The worship of martyrs, of saints, the factitious miracles wrought at their graves, the veneration of their relics and images, were but a travesty of polytheism under another name without the saving graces of the old belief.[1060] A large section of the community were encouraged to fritter away their lives in the sloth of the cloister; and the ecclesiastical murder, disguised under the charge of heresy, of opponents who dared to think and speak became a social terror in grim contrast with the easy tolerance of Pagan times.[1061] At length the night of superstition began to wane and the unexpected advent of a brighter era was announced by a great social upheaval. Again the tide of cosmopolitanism began to flow between the Atlantic and the Euphrates, and a new unification of the detached fragments of the Roman Empire was brought about. Amid the turmoil of two centuries of barren Crusades[1062] the active intercourse of numerous peoples taught Europe to think and judge; and she began to appraise the harvest which had been reaped during so long a period of blind devotion to a creed. The result of the scrutiny was disheartening; the store of gold was found to have turned to dross; and, while one type of man struggled to break the chains which bound them in spiritual subjection, another bent their minds to discover whether through nature and art they could not reach some goal worthy of human ambition. The Renaissance and the Reformation were almost contemporary movements.[1063] From that period to the present, more than five centuries, the history of the world has been one of continued advancement. Since Dante composed his great poem and Copernicus elaborated his theory of the heavens, the well of literature has not run dry nor has the lamp of science been extinguished. Yet in all these years while the rising light has been breaking continuously over the mountain tops the spacious valleys beneath have lain buried in the gloom of unenlightened ages. The peace of society has never ceased to be disturbed by the discord of religious factions; and the task of a modern statesman is still to reconcile conflicting prejudices in a world of ignorance and folly.[1064]

CHAPTER III
BIRTH AND FORTUNES OF THE ELDER JUSTIN: THE ORIGINS OF JUSTINIAN

The function of a government is to administer the affairs of mankind in accordance with the spirit of the age. Not from the political arena, but from the laboratory emanates that expansion of knowledge which surely, though fitfully, changes the aspect and methods of civilization both in peace and war. An impulse which controls the passions of millions may originate with some obscure investigator who reveals a more immediate means to individual or national advantage; and the executive of government is called on to create legislative facilities for the utilization of the new discovery. During the modern period such influences have been continuous and paramount. In the course of a single century a transformation of the world has been achieved by fruitful research, greater than in all previously recorded time. The Georgian era contrasts less strongly with the times of Aristotle and Cicero than with the present day; and the rapid progress of the nineteenth century almost throws the age of Johnson and Gibbon into the shadow of mediaevalism.

Far back in the prehistoric past a bridge was thrown across the chasm which separates savage from civilized life by the discovery of a process for the smelting of metallic ore; and the birth of all the arts may be dated from the time when some primitive race passed from the age of stone into that of bronze or iron. To the ancient world that first step in science must have appeared also to be the last; and ages rolled away during which man learned no more than to employ effectively the materials thus acquired. If the expectation that diligent research may be rewarded by some signal increase of knowledge be excluded from the sphere of human activity, individual aspirations must be restricted to whatever is social and national; and those desirous of distinction have no choice but to devote themselves to art or politics. Within these channels were confined the energies of the people of antiquity; in some states the leading characteristic was civic adornment; in others the cultivation of martial efficiency; to rise to despotic power was the usual ambition of a democratic statesman; to attain to an imperial position that of a flourishing state. Wars of aggression were constantly undertaken, and defensive wars uniformly became so whenever superiority was manifested. Such conflicts in the past have had no permanent influence on the advancement of mankind; and from time to time have been equally conducive to the spread of civilization or barbarism. During the classical period the arts and learning of Athens were attendant on the success of the Grecian or the Roman arms; in the Middle Ages the Goth, the Hun, the Saracen, and the Tartar closed in on the Roman Empire and nullified the work of those enlightened nations. At the present day the advance of civilization, though independent of conquest, is often hastened by aggression;[1065] and there seems no likelihood that it will ever again recede from a territory where it has once been established. At all times scarcity of the necessaries of life, real or conventional, tends to initiate a contest; nor is it possible to foresee an age when, in the absence of a struggle for existence, the world will subside into a condition of perpetual peace.

In the sixth century, among the Byzantines, the public mind was still oppressed with a sense of the supreme importance of religion. That orthodox Christianity must prevail remained the passion of the day; and in the view of each dissentient sect their creed alone was orthodox. Hence government became an instrument of hierarchy, politics synonymous with sectarianism, and the chief business of the state was to eradicate heresy. Mediaevalism was created by this spirit; in the East the Emperor became a pope;[1066] in the West the Pope was to become a sovereign. The conception of being ruled from the steps of an altar was foreign to the genius of classical antiquity, and Christianity almost effected a reversal of the political spirit of the ancient world.