[Sidenote: The work of Justinian.]
Justinian has been declared to have forced upon the Empire which he had reunited the orthodoxy of S. Cyril and the Council of Chalcedon, and the attempt has been made to prove that Cyril himself was a Monophysite.[9] The best refutation of this view is the perfect harmony of the decisions of the Fifth General Council with those of the previous Oecumenical assemblies, and the fact that no novelty could be discovered to have been added to "the Faith" when the "Three Chapters" were condemned.
With the close of the Council the definition of Christian doctrine passes into the background till the rise of the Monothelite controversy. When its decisions were accepted, the labours of Justinian had given peace to the churches.
[Sidenote: and his successors.]
From 565, when Justinian died, to 628, when Heraclius freed the Empire from the danger of Persian conquest, were years of comparative rest in the Church. It was a period of missionary extension, of quiet assertion of spiritual authority, in the midst of political trouble and disaster. Gibbon, who asserts that Justinian died a heretic, adds, "The reigns of his four successors, Justin, Tiberius, Maurice, and Phocas, are distinguished by a rare, though fortunate, vacancy in the ecclesiastical history {23} of the East"; and the sarcasm, though not wholly accurate, may serve to express the gradual progress of unity which marked the years up to the accession of Heraclius. The history of religion is concerned rather with those outside than those within the Church. That history we need not follow, and we may pass over this period with only a brief allusion to the development of independence outside the immediate range of the ecclesiastical power of New Rome. [Sidenote: Rise of separated bodies.] Heresies grew as an expression of national independence. The Chaldaean Church, which stretched to Persia and India, was Nestorian. The Monophysites won the Coptic Church of Egypt, the Abyssinian Church, the Jacobites in Syria, the Armenians in the heart of Asia Minor. In the mountains of Lebanon the Monothelites—of whom we have to speak shortly—organised the Maronite Church; and in Georgia the Church was aided by geographical conditions as well as historical development to ignore the overlordship of the Church of Antioch. So in Europe grew up with the new States, the Bulgarian, the Serbian, and the Wallachian Churches.
[Sidenote: Missions and failures.]
It was thus that, alike as statesmen and Christians, the emperors were devoted advocates of missions. Their wars of conquest often—as notably with the great Emperor Heraclius—assumed the character of holy wars. Where the barbarians of the East made havoc there too often the Church fell without leaving a trace of its work. Without priest and sacrament, the people came to retain only among their superstitions, as sometimes in North Africa to-day, usages which showed that once their ancestors belonged to the kingdom of Christ. Much {24} of the missionary work of the period was done by Monophysites; the record of John of Ephesus preserves what he himself did to spread Christianity in Asia. And it would seem that even the most orthodox of emperors was willing to aid in the work of those who did not accept the Council of Chalcedon so long as they earnestly endeavoured to teach the heathen the rudiments of the faith and to love the Lord in incorruptness.
[Sidenote: Organisation of the Church.]
The Church of the period was divided into five patriarchates, the Church of Cyprus being understood to stand apart and autocephalous. Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch still retained their old power, while Jerusalem was regarded as somewhat inferior. The patriarchates were divided into provinces, the capital of each province having its metropolitan bishop. Under him were other bishops, and gradually the title of archbishop was being understood,—as by Justinian in the decree (Novel, xi.) in which he created his birthplace a metropolitan see,—to imply jurisdiction over a number of suffragan sees. Besides this there were still sees autocephalous in the sense that they owned no superior or metropolitan bishop. It would seem from the Synekdemos of Hierocles (c. 535) that in the sixth century the patriarch of Constantinople had under him about thirty metropolitans and some 450 bishops. But the authority which the patriarch exercised was by no means used to minimise that of the bishops. If the influence of the Imperial Court on the patriarchate was always considerable and sometimes overwhelming, Justinian was careful to preserve the independence of the Episcopate and {25} to order that the first steps in the election of bishops should be by the clergy and the chief citizens in each diocese. And, as a letter of S. Gregory shows, the bishops were elected for life; neither infirmity nor old age was regarded as a cause for deposition, and translation from see to see was condemned by many a Council. All the clergy under the rank of bishop might marry, but only before ordination to the higher orders. In the East it would seem that the number of persons connected in some way with ecclesiastical office was very large. Even excluding the monks,—a numerous and continually increasing body—the hermits, the Stylites (who remained for years on a pillar, where they even received Communion, in a special vessel made for the purpose), the different orders of celibate women—there was still a very considerable number of persons attached to all the important churches, in different positions of ministry. The famous poem of Paul the Silentiary on S. Sophia revels in a recital of the number of persons employed as well as in the beauty of the magnificent building itself.
In architecture, indeed, the Byzantine Church of the sixth century was supreme. No more glorious edifice has ever been consecrated to the service of Christ than the Church of the Divine Wisdom at Constantinople; and the arts which enriched it in mosaic, marble, metals, were brought to a perfection which excited the wonder of succeeding centuries. Before we end this sketch of the history of a great age in the life of the Eastern Church, a word must be said about its most splendid and enduring memorial. Among the most striking passages in the {26} chronicles of the age are the famous descriptions by Procopius and by Paul the Silentiary of the splendours of the great church of Constantinople in the sixth century after Christ. [Sidenote: S. Sophia at Constantinople.] In the wonderful art of mosaic, as it may be seen to-day in some of the churches of the New Rome, in S. Sophia—though much there is still covered—and in the Church of the Chora, the West, with all the beauty that we may still see in Ravenna, was never able to equal the East. In solemn grandeur of architecture fitted for open, public, common worship, expressive of the profoundest verities of Christ's Church, it would be difficult to surpass the work of the great age of Byzantine art. Of this S. Sophia, the Church of the Divine Wisdom, at Constantinople, built by the architects of the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, is the most magnificent example. There the eye travels upward, when the great nave is entered from the narthex, from the arches supporting the gallery to those of the gallery itself, from semi-domes larger and larger, up to the great dome itself, an intricate scheme merging in a central unity. "The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal" is the exclamation which seems forced from the beholder: never was there a church so vast yet so symmetrical, so admirably designed for the participation of all worshippers in the great act of worship. And the splendid pillars, brought from Baalbek of the old heathen days, wrought on the capitals with intricate carvings, with emblems and devices and monograms, the finely decorated doors, and the gigantic mosaic seraphim on the walls, still in the twentieth century dimly image something of the glowing worship of the {27} sixth. Then the "splendour of the lighted space," glittering with thousands of lights, gave "shine unto the world," and guided the seafarers as they went forth "by the divine light of the Church itself." Traveller after traveller, chronicler after chronicler, records impressions of the glory and beauty that belonged to the great Mother Church of the Byzantine rite. Historically, perhaps no church in the world has seen, at least in the Middle Ages, so many scenes that belonged to the deepest crises of national life. From the day when the great emperor who built it prostrated himself before God as unworthy to make the offering of so much beauty, to the day when Muhammad the conqueror (says the legend) rode in over the heaps of Christian dead, it was the centre, and the mirror, of the Church's life in the capital of the Empire. And that is what the worship of the East has always striven to express. It is immemorial, conservative beyond anything that the West can tolerate or conceive; but it belongs, in the present as in the past, to the closest thoughts, the most intimate experiences, of men to whom religion is indeed the guide of life. The Church of S. Sophia, the worship of the East, are the living memorials of the great age of the great Christian emperor and theologian of the sixth century.