What the seven sleepers had woken to was a world that accepted such logic as invincible. Emperors, charged as they were with the protection of the Roman people, and desperate for heavenly assistance, now turned instinctively to those men who could most plausibly claim access to the court of heaven: the bishops of the Catholic Church. In turn, the bishops, granted access to the earthly court of Constantinople, had been able to persuade a succession of emperors that there was nothing likelier to boost state security than the proper entrenchment of Nicaean orthodoxy. It was this potent combination of interests that had spelled ruin for the temple of Artemis: for in 391, the great warrior emperor Theodosius I, grandfather of Theodosius II, had officially forbidden all forms of sacrifice, and the veneration of even household idols.
Nor had that been the limit of his efforts in defence of the Catholic Church. Even more gratifying to the bishops, perhaps, had been his harrying of an enemy subtler, less obvious, and much lighter on their feet than the pagans. A decade before the banning of sacrifices, Theodosius had officially defined all those Christians who disputed the Nicaean settlement as “demented and lunatic.”108 The bishops, then, in their ongoing campaign against heresy, had increasingly been able to take for granted their right of appeal to Caesar. “Help me to destroy the heretics, and I will help you to destroy the Persians.”109 Such was the rallying cry issued to Theodosius II by Nestorius, a brilliant Syrian theologian who in 428 had become Bishop of Constantinople. The bargain struck between emperor and Church could hardly have been spelled out more brutally; and indeed, there were those who thought Nestorius downright vulgar for drawing attention to it. Yet the alliance, in the final reckoning, was founded upon something nobler than mere cynical intolerance. Theodosius, after all, was a man of legendary piety; while Nestorius had been so famed for his holiness in his native Antioch that he had been specially imported to fill the capital’s vacant bishopric. Both men yearned to see the pillars of heaven planted on the fallen earth; and each was convinced that God had called upon him, personally, to achieve it. Their great labour it was, emperor and bishop alike, to complete the heroic project initiated by Constantine at Nicaea: to fashion a single Christianity; to shape the first religion.
Granted, tensions always remained. Beyond the limits of the empire, in Iranshahr, Christians tended to seize every opportunity they could to demonstrate their independence of Constantinople, since any hint that they might be fifth-columnists would see, “instead of incense, the dust of their demolished churches ascending to the sky.”110 Even within the empire itself, in great cities such as Antioch, the leaders of the Church rarely felt much obligation to kowtow to orders from the capital. If emperors were intimidating figures, then so too were bishops. The aura of God’s awful power always encircled them, and Constantinople was far away. The fashion for issuing stentorian pronouncements on the nature of Christ, honed by Nicaea and a host of councils since, was one that any bishop with a strong local power-base, not to mention a fondness for the sound of his own voice, was almost bound to indulge. In 451, a year after the death of Theodosius II, the largest oecumenical council that the Church had ever seen, attended by a full six hundred bishops, was held at Chalcedon, directly across the straits from the imperial palace, in a conscious effort to rein in this tendency. The new regime’s aim—just as Constantine’s had been at Nicaea—was to muzzle a taste for bickering that had come to threaten, in the opinion of the authorities, not only the unity of the Church but the very security of the Roman people.
At stake for the delegates, however, was no longer the relationship of the Son to the Father, an issue long since triumphantly resolved, but a no less awesome mystery: the identity of the Son Himself. How, Christians wanted to know, had His divine and human natures coexisted? Had they been wholly intermingled, like water and wine in a goblet, to constitute a mone physis—a “single nature”? Or had the two natures of Christ in fact co-existed within His earthly body as quite distinct entities, like water and oil? Had both His human and His divine essence experienced birth, suffering and death, or was it the most repugnant blasphemy to declare, as some bishops did, that God Himself “was crucified for us”?111 Knotty questions—nor easily unpicked. The Council of Chalcedon, nevertheless, did its level best. A determinedly middle road was steered. Due weight was given to both the divine and the human elements of Christ: “the same truly God and truly man.” This formula, devised by a bishop of Rome and graced with the approval of the emperor himself, struck the Christians of both the West and Constantinople as eminently reasonable—so much so that never again would they attempt to revise or reverse it.f
Elsewhere, though, there was consternation. By its opponents, Chalcedon was dismissed as—at best—a flaccid equivocation. Across the eastern provinces of the empire, and in Syria and Egypt especially, Christians committed to the belief that Christ’s human nature had been blended indivisibly with the divine refused to be bound by the rulings of the council. Chalcedonians, in reciprocal scorn, labelled these dissidents “Monophysites”—a name intended and felt to be profoundly insulting.g Meanwhile, Christians from the opposite wing of the debate—those who believed it monstrous to imagine that God Himself might have been crucified, that God Himself might have died—felt no less bitterly betrayed by all the fine-spun prevarications of Chalcedon than did their Monophysite adversaries. Nestorius himself, had he not died a day before the arrival of his invitation to attend the council, would have been a prominent member of this faction. In an irony typical of the age, however, a couple of decades before Chalcedon, the man who had urged Theodosius to destroy the heretics had himself been convicted of heresy, disgraced and packed off into exile. He and his doctrines still had plenty of followers, though—Christians who felt that the erstwhile Bishop of Constantinople had been the epitome of orthodoxy. Many of them could be found in the famous schools of Edessa; but there were even more in Mesopotamia. In 489, when a Monophysite takeover of the Blessed City forced the closure of its university, the students and teachers simply decamped across the border. As one Mesopotamian bishop smugly put it, “Edessa went dark and Nisibis blazed with light.”112 The Christians of Iranshahr—implacable opponents of the Monophysites and contemptuous of Chalcedon—had soon lost any lingering trace of loyalty to Constantinople. In turn, the Christians of the West—Chalcedonians and Monophysites alike—dismissed the Mesopotamians as heretics and labelled them “Nestorians.” Chalcedon, far from bringing unity, seemed to have riven the Church for good.
And certainly, as time went on, the rival positions hardened. The Chalcedonians, having seized the commanding heights of the Church’s infrastructure and claimed the prized title of “orthodox,” were in no mood to surrender their spoils. The Monophysites, never doubting for a moment that it was they who were truly the orthodox, proved equally intransigent: rather than accept the bishops foisted on them by Constantinople, they simply took to the countryside and preached their doctrines there. A succession of emperors, desperate to heal the breach, veered ineffectually between compromise and repression. When Anastasius daringly permitted a Monophysite phrase to be spoken in the capital’s churches, the outraged citizenry responded by toppling statues of the emperor, burning down entire districts of the city, and parading the head of a decapitated Monophysite on a pole, to the catchy refrain of: “A conspirator against the Trinity!”113 A few years later, when Justin purged the Church hierarchy in Syria of all those with Monophysite leanings, the exiled bishops positively revelled in their misfortunes, and infuriated Constantinople by posing stagily as martyrs.