As for Justinian—an emperor as forceful, energetic and egotistical as any in Roman history—he never doubted for a moment his ability to secure Christian unity. Following in the footsteps of Anastasius, he offered the Monophysites several dramatic concessions; like Julian, he was perfectly happy to depose an obdurate bishop or two and demand their silence if the situation required it. In addition, though, he unleashed a couple of tactics that neither of his predecessors had thought to deploy. The first of these, bred of Justinian’s sublime conviction that he had a genius for theology, was to invite Monophysites to Constantinople and grace them personally with his reflections on the mysteries of faith. Although this strategy, to the emperor’s own surprise, failed noticeably to shift the convictions of his guests, his self-assurance was barely dented by the disappointment. There lay another means to hand of seducing the Monophysites. Justinian, never a man to squander a potential advantage, and a political operator even when in the throes of his lust, could point to the fact that he had seen fit to take one of their number to his bed.
And not just any Monophysite. Even her bitterest critics—of whom there were many—grudgingly acknowledged that Theodora, consort and beloved of the emperor, was a woman of exceptional abilities. Shrewd, far-sighted and bold, she ranked, in the opinion of Justinian’s cattier critics, as more of a man than her husband ever did. Rumour had it that at the height of the deadly riots of 532, with Constantinople ablaze and Justinian twitchily contemplating flight, she stiffened the imperial backbone by declaring, with a magnificent show of haughtiness, that “purple makes for an excellent shroud.”114 Steel of this order, in a woman, was unsettling enough to the Roman elite; but even more so were the origins of the empress. Theodora, like an exotic bloom sustained by dung, had her roots, so it was darkly whispered, deep in filth. Dancer, actress and stand-up comic, she had also—long before puberty—been honing on slaves and the destitute a career even more scandalous. Her vagina, it was said, might just as well have been in her face; and, indeed, such was the use to which she put all three of her orifices that “she would often complain that she did not have orifices in her nipples as well.”115 The gang-bang had never been held that could wear her out. Most notorious of all had been her trademark floor-show, which had seen her lie on her back, have her genitals sprinkled with grain, and then wait for geese to pick the seeds off one by one with their beaks. Such were the talents, so her critics sneered, that had won for her the besotted devotion of the master of the world.
Yet, this sorely underestimated both husband and wife. Theodora had certainly been a whore: even her admirers admitted as much. What mattered to them, however, and to Justinian as well, was not her record of sin, but rather the radiant glory of her repentance. The one-time prostitute had emerged as a devout Monophysite, a committed student of famous theologians, a woman “more formidable in her understanding and sympathy toward the wronged than any individual ever.”116 Perhaps it was only natural that someone who had endured the pecking of geese at her private parts for public amusement should have empathised with the downtrodden. Whatever had prompted her own personal reformation, though, Theodora undoubtedly provided Justinian with a living, breathing model of all his noblest hopes for the Roman state. Above the gates of the Chalke, the great entrance to the imperial palace, there stretched a magnificent mosaic of Justinian and Theodora together, “both of them appearing to rejoice and celebrate festivals of victory.”117 The message proclaimed by such an image, even if Justinian disdained to spell it out openly, was nevertheless something more than merely subliminal. Stern guardian of orthodoxy though he was, he did not deny to his wife the title of Christian, too. For all the seeming chasm of difference between Chalcedonians and Monophysites, it did not, in the opinion of Justinian himself, threaten the blessings that his empire might expect to receive as its due reward from God. In the ultimate reckoning, what united the Christian people was more significant than what kept them apart.
Most Monophysites—and Nestorians too—shared this view. Despite the festering bitterness of their disputes, none of them truly doubted that they all belonged to the same religion: that there was genuinely such a thing as Christianismos. Failure Chalcedon might have been—but not Nicaea. Two hundred years on from the great council, the only Arian churches were in the West: for there they could enjoy the patronage of barbarians who, of course, knew little better. And it was not only Arians who had been largely scoured from the Christian heartlands. The orthodoxies of Nicaea—that God was a Trinity; that the Son was equal to the Father; that Jesus had been more than merely man—were now so entrenched that few Christians were even aware of just how contested these doctrines had once been.
In 367, some four decades after the first formulation of the Nicaean Creed, a famously authoritarian bishop by the name of Athanasius had written to the churches under his jurisdiction. In these letters, he had prescribed the twenty-seven books that henceforward were to be considered as constituting the “New Testament.” The list had soon become canonical wherever Nicaea was accepted. Simultaneously, Athanasius had commanded that all gospels not included in his canon, and all letters falsely ascribed to the apostles, should be rooted out and destroyed. On this matter too, his guidelines had been widely followed: in due course, the gospels of Basilides, Marcion and every other Gnostic had been consigned to oblivion. Memories of these other Christians and their doctrines had inevitably faded. By the time of Justinian, a whole new history for the faith had come to be written. There was simply no recollection, in the history that the Church had succeeded in manufacturing for itself, of its authentic origins and evolution. Right from the beginning, most Christians now took for granted there had only ever been the one Christianity: a religion that was orthodox, catholic and Nicaean.
And it was this same presumption—that the essence of Christianismos was something both eternal and unchanging—which gave to Justinian’s revolution a distinctive, not to say unsettling, aura of paradox. “This was the commission entrusted to the Emperor by God: to watch over the whole Roman Empire and, so far as was possible, to refashion it.”118 The tone of veiled uncertainty—even nervousness—was telling. Was Justinian properly to be judged as a noble burnisher of ancient verities or as that most disturbing and dangerous of figures, a revolutionary? The question haunted his every move. If his legal reforms, which had served to forge the venerable laws of the Roman people into something novel and intimidating, were palpably shadowed by ambiguity, then so too was an even more awesome project: the modelling of his earthly realm upon the monarchy of the heavens. This, of course, had been the stated goal of a whole succession of emperors since the time of Constantine; but Justinian pursued it with a brutality and literal-mindedness quite without precedent. The emperor was not, by nature, a vicious man; but neither, to put it mildly, was he lacking in self-assurance. Not for him the carefully modulated ambivalence of his predecessors.