“Time Bomb” might be a better name for the GCSQ, since—the exaggerated fancies of future conspiratorial theorists notwithstanding—no absolutely reliable, indissoluble glue held its members tightly together. Ironically, only someone viewing life through the eyes of God, from inside the Mystical Body, and on the path to transformation in Christ, could really understand what the Grand Coalition and its strengths and weaknesses truly were. But the question of whether Christians would “put on Christ” to undertake such an examination was another matter entirely.

Chapter 3

The Turbulent Battle for a Christian Imperial Order

A. A Good Story With a Happy Ending?

Leaders of the Dominate did indeed prove to be ready to experiment. Unfortunately, their pagan totalitarian tendencies at first led them to innovation in the direction of a more vigorous confirmation of the traditional, conservative, “founder-friendly” concept of a divine State servicing the demands of “business as usual”. State worship brought with it the nightmare of Diocletian’s Great Persecution, which was all the more horrifying to Christians in that it followed so unexpectedly upon decades of peaceful—though admittedly rather badly documented—growth.¹

It was the failure of this most organized of imperial harassments, along with the attendant questioning of its effective value, which then turned subsequent emperors to the fourth century settlement with Christianity. Beginning with Constantine (306-337) and ending with Theodosius (379-395) and his descendants, East and West, this entente moved swiftly from a simple recognition of the Church as a legal entity to her adoption as an integral cornerstone of the Greco-Roman Establishment.

Given the fact that the emperors were themselves but novice Christians, and could not be expected, even under the best of circumstances, fully to appreciate the meaning of their new religion, benevolent and cooperative imperial action would depend upon a basic spirit of openness and good will in performance of their new role. And the practical consequences of that openness and good will, in turn, would rest upon two other factors: 1) the character of the imperial administrators most responsible for counseling the emperor and implementing whatever State policies were adopted by him; and, 2) the faith and courage of the Church leaders called upon not only to obey the just commands of the legitimate civil authorities but also to correct and transform them in Christ. With openness to a real conversion on the side of powerful rulers and their advisors, and a combination of both a courageous, authoritative steadfastness in the Faith and a pilgrim spirit on the part of the politically still rather helpless and naïve Christians, mutually advantageous results might gradually be achieved.

But where these necessary pre-conditions to cooperation were lacking, the emasculating consequences for the message of the Word would be horrendous. State support for Christianity would then lead to the subversion of true religion, and the elaboration of a doctrinal and moral revisionism useful primarily to the attainment of the secular goals of “nature as is”. Under these conditions, Church reliance upon the backing of a powerful civil authority would become nothing other than the lazy Catholic’s easy way out. It would reflect a satisfaction with the outward pomp and mere appearance of a Christian order that abandoned the immensely harder work required for a truly substantive transformation in Christ. Such a situation would favor the unseemly career building of “Uncle Tom” popes, bishops, abbots, monks, and priests, all of whom would then shape the catechesis of an Uncle Tom laity. It would encourage a social-climbing, perk-seeking, and more and more cynical Christian population which would grasp the truth that its stale bread was buttered on its secular side; the development of a “Christendom” that saw that its secular master’s will was to be baptized as eminently Catholic in order for even this insipid morsel to be swallowed in peace and quiet; a “Christendom” slavishly accepting of a life that was once again based upon “business as usual”.

That attempts to secure such a perversion of the mission of the Word in history were likely from the government’s side was due to the fact that some emperors and many civil servants clearly remained tied to a pagan appreciation of “nature as is” long past the time of official State conversion to Christianity. While ruling as they had always done, but under changed circumstances that required at least an outward commitment to the new official religion, all such men could consciously or unconsciously continue to sabotage the real work of the correction of natural evils and transformation in Christ.

Similarly, rhetoricians belonging to the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo did not disappear from the Roman scene in the fourth century. They understood that the Church, despite her newly established legal status, could still be tamed and diverted from her substantive mission. One highly effective way of assuring this was by dulling her awareness of her own emasculation; by telling “a good story with a happy ending” about the full conversion of the Empire to Christian beliefs and action, all the while that its foundation vision and related behavior remained unaltered. As with the Manicheans before them, their sabotage could be better promoted through an outwardly enthusiastic embrace of the institutions and the language of their “fellow Christians”, now co-opted for their own quite different purposes. Use of Christian media would block immediate suspicion of their motives, as they, in practice, supported and reinforced the spirit and standard operating procedures of ancient pagan institutions and ingrained custom.

The fact that there were emperors, civil servants, and rhetoricians who could go about their customary work while masquerading as believers, or even actually convincing themselves that they represented an enlightened as opposed to a vulgar Faith, was, of course, at least partially due to failures of perception or courage on the part of good willed Christian leaders of Church and State. Many of these men desperately wanted to believe the “good story with a happy ending” and could easily identify what seemed to be a number of serious reasons for embracing its teaching. After all, the faithful were no longer in fear for their lives. Who, therefore, but a madman would not revere the Roman State for the peace and security it now provided? Who could deny that, with persecution ended, and all public spaces opened to possible Christian penetration, an opportunity had arrived to bring the good news of Redemption freely to everyone on every level of social life? Rome herself, as the great Christian poet, Prudentius (348-c. 413), exulted in his famous response to Symmachus on the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate, could now finally come to understand the true universal mission that the Providence of God had prepared her to fulfill. Through her change of heart and soul, this international empire would now work together with a Church called to the evangelization of the entire world for the greater glory of God and the salvation of all nations.

It cannot be sufficiently stressed that early imperial Christians, from emperors to peasants, grew to maturity in an environment where complete obedience to a prestigious, omnipotent State was generally taken for granted and where those well placed to serve its interests could gain handsome rewards of money, political influence, and fame for everyone around them to appreciate and envy. All that was needed for a believer who was either overwhelmed with awe before the majesty of Rome or himself tempted to bless the “converted” Greco-Roman Establishment in its “business as usual” activities for the sake of insuring himself a life of peaceful enjoyment of power and riches, was a solid, Christian-sounding cover for his adulation or his crime. A “good story with a happy ending” allowing an “appropriate explanation” for the satisfaction of one’s own strongly ingrained illusions or deeply felt passions was often too seductive for contemporaries to contest and correct.²

Among prelates who—to give him the benefit of the doubt—seem perhaps to have been more overwhelmed with awe than personal desire for riches and glory was the first great Church Historian, Eusebius, the Bishop of Caesarea (c. 263-339). His Vita and Laudes Constantini helped mightily to create an aura surrounding the Christian Emperor that was crucial to the transformation of his responsibility from one of mere protection of the Pax Christi to that of playing an unacceptable “apostolic” role in shaping it. Eusebius expressly rejected discussing anything in Constantine’s Vita that could be unedifying from a Christian standpoint, even though the full story might have sent the orthodox believer hunting for a much more certain shield and buckler. Having assured us of Constantine’s beneficence by suppressing any evidence that might contradict its validity, he then moved on, in the Laudes, delivered on the thirtieth anniversary of the Emperor’s reign in 335, to set a tone in praise of the faith-friendly ruler destined for a long history of imitation down to the present day:³

Eusebius begins with the assurance that he intends to avoid any display of rhetoric. He believes that the Emperor is a human being set apart from other human beings in that he is ‘perfect in wisdom, in goodness, in justice, in courage, in piety, in devotion to God: the Emperor truly and he alone is a philosopher, for he knows himself, and he is fully aware that an abundance of every blessing is showered on him from a source quite external to himself, even from heaven itself’. Eusebius compares him to the sun: ‘Thus our Emperor, like the radiant sun, illuminates the most distant subjects of his empire through the presence of his Caesars, as with the far piercing rays of his own brightness’. His Empire is ‘the imitation of the monarchical power in heaven’, because he has consciously modeled his government after that in heaven.

‘Invested as he is with a semblance of heavenly sovereignty, he directs his gaze above, and frames his earthly government according to the pattern of that Divine original, feeling strength in its conformity to the monarchy of God. And this conformity is granted by the universal Sovereign to man alone of the creatures of this earth: for He alone is the author of the sovereign power, Who decreed that all should be subject to the rule of the one. And surely monarchy far transcends every other constitution and form of government: for that democratic equality of power, which is its opposite, may rather be described as anarchy and disorder.’

Throughout the rest of the oration Constantine is praised for his achievements, and for the blessings resulting from the freedom which he gave to the Church. In the last chapter Eusebius refers again to Constantine’s own sermon: ‘Discourses and precepts and exhortations to a virtuous and holy life, are proclaimed in the ears of all nations. Nay, the Emperor himself proclaims them: and it is indeed a marvel that this mighty prince, raising his voice in the hearing of all the world, like an interpreter of the Almighty Sovereign’s will, invites his subjects in every country to the knowledge of the true God’.

This imperial aura was enhanced still further through the work of those less savory and much more openly political and self-serving personalities whom we refer to as “court bishops”. Certain third century prelates, like that Paul of Samosata (200-275) who served the rebellious Zenobia of Palmyra (240-after 274) in the Middle East, already prefigured the type.⁴ Nevertheless, court bishops became much more common from Constantine’s day onwards, once being a prelate anywhere in the Empire really began to “pay”.

It is hard to decide exactly where to place another Eusebius, the Bishop of Nicomedia (d. 341), an advisor to Constantine and a friend and strong supporter of the Egyptian heretic, Arius (250/256-336).⁵ Was he a hidden member of the GCSQ, using his influence over imperial policy to twist Christianity to serve the cause of “business as usual”? Or was he a clever, though heretical Christian, himself manipulating the machinery of a State still fumbling towards an understanding of how it should act with regard to the demands of the Faith? Whatever the answer, the kind of violent, politicizing measures that he advocated and enforced were representative of the general approach of the court bishop, and the many prelates that followed his example are equally representative of the same spiritually destructive phenomenon. So numerous were they in the years to come that St. Basil the Great (330-379) could, with accuracy, respond to an imperial messenger startled to find a successor to the apostles who would not willingly agree to sign on the dotted line of yet another politically-motivated “religious” document that, perhaps, he had never actually met a real bishop before.⁶

Through the work of all three groups—disguised members of the GCSQ active in both governmental and rhetorical professions, overawed or venal prelates, and court bishops—the obedience of the Church to a State that proclaimed itself her “friend” began to be presented as the sole path to the creation of a peaceful and ordered Christendom, as God Almighty wanted it to be structured. The Mystical Body of Christ was thereby expected to accept everything ordered under its traditional aegis as normative, not simply from a customary Roman standpoint, but, much more importantly, from a Christian one as well. Obedience was due to the Empire because she was sacred and apostolic in and of herself, in addition to possessing the glory that came from being Roman and ancient. Isocrates himself could not have devised a better appropriation of a grand theme for a purpose of justifying unquestioned political power.

Despite the fact that the unconscious and conscious authors of this pleasant deception intended their ideas to apply only to the Roman imperial order, they produced a model that could be—and was—used to mould Church-State relations in Persia, Armenia, and Georgia also.⁷ In fact, they produced a model, mutatis mutandis, useful to anyone interested in defending the natural actions of the political and passionate powers-that-be from a supernatural Christian standpoint at any time or place in history. And this includes a contemporary America that has found that claiming that it is interested in doing nothing of the sort is more useful to working for “business as usual” against Christian interference with “nature as is” than any other previous willful approach to life. But in pointing to that truth, I am getting much too far ahead of the bad uses of this “good story” than is suitable for illustrating its immediate dangers in the imperial era.

B. The Good Story Goes Awry

Great doctrinal difficulties regarding this “good story with a happy ending” immediately arose during the reign of Constantine himself. This need not have been the case if the State and its advisors had acted properly, or even known what “acting properly” meant. Church leaders could not logically deny that there were many reasons why any political authority might legitimately be concerned with various disputes regarding the nature of the Faith. After all, Gnosticism espoused an anti-nature ideology denying the State’s very reason for existence. African Donatism, which based the exercise of ecclesiastical authority upon personal sanctity, could easily be applied to the civil sphere and become as threatening to the smooth functioning of the machinery of the government as to that of the Church.⁸ Men like Bishop Priscillian (d. 385) and his followers, rightly or wrongly accused of being members of a secretive, charismatic, orgiastic cult, could reasonably arouse the interest of all conscientious political officials.⁹ Neither the bloodshed on the streets in Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria that accompanied Nestorian and Monophysite battles from the fifth century onwards, nor the bad morale of eighth century troops convinced that military problems at the front were connected with public appreciation of sacred images, could be looked upon as matters of little or no community interest.¹⁰ Any State that refused to treat such issues as serious matters would not be worthy of its name or its God-given mission to maintain natural peace and public order. A Church that imperiously prohibited the State from asking questions regarding its duty in this realm—as many would insist appertains in our own time—would unjustifiably be overstepping the proper boundary between religious and political authorities.

Similarly, there ought to be no surprise that Church leaders might also be positively happy with active State involvement in such disputes. Both Scripture and theological logic argued the need for a symphonia of Church and State. Almost all contemporary believers grew up in a Roman world where the emperor was responsible for the Pax deorum. It would have been quite natural for most of them to presume that, once converted, he would be equally responsible for guaranteeing the Pax Christi. And what was the alternative? Should Christians be condemned to look on helplessly as Gnostic interlopers and heretical mobs forcibly took over dioceses and parishes that a friendly Empire might be willing to aid the orthodox to keep under their own control?

Assistance in maintaining the ecclesiastical peace in union with the dictates of the proper apostolic authorities would thus have been justifiable and profitable for both Church and State. In fact, a desire to offer just such a mutually justifiable assistance seems to have been the primary motive behind the first of Constantine’s interventions in Church affairs, with respect to the Donatist Crisis in Africa.¹¹ Unfortunately, however, innovative and manipulative forms of interference in doctrinal matters very swiftly became the norm. Court bishops were actively associated with this interference from almost the very outset, from the moment that Eusebius of Nicomedia began his relentless efforts to win the emperor to a revision of the decisions of the Council of Nicaea (325) condemning the teaching of his friend, Arius of Alexandria.¹² Government officials immediately realized that the ambitions, envies, and fears of such bishops could easily be stimulated and directed to the support of the primarily political goals—once again, the goals of “nature as is”—that they believed required changes in Church teaching.

Perhaps the greatest basic structural victory for the State in this politicizing enterprise was its molding of the idea of the special importance of a number of imperial bishops—those who came to be referred to as “patriarchs”—into a tool for the more effective exercise of its “sacred” influence over the Church. If it won this victory on the practical level by stirring up ambition, envy, and fear among court bishops, it achieved it on the intellectual plane by relating the significance of a patriarchal See not to its apostolic origins but to its urban political role within the Empire. It was in this way that the Bishop of Constantinople gained entry into the camp of super dioceses forming the so-called Pentarchy, which, in its completed state, included the Bishops of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. While it is true that there was a general, subsequent ecclesiastical acceptance of the utility of dealing with Church affairs through the structure provided by its various “patriarchates”, this fait accompli cannot masquerade their origin in the machinations of men who were eager to secure through them the predominance of traditional political considerations.¹³

In any case, the number of court patriarch, court bishop, and direct government ministerial campaigns involving unjustifiable and reprehensible paths to defining, changing, and obstructing religious doctrine of central importance to the work of correction and transformation of nature take us from Trinitarian through Christological to Iconoclast Controversies with depressing regularity. Rather than governing their dioceses, bishops complicit in these matters wandered the Empire, presiding over kangaroo courts that persecuted orthodox prelates and laymen openly critical of the secularization of religious affairs. Rather than focusing on their primarily political tasks, state bureaucrats aided such court bishops by “going clerical”—doing dubious, threatening, and often outright subversive service as officials at religious councils derailed for governmental purposes.

Every tool imaginable was utilized in such proceedings, with personal libel and slander—such as the accusation that St. Athanasius of Alexandria was conspiring to cut off the Egyptian grain supply to Constantinople and that he was guilty of manslaughter—often at the top of the list.¹⁴ Even the intellectual historical record was brutalized, with the reputations of long dead theologians who were incapable of defending themselves blackened in the process.¹⁵ The consequence was the exile, imprisonment, and death of many good prelates, the disruption of normal diocesan life, and—ironically but not surprisingly to the man who sees the world through the eyes of Christ—damage to the long-term security of the imperial order itself. For unwarranted state religious policies adopted by men with a political tunnel vision often actually aided and abetted local parochial-minded forces totally indifferent or hostile to the survival of a cosmopolitan Empire.

Unwarranted interference in doctrinal affairs was always reprehensible. But it is only right to indicate that a number of Church Fathers and solid believers found even the justifiable assistance offered by the newly Christian Roman State to be often somewhat problematic. St. Augustine (354-430), who openly favored the use of government authority for peacekeeping purposes, made it clear that he himself never actually liked dealing with the civil authorities.¹⁶ His reasons are not difficult to grasp. After all, anything “new”, like the Church, confronting a force and a set of standard operating procedures as ancient as those of “Eternal Rome” was bound to be at something of a disadvantage even in the best of situations.

A major difficulty inherent in this interaction was that one could never fully predict what would come of Roman State involvement in the long run. Libertarians would argue that such a comment speaks clearly on behalf of the abandonment of all governmental interference in religious concerns. If so, it would also argue for the abandonment of any help from any individual or any institution in any religious endeavor whatsoever, perhaps all the more especially in this springtime of Christendom. The fact is that human action in and of itself is “dangerous”, and those who insist that this danger can be avoided through the separation of Christianity from whatever natural force is brought into question by them are merely concocting another “good story with a happy ending” hiding the real truth about the facts of life. By, in effect, abandoning living due to the dangers of life, they simply create a different kind of situation wherein the impact of the Word in history will inevitably be severely limited. They euthanize the message of the Word for the sake of supposedly maintaining its purity. Still, there is no denying that imperial unpredictability was indeed a fact of life, and that this was to a large degree due to the second problem stemming from a merely rhetorical proclamation of the State’s full Christian conversion: the reality of the continued hold upon it of that pagan moral vision that precisely needed to be corrected and transformed—with all the tools at one’s disposal.

In addressing this issue, let us give credit where credit is due. There is ample evidence that the imperial State rather swiftly recognized a need for at least a theoretical public commitment to truly substantive Christian moral change. Various revisions of the Law Code from the 400’s onwards incarnated an awareness of the consequences of this dedication quite vividly. Moreover, governmental support for Church control of numerous public spaces did allow for a great deal of influence over communal and individual human action conducive to effective, practical, long-term moral change.¹⁷

But the penalty-rich clauses of Law Codes, along with formal Church control of public spaces, are no absolute indicators of what people were actually doing in daily life to enforce or respond to their theoretically powerful impact. Examination of contemporary evidence thus reveals what should be obvious: the enormous amount of work that still needed to be done in the moral sphere, both in instilling a general sense of Christian justice and charity as well as in awakening a specific consciousness of what was and was not acceptable State and individual behavior in the eyes of the Church.

Hence, the traditional pagan severity of the Rome State at times easily overcame all of its professed Christian sentiments. This was especially noticeable when it engaged in practical “defense” of a Faith that was both eager to display compassion and also quite aware of the complexities of the human comedy. Government implementation of justifiable anti-heretical policies often lacked all nuance, dismayed orthodox leaders, and created bitter animosities among their victims in consequence. The imperial authorities’ ingrained pagan willfulness, and their tendency arbitrarily to change their spiritual policies for some perceived—and quite temporary—secular good, often wreaked further havoc. Whenever such changes suddenly led to an end to persecution and an opening for heretical vengeance, bitterness then overflowed from the inner to the outer realm. The results were almost invariably detrimental to orthodox belief and believers. Periodic State attack and retreat in dealing with the Donatists of Africa in the 300’s and 400’s offer a major illustration of the evils experienced by faithful clergy and laity from the combined flaws of such exaggerated severity and unexpected tolerance.¹⁸

Any serious investigation of the Donatist controversy also must bring with it mention of another broad area of imperial moral failure that certainly played a major role in that particular struggle: addressing what modern theologians would call the economic “structures of sin”. Shabby treatment of the poor and the powerless at the hands of a fabulously wealthy senatorial aristocracy was endemic to the Roman system. Any supposed conversion of the imperial order to Christianity that did not confront the moral problem of social injustice risked arousing people against the Faith, when their argument was really with an Establishment that was as yet but “baptized” in name only. Politically useful manipulation of the language of religion thus served to obscure the real teaching of the Word in history with respect to economic social issues, turning men against the Church instead of the deconstructionism of the storytellers. Alas, as our own daily experience teaches us, it would not be the last time a shameful political use of religion in this realm would cause similar mistakes to be made.¹⁹

A list of further woes stemming from traditional perceptions of acceptable State behavior is easily compiled. Theodosius’ indiscriminate massacre of innocent and guilty Thessalonians in the wake of a seditious riot in 390 reflected customary political wisdom in desperate need of Christian moral correction. Moreover, to say that court marital and sexual practices were less than satisfactory from the standpoint of transformation in Christ would be a “howler” of an historical understatement. If the women of the Theodosian Dynasty were the models for Christian marriage and motherhood, what possible change could one say had been effected in upper class, familial “business as usual” through the Incarnation of the Son of God?²⁰

Not that one should idolize the ordinary man’s behavior in these matters either. Generally, of course, aside from periodic explosions in politically significant mob action, the story of the average individual’s comportment in any sphere of life remains imperfectly recorded. Nevertheless, it appears to be obvious that the most historically significant moral problem of the Late Empire was the seemingly total indifference of most of the Roman population, low as well as high, to any sense whatsoever of the greater common good. This indifference combined nicely with a desire to satisfy momentary and rather pointless pleasures whenever opportunities to do so arose.

It is for this reason that the powerful had no problem stirring up the vile passions of the popular horse racing factions in the circus in order to shore up a longed-for or endangered imperial political position. Hence, also, men of all classes were ready to risk the very survival of the State for protection or enhancement of their political and financial position, as the maneuvering surrounding the Gothic invasion of Italy in the first decade of the fifth century so amply indicates. Who thinks of the Empire, St. Augustine wondered aloud, absolutely bewildered that refugees arriving from Rome in 410 were more interested in the theater schedule and the successes of their favorite stage actors in Carthage than they were moved to any anguish over the unprecedented sacking of the Eternal City. And Salvian refers to a similar phenomenon in southern Gaul somewhat later in the same century, noting that the individual members of the population somehow had “a smile” on their faces, happy with the satisfaction of their base passions, even though anyone with eyes to see could realize that they were rapidly dying as a viable Roman community.²¹

Christian failings once more helped to aid and abet these moral flaws. Yes, there were powerful voices from among the faithful that were raised to forward the work of correction and elevation of minds and spirits. Some, among them St. Ambrose (c. 340-397), Bishop of Milan, who lashed out at Theodosius over the Thessalonica issue, were actually even successful in their intervention. Others, like St. John Chrysostom (c. 347-407), Patriarch of Constantinople, who vigorously fought injustice to the poor, conspicuous consumption, marital abuse, and general lasciviousness, endured public humiliation and exile as the price for speaking out.²²

Sadly, however, all too many Christians were themselves uncertain trumpets in the war for a change in moral behavior. Some, of course, could not bring themselves to say or do anything in this realm because they were overawed or venal prelates and court bishops of the type discussed above. Others were simply not yet themselves fully awakened to the revolutionary moral consequences of their transformed life in Christ. Unaware of just how deeply revelation and grace were meant to touch them, they were thus incapable of changing their own behavior sufficiently to serve as an example to others and palpably to affect their entire social environment.

This is certainly true with respect to marital concerns. An early example of the problems caused by the influence of the power of mere custom can be seen within the ranks of Church officials themselves, including holy ones. Hippolytus (d. c. 236), an antipope and yet a saint, brutally attacked his fellow hero of the Faith, Pope St. Calixtus (d. 222), as an immoralist. What, exactly, was the nature of Calixtus’ “crime”? It appears to have been merely that of violating traditional Roman practice by permitting the marriage of slaves with freemen. But difficulties in the marital realm were much broader still. In fact, one has the impression that many and even most of the Church Fathers could not bring themselves joyfully to admit the full, sacramental beauty of sexual union in a marriage open to children—and this, despite the fact that their own fundamental theology ought to have led them to embrace such a concept with understanding and joy.²³

Christian embrace of the struggle for social justice was another palpably weak spot. Yes, others beside St. John Chrysostom were deeply concerned about this important issue. Still, it does not appear to have been as important a matter as its significance in daily life ought to have made it, especially when one considers the misery of the mass of the Roman rural population. Perhaps influential orthodox Christians may have not concerned themselves with rural poverty due to the continued paganism of much of the peasantry. Perhaps they may have been frightened off all serious treatment of moral questions concerning wealth and indigence given that both Pelagius (c. 354--c. 420-440), as well as a number of heretics from Africa, where we have seen that the problems of social injustice were very pronounced, openly expressed interest in them.²⁴

It is also conceivable that a focus on such social issues was deflected by notable changes in the character of the higher clergy from the late fourth century onwards. Clearly, with the legalization of Christianity, members of the senatorial aristocracy began to occupy major positions in the Church. This was partly due to the fact that obtaining a prelature became ever more socially acceptable. Fairness, however, dictates indicating that it was also owed to significant pressure from below, since the average man, accurately judging contemporary realities, often encouraged acceptance of the rich and the powerful as bishops. After all, only they had the education granting them an ability to “tell a good story” in defense of the Church and her true needs, as well as the wherewithal from their families to pay for houses of worship and ecclesiastical activities in general. Whatever the reason for their investiture with Church authority, such prelates would quite naturally have been tempted to bring with them their own customary vision—religiously, politically, and socially—when they entered upon their episcopal tasks. And such a vision took for granted the need to focus their attention more upon cementing the advantages and honors given by the imperial government to the clergy as a social class than upon the perennial sufferings of the poor.

Co-option into the existing establishment was also effected through State policy regarding the lower clergy. Christian priests were an administrative godsend to Rome. One of the greatest problems of the Dominate had been the increasing flight of those elements of the local urban population responsible for maintaining civil services—the so-called curiales—from their traditional duties. These tasks were swiftly handed over to the clergy in exchange for their exemption from taxation and certain other public burdens. But whether positively sought after or unwillingly foisted upon it, the greater the clergy’s devotion of attention to traditional corporate class concerns, the less the time and inclination available to them to probe the full meaning of a corrected and transformed Christian social order and to work to achieve it.²⁵

Finally, yet a third problem emerged from the “good story with a happy ending” regarding the “obvious” conversion of the Roman State, turning it into a trustworthy, sacred, and apostolic guide for the faithful. This centered round the rather important matter of the imperial government’s actual ability to perform its tasks as defender of any kind of order, Pax Christi or otherwise. If the Roman State were somehow divinely written into the very nature of things, then it must be supported and invoked for proper protection under all circumstances. No one could be permitted to look anywhere else for political and military assistance than to the Sacred Empire. But if, in practice, it were not an absolutely unalterable element in the eternal plan of God, and could be subject to decline and even actual collapse, such unquestioning support would be a dangerous delusion. Church failure to maintain the proper pilgrimage spirit and remain open to the new steps regularly required to dance the ever-changing dance of life on the political level would be tantamount to flirtation with physical disaster.

To the great sorrow of many Christians of good will, the question of the real power of the Empire became an immediate and demoralizing issue from the late 370’s onwards—precisely the moment of its full public “conversion”. Interestingly enough, the initial reason for this development stemmed directly from the moral flaws discussed above. Goths terrified by the approach of the Huns had begged permission to cross the Danube, and were robbed and humiliated by the self-serving imperial officials responsible for their admission into the Empire. Desperation drove the despoiled barbarians to a rampage, ending in the Battle of Adrianople in 378 with the unexpected, disastrous defeat of the Roman Army and the death of the Emperor Valens—ironically, another political manipulator of the Faith—himself.²⁶

Through a number of twists and turns in the following forty years, aided, once again, by a self-serving short-sightedness on the part of imperial officials, this victory led the Goths to a development of their knowledge of Roman military discipline and strategy, a ravaging of the Balkan Peninsula, a migration to Italy, and a final settlement further westward, in southern Gaul and Spain. Complications related to the Gothic advance into the West brought the withdrawal of Roman forces from Britain and their all-too predictable diversion from public service to private empire building on the Continent. Angle and Saxon mercenaries hired by the unwarlike British population to shield its now unprotected cities soon exploited that island to their own advantage. Roman Britons retreated to the far west and an ever more impoverished and ultimately quite pathetic parochial existence. Withdrawal of Roman forces from the northern frontiers on the Continent also precipitated a massive invasion of a mixture of Vandals, Sueves, and Alans across the Rhine in 406, an assault which led to an advance all the way to Iberia and North Africa. Rome was sacked twice in the course of these various incursions, in 410 and 455.

Although the Roman State in the West broke down in its attempts to deal with such an absolutely unexpected and unprecedented disaster, its eastern machinery seemed, at first, up to the task of coping with it. German Gothic forces near Constantinople and in Asia Minor, though very threatening indeed, were brutally and thoroughly destroyed in the course of the fifth century. By the 530’s, the western-born Emperor Justinian (527-565) felt strong enough to conduct a massive campaign to assure the re-conquest of North Africa, Italy, and Spain. While partly successful in the short run, this effort nevertheless had many unintended negative consequences.

For one thing, the Empire in the East found that its campaigns far afield left it exposed to military problems closer to home. Slavic and Bulgar incursions into the Balkan Peninsula now became regular, and a major Persian invasion in the early 600’s almost brought the Empire to its knees. Even though the Emperor Heraclius (610-641) brilliantly repelled this latter attack, bringing disaster to Persia rather than Rome, his victory proved to be bittersweet. It was quickly followed by defeat after defeat at the unexpected hands of the upstart Arab Moslems, who not only took over the crushed Persian realm but also stripped the Empire of Egypt, North Africa, the Holy Land, and Syria. The loss of Egypt by 642 was particularly painful, since it meant an end to the distribution of the food supplies that had arrived for centuries from this granary of Mediterranean wide significance.

Roman power, therefore, was by no means an absolutely certain divine pillar upon which the Church could base her hopes for defense of the Pax Christi. On the other hand, Rome’s apparent inability to protect any political and social order meant that the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo could not be shielded by it either. Patronage for hidden pagan bureaucrats, sophist word merchants, and court bishops was threatened. Even the bellies of the easily suborned mobs that had counted upon government handouts for survival since the days of Gaius Gracchus under the old Republic could no longer be filled.

But the GCSQ really did not need to despair. Ironically—if not really surprisingly—each and every frighteningly new force that menaced the Greco-Roman ecumene brought fresh recruits into the ranks of that multi-faceted alliance. The short-lived but highly disruptive Persian invasion of the early 600’s aided it chiefly by temporarily unchaining the long repressed parochial wrath of the Jews of the Levant. Thrilled by this obstacle to the relentless progress of Christian evangelization, they actively assisted Persian Zoroastrian persecution.²⁷ Permanent Germanic and Slavic penetration from the late fourth century onwards, on the other hand, insured long-lasting assistance to the GCSQ through the reinforcement their peoples offered for the whole of the pagan vision of nature as the realm of “business as usual”. They provided such assistance even when they had converted to Arian Christianity. After all, this heresy, with its emphasis upon descending levels of divine persons, supported the concept of a great chain of being that, in practice, allowed a continued space for other gods of nature, divinized secular customs, and sacred pagan kingship to flourish. In fact, one might conjecture that it may have been for this very reason that men like Arius and Eusebius of Nicomedia promoted its victory in the first place.²⁸

Despite its semi-Christian flavor, Islam also gave solid aid to the cause of the GCSQ. Yes, the Moslems, reflecting definite Christian influences upon Mohammed, seemed to be concerned for a life of moral change in service of the one true God, with the final purpose of obtaining eternal life for both body and soul. In reality, however, their description of eternity was quite simplistic and carnal in character. It itself appeared to be shaped by natural desires rather than possessing a distinct supernatural character capable of correcting and transforming the everyday mental conceptions and passions of a fallen world.

Similarly, Moslem doctrines could be seen to have provided a noble sounding masquerade—a higher “point of view”—for the furtherance of the interests and successes of a variety of “super clans”, first Arab Bedouin, then those of other ethnic groups as well. Such self-interested manipulation took place everywhere, from Spain to India. These super clans shaped the “appropriate explanation” of what was true, good, and beautiful for the Moslem community—the Umma—as a whole. Many Moslem beliefs and behavioral patterns, and even the accepted text of the Koran and sayings of the Prophet, thus underwent changes according to the specific demands of each of these willful forces, according to place and time. In short, a “good and noble foundation story” was molded to the needs of the strongest factions in classic, Isocrates-friendly fashion. Needless to say, those clan interests, in practice, do not appear to have been particularly concerned for a “boat-rocking” correction and transformation of natural life truly threatening to the standard operating procedures of the status quo.

Yes, there is no denying that certain ideas and labors analogous to Christian ones can indeed be found inside the Moslem community. This is especially true with respect to two phenomena: 1) the hunt for union with a supernatural God pursued by a number of Sufi mystics, and their desire to pass on an understanding of its consequences through their many varied “brotherhoods”; and 2) the speculations of Shiite thinkers in trying to guide daily life in the absence of the true ruler of the Umma, the Hidden Imam. Nevertheless, I would argue that all such highly interesting and often laudable enterprises do not represent the kind of life-changing force rooted in the truly supernatural vision of Christianity. Their value is of the “Seed of the Logos” genre, enhanced, in the case of Islam, by the impact of those Jewish and Christian elements that did form a major component of Moslem beliefs and behavior. But, once again, as St. Justin Martyr indicated, it was only the Catholic Faith that could properly understand and bring such noble endeavors to safe and profitable port.²⁹

C. The Troubled Progress of the True Story

Great theological progress in understanding the “true story” regarding the meaning of the Incarnation occurred throughout the various stages of the imperial era, even amidst the seemingly endless turmoil and the political manipulation masqueraded by the “good story” of the sacred State and its protection of the Pax Christi. This progress, as briefly indicated above, took place in the context of intense discussions concerning the nature of the Trinity (Arianism), of Christ (Nestorianism and Monophysitism), of the character of the Church and her ministers (Donatism), of the relationship of grace and freedom (Pelagianism), of the created universe as a whole (Iconoclasm), and of proper Christian behavior and the path to perfection (sacramental theology, monasticism, mysticism, marriage, social justice). Through this progress, believers gained an ever-deeper knowledge of the Word Incarnate in se and the Word Incarnate continued in time—namely, Christ and His Church. They also advanced in understanding both the meaning of individual “divinization” in and through mankind’s Redeemer as well as the proper use of the natural environment in which we perform our pilgrim dance through life to eternity.

Although a myriad of thinkers played important roles in ensuring this magnificent growth in supernatural wisdom, the key figures in Christian progress in the Faith are St. Athanasius (c. 296-373), St. Hilary of Poitiers (d. 368), the Cappadocian Fathers—St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory Nazianzen (c. 325-389), St. Greogry of Nyssa (d.c. 386)—St. Cyril of Alexandria (c. 375-444), St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662), and St. John of Damascus. Their work was reflected in the decisions of almost all of the initial ecumenical councils—Nicaea, First Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), Third Constantinople (687-688), and Second Nicaea (787) —and in that of numerous secondary, local synods as well.³⁰

In The Whole Christ, his seminal work of the 1920’s on the concept of the Mystical Body and individual Christian deification, the Jesuit writer Emile Mersch catalogued this historical development in knowledge of the consequences of the Incarnation in powerful detail for western readers.³¹ And it was one of the finest accomplishments of Werner Jaeger, in his somewhat later studies of Greco-Roman and Christian paideia, to have demonstrated the increasing awareness on the part of the Church Fathers of just how much Christian revelation could and did work providentially together with the best fruits of ancient natural wisdom.³²

Theological development, as we have seen, was not assured without serious struggles and limitations. One of the most instructive battles illustrating this problem-laden progress concerns the reception of the teaching of St. Augustine, which was seriously resisted not just by friends of Pelagius but also in a number of quite distinct monastic circles. Many monks saw in the Bishop of Hippo’s emphasis upon the central importance of grace a condemnation of their efforts to labor for personal salvation. Here, once again, both an appreciation of the complexity of the individual human dance to sanctity, as well as an intellectual openness to the varied insights of distinct personalities, did a great deal to overcome such misunderstanding.³³ We will have something more to say about such perception and openness in the final section of this chapter. Furthermore, much of the labor leading to theological progress was pursued under the pressure of combat with heretical enemies whose thorough defeat and unconditional surrender heroic fighters for the Faith judged to be essential to Church survival. This conviction was indeed correct. Nevertheless, progress through difficult combat against highly specific, frightening, and often extremely gifted opponents over long stretches of time had unfortunate as well as happy consequences.

Two nefarious side effects are especially important to mention, the first of which was the encouragement that a number of orthodox victories gave to certain understandable but unfounded conclusions regarding the way in which the Faith should be protected. Unfortunately, these included the hope that the mere reiteration of words—even meaningful doctrinal words---along with an exaggerated reverence for the work of heroes—even real heroes in justifiable battles versus error; the pronounced demonization of heretics—even true heretics---along with an excessive reliance on force—even when the arm of the State could and should be legitimately applied—were sufficient in and of themselves for a complete defense of the Christian vision.

A second unhappy side effect was the fact that progress through combat against very specific heresies and heretics frequently diverted attention away from a global presentation of the whole of Christian doctrine. By this, I do not mean to say that some already existing, complete, and calm endeavor of this type was somehow stopped in its tracks by the more specific Trinitarian, Christological, and manifold other battles that actually did take place historically. Nor am I arguing that the task of probing the import of each and every aspect of Revelation simultaneously is a painless enterprise, or even, in the short or long run, that it is humanly possible.

What I do wish to illustrate is the simple truth that the path to doctrinal clarification was historically piecemeal and, as such, often so concentrated on narrow issues as to lead to the neglect of other problems that would return to haunt men, often in the very near future. In the midst of battle, new “good stories” and “appropriate explanations of a passionately desired victory” of dubious character were all too readily concocted. Individual theologians, given ethnic groups, and certain monks, all of them of real merit in one set of conflicts, were lent an air of infallibility and unquestionable holiness that masqueraded dangerous errors and moral failings in other, subsequent clashes. Alliances formed to fight one narrow group of heretics proved to include thinkers harboring contrasting but equally heretical positions. Partisan spirits were cultivated and base actions embraced to ensure what amounted to tainted victories. Maginot Lines built to fight off one enemy ignored the fact that all of their weapons were turned in a single direction, encouraging outflanking maneuvers emerging from different starting points, and even from unrecognized troublemakers already subverting the orthodox camp from within.

All of this disheartened men of sounder doctrine and Christian charity. It fact, it sometimes drove them away from involvement in battles that desperately required their more balanced participation. It also inevitably led to eventual surprises and disappointments for the heroes of the latest, exaggerated “good story”, once their own failings were exposed for everyone to see. Such men were then often tempted to vent their outrage over the “injustice” perpetrated against them by turning against the Church whose sole real defenders they had unquestioningly considered themselves to be. Many even ended their careers by entering, for their own varied reasons, into the already terribly complicated and conflicted ranks of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo.

Theological eyeteeth were cut during the Trinitarian conflicts, the most important of which was the long-lived and variegated Arian Crisis. Still, a good argument can be made that the most difficult matters and the most fruitful long-term developments emerged from two other doctrinal battles: the seemingly innumerable combats over Christology and the subsequent Iconoclast Controversy. Let us look at each of these two struggles in some detail before turning our attention to the equally painful—but comparably productive—question of Church response to the Roman State’s political and social decline.

Christological quarrels were an inevitable corollary of the earlier Trinitarian fray. Once the Church had somewhat satisfactorily clarified the relationship of the Word to the Father and to the Holy Spirit, the study of the relationship of Word and man in Jesus Christ had to rise to the fore. Grave public strife over this topic was first engaged over the supposedly all too humanized understanding of Christ promoted by Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople (c. 386-c. 451), whose views and person were condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431. It then exploded into a centuries-long fury regarding the beliefs of Nestorius’ enemies, the Monophysites.³⁴

Monophysites were deeply attached to St. Cyril of Alexandria’s doctrine of Christ as the “one incarnate nature—monophysis—of the Eternal Word”. They argued that the definition by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 of Our Lord’s possession of two natures, human and divine, united in the single Person of the Divine Word, blessed a dogma that actually “divided Christ”. Such a division, Monophysites claimed, lessened a proper sense of Christ’s overwhelming “otherness”. And thus, they asserted, it promoted the dangerous naturalist tendencies lurking in the bowels of the Nestorian vision.

Intense struggles over Monophysitism had already begun in the discussions at Ephesus concerning the true import of Nestorius’ teachings. Some of that quarreling was, quite frankly, embarrassingly silly—a combat over mere words that could have been explained in a variety of acceptable fashions, had Nestorius’ arrogance, the general party passions on both sides, and a mutual desire to destroy one’s opponents rather than understand their meaning not dominated the “debate”. Much of the discussion, on the other hand, was very significant indeed. Still, one really has to await the seventh century Monothelite flip on the basic Monophysite argument in order to get a sense of the full consequences of adopting or rejecting the substantive doctrines of the pro- and anti-Chalcedonian partisans.

Before doing so, however, it is necessary first to return to the problem of the Roman State’s responsibility for the maintenance of public order. However much the imperial government might have wished to avoid interfering in ecclesiastical dogmatic definition, Monophysites, their prelates, and their local supporters in Egypt, Syria, and Constantinople—militant and sometimes quite brutal monks prominent among them—made it difficult to resist that temptation. Devout followers of St. Cyril proved themselves ready to ally together with and even imitate the vices of men driven by more specious spiritual and secular considerations. They then became dangerous disturbers of the peace and agents of official corruption. Any State qua State would have been shaken by the tumult these Monophysites caused. Effective Roman control over whole provinces was brought into question by it.

Hence, the manifold efforts by the Emperors in Constantinople, starting with Zeno (474-491), Anastasius (491-518), and that ambivalent reconciliatory document called the Henoticon (482), to find some kind of rhetorical play on words—some “good story”—to overcome the divisions that the Chalcedonian definition had sharpened and come to symbolize. These endeavors continued with various projects of the Emperor Justinian. The most despicable of his “pacifying” doctrinal interventions once again involved the condemnations of deceased thinkers disliked by the Monophysites and unable to defend themselves against charges of heresy. Such game playing came to a conclusion with the work of the Emperors Heraclius and Constans II (641-668) in support of the last of these rhetorical flights of fancy—the one developed by Patriarch Sergius I (610-638) of Constantinople.

Sergius’ theology was first built upon Monoenergism. This argued that the doctrine of Christ’s two natures as defined by Chalcedon did not destroy His unity because the Savior’s “oneness” was manifested by His possession of a single divine energy. Various reasons led Sergius to modify the Monoenergist approach, substituting divine will for divine energy as the unifying principle. It was this “one divine will” or Monothelite vision that Heraclius promoted through a document known as the Ecthesis in 638. The Typos (648) under Constans II came out of the inevitable turmoil created by the Ecthesis, and sought to ensure acceptance of the Monothelite position by the simple expedient of prohibiting all discussion of its doctrinal purity from the orthodox camp. Once again, “pragmatists” thought that the time had come to deal with a substantive religious issue crucial to the meaning of the Word by declaring its “closure” for the sake of “public order” and the need to “move on” to the “real life” concerns dictated by “nature as is”.

Every stage of the politically and socially troubled Christological debate provides ample lessons to learn. Still, there are two chief reasons why the Monothelite flip in particular offers one of the best ways of tackling the whole of the tumultuous imperial advance in knowledge of the full impact of the Word as the redemptive force in history. First of all, on the practical level, the resolution of this controversy clarified the position of the pope, the so-called Patriarch of Rome, more sharply than ever before. Secondly, in the speculative realm, the struggle against Monotheletism provided a means for “summing up” the thrust of the entire Christological battle. Both of these reasons are best discussed in tandem.³⁵

Roman Pontiffs repeatedly fade in and out of the life of the universal Church in the early centuries of Christian History.³⁶ Yes, Pope St. Clement I (88-97) powerfully outlined the nature of the agmen we call the Mystical Body of Christ. And, true, the roles of Popes Julius I (337-352) and Liberius (352-366), the one positive and the other negative in character, are important to confront in any attempt to grasp the complex story of the Empire-wide battle over Arianism. Nevertheless, most of what we hear concerning Rome in those first years of ecclesiastical growth involves issues important to the Eternal City herself or her relations with the Church of Carthage in North Africa.

Temptations to parochialism were intensified in Rome by the political problems of the Empire in the West from the early fifth century onwards. These crises led to the domination of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, and Africa by various German tribes. The paganism and Arianism of the tribesmen concerned then dragged western bishops in general into difficult battles with forces that, from the standpoint of the rest of the Empire, were more and more anachronistic in character.

All this changed as the Papacy’s universal role grew in significance in the context of the Monophysite Controversy. Let us begin discussing that growth by remembering that it was Pope Leo the Great’s (440-461) Tome (451), with its formula teaching of Christ’s possession of “two natures in the unity of one Divine Person”, which dramatically shaped the dogmatic definition adopted at Chalcedon. Hence, the Papacy understood its own honor to be on trial in the post-conciliar campaign against that teaching’s ecumenical acceptance. Luckily, the Roman Pontiffs were in a better position than anyone else to defend the decisions of Chalcedon. And this was precisely due to the otherwise parochial effects of the barbarian domination of the Italian peninsula and the protection it offered from the possibility of imperial retribution for failure to heed the Henoticon. It is no surprise that it was with reference to the fight against this imperial word merchandizing and for the complete victory of Chalcedonian orthodoxy that Pope Gelasius (492-496) produced his famous “two swords” argument. In this he elaborated and distinguished the roles of the “ordering” State and the “correcting and transforming” Church in the life of Christendom.³⁷

Ironically, papal defense of Chalcedon and the very prestige of the Holy See itself were to become still more significant due to a stimulus arriving from outside of the Eternal City. From the second third of the sixth century onwards, an increased eastern “pilgrim” involvement in Italy not only counteracted the effects of the barbarian incursion but also brought with it an overwhelming increase in papal self-awareness and power. Such Greek-speaking influence then proved to be of crucial significance in fighting against unacceptably pro-Monophysite policies promoted by the supposedly “sacred and apostolic” imperial State.

This is not to say that events seemed propitious from the start. Heightened eastern participation in Italian affairs began with the Emperor Justinian’s re-conquest of the peninsula from the German Ostrogoths, who had first been dispatched as imperial agents under Theodoric in the 490’s. The Ostrogoths were now to be destroyed in a terrible war extending from the 530’s through the 550’s. Bloodshed continued through the subsequent need to defend imperial gains against a new wave of Germanic Lombard invaders first arriving in Italy in 568. Due to the never-ending conflict, Rome and other imperial-ruled sections of the peninsula found themselves playing host to administrative and military personnel from the East, many of them totally ignorant of Latin. These new arrivals could be counted on to support whatever religious word games the Empire might wish to play. Such games were played not only with respect to the doctrinal life of the Church but also with regard to her structure. This could be seen through exaltation of the roles of the bishops of the two imperial centers East and West, Constantinople and Ravenna, to the obvious detriment of that of the pope of “provincial” Rome.

As important and potentially dangerous as such a major bureaucratic and military migration might be, it was overshadowed in future significance by the positive impact of the highly cultivated Christian Hellenists who arrived in one impressive wave in the early 600’s. These later colonists were Greeks or Greek-speaking Syrian, Palestinian, and North African migrants coming to Italy for two related motives. One was to escape the disastrous invasions of the eastern parts of the Empire mentioned above—first by the Persians, and, immediately after their crushing defeat at the hands of imperial forces, by the much more successful Arab Moslems. Another was to flee imperial, pro-Monothelite religious persecutions.³⁸

Many Greeks and Greek-speakers headed to the more culturally related Sicily and southern Italy. Some went on to work as missionaries in the northern part of the peninsula, where, under the name of decumani and pellegrini, they played a definite but little known role in the evangelization of the fearful Lombards. Those who went to Rome tended to settle at a spot that had already become a small Hellenic neighborhood beforehand: the foot of the Aventine Hill. Traces of their presence remain imprinted on this spot still today. The Roman immigrants included numbers of very energetic monks who were formed by a spirituality best represented by St. Sophronius (560-638) of Palestine and his great disciple, the former civil servant and friend of emperors known to us as St. Maximus the Confessor.

This spirituality, among other things, gave open and intense support to the idea of life as a pilgrimage, one of those core principles we have identified as being supremely important for rendering more effective the Church’s labor as the Body of Christ continued in time. St. Sophronius and his followers started with the general monastic recognition that the baggage we carry with us in the form of property and other possessions can very much obscure our vision of our eternal destination. They took this valuable insight still further, noting that ties to one’s home and all the customary aspects of life within it—even though this might be an ascetic monastic center—can be the biggest piece of extra luggage blocking passage to our eternal fatherland. True abandonment to God and His providence thus required a spirit of pilgrimage reflected most palpably in a physical break with everything personally familiar. It involved a taking to the roads and the high seas; a wandering and ever challenging “exile” for Christ’s sake. Wander these men and their spirituality did: from the Holy Land to North Africa; from North Africa to Spain; and perhaps from Spain to Ireland, whence their heirs were destined to wander to Britain and then back to the European Continent—enriched, by then, by yet another, different, but complementary spirituality to be addressed below.

For the moment, let it suffice for us to make two points: first of all, that this spirit of pilgrimage could not help but open up its adepts to that variety and flux of existence, that ever changing dance of life, which would play such a prominent role in the future activity of papal Rome; and, secondly, that these same pilgrim spirits nevertheless insisted that the world of diversity that they encountered must uniformly dance to the tune sung to it by the unchanging Word. As men solidly rooted in the truth, they understood that none of this diversity would be lost through union with and submission to the correcting and transforming grace of Christ. All that would be lost were those aspects of fallen nature truly worth abandoning.

Having reached the Eternal City, the “Greeks”, those from the Holy Land in particular, took over and transformed some already existing monasteries and built many new ones. Greek-speaking monks and clerics then swiftly rose to importance in the seventh century Roman Church. Abbot John Symponus became a kind of “Secretary of State” to Honorius I (625-638) and John IV (640-642). Pope Honorius sent the deacon Sericus to Constantinople as papal ambassador—apocrisiarios—to the imperial court. By the time of the reign of Pope St. Martin I (649-653), Sericus held the key position of Archdeacon of the Roman Church.

Greek officials were henceforth omnipresent: in Rome, as papal envoys abroad, as bishops scattered throughout Italy, and as representatives to General Councils, freely and fluently translating from Latin into Greek and back again. St. Maximus the Confessor, who arrived in the Eternal City at that same time, found that there were so many Greek-speakers active in the Roman clergy that he could even play a central role in Church affairs without knowing any Latin whatsoever. So numerous were these local and peninsular “Greeklings” that “the biographer of St. Wilfrid of Hexham noted rather disapprovingly that when his hero presented himself to a synod in Rome in 704 to argue his case against deprivation of his see, the bishops present chatted and joked amongst themselves in Greek”.³⁹

Still more importantly, Greeks and Greek-speakers soon became popes themselves. Although the first of these, the Palestinian refugee Theodore (642-649), was elected in the beginning half of the century, and Pope Agatho (678-681) from Sicily may also have been of eastern Greek origin, it was not until 685 that the “Hellenic Papacy” really took flight. At that time, the Archdeacon John V (685-686), born in Antioch in Syria, ascended the papal throne after a normal career in the Roman clergy. Conon (686-687, a Greek speaker from Sicily), Sergius I (687-701, Syrian/Sicilian), John VI (701-705, a Greek of unknown origins), John VII (705-707, another Greek), Sissinius (708, Syrian), Constantine (708-715, Syrian), Gregory III (731-741, Syrian) and the extremely impressive Pope Zacharias (741-752, Greek as well) followed thereafter.⁴⁰

If we were to speak of that pilgrim-spirited Greek domination of the Roman Church using modern terminology, we might say that it presented a multicultural success story. It showed that “multiculturalism” can be a positive force for good, so long as it allows one culture to serve as a “pilgrim” fuel, giving needed backbone to and thereby raising the level of another one that is in trouble. Perhaps Greek Rome is not so well known precisely because it does not fit the pluralist multicultural call for civilizations to melt into some least common denominator shaped “mush” susceptible to mass commercial word merchandizing. This was a multiculturalism that was valuable because it was a rooted multiculturalism; rooted in a deeper understanding of the consequences of correction and transformation in Christ coming from a committed union with the teaching and grace of the redeeming Savior. The new steps in the dance of the life that it taught the Romans were, therefore, brilliant ones indeed.

Eastern influence in Italy, whether under Greek-or Latin-speaking pontiffs, was felt in a variety of specific ways. One of these, the spirit of pilgrimage for the love of Christ, we have already amply discussed. A second eastern influence came in the form of the popularity of certain practices bringing the reality of the changed life stimulated by the Incarnation of the Word into many spheres of daily existence. Easterners were very much active in creating xenodocheia, hospices for foreigners and pilgrims, of whom there were, of course, many in Rome. These were frequently related to diaconia—charitable organizations, often monastic in character, providing aid to the poor and the sick, and attached to Greek churches and chapels in the Eternal City such as St. Maria in Cosmedin, St. George in Velabro, Saints Cosmas and Damian, Saints Sergius and Bacchus, St. Theodore and St. Hadrian.

Additional eastern influences were important in developing the Church’s ability to “tell a good story about a true story”, with significant contributions to liturgical life at the top of the list. For it is no insult to indicate that properly rooted liturgy focused on true worship of God is solid, effective theater as well. It tells the good story about the true story with a power and a range that nothing else can imitate and match. Such eastern liturgical impact took shape in three clear ways.

One was through music, and not simply because of the appearance of Greek-inspired hymns in Latin translation for use in the Mass. Music was much more affected by eastern influence through the greater honor that it now received from high Church officials. Pope St. Gregory the Great (590-603), for all of his association with chant and his creation of a schola cantorum, was worried about the clergy’s over-involvement with singing and sought ways to control and limit it. From the time of Pope Vitalian (657-672) onwards, however, the new, eastern-inspired spirit dominated. That spirit so exalted the role of music that musical accomplishments were soon seen as providing superb preparation for still higher ecclesiastical office. Men like John, Archcantor of the Roman Church, were sent on important diplomatic missions under their cultural cover as musicians. Gifted singers such as Sergius I became popes themselves.

Secondly, the Greek-speaking presence also enhanced liturgy through the impact of elaborate eastern ecclesiastical and court ceremonial on the various rites of the generally more sober Latin Church. Imperial splendor was especially noticeable in those ceremonies emphasizing the sacred role of the Papacy, rites that were enshrined in the mass books of the Latin-speaking Pope Gregory II (715-731). These more splendid and formalized liturgical practices were then carried out in churches beautified in the magnificent and icon-friendly eastern manner.

A third eastern liturgical contribution to the “good story about a true story” came through its development of the Church’s devotional life. Eastern festivals, such as those of the Exaltation of the True Cross and the Nativity, Annunciation, and Dormition of the Virgin Mary were introduced to Rome. The cults of saints popular in the East, including those of the martyr St. Simeon, the doctors Cosmas and Damian, and a battery of warrior heroes like Saint George, who was venerated by the army, also took root. Saint George became so popular that Pope Zacharias himself carried his head in a grand procession from the Lateran to install it in a place of honor in the Church named after him.

Finally, the Greek-speaking migration also had a significant impact on Roman ability to root the “good story” of the Christian God in learned theological studies. This rekindled the deep concern for the old and new paideia that could be found both in the work of Italians of the fifth and sixth centuries like Martianius Cappella, Cassiodorus, Boethius, and Bishop Ennodius of Pavia as well as in the labors of large numbers of Gallic prelates from the senatorial aristocracy. The influence of these men, especially their emphasis upon maintenance of the structure of a Liberal Arts education and the need to translate into Latin the Greek classics that westerners were no longer able to read in their original language, was overturned by the unfortunate anti-scholarly tendencies favored by Pope St. Gregory I.

Not that Gregory, as we shall soon see, would have been in any way hostile to the pilgrim spirit and openness to the reality of the ever-changing dance of life also entering Rome with the eastern disciples of St. Sophronius. Nor was he opposed to telling a good story about the true story himself. Quite the opposite is the case. Nevertheless, his chief concern for the newly Christianized western Roman population was its protection from ancient pagan influences and fresh barbarian ones. He thus denounced the classical training of the older intelligentsia as an obstacle to the effective catechesis of common people. From Gregory’s standpoint, the ancient paideia was at best a simple waste of time, engaging bishops in literary word games and the preparation of sermons that no one in their congregations understood anyway. At worst, it was an introduction either to pagan intellectual and moral perversions or to heretical hair-splitting in dogmatic theology cultivated by subtle Greek word merchants. And if such were the case, it was a danger to the Christian soul in general.⁴¹

Gregory’s impact was reversed through this eastern influx, first and foremost because the Greek language and Greek theological arguments became well known in Rome once more. Whereas men like Popes Vigilius (537-555), Honorius, and probably Gregory himself, could not understand Greek, this was no longer the case in the late 600’s. By that time, an “elitist” classical training had once again become a ticket to higher office and deep esteem. One sees this in the election to the Papacy of a scholarly man like Zacharias who, ironically, translated the anti-Hellene Gregory’s Dialogues into Greek. Hence, also, the praise given by the Liber Pontificalis to Pope Leo II (682-683), who rendered the Greek proceedings of the Sixth General Council into Latin and who was honored for both his scholarly and catechetical successes.⁴²

By this point, we are ready to turn back to the question of Monophysitism and the importance of the Monothelite stage of its history. We must examine this era, first of all with reference to the role of the Papacy in the life of the universal Church and then in terms of its value as a time of “summing up” the entire sense of the Christological battle. Eastern influence in both these realms was to prove to be a long-term blessing for Rome in particular and the cause of the Word in general—even if that lasting blessing had to be paid for through short-term suffering and abject humiliation.

An all too familiar “shock and awe” in the face of imperial power on the one hand, as well as a venal ambition to exploit that strength for personal benefit on the other, had entered Rome in the 530’s along with the troops from Constantinople. It did so to the great detriment of the reputation of the Holy See. A huge gap soon separated the energetic demeanor of Pope Gelasius and other defenders of Chalcedon at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries from Pope Vigilius’ ambivalence and pusillanimity at the time of the Emperor Justinian’s reconciliation efforts. Justinian’s endeavors involved the unseemly badgering of prelates into pro forma acceptance of “appropriate” conciliatory “words” at the Second Council of Constantinople (553), and that shameful condemnation of long dead theologians disliked by Monophysite thinkers already mentioned above.⁴³

Shortly thereafter, Gregorian anti-intellectualism began to take root, giving all theological speculation a bad name in Roman eyes. Anti-intellectualism made it seem as though dogmatic theology were a rhetorical game played by pointlessly subtle snobs. It was almost as though someone with a Platonic spirit could be chastised as being a follower of Isocrates. This anti-speculative outlook did not take the issues that were still at stake in Christological disputes all that seriously, and thus, at least at first, missed the significance of the substantive points being made by participants in the Monothelite struggle. Hence the confusion of one of Gregory’s most loyal followers, the hapless Pope Honorius, who dismissed the whole battle over energies and wills as the work of “croaking frogs”.⁴⁴ Rather than freeing him from that “elitist” conflict, however, his air of contempt made him an unsuspecting agent for encouraging seriously “frog croaking” attacks on Chalcedon, along with broad Monothelite attempts to overturn the work of St Leo the Great. Would that such an outcome were the last manifestation of the dangers of an anti-theological position in the life of the Church!

Seventh and eighth century Greek-speaking monks, clerics, and popes reversed this emasculation of the Papacy as they also ended papal disdain for theology. They did so in two ways. First of all, they strengthened Roman recognition of the Holy See’s responsibility for the universal Church and its spirit of independence vis-à-vis the State. Secondly, they used the power and prestige of the Roman Pontiff as the legitimate, authoritative, sacred and apostolic voice in the concluding battle for a complete and proper understanding of Christ as God-Man against its illegitimate sacred and apostolic imperial competitor.

Eastern efforts to enhance the role and prestige of the Roman Pontiffs were conscious ones. Everything—from treatises regarding the fullness of papal authority to Pope Sergius I’s symbolic translation of the body of St. Leo the Great to a new and more splendid and prominent tomb—testifies to this fact. Despite occasional setbacks, owed more to the advanced age and personality of one or two Greek and Latin-speaking popes than to anything else, the reputation of the Papacy was infinitely higher by the end of Pope Zacharias’ reign than at the beginning of Pope John V’s. The words of St. Maximus the Confessor then rang visibly true:⁴⁵

The extremities of the earth, and all in every part of it who purely and rightly confess the Lord look directly towards the most holy Roman Church and its confession and faith, as it were to a sun of unfailing light, awaiting from it the bright radiance of the sacred dogmas of our Fathers according to what the six inspired and holy councils have purely and piously decreed, declaring most expressly the symbol of faith. For from the coming down of the incarnate Word amongst us, all the Churches in every part of the world have held that greatest Church alone as their base and foundation, seeing that according to the promise of Christ our Savior, gates of hell do never prevail against it, that it has the keys of a right confession and faith in Him, that it opens the true and only religion to such as approach with piety, and shuts up and locks every heretical mouth that speaks injustice against the Most High.

Shortly after the reign of Honorius, wandering Greek-speaking monks, St. Maximus prominent among them, began to transform Rome intellectually through the influence of Eastern learning.⁴⁶ They brought along with them a passion to use that wisdom to fight against the Monothelites. Anti-Montheletism, as St. Sophronius had made crystal clear, was a position that emphasized the impact of the Word on absolutely every aspect of life, demonstrating that even such natural human qualities as “energy” and “will” had to have been assumed by Christ if all that was human were fully to be saved by Him. Far from being rooted in some naturalist enterprise, as the Monophysites claimed that Chalcedonian insistence upon Christ’s simultaneous humanity and divinity inevitably was, St. Sophronius underlined the fact that the Council’s teaching was central to any proper appreciation of the ultimate divinization of the whole of the redeemed individual.

It was this outside eastern stimulus that inspired Pope St. Martin I (649-653) to call the Lateran Synod of 649 to attack both Monothelites and their sacred imperial political supporters. Easterners were most active at that Synod, through the primicerius notariorum, Theophylact, the senior notaries—Paschal, Exuperius, Theodore, Anastasius and Paschasius—the four Greek abbots long time resident in the city of Rome—John of St. Saba, Theodore of St. Saba in Africa, Thalassius of Saints Maria and Andreas, and George of Aquae Salviae—and, most significantly, a memorial signed by thirty-seven monks demanding pro-Chalcedonian action on the part of the Papacy. It was St. Maximus who most nobly responded to complaints from Constantinople that the synod was invalid since it had been held without the sacred Emperor’s orders. "If it is not pious faith but the order of the emperor that validates synods,” he thundered, recalling previous imperial intrusions in Church affairs, now generally recognized as noxious by everyone: “let them accept the synods that were held against the Homoousion at Tyre, at Antioch, at Seleucia, and the robber council of Ephesus.”⁴⁷

Emperor Constans II retaliated by having imperial representatives in Rome kidnap St. Martin and bring him to Constantinople. When the pope still refused to accept the state’s approval of Monothelitism, he was shipped off to a harsh exile, dying a confessor/martyr in the Crimea in March of 655. St. Maximus was also captured and subjected to terrible personal humiliation and bodily suffering, including severe mutilation of the flesh whose dignity he had done so much to defend. He died in 662, seven years after St. Martin. But he left behind him a very modern sounding testimony to the real meaning of the Word as a corrective and transforming force on earth totally destructive to the “good stories” of a “sacred” secular system more concerned about matters of “inclusivity”, “divisiveness”, and “public order” than truth.⁴⁸

If, to realize an economy {a compromise} one suppresses the salvific faith at the same moment as heresy, one does not do anything other by that supposed economy than amputate God rather than maintain His unity. Tomorrow, the Jews…will say to us: let us arrange a peace among us and unite. We will suppress circumcision on our side and baptism on yours and we will cease to combat one another. The Arians proposed the same when they wrote to Constantine the Great: let us suppress the words ‘consubstantial’ and ‘different substance’, so that the churches may unite. That was not the judgment of our Fathers, inspired by God: they preferred to be persecuted and put to death rather than to keep silent one revealed word of the unique divinity, superior to all substance, the divinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And that happened when Constantine the Great allied with the authors of this type of proposition, as those who scrupulously related all that happened then have testified. No Emperor could persuade the Fathers, inspired by God, to consent to a rapprochement with the heretics by compromising expressions. They employed clear and precise expressions corresponding perfectly to the dogma placed in question, and they proclaimed loudly that only the bishops had the right to search for and formulate salutary dogmas of the universal Church.

‘You then say: What? Is it not true that a Christian Emperor is also a priest?’ I respond: No; since he has no place at the altar; he does not consecrate the bread and does not say thereafter on elevating it: ‘Holy things to the holy!’ He does not baptize, does not anoint with holy oil, does not choose and does not create bishops, priests, and deacons; he does not sanctify liturgical sites; he does not wear the distinctive signs of the priesthood, the omophorion and the Gospel, but those of royalty, the crown and the purple. ‘And why does Scripture say that Melchisedech is king and priest?’ (Gen., 14, 18; Heb., 7,1), you say. I respond: he is the sole natural king, the God of the universe, become for our salvation the sole High Priest, of whom Melchisedech is the unique type. When you affirm that another is king and priest according to the order of Melchisedech, dare to cite the text that follows: ‘…who is without father, without mother, without genealogy, whose days have no beginning and whose life has no end’ (Heb. 7, 3). And see what will be the false consequence of your affirmation: (that other ‘king and priest’) will be another incarnated God, working for our salvation as a priest in the order of Melchisedech and not in the order of Aaron. But what good is it to multiply the arguments? During the holy sacrifice, at the sacred altar, it is after having mentioned the bishops, the deacons, and the whole of the clergy that one recalls the emperors, with the laity, when the deacon says: ‘and the laity who have fallen asleep in the faith, Constantine, Constantius, etc’. Again, he recalls the living emperors after having mentioned all those who have been consecrated to God. At these words, {Patriarch} Menas cried out: ‘your words have caused division in the Church’. Maximus responded to him: ‘if he who cites the texts of Holy Scripture and the Fathers causes division in the Church, what treatment will he {the emperor} who suppresses the dogmas of the saints, without whom there would not even be a Church, inflict upon the Church’?

A Rome strengthened by such powerful eastern influence did not retreat, despite the fate of Martin and Maximus. Greek-speakers like Theodore, Bishop John of Philadelphia, Theophanes of St. Caesarius ad Baias, George, priest and monk of Saints Maria and Andreas, along with Conon and Stephen of the Domus Arsicia Monastery, continued to deal vigorously with fall-out from the Monothelite Controversy down through the end of the century. By that time, however, the Emperor Constantine IV Pogonatus (668-685) ruled over a territory in which the Monophysite population had been reduced to a negligible minority and therefore ceased to be a major political problem to be resolved by “business as usual” doctrinal manipulation on the part of the sacred and apostolic government. He therefore called for a new empire-wide synod to bring the battle to an official conclusion. Pope St. Agatho sent representatives to the Third Council of Constantinople, in November, 680, with the Emperor presiding and the papal legates in the place of honor at his right hand—both “sacred” authorities now, seemingly, in full accord.⁴⁹

Monotheletism, and with it Monophysitism, were condemned. All the developments in Trinitarian and Christological thought taking place until this point were effectively “summed up” through this condemnation. Jesus Christ as fully God and fully man, as the Incarnate Word divinizing every aspect of the human individual, including his energy and will, had won this long raging theological conflict. In the process, the Holy See had much more clearly than ever before been confirmed as the final, authoritative, sacred and apostolic voice of Christ’s Body, continued in history as His Church. But it was a Rome whose confidence in its right to rule that Church and whose ability to tell a good story about the true Christian story in doing so had been strengthened from the “outside”: through the spirituality of wandering Eastern pilgrims and pilgrim pontiffs of Greek blood and language, all of them committed to the use of each and every human talent for the benefit of understanding the Faith. Once again, this was a multicultural, “Word-drenched” success story if ever there was one.

By now, however, the struggle over Iconoclasm was ready to explode. It was logical that it should do so, since that conflict was destined to aid the summary of the flaws of the “good but false story” about the relationship of the Sacred Empire and the Church, and complete that magnificent advance in knowledge of the full meaning of the Word in history discernable throughout the whole of the turbulent imperial period. It did so by bringing up questions regarding the sacred character of the entirety of nature emerging logically from discussion of the tools needed for a complete deification of all the varied aspects of an individual human personality.

While not as complex or enduring as the conflict over Christology, the Iconoclast Controversy does divide neatly into two distinct stages.⁵⁰ A first outburst took place in the early eighth century when a variety of natural and military disasters befell the Empire, and commanders of the army along with ordinary soldiers sought out viable reasons for all these setbacks. Two “appropriate explanations” immediately came to the fore. If campaigns against image smashing (i.e., iconoclast) Arab Moslems were going badly, might it not be the case that the image friendly (i.e., iconodule) Romans were engaged in an activity displeasing to God and being suitably punished for their sins? And should that be true, was it not the case that the supporters of such blasphemy must be chastised?

Who was it that actually made and promoted the use of these blasphemous images? It was monks, whose influence over the religious and political life of the Empire had always been enormous. Yet these same blasphemous monks gave to the Empire neither service under arms nor children for the armies of the future. What possible grounds could there be for those who recognized such obvious, common sense evidence not to punish these fraudulent ascetics for their anti-social and self-interested uselessness? What possible reason for not tossing both them and their idolatrous icons onto the bonfire of the vanities? Even the supposed miracles that had once taken place at the feet of such diabolical images had ceased occurring anyway, thereby adding further naturally-discernable proof of God’s displeasure at their veneration by deluded Christians.

Supporting the message recounted by such well-constructed tales, the Emperors Leo III (717-741) and Constantine V (741-775) pressed the Church for acceptance of an anti-image policy. Governmentally-backed Iconoclasm was pursued most openly and authoritatively through a Council at Hiereia in 754. Interestingly enough, not a single member of that Pentarchy so deeply cherished by past imperial ministers, court bishops, and word merchants was present at the gathering. Consultation with the Pentarchy was discarded as a prop for sacred imperial action, since it was no longer trustworthy and therefore politically useless. Instead, the State resorted to cultivation of a concern for “original intent” in support of its entry onto the iconoclast path. It claimed to be defending an Apostolic Christian Tradition that firmly and openly rejected the use of images against the innovations of the monastic iconodules and their fellow idolaters. Hiereia hurled anathemas against the chief villains among them: Patriarch Germanos of Constantinople (715-730), George of Cyprus (the author of the Admonition of an Old Man on Images), and St. John of Damascus—the last of whom wrote, ironically enough, from the safety provided him by his own iconoclast but tolerant Moslem rulers. Assaults on iconodules, especially monks, a large number of whom were forcibly married off to female religious to provide future soldiers for the Empire, intensified. Refugees fled imperial wrath to the traditional places of exile, with an iconodule Rome, under the ever more effective control of a Papacy reinvigorated with Greek assistance, at the top of their list of secure destinations.

Iconoclast pressures began to ease under Leo IV (775-780). After his death, his image-friendly wife, Irene, along with Tarasius, an ally from the imperial bureaucracy whom she made priest and patriarch (784-806), took advantage of her regency for her young son, Constantine VI (780-797), to begin to put Imperial Christendom back in order. Despite the continued hostility of the Roman troops, who for a time successfully blocked it, she finally managed to open the Second Council of Nicaea on 24 September, 787. This reversed the decisions of the preposterous gathering of politically and rhetorically minded prelates at Hiereia. Nicaea was clearly a more acceptable synod from any canonical or even merely customary standpoint, since representatives of the once favored Pentarchy, including those of the Patriarch of Rome, were all present and accounted for.

Unfortunately, the military situation of the Empire did not improve under the succeeding iconodule rulers. Soldiers, fondly recalling the victories they had won under image-smashing inspiration, followed commanders who were happy to exploit their sentiments and lead them into open rebellion. Leo V (813-820) then called yet another synod in 815 to begin the attack on images anew. Assaults on icons and iconodules resumed. They continued under Michael II (820-829) and his son, Theophilos (829-842), with the theological support of a scholarly Patriarch of Constantinople, John the Grammarian (837-843). This prelate’s more learned Iconoclasm was nevertheless accompanied by a still more brutal persecution. Icons were now even tattooed on the bodies of their supporters as punishment for their belief in the importance of using images in the worship of the Creator of the universe.

Despite the disturbance of normal ecclesiastical life, a fruitful doctrinal development nonetheless took place yet again in the midst of this two-stage period of turmoil and sorrow. Iconoclasts themselves brought up serious arguments as fuel for debate. They pointed to indisputable statements by a number of early Church thinkers that did indeed seem to require the rejection of images as objects of idol worship. In doing so, they helped to stimulate historical and philological studies with long-term consequences for the future of learning in the Eastern Empire. Iconoclasts also spoke of the need to follow the true image of Christ, which was said to be found in the words of Scripture, the dogmatic teachings of the Church, and, most importantly, in the Holy Eucharist. They called for “painting” the image of Christ, not in picture form, but through the formation of individuals more dedicated to the cultivation of good behavior and the rejection of wicked deeds. The more moderate among them even engaged in significant discussions of catechetical methodology, admitting that icons might be useful as teaching tools, but only if placed in such a way as to avoid their illicit worship by the faithful.

Confronted intellectually, the orthodox defenders of icons were somewhat slow in deepening their own understanding of the truth of their position and their ability to teach it. Yes, a sophisticated defense of icons was to be found in the work of St. John of Damascus, and the dogmatic pronouncement of the Second Council of Nicaea made that crucial distinction between the veneration and the adoration of images that remains essential to the proper understanding of their use down through to the present. Still, first stage iconodule apologetics were more emotive in character than anything else, reflecting a hunt for a ‘good story” that was not necessarily pertinent to the issue or sometimes even true at all. Vitriolic attacks on iconoclast Jewish and Moslem tendencies often dominated its approach. These were accompanied by moving accounts of supernaturally produced icons of apostolic pedigree, along with catalogues of the miracles brought about through appeals to their holy assistance. Such stories gave to images the prestige of relics and a noble lineage as ancient as that of Holy Writ. But could miraculous tales, true or false, hold up against the theological objections presented by the iconoclasts?

Although accounts of supernatural icon production, along with catalogues of the miracles associated with them, continued to be a major source of future iconodule defense, a much more profound understanding of the real meaning of image veneration finally took root. Yes, the iconodules admitted that the Eucharist, as the Body and Blood of the Savior, was the greatest “image of Christ”. And, yes, that greatest of images had to be painted on the souls of believers who rejected evil and cultivated good deeds. On the other hand, the friends of images came to see that the strength of their position lay in the fact that they possessed a broader and more accurate grasp of the sacred mission of nature as a whole than the iconoclasts did. Unlike the latter, who generally sought to limit the sacred in nature to a narrow liturgical space that could, in practice, be shaped and controlled more easily by the Sacred Emperor and his court bishops, the iconodules extended it to encompass the entirety of a universe that was destined for correction and transformation in Christ.

Thinkers such as Patriarch Nicephoros (806-815) and St. Theodore the Stoudite (759-826), building upon the work of St. John of Damascus, thus related all of Creation to God as an image to its source and painter. They insisted that everything natural was meant to speak to man of things divine. They held that a nature corrected and exalted by supernatural grace spoke infinitely more fully and effectively than one that was struggling along with only its own valuable but stunted Seeds of the Logos. Moreover, they continued, failure to recognize that Christians learned of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty from sources other than ancient written documents, and that knowledge of Christ’s message could actually grow and develop through the ages, was part and parcel of a critical limitation of mind and spirit that also narrowed the effects of the Word made flesh over time and space. Victory over the iconoclasts thus meant that Christ’s Church recognized the rights of the Eternal Word as King of all of Creation, with individual men and their communities as His standard bearers and stewards. It spelled recognition of the fact that the march of Christians through history could be one that actually deepened their grasp of the Faith and its significance—in this particular case, precisely with respect to icons and their veneration.⁵¹

Such developments were also important in weakening the continuing hold of dangerous aspects of Neo-Platonic thought over the Christian mind. Neo-Platonists and their Christian followers saw all of existence as a “great chain of being” stretching from the highest rung—God—down to man and the varied component elements of the universe. The vision of a Great Chain of Being as such was not the problem here, nor the conviction that that Chain was structured according to a “hierarchy of values”. Difficulties emerged chiefly with the belief that greater corruption entered into the created universe the more earthly and fleshly the element involved, and that ultimately the entirety of this material cosmos was shut off from any real union with its all too sublime and unreachable spiritual center. Truly substantive Monophysites, as opposed to those merely quibbling over the definition of words, were all subject to Neo-Platonic temptations. So were many iconoclasts. These temptations were made manifest in their psychological fear of contaminating the Godhead through too close a contact with anything natural, human or otherwise. It was just this type of overly friendly embrace that both Chalcedon and iconodules together were accused of stimulating.

Opponents of Monophysites and iconoclasts effectively countered such a vision. They showed that each and every level of a Great Chain of Being organized according to a true, Christian grasp of the hierarchy of values had intrinsic worth. And, corollary to that, they demonstrated that the more earthly and fleshly aspects of Creation were not essentially more corrupt than those that were more spiritual. In fact, all of nature could truly be corrected and transformed. Jesus Christ was King of the universe: not just certain parts of the universe, but the entirety of the cosmos, and, with it, the entirety of that microcosm that we call the individual human person. Membership in Jesus Christ, both God and man, gave to the individual steward of Creation the hope of an eternal union with the fullness of the Light—not just entry into the “suburbs” of an unreachable spiritual center. A “good story with a happy ending” divinizing the business as usual of the sacred Empire did not teach Christians these truths. It was the “word of the Word” that did so. And that “word of the Word” came through the agency of the evolving wisdom of the ancient Church Fathers and ecclesiastical writers, along with their later, pilgrim minded Greek representatives, working ever more consciously through the authoritative voice of the Roman Pontiffs.

D. The Good Imperial Story, Political Reality, & Pilgrim Change

Already at the time of the Persian debacle, the Emperor Heraclius illustrated at least a practical recognition that Roman power was really not the eternally unalterable force that the “good story” promoted by men like Eusebius of Caesarea depicted it as being. Energetic in all spheres, the emperor began to make major changes in imperial administration and policy that would ultimately be very effective in maintaining and even turning the tide against the external enemy. This willingness to deal with a changed reality through political transformations that did not compromise Catholic truth was a sign of health in the Roman East. It came to involve three specific developments: a more acceptable cooperation of Church and State on doctrinal matters; a recognition of the contemporary necessity for a further militarization of political and social life; and, finally, the growth of a deep crusading spirit—long before the reign of Pope Urban II (1088-1099), the Council of Clermont (1095), and the recapture of Jerusalem (1099).⁵²

On the other hand, these pilgrim changes resulted from a profoundly serious “reality check” and therefore represented a long-term process. In the short term—that is to say, the whole of the horrible seventh and the eighth centuries—serious Christians could easily wonder whether the Roman Empire would honestly be able to cope with an altered reality without disturbing the substance of the Faith. As the crisis with the Persians gave way to disaster at the hands of the Arab Moslems, and the Monothelite stage of the Monophysite battle to the Iconoclast Controversy, Roman Imperial Christendom could readily appear to them to be both politically doomed and spiritually incurable.

This foreboding was perhaps more palpable still in the West than in the East. St. Augustine had already posed the basic question in The City of God after the sack of Rome of 410. It could not help but be asked yet again as Justinian’s gains crumbled swiftly under combined Germanic and Arabic pressure. Roman forces had made their initial victorious headway in Italy only at the cost of massive devastation of the peninsula, and they could barely hold onto a few coastal areas and roads in the north and the center against an unending Lombard onslaught. The Eternal City herself was regularly in danger of being taken by these much-feared and little-trusted barbarians. Spain fell rapidly into the hands of the Visigoths. North Africa held out longer, but only because of the absence of a foreign foe. When this foe appeared in the form of the Moslems, Africa was also severed from the Empire. Meanwhile, Roman Gaul and Britain, both of which had been dominated by Franks, Angles, and Saxons since the fifth century, had never at any moment been threatened with serious re-conquest by Roman armies dispatched from Constantinople.⁵³

“Eternal” Rome was obviously falling apart. A concern for what to do in response to this changed political reality first produced a major practical transformation in the collapsed western imperial sphere. Domination of seventh and eighth century Rome by “foreigners” from the East must have fostered the process of Church willingness to adapt to undeniable change. It may not be at all fanciful to argue that the “multiculturalism” occasioned by the Greek pilgrimage westward contributed to Latin openness in other matters as well. And this included, in the final analysis, a readiness to switch temporal allegiance from sacred and apostolic Roman Emperors in Constantinople who were incapable of protecting western Christians to newly converted Germanic rulers in the West who could potentially do so. This switch of allegiance, sealed, symbolically, by the coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800, was built upon a Triple Alliance conceived in the 490’s in the former Roman province of Gaul.

Germanic allies of Rome had settled within the borders of Gaul during the fourth century. A number of German enemies invaded soon thereafter. All these various tribes began battling among themselves for supremacy as the imperial government collapsed. Their conflicts were watched with a certain pained indifference by the urban Gallo-Roman population, presided over by bishops from families of the old senatorial aristocracy, proud of their heritage of both culture and blood. The Gallo-Romans must have felt that they would lose in this tribal contest, regardless of the group of barbarians that triumphed. None of the Germans were Catholics at the time of the invasions. All of them were either pagans or Arian heretics. None had a real sense of the spirit of classical civilization or a grasp of the laws, art, and philosophy of the imperium. War was their occupation, just as war was their sport. Both Greco-Roman and Christian paideia together were the inevitable victims in this reign of the gladiators, though there was one silver lining in the midst of disaster: both “teachings” also became more intimately bound in a sacred union as they awaited the common axe to fall.⁵⁴

Clovis (c. 466-511), the King of the Franks—a tribe, many of whose members had first moved into Gaul as Roman allies—began to transform this picture radically. He may or may not have had religious sentiments; he may or may not have appreciated the fullness of Roman culture. Clovis definitely did want one thing, though. He wished to see the strength of his tribe increase. He may have felt that he had found a key to satisfaction of this desire in an acceptance of Catholicism. Catholic Baptism would signify association not simply with orthodoxy, but also—because of Christianity’s connection with the Empire, and the growing intimacy of the Faith and Greco-Roman paideia—union with prestigious imperial and classical ideals as well. The result might well be to galvanize an indifferent local population for the support of his particular German tribe as its friend and protector. Whatever the motivation, Clovis and the Franks did enter the Church; many Gallo-Romans did, thus, rally to their cause; a Triple Alliance capable of uniting things Greco-Roman, Christian, and German had indeed been conceived.⁵⁵

Conception is not birth, however, and the Triple Alliance conceived by Clovis subjected Western Europe to a long and difficult pregnancy. Rome was not built in a day; it also proved to be impossible to construct either Rome or a Catholic sense of things in Frankish Gaul overnight. Neither Clovis nor his descendants were able to create a legal, cultural, and religious order that might begin to please a serious student of Greco-Roman paideia or a practicing Catholic. Barbarous concepts swiftly began to corrupt Christian teachings and practices. The character and authoritative self-confidence of bishops plunged, their spirit seemingly maintained only for the vulgar purpose of constructing family-run dioceses whose resources served to augment clan prestige and wealth: in other words, for the “business as usual” concerns of those taking the “obvious” demands of “nature as is” as their definitive guide. There was no development of a state administration worthy of the Roman name. The Merovingian Dynasty, as Clovis’ line was known, could not even sustain itself, and became more inbred, more vicious, and more incompetent as time went on. Assistants to the king, called Mayors of the Palace, coming from the ranks of that Frankish family from the area around Metz that we call the Carolingians, soon found that they were hard at work performing the tasks their useless Merovingian sovereigns could not carry out.⁵⁶

Before moving on, let us once again return to the theme of the pilgrimage spirit and its importance for fulfillment of the plan of God in history. The Franks had settled in the provinces of a deeply Romanized Gaul which had grown fascinated with personal pilgrimages to the Holy Land in the latter fourth century, when such undertakings were still physically possible. Two Gallic writings of the 300’s, the Peregrinatio ad loca sancta and the Itinerarum Burdigalense, described a well-trod pilgrimage circuit that involved not only sites in Palestine but visits to the pioneer monastic communities of Egypt and Syria, whose influences had penetrated westward at the time of St. Athanasius’ exile to Trier earlier in that same century. These works provided valuable information on everything from church discipline, liturgy, devotional life, and architecture to the imperial transport system and the amenities available to the first pilgrims. In addition, they were yet another introduction to the concept we have already treated in depth: the need for each of us to recognize that we are all wanderers through a fleeting earthly existence, and that even a brief moment on pilgrimage enables us to treat this basic but easily neglected truth much more seriously.⁵⁷

Unfortunately for the newly Catholic Franks of the late 400’s, the shattering of the Pax Romana limited their own pilgrimage goals to local destinations. Nevertheless, pilgrimages to the shrines of men like St. Martin of Tours (c. 316-c. 397) and St. Julian of Brioude (300’s) aided mightily in the development of popular understanding of Christian doctrine. Pilgrims often came to such sites to benefit from the miraculous powers derived from a touch of the bones of the saints. They could not help but see in the wondrous cures obtained in such humble locations and through such lowly means the broad consequences of the Word Incarnate transforming nature in Christ. All space and time appeared to have been stirred by the fleshly entrance of the Almighty into history and His offer of supernatural grace. Pilgrim exaltation was so great on the feasts of the saints whose tombs were visited that these were days, as one Frankish source noted, when the whole of the holy Catholic Church rejoiced and “danced together”.⁵⁸ It was the dance of life adapted to the Gallic environment; the good story told in a way that specifically touched the Gallo-Roman-Frankish soul.

A spirit of pilgrimage was kept alive even in the darkest of Merovingian times. Appropriately enough, given what we have seen happening in Rome, this strengthening came from the work of still other wandering foreign monks. Some of these heroic figures, such as St. Columbanus (540-615) and his fellow Irish ascetics, represented that vision of a pilgrimage for Christ demanding the kind of self-exile that had also been taught by St. Sophronius. They may have received this teaching directly from St. Patrick, who had felt himself driven by it as much as any eastern monk. On the other hand, due to the manifold contacts of Ireland with Visigothic Spain, and Visigothic Spain with the Mediterranean at large, there are clear grounds for believing that the Irish also imbibed it from the wandering followers of St. Sophronius themselves, some of whom may even have made it to the Emerald Isle.⁵⁹

Whatever the origin of such a salutary influence, Irish exiles nurtured the ideal of abandonment of all things familiar amidst a population where Gallo-Romans and Franks were now hard to distinguish one from the other, both in blood as well as in semi-barbarous and semi-pagan behavior. But they were not alone in doing so. Self-exiled Britons worked alongside them. These British wanderers were themselves the beneficiaries of Irish monastic influences, but bred together with another kind of pilgrim spirit, complementary but different, coming to them from Rome. I speak here, of course, of Benedictines like St. Boniface (c. 672-754), whose personal career as evangelist led the Roman pontiffs to give him the title of Apostle to the Germans.⁶⁰

British Benedictines brought to Gaul not just that sense of individual Christian pilgrim mission so keenly cherished by the Irish but also a feel for a pilgrim mission organized as a social venture; one with a clear authoritative structure, provided for the sake of constructing a militant new polis, a branch of the universal Christian agmen on its boat-rocking march through history. This latter sentiment was imparted to them from that supreme representative of a union of things Christian and Roman, individual and social, natural and supernatural, St. Benedict of Norcia (c. 480-543). Every aspect of this Patron of Europe’s famous Rule, with its emphasis upon a variegated life of work and study inside a monastic polis supporting that commitment to prayer that was the chief labor of his monks, reflected a considered application of Greco-Roman wisdom to the supreme Christian end of sanctification. Benedict’s balanced and harmonious monastic regimen gave birth to Christian achievements of Greco-Roman flavor of crucial significance to the future in too many realms, aesthetic and scientific, to be catalogued fully at the present juncture.

Benedictine Christian and Greco-Roman syncretism was promoted by a masterful pilgrim commander who pressed one of its Italian followers, St. Augustine of Canterbury (early 500’s-604), unwillingly onto the path to Kent: Pope St. Gregory the Great. Gregory was pastor par excellence, and his courage in confronting new steps in the dance of life was as fruitful as his discomfort regarding theological sophistication was disruptive. He was destined not only to initiate this unpredictably vast Benedictine pilgrim enterprise but also to guide it with prudent and tolerant instructions for confronting its initial potential pagan converts. Interestingly enough, the mission to Britain that he stimulated was then significantly strengthened through the work of vigorous proponents of the classicism that he himself disparaged: the seventh century Greek-speaking immigrants to the Eternal City. In fact one of these Hellenists, St. Theodore of Tarsus (602-690), himself became the eighth Archbishop of Canterbury, contributing mightily both to putting the new English Church on an even keel as well as to encouraging its own indigenous commitment to fashioning a learned Christianity.⁶¹

Despite the inevitable tensions and temptations to excommunicate one another that emerged out of the meeting of these different pilgrim monastic enterprises, Irish and Benedictine, in Britain, the fusion of their visions and labors in the northern province of Northumbria proved to be formative on both sides of the Channel. Our chief source regarding this second evangelization of Britain is St. Bede the Venerable (672/673-735), one of the greatest racconteurs of a “good story” in history. He describes in detail the manner in which the Benedictines and the Irish carried out their work, the organizational talents of the first, the scholarly and artistic merits of the second, how their union eventually was cemented, and the many obstacles placed in the path of both forces. These obstacles included the enmity of the remaining Romano-British Christians, whose parochial blindness left them uninterested in leading the hated barbarians to salvation under any circumstances whatsoever. Not all pilgrims for Christ have been so fortunate in having the history of their sacrifices so well documented. Thankfully, Bede’s account of their tale was more than an historical project. It followed Gregory’s example and provided guidance to anyone who might seek to imitate such missionary work in different lands in the future. And it well demonstrated, in doing so, how a good story about a true story might be supremely useful to the spreading of the Gospel in any age and under any circumstances.⁶²

Grand visions of a special, pilgrim mission entrusted to the tribe of the Franks emerged with the rise to kingship of the Carolingian Family under Pippin the Short (751-768). It was he who was responsible for finally “delivering” the Triple Alliance nurtured in the early medieval European womb. By the 740’s, Pippin, one of the Carolingian Mayors of the Palace, was eager to gain for himself the title of King of the Franks. He was, after all, doing the basic work that merited this honor anyway. Pippin knew that the prestige of his father, Charles the Hammer (717-741), who had thrown back a threatened Moslem invasion of Gaul in the 730’s, had given his family great stature among the Frankish warriors. Still, something more than military prestige was needed to secure the title from an already reigning chieftain-king presumed to be descended from Clovis, the very man who had led the Franks to Baptism in the first place. That something else, he felt, was a still more serious and explicit tie with the Roman Church, the Eternal City, and their sacred and secular mission than even Clovis himself had assured.⁶³

St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636) was another giant in the effort of harnessing Greek and Roman wisdom to the Christian chariot. A man whose encyclopedic knowledge was passed to the Franks both by means of refugees from the Moslem invasion of Spain in the early 700’s as well as through the teaching of the Irish-English monks, St. Isidore was to be of enormous help in justifying a change of dynasty. He had already been of yeoman service to the Visigothic rulers of the Iberian Peninsula in the previous century in dealing with precisely this kind of problem: by providing them with the theoretical underpinnings for an exchange of authorities and by defending their claim to total independence from direct Roman control. In doing so, he also mounted a deadly assault on the concept of the one, single, sacred, imperial State as developed by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea.

St. Isidore went about this task by demonstrating that the word rex, or “ruler” came from just the kind of action it described—the ability to rule. A man called “ruler” who could not actually govern was a fraud. He was doubly dangerous due to the fact that his incapacity not only prevented him from performing his proper function but also because it hid the real possessor of daily authority from both sight and accountability. Moreover, a valid Christian ruler had to govern in union with Christ in this last age before the end of time, the age of the Regnum Christi. Visigothic kings palpably did so, he argued, while the Roman Emperors in Constantinople had repeatedly discredited themselves by giving succor to heretics. Indeed, they were active in St. Isidore’s own time in supporting erroneous Monosphysite doctrines. In short, the sacred Roman imperial cover story was a bad one—not only erroneous but also dangerous in the masquerade of real power that it ensured, to the detriment of the common good of the Christian people.⁶⁴

Followers of the Carolingians could readily claim that Pippin was in an analogous position. Was he not the real ruler of the Kingdom of the Franks, standing in for a Merovingian non-entity? And was this failure to clarify the true possessor of authority not responsible for aiding and abetting all manner of corruption and mayhem, Christian and pagan, in the life of both the State and the Church? Luckily for Pippin, the most vibrant elements in the Western Church were more than predisposed to hear such arguments at the moment that he and his supporters enunciated them.

St. Boniface, to take a prime example, had for some time been seeking protection from the tribe of the Saxons, which was placing serious obstacles in the path of his work of conversion beyond the eastern borders of Gaul. He also was desperate for a chance for the Benedictines and the Benedictine spirit to reform the flaws of the Church of the Frankish Kingdom, giving it a truly substantive Catholic sense of things. Such a reform would inevitably strengthen Roman influence among the Franks, since St. Benedict’s Rule was a model of classical concepts of education, law, and balance, and the Benedictines themselves a proven arm of the Papacy. It was clear to Boniface that it was only the Carolingians, with whom he had begun to work under Charles the Hammer, who had the real power to respond to both of his desires more fully. Anything that transformed their actual power into openly recognized and legitimate authority seemed profitable for the cause of the Pax et Regnum Christi in the West.

In addition, Rome, which was ever more under the direct political control of the popes as the seventh century moved into the eighth, was desperately in search of a new military shield and buckler. The Lombard King was threatening the independence of the Eternal City. Rome’s former protectors, the Roman Emperors, were incompetent defenders, thus explaining why the pope himself had to take responsibility for her physical survival. St. Gregory the Great, with his keen sense of reality, had already recognized this at the beginning of the seventh century, and got into serious trouble with the State authorities in trying to undertake defensive and diplomatic measures on his own. The situation was now infinitely worse, troubled as the East was by almost constant Moslem incursions, requiring the bulk of its military strength for labors on its porous Asia Minor frontier.

Besides, the Roman Pontiffs were no longer certain that they even wanted the sacred emperors to perform this defensive function. Gregory the Great still professed a firm loyalty to Constantinople, but imperial mistreatment of St. Martin I and St. Maximus had begun to effect a serious change in attitude. Moreover, papal opposition to image smashing had brought down various imperial punishments, economic as well as spiritual, upon the Eternal City. Popes and their advisors wondered whether a German tribe like the Franks that seemed willing to bind itself openly and humbly to a Roman and Christian corrective and transforming ideal might not be much more trustworthy than an imperial government that had repeatedly joined battle with the Papacy over issues that were not properly part of its jurisdiction anyway.

Carolingians, St. Boniface, Frankish Romanophile bishops like Chrodegang of Metz (d. 766)—himself a member of the family of the Mayors of the Palace—and the Papacy seized their common opportunity. The Carolingians provided Boniface assistance outside the borders of the kingdom, while the Benedictine and Roman spirit were encouraged to work to reform the Frankish Church. Rome gave Pippin permission to replace his Merovingian predecessor on grounds established by St. Isidore. Pippin promised to deal with the King of the Lombards in filial gratitude to the relieved pontiff.

Amidst the greatest drama, Pope Stephen II (752-757) left Rome and made the long and perilous pilgrim journey to the court of Pippin to give ceremonial form to the deposition of the Merovingians and the Carolingian assumption of authority. The new King of the Franks was anointed in the manner of David, who had been marked out by Samuel as the suitable replacement for the older but unacceptable monarch, Saul. Pippin swore an oath to defend the Faith and, with it, therefore, also the Roman order that Christianity had accepted and sought to correct and transform through grace. Frankish warriors expressed their approval when the ceremony was concluded. The alliance conceived by Clovis, but left floundering in its womb by his descendants, had been brought into the light of day.⁶⁵

Immensely self-confident, but highly conscious of at least a public need to submit to the teachings and practical demands of the True Faith, the character of the Carolingian Frankish spirit is passionately outlined in the Prologue (763 A.D.) to Pippin’s revised version of the Salic Law. This was the basic "constitution" of the so-called "Salty" Franks—i.e., those who lived close to the North Sea—of which a relevant excerpt is given below:⁶⁶

The illustrious people of the Franks was established by God himself; courageous in war, steadfast in peace, serious of intention, noble of stature, brilliant white of complexion and of exceptional beauty; daring, swift and brash. It was converted to the Catholic Faith; while it was still barbarian, it was free of all heresy. It sought the key of knowledge under divine guidance, desiring justice in its behaviour and cultivating piety. It was then that those who were the chiefs of this people long ago dictated the Salic law...

Long live Christ who loves the Franks! May he protect their reign; may he fill their leaders with the light of his grace; may he watch over their army; may he accord them the rampart of Faith; may he grant them the joys of peace and the happiness of those who rule over their age... After professing their Faith and receiving Baptism, these Franks enshrined in gold and silver the bodies of the saints and martyrs whom the Romans had burned with fire, mutilated with the sword, and delivered to the teeth of ferocious beasts.

Charlemagne (768-814) was Pippin’s son. He took it upon himself to complete his father’s labor. This he did with a fury, about which more—in the negative sense, along with other unfortunate features of the Carolingian order—below and in the next chapter. Charlemagne thoroughly subdued the still restive Lombards and made himself their king. He crushed the Saxons and presided over their baptism. Much of what had been the western part of the old Empire was gradually reunited under his aegis. Even Charles’ failures, such as his inability to penetrate deeply into Moslem Spain, provided Western Christendom with some of its greatest chivalric legends—the best of its “good crusading stories”—for the future. It was thus only fitting that his work be rewarded by his coronation as Roman Emperor in the Eternal City at Christmastide, 800. And it was thus only fitting that that coronation be seen as the final confirmation of the Triple Alliance conceived by Clovis and delivered by Pippin.⁶⁷

What was it that distinguished Charles the Great, Pippin, Clovis, and the Franks as a whole? What was it that set St. Boniface, the Benedictines, and the Irish apart? What was it that characterized the popes active in the work of the alliance they all had forged? What did they all symbolize? They symbolized courageous affirmation, commitment, and militant action; courage in the midst of brutal realities that would have led others to despair; the courage of pilgrims.

For courage in abundance was definitely needed. The conditions for creating a new civilization, for giving life to what would eventually become known as the Christian Roman Empire of the German Nation, were horrendous. The still half-barbaric Frankish soldiery had little idea of the real significance of the classical cultural outlook at the time of Charles’ coronation. Greco-Roman conceptions of the State as an organized, administrative entity that provided for the common good and continued beyond the lifetime of a given conquering chieftain remained quite alien to most of them. A full sense of exactly what Christian love and Christian morality meant for the correction and transformation of their individual lives was in no way part of their primary Order of the Day.

St. Boniface, more than anyone, knew the crudity of this people and the arbitrariness of its leaders, and it is thus also extremely worthwhile to dwell for a moment on the informed courage of his actions as a guide to that of his fellow pilgrims. The Apostle to the Germans shows that the cooperation of the powerful and the powerless does not inevitably have to produce religious slavishness. He understood that the Carolingians, like the Merovingians, were not to be treated indiscriminately as though they were knights in shining armor. Some of the members of this dynasty might be honestly committed to sponsoring the Catholic cause. Some were potential manipulators of religion for the benefit of their personal “business as usual”, still interpreted according to the unrepentant terms of “nature as is”. Pious and impious Carolingians alike were both subject to the temptation to make an exact equation between the continued spread of the Christian message on the one hand and the extension of Frankish borders, along with the satisfaction of the political and financial needs of the ruler and his noble supporters, on the other. Hence their combination of solid support for the Church with the confiscation or misdirection of ecclesiastical property for military purposes, their appointment of unworthy but politically influential men to key bishoprics, their campaigns of forced baptism among conquered peoples, and their imposition of tithes upon those forcibly converted before they even were taught what their new Faith was making them pay to achieve.

What should a Catholic do under these circumstances? The extensive correspondence of St. Boniface gives us a pretty sound indication of the proper response. The Apostle to the Germans was well aware, as his close friend and confidant, Bishop Daniel of Winchester, had taught him, that pagan man was truly impressed by power and riches, and that mobilizing both to aid the cause of the Truth could initially open barbarian minds and hearts to a Faith that would require serious long-term catechesis to confirm. His realization of the dependence of the weak Christian missions upon the aid of the Frankish State was clearly outlined in his letter to Grifo, a son and possible successor to Charles Martel, in 741, wherein he begged “that in the event of your coming to power you will help the clerics, priests, monks, nuns and all the servants of God in Thuringia, and that you will protect the Christians from the hostility of the heathens, so that they may not be destroyed by them.” ⁶⁸

Nevertheless, knowing as he did the worldly temptations indulged at the Frankish court, the venality of its bishops, and the rapacity of its nobles, the Apostle to the Germans was disgusted by the corruption that his prudent, realistic working with the system could easily seem to condone. He burned with a passionate desire to end this cause for scandal. In consequence, St. Boniface exploited every opportunity he could find to change the “structures of sin” of the Frankish Kingdom and the mentality of his frightening and often perverse guardians. Hence his fight to enlist the two sons who did actually take up Martel’s legacy—Carloman (Mayor of the Palace in Austrasia, the eastern section of the Frankish realm) and Pippin (the Mayor in Neustria, the western area)—to push through drastic Church and social reforms. These were decreed at the First Germanic Council of 742 (site unknown), and at follow up synods at Leptine and Soissons in the following year.

St. Boniface’s crusading spirit earned him the undying hatred of many degenerate prelates and laymen. Courageous Catholic that he was, he could care less. What else could he possibly do? He took the risks in incurring their wrath that a Catholic dedicated to corrective and transforming action must always take. And he did so just as he accepted that danger of potentially being viewed an accomplice to Frankish crimes, which was an inevitable occupational hazard for a realist of sound pilgrim spirit.⁶⁹

Contemporary popes were all too aware of the dangers that might result from Frankish domination and barbarization as well. They might have done nothing, the risks being what they were, and given the opposition to change on the part of a strong, pro-Constantinople party within the city of Rome itself. Men often have preferred to go down to destruction rather than alter even one aspect of a familiar picture rendered sacred by custom. Germanic stupidities could easily have been taken as an excuse to avoid contact with the Franks entirely and to yearn for some future, corrected, eastern Roman aid. Romans might have gathered in St. Peter’s during a Lombard invasion and waited for an angel to save them, as the population of Constantinople huddled in Hagia Sophia during the Turkish sack centuries later. Frankish opponents of the Triple Alliance could then readily have used a display of such Roman traditionalism and the reality of the general weakness of the Christian position to justify rejection of co-operation with both these potential partners. After all, strong men have frequently crushed what was indecisive, fragile, or simply difficult for them to understand. But Charles and Leo, Pippin, Boniface, and Stephen were men of courage, of affirmation and of action. They did not deny the magnitude of their problems; they simply chose to confront them rather than to run from them.

Frankish vision and courage can be seen, among many other things, in the willingness of its warrior kings to move beyond mere conquest and promote the spread of education in general. Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard, notes that the King-Emperor could never master the alphabet, much less grasp the full import of the wisdom of the ages. His Frankish subjects were overwhelmingly still more limited. Few places could have offered a more dismal prospect for intellectual development than the Kingdom of the Franks, and few rulers might have seemed less likely to risk their warrior prestige in demanding it than those of the Carolingian Dynasty.

And yet Pippin, Charles, and their descendants placed their warriors’ “bet” on learning—encouraging the merging of the disparate elements emerging from the Greek East, Rome, Visigothic Spain, Ireland, Britain, and even Lombard Italy into a fresh, brilliant, and long-lasting Catholic imperial culture of great potential: a Christendom that was apparently cognizant of the changing steps in the dance of life but remained firmly loyal to the unalterable demands of the Eternal Word who was its primary choreographer. Their assistance allowed Benedictine-inspired monasteries to be founded throughout their domains. They encouraged attempts to provide serious education for the clergy and to raise the moral and cultural level of the active population as a whole. In fact, Charles called the most famous scholar of his day, the English Benedictine Alcuin (735-804), to head a school at Aix-la-Chapelle, the Frankish capital. Alcuin responded to the invitation of the warrior King-Emperor by presenting a breathtaking vision of what might thereby be achieved: ⁷⁰

If your intentions are carried out, it may be that a new Athens will arise in France, and an Athens fairer than of old, for our Athens, ennobled by the teaching of Christ, will surpass the wisdom of the Academy. The old Athens had only the teachings of Plato to instruct it, yet even so it flourished by the seven liberal arts. But our Athens will be enriched by the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit, and will, therefore, surpass all the dignity of earthly wisdom.

In other words, Alcuin envisaged an expanding intellectual universe in the center of what was, at the moment, nothing more than a kingdom of gladiators—and at the invitation of its warrior chieftain to boot. The present realities of this world of “blood and iron” would have made other wise men tremble rather than act. But the “realists” were to prove to be correct only in the short run; the future would show who was actually right. And even in the short run, the literary and artistic glories of what we call the Carolingian Renaissance were real enough to inspire lasting pride and a solid base from which to make that new ascent of Mount Tabor that was to follow.

Spirits ran high. Support for centers of learning--such as those at Fulda, Reichenau, and Saint Gall—demonstrated the King-Emperors’ expansion of their commitment to the training of ever more educated clerical leaders. Patronage of magnificent works of art illustrated their desire to tell a good story to the faithful, by presenting the orthodox vision to the eyes of the ordinary inhabitants of Christendom in vivid and beautiful painted form. This fresh batch of sacred monarchs also took their daily administrative tasks to heart, seeking to create Christian order out of chaos through their laws, their admonitions to their subjects, and the work of their emissaries in the form of their counts and trouble-shooting inspectors called missi dominici—“messengers of the lord”. Creation of the zoo at Aix-la-Chapelle symbolized the fact that the world that the Carolingians were making was one in which they intended the lion to lie down with the lamb. And the area to which the Peace of Christ was to be applied was extended through active support of missionary work among the Slavs and the Scandinavians. Outsiders—that is to say the Franks themselves—had been called into the pilgrimage to God through the courageous leap of faith of Roman Christians; other outsiders were now to be welcomed into it by their own native Frankish labors.

Prelates like Archbishop Agobard of Lyons (c.799-840), during the reign of Charlemagne (768-814) and the early years of his son and successor, Louis the Pious (814-840), expressed the hope of the educated elite that the imperial structure, reinvigorated by the alliance of the Romans with the Germans and strengthened by the legal and administrative translation of Christian principles into practical guidance of all aspects of daily life, would provide a stable future for the Empire of the Romans in the West.⁷¹ They thought that the message of the Word was being recounted in too many fine ways not to have some impact in changing the world around them for the better. Would that they had been rewarded more immediately for their noble hopes! But the true story ended by being more complicated than the good story actually indicated it was.

Before concluding this chapter, let us turn back eastward, to the long-term developments mentioned in conjunction with the courageous realism displayed in military affairs by the Emperor Heraclius. The first of these developments was a more acceptable relationship of Church and State, at least with respect to dogmatic issues. Greater harmony was signaled on March 11, 843 by what is called the “Triumph of Orthodoxy”. With the ceremonies and the procession from the Blachernai Palace to Haghia Sophia taking place that day under the aegis of Emperor Michael III (842-867) and Patriarch Methodius (843-847), the Empire recommitted itself to the value of icons, the acceptance of the iconographic understanding of the universe, and the Kingship of Christ over the whole of the cosmos.⁷²

It was clear to many contemporary churchmen that, with this Triumph, Eusebius of Caesarea’s good story regarding the role of the Emperor in shaping the Pax Christi had undergone something of a revision. Too many tyrannical false steps involving too many heresies promoted with the aid of too many arrogant bureaucrats and pusillanimous or corrupt court bishops had harmed the State’s reputation in the dogmatic realm, and that of its clerical allies along with it. The sacrifices of innumerable monks, along with some of those very Patriarchs of Constantinople who were supposed to have been the chief agents of a political domination of religion, gave the Church a new vigor in asserting herself. This limited the imperial role in defining the action of the Word in history, forcing it back onto a more legitimate rung in the hierarchy of values. With a solid internal symphonia of Church and State over basic Christian doctrine seemingly restored, Civil and Canon Law were then reformed to ensure still greater harmony of the secular and religious spheres concerning other aspects of daily life as well.

Historians can point to many positive developments accompanying this eastern doctrinal peace in the years to come. Episcopal confidence grew. Monastic religious life flourished, with the Stoudite monks and the budding Athos community both playing a crucial role in the progress of eastern spirituality. A massive cultural renaissance, a glimpse of which we catch already at the time of the intellectual battles characterizing the second stage of the Iconoclast Controversy, came to full fruition, with great impact on both secular and sacred learning. Classical and encyclopedic in character, this renaissance produced such erudite figures as Patriarch Photius (d. 891), the learned circle around the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (913-959), and the so-called “universities” of Constantinople and Thessalonica. The laity was not to be outdone in such a period of general revival, and it complemented its liturgical and iconodule devotion with a generous funding of all manner of pious and charitable organizations.

A second development emerging from the work begun by Heraclius and perfected in the years after the Triumph of Orthodoxy was a reform of the Empire emphasizing the need for a much more militant defense of its borders. This reform created the administrative units known as Themes. Themes were basically military districts. But the soldiers who fought within them to protect the Empire’s security when foreign incursions threatened also lived and worked there with their families. Professional soldiers they were, but military men with an added stake in the survival and prosperity of what were in effect their homelands.

Through the firmer backbone that the thematic structure gave to the Empire, its frontiers were indeed more effectively protected than they had been for a long time, and this effectiveness was destined to continue for several centuries to come. Despite recurring problems with the Bulgars and other northern neighbors, the Empire could count numerous and sometimes resounding victories against them. Remaining imperial provinces in southern Italy were also solidified. Much more importantly, Roman administrative and military revival led to stunning successes against the Moslems in the east. The weakness of this enemy, ever more badly divided since the days of the Sunnite-Shiite and Ummayad-Abbasid caliphate disputes, was exploited to win back territories long lost to Rome. Many people even entertained hopes for the reincorporation of all of the Christian regions lost to Islam since the 630’s. Moslems were anxious for the safety of the holy city of Mecca itself.

Finally, the military victories of the Emperors Nicephoras II Phocas (963-969) and John I Tzimiskes (969-976), along with the literary celebration of the achievements of frontier soldiers like the legendary Digenes Akrites, made Byzantium in the 900’s appear to be the prototype not just of a militant Roman society but of a militant crusading Christian society as well. In other words, popular misconceptions notwithstanding, Eastern Christianity developed the image of the crusader long before it became a central one in the life of Western Christendom. A martial Christian spirit was its spiritual and artistic brainchild from the moment that Heraclius put icons onto the banners of the Eastern Roman armies. Whatever the story of the origins of medieval crusading may be, the renewed, reformed imperial order of the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries seemed to be alive, thriving, and much more rooted in Catholic Truth than ever before. And this Christian imperial order demonstrated an ability to tell an effective tale about its activities, through the use of everything from the intellect to the image, as it moved from one impressive victory—and conversion of powerful neighboring peoples like the Kievan Rus—to another.

E. Either the Unexamined Words of the GCSQ

Or the Word as King of a Christian Imperial Order

It is now time for us to take final stock of all of the developments concerning the imperial era noted in both the current chapter as well as the previous one, but with specific respect to the central theme addressed by this book. The framework for our discussion should not be a surprise to the reader, since it emerges from the “either-or” option already outlined in the first chapter in dealing with the confrontation of the Sophists with the Platonists. For the problems, failings, and yet ultimate growth of the imperial era merely reflect a more charged variation on the same choice: in this case, either the necessity for “closure” in life and “moving on” in obedience to the unexamined words of the many members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo, or the need to probe the full meaning of existence, learned through the complete message of the Word of God made flesh, and then to correct and transform Christians and the imperial order in which they lived in union with the commands of Christ the King.

We have seen that part of the critique of Christianity offered by the differing components of the GCSQ before its legalization and rise to official State religion was based either on ignorance of what it actually taught or anger over Christian failure to participate in the system. This more substantive assault, while understandable, was, however, tainted by a spirit that constituted the essence of the anti-Christian argument. That spirit was based on two underlying principles: 1) the obvious, “common sense” need to accept the foundation vision of whichever member of the GCSQ was rejecting the new Faith; and, 2) the refusal to confront the fact that the interpretation of that foundation vision was based on the willful choices made by the most powerful elements active in its camp.

Hence, to take but a single example of this type of critique, one can point to the Roman judge who, when faced with Christian prisoners attempting to explain the moral demands placed by their Faith upon them, stopped up his ears and announced: “I cannot bring myself so much as to listen to people who speak ill of the Roman way of religion”—meaning, of course, a “faith” intertwined with the idea of an eternal and unchangeable political and social order closed to the corrective and transforming message of the Word Incarnate.⁷³ Such a Tradition, which, for the Christian, was a natural datum like any other, filled with both Seeds of the Logos to nurture and transform as well as human error and evil to repudiate, was for the judge a fetish object. And treating that Tradition as a fetish object had its undeniable benefits. For one thing, it saved him the painful spectacle of investigating just how much the practical meaning of the Roman Tradition changed if a Cato the Younger or a Caesar or a Diocletian were using his pen or paying his word merchants for an appropriate explanation of its particular blessings.

After the rise of Christianity to the position of State Religion, and the beginnings of the interpretation of the Tradition in line with the will of Constantine, Theodosius, and the latter’s descendants, the critiques of Greco-Roman members of the GCSQ had to settle on a different tone. Now their authors had to make believe that they themselves were Christians and find, if St. Justin Martyr will forgive us the twist on his argument, “Seeds of the words of the Word” that they could turn into tools useful for the maintenance of “business as usual” according to the demands of “nature as is”.

For them, the real answers to the problems of life still came solely from inside their foundation vision, with its natural, “common sense” passions and desires. Nothing substantive was to be gained from this strange, outside, and truly supernatural Christian interloper. Instead of trying to understand, correct, and transform what might be learned from the Christians, their approach—as the case of the Gnostics so clearly illustrates—was that of deconstructing, subverting, and ultimately stripping away any significant meaning from the Faith in Christ that now formed a central—and loathed—part of their political and social environment.

A religion that was new, distinctive, and yet willing and able to find common grounds of cooperation with Seeds of the Logos had to be incorporated into the Establishment. Seeds of the Logos had to be retrieved from their Christian captors and hurled back into the darkness of the cave, while unique teachings based on Revelation were to be ridiculed or ignored. The well-chosen words of rhetoricians could disguise the fact that “faith” in the message of the Incarnate Word was to be nothing other than a more effective religious cover for natural “business as usual”. Many Christians themselves could be counted upon to join in this labor, either because the overwhelming power of custom made a serious consideration of a teaching that was truly different intellectually impossible and materially uncomfortable for them, or because they were quite understandably terrified by the thought of exile, imprisonment, or death.

Critiques of true Christianity, of the full, real message of the Word, now had to take a quite different form from those offered beforehand, when opposition to its teachings could be more open and honest. Christianity now had to be attacked as itself actually being anti-Christian, and this due to the fact that important aspects of the Faith and its practice “rocked the boat” of religion and its daily consequences as the “Sacred Christian Empire” “willed” and “chose” them to be. Business as usual required the dismantling of Christianity…in the name of “real” Christianity. We shall see by the time this work is finished that the proverb, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, is deeply appropriate to the history of the war between “words” and “the Word”. For the imperial rhetoricians would find their skills highly useful in our own time, perhaps more inside the United States of America, with the cooperation of conservative and even traditionalist Catholics, than anywhere else on Earth.

Certainly, an ample stock of black legends, seemingly noble in conception and popular in form, designed for the delectation of the upper and lower classes of the imperial ecumene alike, already began to be stored in the armory of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo in the days before Constantine. The Christians were “atheists”, destroying appreciation for the god that was the cosmos in and of itself, along with the manifold other local pagans divinities through whom his glory was popularly expressed. None of these objects of worship would ever rock the boat of nature since, one or many, they were all just part of the crew that kept that hermetically sealed ship called “here and now” on its pointless voyage. The Christians were also “enemies of mankind”, dangerous to public order and private happiness, but not because the State believed that they were actually guilty of the Bacchic crimes their “superstition” presumed them capable of perpetrating. They were condemned as misanthropes simply because they would not allow the government to do precisely what it wished, and since they placed obstacles between the ordinary man and the satisfaction of his customary passions—all of them truly destructive to both the well-being of the community and the individual. Proclaimed to be ignorant and illiterate in the extreme, Christians were deemed guilty of blocking implementation of the wise decisions of emperors and a conservative aristocracy ready to accomplish the work of reason in rather dubious form: with the information given to them from consultation of sheep guts and magical spells on the one hand; and with the inspiration provided by pornography and pompous, pedantic epic poems celebrating the transfer of wealthy senatorial families from Rome to the Bay of Naples for a fortnight of summer amusement on the other.

Post-Constantinian black legends often continued to emphasize the same themes---though now from a “Christian” imperial standpoint, together with the good religious story that it related concerning its apostolic labors. Here, the insult to God and man supposedly came from that which Sacred Tradition has identified as essential aspects of Orthodox and Catholic belief and practice. The Empire’s borders, public order, and individual human well being were said to be threatened by anti-imperial and ipso facto anti-Christian evils perpetrated in various ways: through the political machinations of the Bishops of Alexandria or Antioch or Rome and their lazy and unproductive monkish allies; by the “inconvenient” adoption of the word homoousion on the part of the Council of Nicaea and the Tome of St. Leo through the decision of the Council of Chalcedon; by hostility to the rhetorical game playing represented by the Henoticon, the Ecthesis, and the Typos; by the veneration offered to icons. True love of God and man was apparently to be found in believers who could accept both the Henoticon and its subsequent condemnation; both an imperial exaltation of the role of a non-Scriptural Pentarchy and its later abandonment as a means of preserving “Primitive Christianity”; the embrace of “up as up” and “up as down”, once the apostolic voice of the imperial court was raised on behalf of both these “common sense” positions, adopted primarily on the basis of immediate, superficial, natural political and material considerations, the one in blatant contradiction to the other.

It is interesting to note that the later black legends popularized by Enlightenment historians like Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) got almost everything substantive that took place in the imperial era concerning Christianity dead wrong. The problems involving the relationship of the new State Religion to the imperial order that they catalogued were indeed real ones, but their interpreters completely misconstrued their true nature and origin. It was the continuing influence of the naturalist Roman foundation vision, linked together with the combined sinfulness of pagans and Christians alike, that caused the religious crises of that era—not the Catholic Faith as such, which merely sought to defend its teachings in the midst of efforts to politicize what were essentially spiritual disputes.

Yes, there were bad mixtures of political policies and belief that regularly characterized the period in question, but these were the product of the machinations of government ministers and court bishops eager to maintain the control of all matters civil and religious in the hands of the infallible polis conducting “business as usual” according to customary standard operating procedures. There was not the slightest possibility that a “Church” and a “State” would ever become separate entities with different spheres of primary concern until there was such a phenomenon as the agmen we call the Mystical Body of Christ. Only this could create the reality of a truly unique spiritual authority possessing the full means to act upon the world at large through its own laws, its own administration, and its own, supernatural esprit de corps.

Yes, there were ignorant Christians, as well as believers whose ideas on certain important matters such as marriage were not those that many modern thinkers—orthodox Catholics included—appreciate. But the ignorant were either men who loathed the idea of working together with the Seeds of the Logos, and were thus looked upon by the developing Magisterium as being out of tune with the message of the Incarnation, or they were writers who were illogical in following through on their own clearly stated theological precepts. “Hidebound” Christians of the imperial era were “backward” only in so far as they allowed ancient customary practices and prejudices to guide them, in contrast to the logic of the Catholic Faith, the teachings of its Scriptures, its growing sacramental theology, and the clear lessons offered through its liturgy.

It seems to me to be especially important to emphasize the misconstruction of the great Trinitarian and Christological battles one finds in later Enlightenment arguments. Men like Gibbon claimed to see the hand of the insanely zealous truth-seeker in all of the twists and turns of doctrinal conflicts, with their undeniably torturous consequences for imperial social peace. But these complex developments did not have their political and social impact because of an exaggerated concern for theological Truth. They had the effect that they did because of that game playing with profound questions and phraseology, mocking and distorting the Truth, typical of the sophist word merchant on the hunt for a gimmick to support the “business as usual” concerns of the powerful.

Truth-seeking Fathers at the Council of Nicaea arrived at words defining the relationship of the Father and the Son with surprising ease and lack of rancor. Their opponents, men like Eusebius of Nicomedia, used their own words not in order to appreciate the strengths or weaknesses of the Nicaean doctrine but rather as tools to build up powerful political alliances, bully their opponents, and push through drastic revisions of the dogmatic affirmations that offended them. In typical word merchant fashion, rhetoricians and the politicians they served then prohibited believers from properly examining the full meaning and consequences of these revised dicta. In effect, the faithful were told that it was time for “closure” and “moving on”, because, for heaven’s sake, the hunt for the obvious goods of power, fame, and riches would be neglected if they did not accept this truth!

Clear and substantive discussions regarding the nature of the “words” in question—a debate that a sophist like Edward Gibbon would naturally consider to be intellectually meaningless—were thus authoritatively silenced. After all, they reflected a spirit of disobedience to an unquestioned traditional imperial authority now declared ipso facto Christian and apostolic in character as well. “What could I do if the Emperor thought otherwise?” the Patriarch of Constantinople asked an orthodox critic during one of these periods of triumphant word merchandising.⁷⁴ In posing this query, he illustrated both the effectiveness of such efforts to divinize imperial power as well as the frequently pathetic, obsequious response of otherwise often conscientious prelates to it. Once again, Gibbon would have been accurate if he had attributed the disruptions caused by doctrinal dispute to a failure of Christians to live up to their duty rather than to some innate danger lying at the heart of Christianity’s concern for truth in and of itself. It was this failure to live up to that duty that contributed mightily to allowing the discussion of sublime matters of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty to become so much humbug serving nothing other than the cause of “nature as is”---as the strongest imperial wills and their rhetorical spokesmen defined it.

In fact, any serious study of Church History demonstrates just how much the zealous truth-seekers engaged in the formulation of orthodox doctrinal teaching loathed and dismissed superfluous word games. The Fathers lamented the presence of wordmongers of all sorts on the streets of Constantinople in the late fourth century, describing for us a contemporary religious version of a very modern public indulgence in pointless babbling on the latest “inside” subject.⁷⁵

No less an authority than St. Gregory Nazianzen has described how, if you went into a shop in Constantinople to buy a loaf, ‘the baker, instead of telling you the price, will argue that the Father is greater than the Son. The money-changer will talk about the Begotten and the Unbegotten, instead of giving you your money, and if you want a bath the bath-keeper assures you that the Son surely proceeds from nothing’.

Great warriors of the above-mentioned battles, men like St. Athanasius and St. Basil the Great, repeatedly reviewed the arguments of their moderate, so-called Semi-Arian opponents in order to determine whether or not they were battling over substance or mere packaging backed by personal whims and ambitions. Through such painstaking endeavors, they were able to disassociate themselves from “friends” whose insufficiently developed words hid terrible disagreements and build bridges with “enemies” whose complex language disguised real substantive agreement.

One saw something similar when the Catholic mind, living a life of Catholic charity, set out to understand the battle between the early theologians of “grace” and “free will”. Here, as Quasten notes in his study of Patrology, a pastoral spirit, ready to grasp the spiritual warfare of different personalities, went a long way toward overcoming what at first seemed to be deadly divergences.

A Church Father like St. Augustine had to engage in long and painful struggle with himself before he accepted the Faith. He brought this experience of the pain of Redemption to his work as a theologian, emphasizing the horror of the sin that had made Christ’s sacrifice necessary. The author of the Confessions tended, in consequence, to underline the need to escape from an otherwise impossible perplexity and seemingly unforgiveable original flaw through gratitude for the free gift of grace from God.⁷⁶

Belief came much more easily to a Church Father such as St. John Cassian (c. 360-435). His conviction that progress in the Faith could steadily be made through personal effort was confirmed by his direct contact with the lives of prayer and sacrifice of the Desert Fathers. He tended, in consequence, to emphasize the value of individual labor in the dance to sanctity and to presume that a methodology of growth in union with God could be taught to others. This he did, in the renowned and highly influential conferences on monastic spiritual life that he offered in both Rome and Gaul.⁷⁷

Not even that much time, charity, and openness were required to bring to center stage yet other Christian teachers eager to put both approaches together for the benefit of the Church at large. Hence, one can look to the work of Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 390-c. 455), a theologian who was prominent in the promotion and acceptance of St. Augustine’s doctrine in southern Gaul. Here was a man devoted to the permanent things in an age of collapse; a time when a Gibbon-like pagan elite chastised real, substantive learning as the obsession of frivolous minds and confused true intellectual pursuits with entertaining word games. Prosper did yeoman service for the cause of transformation in Christ by demonstrating how free will and grace labored closely in mysterious union with one another. Yes, this great thinker argued, our freely offered works are indeed highly profitable to gaining our salvation. But he insisted that they are only able to have this efficacious redemptive effect because their service to that end was purchased at the heavy price of the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ. And the fruits of that divine sacrifice were then offered to us, as St. Augustine taught, as a pure gift of God.⁷⁸

Again, one cannot stress this basic fact enough: it was the hidden members of the GCSQ, court bishops condemned by Christian heroes, and the sophist talents of both these groups that were primarily to blame for the evils deplored by Gibbon—not the zealous truth seekers we call the Fathers of the Church and their activist fellow travelers. Whenever Christians primarily took their cue as to how to defend Christianity and promote evangelization from the accepted wisdom of the world around them, they merely offered themselves as cannon fodder for the proponents of “nature as is”. It was playing their game that made cementing the privileges of the clergy as one of the upper “social orders” within the Empire the chief project of many prelates. It was following this path that created religious bulwarks that may have appeared strong to the servants of the foundation vision of the Greco-Roman ecumene but which amounted to nothing other than so many Maginot Lines that the true enemy of God and man could easily outflank.

Despite their many failings, the turbulent centuries of the growing Christian Imperial Order were replete with innumerable achievements, incalculably enhancing knowledge of the Incarnate Word and its consequences in history. Developments of the fifth through the ninth centuries drew on earlier accomplishments, stimulating a deeper spirit of independence on the part of Church leaders and encouraging them to offer a stiffer resistance to the tyranny of mere custom over the true Christian Tradition and the clever words used to subordinate the Word of God to the passions of willful men. They thus prepared the ground for that qualitative leap forward in loyalty to the fullness of the message of the Incarnation taken from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries; that extraordinary moment in time, as one author has noted, “when values descended to the earth”;⁷⁹ that age when a new ascent of Mount Tabor was mounted.

Let us conclude this chapter by underlining two special points regarding the achievements of the imperial era. The first of these is the fact that the ancient Seeds of the Logos were very valuable indeed. Fetish though the foundation vision and tradition in which they were planted might be, the Mystical Body of Christ nevertheless was obliged to accept and then correct and transform these natural springboards to Truth. They were, after all, planted in God’s own Creation, and lovable in and of themselves. And aside from the specific Seeds of the Logos to be found in rhetoric, philosophy, the State, civil law, and the classical aesthetic outlook, it seems to me essential to mention one other crucially important example of the same useful natural tool: the general Greco-Roman sense of the holistic and cosmopolitan character of the entire human enterprise. This overarching Seed is especially important to mention given the dangers to the Faith destined to arise in later ages from a narrow, nationalist, and reductionist vision of life; a vision that continues in our own, much more parochial—though painfully imperial—era.

Christianity is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, free nor slave: it is supranational and aims at the conquest of the entire globe. It needs an international natural environment for its work to thrive, and needed it perhaps all the more at the beginning of its seemingly impossible missionary enterprise. It got that environment through the help of an Empire whose vision was also universal in scope. Christianity requires the transformation of all aspects of life; it began its labors with the aid of a political entity that itself needed guidance regarding how religion, politics, and society were to be intertwined, but nevertheless wholeheartedly recognized the absolute necessity for a Pax deorum that could potentially be elevated to a Pax Christi. Would that the modern, parochial—though equally imperial—vision of life, with its division of existence into compartmentalized spheres, was as open to proper correction and transformation of its errors as its flawed Roman counterpart.

Secondly, the imperial era was one when the pilgrim spirit required to deal with the changeable earthly realm reappeared regularly to the benefit of Church and society. The danger of a fetish-like traditionalism was real enough, even in a cosmopolitan Empire, and yet custom-bound, naturalist, Greco-Roman culture had sufficient pilgrim spirit, as St. Ambrose and Prudentius exulted, humbly to abandon its false gods and embrace Christ. A similar pilgrim spirit emerged, when needed, to send St. Patrick, St. Sophronius’ progeny, the Irish monks, St. Augustine of Canterbury, and St. Boniface, the Apostle to the Germans, on their various journeys. An analogous pilgrim spirit allowed for the Eastern Empire to make some required changes in its “immutable” structure when changes were clearly mandated. Finally, a comparable pilgrim spirit brought the Triple Alliance of Christians, Romans, and Franks into being in the West, as confirmed by the coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800 at the Basilica of St. Peter.

Christmastide was a symbolically appropriate season for that western, early medieval confirmation of the pilgrim spirit. Why? Because the “good story” of Christmastide demonstrates that courageous affirmation, commitment, and action in the midst of changing and sometimes brutal realities are built into the character of the dance of life as a whole. There are innumerable fearless “leaps” indicated in the events surrounding Christ’s birth and earliest days themselves. One example of courageous affirmation and commitment that forms part of the Christmas story stands out as most germane to my present argument. This is the fearless dedication to the Christ child of the Three Wise Men of the Orient, who represented both regal authority and learning.

It is one of the great ironies of existence that those most ambitious for power often refuse to take the steps that can make their strength endure for generations. The military man and the statesman often reject contemptuously the serious wisdom that would root their work in a truly substantive great mission and give it staying power, turning for support, instead, to “appropriate explanations of strongly felt desires” that turn out to be nothing other than “creatures of a day”. Christians believed that the Three Wise Men were in some way kings. As kings, they could be seen to have risen above the temptation to rely on brute force and sophistry alone. They allied their strength with a desire to be taught the truth, and it was this that led them to the Eternal Word made flesh.

Another of life’s great ironies is the fact that those most interested in the search for truth are often the least willing to commit their lives to wisdom when it is discovered. The life of learning is all too often accompanied by a paralysis of the will. This is partly due to the scholar’s knowledge of the complexities of reaching definite conclusions, and it is partly owed to a fear that his own importance as a hunter would diminish should truth be actually attained. Paralysis frequently ends in bringing ridicule upon the whole concept of truth seeking, especially if the teachings that have been entertained by the truth seeker are shown to have arisen from humble and non-academic sources. We have already seen this in the reaction to Christianity of some of the educated ancient members of the GCSQ, horrified that men of their own class could be waylaid by the Faith of insignificant fishermen.

Such considerations make the actions of the Three Wise Men all the more brilliant. Arriving from the cradle of civilization, they carried with them the esoteric wisdom of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia. Given that the East had been partially Hellenized after the conquests of Alexander the Great, they might be taken as symbols of ancient Greek wisdom, with all its promise and problems, as well. These men could have been expected to stay at home, continue their research, and await workshop reports after noticing the Star of Bethlehem. In the meantime, they would certainly have enjoyed the power that they possessed and the support of rhetorical sophists eager to justify and give it a noble pedigree in exchange for three square meals a day.

A pilgrim spirit triumphed instead. The Three Wise Men took to the road. They may have had endless discussions over the meaning of it all on the way to Bethlehem. But when they arrived at their destination, these representatives of the often quite paralytic and elitist academic enterprise bent their knees. These emissaries of the cradle of civilization eagerly paid homage before the cradle of a new, higher, and decisive civilizing force. The Wise Men, violating all of the best principles of academic objectivity, abandoning all the arrogance of political, social, and military might, placed their wisdom and strength at the service of a helpless child; a helpless child cared for by poor, dishonored parents, who were away from home at the bidding of a distant emperor. Not even the son of a scholar. Not even the son of a conqueror. What of the ridicule of fellow kings and fellow wise men before their action? What of the possible conflicts of human knowledge and faith? What of the potential quarrels of State and Church? “Later”, the Wise Men, in a sense, answered. “We will work them out later. The Truth is there before us in human form, and He has promised not to reject what we have to offer, so long as we accept Him. Our future difficulties must not prevent our present abandonment to the Truth.” Here lay a major defeat for the budding Grand Coalition of the Status Quo; a trouncing that can and must serve as a continuing inspiration for Christians still today.

Sometimes one sees paintings in which the Three Wise Men are depicted as being joined by others in their homage to the Christ child. I should like to think that their entourage consisted of men and women who had been tempted by life’s risks and horrors to run, to hide, and to despair. I should also like to think that these men and women were encouraged by the courageous commitment of the representatives of power and learning to embrace life’s risks in the Truth. After all, three kings stood before them who had not been deterred from combining knowledge and power, despite the obvious problems involved. These same kings were now ready to unite such explosive forces with courageous affirmation of the helpless Christ child. If they were not afraid, either of the world or of God, why should anyone else be? Why flee from love, because of the dangers of loving properly, or marriage, because divorce and cynicism are everywhere to be feared? Why hide from song and dance, from art and beauty, from the table and the vineyard, simply due to the risk of their misuse? Bring them courageously into the sight of the living God, who will not reject them, so long as He and his corrective, transforming teaching are accepted. Embrace the world in Christ, and begin the adventure of life. The future difficulties will be worked out along the road. It was this that Plato had longed for. It was this that the Wise Men had found.

I would paint an extremely crowded canvas of the visit of the Wise Men to Bethlehem. I would draw behind the Magi the awakened faces of representatives of all aspects and walks of life; the joyous faces of all those who had realized that courageous commitment to the Son of God gave them the chance—their only real chance—to embrace life, despite life’s brutal realities. In the distance, I would draw the coronation of Charlemagne, the Triumph of Orthodoxy, and, behind these scenes, the fruits of the brave affirmation of life that they symbolized, and Christian civilization in all its glory. Finally, far away from the rest, I would sketch in the Heavenly Jerusalem. I would do so, because God’s reward for courageous affirmation of life in the Truth here and now is possession of life in the Truth for all eternity.

The Christmas story need not have taken place at all. The Wise Men might have been frightened by the risks entailed for their reputation and power and never set out on their journey. No crowd would have gathered to follow them. Joseph might have abandoned Mary: too much trouble and little happiness with that woman. Mary could have asked for some type of insurance policy from God. The Father might, with full justification, have admitted that His Creation was a cynic’s delight and left it on its own. There would have been no painting, no coronation, no Christian civilization, no Heavenly Jerusalem. For the prize for failure to affirm life in the Truth in the here and now, with all its risks and hardships, is eternal death.

One final “word of the Word” is essential to the conclusion of this chapter. Christ’s affirmation of the value of Creation in its entirety is also an affirmation of the value of history in its entirety. Everything that “was” must remain eternally present to us as a heritage to consult. In ignoring it, we treat everything that “is” today as only passing, and, thus, quite frankly, ultimately pointless for the future. This means that an ever-living appreciation of all that happened in the era of imperial Christendom is incumbent upon anyone who would take Christ’s message seriously and put it to fruitful use in his own time.

Rigorous study of the Fathers and intense investigation of the history of the Church in the first millennium as a whole offers us many lessons of absolutely essential contemporary importance. We neglect that study in literal peril of our spiritual lives. For we have seen that the growth of Christian self-consciousness is not something that has happened or necessarily will continue to happen logically; that one does not always grasp the consequences flowing from attempts to deal with immediate questions of great importance; that the hold of custom and the lure of the bag of tricks manipulated by the GCSQ with its budding black legends and seductive, alternative good stories tempts all people, believers included, to put on blinders and ignore weapons lying right there before their eyes capable of curing their most pressing woes.

Thus, reading theological treatises of a later age, however brilliant, however logically-structured, and however more pure in the sense of being free from the earlier errors of the pioneering Fathers, cannot and must not entirely replace the testimony of on-the-spot witnesses to this or any given period of Church History. Attempts to do just that can cause some of the most gross and early heresies of the Christian experience to reappear unexpectedly, with the support of people who imprudently thought they were better armed than anyone else for avoiding their impact. We will have all too many examples of exactly what this means for war between “words” and “the Word” in the remaining chapters of this book. Thankfully, for the moment, despite the troubles intertwined therewith, we still have a bit more of a “good story about a true story” that lies before us to recount.

Chapter 4

The New Ascent of Mount Tabor

A. A Reality Check, East and West

Exciting developments in understanding the Word Incarnate and the meaning of Christ’s message for individual and social life continued to unfold within the context of the Roman imperial system from the time of Constantine down through the establishment of the Papal-Carolingian alliance, the Triumph of Orthodoxy, and the years following thereafter. The vision of a Sacred Christian Empire protecting the Pax Christi had remained basically intact through all of these centuries, though altered sufficiently to accommodate Catholic doctrine and changed realities in the dance of life, both in the East and in the West.

But was the “good story” regarding a Christian imperial order really true enough to allow the mission of correction and transformation in Christ to proceed freely? Could that “good story” be used to confront new problems effectively as they arose? Or did it continue to allow forces promoting nature “as is” to survive and prosper, and by so doing aid and succor the momentarily “hidden” Grand Coalition of the Status Quo? Examination of the situation in both Eastern and Western Christendom from the mid-ninth through the eleventh centuries yields a worrisome response to both queries.

Again, as noted briefly in the previous chapter, the history of the Eastern Empire under the Macedonian Dynasty (867-1056) in the two centuries after the Triumph of Orthodoxy seems in many respects to be a brilliant one. Great patriarchs, emperors, theologians, monks, scholars, missionaries, saints, and skilled storytellers loyal to the Faith accomplished numerous deeds of permanent value in those two hundred years, many of which were also marked by triumphs for the crusading armies of Eastern Christendom. Looking back at these accomplishments continues to inspire those eager to learn of the full consequences of the Word operative in time. Once more, however, dark sides to this splendid picture of a triumphant Christian Byzantium were not only present but all too easy to identify as well.¹

For one thing, the symphonia emerging out of the Triumph of Orthodoxy with respect to dogmatic issues was still often very seriously troubled when dealing with practical moral and jurisdictional matters. A new ecclesiastical feistiness in resisting unacceptable governmental behavior, born of Church outrage over incursions into her proper sphere of action in the previous centuries of intense battle, may in part account for this. Interestingly enough, it was not just memories of iconoclast synods like the Council of Hiereia that still rankled. Even the elevation to the patriarchal throne of iconodules like Tarasios and Nikephoros through the non-canonical fiat of an image-friendly imperial court also gave grave offense. The monastic communities of St. Theodore the Stoudite remained highly vigilant in maintaining a close watch on such illicit maneuvers on the part of State authorities. They also kept their eyes open for dubious acts of economia—dispensations from proper Christian behavior when a fait accompli made their acceptance appear to be politically and religiously prudent—granted by prelates whom they viewed as being more interested in serving the cause of “nature as is” than in pursuing the pastoral correction and transformation in Christ of fallen men.

Stoudites frequently criticized patriarchal decisions as well. But it must be admitted that Patriarchs of Constantinople were themselves often equally alert in defending the Church as a whole and insistent upon due recognition of their own particular prerogatives in doing so. Their position in the Eastern imperial order was now much more exalted than in past centuries. The revised code of laws called the Eisagoge referred to the Patriarch as the living image of Christ in a society ruled by an emperor stripped of at least some of his previous sacred aura. Aided by the decline of other urban episcopal centers, the presence in the “Queen City” of large numbers of bishops united in what was called the Permanent Synod, and often by their own personal reputation for scholarship as well, patriarchs such as Photius (858-867, 877-886) Nicholas Mysticos (901-906, 912-925), Polyeuctes (956-970), and Michael Cerularios (1043-1058) were keenly conscious of their power and perfectly willing to use it. In consequence, both Stoudite monks and patriarchs together offered opposition to the emperors in many conflicts regarding moral issues: skirmishes involving questions ranging from political murders and scandalous marital affairs to an imperial desire to secularize martyrdom through the canonization of all those soldiers falling in often purely secular battles against the “Moslem” enemy.²

Still, as the divided dates of certain patriarchal reigns suggest, imperial efforts to defeat such opposition—which the court generally regarded as more political than religious in character—were not insignificant. State hostility was not expressed in attacks on the patriarchal office or the extent of Church powers as such. There was no Marsilius of Padua advising the Macedonian emperors. Rather, opposition took the form of jockeying to place close associates or immediate family members on the patriarchal throne in order to provide emperors with comrades and not competitors in leadership. Caesaro-Papism thus continued to flourish, even if different both from its earlier and rather more brutal Eusebian form as well as from the legalist and naturalist version that triumphed in the West in later centuries.

Cultural achievements also brought new problems—religious, political, and social—in their wake, badly shaking the traditional pillars of Eastern Roman life. The ancient learning championed by the fathers of the Byzantine cultural renaissance gave to its sons a deeper knowledge of the meaning and diversity of classical learning than they had possessed beforehand. Much of this learning could thus seem quite new and exotic to its admirers, old and venerable though it actually was. It therefore understandably engendered mighty challenges to existing perceptions of the past and the customs that were firmly tied to them.

The avalanche of imperial military victories in the East also stimulated similar challenges to established beliefs and traditions. Conquest brought non-Greek ethnic groups as well as Moslems and Christian heretics in sizeable number back into the Empire. Moreover, the successes of imperial arms strongly affected the Byzantine concept of nobility. The military virtues responsible for eastern successes overtook civilian—and religious—justifications for aristocratic pedigree. Meanwhile, both external victory and greater internal security aided the growth of a new urban and rural wealth. In practice this meant four things, none of which, in the long run, was compatible with a healthy Catholic political and social order obedient to the full corrective and transforming message of the Incarnate Word.

First of all, an intensified antiquarianism was one not particularly surprising reaction to intellectual tumult and multiculturalism. It is always wise to keep a clear idea of just how unchangeable all of the foundations of the Byzantine system were in the minds of many an imperial thinker. Even though realistic political reforms saved its life, Byzantium at the beginning of the Macedonian period was still guided by the theoretical vision of an unchangeable Rome. Despite the historical facts of life, maps of the Empire continued to include provinces that were only under its control at its greatest height in the second century. Political antiquarianism of this sort was bad enough, but it was also accompanied by the effort of many scholars to ossify the Hellenist learning championed by the authors of the cultural renaissance in an encyclopedic strait jacket.

Ossification extended into the realm of Church thought and practice. The strait jacket thus fashioned was then utilized to try to nip all speculation in the bud, even such as might actually solidify imperial power or enrich a proper understanding of orthodox teaching. Most importantly, antiquarianism and ossification together worked to chastise all non-Greek national cultures as both barbaric as well as innately anti-traditional and anti-Christian. Heresies, for men subject to such a mania, were not ideas; they were simply non-Greek, national, ethnic vices. This parochial mentality, so hostile to the full, pilgrim-spirited, Christian embrace of the true diversity of the world, was highly troublesome in dealing with the Armenians in the East. But it was especially deadly with respect to relations with the Latin West and the Holy See.

It must be noted that anti-Latin sentiment had already begun to intensify in the immediate wake of the defeat of Monothelite Monophysitism. Despite their crucial significance to the victory of Chalcedon, no mention was made of the contribution and sufferings of Pope St. Martin or his chief advisor, St. Maximus Confessor, when the orthodox teaching was officially “restored” in the late seventh century. The eastern Council in Trullo, held in 692 under the Emperor Justinian II (685-695, 704-711), made it painfully clear just how much the Byzantine world now considered Greek liturgical custom and the concept of economia in matters such as the loosening of the bonds of clerical celibacy as normative for the Church at large. Latin practices that differed from those of the Greeks were correspondingly ridiculed, either as being too rigorous, too boorish, or simply manifestations of obvious inbred western heretical tendencies.³

Furthermore, even though Greek-speaking monks had been central to the elaboration of the role of the Roman Pontiffs in the life of the Universal Church, and Greek-speaking popes had themselves dominated the Eternal City in much of the seventh and eighth centuries, the anti-Latin reaction turned into an attack on the powers of the Papacy as such. The eighth century papal alliance with the Franks was viewed in Constantinople as an act of outright treason. The involvement of Popes Nicholas I (858-867) and John VIII (878-882) in the dispute between Photius and Ignatius over possession of the patriarchal throne also rankled. Their role in the work of the conversion and ecclesiastical organization of the nearby Bulgars was viewed as similarly invasive and arrogantly overreaching. Although there were long moments of calm in patriarchal-papal relations in the 900’s and 1000’s, these were not in any sense due to a proper appreciation of their respective roles in the life of the Universal Church. Such tranquility was chiefly owed to the growing political strength of the Eastern Empire and the disasters befalling the Carolingians and Rome by the time of the tragic death of John VIII, the last of the great early medieval pontiffs.⁴

Secondly, an opposite and equally problematic reaction to cultural and military developments in the East involved an embrace of novelty for novelty’s sake. Supporters of this approach “dived into” the “new” with uncritical enthusiasm—most especially when what was “new” happened to possess the more ancient pedigree noted above. An uncritical dive into the “freshly ancient” thus eventually gave to the Byzantium of the eleventh century influential scholars and statesmen who were really Hellenes of the old school; i.e., full-fledged pagans, with a special loathing for monks and monasticism, and an admiration for ideas that could never be reconciled with Christian teachings. This uncritical approach also helped to rekindle in “progressive” religious circles a marked sympathy for a variety of heresies, including both the ancient Gnostic beliefs promoted by the contemporary sects of the Paulicians and the Bogomils as well as early Christian ideas concerning the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul of the mystic, such as those found among the so-called Messalians.

Next, as in all periods when an apparently irresistible flood of changes is met with a strong tendency towards an immovable ossification, many confused or frustrated spirits took refuge from spiritual, intellectual, and social turmoil in an internal “exile”. Everywhere in Byzantium, one notices a growing flight from the public to the private sphere. This took place in ways that range from burial customs to the search for individual sanctity. In the secular sphere, personal family concerns began more and more to take precedence over State matters. In the religious realm, private devotions and paths to perfection began to be cultivated over public liturgy and reception of the sacraments. Perhaps most importantly for long-term ecclesiastical developments, the Stoudite emphasis on a social-minded, cenobitic monasticism began to give way to the more personal approach to union with God championed by St. Simeon the New Theologian (949-1022), the potential dangers of which will be addressed in greater detail in the next chapter.⁵

Finally, all pretensions to Christian economic and social health were abandoned through the revival and strengthening of the battle of the Powerful versus the Powerless, a conflict that regularly alarmed far-sighted Byzantines. The availability of new wealth, both urban as well as rural, fed a seemingly mad passion on the part of all of the more potent forces in Eastern society, from dioceses and monasteries to aristocrats and merchants, to increase their riches at the expense of those unable effectively to defend themselves. The personalizing of life in the East meant that the battle for wealth was fought as much among the more powerful groups as against the poor. In both cases, it was fought with serious lack of concern for the well being of the State as a whole. Church authorities used marital legislation to prevent combinations of private families detrimental to her financial interests; civilian aristocrats tried to choke military competitors by cutting off funding for the army; noblemen from the military sought to circumvent the civilian administration and build still more securely the property and wealth of their individual clans.

Grasping and ambition also had their nefarious impact at the highest level of eastern life. Political machinations surrounding the rise of a given candidate to the imperial throne and attempts to strengthen or thwart a man’s ability actually to exercise State power gave new meaning to the word “Byzantine” even in these seemingly “happy” centuries. Despite the yeoman efforts of some of the greatest of the emperors to stem personal lusts in all social strata, the victory of private powerful interests at court was certain by the middle of the eleventh century. The resulting damage to the common good was enormous, as the failure of the Empire to resist dangerous foreign incursions so well demonstrated. Hence, the disastrous Roman defeat at the hands of the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert in 1071 and the subsequent occupation of Asia Minor by their Moslem families. Hence, also, the successes simultaneously obtained by vigorous steppe peoples penetrating the Empire from the north and the sustained and powerful Norman advances in southern Italy.⁶

All these developments were destructive to the implementation of the full corrective and transforming message of the Word Incarnate. That message could never be reduced to a parochial, ethnic possession. It could not accept the presumption that everything that might be said about God had already been catalogued on library shelves. Neither could it remain uncritical of either ancient or non-classical wisdom, nor tolerate indifference to the destruction of the State’s ability to work for the common good of everyone—including and especially the poor and the powerless. Every one of these developments was a godsend to the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo, providing new recruits for its underground army in the very centuries when the sacred Christian imperial order seemed in some respects more secure than ever before.

At this point we must turn to Carolingian Christendom and its representation of the Roman imperial ideal. The Western Empire also nurtured a deep theoretical confidence in the solidity of its own sacred religious and political mission. A great influence shaping its sense of special purpose within a fixed, unchangeable cosmos came through the writings of the man known to us today as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. These Neo-Platonic works, including On the Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, The Divine Names, and The Mystical Theology, apparently emerged out of fifth century Syria. Two errors accompanied them on their journey to prominence in the western imperial sphere of influence.