The Henotikon and the Acacian Schism

Within six years of Chalcedon the patriarch of Alexandria had been murdered and an anti-Chalcedonian installed in his place; within thirty, an emperor had condemned the council outright and been forced to retract. In 482 the Emperor Zeno issued the Henotikon, an instrument of union that anathematized Nestorius and Eutyches, endorsed Cyril’s Twelve Anathemas, and passed over the Chalcedonian Definition in silence. It reconciled almost no one and cost Constantinople communion with Rome for thirty-five years — the Acacian schism of 484 to 519. This is the first and clearest lesson of the whole affair: dogma cannot be healed by ambiguity.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Egypt Refuses

The resistance began where Dioscorus had reigned. Chalcedon’s sentence against him was received in Egypt as an assault on the see of St. Mark and on the memory of St. Cyril. The Chalcedonian Proterius was installed as patriarch of Alexandria under military protection, and the city seethed. On the news of the Emperor Marcian’s death, rioting broke out; Proterius was murdered in March 457, and the anti-Chalcedonian party consecrated Timothy Aelurus — “the Cat” — as patriarch (Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972, 154–183; Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D., Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1989, on post-Chalcedonian Egypt).

The Emperor Leo I exiled Timothy in 460, but the pattern was set: for the next seventy years the see of Alexandria passed back and forth between Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian claimants according to the policy of the reigning emperor, with the Egyptian populace and the monks of the Egyptian desert overwhelmingly on the anti-Chalcedonian side. In Syria the opposition was stronger in some regions than others and the cities were divided; at Antioch Peter the Fuller twice held the see and added to the Trisagion the words “who was crucified for us” — a liturgical assertion of the single subject that Chalcedonians read as theopaschite in a heretical sense, and which became a badge of party (Frend, 1972, 143–183; Meyendorff, Imperial Unity, 1989).

The usurper Basiliscus in 475 issued an Encyclical condemning Chalcedon and the Tome of Leo outright, and secured several hundred episcopal signatures. The reaction in the capital — led by the Patriarch Acacius and by the monks, with the ascetic Daniel the Stylite descending from his pillar to oppose it — was so strong that Basiliscus retracted in an Anti-Encyclical before losing his throne (Frend, 1972, 169–183; Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History III.4–8; trans. Whitby, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000). The episode taught the government two things: that Chalcedon could not simply be abolished, and that it could not simply be enforced.

The Henotikon

In 482 the Emperor Zeno, advised by Acacius of Constantinople, issued an instrument of union — the Henotikon, “the act of union” — addressed to the bishops, clergy, monks, and laity of Alexandria and the Egyptian provinces. Its text is preserved by Evagrius Scholasticus (Ecclesiastical History III.14; trans. Whitby, 2000; Frend, 1972, 174–183; Meyendorff, Imperial Unity, 1989).

What the Henotikon says: it affirms the Creed of Nicaea as confirmed at Constantinople and Ephesus; it anathematizes Nestorius and Eutyches by name; it accepts Cyril’s Twelve Anathemas; it confesses that Christ is consubstantial with the Father in Godhead and consubstantial with us in manhood, that he is one and not two, and that the miracles and the sufferings belong to one and the same; and it anathematizes anyone who has thought or thinks otherwise, “whether at Chalcedon or at any other synod whatsoever.”

What the Henotikon does not say: it never confesses Christ “in two natures”; it never endorses the Tome of Leo; and it never affirms the Definition of Chalcedon as a rule of faith. The final clause — anathematizing contrary opinions held “at Chalcedon or at any other synod” — could be read as a repudiation of the council, or as a repudiation only of those who had misused it, and it was designed to be readable both ways.

The theological character of the document is worth naming precisely. It is not a heretical formula. Almost every sentence in it could be signed by a Chalcedonian. Its offense is not what it asserts but what it declines to assert: it seeks union by leaving the disputed article of faith unstated, and it substitutes the authority of the emperor for the authority of the council. That is the pattern the Orthodox Church has judged in every century since — from the Ekthesis and the Typos of the monothelite crisis to the false unions of Lyons and Florence. A settlement that requires the faithful not to say what they believe is not a settlement of the faith.

Whom It Satisfied

Almost no one, and this is the decisive fact.

Strict Chalcedonians — above all the Akoimetoi, the “Sleepless” monks of the capital, and the West — held that a formula which passed over an Ecumenical Council in silence had betrayed it.

Strict anti-Chalcedonians held the opposite: that a formula which did not explicitly anathematize Chalcedon and the Tome conceded everything. Those who broke with their own patriarchs for accepting the Henotikon — the party the sources call the Akephaloi, the “headless,” because they would follow no patriarch — became a permanent radical wing of the opposition (Frend, 1972, 174–220; Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2 pt. 1, trans. Allen and Cawte, London: Mowbray, 1987, on the reception of the Henotikon).

The Henotikon did achieve, for a generation, a working communion between Constantinople and Alexandria under emperors willing to enforce it — Zeno, and after him Anastasius I (491–518), who leaned decisively toward the anti-Chalcedonian side and under whom Severus was made patriarch of Antioch in 512. But it purchased that peace by suspending the Church’s confession, and it lost the West.

The Acacian Schism

Rome would not accept a settlement that put Chalcedon in brackets, nor the restoration of Peter Mongus at Alexandria that the Henotikon accompanied. In 484 Pope Felix III excommunicated Acacius of Constantinople; Acacius struck the pope’s name from the diptychs; and the churches of Rome and Constantinople were out of communion for thirty-five years. This is the Acacian schism (484–519) — the first prolonged rupture between the two sees, and a rehearsal, six centuries early, of the estrangement treated in The Great Schism (Frend, 1972, 174–220; Meyendorff, Imperial Unity, 1989; Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History III.18–21).

It ended with a change of regime. Justin I came to the throne in 518 with his nephew Justinian at his side, both firmly Chalcedonian, and reversed the policy of Anastasius: Chalcedon was proclaimed, its adherents restored, and the anti-Chalcedonian bishops deposed. On 28 March 519 the Patriarch John II of Constantinople signed the Formula of Hormisdas, and communion with Rome was restored (Meyendorff, Imperial Unity, 1989; Frend, 1972, 221–232).

Two consequences followed immediately, and they set the shape of everything after.

First, the Chalcedonian restoration of 518–519 drove the anti-Chalcedonian leadership out of their sees and into exile. Severus fled Antioch for Egypt in 518 and never returned. A body of bishops without sees, sheltering in Egypt and among sympathetic populations, is the raw material of a counter-hierarchy (see Severus, Jacob Baradaeus, and the Parallel Hierarchies).

Second, the Formula of Hormisdas, whose Roman drafting included a strong statement of the Apostolic See’s unfailing faith, entered the record as a Western text signed under duress by an Eastern patriarch in a moment of political weakness — and would be quoted against the Orthodox for the next fifteen hundred years in the argument over the papal claims. That argument belongs to The Great Schism.

The Lesson the Church Drew

The Henotikon is the first and clearest of a series of imperial attempts to heal the Chalcedonian breach by formula. Justinian would try again by conciliar reinterpretation (see Section 06); Heraclius and Sergius would try again by proposing one energy and then one will, and would produce a new heresy in the attempt (see Section 07). Every one of these initiatives was well intentioned; several were pressed by intelligent and sincere men; all failed, and two of them created fresh schisms.

The Orthodox reading of this record is not that reconciliation is impossible but that union is a fruit of the one faith confessed, not a substitute for confessing it. Where the Church has defined, the definition is the ground on which reunion can be built; where a proposal asks that the definition be suspended, softened, or left tactfully unmentioned, it is not building on that ground. This is the criterion the Church applied to the Henotikon in the fifth century and it is the criterion by which the modern initiatives are weighed in Section 09.

See Also

References

  • Evagrius Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History III.4–8, III.14 (the text of the Henotikon), III.18–21. Trans. Michael Whitby, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus, Translated Texts for Historians 33. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
  • Frend, W. H. C. The Rise of the Monophysite Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
  • Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989.
  • Grillmeier, Aloys, with Theresia Hainthaler. Christ in Christian Tradition. Vol. 2 pt. 1. Trans. Pauline Allen and John Cawte. London: Mowbray, 1987.
  • Menze, Volker L. Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.