The Condemnation of Severus and the Hardening

In the summer of 536 a standing synod at Constantinople under the Patriarch Menas condemned Severus of Antioch by name, together with the deposed Patriarch Anthimus and two others; in August the Emperor Justinian confirmed the sentence by edict, ordered Severus’ writings burned, and made possession of them a crime. The condemnation stands, and this collection confesses that it stands. It is also true that the coercion which accompanied it drove the separation deeper than any argument could, and that fact is reported here as honestly as the judgment.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Synod of 536

The reign of Justinian was not theologically single-minded, because the court was not. The Emperor was firmly Chalcedonian; the Empress Theodora protected the anti-Chalcedonian exiles and sheltered their deposed leaders in the palace of Hormisdas at Constantinople. In 535 an anti-Chalcedonian sympathizer, Anthimus, was translated to the patriarchal throne of the capital — a striking indication of how far Theodora’s influence reached (Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972, 255–283).

Pope Agapetus I came to Constantinople on a diplomatic errand in 536, refused communion with Anthimus, and secured his deposition before dying in the city that April. In the months that followed, the standing synod (synodos endēmousa) of the capital, presided over by the new Patriarch Menas, condemned and anathematized Anthimus, Severus of Antioch, Peter of Apamea, and the Syrian monk Zooras (Menze, 2008, on the synod of 536 and its acts; Frend, 1972, 270–283; Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D., Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1989).

On 6 August 536 Justinian confirmed the synod’s sentence by imperial constitution (Novella 42), deposing and exiling the condemned, forbidding them to reside in the capital or the great cities, ordering the writings of Severus to be burned, and making the copying or possession of them a punishable offense (Justinian, Novella 42; Menze, 2008; Frend, 1972, 270–283).

The Fifth Ecumenical Council condemned Severus again in 553, and the Church’s tradition has held him among the authors of the schism ever since; the sentence has never been revisited by any council (Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).

What the Condemnation Was For

It is worth being exact, because Section 08 of this collection insists that the Church’s real objection be stated and not a substitute.

Severus was condemned for rejecting the Council of Chalcedon and the Tome of Leo, and for teaching and ordaining against them. He was not condemned for the doctrine of Eutyches; he had anathematized Eutyches, and the sixth-century Chalcedonian polemicists — who had read him, in Greek, in full — knew this perfectly well and argued with him on the ground he actually occupied (see Severus, Jacob Baradaeus, and the Parallel Hierarchies; Lebon, Le monophysisme sévérien, Louvain, 1909; Grillmeier with Hainthaler, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2 pt. 2, London: Mowbray, 1995).

The Church’s judgment is therefore not that Severus mistook the humanity of Christ for a vapour. It is that he refused the confession of an Ecumenical Council, taught others to refuse it, and built a hierarchy on that refusal. That is a sufficient ground, it is the ground the sources give, and it is the one this collection asserts.

The Burning of the Books

One consequence of Novella 42 deserves its own paragraph, because it shapes everything the modern reader can know.

The order to destroy Severus’ writings was effective. His Greek works are lost almost entirely; what survives — the Cathedral Homilies, the vast correspondence, the Contra impium Grammaticum, the Philalethes, the anti-Julianist treatises — survives in Syriac translations made by his own party and preserved outside the empire’s reach (Allen and Hayward, Severus of Antioch, London: Routledge, 2004, on the transmission; Menze, 2008).

The result is that the most influential theologian the Chalcedonian Church ever condemned can be read today only through the labor of the church that venerates him. This is one reason the older Western and Byzantine handbooks described Severus so badly: they were describing a man whose books had been burned, from the summaries of his enemies. Lebon’s demonstration in 1909 that the Syriac corpus shows a Cyrillian and anti-Eutychian Christology was, in effect, the recovery of a suppressed voice. An Orthodox account should say this plainly. Suppressing an opponent’s books is not an argument, and the Church’s case against Severus does not rest on the sixth century having succeeded in silencing him.

The Persecution and the Hardening

The condemnation of 536 was followed by a systematic effort to eliminate the anti-Chalcedonian hierarchy: bishops deposed, monks expelled from their monasteries, communities placed under Chalcedonian bishops, and in places outright violence. The narrative sources for this — above all John of Ephesus, himself an anti-Chalcedonian and a participant — are partisan, and their atrocity accounts must be read as such; but the general policy is documented from the imperial legislation itself, and its scale is not in doubt (Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church, 2008, the standard study; John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints; Frend, 1972, 270–295).

Its effect was the opposite of its intent. Precisely because the imperial Church could now be identified with the imperial government, the separated communities acquired what a persecuted body always acquires: martyrs, a memory, and a reason to ordain their own clergy. Jacob Baradaeus’ ordinations began within a decade of Novella 42, and they were possible because the persecution had made a parallel hierarchy seem not a schismatic ambition but a necessity of survival (Menze, 2008; see Severus, Jacob Baradaeus, and the Parallel Hierarchies).

Justinian thus achieved, in the same reign, the most careful theological reconciliation ever offered to the separated party — the Collatio of 532, the neo-Chalcedonian synthesis, the Fifth Council — and the coercion that made it impossible to accept. The two policies were pursued simultaneously by the same government. It is not surprising that the theology was heard as a demand for surrender.

The Orthodox Assessment

Two judgments must be held together, and the Church’s own tradition holds them.

The conciliar judgment stands. Severus was condemned by the Church for rejecting an Ecumenical Council; the condemnation was ratified by a subsequent Ecumenical Council; no council has revisited it; and the Orthodox Church has never treated it as lapsed. This collection confesses it. Nothing in what follows qualifies that.

The coercion is not defended. The burning of books, the criminalizing of a theology, the deposition of bishops by imperial edict, and the violence against monastic communities are acts of a state, not acts of the Church’s faith, and the Orthodox Church has no interest in defending them. The Church has been on the receiving end of exactly the same instruments — under Constantius, under the iconoclast emperors, under the Ottomans and the Soviets — and knows what they are worth. When she was persecuted, she said that force proves nothing; the same is true when she was the beneficiary.

The distinction matters practically. A great deal of modern discussion of this schism proceeds as though the choice were between defending the sixth-century imperial policy and abandoning the fifth-century council. It is neither. The Definition of Chalcedon is the faith of the Church whatever Justinian’s police did; and Justinian’s police were wrong whatever the Definition says. Holding both is not a compromise but simple accuracy — and it is the condition of the honest conversation that Section 09 reports.

See Also

• Severus, Jacob Baradaeus, and the Parallel Hierarchies — Severus’ actual position and what the persecution produced
• The Three Chapters and Constantinople II — the theological half of Justinian’s policy
• Why Precision Strengthens the Case — why the real objection is stronger than the caricature
• The Divided Orthodox Reception — where the standing of these anathemas is now argued
• The Byzantine Church — the imperial-Church relationship at work here

References

• Justinian I. Novella 42 (6 August 536), against Anthimus, Severus, Peter of Apamea, and Zooras.
• Acts of the Home Synod of Constantinople (536) under Patriarch Menas, in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum III, ed. Eduard Schwartz.
• Menze, Volker L. Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Lebon, Joseph. Le monophysisme sévérien. Louvain: Van Linthout, 1909.
• Allen, Pauline, and C. T. R. Hayward. Severus of Antioch. London: Routledge, 2004.
• Grillmeier, Aloys, with Theresia Hainthaler. Christ in Christian Tradition. Vol. 2 pt. 2. Trans. Pauline Allen and John Cawte. London: Mowbray, 1995.
• 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.
• Price, Richard. The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009.
• John of Ephesus. Lives of the Eastern Saints (partisan narrative source for the persecution).