the force of law. He deposed Eutychius the patriarch of Constantinople for refusing compliance with the imperial theology. He threatened the noble Anastasius, patriarch of Antioch,[1] but assailing him, as Evagrius says, "like some impregnable tower.[2] The timely death of the emperor (a.d. 565) put an end to further proceedings.
Now, in order to understand the policy of Justinian in this matter, we must not credit the vacillating emperor with theological bigotry. The key to the imperial policy in the long Monophysite dispute is to be sought in statecraft. Before this last piece of presumption the emperor had repeatedly interfered in the doctrinal disputes of the Church, and more than once he had ventured on making his own will known concerning one side or the other. Several of his predecessors had set him an example for such actions. But in the main the imperial aim throughout had been what we should call to-day an Erastian comprehensiveness. In the West Justinian saw huge limbs of his empire being torn away by the Goths; in the opposite direction he had to watch the rival power of Persia, ever on the alert to snatch, at his Eastern provinces; and now he had his subjects divided among themselves by a bitter feud. The orthodox found it an easy and congenial task to thunder anathemas against the heretics; they felt no compunction in cutting them off from the Church. But the penalty of the close union of Church and State now obtaining in the Greek world was that this action was perilously like cutting them off from the State also, and so manufacturing rebels. No sovereign could take kindly to such a wilful disruption; in the perilous times of Justinian it would be simply suicidal. Thus his policy naturally tended to the reconciliation of the Monophysites. In the earlier part of his reign he had assembled leaders of both parties with a
- ↑ According to Evagrius, "a man most accomplished in Divine learning," "accessible and affable," yet "so strict in his manners and mode of life, as to insist on very minute matters, and on no occasion to deviate from a staid and settled frame, much less in things of moment," etc. (Hist. Eccl. iv. 40).
- ↑ Ibid.
