Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/42

 DIOSCURUS

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DIOSCURUS

bishops were forced to sign a blank paper. The papal legate Hilarus uttered the protest Contradicitur, and saved himself by flight. Flavian and Eusebiiis of Dorylieuin (q. v.) appealed to the pope, and their let- ters, only lately discoveretl, were probably taken by Hilarus to Rome, which he reached by a devious route. St. Flavian was thrown into prison, and died in three days of the blows and ill usage he had received. The bishops who were present gave their testimony, when the Acts were publicly read at the Council of Chalce- don, to the violence used at Ephesus. No doubt they exaggerated somewhat, in order to excuse their own base compliance. But there were too many witnesses to allow them to falsify the whole affair; and we have also the witness of the letters of Hilarus, of Eusebius, and of Flavian, and the martyrdom of the latter, to confirm the charges against Dioscurus.

No more was read at Chalcedon of the Acts. But at this point begin the Syriac Acts of the Robber Council, which tell us of the carrying out by Dioscurus of a thoroughgoing but short-sighted policy. The papal legates came no more to the council, and Dom- niis excused himself through illness. A few other bishops withdrew or escaped, leaving 101 out of the original 12S, and some nine new-comers raised the total to 110. The deposition of Ibas was voted with cries, such as " Let him be burned in the midst of Antioch". The accused was not present, and no wit- nesses for the defence were heard. Daniel, Bishop of Haran, nephew of Ibas, was degraded. Irenaeus of Tyre, already deposed, was anathematized. Then it was the turn of the leaders of the Antiochene party. Ibas had been accused of immorality and a misuse of ecclesiastical property, as well as of heresy; no such charges could be made against the great Theodoret; his character was imblemished, and his orthodoxy had been admitted by St. Cyril himself. Nevertheless his earlier writings, in which he had incautiously and with incorrect expressions attacked St. Cyril and de- fended Nestorius, were now raked up against him. None ventured to dissent from the sentence of deposi- tion pronounced by Dioscurus, which ordered his writings to be burnt. If we may believe the Acts, Domnus, from his beil of real or feigned sickness, gave a general assent to all that the council had done. But this could not save him from the accusation of favour- ing Nestorians. He was deposed without a word of defence being heard, and a new patriarch, Maximus, was set up in his place.

So ended the council. Dioscurus proceeded to Constantinople, and there made his own secretary, Anatolius, bishop of the city. One foe remained. Dioscurus had avoided reading the pope's letter to the Council of Ephesus, though he promised more than once to do so. He evidently could not then ven- ture to contest the pope's ruling as to the Faith. But now, with his own creatures on the thrones of Antioch and Constantinople, and sure of the support of Chrysa- phius, he stopped at Niciea, and with ten bishops launched an excommunication against St. Leo him- self. It would be vain to attribute all these acts to the desire of his own aggrandizement. Political motives could not have led him so far. He must have known that in attacking the pope he could have no help from the bishops of the West or from the Western emperor. It is clear that he was genuinely infatuated with his heresy, and was fighting in its interests with all his might.

The pope, on hearing the report of Hilarus, immedi- ately annulled the .\cts of the council, absolved all those whom it had excommunicated, and excommuni- cated the hundred bishops who had taken part in it. He wrote to Theodosius II insisting on the necessity of a council to be held in Italy, under his own direc- tion. The emperor, with the obstinacyof a weak man, supported the council, and paid no attention to the intervention of his sist«r, St. Puleheria, nor to that of

his colleague, Valentinian III, who, with his mother Galla Placidia, and his wife, the daughter of Theodo- sius, wrote to him at St. Leo's suggestion. The rea- sons given to the pope by Theodosius for his conduct are unknown, for liis letters to Leo are lost. In June or July, 450, he died of a fall from his horse, and was succeeded by his sister Puleheria, who took for her colleague and nominal husband the excellent general Marcian. St. Leo, now sure of the support of the rulers of the East, declared a council unnecessary; many bishops had already signed his Tome, and the remainder would do so without difficulty. But the new emperor had already taken steps to carry out the pope's wish, by a council not indeed in Italy, which was outside his jurisdiction, but in the immediate neighbourhood of Constantinople, where he could him- self watch its proceedings and ensure its orthodoxy. St. Leo therefore agreed, and sent legates who this time were to preside.

The council, in the intention of both pope and em- peror, was to accept and enforce the definition given long since from Rome. Anatolius was ready enough to please the emperor by signing the Tome; and at Pulcheria's intercession he was accepted as bishop by St. Leo. The latter permitted the restoration to com- munion of those bishops who repented their conduct at the Robber Council, with the exception of Dio- scurus and of the leaders of that synod, whose case he first reserved to the Apostolic See, and then committed to the council. The s>^lod met at Chalcedon, and its si.x hundred bishops made it the largest of ancient councils (see Ch.\lcedon, (Ecumenical Council of). The papal legates presided, supported by lay commis- sioners appointed by the em]5eroT, who were in practice the real presidents, since the legates did not speak Greek. The first point raised was the position of Dio- scurus. He had taken his seat, but the legates ob- jected that he was on his trial. The commissioners asked for the charge against him to be formulated, and it was replied that he had held a council without the permission of the Apostolic See, a thing which had never been permitted. This statement was diflScult to explain, before the discovery of the Syriac Acts; but we now know that Dioscurus had continued his would-be general council for many sessions after the papal legates had taken their departure. The com- missioners ordered him to sit in the midst as accused. (A sentence in this passage of the Acts is wrongly translated in the old Latin version; this was care- lessly followed by Hefele, who thus led Bright into the error of supposing that the commissioners addressed to the legates a rebuke they meant in reality for Dio- scurus.) The Alexandrian patriarch was now as much deserted by his own party as his victims had been deserted at Ephesus by their natural defenders. Some si.xty bishops, Egyptian, Palestinian, and lUy- rian, were on his side, but were afraid to say a word in his defence, though they raised a great commotion at the introduction into the assembly of Theodoret, who had been especially excluded from the Council of Ephesus. The Acts of the first session of the Robber Council were read, continually interrupted by the dis- claimers of the bishops. The leaders of that council, Juvenal of Jerusalem, Thalassius of Ca^sarea, Maximus of Antioch, now declared that Flavian was orthodox; Anatolius had long since gone over to the winning side. Dioscurus alone stood his ground. He was at least no time-server, and he was a convinced heretic. After this session he refused to appear. At the second session (the third, according to the printed texts and Hefele, but the Ballerini are right in inverting the order of the second and third sessions) the case of Dio- scurus was continued. Petitions against him from Alexandria were read. In these he was accused of in- justice and cruelty to the family of CiiTil and of many other crimes, even against the emperor and the State. How much of this was true it is impossible to say, as