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 EUTYCHIANISM

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EUTYCHIANISM

many thousands of monks there that the council had taught plain Nestorianism. They made a raid upon Jerusalem and drove out Juvenal, the bishop, who would not renounce the Chalcedonian definition, al- though he had been before one of the heads of the Robber Council. Houses were set on fire, and some of the orthodox were slain. Theodosius made himself bishop, and throughout Palestine the bishops were ex- pelled and new ones set up. The Bishop of Scythopo- lis lost his life; violence and riots were the order of the day. Eudocia, widow of the Emperor Theodosius II, had retired to Palestine, and gave some support to the insurgent monks. Marcian and Pulcheria took mild measures to restore peace, and sent repeated let- ters in which the real character of the decrees of Chalcedon was carefully explained. St. Euthymius and his community were almost the only monks who upheld the council, but this influence, together with a long letter from St. Leo to the excited monks, had no doubt great weight in obtaining peace. In 453, large numbers acknowledged their error, when Theodosius was driven out and took refuge on Mount Sinai, after a tyranny of twenty months. Others held out on the ground that it was uncertain whether the pope had ratified the council. It was true that he had annulled its disciplinary canons. The emperor therefore wrote to St. Leo asking for an explicit confirmation, which the pope sent at once, at the same time thanking Marcian for his acquiescence in the condemnation of the twenty-eighth canon, as to the precedence of the See of Constantinople, and for repressing the religious riots in Palestine.

In Egypt the results of the council were far more serious, for nearly the whole patriarchate eventually sided with Dioscurus, and has remained in heresy to the present day. Out of seventeen bishops who repre- sented, at Chalcedon, the hundred Egyptian bishops, only four had the courage to sign the decree. These four returned to Alexandria, and peaceably ordained the archdeacon, Proterius, a man of good character and venerable by his age, in the place of Dioscurus. But the deposed patriarch was popular, and the thir- teen bishops, who had been allowed to defer signing the tome of St. Leo, misrepresented the teaching of the council as contrary to that of Cyril. A riot was the result. The soldiers who attempted to quell it were driven into the ancient temple of Serapis, which was now a church, and it was burnt over their heads. Marcian retaliated by depriving the city of the usual largess of corn, of public shows, and of privi- leges. Two thousand soldiers reinforced the garri- son, and committed scandalous violence. The peo- ple were obliged to submit, but the patriarch was safe only under military protection. Schism began through the retirement from his communion of the priest Timo- thy, called ^Elurus, "the cat", and Peter, called Mon- gus, "the hoarse", a deacon, and these were joined by four or five bishops. When the death of Dioscurus (.•September, 454) in exile at Gangra was known, two bishops consecrated Timothy ^Elurus as his successor. Henceforward almost the whole of Egypt acknowl- edged the Monophysite patriarch. On the arrival of the news of the death of Marcian (February, 457), Pro- terius was murdered in a riot, and Catholic bishops were everywhere replaced by Monophysites. The new emperor, Leo, put down force by force, but .Elurus was protected by his minister Aspar. Leo wi.shed for a council, but gave way before the objections made by the pope his namesake, and the difficul- ties of as.sembling .so many bishops. He therefore sent queries throughout the Eastern Empire to be an.swered by the bishops, as to the veneration due to the Council of Chalcedon and as to the ordination and the conduct of .lilurus. As only Catholic bishops were cons\ilted, the replies were unanimous. One or two of the provincial councils, in expressing their indignation against Timothy, add the proviso " if the reports are

accurate", and the bishops of Pamphylia point out that the decree of Chalcedon is not a creed for the people, but a test for bishops. The letters, still pre- served (in Latin only) under the name of Encyclia, or Codex Encyclius, bear the signatures of about 200 bishops, but Nicephorus Callistus says, that there were altogether more than a thousand, while Eulogius, Pa- triarch of Alexandria in the days of St. Gregory the Great, puts the number at 1600. He says that only one bishop, the aged Amphilochius of Side, dissented from the rest, but he soon changed his mind (quoted by Photius, Bibl., CCXXX, p. 283). This tremendous body of testimonies to the Council of Chalcedon is little remembered to-day, but in controversies with the Monophysites it was in those times of equal impor- tance with the council itself, as its solemn ratification. In the following year .^Slurus was exiled, but was recalled in 475 during the short reign of the Mo- nophysite usurper Basiliscus. The Emperor Zeno spared iElurus from further punishment on account of his great age. That emperor tried to reconcile the Monophysites by means of his Henoticon, a decree which dropped the Council of Chalcedon. It could, however, please neither side, and the middle party which adhered to it and formed the official Church of the East was excommunicated by the popes. At Alexandria, the Monophysites were united to the schismatic Church of Zeno by Peter Mongus who be- came patriarch. But the stricter Monophysites se- ceded from him and formed a sect known as Acephali (q. v.). At Antioch Peter Fullo also supported the Henoticon. A schism between East and West lasted through the reigns of Zeno and his more definitely Monophysite successor Anastasius, in spite of the efforts of the popes, especially the great St. Gelasius (q. v.). In 518, the orthodox Justin came to the throne, and reunion was consummated in the following year by him, with the active co-operation of his more famous nephew Justinian, to the great joy of the whole Ea.st. Pope Hormisdas (q. v.) sent legates to reconcile the patriarchs and metropolitans, and every bishop was forced to sign, without alteration, a peti- tion in which he accepted the faith which had always been preserved at Rome, and condemned not only the leaders of the Eutychian heresy, but also Zeno's time- serving bishops of Constantinople, Acacius (q. v.) and his successors. Few of the Eastern bishops seem to have been otherwise than orthodox and anxious for reunion, and they were not obliged to omit from the diptychs of their churches the names of their prede- cessors, who had unwillingly been cut off from actual communion with Rome, in the reigns of Zeno and Anastasius. The famous Monophysite writer Severus was now deposed from the See of Antioch. Justinian, during his long reign, took the Catholic side, but his empress, Theodora, was a Monophysite, and in his old age the emperor leaned in the same direction. We still possess the acts of a conference, between six Severian and seven orthodox bishops, held by his order in 533. The great controvensy of his reign was the dispute about the "three chapters", extracts from the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, and Ibas, which Justinian wished to get condemned in order to conciliate the Severians and other moderate Monophysites. He succeeded in driving Pope Vigi- lius (q. V.) into the acceptance of the Second Council of Constantinople (q.v.), which he had summoned for the purpose of giving effect to his view. The West dis- approved of this condemnation as derogatory to the Council of Chalcedon, and Africa and Illyricum re- fused for some time to receive the council.

The divisions among the heretics have been men- tioned above. A great revival and unification was effected by the great man of the sect, the famous Jacob Baradai, Bishop of Edessa (c. 541-78). (See Bara- D^us.) In his earlier years a reclu.se in his monas- tery, when a bishop he spent his life travelling in a