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 dealt with in various Novels. Justinian was fond of tinkering at this subject, and not always successfully. The most remarkable provisions are in Novels 117 (§§ 10 and 12) and 134 (§ 11), in which he greatly limits the freedom of divorce previously allowed, almost indeed abolishing it. But this severity was found unmaintainable: such complaints arose that in 566, ten years after the 134th Novel appeared, Justin II., nephew and successor of Justinian, repealed (Nov. cxl.) the penalties provided by it and by the 117th, leaving the law as it had stood under earlier sovereigns. The Novels have a great many provisions regarding dowries, simplifying a rather complicated branch of the law and securing the interests of the wife. Several constitutions, prompted by a desire for moral reformation, deal with criminal law, several relate to guardianship, the position of freedmen, and other parts of the law of persons, and nine deal with the law of obligations; none of them of any great importance. Among the ecclesiastical Novels, several groups may be distinguished. One group contains those which deal with the temporal rights and relations of the church and her ministers as holders of property. Eight constitutions may be referred to it, most of which are occupied with the length of time needed for a good title to lands originally belonging to the church to be acquired by adverse enjoyment; and with the conditions under which ecclesiastical lands might be alienated for a term or in perpetuity. Both topics gave Justinian much trouble and he was sometimes obliged to modify his enactments. A second group comprises constitutions merely local in application, referring to a particular province (e.g. Nov. 37 to Africa), church (e.g. Nov. 3 to the Great Church of Constantinople, Nov. 40 to the Church of the Resurrection at Jerusalem), or see (e.g. Nov. 11 to the privileges of the archiepiscopal chair of Justiniana Prima in Illyricum). To a third and more important group may be referred the 13 constitutions dealing with ecclesiastical organization and discipline, the mode of choosing bishops and other clerics, their qualifications, the jurisdiction of bishops, the restrictions on the jurisdiction of civil courts in causes where clerics are concerned (a matter of great interest in view of the questions which were to occupy medieval Europe), the rights, immunities, and position generally of the clergy (e.g. the exemption of a bishop from patria potestas, Nov. 81, the devolution of the property of a cleric dying intestate without legal heirs, Nov. 131, § 13), the regulations under which a church or oratory might be built, endowed, and consecrated, the internal discipline of monasteries and regulation of monastic life. A fourth and last group includes four ordinances levelled at heretics (a good many provisions affecting whom incidentally occur in other Novels, especially in those of the third group). One of these four, called Edictum de Fide, is a short appeal to heretics to return to the safe teaching and anathematizings of the Catholic church (Nov. 132); another is directed against Jews and Samaritans, refusing them immunities from public burdens such as their exclusion from public offices and honours might otherwise have appeared to imply (Nov. 45); a third deprives heretic women of the privileges granted by Justinian's laws to women in respect of their dowry; and the fourth is a sentence of deposition and anathema against Anthimus patriarch of Constantinople, Severus patriarch of Antioch, Peter of Apamea, Zoaras, and others charged with Monophysitism, issued in confirmation of the sentence passed by the synod at Constantinople under the patriarch Mennas in 536. The most generally remarkable characteristics of these ecclesiastical statutes, apart from their spirit of bitter intolerance, are the strong disposition to favour the church, the clerical order, and the monastic life; and the assumption throughout of a complete right of control by the imperial legislator over all sorts of ecclesiastical affairs and questions. Although there are some matters, such as ritual, penance, etc., touched not at all or very slightly, still the impression conveyed here, as in the Codex, is that the civil power claimed a universal and paramount right of legislating for the church; nor is there any distinction laid down or recognized between matters reserved for the legislative action of the church in her synods and those which the emperor may deal with. He always speaks with the utmost respect of the sacred canons, sometimes quotes them, professes to confirm them, and (Nov. 131 § 1) expressly declares that all the canons of the four great general councils are to have the force and rank of laws (τάξιν νόμων ἐπέχειν). But there is no admission of the exclusive right of the church or of any ecclesiastical dignitary or body to legislate on any particular topics; this is indeed implicitly excluded by the laws, especially those in bk. i. of the Codex, which deal with the most specially spiritual of spiritual questions, the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith. It is therefore not surprising that the African bishops who wrote against him in the matter of the Three Articles complain of his conduct as arrogating to the magistrate what belonged of right to the duly constituted officers of the church. Subsequent history shows that the Eastern emperor always maintained his authority over the church; while different political conditions enabled the Western patriarch and the Western church generally to throw off the control of the civil power and even extend its own jurisdiction over civil causes.

These ecclesiastical Novels throw much light on the state of the 6th-cent. Eastern church, and the evils which it was thought necessary to remedy. We hear once or twice of the ignorance of the clergy, persons being sometimes ordained who could not read the prayers used in the sacramental services of the Supper and Baptism (Novs. 6, 137). Irregularities in monastic life were frequent, as appears from the penalties threatened (Novs. 5, 133). Bishops too often resided away from their sees, so that a prohibition to the administrator to send money to them while absent was needed (Nov. 6, § 3; Nova 123, § 9). That a bishop must be unmarried, and a priest either unmarried or married only once and to a virgin, was insisted on. The habit of building churches without funds sufficient for their due maintenance and service is checked