Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/355

 had inspired the decrees of the four great Councils, and assumed the rôle of a priestly expositor of the Catholic faith. As his age advanced, his pious ardour increased, and he pursued his studies far into the night, closeted with venerable ecclesiastics in his library, a circumstance which caused him to incur some contempt among the more active political and military spirits. Thus, when the plot, in which Artabanes was involved, was organized, the conspirators based their hopes of success chiefly on the facility with which he might be surprised during such nocturnal vigils, bereft of guards, who had been dismissed lest they should disturb his devout researches. Several of his theological treatises have come down to us, which, though not voluminous, might have sufficed to give him a respectable rank among ecclesiastical authors, had not his royal position rendered him independent of such distinction. As a specimen of the intellectual activities of an age, in which philosophy and science had been abandoned as worthless pursuits, it may be interesting to quote two passages from Justinian's writings, wherein damnable heresy may be seen opposed to the inestimable conceptions of orthodoxy. In the first he exposes the pernicious errors of Origen, in order that they may be anathematized by an episcopal council; and in the second he defines the true views which must be held as to the ineffable conjunction of the two natures in the Saviour. The Palestinian monks, who cherished the Alexandrian Father, he urges, were engaged in ruining souls by infusing into them ideas assimilated to those of Pythagoras, Plato, and Plotinus, thus perverting them towards the tenets of Paganism and Manichaeanism.