being deputies of the Patriarch of Antioch, and was derived apparently from the Imperial dignity so called, denoting their function as Procurators-general, or officers in chief for the regions in which they were placed. Acacius, another of the Edessene party, was put into this principal See, and suffered, if he did not further, the innovations of Barsumas. The mode by which the latter effected these measures has been left on record by an enemy. "Barsumas accused Babuæus, the Catholicus, before King Pherozes, whispering, 'These men hold the faith of the Romans, and are their spies. Give me power against them to arrest them.'" It is said that in this way he obtained the death of Babuæus, whom Acacius succeeded. When a minority resisted the process of schism, a persecution followed. The death of seven thousand seven hundred Catholics is said by Monophysite authorities to have been the price of the severance of the Chaldaic Churches from Christendom.3 Their loss was compensated in the eyes of the government by the multitude of Nestorian fugitives, who flocked into Persia from the Empire, numbers of them industrious artizans, who sought a country where their own religion was in the ascendant. The foundation of that religion lay, as we have already seen, in the literal interpretation of Scripture, of which Theodore was the principal teacher. The doctrine, in which it formally consisted, is known by the name of Nestorius: it lay in the ascription of a human as well as a Divine Personality to our Lord; and it showed itself in denying the title of "Mother of God," or OEOTÓKoç, to St. Mary. As to our Lord's Personality, it is to be observed that the question of language came in, which always serves to perplex a subject and make a controversy seem a matter of words. The native Syrians made a distinction between the word "Person," and "Pro 1 Asseman. p. lxxviii. 2 Gibbon, ibid. p. 393. sons. sopon," which stands for it in Greek; they allowed that there was one Prosopon or Parsopa, as they called it, and they held that there were two PerIf it is asked what they meant by parsopa, the answer seems to be, that they took the word merely in the sense of character or aspect, a sense familiar to the Greek prosopon, and quite irrelevant as a guarantee of their orthodoxy. It follows moreover that, since the aspect of a thing is its impression upon the beholder, the personality to which they ascribed unity must have lain in our Lord's manhood, and not in His Divine Nature. But it is hardly worth while pursuing the heresy to its limits. Next, as to the phrase "Mother of God," they rejected it as unscriptural; they maintained that St. Mary was Mother of the humanity of Christ, not of the Word, and they fortified themselves by the Nicene Creed, in which no such title is ascribed to her. Whatever might be the obscurity or the plausibility of their original dogma, there is nothing obscure or attractive in the developments, whether of doctrine or of practice, in which it issued. The first act of the exiles of Edessa, on their obtaining power in the Chaldean communion, was to abolish the celibacy of the clergy, or, in Gibbon's forcible words, to allow "the public and reiterated nuptials of the priests, the bishops, and even the patriarch himself." Barsumas, the great instrument of the change of religion, was the first to set an example of the new usage, and is even said by a Nestorian writer to have married a nun.1 He passed a Canon at Councils, held at Seleucia and elsewhere, that Bishops and priests might marry, and might renew their wives as often as they lost them. The Catholicus who followed Acacius went so far as to extend the benefit of the Canon to Monks, that is, to destroy the Monastic order; and his two successors availed 1 Asseman. t. 3, p. 67. themselves of this liberty, and are recorded to have been fathers. A restriction, however, was afterwards placed upon the Catholicus, and upon the Episcopal order. Such were the circumstances, and such the principles, under which the See of Seleucia became the Rome of the East. In the course of time the Catholicus took on himself the loftier and independent title of Patriarch of Babylon; and though Seleucia was changed for Ctesiphon and for Bagdad,' still the name of Babylon was preserved from first to last as a formal or ideal Metropolis. In the time of the Caliphs, it was at the head of as many as twenty-five Archbishops; its Communion extended from China to Jerusalem; and its numbers, with those of the Monophysites, are said to have surpassed those of the Greek and Latin Churches together. The Nestorians seem to have been unwilling, like the Novatians, to be called by the name of their founder,2 though they confessed it had adhered to them; one instance may be specified of their assuming the name of Catholic, but there is nothing to show it was given them by others. "From the conquest of Persia," says Gibbon, "they carried their spiritual arms to the North, the East, and the South; and the simplicity of the Gospel was fashioned and painted with the colours of the Syriac theology. In the sixth century, according to the report of a Nestorian traveller, Christianity was successfully preached to the Bactrians, the Huns, the Persians, the Indians, the Persarmenians, the Medes, and the Elamites: the Barbaric Churches from the gulf of Persia to the Caspian Sea were almost infinite; and their recent faith was conspicuous in the number and sanctity of their monks and martyrs. The pepper coast of Malabar and the isles of the ocean, Socotora and Ceylon, were peopled with an increasing multitude of Christians, 2 Assem. p. lxxvi. 3 Ibid. t. 3, p. 441. 1 1 Gibbon, ibid. and the bishops and clergy of those sequestered regions derived their ordination from the Catholicus of Babylon. In a subsequent age, the zeal of the Nestorians overleaped the limits which had confined the ambition and curiosity both of the Greeks and Persians. The missionaries of Balch and Samarcand pursued without fear the footsteps of the roving Tartar, and insinuated themselves into the camps of the valleys of Imaus and the banks of the Selinga."1 SECTION III. THE MONOPHYSITES. Eutyches was Archimandrite, or Abbot, of a Monastery in the suburbs of Constantinople; he was a man of unexceptionable character, and was of the age of seventy years, and had been Abbot for thirty, at the date of his unhappy introduction into ecclesiastical history. He had been the friend and assistant of St. Cyril of Alexandria, and had lately taken part against Ibas, Bishop of Edessa, whose name has occurred in the foregoing Section. For some time he had been engaged in teaching a doctrine concerning the Incarnation, which he maintained indeed to be none other than that of St. Cyril's in his controversy with Nestorius, but which others denounced as an heresy in the opposite extreme, and substantially a re-assertion of Apollinarianism. The subject was brought before a Council of Constantinople, under the presidency of Flavian, the Patriarch, in the year 448; and Eutyches was condemned by the assembled Bishops of holding the doctrine of One, instead of Two Natures in Christ. It is but indirectly to our present purpose to ascertain accurately what he held, and there has been a great deal of controversy on the subject; 1 Ch. 47. partly from confusion between him and his successors, partly from the indecision or the ambiguity which commonly attaches to the professions of heretics. If a statement must be made of the doctrine of Eutyches himself, in whom the controversy began, let it be said to consist in these two tenets:-in maintaining, first, that "before the Incarnation there were two natures, after their union one," or that our Lord was of or from two natures, but not in two;-and, secondly, that His flesh was not of one substance with ours, that is, not of the substance of St. Mary. Of these two points, he seemed willing to abandon the second, but was firm in his maintenance of the first. let us return to the Council of Constantinople. But On examination Eutyches allowed that the Holy Virgin was consubstantial with us, and that "our God was incarnate of her ;" but he would not allow that He was therefore, as man, consubstantial with us, his notion apparently being that union with the Divinity had changed what otherwise would have been human_nature. However, when pressed, he said, that, though up to that day he had not permitted himself to discuss the nature of Christ, or to affirm that "God's body is man's body though it was human," yet he would allow, if commanded, our Lord's consubstantiality with us. Upon this Flavian observed that "the Council was introducing no innovation, but declaring the faith of the Fathers." To his other position, however, that our Lord had but one nature after the Incarnation, he adhered when the Catholic doctrine was put before him, he answered, "Let St. Athanasius be read; you will find nothing of the kind there." : His condemnation followed: it was signed by twenty-two Bishops and twenty-three Abbots ; 1 among the former were Flavian of Constantinople, Basil metropolitan of Seleucia in Isauria, the me 1 Fleur. Hist. xxvii. 29. |