By Pauper Peregrinus

“I will give unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy.” These mysterious words spoken by Jesus Christ to St. John in the Book of the Apocalypse (11:3) may be understood in various ways, for example of Peter and Paul or of Enoch and Elias. But when one reads the history of the Church, one may wonder whether perhaps they apply most of all to the Pope of Rome and the Roman emperor.

At first sight this may seem a surprising suggestion, given that for almost three centuries, Christians were sporadically but bloodily persecuted under the authority of the emperor. Yet it was the first of the line, Augustus Caesar, who put into motion the events leading to the birth of the incarnate Word in Bethlehem, when he decreed that the whole world should be enrolled. As if in reward for that imperial decree, divine providence seems to have given to the Roman emperors, after their conversion to the gospel, a special role in protecting the word of God on earth by their temporal power. Indeed, many of the Church fathers held that the Roman empire was the great ‘restrainer,’ of which St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, which would first have to be taken out of the way, before the final enemy of Christ could appear.

However that may be, it is certain that the Christian emperors took seriously their responsibility not just for the external peace, but also for the spiritual health, of their realms. Indeed, they deemed the latter to be the best guarantor of the former. Does not God promise in the gospel: Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be yours as well? Nowhere was their concern for the twin welfare of Church-and-empire more evident than in their summoning of ecumenical councils in times of crisis.

Again, this may surprise a modern reader: isn’t it the pope’s business to call councils? Certainly, the pope’s right to do so has long been a part of canon law, and more importantly it follows from the fact that, as the Council of Florence defined in 1439, “to him in blessed Peter was given by our Lord Jesus Christ the full power of feeding, ruling, and governing the whole Church.” Nevertheless, saving the prior rights of the pope, the emperors felt that they too had a duty to bring bishops together to define what the true faith was, when grave doubts arose. After all, from the time of Theodosius I and his Edict of Thessalonica in 380, embracing heresy had come to mean losing the rights of citizenship; and any ruler needs to know who counts as one of the citizens and who doesn’t.

Accordingly, in all the early councils we find more or less clearly a co-operation between the emperor and the pope, as it were two ‘prophets’ charged with upholding the word of God, one by spiritual power, the other by temporal. The first of the ecumenical councils was Nicaea in 325, called to deal with the novel and blasphemous teaching of the priest Arius, that Jesus Christ is merely the highest of creatures. Though Constantine the emperor was still only a catechumen, and had little appreciation of the seriousness of the question, he considered himself bound to summon the bishops to restore the peace of the world. “In my judgment,” he told the 318 assembled hierarchs, many of whom had passed through the great persecution of Diocletian, “internal strife within the Church of God is far more evil and dangerous than any kind of war or conflict.” He explained that this was why on hearing about the controversy, he had immediately sent to require their presence.

Not that he acted on his own initiative alone. One historian, writing a lifetime later, records that Constantine summoned the council “by the judgment of the priests.” While one would like to have more details, it is highly unlikely that the ‘priests’ in question would not have included the occupant of what all men acknowledged to be the first see, namely, Rome.

A particularly good example of the cooperation of pope and emperor is given by the third ecumenical council, that of Ephesus in the year 430. Here the problem was being caused by Nestorius, archbishop of Constantinople, the city where the Roman emperors themselves now resided. Nestorius accepted the true divinity of Jesus Christ, but he had started to deny the right of the Blessed Virgin Mary to be called ‘mother of God.’ She should, he said, be called just ‘mother of Christ.’ Naturally, the faithful resisted, and a new storm broke upon the world.

Theodosius II, the emperor, decided that he had to intervene. He wrote a circular letter to all the major bishops of the empire telling them to assemble and to resolve the question, noting that “society depends upon true religion.” He concluded with these firm words: “We will not tolerate the voluntary absence of anyone.” Theodosius did not venture to give orders to the pope, St. Celestine I, though doubtless wrote to him of his plans. Nor, as far as we know, did Celestine object to Theodosius’s language to the bishops, high-handed though it might sound to us. Instead, he sent Roman legates eastwards to represent the papacy and the west, but making it clear that they must have the novelties of Nestorius condemned.

Theodosius, meanwhile, sent Candidian, his captain of the guard, to Ephesus to see that order was maintained in the city during the council, but warned him not to get involved with the doctrinal dispute. “It is not lawful,” the emperor wrote, “for anyone who is not enrolled among the holy bishops to interfere with ecclesiastical questions.”

On the whole, the popes seem to have been content with such an arrangement, even if it was perhaps, theologically, a bit untidy. Roman law required imperial permission for such large gatherings, and the meetings would be paid for out of public funds. The emperor could require bishops, at least in the Greek-speaking east where he lived, to assemble to resolve doctrinal disputes, provided that he didn’t try to tell them how to do their job, and provided that the pope’s own doctrinal supremacy was respected. Much later, theologians would explain that the emperor had convoked these early councils ‘materially,’ giving the bishops the orders to assemble under pain, at least, of the imperial displeasure, while the pope convoked these same councils ‘formally,’ investing them with the right to act as a magisterial body.

Of course, human nature being what it is, things did not always run so smoothly as at Ephesus. The greatest clash, in the early centuries, between pope and emperor was probably that of the Second Council of Constantinople, in the year 553. The emperor at that time was the great but autocratic Justinian; the pope, the vacillating Vigilius. Justinian was determined to resolve the problem of the Monophysites: those Syrian and Egyptian Christians who had not accepted the definition of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 about the two natures of Christ, and whose disaffection was seriously undermining the unity of the empire. Accordingly, he persuaded the pope that a council had to be held in Constantinople to condemn the writings of three men who had died the previous century ‘in the peace of the Church,’ but whose ideas the Monophysites correctly considered unacceptable. Unusually for those times, Pope Vigilius traveled east in order to be present in person.

The pope was unhappy, though, about the council to which he had agreed, foreseeing correctly that this olive-branch to the Monophysites would lead many western Catholics wrongly to suppose that Chalcedon itself was under attack. He therefore withdrew his consent to the council, and to escape the emperor’s wrath had to take sanctuary first in one then in another of Constantinople’s many churches. Justinian, relying on their previous agreement, went ahead with the council anyway, and he so intimidated the bishops present that they agreed to “strike Vigilius from the diptychs”; that is, not to commemorate him as pope when they offered the holy sacrifice. They protested, though, that in so doing they did not intend to break communion “with the apostolic see of the most holy church of ancient Rome.”

While the pope remained in hiding in the basilica of St. Euphemia, the council condemned the three authors disliked by the Monophysites. Eventually, Pope Vigilius bowed to the inevitable, and agreed to do the same. The Second Council of Constantinople had limped over the finishing line; but it would give rise to divisions in the west that would take nearly one hundred and fifty years to heal.

Happily, this disagreeable episode did not break the union of pope and emperor. The young Constantine IV, the following century, after consultation with Pope Agatho, called the eastern bishops once more to the imperial city to break a mutant form of Monophysitism that held that Christ had only one will. The pope, who is said to have been more than a hundred years old at the time, wrote an exultant letter to Constantine, saluting him as “a new David.” And another century later, in the year 784, the empress Irene wrote to Pope Hadrian I, whom she reverently addressed as ‘Most Holy Head,’ telling him of the council that she and her son were calling in Nicaea to defend the holy images. The pope gave his blessing to the project, and sent his legates to preside.

While it had sometimes been a rocky ride, by the end of the patristic era, the ‘two witnesses’ had thus preserved for all ages to come the true faith about the Blessed Trinity, the incarnation, our Lady, and the saints.

TITLE IMAGE: Council of Ephesus of 431. Notre-Dame de Fourvières Church in Lyon (France). Mary and Child are in the middle, with St. Cyril proclaiming the divine maternity of the Virgin. [Philippe Alès, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christian_council_of_Eph%C3%A8sus_in_431.jpg]

JUSTINIAN: [Roger Culos, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sanvitale03.jpg]