After the deposition of Dioscorus of Alexandria at the Synod of Chalcedon, the ‘Oriental bishops and those with them’ are represented as exclaiming: ‘Many years to the senate! Holy God, Holy Strong, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us. Many years to the emperors! The impious are always routed; Christ has deposed Dioscorus.’ This is the earliest record of the Thrice-Holy Hymn, the Trisagion. It is not clear why the bishops of the diocese of Oriens thought it appropriate to exclaim it on this occasion. It is striking, however, that barely a quarter of a century later, the thrice-holy hymn, with the theopaschite addition (‘Holy God, Holy Strong, Holy Immortal, who was crucified for us, have mercy on us’) became popular in Antioch, as a chant encapsulating the rejection of the Chalcedonian Definition. For even though the controversy over the Trisagion was really a misunderstanding between a Trinitarian understanding of the hymn, found in Constantinople, in which the theopaschite addition implied the passibility of the divine nature, rejected on all sides, and a Christological understanding of the hymn, which affirmed that Christ suffered on the Cross, for the Syrians the theopaschite version of the Trisagion underlined what they believed to be the defect of Chalcedon, namely its failure to affirm with uncompromising clarity that through the Incarnation, God himself, the second person of the Trinity, assumed human nature and human experience, and in particular the human experience of death, in order to redeem humanity from the curse of death unleashed by the Fall of Adam.

Before the Council

The conventional opening date for the Christological controversy of the fifth century of which the climax was the Council of Chalcedon is the arrival at Constantinople in 428 of its new archbishop, Nestorius, a Syrian monk, who publicly criticized the ascription to the Virgin Mary of the title Theotokos (Mother of God). The issue was not the status of the Virgin but the question who it was who was born of her – a human being, united to the Godhead but yet distinct from it (as Nestorius supposed), or God the Word himself, who, in the words of St Paul, ‘being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.’ Opposition to Nestorius was led by Archbishop Cyril of Alexandria, who spotted the opportunity to humiliate the upstart see of Constantinople but was also genuinely shocked by Nestorius' stance – not out of any special devotion to the Virgin, but because of his own emphasis on God the Word made flesh as the one personal subject in Christ and as the one to whom we are united in holy communion. The controversy led to the condemnation of Nestorius at the First Council of Ephesus (431), which was wildly popular in Ephesus itself (after the vote Cyril was escorted to his lodgings by women swinging thuribles) but deeply resented in Syria.

The acts of church councils offer us an exceptionally rich source of information about the utterances and behaviour of large numbers of bishops while engaged in one of their most important duties, namely the collective establishment of orthodoxy and the identification of heresy. They provide examples of Christian leaders in action, not only of individual bishops who in their own cities would be regarded as leaders but in the context of an ecumenical council were overshadowed by their metropolitans or the patriarchs or other key figures prominent in a particular debate, but also of a small number of international leaders. Although the absolute accuracy of council records is open to challenge, with the impossibility of verbatim precision, especially during heated moments, being acknowledged by those responsible for attempting to produce the records, the general impression of the tone and conduct of debates is beyond challenge, while the subscriptions by individual bishops to various decisions also offer insights into how the participants wished their involvement to be registered and remembered.

Episcopal behaviour has recently been the subject of two illuminating studies. The first, by Claudia Rapp, identifies different strands of episcopal authority – spiritual, ascetic and pragmatic –, probes how these were combined to legitimate that authority, and considers how bishops as men of power operated within the evolving economic and social structures of their cities.

Truth

Who in the early church published conciliar acts and why? Without attempting a generalization, I shall simply say that the Acts of Chalcedon were manifestly produced and published by the imperial government, shortly after the council. What was the purpose of publishing the minutes, and not just the decrees? The minutes inevitably showed up disagreements: how was this of any advantage to the winning side?

It is to be noted that conciliar decisions had to be unanimous. All the bishops at Chalcedon, save the Egyptians (allowed to drop out after their patriarch's deposition), had to sign the Definition of Faith. Anti-Chalcedonian sources inform us of bishops who only signed the Definition under compulsion or whose signatures had to be provided by colleagues. Regularly throughout the council when a formal decision had to be reached, a period of open discussion (where the minutes are more likely to be selective than complete) would be closed by the senior bishop present delivering his judgement; this would be followed by similar pronouncements by other bishops, delivered in rough order of seniority. The total number of individual verdicts varied – 192 (almost all the bishops present) in the condemnation of Dioscorus in Session III, 161 in the approval of Leo's Tome in Session IV, a mere 18 in the reinstatement of Bishop Ibas of Edessa in Session X.

Acta conciliorum non leguntur – Nobody reads council acts. Eduard Schwartz's famous dictum is slowly being overtaken by recent scholarly interest, no longer only of theologians and historians of the Church, but also of historians of late antiquity. The fact that the first English translation of the Acts of Chalcedon appears in a series for historians is testimony to this development; it will surely spark many more studies into the riches of this material. With a distinctly historical rather than theological interest, new questions and scholarly perspectives open up. Yet, every examination must confront a number of difficulties of principle and of methodological and hermeneutical challenges arising from the character and the transmission of the body of conciliar records and documentation. In the case of the First Council of Ephesus and the acts associated with it, the complexity of the textual tradition, even more than the sheer volume of information, compounds this difficulty – so much so that their editor considered them to be more challenging in this respect than those of the Council of Chalcedon. Council acts are highly complex, elaborate products. In the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum seven (sub-) volumes of various Greek records and five of Latin translations and collections are concerned with the First Council of Ephesus.

Their editor Eduard Schwartz's principal insight was that the collections in which we find them are what he called publizistische Sammlungen, that is to say collections with a propagandistic purpose, a ‘spin’ we might say in an age of modern media manipulation.

The past, we are told, is eternally fixed and immutable. Against this assertion, and the restriction on human freedom that it implies, the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov (1866–1938) uttered a powerful protest. A supposed fact, such as Socrates' death by poison, might just be tolerable if it was restricted to a single historical period. ‘But’, he continued, –

Shestov surely exaggerates the sheer givenness of historical events. A death is certainly a death, and the cause of Socrates' death is not open to dispute, but many ‘facts’ of history have a more ambiguous character, and it is impossible to recount any event without some degree of interpretation. It should also be noted that no objective events are directly part of human experience: while they occur, they must be observed, and after they have occurred they survive only in memory. Historical memory can be reshaped by the historian. It is the reshaping in the age of Justinian (and at the ecumenical council of 553) of episodes in the Christological controversy of the mid-fifth century that is the subject of this essay.

‘Few councils have been so rooted in tradition as the Council of Chalcedon.’ The words are those of Aloys Grillmeier, from the conclusion of the first volume of his monumental work Christ in Christian Tradition, and they are words with which the bishops who gathered at Chalcedon in 451 would have wholeheartedly agreed. Yet what do we mean by ‘Christian tradition’? How did that tradition develop over time? Who had the authority to determine what would come to be regarded as traditional? All of our contemporary sources for the great controversies that divided the Christian Church in the fourth and fifth centuries appeal to the authority of the one true and unchanging Christian tradition. Yet at the heart of those controversies lies a debate over the very nature and interpretation of Christian tradition itself. In this short paper I wish to explore the place of the Council of Chalcedon in that debate and the evidence of the Acts of Chalcedon that have now become so much more accessible through the superb new translation and commentary that Richard Price and Michael Gaddis have brought before us.

In its broadest sense Christian tradition embraces everything handed down by the Church from the time of the apostles onwards, including doctrinal teachings, ethics, customs and liturgical practices. More narrowly, tradition represents the expression of the faith of the Church, preserving the Christian message revealed by Christ for later generations.

The repercussions of the Council of Chalcedon for both doctrinal questions and religious politics between east and west extended well beyond the fifth and sixth centuries into the seventh. The monothelete doctrine which prompted the papal Lateran Council of 649 was but the latest in a series of attempts by the Byzantine emperors to achieve reconciliation amongst the dissenting religious groups of the empire. The activities of the emperor Justinian to enforce doctrinal agreement had rather provoked disagreement and division, particularly a damaging schism in the west between the papacy – who had been forced into agreement with the emperor – and those bishops and areas which refused to accept the condemnation of the Three Chapters. Thus the aftermath of Chalcedon continued to shape relations between east and west, with the Byzantine emperors still seeking compromise and pacification within the east and the papacy anxious to avoid further schism amongst the western churches. The theological and linguistic divide between east and west, manifest in the mid-fifth century, had become wider and deeper by the seventh.

While the complexities of monotheletism have concerned historians and theologians rather less than those of miaphysitism, the controversy is a highly significant one, both theologically and politically. The questions concerning the will of Christ are of central importance to Christology. Their exposition at the Lateran Council of 649 was extensive and penetrating, and the council itself, as I will argue below, should be seen as a key moment in relations between the Byzantine emperors and the papacy.

In the study of the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, the canons attached to it are frequently neglected. This may be because no discussion of them is recorded in the official acts of 451. Nonetheless, in the oldest Latin version and the Greek manuscript tradition of the Acts of Chalcedon the twenty-seven canons are inserted as ‘the seventh act’, as if they formed part of the agreed record of the council. The debate over Canon 28, which is numbered to follow on from the other 27, forms the seventeenth session in the Greek acts and the sixteenth in the Latin. The canons became part of the ecclesiastical law of the Church and are cited in sixth-century lists.

The purpose of this short article is two-fold: to examine the fate of Canon 28, which confirmed the standing of Constantinople as the leading patriarchal see in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the east, with an authority comparable to that of Old Rome, and to trace the continuity of concern about particular features of clerical life which feature in the 27 canons. Since the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils of 553 and 680/1 were devoted to matters concerning the ‘mystery of the faith’, rather than ecclesiastical legislation, the gathering summoned by Justinian II in 692 was the first to devote itself to canonical legislation for 240 years.

Introduction

The Second Council of Ephesus and the Council of Chalcedon, called two years later, are inextricably linked, by their historical context, in their theological conclusions (in that the one was called with the deliberate intention of annulling measures taken at the other, and of having a new definition of faith adopted), and in the manuscript tradition through which the record of most of their proceedings is preserved. The Council of Ephesus, called by Theodosius II when, as it turned out by accident, his reign had little more than a year to run, represented an emphatic victory for the ‘miaphysite’ (one-nature) tendency in the Greek Church. The presidency was given to Dioscorus, bishop of Alexandria; Theodoret, as the most prominent remaining proponent of a ‘dyophysite’ (two-nature) Christology not in exile, was excluded; and the first session, held on 8 August 449, rehearsed in immense detail the record of proceedings against the extreme-miaphysite archimandrite Eutyches in the autumn of 448, and of hearings called to hear disputes over that record earlier in 449, before absolving Eutyches, and declaring the deposition of Flavian, bishop of Constantinople.

It is the quotation in the acts of the first session at Chalcedon, called by the new emperor Marcian, of this part of the proceedings, incorporating verbatim re-quotations of the records of the hearings held between autumn 448 and spring 449, that preserves for us the record in Greek of the first session at Ephesus, ending with the written affirmations (‘subscriptions’ – ὑπογραφαί) of 140 participants.

The publication in three volumes in the series Translated Texts for Historians of a complete English translation with notes of the materials relating to the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) by Richard Price and Michael Gaddis is a major event. For the first time this priceless dossier becomes readily accessible, and in English translation. This means that professional historians, theologians and students alike can have to hand in convenient form a collection of material which is of the utmost importance for understanding both the history of the Church and the history of late antiquity. Its publication coincides with the appearance of other works by historians dealing with church councils, in particular Fergus Millar's Sather Lectures, published in 2006, and related articles by him. Several recent works on the role of bishops in late antiquity, as well as many publications on the separation of the miaphysites, or non-Chalcedonians, in the sixth century, and on questions of orthodoxy and heresy, also underline the centrality of the negotiations and rivalries surrounding the ‘ecumenical’ councils of the fourth century and later.

The Church began from a very early date to resolve internal disagreements by means of meetings whose proceedings were in one way or another recorded; the earliest example is of course the debate within the Church of Jerusalem in the first century. In the context of a growing new religion which felt its mission to be universal, once the decision to proselytize among the gentiles had been made, local meetings (‘synods’) were ways of establishing communion, imposing order and designating hierarchy.

One of the more startling aspects of the conciliar acts is the regular recording of acclamations. To a modern reader, they appear intrusive and inappropriate, not least because in modern writing-based societies, cheering and shouting by groups has become increasingly marginalized: it is associated with disorder and disruption, even if it has an established role in certain situations, such as sporting events. This sense of what is appropriate is also influenced by a modern belief in the value of individual commitment. To a modern reader, the statements attributed to the individual bishops seem more significant than the ‘shouts’ of the group as a whole. But in a pre-individual society, such shouts have a very different significance.

Acclamations can be found throughout the ancient Near East, and in both the Jewish and the Graeco-Roman tradition. Their primary function must be one of communication in a non-literate form. In both cultures they seem to be closely associated with religious practice. When the people of Ephesus were being encouraged to oppose the Christian apostle Paul, the crowd in the theatre was encouraged to shout the cult acclamation ‘Great is Artemis of the Ephesians’. This will have been a familiar chant from their normal religious ceremonies; it is therefore understandable that they proceeded to repeat the acclamation over a period of two hours.

MONETARY STANDARDS

When Augustus established himself as the absolute ruler over the Roman Empire, he quickly realised the need for a stable monetary system across the Mediterranean. However, instead of fashioning an entirely new system, he reinstated the bimetallic standard that his uncle, Julius Caesar, put in place a few years earlier (47–46 BC). The Augustan monetary system was the following:

1. 4 bronze asses = 1 brass sestertius, 15 grains

2. 4 sestertii = 1 silver denarius, about 60 grains

3. 25 denarii = 1 gold aureus, 125 grains

Hence, the ratio between silver and gold was 12:1. The coins were of fine metal; in fact, aurei were struck at forty to the Roman pound, while denarii were struck at eighty-four to the Roman pound. The silver denarius was restored to 97.7–98 per cent fineness until the reign of Nero, while at least until the reign of Galba the aureus remained 98.33 per cent fine. Apart from the main denominations as they are described above, the Roman mints also issued half-aureus and half-denarius pieces, called gold and silver quinarius respectively. Apart from the stabilisation of the monetary system, Augustus was also responsible for the increasing production of lower-denomination coins. Orichalcum was used for the striking of sestertii (25 g) and dupondii (12.5 g) and copper was used for the as (11 g) and its quarter, quadrans (3 g). Despite the use of two different metals, all of these four denominations covered the need for small change in daily transactions.