Introduction
That heretics should be excluded from government was a political commonplace in the fifth and sixth centuries. Prohibitions on office-holding were part and parcel of enactments against religious deviants and a key part of attempts to establish the orthodox credentials of new or returning regimes. Religious diversity nevertheless remained a basic feature of political institutions in this period. Part of the reason that (supposed) heretics, pagans, Jews, and Samaritans continued to serve was that, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, correct religion was just one consideration in the routine management of central and provincial administration. Religious diversity also persisted because not every doctrinal or ecclesiastical difference was treated by rulers and their subordinates as a matter of heresiological categorisation and legal sanction. As a result, exclusion remained only one approach even for those regimes most invested in ensuring uniformity. A central insight of recent work on orthodoxy and heresy is just how hard bishops often had to work to translate their own notions of the true faith and church into political reality. Intense lobbying was needed even to get sympathetic rulers and officials, both to make legal judgements in their favour and to enforce them effectively amongst (rarely compliant) local communities. In this light, the confident legal pronouncements of the Theodosian dynasty regarding the exclusion of named groups were partly facilitated by their good fortune in coming to power at the end of a century of ecclesiastical wrangling. Fourth-century doctrinal controversies had brought greater theological homogeneity and institutional clarity within the imperial church. Banning Arians, Eunomians, and Priscillianists was easier in the 410s or 420s than it would have been half a century previously. These labels had become established heresiological categories with a clear (if not incontestable) frame of reference to bishops and communities excluded from the mainstream church. Acts of definition and exclusion became less feasible and desirable when controversies were ongoing and the dividing lines less clear cut. Even long-held definitions of orthodoxy and heresy could be relitigated. As in the fourth-century empire, regimes required alternative strategies to negotiate continued fault-lines within the aristocracies that provided the personnel for these political institutions and the collaboration critical for effective local governance.
This chapter considers how confessional differences conditioned alternative forms of religious conformity in East and West. In both political contexts, the easy certainties of late fourth-century doctrinal settlements were overtaken by new subjects of ecclesiastical conflict. In the Eastern Roman Empire, controversy around the episcopate of Nestorius of Constantinople (428–31) led to ongoing debates around how to understand the unity of humanity and divinity in Jesus Christ. The consensus achieved by ecumenical councils at Ephesus in 431 and 449 and Chalcedon in 451 was partial and short lived. These Christological disputes led to ongoing rifts, of which the most long lasting was the divide between proponents and opponents of the settlement of Chalcedon. New heresiological categorisations were developed and bishops unwilling to subscribe to the current standards of doctrinal orthodoxy were excluded from the imperial church. Yet, as Section 2.1 shows, these Christological disputes rarely produced attempts to exclude perceived heretics from the imperial state between Theodosius II and Justinian. The personnel policies of Eastern regimes are best understood in the context of their recurring efforts to seek a broad consensus within the imperial church. What seems to have mattered to emperors was outward conformity to their current working formulation of orthodoxy, even as this overlaid more complex personal inclinations and affiliations. Christological or ecclesiastical uniformity was rarely the impression gained by visitors to Constantinople. Instead, these episcopal petitioners sought to gain their bearings within complex and evolving currents of opinion and patterns of ecclesiastical patronage within palace and bureaucracy. Recent prosopographical studies of high officials at the time of Chalcedon and in the reigns of Anastasius and Justin I provide snapshots of an Eastern bureaucracy marked by the variety and elasticity of doctrinal and ecclesiastical affiliations. Even when contemporary descriptions of personal beliefs and connections to particular churches and holy persons suggest that particular office-holders possessed something like a confessional identity, these allegiances could be put to one side for administrative purposes. The capacity of seemingly Chalcedonian aristocrats to implement anti-Chalcedonian religious policies (and vice versa) makes sense given the form that requirements for office had begun to take. A fundamental but largely generic conformity was the premise of the pre-emptive guarantees introduced by late fifth- and early sixth-century regimes. Such personal and institutional flexibility was necessary in the context of ongoing imperial efforts to contain Christological disputation and its warring factions within a single ecclesiastical framework.
In the post-imperial West, the establishment of new rulers who adhered to Homoian Christianity called into question the (now traditional) proscription of that doctrinal formula as ‘Arian’ heresy and the correlative understanding of the Nicene Creed as a foundational statement of orthodoxy. These Christian debates and conflicts have traditionally been treated as radically different from earlier Trinitarian controversies and ongoing Christological disputes in the East. Recent work has argued forcefully and persuasively for their thoroughgoing continuity with the church conflicts of the later Roman Empire, not least when it came to the political approaches to religious difference taken by the new kings and their elite subjects.Footnote 1 Section 2.2 discusses the range of strategies that post-imperial rulers adopted to this new confessional fault-line within their political institutions. Vandal kings did adopt the anti-heretical measures of their imperial predecessors in excluding ‘Homoousian’ (i.e. Nicene) heretics from their palace and administration; their Burgundian, Ostrogothic and Visigothic counterparts did not. It seems telling that the pursuit of religious uniformity featured in post-Roman Gaul, Italy, and Spain only when previously pagan or Homoian rulers converted to Nicene Christianity. As in the fifth- and early sixth-century East, approaches to religious conformity within the state make most sense as part of wider policies of conciliation. The pragmatic rationale for such a personnel policy is obvious: if they were to establish sustainable power structures, these kings needed to integrate (largely Nicene) provincial elites into their political institutions alongside their pre-existing (and largely Homoian) followers. The key stakeholders within these new kingdoms found ways to play down this doctrinal difference. Regimes, bishops, and elite subjects in Gaul and Italy used non-polemical conceptual frameworks to discuss the presence of two parallel ecclesiastical communities under royal authority. These references to distinct (but implicitly legitimate) ‘churches’, ‘religions’, and ‘confessions’ suggest how adherents to mutually opposed Christian groups could coexist in royal service – and to kings who often staged themselves as pious Christian rulers – without (at least extant) public discussion of the potential contradictions involved.
2.1 Sharing the Emperor’s Opinion: Christology and Appointments in the Eastern Roman Empire
On 30 March 428, the regime of Theodosius II issued an impressively comprehensive law against ‘the insanity of the heretics’.Footnote 2 Theodosius’ drafter recapped previous measures against heresy and applied these to twenty-three sects; a reminder of prohibitions on imperial service topped and tailed the summary.Footnote 3 This encyclopaedic demonstration of the regime’s commitment to orthodoxy quickly went out of date, as the emperor’s recent pick for the bishop of Constantinople – who would later claim he had written this very law – became the subject of an empire-wide theological controversy.Footnote 4 Nestorius’ reluctance straightforwardly to adopt the term ‘Mother of God’ (Theotokos) as an epithet for the Virgin provoked a bitter dispute over the correct conception of the divine and human natures of Christ that would continue for centuries to come.Footnote 5 Attempted resolutions were central to the governance of the church in the Eastern Empire in this period. In the first place, Theodosius II’s regime tried the time-honoured strategy of an ecumenical council.Footnote 6 The emperor’s first go-round at Ephesus in 431 foundered on vague instructions and excessive trust in the capacity of an assembly of bishops to engage in open dialogue.Footnote 7 The attendees split into rival councils under Cyril of Alexandria (412–44) and Nestorius’ ally John of Antioch (429–41), which issued mutual anathemas and orders of deposition. As the pursuit of a resolution reverted back to imperial jurisdiction in discussions at Constantinople and Chalcedon, Nestorius chose retirement. The peace of the church was only salvaged by a new round of negotiations across 432–33, which resulted in the ‘Formula of Reunion’.Footnote 8 Both sides gave important ground: Cyril accepted an Eastern theological formula and most of the Easterners consented to Nestorius’ deposition. Nestorius himself would escape imperial sanction until the mid-430s, when the continued advocacy of his more avid supporters in Constantinople and the East required the formal condemnation and exile of the now heresiarch.Footnote 9 An uneasy peace held until a new round of controversy in 448 crystallised the basic theological conflict from then onwards.Footnote 10 The Formula of Reunion was pulled in one direction by Eastern bishops seeking a clearer statement of Christ as possessing two natures after the union and, in the other, by hardline supporters of Cyril pushing for the recognition of one nature (hence the modern scholarly terms ‘Dyophysite’ and ‘Miaphysite’). The next three years were marked by a series of dizzying U-turns. The condemnation of the archimandrite Eutyches at the Home Synod under Flavian of Constantinople (446–49) in November 448 – in part, for his refusal to recognise two natures after the union – was overturned the next year at the Second Council of Ephesus. In contrast to its previous ecumenical experiment, the regime of Theodosius II ensured that Ephesus II was tightly organised.Footnote 11 The chairman Dioscorus of Alexandria (444–51) secured the condemnation and deposition of Flavian alongside the leading bishops of the East, much to the displeasure of Leo of Rome (who had his own version of the two natures) and the western imperial regime. The death of Theodosius II led to the accession of Marcian and an even more closely managed council to overturn the work of Ephesus II.Footnote 12 A rotating team of current and ex-officials ran a series of assemblies in the autumn of 451 at Chalcedon, just across the Bosporus from the imperial palace. These senatorial chairmen helped to co-ordinate the condemnation of Eutyches and Dioscorus and the acceptance of a two-nature formula (predicated, in part, on Leo’s Tome), to the consternation of almost all the bishops present (who seemed to want anything but a new doctrinal statement). This combination of centralisation and coercion continued to mark Marcian’s ecclesiastical policy in the face of ongoing opposition to Chalcedon in the East.Footnote 13
The conflict that resulted between supporters and opponents of the council encouraged Marcian’s successors to seek new forms of compromise. The failure of consensus at Ephesus I (431), Ephesus II (449), and Chalcedon (451) – combined with an increasing sense amongst churchmen that their favoured council(s) represented the final word on the matter – resulted in a turn away from these meetings as an imperial strategy of dispute resolution.Footnote 14 Later fifth-century and early sixth-century emperors adopted even more centralised modes of doctrinal definition. Leo I (in 458), Basiliscus (twice in 476), and Zeno (in 482) circulated carefully worded position papers and invited the bishops under their authority to subscribe or lose their sees. The last of these documents (the Henotikon) sidestepped Chalcedon and thus sought to establish a broad consensus amongst moderate supporters and opponents of the council.Footnote 15 Although the Henotikon did not explicitly signal approbation or condemnation of the settlement of 451, it was increasingly interpreted in a Miaphysite or anti-Chalcedonian sense, especially in the last decade of the reign of Anastasius (r. 491–518). The Henotikon shaped the character of ecclesiastical politics in the East (and occasioned schism with the see of Rome) until the accession of Justin I in 518.Footnote 16 The new emperor pursued an ecclesiastical policy based on a return to Chalcedon and reconciliation with Rome.Footnote 17 Although support for Chalcedon was the basis of Eastern imperial governance of the church from this point onwards, it was not the end of the compromise politics that had encapsulated much of the previous eight decades.Footnote 18 Justinian, Justin II, and Tiberius II continued to seek a new doctrinal settlement – and an appropriate formulation of the patristic and conciliar past – which would reintegrate the (still numerous and vocal) opponents of Chalcedon into the mainstream imperial church.Footnote 19
This brief summary cannot do full justice to the complexities of these theological debates and ecclesiastical politics; it is also far from capturing the full extent of imperial involvement within them. The conciliar transcripts, imperial orders, and episcopal letters preserved in fifth- and sixth-century documentary collections (and now most frequently accessed through the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum) make plain the involvement of all levels of the Eastern imperial state. It is thus striking that emperors in this period rarely seem to have decided that the implementation of these new formulations of orthodoxy required them to purge the state (as opposed to removing bishops from the ‘imperial’ church). In his fourth edict after Chalcedon (of 18 July 452), Marcian applied the normal legal measures against heretical sects to ‘those who are deceived by the madness of Eutyches in the manner of the Apollinarians’, with specific provisions for bishops, clerics, monks, and those in imperial service.Footnote 20 These measures were reissued on 1 August 455 in a general law that nevertheless made specific and repeated reference to Egypt, Alexandria, and its Chalcedonian bishop Proterius (451–57): an obvious indicator that the failure of a recent mission to anti-Chalcedonian monks in the city had provoked its issue.Footnote 21 On other occasions when Christological error was treated as a subject of legal categorisation, extant constitutions do not discuss imperial service. It is plausible that this absence is exaggerated by the Justinianic Code, whose sections ‘On the Highest Trinity and on the Catholic Faith and that No-One Should Dare Dispute About it Publicly’ and ‘On Heretics, Manichaeans, and Samaritans’ skip straight from the pro-Chalcedonian Marcian and Leo to Justin and Justinian (with the exception of a short anti-Manichaean excerpt from Zeno (r. 474–91) or Anastasius).Footnote 22 The compilers would have been unlikely to include explicitly anti-Chalcedonian enactments within the new Code. It is likewise possible that earlier generalising edicts against heretics in service were understood to apply to those whose Christological views fell outside the preferred definitions of fifth- and early sixth-century emperors. Yet even beyond the realm of codified legislation, the absence of references to the removal of those who opposed the emperor’s preferred doctrinal and conciliar stance is striking. After Marcian’s edict of 455, the next mentions of orders to exclude supporters or opponents of Chalcedon are the expulsions of Miaphysite generals in Egypt by Justinian in 539 and of Miaphysite courtiers and high officials under Justin II in 571.Footnote 23 It is perhaps telling that when Justin and Justinian issued a new generalising anti-heretical law (most likely in 527), they made the notable (if obviously self-interested) claim that prohibitions on heretics in the state had not been rigorously enforced in recent times.Footnote 24 Excepting the measures of Marcian in the aftermath of Chalcedon, specific legal categorisation and exclusion does not seem to have been the approach taken by Eastern imperial regimes to ensure sufficient doctrinal conformity within the state. This is not to suggest that Christological orthodoxy was seen not to matter in appointments to the imperial state in the period from Theodosius II to Justin and Justinian. Rather, it is to argue that such demands for uniformity took a distinctive form as a result of imperial positioning and the character of ecclesiastical allegiances in these ongoing disputes.
The lack of extant legislation against, attested removal of, or definitive preferences for Chalcedonian or anti-Chalcedonian officials makes sense in the context of imperial policies towards complex Christological debates. Numerous emperors sought to maintain a fragile consensus through a studied doctrinal ambiguity. Even after the decisive turn back to Chalcedon under Justin, Eastern regimes continued to seek forms of accommodation with Miaphysite communities. The intractability of these disputes resulted in repeated attempts to secure common positions that would remain palatable to rival groups while excluding what the majority saw as clear and obvious errors.Footnote 25 The maintenance of a balanced compromise was the default setting of imperial interventions, whether the relevant standard of orthodoxy was the Formula of Reunion, the Henotikon, or indeed Chalcedon itself. These attempts to delineate a broad spectrum of acceptable Christian interpretation did not lend themselves to the identification and removal of closely bounded groups. Even those heresiological labels created in the period did not effectively delimit those whom a conscientious emperor might exclude. Less charitable observers on either side applied terms like ‘Nestorian’, ‘Apollinarian’ and ‘Eutychian’ to those still within the bounds of an imperially sanctioned doctrinal consensus, whether it was accusing bishops in the diocese of the East in the 430s and 440s and supporters of Chalcedon from the 450s onwards of following the heresy of Nestorius, or suggesting that the Miaphysite doctrine favoured by hard-line supporters of Cyril in the 430s and 440s and opponents of the latter council had been condemned in the persons of Apollinaris and (after 448) Eutyches.Footnote 26 In this sense, Marcian’s edicts against ‘Eutychians’ and ‘Apollinarians’ were the product of a moment of unusually confrontational delineation of the boundaries of the correct faith. Personnel policies that explicitly excluded those seen as doctrinally problematic could have undermined efforts to keep imperial orthodoxy within the parameters of a common ground.
The lack of what might be termed a ‘sectarian’ mindset is similarly evident from patterns of appointment. Later fifth-century emperors certainly showed favour to specific individuals committed to their vision of Christological orthodoxy. The personal doctrinal views of the Miaphysites Theoctistus (magister officiorum under Basiliscus) and Marinus (praetorian prefect under Anastasius) seem to have been a key part of the reason they were preferred as advisors.Footnote 27 But these imperial preferences did not translate into a more systematic pursuit of Christological or ecclesiastical uniformity within the state. Across this period, representatives of various ecclesiastical factions sought to gauge and influence Christian loyalties within the palace and central administration. To these episcopal petitioners, the most notable feature of the Eastern court was the complexity of its ecclesiastical allegiances. Representatives of both the rival episcopal groupings at and after Ephesus I (431) found plausible indications of support amidst shifting currents of theological and ecclesiastical opinion.Footnote 28 After Chalcedon (451) created a new fault-line in ecclesiastical politics, opponents of the council claimed similar sympathies in the Senate;Footnote 29 once Zeno and Anastasius tacked towards a moderate anti-Chalcedonian stance, the council’s champions likewise found senators willing to act as patrons.Footnote 30 The openness of palace, consistory, and administration even to ecclesiastical factions in imperial disfavour does not fit with a requirement that appointees adhere to an exclusive formulation of orthodoxy.
Part of the reason for this openness is the flexibility of the ecclesiastical affiliations of those appointed to high office. These sympathies could in fact be suspiciously pliable: the changing attitudes of key members of Theodosius II’s consistory during and after the Council of Ephesus (431) provoked numerous accusations of sharp practice.Footnote 31 Prosopographical studies of the Constantinopolitan senate across two major U-turns in imperial religious policy have highlighted the range of ecclesiastical connections and potential doctrinal affiliations present within the imperial state. The attendance, along with the emperor, of thirty-eight current and former imperial officials at the sixth session of Chalcedon on 25 October 451 to hear the new definition of orthodoxy represented a powerful symbol of Christian unity within the imperial establishment. This public demonstration of collective agreement overlaid a much wider spectrum of current and former opinion, as Geoffrey De Ste. Croix’s lucid presentation of the known ecclesiastical connections of these imperial commissioners demonstrates.Footnote 32 Several of these commissioners were likely sympathetic to the bishops from the East (and their dyophysite Christological position): most securely – and most notably – the effective president of the council, the magister militum Anatolius.Footnote 33 The senatorial party also included (erstwhile?) supporters of Cyril and Eutyches, as well as two former officials who had been heavily involved in the conciliar activity just two years before, which had resulted in a Miaphysite formulation and the deposition of leading Eastern bishops.Footnote 34 The split engendered by the council did not mean an end to this complexity. As Christoph Begass has persuasively argued, support for or opposition to Chalcedon did not become an organising principle in the factional politics of the senatorial aristocracy until c. 500. Even as pro- and anti-Chalcedonian groupings become more visible amongst the senatorial aristocracy in the first decades of the sixth century, ‘we are not dealing with solid blocs, which opposed each other irreconcilably and permitted no crossover – especially as the religious beliefs of the protagonists were not so rigid that they can always be fitted into distinct categories’.Footnote 35 In fact, as Begass, Geoffrey Greatrex, and Mischa Meier have demonstrated, the allegiances of Anastasius’ and Justin I’s appointees are often difficult to pin down. Anastasius’ consistory included probable supporters of Chalcedon who facilitated anti-Chalcedonian religious policies and probable opponents who pivoted to a Chalcedonian line under Justin and Justinian.Footnote 36 The continued service of the likes of Fl. Patricius, Fl. Probus, Fl. Hypatius, and Celer through the messy regime change from Anastasius to Justin is particularly telling.Footnote 37 If late fifth- and early sixth-century rulers did not legislate against Chalcedonian or Miaphysite officials, it was (in part) because of the willingness of appointees to put personal beliefs to one side in service of the emperor and the (usually moderate) doctrinal stance that he sought to establish.
The capacity to enact the religious policies, both of an explicitly anti-Chalcedonian ruler and of an outspoken champion of Chalcedon suggests the capacity of careerists to ‘trim’ their sails to the prevailing Christological winds.Footnote 38 Less cynically, these prosopographical analyses highlight how the actions taken by those within the imperial administration did not straightforwardly map onto their personal religious inclinations (and cannot always allow us to reconstruct them).Footnote 39 Anastasius’ magister militum praesentalis Patricius and magister officiorum Celer represent a case in point. The confusion around their doctrinal affiliations results in large measure from their efforts to implement imperial policies. The case for Patricius as a ‘decisive supporter of Severus’ (so Christoph Begass) is based on his involvement in the downfall of Macedonius (496–511), as orchestrated by Anastasius, and hosting of discussions between the Miaphysite leader and John of Claudioupolis in his home in Constantinople sometime between 508 and 511, which took place (according to Severus) ‘by order of our pious king’.Footnote 40 Likewise, his portrayal as a probable ‘pragmatic’ Chalcedonian (so Geoffrey Greatrex) stems from his facilitation of Justin’s pro-Chalcedonian turn through receipt of a request for help from Pope Hormisdas in January 519 and removal of Paul of Edessa for refusal to accept Chalcedon in November 519.Footnote 41 Celer’s conflicting interventions in ecclesiastical politics can similarly be tied to imperial orders and priorities: it is not clear how either the removal of Macedonius or the communication of the emperor’s request that Severus (as bishop of Antioch) reinstate Chalcedonian bishops can bear the weight of a confessional allegiance.Footnote 42 The presence of officials at church councils and their interventions to remove or reinstate particular bishops may have implicated their doctrinal and ecclesiastical loyalties. Their specific allegiances and facility in the relevant questions likely contributed to their selection for such missions. Yet these missions remained (in the first place) issues of policy and procedure.Footnote 43 Where the affiliations and networks of imperial commissioners are identifiable, they seem (as at Chalcedon) to have subsumed these beneath the mandate which they had been entrusted.Footnote 44 The public expression of their Christian identities was mediated by their implication in ecclesiastical policies determined by the palace and administration.
Personal favour shown to particular bishops and ascetics through the granting of audiences and access and the facilitation of their requests likely provides a clearer indicator of support for their doctrinal formula.Footnote 45 At the same time, the provision of a certain degree of patronage to ecclesiastical dignitaries was part and parcel of the responsibilities of the emperor’s subordinates. So (for example), Theodosius II’s praetorian prefects Taurus and Florentius are known to have received requests from opposing ecclesiastical factions in the decades after Ephesus.Footnote 46 Such accessibility was particularly important when regimes sought to keep open the possibility that marginalised bishops and communities might be reintegrated into the imperial church. It is important to note how much De Ste. Croix’s reconstruction of patterns of ecclesiastical allegiance at Chalcedon relies on the letters and patronage networks of Theodoret of Cyrrhus. That Theodoret sent missives to the praetorian prefect Protogenes and the patricius Senator in 448/9 asking for help in overturning his house arrest – and to the magister officiorum John Vincomalus in early 451 thanking him for his part in its cancellation – might suggest that he saw them as allies of the Dyophysite party.Footnote 47 We might get a very different sense of the lay of the land if we could see the (almost certainly overlapping) requests made and allegiances claimed by other ecclesiastical petitioners in the late 440s and early 450s.Footnote 48 If the Christian identities of fifth- and sixth-century Eastern officials often cannot be pinned down to a simple confessional allegiance, it is a result of not only personal but also institutional flexibility.
Personal adherence to a specific Christological interpretation seems to have been less important to imperial regimes than a willingness to maintain those emperors’ priorities in their interactions with representatives of the church. Regimes seem to have wanted to promote, not so much co-religionists, but rather those who were willing publicly to profess and support the (evolving) imperial line on orthodoxy. As Begass has suggested, the conformity that emperors sought from their officials (as from their bishops) was ‘public affirmation of the prevailing doctrine (that is, the one advocated by the emperor)’.Footnote 49 Such an approach makes sense, not only of the attested actions of known officials but also of extant late fifth- and early sixth-century legislation on the orthodoxy of appointees. The turn from the exclusion of heretics to pre-emptive requirements for Christian orthodoxy dovetails neatly, both with the absence of anti-heretical legislation and the pursuit of broad Christological consensus within the imperial church. As Michael Wuk has persuasively argued, the demands for witnesses and oaths made by Leo I, Anastasius, and Justinian left useful ambiguity over the contours of the orthodoxy to which the candidate subscribed. Even the more detailed oath for imperial governors issued by Justinian in 533 represented (in Wuk’s words) ‘a general affirmation of support for a sanitized version of imperial Christianity’, which skirted ‘problematic sectarian issues’.Footnote 50 Ongoing efforts to ensure consensus and harmony likely precluded narrower restrictions of what ‘orthodoxy’ meant in practice, even as an imperial regime would inevitably expect its appointees to support its own definitions of the appropriate patristic and conciliar precedents.Footnote 51 Without the clear break of a historical separation of supposedly ‘heretical’ sects from the imperial church, demands for conformity had to be framed in different terms, even by emperors who issued laws to exclude named groups. For the purposes of office-holding, the personal affiliations of their subordinates were partially overwritten by their certificates of appointment, which (at some point before the 520s) began to specify their ‘orthodoxy’.Footnote 52 By requiring this minimal, public, and above all practical conformity, Eastern regimes could seek an ‘orthodox’ state while continuing to employ officials who personally adhered to a wide spectrum of Christological opinion.
2.2 ‘Your Religion and Ours’: Homoian Regimes and Nicene Christians in the Post-Imperial West
‘Therefore it is necessary and most just to turn round against them that which is contained in those laws, which, since the emperors of various times were induced to error with them, happened then to be promulgated.’Footnote 53 On 24 February 484, the Vandal king Huneric published a systematic law against heresy within his kingdom. This edict was issued in the aftermath of a conference held in Carthage in February 484 that had failed to settle the central dispute splitting the North African church.Footnote 54 In Huneric’s view, the proceedings had shown one party to be at fault. The ‘obstinacy’ of these ‘heretics’ in avoiding a proper debate and reopening their churches without permission demonstrated that they deserved to be punished.Footnote 55 The Vandal king (and his drafter) thus turned to the appropriate legal provisions developed by later Roman emperors (and handily available in book 16.5 of the Theodosian Code). The resultant edict provided a detailed summary of the measures adopted in previous anti-heretical legislation. The details were drawn for the most part from an anti-Donatist edict promulgated by Honorius on 30 January 412: an unsurprising recourse insofar as that law had also followed a conference in Carthage between two conflicting church parties (which Huneric’s own meeting deliberately emulated). Amidst a recapitulation of how ‘the aforementioned emperors also raged similarly against the laity’, Huneric recounted how these provisions went so far that,
They would even make those who served in their palaces subject to the most grave condemnation because of their rank, that with every privilege of their position taken from them, they might incur disgrace (infamia) and recognise themselves to be subject to the same law as everyone else. A penalty of thirty pounds of gold was also enacted for the office staffs of various judges which, if it happened that they persisted in error and paid five times, then at last such people, once they had been convicted and subject to a beating, would be sent into exile.Footnote 56
Alongside these punishments for palace officials and gubernatorial staffs, Huneric’s drafter reproduced Honorius’ graded financial penalties for unrepentant Donatists, starting with inlustres, spectabiles, and senatores.Footnote 57 The conclusion of this law applied all these facets of late Roman legislation to any members of the relevant heretical sect who did not convert to orthodoxy by 1 June 484. Honorius’ fines were specifically assigned to ‘those who remain in the same error, whether they are occupied by service in our household or perhaps are in charge of various functions and offices’.Footnote 58 In Huneric’s view, the application of such measures was particularly appropriate given the identity of those proscribed. For the group to whom the Vandal king gave three months to conform were ‘Homoousian’ heretics: that is, followers of the Nicene Creed (325) and adherents to the mainstream Catholic Christianity of the fifth-century West. It was representatives of this heresy who had persuaded Huneric’s imperial predecessors to implement coercive measures against their ecclesiastical opponents. Now those same Nicene Christians were the fitting recipients of their own ‘evil designs’.Footnote 59
Huneric’s law of 25 February 484 captures a major reversal in the post-imperial West.Footnote 60 The fifth and early sixth centuries saw the gradual establishment of new kingdoms as ‘barbarian’ warbands settled in the provinces of the (soon to be former) western Roman Empire. Not the least surprising aspect of this process of political disintegration and reformation was the religious affiliation of many of the new rulers. The leaders of several groups adhered to a Homoian form of Christianity, which understood the Son to be ‘like’ the Father (similis in Latin; homoios in Greek, hence ‘Homoian’), in contradistinction to the Nicene formula (‘of the same substance’, homoousios in Greek, hence the heresiological label of ‘Homoousian’). This doctrinal formulation had originally developed as a compromise solution within the fourth-century Trinitarian controversies; its high point was the promulgation of a Homoian creed by the twin councils of Rimini and Seleucia under Constantius II in 359–60. Already in the 350s, hardline supporters of Nicaea dismissed the ‘likeness’ of Father and Son as Arian heresy; over the following three decades, the rest of the mainstream imperial church came around to their way of thinking, and from the reign of Theodosius I onwards, proponents of this form of Christianity were excluded from the mainstream imperial church.Footnote 61 But this was not the end for this alternative orthodoxy. Through (often murky) processes of cultural contact, imperial diplomacy, and missionary activity, it became a favoured form of Christianity amongst several of the groups that went on to settle in the western provinces and form new kingdoms: the Visigoths in Aquitaine and Spain; the Vandals in Africa and across various Mediterranean islands; the Burgundians in the Rhône valley; and the Ostrogoths in Italy, Provence, and the Balkans.Footnote 62 Burgundian, Ostrogothic, Vandal and Visigothic kings patronised Homoian clerics and churches within their kingdoms. The result was a fundamental religious difference between the new rulers and the dominant ecclesiastical institutions of their territories – not to mention, most of their subjects.
This theological divergence provoked a spectrum of royal and ecclesiastical responses, of which Huneric’s edict of 25 February 484 represents one extreme.Footnote 63 Vandal kings more generally were outliers in the post-imperial West for their willingness (at least on occasion) to make their support for Homoian Christianity a matter of strict religious uniformity and to do so with reference to the personnel of their households and administration. Even before his conquest of Carthage, Huneric’s father Geiseric had executed four elite Hispano-Roman followers apparently as a result of their Nicene Christianity.Footnote 64 According to the (chronologically vague) reports of Victor of Vita’s History of the Persecution of the African Province, Nicene Christians were excluded from royal service on at least four occasions between the conquest of Carthage in 439 and the death of Huneric in autumn 484.Footnote 65 At some point in the second half of his reign (c. 458–74), ‘Geiseric … decreed that only Arians were to be placed in the various offices (ministeria) within his and his sons’ court.’Footnote 66 Victor of Vita followed this statement with accounts of the torture and punishment of three palace attendants framed as stories of martyrdom.Footnote 67 Huneric himself twice sought Christian uniformity in royal service before the Conference of 484. Sometime between 478 and 480, the king removed the annonae and stipendia of those whom Victor described as ‘the people of our religion at his court’ before sending them into penal exile.Footnote 68 At a later date (but before the spring of 483), a further order was made ‘that no-one could serve in his palace nor carry out public duties unless they made themselves Arian’; those who refused had their property confiscated and were sent to Sicily or Sardinia.Footnote 69 This more systematic frame of reference to the civil administration of the kingdom was repeated in Huneric’s edict of 25 February 484, reflecting his regime’s intensive use of its mechanisms of government against the Nicene Church in this period.Footnote 70 The proconsul Victorianus and the palace attendant Dagila (wife of the king’s cellarer) were amongst the Nicene victims whose sufferings in the spring and summer of 484 were recounted in the third book of Victor’s History.Footnote 71 The unusual intensity of religious coercion in the last year of Huneric’s reign seems to have abated after the king’s death.Footnote 72 Christian uniformity within the state remained a subject of potential concern. An allusion in the Abecedarium, a polemical poem written by Fulgentius of Ruspe at some point in the reign of Thrasamund (496–523), refers to a prohibition on Nicene Christians serving the king (militare).Footnote 73 As part of their repeated recourse to legal categorisation and enforcement, Vandal kings sought to uphold (their) orthodoxy within the state.
It must be stressed that, as in earlier and parallel contexts, the articulation and practical enforcement of these (global and principled) requirements was intermittent and specific (as, more broadly, the use of religious coercion against Nicene Christians in the kingdom).Footnote 74 Alternative rationales remained available: Victor of Vita portrayed some of Geiseric’s Nicene courtiers receiving royal entreaties to convert given their exceptional loyalty and expertise.Footnote 75 The East Roman historian Procopius of Caesarea went so far as to claim that Thrasamund practised a pragmatic tolerance in such matters. ‘To be sure, he [Thrasamund] forced the Christians to change their ancestral doctrine … but he pretended not to know in the least what sort [of Christian] those who refused were.’Footnote 76 Individual advantage was at play: ‘honours’ (timais) and ‘offices’ (archais) were on offer for those who conformed.Footnote 77 In his deliberate myopia, Thrasamund was likely aided by the fuzziness of ecclesiastical affiliations in palace and wider political institutions, outwith the moments of stark clarity wrought by the enforcement of requirements to conform.Footnote 78 It is by no means a certainty that those elites who served the Vandal kings saw or presented a specific form of Trinitarian doctrine as the definitive feature of their Christian identities in the manner assumed by royal edicts and Nicene polemics. Even those who we can be confident (eventually) did – the individuals spotlighted by Victor of Vita for their choice of punishment over conformity to Homoian Christianity – are notable for their capacity to serve those kings as Nicene Christians before the implementation of a royal edict forced their hands. As in parallel courtly contexts, the character of elite sociability could permit and encourage a more fluid approach, which allowed aristocrats to assert a Christian prestige that downplayed or transcended ecclesiastical differences.
The pursuit of religious uniformity on confessional lines was subject to the same practical limitations in Vandal Carthage as in other late ancient political environments. A requirement that those in royal service conform to Homoian Christianity was nevertheless understood as part of the culture of the palaces and administration beyond individual episodes of enforcement. Nicene polemical texts from across this period show an abiding concern for the conflicting demands of royal service and loyalty to (what they saw as) the true faith.Footnote 79 The most referenced of these episodes are Victor of Vita’s exemplary stories of officials who, when given the chance to continue in post, decided instead to become martyrs or confessors. A series of invented dialogues between ‘Catholics’ and ‘Arians’ written under Vandal rule also show a notable interest in defining the doctrinal affiliation and ethical positioning with regard to ‘heretical’ rulership of the civil officials introduced as judge characters.Footnote 80 The exclusion of ‘Homoousian’ heretics from Vandal palace and administration represented an ongoing legal and discursive framework with which the subjects of the Hasding dynasty felt the need to engage.
The Hasding dynasty’s sense of the theoretical necessity and potential implementation of Christian confessional uniformity within the state is notably absent elsewhere in the post-imperial West. The absence of such assertions and provisions is part of a wider dearth of anti-heretical legislation. By contrast to Huneric’s compendious citation of earlier imperial measures on correct religion, these prohibitions and punishments were entirely omitted from the fifth- and sixth-century legal codes and enactments of the Frankish, Burgundian, and Ostrogothic rulers.Footnote 81 The prudentes whom Alaric II (r. 484–507) commissioned to produce a compilation of Roman law for his kingdom (issued in February 507) did preserve Theodosius II’s novel against Jews and Samaritans from January 438 and that of Valentinian III against Manichaeans from April 445 (with their exclusions of those groups from imperial service). The Breviary of Alaric nevertheless excised the anti-heretical laws of book 16.5 from its reduced version of the Theodosian Code.Footnote 82 The pattern is similar in the canons of sixth-century Frankish and Visigothic church councils, which increasingly represented a forum for royal as well as ecclesiastical governance.Footnote 83 As David Freidenreich has encapsulated, these Nicene episcopal assemblies foresaw notably differential treatment for Jews, as opposed to heretics and pagans within their respective jurisdictions. One of the specific guidelines that they repeatedly invoked was (as the bishops gathered at a Gallic council in 535 put it), ‘That Jews should not be placed above Christians as judges’.Footnote 84 Concerns to exclude heterodox individuals from political service were thus still sometimes voiced but not in relation to ‘Homoousian’ (or indeed ‘Arian’) Christians.
The decisions of the compilers to omit such rulings are most easily comprehensible on the backdrop of wider attempts by Homoian rulers and their subjects to avoid pursuing the potential heresiological implications of contemporary doctrinal differences. With one dubious exception, there are no extant reports of Burgundian, Frankish, Ostrogothic, or Visigothic rulers pursuing the exclusion of Nicene appointees.Footnote 85 The most obvious personnel policies of the first western successor kingdoms point in the opposite direction. The central problematic of modern scholarship on the post-Roman West has been increasingly detailed analysis of the manner in which these regimes appealed to the provincial Roman aristocracies whose collaboration was crucial to the viability of these new political arrangements. The provision of continued opportunities to display their status through office-holding has been seen as a key reason why Gallo-Roman, Hispano-Roman, and Romano-African elites turned away from the imperial centre to their ‘Rome at home’.Footnote 86 The need to integrate these local and provincial powerbrokers into the palace and administration made personnel policies rooted in religious uniformity significantly less appealing. As I will discuss further in Chapter 7, similar relationships had to be built with Nicene bishops and churches given their basic expectations of patronage from Christian rulers. The seeming inevitability of both considerations is part of what makes the decisions of Vandal regimes to enforce their own orthodoxy so fascinating, especially as their own policy choices also seem often to have been driven by the same concerns. Like fourth-century emperors, post-Roman kings were able to stage themselves as pious Christian rulers and patrons of the church without pursuing uniformity within their political institutions.Footnote 87
Such deliberate inattention was possible because of the cultivation of non-sectarian ways of thinking about religious identities and the differences between Nicene and Homoian Christians and churches. As part of polite discourse, regimes, appointees, and bishops alike seem to have tried to make Christian affiliation a non-issue. Sam Cohen has recently highlighted the use of ‘descriptive’ (as opposed to ‘accusatory’) language and terminology for Christian difference in Ostrogothic Italy.Footnote 88 The Ostrogothic kings Theoderic (r. 493–526) and Athalaric (r. 526–34) and the bishops of Rome Gelasius and Vigilius chose terms that acknowledged their separate churches and religious loyalties without triumphalising or pathologising them: ‘the other communion’ (altera communio); ‘your religion and ours’ (vestra et nostra religio); ‘the other religion’ (aliena religio); ‘our church’ (ecclesia nostra).Footnote 89 Avitus of Vienne could adopt similar language with reference to the Homoian churchmen patronised by the Burgundian Gundobad in Gaul.Footnote 90 Gundobad’s attempts to bring together and support both Homoian and Nicene clerics suggest a similar desire to reduce the charge of mutual sectarian oppositions (even as heresiological antagonisms remain visible in both kingdoms).Footnote 91 As in the post-Chalcedonian Eastern Empire, the acceptance of Christian diversity within the state seems to have been keyed to wider policies of ecclesiastical consensus.
The rare moments in which uniformity amongst the king’s appointees comes close to being thematised outside of Africa occur when this pursuit of confessional consensus was no longer necessary. When post-Roman rulers converted to Nicene Christianity, they were portrayed as bringing their ‘peoples’ and households with them. The conversions of Clovis (r. 481–511), Reccared (r. 586–601), and Æthelberht (r. 589–616) were staged and received by contemporaries as the conversion of the Franks, Goths, and Angli (respectively).Footnote 92 These ethnic labels did not simply connote communities of descent but represented flexible and evolving frames of reference. Already in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, such terms could be understood to encompass a broad swathe of the king’s followers: both his warband (now settled on land as an army of service) and his courtiers and appointees (potentially even provincial Roman aristocrats).Footnote 93 By the end of the sixth century, the increasing association of leadership of a privileged ‘people’ with rule over a kingdom meant that ethnic labels were increasingly used as shorthand for the political community in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain.Footnote 94 It is thus plausible that these collective acts of conversion engendered particular expectations of the religious affiliations of those office-holders who called themselves, or were perceived as, ‘Franks’ or ‘Goths’ from then on. Events in 580s Spain provide the most clear-cut example of their salience for royal advisors and office-holders. In 580, the Visigothic king Leovigild sought a new compromise between the Nicene and Homoian churches in the kingdom, which was later portrayed by Spanish Nicene authors as an attempt to trick his Hispano-Roman subjects into accepting Arian heresy. Isidore of Seville’s suggestion that Leovigild used offers of gold and property to sweeten the deal is similar to the accusations of worldly advancement levelled against his earlier Vandal counterparts.Footnote 95 Nine years later, Leovigild’s son Reccared choreographed the collective conversion of the Goths and Sueves as well as the ‘Arian’ clerics of his kingdom at the Council of Toledo (589).Footnote 96 The seniores Gothorum who signed on behalf of their people likely represented prominent royal advisers and civil or military leaders. The implication of this abandonment of Homoian Christianity in a series of revolts against Reccared in the late 580s and early 590s suggests that conversion of the ruling elite was seen as particularly necessary.Footnote 97 But it must be stressed that, at Toledo itself, those who specifically served the king were not marked out as a group whose conformity mattered. In his speech Reccared instead portrayed this as an act beneficial to his kingdom, his subjects (populi), and the ‘noble people of the Goths’ (gens Gothorum inclyta).Footnote 98 The lack of references to service or office likely stemmed from changes to the character and perception of the state by the end of the sixth century: the militarisation of office and aristocratic status, the increasing overlap of the jurisdictions of civil and ecclesiastical office-holders, and a more direct association of ‘public’ authority and ‘private’ lordship.Footnote 99 Although office-holders were still the subject of concerns for religious uniformity in kingdoms where rulership was staged in increasingly ministerial terms,Footnote 100 these particular men had become less distinct as a group amongst the king’s elite subjects.
Conclusion
Fundamental doctrinal and ecclesiastical differences impinged on the religious policies of regimes and the religious identities of administrators in East and West; these latent differences and active controversies generally did not result in the identification and exclusion of heretics. The absence of laws against named groups and purges of nonconformists is startling on many levels. The exclusion of heretics from the state had become a basic feature of Christian rulership by the Theodosian dynasty; parallel concerns around non-Christians and other heretical groups continued in this period. Indeed, the Hasding dynasty in North Africa and the emperor Marcian in the aftermath of Chalcedon did pursue orthodoxy within their political institutions along these new fault-lines. The willingness of post-imperial kings and Eastern emperors to allow Homoousians, Nestorians, Eutychians, and supporters or opponents of Chalcedon to serve is an index of their desire not to make these differences into a black-and-white issue of orthodoxy and heresy. Eastern emperors repeatedly sought to include within the imperial church a broad swathe of Christological opinion and representatives of differing doctrinal traditions and ecclesiastical factions. Post-imperial kings attempted to maintain two parallel and implicitly legitimate churches within their spheres of authority. These policies of Christian consensus made the Christian beliefs and allegiances of their administrators less of a subject of scrutiny, so long as those appointees were willing to implement their rulers’ approaches to ecclesiastical politics. This pursuit of conformity over uniformity was made easier by the flexibility of these affiliations (especially in the East), which did not always straightforwardly map onto either ancient heresiological or modern analytical categories. The necessity of administrative neutrality in affairs of the church – as well as obedience to direct imperial commands – likely eased the dilemmas provoked by policies that did not match personal theological proclivities. When the patronage and even vindication of heretics could seem a matter of bureaucratic duty, it should not surprise us that (seemingly) Chalcedonian or anti-Chalcedonian office-holders could carry out disciplinary actions against their own apparent inclinations. Public conformity to the ruler’s religious policy seems to have been the basic requirement of Christians in these political institutions. In this way, self-consciously Christian rulers could seek to uphold Christian orthodoxy within their territories while employing officials who did not agree with them on what that meant.
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