Peeling back several layers of theological onion skins, we come at last to the religious nub at the heart of the Acacian and Laurentian schisms: the Henotikon. This was the Edict of Union issued in 482 by Zeno to the Churches of both East and West, intended to resolve a dispute which had broken out subsequent to the Council of Chalcedon of 451. That Council had decreed that Christ had two natures, human and divine (una persona, duae naturae), a doctrine fiercely opposed by the monophysites (strongest in the Eastern sees of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria), i.e., those who believed that Christ had only one nature (divine), but happily accepted by most Western bishops; after all, the Chalcedonian formula had been devised by none other than Pope Leo in his famous Tome. The dispute (with strident personalities such as Timothy ‘the Weasel’ and Timothy ‘the White Hat’ throwing oil on the flames) flared up again when one Peter Mongus, an opponent of Chalcedon, gained control of the See of Alexandria and began to correspond with Acacius, the new philo-monophysite Bishop of Constantinople, who devised the wording of the Henotikon. In the West, the Henotikon (full of crafty circumlocution surely designed to obscure the fact that it was pro-monophysite) was seen as a fudge, hostile to Chalcedon, and as a result rejected wholesale. Then Pope Anastasius (496-98), at first cool towards the Henotikon, seemed — in a volte-face which cost him the allegiance of many Western clergy — to be veering towards acceptance of it by the time Festus returned from his mission to Emperor Anastasius.* (Pay attention!) As part of Festus’ mission was to secure acceptance of the Henotikon by the West, and as Festus was Laurentius’ patron, it can be assumed that Laurentius was pro-Henotikon, an assumption reinforced by passages in the Liber pontificalis which state that Laurentius’ supporters favoured Pope Anastasius when he wavered towards acceptance of the Henotikon. The same source is uncompromisingly hostile to Pope Anastasius (‘struck down by the Will of God’), but extremely favourable to Pope Symmachus. The clear implication is this: Laurentius was pro-Henotikon and therefore anti-Chalcedon, Symmachus the opposite; thus, by a process of theological osmosis, the Acacian Schism was incorporated into, and continued by, the Laurentian Schism.
In practical terms the effect of the Acacian/Laurentian Schism was to create a rift between Rome and Constantinople, which was not healed until the death of Anastasius (the emperor, not the Pope) in the latter part of Theoderic’s reign. Also, it enabled both Odovacar and Theoderic to establish their regimes largely free of pressure from the East. However, with the formal resolution of the Schism in 519 came reconciliation between Rome and Constantinople. (The new emperor, Justin, aided by his nephew, Justinian — both were rigorous Chalcedonians — established an entente cordiale with Pope Hormisdas, resulting in the absolute condemnation of Acacius, and even of the emperors Zeno and Anastasius, as fellow travellers.) Peace having broken out between the two capitals (theologically speaking), forces inimical to Theoderic began to emerge from the shadows throughout the Roman world. The Ostrogothic occupation became increasingly viewed as an unwelcome interlude, its unwitting function to provide a caretaker government for Italy against that country’s reincorporation into the Roman Empire.
The above resume, stripped of all finer points of theology (which, I confess, defeat my comprehension), presents the bare facts of the Laurentian Schism. The omission of theological minutiae hardly matters, I think, as it was the Schism’s effect, rather than its religious content, that had a bearing on Theoderic’s career.
* The subject of yet another division in the Church, the Acacian Schism, the progenitor of the Laurentian Schism.
* On 17 November 498, the very day Pope Anastasius died.
APPENDIX III
Romans and Barbarians
Throughout the text, I have used the term ‘barbarian’ not, I hope, in a pejorative sense, but simply to designate the Germanic peoples who overran the Western half of the Roman Empire and for a time (the Ostrogoths in particular) caused considerable trouble within the surviving Eastern half. The main and most obvious difference between Romans and barbarians was about culture and literacy. Especially literacy. In recent times there has been a movement to rehabilitate the barbarians: the Vikings were explorers and traders, rather than blood-thirsty marauders; Saxons intermarried peaceably with Romano-Britons instead of going in for ethnic cleansing; the exquisite craftsmanship of Celtic and Teutonic jewellery and weaponry puts these peoples on a par with the Romans; and so on. Recently, Richard Rudgley and Terry Jones, in their identically titled books, Barbarians, put up a well-argued case for the defence. Both, however, in my view, ignore the elephant in the sitting-room: the barbarians were illiterate.
Writing alone enables ideas to be recorded and transferred, which in turn allows them to grow and develop. Without writing, sciences, philosophy, literature, etc. — the very building-blocks of civilization — would be inconceivable. All of which is rather stating the obvious. Without writing, societies are prisoners of the immediate, limited by memory and experience as to how to shape their plans and actions. Oral transfer of knowledge can’t compete with libraries.
The virtues and defects of shame-and-honour barbarian warrior societies compared to those of Graeco-Roman civilization need not be examined here, as they have been touched on fully in the text.
The popular image of the barbarian as ferociously brave, but with mind and emotions at the mercy of physical urges, in contrast to the rational Roman, whose ordered intelligence was always firmly in control of his body, is over-simplified and something of a cliche. (Shades of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Highland warriors, and the polite society of Georgian England that was given such a fright by them!) Nevertheless, although based to some extent on Roman propaganda, it does contain a useful grain of truth. However, it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves that barbarian societies weren’t static, and could evolve quite quickly into ones that could in no way be described as such. The heroic savages described in Beowulf are separated by only a few generations from that great polymath the Venerable Bede.
NOTES
Prologue
the army of the Romans
That this was an East Roman army doesn’t make it any less Roman. The term ‘Roman’ was flexible and inclusive, referring initially to the inhabitants of a small city on the Tiber, then to those of Latium, then Italy, and finally, in AD 212, to all free inhabitants of the empire. Roman emperors could be from many races — Spaniards, Illyrians, Africans, Arab, et al., though never, strangely, German. (The reason, perhaps, was because Germania, never having been conquered by Rome could not be fully accepted by her. An academic once seriously suggested that the rise of Nazism was ultimately due to the fact that, unlike most of the rest of Europe, ‘Germany had never been through the public school of the Roman Empire’!) Claudian, one of the most celebrated late Latin poets, was a Syrian whose mother tongue was Greek. Writing c. 400, he rejoiced that the inhabitants of the empire, though of diverse origins, ‘are all one people’. There exists a mindset which defines East Romans as ‘Byzantines’ — i.e., as different in some way from ‘real’ Romans. But when the Western Empire fell in 476, a fully Roman state continued in the East for nearly two more centuries (after which much of its territory was lost to Arabs and Avars), and its citizens certainly thought of themselves as Romans. (‘Byzantine’ was a term invented by Renaissance scholars and would have had no meaning for contemporaries of the late Ancient World — bar as an alternative to ‘Constantinopolitan’.)