Justinian I
JUSTINIAN I (482–565), Roman emperor, was born in or near Skopje in Macedonia, a city where the local aristocracy spoke Latin. The trusted minister of his uncle, Justin I, from 518, Justinian was made his coemperor and succeeded him in 527. Justinian worked for the liberation of the Latin West from armies of occupation: Ostrogoths in Italy and Illyricum, Vandals in Africa and Sicily, Visigoths in Spain. To this end it was necessary to repair the breach between the court and church of Constantinople, and the church and city of Rome, which had been caused by concessions made in the East to those who held that the Council of Chalcedon (451) had pressed the distinction between the divine and human natures of Christ too far in a direction that could be called Nestorian.
Before the reign of Justinian, Chalcedonians in the East were a party opposed to anything that might obscure the distinction between the natures of Christ. During his reign, some Chalcedonians in the East came to stress what is common to the letters of Cyril of Alexandria, who wrote of a union of two natures in the incarnate Word, and of Leo of Rome, who wrote of one person in two natures. Both Cyril and Leo affirm that the manhood of Christ is the same as everyone's own and subject to suffering. John Mayentius and a group of Scythian monks from the Dobruja, who said that "one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh," had a cool reception in Rome in 519. But Justinian used their language in edicts in 529 and 533, which were included with a letter of approval from Pope John II (received in 534) in the definitive edition of his collection of Roman law, the Corpus juris civilis (535). So the suffering and death as well as the birth of the Son of God became part of the vocabulary of church and state in East and West.
The Corpus juris became the standard textbook of Roman law in the West, at Bologna and elsewhere, but Justinian did not succeed in restoring imperial government. In Africa the Vandals were eliminated, but the mountain tribes were not subdued. In Italy the Ostrogoths were defeated, but they fought on as guerrillas, preferred by the peasants to rent collectors and tax gatherers. Pope Agapetus I came from Rome to Constantinople in 536 in search of a diplomatic solution. He insisted on a purge of those whom he considered disloyal to the Council of Chalcedon and pressed the emperor to introduce a Chalcedonian patriarch into Alexandria. But when he died suddenly his successor at Rome was elected while the Ostrogoths were still in possession. Pope Silverius, deposed and exiled as soon as the imperial armies arrived, obtained a review of his case from Justinian, but he was deposed again and died in prison.
Vigilius, who replaced Silverius, was regarded as an intruder, an agent of Theodora, Justinian's empress, who patronized the Monophysite opponents of the Council of Chalcedon. In 543–544 Justinian issued the "Three Chapters" edict against the person and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, who, though the master of Nestorius, died in 428 before the Nestorian controversy broke out; and against criticisms of Cyril of Alexandria by Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Ibas of Edessa, who at Chalcedon were received as orthodox. In a revised form (551), which has been preserved, this edict contained a series of directions for the use of terms in appropriate contexts, for instance for the proper use of in and of two natures. Vigilius did not criticize these, but he kept up criticism of the "Three Chapters" before and after he was brought to Constantinople in 548 and during the Second Council of Constantinople (553), where a final version of the edict was approved.
The war in Italy continued until 553. After it was over, Vigilius consented to confirm the council, but he died on the way home. His successor at Rome, Pope Pelagius I, succeeded in limiting schism to a few places in northern Italy around Aquileia, but by this time the Monophysites in Syria had acquired their own hierarchy. There and in Egypt, where they kept control, their leaders were not extreme, but they feared to lose their followers if they accepted the orthodoxy of the Council of Chalcedon, as Vigilius feared to lose support in the West if he admitted their orthodoxy. Justinian continued to strive for a balance that can be seen in the architecture of the great churches built in his reign in Constantinople and Ravenna. He kept the West open to Eastern influence but failed to restore the unity of the East.
Bibliography
A review of the political background can be found in George Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1969), pp. 68–79. For the history of theology, see Jaroslav Pelikan's Christian Tradition, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 100–600 (Chicago, 1971), pp. 267–279, and John Meyendorff's Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (Crestwood, N.Y., 1975), pp. 29–89.
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