Even as churchmen preached of eternity, they remained in a world shaped and transformed by the passage of time. As generations went by, eyewitnesses died and memories faded, even as traditions took shape and stories grew in the telling. Historical memory played a profoundly important role in shaping the traditions and sense of identity of the Church, as it evolved through the late antique centuries. Key events might look in the near term - in the perspective of those who witnessed, lived through, and were formed by them - very different from how they would appear in the recollections of more distant times.
Some councils aged well, looking decidedly better the further they receded into the past. Nicaea’s exalted status in fifth-century debates would have seemed quite odd indeed to the Homoian bishops and emperors who had spent much of the fourth century distancing themselves from what they regarded as an extreme departure from the acceptable mainstream of Trinitarian teaching. By contrast, the several similar assemblies of bishops that had met in the mid fourth century to endorse Homoian or Homoiousian creeds gradually faded into obscurity, to be passed over when the firmly Nicene Church of later centuries built its doctrinal and ecclesiological identity around a select sequence of authoritative ‘‘ecumenical’’ councils (on fourth-century controversies see Brennecke 1988; Hanson 1988).
Posterity similarly held up revered deceased individuals - called, always, ‘‘of blessed memory’’ - as ‘‘Fathers of the Church.’’ Men like Athanasius found themselves posthumously endowed by universal consensus with an exalted authority that could never have been imagined during their fiercely controversial lifetimes. The process repeated itself in the fifth century with Cyril of Alexandria, whose writings against Nestorius on the Incarnation would be used at Ephesus II and Chalcedon - less than a decade after his death in ad 444 - as touchstones of orthodoxy against which to
Judge the faith of others (Wessel 2004). What must it have been like for those of his contemporaries who lived through those years, especially old adversaries like Theodoret, who were now forced to join in acclaiming him (Theodoret: Chalcedon, session 8, Price and Gaddis 2005, ii: 250-7)? Ibas of Edessa fell victim in ad 449 to a new political correctness, finding himself condemned and deposed, among other reasons, on the basis of a decades-old letter in which he had sharply criticized the then living Cyril (Letter to Mari, read at Chalcedon, session 10. 137, Price and Gaddis 2005, ii: 295-8; Ibas’ condemnation at Ephesus II, session 2, Flemming 1917: 6-68).
The counterpart to this sanctification, of course, was the designation of ‘‘heresi-archs,’’ equally prominent in their notoriety. First and foremost came Nestorius, who played the same leading role in the heresiological demonology of the fifth century that Arius had in the fourth - even to the point of suffering a similarly miraculous and gruesome demise (Evagrius, Hist. Eccl. 1.7; Zacharias, Chron. 3. 1). The secular Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, ‘‘condemnation of the memory’’ of despised rebels or tyrants (Hedrick 2000), found its ecclesiastical counterpart in the removal of the names of disfavored bishops from the diptychs regularly read in church. Constantinopolitan bishop Acacius’ support of Zeno’s Henotikon in ad 482 had led to a schism with Rome; in ad 518, communion was restored only after the new emperor Justin I acceded to the pope’s demand that the name of the long-dead Acacius be stricken from the diptychs (Meyendorff 1989: 194-215). But in general, rather than erasing past heretics and tyrannical bishops from collective memory, the Church preferred instead to preserve their infamy, to hold them up as cautionary tales or as templates for the condemnation of future deviants.
The passage of time tended to clarify issues. Each new cycle of controversy resulted in further elaboration and refinement of orthodoxy as new questions were asked, debated, and - with varying degrees of finality - answered. Doctrinal statements, and those who uttered or wrote them, would in retrospect be judged as manifestly right or wrong. But in the Christian Roman Empire, theological debate could not take place in isolation from the political process. Bishops were now able to call upon the coercive powers of the secular arm to enforce their judgments, while emperors, firmly convinced that God held them responsible for maintaining the peace of the Church, sought to end disputes and create consensus by any means necessary (see generally Gaddis 2005, and Lizzi Testa, ch. 35). The application of political power to Church controversies served to consolidate and institutionalize the position of the favored faction and at the same time to marginalize its rivals much more effectively than would otherwise have been possible. Its consequence, then, was to make clearer the difference between winners and losers.
World History
