Constantinople: The Story of the Old Capital of the EmpireHutton, William Holden
History
Constantinople: The Story of the Old Capital of the Empire
Hutton, William Holden
Istanbul (Turkey)
Hardly was this false teaching rejected before a new heresy arose.
Eutyches, a monk of Constantinople, denied the existence of two
natures in Christ, and after a dispute which shook the Church for
twenty years his teaching was at last condemned by the fourth General
Council, which met at Chalcedon, just across the Bosphorus. The
Council also emphasised the importance of the position now held by the
New Rome by enacting that it should be "magnified in ecclesiastical
matters even like the elder imperial Rome, as being next to it." This
rule was accepted by the Emperor Marcian, and the power it gave to
consecrate the metropolitans of Thrace, Asia, and Pontus was supported
by the State as a badge of supremacy. The emperors who followed
Marcian were all more or less concerned in the theological strife
which the opinions of Eutyches had raised. The Monophysites, as the
party which rejected the decisions of Chalcedon came to be called, was
constantly rising into power in the Court. The imperial crown was worn
in turn by four adventurers, who deposed prelates and attempted to
reconcile parties at their will. In 482 the Emperor Zeno, with the
advice of the patriarch Acacius, put forth the _Henoticon_ (form of
union), which was intended to reconcile the Monophysites to the
Catholic Church. The controversy was far from stilled by this inept
document; and when in 484, Felix, the pope of Rome, with other Western
bishops, wrote to the patriarch Acacius, declaring him deposed from
his office, and separated from the communion of the faithful, a schism
was caused in Constantinople itself. While the majority of the clergy
and people treated the Roman decree with contempt, some of the monks,
and especially the Akoimetai (an order which kept up perpetual worship
by succession of worshippers, and thus received the name of
"sleepless"), refused communion with their own patriarch. The
Henoticon had divided the Church. The patriarchates of Antioch and
Alexandria were Monophysite; Jerusalem and Constantinople were
orthodox.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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