The position which the emperor thus assumed was not one which the East alone welcomed. Rome, too, recognised that the East had power to make decrees, so long as they were consonant with apostolic doctrine. [Sidenote: The Monophysites.] Justinian now gave himself eagerly to the reconciliation of the Monophysites. In 535 Anthimus, bishop of Trebizond, a friend of the deposed patriarch of Antioch, Severus, who was at least semi-Monophysite, was elected to the patriarchal throne of New Rome. In the same year Pope Agapetus (534-6) came to Constantinople as an envoy of a Gothic king, and he demanded that Anthimus should make formal profession of orthodoxy. The result was not satisfactory: the new patriarch was condemned by the emperor with the sanction of the pope and the approval of a synod. Justinian then issued a decree condemning Monophysitism, which he ordered the new patriarch to send to the Eastern Churches. Mennas, the successor of Anthimus, in his local synod, had condemned and deposed the Monophysite bishops. The controversy was at an end. More important in its results was the dispute with the so-called Origenists. S. Sabas came from {16} Palestine in 531 to lay before the emperor the sad tale of the spread of their evil doctrines, but he died in the next year, and the Holy Land remained the scene of strife between the two famous monasteries of the Old and the New Laura. [Sidenote: The Origenists.] In 541 or 542 a synod at Antioch condemned the doctrines of Origen, but the only result was that Jerusalem refused communion with the other Eastern patriarchate. Justinian himself,--at a time when there was at Constantinople an envoy from Rome, Pelagius,--issued a long declaration condemning Origen. A synod was summoned, which formally condemned Origen in person--a precedent for the later anathemas of the Fifth General Council--and fifteen propositions from his writings, ten of them being those which Justinian's edict had denounced. The decisions were sent for subscription to the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, as well as to Rome. This sanction gave something of an universal condemnation of Origenism; but, since no general council confirmed it, it cannot be asserted that Origen lies under anathema as a heretic. The opinion of the legalists of the age was utterly out of sympathy with one who was rather the cause of heresy in others than himself heretical. [Sidenote: The "Three Chapters."]