THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 254
The Chrysostom Controversy: Theophilus contra Origen
17.2. The Chrysostom Controversy: Theophilus contra Origen
The chief persons, then, in the first controversy, are Theophilus of Alexandria and Chrysostom of Constantinople. The doctrinal question is not to the front, and the interest is in great part personal. This is in fact the only one of the controversies in which one side at least — here the one on defence — has an imposing leader. But perhaps it is the one in which it is least possible to find. any reasons beyond motives of official ambition or of personal antipathy.
The beginner of the attack, Theophilus, who held the Alexandrian see from 385 to 412, has earned a bad name in history for violence and duplicity. He was probably not more unscrupulous than many leading men among his contemporaries, and excelled most of them in scientific and literary tastes. But he has incurred the odium which attaches to every religious persecutor who has not the mitigating plea of personal fanaticism. Another excuse might be alleged in extenuation of his unjust actions: the excessively difficult position in which he was placed.
The peculiar character of the government of Egypt — its close and direct, connexion with the imperial authority — and the absence, except in the city itself, of any civic and municipal institutions, always rendered a good understanding between bishop and pracfect one of the great desiderata. The history of the see and of its most eminent occupants had given it a prestige which was not easily kept intact without encroachments on the secular power. Alexandria had from the beginning been a city of mixed populations and cults, and at this time the factions were more numerous and the occasions of disturbance as serious as in the days of Athanasius. Arianism may have been quelled, but paganism was still vigorous, and had adherents both in the academies of the grammarians and philosophers and also among the most ignorant of the lower classes, who even anticipated disaster when the measuring gauge was moved from the temple of Serapis to a church. The Jewish clement was large, and the broad toleration of Alexander, the Ptolemies, and the pagan Emperors was hardly to be expected in the stormy days which had followed the conversion of Constantine.
But more difficult to deal with than praefects, town mobs, philosophers or Jews, though a more powerful weapon to use if tactfully secured, was the vast number of monks that dwelt in the desert and other regions within the Alexandrian see. These did not constitute one body, and were very dissimilar among themselves. The rule of those who had a rule will be set forth in the following chapter. Here we have to notice the difficulties which the soaring speculations of some, the crass ignorance of others, and the detachment of all from worldly convention and ordinary constituted authority, placed in the way of any attempt to bring them within the general system of civil and ecclesiastical order.
Theophilus was himself a man of learning and culture, eclectic in tastes, diplomatic in schemes. He had used his mathematical knowledge to make an elaborate table of the Easter Cycle. He favoured, in later days, the candidature of a philosophic pagan (Synesius of Cyrene) for the bishopric of Ptolemais. He could read and enjoy the works of writers whose teaching he was publicly anathematising. He appreciated the force of monastic piety, and endeavoured, by vigorous and even violent means, to impose episcopal consecration on some leading ascetics. He shewed his powers as a pacificator in helping to compose dissension in the church of Antioch (392) and in that of Bostra (394). He obtained from the civil authority powers to demolish the great temple of Serapis, which was done successfully, though not without creating much bitterness of feeling. The great campaign of his life, however, began with an attack on the followers of Origen at the very beginning of the fifth century.
There seems some paradox in the circumstance that the strife between the Alexandrian and the Antiochene should have begun (as far as our present purpose is concerned) by an attack made by an Alexandrian patriarch on the principles of the most eminent of all Alexandrian theologians. Theophilus was, both before and after the controversy, an appreciative student of Origen. He had already aroused a tumultuous opposition from some Egyptian monks who were practically anthropomorphites by insisting on the doctrine laid down by Origen as to the incorporeality of the Divine nature, that God is invisible by reason of His nature, and incomprehensible by reason of the limits of human intelligence. The line he now took up may have been due to the influence of Jerome, at that time organising an anti-Origenistic crusade in Palestine; or else, in his opposition to the philosophic paganism of Alexandria, he may have become nervous of any concessions as to aeons and gnosis and final restitution; or again, as seems most probable he saw a powerful ally in his ambition for his see in the grossest and least enlightened theology of his day — that of the unhappy monk who wept that "they had taken away his God" — when in the earlier stage of the controversy the doctrines of the anthropomorphites were condemned by the man who was now their champion.
Having determined to combat Origenism, Theophilus called a synod to Alexandria, which decreed against it. He followed up the ecclesiastical censure by securing from the praefect the support of the secular arm. An attack was made by night on the settlement of those in the district of Nitria, who were supposed to be imbued with Origenistic doctrine. The leaders of them were the four "tall brethren," monks of considerable repute, formerly treated by Theophilus with great respect. Hounded out by soldiers and by the rival anthropomorphite monks, the Tall Brothers fled for their lives, and after many vicissitudes arrived in Constantinople and appealed to the protection of the bishop, John Chrysostom.
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