Absolute Monarchs by John Julius Norwich Read Free Book Online Page A

attend, the pope produced what he described as a Constitutum , signed by himself and nineteen other Western churchmen. It was to some degree a compromise, in that it allowed that there were indeed certain grave errors in the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia; but, it pointed out, the other two writers accused had not been pronounced “orthodox fathers” at Chalcedon. In any case, it was not proper to anathematize the dead. The present agitation over the Three Chapters was therefore unfounded and unnecessary and itself to be condemned. Vigilius concluded by forbidding—“by the authority of the Apostolic See, over which by the Grace of God we preside”—any ecclesiastic to venture any further opinion on the matter.
    It was not till May 25 that the pope formally sent a copy of his paper to the Imperial Palace. He cannot have expected it to be well received; neither, however, had he reckoned with the changed situation in Italy. Totila was dead, the Goths defeated; no longer was it necessary to woo the Roman citizens in Italy for their support. The emperor had had more than enough of Vigilius, and now at last he could afford to treat him as he deserved. He made no reply to the Constitutum; instead, he sent one of his secretaries to the Council with the text of the pope’s secret declaration of June 547 anathematizing the Three Chapters, together with a decree that Vigilius’s name be struck from the diptychs 5 —though Justinian stressed that in repudiating Vigilius personally he was not severing communion with Rome. At its seventh session, on May 26, the Council formally endorsed the emperor’s decree and condemned the pope “until he should repent his errors.”
    For Vigilius, it was the end of the road. Disgraced and banished to an island in the Marmara, he was told that until he accepted the findings of the Council he would never be permitted to return to Rome. Not for another six months—by which time he was suffering agonies from gallstones—did he capitulate, but when at last he did so, his surrender was absolute. In a letter to the patriarch of December 8 he admitted all his previous errors, and early in 554—almost certainly at Justinian’s insistence—he addressed to the Western churches a second Constitutum in which he formally condemned the Three Chapters and all who dared uphold them; as for himself, “whatever is brought forward or anywhere discovered in my name in their defense is hereby nullified.” He could not say more. By now too ill to travel, he remained another year in Constantinople and only then, in a brief respite from pain, started for home. But the effort was too great. On the way, his condition suddenly worsened. He was obliged to interrupt his journey at Syracuse, and there, broken alike in body and spirit, he died. For him there was to be no tomb in St. Peter’s.
    The story of Vigilius did untold harm to the Papacy; and when his successor, Pelagius I, on his accession instantly added his voice to the condemnation, papal prestige lay in tatters. Several sees, including those of Milan and Aquileia, broke off communion with Rome; it was to be half a century before relations were restored with Milan, one and a half before Aquileia and Istria returned to the fold. Meanwhile, in 555 Justinian had decreed that in future the emperor’s personal fiat (“let it be done”) must be obtained for any election of a Bishop of Rome. But less than thirty years after the death of Pelagius in 561 there was to be consecrated a new pontiff who, though failing to heal those particular breaches, would utterly transform his office, giving it new energy and direction: he was to be known as Gregory the Great.
    1. The Scyrians were one of the many minor Germanic tribes, of minimal importance in this story.
    2. Disastrous because in the first weeks the Goths cut all the eleven aqueducts that brought water to Rome, leaving the city half-paralyzed.
    3. See chapter 2, this page .
    4. Their letter will be found