Fb2 Imperial Unity And Christian Divisions: The Church from 450-680 A.D. (Church in History, Vol 2) ePub

History of Church Dogma
To write a record of these schismatic and tiring years of the Church, when thousands of Egyptians and Syrians paid their life in defense of their miaphysite belief of the hypostatic union of Christ's incarnate nature, the ecclesiastic history writer needs to master Christology. Fr. john, revised and published his other gem "Christ in Eastern Christian Thought", qualifies what he wrote about Christological developments during these centuries.

Setup of the empire and Churches
A systematic account of Church-state developments are narrated masterfully in chapters I,II,and III. In chapters IV you will enjoy understanding the cultural variety of the Greek east and its founding Churches, and their robust theological traditions. Chapter V will give you a glimpse of the Latin west.

Chalcedony and its aftermath
chapter VI recounts in a relatively unbiased tone this critical time of the Church and Empire.The age of Justinian is a pleasure even if of a sour epoch, the modus operandi of Justinian and his ingenuous wife Theodora left their imprint, not only in Ravenna's St. Vitale glorious mosaic, but in the memory of Christianity.
chapter VII explains how Constans II tried to establish Ravenna as the center of Imperial Christianity.

Byzantine Emperor and Pope Gregory
Here you will see the first pontiff Maximus, the Byzantine Emperor striving to keep unity of an empire, in disintegration by applying a "Standard Orthodox" faith from the Henoticon to the three chapters, condemning writings of long parted Church thiologians and Chrismatics and the great 'monophysite Orthodox' contra the diophysite orthodox.

New Vocabulary, Ancient personalities?
Yes, indeed, entertaining and confusing. What about monothelites and Monoenergism, and all the other monos, theopaschites, akoimetai, hesycasts, iconoclasm, and all the other ism's.
Can you distinguish Severus of Antioch from that of Asmonien? Or,all the Al's; Al-Harith, Al-Mundhir,and Al-Noman ;Arab kings who influenced the Christian East?

400 pages of ecclesiastics
This is the most honest concise Eastern Church record that is available at hand, since 'History of Eastern Christianity by the late eminent coptologist Aziz Atiya is out of print. For this critical period, in the life of the Empire and the Orthodox Church doctrine. Meyendorff historical mastery with enlightening analysis of the Holy Church of the East as Neil calls it, its Emperial politics to keep its unity throug an enforced Doctrinal belief. .

Jean Meyendorff
Fr. john, of blessed memory, a master of patristic and dogmatic theology is qualified to give us a skillful tour through the maze of these schismatic centuries. A fellow of the Guggenheim Memorial foundation, Fr. John had an opportunity to perfect his in depth study on the history of the Church during its critical years 450-680.
Dr. Jaroslav Pelikan wrote "There are very few scholars in the East or the West who would be in a position to undertake this assignment. And that is, of course, precisely what John Meyendorff is."

History of Eastern Christianity
The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787): Their History and Theology (Theology and Life Series 21)

Thanks

The late John Meyendorff wrote perhaps the best general history of late Christian antiquity in "Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions." Reading it will help readers to understand the present Christian world, and dispel the myth that the Christian church was a unified institution, or that the union of church and state was solely the work of Constantine.

The title of the book implies Meyendorff's themes quite well. He talks about imperial unity and Christian divisions. The imperial unity he explores is the idea, present in Christian thought at least since the 2nd century, that the Roman empire had a providential role in the spread of Christianity. "Jesus was born during the reign of Augustus, the one who reduced to uniformity, so to speak, the many kingdoms on earth so that he had a single empire. It would have hindered Jesus' teaching from being spread through the whole world if there had been many kingdoms...everyone would have been compelled to fight in defense of their own country."(Origen- Contra Celsum) In other words, before Constantine's conversion, the emperor was regarded as the providential manager of earthly affairs. After Constantine's conversion, the Roman emperor was looked on as bringing the kingdom of God about. The bishops were then granted imperial posts, and the church in general started to develop a structure mirroring that of the imperial government. The church in general was granted privileged status until Theodosius banned Pagan cults; Justinian stamped out the last vestiges of Paganism in the Roman empire.

The Christian divisions were many. Meyendorff explores the many doctrinal disputes that took place in late antiquity, and in particular those of Eastern Christendom, an area that until his work had largely been neglected in church histories written in English. The sects included arians, monophysites, monothelites, apolloninarian, etc. He details these groups as well as the numerous schisms that took place. The divisiveness was particularly striking in the "three chapters" controversy. Justinian, in order to heal the schism with the monophysites and unite the empire, asked Pope Vigilius to condemn the works of 3 theologians. When he did so, virtually the entire west protested; the North African church excommunicated him, and even the Roman deacons refused to concelebrate with him. So Vigilius retracted his condemnation, and Justinian convoked the Second Council of Constantinople, which excommunicated Vigilius, who then changed his mind again. Justinian then repressed dissent against the council by force, and Constantinople II was not widely recognized as a council in the west until the Middle Ages. Two lessons can be learned from this: many sects claimed to represent true Christology, and no one had the foggiest idea of who was right and who was wrong; the only way that the unity of the empire could be maintained was through the emperor's force.

Another interesting aspect of this book is the history of the development of the papacy. Briefly, the papacy in late antiquity was not what the Vatican (and modern Catholic apologists like Steve Ray) says it was. The popes did not exercise any kind of jurisdiction outside of the Italian suburban dioceses, and even then it was largely to confirm episcopal elections. The turning point was in the 7th and 8th centuries, which in addition to the Islamic invasions in the middle east, saw the iconoclastic controversy in the Byzantine empire and the Lombard invasion of Italy. The Byzantine empire, its hands full with the iconoclast controversy, refused to help Rome against the Lombards. The Pope looked for a new protector, and found one in Charlemagne. "He was now called to save the See of Peter abandoned by its legitimate protectors in Constantinople. But in doing so, he also gradually assumed the imperial legacy itself, in opposition to Byzantium, with the pope becoming a crucial factor in this new version of Romanitas. None of the main actors of this fundamental change of political geography realized the future consequence for the fate of Christendom: the religious and cultural polarization between East and West." (p. 327)