Historical necessity dictated that Gregory
accept a limited role for the papacy in guaranteeing the widest common
denominator of beliefs. If nothing needed to be defended except the definition
of the faith, the papacy could be acquitted of any responsibility for the Three
Chapters debacle. Blame could be freely apportioned elsewhere. Gregory writes
about Leo with clear proleptic agenda, for in insisting that special matters
embraced everything after the definition of faith, this applied not only to the
canons involving Anatolius and Juvenal, but also to the Three Chapters. While
Gregory does not suggest that Leo had divine foresight, readers might infer
that Providence was at work anticipating the papacy’s need to invalidate the
Three Chapters. Only such prescience could give Leo’s remarks relevance.
While dissenters were right that Leo rejected
only the canons in violation of the Council of Nicea, Gregory was also right in
pointing out that Leo saw two categories, defined faith and particular matters.
Nevertheless, Leo and Gregory did not see the categories in the same way. For
Leo, particular matters were still subject to the decisions of Nicea, and these
could not be overthrown. All decisions were ‘shite’, so to speak, except for
the ‘black’ errors that violated the canons of Nicea; sound authority extended
to both visions of a council’s business. Gregory, on the other hand, set up
opposite categories standing in a black-and-white polarity, one honoured with
permanence, and the other subject to retraction.
Gregory works with the Istrians’ citations of
Leo, who had stressed the inviolability of Chalcedon’s faith, hoping it marked
the final defeat of Eutychianism. From these letters of Leo, composed to define
Chalcedon’s decisions as orthodoxy against the heretical fringe, Gregory crafts
the definition of inviolate faith as finished, rightly and inculpably decreed;
clarified, complete, perfect, and divinely defined. It is called the rule,
confirmation, profession, and definition of faith, as well as the teachings
handed down by the apostles and fathers. The synod decrees it and confirms it
by statute, fixed it by the rules of the canons, and proclaims it. The apostolic
see confirms it and the emperor’s secular arm should protect it.
The profession of faith is eternal truth,
transcendent and absolute, and only doctrine so proclaimed officially by a
synod is inviolable. Because a synod is perfect, its definition of faith cannot
be changed, since ‘completion does not admit addition, nor perfection
increase.” But only this faith which is ‘rightly and blamelessly defined’ must
be kept intact—never impaired, disturbed, changed, questioned, overturned, nor
infringed by novelty.
Because the doctrine of a council has the
authority of s, to change anything is sacrilege; even questioning is lèse
majesté. ‘Those who wish to attack legitimate and divinely inspired
constitutions are not peaceful, but rebellious.’ To ask is to repeat Adam’s
sin: ‘To question what has been clarified, to reconsider what has been
completed, to overturn what has been defined, what else is this than not to
give sufficient thanks and to indulge an unholy longing of deadly desire for
the fruit of the forbidden tree?’ Inquiry implies uncertainty and doubt and can
only confuse believers. ‘To contend with words is nothing else than the
subversion of the listener’ (see II Timothy 2. 14), Gregory quotes Leo. Because
dissent endangers the souls of others, schismatics lack charity. Once an issue
has been decided, one must not continue to fight against ‘the triumphs of
Almighty God’s right hand’. In short, one must accept the profession of faith
decreed by the synod as definitive and forbear dissent. (Carole Straw, “Much
Ado About Nothing: Gregory the Great’s Apology to the Istrians,” in The
Crisis of the Oikoumene: The Three Chapters and the Failed Quest for Unity in
the Sixth-Century Mediterranean, ed. Celia Chazelle and Catherine Cubitt
[Studies in the Early Middle Ages 14; Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers
n.v., 2007], 139-41)