Sunday, October 1, 2023

Excerpt from Carole Straw, “Much Ado About Nothing: Gregory the Great’s Apology to the Istrians"

  

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)