acts of that assembly teach us otherwise; the privilege which the Roman legates possessed was that of voting first (the right of the princeps senatus). The first general council at which a churchman presided was the seventh (at Nicaea, 787), at which the emperor (or empress) deputed, not a layman, but the patriarch Tarasius to preside. The resolutions of these ecclesiastical state-councils did not become the law of the Empire till they were confirmed by imperial edicts.
The emperors, in their capacity as heads of the Church, did not confine themselves to controlling it by controlling the councils. They soon began to issue edicts dealing with theology, by virtue of their own authority. It has been said that the council of Chalcedon closed an epoch of “parliamentary constitutionalism”; a general council was not summoned again for more than one hundred years, though the Empire during that period was seething with religious disunion and unrest. The usurper Basiliscus in his short reign set an example which his successors were not slow to follow. He issued an edict quashing the decision of Chalcedon. Zeno's Henōtikon (see below) a few years later was the second and more famous example of a method which Justinian largely used, and of which the Ecthesis of Heraclius, the Type of Constans II. and the iconoclastic edicts of Leo III. are well-known instances. It was a question of political expediency (determined by the circumstances, the intensity and nature of the opposition, &c.) whether an emperor supported his policy or not by an ecclesiastical council.
The emperor was always able to control the election of the patriarch, and through him he directed the Church. Sometimes emperor and patriarch collided; but in general the patriarchs were docile instruments, and when they were refractory they could be deposed. There were several means of resistance open to a patriarch, though he rarely availed himself of them. His participation in the ceremony of coronation was indispensable, and he could refuse to crown a new emperor except on certain conditions, and thus dictate a policy (instances in 812, Michael I.; 969, John Zimisces). There was the power of excommunication (Leo VI. was excommunicated on account of his fourth marriage). Another means of resistance for the Church was to invoke the support of the bishop of Rome, who embodied the principle of ecclesiastical independence and whose see admittedly enjoyed precedence and primacy over all the sees in Christendom. Up to the end of the 8th century he was a subject of the emperor, and some emperors exerted their ecclesiastical control over Rome by drastic measures (Justinian and Constans II.). But after the conquest of Italy by Charles the Great, the pope was outside the Byzantine domination; after the coronation of Charles in 800 he was associated with a rival empire; and when ecclesiastical controversies arose in the East, the party in opposition was always ready to appeal to him as the highest authority in Christendom. Under the iconoclastic emperors the image-worshippers looked to him as the guardian of orthodoxy.
As to the ecclesiastical controversies which form a leading feature of Byzantine history, their political significance alone concerns us. After the determination of the Arian controversy in 381 new questions (as to the union of the divine and human elements in the person of Christ: one or two natures?) arose, and it may seem surprising that such points of abstruse theology should have awakened universal interest and led to serious consequences. The secret was that they masked national feelings; hence their political importance and the attention which the government was forced to bestow on them. The reviving sense of nationality (anti-Greek) in Syria and in Egypt found expression in the 5th century in passionate monophysitism (the doctrine of one nature): theology was the only sphere in which such feelings could be uttered. The alienation and dissension which thus began had fatal consequences, smoothing the way for the Saracen conquests of those lands; the inhabitants were not unwilling to be severed politically from the Empire. This ultimate danger was at first hardly visible. What immediately troubled the emperors in the first half of the 5th century was the preponderant position which the see of Alexandria occupied, threatening the higher authority of Constantinople. The council of Chalcedon, called by Marcian, an able statesman, was as much for the purpose of ending the domination of Alexandria as of settling the theological question. The former object was effected, but the theological decision of the council was fatal, it only sealed and promoted the disunion. The recalcitrant spirit of Syria and Egypt forced Zeno, thirty years later, to issue his Henōtikon, affirming the decisions of previous councils but pointedly ignoring Chalcedon. This statesman-like document secured peace in the East for a generation. Rome refused to accept the Henōtikon, and when Justinian resolved to restore imperial supremacy in the Western kingdoms, conciliation with Rome became a matter of political importance. For the sake of this project, the unity of the East was sacrificed. The doctrine of Chalcedon was reasserted, the Henōtikon set aside; New Rome and Old Rome were again hand in hand. This meant the final alienation of Egypt and Syria. The national instinct which had been alive in the 5th century grew into strong national sentiment in the 6th. One of the chief anxieties of Justinian's long and busy reign was to repair the mischief. Deeply interested himself in matters of dogma, and prepared to assert to its fullest extent his authority as head of the Church, he has been called “the passionate theologian on the throne”; but in his chief ecclesiastical measures political considerations were predominant. His wife Theodora was a monophysite, and he permitted her to extend her protection to the heretics. He sought new formulae for the purpose of reconciliation, but nothing short of repudiation of the Chalcedon acts would have been enough. The last great efforts for union were made when the Saracens invaded and conquered the dissident provinces. A new formula of union was discovered (One Will and One Energy). This doctrine of monotheism would never have been heard of but for political exigencies. The Egyptians and Syrians would perhaps have accepted this compromise; but it was repudiated by the fanatical adherents of Chalcedon. Heraclius sought to impose the doctrine by an edict (Ecthesis, 638), but the storm, especially in Italy and Africa, was so great that ten years later an edict known as the Type was issued by Constans forbidding all disputation about the number of wills and energies. Constans was a strong ruler, and maintained the Type in spite of orthodox opposition throughout his reign. But the expediency of this policy passed when the Saracens were inexpugnably settled in their conquests, and in his successor's reign it was more worth while to effect a reconciliation with Rome and the West. This was the cause of the 6th Ecumenical Council which condemned monotheism (680-681).
In the Hellenic parts of the Empire devotion to orthodoxy served as a chrysalis for the national sentiment which was to burst its shell in the 10th century. For the Greeks Christianity had been in a certain way continuous with paganism. It might be said that the old deities and heroes who had protected their cities were still their guardians, under the new form of saints (sometimes imaginary) and archangels, and performed for them the same kind of miracles. Pagan idolatry was replaced by Christian image-worship, which by the Christians of many parts of Asia Minor, as well as by the Mahommedans, was regarded as simply polytheism. Thus in the great iconoclastic controversy, which distracted the Empire for nearly 120 years, was involved, as in the monophysitic, the antagonism between different racial elements and geographical sections. Leo III., whose services as a great deliverer and reformer were obscured in the memory of posterity by the ill-fame which he won as an iconoclast, was a native of Commagene. His first edict against the veneration of pictures evoked riots in the capital and a revolt in Greece. The opposition was everywhere voiced by the monks, and it is not to be overlooked that for many monks the painting of sacred pictures was their means of existence. Leo's son Constantine V. pursued the same policy with greater rigour, meeting the monastic resistance by systematic persecution, and in his reign a general council condemned image-worship
