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So I'm currently browsing the extremely limited view allowed on Amazon of the book Doctrine and Debate in the East Christian World, 300-1500 (Avril Cameron and Robert Hoyland, eds.; Routledge, 2011), specifically the chapter written by Syriac scholar Sebastian Brock, "The Conversations with the Syriac Orthodox Under Justinian (532)". While I can't see enough of it to get a good sense of the meat of the chapter, the introductory pages have already got me wondering about a few things that you guys might be able to shed some light on. Brock does note that these exchanges were somewhat atypical of the period, in that there are multiple versions of them authored by participants, witnesses, and assumed witnesses (members of the entourages travelling with both sides).
So when I read, for instance, that the Syrian bishops were already present in Constantinople with the emperor for a number of days before their Chalcedonian counterparts arrived, and even had time to give the emperor a definition of their faith in these few days before the official start of the meetings, it makes me wonder: Wasn't Constantinople pretty firmly Chalcedonian territory by this point? If so, why would it be that the Chalcedonians were travelling from afar, while the non-Chalcedonians were present some days earlier? I know there's some historical intrigue involving Empress Theodora and her fondness for the non-Chalcedonians (hagiographic Syriac and Ethiopian sources unconnected to this specific meeting portray her as directly aiding the non-Chalcedonians to avoid arrest from zealous Chalcedonian authorities), but I wouldn't think that sort of thing would be enough to give the non-Chalcedonians any sort of advantage over those of the Emperor's party in the imperial city itself. (And those same OO sources definitely portray Justinian as belonging to the Chalcedonian confession, and I haven't seen anything historically to suggest otherwise -- arguments over the authorship and/or placement of O Monogenes in our respective liturgies notwithstanding.) What gives? Is it that the areas around Constantinople were confessionally heterogenous (hence there would/could have been 'Orientals' fit to attend the talks living closer to Constantinople than those who travelled there to defend Chalcedon in the talks)? One of the Chalcedonian participants who recorded their side of the talks was one Innocentius of Maronia (a village in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, Greece), who wrote about the meetings in a letter to a priest named Thomas in Thessaloniki. This gives me the impression that the Chalcedonians involved were not just 'Greeks' in the confessional sense that OO mean today when using that term (i.e., Chalcedonians), but actual Greeks from Greece. Again, why? Was there really such a dearth of more local Chalcedonian theologians, or were the Greeks called on because of the great skills of those specific men? If I recall correctly from talking with Fr. Matt on the main confessional board of TAW, Severus of Antioch was booted from Antioch c. 518, so I have to imagine that much more prestigious and important cities for the running of the Empire like Constantinople would've been thoroughly 'Chalcedonianized' (for lack of a better way to put it) by 532. Am I incorrect in this assumption?
Continuing on, we are told from a newly-discovered Syriac Orthodox text concerning the meetings (apparently the earlier-known version was actually a later recension published by Nau, and this newly-discovered text is the longer version on which that recension was based) that the Syrians repeatedly asked the Emperor to have the discussions taken down in writing, but this was rejected not only by the Chalcedonian bishops, but also by Strategius, who was the locum tenens for the magister. Polemical reasons for this are given a bit later on in the text (which I won't go into, both because the preview ends soon after this, and because I wouldn't expect anyone here to believe them or care; they're not really the point, anyhow), but I am left wondering if there was a standard scribal practice known to be employed at the time which would've made this turn of events unusual, or if perhaps it was common enough to not require anything nefarious to explain it. It strikes me as a little bit odd that we have access to things as damaging to any of our clean and easy conceptions of history (and here by 'our', I mean OO like me) as Bar Hebraeus' treatise against the Armenians, the recollection (in the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, 10th century) of the reestablishment of communion between the Syrians and the Egyptians after a period of conflict between and subsequent schism of the Syrian Patriarch Peter III of Callinicus (581-591) and his Egyptian counterpart Pope Anastasius, or the Christological debates in Armenia at the time of Ashot IV Bagratuni (spurred on by the evangelizing mission of Theodore Abu Qurra, Chalcedonian bishop of Harran), yet we do not have any official notes from these seemingly very important meetings because Strategius didn't want to write them down? And I guess Emperor Justinian was fine with this? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, at this point in the chapter it turns to a translation of the longer Syriac document, and after a few pages of that (filled with all the 'hits' that you probably already know if you are well-enough versed in the details of the schism, at least in its early incarnation like this), the preview ends, so I guess I can't learn anything else from this chapter if I don't want to pay $247 for my own copy of the book (curse you, Routledge! And Covid-19, for shuttering our libraries!), which is just a little crazy to me.
If anyone here knows anything about the demographics of Constantinople and its environs at that time, or the scribal practices observed at the imperial court of Justinian, I would very much appreciate some discussion of this. Speaking personally, I think it's a rather big loss for both of our communions that no official records of the conversations held in the court exist, since it is obvious to me from reading just a little bit of the Syriac text that its details -- regardless of whatever truth they may reflect -- are probably rather easy to sidestep, given that they come from a distinctly pro-Syriac source (and I assume the same would be true regarding the letter to the priest in Thessaloniki, for the same reasons). The way I tend to look at these things is not so much "Aha! We have a primary source document that says XYZ, therefore we win!", but rather that here would be an early reflection of what both sides -- Syriac with regard to the Syriac documents, and Greek with regard to the Greek -- actually concerned themselves with at the time, and as such they are inherently valuable as a means to sort of 'peel back' the accumulated traditions surrounding the council and 'the others', and see what should stand as our respective authentic traditions re: why we accept or do not accept _____. And that's pretty important to me, when it comes to both understanding you guys and to tracing a sort of 'through line' from Chalcedon to today with regard to the faith of my own Church.
Thanks for your time, if you've read this far.
So when I read, for instance, that the Syrian bishops were already present in Constantinople with the emperor for a number of days before their Chalcedonian counterparts arrived, and even had time to give the emperor a definition of their faith in these few days before the official start of the meetings, it makes me wonder: Wasn't Constantinople pretty firmly Chalcedonian territory by this point? If so, why would it be that the Chalcedonians were travelling from afar, while the non-Chalcedonians were present some days earlier? I know there's some historical intrigue involving Empress Theodora and her fondness for the non-Chalcedonians (hagiographic Syriac and Ethiopian sources unconnected to this specific meeting portray her as directly aiding the non-Chalcedonians to avoid arrest from zealous Chalcedonian authorities), but I wouldn't think that sort of thing would be enough to give the non-Chalcedonians any sort of advantage over those of the Emperor's party in the imperial city itself. (And those same OO sources definitely portray Justinian as belonging to the Chalcedonian confession, and I haven't seen anything historically to suggest otherwise -- arguments over the authorship and/or placement of O Monogenes in our respective liturgies notwithstanding.) What gives? Is it that the areas around Constantinople were confessionally heterogenous (hence there would/could have been 'Orientals' fit to attend the talks living closer to Constantinople than those who travelled there to defend Chalcedon in the talks)? One of the Chalcedonian participants who recorded their side of the talks was one Innocentius of Maronia (a village in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, Greece), who wrote about the meetings in a letter to a priest named Thomas in Thessaloniki. This gives me the impression that the Chalcedonians involved were not just 'Greeks' in the confessional sense that OO mean today when using that term (i.e., Chalcedonians), but actual Greeks from Greece. Again, why? Was there really such a dearth of more local Chalcedonian theologians, or were the Greeks called on because of the great skills of those specific men? If I recall correctly from talking with Fr. Matt on the main confessional board of TAW, Severus of Antioch was booted from Antioch c. 518, so I have to imagine that much more prestigious and important cities for the running of the Empire like Constantinople would've been thoroughly 'Chalcedonianized' (for lack of a better way to put it) by 532. Am I incorrect in this assumption?
Continuing on, we are told from a newly-discovered Syriac Orthodox text concerning the meetings (apparently the earlier-known version was actually a later recension published by Nau, and this newly-discovered text is the longer version on which that recension was based) that the Syrians repeatedly asked the Emperor to have the discussions taken down in writing, but this was rejected not only by the Chalcedonian bishops, but also by Strategius, who was the locum tenens for the magister. Polemical reasons for this are given a bit later on in the text (which I won't go into, both because the preview ends soon after this, and because I wouldn't expect anyone here to believe them or care; they're not really the point, anyhow), but I am left wondering if there was a standard scribal practice known to be employed at the time which would've made this turn of events unusual, or if perhaps it was common enough to not require anything nefarious to explain it. It strikes me as a little bit odd that we have access to things as damaging to any of our clean and easy conceptions of history (and here by 'our', I mean OO like me) as Bar Hebraeus' treatise against the Armenians, the recollection (in the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, 10th century) of the reestablishment of communion between the Syrians and the Egyptians after a period of conflict between and subsequent schism of the Syrian Patriarch Peter III of Callinicus (581-591) and his Egyptian counterpart Pope Anastasius, or the Christological debates in Armenia at the time of Ashot IV Bagratuni (spurred on by the evangelizing mission of Theodore Abu Qurra, Chalcedonian bishop of Harran), yet we do not have any official notes from these seemingly very important meetings because Strategius didn't want to write them down? And I guess Emperor Justinian was fine with this? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, at this point in the chapter it turns to a translation of the longer Syriac document, and after a few pages of that (filled with all the 'hits' that you probably already know if you are well-enough versed in the details of the schism, at least in its early incarnation like this), the preview ends, so I guess I can't learn anything else from this chapter if I don't want to pay $247 for my own copy of the book (curse you, Routledge! And Covid-19, for shuttering our libraries!), which is just a little crazy to me.
If anyone here knows anything about the demographics of Constantinople and its environs at that time, or the scribal practices observed at the imperial court of Justinian, I would very much appreciate some discussion of this. Speaking personally, I think it's a rather big loss for both of our communions that no official records of the conversations held in the court exist, since it is obvious to me from reading just a little bit of the Syriac text that its details -- regardless of whatever truth they may reflect -- are probably rather easy to sidestep, given that they come from a distinctly pro-Syriac source (and I assume the same would be true regarding the letter to the priest in Thessaloniki, for the same reasons). The way I tend to look at these things is not so much "Aha! We have a primary source document that says XYZ, therefore we win!", but rather that here would be an early reflection of what both sides -- Syriac with regard to the Syriac documents, and Greek with regard to the Greek -- actually concerned themselves with at the time, and as such they are inherently valuable as a means to sort of 'peel back' the accumulated traditions surrounding the council and 'the others', and see what should stand as our respective authentic traditions re: why we accept or do not accept _____. And that's pretty important to me, when it comes to both understanding you guys and to tracing a sort of 'through line' from Chalcedon to today with regard to the faith of my own Church.
Thanks for your time, if you've read this far.
