1.
That place is best for us where our lot is cast by Providence. This was brought home to Theodoret when, after the turmoil of the great cities and their synods, he felt himself constrained from very weariness to turn his face back again to dull, uninteresting Cyrrhus and its unintellectual people. How was it possible that he, dedicated to religion as he was front his birth, and nurtured in monasteries, could live long without gasping in the heat and noise and whirl of capital or council? Even in the first centuries, when persecution drove Christians to and fro, there was more of outward peace and bodily and mental repose in those large populous places for the Bishops of the Church than now, when Christianity was the religion of the Empire. Bishops now were great secular magistrates, and whether they would or no, were involved in secular occupations. In their several cities they had tribunals of their own, and had the task of deciding the quarrels of their subjects. They were attached to the Imperial Court, and were intrusted with many private matters by statesmen, leaders of armies, high officials, or great ladies. They went as ambassadors between sovereigns, and as mediators between prince and people. Such at least was their position in the highways and marts of the world; and, in an age when theological disputes were rife and the decisions in which they issued were state enactments, even the obscurest bishop was a public man, as having a seat in the great Councils in which those decisions were made. He must take his part in momentous questions, and his line in ecclesiastical politics, amid the war of anathemas, and with the risk of incurring the greatest temporal penalties.
2.
But, apart from these extraordinary troubles, of which Theodoret had his full share, the ordinary trials, which arose out of his secular rank, were far more oppressive to him when he got into the world than his solitude at Cyrrhus. In the opening of his first work, dedicated to his friend, John, Bishop of Germanicia, he complains in remarkable language of the obstacles created by his worldly occupations to his pursuing the commentaries on Scripture, which had been demanded of him:—
“The exegesis,” he says, “of the Divine Oracles demands a soul cleansed and spotless; it demands also a keen intelligence, which can penetrate into the things of God, and venture into the shrine of the Spirit. It needs, moreover, a tongue which can subserve that intelligence, and worthily interpret what it understands. Nevertheless, since you, my dearest John, have bid me, I have dared a task beyond my powers, seeing I am implicated in innumerable occupations, of town and country, military and civil, of the Church and the State.”—In Cant. p. 2.
3.
This was his complaint in A.D. 429, before or just upon the commencement of his ecclesiastical conflicts, two years before that Great Council of Ephesus, in which he bore so principal a part, and when his years were not more than thirty-five. What then must have been the load and the pressure of his ecumenical duties, when he was in the full swing of the Nestorian controversy! Heresy is bad at all times, but at that time, if Bishops took up the cause of heresy, they possessed in their secular greatness special opportunities of propagating it, or, if they withstood it, of violent conduct, not only towards its originators, but even towards those who were gentle towards such men. Arianism came into the Church with Constantine, and the Councils which it convoked and made its tools were a scandal to the Christian name. The Council of Nicæa, which preceded them, was by rights final on the controversy, but this Constantine’s successor, Constantius, and his court Bishops would not allow. They did their utmost to undo that which was done once for all and for ever. The Councils of the next century, even such as were orthodox, took their tone and temper from those which had gone before them, and even those which were ecumenical have nothing to boast of as regards the mass of the Fathers, taken individually, who composed them.
All through that time the Bishops of Christendom appear in history as a Mahanaim, the antagonist hosts in a battle, not as the Angels of their respective Churches, and the shepherds of their people. Their synodal functions encroach upon their diocesan; and their relation to their flocks is obscured by their position in the hierarchy. The great Fathers of that period give no countenance to what may be called its crying evil. St. Gregory Nazianzen declared he would never have any thing to do with Councils any more. St. Chrysostom had to protest against their conduct towards himself. St. Basil, despairing of them, looked towards the Pope and St. Athanasius. Athanasius himself took part in three in the course of forty years, but he fought the battle of the faith with his pen more than with his crosier. When the West in his latter days attempted a General Council, it produced nothing better than the wretched gathering at Ariminum. The passage of Ammianus, which Gibbon has made famous, speaks of “the troops of bishops, rushing to and fro in government conveyances,” and of “the public posting establishments almost breaking down under their synods.” In the next generation Cyril and Theodoret would have been happier had they kept at home and settled the points in dispute, as they began them, with theological treatises, dispensing with hostile camps, party votings, and coercive acts. Their controversies, I know, were on vital subjects, the settlement of them was essential, and in settling them the Church was infallible; but in matter of fact and after all they were carried on to their irreversible issue, by the Pope and the civil power, not by the Council to which they were submitted.
4.
It grieves me to think that a man like Theodoret should have played a violent part in these meetings and altercations. I repeat it, I wish he had remained a priest; he would not have been a worse theologian, and he would have been a better man. He would have written more, and quarrelled less. His mind would not have been clouded by resentment, nor his name associated, unjustly associated, with heresy. He would not have called Cyril an Apollinarian, and then been surprised to find the epithet of “Nestorian” fastened on himself. He would not have been so prompt to plunge into hot water, so indignant to find that hot water scalded. He would not have had to learn that a man cannot have so much of fighting as he likes, and no more. He would have recollected that the beginning of strife is like the letting out of waters, and, that if he attempted to thrust others out of the Church, they to a certainty would not be slow in turning out him.
For these acts of mistaken zeal Theodoret received a retributive chastisement from an All-loving Hand. He who had been unjust to a Saint, fell into the clutches of an heresiarch. Theodoret anathematized Cyril, and was anathematized and deposed by Dioscorus. Then he seemed to have forfeited peace for ever: for to Cyril he might have yielded, but to Dioscorus, a teacher of heresy, he could not yield religiously. With a full appreciation of this difficulty, he wrote a letter to his metropolitan, Alexander of Hierapolis. He says:—
“They know not how great my love of quiet is. It is the sweetest of all this life’s delectable things. So great is my longing for it, that I should need no man’s urging to hurry after it, did I not fear the great Judge. Peace I desire, if orthodoxy goes with it; but peace I eschew, if it is unrighteous and heterodox.”
Who then should restore Theodoret to himself, to Cyrrhus and to peace? Dioscorus himself cut the knot of the dilemma for him. In high favour with the Emperor, he obtained a decree for the confinement of Theodoret, first within the walls of Cyrrhus, next to his monastery near Apamea. The civil power, thinking to punish him, rescued him from the scene of strife, to which he found himself committed. And when, shortly afterwards, St. Leo vindicated his orthodoxy at Chalcedon, nothing was wanting to his peace, as far as outward circumstances could be the guarantee of it.