Justinian

the doctrine that held Christ’s body to be incorruptible and which, in recent years, had begun to interest the emperor profoundly. Here, perhaps, lay hopes of finding a via media between the two opposing creeds, which might lead eventually to resolution.

‘Read De Rerum Natura,’* suggested Tan-Shing, when Justinian broached the matter with the sage. ‘By Lucretius — one of your Roman poets from the time of the late Republic.’

In the commune’s well-stocked library, Justinian located a copy of the work in question — a poem in six books, each consisting of a separate scroll. A long read. Settling himself in a comfortable chair, the emperor unscrolled a section of the first volumen. .

‘It’s bleak — bleak and terrible!’ cried Justinian to Tan-Shing some hours later. ‘He postulates that all we are consists of an infinite number of tiny particles — each called atomos. The whole disintegrates when we die, leaving nothing of ourselves but the dispersed atoms — not even a soul!’

‘You are distressed, Martin,’ the sage responded calmly. ‘You have glimpsed the Truth, and it has frightened you. That is only natural, to be expected.’

‘But if Lucretius is right, it means I will not see Theodora again!’

‘Not in the sense, perhaps, that you and she will meet as individuals in some afterlife,’ replied the other gently. ‘She is already part of the Infinite, as you yourself will be eventually — both of you absorbed and re-united in God, the Universe, the All — in Heaven, if you like. Is not that an infinitely greater and more liberating prospect than one that only sees the limited, imperfect Self?’

‘I’ll have Father Eutropus excommunicated, anathematized!’ exclaimed Justinian. ‘His community will be broken up, his Church of Saint Martin deconsecrated!’

‘I do not believe that,’ said Tan-Shing with a patient smile. ‘There speaks Justinianus Augustus only. But already, as “Brother Martin”, you have moved on, experienced a tiny transformation — if you like, a foretaste of the Infinite. As Epicurus says, “We can never step into the same river twice”. Today, I leave Saint Michael’s to resume my pilgrimage. Meanwhile, dear friend, I offer a farewell suggestion: meditate on these wise words of Lucretius, “Nothing is lost”.’

Saddened by the departure of Tan-Shing, whom he had come to regard as a cherished comrade, and oppressed by a nameless sense of bewilderment and dread, Justinian set off from the commune into the countryside later that same day, in an attempt to clear his mind. Scarcely aware of his surroundings, he walked for miles, confused thoughts whirling in his brain, until, coming to a cliff edge, he was forced to stop. Exhausted, he sat down and contemplated the view.

Immediately before him, a precipice dropped hundreds of feet to an expanse of undulating pastureland. Peering over the edge, he spotted on a ledge far below, a large untidy nest in which two downy chicks were stirring. Moments later, an eagle, a tiny lamb gripped in its talons, alighted at the eyrie. Repelled yet fascinated, conscious of the mother ewe’s distress at the loss of her offspring, Justinian watched the eagle’s young tear at the offering with hooked and greedy beaks. For creatures to live, other creatures must die. Like Tan-Shing’s endless cycle of rebirth, transformation was the order of the Universe — if Lucretius was right, that is. Nothing was lost, the poet had affirmed. Could a practical example illustrate that? the emperor wondered. Take a river — its volume lessened as it flowed into the sea. But the surface of the sea evaporated in the sun, to form clouds which, blowing from the sea back over the land cooled as they rose, turning to rain, which restored the river’s volume. Therefore nothing was lost. The cycle was complete.

Was there a parallel here with Aphthartodocetism? as Tan-Shing had suggested. If, as Lucretius proposed, the individual atoms of which the body was made up dispersed after death yet remained constant — in quantity, then nothing, after all, was lost. In this sense, Christ’s body could indeed be held to be incorruptible. ‘If Christ be not risen, then is your faith vain,’ said Paul. But, even if one accepted Lucretius, the Ascension into Heaven could still be said to have occurred, only in a way not previously conceived. Justinian found the thought strangely comforting. In a state of mental excitement akin to an epiphany, he returned to Saint Michael’s, determined to think through the enormous implications of this most challenging of revelations, and to try to form from it some coherent doctrine. It would, he realized, have to be framed in language which, in order to be acceptable to Christians throughout the Roman Empire, must not offend or affright traditional believers. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, he felt as though the scales had dropped from his eyes, enlarging his perception to a terrifying yet exhilarating degree. As that same Paul had said in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, ‘For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’

Back in Constantinople, Justinian lost no time in promulgating the new doctrine of Aphthartodocetism. Even if his subjects might not fully comprehend its meaning (as he himself did but ‘in part’), he felt it was important that, at least on trust, they should accept it; complete understanding could follow later. Throughout that thirty-ninth year of his reign,* Justinian wrestled with refining and clarifying the new dogma, studying and comparing texts, taking endless notes. Night after night, lights burning in the Great Palace testified to the Sleepless One’s unceasing efforts for the spiritual welfare of his people. They were still burning when, on the night of the fourteenth of November, Callinicus, Praepositus of the Sacred Bedchamber, entered the emperor’s tablinum and found him dead, sitting upright at his desk. On his face was an expression partly startled, part enraptured — as though he had suddenly grasped the meaning of some tremendous yet elusive truth.

* Whose poem extolling the glories of Hagia Sophia had recently been recited at the re-dedication of that church.

* Buddha.

** Yerma, near Ankara.

* On the Nature of Things.

* 565.

AFTERWORD

Occupying much of what has been called ‘the last Roman century’, Justinian’s reign, in terms of the chief aims he set himself (restoration of the West Roman Empire in parallel with the establishment of religious unity), has to be adjudged a failure, though a failure of heroic dimensions. For within a few generations of his death, the mighty realm which he had inherited and, with the conquest of Africa, Italy and southern Spain, greatly expanded, had, under the onslaught of Lombards, Avars, and militant Islam, shrunk to an Anatolian rump with a scattered archipelago of minor outposts in the West. And his mission to create religious unity by attempting to resolve the differences between the Monophysite East and the Chalcedonian West (through the Edict condemning the Three Chapters, and the later one regarding Aphthartodocetism), merely resulted in driving the two sides even further apart. Anyway, the epic struggle between the two opposing creeds (which had given rise to so much angst and persecution during the fifth and sixth centuries), suddenly became — with the Arab conquest of Roman Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria — an obsolete irrelevance, as did, due also to Islamic occupation (of the Great King’s realm this time), the eternal tug-of-war between Rome and Persia.

Yet despite so much of his life’s work running into the sands, Justinian has left us an enduring legacy in one important field — that of law. His and Tribonian’s great Institutes provided the foundation for the legal systems of many countries (e.g. Scotland and Holland) at the present day. In addition, we owe to Justinian the existence of a number of magnificent churches, above all Hagia Sophia — the apogee of Roman architectural and engineering genius. If this sublime building were Justinian’s sole memento, the world would still owe him an immeasurable debt.

In a telling metaphor in his perceptive and thought-provoking The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown imagines a traveller by train realizing ‘at the end of a long slow journey that the landscape outside has altered — so in the crucial generations between the reign of Justinian and that of Heraclius, we can sense the definitive emergence of a medieval world’. The world into which Justinian was born was still a fully Roman one. By the year of his death, 565, the signs that Antiquity was ending (e.g. a preoccupation with religious issues at the expense of rational philosophy, of which the closing of the Schools of Athens is a marker) were beginning to appear. It is perhaps not without significance that, almost coincidentally with Justinian’s passing, was born (c. 570) the man whose legacy would bring about the passing also of Justinian’s world —