Justinian

Born c. 250 in Egypt to rich and pious parents, Antony (‘the father of monachism’) as a young man withdrew into the desert to practise a life of prayer, contemplation, and self-imposed austerities — which attracted the admiration of the many anchorites persuaded to follow his example. In 305 he founded a monastery in Egypt, returning to his desert cell (today inhabited by a venerable priest!) in 311, where he lived — a celebrated hermit — until his death, at over a hundred, in 356.

Jerome was born c. 340 probably in what is now Croatia. Educated in Rome, he travelled to the East where, in 374, he retired to the desert. Here, he spent four years in penitential exercises and study. Ordained priest at Antioch in 379, he became secretary to Pope Damasus, then went on to achieve fame as a polemicist and spiritual director to many pious persons. Best known for his translation of the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate), he also wrote many letters, treatises, and commentaries on Holy Scripture. He died in 420 at Bethlehem.

a pilgrimage. . To the Church of Saint Michael, at Germia’

As he approached the end of his life, two important things happened to Justinian. He undertook a pilgrimage to the remote Church of Saint Michael at Germia in Galatia, a remarkable undertaking for a man of eighty-one with sedentary habits. And he developed a profound interest in a strange doctrine known as Aphthartodocetism (the belief that Christ’s body was incorruptible) to the extent of trying to impose it as dogma on the Roman Empire in a decree of 565 — the year of his death. Intended to resolve the rift between the Monophysites and the Chalcedonians, it became a dead letter following Justinian’s death.

In his Justinian and Theodora, Robert Browning suggests that the emperor was impelled to embark on the pilgrimage to Germia by some dream or vision, or through the suggestion of some of the monks or theologians whose opinions he was increasingly consulting in an attempt to resolve the anxieties which clouded his final years. I have tried to bring these various strands together in my account of the pilgrimage (of necessity resorting to imagination to supplement the paucity of evidence), which I have also linked to Justinian’s obsession with Apthartodocetism.

Which raises the question: could a man as profoundly religious as Justinian have interpreted the abovementioned doctrine in terms of a materialist philosophy such as Lucretius’ Atomic Theory? That would certainly have called for a conversion of Damascene proportions. Still, stranger things have happened. Paul himself, on the road to Damascus, changed from being the arch-persecutor of Christians, to becoming probably Christianity’s most successful proselytizer. Constantine, as a result of a compelling vision, virtually overnight altered the status of Christianity from that of a persecuted minority sect, to the official creed of the Roman Empire. Darwinism, once equated with atheism, is today comfortably accepted by most leading churchmen, including the Archbishop of Canterbury; indeed the Church of England was among the first to embrace the theories of Darwin. Two of anthropology’s leading researchers were priests — Pere Teilhard de Chardin and the Abbe Breuil. Darwin himself, before embarking on a scientific career, seriously considered the priesthood as a vocation! And it was a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre, who first proposed the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.* Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest scientific thinkers of our time, has spoken of ‘the mind of God’; even the mighty Richard Dawkins, the high priest of atheism, has conceded the possible existence of superhuman intelligence within the universe. Perhaps, in support of my suggestion, the following could be argued. Viewed in a certain light, Lucretius could be seen to provide the sort of intellectual reinforcement for Aphthartodocetism that Justinian — desperate to find a formula to stave off schism in the Church — may not have found unwelcome.

Read De Rerum Natura”’

This great poem in six books, by Titus Carus Lucretius — a contemporary of Cicero and Julius Caesar — is astonishingly modern in feeling. In proposing that the universe and everything in it is composed of an infinite number of atoms, he is popularizing earlier theories of Democritus, Epicurus, and Leucippus — theories very much in accord with current physics. For Lucretius, life, mind and soul are simply functions of man’s corporeal body, the atoms of which disperse at death. Thus anything like individual survival in an afterlife becomes impossible. He explains contagious diseases by the flying about in the air of minute particles — thus anticipating our knowledge of infection spread by germs. His account of the various types of animal life as they successively appeared on earth strikingly suggests ‘the survival of the fittest’, with parallels to Darwin’s theory of evolution. And all this — developed through the sheer power of intellectual reasoning, rather than by scientific experiment!

* Variously given as Cabades, Cobad, Kavadh.

* She got Justinian to enact edicts freeing prostitutes from virtual slavery to brothel-owners, and enhancing women’s legal rights; she championed women’s rights (often over those of men) at every opportunity, and converted a palace into a hostel for the prostitutes she had liberated, where they were helped to begin new lives.

* An extreme example would be that of Aileen Wuornos, a prostitute (with a young female lover) who embarked on a killing spree of her male clients, whom she clearly despised.

* In Dan Brown’s cerebral thriller, The Lost Symbol, mind (according to Noetic Science), not only can affect mattter, it can actually create it. By extension, this could suggest that Mind (i.e. God) preceded and originated the laws of physics plus the Big Bang — which is consistent with the Catholic Aquinian argument for a Prime Mover.