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Updated: May 28, 2025
Disorder under Constantius had become confusion worse confounded under Valens. The exiled bishops were so many centres of disaffection, and personal quarrels had full scope everywhere. Thus when Basil's brother Gregory was expelled from Nyssa by a riot got up by Anthimus of Tyana, he took refuge under the eyes of Anthimus at Doara, where a similar riot had driven out the Arian bishop.
The empress invited the new Pope to come to Constantinople, or at least to restore her dear Anthimus. Silverius refused decidedly, though he was in the most dangerous position between the Greeks and the Ostrogoths, and even his personal liberty was in danger from Belisarius. Pope Silverius continued to refuse submission to the wishes of the empress.
He could not negotiate a peace for Theodatus; but archimandrites, priests, and monks besought him to proceed against Anthimus as an interloper and teacher of error. Agapetus refused his communion to the new patriarch, required of him a written confession of faith, and return to his bishopric, which he had deserted contrary to the canons.
Thus the divine and the human concurred in one righteous judgment, as we know was done in the case of Anthimus of late, who was deposed from the see of this imperial city by Agapetus, of holy and renowned memory, bishop of Old Rome." In the intrigue of Theodora with Vigilius, Mennas took no part.
The empress Theodora had tried with all her wiles to set a Monophysite prelate on the Byzantine See. Pope Agapetus had frustrated her plans by deposing Anthimus and consecrating Mennas in his place. But Theodora had not given up her intrigues, and she strove to involve in her net the Roman See itself. In the train of Agapetus at Constantinople was the ambitious deacon Vigilius.
Peace was patched up after an unseemly quarrel, and Basil disposed of any future claims from Anthimus by getting the new capital transferred to Podandus. The dispute with Anthimus was little more than a personal quarrel, so that it was soon forgotten. The old Semiarian Eustathius of Sebastia was able to give more serious annoyance.
When Valens divided Cappadocia in 372, the capital of the new province was fixed at Tyana. Thereupon Bishop Anthimus argued that ecclesiastical arrangements necessarily follow civil, and claimed the obedience of its bishops as due to him and not to Basil.
After the Pope's death, Mennas proceeded to hold in May and June of that year a synod in which he declared Anthimus to be entirely deposed from the episcopal dignity, and condemned Severus and other leaders of the Monophysites.
Again, at the time of Togrul Beg, the Greek schism also took place; now from Michael Cerularius, in 1054, to Anthimus, in 1853, Patriarchs of Constantinople, eight centuries have passed of religious deadness and insensibility: a longer time has passed in China of a similar political inertness: yet China has preserved at least the civilization, and Greece the ecclesiastical science, with which they respectively passed into their long sleep; but the Turks of this day are still in the less than infancy of art, literature, philosophy, and general knowledge; and we may fairly conclude that, if they have not learned the very alphabet of science in eight hundred years, they are not likely to set to work on it in the nine hundredth.
The emperor, believing in the orthodoxy of his patriarch, took part at first against the Pope, and strove to overcome him both with threats and with presents. But Justinian, undeceived as to the orthodoxy of Anthimus, gave him up, and Pope Agapetus pronounced judgment of deposition upon him, and on the 13th March, 536, consecrated Mennas, who had been duly elected, to be bishop of Constantinople.
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