W. Robert Godfrey

Where can we look for continuity?

Who will provide assurance that things are continuing?

And it was to the papacy that they looked.

In our first lecture, we were looking at the sort of backgrounds of the Middle Ages, the character, the broad character of the Middle Ages.

We tried to set the stage for what we're going to look at in our period that I'm calling the warm-up.

In this lecture, I want to look at two really critically foundational figures for the development of the early Middle Ages, and indeed, in a sense, the whole Middle Ages, one an emperor and one a pope.

And that's sort of appropriate because much of the tension throughout the history of the Middle Ages is tension between pope and emperor.

The emperor is a fellow we already probably talked about a little bit at the end of the ancient church course, Emperor Justinian.

Emperor Justinian reigned from 527 to 565.

So he had a relatively long reign, a quite important reign, a reign conducted almost entirely from Byzantium, from Constantinople in the east, and a reign that set the stage for the eastern empire as it would develop and prosper and struggle in the centuries to come.

When people talk about the East and about the movement from the ancient Roman period into what's called the Byzantine period, Justinian is often seen as the transitional period, as the point of change.

But he's also quite important for our understanding of the beginnings of medieval history in the West.

Justinian came to the throne as a Christian and as a relatively militant Christian.

Some historians see him as the first Christian emperor really determined that there would be uniformity in the empire on the matter of orthodoxy.

And particularly in the East, the church had been troubled by a theological controversy known as the Monophysite heresy.

The Monophysite heresy, you go back and listen to the medieval lectures, was the heresy that said Christ had only one nature.

And the Orthodox position as established at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was that Christ had two natures, a complete divine nature and a complete human nature.

Some Christians in the East thought this made Christ sound sort of schizophrenic.

That's not the word they would have used.

But it made it sound like there were two persons in the one body, and they didn't like that.