The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus - Coptic ...

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY: BOOK III 139
And further on: ‘Accordingly do not allow anything else to go forth
that is contrary to your sacred Encyclicals, knowing, as we said, that the
whole universe will be overturned again, and that the evils which came
about through the Synod at Chalcedon will be found small, even though
indeed they brought about those countless slaughters, and unjustly and
unlawfully poured forth the blood of the orthodox.’ 20
And further on: ‘We solemnly protest in the presence of our Saviour
Jesus Christ: for our piety is unconstrained; 21 we request the just, canonical
and ecclesiastical condemnation and deposition that has been
brought upon them, and especially upon the man who has for many
reasons been discovered to be an unsaintly bishop in the imperial city.’ 22
The same Zachariah also writes this, in these terms, that when the
imperial encyclical letters had been issued, those [106] in the imperial
city who were infected with the illusion of Eutyches and who were practising
the monastic life, as if reckoning to have encountered some
godsend in Timothy, and hoping to track down their particular position
in the Encyclical, came to him in a hurry. And they retired and withdrew,
as if convinced by Timothy that the Word of God is consubstantial with
us in the £esh and is consubstantial with the Father in Godhead. 23
In contrast to the previous two brief extracts, Allen, Evagrius 125, regarded this supposedly
verbatim quotation as merely an abridgement of Zachariah, but not enough of the
original letter survives in ps.-Zachariah to prove this assertion.
20 I.e. no Counter-Encyclical. This and the following paragraph are not preserved in ps.-
Zachariah.
21 The sense of this interjection is obscure; BEL 345 omits the phrase ‘for our piety’,
while Festugie're (310, with discussion of possible textual changes in n. 13) keeps close to
the literal meaning of the Greek, ‘for our piety is free’ (e ’leuye¤ ran). I would interpret this
as a further assertion by the bishops that their pious decisions had been reached without
interference or compulsion; this assertion was then speci¢cally retracted in their recantation,
quoted at iii.9 (esp. 108:29^9 ‘we have subscribed not in accordance with our intention
but under constraint’).
22 Another attack on Acacius, who would appear to have been formally deposed by the
local Synod, although, again, he is not mentioned by name.
23 Zachariah v.4, returning to the time before Timothy’s departure from Constantinople.
As heir to Dioscorus’ position, Timothy might appear a natural ally to the followers of
Eutyches (cf. ii. n. 103 above, and Zachariah, loc. cit., for an occasion when even the Alexandrians
demanded that he utter a speci¢c anathema against Eutyches), but he had in fact
consistently distanced himself from the Eutychian position that Christ’s £esh came from
heaven and His divinity had entirely absorbed His human nature. Zachariah states that
the Eutychian monks withdrew from Timothy, refusing communion with him, but that