A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

the west - but these could be treated as outside the law, as were pagans and Jews.
The legal codes of Justinian reiterated the suppression of the rights of Jews in
civic, economic and religious spheres, and they were subject to continued abuse
in theological tracts as well as assaults on their synagogues. 31
With orthodoxy enforced, the Greek mind turned inwards. The most
influential religious thinker of the age was Dionysius; his works were claimed to
be those of Dionysius the Areopagite, who was described in the Acts of the
Apostles as a follower of Paul. This gave him unrivalled status, even though the
evidence now suggests that his works date not from the first century but from as
late as AD 500. Dionysius was a mystic, and he described how the human soul
could ascend towards deification to become lost in the mystery of God. As he
put it in his Mystical Theology:
‘My argument now rises from what is below up to the transcendent and the
more it climbs, the more language falters, and when it has passed up and beyond
the ascent, it will turn silent completely [sic], since it will finally be at one with
him who is indescribable.’ 32 Otherworldliness and a reluctance to have any
reasoned debate on the nature of the Godhead now pervaded the Byzantine
world. ‘Even knowledge and discourse themselves are limited to the dim
perceptions allowed in the human world, through the signs and messengers that
God chooses to vouchsafe.’ 33
Justinian stands in a direct line from Theodosius’ laws of 381 and brings them
to their logical conclusion, the creation of an empire based on a single
monolithic faith. Even those laws of Theodosius that had been applied to a single
prefecture were now extended in the Code to the whole of the rest of the empire.
But, as this chapter has shown, heresy and orthodoxy were defined largely as the
result of power struggles within the Church, with the opposing factions
competing for imperial support. The state, in its turn, often had to intrude simply
to restore order. Once the state had decided to intervene in support of orthodoxy
and in opposition to heresy, the outcome was an authoritarianism based on
irrational principles, which presided over the demise of ancient traditions of
reasoned debate. 34