Underground eschatology in the days of Justinian in 538

Koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD) Visiting Professor, Kyungpook National University, Sangju Campus, South Korea, Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College, Australia

Talking about eschatology was banned by the church fathers Eusebius, Jerome and Augustine just to list a few, and the decreed of Gelasia (490) made it illegal. Pagans did not like it and made it illegal and the church used the same rhetoric as the pagans for downplaying the attempts to link events to the time of the End. That was during the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries the popular modus operandi of the church. Thus, banned from public display, eschatology was only found “underground” and underground it was. Procopius thought that Justinian was the Antichrist. Emperor Anastasios I that came to the throne in 491 started to reign in the year 6000 from Creation says a source probably dating to his time but which we only have the 10^th century copy of in the Patria Constantinopeleanous at Notiz III, 40. The persecution of eschatological minded people and coercion statements against thinking “eschatologically” by Eusebius, Jerome and Augustine are discussed in length by R. Landes in 1988. But, just because eschatological thinking is scarce in documents of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, does not mean that there was not an “underground” entertaining of eschatological ideas. Landes is convinced of this. Suddenly after 535 Justinian wanted to think and do only theology. He publically announced that through his minting of his coins showing him as a theologian in the year 538. The whole world saw a paradigm shift right in their hands with the face of the emperor Justinian holding a cross in his hand instead of a sword or lance and instead of sitting on a horse as a soldier. He started building churches left right and center. He grabbed the money of the Romans and gave it to the barbarians coming to Rome to impress them. He developed a mania for unification to such an extent that he and the popes of that time came into deep rifts. A war of words was carefully designed between them. Slowly, Justinian had to give in and lay down his caesaro-papism attitude and thinking that originated with Eusebius and came comfortably for him to his own time as well, and rendered respect for the primacy of the papal see of Rome as the leader of the church. It was reinforced by Leo I, by Gelasius and by Homisdas just before Justinian took the throne. Justinian expressed a few times to the papacy that he accepts what Leo I decided a century or more before about the primary role of the papacy for the church. What Justinian in fact was doing, is to take off his crown and slowly passing it on to the papacy, since he Justinian became theologian in 538, but still, the leader of all theologians was the papacy. Caesaro-papism was to become Papal-caesarism. Just the other way around. The legal persecutions of Justinian was to fall in the hands of the papal see and that went on for 1260 years until Berthier, Napoleon’s general arrested the papacy in 1798 and took its representative to France. There is a possibility that Justinian tapped into this underground eschatology and that the fact that the year 6000 started in 491/2 that he Justininian was in fact living in the time of what Hippolytos described as the seventh millennium when the Second Coming was to take place and heaven was to arrive. Was Justinian’s Hagio Sophia building in Constantinople because he wanted to impress Christ in His second coming that Constantinople rather than Jerusalem should be the center of the “new perceived world”? Is that why he changed to theologian? Is that why he started to persecute heretics, why he tried to unify the eastern and western churches, whey he focused on ecumenism? Was it his silent “underground eschatology” operating in him? Data seems to point in this direction although I have not seen direct statements of the connection between Justinian and “underground eschatology” yet.

Source: Richard Landes,  Lest the Millenium be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Chronography 100–800 CE , in W. Verbeke, D. Verhelst, A. Welkenhuysen eds., The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, Leuven University Press, 1988, p. 137–156.