NONETHELESS, Martin’s successors at Rome held firm. The deadlock remained unbroken, until at last Emperor Constantine IV summoned a Council. Pope Agatho hastily took soundings from bishops at Milan, and also at Hatfield in England, where on September 17th, 680, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore, asked the assembled clergy whether they would back the Imperial government’s line — for the sake of Christian unity?*
Agatho’s representative John, taking a break from teaching music at Wearmouth Abbey, may have felt a twinge of anxiety.* Archbishop Theodore was a Greek, educated in Constantinople, and driven from his birthplace, Tarsus, by Arab invasion. How would the appeal to Imperial unity affect him?
But Theodore and the Hatfield bishops cared only for Scripture and honouring a brave confessor, Martin. ‘We accept what he accepted,’ they reported stoutly back to Rome. ‘What was anathema to him is anathema to us.’ One year later, the Council in Constantinople agreed, 151 to two, and with help from the English the ‘one will’ policy was overturned. Truth, it seemed, was more important than unity.
The English bishops were at an advantage, in that Britain was no longer in the Roman Empire, which had abandoned it in 410. A similar circumstance gave St John Damascene of the Greek Church in Syria the freedom to stand up for sacred art during The Restoration of the Icons.
For more on John and St Benedict Biscop’s abbey at Monkwearmouth in Sunderland, see our post How Benedict Biscop brought Byzantium to Britain.
Tarsus was the birthplace of St Paul. See The Conversion of Saul.