ated the Monophysite opinions. [Sidenote: The
Henotikon.] In 482 the patriarch Acacius of Constantinople, under the
orders probably of the Emperor Zeno (474-91), drew up the _Henotikon_,
an endeavour to secure the peace of the Church by abandoning the
definitions of the Fourth General Council. No longer was "one and the
same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged _in two natures_,
without fusion, without change, without division, without separation."
But it is impossible to ignore a controversy which has been a cause of
wide divergence. Men will not be silent, or forget, when they are
told. Statesmanlike was, no doubt, the policy which sought for unity
by ignoring differences; and peace was to some extent secured in the
East so long as Zeno and his successor Anastasius (491-518) reigned.
But at Rome it was not accepted. Such a document, which implicitly
repudiated the language of Leo the Great, which the Fourth General
Council had adopted, could {8} never be accepted by the whole Church;
and those in the East who were theologians and philosophers rather than
statesmen saw that the question once raised must be finally settled in
the dogmatic decisions of the Church. Had the Lord two Natures, the
Divine and Human, or but one? The reality of the Lord's Humanity as
well as of His Divinity was a truth which, at whatever cost of division
and separation, it was essential that the Church should proclaim and
cherish.

In Constantinople, a city always keen to debate theology in the
streets, the divergence was plainly manifest; and a document which was
"subtle to escape subtleties" was not likely to be satisfactory to the
subtlest of controversialists. The Henotikon was accepted at Antioch,
Jerusalem, and Alexandria, but it was rejected by Rome and by the real
sense of Constantinople. In Alexandria the question was only laid for
a time, and when a bishop who had been elected was refused recognition
by Acacius the Patriarch of Constantinople and Peter "the Stammerer,"
who accepted the Henotikon, preferred to his place, a reference to Rome
led to a peremptory letter from Pope Simplicius, to which Acacius paid
no heed whatever. Felix II. (483-92), after an ineffectual embassy,
actually declared Acacius excommunicate and deposed. The monastery of
the Akoimetai at Constantinople ("sleepless ones," who kept up
perpetual intercession) threw itself strongly on to the side of the
advocates of Chalcedon. Acacius, then ex