Christologie und Kanonistik. Der Dreikapitelstreit in merowingischen libri canonum. By MichaelEber. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. 2023. xxxvi + 404 pp. €80. 978 3 447 12136 1.
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Christology and canon law are not for the faint-hearted, all the more so when the focus is on the sixth-century dispute over the condemnation of the so-called Three Chapters.The controversy involved multiple papal U-turns and the convening of the Fifth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople by Emperor Justinian in 553, followed by mistreatment and exile for those who dissented against his vision of an 'orthodox republic'.Such a theological position was, in most histories of Late Antiquity, received poorly in the Latin west, which fits well into grander narratives of a gradual parting of ways between the post-Roman kingdoms of western Europe and the medieval Roman Empire.A contemporary letter by Bishop Nicetius of Trier is often seen as a case in point: Nicetius accused Justinian of being 'a son of the devil and an enemy of justice', itself hardly a sign of east-west unity, but in his critique he had also seemingly muddled up the Christological details.In this interpretation, not only did Latin authors disagree with imperial policy, they were also fundamentally misinformed about the debates taking place in far-away Constantinople.While some evidence from well-known texts has been previously adduced to suggest that the contemporary reception of the Three Chapters controversy was not so dismal, Michael Eber's monograph breaks new ground by turning to the canon law collections produced in the Merovingian kingdoms.By looking beyond the original writings produced by the bishops to include what contemporaries were copying, Eber suggests that we can reach a more nuanced picture of the Frankish reception of the controversy (p.3).It is easy to generalize about the corporate body of the episcopate or to divide bishops into two sides in any given dispute (which the reviewer is very much guilty of ), and writing a book that consistently makes the case for an individual-centric approach to Christological controversies is an achievement in its own right.Eber first surveys what is known of the Gallic bishops' Christological persuasions between 449 and 549.Contrary to the view that
Source: Early Medieval Europe
DOI: 10.1111/emed.70009
Author: Sihong Lin
Institution: University of Glasgow
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4416678167
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