A CHANGED WORLDopposition was continued by Maximus Confessor from his monastery in
Carthage; in 645 Maximus publicly debated in Carthage with the former
patriarch and Monothelete, Pyrrhus, and then left for Rome to organize the
campaign from there (Chapter 8). The seventh-century popes were equally
opposed to the imperial innovation, and both Pope Martin I and Maximus
were arrested and taken to Constantinople for trial. Yet Monotheletism did
not prevail. It was formally rejected by the Sixth Ecumenical Council held
in Constantinople by the Emperor Constantine IV in 680–1. Not only was
Maximus’ reputation vindicated, but his theological writings established him
as one of the most important of all Orthodox theologians.^44
The seventh century was a period of intense and profound theological dis-
cussion, of which the central theme remained that of the nature of Christ.
What did it mean that man was made in the image of Christ? How could the
human and the divine natures of Christ be known? Did God suffer in the flesh
in the crucifixion? Concerns had already been raised in the late sixth century
about the cult of saints and their efficacy to intervene after death (Chapter
3), and a growing anxiety about religious images and especially depictions of
Christ, and about the status of visual images as conveyors of truth, revealed
itself in seventh-century writing, including the works of the monk Anastasius
of Sinai and the anti-Jewish disputations. This debate and anxiety was part of
the context for a prolonged argument in the next century about the status of
images as compared with writing.^45 Sets of questions and answers on theo-
logical topics also survive from this period and are indicative of the need to
explain issues of faith and practice in a situation that must often have seemed
bewildering. It was in this crucial period that Maximus Confessor and after
him Germanos, patriarch of Constantinople, 715–30, set out the symbolic
understanding of the church and the liturgy that was to underpin eastern
Orthodox thinking thereafter. As well as condemning Monotheletism, the
Sixth Ecumenical Council in 681 recognized the degree of passion that had
been aroused, and the likelihood of manipulation or falsification of evidence;
the same concern was to persist in connection with the councils of the eighth
century. Neither the fifth nor the sixth council had issued moral or pastoral
canons and in 691 a further council was held in order to fill this gap, known
as the Council in Trullo after the room in the palace where it met, or the
‘Quinisext’, after its status as an appendix to both the fifth and the sixth. Deep
doctrinal divisions and the disturbance of church order that came with them
also had profound ethical implications and church discipline needed to be
reasserted. The intellectual and religious history of the period went together
with its political and military history, and was frequently interwoven with it; it
cannot be separated in modern accounts.
Christians under IslamAt first little seemed to change in the provinces that were now part of the
Umayyad caliphate. The rulers concentrated on military aims and on their