Count Belisarius

Palaeologus quoted the words of Pope Leo, which I forget myself, if I ever heard them, but which I gather were to this effect: that the Son is not God only, which is the view of the insane Acuanitcs; or man only, which is the view of the impious Plotinians; nor man in the sense of lacking something or other of the divine, as the foolish Apollinarians hold; but that He has two united natures, human and divine, according to the texts 'I and My Father are one' and also 'My Father is greater than I'; and that the human nature, by which the Son is inferior to the Father, does not diminish from the divine nature, by which the Son is the equal of the Father.

The Cappadocians cheered Palaeologus when he recited this decision, rattling their cups on the tabic or banging with their beech-wood bowls. They did not notice that Belisarius, under the table, was tying their feet together with a length of tough twine – not so tightly that none of them could stir his feet for comfort, but tightly enough to incommode them greatly if they all tried to rise together; for he had tied them in a narrow circle.

Then Simeon ridiculed Palaeologus, and said that to brush aside false doctrine of Acuanitc or Apollinarian or Plotinian was not by any means the same as stating true doctrine; and that for a priest to be elected Pope of Rome did not give him a right to lay down the Christian law finally, and that a Pope might say and do things for political reasons that were injurious both to his God and to his Emperor. Simeon also said that the Son's nature could not be split into two as a man splits faggots with an axe. The Son's doings and sufferings were neither wholly divine nor wholly human, but all of a piece – Godman-like. Thus: the Son walked on the waters of Galilee, which was an act performed through the flesh but transcending the laws of the nature of flesh.

So far, both my accounts agree as to the order of events, but at this point there comes a difference. First let me give the story as I heard it from a man of Adrianople a great many years later; who had heard it, he said, from Simeon's elder son.

According to this Adrianopolitan, Simeon closed his exposition with the following words: 'Hut Pope Leo also remarked on this head – I can quote his very words: "Ardescat in foco ferritin. Sunt vinculo mea solvenda. Max cliani pugionibus et pipere pugnandum est. Tace!" How can you be obedient to such gross folly, men of Cappadocia?'

The Sergeant of the Cappadocians, pretending to understand Latin, cried out recklessly: 'The Blessed Pope Leo spoke very good sense. He was right in every word. Out of your own mouth you are confuted.' For they were all unaware that Simeon had conveyed a secret message to Belisarius to heat the spit in the embers, to cut his bonds, and to be prepared to do battle with daggers and pepper.

But, according to the version that I heard from Andreas not many years ago, it was Belisarius who spoke the Latin words, pretending to confute Simeon, and crying out: 'Ardescit in foco ferritin manibus luis propinquum. Vinculo solvam. Max etiam pugionibus el pipere pugnabitur' – at which (Andreas said) the ignorant Cappadocians cheered the boy as a stout champion of the true faith. These words of Belisarius, if spoken, conveyed a message to Simeon that the spit was already heating in the fire close to his hands, that he would cut his bonds, and that a battle would soon be fought with daggers and pepper.

Against the acceptance of Andreas's account is the well-known tendency in old people to exaggerate or distort the experiences of their youth, especially when telling of a person afterwards famous. Thus, St Matthew learned from certain old gossips that the infant Jesus once restored a dead sparrow to life for them when they were playmates together; and has recorded this in his second Gospel with such other extravagances as that He spoke from His Mother's womb and reproved His stepfather Joseph. But in favour of this version I can say that it came to me not at third but at first hand, and that I knew Andreas as a man of confidence. Nor must it be objected that so young a child as Belisarius then was could not have spoken good Latin, the Latin of Rome: for good Latin was his mother's native tongue. Her own father had been a Roman Senator who left Italy with his family, fifty years before this time, when the barbarian Vandal, King Geiserich, plundered the temples and noble houses of Rome; he came to the Eastern part of the Roman Empire for security, and his family remained true to good Latin. So it was that Belisarius spoke three languages already: the Thracian vernacular of his family estate, and Latin, in which his mother and her chaplain always conversed with him, and Greek, the common language of the Eastern Empire – but Greek not fluently as yet.