By Joseph McCabe
Peter Abélard
St. Augustine and His Age
A Candid History of the Jesuits
Crises in the History of the Papacy
Crises
in the
History of the Papacy
A Study of
Twenty Famous Popes whose Careers and whose Influence Were Important in the Development of the Church and in the History of the World
By
Joseph McCabe
Author of "Peter Abélard," "Life of Saint Augustine," etc.
G.P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1916
Copyright, 1916
BY
JOSEPH McCABE
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
Probably no religious institution in the world has had so remarkable a history, and assuredly none has attracted so large and varied a literature, as the Papacy. The successive dynasties of the priests of ancient Egypt were, by comparison, parochial in their power and ephemeral in their duration. The priests of Buddha, rising to an autocracy in the isolation of Thibet or mingling with the crowd in the more genial atmosphere of China or cherishing severe mysticisms in Japan, offer no analogy to the Papacy's consistent growth and homogeneous dominion. The religious leaders of the Jews, scattered through the world, yet hardened in their type by centuries of persecution, may surpass it in conservative antiquity, but they do not remotely approach it in power and in historical importance. It influences the history of Europe more conspicuously than emperors have ever done, stretches a more than imperial power over lands beyond the most fevered dreams of Alexander or Cæsar, and may well seem to have made "Eternal Rome" something more than the idle boast of a patriot.
Yet this conservative endurance has not been favoured by such a stability of environment as has sheltered the lamas of Thibet or the secular priests of the old Chinese religion. The Papacy has lived through fifteen centuries of portentous change, though it seemed in each phase to have connected itself indissolubly with the dominant institutions and ideas of that phase. The Popes have witnessed, and have survived, three mighty transformations of the face of Europe. They had hardly issued from their early obscurity and lodged themselves in the fabric of the old Roman civilization when this fell into ruins; but they held firmly, amidst the ruins, the sceptre they had inherited. One by one the stately institutions of the older world—the schools, the law-courts, the guilds of craftsmen, the military system, the municipal forms and commercial routes—disappeared in the flood of barbarism which poured over Europe, but this institution, which seemed the least firmly established, was hardly shaken and was quickly accepted by the strange new world. A new polity was created, partly under the direction of the Popes, and it was so entirely saturated by their influence that religion gave it its most characteristic name. Then Christendom, as it was called, passed in turn through a critical development, culminating in the Reformation; and the Papacy begot a Counter-Reformation and secured millions beyond the seas to replace the millions it had lost. The third and last convulsion began with the work of Voltaire and Rousseau and Mirabeau, and has grievously shaken the political theory with which the Papacy was allied and the older religious views which it had stereotyped. Yet today it has some 35,000,000 followers in the three greatest Protestant countries, the lands of Luther, of Henry VIII., and of the Puritan Fathers.
It must seem a futile design to attempt to tell, with any intelligent satisfaction, within the limits of a small volume the extraordinary story of this institution. No serious historian now tries to command more than a section of the record of the Papacy, and he usually finds a dozen volumes required for the adequate presentment of that section. Yet there is something to be said for such a sketch as I propose to give. If we take four of the more important recent histories of the Papacy—those of Father Grisar, Dr. Mann, Dr. Pastor, and Dr. Creighton—we find that the joint thirty volumes do not cover the whole period of Papal history even to the sixteenth century; and the careful student will not omit to include in his reading the still valuable volumes of Milman and of Dr. Langer. In other words, he must study more than fifty volumes if he would have an incomplete account of the development of the Papacy up to the time of the Reformation, and more than that number if he would follow accurately the fortunes of the Papacy since the days of Paul III. The history of the Papacy is very largely the history of Europe, and this voluminous expansion is inevitable. On the other hand, the general student of the history of Europe and the general reader who seeks intellectual pleasure in "the storied page" are not only repelled by such an array of tomes, but they have no interest in a vast proportion of the matter which it is incumbent on the ecclesiastical historian to record. One wants a view of the Papacy in the essential lines of its development, and they are usually lost, or not easily recognized, in the conscientiously full chronicles. Is it possible to give a useful and informing account of the essential history of the Papacy in a small volume?
The rare attempts to do this that have been made have failed from one or other of two causes: they have either been written with a controversial aim and therefore have given only the higher lights or darker shades of the picture, or they have been mere summaries of the larger works, mingling what is relevant and what is not relevant from the developmental point of view. The design which occurs to me is to write a study of the Papacy by taking a score of the outstanding Popes—which means, in effect, a score of the more significant or critical stages in the development of the Papacy—and giving an adequate account of the work and personality of each. The evolution of the Papacy has not, like the evolution of life in general, been continuous. It has had periods of stagnation and moments of rapid progress or decay. Of the first hundred Popes, scarcely a dozen contributed materially to the making of the Papacy: the others maintained or marred the work of the great Popes. It is the same with the environment of the Papacy, which has influenced its fortunes as profoundly as changes of environment have affected the advance of terrestrial life. There have been long drowsy summers closed by something like ice ages; there have been convulsions and strange invasions, stimulating advance by their stem and exacting pressure. I propose to select these more significant periods or personalities of Papal history, and trust that the resultant view of the Papacy will have interest and usefulness. The periods which lie between the various Pontificates which I select will be compressed into a brief account of their essential characters and more prominent representatives, so that the work will form a continuous study of the Papacy.
In the selection of a score of Popes out of more than two hundred and fifty there is room for difference of judgment. The principle on which I have proceeded is plain from the general aim I have indicated. The story of the Papacy may fitly be divided into two parts: a period of making and a period of unmaking. Taking the terms somewhat liberally, one may say that the first period reaches from the second to the fourteenth century, and that the subsequent centuries have witnessed an increasing loss of authority, especially in the catastrophic movements (from the Papal point of view) of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. A selection of significant Popes must, therefore, include the great makers of the Papacy, the men whose vice or incompetence brought destructive criticism upon it, and the men who have, with varying fortune, sought to defend it against the inroads of that criticism during the last four centuries. One must make a selection neither of good Popes nor bad Popes, but of the Popes who, in either direction, chiefly influenced the fortunes of the institution; and, in order that no important phase may be omitted, a few men of no very pronounced personality must be included.
Regarded from this point of view, the history of the Papacy may be compressed within limits which rather accentuate than obscure its interest, and, at the same time, a very ample account may be given of some of its more instructive phases. The first phase, before the Bishop of Rome became a Pope, in the distinctive sense of the word, is best illustrated by taking the bishopric of Callistus at the beginning of the third century. The Roman bishopric was then one of several "apostolic Sees," rarely claiming authority over other bishoprics, and still more rarely finding such a claim acknowledged: thrown somewhat into the shade by the vastly greater strength of the Eastern churches, yet having an immense and as yet undeveloped resource in the tradition, which was now generally accepted, that it had been founded by the two princes of the apostles. There was, however, in three hundred years, no Roman bishop sufficiently endowed to develop this resource, and the fourth century still found the Roman See so little elevated that its African neighbours disdainfully rejected its claim of authority. Then the far-reaching change which followed the conversion of Constantine bestowed on it a material splendour and a secular authority which gave it a distinctive place in Christendom, and a study of the life of Bishop Damasus shows us the extension of its prestige and the exploitation of its tradition; while the founding of a rival imperial city in the East and the obliteration of all other apostolic Sees withdrew half of Christendom from Roman influence before its ecumenic claim was fully developed.
The fall of the western Roman Empire enfeebles the once powerful and independent provincial bishops and gives a more spiritual outlook to the successors of Peter who sit among the ruins of Rome. The life of Leo the Great illustrates this concentration on religious power amidst the autumnal decay of the more material power and of the wealth which had inflated and secularized some of his predecessors. The life of Gregory the Great marks the culmination of this development. The material world seems to be nearing dissolution and the old Roman spirit of organization, which is strong in Gregory I., is directed to the creation of a moral and religious dictatorship. There are still flickers of independence in remote bishoprics, and the East is irrecoverably removed, but the disordered state of Christendom cries for a master. Europe is young again, with a vicious impulsive youth, and the rod of Rome falls healthily on its shoulders; and the paralysis of civic government and land-tenure in Italy inevitably casts secular functions and large possessions upon the one effective power that survives. An elementary royalty begins to attach to the Papacy: the function of ultimate tribunal in that violent world is imposed on it almost by public needs: and, though Gregory is personally disdainful of culture, the Church, and the monastic refuges it consecrates, preserve for a wiser age to come some proportion of the wisdom of the dead age.
With Hadrian I. a new phase opens. The possession and administration of "patrimonies," or bequeathed estates, give place to the definite political control of whole provinces, under the protection of a powerful and conveniently remote King of the Franks. In the ninth century, Nicholas I. consolidates and extends the new power, both as temporal and spiritual ruler. The vice and violence of Europe still justify or promote the growth of a great spiritual autocracy, and the illiteracy of Europe—for culture has touched its lowest depth—permits the imposition on it (in the "False Decretals," etc.) of an impressive and fictitious version of the bases of Papal claims. Then Rome, which has hitherto had singularly few unworthy men in the chair of Peter, becomes gradually degraded to the level of its age, and the Papacy passes into the darkness of the Age of Iron: which is fitly illustrated by the Pontificate of John X. Gregory VII. shows its restoration to spiritual ideals and the union of monastic severity with the Papal tradition; and this steady creation of a machinery for dominating the vice and violence of Europe is perfected in the extraordinary work of Innocent III., who would, for its moral correction, make Europe the United States of the Church and treat its greatest monarchs as satraps of the Papacy.
After Innocent, the Papacy degenerates. A renewed school-life, the influence of the Moors, the evolution of civic life and prosperity, and the rise of powerful kingdoms stimulate the intelligence of Europe, while the political connexions in which the temporal power entangles the Papacy lead to a degeneration which cannot escape the more alert mind of the laity. During a long exile at Avignon the Papal court learns soft ways and corrupt devices—illustrated by the life of John XXII.—and the Great Schism which follows the return to Rome causes a moral paralysis which permits the Pontificate of an unscrupulous adventurer like John XXIII. The prosperous sensuality of the new Europe infects an immense proportion of the clergy: war, luxury, and display entail a vast expenditure, and the more thoughtful clergy and laity deplore the increasing sale by the Popes of sacred offices and spiritual privileges. The body of lay scholars and lawyers grows larger and more critical, while the Papal Court sinks lower and lower. The Papacy is fiercely criticized throughout Europe, and the resentment of its moral complexion leads to a discussion of the bases of its power. The earlier forgeries are discovered and the true story of its human growth is dimly apprehended. The successive Pontificates of Alexander VI., Julius II., and Leo X. exhibit this dramatic development: a flat defiance by the Papal Court of the increasing moral sentiment and critical intelligence of Europe. Men are still so dominated by religious tradition that, apart from an occasional heresy, they generally think only of "reform" and reforming councils. When Luther strikes a deeper note of rebellion, the echo is portentous, and neither reform, nor violence, nor persuasion succeeds in averting the disruption of Christendom. In Paul III., we have the last representative of the Papacy of the Renaissance wavering between the grim menace of Germany and the unpleasantness of reform. In Sixtus V. and Benedict XIV. we study two of the great efforts of the new Papacy to preserve the remaining half of its territory. In Pius VII., Pius IX., and Leo XIII. we see the Papacy meeting the successive waves of the modern revolution.
In composing this sketch of Papal history, or, rather, study of its critical phases, I have gratefully used the larger modern histories to which I have referred. Dr. Ludwig Pastor's History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages[1] is, for the period it covers (1300-1550), the most valuable of all Papal histories. The Catholic author is not less courageous than scholarly, even if we must recognize some inevitable bias of affection, and he has enriched our knowledge by a most judicious and candid use of unpublished documents in the Secret Archives of the Vatican. Dr. H.K. Mann's Lives of the Popes in the Middle Ages,[2] which covers the ground from Gregory I. to Innocent III., is based upon an ample knowledge of the original authorities, but is much less candid and reliable, and seems to be intended only for controversial purposes. Dr. Creighton's learned and judicious History of the Papacy from the Great Schism to the Sack of Rome[3] must be corrected at times by the documents in Pastor. Father H. Grisar's incomplete History of Rome and the Popes in the Middle Ages[4] is a learned and moderate partisan study of the Papacy in the first four centuries. The older works of Dr. J. Langer,[5] Dean Milman,[6] Gregorovius,[7] and Ranke are by no means superfluous to the student, though more recent research or judgment often corrects them. Less extensive works will be noted in the course of each chapter, and I owe much to industrious older authorities like Baronius, Tillemont, Raynaldus, Mansi, etc. I have, however, had the original authorities before me throughout. The earlier chapters are, indeed, based almost entirely on the Latin or Greek sources, and, in the later chapters, at every point which seemed to inspire differences of judgment I have carefully weighed the original texts. For the later mediæval period, however, Creighton, Pastor, and Gregorovius have so generously strengthened their works with quotations and references that, except at a few points, I may direct the reader to their more comprehensive studies. The narrow limits which are imposed by the particular purpose of this work forbid either the constant quoting of passages or the design of enlarging on some of the remarkable scenes to which it at times refers. The severe condensation, after the first few chapters, has entailed a labour only second to that of research, and I can only trust that the abundance of fact will afford some compensation for the lack of elegance. Happily the earlier controversial method of writing Papal history has so far yielded to candid research that the points in dispute—as far as fact is concerned—are comparatively few. Where they occur—where grave and accepted historians of any school dissent—the evidence is more liberally put before the reader.
J.M.
Christmas, 1915.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] English trans., 1891, etc.
[2] Ten vols., 1902-1914.
[3] Six vols., 2d ed., 1897.
[4] English trans., 1911, etc.
[5] Geschichte der römischen Kirche, 1881, etc.
[6] History of Latin Christianity.
[7] The City of Rome in the Middle Ages, English trans., 1900, etc.
CONTENTS
Crises in the History of the Papacy
ST. CALLISTUS AND THE EARLY STRUGGLE
At the close of the second century after the birth of Christ the Christian community at Rome still saw no human prospect of that spiritual mastery of the world which they trusted some day to attain. They lived, for the most part, in the Transtiberina, the last and least reputable section of the great city, beyond the shelter of its walls. In that squalid and crowded district between the Janiculus and the Tiber dwelt the fishers and tanners and other poor workers; and the Jews, and others who shunned the light, found refuge among their lowly tenements. Near that early ghetto, from which they had issued, most of the Christians lingered. Still they were a small community, and still the might of Rome bade them crouch trembling at the gates, lost among the tombs and gardens of the Vatican or the dense poverty at the foot of the Janiculus. Across the river they would see, above the fringe of wharves and warehouses, the spreading line of the Roman people's palaces, from the Theatre of Pompey to the Great Circus: perhaps they would hear the roar of the lions which might at any time taste Christian flesh. Beyond these was the seething popular quarter of the Velabrum, sending up to heaven at night a confused murmur and a blaze of light at which the Christians would cross themselves; and on either side of the Velabrum, the stern guardians of its superstition, were the hills which bore the gold-roofed temple of Jupiter and the marble city of the Cæsars. More than one hundred and fifty years had passed since the death of Christ, yet his followers waited without the gates, little heeded by the million citizens of Rome.
The old gods were dying, it is true. In many a cool atrium there must have been some such discussion about the successor of Jupiter as has been finely imagined by Anatole France; but assuredly not the weirdest of the Syrian visionaries who abounded would have said that, in a few centuries, those neglected fields beside the Neronian Circus at the foot of the Vatican would become the centre of the world, and that men and women would come from the farthest limits of the Empire to kiss the bones of those obscure Christians. Men talked of the progress of the cult of Mithra, which spread even to distant Eboracum, or the success of the priests of Isis or of Cybele, but few thought about the priests of Christ. Earlier in the century, Pliny had written to court to say that he had found, spreading over his province, a sect named the Christians, whose beliefs seemed to him "an immoderate superstition"; though they had, he said, under pressure, abandoned their God in crowds; and he had little doubt that he would extinguish the sect. Few even of the Christians can have imagined that within two centuries their cross would be raised above the proudest monuments of Rome, and that the eagles of Jove and the rams of Mithra would lie in the dust.
Toward the end of the second century the Roman Christians can hardly have numbered twenty thousand. Dr. Döllinger estimates their number at fifty thousand, but the letter of Bishop Cornelius, on which he relies, belongs to a later date and is not accurately quoted by him.[8] The Bishop says that, in his time, the Roman Church had forty-four priests, fourteen deacons and subdeacons, and ninety-four clerics in minor orders. The crowd of acolytes and exorcists must not be regarded in a modern sense; most of them would never be priests. At that time, there was not a single public chapel in Rome and it would be an anachronism to regard each of the thirty or forty priests of Rome as a rector in charge of more than a thousand souls. The Christians gathered stealthily in the houses of their better-endowed brethren to receive the sacred elements from poor glass vessels, and Tertullian blushes to learn that they are found among the panders and gamblers who have to bribe the officials to overlook their illegal ways.[9] The fact that they supported fifteen hundred poor, sick, and widows need not surprise us when we remember what an age of parasitism it was. At least a fourth of the citizens of Rome lived on free rations and had free medical service. There were, in fine, thirty years of development between the time of Cornelius and the time of Callistus.[10]
Yet, it was nearly a century and a half, tradition said, since Peter and Paul had baptized crowds on the banks of the Tiber. One cannot today add anything to the discussion of that tradition and I will very briefly state the evidence. The First Epistle of Peter—which is not undisputed—says[11]: "The Church that is in Babylon saluteth you," and Babylon is very plausibly understood to mean Rome. Next, about the year 96, Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians, speaks vaguely of a "martyrdom" of Peter and Paul, and seems to imply that it took place at Rome.[12] About the middle of the following century, we find it believed in remote parts of the Church—by Papias in Hierapolis and Dionysius at Corinth—that Peter had preached the Gospel at Rome.[13] Ignatius of Antioch also seems to imply that Peter and Paul founded the Roman community.[14] Irenæus and Tertullian and later writers know even more about it—the later the writer, the more he knows—but the historian must hesitate to use their works. There is a respectable early tradition that Peter and Paul preached the Gospel at Rome and suffered there some kind of martyrdom, during or after the Neronian persecution. Peter is not called "bishop" of Rome by any writer earlier than the third century, and the belief that he ruled the Roman Church for twenty-five years seems to be merely the outcome of some fanciful calculations of Anti-Pope Hippolytus.
Of the earlier bishops, Linus and Anacletus (or Anencletus), we know only the names.[15] Then a faint light is thrown on the metropolitan Church by the letter of Clement, its third Bishop. We find an ordered community, with bishop, priests, and deacons; perhaps we conceive it more accurately if we say, with overseer, elders, and servants. Then the mists thicken again and a line of undistinguished names is all that we can discern until the consecration of Bishop Victor in the year 189.
One would like to know more about Bishop Victor. He seems to have been the first Pope, in the familiar sense of the word. "Pope" was, we know, a common title of bishops until the sixth century, but Victor is one of the makers of a distinctive Papacy. We shall, presently, find Tertullian speaking, with his heaviest irony, of "the bishop of bishops, the supreme pontiff," and, although he is probably referring to Callistus, he is echoing the words of some other bishop. History points to Victor, who peremptorily cut off the Eastern churches from communion because they would not celebrate Easter when he did. They were not much concerned, but Victor's premature assertion of leadership marks the beginning of the Papacy.
The Roman Church was wealthier than those of the East, or had a few wealthy members in the city. It sent sums of money to more needy communities and received flattering requests for advice. It was, however, singularly lacking in intellectual distinction, and it produced no scholar to refute the subtle Gnostics and fiery Montanists who came to it. The waves of heresy which raged over the East broke harmlessly on the Italian shore of Christendom. One must not imagine that it was isolated from the East by difference of tongue. Until the end of the third century, it was wholly Greek: more isolated from Rome than from Corinth. Nor is it less inaccurate to say that the Latins were more interested in administration than in speculation. There is little trace of organization until the days of Callistus. One is more disposed to conceive the Roman Church shivering in poverty amid the wealth and culture of the metropolis. The disdainful language of the intellectuals and the wonderful success of Stoicism in the second century excluded it from the educated world; while its secrecy, its stern abstinence from games and festivals, its scorn of the gods, and the shadow of deadly illegality which brooded over it, made it less successful in appealing to the people than the other Eastern religions.
If, however, the Roman See made little impression in Rome, it made some progress in the Church. As the fragments of Papias and Dionysius show, Christians were saying, far away in the East, that it had been founded by Peter; and the Gospels plainly made Peter the chief of the apostles. The Roman See did not yet speak of having inherited the primacy of Peter, and it had very little share in the prestige of Rome. It must rise higher in the eyes of men, and at the end of the second century it was rising. Marcia, the robust ex-slave who shared the brutal pleasures of Commodus and was mistress of his harem of three hundred concubines, had a grateful recollection of earlier Christian kindness, and she secured peace and favour for the Church. Here it is that, for the first time, a clear light falls upon the Christian community at Rome and upon its bishops.
In the year 217 (or 218), Bishop Callistus succeeded Bishop Zephyrin, who had followed Victor. From the fourth century he has been counted one of the greatest of the early Popes. Two of the historic cemeteries bore his name, and there were a Church of St. Callistus (or Calixtus, as the Latins sometimes misspell it) and a Square of St. Callistus in the Trastevere district. Martyrologies honoured him as a witness to the faith, and (probably from the seventh century) the Acta of his martyrdom, including a most impressive account of his virtues and miracles, might be consulted in the archives of Sta. Maria in Trastevere. From these materials, Moretti composed an eloquent biography of the saint, and even the Bollandists, more discreetly, and with disturbing hints that Christian scholars were saying naughty things about the Acta S. Callisti, set their learned seal upon his diploma of sanctity and martyrdom.
Contemporary with Callistus, the saint and martyr, was Hippolytus, the scholar and saint and martyr. They were the two shining jewels of the Roman Church. The many works of Hippolytus had strangely disappeared, and tradition was not even sure of which town he had been Bishop; but there was evidence enough to connect him with the Roman Church and to justify the claim that he was the Origen of the West. When, in 1551, a broken marble statue of Hippolytus was discovered at Rome, it was devoutly restored and set up in the Lateran Museum. And just three hundred years afterwards, in 1851, there was given to the world a lost work of the saintly scholar, from which it is plain that he was the first Anti-Pope, and that the Pope whom he opposed and reviled was Callistus. The first book of this work, the Refutation of all Heresies (sometimes called the Philosophoumena), had long been known; the manuscript copy of Books IV. to X. was found in a monastery on Mount Athos in 1842. Now that the true character of Hippolytus is known, some doubt has been cast upon his scholarship, but it was considerable for his age and environment. He was one of the very few scholars of the Roman Church during several centuries, and one chapter of his work throws an interesting light on the person of Callistus and on a remarkable phase of the development of the Papacy.
The controversy about the authorship of the book and about the charges against Callistus has brought to bear upon that period all the available light; and the modern student will probably find the truth somewhere between the extremes held by the contending historians of the nineteenth century.[16] De Rossi himself, indeed, while pretending to support, entirely discredits the arguments with which Döllinger, in his years of orthodoxy, sought to defend the impeccability of the Popes and to prove the moral obliquity of all who opposed them. The Italian archæologist, it is true, imputes to Hippolytus a malice which goes ill with his reputation for sanctity, but perhaps we shall be able to extricate ourselves from this painful dilemma without grave detriment to the character of either saint.
Callistus was, in the days of Commodus, a slave of the Christian Carpophorus, according to the Liber Pontificalis.[17] He was the son of a certain Domitius who lived in the Transtiberina. The master entrusted the slave with money to open a bank, and the faithful put their savings into it, but it became known after a time that Callistus had—to quote the text literally—"brought all the money to naught and was in difficulties." He fled to the Port of Rome, whence, after leaping into the sea in despair, he was brought back to the house of Carpophorus and put in the pistrinum, the domestic mill in which slaves expiated their crimes. The faithful, prompted by Callistus, begged his release on the ground that he had money on loan and could repay. He had no money, however, and he could think of nothing better than to make a disturbance in the synagogue on the Sabbath, for which the Jews took him before the Prefect Fuscianus[18] and described him as a Christian. He was scourged and was sent to the silver or iron mines of Sardinia—the Siberia of the Empire—from which few returned. But, shortly afterwards, Marcia obtained the release of the Christians, and although Bishop Victor had not included the name of Callistus in the list, Callistus persuaded the eunuch to insert it. Victor, however, reflecting on the hostility of his victims, sent him to live, on a pension provided by the Church, at Antium.
This narrative has been subjected to the most meticulous criticism, as if it were something novel or important to accuse a Pope of having committed certain indiscretions in his youth. It suffices to say that, while Döllinger is, in the end, reduced to claiming that Hippolytus was probably not in Rome at the time, the more learned De Rossi is so impressed by the minuteness and (as far as it can be checked) the accuracy of the account that he believes Hippolytus to have been a deacon of the Church at the time and so to have had official knowledge of the facts. The single point of any importance is open to a humane interpretation. Did or did not Callistus embezzle the money? If he did, how came he to be elected bishop? If he did not, how comes his sainted rival to call him, as he does, a fraud and impostor? We may remember that financial troubles of this kind are peculiarly open to opposite interpretations. Hippolytus, Victor, and Carpophorus, it seems, took the less charitable view; but it would not be unnatural for others to persuade themselves, or be persuaded by Callistus, that he was merely the victim of circumstances.
Victor died in 198 and was succeeded by Zephyrin, "an ignorant and illiterate man," says Hippolytus. Callistus, who had ceased to be a slave when he was sentenced to penal servitude, was recalled to Rome and, apparently, made first deacon (now called archdeacon) of the Church. He was put in charge of a cemetery in the Appian Way which the community had just secured, and this cemetery bears his name to this day. Hippolytus, who was indignant, charges Callistus with ambition, and says that Zephyrin was avaricious and open to bribes; which we may humanely construe to mean that the able administration of Callistus enabled the Bishop to live in some comfort. Nor need we despair of finding a genial interpretation of his further charge, that the deacon induced Zephyrin to meddle with questions of dogma, and then, behind the Bishop's back, diplomatically sympathized with both the contending parties. The truth is that the Latins were sorely puzzled by the subtleties with which the Greeks were slowly and fiercely shaping the dogma that the Father and Son were one nature, yet two persons, and both Zephyrin and Callistus stumbled.
Callistus is further described as assisting Zephyrin in the "coercion," or, as others translate, the "organization" of the clergy, and this point is of greater interest. As far as one can construe the barbarous Latin of the Liber Pontificalis, Zephyrin decreed that the priests were not to consecrate the communion for the people. The sacred elements were to be brought to them, on glass patens, from the altar at which the bishop said mass. Probably this is the "coercion" to which Hippolytus refers, as the aim was, plainly, to emphasize the subordination of the clergy. I would further venture to suggest, against the learned Father Grisar, that this was also the occasion when the sphere of the Roman bishop was divided into twenty-five tituli (or parishes). The Liber Pontificalis describes how Urban I., the successor of Callistus, substituted silver for glass vessels at the altar, and expressly speaks of "twenty-five patens."
We must conclude that Callistus was able as well as persuasive, and we are not surprised to learn that, when Zephyrin died in 217 (or, according to another account, 218) he was chosen Bishop. It was customary, until long afterwards, to choose the bishop from the body of deacons, but Hippolytus and his friends were indignant at the election of the ex-slave, and a schism occurred. Hippolytus had the support of the minority of precisians and correct believers: Callistus was the favourite of the majority. Epithets of which the modern mind can hardly appreciate the gravity were hurled from camp to camp. "Patripassian," thundered Hippolytus; "Ditheist" retorted Callistus. It is quite clear that the scholar set up a rival See at Rome. He says that Callistus, when he was elected, "thought" that he had attained his ambition, and this must mean that he claimed himself to be the true Bishop of Rome. Later tradition, concealing the ugly schism, left the bishopric of Hippolytus in the air, or placed it at the Port of Rome, twenty miles away. But this picture of daily combats implies that both bishops were in Rome, and the little flock was rent and agitated by the first Papal schism.
The dogmatic issue between the rivals cannot profitably be discussed here. The Church was then in an early phase of the great Trinitarian controversy, and, under Victor and Zephyrin, the Roman clergy had favoured the simpler, or unitarian, view. Sabellius, who has given his name to one form of unitarianism, was in Rome and was supported by the deacon Callistus: indeed, his rival says that it was Callistus who seduced Sabellius. However that may be, Callistus shrewdly perceived he could not meet his learned opponent on that ground. He disowned Sabellius, and soon lost himself in a maze of technical theology into which I will not venture to follow him. To theologians I leave also the discussion of the charge that Callistus favoured the rebaptizing of converted heretics.
It is the charges of a practical or disciplinary nature which best illustrate the character of Callistus and make his Pontificate a milestone in the history of the Papacy. When we have made every possible allowance for exaggeration, they show that Callistus infused a remarkable spirit of liberalism into the Christian discipline and made smooth for the tender feet of the Romans the rough ways of his Church.
The first charge is that Callistus admitted grave sinners to communion, if they did penance. The ancient discipline is well known. Those who committed one "mortal" sin after baptism could never again be admitted to communion. They were the pariahs of the community, bearing in the eyes of all the ineffaceable brand of their sin. There was as yet no central power to define mortal sins, but sins of the flesh were, beyond doubt, in that category, and, as such were not uncommon at Rome, a rigorous insistence on the old discipline hampered the growth of the Church. Callistus, with princely liberality, abolished it. "I hear," says Tertullian, "that an edict has gone forth. The supreme Pontiff, that is to say, the Bishop of Bishops, announces: I will absolve even those who are guilty of adultery and fornication, if they do penance."[19] So the narrow gates were opened a little wider to the warm-blooded Romans, and the Church grew.
But, while modern sentiment will genially applaud this act of the first liberal Pope, the fifth charge in the indictment, which I take up next, seems graver. The Greek text of Hippolytus is here particularly corrupt and ambiguous, but the translation given by the Rev. J.M. Macmahon in the Ante-Nicene Library is generally faithful:
For even also he permitted females, if they were unwedded and burned with passion at an age at all events unbecoming [more probably, at a seasonable age], or [and] if they were not disposed to overturn their dignity through a legal marriage, that they might have whomsoever they would choose as a bedfellow, whether a slave or free [freedman], and that they, though not legally married, might consider such an one as a husband.[20]
The Bishop goes on to describe in technical language, which need not be reproduced here, how the practice of abortion spread among Christian ladies as a result of this license.
The apparent gravity of the charge has, however, so far disappeared since the days of Döllinger that we are now asked to admire the bold and exalted charity of Callistus. He is, of course, referring to the Roman law which forbade the widow or daughter of a senator, under pain of losing her dignity of clarissima, to marry a free-born man of lower condition; a slave or freedman she could not validly marry. There cannot have been very many ladies of senatorial rank in the Church at that time, seeing that, seventy years after the conversion of Constantine, St. Augustine found "nearly the whole of the nobility" still pagan.[21] There were, however, some, as the inscriptions in the Catacombs show, and their position was painful. They must either mate with a Christian slave or freedman, and be regarded by the law and their neighbours as living in concubinage: or marry a free-born Christian of low degree and thus forfeit their rank: or devote their virginity or their widowhood to God. The Church was concerned that they should not marry pagan senators, who would scoff at their superstitions and would dissipate their fortunes. Callistus told them that he would recognize as valid in conscience unions with slaves or freedmen which the State did not countenance. The number of ladies to whom the license extended must have been small, and Hippolytus evidently exaggerates the occasional scandals which followed. The impartial historian, however, will hardly regard the action of Callistus as a humanitarian protest against caste-distinctions. Such distinctions were maintained by the Church for centuries afterwards in its legislation about the clergy, and, on the other hand, the measure was profitable to the Church. In practice, indeed, these secret marriages would easily lead to disorder. A Christian lady would, if she were to keep her union secret, merely choose a "husband" among her slaves or freedmen, and would be tempted to use illicit means when her "marriage" threatened to be exposed too plainly to pagan eyes.
The other charges against Callistus show a general policy of liberality. He decreed that a bishop who was convicted of mortal sin was not necessarily to be deposed: he permitted men who had been twice or thrice married to become deacons or priests: he directed that "men in orders" must not be disturbed if they married. Some writers think that, in the latter case, he was referring only to men in minor orders, but that would not have been a daring innovation. Hippolytus, in fact, makes his policy and his character clearer by telling us, indignantly, how Callistus searched the Scriptures for proof that the Church must be wide enough to embrace both saints and sinners. There had been clean and unclean animals in the ark: Christ had said that the tares must grow up with the wheat: and so on. His reputation for liberality spread so far in the Church that, while Tertullian grumbled in Africa, a quaint Syrian charlatan named Alcibiades was attracted from the East to Rome. He brought a mystic work, given to him by two angels of the imposing height of ninety-six miles each, and he proclaimed that his new form of baptism absolved even from certain gross sins which he very freely and suggestively described.
The Church grew during these years of peace, of able organization, and of humanization. Callistus "made a basilica beyond the Tiber"—the Liber Pontificalis says—and there is an interesting passage in the Historia Augusta which seems to refer to this first Christian chapel at Rome. The biographer of Alexander Severus says (c. xliii.) that the Emperor wished to give the Christians the right to have public chapels, but his officials protested that "the temples would be deserted—all Rome would become Christian." This is obviously a piece of later Christian fiction. In a more plausible paragraph, however, Lampridius tells us that the Christians occupied a "public place," to which the innkeepers laid claim, and the Emperor decided that "it was better for God to be worshipped there in some form than for the innkeepers to have it." It is probable enough that this inn is the taverna meritoria (wine shop and restaurant) referred to by Dio Cassius[22]: among the portents which accompanied the struggles of Octavian a stream of oil had burst forth in this hostel in the Transtiberina. We know from Orosius[23] that the Christians claimed the occurrence in later years as a presage of the coming of Christ. The age, if not the disputed ownership, of the place suggests a dilapidated, if not deserted, building; and if we may in one detail trust that interesting romance, the Acta S. Callisti, we have a picture of the Christians of the third century meeting at last, under their enterprising Bishop, in the upper or dining room of this humble old inn in the despised Transtiberina. This was the high-water mark of a century and a half of progress.
Only one other act is authentically recorded of the brief rule of Bishop Callistus: he directed his people to fast on three Sabbaths in the year. This may seem inconsistent with his genial policy, but we must remember that rigorists abounded at Rome and demanded sterner ways. Callistus, apparently, merely sanctioned some slight traditional observance and thus virtually relieved the faithful of others.
It may be fascinating to conjecture what so enterprising a Pope would have done with the ecclesiastical system if he had lived long enough, but Callistus died, according to the best authorities, in the year 222, four or five years after his consecration. He did not die a martyr. In opening his account of the career of Callistus, the rival Bishop says: "This man suffered martyrdom when Fuscianus was Prefect, and this was the sort of martyrdom he suffered." It is inconceivable that Hippolytus should use such language in Rome after the death of Callistus if the Pope had really suffered for the faith. No Christian was executed at Rome under Alexander Severus. We must suppose that after his death, if not during his life, Callistus was applauded as a martyr because of his banishment to Sardinia, and probably this gave rise to the legend of his martyrdom, which first appears, as a bald statement, in the fourth century. The Acta S. Callisti may be traced to about the seventh century, and may be a pious contribution to the rejoicing of the faithful at the transfer of his bones to Sta. Maria in Trastevere.[24] The recklessness with which the writer describes the gentle and friendly Alexander Severus as a truculent enemy of the Christians was noted even by mediæval historians, and the narrative is now regarded as, in the words of Döllinger, "a piece of fiction from beginning to end." Yet Father Grisar[25] describes Callistus as a martyr.
Hippolytus maintained his little schism under Urban I. and Pontianus, while the orthodox community prospered in the sun of imperial favour. Then the grim Maximinus succeeded Alexander on the throne, and the clouds gather again over Christendom. We just discern Pope and Anti-Pope, Pontianus and Hippolytus, passing together to the deadly mines of Sardinia. Later legend generously reconciled the rivals and gave to both of them the martyr's crown; but the authority is late and worthless. In whatever manner he ended his career, Rome was too proud of its one scholar to darken his memory, and the names of Hippolytus and Callistus shone together in ecclesiastical literature until that fateful discovery among the dusty parchments of the monks of Mount Athos.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] It is preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, vi., 43.
[9] De Fuga a Persecutione, xiii.
[10] The number of interments in the Catacombs cannot very well be regarded as evidence. Archæologists differ by millions in estimating the number, and the populous Church after Constantine still buried in the Catacombs, at least until the Pontificate of Damasus.
[11] V., 13.
[12] Epistle, v.
[13] See Eusebius, ii., 15, and iii., 40, for the words of Papias, and ii., 25, for the testimony of Dionysius.
[14] Letter to Romans, iv.
[15] Even the names and order are given differently in early writers. I follow, as is now usual, the order given by Epiphanius (xxvii., 6) and Irenæus.
[16] Bunsen's four-volume Hippolytus and his Age (1852) was sharply attacked by Döllinger (Hippolytus and Callistus, English translation, 1876) and more judiciously handled by G.B. de Rossi in his Bulletino di Archeologia Cristiana (1866, pp. 1-33). Milman (History of Latin Christianity, vol. i.) and Ch. Wordsworth (St. Hippolytus and the Church of Rome, 1853) supported Bunsen. The work itself is translated in The Ante-Nicene Library, vol. vi.
[17] This anonymous catalogue of the Popes, which I must often quote, is a quaint mixture of accurate archives and inaccurate rumours. The first part seems to have been written in the sixth century, and it was continued as a semi-official record. See the Introduction to Duchesne's edition.
[18] Fuscianus was Prefect between the years 186 and 189, so that we have an approximate date of these events.
[19] De Pudicitia, i. Döllinger, on no apparent ground, and against all probability, refers this to Zephyrin, and some older writers think that the indignant Puritan is quoting an African bishop. We must agree with De Rossi that Tertullian has Callistus in mind, especially when we find Hippolytus saying that he was "the first" to do this. An earlier attempt of an Eastern bishop might easily have escaped Hippolytus.
[20] Vol. vi., p. 346. This is a fair, if inelegant, rendering of the Greek text given by Duncker and Schneidewin in their edition of the Refutation, and it corresponds with the Latin translation given by those editors and with De Rossi. Döllinger is alone in his interpretation.
[21] Confessions, viii., 2.
[22] XLVIII.
[23] VI., 18.
[24] Neither this church nor the Basilica S. Callisti can have been the original meeting-place, though the latter may have been founded on it.
[25] History of Rome and the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, i,. 313.
ST. DAMASUS AND THE TRIUMPH
In the year 355, the Christians of the imperial city startled their neighbours by a series of violent and threatening demonstrations. Armed crowds of them filled the streets, and monks and sacred virgins hid themselves from the riot. An inquiring pagan would have learned that the Emperor Constantius, who had waded to supremacy through a stream of blood, was attempting to force on their Bishop and themselves the damnable heresy of Arius. A few weeks before, Constantius had sent his eunuch with rich presents to Liberius, suavely asking him to condemn a certain fiery Athanasius who resisted the heresy. Liberius had courageously refused, and, when the eunuch had cunningly left the gifts beside the tomb of St. Peter, the Bishop had had them cast out of the church. When the exasperated eunuch had returned to the Emperor at Milan, the Christian community had prepared for drastic action, and it was presently known that the civic officials at Rome had received orders to seize the Bishop and send him to Milan. The Christians threatened resistance, and for a few days the city was enlivened by their turbulence. At last, Liberius was dragged from his house at night and taken to Milan; and, since he bravely resisted the Emperor to his face, he was sent on to remote and inhospitable Thrace. Then the clergy, and as many of the faithful as could enter, gathered in their handsome new basilica on the site of the Laterani Palace and swore a great oath that they would know no other bishop as long as Liberius lived. One, at least, of the clergy set out—no doubt amidst the cheers of the people—to accompany his Bishop into exile; this was the deacon Damasus, who was destined to be the next Pope of prominence in the Roman calendar.
The scene reminds us forcibly of the dramatic transformation which had taken place since, a century before, Pope and Anti-Pope had been sent in chains to the mines. For fifty years after that date the Liber Pontificalis is a necrology, a chronicle of gloomy life in the Catacombs. Eleven Popes out of the thirteen who followed Urban I. are—most of them wrongly—described as martyrs, and the record of their actions shrinks to a few lines. At last, with Bishop Eusebius, the chronicle brightens and lengthens; and then, under the name of Silvester, it swells to thirty pages and glows with tokens of imperial generosity. The darkest hour of the Church has suddenly changed into a dazzling splendour.
The historical revolution reflected in this early chronicle of the Popes is well known. For eighty years after the death of Callistus, the hope of the faithful was painfully strained. The Decian persecution (249-251) sent some to the heroic death of the martyr, many to the corrupt officials who sold false certificates of apostasy, and very many back to the pagan temples. Then another schism and another Anti-Pope appeared; and the alliance with St. Cyprian and the African bishops, which had at first promised aid against the schismatics, ended in a contemptuous repudiation by the African bishops of Rome's claim to jurisdiction. The Valerian persecution dissolved the feud in blood, and, then, forty years of peace enabled the Roman Christians to recover and to extend their domain. Two or three small basilicæ were erected or adapted. But, in the year 303, the new hope was chilled by the dreaded summons of the persecutor, and, for the last time, stern-set men and gentle maidens set out to face the headsman. Rome did not suffer much in the next seven years of persecution, but one can imagine the feelings of the faithful when they saw century thus succeed century without bringing any larger hope even of a free place in the sun. And then, in rapid succession, came the triumph of Constantine, the issue of their charter of liberty (the Edict of Milan, 313), the imperial profession of Christianity, the grant to the Christian clergy of the privileges of Roman priests, and the building of large basilicæ and scattering of gold and silver over their marble altars. Even the transfer of the court to Constantinople hardly dimmed the new hope. It remained "a new form of ambition to desert the altars," the pagans murmured, and no one dare thwart the zeal of the clergy.
So, by the year 355, when deacon Damasus makes an inglorious entrance into history, Rome had a large Christian community and at least half a dozen churches. But Christendom was now overcast by the triumph of Arianism and an Arian Emperor, and the struggle put an insupportable strain on the character of the faithful. At first, the prospect at Rome was brave and inspiring. They would all be true to their martyr-bishop; with that thrilling cry in his ears the deacon set out for Thrace. In a very short time, he was back in Rome, having changed his mind: "fired with ambition," his critics said. And, in another short time, the chief deacon Felix, who also had taken the oath, listened to the Arian court and became Bishop of Rome; and Damasus and most of the clergy transferred their loyalty to him. Then, in two or three years, Liberius grew tired of Thrace, and signed some sort of heretical formula, and came back to Rome; and the bloody struggle of Pope and Anti-Pope led to a train of sorrows which darken the life of St. Damasus.
He had been born, probably at Rome, though his father is said to have been a Spaniard, about the year 304.[26] The father had been a priest in the service of the little basilica of St. Lawrence in the city—I am not impressed by Marucchi's contention that he was a bishop—and had brought up Damasus in the same service. The mother Laurentia was pious: the sister Irene consecrated her virginity to God. Damasus became, and remained, a deacon, and was at least in his fiftieth year when he turned his back upon the heroic road to Thrace. He was popular in the new Christian Rome, which Jerome describes so darkly; envious folk called him "the tickler of matrons' ears," and even worse. But we lose sight of him again for ten years after his first appearance.[27]
The events of those ten years are, however, important for the understanding of Damasus and his Church, and must be briefly reviewed. That the clergy had, in the presence of the people, sworn to be true to Liberius, and that the majority of them broke their oath, is confirmed by St. Jerome in his Chronicle. Jerome, a decisive authority, tells also of the fall of Liberius, and this is also recorded by Athanasius, who writes the whole story. When Felix consented to be made bishop, the people were so infuriated that he had to be consecrated by the Emperor's Arian bishops in the palace: a group of eunuchs nominally representing the people, who raged without. Most of the clergy accepted Felix, but a minority, with the mass of the people, refused to do so, and, for two years, he gave his blessing to very thin congregations, or to empty benches. Then the Emperor came to Rome, and an imposing deputation of noble Christian ladies prevailed on him to recall Liberius. The Great Circus provided a new sensation for its 400,000 idlers when an imperial messenger announced that henceforward Liberius and Felix would rule their respective flocks side by side in Rome. "Two circus-factions, so two bishops," the pagan majority ironically replied: but the Christian laity ominously thundered, "One God, one Christ, one Bishop." So when Liberius, "overcome by the weariness of exile and embracing the heretical perversity" (says St. Jerome in his Chronicle), returned to Rome, he was received "as a conqueror." His loyal flock, finely indifferent to the way in which he had purchased his return, lined the route as men had done to welcome a triumphing general in the old days.
This must have been about the end of 357 or the beginning of 358, and we shall not dwell on the scenes which followed. Felix and his followers were driven out of the city. Getting reinforcements, apparently, they returned and took possession of the Basilica Julii in the Transtiberina; but the mass of the faithful, led by Christian senators or officers, took the church by storm, and again swept them out of Rome. The Liber Pontificalis records that a number of the clergy were slain in the battle, and, becoming hopelessly confused between Pope and Anti-Pope, it awards these followers of Felix the palm of martyrdom. But it appears that the Felicians were strong, and for six years held several of the smaller churches; rival clerics and laymen could not meet in the baths and streets without violent results. However, Felix died in 365, and Liberius wisely adopted his clerical supporters.[28]
Damasus remains in decent obscurity during these years, and we may assume that he repented his mistake, and renewed his allegiance to Liberius. But Liberius followed his rival in the next year (366) and the real career of Damasus opened. A well-known passage in the Res Gestæ of the contemporary pagan Ammianus Marcellinus[29] tells how, by that time, the Bishop of Rome scoured the city in a gorgeous chariot, gave banquets which excelled those of the Emperor, and received the smiles and rich presents of all the fine ladies of Rome; and the querulous old soldier is not surprised, he says, that Damasus and his rival Ursicinus (as the name runs in official documents) were "swollen with ambition" for the seat, and stirred up riots so fierce that the Prefect was driven out of Rome, and, after one fight, a hundred and thirty-seven corpses were left on the floor of one of the "Christian conventicles." Jerome,[30] Rufinus,[31] and other ecclesiastical writers of the time place the fatal rioting beyond question, and we may therefore, with a prudent reserve, follow the closer description given in the Libellus.
As soon as the death of Liberius became known, in September, 366, the remnant of his original supporters met in the Basilica Julii, across the river, and elected the deacon Ursicinus, who was at once consecrated by a provincial bishop. It was an act of defiance to Damasus, the popular candidate, whom they were determined to exclude. Then, say these writers, Damasus gathered and bribed a mob, armed with staves, and for three days there was a bloody fight for the possession of the basilica. A week after the death of Liberius (or on October 1st), Damasus marched with his mob, now effectively reinforced by gladiators, to the Lateran Basilica, and was consecrated there. After this, he bribed the Prefect Viventius to expel seven priests of the rival party, but the people rescued them and conducted them to the Basilica Liberii, or Basilica Sicinini (now Sta. Maria Maggiore), in the poor quarter across the river. In this chapel the rebels were at worship in the early morning of October 26th when a crowd of gladiators, charioteers, diggers (or guardians of the Catacombs), and other ruffians (in the pay of Damasus, of course) fell on them with staves, swords, and axes, and an historic fight ensued. The Damasians stormed the barricaded door, fired the sacred building, mounted the roof, and flung tiles on the Ursicinians. In the end the corpses of one hundred and sixty—Ammianus was too modest—followers of Ursicinus, of both sexes, lay on the floor of the blood-splashed chapel, and Ursicinus and his chief supporters were sent into exile.
Such is the tale of woe of the priests Faustinus and Marcellinus, and there is no doubt whatever that for months the most savage encounters desecrated the chapels and Catacombs of Rome. As to whether Damasus was or was not elected in his Church of St. Lawrence in the city before the election of Ursicinus the authorities are not agreed; and it must be left to the decision of the reader whether those who secured his triumph were really a hired mob of gladiators and diggers or a troop of pious and indignant admirers. Jerome, whose modern biographer, Amédée Thierry,[32] plausibly contends that he was studying in Rome at the time, expressly says that the followers of his patron Damasus were the aggressors, and that many men and women were slain. Rufinus is more favourable to the cause of Damasus, but he admits that the churches were "filled with blood."
The Emperor seems not to have been convinced by the report of the triumphant faction, and in the following year he permitted Ursicinus and his followers to return to Rome. But the trouble was renewed, and the Anti-Pope was again banished. His obstinate admirers then met in the Catacombs, and another fierce and fatal fight occurred in the cemetery of St. Agnes, where the servants of Damasus surprised them. It is clear that Damasus had the support of the wealthy and the favour of the pagan officials, but his rival must have controlled a very large, if not the larger, part of the people. The forces engaged, and the growth of the Christian body, may be estimated from the fact that, as Ammianus says, the Prefect Viventius was compelled to retire to the suburbs. He was promptly replaced, in the attempt to control the rioters, by the ruthless and impartial Maximinus, the Prefect of the Food-distribution; and clerics and laymen were indiscriminately put to the torture and punished. At length, in 368, one of the last of the sober old Roman patricians, Prætextatus, became Prefect, and put an end to the riots. The reflections of Prætextatus and Symmachus and other cultivated pagans are not recorded, but we are told by St. Jerome that, when Damasus endeavoured to convert the Prefect, he mischievously replied: "Make me Bishop of Rome and I will be a Christian."
Ursicinus went to din his grievances into the ears of provincial bishops, and there seems to be good ground for the statement in the Libellus that some of these were indignant with Damasus. It is at least clear that Damasus went on to obtain from the Emperor a concession of the most far-reaching character. The imperial rescript making this concession—one of the really important steps in the history of the Papacy and of the Church—has strangely disappeared, but we find the bishops of a later Roman synod (in 378 or 379) writing to Gratian and Valentinian that, when Ursicinus was banished, the Emperors had decreed that "the Roman bishop should have power to inquire into the conduct of the other priests of the churches, and that affairs of religion should be judged by the pontiff of religion with his colleagues."[33] A later rescript of Gratian indicates that the Bishop of Rome was to have five or seven colleagues with him in these inquiries[34]; and further light is thrown on the matter by St. Ambrose who observes[35] that, by a decree of Valentinian, a defendant in a religious dispute was to have a judge of a fitting character (a cleric) and of at least equal rank. Possibly the truculent impartiality of Maximinus was the immediate occasion for asking this privilege, and Valentinian would not find it unseemly that bishops should adjudicate on these new types of quarrels. But we have in this last document the germ of great historical developments. The clergy were virtually withdrawn from secular jurisdiction; the spiritual court was set up in face of the secular. Moreover, if defendants were to be judged only by their equals, who was to judge the Bishop of Rome?
Damasus at once used his powers. He convoked a synod at Rome, and we may realize the enormous progress that the Church had made in fifty years when we learn that ninety-three Italian bishops responded to his summons. On a charge of favouring Arianism, which seems to cloak a real charge of favouring Ursicinus, the bishops of Parma and Puteoli were deposed by the synod, and they appealed in vain to the court. Henceforward bishops—under the presidency of the Bishop of Rome—were to judge bishops. The cultivated and courtly Auxentius of Milan was next condemned, but he was too secure in the favour of the Empress to do more than smile. Neither he nor his great successor, St. Ambrose, acknowledged any authority over them on the part of the Roman bishop.
From this synod, moreover, the bishops wrote to the Emperor to ask that secular officials should be instructed to enforce their jurisdiction and sentences, and we shall hardly be unjust if we suspect the direct or indirect suggestion of Damasus in their further requests. They asked that bishops might be tried either by the Bishop of Rome or by a council of fifteen bishops, and that the Bishop of Rome himself might, "if his case were not laid before an (episcopal) council," defend himself before the Imperial Council.[36] This bold attempt of the Roman bishop to judge all bishops, yet be judged by none, seems to have displeased the Emperor, who may have consulted the Bishop of Milan. We have, at least, no indication that the privilege was granted. But the other points were granted, and instructions were issued to the secular officers, in Gaul as well as in Italy, apprising them of the juridical autonomy of the Church and of their duty to enforce its decisions. Out of his troubles Damasus had won a most important step in the making of the Papacy.
Unfriendly critics might suggest that Damasus paid a price for these powers. A curious passage in the historian Socrates[37] tells us that, in the year 370, Valentinian decreed that every man might henceforward marry two wives. The statement is often rejected as preposterous, but we know that Valentinian had, shortly before, divorced his wife, Severa, in favour of the more comely Justina, and it is probable enough that he passed a law of divorce. The learned Tillemont blushes when he finds no ecclesiastical protest at the time against this flagrant return to pagan morals.
However that may be, Damasus, from his palace by the Lateran Basilica, continued to strengthen his new authority and to regulate the disordered Church. Rome still harboured numbers of rebels, and they seem to have caused him serious annoyance by a persistent charge that, in earlier years, he had sinned with a Roman matron. A converted and relapsed Jew was put forward as the chief witness to the charge, and, when the young Emperor Gratian had failed to impress Rome by his personal assurance that Damasus was innocent, a Roman synod of forty-four bishops professed to investigate and dismiss the accusation. Ursicinus was now, however, living at Milan, and it is not implausibly suggested that his insistence made some impression on the puritanical young Emperor. The case was submitted to the Council of Aquileia in 380, at which St. Ambrose presided, and the bishops declared the innocence of Damasus and demanded the secular punishment of his accusers, who were now scattered over Europe. The Roman rebels then masked their hostility by joining an eccentric, though orthodox, sect in the capital whose ascetic leader bore the name of Lucifer. On these Luciferians in turn the hand of Damasus fell with ruthless severity. Their renowned Macarius, the champion faster of the time outside the Egyptian desert, was physically dragged into court and banished, and the "police" pursued them from one secret meeting-place to another. It is at this time that Faustinus and Marcellinus, who had joined the rigorous sect, addressed their Libellus to the Emperors.
Over the remainder of Italy and over Gaul Damasus did not press the virtual primacy which he had won from the imperial authorities, and the later language of Leo and Gregory makes it advisable for us to grasp clearly the situation in the fourth century. There was no question of Papal supremacy. No important decision was reached by Damasus apart from a synod, and the See of Milan was not regarded as subordinate in authority to that of Rome; though St. Ambrose naturally expressed a peculiar respect for the doctrinal tradition of a church that had been founded by the great apostles. When the Spanish Priscillianists applied to Italy for aid, they appealed, says Sulpicius Severus, "to the two bishops who had the highest authority at that time." When the great struggle with the pagan senators over the statue of Victory took place in 382, it was Ambrose who championed Christianity, Damasus merely sending to him the Roman petition. But Damasus knew the theoretical strength of his position, and knew, as a rule, when to enforce it. In 378, the Emperors severed Illyricum (Greece, Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia) from the Western Empire. Damasus at once contrived that its bishops should look not to the Eastern churches but to himself for direction and support, and from that time onward the Bishop of Thessalonica became the "Vicar" of the Bishop of Rome.
We must leave this vague and imperfect primacy in the West, with its secular foundations, and turn to the more interesting and adventurous course of the diplomacy of Damasus in the East. The narrow limits within which each of these sketches must be confined forbid me to attempt to depict the extraordinary confusion of the Eastern Church. It must suffice to say, in few words, that the struggle against paganism was almost lost in the fiery struggle against heresy, and that the hand of the Arian Valens smote the orthodox as violently and persistently as the hand of any pagan emperor had done. The various refinements of the Arian heresy, the lingering traces of old heresies, and the vigorous beginnings of new heresies, rent each church into factions as violent as those of Rome, and made each important See the theatre of a truculent rivalry. Constantinople, or New Rome as it loved to call itself, was the natural centre of the Eastern religious world, but it was overshadowed by the Arian court and its growing pretensions were watched by the apostolic churches of Antioch and Alexandria almost as jealously as by Old Rome. The triumph over paganism had, before it was half completed, given place to a dark and sanguinary confusion, from the shores of the Euxine to the sands of the Thebaid.
In 371 St. Basil appealed to Damasus for assistance. He sent the deacon Dorotheus with a letter[38] asking the Italians to send to the East visitors who might report to them the condition of the churches. Damasus, not flattered by the lowliness of the embassy or by the smallness of the request, and still much occupied in the West, merely sent his deacon Sabinus. To a further impassioned appeal from Basil he gave no clearer promise of aid, and Basil indignantly observed that it was useless to appeal to "a proud and haughty man who sits on a lofty throne and cannot hear those who tell him the truth on the ground below."[39] Basil made further futile appeals to the West, though not to Damasus, and at length, in 381, the Eastern bishops met in the Council of Constantinople, discussed their own affairs, and, in a famous canon, awarded the See of Constantinople a primacy in the East. Shortly afterwards a synod was held in Italy, under Ambrose, and it sent to the Emperor Theodosius a letter in which the concern of the Italians was plainly expressed.[40] The bishops ask Theodosius to assist in convoking an Ecumenical Council at Rome, and say that "it seems not unworthy that they [the Eastern bishops] should submit to the Bishop of Rome and the other Italian bishops"; though they "do not claim any prerogative of judgment." It is interesting to note at this stage how the Bishop of Rome does not yet stand apart from the other Italian bishops or claim jurisdiction over the East. In a letter written by Damasus somewhere about this time to certain oriental bishops, there is question of "reverence for the Apostolic See" and of the foundation of that See by Peter, but such language is rare and premature, and is not implausibly ascribed to St. Jerome, who was then at Rome.[41] To the Eastern emperor and to the Eastern patriarchs it is not addressed.
Theodosius ignored the request, and sanctioned the holding of another Council at Constantinople. The Westerns had, in the meantime, announced an Ecumenical Council at Rome for the summer of 382, and invited their Eastern brethren. From one cause or other, the proceedings at Rome were delayed, and, while the Italians still anxiously awaited the response to their invitation, a letter came with the message that the Eastern bishops had settled the questions in dispute, and they regretted that they had not "the wings of a dove" in order that they might fly from "the great city of Constantinople" to "the great city of Rome." The letter is a model of polite and exquisite irony.[42] The statesmanship of Damasus had hopelessly miscarried, and the Eastern and Western branches of Christendom were farther than ever from uniting under his presidency.
A more intimate aspect of the character of Damasus is disclosed when we consider the condition of the Roman clergy during his Pontificate. It almost suffices to recall that an imperial rescript of the year 370 forbade priests and monks to visit the houses of widows and orphans, and declared that legacies to them were invalid. St. Jerome himself deplores that there were solid reasons for thus depriving the clergy of a privilege which every gladiator enjoyed, and that the law was shamefully frustrated by donations.[43] Indeed, in 372, the law was extended to nuns and bishops, and for nearly a hundred years the Roman clergy bore the stigma which was implied by such a prohibition.
Jerome's letters ruthlessly depict the condition of the Roman community. Fresh from his austerities in the desert of Chalcidia, the impulsive monk was as ready to denounce vice as to encourage virtue, and evidences of singular laxity mingle with heroic virtue in his vivid pages. On the one hand he directed, in the sobered palace of Marcella on the Aventine, a group of noble dames in the practice of the most rigorous piety and the cultivation of sacred letters. The populace even threatened to fling him into the river, when the lovely and high-born Blesilla terminated her austerities by a premature death, and even Christian writers fiercely contested this introduction into Rome of the ideals of the Egyptian desert. But, on the other hand, Jerome's directions to his pupils incidentally betray that, beyond his little school of virtue and learning, he saw nothing but sin and worldliness. In plain and crude speech he warns his pupils to shun their Christian neighbours and distrust the priests. Sombre as are many of the letters which Seneca wrote in the days of Nero, not one of them can compare with Jerome's lengthy letter to the gentle maiden Eustochium.[44] He fills her virgin mind with a comprehensive picture of frailty and frivolity, and tells her that she may regard, not as a Christian, but as a Manichæan, any austere-looking woman whom she may meet on the streets of Rome. He denounces "the new genus of concubines," the "spiritual brothers and sisters," who share the same house, even the same bed, and, if you protest, complain that you are evil-minded. Eustochium is to avoid gatherings of Christian women, and must never be alone with these clerics, who, exquisitely dressed, their hair curled and oiled, their fingers glittering with rings, spend the livelong day wheedling presents out of their wealthy admirers. I omit the graver details given in this and other letters of the outraged monk.
The impartial historian cannot regard with reserve the criticisms which Ammianus passed on his pagan fellows and then literally accept Jerome's more severe strictures on his fellow-Christians. There is exaggeration on both sides. Yet no one now questions that the Christian community at Rome, lay and clerical, had in the days of Damasus fallen far below its ideals, and it is not pleasant that we find little or no trace of an episcopal struggle against this corruption. It is sometimes said that the rescript which prevented priests from inheriting was passed at the request of the Pope. For this statement there is no historical ground whatever, and it is in the highest degree improbable. It is clear that prosperity had lowered the character of the Church, from its bishop down to its grave-diggers; and the laments of St. Ambrose at Milan, of St. Chrysostom at Antioch and Constantinople, and of St. Augustine in Africa, indicate a general relaxation. The Roman world must pass through another severe and searching trial before men like Leo I. and Gregory I. arise in it.
This conception of Damasus as a courtly and lenient prelate is not materially modified when we regard his more strictly religious work. He restored the Church of St. Lawrence, in which he and his father had served: he built a tiny basilica—little more than a princely tomb for himself, Marucchi believes—on the Via Ardeatina: he erected a new baptistery at St. Peter's. These are not exceptionally impressive works of piety in so prosperous an age.
Damasus was an artist: not—if we judge him by his Epigrams—a man of much inspiration, but one who perceived the value of art in the service of religion. Jerome tells us that he wrote in prose and verse on the beauty of virginity, but we know his very modest poetical talent only from the surviving fifty or sixty inscriptions with which he adorned the graves of the martyrs or the chapels.[45] He had a genuine passion for the adornment and popularization of the Catacombs. They were already falling into decay, and Damasus cleared the galleries, made new air-shafts, and decorated the more important chambers with marble slabs and silver rails. No doubt he did this in part with a view to attracting the pagans, but there can be little doubt that he had a strong personal sentiment for the work.
With the assistance of Jerome, he also endeavoured to improve the literary standard of the Church. Jerome revised the "Old Italian" translation of the Bible; and it seems probable that the canon of the Scriptures which has until recently been regarded as part of a "Gelasian Decree" was composed by Jerome, under the authority of Damasus, and promulgated by a Roman synod. The canon can hardly be due to the pen which wrote the rambling and uncultivated list of books which follows it; probably a later hand united the two and ascribed them to Gelasius.[46]
The eighteen years' Pontificate of Damasus came to a close in 384. He is not in the line of heroic Popes. He was, at his elevation, in his seventh decade of life and his remaining energy was largely spent in struggling against the disastrous consequences of his election. He succeeded rather by geniality of temper and the services of others than by strong personal exertion. But he was lucky in his opportunities. He had control of the new wealth of the Papacy, and the Emperors with whom he had to deal were the indifferent or undiscerning Valentinian and the pious and youthful Gratian. Hence he added materially to the foundations of the mediæval Papacy. One might almost venture to say that the dogmatic Roman conception of a primacy inherited from Peter dates from the scriptural discussions of Damasus and Jerome. They were not the authors of that conception, but it would henceforward form the essential part of the Papal attitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] His latest biographer, the learned Father Marucchi, says 305, but St. Jerome does not say that he was "eighty years old" at death (in 384); he says, "nearly eighty." See Father Marucchi's Il Papa Damaso (1907) and Christian Epigraphy (English trans. 1912), M. Rade's Damasus, Bischof von Rom (1882) is a little more critical.
[27] The less flattering statements about Damasus are generally taken from a certain Libellus precum, or petition, which was presented to the Emperors by two hostile, though esteemed and orthodox, priests about the year 384. The attack on Damasus is, however, in a preface to the petition, which was probably not put before the Emperors. We must make allowance for bitter hostility, but we shall find some of their strangest statements confirmed by the highest authorities. The Libellus is reproduced in Migne's Patrologia Latina, vol. iii.
[28] The Liber Pontificalis, which gives these events, first lets the schismatic Felix die in peace, and then introduces into the series of Pontiffs a Felix II., saint and martyr! To this day the fortunate Felix bears these honours in the liturgy. It was discovered, in 1582, that the Anti-Pope Felix had been confused with a real saint and martyr of that name, and the question of displacing him was debated at Rome. But the miraculous discovery of an inscription in his favour put an end to criticism. The genuine authorities are agreed that Felix died comfortably in his house on the road to the Port of Rome.
[29] XXVII., 3.
[30] Year 369.
[31] II., 10.
[32] Saint Jerome, 1867.
[33] Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Collectio, iii., 625.
[34] Mansi, iii., 628.
[35] Ep., xxi.
[36] Mansi, iii., 624.
[37] IV., 26.
[38] Ep., lxx.
[39] Ep., ccxv.; see also Ep., ccxxxix. and cclxvi., for violent language. All the letters of the Popes, up to Innocent III., are in this work quoted from the Migne edition.
[40] Mansi, iii., 631.
[41] The letter is in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, v., 10.
[42] Theodoret, v., 9.
[43] Ep., lii.
[44] Ep., xxii.
[45] The best collection is Ihm's Damasi Epigrammata (1895).
[46] There is a third part of this "Gelasian Decree," which assigns to the Papacy an absolute primacy derived from Peter. It is improbable that this was due to Damasus. A letter hitherto ascribed to Pope Sirianus (Ep., x. in Migne) has lately been claimed for Damasus (Babut, La plus ancienne décrétale, 1904), but there is not enough evidence to date it. It is a series of directions, better known as Canons of the Romans to the Bishops of Gaul, on the subject of clerical celibacy, fallen virgins, etc.
LEO THE GREAT, THE LAST POPE OF IMPERIAL ROME
During the half-century which followed the death of Damasus occurred two of the decisive events in the transformation of the Roman Empire into Christian Europe. Paganism was destroyed, and the Empire was shattered. Jerome had, with rhetorical inaccuracy, described the great temple of Jupiter as squalid and deserted in the days of Damasus. Now it was in truth deserted, for the imperial seal was set on its closed doors; and the same seal guarded the door of the temples of Isis and Mithra. The homeless gods had sheltered for a time in the schools and in patrician mansions, but these also had fallen with the Empire. The southern half of Europe became a disordered, semi-Christian world, over which poured from the northern forests fresh armies of barbarians. The City of Man was wrecked; and it was not unnatural that the Papacy should aspire to make its old metropolis the centre of the new City of God.
Two Popes of weak ability had followed Damasus, and witnessed, rather than accomplished, the ruin of the old religion. It was Ambrose who had directed the convenient youth of Gratian and Valentinian II., and had dislodged the pagans and other rivals at the point of the spear. Innocent I. (402-417) was a greater man: an upright priest, an able statesman, a zealous believer in the divine right of Popes. Milman has finely drawn him serenely holding his sceptre at Rome while the Emperor cowered behind the fortifications at Ravenna. While Rome tumbled in ruins about him, he continued calmly to tell the bishops of Gaul and Spain and Italy what the "Apostolic See" directed them to do. His puny yet bombastic successor, Zosimus, maintained the solitary blunder, without the redeeming personality, of Innocent, and might have wrecked the Papacy if he had not died within a year or so. The worthier Boniface and still worthier Celestine restored Roman prestige in some measure, and, in 440, after the edifying but undistinguished Pontificate of Sixtus III., Leo the Great entered the chronicle.
Leo, a Roman of Tuscan extraction, was the chief deacon of the Roman Church, and corresponded with Cyril of Alexandria on Eastern affairs. It was probably at his instigation that the learned Cassianus wrote his treatise On the Incarnation of Christ. In 440, Leo was sent by the Emperor to reconcile the generals Aetius and Albinus, who quarrelled while the Empire perished. Sixtus died in his absence, and Leo was unanimously elected to the Papacy. Toward the close of September he returned to Rome, and glanced about the troubled world which he had now to rule.
The dogmatic Papal conception, which we find dawning in the mind of Damasus and see very clear in the mind of Innocent I. and his successors, reached its full development, on the spiritual side, in the mind of Leo the Great. This development was inevitable. There were Eastern, and even some Western, bishops who maintained, against Leo, that the prestige of the Roman See was merely the prestige of Rome, but the answer of the Papacy was easy and effective. In the Gospels which Europe now treasured, Peter was the "rock" on which the Church was built, and to him alone had been given the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Had the Church lost its foundation when Peter died? Were the keys buried beside the bones of Peter in that marble tomb at the foot of the Vatican? There was, from the clerical point of view, logic in the Roman bishop's claim to have inherited the princedom. Leo from the first hour of his Pontificate was sincerely convinced of it. His sermons are full of it. To him is committed "the care of all the Churches": a phrase which he bequeaths to his successors. He is the new type of Roman, blending the ideas of Jerome and Augustine. The wreck of the City of Man matters little. What matters is that these Arian Goths and Vandals are trampling on the City of God: that the churches of Gaul and Spain and Italy and Africa and the East are in disorder, and the successor of Peter must restore their discipline. He is so absorbed in his divine duty that he does not notice how the circumstances favour him. Every other lofty head in the Empire is bowed, and from the seething and impoverished provinces hundreds are looking to the strong man at Rome.
His early letters are the letters of a Supreme Pontiff. The African bishops, he hears, suffer dreadful disorders in their churches. Elections to church-dignities are bought and sold: even laymen and twice-married clerics become bishops. With serene indifference to the earlier history of the African Church and its tradition of independence, he peremptorily recalls the canons and insists on their observance.[47] Fortunately for him, the long struggle against the Donatists and the devastating onset of the Vandals have enfeebled, almost annihilated, the African Church, and there is none to question his authority.
He hears that Anatolius has been made Bishop of Thessalonica, and writes[48] to remind him that he is the "vicar" of the Roman bishop, the successor of Peter, "on the solidity of which foundation the Church is established." When, at a later date, Anatolius uses his power harshly, he sternly rebukes him. And it is interesting to notice what the discipline is on which he insists in this letter.[49] Even subdeacons shall not marry, or, if they are married, shall not know their wives. We are very far away from Callistus.
Another aspect of Leo's character appears in his treatment of the Manichæans at Rome: an interesting illustration of how he kept the strength and serenity of the old Roman though lacking his culture. Leo had a terribly sombre idea of the Manichæans. They lingered in obscure corners of the metropolis, and met stealthily, just as Christians had done two centuries earlier; and of them were told, as had been told of the obscure Christians, dreadful stories. Leo conducted a great inquisition in 444, and brought the Manichæan bishop, with his "elect," to a solemn judgment before the clergy and nobles of Rome. There, he says,[50] they all confessed that the violation of a girl of ten years was part of their ritual. He called down upon them the secular arm, and crushed them in Rome and Italy. What sort of a judicial process was employed to elicit this extraordinary confession—so utterly at variance with all that we know of the ascetic Manichæans—we are not told. But we are painfully reminded of a similar declaration of Augustine in his old age.[51]
In Gaul, the Pope encountered one of the last opponents of Papal aims in the West. The province was completely demoralized by the triumphant barbarians and by the arrival of lax clergy from Africa. In a letter of uncertain date,[52] Leo gives us a dark picture of the state of things in the southern provinces, and this is more than confirmed in the work of the Marseilles priest Salvianus, De Gubernatione Dei. Laymen pose as bishops, Leo says: priests sleep with their wives, and marry their daughters to men who keep concubines: monks serve in the army, or marry: and so on. From this disordered world men were ever ready to appeal to the authority of Rome, and, in 445, a Bishop Celidonius came to complain of the harshness of his metropolitan, the austere and saintly Hilary of Arles. Hilary followed his Bishop to Rome, and, when Leo decided against him, the saint made use, says Leo,[53] of "language which no layman even should dare to use and no priest to hear," and then "fled disgracefully" from Rome.
Again we are in a dilemma between two saints, and we must weigh as best we can the letters of Leo against the biography of Hilary. It will be found a general truth of early Papal history that the man who appeals to Rome is heard more indulgently than the opponent who did not appeal. Hilary, who had deposed the Bishop in plain accordance with the rules, resented Leo's conduct, and scoffed at his supposed supremacy. He then apprehended violence, and stealthily left Rome for Gaul. Leo thereupon—or after hearing new charges against Hilary—wrote to the bishops of Vienne[54] that they were released from obedience to Hilary, who was thenceforward to confine himself to Arles. Whether Hilary ever submitted or no we have no certain knowledge, but the affair had an important sequel. In the same year (449), an imperial rescript,[55] confessedly obtained by Leo, confirmed the sentence, and added:
We lay down this for ever, that neither the bishops of Gaul nor those of any other province shall attempt anything contrary to ancient usage, without the authority of the venerable man, the Pope of the Eternal City.
Even in the height of this quarrel other provinces were not neglected, as a few letters of the year 447 amply show. The letter to the Spanish Bishop Turribius of Astorga[56] is notable as the first explicit Papal approval of the execution of a heretic. It is usual to point out that the errors of Priscillian, the heretic in question, were believed to include magical practices (then a legal and social crime) as well as Manichæan and Gnostic tenets. But we must recognize one of the most terrible principles of the Middle Ages, and something far more than social zeal, in the following words of Leo:
Although ecclesiastical mildness shrinks from blood-punishments, yet it is aided by the severe decrees of Christian princes, since they who fear corporal suffering will have recourse to spiritual remedies.
Here is no reference to legal or social crimes, but to an error which concerns the ecclesiastic. Similar letters, enforcing discipline in the accents of an undisputed head of the Church, were sent to the bishops of Sicily,[57] the bishop of Beneventum,[58] and the bishop of Aquileia.
These quotations from the letters and sermons of Leo will suffice, not only to show the untiring energy and lofty aim of the man, but to convince us that the primacy of Rome in the West is now won. West of the Adriatic, St. Hilary is the last great rebel against the Roman conception. It is true that this spiritual supremacy is still, in part, reliant on "the severe decrees of Christian princes," but the imperial authority is fast fading into nothing, and in another generation the Papal autocracy will stand alone. Leo was not ambitious. Something of the instinctive masterliness of the older Roman may be detected in his actions, but he was a profoundly religious man, seeking neither wealth nor honours of earth, convinced at once that he discharged a divine duty and exerted an authority of the most beneficent value to that disordered Christendom. The calamities of Europe had changed the empty glories of a Damasus into a power second only to that of Octavian.
When we turn to the East we have not only a most valuable indication of the evolution of Christendom into two independent and hostile Churches, but an even more interesting revelation of subtle and unexpected shades in the character of Leo. The great Pope, aided by the very calamities of the time, fastens his primacy on Europe; and, with even mightier exertions and the most tense use of all his resources, he proves that an extension of that primacy to the East is for ever impossible.
His friendly correspondence with Cyril of Alexandria was resumed in the year 444, and, in the adjustment of their differences, Leo made concessions. In the same year, Cyril died, and his successor Dioscorus was addressed with the same recognition of equality. There are differences in points of discipline, but Leo is content to say[59]: "Since the blessed Peter was made chief of the apostles by the Lord, and the Roman Church abides by his instructions, it is impossible to suppose that his holy disciple Mark, who first ruled the Church of Alexandria, gave it other regulations." Five years later, however, Leo received from the East an appeal against the Bishop of Constantinople, and a notable conflict began.
In the unending struggle in the East over the nature of Christ, the monks, a fierce and turbulent rabble living on the fringes of the great cities, had been the most effective champions of orthodoxy, and great was their excitement when the archimandrite (or abbot) of one of their large monasteries outside Constantinople was accused of heresy. The heresy is really diagnosed as such by the proper authorities, but it is not superfluous for the historian to observe that the monk Eutyches was godson of the most powerful eunuch at the court, and this eunuch was detested by the virtuous Empress Pulcheria and by Flavian, the Bishop of Constantinople. Eutyches was condemned by a synod in 448, and he appealed to Leo. I have observed that the appealer—especially from a province where Roman authority was disputed—always had a gracious hearing at the Lateran. In February, 449, Leo wrote to Flavian[60] to express his surprise that he had not sent a report of the proceedings to Rome and that he had disregarded the appeal which the monk had made from his sentence to Rome. However, since appeal has been made to Leo, "we want to know the reasons of your action, and we desire a full account to be communicated to us." Flavian's reply[61] curtly described the heresy and trusted that Leo would see the justice of the sentence.
In the early summer, the Emperors of East and West issued a joint summons to the bishops of Christendom to assemble in Council at Ephesus, and Leo's letters indicate a feverish activity. His chief work was to write a long dogmatic letter[62] on the nature of Christ—a very able theological essay—to be read by his Legates at the Council. Dioscorus of Alexandria presided over this imposing assembly of 360 bishops and representative clergy, in the presence of two imperial commissioners, the Papal Legates, and the patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem, yet it has passed into Western ecclesiastical history under the opprobrious title, given to it by Leo,[63] of "The Robbers' Meeting." It is quite true that the sittings dissolved in brawls, and monks and soldiers brandished their ominous weapons over the heads of the bishops, but that was not unprecedented. The main fact was that Dioscorus contemptuously refused to hear the Roman Legates, as Leo says, and induced the Council to restore Eutyches and depose Flavian. Deacon Hilary, one of the Legates, fled in terror of his life, and unfolded these enormities to Leo, whose correspondence now became intense and indignant.
For a few months, Leo made strenuous efforts to redeem the prestige of his See. We know, since 1882, that Flavian in turn appealed to Rome, but Leo needed no new incentive. He wrote repeatedly to the pious Pulcheria, to Theodosius, to his "vicar" in Thessalonica, and to the monks, priests, and people of Constantinople. He knew the situation well. Alexandria had defied Constantinople, but the case of Constantinople was weakened by the division of court-factions and the monkish support of Eutyches. It seemed an admirable occasion for Rome to adjudicate, and Leo pressed Theodosius and Pulcheria[64] to summon an Ecumenical Council at Rome. In the thick of the struggle (February, 450), Valentinian III. visited Rome with the court, and Leo, with tears in his eyes, besought the Empress Galla Placidia to work for the Roman Council. Galla Placidia knew no more than the monks about theology, and was more concerned about her wayward daughter Honoria, but she urged Pulcheria to ensure the holding of the Council at Rome. Presently there came from Constantinople the news that Theodosius was dead, Pulcheria was mistress of the court, the eunuch-godfather had been executed, the monk exiled, and the Archbishop Flavian restored to his See.
But the more agreeable aspect of this situation was soon darkened by a report that the people of Constantinople had compelled Pulcheria to contract a virginal marriage with Marcian, and the new Emperor had summoned an Ecumenical Council in the East. Leo, for reasons which we may understand presently, now made every effort to prevent the holding of a Council,[65] but the Emperor would not endanger his position by flouting the Eastern Church, and, on October 8th, some six hundred bishops gathered at Chalcedon. Four Legates represented Leo, and were awarded a kind of presidency of the Council. Leo's great doctrinal letter was received with thunders of applause, and, when it was speedily decided to condemn Dioscorus (who had gone the length of excommunicating Leo), it was one of the Papal Legates who pronounced the sonorous sentence. But all knew that these compliments were the prelude to a very serious struggle.
After the fourteenth session, the Papal Legates and imperial commissioners affected to believe that the business of the day was over. Later in the day, however, a fifteenth session was held, and the two hundred bishops present framed the famous twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon. It runs:
As in all things we follow the ordinances of the holy fathers and know the recently read canon of the hundred and fifty bishops [of the Council of Constantinople], so do we decree the same in regard to the privileges of the most holy Church of Constantinople. Rightly have the fathers conceded to the See of Old Rome its privileges on account of its character as the Imperial City, and, moved by the same considerations, the one hundred and fifty bishops have awarded the like privileges to the most Holy See of New Rome.[66]
This drastic restriction of the Roman bishop to the West, and disdainful assurance that the prestige of the city of Rome was the only basis of his primacy, was read in the next session, and the Papal Legates were gravely disturbed. There can be very little doubt that, as Hefele says, the Legates had abstained from the fifteenth session because they knew that this canon would be discussed and passed. There was no secrecy about it, and there was much in previous sessions that led to it. Indeed, it is clear that Leo himself knew of the design, and this probably explains his resistance, which has puzzled many, to the holding of the Council. In the heat of the discussion, the Roman Legate, Boniface, produced this instruction from Leo: "If any, taking their stand on the importance of their cities, should endeavour to arrogate anything to themselves, resist them with all decision."[67] Bishop Eusebius of Dorylæum (the accuser of Eutyches) then said that he had read the third canon of Constantinople to Leo at Rome some time before the Council, and that Leo had assented to it. Leo afterwards denied this, but we must assume that he merely denied having consented, not the reading of the canon to him. It is quite clear that Leo prepared his Legates for this discussion.
It implies no reflection whatever on the character of Leo that he should instruct his Legates diplomatically to obstruct the passing of a canon which he regarded as contrary to a divine ordination. But the next act of his Legates is more serious. Bishop Paschasinus, the chief Legate, produced and read, in Latin, the sixth canon of the famous Council of Nicæa, and the Greeks were amazed to learn, when it was translated, that it awarded the primacy to Rome. There is now no doubt that this was a spurious or adulterated canon, and the feelings of the Greeks, when they consulted the genuine canon, can be imagined. The session closed in a weak compromise. The Legates were allowed to protest that the twenty-eighth canon was passed in their absence, and was injurious to the rights of their Bishop, "who presided over the whole Church." The Greeks politely registered their protest, endorsed the canon, and proceeded to indite a very Greek letter to the Roman Bishop. They express to Leo[68] their deep joy at the successful congress, their entire respect for "the voice of Peter," their loving gratitude that, through his Legates, he had presided over them "as the head over the members"; but they admit that one of their canons did not commend itself to his Legates and they trust that he will at once gratify their Emperor by endorsing it! Christendom was divided into two parts.
The sequel matters little. The Legates returned and declared that the signatures to the canon had been extorted (as Leo afterwards wrote), though this point had been raised in their presence by the imperial commissioners, and its falsity put beyond dispute. To Marcian, to Pulcheria, and to the new Bishop of Constantinople, Anatolius, Leo wrote acrid letters, denouncing the miserable vanity and ambition of Anatolius and the violation of the (spurious) canons of Nicæa. Marcian curtly requested him—almost ordered him[69]—to confirm the results of the Council without delay, and Leo signed the doctrinal decisions. There the matter ended. Rome affected to treat the famous canon as invalid, and the East genially ignored the absence of Leo's signature.[70]
In the midst of his feverish efforts to defeat this Eastern rebellion, Leo was summoned to meet the terrible King of the Huns, and the memory of his triumph, gathering volume from age to age, has completely obliterated his failure to dominate the Greeks. Italy, painfully enfeebled by the Goths, now saw "the scourge of God" slowly descend its northern slopes and prepare for a raid on the south. Leo and a group of Roman officials met Attila on the banks of the Mincio, and the ferocious King and his dreaded Huns meekly turned their backs on Italy and retired to the East. Pen and brush and legend have embellished that wonderful deliverance until it has become a mystery and a miracle, but it was neither mystery nor miracle to the men who first made a scanty record of it. Jornandes[71] following the older historian Priscus, says that Attila was hesitating whether to advance on Rome or no at the moment when Leo and his companions arrived; his officers were trying to dissuade him, and were appealing to his superstition with a reminder of the fate of Alaric after he had sacked Rome. Prosper merely says in his Chronicle that Leo was well received, and succeeded. Idatius, Bishop of Aquæ Flaviæ at the time, does not even mention Leo in his Chronicle. The Huns, he says, were severely stricken by war, by famine, and by some epidemic, and, "being in this plight, they made peace with the Romans and departed."[72] But Rome at the time knew nothing of these fortunate circumstances, and, in the delirious joy of its deliverance, imagined the savage Hun shrinking in awe before its venerable Bishop: kept on imagining, indeed, until some pious fancy of the eighth century believed that the holy apostles had appeared beside the Pope.
When, a few years later (455) a fresh invasion threatened Rome—when the vicious incompetence of the court amid all its desolation set afoot another feud and brought the Vandals from Africa—Leo went out once more to plead for the impoverished city. Genseric was not a savage; the Vandals are libelled by the grosser implication we associate with their name today. Yet he altered not one step of his onward course at the petitions or the threats of the venerable Pontiff. To say that he consented to refrain from slaying or torturing those who submitted, and from firing the city, is merely to say that Leo failed to wring any concession from the largely civilized Vandal. The aged Pontiff sadly returned with his clergy, and for a whole fortnight had to listen in the Lateran Palace to the shrieks of the women who were dragged from their homes, and to receive accounts of the plundering of his churches. The Church of St. Peter and, probably, the Lateran Church alone were spared. And when the Vandal ships had sailed away with their thousands of noble captives, including the Empress Eudoxia, and their mounds of silver, bronze, and marble, Leo had to melt down the larger vessels of the great basilicas to find the necessary chalices for his priests.
Ancestral feelings must have stirred unconsciously in the mind of Leo when he beheld this second ravage of the city of his fathers, but he at once resumed his Pontifical rule. On his return from the north of Italy, he had found occasion to act once more in the East as if the canon of the last Council were forgotten. Now the monks of Palestine had asserted their unyielding zeal, had driven the patriarch of Jerusalem from his seat, and had won to their cause the romantic Empress Eudoxia (of the Eastern court) whose suspected amours had brought on her a polite sentence of exile. Leo at once, somewhat superfluously, called the pious Marcian's attention to the ecclesiastical disorders in his kingdom, and, apparently at that Emperor's request, wrote paternal admonitions to Eudoxia and to the monks. It was gratifying to be able to report presently that the disorders were at an end.
Later (in 453) the monks of Cappadocia gave trouble; and the monks and other supporters of the deposed Dioscorus at Alexandria entered upon a far graver agitation, and murdered their new archbishop. The pious Marcian, to make matters worse, died (457), and, by one of those strange intrigues which disgraced the Eastern court, Leo the Isaurian, an astute peasant, mounted the golden throne. On this man Leo's diplomatic mixture of courtly language and high sacerdotal pretensions made little impression. In spite of Leo's protests[73] he called another General Council, and Leo had to be content to send Legates to inform the assembled bishops what is "the rule of apostolic faith"; which he again set forth in a long dogmatic epistle.[74] To the last year, Leo maintained, serenely and unswervingly, his calm assumption of jurisdiction over the East. Whether he wrote to the patriarch of Antioch,[75] or the patriarch of Constantinople,[76] or the patriarchs of Jerusalem and Alexandria, he spoke as if his sovereignty had never been questioned. "The care of all the churches" lies on his shoulders. He disdains diplomacy and argument. His tone is arrogant and dogmatic in the highest degree, yet no man can read reflectively those long and imperious epistles and not realize that he spoke, not as the individual Leo, demanding personal prestige, but as the successor of Peter, obeying a command which, he sincerely believed, Christ had laid upon him.
So the Papacy was built up. Leo went his way on November 10, 461, and was buried, fitly, in the vestibule of St. Peter's. He had formulated for all time the Papal conception that the successor of Peter had the care of all the churches of the world. A bishop shall not buy his seat in Numidia: a rabble of monks shall not rebel in Syria: a prelate shall not harshly treat his clergy in Gaul, but the Bishop of Rome must see to it. How that gaunt frame of duty was perfected in the next two centuries, and how the prosperity of later times hid the austere frame under a garment of flesh, is the next great chapter in the evolution of the Roman Pontificate.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] Ep., xii.
[48] Ep., vi.
[49] Ep., xiv.
[50] Sermon xvi.
[51] See the author's Saint Augustine and His Age, p. 409.
[52] Ep., clxvii.
[53] Ep., x., 3.
[54] Ep., x.
[55] Ep., xi., in Migne.
[56] Ep., xv.
[57] XVI. and xvii.
[58] XIX.
[59] Ep., ix.
[60] Ep., xxiii.
[61] Ep., xxvi.
[62] The "Tome of Leo," Ep., xxviii.
[63] Ep., xcv.
[64] Ep., xliii. and xlv.
[65] Ep., lxxxii. and lxxxiii.
[66] Hefele's History of the Councils of the Church, iii., 411.
[67] Hefele, iii., 425.
[68] Ep., xcviii.
[69] Ep., cx.
[70] In a letter which he wrote about the time (Ep., ciii.) to the bishops of Gaul, Leo tells them that Dioscorus has been condemned, and says that he encloses a copy of the sentence. The copy appended to the letter is spurious, for it contains an allusion to "the holy and most blessed Pope, head of the universal Church, Leo ... the foundation and rock of faith." But I do not think one can say confidently that this is the actual document sent by Leo.
[71] De Rebus Geticis, xlii.
[72] The Chronicles of Prosper and Idatius are in Migne, vol. li. Idatius adds that Attila was threatened (in his rear) by the troops of Marcian, though we cannot trace such a movement of the Eastern troops. It was enough that Attila believed it.
[73] Ep., clxii.
[74] CLXV.
[75] CXLIX.
[76] CLXX.
GREGORY THE GREAT, THE FIRST MEDIÆVAL POPE
Seventeen Pontiffs successively ruled in the Lateran Palace during the hundred and thirty years which separate the death of Leo I. and the accession of Gregory I. The first seven were not unworthy to succeed Leo, although one of them, Anastasius (496-498), is unjustly committed to Dante's hell for his liberality.[77]
During their tenure of office the Arian Ostrogoth Theodoric set up his promising kingdom in Italy, and the stricken country partly recovered. But the succeeding Popes were smaller-minded men, looking darkly on the heresy of Theodoric and longing to see him displaced by the Catholic Eastern Emperor. Their unfortunate policy was crowned by a betrayal of Rome to the troops of Justinian; and its fruit was the establishment on the throne of Peter, by the unscrupulous Theodora, of the sorriest adventurer that had yet defiled it (Pope Vigilius), the reduction of Italy to the state of a province of the corrupt and extortionate East, and a lamentable dependence of the See of Rome on the whim of the Byzantine autocrat. Seeing its increasing feebleness, a new and fiercer tribe of the barbarians, the Lombards, poured over Italy; and it was a city of ruins, a kingdom of desolation, a continent of anarchy, which Gregory I. was, in the year 590, forced to undertake to control.
At Rome the monuments of what was shudderingly called a pagan age were falling, year by year, into the soil which would preserve them for a more appreciative race. In Gregory's day, across the Tiber from the old quarter, there were to be seen only the mouldering crowns of the theatres and amphitheatres, the grass-girt ruins on the Capitol and on the Palatine, and the charred skeletons of thousands of patrician mansions on the more distant hills. Forty thousand Romans now trembled where a million had once boasted their eternal empire. And, as one sees in some fallen forest, a new life was springing up on the ruins. Beside the decaying Neronian Circus rose the Basilica of St. Peter's, to which strange types of pilgrims made their way under the modest colonnade leading from the river. From the heart of the old Laterani Palace towered the great Basilica of the Saviour (later of St. John) and the mansion of the new rulers of the world. The temples were still closed, and tumbling into ruins; for no one yet proposed to convert into churches those abodes of evil spirits, which one passed hurriedly at night. But on all sides churches had been built out of the fallen stones, and monks and nuns trod the dismantled fora, and new processions filed along the decaying streets. If you mounted the hills, you would see the once prosperous Campagna a poisonous marsh, sending death into the city every few years; and you would learn that such was the condition of much of Italy, where the Lombard now completed the work of Goth and Greek, and that from the gates of Constantinople to the forests of Albion this incomprehensible brood of barbarians was treading under foot what remained of Roman civilization.
The book of what we call ancient history was closed: the Middle Age was beginning. Gregory was peculiarly adapted to impress the world at this stage of transition. His father, Gordianus, had been a wealthy patrician, with large estates in Sicily and a fine mansion on the Cælian hill. De Rossi would make him a descendant of the great family of the Anicii, but the deduction is strained. Gregory's mother was a saint. He inherited vigour and administrative ability, and was reared in the most pious and most credulous spirit of the time. He was put to letters, and we are told that he excelled all others in every branch of culture. Let us say, from his works, that—probably using the writings of the Latin fathers as models—he learned to write a Latin which Jerome would almost have pronounced barbarous, but which people of the sixth century would think excellent, at times elegant. There was very little culture left in Rome in Gregory's days.[78] About the time when Gregory came into the world (540), Cassiodorus was quitting it to found a monastic community on his estate, and he had the happy idea of rescuing some elements of Roman culture from the deluge; though to him culture meant Donatus and Martianus Capella rather than the classics. He succeeded, too, in engaging the industry of the Benedictine monks, to some extent, in copying manuscripts. Culture was, happily, not suffered to die. In Rome, however, it sank very low, and, for centuries, the Latin of the Papal clerks or the Popes is generally atrocious.
Gregory, in 573, was Prefect of Rome when it was beset by the Lombards. The desolation which ensued may have finally convinced him that the end of the world approached: a belief which occurs repeatedly in his letters and sermons. In the following year, he sold his possessions, built six monasteries in Sicily, converted his Roman mansion into the monastery of St. Andrew, and, after giving the rest of his fortune to the poor, began a life of stern asceticism and meditation on the Scriptures. One day he saw some Anglo-Saxon slaves in the market, and he set off to convert these fair, blue-eyed islanders to the faith. But Pope Benedict recalled him and found an outlet for his great energy in secretarial duties at the Lateran.
Pelagius, who in 578 succeeded Benedict, sent Gregory to Constantinople, to ask imperial troops for Italy, and he remained there, caring for Papal interests, for about eight years. On its pretentious culture he looked with so much disdain that he never learned Greek,[79] while the general corruption of clerics and laymen, and the fierce dogmatic discussions, did not modify his belief in a coming dissolution. He maintained his monastic life in the Placidia Palace, and began the writing of that portentous commentary on the book of Job which is known as his Magna Moralia: a monumental illustration of his piety, his imagination, and his lack of culture, occupying about two thousand columns of Migne's quarto edition of his works. He returned to Rome about the year 586, without troops, but with the immeasurably greater treasure of an arm of St. Andrew and the head of St. Luke. Amid the plagues and famines of Italy, he returned to his terrible fasts and dark meditations, and awaited the blast of the archangel's trumpet. An anecdote, told by himself, depicts his attitude. One of his monks appropriated a few crowns, violating his vow of poverty. Gregory refused the dying man the sacraments, and buried him in a dunghill. He completed his commentary on Job, and collected endless stories of devils and angels, saints and sinners, visions and miracles; until one day, in 590, the Romans broke into the austere monastery with the news that Pelagius was dead and Gregory was to be his successor. He fled from Rome in horror, but he was the ablest man in Italy, and all united to make him Pope.
If these things do not suffice to show that Gregory was the first mediæval Pope, read his Dialogues, completed a few years later; no theologian in the world to-day would accept that phantasmagoria of devils and angels and miracles. It is a precious monument of Gregory's world: the early mediæval world. There is the same morbid, brooding imagination in his commentary on the prophecies of Ezekiel, which he found congenial; and in many passages of the forty sermons in which, disdaining flowers of rhetoric and rules of grammar, he tells his people the deep-felt, awful truths of his creed.
Characteristic also is the incident which occurred during his temporary guidance of the Church—while he awaited an answer to the letter in which he had begged the Emperor to release him. A fearful epidemic raged at Rome. Without a glance at the marshes beyond, from which it came, Gregory ordered processions of all the faithful, storming the heavens with hymns and litanies. The figure over the old tomb of Hadrian (or the Castle of Sant' Angelo) at Rome tells all time how an angel appeared in the skies on that occasion, and the pestilence ceased. But the writers who are nearest to the time tell us that eighty of the processionists fell dead on the streets in an hour, and the pestilence went its slow course.
Yet when we turn from these other-worldly meditations and other-worldly plans to the eight hundred and fifty letters of the great Pope, we seem to find an entirely different man. We seem to go back some centuries, along that precarious line of the Anicii, and confront one of the abler of the old patricians. Instead of credulity, we find a business capacity which, in spite of the appalling means of communication, organizes and controls, down to minute details, an estate which is worth millions sterling and is scattered over half a continent. Instead of self-effacement, we find a man who talks to archbishops and governors of provinces as if they were acolytes of his Church, and, at least on one occasion, tells the Eastern autocrat, before whom courtiers shade their eyes, that he will not obey him. Instead of holy simplicity, we find a diplomacy which treats with hostile kings in defiance of the civil government, showers pretty compliments on the fiery Brunichildis or the brutal Phocas, and spends years in combating the pretensions of Constantinople. Instead of angelic meekness, we find a warm resentment of vilification, an occasional flash of temper which cows his opponent, a sense of dignity which rebukes his steward for sending him "a sorry nag" or a "good ass" to ride on. We have, in short, a man whose shrewd light-brown eyes miss no opportunity for intervention in that disorderly world, from Angle-land to Jerusalem; who has in every part of it spies and informers in the service of virtue and religion, and who for fourteen years does the work of three men. And all the time he is Gregory the monk, ruining his body by disdainful treatment, writing commentaries on Ezekiel: a medium-sized, swarthy man, with large bald head and straggling tawny beard, with thick red lips and Roman nose and chin, racked by indigestion and then by gout—but a prodigious worker.
To compress his work into a chapter is impossible; one can only give imperfect summaries and a few significant details. He had secretaries, of course, and we are apt to forget that the art of shorthand writing, which was perfectly developed by the Romans, had not yet been lost in the night of the Middle Ages. Yet every letter has the stamp of Gregory's personality, and we recognize a mind of wonderful range and power.
His episcopal work in Rome alone might have contented another man. Soon after his election he wrote a long letter on the duties and qualifications of a bishop, which, in the shape of a treatise entitled The Book of Pastoral Rule, inspired for centuries the better bishops of Europe. His palace was monastic in its severity. He discharged from his service, in Rome and abroad, the hosts of laymen his predecessors had employed, and replaced them with monks and clerics: incidentally turning into monks and clerics many men who did not adorn the holy state. He said mass daily, and used at times to go on horseback to some appointed chapel in the city, where the people gathered to hear his sermons on the gospels or on Ezekiel. Every shade of simony, every pretext for ordination, except religious zeal, he sternly suppressed. When he found that men were made deacons for their fine voices, he forbade deacons to sing any part of the mass except the Gospel, and he made other changes in the liturgy and encouraged the improvement of the chant. Modern criticism does not admit the Sacramentary and the Antiphonary which later ages ascribed to him, but he seems to have given such impulse to reform that the perfected liturgy and chant of a later date were attributed to him.[80]
His motive in these reforms was purely religious; those who would persuade us that Gregory I. had some regard for profane culture, at least as ancillary to religious, forget his belief is an approaching dissolution, and overlook the nature of profane culture. It was indissolubly connected with paganism, and Gregory would willingly have seen every Latin classic submerged in the Tiber; while his disdain of Greek confirmed the already prevalent ignorance which shut the Greek classics out of Europe, to its grave disadvantage, for many centuries. Happily, many monks and bishops were in this respect less unworldly than Gregory, and the greater Roman writers were copied and preserved. Gregory's attitude toward these men is well known. He hears that Bishop Desiderius of Vienne, a very worthy prelate, is lecturing on "grammar" (Latin literature), and he writes to tell Desiderius that he is filled with "mourning and sorrow" that a bishop should be occupied with so "horrible" (nefandum) a pursuit.[81] It has been frivolously suggested that perhaps Desiderius had been lecturing on the classics in church, but Gregory is quite plain: the reading of the pagan writers is an unfit occupation even for "a religious layman."[82] In the preface to his Magna Moralia he scorns "the rules of Donatus"; and so sore a memory of his attitude remained among the friends of Latin letters that Christian tradition charged him with having burned the libraries of the Capitol and of the Palatine and with having mutilated the statues and monuments of older Rome.[83]
The work of Gregory in Rome, however, was not confined to liturgy and discipline. The tradition of parasitism at Rome was not dead, and, as there was now no Præfectus Annonæ to distribute corn to the citizens, it fell to the Church to feed them; and the Romans were now augmented by destitute refugees from all parts. Gregory had to find food and clothing for masses of people, to make constant grants to their churches and to the monasteries, to meet a periodical famine, and to render what miserable aid the ignorance of the time afforded during the periodical pestilence. Occasionally he had even to control the movements of troops and the dispatch of supplies; at least, in his impatience of the apparent helplessness of the imperial government and his determination to hold Catholic towns against the Lombards, he undertook these and other secular functions.
The control of the vast Papal income and expenditure might alone have sufficed to employ a vigorous man. In Sicily, there were immense estates belonging to the Papacy, and other "patrimonies," as they were called, were scattered over Italy and the islands, or lay as far away as Gaul, Dalmatia, Africa, and the East. Clerical agents usually managed these estates, but we find Gregory talking about their mules and mares and cornfields, and the wages and grievances of their slaves and serfs, as familiarly as if he had visited each of them. It has been estimated, rather precariously, that the Papacy already owned from 1400 to 1800 square miles of land, and drew from it an annual income of from £300,000 to £400,000. Not a domestic squabble seems to have happened in this enormous field but Gregory intervened, and his rigid sense of justice and general shrewdness of decision command respect. Then, there was the equally heavy task of distributing the income, for the episcopal establishment cost little, and nothing was hoarded. In sums of ten, twenty, or fifty gold pieces, in bales of clothing and galleys of corn, in altar-vessels and the ransom of captives, the stream percolated yearly throughout the Christian world, as far as the villages of Syria. Monks and nuns were especially favoured.
Within a few years, there spread over the world so great a repute of Gregory's charity and equity that petitions rained upon Rome. Here a guild of soap-boilers asks his intervention in some dispute: there a woman who, in a fit of temper at the supposed infidelity of her husband, has rushed to a nunnery and now wants to return home, asks his indulgence, and receives it. From all sides are cries of oppression, simony, or other scandal, and Gregory is aroused. Jews appeal to him frequently against the injustice of their Christian neighbours, and they invariably get such justice as the law allows. The Zealots who have seized their synagogues (if of long standing—they were forbidden by law to build new ones) must restore them, or pay for them[84]; impatient priests who would coerce them into "believing" are rebuked. There is only one weakness—a not unamiable weakness—in his treatment of the Jews. Those who abandon their creed are to have their rents reduced: to encourage the others, he says cheerfully.[85] For the pagans, however, he has no mercy, as we shall see. He sanctions compulsion and persecution with mediæval frankness. It should be noted, too, that, while he approved the manumission of slaves, he never condemned the institution as such. Vast regiments of slaves worked the Papal estates, though the ease, if not advantage, of converting them into serfs must have been apparent. Still no slave could enter the clergy—lest, as Leo the Great had declared, his "vileness" should "pollute" the sacred order—and a special probation was imposed on slaves if they wished to enter monasteries: a wise regulation this, for many thought it an easy way to freedom. Still no slave could contract marriage with a free Christian, as Gregory expressly reaffirms.[86]
These details of his work will, however, be more apparent if we pass from Rome to the provinces which he controlled, and observe the success or failure of his intervention. It will at once be understood that his intervention almost invariably means that there is an abuse to correct, and, therefore, the world which we find reflected in Gregory's letters is fearfully corrupt. The restless movements and destructive ways of the barbarians had almost obliterated the older culture, and no new system either of education or polity had yet been devised. The influence of the East had been just as pernicious. The venality and corruption of its officers had infected the higher clergy, and simony prevailed from Gaul to Palestine. Over and over again Gregory writes, in just the same words, to prelates of widely separated countries: "I hear that no one can obtain orders in your province without paying for them." The clergy was thus tainted at its source. Ambitious laymen passed, almost at a bound, to bishoprics, and then maintained a luxurious or vicious life by extorting illegal fees. The people, who had been generally literate under the Romans, were now wholly illiterate and helpless. But Gregory has his informants (generally the agents in charge of the patrimonies) everywhere, and the better clergy and the oppressed and the disappointed appeal to him; and a sad procession of vice and crime passes before our eyes when we read his letters. This anarchic world needed a supreme court more than ever; the Papacy throve on its very disorders.
Italy was demoralized by the settlement of the Arian Lombards over the greater part of the country, and by their murderous raids in all directions. Parts which remained Catholic were often so isolated from Rome that a spirit of defiance was encouraged, and Gregory had grave trouble. Milan, for instance, was in the hands of the Lombards, but the Catholic clergy had fled to Genoa with their archbishop, and they retained something of the independence of the Church of St. Ambrose. We see that they must now have their selection of a bishop approved by Gregory, and that the Pope often quietly reproves the prelate for his indiscretions; but we find also that when, on a more serious occasion, Gregory proposes to have Archbishop Constantius tried at Rome, the latter acridly refuses.
Ravenna, the seat of the Eastern Exarch, who is generally hostile to Gregory, occasions some of his least saintly letters. He hears that Archbishop John wears his pallium on forbidden occasions, and he reproves John with an air of unquestioned authority.[87] John partly disputes the facts, and partly pleads special privileges of Ravenna, but Gregory finds no trace of such privileges and orders him to conform.[88] Then he hears that John and the fine folk of the court are poking fun at him, and his honest anger overflows[89]: "Thank God the Lombards are between me and the city of Ravenna, or I might have had to show how strict I can be." John dies, and we see that the clergy of Ravenna must submit the names of two candidates to Gregory. He rejects the Exarch's man, and chooses an old fellow-monk and friend, Marinianus. But the new Archbishop is forced to maintain the defence of the supposed privileges of Ravenna, and the dispute seems to reach no conclusion during the life of Gregory.
In the isolated peninsula of Istria, the spirit of independence has gone the length of flat defiance, or schism, because the Papacy has acquiesced in the endorsement by the Eastern bishops of the Three Chapters: three chapters of a certain decree of Justinian. The schism is of long standing, and when Gregory is made bishop he sends a troop of soldiers to the patriarch of Aquileia, commanding that prelate and his chief supporters to appear at Rome forthwith, "according to the orders of the most Christian and most Serene lord of all." The use of the Emperor's name seems to have been, to put it politely, not strictly accurate, for when Bishop Severus appealed to Maurice, the Emperor curtly ordered Gregory to desist. We have another indication of the mediæval aspect of Gregory's ideas when, in the following year, he refused to contribute to the relief-fund for the victims of a great fire at Aquileia. His monies were "not for the enemies of the Church," he said. He went on to weaken the schism by other means, partly by bribes, and when Maurice died in 602 and a friendly Exarch was appointed, he at once urged physical force.[90] "The defence of the soul is more precious in the sight of God than the defence of the body," he enacted. He was legislating for the Middle Ages.
His relations with the Lombards and the civil power reveal another side of his character. Small Catholic towns, and even Rome, were constantly threatened by the Lombards, yet Constantinople was unable to send troops, and the Exarch remained inactive behind the marshes and walls of Ravenna. Gregory indignantly turned soldier and diplomatist. He appointed a military governor of Nepi, and later of Naples; and many of his letters are to military men, stirring them to action and telling of the dispatch of troops or supplies. In 592, the Lombards appeared before Rome, and Gregory fell ill with work and anxiety. He then purchased a separate peace from the Lombards[91] and there was great anger at Ravenna and Constantinople. Gregory's sentiment was hardly one of patriotism, which would not be consistent with his philosophy; he was concerned for religion, as he was bound to be since the Lombards were Arians. On the other hand, he acknowledges that if he makes a separate peace with the Lombards, it will be disastrous for other parts of the Empire[92]; and it is clear from the sequel that the Exarch had a policy and was not idly drifting.
A later legend, which some modern writers strangely regard as credible,[93] makes Gregory meet the Lombard king outside Rome, and strike a bargain. A bargain was certainly struck, but the angry Exarch issued from Ravenna with his troops and cut his way to Rome, where his conversation with the Pope cannot have been amiable. The Lombards were back in 593, but were either bribed, or found Rome too strong to be taken. They returned again in 595. Gregory now wrote to a friend in Ravenna[94] that he proposed again to purchase peace, and the Emperor Maurice seems to have written him a scalding letter. From Gregory's indignant reply[95] we gather that Maurice called him "a fool," and hinted that he was a liar and traitor. The government idea evidently was that Gregory was a simple-minded victim of the cunning Lombards, as is very probable; but we must take account of his sincere concern for religion and his longing for peace. His policy of bribes would have been disastrous. At Ravenna, some person posted on the walls a sarcastic "libel" about his statesmanship, and another fiery letter appears in Gregory's register.
In other parts of Italy, he had grave ecclesiastical abuses to correct, and some strange bishops are immortalized in his letters. In 599, he had to issue a circular letter,[96] forbidding bishops to have women in their houses, and ordering priests, deacons, and subdeacons to separate from their wives. Sicily, controlled by his agents, gave him little trouble, but his informers reported that in Sardinia and Corsica the clergy and monks were very corrupt, and the pagans, who were numerous, bribed the officials to overlook the practice of their cult. The metropolitan at Cagliari was an intemperate and avaricious man, and Gregory, after repeated warnings, summoned him to Rome; but there is a curious mixture of indulgence and sternness in the Pope's letters, and Januarius did not go to Rome or alter his wicked ways. As to the pagans, Gregory, at first, merely urged the Archbishop to raise the rents and taxes of those who would not abandon the gods.[97] When this proved insufficient, he ordered physical persecution. If they were slaves, they were to be punished with "blows and tortures"; if they were free tenants, they were to be imprisoned. "In order," he says, in entirely mediæval language, "that they who disdain to hear the saving words of health may at least be brought to the desired sanity of mind by torture of the body."[98]
With other provinces of the old Empire, his correspondence is mainly directed to the correction of grave abuses. His letters to Spain show that Papal authority was fully recognized there, and it is of interest to find a Spanish bishop bemoaning, when Gregory urges that only literate men shall be promoted to the priesthood, that they are too few in number. Africa virtually defied his efforts to reform the Church. The province had recovered a little under Byzantine rule, but its bishops and civic officials took bribes from the Donatists.[99] They refused to persecute the schismatics, when Gregory ordered them to do so, and they defeated his attempt to break up their system of local primacies.[100] He was compelled to leave them in their perverse ways. The same condition of simony and clerical laxity prevailed generally throughout the Roman-Teutonic world, and Gregory could do little more than press for the election of good men to vacant bishoprics.
The diplomatic side of his character appears in his relations with Gaul, where the fiery and wilful Brunichildis was his chief correspondent.[101] It is true that her graver crimes were committed after Gregory's death, but he was particularly well informed, and one cannot admire his references to her "devout mind" or appreciate his belief that she was "filled with the piety of heavenly grace." When, in 599, she asked the pallium for her obsequious Bishop Syagrius of Autun, Gregory granted it: on condition that Syagrius convoked a synod for the correction of abuses and that Brunichildis attacked paganism more vigorously. When, on the other hand, the learned and devout Bishop Desiderius of Vienne, who was hated by Brunichildis for his courage in rebuking her, asked the pallium, Gregory found that there was no precedent and refused. It is true that Brunichildis was generous to the clergy and, in her way, pious; but Gregory must have known the real character of the woman whose influence he sought to win. His sacrifice, moreover, was futile. A few synods were held, but there is no trace of any diminution of simony, drunkenness, and vice among the Frankish priests and monks.
His interest in the neighbouring island of Angle-land is well known. He began, early in his Pontificate, to buy Anglo-Saxon youths and train them for missionary work, but, in 596, he found a speedier way to convert the islanders. The all-powerful Ethelbert was married to the Christian Bertha, and Gregory's friendly relations with Gaul opened the way to his court. He sent the historic mission of monks under Augustine, and, in a few years, had the converted King transforming the pagan temples into churches and driving his people into them. It was Gregory who planned the first English hierarchy.
The monks, who ought to have been Gregory's firmest allies in the reform of Christendom, had already become an ignorant and sensual body, sustaining the ideal of Benedict only in a few isolated communities, and Gregory's efforts to improve them were not wholly judicious. He insisted that they should not undertake priestly or parochial work, and he forbade the bishops to interfere with their temporal concerns. There can be little doubt that this tendency to free them from episcopal control made for greater degeneration. Here again, also, we find a curious illustration of his diplomatic liberality. As a rule he was very severe with apostate monks, yet we find him maintaining through life a friendly correspondence with a renegade monk of Syracuse. Venantius had returned to his position of wealthy noble in the world, and had married a noble dame. Gregory, it is true, urged him to return to his monastery, but the amiability of his language is only explained by the position and influence of the man. The last phase of this part of Gregory's correspondence is singular. Venantius died, and left his daughters to the guardianship of the Pope; and we find Gregory assuring these children of sin that he will discharge "the debt we owe to the goodness of your parents."[102]
We have already seen that Gregory's relations with the eastern Emperor were painful, and another episode must be related before we approach Eastern affairs more closely. The Archbishop of Salona, who was one of the typical lax prelates of the age and who had smiled at Gregory's admonitions and threats, was removed by death, and the Pope endeavoured to secure the election of the archdeacon, a rigorous priest who had been the Pope's chief informer. Neither clergy nor laity, however, desired a change in the morals of the episcopal palace, and they secured from Constantinople an imperial order for the election of their own favourite. Gregory alleged bribery and excommunicated the new archbishop. When the Emperor ordered him to desist, he flatly refused, and a compromise had to be admitted. In another town of the same frontier province, Prima Justiniana, the Emperor proposed to replace an invalid bishop with a more vigorous man, and Gregory refused to consent.[103]
A graver conflict had arisen in the East. Constantinople, with its million citizens and its superb imperial palace, naturally regarded its archbishop as too elevated to submit to Rome, and its ruling prelate, John the Faster,—a priest who rivalled Gregory in virtue and austerity,—assumed the title of "Ecumenical Bishop." Gregory protested, but the Emperor Maurice, with his customary bluntness, ordered the Pope to be silent. A few years later, however, some aggrieved Eastern priests appealed to Rome, and Gregory wrote, in entirely Papal language, to ask John for a report on their case. When John lightly, or disdainfully, answered that he knew nothing about it, the Pope lost his temper. He told his ascetic brother that it would be a much less evil to eat meat than to tell lies: that he had better get rid of that licentious young secretary of his and attend to business: that he must at once take back the aggrieved priests: and that, although he seeks no quarrel, he will not flinch if it is forced on him.[104] John made a malicious retort, by inducing the Empress Constantina to make a request for relics which Gregory was bound to refuse.
The priests were eventually tried at Rome. Whether Gregory's sentence was ever carried out in the East, we do not know, but John took the revenge of styling himself "Ecumenical Bishop" in his correspondence with Gregory, and the Pope then tried to form a league with the patriarchs of the apostolic Sees of Antioch and Alexandria against the ambitious John. In his eagerness to defeat John, he went very near to sharing the Papacy with his allies. Peter, he said, had been at Antioch before Rome, and Mark was a disciple of Peter; therefore the three were in a sense "one See."[105] He added that Rome was so far from aspiring to the odious title that, although it had actually been offered to the Popes by the Council of Chalcedon, neither Leo nor any of his successors had used it.[106]
To John himself Gregory sent a withering rebuke of his pride. To the Emperor Maurice he described John as "a wolf in sheep's clothing," a man who claimed a "blasphemous title" which "ought to be far from the hearts of all Christians"! John may "stiffen his neck against the Almighty," he says, but "he will not bend mine even with swords."[107] He assured the Empress Constantina that John's ambition was a sure sign of the coming of Anti-Christ.[108]
Gregory's peculiar diplomacy only excited the disdain of the subtler Greeks. His position is, in fact, so false—repudiating as "blasphemous" a title which, the whole world knew, he himself claimed in substance—that it has been suggested that he thought the term "Ecumenical Bishop" meant "sole bishop." Such a suggestion implies extraordinary ignorance at Rome, but there is no need to entertain it. To his friends Anastasius of Antioch and Eulogius of Alexandria, Gregory complained that the phrase was an affront, not to all bishops, but merely to the leading patriarchs, and the whole correspondence shows that there was no misunderstanding. Gregory lacked self-control. Anastasius of Antioch, though very friendly, ignored his letters; Eulogius advised him to be quiet, and hinted that people might suggest envy; the Emperor treated him with silent disdain. John died, but his successor Cyriacus actually used the offensive title in telling Gregory of his appointment. There was another outburst, and Maurice impatiently begged the Pope not to make so much fuss about "an idle name." Eulogius of Alexandria, who had some sense of humour, addressed Gregory as "Universal Pope," saying gravely that he would obey his "commands" and not again call any man "Universal Bishop." Possibly Eulogius knew that Gregory had, a few years before, written to John of Syracuse: "As to the Church of Constantinople, who doubts that it is subject to the Apostolic See?"[109] Gregory protested in vain until the close of his life. The Greeks retained their "blasphemous" title: the Latins continued to assert their authority even over the Greek bishops.
Toward the close of the year 602, the Emperor Maurice, now a stricken old man of sixty-three, was driven from his throne by the brutal Phocas; his five boys were murdered before his eyes and he was himself executed. Phocas sent messengers to apprise Gregory of his accession. We may assume that these messengers would give a discreet account of what had happened and, possibly, bring an assurance of the new Emperor's orthodoxy; and we do not know whether Gregory's assiduous servants at Constantinople sent him any independent account. Yet, when we have made every possible allowance, Gregory's letters to Phocas are painful. The first letter[110] begins, "Glory be to God on high," and sings a chant of victory culminating in, "Let the heavens rejoice and the earth be glad." The bloody and unscrupulous adventurer must have been himself surprised. Two months later, Gregory wrote again, hailing the dawn of "the day of liberty" after the night of tyranny.[111] In another letter he[112] saluted Leontia, the new Empress,—a fit consort of Phocas,—as "a second Pulcheria"; and he commended the Church of St. Peter's to her generosity. These two letters were written seven months after the murders, and it is impossible to suppose that no independent report had reached Gregory by that time. Nor do we find that, though he lived for a year afterwards, he ever undid those lamentable letters. It is the most ominous presage of the Middle Ages.
Gregory died on March 12, 604. The racking pains of gout had been added to his maladies, and plague and famine and Lombards continued to enfeeble Italy He had striven heroically to secure respect for ideals—for religion, justice, and honour—in that dark world on which his last thoughts lingered. He had planted many a good man in the bishoprics of Europe. He had immensely strengthened the Papacy, and a strong central power might do vast service in that anarchic Europe. Yet the historian must recognize that the world was too strong even for his personality; simony and corruption still spread from Gaul to Africa, and the ideas which Gregory most surely contributed to the mind of Europe were those more lamentable or more casuistic deductions from his creed which we have noticed. Within a year or so—to make the best we can of a rumour which has got into the chronicles—the Romans themselves grumbled that his prodigal charity had lessened their share of the patrimonies, and we saw that more bitter complaints against him were current in the Middle Ages. Yet he was a great Pope: not great in intellect, not perfect in character, but, in an age of confusion, corruption, and cowardice, a mighty protagonist of high ideals.
FOOTNOTES:
[77] Another of them, Gelasius (492-496), is, or was until recently, regarded as the author of the first canon of Scriptures and the first list of prohibited books. But this so-called "Gelasian Decree" does not bear the name of Gelasius in some of the older manuscripts, and is now much disputed. Father Grisar thinks that "we may take it as certain that it did not emanate from him" (History of Rome and the Popes, iii., 236). The canon is probably due to Damasus (see p. 36) and the rather loosely written list of books which follows it is ascribed to the later age of Hormisdas (514-523). Gelasius was an able and vigorous Pope, and would hardly issue so poor a decree.
[78] Lives of Gregory must be read with discretion. The best and most ample source of knowledge is the stout volume of his letters, but there are early biographies by Paul the Deacon and John the Deacon. Paul wrote about 780, but his fairly sober sketch—into which miracles have been interpolated—does not help us much. John wrote about a century after this, and his fantastic and utterly undiscriminating work is almost useless. The best biography of Gregory is the learned and generally candid work of W.F.H. Dudden (Gregory the Great, 2 vols., 1905).
[79] Ep., ix., 69.
[80] See Dudden's Gregory the Great, i., 264-276.
[81] Ep., vi., 54.
[82] Dr. H.A. Mann (The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, 1902, etc.) would show that Gregory had a regard for culture by quoting much praise of secular learning from the Commentary on the First Book of Kings. This is not a work of Gregory at all. Even the Benedictine editors of the Migne edition claim only that it was written by an admirer who took notes of Gregory's homilies, and they admit that it frequently departs from Gregory's ideas.
[83] See John of Salisbury, Polycraticus, ii., 26. It is difficult to conceive that so unflattering a tradition was entirely an invention.
[84] Ep., ix., 6, etc.
[85] Ep., ii., 32.
[86] Ep., vii., 1.
[87] III., 56.
[88] V., 11.
[89] V., 15.
[90] XIII., 33.
[91] II., 46; v., 36.
[92] V., 36.
[93] It is first found in the unreliable Continuer of Prosper's Chronicle, and seems to be founded on the meeting of Leo and Attila. Neither Gregory nor Paul, the Deacon speaks of a meeting with the Lombard king.
[94] V., 36.
[95] V., 40.
[96] IX., ii.
[97] IV., 26.
[98] IX., 65.
[99] I., 84.
[100] I., 74.
[101] See Ep., vii., 5, 50, 59 etc.
[102] XI., 35.
[103] XI., 47.
[104] III., 53.
[105] V., 43.
[106] It is not true that the Council offered the title to Leo I. It occurs only in petitions which two Eastern priests directed to the Pope and the Council (Mansi, vi., 1006 and 1012), and the Council, as we saw, decreed precisely the opposite. The only other place in which we find it in some form is the spurious Latin version of the sentence on Dioscorus to which I referred on p. 50.
[107] V., 20.
[108] V., 21.
[109] IX., 12.
[110] XIII., 31.
[111] XIII., 38.
[112] XIII., 39.
HADRIAN I. AND THE TEMPORAL POWER
Two centuries after the death of Gregory the Great we still find an occasional prelate of rare piety, such as Alcuin, scanning the horizon for signs of the approaching dissolution. Vice and violence had so far triumphed that it seemed as if God must soon lower the curtain on the human tragedy. But the successors of Gregory in the chair of Peter were far from entertaining such feelings. From the heart of the threatening north, another Constantine had come to espouse their cause, to confound their enemies, and to invest the Papacy with a power that it had never known before. The story of the Popes as temporal sovereigns had begun.
Once more we must say that the development was an almost inevitable issue of the circumstances. The Byzantine rule in Italy had never been strong enough to restrain the Lombards, and the rise of the Mohammedans in the farther East now made Constantinople less competent than ever to administer and to defend its trans-Adriatic province. First the city, then the duchy, of Rome fell under the care of the Popes, from sheer lack of other administrators and defenders. We saw this in the Pontificate of Gregory. Beyond the Roman duchy were the scattered patrimonies, the estates given or bequeathed to the Papacy, and these were often towns, or included towns. Here again the lack of secular authority put all government in the hands of the Pope's agents. Then the Eastern court successively adopted two heresies, Monothelitism and Iconoclasm, and the dwindling respect of Rome for the Greeks passed into bitter hostility. Imperial troops sacked the Lateran, dragged a Pope (Martin I.) ignominiously to the East, and induced another Pope (Honorius I.) to "subvert the immaculate faith" or, at least, to "allow the immaculate to be stained."[113] On the whole, however, the Pontiffs who succeeded Gregory were firm and worthy men. Rome began to shudder between the fierce Lombard and the heretical Greek, and there slowly grew in the Lateran Palace the design of winning independence of the erratic counsels of kings.
At this juncture, the name of Charles Martel blazed through the Christian world, and Gregory III. and the people of Rome implored him to take them under his protection. The Lombards were, however, auxiliaries of Charles, and, as Duchesne suggests, Charles probably resented Gregory's interference in secular affairs; the Pope had recently encouraged the Lombard dukes who were in rebellion against their king, and Liutprand had, in revenge, seized four frontier towns of the Roman duchy. Gregory failed, but his amiable and diplomatic successor, Pope Zachary, changed the Roman policy and made progress. He lent Liutprand the use of the little Papal army to aid in suppressing his dukes, and received the four towns and other "patrimonies." A little later, the Exarch and the Archbishop of Ravenna asked Zachary to intercede for them, and the genial Pope again saw and disarmed the Lombard. The language of the Liber Pontificalis is, at this important stage, so barbarous—a sad reflection of Roman culture, for it must have been written in the Lateran—that one often despairs of catching its exact meaning, but it seems to me clear that it represents Liutprand as giving the district of Cesena to the Papacy, and restoring the exarchate of Ravenna to the city of Ravenna. Presently, however, we shall find the Popes claiming the exarchate.
The next step was the famous intervention of Rome in the affairs of the Franks. Pippin, Mayor of the Palace, aspired to the throne of Childeric III., and consulted the Papacy as to the moral aspect of his design. The astute Pontiff went far beyond the terms of the request, and "ordered" the Franks to make Pippin their monarch: an act which founded the lucrative claim of Rome that she had conferred the kingdom on the father of Charlemagne. Zachary's successor, Stephen II.,[114] completed the work. He was hard pressed by the Lombard King Aistulph, and, after a fruitless appeal to Constantinople, he went to France in 753 and implored Pippin to "take up the cause of the Blessed Peter and the Republic of the Romans." This broke the last link with the East, and Stephen secured the gratitude of Pippin and his dynasty by anointing the King and his sons and pronouncing a dire anathema—which he had assuredly no right to pronounce—on any who should ever dare to displace the family of Pippin from the throne. And so Pippin swore a mighty oath that he would take up the cause of the Blessed Peter, but what he precisely engaged to do is one of the great controversies of history.
It is clear that Pippin was made "Patrician" of Rome. This had long been the official title of the Byzantine Exarch in Italy, and it has no definite meaning when it is transferred to Pippin and Charlemagne. Probably this vagueness was part of the Roman plan. The Pope wanted Pippin's army without his suzerainty. Moreover, in conferring on Pippin the title which had belonged to the Exarch, it was probably implied that the exarchate became part of "the cause of the Blessed Peter." In point of fact, the Liber Pontificalis goes on to say that Pippin swore to win for Rome "the exarchate of Ravenna" as well as other "rights and territories of the Republic." Later, in recording the life of Hadrian I., the Liber Pontificalis says that Stephen asked for "divers cities and territories of the province of Italy, and the grant of them to the Blessed Peter and his Vicars for ever." This part of the work is, it is true, under grave suspicion of interpolation, but the sentence I have quoted may pass. Pippin swore to secure for the Popes, not only the Roman duchy, and "divers cities and territories" which they claimed as "patrimonies," but also the exarchate of Ravenna, to which they had no right whatever. As Hadrian I. repeatedly refers, in his letters to Charlemagne, to this "Donation of Pippin," and in one letter (xcviii.) says that it was put into writing, it is idle to contest it.[115]
Pippin crossed the Alps and forced Aistulph to yield, but as soon as the Franks returned to their country the Lombard refused to fulfil his obligations and again devastated Italy. No answer to the Pope's desperate appeals for aid came from France and, in 756, when Rome was gravely threatened, Stephen sent a very curious letter to Pippin.[116] It is written in the name of St. Peter, and historians are divided in opinion as to whether or no the Pope wished to impose on the superstition of the French monarch and to induce him to think that it was a miraculous appeal from the apostle himself. There is grave reason to think that this was Stephen's design. The letter does not identify the Pope with Peter, as apologists suggest; it speaks of Stephen as a personality distinct from the apostolic writer, insists that it is the disembodied spirit of Peter in heaven that addresses the King, and threatens him with eternal damnation unless he comes to Rome and saves "my body" and "my church" and "its bishop." As Pippin, who had ignored the Pope's appeals so long, at once hurried to Italy on receiving this letter, we may assume that he regarded it as miraculous. However that may be, he crushed Aistulph and forced him to sign a deed abandoning twenty-three cities—the exarchate, the adjacent Pentapolis, Comacchio, and Narni—to the Roman See.[117] The representatives of the Eastern court had hurried to Italy and had claimed this territory, but Pippin bluntly told them that he had taken the trouble to crush Aistulph only "on behalf of the Blessed Peter." Byzantine rule in Italy was henceforth confined to Calabria in the south and Venetia and Istria in the north. The Pope succeeded the Eastern Emperor by right of gift from Pippin; and Pippin would, no doubt, claim that the provinces were his to give by right of the sword. In point of fact, however, the Papacy had claimed the exarchate on some previous title, and that title is unsound.
We may now pass speedily to the Pontificate of Hadrian. Aistulph died in 756; Stephen III. in 757. The ten years' Pontificate of Paul I. was absorbed in a tiresome effort to wring the new rights of Rome from the new Lombard King, Didier, and the struggle led to the severance of the Romans into Frank and Lombard factions: one of the gravest and most enduring results of the secular policy of the Papacy. When Paul died, the Lombard faction, under two high Papal officials named Christopher and Sergius, led Lombard troops upon the opposing faction (who had elected a Pope), crushed them in a brutal and bloody struggle, and elected Stephen IV. Stephen was, however, not the Lombard King's candidate, and Didier intrigued at Rome against the power of Christopher and Sergius. He bribed the Papal chamberlain, Paul Afiarta, and it is enough to say that before long Christopher and Sergius were put in prison and deprived of their eyes. This was done at the Pope's command; it was the price of the restoration by Didier of the cities he still withheld.[118]