CHAPTER I. ORIGIN AND RISE OF THE PAPACY

[Sidenote: [42-842 A.D.]]

Like almost all the great works of nature and of human power in the material world and in the world of man, the papacy grew up in silence and obscurity. The names of the earlier bishops of Rome are known only by barren lists, by spurious decrees and epistles inscribed, centuries later, with their names; by their collision with the teachers of heretical opinions, almost all of whom found their way to Rome; by martyrdoms ascribed with the same lavish reverence to those who lived under the mildest of the Roman emperors, as well as those under the most merciless persecutors. Yet the mythic or imaginative spirit of early Christianity has either respected, or was not tempted to indulge its creative fertility by the primitive annals of Rome. After the embellishment, if not the invention, of St. Peter’s pontificate, his conflict with Simon Magus in the presence of the emperor, and the circumstance of his martyrdom, it was content with raising the successive bishops to the rank of martyrs without any peculiar richness or fullness of legend.

The dimness and obscurity which veiled the growing church, no doubt threw its modest concealment over the person of the bishop. He was but one man, with no recognised function, in the vast and tumultuous population. He had his unmarked dwelling, perhaps in the distant Transteverine region, or in the then lowly and unfrequented Vatican. By the vulgar, he was beheld as a Jew, or as belonging to one of those countless eastern religions, which, from the commencement of the empire, had been flowing, each with its strange rites and mysteries, into Rome. The emperor, the imperial family, the court favourites, the military commanders, the consulars, the senators, the patricians by birth, wealth, or favour, the pontiffs, the great lawyers, even those who ministered to the public pleasures, the distinguished mimes or gladiators, when they appeared in the streets, commanded more public attention than the Christian bishop, except when sought out for persecution by some politic or fanatic emperor. Slowly, and at long intervals, did the bishop of Rome emerge to dangerous eminence.

Christianity itself might seem, even from the first, to have disdained obscurity--to have sprung up or to have been forced into terrible notoriety in the Neronian persecution and the subsequent martyrdom of one at least, according to the vulgar tradition, of its two great apostles. What caprice of cruelty directed the attention of Nero to the Christians, and made him suppose them victims important enough to glut the popular indignation at the burning of Rome, it is impossible to determine. The cause and extent of the Domitian persecution is equally obscure. The son of Vespasian was not likely to be merciful to any connected with the fanatic Jews. Its known victims were of the imperial family, against whom some crime was necessary, and an accusation of Christianity served the end.

At the commencement of the second century, under Trajan, persecution against the Christians is raging in the East. That, however, was a local or rather Asiatic persecution, arising out of the vigilant and not groundless apprehension of the sullen and brooding preparation for insurrection among the whole Jewish race (with whom Roman terror and hatred still confounded the Christians), which broke out in the bloody massacres of Cyrene and Cyprus, and in the final rebellion during the reign of Hadrian, under Barchochebas (Bar Koziba). But while Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, is carried to Rome to suffer martyrdom, the Roman community is in peace, and not without influence. Ignatius entreats his Roman brethren not to interfere with injurious kindness between himself and his glorious death.

The wealth of the Roman community, and their lavish Christian use of their wealth, by contributing to the wants of foreign churches, at all periods, especially in times of danger and disaster (an ancient usage which lasted till the time of Eusebius), testifies at once to their flourishing condition, to their constant communication with more distant parts of the empire, and thus incidentally, perhaps, to the class, the middle or mercantile class, which formed the greater part of the believers.

But the history of Latin Christianity has not begun. For some considerable (it cannot but be an undefinable) part of the first three centuries, the church of Rome, and most, if not all the churches of the West, were, if we may so speak, Greek religious colonies. Their language was Greek, their organisation Greek, their writers Greek, their Scriptures Greek; and many vestiges and traditions show that their ritual, their liturgy, was Greek. Through Greek the communication of the churches of Rome and of the West was constantly kept up with the East; and through Greek every heresiarch, or his disciples, having found his way to Rome, propagated with more or less success his peculiar doctrines. Pope Leo I (440-461) was the first celebrated Latin preacher, and his brief and emphatic sermons read like the first essays of a rude and untried eloquence, rather than the finished compositions which would imply a long study and cultivation of pulpit oratory. Compare them with Chrysostom.

[Sidenote: [42-312 A.D.]]

Africa, not Rome, gave birth to Latin Christianity. Tertullian was the first Latin writer, at least the first who commanded the public ear; and there is strong ground for supposing that, since Tertullian quotes the sacred writings perpetually and copiously, the earliest of those many Latin versions, noticed by Augustine, and on which Jerome grounded his Vulgate, were African. Cyprian kept up the tradition of ecclesiastical Latin. Arnobius, too, was an African.

Thus the Roman church was but one of the confederation of Greek religious republics, founded by Christianity. As of apostolic origin, still more as the church of the capital of the world, it was, of course, of paramount dignity and importance. It is difficult to exaggerate the height at which Rome, before the foundation of Constantinople, stood above the other cities of the earth; the centre of commerce, the centre of affairs, the centre of empire. The Christians, like the rest of mankind, were constantly ebbing and flowing out of Rome and into Rome. The church of the capital could not but assume something of the dignity of the capital; it was constantly receiving, as it were, the homage of all the foreign Christians, who, from interest, business, ambition, curiosity, either visited or took up their residence in the Eternal City.

But if Rome, or the church of Rome, was thus the centre of the more peaceful influences of Christianity, and of the hopes and fears of the Christian world, it was no less inevitably the chosen battle-field of her civil wars; and Christianity has ever more faithfully recorded her dissensions than her conquests. In Rome every feud which distracted the infant community reached its height; nowhere do the judaising tenets seem to have been more obstinate, or to have held so long and stubborn a conflict with more full and genuine Christianity. In Rome every heresy, almost every heresiarch, found welcome reception. All new opinions, all attempts to harmonise Christianity with the tenets of the Greek philosophers, with the oriental religions, the cosmogonies, the theophanies, and mysteries of the East, were boldly agitated, either by the authors of the gnostic systems or by their disciples. Valentinus the Alexandrian was himself in Rome, so also was Marcion of Sinope. The Phrygian Montanus, with his prophetesses, Priscilla and Maximilla, if not present, had their sect, a powerful sect, in Rome and in Africa. In Rome their convert, for a time at least, was the pope; in Africa, Tertullian. Somewhat later, the precursors of the great Trinitarian controversy came from all quarters. Praxeas, an Asiatic; Theodotus, a Byzantine; Artemon, an Asiatic; Noetus, a Smyrniote, at least his disciples the deacon Epigenes and Cleomenes, taught at Rome. Sabellius, from Ptolemais in Cyrene, appeared in person; his opinions took their full development in Rome. Not only do all these controversies betray the inexhaustible fertility of the Greek or eastern imagination, not only were they all drawn from Greek or oriental doctrines, but they must have been still agitated, discussed, ramified into their parts and divisions, through the versatile and subtile Greek. They were all strangers and foreigners; not one of all these systems originated in Rome, in Italy, or in Africa. On all these opinions the bishop of Rome was almost compelled to sit in judgment; he must receive or reject, authorise or condemn; he was a proselyte, whom it would be the ambition of all to gain.

Thus, down to the conversion of Constantine, the biography of the Roman bishops, and the history of the Roman episcopate, are one; the acts and peculiar character of the pontiffs, the influence and fortunes of the see, excepting in the doubtful and occasional gleams of light which have brought out Victor, Zephyrinus, Calixtus, Cornelius, Stephen, into more distinct personality, are involved in a dim and vague twilight. On the establishment of Christianity, as the religion if not of the empire, of the emperor, the bishop of Rome rises at once to the rank of a great accredited functionary; the bishops gradually, though still slowly, assume the life of individual character. The bishop is the first Christian in the first city of the world, and that city is legally Christian. The supreme pontificate of heathenism might still linger from ancient usage among the numerous titles of the emperor; but so long as Constantine was in Rome, the bishop of Rome, the head of the emperor’s religion, became in public estimation the equal, in authority and influence immeasurably the superior, to all of sacerdotal rank. The schisms and factions of Christianity now become affairs of state. As long as Rome is the imperial residence, an appeal to the emperor is an appeal to the bishop of Rome. It was the slow and imperceptible accumulation of wealth, the unmarked ascent to power and sovereignty, which enabled the papacy to endure for centuries.

[Sidenote: [312-395 A.D.]]

The obscurity of the bishops of Rome was not in this alone their strength. The earlier pontiffs (Clement is hardly an exception) were men who of themselves commanded no great authority, and awoke no jealousy. Rome had no Origen, no Athanasius, no Ambrose, no Augustine, no Jerome. The power of the hierarchy was established by other master-minds; by the Carthaginian Cyprian, by the Italian Ambrose, the prelate of political weight as well as of austere piety, by the eloquent Chrysostom. The names of none of the popes, down to Leo and Gregory the Great, appear among the distinguished writers of Christendom. This more cautious and retired dignity was no less favourable to their earlier power, than to their later claim of infallibility. If more stirring and ambitious men, they might have betrayed to the civil power the secret of their aspiring hopes; if they had been voluminous writers, in the more speculative times, before the Christian creed had assumed its definite and coherent form, it might have been more difficult to assert their unimpeachable orthodoxy.

The removal of the seat of empire to Constantinople consummated the separation of Greek and Latin Christianity; one took the dominion of the East, the other of the West. Greek Christianity has now another centre in the new capital; and the new capital has entered into those close relations with the great cities of the East, which had before belonged exclusively to Rome. Alexandria has become the granary of Constantinople; her Christianity and her commerce, instead of floating along the Mediterranean to Italy, pour up the Ægean to the city on the Bosporus. The Syrian capitals, Antioch, Jerusalem, the cities of Asia Minor and Bithynia, Ephesus, Nicæa, Nicomedia, own another mistress. The tide of Greek trade has ebbed away from the West, and found a nearer mart; political and religious ambition and adventure crowd to the new eastern court. That court becomes the chosen scene of Christian controversy; the emperor is the proselyte to gain whom contending parties employ argument, influence, intrigue.

That which was begun by the foundation of Constantinople, was completed by the partition of the empire between the sons of Constantine. There are now two Roman worlds, a Greek, and a Latin. In one respect, Rome lost in dignity, she was no longer the sole metropolis of the empire; the East no longer treated her with the deference of a subject. On the other hand, she was the uncontested, unrivalled head of her own hemisphere; she had no rival in those provinces, which yet held her allegiance, either as to civil or religious supremacy. The separation of the empire was not more complete between the sons of Constantine or Theodosius, than between Greek and Latin Christianity.[b]

[Sidenote: [42-395 A.D.]]

The advance of Christianity involved an emancipation of religion from all political elements, and this was inevitably followed by the establishment of a distinct ecclesiastical body, with a constitution peculiar to itself. In this separation of the church from the state consists, perhaps, the most important and most effectually influential peculiarity of Christian times. The spiritual and temporal powers may come into close contact--they may remain in the most intimate communion; but a perfect coalition can only take place occasionally, and for short periods of time. In their reciprocal relations and position with regard to each other, has since then been involved one of the most important questions presented by all history.

It was nevertheless imperative on the ecclesiastical body to form their constitution on the model of that of the empire; and accordingly the hierarchy of the bishops, metropolitan patriarchs, was formed in close correspondence with the degradations of the civil power. No long time had elapsed before the bishops of Rome acquired the supremacy. It is, indeed, a vain pretence to assert that this supremacy was universally acknowledged by East and West, even in the first century, or, indeed, at any time; but it is equally certain that they quickly gained a pre-eminence, raising them far above all other ecclesiastical dignitaries. Many causes concurred to secure them this position; for if the relative importance of each provincial capital secured to its bishop a corresponding weight and dignity, how much more certainly would this result take place as regarded the ancient capital of the empire--that city whence the whole had derived its name? Rome was, besides, one of the most illustrious seats of the apostles; here had the greater number of the martyrs shed their blood. The bishops of Rome had displayed the most undaunted firmness throughout the different persecutions, and had sometimes been scarcely installed in their sacred office before they followed their predecessor in the path of that martyrdom by which his seat had been vacated. In addition to all this, the emperors now found it advisable to favour the advancement of a great patriarchal authority. In a law that became decisive for the predominance of Rome as well as of Christianity, Theodosius the Great commands that all nations claiming the protection of his grace should receive the faith as propounded by St. Peter to the Romans. Valentinian also forbade the bishops, whether of Gaul or of other provinces, to depart from the received customs of the church without the sanction of that venerable man, the pope of the Holy City. Thenceforth the power of the Roman bishops advanced beneath the protection of the emperor himself. But in this political connection lay also a restrictive force; had there been but one emperor, a universal primacy might also have established itself; but this was prevented by the partition of the empire. The emperors of the East were too eagerly tenacious of their ecclesiastical rights to make it possible that they should promote the extension of power desired by the western patriarchs in their dominions. In this respect also the constitution of the church presents the closest resemblance to that of the empire.

THE PAPACY IN CONNECTION WITH THE FRANKISH EMPIRE

[Sidenote: [312-754 A.D.]]

Scarcely was this great change completed, the Christian religion established, and the church founded, when new events of great importance took place; the Roman Empire, so long conquering and paramount, was now to see itself assailed by its neighbours; in its turn it was invaded and overcome.

Amidst the general convulsion that ensued, Christianity itself received a violent shock. In their terror, the Romans bethought themselves once more of the Etruscan mysteries, the Athenians hoped to be saved by Achilles and Minerva, the Carthaginians offered prayers to the genius Cœlestis; but these were only temporary waverings, for even whilst the empire was shattered in the western provinces, the church remained firm and undisturbed throughout all. But she fell, as was inevitable, into many embarrassments, and found herself in an entirely altered condition. A pagan people took possession of Britain; Arian kings seized the greater part of the remaining West; while the Lombards, long attached to Arianism, and as neighbours most dangerous and hostile, established a powerful sovereignty before the very gates of Rome.

The Roman bishops meanwhile, beset on all sides, exerted themselves with all the prudence and pertinacity which have remained their peculiar attributes to regain the mastery--at least in their ancient patriarchal diocese; but a new and still heavier calamity now assailed them. The Arabs--not conquerors merely, as were the Germans, but men inspired even to fanaticism by an arrogant and dogmatising creed, in direct opposition to the Christian faith--now poured themselves over the West as they had previously done over the East. After repeated attacks, they gained possession of Africa; one battle made them masters of Spain, their general Musa boasting that he would march into Italy by the passes of the Pyrenees and across the Alps, and cause the name of Mohammed to be proclaimed from the Vatican.

This position was all the more perilous for the western portion of Roman Christendom, from the fact that the iconoclastic dissensions were at that time raging with the most deadly animosity on both sides. The emperor of Constantinople had adopted the opposite party to that favoured by the pope of Rome; nay, the life of the latter was more than once in danger from the emperor’s machinations. The Lombards did not fail to perceive the advantages derivable to themselves from these dissensions; their king Aistulf took possession of provinces that till then had always acknowledged the dominion of the emperor, and again advancing towards Rome, he summoned that city also to surrender, demanding payment of tribute with vehement threats.

The Roman see was at this moment in no condition to help itself, even against the Lombards, still less could it hope to contend with the Arabs, who were beginning to extend their sovereignty over the Mediterranean, and were threatening all Christendom with a war of extermination.

But now the faith was no longer confined within the limits of the Roman Empire. Christianity, in accordance with its original destiny, had long overpassed these limits; more especially had it taken deep root among the German tribes of the West; nay, a Christian power had already arisen among these tribes, and towards this the pope had but to stretch forth his hands, when he was sure to find the most effectual succour and earnest allies against all his enemies.

[Sidenote: [496-715 A.D.]]

Among all the Germanic nations, the Franks alone had become Catholic from their first rise in the provinces of the Roman Empire. This acknowledgment of the Roman see had secured important advantages to the Frankish nation. In the Catholic subjects of their Arian enemies, the western Goths and Burgundians, the Franks found natural allies. We read so much of the miracles by which Clovis was favoured--how St. Martin showed him the ford over the Vienne by means of a hind, how St. Hilary preceded his armies in a column of fire--that we shall not greatly err if we conclude these legends to shadow forth the material succours afforded by the natives to those who shared their creed, and for whom, according to Gregory of Tours,[i] they desired victory “with eager inclination.” But this attachment to Catholicism, thus confirmed from the beginning by consequences so important, was afterwards renewed and powerfully strengthened by a very peculiar influence arising from a totally different quarter.

It chanced that certain Anglo-Saxons, being exposed for sale in the slave market of Rome, attracted the attention of Pope Gregory the Great; he at once resolved that Christianity should be preached to the nation whence these beautiful captives had been taken. Never, perhaps, was resolution adopted by any pope whence results more important ensued; together with the doctrines of Christianity, a veneration for Rome and for the holy see, such as had never before existed in any nation, found place among the Germanic Britons. The Anglo-Saxons began to make pilgrimages to Rome; they sent their youth thither to be educated, and King Offa established the tax called “St. Peter’s penny” for the relief of pilgrims and the education of the clergy. The higher orders proceeded to Rome, in the hope that, dying there, a more ready acceptance would be accorded to them by the saints in heaven. The Anglo-Saxons appear to have transferred to Rome and the Christian saints the old Teutonic superstition, by which the gods were described as nearer to some spots of earth than to others, and more readily to be propitiated in places thus favoured.

But besides all this, results of higher importance still ensued when the Anglo-Saxons transplanted their modes of thought to the mainland, and imbued the whole empire of the Franks with their own opinion. Boniface (originally Winfrid or Winfrith), the apostle of the Germans, was an Anglo-Saxon; this missionary, largely sharing in the veneration professed by his nation for St. Peter and his successors, had from the beginning voluntarily pledged himself to abide faithfully by all the regulations of the Roman see; to this promise he most religiously adhered. On all the German churches founded by him was imposed an extraordinary obligation to obedience. Every bishop was required expressly to promise that his whole life should be passed in unlimited obedience to the Romish church, to St. Peter and his representative. Nor did he confine this rule to the Germans only. The Gallican bishops had hitherto maintained a certain independence of Rome; Boniface, who had more than once presided in their synods, availed himself of these occasions to impress his own views on this western portion of the Frankish church; thenceforward the Gallic archbishops received their pallium from Rome, and thus did the devoted submission of the Anglo-Saxons extend itself over the whole realm of the Franks.

The empire had now become the central point for all the German tribes of the West. The fact that the reigning family, the Merovingian race, had brought about its own destruction by its murderous atrocities had not affected the strength of the empire. Another family, that of Pepin of Heristal, had risen to supreme power--men of great energy, exalted force of character, and indomitable vigour. While other realms were sinking together into one common ruin, and the world seemed about to become the prey of the Moslem, it was this race, the house of Pepin of Heristal, afterwards called the Carlovingian, by which the first and effectual resistance was offered to the Mohammedan conquerors.

[Sidenote: [395-715 A.D.]]

The religious development then in progress was also equally favoured by the house of Pepin; we find it early maintaining the best understanding with Rome, and it was under the special protection of Charles Martel and Pepin le Bref that Boniface proceeded in his apostolic labours. Let us consider the temporal condition of the papal power. On the one side the East Roman Empire, weakened, fallen into ruin, incapable of supporting Christendom against Islamism, or of defending its own domains in Italy against the Lombards, yet continuing to claim supremacy even in spiritual affairs. On the other hand, we have the German nations full of the most vigorous life; victorious over the Moslem, attached with all the fresh ardour and trusting enthusiasm of youth to that authority of whose protecting and restricting influences they still felt the need, and filled with an unlimited and most freely rendered devotion.

Already Gregory II perceived the advantages he had gained; full of a proud self-consciousness, he writes thus to that iconoclast emperor, Leo the Isaurian: “All the lands of the West have their eyes directed towards our humility; by them are we considered as a God upon earth.” His successors became ever more and more impressed with the conviction that it was needful to separate themselves from a power (that of the Roman Empire) by which many duties were imposed on them, but which could offer them no protection in return. They could not safely permit a succession to the mere name and empire to fetter them, but turned themselves rather towards those from whom help and aid might also be expected. Thus they entered into strict alliance with those great captains of the West, the Frankish monarchs; this became closer and closer from year to year, procured important advantages to both parties, and eventually exercised the most active influence on the destinies of the world.[c]

With the division of the empire in the year 395, the question of the Roman precedence of Constantinople was left for a time in abeyance; but in the West the authority of the bishop of Rome became more and more firmly established. In the following century the general conditions under which he was called upon to act became so materially modified as to constitute a new period in the history of our subject.

The characters of the men who filled the papal chair during this century, most of them of exemplary life, some of commanding genius, would alone suffice to constitute it a memorable era. “Upon the mind of Innocent I,” says Milman,[b] “seems first distinctly to have dawned the vast conception of Rome’s universal ecclesiastical supremacy.” Innocent I (402-417) seems indeed to have been the first of the popes who ventured to repudiate those political conceptions which threatened to circumscribe the extending influence of his office. Innocent was succeeded by Zosimus (417-418) and Boniface (418-422). The former, whose pontificate lasted only twenty-one months, exhibits a noteworthy exception to the traditions of his see, in the disposition he at one time showed to temporise with Pelagianism, and even to set aside in its favour the decrees of his predecessor. The pontificate of Boniface is notable as having been preceded by a contested election which afforded the emperor Honorius an opportunity for the exercise of his intervention, thereby establishing a precedent for imperial interference on like occasions. At the instance of Boniface himself, Honorius enacted an ordinance designed to avert the scandals incident to such contests. By the new provisions, all canvassing for the vacant chair was strictly prohibited; in the event of a disputed election both candidates were to be deemed ineligible. The successor of Boniface was Celestine I (422-432). The evidence afforded by the events of his pontificate is somewhat conflicting in character. On the one hand, we find the churches of Africa putting forward their latest recorded protest against the Roman pretensions, adducing the sixth canon of the Council of Nicæa in support of their protest; on the other hand, the success with which Celestine intervened in Illyricum, and again in connection with the sees of Narbonne and Vienne, proves that the papal jurisdiction was being accepted with increasing deference in other parts of the empire.

[Sidenote: [418-461 A.D.]]

Barbaric invasion, although resulting in the overthrow of many of the institutions of civilisation, and in widespread suffering and social deterioration, served but to enhance the influence and importance of the Roman see. The apparent fulfilment of prophecy, pagan as well as Christian, when the city was taken and sacked by Alaric (410), seemed to complete the effacement of the temporal power in Rome. Neither the western emperors nor the Gothic conquerors held their court in the ancient capital, where the pope was now at once the most important and conspicuous authority. In the African provinces, the demoralisation occasioned by the fierce controversies and dissensions concerning Pelagianism and Donatism compelled the Catholic communities to exchange their former attitude of haughty independence for one of suppliant appeal, and to solicit the intervention and counsel which they had before rejected. Such was the aspect of affairs in the West when Leo the Great (440-461), by some regarded as the true founder of the mediæval popedom, succeeded to the primacy. A citizen of Rome by birth, he exemplified in his own character many of the ancient Roman virtues--a tenacious adherence to tradition in matters of religious belief, an indomitable resolution in the assertion of the prerogatives of his office, and the austere practice of the recognised duties of social life. This rigid maintenance of orthodoxy had been instilled into him (or at least confirmed) by the exhortations of Augustine, with whom he had become personally acquainted when on a mission to the African province; and before his election to the papal office the celebrated Cassian had conceived so high an opinion of his virtues and abilities as to dedicate to him his treatise on the Incarnation. Regarded, indeed, simply as the able antagonist of the Manichæan and Eutychian heresies, and as the first author of the collect, Leo would fill no unimportant place in the annals of Latin Christendom; but his influence on church history in other respects is of a far deeper and more potent kind. In none was it followed by more important results than by the success with which he established the theory that all bishops who, in questions of importance, demurred to the decision of their metropolitan should be entitled to appeal to Rome. He obtained the recognition of this principle not only in Illyricum, as his predecessor Innocent had done, but also in Gaul; and the circumstances under which he did so in the latter province constitute the whole proceedings a memorable episode in church history.

[Sidenote: [461-532 A.D.]]

The chief obstacle to the recognition of the supremacy of the Roman pontiff was now to be found in the revival of Arianism, which, professed alike by the Goth and the Vandal, represented the dominant faith in the chief cities of northern Italy, as well as in Africa, Spain, and southern Gaul. But the rivalry thus generated only increased the disposition of the Catholic party to exalt the prerogatives of their head, and the attitude of Rome towards other churches continued to be more and more one of unquestionable superiority. In the year 483 Pope Felix II (or III)[84] ventured upon an unprecedented measure in citing Acacius, the patriarch of Constantinople, to Rome, to answer certain allegations preferred against him by John, patriarch of Alexandria, whom he designated as “_frater et coepiscopus noster_” (Thiel,[j] _Epistolæ_, p. 239). On Acacius’ refusing to recognise the legality of the letter of citation, he was excommunicated by Felix. The successor of Felix, Gelasius I (492-496), refused to notify, as was customary, his election to the patriarch of Constantinople, and by his refusal implicitly put forward a fresh assumption, viz., that communion with Rome implied subjection to Rome. Throughout the pontificate of Gelasius the primacy of the Roman see was the burden of his numerous letters to other churches, and he appears also to have been the first of the pontiffs to enunciate the view that the authority which he represented was not controllable by the canons of synods, whether past or present. In Italy these assumptions were unhesitatingly accepted. The Palmary synod, as it was termed, convened in Rome during the pontificate of Symmachus (498-514), formally disavowed its own right to sit in judgment on his administrative acts. Ennodius, bishop of Pavia, (_circa_ 510), declared that the Roman pontiff was to be judged by God alone, and was not amenable to any earthly potentate or tribunal. It is thus evident that the doctrine of papal infallibility, though not yet formulated, was already virtually recognised.

During the Gothic rule in Italy (493-553), its representatives manifested the utmost tolerance in relation to religious questions, and showed little disposition to impose any restraints on the policy of the popes, although each monarch, by virtue of his title of “king of the Romans,” claimed the right to veto any election to the papal chair. In the year 483, when Odoacer sent his first lieutenant, Basilius, from Ravenna to Rome, the latter was invested with the titles _eminentissimus_ and _sublimis_. The pope accordingly appeared as politically the subject of his Arian overlord. The advantage thus gained by the temporal power appears to have been the result of its intervention, which Simplicius (468-483) had himself solicited, in the elections to the papal office, and one of the principal acts of the Palmary synod (above referred to) was to repudiate the chief measures of Basilius, which had been especially directed against the abuses that prevailed on such occasions, and more particularly against bribery by alienation of the church lands. The assertion of this authority on the part of the civil power was declared by the synod to be irregular and uncanonical, and was accordingly set aside as not binding on the church. The fierce contests and shameless bribery which now accompanied almost every election were felt, however, to be so grave a scandal that the synod itself deemed it expedient to adopt the ordinance issued by Basilius, and to issue it as one of its own enactments. In order more effectually to guard against such abuses, Boniface II, in the year 530, obtained from a synod specially convened for the purpose the power of appointing his own successor, and nominated one Vigilius--the same who ten years later actually succeeded to the office. But a second synod, having decided that such a concession was contrary to the traditions of episcopal succession, annulled the grant, and Boniface himself committed the former decree to the flames. At his death, however, the recurrence of the old abuses in a yet more flagrant form induced the senate to obtain from the court of Ravenna a measure of reform of a more comprehensive character, and designed to check not only the simoniacal practices within the church itself, but also the extortion of the court officials.

[Sidenote: [526-590 A.D.]]

In the year 526 Dionysius Exiguus, a monk in Rome, undertook the labour of preparing a new collection of the canons of the councils, and, finding his production favourably received, proceeded also to compile a like collection of the papal letters or decretals, from the earliest extant down to those of Anastasius II in his own day. The letters of the popes were thus placed on a level with the rescripts of the emperors, and in conjunction with the canons formed the basis of the canon law, which afterwards assumed such importance in connection with the history of the church. The negative value of the collection formed by Dionysius may be said, however, almost to equal that of its actual contents; for, from the simple fact that it does not contain those yet earlier decretals subsequently put forth by the pseudo-Isidorus, it affords the most convincing disproof of their genuineness.

The substitution of the rule of the Greek emperors for that of the Gothic monarchs was inimical in almost every respect to the independence and reputation of the popedom. For a short interval before Justinian landed in Italy, Agapetus (535-536), appearing as the emissary of Theodotus to the Eastern court, assumed a bearing which inspired the emperor himself with respect, and his influence was sufficiently potent to procure the deposition of one patriarch of the Eastern capital and to decide the election of another. But, after Belisarius entered Rome and the city had been reduced to subjection, the pontiff was seen to be the mere vassal of the emperor, and not only of the emperor but of the courtesan on the imperial throne. The deposition of Silverius (536-540), and his mysterious fate at Pandataria, together with the elevation of Vigilius (540-555), the nominee of the abandoned Theodora and her pliant slave, completed the degradation of the Roman see. Each successive pope was now little more than a puppet which moved at the pleasure of the Eastern court, and the _apocrisiarius_ or deputy whom he maintained at that court was generally (as in the case of Pelagius I, Gregory I, Sabinian, Boniface III, Martin) his own successor--an honour purchased, it can hardly be doubted, by systematic compliance with the imperial wishes. In the career and fate of Vigilius the papal office was dishonoured as it had never been before, at once by the signal unworthiness of its bearer and by the indignities heaped upon him by the savage malice of his foes. So sinister, indeed, had become the relations between the Roman bishop and the eastern court that Pelagius I (555-560) is said to have besought Narses to send him to prison rather than to Constantinople.

In the year 568 the Lombards invaded Italy. Like the Goths they became converts to Arianism; but they were also far less civilised, and looked with little respect on Roman institutions and Roman habits of thought, while their arrogance, faithlessness, and cruelty gained for them the special detestation of the Roman see. Their conquests did not extend over all Italy. Ravenna and the Pentapolis, Venice, Rome, and its duchy (as the surrounding district was then termed), Naples, Calabria, and Sicily, remained subject to the empire. In the peninsula the pope was, after the exarch of Ravenna, the most powerful potentate, and the presence of a common foe caused the relations between himself and the empire to assume a more amicable character. The emperor, indeed, continued to control the elections and to enforce the payment of tribute for the territory protected by the imperial arms; but on the other hand the pontiff exercised a definite authority with the Roman duchy and claimed to have a voice in the appointment of the civil officers who administered the local government. From the time of Constantine the Great the church had possessed the right of acquiring landed property by bequests, and the Roman see had thus become greatly enriched. Some of its possessions lay far beyond the confines of Italy.[f]

GREGORY THE GREAT (590-604 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [42-590 A.D.]]

The papal monarchy thus rose insensibly upon the episcopal aristocracy. From the first, the word of the successor of St. Peter as bishop of the Eternal City had a high degree of authority. The title of “pope,” attributed in theory to every bishop, was finally reserved for him of Rome alone, a change already manifest under Leo the Great, but not completely brought about until the time of Gregory VII. The bishop of Rome had possessed since the days of the Roman Empire valuable property in the capital and throughout Italy. He had even acquired some across the Alps, for example, in the province of Arles, where he charged the bishop of that city with administering it. Besides this he occupied in Rome itself, that is to say in the most famous city in the world, that great estate which had been assigned to the bishops by the municipal régime in the last days of the empire.

St. Leo (440-461) gave much prestige to his office by the great rôle he played in public affairs and his successful intercession with Attila. He obtained from Valentinian III a decree in which the emperor invited “the entire church to recognise its head in order that peace might forever be preserved”; and at the same period we see him restoring a Gallican bishop to the see from which he had been driven, and transferring the metropolitan seat from Arles to Vienne.

Under the Ostrogoths the church of Rome, treated elsewhere with leniency, could make no progress. But when their power had fallen (553) and Rome came once more under the authority of the emperor of Constantinople, the great distance of her new master opened up a brighter future. The Lombard invasion brought into the church’s territory a large number of refugees, and the Roman population recovered some of its old energy in the double hatred for barbarians and Arians. As for the exarch whom the eastern emperor had charged with the government of his Italian provinces and invested with direct authority over the dukes and military counts of Naples, Rome, Genoa, etc., this official could scarcely make his authority felt in the western half of Italy, relegated as he was to Ravenna, and separated from Rome by the Lombard dominion which included Spoleto.

[Sidenote: [590-604 A.D.]]

It was at this juncture favourable, though dangerous in some respects, that Gregory I appeared (590-604). Descended from the noble Anicia family, Gregory added to distinction of birth every advantage of body and mind. While under thirty he was prefect of Rome, but at the end of several months he abandoned honours and thoughts of worldly things, and sought the retirement of the cloister. But his reputation did not permit him the obscurity he desired. Sent to Constantinople about 570 as secretary and later as apocrisiary (a sort of grand almoner) by Pope Pelagius II, he rendered valuable service to the holy see in its relations with the empire and in its struggles with the Lombards. In 590 the clergy, the senate, and the people raised him with one voice to the supreme pontificate, as successor to Pelagius; but as all elections had to be confirmed by the emperor at Constantinople, Gregory wrote in supplication that his might not be sanctioned. The letter was intercepted, and Maurice’s orders of ratification soon arrived. Gregory hid; he was discovered and brought back to Rome.

Pope in spite of himself, he used all his talent and power to fortify the papacy,[85] propagate Christianity, and improve the discipline and organisation of the church. Although he pleaded that the episcopacy, and especially his own, “was the office of a shepherd of souls and not of a temporal prince,” he did not neglect the temporal power of the holy see. It happened, since the emperor was so little in touch with Italian affairs, that the soldiers charged with defending Rome against the Lombards had received no pay. Gregory paid them, took upon himself the work of defence, and armed the clerics. When Agilulf, whose aggression had provoked these preparations, was compelled to withdraw, Gregory treated with him in the name of Rome, in spite of protests from the exarch.

Feeling thus strengthened in his position, he undertook to propagate Christianity and orthodoxy both within and without the limits of the ancient Roman Empire. Within its boundaries there were still some pagans in Sicily, Sardinia, even at Terracina (Tarracina) at the very gates of Rome, and doubtless also in some parts of Gaul, since there exists a decree of Childebert’s dated 554, with the title _For the Abolition of the Remainder of Idolatry_. There were Arians very close to Rome, the Lombards. By the intervention of Queen Theudelinda, Gregory succeeded in having the heir to the Lombard throne, Adalwald, raised in Catholicism. Since 587 the Visigoths in Spain under Recared had been converted.

As for Great Britain, it was still entirely pagan, and Gregory sent thither the monk Augustine and forty Roman missionaries (596). They landed on the island of Thanet, and going from there sought Ethelbert, king of Kent, who permitted them to preach their doctrines at Canterbury. From this point Christianity spread rapidly towards the north and west, until by 627 it was firmly established in Northumberland. St. Augustine, archbishop of Canterbury, had been named primate of England by Gregory the Great, with whom he kept up a constant correspondence that is still in existence.

Ireland, “the isle of saints,” had already been converted, and now monks were leaving it to win over the barbarians. At this period St. Columban, the monk who denounced Brunehild’s crimes with such boldness, set out to preach the Gospel to the mountaineers of Helvetia, and founded in their midst abbeys surrounded by fertile fields. After him St. Rupert travelled far into Bavaria and established the diocese of Salzburg.

Thus Christianity spread its spirit of proselytism, and St. Gregory fostered it greatly by the mild precepts he inculcated in his missionaries, and the skill with which he facilitated the transition from pagan to Catholic. He wrote to St. Augustine: “You must take care not to destroy the pagans’ temples, but only their idols; use holy water in washing out the edifice, build altars and deposit relics in them. If their temples are well built, so much the better; for it is important that these same ones pass from the cult of demons to that of the true God. When the nation sees its ancient places of worship remain, it will be more disposed to visit them through habit and to worship the true God.”

At home Gregory laboured with success to co-ordinate the powers of the church, in making recognised above everything that of the holy see. We find him bestowing the title of vicar of the Gauls upon the bishop of Arles, to correspond with Augustine archbishop of Canterbury, with the archbishop of Seville for Spain, and him of Thessalonica for Greece; and finally sending secret legates to Constantinople. In his pastoral which he wrote on the occasion of his election, and which became a general regulation throughout the West, he prescribed the bishops their duties according to the decision of several councils. To bind the hierarchy together he sought to prevent the encroachments of one bishop upon another. “I have given you Britain to direct spiritually,” he wrote to the ambitious Augustine, “and not Gaul.” He favoured the monasteries, looked with vigilance after their discipline, and reformed church singing, substituting for the Ambrosian chant, “which,” according to a contemporary, “was like the distant sound of a chariot rolling over the stones,” that Gregorian chant which bears his own name.[d]

The darkest stain on the name of Gregory is his cruel and unchristian triumph in the fall of the emperor Maurice--his base and adulatory praise of Phocas, the most odious and sanguinary tyrant who had ever seized the throne of Constantinople. It is the worst homage to religion to vindicate or even to excuse the crimes of religious men; and the apologetic palliation, or even the extenuation of their misdeeds rarely succeeds in removing, often strengthens, the unfavourable impression.

Gregory was spared the pain and shame of witnessing the utter falsehood of his pious vaticinations as to the glorious and holy reign of Phocas. In the second year of the tyrant’s reign he closed the thirteen important years of his pontificate. The ungrateful Romans paid but tardy honours to his memory. His death (March 10th, 604) was followed by a famine, which the starving multitude attributed to his wasteful dilapidation of the patrimony of the church--that patrimony which had been so carefully administered and so religiously devoted to their use. Nothing can give a baser notion of their degradation than their actions. They proceeded to wreak their vengeance on the library of Gregory, and were only deterred from their barbarous ravages by the interposition of Peter the faithful archdeacon. Peter had been interlocutor of Gregory in the wild legends contained in the _Dialogues_.[k] The archdeacon now assured the populace of Rome that he had often seen the Holy Ghost in the visible shape of a dove hovering over the head of Gregory as he wrote. Gregory’s successor therefore hesitated, and demanded that Peter should confirm his pious fiction or fancy by an oath. He ascended the pulpit, but before he had concluded his solemn oath he fell dead. That which to a hostile audience might have been a manifest judgment against perjury, was received as a divine testimony to his truth. The Roman church has constantly permitted Gregory to be represented with the Holy Ghost, as a dove, floating over his head.

The historian of Christianity is arrested by certain characters and certain epochs, which stand as landmarks between the close of one age of religion and the commencement of another. Such a character is Gregory the Great; such an epoch his pontificate, the termination of the sixth century. Gregory, not from his station alone, but by the acknowledgment of the admiring world, was intellectually, as well as spiritually, the great model of his age. He was proficient in all the arts and sciences cultivated at that time; the vast volumes of his writings show his indefatigable powers; their popularity and their authority, his ability to clothe those thoughts and those reasonings in language which would awaken and command the general mind.

His epoch was that of the final Christianisation of the world, not in outward worship alone, not in its establishment as the imperial religion, the rise of the church upon the ruin of the temple, and the recognition of the hierarchy as an indispensable rank in the social system, but in its full possession of the whole mind of man, in letters, arts as far as arts were cultivated, habits, usages, modes of thought, and in popular superstition.

Not only was heathenism, but, excepting in the laws and municipal institutions, Romanity itself absolutely extinct. The reign of Theodoric had been an attempt to fuse together Roman, Teutonic, and Christian usages. Cassiodorus, though half a monk, aspired to be a Roman statesman, Boethius to be a heathen philosopher. The influence of the Roman schools of rhetoric is betrayed even in the writers of Gaul, such as Sidonius Apollinaris; there is an attempt to preserve some lingering cadence of Roman poetry in the Christian versifiers of that age. At the close of the sixth century all this has expired; ecclesiastical Latin is the only language of letters, or rather letters themselves are become purely ecclesiastical. The fable of Gregory’s destruction of the Palatine library is now rejected as injurious to his fame; but probably the Palatine library, if it existed, would have been so utterly neglected that Gregory would hardly have condescended to fear its influence. His aversion to such studies is not that of dread or hatred, but of religious contempt; profane letters are a disgrace to a Christian bishop; the truly religious spirit would loathe them of itself.

What, then, was this Christianity by which Gregory ruled the world? Not merely the speculative and dogmatic theology, but the popular, vital, active Christianity, which was working in the heart of man; the dominant motive of his actions, as far as they were affected by religion; the principal element of his hopes and fears as regards the invisible world and that future life which had now become part of his conscious belief.

CHRISTIAN MYTHOLOGY

The history of Christianity cannot be understood without pausing at stated periods to survey the progress and development of this Christian mythology, which, gradually growing up and springing as it did from natural and universal instincts, took a more perfect and systematic form, and at length, at the height of the Middle Ages, was as much a part of Latin Christianity as the primal truths of the Gospel. This growth, which had long before begun, had reached a kind of adolescence in the age of Gregory, to expand into full maturity during succeeding ages. Already the creeds of the church formed but a small portion of Christian belief. The highest and most speculative questions of theology, especially in Alexandria and Constantinople, had become watchwords of strife and faction, had stirred the passions of the lowest orders; the two natures, or the single or double will in Christ, had agitated the workshop of the artisan and the seats in the circus. Christ assumed gradually more and more of the awfulness, the immateriality, the incomprehensibleness, of the Deity, and men sought out beings more akin to themselves, more open, it might seem, to human sympathies. Believers delighted in those ceremonials to which they might have recourse with less timidity; the shrines and the relics of martyrs might deign to receive the homage of those who were too profane to tread the holier ground. Already the worship of these lower objects of homage begins to intercept that to the higher; the popular mind is filling with images either not suggested at all, or suggested but very dimly by the sacred writings; legends of saints are supplanting, or rivalling at least, in their general respect and attention, the narratives of the Bible.

Of all these forms of worship, the most captivating, and captivating to the most amiable weaknesses of the human mind, was the devotion to the Virgin Mary. The worship of the Virgin had first arisen in the East; and this worship, already more than initiate, contributed, no doubt, to the passionate violence with which the Nestorian controversy was agitated, while that controversy, with its favourable issue to those who might seem most zealous for the Virgin’s glory, gave a strong impulse to the worship. The denial of the title “the mother of God,” by Nestorius, was that which sounded most offensive to the general ear; it was the intelligible odious point in his heresy. The worship of the Virgin now appears in the East as an integral part of Christianity. Among Justinian’s splendid edifices arose many churches dedicated to the mother of God. The feast of the Annunciation is already celebrated under Justin and Justinian. Heraclius has images of the Virgin on his masts when he sails to Constantinople to overthrow Phocas. Before the end of the century the Virgin is become the tutelar deity of Constantinople, which is saved by her intercession from the Saracens.

WORSHIP OF THE VIRGIN

In the time of Gregory the worship of the Virgin had not assumed that rank in Latin Christianity to which it rose in later centuries, though that second great impulse towards this worship, the unbounded admiration of virginity, had full possession of his monastic mind. With Gregory celibacy was the perfection of human nature; he looked with abhorrence on the contamination of the holy sacerdotal character, even in its lowest degree, by any sexual connection. No subdeacon, after a certain period, was to be admitted without a vow of chastity; no married subdeacon to be promoted to a higher rank. In one of his expositions he sadly relates the fall of one of his aunts, a consecrated virgin; she had been guilty of the sin of marriage. Of all his grievances against the exarch of Ravenna, none seems more worthy of complaint than that he had encouraged certain nuns to throw off their religious habits and to marry. Gregory does not seem to have waged this war against nature, however his sentiments were congenial with those of his age, with his wonted success.[86] His letters are full of appeals to sovereigns and to bishops to repress the incontinence of the clergy; even monasteries were not absolutely safe.

ANGELS AND DEVILS

It was not around the monastery alone, the centre of this preternatural agency, that the ordinary providence of God gave place to a perpetual interposition of miraculous power. Every Christian was environed with a world of invisible beings, who were constantly putting off their spiritual nature and assuming forms, uttering tones, distilling odours, apprehensible by the soul of man, or taking absolute and conscious possession of his inward being. A distinction was drawn between the pure, spiritual, illimitable, incomprehensible nature of the Godhead, and the thin and subtile but bodily forms of angels and archangels. These were perceptible to the human senses, wore the human form, spoke with human language; their substance was the thin air, the impalpable fire; it resembled the souls of men, but yet, whenever they pleased, it was visible, performed the functions of life, communicated not with the mind and soul only but with the eye and ear of man.

The hearing and the sight of religious terror were far more quick and sensitive. The angelic visitations were but rare and occasional; the more active demons were ever on the watch, seizing and making every opportunity of beguiling their easy victims. They were everywhere present, and everywhere betraying their presence. They ventured into the holiest places; they were hardly awed by the most devout saints; but, at the same time there was no being too humble, to whose seduction they would not condescend--nothing in ordinary life so trivial and insignificant but that they would stoop to employ it for their evil purposes. They were without the man, terrifying him with mysterious sounds and unaccountable sights. They were within him, compelling all his faculties to do their bidding, another indwelling will besides his own, compelling his reluctant soul to perform their service. Every passion, every vice, had its especial demon; lust, impiety, blasphemy, vainglory, pride were not the man himself, but a foreign power working within him. The slightest act, sometimes no act at all, surrendered the soul to the irresistible indwelling agent. In Gregory’s _Dialogues_[k] a woman eats a lettuce without making the sign of the cross; she is possessed by a devil, who had been swallowed in the unexorcised lettuce. Another woman is possessed for admitting her husband’s embraces the night before the dedication of an oratory.

MARTYRS AND RELICS

Happily there existed, and existed almost at the command of the clergy, a counterworking power to this fatal diabolic influence, in the perpetual presence of the saints, more especially in hallowed places, and about their own relics. These relics were the treasure with which the clergy, above all the bishops of Rome, who possessed those of St. Peter and St. Paul with countless others, ruled the mind; for by these they controlled and kept in awe, they repaired the evils wrought by this whole world of evil spirits. Happy were the churches, monasteries, whose foundations were hallowed and secured by these sacred talismans. To doubt their presence in these dedicated shrines, in the scenes of their martyrdom, obstinately to require the satisfaction of the senses as to their presence, was an impious want of faith; belief, in proportion to the doubtfulness of the miracle, was the more meritorious. Kings and queens bowed in awe before the possessors and dispensers of these wonder-working treasures.

Relics had now attained a self-defensive power; profane hands which touched them withered; and men who endeavoured to remove them were struck dead. Such was the declaration of Gregory himself, to one who had petitioned for the head or some part of the body of St. Paul. It was an awful thing even to approach to worship them. Men who had merely touched the bones of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Lawrence, though with the pious design of changing their position or placing the scattered bones together, had fallen dead, in one case to the number of ten. The utmost that the church of Rome could bestow would be a cloth which had been permitted to touch them; and even such cloths had been known to bleed. If, indeed, the chains of St. Paul would yield any of their precious iron to the file, which they often refused to do, this, he writes, he would transmit to the empress; and he consoles her for the smallness of the gift by the miraculous power which it will inherently possess.

Gregory doled out such gifts with pious parsimony. A nail which contained the minutest filings from the chains of St. Peter was an inestimable present to a patrician, or an ex-consul, or a barbaric king. Sometimes they were inserted in a small cross; in one instance with fragments of the gridiron on which St. Lawrence was roasted. One of the golden nails of the chains of St. Peter had tempted the avarice of a profane, no doubt a heathen or Arian, Lombard; he took out his knife to sever it off; the awe-struck knife sprang up and cut his sacrilegious throat. The Lombard king Authari and his attendants were witnesses of the miracle, and stood in terror, not daring to lift the fearful nail from the ground. A Catholic was fortunately found, by whom the nail permitted itself to be touched; and this peerless gift, so avouched, Gregory sends to a distinguished civil officer.

SANCTITY OF THE CLERGY

That sanctity which thus dwelt in the relics of the saints, was naturally gathered, as far as possible, around their own persons by the clergy, hallowed as they were and set apart by their ordination from the common race of man; and if the hierarchy had only wielded this power for self-protection, if they had but arrayed themselves in this defensive awe against the insults and cruelties of barbarians, such as the Lombards are described, it would be stern censure which would condemn even manifest imposture. We might excuse the embellishment, even the invention of the noble story of the bishop Sanctulus, who offered his life for that of a captive deacon, before whom the Lombard executioner, when he lifted up his sword to behead him, felt his arm stiffen, and could not move it till he had solemnly sworn never to raise that sword against the life of a Christian. But this conservative respect for the sanctity of their order darkens too frequently into pride and inhumanity; the awful inviolability of their persons becomes a jealous resentment against even unintentional irreverence. A demoniac accused the holy bishop Fortunatus of refusing him the rights of hospitality; a poor peasant receives the possessed into his house, and is punished for this inferential disrespect to the bishop by seeing his child cast into the fire and burned before his eyes. A poor fellow with a monkey and cymbals is struck dead for unintentionally interrupting a bishop Boniface in prayer.

The sacred edifices, the churches, especially, approachable to all, were yet approachable not without profound awe; in them met everything which could deepen that awe; within were the relics of the tutelar saint, the mysteries, and the presence of the Redeemer, of God himself; beneath were the remains of the faithful dead.

Burial in churches had now begun; it was a special privilege. Gregory dwells on the advantage of being thus constantly suggested to the prayers of friends and relatives for the repose of the soul. But that which was a blessing to the holy was but more perilous to the unabsolved and the wicked. The sacred soil refused to receive them; the martyrs appeared and commanded the fetid corpses to be cast out of their precincts. They were seized by devils, who did not fear to carry off their own even from those holy places. But oblations were still effective after death. The consecrated host has begun to possess in itself wonder-working powers. A child is cast forth from his grave, and is only persuaded to rest in quiet by a piece of the consecrated bread being placed upon his breast. Two noble women, who had been excommunicated for talking scandal, were nevertheless buried in the church; but every time the mass was offered, their spirits were seen to rise from their tombs and glide out of the church. It was only after an oblation had been “immolated” for them that they slept in peace.

STATE AFTER DEATH

The mystery of the state after death began to cease to be a mystery. The subtile and invisible soul gradually materialised itself to the keen sight of the devout. A hermit declared that he had seen Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king, at the instant of death, with loose garments and sandals, led between Symmachus the patrician and John the pope, and plunged into the burning crater of Lipari. Benedict, while waking, beheld a bright and dazzling light, in which he distinctly saw the soul of Germanus, bishop of Capua, ascend to heaven in an orb of fire, borne by angels.

Hell was by no means the inexorable dwelling which restored not its inhabitants. Men were transported thither for a short time, and returned to reveal its secrets to the shuddering world. Gregory’s fourth book is entirely filled with legends of departing and of departed spirits, several of which revisit the light of day. On the locality of hell Gregory is modest, and declines to make any peremptory decision. On purgatory, too, he is dubious, though his final conclusion appears to be that there is a purgatorial fire which may purify the soul from very slight sins. Some centuries must elapse before those awful realms have formed themselves into that dreary and regular topography which Dante partly created out of his own sublime imagination, partly combined from all the accumulated legends.

The most singular of these earlier journeys into the future world are the adventures of a certain Stephen, the first part of which Gregory declares he had heard more than once from his own mouth, and which he relates, apparently intending to be implicitly believed. Stephen had to all appearance died in Constantinople, but, as the embalmer could not be found, he was left unburied the whole night. During that time he went down into hell, where he saw many things which he had not before believed. But when he came before the Judge, the Judge said, “I did not send for this man, but for Stephen the smith.” Gregory’s friend Stephen was too happy to get back, and on his return found his neighbour Stephen the smith dead. But Stephen learned not wisdom from his escape. He died of the plague in Rome, and with him appeared to die a soldier, who returned to reveal more of these fearful secrets of the other world, and the fate of Stephen. The soldier passed a bridge, beneath it flowed a river, from which rose vapours, dark, dismal, and noisome. Beyond the bridge (the imagination could but go back to the old Elysian fields) spread beautiful, flowery, and fragrant meadows, peopled by spirits clothed in white. In these were many mansions, vast and full of light. Above all rose a palace of golden bricks; to whom it belonged he could not read. On the bridge he recognised Stephen, whose foot slipped as he endeavoured to pass. His lower limbs were immediately seized by frightful forms, who strove to drag him to the fetid dwellings below. But white and beautiful beings caught his arms, and there was a long struggle. The soldier did not see the issue of the conflict.

Such were among the stories avouched by the highest ecclesiastical authority, and commended it might seem by the uninquiring faith of the ruling intellect of his age--such among the first elements of that universal popular religion which was the Christianity of ages. This religion gradually moulded together all which arose out of the natural instincts of man, the undying reminiscences of all the older religions, the Jewish, the pagan, and the Teutonic, with the few and indistinct glimpses of the invisible world and the future state of being in the New Testament, into a vast system, more sublime perhaps for its indefiniteness, which, being necessary in that condition of mankind, could not but grow up out of the kindled imagination and religious faith of Christendom. And such religion the historian who should presume to condemn as a vast plan of fraud, or a philosopher who should venture to disdain as a fabric of folly only deserving to be forgotten, would be equally unjust, equally blind to its real uses, assuredly ignorant of its importance and its significance in the history of man. For on this, the popular Christianity, turns the whole history of man for centuries.

It is at once the cause and the consequence of the sacerdotal dominion over mankind; the groundwork of authority at which the world trembled; which founded and overthrew kingdoms, bound together or set in antagonistic array nations, classes, ranks, orders of society. Of this, the parent, when the time arrived, of poetry, of art, the Christian historian must watch the growth and mark the gradations by which it gathered into itself the whole activity of the human mind, and quickened that activity till at length the mind outgrew that which had been so long almost its sole occupation. It endured till faith, with the schoolmen, led into the fathomless depths of metaphysics, began to aspire after higher truths; with the reformers, attempting to refine religion to its primary spiritual simplicity, gradually dropped, or left but to the humblest and most ignorant, at least to the more imaginative and less practical part of mankind, this even yet prolific legendary Christianity, which had been the accessory and supplementary Bible, the authoritative and accepted, though often unwritten, Gospel of centuries.[b]

GREGORY’S SUCCESSORS

[Sidenote: [604-649 A.D.]]

Gregory left the papal chair far more securely settled on the lofty eminence where it had been placed than it was when he ascended it. But Sabinian, who succeeded him, expressed little gratitude for the service he had thus performed; indignant at finding the treasury exhausted of its gold, he accused him of having ruined the see by his liberality; and would have proceeded, but for the menaces of both the clergy and the people, publicly to burn his writings. He did not live long after this attempt; and his sudden death was ascribed to a blow on the head inflicted by the angry shade of the departed saint. A truer cause, however, may be found, perhaps, in the fact that he had made himself hated by the populace, by withdrawing the accustomed alms, that he might heal, as he pretended, the injuries inflicted by the liberality of Gregory; a mode of proceeding so little relished by his flock, that, whatever share they might have in his death, they conveyed his breathless body with contempt out of the city.

It was during the pontificate of Boniface III, who resided as Gregory’s legate at the court of Constantinople, and owed his elevation to the emperor, that the Roman pontiff was first dignified with the much-disputed title of universal bishop. For this honour Boniface was indebted to the enmity existing between Phocas and the patriarch of his imperial city. He lived to enjoy his triumph only a few months; and several of his successors seem to have contented themselves with the duties of their station, without entering into direct collision with any rival in authority. It is, however, a singular circumstance, that to the attempts of Boniface IV, who obtained the papal dignity immediately after the pontiff just named, to bring back the separatists from Rome to her communion, a resistance was made by the celebrated Irish apostle Columbanus, breathing much of the freedom and intelligence of later days.

Honorius, who succeeded to the papacy after the two unimportant pontificates of Deusdedit (Deodatus or Adeodatus I) and Boniface V, made a vain attempt to influence the Lombards to restore their king, Adalwald (Adalvaldus), whom they had deposed as a madman, and elected in his place an Arian named Ariwald (Ariovaldus). But the most conspicuous circumstance in his career was his agreement with Sergius, the patriarch of Constantinople, in establishing the celebrated edict by which it was intended to put an end to the monothelite controversy,[87] and render the renewal of it a crime against the laws of the empire. Yet Honorius, in the Sixth General Council, was solemnly anathematised, and classed with the known and most violent supporters of the monothelite heresy.

The death of this pontiff was followed by the pillage of the palace of the Lateran--an outrage which had its origin with the emperor, and was committed by his own officers. Severinus was then placed in the papal chair, but his pontificate was not marked by any important event. The same observation applies to those of his successors, John IV and Theodore. Theodore was succeeded by Martin I, the earliest act of whose pontificate was the calling of a council to condemn the principles of the monothelites, and the late acts of the emperors. The assembly held its first session October 5th, 649; in the fifth and last, which was held on the 31st of October, twenty articles were drawn up against the heresy in question, and its authors, Theodorus, Cyrus, Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paul, together with all such as should embrace their opinions, were formally anathematised.

The Roman pontiff was by this proceeding brought into immediate collision with the emperor; and the power of the greatest potentate of the church was thus measured with that of the highest in the state. In this respect the issue of the controversy deserves particular note. Martin was a zealous and active churchman, learned and conscientious, strongly impressed with a sense of the importance of unity, and disposed to exercise the authority he possessed to the utmost in its favour. No sooner had the council given its decision, than he despatched letters to all orders of the clergy, acquainting them with the event and with the acts it had passed. But the information which the emperor Constans received of these proceedings filled him with the most violent indignation; and he at once resolved to punish the contempt with which his edict, and that of his predecessor, had been treated. He communicated his wishes to Calliopas, exarch of Italy, who soon after made the pontiff a prisoner and conveyed him to the island of Naxos. For three months he was kept nearly continually on board a ship, and carried from one place to the other, without being allowed even the commonest necessaries of life. At Naxos he remained twelve months in captivity; and was then taken to Constantinople, being exposed, during his passage thither, to a treatment which would have been cruel to a condemned malefactor. On his arrival, fresh indignities and barbarities awaited him. He was cast into a miserable prison, in which he lay apparently forgotten for more than three months, and when carried before the tribunal of justice was examined like a common criminal. The part he had taken in the late events, so far as they strictly pertained to religion, was not considered even by his fiercest opponents as involving a guilt sufficient to justify their severities. He was, therefore, arraigned as an enemy of the state. Twenty witnesses, of whom the greater part were soldiers, and who are said to have been bribed for the occasion, appeared as his accusers.

[Sidenote: [649-682 A.D.]]

This mockery of a trial being concluded, the pontiff was carried to an open terrace, where, exposed at once to the gaze of the emperor and the populace, the base servants of the court insulted him in so gross a manner that even the multitude pitied his fate. His outward mantle having been torn off, the officers took him, and stripping off the best of his habits, left only his tunic remaining, which they next rent down on each side, from top to bottom. An iron collar was then fastened round his neck, and he was led from the palace through the midst of the city, chained to one of the keepers of the prison, and preceded by another bearing the sword with which he was to be executed. As they dragged him along, his lacerated feet stained the pavement with blood; and he presented an appearance of humiliation and misery which might well humble the spirits of the haughtiest churchmen of either Rome or Constantinople. But his sufferings did not terminate here. Instead of being executed he was sent into the Chersonesus where he lingered through four months of the severest hardship, then expired. He was succeeded as pope by Eugenius, indebted for his elevation to the influence of the imperial court and his too ready tolerance of its reigning errors. He was consequently regarded at Rome with equal suspicion and dislike. Vitalian, the successor of Eugenius, had the merit of being a strict disciplinarian, and of sending Theodore to England as archbishop of Canterbury. At his death, Adeodatus (Deodatus II) was elected. It was in the pontificate of his successor Domnus that the church of Ravenna became permanently incorporated with that of Rome.

Agatho, the next pope, was not less conspicuous for the devoutness of his character; and the story which is told of his curing by a kiss some leprous person whom he accidentally met, indicates not merely the growing superstition of the age, but the influence which the pontiff’s piety had made upon the minds of the people. At his request it was that the emperor Constantine Pogonatus assembled the Sixth General Council; and it is somewhat singular to find that one of the main objects which his legates laboured at obtaining was a reduction of the sum usually paid by the newly elected pontiff into the imperial treasury. For this indulgence, Agatho willingly confirmed the ancient law, that no pope should be ordained till his election had been formally recognised and confirmed at Constantinople. The harmony which thus existed between the emperor and Agatho was happily continued through the pontificate of Leo II, in whose favour the monarch decreed that the new archbishop of Ravenna should receive his ordination at the hands of the pope. He possessed sufficient interest at the court of the emperor to obtain the important privilege for the Roman pontiffs, of being confirmed in their authority by the exarch of Ravenna, instead of having to make the long and difficult journey to Constantinople.

[Sidenote: [682-701 A.D.]]

The pontificate of John V was as unimportant as it was short; he was succeeded by Conon. Next, Sergius occupied the papal chair to the beginning of the eighth century; but, at the commencement of his pontificate, he saw himself opposed by two powerful rivals, and the palace of the Lateran was for some time besieged with open force by the partisans of these pretenders to the papacy. The contest was continued for a considerable period. Sergius, though supported by imperial influence, had to endure a seven years’ exile before he could possess himself of the dignity; and on his refusal to recognise the canons of the council _in trullo_,[88] was assailed by Justinian II with all the weapons of imperial authority. The conflict was thus renewed, which had so long disturbed the peace of Christendom; and another starting-point given, from which the two great candidates for universal and unlimited power were to begin the race. It is evident that the pontiff had not yet acquired strength sufficient to oppose his rival with certainty of success. At the council of Toledo, held in the year 688, the archbishop of that city obtained a resolution in favour of his opinions, which not simply established his creed in opposition to that of the pontiff, but was couched in terms of haughty defiance and rebuke. The contest, therefore, was as yet unattended by palpable prognostics of the final triumph of the papacy.

The troubles which the church had suffered from the continual motions of half-barbarian hordes were many and severe, but they produced an equivalent advantage. Amid all the struggles to which churchmen were urged by ambition, they displayed, as a body, some of the noblest instances of charity, of care for the poor and distressed, which the world had seen. Pressed by the frequent prospect of immediate ruin, they simultaneously acquired the virtues of resignation and the skill of politicians. It was to them the people owed their preservation when threatened on the one side by foreign enemies, and on the other by the tyranny of their rulers; and till they themselves became oppressors, popular liberty found its best champions among the heads of the church. But when the progress of Christianity itself is considered--that is, the very interests for which the church, with all its attendant powers, was called into existence--doubt and dissatisfaction are almost the invariable result of the inquiry. In Rome, piety was shocked by the open contests which repeatedly took place by candidates for the papal dignity, and by the little less disgraceful plots with which the contending parties prepared for the onset. The provinces, perpetually appealed to on the subject of obedience to the supreme pontiff, saw their own pastors at one time yielding with submissive complacence to his decrees, at another resisting them both openly and in secret.

[Sidenote: [701-731 A.D.]]

Sergius was succeeded by John VI (701), in whose pontificate Campania was invaded by the Lombards, under Gisulf, duke of Benevento. His successor, John VII (705), is noted only for having been guilty of the weakness of returning the canons of the council _in trullo_ to the emperor Justinian, without a single alteration. In his pontificate, moreover, the king of the Lombards restored the lands of which he had despoiled the church, and the deed which contained the grant was written in letters of gold. Sisinius was the next pontiff; but he died a few days after his election, and left the see to Constantine, a native of Syria, who retained it about seven years. He was summoned by Justinian to the capital of the East; but the object which the emperor had in view is unknown, and the only result of his journey seems to have been the restoration of Felix, the archbishop of Ravenna, to his diocese and honours. That unfortunate prelate had made an effort to recover the independence possessed by the former bishops of his see; but, though aided by the warlike masters of the district, his attempt failed; and the emperor sending a body of troops from Sicily, the walls of Ravenna were beaten down, and Felix, loaded with chains, was carried a prisoner to Constantinople. There he had to endure the punishment inflicted on the basest criminals. His eyes were put out, and he was banished to the inhospitable shores of Pontus--a punishment, it is said, which was regarded at Rome as the infliction of divine justice.

Notwithstanding the want of positive evidence as to the express object of Constantine’s journey, it is usually believed to have been occasioned by the emperor’s unceasing anxiety to secure the co-operation of the Roman hierarchy in the establishment of the late decrees. It is also argued, and with seeming reason, that his attendance on the imperial commands is a proof of the still unavoidable subjection which the pontiffs had to endure; while his failing to oppose the canons so objectionable to his church affords a similar proof of his weakness and his fears.

[Sidenote: [715-741 A.D.]]

Gregory II, by whom he was succeeded (715), pursued a bolder line of conduct.[89] The part which he took in opposition to Leo the Isaurian has been already stated; and his determined attack on the Lombards, who made themselves masters of one of the Neapolitan fortresses, indicated the spirit which, in later times, placed Christian prelates at the head of mail-clad armies. Gregory was in all respects the firm defender and zealous advocate of papal authority. At one moment engaged in open hostilities with the emperor, he was at another employed in directing the labours of missionaries and founding monasteries. Germany, at his direction, was traversed by the ardent and pious Boniface; and in Italy the rule of St. Benedict became, under his patronage, the universal canon of monastic institutions.

The pontificate of Gregory II lasted sixteen years, and he was succeeded by a priest of the same name, whom the people elected by some sudden impulse, while engaged in the obsequies of the former. Gregory III (731-741) carried the principles which had actuated his predecessor to a far greater extent. Unable to withdraw the emperor Leo, either by persuasion or threats, from the vigorous persecution of iconoclasm, he proceeded to the daring measure of excommunicating the sovereign, and then made known to the celebrated Charles Martel his readiness to proclaim him consul of Rome, on condition that he would enable him to support his separation from the dominion of the empire. Leo resented the conduct of the pontiff, by depriving him of part of his revenues and rejecting his legates. But the step which Gregory had taken led directly to the establishment of the papacy on the basis of temporal power and grandeur. A new career, new motives to exertion, were opened to the politicians of the church; and it was no longer with rival prelates the bishops of Rome were to contend, but with states and princes. The prizes for which they were henceforth to strive were to be tributary crowns and sceptres--the triumphs they were to celebrate, not those of truth over heresy, but of arbitrary superstition over the free-will, the natural sentiments, and the evangelical knowledge of Christian nations.[g]

That reign of terror known as the struggle of the iconoclasts has been alluded to already in the history of the Byzantine Empire. It may also be summed up here with its consequences.

DRAPER ON THE ORIGIN OF ICONOCLASM

Three causes gave rise to iconoclasm, or the revolt against image-worship; first, the remonstrances and derision of the Mohammedans; second, the good sense of a great sovereign, Leo the Isaurian, who had risen by his merit from obscurity, and had become the founder of a new dynasty at Constantinople; third, the detected inability of these miracle-working idols and fetiches to protect their worshippers or themselves against an unbelieving enemy. Moreover, an impression was gradually making its way among the more intelligent classes that religion ought to free itself from such superstitions. So important were the consequences of Leo’s actions, that some have been disposed to assign to his reign the first attempt at making policy depend on theology; and to this period they therefore refer the commencement of the Byzantine Empire. Through one hundred and twenty years, six emperors devoted themselves to this reformation. But it was premature. They were overpowered by the populace and the monks, by the bishops of Rome, and by a superstitious and wicked woman.

It had been a favourite argument against the pagans how little their gods could do for them when the hour of calamity came, when their statues and images were insulted and destroyed; and hence how vain was such worship, how imbecile such gods. When Africa and Asia, full of relics and crosses, pictures and images, fell before the Mohammedans, those conquerors retaliated the same logic with no little effect. There was hardly one of the fallen towns that had not some idol for its protector. Remembering the stern objurgations of the prophet against this deadly sin, prohibited at once by the commandment of God and repudiated by the reason of man, the Saracen caliphs had ordered all the Syrian images to be destroyed. Amid the derision of the Arab soldiery and the tears of the terror-stricken worshippers, these orders were remorselessly carried into effect, except in some cases where the temptation of an enormous ransom induced the avengers of the unity of God to swerve from their duty. Thus the piece of linen cloth on which it was feigned that our Saviour had impressed his countenance, and which was the palladium of Edessa, was carried off by the victors at the capture of that town, and subsequently sold to Constantinople at the profitable price of twelve thousand pounds of silver. This picture, and also some other celebrated ones, it was said, possessed the property of multiplying themselves by contact with other surfaces, as in modern times we multiply photographs. Such were the celebrated images “made without hands.”

[Sidenote: [726 A.D.]]

It was currently asserted that the immediate origin of iconoclasm was due to the caliph Yazid, who had completed the destruction of the Syrian images, and to two Jews, who stimulated Leo the Isaurian to his task. However that may be, Leo published an edict (726 A.D.), prohibiting the worship of images. This was followed by another directing their destruction, and the whitewashing of the walls of churches ornamented with them. Hereupon the clergy and the monks rebelled; the emperor was denounced as a Mohammedan and a Jew. He ordered that a statue of the Saviour in that part of the city called Chalcopratia should be removed, and a riot was the consequence. One of his officers mounted the ladder and struck the idol with an axe upon its face; it was an incident like that enacted centuries before in the temple of Serapis at Alexandria. The sacred image, which had often arrested the course of nature and worked many miracles, was now found to be unable to protect or to avenge its own honour. A rabble of women interfered in its behalf; they threw down the ladder and killed the officer; nor was the riot ended until the troops were called in and a great massacre perpetrated. The monks spread the sedition in all parts of the empire; they even attempted to proclaim a new emperor. Leo was everywhere denounced as a Mohammedan infidel, an enemy of the mother of God; but with inflexible resolution he persisted in his determination as long as he lived.[h]

MILMAN ON ICONOCLASM

Iconoclasm was an attempt by the Eastern emperor to change by his own arbitrary command the religion of his subjects. No religious revolution has ever been successful which has commenced with the government. Such revolutions have ever begun in the middle or lower orders of society, struck on some responsive chord of sympathy in the general feeling, supplied some religious want, stirred some religious energy, and shaken the inert strength of the established faith by some stronger counter emotion.

Whatever the motives of the emperor Leo the Isaurian (and on this subject, as in all the religious controversies where the writings of the unsuccessful party were carefully suppressed or perished through neglect, authentic history is almost silent), whether he was actuated by a rude aversion to what perhaps can hardly yet be called the fine arts with which Christianity was associating itself, or by a spiritual disdain and impatience of the degrading superstition into which the religion of the Gospel had so long been degenerating, the attempt was as politically unwise and unseasonable as the means employed were despotic and altogether unequal to the end. The time was passed, if it had ever been, when an imperial edict could change, or even much affect, the actual prevailing religion of the empire. For this was no speculative article of belief, no question of high metaphysical theology, but a total change in the universal popular worship, in the spirit and in the essence, if not of the daily ritual, of countless observances and habitual practices of devotion. It swept away from almost all the churches of the empire objects hallowed by devotion, and supposed to be endowed with miraculous agency; objects of hope and fear, of gratitude and immemorial veneration. It not merely invaded the public church, and left its naked walls without any of the old remembrancers of faith and piety; it reached the private sanctuary of prayer. No one could escape the proscription; learned or unlearned, priest or peasant, monk or soldier, clergyman or layman, man, woman, and even child were involved in the strife. Something to which their religious attachments clung, to which their religious passions were wedded, might at any time be forcibly rent away, insulted, trampled under foot; that which had been their pride and delight could only now be furtively visited, and under the fear of detection.

Nor was it possible for this controversy to vent itself in polemic writings. Here actual, personal, furious collision of man and man, of faction and faction, of armed troops against armed troops, was inevitable. The contending parties did not assail each other with mutual anathemas, which they might despise, or excommunication and counter excommunication, the validity of which might be questioned by either party. On one side it was a sacred obligation to destroy, to mutilate, to dash to pieces, to deface the objects on which the other had so long gazed with intense devotion, and which he might think it an equally sacred obligation to defend at the sacrifice of life. It was not a controversy, it was a feud; not a polemic strife, but actual war declared by one part of Christendom against the other. It was well perhaps for Christendom that the parties were not more equally balanced; that, right or wrong, one party in that division of the Christian world, where total change would have been almost extermination, obtained a slow but complete triumph.[b]

Milman then goes on to plead eloquently for the encouragement of the fine arts by the church which produced a Raphael and a Michelangelo, as the Greek religion produced and employed its Phidias and Praxiteles. He then proceeds to describe the ferocity of the dissension.[a]

THE WAR OF ICONOCLASM

[Sidenote: [726-731 A.D.]]

A formidable insurrection broke out in Greece and in the Ægean islands. A fleet was armed, a new emperor, one Cosmas, proclaimed, and Constantinople menaced by the rebels. The fleet, however, was scattered and destroyed by ships which discharged the Greek fire; the insurrection was suppressed, the leaders either fell or were executed, along with the usurper. The monks here and throughout the empire, the champions of this as of every other superstition, were the instigators to rebellion. Few monasteries were without some wonder-working image; the edict struck at once at their influence, their interest, their pride, their most profound religious feelings.

But the more eminent clergy were likewise at first almost unanimous in their condemnation of the emperor. Constantine, bishop of Nacolia, indeed, is branded as his adviser. Another bishop, Theodosius, son of Apsimarus, metropolitan of Ephesus, is named as entering into the war against images. But almost for the first time the bishops of the two Romes, Germanus of Constantinople and Pope Gregory II, were united in one common cause. Leo attempted to win Germanus to his views, but the aged patriarch (he was now ninety-five years old) calmly but resolutely resisted the arguments, the promises, the menaces of the emperor.

But the conduct of Gregory II, as leading to more important results, demands more rigid scrutiny. The Byzantine historians represent him as proceeding, at the first intimation of the hostility of the emperor to image-worship, to an act of direct revolt, as prohibiting the payment of tribute by the Italian province. This was beyond the power, probably beyond the courage, of Gregory. The great results of the final separation of the West from the inefficient and inglorious sovereignty of the East might excuse or palliate, if he had foreseen them, the disloyalty of Pope Gregory to Leo. But it would be to estimate his political and religious sagacity too highly to endow him with this gift of ambitious prophecy, to suppose him anticipating the full development of Latin Christianity when it should become independent of the East.

Like most ordinary minds, and if we are to judge by his letters Gregory’s was a very ordinary mind, he was merely governed by the circumstances and passions of his time without the least foreknowledge of the result of his actions. The letter of Pope Gregory to the emperor (729 A.D.) is arrogant without dignity, dogmatic without persuasiveness; in the stronger part of the argument far inferior, both in skill and ingenuity, to that of the aged Germanus, or the writer who guided his pen. The strange mistakes in the history of the Old Testament, the still stranger interpretations of the New, the loose legends which are advanced as history, give a very low opinion of the knowledge of the times.

[Sidenote: [731-742 A.D.]]

When Gregory addressed this and a second letter to the emperor Leo, the tumult in Constantinople, the first public act of rebellion against iconoclasm, had taken place; but the aged bishop Germanus was not yet degraded from his see. Germanus, with better temper and more skilful argument, had defended the images of the East. Before his death (731), he was deposed or compelled to retire from his see. He died most probably in peace; his extreme age may well account for his death. His personal ill treatment by the emperor is the legend of a later age to exalt him into a martyr.

But these two powerful prelates were not the only champions of their cause whose writings made a strong impression on their age. It is singular that the most admired defender of images in the East was a subject not of the emperor but of the Mohammedan sultan. John of Damascus was famed as the most learned man in the East, and it may show either the tolerance, the ignorance, or the contempt of the Mohammedans for these Christian controversies, that writings which became celebrated all over the East should issue from one of their capital cities, Damascus.

In the West, all power, almost all pretension to power, excepting over Sicily and Calabria, expired with Leo;[90] and this independence partly arose out of and was immeasurably strengthened by the faithful adherence of the West to image-worship.

CONSTANTINE COPRONYMUS (741-775 A.D.)

Leo was succeeded by his son Constantine. The name by which this emperor was known is a perpetual testimony to the hatred of a large part of his subjects. Even in his infancy he was believed to have shown a natural aversion to holy things, and in his baptism to have defiled the font. Constantine Copronymus sounded to Greek ears as a constant taunt against his filthy and sacrilegious character.

The accession of Constantine (741), although he had already been acknowledged for twenty years with his father as joint emperor, met formidable resistance. The contest for the throne was a strife between the two religious parties which divided the empire. During the absence of Constantine, on an expedition against the Saracens, a sudden and dangerous insurrection placed his brother-in-law, Artavasdes, on the throne. Constantinople was gained to the party of the usurper by treachery. The city was induced to submit to Artavasdes only by a rumour, industriously propagated and generally believed, of the death of Constantine. The emperor on one occasion had been in danger of surprise, and escaped by the swiftness of his horses.

[Sidenote: [742-746 A.D.]]

In the capital, as throughout Greece and the European part of the empire, the triumph of Artavasdes was followed by the restoration of the images. Anastasius, the dastard patriarch of Constantinople, as he had been the slave of Leo, now became the slave of the usurper, and worshipped images with the same zeal with which he had destroyed them. He had been the principal actor in the deception of the people by the forged letters which announced the death of Constantine. He plunged with more desperate recklessness into the party of Artavasdes. The monks, and all over whom they had influence, took up the cause of the usurper; but the mass of the people, from royal respect for the memory of Leo, or from their confidence in the vigorous character of Constantine and attachment to the legitimate succession, from indifference or aversion to image-worship, still wavered, and submitted rather than clamorously rejoiced in the coronation of Artavasdes.

But Constantine Copronymus with the religious opinions inherited the courage, the military abilities, and the popularity with the army which had distinguished his father Leo. After some vicissitudes, a battle took place near Ancyra, fought with all the ferocity of civil and religious war. After an obstinate resistance, and after having suffered all the horrors of famine, Constantinople was taken. Artavasdes was punished by the loss of his eyes.

Constantine was a soldier, doubtless of a fierce temper; the blinding and mutilation of many, the beheading a few of his enemies, the abandonment of the houses of the citizens to the plunder of his troops, was the natural course of Byzantine revolution; and these cruelties have no doubt lost nothing in the dark representations of the emperor’s enemies, the only historians of the times. But they suffered as rebels in arms against their sovereign, not as image-worshippers. The fate of the patriarch Anastasius was the most extraordinary. His eyes were put out, he was led upon an ass, with his face to the tail, through the city; and after all this mutilation and insult, for which, considering his tergiversation and impudent mendacity, it is difficult to feel much compassion, he was reinstated in the patriarchal dignity. The clergy in the East had never been arrayed in the personal sanctity which, in ordinary occasions, they possessed in the West; but could Constantine have any other object in this act than the degradation of the whole order in public estimation?

THIRD COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE (746 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [746-766 A.D.]]

For ten years Constantine refrained from any stronger measures against image worship. In the tenth year of Constantine rumours spread abroad of secret councils held for the total destruction of images. Either the emperor must have prepared the public mind for this great change with consummate address, or reverence for images must have been less deeply rooted in the East than in the West, otherwise it can scarcely be supposed that so large a number of the clergy as appeared at the Third Council of Constantinople (746) would have slavishly assented to the strong measures of the emperor. Three hundred and forty-eight bishops formed this synod.

Part of the proceedings of this assembly have been preserved in the records of the rival council, the second held in Nicæa. The passages are cited in the original words, followed by a confutation, sanctioned apparently by the Nicene bishops. The Council of Constantinople proscribes the lawless and blasphemous art of painting. The fathers of Constantinople assume, as boldly as the brethren of Nicæa their sanctity, that all images are the invention of the devil; that they are idols in the same sense as those of the heathen. Nor do they hesitate to impute community of sentiment with the worst heretics to their opponents. They thought that they held the image-worshippers in an inextricable dilemma. If the painters represented only the humanity of Christ, they were Nestorians; if they attempted to mingle it with the divinity, they were Eutychians, circumscribing the infinite and confounding the two substances. It was impiety to represent Christ without his divinity, Arianism to undeify him, despoil him of his godhead.

The Council of Nicæa admits the perfect unanimity of the Council of Constantinople. These 348 bishops concurred in pronouncing their anathema against all who should represent the incarnate Word by material form or colours, who should not restrict themselves to the pure spiritual conception of the Christ, as he is seated, superior in brightness to the sun, on the right hand of the Father; against all who should confound the two natures of Christ in one human image, or who should separate the manhood from the Godhead in the second person of the indivisible Trinity; against all who should not implore the intercession of the Virgin in pure faith, as above all visible and invisible things; against all who should set up the deaf and lifeless images of saints, and who do not rather paint the living likenesses of their virtues in their own hearts. All images, whether statues or paintings, were to be forcibly removed from the churches; everyone who henceforth should set up an image, if a bishop or priest, was to be degraded; if a layman, excommunicated. They proceed to curse by name the principal asserters of image-worship. “Anathema against the double-minded Germanus, the worshipper of wood! Anathema against George (of Cyprus), the falsifier of the traditions of the fathers! Anathema against Mansar (they called by this unchristian-sounding name the famous John of Damascus), the Saracen in heart, the traitor to the empire--Mansar the teacher of impiety, the false interpreter of Holy Scripture!”

Thus was image-worship proscribed by a council, in numbers at least of weight, in the severest and most comprehensive terms. The work of demolition was committed to the imperial officers; only with strict injunctions, not perhaps always obeyed, to respect the vessels, the priestly vestments, and other furniture of the churches, and the cross, the naked cross without any image. The crucifix was of a later period.

THE WAR ON MONASTERIES

[Sidenote: [766-775 A.D.]]

But if the emperor had overawed, or bought, or compelled the seemingly willing assent of so large a body of the eastern clergy, the formidable monks were still in obstinate implacable opposition to his will. It was now fanaticism encountering fanaticism. Everywhere the monks preached resistance to the imperial decree, and enough has been seen of their turbulent and intractable conduct to make us conclude that their language at least would keep no bounds. Stephen, the great martyr of this controversy, had lived as a hermit in a cave near Sinope for thirty years.

The emperor sent the patriarch to persuade him to subscribe the decrees of the Council of Constantinople. The patriarch’s eloquence was vain. The emperor either allowed or compelled the aged monk to retire to the wild rock of Proconnesus, where, to consummate his sanctity, he took his stand upon a pillar. His followers assembled in crowds about him, and built their cells around the pillar of the saint. But the zeal of Stephen would not be confined within that narrow sphere. He returned to the city, and in bold defiance of the imperial orders denounced the iconoclasts. He was seized, cast into prison, and there treated with unusual harshness. But even there the zeal of his followers found access. Constantine exclaimed, in a paroxysm of careless anger, “Am I or this monk the emperor of the world?” The word of the emperor was enough for some of his obsequious courtiers; they rushed, broke open the prison, dragged out the old man along the streets with every wanton cruelty, and cast his body at last into the common grave of the public malefactors.

The emperor took now a sterner and more desperate resolution. He determined to root out monkery itself. The monks were driven from their cloisters, which were given up to profane and secular uses. Consecrated virgins were forced to marry; monks were compelled, each holding the hand of a woman, doubtless not of the purest character, to walk round the Hippodrome among the jeers and insults of the populace. Throughout the whole empire they were exposed to the lawless persecutions of the imperial officers. Their zeal or their obstinacy was chastised by scourgings, imprisonments, mutilations, and even death. The monasteries were plundered, and by no scrupulous or reverent hands; churches are said to have been despoiled of all their sacred treasures, the holy books burned, feasts and revels profaned the most hallowed sanctuaries.

Multitudes fled to the neighbouring kingdoms of the less merciless barbarians; many found refuge in the West, especially in Rome. The prefect of Thrace was the most obsequious agent of his master’s tyranny. The patriarch himself was accused of having used disrespectful language towards the emperor. Already he had been required to acquit himself of imputing Nestorianism to his master; now his accusers swore on the cross that they had heard him hold conference with one of the conspirators. Constantine ordered the imperial seal to be affixed on the palace of the patriarch, and sent him into banishment.

For some new offence, real or supposed, the exiled patriarch was brought back to the capital, scourged so cruelly that he could not walk, and then carried in a litter, and exposed in the great church before all the people assembled to hear the public recital of the charges made against him, and to behold his degradation. At each charge the secretary of his successor smote him on the face. He was then set up in the pulpit, and while Nicetas read the sentence of excommunication, another bishop stripped him of his metropolitan pall, and calling him by the opprobrious name Scotiopsis, “face of darkness,” led him backwards out of the church. The next day his head, beard, eyebrows were shaved; and as we have already said, he was put upon an ass, and paraded through the circus (his own nephew, a hideous, deformed youth, leading the ass), while the populace jeered, shouted, spat upon him. He was then thrown down, trodden on, and in that state lay till the games were over. Some days after the emperor sent to demand a formal declaration of the orthodoxy of his own faith and of the authority of the council. The poor wretch acknowledged both in the amplest manner; as a reward he was beheaded, while still in a state of excommunication, and his remains treated with the utmost ignominy.

This odious scene, blackened it may be by the sectarian hatred of the later annalists, all of whom abhorred iconoclasm, has been related at length, in order to contrast more fully the position of the bishop of Rome. This was the second patriarch of Constantinople who had been thus barbarously treated, and seemingly without the sympathy of the people; and now, in violation of all canonical discipline, the imperial will had raised a eunuch to the patriarchate. What wonder that pontiffs like Gregory II and Gregory III should think themselves justified in throwing off the yoke of such a government, and look with hope to the sovereignty of the less barbarous barbarians of the north--barbarians who, at least, had more reverence for the dignity of the sacerdotal character.

If the Byzantine historians, all image-worshippers, have not greatly exaggerated the cruelties of their implacable enemy Constantine Copronymus, they have assuredly not done justice to his nobler qualities, his valour, incessant activity, military skill, and general administration of the sinking empire, which he maintained unviolated by any of its formidable enemies, and with imposing armies, during a reign of thirty-five years, not including the twenty preceding during which he ruled as the colleague of his father Leo. Constantine died, during a campaign against the Bulgarians, of a fever which, in the charitable judgment of his adversaries, gave him a foretaste of the pains of hell. His dying lips ordered prayers and hymns offered to the Virgin, for whom he had always professed the most profound veneration, utterly inconsistent, his enemies supposed, with his hostility to her sacred images.

HELENA AND IRENE

[Sidenote: [775-787 A.D.]]

A female had been the principal mover in the great change of Christianity from a purely spiritual worship to that paganising form of religion which grew up with such rapidity in the succeeding centuries; a female was the restorer of images in the East, which have since, with but slight interruption, maintained their sanctity. The first, Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, was a blameless and devout woman, who used the legitimate influence of her station, munificence, and authority over her imperial son, to give that splendour which to her piety appeared becoming to the new religion; to communicate to the world all those excitements of symbols, relics, and sacred memorials which she found so powerful in kindling her own devotion. The second, the empress Irene, wife to the son and heir of Constantine Copronymus, an ambitious, intriguing, haughty princess, never lost sight of political power in the height of her religious zeal, and was at length guilty of the most atrocious crime against God and womanhood.

Irene, during the reign of her husband Leo, surnamed the Khazar, did not openly betray her inclination to the image-worship which she had solemnly forsworn under her father-in-law Constantine. On his death (780) she at once seized the government in the name of her son Constantine, who was but ten years old. Her creature, Patriarch Tarasius, summoned a council on image-worship.

The council met in Constantinople (785), but with the army and a large part of the populace of Constantinople image-worship had lost its power. The soldiery, attached to the memory and tenets of Constantine Copronymus, broke into the assembly, and dispersed the affrighted monks and bishops.

SECOND COUNCIL OF NICÆA (787 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [787-842 A.D.]]

Nicæa was chosen for the session of the council, no doubt on account of the reverence which attached to that city, hallowed by the sittings of the first great council of Christendom. Decrees issued from Nicæa would possess peculiar force and authority; this smaller city, too, could be occupied by troops on whom the empress could depend, and in the meantime Irene managed to disband the more unruly soldiery. Thus, while the Bulgarians menaced one frontier and the Saracens another, she sacrificed the safety of the empire, by the dissolution of her best army, to the success of her religious designs.

The council met at Nicæa. The number of ecclesiastics is variously stated from 330 to 387. Among these were at least 130 monks or abbots, besides many bishops, who had been expelled as monks from their sees, and were now restored. They repudiated the so-called Council of Constantinople, as a synod of fools and madmen, who had dared to violate the established discipline of the church and impiously reviled the holy images. They showered their anathemas on all the acts, on all the words, on all the persons engaged in that unhallowed assembly.

The fathers of Nicæa impaired a doubtful cause by the monstrous fables which they adduced, the preposterous arguments which they used, their unmeasured invectives against their antagonists. With one voice they broke out into a long acclamation: “We all believe, we all assent, we all subscribe. This is the faith of the apostles, this is the faith of the church, this is the faith of the orthodox, this is the faith of all the world. We, who adore the Trinity, worship images. Whoever does not the like, anathema upon him! Anathema on all who call images idols! Anathema on all who communicate with them who do not worship images!”

Among the acclamations and the anathemas which closed the Second Council of Nicæa, echoed loud salutations and prayers for the peace and blessedness of the new Constantine and the new Helena. A few years passed and that Constantine was blinded, if not put to death, by his unnatural mother, whom religious faction had raised into a model of Christian virtue and devotion.

The controversy slept during the reign of Nicephorus, and that of Michael, surnamed Rhangabé. The monks throughout this period seem to form an independent power (a power no doubt arising out of and maintained by their championship of image-worship), and to dictate to the emperor, and even to the church. On the other hand, among the soldiery are heard some deep but suppressed murmurs of attachment to the memory of Constantine Copronymus. Leo the Armenian ascended the throne.

As Irene had promoted Tarasius, so Leo raised an officer of his household, Theodotus Cassiteras, to the patriarchal throne. Image-worship was again proscribed by an imperial edict. The worshippers are said to have been ruthlessly persecuted; and Leo, according to the phraseology of the day, is accused of showing all the blood-thirstiness without the generosity of the lion. Yet no violent popular tumult took place; nor does the conspiracy which afterwards cut short the days of Leo the Armenian appear to have been connected with the strife of religious factions. Whatever hopes the clergy, at least the image-worshippers, or the monks, might have conceived at the murder of Leo, which they scrupled not to allege as a sign of the divine disfavour towards the iconoclasts, were disappointed on the accession of Michael the Stammerer. He favoured the Jews in the exaction of tribute (perhaps he was guilty of the sin of treating them with justice), he fasted on the Jewish Sabbath, he doubted the resurrection of the dead, and the personality of the devil, as unauthorised by the religion of Moses. Image-worship he treated with contemptuous impartiality. In a great public assembly (assembled for the purpose), he proclaimed the worship of images a matter altogether indifferent.

Theophilus could not but perceive the failure, and disdained to imitate his father’s temporising policy, who endeavoured to tolerate the monks, while he discouraged image-worship. He avowed his determination to extirpate both at once. Leo the Armenian and Michael the Stammerer had attempted to restrict the honours paid to images; Theophilus prohibited the making of new ones, and ordered that in every church they should be effaced, and the walls covered with pictures of birds and beasts. The sacred vessels, adorned with figures, were profaned by unhallowed hands, sold in the public markets, and melted for their metal. The prisons were full of painters, of monks and ecclesiastics of all orders. The monks, driven from their convents, fled to desert places; some perished of cold and hunger, some threw off the proscribed dress, yet retained the sacred character and habits; others seized the opportunity of returning to the pleasures as to the dress of the world.

The history of iconoclasm has a remarkable uniformity: another female in power, another restoration of images. After the death of Theophilus his widow Theodora administered the empire in the name of her youthful son Michael, called afterwards the Drunkard. Theodora, like her own mother Theoctista, had always worshipped images in private. No sooner was Theophilus dead than the monks, no doubt in the secret of Theodora’s concealed attachment to images, poured into Constantinople from all quarters. She now ventured to send an officer of the palace to command the patriarch, Joannes the Grammarian, either to recant his iconoclastic opinions, or to withdraw from Constantinople. The patriarch is accused of a paltry artifice. He opened a vein in the region of his stomach, and showed himself wounded and bleeding to the people. The rumour spread that the empress had attempted to assassinate the patriarch. But the fraud was detected, exposed, acknowledged. The abashed patriarch withdrew, unpitied and despised, into the suburbs (842). Methodius was raised to the dignity of the patriarchate. The worshippers of images were in triumph.

But Theodora, still tenderly attached to the memory of her husband, demanded, as the price of her inestimable services in the restoration of images, absolution for the sin of his iconoclasm and his persecution of the image-worshippers.

All was now easy; the fanaticism of iconoclasm was exhausted or rebuked. A solemn festival was appointed for the restoration of images. The whole clergy of Constantinople, and all who could flock in from the neighbourhood, met in and before the palace of the archbishop, and marched in procession with crosses, torches, and incense, to the church of St. Sophia. There they were met by the empress and her infant son Michael, Feb. 19th, 842. They made the circuit of the church, with their burning torches, paying homage to every image and picture, which had been carefully restored, never again to be effaced till the days of later, more terrible iconoclasts, the Ottoman Turks.

The Greek church from that time has celebrated the anniversary of this festival with loyal fidelity. The successors of Methodius, particularly the learned Photius, were only zealous to consummate the work of his predecessors, and images have formed part of the recognised religious worship of the Eastern world.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[84] Felix III, if the anti-pope Felix (356 A.D.) is reckoned as Felix II.

[85] [The office to which Gregory I was suddenly elevated in the year 590, included under it the three following distinct dignities. First, it included the actual episcopal charge of the city of Rome; the church of St. John Lateran with its haughty inscription: _Omnium Urbis et Orbis Ecclesiarum Mater et Caput_--being the cathedral church; and the adjoining Lateran palace, which tradition says was given by Constantine to Silvester I, being the place of residence. Secondly, it included the metropolitan or archiepiscopal superintendence of the Roman territory, with jurisdiction over the seven suffragan bishops, afterwards called cardinal bishops; the bishops of Ostia, Portus, Silva Candida, Sabina, Præneste, Tusculum, and Albanum. Thirdly, it included the patriarchal oversight of the suburban provinces, which were under the political jurisdiction of the _Vicarius Urbis_, viz., Campania, Tuscany with Umbria, Picenum, Valeria, Samnium, Apulia with Calabria, Lucania with Bruttium--in short, upper Italy, together with the three islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. As patriarch, the Roman bishop stood on the same footing as the four great patriarchs of the East, those of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem; he enjoyed however the primacy of honour, and standing alone in the West, whereas four patriarchs divided the primacy of the East, his jurisdiction often seemed to extend to districts where he had no jurisdiction by right. For the vicariate of Rome was only one among four vicariates, into which the great prefecture of Italy was politically divided; the other vicariates being northern Italy, with its centre at Milan; western Illyricum, with its capital at Sirmium; and western Africa, with its capital at Carthage. So far were Gaul, Spain, and Britain from belonging to the vicariate of Rome, that they constituted together a separate prefecture, known as the prefecture of Gaul. Nevertheless, all these districts were in time drawn into the patriarchate of Rome, and indeed the whole of western Europe as it gradually came under the influence of Christianity.[e]]

[86] The absurd story about Gregory’s fish-ponds paved with the skulls of the drowned infants of the Roman clergy, is only memorable as an instance of what writers of history will believe, and persuade themselves they believe, when it suits party interests. But by whom, or when, was it invented? It is much older than the Reformation.

[87] [Monothelism or one-ness of will is the opposite of “dyothelism” or duality of will, as distinguishing the divine and the human aspects of Christ. Monothelism had its origin in Sergius.]

[88] [The council held in the _trullus_ or domed hall of the imperial palace in Constantinople. The council here referred to is the Quinisext Council of 692, called the Second Trullan Council, the first being that which condemned monothelite views (681).]

[89] [Gibbon[l] calls him the “founder of the papal monarchy.”]

[90] Leo died June, 741. Gregory III in the same year.