The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I
The emperor168 in his legislation left no part of the Church's discipline unregarded. His purpose was in all respects to make the State Christian; and he considered no part of divine and human things, whether it were dogma or conduct, – which, together, made up the Church's life, – withdrawn from his care and guardianship. Observances which had begun in custom, and gradually been drawn out definitely and enacted in canons, he took into his Digest, not with the intention of giving them greater inward force or stronger grounds as duties, but to show the unity of his own effort with that of the Church. He willingly put the imperial stamp on her salutary regulations. He showed his readiness to help her with external force wherever the inviolable sanctity of her laws seemed to be threatened by the opposition of individuals. In this he recognised the unchangeable order which is so deeply rooted in the nature both of Church and State, that order which is the greatest security for the wellbeing and prosperity of both. And the Church in the course of her long life had hitherto almost universally maintained this order; always, at least, in principle. If it was anywhere transgressed, it was either because the secular power was acting under special commission and approval of the Church, or, if that power acted without such approval, it met with open contradiction whereby not only the illegality of the particular action was marked, but the principle of the Church's freedom and independence was preserved.
There is a passage in the address of the eastern bishops to Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople, quoted in the Second Nicene Council of 789,169 the Seventh General, which cites the words of Justinian given above in one of his laws. The bishops say in their own character – and they are bishops who describe themselves "as sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, that is, of the Arabian impiety" – "It is the priesthood which sanctifies the empire and forms its basis; it is the empire which strengthens and supports the priesthood. Concerning these, a wise king, most blessed among holy princes, said: The greatest gift of God to men is the priestly and the imperial power, the one ordering and administering divine things, the other ruling human things by upright laws."
If we considered the principles of Justinian alone as exhibited in his legislation, without regard to his conduct, we might, like the eastern bishops, take these words as the motto of his reign and the key to his acts as legislator. Indeed, it may be said that this legislation cannot be understood except by presupposing throughout the cordiality of the alliance between the Two Powers. In the election and the lives of bishops, in the discipline of religious houses, in the strict observance of the celibate life which has been assumed with full consent of the will by clergy and by monks, the emperor is as strict in his laws as the Church in her canons. The ruler of the State, who makes laws with a single word of his own mouth, who commands all the armies of the State, who bestows all its offices, who is, in truth, the autocrat, the impersonated commonwealth, shows not a particle of jealousy towards the Church as Church. He enjoins the strict observance of her canons in the fullest conviction that the end which she aims at as Church is the end which he also desires as emperor; that the good life of her bishops and priests is essential for the good of society in general; that the perfect orthodoxy of her creed is the dearest possession, the pillar and safeguard, of his own government. Heresy and schism are, in his sight, the greatest crimes against the State, as they are the greatest sins against the Church and against God. In the course of the two hundred years from Constantine to Justinian the Roman State, as understood by the Illyrian peasant who ruled it for thirty-eight years, had intertwined itself as closely with the Catholic Church as ever it had with Cicero's "immortal gods" in the time of Augustus, or Trajan, or Decius. It was the special pride and glory of Justinian to maintain intact this alliance as the palladium of the empire. And, therefore, his legislation touched every part of the ecclesiastical government, every dogma of the Church's creed, and only on account of this alliance did the Church acquiesce in such a legislation. I suppose that no greater contradiction can ever be conceived than that which exists between the mind of Justinian and the mind which now, and for a long time, has directed the nations of Europe, so far as their governments are concerned in their attitude towards the Church of God. In Europe are nations which are nurtured upon heresy and schism, whether as the basis of the original rebellion which severed them from the communion of the Church or as the outcome of "Free-thought" in their subsequent evolution through centuries of speculation unbridled by spiritual authority; nations, again, bisected by pure infidelity, or struggling with the joint forces of heresy and infidelity which strive to overthrow constitutions originally Catholic in all their structure. In one empire alone the attitude of Constantine and Justinian towards the Church is still maintained. It is that wherein the emperor rules with an amplitude of authority such as Constantine and Justinian held, whose successor he claims to be; where, also, an imperial aide-de-camp, booted and spurred, sits at the council board of a synod called holy, and is by far the most important member of it, for nothing can pass without his sanction – a synod which rules the bishops, being itself nothing but a ministry of the State, drawing, like the council of the empire, its jurisdiction from the emperor.
Justinian was a true successor of the great Theodosius in so far as he upheld orthodoxy, and endeavoured to unite all his subjects in one belief and one centre of unity. The greatest of the Roman emperors had for their first and chief motive, in upholding this first principle of imperial policy, the conviction that thus only they could hope to maintain the peace and security of the empire. Schism in the Church betokened rebellion in the State. In the fourth century heresy had driven the empire to the very brink of destruction. Besides this, all the populations converted from heathendom were accustomed to see a complete harmony between religion and the State, which appeared almost blent into one. Again, we must not forget that at this time the Christian religion had been lately accepted distinctly as a divine institution, and that it embraced the whole man with a plenitude of power which the indifference and division of our own times hardly allow us to conceive. Those who would realise this grasp of the Christian faith, transforming and exalting the whole being, may reach a faint perception of it by reading the great Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries – St. Basil, St. Ambrose, St. Chrysostom, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and St. Leo. They were not in danger of taking the moral corruption of an effete civilisation for the Christian faith. Again, the emperors, living in the midst of this immense intellectual and moral power – for instance, Justinian himself practising in a court the austerities of a monastery – recognised the confession of the same faith as the strongest band which united subjects with their prince. They thought that those who were not united with them in belief could not serve them with perfect love and fidelity. And, lastly, they hoped that their own zeal in maintaining the Church's unity unimpaired would make them worthier of the divine favour, and give success to all their undertakings. Let us take the words of Theodosius, one of the greatest and best among them, to his colleague the younger Valentinian, who up to the time of his mother Justina's death had been unjust to the Catholic cause and favoured the Arian heresy: "The imperial dignity is supported, not by arms, but by the justice of the cause. Emperors who feared God have won victories without armies, have subdued enemies and made them tributary, and have escaped all dangers. So Constantine the Great overcame the tyrant Licinius in a sea-fight. So thy father (the first Valentinian) succeeded in protecting his realm from its enemies, won mighty victories, and destroyed many barbarians. On the contrary, thy uncle Valens polluted churches by the murder of saints and the banishing of priests. Hence by guidance of Divine Providence he was besieged by the Goths, and found his death in the flames. It is true that he who has not unjustly expelled thee does not worship Christ aright. But thy perverse belief has given this opportunity to Maximus. If we do not return to Christ, how can we call upon His aid in the struggle?" The following emperors were of the same judgment: so that they attached to each decree which concerned ecclesiastical matters the motive of meriting thereby God's approval, since they not only took pains to please Him, but also led their subjects to do so. We employ, says Justinian, every care upon the holy churches, because we believe that our empire will be maintained, and the commonwealth protected by the favour of God, but likewise to save our own souls and the souls of all our subjects.
Justinian likewise would have a keen remembrance of the degradation from which his uncle had restored the empire. None knew better than he how the ignoble reigns of the usurper Basiliscus, of Zeno, and of Anastasius, by perpetual tampering with heresy and ruthless persecution of the orthodox, had well-nigh broken that empire to pieces. Had he not thrown all his energy, as the leading spirit of his uncle's realm, into that great submission to Pope Hormisdas which rendered its beginning illustrious?
Nevertheless a dark blot lies upon the name and memory of Justinian. He was not only successor of the great Theodosius in his ardent zeal for the Church's doctrine and unity, but likewise of Constantine, when he sullied his greatness and risked all the success of his former life by falling into the hands of the Nicomedian Eusebius.
The vast event by which the Christian Church had become a ruling power in the commonwealth had affected from that time forth the whole being of Church and State. Christian emperors had come to see in bishops the Fathers and Princes of such a Church, consecrated by God to that office, not appointed by men.170 As such they had honoured them, committed to their wisdom and guidance the salvation of their own souls, and the weal itself of the commonwealth; not hindered them in the performance of their duties, not hampered them by restrictive laws. Rather they had protected them by external force from hindrance when invited thus to show their protection as heads of the State. Circumstances led them on to a more immediate entrance into the Church's special domain, and the things which happened in that domain led to this their entrance. It kept even pace with the developments and disturbances caused by heresy therein.
Christ had committed to the whole episcopate, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the task of spreading the seed of Christian doctrine over the earth, of watching its growth, of eradicating the false seed sown in night-time by the enemy. In proportion as the empire's head took part in this work, his influence on the episcopate could not but increase. If his participation was confined within its due limits, if the temporal ruler hedged the Church round from irruption of external power, if he rooted the tares out of her field only to clear her enclosure, his relation to the bishops remained merely external. But if he went on himself to lay down the limit of the Church's domain, or even if he only took an active part in such limitation; if he made himself the judge what was wheat and what was tares, in so doing he had won an influence on the bishops which did not belong to him. Then Church and State ran a danger of seeing their respective limits confused. Thus the relation of the bishops to the ruler of the State became then, and remains always, an unfailing standard of the Church's freedom and independence.
Now, striking and peremptory as the eastern submission to Pope Hormisdas was, in which Justinian, then a man of thirty-six, had taken large part; clear and unambiguous as in his legislation appears the recognition of the Two Powers, sacerdotal and imperial, which make together the joint foundation of the State, and are a necessity of its wellbeing; distinct, likewise, as is the imperial proclamation of the Pope as the first of all bishops in his laws, his letters, confirmed by his reception of the Popes Agapetus and Vigilius in his own capital city; frank and unembarrassed as his acknowledgment of St. Peter's successors, yet, when he had reached the mature age of seventy, and was lord by conquest of Rome reduced to absolute impotence, and of Italy as a subject province, his treatment of the first bishop, in the person of Vigilius, was a contradiction of his own laws as to the two domains of divine and human things. He passed beyond the limits which marked the boundaries of the two powers. He made himself the supreme judge of doctrine. He convoked a General Council without the Pope's assent; he terminated it without his sanction; he treated the Pope as a prisoner for resisting such action. It is true that St. Peter's successor – and this with a stain upon him which no successor of St. Peter had worn before him – escaped with St. Peter's life in him unimpaired; but so far as the action of Justinian went it was unfilial, inconsistent with his own laws, perilous in the extreme to the Church, dishonouring to the whole episcopate. The divine protection guarded Vigilius – that Vigilius whom an imperious woman had put upon the seat of a lawful living Pope – from sacrifice of the authority to which, on the martyrdom of his predecessor, he succeeded. He died at Syracuse, and St. Peter lived after him undiminished in the great St. Gregory. The names mean the same, the one in Latin, the other in Greek; but no successor ever took on himself the blighted name of Vigilius, while many of the greatest among the Popes have chosen for themselves the name of Gregory, and one at least of the sixteen has equalled the glory of the first.
In judging the conduct of Justinian, both in treatment of persons and in dealing with doctrine, we cannot fail to see that the imperial duty of protection passed into the imperial lust for mastery. If his treatment of Vigilius, whom he acknowledged in the clearest terms as Pope, was scandalous and cruel, still worse, if possible, was the assumption of a right to interpret and to define the Church's doctrine for the Church. The usurper Basiliscus had been the first to issue an imperial decree on doctrine. This was in favour of heresy. He was followed in this by the legitimate emperors Zeno and Anastasius, also in favour of heresy. On the contrary,171 the edicts of Justinian were generally in conformity with the decisions of the Church: generally occasioned by bishops, often drawn up by them. But in the council called by him at Constantinople in 553, he issued decrees on doctrines which only the Church could decide. In doing this he infringed her liberty as grossly as the three whose unlawful act he was imitating. The whole effect of his reign was that State despotism in Church matters lowered the dignity of the spiritual power. The dependence of his bishops on the court became greater and greater. The emperor's will became law in the things of the Church. He persecuted Vigilius: he deposed his own patriarch Eutychius. His example, as that of the most distinguished Byzantine monarch, told with great force upon his successors, for the persecution of future Popes and the deposition of future patriarchs.
The Italy which he had won at the cost of its ruin as to temporal wellbeing was, after his death in 565, speedily lost as to its greater portion, and the Romans172 of the East did little more for it. The Rome which he had reduced almost to a solitude, and ruled through a prefect with absolute power, escaped in the end from the most cruel and heartless despotism inflicted by a distant master on a province at once plundered and neglected. His own eastern provinces suffered terribly from barbarian inroads, and the end of the thirty-seven years' domination, which had seemed a resurrection at the beginning, showed the mighty eastern empire from day to day declining, the western bishops under the action of the Pope more and more exerting an independence which the East could not prevent, the patriarch of Constantinople more and more advancing as the agent of the imperial will in dealing with eastern bishops. What the See of St. Peter was at the end of the sixth century it remains to see in the pontificate of the first Gregory, who shares with the first Leo the double title of Great and Saint.
CHAPTER V
ST. GREGORY THE GREAT
"The banner of the Church is ever flying!Less than a storm avails not to unfoldThe Cross emblazoned there in massive gold:Away with doubts and sadness, tears and sighing!It is by faith, by patience, and by dyingThat we must conquer, as our sires of old."– Aubrey de Vere, "St. Peter's Chains".The historian,173 who has carefully followed the fortunes of Rome as a city during a thousand years, describes it as beginning a new life from the time when Narses, in the year 552, came to reside there as imperial prefect and representative of the absent eastern lord Justinian. Narses so ruled for fifteen years, but when he was recalled there ensued a long time of terrible distress and anxiety – a time of temporal servitude, but one also of spiritual expansion. The complete ruin of Rome as a secular city, the overthrow of all that ancient world of which Rome was the centre and capital, had been effected in the struggle ended by the extinction of the Gothic kingdom. By degrees the laws, the monuments, the very recollections of what had been, passed away. The heathen temples ceased to be preserved as public monuments. The Capitol, on its desolate hill, lifted into the still air its fairy world of pillars in a grave-like silence, startled only by the owl's night cry. The huge palace of the Cæsars still occupied the Palatine in unbroken greatness, a labyrinth of empty halls yet resplendent with the finest marbles, here and there still covered with gold-embroidered tapestry. But it was falling to pieces like a fortress deserted by its occupants. In some small corner of its vast spaces there might still be seen a Byzantine prefect, an eunuch from the court of the eastern despot, or a semi-Asiatic general, with secretaries, servants, and guards. The splendid forums built by Cæsar after Cæsar, each a homage paid by the ruler of the day to the Roman people, whom he fed and feared, became pale with age. Their history clung round them like a fable. The massive blocks of Pompey's theatre showed need of repairs, which were not given. The circus maximus, where the last and dearest of Roman pleasures – the chariot races – were no longer celebrated, stretched its long lines beneath the imperial palace covered with dust and overgrown with grass. The colossal amphitheatre of Titus still reared its circle perfect, but stripped of its decorations. The gigantic baths, fed by no aqueduct since the ruin wrought by Vitiges the Goth, rose like fallen cities in a wilderness. Ivy began to creep over them. The costly marble mantle of their walls dropped away in pieces or was plundered for use. The Mosaic pavements split. There were still in those beautiful chambers seats of bright or dark marble, baths of porphyry or Oriental alabaster. But these found their way by degrees to churches. They served for episcopal chairs, or to receive the bones of a saint, or to become baptismal fonts. Yet not a few remained in their desolation till the walls dropped down upon them, or the dust covered them for centuries. In course of time the rain perforated the uncared-for vaultings of these shady galleries. Having served for refuge to the thief, the coiner, or the assassin, they became like dripping grottoes.
Thus stood the temples, triumphal arches, pillars, and statues before the eyes of a young Roman noble, one out of the few patrician families still surviving. These were the sights with which St. Gregory, who claimed kindred with the Anician race, was familiar from his boyhood, so that the desolation of Jerusalem rose before his mind as the state of his own Rome pressed on his eyes and seared his heart.
This skeleton of a city was scarcely inhabited by the remnant of a people, decimated by hunger and pestilence, and in perpetual fear to see its ill-defended gates broken into by Lombard savages. The walls of Aurelian, half demolished by Totila and hurriedly repaired by Belisarius, alone saved it year after year from the horrors which fell upon captured cities; and would not have saved it but for the indomitable spirit, the perpetual wisdom, foresight, and courage of a son who had been exalted to the Chair of Peter.
While Old Rome lay thus, the shadow of its former self, bereft of all political power, looking to the imperial exarch at Ravenna for its temporal rule, in danger moreover of inundation from its own Tiber, whose banks were no longer maintained with unremitting care, New Rome beside the Bosporus rioted in all the pomp and circumstance of a court still the head of a vast empire. The tributes of all the East, of numberless cities in Asia Minor, in Syria, in Egypt, were still borne unceasingly within its walls, which rose as an impregnable fortress between Europe and Asia. Its emperor still thought himself the lord of the world; its bishop assumed the title of Ecumenical Patriarch. Both emperor and bishop cast but a disdainful glance on the widowed rival which threatened to sink into the grave of waters brought down by her own river. Constantinople could raise and pay armies from all the races of the North and East. A single imperial regiment was quartered at Rome, which, being ill-paid, became disaffected and neglectful of its charge, and could not be counted upon by the Pope for vigorous defence against the ever-pressing danger of a Lombard inroad.
So began the Church's Rome.174 Enslaved politically to Byzantium, wherein the so-called Roman State, with Greek subtlety, carried on the principles of the old heathen government and practised a remorseless despotism, the city of the ancient Cæsars and the people they fed on "bread and games" ceased to exist, and was changed into the holy city, whose life was the Chair of Peter. From the time of Narses, during all the two hundred years of Lombard assault and Byzantine neglect and exaction, the Pope alone, watchful and unceasingly active, carried out the fabric of the Roman hierarchy.175 Its gradual increase, its springing up out of the dust of the old Roman State under the most difficult circumstances, will ever claim the astonishment of the after-world as the greatest transformation to be found in history.
Let us approach the secret of this transformation in the person of the man who best represents it.
Gregory was born about the year 540, and so was witness from his childhood of the intense misery and special degradation of Rome produced by the Gothic war. He was himself the son of Gordian, a man of senatorial rank, from whom he inherited great landed property. Through him he was the great grandson of that illustrious Pope Felix III., whom we have seen resist with success the insolence of Acacius and the despotism of Zeno. Gregory had therefore a doubly noble inheritance – that of a true Roman noble's spirit, and that of the Church's championship. His paternal house stood on that well-known slope of the Cœlian hill, opposite the imperial palace on the Palatine, from which in after-time he sent forth St. Augustine with the monks his brethren to be the Apostle of paganised England. He founded six monasteries in Sicily upon his property, and changed his father's palace into a seventh, in which he followed the Benedictine Rule. In early manhood he had been prætor or prefect of the city, being probably the most eminent of all its citizens in wealth and rank. But his mother St. Silvia, a woman of fervent piety, had educated him with great care. He turned from the secular to the religious life, following perhaps her example, since on the death of his father she became a nun. He was a monk on the Cœlian hill when Pope Benedict in the year 577 named him seventh deacon of the Roman Church. Pope Pelagius II. sent him as nuncio to Constantinople, an office equally difficult and honourable. The emperor Tiberius was then reigning, with whom he became intimate, and with his successor Mauritius. Gregory dwelt in the imperial palace, with some monks of his own monastery whom he had brought with him, pursuing the Rule in all pious observances, winning also the esteem and friendship of many distinguished men, and making himself fully acquainted with the mechanism of the eastern court. He also delivered the patriarch Eutychius from a false Origenistic notion, that the bodies of the blessed after the resurrection were not glorified, but lost their quality as bodies.176 There also he became warmly attached to St. Leander, who afterwards, as archbishop of Seville, greatly helped him in recovering Spain from Arianism to the Catholic faith. The charge of Pope Pelagius to his nuncio Gregory throws a vivid light upon the condition of Rome at the time. His instructions ran: "Lay before our lord the emperor that no words can express the calamities brought upon us by the perfidy of the Lombards, breaking their own engagements. Our brother Sebastian, whom we send to you, has promised to describe to him the necessities and dangers of all Italy. Join him in that entreaty to succour us, for the commonwealth is in such distress, that unless God inspire him to show us his servants the mercy of his natural disposition, and move him to give us a single Magister militum and a single Dux, we are utterly destitute, for Rome and its neighbourhood are specially defenceless. The exarch writes that he can give us no help, for he has not force enough to guard Ravenna. Therefore, may God command the emperor quickly to succour us, before the army of that most wicked nation take the places still remaining to us."177
