Leo the Great E-Book

Reverend Charles Gore

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 203

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Leo the Great was Pope during the 5th century , and most famous for convincing Attila to leave Italy. Gore's Leo the Great is a fascinating biography of the pope.

Leseprobe

CHAPTER I.THE AGE OF LEO.

Our natural desire to know what great men were like when they were young, and what the circumstances of their youth were which molded their capacity for control and command, is proverbially liable to be thwarted by lack of information. In the case of the great Fathers of the Church, we hardly expect to know much of their early years, and the deep interest which invests the youth of St. Augustine has not many parallels. Accordingly, of Leo the Great, before he became an ecclesiastical character, we can tell almost nothing.

He must have been born about the last decade of the fourth century, and a tradition of uncertain origin names his father, Quintius, and describes him as a Tuscan; while the citizens of Volaterrae go further, and claim him for their own city. On the other hand he himself, and his contemporary and friend the chronicler Prosper, call Rome his patria, and the statement seems to outweigh a vague tradition, and entitle us to can Leo a Roman by blood, as tie was in spirit, and, we may add, in religion.

Our ignorance of the circumstances of his birth and education is only an example of the obscurity which hides his private life from first to last. There is no private or domestic interest about Leo such as entwines itself around a character like St. Gregory of Nazianzum. Not only did St. Leo live wholly for the Church and for mankind, but his personal character seems almost merged and lost in the cause to which he has abandoned himself, and private feelings hardly find utterance in the stern and hard antitheses of his epistolary style. And yet in his sermons there breathes a tone of simple, earnest spiritual religion, which assures us of an intense devotion and quiet of soul underlying the manifold and unceasing activity of his outward life. In saying that we know nothing about his education we must perhaps make a slight exception. The polished and refined style of his letters, quite unlike the rough and formless Latin of the African writers, with all the merits and an the faults of a late phase of culture, is sufficient to assure us that he had a literary education: but we, must add, that from beginning to end of his writings there is not a single indication of any acquaintance with the pagan literature of old Rome. Indeed the ecclesiastical authority of an age when the literature of paganism was not yet quite a dead language, went for the present against a ‘classical’ education; and Leo was throughout life ignorant of Greek. More than this we cannot say; but though our records are silent on the individual, general history will throw a little light for us on the circumstances of his youth.

Leo was born into perhaps the most important period of transition in the world’s history, that stormy period which links the ancient and the modern world: the civilization of Rome and the civilization of Christendom. The great empire of Rome, which for four centuries had been almost conterminous with the known world, which seemed irresistible by the mere force of its name, and which in a condition of profound peace had been obliterating national distinctions, and uniting races the most opposite and the most remote in the bonds of commerce and a common government, was now being threatened, overwhelmed and dismembered in all directions by the barbarian hosts.

One by one the Imperial government was surrendering the provinces of the Empire, either to be occupied by the invading hordes, or to maintain for a time, like Britain (abandoned AD 409) and Armorica, a precarious independence; meanwhile the unity of the government had been finally surrendered by the separation of the Eastern and Western Empires at the death of Theodosius the Great, and the Imperial residence in the West, which had been removed for purposes of convenience at the beginning of the fourth century from Rome to Milan was transferred by Honorius, from motives of cowardice, to Ravenna, a city which art had done its best to fortify, and which nature had rendered almost inaccessible by surrounding it with impassable morasses. Here, out of the reach of danger, and remote from any natural centre of administration, was exercised in the future what shadow of authority still remained in the hands of the Emperor of the West.

For if the Empire was becoming contemptible, that contempt centered in the emperor. That supreme position, perhaps the most magnificent that it ever fell to the lot of man to fill, and which had in fact during the four centuries of the Roman Empire, from Julius to Theodosius, been filled by no inconsiderable proportion of the greatest of the world’s rulers,—that position, which in pagan days had raised its occupant at once to the level of the gods, and still assigned to him a superstitious and unbounded veneration, was for nearly thirty years (AD 395-423) filled by Honorius, a man of whom it is related (and the story must at any rate represent the estimate which his subjects formed of his character) that he was alarmed to hear of the loss of Rome, till he learned that it was not a favorite chicken of that name that was lost, but only the eternal city.

While the emperor was thus sunk in contemptible indolence the nobility of Rome seem as a class to have been not much more worthy of respect. The historian, Ammianus Marcelinus, who died about the time of Leo’s birth, gives us an excellent picture of their character and manners. They were extremely luxurious, extremely indolent, and extremely frivolous. They delighted in little but vanity and display. At the same time to degrading vices they added a gross superstition, often to be found among those who were skeptics or even atheists.

Meanwhile the plebeian population of Rome was a congeries of all the nations of the earth, drawn to Rome by the various attractions of the metropolis, the circus, and, above all, the enormous largess of provisions of various kinds which it was the pleasure of the emperors to lavish upon the populace of the capital.

Enough will have been said to show that neither in the emperor, nor nobility, nor plebeians of the capital were to be found the elements of social solidity, or resistance, nor would it seem that much could be looked for from the diminished and still constantly dwindling population of the provinces.

Salvian, a priest of Marseilles and a contemporary of Leo, gives us a terrible picture of the morality of the Roman Empire of his day. His work, “On the government of God”, is a vindication of the ways of God to man, in abandoning the Roman Empire to the barbarians: the Christian world to the pagans and the Arians. It is the punishment of sins. “Among the chaste barbarians we alone are unchaste”; the moral purity of Vandal and Goth contrasts in all directions, in Germany, in Africa, in Spain, with the universal dissoluteness of the Romans.

To complete the picture we must add that almost the whole strength of the army of that date, such as it was, was to be found in the barbarians who had recruited its ranks.

At the time of the invasion of Alaric, though the troops were recalled from the provinces, even as far as Britain, to the defence of Italy, it was found impossible to raise an army composed of Roman legions without the assistance of Alani: and a few years later not only the assistance of Alani, Huns and Goths, but the recall of provincial legions and compulsory levies of new troops were necessary to enable Stilicho to raise a small army to oppose Rhodogast, but he was actually compelled to offer bribes to any slaves who would enlist.

Amidst all these elements of weakness and decay, into this last epoch of the Roman Empire Leo was born. One of his earliest memories would probably have been of the awe and panic which seized the city of Rome at the news of the advance of Alaric with his Goths, and of the burst of joy which hailed the tidings of Stilicho’s great victory at Pollentia. He may have seen the great general seated by the side of his unworthy emperor ascend in triumph to the capitol; and might even, had he wished it, have been present on the occasion of the triumph at the last gladiatorial games which ever disgraced the city of Rome.

If Christian education kept him from the spectacle, he would, at any rate, probably have read the appeal which the poet Prudentius took the occasion to present to the emperor against the blood­thirsty and inhuman sport; but if he were there he must have witnessed the martyrdom of the Asiatic monk Telemachus, who, as we are told, rushed into the arena to separate the gladiators, and died stoned to death by the indignant multitude, but by his death put a stop for ever to all similar combats.

The victory of Pollentia seemed to revive for a moment the spirit of old Roman pride. The poet Claudian—a classical poet, born out of his due time, who across an interval of three hundred years linked his name with the great poets of Rome—ended his lines on the event by bidding “the mad nations learn not to despise the name of Rome”; and the inscription on the triumphal arch boasted that the Gothic race had been for ever subdued. It was, however, but a few years before the Gothic conquerors had the opportunity of reading this inscription for themselves.

Once more, in 405, the generalship of Stilicho delivered Rome from the danger to which it was exposed by the German hosts of Rhodogast. But the feeble emperor sacrificed to his jealousies or his fears that general who was the sole defence of his empire, and Rome lay a helpless prey to the enemy. Leo may have been present at the siege of Rome by Alaric, in 408; he may have suffered from the awful famine in which that siege involved, the city; and he must, at any rate, have heard of the insulting scorn with which Alaric at first rejected, all terms the city could offer, and of the enormous sum which stripped the gorgeous city of its wealth, by which he was at last bought on. He must have watched after this the course of events, which made plain to any spectator that he was witnessing the last stage of the great city’s decadence.

Again, Alaric appeared before the walls of Rome : he set up Attalus, a creature of his own, as emperor, and again brought upon the city the pangs of famine: the mock emperor retired, but Alaric, for the third time, appeared before the city. The gates were opened to him, and Rome was in his hands (AD 410). The sack of the city, that awful scene of carnage, conflagration, and plunder, which struck the knell of pagan Rome, and made an impression so deep and startling upon the imagination of Jerome in his far-on cell in Palestine, cannot have been lost upon the mind of the future pope; joined with the whole of his life’s experience it must have told him in tones he could not mistake that he lived amidst the break-up of the old world; but one thing must have inspired his Christian heart with a glowing sense of exultation and confidence—the barbarian hordes, who mocked at the power of the emperor and the city, humbled themselves in solemn awe before the representatives and symbols of religion: among the smoking rums of the city the churches rose intact, their cupidity shrank before the sacred vessels, and their lust before the consecrated virgins.

If paganism, with its last gasp, could accuse Christianity of having brought all this ruin on the city by making her unfaithful to her ancient gods, Christianity might, with far greater truth, reply, that whatever the causes which brought about the destruction of Rome, it was Christianity alone which could awe and control the new forces which were breaking over the world. The conviction of the impotence of the Western Empire must have been strengthened and confirmed in Leo’s mind by the events of each successive year: on all sides were revolts and revolutions, and the rise and fall of pretenders; provinces were occupied by barbarians, and the defences of the Empire were entrusted to the Goths. Honorius died in 423, and was succeeded, after a usurpation of two years, by the infant Valentinian III, whose authority was exercised in his name for twenty-five years by his mother Placidia. Amid the universal decay of military spirit within the Empire there arose two generals of first-rate ability, Boniface and Aetius, who may deservedly be named the last of the Romans. But the Empire, which could not even control the forces nature provided her with, was almost as much injured by their rivalries as assisted by their genius. It is the last sign of the decadence of a nation when she cannot even use her great men. The revolt of Count Boniface in Africa brought over there Genseric and his Vandals (AD 429); and though the Roman speedily repented of the invitation he had given them, his repentance came too late: the seven fair and populous provinces of Africa and her illustrious Church became a prey to havoc, murder, and desolation, which almost obliterated their name off the earth. Such were the political events amongst which Leo grew to manhood and developed his mind and powers.

It remains to ask what were the theological circumstances of his education. He was born in a time when paganism was almost dead. The celebrated petition of Symmachus to the emperor for the restoration of the altar of victory (AD 384) was the last public effort of the old religion. In the year 388 AD, it is related (and the story, at any rate, represents a truth) that the great Theodosius solemnly in full senate, according to all the forms of the Republic, put the question whether the religion of Jupiter or of Christ should be the religion of the Empire; and by a large majority Jupiter was deposed. Temples in Rome and in the provinces were, in some cases, emptied and closed, very generally destroyed, and occasionally converted into Christian temples. A second Julian and another pagan reaction were now no longer possible. A little later the Sibylline books, objects of such reverential awe under the old religion, were burnt by order of Stilicho. It was not, of course, possible that paganism should be extinguished all at once. The spirit and language of the poems of Claudian are wholly pagan; there were many to reproach Christianity with the calamities of Rome, many who were heard to say they feared the sacrifices of Rhodogast more than his arms; and, at the time of the great siege of Rome by the Goths, the city is said to have fallen back for succor upon the arts of Etruscan divination. But as a power in politics or society paganism was a dead thing; and after Claudian there was no longer even a literature to keep alive its memory.

Meanwhile, the Christian church was consolidating in East and West her doctrinal system. The achievements of Leo’s later days will sufficiently prove his intimate acquaintance with the controversies of the East, and especially with the great Nestorian controversy which arose in his early manhood. His circumstances necessitated his connection with those of the West. The address of Augustine and the African council on the subject of Pelagianism reached Pope Innocent in the last year of his life (AD 417). The counter-appeal of Pelagius did not reach Rome till after his death; before this arrived, however, Innocent had addressed an answer to the African bishops, which at once assured them of his orthodoxy and support, and asserted broadly the authority of his see. Leo must have thus become acquainted with the great Western controversy on the subject of Grace, at the point where it was associated with the growing claims of the Apostolic see, and must have witnessed the blow which the authority of that see suffered by the new pope Zosimus’s temporary acquittal of Pelagius and Celestinus. He was soon introduced in a more personal way into the controversy

An acolyte, Leo, of whom we hear in the letters of St. Augustine, is sent in 418 to carry communications from Rome to the African Church on the subject of the heresy, and if, as seems most probable, this is the future pope, it is interesting to think that he must have come in personal contact on the way with the greatest of Latin theologians.

After this Leo seems to have risen rapidly into distinction. Under the pontificate of Celestine (422-432) he held, the important office of Archdeacon of the Church of Rome, and he seems by this time to have been well known beyond the limits of Italy, and even in the East. He had pressed the Gallican Cassian, the legislator of Western monasticism, to write a work on the Incarnation, and Cassian in yielding to his solicitations calls him “the ornament of the Roman Church, and of the divine ministry”. Then St. Cyril, too, at the time of the Council of Ephesus (431) wishes to put a stop to the ambitious designs of the bishop of Jerusalem to obtain for his see the dignity of a patriarchate, and for that purpose seeks to secure the co-operation of Rome, it is to Leo that he writes, as to one who knows the secrets of the Apostolic see.

Some, indeed, on the strength of the position which Leo held at this time have tried to vindicate the authority of his authorship for some anonymous works directed against Pelagianism or the semi-Pelagianism then prevalent in the Gallican church. Though we have not, however, any good evidence for ascribing these works to Leo, we can have no doubt of his zeal against Pelagian error; indeed, the only authentic record of him under the pontificate of Sixtus (432-440) shows him to us keenly on the watch against the craft of the Pelagian Julian of Aeculanum, who seems to have sought to be readmitted to the orthodox communion without any real recantation of his errors. Thus educated and equipped in controversy Leo was chosen to lead the fight.

Amid the countless signs of decrepitude in the Roman Empire, none, as has been already indicated, was more marked than her inability to control and use in her service the talents of her generals, which, rightly directed, might have warded off for a time the impending ruin. Instead of fighting for the Empire, they fought with one another. One of those quarrels arose in Gaul, about the year 439, between the great general Aetius, in whose hands during the regency of Placidia the real power of the Empire lay, and a smaller rival, Albinus. Under the circumstances, with barbarian hosts ever ready to pour down upon Italy, such quarrels could not too speedily be put a stop to; in the dearth of statesmen, men turned to the church, and Leo, already conspicuous for dexterity and courage, was sent to negotiate a reconciliation. While he was away, in August, 440, Sixtus died.

There was no division of opinion, no danger of an anti-pope now, as there had been on the death of Innocent; all Rome looked to Leo. He was promptly elected to the vacant pontificate, and an embassy sent at once to recall him to Rome. “For more than forty days”, says the chronicler Prosper, “the Roman Church was without a bishop, awaiting with wonderful peace and patience the arrival of the deacon Leo”. On his return, he was consecrated at once, we must suppose, priest and bishop, on September 29; and the earliest of his works which survives to us is his short sermon upon his consecration. We are apt to scoff, very often unjustly, at professions of unwillingness to accept preferment. On this occasion, at any rate, Leo does not try our faith; on the contrary, he thanks God and the people for the favor done him, and asks their prayers for the success of his ministry.

It was a crisis difficult and trying enough to tax the best energies of the strongest and the most capable when Leo was called to the highest position in Christendom. In politics, while the empire of the East was in its normal state of perpetual and premature decay, everything gave warning of the almost immediate collapse of that of the West. It had lost the more distant provinces and Spain, the Vandals held Africa, Sicily had been desolated, and Rome sacked; and while all was weakness within, the barbarian hordes were full of vigor and energy, wild and untamed, indeed, but replete with possibilities of development and future power; and the past had shown that, if they could be controlled at all, that power of control lay with the Church, and therefore with the central figure in the Church, the bishop of Rome.

There was wanted one who could appreciate the opportunity, and make the Apostolic see with its spiritual authority take the place of the tottering Imperial power; and if this was to be done, then Rome and the Church must exhibit, amid the ruins of a falling world, an example of unshaken constancy. She must stand like the rock in the midst of the tossing waves. He then who could appreciate and rise to the opportunity must throw the power of a great intellect and a great spiritual influence into the scale of Church discipline and ecclesiastical solidity. Consistency, firmness, discipline, far-reaching organization in a solid and united Church, these were the qualities the age wanted, and that for the sake of theology no less than in the cause of social order. For, in the first place, the Goths who threatened to become in a great measure masters of the future were Arians by creed; in the East, Nestorianism was still a power, and Eutyches, the heresiarch of the immediate future, was already an old man; and in the West there were Manichaeans, Priscillianists, and Pelagians to disturb the Church’s peace and perplex the wearied hearts of men. Obviously, then, for social and theological reasons alike, an authoritative discipline was what was wanted in the Church no less than the world.

Learning, especially in the West, was almost dead: that sympathy, in which in later days the Church has too often shown herself wanting, which can appreciate and gently influence the half-disciplined struggles of a ‘new learning’, was not then a need; there was scarcely anything that was either intellectually subtle or morally respectable in the heresies of the day by comparison with the Church; under such circumstances, and in such an age, when large sacrifices must be made to the surpassing necessity for ecclesiastical unity, solidity, and strength, Leo, as bishop of Rome, was as completely as any man in history the right man in the right place. His moral character was simple, lofty, and severe; and the ideal of the Christian life, which he realized in himself, he set his great energies, by word as well as example, to impress upon the minds of his flock; but in this, as in everything, it was intensity and singleness of purpose which marked his influence, rather than breadth or freedom of sympathy. His mind expressed itself naturally in his firm and emphatic style; there is nothing domestic about him, and though not wanting in generosity, he is perhaps deficient in gentleness, mildness, and forbearance. Thus, if we approach his character with sympathy, it is not hard to understand;—even if we cannot love, we must admire him; but if we are to appreciate him as he deserves, we must be ready to abandon the desire so natural to us for soft and domestic manners, we must enter into something of his large and imperial purpose, and feel that if Christianity is a soft and gentle influence in social life, it is also and before this an organization and a Church, the bearer of a Divine message of truth, and gifted with a Divine authority of government.