The Papal Monarchy E-Book

William Barry

• Herausgeber: Jovian Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 477

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Alaric, King of the Western Goths, entered Rome with his army, by the Salarian Gate -- outside of which Hannibal had encamped long ago--and took the Imperial City. Eleven hundred and sixty-four years had passed since its legendary foundation under Romulus; four hundred and forty-one since the battle of Actium, which made Augustus Lord in deed, if not in name, of the Roman world. When the Gothic trump sounded at midnight, it announced that ancient history had come to an end, and that our modern time was born. St. Jerome, who in his cell at Bethlehem saw the Capitol given over to fire and flame, was justified from an historical point of view when he wrote to the noble virgin Demetrias, "Thy city, once the head of the universe, is the sepulchre of the Roman people." Even in that age of immense and growing confusion, the nations held their breath when these tidings broke upon them. Adherents of the classic religion who still survived felt in them a judgment of the gods; they charged on Christians the long sequel of calamities which had come down upon the once invincible Empire. Christians retorted that its fall was the chastisement of idolatry. And their supreme philosopher, the African Father St. Augustine, wrote his monumental work, "Of the City of God," by way of proving that there was a Divine kingdom which heathen Rome could persecute in the martyrs, but the final triumph of which it could never prevent. This magnificent conception, wrought out in a vein of prophecy, and with an eloquence which has not lost its power, furnished to succeeding times an Apocalypse no less than a justification of the Gospel. Instead of heathen Rome, it set up an ideal Christendom. But the center, the meeting-place, of old and new, was the City on the Seven Hills.

Leseprobe

THE PAPAL MONARCHY

William Barry

JOVIAN PRESS

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Copyright © 2016 by William Barry

Published by Jovian Press

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ISBN: 9781537809977

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ORIGINS (B.C. 753-A.D. 67)

FROM PETER TO LEO THE GREAT (67-461)

GREGORY THE GREAT, MONASTICISM, AND ST. BENEDICT. (461 - 604)

ICONOCLAST EMPERORS AND LOMBARD KINGS (604-739)

THE DONATION OF PEPIN (739-772)

CHARLEMAGNE, PATRICIAN OF ROME (772-800)

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE (800-814)

CHAOS COME AGAIN (814-867)

FEUDAL HIERARCHY—FALSE DECRETALS (847-882)

THE HOUSE OF THEOPHYLACT (882-964)

ROMANCE OF THE OTHOS (964-1003)

TUSCULAN SUCCESSION—PAPACY BOUGHT AND SOLD (1003-1048)

HILDEBRAND (1048-1073)

HENRY IV. AT CANOSSA (1073-1076)

NORMANS, CRUSADES INVESTITURES (1076-1123)

ST. BERNARD OVERTHROWS ABELARD AND ARNOLD (1123-1155)

FREDERICK REDBEARD AND HIS TIME (1155-1177)

ENTER INNOCENT III. AND FREDERICK OF SICILY (117-1214)

CRUSADES AGAINST GREEKS AND ALBIGENSES (1201-1233)

ST. FRANCIS—THE FRIARS—THE LATERAN COUNCIL (1182-1226)

EXCOMMUNICATION—WARS—FATE OF FREDERICK II (1216-1250)

CONRADIN DIES—THE SICILIAN VESPERS (1250-1299)

ROMAN LAW VERSUS ROMAN PONTIFF (1226-1287)

PHILIP THE FAIR AND POPE BONIFACE (1287-1300)

DANTE’S VISION—ANAGNI—END OF THE MIDDLE AGE (1300-1303)

EPILOGUE

ORIGINS (B.C. 753-A.D. 67)

~

IN THE NIGHT OF THE 24th of August, 410, Alaric, King of the Western Goths, entered Rome with his army, by the Salarian Gate — outside of which Hannibal had encamped long ago—and took the Imperial City. Eleven hundred and sixty-four years had passed since its legendary foundation under Romulus; four hundred and forty-one since the battle of Actium, which made Augustus Lord in deed, if not in name, of the Roman world. When the Gothic trump sounded at midnight, it announced that ancient history had come to an end, and that our modern time was born. St. Jerome, who in his cell at Bethlehem saw the Capitol given over to fire and flame, was justified from an historical point of view when he wrote to the noble virgin Demetrias, “Thy city, once the head of the universe, is the sepulchre of the Roman people.” Even in that age of immense and growing confusion, the nations held their breath when these tidings broke upon them. Adherents of the classic religion who still survived felt in them a judgment of the gods; they charged on Christians the long sequel of calamities which had come down upon the once invincible Empire. Christians retorted that its fall was the chastisement of idolatry. And their supreme philosopher, the African Father St. Augustine, wrote his monumental work, “Of the City of God,” by way of proving that there was a Divine kingdom which heathen Rome could persecute in the martyrs, but the final triumph of which it could never prevent. This magnificent conception, wrought out in a vein of prophecy, and with an eloquence which has not lost its power, furnished to succeeding times an Apocalypse no less than a justification of the Gospel. Instead of heathen Rome, it set up an ideal Christendom. But the center, the meeting-place, of old and new, was the City on the Seven Hills.

To the Roman Empire succeeded the Papal Monarchy. The Pope called himself Pontifex Maximus; and if this hieratic name—the oldest in Europe —signifies “the priest that offered sacrifice on the Sublician bridge,” it denotes, in a curious symbolic fashion, what the Papacy was destined to achieve, as well as the inward strength on which it relied, during the thousand years that stretch between the invasion of the Barbarians and the Renaissance. When we speak of the Middle Ages we mean this second, spiritual and Christian Rome, in conflict with the Northern tribes and then their teacher; the mother of civilization, the source to Western peoples of religion, law, and order, of learning, art, and civic institutions. It became to them what Delphi had been to the Greeks, and especially to the Dorians, an oracle which decided the issues of peace and war, which held them in a common brotherhood, and which never ceased to be a rallying point amid their fiercest dissensions. Thus it gave to the multitude of tribes which wandered or settled down within the boundaries of the West, from Lithuania to Ireland, from Illyria to Portugal, and from Sicily to the North Cape, a brain, a conscience, and an imagination, which at length transformed them into the Christendom that Augustine had foreseen.

If the Papacy were blotted out from the world’s chronicle, the Middle Ages would vanish along with it. But modern Europe cannot be deduced, as was thought in the last century by, writers like Voltaire and Montesquieu, from Augustan Rome, with no regard for the long transition which connects them together. It is in this way that the medieval Popes take their place in the Story of the Nations; they continue the Roman history; they account in no small degree for the institutions under which we are living; and their fortunes, so exalted, so unhappy, and not seldom so tragical, shape themselves into a drama, the scenes and vicissitudes of which are as highly romantic as they are expressive of one great ruling idea.

The stage on which this mighty miracle-play was enacted, though spacious, was well defined. Our direct concern will not be with any dogmatic or strictly religious claims put forth by the Popes— these belong to the theologian—but with the sovereignty which they exercised, the nations affected by their decretals, the Holy Roman Empire which their word called into being, and the kingdoms which gladly or reluctantly acknowledged in them a feudal lordship. Thus their dominion never, if we except passing interludes, went beyond the old Patriarchate of the West, as recognized at the Council of Nicæa. Not even the haughtiest Pontiffs pretended to make or unmake the Byzantine Emperors. They dealt otherwise with the Frankish or Suabian chiefs, whom they anointed, crowned, excommunicated, and deposed at the tomb of the Apostles. But until Gregory II. in 731 cast off his allegiance, they had been subjects, not suzerains, of Constantinople. With Latin Emperors they felt themselves able to cope; but the majesty of that earlier Rome lingered yet on the shores of the Bosporus; and the Papal Monarchy vails its crest before it, unless when the Franks have usurped a precarious and hateful power in Byzance after the Fourth Crusade, or the Normans and Venetians divide between them the strong places of Attica and the Morea. Always the Pope is Western, not Eastern, though he may become a slave of the palace during the two hundred years which follow on the conquest of Italy by Belisarius. Yet even in that period of depression he was slowly winning ground outside the Empire, and every tribe made Christian was bringing a fresh stone to build up the arch of the Papal power, fated for so long to stride visibly across the kingdoms of Europe.

Had the Emperors of the East known how to withstand the onset of those hordes which streamed down over the Alps; could they have overthrown or subdued the Lombards, and so kept the Pepins and Charlemagnes at home, it may be questioned whether any Pope would have dreamt of playing the great part in politics which was found inviting or inevitable as time went on. But the old Empire shrank to the Exarchate of Ravenna; it could barely maintain itself on the edge of the Ionian Sea. The Pontiff, looking round for help against the now converted but always detestable Longbeards of Pavia, signaled to the most daring of the new Christian nations. Pepin answered his call; overcame Astolphus; bestowed on St. Peter a patrimony in lands, serfs, and cities; and paved the way for his son’s coronation in 800 as Emperor of the West. He certainly did not foresee that the “Sacerdotium” and the “Imperium” — those divided members which in heathen Rome had been united in the same person— would struggle during the next seven hundred years in a doubtful contest, until both sank exhausted and the. Reformation broke Christendom in twain. As there is a unity of place, determined by the bounds of the Lower Greek Empire, which includes this vast and exceedingly human series of transactions, so there is a unity of time, but as might be expected, not marked by such definite limits. St. Gregory the Great is its herald and anticipation; Boniface VIII. brings it to a close. But as several centuries take us slowly on to the culminating point, so the fourteenth and fifteenth lead us downwards again until the idea of an Imperial Papal Christendom has spent its force. The Lateran Monarchy stood at its height during some two hundred years — from Gregory VII. to Innocent III., or perhaps to Gregory X. (1073-1274). Its creative influence, if we regard European civilization as a whole, had begun sooner and lasted longer; it was often visible at the extremities when Rome itself had sunk into a strange barbarism. Its spiritual energy neither rose nor fell in exact proportion to the outward splendor of the Holy See, as many instances will prove in the pages that follow.

But another condition of this second rise to greatness on the part of Rome has been often overlooked. If St. Peter was considered to be the spiritual founder of the Papacy, and if the Emperor Constantine, by removing the seat of government to the Golden Horn, had left it room in which to expand, yet the marvelous apparition of Mohammed, and the conquests of his lieutenants or successors, broke the power of the Christian East, and in so doing allowed the West time to develop without hindrance on its own lines. The Caliphate bears, indeed, more than one point of resemblance, external at least, to the dynasty of the Vicars of Christ established in Rome. But it is the long series of invasions, stripping off province after province from the weak Emperors of Byzantium, laying waste the churches of Syria and Egypt, reducing the Patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem to barren names, and thus abolishing the older forms of the Christian polity, which we have now in view. Straightway, the fame and consequence of the one remaining Patriarch who dated from Apostolic times must have been indefinitely enhanced. The Pope became, as a great Catholic genius has written, “heir by default” of antiquity. Those Sees, and, above all, the See of Alexandria, which had shared with him in political prestige, and could never be denied a voice when there was question of dogma or discipline, had passed for ever beneath the Moslem yoke. And the Bishop of Constantinople was but the Emperor’s chaplain, incapable of pursuing a course for himself—the nominee, the puppet, and sometimes the prisoner of one who claimed in his own person to be most sacred, a Divine delegate, and a god on earth. In Rome the Bishop had no rival or second. He tended more and more to become what Cæsar had been of old, the embodied city, with all its mysterious charm, its predestination to supreme command, its unique and indelible character as a shrine or temple of deity. From the seventh century onwards, Rome appeared in men’s eyes to be the Apostolic See par excellence. So much, unwittingly, had the Arabian prophet or impostor brought to pass when his armed disciples overran the many thousand bishoprics of Asia and Africa.

An hour there was when Islam appeared likely to conquer not only the Spanish but the Frankish Catholics. Mussulman armies crossed the Pyrenees; they came north as far as Tours; but Charles Martel in a bloody battle drove them south again. Yet could not the unhappy and degenerate Popes of the ninth or tenth century do much to repel their incursions. Under Leo IV. (in 855) they came up to the walls of Rome and sacked St. Peter’s—an amazing feat, of which the Leonine City is to this day a monument and witness. But no sooner did the Holy See recover from its low estate than Gregory VII. set his undaunted mind to inaugurate against them a Sacred War—for Hildebrand, as he is the restorer of the Medieval Papacy, is likewise the author of the First Crusade. It was now Pope against Caliph during nearly two hundred years. Yet the conquest of the Holy Land, soon won and in a short episode lost, was by no means the chief gain to Rome of these world-famous expeditions. From them we date the extensive and permanent taxing-powers, enforced all over Christendom, which the Sovereign Pontiffs insisted upon as their rights, the Pope being, so to speak, generalissimo of the armies of the Cross. This war-tribute, levied on such a preamble, but constantly applied to purposes of another, and sometimes an indefensible kind, while it enriched the Holy See, gave rise to murmurings, and at last to rebellions which, like that under John Wyclif, assailed the Papacy itself. It is not untrue to assert that from the Crusades, which in their beginnings heightened so greatly the Roman power, sprang the first attempts at a Reformation.

We can now define, almost in a phrase, the splendid but simple theme which we have undertaken. Let us state it. How, we inquire, did the Pontifex Maximus, heir of old Rome and now its Christian Bishop, deal with the peoples which invaded and occupied the Western Empire? And how did they deal with him? Broadly speaking, we find ourselves in presence of three great world-facts or forces—the Roman, the Christian, the Teutonic. From these three modern civilization is derived. Their contest fills the Middle Ages; their reconcilement in a purified Church and a Catholic Empire was the dream of Dante; but the poet’s own time marks the epoch when Teutons, despairing of Rome as they saw it, turned back to their national aspirations, and when the North was already beginning to be rent from the South, as the Ten Tribes from the Kingdom of Judah. This parallel, which is no less exact than profound, might be carried out into most significant details. It will help us to understand the rise, the decline, and the everlasting attitude towards the German races of a spiritual power which was clad in forms coming down to it from a period long antecedent to Christianity, and from nations like the Etruscan or the Greek no less than the Hebrew.

Until of late years, the immeasurable event known as the “Conversion of the Roman Empire” has been much misunderstood. We ought rather to call it. a transformation; elements and institutions already existing were brought under the influence of a few far-reaching ideals, and of a Personality recognized as the Divine Incarnation of these. The old Roman life was not broken up and made over again. While Christians refused to be idolaters, they did not, as so many historians, including Gibbon, have taken for granted, decline to share in the public or private dignities, or to tolerate a multitude of harmless customs, which they found in use. Vehement polemical writers, like the fiery Tertullian, exaggerate a nonconformity which at all times must have been tempered by concessions to the circumstances of every day; while the remains we still possess, from at least the third century, prove that we may not charge upon converted Romans a disdain for the arts, the usages, or the business to which, as subjects of the Empire or citizens of the Capital, they had been accustomed. Their theological system underwent a change; their religion, in the deepest sense of the word, was baptized into a new life; but they took over (and how could it be otherwise?) the language, the ritual, the yearly observances, the festal adornments, and even the artistic symbols, to which they had been brought up. Whatever Puritan dislike to paintings and feastings of the Roman pattern had been nurtured in the Jewish Ghetto on the Janiculum, Christians in no long time must have laid it aside. Not many of them in the third century were Israelite even by descent. And Tertullian himself, who stands for the less accommodating principles, is our witness that the Bishop of Rome (probably Zephyrinus, about 216) was not unwilling to be known as “Episcopus Episcoporum” and “Pontifex Maximus.”

The Roman would be a Christian; but he would not improvise either language or ritual when he found them ready to his hand. What he did was to cleanse them of their idolatrous associations, to combine them more or less skillfully with the teachings of the New Testament and the personages and stories of the Old, until a Catholic Hierarchy and a Christian Liturgy rose into sight, sustaining each other in a majestic and almost overpowering adaptation of outward to inward, of spirit to symbol, and of authority to doctrine. This was no sudden creation, but a slow and imperceptible growth of time, extending over five or six hundred years, so complete at length that as in Pope Leo I. we may contemplate the Romulus, so in Gregory the Great we discern the not unkingly Nunia, of a city more sacred than the antique Rome, yet hardly less imperial. Almost every step of this transmuting process can be followed when we pass out from the less lightsome centuries of the Christian origins. The Church in the West was to develop under the style of the Pontifex Maximus, in accordance with old Roman sacred rites, and by the strength of the Roman Law. St. Peter was to inherit all that Numa could bequeath, and to hand it down along the line of his successors.

This word “Pontifex"—meaning the sacrificer on the bridge—was associated from very early times with ceremonies in honor or deprecation of the dead, whom the Romans called Lemures. The feast of the Lemuralia was kept on the Sublician Bridge, which spanned the Tiber between Aventine and Janiculum, during the 9th, 11th, and 13th of May. Customary rites were performed, after which “the pontifices, vestals, prætors, and other citizens,” according to the Greek writer, Dionysius, cast into the stream thirty figures, named “Argei,” or “Argive men,” made of bulrushes and in the human shape. There can be little doubt that these “priscorum simulacra virorum” were a substitute for live men once offered to propitiate the ghosts of the departed; as the legend says, they were invented by Hercules when he did away with human sacrifices formerly made at that spot in honor of Saturn. But a custom with which these Lemuralia seem to bear affinities —of “driving out” or “casting out” Death, at the beginning of summer—has been traced in nearly every part of Europe. Here, then, is the most ancient ritual in which the Pontifex Maximus comes before our view.

Numa, the mythical priest-king of Rome, is said by Livy to have appointed a college of four pontiffs, at the head of which was the Pontifex Maximus. In 81 B.C. the number was raised to fifteen; and Julius Cxsar, who was himself the Sovereign Pontiff, added to it another when he returned from Egypt. Under Augustus, and down to the fall of Paganism, the Emperor always held the title; he was Pope as well as Consul and Imperator. He continued to hold it for some time afterwards; and not only Constantine but his more Christian successors, Valentinian I. and Gratian, are mentioned under this name on inscriptions now extant. Theodosius, however, gave up all pretense to be the High Priest of a heathen worship; and the title passed to the Bishops of Rome, for whose office it must have long seemed a fitting designation.

We learn from Festus, a Latin writer before 400, that the old Roman pontiffs were looked upon as “rerum quæ ad sacra et religiones pertinent, judices et vindices”; they judged and defended the interests of religion at large. They ranked above all other priests, and regulated the general worship of the gods. To them, it was said, Numa had entrusted the sacred “libri pontificales,” in which were set down the lawful rites of sacrifice, dedication, and augurship, with their unchanging formulas. They were to guard against the decay of worship and the bringing in of strange gods and mysteries, such as those of Bacchus, Isis, and Serapis, which caused so much trouble at various times in Rome. Another, and, as we have seen, a very primitive department of their duties was concerned with the dead—how funerals were to be carried out; by what expiations the Alfanes, or the souls of the departed were to be given rest. They interpreted the heavenly signs of thunder and lightning. The times of the festivals were in their keeping, and they regulated the Calendar. Julius Cæsar, in his capacity as Pontifex Maximus, reformed it in 46 B.C. And Pope Gregory XIII., under the same title, reformed it again by his Bull of February 24, 1582.

Since the Pontiffs were not subject to any court of law, neither to the Senate nor the People, we may accurately describe them as exempt from secular jurisdiction. But they had their own courts, to which not only priests but other individuals and even magistrates were bound to submit, in all that related to religion. Over the Vestal virgins they had and exercised criminal jurisdiction. Where existing laws did not suffice to determine the matter, they made fresh rules which were called “Decrees of the Pontiffs.” The Supreme Pontiff was present at the most solemn kind of marriage, known as confarreatio. He lived in a house which had the sanctity of a temple, on the Via Sacra, not far from that of the Vestals, until the Imperial palace became his home. He received the solemn vows of games and other dedications, whether by the State or private persons; and it is to be presumed that he used some discernment in allowing them; he had most probably a dispensing power. Like all pontiffs, he wore the toga prætextata and a conical cap, called the galerus (which is a name now appropriated to the Cardinal’s hat) with a wooden apex fastened to it He could not, in Republican times, leave Italy. Last of all, the duty was incumbent on him of appointing the six Vestals and the Flamens, or particular priests, of Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and other gods.

It was the boast of Cicero, and Virgil’s almost hieratic poem of the Æneid bears him out, that the Romans were a deeply religious people. This does not signify that they cultivated a speculative theology, or that their morals were austere and their lives devoted to well-doing; but that they observed a ritual which left untouched no act of their public or private existence. The gods had no concern with virtue; that was a man’s own acquisition; but they watched over birth, marriage, death; over war and peace; over agriculture and commerce; they consecrated oaths and treaties, and avenged their violation; they were pledged to the prosperity of the State. Before every public undertaking they must be consulted. Certain sacred relics, the nature of which could only be guessed at, were tokens of their amity preserved by the Vestals in a secret shrine, before which burned the “everlasting fire.” Rome, as it extended its conquests, brought home the vanquished deities; it became “the temple and the shrine of all gods,” but above them towered on his hill Jupiter Capitolinus, and the polytheism of the nations was rapidly merging into a Divine Monarchy, of which Cæsar appeared to be the visible image, the Vicar on Earth, when Christians began to preach their glad tidings in the Jewish Ghetto, over against the Porta Portese, and in the region still known as “across the Tiber.”

At what exact period this came to pass we have no means of ascertaining. Was it within ten or twelve years from the death of Christ, or something later? An early tradition associates it with St. Peter’s arrival in Rome and the year 42 A.D., which Eusebius takes for the starting-point of his bishopric; or, to quote the stronger Latin of St. Jerome, at that date “Peter is sent to Rome, where, preaching the Gospel twenty-five years, he remains Bishop of the same city.” But on what primitive testimony this length of years was stated, it is impossible to conjecture. In 58 A.D. St. Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans, when a Church already existed, some members of which belonged to Cæsar’s household. Three years later he was living at Rome in his own hired house, preaching to those who came about him. The severest critics are willing to allow a journey of St. Peter to the Capital in 64, when he dated his First Epistle from Babylon, that is to say, from heathen, persecuting Rome, as the Sibylline books of Jewish origin had long ago named it. To the martyrdom of Peter and Paul under Nero there is abundant witness, beginning with Clement (95 or 96), who speaks of the “good Apostles” (which implies that he knew them personally), and dwells on their sufferings. No explanation of the reference in St. John’s Gospel to Peter’s death has ever been suggested, save that he was crucified in his old age, and, as tradition affirms, close to the spot where his tomb in the early third century could be pointed out by Gaius the Presbyter, who writes (about 220), “I can show thee the trophies [or relics] of the Apostles. For if thou wilt go to the Vatican or the Ostian Way, thou wilt find the trophies of those who founded this Church.” And among his disciples in Rome Peter had “Marcus my son,” his interpreter—whom he sent by and by to Alexandria—as likewise Silvanus. Paul, we know for certain, had about him when there Timothy, Titus, Luke, Apollos. If a doubtful story could be accepted which Tertullian relates concerning the Apostle John—he was said to have undergone a trial at Rome in the reign of Domitian—this Church would have beheld the chiefest of Christ’s followers, and the writers of three out of the four Gospels.

During the second century, Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred between 100 and 118 A.D.; Papias about 130; Dionysius of Corinth in 170; Irenæus, some twenty years later; and the Muratorian Fragmetit ascribed to Hippolytus towards 190, confirm these scattered notices, which connect Peter with Rome as founding the Church and dying there in a time of persecution. In like manner, the lists of Roman Bishops carry us back to Peter and Paul, who stand at their head. Five such catalogues are extant, clouded over with errors of transcription, but when duly revised, in agreement as regards the names, years, and order, which last has been preserved in the Latin Canon of the Mass. Hegesippus, a Jewish Christian, writing about the middle of the second century, drew up a list on the spot, now probably accessible in Epiphanius (375). Irenæus of Lyons, who paid a visit to Rome after 177, gives us his own catalogue. A third, due to Hippolytus, may be recovered from the Liberian, edited under the Pope of that name. On these and on Julius Africanus, Eusebius relied in his Chronicle and History. Irenæus appeals to “the greatest, oldest, and universally known Church, founded and established by the most glorious Apostles Peter and Paul at Rome.” And he says that they “delivered the office of the Episcopate to Linus.” The order, now recognized by experts, is therefore Linus, Anencletus, Clement, Euarestus, Alexander, Xystus, and so forth. That these names represent historical persons, who were “bishops, in the monarchical sense, of the Roman Church,” is admitted by the most competent scholars of our day, and may be safely assumed. Of Clement’s it noble remonstrance,” addressed to the Corinthian schismatics, Lightfoot has declared that it was “the first step towards Papal domination.” He regards the action of Victor, which he disapproves, at the close of the second century, when that Pope excommunicated the Churches of Asia, as a “decided step” forward. When Ignatius looks up to the Roman Church as “presiding in love,” this, observes Lightfoot, bears witness to its moral ascendency, which was “the historical foundation of its primacy.” Cardinal Newman, as we might expect, takes a loftier view: “It seems to me plain from history,” he tells us, “that the Popes from the first considered themselves to have a universal jurisdiction.” It is indisputable, to say the least, that before the year 200, the Bishop of Rome was recognized everywhere as the successor of St. Peter, and not only as head of the local Church, but in some degree—to speak with the Clementine Romance—as presiding over Christendom.

FROM PETER TO LEO THE GREAT (67-461)

~

BUT OUR FIRST GLIMPSES, WHICH are tantalizing in their brevity, of the Christians at Rome, show us the Church rather than the Bishop. Clement admonishes the Corinthians in its name, not in his own; Ignatius of Antioch, if his epistle be authentic, addresses “the Church presiding in charity in the country of the Romans”; and Pope Soter speaks as representing a community so late as 170 A.D. Thus the Bishop did not stand alone; like the Pontifex Maximus he was head of a College of clergy; and the Roman Church, by its central position in the world’s Capital; by its beneficent use of the wealth which it soon acquired; and by its familiarity with the laws and even the fashions of the Metropolis;–was marked out for distinction as the Christian system molded itself on the Imperial, and Bishops fell into their places, according to the importance of the cities over which they ruled. Not even Jerusalem could have resisted a movement so natural and widespread; but the Jewish war had made an end of Jerusalem; and what other city could vie with Rome? By the year 274, Aurelian is found deciding that the Christian Church property at Antioch, which was in dispute, shall be dealt with as the Bishops of Rome and Italy think fit. Cyprian of Carthage, in 256, recognizes that Rome is the Chair of Peter, “whence the unity of the priesthood took its rise.” These words, and this conception, were to furnish the Magna Charta of the Papacy. For the Popes attribute to themselves all that the “Prince of the Apostles” would claim, were he living on through the centuries. They fuse into one great idea the spiritual prerogatives of their founder and the legal supremacy of Rome over the whole Empire. Rome can be second to none; St. Peter is the first among his brethren. If the Churches of the world ever came into the form of a confederation or a Hierarchy, and they tended to do so from their earliest days, the Roman Church would of necessity be supreme.

As we see in Clement, the old and deeply-ingrained conception of law and order, which is distinctively Roman, had passed over at once into the Christian mind. These converts, whether Jews or Pagans, did not indulge in speculation; they started no new philosophy; and such has been the character of the Church in Rome ever since. It dealt with practice, ritual, discipline; it developed a government, not a school like Alexandria; it held aloof from the wide and remarkable effort of the Gnostics, or “Intellectuals,” who attempted during the second century to resolve the tenets of the Gospel into a theosophic romance. The Latin mind neither comprehended nor was drawn to these dreams of an Orientalized Greek fancy. In like manner, as it was averse to the speculations of the philosophers, so was the Roman Church unwilling to narrow the bounds of conformity by a regimen too severe for the multitudes, who were now thronging about its doors. It would not permit an esoteric creed to split up the congregation of the faithful into “enlightened” and “ignorant.” It refused to shut out sinners from its penance, as the unbending Montanists and Novatians demanded. While conservative in doctrine, it exhibited a sagacious largeness in discipline, and while suffering the strongly forensic mind of Tertullian to model its tradition, it neither approved nor condemned the venturesome thought of Origen and the Alexandrian Clement. None of the early Popes were masters or pupils in philosophy; but this negative wisdom counted for not a little in the respect which was paid to them by the subtle and restless East.

Not individual genius, therefore, but an endemic “custom of the City,” acting on a creed not fully developed, and in the strength of what was allowed to be Apostolic tradition, enabled this Church at the center to grow in pre-eminence. It gave no theologians to Christendom; it produced neither monks nor thinkers; in the list of thirty-two Popes before Constantine, there is only a single illustrious name, that of Clement. But with the fourth century we enter on a new era. The Imperial Government takes the cross and begins by its laws and policy to make the Empire Christian. Constantinople is founded; Rome ceases to be the capital. And an interminable succession of quarrels on the philosophy of the Creed, associated forever with the names of Arius, Apollinaris, Macedonius, Nestorius, and Eutyches, rends the East into factions, the Pope looking on from afar, not entangling himself in the nets of metaphysicians, receiving appeals from all sides, sitting umpire in the midst of a theological chaos. Had he played the philosopher, humanly speaking, he might have gone astray. But the Pontifex Maximus was a Roman and a statesman. He left to others the wrangling over terms of Greek art; for him it was enough to insist upon what had been handed down. These gladiatorial displays of logic went on for well-nigh a hundred and seventy years, during which time the only Pope who furnished a statement of any length to the combatants was Leo I.; and his manner is the Roman, sententious and judicial, not argumentative. The Latin language, copious in legal phrase, abounding in the technicalities of ritual, was neither delicate nor flexible enough to express the finer shades of heresy. It was the language of command: strong, plain, and matter of fact. The Eastern Bishops degenerated into sophists; the Roman found himself a ruler in a deserted but always august city.

Though long incorporated with the Empire, Gaul, Spain, and Germany had never exerted the political influence which was a characteristic of the Latin races; nor could they pretend to the charm, or contest the supremacy, of Greek culture. Outlying provinces, on the extreme line of defense, they lay open to attacks from the wandering tribes of the North. At Treves or Milan the Emperor lived in camp; he was at home only in Central Italy, or in the stately Eastern cities, like Nicomedia, which displayed the riches, the polish, and too often the luxurious softness that were an inheritance from classic Hellas. Taken as a whole, the East was compact in its geography, it had boundless resources of wealth, and could draw upon the mountaineers of the Balkans or the Cilician Taurus to recruit its armies; it could even make good use of Goths arid other untamed auxiliaries, without falling a prey to their strong right arm. Considerations such as these weighed with the sagacious but hardly great Emperor Constantine, when he turned the course of the Roman eagles towards the rising sun and left the Eternal City shorn of its crown of dominion. Henceforth, East and West would go their several ways. Europe was to be Latin, Frankish, German, in its political forms; in religion it was to be Papal and Protestant; while the Greeks became more and more Asiatic, and detested their Christian brethren, the Franks, almost as deeply as they feared the armed disciples of Mohammed.

Modern historians have seen in the founding of Constantinople (330 A.D.) a necessary sequel to the Edict of Toleration, published from Milan in 313, by which the Christian Faith was made one of the religiones licitæ. The Emperor could not have laid the foundation of his new Church and State on the Palatine, which was still the headquarters of Paganism. Arguments, these, of politicians, plausible enough; but in the Middle Ages legend threw the motives of Constantine into a picturesque and gruesome story, to the glorification of Pope Silvester and the Holy Apostles. Leprosy, that mysterious and almost sacred disease, had laid its taint upon the Emperor; he was tempted to cleanse himself in a bath of children’s blood; when Silvester, warned in a dream, stepped between him and this awful experiment; persuaded him to descend into the waters of baptism; and brought him out thence, purified like Naaman in body and soul. Hereupon, Constantine made over to the Pontiff Rome and Italy, with the Islands of the West. He established the Pope where Augustus had reigned, gave him the tokens and state of royalty, and withdrew from the Holy Place. This was the Donation of Constantine, as first told in the eighth century, and believed down to the end of the fifteenth.

It is a prophecy after the event. Paganism, abandoned and soon to be persecuted by its Pontifex Maximus, without the conviction that makes martyrs, and long a hollow formality, was dying. Christians had the State in their hands. What was more, they showed the fiery zeal, the proselytizing spirit, the exuberance in quarrels among themselves, which are signs of a youth rich in hopes, bent upon shaping its own victorious future. Heathen Rome invited them to subdue it. Public policy required that the center of administration should be at the heart of the Empire. The balance of power was displaced. Neither Pope Silvester nor any Pope for centuries dreamt of disowning the Imperial rule; from the Goths in Italy they suffered grievous things as the first subjects of Constantinople. But Rome left to itself was Rome in the hands of the Papacy, fronting the West and the Barbarians. Constantine had imitated Alexander the Great, who, in setting up his throne at Babylon in 330 B.C.—a curious coincidence—and assuming the tiara, left Europe free to follow its own fortunes. Such was the real Donation, not understood at the time by Pope or Emperor, which never lost its force until the Northern nations grew into a world as rich, as cultivated, and as haughtily self-conscious, as the Greek.

Paganism, it may be briefly said, was to furnish Roman Christianity with many of its holiday or outward shows. And the strange phenomena of heresy were to bring to light its powers of government, which, used at the beginning in disputes of local churches or contending sects, were afterwards applied to provinces and kingdoms. The Pope, we have seen, did not affect a speculative genius; he administered rule—a busy and extensive rule in so frequented a place as Rome—according to the tradition of the first age; he would never hear of innovations on the Creed. “Let there be none such, but only what has been delivered,” said Pope Stephen in a quaint phrase to Cyprian (254 A.D.). Now the heretical movement, dating chiefly from Antioch and the Syrian literalists, was an endeavor to lighten the difficulties of the Creed by bringing down its “mysteries” to the capacity of human thought; a process at all times foreign to the spirit of Rome. For Rome, as Döllinger says, “took the world ready-made.” It would not vex itself with philosophic inquiries, whether in its former heathen or its present Christian stage. In discipline it was accommodating, in dogma inflexible, and this from of old. When, therefore, conservative Easterns, such as the unconquerable Athanasius, the golden-mouthed Chrysostom, or the violent Cyril, looked round for help in their struggle with the party of Rationalism, it was a matter of course that they should appeal to Rome. And Rome stood by them. The Pope was at a safe distance from Court; he could not easily be taken or sent into banishment; his unswerving attitude, by which he seemed only to be maintaining that which had always been the rule, made him respected in an age when Bishops lost their dignity by engaging in hot and acrimonious disputes. It is significant that the three Popes who have proved embarrassing to Roman apologists—Liberius, Vigilius, and Honorius—were all charged with innovation. There was never any danger in holding to what had been received. Hence the Popes, unlike the Eastern Fathers, do not meet the arguments of heretics with counter-arguments; they decide, but they decline to reason the matter out. They attend no Councils, if they can help it, away from the Lateran. The only creeds which they approve are those of Nicæa in 325 and of Constantinople in 381. Pope Cœlestine imposes on the Council of Ephesus (431) his own judgment by the imperious hands of Cyril; the session begins and ends in a summer’s day. Leo the Great sends his “Tome,” which is by no means a treatise, to Chalcedon (451), and with the open assistance of Emperor and Empress compels six hundred Bishops to accept it. In a later controversy, Hormisdas (519), relying on the secular arm, makes his creed law throughout the length and breadth of Asia; it is subscribed, or acquiesced in, by perhaps two thousand five hundred Bishops.

But all the writings on divinity of the Roman Pontiffs down to Gregory the Great would not fill a volume of considerable size. Even where they approve, they content themselves with as few words as possible. Contrast the folios of Augustine, to whom they were benignant, with what Innocent, Zosimus, and Cœlestine did not write, on a subject so momentous as that of grace and free will. To others they resigned the task of explaining or defending Christian truth by methods adapted to the intellect. They put down heresy by cutting off the heretic from their communion. In this way, Rome exercised the functions of a Supreme Court of Appeal, and its judgments anticipated those of the General Councils, which were held in the Emperor’s presence or that of his lieutenant.

We cannot describe the Popes of the fourth century as men of rare personal qualities. One of them, Damasus (367-384), has some features, in his tumultuous election and his worldly pomp, which forecast the days of Avignon or the Renaissance. Another, Siricius, who followed him immediately, is the first of whom we possess any genuine Decretal, as the letters were styled that the Roman Chancery sent to Bishops on points concerning which its opinion was asked. Yet the Church was steadily mounting towards pre-eminence. The Latin Fathers—this is their golden age—could not but magnify it by their character, their eloquence, and their achievements. Even Cyprian, who a hundred years earlier had quarreled vehemently with Rome, “did far more,” says Milman, “to advance her power by the primacy which he assigned to St. Peter, than he impaired it by his steady and disdainful repudiation of her authority, whenever it was brought to the test of submission.”

But Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (375-398), was the most saintly of Western prelates—a true Roman born out of due time—and his reverence for the Apostolic See, during a long pontificate, summed itself up in the famous expression, imitated from the legists, “Where is Peter, there is the Church.” On this classic sentence the policy of excommunication, interdict, and even deposition—which is the story of the Middle Ages—may be made to depend. The language of Jerome (342-420), most learned, lively, and provoking of the Fathers, is identical; and he who smiles at the frivolous elegance of Damasus or his clerics, yet cries out to him, “I am with thy blessedness, that is, with the Chair of Peter.” When he undertakes his immortal work, the translation of the Bible, it is with the approval of the same Pope; and the Vulgate, which was the Scripture of the West for nearly twelve hundred years, might almost be reckoned among the genuine Decretals. Then came Augustine (354-430), whose inexhaustible fertility in dispute never drew him into controversy with Rome, though his deep or ingenious commentaries on received doctrine were, in the great break-up which we call the Reformation, turned against her by those most resolute enemies, Luther, Calvin, and Jansenius. But Augustine did more than all the Fathers to lift up the Papacy as on a visible height—to idealize it as the new Jerusalem and the Christian Sion—when he put forth his vision of the City of God. There was no place known to men except Rome which could fulfil so large and sovereign a mission; and that some distinct sanctuary it must be, the Middle Ages would have asserted no less confidently than the Greeks, who beheld the temple of the Sun, not in the open sky above them, but on the island of Delos or in the mountain-gorges of Delphi.

Marcus Aurelius, the crowned philosopher and Stoic (161-180), had in a touching apostrophe made invocation to the “dear City of God,” which was to embrace all mankind. At that very time Christians were beginning to define their own society as the “Catholic Church,” and to oppose against the multitude of Gnostic rites its mystic and divine unity. It was impossible that converts from heathenism should lose the sentiment, universal since Augustus, that Rome was the sacred capital of a world-wide civilization, the meeting-place of all worships, and the center of religion. This great idea can never have died out. Nor would it fail to be kept alive by the progress of the new creed, since it spread from the Imperial cities to their dependencies, and the Roman Province became the Metropolitan circle, with bishops occupying the rank of prefects, or subordinate to them, on the lines of the civil organization. The primitive Church was the Empire taken a second time, but for spiritual and heavenly purposes. In every metropolis, says Bingham (whose evidence has stood the test of modern research), as there was a magistrate over the magistrates of each city, so there was a Bishop over the local bishops. That arrangement the Council of Nicæa confirmed. Constantine had new modelled the Empire. This first of the General Councils (325) acknowledged, in accordance with his dispositions, three great Patriarchates—Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. The Bishop of Rome, it observes in its sixth Canon, already exercised his rights over “the Suburbican churches,” which are understood to mean the churches of the “Diocese of Italy.” What the Popes did actually claim, as time went on, was a supreme right of interference in the “Prefectures” of Italy, in the two Gauls, which included Spain, and in Eastern Illyricum. Besides these particular jurisdictions, of which the last was frequently contested, they held, as appears from Athanasius, who cites a letter of Julius I. to this effect, that it was against the tradition to assemble councils and proceed to grave resolutions without their concurrence. All this betokens a close and increasing communion among the different local bodies of Christians. It is the old Roman vision of a world-empire expanding and realizing itself as a Catholic Church, which if not yet governed by a Supreme Head, was by all its institutions calling for one.

The division of the Empire, which followed on Constantine’s death, gave this problem a fresh turn. Of the Easterns it must be said, in general, that they were Erastians, if we may apply the language of the seventeenth century to the fourth. In the Emperor they owned a Divine right of superintending the Church; he was a kind of lay Bishop, and it was impossible to say where his power ended. The secular arm executed the decrees of Councils, drove heretics into exile, and through all the controversies which tore Christendom wielded the sword of the Lord. It seemed a conclusion from this Old Testament view that the Imperial city ought to share in its master’s prerogatives. Constantinople, which as Byzantium had been the suffragan of Heraclea, would not submit to be reckoned among the inferior churches. It aspired to independence; and though it dared not vie with “Old Rome” at first, it elbowed aside not only Antioch but the ever-orthodox Alexandria, and boldly insisted on taking the second place. Nor, as was shown in the sequel, did it pause when that was attained. Its Patriarch, John the Faster, wrote himself “Universal Bishop” in 590. His successors are still denominated “Œcumenical,” which is the title he usurped; but neither they nor he establish their claim on a direct descent from one of the Apostles. The ground taken was frankly political; the city of the Emperor must be supreme.

In two General Councils, one held within the walls of Constantinople (381), the other in sight of its towers and palaces at Chalcedon (451), this demand was formulated as a Canon, or rule of law. The Popes, without losing a moment, raised the cry of alarm. They felt the danger which this Erastian principle would bring on their own policy of independence and freedom. Damasus, in a statement which might have been dictated by Hildebrand, asserts emphatically the idea to be henceforward echoed in every tone by the Apostolic See. To the temporal greatness of the Empire he opposes (381) the voice of the Lord Himself, who has given to Rome the primacy in Peter. It owes nothing to synods; it is above all other Churches, because of the text in the Gospels. Even Alexandria is “the second See,” as being “consecrated in the name of Peter,” through his disciple, Mark the Evangelist; on a like account Antioch is honorable, “for Peter took up his abode there, before he came to Rome.”

In these declarations, and in the acts to which they were an answer, we note the beginnings of the great schism that has divided the East from the West. Constantinople is Erastian; Pope Damasus is Ultramontane. The answer to Constantinople was the Papal Monarchy.

Disputes concerning precedence among Bishops may seem the vainest of quarrels; but we cannot fail to perceive that the races of men and the systems of philosophy extant within the Roman Empire were struggling here mightily against one another, like the winds on the great sea in Daniel’s vision. Egypt had been from of old the home of a mystical and ascetic religion, of which Neo-Platonism and the Christian teachers had borrowed as much as they would. Antioch and its vast dependencies were now covered with schools, in which the Greek spirit of reasoning and contention exercised full sway. To this side Constantinople was drawn by the habits of its indolent population; but though they welcomed a Syrian of genius, like St. John Chrysostom, in their Archbishop’s chair, they would not submit to rank below a provincial city on the Orontes. And Rome, which was neither given with the Egyptians to ecstatic dreaming, nor involved in the subtle syllogisms of the Asian Greeks, but which held fast by law and tradition, sided now with one of these parties and now with another, as the interests of orthodox government demanded. The history of the fifth and sixth Centuries does but exhibit the three Eastern capitals weakening one another by internecine wranglings, with their accompaniments of riot and persecution, until Syria and Egypt lay defenseless before Islam, and Constantinople trembled within her sea-girt fortifications. By the time of Gregory the Great, the two Patriarchal Churches associated with the name of St. Peter had almost run their course. Rome was left as the sole Apostolic See, founded on the rock.

We may watch this conception growing ever more luminous in the utterances of the Pontiffs themselves. It was to be strenuously acted upon, after the taking of Rome by Alaric, in matters of Church government as of dogmatic teaching, when Innocent I., Cœlestine, and Leo the Great displayed their conviction that in them and through them the Prince of the Apostles ruled. Innocent (402-417) declared that all the Churches of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Sicily had been founded by Peter and his successors; it was incumbent on them to follow the “use” of Rome. He reminds the Bishops of Macedonia that they must send an account of their proceedings to the “head of the Churches.” He takes the part of Chrysostom; excommunicates the usurper of his See, Acacius; is urgent against the Donatist schism in Africa; condemns Pelagius, who brings into the fifth century such a modern air of “Naturalism”; and strives to enforce upon the prelates at Carthage the power of receiving appeals which he grounds on the Canons of Nicæa. He was met, in this instance, with a counter- claim for verification; the Canons (real or interpolated) were those of a Latin assembly at Sardica, now Sophia, in Bulgaria. But they took their place in the Corpus Juris, and helped, like the ever-growing pile of Decretals, to furnish precedents on which the medieval lopes were ready to act iii every part of Christendom.

The fall of Rome in 410 was the destruction of Paganism. As a public religion it disappeared no less completely than the Jewish rites and sacrifices oil the burning of the Temple. Innocent had saved the Basilicas of the Apostles from profanation, and Alaric remained only three days in the city. But, henceforth, sacred ceremonies, popular festivals, and tile great days in the Calendar must all be Christian. The prefect of Rome was a shadow of the impotent Honorius, cowering behind the marshes and walls of Ravenna. But the Popes in their Lateran palace, given them by Constantine, lived amongst the busiest throngs of the ancient Capital, which until the fires kindled by Robert Guiscard and his Normans (1085) spread out round the Palatine, Cælian, and Esquiline Hills. It was the duty of the Pontiff, as it had formerly been of the Emperor, to feed the people in seasons of famine; to make good the losses occasioned by earthquakes, conflagrations, risings of the Tiber, invasions of Goths or Vandals; to preside at the crowded Church festivals, which took the place of gladiatorial sports, abolished at this time; and to do what in them lay as mediators between the people and their conquerors. Alaric had besieged Rome three times; Italy was soon to be threatened by, the strange figure of Attila the Hun (449), famous iii history as the Scourge of God and in medieval poetry as Etzel, the hero of the Nibelung Epic. In 455 Genseric the Vandal took and plundered the city. Yet these reiterated misfortunes did but enhance the Papal greatness; since, whatever mercy was shown amid the prevailing cruelty, the faithful attributed it with Augustine to the power of the Christian name; and Innocent, but much more Leo, might take the credit of it as granted to the Holy Apostles at their intercession.

While, therefore, the Bishops of Constantinople were failing, like Nestorius, into heresy, or suffering deposition and exile; and while Alexandria was disgraced by furious partisans like Theophilus, or miscreants of the stamp of Dioscorus and his Monophysite successors, the Roman dynasty grew in strength, acquired influence with foreign and even hostile nations, absorbed into itself the renown of the Eternal City, and looked forward to subduing the whole West by missionary enterprise. Cœlestine (422-432), the Pope who put down Pelagius and the Pelagians in Africa, and who withstood their intrigues at the Imperial Court, was the same mail that ordered the deposition of Nestorius at Ephesus, and is said to have dispatched Palladius, as afterwards he sent St. Patrick, to preach the gospel in Ireland. Such missions were Roman in their language, liturgy, Canon Law, and cast of civilization. They as truly implied a conquest to the legislation of the Church, as Caæsar’s victorious campaigns in Gaul had brought with them the sovereignty of what was by and by denominated the Jus Civile over the vanquished barbarians. What was now attempted in the farthest Western Isle would be successfully carried out with the Franks before the century ended; with the Angles and Saxons a hundred years later; and at length with Germans, Danes, Norsemen, Wends, Poles, and Hungarians. The Papacy looked west and north. Its inheritance came to it from the old world; but during the next nine hundred years it appears in Europe as the principle of progress, expansion, assimilation, and novelty, disguised under the outward forms of law, which was continually enlarging its bounds by precedent.