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Title: The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI
       The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I


Author: Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies



Release Date: June 28, 2009  [eBook #29268]

Language: English

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THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS

FROM ST. LEO I. TO ST. GREGORY I.

by

THOMAS W. ALLIES, K.C.S.G.

Author of the "Formation Of Christendom"; "Church and State As Seen
in the Formation of Christendom"; "The Throne of the Fisherman";
"A Life's Decision"; and "Per Crucem Ad Lucem"







London: Burns & Oates, Limited
New York: Catholic Publication Society Co.
1888




THE LETTERS OF THE POPES AS SOURCES OF HISTORY.


Cardinal Mai has left recorded his judgment that, "in matter of fact, the
whole administration of the Church is learnt in the letters of the
Popes".[1]

I draw from this judgment the inference that of all sources for the truths
of history none are so precious, instructive, and authoritative as these
authentic letters contemporaneous with the persons to whom they are
addressed. The first which has been preserved to us is that of Pope St.
Clement, the contemporary of St. Peter and St. Paul. It is directed to the
Church of Corinth for the purpose of extinguishing a schism which had there
broken out. In issuing his decision the Pope appeals to the Three Divine
Persons to bear witness that the things which he has written "are written
by us through the Holy Spirit," and claims obedience to them from those to
whom he sends them as words "spoken by God through us".[2]

If the decisions of the succeeding Popes in the interval of nearly two
hundred and fifty years between this letter of St. Clement, about the year
95, and the great letter of St. Julius to the Eusebianising bishops at
Antioch in 342, had been preserved entire, the constitution of the Church
in that interval would have shone before us in clear light. In fact, we
only possess a few fragments of some of these decisions, for there was a
great destruction of such documents in the persecution which occupied the
first decade of the fourth century. But from the time of Pope Siricius, in
the reign of the great Theodosius, a continuous, though not a perfect,
series of these letters stretches through the succeeding ages. There is no
other such series of documents existing in the world. They throw light upon
all matters and persons of which they treat. This is a light proceeding
from one who lives in the midst of what he describes, who is at the centre
of the greatest system of doctrine and discipline, and legislation grounded
upon both, which the world has ever seen. One, also, who speaks not only
with a great knowledge, but with an unequalled authority, which, in every
case, is like that of no one else, but can even be _supreme_, when it is
directed with such a purpose to the whole Church. Every Pope _can_ speak,
as St. Clement, the first of this series, speaks above, claiming obedience
to his words as "words spoken by God through us".

In a former volume I made large use of the letters of Popes from Siricius
to St. Leo. I have continued that use for the very important period from
St. Leo to St. Gregory. Especially in treating of the Acacian schism I have
gone to the letters of the Popes who had to deal with it--Simplicius,
Felix III., Gelasius, Anastasius II., Symmachus, and Hormisdas. I have done
the same for the important reign of Justinian; most of all for the grand
pontificate of St. Gregory, which crowns the whole patristic period and
sums up its discipline.

I am, therefore, indebted in this volume, first and chiefly, to the letters
of the Popes and the letters addressed to them by emperors and bishops,
stored up in Mansi's vast collection of Councils (1759, 31 volumes). I am
also much indebted to Cardinal Hergenroether's work _Photius, sein Leben,
und das griechische Schisma_, and to his _Handbuch der allgemeinen
Kirchengeschichte_, as the number of quotations from him will show. Again,
I may mention the two histories of the city of Rome, by Reumont and
Gregorovius, as most valuable. I acknowledge many obligations to Riffel's
_Geschichtliche Darstellung des Verhaeltnisses zwischen Kirche und Staat_,
with regard to the legislation of Justinian. The edition of Justinian
referred to by me is Heimbach's _Authenticum_, Leipsic, 1851. I have
consulted Hefele's _Conciliengeschichte_ where need was. I have found
Kurth's _Origines de la Civilisation moderne_ instructive. I have used the
carefully emended and supplemented German edition of Roehrbacher's history,
by various writers--Rump and others. St. Gregory is quoted from the
Benedictine edition.

As these works are indicated in the notes as they occur with the single
name of the author, I have given here their full titles.

The present volume is the sixth of the _Formation of Christendom_, though
it has a special title indicating the particular part of that general
subject which it treats. I have, therefore, added to the numbering of the
chapters in the Table of Contents the number which they hold in the whole
work.

  _September 11, 1888._

NOTES:

[1] _Nova Patrum bibliotheca_, p. vi.: In Pontificum reapse epistolis tota
ecclesiae administratio cognoscitur.

[2] See p. 351 below; also _Church and State_, pp. 198-200, for the full
statement of this passage.




  TABLE OF CONTENTS.


  CHAPTER I. (XLIII.).

  THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS.

                                                                   PAGE

  Introduction. Connection with Volume V. St. Leo's action,           1

  Denial of the Primacy as acknowledged at Chalcedon
  suicidal on the part of those who believe in the Church,            3

  Subject of this volume as compared with the fifth,                  5

  The second wonder in human history,                                 6

  The acknowledgment of the Primacy and the political
  powerlessness of the city of Rome coeval,                           6

  The three hundred years from Genseric to Astolphus,                 9

  St. Leo in Rome after Genseric,                                    10

  Political condition of Rome. Avitus emperor, 455-6,                13

  Majorian emperor, 457-461,                                         14

  Death of Pope Leo; changes seen by him in his life,                15

  Hilarus Pope and Libius Severus emperor, 461-465,                  16

  The over-lordship of Byzantium admitted in the choice of
  the Greek Anthemius as emperor, 467,                               18

  Sidonius Apollinaris an eye-witness of Rome's splendour,
  subjection to Byzantium, and unchanged habits in 467,              19

  Anthemius murdered and Rome plundered by Ricimer, 472,             20

  Olybrius emperor, 472; Ricimer and Olybrius die of the
  plague,                                                            20

  Glycerius emperor, 473; Nepos, 474; Romulus Augustulus, 475,       21

  The senate declares to the eastern emperor that an emperor
  of the West is needless,                                           22

  The twenty-one years' death-agony of imperial Rome,                23

  State of the western provinces since the death of Theodosius I.,   24

  The first and the second victory of the Church,                    25

  The effect produced by the wandering of the nations,               26

  The Visigoth and Ostrogoth migrations,                             27

  Gaul overrun by Teuton invaders,                                   28

  Arianism propagated by the Goths among the other tribes,           29

  Burgundian kingdom of Lyons. Spain overrun,                        30

  The Vandals in North Africa and their persecution of Catholics,    31

  The Hunnish inroads,                                               33

  All the western provinces under Teuton governments,                35

  Odoacer and Theodorick,                                            36

  Odoacer succeeded by Theodorick after the capture of Ravenna,      38

  The character of Theodorick's reign,                               39

  His fairness towards the Roman Church and Pontiff,                 40

  The contrast between Theodorick and Clovis,                        42

  The dictum of Ataulph on the Roman empire,                         43

  Ataulph and Theodorick represent the better judgments of
  the invaders,                                                      44

  The outlook of Pope Simplicius at Rome over the western provinces, 45

  And over the eastern empire,                                       46

  Basiliscus and Zeno the first theologising emperors,               47

  How the races descending on the empire had become Arian,           49

  The point of time when the Church was in danger of losing
  all which she had gained,                                          50

  How the division of the empire called out the Primacy,             51

  How the extinction of the western empire does so yet more,         53

  How the Pope was the sole fixed point in a transitional world,     54

  Guizot's testimony,                                                55

  What St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and St. Leo did not foresee,
  which we behold,                                                   57


  CHAPTER II. (XLIV.).

  CAESAR FELL DOWN.

  Great changes in the Roman State following the time of St. Leo,    59

  Nature of the succession in the Caesarean throne, and then
  in the Byzantine,                                                  61

  Personal changes in the Popes and eastern emperors,                62

  Gennadius succeeds Anatolius, and Acacius succeeds Gennadius
  in the see of Constantinople,                                      64

  Acacius resists the Encyclikon of Basiliscus,                      65

  Letter of Pope Simplicius to the emperor Zeno,                     66

  Advancement of Acacius by Zeno,                                    69

  Acacius induces Zeno to publish a formulary of doctrine,           70

  John Talaia, elected patriarch of Alexandria, appeals for
  support to Pope Simplicius,                                        70

  Pope Felix sends an embassy to the emperor,                        71

  His letter to Zeno,                                                72

  His letter to Acacius,                                             73

  His legates arrested, imprisoned, robbed, and seduced,             74

  Pope Felix synodically deposes Acacius,                            75

  Enumerates his misdeeds in the sentence,                           76

  Synodal decrees in Italy signed by the Pope alone,                 78

  Letter of Pope Felix to Zeno setting forth the condemnation
  of Acacius,                                                        79

  The condition of the Pope when he thus wrote,                      81

  How Acacius received the Pope's condemnation,                      83

  The position which Acacius thereupon took up,                      84

  The greatness of the bishop of Constantinople identified
  with the greatness of his city,                                    84

  The humiliations of Rome witnessed by Acacius,                     86

  How the Pope, under these humiliations, spoke to Acacius
  and to the emperor,                                                88

  The Pope on the one side, Acacius on the other, represent
  an absolute contradiction,                                         89

  Eudoxius and Valens matched by Acacius and Zeno,                   92

  Death of Acacius, and estimate of him by three contemporaries,     93

  Fravita, succeeding Acacius, seeks the Pope's recognition,         93

  Letters of the emperor and Fravita to the Pope, and his
  answers,                                                           94

  The position taken by Acacius not maintained by Zeno and
  Fravita,                                                           96

  Nor by Euphemius, who succeeds Fravita,                            96

  Euphemius suspects and resists the new emperor Anastasius,         97

  Condition of the Empire and the Church at the accession of
  Pope Gelasius in 492,                                              98

  The "libellus synodicus" on the emperor Anastasius,               100

  With whom the four Popes--Gelasius, Anastasius, Symmachus,
  and Hormisdas--have to deal,                                      101

  Euphemius, writing to the Pope, acknowledges him to be
  successor of St. Peter,                                           103

  Gelasius replies to Euphemius, insisting on the repudiation
  of Acacius,                                                       104

  Absolute obedience of the Illyrian bishops professed to the
  Apostolic See,                                                    105

  Gelasius shows that the canons make the First See supreme
  judge of all,                                                     106

  Says that the bishop of Constantinople holds no rank among
  bishops,                                                          107

  Praises bishops who have resisted the wrongdoings of temporal
  rulers,                                                           108

  The Holy See, in virtue of its Principate, confirms every
  Council,                                                          109

  Gelasius in 494 defines to the emperor the domain of the
  Two Powers,                                                       110

  And the subordination of the temporal ruler in spiritual things,  111

  The words of Gelasius have become the law of the Church,          113

  The emperor Anastasius deposes Euphemius by the Resident
  Council,                                                          114

  Pope Gelasius, in a council of seventy bishops at Rome,
  sets forth the divine institution of the Primacy,                 115

  And the order of the three Patriarchal Sees,                      115

  And three General Councils--the Nicene, Ephesine, and
  Chalcedonic,                                                      115

  Denies to the see of Constantinople any rank beyond that
  of an ordinary bishop, and omits the Council of 381,              116

  Death of Pope Gelasius and character of his pontificate,          118

  His own description of the time in which he lived,                118


  CHAPTER III. (XLV.).

  PETER STOOD UP.

  Pope Anastasius: his letter to the emperor Anastasius,            120

  He makes the Pope's position in the Church parallel with
  that of the emperor in the world,                                 121

  He writes to Clovis on his conversion,                            122

  St. Gregory of Tours notes the prosperity of Catholic kingdoms
  and the decline of Arian in the West,                             123

  Letter of St. Avitus, bishop of Vienne, to Clovis on his
  baptism,                                                          124

  He recognises the vast importance of the professing the
  Catholic faith by Clovis,                                         125

  And the duty of Clovis to propagate the faith in peoples around,  126

  How the words of St. Avitus to Clovis were fulfilled in history,  127

  The election of Pope Symmachus traversed by the emperor's agent,  128

  His letter termed "Apologetica" to the eastern emperor,           129

  The imperial and papal power compared,                            131

  The papal and the sovereign power the double permanent
  head of human society,                                            133

  Emperors wont to acknowledge Popes on their accession,            134

  Inferences to be deduced from this letter,                        135

  The answer of the emperor Anastasius is to stir up a fresh
  schism at Rome,                                                   136

  The Synodus Palmaris, without judging the Pope, declares
  him free from all charge,                                         137

  Letter of the bishop of Vienne to the Roman senate upon
  this Council,                                                     139

  The cause of the Bishop of Rome is not that of one bishop,
  but of the Episcopate itself,                                     140

  Words of Ennodius, bishop of Pavia, embodied in the act
  of the Roman Council of 503,                                      142

  Result of the attack of the emperor on the Pope is the recording
  in black and white that the First See is judged by no man,        143

  The eastern Church under the emperor Anastasius,                  143

  He deposes Macedonius as well as Euphemius,                       144

  Both these bishops of Byzantium failed to resist his despotism,   147

  Eastern bishops address Pope Symmachus to succour them,           148

  Pope Hormisdas succeeds Symmachus in 514,                         149

  His instruction to the legates sent to Constantinople,            150

  The bishop of Constantinople presents all bishops to the
  emperor,                                                          157

  The conditions for reunion made by Pope Hormisdas,                158

  The treacherous conduct of the emperor,                           159

  Hormisdas describes Greek diplomacy,                              160

  The Syrian Archimandrites supplicate the Pope for help,           161

  Sudden death of the emperor Anastasius,                           162

  The emperor Justin's election and antecedents,                    162

  He notifies his accession to the Pope,                            163

  The Pope holds a council and sends an embassy to Constantinople,  164

  The bishop, clergy, and emperor accept the terms of the Pope,     165

  The formulary of union signed by them,                            167

  The report of the legates to the Pope,                            169

  The emperor Justin's letter to the Pope,                          170

  Character of the period 455-519,                                  171

  Political state of the East and West most perilous to the
  Church,                                                           172

  The Popes under Odoacer and Theodorick,                           173

  How Acacius took advantage of the political situation,            174

  The meaning and range of his attempt,                             175

  The Pope from 476 onwards rests solely upon his Apostolate,       176

  The seven Popes who succeed St. Leo,                              179

  The seven bishops who succeed Anatolius at Constantinople,        180

  The eastern emperors in this time,                                182

  The state of the eastern patriarchates, Alexandria and Antioch,   184

  The waning of secular Rome reveals the power of the Pontificate,  185

  The Popes alone preserved the East from the Eutychean heresy,     185

  The position of St. Leo maintained by the seven following Popes,  186

  The submission to Hormisdas an act of the "undivided" Church,     187

  The adverse circumstances which developed the Pope's Principate,  188


  CHAPTER IV. (XLVI.).

  JUSTINIAN.

  Sequel in Justinian of the submission to Pope Hormisdas,          189

  His acknowledgment of the Primacy to Pope John II. in 533,        190

  Reply of Pope John II. confirming the confession sent to
  him by Justinian,                                                 191

  The _Pandects_ of Justinian issued in the same year,              192

  Close interweaving of ecclesiastical and temporal interests,      193

  Interference with the freedom of the papal election by the
  temporal ruler,                                                   194

  Letter of Cassiodorus as Praetorian prefect to Pope John II.,      195

  Justinian all his reign acknowledged the Primacy of the Pope,     196

  His character, purposes, and actions,                             196

  Succeeds his uncle the emperor Justin I.,                         198

  Great political changes coeval with his succession,               199

  He reconquers Northern Africa by Belisarius,                      199

  The Catholic bishops of Africa meet again in General Council,     200

  They send an embassy to consult Pope John II.,                    201

  Pope Agapetus notes their reference to the Apostolic Principate,  202

  Great renown of Justinian at the reconquest of Africa,            203

  Pope Agapetus at Constantinople deposes its bishop,               204

  Justinian begins the Gothic War. Belisarius enters Rome,          205

  He is welcomed as restorer of the empire,                         206

  The empress Theodora deposes Pope Silverius by Belisarius,        207

  First siege of Rome by Vitiges,                                   210

  The mausoleum of Hadrian stripped of its statues,                 211

  Vitiges, having lost half his army, raises the siege,             213

  Belisarius, having reconquered Italy, is recalled for the war
  with Persia,                                                      214

  Totila, elected Gothic king, renews the war,                      214

  Visits St. Benedict at Monte Cassino, and is warned by him,       215

  Second siege of Rome by Totila,                                   216

  Rome taken by Totila in 546,                                      216

  Third capture of Rome by Belisarius, in 547,                      217

  Fourth capture of Rome by Totila, in 549,                         218

  Totila defeated and killed by Narses at Taginas,                  219

  Fifth capture of Rome by Narses, in 552,                          220

  End of the Gothic war, in 555,                                    221

  Its effect on the civil condition of the Pope, Italy, and Rome,   222

  The sufferings of Rome from assailants and defenders,             223

  The new test of papal authority applied by these events,          225

  Vigilius, having become legitimate Pope, is sent for by
  Justinian,                                                        226

  Church proceedings at Constantinople after the death of
  Pope Agapetus,                                                    227

  The patriarch Mennas, in conjunction with the emperor,
  consecrates at Constantinople a patriarch of Alexandria,          228

  The Origenistic struggle in the eastern empire,                   229

  Justinian theologising,                                           230

  The whole East urged to consent to his edict on doctrine,         231

  Pope Vigilius, summoned by Justinian, enters Constantinople,      232

  After long conferences with emperor and bishops he issues
  a Judgment,                                                       234

  The Pope and emperor agree upon holding a General Council,        235

  The emperor's despotism, and the bishops crouching before it,     236

  The Pope takes sanctuary, and is torn away from the altar,        237

  Flies to the church at Chalcedon,                                 238

  The bishops relent, and the Pope returns to Constantinople,       239

  Eutychius, succeeding Mennas, proposes a council under
  presidency of the Pope,                                           239

  The emperor causes it to meet under Eutychius without the Pope,   240

  Proceedings of the Council. The Pope declines their invitation,   241

  Close of the Council, without the Pope's presence,                242

  The Pope issues a Constitution apart from the Council,            242

  Also a condemnation of the Three Chapters without mention
  of the Council,                                                   243

  The Pope on his way back to Rome dies at Syracuse,                244

  The patriarch Eutychius, refusing to sign a doctrinal decree
  of Justinian, is deposed by the Resident Council,                 244

  Justinian issues his Pragmatic Sanction for government of Italy,  245

  State of things following in Italy,                               246

  Justinian's conception of the relation between Church and State,  248

  He gives to the decrees of Councils and to the canons the
  force of law,                                                     250

  Three leading principles in these enactments,                     251

  The State completely recognises the Church's whole constitution,  251

  The episcopal idea thoroughly realised,                           253

  Concurrent action of the laws of Church and State herein,         254

  Justinian further associated bishops with the civil government,   255

  The part given to them in civil administration,                   256

  A system of mutual supervision in bishops and governors,          257

  The branches of civil matters specially put under bishops,        259

  The completeness and the cordiality of the alliance with
  the Church,                                                       261

  Which differentiates Justinian's attitude from that of
  modern governments,                                               262

  In what Justinian was a true maintainer of the imperial idea,     264

  The dark blot which lies upon Justinian,                          267

  How he passed from the line of defence to that of interference
  and mastery,                                                      269

  The result, spiritual and temporal, of Justinian's reign,         270


  CHAPTER V. (XLVII.).

  ST. GREGORY THE GREAT.

  The state of Rome as a city after the prefecture of Narses,       272

  Contrast of Nova Roma,                                            274

  The Rome of the Church a new city,                                275

  St. Gregory's antecedents as prefect, monk, nuncio, and
  deacon of the Roman Church,                                       276

  Elected Pope against his will. His description of his work,       278

  And of the time's calamity,                                       279

  The utter misery of Rome expressed in the words of Ezechiel,      281

  Contrast between the language used of Rome by St. Leo
  and St. Gregory,                                                  283

  St. Gregory closes his preaching in St. Peter's, overcome
  with sorrow,                                                      284

  The works of St. Gregory out of this Rome,                        285

  The Lombard descent on Italy,                                     287

  Rome ransomed from the Lombards, and Monte Cassino destroyed,     290

  The Primacy untouched by the temporal calamities of Rome,         292

  Its unique prerogative brought out by unequalled sufferings,      293

  The new city of Rome lived only by the Primacy,                   294

  St. Gregory's account of the Primacy to the empress Constantina,  295

  He identifies his own authority with that of St. Peter,           296

  Writes to the emperor Mauritius that the union of the Two
  Powers would secure the empire against barbarians,                297

  Claims to the emperor St. Peter's charge over the whole Church,   298

  John the Foster's assumed title on injury to the whole Church,    299

  What St. Gregory infers from the three patriarchal sees
  being all sees of Peter,                                          301

  Contrast drawn by St. Gregory between the Pope's
  Principate and John the Faster's assumed title,                   302

  The fatal falsehood which this title presupposed,                 303

  The opposing truth in the Principate made _de Fide_ by the
  Vatican Council,                                                  306

  St. Leo against Anatolius, and St. Gregory against John the
  Faster, occupy like positions,                                    307

  St. Gregory's title, "Servant of the servants of God," expresses
  the maxim of his government,                                      308

  The fourteen books of St. Gregory's letters range over every
  subject in the whole Church,                                      309

  The special relation between the sees of St. Peter and St. Mark,  311

  Asserts his supremacy to the Lombard queen Theodelinda,           311

  St. Gregory appoints the bishop of Arles to be over the
  metropolitans of Gaul,                                            312

  The venture of St. Gregory in attempting the conversion of
  England,                                                          313

  St. Augustine commended to queen Brunechild and consecrated
  by the bishop of Arles, and the English Church made by Gregory,   315

  Work of St. Gregory in the Spanish Church,                        316

  He relates the martyrdom of St. Hermenegild,                      316

  His letters to St. Leander of Seville,                            317

  Conversion of king Rechared,                                      318

  St. Gregory's letter of congratulation to him,                    318

  Letter of king Rechared informing the Pope of his conversion,     321

  Gibbon's account of the government which was the result
  of Rechared's conversion,                                         322

  The important principles thus consecrated by the Church,          324

  Overthrow of the Arian kingdoms in Africa, Spain, Gaul and
  Italy, between Pope Felix III. and Pope Gregory I.,               325

  The equal failure of Genseric, Euric, Gondebald, and Theodorick,  327

  The part in this which the Catholic bishops had,                  329

  The Spanish monarchy first of many formed by the Church,          331

  Superiority of this government to the Byzantine absolutism,       332

  St. Gregory as fourth doctor of the western Church,               334

  St. Gregory as a chief artificer in the Church's second victory,  335

  Summary of St. Gregory's action as metropolitan patriarch
  and Pope,                                                         337

  Councils held by him in Rome: protection of monks,                338

  His management of the Patrimonium Petri,                          340

  His success with schismatics and heretics,                        341

  The Primacy from St. Leo to St. Gregory,                          342

  The continued rise of the bishop of Constantinople,             343-5

  The political degradation and danger of Rome,                     345

  Long disaster reveals still more the purely spiritual foundation
  of the Primacy,                                                   346

  Testimony given by the disappearance of the Arian governments
  and the conversion of Franks and Saxons,                          347

  The patriarchate of Constantinople imposed by civil law,          348

  The Nicene constitution in the East impaired by despotism
  and heresy,                                                       349

  The persistent defence of this constitution by the Popes,         350

  The Petra Apostolica in the sixty Popes preceding Gregory,        352

  As discerned by Hurter in the time of Pope Innocent III.,         353

  As in the time from Pope Innocent III. to Leo XIII.,              355

  The continuous Primacy from St. Peter to St. Gregory,             355

  As Rome diminishes the Primacy advances,                          356

  The times in which it was exercised by St. Gregory,               358

  The opposing forces which unite to sustain the Petra Apostolica,  359

  INDEX,                                                            361




THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS.




CHAPTER I.

THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS.

    "Rome's ending seemed the ending of a world.
    If this our earth had in the vast sea sunk,
    Save one black ridge whereon I sat alone,
    Such wreck had seemed not greater. It was gone,
    That empire last, sole heir of all the empires,
    Their arms, their arts, their letters, and their laws.
    The fountains of the nether deep are burst,
    The second deluge comes. And let it come!
    The God who sits above the waterspouts
    Remains unshaken."

    --A. DE VERE, _Legends and Records_--"Death of St. Jerome".


I ended the last chapter by drawing out that series of events in the
Church's internal constitution and of changes in the external world of
action outside and independent of the Church which combined in one result
the exhibition to all and the public acknowledgment by the Church of the
Primacy given by our Lord to St. Peter, and continued to his successors in
the See of Rome. I showed St. Leo as exercising this Primacy by annulling
the acts of an Ecumenical Council, the second of Ephesus, legitimately
called and attended by his own legates, because it had denied a tenet of
what St. Leo declared in a letter sent to the bishops and accepted by them
to be the Christian faith upon the Incarnation itself. I showed him
supported by the Church in that annulment, by the eastern episcopate, which
attended the Council of Chalcedon, and by the eastern emperor, Marcian.
Again, I showed him confirming the doctrinal decrees of the Ecumenical
Council of Chalcedon, which followed the Council annulled by him, while he
reversed and disallowed certain canons which had been irregularly passed.
This he did because they were injurious to that constitution of the Church
which had come down from the Apostles to his own time. And this act of his,
also, I showed to be accepted by the bishop of Constantinople, who was
specially affected, and by the eastern emperor, and by the episcopate: and
also that the confirmation of doctrine on the one hand, and the rejection
of canons on the other, were equally accepted. I also showed this great
Council in its Synodical Letter to the Pope acknowledging spontaneously
that very position of the Pope which the Popes had always set forth as the
ground of all the authority which they claimed. The Council of Chalcedon
addressed St. Leo "as entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the
Vine". But the Vine in the universal language of the Fathers betokened the
whole Church of God. And the Council refers the confirmation of its acts to
the Pope in the same document in which it asserts that the guardianship of
the Vine was given to him by the Saviour Himself. This expression, "by the
Saviour Himself," means that it was not given to him by the decree of any
Council representing the Church. It is a full acknowledgment that the
promises made to Peter, and the Pastorship conferred upon him, descended to
his successor in the See of Rome. It is a full acknowledgment; for how else
was St. Leo entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the Vine?
Those who so addressed him were equally bishops with himself; they equally
enjoyed the one indivisible episcopate, "of which a part is held by each
without division of the whole".[3] But this one, beside and beyond that,
was charged with the whole--the Vine itself. This one point is that in
which St. Peter went beyond his brethren, by the special gift and
appointment of the Saviour Himself. The words, then, of the Council contain
a special acknowledgment that the line of Popes after a succession of four
hundred years sat in the person of Leo on the seat of St. Peter, with St.
Peter's one sovereign prerogative.

It is requisite, I think, distinctly to point out that Christians, whoever
they are, provided only that they admit, as confessing belief in any one of
the three creeds, the Apostolic, the Nicene, or the Athanasian, they do
admit, that there is one holy Catholic Church, commit a suicidal act in
denying the Primacy as acknowledged by the Church at the Council of
Chalcedon. For such a denial destroys the authority of the Church herself
both in doctrine and discipline for all subsequent time. If the Church, in
declaring St. Leo to be entrusted by our Lord with the guardianship of the
Vine, erred; if she asserted a falsehood, or if she favoured an usurpation,
how can she be trusted for any maintenance of doctrine, for any
administration of sacraments, for any exercise of authority? This
consideration does not touch those who believe in no Church at all. They
are in the position of that individual whom the great Constantine
recommended to take a ladder and mount to heaven by himself. But it touches
all who profess to believe in an episcopate, in councils, in sacraments, in
an organised Church, in authority deposited in that Church, and, finally,
in history and in historical Christianity. To all such it may surely be
said, as the simplest enunciation of reasoning, that they cannot profess
belief in the Church which the Creed proclaims while they accept or reject
its authority as they please. Or to localise a general expression: A man
does not follow the doctrine of St. Augustine if he accepts his
condemnation of Pelagius, but denies that unity of the Church in
maintaining which St. Augustine spent his forty years of teaching. The
action of all such persons in the eyes of the world without amounts to
this, that by denying the Primacy they disprove the existence of the
Church. Their negation goes to the profit of total unbelief. Asserters of
the Church's division are pioneers of infidelity, for who can believe in
what has fallen? or is the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ a kingdom
divided against itself? They who maintain schism generate agnostics.

But I was prevented on a former occasion by want of space from dwelling
with due force upon some circumstances of St. Leo's life. These are such as
to make his time an era. I was occupied during a whole volume with the
attempt to set forth in some sort the action of St. Peter's See upon the
Greek and Roman world from the day of Pentecost to the complete recognition
of the Universal Pastorship of Peter as inherited by the Roman Pontiff in
the person of St. Leo.

I approach now a further development of this subject. I go forward to treat
of the Papacy, deprived of all temporal support from the fall of the
western empire, taking up the secular capital into a new spiritual Rome,
and creating a Christendom out of the northern tribes who had subverted the
Roman empire.

There is, I think, no greater wonder in human history than the creation of
a hierarchy out of the principle of headship and subordination contained in
our Lord's charge to Peter. It has been pointed out that the constitution
of the Nicene Council itself manifested this principle, and was the proof
of its spontaneous action in the preceding centuries, while its overt
recognition, as seated in the Roman Pontiff, is seen in the pontificate of
St. Leo.

There is a second wonder in human history, on which it is the purpose of
this volume to dwell. The Roman empire, in which the Pax Romana had
provided a mould of widespread civilisation for the Church's growth, was
at length broken up in the western half of it, by Teuton invaders occupying
its provinces. These were all, at the time of their settlement, either
pagan or Arian. There followed, in a certain lapse of time, the creation of
a body of States whose centre of union and belief was the See of Peter.
That is the creation of Christendom proper. The wonder seen is that the
northern tribes, impinging on the empire, and settling on its various
provinces like vultures, became the matter into which the Holy See, guiding
and unifying the episcopate, maintaining the original principle of
celibacy, and planting it in the institute of the religious life through
various countries depopulated or barbarous, infused into the whole mass one
spirit, so that Arians became Catholics, Teuton raiders issued into
Christian kings, savage tribes thrown upon captive provincials coalesced
into nations, while all were raised together into, not a restored empire of
Augustus, but an empire holy as well as Roman, whose chief was the Church's
defender (_advocatus ecclesiae_), whose creator was the Roman Peter.

It is not a little remarkable that this signal recognition by the Fourth
General Council of the Roman Pontiff's authority coincided in time with the
utter powerlessness to which Rome as a city was reduced. That city, on
whose glory as queen of nations and civiliser of the earth her own bishop
had dwelt with all the fondness of a Roman, when, year by year, on the
least of St. Peter and St. Paul, he addressed the assembled episcopate of
Italy, ran twice, in his own time, the most imminent danger of ceasing to
exist. Italy was absolutely without an army to give her strongest cities a
chance of resisting the desolation of Attila. Rome was without a force
raised to save it from the pitiless robbery of Genseric. Without escort,
and defended only by his spiritual character, Leo went forth to appeal
before Attila for mercy to a heathen Mongol. There is no record of what
passed at that interview. Only the result is known. The conqueror, who had
swept with remorseless cruelty the whole country from the Euxine to the
Adriatic Sea, who was now bent upon the seizure of Italy itself, and in his
course had just destroyed Aquileia, was at Mantua marching upon Rome. His
intention was proclaimed to crown all his acts of destruction with that of
Rome. This was the dowry which he proposed to take for the hand of the last
great emperor's granddaughter, proffered to him by the hapless Honoria
herself. At the word of Leo the Scourge of God gave up his prey: he turned
back from Italy, and relinquished Rome, and Leo returned to his seat. In
the course of the next three years he confirmed, at the eastern emperor's
repeated request, the doctrinal decrees of the great Council; but he
humbled likewise the arrogance of Anatolius, and not all the loyalty of
Marcian, not all the devotion of the empress and saint Pulcheria, could
induce him to exalt the bishop of the eastern capital at the expense of the
Petrine hierarchy. But during those same three years he saw, in Rome
itself, Honoria's brother, the grandson of Theodosius, destroy his own
throne, and thereupon the murderer of an emperor compel his widow to
accept him in her husband's place, in the first days of her sorrow. He
saw, further, that daughter of Theodosius and Eudoxia, when she learnt that
the usurper of her husband's throne was likewise his murderer, call in the
Vandal from Carthage to avenge her double dishonour. This was the Rome
which awaited, trembling and undefended, the most profligate of armies, led
by the most cruel of persecutors. Once more St. Leo, stripped of all human
aid, went forth with his clergy on the road to the port by which Genseric
was advancing, to plead before an Arian pirate for the preservation of the
capital of the Catholic faith. He saved his people from massacre and his
city from burning, but not the houses from plunder. For fourteen days Rome
was subject to every spoliation which African avarice could inflict. Again,
no record of that misery has been kept; but the hand of Genseric was
heavier than that of Alaric, in proportion as the Vandal was cruel where
the Ostrogoth was generous. Alaric would have fought for Rome as Stilicho
fought, had he continued to be commanded by that Theodosius who made him a
Roman general; but Genseric was the vilest in soul of all the Teuton
invaders, and for fifty years, during the utter prostration of Roman power,
he infested all the shores of the Mediterranean with the savagery
afterwards shown by Saracen and Algerine.

This second plundering of Rome was no isolated event. It was only the sign
of that utter impotence into which Roman power in the West had fallen. The
city of Rome was the trophy of Caesarean government during five hundred
years--from Julius, the most royal, to Valentinian, the most abject of
emperors. And now its temporal greatness was lost for ever. It ceased to be
the imperial city, but by the same stroke became from the secular a
spiritual capital. The Pope, freed from the western Caesar,[4] gave to the
Caesarean city its second and greater life: a life of another kind
generating also an empire of another sort. The raid of Genseric in the year
455 is the first of three hundred years of warfare carried on from the time
of the Vandal through the time of the Lombard, under the neglect and
oppression of the Byzantine, until, in the year 755, Astolphus, the last,
and perhaps the worst, of an evil brood, laid waste the campagna, and
besieged the city. St. Leo, in his double embassy to Attila and Genseric,
was an unconscious prophet of the time to come, a visible picture of three
hundred years as singular in their conflict and their issue as those other
three hundred which had their close in the Nicene Council. During all those
ages the Pope is never secure in his own city. He sees the trophy of
Caesarean empire slowly perish away. The capital of the world ceases to be
even the capital of a province. The eastern emperor, who still called
himself emperor of the Romans, omitted for many generations even to visit
the city which he had subjected to an impotent but malignant official,
termed an Exarch, who guarded himself by the marshes of Ravenna, but left
Rome to the inroads of the Lombards. The last emperor who deigned to visit
the old capital of his empire came to it only to tear from it the last
relic of imperial magnificence. But then Jerusalem had fallen into the
hands of the infidel, and Christian pilgrims, since they could no longer
visit the sepulchre of Christ, flocked to the sepulchre of his Vicar the
Fisherman. And thus Rome was become the place of pilgrimage for all the
West. Saxon kings and queens laid down their crowns before St. Peter's
threshold, invested themselves with the cowl, and died, healed and happy,
under the shadow of the chief Apostle. When the three hundred years were
ended, the arm of Pepin made the Pope a sovereign in his own newly-created
Rome. During these three centuries, running from St. Leo meeting Genseric,
the pilot of St. Peter's ship has been tossed without intermission on the
waves of a heaving ocean, but he has saved his vessel and the freight which
it bears--the Christian faith. And in doing this he has made the
new-created city, which had become the place of pilgrimage, to be also the
centre of a new world.

As Leo came back from the gate leading to the harbour and re-entered his
Lateran palace, undefended Rome was taken possession of by the Vandal. Leo
for fourteen days was condemned to hear the cries of his people, and the
tale of unnumbered insults and iniquities committed in the palaces and
houses of Rome. When the stipulated days were over, the plunderer bore away
the captive empress and her daughters from the palace of the Caesars, which
he had so completely sacked that even the copper vessels were carried off.
Genseric also assaulted the yet untouched temple of Jupiter on the Capitol,
and not only carried away the still remaining statues in his fleet which
occupied the Tiber, but stripped off half the roof of the temple and its
tiles of gilded bronze. He took away also the spoils of the temple at
Jerusalem, which Vespasian had deposited in his temple of peace. Belisarius
found them at Carthage eighty years later, and sent them as prizes to
Constantinople.[5]

Many thousand Romans of every age and condition Genseric carried as slaves
to Carthage, together with Eudocia and her daughters, the eldest of whom
Genseric compelled to marry his son Hunnerich. After sixteen years of
unwilling marriage Eudocia at last escaped, and through great perils
reached Jerusalem, where she died and was buried beside her grandmother,
that other Eudocia, the beautiful Athenais whom St. Pulcheria gave to her
brother for bride, and whose romantic exaltation to the throne of the East
ended in banishment at Jerusalem. But one of the great churches at Rome is
connected with her memory: since the first Eudocia sent to the empress her
daughter at Rome half of the chains which had bound St. Peter at his
imprisonment by Agrippa. When Pope Leo held the relics, which had come from
Jerusalem, to those other relics belonging to the Apostle's captivity at
Rome on his martyrdom, they grew together and became one chain of
thirty-eight links. Upon this the empress in the days of her happiness
built the Church of St. Peter ad Vincula to receive so touching a memorial
of the Apostle who escaped martyrdom at Jerusalem to find it at Rome. Upon
his delivery by the angel "from all the expectation of the people of the
Jews," he "went to another place". There, to use the words of his own
personal friend and second successor at Antioch, he founded "the church
presiding over charity in the place of the country of the Romans,"[6] and
there he was to find his own resting-place. The church was built to guard
the emblems of the two captivities. The heathen festival of Augustus, which
used to be kept on the 1st August at the spot where the church was founded,
became for all Christendom the feast of St. Peter's Chains.[7]

In the life of St. Leo by Anastasius, we read that after the Vandal ruin he
supplied the parish churches of Rome with silver plate from the six silver
vessels, weighing each a hundred pounds, which Constantine had given to the
basilicas of the Lateran, of St. Peter, and of St. Paul, two to each. These
churches were spared the plundering to which every other building was
subjected. But the buildings of Rome were not burnt, though even senatorian
families were reduced to beggary, and the population was diminished through
misery and flight, besides those who were carried off to slavery.

At this point of time the grandeur of Trajan's city[8] began to pass into
the silence and desolation which St. Gregory in after years mourned over in
the words of Jeremias on ruined Jerusalem.

Let us go back with Leo to his patriarchal palace, and realise if we can
the condition of things in which he dwelt at home, as well as the condition
throughout all the West of the Church which his courage had saved from
heresy.

The male line of Theodosius had ended with the murder of Valentinian in the
Campus Martius, March 16, 455. Maximus seized his throne and his widow, and
was murdered in the streets of Rome in June, 455, at the end of
seventy-seven days. When Genseric had carried off his spoil, the throne of
the western empire, no longer claimed by anyone of the imperial race,
became a prey to ambitious generals. The first tenant of that throne was
Avitus, a nobleman from Gaul, named by the influence of the Visigothic
king, Theodorich of Toulouse. He assumed the purple at Arles, on the 10th
July, 455. The Roman senate, which clung to its hereditary right to name
the princes, accepted him, not being able to help itself, on the 1st
January, 456; his son-in-law, Sidonius Apollinaris, delivered the
customary panegyric, and was rewarded with a bronze statue in the forum of
Trajan, which we thus know to have escaped injury from the raid of
Genseric. But at the bidding of Ricimer, who had become the most powerful
general, the senate deposed Avitus; he fled to his country Auvergne, and
was killed on the way in September, 456.

All power now lay in the hands of Ricimer. He was by his father a Sueve; by
his mother, grandson of Wallia, the Visigothic king at Toulouse. With him
began that domination of foreign soldiery which in twenty years destroyed
the western empire. Through his favour the senator Majorian was named
emperor in the spring of 457. The senate, the people, the army, and the
eastern emperor, Leo I., were united in hailing his election. He is
described as recalling by his many virtues the best Roman emperors. In his
letter to the senate, which he drew up after his election in Ravenna, men
thought they heard the voice of Trajan. An emperor who proposed to rule
according to the laws and tradition of the old time filled Rome with joy.
All his edicts compelled the people to admire his wisdom and goodness. One
of these most strictly forbade the employment of the materials from older
buildings, an unhappy custom which had already begun, for, says the special
historian of the city, the time had already come when Rome, destroying
itself, was made use of as a great chalk-pit and marble quarry;[9] and for
such it served the Romans themselves for more than a thousand years. They
were the true barbarians who destroyed their city.

But Majorian was unable to prevent the ruin either of city or of state. He
had made great exertions to punish Genseric by reconquering Africa. They
were not successful; Ricimer compelled him to resign on the 2nd of August,
461, and five days afterwards he died by a death of which is only known
that it was violent. A man, says Procopius, upright to his subjects,
terrible to his enemies, who surpassed in every virtue all those who before
him had reigned over the Romans.

Three months after Majorian, died Pope St. Leo. First of his line to bear
the name of Great, who twice saved his city, and once, by the express
avowal of a successor, the Church herself, Leo carried his crown of thorns
one-and-twenty years, and has left no plaint to posterity of the calamities
witnessed by him in that long pontificate. Majorian was the fourth
sovereign whom in six years and a half he had seen to perish by violence. A
man with so keen an intellectual vision, so wise a measure of men and
things, must have fathomed to its full extent the depth of moral corruption
in the midst of which the Church he presided over fought for existence.
This among his own people. But who likewise can have felt, as he did, the
overmastering flood of northern tribes--_vis consili expers_--which had
descended on the empire in his own lifetime. As a boy he must have known
the great Theodosius ruling by force of mind that warlike but savage host
of Teuton mercenaries. In his one life, Visigoth and Ostrogoth, Vandal and
Herule, Frank and Aleman, Burgundian and Sueve, instead of serving Rome as
soldiers in the hand of one greater than themselves, had become masters of
a perishing world's mistress; and the successor of Peter was no longer safe
in the Roman palace which the first of Christian emperors had bestowed upon
the Church's chief bishop. Instead of Constantine and Theodosius, Leo had
witnessed Arcadius and Honorius; instead of emperors the ablest men of
their day, who could be twelve hours in the saddle at need, emperors who
fed chickens or listened to the counsel of eunuchs in their palace. Even
this was not enough. He had seen Stilicho and Aetius in turn support their
feeble sovereigns, and in turn assassinated for that support; and the depth
of all ignominy in a Valentinian closing the twelve hundred years of Rome
with the crime of a dastard, followed by Genseric, who was again to be
overtopped by Ricimer, while world and Church barely escape from Attila's
uncouth savagery. But Leo in his letters written in the midst of such
calamities, in his sermons spoken from St. Peter's chair, speaks as if he
were addressing a prostrate world with the inward vision of a seer to whom
the triumph of the heavenly Jerusalem is clearly revealed, while he
proclaims the work of the City of God on earth with equal assurance.

Hilarus in that same November, 461, succeeded to the apostolic chair.
Hilarus was that undaunted Roman deacon and legate who with difficulty
saved his life at the Robber-Council of Ephesus, where St. Flavian, bishop
of Constantinople, was beaten to death by the party of Dioscorus, and who
carried to St. Leo a faithful report of that Council's acts. At the same
time the Lucanian Libius Severus succeeded to the throne. All that is known
of him is that he was an inglorious creature of Ricimer, and prolonged a
government without record until the autumn of 465, when his maker got tired
of him. He disappeared, and Ricimer ruled alone for nearly two years. Yet
he did not venture to end the empire with a stroke of violence, or change
the title of Patricius, bestowed upon him by the eastern emperor, for that
of king. In this death-struggle of the realm the senate showed courage. The
Roman fathers in their corporate capacity served as a last bond of the
State as it was falling to pieces; and Sidonius Apollinaris said of them
that they might rank as princes with the bearer of the purple, only, he
adds significantly, if we put out of question the armed force.[10] The
protection of the eastern emperor, Leo I., helped them in this resistance
to Ricimer. The national party in Rome itself called on the Greek emperor
for support. The utter dissolution of the western empire, when German
tribes, Burgundians, Franks, Visigoths, and Vandals, had taken permanent
possession of its provinces outside of Italy, while the violated dignity of
Rome sank daily into greater impotence, now made Byzantium come forth as
the true head of the empire. The better among the eastern Caesars
acknowledged the duty of maintaining it one and indivisible. They treated
sinking Italy as one of their provinces, and prevented the Germans from
asserting lordship over it.

At length, after more than a year's vacancy of the throne, Ricimer was
obliged not only to let the senate treat with the Eastern emperor, Leo I.,
but to accept from Leo the choice of a Greek. Anthemius, one of the chief
senators at Byzantium, who had married the late emperor Marcian's daughter,
was sent with solemn pomp to Rome, and on the 12th April, 467, he accepted
the imperial dignity in the presence of senate, people, and army, three
miles outside the gates. Ricimer also condescended to accept his daughter
as his bride, and we have an account of the wedding from that same Sidonius
Apollinaris who a few years before had delivered the panegyric upon the
accession of his own father-in-law, Avitus, afterwards deposed and killed
by Ricimer; moreover, he had in the same way welcomed the accession of the
noble Majorian, destroyed by the same Ricimer. Now on this third occasion
Sidonius describes the whole city as swimming in a sea of joy. Bridal songs
with fescennine licence resounded in the theatres, market-places, courts,
and gymnasia. All business was suspended. Even then Rome impressed the
Gallic courtier-poet with the appearance of the world's capital. What is
important is that we find this testimony of an eye-witness, given
incidentally in his correspondence, that Rome in her buildings was still in
all her splendour. And again in his long panegyric he makes Rome address
the eastern emperor, beseeching him, in requital for all those eastern
provinces which she has given to Byzantium--"Only grant me Anthemius;[11]
reign long, O Leo, in your own parts, but grant me my desire to govern
mine." Thus Sidonius shows in his verses what is but too apparent in the
history of the elevation of Anthemius, that Nova Roma on the borders of
Europe and Asia was the real sovereign.[12] And we also learn that the
whole internal order of government, the structure of Roman law, and the
daily habit of life had remained unaltered by barbarian occupation. This is
the last time that Rome appears in garments of joy. The last reflection of
her hundred triumphs still shines upon her palaces, baths, and temples. The
Roman people, diminished in number, but unaltered in character, still
frequented the baths of Nero, of Agrippa, of Diocletian; and Sidonius
recommends instead baths less splendid, but less seductive to the
senses.[13]

But Anthemius lasted no longer than the noble Majorian or the ignoble
Severus. East and West had united their strength in a great expedition to
put down the incessant Vandal piracies, which made all the coasts of the
Mediterranean insecure.[14] It failed through the treachery of the eastern
commander Basiliscus, to whose evil deeds we shall have hereafter to recur.
This disaster shook the credit of Anthemius, and Ricimer also tired of his
father-in-law. He went to Milan, and Rome was terrified with the report
that he had made a compact with barbarians beyond the Alps. Ricimer marched
upon Rome, to which he laid siege in 472. Here he was joined by Anicius
Olybrius, who had married Placidia, the younger daughter of Valentinian and
Eudoxia, through whom he claimed the throne, as representative of the
Theodosian line. Ricimer, after a fierce contest with Anthemius, burst into
the Aurelian gate at the head of troops all of German blood and Arian
belief, massacring and plundering all but two of the fourteen regions. But
the city escaped burning.

Then Anicius Olybrius entered Rome, consumed at once by famine, pestilence,
and the sword. With the consent of Leo, and at the request of Genseric, he
had been already named emperor. He took possession of the imperial palace,
and made the senate acknowledge him. Anthemius had been cut in pieces, but
forty days after his death Ricimer died of the plague, and thus had not
been able to put to death more than four Roman emperors, of whom his
father-in-law, Anthemius, was the last. The Arian Condottiere, who had
inflicted on Rome a third plundering, said to be worse than that of
Genseric, was buried in the Church of St. Agatha in Suburra,[15] which had
been ceded to the Arians, and which he had adorned.

Olybrius made the Burgundian prince Gundebald commander of the forces, but
died himself in October of that same year, 472, and left the throne to be
the gift of barbarian adventurers. Three more shadows of emperors passed.
Gundebald gave that dignity at Ravenna, in March, 473, to Glycerius, a man
of unknown antecedents. In 474, Glycerius was deposed by Nepos, a
Dalmatian, whom the empress Verina, widow of Leo I., had sent with an army
from Byzantium to Ravenna. Nepos compelled his predecessor to abdicate, and
to become bishop of Salona. He himself was proclaimed emperor at Rome on
the 24th June, 474, after which he returned to Ravenna. While he was here
treating with Euric, the Visigoth king, at Toulouse, Orestes, whom he had
made Patricius and commander of the barbaric troops for Gaul, rose against
him. Nepos fled by sea from Ravenna in August, 475, and betook himself to
Salona, whither he had banished Glycerius.

Orestes was a Pannonian; had been Attila's secretary; then commander of
German troops in service of the emperors. Thus he came to lead the troops
which had been under Ricimer. This heap of Germans and Sarmatians without
a country were in wild excitement, demanding a cession of Italian lands,
instead of a march into Gaul. They offered their general the crown of
Italy. Orestes thought it better to invest therewith his young son, and so,
on the 31st October, 475, the boy Romulus Augustus, by the supremest
mockery of what is called fortune, sat for a moment on the seat of the
first king and the first emperor of Rome.

Italy could no longer produce an army, and the foreign soldiery who had
served under various leaders naturally desired the partition of its lands.
Odoacer was now their leader, who, when a penniless youth, had visited St.
Severinus in Noricum, and received from him the prophecy: "Go into Italy,
clad now in poor skins: thou wilt speedily be able to clothe many richly".
Odoacer, after an adventurous life of heroic courage, made the homeless
warriors whom he now commanded understand that it was better to settle on
the fair lands of Italy than wander about in the service of phantom
emperors. They acclaimed him as their king, and after beheading Orestes and
getting possession of Romulus Augustus, he compelled him to abdicate before
the senate, and the senate to declare that the western empire was extinct.
This happened in the third year of the emperor Zeno the Isaurian, the ninth
of Pope Simplicius, A.D. 476. The senate sent deputies to Zeno at Byzantium
to declare that Rome no longer required an independent emperor; that one
emperor was sufficient for East and for West; that they had chosen for the
protector of Italy Odoacer, a man skilled in the arts of peace as well as
war, and besought Zeno to entrust him with the dignity of Patricius and the
government of Italy. The deposed Nepos also sent a petition to Zeno to
restore him. Zeno replied to the senate that of the two emperors whom he
had sent to them, they had deposed Nepos and killed Anthemius. But he
received the diadem and the imperial jewels of the western empire, and kept
them in his palace. He endured the usurper who had taken possession of
Italy until he was able to put him down, and so, in his letters to Odoacer,
invested him with the title of "Patricius of the Romans," leaving the
government of Italy to a German commander under his imperial authority. So
the division into East and West was cancelled: Italy as a province belonged
still to the one emperor, who was seated at Byzantium. In theory, the unity
of Constantine's time was restored; in fact, Rome and the West were
surrendered to Teuton invaders.[16] This was the last stroke: the mighty
members of the great mother--Gaul, and Spain, and Britain, and Africa, and
Illyricum--had been severed from her. Now, the head, discrowned and
impotent, submitted to the rule of Odoacer the Herule. The Byzantine
supremacy remained in keeping for future use. It had been acknowledged from
the death of Honorius in 423, when Galla Placidia had become empress and
her son emperor by the gift and the army of Theodosius II.

The agony of imperial Rome lasted twenty-one years. Valentinian III. was
reigning in 455: in the March of that year he was murdered, and succeeded
by Maximus, who was murdered in June; then by Avitus in July, who was
murdered in October, 456. Majorianus followed in 457, and reigned till
August, 461: he was followed by Libius Severus in November, who lasted four
years, till November, 465. After an interregnum of eighteen months, in
which Ricimer practically ruled, Anthemius was brought from Byzantium in
April, 467, and continued till July, 472; but Anicius Olybrius again was
brought from Byzantium, reigned for a few months in 472, and died of the
plague in October. In 473, Glycerius was put up for emperor; in 474, he
gave place to Nepos, the third brought from Byzantium. In 475, Romulus
Augustus appears, to disappear in 476, and end his life in retirement at
the Villa of Lucullus by Naples, once the seat of Rome's most luxurious
senator.

Eighty years had now passed since the death of Theodosius. In the course of
these years the realm which he had saved from dissolution after the defeat
and death of Valens near Adrianople, and had preserved during fifteen years
by wisdom in council and valour in war, and still more by his piety, when
once his protecting hand and ruling mind were withdrawn, fell to pieces in
the West, and was scarcely saved in the East. Let us take the last five
years of St. Leo, which follow on the raid of Genseric, in order to
complete the sketch just given of Rome's political state, by showing the
condition of the great provinces which belonged to Leo's special
patriarchate. I have before noticed how it was in the interval between the
retirement of Attila from Rome at the prayer of St. Leo and the seizure of
Rome by Genseric at the solicitation of the miserable empress Eudoxia, when
St. Leo could save only the lives of his people, that he confirmed the
Fourth Ecumenical Council. Not only was he entreated to do this by the
emperor Marcian: the Council itself solicited the confirmation of its acts,
which for that purpose were laid before him, while it made the most
specific confession of his authority as the one person on earth entrusted
by the Lord with His vineyard. From the particular time and the
circumstances under which these events took place, one may infer a special
intention of the Divine Providence. This was that the whole Roman empire,
while it still subsisted, the two emperors, one of whom was on the point of
disappearing, and the whole episcopate, in the most solemn form, should
attest the Roman bishop's universal pastorship. For a great period was
ending, the period of the Graeco-Roman civilisation, from which, after
three centuries of persecution, the Church had obtained recognition. And a
great period was beginning, when the wandering of the nations had prepared
for the Church another task. The first had been to obtain the conversion
of nations linked by the bond of one temporal rule, enjoying the highest
degree of culture and knowledge then existing, but deeply tainted by the
corruption of effete refinement. The second was to exalt rough, sturdy,
barbarian natures, whose bride was the sword and human life their prey,
first to the virtues of the civil state, and next to the higher life of
Christian charity, and thus to link them, who had known only violent
repulsion and perpetual warfare among themselves, in not a temporal but a
spiritual bond. The majestic figure of St. Leo expressed the completion of
the first task. It also symbolises the beneficent power which in the course
of ages will accomplish the second.

The wandering of the nations, says a great historian, was of decisive
effect for the Church, and he quotes another historian's summary
description of it: "It was not the migration of individual nomad hordes, or
masses of adventurous warriors in continuous motion, which produced changes
so mighty. But great, long-settled peoples, with wives and children, with
goods and chattels, deserted their old seats, and sought for themselves in
the far distance a new home. By this the position of individuals, of
communities, of whole peoples, was of necessity completely altered. The old
conditions of possession were dissolved. The existing bonds of society
loosened. The old frontiers of states and lands passed away. As a whole
city is turned into a ruinous heap by an earthquake, so the whole political
system of previous times was overthrown by this massive transmigration. A
new order of things had to be formed corresponding to the wholly altered
circumstances of the nation."[17]

I draw from the same historian[18] an outline of the movement, running
through several centuries, which had this final result. Great troops of
Celts had, before the time of Christ, sought to settle themselves in
Rhoetia and Upper Italy, even as far as Rome. Cimbrians and Teutons, with
as little success, had betaken themselves southwards, while under the
empire the pressure of peoples had more and more increased, and Trajan
could hardly maintain the northern frontier on the Danube. In the third
century, Alemans and Sueves advanced to the Upper Rhine, and the Goths,
from dwelling between the Don and Theiss, came to the Danube and the Black
Sea. Decius fell in battle with them. Aurelian gave them up the province of
Dacia. Constantine the Great conquered them, and had Gothic troops in his
army. Often they broke into the Roman territory, and carried off prisoners
with them. Some of these were Christians and introduced the Goths to the
knowledge of Christianity. Theophilus, a Gothic bishop, was at the Nicene
Council in 325. They had clergy, monks, and nuns, with numerous believers.
Under Athanarich, king of the Visigoths, Christians already suffered, with
credit, a bloody persecution. On the occasion of the Huns, a Scythian
people, compelling the Alans on the Don to join them, then conquering the
Ostrogoths and oppressing the Visigoths, the latter prevailed on the
emperor Valens to admit them into the empire. Valens gave them dwellings in
Thrace on the condition that they should serve in his army and accept Arian
Christianity. So the larger number of Visigoths under Fridiger in 375
became Arians. They soon, however, broke into conflict with the empire
through their ill-treatment by the imperial commanders. In 378, Valens was
defeated near Adrianople; his army was utterly crushed; he met himself with
a miserable death. After this the Visigoths in general continued to be
Arians, though many, especially through the exertions of St. Chrysostom,
were converted to Catholicism. Most of them, however, seem to have been
only half Arians, like their famous bishop Ulphilas. He was by birth a
Goth--some say a Cappadocian--was consecrated between 341 and 348, in
Constantinople. He gave the Goths an alphabet of their own, formed after
the Greek, and made for them a translation of the Bible, of great value as
a record of ancient German. He died in Constantinople before 388--probably
in 381.

Under Theodosius I., about 382, the Visigoths accepted the Roman supremacy,
and the engagement to supply 40,000 men for the service of the empire, upon
the terms of occupying, as allies free of tribute, the provinces assigned
to them of Dacia, Lower Moesia, and Thrace. After this, discontented at
the holding back their pay, and irritated by Rufinus, who was then at the
head of the government of the emperor Arcadius, they laid waste the
Illyrian provinces down to the Peloponnesus, and made repeated irruptions
into Italy, in 400 and 402, under their valiant leader Alarich. In 408 he
besieged Rome, and exacted considerable sums from it. He renewed the siege
in 409, and made the wretched prefect Attalus emperor, whom he afterwards
deposed, and recognised Honorius again. At last he took Rome by storm on
the 24th August, 410. The city was completely plundered, but the lives of
the people spared. He withdrew to Lower Italy and soon died. His
brother-in-law and successor, Ataulf, was first minded entirely to destroy
the Roman empire, but afterwards to restore it by Gothic aid. In the end he
went to Gaul, conquered Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, and afterwards
Barcelona. His half-brother Wallia, after reducing the Alans and driving
back the Sueves and Vandals, planted his seat in Toulouse, which became, in
415, the capital of his Aquitanean kingdom, Gothia or Septimania. Gaul, in
which several Roman commanders assumed the imperial title, was overrun in
the years from 406 to 416 by various peoples, whom the two opposing sides
called in: by Burgundians, Franks, Alemans, Vandals, Quades, Alans, Gepids,
Herules. The Alans, Sueves, Vandals, and Visigoths, at the same time, went
to Spain. Their leaders endeavoured to set up kingdoms of their own all
over Gaul and Spain.

Arianism came from the Visigoths not only to the Ostrogoths but also to the
Gepids, Sueves, Alans, Burgundians, and Vandals. But these peoples, with
the exception of the Vandals and of some Visigoth kings, treated the
Catholic religion, which was that of their Roman subjects, with
consideration and esteem. Only here and there Catholics were compelled to
embrace Arianism. Their chief enemy in Gaul was the Visigoth king Eurich.
Wallia, dying in 419, had been succeeded by Theodorich I. and Theodorich
II., both of whom had extended the kingdom, which Eurich still more
increased. He died in 483. Under him many Catholic churches were laid
waste, and the Catholics suffered a bloody persecution. He was rather the
head of a sect than the ruler of subjects. This, however, led to the
dissolution of his kingdom, which, from 507, was more and more merged in
that of the Franks.

The Burgundians, who had pressed onwards from the Oder and the Vistula to
the Rhine, were in 417 already Christian. They afterwards founded a
kingdom, with Lyons for capital, between the Rhone and the Saone. Their
king Gundobald was Arian. But Arianism was not universal; and Patiens,
bishop of Lyons, who died in 491, maintained the Catholic doctrine. A
conference between Catholics and Arians in 499 converted few. But Avitus,
bishop of Vienne, gained influence with Gundobald, so that he inclined to
the Catholic Church, which his son Sigismund, in 517, openly professed. The
Burgundian kingdom was united with the Frankish from 534.

The Sueves had founded a kingdom in Spain under their king Rechila, still a
heathen. He died in 448. His successor, Rechiar, was Catholic. When king
Rimismund married the daughter of the Visigoth king Theodorich, an Arian,
he tried to introduce Arianism, and persecuted the Catholics, who had many
martyrs--Pancratian of Braga, Patanius, and others. It was only between 550
and 560 that the Gallician kingdom of the Sueves, under king Charrarich,
became Catholic, when his son Ariamir or Theodemir was healed by the
intercession of St. Martin of Tours, and converted by Martin, bishop of
Duma. In 563 a synod was held by the metropolitan of Braga, which
established the Catholic faith. But in 585, Leovigild, the Arian king of
the larger Visigoth kingdom, incorporated with his territory the smaller
kingdom of the Sueves. Catholicism was still more threatened when Leovigild
executed his own son Hermenegild, who had married the Frankish princess
Jugundis, for becoming a Catholic. But the martyr's brother, Rechared, was
converted by St. Leander, archbishop of Seville, and in 589 publicly
professed himself a Catholic. This faith now prevailed through all Spain.

The Vandals, rudest of all the German peoples, had been invited by Count
Boniface, in 429, to pass over from Spain under their king Genseric to the
Roman province of North Africa. They quickly conquered it entirely.
Genseric, a fanatical Arian, persecuted the Catholics in every way, took
from them their churches, banished their bishops, tortured and put to death
many. Some bishops he made slaves. He exposed Quodvultdeus, bishop of
Carthage, with a number of clergy, to the mercy of the waves on a wretched
raft. Yet they reached Naples. The Arian clergy encouraged the king in all
his cruelties. It was only in private houses or in suburbs that the
Catholics could celebrate their worship. The violence of his tyranny, which
led many to doubt even the providence of God, brought the Catholic Church
in North Africa into the deepest distress. Genseric's son and successor,
Hunnerich, who reigned from 477 to 484, was at first milder. He had married
Eudoxia, elder daughter of Valentinian III. The emperor Zeno had specially
recommended to him the African Catholics. He allowed them to meet again,
and, after the see of Carthage had been vacant twenty-four years, to have a
new bishop. So the brave confessor Eugenius was chosen in 479. But this
favour was followed by a much severer persecution. Eugenius, accused by the
bitter Arian bishop Cyrila, was severely ill-treated, shut up with 4976 of
the faithful, banished into the barest desert, wherein many died of
exhaustion. Hunnerich stripped the Catholics of their goods, and banished
them chiefly to Sardinia and Corsica. Consecrated virgins were tortured to
extort from them admission that their own clergy had committed sin with
them. A conference held at Carthage in 484 between Catholic and Arian
bishops was made a pretext for fresh acts of violence, which the emperor
Zeno, moved by Pope Felix III. to intercede, was unable to prevent. 348
bishops were banished. Many died of ill usage. Arian baptism was forced
upon not a few, and very many lost limbs. This persecution produced
countless martyrs. The greatest wonders of divine grace were shown in it.
Christians at Tipasa, whose tongues had been cut out at the root, kept the
free use of their speech, and sang songs of praise to Christ, whose godhead
was mocked by the Arians. Many of these came to Constantinople, where the
imperial court was witness of the miracle. The successor of this tyrant
Hunnerich, king Guntamund, who reigned from 485 to 496, treated the
Catholics more fairly, and, though the persecution did not entirely cease,
allowed, in 494, the banished bishops to return. A Roman Council, in 487 or
488, made the requisite regulations with regard to those who had suffered
iteration of baptism, and those who had lapsed. King Trasamund, from 496 to
523, wished again to make Arianism dominant, and tried to gain individual
Catholics by distinctions. When that did not succeed, he went on to
oppression and banishment, took away the churches, and forbade the
consecration of new bishops. As still they did not diminish, he banished
120 to Sardinia, among them a great defender of the Catholic faith, St.
Fulgentius, bishop of Ruspe. King Hilderich, who reigned from 523 to 530, a
gentle prince and friend of the emperor Justinian, stopped the persecution
and recalled the banished. Fulgentius was received back with great joy, and
in February, 525, Archbishop Bonifacius held at Carthage a Council once
more, at which sixty bishops were present. Africa had still able
theologians. Hilderich was murdered by his cousin Gelimer: a new
persecution was preparing. But the Vandal kingdom in Africa was overthrown
in 533 by the eastern general Belisarius, and northern Africa united with
Justinian's empire. However, the African Church never flourished again with
its former lustre.

But Gaul and Italy had been in the greatest danger of suffering a
desolation in comparison with which even the Vandal persecution in Africa
would have been light. St. Leo was nearly all his life contemporaneous with
the terrible irruptions of the Huns. These warriors, depicted as the
ugliest and most hateful of the human race, in the years from 434 to 441,
having already advanced, under Attila, from the depths of Asia to the
Wolga, the Don, and the Danube, pressing the Teuton tribes before them,
made incursions as far as Scandinavia. In the last years of the emperor
Theodosius II. they filled with horrible misery the whole range of country
from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. In the spring of 451 Attila broke out
from Pannonia with 700,000 men, absorbed the Alemans and other peoples in
his host, wasted and plundered populous cities such as Treves, Mainz,
Worms, Spires, Strasburg, and Metz. The skill of Aetius succeeded in
opposing him on the plains by Chalons with the Roman army, the Visigoths,
and their allies. The issue of this battle of the nations was that Attila,
after suffering and inflicting fearful slaughter, retired to Pannonia. The
next year he came down upon Italy, destroyed Aquileia, and the fright of
his coming caused Venice to be founded on uninhabited islands, which the
Scythian had no vessels to reach. He advanced over Vicenza, Padua, Verona,
Milan. Rome was before him, where the successor of St. Peter stopped him.
He withdrew from Italy, made one more expedition against the Visigoths in
Gaul, but died shortly after. With his death his kingdom collapsed. His
sons fought over its division, the Huns disappeared, and what was
afterwards to be Europe became possible.

The invasions of the Hun shook to its centre the western empire. Aetius,
who had saved it at Chalons in 451, received in 454 his death-blow as a
reward from the hand of Valentinian III., and so we are brought to the
nine phantom emperors who follow the race of the great Theodosius, when it
had been terminated by the vice of its worst descendant.

One Teuton race, the most celebrated of all, I have reserved for future
mention. The Franks in St. Leo's time, and for thirty-five years after his
death, were still pagan. The Salian branch occupied the north of Gaul, and
the Ripuarians were spread along the Rhine, about Cologne. Their paganism
had prevented them from being touched by the infection of the Arian heresy,
common to all the other tribes, so that the Arian religion was the mark of
the Teutonic settler throughout the West, and the Catholic that of the
Roman provincials.

Thus when, in the year 476, the Roman senate, at Odoacer's bidding,
exercised for the last time its still legal prerogative of naming the
emperor, by declaring that no emperor of the West was needed, and by
sending back the insignia of empire to the eastern emperor Zeno, all the
provinces of the West had fallen, as to government, into the hands of the
Teuton invaders, and all of these, with the single exception of the Franks,
were Arians. They alone were still pagans. Odoacer, also an Arian, became
the ruler of Rome and Italy, nominally by commission from the emperor Zeno,
really in virtue of the armed force, consisting of adventurers belonging to
various northern tribes which he commanded. To the Romans he was
Patricius,[19] a title of honour lasting for life, which from Constantine's
time, without being connected with any particular office, surpassed all
other dignities. To his own people he was king of the Ruges, Herules, and
Turcilings, or king of the nations. He ruled Italy, and Sicily, except a
small strip of coast, and Dalmatia, and these lands he was able to protect
from outward attack and inward disturbance. He made Ravenna his seat of
government. He did not assume the title of king at Rome. He maintained the
old order of the State in appearance. The senate held its usual sittings.
The Roman aristocracy occupied high posts. The consuls from the year 482
were again annually named. The Arian ruler left theological matters alone.
But the eyes of Rome were turned towards Byzantium. The Roman empire
continued legally to exist, and especially in the eye of the Church. The
Pope maintained relations with the imperial power.

In the meantime, Theodorich the Ostrogoth, son of Theodemir, chief of the
Amal family, had been sent as a hostage for the maintenance of the treaty
made by the emperor Leo I. with his father, and had spent ten years, from
his seventh to his seventeenth year, at Constantinople. Though he scorned
to receive an education in Greek or Roman literature, he studied during
these years, with unusual acuteness, the political and military
circumstances of the empire. Of strong but slender figure, his beautiful
features, blue eyes with dark brows, and abundant locks of long, fair hair,
added to the nobility of his race, pointed him out for a future ruler.[20]

In 475, Theodorich succeeded his father as king of the Ostrogoths in their
provinces of Pannonia and Moesia, which had been ceded by the empire. He
it was who was destined to lead his people to glory and greatness, but also
to their fall, in Italy. Zeno had striven to make him a personal
friend--had made him general, given him pay and rank. Theodorich had not a
little helped Zeno in his struggle for the empire. The Ostrogoth, in 484,
became Roman consul; but he also appeared suddenly in a time of peace
before the gates of Constantinople, in 487, to impress his demands upon
Zeno. Theodorich and his people occupied towards Zeno the same position
which Alaric and his Visigoths had held towards Honorius. Their provinces
were exhausted, and they wanted expansion. Whether it was that Zeno deemed
the Ostrogothic king might be an instrument to terminate the actual
independence of Italy from his empire, or that the neighbourhood of the
Goths, under so powerful a ruler, seemed to him dangerous, or that
Theodorich himself had cast longing eyes upon Italy, Zeno gave a hesitating
approval to the advance of the last great Gothic host to the southwest. The
first had taken this direction under Alaric eighty-eight years before. Now
a sovereign sanction from the senate of Constantinople, called a Pragmatic
sanction, assigned Italy to the Gothic king and his people.

From Novae, Theodorich's capital on the Danube, not far from the present
Bulgarian Nikopolis, this world of wanderers, numbered by a contemporary as
at least 350,000, streamed forth with its endless train of waggons. At the
Isonzo, Italy's frontier, Odoacer, on the 28th August, 489, encountered the
flood, and was worsted, as again at the Adige. Then he took refuge in
Ravenna. The end of a three years' conflict, in which the Gothic host was
encamped in the pine-forest of Ravenna, and where the "Battle of the
Ravens" is commemorated in the old German hero-saga, was that, in the
winter of 493, the last refuge of Odoacer opened its gates. Odoacer was
promised his life, but the compact was broken soon. His people proclaimed
Theodorich their king. Theodorich had sent a Roman senator to Zeno to ask
his confirmation of what he had done. Zeno had been succeeded by Anastasius
in 491. How much Anastasius granted cannot be told. Rome, during this
conflict, had remained in a sort of neutrality. At first Theodorich
deprived of their freedom as Roman citizens all Italians who had stood in
arms against him. Afterwards, he set himself to that work of equal
government for Italians and Goths which has given a lustre to his reign,
though the fair hopes which it raised foundered at last in an opposition
which admitted of no reconcilement.

Theodorich[21] reigned from 493 to 526. He extended by successful wars the
frontiers of the Gothic kingdom beyond the mainland of Italy and its
islands. Narbonensian Gaul, Southern Austria, Bosnia, and Servia belonged
to it at its greatest extension. The Theiss and the Danube, the Garonne
and the Rhone, flowed beside his realm. The forms of the new government, as
well as the laws, remained the same substantially as in Constantine's time.
The Roman realm continued, only there stood at its head a foreign military
chief, surrounded by his own people in the form of an army. Romandom lived
on in manner of life, in customs, in dress. The Romans were judged
according to their own laws. Gothic judges determined matters which
concerned the Goths; in cases common to both they sat intermixed with Roman
judges. Theodorich's principle was with firm and impartial hand to deal
evenly between the two. But the military service was reserved to the Goths
alone. Natives were forbidden even to carry knives. The Goths were to
maintain public security: the Romans to multiply in the arts of peace. But
even Theodorich could not fuse these nations together. The Goths remained
foreigners in Italy, and possessed as _hospites_ the lands assigned to
them, which would seem to have been a third. This noblest of barbarian
princes, and most generous of Arians, had to play two parts. In Ravenna and
Verona he headed the advance of his own people, and was king of the Goths:
in Rome the Patricius sought to protect and maintain. When, in 500, he
visited Rome, he was received before its gates by the senate, the clergy,
the people, and welcomed like an emperor of the olden time. Arian as he
was, he prayed in St. Peter's, like the orthodox emperors of the line of
Theodosius, at the Apostle's tomb. Before the senate-house, in the forum,
Boethius greeted him with a speech. The German king admired the forum of
Trajan, as the son of Constantine, 143 years before, had admired it.
Statues in the interval had not ceased to adorn it. Romans and Franks,
heathens and Christians, alike were there: Merobaudes, the Gallic general;
Claudian, the poet from Egypt, the worshipper of Stilicho, in verses almost
worthy of Virgil; Sidonius Apollinaris, the future bishop of Clermont, who
panegyrised three emperors successively deposed and murdered. The theatre
of Pompey and the amphitheatre of Titus still rose in their beauty; and as
the Gothic king inhabited the vast and deserted halls of the Caesarean
palace, he looked down upon the games of the Circus Maximus, where the
diminished but unchanged populace of Rome still justified St. Leo's
complaint, that the heathen games drew more people than the shrines of the
martyrs whose intercession had saved Rome from Attila. In fine, St.
Fulgentius could still say, If earthly Rome was so stately, what must the
heavenly Jerusalem be!

The bearing of the Arian king to the Catholic Church and the Roman
Pontificate was just and fair almost to the end of his reign. He protected
Pope Symmachus at a difficult juncture. His minister Cassiodorus supported
and helped the election of Pope Hormisdas. The letters of Cassiodorus, as
his private secretary, counsellor, and intimate friend, remain to attest,
with the force of an eye-witness, a noble Roman and a devoted Christian,
who was also Patricius and Praetorian Prefect--the nature of the
government, as well as the state of Italian society at that time. We hardly
possess such another source of knowledge for this century. But under Pope
John I. this happy state of things broke down. A dark shadow has been
thrown upon the last years of an otherwise glorious government. The noble
Boethius, after being leader of the Roman senate and highly-prized minister
of the Gothic king, died under hideous torture, inflicted at the command of
a suspicious and irritated master. Again, he had forced upon Pope John I.
an embassy to Constantinople, and required of him to obtain from the
eastern emperor churches for Arians in his dominions. The Pope returned,
after being honoured at the eastern court as the first bishop of the world,
laden with gifts for the churches at Rome, but without the required consent
of the emperor to give churches to the Arians. He perished in prison at
Ravenna by the same despotic command. This was in May, 526, and in August
the king himself died almost suddenly, fancying, it was said, that he saw
on a fish which was brought to his table the head of a third victim, the
illustrious Symmachus. What Catholics thought of his end is shown by St.
Gregory seventy years afterwards, who records in his Dialogues a vision
seen at Lipari on the day of the king's death, in which the Pope and
Symmachus were carrying him between them with his hands tied, to plunge him
in the crater of the volcano.

Several writers[22] have termed Theodorich a premature Charlemagne. It
seems to me that, as Genseric was the worst and most ignoble of the
Teutonic Arian princes, Theodorich was the best. The one showed how cruel
and remorseless an Arian persecutor was, the other how fair a ruler and
generous a protector the nature of things would allow an Arian monarch to
be. But in his case the end showed that the Gothic dominion in Italy rested
only on the personal ability of the king, and, further, that no stable
union could take place until these German-Arian races had been incorporated
by the Catholic Church into her own body.[23]

This truth is yet more illustrated by a double contrast between Theodorich
and Clovis. In personal character the former was far superior to the
latter. Clovis was converted at the age of thirty, and died at forty-five.
Yet the effect of the fifteen years of his reign after he became a Catholic
was permanent. From that moment the Franks became a power. In that short
time Clovis obtained possession of a very great part of France, and that
possession went on and was confirmed to his line and people. The
thirty-three years of Theodorich secured to Italy a time of peace, even of
glory, which did not fall to its lot for ages afterwards. Yet the effect of
his government passed with him; his daughter and heiress, the noble
princess Amalasuntha, in whose praise Cassiodorus exhausts himself, was
murdered; his kingdom was broken up, and Cassiodorus himself, retiring from
public life, confessed in his monastic life, continued for a generation,
how vain had been the attempt of the Arian king to overcome the
antagonistic forces of race and religion by justice, valour, and
forbearance.

It was fitting that the attempt should be made by the noblest of Teutonic
races, under the noblest chief it ever produced. Nor is it unfitting here
to recur to the opinion of another great Goth, not indeed the equal of
Theodorich, yet of the same race and the nearest approach to him, one of
those conquerors who showed a high consideration for the Roman empire.
Orosius records "that he heard a Gallic officer, high in rank under the
great Theodosius, tell St. Jerome at Bethlehem how he had been in the
confidence of Ataulph, who succeeded Alaric, and married Galla Placidia.
How he had heard Ataulph declare that, in the vigour and inexperience of
youth, he had ardently desired to obliterate the Roman name, and put the
Gothic in its stead--that instead of Romania the empire should be Gothia,
and Ataulph be what Augustus had been. But a long experience had taught him
two things--the one, that the Goths were too barbarous to obey laws; the
other, that those laws could not be abolished, without which the
commonwealth would cease to be a commonwealth. And so he came to content
himself with the glory of restoring the Roman name by Gothic power, that
posterity might regard him as the saviour of what he could not change for
the better."[24]

It seems that the observation of Ataulph at the beginning of the fifth
century was justified by the experience of Theodorich at the beginning of
the sixth. And, further, we may take the conduct of these two great men as
expressing on the whole the result of the Teutonic migration in the western
provinces. After unspeakable misery produced in the cities and countries of
the West at the time of their first descent, we may note three things. The
imperial lands, rights, and prerogatives fell to the invading rulers. The
lands in general partly remained to the provincials (the former
proprietors), partly were distributed to the conquerors. But for the rest,
the fabric of Roman law, customs, and institutions remained standing, at
least for the natives, while the invaders were ruled severally according to
their inherited customs. Even Genseric was only a pirate, not a Mongol, and
after a hundred years the Vandal reign was overthrown and North Africa
reunited to the empire. In the other cases it may be said that the children
of the North, when they succeeded, after the struggle of three hundred
years, in making good their descent on the South, seized indeed the
conqueror's portion of houses and land, but they were not so savage as to
disregard, in Ataulph's words, those laws of the commonwealth, without
which a commonwealth cannot exist. The Franks, in their original condition
one of the most savage northern tribes, in the end most completely accepted
Roman law, the offspring of a wisdom and equity far beyond their power to
equal or to imitate. And because they saw this, and acted on it most
thoroughly, they became a great nation. The Catholic faith made them. Thus,
when the boy Romulus Augustus was deposed at Rome, and power fell into the
hands of the Herule Odoacer, Pope Simplicius, directing his gaze over
Africa, Spain, France, Illyricum, and Britain, would see a number of
new-born governments, ruled by northern invaders, who from the beginning of
the century had been in constant collision with each other, perpetually
changing their frontiers. Wherever the invaders settled a fresh partition
of the land had to be made, by which the old proprietors would be in part
reduced to poverty, and all the native population which in any way depended
on them would suffer greatly. It may be doubted whether any civilised
countries have passed through greater calamities than fell upon Gaul,
Spain, Eastern and Western Illyricum, Africa, and Britain in the first half
of the fifth century. Moreover, while one of these governments was pagan,
all the rest, save Eastern Illyricum, were Arian. That of the Vandals,
which had occupied, since 429, Rome's most flourishing province, also her
granary, had been consistently and bitterly hostile to its Catholic
inhabitants. That of Toulouse, under Euric, was then persecuting them.
Britain had been severed from the empire, and seemed no less lost to the
Church, under the occupation of Saxon invaders at least as savage as the
Frank or the Vandal. In these broad lands, which Rome had humanised during
four hundred years, and of which the Church had been in full possession,
Pope Simplicius could now find only the old provincial nobility and the
common people still Catholic. The bishops in these several provinces were
exposed everywhere to an Arian succession of antagonists, who used against
them all the influence of an Arian government.

When he looked to the eastern emperor, now become in the eyes of the Church
the legitimate sovereign of Rome, by whose commission Odoacer professed to
rule, instead of a Marcian, the not unworthy husband of St. Pulcheria,
instead of Leo I., who was at least orthodox, and had been succeeded by his
grandson the young child Leo II., he found upon the now sole imperial
throne that child's father Zeno. He was husband of the princess Ariadne,
daughter of Leo I.,[25] a man of whom the Byzantine historians give us a
most frightful picture. Without tact and understanding, vicious, moreover,
and tyrannical, he oppressed during the two years from 474 to 476 his
people, sorely tried by the incursions of barbarous hordes. He also
favoured, all but openly, the Monophysites, specially Peter Fullo, the
heretical patriarch of Antioch. After two years a revolution deprived him
of the throne, and exalted to it the equally vicious Basiliscus--the man
whose treachery as an eastern general had ruined the success of the great
expedition against Genseric, in which East and West had joined under
Anthemius. Basiliscus still more openly favoured heresy. He lasted,
however, but a short time; Zeno was able to return, and occupied the throne
again during fourteen years, from 477 to 491. These two men, Zeno and
Basiliscus, criminal in their private lives, in their public lives
adventurers, who gained the throne by the worst Byzantine arts, opened the
line of the theologising emperors. Basiliscus, during the short time he
occupied the eastern throne, issued, at the prompting of a heretic whom he
had pushed into the see of St. Athanasius--and it is the first example
known in history--a formal decree upon faith, the so-called Encyclikon, in
which only the Nicene, Constantinopolitan, and Ephesine Councils were
accepted, but the fourth, that of Chalcedon, condemned. So low was the
eastern Church already fallen that not the Eutycheans only, but five
hundred Catholic bishops subscribed this Encyclikon, and a Council at
Ephesus praised it as divine and apostolical.

Basiliscus, termed by Pope Gelasius the tyrant and heretic, was swept away.
But his example was followed in 482 by Zeno, who issued his Henotikon,
drawn up it was supposed by Acacius of Constantinople,[26] addressed to the
clergy and people of Alexandria. Many of the eastern bishops, through fear
of Zeno and his bishop Acacius, submitted to this imperial decree; many
contended for the truth even to death against it. These two deeds, the
Encyclikon of Basiliscus and the Henotikon of Zeno, are to be marked for
ever as the first instances of the temporal sovereign infringing the
independence of the Church in spiritual matters, which to that time even
the emperors in Constantine's city had respected.

Simplicius sat in the Roman chair fifteen years, from 468 to 483; and such
was the outlook presented to him in the East and West--an outlook of ruin,
calamity, and suffering in those vast provinces which make our present
Europe--an outlook of anxiety with a prospect of ever-increasing evil in
the yet surviving eastern empire. There was not then a single ruler holding
the Catholic faith. Basiliscus and Zeno were not only heretical themselves,
but they were assuming in their own persons the right of the secular power
to dictate to the Church her own belief. And the Pope had become their
subject while he was locally subject to the dominion of a northern
commander of mercenaries, himself a Herule and an Arian. In his own Rome
the Pope lived and breathed on sufferance. Under Zeno he saw the East torn
to pieces with dissension; prelates put into the sees of Alexandria and
Antioch by the arm of power; that arm itself directed by the ambitious
spirit of a Byzantine bishop, who not only named the holders of the second
and third seats of the Church, but reduced them to do his bidding, and wait
upon his upstart throne. Gaul was in the hand of princes, mostly Arian, one
pagan. Spain was dominated by Sueves and Visigoths, both Arian. In Africa
Simplicius during forty years had been witness of the piracies of Genseric,
making the Mediterranean insecure, and the cities on every coast liable to
be sacked and burnt by his flying freebooters, while the great church of
Africa, from the death of St. Augustine, had been suffering a persecution
so severe that no heathen emperor had reached the standard of Arian
cruelty. In Britain, civilisation and faith had been alike trampled out by
the northern pirates Hengist and Horsa, and successive broods of their
like. The Franks, still pagan, had advanced from the north of Gaul to its
centre, destroyers as yet of the faith which they were afterwards to
embrace. What did the Pope still possess in these populations? The common
people, a portion of the local proprietors, and the Catholic bishops who
had in him their common centre, as he in them men regarded with veneration
by the still remaining Catholic population.

In all this there is one fact so remarkable as to claim special mention.
How had it happened that the Catholic faith was considered throughout the
West the mark of the Roman subject; and the Arian misbelief the mark of the
Teuton invader and governor? Theodosius had put an end to the official
Arianism of the East, which had so troubled the empire, and so attacked the
Primacy in the period between Constantine and himself. During all that time
the Arian heresy had no root in the West. But the emperor Valens, when
chosen as a colleague by his brother Valentinian I., in 364, was counted a
Catholic. A few years later he fell under the influence of Eudoxius, who
had got by his favour the see of Byzantium. This man, one of the worst
leaders of the Arians, taught and baptised Valens, and filled him with his
own spirit; and Valens, when he settled the Goths in the northern provinces
by the Danube, stipulated that they should receive the Arian doctrine.
Their bishop and great instructor Ulphilas had been deceived, it is said,
into believing that it was the doctrine of the Church. This fatal gift of
a spurious doctrine the Goth received in all the energy of an uninstructed
but vigorous will. As the leader of the northern races he communicated it
to them. A Byzantine bishop had poisoned the wells of the Christian faith
from which the great new race of the future was to drink, and when
Byzantium succeeded in throwing Alaric upon the West, all the races which
followed his lead brought with them the doctrine which Ulphilas had been
deceived into propagating as the faith of Christ. So it happened that if
the terrible overthrow of Valens in 378 by the nation which he had deceived
brought his persecution with his reign to an end in the East, yet through
his act Arianism came into possession, a century later, of all but one of
the newly set up thrones in the West.

In truth, at the time the western empire fell the Catholic Church was
threatened with the loss of everything which, down to the time of St. Leo,
she had gained. For the triumph which Constantine's conversion had
announced, for the unity of faith which her own Councils had maintained
from Nicaea to Chalcedon, she seemed to have before her subjection to a
terrible despotism in the East, extinction by one dominant heresy in the
West. For here it was not a crowd of heresies which surrounded her, but the
secular power at Rome, at Carthage, at Toulouse and Bordeaux, at Seville
and Barcelona, spoke Arian. Who was to recover the Goth, the Vandal, the
Burgundian, the Sueve, the Aleman, the Ruge, from that fatal error?
Moreover, her bounds had receded. Saxon and Frank had largely swept away
the Christian faith in their respective conquests. Who was to restore it to
them? The Rome which had planted her colonies through these vast lands as
so many fortresses, first of culture and afterwards of faith, was now
reduced to a mere _municipium_ herself. The very senate, with whose name
empire had been connected for five hundred years, at the bidding of a
barbarous leader of mercenaries serving for plunder, sent back the symbols
of sovereignty to the adventurer, whoever he might be, who sat by
corruption or intrigue on the seat of Constantine in Nova Roma.

This thought leads me to endeavour more accurately to point out the light
thrown upon the Papal power by the various relations in which it stood at
different times to the temporal governments with which it had to deal.

The practical division of the Roman empire in the fourth century, ensuing
upon the act of Constantine in forming a new capital of that empire in the
East, made the Church no longer subject to one temporal government. The
same act tested the spiritual Primacy of the Church. It called it forth to
a larger and more complicated action. I have in a former volume followed at
considerable length the series of events the issue of which was, after
Arian heretics had played upon eastern jealousy and tyrannical emperors
during fifty years, to strengthen the action of the Primacy. But assuredly
had that Primacy been artificial, or made by man, the division of interests
ensuing upon the political disjunction of the East and West would have
destroyed it. Julius and Liberius and Damasus would not have stood against
Constantius and Valens if the heart of the Church had not throbbed in the
Roman Primacy. Still more apparent does this become in the next fifty
years, wherein the overthrow of the western empire begins. Then the sons of
Theodosius, instead of joining hand with hand and heart with heart against
the forces of barbarism, which their father had controlled and wielded,
were seduced by their ministers into antagonism with each other. Byzantium
worked woe to the elder sister of whom she was jealous. Under the infamous
treasons of Rufinus and Eutropius, the words might have been uttered with
even fuller truth than in their original application--

     "Suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit".

Thus Alaric first took Rome. But he did not take the Primacy. Pope Innocent
lost no particle of his dignity or influence by the violation of Rome's
secular dignity. It was only seven years after that event when St.
Augustine and the two great African Councils acknowledged his Principate in
the amplest terms. The heresy of Pelagius and the schism of Donatus were
stronger than the sword of Alaric. And only a few years later, when a most
fearful heresy, broached by the Byzantine bishop, led to the assembly in
which then for the first time the Church met in general Council since
Nicaea, the most emphatic acknowledgment of the Primacy as seated in the
Roman bishop by descent from Peter was given by bishops, the subjects of an
emperor very jealous of the West, to a Pope who could not live securely in
Rome itself.

In all these hundred years it is seen how the division of the empire
enlarged and strengthened the action of the Primacy. But this it did
because the Primacy was divine. The events just referred to, but described
elsewhere at length, would have destroyed it had it not been divine.

But this course of things, which is seen in action from the Nicene to the
Chalcedonic Council, comes out with yet stronger force from the moment when
Rome loses all temporal independence. We may place this moment at the date
of its capture by Genseric. But it continues from that time. The events
which took place at Rome in the twenty-one following years, the nine
sovereigns put up and deposed, the subjection to barbarous leaders of
hireling free-lances, the worse plundering of Ricimer seventeen years after
that of Genseric--these were events grieving to the heart St. Leo and his
successors; but yet not events at Rome alone--the whole condition of things
in East and West which Pope Simplicius had to look upon outside of his own
city, despotic emperors in the East, with bishops bending to their will,
allowing the apostolic hierarchy to be displaced, and the apostolic
doctrine determined by secular masters; Teuton settlements in the West
ruled by the heresy most inimical to the Church; the Catholic population
reduced in numbers and lowered in social position; whole countries seized
by pagans, and forced at once into barbarism and infidelity--in the midst
of all these the Pope stood: his generals were the several bishops of
captured cities, whose places were assaulted by heretical rivals, supported
by their kings. Gaul, Spain, Britain, Africa, Illyricum, Italy itself, no
longer parts of one government, but ruled by enemies, any or all of these
would have rejected the Roman Primacy if it had not come to them with the
strongest warrant both of the Church's past history and her present
consciousness.

Such was the new world in which the Pope stood from the year 455; and he
stood in it for three hundred years. The testimony which such times bear is
a proof superadded to the words of Fathers and the decrees of Councils.

But there is one other point in the political situation on which a word
must be said.

From the time named, the Roman Primacy is the one sole fixed point in the
West. All else is fluctuating and transitional. To the Pope the bishops,
subject in each city to barbarian insolence, cling as their one unfailing
support. Without him they would be Gothic, or Vandal, or Burgundian, or
Sueve, or Aleman, or Turciling,--with him and in him they are Catholic. Let
me express, in the words of another, what is contained in this fact. The
Church, says Guizot, "at the commencement of the fifth century, had its
government, a body of clergy, a hierarchy, which apportioned the different
functions of the clergy, revenues, independent means of action, rallying
points which suit a great society, councils provincial, national, general,
the habit of arranging in common the society's affairs. In a word, at this
epoch Christianity was not only a religion but a Church. If it had not been
a Church, I do not know what would have become of it in the midst of the
Roman empire's fall. I confine myself to purely human considerations: I put
aside every element foreign to the natural consequences of natural facts.
If Christianity had only been a belief, a feeling, an individual
conviction, we may suppose that it would have broken down at the
dissolution of the empire and the barbarian invasion. It did break down
later in Asia and in all north Africa beneath an invasion of the same
kind--that of barbarous Mussulmans. It broke down then though it was an
institution, a constituted Church. Much more might the same fact have
happened at the moment of the Roman empire's fall. There were then none of
those means by which in the present day moral influences are established or
support themselves independent of institutions: no means by which a naked
truth, a naked idea, acquires a great power over minds, rules actions, and
determines events. Nothing of the kind existed in the fourth century to
invest ideas and personal feelings with such an authority. It is clear that
a strongly organised, a strongly governed, society was needed to struggle
against so great a disaster, to overcome such a hurricane. I think I do not
go too far in affirming that, at the end of the fourth and the beginning of
the fifth century, it is the Christian Church which saved Christianity. It
is the Church, with its institutions, its magistrates, and its power, which
offered a vigorous defence to the internal dissolution of the empire, to
barbarism; which conquered the barbarians; which became the bond, the
means, the principle of civilisation to the Roman and the barbarian
world."[27]

In this passage, Guizot speaks of the Church as a government, as a unity.
At the very moment of which he speaks, St. Augustine was addressing the
Pope as the fountainhead of that unity; and in the midst of the dissolution
an emperor was recommending him to the Gallic bishops "as the chief of the
episcopal coronet"[28] encircling the earth. The whole structure which
lasted through this earthquake of nations had its cohesion in him--a fact
seen even more clearly in the time of the third Valentinian than in that of
the conquering Constantine.

But looking to that East, which dates from the Encyclikon of a Basiliscus
and the Henotikon of a Zeno, here the Pope appears as the sole check to a
despotic power. He alone could speak to the emperor on an equal and even a
superior footing. Would such a power not have repudiated his interference,
had it not been convinced of an authority beyond its reach to deny? The
first generation following the utter impotence of Rome as reduced to a
_municipium_ under Arian rulers will answer this question, as we shall see
hereafter, with fullest effect.

I have adduced above three political situations. The first is when the
Primacy passes from dealing with one government to deal with more than one;
the second when the Primacy has to deal with an unsettled world of many
governments; the third when it is the sole fixed point in the face of a
hurricane on one side and a despotism on the other. I observe that the
testimony of all three concurs to bring out its action and establish its
divine character. As an epilogue to all that has been said, I will suppose
a case.

Three men, great with the natural greatness of intellect, greater still in
the acquired greatness of character, greatest of all in the supernatural
grace of saintliness, witnessed this fifth century from its beginning: one
of them, during two decades of years; the second, during three; the last,
during six decades. They saw in their own persons, or they heard in
authentic narratives, all its doings--the cities plundered and overthrown;
the countries wasted; all natural ties disregarded; neither age, nor sex,
nor dignity, respected by hordes of savages, incapable themselves of
learning, strangers to science, without perception of art; the sum being
that the richest civilisation which the world had borne was crushed down by
brute force. They saw, and mourned, and bore with unfailing personal
courage their portion of sorrow, mayhap turning themselves in their inmost
mind from a world perishing before their eyes, to contemplate the joy
promised in a world which should not perish. But neither to St. Jerome, nor
to St. Augustine, nor to St. Leo, did the thought occur that this barbarian
mass could be controlled into producing a civilisation richer than that
which its own incursion destroyed. That, instead of perpetual strife and
mutual repulsion, it could receive the one law of Christ; be moulded into a
senate of nations, with like institutions and identical principles; that,
instead of one empire taking an external impress of the Christian faith,
but rebelling against it with a deep-seated corruption and an unyielding
paganism, and so perishing in the midst of abundance, it should grow into
peoples, the corner-stone of whose government and the parent of their
political constitution should be the one faith of Christ, and their
acknowledged judge the Roman Pastor; and that the Rome which all the three
saw once plundered, and the third twice subjected to that penalty, should
lose all its power as a secular capital, while it became the shrine whence
a divine law went forth; and that these hordes, who laid it waste before
their eyes, should become its children and its most valiant defenders.

Had such a vision been vouchsafed to either of these great saints, with
what words of thankfulness would he have described it. This is the subject
which this narrative opens; and we, the long-descended offspring of these
hordes, have seen this sight and witnessed this exertion of power carried
on through centuries; and degenerate and ungrateful children as we are, we
are living still upon the deeds which God wrought in that conversion of the
nations by the pastoral staff of St. Peter, leading them into a land
flowing with oil and wine.

NOTES:

[3] "Episcopatus unus est cujus a singulis in solidum pars tenetur."--S.
Cyprian, _De Unitate Ecclesiae_.

[4] Gregorovius, i. 286. "Das Papstthum, vom Kaiser des Abendlandes
befreit, erstand, und die Kirche Roms wuchs unter Truemmern maechtig empor.
Sie trat an die Stelle des Reichs."

[5] Gregorovius, i. 200.

[6] St. Ignatius, _Epistle to the Romans_.

[7] "That Roman, that Judean bond
      United then dispart no more--
    Pierce through the veil; the rind beyond
      Lies hid the legend's deeper lore.
    Therein the mystery lies expressed
      Of power transferred, yet ever one;
    Of Rome--the Salem of the West--
      Of Sion, built o'er Babylon."

    A. de Vere, _Legends and Records_, p. 204.

[8] Gregorovius, i. 208.

[9] Gregorovius, i. 215.

[10] Sidonius Apollinaris, _Epist._, i. 9. "Hi in amplissimo ordine,
seposita praerogativa partis armatae, facile post purpuratum principem
principes erant."

[11] "Sed si forte placet veteres sopire querelas
     Anthemium concede mihi; sit partibus istis
     Augustus longumque Leo; mea jura gubernet
     Quem petii."--_Carmen_, ii.

[12] Reumont, i. 700.

[13] He says at the end of 500 hendecasyllabics (jam te veniam loquacitati
Quingenti hendecasyllabi precantur):

    "Hinc ad balnea non Neroniana,
    Nec quae Agrippa dedit, vel ille cujus
    Bustum Dalmaticae vident Salonae,
    Ad thermas tamen ire sed libebat,
    Privato bene praebitas pudori".

[14] For a well-told account of this expedition and its failure, see
Thierry, _Derniers Temps de l'Empire d'Occident_, pp. 77-101.

[15] There is a strange occurrence recorded by St. Gregory in his
_Dialogues_ as having taken place in this church, which would seem to point
at Ricimer's burial in it.

[16] This account has been shortened from that of Gregorovius, i. 231-5.

[17] Giesebrecht, quoted by Hergenroether, _K.G._, i. 449.

[18] Hergenroether, i. 449-453.

[19] Reumont, ii. 6.

[20] Reumont, ii. 9.

[21] Reumont (ii. 29-42) gives an admirable sketch of the government of
Theodorich, by which I have profited in what follows.

[22] Montalembert, Gregorovius, Kurth. Philips (vol. iii., p. 51, sec.
119), remarks: "Waere Theodorich der Grosse nicht Arianer gewesen, so
wuerde, wenn er es sonst gewollt, ihm wohl nichts weiter im Wege gestanden
haben, als sich zum Roemischen kaiser im Abendlande ausrufen lassen".

[23] Gregorovius, i. 312, 315.

[24] Orosius, _Hist._, vii. 43.

[25] Photius, i. 111.

[26] Photius, i. 120.

[27] Guizot, _Sur la Civilisation en Europe_, deuxieme lecon.

[28] Edict of Valentinian III., in 447.




CHAPTER II.

CAESAR FELL DOWN.


When St. Leo refused his assent to the Canons in favour of the see of
Constantinople, which, at the end of the Council of Chalcedon, the Court,
the clergy, and above all Anatolius, the bishop of the imperial city,
desired to be passed, and with that intent overbore the resistance of the
Papal legates, the race of Theodosius was still reigning both at Old and at
New Rome. The eastern sovereigns, Marcian and Pulcheria, by becoming whose
husband Marcian had ascended the throne, had acted with conspicuous loyalty
towards the Pope. The mistakes of Theodosius II. were repaired, and the
cabals of his courtiers ceased to affect the stronger minds and faithful
hearts of his successors. In the West, Galla Placidia, during all the
reign, since the death, in 423, of her brother Honorius, with which her
nephew Theodosius II. had invested her, was also faithful to St. Peter's
See; the same spirit directed her son Valentinian, and his empress-cousin,
the daughter of the eastern emperor. The letters of all exist, in which
they strove to set right their father, or nephew, Theodosius II., in the
matter of Eutyches. All had supported St. Leo in the annulling that
unhappy Council which compromised the faith of the Church so long as it was
allowed to count as a Council. But not for any merit on the part of
Pulcheria and Marcian would St. Leo allow the mere grandeur of a royal
city, because it was the seat of empire, to dethrone from their original
rank, held since the beginning of the Christian hierarchy, the two other
Sees of St. Peter--the one of his disciple St. Mark, sent from his side at
Rome; the other, in which he had first sat himself. St. Leo could not the
least foresee that the course of things in less than a generation would
justify by the plainest evidence of facts his maintenance of tradition and
his prescience of future dangers. He had charged Anatolius with seeking
unduly to exalt himself at the expense of his brethren. The exaltation
consisted in making himself the second bishop of the Church. His see, a
hundred and twenty years before, had, if it existed at all--for it is all
but lost in insignificance--been merely a suffragan of the archbishop of
Heraclea. Leo saw that Anatolius, under cover of the emperor's permanent
residence in Nova Roma, sought to make its bishop the lever by which the
whole episcopate of the East should be moved. We are now to witness the
attempt to carry into effect all which St. Leo feared by a bishop who was
next successor but one to Anatolius in his see.

The changes, indeed, wrought in a few years were immense. St. Leo himself
outlived both Pulcheria and Marcian; and on the death of the latter saw the
imperial succession, which had been in some sense hereditary since the
election of Valentinian I., in 364, pass to a new man. As this is the first
occasion on which the succession to the Byzantine throne comes into our
review, it may be well to consider what sort of thing it was. I suppose the
Caesarean succession even from the first is a hard thing to bring under any
definition. Since Claudius was discovered quaking for fear behind a
curtain, and dragged out to sit upon the throne which his nephew Caius had
hastily vacated, after having been welcomed to it four years before with
universal acclamation, it would be difficult to say what made a man emperor
of the Romans. So much I seem to see in that terrible line, that the
descent from father to son was hardly ever blessed, and that those who were
adopted by an emperor no way related to them succeeded the best. The
children of the very greatest emperors--of a Marcus Aurelius, a
Constantine, a Theodosius--have only brought shame on their parents and
ruin on their empire. Again, if the youth of a Nero or a Caracalla ended in
utter ignominy, the youth of an Alexander Severus produced the fairest of
reigns, while it ended in his murder by an usurper. But strange and
anomalous as the Caesarean succession appears, that of the Byzantine
sovereigns, from the disappearance of the Theodosian race to the last
Constantine who dies on the ramparts of the city made by the first, shows a
great deterioration.[29] There was no acknowledged principle of succession.
Arbitrary force determined it. One robber followed another upon the throne;
so that the eastern despot seemed to imitate that ghastly rule, in the
wood by Nemi, "of the priest who slew the slayer and shall himself be
slain". If the army named one man to the throne, the fleet named another.
If intrigue and shameless deceit gained it in one case, murder succeeded in
another. Relationship or connection by marriage with the last possessor
helped but rarely. This frequent and irregular change, and the personal
badness of most sovereigns, caused endless confusion to the realm. This is
the staple of the thousand years in which the election of the emperor Leo
I., in 457, stands at the head. On the death of Marcian, following that of
Pulcheria, in whose person a woman first became empress regnant, Leo was a
Thracian officer, a colonel of the service, and director of the general
Aspar's household. Aspar was an Arian Goth, commander of the troops, who
had influence enough to make another man emperor, but not to cancel the
double blot of barbarian and heretic in his own person. He made Leo, with
the intention to be his master. And Leo ruled for seventeen years with some
credit; and presently put Aspar and his son to death, in a treacherous
manner, but not without reason. He bore a good personal character, was
Catholic in his faith, and St. Leo lived on good terms with him during the
four years following his election. St. Leo, dying in 461, was succeeded by
Pope Hilarus, the deacon and legate who brought back a faithful report to
Rome of the violent Council at Ephesus, in 449, from which he had escaped.
Pope Hilarus was succeeded in 468 by Simplicius, and in 474 the emperor
Leo died, leaving the throne to an infant grandson of the same name, the
son of his daughter Ariadne, by an Isaurian officer Zeno, who reigned at
first as the guardian of his son, and a few months afterwards came by that
son's death to sole power as emperor. The worst character is given to Zeno
by the national historians. His conduct was so vile, and his government so
discredited by irruptions of the Huns on the Danube, and of Saracens in
Mesopotamia, that his wife's stepmother Verina, the widow of Leo I.,
conspired against him, and was able to set her brother Basiliscus on the
throne. Zeno took flight; Basiliscus was proclaimed emperor. He declared
himself openly against the Catholic faith in favour of the Eutycheans. But
Basiliscus was, if possible, viler than Zeno, and after twenty months Zeno
was brought back. The usurper's short rule lasted from October, 475, to
June, 477; exactly, therefore, at the time when Odoacer put an end to the
western empire. It was upon Zeno's recovery of the throne that he received
back from the Roman senate the sovereign insignia, and conferred the title
of Roman Patricius on Odoacer. In the following years Zeno had much to do
with Theodorich. He gave up to him part of Dacia and Moesia, and finally
he made, in 484, the king of the Ostrogoths Roman consul, as a reward for
the services to the Roman emperor. But, afterwards, Theodorich ravaged
Zeno's empire up to the walls of Constantinople, and was bought off by a
commission to march into Italy and to dethrone Odoacer. Zeno continued an
inglorious and unhappy reign, full of murders, deceits, and crimes of
every sort, for fourteen years after his restoration, and died in 491.

Let us now pass to the ecclesiastical policy of Zeno's reign.

The succession to the see of Constantinople requires to be considered in
apposition with that of the see of Rome. The attempt of Anatolius had been
broken by St. Leo, who also outlived him by three years, for Anatolius died
in 458, a year after the emperor Leo had succeeded Marcian; and his
crowning of Leo is recorded as the first instance of that ceremony being
exercised. At his death Gennadius was appointed, who sat to the year 471.
He is commended by all writers for his admirable conduct. St. Leo[30] had
sent bishops to Constantinople to ask the emperor that he would bring to
punishment Timotheus the Cat, who, being schismatical, excommunicated, and
Eutychean, had nevertheless got possession of the see of Alexandria. He was
endeavouring, after the death of the legitimate bishop, Proterius, who had
succeeded the deposed Dioscorus, to ruin the Catholic faith throughout
Egypt. All the bishops of the East, whom the emperor consulted, pronounced
against this Timotheus. But he was supported by Aspar, who had given Leo
the empire. Nevertheless, Gennadius joined his efforts with those of the
Pope, and Timotheus Ailouros was banished from Alexandria to Gangra.
Another Timotheus Solofaciolus, approved by Pope Leo, was made bishop of
Alexandria.

At the end of 471, Acacius succeeded Gennadius in the see of the capital.
At the time he was well known, having been for many years superior of the
orphans' hospital, where he had gained the affection of everyone. He is
said to have been made bishop by the influence of Zeno, who was then the
emperor's son-in-law. He immediately rose high in the opinion of Leo, who
consulted him on private and public affairs before anyone else. He placed
him in the senate, the first time that the bishop had sat there. Acacius is
said to have used his influence with Leo to soften a severe temper, to
restore many persons to his favour, to obtain the recal of many from
banishment. He took special care of the churches, and of the clergy serving
them, and they in return put his portrait everywhere. Acacius was
considered an excellent bishop when Basiliscus rose against Zeno.

In all this contest Acacius took part against the attempt which Basiliscus
made to overthrow the faith of the Church. He had issued a document termed
the Encyclikon or Circular, in which for the first time in the history of
the Church an emperor had assumed the right, as emperor, to lay down the
terms of the faith. In this act there is not so much to be considered the
mixture of truth and falsehood in the document issued as the authority
which he claimed to set up a standard of doctrine. But he could not induce
Acacius to put his signature to it. Five hundred Greek bishops, it is true,
were found to do so, but Acacius was not one of them. Basiliscus fell, Zeno
was restored, and Acacius came out of the struggles between them with
increased renown.

Zeno's restoration was considered at the time a victory of the Catholic
cause. Basiliscus in his short dominion of twenty months had formally
recalled from exile the notorious heretic Timotheus Ailouros, and put him
in the patriarchal see of Alexandria, as likewise Peter the Fuller in the
see of Antioch. This Timotheus had moved Basiliscus to the strong act of
despotically overriding the faith by issuing an edict upon doctrine.
Basiliscus had been obliged, by the opposition of the monks at
Constantinople, and that of Acacius, and the fear of the returning Zeno, to
withdraw this document. The usurper had to fly for refuge to sanctuary, but
Acacius did not shield him as St. Chrysostom had shielded Eutropius. He
came forth under solemn promise from Zeno that his blood should not be
shed, and was carried with wife and children to Cappadocia, where all were
starved to death.

In all this matter Acacius had gained great credit as defender of the
Council of Chalcedon. He had himself referred for help to Simplicius in the
Apostolic See. Zeno upon his return to power had entered into closer
connection with the Roman chair. He had sent the Pope a blameless
confession of faith, promising to maintain the Council of Chalcedon.
Simplicius, on the 8th October, 477, had congratulated him on his return.
In this letter he reminds Zeno of the acts of his predecessors, Marcian and
Leo: that he owed gratitude to God for bringing him back. "He has restored
their empire to you: do you show Him their service. And as the words which
I lately addressed, under the instruction of the blessed Apostle Peter,
were rejected by those who were about to fall (_i.e._, Basiliscus), I pray
that by God's favour they may profit those who shall stand (_i.e._, Zeno).
I receive the letters sent by your clemency, as an immense pledge of your
devotion. I breathe again joyously, and do not doubt that you will do even
more in religion than I desire. But mindful of my office, I dwell the more
on this matter, because out of regard alike for your empire and your
salvation I ardently wish that you should abide in that cause on which
alone depends the stability of present government and the gaining future
glory. I beg above all things that you should deliver the Church of
Alexandria from the heretical intruder, and restore it to the Catholic and
legitimate bishop, and also restore the several ejected bishops to their
sees, that as you have delivered your commonwealth from the domination of a
tyrant, so you may save the Church of God everywhere from the robbery and
contamination of heretics. Do not allow that to prevail which the iniquity
of the times and a spirit as rebellious against God as against your empire
has stirred up, but rather what so many great pontiffs, and with them the
consent of the universal Church, has decreed. Give full legal vigour to the
decrees of the Council of Chalcedon, or those which my predecessor Leo, of
blessed memory, has with apostolic learning laid down. That is, as you have
found it, the Catholic faith, which has put down the mighty from their
seat, and exalted the humble."[31]

To appreciate this letter, it must be borne in mind that it was written by
Pope Simplicius a year after the western empire was extinguished; that the
writer had seen nine western emperors deposed, and most of them murdered,
in twenty-one years; that it was addressed to the eastern and now only
Roman emperor; and that the writer was living under the absolute rule of
the _condottiere_ chief who had succeeded Ricimer, and is called by Pope
Gelasius a few years afterwards "Odoacer, barbarian and heretic".[32]

The whole East was disturbed at this time by the condition of the great
patriarchal sees of Alexandria and Antioch. The Eutychean party was
perpetually trying for the mastery. At Alexandria, Proterius, who succeeded
Dioscorus when he was deposed at the Council of Chalcedon, had been
murdered in 458. The utmost efforts of Pope Leo and the emperor Leo were
needed to maintain his legitimate successor Timotheus Solofaciolus, against
whom a rival of the same name, Timotheus Ailouros, had been set up by the
Eutychean party, which was far the most numerous. It was on the death of
this patriarch, Timotheus Solofaciolus, in 482, that the clergy and many
bishops had chosen John Talaia as his successor. John Talaia had announced
his election to the Pope in order to be acknowledged by him; also, as was
customary, to the patriarch of Antioch; but had sent his synodal letter by
some indirect manner to Acacius, who thus received the notice by public
report, rather than in the official way. But in the four years which had
elapsed since the restoration of Zeno, Acacius had acquired great influence
over him. Zeno had published a decree in which, "out of regard to our royal
city," he assured to that "Church, the mother of our piety and the see of
all orthodox Christians, the privileges and honours over the consecration
of bishops which, before our government, or during it, it is recognised to
possess," in which he named Acacius, "the most blessed patriarch, father of
our piety". Acacius had made his maintenance of the Council of Chalcedon go
step by step with his claim to exercise patriarchal rights over the great
see of Ephesus. This had led to fresh reclamations from the Pope. Acacius
had gone ever forwards, and seemed, by the favour of Zeno, to be reaching
complete subjection of the eastern patriarchates to the see of
Constantinople. Incensed at what he considered the slight offered to him by
John Talaia, he took up, with the utmost keenness against him, the cause of
a rival, Peter the Stammerer, who had been elected by the Eutychean party.
He worked upon the emperor's mind in favour of the Monophysite pretender.
Peter the Stammerer himself came to Constantinople, and urged to Zeno that
the utmost confusion and disorder might be feared in Egypt if the powerful
and numerous opponents of the Council of Chalcedon had an unacceptable
patriarch put upon them. At the same time, he proposed a compromise which
would unite all parties and prevent the breaking up of the eastern Church.
Acacius, a few years before, had denounced to Pope Simplicius himself this
Peter the Stammerer as an adulterer, robber, and son of darkness. He now
entirely embraced this plan, and not only won the emperor to Peter's side
for the patriarchate, but induced Zeno to publish a doctrinal decree. This
was to express what was common to all confessions of faith down to the
Council of Chalcedon, to avoid the expressions used in controversy, and
entirely to set aside the Council of Chalcedon. In 482 appeared this
Formulary of Union, or Henotikon, drawn up, it was supposed, by Acacius
himself, addressed to the clergy and people of Alexandria. It was first
subscribed by Acacius, as patriarch of Constantinople, then by Peter the
Stammerer, acknowledged for this purpose as patriarch of Alexandria; then
by Peter the Fuller, as patriarch of Antioch; by Martyrius of Jerusalem,
and by other bishops, but by no means all. Zeno used the imperial power to
expel those who would not sign it.

As Peter the Stammerer had gone to the emperor to get his election approved
and supported by Zeno and Acacius, so John Talaia had solicited Pope
Simplicius to confirm his election. This the Pope had been on the point of
confirming, when he received a letter from the emperor accusing John
Talaia, and urging the appointment of Peter the Stammerer. Acacius had not
hesitated to absolve him, and admit him to his communion, and strove by
every effort of deceit and force to induce the eastern bishops to accept
him. The last letter we have of the Pope, dated November 6, 482, strongly
censures Acacius for communicating nothing to him concerning the Church of
Alexandria, and for not instructing the emperor in such a way that peace
might be restored by him.

On March 2, 483, Pope Simplicius died, and was succeeded by Pope Felix.
John Talaia had come in person to Rome to lay his accusation against
Acacius. Also the orthodox monks at Constantinople, and eastern bishops
expelled for not signing the Henotikon, begged for the Pope's assistance,
and denounced Acacius as the author of all the trouble. Amongst these
expelled bishops who appealed to Rome were bishops of Chalcedon, Samosata,
Mopsuestia, Constantina, Hemeria, Theodosiopolis.

The Pope called a council, in which he considered the complaint now brought
before him by John Talaia, as a hundred and forty years before St.
Athanasius had carried his complaint to Pope Julius. It was resolved to
support the ejected bishops, to maintain the Council of Chalcedon, and to
request from the emperor the expulsion of Peter the Stammerer, who was
usurping the see of Alexandria. For this purpose the Pope commissioned two
bishops, Vitalis and Misenus, to go as his legates to the emperor. They
were to invite Acacius to attend a council at Rome, and to answer therein
the complaint brought against him by the elected patriarch of Alexandria.

The legates carried a letter[33] from Pope Felix to the emperor, in which,
according to custom, the Pope informed him of his election. He observed
that, for a long time, the see of the blessed Apostle had been expecting
an answer to the letters sent by his predecessor of blessed memory,
"especially inasmuch as it had bound your majesty, with tremendous vows,
not to allow the see of the evangelist St. Mark to be separated from the
teaching or the communion of his master.... Again, therefore, the reverend
confession of the Apostle Peter, with a mother's voice, renews its
instance. It ceases not with confidence to call upon you as its son. It
cries: O Christian prince, why do you allow me to be interrupted in that
course of charity which binds together the universal Church? Why, in my
person, do you break up the consent of the whole world? I beseech you, my
son, suffer not that tunic of the Lord woven from the top throughout, by
which is signified, as the Holy Spirit rules the whole body, that the
Church of Christ should be one and individual--suffer it not to be broken.
They who crucified our Saviour left it untouched. Do not let it be rent in
your times. My faith it is which the Lord Himself declared should alone be
one, never to be conquered by any assault: He who promised that the gates
of hell should never prevail over the Church founded on my confession. This
Church it was which restored you to the imperial dignity, deprived its
impugners of their power, and opened to you the path of victory in
defending it.[34]

"Look at me, his successor, however humble, as if the Apostle were present.
Look deeper into those ways which concern the reverence due to God and the
condition of man; and be not ungrateful to the Author of your present
prosperity. In you alone survives the name of emperor. Do not grudge us the
saving you. Do not diminish our confidence in praying for you. Look back on
your august predecessors Marcian and Leo, and the faith of so many princes,
you, who are their lawful heir. Once more, look back on your own
engagements, and the words which, on your return to power, you addressed to
my predecessor. The defence of the Council of Chalcedon is expressed in the
whole series." And he ends: "What I could not put in my letter I have
entrusted my brethren and legates to explain. I beseech you to listen, as
well for the preservation of Catholic truth as for the safety of your own
empire."

To Acacius also the legates carried a letter of the Pope, which he opened
by announcing that he had succeeded to the office of Pope Simplicius, and
was forthwith involved in those many cares which the voice of the Supreme
Pastor had imposed upon St. Peter, and which kept him watchfully occupied
with a rule which extended over all the peoples of the earth. At that
moment his greatest anxiety, as it had been that of his predecessor, was
for the city of Alexandria, and for the faith of the whole East. And he
went on to reproach Acacius for not duly informing him of what was passing,
for not defending the Council of Chalcedon, and not using his influence
with the emperor in its defence: "Brother, do not let us despair that the
word of our Saviour will be true; He promised that He would never be
wanting to His Church to the end of the world; that it should never be
overcome by the gates of hell; that all which was bound on earth by
sentence of apostolic doctrine should not be loosed in heaven. Nor let us
think that either the judgment of Peter or the authority of the universal
Church, by whatever dangers it be surrounded, will ever lose the weight of
its force. The more it dreads being weakened by worldly prosperity, the
more, divinely instructed, it grows under adversity. To let the perverse go
on in their way, when you can stop them, is indeed to encourage them. He
who, evidently, ceases to obstruct a wicked deed, does not escape the
suspicion of complicity. If, when you see hostility arising against the
Council of Chalcedon, you do nothing, believe me, I know not how you can
maintain that you belong to the whole Church."

As soon as the two legates arrived at the Dardanelles, they were arrested,
by order of Zeno and Acacius, put in prison, their papers and letters taken
from them. They were menaced with death if they did not accept the
communion of Acacius and of Peter the Stammerer. Then they were seduced
with presents, and deceived with false promises that Acacius would submit
the whole affair to the Pope. They resisted at first, but yielded in the
end, and, passing beyond their commission, gave judgment in favour of Peter
the Stammerer. They had broken all the instructions of the Pope, and
carried back letters from Zeno and Acacius to him, full of extravagant
praises of Peter the Stammerer. His former deposition and condemnation were
entirely put aside. On the other hand, the character of John Talaia was
bitterly impugned. The emperor asserted that he had treated Church matters
with the utmost moderation, and guided himself entirely by the advice of
the patriarch Acacius.

In fact, Acacius was the spiritual superior of the whole eastern empire,
and appeared not to trouble himself any more about the Roman See. He made
no pretence to give any satisfaction for what he had done. Before he had
been the champion of orthodoxy, now he had become in league with heretics.
But he lost all remaining confidence among Catholics. The zealous monks of
his own city withdrew from his communion, and sent one of themselves,
Symeon, to Rome to inform the Pope of all that had happened, and disclose
the faithless behaviour of his legates.[35]

In another letter the Pope had cited Acacius to appear at Rome to meet the
accusation brought against him by John Talaia, the patriarch of Alexandria.
Acacius took no notice of this citation, nor of the complaint brought
against him.

Thereupon, the Pope, in a council of seventy-seven bishops, held at Rome
the 28th July, 484, made inquiry into all this transaction. He annulled the
judgment on Peter the Stammerer, passed without his authority by his
legates, deprived them of their offices, and of communion. He renewed the
condemnation of Peter the Stammerer, he had in the interval admonished
Acacius again, without result. He now issued the decree of deposition upon
him. It runs in the following words:

"You are[36] guilty of many transgressions; have often treated with insult
the venerable Nicene Council; have unrightfully claimed jurisdiction over
provinces not belonging to you. In the case of intruding heretics, ordained
likewise by heretics, whom you had yourself condemned, and whose
condemnation you had urged upon the Apostolic See, you not only received
them to your communion, but even set them over other Churches, which was
not, even in the case of Catholics, allowable; or have even given them
higher rank undeservedly. John is an instance of this. When he was not
accepted by the Catholics at Apamea, and had been driven away from Antioch,
you set him over the Tyrians. Humerius also, having been degraded from the
diaconite and deprived of the Christian name, you advanced to the
priesthood. And as if these seemed to you minor offences, in the boldness
of your pride you assaulted the truth itself of apostolic doctrine. That
Peter, whose condemnation by my predecessor of holy memory you had yourself
recorded, as the subjoined proofs show, you suffered by your connivance
again to invade the see of the blessed evangelist Mark, to drive out
orthodox bishops and clergy, and ordain, no doubt, such as himself, to
expel one who was there regularly established, and hold the Church captive.
Nay, his person was so agreeable to you, and his ministers so acceptable,
that you have been found to persecute a large number of orthodox bishops
and clergy, who now come to Constantinople, and to encourage his legates.
You put upon Misenus and Vitalis to find excuse for one who was
anathematising the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon, and violating the
tomb of Timotheus of holy memory, as sure information has been given us.
You have not ceased to praise and exalt him so as to boast that the very
condemnation you had yourself recorded was untrue. You went even further in
the defence of a perverse man. They who were late bishops, but are now
deprived of their rank and of communion, Vitalis and Misenus, men whom we
had specially sent for his expulsion, you suffered to be deprived of their
papers and imprisoned; you dragged them out thence to a procession which
you were having with heretics, as they confessed; in contempt of their
legatine quality, which even the law of nations would protect, you drew
them on to the communion of heretics, and yourself; you corrupted them with
bribes; and, with injury to the blessed Apostle Peter, from whose see they
went forth, you caused them not only to return with labour lost, but with
the overthrow of all their instructions. In deceiving them, your wickedness
was shown. As to the memorial of my brother and fellow-bishop John
(Talaia), who brought the heaviest charges against you, by not venturing to
give an answer in the Apostolic See, according to the canons, you have
established his allegations. Likewise, you considered unworthy of your
sight our most faithful defender Felix, whom a necessity caused to come
afterwards. You also showed by your letters that known heretics were
communicating with you. For what else are they who, after the death of
Timotheus of holy memory, go back to his church under Peter the Stammerer,
or, having been Catholics, have given themselves up to this Peter, but such
as Peter himself was judged to be by the whole Church, and by yourself?
Therefore, by this present sentence have with those whom you willingly
embrace your portion, which we send to you by the defender of your own
church, being deprived of sacerdotal honour and Catholic communion, and
severed from the number of the faithful. Know that the name and office of
the sacerdotal ministry is taken from you. You are condemned by the
judgment of the Holy Ghost[37] and apostolic authority, and never to be
released from the bonds of anathema.

"Caelius Felix, bishop of the holy Catholic Church of the city of Rome. On
the 28th July, in the consulship of the most honourable Venantius."

This was a synodal letter,[38] signed by sixty-seven bishops, as well as
the Pope. But the copy of the decree against Acacius sent to Constantinople
was signed by the Pope alone, partly according to ancient custom, partly in
order with greater security to transmit it to the eastern capital. Had this
copy been signed by the bishops also, ruling practice would have required
it to be carried over by at least two bishops, which then appeared very
dangerous. A Roman synod of forty-three[39] bishops, in the following
year, 485, wrote to the clergy of Constantinople: "If snares had not been
set for the orthodox by land and sea, many of us might have come with the
sentence of Acacius. But now, being assembled on the cause of the church of
Antioch at St. Peter's, we make a point of declaring to you the custom
which has always prevailed among us. As often as bishops[40] meet in Italy
on ecclesiastical matters, especially when they touch the faith, the custom
is maintained that the successor of those who preside in the Apostolic See,
as representing all the bishops of the whole of Italy, according to the
care of all churches which lies upon him, appoints all things, being the
head of all, as the Lord said to Peter, 'Thou art Peter,' &c. The three
hundred and eighteen holy fathers assembled at Nicaea acted in obedience to
this word, and left the confirmation and authority of what they treated to
the holy Roman Church; both of which things all successions to our own time
by the grace of Christ maintain. What, therefore, the holy council
assembled at St. Peter's decreed, and the most blessed Felix, our Head,
Pope, and Archbishop, ratified, that is sent to you by Tutus, defensor of
the Church."

Three days after the sentence on Acacius, Pope Felix wrote to the emperor
Zeno.[41] He reminded him that, in violation of reverence to God, an
embassy to the Holy See had been taken captive, its papers taken away; it
had been dragged out of prison to communicate with the officers of the
very heretic against whom it had been sent. "Since even barbarous nations,
who knew not God, allowed to embassies for the transaction of human affairs
a sacred liberty, how much more should that liberty be preserved sacred,
especially in divine things, by a Roman emperor and Christian prince?
Putting aside the embassy, which even in the case of the Apostle Peter was
disregarded, be assured at least by these letters that the see of the
Apostle Peter has never granted communion, and will never grant it, to that
Alexandrian Peter long ago justly condemned, and again by synodal decree
suppressed. But as you have not regarded the words of exhortation I
addressed to you, I leave it to your choice to select which you will have,
the communion of the blessed Apostle Peter or that of the Alexandrian
Peter. You will know by the letters of this man's abettor, Acacius, to my
predecessor of holy memory, copies of which I enclose, how even in your own
judgment he was condemned. But this Acacius, who has committed many
atrocities against the ancient rules, and has come to praise one whom he
affirmed to be condemned, and whose condemnation he obtained from the
Apostolic See, has been severed from apostolic communion. But I believe
that your piety, which prefers to comply even with its own laws rather than
to resist them, and which knows that the supreme rule of things human is
given to you on condition of admitting that things divine are allotted to
dispensers divinely assigned, I believe that it will be undoubtedly of
service to you if you permit the Catholic Church in the time of your
principate to use its own laws, nor allow anyone to stand in the way of its
liberty, which has restored to you the imperial power. For it is certain
that this will bring safety to your affairs, if in God's cause, and
according to His appointment, you study to subdue the royal will and not to
prefer it to the bishops of Christ, and rather to learn holy things by them
than to teach them; to follow the form traced out by the Church, not after
human fashion to impose rules on it, nor wish to dominate the commands of
that power to whom it is God's will that your clemency should devoutly
submit, lest, if the measure of the divine disposition be overpast, it may
end in the disgrace of the disponent. And from this time I absolve my
conscience as to all these things, who have to plead my cause before
Christ's tribunal. It will be well for you more and more to reflect that
both in the present state of things we are under the divine examination,
and that after this life's course we shall according to it come before the
divine judgment."

St. Gregory the Great, writing his _Dialogues_[42] about one hundred and
ten years after this letter, informs us that the writer of it was his
great-grandfather, and speaks of his appearing in a vision to his aunt
Tarsilla and showing her the habitation of everlasting light. At the time
of writing it, Pope Felix was living under the domination of the Arian
Herule Odoacer. The great Church of Africa was suffering the most terrible
of persecutions under the Arian Vandal Hunneric, the son of his father
Genseric. Arian Visigoth rulers were in possession of Spain and France, of
whom Euric, as we have seen, was described rather as the chief of a sect
than the sovereign of a people. In all the West not a yard of territory was
under rule of a Catholic sovereign. And he whom the Pope addressed, with
the dignity of the Apostolic See in its reverence for the power which is a
delegation of God, as Roman emperor and Christian prince, was in his
private life scandalous, in all his public rule shifty and tyrannical, and
in belief, if he had any, an Eutychean heretic. It may be added, as a fact
of history, that the emperor went before the divine judgment sooner than
the Pope; that during the seven years which intervened between the letter
and his death he utterly disregarded all that the Pope had done and said.
He suffered, or rather made the bishop of Constantinople to be the ruler of
the eastern Church; he maintained heretics in the sees of Alexandria and
Antioch. After this he died in 491, and the last fact recorded of him is
that the empress Ariadne, the daughter of Leo I., who had brought him the
empire with her hand, when he fell into an epileptic fit and was supposed
to be dead, had him buried at once, and placed guards around his tomb, who
were forbidden to allow any approach to it. When the imperial vault was
afterwards entered, Zeno was found to have torn his arm with his teeth. The
empress widow, forty days after the death of Zeno, conferred her hand, and
with it the empire a second time, upon Anastasius, who had been up to that
time a sort of gentleman usher[43] in the imperial service. Anastasius
ruled the eastern empire twenty-seven years, from 491 to 518.

The Pope further sought by a letter[44] to the clergy and people of
Constantinople to remove the scandal caused by the weakness of his legates,
and to explain the grounds upon which he had deposed Acacius. "Though we
know the zeal of your faith, yet we warn all who desire to share in the
Catholic faith to abstain from communion with him, lest, which God forbid,
they fall into like penalty."

Acacius did not receive the papal judgment against him, but sought to
suppress it. A monk ventured to attach to his mantle as he went to Mass the
sentence of excommunication. It cost him his life, and brought heavy
persecutions on his brethren. Acacius met the Pope with open defiance, and
removed his name from the diptychs.[45] He rested on the emperor Zeno's
support, who did everything at his bidding. Every arm of deceit and of
violence he used equally. The monks, called, from their never intermitted
worship, the Sleepless, in close connection with Rome, suffered severely.
So Acacius passed the remaining five years of his life, dying in the autumn
of 489.

His excommunication by the Pope caused a schism between the East and West
which lasted thirty-five years, from 484 to 519. He met that supreme act of
authority by the counter act of removing the Pope's name from the diptychs.
This invites us to consider the position which he assumed.

From the year 482 (that is, four years after Zeno had recovered the
empire), Acacius appears in possession of full influence over the emperor.
The position of the bishop at Constantinople was, in itself, one of immense
dignity. He was undoubtedly the second person in the imperial city,
surrounded with a pomp and deference only yielding to that accorded to the
emperor, but in some respects superior to it. He was regarded as
sacrosanct: all the respect which the Church received in the minds of the
good was centred in his person. And as he had risen to all this dignity in
virtue of Constantinople being the capital, there was a special connection
between the capital and its bishop, which led it to sympathise with every
accession of power which he received. There can be no doubt that the right
acquired by that bishop over the great sees of Ephesus, Caesarea in Pontus,
and Heraclea in Thrace was extremely popular at Constantinople; and that
when he proceeded further to show his hand over the patriarchate of
Antioch--as, for instance, in nominating one of its archbishops at Tyre, as
the Pope reproached him--the capital was still better pleased. Most of all
when, breaking through all the regulations which the Nicene Council had
consecrated by its approval,--which, however, it had not created, but
found in immemorial subsistence,--he ventured to ordain at Constantinople a
patriarch of Antioch. Thus Stephen II., patriarch of Antioch, had been
murdered in 479 by the fanatical Monophysites, in the baptistry of the
Barlaam Church, and his mangled body thrown into the Orontes. The incensed
emperor punished the criminals, and charged his patriarch Acacius to
consecrate a new bishop for Antioch. Acacius seized the favourable
opportunity, after the example of Anatolius, to advance himself, and
appointed Stephen III. Emperor and patriarch both applied to Pope
Simplicius to excuse this violation of the rights of the Syrian bishops,
alleging the pressure of circumstances, and promising that the example
should not occur again. Simplicius, so entreated, excused the fault,
recognised the patriarch of Antioch--though he had been consecrated in
Constantinople by its bishop--but insisted that such a violation of the
canons should not be repeated. Presently Stephen III. died, upon which
Acacius committed the same fault anew, and in 482 consecrated Calendion
patriarch of Antioch. Calendion brought back from Macedonia the relics of
his great and persecuted predecessor, St. Eustathius; but presently Zeno
and Acacius displaced Calendion. Acacius was using the power which he
possessed over the emperor to advance his own credit in the appointment of
patriarchs, and to establish two notorious heretics--Peter the Fuller at
Antioch, and Peter the Stammerer at Alexandria. All this meant that the
bishop of Constantinople's hand was to be over the East, as the bishop of
Rome's hand was over the West. Then, ever since the Council of Chalcedon,
the two great eastern patriarchates had been torn to pieces by the
conflicts of parties. The Eutychean heresy fought a desperate battle for
mastery. As to Antioch, from the time that Eusebius of Nicomedia had
brought about the deposition of St. Eustathius, preparatory to that of
Athanasius in 330, the great patriarchate of the East had been declining
from the unrivalled position which it had held. As to Alexandria, from the
time that the 150 fathers at Constantinople, in 381, had attempted to make
Constantinople the second see, because it was Nova Roma, the see of St.
Mark bore a grudge against the upstart which sought to degrade it. In spite
of the unequalled renown of its two great patriarchs, St. Athanasius and
St. Cyril, it was sinking. And now heresy, schism, and imperial favour
seemed to have joined together to exhibit Acacius as not only the first
patriarch of the East, but as exercising jurisdiction even within their
bounds, and as nominating those who succeeded to their thrones. All which
would only tend to increase the power and popularity of the bishop of
Constantinople in his own see.

Acacius had now been eleven years bishop. He had gained at once the emperor
Leo; he had appeared to defend the Council of Chalcedon when Basiliscus
attacked it; he had further gained mastery over Zeno; but, more than all
this, he had seen Rome sink into what to eastern eyes must have seemed an
abyss. St. Leo had compelled Anatolius to give up the canons he so much
prized; since then northern barbarians had twice sacked Rome, and
Ricimer's most cruel host of adventurers had reaped whatever the Vandal
Genseric had left. If there was a degradation yet to be endured it would be
that a Herule soldier of fortune should compel a Roman senate to send back
the robes of empire to Constantinople, and be content to live under a
Patricius, sprung from one of the innumerable Teuton hordes, and sanctioned
by the emperor of the East; and Acacius would not forget that in the
councils of that emperor he was himself chief.

If New Rome held the second rank because the Fathers gave the first rank to
Old Rome, in that it was the capital, what was the position of New Rome and
its bishop when Old Rome had ceased in fact to be a capital at all? At that
moment--thirty years after St. Leo had confirmed the greatest of eastern
councils and been greeted by it as the head of the Christian faith--the
Rome in which he sat had been reduced to a mere municipal rank, and its
bishop, with all its people, lived under what was simply a military
government commanded by a foreign adventurer. Odoacer at Ravenna was master
of the lives and liberties of the Romans, including the Pope.

Acacius had had this spectacle for some years before him, when Pope Felix,
succeeding Pope Simplicius, called him to account for entirely reversing
the conduct which he had pursued at the time when Basiliscus had usurped
the empire. Then he defended the Council of Chalcedon and its doctrine;
then he denounced to the Pope Peter the Stammerer as a heretic and a man of
bad life, and had called for his condemnation and obtained it. He had now
taken upon himself not even to ask from the Pope this man's absolution, but
to absolve himself the very heretic he had caused to be condemned, and to
put him into the see of Alexandria, with the rejection of the bishop
legitimately elected, and approved at Rome, and to compose for the emperor
a doctrinal decree, which he subscribed himself first as the first of the
patriarchs, and was compelling all other bishops to sign under pain of
deprivation; when, behold, St. Leo's third successor called him to account
in exactly the same terms as St. Leo would have used, and required him to
meet at Rome the accusation brought against him by John Talaia, a duly
elected patriarch of Alexandria, just as St. Julius, a hundred and forty
years before, had invited the accusing bishops at Antioch to meet St.
Athanasius before his tribunal. He who resided in a state only second to
the emperor in the real capital of the empire to go to a city living in
durance under the northern barbarians, and submit to the judgment of one
whose own tribunal was in captivity to such masters!

But, on the other hand, Pope Felix spoke to the emperor as none but popes
have ever spoken. He called him his son, but he required from him filial
obedience. Above all he spoke in one character, and in one alone--as the
heir of that St. Peter whom the voice of the Lord had set over His Church;
he spoke from Rome, not because it was or had been capital of the empire,
but because it was St. Peter's See, and precisely because he succeeded St.
Peter in his apostolate.

The respective action, therefore, of Pope Felix on one side, and of Acacius
on the other, brought to an issue the most absolute of contradictions. The
Pope claimed obedience, as a superior, from Acacius. When that obedience
was refused, he exerted his authority as superior, and degraded Acacius
both from his rank as bishop, and from Christian communion. And a special
token of that sentence was to order his name to be removed from the
diptychs, and to enjoin the people of his own diocese to hold no communion
with him, on pain of incurring a like penalty with him. Acacius answered by
practically denying the Pope's authority to do any such act. He asserted
himself to be his equal by removing the Pope's name from the diptychs.
There could be no more striking denial of any such authority as the claim
to inherit Peter's universal pastorship, than to treat the Pope himself as,
in virtue of that pastorship, he had treated Acacius.

Even apart from this, the conduct of Acacius carried with it a double
denial of the Pope's authority: a denial that he was the supreme judge of
faith; and a denial that he was the supreme maintainer of discipline in its
highest manifestation, the order of the hierarchy itself.

He denied that the Pope was the supreme judge of faith, by drawing up a
formulary of doctrine, which he induced the emperor to promulgate by
imperial decree; and this independently of what doctrine that formulary
might contain. Further, he did this by supporting two persons judged to be
heretical by the Holy See--Peter the Fuller at Antioch, Peter the Stammerer
at Alexandria. He denied that the Pope was the supreme maintainer of
discipline, by making the two great sees of the East and South subordinate
to himself. As the Pope expressed it in his sentence, he had done
"nefarious things against the whole Nicene constitution," of which the Pope
was special guardian. In fact, his conduct was an imitation of that pursued
in the preceding century by Eusebius of Nicomedia, by Eudoxius, and all
their party. It was even carried out to its full completion. The emperor
was made the head of the Church, on condition of his leading it through the
bishop of Constantinople. Acacius put together the canon of the Council of
381, which said that the bishop of New Rome should hold the second rank in
the episcopate, because his city is New Rome, with the canon attempted to
be passed at Chalcedon, and cashiered by St. Leo, that the fathers gave its
privileges to Old Rome because it was the imperial city. Uniting the two,
he constructed the conclusion, that as Old Rome had ceased to be the
imperial city, which New Rome had actually become, the privileges of Old
Rome had passed to the bishop of New Rome.

This he expressed by removing the name of the Pope from the diptychs in
answer to his sentence of degradation and excommunication. As the Pope
could not suffer the conduct of Acacius, without ceasing to hold the
universal pastorship of St. Peter, so Acacius could not submit to it
without admitting that pastorship. He denied it in both its heads of faith
and government by his conduct. He embodied that denial unmistakably in
removing the Pope's name from the diptychs.

To lay down a parity between the ecclesiastical privileges of the two sees,
Rome and Constantinople, because their cities were both capitals, is
implicitly to deny altogether the divine origin of ecclesiastical
jurisdiction. That is, to deny that the Church is a divine polity at all.
The conduct of Acacius was to bring that matter to an issue. The end of it
will show whether he was right or wrong.

He lived for five years, from 484 to 489, strong in the emperor's support,
who did everything which he suggested. And he had his part as a counsellor,
as well as a bishop, in one most important transaction, which took place in
this interval. The reign of Zeno was disturbed by perpetual insurrections
and perils. In these Theodorick the Goth had been of great service to him,
so that in this year, 484, Zeno had made him consul at Rome. But Theodorick
afterwards thought that Zeno had treated him very ill. He marched upon
Constantinople: Zeno trembled on his throne. Something had to be done. What
was done was to turn Theodorick's longing eyes upon the land possessing
"the hapless dower of beauty".[46] Zeno commissioned him to turn Odoacer
out, and to take his place. In 489, Theodorick led the great mass of his
people into Italy, at the suggestion, and with the warrant of, the man whom
Pope Felix had appealed to as his son, the Roman emperor and Christian
prince. And so, as an emperor and a bishop of Constantinople, a hundred
years before, had led the Gothic nation into the Arian heresy, under the
belief that it was the Christian faith, another emperor of Constantinople
and another bishop turned that Gothic nation upon the Roman mother and the
See of Peter, regardless that they would thereby become temporal subjects
of those who were possessed by the "Arian perfidy". Beside Eudoxius and
Valens in history stand Acacius and Zeno; and beside Alaric, let loose with
his warlike host by the younger sister on the elder in 410, stands
Theodorick, commissioned, in 489, with all his people, to occupy
permanently the birthplace of Roman empire.

The eastern bishops[47] crouched before the emperor's power and his
patriarch's intrigues, who deposed those who were not in his favour, and
tyrannised over the greater number, so that many fled to the West. John
Talaia himself, the expelled patriarch of Alexandria, received the
bishopric of Nola from the Pope, to whom he had appealed. This continued to
be the state of things during five years, from 484 to 489, when Acacius
died, still under sentence of excommunication. One of the greatest bishops
of his time, St. Avitus of Vienna, characterises him with the words,
"Rather a timid lover than a public asserter of the opinion broached by
Eutyches: he praised, indeed, what he had taken from him, but did not
venture to preach it to a people still devout, and therefore unpolluted by
it". Another equally great bishop, Ennodius of Ticinum--that is,
Pavia--says: "He utterly surrendered the glory which he had gained, in
combating Basiliscus, of maintaining the truth"; while the next Pope
Gelasius charges him with intense pride; the effect of which was to leave
to the Church "cause for the peaceful to mourn and the humble to weep".

But all this evil had been wrought by Acacius, and upon his death it
remained to be seen how his successor would act. He was succeeded by
Fravita,[48] who, so far from maintaining the conduct of Acacius in
excluding the name of Pope Felix from the diptychs, wished above all things
to obtain the Pope's recognition. He would not even assume the government
of his see without first receiving it. It was usual for patriarchs and
exarchs to enter on their office immediately after election and
consecration, before the recognition of the other patriarchs which they
afterwards asked for by sending an embassy with their synodal letter. It
seems Fravita would make no use of this right, but besought the Pope's
confirmation in a very flattering letter. It would seem also that, by the
death of Acacius, the emperor Zeno had been delivered from thraldom, and
returned to some sentiment of justice. For he supported the letter of the
new patriarch by one himself to the Pope, and it is from the Pope's extant
answers[49] to these two writings that we learn some of their contents. To
the emperor, the Pope replies that he knows not how to return sufficient
thanks to the divine mercy for having inspired him with so great a care for
religion as to prefer it to all public affairs, and to consider that the
safety of the commonwealth is involved in it. That, desiring to confirm the
unity of the Catholic faith and the peace of the churches, he should be
anxious for the choice of a bishop who should be remarkable for personal
uprightness and, above all things, for affection to the orthodox truth.
That the Church has received in him such a son, and that the pontiff, in
whose accession he rejoices, has already given an indication of his rule in
referring the beginning of his dignity to the See of the Apostle Peter. For
the newly-elected pontiff acknowledges in his letter that Peter is the
chief of the Apostles and the Rock of the Faith: that the keys of the
heavenly mysteries have been entrusted to him, and therefore seeks
agreement with the Pope. Then, after enlarging upon the misdeeds of
Acacius, and his rejection of the Council of Chalcedon, and his absolution
of notorious heretics, the Pope beseeches the emperor to establish peace by
giving up the defence of Acacius. "I do not extort this from you--as being,
however unworthy, the Vicar of Peter--by the authority of apostolic power;
but, as an anxious father earnestly desiring the prosperity of a son, I
implore you. In me, his Vicar, how unworthy soever, the Apostle Peter
speaks; and in him Christ, who suffers not the division of His own Church,
beseeches you. Take from between us him who disturbs us: so may Christ, for
the preservation of His Church's laws, multiply to you temporal things and
bestow eternal."

In his answer to Fravita, Pope Felix expresses the pleasure which his
election gives, and the hope that it will bring about the peace of the
Church. He takes his synodal letter as addressed to the Apostolic See,
"through which, by the gift of Christ, the dignity of all bishops is made
of one mass,"[50] as a token of good-will, inasmuch as his own letter
confesses the Apostle Peter to be the head of the Apostles, the Rock of the
Faith, and the dispenser of the heavenly mystery by the keys entrusted to
him. He is the more encouraged because the orthodox monks formed part of
the embassy. But when the Pope required a pledge from them that Fravita
should renounce reciting the names of Peter the Stammerer and Acacius in
the church, they replied that they had no instructions on that head. For
this reason the Pope delayed to grant communion to Fravita, and he exhorts
him, in the rest of the letter, not to let the misdeeds of Acacius stand in
the way of the Church's peace. "Inform us then, as soon as possible, on
this, that God may conclude what He has begun, and that, fully reconciled,
we may agree together in the structure[51] of the body of Christ."

Fravita died before he received the answer of the Pope, having occupied
the see of Constantinople only three months, and out of communion with the
Pope.

It would seem that the first successor of Acacius as well as the emperor
receded both from his act and the position which it involved. They
acknowledged in their letters, as we learn from the Pope's recitation of
their words, the dignity of the Apostolic See. What they were not willing
to do was to give up the person of Acacius. What the subsequent patriarchs,
Euphemius and Macedonius, alleged, was that he was so rooted in the minds
of the people that they could not venture to condemn him by removing his
name from commemoration in the diptychs.

In 490, Euphemius followed in the see of Constantinople. He was devoted to
the Council of Chalcedon, and ever honoured in the East as orthodox. He
replaced the Pope's name in the diptychs, and renounced communion with
Peter the Stammerer, who had again openly anathematised the Council of
Chalcedon; only he refused to remove from the diptychs the names of his two
predecessors. Pope Felix had written, on the 1st May, 490, to the
archimandrite Thalassio,[52] not to enter into communion with the bishop
who should succeed Fravita, even if he satisfied these demands respecting
Acacius and Peter the Stammerer, unless with the express permission of the
Roman See. This condition he maintained, acknowledging Euphemius as
orthodox, but not as bishop, because he would not remove from the diptychs
the names of two predecessors who had died outside of communion with the
Roman See.

Euphemius had himself subscribed the Henotikon of Zeno, without which the
emperor would never have assented to his election; but he confirmed in a
synod the Council of Chalcedon. When, in April, 491, Zeno died, and through
the favour of his widow, the empress Ariadne, Anastasius obtained the
throne in a very disturbed empire, the patriarch long refused to set the
crown on his head, because he suspected him to favour the Eutychean heresy.
The empress and the senate besought him in vain. He only consented when
Anastasius gave him a written promise to accept the decrees of Chalcedon as
the rule of faith, and to permit no innovation in Church matters. On this
condition he was crowned: but emperor and patriarch continued at variance.
The emperor tried to escape from his promise in order to maintain Zeno's
Henotikon, which he thought the best policy among the many factions of the
East. Euphemius was in the most unhappy position with the monks, who would
not acknowledge him because he was out of communion with the Pope on
account of Acacius.

Pope Felix, having all but completed nine years of a pontificate, in which
he showed the greatest fortitude in the midst of the severest temporal
abandonment, died in February, 492. Italy then had been torn to pieces for
three years by the conflict between Odoacer and Theodorick. Gondebald, king
of the Burgundians, had cruelly ravaged Liguria. Then it was that bishops
began to build fortresses for the defence of their peoples. The Church of
Africa was in the utmost straits under the cruelty of Hunneric. Pope
Gelasius succeeded on the 1st March, 492. His pontificate lasted four years
and eight months; during the whole course of which his extant letters show
that he was no less exposed to temporal abandonment than Felix, and no less
courageous in maintaining the pastorship of Peter.

But the death of the emperor Zeno in 491, and the death of Pope Felix III.
ten months afterwards, in 492, require us to make a short retrospect of the
temporal condition of empire and Church at this time. Zeno, receiving the
empire at the death of his young son by Ariadne, Leo II., in 474, had
reigned seventeen years, if we comprise therein the twenty months during
which the throne was occupied by the insurgent Basiliscus from 475 to 477,
precisely at the moment when Odoacer terminated the western empire. Zeno,
recovering the throne in 477, had acted as a Catholic during about four
years. Pope Simplicius had warmly congratulated him on the recovery of the
empire on the 8th October of that year. In 478, the Pope had thanked
Acacius for informing him that the right patriarch, Timotheus Solofaciolus,
had been restored at Alexandria. But from 482 all is altered. The chronicle
of Zeno's reign becomes a catalogue of misfortunes. The publication of his
Formulary of Union is a gross attack upon the spiritual independence of the
Church. He imposes it upon the eastern bishops on pain of expulsion. He
puts open heretics into the sees of Alexandria and Antioch. All this is
done under the advice and instigation of Acacius, who is the real author of
the Henotikon, and who completes his acts by open defiance of Pope Felix.
When Zeno died he left the empire a prey to every misery. In Italy, Herules
and Ostrogoths were desperately contending for the possession of the
country. Barbarians beyond the Danube incessantly threatened the
north-eastern frontiers. There was no truce with them but at the cost of
incessant payments and every sort of degradation. Egypt and Syria were torn
to pieces by the Eutychean heresy. The infamous surrender of Italy to
Theodorick in 488 has been touched upon. By that the support which the
Ostrogothic king had given to keep Zeno on a tottering throne, followed by
the terror which his discontent had caused at Constantinople, purchased
from the Roman emperor himself the sacrifice of Rome and all the land from
the Alps to the sea. Such was the man with whom the Popes Simplicius and
Felix had to deal. To him it was that, from a Rome which drew its breath
under an Arian Herule, the commander of adventurers who sold their swords
for hire, these Popes wrote those letters full of Christian charity and
apostolic liberty which have been quoted.

When Zeno died in 491, he was attended to the grave by the contempt of his
own wife and the malediction of the people, whom his cruelty, debauchery,
and perfidy had alienated. I take from an ancient Greek document[53] a
note of what followed. "When Zeno died, Anastasius succeeded to his wife
and the empire; and he assembled an heretical council in Constantinople on
account of the holy Council of Chalcedon, in which, by subjecting Euphemius
to numberless calumnies, he banished him beyond Armenia, and put in the see
the most blessed Macedonius. Macedonius called an upright council, and
expressly ratified the decrees of faith passed at Chalcedon; but through
fear of Anastasius he passed over in silence the Henotikon of Zeno." "When
now Peter the Fuller was cast out of Antioch, Palladius succeeded to the
see. And when he died Flavian accepted the Henotikon of Zeno; and he
expressly confirmed the three holy Ecumenical Councils, but to please the
emperor he passed over in silence that of Chalcedon. Now the emperor
Anastasius sent order by the tribune Eutropius to Flavian and Elias of
Jerusalem to hold a council in Sidon, and to anathematise the holy Council
of Chalcedon. But Elias dismissed this without effect; for which the
emperor was very indignant with the patriarchs. But when Flavian returned
to Antioch, certain apostate monks, vehement partisans of the folly of
Eutyches, assembled a robber council, ejected and banished Flavian, and put
Severus in his stead. He, called the Independent,[54] set out with two
hundred apostate monks from Eleutheropolis for Constantinople, muttering
threats against Macedonius. Now this man without conscience had sworn to
Anastasius never to move against the holy Council of Chalcedon: he broke
the oath, and anathematised it with an infamous council. So the emperor
Anastasius had involved Macedonius of Constantinople in many accusations
and expelled him from his see, and banished him to Gangra. Not long after,
having sent away both him and his predecessor Euphemius, under pretence
that the patriarchs had arranged with each other to take refuge with the
Goths, he slew them with the sword. But the heretic Timotheus, surnamed
Kolon and Litroboulos,[55] he gave to the Church as being of one mind with
himself and obedient to his counsels. This man called a most impious synod,
and lifted up his heel against the holy Council of Chalcedon. In agreement
with Severus, they sent their synodical letters together to Jerusalem.
These not being received kindled Anastasius to anger. So he banished Elias
from the holy city to Evila and put John in his see, and sent thither the
synodical acts of Severus and Timotheus."

The emperor Anastasius, whose dealings with the eastern patriarchs in his
empire are thus described, reigned for 27 years, from 491 to 518. It is to
him that, in the long contest which we are following, the four Popes,
Gelasius, Anastasius, Symmachus, and Hormisdas, have to direct their
letters, their exhortations, and their admonitions. During the whole of
this time, from 493, when the conflict between Odoacer and Theodorick is
terminated, they will have exchanged the local rule of the Arian Herule for
that of the Arian Ostrogoth. All write under what a pope of our own day has
called "hostile domination". They write from the Lateran Patriarcheium,
not, as St. Leo I., under the guardianship of one branch of the Theodosian
house at Rome to another branch at Constantinople, but to eastern emperors,
the first of their line who openly assume the right to dictate to Catholics
what they are to believe. Zeno, Basiliscus, and Anastasius found
patriarchs, who could sanction by their subscription much greater
violations of all Christian right than St. Athanasius had denounced in
Constantius, and St. Basil in Valens. They found, also, five Popes in
succession, living themselves "under hostile domination," who resisted
their tyranny, and saved both the doctrine and the discipline of the
Church. Without these Popes it is plain that the Council of Chalcedon would
have been given up in the East, and the Eutychean heresy made the doctrine
of the eastern Church.

We have seen the courageous act of the patriarch Euphemius in refusing
absolutely to crown Anastasius, whom he suspected to be an Eutychean, until
he had received a written declaration from him that he would maintain the
Council of Chalcedon. In the first three years of his reign, Anastasius
gained popularity by enacting wise laws, and by removing a severe and
detested tax, so that, in the words of the ancient biographer of St.
Theodore, "what was to become a field of destruction appeared a paradise of
pleasure".[56]

As soon as Gelasius became Pope, Euphemius sent him, according to custom,
synodal letters. He assured the Pope of his true faith. He recognised in
him the divinely appointed head of the Church. We have the answer of the
Pope to his letter, and as this recognition on the part of the bishop
immediately following Acacius is all-important, it will be well to quote
the very words which show it.[57] "You have read," writes Pope Gelasius to
Euphemius, "the sentence, 'Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word
of God'; that word, for instance, by which He promised that the gates of
hell should never prevail over the confession of the blessed Apostle Peter.
And, therefore, you thought, with reason, because God is faithful in His
words, unless He had promised to institute some such thing, He would not
bring about a true fulfilment of His promise. Then you say that we, by the
grace of the Divine Providence, as He (_i.e._, Christ) pointed out, do not
fail in charity to the holy churches because Christ has placed me in the
pontifical seat, not needing, as he says, to be taught, but understanding
all things necessary for the unity of the Church's body. I, indeed,
personally, am the least of all men, most unworthy for the office of such a
see, except that supernal grace ever works great things out of small. For
what should I think of myself, when the Teacher of the nations declares
himself the last, and not worthy to be called an apostle. But to return to
your words; if you have with truth ascertained that these gifts have been
conferred on me by God, which, whatever goods they are, are gifts of God,
follow then the exhortation of one who needs not to be taught, of one who,
by supernal disposition, keeps watch over all things which touch the unity
of the churches, and, as you assert, offers a bold resistance to the devil,
the disturber of true peace and the structure which contains it. If, then,
you pronounce that I am in possession of such privileges, you must either
follow what you assert to be Christ's appointment, or, which God forbid,
show yourself openly to resist the ordinances of Christ, or you throw out
such things about me for the pleasure of making a show."[58]

Euphemius[59] complained that the election of the new Pope had not been
communicated to him, as was usual. He besought indulgence in respect of the
conditions imposed on him, since the people of Constantinople would not
endure the expulsion of Acacius from the diptychs. The Pope should rather
forgive the dead, and himself write to the people. To this the Pope
replied: "Truly that was an old Church rule with our fathers, by whom the
one Catholic and apostolic communion was preserved free from every
pollution by those who desired it. But now, when you prefer strange
companionship before the return to a pure and blameless union with St.
Peter, how should we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? How should we
offer the old bond of the apostolic ordinance to men who belong to another
communion, and prefer to it, according to your own testimony, condemned
heretics." Euphemius, then, is inconsistent: he must either admit to his
own communion all who are in communion with heretics, or remove all. The
excuse of necessity and fear of the people will not stand, and is unworthy
of a bishop, who has to lead his people, not to be led by them; who has to
account to God for his flock, while his flock have not to account for him.
If Euphemius is afraid of men, the Pope is more afraid, but it is of the
judgment of God.

But while, immediately after the death of Acacius, his successors, Fravita
and Euphemius, were renouncing his pretensions, at the same time that they
would not surrender his person, it is well to see how the bishops of
eastern Illyricum, subjects of the emperor Anastasius, addressed the Pope
upon his accession.

"Holy apostolic Lord and most blessed Father of fathers, we have received
with becoming reverence the wholesome precepts of your apostolate, and
return the greatest thanks to Almighty God and your Blessedness that you
have deigned to visit us with pastoral admonition and evangelic teaching.
For it is our desire and prayer to obey your injunctions in all things,
and, as we have received from our fathers, to maintain without stain the
precepts of the Apostolic See, which your life and merits have inherited,
and to keep the orthodox religion, which you preach, with faithful and
blameless devotion, so far as our rude perception allows. For, even before
your injunction, we had avoided the communion of Peter, Acacius, and all
his followers, as pestilent contagion; and much more now, after the
admonition of the Holy See, must we abstain from that pollution. And if
there be any others, who have followed, or shall follow, the sect of
Eutyches or Peter and Acacius, or have anything to do with their
accomplices and associates, they are to be entirely avoided by us, who seek
a blameless obedience to the Apostolic See according to the divine commands
and the statutes of the fathers. And if there be any, which we neither
suppose nor desire, who, with bad intention, think it their duty to
separate from the Apostolic See, we abjure their company, for, as we said,
guarding in all things the precepts of the fathers, and following the
inviolable rules of the holy canons, we strive with a common faith and
devotion to obey that of your apostolic and singular see ... and we beg
your apostolate to send us some one from your angelical see, that in his
presence arrangements may be made, according to the orthodox faith, and the
fulfilling of your command."[60]

Several letters of Gelasius show that the privileges claimed by the
Byzantine archbishop came frequently into discussion in the contest
respecting the retention of the name of Acacius in the diptychs. Thus he
finds it monstrous that they allege canons against which they are shown to
have always acted by their illicit ambition. "They[61] object canons to
us, not knowing what they say, for these they break by the very fact that
they decline to obey the first see when it gives sound and good advice. It
is the canons themselves which order appeals of the whole Church to be
brought to the examination of this see. But they have never sanctioned
appeal from it. Thus it is to judge of the whole Church, but itself to go
before no judgment. Never have they enjoined judgment to be passed on its
judgment; but have made its sentence indissoluble, as its decrees are to be
followed.... Should the bishop of Constantinople, who according to the
canons holds no rank among bishops, not be deposed when he falls into
communion with false believers?" No place among bishops, because the canon
of 381 and the canons of 451 had not been received. Thus, in his great
letter[62] to all the Illyrian bishops, he asks: "Of what see was he
bishop? Of what metropolitan church was he the prelate? Was it not of a
church the suffragan of Heraclea? We laugh at the claim of a prerogative
for Acacius because he was bishop of the imperial city. Did not the emperor
often hold his court at Ravenna, at Milan, at Sirmium, at Treves? Did the
bishops of these cities ever claim to themselves a dignity beyond the
measure of that which had descended to them from ancient times? Can Acacius
show that he acted by any council in excluding from Alexandria John, a
Catholic consecrated by Catholics; in putting in Peter, a detected and
condemned heretic, without consulting the Apostolic See? In boldly
assuming the power to expel Calendion from Antioch, and, without knowledge
of the Apostolic See, put in again the heretic Peter, who had been
condemned by himself? Certainly if the rank of cities is considered, that
of the bishops of the second and third see is greater than that of the see
which not only holds no rank among bishops, but has not even the rights of
a metropolitan. The power of the secular kingdom is one thing, the
distribution of ecclesiastical dignities is another. The smallness of a
city does not diminish the rank of a king residing in it; nor does the
imperial presence change the measure of religious rank. Let that city be
renowned for the power of the actual empire; but the strength, the liberty,
the advance of religion under it consists in religion holding its own
undisturbed measure in the presence of that power." Then he refers to the
fact how, forty years before, the emperor Marcian himself interceded with
Pope Leo to increase the dignity of that see, but could obtain nothing
against the rules; and then gave the highest praise to St. Leo, because
nothing would induce him to violate the canons, and to the other fact that
Anatolius, himself bishop of Constantinople, confessed that it was rather
his clergy than himself who made this attempt, and that all lay in the
power of the Apostolic See. And, thirdly, did not St. Leo, who confirmed
the Council of Chalcedon, annul in it whatever was done beyond the Nicene
canons? If it was said that, in the case of the bishops of Alexandria and
of Antioch, it was rather the emperor who had acted than Acacius, should
not a bishop suggest to a Christian prince, whose favour he enjoyed to the
utmost, that he should suffer the Church to keep her own rules, and
judgment on bishops should be given by bishops in council. If a bishop was
the greater for being bishop of the imperial city, should he not be the
more courageous in suggesting the right course? Then he quotes Nathan
before David, and St. Ambrose before Theodosius, and St. Leo reproving the
second Theodosius for excess of power in the case of the Latrocinium of
Ephesus; and Pope Hilarus reproving the emperor Anthemius, and Pope
Simplicius and Pope Felix resisting not only the tyrant Basiliscus, but the
emperor Zeno, and they would have succeeded if he had not been urged on by
the bishop of Constantinople. "And we also," adds the Pope, "when Odoacer,
the barbarian and heretic, held the kingdom of Italy, when he commanded us
to do wrong things, by the help of God, as is well known, did not obey
him."

In this same letter the Pope uses the following words: "We are confident
that no one truly a Christian is ignorant that the first see, above all
others, is bound to execute the decree of every council which the assent of
the universal Church has approved; for it confirms every council by its
authority, and maintains it by its continued rule, in virtue of its own
principate which the blessed Apostle Peter received by the voice of the
Lord, but continues to hold and retain by the Church subsequently following
it".

Pope Gelasius had in vain striven to gain the emperor Anastasius. After the
return of his legates, Faustus and Irenaeus, who had gone in the embassy of
Theodorick to Constantinople, he wrote to the emperor, in the year 494, a
famous letter,[63] warning him to defend the Catholic faith, which
Anastasius had not yet openly deserted, nor professed himself an Eutychean.
In it he says: "Glorious son, as a Roman born, I love, I reverence, I
receive you as Roman emperor: as holder, however unworthy, of the Apostolic
See, I endeavour as best I can to supply by opportune suggestions whatever
I find wanting to the complete Catholic faith. For a dispensation of the
divine word has been laid upon me; woe is me if I preach not the Gospel!
Since the blessed Apostle Paul, the vessel of election, in his fear thus
cries out, how much more have I in my smallness to fear if I shrink from
the ministry of preaching inspired by God, and transmitted to me by the
devotion of the fathers? I entreat your piety not to take for arrogance the
execution of a divine duty.[64] Let not a Roman prince esteem the
intimation of truth in its proper sense an injury. Two, then, O emperor,
there are by whom this world is ruled in chief--the sacred authority of
pontiffs and the royal power. Of these that of priests weighs the heavier,
insomuch as they will have in the divine judgment to render an account for
kings themselves. For you know, most gracious son, that pre-eminent as you
are in dignity over the human race, you nevertheless bow the neck
submissively to those who preside over things divine. From them you seek
the terms of salvation; and you recognise that it is your duty in the
order of religion to submit rather than to command in what concerns the
reception and the distribution of heavenly sacraments. As to these matters,
then, you know that you depend on their judgment, and do not wish them to
be controlled by your will. For if, in what regards the order of public
discipline, the ministers of religion, recognising that empire has been
conferred on you by a disposition from above, obey your laws, lest they
should appear to oppose a sentence issued merely in worldly matters, with
what affection ought you to obey those who are appointed for the
distribution of venerable mysteries? Moreover, as no slight responsibility
lies upon pontiffs, if in the worship of God they are silent as to what is
fitting, so for rulers it is no slight danger if, when bound to obey, they
show contempt. And if the hearts of the faithful should submit as a general
rule to all bishops when rightly treating divine things, how much more is
consent to be given to the prelate of that see whom the will of God Himself
has made pre-eminent over all bishops, and the piety of the whole Church
continuously following it out has acknowledged?[65] Herein you evidently
perceive that no one by mere human counsel can ever raise himself to the
privilege or confession of him whom the voice of Christ set over all, whom
the Church we venerate has always confessed and devotedly holds to be her
Primate. Human presumption may attack the appointments of divine judgment;
but no power can succeed in overthrowing them. Do not, I entreat, be angry
with me if I love you so well as to wish you to possess for ever the
kingdom which has been given to you in time, and that, having empire in the
world, you should reign with Christ. You do not allow anything to perish in
your own laws, nor loss to be inflicted on the Roman name. With what face
will you ask of Him rewards _there_ whose losses _here_ you do not prevent?
One is my dove, my perfect is one; one is the Christian, which is the
Catholic faith. There is no cause why one should allow any contagion to
creep in; for 'he who offends in one is guilty of all,' and 'he who
despises small things perishes by little and little'. This is that against
which the Apostolic See provides with the utmost care. For since the
Apostle's glorious confession is the root of the world, it must not be
touched by any rift of pravity, nor suffer the least spot. For if--may God
avert a thing which we are sure is impossible--any such thing were to
happen, how could we resist any error?--how could we correct those who err?
If you declare that the people of one city cannot be composed to peace,
what should we make of the whole world's universe were it deceived by our
prevarication? The series of canons coming down from our fathers, and a
multifold tradition, establish that the authority of the Apostolic See is
set for all Christian ages over the whole Church. O emperor, if anyone made
any attempt against the public laws, you could not endure it; do you think
it is of no concern to your conscience that the people subject to you may
purely and sincerely worship God? Lastly, if it is thought that the feeling
of the people of one city should not be offended by the due correction of
divine things, how much more neither may we, nor can we, by offence of
divine things injure the faith of all who bear the Catholic name?"

How distinctly, and with what unfaltering conviction, the Pope of 494, then
locally a subject of Theodorick the Arian, set forth to the emperor at
Constantinople the universal authority of the Holy See, grounded on what he
calls the Apostle's glorious confession, on which followed the Divine Word
creating his office, is apparent through the whole of this magnificent
letter. Moreover, the distinction of the Two Powers and the character of
their relation to each other, and the divine character of each as a
delegation from God, solemnly uttered by the Pope Gelasius in 494 to the
Roman emperor so unworthy of the rank which the Pope recognised in him,
have passed into the law and practice of the Church during the 1400 years
which have since run out, and will form part of it for ever. Anastasius
disregarded all that the Pope said. He persecuted to the utmost his bishop
Euphemius, because, though not admitted to communion by the Pope, inasmuch
as he refused to erase from the diptychs the name of Acacius, he yet
vigorously maintained the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon. At length
the emperor, having ended his Isaurian wars and sufficiently strengthened
the Monophysite party, succeeded in deposing him in 496. His instruments
in this were the cowardly court bishops,[66] ready to be moved to anything,
who had also on this occasion to confirm the Henotikon of Zeno. Euphemius
was banished to Paphlagonia. The people rioted in the circus and demanded
his restoration, but in vain. However, they always venerated him as a
saint. While the emperor Anastasius was deposing at Constantinople the
bishop who withstood and reproved his conduct in supporting the Eutychean
heresy, while also he was compelling the resident council not only to
depose the bishop, but to confirm the document, originally drawn up by
Acacius, forced upon the bishops of his empire by Zeno, and now again
forced upon them by Anastasius, Gelasius was holding a council of seventy
bishops at Rome. What he enacted there synodically is a proof of the
entirely different spirit which prevailed in the independent West. Here
Pope and bishops alike were living under hostile domination, that of Arian
governments, but they were not crouching before the throne of a despot. The
Pope and the bishops passed at the synod of 496 the following decrees:

"After the writings of the Prophets, the gospels, and the Apostles, on
which by the grace of God the Catholic Church is founded, this also we have
judged fit to be expressed: Although all the Catholic churches spread
throughout the world are the one bridal-chamber of Christ, nevertheless the
holy Roman Church has been set over all other churches, by no constitution
of a council, but obtained the Primacy by the voice of our Lord in the
Gospel: 'Thou art Peter,' &c.

"To whom was also given the companionship of the most blessed Apostle Paul,
the vessel of election, who, not at another time, as heretics battle, but
on one and the same day with Peter combating in the city of Rome under the
emperor Nero, was crowned. And they consecrated this holy Roman Church to
Christ the Lord, and by their presence and worshipful triumph set it over
all the churches in the world.

"First, therefore, is the Roman Church, the see of the Apostle Peter,
having neither spot, nor wrinkle, nor any such thing.

"Second is the see consecrated at Alexandria in the name of blessed Peter
by Mark, his disciple, the Evangelist. And he, sent by the Apostle Peter to
Egypt, preached the word of truth, and consummated a glorious martyrdom.

"Third is the see of the same most blessed Apostle Peter held in honour at
Antioch, because there he dwelt before he came to Rome, and there first the
name of Christian was given to the new people.

"And though no other foundation can be laid, save that which is laid, Jesus
Christ, yet the said Roman Church, after those writings of the Old or New
Testament, which we receive according to rule, does also not prohibit the
following: that is, the holy Nicene Council, of three hundred and eighteen
fathers, held under the emperor Constantine; the holy Council of Ephesus,
in which Nestorius was condemned, with the consent of Pope Coelestine,
under Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, and Arcadius, sent from Italy; the holy
Council of Chalcedon, held under the emperor Marcian and Anatolius, bishop
of Constantinople, in which the Nestorian and Eutychean heresies were
condemned, with Dioscorus and his accomplices."[67]

Thus, twelve years after the attempt of Acacius to set himself up
independent of Rome, and while his next two successors were soliciting the
recognition of Rome, but at the same time were refusing to surrender his
person to condemnation, a Council at Rome pulled down the whole scaffolding
on which the pretension of Acacius had been built.

For while this council omitted from the list of councils acknowledged to be
general that held at Constantinople in 381, it likewise proclaimed the
falsity of the ground alleged in the canon passed in that council, which
gave to Constantinople the second rank in the episcopate because it was New
Rome, which canon again was enlarged by the attempt at the Council of
Chalcedon to put upon the world the positive falsehood asserted in the
rejected 28th canon, that the fathers had given its privileges to the Roman
See because it was the imperial city.

The significance of this decree at such a time cannot be exaggerated. While
the emperor's own Church and bishop are separated by a schism from the
Pope, while the Pope recognises the emperor as the sole "Roman prince," and
in that capacity speaks of him as "pre-eminent in dignity over the human
race," he states at the head of a council, in the most peremptory terms,
that the Principate of Rome is of divine institution, _not_ the
constitution of any council. The decree thus passed is a formal
contradiction of the 28th canon which St. Leo had, forty years before,
rejected.

When we come to the termination of the schism this fact is to be borne in
mind as being accepted voluntarily by those whom it specially concerned,
and whose actions during a hundred years immediately preceding it
condemned. For the decree, besides, does not acknowledge the see of
Constantinople as patriarchal. Acacius had been appointing those who were
really patriarchs: here his own pretended patriarchate is shown to be an
infringement on the ancient order of the Church. Here the Pope in synod, as
before in his letter to the Illyrian bishops, declares of the see of
Constantinople that "it holds no rank among bishops".

And, again, the Roman Council, in all its wording, censures the bishops who
had been so weak as to accept a decree upon the faith of the Church from
the hand of emperors, first the usurper Basiliscus, then Zeno, and at the
time itself Anastasius. And under this censure lay not only Acacius, but
the three following bishops of Constantinople--Fravita, Euphemius, and
Macedonius. For though the last two were firm enough to suffer deposition,
and afterwards death, for the faith of Chalcedon, they were not firm enough
to refuse the emperor's imposition of an imperial standard in doctrine, the
acceptance of which would have destroyed the essential liberty of the
Church.

Two months after the violent deposition of Euphemius at Constantinople,
Pope Gelasius closed a pontificate of less than five years, in which he
resisted the wickedness and tyranny of Anastasius, as Pope Felix had
resisted the like in Zeno. Space has allowed me to quote but a few passages
of the noble letters which he has left to the treasury of the Church. It
may be noted that with his pontificate closes the period of about twenty
years, from 476 to 496, in which no single ruler of East or West, great or
small, professed the Catholic faith. The eastern emperors were Eutychean;
the new western rulers Arian, save when they were pagan. The next year the
conversion of Clovis, with his Franks, opens a new series of events. We may
allow Gelasius,[68] in his letter to Rusticus, bishop of Lyons, to express
the character of his time. "Your charity, most loving brother, has brought
us great consolation in the midst of that whirlwind of calamities and
temptations under which we are almost sunk. We will not weary you by
writing how straitened we have been. Our brother Epiphanius (bishop of
Ticinum or Pavia) will inform you how great is the persecution we bear on
account of the most impious Acacius. But we do not faint. Under such
pressure neither courage fails nor zeal. Distressed and straitened as we
are, we trust in Him who with the trial will find an issue, and if He
allows us for a time to be oppressed, will not allow us to be overwhelmed.
Dearest brother, see that your affection, and that of yours, to us, or
rather to the Apostolic See, fail not, for they who are fixed into the Rock
with the Rock shall be exalted."[69]

NOTES:

[29] See Philips, _Kirchenrecht_, vol. iii., sec. 119.

[30] Tillemont, xvi. 68.

[31] Simplicii, _Ep._ viii.; Photius, i. 115.

[32] Pope Gelasius, 13th letter.

[33] Mansi, vii. 1032-6; Jaffe, 359.

[34] Mansi, vii. 1028; Jaffe, 360.

[35] Photius, i. 123, translated.

[36] Mansi, vii. 1065; Baronius (anno 484), 17; Jaffe, 364.

[37] It is to be observed that the Pope calls his judgment the Judgment of
the Holy Ghost, just as Pope Clement I. did in the first recorded judgment.
See his letter, secs. 58, 59, 63, quoted in _Church and State_, 198-199.

[38] Photius, i. 124.

[39] Mansi, vii. 1139; Baronius (anno 484), 26, 27.

[40] Domini sacerdotes.

[41] Jaffe, 365; Mansi, vii. 1065.

[42] iv. 16.

[43] Silentiarius, in the Greek court, officers who kept silence in the
emperor's presence.

[44] _Ep._ x.; Mansi, vii. 1067.

[45] "The recital of a name in the diptychs was a formal declaration of
Church fellowship, or even a sort of canonisation and invocation. It was
contrary to all Church principles to permit in them the name of anyone
condemned by the Church."--_Life of Photius_, i. 133, by Card.
Hergenroether.

[46]                   "Cui feo la dote
    Dono infelice di bellezza, ond' hai
    Funesta dote d'infinite guai."
                          --_Filicaja._

[47] Photius, i. 128, who quotes Avitus, 3rd letter, and Ennodius, and
Gelasius, _Ep._ xiii.

[48] Photius, i. 126; Hefele, _C.G._, ii. 596.

[49] Jaffe, 371, 372; Mansi, vii. 1097; vii. 1100.

[50] Dum scilicet ad Apostolicam Sedem regulariter destinatur, per quam
_largiente Christo omnium solidatur dignitas sacerdotum_. Quod ipsae
dilectionis tuae literae Apostolorum summum petramque fidei et caelestis
dispensatorem mysterii creditis sibi clavibus beatum Petrum Apostolum
confitentur.

[51] In compage corporis Christi consentire.

[52] Jaffe, 374; Mansi, vii. 1103.

[53] The "libellus synodicus," says Hefele, _C.G._, i. 70, "auch synodicon
genannt, enthaelt kurze Nachrichten ueber 158 Concilien der 9 ersten
Jahrhunderte, und reicht bis zum 8ten allgemeinen Concil incl. Er wurde im
16ten Jahrhundert von Andreas Darmarius aus Morea gebracht, von Pappus,
einem Strasburger Theologen, gekauft, und von ihm im I. 1601 mit
lateinischer Uebersetzung zuerst edirt. Spaeter ging er auch in die
Conciliensammlungen ueber; namentlich liess ihn Harduin im 5ten Bande
seiner Collect. Concil. p. 1491 abdruecken, waehrend Mansi ihn in seine
einzelnen Theile zerlegte, und jeden derselben an der zutreffenden Stelle
(bei jeder einzelnen Synode) mittheilte."

[54] akephalos.

[55] Words of infamous meaning.

[56] Civilta, vol. iii., 1855, p. 429. Acta SS. Jan. XI.

[57] Mansi, viii. 5. _Ep._ i.

[58] Ad veniam luxuriae de me cognosceris ista jactare.

[59] See Photius, i. 129-130. Civilta Cattolica, vol. iii., 1855, pp.
524-5.

[60] Mansi, viii. 13. Rescriptum episcoporum Dardaniae ad Gelasium Papam.

[61] _Ep._ iv. _ad Faustum_; Mansi, viii. 17.

[62] _Ep._ xiii. _Valde mirati sumus_; Mansi, viii. 49.

[63] Mansi, viii. 30-5.

[64] Ne arrogantiam judices divinae rationis officium.

[65] Quem cunctis sacerdotibus et Divinitas summa voluit praeeminere, et
subsequens Ecclesiae generalis jugiter pietas celebravit.

[66] Photius, 134; Hefele, _C.G._, ii. 597.

[67] Hefele, _C.G._, ii. 597-605, has most carefully considered the text
and the date of the Council of 496. I have followed him in his choice of
the text of the best manuscripts, and inasmuch as the biblical canon--the
same as that held in the African Church about 393--seems to have been
confirmed by Pope Hormisdas somewhat later, I have not made use of it in
this place.

[68] _Epist._ xviii.

[69] Qui enim in petra solidabuntur cum petra exaltabuntur.




CHAPTER III.

PETER STOOD UP.


Seven days after the death of Gelasius, Anastasius, a Roman, ascended the
apostolic throne, which he held from November, 496, to November, 498. We
have two letters from him extant, both important. In that addressed upon
his own accession, which he sent to the emperor Anastasius by the hands of
Germanus, bishop of Capua, and Cresconius, bishop of Trent, on occasion of
Theodorick's embassy for the purpose of obtaining the title of king, he
strove to preserve the "Roman prince" from the Eutychean heresy.

"I announce to you the beginning of my pontificate, and consider it a token
of the divine favour that I bear the same as your own august name. This is
an assurance that, like as your own name is pre-eminent among all the
nations in the world, so by my humble ministry the See of St. Peter, as
always, may hold the Principate assigned to it by the Lord God in the whole
Church. We therefore discharge a delegated office in the name of
Christ."[70] After beseeching the emperor that the name of Acacius should
be effaced, in which he is carrying out the judgment of his predecessor,
Pope Felix, he mentions the full instructions given to his legates, in
order that the emperor might plainly see how, in that matter, the sentence
of the Apostolic See had not proceeded from pride, but rather had been
extorted by zeal for God as the result of certain crimes. "This we declare
to you, in virtue of our apostolic office, through special love for your
empire, that, as is fitting, and the Holy Spirit orders, obedience be
yielded to our warning, that every blessing may follow your government. Let
not your piety despise my frequent suggestion, having before your eyes the
words of our Lord, 'He who hears you, hears Me: and he who despises you,
despises Me: and he who despises Me, despises Him who sent Me'. In which
the Apostle agrees with our Saviour, saying, 'He who despises these things,
despises not man but God, who has given us His Holy Spirit'. Your breast is
the sanctuary of public happiness, that through your excellency, whom God
has ordered to rule on earth as His Vicar, not the resistance of hard pride
be offered to the evangelic and apostolic commands, but an obedience which
carries safety with it."

The Pope, then, standing alone in the world, and locally the subject of
Theodorick the Goth, makes the position of the Roman emperor in the world,
and the Pope in the Church, parallel to each other. Both are divine
legations. The Pope, speaking on divine things, claims obedience as
uttering the will of the Holy Spirit, which Pope Anastasius asserts, just
as Pope Clement I., five hundred years before, had asserted it, in the
first pastoral letter which we possess. He, living on sufferance in Rome,
asserts it to the despotic ruler of an immense empire, throned at
Constantinople, in reference to a bishop of Constantinople, whose name he
requires the emperor to erase from the sacred records of the Church as a
condition of communion with the Apostolic See.

This letter was directed to the East, the other belongs to the West, and
records an event which was to affect the whole temporal order of things in
that vast mass of territories already occupied by the northern tribes. On
Christmas day of the year 496, that is, one month after the accession of
Pope Anastasius, the haughty Sicambrian bent his head to receive the holy
oil from St. Remigius, to worship that which he had burnt, and to burn that
which he had worshipped. Clovis, chief of the Franks, and a number of his
warriors with him, were baptised in the name of the most holy Trinity,
never having been subject to the Arian heresy. Upon that event, the Holy
See no longer stood alone, and the ring of Arian heresy surrounding it was
broken for ever. The words of the Pope are these:

"Glorious son, we rejoice that your beginning in the Christian faith
coincides with ours in the pontificate. For the See of Peter, on such an
occasion, cannot but rejoice when it beholds the fulness of the nations
come together to it with rapid pace, and time after time the net be filled,
which the same Fisherman of men and blessed Doorkeeper of the heavenly
Jerusalem was bidden to cast into the deep. This we have wished to signify
to your serenity by the priest Eumerius, that, when you hear of the joy of
the father in your good works, you may fulfil our rejoicing, and be our
crown, and mother Church may exult at the proficiency of so great a king,
whom she has just borne to God. Therefore, O glorious and illustrious son,
rejoice your mother, and be to her as a pillar of iron. For the charity of
many waxes cold, and by the craftiness of evil men our bark is tossed in
furious waves, and lashed by their foaming waters. But we hope in hope
against hope, and praise the Lord, who has delivered thee from the power of
darkness, and made provision for the Church in so great a prince, who may
be her defender, and put on the helmet of salvation against all the efforts
of the infected. Go on, therefore, beloved and glorious son, that Almighty
God may follow with heavenly protection your serenity and your realm, and
command His angels to guard you in all your ways and to give you victory
over your enemies round about you."[71]

Towards the end of the sixth century, the Gallic bishop, St. Gregory of
Tours, notes how wonderfully prosperity followed the kingdom which became
Catholic, and contrasts it with the rapid decline and perishing away of the
Arian kingdoms. And, indeed, this letter of the Pope may be termed a divine
charter, commemorating the birthday of the great nation, which led the way,
through all the nations of the West, for their restoration to the Catholic
faith, and the expulsion of the Arian poison. No one has recorded, and no
one knows, the details of that conversion, by which the Church, in the
course of the sixth century, recovered the terrible disasters which she had
suffered in the fifth; a conversion by which the sturdy sons of the North,
from heretics, became faithful children, and by which she added the Teuton
race, in all its new-born vigour and devotion, to those sons of the South,
whose conversion Constantine crowned with his own. St. Gregory of Tours
calls Clovis the new Constantine, and in very deed his conversion was the
herald of a second triumph to the Church of God, which equals, some may
think surpasses even, the grandeur of the first.

It was fitting that the See of Peter should sound the note, which was its
prelude, by the mouth of Anastasius, as the pastoral staff of St. Gregory
was extended over its conclusion.

Scarcely less remarkable than the words of Pope Anastasius were those
addressed to the new convert by a bishop, the temporal subject of the
Burgundian prince, Gundobald, an Arian, that is, by St. Avitus of Vienna,
grandson of the emperor of that name. Before the baptismal waters were dry
on the forehead of the Frankish king, he wrote to him in these words:[72]

"The followers of all sorts of schisms, different in their opinions,
various in their multitude, sought, by pretending to the Christian name,
to blunt the keenness of your choice. But, while we entrust our several
conditions to eternity, and reserve for the future examination what each
conceives to be right in his own case, a bright flash of the truth has
descended on the present. For a divine provision has supplied a judge for
our own time. In making choice for yourself, you have given a decision for
all. Your faith is our victory. In this case most men, in their search for
the true religion, when they consult priests, or are moved by the
suggestion of companions, are wont to allege the custom of their family,
and the rite which has descended to them from their fathers. Thus making a
show of modesty, which is injurious to salvation, they keep a useless
reverence for parents in maintaining unbelief, but confess themselves
ignorant what to choose. Away with the excuse of such hurtful modesty,
after the miracle of such a deed as yours. Content only with the nobility
of your ancient race, you have resolved that all which could crown with
glory such a rank should spring from your personal merit. If they did great
things, you willed to do greater. Your answer to that nobility of your
ancestors was to show your temporal kingdom; you set before your posterity
a kingdom in heaven. Let Greece exult in having a prince of our law; not
that it any longer deserves to enjoy alone so great a gift, since the rest
of the world has its own lustre. For now in the western parts shines in a
new king a sunbeam which is not new. The birthday of our Redeemer fitly
marked its bright rising. You were regenerated to salvation from the water
on the same day on which the world received for its redemption the birth of
the Lord of heaven. Let the Lord's birthday be yours also: you were born to
Christ when Christ was born to the world. Then you consecrated your soul to
God, your life to those around you, your fame to those coming after you.

"What shall I say of that most glorious solemnity of your regeneration? I
was not able to be present in body: I did not fail to share in your joy.
For the divine goodness added to these regions the pleasure that the
message of your sublime humility reached us before your baptism. Thus that
sacred night found us in security about you. Together we contemplated that
scene, when the assembled prelates, in the eagerness of their holy service,
steeped the royal limbs in the waters of life; when the head, before which
nations tremble, bowed itself to the servants of God; when the helmet of
sacred unction clothed the flowing locks which had grown under the helmet
of war; when, putting aside the breastplate for a time, spotless limbs
shone in the white robe. O most highly favoured of kings, that consecrated
robe will add strength hereafter to your arms, and sanctity will confirm
what good fortune has hitherto bestowed. Did I think that anything could
escape your knowledge or observation, I would add to my praises a word of
exhortation. Can I preach to one now complete in faith, that faith which he
recognised before his completion? Or humility to one who has long shown us
devotion, which now his profession claims as a debt? Or mercy to one whom a
captive people, just set free by you, proclaims by its rejoicing to the
world, and by its tears to God. In one thing I should wish an advance. This
is, since through you God will make your nation all His own, that you
would, from the good treasure of your heart, provide the seeds of faith to
the nations beyond you, lying still in their natural ignorance, uncorrupted
by the germs of false doctrine. Have no shame, no reluctance, to take the
side of God, who has so exalted your side, even by embassies directed to
that purpose.... You are, as it were, the common sun, in whose rays all
delight; the nearest the most, but somewhat also those further off.... Your
happiness touches us also; when you fight, we conquer."

It is easy to look back on the course of a thousand years, and see how
marvellously these words, uttered by St. Avitus at the moment Clovis was
baptised, were fulfilled in his people. "Your happiness touches us also;
when you fight, we conquer." So spoke a Catholic bishop at the side, and
from the court, of an Arian king, and thus he expressed the work of the
Catholic bishops throughout Gaul in the sixth century then beginning. An
apostate from the Catholic faith has said of them that they built up France
as bees build a hive; but he omitted to say that they were able and willing
to do this because they had a queen-bee at Rome, who, scattered as they
were in various transitory kingdoms under heretical sovereigns, gave unity
to all their efforts, and planted in their hearts the assurance of one
undying kingdom. We shall have presently to quote other words of St.
Avitus, speaking, as he says, in the name of all his brethren to the
senators of Rome: "If the Pope of the city is called into question, not one
bishop, but the episcopate, will seem to be shaken". But that, which he
here foresaw, explains in truth a process, of which we do not possess a
detailed history, but which resulted, by the time of St. Gregory, in the
triumph of the Catholic faith over that most fearful heresy which had
contaminated the whole Teuton race of conquerors at the time of their
conquest. The glory of this triumph is divided between St. Peter's See and
the Catholic bishops in the several countries, working each in union with
it. So was formed the hive, not only of France, but of Christ; the hive
which nurtured all the nations of the future Europe.

When Faustus,[73] the ambassador sent by Theodorick to Anastasius to obtain
for him the royal title, returned to Rome in 498, he found Pope Anastasius
dead. The deacon Symmachus was chosen for his successor, and his
pontificate lasted more than fifteen years. But Faustus had hoped to gain
the approval of Pope Anastasius to the Henotikon set up by the emperor Zeno
at the instance of Acacius, and forced by the emperor Anastasius on his
eastern bishops, and specially on three successive bishops of
Constantinople--Fravita, Euphemius, and Macedonius--who took the place of
the second, when he had been expelled by the emperor. Faustus, who was
chief of the senate, with a view to gain to the emperor's side the Pope to
be elected in succession to Anastasius, brought from the East the old
Byzantine hand; that is to say, he bore gifts for those who could be
corrupted, threats for those who could be frightened, and deceit for all.
So freighted he managed to bring about a schism in the papal election, and
the candidate whom he favoured, Laurentius, was set up by a smaller but
powerful party against the election of Symmachus. Thus disunion was
introduced among the Roman clergy, which brought about, during the five
succeeding years, many councils at Rome, and embarrassed the action of the
Pope more than the Arian government of Theodorick.[74] The difficulty of
the times was such that, instead of holding a synod of bishops at Rome to
determine which election was valid, the two candidates, Symmachus and
Laurentius, went to Ravenna, and submitted that point to the decision of
the king Theodorick, Arian as he was. That decision was that he who was
first ordained, or who had the majority for him, should be recognised as
Pope; Symmachus fulfilled both conditions, and his election was
acknowledged.

Symmachus, in the first year of his pontificate, 499, addressed to the
Roman emperor, in his Grecian capital, a renowned letter, termed "his
defence" against imperial calumnies. This letter alone would be sufficient
to exhibit the whole position of the Pope in regard to the eastern emperor
at the close of the fifth century. Space allows me to quote only a part of
it.

The emperor of Constantinople was very wroth at the frustration of his plan
to get influence over the Pope by the appointment of Laurentius, and
reproached Pope Symmachus with moving the Roman senate against him. The
Pope replied:[75]

"If, O emperor, I had to speak before outside kings, ignorant altogether of
God, in defence of the Catholic faith, I would, even with the threat of
death before me, dwell upon its truth and its accord with reason. Woe to me
if I did not preach the gospel. It is better to incur loss of the present
life than to be punished with eternal damnation. But if you are the Roman
emperor, you are bound kindly to receive the embassies of even barbarian
peoples. If you are a Christian prince, you are bound to hear patiently the
voice of the apostolic prelate, whatever his personal desert.[76] I must
confess that I cannot pass over, either on your account or on my own, the
point whether you issue with a religious mind against me the insults which
you utter in presence of the divine judgment. Not on my own account, when I
remember the Lord's promise, 'When they persecute you, and say all manner
of evil against you, for justice' sake, rejoice'. Not on your account,
because I wish not a result to my own glory, which would weigh heavily upon
you. And being trained in the doctrine of the Lord and the Apostles, I am
anxious to meet your maledictions with blessing, your insults with honour,
your hatred with charity. But I would beg you to reflect whether He who
says, 'Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,' will not exact the more from you
for my forbearance.... I wish, then, that the insults, which you think
proper to bestow on my person, while they are glorious to me, may not press
upon you. To my Lord it was said by some: 'Thou hast a devil; a man that is
a glutton, born of fornication'. Am I to grieve over such things? Divine
and human laws present the condition to him who utters them: 'In the mouth
of two or three witnesses every word shall stand'. O emperor, what will you
do in the divine judgment? Because you are emperor, do you think there is
no judgment of God? I pass over that it becomes not an emperor to be an
accuser. Again, both by divine and human laws, no one can be at once
accuser and judge. Will you plead before another judge? Will you stand by
him as accuser? You say I am a Manichean. Am I an Eutychean, or do I defend
Eutycheans, whose madness is the chief support[77] to the Manichean error?
Rome is my witness, and our records bear testimony, whether I have in any
way deviated from the Catholic faith, which, coming out of paganism, I
received in the See of the Apostle St. Peter.... Is it because I will offer
no acceptance to Eutycheans? Such reproaches do not wound me, but they are
a plain proof that you wished to prevent my advancement, which St. Peter by
his intervention has imposed. Or, because you are emperor, do you struggle
against the power of Peter? And you, who accept the Alexandrian Peter, do
you strive to tread under foot St. Peter the Apostle in the person of his
successor, whoever he may be? Should I be well elected if I favoured the
Eutycheans? if I held communion with the party of Acacius? Your motive in
putting forward such things is obvious. Now, let us compare the rank of the
emperor with that of the pontiff. Between them the difference is as great
as the charge of human and divine things. You, emperor, receive baptism
from the pontiff, accept sacraments, request prayers, hope for blessing,
beg for penitence. In a word, you administer things human, he dispenses to
you things divine. If, then, I do not put his rank superior, it is at least
equal. And do not think that in mundane pomp you are before him, for 'the
weakness of God is stronger than men'. Consider, then, what becomes you.
But when you assume the accuser's part, by divine and human law you stand
on the same level with me; in which, if I lose the highest rank, as you
desire, if I be convicted by your accusation, you will equally lose your
rank if you fail to convict me. Let the world judge between us, in the
sight of God and His angels; let us be a spectacle for every age, in which
either the priest shall exhibit a good life, or the emperor a religious
modesty. For the human race is ruled in chief by these two offices, so that
in neither of them should there be anything to offend God, especially
because each of these ranks would appear to be perpetual, and the human
race has a common interest in both.

"Allow me, emperor, to say, Remember that you are a man in order to use a
power granted you by God. For though these things pass first under the
judgment of man, they must go on to the divine examination. You may say, It
is written, 'Let every soul be subject to higher powers'. We accept human
powers in their proper place until they set up their wills against God. But
if all power be from God, more then that which is given to things divine.
Acknowledge God in us and we will acknowledge God in thee. But if you do
not acknowledge God, you cannot use a privilege derived from Him whose
rights you despise. You say that conspiring with the senate I have
excommunicated you. In that I have my part; but I am following fearlessly
what my predecessors have done reasonably. You say the Roman senate has
ill-treated you. If we treat you ill in persuading you to quit heretics, do
you treat us well who would throw us into their communion? What, you say,
is the conduct of Acacius to me? Nothing if you leave him. If you do not
leave him it touches you. Let us both leave the dead. This is what we beg,
that you have nothing to do with what Acacius did. Making your own what
Acacius did, you accuse us of objections. We avoid what Acacius did; do
you avoid it also. Then we shall both be clear of him. Thus relinquishing
his actions you may be joined with our cause, and be associated with our
communion without Acacius. It has always been the custom of Catholic
princes[78] to be the first to address the apostolic prelates upon their
accession, and they have sought, as good sons, with the due affection of
piety, that chief confession and faith to which you know that the care of
the whole Church has been committed by the voice of the Saviour Himself.
But since public circumstances may have caused you to omit this, I have not
delayed to address you first, lest I should be thought to consider more my
own private honour than solicitude for the whole flock of the Lord.

"You say that we have divulged your compelling by force those who had long
kept themselves apart from the contagion of heresy to yield to its
detestable communion. In this, O chief[79] of human powers, I, as
successor, however unmerited, in the Apostolic See, cease not to remind you
that whatever may be your material power in the world, you are but a man.
Review all those who, from the beginning of the Christian belief, have
attempted with various purpose to persecute or afflict the Catholic faith.
See how those who used such violence have failed, and the orthodox truth
prevailed through the very means by which it was thought to be overthrown.
And as it grew under its oppressors, so it is found to have crushed them. I
wonder if even human sense, especially in one who claims to be called
Christian, fails to see that among these oppressors must be counted those
who assault Christian confession and communion with various superstitions.
What matters it whether it be a heathen or a so-called Christian who
attempts to infringe the genuine tradition of the apostolic rule? Who is so
blind that in countries where every heresy has free licence to exhibit its
opinions he should deem the liberty of Catholic communion alone should be
subverted by those who think themselves religious?"

"All Catholic princes," the Pope repeats, "either at their own accession,
or on knowing the accession of a new prelate to the Apostolic See,
immediately addressed their letters to it, to show that they were in union
with it. Those who have not done so declare themselves aliens from it. Your
own writings would justify us in so considering you if we did not from your
assault and hostility avoid you, whether as enemy or judge ... but the
accomplice of error must persecute him who is its enemy."

Let this letter from beginning to end be considered as written by a Pope
just after his election, the validity of which had been disputed by another
candidate whom the emperor had favoured--by a Pope living actually under
the unlimited power of an Arian sovereign, who was in possession of Italy,
and who ruled in right of a conqueror, though he used his power generally
with moderation and equity; further, that it was addressed to one who had
become the sole Roman emperor, the over-lord of the king, who had just
besought of him the royal title; that it required him to cast aside his
patronage of Eutychean heretics; to rescind from the public records of the
Church the name of that bishop who had composed the document called the
Henotikon, the very document which the emperor was compelling his eastern
bishops to accept and promulgate as the confession of the Christian faith.
And let the frankness with which the Pope appeals to the universally
admitted authority of St. Peter's See be at the same time considered, with
the official statement that the emperors were wont immediately to
acknowledge the accession of a Pope[80] and attest their communion with
him.

What was the answer which the eastern emperor made to this letter? He did
not answer by denying anything which the Pope claimed as belonging to his
see, but by rekindling the internal schism which had been laid to sleep by
the recognition of Pope Symmachus. Before sending this letter, the Pope had
held a council of seventy-two bishops in St. Peter's on March 1, 499, which
made important regulations to prevent cabal and disturbance at papal
elections such as had just taken place. This council had been subscribed by
Laurentius himself,[81] and the Pope in compassion[82] had given him the
bishopric of Nocera. Now the emperor Anastasius, reproved for his misdeeds
and misbelief by Pope Symmachus in the letter above quoted, caused his
agents, the patrician Faustus and the senator Probinus, to bring grievous
accusations against Symmachus and to set up once more Laurentius as
anti-pope.[83] In their passionate enmity they did not scruple to bring
their charge against Pope Symmachus before the heretical king Theodorick.
The result of this attempt was that Rome, during several years at least,
from 502 to 506, was filled with confusion and the most embittered party
contentions. Theodorick was induced to send a bishop as visitor of the
Roman Church, and again to summon a council of bishops from the various
provinces of Italy to consider the charges brought against the Pope. During
the year 501 four such councils were held in Rome, of which it may be
sufficient to quote the last, the Synodus Palmaris.[84] Its acts say that
they were by command of king Theodorick to pass judgment on certain charges
made against Pope Symmachus. That the bishops of the Ligurian, Aemilian,
and Venetian provinces, visiting the king at Ravenna on their way, told him
that the Pope himself ought to summon the council, "knowing that in the
first place the merit or principate of the Apostle Peter, and then the
authority of venerable councils following out the commandment of the Lord,
had delivered to his see a singular power in the churches, and no instance
could be produced in which the bishop of that see in a similar case had
been subjected to the judgment of his inferiors". To which king Theodorick
replied that the Pope himself had by letter signified his wish to convene
the council. Then the Synodus Palmaris, passing over a narration of what
had taken place in the preceding councils, came to this conclusion:
"Calling God to witness, we decree that Pope Symmachus, bishop of the
Apostolic See, who has been charged with such and such offences, is, as
regards all human judgment, clear and free (because for the reasons above
alleged all has been left to the divine judgment); that in all the churches
belonging to his see he should give the divine mysteries to the Christian
people, inasmuch as we recognise that for the above-named causes he cannot
be bound by the charges of those who attack him. Wherefore, in virtue of
the royal command, which gives us this power, we restore all that belongs
to ecclesiastical right within the sacred city of Rome, or without it, and
reserving the whole cause to the judgment of God, we exhort all to receive
from him the holy communion. If anyone, which we do not suppose, either
does not accept this, or thinks that it can be reconsidered, he will render
an account of his contempt to the divine judgment. Concerning his clergy,
who, contrary to rule, left their bishop and made a schism, we decree that
upon their making satisfaction to their bishop, they may be pardoned and be
glad to be restored to their offices. But if any of the clergy, after this
our order, presume to celebrate mass in any holy place in the Roman Church
without leave of Pope Symmachus, let him be punished as schismatic."[85]

This was signed by seventy-six bishops, of whom Laurentius of Milan and
Peter of Ravenna stood at the head; and the two metropolitans accompany
their subscription with the words, "in which we have committed the whole
cause to the judgment of God".[86]

When this document reached Gaul, the bishops there, being unable to hold a
council through the division of the country under different princes,
commissioned St. Avitus, bishop of Vienne, to write in his name and their
own, and we have from him the following letter addressed to Faustus and
Symmachus, senators of Rome:[87]

"It would have been desirable that we should, in person, visit the city
which the whole world venerates, for the consideration of duties which
affect us both as men and as Christians. But as the state of things has
long made that impossible, we could wish at least to have had the security
that your great body should learn from a report of the assembled bishops of
Gaul the entreaties called forth by a common cause. But since the
separation of our country into different governments deprives us also of
that our desire, I must first entreat that your most illustrious Order may
not take offence at what I write as coming from one person. For, urged not
only by letters, but charges from all my Gallic brethren, I have undertaken
to be the organ of communicating to you what we all ask of you. Whilst we
were all in a state of great anxiety and fear in the cause of the Roman
Church, feeling that our own state was imperilled when our head was
attacked, inasmuch as a single incrimination would have struck us all down
without the odium which attaches to the oppression of a multitude, if it
had overturned the condition of our chief, a copy of the episcopal decree
was brought to us in our anxiety from Italy, which the bishops of Italy,
assembled at Rome, had issued in the case of Pope Symmachus. This
constitution is made respectable by the assent of a large and reverend
council: yet our mind is, that the holy Pope Symmachus, if accused to the
world, had a claim rather to the support than to the judgment of his
brethren the bishops. For as our Ruler in heaven bids us be subject to
earthly powers, foretelling that we shall stand before kings and princes in
every accusation, so is it difficult to understand with what reason, or by
what law, the superior is to be judged by his inferiors. The Apostle's
command is well known, that an accusation against an elder should not be
received. How, then, is it lawful to incriminate the Principate of the
whole Church? The venerable council itself providing against this in its
laudable constitution, has reserved to the divine judgment a cause which, I
may be permitted to say, it had somewhat rashly taken up; mentioning,
however, that the charges objected to the Pope had in no respect been
proved, either to itself or to king Theodorick. In face of all which, I,
myself a Roman senator, and a Christian bishop, adjure you (so may the God
you worship grant prosperity to your times, and your own dignity maintain
the honour of the Roman name to the universe in this collapsing world),
that the state of the Church be not less in your eyes than that of the
commonwealth; that the power which God has given to you may be also for our
good; and that you have not less love in your Church for the See of Peter,
than in your city for the crown of the world. If, in your wisdom, you
consider the matter to its bottom, you will see that not only the cause
carried on at Rome is concerned. In the case of other bishops, if there be
any lapse, it may be restored; but if the Pope of Rome is endangered, not
one bishop but the episcopate itself will seem to be shaken. You well know
how we are steering the bark of faith amid storms of heresies, whose winds
roar around us. If with us you fear such dangers, you must needs protect
your pilot by sharing his labour. If the sailors turn against their
captain, how will they escape? The shepherd of the Lord's sheepcot will
give an account of his pastorship; it is not for the flock to alarm its own
pastor, but for the judge. Restore, then, to us if it be not already
restored, concord in our chief."

Even after this synod at Rome, the opponents of Symmachus did not cease
their attempts. Clergy and senators sent in a new memorial to the king
Theodorick, in favour of the anti-pope Laurentius, who returned to Rome in
502; and it was four years, during which several councils were held, before
the schism was finally composed. Theodorick then commanded that all the
churches in Rome should be given up to Pope Symmachus,[88] and he alone be
recognised as its bishop.

Against the attacks made upon the fourth synod, which had dismissed the
consideration of the charges against the Pope as beyond its competence,
Ennodius, at that time a deacon, afterwards bishop of Pavia, wrote a long
defence. This writing was read at the sixth synod at Rome, held in 503,
approved, and inserted in the synodal acts. We may, therefore, quote one
passage from it, as the doctrine which it was the result of all this schism
to establish.[89] "God has willed the causes of other men to be terminated
by men; He has reserved the bishop of that one see without question to His
own judgment. It was His will that the successors of the Apostle St. Peter
should owe their innocence to heaven alone, and show a spotless conscience
to that most absolute scrutiny. Do not suppose that those souls whom God
has reserved to His own examination have no fear of their judges. The
guilty has with Him no one to suggest excuse, when the witness of the deeds
is the same as the Judge. If you say, Such will be the condition of all
souls in that trial; I shall reply,[90] To one only was it said, Thou art
Peter, &c. And further, that the dignity of that see has been made
venerable to the whole world by the voice of holy pontiffs, when all the
faithful in every part are made subject to it, and it is marked out as the
head of the whole body."

From the whole of this history we deduce the fact, that the enmity of the
eastern emperor was able by bribing a party at Rome to stir up a schism
against the lawful Pope, which had for its result to call forth the witness
of the Italian and the Gallic bishops respecting the singular prerogatives
of the Holy See. They spoke in the person of Ennodius and Avitus. We have,
in consequence, recorded for us in black and white the axiom which had been
acted upon from the beginning, "the First See is judged by no one".

Let us see on the contrary what the same emperor was not only willing but
able to do in the city which had succeeded to Rome as the capital of the
empire, in which Anastasius reigned alone.

In the year 496, Anastasius had found himself able, as we have seen, to
depose, by help of the resident council, Euphemius of Constantinople. As
his successor was chosen Macedonius, sister's son of the former bishop,
Gennadius, and like him of gentle spirit, "a holy man,[91] the champion of
the orthodox".[92] However much the opinion was then spread in the East
that a successor might rightfully be appointed to a bishop forcibly
expelled from his see, if otherwise the Church would be deprived of its
pastor--an opinion which Pope Gelasius very decidedly censured--Macedonius
II. felt very keenly the unlawfulness of his appointment. When the deposed
Euphemius asked of him a safe conduct for his journey into banishment, and
Macedonius received authority to grant it, he went into the baptistry to
give it, but caused his archdeacon first to remove his omophorion, and
appeared in the garb of a simple priest to give his predecessor a sum of
money collected for him. He was much praised for this. Yet Macedonius had
to subscribe the Henotikon. Hence he experienced a strong opposition from
the monks, who, in their resolute maintenance of the Council of Chalcedon,
declined communion with him; so the nuns also. Macedonius sought to gain
them by holding a council in 497 or 498, which condemned the Eutycheans and
expressed assent to the Council of Chalcedon.

Macedonius was by no means inclined to give up the lately won privileges of
his see as to the ordination of the Exarch of Cappadocian Caesarea, but he
would willingly have restored peace with Rome, and have accepted the
invitation from Rome to celebrate with special splendour the feast day of
St. Peter and St. Paul. The emperor would not let him send a synodical
letter to Rome.

Macedonius could not be induced by threat or promise of the emperor to give
up to him the paper in which at his coronation by Euphemius he had promised
to maintain the Council of Chalcedon. The emperor, after concluding peace
with the Persians, more and more favoured the Eutycheans, and seemed
resolved either to bend or to break Macedonius. The people were so
embittered against Anastasius that he did not venture to appear without his
life-guards even at a religious solemnity, and this became from that time
a rule which marks the sinking moral influence of the emperors. The
suspicion of the people against Anastasius was increased because his mother
was a Manichean, his uncle, Clearchus, devoted to the Arians, and he kept
in his palace Manichean pictures by a Syropersian artist. The Monophysite
party had at the time two very skilful leaders, the monk Severus from
Pisidia and the Persian Xenaias. Xenaias had been made bishop of Hierapolis
by Peter the Fuller, was in fierce conflict with Flavian, patriarch of
Antioch, and raised almost all Syria against him. He carried the flame of
discord even to Constantinople. There a certain fanatic, Ascholius, tried
to murder Macedonius, who pardoned him and bestowed on him a monthly
pension. Presently large troops of monks came under Severus to
Constantinople, bent upon ruining Macedonius. The state of parties became
still more threatening. Macedonius showed still greater energy; he declared
that he would only hold communion with the patriarch of Alexandria and the
party of Severus if they would recognise the Council of Chalcedon as mother
and teacher. But Anastasius, bribed by the Alexandrian patriarch John II.
with two thousand pounds of gold, required that he should anathematise this
council. To this Macedonius answered that this could not be done except in
an ecumenical council presided over by the bishop of Rome. The emperor in
his wrath violated the right of sanctuary in the Catholic churches and
bestowed it on heretical churches. The Eutycheans supplied with money broke
out against the Catholics. They had sung their addition to the Trisagion
on a Sunday in the Church of St. Michael within the palace. They tried to
do it the next Sunday in the cathedral, upon which a fierce tumult broke
out, and they were mishandled and driven out by the people. Now the party
of Severus, favoured by the emperor and many officials, broke out into loud
abuse of Macedonius. Thereupon the faithful part of his flock rose for
their bishop, and the streets rung with the cry, "It is the time of
martyrdom; let no man forsake his father". Anastasius was declared a
Manichean and unfit to rule. The emperor was frightened; he shut the doors
of his palace and prepared for flight. He had sworn never again to admit
the patriarch to his presence, but in his perplexity sent for him. On his
way Macedonius was received with loud acclaim, "Our father is with us," in
which the life-guards joined. He boldly reproved the emperor as enemy of
the Church; but the emperor's hypocritical excuses pacified the patriarch.
When the danger was passed by Anastasius pursued fresh intrigues. He
required Macedonius to subscribe a formula in which the Council of
Chalcedon was passed over. Macedonius would seem to have been deceived, but
afterwards insisted publicly before the monks on his adherence to its
decrees. Then Anastasius tried again to depose him. All possible calumnies
were spread against him--immorality, Nestorianism, falsification of the
Bible; all failed. Then the emperor demanded the delivering up of the
original acts of Chalcedon, which the patriarch steadily refused.
Macedonius had sealed them up and placed them on the altar under God's
protection; but the emperor had them taken away by the eunuch Kalapodius,
economus of the cathedral, and then burnt. After this he imprisoned and
banished a number of the patriarch's friends and relations; then he had the
patriarch seized in the night, deported from the capital to Chalcedon, and
thence to Euchaites in Paphlagonia, to which place he had also banished
Euphemius. Macedonius lived some years after his exile. He died at Gangra
about 516, and was immediately counted among the saints of the eastern
Church.

It cost Anastasius fifteen years to depose Macedonius, that is, from 496 to
511, and this was the way he accomplished it. Thus he succeeded in
overthrowing two bishops of his capital--Euphemius and Macedonius--neither
of whom lived or died in communion with Rome, because, though virtuous and
orthodox in the main, they would not surrender the memory of Acacius. They
had, moreover, one grievous blot on their conduct as bishops. They
submitted themselves to subscribe an imperial statement of doctrine and to
permit its imposition on others. This was a use of despotism in the eastern
Church introduced by the insurgent Basiliscus, carried out first by Zeno
and then by Anastasius, tending to the ruin both of doctrine and
discipline. During the whole reign of Anastasius the patriarchal sees of
Alexandria and Antioch, which had built up the eastern Church in the first
three centuries, which Rome acknowledged as truly patriarchal under Pope
Gelasius in 496, and the new sees which claimed to be patriarchal,
Constantinople and Jerusalem, were in a state of the greatest confusion, a
prey to heresy, party spirit, violence of every kind. Anastasius was able
to disturb Pope Symmachus during the first half of his pontificate by
fostering a schism among his clergy, with the result that he brought out
the recognition of the Pope's privilege not to be judged by his inferiors.
But he was enabled to depose two bishops of the imperial see, his own
patriarchs, blameless in their personal life, orthodox in their doctrine,
longing for reunion with Rome, yet stained by their fatal surrender of
their spiritual independence, subscription to the emperor's imposition of
doctrine. They were not acknowledged by St. Peter's See, and they fell
before the emperor.

In the last years of this emperor, the churches of the eastern empire were
involved in the greatest disorders and sufferings. He had thrown aside
altogether the mask of Catholic: he filled the patriarchal sees with the
fiercest heretics. Flavian was driven from Antioch, Elias from Jerusalem.
Timotheus, a man of bad character, had been put by him into the see of
Constantinople. In this extremity of misery and confusion, the eastern
Church addressed Pope Symmachus in 512.[93]

"We venture to address you, not for the loss of one sheep or one drachma,
but for the salvation of three parts of the world, redeemed not by
corruptible silver or gold, but by the precious blood of the Lamb of God,
as the blessed prince of the glorious Apostles taught, whose chair the Good
Shepherd, Christ, has entrusted to your beatitude. Therefore, as an
affectionate father for his children, seeing with spiritual eyes how we are
perishing in the prevarication of our father Acacius, delay not, sleep not,
but hasten to deliver us, since not in binding only but in loosing those
long bound the power has been given to thee; for you know the mind of
Christ who are daily taught by your sacred teacher Peter to feed Christ's
sheep entrusted to you through the whole habitable world, collected not by
force, but by choice, and with the great doctor Paul cry to us your
subjects 'not because we exercise dominion over your faith, but we are
helpers in your joy'. 'Hasten then to help that east from which the Saviour
sent to you the two great lights of day, Peter and Paul, to illuminate the
whole world.'" They call upon him as the true physician; they disclose to
him the ulcerous sores with which the whole body of the eastern Church is
covered; and they finish by directing to him a confession of faith,
rejecting the two opposite heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches. They remind
him of the holy Pope Leo, now among the saints, and conjure him to save
them now in their souls as Leo saved bodies from Attila.

But yet it was not given to Pope Symmachus to put an end to this confusion.
He sat during fifteen years and eight months, dying on the 9th July, 514.
The schism raised by the Greek emperor was at an end; and seven days after
his decease the deacon Hormisdas was elected with the full consent of all.
In the meantime the state of the East had gone on from bad to worse.
Anastasius, by writing and by oath, had pledged himself at his coronation
to maintain the Catholic faith and the Council of Chalcedon. Instead he had
persecuted Catholics, banished their bishops, by his falsehood and tyranny
sown discord everywhere. At last one of his own generals, Vitalian, rose
against him. After a long silence he once more betook himself to the Pope.
In January, 518, he wrote to the new Pope, Hormisdas, "that the opinion
spread abroad of his goodness led him to apply to his fatherly affection to
ask of him the offices which our God and Saviour taught the holy Apostles
by mouth, and especially St. Peter, whom He made the strength[94] of His
Church". He asked, therefore, "his apostolate by holding a council to
become a mediator by whom unity might be restored to the churches," and
proposed that a general council should be held at Heraclea, the old
metropolis of Thrace.

Hormisdas, after maturely considering the whole state of things, sent a
legation of five persons to the emperor at Constantinople--the bishops
Ennodius of Pavia, Fortunatus of Catania, the priest Venantius, the deacon
Vitalis, and the notary Hilarius--with the most detailed instructions how
to act. The intent was to test the emperor's sincerity--a foresight which
after events completely justified. This instruction is said to be the
earliest of the kind which has come down to us. Since nothing can so
vividly represent the position of the Holy See as the words used by it on
a great occasion at the very moment when it took place, I give a
translation of it. In reading this it should be remembered that these are
the words of a Pope living in captivity under an Arian and barbaric
sovereign, who had taken possession of Italy about twenty years before, and
had sought for and accepted the royal title from this very emperor.
Further, that with the exception of the Frankish kingdom, in which Clovis
had died four years before, all the West was in possession of Arian rulers,
who were also of barbaric descent. The Pope speaks in the naked power of
his "apostolate". The commission which he gave to his legates was this:[95]

"When, by God's help and the prayers of the Apostles, you come into the
country of the Greeks, if bishops choose to meet you receive them with all
due respect. If they propose a night-lodging for you do not refuse, that
laymen may not suppose you will hold no union with them. But if they invite
you to eat with them, courteously excuse yourselves, saying, Pray that we
may first be joined at the Mystical Table, and then this will be more
agreeable to us. Do not, however receive provision or things of that kind,
except carriage, if need be, but excuse yourselves, saying that you have
everything, and that you hope that they will give you their hearts, in
which abide all gifts, charity and unity, which make up the joy of
religion.

"So, when you reach Constantinople, go wherever the emperor appoints; and
before you see him, let no one approach you, save such as are sent by him.
But when you have seen the emperor, if any orthodox persons of our own
communion, or with a zeal for unity, desire to see you, admit them with all
caution. Perhaps you may learn from them the state of things.

"When you have an audience of the emperor, present your letters with these
words: 'Your Father greets you, daily intreating God, and commending your
kingdom to the intercession of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, that God
who has given you such a desire that you should send a mission in the cause
of the Church and consult his holiness, may bring your wish to full
completion'.

"Should the emperor wish, before he receives your papers, to learn the
scope of your mission, use these words: 'Be pleased to receive our papers'.
If he answer, 'What do they contain?' reply, 'They contain greeting to your
piety, and thanks to God for learning your anxiety for the Church's unity.
Read and you will see this.' And enter absolutely into nothing before the
letters have been received and read. When they have been received and read,
add: 'He has also written to your servant Vitalian, who wrote that he had
received permission from your piety to send a deputation of his own to the
holy Pope, your Father. But as it was just to direct these first to your
majesty, he has done so; that by your command and order, if God please, we
may bear to him the letters which we have brought.'

"If the emperor ask for our letters to Vitalian, answer thus: 'The holy
Pope, your Father, has not so enjoined on us; and without his command we
can do nothing. But that you may know the straightforwardness of the
letters, that they have nothing but entreaties to your piety, to give your
mind to the unity of the Church, assign to us some one in whose presence
these letters may be read to Vitalian.' But if the emperor require to read
them himself, you will answer that you have already intimated not such to
be the command of the holy Pope. If he say, 'They may have also other
charges,' reply, 'Our conscience forbids. That is not our custom. We come
in God's cause. Should we sin against Him? The holy Pope's mission is
straightforward; his request and his prayers known to all: that the
constitutions of the fathers may not be broken; that heretics be removed
from the churches. Beyond that our mission contains nothing.'

"If he say, 'For this purpose I have invited the Pope to a council, that if
there be any doubt, it may be removed,' answer, 'We thank God, and your
piety, that you are so minded, that all may receive what was ordered by the
fathers. For then may there be a true and holy unity among the churches of
Christ, if, by God's help, you choose to preserve what your predecessors
Marcian and Leo maintained.' If he say, 'What mean you by that?' answer,
'That the Council of Chalcedon, and the letters of Pope St. Leo, written
against the heretics Nestorius, and Eutyches, and Dioscorus, may be
entirely kept'. If he say, 'We received and we hold the Council of
Chalcedon, and the letters of Pope Leo,' do you then return thanks, kiss
his breast, and say, 'Now we know that God is gracious to you, when you
hasten to do this, for that is the Catholic faith which the Apostles
preached, without which no one can be orthodox. All bishops must hold to
this and preach it.'

"If he say, 'The bishops are orthodox; they do not depart from the
constitutions of the fathers,' answer, 'If the constitutions of the fathers
are kept, and what was decreed in the Council of Chalcedon is in no respect
broken, how is there such discord in the churches of your land? Why do not
the bishops of the East agree?' If he say, 'The bishops were quiet; there
was no disunion among them. The holy Pope's predecessor stirred up their
minds with his letters, and made this confusion;' answer, 'The letters of
Symmachus, of holy memory, are in our hands. If, besides, what your piety
says, that is, "I follow the Council of Chalcedon, I receive the letters of
Pope Leo," they contain nothing except the exhortation to maintain this,
how is it true that confusion has been produced by them? But if that is
contained in the letters which both your Father hopes and your piety agrees
to, what has he done? What is there in him blameworthy?' add your prayers
and tears, entreat him, 'Let your imperial majesty consider God; put before
your eyes his future judgment. The holy fathers who made these rules
followed the faith of the blessed Apostle, on which the Church of Christ is
built.'

"If the emperor say, 'I receive the Council of Chalcedon, and I embrace
the letters of Pope Leo, enter then into communion with me,' answer, 'In
what order is that to take place? We do not avoid your piety, so declaring,
since we know that you fear God, and rejoice that you are pleased to keep
the constitutions of the fathers. We therefore confidently entreat you that
the Church may return through you to unity. Let all the bishops learn your
will, and that you keep the Council of Chalcedon, and the letters of Pope
Leo, and the apostolical constitutions.' If he say, 'In what order is that
to take place?' recur again, humbly, to entreaties, saying, 'Your Father
has written to all the bishops. Join, herewith, your mandates to the effect
that you maintain what the Apostolic See proclaims, and then let the
orthodox not be separated from the unity of the Apostolic See, and the
opponents will be made known. After that, your Father is even prepared, if
need be, to be present himself, and, preserving the constitutions of the
fathers, to deny nothing which is expedient for the Church's integrity.'

"If the emperor say, 'Well, in the meantime accept the bishop of my city,'
again beseech humbly, 'Imperial majesty, we have come with God's help in
the hope of support on your part to make peace and restore tranquillity in
your city. There is question here about two persons. The matter runs its
proper course. First, let all the bishops be so ordered as to form one
Catholic communion; next, the cause of those persons, or of any others who
may be at a distance from their churches, can be specially considered.' If
the emperor say, 'You are speaking of Macedonius; I see your subtlety. He
is a heretic; he cannot possibly be recalled,' answer, 'Imperial majesty,
we name no one personally; we speak rather in favour of your mind and
opinion, that inquiry may be made, and, if he is heretical, a juridical
sentence passed, that he may not be said to be unjustly deposed, being
reputed orthodox'.

"If the emperor should say, 'The bishop of this city consents to the
Council of Chalcedon and the letters of Pope Leo,' answer, 'If he do so it
will help him the more when his cause is examined; and since you have
allowed your servant Vitalian to treat with the Pope, if he hoped for a
good result on these matters, so let it be'. If the emperor say, 'Should my
city remain without a bishop, is it your desire that where I am there
should be no bishop?' reply, 'We said before there was a question about two
persons in this city. As to the canons, we have already suggested that to
break the canons is to sin against religion. There are many remedies by
which your piety may not remain without communion, and the full judicial
form may be preserved.' If he say, 'What are those forms?' reply, 'Not
newly invented by us. The question as to other bishops may be suspended,
and meanwhile a person who agrees with the confession of your piety and
with the constitutions of the Apostolic See until the issue of the trial
may hold the place of the bishop of Constantinople, if by God's help the
bishops are willing to be in accordance with the Apostolic See. You have in
the records of the Church the terms of the profession which they have to
make.'

"But if petitions be presented to you against other Catholic bishops,
especially against those who shamelessly anathematise the Council of
Chalcedon, and do not receive the letters of Pope St. Leo, take those
petitions, but reserve the cause to the judgment of the Apostolic See, that
you may give them a hope of being heard, and yet reserve the authority due
to us. If, however, the emperor promise to do everything if we will grant
our presence, urge in every way that his mandate first be sent to the
bishops through the provinces, which one of you shall accompany, so that
all may know that he keeps the Council of Chalcedon and the letters of Pope
St. Leo. Then write to us that we prepare to come.

"It is, moreover, the custom to present all bishops to the emperor through
the bishop of Constantinople. If their skilful management so devise in
recognising your legation that you see the emperor in the company of
Timotheus, who appears now to govern the church of Constantinople, if you
learn before your presentation that this is so contrived, say, 'The Father
of your piety has so commanded and enjoined us that we should see your
majesty without any bishop'. So remain until this custom be altered.

"If an absolute refusal be given, or if it is so contrived that before you
have an audience you are suddenly put with Timotheus, say, 'Let your piety
grant us a private audience to set forth the causes for which we have been
sent'. If he say, 'Speak before him,' answer, 'We do no offence, but our
legation also contains his person, and he cannot be present at our
communications'. And on no account enter into anything in his presence; but
when he has gone out produce the text of your mission."

The exact conditions which the legates carried to the emperor were these:
"The Council of Chalcedon and the letters of Pope St. Leo to be kept. The
emperor, in token of his agreement, to send an imperial letter to all the
bishops signifying that he so believes and will so maintain. The bishops
also to express their agreement in Church in presence of the Christian
people that they embrace the holy faith of Chalcedon and the letters of
Pope St. Leo, which he wrote against the heretics, Nestorius, Eutyches, and
Dioscorus, also against their followers, Timotheus Ailouros, Peter, or
those similarly guilty, likewise anathematising Acacius, formerly bishop of
Constantinople, and also Peter of Antioch, with their associates. Writing
thus with their own hand in presence of chosen men of repute, they will
follow the formulary which we have issued by our notary.

"Those who have been banished in the Church's cause are to be recalled for
the hearing of the Apostolic See, that a trial and true examination may be
held. Their cause to be reserved entire.

"If any holding communion with the sacred Apostolic See, preaching and
following the Catholic faith, have been driven away, or kept in banishment,
these, it is just, to be first of all recalled.

"Moreover, the injunction we have laid upon the legates, that if memorials
be presented to them against bishops who have persecuted Catholics, their
judgment be reserved to the Apostolic See, that in their case the
constitutions of the fathers be maintained, by which all may be edified."

Anastasius[96] tried again the old arts. He made a bid of everything to
gain the legates. He seemed ready to accept everything save the demand
regarding Acacius, which he was bound to reject on account of the Byzantine
people. Both to the legates on their return to Rome, and to two officers of
his court whom he sent to Rome, he gave honourable letters for the Pope,
whom he invited to be present at the projected council, and endeavoured to
satisfy fully by an orthodox profession of faith wherein he expressly
recognised the Council of Chalcedon. One only point, he said, whatever
might be his personal feeling, he could not concede, that regarding
Acacius, since otherwise the living would be driven out of the Church for
the dead, and great disturbances and blood-shedding would be inevitable. He
left it to the Pope's consideration. He also wrote to the Roman senate to
use its influence for the restoration of peace to the Church, as well with
the Pope as with king Theodorick, "to whom," said the emperor, "the power
and charge of governing you have been committed". It may be added that
Theodorick favoured, as far as he could, the restoration of peace.

Pope Hormisdas, in his answer, praised the zeal made show of by the
emperor, and wished that his deeds would correspond to his words. He could
not contain his astonishment that the promised embassy was so long in
coming, and that the emperor instead of sending bishops to him, sent two
laymen of his court, in whom he soon recognised Monophysites, who tried to
gain him in their favour. In a letter to St. Avitus and the bishops of his
province, he discloses the judgment which he had formed. "As to the Greeks,
they speak peace with their mouth, but carry it not in their hearts; their
words are just, not their actions; they pretend to wish what their deeds
deny; what they professed, they neglect; and pursue the conduct which they
condemned."[97] Still he resolved to send a new embassy to Constantinople
in 517, at the head of which he put the bishops Ennodius and Peregrinus. He
gave them letters to the emperor, the patriarch Timotheus, the clergy and
people of Constantinople.

Anastasius had endeavoured to delay the whole thing, and to deceive the
orthodox until he found himself strong again, and was no longer in danger
from Vitalian. To bribe the people, he gave the church of Constantinople
seventy pounds' weight of gold for masses for the dead. With regard to the
treatment of Acacius, he had the majority on his side, who were not easily
brought to condemn him. Here, also, he had a pretext to break off impending
agreements. When his wife Ariadne died, he showed himself still less
inclined to peace. She had been devoted to Macedonius, and often interceded
for the orthodox. As soon as he thought himself quite secure, he not only
altered his behaviour and language to the Roman See, but, in the words of
the Greek historian, about 200 bishops who had come to Heraclea from
various parts had to separate without doing anything, "having been deluded
by the lawless emperor and Timotheus, bishop of Constantinople".[98] The
Pope's legates he tried to corrupt; when that did not succeed, he dismissed
them in disgrace, and sent the Pope an insolent letter, in which he said he
desisted from any requests to him, as reason forbade to throw away prayers
on those who would listen to nothing, and while he might submit to
injuries, he would not endure commands. Thereupon broke out a great
persecution against Catholics, which the Archimandrites of the second Syria
report to Hormisdas.

In a supplication signed by more than two hundred, they address him:[99]
"Most blessed Father, we beseech you, arise; have compassion on the mangled
body, for you are the head of all. Come to save us. Imitate our Lord, who
came from heaven on earth to seek out the strayed sheep. Remember Peter,
prince of the Apostles, whose See you adorn, and Paul, the vessel of
election, for they went about enlightening the earth. The flock goes out to
meet you, the true shepherd and teacher, to whom the care of all the sheep
is committed, as the Lord says, 'My sheep hear My voice'. Most holy,
despise us not, who are daily wounded by wild beasts." All that the Roman
See had gained was that the orthodox bishops and many conspicuous easterns
attached themselves to it, and the formulary binding them to obedience to
the decisions of the Roman See found very many subscribers. The empire was
in the greatest confusion when Anastasius died suddenly in the year 518,
hated by the majority of his people, as perjured, heretical, and rapacious.
Just before him died the heretical patriarchs, John II. of Alexandria and
Timotheus of Constantinople.

Then suddenly,[100] as in the third century the Illyrian emperors saved the
dissolving empire, another peasant, who in long and honourable service had
risen to the rank of general, and was respected by all men as a virtuous
man and a good Catholic, was called to take up that eastern crown of
Constantine, which Zeno and Anastasius had soiled with the iniquities and
perfidies of forty years.

At Bederiana, on the borders of Thrace and Illyria, there had lived three
young men, Zimarchus, Ditybiotus, and Justin. Under pressure of misfortune
they deserted the plough, and sought a livelihood elsewhere. They started
on foot, their clothes packed on their backs, no money in their purses,
with a loaf in their knapsacks. They came to Byzantium and enlisted. Twenty
years of age and well grown, they attracted the notice of the emperor Leo
I.: he enrolled them among his life-guards. Justin served as captain in the
Isaurian war. For some unknown fault he was condemned to death by his
general, and the next day was to be executed. The general, says Procopius,
was changed by a vision which he saw that night. Under Anastasius, Justin
rose to the rank of senator, patrician, and commander of the imperial
guard. On the death of Anastasius, the eunuch Amantius, who was lord
chamberlain, and had been up to that time all powerful, sent for Justin,
and gave him great sums of money to get the voice of the soldiers and the
people, for a creature of his own, named Theocritus, in whose name he
intended to rule. Justin distributed the money in his own name, and on the
9th July was proclaimed emperor by army and people. He was sixty-eight
years old, and, if Procopius may be believed, could not even write his own
name, at least in Latin. But he was of long experience, and admirable in
the management of affairs. His wife was named Lupicina, of barbarian birth.
Justin, in the first year of his service, had bought her as a slave, and
married her. When he became emperor he crowned her as empress, and with the
applause of the people gave her the name of Euphemia. He had a nephew born
at Tauresium, a village of Dardania, near Bederiana. He was called Uprauda
in his own land; his father was Istock, his mother Vigleniza. The Romans
changed these Teuton names to Justinian, Sabbatius, and Vigilantia.
Uprauda, the Upright, was the future emperor Justinian.

The accession of Justin was received with universal joy; and the new
emperor at once sent a high officer, Gratus, count of the sacred
consistory, to announce it to Pope Hormisdas, with a letter in which he
said that "John, who had succeeded as bishop of Constantinople, and the
other bishops assembled there from various regions, having written to your
Holiness for the unity of the churches, have earnestly besought us also to
address our imperial letters to your Beatitude. We entreat you, then, to
assist the desires of these most reverend prelates, and by your prayers to
render favourable the divine majesty to us and the commonwealth, the
government of which has been entrusted to us by God."[101]

The count Justinian also wrote to Pope Hormisdas that "the divine mercy,
regarding the sorrows of the human race, had at length brought about this
time of desire. Thus I am free to write to your apostolate, our Lord, the
emperor, desiring to restore the churches to unity. A great part has been
already done. It only requires to obtain the consent of your Beatitude
respecting the name of Acacius. For this reason his majesty has sent to you
my most particular friend Gratus, a man of the highest rank, that you might
condescend to come to Constantinople for the restoration of concord, or at
least hasten to send bishops hither, for the whole world in our parts is
impatient for the restoration of unity."[102]

The result was that Pope Hormisdas held a council at Rome in 518, at which
all that had been done by his predecessors, the Popes Simplicius, Felix,
Gelasius, and Symmachus, was carefully reviewed, and all present decreed
that the eastern Church should be received into communion with the
Apostolic See, if they condemned the schismatic Acacius, entirely effacing
his name, and also expunged from the diptychs Euphemius and Macedonius, as
involved in the same guilt of schism. And a pontifical legation was then
named to carry out the desire of the council, and they bore with them an
instruction, from which they might not depart by a hair's-breadth.[103]

The Pope wrote letters to the emperor, to the empress, to the count
Justinian, especially to the bishop of Constantinople, recommending his
legates, and exhorting the bishop to complete the work which was begun by
condemning Acacius and his followers; also to the archdeacon Theodosius and
the clergy of Constantinople.[104] He points out especially that he wants
nothing new, or unusual, or improper, for Christian antiquity had ever
avoided those who had associated with persons condemned; whoever teaches
what Rome teaches, must also condemn what Rome condemns; whoever honours
what the Pope honours, must likewise detest what he detests. A perfect
peace admits of no division. The worship of one and the same God can only
hold its truth in the unity of confession which embodies the belief.

The papal legates were received honourably on their journey, and found the
bishops in general disposed to sign the formulary issued by the Pope. In
March, 519, they came to Constantinople, where they found the greatest
readiness. The patriarch John took the formulary, and gave it the form of
a letter, which seemed to him more honourable than a formulary such as
those who had fallen would sign. He prefixed to the document which the Pope
required to be subscribed the following preface:

"Brother most dear in Christ, when I received the letters of your Holiness,
by the noble count Gratus, and now by the bishops Germanus and John, the
deacons Felix and Dioscorus, the priest Blandus, I rejoiced at the
spiritual charity of your Holiness, in bringing back the unity of God's
most sacred churches, according to the ancient tradition of the fathers,
and in hastening to reject those who tear to pieces Christ's reasonable
flock. Be then assured that, as I have written to you, I am in all things
one with you in the truth. All those rejected by you as heretics I also
reject for the love of peace. For I accept as one the most holy churches of
God, yours of elder, and this of new Rome; yours the See of the Apostle
Peter, and this of the imperial city, I define to be one. I assent to all
the acts of the four holy councils--that is, of Nicaea, Constantinople,
Ephesus, and Chalcedon--done for the confirmation of the faith and the
state of the Church, and suffer nothing of their good judgments to be
shaken; but I know that those who have endeavoured to disturb a single iota
of their decrees have fallen from the holy, universal, and apostolical
Church; and using plainly your own right words, I declare by this present
writing,"[105] &c.

This is the preface given to his letter by the patriarch John; he then
adds the formulary issued by the Pope from his council in Rome as the terms
of restored communion between the East and West.

"The first condition of salvation is to maintain the rule of a right faith,
and to deviate no whit from the tradition of the fathers; because the
decree of our Lord Jesus Christ cannot be passed over, in which He says,
'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church '. These words
are proved by their effect in deed, because the Catholic religion is ever
kept inviolate in the Apostolic See. Desiring, therefore, not to fall from
this faith, and following in all thing the constitutions of the fathers, we
anathematise all heresies, but especially the heretic Nestorius, formerly
bishop of Constantinople, condemned in the Council of Ephesus by
Coelestine, Pope of Rome, and the venerable Cyril, bishop of Alexandria;
and together with him we anathematise Eutyches and Dioscorus, bishop of
Alexandria, condemned in the holy Council of Chalcedon, which we follow and
embrace with veneration, which followed the holy Nicene Council, and set
forth the apostolic faith. To these we join Timotheus the parricide,
surnamed Ailouros, and anathematise him, condemning in like manner Peter of
Alexandria, his disciple and follower in all things; so also we
anathematise Acacius, formerly bishop of Constantinople, who became their
accomplice and follower, and those who persevere in communion and
participation with them; for whoever embraces the communion of condemned
persons shares their judgment. In like manner we condemn and anathematise
Peter of Antioch, with all his followers. Hence we approve and embrace all
the letters of St. Leo, Pope of Rome, which he wrote in the right faith.
Therefore, as aforesaid, following in all things the Apostolic See, we
preach all which it has decreed; and therefore I trust to be with you in
that one communion which the Apostolic See proclaims, in which the solidity
of the Christian religion rests entire and perfect,[106] promising that
these who in future are severed from the communion of the Catholic Church,
that is, who do not in all things agree with the Apostolic See, shall not
have their names recited in the sacred mysteries. But if I attempt in aught
to vary from this my profession, I declare that by my own condemnation I
partake with those whom I have condemned. I have subscribed with my own
hand to this profession, and directed it in writing to thee, Hormisdas, my
holy and most blessed brother, and Pope of Great Rome, by the above-named
venerable bishops, Germanus and John, the deacons Felix and Dioscorus, the
priest Blandus."

The names of Acacius, Fravita, Euphemius, and Timotheus, four bishops of
Constantinople, also of the emperors Zeno and Anastasius, who reigned from
474 to 518 (if we include a few months of Basiliscus), were erased from the
diptychs in the presence of the legates. After that, at the instance of the
emperor, the other bishops, the abbots, and the senate had signed the
formulary, a solemn service was celebrated, to the great joy of the
people, in the Cathedral on Easter eve, the 24th March, to mark the act of
reconciliation, and not the least disturbance took place. The official
narration[107] of the five legates to Pope Hormisdas records the enthusiasm
with which they were received at Constantinople. "From the palace we went
to the church with the vast crowd. No one can believe the exultation of the
people, nor doubt that the Divine Hand was there, bestowing such unity on
the world. We signify to you that in our presence the name of the
anathematised prevaricator, Acacius, was struck out of the diptychs, as
likewise that of the other bishops who followed him in communion. So also
the names of Anastasius and Zeno. By your prayers peace was restored to the
minds of Christians: there is one soul, one joy, in the whole Church; only
the enemy of the human race, crushed by the power of your prayer, is in
mourning."

The emperor Justin wrote to Pope Hormisdas:

"Most religious Father, know that what we have so long earnestly sought to
effect is done. John, the bishop of New Rome, together with his clergy,
agrees with you. The formulary which you ordered, which is in agreement
with the council of the most holy Fathers, has been subscribed by him. In
accordance with that formulary, the mention at the divine mysteries of the
prevaricator Acacius, formerly bishop of this city, has been forbidden for
the future, as well as of the other bishops who either first came against
the apostolic constitutions, or became successors of their error, and
remained unrepentant to death. And since all our realm is to be admonished
to imitate the example of the imperial city, we have directed everywhere
our princely commands, so great is our desire to restore the peace of the
Catholic faith to our commonwealth, to gain for my subjects the divine
protection. For those whom the same realm contains, the same worship
enlightens, what greater blessing can they have than to venerate with one
mind laws of no human origin, but proceeding from the Divine Spirit? Let
your Holiness pray that the divine gift of unity, so long laboured for by
us, may be perpetually preserved."[108]

Thus history tells us that, in the year 484, Acacius, bishop of
Constantinople, being condemned by Pope Felix, answered by striking the
name of Pope Felix out of the diptychs, and that, in the year 519, the name
of Acacius was erased from the diptychs in his own church; that his own
successor not only gave up his memory, but, together with 2500
bishops,[109] signed a formulary which attributes to the Roman See the
words of our Lord to St. Peter, which declares "that the Catholic religion
is ever kept inviolate in the Apostolic See," "in which the solidity of the
Christian religion rests entire and perfect," and which lays down the rule
that whoever does not live and die in the communion of the Roman See has no
claim to commemoration in the Church.

Let us now shortly review the facts which have passed under our notice
since St. Leo returned from his interview with the pirate Genseric in the
year 455.

In that fatal year the Theodosian house became extinct in the West so far
as government was concerned. Valentinian's miserable widow, daughter of the
eastern, wife of the western, emperor, during a short two months the prey
of her husband's murderer, became with her daughters the captive of the
Vandal freebooter, and saw the elder compelled to marry his son Hunnerich,
the future persecutor of the Church. Twenty years succeed in which emperors
are enthroned and pass like shadows, until the Herule general Odoacer,
commanding for the time the Teuton mercenaries, deposes the last imperial
phantom, Romulus Augustulus, and rules Rome and Italy with the title of
Patricius. The western emperor is suppressed.

In 457, the Theodosian house becomes extinct in the East by the death of
the emperor Marcian, before whom the heiress of the empire, St. Pulcheria,
granddaughter of the great Thedosius, had died in 453. He was succeeded by
Leo, a soldier of fortune, but an orthodox emperor, who supported St. Leo.
The emperor Leo reigned until 474, and after a few months, in which his
child grandson, Leo II., nominally reigned, the eastern crown was taken by
Zeno and held till 491, with the exception of twenty months in which
Basiliscus, a successful insurgent, was in possession. As Zeno had reigned
in virtue of being husband of the princess Ariadne, daughter of Leo I., so
Anastasius, in 491, in the words of the Greek chronicle, "succeeded to his
wife and the empire," and he reigned twenty-seven years, to 518.

During this whole period, from the death of the emperor Leo I. in 474 to
that of the emperor Anastasius in 518, the political state of the East and
West was most perilous to the Church. In the East, the three sovereigns,
Zeno, Basiliscus, and Anastasius, were unsound in their belief, treacherous
in their action, scandalous in their life. The Popes addressed with honour,
as the vice-gerents of divine power, men whom, as to their personal
character, they must have loathed. Their government, moreover, was
disastrous to their subjects--a tissue of insurrections, barbaric invasion,
and devastation; at home, civil corruption of every kind.

In the West, Teuton conquerors had taken possession of the Roman empire.
The Herule Odoacer had been put to death in 493 by the Ostrogoth
Theodorick, who, like Odoacer before him, reigned with cognisance and
approbation of the eastern emperor for thirty-three years. Both Odoacer and
Theodorick were Arians; so also Genseric and his son Hunnerich, who ruled
the former Roman provinces in Africa; so the Visigoths in southern France
and Spain; so the Burgundians at Lyons. One conquering race only, that of
the Franks, was not Arian, but pagan, until the conversion of Clovis, in
496, gave to the West one sovereign, Catholic and friendly to the Pope. We
have seen in what terms Pope Anastasius welcomed his baptism. The
population in the old Roman provinces which remained faithful to the
Catholic religion was a portion of the old proprietors, such as had not
been dispossessed by the successive confiscations and redistributions of
land under the victorious northern invaders, and the poor, whether dwelling
in cities or cultivating the soil. And these looked up everywhere to their
several bishops for support and encouragement under every sort of trial.
All men were sorted under two divisions in the vast regions for which
Stilicho had fought and conquered in vain: the one division was Arian and
Teuton, the other Catholic and Roman. And as the several Catholic people
looked to their bishops, so all these bishops looked to the Pope; and St.
Avitus expressed every bishop's strongest conviction when he said, writing
in the name of them all, "In the case of other bishops, if there be any
lapse it may be restored; but if the Pope of Rome is endangered, not one
bishop, but the episcopate itself will seem to be shaken".

When the western emperor was suppressed the Pope became locally subject for
about fourteen years to the Arian Odoacer, and then for a full generation
to the Arian Theodorick. The latter soon found, by a calculation of
interest, that the only way to rule Italy and the adjoining territories
which his conquering arms had attached to Italy was by maintaining civil
justice and equality among all his subjects. He took two of the noblest
Romans, Boethius and Cassiodorus, for his friends and counsellors, and in
the letters of the latter, from about the year 500 to the end of
Theodorick's reign, we possess most valuable information as to the way in
which Theodorick governed. Odoacer would seem likewise, during the years of
his government until he was shut up in Ravenna, to have followed a like
policy. But that the position of the Pope under Odoacer and Theodorick was
one of great difficulty and delicacy no one can doubt. Gelasius speaks of
his having had to resist Odoacer "by God's help, when he enjoined things
not to be done".[110] And in 526 Pope John I. paid with his life, in the
dungeon of Ravenna, the penalty for not having satisfied the Arian
exactions of Theodorick in the eastern embassy imposed upon him.

I mention these things very summarily, having already given them with more
or less detail, but I must needs recur to them because, in weighing the
transactions which the schism of Acacius brought about, it is essential to
bear in mind throughout the embarrassed and subject political situation in
which all the Popes concerned with that schism found themselves.

Within seven years after the western emperor had been suppressed, and the
overlordship of the East been acknowledged by the Roman senate as well as
the Teuton conqueror, what happened?

A bishop of Constantinople, as able and popular as he was unscrupulous, had
established a mental domination over the eastern emperor Zeno. He reigned
in the utmost sacerdotal pomp at Constantinople; he beheld Old Rome sunk
legally to the mere rank of a municipal city, and the See of St. Peter in
it subject to an Arian of barbaric blood. He thought the time was come for
the bishop of the imperial city to emancipate himself from the control of
the Lateran Patriarcheium. Having gained great renown by his defence of the
Council of Chalcedon against the usurper Basiliscus, having denounced at
Rome the misdeeds and the heresy of the Eutychean who was elected by that
party at Alexandria, and having so been high in the trust of Pope
Simplicius, he turned against both Pope and Council. He set up two heretics
as patriarchs--Peter the Stammerer, the very man he had denounced, at
Alexandria, and Peter the Fuller at Antioch. He composed a doctrinal
statement, called the "Form of Union," which, by the emperor's edict, was
imposed on the eastern bishops. It was a scarcely-veiled Eutychean
document. He called to his aid all the jealousy which Nova Roma felt for
her elder sister, all the pride which she felt for the exaltation of her
own bishop. If he succeeded in maintaining his own nominees in the two
original patriarchates of the East, he succeeded at the same time in
subjecting them to his own see. He crowned that series of encroachments
which had advanced step by step since the 150 bishops of the purely eastern
council held at Constantinople just a hundred years before set the
exaltation of the imperial city on a false foundation. In fact, if this his
enterprise succeeded, he obtained the realisation of the 28th canon, which
Anatolius attempted to pass at Chalcedon, and which Pope Leo had
overthrown. But most of all, both in the government of the Church and in
the supreme magisterium, the determination of the Church's true doctrine,
he deposed the successor of St. Peter, and but one single step remained, to
which all his conduct implied the intention to proceed. For the logical
basis of that conduct was the assertion that, as the bishop of Rome had
been supreme when, and because, Rome was the capital of the empire, so when
Constantinople had succeeded Rome as capital, her bishop also succeeded to
the spiritual rights of the Primacy.

We may sum up the attempt of Acacius in a single word: the denial that the
Pope had succeeded to the universal Pastorship of St. Peter.

This, then, was the point at issue, and when the western emperor was
suppressed, and the overlordship of the eastern emperor acknowledged, the
Pope was deprived of all temporal support, and left to meet the attack of
Acacius in the naked power of his apostolate. From the year 483, when the
deeds of Acacius led to his excommunication, followed by the schism, to its
termination in 519, the Popes, being subjects of Arian sovereigns, who were
likewise of barbaric descent, braved the whole civil power of the eastern
emperors, as well as the whole ecclesiastical influence of the bishops of
Constantinople. Not only were Zeno and Anastasius unorthodox, but likewise
they were bent on increasing the influence of that bishop whom they
nominated and controlled. The sovereigns of the East had been able, even by
a simple practice of Byzantine etiquette, to put their own bishop in a
position of determining influence over the whole eastern episcopate. For
we learn from the instruction of Pope Hormisdas to his legates that it was
the custom for every bishop to be presented to the emperor by the bishop of
Constantinople. The Pope most strictly enjoins his legates not to submit to
this. The effect of such a rule upon the eastern bishops who frequented the
court of an absolute sovereign exhibits another cause of that perpetual
growth which accrues to the bishop of the imperial city.

Every human power, every conjunction of circumstances, seemed to be against
the Popes in this struggle. While the East was thus in hostile hands, under
emperors who were either secretly or avowedly heretical, the West was under
Arian domination. Italy was ruled from 493 to 526 by a man of great
ability. Few rulers have surpassed Theodorick either in success as a
warrior or in political skill. He had, further, enlaced the contemporary
rulers in the various countries of the West in ties of relationship with
himself. He had married Andefleda, sister of Clovis; he gave Theudigotha,
one of his own daughters by a concubine, to Alaric of Toulouse, king of the
Visigoths, and another, Ostrogotha, to Sigismund, king of the Burgundians,
at Lyons. Even before he had conquered Odoacer, in 493, he was in strict
alliance with the king of the Vandals in Africa, to whom he gave his sister
Amalafrieda to wife, and her daughter Amalaberga to the king of the
Thuringians. He solicited the royal title in 496 by an embassy to
Anastasius, and the result of that embassy was that the chief man in it,
Faustus, patrician and senator, when he returned to Rome, contrived to
raise a schism in the clergy itself against Pope Symmachus. This schism was
the greatest difficulty which the Pope in all this period encountered.
Theodorick in political talent and warlike genius reminds historians of
Charlemagne: but instead of having that monarch's faith, he was an Arian.
His equal treatment of Arian and Catholic was a carefully thought-out
policy; nor did he scruple at the very end of his career to sacrifice even
the very life of the Pope to his political schemes. He favoured the senate
of Rome in its corporate capacity; he favoured individual senators, but
always as instruments of his own absolute rule, the key to which was to
unite the use of the Roman mind in administration with the Gothic arm in
action. When the end of the schism came, he had married his only child
Amalasunta, the heiress of his kingdom, to Eutharic, who in the first year
of the emperor Justin was consul of Rome with that prince, and nominated by
him.

On what, then, did the Pope rely? On one thing only--that in the inmost
conscience of the Church, in East and West, he was recognised as St.
Peter's successor; that upon everyone who sat in the Apostolic See had
descended the mighty inheritance, the charge which no man could execute
except he were empowered by divine command and sustained by divine support.
For as it required God to utter the words, "Upon this rock I will build My
Church"; "If thou lovest Me, feed My sheep"; "Confirm thy brethren "; so
it no less required God to enable any man to fulfil that charge. But how
when it comes to a succession of men? How many families can show a
continuous succession of three temporal rulers equally great? Can any
family show four such? Can anyone calculate the power which maintains such
a succession through centuries?

Here, after four full centuries, in that one belief the seven next
successors of St. Leo--Hilarus, Simplicius, Felix, Gelasius, Anastasius,
Symmachus, and Hormisdas--stood as one man. Their counsels did not vary.
Their resolve was one. Their course was straight. In Leo's time the earth
reeled beneath the tread of Attila, the city groaned beneath Genseric's
hoof. And now three heretics--despots, and ignoble despots, if ever such
there were--filled the sole imperial throne. Arians, closely connected by
family ties and identical interests, divided the West among them. The seven
Popes sat on at the Lateran in the palace which Constantine had given them,
and said Mass in the church which he had built for them. Three of his
degenerate successors tried every art against them and failed. During
twenty years of this time, from 476 to 496, no ruler small or great
acknowledged the Catholic faith. The East was Eutychean, the West Arian. At
length St. Remigius baptised the Frankish chief as first-born of the Teuton
race in the Catholic faith of the Holy Trinity, and the Pope at Rome gave
utterance as a father to his joy. The end was that the schism was
terminated on the part of the bishop, the heir of the seat and the
ambition of Acacius, by the prince, by his nobles, among them the
legislator who was to be Justinian, and by 2500 bishops throughout the
East, acknowledging in distinct terms that one unique authority on which
the Popes had rested throughout the contest. They declared solemnly, in
celebrating the holiest mystery of the Christian faith, that the word of
the Lord cannot be passed over, saying, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock
I will build My Church". They added that the course of five hundred years
had exemplified the fact "that the solidity of the Christian religion rests
entire and perfect in the Apostolic See". The rebellion of Acacius in 483
drew forth this confession from his successor, John II., in 519.

The seven successors of St. Leo stood as one man. No variation in their
language or their conduct can be found. Not so the seven successors of
Anatolius at Constantinople. That bishop, who had seen himself foiled by
the vigour and sagacity of St. Leo at the Council of Chalcedon, lived
afterwards on good terms with him, and died in 458, in his lifetime. He was
succeeded by Gennadius, who, during the thirteen years of his episcopate,
was faithful both to the creed which St. Leo had preserved and to the
dignity of the Apostolic See. He was followed by Acacius, who occupied the
see from 471 to 489. There was some quality in Acacius which gained the
favour of princes. He had charmed at once the old emperor Leo I.; but Zeno,
whose influence first made him bishop, afterwards followed all his
teaching. He had also gained a renown for orthodoxy by refusing the
attempt of Basiliscus to make the imperial will a rule of Church doctrine.
It was when his stronger mind had mastered Zeno that he began the desperate
attempt against the doctrine and discipline of the Apostolic See which has
been our chief subject. But when he died in 489, his successor Fravita at
once renounced the position which he had taken up by asking the recognition
of Pope Felix and restoring his name in the diptychs. It is true that in
his conduct he was double-dealing, and, while he sought for the Pope's
recognition, parleyed with the heretical patriarch of Alexandria. But he
died in three months, and was succeeded by Euphemius, who likewise
repudiated the act of Acacius, and earnestly sought reconciliation with the
Pope, while he was unwilling to fulfil the condition of it--that he should
erase the name of Acacius from the diptychs. The six years' episcopate of
Euphemius was one long contest with the treachery and persecution of the
emperor Anastasius, who at last, by help of the resident council, was able
to depose him. He placed Macedonius in his stead, who again sought to be
reconciled with the Pope, but only would not pay the price of renouncing
the person, as he fully renounced the conduct, of Acacius. During fifteen
years, from 496 to 511, as Euphemius had resisted the covert heresy of
Anastasius, so did Macedonius, and, like him, he fell at last before the
enmity of the emperor. Upon the deposition of Macedonius, the emperor
obtained the election of Timotheus, who during seven years was his docile
instrument. When he died in 518, the bishop John was elected, whose great
desire was the restoration of unity, with the maintenance of the faith of
Chalcedon. By side of the seven Popes succeeding St. Leo put the seven
bishops of the emperor's city. We find two--the first and the
last--Gennadius and John, blameless. The second, Acacius, author of all the
evil in a schism of thirty-five years. The third, the fourth, and the fifth
shrink from the deed of Acacius; and two of them are deposed by the
emperor, while his people respect and cherish their memory. The sixth is a
mere tool of the emperor.

Four eastern emperors occupy the sixty years from Marcian to Justin. Three
of them are of the very worst which even Byzantium can show. Their reply to
the appeal of the Pope to "the Christian prince and Roman emperor" was to
betray the faith and sacrifice Rome to Arian occupation.

But when we turn from the bishops and emperors of the eastern capital to
the seats of the ancient patriarchs, to the Alexandria of Athanasius and
Cyril, to the Antioch of Ignatius, Chrysostom, and Eustathius, no words can
express the division, the scandals, the excesses, which the Eutychean
spirit, striving to overthrow the Council of Chalcedon, showed during those
sixty years. With this spirit Acacius played to stir up the eastern
jealousy against the Apostolic See of the West, and he found a most willing
coadjutor in the eastern emperor, the more so because that See was no
longer locally situated in his domain. The chance of Acacius lay
throughout in the pride of that monarch who was become the sole inheritor
of the Roman name, as Pope Felix reminded him, and who would fain see Nova
Roma the centre of ecclesiastical rule, as it was become the head of the
diminished empire. Anastasius, after Zeno, was still more swayed by these
motives than his predecessor.

But here we touch the completeness of the success which followed the trust
placed in their apostolate by the seven immediate successors of St. Leo. In
proportion as Rome became in the temporal order a mere municipal city, the
sacerdotal authority of its bishop came out into clearer light. Three times
in the fifth century Rome was mercilessly sacked--in 410, in 455, in 472.
Its senators were carried into slavery, its population diminished. The
finishing stroke of its ignominy may be said to be the deposition, by a
barbarian _condottiere_, of the poor boy whose name, repeating in
connection the founder of the city with the founder of the empire, seemed
to mock the mortal throes of the great mother. But this lessening of the
secular city, so far from lessening the authority of the spiritual power,
reveals to all men, believers or unbelievers, that the pontificate, whose
seat is locally in the city, has a life not derived from the city. Rome's
temporal fall exhibits in full the intangible spiritual character of the
pontificate. If St. Peter had to any seemed to rule because he was seated
on the pedestal of the Caesarean empire, when that empire fell the Apostle
alone remained to whom Christ gave the charge, whom He invested with the
"great mantle".[111] The bishop of the city in which an Arian Ostrogoth
ruled supreme as to temporal things was acknowledged by the head of the
empire, from whom the Ostrogoth derived his title, as the person in whom
our Lord's word--the creative word which founds an empire as it makes a
world--was accomplished, had been during five hundred years accomplished,
would be for ever accomplished.[112]

The malice of Acacius largely led to this result. His attack was the
prelude to the sifting of the Pope's prerogative during thirty-five years:
its sifting by a rival at Constantinople, by the eastern bishops, by the
eastern emperor, who had now also become the sole Roman emperor; and the
sifting was followed by a full acknowledgment. Nothing but this hostile
conduct would have afforded so indubitable a proof of the thing impugned.
While the ancient patriarchates which had formed the substructure of the
triple dais on which the Apostolic See rested were falling into
irretrievable confusion, while the new State-made patriarch at
Constantinople was trying to nominate and, if he could, to consecrate his
elders and superiors at Alexandria and Antioch, who descended from Peter,
the essential prerogative of the Apostolic See itself came forth into full
light. The bishops at Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and
every other city in the world would be great or small in influence
according to the greatness or smallness of their city. If the city fell
altogether, the see would fall. Its life was tied to the city. But it was
not so with that pontificate on which the Church was built. There and there
only the living power was given by Christ to a man: not local, nor limited,
nor transitory. This was the great truth which the Acacian schism helped to
establish in the minds of men, and which was proclaimed in that Nova Roma
where Acacius had refused the judgment of Pope Felix, and had tried to put
himself on an equality. As a result, in the terms of union which have been
above recited, the action of Acacius has had the honour to condemn the
rebellion of Photius three hundred years before it arose, and every other
rebellion which has imitated that of Photius.

Nor must it be forgotten that it was the constancy of the Popes in these
sixty years which alone prevented the prevailing of Eutychean doctrine in
the East. Blent with that doctrine was the attempt of three emperors to
substitute themselves as judges of doctrine for the Apostolic See and the
bishops in union with it. At the moment when John Talaia[113] was expelled
from Alexandria, the Monophysite heresy, espoused by Acacius and imposed by
Zeno, would have triumphed, save for the Popes Simplicius and Felix. And it
would have triumphed while the instrument of its triumph, the Henotikon,
would have inflicted a deadly blow upon the government of the Church by
taking away the independence of her teaching office. This struggle
continued during the reign of Zeno; and Anastasius, as soon as he became
emperor, used all the absolute power which he possessed to enforce the
reception of the same document. Even Euphemius and Macedonius were obliged
to sign it, and the sacrifice which they made in suffering deposition does
not deliver their character of bishops from the stain of this weakness. We
see in this period the first stadium traversed by the Greek Church in that
descending course which, in another century, brought it to the ruin wrought
by Mahomet.

On the other hand, the seven Popes kept the position of St. Leo--rather,
they more than kept it, because, under outward circumstances so greatly
altered for the worse, they both maintained his doctrine and justified his
conduct. They insisted through the darkest times, under pressure of the
greatest calamities, deprived of all temporal aid, that the person of
Acacius should be solemnly removed from recognition as a bishop by the
Church. They insisted, and it was done. The act of Acacius, if allowed to
pass, would have carried into actual life the assertion of the canon which
St. Leo had rejected: that the privileges of the Roman See were derived
from the grant of the Fathers to Rome because it was the capital. The
expunging of his name from the diptychs, with the solemn asseveration that
the rank of the Holy See was derived from the gift of Christ, and that the
Church's solidity as a fabric consisted in it, and equally the maintenance
of the Catholic religion, established the contradictory of that 28th canon,
and enforced for ever the subordination of the see which Acacius sought to
exalt. At the same time it pointed out the distinction between the See of
Peter and all other sees: the distinction that in the case of every other
bishop the spiritual life of the bishop, as a ruler, is local and attached
to his see. But the See of Peter is the generator of the episcopate,
because of Peter ever living in his successor.

It may also be remarked that it is this overflowing life of Peter which
invests titular bishops with the names of dead sees. Thus they sit as
members of a General Council, verifying to the letter St. Cyprian's adage,
that the episcopate is one, of which a part is held by each without
division of the whole.

The submission of Constantinople in its bishop, its clergy, its emperor,
its nobles, attested by the subscription of 2500 bishops throughout the
East, is an event to which there can hardly be found a parallel. The
submission was made to Pope Hormisdas when he was himself, as his
predecessors for forty-three years had been, subject to an Arian
ruler.[114] If there be in all history an act which can be called in a
special sense an act of the undivided Church, it is this. It was made more
than three hundred years before the schism of Photius. If the confession
contained in this submission does not exhibit the mind of the Church, what
form of words, what consent of will, can ever be shown to convey it? If
those who subscribed this confession subscribed a falsehood, why pretend
any longer to attribute authority to the Church? But it must be added, if
their confession was the truth, why not obey it?

It is to be noted that this period of sixty years is full of events which
caused the greatest suffering to the Popes, were unceasingly deplored by
them, and resisted to the utmost of their power. The temporal condition of
themselves, of the bishops, of their people in Italy, Africa, France,
Spain, Illyricum, Britain, was most sad. The most vehement of persecutions
desolated Africa. Again, there was the suppression of the western emperor,
with the consequent subjection of the Apostolic See to the temporal
government of the most hateful of heresies: the Oriental despotism of Zeno
and Anastasius, continued for forty-four years, mixed with another heresy,
and tending to destroy both faith and independence in the bishops subject
to it. The Popes, as Romans, felt with the keenest sympathy the political
degradation of Rome. Can any appeal be more touching than that which they
made, and made in vain, to the "Christian king and Roman prince"? Out of
all these things, whose natural consequences tended to extinguish their
principate, came forth the most magnificent attestation to it which is to
be found in the first five hundred years of the Christian religion.

NOTES:

[70] _Epist._ i.; Labbe, v. 406.

[71] Mansi, viii. 193.

[72] Epistola Aviti episcopi Viennensis ad Clodoveum regem
Francorum.--Mansi, viii. 175.

[73] See for this narrative the German Roehrbacher, viii. 486; Civilta,
1855, art. 9, pp. 152-3; Hefele, ii. 607; Photius, i. 136.

[74] Photius, i. 137. Der Einfluss des roemischen Stuhles war doch mehr
durch die Erneuerung des laurentianischen Schisma als durch die Macht der
arianischen Ostgothen auf laengere Zeit gelaehmt.

[75] _Ep._ vi.; Mansi, viii. 213-217.

[76] Qualiscunque praesulis apostolici debes vocem patienter audire.

[77] _I.e._, Manicheans placed the seat of evil in matter, and Eutycheans
denied the materiality of the Lord's body. The Pope alludes to the
Emperor's Eutychean doctrine.

[78] Catholici principes quidem semper apostolicos praesules institutos
suis literis praevenerunt, et illam confessionem fidemque praecipuam,
tanquam boni filii, quaesierunt debitae pietatis affectu, cui noscis ipsius
Domini Salvatoris ore curam totius Ecclesiae delegatam.

[79] Ubi te, rerum humanarum princeps, qualiscunque Sedis Apostolicae
vicarius contestari mea voce non desino.

[80] Ad eam sua protinus scripta miserunt ut _se docerent ejus esse
consortes_.--Mansi, viii. 217.

[81] See Hefele, ii. 607 and 209.

[82] "Intuitu misericordiae," says Anastasius.

[83] Hefele, ii. 216.

[84] Mansi, viii. 247-252; Hefele, ii. 623-5.

[85] _Acts of the Synodus Palmaris._--Mansi, viii. 247-251.

[86] Hefele, ii. 624.

[87] Mansi, viii. 293-5. _Ep._ xxxi. Migne, vol. lix, 248.

[88] Hefele, ii. 625-30; Roehrbacher, viii. 463.

[89] Mansi, viii. 284, _The libellus apologeticus_, pp. 274-290.

[90] Replicabo, uni dictum, Tu es Petrus, &c., et rursus sanctorum voce
pontificum dignitatem ejus sedis factam toto orbe venerabilem, dum illi
quicquid fidelium est ubique submittitur, dum totius corporis caput esse
designatur.--Mansi, viii. 284.

[91] The narrative from Photius, i. 134.

[92] Ephrem, v. 9759.

[93] Ecclesia orientalis ad Symmachum episcopum Romanum.--Mansi, viii.
221-6.

[94] In qua fortitudinem Ecclesiae suae constituit. Epistola Anastasii ad
Hormesdam pontificem.--Mansi, viii. 384.

[95] Mansi, viii. 389-393.

[96] Photius, i. 143-5, translated.

[97] _Ep._ x. _ad Avitum Viennensem._ Mansi, viii. 410.

[98] Theophanes, p. 248.

[99] Mansi, viii. 425.

[100] German Roehrbacher, viii. 532, book 43, 81, mostly followed.

[101] Mansi, viii. 435.

[102] Mansi, viii. 438.

[103] Mansi, viii. 441. Indiculus quem acceperunt legati Apostolicae Sedis.
It much resembles the former one, given to the legates sent to Anastasius.

[104] Photius, i. 148.

[105] Mansi, viii. 451.

[106] In qua est integra Christianae religionis et perfecta soliditas.

[107] Suggestio Germani et Joannis episcoporum, Felicis et Dioscori
diaconorum, et Blandi presbyteri.--Mansi, viii. 453.

[108] Sacra imperatoris Justini ad Hormisdam.--Mansi, viii. 456.

[109] Photius, i. 149, who refers to the Deacon Rusticus, _Disputatio
contra Acephalos_.

[110] Mansi, viii. 60.

[111] Il granto manto, Dante.

[112] Quia in sede Apostolia inviolabilis _semper_ Catholica custoditur
religio.

[113] Hergenroether, _K.G._, i. 333.

[114] See Photius, i. 149.




CHAPTER IV.

JUSTINIAN.


The submission of the eastern empire and episcopate to Pope Hormisdas, in
519, is a memorable incident in the history of the Church. A large and
marked part in it was taken by the man who for thirty-eight years was to
rule the eastern empire, to expel the Goths from Italy, thus recovering the
original seat of Roman power, and the Vandals from Africa, and so once more
attach the great southern provinces, for so many ages the granary of Rome
and Italy itself, to the existing Byzantine realm. Before, however, this
was done, when, after the death of Theodorick, the Gothic kingdom still
subsisted under his grandson Athalarick and his daughter Amalasunta, the
emperor Justinian addressed to Pope John II., in the year 533, a letter
from which I quote as follows. I preface that this letter was carried to
the Pope by two imperial legates, the bishops Hypatius and Demetrius. It
begins:[115] "Rendering honour to the Apostolic See and to your Holiness,
whom we ever have revered, and do revere, as is befitting a father, we
hasten to bring to the knowledge of your Holiness everything which
concerns the state of the churches. For the existing unity of your
Apostolic See, and the present undisturbed state of God's holy churches,
has always been a thing which we have earnestly sought to maintain. And so
we lost no time in subjecting and uniting all bishops of the whole eastern
region[116] to the See of your Holiness. We have now, therefore, held it
necessary that the points mooted, though they are clear and beyond doubt,
and have been ever firmly maintained and proclaimed by all bishops
according to the teaching of your Apostolic See, should be brought to the
knowledge of your Holiness. For we do not allow that anything concerning
the state of the churches, clear and undoubted though it be, when once
mooted, should not be made known to your Holiness, who is the head of all
the holy churches. For, as we said, in all things we hasten to increase the
honour and authority of your See." He then proceeds to recite a creed which
carefully condemns the errors of Nestorius on the one side, and Eutyches on
the other, and acknowledges "the holy and glorious Virgin Mary to be
properly and truly Mother of God". At the beginning of this creed he
introduces the words: "All bishops of the holy and apostolic Church, and
the most reverend archimandrites of the sacred monasteries, following your
Holiness, and maintaining that state and unity of God's holy churches which
they have from the Apostolic See of your Holiness, changing no wit of that
ecclesiastical state which has held and holds now, confess with one
consent," &c. And he concludes with the words: "All bishops, therefore,
following the doctrine of your Apostolic See, so believe, confess, and
preach: for which we have hastened to bring this to the knowledge of your
Holiness, by the bishops Hypatius and Demetrius; and we beg your fatherly
affection, that by letters addressed to us, and to the bishop and
patriarch, your brother, of this imperial city (since he on the same
occasion wrote to your Holiness, being earnest in all things to follow the
Apostolic See), you would make known to us that your Holiness receives all
who make the above true confession. For so the love of all to you and the
authority of your See will increase, and the unity of the holy churches
with you will be preserved unbroken, when all bishops learn through you the
sincere doctrine of your Holiness in what has been reported to you. But we
beseech your Holiness to pray for us, and obtain for us the guardianship of
God."

Pope John II. acknowledges this letter to "his most gracious son, Justinian
Augustus". He highly celebrates the praises of "the most Christian prince,"
that "in your zeal for faith and charity, instructed in the Church's
discipline, you preserve reverence to the See of Rome, and subject all
things to it, and bring them to its unity, to the author of which, the
first Apostle, the Lord's words were addressed, 'Feed My sheep': which both
the rules of the Fathers and the statutes of emperors declare to be the
head of all churches, and the reverential words of your Piety attest". The
Pope adds: "Your imperial words, brought by the bishops Hypatius and
Demetrius, which have been agreed to by our brethren and fellow-bishops,
being agreeable to apostolic doctrine, we by our authority confirm". "This,
then, is your true faith; this all Fathers of blessed memory and prelates
of the Roman Church, whom in all things we follow, this the Apostolic See
has to this time preached and maintained unshaken." "And we beseech our God
and Saviour Jesus Christ to preserve you long and peacefully in this true
religion and unity, and veneration of the Apostolic See, whose principate
you, as most Christian and pious, preserve in all things."

In the same year, 533, in which Justinian addressed to the Pope this
remarkable recognition of the Roman Primacy, specifying that everything
which concerns the whole Church should be brought before the Pope, though
it might be already certain and in accordance with established usage, he
gave his approval to that collection of laws called in Latin the _Digest_
and in Greek the _Pandects_, which he had commissioned Tribonian and other
great lawyers to draw up. Seventeen commissioners, having power given to
them to alter, omit, and correct, selected by his command, out of nearly
two thousand volumes, what they considered serviceable in the imperial laws
and the decisions of great lawyers. It is a vast repertory of judicial
cases in which Roman lawyers seek to apply the general rules of law and
natural equity. It was the first attempt since the Twelve Tables to
construct an independent centre of right as a whole,[117] and it was
confirmed by the authority of the emperor on the 16th December, 533.

As in the whole course of the fifth century, so no less in the sixth, it is
necessary to bear in mind the close interweaving of political with
ecclesiastical facts. The force and bearing of the one only become
intelligible when the others are weighed. In 519, under Pope Hormisdas, the
schism of Acacius had collapsed, and the most emphatic acknowledgment of
all which the Popes had claimed in the contest with him, and with the
emperors Zeno and Anastasius, who favoured him, had taken place. Pope
Hormisdas had been succeeded in 523 by Pope John I. Compelled by the king
Theodorick to undertake an embassy to the emperor Justin, received at
Byzantium with the highest honour as first Bishop of the Church, being also
the first Pope who had visited the eastern capital, and crowned with gifts
for the churches at Rome, he returned only to die in the dungeon of the
Arian prince at Ravenna, in 526. In three months Theodorick had followed to
the tomb his three victims--Symmachus, Boethius, and Pope John I. His death
had well-nigh broken up the league of Teutonic Arian rulers against the
Catholic faith, of which he had been the soul during the thirty-three years
of his reign. Justinian had been taken by his uncle Justin as partner of
his empire in April, 527, and crowned, together with his wife Theodora, on
Easter Day. Four months later he succeeded his uncle in the sole power. At
the death of Theodorick, the innate weakness of the Gothic kingdom in
Italy, which had been veiled by the personal ability of the sovereign, came
to full light. The utter incompatibility between the savage Goth and the
cultured Roman showed itself in the rejection of the queen Amalasunta, in
the depriving her of her son, and his subsequent corruption and premature
death, its result. It was shown also in the retirement of Cassiodorus from
the place of counsellor and minister of the Gothic king. Upon the death of
Pope John I., in 526, Theodorick had exercised his power in urging the
Romans to select Felix for pope. For this permanent injury had been
inflicted upon the liberty of the papal election by the foreign occupation
of Italy. It began under Odoacer in 483, when the temporal ruler, being a
foreigner and an Arian, for the first time sought to mix himself with the
election. Twenty years after, under Pope Symmachus, the attempt of Odoacer
had been condemned. But what the Herule and the Gothic ruler, both Arians,
had begun, the Byzantine emperor, when he recovered possession of Rome,
carried on, and the original freedom of election was subjected to the
control of the eastern emperor for hundreds of years.

Pope Felix sat until 530, and was then succeeded by Bonifacius II., the son
of a Goth; not, however, without a temporary schism, occasioned by the
attempt of King Athalarick to exert the arbitrary power used by his
grandfather Theodorick in the election. Pope John II. followed in 532. In
this Pope's time Cassiodorus was made Praetorian prefect by King
Athalarick, and wrote to the Pope as a son to his father: "Be careful to
remind me what I am to do. I wish to deal rightly, though I am blamed. A
sheep which desires to hear the voice of his shepherd is not so easily led
astray; and if he has one who warns continually at his side, can scarcely
be criminal. I am, indeed, judge in the palace, but shall not therefore
cease to be your disciple. For we execute this office well when we do not
in the least depart from your injunctions. Since, then, I wish to be guided
by your counsels and supported by your prayers, you must show your hand
when there is anything in me otherwise than would be desired. That chair
which is the wonder of the whole world should carefully protect its own,
since, though it is given to the whole world, yet it admits in you a
special local love."[118]

The Pope, to whom the Praetorian prefect of Athalarick, the temporal
sovereign, addressed this language, is John II., to whom Justinian, from
Byzantium, spoke as a son, and whose primacy he acknowledged in terms so
ample, before he became, by the conquest of Belisarius, the temporal lord
of Rome; the year, also, before he reconquered Northern Africa by the sword
of the same great general.

Justinian, with not less precision than former emperors, acknowledged all
his life long the primacy of the Roman See. We need not exclude political
motives from this acknowledgment, but we must allow to him the fullest
conviction as to its legitimate authority. If now and then, under the
impulse of passion or despotic humour, he seemed to disregard its rights,
he soon strove again to obtain the Pope's assent to his measures. In his
edict to his own patriarch Epiphanius, he declared expressly that he held
himself bound accurately to inform the Pope, as head of all bishops,
concerning the circumstances of his realm, especially since the Roman
Church by its decisions in faith had overthrown the heresies which arose in
the East.[119] The imperial theologian was very unwilling to give up the
initiative in the determination of ecclesiastical questions; nevertheless,
he acknowledged in the Bishop of Old Rome the superior judge without whose
confirmation his own steps remained devoid of force and effect.[120]

The man who was born an Illyrian peasant, who was the leading spirit during
the nine years' reign of another Illyrian peasant, his uncle, who succeeded
him in 527, and ruled the greatest kingdom of the earth during thirty-eight
years; to whom the bitter Vandal in Africa and the nobler Goth in Italy
yielded up their equally ill-gotten prey; who became the great legislator
of the Roman world, by the commission given to his chief lawyers to select
and, after correction, tabulate the laws of the emperors his predecessors;
to whom, in consequence, the actual nations of Europe owe what was to them
the fountain of universal right, demands a somewhat detailed account of his
character, his purposes, and his actions. When the prince of the poets of
Christendom, the only poet who has spoken in the name and with the voice of
Christendom, meets his spirit under the guidance of Beatrice, the emperor
utters words the truth of which all must feel:

    "Caesar I was and am Justinian,
    Moved by the will of that Prime Love I feel
    I clear'd the encumbered laws from vain excess".[121]

It is in this character that Justinian lives for all history, and his name
stands out among all Byzantine sovereigns with a lustre of its own. I have
therefore first quoted the most definite words of the great legislator,
spontaneously acknowledging the right of St. Peter's successor to know and
to judge of all that concerns the Church's doctrine and practice. The
acknowledgment of this right is the more to be marked because, when it was
made by the eastern emperor, that successor was not his own subject. That
he was the head of all the churches of the world, that he was so by descent
from Peter, that in virtue of this headship and descent he had a right of
supervision over everything which belonged to the Church in all the
world--this is what Justinian avows, and this, moreover, is equally what
the Pope claimed then as he claims now.

Justinian ascended the eastern throne in August, 527, at about the age of
forty-five. He would therefore have been born in 482. He was of somewhat
more than middle height, of regular features, dark colour, of ample chest,
serene and agreeable aspect. Through the care of his uncle he had had a
good education, and had early learned to read and write. He was skilled in
jurisprudence, architecture, music, and, moreover, in theology. His
personal piety was remarkable. When he became emperor he bestowed all his
private goods on churches, and ruled his house like a monastery. In Lent,
his life approached that of a hermit in severity. He ate no bread; drank
only water; for his nourishment he contented himself every other day with a
portion of wild herbs, seasoned with salt and vinegar. We have sure
testimony respecting his fasts and mortifications, since he has taken pains
in his last laws, the _Novels_, to inform the world of them.[122]

His uncle Justin had died at the age of seventy-seven, after reigning nine
years. His accession had marked a sort of resurrection in eastern affairs.
Instead of three emperors, Basiliscus, Zeno, and Anastasius, alike
ignominious in their government, unsound in their faith, infamous in their
life, and remorselessly tyrannical in their treatment both of Church and
State, Justin had crowned an honourable life as a general in the imperial
service with a creditable reign, in which his fidelity to the Catholic
faith was remarkable. The moment of Justinian's succession was coeval with
great changes in the West. By the death of Theodorick, who in his last
year had begun the work of active Arian persecution, the great kingdom
which he had maintained for a generation seemed on the point of
dissolution, through the intrinsic inaptitude for government which his
Gothic subjects at once betrayed when let loose from the master's powerful
hand. In Africa, moreover, a succession of cruel Vandal persecutors, almost
equal to their original, Genseric, had shaken their tenure of the country.
At the same time, the Frankish kingdom, strengthened greatly by the
conversion of Clovis, was growing in power and extent--a growth not
interrupted by his early death in 511, at the age of forty-five.[123]

Such was the state of things when Justinian directed the great power which
the revenues of the eastern empire enabled him to wield, towards the
restoration of that empire, first in Africa, and then in Italy. Later in
the same year, 533, in which he addressed to John II. the explicit
acknowledgment of his supreme authority with which I began, he despatched
his great general Belisarius with 16,000 chosen troops, 6000 of them
cavalry, to Carthage. The Vandal ruler Gelimer offered but a feeble and
utterly ineffectual resistance. He surrendered himself at Carthage to
Belisarius, by the end of the year, and was brought to Constantinople.
There Justinian received Belisarius in what was like one of Rome's hundred
triumphs, except that the conqueror marched on foot. The booty of the
Vandal kings was borne before him, in which were conspicuous the precious
things which Genseric had carried away from Rome--the vessels of the temple
of Jerusalem. When the captive king was brought into the circus, and saw
before him the emperor and countless rows of spectators, he is said to have
shed no tears, but to have uttered the words of the preacher: "Vanity of
vanities, all is vanity". But his head did not fall under the axe of the
lictors, as in the ancient Roman triumphs. He received in Dalmatia a great
property, and lived there in abundance with his family. The other captives
were enrolled in the Roman army, and Justinian and Theodora heaped presents
upon the daughters of Hilderich, and all the descendants of that princess
Eudocia, great-granddaughter of the great Theodosius, who had been obliged
to espouse the son of Genseric in her captivity at Carthage.

Then Justinian divided North Africa into seven provinces--Tingitana,
Mauritanea, Numidia, Carthage, Byzacene, Tripolis, and Sardinia, which
last, having belonged to the Vandals, was put into the prefecture of
Africa. This received a Praetorian prefect and proconsular governors, who
were charged to maintain the land, and show to the inhabitants the
difference between civilised Roman government and Vandal cruelty. Justinian
restored many cities, and erected many great buildings, especially
churches, of which five in Leptis alone.[124]

An early result of Justinian's reconquest of Africa was that the bishops
met in plenary council, under the presidency of the primate of Carthage,
Reparatus, successor of Boniface. After a hundred years of Vandal
oppression, 217 bishops assembled in the Basilica of Faustus, at Carthage,
named Justiniana in honour of the emperor--the church which Hunnerich had
taken from the Catholics, in which many bodies of martyrs were buried. To
their intercession the council ascribed their deliverance from persecution.
After reading the Nicene decrees, they discussed the question whether Arian
priests who had become Catholics should be received in their dignity or
only to lay communion. All the members of the council inclined to the
latter judgment. They, however, would come to no decision, but with one
voice determined to consult Pope John II. They addressed a letter to him by
the hands of two bishops and a deacon, in which they say: "We considered it
agreeable to charity that no one should disclose our judgment until first
the custom or determination of the Roman Church should be made known to us:
honouring herein with due obedience the authority of your Blessedness,
being such a Pontiff as the holy See of Peter deserved to have, worthy of
veneration, full of affection, speaking the truth without falsehood, doing
nothing with arrogance. Therefore the free charity of the whole brotherhood
thought that your counsel should be asked. And we beg that your mind, the
organ of the Holy Spirit,[125] may answer us kindly and truly."[126]

When the African deputies reached Rome, Pope John II. was already dead.
But his successor Agapetus answered the questions of the council, attaching
also the ancient canons which decided thereupon, to the effect that at
whatever age a person had been infected by the Arian pestilence, if he
became afterwards a Catholic he should not retain any rank, but that
converted Arian priests might receive support from the Church fund. Pope
Agapetus wrote expressing his intense joy at the recovery of their country:
"For, since the Church is everywhere one body, your sorrow was our
affliction. And we acknowledge your most sincere charity in that, as became
wise and learned men, you did not forget the Apostolic Principate; but, in
order to resolve that question, sought approach to that See to which the
power of the keys is given".[127]

This council also sent an embassy to Justinian, beseeching him to restore
the possessions and rights of the Church in Africa which the Vandals had
taken away--a request which the emperor granted in an edict to his
Praetorian prefect Salomo. And Agapetus expressly restored to the primate
of Carthage any rights as metropolitan which the enemy had taken away.[128]

Thus the terrible persecution inaugurated by Genseric when the Vandal host
lay around the deathbed of St. Augustine at Hippo in 430 came to an end. In
the interval, the African church had suffered every extremity of barbarian
cruelty from the Arian invaders. At the end, the primate of Carthage, at
the head of all the bishops of the several provinces, is found referring to
the Pope, a subject of the Arian Theodatus, for guidance in the treatment
of Arian priests and bishops who submitted to the Church. The Pope, on his
side, acknowledges all the rights of the primate of Carthage which existed
before the invasion. As to civil rights of property, the Byzantine
conqueror restores the possessions of the Church which had been taken away
by the Vandals.

By the restoration of the African province to the Roman empire and the
Catholic faith Justinian won great renown. His accession had been welcomed
with joy by the Catholic people. Full of great designs, he aimed at the
extension of his realm, and endeavoured to advance the Christian cause by
missions to countries as yet without the faith. Greatness and majesty are
shown in all his creations.[129] In the year following the African
reconquest Pope Agapetus wrote to him, praising his solicitude in
maintaining the unity of the Church, and identifying the advance of his
empire with the increase of religion.[130] The Pope adds that the emperor
desired the profession of faith which he had sent to his predecessor Pope
John II., and which had been confirmed by him, to be confirmed also by
himself, for which "we praise you: we assent, not because we admit in
laymen an authority to preach, but because, since the zeal of your faith is
in accordance with the rules of our fathers, we confirm and give it force".

It is to be remembered that Pope Agapetus, elected in 535, was the subject
of the Gothic king Theodatus, and as such was sent by him, under threats of
death, in the winter of this year, on an embassy to Justinian. The purpose
of Theodatus was to support his tottering throne by the intercession of the
Pope. He had murdered at the lake of Bolsena the daughter and heiress of
Theodorick, Amalasunta, who had made him king upon the untimely death of
her son Athalarick in 534. He was secretly proposing to cede the Gothic
kingdom of Italy to Justinian for a pension of 1200 pounds of gold. Thus
Agapetus was sent to Constantinople in the winter of 535, as Pope John I.
had been sent by Theodorick ten years before. He entered that city on the
20th February, 536; he died on the 22nd April following. In these two
months the Pope, the subject of Theodatus, did great things. A certain
Anthimus, a secret friend of the Monophysite heresy, had been brought, by
the favour of the like-minded empress Theodora, from the see of Trebisond
and put into that of Constantinople, having been able to impose himself
upon the emperor as orthodox. Agapetus was received with the greatest
honour, being only the second Pope who had visited Byzantium. He could not
negotiate a peace for Theodatus; but archimandrites, priests, and monks
besought him to proceed against Anthimus as an interloper and teacher of
error. Agapetus refused his communion to the new patriarch, required of him
a written confession of faith, and return to his bishopric, which he had
deserted contrary to the canons. The emperor, believing in the orthodoxy of
his patriarch, took part at first against the Pope, and strove to overcome
him both with threats and with presents. But Justinian, undeceived as to
the orthodoxy of Anthimus, gave him up, and Pope Agapetus pronounced
judgment of deposition upon him, and on the 13th March, 536, consecrated
Mennas, who had been duly elected, to be bishop of Constantinople. He first
required of him a written confession "to carry to Rome, to St. Peter".[131]

Soon after this the Pope died suddenly. The whole population at
Constantinople attended his funeral. Never, it was said, had the mourning
for a bishop or an emperor drawn together such a concourse of people. His
body was carried back to Rome in triumph and buried in St. Peter's.

Pope Agapetus was succeeded in 536 by Pope Silverius, chosen under the
influence of the Gothic king Theodatus. He was the last Pope so chosen; and
the moment of his election is coincident with events destined to change
permanently the material condition both of Rome and Italy.

Justinian had accomplished, with singular ease and rapidity, the first half
of his design. This was the reunion of North Africa to his empire, and the
restoration in it of the Catholic faith. The second part of his design was
to accomplish the same double result for Rome and for Italy. He sent
Belisarius, after the victory at Carthage, into Sicily, where Syracuse and
Palermo were taken; and in the summer of 536 the great commander entered
Italy, captured Naples, and advanced towards Rome on the Appian Road. So
the Gothic war began. Theodatus was in Rome. The Gothic army in the Pontine
marshes became aware of his incompetence and his secret treating with
Justinian, deposed him, and elected Vitiges to be their king in his stead,
by whose orders the fugitive was slain in his flight on the Flaminian Road.
But Vitiges hastened to Ravenna, where he espoused the unwilling Matasunta,
daughter of Amalasuntha, granddaughter of Theodorick. Four thousand Goths
alone remained to cover Rome. Belisarius appeared before it. A deputation,
supported by Pope Silverius, brought him the keys of the city. The garrison
was too weak to defend it, and on the 9th December, 536, Belisarius took
possession of Rome, at the head of the imperial troops, who had nothing
Roman in them except the name. It was sixty years since Odoacer had caused
the senate to declare a western emperor needless, and Rome, as to temporal
rule, had fallen, first under the Herule, then under the Goth. The Romans
welcomed Belisarius as a deliverer from the double yoke of the northern
intruder and the Arian heretic.

For however Theodorick recognised, after the fury of the conflict with his
brother-Teuton, the Herule Odoacer, was over, the necessity of ruling with
justice over Goth and Italian, however prosperous as to the maintenance of
peace and internal order the great kingdom stretching from Illyricum to
Southern Gaul had been, whatever support he had given to the maintenance of
Roman law, custom, and institutions, there was not a Roman, from Symmachus
and Boethius in the senate to the meanest inhabitant of Trastevere, who
would not loathe the occupation of Rome and Italy by the Gothic invasion.
The Goths were a people of remarkable courage and extraordinary force of
body. But the feeling with which Italians and, above all, Romans would
regard them as masters of their country and confiscators of its soil, can
only be expressed by what the English would feel if a swarm of Zulus were
to take possession of England. So, when Belisarius entered Rome, the Romans
looked for their being replaced under the direct and lawful government of
one who should be in deed and in truth a Roman prince, as Pope Felix had
called the recreant Zeno, that is, the head of law, the supreme judge, the
defender of the Church. This was what they looked for. I am about to
mention what they found.

The empress Theodora had tried with all her wiles to set a Monophysite
prelate on the Byzantine See.[132] Pope Agapetus had frustrated her plans
by deposing Anthimus and consecrating Mennas in his place. But Theodora had
not given up her intrigues, and she strove to involve in her net the Roman
See itself. In the train of Agapetus at Constantinople was the ambitious
deacon Vigilius. She sought to win him by promising him the Roman See. She
offered him a great sum of money, and all her powerful support in attaining
the papal dignity, if he would bind himself thereupon to abrogate the
Council of Chalcedon, to enter into communion with Anthimus and Severus,
and help them to recover the sees of Constantinople and Antioch. Vigilius
agreed, and Theodora worked for the interests of her favourite by means of
Antonina, wife of Belisarius. In the meantime, Silverius, as we have seen,
had been chosen Pope in Rome, and Theodatus had exercised in his favour the
influence which the Teuton rulers, whether styled Patricius or King, had
claimed in the papal election since Odoacer. The empress invited the new
Pope to come to Constantinople, or at least to restore her dear Anthimus.
Silverius refused decidedly, though he was in the most dangerous position
between the Greeks and the Ostrogoths, and even his personal liberty was in
danger from Belisarius.

Pope Silverius continued to refuse submission to the wishes of the empress.
The great commander sat in the Pincian palace in March, 537, scarcely three
months after he had taken possession of Rome.[133] There he abased himself
to carry out the commands of two shameless women, Theodora and Antonina. He
caused Pope Silverius to be brought before him on a charge of writing
treasonable letters to Vitiges. The Pope had taken refuge at Santa Sabina
on the Aventine. When brought before Belisarius, he found him sitting at
the feet of Antonina, who reclined on a couch. The attending clergy had
been left behind the first and second curtains. The Pope and the deacon
Vigilius entered alone. "Lord Pope Silverius," said Antonina, "what have we
done to thee and the Romans that thou wouldst deliver us into the hands of
the Goths?" While she was heaping reproaches upon him, John, a sub-deacon
of the first region, entered, took the pallium from his shoulders, and led
him into another room, where he was stript of his episcopal vestments, the
dress of a monk was put upon him, and his deposition was announced to the
clergy. He was then banished to Patara in Lycia. All these intrigues had
been unknown to Justinian. Afterwards, the bishop[134] of Patara went to
him, and invoked before the emperor the judgment of God, saying there were
many kings in this world, but not one set over the Church of the whole
world, as was that bishop who had been expelled from his see. Justinian,
hearing this, ordered Silverius to be taken back to Rome, and a true
judgment of his case to be made. But then the Pope fell entirely into the
hands of his rival Vigilius, who in the meantime had, by the help of
Belisarius, got possession of the pontificate. Vigilius caused him to be
deported to the island of Palmaria. There it is only known that he died in
great misery, but with the crown of martyrdom.

This was the first act of that dominion, lasting more than two hundred
years, in which the Byzantine sovereigns were lords of Rome, as part of a
reconquered province, and claimed to confirm the Papal elections, a claim
set up by the Herule Odoacer, continued by Theodorick, inherited by
Justinian.

When Belisarius occupied Rome he had only 5000 soldiers at his command.
Vitiges, the new Gothic king, had gone to Ravenna, and made peace with the
Franks by surrendering to them the southern provinces of France, held by
Theodorick. He then levied the whole fighting force of the Goths, and, in
March, 537, advanced from Umbria upon Rome at the head of 150,000 men.
Belisarius, in the three months, had done his best to repair the walls, the
towers, and the gates of the city. He had also laid up provisions. He dug
trenches round the least defended spots, and had constructed great machines
which shot bolts strong enough to nail an armoured man to a tree. Vitiges
approached from the Anio, and made a desperate attempt to storm the city at
once. Having failed in this, through the great courage and skill of
Belisarius, and being unable, even with his vast host, to surround the
city, he set up six fortified camps from the Flaminian Gate to that of
Proeneste, and a seventh in the Neronian fields on the other side of the
river, the plain which stretches from the Vatican to the Milvian bridge.
The Goth cut off the fourteen aqueducts which supplied Rome with water.
Those greatest monuments of imperial magnificence from that time have
stretched their broken arches across the Campagna, the admiration and
sorrow of every beholder in so many generations. What five hundred years
of empire had done, the Goth, in his fury to recover the land which he had
usurped, was able to ruin. The besiegers went on wasting the Campagna, and
preventing the entrance of provisions into the city. Amid the increasing
want, and the fear of worse, Vitiges in vain tried to seduce the Romans to
revolt. Finding that Belisarius would not capitulate, he constructed great
wooden towers, loftier than the walls, upon wheels, from which fifty men to
each should direct battering-rams. Belisarius opposed him with like
weapons. On the nineteenth day, the Goths poured out from their seven camps
for a general storm. In a tremendous conflict, Belisarius beat back the
invaders by counter sallies at the gates assailed. But at one point they
all but succeeded. The Mausoleum of Hadrian formed part of the defence.
Procopius, the eye-witness of this famous siege, and its narrator, says of
it: "The tomb of the Roman emperor Hadrian lies outside the Aurelian Gate,
a stone's-throw from the walls--a work of marvellous splendour. For it
consists of huge blocks of Parian marble, fastened to each other without
jointing from inside. It has four equal sides, each of them in length a
stone's-cast. Its height exceeds that of the city walls. Upon it stand
wonderful statues of men and horses." This is all that Procopius says. Up
to this moment, full four centuries after the death of Hadrian, all the
glories of Grecian art, which that imperial traveller over the world, from
Newcastle to the cataracts of the Nile, could collect, had shone through
the Roman sky on the monument, splendid as a palace and strong as a castle.
On this fatal day of Rome's direst need they were hurled down upon the
advancing Goth, whom the narrow streets had enabled to approach with
scaling ladders. Statues of emperors, gods, and heroes hailed upon the
northern giants; the works of Polycletus and Praxiteles were used for
common stones upon invaders who despised art as well as letters; and a
thousand years afterwards, when the building was finally formed into a
castle, in digging the trenches the fragments of the Sleeping Faun were
found, which had crushed some inglorious barbarian and saved Rome from
capture.

But the storming, repulsed at every gate, cost Vitiges the flower of his
host. Thirty thousand are said to have fallen, that being the number which
Procopius records as derived from Gothic officers themselves; and greater,
he says, was the number of wounded, when the deadly bolts from the machines
of Belisarius mowed down their encumbered masses in flight.

The result of this great conflict was to weaken the Goths, to encourage the
Romans, to make Belisarius confident of success. The siege lasted after
this nearly a year. The extremity of hunger and misery was endured in the
city. The supply of water was reduced to the cisterns and springs and the
river. Vitiges at length occupied Porto, and cut off Rome from the sea. But
the Goths also suffered terribly both from famine and from summer heat. The
end of all was that, after a siege of a year and nine days, in which the
Goths had fought 69 battles, Vitiges, in March, 538, drew off his
diminished troops. One morning, Belisarius, from his Pincian palace, saw
one-half of the remaining Goths on the other side of the Milvian bridge,
and he forthwith ordered a sally upon their rear-guard. Vitiges left
perhaps the half of his great host mouldering in the wasted, pestilent,
deserted Campagna. He left also a city impoverished in numbers, full of
sickness and misery. He had destroyed all the villas and dwellings of the
Campagna; the churches of the Martyrs lay in heaps of ruins: from the Porta
Salara to the Porta Nomentana hardly one stone upon another seems to have
remained. Also Vitiges had ordered the senators whom he had left at Ravenna
to be put to death. Only, during this siege, the basilicas of Rome's patron
saints, which lay outside the walls, received no damage and were respected
by the Goths.[135]

After this the storm of war drew off to the North. It continued with
changing fortune in the provinces of Tuscany, Aemilia, the plain of the Po,
the coasts of the Hadriatic. On the one side Franks and Burgundians took
part; on the other side the soldiers of Belisarius were made up of all
races from the East: not without skill in fight, but without discipline,
under rival and quarrelling commanders. They pressed grievously on the land
which they were sent to deliver. But the Goths grew weaker: they never
recovered their losses before Rome. At last Belisarius got hold of
Ravenna--not by capture, but after long negotiations, on both sides
deceptive. Belisarius made the Goths believe that he would set himself at
their head, and construct a new western empire. Vitiges, whether he trusted
him or not, came to terms with him. Belisarius proclaimed Justinian
emperor. The German realm seemed broken to pieces: only Verona, Pavia, and
a portion of Liguria held out. A small part only of the army still carried
the national banner. Then the conqueror, in 539, was recalled to Byzantium,
to conduct the war against Persia. He left Italy almost subdued, and
carried with him the captive king of the Goths, Vitiges, as in former years
he had carried Gelimer, the captive king of the Vandals. This was in 539,
thirteen years after Theodorick's death.

The first act of that fearful drama, the Gothic war, was over. But as soon
as Belisarius disappeared, the Goths began to recover themselves. The
generals of Justinian lived on plunder. In Totila arose a new Gothic
leader, the bravest of the brave. At the end of the year 541 he marched out
of Verona with only five thousand men, defeated the incapable and disunited
Grecian captains, took city after city, passed the Apennines, passed near
Rome, without assailing it. In this career of victory the Gothic king once
approached that Campanian hill on which the great benefactor of the West,
St. Benedict, was laying the foundations of the coenobitic life. In the
first instance, Totila tried to deceive the Saint. He dressed up a high
officer as king, and sent him, with three of his chief counts in
attendance, to personate himself. When Benedict saw the Gothic train
approaching he was seated, and as soon as they were within earshot, he
cried out to the warrior pretending to be king: "Son, lay aside that dress
which is not thine". The Goth fell to the ground in dismay, and returned to
report his discomfiture to Totila, who then came himself. But when he saw
Benedict seated at a distance he prostrated himself, and though Benedict
thrice bade him arise, he continued prostrate. The Saint then came to him,
raised him up, upbraided him with the acts which he had committed, and
revealed to him the future concerning himself: "Many evils thou doest; many
hast thou done. Put a curb at length on thine iniquity. Rome, indeed, thou
shalt enter; the sea thou shalt pass. Nine years thou shalt reign; in the
tenth thou shalt die."[136] The king was awe-struck. The savage in him
was quelled by the speaker's sanctity. From this time forth he altered
his conduct, and became more humane. In the capture of Naples shortly
afterwards he showed by his merciful treatment the effect which the
presence of St. Benedict had produced on him, as well as in the following
years of his life. This interview took place in the year 542.

But Totila[137] so advanced in power that, in spite of Byzantine intrigue
and jealousy, Belisarius, having happily concluded the Persian war, was
sent back to the supreme command in Italy. He landed in Ravenna, but
without army, war-material, or money. In the summer of 545, Totila, having
subdued the land all about Rome, laid siege to Rome itself. Belisarius
occupied Porto, and Totila set up his camp eight miles from Rome,
commanding the Tiber, and turning the siege into the closest blockade. In
vain Belisarius attempted to burst the Gothic bar of the river and
introduce provisions to Rome. In vain embassies were sent to Constantinople
for help. The most frightful distress ensued at Rome. At length, after
about eighteen months, certain Isaurian soldiers of the Greek garrison gave
up the Porta Asinaria, and on the night of the 17th December, 546, Totila
took the ill-defended city. When he entered, it was almost without
inhabitants. Those whom the sword, famine, and pestilence had not yet taken
were in flight or hiding. Patricians crept about in the garb of slaves. The
number of victims at this capture was small. The desolation and misery seem
to have worked not only on Totila, but also on his army. The plunder, which
a captured city could not escape, was generally bloodless; but many houses
were burnt in the Trasteverine quarter. As Theodorick had offered his
prayers at the tomb of the Apostles, so Totila went from the Lateran to St.
Peter's. What a change had the forty-six years brought about. To the
miserable remnant of the senate Totila upbraided the ingratitude which had
been shown for Gothic benefits under Theodorick. He accepted, however, the
intercession of the deacon Pelagius, and protected not only the female sex
in general, but especially the noble Rusticiana, widow of Boethius and
daughter of Symmachus. Amalasunta had restored their property to her sons,
the younger Boethius and Symmachus; but the war seems to have consumed
everything. She was now a beggar, and the wild host of Totila wished to put
her to death for having, as she was charged, maimed statues of Theodorick.
But the king rescued her from their fury.

In the first impulse of wrath Totila had threatened to level Rome with the
ground. Belisarius, lying sick at Porto, had addressed to him a letter,
entreating him to spare the greatest and noblest of cities. He did,
however, throw down a considerable part of the walls, and when he marched
to Lucania against the Greeks, took with him the chief citizens, and made
the rest of the inhabitants migrate to Campania. He left a desert behind
him. If we could trust the exaggerated reports of Greek historians, Rome
remained forty days without inhabitants, tenanted only by beasts.

So ended the second act of the Gothic tragedy.

But as Vitiges had quitted Rome, so Totila deserted it, and in the spring
of 547 it was entered again by Belisarius. In less than a month he restored
as well as he could the part of the walls demolished, called back the
inhabitants lingering in the neighbourhood, and prepared for a new attack.
It was not long in coming. Scarcely had the gaps in the walls been filled
up by stones piled in disorder and the trenches cleared, when the Gothic
king reappeared. Thrice was his assault repulsed; then he gave up the
attempt, broke down the bridges over the Anio behind him, and went to
Tibur, which he took by treachery of the inhabitants, who were at strife
with the Isaurian garrison. Totila massacred the citizens, the bishop, and
the clergy; got possession of the upper course of the Tiber, and cut off
the Romans from Tuscany. But then Belisarius was enabled to give greater
care to repairing the city's defences. The state in which several gates
remain to this day still show his hand. He restored Trajan's aqueduct,
which fed the mills on the right bank. But in the winter of 547 the great
captain was drawn away from Rome to carry on a miserable petty war with
insufficient force in the south of Italy, and was finally recalled to
Constantinople. So ended the third act of Rome's fall.

But Totila hastened from place to place, from victory to victory. After
scouring the South and then Umbria at the beginning of 549, he stood the
third time before Rome. A strong Byzantine garrison in the city had
provided magazines, and the wide spaces within the walls had been sown with
wheat. His first attack failed; but treachery opened to him the Ostian
gate, and its famished defenders soon surrendered the mausoleum of Hadrian.
The conqueror, in this fourth capture of the city, acted mildly. He called
back the yet absent inhabitants, amongst them many of the senators who had
been sent into Campania. How had the nobles of Rome melted away! Vitiges
had ordered those kept in Ravenna as hostages to be slain. Some had then
escaped to Liguria. The distrust of the Greeks as well as of the Goths
threatened them. Cethegus, chief of the senate, had been compelled to
leave before the first siege of Totila. Now Totila did not succeed in
coming to terms with Justinian. The Greek army received a new commander in
the eunuch Narses, who had served before under Belisarius. In him skill,
energy, court favour, and the command of considerable forces were united.
Before the end of 549, Totila left Rome. Almost all Italy save Ravenna was
in his hands. He dealt generously with the people, whilst the Byzantine
officials, exhausting the land with their exactions, added to the
sufferings of war.

And now we reach the fifth act of the drama in which Rome was humbled to
the very dust. Totila, for more than two years and a half, carried on an
unceasing struggle over land and sea--Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, which he
subdued, and beyond the Hadriatic, to the opposite coasts. Though generally
victorious, he was more like the leader in an old Gothic raid than a king
who ruled and defended a great realm. At last, in the spring of 552, Narses
advanced from Ravenna with a great force to a decisive battle for Rome.
Totila advanced from Rome into Tuscany to meet him. At Taginas, on the
longest day, the conflict which decided the fate of the Gothic kingdom took
place. All that summer day the battle lasted. The Gothic king, a true
knight in royal armour, on a splendid steed, marshalled and led his host.
When night had come his cavalry was overthrown, his footmen broken. The
spear of a Gepid had wounded him mortally. He was taken from the field,
died in the night, was hastily buried. But his grave was disclosed to the
Greeks. They left him where he lay; only his blood-stained mantle and
diadem set with precious stones were carried to Constantinople. Six
thousand of his bravest warriors lay on the field of battle. Yet when the
remains of the host collected themselves in Upper Italy they elected Teia
in Pavia for head of the yet unconquered race.

But Narses, having captured the strong places in Middle Italy, advanced
upon Rome. The Gothic garrison was too weak to defend the wide circuits of
the walls. Parts were soon taken. Presently Hadrian's tomb, which Totila
had surrounded with fresh walls, alone held out. But it soon fell, and
hapless Rome was captured for the fifth time in the reign of Justinian. It
was a day of doom for the still remaining noble families. Goths and Greeks
alike turned against them. In Campania and in Sicily many distinguished
Romans had waited for better times. Now not only the flying Goths cut down
all who fell into their hands, but the barbarian troops in the army of
Narses, at their entrance into Rome, followed the example. Then, again,
three hundred youths of the noblest families, who had been kept as hostages
at Pavia, were all executed by Teia. The western consulate ended in 534,
Flavius Theodorus Paulinus being the last. It continued seven years longer
in the East, where to Flavius Basilius, consul in 541, no successor was
given. When Justinian abolished this dignity it had lasted 1050 years, with
few interruptions. Though for more than half this time it had been a mere
title of honour, yet the consuls gave their name to the year, and served
still, it may be, to mark to the world the unity of the Roman empire.

From Rome the conqueror Narses turned his steps southwards to Cumae, that
he might seize the treasure of the Goths, which was guarded by the new king
Teia's brother Aligern. This brought Teia himself by a rapid march down the
Hadriatic coast, and crossing Italy obliquely, he appeared at the foot of
Vesuvius. There, in the spring of 553, Teia fought a last and desperate
battle over the grave of sunken cities, in view of the Gulf of Naples. At
the head of a small host, he fought from early morn to noon. It was like a
battle of Homeric warriors. Then he could no longer support the weight of
twelve lances in his shield, and, calling to his armour-bearer for a fresh
shield, he fell transfixed by a lance. The next day the remnant of the
army, save a thousand who fought their way through and reached Pavia,
accepted terms from Narses, to leave Italy and fight no more against the
emperor.

But Italy was far yet from tranquillity. Teia had incited the Alemans and
the Franks to break into Italy. The two brothers, Leuthar and Bucelin, led
a raid of 70,000 men, who ravaged Central and Southern Italy down to the
Straits of Sicily. One of these barbarians carried back his spoil-laden
troops to the Po, where pestilence consumed him and his horde. The host of
the other brother, Bucelin, when it had reached Capua, was overthrown on
the Vulturnus by Narses, with a slaughter as utter as that which Marius
inflicted on the Cimbri. Scarcely five are said to have escaped. So, in
the spring of 555, after twenty years of destruction, ended the Gothic
war.[138]

The reconquest of North Africa from the Vandals cost Justinian a few months
of uninterrupted victory. The reconquest of Italy from the Goths cost
twenty years of suffering to both sides, leaving, indeed, Justinian master
but of a ruined Italy, master also of Rome, but after five successive
captures; its senate reduced to a shadow, its patricians all but destroyed,
its population shrunk, it is supposed, when Narses took possession of it in
552, to between thirty and forty thousand impoverished inhabitants. But the
greatest change remains to be recorded. The Pope had indeed been delivered
from Arian sovereigns, who held the country under military occupation, but
exercised their civil rule with leniency and consideration, bearing, no
doubt, in mind that they were, at least in theory, vice-gerents of an
over-lord who ruled at Constantinople what was still the greatest empire of
the world. What Pope Gelasius truly called "hostile domination" had been
tempered during three-and-thirty years by the personal qualities of one who
was at once powerful in arms and wise in statesmanship. Rome, in the time
of Theodorick and Athalarick, had been maintained, its senate respected,
the Pope treated with deference. A stranger entering Rome in 535, at the
beginning of the Gothic war, would still have seen the greatest and
grandest city of the world, standing in general with its buildings
unimpaired. In 552, the Pope, instead of a distant over-lord, to whom he
could appeal as Roman prince, had received an immediate master, who ruled
Rome by a governor with a permanent garrison, and who understood his rule
at Rome to be the same as his rule at Byzantium. The same as to its
absolute power; but with this difference, that while Byzantium was the seat
of his imperial dignity, in which every interest touched his personal
credit, and its bishop was to be supported as the chief officer of his
court and the chief councillor of his administration, the Rome he took from
the Goths was simply a provincial town of a recovered province, once indeed
illustrious, but now ruined and very troublesome. A provincial town because
the seat of Byzantine power in Italy was henceforth not at Rome but at
Ravenna, while the sovereign of Italy no longer held his court within
Italy, at Ravenna or at Verona, as Theodorick and Athalarick, but at
Constantinople. Mature reflection upon the civil condition made for the
Pope by the result of the Gothic war will, I think, show that no severer
test of the foundation of his spiritual authority could be applied than
what this great event brought in its train. Nor must we omit to note that
this test was brought about not only by the operation of political causes,
but by actors who had not the intention of producing such a result. The
suffering of Rome, in particular, during this war at the hands of Vitiges,
Belisarius, Totila, Teia, Narses, is indescribable. It is hard to say
whether defender or assailant did it most injury; but it is true to say
that the one and the other were equally merciless in their purpose to
retain it as a prey or to recover it as a conquest. Vitiges, besides
pressing the people cooped up in its walls with a terrible famine during
his siege of a year, broke down its aqueducts and ruined every building on
that part of the Campagna which he scoured. Totila, in like manner, after
famishing the inhabitants, when he took Rome, broke down a good part of its
walls, and at his second capture, in 546, the city is described as having
been absolutely deserted. In the last struggle, Teia slew without pity the
three hundred hostages of Rome's noblest blood who had been sent to Pavia,
thereby almost destroying its patricians. These were the parting tokens of
Gothic affection for Italy. Then Belisarius, attempting to relieve Rome
with inadequate forces, which was all that the penury of Justinian allowed
him, was the means of prolonging the famine, while he did not save the city
from capture. Lastly, Narses, sent to finish the war, enrolled in Dalmatia
an army of adventurers. Huns, Lombards, Herules, Gepids, Greeks, and even
Persians, in figure, language, arms, and customs utterly dissimilar, fought
for him under the imperial standard, greedy for the treasures of Italy.
Narses took Rome in 552, and governed it as imperial prefect for fifteen
years at the head of a Greek garrison, until he was recalled in 567. That
occupation of Narses in 552 is the date of Rome's extinction as the old
secular imperial city. The year after his recal came the worst plague of
all, and the most enduring. The Lombards did but repeat for the subjection
of Italy to a fresh northern invasion what Narses had done to deliver it
from Theodorick's older one in the preceding century.

Now let us see the nature of the test which this course of events, the work
of Goth and Greek alike--inflicting great misery and danger on the clergy
and the Pope, as upon their people--applied to the papal authority itself.

A more emphatic attestation of that authority than the confession given in
519 to Pope Hormisdas by the whole Greek episcopate, and by the emperor at
the head of his court, could hardly be drawn up. It settled for ever the
question of right, and estopped Byzantium, whether in the person of Caesar
or of patriarch, from denial of the Pope's universal pastorship, as derived
from St. Peter. We have seen that not only did Justinian, when the leading
spirit in his uncle's freshly-acquired succession to the eastern empire, do
his utmost to bring about this confession, but that in the first years of
his reign his letter to Pope John II. reaffirmed it; and his treatment of
Pope Agapetus when he appeared at Constantinople, not only as Pope, but in
the character of ambassador from the Gothic king Theodatus, exhibited that
belief in action. But now a state of things quite unknown before had
ensued. Hitherto Rome had been the capital, of which even Constantine's
Nova Roma was but the pale imitation. But the five times captured,
desolate, impoverished Rome which came back under Narses to Justinian's
sway, came back not as a capital, but as a captive governed by an exarch.
Was the bishop of a city with its senate extinct, its patriciate destroyed,
and with forty thousand returned refugees for its inhabitants, still the
bearer of Peter's keys--still the Rock on which the City of God rested? Had
there been one particle of truth in that 28th canon which a certain party
attempted to pass at the Council of Chalcedon, and which St. Leo
peremptorily annulled, a negative answer to this must now have followed.
That canon asserted "that the Fathers justly gave its prerogatives to the
see of the elder Rome because that was the imperial city". Rome had ceased
to be the imperial city. Did the loss of its bishop's prerogatives follow?
Did they pass to Byzantium because it was become the imperial city, because
the sole emperor dwelt there? Thus, about a hundred years after the repulse
of the ambitious exaltation sought by Anatolius, its rejection by the
provident wisdom and resolute courage of St. Leo was more than justified by
the course of events. St. Leo's action was based upon the constitution of
the Church, and therefore did not need to be justified by events. But the
Divine Providence superadded this justification, and that under
circumstances which had had no parallel in the preceding five hundred
years.

For when Belisarius, submitting himself to carry out the orders of an
imperious mistress, deposed, as we have seen, the legitimate Pope Silverius
by force in March, 537, Vigilius, in virtue of the same force, was
consecrated a few days after to succeed him. The exact time of the death
which Pope Silverius suffered in Palmaria is not known. But Vigilius is not
recognised as lawful Pope until after his death, probably in 540. He then
ascended St. Peter's seat with a blot upon him such as no pontiff had
suffered before. And this pontificate lasted about fifteen years, and was
full of such humiliation as St. Peter had never suffered before in his
successors.

We are not acquainted with the detail of events at Rome in those terrible
years, but we learn that, as Pope John I. was sent to Constantinople as a
subject by Theodorick, and Pope Agapetus again as a subject by Theodatus,
so Vigilius was urged by Justinian to go thither, and that after many
delays he obeyed the emperor very unwillingly.

But it is requisite here to give a short summary of what Justinian had been
doing in the affairs of the eastern Church from the time that Pope
Agapetus, having consecrated Mennas to be bishop of Constantinople, died
there in 536. After the Pope's death, Mennas proceeded to hold in May and
June of that year a synod in which he declared Anthimus to be entirely
deposed from the episcopal dignity, and condemned Severus and other leaders
of the Monophysites. In this synod Mennas presided, and the two Roman
deacons, Vigilius and Pelagius, who had been the legates of Pope Agapetus,
but whose powers had expired at his death, sat next to him, but only as
Italian bishops. How little the patriarch Mennas could there represent the
Church's independence is shown by his words to the bishops in the fourth
session: "Your charity knows that nothing of what is mooted in the Church
should take place contrary to the decision and order of our emperor,
zealous for the faith," while of their relation to the Pope he said: "You
know that we follow and obey the Apostolic See; those who are in communion
with it we hold in communion; those whom it condemns we also condemn".[139]
Justinian, irritated by the boldness of the Monophysites, added the
sanction of law to the decrees of this council, which deposed men who had
occupied patriarchal sees. He used these words: "In the present law we are
doing an act not unusual to the empire. For as often as an episcopal decree
has deposed from their sacerdotal seats those unworthy of the priesthood,
such as Nestorius, Eutyches, Arius, Macedonius, and Eunomius, and others in
wickedness not inferior to them, so often the empire has agreed with the
authority of the bishops. Thus the divine and the human concurred in one
righteous judgment, as we know was done in the case of Anthimus of late,
who was deposed from the see of this imperial city by Agapetus, of holy and
renowned memory, bishop of Old Rome."[140]

In the intrigue of Theodora with Vigilius, Mennas took no part. He took
counsel with the emperor how to maintain the Catholic faith in Alexandria
against the heretical patriarch Theodosius. By the emperor's direction,
ordering him to expel Theodosius, Mennas, in 537 or 538, consecrated Paul,
a monk of Tabenna, to be patriarch of Alexandria. The act would appear to
have been done in the presence of Pelagius, then nuncio in Constantinople,
without reclamation on his part, or of the nuncios who represented Antioch
and Jerusalem. Mennas in this repeated the conduct of Anatolius and Acacius
in former times, who were censured, the one by St. Leo, the other by Pope
Simplicius. By this event the four eastern patriarchs seemed to agree to
accept the first four councils, and the unity of the Church to be quite
restored, from which Alexandria had until then stood aloof; but the
patriarch Paul came afterwards in suspicion of heresy and had to give way
to Zoilus. Mennas was on the best terms with the emperor; he might easily
have used the deposition of Silverius and the unlawful exaltation of
Vigilius in 537 for increase of his own influence, had not a feeling of
duty or love of peace held him back. But Vigilius also, when he came to be
acknowledged, had come to realise his position and its responsibility. He
was far from fulfilling the unlawful promises made to Theodora, and from
favouring the Monophysites. The empress found that she had thrown away her
money and failed in her intrigue. In letters[141] to the emperor and to
Mennas, in 540, Vigilius declared his close adherence to the acts of his
predecessors, St. Leo in particular, and to the decrees in faith of the
four General Councils, while he confirmed the acts of the council held by
Mennas against Severus and the other Monophysite leaders.

In the meantime new dissensions threatened to agitate the whole eastern
realm.[142] The partisans of Origen in Palestine and the neighbouring
countries rose. At their head stood Theodore Askidas, archbishop of
Caesarea in Cappadocia, and Domitian, metropolitan of Ancyra, who had
obtained, by favour of Justinian, these important sees. Ephrem, patriarch
of Antioch about 540, condemned Origenism in a synod. Pelagius, being papal
nuncio at Constantinople, had, together with Ephrem, patriarch of Antioch,
condemned the patriarch Paul of Alexandria at Gaza. Deputies from Peter,
patriarch of Jerusalem, and the orthodox monks journeyed with Pelagius to
Constantinople, to present to the emperor an accusation against the
Origenists. Pelagius had much influence with Justinian, and he and Mennas
procured for the petitioners access to the emperor. They asked him to issue
a solemn condemnation of Origen's errors. The emperor listened willingly,
and issued in the form of a treatise to Mennas a still extant censure of
Origen and his writings. He called upon the patriarchs to hold synods upon
them. Mennas, in 543, held one in the capital, which issued fifteen
anathemas against Origen.[143] Theodore Askidas and Domitian, by submitting
to the imperial edict and the condemnation of Origen, kept their places and
secured afresh their influence, which the monks of Palestine, who were not
Origenistic, felt severely. They even managed, in the interest of their
party, to turn the attention of the dogmatising emperor to another
question, and moved him to issue, in 544, the edict upon the Three
Chapters. He thought he was bringing back the Monophysites to orthodoxy. He
was really casting a new ferment into the existing agitation.

At first the patriarch Mennas was very displeased with this edict censuring
in the so-called Three Chapters Theodoret, Ibas, and Theodore of Mopsuestia
as Nestorians. He considered the credit of the Council of Chalcedon to be
therein impeached, and declared that he would only subscribe to it after
the Pope had subscribed. Afterwards, being more strongly pressed, he
subscribed unwillingly, but with the reservation, confirmed to him even
upon oath, that if the Bishop of Rome refused his assent his signature
should be returned to him, and his subscription be regarded as withdrawn.
The other eastern patriarchs also at first resisted, but finished by
complying with the imperial threats, as particularly Ephrem of Antioch.
Most of the bishops, accustomed to slavish subjection to their patriarchs,
followed their example, and Mennas had to urge the bishops under him by
every means to comply. However, many bishops complained of this pressure to
the papal legate Stephen, who pronounced against the edict, which seemed
indirectly to impeach the authority of the Fourth Council. He even refused
communion with Mennas because he had broken his first promise and given his
assent before the Pope had decided upon it. Through the whole West the
writings of Theodore, Theodoret, and Ibas were little known, but the
decrees of Chalcedon were zealously maintained. The edict was refused,
especially in Northern Africa. It was censured by the bishop Portian in a
writing addressed to the emperor, and by the learned deacon Ferrandus.

Means had been taken by fraud and force to win the whole East to consent to
the edict.[144] Mennas, patriarch of Constantinople; Ephrem, patriarch of
Antioch; Peter, patriarch of Jerusalem, crouched before the tyranny of
Justinian; and so also Zoilus of Alexandria, though he promised Vigilius
that he would not sign the edict, afterwards subscribed it.[145] At this
point Justinian sought before everything to get the assent of the Pope, and
he sent for Vigilius to Constantinople. He claimed the presence of Vigilius
as his subject in virtue of the conquest of Belisarius: he meant to use
this authority of Vigilius as Pope for his own purpose. Vigilius foresaw
the difficulties into which he would fall. At length he left Rome in 544,
before Totila began the second siege. He lingered in Sicily a year, in 546;
he then travelled through Greece and Illyricum. At last he entered
Byzantium on the 25th January, 547, and was welcomed with the most
brilliant reception. Justinian humbly besought his blessing, and embraced
him with tears. But this good understanding did not last long. Vigilius
approved the conduct of his legates and refused his communion to Mennas,
who, in signing the formula of Hormisdas, had bound himself to follow the
Roman See, and had broken his special promise. Vigilius withdrew it also
from the bishops who had subscribed the imperial edict. He and the bishops
attending him saw in this edict a scheme to help the Acephali, upon whom
Vigilius repeated his anathema. But Mennas feared the emperor much more
than he feared the Pope, whose name he now removed from commemoration at
the Mass. Vigilius, like the westerns in general, considered the edict to
be useless and dangerous, as giving a pretext for seeming to abrogate the
Council of Chalcedon, and also as a claim on the part of the emperor to the
highest authority in Church matters. Justinian tried repeatedly his
personal influence with the Pope, that also of bishops and officers of
State. He even had him watched for a length of time and cut off from all
approach, so that the Pope exclaimed, "If you have made me a prisoner, you
cannot imprison the holy Apostle Peter". Yet the intercourse of Vigilius
with eastern bishops soon convinced him that they were generally agreed
with the emperor; that a prolonged resistance on his part would produce a
new division between Greeks and Latins; that considerable grounds existed
for the condemnation of the Three Chapters, with which, hitherto, he had
not been well acquainted. So he allowed the subject to be further
considered, held out a prospect of agreeing with the emperor, and
readmitted Mennas to his communion, who restored the Pope's name in the
liturgy. This reconciliation took place on the feast of the Princes of the
Apostles, 29th June, 547.

The Pope, after further conferences with bishops present at
Constantinople, seventy of whom had not signed the imperial edict, issued,
on the 11th April, 548, his _Judgment_, directed to Mennas, of which all
but fragments are lost. In it he most strongly maintained the authority of
the four General Councils, especially of the fourth; put under anathema the
godless writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, and also his person; the letter
said to be written by Ibas to Maris, which Justinian had marked as
supposititious, and the writings of Theodoret, which impugned orthodoxy and
the twelve anathemas of Cyril. It was his purpose to quiet excitement,
satisfying the Greeks by a specific condemnation of the Three Chapters, and
the Latins by maintaining the rank of the Council of Chalcedon. And he
required that therewith the strife should cease. But neither side accepted
the condition. The westerns, especially Dacius, archbishop of Milan, and
Facundus, bishop of Hermiane, vehemently attacked his _Judgment_. So did
many African monks. Even two Roman deacons, the Pope's own nephew Rusticus,
and Sebastianus, though they began by supporting the _Judgment_, became
very violent against the Pope, spread the most injurious reports against
him, and disregarded his warnings. He deposed and excommunicated them.
False reports were spread that, against the Council of Chalcedon, the Pope
had condemned the persons of Theodoret and Ibas, and had gone against the
decrees of his predecessors. The Pope, after the death of the empress
Theodora, on the 28th June, 548, had continued by the emperor's wish at
Constantinople, especially since Totila had retaken Rome in 549. He had
gone to Thessalonica and returned; he tried in several letters to the
bishops of Scythia and Gaul to correct their misconceptions. These,
however, prevailed with the bishops of Illyria, Dalmatia, and Africa, who
in 549 and 550 separated themselves from the communion of Vigilius. A thing
not heard of before now occurred. The Roman Bishop stood with the Greek
bishops on one side, the Latin bishops on the other, and the bewilderment
increased from day to day.

In the summer of 550 the Pope and the emperor came to an agreement that a
General Council should be held at which the western bishops should be
present, until which all dispute about the Three Chapters, and any fresh
step on the subject, should be forbidden, and in the meantime the Pope's
_Judgment_ should be returned to him. That took place at once, and
preparations were made for the council. In June a council held at
Mopsuestia by direction of the emperor declared that from the time of human
memory the name of its former bishop, Theodore, had been erased from
commemoration, and the name of St. Cyril put in. But the western bishops
avoided answering the invitation to the council. The Illyrian did not come
at all; the African sent as deputies Reparatus, the primate of Carthage,
Firmus of Numidia, and two Byzacene bishops. These were besieged both with
threats and presents; two were induced to sign the imperial edict; the
other two were banished, Reparatus under charge of a political crime. While
the western bishops showed still less inclination to appear, the court
broke its agreement with Vigilius. A new writing against the Three Chapters
was read in the palace before several bishops, and subscribed by them.
Theodore Askidas, the chief contriver, and his companions, excused
themselves to the Pope, who called them to account, and begged pardon, but
spread the writing still more, set the emperor against Vigilius, and
induced him to publish, in 551, a further edict under the name of a
confession of faith. It contained, together with a detailed exposition of
doctrine upon the Trinity and Incarnation, thirteen anathemas, with the
refutation of different objections made by the defenders of the Three
Chapters; for instance, that the letter of Ibas had been approved at
Chalcedon, the condemnation of dead men forbidden, and Theodore of
Mopsuestia been praised by orthodox Fathers.

The restoration of peace was thus made much more difficult, and the promise
given to the Pope broken. The Pope protected himself against this violation
of the agreement, by which nothing was to be done in the matter before the
intended council, and considered himself released from his engagements. He
saw herein the arbitrary interference of a despotic ruler anticipating the
council's decision, which put in question the Church's whole right of
authority, and much increased the danger of a schism. In an assembly of
Greek and Latin bishops held in the Placidia palace, where he resided, he
desired them to request the emperor to withdraw the proposed edict, and to
wait for a general consideration of the subject, and especially for the
sentence of the Latin bishops. If this was not granted, to refuse their
subscription to the edict. Moreover, the See of Peter would excommunicate
them. Dacius, also, archbishop of Milan, spoke in this sense. But the
protest was disregarded, and Theodore Askidas, who had formed part of the
assembly, went with the bishops of his party to the Church in which the
edict was posted up, held solemn service there, struck out of the diptychs
the patriarch Zoilus of Alexandria, who declined to condemn the Three
Chapters, and proclaimed at once Apollinaris for his successor, with the
consent of the weak Mennas, and in contempt of the Pope's authority. Not
only now were the Three Chapters in question, but the whole right and
independence of the Church's authority. Vigilius, having long warned the
vain court-bishop Theodore Askidas, always a non-resident in his diocese,
and having now been witness of a violence so unprecedented, put him under
excommunication.

At this resistance Justinian was greatly embittered, and was inclined to
imprison the Pope and his attendants. The Pope took refuge in the Church of
St. Peter, by the palace of Hormisdas. He repeated with greater force his
former declaration, entirely deprived Theodore Askidas, and put Mennas and
his companions under ban, until they made satisfaction, on the 14th August,
551. At least the sentence was kept ready for publication. He was attended
by eleven Italian and two African bishops. The emperor sent the praetor
with soldiers to remove him by force. Vigilius clung to the altar, so that
it was nearly pulled down with him. His imprisonment was prevented by the
crowd which burst in, indignant at the ill-treatment offered to the
Church's first bishop, and by the disgust of the soldiers at the gaol-work
put upon them. The emperor, seeming to repent his hastiness, sent high
officers of State to assure the Pope of personal security, at first with
the threat to have him removed by force if he was not content with this;
then he empowered the officers to swear that no ill should befal him. The
Pope thereon returned to the palace of Placidia. But there, in spite of
oaths, he was watched, deprived of his true servants, surrounded with paid
spies, attacked with every sort of intrigue, even his handwriting forged.
Then, seeing his palace entirely surrounded by suspicious persons, he
risked, on the 23rd December, 551, a flight across the Bosphorus to the
Church of St. Euphemia in Chalcedon, in which the Fourth Council had been
held. Here, in January, 552, he published his decree against Theodore and
Mennas, and was for a long time sick. When the emperor, with the offer of
another oath, sent high officials to invite him to return to the capital,
he replied that he needed no fresh oaths if the emperor had only the will
to restore to the Church the peace which she enjoyed under his uncle
Justin. He desired the emperor to avoid communion with those who lay under
his ban. In his Encyclical of the 5th February, 552, he made known to all
the Church what had passed, and expressed his belief and his wishes. Even
in his humiliation the successor of Peter inspired a great veneration.
They tried to approach him. He soon received a writing from Theodore
Askidas, Mennas, Andrew, archbishop of Ephesus, and other bishops, in which
they declared their adherence to the decrees of the four General Councils
which had been made in agreement with the legates of the Apostolic See, as
well as to the papal letters. They consented also to the withdrawal of all
that had been written on the Three Chapters, and besought the Pope to
pardon as well their intercourse with those who lay under his ban as the
offences committed against him, in which also they claimed to have had no
part. So things were brought to the condition in which they were before the
appearance of the last imperial edict. Vigilius now returned from Chalcedon
to Constantinople.

Mennas, who died in August, 552, was succeeded by Eutychius. He addressed
himself to the Pope on the 6th January, 553, whose name had been restored
by Mennas to the first place in the diptychs. Eutychius presented his
confession of faith. He also proposed that a decision, in respect of the
Three Chapters in accordance with the four General Councils, should be made
in a meeting of bishops under the Pope's presidency. Apollinaris of
Alexandria, Domnus of Antioch, Elias of Thessalonica, and other bishops
subscribed this request. The Pope, in his reply of the 8th January, praised
their zeal, and accepted the proposition of a council which he had before
approved. Negotiations then began about its management. Here the emperor
resisted the Pope's proposals in many points. He would not have the council
held in Italy or Sicily, as the Pope desired, nor carry out his own
proposal to summon such western bishops as the Pope named. He proposed
further that an equal number of bishops should be consulted on both sides;
hinting, moreover, that an equal number should be drawn from each
patriarchate, while Vigilius meant an equal number from the East and the
West, which he thought necessary to bring about a successful result. At
last the emperor caused the council actually to meet on the 5th May, 553,
under the presidency of Eutychius, with 151 bishops, among whom only six
from Africa represented the West, against the Pope's will, in the
secretarium of the chief church of Constantinople. First was read an
imperial writing of much detail, which entered into the previous
negotiations with Vigilius; then the correspondence between Eutychius and
the Pope. It was resolved to invite him again. Vigilius refused to take
part in the council, first on account of the excessive number of eastern
bishops and the absence of most western; then of the disregard shown to his
wishes. Further, he sought to preserve himself from compulsion, and
maintain his decision in freedom. He had reason to fear the infringement of
his dignity. Moreover, no one of his predecessors had taken personally a
part in eastern councils, and Pope Celestine had forbidden his legates to
enter into discussion with bishops, and appear as a party. The Pope
maintained his refusal not only to the high officers of the emperor, but to
an embassy from the council, at the head of which stood three eastern
patriarchs. This he did, being the emperor's subject; being also in the
power of an emperor who was able to appear to the eastern bishops almost
the head of the Church, and to sway them as he pleased. The Pope would only
declare himself ready to give his judgment apart. An account of this
unsuccessful invitation was given in the council's second session of the
8th May. The western bishops still in the capital were invited to attend,
but several declined, because the Pope took no part. At the third session,
of the 9th May, after reading the former protocols, a confession of faith
entirely agreeing with the imperial document communicated four days before
was drawn up, and a special treatment of the Three Chapters ordered for
another day. At the fourth session, seventy-one heretical or offensive
propositions of Theodore of Mopsuestia were read and condemned. In the
fifth, the opposition made to him by St. Cyril and others was considered,
as well as the question whether it is allowable to anathematise after their
death men who have died in the Church's communion. This was affirmed
according to previous examples, and testimony from Augustine, Cyril, and
others. Theodoret's writings against Cyril were also anathematised. In the
sixth session, the same was done with the letter of Ibas. In the seventh
session, several documents sent by the emperor were read, specially letters
of Pope Vigilius up to 550, and a letter from the emperor Justin to his
prefect Hypatius, in 520, forbidding that a feast to Theodore or to
Theodoret should any longer be kept in the city of Cyrus. The imperial
commissioner informed the council, likewise, that the Pope had sent by the
sub-deacon Servusdei a letter to the emperor, which the emperor had not
received, and therefore not communicated to the council. The longer Latin
text of the acts also says that the emperor had commanded the Pope's name
to be erased from the diptychs, without prejudice, however, to communion
with the Apostolic See, which the council accepted. It held its last
sitting on the 2nd June, 553, and issued fourteen anathemas in accordance
with the thirteen of Justinian. There were then present 165 bishops.

The document brought to the emperor by the sub-deacon in the Pope's name,
but rejected, must be what has come down to us as the Constitution of the
14th May. It had the subscription of Vigilius, of sixteen bishops--nine
Italian, three Asiatic, two Illyrian, and two African--with three Roman
clergy. It decidedly rejected sixty propositions drawn from the writings of
Theodore; anathematised five errors as to the Person of Christ; forbade the
condemnation of Theodore's person, and of the two other Chapters. If this
document was really drawn up by Vigilius, who had persisted during almost
six years, as the emperor admitted, in condemning the Three Chapters, it
must be explained by the Pope finding his especial difficulty in the manner
of terminating the matter, so that the western bishops should be entirely
satisfied that the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon remained inviolate;
that he purposed only to condemn errors, but spare persons; that he wished
to set his refusal against the pressure of the changeable emperor and the
blind submission of the Grecian bishops, without surrendering any point of
faith. Many irregularities appeared in what preceded the council and took
place in it. Justinian's conduct was dishonouring to the Church, and he
used force to get the decrees of the Council accepted. At last Vigilius,
who seems with other bishops to have been banished, gave way to the
pressure, and issued a decided condemnation of the Three Chapters, in a
writing to Eutychius of 8th December, 553; and in a Constitution dated 23rd
February, 554, he made no mention of the council, but gave his own decision
in accordance with it, and independent of it, as he had before intended.
Only by degrees the council held by Eutychius obtained the name of the
Fifth General Council.

In August, 554, the Pope was again on good terms with the emperor, who
issued at his request the Pragmatic Sanction for Italy. Then Vigilius set
out to return to Rome, but died on his way at Syracuse in the beginning of
555. He had spent seven years in the Greek capital, in a position more
difficult than had ever before occurred; ignorant himself of the language;
struggling to his utmost to meet the dangers which assaulted the Church
from every side. Now one and now another seemed to threaten the greater
evil. He never wavered in the question of faith itself, but often as to
what it was opportune to do: as whether it was advisable or necessary to
condemn persons and writings which the Council of Chalcedon had spared:
whether to issue a judgment which would be looked upon by the Monophysites
as a triumph of their cause: which for the same reason would be utterly
detested by most westerns, as a supposed surrender of the Council of
Chalcedon; which, instead of closing the old divisions, might create new.
Subsequent times showed the correctness of his solicitude.[146]

The patriarch Eutychius who presided at this council by the emperor's
order, without the Pope, was held in great consideration by Justinian, and
was consulted in his most important affairs. When Justinian had restored
with the greatest splendour the still existing Church of Santa Sophia,
Eutychius consecrated it in his presence on the 24th December, 563.
Justinian then allotted to the service of the cathedral 60 priests, 100
deacons, 90 sub-deacons, 110 lectors, 120 singers, 100 ostiarii, and 40
deaconesses, a number which much increased between Justinian and Heraclius.

Justinian in his last years was minded to sanction by a formal decree a
special doctrine which, after long resisting the Eutycheans, he had taken
from them. It was that the Body of Christ was from the beginning
incorruptible, and incapable of any change. He willed that all his bishops
should set their hands to this decree. Eutychius was one of the first to
resist. On the 22nd January, 565, he was taken by force from his cathedral
to a monastery; he refused to appear before a resident council called by
the emperor, which deposed him, and appointed a successor. He was banished
to Amasea, where he died, twelve years afterwards, in the monastery which
he had formerly governed.[147]

But Justinian had become again, by the conquest of Narses, lord of Rome and
Italy, and as such, in the year 554, issued at the request of Vigilius his
Pragmatic Sanction. In Italy the struggle was at an end; the land was a
desert. Flourishing cities had become heaps of smoking ruins. Milan had
been destroyed. Three hundred thousand are said to have perished there.
Before the recal of Belisarius, fifty thousand had died of hunger in the
march of Ancona. Such facts give a notion of Rome's condition. In 554,
Narses returned, and his victorious host entered, laden with booty, crowned
with laurels. It was his task to maintain a regular government, which he
did with the title of Patricius and Commander.[148] The Pragmatic Sanction
was intended to establish a new political order of things in Italy, which
was reunited to the empire. The two supreme officials of the Italian
province were the Exarch and the Prefect. The title of Exarch then came up,
and continued to the end of the Greek dominion in Italy. He united in
himself the military and civil authority; but for the exercise of the
latter the Prefect stood at his side as the first civil officer. Obedience
to the whole body of legislation, as codified by Justinian's order, was
enacted. For the rest the provisions of Constantine were followed. The
administration of justice was in the hands of provincial judges, whom the
bishops and the nobility chose from the ranks of the latter. It was then
the bishops began to take part in the courts of justice of their own
cities, as well in the choice and nomination of the officers as in their
supervision.[149] The words Roman commonwealth, Roman emperor, Roman army,
were heard again. But no word was said of restoring a western emperor. Rome
retained only an ideal precedence; Constantinople was the seat of empire.
Rome received a permanent garrison, and had to share with Ravenna, where
the heads of the Italian government soon permanently resided. Justinian's
constitution found existing the mere shadow of a senate. The prefect of the
city governed at Rome. There is mention made of a salary given to
professors of Grammar and Rhetoric,[150] to physicians and lawyers; but it
is doubtful whether this ever came into effect. The Gothic war[151] seems
to have destroyed the great public libraries of Rome, the Palatine and
Ulpian, as well as the private libraries of princely palaces, such as
Boethius and Symmachus possessed. And in all Italy the war of extermination
between Goths and Greeks swallowed up the costly treasures of ancient
literature, save such remnant as the Benedictine monasteries were able to
collect and preserve.[152] No building of Justinian's in Rome is known.
All his work of this kind was given to Ravenna. From this time forth every
new building in Rome is due to the Popes.

Small reason had the Popes to rejoice that the rule of an orthodox emperor
had followed at Rome that of an Arian king. Three months after the death of
Vigilius at Syracuse Justinian caused the deacon Pelagius to be elected: he
had difficulty in obtaining his recognition until he had cleared himself by
oath in St. Peter's of an accusation that he had hastened his predecessor's
death. The confirmation of the Pope's election remained with the emperor.
This permanent fetter came upon the Popes from the interference of Odoacer
the Herule in 484. After Justinian's death, the Romans sent an embassy to
his successor complaining that their lot had been more endurable under the
dominion of barbarians than under the Greeks.

When Narses,[153] re-entering Rome, celebrated a triple triumph over the
expulsion of barbarians from Italy, the reunion of the empire, and the
Church's victory over the Arians, a contemporary historian writes that the
mind of man had not power enough to conceive so many reverses of fortune,
such destruction of cities, such a flight of men, such a murdering of
peoples, much less to describe them in words. Italy was strewn with ruins
and dead bodies from the Alps to Tarentum. Famine and pestilence, following
on the steps of war, had reduced whole districts to desolation. Procopius
compares the reckoning of losses to that of reckoning the sands of the
sea. A sober estimate computes that one-third of the population perished,
and the ancient form of life in Rome and in all Italy was extinct for ever.

But before we make an estimate of Justinian's whole action and character
and their result, a subject on which we have scarcely touched has to be
carefully weighed.

What was the relation between the Two Powers conceived in the mind of
Justinian, expressed in his legislation, carried out in his conduct,
whether to the Roman Primate or the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch,
Jerusalem, and Constantinople in his own eastern empire, or to the whole
Church when assembled in council, as at Constantinople in 553? Was he
merely carrying on as emperor a relation which he had inherited from so
many predecessors, beginning with Constantine, or did he by his own laws
and conduct alter an equilibrium before existing, and impair a definite and
lawful union by transgressing the boundaries which made it the co-operation
of Two Powers.

If we look back just a hundred years before his _Digest_ appeared, we find,
in the great deed[154] in which the emperors Theodosius II. and Valentinian
III. convoked the Council of Ephesus, the charge which they considered to
be laid upon the imperial power to maintain that union of the natural and
the spiritual government on which, as on a joint foundation, the Roman
State, in the judgment of its rulers, was itself built. Some of the words
they use are: "We are the ministers of Providence for the advancement of
the commonwealth, while, inasmuch as we represent the whole body of our
subjects, we protect them at once in a right belief and in a civil polity
corresponding with it".

This first and all-embracing principle of protecting all and every power
which existed in the commonwealth, and maintaining it in due position, was
most firmly held by Justinian. As to his own imperial authority and the
basis on which it rested, he says: "Ever bearing in mind whatever regards
the advantage and the honour of the commonwealth which God has entrusted to
our hands, we seek to bring it to effect".[155] As to the Two Powers
themselves, he recognises them thus: "The greatest gifts of God to men
bestowed by the divine mercy are the priesthood and the empire; the former
ministering in divine things, the latter presiding over human things, and
exerting its diligence therein. Both, proceeding from one and the same
principle, are the ornament of human life. Therefore nothing will be so
great a care to emperors as the upright conduct of bishops, for, indeed,
bishops are ever supplicating God for emperors. But if what concerns them
be entirely blameless and full of confidence in God, and if the imperial
power rightly and duly adorn the commonwealth entrusted to it, an admirable
agreement will ensue, conferring on the human race all that is for its
good. We then bear the greatest solicitude for the genuine divine doctrine,
and for the upright conduct of bishops, which we trust, when that doctrine
is maintained, because through it we shall obtain the greatest gifts from
God,[156] shall be secure in the possession of those which we have, and
shall acquire those which have not yet come. But all will be done well and
fittingly if the beginning from which it springs be becoming and dear to
God. And this we are confident will be, provided the observance of the holy
canons be maintained, such as the Apostles, so justly praised and
worshipped, those eye-witnesses and ministers of God the Word, have
delivered down to us, and the holy Fathers have maintained and carried
out."[157] And he proceeds to give the force of civil law to the canons
concerning the election of bishops and other matters.

In another law he says, "Be it therefore enacted[158] that the force of law
be given to the holy canons of the Church which have been set forth or
confirmed by the four holy Councils; that is, by the 318 holy Fathers in
the Nicene, by the 150 in that of Constantinople, by the first of Ephesus,
in which Nestorius was condemned, and by Chalcedon, when Eutyches, together
with Nestorius, was put under anathema. For we accept the decrees of these
four synods as the Holy Scriptures, and observe their canons as laws.

"And, therefore, be it enacted according to their definitions that the most
holy Pope of Old Rome is the first of all bishops, and that the most
blessed archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, holds the second place
after the holy Apostolic See of Old Rome, but takes precedence of all other
bishops."

In the laws just quoted we see three of the most important principles which
run through the acts of Justinian. The first is, that the emperor, having
the whole commonwealth committed to him by God, is the guardian both of
human and divine things in it, which together make up the whole
commonwealth; the second is, that there are Two Powers, the human and the
divine, both derived from God. The third is, that while the emperor is the
direct head of all human things, he guards divine things by accepting the
decrees of General Councils as the Holy Scriptures, and by giving to the
canons of the Church as descending from the Apostles, "the eye-witnesses
and ministers of God the Word," the force of law.

If in these laws we find Church and State greet each other as friends, and
offer each other a mutual support, because both aim at one object, and what
the holiness of the Church required, advanced no less the peace, the
security, and the welfare of the State, so a complete concurrence between
them might be shown in all other respects.[159] The State recognised and
honoured the whole constitution of the Church as it had been drawn in its
first lineaments by the author of the Christian religion, as in perfect
sequence it had formed itself out of the Church's inmost life, and that in
force and purity, because it had been free from the pressure of external
laws. The proper position of the Roman bishop as supreme head of the whole
Church, the relation of the patriarchs to each other, their privileges over
the metropolitans, the close connection of these with their several
bishops, were never for a moment unrecognised, because so clear a
consciousness of these showed itself in the whole Catholic world, that no
change was possible without a general scandal. Thus the laws of Church and
State kept pace with each other, when it could not but happen that the ties
between patriarch and metropolitan, between metropolitan and bishop, became
more stringent, as external increase was followed by decline in inward life
and the fervour of faith. Thus the regular course was that the metropolitan
examined the election of the bishop by the clergy and people, consecrated
him, introduced him to the direction of his charge, and by the _litterae
formatae_ gave him his place in the fabric of the Church. So the
metropolitan was consecrated by his patriarch, in whose own election all
the bishops of the province, but especially the metropolitans, took part.
The metropolitan summoned his bishops, the patriarchs their metropolitans,
to the yearly synods. The bishops did not vote without their metropolitan;
they took counsel with him, sometimes intrusted him with their votes.[160]
General laws of the Church, and also imperial edicts, were transmitted
first to the patriarchs, and from them to the metropolitans, and from these
to the bishops. Bishops might not leave their diocese without permission of
the metropolitan, nor the metropolitan without that of the patriarch.[161]

In like manner, we find in Justinian's laws the relation of the bishop to
his diocese, and especially to his clergy, recognised as we find it
presented by the Church from the beginning, and as the lapse of time had
more and more drawn it out. The law's recognition secured it from all
attack. The idea that without the bishop there is neither altar, sacrifice,
nor sacrament had become, through the spirit of unity which rules the
Church, a fact visible to all. The more heresies and divisions exerted
their destroying and dissolving power, while the Church went on expanding
in bulk, every divine service in private houses was forbidden. Since such
assemblies attacked as well the peace and security of the State as the
unity of belief, the governors of provinces, as well as the bishops, had
most carefully to guard against such acts. Neither in city nor country
could a church, a monastery, or an oratory be raised without the bishop's
permission. This was made known to all by his consecrating the appointed
place in solemn procession, with prayer and singing, by elevation of the
cross. Without this such building was considered a place where errors
lurked and deserters took refuge.[162] In this concurrent action of the
laws of Church and State respecting the relation of the bishop to the whole
Church and to his own clergy, we never miss the perfect union between the
two even as to the smallest particulars. The conclusion is plain that the
secular power did not intend to act here on the ground of its own
supremacy, or as an exercise of its own majesty. Not only did it issue no
new regulations whereby any fresh order should be in the smallest degree
introduced: it raised to the condition of its own laws the canons which had
long obtained force in the Church, whose binding power was accepted by
everyone who respected the Church, as lying in themselves and in the
authority from which they proceeded. These it took simply and without
addition, and by so taking recognised in them the double character. So, if
they were transgressed, a double penalty ensued. The Church's punitive
power is contained in its legislative, the recognition of which is an
acknowledgment of the former. This the State, not only tacitly but
expressly, recognised. And by taking the Church's laws, it not only did not
obliterate the character and dignity of that authority, from which they had
issued, but it did not change the penalty, nor consider it from another
point of view. It remained what it had always been, and from its nature
must be, an ecclesiastical punishment. The State only lent its arm, when
that was necessary, for its execution. With this, however, it was not
content. The Church's life entered too deeply into the secular life. Those
who were to carry on the one and sanctify the other stood in the closest
connection with the whole State. So it made the canons its own proper laws,
and thus attached temporal penalties to their transgression. So we find
everywhere the addition that each violation would carry with it not only
the divine judgment and arm the Church's hand to punish, but likewise draw
down upon it the prescribed penalties from the imperial majesty.

But so far the empire was maintaining by its secular authority the proper
laws and institutions of the Church. Justinian went far beyond this.[163]
His legislation associated the bishop with the count in the government of
cities and provinces. It gave up to him exclusively the superintendence of
morality and the protection of moral interests, the control of public works
and of prisons. It bestowed on him a large jurisdiction--even more, put
under his supervision the conduct of public functionaries in their
administration, and conferred on him a preponderating influence on their
election. In a word, it by degrees displaced the centre of gravity in
political life by investing the episcopate with a large portion of temporal
attributions.

To give in detail what is here summed up would involve too large a space. A
few specimens must suffice. The bishop in his own spiritual office would
have a great regard for widows and orphans.[164] Parents when dying felt
secure in recommending children to their protection against the avarice of
secular judges. Hence the custom had arisen that bishops had to watch over
the execution of wills, especially such as were made for benevolent
purposes. They could in case of need call in the assistance of the
governor. Their higher intelligence and disinterested character were in
such general credit that they had no little influence in the drawing up of
wills. But the State under Justinian was so far from regarding: this with
jealousy, that he ordered, if a traveller should die without a will in an
inn, the bishop of the place should take possession of the property, either
to hand it over to the rightful heirs, or to employ it for pious purposes.
If the innkeeper were found guilty of embezzlement, he was to pay thrice
the sum to the bishop, who could apply it as he wished. No custom,
privilege, or statute was allowed to have force against this. Those who
opposed it were made incapable of testing. Down to the sixth century[165]
we find no law of the Church touching the testamentary dispositions of
Christians. Justinian is the first of whom we know that he entrusted the
execution of wills specially to the supervision of bishops. That he did
this shows the great trust which he placed in their uprightness.

It was to be expected that bishops should have a special care for the city
which was their see.[166] Various laws of Justinian gave them here
privileges in which we cannot fail to see the foundation of the later
extension of episcopal authority and influence over the whole sphere of
secular life. With their clergy and with the chief persons in the city,
they took special part in the election of _defensors_ and of the other city
officers; so also in the appointment of provincial administrators. It was
their duty to protect subjects against oppressions from soldiers and
exaction of provision, as well as against all excessive claim of taxes and
unlawful gifts to imperial officers. A governor on assuming the province
was bound to assemble the bishop, the clergy, and the chief people of the
capital, that he might lay before them the imperial nomination, and the
extent of the duties which he was to fulfil. Thus they were enabled to
judge on each occasion whether the representative of the emperor was
fulfilling his charge. Magistrates, before entering on office, had to take
the prescribed oath before the metropolitan and the chief citizens. The
oath itself was an act made before God, and as such under cognisance of the
bishop. But special regulations enjoined him to watch over the whole
conduct and each particular act of the governor. If general complaints were
made of injustice, he was to inform the emperor. If only an individual had
suffered wrongs, the bishop was judge between both parties. If sentence was
given against the accused, and he refused to make satisfaction, the matter
came before the emperor in the last resort. The emperor, if the bishop had
decided according to right, condemned his governor to death, because he who
should have been the protector of others against wrong had himself
committed wrong. If a governor was deposed for maladministration, he was
not to quit the province before fifty days, and he could be accused before
the bishop for every unjust transaction. Even if he was removed or
transferred to another charge, and had left behind him a lawful substitute,
the same proceeding took place before the bishop. On this account civil
orders also were sent to the bishops to be publicly considered by them, and
kept among the church documents, their fulfilment supervised, and
violations reported to the emperor. But, to complete this picture, it must
be remarked that this supervision was not one-sided. The emperor sent even
his ecclesiastical regulations not only through the patriarch of
Constantinople to the metropolitans, but through the Praetorian prefect to
the governors of provinces. He directed them to support the bishops in
their execution, but he likewise enjoined them to report neglect of them to
the emperor. Especially they were to watch the execution of imperial
decrees upon Church discipline, and monasteries in particular. The rules,
so often repeated because so frequently broken, respecting the
inalienability of Church property, were to be specially watched, and also
the celebration, as prescribed, of yearly synods. But the civil magistrates
were only recommended to keep a supervision, which did not extend to the
right of official exhortation; far less that they were allowed in any
ecclesiastical matter, in which the bishop might be at all in fault, to act
upon their own authority, or receive an accusation against him from
whomsoever and for whatsoever it might be. But the bishop could act in his
quality of judge between a party and the governor himself, if the party
had called upon him. Especially, Justinian allowed bishops a decisive
influence upon legal proceedings in certain branches. The inspection of
forbidden games, public buildings, roads, and bridges, the distribution of
corn, was under them. They were to examine the competence of a security.
The curators of insane persons took oath before them to fulfil their duty.
If a father had named none, the bishop took part in the choice of them; the
act was deposited among the church documents. If the children of an insane
father wished to marry, the bishop had to determine the dowry and the
nuptial donation. In the absence of the proper judge, the bishop of the
city could receive complaints from those who had to make a legal demand on
another, or to protect themselves from a pledge falling overdue. The proofs
of a wrong account could, in the accountant's absence, be made before the
bishop, and had legal force. If the ground-lord would not receive the
ground-rent, the feoffee should consign it at Constantinople to the
Praetorian prefect or the patriarch, in the provinces to the governor, or
in his absence to the bishop of the city where the ground-lord who refused
to receive it had his domicile. Whoever found no hearing, either in a civil
or criminal matter, before the judge of the province, was directed to go to
the bishop, who could either call the judge to him, or go in person to the
judge, to invite him to do justice to the complainant according to the
strict law, in order that the bishop might not be obliged to carry the
refusal of justice by appeal to the imperial court.[167] If the judge was
not moved by this, the bishop gave the complainant a statement of the whole
case for the emperor, and the delinquent had to fear severe penalties, not
alone because he had been untrue to his office, but because he did not
allow himself, even at the demand of the bishop, to do what, without it,
lay in the circle of his duties. But this referring to the bishop was not
arbitrary--that is, not one which it lay in the will of the complainant to
use or not, but necessary, so that anyone who appealed to the imperial
court without this endeavour incurred, whether his complaint was founded or
not, the same punishment as the judge who refused to give a decision at the
bishop's request. Even if the complainant only suspected the judge, he was
bound to apply to the bishop to join the judge in examining the matter, and
to bring it to a strict legal issue. In the face of such honourable
confidence which was placed in the bishops, and which was also justified in
general by a happy result, we ought not to be surprised if either the
emperor himself or inferior magistrates committed to them the termination
of entangled processes, in which they exercised just such a jurisdiction as
may either in general be exercised by delegates, or was committed to them
for the special occasion.

The emperor[168] 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 Romans[172] 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.

NOTES:

[115] Mansi, viii. 795-99.

[116] This refers to the reunion of a great portion of the eastern Church,
which had fallen a prey to the most manifold errors since the Council of
Chalcedon.--Riffel, p. 543.

[117] Savigny, _Geschichte des roemischen Rechts im Mittelalter_, 1834, i.
36. Quoted by Rump, ix. 72.

[118] _Ep._ xi. 2: Sedes illa toto orbe mirabilis licet generalis mundo sit
praedita.

[119] _Nov._ cxxxi. c. 2: thespizomen ton hagiotaton tes presbyteras Rhomes
papan proton einai panton ton hiereon.... te gnome kai orthe krisei tou
ekeinou sebasmiou thronou katergethesan. _Nov._ ix. init.: Pontificatus
apicem apud eam (Romam anteriorem) esse nemo est qui dubitet.--Photius, p.
156.

[120] Translated from Photius, p. 156.

[121] "Cesare fui e son Giustiniano,
      Che, per voler del primo amor ch'io sento,
      Dentro alle leggi trassi il troppo e il vano."
                              --_Paradiso_, vi. 10.

[122] This paragraph translated from Rump, ix. 70.

[123] Rump, viii. 487.

[124] Account from Rump, ix. 172-4, compressed.

[125] Respondeat mens illa Sancto Spiritui serviens.

[126] Mansi, viii. 808.

[127] Mansi, viii. 849.

[128] See Baronius, A.D. 535, sec. 40; Hefele, ii. 736-8; Rump, ix. 174-6;
_Novell._ xxxix. _De Africana Ecclesia._

[129] Photius, i. 153-4: words of Hergenroether, who quotes eastern
historians, who call him megaloprepesteros anakton ton proteron ...
megalourgos krator.

[130] Mansi, viii. 846.

[131] Photius, i. 160-2; Rump, ix. 181.

[132] Photius, i. 163. The words which concern the conduct of Vigilius are
taken from Cardinal Hergenroether. Baronius, A.D. 538, sec. 5, gives from
Anastasius the words of the empress, and the Pope's answer, and the
following narrative.

[133] Gregorovius, i. 372. See Liberatus, _Breviarium_, ch. xxii.

[134] Liberatus, _Breviarium_.

[135] Reumont, ii. 49.

[136] St. Gregory, _Dialogues_, ii. 14, 18.

[137] The following drawn from Reumont's narrative, ii. 50-6.

[138] The narrative drawn from Reumont, ii. 56-7; Gregorovius, i. 448-9.

[139] Mansi, viii. 969; Photius, i. 163.

[140] Mansi, viii. 1149.

[141] Mansi, ix. 35-40.

[142] Narrative drawn from Photius, i. 165-6, down to "Ferrandus," p. 232,
below.

[143] Mansi, ix. 487-537.

[144] Hefele, ii. 790.

[145] Hergenroether, _K.G._, i. 344-5; Photius, i. 166.

[146] Translated from Hergenroether's _K.G._, i., pp. 345-351, from p. 232,
above, "at this point Justinian sought," &c., with reference also to the
life of Photius.

[147] Hergenroether, Photius, i. 174; Rump, _K.G._, ix. 283.

[148] See Reumont, ii. 58-62; Gregorovius, i. 453-9.

[149] Reumont, 60.

[150] Gregorovius, 455.

[151] _Ibid._, 456.

[152] Reumont, 61.

[153] Gregorovius, 450-2.

[154] See vol. v. 281.

[155] _Constitutio_, lxxxii. 667.

[156] Honestatem quam illis obtenentibus credimus.

[157] _Constitutio_, vi. 48.

[158] 119. _De ecclesiasticis titulis_, p. 940. _Sancimus_. This word in
Roman law in the time of Justinian is equivalent to the English formula,
"Be it enacted by the Queen's most excellent Majesty, by and with the
advice and consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons in
Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same". There lies in
these two formulae, expressing the supreme legislative authority, a
comparison between the constitution of the lower Roman empire and the
medieval constitutions established everywhere by the influence of the
Church under guidance of the Popes.

[159] Riffel, 611-12, translated.

[160] See Justinian, _Gloss._ v., directed to the patriarch of
Constantinople, Epiphanius. _Epilogus_, p 48: Haec igitur omnia sanctissimi
patriarchae sub se constitutis Deo amabilibus metropolitis manifesta
faciant, at illi subjectis sibi Deo amabilibus episcopis declarent, et illi
monasteriis Dei sub sua ordinatione constitutis cognita faciant, quatenus
per omnia Domini cultura maneat undique in eos incorrupta.

[161] Riffel, p. 615, translated.

[162] Riffel, p. 617.

[163] Kurth, ii. 35.

[164] See Riffel, p. 624.

[165] Riffel, p. 625.

[166] _Ibid._, pp. 629-35.

[167] See St. Gregory, _Epis._, x. 51 (vol. ii. 1080), where he writes to
the ex-consul Leontius, in Sicily, who had beaten with rods the ex-prefect
Libertinus: "Si mihi constare potuisset quia justas causas de suis
rationibus haberent, et prius per epistolas vos pulsare habui; et si
auditus minime fuissem, serenissimo Domino Imperatori suggererem".

[168] Riffel, p. 635.

[169] Mansi, xii. 1130.

[170] Riffel, 562.

[171] Photius, p. 155.

[172] Photius, 173.




CHAPTER V.

ST. GREGORY THE GREAT.

    "The banner of the Church is ever flying!
    Less than a storm avails not to unfold
    The Cross emblazoned there in massive gold:
    Away with doubts and sadness, tears and sighing!
    It is by faith, by patience, and by dying
    That 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 Caesars 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 Caesar after Caesar, 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 Caesars 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 Coelian 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 praetor 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 Coelian 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]

Gregory returned from Constantinople in 585, and lived as one of the seven
deacons on the Coelian hill, when, on 8th February, 590, Pope Pelagius
died of the pestilence, and Gregory was unanimously chosen to succeed him.

It was a moment of the greatest depression. The Tiber had in the winter
overflowed a large portion of the city. The destruction wrought had been
followed by a terrible plague. Gregory strove to escape the charge put upon
him, and besought the emperor not to confirm his election. In the meantime,
the clergy and people urged upon him the provisional exercise of the
episcopal charge. As such he ordered a sevenfold procession to entreat the
cessation of the plague. The clergy of Rome, the abbots, the abbesses with
their nuns, the children, the laymen, the widows, and the married women,
each company separately arranged, were to start from seven different
churches, and to close their pilgrimage together at the basilica of St.
Maria Maggiore.

During the procession itself eighty victims to the plague fell dead. But as
Gregory was passing over the bridge of St. Peter's, a heavenly vision
consoled them in the midst of their litanies. The archangel Michael was
seen over the tomb of Hadrian, sheathing his flaming sword in token that
the pestilence was to cease. Gregory heard the angelic antiphon from
heavenly voices--_Regina Coeli, laetare_, and added himself the concluding
verse--_Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia_.

The assent of the emperor Mauritius arriving from Constantinople about six
months after his election compelled Gregory to become Pope. At first,
indeed, he disguised himself and took to flight, and hid himself in the
woods.[178] The people fasted and prayed three days for his discovery. He
was found, and then permitted himself to be taken back to Rome, where he
was received with great rejoicing. He was led, according to custom, to the
"Confession" of St. Peter, where he made his profession of faith. He was
then consecrated, the 3rd September, 590. Nor can any words but his own
adequately express his feelings, together with the character of the time in
which he lived. With heavy heart he approached the burden laid upon him.
Neither then nor ever after did he deceive himself as to the gravity of the
situation. "Since," are his words, "I submitted the shoulders of my spirit
to this burden of the episcopal office, I can no longer collect my soul,
distracted as it is on so many sides. At one time I have to consider the
affairs of churches and monasteries, often taking into account the lives
and actions of individuals. At another time I have to represent my
fellow-citizens in their affairs. Again, I have to groan over the swords
of barbarians advancing to storm us, and to dread the wolves which lie in
wait for a flock huddled together in fear. Then, again, I must charge
myself with the care of public affairs, to provide means even for those to
whom the maintenance of order is entrusted, or I must patiently endure
certain depredators, or take precautions against them, that tranquillity be
not disturbed." In another place he says: "Daily I feel what fulness of
peace I have lost, to what fulness of cares I have been exalted. If you
love me, weep for me, since so many temporal businesses press on me that I
seem as if this dignity had almost excluded me from the love of God. Not of
the Romans only am I bishop, but bishop of the Lombards, whose right is the
right of the sword, whose favour is punishment. The billows of the world so
surge upon me, that I despair of steering into harbour the frail vessel
entrusted to me by God, while my hand holds the helm amid a thousand
storms." Again, in his synodical letter[179] announcing his accession to
the patriarchs, he says: "Especially, whoever bears the title of Pastor in
this place is grievously occupied by external cares, so that he is often in
doubt whether he is executing the work of a Pastor or that of an earthly
lord". Thus thirteen hundred years ago spoke the Pope. Does his language in
the nineteenth century differ much from his language in the sixth? Shortly
after his accession, preaching to his people in St. Peter's, he said:[180]
"Where, I pray you, is any delight to be found in this world? Mourning
meets us everywhere; groans surround us. Ruined cities, fortresses
overthrown, lands laid waste, the earth reduced to a desert. The fields
have none to till them. There is scarcely a dweller in the cities. Yet even
these poor remnants of the human race are smitten daily and without
ceasing. The scourge of heaven's justice strikes without end, because even
under its strokes our bad actions are not corrected. We see men led into
captivity, beheaded, slain before our eyes. What pleasure, then, does life
retain, my brethren? If yet we are fond of such a world, it is not joys but
wounds which we love. We see the condition of that Rome which anon seemed
to be mistress of the world: worn down by sorrows which have no measure,
desolate of inhabitants, assaulted by enemies, filled with ruins. We see in
it fulfilled what long ago our prophet said against Samaria: 'Set on a
vessel; set it on, I say, and put water into it. Heap together into it the
pieces thereof.' And then: 'The seething of it is boiling hot; and the
bones thereof are thoroughly sodden in the midst thereof.' And further:
'Heap together the bones, which I will burn with fire: the flesh shall be
consumed, and the whole composition shall be sodden, and the bones shall be
consumed. Then set it empty upon burning coals, that it may be hot, and the
brass thereof may be melted.' Now the vessel was set on when our city was
founded. The water was put into it and the pieces heaped together, when
there was a confluence of peoples to it from all sides. Like boiling water
they bubbled up with the world's actions; like bits of flesh they were
boiled in their own heat. He says well, 'The seething of it is boiling hot,
and the bones thereof are thoroughly sodden in the midst thereof'. For
great, indeed, in it at first was the heat of secular glory; but presently
the glory itself and those who followed it burnt out. Bones mean the
powerful of the world; flesh its various peoples: as bones support flesh,
so the powerful of the world rule the weakness of the masses. But now,
behold, all the powerful of this world have been taken from it. The bones,
then, are thoroughly sodden. The peoples are gone; the flesh, then, is
boiled up. There follows then: 'Heap together the bones, which I will burn
with fire; the flesh shall be consumed, and the whole composition shall be
sodden; and the bones shall waste away'. For where is the senate? where any
longer a people? The bones are wasted, the flesh consumed; all pride of
secular dignities is perished out of it. The whole composition is sodden.
Yet every day the sword, every day innumerable sorrows press upon us, the
poor remaining remnant. So, then, this also applies: 'Set it empty upon
burning coals'. For since there is no senate, since the people has died
out, and yet sorrow and suffering are multiplied day by day on the few that
remain, Rome is empty, and yet it burns. We apply this to men, but we see
the very structures destroyed by the multiplication of ruins. So that he
adds, upon the empty city, 'Burn it and melt its brass'. For it is come to
the vessel itself being destroyed, in which before both flesh and bones
were consumed. For when the dwellers have fallen away even the walls fall.
But where are those who once rejoiced in its glory? Where is their pomp and
pride, and those ecstasies of frequent transport?

"In Rome are fulfilled the prophet's words against Niniveh: 'Where is the
dwelling of the lions, and the feeding-place of the young lions?'[181] Were
not its commanders and its princes lions who overran the whole world, and
ravened, and slaughtered the prey? Here the young lions found their
feeding-place, because the boyhood, the youth, the flower of manhood, from
generation to generation, flocked hither, when they sought to get on in the
world. Now Rome is desolate, worn down, full of sorrows. No one comes to it
to get on in the world; no man of power or violence remains to raven on the
prey. Then may we say, 'Where is the dwelling of the lions, and the
feeding-place of the young lions?' Upon it has fallen the lot of Judea,
foretold by the prophet: 'Enlarge thy baldness as the eagle'.[182] For man
is wont to be bald upon the head alone; but the eagle's baldness is over
all his body. When very old, his plumes and feathers fall from his whole
body. The city which has lost its inhabitants, in losing its feathers, has
enlarged its baldness as the eagle. Shrunk also are its wings, with which
it used to fly to the prey, for all its men of might, by whom it ravened,
are extinguished."

We may here contrast the language concerning the Rome which lay before
their eyes of the two Popes St. Leo and St. Gregory. They spoke with an
interval between them of 140 years. The first spoke still of the actual
queen of the world, of the secular empire subdued and inherited by the
spiritual. The feathers of Leo's eagle shone to him with celestial light;
the talons of the royal bird traversed the earth not to raven, but to feed
a conquered world with Christian doctrine. St. Gregory speaks of the eagle
as bald; but we shall see that he who day by day guarded the gates of
defenceless Rome against the Lombard spoiler, barbarian also and heretic,
fed no less the ends of the earth with Christian doctrine. It was he who
brought the _Ultima Thule_, and its inhabitants the _penitus toto divisos
orbe Britannos_ again under the yoke of Christ, and taught the sea-kings
humanity.

A little later St. Gregory closed his exposition of the prophet Ezechiel in
St. Peter's with these sorrowful words: "So far, dear brethren, by the gift
of God, we have searched out hidden meanings for you. Let no man blame me
if I close them here, because, as you all witness, our sufferings have
grown enormous. On every side we are encircled with swords: on every side
we are in imminent peril of death. Some return to us maimed of their hands;
of others we hear that they are captured; of others, again, that they are
slain. My tongue can no longer expound, when my spirit is weary of my life.
Let no one ask me to unfold the Scriptures; for my harp is turned to
mourning, and my voice to the cry of the weeper. The eye of my heart no
longer keeps its watch in the discussion of mysteries; my soul droops for
weariness. Study has lost its charm for me. I have forgotten to eat my
bread for the voice of my groaning. How can one who is not allowed to live
take pleasure in the mystical sense of Scripture? How can one whose daily
chalice is bitterness present sweets for others to drink? What remains for
us but while we weep to give thanks for the strokes of the scourge which we
suffer for our iniquities. Our Creator is become our Father by the Spirit
of adoption whom He has given to us: sometimes He feeds His sons with
bread; sometimes He corrects them with the scourge; because He schools us
by sorrows and by gifts for the unending inheritance."[183]

This was the Rome in which Gregory ruled as Pope for fourteen years, since
he saw the archangel's sword sheathed over the castle of St. Angelo, into
which name the pagan mausoleum was baptised. Pestilence in the city, where
the remnant of a people wandered disconsolate by the mighty halls and vast
spaces of the old emperors--swords of pagan or Arian barbarians all round
the patched-up walls of Aurelian. City after city through the hapless Italy
reported as plundered or ruined by the Lombard devastation. Presently the
trials of a sick-bed and frequent attacks of gout were added to his daily
tale of sorrows. In the last years of Gregory it came to pass that the
universal Church was governed from the sick-bed of one worn down, not by
years--for he died at sixty-four--but by sufferings of body and mind. The
prisoner of the Lombards had to struggle perpetually with the spirit of
Byzantine despotism and the aggressive arrogance of a prelate whom
successive eastern sovereigns had nursed from a suffragan of Heraclea to be
the claimant of an ecumenical patriarchate. Yet the eyes of Gregory were
bent likewise on the northern conquerors who had seized the provinces of
the West. Before he was Pope he had observed in the slave-market of Rome
the fair-haired Angles whom he would fain make angels; when Pope he sent
forth from his father's house, which he had given to the great Father
Benedict, those who were to carry the banner of that father into the isle
lost to Christ. In that island he appointed the primate of Canterbury, and
designed the primate of York. Through St. Leander and St. Isidore, and the
martyr St. Hermenegild, he recovered Spain from the Arian blight; through
the queen Theodelinda he made some impression upon Lombard cruelty and
misbelief; through the Frankish monarchy he won back France from
dissolution and heresy. As he saw the palaces around him deserted, and the
broken aqueducts mourn over their intercepted streams in a wasted Campagna,
and the glory of Trajan's forum become paler day by day, he thought that
the end of the world was coming--and so thinking and so saying, he founded
Christendom. In Rome itself, the almsgivers whom he had organised traversed
the streets daily, carrying food to the hungry, medicine and medical aid to
the sick. Every month he allotted portions of corn, wine, oil, cheese,
fish, vegetables. The Church seemed to be the general provider. Every day
he fed at his table twelve poor pilgrims, and served them himself. The nuns
who took refuge in Rome, from the destruction of their monasteries by the
Lombards, amounted to three thousand, whom Gregory supported, especially
during the severe winter of 597. He wrote to the sister of the emperor
Mauritius: "To their prayers and tears and fasts Rome owes its delivery
from the sword of the Lombards".[184] Other cities also he saved, and so he
distributed the vast patrimony of the Roman Church in Southern Italy,
Sicily, Africa, France, Illyricum, with such wisdom and so beneficent a
mercy, that historians trace to him the beginning of that temporal
sovereignty which two hundred years after him the Popes were to take in
change for the cruel abandonment, paired with incessant exaction, of
Byzantine despotism; and the most loyal of subjects were called to be the
most beneficent of sovereigns; and the people who had found them fathers
from age to age rejoiced to see the fathership united with kingship.

What had happened to the Italy recovered by the arms of Belisarius and
Narses, to the unity of the Roman empire, which caused the calamitous state
described by Gregory?

Both Belisarius and Narses had enrolled a multifarious host of adventurers
under the banner which professed to deliver Rome and Italy from the Gothic
occupation. Narses especially had awakened the greed of the Lombards by the
sight of Italy's fair lands. Scarcely had he ceased to govern Rome, in
567, when the effect of this became visible. What Alaric, what Odoacer,
what Theodorick, had done, Alboin did with yet more terrible results; and
the fourth captivity which Nova Roma had prepared for her mother, become in
her mind a hated rival, was the hardest, the longest, the most destructive
of all. It is doubtful whether the retort of the eunuch Narses to the
empress Sophia, when she recalled him from his government to ply, as she
said, the spindle, that he would spin for her such a thread as in her life
she would not disentangle, is authentic, but it undoubtedly presents
historic truth. Whether or not Narses called the Lombards into Italy, their
king Alboin came from Pannonia over the Carnian Alps into the plain which
has ever since borne their name; and this was in the next year--568--to the
recal of Narses. The Goth and the Herules had worked much woe and wrought
great destruction; but the Goths compared to the Lombards were as knights
compared to villains. The Lombards, inferior to them by far in strength
both of body and of mind, this rudest of Teuton races seemed incapable of
receiving culture. It had, moreover, fewer elements in it capable of being
worked into the stable order of a state. In belief it was partly Arian and
partly pagan. It had also a mixture of Sarmatian blood. When they broke
into Italy, the cities of that land, however wasted and depopulated through
Attila and the Gothic wars, yet retained their Roman form, yet were full of
ancient monuments, splendid still in desolation. Now, one after another
fell under the sword of those barbarians. Milan surrendered to Alboin in
the autumn of 569, and after three years' siege he entered as conqueror
into Theodorick's palace in Pavia. Only Rome, Ravenna, and the cities of
the coast still carried the imperial flag. The Romans themselves regarded
as a marvel the maintenance of their scarcely defended city. Alboin aimed
at making the palace of the Caesars his royal residence. His warriors
advanced with terrible devastation from Spoleto to the very walls of Rome
in the time of Pope John III., who died, after nearly thirteen years'
government, the 13th July, 573.

Rome was then so severely pressed that the See of Peter remained more than
a year unfilled; for the Lombards were encamped before Rome, and hindered
communication with Byzantium, whence Benedict I., the newly-elected Pope,
had to wait for the imperial confirmation. The _Book of the Popes_ recites
that during his four years' government the Lombards overran all Italy, and
that pestilence and hunger consumed her people. Rome, also, was visited by
both. The emperor Tiberius tried to succour it by sending corn from Egypt
to the harbour Porto.

Alboin had been murdered, and Kleph had succeeded him, on whose death, in
575, the Lombards fell into anarchy, and were divided into thirty-six
dukes, and Faroald, the first duke of Spoleto, held Rome besieged when
Benedict I. died, in 578; and so his successor, Pelagius II., a Roman of
Gothic descent, was consecrated without the emperor's confirmation. The
beleaguered Pope sent a cry of distress by an embassy to the eastern
emperor, together with a gift of 3000 pounds' weight of gold from the
impoverished city. But the emperor, engaged in a Persian war, could only
send insufficient troops to Ravenna, more precious to him than Rome,
declined the Roman gold, and advised to corrupt with it the Lombard
commanders. Zoto, the Lombard duke of Beneventum, returning from Rome,
which had ransomed itself, destroyed St. Benedict's monastery of Monte
Cassino, in 580. The monks escaped to Rome, carrying with them the Saint's
autograph of his Rule. Pope Pelagius II. received them in the Lateran
basilica. There they founded the first Benedictine monastery in Rome. They
named it after St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, and so
Constantine's basilica, or the Church of the Saviour, became in after-times
St. John Lateran. Monte Cassino lay in ruins 140 years, during which time
the great Order had its chief seat in Rome.

Thus did Rome and Italy learn what they had gained by reunion with the
eastern empire under Justinian. The pitiless financial exaction of that
empire was exerted wherever it had power. War and pestilence ravaged town
and country. It cost the Church a labour of 200 years to turn the Lombards
from Arians and savages into Catholics who should one day be capable of
resisting a Barbarossa and generating a Dante.

What, during these 200 years, an imperial exarch at Ravenna was like
Gregory tells us in a letter to his friend Sebastian, bishop of Sirmium:
"Words cannot express what I suffer from your friend, the lord Romanus. I
may say that his malice against us is worse than the swords of the
Lombards. The enemies who slay us seem to us kinder than the magistrates of
the commonwealth, who wear our hearts out with their malignity, their
plundering, and their deceit. At one and the same time to superintend
bishops and clergy, monasteries also and the people, carefully to watch
against insidious attacks of our enemies, and be perpetually on guard
against the treachery and ill-treatment of our rulers, you, my brother, can
the better judge what labour and sorrow is here in proportion to the purity
of your affection for me who suffer it."[185]

This glimpse will be enough of the generation which preceded the accession
of St. Gregory to the Chair of Peter. The whole fifty years of his life up
to that time were for his country like the prophet's scroll, inscribed with
lamentation and mourning and woe. And in his words to the bishop of Sirmium
he gives a faithful picture of the position which his successors held until
the time when at length they invoked the king of the Franks to come to the
succour of St. Peter.

The calamities which fell upon Italy, and especially upon Rome, in the five
captures of the Gothic war, in the subsequent descent of the Lombards, in
the subjection of the old capital to a distant and despotic lord, were so
great that eye-witnesses declare no language could express them. That they
were to the Popes themselves unspeakably distressing, that the Popes did
all in their power to avert them, the letters of the Popes remain to
testify. I must now dwell for a time on the singular result which they had
upon the Roman Primacy. When temporal calamities less than these fell upon
the cities of Alexandria and Antioch, the seats of the other two original
Petrine patriarchates, the authority of their prelates sunk almost to
nothing. Before these calamities they had yielded up a large portion of
their dignity and autonomy to the overreaching see of the eastern capital,
the rank of which, above that of a simple bishopric, rested on nothing but
the emperor's will to concentrate spiritual power in his own hands, by
making its seat for the whole eastern empire the city of the Bosporus. But
when Rome was ruined in the Gothic war nothing of the kind took place. St.
Gregory inherited his place as successor of St. Peter without the least
impairment of the authority which his see had held from the beginning. One
wound, indeed, had been inflicted upon it by the Herule Odoacer, when in
occupation of the sovereign power which he held over Italy, in name, by
delegation of the emperor Zeno, in fact, as head of the foreign
mercenaries, he had claimed a right to confirm the election of the Pope
when chosen. Theodorick and Theodatus had continued to exert that
right--and from the Goths Justinian had taken it--and Gregory himself, as
we have seen, had applied to the imperial power at Constantinople to
frustrate his own election by clergy and people. But the Pope, when once
recognised, entered upon his full and undiminished authority. All that St.
Leo had been St. Gregory was, though Rome had been almost destroyed, and
was in the temporal rule subject to the emperor's officer, the exarch at
Ravenna. I do not know any fact of history which brings out more distinctly
the character of the Pope as inheriting the charge over the whole Church
committed by our Lord to St. Peter. That was not a charge depending on the
city in which it might be exercised. It was a charge committed to the chief
of the Apostles. As our Lord promised to be with the apostolic body to the
consummation of the world, as all their spiritual powers depended on His
being with them, so, above all, most of all, the spiritual power of their
head. Rome might be absolutely destitute of inhabitants after Totila's
victory, but the Pope was not touched. Rome might cease to be capital even
of a province, but the Pope was not touched. And it was a series of the
most terrible disasters which revealed this prerogative of the Pope as head
of the Christian hierarchy. The Pope might be a captive at Constantinople,
scorned, deceived, torn away even from the refuge of the altar, surrounded
with spies, betrayed by subservient bishops and patriarchs, and, worst of
all, be labouring under the stigma of an election originally enforced by
arbitrary violence; a despotic emperor might do his worst, but the Pope's
successors carried on his prerogatives unimpaired. The walls of Aurelian
preserved Rome from the Lombard, but the Pontiff who kept guard over them
was not contained in them. His rule was intangible by material attack as
it was beyond the reach of material despotism. Italy might be ruined, and a
new Rome made out of its ruins, but the Pope would be the maker of it. And
the most terrible calamity was chosen to reveal this singular prerogative.
The death of _Senatus populusque Romanus_ discovered even to the outside
world the life which proceeded from St. Peter's body, as each archbishop
received from St. Peter's successor the pallium which had been laid upon
it. Thus was conveyed to the mind by the senses that participation of the
Primacy, in which consisted all the authority which he exercised over other
bishops. The violence of the Teuton, the misbelief of the Arian, the
despotism of the Byzantine, were unconsciously co-operating to this result.

For it must be added that the Rome which survived after the conquest by
Justinian only lived by the Primacy of which it was the seat. Two
historians[186] of the city, writing from quite opposite points of view,
one a Catholic Christian, the other a rationalistic unbeliever, unite in
witnessing that from the time of Narses the spiritual power of the Primacy
was the spring of all action. Not only such new buildings as arose were
churches and the work of the Popes; St. Gregory also fed the city from the
patrimonium of the church which he administered. Rome had been made by her
empire, which the political wisdom and valour of her citizens had formed
through so many centuries. When at length the wandering of the nations had
broken up that empire, and the northern soldiers whom the emperors,
specially from Constantine onwards, had enrolled in her armies and taken
for their ministers and generals, followed the example of Alaric and
Ataulph, and assumed the rule for themselves, the situation of Rome offered
it no protection. The emperor who, at the beginning of the fifth century,
took refuge from Alaric in Ravenna was followed a century later by the
Gothic king, whose body, still reposing in his splendid tomb at Ravenna,
was a memorial that this fortress had been the centre of his power.
Theodorick was succeeded by the exarch, the permanent representative of an
absent lord. We are following the fortunes of Rome in the 300 years from
Genseric to Astolphus. In the second and third of these three centuries
Rome would have ceased to exist, but for the imperishable life which did
not come from her but was stored up in her. That life was the _form_ of her
new body; otherwise it would have been a carcase lying prostrate in the
dust of mouldering theatres and desolated baths. Their patriarchs saved
neither Antioch nor Alexandria; but the Papacy not only saved Rome, but
created her anew.

Out of such a Rome St. Gregory poured forth his sorrows to the empress
Constantine, wife of Mauritius: "It is now seven-and-twenty years since we
have been living in this city among the swords of the Lombards".[187] He
was writing in the year 595, and he reckons from the descent of Alboin in
568. "What the sums called for from the Church in these years day by day
to live at all have been I cannot express. I may say in a word that as your
Majesties have, with the first army of Italy at Ravenna, a chancellor of
the exchequer who supplies daily wants, so in this city for the like
purpose I am such a person. And yet this same church which at one and the
same time is at such endless expense for the clergy, the monasteries, the
poor, the people, and moreover for the Lombards, is pressed also by the
affliction of all the churches, which groan over the pride of this one man,
yet do not venture to utter a word."

And Gregory, referring just before to the pride of this one man, who had
the audacity to put in a letter to the Pope himself, a superscription in
which, according to the Pope's judgment, he claimed to be sole bishop in
the Church, used words which will serve to indicate what Gregory conceived
his own authority to be, as well as the source on which it rested: "I
beseech you, by Almighty God, not to permit your Majesty's time to be
polluted by one man's arrogance. Do not in any way give your consent to so
perverse an appellation. By no means let your Majesty in such a cause
despise me the individual, for the sins of Gregory are indeed so great as
to deserve such treatment, but there are no sins of the Apostle Peter that
he should deserve in your time such treatment. Wherefore, I again and again
entreat you, by Almighty God, that as former princes, your progenitors,
have sought the favour of the holy Apostle Peter, so you also would seek
it and preserve it for yourselves. Nor let his honour be in your mind the
least diminished by our sins, his unworthy servant: that he may be now your
helper in all things, and hereafter be able to pardon your sins."

I quote the following passage from a letter[188] to the emperor Mauritius
himself, not only because Gregory alleges as the root of his own authority
the three great words spoken by our Lord to Peter, but for the description
of the times in which he lived, and the vast importance of union between
the two great powers. This, he says, if faithfully maintained on both
sides, would have protected them from such calamities.

"Your Majesty, who is appointed by God, watches, among the other cares of
your empire, with the uprightness of a spiritual zeal over the preservation
of sacerdotal charity. For, with piety as well as truth, you think that no
one can rule well the things of this world unless he knows how to treat
divine things, and that the peace of the human commonwealth depends on the
peace of the universal Church. For, most gracious emperor, what power of
man, what masterful arm of flesh, would presume to lay unholy hands upon
the dignity of your most Christian empire, if the bishops were with one
accord of mind to beseech their Redeemer for you by their words, and, if
need be, by their deservings? Is there any nation so ferocious as to use
its sword so cruelly for the destruction of the faithful, unless our life,
who are called but are not bishops, had upon it the stain of the worst
actions? While, deserting what belongs to us, and aiming at what is beyond
us, we add our own sins to the brute strength of barbarians. Our guilt
sharpens the swords of our enemies, and weighs down the strength of the
State. What excuse can we make who press down the people of God, over which
we unworthily preside, with the burden of our sins? Who preach with our
tongues and kill by our examples? Whose works teach iniquity, while their
words make a show of justice? We wear down the body with fasts, while the
mind swells with arrogance. This puts on poor apparel; that has more than
imperial pride. We lie in ashes, and despise dignities. We teach the
humble, and lead the proud, and hide the wolf's teeth in the sheep's face.
What result has all this but that, while we impose on men, we are made
known to God? Thus it is with the greatest wisdom that your Majesty seeks
the peace of the Church as the means of stilling the tumults of war, and
would make the hearts of bishops rest once more in its solid structure.
That is my wish: in that to the utmost of my power I obey you.

"But since it is not my cause but God's, and since not I only but the whole
Church is thrown into confusion; since sacred laws, since venerable
councils, since the very commands even of our Lord Jesus Christ are
disturbed by the invention of this haughty and pompous language, let the
most pious emperor lance the wound and overcome the sick man's resistance
by the force of the imperial authority. If you bind up that wound, you
raise up the State; and by cutting off such abuses, contribute to the
length of your reign.

"For to all who know the Gospel it is notorious that the charge of the
whole Church was entrusted by the voice of the Lord to the holy Apostle
Peter, chief of all the Apostles." And he then cites, as so many of his
predecessors cited, the three great words. He concludes: "Peter received
the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the power of binding and loosing, the
charge of the whole Church, the Principate over it; yet he is not called
the universal Apostle, and John, my colleague as bishop, endeavours to be
called universal bishop.

"All things in Europe are delivered over to the power of barbarians. Our
cities are destroyed, our fortresses overthrown, our provinces depopulated.
The ground remains untilled. Day by day idolaters exercise their rage upon
the faithful, who are cruelly slaughtered; and bishops who should lie in
dust and ashes seek for themselves vanitous names: glory in new and profane
titles.

"Am I in this defending a cause proper to myself? Am I resisting my own
special injury? Nay, it is the cause of Almighty God: the cause of the
universal Church. Who is he who, in spite of the commands of the Gospel, in
spite of the decrees of councils, presumes to usurp a new title for
himself? I would that he who has agreed to be called universal may be
himself one, without the diminution of others.

"And we know, indeed, that many bishops of Constantinople have fallen into
the gulf of heresy; have become not heretics only but heresiarchs. Thence
came Nestorius, who, deeming Jesus Christ, the Mediator of God and man, to
be two persons, because he did not believe that God could become man, went
even to the extent of Jewish unbelief. Thence came Macedonius, who denied
the Godhead of the Holy Spirit, consubstantial with the Father and the Son.
If, then, anyone seizes upon that name for himself, as in the judgment of
all good men he has done, the whole Church--which God forbid--falls from
its state when he who is called universal falls. But far from the hearts of
Christians be that blasphemous name in which the honour due to all bishops
is taken away, while one madly arrogates it to himself.

"I know that in honour of St. Peter, prince of the Apostles, that title was
offered to the Roman Pontiff during the venerable Council of Chalcedon. But
no one of them ever consented to use this name of singularity; lest while
something peculiar was given to one, all bishops should be deprived of the
honour due to them. Do we, then, not seek the glory of this name, even when
offered to us, and does another catch at it for himself, when it is not
offered?

"Your Majesty, then, must bend that neck which refuses obedience to the
canons. He must be restrained, who does an injury to the whole Church; who
is proud in heart; who has a greed after a name given to none other; who by
such a singular name throws a slur upon your empire also in putting himself
over it.

"We are all scandalised at this: let the author of the scandal return to
right, and all contest between bishops will cease. For I am the servant of
all bishops so long as they live like bishops. But whoever, through
vainglory and contrary to the statutes of the Fathers, lifts his neck
against Almighty God, I trust in Almighty God that he will not bend me even
with the sword."

As Gregory quotes the three words said to Peter, with application of them
to his own see, it seems needless to repeat other passages in which he says
the same thing. But there is a letter to Eulogius,[189] patriarch of
Alexandria, which begins by saying that this patriarch had written to him
much concerning the See of Peter, and that he sat in it in his successors
down to Gregory's own time. Whereupon Gregory, before himself citing the
three words, says: "Who does not know that holy Church is founded on the
solidity of the chief Apostle, whose name expressed his firmness, being
called Peter from Petra". Then he calls the attention of Eulogius to the
fact that all the three patriarchal sees were sees of Peter, with this
remarkable inference, that "though there were many Apostles, only the see
of the prince of the Apostles, which is the see of one in three places,
received supreme authority _in virtue of its very principate_".[190]

Let us attempt to gather the meaning of the various statements quoted from
St. Gregory, and see whether they do not form a coherent whole.

He claims, like all his predecessors, the three great texts concerning
Peter, as conveying the charge of the whole Church, the Principate, to
Peter and his heirs, that is, the Popes preceding him.

He contrasts in the most pointed manner this charge with the name of
Ecumenical, which he translates universal, patriarch, as assumed by the
bishop of Constantinople, and he contrasts not the name only, but the thing
which he conceives to be meant by the name and carried in it.

He contrasts likewise the moderation of his predecessors, who, though
inheriting Peter's charge over the whole Church, declined to accept a name
which seemed to exclude other bishops from their proper honour.

Peter's charge over the whole Church, then, in the judgment of Gregory, had
descended to himself, as he wrote to the empress, "though the sins of
Gregory, who is Peter's unworthy servant, are great, the sins of the
Apostle are none," to justify the treatment he has met with in this
assumption by another of the title Ecumenical. In a word, the _charge_ is a
command of the Gospel, the _assumption_ is "a name of blasphemy and
diabolical pride, and a forerunner of Antichrist".

I conceive that we may interpret St. Gregory's mind in this way. When he so
wrote he had behind him rather more than five full centuries since St.
Peter and St. Paul had given up their lives in Rome for the Christian
faith, and become its patron saints. In all that time Gregory had seen the
hierarchy founded by the bearer of the keys fill the earth. Peter, as a
token of his Principate, had put his name in the three chief sees, sitting
himself as bishop in Antioch for seven years; sitting also himself in Rome,
as bishop, and dying there; sending also his disciple Mark from Rome to
Alexandria. Our Lord's gift and charge to Peter was the source of unity in
His Church. He Himself being mediator between God and man united His Church
with the Divine Trinity in unity. Then He gave the keys of His kingdom to
Peter, in whom unity was secured through the three patriarchs and the other
bishops. Such was the constitution which stood without a break before St.
Gregory from the Apostles to the Nicene Council. From St. Sylvester to his
own time the Popes had been maintaining that constitution. But now the
claim of the bishops of Constantinople was directly against this
constitution. Pope Gelasius, his predecessor, had told that bishop in his
day that he had no rank above that of a simple bishop.[191] For all their
adventitious rank they rested, not upon God, not upon Jesus Christ, not
upon St. Peter, but upon the residence of the emperors in their city. That
was the ground upon which they called themselves ecumenical, a title which
Gregory interpreted universal. Their first step in moving beyond the
position of simple bishop was when the 150 bishops at Constantinople in 381
attempted to give them the second place in rank. And this they did not upon
any ground of apostolic descent, but because Constantinople was Nova Roma.
As to their act in doing this Gregory writes to Eulogius: "The Roman Church
up to this time does not possess, nor has received, the canons or the acts
of that council; it has received that council so far as it condemned
Macedonius".[192] Their next step was at the Council of Chalcedon to
attempt passing a canon, to the effect that the Fathers had given its rank
to Rome because it was the capital, that the 150 Fathers had therefore
given the second rank to Constantinople, because it was the _new_ capital;
and that, therefore, the Pontic, the Arian, and the Thracian exarchs of
Caesarea, Ephesus, and Heraclea should be subjected to it. This canon St.
Leo had absolutely rejected, and the emperor Marcian had accepted his
rejection. In the 130 years from St. Leo to himself, St. Gregory had seen
the assumptions of the bishops of Constantinople continually increasing.
They rested upon the imperial favour. And now in the case of John the
Faster they had gone so far that he prefixed his assumed title of
ecumenical patriarch to the very documents which he sent to the Pope for
revision. And this though the cause had been settled by himself, and had
now come before the Pope, whose power therefore to revise the sentence of
one who called himself ecumenical patriarch he did not dispute.

Nor, indeed, did it appear over what domain he claimed to be universal. It
might be over the eastern bishops; it might be over the two patriarchs of
Alexandria and Antioch, with the later patriarch of Jerusalem; it might be
over the actual Roman empire; it might be, finally, over the whole Church.
But whichever it might be, the claim would equally be, in Gregory's
judgment, unlawful, based simply and solely upon imperial power; resting
also in its origin upon a direct untruth, which assaulted the whole
foundation whereon the charge of the whole Church, the Principate of
Gregory, rested; couched, moreover, in language which would enable future
generations of Greeks to draw the conclusion that, since the Primacy of
Rome proceeded from its being the capital, when Rome ceased to be the
capital, and Constantine's city became the capital, the Primacy also passed
to it.

Thus, in the whole assumption of the bishops of Constantinople, it was
presupposed that the spiritual power and the hierarchy of the Church
descended not from Jesus Christ, but from the emperors.[193] So it is clear
that this empty title, which seemed to the emperor Mauritius a meaningless
word, a mere nothing, contained in itself the whole system of Antichrist.
The Pope saw it, and his words are the more significant when we remember
that at the time he uttered them the man had already reached full manhood
who was to cut the empire of Justinian in half, to deprive of their liberty
three of the eastern patriarchs, destroy a multitude of the Christian
people, and be parent of the religion which through the course of 1200
years has shown itself to be specially anti-Christian. There in his Arab
tent, as yet the faithful husband of an old wife, was the future Khalif,
in whom the spiritual and the temporal power would be joined together; who
would set up in a false theocracy that usurpation which Constantine's
eastern successors were striving to carry out in the Christian Church.
Mahommed would consecrate that very false principle which was at the root
of the ecumenical patriarch's arrogance. Thus the strongest word used by
Gregory of John the Faster's assumption, that it was "a name of blasphemy,
of diabolical pride, and a forerunner of Antichrist," received its exact
verification within a generation after Gregory had spoken it.

But Gregory's charge and Principate were of divine creation, and did not
exclude the proper power and jurisdiction either of every bishop or of the
whole episcopate, at the head of which it stood, and through which it
worked, carefully maintaining what had been from the beginning, preserving
the rank and place of each, consolidating all in the one structure.[194]
The intruder set up by the imperial power deposed Alexandria and Antioch to
make them subject to himself; the lawful shepherd maintained Alexandria and
Antioch because they grew upon the tree of which he was the trunk. His
charge did not exclude, but did indeed include them. The reasoning of St.
Gregory in his letter to the emperor of the day, and his very words in his
letter to the patriarch Eulogius, have become a matter of faith by their
enrolment in the decree of the Vatican Council. That decree defines the
Principate to be an episcopal power of jurisdiction, which is immediate,
over the whole Church. By it the whole Church becomes one flock, under one
shepherd. And it further defines that, "It is so far from being true that
this power of the Supreme Pontiff is injurious to the ordinary and
immediate power of episcopal jurisdiction, by which bishops placed by the
Holy Spirit have succeeded the Apostles, and as true pastors feed and rule
the flocks severally assigned to them, each his own, that this jurisdiction
is asserted, strengthened, and maintained by the supreme and universal
pastor, according to St. Gregory's words: 'My honour is the honour of the
universal Church; my honour is the solid strength of my brethren; then am I
truly honoured when his due rank is given to each'."[195]

It may be observed that Gregory's position against the assumption of John
the Faster is the same as St. Leo's position against Anatolius. In both
cases the Popes discerned the hostile power located in the see of Nova Roma
which was at work against the original order of the Church, and the Pope
who was at the head of it. The only difference lies in the great advance
which the hostile power had made on one hand, and on the other hand the
excessively difficult temporal position in which St. Gregory had to fight
the battle for the cause, as he said, of the universal Church. Yet the
speech of the Pope beleaguered by the Lombards in a decimated and subject
Rome is as strong as the speech of the Pope who had the imperial
grandchildren of Theodosius for friends and supporters, and, when they
failed, saved Rome by her two Apostles from the destruction menaced by
Attila and Genseric.

But there was no one in the eastern Church--neither the emperor Mauritius,
nor the patriarch John the Faster, nor the patriarch Eulogius--who failed
to acknowledge the Pope's charge over the whole Church, grounded on the
three texts to Peter. Gregory himself reprehends the patriarch Eulogius for
giving him in the superscription of his letter the title "universal Pope".
He chose for himself, in opposition to the bishop John's arrogated title of
ecumenical patriarch, that of "servant of the servants of God". The title
chosen indicated the temper in which St. Gregory exercised the vast charge
which he had inherited. For if there is any one principle which seems to
serve as the favourite maxim of his whole pontificate, it is that expressed
in a letter to the bishop of Syracuse. That bishop had been speaking of an
African primate who had professed that he was subject to the Apostolic See.
St. Gregory's comment is: "If a bishop is in any fault, I know not any
bishop who is not subject to it. But when no fault requires it, all are
equal according to the estimation of humility."[196] Natalis, archbishop
of Salona, in Dalmatia, had given the Pope much trouble. The Pope deals
with him tenderly in more than one letter. But he says: "After the letters
of my predecessor (Pelagius) and my own, in the matter of Honoratus the
archdeacon, were sent to your Holiness, in despite of the sentence of us
both, the above-mentioned Honoratus was deprived of his rank. Had either of
the four patriarchs done this, so great an act of contumacy could not have
been passed over without the most grievous scandal. However, as your
brotherhood has since returned to your duty, I take notice neither of the
injury done to me, nor of that to my predecessor."[197]

Of the immense energy shown by St. Gregory in the exercise of his
Principate, of the immense influence wielded by him both in the East and in
the West, of the acknowledgment of his Principate by the answers which
emperor and patriarch made to his demands and rebukes, we possess an
imperishable record in the fourteen books of his letters which have been
preserved to us. They are somewhat more than 850 in number. They range over
every subject, and are addressed to every sort of person. If he rebukes the
ambition of a patriarch, and complains of an emperor's unjust law, he cares
also that the tenants on the vast estates of the Church which his officers
superintend at a distance should not be in any way harshly treated. He
writes to his _defensor_ in Sicily: "I am informed that if anyone has a
charge against any clerks, you throw a slight upon the bishops by causing
these clerks to appear in your own court. If this be so, we expressly order
you to presume to do so no more, because beyond doubt it is very unseemly.
If anyone charges a clerk, let him go to his bishop, for the bishop himself
to hear the case, or depute judges. If it come to arbitration, let the
so-deputed judges cause the parties to select a judge. If a clerk or a
layman have anything against a bishop, you should act between them either
by hearing the cause yourself, or by inducing the parties to choose judges.
For if his own jurisdiction is not preserved to each bishop, what else
results but that the order of the Church is thrown into confusion by us,
the very persons who are charged with its maintenance.

"We have also been informed that certain clerks, put into penance for
faults they had committed by our most reverend brother the bishop John,
have been dismissed by your authority without his knowledge. If this is
true, know that you have committed an altogether improper act, worthy of
great censure. Restore, therefore, at once those clerks to their own
bishop, nor ever do this again, or you will incur from us severe
punishment."[198]

I have quoted already his letters on eastern affairs. They might be
enlarged upon to any extent. As to those who held the highest rank, he has
warm sympathy with a deposed patriarch of Antioch, sending him a copy of
the letter which announced his accession, as well as to the sitting
patriarchs. After twenty years' deposition Anastasius was restored. He has
also close friendship with Eulogius, patriarch of Alexandria, to whom he
writes gracefully: "Besides our mutual affection, there is a peculiar bond
uniting us to the Alexandrian Church. All know that the Evangelist Mark was
sent by his master Peter; thus we are clasped together by the unity of the
master and the disciple. I seem to sit in the disciple's see for the
master's sake, and you in the master's see for the sake of the disciple. To
this we must add your personal merits; for we know how you follow the
institutions of him from whom you spring. Thus we are touched with
compassion for what you suffer; but we shrink from telling you what we
endure ourselves by the daily plundering, killing, and maiming of our
people by the Lombards."[199]

Let us here take a short view of Gregory's incessant activity among the
western nations in process of formation. In his struggle to tame the
ferocity, lawlessness, and unbelief of the Lombards, he betakes himself to
the illustrious Catholic queen Theodelinda. He strives to use her influence
with her husband Agilulf, on behalf of Rome, ever the object of oppression.
Knowing her to be a good Christian, he sent her his _Dialogues_. He also
set before her the supremacy of his see, because she had been misled into
withdrawing from the communion of the new archbishop of Milan, Constantius.
The Pope assures her that the archbishop, as well as himself, venerates the
doctrinal decisions of the Four Councils. He adds: "Since, then, by my own
public profession you know the entireness of our belief, it is fitting that
you have no further scruple concerning the Church of St. Peter, prince of
the Apostles. But persist in the true faith, and ground your life on the
rock of the Church, that is, in his confession: lest your many tears and
your good works avail nothing, if they be separated from the true faith.
For as branches wither without a root, so works, however good they seem,
are nothing if separated from the solidity of the faith."[200]

Ten of his letters are addressed to Brunechild, the terrible queen of the
Franks. But his letter to all the Gallic bishops in the kingdom of
Childebert will best set forth his authority. That king then reigned over
nearly all France. The Pope began by saying that the universe itself was
ruled by graduated orders of spirits. If there was such distinction of
ranks even in the sinless, what man should hesitate to obey a disposition
to which angels are subject? "Since, then, each individual office is
happily fulfilled when there is a superior to whom application can be made,
we have thought it good, following ancient custom, to make our brother
Virgilius, bishop of Arles, our representative in the churches which are in
the kingdom of our most illustrious son king Childebert. We do this in
order that the integrity of the Catholic faith, that is, of the Four holy
Councils, may by God's protection be carefully preserved; and that, if any
contention should arise between our brethren and fellow-bishops, he may, by
virtue of his authority, as holding the place of the Apostolic See, reduce
it by discreet moderation. We have also enjoined him, that if any contest
should arise requiring the presence of others, he should collect a
sufficient number of our brethren and fellow-bishops, discuss the matter
equitably, and determine it in conformity with the canons. But if, which
the divine power avert, contest should arise on a matter of faith, or some
business emerge about which there is great hesitation, and which for its
magnitude requires the judgment of the Apostolic See, after diligent
examination of the facts, he is to make report to us, that we may terminate
all doubt thereon by a fitting sentence."[201]

In this letter we are at a hundred years after the conversion of Clovis.
The Catholic kingdom has swallowed up its Arian competitors whether at
Toulouse or at Lyons, and over it stands the protecting vigour of Gregory,
as a hundred and fifty years before that of Leo strove to support the
falling empire. Arles receives the pallium for the Frankish kingdom, as it
held it for the Theodocian empire, from Rome. Leo saw the imperial line
expire at Rome; from Rome Gregory places the bishops "of his most
illustrious son Childebert" under the old primacy of Arles. This is the
"solidity" of the rock of Peter in which Gregory recommends the queens
Theodelinda and Brunechild to place themselves.

We know how Gregory, while yet a Roman deacon and monk, walking one day
from the palace which he had made a monastery, scarcely more than a
stone's-throw to the forum in which a slave-market was held, was moved to
pity at the sight of the fair-haired Angles; how he was minded to leave
Rome himself on a mission to convert them; how he was kept back by the
affection of the Romans; how Pope Pelagius suddenly died of the plague, and
Gregory, in spite of all his efforts, was made to succeed him; how from the
See of Peter he sent out Augustine and his forty monks to the lost island
in the Atlantic, where, since Stilicho withdrew the Roman armies, every
cruelty had revelled, and every pagan abomination had been practised by the
Saxon invaders. To many, no doubt, the subsequent success of Gregory's
venture to convert the Anglo-Saxon England has served to disguise its
danger and difficulty at the time. When Augustine reached the shores of
Kent, the successive invasions of the Saxon pirates had set up eight petty
kingdoms upon the ruin of the Roman civilisation and the Christian Church.
The miseries which are covered under those five generations of unrecorded
strife are supposed to have exceeded the misery endured in France, Spain,
Italy, and the Illyrian provinces during the same time. The old inhabitants
were reduced to slavery, or exterminated, or driven to the three corners of
Cornwall, Wales, and Strathclyde. So bitter was the British feeling under
the destruction of their country and the wrongs they had endured, that it
overcame all Christian principle in them, and the Welsh refused all aid to
the Roman missionary in the attempt to convert a race so cruel. It required
all St. Gregory's firmness to induce his own monks to persist. In all the
annals of Christian enterprise during eighteen centuries, there is
probably not one which presented less hope of success than St. Gregory's
resolution to add the spiritual beauty of the Christian to the physical
beauty which he admired in the captives of the Roman forum.

Among those to whom he applied to assist and further his purpose was the
great queen of the Franks. To Brunechild he directed a letter saluting her,
he says, with the charity of a father: "We hear that, by the help of God,
the English people is willing to become Christian; and we recommend the
bearer of these, the servant of God, Augustine, to your Excellency, to help
him in all things, and to protect his work".[202]

It was also to Virgilius, bishop of Arles, and primate of all the Gallic
bishops, as we have seen, by Gregory's own appointment, that he sent
Augustine, after his first success with Ethelbert, to receive episcopal
consecration.

From Gregory's own hand, and in virtue of his apostolic power, England in
its second spring received its division into two provinces, one to be
seated at Canterbury, the other at York. His letters to St. Augustine still
exist to show how he entered into all the difficulties of the missionary,
all the needs of a land in conversion from paganism. From him date the
great prerogatives of the see of Canterbury, extending over the whole
island, inasmuch as it was the matrix of the Church in England. If sons may
deny their father, Englishmen may deny Gregory, and add to schism the guilt
of parricide.

But Gregory was hardly less active in restoring Spain from the Arian blight
than in giving birth to a new Christian England. He writes, in 594: "We
have heard from many who have come from Spain how lately Hermenegild, son
of Leovigild, king of the Visigoths, has been converted from the Arian
heresy to the Catholic faith by the preaching of Leander, bishop of
Seville, long united to me in intimate friendship. His Arian father, by
bribes and threats alike, tried to bring him back. Not succeeding, he
deprived him of his rank and all his possessions. When this also failed, he
put him in close imprisonment, fettering both neck and hands. So
Hermenegild learnt to despise the earthly kingdom, and to yearn after the
heavenly, while he lay in bonds and sackcloth. When Easter came, his father
sent him in the middle of the night an Arian bishop that he might receive
communion sacrilegiously consecrated, and so recover his favours.
Hermenegild repulsed the bishop with strong reproaches. The father, hearing
his report, burst into fury and sent officers to destroy him. They split
open his skull with an axe, and so destroyed the life of the body which he
had disregarded. Miracles followed. Psalms were heard about the body of the
royal martyr--royal, indeed, because he was a martyr."[203]

Writing to St. Leander, archbishop of Seville, Gregory says: "I am so
tossed by this world's waves that I cannot steer to harbour this old
weather-beaten bark which the secret dispensation of God has committed to
my care. Shipwreck creaks in its worn-out planks. Dearest brother, if you
love me, stretch out the hand of your prayers to me in this tempest. Your
reward for helping me will be greater success in your own labours.

"No words of mine can express the joy which I feel at hearing the perfect
conversion of our common son, king Rechared, to the Catholic faith."[204]

On another occasion Gregory writes to Leander, sending him the pallium,
"blessed by Peter, prince of the Apostles," only to be used at Mass: "I see
by your letter that burning charity which kindles others. He who is not
himself on fire cannot inflame others. I always call to mind your life with
great veneration. But as for me I am not what I was: 'Call me not Noemi,
which is fair; call me Mara, for I am full of bitterness'. Following the
way of my Head, I had resolved to be the scorn of men, the outcast of the
people. But the burden of this honour weighs me down; innumerable cares
pierce me like swords. There is no rest of the heart. I was tranquil in my
monastery. The tempest arose; I am in its waves, suffering with the loss of
quiet a shipwreck of mind. The gout oppresses you; I also am terribly
pained by it. It will be well if, under these strokes of the scourge, we
perceive them to be gifts, by which the sense of the flesh may atone for
sins which delights of the flesh may have led us to commit.

"The shortness of my letter will show how weak and how occupied I am, who
say so little to one whom I love so much."[205]

St. Gregory tells us that king Rechared, after the martyrdom of his brother
St. Hermenegild, was converted from the Arian heresy, and brought the whole
Visigothic nation to the Catholic faith. "The brother of a martyr fitly
became a preacher of the faith. If Hermenegild had not died a martyr, this
he would not have been able to do; for 'except the grain of wheat falling
into the ground dieth, itself remaineth alone; but if it die, it bringeth
forth much fruit'. This we see to be doing in the members which we know to
have been done in the Head. In the nation of the Visigoths one died that
many might live."[206]

A letter of St. Gregory to this king Rechared is extant, which one of the
greatest French bishops, Hincmar of Reims, nearly three hundred years after
it was written, thought worthy to be sent as a present to the emperor
Charles the Bald. I quote portions of it:[207]

"Most excellent son, words cannot tell the delight which I receive from
your work and from your life. When I hear the power of that new miracle
wrought in our days, that by means of your Excellency the whole nation of
the Goths has been brought over from the error of the Arian heresy to the
solidity of the right faith, I exclaim with the prophet, 'This is the
change of the hand of the Most High'. Is there a heart of stone which would
not be softened on hearing of so great a work into praises of Almighty God
and affection for your Excellency? Often, when my sons meet, it is my
pleasure to tell them of the deeds wrought by you, and to join my
admiration with theirs. I get angry with myself that I am lazy, useless,
and inert, while kings are labouring for the gain of the heavenly country
by the ingathering of souls. What, then, shall I allege to the Judge at
that tremendous tribunal, if I come before Him then with empty hands, while
your Excellency leads a long train of the faithful whom you have drawn into
the grace of the true faith by zealous and continuous preaching? But by
God's gift this is my great consolation, to love in you that holy work
which I have not in myself. When your acts move me to a great exultation, I
make mine by charity what is yours by labour. Thus, in your work and our
exultation over it, we may cry out with the angels over the conversion of
the Goths, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good
will'. But how joyfully St. Peter, prince of the Apostles, has received
your offerings is borne witness to all men by your life.

"You tell me that the abbots, who were carrying your offering to St. Peter,
were driven back by a bad sea passage into Spain. Your gifts, which
afterwards arrived, were not refused, but the courage of their bearers was
tried. The adversity which good intentions encounter is a trial of virtue,
not a judgment of reprobation. When St. Paul came to preach in Italy, how
great was the blessing he brought; yet he was shipwrecked in coming, but
the ship of his heart was not broken by the waves of the sea.

"Also, I am told that your Excellency issued a certain decree against the
misbelief of the Jews, which they strove by a bribe to have modified. This
bribe you despised, and in the desire to please God preferred innocence to
gold. This brought to my mind king David's act. He longed for a draught
from the fountain of Bethlehem, which the enemy's host encompassed. His
soldiers risked their lives to bring it. But he refused, saying: 'God
forbid that I should drink the blood of these men. So he offered it to the
Lord.'[208] If an armed king made a sacrifice to God of the water which he
refused, think what a sacrifice to Almighty God that king presented who for
His love refused to receive, not water, but gold. Therefore, most excellent
son, I say confidently that the gold which you refused to receive against
God you offered to Him. These are great deeds, the glory of which is due to
God....

"Government of subjects should be tempered with great moderation, lest
power steal away the judgment. A kingdom is ruled well when the glory of
ruling does not overmaster the spirit. Provide also against fits of anger,
lest unlimited power be used hurriedly. Anger in punishing even delinquents
should not anticipate judgment like a mistress, but follow reason as a
servant, coming when she is called. If it once is in possession of the
mind, it puts down to justice even a cruel deed. Therefore it is written:
'The wrath of man worketh not the justice of God'; and again: 'Let
everyone be swift to hear but slow to speak'. I do not doubt but that by
God's help you practise all this. But as opportunity offers, I creep behind
your good works, that when an adviser adds himself to what you do without
advice, you may not be alone in your doing. May Almighty God stretch forth
His heavenly hand to protect you in all your acts, granting you prosperity
in the present life, and, after long years, eternal joy.

"I enclose a small key from the most sacred body of the Apostle St. Peter,
with his blessing. It contains an iron filing from his chains, that what
bound his neck for martyrdom may deliver yours from all sin. I have also
given the bearer of these a cross for you: it contains some of the wood of
the Lord's cross, and hair of St. John Baptist; by which you may always be
consoled by our Saviour through the intercession of His precursor. To our
most reverend brother and fellow-bishop Leander we have sent the pallium
from the See of the Apostle St. Peter, in accordance with ancient custom,
with your life, with his own goodness and dignity."

This letter of St. Gregory had been drawn forth by one from king Rechared
to him, in which the king said he had been minded to inform of his
conversion one who was superior to all other bishops, that he had sent a
golden jewelled chalice which he hoped might be found worthy of the Apostle
who was first in honour. "I beseech your Highness, when you have an
opportunity, to find me out with your golden letters. For how truly I love
you is not, I think, unknown to one whose breast the Lord inspires, and
those who behold you not in the body, yet hear your good report; I commend
to your Holiness with the utmost veneration Leander, bishop of Seville, who
has been the means of making known to us your good will. I am delighted to
hear of your health, and beg of your Christian prudence that you would
frequently commend to our common Lord in your prayers the people who, under
God, are ruled by us, and have been added to Christ in your times, that
true charity towards God may be strengthened by the very distance which
divides us."[209]

The fact commemorated in these letters was indeed one for which the Pope
might well use the angelical hymn of praise. "The bishops of Spain,"[210]
says Gibbon, "respected themselves and were respected by the public;
their indissoluble union confirmed their authority; and the regular
discipline of the Church introduced peace, order, and stability into the
government of the State. From the reign of Rechared, the first Catholic
king, to that of Witiza, the immediate predecessor of the unfortunate
Roderic, sixteen national councils were successively convened. The six
metropolitans--Toledo, Seville, Merida, Braga, Tarragona, and
Narbonne--presided according to their respective seniority; the assembly
was composed of their suffragan bishops, who appeared in person or by
their proxies; and a place was assigned to the most holy or opulent of
the Spanish abbots. During the first three days of the convocation, as
long as they agitated the ecclesiastical questions of doctrine and
discipline, the profane laity was excluded from their debates, which were
conducted, however, with decent solemnity. But on the morning of the
fourth day the doors were thrown open for the entrance of the great
officers of the palace, the dukes and counts of the provinces, the judges
of the cities, and the Gothic nobles; and the decrees of heaven were
ratified by the consent of the people. The same rules were observed in
the provincial assemblies, the annual synods which were empowered to hear
complaints and to redress grievances; and a legal government was
supported by the prevailing influence of the Spanish clergy.... The
national councils of Toledo, in which the free spirit of the barbarians
was tempered and guided by episcopal policy, have established some
prudent laws for the common benefit of the king and people. The vacancy
of the throne was supplied by the choice of the bishops and palatines;
and after the failure of the line of Alaric, the regal dignity was still
limited to the pure and noble blood of the Goths. The clergy who anointed
their lawful prince always recommended the duty of allegiance; and the
spiritual censures were denounced on the heads of the impious subjects
who should resist his authority, conspire against his life, or violate by
an indecent union the chastity even of his widow. But the monarch
himself, when he ascended the throne, was bound by a reciprocal oath to
God and his people that he would faithfully execute his important trust.
The real or imaginary faults of his administration were subject to the
control of a powerful aristocracy; and the bishops and palatines were
guarded by a fundamental privilege that they should not be degraded,
imprisoned, tortured, nor punished with death, exile, or confiscation,
unless by the free and public judgment of their peers."

We have here the historian, who is one of the bitterest enemies of the
Christian Church and Faith, avowing that the barbarian Visigoths received
from the hands of that Church and Faith, at the end of the sixth century,
the great institutions of a limited Christian monarchy, consecrated by the
Church, in which the king at his accession solemnly avowed his
responsibility for his exercise of the immense functions entrusted to him;
also of parliaments, in which clergy and laity sat together in common
deliberation upon the affairs of the State, grievances were redressed, and
laws for the benefit of king and people passed; in fact, a reign of legal
government, based upon law and justice, and confirmed by religious
sanction.

And in all this the hand of the Pope was seen, sending to the chief bishop
of Spain the pallium direct from the body of St. Peter, on which it had
been laid, as the visible symbol of apostolic power dwelling in the
Apostle's See, and radiating from it.

This is the first instance, and not the least striking, of a fact which
lies at the foundation of modern Europe; for so the Teuton war leaders
became Christian kings, and so the northern barbarians were changed into
Christian nations. For that which Gibbon here describes took place in all
the Teuton peoples who accepted the Catholic faith. He has elsewhere said:
"The progress of Christianity has been marked by two glorious and decisive
victories: over the learned and luxurious citizens of the Roman empire, and
over the warlike barbarians of Scythia and Germany, who subverted the
empire and embraced the religion of the Romans".[211]

Of this latter victory we can celebrate the accomplishment, as St. Gregory
did, in the words of the angelic hymn, but the details have not been
preserved for us, even in the scanty proportion which we possess concerning
the former. Fighting for thirty years with the Lombards for the very
existence of Rome, Gregory was the contemporary and witness of this second
victory. Not until the Arian heresy was subdued by the Catholic faith could
it be said to be accomplished. The pontificate of his ancestor in the third
degree, Pope Felix III., might be called heroic, in that, while under the
domination of the Arian Herule, Odoacer, he resisted the meddling with the
received doctrine of the Church by the emperor Zeno, guided by the larger
mind and treacherous fraud of Acacius, the bishop of Constantinople, who
ruled its emperor. Then the Arian Vandals bitterly persecuted the Church in
Africa, and the Visigoth Arians had possession of France from the Loire
southwards, and of Spain. Nowhere in the whole world was there a Catholic
prince. The north and east of France and Belgium was held by the still
pagan Franks. By the time of Gregory, Clovis and his sons had extinguished
the Arian Visigoth kingdom and the Arian kingdom of Burgundy, and ruled one
Catholic kingdom of all France. Under Rechared, the Arian Visigoth kingdom
in Spain became Catholic. Gregory also announced to his friend, the
patriarch Eulogius, that the pagan Saxons in England were receiving the
Catholic faith by thousands from his missionary. The taint which the
wickedness of the eastern emperor Valens had been so mysteriously allowed
to communicate to the nascent faith of the Teuton tribes, through the
noblest of their family, the Goths, was, during the century which passed
between Pope Felix and Pope Gregory, purged away. It was decided beyond
recal that the new nations of the West should be Catholic. Five times had
Rome been taken and wasted: at one moment, it is said, all its inhabitants
had deserted it and fled. The ancient city was extinct: in and out of it
rose the Rome of the Popes, which Gregory was feeding and guarding. The
eastern emperor, who called himself the Roman prince, in recovering her had
destroyed her; but the life that was in her Pontiff was indestructible. The
ecumenical patriarch was foiled by the Servant of the servants of God: in
proportion as the eastern bishops submitted their original hierarchy, of
apostolic institution, and the graduated autonomy which each enjoyed under
it, to an imperial minister, termed a patriarch, in Constantinople, all the
bishops of the West, placed as they were under distinct kingdoms, found
their common centre, adviser, champion, and ruler in the Chair of Peter,
fixed in a ruined Rome. If Gregory, in his daily distress, thought that the
end of the world was coming, all subsequent ages have felt that in him the
world of the future was already founded. In the two centuries since the
death of the great Theodosius, the countries which form modern Europe had
passed through indescribable disturbance, a misery without
end--dislodgement of the old proprietors, a settlement of new inhabitants
and rulers. The Christian religion itself had receded for a time far within
the limits which it had once reached, as in the north of France, in
Germany, and in Britain. The rulers of broad western lands, with the
conquering host which they led, had become the victims first, and then the
propagators, of the same fatal heresy. The conquered population alone
remained Catholic. The conversion of Clovis was the first light which arose
in this darkness. And now, a hundred years after that conversion, Paris and
Bordeaux, and Toulouse and Lyons, Toledo and Seville, were Catholic once
more, and Gregory, a provincial captive in a collapsing Rome, was owned by
all these cities as the standard and arbiter of their faith, and the king
of the Visigoths thankfully received a few filings from the chains of the
Apostle Peter as a present which worthily celebrated his conversion.

It is to be observed that this absolute defeat of the Arian heresy in
several countries is accomplished in spite of the power which, in all of
them, was wielded by Arian rulers. In vain had Genseric, Hunnerich,
Guntamund, and Thrasimund oppressed and tortured the Catholics of Africa,
banished their bishops, and set up nominees of their own as Arian bishops
in their places for a hundred years. No sooner did Belisarius land on their
soil than the fabric reared with every possible deceit and cruelty fell to
the ground. The Arian Vandal king was carried away in triumph, as the spoil
of a single battle, to Constantinople, and the Catholic bishops, while they
hailed Justinian as their deliverer, met in plenary council, acknowledging
the Primacy of Peter, as in the days of St. Augustine. In vain had the
powerful Visigoth monarchy, seated during three generations at Toulouse,
persecuted with fraud and cruelty its Catholic people. A single blow from
the arm of Clovis delivered from their rule the whole country from the
Loire to the Pyrenees. In vain had Gondebald and his family in Burgundy
wavered between the heresy which he professed and the Catholic faith which
he admired. The children of Clovis absorbed that kingdom also. But the
strongest example of all remains. In vain, too, had Theodorick, after the
murder of his rival Odoacer when an invited guest in the banquet of
Ravenna, covered over the savage, and governed with wisdom and moderation a
Catholic people, whom he soothed by choosing their noblest--Cassiodorus,
Symmachus, and Boethius--for his ministers. He had formed into a family
compact by marriages the Arian rulers in Africa, Spain, and Gaul. His
moderation gave way when he saw the eastern emperor resume the policy of a
Catholic sovereign. He put on the savage again, and he ended with the
murder not only of his own long-trusted ministers, but of the Pope, who
refused to be his instrument in procuring immunity for heresy from a
Catholic emperor.

At his death, overclouded with the pangs of remorse, the Arian rule which
he had fostered with so much skill showed itself to have no hold upon an
Italy to which he had given a great temporal prosperity. The Goths, whom he
had seemed to tame, were found incapable of self-government, and every
Roman heart welcomed Belisarius and Narses as the restorers of a power
which had not ceased to claim their allegiance, even through the turpitudes
and betrayals of Zeno and Anastasius.

The best solution which I know for this wonderful result, brought about in
so many countries, is contained in a few words of Gibbon: "Under the Roman
empire the wealth and jurisdiction of the bishops, their sacred character
and perpetual office, their numerous dependents, popular eloquence and
provincial assemblies, had rendered them always respectable and sometimes
dangerous. Their influence was augmented by the progress of superstition"
(by which he means the Catholic faith), "and the establishment of the
French monarchy may in some degree be ascribed to the firm alliance of a
hundred prelates who reigned in the discontented or independent cities of
Gaul."[212] But how were these prelates bound together in a firm alliance?
Because each one of them felt what a chief among them, St. Avitus, under
an Arian prince, expressed to the Roman senate in the matter of Pope
Symmachus by the direction of his brother bishops, that in the person of
the Bishop of Rome the principate of the whole Church was touched; that "in
the case of other bishops, if there be any lapse, it may be restored; but
if the Pope of Rome is endangered, not one bishop but the episcopate itself
will seem to be shaken".[213] If the bishops had been all that is above
described with the exception of this one thing, the common bond which held
them to Rome, how would the ruin of their country, the subversion of
existing interests, the confiscation of the land, the imposition of foreign
invaders for masters, have acted upon them? It would have split them up
into various parties, rivals for favour and the power derived from favour.
The bishops of each country would have had national interests controlling
their actions. The Teuton invaders were without power of cohesion, without
fraternal affection for each other; their ephemeral territories were in a
state of perpetual fluctuation. The bishops locally situated in these
changing districts would have been themselves divided. In fact, the Arian
bishops had no common centre. They were the nominees and partisans of their
several sovereigns. They presented no one front, for their negation was no
one faith. We cannot be wrong in extending the action assigned by Gibbon to
the hundred bishops of Gaul, to the Catholic bishops throughout all the
countries in which a poorer Catholic population was governed by Arian
rulers. The divine bond of the Primacy, resting upon the faith which it
represented, secured in one alliance all the bishops of the West. Nor must
we forget that the Throne of Peter acknowledged by those bishops as the
source of their common faith, the crown of the episcopate, was likewise
regarded by the Arian rulers themselves as the great throne of justice,
above the sway of local jealousies and subordinate jurisdictions. It
represented to their eyes the fabric of Roman law, the wonderful creation
of centuries, which the northern conquerors were utterly unable to emulate,
and made them feel how inferior brute force was to civil wisdom and equity.

In the constitution of the Visigothic kingdom of Spain from the time of
Rechared, when it became Catholic, we see the first fruits of the Church's
beneficent action on the northern invaders. The barbarian monarchy from its
original condition of a military command in time of war, directing a raid
of the tribe or people upon its enemies, becomes a settled rule, at the
head of estates which meet in annual synod, and in which bishops and barons
sit side by side. Government reposes on the peaceable union of the Two
Powers. In process of time this sort of political order was established
everywhere throughout the West, by the same action and influence of the
Church. In the Roman empire the supreme power had been in its origin a
mandate conferred by the citizens of a free state on one of their number
for the preservation of the commonwealth. The notion of dynastic descent
was wanting to it from the beginning. But the power which Augustus had
received in successive periods of ten years passed to his successors for
their life. Still they were rather life-presidents with royal power than
kings. And it may be noticed that in that long line no blessing seemed to
rest on the succession of a son to his father; much, on the contrary, on
the adoption of a stranger of tried capacity guided by the choice of the
actual ruler. But in the lapse of centuries the imperial power had become
absolute. Especially in the successors of Constantine, and in the city to
which he had given his name and chosen for the home of his empire, not a
shadow of the old Roman freedom remained. One after another the successful
general or the adventurer in some court intrigue supplanted or murdered a
predecessor, and ascended the throne, but with undiminished prerogatives.
Great was the contrast in all the new kingdoms at whose birth the influence
of the Church presided. There the kings all sat by family descent, in
which, however, was involved a free acceptance on the part of their people.
The bishops who had had so large a part in the foundation of the several
kingdoms had a recognised part in their future government. Holding one
faith, and educated in the law of the Romans, and joined on to the
preceding ages by their mental culture as well as their belief, they
contributed to these kingdoms a stability and cohesion which were wanting
to the Teuton invaders in themselves. They incessantly preached peace as a
religious necessity to those tribes which had been as ready to consume
each other as to divide the spoils of their Roman subjects. This united
phalanx of bishops in Gaul conquered in the end even the excessive
degeneracy, self-indulgence, and cruelty of the Merovingian race. Thanks to
their perpetual efforts, while the policy of a Clovis made a France, the
wickedness of his descendants did not destroy it, but only themselves, and
caused a new family to be chosen wherein the same tempered government might
be carried on.

It is remarkable that while the Byzantine emperors, from the extinction of
the western empire, were using their absolute power to meddle with the
doctrine of the Church which Constantine acknowledged to be divine, and to
fetter its liberty which he acknowledged to be unquestionable, the Popes
from that very time were through the bishops, to whom they were the sole
centre in so many changes and upheavals, constructing the new order of
things. Through them the Church maintained her own liberty, and allied with
it a civil liberty which the East had more and more surrendered.

In the East, the Church in time was younger than the empire; in the West,
she preceded in time these newly formed monarchies. Amid the universal
overthrow which the invaders had wrought she alone stood unmoved. The
heresy which had so threatened her disappeared. On Goths, and Franks, and
Saxons, and Alemans, she was free to exercise her divine power.[214] It is
in that sixth century of tremendous revolutions that she laid the
foundation of the future European society. Byzantium was descending to
Mahomet while Rome was forecasting the Christian commonwealth of Charles
the Great. In the Rome of Constantine, while the old civilisation had
accepted her name, the old pagan principles had continually impeded her
action. The civil rulers especially had harked back after the power of the
heathen Pontifex Maximus; but in these new peoples who were not yet
peoples, but only the unformed matter (_materia prima_) out of which
peoples might be made, the Church was free to put her own ideal as a _form_
within them. They had the rudiments of institutions, which they trusted her
to organise. They placed her bishops in their courts of justice, in their
halls of legislation. The greatest of their conquerors in the hour of his
supreme exaltation, which also was received from the Pope, was proud to be
vested by her in the dalmatic of a deacon.

Of this new world St. Gregory, in his desolated Rome, stood at the head.

There is yet another aspect of this wonderful man which we have to
consider. We possess about 850 of his letters. If we did but possess the
letters of his sixty predecessors in the same relative proportion as his,
the history of the Church for the five centuries preceding him, instead of
being often a blank, would present to us the full lineaments of truth. The
range of his letters is so great, their detail so minute, that they
illuminate his time and enable us to form a mental picture, and follow
faithfully that pontificate of fourteen years, incessantly interrupted by
cares and anxieties for the preservation of his city, yet watching the
beginnings and strengthening the polity of the western nations, and
counterworking the advances of the eastern despotism. The divine order of
greatness is, we know, to do and to teach. Few, indeed, have carried it out
on so great a scale as St. Gregory. The mass of his writing preserved to us
exceeds the mass preserved to us from all his predecessors together, even
including St. Leo, who with him shares the name of Great, and whose sphere
of action the mind compares with his. If he became to all succeeding times
an image of the great sacerdotal life in his own person, so all ages
studied in his words the pastoral care, joining him with St. Gregory of
Nazianzum and St. Chrysostom. The man who closed his life at sixty-four,
worn out not with age, but with labour and bodily pains, stands, beside the
learning of St. Jerome, the perfect episcopal life and statesmanship of St.
Ambrose, the overpowering genius of St. Augustine, as the fourth doctor of
the western Church, while he surpasses them all in that his doctorship was
seated on St. Peter's throne. If he closes the line of Fathers, he begins
the period when the Church, failing to preserve a rotten empire in
political existence, creates new nations; nay, his own hand has laid for
them their foundation-stones, and their nascent polity bears his manual
inscription, as the great campanile of St. Mark wears on its brow the
words, _Et Verbum caro factum est_. These were the words which St. Gregory
wrote as the bond of their internal cohesion, as the source of their
greatness, permanence, and liberty upon the future monarchies of Europe.

What mortal could venture to decide which of the two great victories
allowed by Gibbon to the Church is the greater? But we at least are the
children of the second. It was wrought in secrecy and unconsciousness, as
the greatest works of nature and of grace are wrought, but we know just so
much as this, that St. Gregory was one of its greatest artificers. The
Anglo-Saxon race in particular, for more than a thousand years, has
celebrated the Mass of St. Gregory as that of the Apostle of England. Down
to the disruption of the sixteenth century, the double line of its bishops
in Canterbury and York, with their suffragans, regarded him as their
founder, as much as the royal line deemed itself to descend from William
the Conqueror. If Canterbury was Primate of all England and York Primate of
England, it was by the appointment of Gregory. And the very civil
constitution of England, like the original constitutions of the western
kingdoms in general, is the work in no small part of that Church which St.
Augustine carried to Ethelbert, and whose similar work in Spain Gibbon has
acknowledged. Under the Norman oppression it was to the laws of St. Edward
that the people looked back. The laws of St. Edward were made by the
bishops of St. Gregory.

How deeply St. Gregory was impressed with the conviction of his own
vocation to be the head of the whole Church we have seen in his own
repeatedly quoted words.[215] What can a Pope claim more than the
attribution to himself as Pope of the three great words of Christ spoken to
Peter? Accordingly, all his conduct was directed to maintain every
particular church in its due subordination to the Roman Church, to
reconcile schismatics to it, to overcome the error and the obstinacy of
heretics. Again, since all nations have been called to salvation in Christ,
St. Gregory pursued the conversion of the heathen with the utmost zeal.
When only monk and cardinal deacon, he had obtained the permission of Pope
Pelagius to set out in person as missionary to paganised Britain. He was
brought back to Rome after three days by the affection of the people, who
would not allow him to leave them. When the death of Pope Pelagius placed
him on the papal throne, he did not forget the country the sight of whose
enslaved children had made them his people of predilection.

With regard to the churches belonging to his own patriarchate, a bishop in
each province, usually the metropolitan, represented as delegate the Roman
See. To these, as the symbol of their delegated authority as his _vicarii_,
Gregory sent the pallium. All the bishops of the province yielded them
obedience, acknowledged their summons to provincial councils. A hundred
years before Pope Symmachus had begun the practice of sending the pallium
to them, but Gregory declined to take the gifts which it had become usual
to take on receiving it. St. Leo, fifty years before Symmachus, had
empowered a bishop to represent him at the court of the eastern emperor,
and had drawn out the office and functions of the nuncio. Like his great
predecessor, St. Gregory carefully watched over the rights of the Primacy.
Upon the death of a metropolitan, he entrusted during the vacancy the
visitation of the churches to another bishop, and enjoined the clergy and
people of the vacant see to make a new choice under the superintendence of
the Roman official. The election being made, he carefully examined the
acts, and, if it was needed, reversed them. As he required from the
metropolitans strict obedience to his commands, so he maintained on the one
hand the dependence of the bishops on their metropolitans, while on the
other he protected them against all irregular decisions of the
metropolitan. He carefully examined the complaints which bishops made
against their metropolitan; and when bishops disagreed with each other, and
their disagreement could not be adjusted by the metropolitan, he drew the
decision to himself.

Gregory also held many councils in Rome which passed decisions upon
doctrine and discipline. We may take as a specimen that which he held in
the Lateran Church on the 5th April, 601,[216] with twenty-four bishops and
many priests and deacons. It is headed: "Gregory, bishop, servant of the
servants of God, to all bishops". The Pope says that his own government of
a monastery had shown him how necessary it was to provide for their
perpetual security: "Since we have come to the knowledge that in very many
monasteries the monks have suffered much to their prejudice and grievance
from bishops ... we therefore, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by
the authority of the blessed Peter, prince of the Apostles, in whose place
we preside over this Church, forbid that henceforth any bishop or layman,
in respect of the revenues, goods, or charters of monasteries, the cells or
buildings belonging to them, do in any manner or upon any occasion diminish
them, or use deceit or interference". If there be a contest whether any
property belong to the church of a bishop or to a monastery, arbitrators
shall decide. If an abbot dies, no stranger, but one of the same community,
must be chosen by the brethren, freely and concordantly, for his successor.
If no fitting person is found in the monastery itself, the monks are to
provide that one be chosen from another monastery. In the abbot's lifetime
no other superior may be set over the monastery, except the abbot have
committed transgressions punishable by the canons. Against the will of the
abbot no monk may be chosen to be set over another monastery or receive
holy orders. The bishop may not make an inventory of the goods of the
monastery, nor mix himself, even after the abbot's death, in the concerns
of the monastery; he may hold no public mass in the monastery, that there
be no meeting of people, or women, there; he may set up no pulpit there,
and without the consent of the abbot make no regulation, and employ no
monk for any church service.

All the bishops answered: "We rejoice in the liberties of the monks, and
confirm what your Holiness has set forth as to this".

As metropolitan of the particular Roman province, Gregory was equally
active. The political circumstances of Italy had exerted the most
prejudicial effect on the Church. Ecclesiastical life was impaired. The
discipline both of monks and clergy was weakened. Bishops had become
negligent in their duties; many churches orphaned or destroyed. But at the
end of his pontificate things had so improved that he might well be termed
the reformer of Church discipline. He watched with great care over the
conduct and administration of the bishops. In this the officers called
_defensors_, that is, who administered the patrimony of the Church in
the different provinces, helped him greatly in carrying out his commands.
In the war with the Lombards, many episcopal sees had been wasted, and many
of their bishops expelled. Gregory provided for them, either in naming them
visitors of his own, or in calling in other bishops to their support. He
rebuilt many churches which had been destroyed. He carefully maintained the
property of churches: he would not allow it to be alienated, except to
ransom captives or convert heathens. The Roman Church had then large
estates in Africa, Gaul, Sicily, Corsica, Dalmatia, and especially in the
various provinces of Italy. These were called the Patrimony of Peter. They
consisted in lands, villages, and flocks. In the management of these
Gregory's care did not disdain the minutest supervision. His strong sense
of justice did not prevent his being a merciful landlord, and especially he
cared for the peasantry and cultivators of the soil.

The monastic life which in his own person he had so zealously practised, as
Pope he so carefully watched over that he has been called the father of the
monks. He encouraged the establishment of monasteries. Many he built and
provided for himself out of the Roman Church's property. Many which wanted
for maintenance he succoured. He issued a quantity of orders supporting the
religious and moral life of monks and nuns. He invited bishops to keep
guard over the discipline of monasteries, and blamed them when
transgressions of it came to light. But he also protected monasteries from
hard treatment of bishops, and, according to the custom of earlier Popes,
exempted some of them from episcopal authority.

In restoring schismatics to unity he was in general successful. He wrought
such a union among the bishops of Africa that Donatism lost influence more
and more, and finally disappeared. He dealt with the obstinate Milanese
schism which had arisen out of the treatment of the Three Chapters. He won
back a great part of the Istrians. He had more trouble with the two
archbishops of Constantinople, John the Faster and Cyriacus; and his former
friend the emperor Mauritius turned against him, so that he welcomed the
accession of Phocas, as a deliverance of the Church from unjust domination.
The unquestioning loyalty with which, as a civil subject, he welcomed this
accession has been unfairly used against him. As first of all the civil
dignitaries of the empire he could only accept what had been done at
Constantinople. But in all his fourteen years neither the difficulty of
circumstances nor the consideration of persons withheld him from carrying
out his resolutions with a patience and a firmness only equalled by
gentleness of manner. From beginning to end he considered himself, and
acted, as set by God to watch over the maintenance of the canons, the
discipline enacted by them, and so doing to perfect by his wisdom as well
as to temper by his moderation the vast fabric of the Primacy as it had
grown itself, and nurtured in its growth the original constitution of the
Church during nearly six hundred years.

We may now say a few words upon the Primacy itself as exerted by St. Leo at
the Council of Chalcedon, and the Primacy as exerted by St. Gregory in the
fourteen years from 590 to 604; also on the interval between them, and the
relative position of the bishop of Constantinople to Leo in the person of
Anatolius, and to Gregory in the person of John the Faster. We see at once
that the intention which Leo discerned in Anatolius, which he sternly
reprehended and summarily overthrew, has been fully carried out by John the
Faster, who, in documents sent to the Pope himself for revision, as
superior, terms himself ecumenical patriarch. Who had made him first a
patriarch and then ecumenical? The emperor alone. He is so called in the
laws of Justinian. The 140 years from Leo to Gregory are filled with the
continued rise of the Bishop of Nova Roma under the absolute power of the
emperor. He has succeeded not only in taking precedence of the legitimate
patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch; he has more than once stripped of
their rights the metropolitans and bishops subject to the great see of the
East, and himself consecrated at Constantinople a patriarch of Antioch by
order of the emperor of the day. This Acacius did, humbly begging the
Pope's pardon for such a transgression of the due order and hierarchy, and
repeating the offence against the Nicene order and constitution on the
first opportunity. In the same way he has interfered with the elections at
Alexandria. We learn from the instruction given by Pope Hormisdas to his
legates that all the eastern bishops when they came to Constantinople
obtained an audience of the emperor only through the bishop of
Constantinople. The Pope carefully warns his legates against submitting to
this pretension. Pope Gelasius told the bishop in his day that his see had
no ecclesiastical rank above that of a simple bishop. We laugh, he said, at
the pretension to erect an apostolical throne upon an imperial residence.
But, in the meantime, Constantinople has become the head of all civil
power. The emperor of the West has ceased to be. The Roman senate, at the
bidding of a Herule commander of mercenaries, has sent back even the
symbols of imperial rank to the eastern emperor; and in return Zeno has
graciously made Odoacer patricius of Rome, with the power of king, until
Theodorick was ready to be rewarded with the possession of Italy for
services rendered to the eastern monarch, with the purpose likewise of
diverting his attention from Nova Roma. Therefore, in spite of the
submission rendered by all the East, the bishops, the court, the emperor,
and by Justinian himself; in spite, also, of two bishops successively
degraded by an emperor, the bishop of Constantinople ever advances. The law
of Justinian, which acknowledges the Pope as first of all bishops in the
world, and gives him legal rank as such, makes the bishop of the new
capital the second. Presently Justinian becomes by conquest immediate
sovereign of Rome. The ancient queen and maker of the empire is humbled in
the dust by five captures; is even reduced to a desert for a time; and when
a portion of her fugitive citizens comes back to the abandoned city, a
Byzantine prefect rules it with absolute power. A Greek garrison, the badge
of Rome's degradation, supports his delegated rule. Presently the seat of
that rule is for security transferred to Ravenna, and Rome is left, not
merely discrowned, but defenceless. All the while the bishop of
Constantinople is seated in the pomp of power at the emperor's court;
within the walls of the eastern capital his household rivals that of the
emperor; in certain respects the public worship gives him a homage greater
than that accorded to the absolute lord of the East. He reflects with
satisfaction that the one person in the West who can call his ministration
to account is exposed to the daily attacks of barbarians: is surrounded
with palaces whose masters are ruined, and which are daily dropping into
decay. The Pope, behind the crumbling walls of Aurelian, shudders at the
cruelties practised on his people: the bishop of Constantinople, by terming
himself ecumenical, announces ostentatiously that he claims to rule all his
brethren in the East--that he is supreme judge over his brother patriarchs.
One only thing he does not do: he claims no power over the Pope himself; he
does not attempt to revise his administration in the West. He acknowledges
his primacy, seated as it is in a provincial city, pauperised, and
decimated with hunger and desertion.

In this interval the Pope has seen seven emperors pass like shadows on the
western throne, and their place taken first by an Arian Herule and then by
an Arian Goth. Herule and Goth disappear, the last at the cost of a war
which desolates Italy during twenty years, and casts out, indeed, the
Gothic invader and confiscator of Italy, but only to supply his place by
the grinding exactions of an absent master, followed immediately by the
inroad of fresh savages, far worse than the Goth, under whose devastation
Italy is utterly ruined. Whatever portion of dignity the old capital of the
world lent to Leo is utterly lost to Gregory. It has been one tale of
unceasing misery, of terrible downfal to Rome, from Genseric to Agilulf. It
may seem to have been suspended during the thirty-three years of
Theodorick, but it was the iron force of hostile domination wielded by the
gloved hand. When the Goth was summoned to depart, he destroyed ruthlessly.
The rage of Vitiges casts back a light upon the mildness of Theodorick; the
slaughters ordered by Teia are a witness to Gothic humanity. No words but
those of Gregory himself, in applying the Hebrew prophet, can do justice to
the temporal misery of Rome. The Pope felt himself silenced by sorrow in
the Church of St. Peter, but he ruled without contradiction the Church in
East and West. Not a voice is heard at the time, or has come down to
posterity, which accuses Gregory of passing the limits of power conceded to
him by all, or of exercising it otherwise than with the extremest
moderation.

Disaster in the temporal order, continued through five generations, from
Leo to Gregory, has clearly brought to light the purely spiritual
foundation of the papal power. If the attribution to the Pope of the three
great words spoken by our Lord to St. Peter, made to Pope Hormisdas by the
eastern bishops and emperor, does not prove that they belong to the Pope
and were inherited by him from St. Peter, what proof remains to be offered?
If the attribution is so proved, what is there in the papal power which is
not divinely conferred and guaranteed? Neither the first Leo, nor the first
Gregory, nor the seventh Gregory, nor the thirteenth Leo, ask for more; nor
can they take less.

If St. Gregory exercised this authority in a ruined city, over barbarous
populations which had taken possession of the western provinces, over
eastern bishops who crouched at the feet of an absolute monarch, over a
rival who, with all the imperial power to back him, did not attempt to deny
it, how could a greater proof of its divine origin be given?

In this respect boundless disaster offers a proof which the greatest
prosperity would have failed to give. Not even a Greek could be found who
could attribute St. Gregory's authority in Rome to his being bishop of the
royal city. The barbarian inundation had swept away the invention of
Anatolius.

But this very time was also that in which the heresy whose leading doctrine
was denial of the Godhead of the Church's founder came from a threatening
of supremacy to an end. In Theodorick Arianism seemed to be enthroned for
predominance in all the West. His civil virtues and powerful government,
his family league of all the western rulers,--for he himself had married
Andefleda, sister of Clovis, and had given one daughter for wife to the
king of the Vandals in Africa, and another to the king of the Visigoths in
France,--was a gage of security. In Gregory's time the great enemy has laid
down his arms. He is dispossessed from the Teuton race in its Gallic,
Spanish, Burgundian, African settlements. Gregory, at the head of the
western bishops who in every country have risked life for the faith of
Rome, has gained the final victory. One only Arian tribe survives for a
time, ever struggling to possess Rome, advancing to its gates, ruining its
Campagna, torturing its captured inhabitants, but never gaining possession
of those battered walls, which Totila in part threw down and Belisarius in
piecemeal restored. And Gregory, too, is chosen to stop the Anglo-Saxon
revel of cruelty and destruction, which has turned Britain from a civilised
land into a wilderness, and from a province of the Catholic Church to
paganism, from the very time of St. Leo. Two tribes were the most savage of
the Teuton family, the Saxon and the Frank. The Frank became Catholic, and
Gregory besought the rulers of the converted nation to help his
missionaries in their perilous adventure to convert the ultramarine
neighbours, still savage and pagan. He also ordered their chief bishop to
consecrate the chief missionary to be archbishop of the Angles. As there
was a Burgundian Clotilda by the side of Clovis, there was a Frankish
Bertha by the side of Ethelbert; and these two women have a glorious place
in that second great victory of the Church. The Visigoth and Ostrogoth with
their great natural gifts could not found a kingdom. Their heresy deprived
the Father of the Son, and they were themselves sterile. Those who denied a
Divine Redeemer were not likely to convert a world.

But all through Gregory's life the Byzantine spirit of encroachment was one
of his chief enemies. The claim of its bishop to be ecumenical patriarch
stopped short of the Primacy. But one after another the bishops of that see
sought by imperial laws to detach the bishops of Eastern Illyria from their
subjection to the western patriarchate. Their nearness to Constantinople,
their being subjects of the eastern emperor, helped this encroachment.

It would appear also that in Gregory's time--a hundred years after Pope
Gelasius had put the bishop of the imperial city in remembrance that he had
been a suffragan to Heraclea--the legislation of Justinian had succeeded in
inducing the Roman See to acknowledge that bishop as a patriarch. His
actual power had gone far beyond. There can be no doubt that, while the
Pope had become legally the subject of the eastern emperor, the bishop of
Constantinople had become in fact the emperor's ecclesiastical minister in
subjugating the eastern episcopate. The Nicene episcopal hierarchy
subsisted indeed in name. To the Alexandrian and Antiochene patriarchs two
had been added--one at Jerusalem, the other at Constantinople. But the last
was so predominant--as the interpreter of the emperor's will--that he stood
at the head of the bishops in all the realm ruled from Constantinople over
against the Pope as the head of the western bishops in many various lands.

The bishops were in Justinian's legislation everywhere great imperial
officers, holding a large civil jurisdiction, especially charged with an
inspection of the manner in which civil governors performed their own
proper functions; most of all, the patriarchs and the Pope.

But that episcopal autonomy--if we may so call it--under the presidence of
the three Petrine patriarchs, which was in full life and vigour at the
Nicene Council, which St. Gregory still recognised in his letter to
Eulogius, was greatly impaired. While barbaric inundation had swept over
the West, the struggles of the Nestorian and Eutychean heresies, especially
in the two great cities of Alexandria and Antioch, had disturbed the
hierarchy and divided the people which the master at Constantinople could
hardly control. That state of the East which St. Basil deplored in burning
words--which almost defied every effort of the great Theodosius to restore
it to order--had gone on for more than two hundred years. The Greek
subtlety was not pervaded by the charity of Christ, and they carried on
their disputes over that adorable mystery of His Person in which the secret
of redeeming power is seated, with a spirit of party and savage persecution
which portended the rise of one who would deny that mystery altogether, and
reduce to a terrible servitude those who had so abused their liberty as
Christians and offered such a scandal to the religion of unity which they
professed.

From St. Sylvester to St. Leo, and, again, from St. Leo to St. Gregory, the
effort of the Popes was to maintain in its original force the Nicene
constitution of the Church. Well might they struggle for the maintenance of
that which was a derivation from their own fountainhead--"the
administration of Peter"[217]--during the three centuries of heathen
persecution by the empire. It was not they who tightened the exercise of
their supreme authority. The altered condition of the times, the tyranny of
Constantius and Valens, the dislocation of the eastern hierarchy, the rise
of a new bishop in a new capital made use of by an absolute sovereign to
control that hierarchy, a resident council at Constantinople which became
an "instrument of servitude" in the emperor's hands to degrade any bishop
at his pleasure and his own patriarch when he was not sufficiently pliant
to the master,--these were among the causes which tended to bring out a
further exercise of the power which Christ had deposited in the hands of
His Vicar to be used according to the needs of the Church. No one has
expressed with greater moderation than St. Gregory the proper power of his
see, in the words I have quoted above:[218] "I know not what bishop is not
subject to the Apostolical See, if any fault be found in bishops. But when
no fault requires it, all are equal according to the estimation of
humility." In Rome there is no growth by aid of the civil power from a
suffragan bishop to an universal Papacy. The Papacy shows itself already in
St. Clement, a disciple of St. Peter's, "whose name is written in the book
of life,"[219] and who, involving the Blessed Trinity, affirms that the
orders emanating from his see are the words of God Himself.[220] This is
the ground of St. Gregory's moderation; and whatever extension may
hereafter be found in the exercise of the same power by his successors is
drawn forth by the condition of the times, a condition often opposed to the
inmost wishes of the Pope. Those are evil times which require "a thousand
bishops rolled into one" to oppose the civil tyranny of a Hohenstaufen, the
violence of barbarism in a Rufus, or the corruption of wealth in a
Plantagenet.

Between St. Peter and St. Gregory, in 523 years, there succeeded full sixty
Popes. If we take any period of like duration in the history of the world's
kingdoms, we shall find in their rulers a remarkable contrast of varying
policy and temper. Few governments, indeed, last so long. But in the few
which have so lasted we find one sovereign bent on war, another on peace,
another on accumulating treasure, another on spending it; one given up to
selfish pleasures, here and there a ruler who reigns only for the good of
others. But in Gregory's more than sixty predecessors there is but one
idea: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the
gates of hell shall not prevail against it," is the compendious expression
of their lives and rule. For this St. Clement, who had heard the words of
his master, suffered exile and martyrdom in the Crimea. For this five
Popes, in the decade between 250 and 260, laid down their lives. The letter
of St. Julius to the Eusebian prelates is full of it. St. Leo saw the
empire of Rome falling around him, but he is so possessed with that idea
that he does not allude to the ruin of temporal kingdoms. St. Gregory
trembles for the lives of his beleaguered people, but he does not know the
see which is not subject to the Apostolic See. In weakness and in power, in
ages of an ever varying but always persistent adversity, in times of
imperial patronage, and, again, under heretical domination, the mind of
every Pope is full of this idea. The strength or the weakness of individual
character leaves it untouched. In one, and only one, of all these figures
his dignity is veiled in sadness. Pope Vigilius at Constantinople, in the
grasp of a despot, and with the stain of an irregular election never
effaced from his brow, is still conscious of it, still has courage to say,
"You may bind me, but you will not bind the Apostle St. Peter". Six hundred
years after St. Gregory, when accordingly the succession of Popes had been
rather more than doubled, I find the biographer of Innocent III. thus
commenting on his election in 1198: "The Church in these times ever had an
essential preponderance over worldly kingdoms. Resting on a spiritual
foundation, she had in herself the vigour of immaterial power, and
maintained in her application of it the superiority over merely material
forces. She alone was animated by a clearly recognised idea, which never at
any time died out of her. For its maintenance and actuation were not
limited to the person of a Pope, who could only be the representative, the
bearer, the enactor, for the world of this idea in its fullest meaning. If
here and there a particular personality seemed unequal to the carrying out
such a charge, the force of the idea did not suffer any defect through him.
Most papal governments were very short in their duration. This itself was a
challenge to those whose life was absorbed in that of the Church to place
at its head a man whose ability, enlightened and guided by strength of
will, afforded a secure assurance for the exercise of an universal charge.
From the clear self-consciousness of the Church in this respect proceeded
that firm pursuance of a great purpose distinctly perceived. It met with no
persistent or wisely conducted resistance on the part of the temporal
power. On one side all rays had their focus in one point. In temporal
princes the rays were parted. Few of these showed in their lives a purpose
to which all their acts were made consistently subordinate. As
circumstances swayed them, as the desire of the moment led them away, they
threw themselves, according to their personal inclinations, with impetuous
storm and violence upon the attainment of their wishes. They had to yield
in the end to the power of the Church, slower, indeed, but continuous,
pursued with superiority of spirit, moreover with the firm conviction of
guidance from above, and of the special protection from this inseparable,
and so attaining its mark. One only royal race ventured on a contest with
the Church for supremacy; for one only, the Hohenstaufen, were conscious of
a fixed purpose. They encountered a direct struggle with the Church; but
the conflict issued to the honour of the Church. The Popes who led it came
out of it with a renown in the world's history, which without that conflict
they would never have so gloriously attained. If we look from these events
before and afterwards upon the ages, and see how the institution of the
Papacy outlasts all other institutions in Europe, how it has seen all
States come and go, how in the endless change of human things it alone
remains unchanged, ever with the same spirit, can we then wonder if many
look up to it as the Rock unmoved amid the roaring billows of centuries?"
And he adds in a note, "This is not a polemical statement, but the verdict
of history".[221]

The time of St. Gregory in history bore the witness of six centuries; the
time of Innocent III. of twelve; the time of Leo XIII. bears that of more
than eighteen centuries to the consideration of this contrast between the
natural fickleness of men and of lives of men, shown from age to age, and
the persistence, on the other hand, of one idea in one line of men. The
eighteen centuries already past are yet only a part of an unknown future.
But to construct such a Rock amid the sea and the waves roaring in the
history of the nations reveals an abiding divine power. It leaves the
self-will of man untouched, yet sets up a rampart against it. The
explanation attempted three hundred and fifty years ago of an imposture or
an usurpation is incompatible with the clearness of an idea which is
carried out persistently through so many generations. Usurpations fall
rapidly. But in this one case the divine words themselves contain the idea
more clearly expressed than any exposition can express it. The King
delineates His kingdom as none but God can; it must also be added that He
maintains it as none but God can maintain.

We may return to St. Gregory's own time, and note the unbroken continuity
of the Primacy from St. Peter himself. It is a period of nearly six hundred
years from the day of Pentecost. Just in the middle comes the conversion
of Constantine. Before it Rome is mainly a heathen city, the government of
which bears above all things an everlasting enmity against any violation of
the supreme pontificate annexed by the provident Augustus to the imperial
power, and jealously maintained by every succeeding emperor. To suffer an
infringement of that pontificate would be to lose the grasp over the
hundred varieties of worship allowed by the State. Yet when Constantine
acknowledged the Christian faith, the names of St. Peter and St. Paul were
in full possession of the city, so far as it was Christian. They were its
patron-saints. Every Christian memory rested on the tradition of St.
Peter's pontifical acts, his chair, his baptismal font, his dwelling-place,
his martyrdom. The impossibility of such a series of facts taking
possession of a heathen city during the period antecedent to Constantine's
victory over Maxentius, save as arising from St. Peter's personal action at
Rome, is apparent.

In the second half of this period, from Constantine to St. Gregory, the
civil pre-eminence of Rome is perpetually declining. The consecration of
New Rome as the capital of the empire, in 330, by itself alone strikes at
it a fatal blow. Presently the very man who had reunited the empire divided
it among his sons, and after their death the division became permanent.
Valentinian I., in 364, whether he would or not, was obliged to make two
empires. From the death of Theodosius, in 395, the condition of the western
empire is one long agony. The power of Constantinople continually
increases. At the death of Honorius, in 423, the eastern emperor becomes
the over-lord of the western. During fifty years Rome lived only by the arm
of two semi-barbarian generals, Stilicho and Aetius. Both were assassinated
for the service; and in the boy Romulus Augustulus a western emperor ceased
to be, and the senate declared that one emperor alone was needed. After
fifty years of Arian occupation, the Gothic war ruined the city of Rome. In
Gregory's time it had ceased to be even the capital of a province. Its lord
dwelt at Constantinople; Rome was subject to his exarch at Ravenna.

Yet from Constantine and the Nicene Council the advance of Rome's Primacy
is perpetual. In Leo I. it is universally acknowledged. At the fall of the
western empire Acacius attempts his schism. He is supported while living by
the emperor Zeno, and his memory after his death by the succeeding emperor
Anastasius, who reigned for twenty-seven years, longer than any emperor
since Augustus had reigned over the whole empire. All the acts of these two
princes show that they would have liked to attach the Primacy to their
bishop at Constantinople. Anastasius twice enjoyed the luxury of deposing
him through the resident council. But Anastasius died, and the result of
the Acacian schism was a stronger confession of the Roman Primacy made to
Pope Hormisdas, the subject of the Arian Theodorick, by the whole Greek
episcopate, than had ever been given before. The sixth century and the
reign of Justinian completed the destruction of the civil state of Rome;
and the Primacy of its bishop, St. Gregory, was more than ever
acknowledged.

Not a shadow of usurpation or of claim to undue power rested upon that
unquestioned Primacy which St. Gregory exercised. While he thought the end
of the world was at hand, while he watched Rome perishing street by street,
he planted unconsciously a western Christendom in what he supposed all the
time to be a perishing world. Civil Rome was not even a provincial capital;
spiritual Rome was the acknowledged head of the world-wide Church.

I know not where to find so remarkable a contrast and connection of events
as here. Temporal losses, secular ambitions, episcopal usurpations, violent
party spirit, schism and heresy in the great eastern patriarchates, and
amid it all the descent of the Teutons on the fairest lands of the western
empire, the establishment of new sovereignties in Spain, Gaul, and Italy,
under barbarians who at the time of their descent were Arian heretics, and
afterwards became Catholic, with the result that Gregory has to keep watch
within the walls of Rome for a whole generation against the Lombard, still
in unmitigated savagery and unabated heresy, and that the world-wide Church
acknowledges him for her ruler without a dissenting voice. The "Servant of
the servants of God" chides and corrects the would-be "ecumenical
patriarch," who has risen since Constantine from the suffragan of a
Thracian city to be bishop of Nova Roma and right hand of the emperor; who
has deposed Alexandria from the second place and Antioch from the third,
but cannot take the first place from the See of Peter. The perpetual
ambition of the bishops of Nova Roma, the perpetual fostering of that
ambition for his own purpose by the emperor, only illustrates more vividly
the inaccessible dignity which both would fain have transferred to the city
of Constantine, but were obliged to leave with the city of Peter. As the
forum of Trajan sinks down stone by stone, the kings of the West are
preparing to flock in pilgrimage to the shrine of Peter. This was the
answer which the captives in the forum made to the deliverer of their race.

There is nothing like this elsewhere in history.

Constantine, Valens, Theodosius, Justinian, and, no less, Alaric and
Ataulph, Attila and Genseric, Theodorick and Clovis, Arius, Nestorius,
Eutyches, as well as St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St. Ambrose, St.
Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Cyril, and, again, Dioscorus, Acacius, and a
multitude of the most opposing minds and beliefs which these represent,
contribute, in their time and degree, for the most part unconsciously, and
many against their settled purpose, to acknowledge this Primacy as the Rock
of the Church, the source of spiritual jurisdiction, the centre of a divine
unity in a warring world. In St. Gregory we see the power which has had
antecedents so strange and concomitants so repulsive deposited in the hands
of a feeble old man who is constantly mourning over the cares in which that
universal government involves him, while the world for evermore shall
regard him as the type and standard of the true spiritual ruler, who calls
himself, not Ecumenical Bishop, but Servant of the servants of God. It is a
title which his successors will take from his hand and keep for ever as the
badge of the Primacy which it illustrates, while it serves as the seal of
its acts of power. He calls himself servant just when he is supreme.

In St. Gregory the Great, the whole ancient world, the Church's first
discipline and original government, run to their ultimate issue. In him the
patriarchal system, as it met the shock of absolute power in the civil
sovereign, and the subversion of the western empire by barbarous
incursions, accompanied by the establishment of new sovereignties and the
foundation of a new Rome, the rival and then the tyrant of the old Rome,
receives its consummation. The medieval world has not yet begun. The
spurious Mahometan theocracy is waiting to arise. In the midst of a world
in confusion, of a dethroned city falling into ruins, the successor of St.
Peter sits on an undisputed spiritual throne upon which a new world will be
based in the West, against which the Khalifs of a false religion will exert
all their rage in the East and South, and strengthen the rule which they
parody. A new power, which utterly denies the Christian faith, which
destroys hundreds of its episcopal sees and severs whole countries from its
sway, will dash with all its violence against the Rock of Peter, and
finally will have the effect of making the bishop who is there enthroned
more than ever the symbol, the seat, and the champion of the Kingdom of the
Cross.

NOTES:

[173] See Gregorovius, ii. 3, 4.

[174] Gregorovius, ii. 6.

[175] _Ibid._, ii. 5, literal.

[176] Nirschl, iii. 534.

[177] Third letter of Pelagius II.; Mansi ix., p. 889: Nefandissima gens.

[178] Attested by St. Gregory of Tours, who heard it from a deacon of his
church then at Rome.

[179] _Ep._ i. 25, p. 514.

[180] _Homily_ xviii. _on Ezechiel_, tom. i. 1374.

[181] Nahum ii, 11.

[182] Micheas i. 16.

[183] End of the _Homilies on Ezechiel_, tom. i. 1430.

[184] Quoted by Reumont, ii. 90.

[185] _Ep._ v. 42, p. 769.

[186] Reumont and Gregorovius.

[187] _Ep._ v. 21, p. 751.

[188] _Ep._ v. 20, tom. ii. 747.

[189] _Ep._ vii. 40, p. 887.

[190] I have drawn attention to this fact, and the idea which it represents
as attested by Popes earlier than St. Gregory, in vol. v., pp. 53-60, of
the _Formation of Christendom_, "The Throne," &c.

[191] Rump, ix. 501-2; see his words quoted above, p. 107.

[192] _Ep._ vii. 34, p. 882.

[193] Rump, ix. 502.

[194] Providentissime piissimus Dominus ad compescendos bellicos motus
pacem quaerit ecclesiae _atque ad hujus compagem sacerdotum dignatur corda
reducere_.-_Ep._ v. 20, p. 747.

[195] De vi et ratione Primatus Romani Pontificis--c. iii., quoting the
letter of St. Gregory to Eulogius, viii. 30.

[196] _Ep._ ix. 59, p. 976.

[197] _Ep._ ii. 52, p. 618.

[198] _Ep._ xi. 37, p. 1120.

[199] _Ep._ vi. 60, p. 836.

[200] _Ep._ iv. 38, p. 718.

[201] _Ep._ v. 54, p. 784.

[202] _Ep._ vi. 59, p. 835.

[203] _Dialog._, iii. 31, p. 345, A.D. 594.

[204] _Ep._ i. 43, p. 531.

[205] _Ep._ ix. 121, pp. 1026-8, shortened.

[206] _Dialog._, iii. 31, p. 348.

[207] _Ep._ ix. 122, p. 1028.

[208] Paralipom. i. 11, 18.

[209] _Ep._ ix. 61, p. 977.

[210] Gibbon, ch. xxxviii.: a sneer or two have been omitted.

[211] Gibbon, ch. xxxix.

[212] Ch. xxxviii.

[213] See above, p. 141.

[214] See Kurth, ii. 25-6.

[215] See in the _Kirchen-lexicon_ of Card. Hergenroether the article on
Gregory I., vol. v., p. 1079.

[216] See Hefele, _Conciliengeschichte_, iii., p. 56; St. Gregory, ii., p.
1294; Mansi, x., p. 486.

[217] S. Siricius, _Ep._

[218] P. 308.

[219] Philippians iv. 3.

[220] See St. Clement's epistle, sec. 59. "Receive our counsel and you
shall not repent of it. For, as God liveth, and as the Lord Jesus Christ
liveth, and the Holy Spirit, and the faith and the hope of the elect, he
who performs in humility, with assiduous goodness, and without swerving,
_the commands and injunctions of God_, he shall be enrolled and esteemed in
the number of those saved through Jesus Christ, through whom be glory to
Him for ever and ever. Amen. But if any disobey _what has been ordered by
Him through us_, let them know that they will involve themselves in a fall,
and no slight danger, but we shall be innocent of this sin."

[221] Hurter's _Geschichte Papst Innocenz des Dritten_, i. 85-7.




INDEX.


  _Acacius_, bishop of Constantinople, 471-489, 65;
    his conduct to the year 482, 66;
    induces Zeno to publish a formulary of doctrine, 70;
    deposed by Pope Felix, 75;
    rejects the Pope's sentence, 83;
    attempts superiority over the eastern patriarchates, 84-86;
    position taken up by him against the Pope, 84-91;
    dies after five years of excommunication in 489, defying the
      Pope, 83;
    his name erased from the diptychs, 168;
    summary of his conduct and aims, 174-6

  _Agapetus_, Pope, his accession, 202;
    confirms all his old rights to the Primate of Carthage, 203;
    confirms Justinian's profession of faith, at the emperor's
      request, 204;
    goes to Constantinople, deposes Anthimus and consecrates Mennas
      patriarch, 205

  _Agnostics_, generated by schismatics, 5

  _Alexandria and Antioch_, fearful state of their
      patriarchates, 184;
    the vast difference between their patriarchs and the Primacy, 185

  _Anastasius II._, Pope, 496-8, 120;
    his letter to the emperor asserts that as the imperial secular
      dignity is pre-eminent in the whole world, so the Principate
      of St. Peter's See in the whole Church, 120;
    both are divine delegations, 121;
    writes to Clovis upon his conversion, 122;
    anticipates the great results to follow from it, 123

  _Anastasius_, eastern emperor in 491, made emperor when a
      _Silentiarius_ in the court, 518, 83;
    summary of his reign in the "libellus synodicus," 100-1;
    four Popes--Gelasius, Anastasius, Symmachus, and Hormisdas--have
      to deal with him, 102;
    tries to prevent the election of Pope Symmachus, 129;
    he is obliged to allow the Roman See not to be judged, 143;
    he deposes Euphemius, and puts Macedonius in his stead at
      Constantinople, 143;
    exalts Timotheus to the see of Constantinople, 148;
    fills the eastern patriarchal sees with heretics, 149;
    being pressed by Vitalian, betakes himself to Pope Hormisdas, 150;
    receives his conditions, except those concerning Acacius, 159;
    his treachery and cruelty, 160;
    his sudden death, 162

  _Anatolius_, bishop of Constantinople, crowns the emperor Leo I.,
      dies in 458, 64;
    his ambition seen and checked by St. Leo, 60;
    is to Leo what John the Faster is to Gregory, 307

  _Anicius Olybrius_, Roman emperor, 20

  _Anthemius_, Roman emperor, 18

  _Arianism_, propagated among the Goths by the emperor Valens, 49;
    communicated by them to the Teuton tribes, 29;
    prevalent throughout the West, 50;
    fails in the Vandal, Visigothic, Burgundian, and Ostrogothic
     kingdoms, 327-9

  _Aspar_, Arian Goth, makes Leo I. emperor, and is slain by him, 62

  _Ataulph_, marries Galla Placidia, his judgment upon the Goths and
      Romans, 43

  _Avitus, St._, bishop of Vienne, in Gaul, his character of
      Acacius, 93;
    his letter to Clovis on his conversion, 124;
    urges his duty to propagate the faith in the peoples around him,
      126;
    writes to the Roman senate that the cause of the Bishop of Rome is
      not one bishop but that of the Episcopate itself, 140

  _Avitus_, Roman emperor, 13

  _Augustine, St._, the great victory of the Church which he did
      not foresee, 57


  _Baronius_, quoted, 76, 79, 202, 207

  _Basiliscus_, usurper, first of the theologising emperors, 46

  _Belisarius_, reconquers Northern Africa, 199;
    begins the Gothic war, and enters Rome, 205;
    deposes Pope Silverius, 207;
    defends Rome against Vitiges, 210;
    captures Rome the third time, 207

  _Benedict, St._, his monastery at Monte Cassino destroyed by the
      Lombards, 290;
    his Order has its chief seat for 140 years at St. John Lateran, 290;
    rebukes and subdues Totila, 215

  _Byzantium_, the over-lordship of its emperor acknowledged,
      18, 23;
    the succession to its throne, 61;
    its constitution under Justinian contrasted with the medieval
      constitution of England, 250


  _Cassiodorus_, his letter as Praetorian prefect to Pope John II., 195

  _Church, Catholic_, its two great victories, 5, 25;
    attested and described by Gibbon, 325

  _Civilta Cattolica_, quoted, 103, 104, 128

  _Constantinople_, its seven bishops who follow Anatolius, 180;
    submission of its bishop, clergy, emperor, and nobles to Pope
      Hormisdas, 187;
    service of its cathedral under Justinian, 244;
    growth of its bishop from St. Leo to St. Gregory, 342;
    all the work of the imperial power, 344;
    perpetual encroachment of its bishops, 348, 359

  _Cyprian, St._, quoted, "De Unitate Ecclesiae," 3


  _Dante_, quoted, 184; on Justinian, 197

  _Diptychs_, their meaning and force, 83


  _Ennodius, St._, bishop of Pavia, asserts that God has reserved to
      Himself all judgment upon the successors of St. Peter, 142;
    his character of Acacius, 93

  _Euphemius_, in 490 succeeds Fravita at Constantinople, 96;
    opposes the emperor Anastasius, but signs his Henotikon, 97;
    begs for reconciliation with Pope Felix, but will not give up
      Acacius, 97;
    recognises the authority of Pope Gelasius, 103-5;
    deposed by the emperor through the Resident Council in 496, 114

  _Eutychius_, patriarch of Constantinople, 239;
    presides over the Fifth Council, 240;
    consecrates Santa Sophia in 563, 244;
    is deposed by Justinian in 565, 245


  _Felix III._, Pope, 483-492, 71;
    his letter to the emperor Zeno, stating his succession from
      St. Peter, 72;
    his letter to Acacius, 73;
    holds a council in 484 and deposes Acacius, 75;
    his sentence, recounting the misdeeds of Acacius, 76-8;
    the synodal sentence signed by the Pope alone, which is justified by
      the Roman synod, 79;
    denounces Acacius to the emperor Zeno, 80;
    his utter helplessness as to secular support when he thus
      writes, 82, 88;
    writes afresh to the emperor Zeno that the Apostle Peter speaks in
      him as his Vicar, 94;
    delays to grant communion to Fravita, successor of Acacius, 94;
    dies after nine years of pontificate, 97.

  _Filicaja_, quoted, 91

  _Franks_, made great by the Catholic faith, 44, 348;
    so found a kingdom, while Ostrogoths and Visigoths lose it, 348

  _Fravita_, succeeds Acacius at Constantinople, and begs for the
      Pope's recognition, 93;
    dies after three months, 96


  _Gelasius_, Pope, 492, 98;
    condition of the Empire and Church at his accession, 98-9;
    writes to Euphemius, who will cede everything except the person of
      Acacius, 103-5;
    the bishops of Eastern Illyricum profess their obedience to the
      Apostolic See, 105-6;
    to whom the Pope declares that the see of Constantinople has no
      precedence over other bishops, 107;
    that the Holy See, in virtue of its Principate, confirms every
      council, 109;
    his great letter to the emperor Anastasius defines the domain of
      the Two Powers, 110;
    the Primacy instituted by Christ, acknowledged by the Church, 111;
    in the Roman synod of 496, declares the divine Primacy of the Roman
      See, the second rank of Alexandria, and the third of Antioch, as
      sees of Peter, 113;
    the three Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus in 431, and Chalcedon, to be
      general, 116;
    omits the Council of Constantinople in 381, 116;
    death of Gelasius, and character of the time of his sitting, 118;
    calls Odoacer "barbarian and heretic," 68

  _Gennadius_ bishop of Constantinople, 458-71, 64

  _Gibbon_, acknowledges the two great victories of the Church, 325;
    and the work of the Church in the Spanish monarchy, 322;
    and the influence of bishops in establishing the French
      monarchy, 329

  _Glycerius_, Roman emperor, 21

  _Gregorovius_, "Geschichte der Stadt Rom.," quoted, 9, 11, 13, 14,
      23, 42, 208, 222, 245, 247, 272-3, 275

  _Gregory, St., the Great_, his ancestry, 276;
    state of Rome described by his predecessor Pope Pelagius, 277;
    elected Pope, 590--tries for six months to escape, 278;
    describes the work he was undertaking, 279;
    and the misery of Rome in the words of Ezechiel, 281;
    the Rome of St. Leo and the Rome of St. Gregory, 284;
    his works done out of this Rome, 285-7;
    the Lombard descent on Italy, 288;
    alludes to a strange occurrence in St. Agatha dei Goti, 21;
    refers to his great-grandfather, Pope Felix III., 81;
    describes St. Benedict rebuking Totila, 215;
    his right of reporting injustice to the emperor, 260;
    his Primacy untouched by Rome's calamities, 292;
    describes his Primacy to the empress Constantina, 295;
    identifies to her his authority with that of St. Peter, 296;
    also to the emperor Mauritius, 299;
    and to the Lombard queen Theodelinda, 312;
    and to the king of the Franks, 312;
    and to Rechared, Gothic king of Spain, 319;
    and in the appointment of the English hierarchy, 315;
    his inference from the original patriarchal sees being all sees
      of Peter, 301;
    exposes the contrast between the assumed title of the patriarch
      of Constantinople and his own Principate, 302-7;
    his title, "Servant of the servants of God," expresses his
      administration, 308;
    as fourth Doctor of the western Church, 334;
    as chief artificer in the Church's second victory, 335;
    England indebted to him, both for hierarchy and civil constitution,
      336;
    his action as bishop, metropolitan, patriarch, and Pope, 337;
    councils held by him at Rome, 338;
    defends the liberties of monasteries against bishops, 339;
    and as metropolitan succours distressed bishoprics, 340;
    called the father of the monks, 341;
    compared with St. Leo in the exercise of the Primacy, 342;
    continues the struggle of the Popes from St. Sylvester to maintain
      the Nicene constitution, 350

  _Gregory of Tours, St._, notes the prospering of the Catholic,
      and the decline of the Arian kingdoms, 123;
    attests St. Gregory's flight from the papacy, 279

  _Guizot_, his witness to the action of the hierarchy, 54


  _Hefele_, "Conciliengeschichte," quoted, 93, 100, 114, 116, 128,
      136, 137, 139, 142, 202, 232

  _Hergenroether_, Card., quoted, "Kirchengeschichte," 26, 114, 185,
      232, 244;
    "Photius, sein Leben," 46, 47, 68, 75, 78, 83, 92, 93, 104, 128,
      129, 143, 159, 165, 170, 187, 196, 203, 205, 207, 228, 230, 232,
      245, 270, 271

  _Hilarus_, Pope, 16

  _Hormisdas_, deacon, elected Pope in 514, 149;
    sends a legation to the emperor Anastasius, who had applied to his
      fatherly affection, 150;
    instruction given to his legates, 151-8;
    orders them not to be introduced by the bishop of Constantinople,
      157;
    conditions of reunion proposed by him to the emperor, 158;
    is deceived by the emperor, and denounces the treachery of Greek
      diplomacy, 160;
    is appealed to by the Syrian Archimandrites, 161;
    resolves how to terminate the Acacian schism, 164;
    his formulary of union accepted by the East, 167;
    dies in 523, 193

  _Hurter's_ "Geschichte Papst Innocenz des Dritten," the papal idea
      carried out through generations, 353-5


  _Ignatius, St._, of Antioch, quoted, 12


  _Jerome, St._, the result which he did not foresee, 57

  _John_, patriarch of Constantinople, accepts the formulary of Pope
      Hormisdas, 166

  _John I._, Pope, martyred by Theodorick, 193

  _John II._, Pope, praises Justinian for acknowledging the Primacy,
      and confirms his confession of faith, 191

  _John Talaia_, elected patriarch of Alexandria, 68;
    offends Acacius, 69;
    flies for refuge to Pope Simplicius, 71;
    is supported by Pope Felix, 75;
    made bishop of Nola by Pope Felix, 92

  _John The Faster_, patriarch of Constantinople, assumes a
      scandalous title, 299;
    holds to Gregory the position of Anatolius to Leo, 307

  _Justin I._, made emperor, 162;
    writes to Pope Hormisdas, 163;
    announces to him the condemnation of Acacius, 169;
    his reign of nine years, 198

  _Justinian_, his origin, 162;
    entreats Pope Hormisdas to restore unity, 164;
    acknowledges to Pope John II. his Primacy, 189;
    enacts the _Pandects_, 192;
    acknowledged the Pope's Primacy all his life, 195;
    his character as legislator, 197;
    recovers North Africa, 199;
    begins the Gothic war, 206;
    domineers over the eastern Church, 227-32;
    acknowledges the dignity of Pope Vigilius, 232;
    persecutes him, 232-40;
    issues dogmatic decrees, 236, 242;
    issues Pragmatic Sanction for Italy, 243;
    deposes his patriarch Eutychius, 244;
    is conception of Church and State, 248-56;
    makes bishops and governors exercise mutual supervision, 257;
    completeness and cordiality of his alliance with the Church, 261;
    his spirit the opposite to that of modern governments, 262;
    how far he maintains, how far goes beyond, the imperial idea, 264-9;
    result spiritual and temporal of his reign, 270


  _Kurth_, quoted "Les Origines de la Civilisation modern," 41;
    on the policy of Justinian, 255;
    the Church's power over the new nations, 333


  _Leander, St._, archbishop of Seville, becomes an intimate friend of
      St. Gregory during his nunciature at Constantinople, 277;
    receives the pallium from St Gregory, 317, 321

  _Leo I., St._, his universal Pastorship acknowledged by the Church
      in General Council, 1-3;
    and the succession of the Popes during 400 years, from St. Peter, 3;
    rescues Rome from Attila, and from Genseric, 7-8;
    his character, acts, and times, 15;
    stands between the two great victories of the Church, and represents
      both, 25-6;
    the result which St. Leo did not foresee, 57;
    his prescience of usurpation from the Byzantine bishop, 60;
    his prescience of what the bishops of Constantinople aimed at, 307;
    draws out the office and functions of the nuncio, 338

  _Leo I._, emperor, 467, 62;
    dies in 474, 63

  _Leo II._, an infant, succeeds for a few months, 63

  _Liberatus_, "Breviarium," quoted, 208, 209

  _Libius Severus_, Roman emperor, 16

  _Lombards_, their descent on Italy and uncivilised savagery, 287-91;
    for ever strive to possess Rome, but never succeed, 347


  _Macedonius_, bishop of Constantinople, feels his unlawful
      appointment, 143;
    persecuted during fifteen years, and finally deposed by the emperor
      Anastasius, 144-8;
    refuses to give up the Council of Chalcedon, but will not surrender
      the memory of Acacius, and never enjoys communion with the Pope,
      144-8

  _Majorian_, Roman emperor, 14

  _Martyrdom_, Papal, of 300 years, 10, 54

  _Mausoleum of Hadrian_, stripped of its statues, 211;
    an apparition of St. Michael changes its name, 278

  _Mennas_, patriarch of Constantinople, 228-239


  _Nepos_, Roman emperor, 21


  _Odoacer_, extinguishes the western emperor, 22;
    named Patricius of the Romans by the emperor Zeno, 35;
    slain by Theodorick, 38;
    his exaltation foretold by St. Severinus, 22

  _Olybrius_, Roman emperor, 20

  _Orosius_, an important anecdote preserved by him, 43


  _Pallium_, sent by the Pope to the chief bishop in each province, 337;
    the duties and powers which it carried with it, 337

  _Papal election_, the freedom of, assailed by Odoacer, 194, 292;
    by Theodorick and Justinian, 210, 292

  _Pelagius II._, Pope, 578-590, describes the state of Rome, 277

  _Petra Apostolica_, in the sixty Popes preceding Gregory, 352;
    in the Popes from St. Gregory to Innocent III., 353;
    in the Popes from Innocent III. to Leo XIII., 355;
    sustained by opposing forces, 359

  _Philips_, "Kirchenrecht," his judgment of Theodorick, 41;
    on Byzantine succession, 61

  _Primacy, the Roman_, its denial suicidal in all who believe one holy
      Catholic Church, 3-4;
    the creator of Christendom, 5, 6, 10, 57-8;
    tested by the division of the empire, 51;
    still more by the extinction of the western emperor, 53;
    witness to it by Guizot, 55;
    saves, in the seven successors of St. Leo, the eastern Church from
      becoming Eutychean, 179-86;
    developed by the sufferings of sixty years, 188;
    acknowledged by the Council of Africa after the expulsion of the
      Vandals, 201;
    defined by the Vatican Council, as held by St. Gregory I., 307;
    saves the western bishops from absorption in their several countries,
      330;
    preserver of civil liberties, 333;
    resister of Byzantine despotism, 333;
    its development from St. Leo I. to St. Gregory I., 342;
    confirmed and illustrated by civil disasters, 346;
    as Rome, the secular city, diminishes, the Primacy advances, 357


  _Rechared_, king of the Spanish Visigoths, converted, 318;
   his letter to St. Gregory informing him of his conversion, 321

  _Reumont_, "Geschichte der Stadt Rom.," quoted, over-lordship of
      Byzantium, 19;
    Odoacer, Patricius at Rome, 35;
    picture of Theodorick, 36;
    of his government, 38;
    sparing of St. Peter's and St. Paul's, 213;
    Totila's deeds, 215;
    Narses made Patricius of Rome, 245;
    the Pragmatic Sanction, 246

  _Riffel_, "Kirche und Staat," quoted, 190, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 267

  _Roehrbacher_, the German edition of the history, quoted, 128, 142, 162,
      192, 198, 199, 200, 202, 205, 245, 303, 305

  _Rome_, its fall as a city coeval with the universal recognition
      of the Papal Primacy, 6-10;
    this fall and this recognition traced from Constantine to St.
      Gregory, 356-8;
    imperial, its death agony of twenty-one years, 23;
    its sufferings in the Gothic war, 210-23;
    the new city, from Narses, lives only by the Primacy, 294;
    its extreme misery in the days of St. Gregory, 281, 284

  _Romulus Augustulus_, Roman emperor, 21


  _Saxons_, rudest of Teuton tribes, humanised by St. Gregory, 348

  _Sidonius Apollinaris_, picture of the Roman senate, 17;
    description of Rome in 467, 18;
    makes Rome acknowledge the over-lordship of the East, 19;
    describes the Roman baths, 19

  _Silverius, St._, Pope, elected in 536, 205;
    deposed by Belisarius, at the instigation of Theodora, 208;
    martyred in the island of Palmaria, 209

  _Simplicius_, Pope, his outlook from Rome, 45;
    his letter to the emperor Zeno, 66

  _Symmachus_, elected Pope in 498, 128;
    his letter to the eastern emperor, 129;
    compares the imperial and the papal power, 131;
    they are the two heads of human society, 133;
    Catholic princes acknowledge Popes on their accession, 134;
    inferences to be deduced from this letter, 136;
    the Synodus Palmaris refuses to judge the Pope, 136;
    addressed by eastern bishops in their misery as a father by his
      children, 149;
    dies in 514, 149


  _Theodora_, empress, her promises to Vigilius, 208;
   her violent deposition of Pope Silverius, 209

  _Theodorick_, the Ostrogoth, how nurtured, 36;
    marches on Italy, 37;
    which he conquers, and slays Odoacer, 38;
    character of his reign, 39;
    slays Pope John I., and his own ministers, Boethius and Symmachus,
      41, 329;
    judgment of him by St. Gregory, 41;
    contrast with Clovis, 42;
    his kingdom came to nothing, 43;
    asks the title of king from the emperor Anastasius, 128;
    determines the election of Pope Symmachus against Laurentius, 129;
    induced to send a bishop as visitor of the Roman Church, 137;
    said by the emperor to have the charge of governing the Romans
      committed to him, 159;
    his ability and family connections, 177;
    final failure of his state, his family, and people, 328-9;
    his attempt to maintain Arianism in the West foiled, 347

  _Thierry_, "Derniers temps de l'Empire d'Occident," 20

  _Tillemont_, quoted, 64

  _Totila_, elected Gothic king, 214;
    is warned by St. Benedict, 215;
    takes Rome, 216;
    takes Rome, its fourth capture, 218;
    killed at Taginas, 219


  _Valens_, emperor, poisons the western empire with Arianism, 50, 92

  _Valentinian III._, his edict in 447 terms the Pope, Leo I.,
      _principem episcopalis coronae_, 56;
    murdered by Maximus, 13

  _Vere, A. de_, quoted, "Legends and Records," 1, 12;
    "Chains of St. Peter," 272

  _Vigilius_, made Pope by Belisarius, 209;
    summoned to Constantinople by Justinian, 226;
    his persecution there, 232-243;
    his dignity as Pope left unimpaired, 293

  _Vitiges_, besieges Rome, and ruins the aqueducts and Campagna, 210-13;
    carried a captive to Constantinople, 214


  _Wandering of the nations_, 26-35


  _Zeno_, eastern emperor, 63;
    second of the theologising emperors, 47;
    his conduct and character, 63;
    matched with the emperor Valens, 92;
    his death, 91, 99




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