The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I

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 - S. Siricius, Ep.]– 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 - P. 308 (#FNanchor_194_194).] "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 - Philippians iv. 3.] and who, involving the Blessed Trinity, affirms that the orders emanating from his see are the words of God Himself.[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."] 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 - Hurter's Geschichte Papst Innocenz des Dritten, i. 85-7.]

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

1

Nova Patrum bibliotheca, p. vi.: In Pontificum reapse epistolis tota ecclesiæ administratio cognoscitur.

2

See p. 351 below; also Church and State, pp. 198-200, for the full statement of this passage.

3

"Episcopatus unus est cujus a singulis in solidum pars tenetur." – S. Cyprian, De Unitate Ecclesiæ.

4

Gregorovius, i. 286. "Das Papstthum, vom Kaiser des Abendlandes befreit, erstand, und die Kirche Roms wuchs unter Trümmern mächtig 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 prærogativa partis armatæ, 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 quæ Agrippa dedit, vel ille cujus
Bustum Dalmaticæ vident Salonæ,
Ad thermas tamen ire sed libebat,
Privato bene præbitas pudori".