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

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 Cæsarean 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 Talaia113 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.