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

Gregory returned from Constantinople in 585, and lived as one of the seven deacons on the Cœlian 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 Cœli, lætare, 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 letter179 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 Cæsars 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.