Kitabı oku: «Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III», sayfa 14

A more peremptory assertion cannot be made than this, and it is made by a Pope to an emperor, on the occasion of calling a General Council. It is carried by his legates, as ambassadors carry the commission of their sovereign. The answer which the Council sent at its conclusion to the Pope shows how it was received. It ascribes to the Pope in fullest terms the position which he claimed, beginning in these words: “Greatest diseases require the greatest remedies, as you, most Blessed, know; and therefore Christ our God, whose power created, whose wisdom provides all things, has appointed your Holiness as a skilled physician to meet the contagion of heresy by the force of true belief, and to impart the vigour of health to the members of the Church. We then, having read through the letters of a true confession sent by your paternal Blessedness to the most gracious emperor, leave to you what is to be done; to you who hold the first see of the universal Church, standing on the firm rock of faith. We recognise your letters as written from the supreme head of the apostles. By them we have cast out the heretical sect which has lately set up its manifold error. According to the sentence previously passed upon them, we have cast out Theodore, bishop of Pharan, Sergius, Honorius, Cyrus, Paul, Pyrrhus, and Peter. We have sent what we have done, and these things will be learned from those who represented you, Theodore and George, priests; John, deacon; and Constantine, sub-deacon. They state accurately the doctrine which they have approved, which we beseech your paternal Holiness to set your seal upon by your honoured rescript.”

Is it possible to accept in more express terms the authority claimed by the Pope in his letter to the emperor, including that descent from Peter, to whom the promise made by our Lord is made the source and the guarantee of the authority? Is it possible more fully to acknowledge his right to confirm, in their own words, “to set his seal” on their proceedings?

But the Council also congratulated the emperor on the work over which as sovereign he had presided. Its success they attribute to the Pope in these words: “The highest of all, the first apostle fought with us; for we had for our supporter, who by his writing set forth the mystery of theology, his imitator and the successor of his chair. The city of Rome the elder presented to you a confession dictated by God, and caused the daylight of belief to rise from the West. Paper and ink it seemed, but Peter spoke by Agatho.”

This address is signed first by the three legates, Theodore, George and John, “holding the place of most Blessed Agatho, universal Pope of the City of Rome,” next by “George, by the mercy of God bishop of Constantinople, New Rome” – thirdly by Peter, a priest, holding the place of the Apostolic See of Alexandria; fourthly by Theophanes, by the mercy of God bishop of Antioch, Theopolis; fifthly by George, the priest, representing Theodore, not bishop but representing the See of Jerusalem.

Thus these two patriarchates could only shew two priests to record their agreement.

The emperor issued an edict in which he set forth a most carefully drawn creed. He also addressed a letter to Pope Leo, who had succeeded Agatho. He mentions how the legates of the Pope had been received, how every authority of Scripture and the preceding Councils had been carefully examined; “moreover we beheld as it were with the eyes of our mind the chief of the apostolic choir, the Peter of the first see, setting forth the mystery of the whole dispensation, and addressing us in the words of Christ: Thou art Christ the Son of the living God. For his sacred letter portrayed to us the whole Christ, which we joyfully and sincerely received and folded him in our arms as Peter himself. God has done glorious things and preserved to us the faith entire. How should He not in that rock in which He founded the Church Himself, and foretold that the gates of hell, the snares of heretics, should not prevail against it? Act therefore as a man and be firm, gird thyself with the sword of the word, and sharpen it with divine zeal. Be the firm champion of the right faith; study to cut short every heretical talk or attempt as of old Peter struck off with the sword the sense of Jewish hearing, prefiguring the deafness of the legal and servile synagogue. The condition of the whole Roman polity is tranquillised with the tranquillity of the faith. We exhort therefore your most sacred headship to send at once your nuntio to our royal city, that he may dwell here and in all emergent matters, dogmatic, canonical, or simply ecclesiastical may express the person of your Holiness.

“Farewell in the Lord, most blessed, and pray the more earnestly for our realm.”

We have, therefore, on this great occasion a complete concurrence of three authorities; of the Pope in addressing an eastern emperor in prospect of a General Council, of that Council itself answering this address of the Pope; of the emperor in his letter to the Pope by his legates returning to him from the Council; and it is to be noted that the Pope does not assert the nature of his authority as descending by a divine grant to Peter and exercised in virtue of it during six centuries with any greater emphasis than the emperor and the Council acknowledge it.

In the meantime Pope Agatho had died on the 10th January, 681. The see remained vacant eighteen months, during which the Council ended. Leo II. was consecrated the 17th August, 682, and his short pontificate ended the 3rd July, 683. To him the letter of the emperor was carried, and he discharged the office of confirming this Council, as St. Leo had confirmed that of Chalcedon, and of bringing it to the knowledge of the West.

The letter to the emperor, in which Leo II. confirms the Sixth Council, is a document extending over nearly six folio columns. It shows throughout the Pope's great anxiety for the exact maintenance of the faith, and how severe had been the struggle with the heresy which had been upheld by two emperors and by four successive patriarchs of the imperial city. The Pope draws out in it a creed of the utmost minuteness in regard of the contested doctrine, the Person of our Lord in His Two Natures. He repeats his acknowledgment of the Five preceding General Councils as handing down one continuous doctrine from the beginning, and joins with them the Council just held as witness of the same doctrine; and he likewise joins the heretics during several hundred years from Arius, in one anathema, which closes with the inventors of this new error – that is, “Theodore, Bishop of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, who lurked like thieves in the See of Constantinople rather than sat as guides; nay, and also Honorius, who did not set himself to hallow this Apostolic Church by the teaching of the apostolic tradition, but allowed it, being spotless, to be stained by a profane betrayal”. These words, by which St. Leo expressed how far he assented to the condemnation of Honorius by the Council, have a light thrown upon them by the words which he used in making known the condemnation of the Monothelites to the Spanish bishops, when among the condemned he included Honorius, “who did not extinguish the flame of heretical doctrine when it first arose, as was the office of the apostolic authority, but by neglecting fostered it”. And, again, in announcing the confirmation of the Council to the Spanish king, Erwig, he says of Honorius, “who allowed the spotless rule of the apostolic tradition, which he had received from his predecessors, to be stained”.

It may be noted that St. Leo II. does not enter into the matter contained in the letters of Honorius; does not express agreement with words which passed in the Council that “they were opposed to apostolic belief, to the declarations of Councils, and of all the approved fathers,” that “they agreed with the false doctrines of heretics”; he does not repeat the reproach that Honorius, by proof of his letter to Sergius, agreed in all respects with his meaning, and confirmed his godless doctrines. “Be it sufficient for us to know that if the name of Pope Honorius appeared in those sentences it certainly was not because he really taught or held the Monothelite heresy, but solely because with too great allowance he did not rebuke it, nor set himself to strangle it at its beginning, insomuch as undoubtedly that manner of action had given great encouragement to the favourers of those errors.” I quote two further judgments of the present day, that “the letters of Honorius contain nothing heretical,” and that “in fact no error of faith whatever is found in those letters of Honorius”. The anathema which lies on the memory of Honorius, who lived in renown and was buried in honour in St. Peter's, is a warning given by the Holy See itself to everyone who sits in that chair to weigh well both words and conduct, and guard both from the slightest negligence in matters of doctrine. Honorius died before the Exposition of Sergius was published or presented for his acceptance. Had he lived to judge of it those who study the history of the time succeeding down to the Sixth Council cannot doubt that he would have censured it as his successors censured it.

The Sixth Council closes a crisis of danger to the faith of the Church than which no greater is to be found in all history. The years from 638, in which Honorius died, to 682, in which his successor St. Leo II. approved the doctrinal decision of the Council, and further, allowed the conduct of a predecessor to be condemned, are occupied by ten successors of Honorius, every one of whom with the utmost zeal condemned the heresy which was supported by two emperors, wielding absolute power, and by four successive patriarchs of Constantinople, besides patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch. All these put ecclesiastical authority at the service of these emperors to carry out their will. Heraclius and Constans II. were not theologians, and it required theological skill to construct concerning the Person of our Lord a heresy which could present itself to the fastidious Greek mind, clothed in proper expressions of a language lending itself with unsurpassable accuracy to every variation of thought. Cyrus, made for his first suggestions, by the grateful monarch, patriarch of Alexandria, was so good as to provide Heraclius with doctrinal decrees intended to make the disloyal sects of Egypt believe that they could express their own false doctrine in words which might pass for an assent to the Council of Chalcedon and the doctrine of St. Leo. When the patriarch Sophronius denounced the error and appealed to Rome and Pope Honorius in words which after twelve hundred years sound like a trumpet's call, Sergius being patriarch of Constantinople, the bosom friend and most trusted counsellor of Heraclius, holding the see of the Golden City for eight and twenty years, living and dying, too, in the greatest renown as an orthodox bishop, approached Pope Honorius with insidious language, totally disguising the real state of things in the East. He wished the Pope to believe that Cyrus of Alexandria was winning the proud and tumultuous sects of Egypt to Catholic union with the doctrine of St. Leo, which Honorius held with the utmost fidelity. Not only did he write letters, but he constructed a document to which he induced the emperor to set the imperial seal and require it to be signed by all bishops, and especially by the bishop of Rome. The document was intended to introduce that heresy formulated by Cyrus, which Sophronius exposed and refuted. Pope Honorius died in October 638, and never saw this document. Sergius got it passed by his Council at Constantinople, but died himself in December of the same year. Pope Severinus was elected to succeed Honorius before the end of the year 638, but his consecration was delayed by Greek intrigues for nineteen months, in the hope of obtaining his assent to the document drawn up by Sergius. This was found to be hopeless. The exarch then contented himself with plundering the Lateran treasury. Pope Severinus was at length consecrated, and sat for two months and six days, in which time however he condemned the Ecthesis. He was succeeded by two Popes, John IV. and Theodore, who behaved with the same decision and fortitude. But a new emperor had succeeded, after a frightful revolution, at twelve years of age; and a new patriarch of Constantinople was ready to draw up a new document for the heresy. It was met by another Pope, whose first act was to call a great Council at the Lateran, to condemn the heresy under anathema, and the two documents, of which the first was fathered by Heraclius, and the second by Constans II. For this act of courage St. Martin four years afterwards was stolen from Rome, judged at Constantinople as a traitor by the senate, and sent a prisoner to die of famine, as is believed, in the Crimea. The emperor, having Rome in full possession, used such means that Eugenius was put into the see while St. Martin was still living as a condemned criminal. But Eugenius could not be compelled to accept the heresy of the Byzantine monarch and patriarch. There follow five Popes, Vitalian, Adeodatus, Donus, Agatho, and Leo II. At length, when Constans had perished miserably in his bath at Syracuse, his son Constantine broke the line of heretical emperors. But he found in truth the heresy so embedded in his capital that he was obliged to act with great caution. After repulsing a Mohammedan attack upon his capital which lasted seven years, and was overcome only by the aid of the Greek fire, when if the city had been taken the Greek empire would have ended, and the patriarch of Constantinople have shared the lot of his brethren at Alexandria and Antioch, the emperor was enabled to invite Pope Donus to hold a Council at Constantinople which should terminate this long struggle. It was a struggle in which the whole West followed the Pope, but much of the East was in favour of the heresy. Pope Agatho had succeeded Donus; he accepted the request of the emperor, he had Councils held through the West, and a full patriarchal Council at Rome. So he appeared by his legates at Constantinople, and was welcomed with the words, “Peter has spoken by Agatho,” as 230 years before they cried, “Peter has spoken by Leo”. But Agatho also died before the Council had finished its work, and the tenth successor of Honorius, Leo II., during his short pontificate of ten months, set his seal upon the Council, and endured to censure a predecessor for neglect of his office, and for allowing by that neglect a heresy to obtain a temporary success. Ten Popes in succession, one of them actually martyred, all of them vassals of absolute sovereigns, had during all this interval of forty years alone prevented the heresy being forced upon the Church. Four patriarchs of Constantinople in succession had fostered it; and four were together condemned. They were condemned, not for negligence in allowing others to spread the heresy, but as its originators; as advisers and mouthpiece of emperors, all whose power had been bent by them to extort approval of it from Popes, who in their civil position were helpless subjects in a “servile” province, but in their religious character were successors of St. Peter.

Now at the time the western emperor ceased to exist seven Popes succeeding St. Leo defended his doctrine against two emperors, Zeno and Anastasius, and foiled all the efforts of Acacius to use the eastern jealousy and the pride of the royal city, and exalt his see above the control of St. Peter's successor, until the seventh Pope, Hormisdas, then a subject of the Arian Gothic king, Theodorich, compelled the eastern emperor, the patriarch, the bishops, and the court, to confess his supreme authority, as successor of St. Peter. Seven Popes then stood neither hesitating nor fluctuating: over against them in that time stood seven bishops of Constantinople, one originator of the whole schism, others yielding to the emperor's will even against their own wishes. It was a contest of 44 years with an oriental despotism, waged by Popes the subjects of Arian Goths. They alone maintained the faith of the Church, as embodied in the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon, and saved the East.

Now, again, there has been a struggle for 44 years, in which ten Popes, subjects of the eastern emperor, and liable as such to be summoned by him to his capital, where one of them was indeed condemned to death, stood likewise as one man. They dwelt in a Rome no longer recognised as the head of the empire. Of this whole seventh century the special historian of the city says that for Rome it was “the most frightful, the most devastating of all”. Civil power was not in their hands. Their election itself had to be confirmed by the exarch as representing the emperor, or by the emperor himself. The first of the ten, Pope Severinus, had to wait nineteen months for it, after which he sat two months. The last of the ten, St. Leo II., began to sit eighteen months after the death of his predecessor, St. Agatho, and then only sat ten months. During the whole of this period, from the death of Honorius in 638, to the ratification of the Sixth Council in 682, the yielding of any one of these ten Popes would have carried with it the subjection of the whole church to the Monothelite error. They saved the East, they saved the Royal City, the seat of all power, in spite of its four patriarchs condemned as heretics. That Heraclius and Constans did not destroy the faith in the seventh century is as much their work and merit as that Zeno and Anastasius did not destroy it in the fifth. Perhaps the test which by the force of circumstances was applied to the Popes from the time Rome was governed from Constantinople as a captive city in the second half of the sixth and the whole of the seventh century was even more severe than that applied to them in the fifth. Their condition was more helpless, inasmuch as the Byzantine subjection was heavier than the Arian Gothic control, while the pillaged Italy of the exarchs was wretched, and the prosperous realm of Theodoric guarded jealously the last remains of imperial grandeur. He at least was a king in Italian Ravenna and Verona, and Rome was both great and dear to him. But Justinian and those who followed him were task-masters on the Bosphorus, who placed a tax-collector at Ravenna to wring out the last drop of Italy's blood, and plunder, as occasion served, the treasury of the Church in the Pope's Lateran Patriarcheion.

In what consisted the power by which twenty-nine Popes from Pelagius I. in 555, to Gregory II. in 715 bore so fearful a strain? Solely in one thing: in the belief that the throne of St. Peter had been fixed at Rome, and that St. Peter had received by a direct gift from Christ, and his successor had inherited, the charge to feed and govern the universal Church. The five times captured Rome lived on in this belief, and was become the city of the Popes. The eye of a conqueror, legislator and ruler, had chosen with a wisdom which all posterity has acknowledged the fairest and the strongest of cities for the seat of his power. He made it a royal residence; he could not make it an apostolic see. When at length his city fell, the empire fell with it. In the day of its pride it sought to trample on the elder Rome by the privileges of new Rome. The second of these attempts was foiled by the ten successors of Pope Honorius.

The danger to the Christian faith in these fifty years which begin, it is to be noted, at the death of Mohammed and the election of a chalif in his stead, has been touched upon; but the danger to the empire must not be dissociated from it. All the tyranny, the extortion, the spiritual encroachment of the empire could not sever the links which bound it to the Church. Heraclius had been warned by his former minister Maximus how perilous to his empire his meddling with the creed would be. “It is not a time for such things,” he said. “It is a time of blood on account of our sins, not of theologising; a time of lamentation, a time of imploring God's mercy, not of sophistical contradiction, moving Him to greater indignation.” The Greek chronographer in the ninth century marks the rise of the Arabian enemy as a scourge of Christian sins. He traces the whole calamitous series of events to the seduction of Heraclius, by a certain Athanasius, full of native Syrian guile, whom he promised to make and did afterwards make patriarch of Antioch: Heraclius was confused by his use of new terms. He consulted Sergius, and also Cyrus, then bishop of Phasis. He found the three agree. He followed them. He translated Cyrus from Phasis to Alexandria. Then Heraclius issued an imperial edict on doctrine. When Constans had succeeded as emperor another imperial edict on doctrine, drawn up by another bishop of Constantinople, appeared, which St. Martin condemned in his Council at Rome. Then the emperor Constans, full of wrath, carried St. Martin and St. Maximus to Constantinople, tortured them and banished them to the Chersonese, and punished many of the western bishops besides. But Agatho, being elected Pope, and moved by the zeal of God, also summoned a holy Council and put under ban the Monothelite heresy. Upon all his narrative the conclusion of Theophanes is: “The Church being thrown into disorder by emperors and impious bishops, Amalek the child of the desert rose up to scourge us, the people of Christ. The Roman army met with a great defeat on the Yarmuk. There followed the capture of Palestine, of Cæsarea, of Jerusalem, then the loss of Egypt, then the captivity of inland and islands, and all Romania; the utter destruction of the Roman force in Phœnicia, the dissolution of all Christian peoples and places, which did not cease till the persecutor of the Church perished miserably in his bath in Sicily.”

Thus when the Sixth Council met at Constantinople not only had the emperor Constantine the Bearded declined far from the position held by Justinian, at the time in which he made Rome a garrison city in a servile province, a hundred and thirty years before, but his empire was not half so great as that of his great grandfather Heraclius, after the triumph of the Persian war. Not only were Syria and Egypt, and all Roman land on the side of Persia, and northern Africa as far as Kairowan, lost to the empire, but it had just escaped utter destruction by repelling the fleet of Muawiah after a conflict of several years from the waters of the Bosphorus. And the great and abiding difference to the eastern monarch was that he had lost this vast amount of territory to an enemy who had put the propagation of a different creed, antagonistic in its first principles to the Christian faith, into the hands of a single man. That single man, a chalif, wielding an absolute civil power, appertinent to the prophet's spiritual authority, had fixed the seat of his dominion in the heart of Rome's former domain in the East. The Mohammedan now moved upon Constantinople from his basis at Damascus. He had advanced upon Sicily likewise, and had taken Syracuse in 669, and from that time forth southern Italy had to dread his descent upon its coasts. By his union of spiritual and civil power in his person as chalif, he had now the whole Saracen force by land and sea at his command.

What were the Avars of the North or the Persians of the East compared to this new enemy, whose war-cry was, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His prophet”; whose meaning was, “There is no Christ, and no Mother of God, and no saints and no sacrifice, no kingdom in heaven to be gained by penance and humility. But there is the reign of a prophet on earth; receive his successor and you shall be our equals, refuse him and you, your wives and your children will be the captives of his sword.”

These were the wounds struck by the Monothelite heresy on the Christian Church and the eastern empire in the first fifty years which ran from the death of Mohammed.

Constantine IV. died in 685, leaving the throne to his son Justinian II. He had reigned since the murder of his father in 668, and the whole course of his reign showed a very favourable contrast with that of Constans II. But greater still, if possible, was to be the contrast presented to his government by that of his son, who succeeded at a most immature age, and showed himself without counsel, self-command, and reason in all that he did. He was the first of several bad and incapable rulers. His tyranny deprived him of the throne after ten years. He was deposed with the Byzantine penalty of an amputated nose. Upon this deposition, in 695, the following twenty-two years produced seven revolutions, putting the imperial power into new hands and new families. One of these violent changes replaced Justinian II., maimed and dishonoured as he was, after a banishment of ten years. But he had learned no prudence, and the inhumanity of his last six years in his second reign exceeded that of his first reign.

In those first ten years from 685 to 695 events happened of importance to the Church, which also illustrate the spirit dominant at Constantinople. The condition of the empire required the strictest union with the West. It was pressed severely by the Mohammedan advance. To meet this effectually the reconciliation which had taken place at the Sixth Council was needed to be wisely and temporately maintained. But Justinian II. summoned a Greek Council to meet in the same hall of his palace, called the Dome, in which that Council had been held. It passed a number of canons on discipline, many of which were injurious to the West and only calculated to increase the mutual estrangement. Inasmuch as the Fifth and Sixth General Councils had passed no canons of discipline, this Council held in 692 was to complete that omission. It called itself the Quinisext. The later Greeks even confounded it with the Sixth Council, others contented themselves with saying that “it was held five or six years after it, and by nearly the same Fathers”. It issued a hundred and two canons on discipline. “It seemed as if the bishops of this Council in their disgust at the undeniable superiority of the Roman Church in matters of faith, in which its authority had always at last prevailed and determined the issue, were bent on making good their right of autonomy at least in matters of discipline, and sought to avenge themselves by disapproving Roman customs for that superiority burdensome to Greek vanity.” As a matter of fact these canons had the effect of widening the breach between Latins and Greeks. It is true that in the eighth century all Greeks did not yet count them ecumenical, but in the Iconoclast contest they gained great consideration, and in the ninth century scarcely a Byzantine doubted any longer that they were ecumenical.

The chief value of this Council now lies in the picture which it presents to us of the actual state and temper of the eastern Church at that time, the closing ten years of a century about which we possess so little detailed information. I am here concerned especially with two things – one, the position of the emperor as regards both the Pope and the Church; the other, the position of the patriarch of Constantinople; on both this Council casts light.

As to the emperor, not only was it convoked by his command and assembled in a hall of his palace, but its canons were subscribed by the emperor first with the imperial vermilion, and the second place was left vacant for the Pope's signature. Then followed the subscriptions of Paul of Constantinople, Peter of Alexandria, Anastasius of Jerusalem, George of Antioch; on the whole, of 211 bishops, or their representatives, all Greeks and Orientals, including Armenians. It styled itself ecumenical, and the emperor tried to impose it as such. In its address to the emperor it said by that it was called by him “to restore to order the Christian life, and root out the remains of Jewish and heathen perversity,” while it ended by addressing to him the words, “as thou hast honoured the Church by convoking us, so also be pleased to confirm what we have decreed”.

As to the Bishop of Constantinople, this Council said in its 36th canon, “renewing the decrees of the Second and Fourth General Councils, we decree that the see of Constantinople enjoy the same prerogatives as that of old Rome, and in ecclesiastical matters be as great as it, counting as the second after it. After it comes the see of Alexandria, then that of Antioch, then that of Jerusalem.”

In order to comprehend what this canon gave to the see of Constantinople, it is requisite to bear in mind the actual condition of the eastern Church at the time. We are now at the year 692, that is full fifty years since the other eastern patriarchates fell under Saracen dominion. They had become more and more powerless. They depended upon the alms and the support given to them from Constantinople. In fact at this time the archbishop of the Grecian capital was the only real patriarch in the diminished empire. The courtiers of Constantinople, as we have seen thirty years before in the persecution of St. Maximus, affected to consider the conquests of the Saracen barbarians as transitory. Since then Constantinople itself had only been saved by hurling the Greek fire on the assailing Saracen fleet. A shadow only of their old right remained in the Saracen provinces of Alexandria and Antioch; they had still their old names. These were put down for them, if, as is supposed, they were not present at this council, because there were none at the moment. Four years later Carthage was taken by the Saracens; within eight years the whole Roman domination in Africa to the Atlantic was at an end. The empire had not yet lost everything in the West, for there were still some Byzantine troops and possessions in Italy. The Pope still acknowledged the emperor as his sovereign; and to Pope Sergius the emperor Justinian II. sent these canons, with the request that he would sign them. It is obvious that the position given in them to the bishop of Constantinople was no longer mere rank as in the first step taken in this direction by the Council of 381 under the great Theodosius. It was a higher jurisdiction similar in the East to that which the Pope held in the West. The Byzantine conception, as shewn in this Council, is clearly that the emperor was head of the Church, who, as he did it the honour to call it together, so he did it the further honour to confirm its decrees. Not, as in the case of the first Constantine, that he should make them laws of the empire, over and above their intrinsic spiritual force, as canons of those to whom Christ had committed the government of His Church, but that the emperor's signature, in the same way as he created a law in civil matters, made a canon in spiritual.