Kitabı oku: «Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III», sayfa 17

“We entreat you, as brethren in Christ, enter again into the truth, which you have left. Cast aside pride, destroy your self-assurance, write to all and everywhere, raise up again those whom you have scandalised and blinded, though, insensible as you are, you hold this for nothing. The charity of Christ knows that, when we enter the church of the holy Prince of the Apostles, and behold his portrait, compunction comes on us, and, like rain from heaven, a flood of tears comes down. Christ made the blind to see; you have blinded those who saw well, and have made them stumble, little as you think of it. You have reduced men to ignorance, stopped their fair running, deprived them of their prayers. Instead of vigils, prayerfulness, and zeal to God, you have dissolved the poor population in sleepiness, slumbering, and carelessness. They have lost their head. And you say that we worship stones, and walls, and boards. Not so, O emperor. But to rouse memory and feeling, to raise up the dull, rude, and untaught mind, by their names, their invocation, their features. Not as gods, as you assert: far from it: for we do not place our hopes in these things. If it be a picture of our Lord, we say, ‘O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, help us and save us’. If it be of His holy Mother, we say, ‘Holy bearer of God, Mother of the Lord, intercede with thy Son, our true God, to save our souls’. If it be of a martyr, ‘Saint Stephen, who didst shed thy blood for Christ, by thy confidence as proto-martyr, intercede for us’. So we say, in the case of every martyr who suffered martyrdom. Suchlike are the prayers which we address through them. It is not, as you assert, O emperor, that we call the martyrs gods. Put away those evil thoughts of yours. I charge you, save your own soul from the scandals and the imprecations which you receive from all the world: for even the little children make a mock of you. Go to the children's schools, and say, ‘I am he who pull down and drive away pictures’. They will answer by throwing their slates at your head: and what you have failed to learn from the wise, you will be taught by the simple.

“You write, ‘Ozias, the Jewish king, took out of the temple, after eight hundred years, the brazen serpent: so have I, after eight hundred years, expelled the idols from the churches’. Truly, Ozias was your brother, and had your self-conceit, and tyrannised over the priests of that day, just as you do. For holy David carried that serpent into the temple with the sacred ark. What was it but a brazen work consecrated by God for those who were then suffering from the bite of serpents: that an image might be shown to the people of the prime suggester of sin to the first creature formed by God, Adam and Eve, this was set up for the healing of sins. But you, as you boast, after eight hundred years, have cast out from the churches the blessing and consecration of the martyrs, and, as you fairly confessed at first, of set purpose and without necessity, and, lastly, by the subscription of your own hand, put upon your own head their curse.

“Now we, as holding supreme and undoubted authority from St. Peter the chief, were minded to rebuke you, but since you have brought the curse upon yourself, keep it and share it with your advisers. See to what extent you have broken in upon the edification and good course of others. The charity of Christ knows this. When we enter a church ourselves and behold the picture of our Lord Jesus Christ's wonderful deeds and of His holy Mother bearing in her arms and nursing our Lord and our God, and the angels standing round them and chanting the Holy, Holy, Holy, we do not leave that church without compunction. And, again, who is not touched with compunction and moved to tears when he beholds the baptismal vessels and the circle of priests surrounding, and the mystical supper, and the blind recovering their sight, and the raising of Lazarus, and the healing of the leper and the paralytic, and the multitude reclining on the grass, the baskets and the remnants taken up, and the fragments, and the transfiguration on Mount Thabor, the Lord's crucifixion, His burial, His resurrection, His holy ascension, and the descent of the Holy Spirit? Who that beholds the history of Abraham, and the knife approaching the throat of his son, is not moved to compunction and tears? In a word, all the sufferings of our Lord. It were better for you, emperor, if the choice were offered you, to be called a heretic than the persecutor and destroyer of the histories, the pictures, the images, the sufferings of our Lord. Yet to be called a heretic would be thy misery and thy loss. Let me tell you the difference. The heretic is said to be known, when he is known only to few. The scandals he gives are dark, the thoughts perplexed and hard to discern. Those who enforce them and are destitute of humiliation soon fall by their own ignorance and confusion of mind. Their condemnation is not so great as yours. You have openly pursued things well observed and conspicuous as light. You have stripped naked the churches of God. As the holy fathers clothed and adorned them you have left them bare and tattered. And that, too, when you had no less a pontiff than the lord Germanus, our brother and fellow priest. You should have taken his counsel as that of a father and teacher, as aged and experienced in matters both of Church and State. He is ninety-five years old: he has served one after another patriarch and emperor. He was never dispensed with, for his utility in both these services. You disregarded him and called to your side that transgressing fool the Ephesian, the son of Apsimar, and his like. For the lord Germanus and the then patriarch George, having informed and persuaded Constantine, the son of Constans, the father of Justinian, to write to us at Rome, he wrote to us under sanction of an oath, and proposed to us fitting men that there should be an ecumenical Council. ‘Nor will I,’ said he, ‘sit with them as emperor, nor speak as having control, but as one of them; and as the pontiffs enact I will execute. And those who hold the right we will receive, and those who hold the wrong we will cast out and banish. If my father perverted anything in the pure and blameless faith, I will be the first to lay him under anathema. For it was by the grace of God that we sent to you; and the Sixth Council was held in peace.’ O emperor, you know that the dogmas of holy church belong not to kings but to pontiffs, and require to be infallibly determined. For this reason pontiffs have been set over the churches, who abstain from secular matters, and kings equally abstain from matters of the Church and take charge of what is in their hands. The agreement of Christ-loving kings and of faithful pontiffs is one power when their administration is ruled by peace and charity.

“You have written in favour of an ecumenical Council being held. To us it seems unadvisable. You are he who prosecutes, insults and destroys the images. Give way, and grant us silence, and the world will be at peace, and scandals will cease. Suppose that we listen to you, that bishops have met together from all the world, that the Senate and Council have sat. Where is the devoted Christian emperor who is wont by custom to sit at the Council, to honour those who speak on the right side, to reject those who err from the truth, when you, the emperor, waver, and speak with the tongue of barbarians? Know you not that your attack upon the holy images is a work of contention, arrogance, and pride? At a moment when the churches of God enjoyed unbroken peace you raised up dissensions, enmities, and scandals. Be quiet, rest, and there is no need of a Council. Write to every one and everywhere throughout the world which you have scandalised by saying that Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, and Gregory, Pope of Rome, have erred respecting the images, and we will bear you scatheless for the sin of your mistake, as having received from God authority to loose things in heaven and things on earth. God is our witness that we have presented all the letters which you have written to us to the ears and hearts of the kings of the West, pacifying them in respect of your soul, praising and magnifying you in respects of your former government. Hence they welcomed your imperial letters with the honour due from kings when they had not yet heard of your evil attack upon the images. When they heard and were assured of this, that you had sent Jovinus, your officer of the guards, to destroy the statue of our Saviour, called the Witness, by which many miracles have been worked, many women of fervent zeal, such as the ointment-sellers, were present, beseeching the guardsman not to do it. He heard them not, but planted a a ladder, and mounted it, and with three blows of his axe shivered the face of the Saviour. The women could not bear that impious act. They drew away the ladder, clubbed him, and put him to death on the spot. You, zealous for evil, sent and slew there I know not how many women, in the presence of competent witnesses from Rome, from France, from the Vandals, from Mauritania, from Gothia, and generally from all the countries comprising the interior of the West. When these returned each to his own land and told the story of your revolutionary and childish deeds, they tore down your laurelled letters and defaced your countenance. Lombards and Sarmatians and other peoples towards the north overran unhappy Decapolis, they took your very metropolis, Ravenna, deposed your magistrates, and appointed their own. And they are minded so to do to imperial possessions adjoining us, and to Rome, while you are not able to defend us. These are the results of senseless folly. Yet you frighten us and say ‘I will send to Rome and break in pieces the image of St. Peter, nay, and bring up in fetters their bishop Gregory, as Constans did to Martin’. And yet you should know and be assured that the pontiffs who in series sit at Rome for the sake of peace are as a middle wall and a fence to the East and to the West, the arbitrators of concord. And the emperors, your predecessors, struggled hard to maintain this peace. And if you bluster and threaten us, we have no need to fight you. Let the Bishop of Rome retreat twenty-four stades into Campania and go you, pursue the winds. Our predecessor, the pontiff Martin, sat for peace-sake exhorting. Thus it was that the evil Constans, erroneous in his belief as to the Holy Trinity, and throwing in his aid to the then heretical pontiffs, Sergius and Paul and Pyrrhus, sent and kidnapped him and tyrannously brought him up to Byzantium. After many cruelties inflicted he banished him, as he inflicted many on Maximus the monk also, and his disciple Anastasius, and banished them to Lazika. And Constans, their banisher, was murdered, and died in his sin. And the count, who was the chief of his household, being assured by the bishops of Sicily that he was a heretic, buried him secretly in the church, and his course was ended in his sin. But for the blessed Martin, the city in which he was banished bears witness to him, Cherson, and the Bosphorus, and all the North, and the dwellers in the North, by flocking to his tomb and receiving cures.

“May the Lord think us worthy to go the way of Martin, but for the help of the many we are willing to live, and live on. For all the West has its eyes fixed upon our humility, if we be not such, but they have a great faith in us, and upon him whose statue you threaten to destroy and sweep away, the blessed Peter, whom all the kingdoms of the West look upon as a god upon earth. And if you venture to try the truth of this, the kings of the West are ready even to avenge the easterns whom you have wronged. But, we beseech you in the Lord, turn away from these revolutionary, childish actions. You know that you are not able to defend Rome, the very head of your royalty, unless perhaps the mere city from its nearness to the sea and a fleet. As I said before, if the Pope go two miles and a half out of Rome, he fears nothing from you. One thing is our grief: savages and barbarians are civilised; you that are civilised become savage and barbarous. In full assurance of faith the whole West makes its offering to the holy Prince of the Apostles. And if you send to pull down the statue of St. Peter, look, we tell you beforehand, not on us be the bloodshed which will follow. On thy neck and head let it fall. We have just received an entreaty from the far West, from one called Septetus, desiring by the grace of God to see our face, that we may give him holy baptism. To avoid the reproach of neglect and slackness we are preparing for the journey.

“May God cast his fear into your heart and bring you back to the truth after the evils which you have inflicted upon the world. Let me receive your letter announcing your conversion. May the God who came down from heaven, and entered into the womb of the holy Virgin, the Mother of God, for the salvation of men, dwell in thy heart and cast out at once those who dwell in thee and have put in scandals; and may He bestow peace upon the Church of all Christians for ever and ever. Amen.”

To this letter of Pope Gregory II. to Leo the Isaurian must be added a second, written at some time between the date of the first, in 727, and the date of the Pope's death in 731. Indeed from some expressions in the second we may infer that it was sent very shortly after the first.

“We have received by our legate Rufinus the letter of your God-defended Majesty and Brotherhood in Christ. Indeed it is a burden to my life that you have not changed, but persist in the same evils – not having a Christian mind, nor being a follower and imitator of our holy and glorious wonder-working fathers and teachers. Indeed, foreign teachers I do not bring into the field, but those of your own city and country. Are there wiser than Gregory the wonder-worker, and Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory the theologian, and Basil of Cappadocia, and John Chrysostom? not to speak of thousands upon thousands like to them of our holy fathers and teachers inspired by God. But you have rather followed your self-assurance, and the passions of your own heart, when you wrote, ‘I am priest as well as emperor’. This indeed, the emperors before you showed both in word and deed by planting and caring for the churches; in conjunction with the bishops seeking out the truth with the desire and zeal of orthodoxy. Such were the great Constantine, the great Theodosius, the great Valentinian, and Constantine the father of Justinian II., the man of the Sixth Council. Those emperors governed in the spirit of religion, assembling councils in unity of mind and purpose with the bishops, searching out truth of doctrine, and so establishing and adorning the holy churches. These are priests and emperors; they showed it by their action. But you from the time you took the empire have not kept to the end the boundaries set by the Fathers. You found the churches arrayed in embroidered robes, fringed with gold; you stripped off their ornaments and left them in nakedness. For what are our churches? Are they not things made with hands – stones, wood, straw, at best? But they were adorned by pictures and histories, portraying the wonders of the saints, the sufferings of our Lord, and of His holy and glorious Mother, and of the holy Apostles. On these histories and pictures men spend their substance.

“Fathers and mothers, bearing in their arms little children fresh from baptism, leading the youth and those who have come in from the heathen, point with their finger to the histories, build them up in faith, and carry their minds and their hearts aloft to God. You have deprived the poor of these things, and have plunged them into idle talk, gossip, songs, castanets, pipings, and trifling. Instead of thanksgiving and glorifying you have taught them to babble. Have your portion with the speakers of idle words.

“O emperor, listen to our humility, and cease. Follow holy Church as you found and received it. Dogmas belong not to emperors, but to bishops. It is we who have the mind of Christ. One is the discipline of the Church's commands; another, the perception of secular things. That military, ill-omened, rude mind, which you have for secular management, you cannot use for the spiritual treatment of doctrine. I point out to you the difference between palace and church, between emperors and pontiffs. Acknowledge it, and save yourself, and be not contentious. Were any one to take from you the royal robes, the purple, the diadem, the mantle, the several marks of rank, you would seem, in the sight of men, unseemly, shapeless, worthless; so you have made the churches. As you would then be, you have stripped the churches, and reduced them to tatters. For, just as the pontiff has no authority to enter the palace, and to make royal appointments, so the emperor has no authority to enter into the church, to make elections of the clergy, to consecrate and handle the symbols of the sacred mysteries, nor even to participate in them without the priest. Let each of us remain in the vocation wherein he was called by God. O emperor, do you see the difference between bishops and kings? If any one sins against you, O emperor, you confiscate his house, and leave him naked of all but his life, and, at last, you hang or behead him, or banish him, and make him a stranger to his children, and all his relations and friends. Pontiffs do not this. But if any one has sinned and confessed, instead of hanging and beheading, they put upon his neck the gospel and the cross, they guard him in their treasury, banish him to where the deacons and catechumens attend, put fasting on his stomach, vigil on his eyes, thanksgiving on his tongue. And when they have well disciplined and chastised him, they set before him the precious Body of the Lord, and give him to drink His holy Blood. And having restored him to be a vessel of election, cleansed from sin, they help him forward, pure and blameless, to the Lord. Emperor, do you see the difference between church and palace? Emperors who have reigned piously in Christ have neither disobeyed nor afflicted pontiffs. You, O emperor, transgressor and perverter, wrote with your own hand and subscribed, that he who removes the boundaries of the Fathers is accursed. Therein you condemned yourself, and separated the Holy Spirit from you: you punish and tyrannise over us with the soldier's arm of flesh. We, unarmed and undefended, having no earthly and carnal armies, invoke the sovereign ruler of all creation, Christ, whose seat is in heaven, who leads the hosts of the heavenly powers that He may send to you a demon, according to the Apostle's words, to ‘deliver over such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,’ that the spirit may be saved. See, O emperor, into what a depth of shamelessness and inhumanity you have thrust yourself. You have cast your soul into abysses and precipices, because you would not humble yourself, nor bend your stubborn neck. For, when bishops, by good instruction and teaching, are able to present kings to God blameless, and exempt from errors and faults, they lay up a store of praise and glory before Him for the great Resurrection, when God will make manifest our hidden deeds in the presence of His angels. We, the humble, will then be ashamed, not to have reclaimed you through your disobedience. The pontiffs, before us, who each, in his own time, present their emperors to God, shame our poverty, in that we do not, in our days, present an emperor in honour and glory, but one disgraced and counterfeit. Once again we invite you: repent and be converted: enter into the truth: maintain what you found and received: give honour and glory to our holy and renowned fathers and teachers, who, following God's guidance, opened the blindness of our hearts and eyes, until they recovered sight. Your letter said, ‘Why was nothing said about images in the six Councils?’ Most true, O emperor, neither was anything said about bread and water, eating or not eating, drinking or not drinking. From the very beginning these things were given for the life of man. So, too, were images handed down. Bishops carried them into councils. No traveller, loving Christ and God, went on a journey without pictures, as men of virtue, and in God's favour. We pray you become bishop at once, and emperor, as you wrote. If, as emperor, you are ashamed to call yourself to account, write to all the countries which you have scandalised, by saying that Gregory, the Pope of Rome, has erred in the matter of images, and also Germanus, the patriarch of Constantinople. Then we take upon ourselves the guilt of your sin, as those who have received from the Lord authority and warrant to loose and to bind things on earth and things in heaven. And we will make you without charge as to this. You refuse. We, as those who shall give account to Christ our Master, have exhorted, have instructed you, as we were taught by the Lord. You recoiled: you refused to obey us, weak as we are: and Germanus, your bishop: and our fathers, the holy and glorious wonder-workers and teachers. You followed men perverse and rotten, erring from truth of doctrine. Take your portion with them. As we wrote to you before, we, by the grace of God, are following the road to the interior of the West for those who seek baptism. I have sent thither bishops and clergy of our holy Church. Their princes have received them, and bow their heads to be illuminated. They ask for me in person to receive them. On this path, by God's grace, we are bent: that we may not be condemned for neglect.

“May God grant you understanding and repentance to return to the truth which you have deserted, and restore the humble populations to Christ, the One Shepherd, and to the one fold of orthodox churches and priests. And may our Lord and God grant peace to the whole world now and for ever and ever. Amen.”

These letters, which I have given entire, were written at the end of the third decade of the eighth century. They mark the breaking out of the Iconoclast persecution. They seem to me to give a complete picture not merely of the personal character in the two great factors of the time, Pope St. Gregory II. and the Isaurian emperor, Leo III., but of the power and influence of the Pope and the bishops in the spiritual life, and of the eastern ruler in the civil commonwealth. What the Pope claims, he puts forth in the most distinct language, and through all his letters it comes out that his predecessors have ever both possessed and exercised it. It is matter of simple history. Again we see incidentally from the words which he uses regarding the images and pictures, that, when he wrote, they were as much part of the Church's ritual as the prayers. To expel them from the Church was at once a complete interference with the inner life and conduct of Christians, and also had the effect to make at least in appearance the sacred places themselves synagogues and mosques, instead of habitations wherein Christ, His holy Mother and the saints had a dwelling. The conjunction of tyranny with impiety in Leo's attempt is made manifest.

Again, the relation between kings who rule the secular commonwealth, and the Pope, who, with the bishops throughout the world, presides over the one fold of Christ, is marked as simply and also as decisively as words can mark it. The Pope recognises in the amplest terms the temporal king as God's minister in his own domain, not a mandatory appointed by the people, who might be called to account by the people, and be deposed at its will, but the image of God, and one who administers the authority of God for the government of human society. As simply and as distinctly he mentions himself as holding, by express grant of God, power to bind and to loose things in earth and things in heaven. The king has no more power to enter the Church and touch the things of God therein than he himself has to enter the palace, and make appointments in matters of State. But there is this great difference – he has to answer for the conduct of kings in spiritual matters. Kings have to answer for how they treat him; but cannot call him to account for his administration of the divine power committed to him. In all things that concern sin the spiritual supremacy is complete. Its giver is God alone, and to God alone it is subject. This root of the spiritual power is brought out by the whole tenor of his words, in which the exact mediæval relation of the two powers is implicitly contained. The supreme minister of God in temporal things is the first son, but likewise the subject of the Church in spiritual things. In all this Pope Gregory II. in the year 727 may be said exactly to repeat what Pope Gelasius said in the year 494, both unarmed Popes speaking to emperors, lords of armies and absolute in civil power.

The relation between East and West is also very distinctly stated. The East lies crouching almost helpless beneath an unalloyed despotism, whilst all the nations of the West look up to St. Peter in Rome “as a God upon earth”. When this was written just ninety years had passed since the sepulchre of Christ had fallen into subjection to the infidel and no less anti-Christian Saracen. The pilgrims who could no longer go to the sepulchre of Christ went to the sepulchre of the fisherman, and saw in the statue of St. Peter in his own Basilica the symbol of Christ reigning. But likewise all the kings of the West looked upon the successor of St. Peter as no less seated on the throne of justice, of peace, of concord, of charity, than as the supreme oracle of the Christian faith. What the patriarch Sophronius had said of him in the agony of the holy city before the impure Omar, the nations of the West knew and felt him to be. As Leo III. threatened to destroy the statue of Peter, so they went to him for baptism, so their kings were already buried in peace beneath the shadow of the Vatican. In 716, the year before the accession of Leo III., Theodon, Duke of Bavaria, came to Rome, being the first German prince who made a pilgrimage to the tomb of the apostles, as later on in 726, the very year in which the nefarious proceedings of Leo III. began, Ina, king of Wessex, with his queen Ethelberga came and began the school of the English in Rome, and made his land tributary to the Romescot. So Constantine the Bearded had acknowledged the authority which his successor was trying to diminish, while he sought to reduce the Christian Church, instinct with the presence, the miracles, the sufferings of our Lord, His Mother, and His Saints, to the bareness of the Jewish synagogue and the Mohammedan mosque.

It may be observed also that the Pope associates his own office with that of bishops throughout the world, especially with that of Germanus, as bishop of the imperial city. In his mind the bishops belong to the Pope, and the Pope no less to the bishops. There is no jealousy of them in his supremacy, nor of him in their subordinate jurisdiction. He censures Leo III. for not consulting his patriarch, Germanus. The authority which he so clearly describes is one and the same in the whole episcopate, where St. Gregory II. himself according to the language used three centuries before of St. Leo the Great is “princeps episcopalis coronæ”.

All these things come out not in the way of controversy but in an uncontroversial and authoritative exhortation of a Pope to an emperor. The Pope is clad in spiritual armour only in the midst of a captive province; the emperor is the master of fleets and legions behind the walls of Constantine.

No history written afterwards at a distance of time could set forth these things with so great a force as the words of a Pope issued to the chief actor in a desperate struggle at the very beginning of the conflict. The immediate result is to be noted. In the year 730 the emperor, finding that he could not make Germanus, the nonagenarian patriarch of Constantinople, further his design in stripping the churches of their ornament, deposed him and put a compliant instrument in his stead, Anastasius, a priest and officer of the great Church, who held the see three and twenty years to the time of Leo's son Kopronymus, with what effect and what ending will be afterwards seen. St. Gregory II. died in 731. In the four years which elapsed from the first letter to his death he was rewarded for it by the emperor Leo in five attempts to have him murdered. All these attempts were frustrated by the fidelity of those about the Pope, and by the awakened solicitude of the Italian people, who saw in Leo the most cruel and remorseless of tyrants, in Gregory not only the champion of their faith, but the defender of their temporal well-being, of every moral as well as religious liberty.

The Greek chronographer, Theophanes, the main part of whose life belongs to this same eighth century, calls Pope Gregory II. “the most holy apostolic man, the assessor of Supreme Peter in his chair, conspicuous in word and deed”. His resistance to the rude soldier on the eastern throne won him great praise from the subjects of that throne. The rude soldier met him only with scorn and violence, as he met the murmuring of his people. Greece itself had taken arms in defence of its violated churches. Leo, by means of the Greek fire, destroyed the fleet of the insurgent Cyclades, and punished with the utmost severity his opponents in the capital. He carried on with greater violence the attack on the images. In many cases it passed on to the relics. The patriarch Germanus made one more attempt to persuade the emperor. He reminded the emperor of the oath taken at his coronation to maintain the faith of the Fathers. This brought matters to an open breach. St. John of Damascus attests that “the blessed Germanus, distinguished in his life and his words, was scourged and banished”. Another Greek historian, Cedrenus, adds that the emperor called him an idolater and struck with his own hands the patriarch of ninety years, who laid upon the altar of the great church the omophorion, the symbol of his rank, and departed into exile, with the words, “If I am Jonas, cast me into the sea, but I cannot touch the faith without a General Council be held”. Germanus had sat for fifteen years; St. John Chrysostom and he the noblest who ever sat on that perilous throne. He retired to his paternal house, and did not cease his courageous struggle against the Iconoclast. He died in most extreme old age, it is supposed in 740.