Kitabı oku: «Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III», sayfa 21

During these two hundred years, from the first inroad of the Lombards, nothing could be more embarrassing than the civil position of the Popes. Beside the main body of the Lombards, occupying the great plain of North Italy, with their capital at Pavia, there were two duchies, one of Spoleto, immediately to the north of Rome and its territory, and another of Benevento, holding a considerable portion of Italian territory near Naples. This city, with other seaports, continued in possession of the empire. The Lombard kings were evermore trying to bring their outlying duchies into closer obedience to the royal power. Again the fortress and territory of Ravenna, the imperial metropolis, lay further to the north, touching the Lombard possessions. The Lombards, when they came into Italy, were so little advanced in political science of government, so little coherent among themselves, that at one time they were divided among thirty-six chiefs, so many heads of robbers and devastating bands, barbarous and un-Christian. There can be no doubt that the aim of the Lombard kings from the beginning had been to make themselves masters of Rome, and to rule the whole of Italy as a kingdom. The example and success of Theodorich was fresh before them. Justinian's success under his generals Belisarius and Narses was even younger than the glory of the great Gothic king. Gregory the Great had laid a foundation for christianising the Lombard people in his friendship with the great and good Queen Theodelinda. In process of time they had become Catholic. Their king, Liutprand, had caused the relics of St. Augustine, which had been carried from Africa to Sardinia during the Vandal persecution, to be brought to his capital city, Pavia, where the shrine of the greatest of the fathers still abides in honour. Pope Zacharias, by his personal dignity, prevailed over both Liutprand and Rachis. But the contest for the dominion of Italy went on in spite of reverence for the Apostolic See. The people were Catholic, but tumultous and stubborn. After a long-continued struggle of various success, the king Liutprand seemed to be on the point of incorporating the Spolentine and Beneventan duchies, of closing upon Rome, and expelling the emperor from Ravenna. Upon his death, and the retirement of Rachis, Aistulf was uniting all the Lombard force for the attainment of their purpose from the beginning, to expel the emperor from Italy, and to make the Pope a Lombard subject. He went so far as to put a poll-tax on the Roman duchy, and to style himself king of Italy. There the Carlovingian hand arrested him: and the keys of the cities which the Lombard had won from the Byzantine, and Pipin from the Lombard, laid by the gift of Pipin on the tomb of the chief apostle, signified to all men that his successor had become a temporal prince, after forming Rome in the centre of a captive province from a heathen city into a spiritual capital during the unceasing calamity of three centuries. We have scarcely any record of the indescribable sorrows which the Lombard in his aggressive policy, and the Byzantine in his continuous resistance, made up of treachery and bribery added to insufficient military power, inflicted on the cities and the people of Italy: nor of what the Popes endured in their loyal acknowledgment of their duty as subjects, and their unbroken tenacity in maintaining the faith and government of the Church against the succession of adventurers who mounted the Byzantine throne. These culminated in the seven revolutions terminated by that of Leo III. Then the strong man, armed, rode his charger right into the Church of God and strove to add the Popes of Rome to the number of patriarchs whom he raised, deposed, blinded, and executed as he pleased. He made them ecumenical and trod upon them when so made, with the heel of the imperial buskin. And now we come from the first oppression in confirming the Pope, and the second in reducing him to a captive vassal, to the third of subjecting him as the chief teacher of the Church to the lay power of the emperor.

As we look back we see the whole mind of Justinian photographed in his imperial legislation. When he had to speak to the bishop of his capital his language ran: “To the most holy and blessed Archbishop of this Imperial City, and Ecumenical Patriarch” – the core of the title was “Bishop of this Imperial City,” its corollary “Ecumenical Patriarch”. To him the bishops of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were to submit any appeal from the provinces subject to them. Rome was not to be deposed from the prior rank acknowledged once for all by the eastern monarch and episcopate at the termination of the Acacian schism, in which act Justinian himself, as the ruling nephew, had taken notable part: but there was to be at Constantinople a similar patriarch, whom the whole eastern world should obey. From him the eastern bishops were to learn the mind of the emperor, just as, when they attended the court, he introduced them to the imperial presence. The emperor would honour him by using him as his chief ecclesiastical minister, who held the portfolio of doctrine. The laws which all the world was to receive bore this exaltation of the imperial bishop in their bosom. And it must be confessed that in St. Gregory's time the patriarchal title which Pope Gelasius had utterly refused to the Byzantine bishop a century before, had been conceded to him in St. Gregory's practice: the patriarchal title, but not the ecumenical. Of the patriarchs, when speaking of a fault to be condoned, he wrote, “if any of the four patriarchs had done this we could not pass it over,” and Constantinople must be added to Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem to make up this number of four: but of the assumed title of ecumenical, he wrote that it was diabolical, and the forerunner of anti-Christ.

But another part of Justinian's conduct is no less salient. He is not the first, indeed, but he is the chief of the theologising emperors. The disastrous assumption of dictating doctrine, and deciding in theological controversies, which, at the moment of the fall of the western empire, the insurgent Basiliscus had begun during his short-lived reign, and Zeno continued, and Anastasius reinforced, was taken up with far greater force by Justinian. He laboured during eight years just at the middle of the sixth century to exhibit Pope Vigilius at Constantinople as the first of his five patriarchs: he made the bishop of his capital hold a General Council without the Pope: he imposed his own doctrinal lucubrations upon that Council. He raised in the minds of the western bishops suspicions and fears as to Pope Vigilius being forced to become his instrument. The patriarch Epiphanius, who had weakly yielded to him, he afterwards deposed. Pope Vigilius escaped at last to die at Syracuse on his return to Rome worn out with the “contradiction of sinners” which he had experienced. In his person St. Peter had been a captive; seeds of schism and distrust had been scattered by Justinian in the West: which it required all the wisdom, the energy, and the patience of the great St. Gregory a generation later to overcome and root out. The following theologising emperors, Heraclius, Constans II., Justinian II., the poor phantom Philippicus Bardanes, and lastly Leo III., were only completing and crowning Justinian's double work, of making an ecumenical patriarch, and an emperor behind him, the ultimate judge of doctrine.

But had Leo III. succeeded in his attempt to grasp spiritual and temporal power in one hand, the Church of God would have come to an end. The whole future of the world was touched by the issue of this conflict.

It is to be remarked how immovable the Popes were, not only in the maintenance of Christian doctrine pure and proper, but likewise in the maintenance of that relation between the Two Powers which Christian doctrine requires as one of the conditions of its own action in the world. What on this subject Pope Gelasius in the last decade of the fifth century had said to the emperor Anastasius, now after two hundred and thirty years Pope St. Gregory II. was saying to the Iconoclast emperor Leo. In the interval Italy had been governed by the Byzantines, so far as they possessed it, during two centuries as a subject province, the captive of its spear; Rome had lived through it only in virtue of the Pope's primacy. The eastern empire having been false to the faith in its emperors and in many of its bishops, but especially in four successive patriarchs of Constantinople, had been cut in two, and one half of it given over to an anti-Christian religion to rule with unrestricted violence. And now the diminished emperor, who had just saved his capital from the Mohammedan chalif, had been seduced by Jewish and Mohammedan principles to sweep the Christian churches in his remaining dominion, from Sancta Sophia to the least country church, free of Christian symbols, beginning with the most sacred image of the Redeemer which adorned the gate of his own palace as the witness for the need of the oppressed. Then St. Gregory II. stood up against Leo III. exactly as his predecessor, Pope Gelasius, had resisted the emperor of the former day. Syria and Egypt and North Africa, and, still greater shame and peril, Spain had become Mohammedan. The Pope stood, in 727, where he had stood in 495. In the interval all these countries had fallen: but St. Gregory II. could tell a furious tyrant that all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as “a god upon earth” – that he could not execute his threat to pull down the statue of St. Peter, which the Christians of that day reverenced in his basilica at Rome, which the Christians of eleven centuries have reverenced since in the same place, and put their head under the Apostle's foot as the acknowledgment of the dignity with which Christ invested him.

St. Gregory II. told Leo, the Isaurian, that his own imperial dignity was itself of divine institution, as the organ of human government: while the ecclesiastical dignity was of divine institution, in virtue of that divine intervention by which alone men become sons of God. The answer of the tyrant was five times to attempt the Pope's life, as that of a rebellious vassal whom he was entitled to put under ban, and efface as a natura ferina. But the issue of this contest was that three Popes, St. Gregory II., St. Gregory III., St. Zacharias, equally great, wise, and prudent, maintained intact their Primacy: that their successor, Stephen II., was the first Pope who crossed the Alps; that he consecrated the Carlovingian dynasty, and was accepted in Rome triumphantly as her king. In this series of acts he had also broken the chains of Italy, and a Pope presently following, who had ceased to be an eastern vassal, was to create a counterpoise to the chalif of Mohammed in an emperor, not Byzantine, but Roman, not grasping illicit power in the spirit of Saracenic pride, but as a type of Christian monarchy placed at the head of lawful government, not a perversion of Constantine and Theodosius, but the loyal spirit of both embodied by a divine consecration.

During the reigns of Leo III. and his son, Constantine Kopronymus, and the times of the Popes Gregory II., Gregory III., Zacharias, and Stephen II., certain events take place in the East and the West respectively, which, by their striking contrast with each other, while they coincide in the time of their happening, remarkably express and sum up the course taken by the three centuries which we are considering. Despotism matures in the East, and barbaric savagery triumphs: freedom, order, the majesty of nations growing into one faith, dawn upon the West.

In 727 the yet existing letters of Pope Gregory II. to the emperor Leo exhibit that monarch as thoroughly possessed with the claim to govern the Church as he governs the State. In this he is as thoroughly encountered by the Pope, who calls up against him the unbroken tradition of the Church during the seven centuries, and reminds him of the sad misfortunes of those emperors who had attempted to carry their civil authority into the domain of revealed truth. The great eastern teacher, St. John of Damascus, then living in the Syrian court of the chalif, lays this down in language as peremptory as that of the Pope. The guilt of Leo III. is heightened by the fact that he had before him in the history of his own realm during the hundred years preceding him the rise of a religion essentially opposed to the Christian faith, which he was professing himself to purify. Its force, ever exercised against Christians with the utmost virulence and cruelty, was centered in the fact that its chief deduced all civil authority from the prophetic office of its founder. But while the kingship of Mohammed, as inherited by his chalifs, began with his attempt to found a religion, Leo, in continuing and advancing to their utmost tension the interferences of Justinian with the spiritual order, was undoing the ancient laws of the empire for a hundred and fifty years, from the time of Constantine to that of Zeno. His own patriarch, Germanus, chose rather to lay his omophorion on the altar, and depart into exile than sanction and accept Leo's usurpation in sacred things. The whole liberty, and with it the whole existence of the Church, were comprehended in the resistance maintained by Pope Gregory, and attested by patriarch Germanus as a victim. Gregory II. followed, in giving to Cæsar the things of Cæsar, but to God the things of God, the whole line of his predecessors. Leo III. imitated wrongly the chief antagonist of the Christian name; but Mohammed was at least consistent with his original falsehood. In this his religion itself was contained. Likewise the whole work of Christendom was embodied in the victorious defence of Gregory against the consummation of eastern despotism.

The acts which followed by Pope and by emperor agreed with their several principles. Gregory III. on his accession at once endeavoured to bring the emperor to a better mind. But Leo had already deposed Germanus, and put Anastasius, a docile instrument, in his stead. The Pope called a council at Rome, which entirely supported the freedom of the Church. Leo turned to brute force. He sent out a great fleet with the commission to destroy his own metropolis, Ravenna, then to advance upon Rome, seize the Pope, and carry him away captive, as eighty years before St. Martin had been taken. Five years after this violent act of despotism, which the winds and seas had frustrated, Pope Gregory III., pressed hard by the advancing arms of the Lombard king, Liutprand, besought the great conqueror, Charles Martell, to take up his defence. He appealed to the piety of the Frank leader in behalf of St. Peter, a piety extinct in the Roman emperor's breast. Two years later Pipin had succeeded to the power of Charles Martell, and intimated in the strongest manner the veneration for the Apostolic See felt by the Frank people, in asking Pope Zacharias to pronounce as Pope that Pipin might duly be elected king of the Franks. Zacharias gave his decision: and the diet of the kingdom at Soissons bore out to the full the sentence of Pope Gregory II. in his letter to Leo III., that all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as a god upon earth. Pipin became king of the Franks by the diet of the Franks accepting the decision of Pope Zacharias in 752, when in 733 the rough Isaurian soldier thought only of subduing the predecessor of Zacharias, Gregory III., by a dungeon in Byzantium after the mode of Constans II. with St. Martin. But even yet the contrast is not complete.

Not only had Leo III., in his wrath at being foiled by the elements, confiscated the patrimonies of the Church in the southern provinces of Italy which he possessed, and in Sicily, and in his realm generally, but he interfered with the immemorial spiritual jurisdiction of the Pope as patriarch, and assigned to his own patriarch at Constantinople the privileges which by the appointment of St. Leo had been given to the great metropolis, Thessalonica. This jurisdiction the patriarchs of Constantinople had coveted for centuries. Theodosius II. had tried to give it them by an imperial decree: but it was rescinded. Anastasius, who had been substituted for Germanus in 730, received the ill-omened gift in 733. The giver's son, Kopronymus, afterwards punished by blindness this unhappy man, but sent him back thus blinded to occupy his see during ten years; made him crown his son, and only in 753 Anastasius, becoming once more a servile persecutor of images, terminated the episcopate which he had so ingloriously received in 730. On the other hand, Pope Stephen II., successor of Zacharias, in spite of bodily weakness and continual danger, crossed the Alps, crowned Pipin, his wife and his sons, in the Abbey of St. Denys, in 754, and so consecrated the Carlovingian race. The rising monarchy of the Franks exulted in that very dignity of St. Peter's successor, which the Byzantine monarch was striving to subject to his own will.

But this contrast had a yet further and even more striking issue. Pope Stephen II., hard pressed by the resolute attempt of king Aistulf to make himself temporal king of Rome, applied for defence to the man he still recognised as sovereign, Constantine Kopronymus, and received for answer only the words that he might get it where he could. He beheld the Lombard destroying and trampling on every thing outside the walls of Rome. In the utmost bodily weakness he had taken the road to Pavia: he resisted every effort of Aistulf to detain him. He had been received by Pipin with joy and admiration. Protection against the Lombards was promised him. The Lombard king gave way to his fear of the Frankish kings, but presently broke through every engagement. On 1st January, 756, he had promised himself Rome, and all which it contained. By the end of the year he had surrendered the exarchate to St. Peter, and Rome had accepted her Pontiff Stephen as her king. And the name of Stephen II. is numbered with that of his three predecessors as the maker of pontifical liberty. Kopronymus ventured to ask Pipin to restore to him the cities which Pipin had conquered. He received for reply that not for earthly reward or wealth, but for the love of St. Peter, the king of the Franks had bestowed on the Pope, his successor, the cities which he had delivered from the Lombard, and restored Rome to him by delivering it from Lombard aggression.

Constantine Kopronymus had succeeded his father Leo III. in 740. An insurrection arose against him in his own house. It was put down with terrible severity. These were his doings in Constantinople in the same year 754, when Pipin was crowned by the Pope. He had surpassed his father in the cruelty with which he attempted to alter the existing worship of the Church. He had obtained some advantage in war against the Saracens, who were divided by the contest between the Ommaiads and the Abbassides, but he thought not the least of saving Italy from the Lombards, much more he desired to deliver the churches from the sacred images. For this purpose he caused many assemblies to be held and addressed the people, moving them to destroy the images. At last he held a Council at Constantinople of 338 bishops. At their head stood Gregory, bishop of Neocesarea, Theodosius, archbishop of Ephesus, a son of the emperor Apsimar, Sisinnius, bishop of Perge in Pamphylia. There was no patriarch, no representative from the sees of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The see of Constantinople was vacant, as Anastasius had just died. The Council met on the Asiatic side, opposite Constantinople, on the 10th February, 754, and sat six months. Then on the 8th August it passed over to the Church of Blachernæ. There the emperor presented himself at the ambon holding by the hand the monk Constantine, bishop of Sylæum, and cried with a loud voice, “Many years to the ecumenical patriarch Constantine.” At the same time he invested him with the patriarchal robes and the pallium. The Council ended that day, and nothing of it remains to us except a so-called confession of faith in the acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the second of Nicæa, in 787, where it was refuted and rejected.

The Council of 787, called in the time of another Constantine, the grandson of Kopronymus, when the eastern emperor had returned for the moment to the orthodox faith, has denounced this Council of 754 as claiming most unlawfully the title of ecumenical. Being confirmed by Pope Adrian I., it enjoys that title itself, and its utter condemnation of the Council of 338 bishops which met at the request of Kopronymus can be trusted. Here it is sufficient to say that this Council of 754 covered Kopronymus and his little son Leo with acclamations for having destroyed idolatry. When the emperor and the new patriarch Constantine and the rest of the bishops appeared in the square at Constantinople they published the decree of the Council, and renewed their anathemas against the patriarch Germanus and St. John Damascene. When the decree reached the provinces, Catholics were everywhere dismayed; the Iconoclasts began to sell the holy vessels and disorganise the churches. The images were burnt, the pictures torn down or whitewashed; only landscapes and the figures of birds and beasts were retained, especially pictures of theatres, hunts, and races. To bow before the images of Christ and of the saints was forbidden; to bow before the emperor was retained, and any insult to his figure upon a coin punished with death.

In 754, Kopronymus, holding Constantine by the hand, presented him to the assembled bishops as his own choice for ecumenical patriarch. Not only was the individual his choice, but his father, Leo, twenty years before, had made the office by constituting the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops of the capital conterminous with the empire, in that he deprived the Pope in his quality of the first patriarch of the ten provinces which from the beginning had acknowledged his patriarchal superintendence.

We may follow to his end the ecumenical patriarch who had this beginning.

It seems that neither a bishop nor a secular priest in the eastern empire ventured to oppose the decree of this Council. But monks suffered the most fearful persecution. They were driven away and their monasteries destroyed. Nor were these the worst blows which the emperor dealt upon their institution. He invented truly devilish means to make them contemptible and abhorred. Some who had been banished from Constantinople yielded to his will, subscribed the edict against images, quitted their dress and married. Thereupon they returned to the city, recovered all their civil rights, were marked with favour, received the emperor's personal attention. But those who remained true to their faith and their habit experienced his utmost severity. A month after his return from the war, the 24th August, 766, on which day he had appointed a chariot-race, he caused the monks in the neighbourhood of Constantinople to be brought together into the racecourse. There, as the rows of seats were crowded with people, he compelled each monk to pass in procession with a woman of bad life beside him. Thus they suffered every indignity which an excited populace could put upon them. The bad courtiers saw that it was an evil stroke of the emperor. Those who had not the secret thought that they had been taken in company with these women.

This spectacle so pleased the emperor that, four days afterwards, he repeated it with nineteen of his chief officers, whom he charged with a conspiracy against him. The real offence was the maintenance of the right belief, the having had relation with the banished Stephen in his exile at Proconnesus, and more than once to have praised his constancy in suffering. He caused them to be led round the racecourse, and made the crowd spit on them and revile them. The two of highest account were beheaded: two patricians, brothers, Constantine, who had been controller-general of the posts, and Strategius, officer in the life guards; the rest were blinded and banished to an island, nor did Kopronymus forget every year that he lived to send thither executioners to inflict on each a hundred strokes of oxhide. When he found that the people grieved over the execution of Constantine and Strategius, had not forborne tears, and even murmured, he put down this to the fault of the prefect Procopius, who ought to have suppressed these seditious cries; he had him scourged and deprived.

The patriarch Constantine had received from the emperor extraordinary and unfitting honours. They were followed by public disgrace. The emperor learnt that he had had intercourse with one of the accused for conspiracy. He put up witnesses who declared that they had heard expressions from him against the emperor. This the patriarch absolutely denied, and proof was not forthcoming. The emperor caused them secretly to confirm their statement by an oath taken on the holy Cross. Thereupon, without further proof he set seals upon the door of the patriarchal palace, and banished the patriarch to Prince's Island. Constantine was thus deposed on the 30th August, 766, and on the 16th November the emperor, without regarding any canonical form, named Nicetas to his place. The new patriarch was yet more unfitted for so eminent a rank, being a eunuch and slave by birth. From his youth he had only been accustomed to attend on women, had scarcely learnt to read; but the emperor, on recommendation of certain ladies of the court, had caused him to be made a priest and given him a post in the Church of the Apostles. Upon entering the patriarchal palace Nicetas showed himself worthy of the imperial choice, for he caused the magnificent mosaics on the walls to be destroyed. These his two predecessors had spared for their beauty.

By similar services the highest dignitaries of the kingdom were obtained. A zealous Iconoclast was in the eyes of the emperor qualified for every civil or military post. Thus Michael of Melissene, brother of the empress Eudocia, was made governor of Phrygia, Lachanodracon of Asia, and Manes of Galatia. At the beginning of 767 Constantine sent these new and yet more severe governors into the provinces, having just before imposed an oath on all his subjects not to honour images. Then began a general persecution of the orthodox. Those governors showed themselves in the provinces obedient instruments of their emperor's rage. They profaned churches, persecuted monks, and destroyed pictures. They tore relics of the saints from their sanctuaries, and cast them into rivers or drains. They mixed them with bones of animals, and burnt them together, so that the ashes might not be distinguished. The relics of the martyr St. Euphemia, in whose church at Chalcedon the great Council had been held, were its chief treasure. The emperor had the shrine cast into the sea, changed part of the church into an arsenal, and made the other part a place where all the rubbish of the city might be shot. The waves carried the shrine to the Isle of Lemnos, whose inhabitants fished it up. Twenty years after the death of Kopronymus, Irene, then reigning with her son Constantine, caused this treasure to be brought back to Chalcedon, the church to be purified and restored to its former condition.

The deposed patriarch Constantine had endured the hardest treatment at Prince's Island during thirteen months. The emperor had learnt that this unhappy prelate had told to others an impious remark concerning the Mother of God, which the emperor had made, and enjoined silence about it. Furious in his wrath he ordered him to be brought to Constantinople; he had him beaten till he could not stand, and had him carried in a litter to Sancta Sophia to be degraded. He was cast down on the steps of the sanctuary. A court-secretary read in presence of the whole assembly, called together by the emperors order, a detailed accusation with loud voice, and as he read each detail struck him with it in the face. In the meantime Nicetas had mounted the patriarchal chair, and presided over each insult which his benefactor suffered. When the reading was finished, Nicetas took the act of accusation, had Constantine carried to the tribune, where he was held upright by several, that the people might see him, made one of his suffragans go up to pronounce the anathema, to take off the episcopal robes, and with insulting expressions to expel him from the church, from which he had to go backwards.

The next day, a day of games in the circus, his beard, eye-brows, and hair were torn out; he was dressed in a short woollen smock without sleeves, put backwards on an ass, and led through the circus by a nephew whose nose had been cut off. The parties of the circus reviled him and spat on him. At the end of the circus he was thrown down, trodden under foot, and put upon the stone which terminated the circus to be exposed there, so long as the games lasted, to the jeers of the riders as they passed. He was then thrown into prison, where he lay almost forgotten to the 15th August of the following year, 768. That day was the last of his sufferings. The emperor sent two patricians to him to ask what he thought of the emperor's belief and the doctrine of the council. The sufferer, to the last a courtier, thought by a submissive answer to alleviate his punishment. He replied: “The emperor's belief is holy, and the council has issued a holy confession”. The patricians said at once: “That is just the admission which we wished to have from thy godless mouth. Nothing more remains for thee but death.” They then pronounced his condemnation, and led him into the amphitheatre, where his head was struck off. It was fastened by the ears to the mile-stone, where it served the mob three days for a spectacle. The body was dragged to the Pelagium, a spot where the church of St. Pelagia had stood, which the emperor had pulled down, to make a court where the bodies of the condemned were thrown after execution; in the same way as on the other side the water he had pulled down St. Andrew's church to make a place of execution. The body was also said to have been dissected for the good of science. This was the reward which the patriarch received for having sacrificed his faith and conscience in giving sanction to his master's impieties.