Kitabı oku: «Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III», sayfa 22

This degradation by Kopronymus of the man whom he had made and called ecumenical patriarch, and to make him had persisted in his father's overthrow of the Church's order from the beginning, by an act of despotic power breaking into her constitution, is it not also a token of the condition into which the most ruthless tyranny had reduced the episcopate of that eastern realm? Those bishops who, at the bidding of an adventurer, successful for the moment and presently swept away, had met at Constantinople in 710 to overthrow the Sixth Council and the faith of the Church; and again, the three hundred and thirty-eight who had met at the same place at the bidding of Kopronymus to make the whole order of divine worship subject to his will, did the spirit of St. Basil, St. Athanasius, St. Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria live in them still, or were they in possession indeed of unquestioned episcopal rank and all the powers which belong to consecration, but in fact the most abject minions of the most debased human will – the will of a Byzantine despot? The will of one fined already of one half his empire by the divine Hand which raised up the most abject of savages to punish a debased Christian realm. Yet ruler after ruler had not received the lesson which faith derives from chastisement. Leo III. surpassed his predecessors, and his son surpassed the father, in imitating the arrogance of a false theocracy. He carried his civil autocracy into interference with the doctrine and the worship of the Church. This interference the laws of his own empire warned him against, as cited by St. Gregory II. in the examples of the greatest emperors.

It is not too much to say that the despotism wielded by those who occupied the Byzantine throne from Justinian to Kopronymus had eaten out the courage and dulled the sense of divine things which we admire in the Fathers of the fourth century. Athanasius denounced a Constantius, and Basil a Valens, but the eastern bishops of the eighth century crouched before Leo and Kopronymus, and if there had not been a succession of Popes, in whom the spirit of St. Leo lived on, and the doctrine of St. Leo was maintained, the Church herself would have yielded to the most debasing despotism ever seen. But it must not be forgotten that the bishops of the West were faithful to the teaching and emulated the stedfastness of the Popes. A despotic patriarch, nominee and instrument of a despotic emperor, made a servile episcopate. A martyr Pope, such as St. Martin, likewise made an army of martyrs. The several character of bishops in the East and West completes the contrast which we have been drawing out.

In the patriarch Constantine the ecumenical patriarchate received its completed form. Kopronymus chose him; took him by the hand, presented him to the 338 bishops who held an illicit and heretical council at his bidding; having used him for his purposes, deposed, beheaded him, treated his lifeless body with extreme dishonour.

In the same Kopronymus, the two hundred years of secular lordship begun by Justinian's conquest of Rome came to an end. He had disregarded the appeal of Pope Stephen to defend his own dominion from the Lombards. Pipin had deprived them of that dominion, and then bestowed it upon St. Peter. Kopronymus asked Pipin to give it back to him. Pipin refused, and after thirty-four successive Popes had endured a dominion which began with the deposition of St. Silverius by a shameless woman, and perhaps cannot show a single act of generous defence in return for loyal service during two centuries, the attempt inaugurated by Justinian, and finished by Kopronymus, to reduce the successor of St. Peter to a patriarch whom they might treat as the patriarch Constantine was treated, failed finally and for ever. Stephen II., an infirm old man who had crossed the Alps at the risk of his life, deserted by Kopronymus and threatened by Aistulf, sat at the grave of the chief Apostle, Prince as well as Bishop of Rome, and the Christian faith was not left to be determined by soldiers of fortune on the throne of Byzantium, but saved by and for the guardianship of the living Peter.

From Metrophanes, the first recorded bishop of Byzantium, not yet Constantinople, in the time of the Nicene Council to Methodius, in the year 842, when the Iconoclast contest came to a final end, fifty-eight bishops sat on the chair of the Greek capital. The first was simple bishop of a suffragan city to the Thracian metropolis of Heraclea. As soon as Constantine in the year 330 had consecrated his new capital as Nova Roma, there began a continual exaltation, the work of the eastern emperors for their own purposes; after four centuries the bishops of Constantinople had in 733 reached the culmination of their hopes by receiving from the emperor Leo III. ten provinces out of the Roman jurisdiction, and twenty bishoprics of his own birth-land, Isauria, previously belonging to the patriarch of Antioch. They were in a Greek sense ecumenical, not because their authority extended over the world, but because by imperial gift it had become conterminous with that portion of the world which was considered by the Greek emperor the habitation of men, that is, his subjects. The original and true patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch had fallen under Mohammedan domination. So likewise had Jerusalem, which attained patriarchal rank only in the middle of the fifth century. The name of each as patriarch was carefully maintained, especially for appearance in the list of Greek councils, but in each case, and for hundreds of years, it was little more than “magni nominis umbra”. Of the fifty-eight bishops of the capital many have gained for themselves imperishable honour, many are venerated in the number of the saints by Greeks and Latins, and looked up to as intercessors and protectors, others have at least left behind them in one or other respect a distinguished memory. But more than a third, one and twenty, are branded as heretics or favourers of heresy. Almost as many were for various reasons deposed, partly by heretical, partly by orthodox emperors. Several, also, of them received at the same time dishonouring treatment, such as Kallinikus, Anastasius, and Constantine. In three cases, those of St. Chrysostom, Eutychius, and Pyrrhus, deposed prelates, were restored, a case which much oftener recurs in later Byzantine history.

In the fourth century the names of Eusebius, Macedonius, Eudoxius, and Demophilus in the see of the capital are marked as supporters of the Arian heresy. In the fifth century the Nestorian heresy springs from its author in the very chair of Constantinople. Fifty years later the Acacian schism springs in like manner from the ambition of its author in the same chair, and the names of four successors, Fravitas, Euphemius, Macedonius II, and Timotheus are struck from the diptychs of their own church, when the schism was terminated under Pope Hormisdas. In less than twenty years after this, Anthimus, put into the see of the capital by the intrigues of the same empress Theodora who violently deposed Pope St. Silverius, was deposed by Pope Agapetus in his visit to Constantinople, as a Monophysite heretic. In the sixth century the Monothelite heresy was owing mainly to the political intrigues of Sergius, sitting for twenty-eight years in the see of Constantinople, also the prime minister and guide of the emperor Heraclius; he and his three successors, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, were the main-stay of that most insidious and stubborn heresy, which for forty continuous years kept the Church in peril, and strove to overthrow the efforts of ten Popes to maintain the faith, and brought one of them to die a martyr under the rule of Constans II. But in the seventh and eighth centuries, the most terrible Iconoclast persecution found in six bishops of Constantinople its main support, in that they put to the service of the emperors Leo III. and Constantine Kopronymus, Leo V. and Theophilus, these immense ecclesiastical powers with which the emperors themselves had invested them over the eastern bishops. The single patriarch had himself become a despot in wielding the tyranny of the civil despot as his chief instrument. These six ecumenical patriarchs wielded their authority under Iconoclast emperors for a long time: Anastasius I. from 730 to 753; Constantine II. from 754 to 766; Nicetas I. from 766 to 780; then an orthodox sovereign brought with him an orthodox council. The patriarch Tarasius and union with the West might seem to have secured a deliverance from a renewed reign of the Iconoclast violence. On the contrary, three succeeding patriarchs, Theodotus from 815 to 821; Antonius I. from 821 to 832, and John VII. from 832 to 841, did what they could to carry out the wishes of their masters for that heresy.

Such was the conduct, as guardian of the faith, of the line of pseudo-popes set up by state policy at Constantinople, in virtue of the pretension that the bishop of Nova Roma should enjoy equal rights with the bishop of Old Rome.

It is to be noted that in this period the whole doctrine concerning the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ went through the most complete sifting and discussion in the Councils of the Church. During it, from St. Silvester to Gregory IV., seventy pontiffs sat in the chair of Peter. They lived in full five hundred years of perpetual struggle. One after another “apparent diræ facies inimicaque Troiæ numina” – Arius in the foreground heralding Mohammed in the rear; Nestorius and Eutyches tearing the unity of the Church on opposite sides; an able bishop of Constantinople seizing the moment of Rome's temporal captivity under Arian strangers to raise his see to parity: the East well nigh devoured by opposing sects. After this, an insidious Byzantine couple, Heraclius and Sergius, emperor and patriarch, covering up deep wounds with ambiguous words, and sacrificing the empire by their sacrifice of the faith; and lastly, emperors who disregard things human and divine, and mark their mastery over doctrine by the subversion of worship, a Leo III. and a Constantine Kopronymus. All secular power is in the hands of Nova Roma which Constantine has set up to be the Christian city from its cradle: the seven greater hills to take the place of the hills by the Tiber, and in these very hills of Constantine from age to age the evil vision nestles – his successor and his patriarch are the chief performers in this ever recruited drama of heresy. But through all these attacks the seventy successors on St. Peter's throne have kept the doctrine of the Church, that is the doctrine of the Incarnation itself, one and unchanged. The infidel has trampled upon Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem; but while the old Christendom has sunk from debased nations into Saracen serfdom, a new Christendom has arisen among Teuton settlers, making their first steps in national life. Nova Roma has been false to the purpose for which Constantine founded it; and Old Rome has found among those whom the rival counts as barbarians, one more faithful as well as more powerful than she has been. Charlemagne stands at the end of the vista which Constantine begins. Of the two, does he not merit most in the Church of God?

But to estimate at its due value this long series of historic facts, it must be remembered that during at least three centuries of this period, the seventy Popes work as captives, the fifty-eight bishops of Constantinople work as the right hand of emperors. From the time indeed when St. Silvester passed from the catacombs to the Lateran palace, to the time when the Vandal robbers desolated Rome under the eyes of St. Leo, the Popes were not captives. They had severe persecution at times to undergo: especially under Constantius I., the whole fifty years of Arian trial were a special test of their fortitude, their clear undoubted maintenance of the Godhead of our Lord, their unfaltering trust in their apostolic right. But so long as there was a Christian western emperor he had a regard to the Apostolic See of the West: even a Valentinian III. could acknowledge St. Leo in an imperial edict in 447 as “Principem episcopalis coronæ”; words which present the very idea of St Peter's majesty, as the root, the bond, and the crown of the episcopate. But with the inroad of barbarians, as soldiers of fortune and civil masters of Rome, another time begins. And when to barbarous manners and brute force was added the Arian spirit, a period ensued which was calculated to test to the utmost the dowry of truth bestowed on the Apostolic See. Justinian as a civil ruler may be deemed worse than Odoacer, worse even than Theodorich. What the Popes did, they did often after being nominated without free election, often with the postponement of their confirmation after election (as when after the death of Pope Honorius, Pope Severinus had his three years diminished to two months, in the hope of Heraclius to bend him to the Monothelite heresy), sometimes with unjust depositions, as St. Silverius by Theodora, as St. Martin by Constans II., as St. Sergius attempted by Justinian II., as John VI. attempted by Apsimar, the emperor of a day: again by unlawful substitution for a living Pope, as Eugenius to St. Martin, when condemned but not yet martyred. Then again the eleven years preceding the great Pope Sergius from 676 to 687 witness the appointment of six Popes. At this time there is a series of Popes who show eastern lineage, as if the emperor's hand were busy in the choice of them. But no one of them fails, and St. Sergius and St. Gregory III., both easterns, are of the very greatest and most stedfast in the whole time of Popes.

Add to this that the civil condition of these Popes, from the entrance of the Lombards to the end of the exarchs, was often most perilous. It was plaintively alluded to by St. Agatho in addressing the Sixth Council, when forty years after the death of Honorius he set forth in most absolute language the unfaltering integrity of faith which had marked the Apostolic See to his own time, language; which the Council accepted.

It is to be noted that a Pope, whose election had been long delayed by the mere arbitrary will of emperor or exarch, as soon as he was consecrated, entered into the full possession of his unrestricted rights. The exarch who had power to delay, who had power to plunder the Lateran treasury of the Church, as Isaac and John Platina did, had no power to lessen the dignity of St. Peter's succession when once acknowledged. Even Vigilius is admitted to have emancipated himself from the thraldom of Theodora; and Eugenius, forced upon the Romans by the tyranny of Constans II., was a blameless Pope, who did not yield to the heresy of Constans.

What manner of men were they who were loyal vassals to the most iniquitous rulers, and when solicited by their own faithful peoples to break an abhorred yoke yet held them back, and adhered to those who gave them neither protection nor justice? They did not rule as Satraps in a kingdom worn down to prostration by centuries of arbitrary power, but were acknowledged as sitting in the apostolic throne of Faith and Justice by rough lords from the North, to whom obedience in spiritual things was a Christian virtue learned with great difficulty by those who inherited a natural independence. Interminable intestine quarrels among the western potentates, who yet accept the voice of an unarmed Pope as the interpreter of faith, and the most upright arbiter of human justice, are a proof the more how deeply the rule of St. Peter had sunk into the western mind.

What guarantee of truth can be offered by the course of human things if this be not one? That is the testimony of the three centuries from Genseric the Vandal to Aistulf the Lombard. The testimony of Teuton conquerors, who burn what they once worshipped, and worship what they once burnt, who enter on their dominion as spoilers and develop into Christian monarchs. The testimony of Constantine's imperial successors, who own the papal succession to St. Peter, while they try to bend it to their will, and in the attempt subject half their empire to an anti-Christian tyranny. Lastly, the testimony of St. Leo the Great and fifty-one successors to the time when St. Leo III., invested with civil sovereignty, employed the acknowledged greatness of his spiritual power to restore the empire which the first Leo saw sinking in ruins.

Chapter VIII. From Servitude To Sovereignty

The first land possession of the Roman See appears to have been the Cæsarean palace of the Lateran, the gift to it of the emperor Constantine, in gratitude to God for having conquered the heathen empire at the Milvian Bridge. It noted the impression on the conqueror's soul of the divine sign, in this prevail. Therein St. Silvester took up his abode, and in it was built the Cathedral Church of Rome and of the world. For a thousand years it remained the abode of the Popes – the centre of the Church's visible life, whence her spiritual jurisdiction radiated, the proper residence of one hundred and sixty Popes, from St. Silvester to B. Pope Benedict XI.

It is not a little to be noted that the original root of the Pope's temporal power was his unique spiritual power, that the gift of Constantine foreshadowed the empire of Charlemagne; that the first Christian emperor removed the Pope from the catacombs to a Cæsarean palace; that the second emperor received back from the Pope that imperial title and power which so many successors seated in Constantine's Nova Roma had used so cruelly against the successor of St. Peter, whom yet they acknowledged. And still the Lateran Basilica bears on its front in barbarous Latin the title no less true than proved,

“Dogmate Papali datur ac simul Imperiali,

Quod sim cunctarum Mater Caput Ecclesiarum”.

Nor is there any spot on the earth upon which the guiding hand of God in the fortunes of the world may be more profitably studied than before the entrance of that Church so well styled in her double character Mother and Head. If the Mother were not head her rule would be impotent; if the head were not mother it would be unbearable.

The munificence thus begun in his gratitude by Constantine was continued during centuries by great Roman families and by others also. The pastoral staff fixed itself in Roman earth, and became a great tree. In due time it flowered in a prince's sceptre. It is most interesting to mark in the gifts to the Roman See the heathen names of ancient patrician families commemorated. Under the properties administered by St. Gregory the Great we read of the Massa Papirianensis, the Massa Furiana, the Massa Varroniana, the Fundus Cornelii.

A fact which enters deep into the world's history bears remarkable witness to the rapid increase of papal wealth and its inevitable accompaniment, the political independence of St. Peter's chair. From the time the unity of the Roman realm began to be dissolved into two empires, the eastern and the western, not a single western ruler fixed his seat abidingly in Rome, although almost all lived in Italy, and although many of them could have put to good use, amid the State's increasing weakness, the help which the charm of the Roman name offered. After the death of Constantine the Great in 337, of his three sons Constantius I. received the East, Constans I. received the West in union with his younger brother Constantine II., but after his murder, alone. This Constans usually dwelt in Gaul. When he visited Italy we find him prefer Milan and Aquileia to Rome. He yielded to the insurgent Maxentius, and then Constantius became sole master of the realm, and, when in the West, lived chiefly in Milan. In his whole reign once only did he enter Rome.

The second division of the realm, which followed the emperor Jovian, gave Valentinian for ruler of the West, who selected at first Milan for residence, but was compelled by incursions of the German peoples to spend much time on the Rhine. We learn, partly from the history of St. Ambrose, partly from other documents, that the sons and successors of Valentinian I., Gratian, and Valentinian II., as well as the mother and guardian of the latter, the widowed empress Justina, when in Italy held their court chiefly at Milan and Aquileia.

The third and final partition, which severed the West for ever from the East, took place in 395 after the death of the Spaniard, Theodosius I., whom Gratian had taken for his partner. From that time not Rome, not Milan, or Aquileia, but the seaport Ravenna appears the permanent residence of those phantom-emperors who ruled for nearly a century until the full dissolution of the western empire. The political significance of the last city even remarkably survived the name of the Roman empire.

We are expressly told that Odoacer, the first German king of Italy, who deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last West Roman, had his seat in Ravenna. The same was the case with Odoacer's conqueror, the great Ostrogoth, Theodorich. During his government Ravenna received the title of the royal city, though the Ostrogoth often lived in other great cities of upper Italy, such as Pavia and Verona. Finally Ravenna, after the extinction of the Ostrogothic state and people, remained for nearly two hundred years the seat of the exarchs, Byzantine viceroys of Italy.

Why of so many princes bearing the title of Roman emperors or kings of Italy did no single one make his seat in the former capital of the world? Why did the greater number pay it only a transitory visit, some perhaps not see it at all? I think only one sufficient answer can be given to this question. They shunned a longer stay at Rome because they felt that in a city which had assumed a priestly character they would no longer play the first part so much as kings desire and must desire it. That fact is, therefore, an incontestable proof not only of the papal power, but likewise of its wealth. Without property no co-active force, not even spiritual, can in the long run maintain itself.

The law of the year 321, allowing churches to receive landed property from any testator, had results so astonishingly great, that in 50 years Valentinian I. thought it necessary to put a limit on it. We may pass at once to the time of St. Gregory the Great, the fourteen years 590 to 604. At that time the Bishop of Rome in his Lateran Palace, had become the greatest ground landlord in Italy, and even in all the West. He was the real protector of Rome. The eastern emperor bore the name, but in every need and trial it was not at Ravenna or at Constantinople that help was sought, but at the Lateran. Royal dignity waited already upon the Vicar of Christ; a dignity with which the spontaneous offerings of three hundred years had invested him. St. Gregory lived like a monk, and gave away as a king from the inexhaustible fountain of the apostolic charity.

His letters enable us to form a fair estimate of the domains of the Roman Church at that time. In his unresting activity to minister aright the material wealth of the Church, the son of St. Benedict ripened the recognition of his political independence. His death preceded by 150 years the legal acknowledgment of sovereignty attained by his successor, Stephen II., and that intervening period was, as we have seen, a time of exceedingly severe trial. A notice of the deacon John, biographer of St. Gregory, informs us that in his pontificate the Roman Church possessed at least twenty-three patrimonies. These were respectively, that of Sicily, of Syracuse, of Palermo, of Calabria, of Apulia, the Samnite, the Neapolitan, the Campanian, the Tuscan, the Sabine, the Nursian, the Carseolan, that of Via Appia, of Ravenna, of Illyricum, the Istrian, Dalmatian, Sardinian, Corsican, Ligurian, that of the Cottian Alps, of Germanicia, and of Gaul.

The position of the Popes from the time of St. Gregory to the beginning of the State of the Church is thus described by a Jewish writer forty years ago. “The Popes were usually the helpers out of every need. They supplied the money required for the payment of the troops, and for the requisite provisionment, to keep off the ever-impending threatenings of scarcity. They also frequently redeemed captives. Now as the Protector always exercised a decisive influence on the protected, and the distant emperors distinguished themselves as much by their neglect, as the Vicars of Christ by their activity in the interest of Italy, and especially of the seven-hilled city, nothing was more natural than that the estimation of those who were so often its preservers advanced more and more. Thus they soon came in fact to stand at the head of almost all secular matters in and about Rome, with almost sovereign power. That was especially the case since the pontificate of the great Gregory I., a Pope truly venerable both for his very distinguished mental gifts, and for his far-stretching, sound, practical discernment, and his inflexible will. These were the reasons enabling him to assume a freer political position towards the Greek imperial court than his predecessors.”

It has been computed that the Popes were in all landlords of 1360 square miles, that is 870,400 acres, in the time of Leo the Isaurian, and that these lands produced to them 200,000 gold soldi in money, and 500,000 in kind. And if we add to this computation the very great secular powers which the policy of Justinian had placed throughout his empire in the hands of the bishops, we may form some notion of the secular authority wielded by the Popes before they obtained the technical rank of sovereigns, according to modern definition of that word. Constantine's gift of the Lateran palace may be considered the starting point which the continual generosity of so many succeeding generations extended, as has been recounted, until the unanimous voice of his people, delivered, as they hoped, from the Lombard burden, saluted Stephen II. on his return in 756, not only as Papa, but as Dominus Urbis.

Under the year 752, when Aistulf had attacked the exarchate and occupied the city of Ravenna, and was turning his arms against the Roman duchy and the cities depending on it, Muratori writes: “From what we have hitherto seen, although the Greek emperors had their ministers in Rome, yet the principal authority of government seems to have been seated in the Roman Pontiffs. They with the power and majesty of their rank and with the accompaniment of their virtues tranquilly governed that city and duchy, defending it moreover vigorously, when need arose, from the claws of the Lombards.”

Such was the position of the Pontiffs before that definitive rejection of the Byzantine sovereign made by Stephen II. when he was left naked to the assault of Aistulf by the cowardice or the impotence of Constantine Kopronymus. From his return in 756 he and his successors after him became kings as well as Popes of Rome. Scrupulous as the two Gregories, Zacharias and Stephen himself had been up to the time of the compact with Pipin, never after did any Pope acknowledge the Byzantine as his civil sovereign.

Never could an Italian of those ages have given to the Goth or the Lombard that heartfelt devotion which they felt for the perpetual defender of the Italian people, who was seated in the centre of Italy at once the champion of the Christian faith, and representative of Rome's old Commonwealth. The Byzantine slave-master revolted the Roman heart; the Arian politician revolted the Christian faith: but in the Roman see St. Sergius the Syrian emulated the courage of St. Martin the Roman, and St. Gregory III., also Syrian, was in no quality behind his predecessor St. Gregory II. the Roman. Is it any wonder that by the end of the seventh century when a Justinian II. tried to repeat on the person of St. Sergius the wickedness practised by his grandfather upon St. Martin, his own soldiers rose against the guardsman whom he had deputed to this atrocious work, and recognized in the Pope the defender of all which they held dear, whether in the natural or the supernatural life.

And, again, had not the seven revolutions at Byzantium – ending in the exultation of a rough soldier who was able in the field, but ignorant in doctrine – given a sufficient lesson to the Italian peoples to cast off a force which disregarded all right in the natural order, and the whole tradition of faith in the supernatural realm of revealed truth?

That is the consummation which we have been following during a whole generation, from 726 to 756.

I will here insert the judgment of another historian, upon the gift of the exarchate, made by Pipin to St. Peter, in the person of the Popes: – “To question the rightness of this donation is unreasonable and preposterous. Since the reconquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses, Rome was regarded at Constantinople simply as a province, not as a member of the realm, or not as, what it had originally been, the seat of empire. On what could the right of Greek tyrants be founded constantly to receive back, even at second hand, conquests which they were able neither to govern nor to maintain? The assertions of some late historical writers seem to pre-suppose that all Europe, as far as the Rhine and the Danube, were placed by God for ever under the Byzantine yoke, and that the shaking off this yoke was an unpardonable injustice. Rome did under her bishops what peoples did under their kings. Rome took her opportunity to free herself from the yoke of foreign dominion and unnatural relations. No prince, no people of Europe has any other claim upon its soil to show than this and the centuries. Both tell for Rome. Before this testimony, the lesser but yet valid right disappears, that the Greek emperor had confiscated the Papal possessions situated in Lower Italy, and that nothing was more natural than that it should take the compensation which presented itself. The other question which has been also proposed, whether the office of a teacher and bishop of the Christian community can be united with a secular administration, had been long before answered. Rome owed its actual existence solely to the protection of its bishops. They had found their best right of sovereignty in the gratitude of the people, and long before the donation of Ravenna, they had been, if not in name, yet in fact, princes in Rome.”