Kitabı oku: «Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III», sayfa 25

Chapter IX. The Making Of Christendom

Among the events of history, as the historic mind would ponder them, or the judgments of God, as the Christian mind would interpret them, there are none greater than the two which for some time past I have been attempting to narrate or to contemplate. One is the wandering of the nations on the north of the great inland sea: the other is, the wandering of the nations on its south. Having reached the last year of the eighth century, we may cast a glance back upon both, and unite, if it may be, in a single picture the action upon both of a power which owed its institution only to the greatest fact of all facts concerning our race, the assumption of human nature, the soul and body of man, in His own Person, by the Creator of all things, the Son of God. That power existed only in virtue of certain words uttered and a certain will exercised, during His life upon earth. As the last of His thirty-three years was beginning, He had said to a man: Thou art the Rock, and upon this Rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. How far did the gates of hell advance upon the Church of God in the four hundred years which elapsed from the death of the great Theodosius?

When he closed his eyes in the year 395, the great empire of Augustus in the East and West was still intact. The fifth and the sixth centuries may be said to be filled by the fall of that empire in the West. I have required ten chapters to give even a slight account of the effects produced upon the Christian Church by the wandering of the northern nations to the time of St. Gregory the Great. But the seventh and eighth centuries are filled with the pouring out of the Mohammedan flood upon the Christian people, which had more or less remained after the wandering of the northern nations ended in their settlement. It is another convulsion equal in its range and perhaps still greater in its effects than that which made Teuton tribes the masters of Gaul and Spain and Britain, of Germany, of Italy, and Illyricum. The peoples of the north had struggled for hundreds of years to break the barriers of the Rhine and the Danube, and in their savage ferocity and tameless independence wrest the South, so long coveted, from the civilised but degenerate Roman. The prize, which they had almost reached in the third century, was saved from their grasp until the fifth by a succession of brave and able generals invested with imperial power. But the Teuton could both admire and receive the law and the religion of the empire which he overthrew. Far otherwise was it, when a savage tribe of Arabia, kindled to white heat by a fanatic and false belief, burst upon a despotic empire in which Christian faith and morality were deeply impaired. It needed but the third decade of one emperor's reign to abrogate the Roman sovereignty held during seven hundred years over Syria and Egypt, and to establish the sway of a false prophet, the bitterest enemy of the Christian faith, over the very city which contained the sepulchre of Christ. “The law had gone forth from Sion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,” and thither all Christian nations sent a host of pilgrims to kindle anew their faith and love before the shrine which had held for a day the source of all that life, the Body of the God-man. Now that shrine, with all the memorial places of the Divine Life upon earth, fell into hands whose work it was to set up instead of the Christ, a man of turbulent passions and unmeasured ambition: instead of the Christian home, the denial of all Christian morality: instead of a Virgin Mother placed at the head of her sex, and unfolding from age to age the worth and dignity of woman, the dishonoured captives of a brigand warfare. All this took place within ten years after the death of Mohammed, and by the end of the reign of Heraclius, when the greatest triumph ever won by a Roman emperor over the rival Persian monarchy was followed by the most ignominious defeat from a troop of Arabian robbers, and the permanent abandonment of Roman territory. During the sixty following years, not only had Antioch and Alexandria, as well as Jerusalem, become Mohammedan, but the last fortress of Christian power in the East, the impregnable city of Constantine, trembled repeatedly at the approach of Saracen hosts, being rescued rather by its matchless position, its strong walls, and the invention of the Greek fire, than by the superior valour of its defenders. At the end of that seventh century, the whole northern coast of Africa had passed away from Roman to Saracenic rule: from the Christian faith to its Mohammedan antagonist. In ten years more, the Saracen banner crossed over the straits of Gibraltar, and the Church of Spain fell under its domination. At this time the eastern empire, diminished as it had been, passed through severe revolutions. It seemed that from intestine dissension and the despotism of one crowned adventurer after another, the remnant of the eastern realm, which during seventy years could hardly maintain itself against Saracen aggression, was coming of itself to an end. In this uttermost extremity at Constantinople, a soldier had risen from the ranks to be a trusted general, and when the empire received him for its chief, a long prepared attack by the chalif on his capital was beaten back successfully by Leo III. In the time of the chalif Walid, who reigned from 705 to 715, the Arabian flag floated over the walls of Samarcand: its conquest had stretched to the foot of the Himalayas. His governor in Africa, Musa, had carried the bounds of his empire to the Atlantic ocean. The single city of Ceuta owned still the Byzantine sway. And the Christian count, Julian, for a private wrong, betrayed to the Saracen the city entrusted to his charge. Musa added almost all Spain to the Saracen domain. Constantinople had been besieged in 668, and saved under Constantine the Bearded; it was saved again in 718, under Leo III. These two deliverances, with the fact that it had not been taken in all the interval from the time of Heraclius, may be termed the only checks received from Christians by the Mohammedan conquest in the whole period from the death of Mohammed. Had it succeeded in gaining Constantinople when it gained Toledo, it is difficult to see how the universal enthralment of the Christian faith under the almost insufferable tyranny of the Arabian false prophet could have been prevented.

Thus when St. Gregory II. succeeded to the throne of Peter in 715, and Leo III. to the throne of Constantine in 717, the position of the Christian Faith before Islam seemed to stand in terrible danger. The sons of Mohammed, lords of Asia, Egypt, Africa, and Spain, were besetting, with long prepared fleet and army, the last remains of the Greek power in Constantinople on the East, and on the West had only to look to the conquest of France. If they became masters of France, there was no strength left to resist them, neither Italy divided between Lombards, Greeks, and the old inhabitants, subjects of one or the other, nor Germany divided among various peoples. The whole world seemed to be reserved for the anti-Christian kingdom of Mohammed: all nations about to pass under the hard servitude of a conquering Arabian tribe, instinct with hatred to the Christian life; all women to become slaves of man's passion: all reason to endure subjection to a lie imposed by the scimitar. What we have since seen of Mohammedan rule in Asia and in Africa during twelve hundred years, seemed then on the point of becoming the general doom.

That was the time chosen by the eastern emperor, after a reign of ten years, to attempt the imposition of a fresh heresy upon Pope Gregory II. The man who was formally bound by his position as Roman emperor, and by the oath taken at his coronation to defend the Church as it had come down to him from the seven preceding centuries, was filled with a desire to remodel the practice of that Church in all its worship. He advanced claims which were not only an invasion of its independence by the civil power, but in themselves rested only upon the practice and the sentiments of the Church's two great enemies, the Jew and the Saracen. The Jew abhorred the relative worship paid to the images and pictures of our Lord, of His Mother, and of the saints, because he utterly denied the fact of the Incarnation, which these images and pictures were ever presenting in the daily worship of the faithful. The Mohammedan shared this abhorrence, because he denounced the Christian as an idolater for his belief in our Lord, as Son of God. Leo III. took up the mind of the Jew and the Saracen into his own rude and unformed nature, and bent the whole force of the imperial power to subdue the Pope to his will. Spain had just fallen into Mohammedan hands: and the lord at Damascus ruled from the Atlantic to Samarcand. Under his rule, which was the bitterest ignominy to every Christian, lay more than half the empire which Justinian had left. Then, in 726, a contest, the most unequal which can be conceived, began between Pope Gregory II. and the emperor Leo III. It continued fifty years under Leo and his son, Kopronymus, who died in 776. In the course of it, Leo sent a great fleet against the coast of Italy, whose commander was instructed to take and plunder Ravenna, to proceed to Rome, to put down all opposition to the imperial heresy, and to carry Pope Gregory captive to Constantinople, after the fashion used in the preceding century to Pope St. Martin. Pope Gregory II. endured to his death the joint heresy and tyranny of the eastern lord, and induced the irritated populations of Italy still to keep allegiance to him. His successor, Pope Gregory III., used the same forbearance. Pope Zacharias for ten years went on enduring, while the Frank nation accepted, on his judgment, a new dynasty. For twenty-eight years, from 726 to 754, no amount of wrong could induce four successive Popes to throw off the allegiance which had pressed upon Italy as a servile province since the conquest of Justinian. At length, the fourth Pope, Stephen II., was deserted in his utmost need by the emperor himself: was threatened with a Lombard poll tax laid upon Rome, and the position of vassal to an Aistulf in the city of St. Peter. Then the eastern servitude at last dropped, and the issue of the most unequal combat, begun in 726, was terminated by the compact ratified at Quiersy in 754, and carried out at Pavia in 756. This compact secured to Pope Stephen and his successors the position of sovereign princes in Rome, and the territory attached to it. In 756 Pope Stephen II. re-entered Rome as its acknowledged civil sovereign. Yet, in the eighteen years following this event, the last king of the Lombards renewed the ambition of Liutprand and Aistulf, to become the lord of Rome, and the renewal of Pipin's gift by Charlemagne, in 774, alone closed the momentous contest which, beginning in 726 with an attack on the unarmed Pope, ended in the deliverance of Italy from the most cruel of thraldoms, and made the Pope, who had long been Rome's only support and benefactor, its temporal as well as its spiritual head.

At the time of that event, more than four centuries had passed since Constantine, in 330, consecrated his city on the Bosphorus to be Nova Roma, pursuing his idea to found a capital which should be Christian from its birth, and the centre of a great Christian empire. Five years before the Church had met for the first time in General Council. The object of its meeting was to refute and censure an attack upon the Godhead of its Founder, and the place at which it met was a city immediately on the Asiatic side of the strait, on which what was then Byzantium stood. The position taken by Constantine was to guard with the imperial sword the chamber in which the Church's bishops sat, to accept their decrees as the utterance of Christ himself, and to add the force of imperial law to the spiritual authority which he acknowledged them of themselves to possess.

From the baptism of Byzantium as Nova Roma in 330, fifty years succeed to 380, in which Constantinople becomes the chief seat of the very heresy condemned by the Church at the Council of 325. Its see is sought after immediately as the prize of worldly ecclesiastics in the East. Eusebius, the man who presently became its bishop, deceives Constantine into fostering the heresy which he abhorred: its bishop, Macedonius, was the docile servant of the emperor Constantius in his attempt to change the faith of the Church: its bishop, Eudoxius, nurtured the emperor Valens in the same heresy. But the succession of Popes in Julius, Liberius, and Damasus, frustrated these efforts of the bishops of Nova Roma in the first half century of its promotion: and when Theodosius sat on the throne of Constantine, with his colleagues, Gratian and Valentinian, their law of 380 called upon their peoples “to hold the religion which is proved to have been delivered to the Romans by the divine apostle, Peter, since it has been maintained there from his time to our own”.

But the terrible effects wrought upon the eastern episcopate by the Arian assault had not been finally overcome. The next attack upon the Person of our Lord proceeded from the eloquent Syrian, Nestorius, who had been put in the see of Constantinople. It required all the energy of Pope Celestine and the patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, to overcome that heresy which still attacked the Incarnation, and was supported by court favour at the eastern capital, and the jealousy of its emperor for his bishop. It is remarkable that the First Council at Ephesus, in 431, should have been followed by a Second Council at the same place in 447. This second Council was, so far as its convocation and its constitution went, regularly entitled to be a General Council. Its decree was in favour of an opposite heresy to that of Nestorius, on the same subject of our Lord's Person, and its originator was the monk Eutyches, in high repute at the head of a monastery at Constantinople. The Council after its completion was rejected, and the heresy overthrown, by the single arm of St. Leo the Great. The whole Church at Chalcedon accepted his act and acknowledged his Primacy. But this Monophysite heresy had driven its roots deep into the Greek mind. During two hundred years, to the time of Mohammed himself, its effects may be traced, corrupting the unity of belief in the eastern patriarchates, encouraging perpetual party spirit, breaking constantly the succession of bishops in the hierarchy. In the time of St. Leo, the patriarch Proterius, who succeeded the deposed Dioscorus, was murdered by the Monophysite faction. A few years later the bishop of Constantinople used this heresy for the purpose of exalting his see against Rome, which had just been deprived of its emperor, and its government left in the hand of barbarians, who were also heretics. Thus supported by imperial power, Acacius brought about a schism which lasted for thirty-five years. The resistance of seven Popes, the last of whom, Hormisdas, obtained the full result which his predecessors had sought for, frustrated this second century of Byzantine aggression upon the faith and government of the Church.

Indeed, so striking and unquestionable was the submission of the Byzantine sovereign, and the recognition by the Byzantine bishop of the Papal authority, that from this time forth a somewhat new course was pursued by the eastern emperor and patriarch in regard to that authority. The purpose of Justinian in his subsequent reign was, while he acknowledged in very ample terms the papal primacy, to subject it in its practical execution to his own civil power. Thus when he had become by conquest immediate lord of Rome, he summoned Pope Vigilius to attend him at Constantinople. During eight years he subjected him to perpetual mortifications. He issued doctrinal decrees and required the Pope to accept them. His laws fully admitted the Pope's rank; he never denied his succession from St. Peter: but his pretension was to make the five patriarchs use their great authority in submission to himself; and he included the first of the patriarchs in this overweening claim, as his namesake Justinian II. signed his council in Trullo at the head of all, and left a line between himself and the patriarch of Constantinople for the signature of Pope Sergius, which was never given.

The result of Justinian's oppression of Pope Vigilius was to create temporary schisms in some parts of the West, through dread of the bishops that something had been conceded to the usurpation of the civil power. Not until the time of Gregory the Great could the Apostolic See recover the injury thus inflicted. But Justinian did much more than persecute a particular Pope. I think it may be said with truth, that from the conquest of Italy under his generals, Belisarius and Narses, it was the continual effort of the Byzantine emperors to subject the Papacy to the civil power in the exercise of its spiritual supremacy. From Justinian to Constantine Kopronymus – a period of more than two hundred years – that is the relation between the Two Powers which the eastern emperors carried in their minds and executed as far as they were able.

The fourth century of Nova Roma's exaltation opened with the strongest assertion of this claim which had yet been seen. The able and unscrupulous Sergius had become patriarch of Constantinople, and was prime minister of the emperor Heraclius. The whole East was teeming with Monophysite opinions, and every city, in proportion to its size and dignity, torn with party conflicts arising out of dissension respecting the Person of our Lord. Sergius thought he had devised a remedy by that Monothelite statement which, as he imagined, enabled him to present in a more conciliating form the old heresy put down by St. Leo and the Council of Chalcedon. He led the emperor Heraclius to publish this heresy in the imperial name. Then four successive patriarchs of Constantinople were found to put all their spiritual rank at the service of two emperors, Heraclius and Constans II., to formulate the heresy, and force it, if possible, on the Popes. Ten successive Popes resisted – one to martyrdom itself – and after a struggle of fifty years, Popes Agatho and Leo II. at the Sixth Council – when the eastern emperor for the moment became orthodox, and his patriarch and bishops followed him – condemned and expelled the heresy. But this fatal attempt of Sergius and Heraclius had been exactly coincident with the rise of Mohammed. The Greek contention respecting the Person of Christ had lasted three hundred years, from the Nicene Council, when the success of the false prophet led vast countries, once the most flourishing of Christian provinces, to yield to the human authority of a robber, and to put him in the place of the God-man whom by their works they had so often denied. And so the fourth century from the exaltation of Nova Roma had been completed.

Yet still it was reserved for the fifth century to Constantinople, at a time of its extreme humiliation, when for ninety years it had only just obtained from a new and undisclosed invention the power to keep the all-conquering Saracen outside its walls – to make its final and most absolute attack upon the elder sister whom it acknowledged as the leader of the Christian faith. Syria and Egypt and Africa and Spain were gone, and the Persian monarchy, for so many hundred years the rival of the Roman, equally was absorbed in the enormous Saracen dominion, and the cities of Asia Minor were in daily dread of the same foe prevailing over their religion and desecrating their homes. Such was the condition of things when the yet remaining Christian emperor assumed over the Christian Church the power of Mohammed's chalifs in the territory which they ruled in Mohammed's name. Another fifty years occur in which, when after the orthodox patriarch Germanus had been forced to lay the insignia of his rank on the altar of Sancta Sophia and depart, three Iconoclast patriarchs in succession, Anastasius from 730 to 753, Constantine from 753 to 766, and Nicetas I. from 766 to 780, placed themselves at the disposal of their emperors to corrupt the faith and subject the government of the Church, until at the Seventh Council once again an eastern emperor became orthodox: and an eastern orthodox patriarch followed again in Tarasius; and Adrian I. was received as Pope, being no longer a vassal of Constantinople, but a sovereign prince.

Upon these antecedents ensued the temporal sovereignty of the Pope. What is the witness of history to the spiritual action of the Popes during this long period of 426 years, from 330, when Byzantium became Constantinople, to 756, when the people of Rome welcomed with universal jubilee the return of their Pope, Stephen II., as sovereign? – when again in 774 Charles at the beginning of his great career approached St. Peter as a pilgrim, and renewed to him his father Pipin's act of munificent piety.

Let us follow the course of the heresies which, during four centuries and a half from the Nicene Council in 325, to the defeat of the Iconoclasts at the Seventh Council, attacked the faith of the Church. They turn upon the Person of our Lord: upon that mighty fact of the Incarnation which filled all men's minds. The Arian denied that He was God; the Nestorian and Monophysite sought in opposite methods to deal with His two natures. The Monothelite pursued the question to its inmost point as it touched the two natures in the operation of the Will; his error in its root was especially Eutychean. When the question began the original eastern patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch were in their primal state and glory. They held their descent from Peter, like the See of Rome. Like the Apostolic See their chairs were at the head of a great mass of bishops, Antioch in particular having a crowd of metropolitans governing important provinces, who looked up to the great see of the East, who, when the patriarchate was vacant, voted for the election, as they received from him the confirmation of their own election. Alexander in the mother see of Egypt had been the first to condemn his own insurgent priest, Arius, and at the Nicene Council he was attended by his deacon, Athanasius, who was soon to succeed to his place, and raise during his episcopate of forty-six years the See of St. Mark to its loftiest renown. Eustathius, at the same Council, the twenty-fourth bishop of Antioch, was a noted confessor, and with Alexander contributed to its decision; while Pope Silvester threw the whole weight of the West, which had no doubt as to the Godhead of Christ, in favour of the same result. As yet Constantinople was not; and the See of Jerusalem, though highly honoured, was in the hierarchy a simple bishopric suffragan to the metropolitan of Cesarea. There could be no controversy more reaching to the inmost heart of faith in the Church than that which concerned the Person of the Lord. Taking the four centuries and a half as a whole we find that the eastern patriarchates failed under the trial. The first of them, Alexandria, had for its two greatest teachers Athanasius and Cyril, both doctors of the Church, both renowned in their defence and illustration of the doctrine that God became man. But no sooner had Cyril died than his see became the centre of the Monophysite error. Almost the whole Christian people of Egypt followed its bad lead, and when the Saracen chief took Egypt and Alexandria in the name of Mohammed he found support rather than opposition in the mass of the Christians, who, in their bitter party hatred, called the remnant of Catholics still remaining Melchites or Royalists as the most opprobrious epithet they could devise. And in process of time, under Omar and his successors, the country of Athanasius has become the heart of Mohammedan learning and zeal.

Scarcely less melancholy is the history of Antioch and its twelve provinces of metropolitans, with their 163 bishops. Eustathius was speedily deposed by the Arian faction, even before Athanasius, and during ninety years a perpetual schism preyed upon the dignity of the great eastern see. In the fifth century it was unable to prevent the advance of Constantinople. It fell a speedy prey to the Mohammed's chalif, and from that time the man who bore the name of its patriarch was often a dependent and pensioner at the eastern capital. Jerusalem had succeeded in obtaining the patriarchal dignity at the Council of Chalcedon. But in less than two hundred years Omar polluted its holy place by his presence, and the most stirring voice uttered by its patriarchs is that cry of its noble Sophronius, bidding his chief bishop go to the throne of Peter, “where the foundations of holy doctrine are laid,” and invite the sitter on that throne, who was Honorius, to rescue the faith imperilled by his brother patriarchs, Sergius at Constantinople, and Cyrus at Alexandria, leaders of the Monothelite heresy.

When therefore the emperor Constantine Kopronymus, in 754, took by the hand Constantine whom he had chosen to be ecumenical patriarch, and presented him as the elect of the emperor to the Council of more than three hundred bishops, whom he had convoked to sanction his own heresy, while twelve years afterwards, as the sequel of many torments, he executed him and had his body dissected; we may say that the eastern patriarchs had utterly failed to defend either the faith or the hierarchy of the Church. Mohammed did not appear to complete the work of Arius, until the descendants of those who condemned Arius in 325 had obscured by interminable disputes during three hundred years what their spiritual ancestors had declared to be the faith of the Church. The causes of this failure had been internal. There had been great bishops in the East during this period. Chrysostom had sat in Constantinople, suffered, confessed, and been exiled before Nestorius, who sat there also, and was exiled for his heresy. Germanus, in the same see, did not yield to Leo III., and in that worst time confessed, and his place was forthwith taken by Anastasius, who subscribed all Leo's evil will. Kopronymus strove to exterminate the monks, who suffered every extremity for their maintenance of the faith. But as the main result the Byzantine despotism had overcome the eastern episcopate. I do not know how more telling proofs of that evil victory could be shown than that Philippicus Bardanes, in 711, during his ephemeral reign, should be able to assemble a council at Constantinople, which he required to restore the Monothelite heresy, condemned at the Sixth Council, and scarcely met with an episcopal opponent; and again that Kopronymus could assemble another large council in 754, to establish his Iconoclast aggression, which was received without dissent.

How then was the faith preserved during these four hundred and sixty years?

From Pope Sylvester to Pope Stephen II. we count sixty-one Popes. In that long period of time the doctrine of the Godhead and the Person of Christ with all its manifold consequences was fully drawn out. The variation which had been seen in the patriarchal and episcopal sees of the East was never found at Rome. All political and external help may be said to have failed the Popes. They lost their own western emperor, and the sole remaining eastern emperor turned against them. More also, he set up against them a new bishop who at the beginning of the time did not exist, the bishop of the eastern capital. The eastern lord added from generation to generation rank and influence to this bishop. He made him his own intermediate instrument of communication with all the bishops of his eastern realm, to whom it had been the continual policy of Justinian and his successors to grant great political privileges, making them in large degree partakers of civil authority. They sought to rule the East throughout its manifold divided interests by the authority of the local bishops; and they sought to rule the bishops themselves by their own patriarch. Rome, from being the head of the Roman monarchy at the beginning of the period, ceased to be the capital even of a “servile” Italy, the captive of Belisarius. The Popes passed through Odoacer, Theodorich, Theodatus, also Vitiges and Totila, also Liutprand, Aistulf, and Desiderius. Their elections, when made, were delayed in their recognition, or even controlled in their choice. They saw a crowd of northern raiders take possession of the whole West, and at one time the very heresy which at the beginning of the period had been condemned by the Church, was in possession of all the governments of the West but that of the Franks, and had for the chief ruler of its councils and the head of the regal league against the faith of Rome the greatest man whom the northern tribes can show during their time of immigration, and he had made Italy powerful and respected, and cultivated Rome with extreme solicitude. When St. Silvester sat in St. Peter's chair, Rome was the single capital of the whole empire; when St. Leo sat there he witnessed the fall of the West, but stood imperturbable before Attila and Genseric; when St. Gregory sat there, he divined from the temporal ruin and desolation of Rome, which he saw perishing piecemeal around him, that the world's last time was coming. When St. Martin sat there, he was torn from his sick bed by the eastern master to die in the Crimea; when St. Gregory II. sat there, the same eastern master threatened to break in pieces the statue of St. Peter in his Basilica. But in all the four hundred and sixty years from the first to the second Nicene Council, the witness of Rome to the Divine Person of her Lord was clear and distinct. Neither the greatest nor the worst of her opponents had subdued that witness, or rendered it faltering or indistinct. For this reason it was that the Pope, whose life the Iconoclast soldier, when clothed with the imperial purple, five times attempted, could reply to his threat, that all the West looked upon St. Peter as a God upon earth; that the one Teuton king before whose victorious reign that of Theodorich is pale and colourless, ascended on his knees the steps before St. Peter's tomb, laid upon the altar over his body the gift of temporal sovereignty, and went forth from that moment the predestined civil head of that new Christendom which St. Peter had made out of the northern adventurers.