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In the meantime Sergius had died, and Heraclius had put his friend Pyrrhus, who shared his Monothelite heresy, in his place at Constantinople. We learn from the letter just quoted that the death of Pope Honorius and the choice of Severinus to succeed him had already been made known at Constantinople before the Ecthesis was sent to Rome, which was, therefore, never presented for acceptance to Honorius.
I will now take another narrative of what was happening at Rome. Honorius died on 12th October, 638, and was buried in peace and great renown at St. Peter's. The Romans chose their countryman Severinus, son of Labienus, for his successor. The confirmation was delayed during nineteen months and sixteen days, as it seems, because the elected refused to subscribe the Ecthesis of the patriarch Sergius, being a formulary favouring Monothelism.
Before Severinus was yet consecrated the imperial officers practised a robbery upon the treasury of the Church, in which the violence exercised reminds of the dealing of Turkish pashas, with whom in general Byzantine ministers may be compared. The treasures of the Roman Church were kept in the vestiary of the episcopal palace. There were the costly presents which various Christian emperors, patricians, and consuls had left to the blessed Apostle Peter for the redemption of their souls, to be given, as occasion might be, in alms to the poor or for ransoming of captives. There was a report that Honorius had stored up vast sums, and his magnificent buildings caused full credence to be given to this report. Isaac, the exarch in Ravenna, found himself in want of money. The imperial troops riotously demanded to be paid. Isaac had long cast his eyes on the Church's treasury, and now devised a plan to get possession of it. The Book of the Popes gives a detailed description of this incident, and it is not only an exception to the scantiness of historical accounts about Rome, but casts a passing light on the circumstances of the city.
The chartular Mauritius was then at Rome, perhaps as Magister Militum and commander of the Roman army. This consisted of troops in Byzantine pay, but no doubt was already organised as a city militia. Mauritius led by deceit against the Church of God, and taking counsel with certain ill-minded persons, stirred up this Roman force. What good, he said, is it that such a mass of money has been laid up by Pope Honorius in his Lateran Palace while your wages are not paid, which our lord the emperor has sent, and the holy man has put them in his treasury? Kindled by these words, all the armed men in the city of Rome, young and old, flocked to the Lateran Palace. They could not force an entrance, because those who attended on Severinus, the Pope elect, resisted. Mauritius, seeing this, encamped his army there for three days. Then he summoned the judges, that is, the high officers of the city, who were in his counsel. They broke in and set the imperial seal upon the treasure. Then Mauritius wrote an account of what he had done to the exarch Isaac at Ravenna, saying that he had put his seal on the treasury and they could take without harm anything which they liked. When Isaac learnt this he came to Rome; he banished all the chief persons of the church who resided in the several cities, so that none of the clergy could resist him, and, after some days, he entered the Lateran Palace; he stayed there eight days, and plundered everything. Part he sent to the emperor in the imperial city, part he gave to the troops, part he kept for himself. Anastasius concludes with the words: After this the most holy Severinus was consecrated, and Isaac returned to Ravenna. The meaning of which seems to be that Isaac had come to Rome under pretence of confirming the election of Severinus, which he made the elected Pope pay for by the plunder of his treasury.
In the meantime Roman Commissioners were urging upon the emperor Heraclius at Constantinople to issue the imperial consent to the consecration of the Pope. After many negotiations, the chief of the clergy there showed them a doctrinal writing, the Ecthesis, and said, “We will only support you in your matter if you promise us to persuade the Pope to subscribe this act and to recognise without reserve the doctrines therein contained”. The Commissioners, who perceived the drift of the act, and that on account of this the first See of Christendom had so long remained unfilled, answered calmly and prudently: “In this affair we can do nothing. A message has been entrusted to us, but no order given us to make a confession of faith. We will give you the assurance that we will inform the Elect of everything that you have said; that we will show him this paper and beseech him, if he approve of its contents, to subscribe it. Be so good, therefore, as to put no hindrance to our mission for this matter, to do us no violence, and not to detain us without end. None can do violence to another, especially in a matter of faith; for in such a case even the weakest becomes very strong, even the quietest feels himself a hero; and since he strengthens his soul with the word of God, the most violent attacks serve only to confirm not to weaken him. And how much more does this apply to the Church and clergy of Rome, who, from the beginning to the present, as eldest of all the churches under the sun, presides over all! Having received this privilege according to the canons, as well from councils and apostles as from their supreme Head, in this matter of succession in the Pontificate, it is subject to no writings whatsoever, to no issue of synodical documents; but in all these matters all are subject to it according to sacerdotal law.” This is what with a most sacred and becoming confidence, fearing nothing, those intrepid ministers of the immovable Rock said to the clergy of Constantinople; who thereupon ceased from their pretension, and promised to obtain for them the imperial confirmation.
Pope Severinus, after suffering the double humiliation of having the treasury of the Church sacked by the emperor's viceroy, and his own election unconfirmed for nearly twenty months, ascended the throne of Peter on the 28th May, 640, and sat two months and six days. “He loved the clergy, and was most liberal to them all,” says of him the Book of the Popes; “holy, benignant above all men, a lover of the poor, large-handed, most gentle.” In this short Pontificate he found time to reject the imperial decree, called the Ecthesis.
Had Pope Severinus at this moment failed in his duty, the whole Church would have been involved in the Monothelite heresy. Not only Pope Severinus, but his successors during forty years, were the sole stay of the Church against a heresy – the last root of the condemned Eutychean heresy – which overthrew the true doctrine of the Incarnation, making our Lord Jesus Christ not God and Man in one Person, but a Person compounded out of God and Man, and therefore not Man at all. The whole temporal power of the Byzantine sovereign, at that time despotic lord of Rome, and backed by subservient patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus, and Peter, was exerted to compel the Popes who sat during these forty years to accept the false doctrine presented to them in an imperial decree. The successive Popes in this time, Severinus, John IV., Theodore I., St. Martin I., St. Eugenius I., St. Vitalian, Deusdedit, Donus I., rejected and condemned the decision urged upon them by the imperial and patriarchal pressure, all of them at the risk of every sort of persecution – one, St. Martin, at the cost of a singularly painful and glorious martyrdom. The next Pope, St. Agatho, condemned the heresy in a General Council allowed at Constantinople itself by an orthodox emperor over which his legates presided. The Pope succeeding him, St. Leo II. ratified the condemnation by the Council of four successive Byzantine patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus and Peter, as heretics, and censured the negligence of Honorius in not extinguishing at once so dangerous a flame. In truth it had held the life of the Church in suspense during more than forty years. Had one of the ten successors of Honorius failed, all would have been lost, so near to the precipice was the Byzantine despotism and the State patriarchate, subservient to it, and supplying it obediently with theological knowledge sufficient to formulate heresy, allowed by the Divine Providence in that fearful century to drive the Church. And precisely during these years the new Arabian conqueror – the chalif of Mohammed – cut in two the empire which was attempting this parricide. When Heraclius went forth committing his city and his son to God, to the holy Mother of God, and to his bishop, he triumphed for the only time in the long Roman history over Rome's eastern rival, and brought back the Cross from Persia to Constantinople, and then carried it in dutiful homage to be replaced in its old shrine where our Lord suffered at Jerusalem. When at the bidding of that very bishop Sergius he tampered with the Christian faith, and oppressed the successor of St. Peter, he lost Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, with the great provinces which belonged to them. Out of the four patriarchates of his empire, three became subject to the Mohammedan chalif. The subjection came suddenly, but has lasted with a short interval from that time to this. The conquest, as yet unbroken, of Mohammed over Christian peoples dates from the perfidy of Heraclius and of his grandson Constans II. and the heresy propagated by four Byzantine patriarchs.
Returning to the history of this time we find that the successor of Pope Severinus, John IV., was consecrated 24th December, 640, and held a council at Rome immediately after his accession, and condemned under anathema the Monothelite heresy. Heraclius died February 11th, 641. Upon his death Pope John IV. sent a letter to his successors, Constantinus-Heraclius, and Heracleonas, setting forth the same faith. He also informed the new Patriarch, Pyrrhus, that he had condemned the Ecthesis: and St. Maximus informs us that Heraclius I., to turn away the Western displeasure at the Ecthesis from his own person, at the beginning of the year 641 wrote to Pope John IV. that “the Ecthesis is not mine, nor did I command it to be drawn up, but the patriarch Sergius prepared it five years ago, and besought me on my return from the East to publish it with my subscription”. The purpose of John IV. in writing to the new emperors was to set forth the doctrine of the two Operations and Wills in Christ, and in doing this to defend the orthodoxy of his predecessor Honorius. It is to be observed that after the death of Honorius, when the eastern patriarchs began to assert that Honorius in his answers to Sergius, which up to that time had been private, favoured the heresy which Sergius had imposed upon the eastern bishops, and was trying to put upon the Pope, his successors denied with much care that Honorius had any such meaning. Thus in this document of Pope John IV. directed to the sons of Heraclius, which bears the title, Defence of Pope Honorius, he says: —
“My predecessor, teaching concerning the mystery of Christ's Incarnation, said that there were not in Him, as there are in us, opposing wills of the spirit and the flesh. Certain men, twisting this to their own meaning, threw out the suspicion that he had taught that there was one Will of the Godhead and the Manhood, which is utterly contrary to the truth. I could wish them to reply to my question, in regard to which nature do they assert that there is one Will of Christ our God? If it be only in regard to the Divine Nature, what is their reply concerning His Human Nature? For he is likewise Perfect Man, lest they be condemned with Manichæus. If they speak in regard to the Manhood of Christ that this Will is Perfect God, let them see whether they do not fall under the condemnation of Photinus and Ebion. But if they assert that in the Two Natures there is only one Will, they will confuse not only the Natural Wills but the Natures themselves, so that neither the one nor the other, that is, the Divine and the Human, can be understood. For as we do not, like the impious Nestorius, suffer Two Natures to make up one Christ, so we do anything but deny, yet neither do we confuse, the difference of Natures, inasmuch as we confess the Two Natures united in the one Person of Christ our God with an agreement which language is not able to express. For in that they assert One Will of Christ's Godhead and Manhood and at the same time one Operation, what else do they assert than that one Nature of Christ our God operates according to the division of Eutyches and Severus. As a last argument, the orthodox Fathers, who have flourished in the whole world, are proved to teach in full accordance at once Two Natures and Two Wills and Operations.”
In these words, which John IV. writes as Pope to the immediate successors of Heraclius within three years after the death of Honorius, he would seem not only to have set forth in plain language the immense importance of the doctrine itself, but to be an unimpeachable witness of the meaning of Honorius, one of whose priests he had been, and as such well acquainted with his doctrine.
The pontificate of John IV., for the confirmation of which he had to wait four months, lasted only twenty-one months, and was disquieted throughout by the conflict with the Byzantine court and patriarch respecting the Ecthesis. There was war between the exarch and the Lombard king, Rotharis, but it did not touch Rome. All misfortunes which threatened it came from Byzantium. The struggle against the eastern heresy embittered the feeling of Constantinople to Rome. At the same time, the Byzantine court was disturbed by intestine revolutions. Heraclius ended his reign of 31 years in February, 641. His eldest son, Heraclius Constantinus, succeeded, but, after seven months, was poisoned by his stepmother, Martina, and the Monothelite patriarch Pyrrhus was charged with concurrence. In a few months, Martina's own son, Heracleonas, was deposed by an insurrection. His nose was cut off, and the tongue of the empress Martina cut out, and both were banished. The grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., became emperor in 642, a boy of twelve years, and reigned 26 years, until 668. The reign of this emperor is much to be noted, because it is contemporaneous with the second, third, and fourth chalifs: Constans II. stands in history over against Omar, Osman, and Ali.
On the death of John IV., Theodorus, a Greek of Jerusalem, was made Pope: it is supposed by the influence of the exarch Isaac. He was the first of many Greeks, who, in this period, were made Popes: of all of whom, without exception, it is recorded that their integrity, as Popes, was in no way affected by any national feeling: they sacrificed nothing to Byzantine policy.
At the beginning of this pontificate, Mauritius, the officer called chartular, whose proceeding in the robbery of the Lateran treasury has been recorded above, raised a rebellion in Rome. He found people, nobility, and army embittered by the Byzantine domination, and used this feeling for his own purposes. He spread a report that Isaac was striving to be king, made party with those same turbulent Romans who had joined in the attack upon the Lateran, and induced the garrisons in all the castles of the Roman territory to refuse obedience to the exarch. When Isaac heard this, that all the army of Italy had taken the oath to Mauritius, he sent Donus as commander with an army to Rome. Thereupon the Roman army gave up Mauritius, and joined Donus. Mauritius took asylum at St. Mary of the Crib. He was taken out and sent with an iron collar about his neck, as well as the others implicated in the insurrection, to the exarch at Ravenna: but, before he arrived there, was beheaded, and his head carried to Ravenna and impaled. Isaac kept the other conspirators in prison, collared in the same way, but they escaped execution by the death of Isaac himself. Isaac was buried in the beautiful church of St. Vitale, in Ravenna, and his epitaph is preserved in Greek, and being a picture not only of the man, but of his time, is worth transcribing. It runs thus: —
“Here lies one, a brilliant commander, who for six years, preserved Rome and the West without injury for our serene lords, Isaac, the fellow-worker with emperors, the great ornament of all Armenia, where he was of illustrious race. Upon his death in great renown, his wife Susannah mourns over her loss like a chaste dove, the loss of a husband who gained glory by his labours both in the East and in the West, for he commanded the army of both.”
Isaac may be considered as the ideal exarch, and by contemplating his deeds, we may attain to a knowledge of the race of exarchs, viceroys of Italy, and images, in common clay, of their masters in marble, towards whom, for 200 years, St. Gregory and his successors had to exercise the virtue of loyalty.
Upon the accession of Constans II., in 642, the patriarch Pyrrhus, under suspicion of complicity with the empress Martina in the poisoning of the emperor Heraclius Constantinus, fled to Africa. His place was taken by Paulus, a still more zealous Monothelite. Pyrrhus, coming to the West, which was unanimous in rejecting that heresy, represented himself to have been convinced by the eloquence of the Abbot Maximus, in an African Council in 645, and came to Rome to lay the confession of his faith at the feet of the Apostle Peter. Pope Theodorus received the repentant patriarch with great ceremony in the Vatican Basilica before the assembled clergy and people, to whom he solemnly condemned his own errors. But, when he went to Ravenna, Pyrrhus fell back again. Pope Theodorus thereupon condemned him in a Roman Council.
In 646, the African bishops, in four councils, had condemned the Monothelite doctrine with the Ecthesis. Pope Theodorus, in accordance with the wish of these African Councils, admonished the new patriarch, Paulus II., at Constantinople, to return to the faith of the Church. Paulus sent a long answer, in which he expressed the Monothelite doctrine. Pope Theodorus condemned him after his nuncios at Constantinople had in vain endeavoured to draw from him an orthodox confession. At the same time Pope Theodorus named Stephen, Bishop of Dor, Apostolic Vicar for Palestine, with the charge to resist the heresy which Sergius, Bishop of Joppa, was spreading, and to depose the bishops intruded by him. The patriarchal chair at Jerusalem was, in fact, vacant, and the patriarchate laid waste by this usurper. Hence the Pope took charge of it. So afterwards John of Philadelphia was appointed Apostolic Vicar.
Paulus did not give way. He moved the emperor Constans II. in 648 to issue a new doctrinal decree, drawn up by himself, called the Typus, which was to take the place of the Ecthesis, and prepare in another way the spread of Monothelite error. It was to forbid under the severest secular punishments any dispute respecting One or Two Operations in our Lord or One or Two Wills. In itself it seemed intended to quiet the westerns, but in the actual state of things only for the prejudice of Catholics. Maximus the Confessor shewed that in it truth and error were alike intended to be suppressed. The eastern bishops were again compelled to subscribe. Those who refused were persecuted, even the papal legates. Their altar in the Placidia palace was destroyed, and they were forbidden to celebrate, and severe ill-treatment added.
While the Greek emperor, led by his patriarch Paulus, was issuing his edict concerning the Christian faith, Muawia, as general of the third chalif, Osman, with a fleet of 1700 ships, great and small, being already in possession of Syria, had made a descent on Cyprus, occupied the city of Constantia, subjected and laid waste the whole island.
Pope Theodorus is recorded in the book of the Popes as “a lover of the poor, large-handed, kind to all, and very merciful”.
