The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations Part 2

But this course of things, which is seen in action from the Nicene to the Chalcedonic Council, comes out with yet stronger force from the moment when Rome loses all temporal independence. We may place this moment at the date of its capture by Genseric. But it continues from that time. The events which took place at Rome in the twenty-one following years, the nine sovereigns put up and deposed, the subjection to barbarous leaders of hireling free-lances, the worse plundering of Ricimer seventeen years after that of Genseric--these were events grieving to the heart St. Leo and his successors; but yet not events at Rome alone--the whole condition of things in East and West which Pope Simplicius had to look upon outside of his own city, despotic emperors in the East, with bishops bending to their will, allowing the apostolic hierarchy to be displaced, and the apostolic doctrine determined by secular masters; Teuton settlements in the West ruled by the heresy most inimical to the Church; the Catholic population reduced in numbers and lowered in social position; whole countries seized by pagans, and forced at once into barbarism and infidelity--in the midst of all these the Pope stood: his generals were the several bishops of captured cities, whose places were a.s.saulted by heretical rivals, supported by their kings. Gaul, Spain, Britain, Africa, Illyric.u.m, Italy itself, no longer parts of one government, but ruled by enemies, any or all of these would have rejected the Roman Primacy if it had not come to them with the strongest warrant both of the Church's past history and her present consciousness.

Such was the new world in which the Pope stood from the year 455; and he stood in it for three hundred years. The testimony which such times bear is a proof superadded to the words of Fathers and the decrees of Councils.

But there is one other point in the political situation on which a word must be said.

From the time named, the Roman Primacy is the one sole fixed point in the West. All else is fluctuating and transitional. To the Pope the bishops, subject in each city to barbarian insolence, cling as their one unfailing support. Without him they would be Gothic, or Vandal, or Burgundian, or Sueve, or Aleman, or Turciling,--with him and in him they are Catholic. Let me express, in the words of another, what is contained in this fact. The Church, says Guizot, "at the commencement of the fifth century, had its government, a body of clergy, a hierarchy, which apportioned the different functions of the clergy, revenues, independent means of action, rallying points which suit a great society, councils provincial, national, general, the habit of arranging in common the society's affairs. In a word, at this epoch Christianity was not only a religion but a Church. If it had not been a Church, I do not know what would have become of it in the midst of the Roman empire's fall. I confine myself to purely human considerations: I put aside every element foreign to the natural consequences of natural facts.

If Christianity had only been a belief, a feeling, an individual conviction, we may suppose that it would have broken down at the dissolution of the empire and the barbarian invasion. It did break down later in Asia and in all north Africa beneath an invasion of the same kind--that of barbarous Mussulmans. It broke down then though it was an inst.i.tution, a const.i.tuted Church. Much more might the same fact have happened at the moment of the Roman empire's fall. There were then none of those means by which in the present day moral influences are established or support themselves independent of inst.i.tutions: no means by which a naked truth, a naked idea, acquires a great power over minds, rules actions, and determines events. Nothing of the kind existed in the fourth century to invest ideas and personal feelings with such an authority. It is clear that a strongly organised, a strongly governed, society was needed to struggle against so great a disaster, to overcome such a hurricane. I think I do not go too far in affirming that, at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century, it is the Christian Church which saved Christianity. It is the Church, with its inst.i.tutions, its magistrates, and its power, which offered a vigorous defence to the internal dissolution of the empire, to barbarism; which conquered the barbarians; which became the bond, the means, the principle of civilisation to the Roman and the barbarian world."[27]

In this pa.s.sage, Guizot speaks of the Church as a government, as a unity.

At the very moment of which he speaks, St. Augustine was addressing the Pope as the fountainhead of that unity; and in the midst of the dissolution an emperor was recommending him to the Gallic bishops "as the chief of the episcopal coronet"[28] encircling the earth. The whole structure which lasted through this earthquake of nations had its cohesion in him--a fact seen even more clearly in the time of the third Valentinian than in that of the conquering Constantine.

But looking to that East, which dates from the Encyclikon of a Basiliscus and the Henotikon of a Zeno, here the Pope appears as the sole check to a despotic power. He alone could speak to the emperor on an equal and even a superior footing. Would such a power not have repudiated his interference, had it not been convinced of an authority beyond its reach to deny? The first generation following the utter impotence of Rome as reduced to a _municipium_ under Arian rulers will answer this question, as we shall see hereafter, with fullest effect.

I have adduced above three political situations. The first is when the Primacy pa.s.ses from dealing with one government to deal with more than one; the second when the Primacy has to deal with an unsettled world of many governments; the third when it is the sole fixed point in the face of a hurricane on one side and a despotism on the other. I observe that the testimony of all three concurs to bring out its action and establish its divine character. As an epilogue to all that has been said, I will suppose a case.

Three men, great with the natural greatness of intellect, greater still in the acquired greatness of character, greatest of all in the supernatural grace of saintliness, witnessed this fifth century from its beginning: one of them, during two decades of years; the second, during three; the last, during six decades. They saw in their own persons, or they heard in authentic narratives, all its doings--the cities plundered and overthrown; the countries wasted; all natural ties disregarded; neither age, nor s.e.x, nor dignity, respected by hordes of savages, incapable themselves of learning, strangers to science, without perception of art; the sum being that the richest civilisation which the world had borne was crushed down by brute force. They saw, and mourned, and bore with unfailing personal courage their portion of sorrow, mayhap turning themselves in their inmost mind from a world peris.h.i.+ng before their eyes, to contemplate the joy promised in a world which should not perish. But neither to St. Jerome, nor to St. Augustine, nor to St. Leo, did the thought occur that this barbarian ma.s.s could be controlled into producing a civilisation richer than that which its own incursion destroyed. That, instead of perpetual strife and mutual repulsion, it could receive the one law of Christ; be moulded into a senate of nations, with like inst.i.tutions and identical principles; that, instead of one empire taking an external impress of the Christian faith, but rebelling against it with a deep-seated corruption and an unyielding paganism, and so peris.h.i.+ng in the midst of abundance, it should grow into peoples, the corner-stone of whose government and the parent of their political const.i.tution should be the one faith of Christ, and their acknowledged judge the Roman Pastor; and that the Rome which all the three saw once plundered, and the third twice subjected to that penalty, should lose all its power as a secular capital, while it became the shrine whence a divine law went forth; and that these hordes, who laid it waste before their eyes, should become its children and its most valiant defenders.

Had such a vision been vouchsafed to either of these great saints, with what words of thankfulness would he have described it. This is the subject which this narrative opens; and we, the long-descended offspring of these hordes, have seen this sight and witnessed this exertion of power carried on through centuries; and degenerate and ungrateful children as we are, we are living still upon the deeds which G.o.d wrought in that conversion of the nations by the pastoral staff of St. Peter, leading them into a land flowing with oil and wine.

NOTES:

[3] "Episcopatus unus est cujus a singulis in solidum pars tenetur."--S.

Cyprian, _De Unitate Ecclesiae_.

[4] Gregorovius, i. 286. "Das Papstthum, vom Kaiser des Abendlandes befreit, erstand, und die Kirche Roms wuchs unter Trummern machtig empor.

Sie trat an die Stelle des Reichs."

[5] Gregorovius, i. 200.

[6] St. Ignatius, _Epistle to the Romans_.

[7] "That Roman, that Judean bond United then dispart no more-- Pierce through the veil; the rind beyond Lies hid the legend's deeper lore.

Therein the mystery lies expressed Of power transferred, yet ever one; Of Rome--the Salem of the West-- Of Sion, built o'er Babylon."

A. de Vere, _Legends and Records_, p. 204.

[8] Gregorovius, i. 208.

[9] Gregorovius, i. 215.

[10] Sidonius Apollinaris, _Epist._, i. 9. "Hi in amplissimo ordine, seposita praerogativa partis armatae, facile post purpuratum principem principes erant."

[11] "Sed si forte placet veteres sopire querelas Anthemium concede mihi; sit partibus istis Augustus longumque Leo; mea jura gubernet Quem petii."--_Carmen_, ii.

[12] Reumont, i. 700.

[13] He says at the end of 500 hendecasyllabics (jam te veniam loquacitati Quingenti hendecasyllabi precantur):

"Hinc ad balnea non Neroniana, Nec quae Agrippa dedit, vel ille cujus Bustum Dalmaticae vident Salonae, Ad thermas tamen ire sed libebat, Privato bene praebitas pudori".

[14] For a well-told account of this expedition and its failure, see Thierry, _Derniers Temps de l'Empire d'Occident_, pp. 77-101.

[15] There is a strange occurrence recorded by St. Gregory in his _Dialogues_ as having taken place in this church, which would seem to point at Ricimer's burial in it.

[16] This account has been shortened from that of Gregorovius, i. 231-5.

[17] Giesebrecht, quoted by Hergenrother, _K.G._, i. 449.

[18] Hergenrother, i. 449-453.

[19] Reumont, ii. 6.

[20] Reumont, ii. 9.

[21] Reumont (ii. 29-42) gives an admirable sketch of the government of Theodorich, by which I have profited in what follows.

[22] Montalembert, Gregorovius, Kurth. Philips (vol. iii., p. 51, sec.

119), remarks: "Ware Theodorich der Grosse nicht Arianer gewesen, so wurde, wenn er es sonst gewollt, ihm wohl nichts weiter im Wege gestanden haben, als sich zum Romischen kaiser im Abendlande ausrufen la.s.sen".

[23] Gregorovius, i. 312, 315.

[24] Orosius, _Hist._, vii. 43.

[25] Photius, i. 111.

[26] Photius, i. 120.

[27] Guizot, _Sur la Civilisation en Europe_, deuxieme lecon.

[28] Edict of Valentinian III., in 447.

CHAPTER II.

CaeSAR FELL DOWN.

When St. Leo refused his a.s.sent to the Canons in favour of the see of Constantinople, which, at the end of the Council of Chalcedon, the Court, the clergy, and above all Anatolius, the bishop of the imperial city, desired to be pa.s.sed, and with that intent overbore the resistance of the Papal legates, the race of Theodosius was still reigning both at Old and at New Rome. The eastern sovereigns, Marcian and Pulcheria, by becoming whose husband Marcian had ascended the throne, had acted with conspicuous loyalty towards the Pope. The mistakes of Theodosius II. were repaired, and the cabals of his courtiers ceased to affect the stronger minds and faithful hearts of his successors. In the West, Galla Placidia, during all the reign, since the death, in 423, of her brother Honorius, with which her nephew Theodosius II. had invested her, was also faithful to St. Peter's See; the same spirit directed her son Valentinian, and his empress-cousin, the daughter of the eastern emperor. The letters of all exist, in which they strove to set right their father, or nephew, Theodosius II., in the matter of Eutyches. All had supported St. Leo in the annulling that unhappy Council which compromised the faith of the Church so long as it was allowed to count as a Council. But not for any merit on the part of Pulcheria and Marcian would St. Leo allow the mere grandeur of a royal city, because it was the seat of empire, to dethrone from their original rank, held since the beginning of the Christian hierarchy, the two other Sees of St. Peter--the one of his disciple St. Mark, sent from his side at Rome; the other, in which he had first sat himself. St. Leo could not the least foresee that the course of things in less than a generation would justify by the plainest evidence of facts his maintenance of tradition and his prescience of future dangers. He had charged Anatolius with seeking unduly to exalt himself at the expense of his brethren. The exaltation consisted in making himself the second bishop of the Church. His see, a hundred and twenty years before, had, if it existed at all--for it is all but lost in insignificance--been merely a suffragan of the archbishop of Heraclea. Leo saw that Anatolius, under cover of the emperor's permanent residence in Nova Roma, sought to make its bishop the lever by which the whole episcopate of the East should be moved. We are now to witness the attempt to carry into effect all which St. Leo feared by a bishop who was next successor but one to Anatolius in his see.

The changes, indeed, wrought in a few years were immense. St. Leo himself outlived both Pulcheria and Marcian; and on the death of the latter saw the imperial succession, which had been in some sense hereditary since the election of Valentinian I., in 364, pa.s.s to a new man. As this is the first occasion on which the succession to the Byzantine throne comes into our review, it may be well to consider what sort of thing it was. I suppose the Caesarean succession even from the first is a hard thing to bring under any definition. Since Claudius was discovered quaking for fear behind a curtain, and dragged out to sit upon the throne which his nephew Caius had hastily vacated, after having been welcomed to it four years before with universal acclamation, it would be difficult to say what made a man emperor of the Romans. So much I seem to see in that terrible line, that the descent from father to son was hardly ever blessed, and that those who were adopted by an emperor no way related to them succeeded the best. The children of the very greatest emperors--of a Marcus Aurelius, a Constantine, a Theodosius--have only brought shame on their parents and ruin on their empire. Again, if the youth of a Nero or a Caracalla ended in utter ignominy, the youth of an Alexander Severus produced the fairest of reigns, while it ended in his murder by an usurper. But strange and anomalous as the Caesarean succession appears, that of the Byzantine sovereigns, from the disappearance of the Theodosian race to the last Constantine who dies on the ramparts of the city made by the first, shows a great deterioration.[29] There was no acknowledged principle of succession.

Arbitrary force determined it. One robber followed another upon the throne; so that the eastern despot seemed to imitate that ghastly rule, in the wood by Nemi, "of the priest who slew the slayer and shall himself be slain". If the army named one man to the throne, the fleet named another.

If intrigue and shameless deceit gained it in one case, murder succeeded in another. Relations.h.i.+p or connection by marriage with the last possessor helped but rarely. This frequent and irregular change, and the personal badness of most sovereigns, caused endless confusion to the realm. This is the staple of the thousand years in which the election of the emperor Leo I., in 457, stands at the head. On the death of Marcian, following that of Pulcheria, in whose person a woman first became empress regnant, Leo was a Thracian officer, a colonel of the service, and director of the general Aspar's household. Aspar was an Arian Goth, commander of the troops, who had influence enough to make another man emperor, but not to cancel the double blot of barbarian and heretic in his own person. He made Leo, with the intention to be his master. And Leo ruled for seventeen years with some credit; and presently put Aspar and his son to death, in a treacherous manner, but not without reason. He bore a good personal character, was Catholic in his faith, and St. Leo lived on good terms with him during the four years following his election. St. Leo, dying in 461, was succeeded by Pope Hilarus, the deacon and legate who brought back a faithful report to Rome of the violent Council at Ephesus, in 449, from which he had escaped.

Pope Hilarus was succeeded in 468 by Simplicius, and in 474 the emperor Leo died, leaving the throne to an infant grandson of the same name, the son of his daughter Ariadne, by an Isaurian officer Zeno, who reigned at first as the guardian of his son, and a few months afterwards came by that son's death to sole power as emperor. The worst character is given to Zeno by the national historians. His conduct was so vile, and his government so discredited by irruptions of the Huns on the Danube, and of Saracens in Mesopotamia, that his wife's stepmother Verina, the widow of Leo I., conspired against him, and was able to set her brother Basiliscus on the throne. Zeno took flight; Basiliscus was proclaimed emperor. He declared himself openly against the Catholic faith in favour of the Eutycheans. But Basiliscus was, if possible, viler than Zeno, and after twenty months Zeno was brought back. The usurper's short rule lasted from October, 475, to June, 477; exactly, therefore, at the time when Odoacer put an end to the western empire. It was upon Zeno's recovery of the throne that he received back from the Roman senate the sovereign insignia, and conferred the t.i.tle of Roman Patricius on Odoacer. In the following years Zeno had much to do with Theodorich. He gave up to him part of Dacia and Moesia, and finally he made, in 484, the king of the Ostrogoths Roman consul, as a reward for the services to the Roman emperor. But, afterwards, Theodorich ravaged Zeno's empire up to the walls of Constantinople, and was bought off by a commission to march into Italy and to dethrone Odoacer. Zeno continued an inglorious and unhappy reign, full of murders, deceits, and crimes of every sort, for fourteen years after his restoration, and died in 491.

Let us now pa.s.s to the ecclesiastical policy of Zeno's reign.