The Church and the Barbarians Part 11

Peter from the barbarians near at hand. In S. Peter's name letters summoned Pippin to the rescue of the church especially dear to the Franks.[1] But before this Stephen had made Pippin his friend. In 753 he left Rome and failing to win from Aistulf any concession to the Imperial power made his way across the Alps, and on the Feast of the Epiphany, 754, met in their own land Pippin and his son who was to be Charles the Great. The pope fell at the king's feet and besought him by the mercies of G.o.d to save the Romans from the hands of the Lombards. Then Pippin and all his lords held up their hands in sign of welcome and support. Then Stephen on July 28, 754, in the great monastery which was to become the crowning-place of Frankish kings, anointed Pippin and his sons Charles and Carloman as king of the Franks and kings in succession.

[Sidenote: The crowning of Pippin.]

A point of special interest in this event is the t.i.tle given to Pippin at his crowning at Saint Denis. The t.i.tle of Patrician of the Romans was given by the pope, as commissioned by the emperor, "to act against the king of the Lombards for the recovery of the lost lands of the Empire." Pippin was made the officer of the distant emperor, and the pope would say as little as possible about the rights of him who ruled in Constantinople, and as much as he could about the Church which ruled in Rome. It was a step in the a.s.sertion of {149} political rights for the Roman Church. A new order of things was springing up in Italy.

The popes were a.s.serting a political power as belonging to S. Peter.

They were a.s.serting that the exarchate had ceased in political theory as well as in practical fact. In this new order Pippin was to be involved as supporter of the protectorate which the papacy a.s.sumed to itself.

Then the Franks came forward to save Rome from the Lombards. The last act of the romantic life of Carloman was to plead for justice to Aistulf,--that what he had won should not be taken from him,--and to be refused. Twice Pippin came south and saved the pope: and then the cities he had won he refused to give up to the envoys of the distant emperor and declared that "never should those cities be alienated from the power of S. Peter and the rights of the Roman Church and the pontiff of the Apostolic See." From this dates the Roman pope's independence of the Roman emperor, the definite political severance of Italy from the East, and therefore a great stop towards the schism of the Church. Iconoclasm and the independence of the popes alike worked against the unity of Christendom.

[Sidenote: The papal power.]

Pope Stephen, thanks to Pippin, had become the arbitrator of Italy.

The keys of Ravenna and of the twenty-two cities which "stretched along the Adriatic coast from the mouths of the Po to within a few miles of Ancona and inland as far as the Apennines" were laid on the tomb of S.

Peter. The "States of the Church" began their long history, the history of "the temporal power."

And this new power was seen outside Italy as well {150} as within.

From the eighth century, at least, the popes are found continually intervening in the affairs of the churches among the Franks and the Germans, granting privileges, giving indulgence, writing with explicit claim to the authority which Christ gave to S. Peter. Into the recesses of Gaul, among Normans at Rouen, among Lotharingians at Metz, to Amiens, or Venice, or Limoges, the papal letters penetrated; and their tone is that of confidence that advice will be respected or commands obeyed. And this is, in small matters especially, rather than in great. The popes at least claimed to interfere everywhere in Christian Europe and in everything.[2] Within Italy events moved quickly.

The first step towards a new development was the destruction of the Lombard kingdom by Charles, who succeeded his father Pippin in 768. At first joint ruler with his brother he became on the latter's death in 771 sole king of all the Franks. In 772 Hadrian I., a Roman, ambitious and distinguished, succeeded the weak Stephen III. on the papal throne.

He reigned till 795 and one of his first acts was to summon Charles and the Franks to his rescue against the Lombards. [Sidenote: Charles the Great and Rome.] In the midst of his conquests--which it is not here our part to tell--Charles spent the Holy Week and Easter of 774 at Rome. Thus the one contemporary authority tells the tale of the great alliance which was made on the Wednesday in Easter week: "On the fourth day of the week the aforesaid pontiff with all his n.o.bles both clerkly and knightly went forth to S. Peter's Church and there {151} meeting the king in colloquy earnestly prayed him and with paternal affection admonished him to fulfil entirely that promise which his father of holy memory the dead king Pippin had made, and which he himself with his brother Carloman and all the n.o.bles of the Franks had confirmed to S.

Peter and his vicar Pope Stephen II. of holy memory when he visited Francia, that they would grant divers cities and territories in that province of Italy to S. Peter and his vicars for ever. And when Charles had caused the promise which was made in Francia at a place called Carisiac.u.m (Quierzy) to be read over to him all its contents were approved by him and his n.o.bles. And of his will and with a good and gracious mind that most excellent and most Christian king Charles caused another promise of gift like the first to be drawn up by Etherius his most religious and prudent chaplain and notary, and in this he gave the same cities and lands to S. Peter and promised that they should be handed over to the pope with their boundaries set forth as is contained in the aforesaid donation, namely: From Luna with the island of Corsica, thence to Surianum, thence to Mount Bardo, that is to Vercetum, thence to Parma, thence to Pihegium, and from thence to Mantua and Mons Silicis, together with the whole exarchate of Ravenna, as it was of old, and the provinces of the Venetia and Istria; together with the whole duchy of Spoletium and that of Beneventum." [3] The donation was confirmed, says the chronicler, with the most solemn oaths.

Now if this records the facts, and if two-thirds of Italy were given by Charles (who possessed very little {152} of it) to the popes, it is almost incredible that his later conduct should have shown that he did not pay any regard to it. But the question is of political rather than ecclesiastical interest, and it may suffice to say that there are very strong reasons for believing the pa.s.sage to be a later interpolation.[4]

[Sidenote: The revival of the Empire, 800.]

Within four mouths Charles had subdued the Lombards and become "rex Francorum et Langobardorum atque patricius Romanorum." For nearly a quarter of a century Charles was employed in other parts of his empire: he dealt friendly but firmly with the pope; but he kept away from Rome.

But in 799 the new pope Leo III., attacked by the Romans probably for some harshness in his rule, fled from the city and in July came to Charles at Paderborn to entreat his help. It is probable that the great English scholar, Alcuin, who has been called the Erasmus of the eighth century, had already suggested to the great king that the weakness of the Eastern emperors was a real defeasance of power and that the crown imperial might be his own. However that may be Charles came to Rome and made a triumphal entry on November 24, 800. The charges against the pope were heard and he swore to his innocence. On the feast of the Nativity, in the basilica of S. Peter, when Charles had wors.h.i.+pped at the _confessio_, the tomb of S. Peter, Leo clothed him with a purple robe and set a crown of gold upon his head. "Then all the faithful Romans beholding so great a champion given them and the love which {153} he bore towards the holy Roman Church and its vicar, in obedience to the will of G.o.d and S. Peter the key-bearer of the kingdom of heaven, cried with one accord in sound like thunder 'To Charles the most pious Augustus, crowned of G.o.d, the Emperor great and peaceable, life and victory!'"

Thus the Roman pope and the Roman people claimed to make anew in Rome the Roman Empire with a German for Caesar and Augustus. It was not, if we believe Charles's own close friend Einhard, a distinction sought by the new emperor himself. "At first he so disliked the t.i.tle of _Imperator_ and _Augustus_ that he declared that if he had known before the intention of the pope he would never have entered the church on that day, though it was one of the most holy festivals of the year."

[5] It may well be that Charles, who had corresponded with the Caesars of the East, hesitated to take a step of such bold defiance. Men still preserved the memories of how the soldiers of Justinian had won back Italy from the Goths. Nor was Charles pleased to receive such a gift at the hands of the pope. He did not recognise the right of a Roman pontiff to give away the imperial crown. What could be given could be taken away. It was a precedent of evil omen.

But none the less the coronation of Charles the Great, as men came to call him, was the greatest event in the Middle Age. It allowed the vitality of the idea of empire which the West inherited from the Romans, and it showed that idea linked to the new power of the popes.

It founded the Holy Roman Empire. Twelve years later the Empire of the West won some sort of recognition from the Empire of the East. In 812 an amba.s.sage from Constantinople came {154} to Charles at Aachen, and Charles was hailed by them as Imperator and Basileus. The Empire of the West was an accomplished and recognised fact.

[Sidenote: Results of the revived Empire.]

Its significance was at least as much religious as poetical. Charles delighted in the works of S. Augustine and most of all in the _De Civitate Dei_; and that great book is the ideal of a Christian State, which shall be Church and State together, and which replaces the Empire of pagan Rome. The abiding idea of unity had been preserved by the Church: it was now to be strengthened by the support of a head of the State. The one Christian commonwealth was to be linked together in the bond of divine love under one emperor and one pope. That Constantine the first Christian emperor had given to the popes the sovereignty of the West was a fiction which it seems was already known at Rome: Hadrian seems to have referred to the strange fable when he wrote to Charles the Great in 777. It was a legend very likely of Eastern fabrication, and it was probably not as yet believed to have any claim to be authentic; but when the papacy had grown great at the expense of the Empire it was to be a powerful weapon in the armoury of the popes.

Now it served only, with the revival of learning at the court of Charles the Great, to ill.u.s.trate two sides of the great movement for the union of Europe under two monarchs, the spiritual and the temporal.

The coronation of Charles was indeed a fact the importance of which, as well as the conflicts which would inevitably flow from it, lay in the future. But it showed the Roman Church great, and it showed the absorption of the great Teutonic race in the fascinating ideal of unity at once Christian and imperial.

[1] _Cod. Car._ in Muratori, _Rer. Ital. Script._, iii. (2) 90.

[2] Cf. Dr. J. von Pflugk-Hartung, _Acta Pontific.u.m Romanorum inedita_, 1880, 1884.

[3] _Liber Pontificalis_, i. 498.

[4] The question may be read in Mgr. d.u.c.h.esne's Introduction to the _Liber Pontificalis_, ccx.x.xvii.-ccxlii.; and Dr. Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_, vii. 387-97.

[5] _Liber Pontificalis_, ii. 6.

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CHAPTER XIV

THE ICONOCLASTIC CONTROVERSY

We have spoken already of two important periods in the history of the Eastern Church. We must now briefly sketch another.

[Sidenote: Sketch of the period, 725-847.]

The third period (725-847) is that of Iconoclasm. Of this, the originator was the emperor Leo III., one of those soldiers who endeavour to apply to the sanctuary the methods of the parade-ground.

He issued a decree against the reverence paid to icons (religious images and pictures), and, in 729, replaced the patriarch S. Germa.n.u.s by the more supple Anastasius; a docile a.s.sembly of bishops at Hieria, under Constantine V. (Cop.r.o.nymus), pa.s.sed a decree against every image of the Lord, the Virgin, and the saints. A fierce persecution followed, which was hardly ended before the accession to power of Irene, widow of Leo IV., under whom a.s.sembled the Seventh General Council at Nicae in 787, a Council to which the West and the distant East sent representatives. This Council decreed that icons should be used and receive veneration (_proskuesis_) as did the Cross and the book of the Gospels. A persecution followed, as bitter as that of the iconoclastic emperors, and the troubled years of the first half of the ninth century, stained in Byzantium by every crime, found almost their only brightness in the patriarchate (843-7) of S. Methodius, a wise ruler, an {156} orthodox theologian, a charitable man. In Antioch and Jerusalem, about the same period, orthodox patriarchs were re-established by the toleration of the Ommeyads and the earlier Abbasaides; but on the European frontiers of the Empire conversion was at a standstill during the whole period of iconoclastic fury and reaction, while in the north-east of Syria and in Armenia the heresy of the Paulicians (Adoptianism) spread and flourished, and the Monophysites still throve on the Asiatic borders. In theology the Church of Constantinople was still strong, as is shown by the great work of S. Theodore of the Studium, famous as a hymn-writer, a liturgiologist, and a defender of the faith.

Such are the facts, briefly summarised, of the history of rather more than a century in the East. But we must examine more attentively the meaning of the great strife which divided the Eastern Church.

[Sidenote: The orthodox doctrine of images.]

The orthodox doctrine, as it is now defined, is this--that "the icons are likenesses engraved or painted in oil on wood or stone or any sort of metal, of our Saviour Christ, of the Mother of G.o.d, and of the holy men who from Adam have been well-pleasing to G.o.d. From earliest times the icons have been used not only to give internal dignity and beauty to every Christian church and house, but, which is much more essential, for the instruction and moral education of Christians. For when any Christian looks at the icons, he at once recalls the life and deeds of those who are represented upon them, and desires to conform himself to their example. On this account also the Church decreed in early times that due reverence should always be paid {157} by Christians to the holy icons, which honour of course is not rendered to the picture before our eyes, but to the original of the picture." This statement represents the views of the orthodox Eastern theologians of the eighth as clearly as it does the teaching of the nineteenth century. It represents also the opinions of the popes contemporary with the Iconoclastic movement, who withstood the emperors to the face. Leo was threatened by Gregory II., and the patriarch who had yielded to the storm, Anastasius, was excommunicated. The pope advocated, in clear dogmatic language, the use of images for instruction of the ignorant and encouragement of the faithful. In Greece there was something like a revolution, but it was sternly repressed. [Sidenote: The acceptance in the West.] In 731 a council, at which the archbishops of Ravenna and Grado were present, and ninety-three other Italian prelates, with a large representation of the laity, under Pope Gregory III., ordered that if anyone should stand forth as "a destroyer, profaner, and blasphemer against the veneration of the holy images, that is of Christ and His sinless Mother, of the blessed Apostles and the Saints, he should be excluded from the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and from all the unity and fabric of the Church." The answer to this, it would seem, was the separation of the Illyrian territories and sees from the Roman patriarchate, as well as the sees in Sicily and Calabria: the pope's authority was restricted to the territory of the exarchate, including Rome, Venice and Ravenna. In Constantinople the resistance of the people to the Iconoclastic decrees was met by a bitter persecution, which Constantine V. began in 761. Under {158} his father Leo III. the virgin Theodosia was martyred, who is revered among the most popular of the Saints in Constantinople to-day. [Sidenote: The Iconoclastic persecution.] The position of the people who clung to their old ways of wors.h.i.+p in the eighth century was indeed not unlike that of those who to-day struggle on, always in dread of active persecution, under the Muhammadan rule. Muhammadanism, with its stern suppression of all representation of things divine or human, was believed to have been one of the suggesting forces which brought about the Iconoclastic movement. Leo III. had been brought into intimate a.s.sociation with the Saracens; and it was said in his own day that he had learned his fury against images from one of them. The tale was a fable, but it showed how entirely Leo's action was contrary to the religious feeling of his time.

[Sidenote: Iconoclastic theology.]

It is difficult perhaps for a Western, or at least an Anglican, to-day to form a just estimate of the strong feeling of the majority of the Eastern Christians in favour of "image-wors.h.i.+p." It is easy to see how the stern simplicity of the Muhammadan wors.h.i.+p, which in all the strength of the creed that carried its disciples in triumphant march over continents and over ancient civilisations was present to the eyes of the soldiers of Heraclius and Leo, appealed to all those who knew the power and the need of stern self-restraint. That Islam should seem to be more spiritual than Christianity seemed irony indeed, but an irony which seemed to have facts to prove it. An age of superst.i.tion, an age of credulous limits after the miraculous, an age when materialism made rapid progress among {159} the courtiers of the great city, was an age, it might well seem, which needed a protest against "iconoduly," as the iconoclasts termed the custom of the Eastern Church. And if the controversy could have been kept away from the field of pure theology it might well have been that an Iconoclastic victory would not have been other than a benefit to religion. Leo was content to replace the crucifix by a cross. But it is impossible to sunder the symbol from the doctrine, and the Greeks would never rest satisfied with a definition, still less with a practical change, without probing to its inner meaning. This feeling was expressed in form philosophical and theological by one of the last of the great Greek Fathers, S. John Damascene, and by the united voice of the Church in the decision of the Seventh General Council.

[Sidenote: S. John Damascene.]

S. John of Damascus, who died about 760, was clear in his acceptance of all the Councils of the Church, clear in his rejection of Monophysitism and Monothelitism. He described in clear precision the two natures in one hypostasis, the two wills, human and Divine, with a wisdom and knowledge related to each; but he was equally clear that the composite personality involves a _communicatio idiomatum_ (_antidosis idiomaton_). The human nature taken up into the Divine received the glory of the Divinity: the Divine "imparts to the human nature of its own glories, remaining itself impa.s.sible and without share in the pa.s.sions of humanity." S. John Damascene taught then that our Lord's humanity was so enriched by the Divine Word as to know the future, though this knowledge was only manifested progressively as He increased in age, and {160} that only for our sakes did He progressively manifest His knowledge. While he declared that each Nature in the Divine Person had its will, he explained that the One Person directed both, and that His Divine will was the determinant will. It might well seem that in his desire to avoid Nestorianism he did not attach so full a meaning to our Lord's advance in human knowledge as did some of the earlier Fathers. But the practical bearing of S. John's writings was in direct relation to the great controversy of his age, to which he devoted three addresses in particular. He defined the "wors.h.i.+p" of the icons as all based upon the wors.h.i.+p of Christ, and attacked iconoclasm as involving ultimately an a.s.sault upon the doctrine of the Incarnation. On this ground S. Theodore of the Studium and Nicephorus the patriarch of Constantinople, who was driven from his see by the emperor, are at one with S. John Damascene.

[Sidenote: S. Theodore of the Studium.]

Theodore of the Studium occupies a place in Greek thought which is, perhaps, comparable to that of S. Anselm in the Latin Church. If there never was anything in the East exactly corresponding to the era of the schoolmen in the West, if the theology of Byzantium throughout might seem to be a scholasticism, but a scholasticism apart, still it would not be untrue to describe S. Theodore as the last of the Greek Fathers.

He came at a time in Byzantine history when a great crisis was before the Church and State, so closely conjoined in the Eastern Empire. Born in the last half of the eighth century, and dying on November 11th, 826, Theodore lived through the most vital period of the Iconoclastic struggle, and he left, in his {161} theological and familiar writings, the most important memorial of the orthodox position which he did so much to render victorious.

Theodore of the Studium is a striking example of the influence of environment, tradition, and _esprit de corps_. His life is inextricably bound up with the history, and his opinions were indubitably formed to a very large extent by the influence, of the great monastery of S. John Baptist of the Studium, founded towards the close of the fourth century by Fl. Studius, a Roman patrician, the remains of which still charm the traveller who penetrates through the obscurest part of Constantinople to the quarter of Psamatia. The house was dedicated to S. John Baptist, and according to the Russian traveller, Antony of Novgorod, it contained special relics of the Precursor. A later description shows the extreme beauty, seclusion, severity of the place, surrounded by cypress trees and looking forth on the great city which was mistress of the world. Even to-day the splendid columns which still remain and the impressive beauty of the crypt make the church, though in an almost ruinous condition, a striking object in Constantinople. The monastery first became famous as the home of the Akoimetai, or Sleepless Monks, (as they were called from their hours of prayer,) when they withstood the heresies of the later fifth century,[1] and fell themselves into error, but from the date of the Fifth General Council to the outbreak of the Iconoclastic controversy they remained in comparative obscurity.

The era of Iconoclasm, which did so much to devastate the East, and which, by the emigration of some {162} 50,000 Christians, cleric and lay, to Calabria, exercised so important an influence on the history of Southern Italy, might have cast a fatal blight on the Church in Constantinople had it not been for the stand made by the Monks of the Studium. [Sidenote: The Monks of the Studium and the Iconoclastic Controversy.] The age of the Iconoclasts was the golden age of the Studite monks. Persecuted, expelled from their house by Constantine Cop.r.o.nymus, they were restored at his death in 775, but had dwindled, it seems, to the number of twelve. A new era of power began for them under their Archimandrite Sabbas, and this was increased by his successor, Theodore, whose life covered the period of the greatest theological importance in the history of Iconoclasm. When the patriarchal see was held for seven-and-twenty years by Iconoclasts, Theodore upheld the spirits of his brethren, and even in exile contrived to be their indefatigable leader and support. His was never a submissive, but always an active resistance to the imperial attempt to dragoon the Church, and a typical audacity was the solemn procession with all the monastery's icons, the monks singing the hymn "_Ten achranton eikona sou proskunoumen_, _agathe_" which caused his expulsion. His exile produced a series of impressive letters in which, with every vigour and cogency of argument of which a logical Greek was capable, he exhorted, encouraged, and consoled those who, like himself, remained steadfast to their faith. The Studium gave, too, its actual martyrs, James and Thaddeus, to the traditional belief; and Theodore in exile, who would gladly have borne them company in their death, commemorated their heroism and {163} implored their intercessions.

Theodore's whole life was one of resistance, active or pa.s.sive, to the attempt of the emperors to dictate the Church's Creed; and though he did not live to see the conclusion of the conflict, its final result was largely due to his persistent and strenuous efforts. For a while after his death there is silence over the history of the Studites, till, in 844, we find them bringing back his body in solemn triumph from the island of Prinkipo. Till the middle of the ninth century they remained a potent force; from that time up to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, if they retained their fame, their activity was diminished.

[Sidenote: The rule of the Studium.]

Professor Marin[2] has collected interesting details from many sources as to the rule of the house, its dress, liturgical customs, learning, discipline. The liturgy was said at six on days when the fast lasted till nine, at three on other days; and the monks were expected to communicate daily. While the house was essentially a learned society, a community of sacred scholars, Theodore stands out from its whole annals as a great preacher, and no less for the charm of his personal character. It was he, fitly, who gave to the house that special Rule, which stood in the same relation to the general customary observance by Eastern monks of that somewhat vague series of laws known as "the Rule of Basil," that the reform of Odo of Cluny stood to the work of S.

Benedict himself. It was an eminently sensible codification of floating custom in regard to monastic life. All that Theodore did--and this applies with special force to the sermons which he {164} preached--seems to have been eminently practical, charitable, and sane.

There is an underlying force of the same kind in the argument of his three _Antirrhetici_, in which he triumphantly vindicates the wors.h.i.+p of Christ in His G.o.dhead and His manhood as being inseparable and essential to the true knowledge of the faith as it is in Jesus. There can be no rivalry between icon and prototype: "The wors.h.i.+p of the image is wors.h.i.+p of Christ, because the image is what it is in virtue of likeness to Christ."