The Church and the Barbarians Part 12

This was the point on which the orthodox met the theologians who defended iconoclasm: the iconoclasts in seeking to destroy all images were seen to strike at a vital truth of the Incarnation, the true humanity of Jesus. The theologians demanded the preservation and wors.h.i.+p,--reverence rather than wors.h.i.+p in the modern English use of the words,--of the icons as a security for the remembrance of the Manhood of the Lord. The wors.h.i.+p was not _latreia_, which can be paid to G.o.d alone, but _proskunesis schetike_. Christ, said S. Theodore, was in danger of losing the quality of being man if not seen and wors.h.i.+pped in an image.

The long dispute ended, as we have said, after the accession of the Empress Irene, who, unworthy though she was to have part in any great religious movement, yet had always been attached to the traditional opinions of the Greek people. The monks of Constantinople had exercised a steady influence during all the years of disturbance: and they were to triumph. [Sidenote: The Seventh General Council, 787.]

The Empress Irene replaced the patriarch Paul in 783 by her own secretary Tarasius, and it was determined at once to reverse the decrees that {165} had been pa.s.sed at Constantinople in 754. In 787 for the second time a council met at Nicaea, across the Sea of Marmora, which became recognised as the Seventh General Council. To it came representatives of East and West, and the decision which was arrived at was practically that of the whole Church.

The persecution of the orthodox was renewed for a time under Leo V.

(813-20), and it is said that more perished in his time than in that of Constantine V. Theophilus (829-42) was almost equally hostile. It was not till his widow Theodora a.s.sumed the reins of power in 842 as regent for her son that the final triumph of orthodoxy was a.s.sured; and this was followed by the five years' patriarchate of S. Methodius, a man of peace and of wisdom.

To some the action of the emperors in attacking image wors.h.i.+p has seemed a serious attempt at social reform, an endeavour to raise the standard of popular wors.h.i.+p, and through that to affect the people themselves intellectually, morally, and spiritually. But history has spoken conclusively of the violence with which the attempt was made, and theology has decisively p.r.o.nounced against its dogmatic a.s.sertions.

The long controversy is important in the history of the Church because it so clearly expresses the character of the Eastern Church, so decisively demonstrates its intense devotion to the past, and so expressively ill.u.s.trates the close attachment, the abiding influence, of the people and the monks, as the dominant factor in the development of theology and religious life.

[1] See above, pp. 8, 14.

[2] _De Studio Coen.o.bio Constantinopolitano_, Paris, 1897.

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CHAPTER XV

LEARNING AND MONASTICISM

Something has been said in earlier chapters of the relation of several great Churchmen towards education, towards the ancient cla.s.sics, and towards the studies of their own times. Something has been said, too, in the last chapter, of Greek monastic life. The period which begins with the eighth century deserves a longer mention, inadequate though it be; for there was over a great part of Europe in the days of Charles the Great a veritable literary renaissance which broke upon the long period which men have called the dark ages with a ray of light.

[Sidenote: Learning at the court of Charles the Great.]

Charles the Great had all the interests of a scholar. He knew Latin well and Greek pa.s.sably. He delighted to listen to the deeds of the past, or to theological treatises, when he dined, after the fas.h.i.+on of monks. His interest in learning centred in his interest in the teaching and services of the Church. Most reverently, we are told by his biographer, and with the utmost piety did he cultivate the Christian religion with which he had been imbued from his infancy. He was a constant church-goer, a regular wors.h.i.+pper at the ma.s.s. Near to his religious interest was his interest in education. A famous letter of his to the abbats of monasteries {167} throughout the Empire, written in 787, is a salient example of the close connection between learning and monasticism in his day. He urged that "letters" should be studied, students selected and taught, that all the clergy should teach children freely, and that every monastery and cathedral church should have a theological school. "Although right doing is better than right speaking," he wrote, "yet must the knowledge of what is right go before the doing of it."

What he tried to do throughout his empire was a reflection of what he did in his own court. He delighted to surround himself at Aachen with learned men. Most notable among them were Paul the Deacon, the historian of the Lombards, and Alcuin the Northumbrian whom he had met in Italy and whom he made prominent among his counsellors.

Charles, says Einhard, spent much time and labour in learning from Alcuin, and that not only in religion, but "in rhetoric and dialectic and especially astronomy"; and he "carefully reformed the manner of reading and singing; for he was thoroughly instructed in both, though he never read publicly himself, nor sang except in a low voice, and with the rest of the congregation."

[Sidenote: Alcuin of Northumbria.]

Alcuin connects the learning of England with the revival on the Continent. He had been trained in the school at York by Archbishop Egbert, who was himself a pupil of Bede. He had studied the ancient cla.s.sics in Greek as well as Latin and knew at least a little of Hebrew. The library at York is known to have contained books in all those languages, and Aristotle was among them. Vergil, he said, when he was a boy he cared more for [Transcriber's note: a line appears to be missing here] than the vigils of the Church and the chanting of the {168} psalms. About 782 he took charge of the schools which Charles had founded at his court, and he became a very close friend and trusted adviser of the emperor himself. With him (but for a short return to England) he lived till in 796 he had leave to retire to Tours, where he was abbat of the great monastery of S. Martin, and where he died in 804. He was a great teacher; a writer of books of education and books of Church practice, of lives of the saints, of hymns, epigrams, prayers, controversial tracts; a compiler of summaries of patristic teaching; a leader in the reform of monastic houses. Among the many notable points in his career, as ill.u.s.trating the life of learned churchmen of his age, are two especially to be observed. The first is his "humanism." He was a scholar of an ancient type; and the society in which he lived delighted to believe itself cla.s.sical as well as Christian. In a contemporary description of the life at Charles's court Alcuin is called "Flaccus" and is described as "the glory of our bards, mighty to shout forth his songs, keeping time with his lyric foot, moreover a powerful sophist, able to prove pious doctrines out of Holy Scripture, and in genial jest to propose or solve puzzles of arithmetic." As a theologian he was most famous for his books against Felix of Urgel and Elipandus of Toledo, on the subject of the Adoptianist heresy (see above, ch. vi), and there is no doubt that his was an important influence in the Council of Frankfort which condemned them. The second is his att.i.tude towards the monastic life. He admired the monastic life, but he had not been trained as a strict Benedictine, indeed he was probably no more than a secular in deacon's orders. He held abbeys as their superior, just as many {169} laymen did; but he never seems to have been inclined to take upon him any strict rule. His example shows how natural was the next step in monastic history which is a.s.sociated with the abbey of Cluny.

[Sidenote: The schools of Europe.]

In Alcuin England was linked to the wider world of Christendom. This has been summarily expressed by a great English historian thus: "The schools of Northumbria had gathered in the harvest of Irish learning, of the Franco-Gallican schools still subsisting and preserving a remnant of cla.s.sical character in the sixth century, and of Rome, itself now barbarised. Bede had received instruction from the disciples of Chad and Cuthbert in the Irish studies of the Scriptures, from Wilfrid and Acca in the French and Roman learning, and from Benedict Biscop and Albinus in the combined and organised discipline of Theodore. By his influence with Egbert, the school of York was founded, and in it was centred nearly all the wisdom of the West, and its great pupil was Alcuin. Whilst learning had been growing in Northumbria, it had been declining on the Continent; in the latter days of Alcuin, the decline of English learning began in consequence of the internal dissensions of the kings, and the early ravages of the Northmen. Just at the same time the Continent was gaining peace and organisation under Charles. Alcuin carried the learning which would have perished in England into France and Germany, where it was maintained whilst England relapsed into the state of ignorance from which it was delivered by Alfred. Alcuin was rather a man of learning and action than of genius and contemplation like Bede, but his power of organisation and of teaching was great, and his services {170} to religion and literature in Europe, based indeed on the foundation of Bede, were more widely extended and in themselves inestimable." [1]

[Sidenote: John Scotus.]

Side by side with the career of Alcuin, of which much is known, may be placed that of another scholar who was at least equally influential, but of whose life little is known. John the Scot, whose thought exercised a profound influence on the ages after his death, was one of the Irish scholars whom the famous schools of that island produced as late as the ninth century. He became attached to the court of Charles the Bald, as Alcuin had been to that of Charles the Great. He became like Alcuin a prominent defender of the faith, being invited by Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, to answer the monk Gottschalk's exaggerated doctrine of predestination, which went much farther than S.

Augustine, and might be described as Calvinist before Calvin; but his arguments were also considered unsound, and his opinions were condemned in later synods. The argument that, evil being the negation of good, G.o.d could not know it, for with Him to know is to cause, was certainly weak if not formally heretical, and his subtleties seemed to the theologians of his time to be merely inept.i.tudes. He was also, it is at least probable, engaged in the controversy on the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist which began about this time, originating in the treatise of Paschasius Radbertus, _de Sacramento Corporis et Sanguinis Christi_.

In 1050 a treatise bearing John the Scot's name was condemned; but it seems that this was really written by Ratramnus of Corbie. The view of Radbert was that which was {171} afterwards formalised into Transubstantiation. The view attributed to John was a clear denial of any materialising doctrine of the Sacrament. Later writers say that John returned to England, taught in the abbey school at Malmesbury, the famous school originated by Irish monks and ill.u.s.trated by the fame of S. Aldhelm, and there died. His chief work was the _de Divisione Naturae_, in which he seems to antic.i.p.ate much later philosophic argument (notably that of S. Anselm and Descartes as to the existence of G.o.d) and to have been the precursor if not the founder of Nominalism.

With John the Scot it is clear that both the old literature and philosophy survived and were fruitful and that new interests, which would carry theology into further developments, were arising. A revival of learning was naturally the growth of the monastic system; but that system was itself far from secure at the time of which we speak.

[Sidenote: The Benedictine rule.]

The Benedictine rule did not win its way over Europe without some checks; nor was it always able to retain its hold in an age of general disorder. Much depended upon the abbat in each particular house. In Gaul, the rule of S. Columban had made him absolute. But such a submission was never accepted in central and southern Gaul. From the end of the sixth century it is clear that monasticism was beginning to slacken its devotion. The history of the monastery of S. Radegund as given by Gregory of Tours shows this; so does the letter of Gregory the Great to Brunichild. Nor did the milder rule of S. Benedict long remain unaltered in practice.

A new revival is connected with the names of Odo and Cluny.

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[Sidenote: The decay of monasticism in the ninth century.]

Saint Odo emerges from an age in which the most striking feature was the rea.s.sertion of the imperial power and the imperial idea. The ninth century, as it began, witnessed a remarkable revival, the revival of a decayed and dormant inst.i.tution--the Roman Empire--in whose ashes there had yet survived the fire which had inspired the rulers of the world in the past. The great idea of imperialism was reborn in the person of a man of extraordinary physical and mental power, a sovereign who, while he had not a little of the weaknesses of his age, had also in a remarkable degree centred in himself its highest philosophic aspirations. The early ninth century is dominated by the figure of Charles the Great. The result was inevitable. Lay power, lay over-lords.h.i.+p or supremacy, extends everywhere, intrudes into the recesses of monastic life, and dictates even in things purely spiritual. And as the new tide of barbarian invasion, Saracen or Norman, sweeps on in Spain or Gaul, the Church, for very physical needs, seeks refuge under the protection of lay barons, princes, and kings. Feudalism is rising. The monastic houses fall often under the arrogant rule of lay abbats. And the popes, not rarely a prey themselves to the vices of the age, sink into impotence and become enmeshed in worldly, often shameful, intrigue and disorder. The canons of Church councils show that it was below as it was above. Secularity was general, vice was far from rare.

The Divine spirit and the past history of Christianity made it certain that a revival of life must come. The dry bones would feel the breath and would live {173} again. [Sidenote: S. Odo.] On the borders of the lands of Maine and Anjou was born in 879, of a line of feudal barons, Odo, the regenerator of monasticism, the ultimate reviver of the papacy, the spiritual progenitor of Hildebrand himself. Promised to G.o.d at his birth, he was long held back by his father for knighthood and the life of a warrior such as he himself had led; a grievous sickness gave him, on his recovery, to the monastic life. The disciple alike of S. Martin and S. Benedict, he took inspiration from them to revive the strict monastic rule. From a canon he became a monk, after a noviciate at Baume, the foundation of Columban in the wild and beautiful valley between the Seille and the Dard, in the diocese of Besancon. For a time he tasted the life of the anchorite and the coen.o.bite. Then he pa.s.sed to the abbey of Cluny, founded in 910 by William of Aquitaine in the mountains above the valley of the Grosne, and ruled till 927 by Berno, who came himself from Baume. On his death Odo became abbat; and to him the great development of the revival of strict monasticism is due.

[Sidenote: Cluny.]

Cluny became the type of the exempted abbeys, and the highest representative of the monastic privileges. It embodied in itself the best expression of the resistance to feudalism; it became the most powerful support of the papacy and of the much-needed movement for the reform of the Church. The first necessity of the new monasticism was an absolute independence of the lay power. Thus the founder attached it from the first to the Roman Church, and gave up all his own rights of property. Its situation, in the heart of Burgundy, {174} removed it from the power of the king. Charles the Simple permitted its foundation, Louis d'Outremer confirmed its privileges. When Urban II., a militant Cluniac, became pope the interests of Cluny and Rome were more than ever identified. The monks elected their abbat without exterior interference. To prevent this becoming an abuse, the first abbats always proposed their coadjutors as their successors. Thus it was with Berno(910-27), Odo (927-48), Maieul (948-94), Odilo (990-1049). After that there arose the custom of appointing the grand prior as successor--as in the case of S. Hugh (1049-1109). From the confirmation of its foundation in 931 by John XI. Cluny received the greatest favours at the hands of the papacy, its abbats being created archabbots with episcopal insignia; and it was made entirely independent of the bishops.

[Sidenote: The rule of Cluny.]

Cluny soon attracted attention, wealth, and followers. Corrupt old communities or new foundations sought the guidance or protection of its abbats. When each monastery was independent and isolated it was impossible to reform a lax community, or for it to defend itself from feudal violence and the hostility of the secular clergy. Odo, the saint who saw these evils, therefore started what soon became the Congregation of Cluny. The daughter-houses were regarded not as independent, but as parts of Cluny. There was only one abbat, the arch-abbat of Cluny, who was the head of all. Necessary local control was exercised by the prior, responsible to and nominated by the abbat.

Some houses resisted annexation to Cluny, such as S. Martial at Limoges, which kept up the contest from 1063 to 1240. Contact {175} between the abbey and its dependencies was preserved by visitation of the abbat; and the dependent houses sent representatives to periodical chapters, which met at Cluny under the abbat. In the eleventh century these were merely consultative, but in the thirteenth they had become political, administrative, and judicial, even subjecting the abbat to their control. The rule of S. Benedict was followed in the abbey and its dependencies. The monks did some manual labour, but devoted themselves chiefly to religious exercises, to teaching the young, to hospitality and almsgiving.

But the Cluniacs, protected by the papacy, and enriched by the offerings of the faithful all over Europe, taught an extreme doctrine as to the power of the Holy See. Their ideal was the absolute separation of Church from State, the reorganisation of the Church under a general discipline such as could be exercised only by the pope. He, in their ideal, was to stand towards the whole world as the Cluniac abbat stood towards each Cluniac priory, the one ultimate source of jurisdiction, the Universal Bishop, appointing and degrading the diocesan bishops as the abbat made and unmade the priors.

How much of all this did the great Odo plan? Not very much. But it was his work to revive the discipline, the holiness, the self-sacrifice, which, through the reformed monasteries, should touch the whole Church.

And thus monasticism at the beginning of the eleventh century was a wholly new force in the life of Christendom. It was destined to reform the papacy itself.

[1] Bp. Stubbs in _Dict. of Christian Biography_, vol. i. p. 74.

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CHAPTER XVI

SACRAMENTS AND LITURGIES

[Sidenote: Baptism.]

In the centuries with which we deal the importance of Baptism cannot be overrated. It was everywhere, in all the missions of the Church, regarded as the critical point of the individual life and the indispensable means of entrance to the Christian Church. When the children of Sebert the king of the East Saxons wished to have all the privileges of Christians, which their father had had, and "a share in the white bread" though they were still heathen, Mellitus the bishop answered, "If you will be washed in that font of salvation in which your father was washed, then you may also partake of the holy bread of which he used to partake: but if you despise the laver of life you cannot possibly receive the bread of life"; and he was driven from the kingdom because he would not yield an inch. The tale however shows also that there were still on the fringe of Christianity persons who were not baptized, not catechumens, yet still interested in the religion and to some extent anxious to be sharers in its life.

Throughout the early history of Gaulish Christianity the same is to be observed, and it is doubtless the reason why a number of semi-pagan customs still survived among those who were nominally Christians, {177} as well as those who still stood outside the Church. Baptism in the case of many was a critical point in the history of a tribe or nation.

The baptism of Chlodowech was the greatest historical event in the history of the Franks: it was of critical importance that the Franks, with him, accepted orthodox Christianity, that he, robed in the white vesture which West and East alike considered meet, and which was sometimes worn for the octave after baptism, confessed his faith in the Blessed Trinity, was baptized in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and was anointed with the holy chrism and signed with the sign of the cross. Baptism not only admitted into the Christian Church, but was invested with the a.s.sociations of the human family, and thus had transferred to it some of the conditions in which students of anthropology find such interesting survivals, of primitive ideas. The conception of spiritual relations.h.i.+p was endowed with the results which belonged to natural kins.h.i.+p. The sponsors became spiritual parents.