The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations Part 13

The a.s.sent of the emperor Mauritius arriving from Constantinople about six months after his election compelled Gregory to become Pope. At first, indeed, he disguised himself and took to flight, and hid himself in the woods.[178] The people fasted and prayed three days for his discovery. He was found, and then permitted himself to be taken back to Rome, where he was received with great rejoicing. He was led, according to custom, to the "Confession" of St. Peter, where he made his profession of faith. He was then consecrated, the 3rd September, 590. Nor can any words but his own adequately express his feelings, together with the character of the time in which he lived. With heavy heart he approached the burden laid upon him.

Neither then nor ever after did he deceive himself as to the gravity of the situation. "Since," are his words, "I submitted the shoulders of my spirit to this burden of the episcopal office, I can no longer collect my soul, distracted as it is on so many sides. At one time I have to consider the affairs of churches and monasteries, often taking into account the lives and actions of individuals. At another time I have to represent my fellow-citizens in their affairs. Again, I have to groan over the swords of barbarians advancing to storm us, and to dread the wolves which lie in wait for a flock huddled together in fear. Then, again, I must charge myself with the care of public affairs, to provide means even for those to whom the maintenance of order is entrusted, or I must patiently endure certain depredators, or take precautions against them, that tranquillity be not disturbed." In another place he says: "Daily I feel what fulness of peace I have lost, to what fulness of cares I have been exalted. If you love me, weep for me, since so many temporal businesses press on me that I seem as if this dignity had almost excluded me from the love of G.o.d. Not of the Romans only am I bishop, but bishop of the Lombards, whose right is the right of the sword, whose favour is punishment. The billows of the world so surge upon me, that I despair of steering into harbour the frail vessel entrusted to me by G.o.d, while my hand holds the helm amid a thousand storms." Again, in his synodical letter[179] announcing his accession to the patriarchs, he says: "Especially, whoever bears the t.i.tle of Pastor in this place is grievously occupied by external cares, so that he is often in doubt whether he is executing the work of a Pastor or that of an earthly lord". Thus thirteen hundred years ago spoke the Pope. Does his language in the nineteenth century differ much from his language in the sixth? Shortly after his accession, preaching to his people in St. Peter's, he said:[180]

"Where, I pray you, is any delight to be found in this world? Mourning meets us everywhere; groans surround us. Ruined cities, fortresses overthrown, lands laid waste, the earth reduced to a desert. The fields have none to till them. There is scarcely a dweller in the cities. Yet even these poor remnants of the human race are smitten daily and without ceasing. The scourge of heaven's justice strikes without end, because even under its strokes our bad actions are not corrected. We see men led into captivity, beheaded, slain before our eyes. What pleasure, then, does life retain, my brethren? If yet we are fond of such a world, it is not joys but wounds which we love. We see the condition of that Rome which anon seemed to be mistress of the world: worn down by sorrows which have no measure, desolate of inhabitants, a.s.saulted by enemies, filled with ruins. We see in it fulfilled what long ago our prophet said against Samaria: 'Set on a vessel; set it on, I say, and put water into it. Heap together into it the pieces thereof.' And then: 'The seething of it is boiling hot; and the bones thereof are thoroughly sodden in the midst thereof.' And further: 'Heap together the bones, which I will burn with fire: the flesh shall be consumed, and the whole composition shall be sodden, and the bones shall be consumed. Then set it empty upon burning coals, that it may be hot, and the bra.s.s thereof may be melted.' Now the vessel was set on when our city was founded. The water was put into it and the pieces heaped together, when there was a confluence of peoples to it from all sides. Like boiling water they bubbled up with the world's actions; like bits of flesh they were boiled in their own heat. He says well, 'The seething of it is boiling hot, and the bones thereof are thoroughly sodden in the midst thereof'. For great, indeed, in it at first was the heat of secular glory; but presently the glory itself and those who followed it burnt out. Bones mean the powerful of the world; flesh its various peoples: as bones support flesh, so the powerful of the world rule the weakness of the ma.s.ses. But now, behold, all the powerful of this world have been taken from it. The bones, then, are thoroughly sodden. The peoples are gone; the flesh, then, is boiled up. There follows then: 'Heap together the bones, which I will burn with fire; the flesh shall be consumed, and the whole composition shall be sodden; and the bones shall waste away'. For where is the senate? where any longer a people? The bones are wasted, the flesh consumed; all pride of secular dignities is perished out of it. The whole composition is sodden.

Yet every day the sword, every day innumerable sorrows press upon us, the poor remaining remnant. So, then, this also applies: 'Set it empty upon burning coals'. For since there is no senate, since the people has died out, and yet sorrow and suffering are multiplied day by day on the few that remain, Rome is empty, and yet it burns. We apply this to men, but we see the very structures destroyed by the multiplication of ruins. So that he adds, upon the empty city, 'Burn it and melt its bra.s.s'. For it is come to the vessel itself being destroyed, in which before both flesh and bones were consumed. For when the dwellers have fallen away even the walls fall.

But where are those who once rejoiced in its glory? Where is their pomp and pride, and those ecstasies of frequent transport?

"In Rome are fulfilled the prophet's words against Niniveh: 'Where is the dwelling of the lions, and the feeding-place of the young lions?'[181] Were not its commanders and its princes lions who overran the whole world, and ravened, and slaughtered the prey? Here the young lions found their feeding-place, because the boyhood, the youth, the flower of manhood, from generation to generation, flocked hither, when they sought to get on in the world. Now Rome is desolate, worn down, full of sorrows. No one comes to it to get on in the world; no man of power or violence remains to raven on the prey. Then may we say, 'Where is the dwelling of the lions, and the feeding-place of the young lions?' Upon it has fallen the lot of Judea, foretold by the prophet: 'Enlarge thy baldness as the eagle'.[182] For man is wont to be bald upon the head alone; but the eagle's baldness is over all his body. When very old, his plumes and feathers fall from his whole body. The city which has lost its inhabitants, in losing its feathers, has enlarged its baldness as the eagle. Shrunk also are its wings, with which it used to fly to the prey, for all its men of might, by whom it ravened, are extinguished."

We may here contrast the language concerning the Rome which lay before their eyes of the two Popes St. Leo and St. Gregory. They spoke with an interval between them of 140 years. The first spoke still of the actual queen of the world, of the secular empire subdued and inherited by the spiritual. The feathers of Leo's eagle shone to him with celestial light; the talons of the royal bird traversed the earth not to raven, but to feed a conquered world with Christian doctrine. St. Gregory speaks of the eagle as bald; but we shall see that he who day by day guarded the gates of defenceless Rome against the Lombard spoiler, barbarian also and heretic, fed no less the ends of the earth with Christian doctrine. It was he who brought the _Ultima Thule_, and its inhabitants the _penitus toto divisos...o...b.. Britannos_ again under the yoke of Christ, and taught the sea-kings humanity.

A little later St. Gregory closed his exposition of the prophet Ezechiel in St. Peter's with these sorrowful words: "So far, dear brethren, by the gift of G.o.d, we have searched out hidden meanings for you. Let no man blame me if I close them here, because, as you all witness, our sufferings have grown enormous. On every side we are encircled with swords: on every side we are in imminent peril of death. Some return to us maimed of their hands; of others we hear that they are captured; of others, again, that they are slain. My tongue can no longer expound, when my spirit is weary of my life.

Let no one ask me to unfold the Scriptures; for my harp is turned to mourning, and my voice to the cry of the weeper. The eye of my heart no longer keeps its watch in the discussion of mysteries; my soul droops for weariness. Study has lost its charm for me. I have forgotten to eat my bread for the voice of my groaning. How can one who is not allowed to live take pleasure in the mystical sense of Scripture? How can one whose daily chalice is bitterness present sweets for others to drink? What remains for us but while we weep to give thanks for the strokes of the scourge which we suffer for our iniquities. Our Creator is become our Father by the Spirit of adoption whom He has given to us: sometimes He feeds His sons with bread; sometimes He corrects them with the scourge; because He schools us by sorrows and by gifts for the unending inheritance."[183]

This was the Rome in which Gregory ruled as Pope for fourteen years, since he saw the archangel's sword sheathed over the castle of St. Angelo, into which name the pagan mausoleum was baptised. Pestilence in the city, where the remnant of a people wandered disconsolate by the mighty halls and vast s.p.a.ces of the old emperors--swords of pagan or Arian barbarians all round the patched-up walls of Aurelian. City after city through the hapless Italy reported as plundered or ruined by the Lombard devastation. Presently the trials of a sick-bed and frequent attacks of gout were added to his daily tale of sorrows. In the last years of Gregory it came to pa.s.s that the universal Church was governed from the sick-bed of one worn down, not by years--for he died at sixty-four--but by sufferings of body and mind. The prisoner of the Lombards had to struggle perpetually with the spirit of Byzantine despotism and the aggressive arrogance of a prelate whom successive eastern sovereigns had nursed from a suffragan of Heraclea to be the claimant of an ec.u.menical patriarchate. Yet the eyes of Gregory were bent likewise on the northern conquerors who had seized the provinces of the West. Before he was Pope he had observed in the slave-market of Rome the fair-haired Angles whom he would fain make angels; when Pope he sent forth from his father's house, which he had given to the great Father Benedict, those who were to carry the banner of that father into the isle lost to Christ. In that island he appointed the primate of Canterbury, and designed the primate of York. Through St. Leander and St. Isidore, and the martyr St. Hermenegild, he recovered Spain from the Arian blight; through the queen Theodelinda he made some impression upon Lombard cruelty and misbelief; through the Frankish monarchy he won back France from dissolution and heresy. As he saw the palaces around him deserted, and the broken aqueducts mourn over their intercepted streams in a wasted Campagna, and the glory of Trajan's forum become paler day by day, he thought that the end of the world was coming--and so thinking and so saying, he founded Christendom. In Rome itself, the almsgivers whom he had organised traversed the streets daily, carrying food to the hungry, medicine and medical aid to the sick. Every month he allotted portions of corn, wine, oil, cheese, fish, vegetables. The Church seemed to be the general provider. Every day he fed at his table twelve poor pilgrims, and served them himself. The nuns who took refuge in Rome, from the destruction of their monasteries by the Lombards, amounted to three thousand, whom Gregory supported, especially during the severe winter of 597. He wrote to the sister of the emperor Mauritius: "To their prayers and tears and fasts Rome owes its delivery from the sword of the Lombards".[184] Other cities also he saved, and so he distributed the vast patrimony of the Roman Church in Southern Italy, Sicily, Africa, France, Illyric.u.m, with such wisdom and so beneficent a mercy, that historians trace to him the beginning of that temporal sovereignty which two hundred years after him the Popes were to take in change for the cruel abandonment, paired with incessant exaction, of Byzantine despotism; and the most loyal of subjects were called to be the most beneficent of sovereigns; and the people who had found them fathers from age to age rejoiced to see the fathers.h.i.+p united with kings.h.i.+p.

What had happened to the Italy recovered by the arms of Belisarius and Na.r.s.es, to the unity of the Roman empire, which caused the calamitous state described by Gregory?

Both Belisarius and Na.r.s.es had enrolled a multifarious host of adventurers under the banner which professed to deliver Rome and Italy from the Gothic occupation. Na.r.s.es especially had awakened the greed of the Lombards by the sight of Italy's fair lands. Scarcely had he ceased to govern Rome, in 567, when the effect of this became visible. What Alaric, what Odoacer, what Theodorick, had done, Alboin did with yet more terrible results; and the fourth captivity which Nova Roma had prepared for her mother, become in her mind a hated rival, was the hardest, the longest, the most destructive of all. It is doubtful whether the retort of the eunuch Na.r.s.es to the empress Sophia, when she recalled him from his government to ply, as she said, the spindle, that he would spin for her such a thread as in her life she would not disentangle, is authentic, but it undoubtedly presents historic truth. Whether or not Na.r.s.es called the Lombards into Italy, their king Alboin came from Pannonia over the Carnian Alps into the plain which has ever since borne their name; and this was in the next year--568--to the recal of Na.r.s.es. The Goth and the Herules had worked much woe and wrought great destruction; but the Goths compared to the Lombards were as knights compared to villains. The Lombards, inferior to them by far in strength both of body and of mind, this rudest of Teuton races seemed incapable of receiving culture. It had, moreover, fewer elements in it capable of being worked into the stable order of a state. In belief it was partly Arian and partly pagan. It had also a mixture of Sarmatian blood. When they broke into Italy, the cities of that land, however wasted and depopulated through Attila and the Gothic wars, yet retained their Roman form, yet were full of ancient monuments, splendid still in desolation. Now, one after another fell under the sword of those barbarians. Milan surrendered to Alboin in the autumn of 569, and after three years' siege he entered as conqueror into Theodorick's palace in Pavia. Only Rome, Ravenna, and the cities of the coast still carried the imperial flag. The Romans themselves regarded as a marvel the maintenance of their scarcely defended city. Alboin aimed at making the palace of the Caesars his royal residence. His warriors advanced with terrible devastation from Spoleto to the very walls of Rome in the time of Pope John III., who died, after nearly thirteen years'

government, the 13th July, 573.

Rome was then so severely pressed that the See of Peter remained more than a year unfilled; for the Lombards were encamped before Rome, and hindered communication with Byzantium, whence Benedict I., the newly-elected Pope, had to wait for the imperial confirmation. The _Book of the Popes_ recites that during his four years' government the Lombards overran all Italy, and that pestilence and hunger consumed her people. Rome, also, was visited by both. The emperor Tiberius tried to succour it by sending corn from Egypt to the harbour Porto.

Alboin had been murdered, and Kleph had succeeded him, on whose death, in 575, the Lombards fell into anarchy, and were divided into thirty-six dukes, and Faroald, the first duke of Spoleto, held Rome besieged when Benedict I. died, in 578; and so his successor, Pelagius II., a Roman of Gothic descent, was consecrated without the emperor's confirmation. The beleaguered Pope sent a cry of distress by an emba.s.sy to the eastern emperor, together with a gift of 3000 pounds' weight of gold from the impoverished city. But the emperor, engaged in a Persian war, could only send insufficient troops to Ravenna, more precious to him than Rome, declined the Roman gold, and advised to corrupt with it the Lombard commanders. Zoto, the Lombard duke of Beneventum, returning from Rome, which had ransomed itself, destroyed St. Benedict's monastery of Monte Ca.s.sino, in 580. The monks escaped to Rome, carrying with them the Saint's autograph of his Rule. Pope Pelagius II. received them in the Lateran basilica. There they founded the first Benedictine monastery in Rome. They named it after St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, and so Constantine's basilica, or the Church of the Saviour, became in after-times St. John Lateran. Monte Ca.s.sino lay in ruins 140 years, during which time the great Order had its chief seat in Rome.

Thus did Rome and Italy learn what they had gained by reunion with the eastern empire under Justinian. The pitiless financial exaction of that empire was exerted wherever it had power. War and pestilence ravaged town and country. It cost the Church a labour of 200 years to turn the Lombards from Arians and savages into Catholics who should one day be capable of resisting a Barbarossa and generating a Dante.

What, during these 200 years, an imperial exarch at Ravenna was like Gregory tells us in a letter to his friend Sebastian, bishop of Sirmium: "Words cannot express what I suffer from your friend, the lord Roma.n.u.s. I may say that his malice against us is worse than the swords of the Lombards. The enemies who slay us seem to us kinder than the magistrates of the commonwealth, who wear our hearts out with their malignity, their plundering, and their deceit. At one and the same time to superintend bishops and clergy, monasteries also and the people, carefully to watch against insidious attacks of our enemies, and be perpetually on guard against the treachery and ill-treatment of our rulers, you, my brother, can the better judge what labour and sorrow is here in proportion to the purity of your affection for me who suffer it."[185]

This glimpse will be enough of the generation which preceded the accession of St. Gregory to the Chair of Peter. The whole fifty years of his life up to that time were for his country like the prophet's scroll, inscribed with lamentation and mourning and woe. And in his words to the bishop of Sirmium he gives a faithful picture of the position which his successors held until the time when at length they invoked the king of the Franks to come to the succour of St. Peter.

The calamities which fell upon Italy, and especially upon Rome, in the five captures of the Gothic war, in the subsequent descent of the Lombards, in the subjection of the old capital to a distant and despotic lord, were so great that eye-witnesses declare no language could express them. That they were to the Popes themselves unspeakably distressing, that the Popes did all in their power to avert them, the letters of the Popes remain to testify. I must now dwell for a time on the singular result which they had upon the Roman Primacy. When temporal calamities less than these fell upon the cities of Alexandria and Antioch, the seats of the other two original Petrine patriarchates, the authority of their prelates sunk almost to nothing. Before these calamities they had yielded up a large portion of their dignity and autonomy to the overreaching see of the eastern capital, the rank of which, above that of a simple bishopric, rested on nothing but the emperor's will to concentrate spiritual power in his own hands, by making its seat for the whole eastern empire the city of the Bosporus. But when Rome was ruined in the Gothic war nothing of the kind took place. St.

Gregory inherited his place as successor of St. Peter without the least impairment of the authority which his see had held from the beginning. One wound, indeed, had been inflicted upon it by the Herule Odoacer, when in occupation of the sovereign power which he held over Italy, in name, by delegation of the emperor Zeno, in fact, as head of the foreign mercenaries, he had claimed a right to confirm the election of the Pope when chosen. Theodorick and Theodatus had continued to exert that right--and from the Goths Justinian had taken it--and Gregory himself, as we have seen, had applied to the imperial power at Constantinople to frustrate his own election by clergy and people. But the Pope, when once recognised, entered upon his full and undiminished authority. All that St.

Leo had been St. Gregory was, though Rome had been almost destroyed, and was in the temporal rule subject to the emperor's officer, the exarch at Ravenna. I do not know any fact of history which brings out more distinctly the character of the Pope as inheriting the charge over the whole Church committed by our Lord to St. Peter. That was not a charge depending on the city in which it might be exercised. It was a charge committed to the chief of the Apostles. As our Lord promised to be with the apostolic body to the consummation of the world, as all their spiritual powers depended on His being with them, so, above all, most of all, the spiritual power of their head. Rome might be absolutely dest.i.tute of inhabitants after Totila's victory, but the Pope was not touched. Rome might cease to be capital even of a province, but the Pope was not touched. And it was a series of the most terrible disasters which revealed this prerogative of the Pope as head of the Christian hierarchy. The Pope might be a captive at Constantinople, scorned, deceived, torn away even from the refuge of the altar, surrounded with spies, betrayed by subservient bishops and patriarchs, and, worst of all, be labouring under the stigma of an election originally enforced by arbitrary violence; a despotic emperor might do his worst, but the Pope's successors carried on his prerogatives unimpaired. The walls of Aurelian preserved Rome from the Lombard, but the Pontiff who kept guard over them was not contained in them. His rule was intangible by material attack as it was beyond the reach of material despotism. Italy might be ruined, and a new Rome made out of its ruins, but the Pope would be the maker of it. And the most terrible calamity was chosen to reveal this singular prerogative.

The death of _Senatus populusque Roma.n.u.s_ discovered even to the outside world the life which proceeded from St. Peter's body, as each archbishop received from St. Peter's successor the pallium which had been laid upon it. Thus was conveyed to the mind by the senses that partic.i.p.ation of the Primacy, in which consisted all the authority which he exercised over other bishops. The violence of the Teuton, the misbelief of the Arian, the despotism of the Byzantine, were unconsciously co-operating to this result.

For it must be added that the Rome which survived after the conquest by Justinian only lived by the Primacy of which it was the seat. Two historians[186] of the city, writing from quite opposite points of view, one a Catholic Christian, the other a rationalistic unbeliever, unite in witnessing that from the time of Na.r.s.es the spiritual power of the Primacy was the spring of all action. Not only such new buildings as arose were churches and the work of the Popes; St. Gregory also fed the city from the patrimonium of the church which he administered. Rome had been made by her empire, which the political wisdom and valour of her citizens had formed through so many centuries. When at length the wandering of the nations had broken up that empire, and the northern soldiers whom the emperors, specially from Constantine onwards, had enrolled in her armies and taken for their ministers and generals, followed the example of Alaric and Ataulph, and a.s.sumed the rule for themselves, the situation of Rome offered it no protection. The emperor who, at the beginning of the fifth century, took refuge from Alaric in Ravenna was followed a century later by the Gothic king, whose body, still reposing in his splendid tomb at Ravenna, was a memorial that this fortress had been the centre of his power.

Theodorick was succeeded by the exarch, the permanent representative of an absent lord. We are following the fortunes of Rome in the 300 years from Genseric to Astolphus. In the second and third of these three centuries Rome would have ceased to exist, but for the imperishable life which did not come from her but was stored up in her. That life was the _form_ of her new body; otherwise it would have been a carcase lying prostrate in the dust of mouldering theatres and desolated baths. Their patriarchs saved neither Antioch nor Alexandria; but the Papacy not only saved Rome, but created her anew.

Out of such a Rome St. Gregory poured forth his sorrows to the empress Constantine, wife of Mauritius: "It is now seven-and-twenty years since we have been living in this city among the swords of the Lombards".[187] He was writing in the year 595, and he reckons from the descent of Alboin in 568. "What the sums called for from the Church in these years day by day to live at all have been I cannot express. I may say in a word that as your Majesties have, with the first army of Italy at Ravenna, a chancellor of the exchequer who supplies daily wants, so in this city for the like purpose I am such a person. And yet this same church which at one and the same time is at such endless expense for the clergy, the monasteries, the poor, the people, and moreover for the Lombards, is pressed also by the affliction of all the churches, which groan over the pride of this one man, yet do not venture to utter a word."

And Gregory, referring just before to the pride of this one man, who had the audacity to put in a letter to the Pope himself, a superscription in which, according to the Pope's judgment, he claimed to be sole bishop in the Church, used words which will serve to indicate what Gregory conceived his own authority to be, as well as the source on which it rested: "I beseech you, by Almighty G.o.d, not to permit your Majesty's time to be polluted by one man's arrogance. Do not in any way give your consent to so perverse an appellation. By no means let your Majesty in such a cause despise me the individual, for the sins of Gregory are indeed so great as to deserve such treatment, but there are no sins of the Apostle Peter that he should deserve in your time such treatment. Wherefore, I again and again entreat you, by Almighty G.o.d, that as former princes, your progenitors, have sought the favour of the holy Apostle Peter, so you also would seek it and preserve it for yourselves. Nor let his honour be in your mind the least diminished by our sins, his unworthy servant: that he may be now your helper in all things, and hereafter be able to pardon your sins."

I quote the following pa.s.sage from a letter[188] to the emperor Mauritius himself, not only because Gregory alleges as the root of his own authority the three great words spoken by our Lord to Peter, but for the description of the times in which he lived, and the vast importance of union between the two great powers. This, he says, if faithfully maintained on both sides, would have protected them from such calamities.

"Your Majesty, who is appointed by G.o.d, watches, among the other cares of your empire, with the uprightness of a spiritual zeal over the preservation of sacerdotal charity. For, with piety as well as truth, you think that no one can rule well the things of this world unless he knows how to treat divine things, and that the peace of the human commonwealth depends on the peace of the universal Church. For, most gracious emperor, what power of man, what masterful arm of flesh, would presume to lay unholy hands upon the dignity of your most Christian empire, if the bishops were with one accord of mind to beseech their Redeemer for you by their words, and, if need be, by their deservings? Is there any nation so ferocious as to use its sword so cruelly for the destruction of the faithful, unless our life, who are called but are not bishops, had upon it the stain of the worst actions? While, deserting what belongs to us, and aiming at what is beyond us, we add our own sins to the brute strength of barbarians. Our guilt sharpens the swords of our enemies, and weighs down the strength of the State. What excuse can we make who press down the people of G.o.d, over which we unworthily preside, with the burden of our sins? Who preach with our tongues and kill by our examples? Whose works teach iniquity, while their words make a show of justice? We wear down the body with fasts, while the mind swells with arrogance. This puts on poor apparel; that has more than imperial pride. We lie in ashes, and despise dignities. We teach the humble, and lead the proud, and hide the wolf's teeth in the sheep's face.

What result has all this but that, while we impose on men, we are made known to G.o.d? Thus it is with the greatest wisdom that your Majesty seeks the peace of the Church as the means of stilling the tumults of war, and would make the hearts of bishops rest once more in its solid structure.

That is my wish: in that to the utmost of my power I obey you.

"But since it is not my cause but G.o.d's, and since not I only but the whole Church is thrown into confusion; since sacred laws, since venerable councils, since the very commands even of our Lord Jesus Christ are disturbed by the invention of this haughty and pompous language, let the most pious emperor lance the wound and overcome the sick man's resistance by the force of the imperial authority. If you bind up that wound, you raise up the State; and by cutting off such abuses, contribute to the length of your reign.

"For to all who know the Gospel it is notorious that the charge of the whole Church was entrusted by the voice of the Lord to the holy Apostle Peter, chief of all the Apostles." And he then cites, as so many of his predecessors cited, the three great words. He concludes: "Peter received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the power of binding and loosing, the charge of the whole Church, the Princ.i.p.ate over it; yet he is not called the universal Apostle, and John, my colleague as bishop, endeavours to be called universal bishop.

"All things in Europe are delivered over to the power of barbarians. Our cities are destroyed, our fortresses overthrown, our provinces depopulated.

The ground remains untilled. Day by day idolaters exercise their rage upon the faithful, who are cruelly slaughtered; and bishops who should lie in dust and ashes seek for themselves vanitous names: glory in new and profane t.i.tles.

"Am I in this defending a cause proper to myself? Am I resisting my own special injury? Nay, it is the cause of Almighty G.o.d: the cause of the universal Church. Who is he who, in spite of the commands of the Gospel, in spite of the decrees of councils, presumes to usurp a new t.i.tle for himself? I would that he who has agreed to be called universal may be himself one, without the diminution of others.

"And we know, indeed, that many bishops of Constantinople have fallen into the gulf of heresy; have become not heretics only but heresiarchs. Thence came Nestorius, who, deeming Jesus Christ, the Mediator of G.o.d and man, to be two persons, because he did not believe that G.o.d could become man, went even to the extent of Jewish unbelief. Thence came Macedonius, who denied the G.o.dhead of the Holy Spirit, consubstantial with the Father and the Son.

If, then, anyone seizes upon that name for himself, as in the judgment of all good men he has done, the whole Church--which G.o.d forbid--falls from its state when he who is called universal falls. But far from the hearts of Christians be that blasphemous name in which the honour due to all bishops is taken away, while one madly arrogates it to himself.

"I know that in honour of St. Peter, prince of the Apostles, that t.i.tle was offered to the Roman Pontiff during the venerable Council of Chalcedon. But no one of them ever consented to use this name of singularity; lest while something peculiar was given to one, all bishops should be deprived of the honour due to them. Do we, then, not seek the glory of this name, even when offered to us, and does another catch at it for himself, when it is not offered?

"Your Majesty, then, must bend that neck which refuses obedience to the canons. He must be restrained, who does an injury to the whole Church; who is proud in heart; who has a greed after a name given to none other; who by such a singular name throws a slur upon your empire also in putting himself over it.

"We are all scandalised at this: let the author of the scandal return to right, and all contest between bishops will cease. For I am the servant of all bishops so long as they live like bishops. But whoever, through vainglory and contrary to the statutes of the Fathers, lifts his neck against Almighty G.o.d, I trust in Almighty G.o.d that he will not bend me even with the sword."

As Gregory quotes the three words said to Peter, with application of them to his own see, it seems needless to repeat other pa.s.sages in which he says the same thing. But there is a letter to Eulogius,[189] patriarch of Alexandria, which begins by saying that this patriarch had written to him much concerning the See of Peter, and that he sat in it in his successors down to Gregory's own time. Whereupon Gregory, before himself citing the three words, says: "Who does not know that holy Church is founded on the solidity of the chief Apostle, whose name expressed his firmness, being called Peter from Petra". Then he calls the attention of Eulogius to the fact that all the three patriarchal sees were sees of Peter, with this remarkable inference, that "though there were many Apostles, only the see of the prince of the Apostles, which is the see of one in three places, received supreme authority _in virtue of its very princ.i.p.ate_".[190]

Let us attempt to gather the meaning of the various statements quoted from St. Gregory, and see whether they do not form a coherent whole.

He claims, like all his predecessors, the three great texts concerning Peter, as conveying the charge of the whole Church, the Princ.i.p.ate, to Peter and his heirs, that is, the Popes preceding him.

He contrasts in the most pointed manner this charge with the name of Ec.u.menical, which he translates universal, patriarch, as a.s.sumed by the bishop of Constantinople, and he contrasts not the name only, but the thing which he conceives to be meant by the name and carried in it.

He contrasts likewise the moderation of his predecessors, who, though inheriting Peter's charge over the whole Church, declined to accept a name which seemed to exclude other bishops from their proper honour.

Peter's charge over the whole Church, then, in the judgment of Gregory, had descended to himself, as he wrote to the empress, "though the sins of Gregory, who is Peter's unworthy servant, are great, the sins of the Apostle are none," to justify the treatment he has met with in this a.s.sumption by another of the t.i.tle Ec.u.menical. In a word, the _charge_ is a command of the Gospel, the _a.s.sumption_ is "a name of blasphemy and diabolical pride, and a forerunner of Antichrist".

I conceive that we may interpret St. Gregory's mind in this way. When he so wrote he had behind him rather more than five full centuries since St.

Peter and St. Paul had given up their lives in Rome for the Christian faith, and become its patron saints. In all that time Gregory had seen the hierarchy founded by the bearer of the keys fill the earth. Peter, as a token of his Princ.i.p.ate, had put his name in the three chief sees, sitting himself as bishop in Antioch for seven years; sitting also himself in Rome, as bishop, and dying there; sending also his disciple Mark from Rome to Alexandria. Our Lord's gift and charge to Peter was the source of unity in His Church. He Himself being mediator between G.o.d and man united His Church with the Divine Trinity in unity. Then He gave the keys of His kingdom to Peter, in whom unity was secured through the three patriarchs and the other bishops. Such was the const.i.tution which stood without a break before St.

Gregory from the Apostles to the Nicene Council. From St. Sylvester to his own time the Popes had been maintaining that const.i.tution. But now the claim of the bishops of Constantinople was directly against this const.i.tution. Pope Gelasius, his predecessor, had told that bishop in his day that he had no rank above that of a simple bishop.[191] For all their advent.i.tious rank they rested, not upon G.o.d, not upon Jesus Christ, not upon St. Peter, but upon the residence of the emperors in their city. That was the ground upon which they called themselves ec.u.menical, a t.i.tle which Gregory interpreted universal. Their first step in moving beyond the position of simple bishop was when the 150 bishops at Constantinople in 381 attempted to give them the second place in rank. And this they did not upon any ground of apostolic descent, but because Constantinople was Nova Roma.

As to their act in doing this Gregory writes to Eulogius: "The Roman Church up to this time does not possess, nor has received, the canons or the acts of that council; it has received that council so far as it condemned Macedonius".[192] Their next step was at the Council of Chalcedon to attempt pa.s.sing a canon, to the effect that the Fathers had given its rank to Rome because it was the capital, that the 150 Fathers had therefore given the second rank to Constantinople, because it was the _new_ capital; and that, therefore, the Pontic, the Arian, and the Thracian exarchs of Caesarea, Ephesus, and Heraclea should be subjected to it. This canon St.

Leo had absolutely rejected, and the emperor Marcian had accepted his rejection. In the 130 years from St. Leo to himself, St. Gregory had seen the a.s.sumptions of the bishops of Constantinople continually increasing.

They rested upon the imperial favour. And now in the case of John the Faster they had gone so far that he prefixed his a.s.sumed t.i.tle of ec.u.menical patriarch to the very doc.u.ments which he sent to the Pope for revision. And this though the cause had been settled by himself, and had now come before the Pope, whose power therefore to revise the sentence of one who called himself ec.u.menical patriarch he did not dispute.

Nor, indeed, did it appear over what domain he claimed to be universal. It might be over the eastern bishops; it might be over the two patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, with the later patriarch of Jerusalem; it might be over the actual Roman empire; it might be, finally, over the whole Church.

But whichever it might be, the claim would equally be, in Gregory's judgment, unlawful, based simply and solely upon imperial power; resting also in its origin upon a direct untruth, which a.s.saulted the whole foundation whereon the charge of the whole Church, the Princ.i.p.ate of Gregory, rested; couched, moreover, in language which would enable future generations of Greeks to draw the conclusion that, since the Primacy of Rome proceeded from its being the capital, when Rome ceased to be the capital, and Constantine's city became the capital, the Primacy also pa.s.sed to it.

Thus, in the whole a.s.sumption of the bishops of Constantinople, it was presupposed that the spiritual power and the hierarchy of the Church descended not from Jesus Christ, but from the emperors.[193] So it is clear that this empty t.i.tle, which seemed to the emperor Mauritius a meaningless word, a mere nothing, contained in itself the whole system of Antichrist.

The Pope saw it, and his words are the more significant when we remember that at the time he uttered them the man had already reached full manhood who was to cut the empire of Justinian in half, to deprive of their liberty three of the eastern patriarchs, destroy a mult.i.tude of the Christian people, and be parent of the religion which through the course of 1200 years has shown itself to be specially anti-Christian. There in his Arab tent, as yet the faithful husband of an old wife, was the future Khalif, in whom the spiritual and the temporal power would be joined together; who would set up in a false theocracy that usurpation which Constantine's eastern successors were striving to carry out in the Christian Church.

Mahommed would consecrate that very false principle which was at the root of the ec.u.menical patriarch's arrogance. Thus the strongest word used by Gregory of John the Faster's a.s.sumption, that it was "a name of blasphemy, of diabolical pride, and a forerunner of Antichrist," received its exact verification within a generation after Gregory had spoken it.

But Gregory's charge and Princ.i.p.ate were of divine creation, and did not exclude the proper power and jurisdiction either of every bishop or of the whole episcopate, at the head of which it stood, and through which it worked, carefully maintaining what had been from the beginning, preserving the rank and place of each, consolidating all in the one structure.[194]

The intruder set up by the imperial power deposed Alexandria and Antioch to make them subject to himself; the lawful shepherd maintained Alexandria and Antioch because they grew upon the tree of which he was the trunk. His charge did not exclude, but did indeed include them. The reasoning of St.

Gregory in his letter to the emperor of the day, and his very words in his letter to the patriarch Eulogius, have become a matter of faith by their enrolment in the decree of the Vatican Council. That decree defines the Princ.i.p.ate to be an episcopal power of jurisdiction, which is immediate, over the whole Church. By it the whole Church becomes one flock, under one shepherd. And it further defines that, "It is so far from being true that this power of the Supreme Pontiff is injurious to the ordinary and immediate power of episcopal jurisdiction, by which bishops placed by the Holy Spirit have succeeded the Apostles, and as true pastors feed and rule the flocks severally a.s.signed to them, each his own, that this jurisdiction is a.s.serted, strengthened, and maintained by the supreme and universal pastor, according to St. Gregory's words: 'My honour is the honour of the universal Church; my honour is the solid strength of my brethren; then am I truly honoured when his due rank is given to each'."[195]

It may be observed that Gregory's position against the a.s.sumption of John the Faster is the same as St. Leo's position against Anatolius. In both cases the Popes discerned the hostile power located in the see of Nova Roma which was at work against the original order of the Church, and the Pope who was at the head of it. The only difference lies in the great advance which the hostile power had made on one hand, and on the other hand the excessively difficult temporal position in which St. Gregory had to fight the battle for the cause, as he said, of the universal Church. Yet the speech of the Pope beleaguered by the Lombards in a decimated and subject Rome is as strong as the speech of the Pope who had the imperial grandchildren of Theodosius for friends and supporters, and, when they failed, saved Rome by her two Apostles from the destruction menaced by Attila and Genseric.

But there was no one in the eastern Church--neither the emperor Mauritius, nor the patriarch John the Faster, nor the patriarch Eulogius--who failed to acknowledge the Pope's charge over the whole Church, grounded on the three texts to Peter. Gregory himself reprehends the patriarch Eulogius for giving him in the superscription of his letter the t.i.tle "universal Pope".

He chose for himself, in opposition to the bishop John's arrogated t.i.tle of ec.u.menical patriarch, that of "servant of the servants of G.o.d". The t.i.tle chosen indicated the temper in which St. Gregory exercised the vast charge which he had inherited. For if there is any one principle which seems to serve as the favourite maxim of his whole pontificate, it is that expressed in a letter to the bishop of Syracuse. That bishop had been speaking of an African primate who had professed that he was subject to the Apostolic See.