The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations Part 14

St. Gregory's comment is: "If a bishop is in any fault, I know not any bishop who is not subject to it. But when no fault requires it, all are equal according to the estimation of humility."[196] Natalis, archbishop of Salona, in Dalmatia, had given the Pope much trouble. The Pope deals with him tenderly in more than one letter. But he says: "After the letters of my predecessor (Pelagius) and my own, in the matter of Honoratus the archdeacon, were sent to your Holiness, in despite of the sentence of us both, the above-mentioned Honoratus was deprived of his rank. Had either of the four patriarchs done this, so great an act of contumacy could not have been pa.s.sed over without the most grievous scandal. However, as your brotherhood has since returned to your duty, I take notice neither of the injury done to me, nor of that to my predecessor."[197]

Of the immense energy shown by St. Gregory in the exercise of his Princ.i.p.ate, of the immense influence wielded by him both in the East and in the West, of the acknowledgment of his Princ.i.p.ate by the answers which emperor and patriarch made to his demands and rebukes, we possess an imperishable record in the fourteen books of his letters which have been preserved to us. They are somewhat more than 850 in number. They range over every subject, and are addressed to every sort of person. If he rebukes the ambition of a patriarch, and complains of an emperor's unjust law, he cares also that the tenants on the vast estates of the Church which his officers superintend at a distance should not be in any way harshly treated. He writes to his _defensor_ in Sicily: "I am informed that if anyone has a charge against any clerks, you throw a slight upon the bishops by causing these clerks to appear in your own court. If this be so, we expressly order you to presume to do so no more, because beyond doubt it is very unseemly.

If anyone charges a clerk, let him go to his bishop, for the bishop himself to hear the case, or depute judges. If it come to arbitration, let the so-deputed judges cause the parties to select a judge. If a clerk or a layman have anything against a bishop, you should act between them either by hearing the cause yourself, or by inducing the parties to choose judges.

For if his own jurisdiction is not preserved to each bishop, what else results but that the order of the Church is thrown into confusion by us, the very persons who are charged with its maintenance.

"We have also been informed that certain clerks, put into penance for faults they had committed by our most reverend brother the bishop John, have been dismissed by your authority without his knowledge. If this is true, know that you have committed an altogether improper act, worthy of great censure. Restore, therefore, at once those clerks to their own bishop, nor ever do this again, or you will incur from us severe punishment."[198]

I have quoted already his letters on eastern affairs. They might be enlarged upon to any extent. As to those who held the highest rank, he has warm sympathy with a deposed patriarch of Antioch, sending him a copy of the letter which announced his accession, as well as to the sitting patriarchs. After twenty years' deposition Anastasius was restored. He has also close friends.h.i.+p with Eulogius, patriarch of Alexandria, to whom he writes gracefully: "Besides our mutual affection, there is a peculiar bond uniting us to the Alexandrian Church. All know that the Evangelist Mark was sent by his master Peter; thus we are clasped together by the unity of the master and the disciple. I seem to sit in the disciple's see for the master's sake, and you in the master's see for the sake of the disciple. To this we must add your personal merits; for we know how you follow the inst.i.tutions of him from whom you spring. Thus we are touched with compa.s.sion for what you suffer; but we shrink from telling you what we endure ourselves by the daily plundering, killing, and maiming of our people by the Lombards."[199]

Let us here take a short view of Gregory's incessant activity among the western nations in process of formation. In his struggle to tame the ferocity, lawlessness, and unbelief of the Lombards, he betakes himself to the ill.u.s.trious Catholic queen Theodelinda. He strives to use her influence with her husband Agilulf, on behalf of Rome, ever the object of oppression.

Knowing her to be a good Christian, he sent her his _Dialogues_. He also set before her the supremacy of his see, because she had been misled into withdrawing from the communion of the new archbishop of Milan, Constantius.

The Pope a.s.sures her that the archbishop, as well as himself, venerates the doctrinal decisions of the Four Councils. He adds: "Since, then, by my own public profession you know the entireness of our belief, it is fitting that you have no further scruple concerning the Church of St. Peter, prince of the Apostles. But persist in the true faith, and ground your life on the rock of the Church, that is, in his confession: lest your many tears and your good works avail nothing, if they be separated from the true faith.

For as branches wither without a root, so works, however good they seem, are nothing if separated from the solidity of the faith."[200]

Ten of his letters are addressed to Brunechild, the terrible queen of the Franks. But his letter to all the Gallic bishops in the kingdom of Childebert will best set forth his authority. That king then reigned over nearly all France. The Pope began by saying that the universe itself was ruled by graduated orders of spirits. If there was such distinction of ranks even in the sinless, what man should hesitate to obey a disposition to which angels are subject? "Since, then, each individual office is happily fulfilled when there is a superior to whom application can be made, we have thought it good, following ancient custom, to make our brother Virgilius, bishop of Arles, our representative in the churches which are in the kingdom of our most ill.u.s.trious son king Childebert. We do this in order that the integrity of the Catholic faith, that is, of the Four holy Councils, may by G.o.d's protection be carefully preserved; and that, if any contention should arise between our brethren and fellow-bishops, he may, by virtue of his authority, as holding the place of the Apostolic See, reduce it by discreet moderation. We have also enjoined him, that if any contest should arise requiring the presence of others, he should collect a sufficient number of our brethren and fellow-bishops, discuss the matter equitably, and determine it in conformity with the canons. But if, which the divine power avert, contest should arise on a matter of faith, or some business emerge about which there is great hesitation, and which for its magnitude requires the judgment of the Apostolic See, after diligent examination of the facts, he is to make report to us, that we may terminate all doubt thereon by a fitting sentence."[201]

In this letter we are at a hundred years after the conversion of Clovis.

The Catholic kingdom has swallowed up its Arian compet.i.tors whether at Toulouse or at Lyons, and over it stands the protecting vigour of Gregory, as a hundred and fifty years before that of Leo strove to support the falling empire. Arles receives the pallium for the Frankish kingdom, as it held it for the Theodocian empire, from Rome. Leo saw the imperial line expire at Rome; from Rome Gregory places the bishops "of his most ill.u.s.trious son Childebert" under the old primacy of Arles. This is the "solidity" of the rock of Peter in which Gregory recommends the queens Theodelinda and Brunechild to place themselves.

We know how Gregory, while yet a Roman deacon and monk, walking one day from the palace which he had made a monastery, scarcely more than a stone's-throw to the forum in which a slave-market was held, was moved to pity at the sight of the fair-haired Angles; how he was minded to leave Rome himself on a mission to convert them; how he was kept back by the affection of the Romans; how Pope Pelagius suddenly died of the plague, and Gregory, in spite of all his efforts, was made to succeed him; how from the See of Peter he sent out Augustine and his forty monks to the lost island in the Atlantic, where, since Stilicho withdrew the Roman armies, every cruelty had revelled, and every pagan abomination had been practised by the Saxon invaders. To many, no doubt, the subsequent success of Gregory's venture to convert the Anglo-Saxon England has served to disguise its danger and difficulty at the time. When Augustine reached the sh.o.r.es of Kent, the successive invasions of the Saxon pirates had set up eight petty kingdoms upon the ruin of the Roman civilisation and the Christian Church.

The miseries which are covered under those five generations of unrecorded strife are supposed to have exceeded the misery endured in France, Spain, Italy, and the Illyrian provinces during the same time. The old inhabitants were reduced to slavery, or exterminated, or driven to the three corners of Cornwall, Wales, and Strathclyde. So bitter was the British feeling under the destruction of their country and the wrongs they had endured, that it overcame all Christian principle in them, and the Welsh refused all aid to the Roman missionary in the attempt to convert a race so cruel. It required all St. Gregory's firmness to induce his own monks to persist. In all the annals of Christian enterprise during eighteen centuries, there is probably not one which presented less hope of success than St. Gregory's resolution to add the spiritual beauty of the Christian to the physical beauty which he admired in the captives of the Roman forum.

Among those to whom he applied to a.s.sist and further his purpose was the great queen of the Franks. To Brunechild he directed a letter saluting her, he says, with the charity of a father: "We hear that, by the help of G.o.d, the English people is willing to become Christian; and we recommend the bearer of these, the servant of G.o.d, Augustine, to your Excellency, to help him in all things, and to protect his work".[202]

It was also to Virgilius, bishop of Arles, and primate of all the Gallic bishops, as we have seen, by Gregory's own appointment, that he sent Augustine, after his first success with Ethelbert, to receive episcopal consecration.

From Gregory's own hand, and in virtue of his apostolic power, England in its second spring received its division into two provinces, one to be seated at Canterbury, the other at York. His letters to St. Augustine still exist to show how he entered into all the difficulties of the missionary, all the needs of a land in conversion from paganism. From him date the great prerogatives of the see of Canterbury, extending over the whole island, inasmuch as it was the matrix of the Church in England. If sons may deny their father, Englishmen may deny Gregory, and add to schism the guilt of parricide.

But Gregory was hardly less active in restoring Spain from the Arian blight than in giving birth to a new Christian England. He writes, in 594: "We have heard from many who have come from Spain how lately Hermenegild, son of Leovigild, king of the Visigoths, has been converted from the Arian heresy to the Catholic faith by the preaching of Leander, bishop of Seville, long united to me in intimate friends.h.i.+p. His Arian father, by bribes and threats alike, tried to bring him back. Not succeeding, he deprived him of his rank and all his possessions. When this also failed, he put him in close imprisonment, fettering both neck and hands. So Hermenegild learnt to despise the earthly kingdom, and to yearn after the heavenly, while he lay in bonds and sackcloth. When Easter came, his father sent him in the middle of the night an Arian bishop that he might receive communion sacrilegiously consecrated, and so recover his favours.

Hermenegild repulsed the bishop with strong reproaches. The father, hearing his report, burst into fury and sent officers to destroy him. They split open his skull with an axe, and so destroyed the life of the body which he had disregarded. Miracles followed. Psalms were heard about the body of the royal martyr--royal, indeed, because he was a martyr."[203]

Writing to St. Leander, archbishop of Seville, Gregory says: "I am so tossed by this world's waves that I cannot steer to harbour this old weather-beaten bark which the secret dispensation of G.o.d has committed to my care. s.h.i.+pwreck creaks in its worn-out planks. Dearest brother, if you love me, stretch out the hand of your prayers to me in this tempest. Your reward for helping me will be greater success in your own labours.

"No words of mine can express the joy which I feel at hearing the perfect conversion of our common son, king Rechared, to the Catholic faith."[204]

On another occasion Gregory writes to Leander, sending him the pallium, "blessed by Peter, prince of the Apostles," only to be used at Ma.s.s: "I see by your letter that burning charity which kindles others. He who is not himself on fire cannot inflame others. I always call to mind your life with great veneration. But as for me I am not what I was: 'Call me not Noemi, which is fair; call me Mara, for I am full of bitterness'. Following the way of my Head, I had resolved to be the scorn of men, the outcast of the people. But the burden of this honour weighs me down; innumerable cares pierce me like swords. There is no rest of the heart. I was tranquil in my monastery. The tempest arose; I am in its waves, suffering with the loss of quiet a s.h.i.+pwreck of mind. The gout oppresses you; I also am terribly pained by it. It will be well if, under these strokes of the scourge, we perceive them to be gifts, by which the sense of the flesh may atone for sins which delights of the flesh may have led us to commit.

"The shortness of my letter will show how weak and how occupied I am, who say so little to one whom I love so much."[205]

St. Gregory tells us that king Rechared, after the martyrdom of his brother St. Hermenegild, was converted from the Arian heresy, and brought the whole Visigothic nation to the Catholic faith. "The brother of a martyr fitly became a preacher of the faith. If Hermenegild had not died a martyr, this he would not have been able to do; for 'except the grain of wheat falling into the ground dieth, itself remaineth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit'. This we see to be doing in the members which we know to have been done in the Head. In the nation of the Visigoths one died that many might live."[206]

A letter of St. Gregory to this king Rechared is extant, which one of the greatest French bishops, Hincmar of Reims, nearly three hundred years after it was written, thought worthy to be sent as a present to the emperor Charles the Bald. I quote portions of it:[207]

"Most excellent son, words cannot tell the delight which I receive from your work and from your life. When I hear the power of that new miracle wrought in our days, that by means of your Excellency the whole nation of the Goths has been brought over from the error of the Arian heresy to the solidity of the right faith, I exclaim with the prophet, 'This is the change of the hand of the Most High'. Is there a heart of stone which would not be softened on hearing of so great a work into praises of Almighty G.o.d and affection for your Excellency? Often, when my sons meet, it is my pleasure to tell them of the deeds wrought by you, and to join my admiration with theirs. I get angry with myself that I am lazy, useless, and inert, while kings are labouring for the gain of the heavenly country by the ingathering of souls. What, then, shall I allege to the Judge at that tremendous tribunal, if I come before Him then with empty hands, while your Excellency leads a long train of the faithful whom you have drawn into the grace of the true faith by zealous and continuous preaching? But by G.o.d's gift this is my great consolation, to love in you that holy work which I have not in myself. When your acts move me to a great exultation, I make mine by charity what is yours by labour. Thus, in your work and our exultation over it, we may cry out with the angels over the conversion of the Goths, 'Glory to G.o.d in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will'. But how joyfully St. Peter, prince of the Apostles, has received your offerings is borne witness to all men by your life.

"You tell me that the abbots, who were carrying your offering to St. Peter, were driven back by a bad sea pa.s.sage into Spain. Your gifts, which afterwards arrived, were not refused, but the courage of their bearers was tried. The adversity which good intentions encounter is a trial of virtue, not a judgment of reprobation. When St. Paul came to preach in Italy, how great was the blessing he brought; yet he was s.h.i.+pwrecked in coming, but the s.h.i.+p of his heart was not broken by the waves of the sea.

"Also, I am told that your Excellency issued a certain decree against the misbelief of the Jews, which they strove by a bribe to have modified. This bribe you despised, and in the desire to please G.o.d preferred innocence to gold. This brought to my mind king David's act. He longed for a draught from the fountain of Bethlehem, which the enemy's host encompa.s.sed. His soldiers risked their lives to bring it. But he refused, saying: 'G.o.d forbid that I should drink the blood of these men. So he offered it to the Lord.'[208] If an armed king made a sacrifice to G.o.d of the water which he refused, think what a sacrifice to Almighty G.o.d that king presented who for His love refused to receive, not water, but gold. Therefore, most excellent son, I say confidently that the gold which you refused to receive against G.o.d you offered to Him. These are great deeds, the glory of which is due to G.o.d....

"Government of subjects should be tempered with great moderation, lest power steal away the judgment. A kingdom is ruled well when the glory of ruling does not overmaster the spirit. Provide also against fits of anger, lest unlimited power be used hurriedly. Anger in punis.h.i.+ng even delinquents should not antic.i.p.ate judgment like a mistress, but follow reason as a servant, coming when she is called. If it once is in possession of the mind, it puts down to justice even a cruel deed. Therefore it is written: 'The wrath of man worketh not the justice of G.o.d'; and again: 'Let everyone be swift to hear but slow to speak'. I do not doubt but that by G.o.d's help you practise all this. But as opportunity offers, I creep behind your good works, that when an adviser adds himself to what you do without advice, you may not be alone in your doing. May Almighty G.o.d stretch forth His heavenly hand to protect you in all your acts, granting you prosperity in the present life, and, after long years, eternal joy.

"I enclose a small key from the most sacred body of the Apostle St. Peter, with his blessing. It contains an iron filing from his chains, that what bound his neck for martyrdom may deliver yours from all sin. I have also given the bearer of these a cross for you: it contains some of the wood of the Lord's cross, and hair of St. John Baptist; by which you may always be consoled by our Saviour through the intercession of His precursor. To our most reverend brother and fellow-bishop Leander we have sent the pallium from the See of the Apostle St. Peter, in accordance with ancient custom, with your life, with his own goodness and dignity."

This letter of St. Gregory had been drawn forth by one from king Rechared to him, in which the king said he had been minded to inform of his conversion one who was superior to all other bishops, that he had sent a golden jewelled chalice which he hoped might be found worthy of the Apostle who was first in honour. "I beseech your Highness, when you have an opportunity, to find me out with your golden letters. For how truly I love you is not, I think, unknown to one whose breast the Lord inspires, and those who behold you not in the body, yet hear your good report; I commend to your Holiness with the utmost veneration Leander, bishop of Seville, who has been the means of making known to us your good will. I am delighted to hear of your health, and beg of your Christian prudence that you would frequently commend to our common Lord in your prayers the people who, under G.o.d, are ruled by us, and have been added to Christ in your times, that true charity towards G.o.d may be strengthened by the very distance which divides us."[209]

The fact commemorated in these letters was indeed one for which the Pope might well use the angelical hymn of praise. "The bishops of Spain,"[210]

says Gibbon, "respected themselves and were respected by the public; their indissoluble union confirmed their authority; and the regular discipline of the Church introduced peace, order, and stability into the government of the State. From the reign of Rechared, the first Catholic king, to that of Witiza, the immediate predecessor of the unfortunate Roderic, sixteen national councils were successively convened. The six metropolitans--Toledo, Seville, Merida, Braga, Tarragona, and Narbonne--presided according to their respective seniority; the a.s.sembly was composed of their suffragan bishops, who appeared in person or by their proxies; and a place was a.s.signed to the most holy or opulent of the Spanish abbots. During the first three days of the convocation, as long as they agitated the ecclesiastical questions of doctrine and discipline, the profane laity was excluded from their debates, which were conducted, however, with decent solemnity. But on the morning of the fourth day the doors were thrown open for the entrance of the great officers of the palace, the dukes and counts of the provinces, the judges of the cities, and the Gothic n.o.bles; and the decrees of heaven were ratified by the consent of the people. The same rules were observed in the provincial a.s.semblies, the annual synods which were empowered to hear complaints and to redress grievances; and a legal government was supported by the prevailing influence of the Spanish clergy.... The national councils of Toledo, in which the free spirit of the barbarians was tempered and guided by episcopal policy, have established some prudent laws for the common benefit of the king and people. The vacancy of the throne was supplied by the choice of the bishops and palatines; and after the failure of the line of Alaric, the regal dignity was still limited to the pure and n.o.ble blood of the Goths. The clergy who anointed their lawful prince always recommended the duty of allegiance; and the spiritual censures were denounced on the heads of the impious subjects who should resist his authority, conspire against his life, or violate by an indecent union the chast.i.ty even of his widow. But the monarch himself, when he ascended the throne, was bound by a reciprocal oath to G.o.d and his people that he would faithfully execute his important trust.

The real or imaginary faults of his administration were subject to the control of a powerful aristocracy; and the bishops and palatines were guarded by a fundamental privilege that they should not be degraded, imprisoned, tortured, nor punished with death, exile, or confiscation, unless by the free and public judgment of their peers."

We have here the historian, who is one of the bitterest enemies of the Christian Church and Faith, avowing that the barbarian Visigoths received from the hands of that Church and Faith, at the end of the sixth century, the great inst.i.tutions of a limited Christian monarchy, consecrated by the Church, in which the king at his accession solemnly avowed his responsibility for his exercise of the immense functions entrusted to him; also of parliaments, in which clergy and laity sat together in common deliberation upon the affairs of the State, grievances were redressed, and laws for the benefit of king and people pa.s.sed; in fact, a reign of legal government, based upon law and justice, and confirmed by religious sanction.

And in all this the hand of the Pope was seen, sending to the chief bishop of Spain the pallium direct from the body of St. Peter, on which it had been laid, as the visible symbol of apostolic power dwelling in the Apostle's See, and radiating from it.

This is the first instance, and not the least striking, of a fact which lies at the foundation of modern Europe; for so the Teuton war leaders became Christian kings, and so the northern barbarians were changed into Christian nations. For that which Gibbon here describes took place in all the Teuton peoples who accepted the Catholic faith. He has elsewhere said: "The progress of Christianity has been marked by two glorious and decisive victories: over the learned and luxurious citizens of the Roman empire, and over the warlike barbarians of Scythia and Germany, who subverted the empire and embraced the religion of the Romans".[211]

Of this latter victory we can celebrate the accomplishment, as St. Gregory did, in the words of the angelic hymn, but the details have not been preserved for us, even in the scanty proportion which we possess concerning the former. Fighting for thirty years with the Lombards for the very existence of Rome, Gregory was the contemporary and witness of this second victory. Not until the Arian heresy was subdued by the Catholic faith could it be said to be accomplished. The pontificate of his ancestor in the third degree, Pope Felix III., might be called heroic, in that, while under the domination of the Arian Herule, Odoacer, he resisted the meddling with the received doctrine of the Church by the emperor Zeno, guided by the larger mind and treacherous fraud of Acacius, the bishop of Constantinople, who ruled its emperor. Then the Arian Vandals bitterly persecuted the Church in Africa, and the Visigoth Arians had possession of France from the Loire southwards, and of Spain. Nowhere in the whole world was there a Catholic prince. The north and east of France and Belgium was held by the still pagan Franks. By the time of Gregory, Clovis and his sons had extinguished the Arian Visigoth kingdom and the Arian kingdom of Burgundy, and ruled one Catholic kingdom of all France. Under Rechared, the Arian Visigoth kingdom in Spain became Catholic. Gregory also announced to his friend, the patriarch Eulogius, that the pagan Saxons in England were receiving the Catholic faith by thousands from his missionary. The taint which the wickedness of the eastern emperor Valens had been so mysteriously allowed to communicate to the nascent faith of the Teuton tribes, through the n.o.blest of their family, the Goths, was, during the century which pa.s.sed between Pope Felix and Pope Gregory, purged away. It was decided beyond recal that the new nations of the West should be Catholic. Five times had Rome been taken and wasted: at one moment, it is said, all its inhabitants had deserted it and fled. The ancient city was extinct: in and out of it rose the Rome of the Popes, which Gregory was feeding and guarding. The eastern emperor, who called himself the Roman prince, in recovering her had destroyed her; but the life that was in her Pontiff was indestructible. The ec.u.menical patriarch was foiled by the Servant of the servants of G.o.d: in proportion as the eastern bishops submitted their original hierarchy, of apostolic inst.i.tution, and the graduated autonomy which each enjoyed under it, to an imperial minister, termed a patriarch, in Constantinople, all the bishops of the West, placed as they were under distinct kingdoms, found their common centre, adviser, champion, and ruler in the Chair of Peter, fixed in a ruined Rome. If Gregory, in his daily distress, thought that the end of the world was coming, all subsequent ages have felt that in him the world of the future was already founded. In the two centuries since the death of the great Theodosius, the countries which form modern Europe had pa.s.sed through indescribable disturbance, a misery without end--dislodgement of the old proprietors, a settlement of new inhabitants and rulers. The Christian religion itself had receded for a time far within the limits which it had once reached, as in the north of France, in Germany, and in Britain. The rulers of broad western lands, with the conquering host which they led, had become the victims first, and then the propagators, of the same fatal heresy. The conquered population alone remained Catholic. The conversion of Clovis was the first light which arose in this darkness. And now, a hundred years after that conversion, Paris and Bordeaux, and Toulouse and Lyons, Toledo and Seville, were Catholic once more, and Gregory, a provincial captive in a collapsing Rome, was owned by all these cities as the standard and arbiter of their faith, and the king of the Visigoths thankfully received a few filings from the chains of the Apostle Peter as a present which worthily celebrated his conversion.

It is to be observed that this absolute defeat of the Arian heresy in several countries is accomplished in spite of the power which, in all of them, was wielded by Arian rulers. In vain had Genseric, Hunnerich, Guntamund, and Thrasimund oppressed and tortured the Catholics of Africa, banished their bishops, and set up nominees of their own as Arian bishops in their places for a hundred years. No sooner did Belisarius land on their soil than the fabric reared with every possible deceit and cruelty fell to the ground. The Arian Vandal king was carried away in triumph, as the spoil of a single battle, to Constantinople, and the Catholic bishops, while they hailed Justinian as their deliverer, met in plenary council, acknowledging the Primacy of Peter, as in the days of St. Augustine. In vain had the powerful Visigoth monarchy, seated during three generations at Toulouse, persecuted with fraud and cruelty its Catholic people. A single blow from the arm of Clovis delivered from their rule the whole country from the Loire to the Pyrenees. In vain had Gondebald and his family in Burgundy wavered between the heresy which he professed and the Catholic faith which he admired. The children of Clovis absorbed that kingdom also. But the strongest example of all remains. In vain, too, had Theodorick, after the murder of his rival Odoacer when an invited guest in the banquet of Ravenna, covered over the savage, and governed with wisdom and moderation a Catholic people, whom he soothed by choosing their n.o.blest--Ca.s.siodorus, Symmachus, and Boethius--for his ministers. He had formed into a family compact by marriages the Arian rulers in Africa, Spain, and Gaul. His moderation gave way when he saw the eastern emperor resume the policy of a Catholic sovereign. He put on the savage again, and he ended with the murder not only of his own long-trusted ministers, but of the Pope, who refused to be his instrument in procuring immunity for heresy from a Catholic emperor.

At his death, overclouded with the pangs of remorse, the Arian rule which he had fostered with so much skill showed itself to have no hold upon an Italy to which he had given a great temporal prosperity. The Goths, whom he had seemed to tame, were found incapable of self-government, and every Roman heart welcomed Belisarius and Na.r.s.es as the restorers of a power which had not ceased to claim their allegiance, even through the turpitudes and betrayals of Zeno and Anastasius.

The best solution which I know for this wonderful result, brought about in so many countries, is contained in a few words of Gibbon: "Under the Roman empire the wealth and jurisdiction of the bishops, their sacred character and perpetual office, their numerous dependents, popular eloquence and provincial a.s.semblies, had rendered them always respectable and sometimes dangerous. Their influence was augmented by the progress of superst.i.tion"

(by which he means the Catholic faith), "and the establishment of the French monarchy may in some degree be ascribed to the firm alliance of a hundred prelates who reigned in the discontented or independent cities of Gaul."[212] But how were these prelates bound together in a firm alliance?

Because each one of them felt what a chief among them, St. Avitus, under an Arian prince, expressed to the Roman senate in the matter of Pope Symmachus by the direction of his brother bishops, that in the person of the Bishop of Rome the princ.i.p.ate of the whole Church was touched; that "in the case of other bishops, if there be any lapse, it may be restored; but if the Pope of Rome is endangered, not one bishop but the episcopate itself will seem to be shaken".[213] If the bishops had been all that is above described with the exception of this one thing, the common bond which held them to Rome, how would the ruin of their country, the subversion of existing interests, the confiscation of the land, the imposition of foreign invaders for masters, have acted upon them? It would have split them up into various parties, rivals for favour and the power derived from favour.

The bishops of each country would have had national interests controlling their actions. The Teuton invaders were without power of cohesion, without fraternal affection for each other; their ephemeral territories were in a state of perpetual fluctuation. The bishops locally situated in these changing districts would have been themselves divided. In fact, the Arian bishops had no common centre. They were the nominees and partisans of their several sovereigns. They presented no one front, for their negation was no one faith. We cannot be wrong in extending the action a.s.signed by Gibbon to the hundred bishops of Gaul, to the Catholic bishops throughout all the countries in which a poorer Catholic population was governed by Arian rulers. The divine bond of the Primacy, resting upon the faith which it represented, secured in one alliance all the bishops of the West. Nor must we forget that the Throne of Peter acknowledged by those bishops as the source of their common faith, the crown of the episcopate, was likewise regarded by the Arian rulers themselves as the great throne of justice, above the sway of local jealousies and subordinate jurisdictions. It represented to their eyes the fabric of Roman law, the wonderful creation of centuries, which the northern conquerors were utterly unable to emulate, and made them feel how inferior brute force was to civil wisdom and equity.

In the const.i.tution of the Visigothic kingdom of Spain from the time of Rechared, when it became Catholic, we see the first fruits of the Church's beneficent action on the northern invaders. The barbarian monarchy from its original condition of a military command in time of war, directing a raid of the tribe or people upon its enemies, becomes a settled rule, at the head of estates which meet in annual synod, and in which bishops and barons sit side by side. Government reposes on the peaceable union of the Two Powers. In process of time this sort of political order was established everywhere throughout the West, by the same action and influence of the Church. In the Roman empire the supreme power had been in its origin a mandate conferred by the citizens of a free state on one of their number for the preservation of the commonwealth. The notion of dynastic descent was wanting to it from the beginning. But the power which Augustus had received in successive periods of ten years pa.s.sed to his successors for their life. Still they were rather life-presidents with royal power than kings. And it may be noticed that in that long line no blessing seemed to rest on the succession of a son to his father; much, on the contrary, on the adoption of a stranger of tried capacity guided by the choice of the actual ruler. But in the lapse of centuries the imperial power had become absolute. Especially in the successors of Constantine, and in the city to which he had given his name and chosen for the home of his empire, not a shadow of the old Roman freedom remained. One after another the successful general or the adventurer in some court intrigue supplanted or murdered a predecessor, and ascended the throne, but with undiminished prerogatives.

Great was the contrast in all the new kingdoms at whose birth the influence of the Church presided. There the kings all sat by family descent, in which, however, was involved a free acceptance on the part of their people.

The bishops who had had so large a part in the foundation of the several kingdoms had a recognised part in their future government. Holding one faith, and educated in the law of the Romans, and joined on to the preceding ages by their mental culture as well as their belief, they contributed to these kingdoms a stability and cohesion which were wanting to the Teuton invaders in themselves. They incessantly preached peace as a religious necessity to those tribes which had been as ready to consume each other as to divide the spoils of their Roman subjects. This united phalanx of bishops in Gaul conquered in the end even the excessive degeneracy, self-indulgence, and cruelty of the Merovingian race. Thanks to their perpetual efforts, while the policy of a Clovis made a France, the wickedness of his descendants did not destroy it, but only themselves, and caused a new family to be chosen wherein the same tempered government might be carried on.

It is remarkable that while the Byzantine emperors, from the extinction of the western empire, were using their absolute power to meddle with the doctrine of the Church which Constantine acknowledged to be divine, and to fetter its liberty which he acknowledged to be unquestionable, the Popes from that very time were through the bishops, to whom they were the sole centre in so many changes and upheavals, constructing the new order of things. Through them the Church maintained her own liberty, and allied with it a civil liberty which the East had more and more surrendered.

In the East, the Church in time was younger than the empire; in the West, she preceded in time these newly formed monarchies. Amid the universal overthrow which the invaders had wrought she alone stood unmoved. The heresy which had so threatened her disappeared. On Goths, and Franks, and Saxons, and Alemans, she was free to exercise her divine power.[214] It is in that sixth century of tremendous revolutions that she laid the foundation of the future European society. Byzantium was descending to Mahomet while Rome was forecasting the Christian commonwealth of Charles the Great. In the Rome of Constantine, while the old civilisation had accepted her name, the old pagan principles had continually impeded her action. The civil rulers especially had harked back after the power of the heathen Pontifex Maximus; but in these new peoples who were not yet peoples, but only the unformed matter (_materia prima_) out of which peoples might be made, the Church was free to put her own ideal as a _form_ within them. They had the rudiments of inst.i.tutions, which they trusted her to organise. They placed her bishops in their courts of justice, in their halls of legislation. The greatest of their conquerors in the hour of his supreme exaltation, which also was received from the Pope, was proud to be vested by her in the dalmatic of a deacon.

Of this new world St. Gregory, in his desolated Rome, stood at the head.

There is yet another aspect of this wonderful man which we have to consider. We possess about 850 of his letters. If we did but possess the letters of his sixty predecessors in the same relative proportion as his, the history of the Church for the five centuries preceding him, instead of being often a blank, would present to us the full lineaments of truth. The range of his letters is so great, their detail so minute, that they illuminate his time and enable us to form a mental picture, and follow faithfully that pontificate of fourteen years, incessantly interrupted by cares and anxieties for the preservation of his city, yet watching the beginnings and strengthening the polity of the western nations, and counterworking the advances of the eastern despotism. The divine order of greatness is, we know, to do and to teach. Few, indeed, have carried it out on so great a scale as St. Gregory. The ma.s.s of his writing preserved to us exceeds the ma.s.s preserved to us from all his predecessors together, even including St. Leo, who with him shares the name of Great, and whose sphere of action the mind compares with his. If he became to all succeeding times an image of the great sacerdotal life in his own person, so all ages studied in his words the pastoral care, joining him with St. Gregory of n.a.z.ianzum and St. Chrysostom. The man who closed his life at sixty-four, worn out not with age, but with labour and bodily pains, stands, beside the learning of St. Jerome, the perfect episcopal life and statesmans.h.i.+p of St.

Ambrose, the overpowering genius of St. Augustine, as the fourth doctor of the western Church, while he surpa.s.ses them all in that his doctors.h.i.+p was seated on St. Peter's throne. If he closes the line of Fathers, he begins the period when the Church, failing to preserve a rotten empire in political existence, creates new nations; nay, his own hand has laid for them their foundation-stones, and their nascent polity bears his manual inscription, as the great campanile of St. Mark wears on its brow the words, _Et Verb.u.m caro factum est_. These were the words which St. Gregory wrote as the bond of their internal cohesion, as the source of their greatness, permanence, and liberty upon the future monarchies of Europe.

What mortal could venture to decide which of the two great victories allowed by Gibbon to the Church is the greater? But we at least are the children of the second. It was wrought in secrecy and unconsciousness, as the greatest works of nature and of grace are wrought, but we know just so much as this, that St. Gregory was one of its greatest artificers. The Anglo-Saxon race in particular, for more than a thousand years, has celebrated the Ma.s.s of St. Gregory as that of the Apostle of England. Down to the disruption of the sixteenth century, the double line of its bishops in Canterbury and York, with their suffragans, regarded him as their founder, as much as the royal line deemed itself to descend from William the Conqueror. If Canterbury was Primate of all England and York Primate of England, it was by the appointment of Gregory. And the very civil const.i.tution of England, like the original const.i.tutions of the western kingdoms in general, is the work in no small part of that Church which St.

Augustine carried to Ethelbert, and whose similar work in Spain Gibbon has acknowledged. Under the Norman oppression it was to the laws of St. Edward that the people looked back. The laws of St. Edward were made by the bishops of St. Gregory.

How deeply St. Gregory was impressed with the conviction of his own vocation to be the head of the whole Church we have seen in his own repeatedly quoted words.[215] What can a Pope claim more than the attribution to himself as Pope of the three great words of Christ spoken to Peter? Accordingly, all his conduct was directed to maintain every particular church in its due subordination to the Roman Church, to reconcile schismatics to it, to overcome the error and the obstinacy of heretics. Again, since all nations have been called to salvation in Christ, St. Gregory pursued the conversion of the heathen with the utmost zeal.

When only monk and cardinal deacon, he had obtained the permission of Pope Pelagius to set out in person as missionary to paganised Britain. He was brought back to Rome after three days by the affection of the people, who would not allow him to leave them. When the death of Pope Pelagius placed him on the papal throne, he did not forget the country the sight of whose enslaved children had made them his people of predilection.

With regard to the churches belonging to his own patriarchate, a bishop in each province, usually the metropolitan, represented as delegate the Roman See. To these, as the symbol of their delegated authority as his _vicarii_, Gregory sent the pallium. All the bishops of the province yielded them obedience, acknowledged their summons to provincial councils. A hundred years before Pope Symmachus had begun the practice of sending the pallium to them, but Gregory declined to take the gifts which it had become usual to take on receiving it. St. Leo, fifty years before Symmachus, had empowered a bishop to represent him at the court of the eastern emperor, and had drawn out the office and functions of the nuncio. Like his great predecessor, St. Gregory carefully watched over the rights of the Primacy.

Upon the death of a metropolitan, he entrusted during the vacancy the visitation of the churches to another bishop, and enjoined the clergy and people of the vacant see to make a new choice under the superintendence of the Roman official. The election being made, he carefully examined the acts, and, if it was needed, reversed them. As he required from the metropolitans strict obedience to his commands, so he maintained on the one hand the dependence of the bishops on their metropolitans, while on the other he protected them against all irregular decisions of the metropolitan. He carefully examined the complaints which bishops made against their metropolitan; and when bishops disagreed with each other, and their disagreement could not be adjusted by the metropolitan, he drew the decision to himself.

Gregory also held many councils in Rome which pa.s.sed decisions upon doctrine and discipline. We may take as a specimen that which he held in the Lateran Church on the 5th April, 601,[216] with twenty-four bishops and many priests and deacons. It is headed: "Gregory, bishop, servant of the servants of G.o.d, to all bishops". The Pope says that his own government of a monastery had shown him how necessary it was to provide for their perpetual security: "Since we have come to the knowledge that in very many monasteries the monks have suffered much to their prejudice and grievance from bishops ... we therefore, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the authority of the blessed Peter, prince of the Apostles, in whose place we preside over this Church, forbid that henceforth any bishop or layman, in respect of the revenues, goods, or charters of monasteries, the cells or buildings belonging to them, do in any manner or upon any occasion diminish them, or use deceit or interference". If there be a contest whether any property belong to the church of a bishop or to a monastery, arbitrators shall decide. If an abbot dies, no stranger, but one of the same community, must be chosen by the brethren, freely and concordantly, for his successor.