The period we have been considering is peculiar in the fact that, though its great men are inferior to those of many other epochs, their influence on future ages has been greater. Roman law, monasticism, and the papacy owe their long and profound influence very largely to Justinian, Benedict, and Gregory. The men of the sixth century, though less civilized than their predecessors, were much more civilized than the men of the next four centuries, and they succeeded in framing institutions that ultimately tamed the barbarians. It is noteworthy that, of the above three men, two were aristocratic natives of Rome, and the third was Roman Emperor. Gregory is in a very real sense the last of the Romans. His tone of command, while justified by his office, has its instinctive basis in Roman aristocratic pride. After him, for many ages, the city of Rome ceased to produce great men. But in its downfall it succeeded in fettering the souls of its conquerors: the reverence which they felt for the Chair of Peter was an outcome of the awe which they felt for the throne of the Caesars.
In the East, the course of history was different. Mahomet was born when Gregory was about thirty years old.
* I Timothy VI, 20, 21.
† Mark XXV, 34.
* Or rather the author of an Epistle attributed to Saint Paul—Colossians II, 8.
* Matthew XIX, 12.
* Origen, Contra Celsum, Bk. I, Ch. II.
* Origen, op. cit., Bk. I, Ch. XXVI.
† Ibid., Bk. VIII, Ch. LXXV.
‡ Not exactly in its present form, which was decided upon in 362.
* The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. XV.
* See Oesterley and Robinson, Hebrew Religion.
† See Angus, The Mystery Religions and Christianity.
* This thesis seems to anticipate the outlook of feudalism.
† Epistle XVII.
* Epistle XX.
* This allusion to the Books of Samuel begins a line of biblical argument against kings which persisted throughout the Middle Ages, and even in the conflict of the Puritans with the Stuarts. It appears for instance in Milton.
* Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. VI, p. 17.
* Ibid., p. 212.
† Ibid., p. 30.
* This hostility to pagan literature persisted in the Church until the eleventh century, except in Ireland, where the Olympian gods had never been worshipped, and were therefore not feared by the Church.
† Letter LX.
‡ Letter CXXVIII.
* Confessions, Bk. II, Ch. IV.
† I must except Mahatma Gandhi, whose autobiography contains passages closely similar to the above.
* Confessions, Bk. II, Ch. II.
* Confessions, Bk. III, Ch. I.
† Ibid., Bk. IV, Ch. II.
‡ Ibid., Bk. VI, Ch. XV.
§ Ibid., Bk. VIII, Ch. VII.
Ibid., Bk. IV, Ch. III.
* Confessions, Bk. IV, Ch. XVI.
* Ibid., Bk. V, Ch. VI.
‡ Ibid., Bk. V, Ch. III.
* Confessions, Bk. II, Ch. VII.
† Ibid., Bk. V, Ch. XIV.
‡ Ibid., Bk. V, Ch. X.
* Confessions, Bk. VII, Ch. IX.
† Ibid., Bk. VII, Ch. XXI.
* Confessions, Ch. XX.
† Ibid., Ch. XXVIII.
‡ Ibid., Ch. XXX.
* The City of God, I, 31.
† Ibid., I, 35.
‡ Ibid., II, 14.
§ This argument is not original; it is derived from the academic sceptic Carneades. Cf. Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, p. 166.
* The City of God, VIII, 5.
* Romans VI.
† The City of God, XIV, 15.
* Galatians II, 1-14.
† Of Abdon we know only that he had forty sons and thirty nephews, and that all these seventy rode donkeys (Judges XII, 14).
* Erastianism is the doctrine that the Church should be subject to the State.
* Gibbon, op. cit., Chap. XLVII.
† Ibid.
* The desert near Egyptian Thebes.
* Op. cit., XXXVII, note 57.
* Cambridge Medieval History, II, Chap. VIII.
* So at least Bury says in his life of the Saint.
Part II. The Schoolmen
CHAPTER VII
The Papacy in the Dark Ages
DURING the four centuries from Gregory the Great to Sylvester II, the papacy underwent astonishing vicissitudes. It was subject, at times, to the Greek Emperor, at other times to the Western Emperor, and at yet other times to the local Roman aristocracy; nevertheless, vigorous popes in the eighth and ninth centuries, seizing propitious moments, built up the tradition of papal power. The period from A.D. 600 to 1000 is of vital importance for the understanding of the medieval Church and its relation to the State.
The popes achieved independence of the Greek emperors, not so much by their own efforts, as by the arms of the Lombards, to whom, however, they felt no gratitude whatever. The Greek Church remained always, in a great measure, subservient to the Emperor, who considered himself competent to decide on matters of faith, as well as to appoint and depose bishops, even patriarchs. The monks strove for independence of the Emperor, and for that reason sided, at times, with the Pope. But the patriarchs of Constantinople, though willing to submit to the Emperor, refused to regard themselves as in any degree subject to papal authority. At times, when the Emperor needed the Pope’s help against barbarians in Italy, he was more friendly to the Pope than the patriarch of Constantinople was. The main cause of the ultimate separation of the Eastern and the Western Churches was the refusal of the former to submit to papal jurisdiction.
After the defeat of the Byzantines by the Lombards, the popes had reason to fear that they also would be conquered by these vigorous barbarians. They saved themselves by an alliance with the Franks, who, under Charlemagne, conquered Italy and Germany. This alliance produced the Holy Roman Empire, which had a constitution that assumed harmony between Pope and Emperor. The power of the Carolingian dynasty, however, decayed rapidly. At first, the Pope reaped the advantage of this decay, and in the latter half of the ninth century Nicholas I raised the papal power to hitherto unexampled heights. The general anarchy, however, led to the practical independence of the Roman aristocracy, which, in the tenth century, controlled the papacy, with disastrous results. The way in which, by a great movement of reform, the papacy, and the Church generally, was saved from subordination to the feudal aristocracy, will be the subject of a later chapter.
In the seventh century, Rome was still subject to the military power of the emperors, and popes had to obey or suffer. Some, e.g., Honorius, obeyed, even to the point of heresy; others, e.g., Martin I, resisted, and were imprisoned by the Emperor. From 685 to 752, most of the popes were Syrians or Greeks. Gradually, however, as the Lombards acquired more and more of Italy, Byzantine power declined. The Emperor Leo the Isaurian, in 726, issued his iconoclast decree, which was regarded as heretical, not only throughout the West, but by a large party in the East. This the popes resisted vigorously and successfully; at last, in 787, under the Empress Irene (at first as regent), the East abandoned the iconoclast heresy. Meanwhile, however, events in the West had put an end forever to the control of Byzantium over the papacy.
In about the year 751, the Lombards captured Ravenna, the capital of Byzantine Italy. This event, while it exposed the popes to great danger from the Lombards, freed them from all dependence on the Greek emperors. The popes had preferred the Greeks to the Lombards for several reasons. First, the authority of the emperors was legitimate, whereas barbarian kings, unless recognized by the emperors, were regarded as usurpers. Second, the Greeks were civilized. Third, the Lombards were nationalists, whereas the Church retained Roman internationalism. Fourth, the Lombards had been Arians, and some odium still clung to them after their conversion.
The Lombards, under King Liutprand, attempted to conquer Rome in 739, and were hotly opposed by Pope Gregory III, who turned to the Franks for aid. The
Merovingian kings, the descendants of Clovis, had lost all real power in the Frankish kingdom, which was governed by the “Mayors of the Palace.” At this time the Mayor of the Palace was an exceptionally vigorous and able man, Charles Martel, like William the Conqueror a bastard. In 732 he had won the decisive battle of Tours against the Moors, thereby saving France for Christendom. This should have won him the gratitude of the Church, but financial necessity led him to seize some Church lands, which much diminished ecclesiastical appreciation of his merits. However, he and Gregory III both died in 741, and his successor Pepin was wholly satisfactory to the Church. Pope Stephen III, in 754, to escape the Lombards, crossed the Alps and visited Pepin, when a bargain was struck which proved highly advantageous to both parties. The Pope needed military protection, but Pepin needed something that only the Pope could bestow: the legitimization of his title as king in place of the last of the Merovingians. In return for this, Pepin bestowed on the Pope Ravenna and all the territory of the former Exarchate in Italy. Since it could not be expected that Constantinople would recognize such a gift, this involved a political severance from the Eastern Empire.
If the popes had remained subject to the Greek emperors, the development of the Catholic Church would have been very different. In the Eastern Church, the patriarch of Constantinople never acquired either that independence of secular authority or that superiority to other ecclesiastics that was achieved by the Pope. Originally all bishops were considered equal, and to a considerable extent this view persisted in the East. Moreover, there were other Eastern patriarchs, at Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, whereas the Pope was the only patriarch in the West. (This fact, however, lost its importance after the Mohammedan conquest.) In the West, but not in the East, the laity were mostly illiterate for many centuries, and this gave the Church an advantage in the West which it did not possess in the East. The prestige of Rome surpassed that of any Eastern city, for it combined the imperial tradition with legends of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, and of Peter as first Pope. The Emperor’s prestige might have sufficed to cope with that of the Pope, but no Western monarch’s could. The Holy Roman emperors were often destitute of real power; moreover they only became emperors when the Pope crowned them. For all these reasons, the emancipation of the Pope from Byzantine domination was essential both to the independence of the Church in relation to secular monarchs, and to the ultimate establishment of the papal monarchy in the government of the Western Church.
Certain documents of great importance, the “Donation of Constantine” and the False Decretals, belong to this period. The False Decretals need not concern us, but something must be said of the Donation of Constantine. In order to give an air of antique legality to Pepin’s gift, churchmen forged a document, purporting to be a decree issued by the Emperor Constantine, by which, when he founded the New Rome, he bestowed upon the Pope the old Rome and all its Western territories. This bequest, which was the basis of the Pope’s temporal power, was accepted as genuine by the whole of the subsequent Middle Ages. It was first rejected as a forgery, in the time of the Renaissance, by Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1406-57) in 1439. He had written a book “on the elegancies of the Latin language,” which, naturally, were absent in a production of the eighth century. Oddly enough, after he had published his book against the Donation of Constantine, as well as a treatise in praise of Epicurus, he was made apostolic secretary by Pope Nicholas V, who cared more for latinity than for the Church. Nicholas V did not, however, propose to give up the States of the Church, though the Pope’s title to them had been based upon the supposed Donation.
The contents of this remarkable document, are summarized by C. Delisle Burns as follows:
After a summary of the Nicene creed, the fall of Adam, and the birth of Christ, Constantine says he was suffering from leprosy, that doctors were useless, and that he therefore approached “the priests of the Capitol.” They proposed that he should slaughter several infants and be washed in their blood, but owing to their mothers’ tears he restored them. That night Peter and Paul appeared to him and said that Pope Sylvester was hiding in a cave on Soracte, and would cure him. He went to Soracte, where the “universal Pope” told him Peter and Paul were apostles, not gods, showed him portraits which he recognized from his vision, and admitted it before all his “satraps.” Pope Silvester thereupon assigned him a period of penance in a hair shirt; then he baptized him, when he saw a hand from heaven touching him. He was cured of leprosy and gave up worshipping idols. Then “with all his satraps, the Senate, his nobles and the whole Roman people, he thought it good to grant supreme power to the See of Peter,” and superiority over Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Constantinople. He then built a church in his palace of the Lateran. On the Pope he conferred his crown, tiara, and imperial garments. He placed a tiara on the Pope’s head and held the reins of his horse. He left to “Silvester and his successors Rome and all the provinces, districts, and cities of Italy and the West to be subject to the Roman Church forever;” he then moved East “because, where the princedom of bishops and the head of the Christian religion has been established by the heavenly Emperor it is not just that an earthly Emperor should have power.”
The Lombards did not tamely submit to Pepin and the Pope, but in repeated wars with the Franks they were worsted. At last, in 774, Pepin’s son Charlemagne marched into Italy, completely defeated the Lombards, had himself recognized as their king, and then occupied Rome, where he confirmed Pepin’s donation. The Popes of his day, Hadrian and Leo III, found it to their advantage to further his schemes in every way. He conquered most of Germany, converted the Saxons by vigorous persecution, and finally, in his own person, revived the Western Empire, being crowned Emperor by the Pope in Rome on Christmas Day, A.D. 800.
The foundation of the Holy Roman Empire marks an epoch in medieval theory, though much less in medieval practice. The Middle Ages were peculiarly addicted to legal fictions, and until this time the fiction had persisted that the Western provinces of the former Roman Empire were still subject, de jure, to the Emperor in Constantinople, who was regarded as the sole source of legal authority. Charlemagne, an adept in legal fictions, maintained that the throne of the Empire was vacant, because the reigning Eastern sovereign Irene (who called herself emperor, not empress) was a usurper, since no woman could be emperor. Charles derived his claim to legitimacy from the Pope. There was thus, from the first, a curious interdependence of pope and emperor. No one could be emperor unless crowned by the Pope in Rome; on the other hand, for some centuries, every strong emperor claimed the right to appoint or depose popes. The medieval theory of legitimate power depended upon both emperor and pope; their mutual dependence was galling to both, but for centuries inescapable. There was constant friction, with advantage now to one side, now to the other. At last, in the thirteenth century, the conflict became irreconcilable. The Pope was victorious, but lost moral authority shortly afterwards. The Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor both survived, the Pope to the present day, the Emperor to the time of Napoleon. But the elaborate medieval theory that had been built up concerning their respective powers ceased to be effective during the fifteenth century. The unity of Christendom, which it maintained, was destroyed by the power of the French, Spanish, and English monarchies in the secular sphere, and by the Reformation in the sphere of religion.
The character of Charles the Great and his entourage is thus summed up by Dr. Gerhard Seeliger:*
Vigorous life was developed at Charles’s court. We see there magnificence and genius, but immorality also. For Charles was not particular about the people he drew round him. He himself was no model, and he suffered the greatest licence in those whom he liked and found useful. As “Holy Emperor” he was addressed, though his life exhibited little holiness. He is so addressed by Alcuin, who also praises the Emperor’s beautiful daughter Rotrud as distinguished for her virtues in spite of her having borne a son to Count Roderic of Maine, though not his wife. Charles would not be separated from his daughters, he wo
uld not allow their marriage, and he was therefore obliged to accept the consequences. The other daughter, Bertha, also had two sons by the pious Abbot Angilbert of St. Riquier. In fact the court of Charles was a centre of very loose life.
Charlemagne was a vigorous barbarian, politically in alliance with the Church, but not unduly burdened with personal piety. He could not read or write, but he inaugurated a literary renaissance. He was dissolute in his life, and unduly fond of his daughters, but he did all in his power to promote holy living among his subjects. He, like his father Pepin, made skilful use of the zeal of missionaries to promote his influence in Germany, but he saw to it that popes obeyed his orders. They did this the more willingly, because Rome had become a barbarous city, in which the person of the Pope was not safe without external protection, and papal elections had degenerated into disorderly faction fights. In 799, local enemies seized the Pope, imprisoned him, and threatened to blind him. During Charles’s lifetime, it seemed as if a new order would be inaugurated; but after his death little survived except a theory.
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