CHAPTER LVI.

The Making of Christendom.

PREFACE.

This volume is strictly in continuance of the two which it follows—“The

Throne of the Fisherman built by the Carpenter’s Son,” and “The Holy See

and the Wandering of the Nations”. It is bulk alone which prevents my

offering the three in one cover as historic proof, from original

documents, of the first eight centuries that the Holy See by the

institution of Christ is the Root, the Bond, and the Crown of Christendom.

The works chiefly used in it are before and above all the letters of the

Popes in their office of governing the Christian Commonwealth, which are

contained in the great collection of Mansi, thirty-one volumes folio. The

full titles of other works chiefly referred to are Cardinal Hergenröther,

to whose work, _Photius, Patriarch von Constantinopel, sein Leben, seine

Schriften, und das griechische Schisma_, and to his _Handbuch der

allgemeinen Kirchengeschichte_, I owe great obligations—they are each in

three volumes; Alfred von Reumont, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, in three

volumes; Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, in eight volumes; Kurth,

_Les origines de la Civilisation moderne_, in two volumes; Jungmann,

_Dissertationes_, in seven volumes; the German edition of Rohrbacher’s

History, vol. x. by Rump, vol. xi. by Kellner; Hefele,

_Concilien-Geschichte_, in seven volumes; Muratori, _Annali d’Italia_;

Brunengo, _Le Origini della Sovranità Temporale dei Papi_, and _I primi

Papi-Re e l’ultimo Re dei Longo-bardi_; F. von Hoensbroech, _Enstehung und

Entwicklung des Kirchenstaates_; Niehues, _Kaiserthum und Papstthum_,

Döllinger, _Muhammed’s Religion, nach ihrer inneren Entwicklung und ihrem

Einflusse auf das Leben der Völker_. Regensburg, 1838.

CONTENTS

Prologue To The Seven Volumes Of The Formation Of Christendom.

Contents To The Seven Volumes Of The Formation Of Christendom.

Preface.

Chapter I. The Pope And The Byzantine.

Chapter II. Pope Martin, His Council, And His Martyrdom.

Chapter III. Heraclius Betrays The Faith, And Cuts His Empire In Two.

Chapter IV. Christendom And Islam.

Chapter V. Old Rome And New Rome.

Chapter VI. An Emperor Priest And Four Great Popes.

Chapter VII. Rome’s Three Hundred Years, 455-756 From Genseric To Aistulf,

Between The Goth, The Lombard, And The Byzantine.

Chapter VIII. From Servitude To Sovereignty.

Chapter IX. The Making Of Christendom.

Index.

Footnotes

CHAPTER I. THE POPE AND THE BYZANTINE.

I have hitherto conducted the history of the Throne of the Fisherman built

by the Carpenter’s Son in unbroken succession from St. Peter to St.

Gregory the Great. It is a period of 575 years from the Day of Pentecost

A.D. 29 to St. Gregory’s death in A.D. 604. This period is very nearly

bisected by the conversion of Constantine. The first half contains the

action of the Primacy over against a hostile heathen empire. The second

half contains its action upon an empire which, at least in principle,

acknowledged union with the Catholic Church as a duty, a privilege, and a

necessity. The testimony rendered by Councils and by Fathers to the Roman

Primacy may be said to be complete in the time of St. Gregory. Subsequent

Councils can only add a closer precision to the testimony of the Council

of Chalcedon. Subsequent acts of the Eastern empire can scarcely go beyond

the submission of its episcopate, its emperor, and its nobles to Pope

Hormisdas. The point of that submission consists in the solemn acceptance

of the line of Roman bishops as inheriting the charge given by our Lord to

St. Peter. Subsequent legislation can but apply in detail the acceptance

by Justinian of the Pope’s right to examine everything which belongs to

the doctrine or concerns the conduct of the Church throughout the world.

And force is even added to this acceptance, because it was made when the

Pope, John II., to whom it was made, was not in fact his temporal subject.

I propose to treat in this volume of a period embracing two hundred years.

It runs from the time of St. Gregory the Great to the founding of the holy

Roman empire, in the person of Charlemagne, by Pope St. Leo III.

But, before entering on this treatment, it seems to me called for to make

one remark on all which I have hitherto written or am hereafter to write,

and to draw out distinctly a principle which affects every line of my

narrative. This is the necessity of considering the Church as the one

kingdom of Christ in all ages: one and the same polity from the Day of

Pentecost to the Day of Judgment. This idea has always been before me as

the rule of faith in writing the six preceding volumes. It has been the

major premiss of my whole argument. To a Catholic the unity of the Church

is as necessary as the unity of God; and, equally, to say that the Church

is fallible is to deny the existence of any such thing as the kingdom of

God upon earth. The sooner that anything which is fallible is swept away

the better. The one duty which we owe to fallibility is to label it. The

thing called public opinion(1) is fallible, and, accordingly, every

generation sweeps it away and substitutes a fresh fallibility, destined to

disappear after a similar ascendency, which waxes and wanes in varying

durations of time. Division is the strongest proof of fallibility in that

which is divided, as unity is of truth in that which remains one mass. For

this cause those who substitute national churches in a particular country

under the political head of that country, whether king, president, or

parliament, for the one divine polity in all countries, are divided from

my argument by an impassable gulf. They no more believe in the Church

which is “the house of God, the pillar and basis of the truth,” than he

who sets up three gods believes in one Infinite Creator and Rewarder of

His creatures. The decrees of a General Council in matters of faith are

not recognised by them as part of the divine deposit; for to them they are

not acts of the Sovereign Lord in His plenary council. The lessons of

history fail to convey any definite impressions to minds in which this

idea is wanting. Rather the lessons of history affect them as the heathen

was affected who heard the description of our Lord’s sufferings undergone

for his redemption only to exclaim, “Was it not a long time ago?” There

are facts, but no connection. A strong instance of this is that the want

of written records in the first three centuries is not made up to them by

the acts of the Church in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, because

to them the Church is not a polity instinct with one life and following

from the beginning identical rules of government. On the contrary, they

argue from the silence of perished documents in the three earliest

centuries against the recorded practice of the three centuries following.

Thus to them the acts of the Church in the Council of Ephesus in 431,(2)

the next ecumenical council to the Nicene, throw no light upon the acts of

the Church in the Nicene, of which no full record exists. Nor, again, do

the acts of the Council of Chalcedon illustrate to them the antecedent

constitution of the Church. And the supplication of the Eastern emperor,

Marcian, to Pope St. Leo to confirm those acts tells them nothing as to

the relation of the Council to the Pope in the time of the Nicene Council.

Less even than infidels, who reject the Christian revelation altogether,

but have a regard for historical sequence, do the nurslings of a national

church, especially if it was in origin a queen’s love-child, and then

dandled on the knees of successive kings, understand the majesty of the

Apostolic See, as set forth in the words of our Lord, or as unfolded in

the course of ages. If the political constitution under which they live be

a system of compromise, they are tempted to make the constitution of the

Church a similar system, in which a change of ministry alters or even

reverses the policy of a kingdom. “The holy Catholic Church, the communion

of saints,” is not an entity to such minds. Therefore they fail to

appreciate the proof of the one polity at the head of which St. Peter’s

successor stands. For some that polity ceased to exist in the fifth

century; for others in the ninth; for others in the sixteenth; for all

such it is non-existent in the nineteenth. It is for them as the human

soul for the infidel surgeon: he cannot find it under his knife. Or as God

for the infidel astronomer: he cannot see God in the order of the

universe, though he will receive what physicists tell him, that the

universe is absolutely one.

But I write for those to whom history is intelligible, because it is an

order of events unrolling itself as a drama at once human and divine; to

whom the human soul makes itself known by its acts; to whom “the heavens

declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork—day unto

day utters speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.” To whom

likewise there is one “Jesus Christ yesterday and to-day, and the same for

ever”: yesterday at Pentecost with St. Peter and the apostles and our

Blessed Lady; to-day with Leo XIII. at Rome and nineteen hundred years of

doctors, martyrs, and saints; “the same for ever” at the Day of Judgment.

And now I turn another leaf in the book of human actions, which our Lord

holds on His knees and unfolds in His history of His one Church.

During the whole pontificate of St. Gregory he was defending himself

against the deceit and despotism of the man whom he acknowledged as his

lawful sovereign, the Byzantine emperor. The despotism usually veiled

itself in deceit, while the deceit rested upon the despotism rooted in the

heart of the eastern that he was lord of the world.(3) Worse than the

Lombards, who pursued to the very gates of Rome the people nourished by

Gregory on the Church’s patrimonium, who spoiled, maimed, and tortured

those whom they could catch, were the intrigues of the imperial

lieutenants, the exarchs of Ravenna, plotting with the Lombards, enemies

of the emperor, against his subjects, the Pope and his Romans. With this

state of things the seventh century begins, and so it continues to the

end. We have to consider the great events which took place in this

century, and especially to point out their connection with this fact of

the Byzantine temporal despotism as it was turned upon the spiritual

power.

Again, during his whole pontificate, St. Gregory was resisting the

attempts of the bishops of Constantinople to extend their power. In his

own time it would seem to have been an effect of Justinian’s legislation

that the Roman See accepted them as patriarchs, which Pope Gelasius denied

them to be. Not only so but in every step of their advancement they were

backed by the emperors to go on yet further by pushing their See under the

title of Ecumenical to a position over the eastern empire parallel to that

of the Pope over the West, while it was subordinate at the same time to

the emperor himself. The four-and-twenty immediate successors of St.

Gregory, from Pope Sabinian, elected in 604, to Pope Constantine, who died

in 715, were exposed to the full force of this attempt. The bearing of it

upon the rise of the Mohammedan empire will appear more and more as we

proceed in the history of this terrible century.

The first event on which we must dwell for a time on account of its great

effect upon the history of the century, is the long continued hostility

between the eastern and the Persian empires. In the year 602 the general

Phocas had deposed the emperor Mauritius.(4) From his reign most Byzantine

historians date the ever increasing calamities of the empire. The popular

feeling that a bad ruler is a judgment from God was expressed in the story

that a pious monk once asked, O God, why hast Thou set this man over us as

emperor? when he received for answer, Because I could find none worse.

Phocas reigned about seven years, and his end was as follows. The

patriarch Thomas had, by his entreaties, drawn to Constantinople Theodore

of Siceon, who enjoyed a great reputation for holiness. The mind of

patriarch Thomas had been greatly moved by auguries of misfortune which as

it were filled the air. He urged the saint to pray and then to give him

his advice. The saint at last yielded to his entreaties and said, “It was

my mind not to disturb you. It is not for your good to know these things.

But since you will have it so, learn that the incident which troubles you

betokens many great misfortunes. Many will leave our religion. Incursions

of barbarians will follow, and great blood-shedding. Devastation and

insurrection through the whole world. Churches will be deserted. The fall

of the divine service and of the empire is approaching: and the adversary

is nigh at hand.”

Whilst St. Theodore was at Constantinople the emperor Phocas suffered from

gout in hands and feet. He sent for the saint, who laid his hands upon him

and prayed for him. The emperor felt relief, and commended himself and his

realm to Theodore’s prayers. The saint replied that if he wished such a

prayer to be heard he must cease from oppression and shedding of blood.

Phocas had great need of such warning, but profited little by it. Narses

was the ablest and bravest general whom he had to send against the

Persians, but he broke his word, and had him burnt alive. This frightful

execution moved the patrician Germanus to try after the place of emperor

which Phocas had once offered to him. He planned a conspiracy with

Constantina, widow of the emperor Mauritius. She had taken asylum with her

daughters in Sancta Sophia. This was in 606. At the sight of her the

people flocked together and took up arms. Phocas sent orders to bring out

Constantina with her daughters. The patriarch Cyriakus refused: only when

he had compelled Phocas to swear that no harm should be done to them, he

gave them up. Phocas kept his word, and only confined them in a monastery.

Germanus was forced to become a priest. In the next year, 607, Germanus

and Constantina with other persons of high rank made a new conspiracy. It

was discovered. Germanus with his daughter, the widow of prince

Theodosius, eldest son of the preceding emperor Mauritius, was beheaded.

The same lot befel Constantina and her daughters at Chalcedon, on the spot

where, five years before, the emperor Mauritius had witnessed the

execution of five sons, one after another, uttering at each stroke only

the words: “Just art Thou, O Lord, and just is Thy judgment”: and then

offering his own head to the sword. Phocas put to death the other

conspirators with fearful tortures. Such executions were followed by fresh

conspiracies, and these by similar punishments. At last, Crispus, the very

stepson of Phocas, rose against him, and invited Heraclius, governor of

Africa, to depose the emperor. Heraclius despatched a fleet under the

command of his son, bearing the same name. Only as it drew near

Constantinople did Phocas hear of it. He prepared for defence, but Crispus

secretly traversed all his efforts, pretending to be on his side. After a

bloody engagement the fleet appeared before the walls of the capital on

Sunday the 4th October, 610. The next morning a senator, whose wife Phocas

had dishonoured, appeared with a troop of soldiers at the palace. Phocas

was seized, stripped of the purple, his hands bound behind his back, and

carried through the city and the fleet before the young Heraclius, who was

still on board his vessel. “Wretch,” said Heraclius, “hast thou governed

the empire so?” “And wilt thou,” answered Phocas, “govern it better?”

Heraclius trampled on him, cut off his hands and feet, and then his head,

in sight of the vast throng which lined the shore. His head and limbs were

carried on spears through the city, the trunk dragged through the streets,

and all at last burnt.

Heraclius, accompanied by Crispus, disembarked. He invited Crispus to put

on the imperial robe, since he was not come to invest himself with it, but

only to avenge Mauritius and his children. Crispus refused, and then

Heraclius had nothing to oppose to the request of the patriarch Sergius,

who had just succeeded Thomas, that he should be crowned by him. Crispus

was given the government of Cappadocia: but becoming a few years later

unfaithful to Heraclius, as he had been to his stepfather Phocas, was

compelled to receive the torture, and pass the rest of his days in

banishment.

It may here be said that the dynasty thus begun occupied the throne for

five generations. Justinian II., great-great-grandson of Heraclius, was

more cruel if possible, than Phocas: he was deposed by an adventurer in

695, and his nose cut off to incapacitate him for any future recovery of

the throne. His successor lasted three years: and another for seven; after

which Justinian, who wore a golden nose for the one which he had lost,

recovered the throne; practised during five years atrocious cruelties, was

deposed by a third adventurer, Philippicus Bardanes in 711: put to death,

and his head carried to Rome to assure all men that they were delivered

from a tyrant, and a special oppressor of the Church.

Such in personal conduct was the manner of men who sat on the eastern

throne of the great Constantine during the seventh century: whom

four-and-twenty Popes found themselves bound to acknowledge as “Christian

kings and Roman princes”. What they were in this capacity, which was the

first and greatest of all their duties, as recognised by the imperial

laws, will be seen as the narrative proceeds. Under these men the Popes,

utterly deprived of temporal power, in the midst of a province an outlying

domain of a distant despot, had to maintain the unity of the Christian

faith, and the independence of the Holy See as its guardian. In the midst

of these things the chalifs of Mohammed broke upon the eastern empire, and

severed from it its fairest provinces. It is requisite to follow closely

the series of events, and the connection of times.

Upon his accession to the throne in 603 Phocas had sent an embassy to the

Persian emperor Chosroes, expressing his desire to maintain peace with

him. But Chosroes under pretext of avenging his benefactor, the late

emperor Mauritius, began a war which lasted more than four and twenty

years, inflicted fearful sufferings on both empires, and had the most

important consequences by leaving them in a state of great weakness to

meet the assault of a new enemy, the Mohammedan chalifate.

During the first eighteen years of this war, that is, from 604 to 622, the

Greek empire suffered a series of defeats and disasters. Through the whole

East, from the ruins of Babylon to the Bosphorus, cities were burnt and

destroyed, the country ravaged and left without cultivation, the

inhabitants slain or carried away into slavery. The Persians tore from the

empire province after province—Armenia, Mesopotamia, Cappadocia. In 610

they came up to the walls of Chalcedon. The accession of Heraclius

produced no pause in their destructive course. In 611 they took Edessa,

Apamea, and Antioch. In 615 they plundered Palestine, and took Jerusalem.

The Church of Gethsemane, on the Mount of Olives, and Constantine’s

Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre were destroyed or burnt. Among the

inhabitants carried away was the patriarch Zacharias. The Persians seized

in plunder all that was valuable, and the priceless relic of the Holy

Cross was taken away by the fire-worshipper Chosroes. The Sponge and the

Lance were saved by the patrician Nicetas, who purchased them at a high

price from a Persian soldier, and then brought them to Constantinople,

where they were exposed for veneration of the faithful.

It is to be noted that in 610 the Jews at Antioch had an insurrection, and

massacred a great number of the most considerable inhabitants. They seized

the patriarch Anastasius II., whom we have seen St. Gregory treat with

such regard; they frightfully maimed him, dragged him by the feet through

his city, and finished by casting him upon a funeral pile. When Jerusalem

was captured in 615, the Jews of Palestine bought of the Persians as many

Christians as they could get, for the pleasure of strangling them. It is

recorded that they murdered seventy thousand in this manner.

Eight days before the taking of Jerusalem the fortress monastery of Mar

Sabas, 2000 feet above the Dead Sea, then, as now, of the greatest renown,

was assaulted by the Arabs. All but fourty-four of the oldest monks had

fled, but these remained, and, after its capture, suffered first grievous

tortures, and at last martyrdom. When the monks who had fled returned,

they found the bodies of their brethren unburied; the abbot Modestus gave

them holy burial. He afterwards superintended the diocese of Jerusalem

during the absence of the captive patriarch. What Monte Cassino is to

Italy, and Mount Athos to Greece, Mar Sabas was then and is now to

Palestine.

At this time St. John the Almsgiver—the last great patriarch of

Alexandria—gave every help to the fugitives from the Persian seizure of

the Holy Land. It is a sign of the secular power wielded by the Egyptian

patriarch that he ordered the confiscation of the goods of those who used

in his city false weights and measures. After he had lovingly received and

supported the fugitives from Syria and Palestine, he had, in the next

year, 616, to fly himself in order to escape the sword of the Persians. He

was on his way with the patrician Nicetas to Constantinople, when, at

Rhodes, he had a vision, in consequence of which he said to his companion:

“You invite me to the king of this world, but the Lord of heaven comes

before you”. He told Nicetas the vision, and left him to go to Amathus in

Cyprus, his birthplace. There he made his will in these words: “I thank

Thee, O Lord, that Thou hast heard my prayer, and that only one-third of

one gold piece remains to me, though at my consecration I found 8000

pounds’ weight of gold in the bishop’s house at Alexandria, not reckoning

those countless sums which I have received from the friends of Christ.

Therefore, I order that this small remnant be given to Thy servants.” Ten

years he sat in the See of Alexandria. George was his successor. But from

this time nothing more is known of this Church’s history. Alexandria fell

first under the Persians, and then under Amrou, the Mohammedan. The

Arabian domination supported Christian errors only, and from that time the

Church of St. Athanasius has never lifted its head again, and the land of

the Desert Fathers is become the chief seat of the religion which puts an

impostor in the place of the Redeemer.

In the year 616, the Persians broke into Egypt, took and plundered

Alexandria, and carried their ravages to the borders of Æthiopia. Another

Persian army besieged Chalcedon. Still Heraclius remained inactive. He

only sent an embassy to Chosroes. In 619 he sent another, beseeching mercy

in the name of the senate. Chosroes replied: “I will spare the Romans when

they renounce their Crucified One and worship the sun”. He remembered not

that he had to thank the Romans for his crown, that in his time of trouble

he had found help only from the God of the Christians. Heraclius lost

courage at this answer. Since the loss of Egypt Constantinople was

suffering from famine, as well as a grievous pestilence. The emperor

resolved to quit his capital, and take refuge with his father in Africa.

He embarked his chief treasures, and directed the fleet to Carthage. Most

of it was wrecked in a storm. A panic fell on his people, and they

besought him with tears and cries not to forsake them. The patriarch

Sergius went to the palace, led Heraclius to Sancta Sophia, and compelled

him before the altar to swear aloud not to desert his capital. Heraclius

submitted against his will.

In 619 he was very nearly taken captive by the Khan of the Avars, who had

asked him for an interview, ostensibly to settle terms of peace, in

reality to secure his person and riches, and to fall upon Constantinople.

The emperor came in great pomp, was surprised, and scarcely escaped in

disguise. The Avars obtained an immense booty, and, according to the

patriarch Nicephorus, carried away captive beyond the Danube 270,000 men,

women, and children.

At length, in the twelfth year of his reign, Heraclius awoke from his

torpor, and his awakening was one of the most marvellous events recorded

in history. His treasury was empty and his credit not good enough to

borrow; but he resolved to attack the Persians in their own country. To

secure Constantinople he made peace with the Avars, and to hold them in

check he ceded provinces to other races, Slaves, Croatians, and Servians.

He made churches and monasteries supply a forced loan. He took even the

candlesticks and holy vessels of Sancta Sophia and coined them. When all

was ready for his departure, he declared his eldest son, Heraclius

Constantinus, ten years old, regent of the kingdom under tutorship of

Sergius the patriarch and Bonosus, patrician. Then he celebrated the

Easter festival, 4th April, 622. The next day he went to Sancta Sophia,

threw himself before the altar and cried: “Lord, deliver us not for the

punishment of our transgressions to our enemies, but look upon us in Thy

mercy and grant us victory, that the wicked cease to exalt themselves and

to mock Thine inheritance”. Then he turned to the patriarch Sergius with

the words: “My city and my son I leave to God’s protection, the Blessed

Virgin’s, and thine”. Upon this he took into his hands an image of our

Saviour, which was said not to have been made by hands, marched to the

Bosphorus and crossed over to Asia.

A train of defeats by the Persians had demoralised the Greek soldiers.

Heraclius reinforced his army with allied troops, amongst them a number of

Turks. He spent some months at first in restoring courage to his forces.

“See,” he said, “my children, how the enemies of God trample on our land,

lay waste our cities, burn our sanctuaries, desecrate our altars, pollute

our churches with the vilest abominations.” When he had thus enheartened

them he reviewed them together, and swore to fight with them and on equal

terms unto death, to share all their dangers, to be inseparable from them

as a father with his children. And moreover, he kept his word.

Heraclius was ever at the head of his soldiers: he united valour with

caution: he entered Armenia and defeated the Persians in several battles.

Then he made a show of taking up his winter-quarters in Pontus, but

suddenly burst into Persia, and utterly discomfited a large force. He took

the enemy’s camp, together with immense treasure. His troops were

astounded at their own victories, and he wintered them in Armenia. The

next campaign was no less glorious. He kept Easter Day in 623, which fell

on the 27th March, with his family at Nicomedia. By the 20th April he was

in Persia. He had written to Chosroes, and offered him peace. The Persian

king not only rejected his offer, but put the bearers of it to death.

Heraclius used all these circumstances to give courage and confidence to

his troops. He penetrated to the heart of Persia: he burnt the cities and

villages which he passed on his way, and marched on Ganzac, now Tauris,

where Chosroes was encamped with forty thousand men. At the first onset,

Chosroes took flight. His troops were mown down, captured, or scattered.

Ganzac was the capital of Atropatene. The Persian kings kept there a

treasure, said to be that of Crœsus and to have been brought thither by

Cyrus. The most renowned fire-temple of the chief god of the Persians was

in this city. Here Zoroaster, the founder of that worship, had been born

and lived. There was also here a colossal statue of Chosroes. He was

seated in the middle of the palace under a great baldachin representing

heaven. Round him were the sun, moon and stars, and angels bearing

sceptres. The statue, by means of machinery, caused rain to fall, and

thunder to sound. In fact, Chosroes assumed here divine worship. The

emperor ordered the statue to be overthrown and broken to pieces.

Heraclius burnt palace and temple, with part of the city. Then he marched

into Albania for the winter, and, out of pity, set free fifty thousand

Persian prisoners, to whom he likewise gave maintenance. This humanity so

won their hearts that they burst into tears, and prayed that he might

restore freedom to Persia, and put to flight Chosroes, whom they called

the Waster of the human race—so hateful had he made himself by oppression

and cruelty.

In the campaign of 624, Chosroes brought up three armies against the

emperor. Heraclius defeated them in three great battles. He made so sudden

a night attack upon what remained that their general, Sarbar, wakened by

the clash of arms, had scarcely time to spring from his bed on horseback,

and ride away at full speed, while the conqueror took possession of his

golden shield, and even his clothes. In his fourth campaign, that of 625,

Heraclius was also victorious. Chosroes avenged the defeat of his troops

by falling on the churches of Persia, which he stripped of all their

ornaments: and to punish the emperor, he compelled the Christians of his

realm to become Nestorians. Fifteen years before, he had, to please his

physician, compelled the inhabitants of Edessa to become Eutycheans.

Chosroes rallied all his forces for the campaign of 626. He raised three

great armies, composed indifferently of freemen and slaves, of natives and

foreigners. Sarbar led one of these armies to Chalcedon to besiege

Constantinople, on the Asiatic side, while the Khan of the Avars, breaking

truce, appeared on the European side, to demand the surrender of the city

and all its wealth. Its inhabitants, however, defended themselves with

such valour as to repulse both Avars and Persians. The fall of the Avar

power begins at this moment. It was henceforth occupied by intestine

struggles. Sais led the second army of Chosroes, which was defeated by

Theodore, brother of the emperor Heraclius. Heraclius himself broke the

third army under the command of Rhazates, at Nineveh, on the 12th

December, 627. The battle began in early morning, and ended only in the

evening. The Persians lost, besides the commanding general, his three

lieutenants, almost all their officers, and nearly the half of their

soldiers. The Romans had only fifty killed, but many thousands wounded.

These the emperor tended with so much care that only ten died.

Nineveh, at that time, was only a village on the ruins of the old capital.

Heraclius marched thence upon Ctesiphon, the capital of Persia, built upon

the remains of old Babylon, at a little distance. On his road he passed

palaces, seats, and chaces wherein the Persian nobles pursued their

hunting. Heraclius suffered his soldiers to sack and burn them all.

Chosroes fled from city to city. Heraclius made him new peace-proposals at

the beginning of 628. Chosroes refused them all, and became perfectly

hated by the Persians. He thought not of the justice of God, which was

pursuing him. Thirty-eight years before he had murdered his father

Hermisdas to obtain his throne. What he had done to his father was to

happen to him from his eldest son. He had been struck by a violent

dysentery: and wished to make Medarses, his son by his favourite wife

Syra, a Christian, his successor in the throne. His eldest son, Siroes,

irritated by this preference, gained the nobles and the army, was

proclaimed king, and sent an embassy to Heraclius. Chosroes was captured

in his flight, and brought to Ctesiphon, on the 24th February, 628. He was

put in chains and imprisoned in the strong tower, Tenebres, which he had

built to keep his treasures. The next day Siroes was crowned: the first

act of his government was to condemn his father to die of starvation. “Let

him eat,” he said, “the gold for which he has desolated the world, and

condemned so many to die of hunger.” The Satraps and all his enemies were

made to mock the fallen ruler, and spit in his face. Siroes ordered

Medarses and all his brethren to be strangled before his father’s eyes:

and, as the old king was still living on the fifth day, had him shot to

death with arrows. So ended Chosroes, king of Persia, murdered by his son

as he murdered his father.

These victories the emperor Heraclius reported at Constantinople, and also

sent a letter, in which Siroes announced his coronation, and proclaimed

his wish for peace. This letter was read from the ambo of Sancta Sophia on

the Feast of Pentecost, 15th May, 628.

Siroes, in fact, established a stable peace with the emperor. He restored

him all Christian prisoners in Persia, among them, Zacharias, patriarch of

Jerusalem. He delivered to him also the true Cross, which Sarbar had taken

away fourteen years before at the capture of Jerusalem. This was at first

carried to Constantinople: but in the following year, 629, the emperor

took ship to bring it back to Jerusalem, and give thanks to God for his

victories. Here he replaced the Cross on its old spot. It had remained in

its case, as it was taken away. The patriarch, with his clergy, recognised

the seal as intact, opened with its key the shrine, worshipped the Cross,

and showed it to the people. The Church celebrates, by the Feast of the

Exaltation of the Holy Cross, this event on the same day, the 14th

September, on which she had before celebrated the apparition of the Cross

to Constantine. Heraclius, in the same year, came to Edessa, and restored

to the Catholics the church which Chosroes had given to the Nestorians.

And he paid back, in the shape of a yearly income to Sancta Sophia and its

clergy, the sums which he had borrowed for the costs of the war.

Let us dwell for a moment on these acts of Heraclius, from 622 to 629.

No Roman emperor, in the course of many hundred years, during the whole

time in which Rome and Persia stood as rivals over against each other,

obtained such a triumph over the king of kings, as did Heraclius. He

surpassed by far Trajan at the culmination of the empire. Heraclius,

commending his city and his son to the protection of God, of our Blessed

Lady, and of the bishop of his city, God’s representative, went forth on

what seemed a desperate expedition, borrowing from churches and

monasteries the means to equip it. For seven years victory crowned his

course. Trajan stopped at the Mesopotamian provinces. Julian perished in

them. Mark Antony won no honour of Rome’s eastern rival: Crassus and his

host never returned. Galerius was stuffed and served as a footstool for

the great king to mount on horseback. Into the heart of that eastern realm

Heraclius threw himself fearlessly. He made his own army out of divers

peoples, and shared their dangers. Host after host he overthrew, as only

the son of Philip, the conqueror without his match, had done before him.

In the end, on the very spot where a Roman emperor, the special despiser

of the Nazarene, and fostering in his heart the destruction of the Church

as the crowning work of his reign, to be achieved upon his return as

conqueror, perished by a Persian lance, Heraclius, after driving to

despair the great king, the persecutor of the Cross, its possessor by

conquest, saw him dethroned, famished, and at last shot to death by his

son. He received from that son, the successor of the murdered father,

abundant satisfaction for the wrongs which the Roman empire had suffered

from its great rival of so many hundred years.

But, moreover, during these very seven years in which Heraclius won a

perpetual victory in the name of the Cross—the wood of which he brought

back as a conqueror to Jerusalem, giving thanks and worship, and replaced

it with the seal which guarded it unbroken in its old sanctuary—an Arabian

trafficker who had gained his living by carrying goods from city to city,

and lived virtuously with one wife much his elder, upon her death, when he

was more than fifty years of age, was assuming the name of a prophet and

the position of a conqueror. The year in which Heraclius started is the

same in which this pretension was set up. His claim to be a prophet is

exactly coincident with the years in which he was taking to himself wife

after wife, in which, entering suddenly the tent of his adopted son, he

was seduced by a casual glance on that wife’s beauty to desire her, to

obtain her, and to forge a permission from the Most High to take as many

wives as he pleased, and the wives of others—a forgery as yet unique in

all the history of imposture; for many bad men have taken the wives of

others, but no one except Mohammed has pretended to have a divine sanction

for an act which treads under foot all human justice, and pulls down for

the lust of one man the very foundation of domestic life.

It is of this man that one who has analysed his religion and described its

course opens his work with these words(5):—

“Since the beginning of the world has no other man—mere man—ever exerted

so boundless an influence on the human race in the relations of religion,

morality, and polity as Mohammed, the Arab. A man, by no means one of

those rare spirits whom Providence at times evokes and endues with genius

to open a path for a new world—a man rather whose mind was enclosed in

narrow limits, poor in ideas for the construction of a new religion: a man

such as this has for twelve hundred years cast his net of artless yet

impenetrable links of doctrine round a hundred million souls—roots of

teaching which have sunk into the marrow of men’s minds, have taken up

into themselves and mastered the whole of life, and impressed a uniform

stamp on the thoughts and deeds of races as well as individuals.”

The seven years of Heraclius form part of the ten years of this Mohammed,

in which the trader turns prophet and the reformer of religion endeavours

to put a divine sanction on polygamy, in conjunction with a boundless

concubinage of which captives were the prey.

As eighteen years of continual defeat by the Persians, from 604 to 622,

had reduced the Eastern empire to a state of demoralised weakness, so the

seven succeeding years, from 622 to 629, in which Heraclius wrought a full

revenge on the Persian king, inflicted no passing collapse upon the empire

resuscitated by the Sassanides in the third century. King Siroes did not

long enjoy the fruit of his parricide. He reigned six months and then he

died—some say of the plague, some of remorse. After his death the throne

of Persia seemed to become a seat of murder. His young son, Ardeschir, or

Artaxerxes, was killed after reigning seven months by his uncle, the

general Sarbar. Sarbar kept the throne two months and was killed.

Devanschir took his place. He was followed by Borane, a daughter of

Chosroes. She was replaced by a certain Tschaschindeh, who was followed by

Borane’s sister, Azermidokt. A certain Kesra, or Chosroes, succeeded, and

he gave way to a Ferokzad. Finally, Jezdedjerd, a grandson of the last

Chosroes, was crowned in the year 632. Thus in the short space of four

years about nine persons succeeded to the throne by murder. Jezdedjerd

III. began his reign in the year Mohammed died. He is called by

Theophanes, Hormisdas. He had the honour to be the last king of Persia and

to end his days by the sword of the Arab in 651. His son, Peroxes, became

a captain in the life-guards of the emperor of China at Singapore, and

left no posterity.

After this glimpse at the action of the Byzantine and Persian empires on

each other during the thirty years which follow immediately on the death

of St. Gregory, we turn to consider the conduct of the temporal liege-lord

of the Pope towards him whom he recognised as successor of St. Peter.

The emperor Phocas, following in this his predecessor Justinian, had

expressly enjoined on the patriarch of Constantinople to recognise the

Primacy of Rome.(6) What the chroniclers remark is important, that

Boniface III., the next to succeed St. Gregory, received a decree from

Phocas, in which he solemnly declared that the See of the Roman Church was

to be considered the head of Christendom. It may be remarked here that

Phocas did not say a word more than his predecessor, Marcian, said to St.

Leo a hundred and fifty years before. Phocas may be named a tyrant, but

Marcian has left an unspotted reputation as a Christian king and Roman

prince, who received the empire with the hand of Pulcheria, heiress of the

great Theodosius, and the only descendant worthy of his greatness, whose

name stands also on the diptychs of the Catholic Church as a virgin

saint.(7)

Upon the history of the City of Rome during the first half of the seventh

century the greatest obscurity rests.(8) It was indeed the most frightful

and destructive century for the former queen-city of the world. The Book

of the Popes by Anastasius(9) trickles in a slender thread amid war,

famine, and pestilence, and inundations of the Tiber; but it is all we

have to look at.

With the death of the great Pontiff, who guarded and fed his city while

the calamities which he saw all round the sphere of his vision over the

whole Church led him to look for the end of the world, the See of Peter

remained half a year unfilled until his successor, Sabinianus of Volterra,

formerly Papal Nuncio at the Byzantine court, received the confirmation of

his election from the exarch or the emperor. The confirmation of each

pope’s election was, as a rule, obtained either from the exarch or direct

from the emperor. It was a business both costly and protracted. It also

made the spiritual head of Rome dependent for his recognition on the

imperial court. I find that in the period of 111 years, running from the

death of St. Gregory in 604 to the death of Pope Constantine in 715,

twenty-four popes succeeded. Of these the first, Sabinian, in 604, had to

wait six months. Phocas confirmed the election of Boniface III., the next

pope, after a year. He died in November, 607, and Boniface IV. following

took his seat in August, 608. When he died, Pope Deusdedit waited five

months. At his death Boniface V. succeeded after a year, in 619. Pope

Honorius followed Boniface in five days and sat during thirteen years, but

at his death the confirmation of his successor, Pope Severinus, was

delayed by Greek intrigue, and for a purpose hereafter to be mentioned,

during nineteen months and sixteen days, so that he only sat from the 28th

May to the 1st August, 640. St. Martin in 649 did not wait for the

imperial confirmation; he was first banished and then martyred by the

emperor Constans II., who put in by threats his successor, Eugenius,

during his lifetime. St. Leo II. waited eighteen months in 682, after the

death of Pope Agatho, and the next Pope, Benedict II., a year in 684.

This privation of its original freedom, according to which the Pope’s

consecration followed at once upon his complete and legitimate election by

clergy and people, the Roman Church owed to the Arian Herule Odoacer,

during his occupation of Italy. It was eagerly grasped, after Theodorich

and Theodatus had exercised it, by Justinian, when he became, by conquest,

lord of Rome. I have already recorded the infamous violence exerted by

Belisarius as soon as he had entered Rome, at the bidding of the Empress

Theodora, upon St. Silverius. Now we have the eastern emperors, through

the seventh century, exerting, sometimes directly, sometimes by delegation

to their exarch, this stolen privilege. It was taken by Odoacer ostensibly

for the preservation of order in the election, and the prevention of

violence. I suppose it is the furthest reach of disloyalty to exercise a

power which has been entrusted for protection to the injury of the party

protected. This disloyalty was perpetually shown by the eastern emperors

to the Popes, whose Primacy over the Church they acknowledged, until they

finally lost the opportunity by the new-creation of the Western empire,

and the acquisition of temporal sovereignty by the Popes.

At the accession of Honorius I., in 625, it is stated to have been the

custom, upon the death of a Pope, that the Archpriest, the Archdeacon, and

the first of the Notaries signified his death to the exarch. The Acts of

the new election, subscribed by clergy and laity, were deposited in the

archives of the Lateran. A copy of them was sent to the emperor. The

report sent to the exarch was the more important. This Viceroy of Italy

was humbly besought for his consent: nay, even the Archbishop and Judges

of Ravenna were asked to obtain it from him. The clergy and people of Rome

had to look to the exarch, the emperor’s delegate, even more than to the

emperor, since he stood in more immediate relation to Rome, and determined

the decision of the Byzantine court. The Romans, suffering from the delay

of their bishop’s consecration, would entreat the emperor to lessen the

time of disturbance by allowing the exarch to confirm their choice.(10)

In the short pontificates of the Popes, who sat from St. Gregory to

Honorius, we may note one remarkable fact. Full six centuries after its

erection by Agrippa, as the vestibule of his baths in the centre of the

Campus Martius, stood what was called the Pantheon, with its superb

portico of granite pillars and white marble capitals, untouched in their

beauty—the fairest relic of ancient Rome. It had withstood all the

inundations of the Tiber: all the devastations of the Gothic war: all the

injuries of time. Every winter the floods forced themselves up over its

floor: day and night the dome, through its aperture, received the waters

of heaven. The images of Augustus(11) and Agrippa probably stood still in

their niches: the beams of gilded brass supported its roof, covered with

the gilt tiles of bronze, which neither Vandal, nor Goth, nor Byzantine

robber had yet carried away. Pliny had given it the name of Pantheon: Dio

Cassius had seen in it the statues of Mars and Venus, and of the deified

Cæsars. A tablet of the Fratres Arvales has been found, dating from the

year 59, in Nero’s time, and showing that worship to the pagan gods was

then offered in it.

Pope Boniface IV. beheld this wonder of ancient art, and longed to make a

church of that beautiful dome which hung like the vault of heaven over the

broadest expanse ever covered by a roof. He asked it of the emperor

Phocas, and received it as a gift. He assembled the clergy of Rome, and a

procession, singing hymns, entered that noble doorway, and the Pope

sprinkled with holy water the marble-encrusted walls, from which every

vestige of heathendom was cleared away. The “Gloria in Excelsis” resounded

for the first time in that dome from which Michael Angelo took his most

beautiful creation. The temple of all the demons was purified: and Pope

Boniface IV. preserved it for all succeeding ages, under its dedication to

the Ever-virgin Mother of God, and all martyrs. So it was saved from

becoming, in mediæval times, the hold of some noble robber. And from it

the devotion to All Saints, on the 1st November, and for All Souls, on the

2nd, was propagated amongst the nations of the West. What was originally a

Roman festival passed beyond the Alps and the dome of Agrippa, the partner

of Augustus and the husband of Julia, and through her progenitor of

Cæsars, became the shrine from which the glorious office of all the saints

in the Church triumphant, and that of intercession for all souls in the

Church suffering, went forth to the Christian world.

From 604 to 625, five Pontiffs had ascended the Roman chair, and all had

to wait, after their election, for the good pleasure of the Byzantine

emperor, that they should take their seat. In 625, there succeeded a man

of great distinction. He was a Campanian of high birth, and he strove to

follow the example of his master, St. Gregory. Honorius I. sat for 13

years, and with Vitalian, A.D. 657-672, and Sergius, 687-701, alone

reached that length of pontificate, while twenty-one other Popes share

between them, including vacancies and delays interposed by the Byzantine,

the remaining 69 years. We have no documents existing to account for such

a number of short pontificates. Honorius busied himself much in the

conversion of the southern Saxon kingdoms in England, where St. Bede(12)

attests that the Bishop Birinus came by his instance. Anastasius gives a

long account of the gifts which he bestowed on the churches of Rome; among

them, that he covered the confession of St. Peter with pure silver,

weighing 187 pounds: and the whole church with brazen tiles which, with

the consent of the emperor Heraclius, he took from the temple of Roma:

that he built the church of St. Agnes, and made her a silver shrine,

weighing 252 pounds; also, the church of the Four-crowned. Of his

character, the Abbot Jonas, near his time, writes: he was “a venerable

prelate, sagacious, strong in counsel, clear in doctrine, powerful by his

gentleness and humility”. He also clothed with silver plates, weighing 975

pounds, the middle or royal door of St. Peter’s, on which there was an

inscription, calling him “Honorius, the good bishop, the leader of the

people. Your own prelate, blessed Peter, made your doors of silver; O

doorkeeper of heaven, maintain for this in tranquillity all the times of

your flock.” And there, in the great Basilica, he was buried in all

honour.

But, in his person, one of the State-made patriarchs of Constantine’s city

is able to make the solitary boast that he once deceived one Roman

Pontiff. Sergius, who sat in that See, from 610 to 638, and who seems to

have obtained as great a mastery over the mind of the emperor Heraclius as

his predecessor, Acacius, had over the emperor Zeno, constructed a

doctrinal exposition called the Ecthesis, which he induced the emperor to

father and promulgate. He was desirous, above all things, to obtain the

Pope’s approval of the doctrine which he afterwards set forth in this

document. He wrote to the Pope letters, the purpose of which the successor

of St. Peter, instead of seeing through, appears to have misconceived.

After the death of Honorius, the Monothelite emperors and patriarchs

claimed to have received the support of that Pope. His not having

detected, and actively condemned the deceit of Sergius, brought upon the

memory of Honorius the heavy rebuke that Pope St. Leo. II. assented so far

to the sentence of the Sixth General Council in 682, as to have written to

the Spanish bishops:—“Those who had been traitors to the purity of the

Apostolic tradition were punished with eternal condemnation: they are

Theodore of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus, Petrus

of Constantinople, together with Honorius, who, instead of extinguishing,

when it began to arise, the flame of heretical doctrine, fostered it by

his neglect”.(13)

Much light would appear to be thrown upon the belief of Pope Honorius by

the history of the forty years succeeding his death.

He sat within a few days of thirteen years. He was buried, says

Anastasius, on the 12th October, 638, in St. Peter’s, and the See remained

vacant one year seven months and seventeen days. Why did it so remain

vacant?

The era and the question are both most important to note. The following

narrative(14) will explain why the Papal See was kept vacant nineteen

months after the election of a successor to Pope Honorius.

In the year 638, Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, composed in the

name of the emperor Heraclius an edict which he called Ecthesis or

exposition, as if it were merely an exposition of the Catholic faith

respecting the dispute about the One or the Two Operations in our Lord. He

then brought about that the emperor subscribed and published it. Perhaps

Sergius wished to take advantage of the vacancy in the Papal See to make

the Monothelite error a law of the State, and to compel the future Pope to

subscribe it, for which he wished to get the imperial subscription making

it a law.

The Ecthesis begins with a confession of faith in the Holy Trinity which

is quite orthodox. It then enlarges upon the Incarnation, and draws out

the distinction of the Two Natures and the Unity of the Person. It

proceeds:—“We acknowledge one Son and Lord Jesus Christ, who is at once

capable and incapable of suffering, visible and invisible. We teach that

the miracles and the sufferings belong to one and the same; we ascribe all

divine and human Operation to one and the same Word become flesh; we offer

... to Him one adoration, and allow no man to hold and teach either One or

Two Operations in the Divine Incarnation of the Lord; but rather,

according to the tradition of the holy General Councils, that one and the

same only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, works both the divine and

the human actions, and that the whole Operation belonging at once to God

and to man proceeds from one and the same Incarnate God, the Word,

indivisibly and unconfusedly, and is to be referred to one and the same.

Since the expression, One Operation, if used by some fathers, still sounds

strange and disturbs the ears of some who conceive that it is used for the

doing away of the Two Natures personally united in Christ our God, and in

like manner the expression Two Operations offends many, as not used by any

one of the chief doctors of the Church, and because there follow from it

two Wills opposed to each other, as if God the Word willed to fulfil His

saving passion, while His Manhood resisted that will of His, and so two

are introduced willing contrary things, an impious thing opposed to

Christian doctrine. For even the impious Nestorius, though he divided the

divine taking of the manhood from the Lord, and introduced two Sons, did

not venture to speak of two Wills. Rather he taught identity of will in

the two persons invented by him. How then can they who confess the right

faith, and glorify one Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the true God, receive

two Wills and those opposed to each other in Him? Following, therefore,

the holy Fathers in all things and in this, we confess One Will of our

Lord Jesus Christ, the true God, so that at no time did His Flesh,

animated by the mind, make a natural movement of itself separately and by

its own impulse, which was contrary to the bidding of God the Word

personally united with it; but when and such and as much as God the Word

Himself willed ... and we exhort all Christians to be so minded, and so to

hold, adding nothing and taking away nothing. I, Heraclius, the faithful

emperor in Jesus Christ our Lord, have subscribed.”

Sergius did not fail to have the Ecthesis confirmed by a council at

Constantinople. He died himself in December, 638, but before this he had

it read, probably, to his Resident Council, and asked for the judgment of

its members. The bishops answered, like good courtiers, “The exposition of

our great and most wise Emperor agrees in truth with the teaching of the

Apostles. This is the doctrine of the Fathers, this the support of the

Church. This the confessions of the Five Councils teach; by this the unity

of the Christian people is assured, the weakness of the simple

strengthened. This works the salvation of mankind. This we also believe;

this we confirm; with this we agree.” Sergius gave his solemn

confirmation, and added, “If any one henceforth, disregarding the

prohibition of the Emperor and the Council, dares to teach that there is

One Operation or that there are Two in Christ he shall, if he be bishop,

priest, deacon, or clerk, be deposed; but if monk or layman, be excluded

from Communion in the Body and Blood of our Lord until he return to his

duty”. Thereupon the Ecthesis was attached publicly to the narthex of

Sancta Sophia.

The Ecthesis had been specially drawn up against the teaching of the

champion of orthodoxy in the East, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, who

had appealed to Pope Honorius, and expressed full trust in his defence of

the truth. But before its appearance Sophronius was already dead, and his

see had come into the hands of the Monothelite Sergius, Bishop of Joppa.

Macedonius had, contrary to the canons, been imposed on the see of

Antioch, and consecrated by Sergius of Constantinople. It is true he had

never entered his city, which was already captured by the Arabs. He had

remained in Constantinople.

Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, in an epistle read afterwards at the Roman

Council of Pope St. Martin, expressed to his spiritual brother and

fellow-ministrant, Sergius of Constantinople, his intense delight at the

Ecthesis which his great sovereign had drawn up in behalf of the faith,

which was ready to be sent to the exarch Isaac at Ravenna, and was to be

accepted by his brother Severinus, elected at Rome. I have read it, he

said, not once or twice but many times. I admire an exposition brilliant

as the sun’s light, announcing with unswerving accuracy the true faith;

and I sung praises to God who had bestowed on us so wise a governor,

guiding to harbour the holy churches. He has saved us once, twice, and

thrice from tyrannous power, from Persian boastfulness, from Saracen

domination.(15)

In the meantime Sergius had died, and Heraclius had put his friend

Pyrrhus, who shared his Monothelite heresy, in his place at

Constantinople. We learn from the letter just quoted that the death of

Pope Honorius and the choice of Severinus to succeed him had already been

made known at Constantinople before the Ecthesis was sent to Rome,(16)

which was, therefore, never presented for acceptance to Honorius.

I will now take another narrative(17) of what was happening at Rome.

Honorius died on 12th October, 638, and was buried in peace and great

renown at St. Peter’s. The Romans chose their countryman Severinus, son of

Labienus, for his successor. The confirmation was delayed during nineteen

months and sixteen days, as it seems, because the elected refused to

subscribe the Ecthesis of the patriarch Sergius, being a formulary

favouring Monothelism.

Before Severinus was yet consecrated the imperial officers practised a

robbery upon the treasury of the Church, in which the violence exercised

reminds of the dealing of Turkish pashas, with whom in general Byzantine

ministers may be compared. The treasures of the Roman Church were kept in

the vestiary of the episcopal palace.(18) There were the costly presents

which various Christian emperors, patricians, and consuls had left to the

blessed Apostle Peter for the redemption of their souls, to be given, as

occasion might be, in alms to the poor or for ransoming of captives. There

was a report that Honorius had stored up vast sums, and his magnificent

buildings caused full credence to be given to this report. Isaac, the

exarch in Ravenna, found himself in want of money. The imperial troops

riotously demanded to be paid. Isaac had long cast his eyes on the

Church’s treasury, and now devised a plan to get possession of it. The

Book of the Popes gives a detailed description of this incident, and it is

not only an exception to the scantiness of historical accounts about Rome,

but casts a passing light on the circumstances of the city.

The chartular Mauritius was then at Rome, perhaps as Magister Militum and

commander of the Roman army. This consisted of troops in Byzantine pay,

but no doubt was already organised as a city militia. Mauritius led by

deceit against the Church of God, and taking counsel with certain

ill-minded persons, stirred up this Roman force. What good, he said, is it

that such a mass of money has been laid up by Pope Honorius in his Lateran

Palace while your wages are not paid, which our lord the emperor has sent,

and the holy man has put them in his treasury? Kindled by these words, all

the armed men in the city of Rome, young and old, flocked to the Lateran

Palace. They could not force an entrance, because those who attended on

Severinus, the Pope elect, resisted. Mauritius, seeing this, encamped his

army there for three days. Then he summoned the judges, that is, the high

officers of the city, who were in his counsel. They broke in and set the

imperial seal upon the treasure. Then Mauritius wrote an account of what

he had done to the exarch Isaac at Ravenna, saying that he had put his

seal on the treasury and they could take without harm anything which they

liked. When Isaac learnt this he came to Rome; he banished all the chief

persons of the church who resided in the several cities, so that none of

the clergy could resist him, and, after some days, he entered the Lateran

Palace; he stayed there eight days, and plundered everything. Part he sent

to the emperor in the imperial city, part he gave to the troops, part he

kept for himself. Anastasius concludes with the words: After this the most

holy Severinus was consecrated, and Isaac returned to Ravenna. The meaning

of which seems to be that Isaac had come to Rome under pretence of

confirming the election of Severinus, which he made the elected Pope pay

for by the plunder of his treasury.(19)

In the meantime Roman Commissioners were urging upon the emperor Heraclius

at Constantinople to issue the imperial consent to the consecration of the

Pope. After many negotiations, the chief of the clergy there showed them a

doctrinal writing, the Ecthesis, and said, “We will only support you in

your matter if you promise us to persuade the Pope to subscribe this act

and to recognise without reserve the doctrines therein contained”. The

Commissioners, who perceived the drift of the act, and that on account of

this the first See of Christendom had so long remained unfilled, answered

calmly and prudently: “In this affair we can do nothing. A message has

been entrusted to us, but no order given us to make a confession of faith.

We will give you the assurance that we will inform the Elect of everything

that you have said; that we will show him this paper and beseech him, if

he approve of its contents, to subscribe it. Be so good, therefore, as to

put no hindrance to our mission for this matter, to do us no violence, and

not to detain us without end. None can do violence to another, especially

in a matter of faith; for in such a case even the weakest becomes very

strong, even the quietest feels himself a hero; and since he strengthens

his soul with the word of God, the most violent attacks serve only to

confirm not to weaken him. And how much more does this apply to the Church

and clergy of Rome, who, from the beginning to the present, as eldest of

all the churches under the sun, presides over all! Having received this

privilege according to the canons, as well from councils and apostles as

from their supreme Head, in this matter of succession in the Pontificate,

it is subject to no writings whatsoever, to no issue of synodical

documents; but in all these matters all are subject to it according to

sacerdotal law.” This is what with a most sacred and becoming confidence,

fearing nothing, those intrepid ministers(20) of the immovable Rock said

to the clergy of Constantinople; who thereupon ceased from their

pretension, and promised to obtain for them the imperial confirmation.

Pope Severinus, after suffering the double humiliation of having the

treasury of the Church sacked by the emperor’s viceroy, and his own

election unconfirmed for nearly twenty months, ascended the throne of

Peter on the 28th May, 640, and sat two months and six days. “He loved the

clergy, and was most liberal to them all,” says of him the Book of the

Popes; “holy, benignant above all men, a lover of the poor, large-handed,

most gentle.” In this short Pontificate he found time to reject the

imperial decree, called the Ecthesis.

Had Pope Severinus at this moment failed in his duty, the whole Church

would have been involved in the Monothelite heresy. Not only Pope

Severinus, but his successors during forty years, were the sole stay of

the Church against a heresy—the last root of the condemned Eutychean

heresy—which overthrew the true doctrine of the Incarnation, making our

Lord Jesus Christ not God and Man in one Person, but a Person compounded

out of God and Man, and therefore not Man at all. The whole temporal power

of the Byzantine sovereign, at that time despotic lord of Rome, and backed

by subservient patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus, and Peter, was

exerted to compel the Popes who sat during these forty years to accept the

false doctrine presented to them in an imperial decree.(21) The successive

Popes in this time, Severinus, John IV., Theodore I., St. Martin I., St.

Eugenius I., St. Vitalian, Deusdedit, Donus I., rejected and condemned the

decision urged upon them by the imperial and patriarchal pressure, all of

them at the risk of every sort of persecution—one, St. Martin, at the cost

of a singularly painful and glorious martyrdom. The next Pope, St. Agatho,

condemned the heresy in a General Council allowed at Constantinople itself

by an orthodox emperor over which his legates presided. The Pope

succeeding him, St. Leo II. ratified the condemnation by the Council of

four successive Byzantine patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus and Peter,

as heretics, and censured the negligence of Honorius in not extinguishing

at once so dangerous a flame. In truth it had held the life of the Church

in suspense during more than forty years. Had one of the ten successors of

Honorius failed, all would have been lost, so near to the precipice was

the Byzantine despotism and the State patriarchate, subservient to it, and

supplying it obediently with theological knowledge sufficient to formulate

heresy, allowed by the Divine Providence in that fearful century to drive

the Church. And precisely during these years the new Arabian conqueror—the

chalif of Mohammed—cut in two the empire which was attempting this

parricide. When Heraclius went forth committing his city and his son to

God, to the holy Mother of God, and to his bishop, he triumphed for the

only time in the long Roman history over Rome’s eastern rival, and brought

back the Cross from Persia to Constantinople, and then carried it in

dutiful homage to be replaced in its old shrine where our Lord suffered at

Jerusalem. When at the bidding of that very bishop Sergius he tampered

with the Christian faith, and oppressed the successor of St. Peter, he

lost Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, with the great provinces which

belonged to them. Out of the four patriarchates of his empire, three

became subject to the Mohammedan chalif. The subjection came suddenly, but

has lasted with a short interval from that time to this. The conquest, as

yet unbroken, of Mohammed over Christian peoples dates from the perfidy of

Heraclius and of his grandson Constans II. and the heresy propagated by

four Byzantine patriarchs.

Returning to the history of this time we find that the successor of Pope

Severinus, John IV., was consecrated 24th December, 640, and held a

council at Rome immediately after his accession, and condemned under

anathema the Monothelite heresy. Heraclius died February 11th, 641. Upon

his death Pope John IV. sent a letter to his successors,

Constantinus-Heraclius, and Heracleonas, setting forth the same faith. He

also informed the new Patriarch, Pyrrhus, that he had condemned the

Ecthesis: and St. Maximus informs us that Heraclius I., to turn away the

Western displeasure at the Ecthesis from his own person, at the beginning

of the year 641 wrote to Pope John IV. that “the Ecthesis is not mine, nor

did I command it to be drawn up, but the patriarch Sergius prepared it

five years ago, and besought me on my return from the East to publish it

with my subscription”. The purpose of John IV. in writing to the new

emperors was to set forth the doctrine of the two Operations and Wills in

Christ, and in doing this to defend the orthodoxy of his predecessor

Honorius. It is to be observed that after the death of Honorius, when the

eastern patriarchs began to assert that Honorius in his answers to

Sergius, which up to that time had been private, favoured the heresy which

Sergius had imposed upon the eastern bishops, and was trying to put upon

the Pope, his successors denied with much care that Honorius had any such

meaning. Thus in this document of Pope John IV. directed to the sons of

Heraclius, which bears the title,(22) Defence of Pope Honorius, he says:—

“My predecessor, teaching concerning the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation,

said that there were not in Him, as there are in us, opposing wills of the

spirit and the flesh. Certain men, twisting this to their own meaning,

threw out the suspicion that he had taught that there was one Will of the

Godhead and the Manhood, which is utterly contrary to the truth. I could

wish them to reply to my question, in regard to which nature do they

assert that there is one Will of Christ our God? If it be only in regard

to the Divine Nature, what is their reply concerning His Human Nature? For

he is likewise Perfect Man, lest they be condemned with Manichæus. If they

speak in regard to the Manhood of Christ that this Will is Perfect God,

let them see whether they do not fall under the condemnation of Photinus

and Ebion. But if they assert that in the Two Natures there is only one

Will, they will confuse not only the Natural Wills but the Natures

themselves, so that neither the one nor the other, that is, the Divine and

the Human, can be understood. For as we do not, like the impious

Nestorius, suffer Two Natures to make up one Christ, so we do anything but

deny, yet neither do we confuse, the difference of Natures, inasmuch as we

confess the Two Natures united in the one Person of Christ our God with an

agreement which language is not able to express. For in that they assert

One Will of Christ’s Godhead and Manhood and at the same time one

Operation, what else do they assert than that one Nature of Christ our God

operates according to the division of Eutyches and Severus. As a last

argument, the orthodox Fathers, who have flourished in the whole world,

are proved to teach in full accordance at once Two Natures and Two Wills

and Operations.”

In these words, which John IV. writes as Pope to the immediate successors

of Heraclius within three years after the death of Honorius, he would seem

not only to have set forth in plain language the immense importance of the

doctrine itself, but to be an unimpeachable witness of the meaning of

Honorius, one of whose priests he had been, and as such well acquainted

with his doctrine.

The pontificate of John IV., for the confirmation of which he had to wait

four months, lasted only twenty-one months, and was disquieted throughout

by the conflict with the Byzantine court and patriarch respecting the

Ecthesis.(23) There was war between the exarch and the Lombard king,

Rotharis, but it did not touch Rome. All misfortunes which threatened it

came from Byzantium. The struggle against the eastern heresy embittered

the feeling of Constantinople to Rome. At the same time, the Byzantine

court was disturbed by intestine revolutions. Heraclius ended his reign of

31 years in February, 641. His eldest son, Heraclius Constantinus,

succeeded, but, after seven months, was poisoned by his stepmother,

Martina, and the Monothelite patriarch Pyrrhus was charged with

concurrence. In a few months, Martina’s own son, Heracleonas, was deposed

by an insurrection. His nose was cut off, and the tongue of the empress

Martina cut out, and both were banished. The grandson of Heraclius,

Constans II., became emperor in 642, a boy of twelve years, and reigned 26

years, until 668. The reign of this emperor is much to be noted, because

it is contemporaneous with the second, third, and fourth chalifs: Constans

II. stands in history over against Omar, Osman, and Ali.

On the death of John IV., Theodorus, a Greek of Jerusalem, was made Pope:

it is supposed by the influence of the exarch Isaac. He was the first of

many Greeks, who, in this period, were made Popes: of all of whom, without

exception, it is recorded that their integrity, as Popes, was in no way

affected by any national feeling: they sacrificed nothing to Byzantine

policy.

At the beginning of this pontificate, Mauritius, the officer called

chartular, whose proceeding in the robbery of the Lateran treasury has

been recorded above, raised a rebellion in Rome. He found people,

nobility, and army embittered by the Byzantine domination, and used this

feeling for his own purposes. He spread a report that Isaac was striving

to be king, made party with those same turbulent Romans who had joined in

the attack upon the Lateran, and induced the garrisons in all the castles

of the Roman territory to refuse obedience to the exarch. When Isaac heard

this, that all the army of Italy had taken the oath to Mauritius, he sent

Donus as commander with an army to Rome. Thereupon the Roman army gave up

Mauritius, and joined Donus. Mauritius took asylum at St. Mary of the

Crib.(24) He was taken out and sent with an iron collar about his neck, as

well as the others implicated in the insurrection, to the exarch at

Ravenna: but, before he arrived there, was beheaded, and his head carried

to Ravenna and impaled. Isaac kept the other conspirators in prison,

collared in the same way, but they escaped execution by the death of Isaac

himself. Isaac was buried in the beautiful church of St. Vitale, in

Ravenna, and his epitaph is preserved in Greek, and being a picture not

only of the man, but of his time, is worth transcribing. It runs thus:—

“Here lies one, a brilliant commander, who for six years, preserved Rome

and the West without injury for our serene lords, Isaac, the fellow-worker

with emperors, the great ornament of all Armenia, where he was of

illustrious race. Upon his death in great renown, his wife Susannah mourns

over her loss like a chaste dove, the loss of a husband who gained glory

by his labours both in the East and in the West, for he commanded the army

of both.”

Isaac may be considered as the ideal exarch, and by contemplating his

deeds, we may attain to a knowledge of the race of exarchs, viceroys of

Italy, and images, in common clay, of their masters in marble, towards

whom, for 200 years, St. Gregory and his successors had to exercise the

virtue of loyalty.

Upon the accession of Constans II., in 642, the patriarch Pyrrhus, under

suspicion of complicity with the empress Martina in the poisoning of the

emperor Heraclius Constantinus, fled to Africa. His place was taken by

Paulus, a still more zealous Monothelite. Pyrrhus, coming to the West,

which was unanimous in rejecting that heresy, represented himself to have

been convinced by the eloquence of the Abbot Maximus, in an African

Council in 645, and came to Rome to lay the confession of his faith at the

feet of the Apostle Peter. Pope Theodorus received the repentant patriarch

with great ceremony in the Vatican Basilica before the assembled clergy

and people, to whom he solemnly condemned his own errors. But, when he

went to Ravenna, Pyrrhus fell back again. Pope Theodorus thereupon

condemned him in a Roman Council.(25)

In 646, the African bishops, in four councils, had condemned the

Monothelite doctrine with the Ecthesis. Pope Theodorus, in accordance with

the wish of these African Councils, admonished the new patriarch, Paulus

II., at Constantinople, to return to the faith of the Church. Paulus sent

a long answer,(26) in which he expressed the Monothelite doctrine. Pope

Theodorus condemned him after his nuncios at Constantinople had in vain

endeavoured to draw from him an orthodox confession. At the same time Pope

Theodorus named Stephen, Bishop of Dor, Apostolic Vicar for Palestine,

with the charge to resist the heresy which Sergius, Bishop of Joppa, was

spreading, and to depose the bishops intruded by him. The patriarchal

chair at Jerusalem was, in fact, vacant, and the patriarchate laid waste

by this usurper. Hence the Pope took charge of it. So afterwards John of

Philadelphia was appointed Apostolic Vicar.

Paulus did not give way. He moved the emperor Constans II. in 648 to issue

a new doctrinal decree, drawn up by himself, called the Typus, which was

to take the place of the Ecthesis, and prepare in another way the spread

of Monothelite error. It was to forbid under the severest secular

punishments any dispute respecting One or Two Operations in our Lord or

One or Two Wills. In itself it seemed intended to quiet the westerns, but

in the actual state of things only for the prejudice of Catholics. Maximus

the Confessor shewed that in it truth and error were alike intended to be

suppressed. The eastern bishops were again compelled to subscribe. Those

who refused were persecuted, even the papal legates. Their altar in the

Placidia palace was destroyed, and they were forbidden to celebrate, and

severe ill-treatment added.

While the Greek emperor, led by his patriarch Paulus, was issuing his

edict concerning the Christian faith, Muawia, as general of the third

chalif, Osman, with a fleet of 1700 ships, great and small, being already

in possession of Syria, had made a descent on Cyprus, occupied the city of

Constantia, subjected and laid waste the whole island.(27)

Pope Theodorus is recorded in the book of the Popes as “a lover of the

poor, large-handed, kind to all, and very merciful”.

CHAPTER II. POPE MARTIN, HIS COUNCIL, AND HIS MARTYRDOM.

Martinus prærogativa martyrii ter maximus nuncupandus.

Baronius, Tom. viii., Preface.

In the mean time Pope Theodorus, having during the seven years of his

pontificate maintained the faith against the aggression of the Byzantine

emperor and patriarch with the same resolution as his predecessors, Popes

Severinus and John IV., died on the 13th May, 649, and was buried at St.

Peter’s. His death occurred just after the Typus had been issued, and

perhaps before he had seen it. On the 5th of the following July, Martin

was chosen to succeed him.(28) Martin was then a Roman priest, had been a

nuncio at Constantinople, a man distinguished by his virtue and knowledge,

as well as by his personal beauty. By the fifteenth letter of this Pope we

learn that the Roman clergy would not wait for the imperial consent to his

consecration, and so in due time the Greeks pretended that he had taken

possession of the episcopate irregularly. This pontiff, one of the most

remarkable and vigorous that ever sat on the throne of St. Peter, although

aware of the penalty imposed by the emperor Constans, in his Typus, shrunk

not the least, but was rather kindled with greater zeal to summon

immediately a council of the Bishops of Italy, which met on the 5th

October in this year at the Sacristy of the Lateran Basilica.

Anastasius,(29) the librarian, gives the following narrative of events

which now took place concerning Pope Martin:—

“In his time Paulus, bishop of Constantinople, inflated with the Spirit of

pride against the holy Church of God, presumed in his audacity to go

against the definitions of the Fathers. Moreover he took pains to veil his

own error for the seduction of others, so that he induced the emperor also

to set forth the Typus for the destruction of Catholic belief. In this he

deprived of their strength all the voices of the holy Fathers by the

expressions of the worst heretics, laying down that one should confess

neither One nor Two Wills or Operations in Christ our Lord.

“In defending his own perversion he did a deed which no former heretic had

ventured to do. He pulled down the altar belonging to our Holy See(30) in

the chapel of the Placidia palace, prohibiting our nuncios from offering

therein to God the adorable and immaculate Victim, or receiving the

sacraments of communion. These nuncios by command of the apostolic

authority had enjoined him to desist from his heretical intention. They

also bore witness in suffering diverse persecutions with other orthodox

men, and venerable priests, some of whom he imprisoned, some he banished,

some he scourged. Well nigh the whole world being thus disturbed, many of

the orthodox brought up complaints from various places to our Apostolic

See, intreating that the web of all this malice and destruction might be

rent by the Apostolic authority, so that the disease of their Ecthesis

might not break up the whole body of the Catholic Church. Then most

blessed Martin, the bishop, sent and assembled 105 bishops in the city of

Rome, and called a Synod according to the institution of the orthodox

Fathers in the church of the Saviour at the Lateran episcopal palace.

Bishops and priests sitting, deacons and the whole clergy standing, they

condemned Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paulus, patriarchs of

Constantinople, who presumed to mix up their innovations with the

immaculate faith. That is, in their haste to exclude this, they dressed up

a confusion of heretical dogmas against God’s Catholic church, for which

they were smitten with anathema. This council now forms part of the

Church’s archives. And the Pope causing copies to be made, sent them

throughout the East and West, placing them in the hands of the orthodox

faithful. At that very time the emperor sent into Italy his chamberlain

and exarch Olympius, to be viceroy of the whole land. His commands

were:—‘You are to carry out what Paulus, patriarch of this heaven defended

city, has suggested to us. And if you find the province itself agreeing in

the Typus set forth by us then lay hold of all the bishops, landed

proprietors, dwellers, and strangers, and let them subscribe it. But, if,

as Plato, the patrician, and Euphranius have suggested to us, you can

carry with you the armed force there, we command you to lay hold of

Martin, who was nuncio here, in the imperial city. And afterwards let all

the churches read afresh the orthodox Typus, because it has been made by

us, and let all the bishops in Italy set their names to it. But if you

find the armed force opposed, keep it secret till you have got possession

of the province, and are able to have on your side the army of the Roman

city, and of Ravenna, that you may be able to execute our commands as soon

as possible.’ The said Olympius, coming to Rome, found the holy Church of

Rome united with all the bishops of Italy, whether priests or clergy, and

wishing to execute the commands received he tried, by help of the army, to

make a schism in the Church. This took a long time, and Almighty God did

not permit him to accomplish what he was trying to do. Seeing then that he

was overcome by the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of God, he thought

it necessary to veil his bad intention, and to accomplish what he had not

been able to do with the armed hand in heretical fashion at mass in the

Church of God’s Holy Mother, the Ever-virgin Mary, at the Crib. For while

the holy Pope was giving him communion he had instructed one of his guards

to murder him. But, Almighty God, who is wont to protect His orthodox

servants, and to deliver them from all evil, Himself blinded the eyes of

the swordsman of the exarch Olympius, and he was not allowed to see the

Pontiff at the moment of giving communion, or the kiss of peace, that he

might shed his blood and subject to heresy the Catholic Church of God. The

soldier attested this afterwards on his oath to several. So Olympius,

seeing that the hand of God protected the holy Pope Martin, thought it

necessary to agree with him, and to disclose the commands which he had

received. Then having made peace with the Church, he collected his army

and went to Sicily against the Saracens who were there. And through the

sin a great destruction fell on the Roman army, and then the exarch died

of disease.”

In the Council of the Lateran, held by Pope Martin in 649, the Pope

carefully examined the whole history and documents concerning the attempt

of the patriarch Sergius, and the emperor Heraclius, and the succeeding

patriarchs at Alexandria, Constantinople, and Antioch, to alter the faith

of the Church. The imperial documents, the Ecthesis of Heraclius, composed

by Sergius, the Typus of Constans II. composed by the sitting patriarch,

Paulus, both of them one after the other imposed by violence on the

eastern episcopate, letters from many bishops, documents, in fact, of

every kind, were subjected to careful reading. The Council drew up twenty

canons which it imposed under anathema. The Pope at the head of the

Bishops, subscribed in these words: “I, Martin, by the grace of God,

Bishop of the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the City of Rome,

ordain and subscribe this definition, confirmatory of the orthodox faith,

and condemning Sergius, formerly Bishop of Constantinople, Cyrus, Bishop

of Alexandria, Theodorus, Bishop, Pyrrhus, and Paulus, also, Bishop of

Constantinople, together with their heretical writings”. Then follow the

signatures of the Bishops of Italy, the Archbishop of Aquileia and Grado

first, the Archbishop of Milan adding his assent afterwards.

Pope Martin also wrote to the emperor Constans II., sending him the acts

of the Council, together with a Greek translation. Thus, with the utmost

force, and with the presentiment of hard trials, he strove to prevent the

further spread of Monothelite error. He also declared himself against the

heretical patriarchs, Peter of Alexandria and Macedonius of Antioch,

deposed Paul, Archbishop of Thessalonica, and provided for sending

Catholic bishops and clergy to the East.

In these events, we have this very striking fact, that within eleven years

after the death of Pope Honorius in 638, we find four Popes his immediate

successors, Severinus, John IV., Theodorus, and Martin, opposing two

emperors, Heraclius, and his grandson, Constans II., censuring three

patriarchs of Constantinople, Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paulus, besides other

eastern patriarchs, and the last of them solemnly condemning “the impious

Ecthesis and still more impious Typus,” and all manner of heretical

expositions, whether made by patriarchs, or imposed by emperors. There can

be no doubt that all these four Popes had been clergy of Honorius himself,

and as little doubt that they were maintaining the doctrine which he held.

There is no appearance that any one at Rome was the least inclined to the

Monothelite heresy, and the insidious manner in which it was propagated by

those who held it is conspicuous on every occasion. Nor must it be

forgotten that the publication of this judgment of Pope Martin fulfils all

the conditions of a judgment _ex cathedra_.

But the events which now took place are of so great an importance for all

subsequent time that it seems necessary to enlarge upon the epitome of

them just given, and to draw out the full range of their bearing, not only

on the doctrine of the Church, but on its government at the time.

We are witnessing a deliberate attempt by successive patriarchs of

Constantinople to alter the faith of the Church as it had been laid down

at the Council of Chalcedon. And not this only, but to make the mouth of

their emperor the instrument for disseminating their heresy, and to use

the whole material power of that emperor as despotic lord of Rome to

overthrow the defence of the faith by the Roman See, the superior

authority of which, at the same time, neither emperor nor patriarch

denied. This attempt continues during forty years from the death of Pope

Honorius in 638, and in the whole of that time, it was the constancy of

the Roman See, the purely spiritual power of the successor of St. Peter,

in the midst of the greatest danger and a helpless temporal position,

which preserved the life of the Church, and foiled the Byzantine

oppressor, together with the underplay of the Byzantine patriarch.

I take from the Acts of the Lateran Council of 649 the following:—

“Pope Martin said, ‘Let the copy of the Typus lately composed against the

orthodox faith, by persuasion of Paul, Bishop of Constantinople, be

brought before our consideration’.

“Theophylact, first of the notaries of the Apostolic See, said, ‘I bear in

my hands the copy of the Typus ordered by your Beatitude’.

“Pope Martin said, ‘Let it be read in the presence of the holy Council,

that we may accurately examine its meaning’.

“Theodoras, regionary notary of the Apostolic See, read it thus,

translated from the Greek into Latin.” It must be remembered that the

following are words of the emperor, spoken in that character.

“Since we are accustomed to do everything and to consider everything which

concerns our Christian polity, and especially whatever touches the purity

of our faith, through which we look for all our prosperity, we recognise

how greatly our orthodox people has been disturbed. Some of them maintain

One Will in the dispensation of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ,

and His One Operation in divine and human things. Others maintain Two

Wills and Two Operations in the same dispensation of the Incarnate Word.

The one support themselves by saying that our Lord Jesus Christ, because

of the One Person, wills and operates both divine and human things in the

two natures, without confusion, and without separation. The others say,

because in one and the same Person two natures are bound together without

division, their distinction from each other remains, and according to the

quality of the natures one and the same Christ operates both what is

divine and what is human. Hence our Christian polity has been led into

much variance and strife; the parties do not agree, and thus it is injured

in many ways. Led therefore by Almighty God, we thought it fit to quench

the flame of dissension thus enkindled, and not allow it further to feed

upon human souls. We therefore proclaim to our subjects, who continue in

orthodoxy, and the immaculate Christian faith, and belong to the Catholic

and Apostolic Church, that it is no longer open to them to introduce any

question, strife, or contention with each other concerning One Will or One

Operation, or Two Operations or Two Wills. This we command, not as taking

anything away from the pious belief of the holy approved Fathers

concerning the dispensation of our Incarnate God the Word, but intending

to put a stop to further contest on account of the said questions, and in

these to follow and be satisfied with the sacred Scriptures and the

traditions of the five holy Ecumenical Councils, and the simple

unquestioned usages and expressions of the holy approved Fathers. Their

dogmas, canons, and laws are those of the holy Catholic and Apostolic

Church. Add to them nothing of your own: take from them nothing: interpret

them not according to your own view, but keep the form which existed

everywhere before the contention upon these questions arose. None then

laid down One Will or One Operation, or Two Wills or Two Operations, under

any contention.... Now to ensure perfect unity and concord, and to leave

no opportunity to those who would contend for ever, we have ordered the

documents (_i.e._, the Ecthesis) attached to the narthex of the great

church in our imperial city, which contain the questions above mentioned,

to be removed. Now those who transgress these commands will first be

subject to the judgment of Almighty God, and then to the severe imperial

indignation for contempt. If it be a bishop or clerk, he shall be deposed

from his particular rank; if a monk, he shall be banished; if noble or

military, he shall be deposed. If they be private persons, when of rank,

their property shall be confiscated; when of low degree, they shall be

scourged and banished for ever. So that all shall be restrained by the

fear of God, and seeing the punishments respectively threatened, shall

maintain unshaken and undisturbed, the peace of God’s holy Churches.”

As(31) one Bishop of Constantinople, Sergius, composed the Ecthesis, so

another, his second successor, Paul, composed the Typus, but as Sergius

did not give to his work the fitting form of an imperial decree, but the

theological form of a creed, Paul showed himself more skilful, and dressed

his Typus in imperial clothing. Constans himself says that he meant to

restore the peace of the Church by this new decree. There is no reason to

doubt this, since, in tearing down the Ecthesis from the wall of Sancta

Sophia, he plainly purposed to quiet the minds of the Westerns and those

who held with them. It is further clear that while the Ecthesis forbade

contention concerning One or Two Operations, it inconsistently proclaimed

One Will, that is Monothelism. But the Typus consistently rejected not

only One Operation, but One Will. It wished in this to be impartial. This

apparent impartiality is likewise the chief distinction between the Typus

and the Ecthesis, for they are like each other in the main thought, which

is, that the development of doctrine should remain at the point to which

it had come in the five general councils, and that further questions

should not be entered into. However, that impartiality is but a false _via

media_, for it puts the true doctrine of the Two Wills upon the same

footing with the heresy, and forbids both one and the other. Another

distinction between the Ecthesis and the Typus lies in this, that the

Ecthesis only required obedience in general. Constans, on the contrary,

threatened every transgressor of his Typus with the severest civil

punishments, and these he executed with the utmost cruelty.

The Typus is the fifth specimen of doctrinal despotism proceeding from the

Byzantine emperors since the time of St. Leo. In all these the effort was

the same. So far as the relation between the emperor and the Pope is

concerned, the principle at issue is whether the Byzantine emperor, with

the Byzantine patriarch as his chief agent, should dictate the creed and

direct the government of the Church, or the Pope and the bishops.

The first attempt proceeds from Basiliscus, who, by insurrection got

possession of the imperial throne for about twenty months, and in that

short time issued the Encyclikon, in which Timotheus Ailouros, patriarch

of Alexandria, helped him as to the composition, and 500 Greek bishops

were found to accept and praise it. Basiliscus with his wife and children,

was presently starved to death by the emperor Zeno.

The second attempt was by Zeno, when he had recovered the throne, and

fallen into the hands of his patriarch Acacius. He then issued the

Henoticon, which Acacius had drawn up, which was imposed by force on the

bishops, and which Fravita, Euphemius, Macedonius, and Timotheus,

successive patriarchs of Constantinople, submitted to subscribe, the first

under Zeno, the following three under Anastasius. The wisdom and firmness

of successive Popes frustrated this attempt, and Hormisdas finally

obtained a full reparation, and the acknowledgment of his own charge over

the whole Church, by the gift of Christ to St. Peter, which the bishops of

the Apostolic See inherited.

Yet, notwithstanding this most solemn confession on the part of the bishop

of Constantinople, of the emperor, and of the nobles of the East, some

thirty years later, Justinian, having become direct lord of Rome, and

having summoned Pope Vigilius as his temporal subject, to go to

Constantinople, makes a third attempt, and issues to the Fifth General

Council his own “Confession of Faith,” which a recreant court-archbishop,

Theodore Askidas, supplies him with, and which the patriarch of

Constantinople, Eutychius, then, by the emperor’s nomination, presiding

over the Council, as well as the eastern bishops in the Council, receive.

The whole attitude and conduct of Justinian at the Fifth Council show how

deeply this most distinguished of the eastern emperors was imbued with the

doctrinal despotism of his throne. And from that time, the contention of

his successors is still more pronounced, and their temporal power over the

Pope, as their subject, is unsparingly exercised, not to deny his

spiritual supremacy in itself, but to make its exercise subject to their

imperial power, and in this the patriarchs of Constantinople, assuming by

and with the consent of the emperors, the title of Ecumenical Patriarch,

serve their sovereign as the chief instrument for reducing the Church to

servitude. It is to be observed that Justinian conferred this title upon

them in his laws. From that time they one and all clung to it.

The fourth attempt is made by Heraclius at the end of his long reign, when

he had fallen under the influence of Sergius, as his predecessor, Zeno,

had fallen under the influence of Acacius. Not only did Sergius hold the

great see of the capital during twenty-eight years from 610 to 638, but

things recorded of him seem to indicate that he was a man of extraordinary

resolution. He had preserved Heraclius from deserting his capital, and

flying back for refuge to his father at Carthage, after a long series of

defeats from the Persians. He had acted as guardian of his son, and

administrator of the empire during the marvellous six years when

Heraclius, shaking off twelve years of apathy, and going forth in the name

of God, and in publicly uttered commendation of his kingdom to the Blessed

Mother of God, had triumphed over the Great King. Servius finally supplied

him with the exposition, which was to present in seeming concord the

wrangling episcopacy of his eastern empire, and overcome the Roman Pontiff

in his maintenance of the faith.

The fifth attempt was made by Constans II., grandson of Heraclius, for

whom Paul II., patriarch of Constantinople, invested his heresy in fitting

language, and presented it in the Typus as an imperial decree which all

were to accept under punishment to property, freedom, or life. And Pope

Martin I. had to fight the old battle of the Church as a subject to a

sovereign who was at once without mercy and without scruple.

The Typus is the perfect specimen of the theologising emperor, who begins

by attributing to himself the charge over the whole Church, and puts

himself precisely in the place of the Pope and the bishops in formulating

the true Christian doctrine, wherein he claims the initiative, and the

ultimate decision.

It need only be added that in all this succession of attempts to deprive

the Church of God of her liberty, and the Pope of that guardianship of the

faith which alone is adequate to its maintenance, the successors of

Constantine departed essentially from the position which the first of

Christian emperors took at the first General Council. He did not sit in

that Council. He placed himself with the sword of empire at the entrance

to guard the approach. He made the decrees of the Council laws of the

Roman empire; but he acknowledged that the power to make them rested in

the bishops alone.

Nor would it be unhistorical to note that in proportion as the emperors,

whose seat was Byzantium, encroached upon the liberty of the Church, and

sought domination over the successor of St. Peter, in whose prerogatives

that liberty was seated, their temporal empire declined. The despotism

which flung itself with insolence and violence against the Church became

odious to its own subjects. We shall see an instance of this which almost

passes belief when the patriarchate of St. Athanasius embraces the Moslem

conqueror, to escape the Byzantine sovereign, and terms the defenders of

the Christian faith Melchites, that is, Royalists, because, while they

rejected the Eutychean heresy, they were likewise loyal to the eastern

emperor.

Let us see how Pope Martin meets this attempt. No sooner is he invested

with “the great mantle,”(32) than he summons a Council to meet in the

basilica of Constantine, then called the Church of the Saviour, now St.

John Lateran, adjoining the papal palace, the Mother Church of Rome. He

called this council in order to judge the doctrine which two emperors,

using two Byzantine patriarchs, and at the same time used by them, seek to

impose upon the Church, instead of the doctrine of St. Leo the Great,

accepted and set forth at the Council of Chalcedon. It held from the 5th

to the 31st October, 649, five sittings. It was attended by 105 bishops,

chiefly from Italy (excluding the Lombard dominion), Sicily and Sardinia,

with some African, and a few foreign. The acts have come to us complete,

both in Greek and Latin, the former being the proper language of the two

documents, the Ecthesis and Typus. I give the following epitome of the

Pope’s speech to the Council:—

“Christ has commanded pastors to be watchful: this concerns us also, and

especially must we watch over the purity of the faith, since certain

bishops, who do not deserve this name, have lately sought to spoil our

confession of belief by new invented expressions. Everyone knows them,

since they have come forward openly to injure the Church: such are Cyrus

of Alexandria, Sergius of Constantinople, and his followers, Pyrrhus and

Paulus. Cyrus eighteen years ago taught in Alexandria One Operation in

Christ, and published from the pulpit nine heads of doctrine. Sergius

approved this, issued somewhat later the Ecthesis under the name of the

emperor Heraclius, and taught One Will and One Operation, which leads to

One Nature of Christ. The Fathers distinctly taught that Operation answers

to Nature, and whoever has like Operation must likewise be of like Nature.

Since then the Fathers teach Two Natures in Christ, it follows that Two

Wills and Operations are united without mixture and without division in

one and the same Incarnate Word. That both are naturally one thing is not

possible. Pope Leo also taught Two Wills, and so holy Scripture indicates.

So Christ wrought what belonged to the Godhead corporeally, since He

manifested it through His flesh animated by a reasonable soul; but what

belonged to the Manhood, He wrought by the Godhead, since He took upon Him

freely for our sake human weaknesses, that is, sufferings, but without

sin. Cyrus, in issuing his nine heads of doctrine, Sergius, in issuing the

Ecthesis, contradicted the doctrine of Leo, and of the Council of

Chalcedon. But Pyrrhus and Paulus spread the error more widely; in

particular, Pyrrhus by threats and flatteries seduced many bishops to

subscribe his impiety. When he had afterwards come to shame, he came

hither and presented to our Holy See a writing in which he anathematised

his former error. But he returned as a dog to his vomit, and was therefore

rightly deposed. But Paulus went even beyond his predecessor; he confirmed

the Ecthesis, and contradicted the true doctrine.

“Therefore he also was deposed by the Holy See. Specially imitating

Sergius, to cover his error he counselled the emperor to issue the Typus,

which annuls the Catholic doctrine, denies to Christ properly all will and

all operation, and therewith likewise each nature, for nature is shown by

its operation. He has done what hitherto no heretic has dared; he has

destroyed the altar of our Holy See in the Placidia Palace, and forbidden

our Nuncios to celebrate thereon. He has persecuted those nuncios because

they exhorted him to give up his error, as well as other orthodox men,

imprisoning some, banishing others, beating others. As these men (that is,

Sergius and the rest) have disturbed well-nigh the whole world, complaints

both written and oral have come to us from various sides urging us to put

down the falsehood by apostolic authority. Our predecessors have both by

writing and by their nuncios tried to correct them, but without success.

We have, therefore, thought it needful to convoke you, to consider

together with you them and the new teaching.”(33)

Pope Theodorus had named Stephen, Bishop of Dor, in Palestine, to be

Apostolic Vicar in that province. He was the prelate whom the patriarch of

Jerusalem, Sophronius, had sent to Rome in the time of Honorius to solicit

support for the faith of that Pope, and to set before him the dangerous

state of affairs. He was introduced in the Lateran Council at its second

sitting, and read to it the following memorial:—(34)

“To the holy Apostolic Council held by the grace of God and the regular

authority of most blessed Pope Martin presiding, in the great city of the

elder Rome, for the confirmation and defence of the definitions received

from our fathers and councils, I, Stephen, Bishop, and sitting in the

first see of the council under the throne of Jerusalem, make the following

report:—Jerusalem was in peace and tranquillity when the tempest broke

upon it. For first of all Theodorus, Bishop of Pharan, then Cyrus, Bishop

of Alexandria, then Sergius, Bishop of Constantinople, and Pyrrhus and

Paulus, who succeeded him, set up afresh the doctrine of the heretics

Apollinaris and Severus. By these men the whole Catholic Church has been

thrown into confusion. I speak to your supreme see, which is set over all

sees, for the healing of every wound, for this it has been accustomed to

do with power from of old and from the beginning by apostolical authority.

Since Peter, the great head of the Apostles, was manifestly invested not

only with the keys of heaven to open to those who believe and to close to

those who disbelieve the gospel, but he first had the charge to feed the

sheep of the whole Catholic Church—to convert and confirm his spiritual

brethren of the same order, as he received this dignity over all, given to

him providentially by God Himself for our sakes incarnate.

“Knowing which things, Sophronius, of blessed memory, formerly patriarch

of Christ’s holy city, took me and placed me on the holy spot of Calvary,

and there indissolubly bound me with these words:—Thou shalt answer to God

Himself who on this spot chose to be crucified for us, when He comes at

His glorious epiphany to judge the living and the dead, if thou delayest

and disregardest His endangered faith, for I myself am bodily prevented

from doing this by the Saracen invasion which has come upon us for our

sins.(35) Go, then, swiftly from end to end of the earth, until thou reach

the Apostolic See in which the foundations of our holy doctrines rest. Not

once, not twice, but again and again make known to the holy men there what

is being here mooted, until with apostolic prudence they bring forth

judgment to victory, and effect, according to the canons, a complete

annulment of these innovating doctrines. Shuddering at the adjuration put

on me in this most holy spot, remembering also the episcopal dignity

granted to me by God, further bearing in mind the entreaties from almost

all the bishops of the East and their Christian people, agreeing with

Sophronius, who is now among the saints, as first of the Episcopal Council

of Jerusalem, I gave no sleep to my eyes nor slumber to my eyelids in

fulfilling this command. This now is the third time that I take refuge at

your apostolical feet, beseeching you, as all beseech you, to help the

faith of Christians in its danger. The enemy pursue me from place to place

to have me imprisoned and delivered to them in fetters, but the Lord has

saved me from my persecutors. Nor has God failed to the prayers of His

supplicants, but has raised up your predecessors, the apostolic prelates,

to no slight exertions in correcting these men, though they would not be

softened, and now he has raised up the most blessed Pope Martin.... I

beseech you, therefore, not to despise the earnest entreaties of the

orthodox bishops and peoples throughout the East, and of my now sainted

lord Sophronius, brought to your blessedness now by me the least of all.”

In further sittings of this Council abundant testimony from the Greek and

Latin fathers was presented to show how contrary to them was the teaching

which the emperors and the patriarchs of Byzantium were seeking by crude

force to impose on bishops and people. In the end the Council passed

twenty canons fully setting forth the true doctrine, and condemning the

heresy as contrary to what had been taught up to that time: especially

“the most impious Ecthesis which was made by Heraclius, formerly emperor,

under persuasion of Sergius, against the orthodox faith”; and with it “the

atrocious Typus lately drawn up by the most serene prince, the Emperor

Constans, against the Catholic Church, by persuasion of Paulus”.

In(36) rank this council stands near to the General Councils; its twenty

canons being issued by Pope Martin under anathema upon matters of faith

are as binding on the Church now as when they were first published. The

creed of this Council is a simple repetition and exhibition of the creed

of the Council of Chalcedon, until we come to the addition which at once

transfixes the heresy and sets forth the faith. After the words “we

believe one and the same only-begotten Son, God, the Word, our Lord Jesus

Christ,” the addition runs, “and we believe as Two Natures of the same,

united without confusion, so likewise Two Natural Wills, the divine and

the human, and Two Natural Operations, the divine and the human, for the

perfect and unfailing assurance that He is truly perfect God and perfect

Man in very deed, one and the same our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, willing

and working divinely and humanly our salvation, as the prophets of old and

our Lord Jesus Christ Himself taught us, and the creed of the holy fathers

handed down, and in general all the holy universal Councils and the whole

band of approved doctors in the Catholic Church. This, in agreement with

them all according to their inspired teaching, we one and all confess and

define.”

Among the documents read at the Lateran Council was one from the whole

African episcopate addressed to Pope Theodorus three years before, in 646,

in the following titles: “To our most blessed Lord, seated in the

apostolic headship, the Father of Fathers, Theodorus, most holy Pope and

Chief Shepherd of all Prelates, Columbus Bishop of the first See of the

Byzacene Council, and Reparatus Bishop of the first See of the Mauritanian

Council, and with us all the bishops of the three Councils of Africa.” It

is to be noted that the Archbishop of Carthage is not mentioned, for

Fortunatus was elected somewhat later to take the place of a Monothelite.

“No one can question that a great and neverfailing spring of grace wells

forth from your Apostolic See, enriching all Christians. Thence in

abundance rivulets come forth, irrigating the whole Christian world,

whence, O Father of Fathers, in honour of most holy Peter, your Apostolic

See has been appointed, by divine decree in a peculiar and unique manner,

to search into and to treat the sacred doctrines of the Church, receiving

which as truly handed down it is the most necessary function of the high

priest of that supreme and apostolic See to certify.” Then the African

bishops, by quoting, made their own that famous answer given by Pope

Innocent I. to the African bishops in the time of St. Augustine, 230 years

before. “This obedience,” they proceed, “we humbly render to your

apostolic supremacy, and beseech the Pope to do away with the hateful

novelty which has sprung up in the Church of Constantinople.”

This letter has a double interest, being one of the last recorded acts of

the ancient African episcopate, which was already in conflict with the

Mohammedan assault, and about fifty years later was entirely swept away.

It would be difficult to find stronger words than it uses to describe the

Papal authority and the special gift which it recognises as belonging to

the See of Peter by divine ordinance.(37)

Several of the letters written by Pope Martin after the Lateran Synod

testify his zeal to overthrow the Monothelite heresy. Among these is his

answer to the just-quoted letter,(38) which he addresses to the Church of

Carthage, and all the bishops, clergy, and laity subject to it. He praises

them for the synodical letters drawn up by the Church’s glorious orator,

Augustine, through the Holy Ghost, to his Apostolic See, alluding to that

great confession of his(39) Primacy which we have in the letters of the

Saint, and which, he says, their words repeat, and so he presents to them

the acts of the Lateran Council.

Particularly remarkable is the Pope’s letter(40) to the bishops under the

Sees of Jerusalem and Antioch, that is, the patriarchates which had fallen

under Mohammedan domination. He announces to them that, after due

examination, he had condemned “the Exposition of the Emperor Heraclius,

and the formula of the present serene emperor,” and he deplores the havoc

which heretics had made in the East, irregularly setting up a false bishop

at Antioch, the heretic Macedonius, and another, Peter, at Alexandria. The

Pope adds that in his anxiety to build up the Church of God, which they

were laying waste, he had, according to the power given him by the Lord in

the person of blessed Peter, ordered his brother John, Bishop of

Philadelphia, to supply his place in all ecclesiastical matters through

the East, and to create in all cities episcopally subject to the Sees of

Antioch and Jerusalem bishops, priests, and deacons, and he begs them as

sons of obedience “to help our Vicar set by Apostolic authority”.

The Bishop of Thessalonica, in the course of 200 years since St. Leo and

the succeeding Popes had made him their Vicar for the great province of

Eastern Illyricum, had become a prelate of very high rank. Paul was

actually bishop, but he favoured the new heresy, and the Pope, after

warning him in vain,(41) wrote deposing him, unless he received without

the least omission everything which had been synodically ratified and

defined at the Council. At the same time he wrote to the people of

Thessalonica, enjoining them to have no society, agreement, or connection

with such a man.

Thus, in the case of any diocese, whether that of a simple bishop, or a

primate, or a patriarch, the Pope does not hesitate to tell their several

diocesans that they are set free from all duty of obedience to one

condemned by him. No act can show the superior authority of the universal

Primate more strongly than this. St. Gregory the Great had said that all

bishops were equal when performing their respective work in their own

diocese; but if that work is not duly performed, he knows of no bishop who

is not subject to the Apostolic See. The power of the Primacy is

essentially for edification of the whole Church, and so is exerted

whenever the Church and the faith of the Church are anywhere in danger.

The acts of St. Martin I. at a crisis of singular danger follow exactly

the rule of St. Gregory. If an emperor supports heresy, he condemns his

act, though he may be a lawful sovereign; if a patriarch is false to the

faith, he sets a vicar of his own to appoint fresh bishops in the

patriarchate. If his own vicar sins against the power which appointed him,

he dissolves the primary bond according to which the people of that

diocese is bound to their own bishop.

But the supreme authority of the Roman See is indicated most plainly in

the encyclical letter issued by the Pope. It is addressed(42) “Martin,

Servant of the Servants of God, by grace Bishop of God’s holy Catholic and

Apostolic Church of the Romans, together with the Synod of Bishops here

canonically assembled with us for the confirmation of the true dogmas of

the Catholic Church, to those who have inherited the like precious faith

as we of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through the laver of

regeneration, who sojourn in holiness and justice in every part of His

dominion, our brethren the bishops, priests, deacons, heads of

monasteries, monks, ascetics, and to the whole sacred plenitude of the

Catholic Church”.