Such a visit accompanied by such acts give a lively picture of the regard

entertained by a Byzantine emperor for the city which gave him his title.

It sums up the hundred and ten years of abject servitude into which all

Italy had fallen since the capture of the city by Narses under Justinian.

We have the contemptuous despot, the long-suffering Pope, the half-ruined

powerless city. Three hundred and six years had passed since the

degenerate son of Constantine, when he came to Rome in 357, was amazed at

the beauty of its great buildings, the forum of Trajan, the theatre of

Pompey, the unequalled Flavian amphitheatre. But in Constans the memories

of Rome were dead: he robbed the last relic of its grandeur, Agrippa’s

pantheon, nor was he ready to reverence the protection of the Blessed

Virgin over the Church dedicated to her by the Pope on receiving it as the

gift of a preceding emperor. These last spoils he had embarked for his

royal city, but they were detained at Syracuse, and on its capture shortly

afterwards by the Saracens fell into their hands.

But before this event the life and misdeeds of the emperor Constans II.

had come to a sudden end. He was living in Ortygia, the sole remaining

quarter of that once princely city, wherein Achradyna, Tyche, Neapolis,

and Epipolæ lay desolate. He had entered his bath one day, and received in

it a blow on his head by his attendant, whether a slave, or a conspirator.

His courtiers when they at length came in found him dead. The Greek

chronologist Theophanes alleges as a reason for this event that after his

murder of his brother he became greatly hated at Constantinople, both for

his persecution of Pope Martin and Maximus, “that most wise confessor,

whose tongue he cut out, and whose hands he cut off, and condemned many of

the orthodox with tortures, banishments, and confiscations, because they

would not submit to his heresy”. In his dread he had wished to transfer

his residence to the West, but this his counsellors prevented. His

treatment of the Sicilians was so bad that some in despair went to settle

at Damascus, though it had become the capital of the chalif.

So lived and so died the grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., “Roman

emperor and Christian prince”(117) from 642 to 668, in the times when the

chalifs of Mohammed, Omar, Osman, Ali, and Muawiah carved the Saracen

realm out of the empire which Heraclius had possessed, and out of the

kingdom of the “Great King,” whom Heraclius, when bearing the standard of

the cross had brought low. If Heraclius treated Syria and Egypt as

Constans treated Rome and Italy, is not the wonder diminished that in the

ten years of Omar the structure of Roman power which had lasted seven

centuries was overthrown, and those provinces had received a Mohammedan

instead of a Byzantine master? Muawiah at Damascus cherished the Syria

which at Antioch the lord on the Bosphorus had ground down with taxes. The

Rome also which Constans, when he had been welcomed as its emperor, left

stripped of its last ornaments was regarded with veneration by the

farthest isle of the West, which it was winning at once to civilised and

to Christian life. An English authority tells us that five years after the

visit of Constans, Pope Vitalian, in the twelfth year of his pontificate,

on the 26th March, 668, consecrated a monk of Tarsus, then living at Rome,

learned both in secular and divine literature, speaking both Greek and

Latin, of holy life, and venerable in age, being sixty-six years old. Thus

Theodore was sent to be Archbishop of Canterbury. He was received in his

passage through France by the Archbishop of Arles, and the bishop of

Paris. He reached his see in the following year, 669, and sat in it full

twenty-one years.(118) St. Bede’s account of him says that he went over

the whole island, wheresoever there were English, was received by all most

cordially, and obeyed, when he gave them a right order of life, and the

canonical celebration of Easter, which he spread abroad. St. Bede adds

that he was the first among the archbishops whom the whole Church of the

English consented to obey. His friend Adrian, who had recommended him to

the Pope, and accompanied him from Rome, attended him in England: they had

a large number of disciples, whom they instructed not only in theology,

but in music, astronomy, and arithmetic. St. Bede wrote forty years after

the death of Theodore, and says, “Even at this day there survive persons

taught by them, who know the Greek and Latin languages as well as their

own. Nor from the time the English came to Britain were there ever happier

times, since, possessing kings most valiant and at the same time

Christian, they were a terror to all barbarous nations; and the vows of

all men tended to the joys of the heavenly kingdom but newly revealed to

them; and all who wished to be instructed in the sacred lessons had

masters ready to teach them.”

Constans was succeeded by his son Constantine IV. after he had put down in

Sicily a short-lived rebellion. He did not imitate his father’s violent

deeds: he did not wish to maintain by force the Typus, which was still in

legal existence. Pope Vitalian had done him service in his struggle with

the usurper, and made use of his favourable sentiments to proceed with

more decision against the Monothelites.

The Monothelite patriarch Peter had died in 666, two years before

Constans. The three following patriarchs, Thomas II., John V., and

Constantine, inclined to orthodoxy. They occupied together only nine

years, from 667 to 676. The Sixth Council left their names in the

diptychs. Yet so great was the power which the Monothelites possessed in

the capital that Constantine Pogonatus, though not a Monothelite, and much

wishing to be reconciled with the Roman Church, thought it dangerous at

the beginning of his government to alter the state of things; and the

Typus, as law imposed by the State, was not abrogated. The next patriarch,

Theodore, in 670 was again Monothelite, and he was, though moderate

himself, induced by Makarius, patriarch of Antioch, to erase from the

diptychs the names of all the Popes since Honorius.

Pope Vitalian, after an admirable pontificate of fourteen years and a

half, had died in 672, and was succeeded by the Roman, Adeodatus, who sat

four years, and he by Pope Donus, also a Roman, in 676. Donus died in 678,

and was followed by Agatho, a Sicilian of Palermo.

During seven years, which end in 678, the Emperor Constantine was fighting

a battle of life or death with the Saracen chalif Muawiah for

Constantinople itself. Every year during several months the Saracen fleet

was in the waters of the Bosphorus. They had taken the city of Cyzikus and

wintered there, renewing the contest in the spring. During seven years

they continued to do this. Had they taken the city the whole Christian

empire in the East would have fallen. It is hard to limit the ruin which

would have ensued to the Christian Church. But in weighing the events of

this century the extreme peril in which the Church lay through the furious

outburst of the Saracens should not be forgotten. On this occasion the

Greek fire is said to have been first used. By it, as water would not

extinguish it, many ships and their crews were destroyed. After this

conflict of seven years, the Saracens having lost a great multitude of

men, at last retired, owning that they were defeated. Their fleet in

retiring met with a great tempest, and in a battle also which took place

with three imperial commanders the Saracens lost 30,000 men. Muawiah, the

chalif, treated for peace with the emperor, and it was concluded on

glorious terms for the empire. This victory led the northern Avars also to

treat the emperor with deference.(119)

Thus the emperor was enabled to execute his wish for the restoration of

communion with the West. He addressed a letter to Pope Donus on the 12th

August, 678, requesting him to send commissioners to Constantinople to

make arrangements for a Council to be held there. Pope Donus had died in

678 and this letter was received by his successor, Agatho. He desired the

whole West on this occasion to be called to council, and for that purpose

caused particular synods to be held everywhere. During this year Theodore,

the patriarch of Constantinople, was deposed, it is not known on what

grounds, but he was indisposed to union with the West. In his stead George

was chosen, who at first was on the Monothelite side, but, instructed by

the testimonies of the Fathers and the synods at Rome, which were read in

the Sixth Council, he attached himself strongly to the orthodox.

Pope Agatho, waiting for many bishops, among them English, to come to

Rome, only held in March, 680, his synod of 125 bishops in preparation for

the Council to be held in Constantinople, and to name legates to attend

it. This was a great Council of the western patriarchate, which had been

preceded by smaller Councils in the several provinces, as, for instance,

Milan. Agatho and the council sent two letters to the emperor, which

developed the creed of the Church according to the Lateran Council of 649,

and signified its acceptance as necessary to all believers. The priests

Theodore and George, the deacon John, and the sub-deacon Constantine were

appointed legates for the Roman Church; the Bishops Abundantius of

Paterno, John of Porto, and John of Reggio as deputies for the Council;

and the priest Theodore to represent Ravenna. Agatho described these

commissioners, not as learned theologians, for the confusion of the times

made such very rare. His words run, “How can perfect knowledge of the

Scriptures be found in men who live in the midst of heathens and get their

support by manual labour with the greatest difficulty? but we maintain

whatever has been defined by our apostolic predecessors and the Five

Councils in simplicity of heart as the unambiguous faith descending from

our fathers”.(120)

Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, had been invited by the Pope to attend

his Council at Rome, but was unable to come. In the preceding year, 679,

St. Wilfrid, Bishop of York, was heard at the Lateran on his appeal in a

Council of 16 bishops and restored to his see.(121)

The legates were honourably received in the capital and lodged in the

Placidia Palace. After their arrival on the 10th September, 680, the

emperor invited the patriarch George, of Constantinople, and through him

Makarius, of Antioch, to call to council the metropolitans subject to

them. At first the court had not thought of the sees of Alexandria and

Jerusalem, which were under Saracen domination. But before the Council

entered on deliberation two regular priests, Peter and George, were found,

the first to represent Alexandria, the last to stand in the place of

Theodore, vicar of the patriarchate of Jerusalem. It would seem that it

was as well through this representation of the other sees, as also because

of what Pope Agatho had done, that the Council which now met, though it

had not been the original purpose of the emperor, from its beginning was

marked as ecumenical, and afterwards took rank as the Sixth of these with

the Five preceding.

The Council was held from the 7th November, 680, to the 16th September,

681, in the hall called the Dome of the Imperial Palace, under the

presidency of the papal legates and the imperial presidency of honour. The

Emperor, with many officers of State, was present at the first eleven

sessions, and with them directed the external order of business; but both

he and they were carefully distinguished from the members of the Council,

whose numbers did not at first reach a hundred, but afterwards rose to

174.

In the first session, the 7th September, the Roman deputies, in an address

to the emperor, desired that those who represented the Byzantine Church

would declare the origin of the innovation which had existed in it for

more than forty years. Macarius and his associates appealed to the earlier

General Councils and to the Fathers. Thereupon the acts of the Council of

Ephesus were read. There was found in them nothing in favour of the

Monothelites, for the words of Cyril, that the will of Christ was

almighty, could only be referred to His divine nature. In the second

session, on the 10th November, the acts of the Council of Chalcedon were

read, which were entirely unfavourable to the heresy. Macarius in vain

attempted to insist on the words “theandric operation” without determining

their meaning. On the reading the acts of the Fifth Council, at the third

sitting, the 13th November, the writing of Mennas to Vigilius and two

alleged letters of the latter were admitted to be spurious. The

Monothelites could show nothing for themselves out of the General

Councils. They had now to seek proof from the writings of the Fathers.

They begged for time, and, on the proposition of George of Constantinople,

the letters of Agatho and the Roman Council were ordered to be read, which

occupied the fourth session, on the 15th November. In the fifth and sixth

sessions, of the 7th December, 680, and the 12th February, 681, Macarius

proposed passages from the writings of Fathers in behalf of his doctrine,

but it was shown that they were mostly falsified or imperfectly quoted or

indecisive. At the seventh session, 13th February, 681, the Roman

collection of passages from the Fathers in support of the doctrine of Two

Wills and Two Operations was read against the others. George and Macarius

received copies of them. While Macarius remained obstinate, George was

convinced of the correctness of the doctrine set forth in the papal

letters, and on the 17th February he gave in a confession to the Roman

legates in which the Two Wills and the Two Operations were expressly

acknowledged. When, then, the emperor at the eighth session, on the 7th

March, questioned the bishops on their accession to the letters of Agatho,

not only George of Constantinople admitted this, who requested and

obtained from the emperor the reinsertion of Pope Vitalian into the

diptychs of his Church, but also Theodore of Ephesus, Sisinnius of

Heraklea, Domitius of Prusias, and other bishops, mostly in the

jurisdiction of Byzantium, five also from that of Antioch. On the

contrary, Macarius put in a confession directed against “the godless

heresy” of Maximus. The examination of the patristic passages put in by

him began, which was continued in the following session of March 8,

wherein Macarius took no more part. He and his pupil Stephen were deposed

as falsifiers of the faith and teachers of error. At the tenth session,

the 18th March, the testimonies put in by the Roman legates were, after

collation with the manuscripts of the patriarchal archives, found correct,

and a confession agreeing with the declaration of Agatho was delivered by

Theodore, Bishop of Melitene, and others. As the close of the eleventh

session, the 20th March, in which at the instance of the representative

from Jerusalem, the letter of St. Sophronius to Sergius, and, at the

instance of the Roman legates, four passages of Macarius and his pupil

Stephen were read, the emperor announced that as he was prevented from

further attendance at the sessions by state business, four officials of

rank would henceforth represent him. But, besides, the chief matter was

already settled. Old and New Rome were again united in belief.

At the twelfth sitting on the 22nd March a number of writings were read

which Macarius had transmitted to the emperor, but the emperor sent on to

the Council unread. Among them were contained the letters of Sergius to

Cyrus and Honorius, and the answer of the latter. These documents were

collated with the manuscripts of the patriarchal archive, and found to

agree. Thereupon in the thirteenth session, on the 28th March,

condemnation was passed upon the heads and favourers of Monothelitism, on

Theodore of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, Peter of

Constantinople (the three patriarchs next following, of whom nothing

heretical was found, were spared), as likewise upon “Honorius of Rome, who

followed Sergius and confirmed his teaching”. The synodal letter of

Sophronius was acknowledged as orthodox. In the fourteenth session, on the

5th April, at which also the newly-elected Catholic patriarch of Antioch,

Theophanes, was present, the falsifications in the Fifth Council, the

writing ascribed to Mennas and the two suppositious letters of Vigilius,

were laid under anathema. On the octave of Easter, the 14th April, John,

bishop of Porto, celebrated Mass in the emperor’s presence at Sancta

Sophia according to the Latin rite. The monk and priest Polychronius, who

already in the fourteenth session had been accused by Domitius, bishop of

Prusias, as a deceiver of the people, was brought before the Council at

its fifteenth session on the 26th April. He desired in confirmation of the

Monothelite doctrine to raise up a dead man. He was allowed to try in

order to undeceive the people. He laid his confession of faith upon a dead

body which was brought in, and whispered for two hours long into his ears,

of course without effect. As he was not shaken in his attachment to the

heresy, he was deprived of his rank as priest, and excommunicated. In the

sixteenth session, which was held, after a long interval, on the 9th

August, a Syrian priest, Constantine of Apamea, wished to get the doctrine

recognised that there were in Christ two operations belonging to the

Natures, but only one personal Will of the Word: that besides this Christ

had once indeed also a natural human Will, but that He laid aside this at

the crucifixion together with flesh and blood. The Council condemned this

doctrine as savouring of Manichean and Apollinarian heresy, issued

anathema against those whom it condemned, and resolved to publish a

confession of faith, which was considered at the seventeenth session of

the 11th September, and solemnly proclaimed at the closing session on the

16th September, in presence of the emperor. In this, after agreement

declared with the five preceding General Councils, it was proclaimed that

there are to be received in Christ Two Natural Operations and Two Natural

Wills undivided, inseparable, unchangeable, and unmixed, which are not

contrary to each other, since the human will follows the divine and is

subject to it, is indeed deified and exalted, but not removed or

extinguished. Neither of the Two Natures can be without operation or

without will. The Council thanked the emperor in a special address for his

labours to bring about the peace of the Church, requested that five

accredited copies of the decree of faith should be provided for the five

patriarchal sees, and in a special letter to the Pope besought the

confirmation of their decrees by him.(122) Besides this very brief summary

of the eighteen sessions of the Sixth Council, it is requisite to take

notice of certain documents which were either presented to the Council by

the legates, as their commission from the Pope, or proceeded from the

Council or the emperor at its conclusion.

Pope Agatho had committed to his legates a long letter to the emperor. One

passage from it may shew how plainly he set forth the authority of the

Apostolic See and its inerrancy in matters of faith. He lays down the

doctrine which opposes the Monothelite heresy, not as a matter for

discussion, but as absolutely determined. “St. Peter,” he says, “received

the charge to feed the spiritual sheep of the Church by a triple

commendation from the Redeemer of all Himself. By his help this

apostolical Church of his never turned aside from the way of truth to any

error. The whole Catholic Church and General Councils followed in all

things his authority as that of the chief of the apostles. This is the

true rule of faith, which in prosperity and adversity the spiritual mother

of your empire, the Apostolic Church of Christ, has kept unswervingly,

which, by the grace of Almighty God, will be proved never to have erred

from the path of apostolic tradition. It has never yielded to the

corruption of heretical novelties, but as from the beginning of the

Christian faith it has received from its authors the chief apostles, it

has continued spotless according to the divine promise of the Lord our

Saviour Himself, which He spoke to the chief of His disciples in the

gospel: ‘Peter, behold Satan has sought to sift you, but I have prayed for

thee,’ etc. Let your clemency consider how the Lord and Saviour of all,

whose the faith is, who promised that the faith of Peter should not fail,

charged him to confirm his brethren, which it is known to all that the

apostolic pontiffs, my predecessors, have ever confidently done.”

A more peremptory assertion cannot be made than this, and it is made by a

Pope to an emperor, on the occasion of calling a General Council. It is

carried by his legates, as ambassadors carry the commission of their

sovereign. The answer(123) which the Council sent at its conclusion to the

Pope shows how it was received. It ascribes to the Pope in fullest terms

the position which he claimed, beginning in these words: “Greatest

diseases require the greatest remedies, as you, most Blessed, know; and

therefore Christ our God, whose power created, whose wisdom provides all

things, has appointed your Holiness as a skilled physician to meet the

contagion of heresy by the force of true belief, and to impart the vigour

of health to the members of the Church. We then, having read through the

letters of a true confession sent by your paternal Blessedness to the most

gracious emperor, leave to you what is to be done; to you who hold the

first see of the universal Church, standing on the firm rock of faith. We

recognise your letters as written from the supreme head of the apostles.

By them we have cast out the heretical sect which has lately set up its

manifold error. According to the sentence previously passed upon them, we

have cast out Theodore, bishop of Pharan, Sergius, Honorius, Cyrus, Paul,

Pyrrhus, and Peter. We have sent what we have done, and these things will

be learned from those who represented you, Theodore and George, priests;

John, deacon; and Constantine, sub-deacon. They state accurately the

doctrine which they have approved, which we beseech your paternal Holiness

to set your seal upon by your honoured rescript.”

Is it possible to accept in more express terms the authority claimed by

the Pope in his letter to the emperor, including that descent from Peter,

to whom the promise made by our Lord is made the source and the guarantee

of the authority? Is it possible more fully to acknowledge his right to

confirm, in their own words, “to set his seal” on their proceedings?

But the Council also congratulated the emperor on the work over which as

sovereign he had presided. Its success they attribute to the Pope in these

words: “The highest of all,(124) the first apostle fought with us; for we

had for our supporter, who by his writing set forth the mystery of

theology, his imitator and the successor of his chair. The city of Rome

the elder presented to you a confession dictated by God, and caused the

daylight of belief to rise from the West. Paper and ink it seemed, but

Peter spoke by Agatho.”

This address is signed first by the three legates, Theodore, George and

John, “holding the place of most Blessed Agatho, universal Pope of the

City of Rome,” next by “George, by the mercy of God bishop of

Constantinople, New Rome”—thirdly by Peter, a priest, holding the place of

the Apostolic See of Alexandria; fourthly by Theophanes,(125) by the mercy

of God bishop of Antioch, Theopolis; fifthly by George, the priest,

representing Theodore, not bishop but representing the See of Jerusalem.

Thus these two patriarchates could only shew two priests to record their

agreement.

The emperor issued an edict(126) in which he set forth a most carefully

drawn creed. He also addressed a letter(127) to Pope Leo, who had

succeeded Agatho. He mentions how the legates of the Pope had been

received, how every authority of Scripture and the preceding Councils had

been carefully examined; “moreover we beheld as it were with the eyes of

our mind the chief of the apostolic choir, the Peter of the first see,

setting forth the mystery of the whole dispensation, and addressing us in

the words of Christ: Thou art Christ the Son of the living God. For his

sacred letter portrayed to us the whole Christ, which we joyfully and

sincerely received and folded him in our arms as Peter himself. God has

done glorious things and preserved to us the faith entire. How should He

not in that rock in which He founded the Church Himself, and foretold that

the gates of hell, the snares of heretics, should not prevail against it?

Act therefore as a man and be firm, gird thyself with the sword of the

word, and sharpen it with divine zeal. Be the firm champion of the right

faith; study to cut short every heretical talk or attempt as of old Peter

struck off with the sword the sense of Jewish hearing, prefiguring the

deafness of the legal and servile synagogue. The condition of the whole

Roman polity is tranquillised with the tranquillity of the faith. We

exhort therefore your most sacred headship(128) to send at once your

nuntio to our royal city, that he may dwell here and in all emergent

matters, dogmatic, canonical, or simply ecclesiastical may express the

person of your Holiness.

“Farewell in the Lord, most blessed, and pray the more earnestly for our

realm.”

We have, therefore, on this great occasion a complete concurrence of three

authorities; of the Pope in addressing an eastern emperor in prospect of a

General Council, of that Council itself answering this address of the

Pope; of the emperor in his letter to the Pope by his legates returning to

him from the Council; and it is to be noted that the Pope does not assert

the nature of his authority as descending by a divine grant to Peter and

exercised in virtue of it during six centuries with any greater emphasis

than the emperor and the Council acknowledge it.

In the meantime Pope Agatho had died on the 10th January, 681. The see

remained vacant eighteen months, during which the Council ended. Leo II.

was consecrated the 17th August, 682, and his short pontificate ended the

3rd July, 683. To him the letter of the emperor was carried, and he

discharged the office of confirming this Council, as St. Leo had confirmed

that of Chalcedon, and of bringing it to the knowledge of the West.

The letter to the emperor, in which Leo II. confirms the Sixth Council, is

a document extending over nearly six folio columns.(129) It shows

throughout the Pope’s great anxiety for the exact maintenance of the

faith, and how severe had been the struggle with the heresy which had been

upheld by two emperors and by four successive patriarchs of the imperial

city. The Pope draws out in it a creed of the utmost minuteness in regard

of the contested doctrine, the Person of our Lord in His Two Natures. He

repeats his acknowledgment of the Five preceding General Councils as

handing down one continuous doctrine from the beginning, and joins with

them the Council just held as witness of the same doctrine; and he

likewise joins the heretics during several hundred years from Arius, in

one anathema, which closes with the inventors of this new error—that is,

“Theodore, Bishop of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul,

and Peter, who lurked like thieves in the See of Constantinople rather

than sat as guides;(130) nay, and also Honorius, who did not set himself

to hallow this Apostolic Church by the teaching of the apostolic

tradition, but allowed it, being spotless, to be stained by a profane

betrayal”. These words, by which St. Leo expressed how far he assented to

the condemnation of Honorius by the Council, have a light thrown upon them

by the words which he used in making known the condemnation of the

Monothelites to the Spanish bishops, when among the condemned he included

Honorius, “who did not extinguish the flame of heretical doctrine when it

first arose, as was the office of the apostolic authority, but by

neglecting fostered it”.(131) And, again, in announcing the confirmation

of the Council to the Spanish king, Erwig, he says of Honorius, “who

allowed the spotless rule of the apostolic tradition, which he had

received from his predecessors, to be stained”.(132)

It may be noted that St. Leo II. does not enter into the matter contained

in the letters of Honorius; does not express agreement with words which

passed in the Council that “they were opposed to apostolic belief, to the

declarations of Councils, and of all the approved fathers,” that “they

agreed with the false doctrines of heretics”; he does not repeat the

reproach that Honorius, by proof of his letter to Sergius, agreed in all

respects with his meaning, and confirmed his godless doctrines. “Be it

sufficient for us to know that if the name of Pope Honorius appeared in

those sentences it certainly was not because he really taught or held the

Monothelite heresy, but solely because with too great allowance he did not

rebuke it, nor set himself to strangle it at its beginning, insomuch as

undoubtedly that manner of action had given great encouragement to the

favourers of those errors.”(133) I quote two further judgments of the

present day, that “the letters of Honorius contain nothing heretical,” and

that “in fact no error of faith whatever is found in those letters of

Honorius”.(134) The anathema which lies on the memory of Honorius, who

lived in renown and was buried in honour in St. Peter’s, is a warning

given by the Holy See itself to everyone who sits in that chair to weigh

well both words and conduct, and guard both from the slightest negligence

in matters of doctrine. Honorius died before the Exposition of Sergius was

published or presented for his acceptance. Had he lived to judge of it

those who study the history of the time succeeding down to the Sixth

Council cannot doubt that he would have censured it as his successors

censured it.

The Sixth Council closes a crisis of danger to the faith of the Church

than which no greater is to be found in all history. The years from 638,

in which Honorius died, to 682, in which his successor St. Leo II.

approved the doctrinal decision of the Council, and further, allowed the

conduct of a predecessor to be condemned, are occupied by ten successors

of Honorius, every one of whom with the utmost zeal condemned the heresy

which was supported by two emperors, wielding absolute power, and by four

successive patriarchs of Constantinople, besides patriarchs of Alexandria

and Antioch. All these put ecclesiastical authority at the service of

these emperors to carry out their will. Heraclius and Constans II. were

not theologians, and it required theological skill to construct concerning

the Person of our Lord a heresy which could present itself to the

fastidious Greek mind, clothed in proper expressions of a language lending

itself with unsurpassable accuracy to every variation of thought. Cyrus,

made for his first suggestions, by the grateful monarch, patriarch of

Alexandria, was so good as to provide Heraclius with doctrinal decrees

intended to make the disloyal sects of Egypt believe that they could

express their own false doctrine in words which might pass for an assent

to the Council of Chalcedon and the doctrine of St. Leo. When the

patriarch Sophronius denounced the error and appealed to Rome and Pope

Honorius in words which after twelve hundred years sound like a trumpet’s

call, Sergius being patriarch of Constantinople, the bosom friend and most

trusted counsellor of Heraclius, holding the see of the Golden City for

eight and twenty years, living and dying, too, in the greatest renown as

an orthodox bishop, approached Pope Honorius with insidious language,

totally disguising the real state of things in the East. He wished the

Pope to believe that Cyrus of Alexandria was winning the proud and

tumultuous sects of Egypt to Catholic union with the doctrine of St. Leo,

which Honorius held with the utmost fidelity. Not only did he write

letters, but he constructed a document to which he induced the emperor to

set the imperial seal and require it to be signed by all bishops, and

especially by the bishop of Rome. The document was intended to introduce

that heresy formulated by Cyrus, which Sophronius exposed and refuted.

Pope Honorius died in October 638, and never saw this document. Sergius

got it passed by his Council at Constantinople, but died himself in

December of the same year. Pope Severinus was elected to succeed Honorius

before the end of the year 638, but his consecration was delayed by Greek

intrigues for nineteen months, in the hope of obtaining his assent to the

document drawn up by Sergius. This was found to be hopeless. The exarch

then contented himself with plundering the Lateran treasury. Pope

Severinus was at length consecrated, and sat for two months and six days,

in which time however he condemned the Ecthesis. He was succeeded by two

Popes, John IV. and Theodore, who behaved with the same decision and

fortitude. But a new emperor had succeeded, after a frightful revolution,

at twelve years of age; and a new patriarch of Constantinople was ready to

draw up a new document for the heresy. It was met by another Pope, whose

first act was to call a great Council at the Lateran, to condemn the

heresy under anathema, and the two documents, of which the first was

fathered by Heraclius, and the second by Constans II. For this act of

courage St. Martin four years afterwards was stolen from Rome, judged at

Constantinople as a traitor by the senate, and sent a prisoner to die of

famine, as is believed, in the Crimea. The emperor, having Rome in full

possession, used such means that Eugenius was put into the see while St.

Martin was still living as a condemned criminal. But Eugenius could not be

compelled to accept the heresy of the Byzantine monarch and patriarch.

There follow five Popes, Vitalian, Adeodatus, Donus, Agatho, and Leo II.

At length, when Constans had perished miserably in his bath at Syracuse,

his son Constantine broke the line of heretical emperors. But he found in

truth the heresy so embedded in his capital that he was obliged to act

with great caution. After repulsing a Mohammedan attack upon his capital

which lasted seven years, and was overcome only by the aid of the Greek

fire, when if the city had been taken the Greek empire would have ended,

and the patriarch of Constantinople have shared the lot of his brethren at

Alexandria and Antioch, the emperor was enabled to invite Pope Donus to

hold a Council at Constantinople which should terminate this long

struggle. It was a struggle in which the whole West followed the Pope, but

much of the East was in favour of the heresy. Pope Agatho had succeeded

Donus; he accepted the request of the emperor, he had Councils held

through the West, and a full patriarchal Council at Rome. So he appeared

by his legates at Constantinople, and was welcomed with the words, “Peter

has spoken by Agatho,” as 230 years before they cried, “Peter has spoken

by Leo”. But Agatho also died before the Council had finished its work,

and the tenth successor of Honorius, Leo II., during his short pontificate

of ten months, set his seal upon the Council, and endured to censure a

predecessor for neglect of his office, and for allowing by that neglect a

heresy to obtain a temporary success. Ten Popes in succession, one of them

actually martyred, all of them vassals of absolute sovereigns, had during

all this interval of forty years alone prevented the heresy being forced

upon the Church. Four patriarchs of Constantinople in succession had

fostered it; and four were together condemned. They were condemned, not

for negligence in allowing others to spread the heresy, but as its

originators; as advisers and mouthpiece of emperors, all whose power had

been bent by them to extort approval of it from Popes, who in their civil

position were helpless subjects in a “servile” province, but in their

religious character were successors of St. Peter.

Now at the time the western emperor ceased to exist seven Popes succeeding

St. Leo defended his doctrine against two emperors, Zeno and Anastasius,

and foiled all the efforts of Acacius to use the eastern jealousy and the

pride of the royal city, and exalt his see above the control of St.

Peter’s successor, until the seventh Pope, Hormisdas, then a subject of

the Arian Gothic king, Theodorich, compelled the eastern emperor, the

patriarch, the bishops, and the court, to confess his supreme authority,

as successor of St. Peter. Seven Popes then stood neither hesitating nor

fluctuating: over against them in that time stood seven bishops of

Constantinople, one originator of the whole schism, others yielding to the

emperor’s will even against their own wishes. It was a contest of 44 years

with an oriental despotism, waged by Popes the subjects of Arian Goths.

They alone maintained the faith of the Church, as embodied in the decrees

of the Council of Chalcedon, and saved the East.

Now, again, there has been a struggle for 44 years, in which ten Popes,

subjects of the eastern emperor, and liable as such to be summoned by him

to his capital, where one of them was indeed condemned to death, stood

likewise as one man. They dwelt in a Rome no longer recognised as the head

of the empire. Of this whole seventh century the special historian of the

city says that for Rome it was “the most frightful, the most devastating

of all”.(135) Civil power was not in their hands. Their election itself

had to be confirmed by the exarch as representing the emperor, or by the

emperor himself. The first of the ten, Pope Severinus, had to wait

nineteen months for it, after which he sat two months. The last of the

ten, St. Leo II., began to sit eighteen months after the death of his

predecessor, St. Agatho, and then only sat ten months. During the whole of

this period, from the death of Honorius in 638, to the ratification of the

Sixth Council in 682, the yielding of any one of these ten Popes would

have carried with it the subjection of the whole church to the Monothelite

error. They saved the East, they saved the Royal City, the seat of all

power, in spite of its four patriarchs condemned as heretics. That

Heraclius and Constans did not destroy the faith in the seventh century is

as much their work and merit as that Zeno and Anastasius did not destroy

it in the fifth. Perhaps the test which by the force of circumstances was

applied to the Popes from the time Rome was governed from Constantinople

as a captive city in the second half of the sixth and the whole of the

seventh century was even more severe than that applied to them in the

fifth. Their condition was more helpless, inasmuch as the Byzantine

subjection was heavier than the Arian Gothic control, while the pillaged

Italy of the exarchs was wretched, and the prosperous realm of Theodoric

guarded jealously the last remains of imperial grandeur. He at least was a

king in Italian Ravenna and Verona, and Rome was both great and dear to

him. But Justinian and those who followed him were task-masters on the

Bosphorus, who placed a tax-collector at Ravenna to wring out the last

drop of Italy’s blood, and plunder, as occasion served, the treasury of

the Church in the Pope’s Lateran Patriarcheion.

In what consisted the power by which twenty-nine Popes from Pelagius I. in

555, to Gregory II. in 715 bore so fearful a strain? Solely in one thing:

in the belief that the throne of St. Peter had been fixed at Rome, and

that St. Peter had received by a direct gift from Christ, and his

successor had inherited, the charge to feed and govern the universal

Church. The five times captured Rome lived on in this belief, and was

become the city of the Popes. The eye of a conqueror, legislator and

ruler, had chosen with a wisdom which all posterity has acknowledged the

fairest and the strongest of cities for the seat of his power. He made it

a royal residence; he could not make it an apostolic see. When at length

his city fell, the empire fell with it. In the day of its pride it sought

to trample on the elder Rome by the privileges of new Rome. The second of

these attempts was foiled by the ten successors of Pope Honorius.

The danger to the Christian faith in these fifty years which begin, it is

to be noted, at the death of Mohammed and the election of a chalif in his

stead, has been touched upon; but the danger to the empire must not be

dissociated from it. All the tyranny, the extortion, the spiritual

encroachment of the empire could not sever the links which bound it to the

Church. Heraclius had been warned by his former minister Maximus how

perilous to his empire his meddling with the creed would be.(136) “It is

not a time for such things,” he said. “It is a time of blood on account of

our sins, not of theologising; a time of lamentation, a time of imploring

God’s mercy, not of sophistical contradiction, moving Him to greater

indignation.” The Greek(137) chronographer in the ninth century marks the

rise of the Arabian enemy as a scourge of Christian sins. He traces the

whole calamitous series of events to the seduction of Heraclius, by a

certain Athanasius, full of native Syrian guile, whom he promised to make

and did afterwards make patriarch of Antioch: Heraclius was confused by

his use of new terms. He consulted Sergius, and also Cyrus, then bishop of

Phasis. He found the three agree. He followed them. He translated Cyrus

from Phasis to Alexandria. Then Heraclius issued an imperial edict on

doctrine. When Constans had succeeded as emperor another imperial edict on

doctrine, drawn up by another bishop of Constantinople, appeared, which

St. Martin condemned in his Council at Rome. Then the emperor Constans,

full of wrath, carried St. Martin and St. Maximus to Constantinople,

tortured them and banished them to the Chersonese, and punished many of

the western bishops besides. But Agatho, being elected Pope, and moved by

the zeal of God, also summoned a holy Council and put under ban the

Monothelite heresy. Upon all his narrative the conclusion of Theophanes

is: “The Church being thrown into disorder by emperors and impious

bishops, Amalek the child of the desert rose up to scourge us, the people

of Christ. The Roman army met with a great defeat on the Yarmuk. There

followed the capture of Palestine, of Cæsarea, of Jerusalem, then the loss

of Egypt, then the captivity of inland and islands, and all Romania; the

utter destruction of the Roman force in Phœnicia, the dissolution of all

Christian peoples and places, which did not cease till the persecutor of

the Church perished miserably in his bath in Sicily.”

Thus when the Sixth Council met at Constantinople not only had the emperor

Constantine the Bearded declined far from the position held by Justinian,

at the time in which he made Rome a garrison city in a servile province, a

hundred and thirty years before, but his empire was not half so great as

that of his great grandfather Heraclius, after the triumph of the Persian

war. Not only were Syria and Egypt, and all Roman land on the side of

Persia, and northern Africa as far as Kairowan, lost to the empire, but it

had just escaped utter destruction by repelling the fleet of Muawiah after

a conflict of several years from the waters of the Bosphorus. And the

great and abiding difference to the eastern monarch was that he had lost

this vast amount of territory to an enemy who had put the propagation of a

different creed, antagonistic in its first principles to the Christian

faith, into the hands of a single man. That single man, a chalif, wielding

an absolute civil power, appertinent to the prophet’s spiritual authority,

had fixed the seat of his dominion in the heart of Rome’s former domain in

the East. The Mohammedan now moved upon Constantinople from his basis at

Damascus. He had advanced upon Sicily likewise, and had taken Syracuse in

669, and from that time forth southern Italy had to dread his descent upon

its coasts. By his union of spiritual and civil power in his person as

chalif, he had now the whole Saracen force by land and sea at his command.

What were the Avars of the North or the Persians of the East compared to

this new enemy, whose war-cry was, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed

is His prophet”; whose meaning was, “There is no Christ, and no Mother of

God, and no saints and no sacrifice, no kingdom in heaven to be gained by

penance and humility. But there is the reign of a prophet on earth;

receive his successor and you shall be our equals, refuse him and you,

your wives and your children will be the captives of his sword.”

These were the wounds struck by the Monothelite heresy on the Christian

Church and the eastern empire in the first fifty years which ran from the

death of Mohammed.

Constantine IV. died in 685, leaving the throne to his son Justinian II.

He had reigned since the murder of his father in 668, and the whole course

of his reign showed a very favourable contrast with that of Constans II.

But greater still, if possible, was to be the contrast presented to his

government by that of his son, who succeeded at a most immature age, and

showed himself without counsel, self-command, and reason in all that he

did. He was the first of several bad and incapable rulers. His tyranny

deprived him of the throne after ten years. He was deposed with the

Byzantine penalty of an amputated nose. Upon this deposition, in 695, the

following twenty-two years produced seven revolutions, putting the

imperial power into new hands and new families. One of these violent

changes replaced Justinian II., maimed and dishonoured as he was, after a

banishment of ten years. But he had learned no prudence, and the

inhumanity of his last six years in his second reign exceeded that of his

first reign.

In those first ten years from 685 to 695 events happened of importance to

the Church, which also illustrate the spirit dominant at Constantinople.

The condition of the empire required the strictest union with the West. It

was pressed severely by the Mohammedan advance. To meet this effectually

the reconciliation which had taken place at the Sixth Council was needed

to be wisely and temporately maintained. But Justinian II. summoned a

Greek Council to meet in the same hall of his palace, called the Dome, in

which that Council had been held. It passed a number of canons on

discipline, many of which were injurious to the West and only calculated

to increase the mutual estrangement. Inasmuch as the Fifth and Sixth

General Councils had passed no canons of discipline, this Council held in

692 was to complete that omission. It called itself the Quinisext. The

later Greeks even confounded it with the Sixth Council, others contented

themselves with saying that “it was held five or six years after it, and

by nearly the same Fathers”. It issued a hundred and two canons on

discipline. “It seemed as if the bishops of this Council in their disgust

at the undeniable superiority of the Roman Church in matters of faith, in

which its authority had always at last prevailed and determined the issue,

were bent on making good their right of autonomy at least in matters of

discipline, and sought to avenge themselves by disapproving Roman customs

for that superiority burdensome to Greek vanity.”(138) As a matter of fact

these canons had the effect of widening the breach between Latins and

Greeks. It is true that in the eighth century all Greeks did not yet count

them ecumenical, but in the Iconoclast contest they gained great

consideration, and in the ninth century scarcely a Byzantine doubted any

longer that they were ecumenical.(139)

The chief value of this Council now lies in the picture which it presents

to us of the actual state and temper of the eastern Church at that time,

the closing ten years of a century about which we possess so little

detailed information. I am here concerned especially with two things—one,

the position of the emperor as regards both the Pope and the Church; the

other, the position of the patriarch of Constantinople; on both this

Council casts light.

As to the emperor, not only was it convoked(140) by his command and

assembled in a hall of his palace, but its canons were subscribed by the

emperor first with the imperial vermilion, and the second place was left

vacant for the Pope’s signature.(141) Then followed the subscriptions of

Paul of Constantinople, Peter of Alexandria, Anastasius of Jerusalem,

George of Antioch; on the whole, of 211 bishops, or their representatives,

all Greeks and Orientals, including Armenians. It styled itself

ecumenical, and the emperor tried to impose it as such. In its address to

the emperor it said by that it was called(142) by him “to restore to order

the Christian life, and root out the remains of Jewish and heathen

perversity,” while it ended by addressing to him the words, “as thou hast

honoured the Church by convoking us, so also be pleased to confirm what we

have decreed”.

As to the Bishop of Constantinople, this Council said in its 36th canon,

“renewing the decrees of the Second and Fourth General Councils, we decree

that the see of Constantinople enjoy the same prerogatives as that of old

Rome, and in ecclesiastical matters be as great as it, counting as the

second after it. After it comes the see of Alexandria, then that of

Antioch, then that of Jerusalem.”

In order to comprehend what this canon gave to the see of Constantinople,

it is requisite to bear in mind the actual condition of the eastern Church

at the time. We are now at the year 692, that is full fifty years since

the other eastern patriarchates fell under Saracen dominion.(143) They had

become more and more powerless. They depended upon the alms and the

support given to them from Constantinople. In fact at this time the

archbishop of the Grecian capital was the only real patriarch in the

diminished empire. The courtiers of Constantinople, as we have seen thirty

years before in the persecution of St. Maximus, affected to consider the

conquests of the Saracen barbarians as transitory. Since then

Constantinople itself had only been saved by hurling the Greek fire on the

assailing Saracen fleet. A shadow only of their old right remained in the

Saracen provinces of Alexandria and Antioch; they had still their old

names. These were put down for them, if, as is supposed, they were not

present at this council, because there were none at the moment. Four years

later Carthage was taken by the Saracens; within eight years the whole

Roman domination in Africa to the Atlantic was at an end. The empire had

not yet lost everything in the West, for there were still some Byzantine

troops and possessions in Italy. The Pope still acknowledged the emperor

as his sovereign; and to Pope Sergius the emperor Justinian II. sent these

canons, with the request that he would sign them. It is obvious that the

position given in them to the bishop of Constantinople was no longer mere

rank as in the first step taken in this direction by the Council of 381

under the great Theodosius. It was a higher jurisdiction similar in the

East to that which the Pope held in the West. The Byzantine conception, as

shewn in this Council, is clearly that the emperor was head of the Church,

who, as he did it the honour to call it together, so he did it the further

honour to confirm its decrees. Not, as in the case of the first

Constantine, that he should make them laws of the empire, over and above

their intrinsic spiritual force, as canons of those to whom Christ had

committed the government of His Church, but that the emperor’s signature,

in the same way as he created a law in civil matters, made a canon in

spiritual.

So ten years after the emperor Constantine IV. in the Sixth Council and

the Council itself asked from the Pope for the confirmation of its

decrees, his son Justinian II. required the Pope as his subject to accept

as one of five patriarchs, three of whom it may be said were nonentities,

a position of subjection to himself in the spiritual domain. The place

left for the Pope’s signature _after_ that of the emperor and _before_

that of the bishop of Constantinople graphically represents the idea which

Justinian II. was seeking to impose. The Pope was to sign as patriarch and

first of the five, not as the successor of St. Peter, who in virtue of his

Primacy “set his seal,” according to the expression of the Sixth Council,

on the whole. In the Trullan canons, the Byzantine idea having evolved

itself with undeviating encroachment during three centuries, appears

complete. Its completeness is shewn in two things. Constantine IV. asked

the Pope to confirm the Council; his son Justinian confirms it himself,

and the council which he would confirm exhibits an eastern primacy seated

at Constantinople. It admits not only the priority, but in a certain sense

the superiority of the Roman primacy; but it would keep both the eastern

and the western primacy under the imperial control. The eastern primacy

would make itself the chief instrument of this control, and so practically

put itself above the western.

As has been seen above, the emperors through four patriarchs of their

capital tried during forty years to force the Monothelite heresy on the

Popes. In like manner from the Trullan Council they tried to force the

Greek discipline and the eastern primate upon the Popes. Had they

succeeded the ambition of the Byzantine prelates would have reached its

full success.(144) The imperial residence on the Bosphorus would have

taken the place of old Rome. The city of Constantine, fighting for very

existence with the ever-advancing Mohammedan, tried this last stroke in

its hour of greatest weakness.

Turning to Rome at this time we find a very rapid succession of Popes, for

which we have no information enabling us to account. They are also

frequently Greeks or Orientals; and here the suspicion arises that the

exarch of the emperor had influenced the election in the hope that some

national feeling might affect them in the administration of their office.

St. Agatho, who died in January, 681, was a Sicilian of Palermo, St. Leo

II., who succeeded in 682 and died 683, was likewise a Sicilian. The next,

Benedict II., a Roman, sat only from June, 684, to May, 685; his

successor, John V., a Syrian, of Antioch, only from July, 685, to August,

686, and Conon, a Thracian, from October, 686, to September, 687. The

following election was remarkable. There were two parties among the

electors(145)—one for the archpriest Theodore, the other for the

archdeacon Paschalis. Both were in the Lateran palace. Here both sides

agreed to elect the priest Sergius. One of the rival candidates, Theodore,

did him homage at once; the other, Paschalis, very unwillingly, and he

secretly called in the exarch from Ravenna to his aid. The exarch, John

Platina, came suddenly to Rome. He convinced himself that the choice of

Sergius was canonical and that of the large majority, but as Paschalis had

promised him a donation of a hundred pounds’ weight of gold, he insisted

upon being paid this sum from the Church’s treasury. Sergius was obliged

to submit, and thereupon was consecrated in December, 687, and sat till

701.

Pope Sergius was born at Palermo, of Syrian parentage, his father having

settled there from Antioch. He had come to Rome in the time of Pope

Adeodatus, had recommended himself by his ability, and had passed through

the various ranks of the clergy. His eastern parentage did not prevent his

offering as strenuous an opposition to the heretical suggestions of the

Greek emperor as his predecessors had shewn.(146) One and the same spirit

lived in all the Popes: the will and the genius of government. The natural

quality of the old Romans had been transfigured by the supernatural gift

belonging to the Church. The restless spirit of Byzantium, inexhaustible

in the production of new theological doctrines, which at least maintained

a continuous interest on the popular mind, tried in vain all the arms of

Greek sophistry and dialectic skill against the rock of Peter. They

recoiled from the sturdy Roman understanding and only helped the Popes in

their work of massing the western fabric of concentrated discipline.

The rank of Rome(147) as the holy city, reverence for the head of the

universal Church, veneration of the apostle Peter, had mounted higher and

higher at this time in the West. If St. Peter had already enjoyed, at the

period of the Gothic denomination, a worship which impressed the Greeks,

his influence now had become more decided, characteristic, and world-wide.

It dwelt not so much on his martyrdom, on his high rank as an apostle, but

rather on his being the founder of the Roman Church and its see. The

invisible saint in heaven was the possessor in title of many domains and

patrimonies on earth: the theocratic king of Rome. He had begun to

consider its people as his own, he counted upon its political government,

which he transmitted like a celestial fief to the Popes his successors.

His golden tomb at Rome in a Basilica radiant with gold had gradually

become the symbol of the Church and of the salvation which the world

received from this his institution. Pilgrims from the furthest lauds now

streamed to venerate it. The Anglo-Saxons especially, in the glow of their

first conversion, were impelled by a passionate yearning to Rome. At the

moment that the East sent its pilgrims to Mecca and Medina, swarms of

pious pilgrims from Gaul, Spain, and Britain descended the Alps to cast

their eyes upon eternal Rome and prostrate themselves before St. Peter’s

tomb, which had become the sanctuary of the West.

In the year 689 the young king of Wessex, Cadwalla, excited the greatest

admiration. After many battles at home, he sheathed his sword and

undertook the long journey to Rome to receive baptism from Pope Sergius

himself. There on Easter eve the long-haired barbarian king was seen in

the white dress of the illuminated at the porphyry baptismal font of the

Lateran, with the wax candle in his hand, and received the name of Peter.

He lived but eight days after, and was buried in the atrium of St.

Peter’s, with a long inscription, still extant. It said how King Cadwalla,

for the love of God, left his throne, his family, his country, all that

the valour of his ancestors and his own had gained him, coming far over

land and sea as a royal guest to behold Peter, and Peter’s see. He died at

thirty years of age, in the reign of the Lord Justinian, in the second

year of the pontificate of the apostolic man, Pope Sergius.

Cadwalla’s appearance at Rome was a prelude to those long centuries

wherein the Teutonic West would bow before the spiritual authority of the

Pope. Twenty years later two other Anglo-Saxon kings, Conrad of Mercia,

and Offa of Essex, came to Rome, not to be baptised, for they were already

Christians, but to change the royal robe for the monkish cowl. Their long

hair was cut off and dedicated to the apostle, and after living as monks

under the shadow of the Vatican, they received a grave in the atrium of

the Basilica, as a pledge that they had entered the company of the saints.

It was not long before Rome had a Saxon colony in the neighbourhood of the

Vatican.

Sergius raised a monument to St. Leo the Great in St. Peter’s itself. It

was the first example, as hitherto the Popes had either been buried in the

cemeteries outside the walls or in the atrium of the Basilica. But from

the time that in 688 Pope Sergius had translated the body of St. Leo into

the transept itself, and raised an altar over it, other very distinguished

Popes received the like honour.

But Pope Sergius also received a special messenger from his lord Justinian

II. He had sent the canons of the eastern Council of 692, held in his

palace, to the Pope, requesting him to sign them on the line left vacant

between his own signature and that of his patriarch. The Greeks were above

all things anxious to obtain their acceptance by the Pope. This was

refused by Pope Sergius, who forbade the acts of the Council to be

published. Upon this the emperor sent a high officer to Rome, who carried

off to Constantinople John, bishop of Porto, and Boniface, counsellor of

the apostolic see. But he did not stop with this. He sent likewise the

captain of his guards, Zacharias, with orders to seize the Pope and deport

him to Constantinople.(148) But by the mercy of God, and help of Peter,

prince of the apostles, who guarded his own Church, the heart of the army

of Ravenna, and also of the duchy of Pentapolis (that is the five cities,

Ancona, Umana, Pesaro, Fano, and Rimini), was moved not to allow the

Pontiff of the Apostolic See to go up to the royal city. And when the

soldiers had assembled in a multitude from all sides, Zacharias the

guardsman, in fear and trepidation lest he should be killed by the angry

crowd, besought the Pope that the gates might be closed, but he himself

took refuge with the Pope, and besought him with tears, that he would take

pity on him and not suffer him to be killed. Now the army of Ravenna had

entered by St. Peter’s gate, and reached the Lateran palace in its ardour

to catch sight of the Pope, who was said to have been taken away in the

night, and put in a vessel. The gates of the palace, both upper and lower,

had been shut. They threatened to tear them down unless they were opened.

The guardsman Zacharias, in his extreme terror and despair, had crept

under the Pope’s bed. He had lost his senses, but the Pope comforted him,

and came out and seated himself on the basilic of St. Sebastian, in the

seat called “under the apostles,” where with mild words he turned away the

wrath of the soldiers and people, but they would not leave the palace

until with mocks and gibes they had turned the guardsman out of Rome.

So after forty years Justinian II. had repeated the worst deed of his

grandfather Constans. Had Pope Sergius been taken to Constantinople the

same lot awaited him there as had befallen his martyred predecessor Pope

Martin. Yet in the interval the emperor’s own father had acknowledged in

the amplest terms the authority of St. Peter’s successor. But the people

of Rome as well as the emperor’s own army at Ravenna and in central Italy

had learnt rather to defend the Pope than to yield to an unjust outrage.

Justinian, at this time beaten in the field by Saracens and Bulgarians,

was anxious to improve the beauty of his palace, by constructing a

magnificent fountain and esplanade, from which he could better view the

party of the Blues which he favoured. Now a church stood in the way of

this enlargement, and he called upon Callinicus, who had succeeded Paul as

patriarch in 693, to use the prayers customary when a church was pulled

down. The patriarch replied that he had prayers for the building of

churches, but none for their demolition. The emperor insisted, and

Callinicus so far yielded as to use the prayer, “Glory be to God, now and

for ever more, who allows and endures even this”. After which the church

was pulled down.

Three years afterwards the tyranny of Justinian met with its reward. He

had prepared a massacre, in which also the patriarch would have been

included. The patrician Leontius, a general of merit, had been imprisoned

for some years. He was set free and ordered to Greece. On his way he

lamented his fate to some friends. They advised him to rise against the

emperor. He presented himself at the prætorium, gained admission in the

emperor’s name, overpowered the officer in command, set free the prisoners

under his charge, some of the best men in the city who had been confined

there for six or even eight years. Leontius then with his friends marched

through the streets, inviting all Christians to Sancta Sophia. He went to

the patriarch who knew that he was involved in the sentence of death

intended by Justinian. The patriarch accompanied Leontius to the

baptistery where a great multitude had assembled and uttered these words:

“This is the day which the Lord has made”. It became the signal for a

general insurrection. The people rushed to the hippodrome. Thither in the

morning Justinian was brought. His nose and tongue were both maimed, and

he was banished to the Crimea. And Leontius reigned in his stead.

But Leontius was not fortunate in war. He had dethroned by this sudden

revolution the fifth sovereign in the line of Heraclius. In three years an

army which dreaded punishment because it had not saved Carthage from the

Saracens rebelled against him; he was deposed by another officer, Apsimar

or Tiberius II., who lasted seven years from 698 to 705. At that time the

banished and maimed Justinian was enabled by help of the Bulgarians to

recover possession of Constantinople.(149) Then began the time of

vengeance not only on the two usurpers, as he deemed them, who had sat

between them ten years on his throne, but on all who had supported them.

Leontius and Apsimar were carried in chains through all the streets. Then,

as the games in the circus were proceeding and the people crowding to

them, they were thrown prostrate before the emperor who was seen seated

with a foot on the neck of each, while the crowd as they went by shouted,

“Thou hast trodden upon the asp and the basilisk, and trampled on the lion

and the dragon”. When the games were over Justinian removed his foot from

the necks of his fallen rivals, and dismissed them to be beheaded. The

patriarch Callinicus he deprived of sight, and banished to Rome, and put

in his stead Cyrus, a monk, who had foretold his restoration. He slew a

vast multitude of civilians and soldiers. He tied men up in sacks, and

threw them into the sea. He invited men to a great banquet, and as they

rose from it had them hung or beheaded. In the meantime, while these

events took place at Constantinople, Pope Sergius had closed in honour his

pontificate of thirteen years and eight months, in September, 701. The

native soldiers of Italy had defended him against the attempt of

Justinian, and during all his pontificate he refused to recognise the

Trullan canons. He was succeeded in less than two months by another Greek,

Pope John VI. At the time Tiberius Apsimar was emperor, having dethroned

Leontius. He ordered his exarch Theophylact to proceed to Rome. He was

supposed to come with a bad intent against the Pope. Italian troops from

the provinces flocked to Rome, and the city also rose against him. The

Pope again, as in the time of Pope Sergius, ordered the gates to be

closed; induced the Italians to retire from Rome, and saved the exarch.

Without troops himself he possessed a greater influence over the Italians

than the exarch. This Pope also induced the Lombard Duke of Beneventum to

retire from an attack on Campania, in which he had done much harm. Pope

John from the treasury of the Church redeemed his captives. We hear

nothing of the exarch giving help either to defend or to ransom the

emperor’s subjects.

After little more than three years John VI. was succeeded by another

Greek, John VII. He was consecrated in March, 705. In the autumn of that

year Justinian II. regained his throne. He sent at once two Metropolitans

to Rome, to urge the Pope to accept the Trullan canons. The Pope returned

the canons in silence. He did not accept the Council of 692 any more than

his predecessors. He died in 707, and was followed by Sisinnius, a Syrian,

who sat but 20 days, and his successor Constantine, also a Syrian, was

consecrated in March, 708, the seventh Pope in succession who came from

Syria or the Greek empire.

In the year 709, Justinian II. wreaked his vengeance on Ravenna, stored up

during the ten years of his banishment, whether it was that their

opposition with that of Pope Sergius had rankled in his mind, or that they

had rejoiced at his fall, or, at any rate, that they had not been faithful

to him. Now, at length, he sent the patrician Theodore, who commanded the

army in Sicily, with a fleet against them. The chief people of the city,

including the archbishop Felix, were enticed by the general to his ship,

where they were received by twos in his tent. They were then seized,

gagged, and put into confinement below. The Greeks landed, burned and

plundered the city, and killed many. The chief captives were carried to

Byzantium, and brought before the emperor, who sat on a throne studded

with emeralds, and wore a diadem of pearls embroidered with gold. As soon

as he saw them, he ordered them to execution, contenting himself with only

blinding archbishop Felix, and banishing him to Pontus.(150)

Intense was the hatred of Byzantium kindled in Italy by such deeds.(151)

It was at this time that Justinian II., by an imperial letter, summoned

Pope Constantine to his capital. The Pope obeyed the command, and set sail

from Porto on the 10th October, 710, accompanied by a considerable

attendance. After he had left Rome, the exarch, John Rhizocapus, came, in

the emperor’s name, to Rome, and put to death four of the chief officers

of the papal court, and “going to Ravenna, there for his most foul

misdeeds perished by a most ignominious death”.

Pope Constantine passed by Naples and Sicily, and wintered at Otranto.

Here he received an imperial order, requiring the magistrates to treat him

wherever he went with the same honour as the emperor himself. When he

reached Constantinople, the young son of the emperor, the highest

nobility, the patriarch Cyrus, with the clergy, and a great multitude,

came out seven miles to meet him. The Pope, wearing the dress which he

wore at Rome in great ceremonies, entered the city with his train, riding

the imperial horses richly caparisoned. They were taken in triumph first

to the royal palace, and then to the Pope’s own abode at the Placidia

palace. Justinian, being at Nicæa, sent him a letter full of thanks, and

begged the Pope to meet him at Nicomedia. When they met, the emperor,

wearing his crown, threw himself at the Pope’s feet, and kissed them. They

then embraced to the great joy of the people.

It appears that the Deacon Gregory,(152) the next successor of Pope

Constantine, was attending on him, and that he answered with great ability

certain questions put by the emperor. They are supposed to have referred

to the Trullan canons. They were not confirmed. The later practice(153) of

the Roman Church, with regard to these canons, continued to be to suffer

those only to hold, which were not contrary to the decrees of the Popes

and the western discipline. On the Sunday, the Pope celebrated Mass before

the emperor, who received Communion from him; besought him to pray that

his sins might be forgiven, renewed all the privileges of the Roman

Church, and left the Pope free, to return home. That return was delayed by

the frequent sicknesses of the Pope. At length, however, he reached Gaeta

in safety, where a great number of clergy and of the Roman people met him,

and he entered Rome in joy in October, 711.

But the Pope had left behind him, and counselled in vain, an emperor bent

on his own destruction. Justinian had conceived a furious hatred against

the town of Cherson. He had sent a large fleet against it. Its chief men

were taken away and cruelly tortured. The fleet itself was afterwards

utterly wrecked by a tempest: upon which Justinian prepared another, under

fresh commanders, who were instructed to inflict fresh cruelties. In the

end the people of Cherson was driven into revolt. They proclaimed emperor

Bardanes, one of the commanders of the fleet. Another officer, a

chamberlain of Justinian, whom he had frightfully injured, and who

expected to be killed by him, joined in the revolt. He was sent by

Bardanes to seize Justinian, persuaded the soldiers to desert him, fell

upon him, and, with his sword, cut off his head, which he sent at once to

Bardanes, who forthwith despatched it by the same soldier to Rome. And

thus the extinction of the race of Heraclius was signified to the West by

the exposure of his head. His only son, Tiberius, a boy of ten, had

already been slaughtered like a sheep.(154)

Thus it was that Pope Constantine, three months after his return to Rome,

received tidings that Justinian was killed, and that Philippicus Bardanes

had taken his place. In these days(155) theology had so penetrated every

relation of life that every emperor, on his accession, was accustomed to

send his profession of belief to the highest bishops of his empire. That

of Philippicus unhappily signified to the Pope that he was a Monothelite.

Thereupon Pope Constantine, in council, refused to accept his letter.

In fact, the Armenian officer who had at length put an end to the life and

crimes of Justinian II., had no sooner obtained recognition as emperor,

than he resolved to overthrow the Sixth Council, and establish the heresy

which it had condemned. In the year and a-half, during which he reigned,

he caused a council to meet at Constantinople. He deposed the patriarch

Cyrus, who would not yield to his wishes: and put in his place the deacon,

John, who was more submissive. This council, whose Acts were buried with

the emperor, and whose numbers are not known, ordered the Monothelite

heresy to be subscribed by all. Most of the bishops, with miserable

cowardice, gave way to the will of the court. Among the number is said to

have been even Germanus, then archbishop of Cyzicus, and afterwards, as

patriarch of Constantinople, a firm defender of the faith. Only a few

bishops, like Zeno of Sinope, resisted. The copy of the Acts of the Sixth

Council, kept in the palace, was burnt. At Rome, the Pope’s rejection of

the new emperor’s creed was taken up by the people with the utmost zeal.

They would not receive his image in the church, nor bear the mention of

his name in the Mass, nor tolerate his coin.

But, in eighteen months, his own profligate life caused him to be deposed.

Two officers of high rank, one of them commanding the forces in the

neighbouring provinces, determined to rid the empire of such a master. An

emissary of theirs, entering on Whitsun eve suddenly by the golden gate,

with a company of soldiers, gained admittance to the emperor’s chamber,

and carried him off unconscious from the effect of a drunken carouse on

his birthday. They took him to the hippodrome, and there blinded him. On

the next day, being Pentecost, the people were assembled in the great

church, and Artemius, the first secretary, was crowned, and his name

changed to Anastasius. On the following Saturday, he punished with

blindness the two conspirators who had so treated his predecessor.(156)

Thus Rome and the East were suddenly delivered from a revolution which had

fallen upon them with equal suddenness, a fresh domination of the

Monothelite heresy. All acts done by the government of the fallen

Philippicus were annulled, and the Sixth Council solemnly proclaimed

afresh by clergy and people at Rome. There was great rejoicing at the fall

of Philippicus, and the rise of Anastasius, who sent to the Pope a letter

containing his orthodox belief.

It is to be noted also that the patriarch of Constantinople, John VI., who

had been put into the place of Cyrus by Philippicus, had joined in the

emperor’s acts against the Sixth Council, and led the council which

rejected it, now wrote to Pope Constantine to excuse himself for having

yielded to force. He began the letter with these words:—(157)

“God, who has constructed the magnificence of visible things as a mark of

His own Godhead and power, has specially in the formation of man, the most

honoured of the sensible creation, shown His glory and wisdom, so that the

prophet cried out, ‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me’. Now, the

Maker of our nature, designing the head to be over the whole body, placed

in it the most important of our senses, and caused all the movement and

perfection of the other limbs to spring from it, and be preserved in it.

If one of these meet with loss or injury, it is not left without care, but

the head shows a natural sympathy even to the extremest parts of the body,

and heals the local suffering by the hand’s ministry and the eye’s

guidance, the aid of which it does not refuse as useless. With this we can

compare your own apostolical pre-eminence, counting you, according to the

canons, as the head of the Christian priesthood.(158) And so with reason

we ask of you to be released from the discouragement which has fallen on

the body of the Church by the pestilent exercise of tyrannical power.”

The patriarch further beseeches the Pope to pardon his fault that under

this stress he had rejected the doctrine of the Sixth Council, in the

words: “Since you are the disciple and the successor of him who heard from

the Lord, ‘Simon, Simon, behold Satan has sought to sift you as wheat, but

I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not: and thou when thou art

converted confirm thy brethren,’ you are a debtor to supply what is needed

for the correction which confirms, and also to show a sympathetic

kindness”.

Pope Constantine is the fifth and also the last Pope who paid a visit to

Constantinople. As these visits cast an important light upon the condition

during two hundred years under which, being acknowledged as successors of

St. Peter, they exercised as subjects in the civil order their supreme

authority in the Church, I think it belongs to the matter now treated to

refer to the facts and results of each visit. Pope John I., who sat from

523 to 525, was a subject of King Theodorich, and was summoned by him to

Ravenna. There he was compelled, much against his will, to go with three

senators on an embassy to the emperor Justin I. Theodorich was most

indignant that the emperor had required Arians in his empire to give back

their churches to the Catholics. He threatened the Pope that if this

treatment was not reversed he would drown Italy in blood.(159) So the

Pope, being sick, went with the senators to Constantinople. On their

arrival the whole city went out with wax lights and bannered crosses in

honour of the blessed Apostles, Peter and Paul, for the Greeks testified

that from the time of Constantine and St. Silvester they had never merited

to receive a successor of St. Peter. Then the emperor Justin, doing honour

to God, threw himself to the ground upon his face and worshipped the most

blessed Pope John. Pope John and the senators besought him with many tears

to accept their legation. The emperor rejoiced that he had been found

worthy to see in his kingdom a successor of St. Peter and was gloriously

crowned by his hands.

When they returned with success to King Theodorich at Ravenna they found

that he had imprisoned the two illustrious senators, Symmachus and

Boethius; he put the Pope likewise in prison, and so the bishop of the

first see suffered affliction in ward, and died of want. Ninety-eight days

after his death in prison the heretical King Theodorich by the will of God

suddenly died.

Ten years after this, in 535, the same Book of the Popes records that Pope

Agapetus, being the subject of Theodatus, King of the Goths, was sent by

him on embassy to the emperor Justinian. Theodatus had put to death the

Queen Amalasunta, daughter of Theodorich, who had herself given him the

crown. He hoped that the Pope might save him with the emperor. The Pope

was received with all distinction. But he found a heretic seated on the

see of the capital, whose orthodoxy the emperor defended. And the emperor

said to the Pope, “Either agree with us or I will have you banished”. The

Pope replied: “Sinner that I am, I came to Constantinople to see the most

Christian Emperor Justinian. I find instead a Diocletian. But I do not

fear your threats. But that you may know that your bishop does not belong

to the Christian religion, let him confess there to be Two Natures in

Christ.” Then the Bishop Anthimus, being cited by the emperor, would never

confess in answer to the question of Pope Agapetus that there are Two

Natures in our Lord Jesus Christ. So the Pope prevailed. The emperor with

joy submitted himself to the Holy See, and worshipped Pope Agapetus; he

expelled Anthimus from his communion and banished him, and besought the

Pope to consecrate Mennas in his stead. This was done. The Pope was taken

ill, and died after two months at Constantinople. He was buried with a

greater concourse of people than had ever attended the funeral of emperor

or bishop. His body was carried back in triumph to Rome and buried at St.

Peter’s.(160)

Shortly after Justinian added the direct sovereignty of conquest to that

respect, whatever its extent may have been, with which Rome and the Popes

regarded the sole emperor who since the abolition of the western emperor

in 476 represented the Roman name, though seated on the Bosphorus. Pope

Vigilius in 547 was his subject, and as such summoned by him to

Constantinople, whither he went with the same reluctance as his two

predecessors at the command of Theodorich and Theodatus. The emperor’s

purpose was to force the Pope to set his seal upon a doctrinal edict of

his own. At first Justinian humbly besought his blessing, and embraced him

with tears. But this soon turned to persecution, and seven years of

perpetual humiliation for the Pope followed. Deceived, isolated,

imprisoned, deserted, he did not surrender the faith. St. Peter in his

person was not overcome, but he was discredited, and it required forty

years, crowned by the wisdom and fortitude of St. Gregory, to restore the

full lustre of the Holy See.

After a hundred years and a succession of fourteen Popes, St. Martin held

a great Council at Rome in 649, in which he passed anathema upon the

heresy of two eastern emperors, grandfather and grandson. In requital for

this the grandson had him seized in his Lateran Church itself, carried

secretly to Constantinople, judged by the senate there for high treason,

condemned to death, and finally suffered him to die of starvation in the

Crimea. As Pope John I. gained his crown of martyrdom by the first visit

of a Pope to Constantinople, so Pope Martin gained the like crown by the

fourth.

About thirty years after this a General Council was held in which the

heresy which St. Martin had placed under ban was condemned afresh; and it

was called by the wish and command of the then reigning emperor, son of

the very man who had persecuted St. Martin to death, and in it the largest

acknowledgments of St. Peter’s succession at Rome were made to St.

Martin’s successors.

Yet, ten years afterwards, this man’s son, then emperor, tried to repeat

upon Pope Sergius the crime of the grandfather committed on Pope St.

Martin. That his attempt was baffled, the life of his messenger saved by

Pope Sergius, and the messenger dismissed in most ignominious flight, was

owing to the Italian troops of the emperor rising in defence of the Pope.

They would not allow him to be taken to the capital on the Bosphorus.

In another ten years the usurper Apsimar had despatched another exarch,

Theophylact, to carry Pope John VI. to Constantinople that he might be

induced to give the consent which Pope Sergius had refused to the canons

of the Trullan Council. This attempt also was frustrated by the flocking

of Italian troops to Rome in defence of the Pope.

Last is the visit of Pope Constantine, in which two things are remarkable.

The very emperor who had attempted to kidnap Pope Sergius in 693, being on

the eve of the extinction which was to fall on the line of Heraclius, in

710 invited Pope Constantine to visit him, ordered him everywhere to be

received with royal honours; when they met, fell, though crowned, at his

feet to kiss them, and sent him back in highest honour. And presently the

patriarch of Constantinople, begging of him to be condoned for a grievous

fault, drew a picture of his supremacy the functions of which he compared

to those which the Creator in His wisdom has given to the head in the

human body. I will venture to say that no western mind has expressed with

greater force or tenderness the office which belongs to him who sits in

the see of the chief apostle than was done by the tenant for the time of

that see of New Rome, which for more than three centuries had been

striving to rival and depress the elder Rome.

The emperor Anastasius, so strangely chosen from a first secretary to

succeed a fallen usurper, and undo his establishment of heresy, was both

orthodox and blameless in conduct, and strove to defend his much

endangered empire. He had armed a fleet, but it rebelled and killed its

commander. The end of a civil war, lasting six months, was that Anastasius

retired of his own accord on condition that his life should be spared: he

became a monk and priest and was banished to Thessalonica. He had reigned

two years and a half.

Anastasius, some time after his retirement, made, when Leo III. was

established on the throne, an attempt to regain it. For this he was

publicly executed at Constantinople. So he was added to his predecessors,

Leontius, Apsimar, and Justinian II., making the fourth of the seven

emperors reigning from 685 to the accession of Leo III. in 717, to whom

the throne was a scaffold.

Theodosius III., a good man but an incapable ruler, had in vain tried to

escape the crown imposed on him by the rebellious fleet. After a year the

general of the army of the East, a soldier of great capacity and vigour,

was advancing to dethrone him. The senate and patriarch advised him to

resign. His private property was secured to him on condition that both he

and his son became priests. Theodosius III. yielded possession of a throne

from acquiring which he had fled, and lived in peace at Ephesus. He gave

himself up to good works, and when he was buried in St. Philip’s Church he

had ordered the single word _health_ to be engraven on his tomb: a silent

intimation that he was the sole among Leo’s six predecessors who had

escaped unhurt, and no less that he found in death the healing of all

sorrows.

In the year 717 Leo the Isaurian mounted the throne thus vacated, and

entering by the golden gate on the 25th March, 717, was crowned in Sancta

Sophia by the patriarch Germanus, after he had taken before him the oath

to maintain the faith of the Church intact.

On the 8th April, 715, Pope Constantine died, after a pontificate of seven

years, “a strenuous and successful defender of Rome’s orthodox faith, and

a worthy predecessor of greater successors, under whom Rome was delivered

from the Byzantine yoke”.(161) After forty days St. Gregory II. became

Pope on the 19th May, 715.

Between the two Popes St. Gregory I. and St. Gregory II. lies a period of

111 years, marked with disasters to the Christian people and religion such

as no preceding century can show. At the death of St. Gregory I. in 604,

all the shores of the Mediterranean were in possession of Christians. The

authority of the eastern emperor extended from Constantinople over Asia

Minor, Syria, and the region up to the Euphrates, Egypt, and the long

range of Northern Africa, embracing the present Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers,

and Morocco, to the Atlantic. The beginning of Christian kingdoms, looking

up with filial affection to their spiritual Father in Rome, was apparent

to the eye of the first Gregory. Gaul and Spain and Africa, lately

recovered by Justinian, had a network of spiritual provinces, in which

each Metropolitan received from Rome the pallium, the token of apostolic

authority and unity. St. Gregory himself had added to these by the mission

of Augustine, and the chair of unity founded at Canterbury. Full as these

countries were of violence, mutual aggression, and unsubdued ferocity, the

Teutonic invaders had nevertheless accepted the law of Christ from Rome,

and the first principles of human order had been fused with their natural

traditions of freedom. Above all, the Arian heresy had been dispossessed,

and there was no appearance of a religion counter to the Christian

arising. In every city of a vast region the bishop was regarded by his

people with veneration, the very source of which lay in a power which he

held by imposition of hands. A spiritual head to those around him, he was

himself a link in the chain of that universal hierarchy the head of which

was at Rome.

At the accession of Gregory II. the whole coast line from Cilicia at least

to Mauritania on the Atlantic, had been lost to the Roman empire, and in a

very great degree to the Christian Church as well. It was all now in the

occupation of a single power, the head of which was termed the successor.

The successor that is of the Arabian who had set himself in the place of

Christ, who had conquered the Christians in this vast range of territory,

and would allow them to live only on tenure of subjection. Instead of the

remnant of primeval tradition which formed the mythology and influenced

the customs of the northern tribes at the time of their descent on the

western empire, the Arabian prophet and his successors had impregnated

their people with a furious and fanatical belief to be imposed by force.

It was a chief part of that belief that it ought to be imposed by force on

all outside. And they who fell in such a holy war were held to be martyrs,

as indeed they witnessed and imitated the life of Mohammed from the time

of the Hegira. Thus the possession of the world was attached to the

profession of one God and Mohammed as his prophet. In the century next

after the death of the prophet those who retrace the deeds of his

followers must admit that every possible disregard of human life and of

the things most hallowed in Christian society had been shown by them in

the construction of a kingdom now stretching from the Atlantic to the

Indus. The religion under whose inspiration all this had been done, was

framed in essential antagonism to the Christian faith. For indeed the

mystery on which the Christian faith rested, that the Son of God had

assumed human nature for the redemption of man, was denounced by it as

derogatory to the very conception of God. Mohammedans proscribed

Christians as associators of a creature with the Creator. This association

they called idolatry. The northern wandering of the nations might receive

Christian belief and be formed into a Christendom. The southern wandering

of the nations, since it rested on a prophet the personal antagonist of

the Christian founder, could only substitute Islamieh for Christendom.

This it had done over the empire which as we have seen was constructed at

the time St. Gregory II. became Pope, and Leo III. after six revolutions

became emperor at Constantinople.

Between the two Gregories twenty-four Popes occupied the throne of St.

Peter, from Pope Sabinian to Pope Constantine. Of these three only,

Honorius, Vitalian, and Sergius, sat over ten years each; the three

together occupied forty-one years, leaving seventy years in the gross for

the remaining twenty-one pontificates. But a considerable portion of these

years must be deducted for the time which intervened between their

election, and the allowing of their consecration by the consent of the

emperor or the exarch as his viceroy. In that interval Greek arts were

applied, to induce the Pope elect to consent to some thing desired by the

emperor. Thus Pope Severinus on the death of Honorius was kept out of his

see for nineteen months and sixteen days, to obtain, if possible, his

consent to the doctrine put forth by Heraclius in the Ecthesis. In this

manner the pontificate of Severinus was reduced to two months and three

days, in which he found time to condemn the emperor’s Ecthesis. So again

on the election of St. Sergius in 687, the exarch hurried down from

Ravenna to prevent it if possible; but he was too late, and could only

plunder the Church’s treasury of one hundred pounds weight of gold. These

are samples, but the action continued over the whole period. Historians

remark that the seven last Popes who sat during it were all Greeks, and

conclude that the emperors thought compliance might be hoped for in such

cases. This series of seven began with John VI. in 685. The seven Popes

were all faithful not to the exacting demands of emperors, but to the

charge of St. Peter, and during the thirty years in which they occupied

the Holy See seven revolutions of emperors took place at Constantinople.

Three emperors perished by public execution; a fourth was only blinded; a

fifth having become a priest, and attempted to regain the throne was then

executed as a traitor by its actual tenant. The worst of the six was the

fifth emperor in the line of Heraclius, whose head was sent to Rome as a

ghastly but indisputable witness that Italy was delivered from his

tyranny.

During the whole one hundred and eleven years Italy was governed as a

province which had no civil rights. I recur to the words of St. Agatho in

his letter(162) to the Sixth Council for the importance of his

acknowledging the sad condition of learning, as a result of the miserable

danger and uncertainty of the time. Not often does a Pope say of his own

legates, “How should they who gained their daily bread by manual labour

with the utmost hazard, possess accurate and abundant learning?” But he

gave assurance that “with simplicity of heart and without faltering they

maintained the faith handed down from their fathers, making their one and

their chief good that nothing should be diminished, nothing changed, but

the words and the meaning both kept untouched”.

Whatever pomp and glory remained to the empire was centered in

Constantinople. Rome and the Pope were powerless as to material strength.

So St. Martin, when accused at his trial of favouring an enemy of the

emperor, replied: “What was I to resist an exarch, without any force of my

own?” At that time Constantinople was probably the greatest as well as the

richest city in the world. When Constans II. eight years after visited

Rome he swept away whatever works of art pleased him for the further

adornment of his capital. In the four centuries down to Leo III. which

elapsed since the consecration of the capital by its founder, every

successor had made it a point of honour to improve the beauty and increase

the strength of the imperial residence.

Thus those twenty-four Popes from the first to the second Gregory were

dwelling in a Rome which continued to exist only as the seat of their own

primacy, drawing successive generations to it, and visited year by year

through the pilgrims who came to it from all parts of the world, since

they sought the tomb of the chief apostle when the sepulchre of the Master

was enthralled by the Saracen. Beside that tomb they stood with Roman

fortitude against Byzantine fluctuation. Heraclius published an Ecthesis,

and Constans II. a Typus. Ten Popes condemned both, and then Constantine

IV. humbly admitted that both were worthless. He further undid the heresy

of four successive patriarchs by putting them under anathema. He received

as the living Peter the successor of one whom his father had stolen from

Rome and martyred in the Crimea; just as his son Justinian fell at the

feet of Pope Constantine, after he had tried to repeat the crime of his

grandfather Constans on the person of Pope Sergius. So in 680 Theodore,

then patriarch of Constantinople, urged on by another patriarch who lived

at Constantinople since his own Antioch was become a spoil of the Saracen,

expunged from the diptychs the names of all the Popes after Honorius to

his own time. Theodore was himself deposed while the Sixth Council sat,

and Macarius, his adviser, was deposed by that Council, but Theodore lived

to be restored and to die as patriarch with a sounder faith than he had

shown at the beginning. It is remarkable that after the four Monothelite

patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, who were condemned at the

Sixth Council, three patriarchs, Thomas II., 667-8, John V., 669-674, and

Constantine I., 674-6,(163) “leant to orthodoxy,” and so escaped the

censure of the Council, while Theodore was heretical from 678 to 680, and

orthodox when restored from 683 to 686.

Thirty years after the Sixth Council the patriarch, John V., after

presiding at the council summoned by the Emperor Philippicus, who

attempted by it to re-establish the Monothelite heresy, besought pardon of

Pope Constantine as the head whose function it was to heal all the wounds

of the body. I know not what proof of the Roman primacy surpasses in

force, to those who have eyes to see, this proof arising from the

alternate persecution and confession of Byzantine emperors and patriarchs,

compared with the unbending fortitude and unalterable faith of the

twenty-four Popes in that long century when Rome served as a slave in the

natural order, and was worshipped in the spiritual kingdom as a sanctuary.

CHAPTER VI. AN EMPEROR PRIEST AND FOUR GREAT POPES.

The Sixth General Council had been held in 680, and on the union of the

East and West the long and obstinate Monothelite heresy had seemed to be

extinguished with all the authority wielded by the Pope at the head of a

General Council. Yet thirty years after this event the fifth emperor of

the line of Heraclius was dethroned and beheaded by a usurper; and the

first act of the insurgent when seated on the throne of Constantine was to

call a council of his own eastern bishops at Constantinople, which at his

command attempted to abrogate the Sixth Council and to set up again as the

proper faith of the Church the heresy which it had condemned. And this act

of Philippicus Bardanes met with nothing like an adequate resistance from

the eastern bishops. It is true that the patriarch Cyrus, refusing to

comply with the wishes of the new emperor, was deposed by him, and a more

obsequious successor, the deacon John, put in his place. But even

Germanus, then archbishop of Cyzicus, yielded to the storm, and thus a

bishop of imperial blood, who four years afterwards was himself placed in

the see of Constantinople, who held it during fifteen years, and then was

deposed because he would not yield to the heretical measures of another

emperor, is said to have been subservient to the will of Philippicus

Bardanes.

No incident can show more plainly the pretensions of the eastern emperor

and the weakness of the eastern bishops than the fact that the first act

of an Armenian officer when he had, by the murder of his sovereign, put on

the imperial buskins on which the eagle of the Roman power was

embroidered, consisted in an attempt to alter the faith of the Church, and

that the alteration was supported by the bishops whom he had convened.

Philippicus himself was a worthless sensualist, whose reign was put an end

to in eighteen months by another revolution. Two more transient emperors

passed to the dishonoured throne, and then appeared a third, who reigned

twenty-four years, and has left his mark on history.

Leo III. was a soldier of great courage and considerable skill. He was of

low birth in the province of Isauria, but worked his way through the

various grades of the army until he became the most highly reputed of its

generals at a moment when a succession of seven revolutions had seemed to

portend the coming extinction of the empire. Besides its internal

dissensions, it was hard pressed by the chalif Solomon, who was making

every preparation for the final conquest of the capital. When by the

cession of the good but impotent Theodosius III. the Isaurian officer

obtained the crown, sodden as it were with the blood of three successive

emperors, it might have seemed that the last hour had come of the great

city whose ramparts had served as the only sufficient bulwark against the

Mohammedan torrent of conquest. Leo III. thought not so. His first act was

to defeat the chalif and cast back his invading host. The eastern empire

breathed afresh under his resolute spirit and strategic skill, and learnt

to meet not ingloriously the Saracen in battle. Ten years of success had

given to its ruler some rays of the glory which had shone upon the older

emperors.

It is of the year 726 that the most learned of Italian historians(164)

speaks in these words: “This year Leo, the Isaurian, began a tragedy which

convulsed the Church of God and laid the foundations for the loss of Italy

to the Greek emperors. Theophanes, Nicephorus, and other historians tell

us that a submarine volcano had broken out in the Ægean Sea and cast up a

quantity of pumice stone on the adjoining coast. This natural incident had

produced the greatest alarm. Moreover, a perfidious renegade named

Bezer,(165) who had embraced the Arabian superstition, had nestled himself

in the imperial court, and succeeded in making the emperor believe that

God was enraged with the Christians on account of the images which they

had in their churches and venerated. No doubt abuses did exist in the

veneration of these images, as have since appeared among the Moscovites,

united to the Greek Church. But such abuses neither were nor are a reason

to abolish these images, for, as men of great knowledge have proved, the

use of images and a well-regulated veneration of them is not only lawful,

but greatly fosters piety in the Christian Catholic people. Now the

emperor Leo, infatuated by his own great penetration of mind and seduced

by this evil counsellor, practised a usurpation upon the rights of the

priesthood, and published an edict ordering that from that moment all the

sacred images should be forbidden and removed through the territory of the

Roman empire. He called the kissing them or venerating them idolatry. This

was the beginning of the Iconoclast heresy. This rash and iniquitous

prohibition excited great commotion among his subjects. The larger part

detested him as heretical, as holding Mohammedan sentiments, and the more

because it was known that he held in abomination the sacred relics, and

denied the intercession of the saints with God—that is, attacked beliefs

established in the Church of God. He also impugned thereby the profession

of faith which he had made when he assumed the imperial throne, refusing

to listen to the judgment of bishops who are chosen by God for guardians

of the doctrine which belongs to the faith. Though we have not the letters

written by him to Pope Gregory II. about abolishing the sacred images, and

the pontiff’s answers to him, yet the sequel plainly shows that he sent to

Rome the above-named edict, and that the holy pontiff not only opposed it,

but wrote with kindled feelings to the emperor about it, inducing him to

give up this sacrilegious design.”

Though the letters thus mentioned no longer exist, we possess letters from

Pope Gregory II. to the emperor Leo shortly after, which present to us the

clearest and most authentic picture of the Iconoclast contest. Both the

contention of the emperor and the censure of the pontiff are there

expressed in the words used at the very moment of the struggle. I shall

follow them accurately and in so much detail as to show the interests

which were then at stake.

In the person of St. Gregory II., after several Popes of eastern descent,

a Roman had again reached the pontificate.(166) He was acquainted with

Constantinople, to which place he had accompanied his predecessor, Pope

Constantine. His experience in political things was as great as his grasp

of theological knowledge was firm. He had dealt with Greeks and Lombards,

not only in ecclesiastical affairs, but as counsellor, as arbitrator, and

as party concerned in disputes. He adorned the churches of Rome, but he

likewise strengthened her fortifications on the Esquiline. When, in the

year 717, a considerable portion of the city had been dangerously flooded,

and in the quarter of the Via Lata the water had risen eight-feet high,

the poor people found support and consolation in the Pope. During many

years there had been peace between Church and Empire as also between the

Roman See and the patriarchate of the imperial capital. The first years of

Leo III. promised nothing but good. Born of low birth in the mountains of

Isauria, and destitute of education, he had risen by his valour step by

step, and was in command of the Anatolian army when called to succeed

Theodosius III. His reign of four and twenty years would have been

fortunate had not the dogmatising fancies which seemed to be inherited by

the most various natures on the Byzantine throne taken possession of him.

Through them he kindled a conflict which set East and West in commotion,

and completed the rent between them.

It was about the year 727, the twelfth year of his own pontificate, and

ten years after the accession of Leo III., when the acts of the eastern

emperor caused St. Gregory II. to address the following letter to

him.(167)

“The letter of your God-protected majesty and fraternity we have received

by the augustal officer of the Guards, and we likewise keep it securely in

the holy church close to the confession of the holy and glorious Peter,

prince of the apostles, where likewise are kept the letters of your

predecessors who reigned in the love of Christ. In this letter you well

and piously, as befits a Christian emperor, professed that you would keep

without fail the injunctions of our holy fathers and teachers. It is

first, and remarkable, that the letter is yours and not another’s, sealed

with the imperial seal, and subscribed within in vermilion, by your own

hand, as is the wont of emperors to subscribe. Therein you professed with

the clearest piety our blameless and orthodox faith. You wrote, ‘he who

moves and pulls down the boundaries of the fathers is execrable’. On

receiving this we uttered hymns of thanksgiving to God, for God assuredly

has given you the throne. You were running well. Who then has rung an

alarum in your ears, and perverted your heart like a twisted bowstring,

and turned your eyes backwards? During ten years by the grace of God you

went well. You never spoke of the holy images. Now you say they take the

place of idols, and that those who worship them are idolaters. And you are

bent on sweeping them away, and clearing the land of them. And you fear

not the judgment of God in bringing scandals into the hearts of men, not

of the faithful only, but of the faithless too. Christ charges you not to

scandalise one of the little ones, and for a small offence to depart into

everlasting fire, and you have scandalised the whole world, as if you

could not endure death, nor make an evil confession. You have written that

‘we should not worship things made with hands, nor any kind of likeness,

as God said, neither in heaven nor on earth; and show me, if you please,

who has charged us to reverence and worship things made with hands. Then I

will confess that is God’s command’. And why, you that are emperor and

head of Christians, did you not enquire of those who had the knowledge of

experience? You might have been satisfied by them concerning what things

made by hands God spoke, before stirring up, confounding, and disturbing

humble people. But you thrust away, and denied, and cast out our holy

fathers and teachers whom, with your own hand and in writing, you

professed to obey and follow. The holy and inspired fathers and teachers

are our scripture, our light and our salvation. The six Councils held in

Christ have commanded us, and you do not accept their testimony. We are

compelled to write to you in rude uncultured words, since uncultured and

rude you are. But truly they carry the power and the truth of God. We

entreat you in God’s name to cast aside the haughtiness and pride which

beset you, and gently and humbly give us your attention. May God lead you

to the truth of what He has said. He was speaking of idolaters who had

possession of the promised land. They worshipped animals in gold and

silver and wood; they worshipped the whole creation, and all winged birds.

Their cry was, ‘These are our gods and other god there is not’. It was for

these devilish things, made by the hand, injurious and execrable, that God

condemned their worship. For since there are things made with hands to the

service and glory of God, whose will it was to introduce His own holy

people of the Hebrews, as He foretold to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give

them the land of promise, and to make the Israelites possessors and

inheritors of the possessions of idolaters, and to crush and utterly wipe

out those generations because they had polluted the land and the air by

their transgressions, God warned His people beforehand not to fall into

their modes of worship. He selected two men of the Israelite people,

blessed and hallowed them for the execution of works wrought by the hand,

but for the glory and service of God, as a memorial to those generations,

Bezaleel and Eliab, of the first tribe of Dan. God said to Moses, ‘Cut out

two tables of stone and bring them to Me’. He brought them, and God, with

His own finger, wrote upon them the ten life-giving and immortal words.

Then God said: ‘Make cherubim and seraphim, and a table, and cover it

within and without with gold: and mark an ark of incorruptible wood, and

put thy testimonies into the ark for a memorial to your generations, that

is, the tablets, the urn, the rod, the manna’. Are these fashions and

resemblances made by hand, or are they not? But they are for the glory and

service of God. That great Moses, full of fear, in his desire to see a

likeness and resemblance, not to be deceived, besought God, saying, ‘Lord,

show me Thyself manifestly, that I may see Thee’. And the Lord answered,

‘If thou seest Me, thou wilt die. But pass into the hole of the rock, and

thou shalt see My hind parts.’ God showed to him in a vision the mystery

hidden from the beginning of the world. But in our generations, in the

last days, He showed Himself to us manifestly, both His front and His hind

part, entire. When God saw the race of men perishing to the end, taking

pity on His own creation, He sent forth His Son, begotten before time.

And, coming down from heaven, He entered the womb of the holy Virgin Mary.

The true Light shone forth in her womb, and, instead of human generation,

the Light became flesh. And He was baptised in the River Jordan, and us

also He baptised. He began to give us pledges of knowledge, that we might

not be deceived. And, entering into Jerusalem, into the Upper Chamber of

holy and glorious Sion, to the mystical supper, He delivered to us His

holy Body, and gave us to drink His precious Blood. There also He washed

our feet; we drank with Him, and we ate with Him, and our hands felt Him,

and He became our companion. And the Truth was manifested to us, and the

error and the mist which encompassed us fled away and vanished. And their

‘voice went forth into all the world, and their words to the end of the

earth’. Then men from the whole world came flying as eagles to Jerusalem,

as the Lord said in the gospels, ‘wheresoever the body shall be, there

shall the eagles also be gathered together’. Christ is the Body: the high

flying eagles are men who worship God and love Christ. Those who saw the

Lord, as they saw Him, drew His portrait. Those who saw James, the Lord’s

brother, as they saw him, drew his portrait. Those who saw the

proto-martyr, Stephen, as they saw him, drew his portrait. In a word,

those who saw the faces of the martyrs who poured forth their blood for

Christ, drew them. And men in all the world, beholding, gave up the

worshipping of the devil, and worshipped these not with absolute, but with

relative, worship. Which of the two seems to you, O emperor, right, to

worship: these images, or those of the devil’s error? When Christ was

present at Jerusalem, Augar, then king of the Edessenes, hearing of His

wonderful works, wrote to Christ: and Christ, with His own hand, sent him

an answer, and His own holy and glorious face. Send to that not made with

hands, and behold it. Multitudes of eastern peoples flock thither, and

worship. Many other such things not made with hands exist, which the hosts

of Christian pilgrims possess, whose daily worship you overlook.(168) Why

do we not examine and depict the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Because

we know Him not, and it is impossible to examine and depict the nature of

God. Had we beheld and known Him as we did His Son, Him also we might have

examined and depicted, and you might call His image, too, an idol.

“We entreat you, as brethren in Christ, enter again into the truth, which

you have left. Cast aside pride, destroy your self-assurance, write to all

and everywhere, raise up again those whom you have scandalised and

blinded, though, insensible as you are, you hold this for nothing. The

charity of Christ knows that, when we enter the church of the holy Prince

of the Apostles, and behold his portrait, compunction comes on us, and,

like rain from heaven, a flood of tears comes down. Christ made the blind

to see; you have blinded those who saw well, and have made them stumble,

little as you think of it. You have reduced men to ignorance, stopped

their fair running, deprived them of their prayers. Instead of vigils,

prayerfulness, and zeal to God, you have dissolved the poor population in

sleepiness, slumbering, and carelessness. They have lost their head. And

you say that we worship stones, and walls, and boards. Not so, O emperor.

But to rouse memory and feeling, to raise up the dull, rude, and untaught

mind, by their names, their invocation, their features. Not as gods, as

you assert: far from it: for we do not place our hopes in these things. If

it be a picture of our Lord, we say, ‘O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,

help us and save us’. If it be of His holy Mother, we say, ‘Holy bearer of

God, Mother of the Lord, intercede with thy Son, our true God, to save our

souls’. If it be of a martyr, ‘Saint Stephen, who didst shed thy blood for

Christ, by thy confidence as proto-martyr, intercede for us’. So we say,

in the case of every martyr who suffered martyrdom. Suchlike are the

prayers which we address through them. It is not, as you assert, O

emperor, that we call the martyrs gods. Put away those evil thoughts of

yours. I charge you, save your own soul from the scandals and the

imprecations which you receive from all the world: for even the little

children make a mock of you. Go to the children’s schools, and say, ‘I am

he who pull down and drive away pictures’. They will answer by throwing

their slates at your head: and what you have failed to learn from the

wise, you will be taught by the simple.

“You write, ‘Ozias, the Jewish king, took out of the temple, after eight

hundred years, the brazen serpent: so have I, after eight hundred years,

expelled the idols from the churches’. Truly, Ozias was your brother, and

had your self-conceit, and tyrannised over the priests of that day, just

as you do. For holy David carried that serpent into the temple with the

sacred ark. What was it but a brazen work consecrated by God for those who

were then suffering from the bite of serpents: that an image might be

shown to the people of the prime suggester of sin to the first creature

formed by God, Adam and Eve, this was set up for the healing of sins. But

you, as you boast, after eight hundred years, have cast out from the

churches the blessing and consecration of the martyrs, and, as you fairly

confessed at first, of set purpose and without necessity, and, lastly, by

the subscription of your own hand, put upon your own head their curse.

“Now we, as holding supreme and undoubted authority from St. Peter the

chief, were minded to rebuke you, but since you have brought the curse

upon yourself, keep it and share it with your advisers. See to what extent

you have broken in upon the edification and good course of others. The

charity of Christ knows this. When we enter a church ourselves and behold

the picture of our Lord Jesus Christ’s wonderful deeds and of His holy

Mother bearing in her arms and nursing our Lord and our God, and the

angels standing round them and chanting the Holy, Holy, Holy, we do not

leave that church without compunction. And, again, who is not touched with

compunction and moved to tears when he beholds the baptismal vessels and

the circle of priests surrounding, and the mystical supper, and the blind

recovering their sight, and the raising of Lazarus, and the healing of the

leper and the paralytic, and the multitude reclining on the grass, the

baskets and the remnants taken up, and the fragments, and the

transfiguration on Mount Thabor, the Lord’s crucifixion, His burial, His

resurrection, His holy ascension, and the descent of the Holy Spirit? Who

that beholds the history of Abraham, and the knife approaching the throat

of his son, is not moved to compunction and tears? In a word, all the

sufferings of our Lord. It were better for you, emperor, if the choice

were offered you, to be called a heretic than the persecutor and destroyer

of the histories, the pictures, the images, the sufferings of our Lord.

Yet to be called a heretic would be thy misery and thy loss. Let me tell

you the difference. The heretic is said to be known, when he is known only

to few. The scandals he gives are dark, the thoughts perplexed and hard to

discern. Those who enforce them and are destitute of humiliation soon fall

by their own ignorance and confusion of mind. Their condemnation is not so

great as yours. You have openly pursued things well observed and

conspicuous as light. You have stripped naked the churches of God. As the

holy fathers clothed and adorned them you have left them bare and

tattered. And that, too, when you had no less a pontiff than the lord

Germanus, our brother and fellow priest. You should have taken his counsel

as that of a father and teacher, as aged and experienced in matters both

of Church and State. He is ninety-five years old: he has served one after

another patriarch and emperor. He was never dispensed with, for his

utility in both these services. You disregarded him and called to your

side that transgressing fool the Ephesian, the son of Apsimar, and his

like. For the lord Germanus and the then patriarch George, having informed

and persuaded Constantine, the son of Constans, the father of Justinian,

to write to us at Rome, he wrote to us under sanction of an oath, and

proposed to us fitting men that there should be an ecumenical Council.

‘Nor will I,’ said he, ‘sit with them as emperor, nor speak as having

control, but as one of them; and as the pontiffs enact I will execute. And

those who hold the right we will receive, and those who hold the wrong we

will cast out and banish. If my father perverted anything in the pure and

blameless faith, I will be the first to lay him under anathema. For it was

by the grace of God that we sent to you; and the Sixth Council was held in

peace.’ O emperor, you know that the dogmas of holy church belong not to

kings but to pontiffs, and require to be infallibly determined. For this

reason pontiffs have been set over the churches, who abstain from secular

matters, and kings equally abstain from matters of the Church and take

charge of what is in their hands. The agreement of Christ-loving kings and

of faithful pontiffs is one power when their administration is ruled by

peace and charity.