THE CHURCH (568-700)
One great political effect of the Lombard conquest was the opportunity
which it gave the Papacy, while Lombard and Byzantine were buffeting
each other, to grow strong and independent. Had Italy remained a Greek
province the Pope would have been a mere provincial bishop, barely
taking ceremonial precedence of the metropolitans of Ravenna, Aquileia,
and Milan; had Italy become a Lombard kingdom, the Pope would have been
a royal appointee; but with the Lombard kings fighting the Byzantine
Exarchs, each side needing papal aid and sometimes bidding for it, the
Pope was enabled to become master of the city and of the duchy of Rome,
and the real head of the Latin people as well as of the Latin clergy. In
fact, the growth of the Roman Catholic Church is the most interesting
development in this period. The Lombards gave it the opportunity to grow
strong and independent, but the power to take advantage of the
opportunity came from within. This power was compact of many elements,
secular and spiritual. From the ills of the world men betook themselves
with southern impulsiveness to things religious; they sought refuge,
order, security in the Church. In the greater interests of life among
the Latins the rising ecclesiastical fabric had no competitor. Paganism
had vanished before Christianity, philosophy before theology.
Literature, art, science had perished. Italy had ceased to be a country.
The ancient Empire of Rome had faded into a far-away memory. The wreck
of the old nobility left the ecclesiastical hierarchy without a rival.
In the midst of the general ruin of Roman civilization the Church stood
stable, offering peace to the timid, comfort to the afflicted,
refinement to the gentle, a home to the homeless, a career to the
ambitious, power to the strong. By a hundred strings the Church drew men
to her; in a hundred modes she sowed the prolific seeds of
ecclesiastical patriotism. She was essentially Roman, and gathered to
herself whatever was left of life and vigour in the Roman people. With a
structure and organization framed on the Imperial pattern, she slowly
assumed in men's minds an Imperial image; and Rome, a provincial town
whose civil magistrates busied themselves with sewers and aqueducts,
again began to inspire men with a strange confidence in a new Imperial
power.
In addition to the strength derived from her immense moral and spiritual
services, the Church had the support of two potent forces, ignorance and
superstition. The general break-up of the old order had lowered the
common level of knowledge. Everybody was ignorant, everybody was
superstitious. The laws of nature were wholly unknown. Every ill that
happened, whether a man tripped over his threshold, or a thunderbolt hit
his roof, was ascribed to diabolic agencies. The old pagan
personification of natural forces, without its poetry, was revived. The
only help lay in the priest, a kind of magical protector, who with
beads, relics, bones, incense, and incantation defended poor humanity
from the assaults of devils. Thus, while all civil society suffered from
ignorance, while every individual suffered from the awful daily, hourly,
presence of fear, the Church profited by both.
Beside these intangible resources, the Church, or to speak more
precisely the Papacy, had others of a material kind. For centuries pious
men, especially when death drew near, had made great gifts of land to
the bishops of Rome, until these bishops had become the greatest landed
proprietors in Italy. Most of their estates were in Sicily, but others
were scattered all over Italy, and even in Gaul, Illyria, Sardinia, and
Corsica. In extent they covered as much as eighteen hundred square
miles, and yielded an enormous income. This income enabled the Popes to
maintain churches and monasteries, schools and missionaries, to buy off
raiding armies of Lombards, and also to equip soldiers of their own.
These estates the Church owned as a mere private landlord. During the
Gothic dominion and the restoration of Imperial rule, she had no rights
of sovereignty. But later on, during the disturbed period of border war
between Lombards and Greeks, we find the Popes actually ruling the duchy
of Rome.
The corner-stone of the great papal power, however, was laid by the
genius of one man, who organized the monastic sentiment of the sixth
century and put it to the support of the Papacy. There had been monks in
Italy long before St. Benedict (480-544), but as civil society
disintegrated, men in ever greater numbers fled from the world, and
sought peace in solitude and in monastic communities. St. Benedict
perceived that the monastic rules and customs derived from the East were
ill suited to the West; so he devised a monastic system, and formulated
his celebrated Rule, which became the pattern for all other monastic
rules in Europe. He founded a monastery at Subiaco, a little village
near Rome, and afterwards the famous abbey on Monte Cassino, a high hill
midway between Rome and Naples, which became the mother of all
Benedictine monasteries and shone like a light in the Dark Ages.
Benedict's ideal was to help men shut themselves off from the
temptations of life and realize, as far as they could, the prayer "Thy
kingdom come ... on earth as it is in Heaven." He ordained community of
property, and required a novitiate. Most strictly he forbade idleness,
and with special insistence exhorted his brethren to till the ground
with their own hands. Intellectual interests followed; and Benedictine
monks became the teachers not only of agriculture, but of handicraft, of
art and learning. His Order spread fast over Italy and Gaul, and in time
over Spain, England, and Germany. Its communities, like the old _castra
romana_, upheld the authority of Rome and enforced her dominion.
The attractions of the monastic life at Monte Cassino are well set out
in a letter written (after St. Benedict's day) to one of the abbots, by
a man of the world who had once lived there: "Though great spaces
separate me from your company, I am bound to you by a clinging
affection that can never be loosed, nor are these short pages enough to
tell you of the love that torments me all the time for you, for the
superiors and for the brethren. So much so that when I think about those
leisure days spent in holy duties, the pleasant rest in my cell, your
sweet religious affection, and the blessed company of those soldiers of
Christ, bent on holy worship, each brother setting a shining example of
a different virtue, and the gracious talks on the perfections of our
heavenly home, I am overcome, all my strength goes, and I cannot keep
tears from mingling with the sighs that burst from me. Here I go about
among Catholics, men devoted to Christian worship; everybody receives me
well, everybody is kind to me from love of our father Benedict, and for
the sake of your merits; but compared with your monastery the palace is
a prison; compared with the quiet there this life is a tempest."[4]
What Benedict did for the monastic orders, another great man, St.
Gregory (540-604), did for the Papacy itself. Gregory the Great, the
most commanding figure in the history of Europe between Theodoric and
Charlemagne, was a Roman, made of the same stuff as Scipio and Cato, and
presented the interesting character of a Christian and an antique Roman
combined. Born of a noble Roman family, Gregory was educated in Rome,
and entered the service of the state, in which he rose to the high
office of prefect of the city; but, dissatisfied with civil life, he
abandoned it and became a monk. He wanted to give himself up wholly to
a monastic life, but deemed it his duty to accept office in the papal
service, and filled the distinguished position of papal ambassador (to
use a modern term) at the Imperial court at Constantinople. In 590 he
was elected Pope, half against his will, for he desired to be either a
monk or a missionary; but he felt that the hopes of civilization and the
future of religion lay in the Papacy, and he applied himself with energy
to his new task. This task was as complex and multifarious as possible.
It concerned all Europe, from Sicily to England. Rome itself was in a
deplorable condition, left undefended by the Exarch, and threatened by
the Lombards of Spoleto, who harried the country to the very gates,
murdering some Romans and carrying others off as slaves. Gregory had to
take complete control of the city, military and civil. He wrote: "I do
not know any more whether I now fill the office of priest or of temporal
prince; I must look to our defence and everything else. I am paymaster
of the soldiers." He kept up the courage of the Romans, and tried to
draw spiritual good out of their plight. It was impossible for a
contemporary eye to see that under present wretchedness lay germinating
the seeds of empire; yet Gregory acted as if he beheld them. In spite of
apprehensions of the end of the world he organized the Church to endure
for centuries. Both at home and abroad he displayed a tireless activity.
Among the foreign events of his pontificate are the conversion of
England by Augustine (597) and the ministry of St. Columbanus (543-615)
among the Franks, Alemanni, and Lombards. It was Gregory who saw the
handsome fairhaired boys from England standing in the market-place and
said, "Non Angli sed angeli." He had the true imperial instinct, and
always encouraged the clergy in distant parts of Europe to visit Rome
and to apply to Rome for counsel and aid. The respect in which he was
held may be inferred from the titles given him by Columbanus: "To the
holy lord and father in Christ, the most comely ornament of the Roman
Church, the most august flower, so to speak, of all this languishing
Europe, the illustrious overseer, to him who is skilled to inquire into
the theory of the Divine causality, I, a mean dove (Columbanus), send
Greeting in Christ." Gregory also maintained close relations with the
clergy in Africa, and received homage from the Spanish bishops, for
Spain had recently been converted from Arianism to Catholicism. He was
by no means content to confine his dealings to the clergy, but was in
frequent correspondence with kings and queens of western Europe, as well
as with the Emperor and Empress in Constantinople. His immense energy
made itself felt everywhere. He made rules for the liturgy; and mass is
still celebrated partly according to his directions. He reformed church
music and founded schools for the Gregorian chant. He administered the
papal revenues, superintending the management of farms, stables, and
orchards. He founded monasteries, he supported hospitals and asylums.
Benedict and Gregory are the two great figures of this period, and,
though no worthy successor followed for several generations, they did
their work so well that the Papacy, like a great growing oak, continued
to spread its power conspicuously in the eyes of the world, and also,
out of sight, in the hearts and habits of men.
The relations between the Papacy and the Empire were difficult. The
Popes were subjects of the Emperor. The whole ecclesiastical
organization throughout the Empire was subject to the Imperial will,
just as the civil or military service was. The Papacy did not like this
position of subordination and resented any interference in papal
affairs. Though Odoacer, Theodoric, and Justinian had always asserted
their right to exercise a supervision over papal elections, the Popes
had never acquiesced willingly, and even in those early days showed a
marked disposition to take exclusive control of what they deemed their
own affairs. It might be supposed that the Papacy, mindful of the great
danger of a Lombard conquest of Rome, would have clung to the Empire;
but after the Lombards had become Catholics the gap between the Romans
and the Greco-Oriental Empire was nearly as wide as that between them
and the Lombards. There was a fundamental difference between the Greek
mind, floating over metaphysics and speculative theology, and the Roman
mind, bound to political conceptions and practical ends. A theology
which would satisfy a congregation in St. Sophia would not suit the
worshippers in St. Peter's. The Empire, obliged to adapt theological
niceties to political necessities, favoured any creed of compromise,
which should promote political concord and unity. Rome, with its
despotic, imperial instincts, felt that orthodoxy was its strength, and
maintained an inflexible creed. The two were an ill-yoked pair, and
quarrels were inevitable.
The relations between the Papacy and the Lombards were more simple. They
varied between war, and friendship real or feigned. In the beginning,
and even, as we have seen, in Gregory's time, there was war; but then
began the conversion of the Lombards to Christianity, and intervals of
peace followed, during which the Lombard king saluted the Pope as "Most
Holy Father," and the Pope replied "My well-beloved Son."
FOOTNOTES:
[4] _Le cronache italiane del medio evo descritte_, Ugo Balzani
(translated).