ST. DAMASUS AND THE TRIUMPH
In the year 355, the Christians of the imperial city startled their
neighbours by a series of violent and threatening demonstrations. Armed
crowds of them filled the streets, and monks and sacred virgins hid
themselves from the riot. An inquiring pagan would have learned that
the Emperor Constantius, who had waded to supremacy through a stream
of blood, was attempting to force on their Bishop and themselves the
damnable heresy of Arius. A few weeks before, Constantius had sent
his eunuch with rich presents to Liberius, suavely asking him to
condemn a certain fiery Athanasius who resisted the heresy. Liberius
had courageously refused, and, when the eunuch had cunningly left the
gifts beside the tomb of St. Peter, the Bishop had had them cast out
of the church. When the exasperated eunuch had returned to the Emperor
at Milan, the Christian community had prepared for drastic action, and
it was presently known that the civic officials at Rome had received
orders to seize the Bishop and send him to Milan. The Christians
threatened resistance, and for a few days the city was enlivened by
their turbulence. At last, Liberius was dragged from his house at night
and taken to Milan; and, since he bravely resisted the Emperor to his
face, he was sent on to remote and inhospitable Thrace. Then the
clergy, and as many of the faithful as could enter, gathered in their
handsome new _basilica_ on the site of the Laterani Palace and swore
a great oath that they would know no other bishop as long as Liberius
lived. One, at least, of the clergy set out--no doubt amidst the cheers
of the people--to accompany his Bishop into exile; this was the deacon
Damasus, who was destined to be the next Pope of prominence in the
Roman calendar.
The scene reminds us forcibly of the dramatic transformation which
had taken place since, a century before, Pope and Anti-Pope had been
sent in chains to the mines. For fifty years after that date the
_Liber Pontificalis_ is a necrology, a chronicle of gloomy life in
the Catacombs. Eleven Popes out of the thirteen who followed Urban I.
are--most of them wrongly--described as martyrs, and the record of
their actions shrinks to a few lines. At last, with Bishop Eusebius,
the chronicle brightens and lengthens; and then, under the name of
Silvester, it swells to thirty pages and glows with tokens of imperial
generosity. The darkest hour of the Church has suddenly changed into a
dazzling splendour.
The historical revolution reflected in this early chronicle of the
Popes is well known. For eighty years after the death of Callistus, the
hope of the faithful was painfully strained. The Decian persecution
(249-251) sent some to the heroic death of the martyr, many to the
corrupt officials who sold false certificates of apostasy, and very
many back to the pagan temples. Then another schism and another
Anti-Pope appeared; and the alliance with St. Cyprian and the African
bishops, which had at first promised aid against the schismatics, ended
in a contemptuous repudiation by the African bishops of Rome's claim
to jurisdiction. The Valerian persecution dissolved the feud in blood,
and, then, forty years of peace enabled the Roman Christians to recover
and to extend their domain. Two or three small _basilicæ_ were erected
or adapted. But, in the year 303, the new hope was chilled by the
dreaded summons of the persecutor, and, for the last time, stern-set
men and gentle maidens set out to face the headsman. Rome did not
suffer much in the next seven years of persecution, but one can imagine
the feelings of the faithful when they saw century thus succeed century
without bringing any larger hope even of a free place in the sun. And
then, in rapid succession, came the triumph of Constantine, the issue
of their charter of liberty (the Edict of Milan, 313), the imperial
profession of Christianity, the grant to the Christian clergy of the
privileges of Roman priests, and the building of large _basilicæ_
and scattering of gold and silver over their marble altars. Even the
transfer of the court to Constantinople hardly dimmed the new hope.
It remained "a new form of ambition to desert the altars," the pagans
murmured, and no one dare thwart the zeal of the clergy.
So, by the year 355, when deacon Damasus makes an inglorious entrance
into history, Rome had a large Christian community and at least half
a dozen churches. But Christendom was now overcast by the triumph of
Arianism and an Arian Emperor, and the struggle put an insupportable
strain on the character of the faithful. At first, the prospect at Rome
was brave and inspiring. They would all be true to their martyr-bishop;
with that thrilling cry in his ears the deacon set out for Thrace. In a
very short time, he was back in Rome, having changed his mind: "fired
with ambition," his critics said. And, in another short time, the chief
deacon Felix, who also had taken the oath, listened to the Arian
court and became Bishop of Rome; and Damasus and most of the clergy
transferred their loyalty to him. Then, in two or three years, Liberius
grew tired of Thrace, and signed some sort of heretical formula, and
came back to Rome; and the bloody struggle of Pope and Anti-Pope led to
a train of sorrows which darken the life of St. Damasus.
He had been born, probably at Rome, though his father is said to have
been a Spaniard, about the year 304.[26] The father had been a priest
in the service of the little _basilica_ of St. Lawrence in the city--I
am not impressed by Marucchi's contention that he was a bishop--and had
brought up Damasus in the same service. The mother Laurentia was pious:
the sister Irene consecrated her virginity to God. Damasus became,
and remained, a deacon, and was at least in his fiftieth year when he
turned his back upon the heroic road to Thrace. He was popular in the
new Christian Rome, which Jerome describes so darkly; envious folk
called him "the tickler of matrons' ears," and even worse. But we lose
sight of him again for ten years after his first appearance.[27]
The events of those ten years are, however, important for the
understanding of Damasus and his Church, and must be briefly reviewed.
That the clergy had, in the presence of the people, sworn to be true to
Liberius, and that the majority of them broke their oath, is confirmed
by St. Jerome in his Chronicle. Jerome, a decisive authority, tells
also of the fall of Liberius, and this is also recorded by Athanasius,
who writes the whole story. When Felix consented to be made bishop,
the people were so infuriated that he had to be consecrated by the
Emperor's Arian bishops in the palace: a group of eunuchs nominally
representing the people, who raged without. Most of the clergy accepted
Felix, but a minority, with the mass of the people, refused to do so,
and, for two years, he gave his blessing to very thin congregations,
or to empty benches. Then the Emperor came to Rome, and an imposing
deputation of noble Christian ladies prevailed on him to recall
Liberius. The Great Circus provided a new sensation for its 400,000
idlers when an imperial messenger announced that henceforward Liberius
and Felix would rule their respective flocks side by side in Rome.
"Two circus-factions, so two bishops," the pagan majority ironically
replied: but the Christian laity ominously thundered, "One God, one
Christ, one Bishop." So when Liberius, "overcome by the weariness of
exile and embracing the heretical perversity" (says St. Jerome in his
Chronicle), returned to Rome, he was received "as a conqueror." His
loyal flock, finely indifferent to the way in which he had purchased
his return, lined the route as men had done to welcome a triumphing
general in the old days.
This must have been about the end of 357 or the beginning of 358,
and we shall not dwell on the scenes which followed. Felix and his
followers were driven out of the city. Getting reinforcements,
apparently, they returned and took possession of the Basilica Julii
in the Transtiberina; but the mass of the faithful, led by Christian
senators or officers, took the church by storm, and again swept them
out of Rome. The _Liber Pontificalis_ records that a number of the
clergy were slain in the battle, and, becoming hopelessly confused
between Pope and Anti-Pope, it awards these followers of Felix the
palm of martyrdom. But it appears that the Felicians were strong, and
for six years held several of the smaller churches; rival clerics and
laymen could not meet in the baths and streets without violent results.
However, Felix died in 365, and Liberius wisely adopted his clerical
supporters.[28]
Damasus remains in decent obscurity during these years, and we may
assume that he repented his mistake, and renewed his allegiance to
Liberius. But Liberius followed his rival in the next year (366) and
the real career of Damasus opened. A well-known passage in the _Res
Gestæ_ of the contemporary pagan Ammianus Marcellinus[29] tells how, by
that time, the Bishop of Rome scoured the city in a gorgeous chariot,
gave banquets which excelled those of the Emperor, and received the
smiles and rich presents of all the fine ladies of Rome; and the
querulous old soldier is not surprised, he says, that Damasus and his
rival Ursicinus (as the name runs in official documents) were "swollen
with ambition" for the seat, and stirred up riots so fierce that the
Prefect was driven out of Rome, and, after one fight, a hundred and
thirty-seven corpses were left on the floor of one of the "Christian
conventicles." Jerome,[30] Rufinus,[31] and other ecclesiastical
writers of the time place the fatal rioting beyond question, and we may
therefore, with a prudent reserve, follow the closer description given
in the _Libellus_.
As soon as the death of Liberius became known, in September, 366,
the remnant of his original supporters met in the Basilica Julii,
across the river, and elected the deacon Ursicinus, who was at once
consecrated by a provincial bishop. It was an act of defiance to
Damasus, the popular candidate, whom they were determined to exclude.
Then, say these writers, Damasus gathered and bribed a mob, armed with
staves, and for three days there was a bloody fight for the possession
of the basilica. A week after the death of Liberius (or on October
1st), Damasus marched with his mob, now effectively reinforced by
gladiators, to the Lateran Basilica, and was consecrated there. After
this, he bribed the Prefect Viventius to expel seven priests of the
rival party, but the people rescued them and conducted them to the
Basilica Liberii, or Basilica Sicinini (now Sta. Maria Maggiore), in
the poor quarter across the river. In this chapel the rebels were
at worship in the early morning of October 26th when a crowd of
gladiators, charioteers, diggers (or guardians of the Catacombs), and
other ruffians (in the pay of Damasus, of course) fell on them with
staves, swords, and axes, and an historic fight ensued. The Damasians
stormed the barricaded door, fired the sacred building, mounted the
roof, and flung tiles on the Ursicinians. In the end the corpses of one
hundred and sixty--Ammianus was too modest--followers of Ursicinus,
of both sexes, lay on the floor of the blood-splashed chapel, and
Ursicinus and his chief supporters were sent into exile.
Such is the tale of woe of the priests Faustinus and Marcellinus, and
there is no doubt whatever that for months the most savage encounters
desecrated the chapels and Catacombs of Rome. As to whether Damasus was
or was not elected in his Church of St. Lawrence in the city _before_
the election of Ursicinus the authorities are not agreed; and it must
be left to the decision of the reader whether those who secured his
triumph were really a hired mob of gladiators and diggers or a troop of
pious and indignant admirers. Jerome, whose modern biographer, Amédée
Thierry,[32] plausibly contends that he was studying in Rome at the
time, expressly says that the followers of his patron Damasus were the
aggressors, and that many men and women were slain. Rufinus is more
favourable to the cause of Damasus, but he admits that the churches
were "filled with blood."
The Emperor seems not to have been convinced by the report of the
triumphant faction, and in the following year he permitted Ursicinus
and his followers to return to Rome. But the trouble was renewed, and
the Anti-Pope was again banished. His obstinate admirers then met in
the Catacombs, and another fierce and fatal fight occurred in the
cemetery of St. Agnes, where the servants of Damasus surprised them.
It is clear that Damasus had the support of the wealthy and the favour
of the pagan officials, but his rival must have controlled a very
large, if not the larger, part of the people. The forces engaged,
and the growth of the Christian body, may be estimated from the fact
that, as Ammianus says, the Prefect Viventius was compelled to retire
to the suburbs. He was promptly replaced, in the attempt to control
the rioters, by the ruthless and impartial Maximinus, the Prefect of
the Food-distribution; and clerics and laymen were indiscriminately
put to the torture and punished. At length, in 368, one of the last of
the sober old Roman patricians, Prætextatus, became Prefect, and put
an end to the riots. The reflections of Prætextatus and Symmachus and
other cultivated pagans are not recorded, but we are told by St. Jerome
that, when Damasus endeavoured to convert the Prefect, he mischievously
replied: "Make me Bishop of Rome and I will be a Christian."
Ursicinus went to din his grievances into the ears of provincial
bishops, and there seems to be good ground for the statement in the
_Libellus_ that some of these were indignant with Damasus. It is
at least clear that Damasus went on to obtain from the Emperor a
concession of the most far-reaching character. The imperial rescript
making this concession--one of the really important steps in the
history of the Papacy and of the Church--has strangely disappeared,
but we find the bishops of a later Roman synod (in 378 or 379) writing
to Gratian and Valentinian that, when Ursicinus was banished, the
Emperors had decreed that "the Roman bishop should have power to
inquire into the conduct of the other priests of the churches, and
that affairs of religion should be judged by the pontiff of religion
with his colleagues."[33] A later rescript of Gratian indicates that
the Bishop of Rome was to have five or seven colleagues with him in
these inquiries[34]; and further light is thrown on the matter by St.
Ambrose who observes[35] that, by a decree of Valentinian, a defendant
in a religious dispute was to have a judge of a fitting character (a
cleric) and of at least equal rank. Possibly the truculent impartiality
of Maximinus was the immediate occasion for asking this privilege, and
Valentinian would not find it unseemly that bishops should adjudicate
on these new types of quarrels. But we have in this last document
the germ of great historical developments. The clergy were virtually
withdrawn from secular jurisdiction; the spiritual court was set up in
face of the secular. Moreover, if defendants were to be judged only by
their equals, who was to judge the Bishop of Rome?
Damasus at once used his powers. He convoked a synod at Rome, and we
may realize the enormous progress that the Church had made in fifty
years when we learn that ninety-three Italian bishops responded to his
summons. On a charge of favouring Arianism, which seems to cloak a
real charge of favouring Ursicinus, the bishops of Parma and Puteoli
were deposed by the synod, and they appealed in vain to the court.
Henceforward bishops--under the presidency of the Bishop of Rome--were
to judge bishops. The cultivated and courtly Auxentius of Milan was
next condemned, but he was too secure in the favour of the Empress to
do more than smile. Neither he nor his great successor, St. Ambrose,
acknowledged any authority over them on the part of the Roman bishop.
From this synod, moreover, the bishops wrote to the Emperor to ask that
secular officials should be instructed to enforce their jurisdiction
and sentences, and we shall hardly be unjust if we suspect the direct
or indirect suggestion of Damasus in their further requests. They
asked that bishops might be tried _either_ by the Bishop of Rome _or_
by a council of fifteen bishops, and that the Bishop of Rome himself
might, "if his case were not laid before an (episcopal) council,"
defend himself before the Imperial Council.[36] This bold attempt of
the Roman bishop to judge all bishops, yet be judged by none, seems
to have displeased the Emperor, who may have consulted the Bishop of
Milan. We have, at least, no indication that the privilege was granted.
But the other points were granted, and instructions were issued to
the secular officers, in Gaul as well as in Italy, apprising them of
the juridical autonomy of the Church and of their duty to enforce its
decisions. Out of his troubles Damasus had won a most important step in
the making of the Papacy.
Unfriendly critics might suggest that Damasus paid a price for these
powers. A curious passage in the historian Socrates[37] tells us that,
in the year 370, Valentinian decreed that every man might henceforward
marry two wives. The statement is often rejected as preposterous,
but we know that Valentinian had, shortly before, divorced his wife,
Severa, in favour of the more comely Justina, and it is probable enough
that he passed a law of divorce. The learned Tillemont blushes when
he finds no ecclesiastical protest at the time against this flagrant
return to pagan morals.
However that may be, Damasus, from his palace by the Lateran Basilica,
continued to strengthen his new authority and to regulate the
disordered Church. Rome still harboured numbers of rebels, and they
seem to have caused him serious annoyance by a persistent charge that,
in earlier years, he had sinned with a Roman matron. A converted
and relapsed Jew was put forward as the chief witness to the charge,
and, when the young Emperor Gratian had failed to impress Rome by
his personal assurance that Damasus was innocent, a Roman synod of
forty-four bishops professed to investigate and dismiss the accusation.
Ursicinus was now, however, living at Milan, and it is not implausibly
suggested that his insistence made some impression on the puritanical
young Emperor. The case was submitted to the Council of Aquileia in
380, at which St. Ambrose presided, and the bishops declared the
innocence of Damasus and demanded the secular punishment of his
accusers, who were now scattered over Europe. The Roman rebels then
masked their hostility by joining an eccentric, though orthodox, sect
in the capital whose ascetic leader bore the name of Lucifer. On these
Luciferians in turn the hand of Damasus fell with ruthless severity.
Their renowned Macarius, the champion faster of the time outside the
Egyptian desert, was physically dragged into court and banished, and
the "police" pursued them from one secret meeting-place to another.
It is at this time that Faustinus and Marcellinus, who had joined the
rigorous sect, addressed their _Libellus_ to the Emperors.
Over the remainder of Italy and over Gaul Damasus did not press the
virtual primacy which he had won from the imperial authorities, and the
later language of Leo and Gregory makes it advisable for us to grasp
clearly the situation in the fourth century. There was no question of
Papal supremacy. No important decision was reached by Damasus apart
from a synod, and the See of Milan was not regarded as subordinate in
authority to that of Rome; though St. Ambrose naturally expressed a
peculiar respect for the doctrinal tradition of a church that had been
founded by the great apostles. When the Spanish Priscillianists applied
to Italy for aid, they appealed, says Sulpicius Severus, "to the _two_
bishops who had the highest authority at that time." When the great
struggle with the pagan senators over the statue of Victory took place
in 382, it was Ambrose who championed Christianity, Damasus merely
sending to him the Roman petition. But Damasus knew the theoretical
strength of his position, and knew, as a rule, when to enforce it. In
378, the Emperors severed Illyricum (Greece, Epirus, Thessaly, and
Macedonia) from the Western Empire. Damasus at once contrived that
its bishops should look not to the Eastern churches but to himself
for direction and support, and from that time onward the Bishop of
Thessalonica became the "Vicar" of the Bishop of Rome.
We must leave this vague and imperfect primacy in the West, with its
secular foundations, and turn to the more interesting and adventurous
course of the diplomacy of Damasus in the East. The narrow limits
within which each of these sketches must be confined forbid me to
attempt to depict the extraordinary confusion of the Eastern Church. It
must suffice to say, in few words, that the struggle against paganism
was almost lost in the fiery struggle against heresy, and that the hand
of the Arian Valens smote the orthodox as violently and persistently
as the hand of any pagan emperor had done. The various refinements
of the Arian heresy, the lingering traces of old heresies, and the
vigorous beginnings of new heresies, rent each church into factions as
violent as those of Rome, and made each important See the theatre of
a truculent rivalry. Constantinople, or New Rome as it loved to call
itself, was the natural centre of the Eastern religious world, but it
was overshadowed by the Arian court and its growing pretensions were
watched by the apostolic churches of Antioch and Alexandria almost as
jealously as by Old Rome. The triumph over paganism had, before it was
half completed, given place to a dark and sanguinary confusion, from
the shores of the Euxine to the sands of the Thebaid.
In 371 St. Basil appealed to Damasus for assistance. He sent the
deacon Dorotheus with a letter[38] asking the Italians to send to the
East visitors who might report to them the condition of the churches.
Damasus, not flattered by the lowliness of the embassy or by the
smallness of the request, and still much occupied in the West, merely
sent his deacon Sabinus. To a further impassioned appeal from Basil
he gave no clearer promise of aid, and Basil indignantly observed
that it was useless to appeal to "a proud and haughty man who sits on
a lofty throne and cannot hear those who tell him the truth on the
ground below."[39] Basil made further futile appeals to the West,
though not to Damasus, and at length, in 381, the Eastern bishops met
in the Council of Constantinople, discussed their own affairs, and,
in a famous canon, awarded the See of Constantinople a primacy in the
East. Shortly afterwards a synod was held in Italy, under Ambrose,
and it sent to the Emperor Theodosius a letter in which the concern
of the Italians was plainly expressed.[40] The bishops ask Theodosius
to assist in convoking an Ecumenical Council at Rome, and say that
"it seems not unworthy that they [the Eastern bishops] should submit
to the Bishop of Rome and the other Italian bishops"; though they "do
not claim any prerogative of judgment." It is interesting to note at
this stage how the Bishop of Rome does not yet stand apart from the
other Italian bishops or claim jurisdiction over the East. In a letter
written by Damasus somewhere about this time to certain oriental
bishops, there is question of "reverence for the Apostolic See" and
of the foundation of that See by Peter, but such language is rare and
premature, and is not implausibly ascribed to St. Jerome, who was then
at Rome.[41] To the Eastern emperor and to the Eastern patriarchs it is
not addressed.
Theodosius ignored the request, and sanctioned the holding of another
Council at Constantinople. The Westerns had, in the meantime, announced
an Ecumenical Council at Rome for the summer of 382, and invited their
Eastern brethren. From one cause or other, the proceedings at Rome were
delayed, and, while the Italians still anxiously awaited the response
to their invitation, a letter came with the message that the Eastern
bishops had settled the questions in dispute, and they regretted that
they had not "the wings of a dove" in order that they might fly from
"the great city of Constantinople" to "the great city of Rome." The
letter is a model of polite and exquisite irony.[42] The statesmanship
of Damasus had hopelessly miscarried, and the Eastern and Western
branches of Christendom were farther than ever from uniting under his
presidency.
A more intimate aspect of the character of Damasus is disclosed when
we consider the condition of the Roman clergy during his Pontificate.
It almost suffices to recall that an imperial rescript of the year 370
forbade priests and monks to visit the houses of widows and orphans,
and declared that legacies to them were invalid. St. Jerome himself
deplores that there were solid reasons for thus depriving the clergy
of a privilege which every gladiator enjoyed, and that the law was
shamefully frustrated by donations.[43] Indeed, in 372, the law was
extended to nuns and bishops, and for nearly a hundred years the Roman
clergy bore the stigma which was implied by such a prohibition.
Jerome's letters ruthlessly depict the condition of the Roman
community. Fresh from his austerities in the desert of Chalcidia, the
impulsive monk was as ready to denounce vice as to encourage virtue,
and evidences of singular laxity mingle with heroic virtue in his vivid
pages. On the one hand he directed, in the sobered palace of Marcella
on the Aventine, a group of noble dames in the practice of the most
rigorous piety and the cultivation of sacred letters. The populace even
threatened to fling him into the river, when the lovely and high-born
Blesilla terminated her austerities by a premature death, and even
Christian writers fiercely contested this introduction into Rome of
the ideals of the Egyptian desert. But, on the other hand, Jerome's
directions to his pupils incidentally betray that, beyond his little
school of virtue and learning, he saw nothing but sin and worldliness.
In plain and crude speech he warns his pupils to shun their Christian
neighbours and distrust the priests. Sombre as are many of the letters
which Seneca wrote in the days of Nero, not one of them can compare
with Jerome's lengthy letter to the gentle maiden Eustochium.[44] He
fills her virgin mind with a comprehensive picture of frailty and
frivolity, and tells her that she may regard, not as a Christian,
but as a Manichæan, any austere-looking woman whom she may meet on
the streets of Rome. He denounces "the new genus of concubines," the
"spiritual brothers and sisters," who share the same house, even the
same bed, and, if you protest, complain that you are evil-minded.
Eustochium is to avoid gatherings of Christian women, and must never be
alone with these clerics, who, exquisitely dressed, their hair curled
and oiled, their fingers glittering with rings, spend the livelong day
wheedling presents out of their wealthy admirers. I omit the graver
details given in this and other letters of the outraged monk.
The impartial historian cannot regard with reserve the criticisms which
Ammianus passed on his pagan fellows and then literally accept Jerome's
more severe strictures on his fellow-Christians. There is exaggeration
on both sides. Yet no one now questions that the Christian community at
Rome, lay and clerical, had in the days of Damasus fallen far below its
ideals, and it is not pleasant that we find little or no trace of an
episcopal struggle against this corruption. It is sometimes said that
the rescript which prevented priests from inheriting was passed at the
request of the Pope. For this statement there is no historical ground
whatever, and it is in the highest degree improbable. It is clear that
prosperity had lowered the character of the Church, from its bishop
down to its grave-diggers; and the laments of St. Ambrose at Milan,
of St. Chrysostom at Antioch and Constantinople, and of St. Augustine
in Africa, indicate a general relaxation. The Roman world must pass
through another severe and searching trial before men like Leo I. and
Gregory I. arise in it.
This conception of Damasus as a courtly and lenient prelate is not
materially modified when we regard his more strictly religious work.
He restored the Church of St. Lawrence, in which he and his father had
served: he built a tiny _basilica_--little more than a princely tomb
for himself, Marucchi believes--on the Via Ardeatina: he erected a new
baptistery at St. Peter's. These are not exceptionally impressive works
of piety in so prosperous an age.
Damasus was an artist: not--if we judge him by his _Epigrams_--a man
of much inspiration, but one who perceived the value of art in the
service of religion. Jerome tells us that he wrote in prose and verse
on the beauty of virginity, but we know his very modest poetical talent
only from the surviving fifty or sixty inscriptions with which he
adorned the graves of the martyrs or the chapels.[45] He had a genuine
passion for the adornment and popularization of the Catacombs. They
were already falling into decay, and Damasus cleared the galleries,
made new air-shafts, and decorated the more important chambers with
marble slabs and silver rails. No doubt he did this in part with a view
to attracting the pagans, but there can be little doubt that he had a
strong personal sentiment for the work.
With the assistance of Jerome, he also endeavoured to improve the
literary standard of the Church. Jerome revised the "Old Italian"
translation of the Bible; and it seems probable that the canon of
the Scriptures which has until recently been regarded as part of a
"Gelasian Decree" was composed by Jerome, under the authority of
Damasus, and promulgated by a Roman synod. The canon can hardly be due
to the pen which wrote the rambling and uncultivated list of books
which follows it; probably a later hand united the two and ascribed
them to Gelasius.[46]
The eighteen years' Pontificate of Damasus came to a close in 384. He
is not in the line of heroic Popes. He was, at his elevation, in his
seventh decade of life and his remaining energy was largely spent in
struggling against the disastrous consequences of his election. He
succeeded rather by geniality of temper and the services of others than
by strong personal exertion. But he was lucky in his opportunities.
He had control of the new wealth of the Papacy, and the Emperors with
whom he had to deal were the indifferent or undiscerning Valentinian
and the pious and youthful Gratian. Hence he added materially to the
foundations of the mediæval Papacy. One might almost venture to say
that the dogmatic Roman conception of a primacy inherited from Peter
dates from the scriptural discussions of Damasus and Jerome. They were
not the authors of that conception, but it would henceforward form the
essential part of the Papal attitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 26: His latest biographer, the learned Father Marucchi, says
305, but St. Jerome does not say that he was "eighty years old" at
death (in 384); he says, "nearly eighty." See Father Marucchi's _Il
Papa Damaso_ (1907) and _Christian Epigraphy_ (English trans. 1912), M.
Rade's _Damasus, Bischof von Rom_ (1882) is a little more critical.]
[Footnote 27: The less flattering statements about Damasus are
generally taken from a certain _Libellus precum_, or petition, which
was presented to the Emperors by two hostile, though esteemed and
orthodox, priests about the year 384. The attack on Damasus is,
however, in a preface to the petition, which was probably not put
before the Emperors. We must make allowance for bitter hostility,
but we shall find some of their strangest statements confirmed by
the highest authorities. The _Libellus_ is reproduced in Migne's
_Patrologia Latina_, vol. iii.]
[Footnote 28: The _Liber Pontificalis_, which gives these events,
first lets the schismatic Felix die in peace, and then introduces into
the series of Pontiffs a Felix II., saint and martyr! To this day the
fortunate Felix bears these honours in the liturgy. It was discovered,
in 1582, that the Anti-Pope Felix had been confused with a real saint
and martyr of that name, and the question of displacing him was debated
at Rome. But the miraculous discovery of an inscription in his favour
put an end to criticism. The genuine authorities are agreed that Felix
died comfortably in his house on the road to the Port of Rome.]
[Footnote 29: XXVII., 3.]
[Footnote 30: Year 369.]
[Footnote 31: II., 10.]
[Footnote 32: _Saint Jerome_, 1867.]
[Footnote 33: Mansi, _Sacrorum Conciliorum Collectio_, iii., 625.]
[Footnote 34: Mansi, iii., 628.]
[Footnote 35: _Ep._, xxi.]
[Footnote 36: Mansi, iii., 624.]
[Footnote 37: IV., 26.]
[Footnote 38: _Ep._, lxx.]
[Footnote 39: _Ep._, ccxv.; see also _Ep._, ccxxxix. and cclxvi., for
violent language. All the letters of the Popes, up to Innocent III.,
are in this work quoted from the Migne edition.]
[Footnote 40: Mansi, iii., 631.]
[Footnote 41: The letter is in Theodoret, _Ecclesiastical History_, v.,
10.]
[Footnote 42: Theodoret, v., 9.]
[Footnote 43: _Ep._, lii.]
[Footnote 44: _Ep._, xxii.]
[Footnote 45: The best collection is Ihm's _Damasi Epigrammata_ (1895).]
[Footnote 46: There is a third part of this "Gelasian Decree," which
assigns to the Papacy an absolute primacy derived from Peter. It is
improbable that this was due to Damasus. A letter hitherto ascribed
to Pope Sirianus (_Ep._, x. in Migne) has lately been claimed for
Damasus (Babut, _La plus ancienne décrétale_, 1904), but there is not
enough evidence to date it. It is a series of directions, better known
as _Canons of the Romans to the Bishops of Gaul_, on the subject of
clerical celibacy, fallen virgins, etc.]