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THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS
FROM ST. LEO I. TO ST. GREGORY I.
by
THOMAS W. ALLIES, K.C.S.G.
Author of the "Formation Of Christendom"; "Church and State As Seen
in the Formation of Christendom"; "The Throne of the Fisherman";
"A Life's Decision"; and "Per Crucem Ad Lucem"
London: Burns & Oates, Limited
New York: Catholic Publication Society Co.
1888
THE LETTERS OF THE POPES AS SOURCES OF HISTORY.
Cardinal Mai has left recorded his judgment that, "in matter of fact, the
whole administration of the Church is learnt in the letters of the
Popes".[1]
I draw from this judgment the inference that of all sources for the truths
of history none are so precious, instructive, and authoritative as these
authentic letters contemporaneous with the persons to whom they are
addressed. The first which has been preserved to us is that of Pope St.
Clement, the contemporary of St. Peter and St. Paul. It is directed to the
Church of Corinth for the purpose of extinguishing a schism which had there
broken out. In issuing his decision the Pope appeals to the Three Divine
Persons to bear witness that the things which he has written "are written
by us through the Holy Spirit," and claims obedience to them from those to
whom he sends them as words "spoken by God through us".[2]
If the decisions of the succeeding Popes in the interval of nearly two
hundred and fifty years between this letter of St. Clement, about the year
95, and the great letter of St. Julius to the Eusebianising bishops at
Antioch in 342, had been preserved entire, the constitution of the Church
in that interval would have shone before us in clear light. In fact, we
only possess a few fragments of some of these decisions, for there was a
great destruction of such documents in the persecution which occupied the
first decade of the fourth century. But from the time of Pope Siricius, in
the reign of the great Theodosius, a continuous, though not a perfect,
series of these letters stretches through the succeeding ages. There is no
other such series of documents existing in the world. They throw light upon
all matters and persons of which they treat. This is a light proceeding
from one who lives in the midst of what he describes, who is at the centre
of the greatest system of doctrine and discipline, and legislation grounded
upon both, which the world has ever seen. One, also, who speaks not only
with a great knowledge, but with an unequalled authority, which, in every
case, is like that of no one else, but can even be _supreme_, when it is
directed with such a purpose to the whole Church. Every Pope _can_ speak,
as St. Clement, the first of this series, speaks above, claiming obedience
to his words as "words spoken by God through us".
In a former volume I made large use of the letters of Popes from Siricius
to St. Leo. I have continued that use for the very important period from
St. Leo to St. Gregory. Especially in treating of the Acacian schism I have
gone to the letters of the Popes who had to deal with it--Simplicius,
Felix III., Gelasius, Anastasius II., Symmachus, and Hormisdas. I have done
the same for the important reign of Justinian; most of all for the grand
pontificate of St. Gregory, which crowns the whole patristic period and
sums up its discipline.
I am, therefore, indebted in this volume, first and chiefly, to the letters
of the Popes and the letters addressed to them by emperors and bishops,
stored up in Mansi's vast collection of Councils (1759, 31 volumes). I am
also much indebted to Cardinal Hergenroether's work _Photius, sein Leben,
und das griechische Schisma_, and to his _Handbuch der allgemeinen
Kirchengeschichte_, as the number of quotations from him will show. Again,
I may mention the two histories of the city of Rome, by Reumont and
Gregorovius, as most valuable. I acknowledge many obligations to Riffel's
_Geschichtliche Darstellung des Verhaeltnisses zwischen Kirche und Staat_,
with regard to the legislation of Justinian. The edition of Justinian
referred to by me is Heimbach's _Authenticum_, Leipsic, 1851. I have
consulted Hefele's _Conciliengeschichte_ where need was. I have found
Kurth's _Origines de la Civilisation moderne_ instructive. I have used the
carefully emended and supplemented German edition of Roehrbacher's history,
by various writers--Rump and others. St. Gregory is quoted from the
Benedictine edition.
As these works are indicated in the notes as they occur with the single
name of the author, I have given here their full titles.
The present volume is the sixth of the _Formation of Christendom_, though
it has a special title indicating the particular part of that general
subject which it treats. I have, therefore, added to the numbering of the
chapters in the Table of Contents the number which they hold in the whole
work.
_September 11, 1888._
NOTES:
[1] _Nova Patrum bibliotheca_, p. vi.: In Pontificum reapse epistolis tota
ecclesiae administratio cognoscitur.
[2] See p. 351 below; also _Church and State_, pp. 198-200, for the full
statement of this passage.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. (XLIII.).
THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS.
PAGE
Introduction. Connection with Volume V. St. Leo's action, 1
Denial of the Primacy as acknowledged at Chalcedon
suicidal on the part of those who believe in the Church, 3
Subject of this volume as compared with the fifth, 5
The second wonder in human history, 6
The acknowledgment of the Primacy and the political
powerlessness of the city of Rome coeval, 6
The three hundred years from Genseric to Astolphus, 9
St. Leo in Rome after Genseric, 10
Political condition of Rome. Avitus emperor, 455-6, 13
Majorian emperor, 457-461, 14
Death of Pope Leo; changes seen by him in his life, 15
Hilarus Pope and Libius Severus emperor, 461-465, 16
The over-lordship of Byzantium admitted in the choice of
the Greek Anthemius as emperor, 467, 18
Sidonius Apollinaris an eye-witness of Rome's splendour,
subjection to Byzantium, and unchanged habits in 467, 19
Anthemius murdered and Rome plundered by Ricimer, 472, 20
Olybrius emperor, 472; Ricimer and Olybrius die of the
plague, 20
Glycerius emperor, 473; Nepos, 474; Romulus Augustulus, 475, 21
The senate declares to the eastern emperor that an emperor
of the West is needless, 22
The twenty-one years' death-agony of imperial Rome, 23
State of the western provinces since the death of Theodosius I., 24
The first and the second victory of the Church, 25
The effect produced by the wandering of the nations, 26
The Visigoth and Ostrogoth migrations, 27
Gaul overrun by Teuton invaders, 28
Arianism propagated by the Goths among the other tribes, 29
Burgundian kingdom of Lyons. Spain overrun, 30
The Vandals in North Africa and their persecution of Catholics, 31
The Hunnish inroads, 33
All the western provinces under Teuton governments, 35
Odoacer and Theodorick, 36
Odoacer succeeded by Theodorick after the capture of Ravenna, 38
The character of Theodorick's reign, 39
His fairness towards the Roman Church and Pontiff, 40
The contrast between Theodorick and Clovis, 42
The dictum of Ataulph on the Roman empire, 43
Ataulph and Theodorick represent the better judgments of
the invaders, 44
The outlook of Pope Simplicius at Rome over the western provinces, 45
And over the eastern empire, 46
Basiliscus and Zeno the first theologising emperors, 47
How the races descending on the empire had become Arian, 49
The point of time when the Church was in danger of losing
all which she had gained, 50
How the division of the empire called out the Primacy, 51
How the extinction of the western empire does so yet more, 53
How the Pope was the sole fixed point in a transitional world, 54
Guizot's testimony, 55
What St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and St. Leo did not foresee,
which we behold, 57
CHAPTER II. (XLIV.).
CAESAR FELL DOWN.
Great changes in the Roman State following the time of St. Leo, 59
Nature of the succession in the Caesarean throne, and then
in the Byzantine, 61
Personal changes in the Popes and eastern emperors, 62
Gennadius succeeds Anatolius, and Acacius succeeds Gennadius
in the see of Constantinople, 64
Acacius resists the Encyclikon of Basiliscus, 65
Letter of Pope Simplicius to the emperor Zeno, 66
Advancement of Acacius by Zeno, 69
Acacius induces Zeno to publish a formulary of doctrine, 70
John Talaia, elected patriarch of Alexandria, appeals for
support to Pope Simplicius, 70
Pope Felix sends an embassy to the emperor, 71
His letter to Zeno, 72
His letter to Acacius, 73
His legates arrested, imprisoned, robbed, and seduced, 74
Pope Felix synodically deposes Acacius, 75
Enumerates his misdeeds in the sentence, 76
Synodal decrees in Italy signed by the Pope alone, 78
Letter of Pope Felix to Zeno setting forth the condemnation
of Acacius, 79
The condition of the Pope when he thus wrote, 81
How Acacius received the Pope's condemnation, 83
The position which Acacius thereupon took up, 84
The greatness of the bishop of Constantinople identified
with the greatness of his city, 84
The humiliations of Rome witnessed by Acacius, 86
How the Pope, under these humiliations, spoke to Acacius
and to the emperor, 88
The Pope on the one side, Acacius on the other, represent
an absolute contradiction, 89
Eudoxius and Valens matched by Acacius and Zeno, 92
Death of Acacius, and estimate of him by three contemporaries, 93
Fravita, succeeding Acacius, seeks the Pope's recognition, 93
Letters of the emperor and Fravita to the Pope, and his
answers, 94
The position taken by Acacius not maintained by Zeno and
Fravita, 96
Nor by Euphemius, who succeeds Fravita, 96
Euphemius suspects and resists the new emperor Anastasius, 97
Condition of the Empire and the Church at the accession of
Pope Gelasius in 492, 98
The "libellus synodicus" on the emperor Anastasius, 100
With whom the four Popes--Gelasius, Anastasius, Symmachus,
and Hormisdas--have to deal, 101
Euphemius, writing to the Pope, acknowledges him to be
successor of St. Peter, 103
Gelasius replies to Euphemius, insisting on the repudiation
of Acacius, 104
Absolute obedience of the Illyrian bishops professed to the
Apostolic See, 105
Gelasius shows that the canons make the First See supreme
judge of all, 106
Says that the bishop of Constantinople holds no rank among
bishops, 107
Praises bishops who have resisted the wrongdoings of temporal
rulers, 108
The Holy See, in virtue of its Principate, confirms every
Council, 109
Gelasius in 494 defines to the emperor the domain of the
Two Powers, 110
And the subordination of the temporal ruler in spiritual things, 111
The words of Gelasius have become the law of the Church, 113
The emperor Anastasius deposes Euphemius by the Resident
Council, 114
Pope Gelasius, in a council of seventy bishops at Rome,
sets forth the divine institution of the Primacy, 115
And the order of the three Patriarchal Sees, 115
And three General Councils--the Nicene, Ephesine, and
Chalcedonic, 115
Denies to the see of Constantinople any rank beyond that
of an ordinary bishop, and omits the Council of 381, 116
Death of Pope Gelasius and character of his pontificate, 118
His own description of the time in which he lived, 118
CHAPTER III. (XLV.).
PETER STOOD UP.
Pope Anastasius: his letter to the emperor Anastasius, 120
He makes the Pope's position in the Church parallel with
that of the emperor in the world, 121
He writes to Clovis on his conversion, 122
St. Gregory of Tours notes the prosperity of Catholic kingdoms
and the decline of Arian in the West, 123
Letter of St. Avitus, bishop of Vienne, to Clovis on his
baptism, 124
He recognises the vast importance of the professing the
Catholic faith by Clovis, 125
And the duty of Clovis to propagate the faith in peoples around, 126
How the words of St. Avitus to Clovis were fulfilled in history, 127
The election of Pope Symmachus traversed by the emperor's agent, 128
His letter termed "Apologetica" to the eastern emperor, 129
The imperial and papal power compared, 131
The papal and the sovereign power the double permanent
head of human society, 133
Emperors wont to acknowledge Popes on their accession, 134
Inferences to be deduced from this letter, 135
The answer of the emperor Anastasius is to stir up a fresh
schism at Rome, 136
The Synodus Palmaris, without judging the Pope, declares
him free from all charge, 137
Letter of the bishop of Vienne to the Roman senate upon
this Council, 139
The cause of the Bishop of Rome is not that of one bishop,
but of the Episcopate itself, 140
Words of Ennodius, bishop of Pavia, embodied in the act
of the Roman Council of 503, 142
Result of the attack of the emperor on the Pope is the recording
in black and white that the First See is judged by no man, 143
The eastern Church under the emperor Anastasius, 143
He deposes Macedonius as well as Euphemius, 144
Both these bishops of Byzantium failed to resist his despotism, 147
Eastern bishops address Pope Symmachus to succour them, 148
Pope Hormisdas succeeds Symmachus in 514, 149
His instruction to the legates sent to Constantinople, 150
The bishop of Constantinople presents all bishops to the
emperor, 157
The conditions for reunion made by Pope Hormisdas, 158
The treacherous conduct of the emperor, 159
Hormisdas describes Greek diplomacy, 160
The Syrian Archimandrites supplicate the Pope for help, 161
Sudden death of the emperor Anastasius, 162
The emperor Justin's election and antecedents, 162
He notifies his accession to the Pope, 163
The Pope holds a council and sends an embassy to Constantinople, 164
The bishop, clergy, and emperor accept the terms of the Pope, 165
The formulary of union signed by them, 167
The report of the legates to the Pope, 169
The emperor Justin's letter to the Pope, 170
Character of the period 455-519, 171
Political state of the East and West most perilous to the
Church, 172
The Popes under Odoacer and Theodorick, 173
How Acacius took advantage of the political situation, 174
The meaning and range of his attempt, 175
The Pope from 476 onwards rests solely upon his Apostolate, 176
The seven Popes who succeed St. Leo, 179
The seven bishops who succeed Anatolius at Constantinople, 180
The eastern emperors in this time, 182
The state of the eastern patriarchates, Alexandria and Antioch, 184
The waning of secular Rome reveals the power of the Pontificate, 185
The Popes alone preserved the East from the Eutychean heresy, 185
The position of St. Leo maintained by the seven following Popes, 186
The submission to Hormisdas an act of the "undivided" Church, 187
The adverse circumstances which developed the Pope's Principate, 188
CHAPTER IV. (XLVI.).
JUSTINIAN.
Sequel in Justinian of the submission to Pope Hormisdas, 189
His acknowledgment of the Primacy to Pope John II. in 533, 190
Reply of Pope John II. confirming the confession sent to
him by Justinian, 191
The _Pandects_ of Justinian issued in the same year, 192
Close interweaving of ecclesiastical and temporal interests, 193
Interference with the freedom of the papal election by the
temporal ruler, 194
Letter of Cassiodorus as Praetorian prefect to Pope John II., 195
Justinian all his reign acknowledged the Primacy of the Pope, 196
His character, purposes, and actions, 196
Succeeds his uncle the emperor Justin I., 198
Great political changes coeval with his succession, 199
He reconquers Northern Africa by Belisarius, 199
The Catholic bishops of Africa meet again in General Council, 200
They send an embassy to consult Pope John II., 201
Pope Agapetus notes their reference to the Apostolic Principate, 202
Great renown of Justinian at the reconquest of Africa, 203
Pope Agapetus at Constantinople deposes its bishop, 204
Justinian begins the Gothic War. Belisarius enters Rome, 205
He is welcomed as restorer of the empire, 206
The empress Theodora deposes Pope Silverius by Belisarius, 207
First siege of Rome by Vitiges, 210
The mausoleum of Hadrian stripped of its statues, 211
Vitiges, having lost half his army, raises the siege, 213
Belisarius, having reconquered Italy, is recalled for the war
with Persia, 214
Totila, elected Gothic king, renews the war, 214
Visits St. Benedict at Monte Cassino, and is warned by him, 215
Second siege of Rome by Totila, 216
Rome taken by Totila in 546, 216
Third capture of Rome by Belisarius, in 547, 217
Fourth capture of Rome by Totila, in 549, 218
Totila defeated and killed by Narses at Taginas, 219
Fifth capture of Rome by Narses, in 552, 220
End of the Gothic war, in 555, 221
Its effect on the civil condition of the Pope, Italy, and Rome, 222
The sufferings of Rome from assailants and defenders, 223
The new test of papal authority applied by these events, 225
Vigilius, having become legitimate Pope, is sent for by
Justinian, 226
Church proceedings at Constantinople after the death of
Pope Agapetus, 227
The patriarch Mennas, in conjunction with the emperor,
consecrates at Constantinople a patriarch of Alexandria, 228
The Origenistic struggle in the eastern empire, 229
Justinian theologising, 230
The whole East urged to consent to his edict on doctrine, 231
Pope Vigilius, summoned by Justinian, enters Constantinople, 232
After long conferences with emperor and bishops he issues
a Judgment, 234
The Pope and emperor agree upon holding a General Council, 235
The emperor's despotism, and the bishops crouching before it, 236
The Pope takes sanctuary, and is torn away from the altar, 237
Flies to the church at Chalcedon, 238
The bishops relent, and the Pope returns to Constantinople, 239
Eutychius, succeeding Mennas, proposes a council under
presidency of the Pope, 239
The emperor causes it to meet under Eutychius without the Pope, 240
Proceedings of the Council. The Pope declines their invitation, 241
Close of the Council, without the Pope's presence, 242
The Pope issues a Constitution apart from the Council, 242
Also a condemnation of the Three Chapters without mention
of the Council, 243
The Pope on his way back to Rome dies at Syracuse, 244
The patriarch Eutychius, refusing to sign a doctrinal decree
of Justinian, is deposed by the Resident Council, 244
Justinian issues his Pragmatic Sanction for government of Italy, 245
State of things following in Italy, 246
Justinian's conception of the relation between Church and State, 248
He gives to the decrees of Councils and to the canons the
force of law, 250
Three leading principles in these enactments, 251
The State completely recognises the Church's whole constitution, 251
The episcopal idea thoroughly realised, 253
Concurrent action of the laws of Church and State herein, 254
Justinian further associated bishops with the civil government, 255
The part given to them in civil administration, 256
A system of mutual supervision in bishops and governors, 257
The branches of civil matters specially put under bishops, 259
The completeness and the cordiality of the alliance with
the Church, 261
Which differentiates Justinian's attitude from that of
modern governments, 262
In what Justinian was a true maintainer of the imperial idea, 264
The dark blot which lies upon Justinian, 267
How he passed from the line of defence to that of interference
and mastery, 269
The result, spiritual and temporal, of Justinian's reign, 270
CHAPTER V. (XLVII.).
ST. GREGORY THE GREAT.
The state of Rome as a city after the prefecture of Narses, 272
Contrast of Nova Roma, 274
The Rome of the Church a new city, 275
St. Gregory's antecedents as prefect, monk, nuncio, and
deacon of the Roman Church, 276
Elected Pope against his will. His description of his work, 278
And of the time's calamity, 279
The utter misery of Rome expressed in the words of Ezechiel, 281
Contrast between the language used of Rome by St. Leo
and St. Gregory, 283
St. Gregory closes his preaching in St. Peter's, overcome
with sorrow, 284
The works of St. Gregory out of this Rome, 285
The Lombard descent on Italy, 287
Rome ransomed from the Lombards, and Monte Cassino destroyed, 290
The Primacy untouched by the temporal calamities of Rome, 292
Its unique prerogative brought out by unequalled sufferings, 293
The new city of Rome lived only by the Primacy, 294
St. Gregory's account of the Primacy to the empress Constantina, 295
He identifies his own authority with that of St. Peter, 296
Writes to the emperor Mauritius that the union of the Two
Powers would secure the empire against barbarians, 297
Claims to the emperor St. Peter's charge over the whole Church, 298
John the Foster's assumed title on injury to the whole Church, 299
What St. Gregory infers from the three patriarchal sees
being all sees of Peter, 301
Contrast drawn by St. Gregory between the Pope's
Principate and John the Faster's assumed title, 302
The fatal falsehood which this title presupposed, 303
The opposing truth in the Principate made _de Fide_ by the
Vatican Council, 306
St. Leo against Anatolius, and St. Gregory against John the
Faster, occupy like positions, 307
St. Gregory's title, "Servant of the servants of God," expresses
the maxim of his government, 308
The fourteen books of St. Gregory's letters range over every
subject in the whole Church, 309
The special relation between the sees of St. Peter and St. Mark, 311
Asserts his supremacy to the Lombard queen Theodelinda, 311
St. Gregory appoints the bishop of Arles to be over the
metropolitans of Gaul, 312
The venture of St. Gregory in attempting the conversion of
England, 313
St. Augustine commended to queen Brunechild and consecrated
by the bishop of Arles, and the English Church made by Gregory, 315
Work of St. Gregory in the Spanish Church, 316
He relates the martyrdom of St. Hermenegild, 316
His letters to St. Leander of Seville, 317
Conversion of king Rechared, 318
St. Gregory's letter of congratulation to him, 318
Letter of king Rechared informing the Pope of his conversion, 321
Gibbon's account of the government which was the result
of Rechared's conversion, 322
The important principles thus consecrated by the Church, 324
Overthrow of the Arian kingdoms in Africa, Spain, Gaul and
Italy, between Pope Felix III. and Pope Gregory I., 325
The equal failure of Genseric, Euric, Gondebald, and Theodorick, 327
The part in this which the Catholic bishops had, 329
The Spanish monarchy first of many formed by the Church, 331
Superiority of this government to the Byzantine absolutism, 332
St. Gregory as fourth doctor of the western Church, 334
St. Gregory as a chief artificer in the Church's second victory, 335
Summary of St. Gregory's action as metropolitan patriarch
and Pope, 337
Councils held by him in Rome: protection of monks, 338
His management of the Patrimonium Petri, 340
His success with schismatics and heretics, 341
The Primacy from St. Leo to St. Gregory, 342
The continued rise of the bishop of Constantinople, 343-5
The political degradation and danger of Rome, 345
Long disaster reveals still more the purely spiritual foundation
of the Primacy, 346
Testimony given by the disappearance of the Arian governments
and the conversion of Franks and Saxons, 347
The patriarchate of Constantinople imposed by civil law, 348
The Nicene constitution in the East impaired by despotism
and heresy, 349
The persistent defence of this constitution by the Popes, 350
The Petra Apostolica in the sixty Popes preceding Gregory, 352
As discerned by Hurter in the time of Pope Innocent III., 353
As in the time from Pope Innocent III. to Leo XIII., 355
The continuous Primacy from St. Peter to St. Gregory, 355
As Rome diminishes the Primacy advances, 356
The times in which it was exercised by St. Gregory, 358
The opposing forces which unite to sustain the Petra Apostolica, 359
INDEX, 361
THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS.
CHAPTER I.
THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS.
"Rome's ending seemed the ending of a world.
If this our earth had in the vast sea sunk,
Save one black ridge whereon I sat alone,
Such wreck had seemed not greater. It was gone,
That empire last, sole heir of all the empires,
Their arms, their arts, their letters, and their laws.
The fountains of the nether deep are burst,
The second deluge comes. And let it come!
The God who sits above the waterspouts
Remains unshaken."
--A. DE VERE, _Legends and Records_--"Death of St. Jerome".
I ended the last chapter by drawing out that series of events in the
Church's internal constitution and of changes in the external world of
action outside and independent of the Church which combined in one result
the exhibition to all and the public acknowledgment by the Church of the
Primacy given by our Lord to St. Peter, and continued to his successors in
the See of Rome. I showed St. Leo as exercising this Primacy by annulling
the acts of an Ecumenical Council, the second of Ephesus, legitimately
called and attended by his own legates, because it had denied a tenet of
what St. Leo declared in a letter sent to the bishops and accepted by them
to be the Christian faith upon the Incarnation itself. I showed him
supported by the Church in that annulment, by the eastern episcopate, which
attended the Council of Chalcedon, and by the eastern emperor, Marcian.
Again, I showed him confirming the doctrinal decrees of the Ecumenical
Council of Chalcedon, which followed the Council annulled by him, while he
reversed and disallowed certain canons which had been irregularly passed.
This he did because they were injurious to that constitution of the Church
which had come down from the Apostles to his own time. And this act of his,
also, I showed to be accepted by the bishop of Constantinople, who was
specially affected, and by the eastern emperor, and by the episcopate: and
also that the confirmation of doctrine on the one hand, and the rejection
of canons on the other, were equally accepted. I also showed this great
Council in its Synodical Letter to the Pope acknowledging spontaneously
that very position of the Pope which the Popes had always set forth as the
ground of all the authority which they claimed. The Council of Chalcedon
addressed St. Leo "as entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the
Vine". But the Vine in the universal language of the Fathers betokened the
whole Church of God. And the Council refers the confirmation of its acts to
the Pope in the same document in which it asserts that the guardianship of
the Vine was given to him by the Saviour Himself. This expression, "by the
Saviour Himself," means that it was not given to him by the decree of any
Council representing the Church. It is a full acknowledgment that the
promises made to Peter, and the Pastorship conferred upon him, descended to
his successor in the See of Rome. It is a full acknowledgment; for how else
was St. Leo entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the Vine?
Those who so addressed him were equally bishops with himself; they equally
enjoyed the one indivisible episcopate, "of which a part is held by each
without division of the whole".[3] But this one, beside and beyond that,
was charged with the whole--the Vine itself. This one point is that in
which St. Peter went beyond his brethren, by the special gift and
appointment of the Saviour Himself. The words, then, of the Council contain
a special acknowledgment that the line of Popes after a succession of four
hundred years sat in the person of Leo on the seat of St. Peter, with St.
Peter's one sovereign prerogative.
It is requisite, I think, distinctly to point out that Christians, whoever
they are, provided only that they admit, as confessing belief in any one of
the three creeds, the Apostolic, the Nicene, or the Athanasian, they do
admit, that there is one holy Catholic Church, commit a suicidal act in
denying the Primacy as acknowledged by the Church at the Council of
Chalcedon. For such a denial destroys the authority of the Church herself
both in doctrine and discipline for all subsequent time. If the Church, in
declaring St. Leo to be entrusted by our Lord with the guardianship of the
Vine, erred; if she asserted a falsehood, or if she favoured an usurpation,
how can she be trusted for any maintenance of doctrine, for any
administration of sacraments, for any exercise of authority? This
consideration does not touch those who believe in no Church at all. They
are in the position of that individual whom the great Constantine
recommended to take a ladder and mount to heaven by himself. But it touches
all who profess to believe in an episcopate, in councils, in sacraments, in
an organised Church, in authority deposited in that Church, and, finally,
in history and in historical Christianity. To all such it may surely be
said, as the simplest enunciation of reasoning, that they cannot profess
belief in the Church which the Creed proclaims while they accept or reject
its authority as they please. Or to localise a general expression: A man
does not follow the doctrine of St. Augustine if he accepts his
condemnation of Pelagius, but denies that unity of the Church in
maintaining which St. Augustine spent his forty years of teaching. The
action of all such persons in the eyes of the world without amounts to
this, that by denying the Primacy they disprove the existence of the
Church. Their negation goes to the profit of total unbelief. Asserters of
the Church's division are pioneers of infidelity, for who can believe in
what has fallen? or is the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ a kingdom
divided against itself? They who maintain schism generate agnostics.
But I was prevented on a former occasion by want of space from dwelling
with due force upon some circumstances of St. Leo's life. These are such as
to make his time an era. I was occupied during a whole volume with the
attempt to set forth in some sort the action of St. Peter's See upon the
Greek and Roman world from the day of Pentecost to the complete recognition
of the Universal Pastorship of Peter as inherited by the Roman Pontiff in
the person of St. Leo.
I approach now a further development of this subject. I go forward to treat
of the Papacy, deprived of all temporal support from the fall of the
western empire, taking up the secular capital into a new spiritual Rome,
and creating a Christendom out of the northern tribes who had subverted the
Roman empire.
There is, I think, no greater wonder in human history than the creation of
a hierarchy out of the principle of headship and subordination contained in
our Lord's charge to Peter. It has been pointed out that the constitution
of the Nicene Council itself manifested this principle, and was the proof
of its spontaneous action in the preceding centuries, while its overt
recognition, as seated in the Roman Pontiff, is seen in the pontificate of
St. Leo.
There is a second wonder in human history, on which it is the purpose of
this volume to dwell. The Roman empire, in which the Pax Romana had
provided a mould of widespread civilisation for the Church's growth, was
at length broken up in the western half of it, by Teuton invaders occupying
its provinces. These were all, at the time of their settlement, either
pagan or Arian. There followed, in a certain lapse of time, the creation of
a body of States whose centre of union and belief was the See of Peter.
That is the creation of Christendom proper. The wonder seen is that the
northern tribes, impinging on the empire, and settling on its various
provinces like vultures, became the matter into which the Holy See, guiding
and unifying the episcopate, maintaining the original principle of
celibacy, and planting it in the institute of the religious life through
various countries depopulated or barbarous, infused into the whole mass one
spirit, so that Arians became Catholics, Teuton raiders issued into
Christian kings, savage tribes thrown upon captive provincials coalesced
into nations, while all were raised together into, not a restored empire of
Augustus, but an empire holy as well as Roman, whose chief was the Church's
defender (_advocatus ecclesiae_), whose creator was the Roman Peter.
It is not a little remarkable that this signal recognition by the Fourth
General Council of the Roman Pontiff's authority coincided in time with the
utter powerlessness to which Rome as a city was reduced. That city, on
whose glory as queen of nations and civiliser of the earth her own bishop
had dwelt with all the fondness of a Roman, when, year by year, on the
least of St. Peter and St. Paul, he addressed the assembled episcopate of
Italy, ran twice, in his own time, the most imminent danger of ceasing to
exist. Italy was absolutely without an army to give her strongest cities a
chance of resisting the desolation of Attila. Rome was without a force
raised to save it from the pitiless robbery of Genseric. Without escort,
and defended only by his spiritual character, Leo went forth to appeal
before Attila for mercy to a heathen Mongol. There is no record of what
passed at that interview. Only the result is known. The conqueror, who had
swept with remorseless cruelty the whole country from the Euxine to the
Adriatic Sea, who was now bent upon the seizure of Italy itself, and in his
course had just destroyed Aquileia, was at Mantua marching upon Rome. His
intention was proclaimed to crown all his acts of destruction with that of
Rome. This was the dowry which he proposed to take for the hand of the last
great emperor's granddaughter, proffered to him by the hapless Honoria
herself. At the word of Leo the Scourge of God gave up his prey: he turned
back from Italy, and relinquished Rome, and Leo returned to his seat. In
the course of the next three years he confirmed, at the eastern emperor's
repeated request, the doctrinal decrees of the great Council; but he
humbled likewise the arrogance of Anatolius, and not all the loyalty of
Marcian, not all the devotion of the empress and saint Pulcheria, could
induce him to exalt the bishop of the eastern capital at the expense of the
Petrine hierarchy. But during those same three years he saw, in Rome
itself, Honoria's brother, the grandson of Theodosius, destroy his own
throne, and thereupon the murderer of an emperor compel his widow to
accept him in her husband's place, in the first days of her sorrow. He
saw, further, that daughter of Theodosius and Eudoxia, when she learnt that
the usurper of her husband's throne was likewise his murderer, call in the
Vandal from Carthage to avenge her double dishonour. This was the Rome
which awaited, trembling and undefended, the most profligate of armies, led
by the most cruel of persecutors. Once more St. Leo, stripped of all human
aid, went forth with his clergy on the road to the port by which Genseric
was advancing, to plead before an Arian pirate for the preservation of the
capital of the Catholic faith. He saved his people from massacre and his
city from burning, but not the houses from plunder. For fourteen days Rome
was subject to every spoliation which African avarice could inflict. Again,
no record of that misery has been kept; but the hand of Genseric was
heavier than that of Alaric, in proportion as the Vandal was cruel where
the Ostrogoth was generous. Alaric would have fought for Rome as Stilicho
fought, had he continued to be commanded by that Theodosius who made him a
Roman general; but Genseric was the vilest in soul of all the Teuton
invaders, and for fifty years, during the utter prostration of Roman power,
he infested all the shores of the Mediterranean with the savagery
afterwards shown by Saracen and Algerine.
This second plundering of Rome was no isolated event. It was only the sign
of that utter impotence into which Roman power in the West had fallen. The
city of Rome was the trophy of Caesarean government during five hundred
years--from Julius, the most royal, to Valentinian, the most abject of
emperors. And now its temporal greatness was lost for ever. It ceased to be
the imperial city, but by the same stroke became from the secular a
spiritual capital. The Pope, freed from the western Caesar,[4] gave to the
Caesarean city its second and greater life: a life of another kind
generating also an empire of another sort. The raid of Genseric in the year
455 is the first of three hundred years of warfare carried on from the time
of the Vandal through the time of the Lombard, under the neglect and
oppression of the Byzantine, until, in the year 755, Astolphus, the last,
and perhaps the worst, of an evil brood, laid waste the campagna, and
besieged the city. St. Leo, in his double embassy to Attila and Genseric,
was an unconscious prophet of the time to come, a visible picture of three
hundred years as singular in their conflict and their issue as those other
three hundred which had their close in the Nicene Council. During all those
ages the Pope is never secure in his own city. He sees the trophy of
Caesarean empire slowly perish away. The capital of the world ceases to be
even the capital of a province. The eastern emperor, who still called
himself emperor of the Romans, omitted for many generations even to visit
the city which he had subjected to an impotent but malignant official,
termed an Exarch, who guarded himself by the marshes of Ravenna, but left
Rome to the inroads of the Lombards. The last emperor who deigned to visit
the old capital of his empire came to it only to tear from it the last
relic of imperial magnificence. But then Jerusalem had fallen into the
hands of the infidel, and Christian pilgrims, since they could no longer
visit the sepulchre of Christ, flocked to the sepulchre of his Vicar the
Fisherman. And thus Rome was become the place of pilgrimage for all the
West. Saxon kings and queens laid down their crowns before St. Peter's
threshold, invested themselves with the cowl, and died, healed and happy,
under the shadow of the chief Apostle. When the three hundred years were
ended, the arm of Pepin made the Pope a sovereign in his own newly-created
Rome. During these three centuries, running from St. Leo meeting Genseric,
the pilot of St. Peter's ship has been tossed without intermission on the
waves of a heaving ocean, but he has saved his vessel and the freight which
it bears--the Christian faith. And in doing this he has made the
new-created city, which had become the place of pilgrimage, to be also the
centre of a new world.
As Leo came back from the gate leading to the harbour and re-entered his
Lateran palace, undefended Rome was taken possession of by the Vandal. Leo
for fourteen days was condemned to hear the cries of his people, and the
tale of unnumbered insults and iniquities committed in the palaces and
houses of Rome. When the stipulated days were over, the plunderer bore away
the captive empress and her daughters from the palace of the Caesars, which
he had so completely sacked that even the copper vessels were carried off.
Genseric also assaulted the yet untouched temple of Jupiter on the Capitol,
and not only carried away the still remaining statues in his fleet which
occupied the Tiber, but stripped off half the roof of the temple and its
tiles of gilded bronze. He took away also the spoils of the temple at
Jerusalem, which Vespasian had deposited in his temple of peace. Belisarius
found them at Carthage eighty years later, and sent them as prizes to
Constantinople.[5]
Many thousand Romans of every age and condition Genseric carried as slaves
to Carthage, together with Eudocia and her daughters, the eldest of whom
Genseric compelled to marry his son Hunnerich. After sixteen years of
unwilling marriage Eudocia at last escaped, and through great perils
reached Jerusalem, where she died and was buried beside her grandmother,
that other Eudocia, the beautiful Athenais whom St. Pulcheria gave to her
brother for bride, and whose romantic exaltation to the throne of the East
ended in banishment at Jerusalem. But one of the great churches at Rome is
connected with her memory: since the first Eudocia sent to the empress her
daughter at Rome half of the chains which had bound St. Peter at his
imprisonment by Agrippa. When Pope Leo held the relics, which had come from
Jerusalem, to those other relics belonging to the Apostle's captivity at
Rome on his martyrdom, they grew together and became one chain of
thirty-eight links. Upon this the empress in the days of her happiness
built the Church of St. Peter ad Vincula to receive so touching a memorial
of the Apostle who escaped martyrdom at Jerusalem to find it at Rome. Upon
his delivery by the angel "from all the expectation of the people of the
Jews," he "went to another place". There, to use the words of his own
personal friend and second successor at Antioch, he founded "the church
presiding over charity in the place of the country of the Romans,"[6] and
there he was to find his own resting-place. The church was built to guard
the emblems of the two captivities. The heathen festival of Augustus, which
used to be kept on the 1st August at the spot where the church was founded,
became for all Christendom the feast of St. Peter's Chains.[7]
In the life of St. Leo by Anastasius, we read that after the Vandal ruin he
supplied the parish churches of Rome with silver plate from the six silver
vessels, weighing each a hundred pounds, which Constantine had given to the
basilicas of the Lateran, of St. Peter, and of St. Paul, two to each. These
churches were spared the plundering to which every other building was
subjected. But the buildings of Rome were not burnt, though even senatorian
families were reduced to beggary, and the population was diminished through
misery and flight, besides those who were carried off to slavery.
At this point of time the grandeur of Trajan's city[8] began to pass into
the silence and desolation which St. Gregory in after years mourned over in
the words of Jeremias on ruined Jerusalem.
Let us go back with Leo to his patriarchal palace, and realise if we can
the condition of things in which he dwelt at home, as well as the condition
throughout all the West of the Church which his courage had saved from
heresy.
The male line of Theodosius had ended with the murder of Valentinian in the
Campus Martius, March 16, 455. Maximus seized his throne and his widow, and
was murdered in the streets of Rome in June, 455, at the end of
seventy-seven days. When Genseric had carried off his spoil, the throne of
the western empire, no longer claimed by anyone of the imperial race,
became a prey to ambitious generals. The first tenant of that throne was
Avitus, a nobleman from Gaul, named by the influence of the Visigothic
king, Theodorich of Toulouse. He assumed the purple at Arles, on the 10th
July, 455. The Roman senate, which clung to its hereditary right to name
the princes, accepted him, not being able to help itself, on the 1st
January, 456; his son-in-law, Sidonius Apollinaris, delivered the
customary panegyric, and was rewarded with a bronze statue in the forum of
Trajan, which we thus know to have escaped injury from the raid of
Genseric. But at the bidding of Ricimer, who had become the most powerful
general, the senate deposed Avitus; he fled to his country Auvergne, and
was killed on the way in September, 456.
All power now lay in the hands of Ricimer. He was by his father a Sueve; by
his mother, grandson of Wallia, the Visigothic king at Toulouse. With him
began that domination of foreign soldiery which in twenty years destroyed
the western empire. Through his favour the senator Majorian was named
emperor in the spring of 457. The senate, the people, the army, and the
eastern emperor, Leo I., were united in hailing his election. He is
described as recalling by his many virtues the best Roman emperors. In his
letter to the senate, which he drew up after his election in Ravenna, men
thought they heard the voice of Trajan. An emperor who proposed to rule
according to the laws and tradition of the old time filled Rome with joy.
All his edicts compelled the people to admire his wisdom and goodness. One
of these most strictly forbade the employment of the materials from older
buildings, an unhappy custom which had already begun, for, says the special
historian of the city, the time had already come when Rome, destroying
itself, was made use of as a great chalk-pit and marble quarry;[9] and for
such it served the Romans themselves for more than a thousand years. They
were the true barbarians who destroyed their city.
But Majorian was unable to prevent the ruin either of city or of state. He
had made great exertions to punish Genseric by reconquering Africa. They
were not successful; Ricimer compelled him to resign on the 2nd of August,
461, and five days afterwards he died by a death of which is only known
that it was violent. A man, says Procopius, upright to his subjects,
terrible to his enemies, who surpassed in every virtue all those who before
him had reigned over the Romans.
Three months after Majorian, died Pope St. Leo. First of his line to bear
the name of Great, who twice saved his city, and once, by the express
avowal of a successor, the Church herself, Leo carried his crown of thorns
one-and-twenty years, and has left no plaint to posterity of the calamities
witnessed by him in that long pontificate. Majorian was the fourth
sovereign whom in six years and a half he had seen to perish by violence. A
man with so keen an intellectual vision, so wise a measure of men and
things, must have fathomed to its full extent the depth of moral corruption
in the midst of which the Church he presided over fought for existence.
This among his own people. But who likewise can have felt, as he did, the
overmastering flood of northern tribes--_vis consili expers_--which had
descended on the empire in his own lifetime. As a boy he must have known
the great Theodosius ruling by force of mind that warlike but savage host
of Teuton mercenaries. In his one life, Visigoth and Ostrogoth, Vandal and
Herule, Frank and Aleman, Burgundian and Sueve, instead of serving Rome as
soldiers in the hand of one greater than themselves, had become masters of
a perishing world's mistress; and the successor of Peter was no longer safe
in the Roman palace which the first of Christian emperors had bestowed upon
the Church's chief bishop. Instead of Constantine and Theodosius, Leo had
witnessed Arcadius and Honorius; instead of emperors the ablest men of
their day, who could be twelve hours in the saddle at need, emperors who
fed chickens or listened to the counsel of eunuchs in their palace. Even
this was not enough. He had seen Stilicho and Aetius in turn support their
feeble sovereigns, and in turn assassinated for that support; and the depth
of all ignominy in a Valentinian closing the twelve hundred years of Rome
with the crime of a dastard, followed by Genseric, who was again to be
overtopped by Ricimer, while world and Church barely escape from Attila's
uncouth savagery. But Leo in his letters written in the midst of such
calamities, in his sermons spoken from St. Peter's chair, speaks as if he
were addressing a prostrate world with the inward vision of a seer to whom
the triumph of the heavenly Jerusalem is clearly revealed, while he
proclaims the work of the City of God on earth with equal assurance.
Hilarus in that same November, 461, succeeded to the apostolic chair.
Hilarus was that undaunted Roman deacon and legate who with difficulty
saved his life at the Robber-Council of Ephesus, where St. Flavian, bishop
of Constantinople, was beaten to death by the party of Dioscorus, and who
carried to St. Leo a faithful report of that Council's acts. At the same
time the Lucanian Libius Severus succeeded to the throne. All that is known
of him is that he was an inglorious creature of Ricimer, and prolonged a
government without record until the autumn of 465, when his maker got tired
of him. He disappeared, and Ricimer ruled alone for nearly two years. Yet
he did not venture to end the empire with a stroke of violence, or change
the title of Patricius, bestowed upon him by the eastern emperor, for that
of king. In this death-struggle of the realm the senate showed courage. The
Roman fathers in their corporate capacity served as a last bond of the
State as it was falling to pieces; and Sidonius Apollinaris said of them
that they might rank as princes with the bearer of the purple, only, he
adds significantly, if we put out of question the armed force.[10] The
protection of the eastern emperor, Leo I., helped them in this resistance
to Ricimer. The national party in Rome itself called on the Greek emperor
for support. The utter dissolution of the western empire, when German
tribes, Burgundians, Franks, Visigoths, and Vandals, had taken permanent
possession of its provinces outside of Italy, while the violated dignity of
Rome sank daily into greater impotence, now made Byzantium come forth as
the true head of the empire. The better among the eastern Caesars
acknowledged the duty of maintaining it one and indivisible. They treated
sinking Italy as one of their provinces, and prevented the Germans from
asserting lordship over it.
At length, after more than a year's vacancy of the throne, Ricimer was
obliged not only to let the senate treat with the Eastern emperor, Leo I.,
but to accept from Leo the choice of a Greek. Anthemius, one of the chief
senators at Byzantium, who had married the late emperor Marcian's daughter,
was sent with solemn pomp to Rome, and on the 12th April, 467, he accepted
the imperial dignity in the presence of senate, people, and army, three
miles outside the gates. Ricimer also condescended to accept his daughter
as his bride, and we have an account of the wedding from that same Sidonius
Apollinaris who a few years before had delivered the panegyric upon the
accession of his own father-in-law, Avitus, afterwards deposed and killed
by Ricimer; moreover, he had in the same way welcomed the accession of the
noble Majorian, destroyed by the same Ricimer. Now on this third occasion
Sidonius describes the whole city as swimming in a sea of joy. Bridal songs
with fescennine licence resounded in the theatres, market-places, courts,
and gymnasia. All business was suspended. Even then Rome impressed the
Gallic courtier-poet with the appearance of the world's capital. What is
important is that we find this testimony of an eye-witness, given
incidentally in his correspondence, that Rome in her buildings was still in
all her splendour. And again in his long panegyric he makes Rome address
the eastern emperor, beseeching him, in requital for all those eastern
provinces which she has given to Byzantium--"Only grant me Anthemius;[11]
reign long, O Leo, in your own parts, but grant me my desire to govern
mine." Thus Sidonius shows in his verses what is but too apparent in the
history of the elevation of Anthemius, that Nova Roma on the borders of
Europe and Asia was the real sovereign.[12] And we also learn that the
whole internal order of government, the structure of Roman law, and the
daily habit of life had remained unaltered by barbarian occupation. This is
the last time that Rome appears in garments of joy. The last reflection of
her hundred triumphs still shines upon her palaces, baths, and temples. The
Roman people, diminished in number, but unaltered in character, still
frequented the baths of Nero, of Agrippa, of Diocletian; and Sidonius
recommends instead baths less splendid, but less seductive to the
senses.[13]
But Anthemius lasted no longer than the noble Majorian or the ignoble
Severus. East and West had united their strength in a great expedition to
put down the incessant Vandal piracies, which made all the coasts of the
Mediterranean insecure.[14] It failed through the treachery of the eastern
commander Basiliscus, to whose evil deeds we shall have hereafter to recur.
This disaster shook the credit of Anthemius, and Ricimer also tired of his
father-in-law. He went to Milan, and Rome was terrified with the report
that he had made a compact with barbarians beyond the Alps. Ricimer marched
upon Rome, to which he laid siege in 472. Here he was joined by Anicius
Olybrius, who had married Placidia, the younger daughter of Valentinian and
Eudoxia, through whom he claimed the throne, as representative of the
Theodosian line. Ricimer, after a fierce contest with Anthemius, burst into
the Aurelian gate at the head of troops all of German blood and Arian
belief, massacring and plundering all but two of the fourteen regions. But
the city escaped burning.
Then Anicius Olybrius entered Rome, consumed at once by famine, pestilence,
and the sword. With the consent of Leo, and at the request of Genseric, he
had been already named emperor. He took possession of the imperial palace,
and made the senate acknowledge him. Anthemius had been cut in pieces, but
forty days after his death Ricimer died of the plague, and thus had not
been able to put to death more than four Roman emperors, of whom his
father-in-law, Anthemius, was the last. The Arian Condottiere, who had
inflicted on Rome a third plundering, said to be worse than that of
Genseric, was buried in the Church of St. Agatha in Suburra,[15] which had
been ceded to the Arians, and which he had adorned.
Olybrius made the Burgundian prince Gundebald commander of the forces, but
died himself in October of that same year, 472, and left the throne to be
the gift of barbarian adventurers. Three more shadows of emperors passed.
Gundebald gave that dignity at Ravenna, in March, 473, to Glycerius, a man
of unknown antecedents. In 474, Glycerius was deposed by Nepos, a
Dalmatian, whom the empress Verina, widow of Leo I., had sent with an army
from Byzantium to Ravenna. Nepos compelled his predecessor to abdicate, and
to become bishop of Salona. He himself was proclaimed emperor at Rome on
the 24th June, 474, after which he returned to Ravenna. While he was here
treating with Euric, the Visigoth king, at Toulouse, Orestes, whom he had
made Patricius and commander of the barbaric troops for Gaul, rose against
him. Nepos fled by sea from Ravenna in August, 475, and betook himself to
Salona, whither he had banished Glycerius.
Orestes was a Pannonian; had been Attila's secretary; then commander of
German troops in service of the emperors. Thus he came to lead the troops
which had been under Ricimer. This heap of Germans and Sarmatians without
a country were in wild excitement, demanding a cession of Italian lands,
instead of a march into Gaul. They offered their general the crown of
Italy. Orestes thought it better to invest therewith his young son, and so,
on the 31st October, 475, the boy Romulus Augustus, by the supremest
mockery of what is called fortune, sat for a moment on the seat of the
first king and the first emperor of Rome.
Italy could no longer produce an army, and the foreign soldiery who had
served under various leaders naturally desired the partition of its lands.
Odoacer was now their leader, who, when a penniless youth, had visited St.
Severinus in Noricum, and received from him the prophecy: "Go into Italy,
clad now in poor skins: thou wilt speedily be able to clothe many richly".
Odoacer, after an adventurous life of heroic courage, made the homeless
warriors whom he now commanded understand that it was better to settle on
the fair lands of Italy than wander about in the service of phantom
emperors. They acclaimed him as their king, and after beheading Orestes and
getting possession of Romulus Augustus, he compelled him to abdicate before
the senate, and the senate to declare that the western empire was extinct.
This happened in the third year of the emperor Zeno the Isaurian, the ninth
of Pope Simplicius, A.D. 476. The senate sent deputies to Zeno at Byzantium
to declare that Rome no longer required an independent emperor; that one
emperor was sufficient for East and for West; that they had chosen for the
protector of Italy Odoacer, a man skilled in the arts of peace as well as
war, and besought Zeno to entrust him with the dignity of Patricius and the
government of Italy. The deposed Nepos also sent a petition to Zeno to
restore him. Zeno replied to the senate that of the two emperors whom he
had sent to them, they had deposed Nepos and killed Anthemius. But he
received the diadem and the imperial jewels of the western empire, and kept
them in his palace. He endured the usurper who had taken possession of
Italy until he was able to put him down, and so, in his letters to Odoacer,
invested him with the title of "Patricius of the Romans," leaving the
government of Italy to a German commander under his imperial authority. So
the division into East and West was cancelled: Italy as a province belonged
still to the one emperor, who was seated at Byzantium. In theory, the unity
of Constantine's time was restored; in fact, Rome and the West were
surrendered to Teuton invaders.[16] This was the last stroke: the mighty
members of the great mother--Gaul, and Spain, and Britain, and Africa, and
Illyricum--had been severed from her. Now, the head, discrowned and
impotent, submitted to the rule of Odoacer the Herule. The Byzantine
supremacy remained in keeping for future use. It had been acknowledged from
the death of Honorius in 423, when Galla Placidia had become empress and
her son emperor by the gift and the army of Theodosius II.
The agony of imperial Rome lasted twenty-one years. Valentinian III. was
reigning in 455: in the March of that year he was murdered, and succeeded
by Maximus, who was murdered in June; then by Avitus in July, who was
murdered in October, 456. Majorianus followed in 457, and reigned till
August, 461: he was followed by Libius Severus in November, who lasted four
years, till November, 465. After an interregnum of eighteen months, in
which Ricimer practically ruled, Anthemius was brought from Byzantium in
April, 467, and continued till July, 472; but Anicius Olybrius again was
brought from Byzantium, reigned for a few months in 472, and died of the
plague in October. In 473, Glycerius was put up for emperor; in 474, he
gave place to Nepos, the third brought from Byzantium. In 475, Romulus
Augustus appears, to disappear in 476, and end his life in retirement at
the Villa of Lucullus by Naples, once the seat of Rome's most luxurious
senator.
Eighty years had now passed since the death of Theodosius. In the course of
these years the realm which he had saved from dissolution after the defeat
and death of Valens near Adrianople, and had preserved during fifteen years
by wisdom in council and valour in war, and still more by his piety, when
once his protecting hand and ruling mind were withdrawn, fell to pieces in
the West, and was scarcely saved in the East. Let us take the last five
years of St. Leo, which follow on the raid of Genseric, in order to
complete the sketch just given of Rome's political state, by showing the
condition of the great provinces which belonged to Leo's special
patriarchate. I have before noticed how it was in the interval between the
retirement of Attila from Rome at the prayer of St. Leo and the seizure of
Rome by Genseric at the solicitation of the miserable empress Eudoxia, when
St. Leo could save only the lives of his people, that he confirmed the
Fourth Ecumenical Council. Not only was he entreated to do this by the
emperor Marcian: the Council itself solicited the confirmation of its acts,
which for that purpose were laid before him, while it made the most
specific confession of his authority as the one person on earth entrusted
by the Lord with His vineyard. From the particular time and the
circumstances under which these events took place, one may infer a special
intention of the Divine Providence. This was that the whole Roman empire,
while it still subsisted, the two emperors, one of whom was on the point of
disappearing, and the whole episcopate, in the most solemn form, should
attest the Roman bishop's universal pastorship. For a great period was
ending, the period of the Graeco-Roman civilisation, from which, after
three centuries of persecution, the Church had obtained recognition. And a
great period was beginning, when the wandering of the nations had prepared
for the Church another task. The first had been to obtain the conversion
of nations linked by the bond of one temporal rule, enjoying the highest
degree of culture and knowledge then existing, but deeply tainted by the
corruption of effete refinement. The second was to exalt rough, sturdy,
barbarian natures, whose bride was the sword and human life their prey,
first to the virtues of the civil state, and next to the higher life of
Christian charity, and thus to link them, who had known only violent
repulsion and perpetual warfare among themselves, in not a temporal but a
spiritual bond. The majestic figure of St. Leo expressed the completion of
the first task. It also symbolises the beneficent power which in the course
of ages will accomplish the second.
The wandering of the nations, says a great historian, was of decisive
effect for the Church, and he quotes another historian's summary
description of it: "It was not the migration of individual nomad hordes, or
masses of adventurous warriors in continuous motion, which produced changes
so mighty. But great, long-settled peoples, with wives and children, with
goods and chattels, deserted their old seats, and sought for themselves in
the far distance a new home. By this the position of individuals, of
communities, of whole peoples, was of necessity completely altered. The old
conditions of possession were dissolved. The existing bonds of society
loosened. The old frontiers of states and lands passed away. As a whole
city is turned into a ruinous heap by an earthquake, so the whole political
system of previous times was overthrown by this massive transmigration. A
new order of things had to be formed corresponding to the wholly altered
circumstances of the nation."[17]
I draw from the same historian[18] an outline of the movement, running
through several centuries, which had this final result. Great troops of
Celts had, before the time of Christ, sought to settle themselves in
Rhoetia and Upper Italy, even as far as Rome. Cimbrians and Teutons, with
as little success, had betaken themselves southwards, while under the
empire the pressure of peoples had more and more increased, and Trajan
could hardly maintain the northern frontier on the Danube. In the third
century, Alemans and Sueves advanced to the Upper Rhine, and the Goths,
from dwelling between the Don and Theiss, came to the Danube and the Black
Sea. Decius fell in battle with them. Aurelian gave them up the province of
Dacia. Constantine the Great conquered them, and had Gothic troops in his
army. Often they broke into the Roman territory, and carried off prisoners
with them. Some of these were Christians and introduced the Goths to the
knowledge of Christianity. Theophilus, a Gothic bishop, was at the Nicene
Council in 325. They had clergy, monks, and nuns, with numerous believers.
Under Athanarich, king of the Visigoths, Christians already suffered, with
credit, a bloody persecution. On the occasion of the Huns, a Scythian
people, compelling the Alans on the Don to join them, then conquering the
Ostrogoths and oppressing the Visigoths, the latter prevailed on the
emperor Valens to admit them into the empire. Valens gave them dwellings in
Thrace on the condition that they should serve in his army and accept Arian
Christianity. So the larger number of Visigoths under Fridiger in 375
became Arians. They soon, however, broke into conflict with the empire
through their ill-treatment by the imperial commanders. In 378, Valens was
defeated near Adrianople; his army was utterly crushed; he met himself with
a miserable death. After this the Visigoths in general continued to be
Arians, though many, especially through the exertions of St. Chrysostom,
were converted to Catholicism. Most of them, however, seem to have been
only half Arians, like their famous bishop Ulphilas. He was by birth a
Goth--some say a Cappadocian--was consecrated between 341 and 348, in
Constantinople. He gave the Goths an alphabet of their own, formed after
the Greek, and made for them a translation of the Bible, of great value as
a record of ancient German. He died in Constantinople before 388--probably
in 381.
Under Theodosius I., about 382, the Visigoths accepted the Roman supremacy,
and the engagement to supply 40,000 men for the service of the empire, upon
the terms of occupying, as allies free of tribute, the provinces assigned
to them of Dacia, Lower Moesia, and Thrace. After this, discontented at
the holding back their pay, and irritated by Rufinus, who was then at the
head of the government of the emperor Arcadius, they laid waste the
Illyrian provinces down to the Peloponnesus, and made repeated irruptions
into Italy, in 400 and 402, under their valiant leader Alarich. In 408 he
besieged Rome, and exacted considerable sums from it. He renewed the siege
in 409, and made the wretched prefect Attalus emperor, whom he afterwards
deposed, and recognised Honorius again. At last he took Rome by storm on
the 24th August, 410. The city was completely plundered, but the lives of
the people spared. He withdrew to Lower Italy and soon died. His
brother-in-law and successor, Ataulf, was first minded entirely to destroy
the Roman empire, but afterwards to restore it by Gothic aid. In the end he
went to Gaul, conquered Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, and afterwards
Barcelona. His half-brother Wallia, after reducing the Alans and driving
back the Sueves and Vandals, planted his seat in Toulouse, which became, in
415, the capital of his Aquitanean kingdom, Gothia or Septimania. Gaul, in
which several Roman commanders assumed the imperial title, was overrun in
the years from 406 to 416 by various peoples, whom the two opposing sides
called in: by Burgundians, Franks, Alemans, Vandals, Quades, Alans, Gepids,
Herules. The Alans, Sueves, Vandals, and Visigoths, at the same time, went
to Spain. Their leaders endeavoured to set up kingdoms of their own all
over Gaul and Spain.
Arianism came from the Visigoths not only to the Ostrogoths but also to the
Gepids, Sueves, Alans, Burgundians, and Vandals. But these peoples, with
the exception of the Vandals and of some Visigoth kings, treated the
Catholic religion, which was that of their Roman subjects, with
consideration and esteem. Only here and there Catholics were compelled to
embrace Arianism. Their chief enemy in Gaul was the Visigoth king Eurich.
Wallia, dying in 419, had been succeeded by Theodorich I. and Theodorich
II., both of whom had extended the kingdom, which Eurich still more
increased. He died in 483. Under him many Catholic churches were laid
waste, and the Catholics suffered a bloody persecution. He was rather the
head of a sect than the ruler of subjects. This, however, led to the
dissolution of his kingdom, which, from 507, was more and more merged in
that of the Franks.
The Burgundians, who had pressed onwards from the Oder and the Vistula to
the Rhine, were in 417 already Christian. They afterwards founded a
kingdom, with Lyons for capital, between the Rhone and the Saone. Their
king Gundobald was Arian. But Arianism was not universal; and Patiens,
bishop of Lyons, who died in 491, maintained the Catholic doctrine. A
conference between Catholics and Arians in 499 converted few. But Avitus,
bishop of Vienne, gained influence with Gundobald, so that he inclined to
the Catholic Church, which his son Sigismund, in 517, openly professed. The
Burgundian kingdom was united with the Frankish from 534.
The Sueves had founded a kingdom in Spain under their king Rechila, still a
heathen. He died in 448. His successor, Rechiar, was Catholic. When king
Rimismund married the daughter of the Visigoth king Theodorich, an Arian,
he tried to introduce Arianism, and persecuted the Catholics, who had many
martyrs--Pancratian of Braga, Patanius, and others. It was only between 550
and 560 that the Gallician kingdom of the Sueves, under king Charrarich,
became Catholic, when his son Ariamir or Theodemir was healed by the
intercession of St. Martin of Tours, and converted by Martin, bishop of
Duma. In 563 a synod was held by the metropolitan of Braga, which
established the Catholic faith. But in 585, Leovigild, the Arian king of
the larger Visigoth kingdom, incorporated with his territory the smaller
kingdom of the Sueves. Catholicism was still more threatened when Leovigild
executed his own son Hermenegild, who had married the Frankish princess
Jugundis, for becoming a Catholic. But the martyr's brother, Rechared, was
converted by St. Leander, archbishop of Seville, and in 589 publicly
professed himself a Catholic. This faith now prevailed through all Spain.
The Vandals, rudest of all the German peoples, had been invited by Count
Boniface, in 429, to pass over from Spain under their king Genseric to the
Roman province of North Africa. They quickly conquered it entirely.
Genseric, a fanatical Arian, persecuted the Catholics in every way, took
from them their churches, banished their bishops, tortured and put to death
many. Some bishops he made slaves. He exposed Quodvultdeus, bishop of
Carthage, with a number of clergy, to the mercy of the waves on a wretched
raft. Yet they reached Naples. The Arian clergy encouraged the king in all
his cruelties. It was only in private houses or in suburbs that the
Catholics could celebrate their worship. The violence of his tyranny, which
led many to doubt even the providence of God, brought the Catholic Church
in North Africa into the deepest distress. Genseric's son and successor,
Hunnerich, who reigned from 477 to 484, was at first milder. He had married
Eudoxia, elder daughter of Valentinian III. The emperor Zeno had specially
recommended to him the African Catholics. He allowed them to meet again,
and, after the see of Carthage had been vacant twenty-four years, to have a
new bishop. So the brave confessor Eugenius was chosen in 479. But this
favour was followed by a much severer persecution. Eugenius, accused by the
bitter Arian bishop Cyrila, was severely ill-treated, shut up with 4976 of
the faithful, banished into the barest desert, wherein many died of
exhaustion. Hunnerich stripped the Catholics of their goods, and banished
them chiefly to Sardinia and Corsica. Consecrated virgins were tortured to
extort from them admission that their own clergy had committed sin with
them. A conference held at Carthage in 484 between Catholic and Arian
bishops was made a pretext for fresh acts of violence, which the emperor
Zeno, moved by Pope Felix III. to intercede, was unable to prevent. 348
bishops were banished. Many died of ill usage. Arian baptism was forced
upon not a few, and very many lost limbs. This persecution produced
countless martyrs. The greatest wonders of divine grace were shown in it.
Christians at Tipasa, whose tongues had been cut out at the root, kept the
free use of their speech, and sang songs of praise to Christ, whose godhead
was mocked by the Arians. Many of these came to Constantinople, where the
imperial court was witness of the miracle. The successor of this tyrant
Hunnerich, king Guntamund, who reigned from 485 to 496, treated the
Catholics more fairly, and, though the persecution did not entirely cease,
allowed, in 494, the banished bishops to return. A Roman Council, in 487 or
488, made the requisite regulations with regard to those who had suffered
iteration of baptism, and those who had lapsed. King Trasamund, from 496 to
523, wished again to make Arianism dominant, and tried to gain individual
Catholics by distinctions. When that did not succeed, he went on to
oppression and banishment, took away the churches, and forbade the
consecration of new bishops. As still they did not diminish, he banished
120 to Sardinia, among them a great defender of the Catholic faith, St.
Fulgentius, bishop of Ruspe. King Hilderich, who reigned from 523 to 530, a
gentle prince and friend of the emperor Justinian, stopped the persecution
and recalled the banished. Fulgentius was received back with great joy, and
in February, 525, Archbishop Bonifacius held at Carthage a Council once
more, at which sixty bishops were present. Africa had still able
theologians. Hilderich was murdered by his cousin Gelimer: a new
persecution was preparing. But the Vandal kingdom in Africa was overthrown
in 533 by the eastern general Belisarius, and northern Africa united with
Justinian's empire. However, the African Church never flourished again with
its former lustre.
But Gaul and Italy had been in the greatest danger of suffering a
desolation in comparison with which even the Vandal persecution in Africa
would have been light. St. Leo was nearly all his life contemporaneous with
the terrible irruptions of the Huns. These warriors, depicted as the
ugliest and most hateful of the human race, in the years from 434 to 441,
having already advanced, under Attila, from the depths of Asia to the
Wolga, the Don, and the Danube, pressing the Teuton tribes before them,
made incursions as far as Scandinavia. In the last years of the emperor
Theodosius II. they filled with horrible misery the whole range of country
from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. In the spring of 451 Attila broke out
from Pannonia with 700,000 men, absorbed the Alemans and other peoples in
his host, wasted and plundered populous cities such as Treves, Mainz,
Worms, Spires, Strasburg, and Metz. The skill of Aetius succeeded in
opposing him on the plains by Chalons with the Roman army, the Visigoths,
and their allies. The issue of this battle of the nations was that Attila,
after suffering and inflicting fearful slaughter, retired to Pannonia. The
next year he came down upon Italy, destroyed Aquileia, and the fright of
his coming caused Venice to be founded on uninhabited islands, which the
Scythian had no vessels to reach. He advanced over Vicenza, Padua, Verona,
Milan. Rome was before him, where the successor of St. Peter stopped him.
He withdrew from Italy, made one more expedition against the Visigoths in
Gaul, but died shortly after. With his death his kingdom collapsed. His
sons fought over its division, the Huns disappeared, and what was
afterwards to be Europe became possible.
The invasions of the Hun shook to its centre the western empire. Aetius,
who had saved it at Chalons in 451, received in 454 his death-blow as a
reward from the hand of Valentinian III., and so we are brought to the
nine phantom emperors who follow the race of the great Theodosius, when it
had been terminated by the vice of its worst descendant.
One Teuton race, the most celebrated of all, I have reserved for future
mention. The Franks in St. Leo's time, and for thirty-five years after his
death, were still pagan. The Salian branch occupied the north of Gaul, and
the Ripuarians were spread along the Rhine, about Cologne. Their paganism
had prevented them from being touched by the infection of the Arian heresy,
common to all the other tribes, so that the Arian religion was the mark of
the Teutonic settler throughout the West, and the Catholic that of the
Roman provincials.
Thus when, in the year 476, the Roman senate, at Odoacer's bidding,
exercised for the last time its still legal prerogative of naming the
emperor, by declaring that no emperor of the West was needed, and by
sending back the insignia of empire to the eastern emperor Zeno, all the
provinces of the West had fallen, as to government, into the hands of the
Teuton invaders, and all of these, with the single exception of the Franks,
were Arians. They alone were still pagans. Odoacer, also an Arian, became
the ruler of Rome and Italy, nominally by commission from the emperor Zeno,
really in virtue of the armed force, consisting of adventurers belonging to
various northern tribes which he commanded. To the Romans he was
Patricius,[19] a title of honour lasting for life, which from Constantine's
time, without being connected with any particular office, surpassed all
other dignities. To his own people he was king of the Ruges, Herules, and
Turcilings, or king of the nations. He ruled Italy, and Sicily, except a
small strip of coast, and Dalmatia, and these lands he was able to protect
from outward attack and inward disturbance. He made Ravenna his seat of
government. He did not assume the title of king at Rome. He maintained the
old order of the State in appearance. The senate held its usual sittings.
The Roman aristocracy occupied high posts. The consuls from the year 482
were again annually named. The Arian ruler left theological matters alone.
But the eyes of Rome were turned towards Byzantium. The Roman empire
continued legally to exist, and especially in the eye of the Church. The
Pope maintained relations with the imperial power.
In the meantime, Theodorich the Ostrogoth, son of Theodemir, chief of the
Amal family, had been sent as a hostage for the maintenance of the treaty
made by the emperor Leo I. with his father, and had spent ten years, from
his seventh to his seventeenth year, at Constantinople. Though he scorned
to receive an education in Greek or Roman literature, he studied during
these years, with unusual acuteness, the political and military
circumstances of the empire. Of strong but slender figure, his beautiful
features, blue eyes with dark brows, and abundant locks of long, fair hair,
added to the nobility of his race, pointed him out for a future ruler.[20]
In 475, Theodorich succeeded his father as king of the Ostrogoths in their
provinces of Pannonia and Moesia, which had been ceded by the empire. He
it was who was destined to lead his people to glory and greatness, but also
to their fall, in Italy. Zeno had striven to make him a personal
friend--had made him general, given him pay and rank. Theodorich had not a
little helped Zeno in his struggle for the empire. The Ostrogoth, in 484,
became Roman consul; but he also appeared suddenly in a time of peace
before the gates of Constantinople, in 487, to impress his demands upon
Zeno. Theodorich and his people occupied towards Zeno the same position
which Alaric and his Visigoths had held towards Honorius. Their provinces
were exhausted, and they wanted expansion. Whether it was that Zeno deemed
the Ostrogothic king might be an instrument to terminate the actual
independence of Italy from his empire, or that the neighbourhood of the
Goths, under so powerful a ruler, seemed to him dangerous, or that
Theodorich himself had cast longing eyes upon Italy, Zeno gave a hesitating
approval to the advance of the last great Gothic host to the southwest. The
first had taken this direction under Alaric eighty-eight years before. Now
a sovereign sanction from the senate of Constantinople, called a Pragmatic
sanction, assigned Italy to the Gothic king and his people.
From Novae, Theodorich's capital on the Danube, not far from the present
Bulgarian Nikopolis, this world of wanderers, numbered by a contemporary as
at least 350,000, streamed forth with its endless train of waggons. At the
Isonzo, Italy's frontier, Odoacer, on the 28th August, 489, encountered the
flood, and was worsted, as again at the Adige. Then he took refuge in
Ravenna. The end of a three years' conflict, in which the Gothic host was
encamped in the pine-forest of Ravenna, and where the "Battle of the
Ravens" is commemorated in the old German hero-saga, was that, in the
winter of 493, the last refuge of Odoacer opened its gates. Odoacer was
promised his life, but the compact was broken soon. His people proclaimed
Theodorich their king. Theodorich had sent a Roman senator to Zeno to ask
his confirmation of what he had done. Zeno had been succeeded by Anastasius
in 491. How much Anastasius granted cannot be told. Rome, during this
conflict, had remained in a sort of neutrality. At first Theodorich
deprived of their freedom as Roman citizens all Italians who had stood in
arms against him. Afterwards, he set himself to that work of equal
government for Italians and Goths which has given a lustre to his reign,
though the fair hopes which it raised foundered at last in an opposition
which admitted of no reconcilement.
Theodorich[21] reigned from 493 to 526. He extended by successful wars the
frontiers of the Gothic kingdom beyond the mainland of Italy and its
islands. Narbonensian Gaul, Southern Austria, Bosnia, and Servia belonged
to it at its greatest extension. The Theiss and the Danube, the Garonne
and the Rhone, flowed beside his realm. The forms of the new government, as
well as the laws, remained the same substantially as in Constantine's time.
The Roman realm continued, only there stood at its head a foreign military
chief, surrounded by his own people in the form of an army. Romandom lived
on in manner of life, in customs, in dress. The Romans were judged
according to their own laws. Gothic judges determined matters which
concerned the Goths; in cases common to both they sat intermixed with Roman
judges. Theodorich's principle was with firm and impartial hand to deal
evenly between the two. But the military service was reserved to the Goths
alone. Natives were forbidden even to carry knives. The Goths were to
maintain public security: the Romans to multiply in the arts of peace. But
even Theodorich could not fuse these nations together. The Goths remained
foreigners in Italy, and possessed as _hospites_ the lands assigned to
them, which would seem to have been a third. This noblest of barbarian
princes, and most generous of Arians, had to play two parts. In Ravenna and
Verona he headed the advance of his own people, and was king of the Goths:
in Rome the Patricius sought to protect and maintain. When, in 500, he
visited Rome, he was received before its gates by the senate, the clergy,
the people, and welcomed like an emperor of the olden time. Arian as he
was, he prayed in St. Peter's, like the orthodox emperors of the line of
Theodosius, at the Apostle's tomb. Before the senate-house, in the forum,
Boethius greeted him with a speech. The German king admired the forum of
Trajan, as the son of Constantine, 143 years before, had admired it.
Statues in the interval had not ceased to adorn it. Romans and Franks,
heathens and Christians, alike were there: Merobaudes, the Gallic general;
Claudian, the poet from Egypt, the worshipper of Stilicho, in verses almost
worthy of Virgil; Sidonius Apollinaris, the future bishop of Clermont, who
panegyrised three emperors successively deposed and murdered. The theatre
of Pompey and the amphitheatre of Titus still rose in their beauty; and as
the Gothic king inhabited the vast and deserted halls of the Caesarean
palace, he looked down upon the games of the Circus Maximus, where the
diminished but unchanged populace of Rome still justified St. Leo's
complaint, that the heathen games drew more people than the shrines of the
martyrs whose intercession had saved Rome from Attila. In fine, St.
Fulgentius could still say, If earthly Rome was so stately, what must the
heavenly Jerusalem be!
The bearing of the Arian king to the Catholic Church and the Roman
Pontificate was just and fair almost to the end of his reign. He protected
Pope Symmachus at a difficult juncture. His minister Cassiodorus supported
and helped the election of Pope Hormisdas. The letters of Cassiodorus, as
his private secretary, counsellor, and intimate friend, remain to attest,
with the force of an eye-witness, a noble Roman and a devoted Christian,
who was also Patricius and Praetorian Prefect--the nature of the
government, as well as the state of Italian society at that time. We hardly
possess such another source of knowledge for this century. But under Pope
John I. this happy state of things broke down. A dark shadow has been
thrown upon the last years of an otherwise glorious government. The noble
Boethius, after being leader of the Roman senate and highly-prized minister
of the Gothic king, died under hideous torture, inflicted at the command of
a suspicious and irritated master. Again, he had forced upon Pope John I.
an embassy to Constantinople, and required of him to obtain from the
eastern emperor churches for Arians in his dominions. The Pope returned,
after being honoured at the eastern court as the first bishop of the world,
laden with gifts for the churches at Rome, but without the required consent
of the emperor to give churches to the Arians. He perished in prison at
Ravenna by the same despotic command. This was in May, 526, and in August
the king himself died almost suddenly, fancying, it was said, that he saw
on a fish which was brought to his table the head of a third victim, the
illustrious Symmachus. What Catholics thought of his end is shown by St.
Gregory seventy years afterwards, who records in his Dialogues a vision
seen at Lipari on the day of the king's death, in which the Pope and
Symmachus were carrying him between them with his hands tied, to plunge him
in the crater of the volcano.
Several writers[22] have termed Theodorich a premature Charlemagne. It
seems to me that, as Genseric was the worst and most ignoble of the
Teutonic Arian princes, Theodorich was the best. The one showed how cruel
and remorseless an Arian persecutor was, the other how fair a ruler and
generous a protector the nature of things would allow an Arian monarch to
be. But in his case the end showed that the Gothic dominion in Italy rested
only on the personal ability of the king, and, further, that no stable
union could take place until these German-Arian races had been incorporated
by the Catholic Church into her own body.[23]
This truth is yet more illustrated by a double contrast between Theodorich
and Clovis. In personal character the former was far superior to the
latter. Clovis was converted at the age of thirty, and died at forty-five.
Yet the effect of the fifteen years of his reign after he became a Catholic
was permanent. From that moment the Franks became a power. In that short
time Clovis obtained possession of a very great part of France, and that
possession went on and was confirmed to his line and people. The
thirty-three years of Theodorich secured to Italy a time of peace, even of
glory, which did not fall to its lot for ages afterwards. Yet the effect of
his government passed with him; his daughter and heiress, the noble
princess Amalasuntha, in whose praise Cassiodorus exhausts himself, was
murdered; his kingdom was broken up, and Cassiodorus himself, retiring from
public life, confessed in his monastic life, continued for a generation,
how vain had been the attempt of the Arian king to overcome the
antagonistic forces of race and religion by justice, valour, and
forbearance.
It was fitting that the attempt should be made by the noblest of Teutonic
races, under the noblest chief it ever produced. Nor is it unfitting here
to recur to the opinion of another great Goth, not indeed the equal of
Theodorich, yet of the same race and the nearest approach to him, one of
those conquerors who showed a high consideration for the Roman empire.
Orosius records "that he heard a Gallic officer, high in rank under the
great Theodosius, tell St. Jerome at Bethlehem how he had been in the
confidence of Ataulph, who succeeded Alaric, and married Galla Placidia.
How he had heard Ataulph declare that, in the vigour and inexperience of
youth, he had ardently desired to obliterate the Roman name, and put the
Gothic in its stead--that instead of Romania the empire should be Gothia,
and Ataulph be what Augustus had been. But a long experience had taught him
two things--the one, that the Goths were too barbarous to obey laws; the
other, that those laws could not be abolished, without which the
commonwealth would cease to be a commonwealth. And so he came to content
himself with the glory of restoring the Roman name by Gothic power, that
posterity might regard him as the saviour of what he could not change for
the better."[24]
It seems that the observation of Ataulph at the beginning of the fifth
century was justified by the experience of Theodorich at the beginning of
the sixth. And, further, we may take the conduct of these two great men as
expressing on the whole the result of the Teutonic migration in the western
provinces. After unspeakable misery produced in the cities and countries of
the West at the time of their first descent, we may note three things. The
imperial lands, rights, and prerogatives fell to the invading rulers. The
lands in general partly remained to the provincials (the former
proprietors), partly were distributed to the conquerors. But for the rest,
the fabric of Roman law, customs, and institutions remained standing, at
least for the natives, while the invaders were ruled severally according to
their inherited customs. Even Genseric was only a pirate, not a Mongol, and
after a hundred years the Vandal reign was overthrown and North Africa
reunited to the empire. In the other cases it may be said that the children
of the North, when they succeeded, after the struggle of three hundred
years, in making good their descent on the South, seized indeed the
conqueror's portion of houses and land, but they were not so savage as to
disregard, in Ataulph's words, those laws of the commonwealth, without
which a commonwealth cannot exist. The Franks, in their original condition
one of the most savage northern tribes, in the end most completely accepted
Roman law, the offspring of a wisdom and equity far beyond their power to
equal or to imitate. And because they saw this, and acted on it most
thoroughly, they became a great nation. The Catholic faith made them. Thus,
when the boy Romulus Augustus was deposed at Rome, and power fell into the
hands of the Herule Odoacer, Pope Simplicius, directing his gaze over
Africa, Spain, France, Illyricum, and Britain, would see a number of
new-born governments, ruled by northern invaders, who from the beginning of
the century had been in constant collision with each other, perpetually
changing their frontiers. Wherever the invaders settled a fresh partition
of the land had to be made, by which the old proprietors would be in part
reduced to poverty, and all the native population which in any way depended
on them would suffer greatly. It may be doubted whether any civilised
countries have passed through greater calamities than fell upon Gaul,
Spain, Eastern and Western Illyricum, Africa, and Britain in the first half
of the fifth century. Moreover, while one of these governments was pagan,
all the rest, save Eastern Illyricum, were Arian. That of the Vandals,
which had occupied, since 429, Rome's most flourishing province, also her
granary, had been consistently and bitterly hostile to its Catholic
inhabitants. That of Toulouse, under Euric, was then persecuting them.
Britain had been severed from the empire, and seemed no less lost to the
Church, under the occupation of Saxon invaders at least as savage as the
Frank or the Vandal. In these broad lands, which Rome had humanised during
four hundred years, and of which the Church had been in full possession,
Pope Simplicius could now find only the old provincial nobility and the
common people still Catholic. The bishops in these several provinces were
exposed everywhere to an Arian succession of antagonists, who used against
them all the influence of an Arian government.
When he looked to the eastern emperor, now become in the eyes of the Church
the legitimate sovereign of Rome, by whose commission Odoacer professed to
rule, instead of a Marcian, the not unworthy husband of St. Pulcheria,
instead of Leo I., who was at least orthodox, and had been succeeded by his
grandson the young child Leo II., he found upon the now sole imperial
throne that child's father Zeno. He was husband of the princess Ariadne,
daughter of Leo I.,[25] a man of whom the Byzantine historians give us a
most frightful picture. Without tact and understanding, vicious, moreover,
and tyrannical, he oppressed during the two years from 474 to 476 his
people, sorely tried by the incursions of barbarous hordes. He also
favoured, all but openly, the Monophysites, specially Peter Fullo, the
heretical patriarch of Antioch. After two years a revolution deprived him
of the throne, and exalted to it the equally vicious Basiliscus--the man
whose treachery as an eastern general had ruined the success of the great
expedition against Genseric, in which East and West had joined under
Anthemius. Basiliscus still more openly favoured heresy. He lasted,
however, but a short time; Zeno was able to return, and occupied the throne
again during fourteen years, from 477 to 491. These two men, Zeno and
Basiliscus, criminal in their private lives, in their public lives
adventurers, who gained the throne by the worst Byzantine arts, opened the
line of the theologising emperors. Basiliscus, during the short time he
occupied the eastern throne, issued, at the prompting of a heretic whom he
had pushed into the see of St. Athanasius--and it is the first example
known in history--a formal decree upon faith, the so-called Encyclikon, in
which only the Nicene, Constantinopolitan, and Ephesine Councils were
accepted, but the fourth, that of Chalcedon, condemned. So low was the
eastern Church already fallen that not the Eutycheans only, but five
hundred Catholic bishops subscribed this Encyclikon, and a Council at
Ephesus praised it as divine and apostolical.
Basiliscus, termed by Pope Gelasius the tyrant and heretic, was swept away.
But his example was followed in 482 by Zeno, who issued his Henotikon,
drawn up it was supposed by Acacius of Constantinople,[26] addressed to the
clergy and people of Alexandria. Many of the eastern bishops, through fear
of Zeno and his bishop Acacius, submitted to this imperial decree; many
contended for the truth even to death against it. These two deeds, the
Encyclikon of Basiliscus and the Henotikon of Zeno, are to be marked for
ever as the first instances of the temporal sovereign infringing the
independence of the Church in spiritual matters, which to that time even
the emperors in Constantine's city had respected.
Simplicius sat in the Roman chair fifteen years, from 468 to 483; and such
was the outlook presented to him in the East and West--an outlook of ruin,
calamity, and suffering in those vast provinces which make our present
Europe--an outlook of anxiety with a prospect of ever-increasing evil in
the yet surviving eastern empire. There was not then a single ruler holding
the Catholic faith. Basiliscus and Zeno were not only heretical themselves,
but they were assuming in their own persons the right of the secular power
to dictate to the Church her own belief. And the Pope had become their
subject while he was locally subject to the dominion of a northern
commander of mercenaries, himself a Herule and an Arian. In his own Rome
the Pope lived and breathed on sufferance. Under Zeno he saw the East torn
to pieces with dissension; prelates put into the sees of Alexandria and
Antioch by the arm of power; that arm itself directed by the ambitious
spirit of a Byzantine bishop, who not only named the holders of the second
and third seats of the Church, but reduced them to do his bidding, and wait
upon his upstart throne. Gaul was in the hand of princes, mostly Arian, one
pagan. Spain was dominated by Sueves and Visigoths, both Arian. In Africa
Simplicius during forty years had been witness of the piracies of Genseric,
making the Mediterranean insecure, and the cities on every coast liable to
be sacked and burnt by his flying freebooters, while the great church of
Africa, from the death of St. Augustine, had been suffering a persecution
so severe that no heathen emperor had reached the standard of Arian
cruelty. In Britain, civilisation and faith had been alike trampled out by
the northern pirates Hengist and Horsa, and successive broods of their
like. The Franks, still pagan, had advanced from the north of Gaul to its
centre, destroyers as yet of the faith which they were afterwards to
embrace. What did the Pope still possess in these populations? The common
people, a portion of the local proprietors, and the Catholic bishops who
had in him their common centre, as he in them men regarded with veneration
by the still remaining Catholic population.
In all this there is one fact so remarkable as to claim special mention.
How had it happened that the Catholic faith was considered throughout the
West the mark of the Roman subject; and the Arian misbelief the mark of the
Teuton invader and governor? Theodosius had put an end to the official
Arianism of the East, which had so troubled the empire, and so attacked the
Primacy in the period between Constantine and himself. During all that time
the Arian heresy had no root in the West. But the emperor Valens, when
chosen as a colleague by his brother Valentinian I., in 364, was counted a
Catholic. A few years later he fell under the influence of Eudoxius, who
had got by his favour the see of Byzantium. This man, one of the worst
leaders of the Arians, taught and baptised Valens, and filled him with his
own spirit; and Valens, when he settled the Goths in the northern provinces
by the Danube, stipulated that they should receive the Arian doctrine.
Their bishop and great instructor Ulphilas had been deceived, it is said,
into believing that it was the doctrine of the Church. This fatal gift of
a spurious doctrine the Goth received in all the energy of an uninstructed
but vigorous will. As the leader of the northern races he communicated it
to them. A Byzantine bishop had poisoned the wells of the Christian faith
from which the great new race of the future was to drink, and when
Byzantium succeeded in throwing Alaric upon the West, all the races which
followed his lead brought with them the doctrine which Ulphilas had been
deceived into propagating as the faith of Christ. So it happened that if
the terrible overthrow of Valens in 378 by the nation which he had deceived
brought his persecution with his reign to an end in the East, yet through
his act Arianism came into possession, a century later, of all but one of
the newly set up thrones in the West.
In truth, at the time the western empire fell the Catholic Church was
threatened with the loss of everything which, down to the time of St. Leo,
she had gained. For the triumph which Constantine's conversion had
announced, for the unity of faith which her own Councils had maintained
from Nicaea to Chalcedon, she seemed to have before her subjection to a
terrible despotism in the East, extinction by one dominant heresy in the
West. For here it was not a crowd of heresies which surrounded her, but the
secular power at Rome, at Carthage, at Toulouse and Bordeaux, at Seville
and Barcelona, spoke Arian. Who was to recover the Goth, the Vandal, the
Burgundian, the Sueve, the Aleman, the Ruge, from that fatal error?
Moreover, her bounds had receded. Saxon and Frank had largely swept away
the Christian faith in their respective conquests. Who was to restore it to
them? The Rome which had planted her colonies through these vast lands as
so many fortresses, first of culture and afterwards of faith, was now
reduced to a mere _municipium_ herself. The very senate, with whose name
empire had been connected for five hundred years, at the bidding of a
barbarous leader of mercenaries serving for plunder, sent back the symbols
of sovereignty to the adventurer, whoever he might be, who sat by
corruption or intrigue on the seat of Constantine in Nova Roma.
This thought leads me to endeavour more accurately to point out the light
thrown upon the Papal power by the various relations in which it stood at
different times to the temporal governments with which it had to deal.
The practical division of the Roman empire in the fourth century, ensuing
upon the act of Constantine in forming a new capital of that empire in the
East, made the Church no longer subject to one temporal government. The
same act tested the spiritual Primacy of the Church. It called it forth to
a larger and more complicated action. I have in a former volume followed at
considerable length the series of events the issue of which was, after
Arian heretics had played upon eastern jealousy and tyrannical emperors
during fifty years, to strengthen the action of the Primacy. But assuredly
had that Primacy been artificial, or made by man, the division of interests
ensuing upon the political disjunction of the East and West would have
destroyed it. Julius and Liberius and Damasus would not have stood against
Constantius and Valens if the heart of the Church had not throbbed in the
Roman Primacy. Still more apparent does this become in the next fifty
years, wherein the overthrow of the western empire begins. Then the sons of
Theodosius, instead of joining hand with hand and heart with heart against
the forces of barbarism, which their father had controlled and wielded,
were seduced by their ministers into antagonism with each other. Byzantium
worked woe to the elder sister of whom she was jealous. Under the infamous
treasons of Rufinus and Eutropius, the words might have been uttered with
even fuller truth than in their original application--
"Suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit".
Thus Alaric first took Rome. But he did not take the Primacy. Pope Innocent
lost no particle of his dignity or influence by the violation of Rome's
secular dignity. It was only seven years after that event when St.
Augustine and the two great African Councils acknowledged his Principate in
the amplest terms. The heresy of Pelagius and the schism of Donatus were
stronger than the sword of Alaric. And only a few years later, when a most
fearful heresy, broached by the Byzantine bishop, led to the assembly in
which then for the first time the Church met in general Council since
Nicaea, the most emphatic acknowledgment of the Primacy as seated in the
Roman bishop by descent from Peter was given by bishops, the subjects of an
emperor very jealous of the West, to a Pope who could not live securely in
Rome itself.
In all these hundred years it is seen how the division of the empire
enlarged and strengthened the action of the Primacy. But this it did
because the Primacy was divine. The events just referred to, but described
elsewhere at length, would have destroyed it had it not been divine.
But this course of things, which is seen in action from the Nicene to the
Chalcedonic Council, comes out with yet stronger force from the moment when
Rome loses all temporal independence. We may place this moment at the date
of its capture by Genseric. But it continues from that time. The events
which took place at Rome in the twenty-one following years, the nine
sovereigns put up and deposed, the subjection to barbarous leaders of
hireling free-lances, the worse plundering of Ricimer seventeen years after
that of Genseric--these were events grieving to the heart St. Leo and his
successors; but yet not events at Rome alone--the whole condition of things
in East and West which Pope Simplicius had to look upon outside of his own
city, despotic emperors in the East, with bishops bending to their will,
allowing the apostolic hierarchy to be displaced, and the apostolic
doctrine determined by secular masters; Teuton settlements in the West
ruled by the heresy most inimical to the Church; the Catholic population
reduced in numbers and lowered in social position; whole countries seized
by pagans, and forced at once into barbarism and infidelity--in the midst
of all these the Pope stood: his generals were the several bishops of
captured cities, whose places were assaulted by heretical rivals, supported
by their kings. Gaul, Spain, Britain, Africa, Illyricum, Italy itself, no
longer parts of one government, but ruled by enemies, any or all of these
would have rejected the Roman Primacy if it had not come to them with the
strongest warrant both of the Church's past history and her present
consciousness.
Such was the new world in which the Pope stood from the year 455; and he
stood in it for three hundred years. The testimony which such times bear is
a proof superadded to the words of Fathers and the decrees of Councils.
But there is one other point in the political situation on which a word
must be said.
From the time named, the Roman Primacy is the one sole fixed point in the
West. All else is fluctuating and transitional. To the Pope the bishops,
subject in each city to barbarian insolence, cling as their one unfailing
support. Without him they would be Gothic, or Vandal, or Burgundian, or
Sueve, or Aleman, or Turciling,--with him and in him they are Catholic. Let
me express, in the words of another, what is contained in this fact. The
Church, says Guizot, "at the commencement of the fifth century, had its
government, a body of clergy, a hierarchy, which apportioned the different
functions of the clergy, revenues, independent means of action, rallying
points which suit a great society, councils provincial, national, general,
the habit of arranging in common the society's affairs. In a word, at this
epoch Christianity was not only a religion but a Church. If it had not been
a Church, I do not know what would have become of it in the midst of the
Roman empire's fall. I confine myself to purely human considerations: I put
aside every element foreign to the natural consequences of natural facts.
If Christianity had only been a belief, a feeling, an individual
conviction, we may suppose that it would have broken down at the
dissolution of the empire and the barbarian invasion. It did break down
later in Asia and in all north Africa beneath an invasion of the same
kind--that of barbarous Mussulmans. It broke down then though it was an
institution, a constituted Church. Much more might the same fact have
happened at the moment of the Roman empire's fall. There were then none of
those means by which in the present day moral influences are established or
support themselves independent of institutions: no means by which a naked
truth, a naked idea, acquires a great power over minds, rules actions, and
determines events. Nothing of the kind existed in the fourth century to
invest ideas and personal feelings with such an authority. It is clear that
a strongly organised, a strongly governed, society was needed to struggle
against so great a disaster, to overcome such a hurricane. I think I do not
go too far in affirming that, at the end of the fourth and the beginning of
the fifth century, it is the Christian Church which saved Christianity. It
is the Church, with its institutions, its magistrates, and its power, which
offered a vigorous defence to the internal dissolution of the empire, to
barbarism; which conquered the barbarians; which became the bond, the
means, the principle of civilisation to the Roman and the barbarian
world."[27]
In this passage, Guizot speaks of the Church as a government, as a unity.
At the very moment of which he speaks, St. Augustine was addressing the
Pope as the fountainhead of that unity; and in the midst of the dissolution
an emperor was recommending him to the Gallic bishops "as the chief of the
episcopal coronet"[28] encircling the earth. The whole structure which
lasted through this earthquake of nations had its cohesion in him--a fact
seen even more clearly in the time of the third Valentinian than in that of
the conquering Constantine.
But looking to that East, which dates from the Encyclikon of a Basiliscus
and the Henotikon of a Zeno, here the Pope appears as the sole check to a
despotic power. He alone could speak to the emperor on an equal and even a
superior footing. Would such a power not have repudiated his interference,
had it not been convinced of an authority beyond its reach to deny? The
first generation following the utter impotence of Rome as reduced to a
_municipium_ under Arian rulers will answer this question, as we shall see
hereafter, with fullest effect.
I have adduced above three political situations. The first is when the
Primacy passes from dealing with one government to deal with more than one;
the second when the Primacy has to deal with an unsettled world of many
governments; the third when it is the sole fixed point in the face of a
hurricane on one side and a despotism on the other. I observe that the
testimony of all three concurs to bring out its action and establish its
divine character. As an epilogue to all that has been said, I will suppose
a case.
Three men, great with the natural greatness of intellect, greater still in
the acquired greatness of character, greatest of all in the supernatural
grace of saintliness, witnessed this fifth century from its beginning: one
of them, during two decades of years; the second, during three; the last,
during six decades. They saw in their own persons, or they heard in
authentic narratives, all its doings--the cities plundered and overthrown;
the countries wasted; all natural ties disregarded; neither age, nor sex,
nor dignity, respected by hordes of savages, incapable themselves of
learning, strangers to science, without perception of art; the sum being
that the richest civilisation which the world had borne was crushed down by
brute force. They saw, and mourned, and bore with unfailing personal
courage their portion of sorrow, mayhap turning themselves in their inmost
mind from a world perishing before their eyes, to contemplate the joy
promised in a world which should not perish. But neither to St. Jerome, nor
to St. Augustine, nor to St. Leo, did the thought occur that this barbarian
mass could be controlled into producing a civilisation richer than that
which its own incursion destroyed. That, instead of perpetual strife and
mutual repulsion, it could receive the one law of Christ; be moulded into a
senate of nations, with like institutions and identical principles; that,
instead of one empire taking an external impress of the Christian faith,
but rebelling against it with a deep-seated corruption and an unyielding
paganism, and so perishing in the midst of abundance, it should grow into
peoples, the corner-stone of whose government and the parent of their
political constitution should be the one faith of Christ, and their
acknowledged judge the Roman Pastor; and that the Rome which all the three
saw once plundered, and the third twice subjected to that penalty, should
lose all its power as a secular capital, while it became the shrine whence
a divine law went forth; and that these hordes, who laid it waste before
their eyes, should become its children and its most valiant defenders.
Had such a vision been vouchsafed to either of these great saints, with
what words of thankfulness would he have described it. This is the subject
which this narrative opens; and we, the long-descended offspring of these
hordes, have seen this sight and witnessed this exertion of power carried
on through centuries; and degenerate and ungrateful children as we are, we
are living still upon the deeds which God wrought in that conversion of the
nations by the pastoral staff of St. Peter, leading them into a land
flowing with oil and wine.
NOTES:
[3] "Episcopatus unus est cujus a singulis in solidum pars tenetur."--S.
Cyprian, _De Unitate Ecclesiae_.
[4] Gregorovius, i. 286. "Das Papstthum, vom Kaiser des Abendlandes
befreit, erstand, und die Kirche Roms wuchs unter Truemmern maechtig empor.
Sie trat an die Stelle des Reichs."
[5] Gregorovius, i. 200.
[6] St. Ignatius, _Epistle to the Romans_.
[7] "That Roman, that Judean bond
United then dispart no more--
Pierce through the veil; the rind beyond
Lies hid the legend's deeper lore.
Therein the mystery lies expressed
Of power transferred, yet ever one;
Of Rome--the Salem of the West--
Of Sion, built o'er Babylon."
A. de Vere, _Legends and Records_, p. 204.
[8] Gregorovius, i. 208.
[9] Gregorovius, i. 215.
[10] Sidonius Apollinaris, _Epist._, i. 9. "Hi in amplissimo ordine,
seposita praerogativa partis armatae, facile post purpuratum principem
principes erant."
[11] "Sed si forte placet veteres sopire querelas
Anthemium concede mihi; sit partibus istis
Augustus longumque Leo; mea jura gubernet
Quem petii."--_Carmen_, ii.
[12] Reumont, i. 700.
[13] He says at the end of 500 hendecasyllabics (jam te veniam loquacitati
Quingenti hendecasyllabi precantur):
"Hinc ad balnea non Neroniana,
Nec quae Agrippa dedit, vel ille cujus
Bustum Dalmaticae vident Salonae,
Ad thermas tamen ire sed libebat,
Privato bene praebitas pudori".
[14] For a well-told account of this expedition and its failure, see
Thierry, _Derniers Temps de l'Empire d'Occident_, pp. 77-101.
[15] There is a strange occurrence recorded by St. Gregory in his
_Dialogues_ as having taken place in this church, which would seem to point
at Ricimer's burial in it.
[16] This account has been shortened from that of Gregorovius, i. 231-5.
[17] Giesebrecht, quoted by Hergenroether, _K.G._, i. 449.
[18] Hergenroether, i. 449-453.
[19] Reumont, ii. 6.
[20] Reumont, ii. 9.
[21] Reumont (ii. 29-42) gives an admirable sketch of the government of
Theodorich, by which I have profited in what follows.
[22] Montalembert, Gregorovius, Kurth. Philips (vol. iii., p. 51, sec.
119), remarks: "Waere Theodorich der Grosse nicht Arianer gewesen, so
wuerde, wenn er es sonst gewollt, ihm wohl nichts weiter im Wege gestanden
haben, als sich zum Roemischen kaiser im Abendlande ausrufen lassen".
[23] Gregorovius, i. 312, 315.
[24] Orosius, _Hist._, vii. 43.
[25] Photius, i. 111.
[26] Photius, i. 120.
[27] Guizot, _Sur la Civilisation en Europe_, deuxieme lecon.
[28] Edict of Valentinian III., in 447.