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The Church and the Barbarians

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Title: The Church and the Barbarians

Author: William Holden Hutton


        
Release date: August 21, 2007 [eBook #22366]

Language: English

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THE CHURCH AND THE BARBARIANS


  BEING AN OUTLINE OF
  THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH
  FROM A.D. 461 TO A.D. 1003


BY THE REV.

WILLIAM HOLDEN HUTTON, B.D.



FELLOW AND TUTOR OF S. JOHN BAPTIST COLLEGE, OXFORD

EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF ROCHESTER




RIVINGTONS

34 KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN

LONDON

1906




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[Transcriber's note: Footnotes have been renumbered sequentially and
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"Assyrians."  In such cases, check the referenced page to see which
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[Transcriber's note: The original book had side-notes in its pages'
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brackets, and preceded with "Sidenote:".]




EDITORIAL NOTE

While there is a general agreement among the writers as to principles,
the greatest freedom as to treatment is allowed to writers in this
series.  The volumes, for example, will not be of the same length.
Volume II., which deals with the formative period of the Church, is,
not unnaturally, longer in proportion than the others.  To Volume VI.,
which deals with the Reformation, will be allotted a similar extension.
The authors, again, use their own discretion in such matters as
footnotes and lists of authorities.  But the aim of the series, which
each writer sets before him, is to tell, clearly and accurately, the
story of the Church, as a divine institution with a continuous life.

W. H. HUTTON




PREFACE

It has seemed to me impossible to deal with the long period covered by
this volume as briefly as the scheme of the series required without
leaving out a great many events and concentrating attention chiefly
upon a few central facts and a few important personages.  I think that
the main results of the development may thus be seen, though there is
much which is here omitted that would have been included had the book
been written on other lines.

Some pages find place here which originally appeared in _The Guardian_
and _The Treasury_, and a few lines which once formed part of an
article in _The Church Quarterly Review_.  My thanks are due for the
courtesy of the Editors.  I have reprinted some passages from my
_Church of the Sixth Century_, a book which is now out of print and not
likely to be reissued.

I have to thank the Rev. L. Pullan for help from his wide knowledge,
and Mr. L. Strachan, of Heidelberg, of whose accuracy and learning I
have had long experience, for reading the proofs and making the index.

W. H. H.

S. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD,
  _Septuagesima_, 1906.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I                                                    PAGE
  THE CHURCH AND ITS PROSPECTS IN THE FIFTH CENTURY  . . . .    1

CHAPTER II
  THE EMPIRE AND THE EASTERN CHURCH, 461-628 . . . . . . . .    6

CHAPTER III
  THE CHURCH IN ITALY, 461-590 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   29

CHAPTER IV
  CHRISTIANITY IN GAUL FROM THE SIXTH TO THE EIGHTH CENTURY    41

CHAPTER V
  THE PONTIFICATE OF GREGORY THE GREAT . . . . . . . . . . .   60

CHAPTER VI
  CONTROVERSY AND THE CATHOLICISM OF SPAIN . . . . . . . . .   72

CHAPTER VII
  THE CHURCH AND THE MONOTHELITE CONTROVERSY . . . . . . . .   83

CHAPTER VIII
  THE CHURCH IN ASIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   93

CHAPTER IX
  THE CHURCH IN AFRICA   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  103

CHAPTER X
  THE CHURCH IN THE WESTERN ISLES  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  113

CHAPTER XI
  THE CONVERSION OF SLAVS AND NORTHMEN . . . . . . . . . . .  123

CHAPTER XII
  PROGRESS OF THE CHURCH IN GERMANY  . . . . . . . . . . . .  134

CHAPTER XIII
  THE POPES AND THE REVIVAL OF THE EMPIRE  . . . . . . . . .  143

CHAPTER XIV
  THE ICONOCLASTIC CONTROVERSY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  155

CHAPTER XV
  LEARNING AND MONASTICISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  166

CHAPTER XVI
  SACRAMENTS AND LITURGIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  176

CHAPTER XVII THE END OF THE DARK AGE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.  191

APPENDIX I
  LIST OF EMPERORS AND POPES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  205

APPENDIX II
  A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  209

INDEX  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  211




{1}

THE CHURCH AND THE BARBARIANS


CHAPTER I

THE CHURCH AND ITS PROSPECTS IN THE FIFTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: The task of the Church]

The year 461 saw the great organisation which had ruled and united
Europe for so long trembling into decay.  The history of the Empire in
relation to Christianity is indeed a remarkable one.  The imperial
religion had been the necessary and deadly foe of the religion of Jesus
Christ; it had fought and had been conquered.  Gradually the Empire
itself with all its institutions and laws had been transformed, at
least outwardly, into a Christian power.  Questions of Christian
theology had become questions of imperial politics.  A Roman of the
second century would have wondered indeed at the transformation which
had come over the world he knew: it seemed as if the kingdoms of the
earth had become the kingdoms of the Lord and of His Christ.  But also
it seemed that the new wine had burst the old bottles.  The boundaries
of the Roman world had been outstepped: nations had come in from the
East and from the West.  The {2} system which had been supreme was not
elastic: the new ideas, Christian and barbarian alike, pressed upon it
till it gave way and collapsed.  And so it came about that if
Christianity had conquered the old world, it had still to conquer the
new.

[Sidenote: The decaying Empire.]

Now before the Church in the fifth century there were set several
powers, interests, duties, with which she was called upon to deal; and
her dealing with them was the work of the next five centuries.  They
were,--the Empire, Christian, but obsolescent; the new nations, still
heathen, which were struggling for territory within the bounds of the
Empire, and for sway over the imperial institutions; the distant tribes
untouched by the message of Christ; and the growth, within the Church
itself, of new and great organisations, which were destined in great
measure to guide and direct her work.  Politics, theology,
organisation, missions, had all their share in the work of the Church
from 461 to 1003.  In each we shall find her influence: to harmonise
them we must find a principle which runs through her relation to them
all.

[Sidenote: The need of unity.]

The central idea of the period with which we are to deal is unity.  Up
till the fifth century, till the Council of Chalcedon (451) completed
the primary definition of the orthodox Christian faith in the person of
the Lord Jesus Christ, Christians were striving for conversion,
organisation, definition.  All these aims still remained, but in less
prominence.  The Church's order was completed, the Church's creed was
practically fixed, and the dominant nations in Europe had owned the
name of Christ.  There remained a new and severe test.  Would the {3}
Church win the new barbarian conquerors as she had won the old imperial
power?  There was to be a great epoch of missionary energy.  But of the
firm solidity of the Church there could be no doubt.  Heresies had torn
from her side tribes and even nations who had once belonged to her
fold.  But still unity was triumphant in idea; and it was into the
Catholic unity of the visible Church that the new nations were to be
invited to enter.  S. Augustine's grand idea of the City of God had
really triumphed, before the fifth century was half passed, over the
heathen conceptions of political rule.  The Church, in spite of the
tendency to separate already visible in East and West, was truly one;
and that unity was represented also in the Christian Empire.  "At the
end of the fifth century the only Christian countries outside the
limits of the Empire were Ireland and Armenia, and Armenia, maintaining
a precarious existence beside the great Persian monarchy of the
Sassanid kings, had been for a long time virtually dependent on the
Roman power." [1]  Politically, while tyrants rise and fall, and
barbarian hosts, the continuance of the Wandering of the Nations, sweep
across the stage, we are struck above all by the significant fact which
Mr. Freeman (_Western Europe in the Fifth Century_) knew so well how to
make emphatic:--"The wonderful thing is how often the Empire came
together again.  What strikes us at every step in the tangled history
of these times is the wonderful life which the Roman name and the Roman
Power still kept when it was thus attacked on every side from without
and torn in pieces in every quarter from within."  And the reason for
this indubitably was that the {4} Empire had now another organisation
to support it, based on the same idea of central unity.  One Church
stood beside one Empire, and became year by year even more certain,
more perfect, as well as more strong.  In the West the papal power rose
as the imperial decayed, and before long came near to replacing it.  In
the East, where the name and tradition of old Rome was always preserved
in the imperial government, the Church remained in that immemorial
steadfastness to the orthodox faith which was a bond of unity such as
no other idea could possibly supply.  In the educational work which the
emperor had to undertake in regard to the tribes which one by one
accepted their sway, the Christian Church was their greatest support.
In East as well as West, the bishops, saints, and missionaries were the
true leaders of the nations into the unity of the Empire as well as the
unity of the Church.  [Sidenote: The Church's conquest of barbarism.]
The idea of Christian unity saved the Empire and taught the nations.
The idea of Christian unity was the force which conquered barbarism and
made the barbarians children of the Catholic Church and fellow-citizens
with the inheritors of the Roman traditions.

If the dominant idea of the long period with which this book is to deal
is the unity of the Church, seen through the struggles to preserve, to
teach, or to attain it, the most important facts are those which belong
to the conversion, to Christ and to the full faith of the Catholic
Church, of races new to the Western world.  The gradual extinction in
Italy of the Goths, the conversion of the Franks, of the English, of
many races on distant barbarian borderlands of civilisation, the
acceptance of Catholicism by the Lombards and {5} the Western Goths, do
not complete the historical tale, though they are a large part of it:
there was the falling back in Africa and for a long time in Europe of
the settlements of the Cross before the armies of the Crescent.  There
were also two other important features of this long-extended age, to
which writers have given the name of dark.  There was the survival of
ancient learning, which lived on through the flood of barbarian
immigration into the lands which had been its old home, yet was very
largely eclipsed by the predominance of theological interests in
literature.  And there was the growth of a strong ecclesiastical power,
based upon an orthodox faith (though not without hesitations and
lapses), and gradually winning a formidable political dominion.  That
power was the Roman Papacy.



[1] Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_, p. 13, ed. 1904.




{6}

CHAPTER II

THE EMPIRE AND THE EASTERN CHURCH

(461-628)

When the death of Leo the Great in 461 removed from the world of
religious progress a saintly and dominant figure whose words were
listened to in East and West as were those of no other man of his day,
the interest of Church history is seen to turn decisively to the East.

[Sidenote: Character of the Greek Church.]

The story of Eastern Christendom is unique.  There is the fascinating
tale of the union of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology, and its
results, so fertile, so vigorous, so intensely interesting as logical
processes, so critical as problems of thought.  For the historian there
is a story of almost unmatched attraction; the story of how a people
was kept together in power, in decay, in failure, in persecution, by
the unifying force of a Creed and a Church.  And there is the
extraordinary missionary development traceable all through the history
of Eastern Christianity: the wonderful Nestorian missions, the activity
of the evangelists, imperial and hierarchical, of the sixth century,
the conversion of Russia, the preludes to the remarkable achievements
in modern times of orthodox missions in the Far East.

Throughout the whole of the long period indeed {7} which begins with
the death of Leo and ends with that of Silvester II., though the Latin
Church was growing in power and in missionary success, it was probably
the Christianity of the East which was the most secure and the most
prominent.  Something of its work may well be told at the beginning of
our task.

[Sidenote: The Monophysite controversy.]

The last years of the fifth century were in the main occupied in the
East by the dying down of a controversy which had rent the Church.  The
Eutychian heresy, condemned at Chalcedon, gave birth to the Monophysite
party, which spread widely over the East.  Attempts were soon made to
bridge over the gulf by taking from the decisions of Chalcedon all that
definitely repudiated the Monophysite opinions.  [Sidenote: The
Henotikon.] In 482 the patriarch Acacius of Constantinople, under the
orders probably of the Emperor Zeno (474-91), drew up the _Henotikon_,
an endeavour to secure the peace of the Church by abandoning the
definitions of the Fourth General Council.  No longer was "one and the
same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged _in two natures_,
without fusion, without change, without division, without separation."
But it is impossible to ignore a controversy which has been a cause of
wide divergence.  Men will not be silent, or forget, when they are
told.  Statesmanlike was, no doubt, the policy which sought for unity
by ignoring differences; and peace was to some extent secured in the
East so long as Zeno and his successor Anastasius (491-518) reigned.
But at Rome it was not accepted.  Such a document, which implicitly
repudiated the language of Leo the Great, which the Fourth General
Council had adopted, could {8} never be accepted by the whole Church;
and those in the East who were theologians and philosophers rather than
statesmen saw that the question once raised must be finally settled in
the dogmatic decisions of the Church.  Had the Lord two Natures, the
Divine and Human, or but one?  The reality of the Lord's Humanity as
well as of His Divinity was a truth which, at whatever cost of division
and separation, it was essential that the Church should proclaim and
cherish.

In Constantinople, a city always keen to debate theology in the
streets, the divergence was plainly manifest; and a document which was
"subtle to escape subtleties" was not likely to be satisfactory to the
subtlest of controversialists.  The Henotikon was accepted at Antioch,
Jerusalem, and Alexandria, but it was rejected by Rome and by the real
sense of Constantinople.  In Alexandria the question was only laid for
a time, and when a bishop who had been elected was refused recognition
by Acacius the Patriarch of Constantinople and Peter "the Stammerer,"
who accepted the Henotikon, preferred to his place, a reference to Rome
led to a peremptory letter from Pope Simplicius, to which Acacius paid
no heed whatever.  Felix II. (483-92), after an ineffectual embassy,
actually declared Acacius excommunicate and deposed.  The monastery of
the Akoimetai at Constantinople ("sleepless ones," who kept up
perpetual intercession) threw itself strongly on to the side of the
advocates of Chalcedon.  Acacius, then excommunicated by Rome because
he would not excommunicate the Monophysite patriarch of Alexandria,
retorted by striking out the name of Felix from the diptychs of the
Church.

{9}

[Sidenote: Schism between East and West.]

It was the first formal beginning of the schism which,--temporarily,
and again and again, healed,--was ultimately to separate East and West;
and it was due, as so many misfortunes of the Church have been, to the
inevitable divergence between those who thought of theology first as
statesmen and those who thought first as inquirers after the truth.
The schism spread more widely.  In Syria Monophysitism joined
Nestorianism in the confusion of thought: in Egypt the Coptic Church
arose which repudiated Chalcedon: Abyssinia and Southern India were to
follow.  Arianism had in the East practically died away; Nestorianism
was powerful only in far-away lands, but Monophysitism was for a great
part of the sixth century strong in the present, and close to the
centre of Church life.  The sixth century began, as the fifth had
ended, in strife from which there seemed no outway.  Nationalism, and
the rival claims of Rome and Constantinople, complicated the issues.

Under Anastasius, the convinced opponent of the Council of Chalcedon
and himself to all intents a Monophysite in opinion, some slight
negotiations were begun with Rome, while the streets of Constantinople
ran with blood poured out by the hot advocates of theological dogma.
In 515 legates from Pope Hormisdas visited Constantinople; in 516 the
emperor sent envoys to Rome; in 517 Hormisdas replied, not only
insisting on the condemnation of those who had opposed Chalcedon, but
also claiming from the Caesar the obedience of a spiritual son; and in
that same year Anastasius, "most sweet-tempered of emperors," died,
rejecting the papal demands.

{10}

The accession of Justin I. (518-27) was a triumph for the orthodox
faith, to which the people of Constantinople had firmly held.  The
patriarch, John the Cappadocian, declared his adherence to the Fourth
Council: the name of Pope Leo was put on the diptychs together with
that of S. Cyril; and synod after synod acclaimed the orthodox faith.
Negotiations for reunion with the West were immediately opened.  The
patriarch and the emperor wrote to Pope Hormisdas, and there wrote also
a theologian more learned than the patriarch, the Emperor's nephew,
Justinian.  "As soon," he wrote, "as the Emperor had received by the
will of God the princely fillet, he gave the bishops to understand that
the peace of the Church must be restored.  This had already in a great
degree been accomplished."  But the pope's opinion must be taken with
regard to the condemnation of Acacius, who was responsible for the
Henotikon, and was the real cause of the severance between the
churches.  [Sidenote: Reunion, 519.] The steps towards reunion may be
traced in the correspondence between Hormisdas and Justinian.  It was
finally achieved on the 27th of March, 519.  The patriarch of
Constantinople declared that he held the Churches of the old and the
new Rome to be one; and with that regard he accepted the four Councils
and condemned the heretics, including Acacius.

The Church of Alexandria did not accept the reunion; and Severus,
patriarch of Antioch, was deposed for his heresy.  There was indeed a
considerable party all over the East which remained Monophysite; and
this party it was the first aim of Justinian (527-65), when he became
emperor, to convince or to subdue.  He was the {11} nephew of Justin,
and he was already trained in the work of government; but he seemed to
be even more zealous as a theologian than as a lawyer or administrator.
The problem of Monophysitism fascinated him.  [Sidenote: The Emperor
Justinian.] From the first, he applied himself seriously to the study
of the question in all its bearings.  Night after night, says
Procopius, he would study in his library the writings of the Fathers
and the Holy Scriptures themselves, with some learned monks or prelates
with whom he might discuss the problems which arose from their perusal.
He had all a lawyer's passion for definition, and all a theologian's
delight in truth.  And as year by year he mastered the intricate
arguments which had surged round the decisions of the Councils, he came
to consider that a _rapprochement_ was not impossible between the
Orthodox Church and those many Eastern monks and prelates who still
hesitated over a repudiation which might mean heresy or schism.  And
from the first it was his aim to unite not by arms but by arguments.
The incessant and wearisome theological discussions which are among the
most prominent features of his reign, are a clearly intended part of a
policy which was to reunite Christendom and consolidate the definition
of the Faith by a thorough investigation of controverted matters.
Justinian first thought out vexed questions for himself, and then
endeavoured to make others think them out.

From 527, in the East, Church history may be said to start on new
lines.  The Catholic definition was completed and the imperial power
was definitely committed to it.  We may now look at the Orthodox Church
as one, united against outside error.

{12}

A period of critical interest in the history of Europe is that to which
belongs the difficult and complicated Church history of the East from
the accession of the Emperor Justinian to the death of S. Methodius.

The period naturally divides itself into three parts--the first, from
527 to 628, dealing with the Church at the height of its authority, up
to the overthrow of the Persian power; the second to 725, the period up
to the beginning of the iconoclastic controversy; and the third up to
its close and the death of S. Methodius in 847.  With the first we will
deal in the present chapter.

[Sidenote: Church and State in the East.]

But throughout the whole three centuries, from 527 to 847, the
essential character of the Church's life in the east is the same.  In
the East the Church was regarded more decisively than in the West as
the complement of the State.  Constantine had taught men to look for
the officials of the Church side by side with those of the civil power.
At Constantinople was the centre of an official Christianity, which
recognised the powers that be as ordained of God in a way which was
never found at Rome.  At Rome the bishops came to be political leaders,
to plot against governments, to found a political power of their own.
At Constantinople the patriarchs, recognised as such by the Emperor and
Senate of the New Rome, sought not to intrude themselves into a sphere
outside their religious calling, but developed their claims, in their
own sphere, side by side with those of the State; and their example was
followed in the Churches which began to look to Constantinople for
guidance.  There was a necessary consequence of this.  {13} [Sidenote:
Nationalism of the Churches.] It was that when the nationalities of the
East,--in Egypt, Syria, Armenia, or even in Mesopotamia--began to
resent the rule of the Empire, and struggled to express a patriotism of
their own, they sought to express it also on the ecclesiastical side,
in revolt from the Church which ruled as a complement to the civil
power.  Heresy came to be a sort of patriotism in religion.  And while
there was this of evil, it was not evil that each new barbarian nation,
as it accepted the faith, sought to set up beside its own sovereign its
patriarch also.  "Imperium," they said, "sine patriarcha non staret,"
an adage which James I. of England inverted when he said, "No bishop,
no king."  Though the Bulgarians agreed with the Church of
Constantinople in dogmas, they would not submit to its jurisdiction.
The principle of national Churches, independent of any earthly supreme
head, but united in the same faith and baptism, was established by the
history of the East.  Gradually the Church of Constantinople, by the
growth of new Christian states, and by the defections of nations that
had become heretical, became practically isolated, long before the
infidels hedged in the boundaries of the Empire and hounded the
imperial power to its death.  Within the boundaries the Church
continued to walk hand-in-hand with the State.  Together they acted
within and without.  Within, they upheld the Orthodox Faith; without,
they gave Cyprus its religious independence, Illyricum a new
ecclesiastical organisation, the Sinaitic peninsula an autonomous
hierarchy.  More and more the history of these centuries shows us the
Greek Church as the Eastern Empire in its religious aspect.  And it
shows that the division between East {14} and West, beginning in
politics, was bound to spread to religion.  As Rome had won her
ecclesiastical primacy through her political position, so with
Constantinople; and when the politics became divergent so did the
definition of faith.  Rome, as a church, clung to the obsolete claims
which the State could no longer enforce: Constantinople witnessed to
the independence which was the heritage of liberty given by the
endowment of Jesus Christ.

Such are the general lines upon which Eastern Church history proceeds.
We must now speak in more detail, though briefly, of the theological
history of the years when Justinian was emperor.

[Sidenote: Early controversy in Justinian's reign.]

Justinian was a trained theologian, but he was also a trained lawyer;
and the combination generally produces a vigorous controversialist.  It
was in controversy that his reign was passed.  The first controversy,
which began before he was emperor, was that, revived from the end of
the fifth century, which dealt with the question of the addition to the
Trisagion of the words, "Who was crucified for us," and involved the
assertion that One of the Trinity died upon the cross.  In 519 there
came from Tomi to Constantinople monks who fancied that they could
reconcile Christendom by adding to the Creed, a delusion as futile as
that of those who think they can advance towards the same end by
subtracting from it.  After a debate on the matter in Constantinople,
Justinian consulted the pope.  Letters passed with no result.  In 533,
when the matter was revived by the Akoimetai, Justinian published an
edict and wrote letters to pope and patriarch to bring the matter to a
final decision.  "If One of the Trinity did {15} not suffer in the
flesh, neither was He born in the flesh, nor can Mary be said, verily
and truly, to be His Mother."  The emperor himself was accused of
heresy by the Vigilists; and at last Pope John II. declared the phrase,
"One Person of the Trinity was crucified," to be orthodox.  His
judgment was confirmed by the Fifth General Council.[1]

The position which the emperor thus assumed was not one which the East
alone welcomed.  Rome, too, recognised that the East had power to make
decrees, so long as they were consonant with apostolic doctrine.

[Sidenote: The Monophysites.]

Justinian now gave himself eagerly to the reconciliation of the
Monophysites.  In 535 Anthimus, bishop of Trebizond, a friend of the
deposed patriarch of Antioch, Severus, who was at least
semi-Monophysite, was elected to the patriarchal throne of New Rome.
In the same year Pope Agapetus (534-6) came to Constantinople as an
envoy of a Gothic king, and he demanded that Anthimus should make
formal profession of orthodoxy.  The result was not satisfactory: the
new patriarch was condemned by the emperor with the sanction of the
pope and the approval of a synod.  Justinian then issued a decree
condemning Monophysitism, which he ordered the new patriarch to send to
the Eastern Churches.  Mennas, the successor of Anthimus, in his local
synod, had condemned and deposed the Monophysite bishops.  The
controversy was at an end.

More important in its results was the dispute with the so-called
Origenists.  S. Sabas came from {16} Palestine in 531 to lay before the
emperor the sad tale of the spread of their evil doctrines, but he died
in the next year, and the Holy Land remained the scene of strife
between the two famous monasteries of the Old and the New Laura.
[Sidenote: The Origenists.] In 541 or 542 a synod at Antioch condemned
the doctrines of Origen, but the only result was that Jerusalem refused
communion with the other Eastern patriarchate.  Justinian himself,--at
a time when there was at Constantinople an envoy from Rome,
Pelagius,--issued a long declaration condemning Origen.  A synod was
summoned, which formally condemned Origen in person--a precedent for
the later anathemas of the Fifth General Council--and fifteen
propositions from his writings, ten of them being those which
Justinian's edict had denounced.  The decisions were sent for
subscription to the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem,
as well as to Rome.  This sanction gave something of an universal
condemnation of Origenism; but, since no general council confirmed it,
it cannot be asserted that Origen lies under anathema as a heretic.
The opinion of the legalists of the age was utterly out of sympathy
with one who was rather the cause of heresy in others than himself
heretical.

[Sidenote: The "Three Chapters."]

But the most important controversy of the reign was that which was
concerned with the "Three Chapters."  Justinian, who had himself
written against the Monophysites, was led aside by an ingenious monk
into an attack upon the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret
of Cyrrhus, and Ibas of Edessa.  The Emperor issued an edict (544) in
which "Three Chapters" asserted the heresy of the incriminated
writings.  Within a short {17} time the phrase "The Three Chapters" was
applied to the subjects of the condemnation; and the Fifth General
Council, followed by later usage, describes as the "Three Chapters" the
"impious Theodore of Mopsuestia with his wicked writings, and those
things which Theodoret impiously wrote, and the impious letter which is
said to be by Ibas." [2]

Justinian's edict was not favourably received: even the patriarch
Mennas hesitated, and the papal envoy and some African bishops broke
off communion.  The Latin bishops rejected it; but the patriarchs of
Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem gave their adhesion.  Justinian
summoned Pope Vigilius; and a pitiable example of irresolution he
presented when he came.  He accepted, rejected, censured, was
complacent and hostile in turns.  [Sidenote: The Fifth General Council,
553.] At last he agreed to the summoning of a General Council, and
Justinian ordered it to meet in May, 553.  Vigilius, almost at the last
moment, would have nothing to do with it.  The patriarch of
Constantinople presided, and the patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria
appeared in person, the patriarch of Jerusalem by three bishops.  The
acts of the Council were signed by 164 prelates.  The Council, like its
predecessors, was predominantly Eastern; but its decisions were
afterwards accepted by the West.  The precedents of the earlier
Councils were strictly followed in regard to Rome: no supremacy was
allowed though the honourable primacy was not contested.[3]
Justinian's letter, sketching the history of the controversy of the
Three Chapters, {18} was read, but he did not interfere with the
deliberations.  It was summoned to deal with matters concerning the
faith, and these were always left to the decision of the Episcopate.
The discussion was long; and after an exhaustive examination of the
writings of Theodore, the Council proceeded to endorse the first
"chapter," by the condemnation of the Mopsuestian and his writings.
The case of Theodoret was less clear: indeed, a very eminent authority
has regarded the action of the Council in his case as "not quite
equitable." [4]  But the grounds of the condemnation were such
statements of his as that "God the Word is not incarnate," "we do not
acknowledge an hypostatic union," and his description of S. Cyril as
_impius, impugnator Christi, novus haereticus_, with a denial of the
_communicatio idiomatum_, which left little if any doubt as to his own
position.[5]  When the letter of Ibas came to be considered, it was
plainly shown that its statements were directly contrary to the
affirmations of Chalcedon.  It denied the Incarnation of the Word,
refused the title of Theotokos to the Blessed Virgin, and condemned the
doctrines of Cyril.  The Council had no hesitation in saying anathema.

Here its work was ended.  It had safeguarded the faith by definitely
exposing the logical consequences of statements which indirectly
impugned the Divine and Human Natures of the Incarnate Son.

[Sidenote: The need for its decisions.]

So long as human progress is based upon intellectual principles as well
as on material growth, a teaching body which professes to guard and
interpret a Divine Revelation must speak {19} without hesitation when
its "deposit" is attacked.  The Church has clung, with an inspired
sagacity, to the reality of the Incarnation: and thus it has preserved
to humanity a real Saviour and a real Exemplar.  The subtle brains
which during these centuries searched for one joint in the Catholic
armour wherein to insert a deadly dart, were foiled by a subtlety as
acute, and by deductions and definitions that were logical, rational,
and necessary.  If the Councils had not defined the faith which had
been once for all delivered to the saints, it would have been dissolved
little by little by sentimental concessions and shallow inconsistencies
of interpretation.  It was the work of the Councils to develope and
apply the principles furnished by the sacred Scriptures.  New questions
arose, and it was necessary to meet them: it was clear, then, that
there was a real division between those who accepted Christianity in
the full logical meaning of the Scriptures, in the full confidence of
the Church, and those who doubted, hesitated, denied; and it is clear
now that the whole future of Christendom depended upon the acceptance
by the Christian nations of a single rational and logically tenable
Creed.  This involved the rejection of the Three Chapters, as it
involved equally the condemnation of Monophysitism and Monothelitism.
From the point of view of theology or philosophy the value of the work
of the Church in this age is equally great.  The heresies which were
condemned in the sixth century (as in the seventh) were such as would
have utterly destroyed the logical and rational conception of the
Person of the Incarnate Son, as the Church had received it by divine
inspiration.  Some Christian historians may seem for a moment to yield
a half {20} assent to the shallow opinions of those who would refuse to
go beyond what is sometimes strangely called the "primitive simplicity
of the Gospel."  But it is impossible in this obscurantist fashion to
check the free inquiry of the human intellect.  The truths of the
Gospel must be studied and pondered over, and set in their proper
relation to each other.  There must be logical inferences from them,
and reasonable conclusions.  It is this which explains that struggle
for the Catholic Faith of which historians are sometimes impatient, and
justifies a high estimate of the services which the Church of
Constantinople rendered to the Church Universal.

It is in this light that the work of the Fifth General Council, to be
truly estimated, must be regarded.  It will be convenient here to
summarise the steps by which the Fifth General Council won recognition
in the Church.

In the first place, the emperor, according to custom, confirmed what
the Council had decreed; and throughout the greater part of the East
the decision of Church and State alike was accepted.  In 553 there was
a formal confirmation by a synod of bishops at Jerusalem; but for the
most part there was no need of such pronouncement.  African bishops and
Syrian monks here and there refused obedience; but the Church as a
whole was agreed.

[Sidenote: Pope Vigilius.]

Pope Vigilius, it would seem, was in exile for six months on an island
in the Sea of Marmora.  On December 8, 553, he formally anathematised
the Three Chapters.  On February 23, 554, in a _Constitution_, he
announced to the Western bishops his adhesion to the decisions {21} of
the General Council.  Before the end of 557 he was succeeded, on his
death, by Pelagius, well known in Constantinople.  He, like Vigilius,
had once refused but now accepted the Council.

When Rome and Constantinople were agreed, the adhesion of the rest of
the Catholic world was only a question of time.  But the time was long.
In North Italy there was for long a practical schism, which was not
healed till Justin II. issued an explanatory edict,[6] and the genius,
spiritual and diplomatic, of Gregory the Great was devoted to the task
of conciliation.  Still it was not till the very beginning of the
eighth century[7] that the last schismatics returned to union with the
Church: thus a division in the see of Aquileia, by which for a time
there were two rival patriarchates, was closed.  Already the rest of
Europe had come to peace.

[Sidenote: The Aphthartodocetes.]

The last years of Justinian were disturbed by a new heresy, that of
those who taught that the Body of the Lord was incorruptible, and it
was asserted that the emperor himself fell into this error.  The
evidence is slight and contradictory, and the matter is of no
importance in the general history of the Church.[8]  But it is worth
remembering that little more than a century after his death his name
was singled out by the Sixth General Council for special honour as of
"holy memory."  His work, indeed, had been great, as theologian and as
Christian emperor; there was no more important or more accurate writer
{22} on theology in the East during the sixth century; and he must ever
be remembered side by side with the Fifth General Council which he
summoned.  There were many defects in the Eastern theory of the
relations between Church and State; but undoubtedly under such an
emperor it had its best chances of success.

[Sidenote: The work of Justinian.]

Justinian has been declared to have forced upon the Empire which he had
reunited the orthodoxy of S. Cyril and the Council of Chalcedon, and
the attempt has been made to prove that Cyril himself was a
Monophysite.[9]  The best refutation of this view is the perfect
harmony of the decisions of the Fifth General Council with those of the
previous Oecumenical assemblies, and the fact that no novelty could be
discovered to have been added to "the Faith" when the "Three Chapters"
were condemned.

With the close of the Council the definition of Christian doctrine
passes into the background till the rise of the Monothelite
controversy.  When its decisions were accepted, the labours of
Justinian had given peace to the churches.

[Sidenote: and his successors.]

From 565, when Justinian died, to 628, when Heraclius freed the Empire
from the danger of Persian conquest, were years of comparative rest in
the Church.  It was a period of missionary extension, of quiet
assertion of spiritual authority, in the midst of political trouble and
disaster.  Gibbon, who asserts that Justinian died a heretic, adds,
"The reigns of his four successors, Justin, Tiberius, Maurice, and
Phocas, are distinguished by a rare, though fortunate, vacancy in the
ecclesiastical history {23} of the East"; and the sarcasm, though not
wholly accurate, may serve to express the gradual progress of unity
which marked the years up to the accession of Heraclius.  The history
of religion is concerned rather with those outside than those within
the Church.  That history we need not follow, and we may pass over this
period with only a brief allusion to the development of independence
outside the immediate range of the ecclesiastical power of New Rome.
[Sidenote: Rise of separated bodies.] Heresies grew as an expression of
national independence.  The Chaldaean Church, which stretched to Persia
and India, was Nestorian.  The Monophysites won the Coptic Church of
Egypt, the Abyssinian Church, the Jacobites in Syria, the Armenians in
the heart of Asia Minor.  In the mountains of Lebanon the
Monothelites--of whom we have to speak shortly--organised the Maronite
Church; and in Georgia the Church was aided by geographical conditions
as well as historical development to ignore the overlordship of the
Church of Antioch.  So in Europe grew up with the new States, the
Bulgarian, the Serbian, and the Wallachian Churches.

[Sidenote: Missions and failures.]

It was thus that, alike as statesmen and Christians, the emperors were
devoted advocates of missions.  Their wars of conquest often--as
notably with the great Emperor Heraclius--assumed the character of holy
wars.  Where the barbarians of the East made havoc there too often the
Church fell without leaving a trace of its work.  Without priest and
sacrament, the people came to retain only among their superstitions, as
sometimes in North Africa to-day, usages which showed that once their
ancestors belonged to the kingdom of Christ.  Much {24} of the
missionary work of the period was done by Monophysites; the record of
John of Ephesus preserves what he himself did to spread Christianity in
Asia.  And it would seem that even the most orthodox of emperors was
willing to aid in the work of those who did not accept the Council of
Chalcedon so long as they earnestly endeavoured to teach the heathen
the rudiments of the faith and to love the Lord in incorruptness.

[Sidenote: Organisation of the Church.]

The Church of the period was divided into five patriarchates, the
Church of Cyprus being understood to stand apart and autocephalous.
Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch still retained their old
power, while Jerusalem was regarded as somewhat inferior.  The
patriarchates were divided into provinces, the capital of each province
having its metropolitan bishop.  Under him were other bishops, and
gradually the title of archbishop was being understood,--as by
Justinian in the decree (Novel, xi.) in which he created his birthplace
a metropolitan see,--to imply jurisdiction over a number of suffragan
sees.  Besides this there were still sees autocephalous in the sense
that they owned no superior or metropolitan bishop.  It would seem from
the _Synekdemos_ of Hierocles (c. 535) that in the sixth century the
patriarch of Constantinople had under him about thirty metropolitans
and some 450 bishops.  But the authority which the patriarch exercised
was by no means used to minimise that of the bishops.  If the influence
of the Imperial Court on the patriarchate was always considerable and
sometimes overwhelming, Justinian was careful to preserve the
independence of the Episcopate and {25} to order that the first steps
in the election of bishops should be by the clergy and the chief
citizens in each diocese.  And, as a letter of S. Gregory shows, the
bishops were elected for life; neither infirmity nor old age was
regarded as a cause for deposition, and translation from see to see was
condemned by many a Council.  All the clergy under the rank of bishop
might marry, but only before ordination to the higher orders.  In the
East it would seem that the number of persons connected in some way
with ecclesiastical office was very large.  Even excluding the
monks,--a numerous and continually increasing body--the hermits, the
Stylites (who remained for years on a pillar, where they even received
Communion, in a special vessel made for the purpose), the different
orders of celibate women--there was still a very considerable number of
persons attached to all the important churches, in different positions
of ministry.  The famous poem of Paul the Silentiary on S. Sophia
revels in a recital of the number of persons employed as well as in the
beauty of the magnificent building itself.

In architecture, indeed, the Byzantine Church of the sixth century was
supreme.  No more glorious edifice has ever been consecrated to the
service of Christ than the Church of the Divine Wisdom at
Constantinople; and the arts which enriched it in mosaic, marble,
metals, were brought to a perfection which excited the wonder of
succeeding centuries.  Before we end this sketch of the history of a
great age in the life of the Eastern Church, a word must be said about
its most splendid and enduring memorial.  Among the most striking
passages in the {26} chronicles of the age are the famous descriptions
by Procopius and by Paul the Silentiary of the splendours of the great
church of Constantinople in the sixth century after Christ.  [Sidenote:
S. Sophia at Constantinople.] In the wonderful art of mosaic, as it may
be seen to-day in some of the churches of the New Rome, in S.
Sophia--though much there is still covered--and in the Church of the
Chora, the West, with all the beauty that we may still see in Ravenna,
was never able to equal the East.  In solemn grandeur of architecture
fitted for open, public, common worship, expressive of the profoundest
verities of Christ's Church, it would be difficult to surpass the work
of the great age of Byzantine art.  Of this S. Sophia, the Church of
the Divine Wisdom, at Constantinople, built by the architects of the
Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, is the most magnificent
example.  There the eye travels upward, when the great nave is entered
from the narthex, from the arches supporting the gallery to those of
the gallery itself, from semi-domes larger and larger, up to the great
dome itself, an intricate scheme merging in a central unity.  "The
length and the breadth and the height of it are equal" is the
exclamation which seems forced from the beholder: never was there a
church so vast yet so symmetrical, so admirably designed for the
participation of all worshippers in the great act of worship.  And the
splendid pillars, brought from Baalbek of the old heathen days, wrought
on the capitals with intricate carvings, with emblems and devices and
monograms, the finely decorated doors, and the gigantic mosaic seraphim
on the walls, still in the twentieth century dimly image something of
the glowing worship of the {27} sixth.  Then the "splendour of the
lighted space," glittering with thousands of lights, gave "shine unto
the world," and guided the seafarers as they went forth "by the divine
light of the Church itself."  Traveller after traveller, chronicler
after chronicler, records impressions of the glory and beauty that
belonged to the great Mother Church of the Byzantine rite.
Historically, perhaps no church in the world has seen, at least in the
Middle Ages, so many scenes that belonged to the deepest crises of
national life.  From the day when the great emperor who built it
prostrated himself before God as unworthy to make the offering of so
much beauty, to the day when Muhammad the conqueror (says the legend)
rode in over the heaps of Christian dead, it was the centre, and the
mirror, of the Church's life in the capital of the Empire.  And that is
what the worship of the East has always striven to express.  It is
immemorial, conservative beyond anything that the West can tolerate or
conceive; but it belongs, in the present as in the past, to the closest
thoughts, the most intimate experiences, of men to whom religion is
indeed the guide of life.  The Church of S. Sophia, the worship of the
East, are the living memorials of the great age of the great Christian
emperor and theologian of the sixth century.

And the fact that this building was due to the genius and power not of
the Church, but of Justinian, leads us back to the significance of the
State authority in the ecclesiastical history of the East.

As it was said in England that kings were the Church's nursing fathers,
so in the Eastern Empire might the same text be used in rather a
different {28} sense.  The Church was in power before the Empire was
Christian; but the Christian Empire was ever urgent to proclaim its
attachment to the Church and to guarantee its protection.  The imperial
legislation of the great lawgiver began always in the name of the Lord,
and the code emphasised as the foundation of society and civil law the
orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and of Christ.  And step by step the
great emperor endeavoured, in matters of morality and of gambling, to
enforce the moral laws of the Church.  Works of charity and mercy were
undertaken by Church and State, hand in hand, and the noble buildings
which marked the magnificent period of Byzantine architecture were the
works of a society which, from the highest to the lowest member, was
penetrated by Christian ideals.  Thus, very briefly, we may epitomise
the work of the first period we have mentioned.  A word must be said
later of later times.



[1] Mansi, _Concilia_, ix. 384.  The phrase was preserved in the Hymn
'_O onogenês_, which was inserted in the Mass, and the composition of
which is ascribed to Justinian himself.

[2] Mansi, ix. 181.

[3] Cf. Nicaea, Canon vi.; Constantinople, Canons ii. and iii.;
Ephesus, Canon viii.; Chalcedon, Canons ix. and xvii.

[4] Dr. W. Bright, _Waymarks in Church History_, p. 238.

[5] See Hefele, _History of the Councils_ (Eng. trans.), iv. 311.

[6] Given in Evagrius, v. 4.

[7] A.D. 700, Mansi, _Concilia_, xii. 115.

[8] See Gibbon, ed. J. B. Bury, vol. v. pp. 139, 140, 522, 523; and W.
H. Hutton, _The Church of the Sixth Century_, pp. 204-240, 303-309.

[9] Cf. Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, ii. pp. 396, 396, 399, etc.




{29}

CHAPTER III

THE CHURCH IN ITALY, 461-590

[Sidenote: The end of the Empire in the West, 476.]

The death of S. Leo took place but a few years before the Roman Empire
in the West became extinguished, and political interests entirely
submerged those of religion in the years that followed it.  Dimly,
beneath the noise of the barbarian triumph, we discern the survival in
Rome of the Church's powers and claims; but it is not till the rise of
another pope of mighty genius that they claim any consideration as
important.  In 461 died S. Leo; in 476 Romulus Augustulus, the last of
the continuous line of Western Caesars, surrendered his sceptre to the
Herul Odowakar.  The barbarian governed with the aid of Roman
statesmen: he fixed his seat of rule at Ravenna rather than at Rome: he
showed consideration to the saintly Epiphanius, Bishop of Pavia:
heretic though he was, he desired to keep well with the Catholic
bishops of Rome.  After him came a greater man, Theodoric the Goth,
whose capture of Ravenna, March 5th, 493, was followed by the
assassination of Odowakar.  [Sidenote: Theodoric the Goth, 493.]
Theodoric, also an Arian, became sole ruler of Italy.  He too was
served by Roman officials, and his administration was modelled on that
of the Caesars.  A special interest attaches to his {30} dealings with
the Church.  The king, indeed, Arian though he was, looked on the
Catholic Church with no unfriendly eye.  His great minister,
Cassiodorus, was orthodox: and it is in his writings, which enshrine
the policy of his master, that we must search for the relations between
Church and State in the days before Belisarius had won back Ravenna and
Italy to the allegiance of the Roman Caesar.

The letters of Cassiodorus supply, if not a complete account, at least
very valuable illustrations, of the position assumed by the East Gothic
power under Theodoric and his successors in regard to the Church.  The
favour shown by the Ostrogoth sovereign to Cassiodorus, a staunch
Catholic, yet senator, consul, patrician, quaestor, and praetorian
praefect, is in itself an illustration of the absence of bitter Arian
feeling.  [Sidenote: His relation with the Catholic Church.] This
impression is deepened by a perusal of the letters which Cassiodorus
wrote in the name of his sovereign.  The subjects in which the Church
is most frequently related to the State are jurisdiction and property.
In the latter there seems a clear desire on the part of the kings to
give security and to act even with generosity to all religious bodies,
Catholic as well as Arian.  Church property was frequently, if not
always, freed from taxation.[1]  The principle which dictated the whole
policy of Theodoric is to be seen in a letter to Adila, senator and
comes.[2]  "Although we will not that any should suffer any wrong whom
it belongs to our religious obligation to protect, since the free
tranquillity of the subjects is the glory of the ruler; yet especially
do we desire that all churches {31} should be free from any injury,
since while they are in peace the mercy of God is bestowed on us."
Therefore he orders all protection to be given to the churches: yet
answer is to be made in the law courts to any suit against them.  For,
as he says in another letter, "if false claims may not be tolerated
against men, how much less against God."  Again, "If we are willing to
enrich the Church by our own liberality, _a fortiori_ will we not allow
it to be despoiled of the gifts received from pious princes in the
past."

It was on such liberality that the material power of the Church was
slowly strengthening itself.  Similarly, as in the East, clerical
privilege was beginning to be allowed in the law courts: the Church was
acquiring the right to judge all cases in which her officers were
concerned.  Theodoric's successors bettered his instructions.
Athalaric allowed to the Roman pope the jurisdiction over all suits
affecting the Roman clergy.

[Sidenote: Weakness of the Church.]

But this picture of toleration and privilege which we obtain from the
official letters of Cassiodorus, cannot be regarded as a complete
description of the attitude of the East Gothic rule towards the
Catholic Church.  Pope after pope was the humble slave of the Gothic
ruler.  They were sent to Constantinople as his envoys, and though they
stood firm for the Catholic faith and in rejection of all compromise
with regard to the doctrine of Chalcedon, they were entirely impotent
in Italy itself.  Catholic Italy was at the feet of the Arian Goth.
The cruel imprisonment of Pope John, used as a political tool in 525
and flung away when he proved ineffective, gave a new martyr to the
Roman calendar; and, in spite of {32} the absence of direct evidence,
it is difficult to regard the executions of Symmachus and of Boethius
as entirely unconnected with religions questions.  Both were Catholics;
both, to use Mr. Hodgkin's words,[3] "have been surrounded by a halo of
fictitious sanctity as martyrs to the cause of Christian orthodoxy."
The father-in-law, "lest, through grief for the loss of his son-in-law,
he should attempt anything against his kingdom," Theodoric "caused to
be accused and ordered him to be slain." [4]  Boethius, who wrote the
most famous work of the Early Middle Age, _The Consolation of
Philosophy_, a book which became the delight of Christian scholars, of
monks and kings, was translated by Alfred the West Saxon, and formed
the foundation of very much of the Christian thought of many succeeding
generations, met a horrible death in 526 on a charge of corresponding
with the orthodox Emperor Justin.  No doubt the main reason for the
butchery was political; but it is impossible in this age wholly to
separate religion from politics; especially when we read, in almost
immediate conjunction with the story of the murder of these men, that
Theodoric ordered that on a certain day the Arians should take
possession of all the Catholic basilicas.  It was not until the Gothic
power had finally fallen, and Narses had reestablished the imperial
power, that the life and property of Catholics were absolutely safe.

The death of Theodoric (August 30, 526) was followed by the downfall of
his power.  Within ten years all Italy was won back to the Roman and
Catholic Empire ruling from the East.

{33}

[Sidenote: The imperial restoration, 554.]

With the restoration of the imperial power the Church came to the front
more prominently.  So long as Justinian reigned the popes were kept in
subjection; but ecclesiastics generally were admitted to a large share
in judicial and political power.  The emperors looked for their
strongest political support in the Catholic party.  Suppression of
Arianism became a political necessity at Ravenna.  Justinian gave to
Agnellus the churches of the Arians.  [Sidenote: The Pragmatic
Sanction.] In 554 the emperor issued his solemn Pragmatic Sanction for
the government of Italy.  Of this, Section XII. gives a power to the
bishops which shows the intimate connection between State and Church.
"Moreover we order that fit and proper persons, able to administer the
local government, be chosen as _iudices_ of the provinces by the
bishops and chief persons of each province from the inhabitants of the
province itself."  This is important, of course, as allowing popular
elections, but far more important in its recognition of the position of
the clerical estate.  Justinian's new administration of Italy was to be
military; but hardly less was it to be ecclesiastical.  Here we have,
says Mr. Hodgkin,[5]--whose words I quote because I can find none
better to express what seems to me to be the significance of this
act--"a pathetic confession of the emperor's own inability to cope with
the corruption and servility of his civil servants.  He seems to have
perceived that in the great quaking bog of servility and dishonesty by
which he felt himself to be surrounded, his only sure standing-ground
was to be found in the spiritual estate, the order of men who wielded a
power {34} not of this world, and who, if true to their sacred mission,
had nothing to fear and little to hope from the corrupt minions of the
court."  This is significant in regard to the rise of the power of the
popes in the Western capital of the Empire and in the whole of Italy.
It was by the good deeds of the clergy, and by the need of them, that
they came forward before long as the masters of the country.

This rule of the Pragmatic Sanction was not an isolated instance; at
every point the bishop was placed _en rapport_ with the State, with the
provincials, and with the exarch himself.[6]  In jurisdiction, in
advice, from the moment when he assisted at a new governor's
installation, the bishop was at the side of the lay officer, to
complain and even, if need be, to control.

One power still remained to the emperor himself (in the seventh century
it was transferred to the exarch)--that of confirming the election of
the pope.  Narses seated Pelagius on the papal throne; but when one as
mighty as the "eunuch general" arose in Gregory the Great, the power of
the exarchate passed, slowly but surely, into the hands of the papacy.
The changes of rulers in Italy, the policies of the falling Goths and
of the rising Roman Empire, found their completion in the effects of
the Lombard invasion.  But before this there were thirty years of
growth for the Church, and the growth was due very largely to a new
force, though for a while it remained below the surface.  It was the
power of the monastic life, realised anew by the genius and holiness of
S. Benedict of Nursia.  {35} [Sidenote: The work of S. Benedict.] Born
about 480, of noble parentage, he gave himself from early years to
serve God "in the desert."  At about the age of fifteen he is spoken of
by his biographer, the great S. Gregory, in words which might form the
motto of his life, as "sapienter indoctus."  First, a solitary at
Subiaco; then the unwilling abbat of a neighbouring monastery, whose
monks endeavoured to kill him; then again living "by himself in the
sight of Him who seeth all things"; at last, in 529, he founded in
Campania the monastery of Monte Cassino, the mother of all the revived
monasticism of the Middle Age.

[Sidenote: His rule.]

The monastery of Monte Cassino became a pattern of the religious life.
S. Benedict was a wise and statesmanlike ruler, to whom men came with
confidence from every rank and every race, to be his disciples, or to
place their boys under him for instruction.  The rule which he drew up
was as potent in the ecclesiastical world as was the code of Justinian
in the civil.  It had its bases in the root ideas of obedience,
simplicity, and labour.  "Never to depart from the governance of God"
was his primary maxim to his monks; and a monastery was to be a "school
of the Lord's service" and a "workshop of the spiritual art."  The
beginning of all was to be prayer.  "Inprimis ut quidquid agendum
inchoas bonum, a Deo perfici instantissima oratione deposcas."  And
though absolute power was left, without appeal, in the hands of the
abbat, and the rule of the whole house was to be "nullus in monasterio
proprii sequatur cordis voluntatem," yet great individual liberty was
left to each monk in the direction of his own religious {36} life.
Everyone, he knew, had "his own gift of God"--some could fast more than
others; some could spend more time in silent prayer and meditation; and
none could do any good, he knew, however strict their outer rule,
without daily enlightenment from God.  There was place in his scheme
for those whose work was chiefly manual, those who reclaimed
uncultivated lands and turned the wilderness into a garden of the Lord,
and for those who spent long hours in contemplation and prayer.  The
public solemn singing of offices was no more characteristic of his rule
than was the following of the hermits in pure prayer.

One who would be admitted to the monastery must take oath before the
whole community that he intended constantly to remain firm in his
profession, to live a life of conversion to God, and to obey those set
over him, but the last only "according to the rule."  True monks were
his followers to count themselves only if they lived by the labours of
their hands.  Idleness, said Benedict, is the enemy of the soul.  The
life of the monks was ascetic, but without the extreme rigour of the
earlier "religious"--hermits and coenobites.  The rule required
austerities, and gave strict injunction as to food at all times, and
especially in Lent; but it did not encourage voluntary austerities
beyond the rule, and it admitted many relaxations for the old, the
infirm, or those whose labours were especially hard.

Where all depended so much on a superior it was of especial importance
that he should be wisely chosen and should rule wisely.  In three
things he was to be pre-eminent--exhortation, example, and prayer; and
prayer, says the saint, is the greatest of these; for {37} although
there be much virtue in exhortation and example, yet prayer is that
which promotes grace and efficacy alike in deed and word.  He was to
recognise no difference of social rank.  Good deeds and obedience were
to be the only ways to his favour.  Only if exceptional merit required
promotion was there to be any breach of the proper order in which each
should hold his place, "since, whether slaves or free, we are all one
in Christ, and, under the same Lord, wear all of us the same badge of
service."

In a cell hard by the monastery dwelt Benedict's sister, S.
Scholastica, whose religious life he directed, but whom he rarely saw,
and who became a pattern to nuns as he to monks.

[Sidenote: Its wide influence.]

The influence of Benedict was, even in his own lifetime, extraordinary.
There were times when it might almost be said that all Italy looked to
him for guidance; and there is no more striking scene in the history of
the decaying Gothic power than when the cruel Totila, whose end he
foresaw, and the secrets of whose heart lay open to his gaze, visited
him in his monastery and heard the words of truth from his lips.  When,
fortified by the Body and Blood of the Lord, he passed away with hands
still uplifted in prayer, he had created a power which did more than
any other to make the Church predominant in Italy.  The rule, the
definite organisations, of monasticism came to the world from Italy and
from Benedict.  Though the Benedictines were never actively papal
agents, yet indirectly, by their training and by their influence on the
whole nature of medieval religion, they formed a strong support for the
growing power of the Roman see.

{38}

But Benedict was not the only leader, though he was the greatest, in
the monastic revival of the sixth century.  With another great name his
work may be placed to some extent in contrast.

[Sidenote: Scholarship and learning.]

S. Benedict was no advocate of exclusively ecclesiastical study.  He
adapted the ancient literatures to the purposes of Christian education.
It is true that the main subjects of study for his monks were the Holy
Scriptures, and the chief object the edification of the individual by
meditation and of the people by preaching; but the monks learnt to
write verse correctly and prose in what had claims to be considered a
style.  Yet what he himself did in that direction was little indeed.
Perhaps the most that can be said is that he left the way open to his
successors.  And of these the greatest was Cassiodorus.

[Sidenote: Cassiodorus.]

Cassiodorus, the statesman, the orthodox adviser and friend of the
Arian Theodoric, lived to become a Christian teacher and a monk.  The
friend of Pope Agapetus, he endeavoured with his sanction in 535 to set
up a school in Rome which should give to Christians "a liberal
education."  The pope's death, a year later, prevented the scheme being
carried out.  But a few years later, in the monastery of Vivarium near
Squillace, he set himself to found a religious house which should
preserve the ancient culture.  Based on a sound knowledge of grammar,
on a collation and correction of texts, on a study of ancient models in
prose and verse, he would raise an education through "the arts and
disciplines of liberal letters," for, he said, "by the study of secular
literature our minds are trained to understand the Scriptures {39}
themselves."  That was the supreme end at Squillace, as it was at Monte
Cassino; and though Cassiodorus looked at letters differently from
Benedict, his work, too, was important in founding a tradition for
Italian monasticism.

[Sidenote: Weakness of the papacy under Pelagius, 555-60.]

While monasticism was transforming Italy and placing Catholicism on a
firm basis in the Western lands of the Empire, the power of the papal
see, when Rome was reconquered by the imperial forces from
Constantinople, seemed to sink to the lowest depths.  The papacy under
Vigilius (537-55) and Pelagius (555-60) was the servant of the
Byzantine Caesars.  The history of the controversies in which each pope
was engaged, the scandal of their elections, there is no need to relate
here.  Suffice it to say that the decisions of the Fifth General
Council were in no way the work of either, but were eventually accepted
by both.  The self-contradictions of Vigilius are pitiable; and the
acceptance of Pelagius by the Romans was only won by his rejecting a
formal statement of his predecessor.

Consecrated only by two bishops[7] on Easter Day, 556, he began a
pontificate which was from the first disputed and even despised.  The
Archbishop of Milan and the patriarch of Aquileia would not communicate
with him.  In Gaul he was received with suspicion, and he was obliged
to write to King Childebert, submitting to him a profession of his
faith.[8] It is clear that the Gallican Church no more than the Lombard
regarded {40} the pope as _ipso facto_ orthodox or the guardian of
orthodoxy.  Even this letter of Pelagius was not regarded as
satisfactory.  It was long before the Churches entered into communion
with him; and even to the last, the northern sees of Italy refused.  He
ruled, unquietly enough, for four years; and died, leaving a memory
free at least from simony, and honoured as a lover of the poor.

Under him, as under Vigilius, the papacy had been compelled to submit
to the judgment of the East.  "The Church of Rome," says Mgr. Duchesne,
"was humiliated." [9]

The lives of these two popes cover the most important period in the
ecclesiastical history of the sixth century.  After the death of
Pelagius I., and up to the accession of Gregory the Great in 590, the
interest of Italian history is political rather than ecclesiastical.
The emperors tried to rule, through their exarchs at Ravenna, from
Constantinople.  The papacy grew quietly in power.  Then came the
Lombards and a new era began.



[1] So _Var._, i. 26, ed. Mommsen, p. 28.

[2] ii. 29, p. 63.

[3] _Italy and her Invaders_, vol. iii. p. 516.

[4] _Anonymus Valesii_.

[5] _Italy and her Invaders_, vol. vi. p. 528.

[6] Instances are collected by M. Diehl, _Études sur l'administration
byzantine dans l'exarchat de Ravenne_, p. 320.

[7] Et dum nou essent episcopi qui cum ordinarent, inventi sunt duo
episcopi, Johannes de Perusia et Bonus de Ferentino, et Andreas
presbiter de Hostis, et ordinaverunt eum.--_Liber Pontificalis_, i. 303.

[8] Migne, Patr. Lat., tom. lxix. p. 402.

[9] _Revue des Questions Historiques_, Oct. 1884, p. 439.




{41}

CHAPTER IV

CHRISTIANITY IN GAUL FROM THE SIXTH TO THE EIGHTH CENTURY

A very special interest belongs to the history of Christianity in Gaul.
There is no more striking example of what the Church did to bridge over
the gulf between the old culture and the barbarians.

[Sidenote: Roman Gaul.]

Among early Christian martyrs few are more renowned than those who died
in Southern Gaul.  Paganism lived on, concealed, in many country
districts, but the life and power and thought of the people became by
the time of Constantine, by the fourth century, entirely Christian.  As
the state organised so did the Church.  Gaul had seventeen provincial
governments; it came to have seventeen archbishops, and under them
bishops for each great city.  On the Roman empire and the Christian
Church the foundations were laid; and they were laid firm.

[Sidenote: The barbarian invasions.]

At the beginning of the fifth century a terrible storm swept over the
land.  It was the storm of Teutonic invasion.  Vandals, Burgundians,
Alans, Suevi poured over the land; the Huns followed them, only to be
beaten back by a union of the other tribes.  Then, after the Battle of
Châlons (451), there gradually rose out {42} of the Teutonic conquerors
the conquering power of one tribe, that of the Franks.

[Sidenote: The Church in Gaul.]

By the first ten years of the sixth century Gaul was united again,
under the rule of Chlodowech (Clovis), King of the Franks.  Till well
on in the Middle Ages it was that title which the rulers of Gaul always
bore, "Rex Francorum," King of the Franks.  France to-day still dates
her existence as a nation from the baptism of Clovis.  It was that, his
admission into the Catholic Christianity of the Gauls over whom he
ruled, which enlisted on the side of the Frankish power all the culture
and civilisation which had never died out since the Roman days.  Under
the fostering care of the Church it had survived.  Brotherhood,
charity, compassion, unity, all the great ideas which the Church
cherished, were to work in long ages the transformation of the Frankish
kingship.  And when Chlodowech became king under the blessing of the
Church, which had survived all through these centuries since it was
planted under the Romans, the fusion of races soon followed.  The
French nation as we now know it is not merely Celtic, or Gaulish, but
Roman too, and lastly Frankish--that is, Teutonic.

[Sidenote: The baptism of Chlodowech, 496.]

The history of the baptism of Chlodowech is one of the most dramatic in
the annals of the early Middle Age.  His wife, Chrotechild, was the
niece of the Burgundian king, and she was a devout Catholic.  Slowly
she won her way to his heart.  Never, said the chroniclers, did she
cease to persuade him that he should serve the true God; and when in
the crisis of a battle against the Alamanni he called her words to
mind, he vowed to {43} be baptised if Christ should give him the
victory.  The legend adorns the historic fact that Chlodowech was
baptised by S. Remigius at Rheims, on Christmas Day, 496, and that some
three thousand of his warriors were baptised with him.  "Bow thy neck,
O Sigambrian," said the prelate, "adore that which thou hast burned and
burn that which thou hast adored."  Within a generation all races of
the Franks had followed the Frankish king.

[Sidenote: The dark days of the Merwings.]

The years that followed were full of growth.  But for long the
Christianity which was nominally triumphant was imperfect indeed.
Chlodowech died in 511; his race went on ruling, Catholic in name but
very far from obedient to the Church's laws.  The tale of their
successors, their wars and their crimes, is one which belongs to social
or political history, not to the history of the Church.  The Church's
life was lived underground in the slow progress of Christian ideas.
Chlothochar, sole ruler of the Franks, died in 561.  How little had the
half-century accomplished.  Then came an age of division, murders,
horrors, in which the names of great ladies stand out as at least the
equals of their lords in crime.  Predegund, who became the wife of
Chilperich of Neustria, and Brunichildis, the wife first of Sigebert of
Austrasia, and then of Merovech, Chilperich's son, were rivals in
wickedness.  The horrors of those days are recorded in the history of
Gregory, who ruled over the see of Tours from 573 to 595.  It was an
age in which, while the rulers were Christian in name, and the land was
mapped out into sees ruled by Christian bishops, and monasteries were
springing up to teach {44} the young and to set an example of religious
life, the general atmosphere was almost avowedly pagan.  Men said,
tells Gregory, that "if a man has to pass between pagan altars and
God's church there is no harm in his paying homage to both," and the
lives of such men showed that it is impossible to serve God and Mammon.

Yet for a century and a half the Merwings, descendants of Chlodowech,
had among them strong rulers, great conquerors, men of iron as well as
men of blood.  Early in the seventh century, from 628 to 638, there
ruled in Gaul Dagobert, the greatest of the Merwing kings.  His rule
extended from the Pyrenees to the North Sea, from the ocean to the
forests of Thuringia and Bohemia.  He was "ruler of all Gaul and the
greater part of Germany, very influential in the affairs of Spain,
victorious over Slavs and Bulgarians, and at home a great king,
encouraging commerce and putting into better shape the law codes of his
subjects."

[Sidenote: Break up of their kingdom.]

That was the culmination of the Merwing power.  The seventh century saw
its decay, and a new step towards the medieval monarchy of the Franks.
Two causes effected the fall of the Merwings--their own vices and the
growth of feudalism with the creation of great local lords.  These
threatened to break up the kingdom of Chlodowech into small states, to
disintegrate and thus destroy the united nation of the Franks.

The first cause is one which it is difficult to exaggerate.  We read in
the pages of that great historian and great bishop, Gregory of Tours,
the terrible tale of their crimes, their brutal luxury, their lust for
blood, the {45} unbridled licence of their passions.  That was the
record of the days of their decay.  There was, however, even at the
best a great change from the times of Roman rule.  For civilisation,
literary culture, law, we find substituted in the pages of Gregory of
Tours savagery, scenes of brutality, drunkenness, robbery.  Law and
civilisation seem to sleep.  It was in this state of the country, when
every man's hand was against his neighbour, when law was unheard amid
the strife, that feudalism arose, a natural development of the desire
for self-preservation, which led to associations to supply the mutual
protection which there was no strength behind the law to enforce.  In
all these movements the Church had an active part.  [Sidenote: The
influence of the Church.] It was her principles of association which
taught men the idea of unity, of bonds by which personal security
should be based on new guarantees amid the weakness of government and
the neglect of law.  The Church held the tradition of a civilisation
the barbarians had never known, and in her own moral teaching she set
forth the way to an ideal state which should combine all the elements
of strength.  The growth of the Frankish nation was guided almost
entirely by the Church.

Feudalism, Roman administration and law, Christian faith and
discipline--these three factors were at work throughout the Dark Ages
from the fifth to the ninth century: and they were all--the last two
most especially--under the direction of the Church.  And first and most
obviously the monarchy of the Merwings was a patent imitation of the
Roman Empire.  The clergy had maintained the imperial tradition.  It
was they who taught the sovereigns to replace the emperors {46} and to
produce around them the illusion of a Roman rule.  They employed
officers with the same titles, centred their administration in their
household, claimed and exercised unlimited power.  No power above them
did they recognise, save only, when they would listen to their
teachers, the power of the love--more often the fear--of God.  The
barbarian invasions that had swept over the land had destroyed the
local, as well as the central administration.  At Arles survived the
relics of the old Roman functionaries of the prefecture; but in the
land of the Franks the whole system had to be reconstructed from the
tradition of which the Church was the faithful guardian.

[Sidenote: Relations with the Eastern Empire.]

Thus the real aim of Chlodowech and his successors was not to conquer
the Roman Empire, not to substitute a Teutonic power for a Roman one;
but to take the place of the empire in Gaul, to succeed to its
heritage, to re-establish its authority, under Frankish kings.  Thus
when the Empire of the West had ceased to be, the Frankish kings sought
titles and alliances from the emperors who still ruled at
Constantinople.  It is a significant characteristic, indeed, of the
Merwing monarchy that it kept up close relations with the distant Roman
Empire in the East, that the Frankish kings professed to be the loyal
allies, as they were often the formally adopted sons, of the Roman
emperors and the consuls of the republic.

The Frankish kings, by their Christianity, imperfect though it was,
were admitted to fellowship with the central power of the Christian
world, with emperor at Byzantium and pope at Rome.

"Gaul was really independent of the empire in all {47} respects," [1]
and it is not there that we should seek for ecclesiastical relations
with Constantinople.  But there can be no question that the Catholicism
of the Franks owed something to Eastern influences.  There are points
in the Gallican ritual which are distinctly Byzantine, and must belong
to this period.  Chlodowech, as an ally rather than a subject, and not
least, perhaps, because he was a Catholic, received the dignity of the
consulate from Anastasius.[2]  And in the reign of the great Justinian
the Merwings looked to the emperor for recognition and support.
Theodebert, his "son," accepted a commission to propagate the Catholic
faith in the imperial name.[3]  Bishops, too, who might be in need of
advice and consolation, applied naturally to Constantinople.  Nicetius,
Bishop of Trier, that "man of highest sanctity, admirable in preaching,
and renowned for good works," [4] persecuted by Chlothochar and his
men, wrote naturally to the holy and orthodox emperor, "dominus semper
suus."  In the midst of barbarities scarce conceivable,[5] the finest
characters were trained by the simple verities of the Catholic faith,
to which they clung with an extraordinary tenacity.  Nor is this
anywhere more strongly shown than in the history of the Franks.  Of the
meaning of the great struggle of Catholicism against Arianism, and of
its immense personal value, the histories afford many instances.  There
is an eloquent passage in {48} [Sidenote: The strength of the Catholic
faith among the Franks.] Mr. Hodgkin's _Italy and her Invaders_[6]
which I cannot forbear to quote.  "In the previous generation both
Brunichildis and Galswintha had easily conformed to the Catholic faith
of their affianced husbands.  Probably the councillors of Leovigild
expected that a mere child like Ingunthis would without difficulty make
the converse change from Catholicism back into Arianism.  This was ever
the capital fault of the Arian statesmen, that, with all their
religious bitterness, they could not comprehend that the profession of
faith, which was hardly more than a fashion to most of themselves, was
a matter of life and death to their Catholic rivals.  Here, for
instance, was their own princess, Brunichildis, reared in Arianism,
converted to the orthodox creed, clinging to it tenaciously through all
the perils and adversities of her own stormy career, and able to imbue
the child-bride, her daughter, with such an unyielding devotion to the
faith of Nicaea, that not one of all the formidable personages whom she
met in her new husband's home could avail to move her by one hair's
breadth towards 'the Arian pravity.'"

It was the strength of the Catholicism of those who were trained in it
and by it, seen in Spain and Gaul as well as in Italy, which drew the
Frankish churchmen naturally towards the great witnessing power of the
Roman bishop.  The pontificate of Gregory the Great affords significant
illustrations of this influence.

From 595 the letters of S. Gregory show a continual interest in Gaul.
A good deal of it is personal, concerned with the management of papal
estates or with {49} the relations of particular persons towards the
pope himself.  [Sidenote: Gregory the Great and Gaul.] But Gregory was
careful to assert a very special connection between Rome and the "lands
of the Gauls" in all ecclesiastical matters.  The Roman Church was the
mother to whom they applied in time of need.[7]  Gregory gave the
pallium to Vergilius, bishop of the ancient city of Arles, and with it
the position of papal vicar within the kingdoms of Burgundy, Austrasia,
and Aquitaine.  He recognised the terrible laxity of the Gallican
Church: the clergy were negligent, simoniacal, vicious; laymen were
often consecrated to the episcopate.  He gave counsel freely to the
kings: Childebert he warmly commended: Brunichild, whose tenacious
adherence to the Catholic faith he knew, while he probably knew but
little of her personal character, he wrote to with paternal affection,
granted the pallium at her request and that of Gallican bishops to S.
Syagrius, Bishop of Autun, and appealed to her as one who had the will
as well as the power to reform abuses, remove scandals, and destroy
paganism.  He set himself determinedly to work against the taint of
money which hung over the whole Church.  He earnestly pleaded for the
expulsion of "these detestable evils," for the summoning of a synod
which should reform the whole Church.  He pleaded in vain; but his work
was not without lasting results.  He founded the alliance between the
papacy and the Frankish kings which was to be so fruitful in later
history.  And he founded it not with a political but with an entirely
religious object.  Through the court he hoped to reform the Church.  He
saw how closely Church and State were {50} linked together, and he
thought that he could make the kings act as rulers who set the Church's
interest always first.  It has been well said that his work, though the
Church long remained corrupt, was not in vain.  "He succeeded in
establishing a regular intercourse between himself and the churches of
Gaul, especially in the cities of the east and south; he fixed a
tradition of friendship between the apostolic see and the Frank
princes; he held up an ideal of Christianity before a savage and
half-pagan people; and he caused the name of bishop to be once more
reverenced in a land where it had grown to be almost synonymous with
avarice, lawlessness, and corrupt ambition.  If Gregory did no more
than this he accomplished enough.  Though his work was not rich in
definite results at the moment, yet afterwards, in the reign of
Charlemagne, its effects became manifest." [8]

[Sidenote: Relations of the Frankish Church with Rome.]

At the same time the Frankish Church undoubtedly maintained a position
distinctly independent of Rome.  Arles never really became a papal
vicariate.  Gregory's endeavours were fruitless in practical result.[9]
The Gallican churches continued to be governed by their bishops, with
every degree of local variety, not by the pope.  Gregory rather set
forth an ideal than established a subordination.  His influence was
personal not constitutional, and it was not strong.  Yet in the days
between Gregory and Charles the Great the links connecting Rome with
Gaul were not weakened.  Later on they were to be strengthened still
more by the growth of a reformed monasticism, which gave support {51}
to the papacy while yet it looked to the popes for guidance.  But
meanwhile the influence of individual ecclesiastics in Gaul must not be
forgotten.  As was so often the case in medieval Europe, an age of
wickedness presents, in the chronicles and biographies, a very large
proportion of lives which received the praise of sanctity.  Bishops,
anchorites, monks, often, it would seem, rose far above the standard of
their day: men noted their lives with awe and remembered them with
reverence.  They moved in a society of curious complexity.

[Learning at the court of the Merwings.]

Venantius Fortunatus, who dedicated his poems to Gregory the Great, and
was "the great man of letters of his age," was a poet, but a Christian
poet--a writer of letters, but a close friend of holy souls, and
notably of S. Radegund, the exiled princess and saint.[10]  We learn
from him that even in those days of blood there was a literary society
at the Frankish courts, and the savage king Chilperich made pretence to
be a writer, a theologian, and even a poet, though Gregory of Tours
assures us that he had not the least notion of prosody.

Venantius Fortunatus and his literary friends, Chilperich and his
obsequious courtiers, link us to another and more notable name.  To one
bishop, who achieved canonisation, we owe very much of what we know of
the history of those times.

Gregory of Tours wrote memoirs which "are those of a man who has played
a great part in the State.  At the same time he has the sense for
interesting {52} things, miracles, and adventures, which is sometimes
wanting in historians." [11]

[Sidenote: Gregory of Tours.]

We learn from his books that he had been trained in classic learning,
and that the bishops of the day did not turn aside from the pagan
classics.  It is quite clear that his education was not merely
theological or even exclusively Christian.  Other writers he refers to,
but with Vergil he certainly was familiar.  And it is difficult to
believe that he stood alone, bitterly though he complained of the
ignorance of his contemporaries.  The very fact that Gregory the Great
denounced the custom of bishops studying and teaching classical grammar
and classical fables, shows that the education of those days was not
very closely confined.  And of its results, seen also in a goodly list
of clerical men of letters, Gregory of Tours is perhaps the best
example.

He was before all things a bishop; he wrote indeed, as a French writer
has happily said, "en évêque"; but he was also a statesman and a very
keen observer of life.  From his pages we learn how slight had been the
impression that Christianity had yet made on the lives of barbarous
men.  We see kings still wondering that God's power could be greater
than their own, yet when they were awoke to terror by the thought of
death flying in craven fear to the feet of the minister of God.  The
whole history is a tale of treacheries and murders, of quarrels and of
sins among men and women pledged to God; and yet it is evident that
behind the cruelty and crime there was a new spirit at work, slowly
transforming society by the conversion of individuals.  It was a
transformation {53} which was going on all over Europe; nowhere at this
time, perhaps, more conspicuously than in Gaul and in Ireland.  There
are many parallels between the Celtic "age of saints" and the Merwing
age of sinners.  It is difficult to learn the full truth about either;
but out of the darkness comes the conspicuous witness of individual
saints.  Of one or two of these a word may be said.  Most notable is
one who served both Ireland and Gaul.

[Sidenote: S. Columban (540-615).]

The figure of the great Irish monk Columban is a light in the darkness
of the gross and cruel Merwing age.  Born about 540, he died in 615,
after a life of achievement and hardness such as was given to few of
his time.  He died at Bobbio, crowned with the halo of heroism and
sanctity; but he was born in distant Ireland, and the main work of his
life had been to introduce into Gaul the monastic movement which was
led in Italy by S. Benedict.  During the intellectual and moral
weakness which the barbarian invasions brought upon the West the Church
in Ireland appeared to stand forth resplendent in the security of her
faith and virtue and in the cultivation of learning.  In the warm
Celtic nature the Gospel, so late introduced, had found a natural home.
The monasteries which rose all over the land, with the huts of hermits
and the cells of anchorites, were the seed-plots of religion and sacred
lore.  The community life of Christian religious was naturally grafted
on to the old Druid stock.  The tribes of the Goidels became the
monasteries; the head of the family was the abbat; the country looked
everywhere to the monks for leadership.  Thus Armagh and Emly, Clonard,
Ennismore, Clonfert, Clonmacnoise, {54} Bangor, arose to teach and
govern the Church.  Their monks lived by severe rule, based, no doubt,
upon the customs of the East, of Egypt or Syria, most strict in the
abasement of the selfish will, in penitence, in work, in prayer.  "Good
is the rule of Bangor," said the ancient sequence, "strait, austere,
holy, and just."  It was this rule, with the enthusiasm which marked
all classes for religion and for knowledge, which inspired S. Columban
in his great work.  It was a work whose keynote was sacred study and
which found its harmony in monastic service.  S. Columban was the type,
the representative _par excellence_, of the Irish monk, in his high
idealism, his thirst for self-sacrifice, his adventurous and missionary
spirit.

[Sidenote: His work in Gaul.]

He was trained at Bangor, but there he could not stay.  He was fired
with the determination to spread the Gospel over sea, among the Gauls
who, under a veneer of Christianity, still often lived a pagan life.
There heathen superstitions still flourished, in worship of the old
gods, in veneration of trees and rocks and idols: the heathen morals
were hardly disguised.  The Frankish society over which the Merwings
ruled, the Gaul of Sigebert and Chilperich and Chlothochar, was stained
with blood and lust.  Apart from it altogether, it would seem, and
exercising hardly any influence, were a few holy bishops and very many
isolated monasteries, the homes of prayer and renunciation and
penitence.  In the sixth century it is said that some two hundred
monasteries were founded in Gaul; but their protest against the vice of
their age was for the most part a silent one.  Columban, when he
landed, was to make a more effective protest against the luxury of the
time, {55} the ineffective, unmeaning faith in the forgiveness of sins
apart from renunciation of them, which marked the semi-Christian
society into which he came.

[Sidenote: Luxeuil and its rule.]

Guntchramn, king of the Burgundians, gave him a settlement at Annegray,
and afterwards at Luxeuil, where there grew up, on the site of an
earlier Roman township, a monastery of stern and rigid rule.
Eventually he added a third foundation at Fontaine; and he presided
over three houses, governing according to a rule which he himself drew
up, after the examples of Clonard and Bangor.  Its characteristic was
the completeness of the self-denial aimed at; its motto the thought,
"Think not of what thou art, but of what thou shalt be"; its government
an autocracy depending wholly on the abbat; its scholarship not only
that of the Bible, but of the Latin classics--of Horace and of Vergil.
Its work was twofold.  In the first place, it exemplified a strict life
of obedience, self-sacrifice, and prayer, the home of which was ever
ready to minister to sick souls without; and, secondly, it supplied the
religion of the age with a penitential system--in the penitential based
upon Irish models--which was of great influence in the secular and
ecclesiastical legislation of the future.  Columban was not favourably
received by all the episcopate of his new country.  They were men of
different ideals, unacquainted with the culture which meant so much to
him; and their acceptance of the general Western custom of observing
Easter caused a warm dispute with the Celtic monks.  To Gregory the
Great and to the Gaulish bishops Columban alike appealed on behalf of
the custom he had received; but finally, after more than thirty {56}
years' residence in Burgundy, he consented to observe the Celtic custom
in silence, without endeavour to make converts to it.  A more grave
enemy at the beginning of the seventh century was the wicked young
Burgundian king, Theodoric, at whose court was his grandmother,
Brunichild.  His stern denunciations of vice, his refusal to recognise
the king's unlawful children, brought on Columban the fury of the
oppressor, and he was ordered away from Luxeuil into a sort of
semi-captivity at Besançon, and thence into exile.  Long he wandered
through Gaulish lands, to Nevers, down the Loire to Nantes, whence it
was said that the ship refused to bear him back to Ireland.  At last,
after a meeting with Chlothochar, King of Neustria, whose rule over all
the Franks he had prophesied, he found refuge at Bregenz, by the lake
of Constance.  With him were several of his monks, among them the S.
Gall whose settlement in those lands has given the name to a canton of
what is now Switzerland.  The long journey of the exiled monks, with
their strange tonsure, their holiness, their alms, their works of
healing, was a veritable mission.  [Sidenote: Bobbio.] The journey
eventually ended in Italy; the internecine strifes of the Merwings
which ceased for the time in the union of the whole land of the Franks
under Chlothochar, left Columban without interest in Gaul, and the
Lombard sovereigns gave him a home at Bobbio, in the Apennines, where
his monastery, aided by the holiness of Queen Theodelind, was a mighty
influence in the conversion of Lombardy from Arianism.  There, in 615,
he died, the prophet of his age, the stern preacher of righteousness,
the wise student, the faithful herdsman of souls.  {57} Columban is a
great figure, of the chief facts of whose life there is no doubt.  It
is not so with many others.

[Sidenote: S. Wandrille.]

S. Patrick belongs, we do not doubt, to true history; but there is no
doubt as to the richness of the legendary element in his life.  Much
the same is true of S. Wandrille.  Few Englishmen, we suspect, have
heard his name; but he was a great figure in an age which Mabillon
called golden in its religious aspect, the strange, wild time of the
Merwings, the seventh century after Christ.  In 648 S. Wandrille
founded the abbey of Fontenelle, in the district of Caux.  He lived
till a great age, his death being probably much later than 667, to
which year it has been assigned.  His career affords a very vivid
picture of the monastic life of the time, standing out amid the
darkness of crime.  He rightly emphasises the holiness and wisdom and
learning of the great bishops of the Merwing age.  It was their work as
leaders, missionaries, statesmen in the highest Christian sense which
the monasteries were called upon to continue and perfect.  The
monasteries were the refuge and the rallying-ground of those who fought
against the secularisation of the Church at the hands of the
Gallo-Roman aristocracy.  S. Wandrille, born of the great Karling
house, was a leader among leaders, statesman among statesmen, monk
among monks.  He was one who passed from a great though barbaric court,
where he had been a trusted official, into the strictness of monastic
training, and then into the solitude of secluded communion with God.
Such lives as his were the great attractive forces of the seventh
century; such retreats as the valley of Fontenelle were the centres of
Christian influence of the age.

{58}

Between these men and Gregory of Tours it might seem that there was
little in common.  But there were others whose lives combined the
interests of the two, the interests of monk and statesman and bishop.

[Sidenote: S. Didier.]

Another great clerk of the seventh century who must not be forgotten is
S. Didier (Desiderius) of Cahors, at one time treasurer of Chlothochar
II, and of Dagobert I., the friend of saints like Eloi (Eligius), Ouen,
and Arnulf.  Through him we learn something of the religious life of
Southern Gaul.  He died probably in 655, and thus he represented the
earlier part of the seventh century.  His biographer gives a long list
of the holy bishops who were his contemporaries, and of the churches
and monasteries which were scattered thickly over the land.  The whole
tone of his writing--earnest, biblical, spiritual, shows how the
Church, in spite of weakness and sloth and failure in some of her chief
men, yet held up a standard of right and justice, purity and devotion,
which penetrated all over the country, into castles and humble
homesteads, and profoundly affected the whole national life.  And this
work was concentrated in the public eye in those good men who at court,
amid good and ill report, lived as servants of Him who went about doing
good.

But while the Church was thus entering into all the national life, as a
sharer in its interests of every kind, it was the monastic ideal, there
can be little doubt, which ultimately exercised the greatest influence
on the Franks.  The saints who won reverence were for the most part
monks.  The work of Columban passed into the work of Benedict, and when
Luxeuil accepted {59} the Benedictine rule, and when the Council of
Autun in 670 declared it to be the rule for all monks everywhere, a
great step was taken towards the intimate union of Gaul with the rest
of Christendom in the things on which they had begun to set most store.



[1] Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_, vol. i. p. 396.

[2] Greg. Tur., ii. 38 (Migne, _Patr. Lat._, p. 236).

[3] Bouquet, _Recueil_, tom. iv. p. 59, epist. 15: cf. Gasquet,
_L'Empire byzantin et la Monarchie franque_, p. 165.

[4] Greg. Turon., _Hist. Franc._, x. 29 (Migne, p. 560): cf. also his
_Vitae Patrum_, 17.  Hontheim, _Historia diplomatica_, i. 47.

[5] Cf. Greg. Turon., v. 3, on the frightful cruelty of Rauching.

[6] Vol. v. p. 262.

[7] S. Greg., _Epp._ v. 58.

[8] F. H. Dudden, _Gregory the Great_, ii. 69.

[9] Cf. E. Lavisse, _Hist. de France_, tome ii. p. 219,

[10] M. Roger, _L'Enseignement des lettres classiques d'Ausone à
Alcuin_, p. 100.

[11] W. P. Ker, _The Dark Ages_, p. 125.




{60}

CHAPTER V

THE PONTIFICATE OF GREGORY THE GREAT

[Sidenote: Gregory the Great.]

About 540 was born in Rome, of a noble family, the great Pope Gregory,
whose work was to place the papacy at the head of Italian politics, and
to lay the lines on which papal action for many centuries was to be
based.  When he was a child it might well have seemed that Italy under
a strong Gothic rule would submit to the Arian teaching which the State
supported.  Theodoric endeavoured to make an united Italy; but the
Church knew that there could be no compromise on the doctrine of the
perfect Godhead of the Lord Jesus, and her attitude preserved Italy
both for Catholicism and for the Empire.  Gregory was taught as a
Catholic, but he was taught also in classical grammar, composition,
rhetoric, and the writings of the great Romans--pre-Christian, as well
as of later days.  He began his life's work as a Roman official, and by
the year 573 he is found as prefect of the city.  A year later, it
would seem, he became a monk, giving up all his property, all his signs
of rank and wealth, all his power and place.  Soon, if not at once, he
came to serve under the rule of S. Benedict, whose life he afterwards
wrote, in the monastery dedicated to S. Andrew on the Caelian hill.

{61}

[Sidenote: The Lombard invasion, 568.]

It was the time when Italy was again at the feet of the barbarians.
The Lombards, the last of the Teutonic nations to settle in the West,
established at Pavia a kingdom which lasted for two centuries
(568-774), and which again rent away much of the fair Italian lands
from the unity of the Empire, leaving the Exarchate at Ravenna in a
state half isolated and wholly perilous.

[Sidenote: The effect on Italy.]

Gradually the onward sweep of the new barbarians, who called themselves
Arians, but were not strongly bound by any creed, swept away all power
save their own and the pope's.  The destruction of Monte Cassino was
typical of one side of their work--the turning aside from Rome at
Gregory's intercession of another.  The Empire struggled to retain its
hold on Italy and to govern the Western world from Ravenna, with
instructions from the New Rome; but it failed.  The papacy studied to
be quiet.  And the close of the sixth century showed that power would
return in the end to the city which had founded the Empire, and to the
Church which was now claiming to teach and to unite the nations.

A period of papal insignificance was gradually ended by the progress of
new ideals for the papacy.  This came about in three ways.

[Sidenote: The popes and the exarchate.]

1. It was the aim of each pope to set up his power against that of the
imperial exarchate, by which Italy was ruled after its reconquest by
Belisarius and Narses.  Gradually, step by step, the popes claimed
cognisance of secular matters, intervened in politics, and stood forth
as a leaders in Italian affairs.  The imperial administration saw the
danger, and, from time to time, made definite {62} opposition to the
papal pretensions.  It endeavoured to restore the unity of the Church,
to secure the universal condemnation of the Three Chapters, but under
sanction of Ravenna rather than of Rome.  Thus the exarch Smaragdus, in
587, led Severus, patriarch of Aquileia, before the Ravennate prelates
to make submission;[1] and later the emperor Maurice interfered to
present the pope compelling the patriarch to submission.  But these
endeavours were futile; and the great Gregory, statesman and
administrator of the first order, made the papacy the most important
political power in the western provinces of the Empire.  In 599 this
was apparent in Gregory's negotiation with the Lombard king, Agilulf.

[Sidenote: The Benedictines in South Italy.]

2. The papal influence was increased, and the Greek power diminished,
by the direct replacement of Eastern monks by Benedictines.[2]  The
monasteries founded by Greeks during the imperial restoration, no
longer replenished from Constantinople, fell into the hands of the
great papal force founded by the greatest saint, and marshalled by the
greatest administrator of the century.

[Sidenote: Missions from Rome.]

3. And, lastly, the power of the papacy was at once evidenced and
increased by the revival of its missionary energy.  What Pelagius II.
had stayed, Gregory the Great accomplished--conversion of England by
the mission of Augustine.  Spain, too, was won from Arianism by a
personal friend of Gregory's, though without Roman intervention;[3] and
within Italy itself the {63} pope began the great work of the
conversion of the Lombards to the Catholic faith, with the full
teaching both of the Tome of Leo and of the Fifth General Council.
Gregory sent the Acts of the Council to be taught to the little child
Adalwald, the Lombard king.

Thus in each of these three directions the progress of papal power is
connected with the influence of Gregory the Great.  It is of his papacy
therefore that we must speak as the critical point in the upward
movement.  Between 574 and 590 Gregory gained experience in many ways.
To a strict monastic training he added, in 579, the employment of papal
apocrisiarius (or envoy) at the imperial court at Constantinople.  Here
he became intimate with the chief ecclesiastics, with Anastasius, who
had been deposed from the patriarchal see of Antioch, and who came to
regard him as "the very mouth and lantern of the Lord," with Leander of
Seville, who had come to lay the needs of the Catholic cause in Spain
before the emperors,[4] and with the imperial family.  [Sidenote:
Gregory as abbat.] About 586 he returned to Rome, and became abbat of
the monastery in which he had formerly served.  It was there that he
completed his commentary, or _moralia_, on the book of Job, which he
had delivered as lectures at Constantinople, an epitome of Christian
theology and morals.  It was then that he saw the bright lads from
Deira, who first turned his thoughts to the conversion of England.[5]
The controversy of the Three Chapters was still lingering on in Italy,
and it was Gregory who was given the task of inducing the Istrian {64}
bishops to accept the decisions of the Fifth General Council.
[Sidenote: Gregory elected Pope, 590.] So skilful did he prove himself
as a controversialist, as an administrator, and as an adviser of
Pelagius, that he was elected with enthusiasm to succeed that pope in
590.

[Sidenote: The pastoral rule.]

His ideal of the pastoral office is set forth in that golden book, the
_Liber regulae pastoralis_, in which he describes the life of a true
shepherd of the Christian people.  A life of absolute purity and
devotion as therein sketched was that which made Gregory's pontificate
notable for its wisdom, its discretion, and its wise governance.  The
pastoral office to him was one even more of the cure of souls than of
government, and that idea is shown in all his letters.  He wrote to
kings, abbats, individual Christians, with the spirit of direct
encouragement and admonition, as a wise teacher dispensing instruction.
In the Lateran he lived, as he had lived on the Caelian hill, a life of
strict ascetic rule, wearing still his monastic dress, and living in
common with his clerks and monks.  [Sidenote: Gregory's life.] John the
Deacon, who wrote his biography nearly two centuries after his death,
says that "the Roman Church in Gregory's time was like that Church as
it was under the rule of the apostles, or the Church of Alexandria when
S. Mark was its bishop."  Charity was by him developed into a great
scheme of benevolence organised with the minutest care and recorded in
detail in books that were a model to later times.  The political and
ecclesiastical cares of the papacy never prevented Gregory from what he
considered the chiefest duty of his office, that of preaching.  His
sermons, which were as famous as those of Chrysostom in Constantinople,
were {65} direct in their appeal, vivid in their illustration, terse
and epigrammatic in their expression.  Paul the Deacon sums up his work
by saying that he was entirely engrossed in gaining souls.

[Sidenote: His statesmanship.]

At the same time he was a statesman as well as a bishop.  He governed
the "patrimony of S. Peter," lands scattered over Italy and even Gaul,
with a careful supervision, entering into minute matters as well as
general policy, freeing slaves, caring for the cultivation of land; and
the intimate knowledge which he thus acquired is shown in his
_Dialogues_, which throw a flood of light on the life, secular as well
as ecclesiastical, of his age.  Outside these districts, in purely
spiritual matters, he showed a constant vigilance.  Everywhere what was
needed seemed to be known to the pope, and everywhere he was planning
to remedy evils, to build up the Church, to reform abuses, to convert
heretics, to supply new bishops, to encourage the growth of
monasticism.  This activity extended not only to what were called the
suburbicarian provinces but to distant lands, such as Spain, Illyricum,
Gaul, Africa, as well as to Northern Italy.  Something has been said of
his relations in Gaul, and remains to be said of his intervention in
Africa.  His relations with Constantinople may be most significantly
illustrated by the dispute as to the title of the patriarch of New Rome.

[Sidenote: The title "Universal Bishop."]

In 588 the acts of a synod of Constantinople were declared by Pelagius
II. to be invalid be-cause the patriarch used the title _oikoumenikos_
or _universalis_.  Just as at the Council of Chalcedon the Alexandrine
representatives styled the pope "oecumenical archbishop and {66}
patriarch of the Great Rome," so the patriarch of Constantinople used
the style and dignity of "oecumenical patriarch."  It was one that had
been employed at least since 518, and it seems to have been commonly
used.  From the use of this title came grave controversy.  In 588 the
acts of a synod of Constantinople were declared by Pelagius II. to be
invalid because the patriarch used the title _oikoumenikos_ or
_universalis_: and in 595 Gregory the Great strongly condemned the use
of such a phrase, at the same time repudiating its use for his own see.
"The Council of Chalcedon," he wrote, "offered the title of universal
to the Roman pontiff, but he refused to accept it, lest he should seem
thereby to derogate from the honour of his brother bishops." [6]  And
to the emperor Maurice he said still more distinctly, "I confidently
affirm that whosoever calls himself _sacerdos universalis_, or desires
to be so called by others, is in his pride a forerunner of Antichrist."
But the patriarchs continued to use the title, and before a century had
elapsed, the popes followed their example.

[Sidenote: The province of Illyricum.]

The relation of Gregory with the Church of Illyricum gives opportunity
for mention of that anomalous patriarchate.  Somewhat apart from the
general Church history of the early Middle Age stands the province of
Illyricum.  Its ecclesiastical status was even more ambiguous than its
political.  On its borders, or within its limits, the patriarchate of
Rome touched that of {67} Constantinople, and the claims of the two,
sometimes at least conflicting, were complicated by the privileges
given by Justinian to his birthplace.  In the tenth century it was
undoubtedly under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, in the seventh it
appears to have been under that of Rome.  In the Councils at
Constantinople in 681 and 692, the Illyrian bishops appeared as
attached exclusively to Rome; and so, it has been noticed, did those of
Crete, Thessalonica, and Corinth.  In the sixth century there are
instances, though not numerous ones, of papal interference, in the
nature of the exercise of judicial power, in the province of Illyricum;
and at the end of the century Gregory the Great was especially active
in his correspondence with the bishops.  It would seem from one of his
letters that he counted even Justiniana Prima as under his authority,
though the intention of the emperor was certainly not to make it so.
This edict--for so it practically is--is interesting also because it
appears to deal with all the ecclesiastical provinces of the empire
which depended immediately on the Roman patriarchate.  It omits Africa,
and the fact that the popes did not send the pallium to the Bishop of
Carthage (the North African Metropolitan) shows that the popes did not
claim to confer jurisdiction, but merely to recognise a special
relationship, by this act.[7]  On the other hand, it is to be observed
that the code of Justinian contains a law of Theodosius II. which
places the Illyrian bishopric under the jurisdiction of the patriarch
of Constantinople.  But this law is beset with many difficulties, and
it has been {68} argued that it was merely the expression of a
temporary rupture between the Empire and the papacy, which in the
schism of 484-519 was gravely accentuated; and there are grounds for
thinking that the bishops of Thessalonica exercised authority in
Illyricum as delegates of Rome--yet rather from their political than
their ecclesiastical associations.  However this may be, there can be
no doubt that the position given by Justinian to the city of his birth
was intended to be practically patriarchal, and that the Bishop of
Thessalonica, whether vicar or not of the pope, was practically
ignored.  The whole question is indeed a notable example of the
difficulties consequent on the close connection between religion and
politics in the sixth century.

[Sidenote: Gregory's claim to jurisdiction.]

Gregory's action was that of a wise but masterful ruler, and it seems
to have been based on the view that all the bishops of the West were
directly under his jurisdiction.  Similar cases of interference are to
be found in regard to the churches of Istria, and to the great sees of
Ravenna and Milan.  In connection may be seen the claim to grant the
_pallium_, a mark of honour which seems to have been gradually passing
into a sign of jurisdiction.[8]  Gregory claimed for the successors of
S. Peter something like an apostolic authority, and he at least
suggested a theory of the papal office which was capable of almost
indefinite extension.  Politic and religion here met together.  When
Airulf in 592 appeared before Rome the pope made a separate treaty with
him: he stepped into the {69} place of ruler of imperial Italy when he
disregarded the exarch and even the emperor, and entered into
negotiations on his own account; and up to the time of his death he was
practically responsible for the rearrangement of Italy.  His letter to
the great Lombard queen, Theodelind, of whom memorials survive to-day
at Monza, show how the two sides of his position mingled; how he was
statesman and diplomatist as well as priest and missionary.

[Sidenote: His missions.]

In his missionary interests he passed far outside Italy.  The most
conspicuous example is the conversion of the English, which he had in
earlier years been most anxious himself to undertake, and which was
begun in 597 under his direction by Augustine; but it is not the only
one.  In Northern Italy, in Africa and Gaul, Gregory was active in
seeking the conversion of pagans and heretics, and in endeavouring by
gentle measures to lead the Jews to Christ.

[Sidenote: His relations on monasticism.]

More important still in the history of the papacy was Gregory's work in
spreading, organising, and systematising monasticism.  He insisted on
the strict observance of the rule of S. Benedict.  Not only did he
reform, but he very greatly strengthened, the monasticism of Italy.
Conspicuously did his _privilegia_, granting or recognising a
considerable freedom from episcopal control, start the monks on a new
advance.  While not exempting them from the rule of bishops, he made it
possible for future popes to win support for themselves by granting
such exemptions.

But Gregory's fame does not lie wholly in any of these spheres of
activity.  Great as a ruler and an {70} organiser, he was known also to
later ages, as to his own, for his theological writings.  He was not
only a practical ruler and practical minister of Christ; he was also a
leader in Christian learning--the last, as men have come to call him,
of the four great Latin doctors.

[Sidenote: His relations to learning.]

The work of Gregory the Great was here as elsewhere far-reaching, but
rather an organising than a formative one.  Classical studies, in which
he had been trained, he put aside; and when he did his utmost to spread
monasteries over the length and breadth of Italy, it was not at all of
learning in a secular sense, but wholly of religion that he thought.
Thus his own theology is primarily a biblical theology.  The Bible was
to him the word of God.  Like the author of the _Imitatio Christi_ in
later days, he did not care to argue as to the authorship of the
different books but to profit by what was in them.  He was a great
expositor, a great preacher, and that always with a practical aim.  As
he said, "We hear the doctrine  words of God if we act on them."
[Sidenote: His doctrine of the church.] In his more general theological
writings he sums up, with the precision of a master, not any new
doctrines or advances in speculation, but the theology of the Church of
his age.  And he is able thus to emphasise the crying need of unity in
words which state the claim of the Church for the conversion of the
pagans and heretics of his day: "Sancta autem universalis ecclesia
praedicat Deum veraciter nisi intra se coli non posse, asserens quod
omnes qui extra ipsam sunt minime salvabuntur."  Outside this there was
no hope of spiritual health.  And this doctrine he based {71} on the
unity of Christ's life with that of the Church: "Our Redeemer showed
that He is one person with the Church, which He took to be His own";
and thus it was that "The Churches of the true faith set in all parts
of the world make one Catholic Church, in which all the faithful who
are right minded toward God live in concord."  Thus he was, in theology
as in ecclesiastical politics, a concentrating and clarifying force;
and when, on March 12th, 604, he passed to his rest, he had laid firm
the foundations of the medieval papacy, and in hardly less degree those
of the theological system of the medieval Church.



[1] _Paulus Diaconus_, iii, 26, ed. Waitz, pp. 105-7.

[2] Diehl, _op. cit._, gives a list, p. 256.

[3] Joannes Biclarensis, _Chronicon_ (Migne, _Patr. Lat._, lxxii. 868).

[4] See below, p. 76.

[5] The _Vita Antiquissima_ (S. Gall. MS.), by a monk of Whitby, does
not represent them as slaves (pp. 13, 14), ed. Gasquet.

[6] S. Greg., _Epp._, v. 18.  The term _sacerdos_ is commonly used for
bishop at this date.  Thus Gregory of Tours calls a bishop _sacerdos_
during this life, _antistes_ after his death.  S. Gregory must not,
however, be understood as disclaiming a papal supremacy.

[7]  The letter is Epp. Greg. (Jaffé), 1497; cf. letter to Syagrius,
Bishop of Autun.

[8] It does not seem, from Bede i. 39, that, as has been asserted, it
was always necessary to apply for it.




{72}

CHAPTER VI

CONTROVERSY AND THE CATHOLICISM OF SPAIN

[Sidenote: Pelagian controversy of sixth century.]

Controversies which belong to this period are those connected with
semi-Pelagianism and with Adoptianism.  Faustus, Bishop of Riez, who
died almost at the end of the fifth century, held views which were
opposed to those of S. Augustine as well as to those of Pelagius.  His
writings were attacked by many, among them by Caesarius, Bishop of
Arles from 501 to 542, who caused a synod at Orange in 529 to condemn
semi-Pelagian opinions, in a statement which declared that sufficient
grace is given to all the baptized (an expression which had an
important history centuries later).  The writings of Faustus were the
subject of much discussion also at Constantinople, and they were
condemned by several of the popes.

Of a wholly different kind was the heresy originating in the East, and
probably revived through the controversy of the Three Chapters, which
came into prominence in the eighth century in Spain.  It has been
thought that the exigencies of anti-Muhammadan controversy had
something to do with the importance which the question now assumed.
The Spanish Church had a long record, in the Councils of Toledo, of
orthodox and {73} strenuous adherence to the Christian faith; but it
showed also a strongly nationalistic spirit, and it was natural that
much should be developed, through antagonism to Muhammadanism and Arian
influences, which would fall into danger of extreme reaction on the one
side or of unwise concession on the other.  "Spanish Christianity," it
has been said in a phrase which has become classical, "was a perpetual
crusade."  In Spain the Christian contest against sin and unbelief
became more often, or more constantly, than elsewhere an actual
physical struggle against those who distorted or denied the faith of
the Church and those who trampled it under foot.  This is, of course,
most true of the ages which followed the Moorish invasions, of the long
strife between Christians and Moors, of the times and the thoughts
which gave birth to the immortal literature of the peninsula, to
Calderon and Cervantes, to Lope de Vega and S. Teresa of Jesus.  But it
is also true, though in a less degree, of the earlier times--of those
which extended from the introduction of Christianity--from the
missionary visit, it may be, of S. Paul himself--down to the
destruction of the monarchy of the Wisigoths in 711.  Spain was in 589
won to Catholicism by the conversion of its king Reccared.  But this
was the end of a long and critical period, for from the acceptance of
Arianism by Remismond in 466 the country was under the rule of princes
who were pledged to that error.

The Wisigoths identified their heresy with their nationality.  The
general decadence of the Empire spread to Spain.  The social system was
in a state of dissolution.  The canons of the Councils show a {74}
picture of life which is appalling in its corruption, but at the same
time are evidence of the earnest efforts of the Church for amendment.
[Sidenote: The conversion of Spain.] They show how Christianity had
penetrated into the country districts, and how eager were the bishops
of the sixth century to do their spiritual duty far and wide.  Side by
side with the canons of Church Councils is the great Fuero Jusgo (in
process of compilation from the fifth to the eighth century) in
witnessing to the efforts for a better state of things.  During the
rule of the West Goths, persecution of Catholics had been frequent, but
when Amalric married Hlothild, daughter of Chlodowech, promising her
tolerance of her religion, a way was opened for a new life to
orthodoxy.  But Amalric broke his promise, and an invasion of Spain by
the Franks followed.  In the reign of the Arian Theudis (531-48) there
was still more decisive intervention.  Childebert and Chlothochar
invaded Spain and besieged Saragossa, but were driven back; and it was
not till Athanagild called in the armies of Justinian that the
confusion and division of Spanish life; between orthodox and heretic,
Roman and Goth, was healed in the slightest degree.  The year 560
witnessed the conversion of King Mir by Martin of Braga, and three
years later, and again in 572, Councils at Braga witnessed to the
Catholic faith of the Church.  But it was an era of fightings and
fears.  The Roman armies of the Eastern Empire held the cities of the
coast long after Athanagild had come to be recognised as king of all
the Goths in Spain, but gradually unity was springing up under the rule
of that able chieftain.  He died in 568, having married his daughters,
Brunichild and Galswintha, to {75} the Frankish kings, Sigebert and
Chilperich.  His successor Leovigild established a sway over all the
Wisigothic possessions and ruled from Nîmes to Seville.  The wedding of
Brunichild, though sung by Venantius Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers,
was but the beginning of crime and of sorrows; yet it led indirectly to
the conversion of Spain.  Brunichild's daughter Ingunthis married
Leovigild's son Hermenigild.  She was bitterly persecuted as a Catholic
when she came to Spain, but she clung to her faith with the devotion of
a martyr, and she won over her husband.  [Sidenote: Hermenigild.] At
Seville Hermenigild was for some time acting as king, under his father,
and when he was threatened on his conversion with the loss of all he
had he took up arms.  After a long contest he was subdued, and he
underwent a long persecution ending eventually in death when he refused
to receive communion at the hands of an Arian bishop on Easter Day,
585.[1]  Ingunthis escaped to Constantinople.  Then till 587 Arianism
reigned supreme in Spain, and John of Biclaro, Catholic bishop of
Gerona, writes as one crying in a wilderness.  But Catholicism in Spain
was scotched, not killed, and when Reccared (586-601) called Arian and
Catholic bishop alike before him, and after two years definitely
accepted orthodoxy under the influence of his uncle Leander, Archbishop
of Seville, it was not long before the whole of Council of Spain
accepted his decision and followed his example.  [Sidenote: Council of
Toledo, 589.] This was in 587, and an {76} inscription shows that the
cathedral church of Toledo was then consecrated in the Catholic faith.
With the Council of Toledo (third synod of Toledo), 589,[2] which
accepted the first four General Councils and the Procession of the Holy
Ghost from the Father and the Son, Spain returned to the unity of the
faith.  From Reccared's reign, too, dates a civilisation distinctly
traceable to Constantinople and a recognition of absolute equality
between the different races in the peninsula.  And to that golden age
belong also the great saint and preacher, Leander, who died in 603, and
S. Isidore of Seville, the encyclopaedic writer, who died thirty-three
years later.  S. Leander had at Constantinople come to know Gregory the
Great.  He was the chief theologian of Spain in his age, and his words
welcomed and ratified the conversion.  Thus the modern history of Spain
and her most Catholic kings begins.  The importance of the period
culminates in the compilation, almost final, of the great Wisigothic
Code, the Fuero Jusgo, at once civil and ecclesiastical, the result of
a union between Church and State even more perfect than that
represented in the English Witenagemot.

The concentration of Spanish interests on theological questions led
before long to new developments, but meanwhile it helped the happy
tendency to unity which Recceswinth (652-72) confirmed by allowing the
intermarriage which had long been forbidden--Recceswinth, whose
splendid gold crown, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, still remains
amongst the most striking memorials of the Christian art of the seventh
century.  Wamba, his successor, established his supremacy in {77}
Septimania by the capture of Nîmes from a traitorous vicegerent, and
lived to show the sincerity with which the Wisigoths had accepted the
idea of the sanctity of vows to God.  During an illness, when he was
supposed to be incapable of recovery and remained in a stupor, he
received the tonsure that he might die as a monk: when he recovered he
refused to return to the world and abdicated the throne.  His
successors were equally strict, it would seem, in obedience to the
Church's laws, often unintelligently interpreted.

[Sidenote: Persecution of the Jews.]

To these days, too, belongs one of the first and darkest blots on the
popular Christianity of the Middle Age--the persecution of Jews.  The
Jews of Spain had long been restless under a government which was so
strongly ecclesiastical in its sympathies: persecuting laws oppressed
them, and they could hardly even in secret practise their religion.
Plots were constant and natural, and at last it is said that the Jews
incited the Saracens, who had overthrown the imperial power in Africa,
to cross the sea and strip from the weak Wisigoths of Spain the last
remains of their power.  In 695 a Council at Toledo (the sixteenth)
determined when the plot was discovered wholly to destroy the Judaic
faith in their land.  It was ordered that all grown-up Jews should be
made slaves, and all children brought up as Christians.  This was the
very year of the storming of Carthage.[3]  It is not to be wondered at
that the Jews gave every help they could to the infidels who, before
long, attacked the kingdom of the Wisigoths.  Within twenty years
Spain, up to the very mountains of the {78} Basque land and of the
Asturias, was conquered by the followers of Muhammad, and silence fell
upon the country which had appeared to be the home of an abiding Church.

The splendid edifice which had seemed to be reared on the solid
foundations of religion and law was shattered by the repeated blows of
the Arab invasion.  Why was this?  The chroniclers gave answer without
hesitation--"Peccatis exigentibus, victi sunt Christiani."  The Goths
(as they proudly called themselves) "have so offended Thee, O Lord, by
their pride, that they deserved a fall by the sword of the Saracen."
It was, in truth, as the great Sancho of Navarre declared in his
charter of foundation to the abbey of Albelda, "Our ancestors sinned
without scruple; they daily transgressed the commandments of the Lord,
and so to punish them as they had deserved and to make them turn to
Him, the Most Just of Judges delivered them to a barbarous people."  In
truth, the mass of the land had never been converted to Catholic
Christianity at all, and a heretical society was powerless against
Moslem sincerity and swords.  Only in the north was Catholicism
supreme, and thence came in later days the reconquest.  But Catholics
lived on all over Spain under their conquerors in comparative peace.

[Sidenote: The Adoptianist heresy.]

The Church survived.  Persecution made its life strong and vigorous,
and that life found outlet in new varieties of theological expression.
Elipandus, Archbishop of Toledo, within seventy years of the Saracen
conquest, became known outside his own land, with Felix, bishop of the
northern see of Urgel, for his advocacy of the statement that {79}
Christ's Sonship was that of adoption.  Asserting the two Natures and
the two Wills of the Lord, the Adoptianists regarded Christ as only in
His divine nature truly the Son of God.  Eager to assert the full
Humanity and to rebut the Muhammadan charges of idolatry, the Spanish
theologians taught that "one and the same Person was in two aspects a
Son, in virtue of His relation to two different natures," and that "the
Divine Son of God, begotten from all eternity of the Father, not by
adoption but by birth, not by grace but by nature--that He, when made
of a woman, made under the law, was Son of God, not by origin but by
adoption, not by nature but by grace." [4]  It was an attempt to carry
further the decisions adopted at Chalcedon and to account for the
origin of the two Natures, their completeness in distinction, and their
union together.

[Sidenote: Its condemnation.]

Adoptianism was condemned at Regensburg in 792, and at Frankfort in
794, and, under the influence of Alcuin, Felix made submission at
Aachen in 799.  Elipandus, safe among the Saracens, held out in his
opinions.  It would seem that the discussion represented the
eighth-century expression of the age-long conflict between logic and
mystery, the desire for exact definition, and the sense of something
beyond human understanding in what belongs to the nature of God, and to
the divine action in the Incarnation, the union of God and man.

[Sidenote: Adoptianism in the East.]

Adoptianism had in the East a greater success and a longer history than
in the West.  In Syria and Armenia vast numbers joined the sect
founded, or revived, by one {80} Constantine in the middle of the
seventh century.  He lived near Samosata, and probably inherited the
teaching of the earlier heretic, Paul of that place.  The sect came to
be called Paulicians.  They rejected the real divinity of Christ and
placed themselves in opposition to very much else which belonged to the
earliest Christian tradition, as in their rejection of the Old
Testament and the perpetual virginity of the Lord's Mother.  Armenia
became the headquarters of a large and prosperous sect, towards which
emperors alternately were persecuting or favourable.  Nicephorus I.
(802-11) was friendly to it, but his successor put it down with
relentless savagery; and after it had led to a formidable rebellion,
its votaries were finally suppressed by the generals of Basil the
Macedonian, 871.  But its tenets lingered on in Thrace, whither it had
been transported when some of its disciples were expropriated by
Constantine V., till the eighteenth century, and still later in Armenia
itself.  The authoritative book of the Armenian Paulicians, the _Key of
Truth_, has been thought to have been completed by one Smbat, minister
of Chosroes of Persia, whose date is 800-50,[5] but the history of
those days is certainly very confused and may have been distorted.

The intervention of Charles the Great in this controversy is but one
illustration of the importance of theological questions in the outlook
of the reviver of the Empire in the Catholic West.  Other theological
doctrines had a like interest in his view and in that of his house; and
in some of them also Spain was concerned.  At Toledo, in 589, Reccared,
when he accepted the Catholic creed, had inserted his belief in {81}
the double procession of the Holy Ghost.  This was again discussed in
767 at Gentilly, and at Aachen in 809.

[Sidenote: The "Veni Creator."]

Alcuin, as in the Adoptianist controversy, played a great part in
stating the view which the West was coming generally to accept.  Leo
III. was consulted, and advised that no addition should be made to the
Creed for fear of widening the breach with the East.  It would seem
that the great hymn, "Veni Creator Spiritus," is the expression of this
doctrine by the ninth century, and is the work of Rabanus Maurus, a
monk of the famous house of Fulda.

[Sidenote: The "Quicunque Vult."]

While this sums up in devotional form the Christian thought as to one
of the mysteries of faith, the hymn of a character more distinctly
credal, called "Quicunque vult," enshrines it in another aspect.  The
"Quicunque" has, indeed, a much earlier history.  In 633 the Fourth
Council of Toledo quoted many of its clauses.  Leodgar, Bishop of Autun
(663-78), directed his clergy to learn it by heart; and it became a not
uncommon profession of faith to be made by a bishop at his
consecration.  At the end of the eighth century it seems to have been
widely recited in church.  But it certainly goes back very much
earlier.  Caesarius, Bishop of Arles (501-43), the opponent of
semi-Pelagianism, has been proved to have used the creed continually:
it was quoted also by his rival, Avitus, Bishop of Vienne (490-523),
and it is probable that it represents the teaching of the great abbey
of Lerins in the controversies of the beginning of the sixth century.
It was decisively a Western creed: it {82} never came into the offices
of the orthodox Church of the East.  In the West it became a popular
means of instruction and a popular confession of the joy of Christian
faith.  It was sung in procession, recited in the services, meditated
on by the clergy.  It formed a model of orthodox expression of belief
in days of confusion and controversy.



[1] This story is discredited by a recent writer, Mr. Dudden, _S.
Gregory the Great_, i. 407 (following F. Görres), but I see no reason
to doubt that S. Gregory was rightly informed, and I accept what Dr.
Hodgkin (_Eng. Hist. Rev._, ii. 216) states as the facts.

[2] Mansi, _Concilia_, ix. 977-1010.

[3] See below, p. 109.

[4] See B. L. Ottley, _Doctrine of the Incarnation_, ii. 152-4.

[5] See F. C. Conybeare, _The Key of Truth_, p. 67.




{83}

CHAPTER VII

THE CHURCH AND THE MONOTHELITE CONTROVERSY, 628-725

The years of peace that succeeded the death of Justinian ended with the
triumph of the Empire over barbarian foes.  Christian philosophy had
seemed to be quiescent, but there were questions which thoughtful men
must have seen would soon come up for solution as the inevitable result
of the Monophysite controversy.  Thought in the active Eastern minds
could not stand still; and the West too, as the barbarians were
conquered, assimilated, and converted by the Church, began to enter
keenly into the theology of the East.  In Gaul and Britain, as well as
at Milan and at Rome, there arose critics and historians who could
carry on the work of Leo the Great and of the line of chroniclers who
had told in Greek the story of the Church's life.  A word at first as
to the general interest of the period.

[Sidenote: The East in the seventh century.]

With the victory of Heraclius over the Persians in 628, it might seem
that heresy would be driven from its home in the distant East, that
Nestorianism would die out, and that Sergius I., Patriarch of
Constantinople (610-38), would be able to win back the Monophysites to
the unity of the Church.  But this happy result was {84} prevented by
the spread of the Muhammadan conquest, beginning even before the death
of the Prophet in 632, and by the rise of a new heresy--the
Monothelitism which gave to the two Natures of our Lord but a single
will.  As the Mussulman arms spread the faith of Islam, the Jacobite
Church of Syria seemed almost to welcome it as a refuge from the
dominance of orthodoxy.  In Egypt the Coptic (Monophysite) patriarch
entered Alexandria in triumph with the Muslim force when the Orthodox
patriarch fled with the imperial troops.  The Melkite (Orthodox) body
was, however, not wholly unprotected by the conquerors, and at
Jerusalem it was allowed to remain in possession, though at Antioch
there was for long no Orthodox patriarch at all.  Of the Monothelite
heresy--condemned at the Sixth General Council, 681--we may for the
moment defer to speak, except to note that in the political
disturbances that swept over the Lebanon the heresy took root there,
under one John Maron, and founded the division, religious and
political, of the Maronites, which still endures.

[Sidenote: Missionary work.]

But while the Church was thus suffering in various ways, the Byzantine
missionary energy was far from exhausted.  Heraclius sought to convert
the barbarian tribes far and near, the Croats and Serbs, the Bulgarians
and Slavs, and the Church of Constantinople appointed an official to
inspect the districts on the frontiers and to examine candidates for
baptism.  Equally he sought to reunite the Armenians to the Orthodox
Church; but after interviews and theological discussions the opponents
of the Greeks triumphed, and the catholicos Nerses {85} III. in 645
anathematised the Council of Chalcedon--a declaration which, after a
momentary reunion, was renewed early in the eighth century.  The
Armenian Church thus remained formally Monophysite.  While the orthodox
emperors were thus unsuccessful in reuniting the separated Churches,
the patriarchate of Constantinople was winning a strength within which
she had lost without; the area of her confined jurisdiction was
straitly ruled, and 356 bishoprics towards the end of the seventh
century acknowledged the patriarchal throne.  The emperors and the
Church alike recognised no supremacy of Rome--a fact which was
emphasised by the decree of 666 which declared Ravenna free from papal
jurisdiction, and in the condemnation of Honorius by the Sixth General
Council.  [Sidenote: The Trullian Council, 691.] So, again, the Council
at Constantinople called _in Trullo_ (691), directed canon after canon
against the customs and claims of the Roman Church.  This independence
was emphasised by the compilation of a _Syntagma_, or collection of
canons, parallel to the much later collection in the West.  These
canons, it may be remarked in passing, throw most interesting light on
the customs of the Greek Church--on clerical marriage, for example,
which was allowed to be dissolved only by the clergy of the recently
converted barbarous tribes, among whom a return to celibate life might
sometimes be advisable.

So much for the general characteristics of the period 628-725.  We may
now turn to the critical point of theology on which the ecclesiastical
history of the time turned.

Monophysitism was not dead in spite of Chalcedon {86} or
Constantinople.  [Sidenote: The Aphthartodocetic controversy.] The
Fourth and Fifth General Council had still left points of debate for
those within as well as those without the Church.  In the form which it
was asserted that Justinian had himself come to accept, it asserted the
Lord's Body to be incapable of sin or corruption, and only subject to
suffering by the voluntary exercise of His divine power.  While the
accusations against Justinian in John of Nikiu and Nicetius of Trier
are contradictory to each other, and make it clear that he did not
accept the opinion of Julian of Halicarnassus, they may serve to
illustrate the confusion of thought with which these subjects were
handled.  The followers of Julian, whose view has here been summarised,
were nicknamed by those of the famous monk Severus (Monophysite
patriarch of Antioch in 513), "Aphthartodocetes" or "Phantasiasts."
Those who followed Severus, while they were prepared to recognise two
natures in Christ, yet dwelt strongly on their union, and especially on
the "one energy" of the Lord's will.  From this a further step was to
be taken.  There were some who believed in the transformation of the
human nature into the Divine, and who came to be called _Aktistetes_,
and, in a still further extreme, _Adiaphorites_, when they denied any
distinction between the Godhead and manhood in Christ.  The error at
the root of all these contentions seems to have been the dwelling upon
the physical rather than the spiritual effects of the Divine power
revealed in the incarnation of the Son of God.  Theologians arose to
controvert it and to develop the theological decisions of the Council;
chief among them was Leontius of Byzantium, a philosophic apologist of
real {87} eminence, whose work was taken up later and completed by John
of Damascus.

[Sidenote: The Emperor Heraclius as a theologian.]

It is not to be wondered at that a great soldier, filled with a deep
sense of the necessity of uniting the Empire against its foes, should
be led to accept a theological development which seemed to offer the
hope of a reconciliation.  From 622, under the advice of Sergius, as a
Patriarch of Constantinople, a basis of reunion was sought in the
formula that though the Lord had two Natures He had yet only "one
theandric energy."  The emperor Heraclius turned unwisely from the army
to the Church, which, like many able military men, he thought might be
coerced or led into opinions which seemed to him to be common sense.
For a time it appeared that he would succeed: three patriarchs of
Constantinople, one of Antioch, one of Alexandria, one of Rome
(Honorius I.), were in agreement, if a little tepidly, favourable to
the phrase.  Honorius definitely stated that he confessed "_one_ WILL
of our Lord Jesus Christ." [1] [Sidenote: The Ecthesis, 638.] Only
Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem (634), held out.  In 638 the emperor
issued the Ecthesis,[2] or Confession of Faith, drawn up by the
patriarch Sergius.  It professed adherence to orthodox definitions, and
continued, "Wherefore, following the Holy Fathers in all things, and in
this, we confess one Will of our Lord Jesus Christ, the very God, so
that never was there a separate Will of His Body animated {88} by the
intellect, nor one of contrary motion natural to itself, but one which
operated when and how and to what purpose He who is God the Word
willed."  This statement was repudiated by Rome, and in 649 condemned
in a synod at the Lateran under Martin I., who ended his days in exile
for disobeying the imperial power.  The quarrel became one between Rome
and Constantinople, at a time when the popes had recovered their
orthodoxy and the patriarchs were subservient to impetuous emperors.
[Sidenote: The Type, 648.] In 648 the _Type_ issued from New Rome as an
attempt at pacification; but the Old Rome rejected it, with anathemas.
In 680 a synod, under Pope Agatho, at which S. Wilfrith of Ripon was
present and signed for the north part of Britain, rejected as heresy
the doctrine of the two wills, and local councils (as at Hatfield six
months later) agreed with the rejection.

[Sidenote: Sixth General Council, 681.]

All this led on to the summoning of the Sixth General Council at
Constantinople, which sat from November, 680, to September, 681.  The
temporary schism between Rome and Constantinople was healed.  Agatho's
letter condemning the doctrine of the two wills was accepted; anathema
was laid upon those, dead or alive, who had accepted the heresy, and
among them Pope Honorius I., a condemnation repeated by many a pope
after him.  The Council declared that the Lord possesses two wills,
"for just as the Flesh is, and is said to be, the Flesh of the Word, so
also His human will is, and is said to be, proper [natural] to the
Word."  And also, "just as His holy and spotless ensouled flesh was
taken into God yet not annihilated, so His human will though taken into
God was not annihilated."  Again, as so often in {89} the days of
Justinian, the words of S. Leo were appropriated for a definition of
the orthodox belief.  The Council was attended by 289 bishops, the
emperor occupying the position which had been common since Nicaea,
while on his right were the bishops of the East, on his left those of
the West.  Rightly was the doctrine of one will condemned as contrary
to the Chalcedonian assertion of the Lord's perfect Humanity; and the
condemnation was readily accepted by the Church.  Only in Syria, among
the Maronites (followers of John Maro), did Monothelitism linger on for
centuries, till they became absorbed in the Latin Church.

[Sidenote: The Monothelite controversy.]

The chief opponent of Monothelitism was Maximus, whose _Disputation
with Pyrrhus_ remains the most important survival of the controversy.
It is a subtle and rational exposition of the orthodox doctrine.  The
original phrase, _theandric energy_, from which the Ecthesis of
Heraclius started, seems to have been drawn from the unknown Platonist
who came to be called Dionysius the Areopagite, and whose writings had
a continued influence in the Middle Age.  But to all reasonable
thinkers the main question was decided.  The truth of Christ's human
nature was an essential verity of the faith, and to deny His human will
would make His nature incomplete, and His goodness in any true sense
impossible.  The difficulty would arise again when Luther and Calvin
carried further the dispute concerning the nature of the human will,
but as regards her Lord the Church had come to a decision based upon
her knowledge of His divine life on earth.

The Council _in Trullo_ (named from the {90} dome-shaped place of
meeting), 691, called also _Quini-sextan_, summoned by Justinian II.
(685-711), was not Oecumenical, and was disciplinary rather than
dogmatic.  It condemned many Roman practices, and asserted definitely
that the patriarchal throne of Constantinople should enjoy the same
privileges as that of Old Rome, should in all ecclesiastical matters be
entitled to the same pre-eminence, and should rank as second after it.
The _Liber Pontificalis_, the Roman Church history of the time, states
that the pope's legates gave assent to the decrees, which is unlikely.
But this one was no more than the repetition of many previous
statements, as emphatic in the sixth as in the seventh century.  The
position was simply that claimed by the patriarch John when he signed
the formula of Catholic faith drawn up and proposed by Pope Hormisdas.
[Sidenote: Repudiation of Roman claims.] He insisted on prefixing a
repudiation of the Roman claim to supremacy over Christendom.  "I
hold," he declared, "the most holy Churches of the Elder and the New
Rome to be one.  I define the See of the Apostle Peter and this of the
Imperial City to be one See."  By this it is clear that he designed to
assert both the unity of the Church--which, as it has always seemed to
the East, was threatened by the demand of the Roman obedience--and the
equality of the two great churches of the Old and the New Rome.

Justinian I. spoke of Constantinople as "head of all the churches"
("omnium ecclesiarum caput"), but it is clear that he did not regard
this position as conferring any supreme or exclusive jurisdiction.  It
was a title of honour which he would use of other patriarchates; and
that he did not consider the power {91} of the patriarchates as
unalterable is seen by his attempted creation of the new jurisdiction
of his own city Justiniana Prima (Tauresium), a few miles south of
Sofia, over a large district.  To the archbishop whom he here created
he gave authority to "hold the place of the apostolic throne" within
his province.[3]

[Sidenote: Independent attitude of Constantinople.]

This position, then, of the Byzantine patriarchate, as independent of
the other patriarchates, and equal to that of the older Rome, but
occupying in point of honour a secondary position, was recognised by
Church and State alike; and it was this that the Council _in Trullo_
reaffirmed.  In another point it was divergent from Rome--that of the
marriage of the clergy.  Subdeacons, deacons, and priests were
forbidden to marry, but those married before ordination were equally
forbidden, under pain of excommunication, to separate from their wives.

An attempt of the mad emperor Justinian II. to enforce the acceptance
of the decrees by Pope Sergius I. was a complete failure.  Popes were
becoming much stronger in Italy than was the distant Caesar.

Rome was becoming independent of emperor and of exarch alike.  In 711
the pope Constantine visited Constantinople as an honoured guest, where
he was treated with diplomatic politeness, and where, possibly after
they had undergone modification, he signed the {92} decrees of the
Trullian Council.  On this point the papal biographer is silent, but he
asserts with enthusiasm the reverence of the emperor for the pope and
the latter's regret when the bloody tyrant met the reward of his crimes
a few weeks later.  With this the ecclesiastical interest of Eastern
history is for a time in the background.



[1] This is spoken of by a recent Roman Catholic writer as "la
déplorable réponse de Honorius, ce monument de bonne foi surprise et de
naïveté confiante."  It does not support the notion of papal
infallibility.

[2] Given in Baronius, A.D. 689.

[3] See Procopius, _De Aedif._, iv. 1 (ed. Bonn., pp. 266, 267); and
_Novellae_, xi. (de privilegiis archiepiscopi primae Justinianae) and
cxxxi. (de ecclesiasticis canonibus et privilegiis), cap. 3.  It is no
alteration of patriarchal powers, but rather the assertion of them.
Still patriarchal jurisdictions are not regarded as unalterable--as is
clear from the creation of the modern national churches of the Balkan
lands.




{93}

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHURCH IN ASIA

[Sidenote: The Church in Persia.]

In the East Christianity had spread to Persia from Edessa.[1]  The
Parthians seem to have put no obstacle in its way, but when the
Persians came into conflict with the Roman Empire, now Christian, there
was long and bitter persecution.  At last toleration was reached, after
Sapor II., and from the beginning of the fourth century the Church in
Persia was organised, and governed by many bishops; the primate took
the title of Catholicos and had his see at Seleucia, and had suffragans
on both sides of the Persian Gulf.  In Assyria and Chaldaea the mass of
the population became Christians, and Christians were spread, less
thickly, over Media, Khorassan, and Persia itself.  The dignity of the
Persian catholicos was considerable; he might be compared with the
Byzantine patriarchs, and the Church almost occupied the position of an
established religion, related to the civil power.  But the distance,
and the constant wars between the Empire and Persia, tended inevitably
to separate the Churches.  From the end of the fifth century the Church
in Persia, surrendered to {94} Nestorianism, had begun visibly to
decay.  It was controlled by the Persian kings, it was a prey to
endless controversy and intrigue, and when the Persian kingdom was at
war with the Empire it was in grave danger.  It held councils
furtively; it passed canons, and, itself heretical, condemned other and
more recent heresies than its own.  But often its catholicos engaged in
the dynastic politics of the Persian dynasties, and Christianity,
regarded as one among many religions, and tainted with the same
materialism as the rest, sank into impotence and was torn by schism.
Meanwhile, in the neighbourhood of the Persian realm, Christianity was
spreading.

[Sidenote: Growth of the Church under Justinian.]

Many barbarous tribes during Justinian's reign were admitted to the
Christian faith and fellowship.  The Tzani dwelling on the border of
Armenia and Pontus, "separated from the sea by precipitous mountains
and vast solitudes, impassable torrent beds and yawning chasms,"
[2]--in a land where, Procopius tells us,[3] "it is not possible to
irrigate the ground, to reap a crop, or to find a meadow anywhere; and
even the trees bear no fruit, because for the most part there is no
regular succession of seasons, and the land is not at one time
subjected to cold and wet, and at another made fertile by the warmth of
the sun, but is desolated by perpetual winter and covered by eternal
snows.  They changed their religion to the true faith, became
Christians, and embraced a more civilised mode of life."  The king of
those Heruls who served in the Roman army, and a Hunnish king, Gordas,
{95} became Christians.  The Abasgi (or Albagrians) of the Caucasus
were converted, and for the most part remained associated with the
Armenians and the Iberians of Georgia,[4] "when they were compelled by
the Persian king to worship idols," put themselves under the imperial
protection, and they remained closely in connection with the Armenian
Church till 608 when they accepted the decisions of Chalcedon.  They
remained independent and orthodox till their union, a century ago, with
the Russian Church.

[Sidenote: Separation from the Church.]

In Armenia, similarly, had grown up a national Church, which had a
catholicos, a hierarchy, a vernacular liturgy of its own.  When in the
middle of the fifth century the ancient kingdom was split up between
the Empire and the Persians, the Armenian Church still remained apart.
Its national features were strongly marked even before dogmatic
differences arose.  With the Nestorian and Monophysite heresies new
divisions took place.  The Persians gradually, between 435 and 480,
accepted Nestorianism, and in 483 definitely separated from the
Catholic Church, and Nisibis became a school of Nestorian theology.
The Armenians survived this danger but were led into Monophysitism, and
in 505 they pronounced against the Council of Chalcedon.  Their
theology became tainted with further heresy in the sixth century, and
they are still separate from the orthodox Church of the East.  Thus, at
the time with which we have to deal, as we have said, Christianity east
of Antioch and on the borders of Persia was under Nestorian influence.
After 431 Nestorianism became gradually established {96} as the
dominant creed.  The Church of the East, as it was officially called,
rejected the Third General Council, and was cut off from the Catholic
Church.  It long remained a strong body.  The great schools of Nisibis,
Edessa, and Baghdad were centres of religion, learning, and
civilisation.

[Sidenote: The Nestorians.]

The Nestorians[5] also sent out missionaries northward among the
wandering Tartar tribes and along the shores of the Caspian; southward
to Persia, India and Ceylon; and eastward across the steppes of Central
Asia into China.  The bilingual inscription of Singanfu, in Chinese and
Syriac, relates that Nestorian missionaries laboured in China as far
back as A.D. 636.[6]  In the sixth and seventh centuries the Church of
the East could count its twenty-five metropolitans or archbishops; and
the number and remoteness of their sees, stretching from Jerusalem to
China, testifies to her missionary zeal.  Those who dwelt nearest to
Baghdad met the catholicos in yearly synod; those farthest off sent
their confession of faith to him every sixth year.

[Sidenote: Prester John and his conversion.]

By the Middle Ages the Church of the East had spread over the whole of
Central Asia.  The curious legends of the powerful kingdom of Prester
John, somewhere in the heart of Asia, grew out of the conversion, by
Nestorian merchants in the eleventh century, of a certain King of
Kerait, a kingdom of Tartary to the north of China.  This king is said
to have requested that missionaries might be sent to him from the
Church {97} of his converters; and, when they were come, these
missionaries baptized him, naming him John,[7] and he was ordained
priest (Presbyter or Prester).  Two hundred thousand people of the
nation embraced Christianity; the successors to the kingdom bore the
dynastic name of John, and were ordained priests.  However uncertain
this story is, the fact of the conversion of the princes of Kerait in
Tartary is sufficiently well established.  [Sidenote: Height of
prosperity.] The prosperity of the Church of the East culminated in the
eleventh century.  The khalifs of Baghdad protected their Christian
subjects, and important offices of state were often filled by them.

The Indian Church, which was believed to date back to the time of S.
Thomas the Apostle, had probably its origin in Nestorian missions, and
accepted Monophysite opinions.

[Sidenote: Their missions]

As we have seen, the wider field of missionary work owed much to the
labours of the Nestorians.  It is possible that Cosmas,[8] who had
travelled far afield in the first half of the sixth century, may have
been a Nestorian; but the reverence with which he speaks of the
orthodox faith, and his constant use of the Catholic writers, would
seem to show rather that, when he became a monk at any rate, he was
orthodox.  From him, however, we obtain knowledge of the wide field of
Nestorian missions.  Recent discoveries have largely added to our
knowledge.  It is clear that in the sixth century, {98} apparently
before 540, Nestorian bishoprics were founded in Herat and Samarkand.
Monumental inscriptions date back as far as 547.  [Sidenote: in the Far
East.] Merv, as early as 650, is spoken of as a "falling church" [9]
amid the triumphs of Islam.  China has been already mentioned, and
though it is not clear that only Nestorian missions prospered in the
far land, there is no doubt that their success was the most prominent.
Christian communities existed near the borders of Tibet[10] in the
seventh century; and in the eighth and ninth they were strong in India.
Even in the eleventh century the "Nestorian worship retained a great
hold over many parts of Asia, between the Euphrates and the Gobi
desert."  Into the later and fragmentary history of these missions it
is not here the place to enter.  Let it only be remembered that the
labours of "those Nestorian missionaries who preached and baptized
under the shadow of the wall of China, and on the shores of the Yellow
Sea, the Caspian, and the Indian Ocean" [11] were made possible by the
diplomatic and military triumphs which radiated from Constantinople in
the sixth century, and by the Christian zeal of orthodox emperors and
patriarchs.

[Sidenote: Nestorianism in Persia.]

Meanwhile in Persia the Monophysites contended for supremacy with the
Nestorians, and organised themselves with considerable skill.  But the
Nestorians, who founded schools and developed a Christology on lines
different from those on which European thought was {99} proceeding,
became still more rigid in their rejection of the Catholic teaching.
Maraba the catholicos (540-52) and Thomas of Edessa, his pupil, seem to
have drawn very near to orthodoxy; but the controversy of the Three
Chapters widened the breach.  Council after council, theologian,
catholicos, monastery, bishop, alike denounced Justinian; and they had
the support of the pagan philosophers whom he had expelled from the
schools of Athens.

In Persia monasticism and the life of hermits--though the introduction
of either is difficult if not impossible to trace[12]--flourished and
developed on lines of their own.  For a long time there was no
distinction between monastic and secular life: it was only gradually
that an organised monasticism grew up out of the coenobitic life for
men and for women.  But from the sixth century onward the organisation
of monasticism gave strength to the Church, and enabled it for some
time to resist the Muhammadan invasion.  The Church, mapped out into
dioceses and well served by numerous clergy, and having its own canon
law, its own liturgical forms, and its own theology, was able for long,
in spite of the absence of all state support and in spite often of
state persecution, to survive in some appearance of strength till the
Muhammadan invasion.  The Mussulman conquest, when once it was
achieved, gave something like security to the Nestorians.  Though there
was a time of persecution in the ninth century, it was short.
Christians as teachers, physicians, philosophers, were famous in the
foundation of the learning of the palmy days of the khalifs.  But the
whole {100} structure fell before the invasions, in later days, of the
Mongols and the Turks.

[Sidenote: The Church in Palestine.]

From the more distant parts of the Persian Empire we may pass to the
land where the Church had its birth.  During the period of revived
power in the Empire, Palestine was at peace under Justinian's rule.

In Jerusalem itself[13] it is chiefly to be said that the emperor
engaged in large restorations and some original church building after
the style of his better known work.  He had a severe struggle with the
Samaritans, but it led to many conversions.[14]

[Sidenote: Conquest by the Persians.]

But here, as elsewhere, as time went on the encroachments of the
Persians were a perpetual danger to the Christianity of the East.  In
615 Jerusalem fell into their hands.  The Jews, whom earlier emperors
had, like Justinian, kept in subjection, had grown in the days of
Heraclius to be much more powerful in Syria than the Christians, and it
was they who secured Jerusalem and gave it into the hands of the
Persians; and again, after the Christians had overpowered the garrison,
the city was given back to them and to scenes of pillage and outrage;
the churches, so splendid as early as the fourth century, and described
in glowing language by Procopius in the sixth, were sacked and defiled;
the clergy and the patriarch were made captive; the Holy Cross,
discovered by the Empress Helena, was sent away into Persia; and "all
these things," says the chronicler, "happened not in a year or a month,
but within a few days."  The ruined churches were, however, restored
{101} before long by the alms of the faithful, and it was not long
before the Christians themselves were favoured by the Persian king, and
Chosroes, in consequence of a council at Jerusalem in 628, legalised,
it would seem, the Monophysite heresy as the representative of
Christianity.  [Sidenote: Reconquest by Heraclius, 622.] The conquest
of Egypt followed on that of Syria; and the union of the Coptic Church
with that of the Syrian Monophysites was a result, natural and almost
inevitable, of the community of suffering between them.  Within a few
years--his campaign began in 622--the heroic emperor Heraclius won back
all that had been lost, utterly defeated the Persians, won back the
Holy Rood, restored the patriarch Zacharias to Jerusalem, and returned
in triumph to the imperial city.  In 629 he went on a pilgrimage to the
Holy City, and on September 14th--still observed as the feast of the
Exaltation of the Holy Cross--he restored the Rood to the Church of the
Resurrection.

[Sidenote: Conquest by the Muhammadans.]

In the year 610 Muhammad began his career as a prophet.  It is no part
of Church history to trace the origin of his opinions or his power, to
tell how he learnt from Jews and Nestorians, or how he established a
marvellous organisation on a basis of theocratic militarism.  The
migration from Meccah to Medinah in 622 was the beginning of his active
ministry, of religious teaching carried forward by sword and fire.  The
capture of Meccah, the submission of Arabia, the extinction of the
Christian (Monophysite) communities in the peninsula, were followed
before long by the invasion of Syria and the capture of Jerusalem by
the Khalif Omar in 637.  The year before, Heraclius {102} had taken
away the Holy Rood and the treasures of the churches to Constantinople.
Two years later the Muhammadans seized Egypt, from which the Persians
had not so long been driven out by the armies of the Empire.  The fatal
policy of the Monothelite emperors had opened the way to the triumph of
Islam.  Of this we shall see more, in Africa and in Southern Europe, in
later days.



[1] See _The Church of the Fathers_ (vol. ii. of the present series),
chapter xxix., for the earlier history.

[2] Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_, i. 441.

[3] _Aedif._, iii. 6.

[4] Joannes Biclarensis, p. 853.

[5] I quote from the admirable summary in the Reports of the
Archbishop's Mission to the Assyrian Christians.

[6] See an interesting account in Williams's _Middle Kingdom_.

[7] His name was Ung; his title Khan; Ung Khan was Syriacised into
Yukhanan, i.e. John.

[8] The _Christian Topography_ was written between 535 and 537.
Beazley, _Dawn of Modern Geography_, p. 279.

[9] Assemani, _Bibl. Orient_, iii. i. 130, 131.

[10] See Waddell, _Buddhism in Tibet_, pp. 421, 422.

[11] Beazley, _Dawn of Modern Geography_, p. 211.

[12] Cf. Budge, _The Book of Governors_, i. cxvi., and Labourt, _Le
Christianisme dans l'empire perse_, 303.

[13] Cf. Procopius, _Aedif._; and John Moschus, _Pratum Spirituale_
(Migne, Patr. Groec., lxxxvii. [3]).

[14] Procopius, _Aedif._, v. 8.




{103}

CHAPTER IX

THE CHURCH IN AFRICA

[Sidenote: The Church in North Africa.]

In the middle of the fifth century the Christian power in North Africa
fell under the domination of the Arian Vandals.  S. Augustine died in
430 while the foe was at the gates of his city.  In 439 Carthage fell,
and Roman civilisation was extinguished.  The rule of the Vandals was
not only Arian but barbarous.  It is not unlikely that their victory
was won with the aid of the remaining Donatists and the heathen Moors.
With the reign of Gaiseric some degree of toleration was allowed to the
Catholic Church, but the persecution which had marked the earlier days
of the Arian power now took the form of confiscation and the
suppression of public worship.  The Church suffered grievously, and not
least in the class of persons ordained to the ministry and consecrated
to the episcopate.  But still the Catholics were the great majority,
and it was seen that the Arian Vandals were in danger of absorption by
the subtle influence of the truth.  It was a last effort of Gaiseric's
to deprive the Catholics of their leaders, which eventually brought
about their restoration.  The Bishop of Carthage and several of his
clergy were put on board a ship and told to escape whither they could.
They reached Naples, {104} and their piteous plight and the news they
brought helped to direct the attention of the imperial power to its
lost heritage.  [Sidenote: The Vandal persecution.] Meanwhile the
suffering Church, enjoying now a scanty toleration, now suffering a
severer persecution, continued to make converts and to produce martyrs.
In 477 Gaiseric died.  A year before his death he had allowed the
Catholics to reopen their churches and to bring back their bishops and
clergy from exile.  And still their missionary efforts had never been
relaxed.  Church life still continued; inscriptions remaining to-day
preserve the epitaphs of men buried in the darkest days with Catholic
rites; and in the interior ancient monasteries remained undisturbed.
Hunneric, the next Vandal king, though nominally an Arian, set himself
to extirpate heresies which he did not accept: Manichaeans under his
sway received treatment more severe than Catholics.  Indeed, the
Catholics began to raise their heads under the leadership of Eugenius,
who was elected in 479 to the see of Carthage, the only bishopric in
the country which held metropolitan rank.  The Bishop of Carthage was
the spiritual head of the whole province, held a superiority over the
bishops outside the limits of Proconsularis, and was, as it were, the
patriarch of the African Church.  For twenty-three years the see had
had no pastor, and the restoration marked a distinct step towards the
ending of the Vandal domination.  But there was a final effort;
Hunneric, unable to decoy the Catholics, determined to exterminate
them; a writer of the time tells that nearly five thousand clergy were
banished to the desert, where their fate was a practical martyrdom.  A
conference was {105} summoned in 484, at which it was endeavoured to
make the Catholic clergy abate the strictness of their orthodoxy, but
Eugenius stood firm.  Persecution again followed.  The writer already
mentioned, Victor Vitensis, says, "The Vandals did not blush to set
forth against us the law which formerly our Christian emperors had
passed against them and other heretics for the honour of the Catholic
Church, adding many things of their own as it pleased their tyrannical
power."  Thus evil deeds bring their necessary consequences.  A bitter
persecution swept over the land, and till the death of Hunneric, at the
end of the year, atrocities of the most terrible kind were perpetrated.
It was a brief age of martyrs, and rooted the Church more firmly in the
affections of its children.  It was an age, too, of saints, and
Fulgentius shines out by the side of Eugenius as a pattern of Christian
devotion and asceticism.  In the years that followed king succeeded
king, and the condition of the Church became gradually more tolerable,
till under Hilderic much of the old organisation was restored and the
monastic houses were established in a condition of considerable
independence.  When Gelimer usurped the Vandal throne, the power of
Justinian was able to intervene, and in 533 Belisarius recovered North
Africa for the Empire.  [Sidenote: Reconquest of Africa by Belisarius,
533.] The restoration of the direct rule of the emperors was of
necessity the restoration of Catholicism to dominance.  But materially
the Church had received blows from which she never fully recovered.
Her possessions, buildings, treasures had for the most part passed from
her hands: and many sees, many parishes, {106} still remained without
pastors.  Such was the result of "the violent captivity of a century."

[Sidenote: The revival of the North African Church.]

Justinian aimed at restoring all things to their first estate.  "We
would be the guardians and defenders of the ancient traditions," he
wrote in 542 to the primate of Byzacene.  He confirmed the Bishop of
Carthage in his metropolitan dignity; he restored sees, allowed synods
to meet, gave special privileges to the clergy.  An era of church
building set in, and fine monasteries were erected, in all the
impressive solidity of the Byzantine style, even in distant parts of
the Roman territory.  Tebessa remains a marvellous example of the
wealth and dignity which came anew to the North African Church.  The
literary power of the Church revived with her material prosperity: a
school of writers arose again in the land of Augustine.  Primasius,
Facundus, Liberatus, Victor of Tonnenna, were among those who restored
the activity and knowledge of the Church in history, theology, and
apologetic.  Over all the emperor Justinian kept his watchful eye,
directing, interfering, exhorting, as seemed to him good.  The
controversy of the Three Chapters had its echoes in Africa, and the
deacon Ferrand, a learned theologian, represented a very wide feeling
when, in his _Defensio_, he deprecated any condemnation of the dead
theologians; and in Facundus, Bishop of Hermiane, the unhappy
hesitating pope Vigilius found an adviser who, if anyone, might have
given him firmness.  In the result, the emperor, by the pen at least as
much as the sword, overpowered resistance, and Africa accepted the
decisions of Constantinople.  Reparatus, Bishop of Carthage, who
resisted, was deposed, Liberatus {107} preserves the record of bitter
persecution, and Victor of Tonnenna, who equally refused to accept the
decision against the Three Chapters, is especially bitter in his
denunciation of Justinian.  But the pope Pelagius was able, in 560, to
announce the assent of Africa to the statements of the Fifth General
Council.  The Church from the death of Justinian settled down in
peaceable habitations, strong in the imperial support and the affection
of the people.  But as, in the relaxation which set in as time went on,
the power of the imperial administration decayed, the power of the
popes in Africa was gradually strengthened, and the power of the
bishops rose equally.  But this was not all.  In time relaxation set in
in the Church as well as in the State.  There are tales of immoral and
corrupt bishops, of disobedience to authority, of a recrudescence, from
591 to 596, of Donatism.  It was the pope Gregory the Great who took in
hand the needed reformation.  [Its relation to Gregory the Great.] His
letters are full of African affairs: his keen attention, his
instructions to Hilarus, the administrator of the Roman Church's
possessions in Italy, his minute knowledge, his wise understanding of
the many difficult problems which beset the Church, are prominent in
his correspondence.  It was he who reversed the conception of Justinian
in regard to the Church of North Africa.  The emperor had striven for
orthodoxy, without the supremacy of the pope.  Gregory was determined
to secure the latter, and the history of North Africa affords an
excellent example of how the papal power grew.  It was by continual
intervention, in affairs small as well as great, and by constant
solicitude: it was by the use of prudent {108} and sympathetic agents,
and the firm adherence to a policy of charity, orthodoxy and
discretion, that the great pope enforced his views on the bishops, the
Church, the imperial representatives.  While he sternly rebuked all
abuse of the political authority which had fallen into the hands of the
bishops, he tenaciously clung to the right of hearing appeals in cases
between churchmen and public officials which circumstances had placed
in his hands.  From a right of control he passed to a right of direct
intervention; and in State as well as Church the administrators felt
the power of his indomitable will.  While disorganisation was spreading
in the civil order the Church was growing in concentration and
authority.

[Sidenote: The Monothelite controversy.]

But the Monothelite controversy went far to shatter the power which the
labour of Gregory had built up, and with it the Christianity of
Northern Africa.  The orthodox felt less and less bound to emperors who
supported heresy, and the Arab invasion drew near without the people
perceiving the full extent of their danger.  Fortunatus, Bishop of
Carthage, declared himself a Monothelite, but in every other province
besides his the Church formally repudiated the heresy.  In 646
Fortunatus was deposed and Victor succeeded him; and this is almost the
last recorded incident in the history of the North African Church.  As
the Arab invader advanced, refugees from Syria and Egypt poured into
the land, and, since many of them were heretical, added to the
religious diffusions of the country.  The abbat Maximus upheld the
banner of orthodoxy against all comers.  The victory which he won over
the heresiarch Pyrrhus in 645, followed by the declarations of {109}
provincial synods in 646, was the last expression of African orthodoxy.

John, the Jacobite bishop of Nikiu, whose contemporary account of the
Saracen conquest is of the first value, declares that "everyone said
that the expulsion of the Romans and the victory of the Mussulmans were
brought about by the tyranny of the emperor Heraclius and the troubles
which he made the orthodox suffer."  A general discontent with the
Byzantine government arose, and Rome, which was more in sympathy with
the people, was unable to help them.  In 646 the patrician Gregory, the
imperial governor, orthodox and a protector of the Church, declared
that the Monothelite Constans II. had forfeited the throne, and assumed
for himself the title of emperor.  Within a year he was defeated and
slain by the Saracens at Sbeitla, and Byzantine Africa was placed at
the mercy of the Muhammadan invader.  The Copts long resisted, but
their resistance was overcome in the autumn of 646.  Alexandria fell a
second time and finally into the hands of the Arabs.

[Sidenote: The conquest by the Muhammadans.]

For fifty years the Byzantine power maintained a foothold, precarious
and nominal.  Inch by inch, and with intervals of repose and even of
reconquest,--as when John the Patrician, under Leo the Isaurian,
recaptured Carthage,--the infidels advanced, and the Berber tribes of
the interior pressed, too, upon the Christians.  Carthage was again
taken by the Muhammadans in 698: the native tribes joined the invaders,
and by 708 Roman Africa was wholly in their hands.  Toleration was at
first allowed; but from 717 the Christians had only the choice of
banishment and {110} apostasy.  Still many held out: Christian villages
remained, Christian communities, as late as the fourteenth century; and
even now it is said that in some parts Christian customs survive.  The
Church at Carthage existed certainly in some organised form till the
eleventh century, and it was not till 1583 that the Church of Tunis was
utterly destroyed.

Meanwhile events in other parts of Africa had run a different course.
The patriarchate of Alexandria had a long and distinguished history,
and from it had spread missions far into the south.

[Sidenote: The Jacobites.]

The Monophysite controversy led to the founding of the Jacobite sect.
Secret consecrations at Constantinople by bishops in prison during
Justinian's severe rule sent a bishop to Hira for the Arabian
Christians in Persia, and another to the borders of Edessa, who founded
the Jacobites and with the assistance of Egyptian Monophysite bishops
continued the episcopal succession.  In Egypt there arose the division
between the Melkites, who followed the imperial orders and accepted the
decisions of the Councils, and the Copts, who dissented.  The
Monophysites of Syria, Egypt, and Armenia, with temporary and
superficial differences, remained practically at one.  National
differences confirmed their divergence from the Roman Empire and the
Catholic Church.  Thus while in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere the Church
was still powerfully represented, though side by side with strong
sectarian organisations, there were, when the followers of Muhammad
came to add to the confusion, three nationalistic and heretical bodies,
separate from the Church--those of Persia and Armenia and Ethiopia.  Of
the last something must now be said.

{111}

[Sidenote: The Abyssinian Church.]

South of Egyptian territory, properly so called, lay the Ethiopians,
vassals of Egypt, tracing in a dim fashion their Christianity back to
one of those queens who bore the title of _Candace_.  These wild and
warring tribes kept up continual conflict, and among the Blemmyes men
still worshipped Isis in the temple of Philae.  In 548 began the
conversion of the Nobadae of the Soudan, of whose reception into the
Christian fold the great Monophysite missionary, John of Ephesus, gives
an account.  Churches were built, and one inscription at least survives
with the name of a Christian king.  Beyond them the Alodaei learnt the
faith from the same preacher, Longinus.  Nubia, or Mugurrah, was also
visited by Christian missionaries at the same time.  Under Justinian,
the temple of Philae was turned into a church, and the Blemmyes became
Christian.  Christian remains long existed, even down to the
neighbourhood of Khartoum; and it was long before the Muhammadan
conquerors swept all the worship of Christ away.  Further south
Christianity spread on both sides of the Red Sea.  In Arabia Felix was
the kingdom of the Homerites or Himyarites, whose chief city was Safar,
and at different times they were ruled by the same king as the land of
Axum, "the farthest Ind" of the Greek chronicler Theophanes.  After the
dispersion, Jewish colonies settled in Arabia, and in the fourth
century Christianity followed.  At the end of the fifth century a
bishop is found among the Homerites, and a Trinitarian inscription is
dated 542-3.  About the same time the Church in Abyssinia, founded in
the time of S. Athanasius, received the national religion of the
country through the conversion of the Negus at the end {112} of the
fifth century.  While the land of Safar at times relapsed into
heathenism and massacred Christians, the Abyssinians remained firm in
the faith.  Procopius tells that Ellesthaeos, an Ethiopian king, during
the reign of Justin I., invaded the land of the Homerites to avenge
their persecutions and to suppress the Jewish predominance and set up a
Christian king.  With him and his successors Justinian entered into
treaties, as also with the kings of Axum or Abyssinia.  While the
Muhammadan conquest swept away the Christianity of the Arabians and
drove those who clung to it northward to the banks of the Euphrates,
the Church in Abyssinia, which had accepted Monophysitism, remained
independent, just as its mother church of Egypt obtained toleration.
It still continues separate, Monophysite, and in communion with the
Coptic Church of Egypt.




{113}

CHAPTER X

THE CHURCH IN THE WESTERN ISLES

[Sidenote: Christianity in Britain.]

When Gregory the Great sent Augustine and his brother monks to preach
to the Teutonic tribes which had made Britain their home, there were
already two Churches in the island.  There was the Church of the
Brythons, gradually separated by the advance of the Saxons into the
Churches of Cumbria or Strathclyde, Wales, and West Wales or Cornwall.
These stood apart from the English for a long time, were late in
accepting the Catholic customs of the West, and had no influence on the
progress of English Christianity.  And there was the Church founded in
North Britain by Celtic missionaries from Ireland.  In Ireland there
seems little doubt that Christianity was known by the end of the fourth
century.  In the fifth century the progress was extraordinarily rapid.
S. Patrick "organised the Christianity which already existed; he
converted kingdoms which were still pagan, especially in the west; and
he brought Ireland into connection with the Church of the Empire, and
made it formally part of Universal Christendom." [1]

The subsequent history of the Church in Ireland forms a fit
introduction to that of the Church in {114} England, in spite of the
separation between them.  Irish Christianity did not long preserve its
close union with Western Europe.  The popes, as well as the emperors,
were too weak to interfere in the distant islands.  The Irish relapsed
into the use of what is called the Celtic Easter, and to other
practices which were usual before Patrick's day and which served to cut
them off from the newly-converted Teutons, as well as from the Latin
world in general.  [Sidenote: Death of S. Patrick, 461.] Patrick died
in 461.  In 563 Columba, trained in the great schools which had sprung
up in the Irish monasteries, crossed to what is now called Scotland to
confirm the faith of the Irish settlers and to convert the heathen
Picts.  The organisation of the Church to which he belonged was
essentially tribal and monastic.  [Sidenote: The Celtic Church.] Though
S. Patrick had probably consecrated diocesan bishops in large numbers,
the Church soon became "predominantly monastic."  Tribal feeling was so
strong that the Church, too, assimilated itself to the tribal idea, and
the Church's monasteries were her tribes.  In a land where there were
no cities monasteries took their place, and the bishops naturally came
to dwell in them, and so to seem less prominent in their episcopal than
in their monastic aspect.  The monks became the chief power in
Christian Ireland; and in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries
there were many bishops without dioceses, and it seems probable that
their rank, though not their function, was less important than that of
the abbats, the heads of the tribal monasticism.

In the seventh century again the Irish Church came back into closer
association with the Church throughout {115} Europe.  This union was
due very largely to the influence of learning, and still more to the
influence of missionary zeal.  "From Iceland to the Danube or the
Apennines, among Frank or Burgundian or Lombard, the Irish energy
seemed omnipotent and inexhaustible." [2] Into Ireland it would seem
that classical culture was introduced by the first Christian teachers,
and that from the first it was intended to serve as a preparation for
religious teaching.[3] It would seem that it was from Brittany that it
spread to Ireland.  [Sidenote: The influences outside Ireland] The
schools of Ireland became famous.  Books as diverse as the Antiphonary
of Bangor and Adamnan's Life of Columba show that the teaching in its
different ways was a sound and a liberal one.

In England the Irish tradition and influence spread.  If the Celtic
school of Bangor perished in the stress of the bitter wars between
English and Welsh, Malmesbury, which trained S. Aldhelm, showed that
the Irish love of letters was capable of transplantation into a land
now most prominently Teutonic.  But the Roman influence and the
influence of the East were still more effective.  [Sidenote: in
learning,] Benedict Biscop brought back with him to Northumbria the
traditions and rules of Italian art and learning, and Theodore of
Tarsus brought a wider influence, which was Greek as well as Latin.  He
himself founded a school at Canterbury, and taught it; and in distant
times Dunstan, at Glastonbury and at Canterbury, was his worthy
successor.  In the north Bede was at {116} Jarrow a writer of great
power and wide scope, and the school of York was a nursery of classic
studies which produced the great scholar Alcuin.  Thus the community of
scholarship brings the Churches together.

[Sidenote: in missionary work.]

More prominent was the zeal for the conversion of the heathen.  The
work of Columban and of S. Gall had its origin in the Irish schools,
and there was no more fruitful influence on the Europe of the Dark Age.
The work of Columba and his followers was to begin in the north of
Britain what Roman missionaries undertook in the south.  For more than
thirty years Columba, who landed in Iona in 563, taught the Picts and
Scots.  His Life by his disciple Adamnan is one of the most beautiful
memorials of medieval saintliness that we possess.  The monastery which
he founded lasted till the eighth century.  His school did a famous
work in North Britain in the seventh; King Oswald of Northumbria was
trained there, and S. Aidan, his fellow-helper, the typical saint of
Northumbria.  From the same source came Melrose, the great Scottish
monastery, and S. Chad, the apostle of the Middle English.

[Sidenote: Scotland.]

A century of intermittent strife swept over the northern lands.
Scotland became Christian slowly and with little connection with the
south.  Heathen onslaughts ravaged the Christian lands, and yet, in
spite of all, monasteries for men and women sprang up in the north.
The influence of S. Aidan (died 651) was continued by S. Cuthbert and
S. Hilda, typical parents of monks and nuns.  In 664 (Synod of Whitby)
at last came union with the Church of the English, who appealed to the
authority of Rome and {117} of S. Peter in favour of their customs, and
the Northumbrian king, Oswin, ratified the union of the Celtic and the
English Churches.  Early in the eighth century other Celtic Churches
came into the agreement; only Cornwall held out for two centuries more.

[Sidenote: The mission of St. Augustine, 597.]

The English Church, which thus came to represent the Christianity of
the whole island, was founded from Rome by S. Augustine in Kent in 597.
It was from the first an active missionary body.  It gradually won its
way over the whole island, conquering and assimilating the alien
influences which were at first opposed to it.  So when a storm of
heathen persecution swept over England and Scotland at the end of the
eighth century, when "the ravaging of heathen men lamentably destroyed
God's church at Lindisfarne," when the monks of Iona were given to
martyrdom, when English prelates and kings gave their lives to hold the
land for Christ, the Church still endured, with material loss but with,
for the time at least, enhanced glory and virtue.  Three names stand
out conspicuously from the seventh and ninth centuries.  [Sidenote:
Theodore of Tarsus, 668.] Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury
from 668 to 693, was the great organiser of the English Church.  A
scholar, a teacher, a statesman, he knit the different tribes of
English, Saxon, Jute, together in the unity of faith and discipline.
Church councils sprang up under him to rule, and Church laws to guide
men in the way.  He kept up a close connection with the Western Church,
but he did not surrender independence to a papal supremacy.  Wilfrith
of Ripon, his contemporary, was great also as a teacher and as a
missionary beyond the seas, {118} and among the Saxons of South
Britain.  The seventh century was the age in which the foundations of
the English Church were laid on firm bases.

[Sidenote: Bede.]

Hardly less important, though in a different way, was the work of the
monk Baeda, the father of English history.  He was a man who knew the
history and the theology of the Western Church, and who taught by his
writings and his life.  His influence on the development of the Church
in the north, both by his great history, his religious treatises, and
his influence on Egbert, Archbishop of York, is incalculable.

[Sidenote: Alfred.]

The age of Alfred, who died in 899, was equally important.  It
witnessed a more distinct union with the Church of Wales, whose glories
go back to the time of S. David in the fifth century.  It confirmed a
strong union between Church and State in England, and it witnessed a
revival of Christian learning in which Alfred himself and a Welshman,
Asser, whom he made bishop of an English see, were the leaders.  Alfred
was a bright example of what Christianity could do for mankind.
Warrior, scholar, saint, pattern king whose heart was given to his
people, he bore himself nobly before the world as one who loved and
worshipped the Master Christ.  Under his sway the Church rose again to
instruct and guide the people, and when he died he left the English
land a united Christian nation.  The Danes, who after years of
predatory invasion were become settlers over a large part of England,
were brought into the Church; and the British Church in Cornwall was
brought nearer to unity with the English, a union which was complete
from 931.

{119}

[Sidenote: Conversion of the north.]

While in the extreme north, Ross, Cromarty, Sutherland, and Caithness,
the Church remained missionary rather than parochial, in the Scotland
of the south monasticism became prominent again under a new order
called, in Goidelic, "Culdees" (servants of God).  In the midlands
years of disturbance caused much of the organisation of the Church to
disappear, bishoprics to cease, monasteries to be destroyed.  After the
Danish wars the work of reconstruction was an urgent need, and a great
prelate came to lead it.

[Sidenote: Dunstan, 924-88.]

Dunstan (924-88) was a West Saxon who was taught at Glastonbury by
Irish priests, and who rose, through his friendship with leaders in
Church and State, by the holiness of his life, and by the experience
that he won when in exile in Flanders, to be head of the English
Church.  As archbishop he was "a true shepherd."  He gave up all the
preferments he had before enjoyed, only visiting Glastonbury
occasionally for a time of repose.  His friends, Aethelwold, Bishop of
Winchester, and Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, with King Eadgar's help,
did their utmost to introduce the strict rule of S. Benedict into the
monasteries, replacing the clergy of the cathedral churches (secular
canons) by monks.  Dunstan sympathised, but he did not actively support
their action.  Abroad there was strong feeling against clerical
marriage, and there were many canons passed against it.  The danger of
the Church falling into the hands of an hereditary class of officials
was a real one; but it does not seem to have been much felt in England.
Dunstan paid far more heed to the clergy's books than their wives.

{120}

[Sidenote: His work as archbishop and reformer.]

He made rules, and encouraged schools for the training of priests.  He
ordered priests to learn handicrafts that they might teach them to
others.  He ordered that a sermon should be preached in each church
every Sunday.  His zeal for moral reform was seen in many canons passed
against the abuses of the age, and he did not hesitate to enforce them
against the highest in the land.  When the pope ordered him to absolve
a great lord whom he had excommunicated for an unlawful marriage, he
refused to obey.

Early in the tenth century an illustration of the position occupied by
the English Church in relation to Rome, and of the learning of its
clergy and their style of preaching, is afforded by the writings of
Aelfric, who described himself in his early years as "a monk and a
mass-priest," and was later on abbat of Eynsham.  Of his work, besides
educational treatises, eighty sermons, chiefly translated from the
Latin, remain.  In them he shows clearly that the claims of the papacy
with regard to S. Peter were not accepted by all in England, and he
taught the spiritual, not corporal, presence of the Lord's Body in the
Holy Communion.  The English Church differed also from Rome in the fact
that many of the clergy were married, and though this was not regarded
as lawful, they were not separated from their wives.  But in all
essential matters the English Church remained in union with the foreign
Churches and retained her ancient reputation for unbroken orthodoxy.
This reputation was increased by the fame of S. Dunstan, whose sojourn
abroad had served to link English churchmen again to their brothers
over sea.

{121}

The last years of the great archbishop were given to prayer and study,
and to the arts of music and handicraft which he had practised in his
youth.  He set himself to train the young, to succour the needy, and to
make peace among all men.  He died on May 19th, 988, and with him the
new energy he had infused into the Church seemed to pass away.
[Sidenote: The Danish invasions.] New Danish invasions turned men's
thoughts other ways, but still monasteries made progress.  The
Benedictine rule was accepted over Southern England, and in the north
the see of Durham rose replacing the older northern see, when it became
the resting-place of the bones of the great missionary, S. Cuthbert.
The Danish invasions were not so barbarous now as in earlier days.
Some of the Danes were Christians, and it was at Andover that Olaf
Trigvason, King of Norway, was confirmed by Bishop Aelfeah, calling
King Aethelred father.  He went back to Norway a Christian devoted to
the conversion of his people.[4]

The English Church at the beginning of the eleventh century was in full
communion with the Western Church, but was practically to a large
extent apart from papal influence.  Church and State walked hand in
hand, and the relations between sovereign and archbishop resembled
those of the New rather than the Old Rome.  The missionary energy which
had in former years sent forth Wilfrith and Winfrith was now for the
time exhausted.  England needed a new religious revival.  It came
later, at the time of a political conquest.

Meanwhile the Irish Church was regaining its learning and its
missionary zeal: both were expressed in {122} the _consuetudo
peregrinandi_ with which the Irish monks were credited in the ninth
century.  But from the time of the Danish invasions the Irish Church,
and the Welsh also, suffered severely.  Heathen settlements in Ireland
were only gradually converted, as that of Dublin in 943.  The disturbed
state of their home encouraged Irish monks to cross the seas.  Action
and reaction led Ireland more close than ever to the Roman papacy.



[1] Bury, _Life of S. Patrick_, pp. 212-13.

[2] R. L. Poole, _Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought_, p.
10.

[3] Cf. Roger, _L'Enseignement des lettres classiques_, p. 236.

[4] See ch. xi.




{123}

CHAPTER XI

THE CONVERSION OF SLAVS AND NORTHMEN

[Sidenote: Cyril and Methodius, 868.]

The ninth century was a great age of conversion, and the work is very
largely associated with two great names in the development of
civilisation and learning, those of two brothers, born in Thessalonica,
probably between 820 and 830--Constantine (who changed his name to
Cyril when he was consecrated bishop by Hadrian II. in 868) and
Methodius.  Their lives show the connection still existing between Rome
and the East in Church matters, and illustrate the zeal for educational
work which was so conspicuous a feature in the converting energy of the
Church of Constantinople.  Cyril was not only a priest and a
missionary, he was a "philosopher."  Methodius, it is said, had been a
civil administrator.  Both were scholars and linguists, and the
influence which they exercised upon the Slavs is incalculably great.
In missions always it is the personal influence which is the most
striking.  But the time is needed as well as the man.  So much we see
again and again, however cursorily we study the evangelising work of
this age.

In missions the ninth century carried out what the eighth neglected or
was unable to accomplish.  The {124} wars against the Finnish
Bulgarians from 755 onwards brought the Church as well as the State
into grave danger, or rather were defensive of each.  [Sidenote: The
conversion of the Bulgarians.] In the eighth century there were several
isolated conversions, including a whole family of boïars from whom
sprang the recluse, saint Joannicius; but there was no general
movement.  The Bulgarians remained enemies of Christianity and
destroyers of all Roman civilisation: S. Theodore of the Studium
declared that it was criminal sacrilege to exchange hostages with them.
But gradually the geographical nearness brought closer connection;
bar

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