Chapter V · Old Rome And New Rome. (continued 2)

[pg 287]

After a hundred years and a succession of fourteen Popes, St. Martin held a great Council at Rome in 649, in which he passed anathema upon the heresy of two eastern emperors, grandfather and grandson. In requital for this the grandson had him seized in his Lateran Church itself, carried secretly to Constantinople, judged by the senate there for high treason, condemned to death, and finally suffered him to die of starvation in the Crimea. As Pope John I. gained his crown of martyrdom by the first visit of a Pope to Constantinople, so Pope Martin gained the like crown by the fourth.

About thirty years after this a General Council was held in which the heresy which St. Martin had placed under ban was condemned afresh; and it was called by the wish and command of the then reigning emperor, son of the very man who had persecuted St. Martin to death, and in it the largest acknowledgments of St. Peter's succession at Rome were made to St. Martin's successors.

Yet, ten years afterwards, this man's son, then emperor, tried to repeat upon Pope Sergius the crime of the grandfather committed on Pope St. Martin. That his attempt was baffled, the life of his messenger saved by Pope Sergius, and the messenger dismissed in most ignominious flight, was owing to the Italian troops of the emperor rising in defence of the Pope. They would not allow him to be taken to the capital on the Bosphorus.

In another ten years the usurper Apsimar had despatched another exarch, Theophylact, to carry Pope [pg 288] John VI. to Constantinople that he might be induced to give the consent which Pope Sergius had refused to the canons of the Trullan Council. This attempt also was frustrated by the flocking of Italian troops to Rome in defence of the Pope.

Last is the visit of Pope Constantine, in which two things are remarkable. The very emperor who had attempted to kidnap Pope Sergius in 693, being on the eve of the extinction which was to fall on the line of Heraclius, in 710 invited Pope Constantine to visit him, ordered him everywhere to be received with royal honours; when they met, fell, though crowned, at his feet to kiss them, and sent him back in highest honour. And presently the patriarch of Constantinople, begging of him to be condoned for a grievous fault, drew a picture of his supremacy the functions of which he compared to those which the Creator in His wisdom has given to the head in the human body. I will venture to say that no western mind has expressed with greater force or tenderness the office which belongs to him who sits in the see of the chief apostle than was done by the tenant for the time of that see of New Rome, which for more than three centuries had been striving to rival and depress the elder Rome.

The emperor Anastasius, so strangely chosen from a first secretary to succeed a fallen usurper, and undo his establishment of heresy, was both orthodox and blameless in conduct, and strove to defend his much endangered empire. He had armed a fleet, but it rebelled and killed its commander. The end of a civil war, [pg 289] lasting six months, was that Anastasius retired of his own accord on condition that his life should be spared: he became a monk and priest and was banished to Thessalonica. He had reigned two years and a half.

Anastasius, some time after his retirement, made, when Leo III. was established on the throne, an attempt to regain it. For this he was publicly executed at Constantinople. So he was added to his predecessors, Leontius, Apsimar, and Justinian II., making the fourth of the seven emperors reigning from 685 to the accession of Leo III. in 717, to whom the throne was a scaffold.

Theodosius III., a good man but an incapable ruler, had in vain tried to escape the crown imposed on him by the rebellious fleet. After a year the general of the army of the East, a soldier of great capacity and vigour, was advancing to dethrone him. The senate and patriarch advised him to resign. His private property was secured to him on condition that both he and his son became priests. Theodosius III. yielded possession of a throne from acquiring which he had fled, and lived in peace at Ephesus. He gave himself up to good works, and when he was buried in St. Philip's Church he had ordered the single word health to be engraven on his tomb: a silent intimation that he was the sole among Leo's six predecessors who had escaped unhurt, and no less that he found in death the healing of all sorrows.

In the year 717 Leo the Isaurian mounted the throne thus vacated, and entering by the golden gate on the 25th March, 717, was crowned in Sancta Sophia by the [pg 290] patriarch Germanus, after he had taken before him the oath to maintain the faith of the Church intact.

On the 8th April, 715, Pope Constantine died, after a pontificate of seven years, “a strenuous and successful defender of Rome's orthodox faith, and a worthy predecessor of greater successors, under whom Rome was delivered from the Byzantine yoke”.161 After forty days St. Gregory II. became Pope on the 19th May, 715.

Between the two Popes St. Gregory I. and St. Gregory II. lies a period of 111 years, marked with disasters to the Christian people and religion such as no preceding century can show. At the death of St. Gregory I. in 604, all the shores of the Mediterranean were in possession of Christians. The authority of the eastern emperor extended from Constantinople over Asia Minor, Syria, and the region up to the Euphrates, Egypt, and the long range of Northern Africa, embracing the present Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco, to the Atlantic. The beginning of Christian kingdoms, looking up with filial affection to their spiritual Father in Rome, was apparent to the eye of the first Gregory. Gaul and Spain and Africa, lately recovered by Justinian, had a network of spiritual provinces, in which each Metropolitan received from Rome the pallium, the token of apostolic authority and unity. St. Gregory himself had added to these by the mission of Augustine, and the chair of unity founded at Canterbury. Full as these countries were of violence, mutual aggression, and unsubdued ferocity, the Teutonic invaders had nevertheless [pg 291] accepted the law of Christ from Rome, and the first principles of human order had been fused with their natural traditions of freedom. Above all, the Arian heresy had been dispossessed, and there was no appearance of a religion counter to the Christian arising. In every city of a vast region the bishop was regarded by his people with veneration, the very source of which lay in a power which he held by imposition of hands. A spiritual head to those around him, he was himself a link in the chain of that universal hierarchy the head of which was at Rome.

At the accession of Gregory II. the whole coast line from Cilicia at least to Mauritania on the Atlantic, had been lost to the Roman empire, and in a very great degree to the Christian Church as well. It was all now in the occupation of a single power, the head of which was termed the successor. The successor that is of the Arabian who had set himself in the place of Christ, who had conquered the Christians in this vast range of territory, and would allow them to live only on tenure of subjection. Instead of the remnant of primeval tradition which formed the mythology and influenced the customs of the northern tribes at the time of their descent on the western empire, the Arabian prophet and his successors had impregnated their people with a furious and fanatical belief to be imposed by force. It was a chief part of that belief that it ought to be imposed by force on all outside. And they who fell in such a holy war were held to be martyrs, as indeed they witnessed and imitated the life of Mohammed from the [pg 292] time of the Hegira. Thus the possession of the world was attached to the profession of one God and Mohammed as his prophet. In the century next after the death of the prophet those who retrace the deeds of his followers must admit that every possible disregard of human life and of the things most hallowed in Christian society had been shown by them in the construction of a kingdom now stretching from the Atlantic to the Indus. The religion under whose inspiration all this had been done, was framed in essential antagonism to the Christian faith. For indeed the mystery on which the Christian faith rested, that the Son of God had assumed human nature for the redemption of man, was denounced by it as derogatory to the very conception of God. Mohammedans proscribed Christians as associators of a creature with the Creator. This association they called idolatry. The northern wandering of the nations might receive Christian belief and be formed into a Christendom. The southern wandering of the nations, since it rested on a prophet the personal antagonist of the Christian founder, could only substitute Islamieh for Christendom.

This it had done over the empire which as we have seen was constructed at the time St. Gregory II. became Pope, and Leo III. after six revolutions became emperor at Constantinople.

Between the two Gregories twenty-four Popes occupied the throne of St. Peter, from Pope Sabinian to Pope Constantine. Of these three only, Honorius, Vitalian, and Sergius, sat over ten years each; the three together [pg 293] occupied forty-one years, leaving seventy years in the gross for the remaining twenty-one pontificates. But a considerable portion of these years must be deducted for the time which intervened between their election, and the allowing of their consecration by the consent of the emperor or the exarch as his viceroy. In that interval Greek arts were applied, to induce the Pope elect to consent to some thing desired by the emperor. Thus Pope Severinus on the death of Honorius was kept out of his see for nineteen months and sixteen days, to obtain, if possible, his consent to the doctrine put forth by Heraclius in the Ecthesis. In this manner the pontificate of Severinus was reduced to two months and three days, in which he found time to condemn the emperor's Ecthesis. So again on the election of St. Sergius in 687, the exarch hurried down from Ravenna to prevent it if possible; but he was too late, and could only plunder the Church's treasury of one hundred pounds weight of gold. These are samples, but the action continued over the whole period. Historians remark that the seven last Popes who sat during it were all Greeks, and conclude that the emperors thought compliance might be hoped for in such cases. This series of seven began with John VI. in 685. The seven Popes were all faithful not to the exacting demands of emperors, but to the charge of St. Peter, and during the thirty years in which they occupied the Holy See seven revolutions of emperors took place at Constantinople. Three emperors perished by public execution; a fourth was only blinded; a fifth having become a priest, and attempted to regain the throne was [pg 294] then executed as a traitor by its actual tenant. The worst of the six was the fifth emperor in the line of Heraclius, whose head was sent to Rome as a ghastly but indisputable witness that Italy was delivered from his tyranny.

During the whole one hundred and eleven years Italy was governed as a province which had no civil rights. I recur to the words of St. Agatho in his letter162 to the Sixth Council for the importance of his acknowledging the sad condition of learning, as a result of the miserable danger and uncertainty of the time. Not often does a Pope say of his own legates, “How should they who gained their daily bread by manual labour with the utmost hazard, possess accurate and abundant learning?” But he gave assurance that “with simplicity of heart and without faltering they maintained the faith handed down from their fathers, making their one and their chief good that nothing should be diminished, nothing changed, but the words and the meaning both kept untouched”.

Whatever pomp and glory remained to the empire was centered in Constantinople. Rome and the Pope were powerless as to material strength. So St. Martin, when accused at his trial of favouring an enemy of the emperor, replied: “What was I to resist an exarch, without any force of my own?” At that time Constantinople was probably the greatest as well as the richest city in the world. When Constans II. eight years after visited Rome he swept away whatever works of art pleased him [pg 295] for the further adornment of his capital. In the four centuries down to Leo III. which elapsed since the consecration of the capital by its founder, every successor had made it a point of honour to improve the beauty and increase the strength of the imperial residence.

Thus those twenty-four Popes from the first to the second Gregory were dwelling in a Rome which continued to exist only as the seat of their own primacy, drawing successive generations to it, and visited year by year through the pilgrims who came to it from all parts of the world, since they sought the tomb of the chief apostle when the sepulchre of the Master was enthralled by the Saracen. Beside that tomb they stood with Roman fortitude against Byzantine fluctuation. Heraclius published an Ecthesis, and Constans II. a Typus. Ten Popes condemned both, and then Constantine IV. humbly admitted that both were worthless. He further undid the heresy of four successive patriarchs by putting them under anathema. He received as the living Peter the successor of one whom his father had stolen from Rome and martyred in the Crimea; just as his son Justinian fell at the feet of Pope Constantine, after he had tried to repeat the crime of his grandfather Constans on the person of Pope Sergius. So in 680 Theodore, then patriarch of Constantinople, urged on by another patriarch who lived at Constantinople since his own Antioch was become a spoil of the Saracen, expunged from the diptychs the names of all the Popes after Honorius to his own time. Theodore was himself deposed while the Sixth Council sat, and Macarius, his [pg 296] adviser, was deposed by that Council, but Theodore lived to be restored and to die as patriarch with a sounder faith than he had shown at the beginning. It is remarkable that after the four Monothelite patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, who were condemned at the Sixth Council, three patriarchs, Thomas II., 667-8, John V., 669-674, and Constantine I., 674-6,163 “leant to orthodoxy,” and so escaped the censure of the Council, while Theodore was heretical from 678 to 680, and orthodox when restored from 683 to 686.

Thirty years after the Sixth Council the patriarch, John V., after presiding at the council summoned by the Emperor Philippicus, who attempted by it to re-establish the Monothelite heresy, besought pardon of Pope Constantine as the head whose function it was to heal all the wounds of the body. I know not what proof of the Roman primacy surpasses in force, to those who have eyes to see, this proof arising from the alternate persecution and confession of Byzantine emperors and patriarchs, compared with the unbending fortitude and unalterable faith of the twenty-four Popes in that long century when Rome served as a slave in the natural order, and was worshipped in the spiritual kingdom as a sanctuary.

[pg 297]