Chapter III · (continued 2)

Four eastern emperors occupy the sixty years from Marcian to Justin. Three of them are of the very worst which even Byzantium can show. Their reply to the appeal of the Pope to "the Christian prince and Roman emperor" was to betray the faith and sacrifice Rome to Arian occupation.

But when we turn from the bishops and emperors of the eastern capital to the seats of the ancient patriarchs, to the Alexandria of Athanasius and Cyril, to the Antioch of Ignatius, Chrysostom, and Eustathius, no words can express the division, the scandals, the excesses, which the Eutychean spirit, striving to overthrow the Council of Chalcedon, showed during those sixty years. With this spirit Acacius played to stir up the eastern jealousy against the Apostolic See of the West, and he found a most willing coadjutor in the eastern emperor, the more so because that See was no longer locally situated in his domain. The chance of Acacius lay throughout in the pride of that monarch who was become the sole inheritor of the Roman name, as Pope Felix reminded him, and who would fain see Nova Roma the centre of ecclesiastical rule, as it was become the head of the diminished empire. Anastasius, after Zeno, was still more swayed by these motives than his predecessor.

But here we touch the completeness of the success which followed the trust placed in their apostolate by the seven immediate successors of St. Leo. In proportion as Rome became in the temporal order a mere municipal city, the sacerdotal authority of its bishop came out into clearer light. Three times in the fifth century Rome was mercilessly sacked—in 410, in 455, in 472. Its senators were carried into slavery, its population diminished. The finishing stroke of its ignominy may be said to be the deposition, by a barbarian condottiere, of the poor boy whose name, repeating in connection the founder of the city with the founder of the empire, seemed to mock the mortal throes of the great mother. But this lessening of the secular city, so far from lessening the authority of the spiritual power, reveals to all men, believers or unbelievers, that the pontificate, whose seat is locally in the city, has a life not derived from the city. Rome's temporal fall exhibits in full the intangible spiritual character of the pontificate. If St. Peter had to any seemed to rule because he was seated on the pedestal of the Cæsarean empire, when that empire fell the Apostle alone remained to whom Christ gave the charge, whom He invested with the "great mantle".[111] The bishop of the city in which an Arian Ostrogoth ruled supreme as to temporal things was acknowledged by the head of the empire, from whom the Ostrogoth derived his title, as the person in whom our Lord's word—the creative word which founds an empire as it makes a world—was accomplished, had been during five hundred years accomplished, would be for ever accomplished.[112]

The malice of Acacius largely led to this result. His attack was the prelude to the sifting of the Pope's prerogative during thirty-five years: its sifting by a rival at Constantinople, by the eastern bishops, by the eastern emperor, who had now also become the sole Roman emperor; and the sifting was followed by a full acknowledgment. Nothing but this hostile conduct would have afforded so indubitable a proof of the thing impugned. While the ancient patriarchates which had formed the substructure of the triple dais on which the Apostolic See rested were falling into irretrievable confusion, while the new State-made patriarch at Constantinople was trying to nominate and, if he could, to consecrate his elders and superiors at Alexandria and Antioch, who descended from Peter, the essential prerogative of the Apostolic See itself came forth into full light. The bishops at Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and every other city in the world would be great or small in influence according to the greatness or smallness of their city. If the city fell altogether, the see would fall. Its life was tied to the city. But it was not so with that pontificate on which the Church was built. There and there only the living power was given by Christ to a man: not local, nor limited, nor transitory. This was the great truth which the Acacian schism helped to establish in the minds of men, and which was proclaimed in that Nova Roma where Acacius had refused the judgment of Pope Felix, and had tried to put himself on an equality. As a result, in the terms of union which have been above recited, the action of Acacius has had the honour to condemn the rebellion of Photius three hundred years before it arose, and every other rebellion which has imitated that of Photius.

Nor must it be forgotten that it was the constancy of the Popes in these sixty years which alone prevented the prevailing of Eutychean doctrine in the East. Blent with that doctrine was the attempt of three emperors to substitute themselves as judges of doctrine for the Apostolic See and the bishops in union with it. At the moment when John Talaia[113] was expelled from Alexandria, the Monophysite heresy, espoused by Acacius and imposed by Zeno, would have triumphed, save for the Popes Simplicius and Felix. And it would have triumphed while the instrument of its triumph, the Henotikon, would have inflicted a deadly blow upon the government of the Church by taking away the independence of her teaching office. This struggle continued during the reign of Zeno; and Anastasius, as soon as he became emperor, used all the absolute power which he possessed to enforce the reception of the same document. Even Euphemius and Macedonius were obliged to sign it, and the sacrifice which they made in suffering deposition does not deliver their character of bishops from the stain of this weakness. We see in this period the first stadium traversed by the Greek Church in that descending course which, in another century, brought it to the ruin wrought by Mahomet.

On the other hand, the seven Popes kept the position of St. Leo—rather, they more than kept it, because, under outward circumstances so greatly altered for the worse, they both maintained his doctrine and justified his conduct. They insisted through the darkest times, under pressure of the greatest calamities, deprived of all temporal aid, that the person of Acacius should be solemnly removed from recognition as a bishop by the Church. They insisted, and it was done. The act of Acacius, if allowed to pass, would have carried into actual life the assertion of the canon which St. Leo had rejected: that the privileges of the Roman See were derived from the grant of the Fathers to Rome because it was the capital. The expunging of his name from the diptychs, with the solemn asseveration that the rank of the Holy See was derived from the gift of Christ, and that the Church's solidity as a fabric consisted in it, and equally the maintenance of the Catholic religion, established the contradictory of that 28th canon, and enforced for ever the subordination of the see which Acacius sought to exalt. At the same time it pointed out the distinction between the See of Peter and all other sees: the distinction that in the case of every other bishop the spiritual life of the bishop, as a ruler, is local and attached to his see. But the See of Peter is the generator of the episcopate, because of Peter ever living in his successor.

It may also be remarked that it is this overflowing life of Peter which invests titular bishops with the names of dead sees. Thus they sit as members of a General Council, verifying to the letter St. Cyprian's adage, that the episcopate is one, of which a part is held by each without division of the whole.

The submission of Constantinople in its bishop, its clergy, its emperor, its nobles, attested by the subscription of 2500 bishops throughout the East, is an event to which there can hardly be found a parallel. The submission was made to Pope Hormisdas when he was himself, as his predecessors for forty-three years had been, subject to an Arian ruler.[114] If there be in all history an act which can be called in a special sense an act of the undivided Church, it is this. It was made more than three hundred years before the schism of Photius. If the confession contained in this submission does not exhibit the mind of the Church, what form of words, what consent of will, can ever be shown to convey it? If those who subscribed this confession subscribed a falsehood, why pretend any longer to attribute authority to the Church? But it must be added, if their confession was the truth, why not obey it?

It is to be noted that this period of sixty years is full of events which caused the greatest suffering to the Popes, were unceasingly deplored by them, and resisted to the utmost of their power. The temporal condition of themselves, of the bishops, of their people in Italy, Africa, France, Spain, Illyricum, Britain, was most sad. The most vehement of persecutions desolated Africa. Again, there was the suppression of the western emperor, with the consequent subjection of the Apostolic See to the temporal government of the most hateful of heresies: the Oriental despotism of Zeno and Anastasius, continued for forty-four years, mixed with another heresy, and tending to destroy both faith and independence in the bishops subject to it. The Popes, as Romans, felt with the keenest sympathy the political degradation of Rome. Can any appeal be more touching than that which they made, and made in vain, to the "Christian king and Roman prince"? Out of all these things, whose natural consequences tended to extinguish their principate, came forth the most magnificent attestation to it which is to be found in the first five hundred years of the Christian religion.

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