Title: The Church and the Barbarians
Author: William Holden Hutton
Release date: August 21, 2007 [eBook #22366]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
Produced by Al Haines
1906
[Transcriber's note: Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with Project Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99. For the book's Index, a page number has been placed only at the start of that section.]
[Transcriber's note: Footnotes have been renumbered sequentially and moved to the end of their respective chapters. The book's Index has a number of references to footnotes, e.g. the "96 n." entry under "Assyrians." In such cases, check the referenced page to see which footnote(s) are relevant.]
[Transcriber's note: The original book had side-notes in its pages' left or right margin areas. Some of these sidenotes were at or near the beginning of a paragraph, and in this e-text, are placed to precede their host paragraph. Some were placed elsewhere alongside a paragraph, in relation to what the sidenote referred to inside the paragraph. These have been placed into the paragraph near where they were in the original book. All sidenotes have been enclosed in square brackets, and preceded with "Sidenote:".]
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.
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.
S. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD, Septuagesima, 1906.
{1}
[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}
(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}
[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}
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}
[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}
[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}
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}
[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}
[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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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.
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[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; barbarians enlisted in the Roman armies; at last illustrious prisoners in Constantinople were the cause of light being brought to their own land. Boris, the Bulgarian king, obtained teachers from the New Rome, and applied also to Pope Nicolas I. (858-67) for instruction. In 864 the Bulgarians accepted the faith, and the contest for patriarchal rights over them was hotly pressed between Nicolas and Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople (857-86). In the end, after receiving answers from the pope to 106 questions, and after being treated with too little consideration by Hadrian II. (867-72), Boris decided to accept an archbishop from Constantinople in 870, and ten bishoprics were founded.
[Sidenote: The conversion of the Slavs.]
But the great work of Cyril and Methodius was not directly concerned with the Bulgarian conversion. In Pannonia and Moravia and Croatia they were the great missionaries to the Slavs. Cyril invented a Slavonic alphabet, and was able to preach to the Slavs everywhere in their own tongue; and in Serbia a flourishing Church sprang {125} up which retained the Slavonic rite. Early in the tenth century many Slavonian priests were ordained by the Bishop of Nona, himself a Slav by birth. But these districts were weakened by incessant strife, and their contests with the East were often fomented by the popes. Their Christianity was distinctly Byzantine; but they were never able to be a real strength to the emperor or the Orthodox Church.
[Sidenote: Poland.]
Poland, on the other hand, and later, received its Christianity from a Latin source. There may have been earlier Greek influences through the Slavonic Christians to the south-east; but it was not till 965 that the king, Mieczyslaw, was converted, when he married a Bohemian princess. He became a member of the Empire and the vassal of Otto I. The bishopric of Posen was founded in 968, and the gospel was preached by S. Adalbert, already Bishop of Prague. S. Adalbert, who for a short time held the see of Gnesen, passed on to preach to the heathen Prussians, by whom he was martyred in 997. Otto III. visited the Christian king in A.D. 1000, and gave him a relic, the lance of S. Maurice, still preserved at Cracow. The ecclesiastical organisation of the country was then consolidated; Gnesen was made the metropolitan see, and Polish and Pomeranian dioceses were placed under it. The Latin Church was dominant over Polish Christianity.
[Sidenote: The Prussians and S. Adalbert.]
But the pagan Prussians regarded S. Adalbert as a political emissary and a sorcerer who destroyed their crops, and killed him without hesitation; Bruno, whom Silvester II. sent to succeed him, perished within a year, and the attempt to Christianise the Prussians was {126} abandoned for nearly two centuries. Similar was the course of events among the Wends. It is not till the tenth century that we know anything of endeavours for their conversion, and then they were due to the all-embracing energy of Otto I. Henry I. had borne the royal arms in victory over the lands watered by the Elbe, the Oder, and the Saale; and now his successor began the establishment of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, under the see of Magdeburg. Boso, Bishop of Merseburg, set himself to learn and preach in the Slav tongue, but it seems that the German clergy who were introduced were unsuccessful as missionaries, and won the reputation of greedy political agitators. At the end of the tenth century a torrent of pagan fury swept over the land, destroyed the churches, and stamped the growing Christianity under foot.
[Sidenote: The conversion of Russia.]
The beginnings of Russian Christianity may possibly be found, as the patriarch Photius asserted, before the results of the defeat of the barbarians by John Zimisces. But it was not till nearly a century later that anything notable occurred. Olga, a "ruler of Russia," visited Constantinople in 957 and was baptized. Yet the Greek missionaries made but slow progress. It was not till Vladimir married the sister of the emperor Basil in 989, and restored the city of Cherson,—in which Cyril more than a century before had been a missionary,—where he was baptized, to the Empire, that the evangelisation of Russia really began. Vladimir deliberately chose the Greek in preference to the Roman form of Christianity, and acted, it would seem, with some semblance of national consent. The baptism of the people of {127} Kiev in the waters of the Dnyepr, as one flock, "some standing in the water up to their necks, others up to their breasts, holding their young children in their arms," was typical of the national acceptance of Christ. Everywhere churches and schools were built and the Slavonic Scriptures taught the people; at Kiev was built the Church of S. Sophia by Greek masons, in commemoration of the debt to the great Church of the New Rome. [Sidenote: S. Vladimir, 989.] Vladimir became the apostle of his people. The Church pressed forward eagerly, forward over the vast expanse covered by the Russian power, and, not without martyrdoms and tales of heroic adventure, won its way triumphantly to Russian hearts.
[Sidenote: The conversion of the Czechs.]
The early days of Christianity in Moravia and Bohemia are wrapped in obscurity. In 801 Charles the Great endeavoured a forcible conversion of the former country, but with no more than transitory success. Yet in 836 a church was consecrated at Neutra by the Archbishop of Salzburg. A little later than this we hear of the beginnings of Christian faith among the Czechs. Early Bohemian history, when it emerges from an obscurity lighted by legend, is full of romantic incident. There are passages again and again in its records which for weirdness and ferocity remind us of a grim story of Meinhold's. Paganism lingered there with some of its ancient power, when it had perished, at least outwardly, in all neighbouring lands. In the eleventh century Bohemian heathens still went on pilgrimages to the temple at Arcona on the isle of Eugen, till the practice was stopped by Bretislav II. Still a beginning had been made. In {128} 845 fourteen Bohemian nobles, who had taken refuge at the court of Louis the German, were baptized at Regensburg; but the conversion of the country was to come from the East. Cyril and Methodius, sent by the emperor Michael III. from Constantinople, converted the Moravians, and from them the gospel was handed on to the Czechs. It was Methodius, on whom the pope had conferred the title of Archbishop of Moravia, who baptized the Bohemian prince Borivoj. For the history of Bohemian Christianity the earliest authority is Kristián, brother of Duke Boleslav II., in The Life of S. Ludmilla and the Martyrdom of S. Wenceslas. [Sidenote: S. Wenceslas.] This is an extremely valuable book, not only as a biography—hagiological, like so much valuable early material for history, yet truthful—and as a record of manners in the tenth century, but as containing the account of the conversion of Moravia to Christianity, which shows that the conversion came first from the East, and the Church long retained a special connection with the Eastern peoples, Bulgarians and Greeks. The account of the murder of S. Wenceslas is of great interest as showing how close was the connection of religion with family and dynastic feuds. S. Ludmilla was murdered in 927 by the orders of her daughter-in-law, who remained a pagan; a year later,[1] her saintly grandson Wenceslas was slain by the men of his evil brother Boleslav. "Holy Wenceslas, who was soon to be a victim for the sake of Christ, rose early, wishing, according to his holy habit, to hurry to the church, that he might remain there for some time in solitary prayer before the congregation arrived; {129} and wishing as a good shepherd to hear matins together with his flock, and join in their song, he soon fell into the snares that had been laid," and it was outside the church that he was slain.
[Sidenote: Restoration of Christianity in Bohemia.]
It was not till the invasion of the country by the armies of Otto I. in 938 that Christianity was restored even to full toleration, and only when Otto came himself in 950 that it was secured. Boleslav II., the nephew of S. Wenceslas, was named the Pious; and Prague, in 973, was separated from Regensburg and became a bishopric. While among the Moravians the Slavonic rite introduced by Methodius was still largely used, in Bohemia the Roman rite was followed. Voytech (Adalbert), a Czech, was the second bishop, and to him, in spite of failures and difficulties, the conversion of Bohemia was largely due. He died a martyr (as we have said), while preaching to the heathen Prussians, and for a time darkness again settled over the history of the Czechs.
[Sidenote: The conversion of the Danes]
Meanwhile the current of conversion had spread northwards. It was in 822 that Ebbo, Archbishop of Rheims, was sent to Denmark in consequence of a political embassy to Louis the Pious, emperor from 814 to 840. Harold, the Danish king, had asked aid. The emperor gave him also a Christian teacher; and in 826 the king and his wife were baptized. Other missionaries went northwards, but before long the Danes drove out both their king Harold and his teacher Ansgar. From Denmark, however, the mission spread to Sweden, and in 831 an archbishopric was established at Hamburg to direct all the northern {130} missions, and Ansgar was invested with the pallium by Pope Gregory IV. The missions had a chequered career. [Sidenote: and of Sweden.] Hamburg was seized and pillaged by the Northmen in 845, and the Swedish mission was for a time destroyed. In 849 a new revival took place, when Ansgar was given the see of Bremen in addition to that of Hamburg; and before long he won over the king of the Jutes and his people of Schleswig. In 853 Ansgar returned to Sweden, where he was favourably received by the king Olaf. The tale of his vast missionary labours, from which he was rightly called the "Apostle of the north," is told with spirit and feeling by Adam of Bremen, who wrote in the eleventh century, as well as by the biographer who commemorated him on his death. He not only preached, but he "redeemed captives, nourished those who were in tribulation, taught his household. As an apostle without, a monk within, he was never idle." When it was said that his prayers wrought miracles of healing, he said, "If I could but think myself worthy of such a favour from the Lord, I would pray Him to grant me but one miracle—that out of me, by His grace; He would make a good man." [Sidenote: S. Ansgar.] S. Ansgar is, in his work as in his training, a parallel to S. Boniface. Like him one of the finest fruits of monasticism, which first taught in solitude and then sent out to work actively in the world, he was brought up at Corbie. For nearly thirty-five years he laboured incessantly among the peoples of the north, and at the very end of his life he gallantly went among heathen chiefs to rebuke them for buying and selling slaves. He died in 865, and S. Rimbert, {131} his disciple and biographer, was his successor in his sees.
[Sidenote: Norway.]
Gradually, and in different ways, Christianity spread in the far north. Haakon, the son of Harold Haarfager of Norway, was sent to be foster-son to Aethelstan of England, who "had him baptized and brought up in the right faith," and he became a great king under the name of Haakon the Good. From England he brought over teachers, and he built churches; and then at last he addressed all the leaders of his people and besought them "all, young and old, rich and poor, women as well as men, that they should all allow themselves to be baptized, and should believe in one God, and in Christ the Son of Mary, and refrain from all sacrifices and heathen gods, and should keep holy the seventh day, and abstain from all work on it, and keep a fast on the seventh day." [2] But it was long before his people obeyed him. Rebellion and dynastic war followed in rapid succession; and he died of a wound from a chance arrow that struck him as he pursued his defeated foes. The first Christian king of Norway died in a land which was still heathen. But the seed was sown in the hearts of the men who had seen the brave, strong, chivalrous life of him who owned Christ for Lord.
[Sidenote: Olaf Trigvason.]
In Denmark the conversion begun in the ninth century was long delayed, and it was not till Otto I. conquered the Danes and sent Bishop Poppo who instructed King Harold and his army so that they were baptized, that the land {132} became definitely a Christian kingdom. From Denmark the gospel spread again to Norway; but it was not till near the end of the tenth century that Olaf Trigvason was baptized by a hermit on one of the Scilly Isles, and then in his short reign devoted himself to converting his people, often forcibly, as a choice between death and baptism. To Iceland and Greenland too Olaf sent missionaries. He died at last, like a true Wiking hero, in a sea fight; and it was not until the next century and the days of Olaf the Saint that the faith of Christ conquered the North.
[Sidenote: The conversion of Iceland.]
There seems no doubt that Christianity in Iceland began by missionary enterprise from Irish monks. From time to time anchorites sought refuge in that ultima Thule, "that they might pray to God in peace"; but whether they did any direct work of conversion is doubtful. The actual conversion came undoubtedly from Norway. A Christian queen lived in Iceland at the end of the ninth century, the wife of the Norse Olaf who was king in Dublin; but little if any impression was made on the heathenism of the people. Nearly a century later an Icelander called Thorwald Kothransson brought a Christian bishop Frederic from Saxony, who wrought some conversions and left a body of baptized Christians behind him. In the year 1000 came a priest Thormod and several chiefs back from the Norse court of Olaf, and in a meeting of the Althing—the great assembly of the people—preached to them the One God in Trinity. The whole people became Christian, and the few heathen {133} customs that still lingered, as it were by permission, after the great baptism, soon fell away like raindrops in the bright sun. Among the last news that came to Olaf Trigvason was that his distant people had fulfilled the wish of his heart.
[1] According to the chronicle of Kristián.
[2] The Saturday fast was still observed in many parts of Christendom.
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[Sidenote: The Lombards in Italy.]
The acceptance of Christianity and of Catholicism by the barbarian tribes which conquered Europe was a slow process. The conversion of the Lombards, for example, whom we have seen as Arians, sometimes tolerant, sometimes persecuting, was gradual. The Church always held its own, in faith though not in possessions, in Italy; and from the pontificate of Gregory the Great the moral force of the Catholic Society began to win the Lombards to its fold. It was proved again and again that heresy was not a unifying power. The Catholic Church held together its disciples in the Catholic creed. It is possible that Agilulf, the husband of the famous Catholic queen Theodelind, himself became a Catholic before he died. Paul the Deacon says that he "both held the Catholic faith and bestowed many possessions on the Church of Christ, and restored the bishops, who were in a depressed and abject condition, to the honour of their wonted dignity." Whatever may be the meaning of this, it certainly expresses the fact that before the middle of the seventh century the Lombards were passing almost insensibly into the Catholic fold, and Italy had practically become united in one faith though far from united in one government.
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[Sidenote: The Church in the Frankish kingdoms.]
With Germany it was different. As the Merwing kingdoms decayed, the Eastern one, Austrasia, with its capital, Metz, was but a poor bulwark against heathen tribes on its borders, which were yet, it might seem at times, little more barbarous than itself. The kingdom of Austrasia stretched eastwards from Rheims "spreading across the Rhine an unknown distance into Germany, claiming the allegiance of Thuringians, Alamanni and Bavarians, fitfully controlling the restless Saxons, touching with warlike weapons and sometimes vainly striving with the terrible Avars." [1] Kings of the Bavarian line came to rule in Northern Italy, but Bavaria was little touched by Christian faith. At last when the descendants of Arnulf[2] came as kings over a now again united Frankish monarchy, when Charles Martel made one power of Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy, the time for a new advance seemed to have come. Theodelind, the Catholic queen of the Lombards, was herself of Bavarian birth, but a century after her time the people of her native land, it seems, were still heathen. They were apart from the Roman civilisation and the Catholic tradition: conversion, to touch them, must be a direct and aggressive movement.
At the end of the seventh century S. Rupert began the work. He settled his episcopal throne at Salzburg. He was followed by Emmeran, and by Corbinian. Slowly the work proceeded, hindered by violence on the part of dukes and saints, favoured by popes and making a beginning for Roman missionary interest in the distant borders of the Empire under the Germans.
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But it was not to these Frankish missionaries, or to Roman envoys, that the most important work was due. It was due to an outburst of converting zeal on the part of the newly converted race who had made Britain the land of the English.
[Sidenote: Saint Boniface.]
Of all the great missionaries of the eighth century perhaps the greatest was Winfrith of Crediton, an Englishman who became the father of German Christianity and the precursor of the great religious and intellectual movement of the days of Charles the Great. He followed the Northumbrian Willibrord who for twenty-six years had laboured in Frisia, and supported by the commission of Gregory II. he set forth in 719 to preach to the fierce heathens of Germany. He was instructed to use the Roman rite and to report to Rome any difficulties he might encounter. He began to labour in Thuringia, a land where Irish missionaries had already been at work, and where he recalled the Christians from evil ways into which they had lapsed. He passed on through Neustria and thence to Frisia, where for three years he "laboured much in Christ, converting not a few, destroying the heathen shrines and building Christian oratories," aiding the venerable Willibrord in the work he had so long carried on. But he felt the call to labour in lands as yet untouched, and so he determined to go to the Germans. As he passed up the Rhine he drew to him the boy Gregory afterwards famous as abbat of Utrecht, and at last he settled in the forests of Hessen and built a monastery at Amöneburg. From his old friends in England he received sound advice as to the treatment of heathen customs and the gentle methods of conversion which befit the gospel of {137} Christ. [Sidenote: His mission from Rome, 723.] From Rome he received affectionate support; and in 722 he was summoned to receive a new mission from the pope himself. On S. Andrew's Day, 723,[3] after a solemn profession of faith in the Holy Trinity and of obedience to the Roman See—the first ever taken by one outside the Roman patriarchate—he was consecrated bishop. He set out with letters from the pope to Christians of Thuringia and to the duke Charles. Charles Martel accepted the trust and gave to Winfrith (who had assumed the name of Boniface) the pledge of his protection. The missionary's first act on his return to Hessen was to destroy the ancient oak at Geismar, the object of devotion to the worshippers of the Germanic gods; and the act was followed by many conversions of those who saw that heathenism could not resent the attack upon its sacred things. Still there were difficulties. Those who had learned from the old Celtic mission were not ready to accept the Roman customs. Gregory II. wrote in 724, exhorting him to perseverance: "Let not threats alarm thee, nor terrors cast thee down, but stayed in confidence on God proclaim the word of truth." The work grew: monasteries and churches arose: many English helpers came over: the favour of Charles Martel was a protection. As the Benedictines opened out new lands, ploughed, built, studied, taught, religion and education spread before him. [Sidenote: Boniface archbishop, 732.] In 732 Boniface was made archbishop, received a pallium from Rome, and was encouraged by the new pope Gregory III. to organise the Church which he had founded and {138} to spread forth his arms into the land of the Bavarians. There Christianity had already made some way under Frankish missionaries: it needed organisation from the hand of a master. He "exercised himself diligently," says his biographer Willibald, "in preaching, and went round inspecting many churches." In 738 he paid his last visit to Rome, where he stayed nearly a year and was treated with extraordinary respect and affection. On his return he divided Bavaria into the four dioceses of Salzburg, Regensburg, Freising, and Passau, and later on he founded other sees also, including Würzburg. It was his next aim to do something to reform the lax morals of the Frankish Church, which had sunk to a low ebb under the Merwings. The Austrasian Synod, which bears in some respects a close resemblance to the almost contemporary English Synod of Clovesho (747), of 742 dealt boldly with these matters. Other councils followed in which Boniface took a leading part, and which made a striking reformation. [Sidenote: His missionary work and martyrdom.] His equally important work was to complete the conquest of the general spirit of Western Christendom, which looked to Rome for leadership, over the Celtic missionaries, noble missionaries and martyrs who yet lacked the instinct of cohesion and solidarity. A long series of letters, to the popes, to bishops, princes and persons of importance, shows the breadth of his interests and the nature of his activity. To "four peoples," he says, he had preached the gospel, the Hessians, Thuringians, Franks and Bavarians, not to all for the first time but as a reformer and one who removed heathen influences from the Church. As Archbishop of Mainz he was untiring even in advanced age: in politics as well as in {139} religion he was a leader of men. It was he who anointed Pippin at Soissons in 751 and thus gave the Church's sanction to the new Karling line. He determined to end his days as a missionary to the heathen. In 755 he went with a band of priests and monks once more to the wild Frisians, and at Dokkum by the northern sea he met his death at the hands of the heathen whom he came to win to Christ. The day, ever remembered, was June 5, 755.
Boniface was truly attached to the popes, truly respectful to the Roman See: but he preserved his independence. His attitude towards the secular power was precisely similar. He was a great churchman, a great statesman, a great missionary; but his religious and political opinions cannot be tied down to the limits of some strict theory. His was a wide, genial nature, in things spiritual and in things temporal genuine, sincere; a true Saint, a true Apostle. Through the lives and sacrifices of such men it was that the Church came to exercise so profound an influence over the politics of the Middle Age.
[Sidenote: The Emperors and missions.]
The work which S. Boniface began was continued by weapons other than his own. When the Empire of the Romans was revived (as we shall tell in the next chapter) by the chiefs of the Arnulf house, when a Catholic Caesar was again acclaimed in the Roman churches, the ideas on which the new monarchy was to rest were decisively Christian and Catholic. Charles the son of Pippin was a student of theology, among many other things. He believed firmly that it was a real kingdom of God which he was called to form and govern upon earth. The spirit which inspired the followers of {140} Muhammad inspired him too. He was determined not to leave to priests and popes the propagation of the faith which he believed.
[Sidenote: Charles and the Saxons.]
For thirty-two years Charles the Great, as his people came to call him, was engaged in a war which claimed to be waged for the spread of the Christian faith. Charles was before all things in belief (though not always in life) a Christian, and it was intolerable to him that within the German lands should remain a large and powerful body of heathens. In 772 he marched into the land of the Angarii and destroyed the Irminsul, a column which was representative of the power which the Saxons worshipped. It was destroyed, and the army after its victories returned in triumph. In 774 the Saxons turned the tables and burnt the abbey of Fritzlar which had been founded by S. Boniface. In 775 Charles resolved to avenge this loss, but made little progress. In 776 he was more successful, and a great multitude of Saxons submitted and were baptized. In 777 there was another great baptism, but, says the chronicler, the Saxons were perfidious. In 778 when Charles was in Spain the Saxons devastated a vast tract of land, and even for a time stole the body of S. Boniface from its tomb at Fulda. Charles crushed the resistance, and from 780 he set himself to organise the Church in the Saxon lands, issuing severe edicts which practically enforced Christianity on the conquered Saxons with the penalty of death for the performance of pagan rites, and even for eating meat in Lent. A law was also decreed that all men should give a tenth of their substance and work to the churches and priests. Still the conquest was not {141} durable, for a terrible insurrection in 782 slew a whole army of the Germans and massacred priests and monks wherever they could be found. Then came years of carnage: once Charles—it is said—caused 4,500 Saxons to be beheaded in one day. In 793 there was a new outbreak. The Saxons "as a dog returneth to his vomit so returned they to the paganism they had renounced, again deserting Christian faith and lying not less to God than to their lord the king." Churches were destroyed, bishops and priests slain, and the land was again defiled with blood. They allied with the Avars, and Charles was thus beset with heathen foes in Hungary and in North Germany at once. He tried every measure of devastation and exile; but it seems that by 797 he had come more clearly to see the Christian way. "Let but the same pains be taken," he wrote—or the English scholar Alcuin wrote for him—"to preach the easy yoke and light burden of Christ to the obstinate people of the Saxons as are taken to collect the tithes from them or to punish the least transgression of the laws imposed on them, and perhaps they would be found no longer to repel baptism with abhorrence." But he was far from always acting up to this view, and he even allied with heathen Slavs to accomplish the subjugation of his enemies. As he conquered he mapped out the land in bishoprics and planted monasteries at important points: he took Saxon boys to his court and sent them back trained, often as ecclesiastics, to teach and rule. Among such was Ebbo, afterwards Archbishop of Rheims, the "Apostle of Denmark." From abroad too came other missionaries, and notable among them was another Englishman, Willehad of {142} Northumbria, who became in 788 the first bishop of Bremen. At last Christianity was, at least nominally, in possession from the Rhine to the Elbe, and in the words of Einhard "thus they were brought to accept the terms of the king, and thus they gave up their demon worship, renounced their national religious customs, embraced the Christian faith, received the divine sacraments, and were united with the Franks, forming one people."
Under Charles the organisation of the German Church, begun by Boniface, received a great extension. It was possible, after his death, to regard Germany as Christian and as organised in its religion on the lines of all the Western Churches.
[1] Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, v. 203.
[2] See p. 1-14.
[3] This seems to me the most probable date. Cf. Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, i. 448.
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[Sidenote: Growth of papal power.]
The growth of the temporal power of the bishops of Rome was due to two causes, the withdrawal of the imperial authority from Italy and the conversion of the barbarians. As the emperors at Constantinople became more and more busied with affairs Eastern, with the encroachments of barbarians, heathen and Muhammadan, and the imperial rule in Italy was destroyed by the Lombards, the popes stood out as the one permanent institution in Northern and Central Italy. As gradually the barbarians came to accept the faith they received it at the hands of the great ecclesiastical organisation which kept together the traditions, so strangely transformed, of the Old Rome. The legislation of Justinian also had given great political power to the popes: and this power was greatly increased when the papacy found itself the leader in the resistance of the great majority of Christian peoples against the policy of the Iconoclastic emperors. The history of Rome began to run on very different lines from that of Venice, Naples, or other great cities. It became for a while a conflict between the local military nobility and the clergy under the rule of the pope. The {144} struggle was a political one, just as the assumption of power by the popes, of power over the country and a considerable district around it, was a political act.
The popes had but very slight relations with the kings of the Merwing house. It was different when the Karlings came into power. Zacharias, both directly and through S. Boniface, came into close connection with Pippin and Carloman. At first he was concerned simply with reform in the Frankish Church, but before long he found himself able to intervene in a critical event and to take part in the inauguration of the Karling House, the revival as it claimed to be of the Empire in the West.
[Sidenote: The Karling reformation.]
The growth of the papal power was closely associated with two other historic events: the growth of the Karling house among the Franks, and the process of revival in the Church's spiritual activity, showing itself in missions without and reforms within. The last leads back to the first.
Whatever may be thought of the Karling reformation, it cannot be denied that for the century before Charles assumed the Imperial crown the Church showed many signs of corruption. The darkness of the picture is relieved only by the lives of some remarkable saints.
[Sidenote: The Karling House.]
The first, of course, is S. Arnulf, Bishop of Metz, the great-grandfather of Charles Martel. Born about 582, he died in 641, and the holy simplicity of his life as statesman and priest comes like a ray of sunshine in the gloom of the days of "half heathen and wholly vicious" kings. Mr. Hodgkin, with an eye no doubt to modern affairs, comments thus on the career of the prelate so different from the greedy, turbulent, and licentious men whom {145} Gregory of Tours describes: "In reading his life one cannot but feel that in some way the Frankish nation, or at least the Austrasian part of it, has groped its way upwards since the sixth century." [Sidenote: S. Arnulf.] Arnulf was a type of the good bishops of the Middle Ages, strong, able to hold his own with kings, a friend of the poor, eager to pass from the world to a quiet eventide in some monastic shade. The tale that is told of him is typical of the sympathies and passions of his age. Bishop of Metz, and chief counsellor of Dagobert whose father Chlothochar he had helped to raise to the throne, when he expressed his wish to retire from the world the king cried out that if he did he would slay his two sons. "My sons' lives are in the hands of God," said Arnulf. "Yours will not last long if you slay the innocent"; and when Dagobert drew his sword on him he said, "Would you return good for evil? Here am I ready to die in obedience to Him Who gave me life and Who died for me." Queen and nobles cried out, and the king fell penitent at the bishop's feet. Like S. Arnulf's is the romantic figure of his descendant Carloman, who turned from the rule of kingdoms and the command of armies to the seclusion of Soracte and Monte Cassino. The "great renunciation" is a striking tale. The disappearance, the long days of patient submission to rule, the discovery of the real position of the humble brother, and then the last dramatic appearance to follow an unpopular cause, make a story as striking as any which have come to us from the Middle Age. But before Carloman come many other noble figures. The fifty years that followed Arnulf's death are but a dreary tale of anarchy and blood. It is broken here and there {146} by records of Christian endurance or martyrdom: bishops who tried to serve the State often served not wisely but too well and met the fate of unsuccessful political leaders. Leodegar, Bishop of Autun, who helped Ebroin to raise Theoderic III to the throne of Neustria, was blinded, imprisoned and at length put to death and appears in the Church's calendar as S. Leger.
The crisis came when the long march of the successful Muhammadans was stayed by the arms of S. Arnulf's descendant Charles Martel, mayor of the palace to the King of Austrasia 717, to all the kingdoms from 719, who lived till 741. In 711 the Wisigothic monarchy of Spain had fallen before the infidels: in 720 the Moors entered Gaul. From then to 731 there was for Abder Rahman an almost unbroken triumph. The power of the Prophet reached from Damascus to beyond the Pyrenees. Then Charles Martel came to the relief of Southern Gaul, and on an October Sunday in 732 the hosts of Islam were utterly routed at Poictiers by the soldiers of the Cross. [Sidenote: The defeat of the Saracens.] It was a great deliverance; and there is no wonder that imagination has exaggerated its importance and thought that but for the Moorish defeat there might to-day be a muezzin in every Highland steeple and an Imám set over every Oxford college. Charles had still to reconquer Septimania and Provence. Arles and Nîmes, the great Roman cities, had to be recovered from the Arabs who had seized them, and Avignon, Agde, Beziers, cities whose future was as wonderful as was the others' past, were also won back by the arms of the Christian chief.
Charles died in 741. He had refused to help Pope {147} Gregory III. in 739 against the Lombards. It was reserved for his son Pippin to make that alliance between the papacy and the Karling house which dictated the future of Europe. [Sidenote: Pippin.] To Pippin came the lordship of the West Franks, to Carloman his brother that of the East Franks, when their father died. They conquered, they reformed the Church among the Franks, with the aid of Boniface, and then came that dramatic retirement of Carloman in 747 which showed him to be true heir of S. Arnulf. Four years later the house of the Karlings became the nominal as well as the real rulers of the Franks. In 751 the bishop of Würzburg for the East Franks, and the abbat of S. Denis for those of the West, went to Rome to ask the pope's advice. Were the wretched Merwings "who were of royal race and were called kings but had no power in the realm save that grants and charters were drawn up in their names" to be still called kings, for "what willed the major domus of the Franks, that they did?" Zacharias answered as a wise man would, that he who had the power should bear the name. And so, blessed by the great missionary S. Boniface, Pippin was "heaved" on the shield, and became king of the Franks, and Childerich, the last of the Merwings, went to a distant monastery to end his days.
[Sidenote: The end of the Imperial power in Italy.]
But this was only a beginning. The pope was threatened by the barbarians, neglected by the emperors who reigned at Constantinople, and at last was in actual conflict with those who tried to impose Iconoclasm upon the Church. In 751 the exarchate, the representation of the Imperial power in Italy, with its seat at Ravenna, was overwhelmed by the {148} arms of Aistulf, the Lombard king. The time had come, thought Pope Stephen II. (752-7), when the distant barbarians, now orthodox, should be called to save the patrimony of S. Peter from the barbarians near at hand. In S. Peter's name letters summoned Pippin to the rescue of the church especially dear to the Franks.[1] But before this Stephen had made Pippin his friend. In 753 he left Rome and failing to win from Aistulf any concession to the Imperial power made his way across the Alps, and on the Feast of the Epiphany, 754, met in their own land Pippin and his son who was to be Charles the Great. The pope fell at the king's feet and besought him by the mercies of God to save the Romans from the hands of the Lombards. Then Pippin and all his lords held up their hands in sign of welcome and support. Then Stephen on July 28, 754, in the great monastery which was to become the crowning-place of Frankish kings, anointed Pippin and his sons Charles and Carloman as king of the Franks and kings in succession.
[Sidenote: The crowning of Pippin.]
A point of special interest in this event is the title given to Pippin at his crowning at Saint Denis. The title of Patrician of the Romans was given by the pope, as commissioned by the emperor, "to act against the king of the Lombards for the recovery of the lost lands of the Empire." Pippin was made the officer of the distant emperor, and the pope would say as little as possible about the rights of him who ruled in Constantinople, and as much as he could about the Church which ruled in Rome. It was a step in the assertion of {149} political rights for the Roman Church. A new order of things was springing up in Italy. The popes were asserting a political power as belonging to S. Peter. They were asserting that the exarchate had ceased in political theory as well as in practical fact. In this new order Pippin was to be involved as supporter of the protectorate which the papacy assumed to itself.
Then the Franks came forward to save Rome from the Lombards. The last act of the romantic life of Carloman was to plead for justice to Aistulf,—that what he had won should not be taken from him,—and to be refused. Twice Pippin came south and saved the pope: and then the cities he had won he refused to give up to the envoys of the distant emperor and declared that "never should those cities be alienated from the power of S. Peter and the rights of the Roman Church and the pontiff of the Apostolic See." From this dates the Roman pope's independence of the Roman emperor, the definite political severance of Italy from the East, and therefore a great stop towards the schism of the Church. Iconoclasm and the independence of the popes alike worked against the unity of Christendom.
[Sidenote: The papal power.]
Pope Stephen, thanks to Pippin, had become the arbitrator of Italy. The keys of Ravenna and of the twenty-two cities which "stretched along the Adriatic coast from the mouths of the Po to within a few miles of Ancona and inland as far as the Apennines" were laid on the tomb of S. Peter. The "States of the Church" began their long history, the history of "the temporal power."
And this new power was seen outside Italy as well {150} as within. From the eighth century, at least, the popes are found continually intervening in the affairs of the churches among the Franks and the Germans, granting privileges, giving indulgence, writing with explicit claim to the authority which Christ gave to S. Peter. Into the recesses of Gaul, among Normans at Rouen, among Lotharingians at Metz, to Amiens, or Venice, or Limoges, the papal letters penetrated; and their tone is that of confidence that advice will be respected or commands obeyed. And this is, in small matters especially, rather than in great. The popes at least claimed to interfere everywhere in Christian Europe and in everything.[2] Within Italy events moved quickly.
The first step towards a new development was the destruction of the Lombard kingdom by Charles, who succeeded his father Pippin in 768. At first joint ruler with his brother he became on the latter's death in 771 sole king of all the Franks. In 772 Hadrian I., a Roman, ambitious and distinguished, succeeded the weak Stephen III. on the papal throne. He reigned till 795 and one of his first acts was to summon Charles and the Franks to his rescue against the Lombards. [Sidenote: Charles the Great and Rome.] In the midst of his conquests—which it is not here our part to tell—Charles spent the Holy Week and Easter of 774 at Rome. Thus the one contemporary authority tells the tale of the great alliance which was made on the Wednesday in Easter week: "On the fourth day of the week the aforesaid pontiff with all his nobles both clerkly and knightly went forth to S. Peter's Church and there {151} meeting the king in colloquy earnestly prayed him and with paternal affection admonished him to fulfil entirely that promise which his father of holy memory the dead king Pippin had made, and which he himself with his brother Carloman and all the nobles of the Franks had confirmed to S. Peter and his vicar Pope Stephen II. of holy memory when he visited Francia, that they would grant divers cities and territories in that province of Italy to S. Peter and his vicars for ever. And when Charles had caused the promise which was made in Francia at a place called Carisiacum (Quierzy) to be read over to him all its contents were approved by him and his nobles. And of his will and with a good and gracious mind that most excellent and most Christian king Charles caused another promise of gift like the first to be drawn up by Etherius his most religious and prudent chaplain and notary, and in this he gave the same cities and lands to S. Peter and promised that they should be handed over to the pope with their boundaries set forth as is contained in the aforesaid donation, namely: From Luna with the island of Corsica, thence to Surianum, thence to Mount Bardo, that is to Vercetum, thence to Parma, thence to Pihegium, and from thence to Mantua and Mons Silicis, together with the whole exarchate of Ravenna, as it was of old, and the provinces of the Venetia and Istria; together with the whole duchy of Spoletium and that of Beneventum." [3] The donation was confirmed, says the chronicler, with the most solemn oaths.
Now if this records the facts, and if two-thirds of Italy were given by Charles (who possessed very little {152} of it) to the popes, it is almost incredible that his later conduct should have shown that he did not pay any regard to it. But the question is of political rather than ecclesiastical interest, and it may suffice to say that there are very strong reasons for believing the passage to be a later interpolation.[4]
[Sidenote: The revival of the Empire, 800.]
Within four mouths Charles had subdued the Lombards and become "rex Francorum et Langobardorum atque patricius Romanorum." For nearly a quarter of a century Charles was employed in other parts of his empire: he dealt friendly but firmly with the pope; but he kept away from Rome. But in 799 the new pope Leo III., attacked by the Romans probably for some harshness in his rule, fled from the city and in July came to Charles at Paderborn to entreat his help. It is probable that the great English scholar, Alcuin, who has been called the Erasmus of the eighth century, had already suggested to the great king that the weakness of the Eastern emperors was a real defeasance of power and that the crown imperial might be his own. However that may be Charles came to Rome and made a triumphal entry on November 24, 800. The charges against the pope were heard and he swore to his innocence. On the feast of the Nativity, in the basilica of S. Peter, when Charles had worshipped at the confessio, the tomb of S. Peter, Leo clothed him with a purple robe and set a crown of gold upon his head. "Then all the faithful Romans beholding so great a champion given them and the love which {153} he bore towards the holy Roman Church and its vicar, in obedience to the will of God and S. Peter the key-bearer of the kingdom of heaven, cried with one accord in sound like thunder 'To Charles the most pious Augustus, crowned of God, the Emperor great and peaceable, life and victory!'"
Thus the Roman pope and the Roman people claimed to make anew in Rome the Roman Empire with a German for Caesar and Augustus. It was not, if we believe Charles's own close friend Einhard, a distinction sought by the new emperor himself. "At first he so disliked the title of Imperator and Augustus that he declared that if he had known before the intention of the pope he would never have entered the church on that day, though it was one of the most holy festivals of the year." [5] It may well be that Charles, who had corresponded with the Caesars of the East, hesitated to take a step of such bold defiance. Men still preserved the memories of how the soldiers of Justinian had won back Italy from the Goths. Nor was Charles pleased to receive such a gift at the hands of the pope. He did not recognise the right of a Roman pontiff to give away the imperial crown. What could be given could be taken away. It was a precedent of evil omen.
But none the less the coronation of Charles the Great, as men came to call him, was the greatest event in the Middle Age. It allowed the vitality of the idea of empire which the West inherited from the Romans, and it showed that idea linked to the new power of the popes. It founded the Holy Roman Empire. Twelve years later the Empire of the West won some sort of recognition from the Empire of the East. In 812 an ambassage from Constantinople came {154} to Charles at Aachen, and Charles was hailed by them as Imperator and Basileus. The Empire of the West was an accomplished and recognised fact.
[Sidenote: Results of the revived Empire.]
Its significance was at least as much religious as poetical. Charles delighted in the works of S. Augustine and most of all in the De Civitate Dei; and that great book is the ideal of a Christian State, which shall be Church and State together, and which replaces the Empire of pagan Rome. The abiding idea of unity had been preserved by the Church: it was now to be strengthened by the support of a head of the State. The one Christian commonwealth was to be linked together in the bond of divine love under one emperor and one pope. That Constantine the first Christian emperor had given to the popes the sovereignty of the West was a fiction which it seems was already known at Rome: Hadrian seems to have referred to the strange fable when he wrote to Charles the Great in 777. It was a legend very likely of Eastern fabrication, and it was probably not as yet believed to have any claim to be authentic; but when the papacy had grown great at the expense of the Empire it was to be a powerful weapon in the armoury of the popes. Now it served only, with the revival of learning at the court of Charles the Great, to illustrate two sides of the great movement for the union of Europe under two monarchs, the spiritual and the temporal. The coronation of Charles was indeed a fact the importance of which, as well as the conflicts which would inevitably flow from it, lay in the future. But it showed the Roman Church great, and it showed the absorption of the great Teutonic race in the fascinating ideal of unity at once Christian and imperial.
[1] Cod. Car. in Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script., iii. (2) 90.
[2] Cf. Dr. J. von Pflugk-Hartung, Acta Pontificum Romanorum inedita, 1880, 1884.
[3] Liber Pontificalis, i. 498.
[4] The question may be read in Mgr. Duchesne's Introduction to the Liber Pontificalis, ccxxxvii.-ccxlii.; and Dr. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, vii. 387-97.
[5] Liber Pontificalis, ii. 6.
{155}
We have spoken already of two important periods in the history of the
Eastern Church. We must now briefly sketch another.
[Sidenote: Sketch of the period, 725-847.]
The third period (725-847) is that of Iconoclasm. Of this, the originator was the emperor Leo III., one of those soldiers who endeavour to apply to the sanctuary the methods of the parade-ground. He issued a decree against the reverence paid to icons (religious images and pictures), and, in 729, replaced the patriarch S. Germanus by the more supple Anastasius; a docile assembly of bishops at Hieria, under Constantine V. (Copronymus), passed a decree against every image of the Lord, the Virgin, and the saints. A fierce persecution followed, which was hardly ended before the accession to power of Irene, widow of Leo IV., under whom assembled the Seventh General Council at Nicae in 787, a Council to which the West and the distant East sent representatives. This Council decreed that icons should be used and receive veneration (proskuêsis) as did the Cross and the book of the Gospels. A persecution followed, as bitter as that of the iconoclastic emperors, and the troubled years of the first half of the ninth century, stained in Byzantium by every crime, found almost their only brightness in the patriarchate (843-7) of S. Methodius, a wise ruler, an {156} orthodox theologian, a charitable man. In Antioch and Jerusalem, about the same period, orthodox patriarchs were re-established by the toleration of the Ommeyads and the earlier Abbasaides; but on the European frontiers of the Empire conversion was at a standstill during the whole period of iconoclastic fury and reaction, while in the north-east of Syria and in Armenia the heresy of the Paulicians (Adoptianism) spread and flourished, and the Monophysites still throve on the Asiatic borders. In theology the Church of Constantinople was still strong, as is shown by the great work of S. Theodore of the Studium, famous as a hymn-writer, a liturgiologist, and a defender of the faith.
Such are the facts, briefly summarised, of the history of rather more than a century in the East. But we must examine more attentively the meaning of the great strife which divided the Eastern Church.
[Sidenote: The orthodox doctrine of images.]
The orthodox doctrine, as it is now defined, is this—that "the icons are likenesses engraved or painted in oil on wood or stone or any sort of metal, of our Saviour Christ, of the Mother of God, and of the holy men who from Adam have been well-pleasing to God. From earliest times the icons have been used not only to give internal dignity and beauty to every Christian church and house, but, which is much more essential, for the instruction and moral education of Christians. For when any Christian looks at the icons, he at once recalls the life and deeds of those who are represented upon them, and desires to conform himself to their example. On this account also the Church decreed in early times that due reverence should always be paid {157} by Christians to the holy icons, which honour of course is not rendered to the picture before our eyes, but to the original of the picture." This statement represents the views of the orthodox Eastern theologians of the eighth as clearly as it does the teaching of the nineteenth century. It represents also the opinions of the popes contemporary with the Iconoclastic movement, who withstood the emperors to the face. Leo was threatened by Gregory II., and the patriarch who had yielded to the storm, Anastasius, was excommunicated. The pope advocated, in clear dogmatic language, the use of images for instruction of the ignorant and encouragement of the faithful. In Greece there was something like a revolution, but it was sternly repressed. [Sidenote: The acceptance in the West.] In 731 a council, at which the archbishops of Ravenna and Grado were present, and ninety-three other Italian prelates, with a large representation of the laity, under Pope Gregory III., ordered that if anyone should stand forth as "a destroyer, profaner, and blasphemer against the veneration of the holy images, that is of Christ and His sinless Mother, of the blessed Apostles and the Saints, he should be excluded from the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and from all the unity and fabric of the Church." The answer to this, it would seem, was the separation of the Illyrian territories and sees from the Roman patriarchate, as well as the sees in Sicily and Calabria: the pope's authority was restricted to the territory of the exarchate, including Rome, Venice and Ravenna. In Constantinople the resistance of the people to the Iconoclastic decrees was met by a bitter persecution, which Constantine V. began in 761. Under {158} his father Leo III. the virgin Theodosia was martyred, who is revered among the most popular of the Saints in Constantinople to-day. [Sidenote: The Iconoclastic persecution.] The position of the people who clung to their old ways of worship in the eighth century was indeed not unlike that of those who to-day struggle on, always in dread of active persecution, under the Muhammadan rule. Muhammadanism, with its stern suppression of all representation of things divine or human, was believed to have been one of the suggesting forces which brought about the Iconoclastic movement. Leo III. had been brought into intimate association with the Saracens; and it was said in his own day that he had learned his fury against images from one of them. The tale was a fable, but it showed how entirely Leo's action was contrary to the religious feeling of his time.
[Sidenote: Iconoclastic theology.]
It is difficult perhaps for a Western, or at least an Anglican, to-day to form a just estimate of the strong feeling of the majority of the Eastern Christians in favour of "image-worship." It is easy to see how the stern simplicity of the Muhammadan worship, which in all the strength of the creed that carried its disciples in triumphant march over continents and over ancient civilisations was present to the eyes of the soldiers of Heraclius and Leo, appealed to all those who knew the power and the need of stern self-restraint. That Islam should seem to be more spiritual than Christianity seemed irony indeed, but an irony which seemed to have facts to prove it. An age of superstition, an age of credulous limits after the miraculous, an age when materialism made rapid progress among {159} the courtiers of the great city, was an age, it might well seem, which needed a protest against "iconoduly," as the iconoclasts termed the custom of the Eastern Church. And if the controversy could have been kept away from the field of pure theology it might well have been that an Iconoclastic victory would not have been other than a benefit to religion. Leo was content to replace the crucifix by a cross. But it is impossible to sunder the symbol from the doctrine, and the Greeks would never rest satisfied with a definition, still less with a practical change, without probing to its inner meaning. This feeling was expressed in form philosophical and theological by one of the last of the great Greek Fathers, S. John Damascene, and by the united voice of the Church in the decision of the Seventh General Council.
[Sidenote: S. John Damascene.]
S. John of Damascus, who died about 760, was clear in his acceptance of all the Councils of the Church, clear in his rejection of Monophysitism and Monothelitism. He described in clear precision the two natures in one hypostasis, the two wills, human and Divine, with a wisdom and knowledge related to each; but he was equally clear that the composite personality involves a communicatio idiomatum (antidosis idiômatôn). The human nature taken up into the Divine received the glory of the Divinity: the Divine "imparts to the human nature of its own glories, remaining itself impassible and without share in the passions of humanity." S. John Damascene taught then that our Lord's humanity was so enriched by the Divine Word as to know the future, though this knowledge was only manifested progressively as He increased in age, and {160} that only for our sakes did He progressively manifest His knowledge. While he declared that each Nature in the Divine Person had its will, he explained that the One Person directed both, and that His Divine will was the determinant will. It might well seem that in his desire to avoid Nestorianism he did not attach so full a meaning to our Lord's advance in human knowledge as did some of the earlier Fathers. But the practical bearing of S. John's writings was in direct relation to the great controversy of his age, to which he devoted three addresses in particular. He defined the "worship" of the icons as all based upon the worship of Christ, and attacked iconoclasm as involving ultimately an assault upon the doctrine of the Incarnation. On this ground S. Theodore of the Studium and Nicephorus the patriarch of Constantinople, who was driven from his see by the emperor, are at one with S. John Damascene.
[Sidenote: S. Theodore of the Studium.]
Theodore of the Studium occupies a place in Greek thought which is, perhaps, comparable to that of S. Anselm in the Latin Church. If there never was anything in the East exactly corresponding to the era of the schoolmen in the West, if the theology of Byzantium throughout might seem to be a scholasticism, but a scholasticism apart, still it would not be untrue to describe S. Theodore as the last of the Greek Fathers. He came at a time in Byzantine history when a great crisis was before the Church and State, so closely conjoined in the Eastern Empire. Born in the last half of the eighth century, and dying on November 11th, 826, Theodore lived through the most vital period of the Iconoclastic struggle, and he left, in his {161} theological and familiar writings, the most important memorial of the orthodox position which he did so much to render victorious.
Theodore of the Studium is a striking example of the influence of environment, tradition, and esprit de corps. His life is inextricably bound up with the history, and his opinions were indubitably formed to a very large extent by the influence, of the great monastery of S. John Baptist of the Studium, founded towards the close of the fourth century by Fl. Studius, a Roman patrician, the remains of which still charm the traveller who penetrates through the obscurest part of Constantinople to the quarter of Psamatia. The house was dedicated to S. John Baptist, and according to the Russian traveller, Antony of Novgorod, it contained special relics of the Precursor. A later description shows the extreme beauty, seclusion, severity of the place, surrounded by cypress trees and looking forth on the great city which was mistress of the world. Even to-day the splendid columns which still remain and the impressive beauty of the crypt make the church, though in an almost ruinous condition, a striking object in Constantinople. The monastery first became famous as the home of the Akoimetai, or Sleepless Monks, (as they were called from their hours of prayer,) when they withstood the heresies of the later fifth century,[1] and fell themselves into error, but from the date of the Fifth General Council to the outbreak of the Iconoclastic controversy they remained in comparative obscurity.
The era of Iconoclasm, which did so much to devastate the East, and which, by the emigration of some {162} 50,000 Christians, cleric and lay, to Calabria, exercised so important an influence on the history of Southern Italy, might have cast a fatal blight on the Church in Constantinople had it not been for the stand made by the Monks of the Studium. [Sidenote: The Monks of the Studium and the Iconoclastic Controversy.] The age of the Iconoclasts was the golden age of the Studite monks. Persecuted, expelled from their house by Constantine Copronymus, they were restored at his death in 775, but had dwindled, it seems, to the number of twelve. A new era of power began for them under their Archimandrite Sabbas, and this was increased by his successor, Theodore, whose life covered the period of the greatest theological importance in the history of Iconoclasm. When the patriarchal see was held for seven-and-twenty years by Iconoclasts, Theodore upheld the spirits of his brethren, and even in exile contrived to be their indefatigable leader and support. His was never a submissive, but always an active resistance to the imperial attempt to dragoon the Church, and a typical audacity was the solemn procession with all the monastery's icons, the monks singing the hymn "Tên achranton eikona sou proskunoumen, agathe" which caused his expulsion. His exile produced a series of impressive letters in which, with every vigour and cogency of argument of which a logical Greek was capable, he exhorted, encouraged, and consoled those who, like himself, remained steadfast to their faith. The Studium gave, too, its actual martyrs, James and Thaddeus, to the traditional belief; and Theodore in exile, who would gladly have borne them company in their death, commemorated their heroism and {163} implored their intercessions. Theodore's whole life was one of resistance, active or passive, to the attempt of the emperors to dictate the Church's Creed; and though he did not live to see the conclusion of the conflict, its final result was largely due to his persistent and strenuous efforts. For a while after his death there is silence over the history of the Studites, till, in 844, we find them bringing back his body in solemn triumph from the island of Prinkipo. Till the middle of the ninth century they remained a potent force; from that time up to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, if they retained their fame, their activity was diminished.
[Sidenote: The rule of the Studium.]
Professor Marin[2] has collected interesting details from many sources as to the rule of the house, its dress, liturgical customs, learning, discipline. The liturgy was said at six on days when the fast lasted till nine, at three on other days; and the monks were expected to communicate daily. While the house was essentially a learned society, a community of sacred scholars, Theodore stands out from its whole annals as a great preacher, and no less for the charm of his personal character. It was he, fitly, who gave to the house that special Rule, which stood in the same relation to the general customary observance by Eastern monks of that somewhat vague series of laws known as "the Rule of Basil," that the reform of Odo of Cluny stood to the work of S. Benedict himself. It was an eminently sensible codification of floating custom in regard to monastic life. All that Theodore did—and this applies with special force to the sermons which he {164} preached—seems to have been eminently practical, charitable, and sane. There is an underlying force of the same kind in the argument of his three Antirrhetici, in which he triumphantly vindicates the worship of Christ in His Godhead and His manhood as being inseparable and essential to the true knowledge of the faith as it is in Jesus. There can be no rivalry between icon and prototype: "The worship of the image is worship of Christ, because the image is what it is in virtue of likeness to Christ."
This was the point on which the orthodox met the theologians who defended iconoclasm: the iconoclasts in seeking to destroy all images were seen to strike at a vital truth of the Incarnation, the true humanity of Jesus. The theologians demanded the preservation and worship,—reverence rather than worship in the modern English use of the words,—of the icons as a security for the remembrance of the Manhood of the Lord. The worship was not latreia, which can be paid to God alone, but proskunêsis schetikê. Christ, said S. Theodore, was in danger of losing the quality of being man if not seen and worshipped in an image.
The long dispute ended, as we have said, after the accession of the Empress Irene, who, unworthy though she was to have part in any great religious movement, yet had always been attached to the traditional opinions of the Greek people. The monks of Constantinople had exercised a steady influence during all the years of disturbance: and they were to triumph. [Sidenote: The Seventh General Council, 787.] The Empress Irene replaced the patriarch Paul in 783 by her own secretary Tarasius, and it was determined at once to reverse the decrees that {165} had been passed at Constantinople in 754. In 787 for the second time a council met at Nicaea, across the Sea of Marmora, which became recognised as the Seventh General Council. To it came representatives of East and West, and the decision which was arrived at was practically that of the whole Church.
The persecution of the orthodox was renewed for a time under Leo V. (813-20), and it is said that more perished in his time than in that of Constantine V. Theophilus (829-42) was almost equally hostile. It was not till his widow Theodora assumed the reins of power in 842 as regent for her son that the final triumph of orthodoxy was assured; and this was followed by the five years' patriarchate of S. Methodius, a man of peace and of wisdom.
To some the action of the emperors in attacking image worship has seemed a serious attempt at social reform, an endeavour to raise the standard of popular worship, and through that to affect the people themselves intellectually, morally, and spiritually. But history has spoken conclusively of the violence with which the attempt was made, and theology has decisively pronounced against its dogmatic assertions.
The long controversy is important in the history of the Church because it so clearly expresses the character of the Eastern Church, so decisively demonstrates its intense devotion to the past, and so expressively illustrates the close attachment, the abiding influence, of the people and the monks, as the dominant factor in the development of theology and religious life.
[1] See above, pp. 8, 14.
[2] De Studio Coenobio Constantinopolitano, Paris, 1897.
{166}
Something has been said in earlier chapters of the relation of several great Churchmen towards education, towards the ancient classics, and towards the studies of their own times. Something has been said, too, in the last chapter, of Greek monastic life. The period which begins with the eighth century deserves a longer mention, inadequate though it be; for there was over a great part of Europe in the days of Charles the Great a veritable literary renaissance which broke upon the long period which men have called the dark ages with a ray of light.
[Sidenote: Learning at the court of Charles the Great.]
Charles the Great had all the interests of a scholar. He knew Latin well and Greek passably. He delighted to listen to the deeds of the past, or to theological treatises, when he dined, after the fashion of monks. His interest in learning centred in his interest in the teaching and services of the Church. Most reverently, we are told by his biographer, and with the utmost piety did he cultivate the Christian religion with which he had been imbued from his infancy. He was a constant church-goer, a regular worshipper at the mass. Near to his religious interest was his interest in education. A famous letter of his to the abbats of monasteries {167} throughout the Empire, written in 787, is a salient example of the close connection between learning and monasticism in his day. He urged that "letters" should be studied, students selected and taught, that all the clergy should teach children freely, and that every monastery and cathedral church should have a theological school. "Although right doing is better than right speaking," he wrote, "yet must the knowledge of what is right go before the doing of it."
What he tried to do throughout his empire was a reflection of what he did in his own court. He delighted to surround himself at Aachen with learned men. Most notable among them were Paul the Deacon, the historian of the Lombards, and Alcuin the Northumbrian whom he had met in Italy and whom he made prominent among his counsellors.
Charles, says Einhard, spent much time and labour in learning from Alcuin, and that not only in religion, but "in rhetoric and dialectic and especially astronomy"; and he "carefully reformed the manner of reading and singing; for he was thoroughly instructed in both, though he never read publicly himself, nor sang except in a low voice, and with the rest of the congregation."
[Sidenote: Alcuin of Northumbria.]
Alcuin connects the learning of England with the revival on the Continent. He had been trained in the school at York by Archbishop Egbert, who was himself a pupil of Bede. He had studied the ancient classics in Greek as well as Latin and knew at least a little of Hebrew. The library at York is known to have contained books in all those languages, and Aristotle was among them. Vergil, he said, when he was a boy he cared more for [Transcriber's note: a line appears to be missing here] than the vigils of the Church and the chanting of the {168} psalms. About 782 he took charge of the schools which Charles had founded at his court, and he became a very close friend and trusted adviser of the emperor himself. With him (but for a short return to England) he lived till in 796 he had leave to retire to Tours, where he was abbat of the great monastery of S. Martin, and where he died in 804. He was a great teacher; a writer of books of education and books of Church practice, of lives of the saints, of hymns, epigrams, prayers, controversial tracts; a compiler of summaries of patristic teaching; a leader in the reform of monastic houses. Among the many notable points in his career, as illustrating the life of learned churchmen of his age, are two especially to be observed. The first is his "humanism." He was a scholar of an ancient type; and the society in which he lived delighted to believe itself classical as well as Christian. In a contemporary description of the life at Charles's court Alcuin is called "Flaccus" and is described as "the glory of our bards, mighty to shout forth his songs, keeping time with his lyric foot, moreover a powerful sophist, able to prove pious doctrines out of Holy Scripture, and in genial jest to propose or solve puzzles of arithmetic." As a theologian he was most famous for his books against Felix of Urgel and Elipandus of Toledo, on the subject of the Adoptianist heresy (see above, ch. vi), and there is no doubt that his was an important influence in the Council of Frankfort which condemned them. The second is his attitude towards the monastic life. He admired the monastic life, but he had not been trained as a strict Benedictine, indeed he was probably no more than a secular in deacon's orders. He held abbeys as their superior, just as many {169} laymen did; but he never seems to have been inclined to take upon him any strict rule. His example shows how natural was the next step in monastic history which is associated with the abbey of Cluny.
[Sidenote: The schools of Europe.]
In Alcuin England was linked to the wider world of Christendom. This has been summarily expressed by a great English historian thus: "The schools of Northumbria had gathered in the harvest of Irish learning, of the Franco-Gallican schools still subsisting and preserving a remnant of classical character in the sixth century, and of Rome, itself now barbarised. Bede had received instruction from the disciples of Chad and Cuthbert in the Irish studies of the Scriptures, from Wilfrid and Acca in the French and Roman learning, and from Benedict Biscop and Albinus in the combined and organised discipline of Theodore. By his influence with Egbert, the school of York was founded, and in it was centred nearly all the wisdom of the West, and its great pupil was Alcuin. Whilst learning had been growing in Northumbria, it had been declining on the Continent; in the latter days of Alcuin, the decline of English learning began in consequence of the internal dissensions of the kings, and the early ravages of the Northmen. Just at the same time the Continent was gaining peace and organisation under Charles. Alcuin carried the learning which would have perished in England into France and Germany, where it was maintained whilst England relapsed into the state of ignorance from which it was delivered by Alfred. Alcuin was rather a man of learning and action than of genius and contemplation like Bede, but his power of organisation and of teaching was great, and his services {170} to religion and literature in Europe, based indeed on the foundation of Bede, were more widely extended and in themselves inestimable." [1]
[Sidenote: John Scotus.]
Side by side with the career of Alcuin, of which much is known, may be placed that of another scholar who was at least equally influential, but of whose life little is known. John the Scot, whose thought exercised a profound influence on the ages after his death, was one of the Irish scholars whom the famous schools of that island produced as late as the ninth century. He became attached to the court of Charles the Bald, as Alcuin had been to that of Charles the Great. He became like Alcuin a prominent defender of the faith, being invited by Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, to answer the monk Gottschalk's exaggerated doctrine of predestination, which went much farther than S. Augustine, and might be described as Calvinist before Calvin; but his arguments were also considered unsound, and his opinions were condemned in later synods. The argument that, evil being the negation of good, God could not know it, for with Him to know is to cause, was certainly weak if not formally heretical, and his subtleties seemed to the theologians of his time to be merely ineptitudes. He was also, it is at least probable, engaged in the controversy on the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist which began about this time, originating in the treatise of Paschasius Radbertus, de Sacramento Corporis et Sanguinis Christi. In 1050 a treatise bearing John the Scot's name was condemned; but it seems that this was really written by Ratramnus of Corbie. The view of Radbert was that which was {171} afterwards formalised into Transubstantiation. The view attributed to John was a clear denial of any materialising doctrine of the Sacrament. Later writers say that John returned to England, taught in the abbey school at Malmesbury, the famous school originated by Irish monks and illustrated by the fame of S. Aldhelm, and there died. His chief work was the de Divisione Naturae, in which he seems to anticipate much later philosophic argument (notably that of S. Anselm and Descartes as to the existence of God) and to have been the precursor if not the founder of Nominalism.
With John the Scot it is clear that both the old literature and philosophy survived and were fruitful and that new interests, which would carry theology into further developments, were arising. A revival of learning was naturally the growth of the monastic system; but that system was itself far from secure at the time of which we speak.
[Sidenote: The Benedictine rule.]
The Benedictine rule did not win its way over Europe without some checks; nor was it always able to retain its hold in an age of general disorder. Much depended upon the abbat in each particular house. In Gaul, the rule of S. Columban had made him absolute. But such a submission was never accepted in central and southern Gaul. From the end of the sixth century it is clear that monasticism was beginning to slacken its devotion. The history of the monastery of S. Radegund as given by Gregory of Tours shows this; so does the letter of Gregory the Great to Brunichild. Nor did the milder rule of S. Benedict long remain unaltered in practice.
A new revival is connected with the names of Odo and Cluny.
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[Sidenote: The decay of monasticism in the ninth century.]
Saint Odo emerges from an age in which the most striking feature was the reassertion of the imperial power and the imperial idea. The ninth century, as it began, witnessed a remarkable revival, the revival of a decayed and dormant institution—the Roman Empire—in whose ashes there had yet survived the fire which had inspired the rulers of the world in the past. The great idea of imperialism was reborn in the person of a man of extraordinary physical and mental power, a sovereign who, while he had not a little of the weaknesses of his age, had also in a remarkable degree centred in himself its highest philosophic aspirations. The early ninth century is dominated by the figure of Charles the Great. The result was inevitable. Lay power, lay over-lordship or supremacy, extends everywhere, intrudes into the recesses of monastic life, and dictates even in things purely spiritual. And as the new tide of barbarian invasion, Saracen or Norman, sweeps on in Spain or Gaul, the Church, for very physical needs, seeks refuge under the protection of lay barons, princes, and kings. Feudalism is rising. The monastic houses fall often under the arrogant rule of lay abbats. And the popes, not rarely a prey themselves to the vices of the age, sink into impotence and become enmeshed in worldly, often shameful, intrigue and disorder. The canons of Church councils show that it was below as it was above. Secularity was general, vice was far from rare.
The Divine spirit and the past history of Christianity made it certain that a revival of life must come. The dry bones would feel the breath and would live {173} again. [Sidenote: S. Odo.] On the borders of the lands of Maine and Anjou was born in 879, of a line of feudal barons, Odo, the regenerator of monasticism, the ultimate reviver of the papacy, the spiritual progenitor of Hildebrand himself. Promised to God at his birth, he was long held back by his father for knighthood and the life of a warrior such as he himself had led; a grievous sickness gave him, on his recovery, to the monastic life. The disciple alike of S. Martin and S. Benedict, he took inspiration from them to revive the strict monastic rule. From a canon he became a monk, after a noviciate at Baume, the foundation of Columban in the wild and beautiful valley between the Seille and the Dard, in the diocese of Besançon. For a time he tasted the life of the anchorite and the coenobite. Then he passed to the abbey of Cluny, founded in 910 by William of Aquitaine in the mountains above the valley of the Grosne, and ruled till 927 by Berno, who came himself from Baume. On his death Odo became abbat; and to him the great development of the revival of strict monasticism is due.
[Sidenote: Cluny.]
Cluny became the type of the exempted abbeys, and the highest representative of the monastic privileges. It embodied in itself the best expression of the resistance to feudalism; it became the most powerful support of the papacy and of the much-needed movement for the reform of the Church. The first necessity of the new monasticism was an absolute independence of the lay power. Thus the founder attached it from the first to the Roman Church, and gave up all his own rights of property. Its situation, in the heart of Burgundy, {174} removed it from the power of the king. Charles the Simple permitted its foundation, Louis d'Outremer confirmed its privileges. When Urban II., a militant Cluniac, became pope the interests of Cluny and Rome were more than ever identified. The monks elected their abbat without exterior interference. To prevent this becoming an abuse, the first abbats always proposed their coadjutors as their successors. Thus it was with Berno(910-27), Odo (927-48), Maieul (948-94), Odilo (990-1049). After that there arose the custom of appointing the grand prior as successor—as in the case of S. Hugh (1049-1109). From the confirmation of its foundation in 931 by John XI. Cluny received the greatest favours at the hands of the papacy, its abbats being created archabbots with episcopal insignia; and it was made entirely independent of the bishops.
[Sidenote: The rule of Cluny.]
Cluny soon attracted attention, wealth, and followers. Corrupt old communities or new foundations sought the guidance or protection of its abbats. When each monastery was independent and isolated it was impossible to reform a lax community, or for it to defend itself from feudal violence and the hostility of the secular clergy. Odo, the saint who saw these evils, therefore started what soon became the Congregation of Cluny. The daughter-houses were regarded not as independent, but as parts of Cluny. There was only one abbat, the arch-abbat of Cluny, who was the head of all. Necessary local control was exercised by the prior, responsible to and nominated by the abbat. Some houses resisted annexation to Cluny, such as S. Martial at Limoges, which kept up the contest from 1063 to 1240. Contact {175} between the abbey and its dependencies was preserved by visitation of the abbat; and the dependent houses sent representatives to periodical chapters, which met at Cluny under the abbat. In the eleventh century these were merely consultative, but in the thirteenth they had become political, administrative, and judicial, even subjecting the abbat to their control. The rule of S. Benedict was followed in the abbey and its dependencies. The monks did some manual labour, but devoted themselves chiefly to religious exercises, to teaching the young, to hospitality and almsgiving.
But the Cluniacs, protected by the papacy, and enriched by the offerings of the faithful all over Europe, taught an extreme doctrine as to the power of the Holy See. Their ideal was the absolute separation of Church from State, the reorganisation of the Church under a general discipline such as could be exercised only by the pope. He, in their ideal, was to stand towards the whole world as the Cluniac abbat stood towards each Cluniac priory, the one ultimate source of jurisdiction, the Universal Bishop, appointing and degrading the diocesan bishops as the abbat made and unmade the priors.
How much of all this did the great Odo plan? Not very much. But it was his work to revive the discipline, the holiness, the self-sacrifice, which, through the reformed monasteries, should touch the whole Church.
And thus monasticism at the beginning of the eleventh century was a wholly new force in the life of Christendom. It was destined to reform the papacy itself.
[1] Bp. Stubbs in Dict. of Christian Biography, vol. i. p. 74.
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[Sidenote: Baptism.]
In the centuries with which we deal the importance of Baptism cannot be overrated. It was everywhere, in all the missions of the Church, regarded as the critical point of the individual life and the indispensable means of entrance to the Christian Church. When the children of Sebert the king of the East Saxons wished to have all the privileges of Christians, which their father had had, and "a share in the white bread" though they were still heathen, Mellitus the bishop answered, "If you will be washed in that font of salvation in which your father was washed, then you may also partake of the holy bread of which he used to partake: but if you despise the laver of life you cannot possibly receive the bread of life"; and he was driven from the kingdom because he would not yield an inch. The tale however shows also that there were still on the fringe of Christianity persons who were not baptized, not catechumens, yet still interested in the religion and to some extent anxious to be sharers in its life. Throughout the early history of Gaulish Christianity the same is to be observed, and it is doubtless the reason why a number of semi-pagan customs still survived among those who were nominally Christians, {177} as well as those who still stood outside the Church. Baptism in the case of many was a critical point in the history of a tribe or nation. The baptism of Chlodowech was the greatest historical event in the history of the Franks: it was of critical importance that the Franks, with him, accepted orthodox Christianity, that he, robed in the white vesture which West and East alike considered meet, and which was sometimes worn for the octave after baptism, confessed his faith in the Blessed Trinity, was baptized in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and was anointed with the holy chrism and signed with the sign of the cross. Baptism not only admitted into the Christian Church, but was invested with the associations of the human family, and thus had transferred to it some of the conditions in which students of anthropology find such interesting survivals, of primitive ideas. The conception of spiritual relationship was endowed with the results which belonged to natural kinship. The sponsors became spiritual parents. The code of Justinian forbade the marriage of a godchild and godparent, because "nothing can so much call out fatherly affection and the just prohibition of marriage as a bond of this kind, by means of which, through the action of God, their souls are united to one another." This led to the growth of as elaborate a scheme of spiritual relationships as that which already hedged round among many tribes the eligibility for marriage among persons even remotely akin to one another. In the East, as in the West, baptism was most frequently conferred at the time of the great Christian festivals, Christmas (as in the case of Chlodowech), Epiphany, and especially Easter; and Easter Eve became, later {178} on, especially consecrated to the sacred rite. In the East baptism was often postponed till the infant was two years old; and everywhere there was for long a tendency even among Christian parents to hold back children from the laver of regeneration for fear of the consequences of post-baptismal sin. It was thus that a name was often given, and a child received into the Church, some weeks or even months before the baptism took place. The Greek Syntagma of the seventh century contains interesting information as to the baptism of heretics. It is ordered that Sabellians, Montanists, Manichaeans, Valentianists and such like shall be baptized just as pagans are, after instruction and examination in the faith, and, after insufflation, by triple immersion.
[Sidenote: Confirmation.]
Throughout these centuries baptism was not separated from Confirmation, except in the case of some converts from heresy. The two rites were regarded as parts of the same sacrament, or at least the former was not considered complete without the latter. The sacramental life of the individual in fact was to begin with his entrance into the Church and never to be intermitted. Even infants were present throughout the celebration of the sacred mysteries and partook of the Communion, a custom which was only abandoned in the West because of the difficulty of frequent giving of Confirmation and the consequent delay of that rite till later years.
[Sidenote: The Holy Communion.]
Baptism and Confirmation was the gate by which the Christian was admitted to the Sacrament of the Lord's Body and Blood. The celebration of that Sacrament was the chief act of the Church's worship every Sunday and holy day, and in {179} Spain, Africa, Antioch, daily, in Rome every day except Friday and Saturday, in Alexandria except on Thursday and Friday: indeed by the end of the sixth century it seems probable that in most parts of the Church a daily celebration was usual. From the seventh century the mass of the presanctified, when the priest communicated from elements previously consecrated, is found in use on certain days, and in the East throughout except on Saturdays and Sundays. [Sidenote: Frequent Communion.] It seems clear that at least up to the sixth century it was usual for all who were confirmed to communicate whenever they were present, unless they were under penance; but the custom of noncommunicating attendance was growing up. In the East a spiritual writer said, "it is not rare or frequent communion which matters, but to make a good communion with a prepared conscience"; while in the West Bede's letter to Archbishop Egbert of York supplies an excellent illustration of custom. [Sidenote: Bede.] The people are to be told, he advises, "how salutary it is for all classes of Christians to participate daily in the body and blood of our Lord, as you know well is done by Christ's Church throughout Italy, Gaul, Africa, Greece, and all the countries of the East. Now, this kind of religion and heavenly devotion, through the neglect of our teachers, has been so long discontinued among almost all the laity of our province, that those who seem to be most religious among them communicate in the holy mysteries only on the Day of our Lord's birth, the Epiphany, and Easter, whilst there are innumerable boys and girls, of innocent and chaste life, as well as young men and women, old men and old women, who without any scruple {180} or debate are able to communicate in the holy mysteries on every Lord's Day, nay, on all the birthdays of the holy Apostles and martyrs, as you have yourself seen done in the holy Roman and Apostolic Church." It would seem from this that frequent communion was inculcated by the first missionaries to England in the sixth century. Bede tells also how in his day two Anglian priests went on a mission to the heathen Saxons, and, while waiting for the decision of the "satrap," "devoted themselves to prayer and psalm-singing, and daily offered to God the sacrifice of the Saving Victim, having with them sacred vessels and a hallowed table to serve as an altar."
[Sidenote: Fasting Communion.]
The Sacrament was received in both kinds and fasting, and the priest was forbidden to celebrate after taking any food; some exception to this rule may be inferred from a canon of the Second Council of Mâcon in 585 enforcing it, and the ecclesiastical historian Socrates (whose History extends from 306 to 439) states that some in Egypt did not receive "as the custom is among Christians," but after a meal. The presence of the Lord in the Eucharist was recognised and adored. [Sidenote: The doctrine of the Sacrifice.] S. Anastasius of Sinai, probably of the sixth century, writes: "After the bloodless sacrifice has been consecrated, the priest lifts up the bread of life, and shows it to all." The Eucharist is continually spoken of as the holy Sacrifice, the offering of the Saving Victim, the Celestial Oblation; and it was offered, as the writings of Gregory the Great show, in special intercession for the dead as well as the living. From the beginning of the fifth century it seems to have been, at least occasionally, {181} reserved in church as well as sent to the sick in their own houses.
[Sidenote: The Roman mass.]
During the fifth and sixth centuries it would seem that the Roman mass, the rite which has slowly superseded the local forms of service in most parts of Europe, was undergoing the modifications which brought it to the stereotyped form it now has. The severe, terse, practical nature of the liturgy, in words, ritual, ceremonial, which is so characteristic of the Roman nature, was being altered by the admixture of other elements. This was especially the case, it is said, in France and Germany, during the ninth century. Earlier changes had been made by Gregory the Great, partly from Eastern sources. [Sidenote: The fifth century.] At the middle of the fifth century the rite, in words and action alike, was a simple one. The choir sang an introit, the priest a collect, epistle and gospel were read, and a psalm was sung: the gifts were offered, the prayer or "preface" of the day was followed by the Sanctus, as in the East, and then came the Canon or actual Consecration. After this was the Lord's Prayer, communion of priests, clergy and people, a psalm and a collect and the end. The ceremonial was equally simple, and was connected almost exclusively with the entrance of the celebrant and his ministers, at which incense was used, and with the reading of the gospel, where also lights and incense were prominent. All else was simple and of dignified reticence. "Mystery never flourished in the clear Roman atmosphere, and symbolism was no product of the Roman religious mind. Christian symbolism is not of pure Roman birth, not a native product of the {182} Roman spirit." [1] This reticent character is most clearly found in the Gregorian missal, which has been believed to represent the period of Gregory the Great. More probably the assertion of John the Deacon that Gregory revised the Gelasian Sacramentary is an error, and what is called the Gregorian Sacramentary is simply the book which was sent by Pope Hadrian I. to Charles I. between 784 and 791. But that S. Gregory did make certain alterations is certain. They were three in the Liturgy, two in the ceremonial of the mass. The Alleluia was ordered to be more frequently chanted than before; and we find it used outside the Easter season almost immediately after this by S. Augustine in England. He added words to the "Hanc igitur" in the Canon of the mass, praying for peace and inclusion in the number of the elect. He inserted the Lord's Prayer immediately after the Canon. He also forbade the deacons to sing any of the mass except the gospel and the subdeacons to wear chasubles at the altar.
[Sidenote: The eighth century.]
It is thought that the great change, which made the Roman mass into the elaborate rite it became, is due to the influence, at the end of the eighth century, of Charles the Great, who with the determination of a ruler and the interest of a liturgiologist made one rite to be observed throughout his dominions, but enriched the Gregorian book with details and ceremonies derived from uses already common in France. The study of liturgies became common in the ninth century, and in Gaul additions were made to the book sent by Pope Hadrian {183} to Charles the Great, which were finally accepted throughout the greater part of Italy, the Ambrosian rite in the province of Milan remaining different throughout the changes.
It is natural that English readers should desire to know more particularly of the first English Christian worship. How did the Church's worship first begin in our own land?
[Sidenote: The rites of the Western isles.]
No doubt the Christians who received conversion during the Roman occupation of Britain, and those of Ireland who were won by the preaching of S. Patrick, worshipped according to the same rite as the churches of Spain or the churches of Gaul, following that use which survived in Spain generally till the eleventh century and in Gaul till the ninth. Gildas, who wrote during the stress of the conquest of the Christian Brythons by the heathen English, mentions one custom which undoubtedly was Gallican, and which is preserved in the Gelasian Sacramentary and the Missale Francorum, the one a Roman collection which contains Gallican uses, the other a Gallican rite. It is that of anointing the hands of priests, and perhaps deacons, in ordination, and the custom was kept up after the conversion of the English, at least in some parts of England in the tenth and eleventh centuries. But the influence of the British Church was slight. It is of more interest to us to know what was the first worship offered in this land by those who were to convert our own forefathers.
Bede tells us how first Augustine prayed when he came before the heathen king of Kent. Some days after their landing Aethelbert received the monks from {184} Rome. [Sidenote: S. Augustine in Kent.] They had tarried, it seems probable, under the walls of the old Roman fortress of Richborough. They had waited, in prayer and patience, for the beginning of their Mission. It was on prayer that they still depended when they were summoned before the king. On a ridge of rocks overlooking the sea sat Aethelbert and his gesiths, and watched the band of some forty men draw near. Slowly they came, and the strange sound of the Church's music was wafted to the ears of the heathen company as they drew near. Before them was borne a tall silver cross, and a banner which displayed the pictured image of the Saviour Lord,
The Cross preceding Him who floats in air,
The pictured Saviour.
S. Gregory, the great pope who had sent the mission, who had himself long dwelt at the court of the emperors in Constantinople, had learnt the value of icons, of sacred pictures, as texts for an appeal, or as stimulants to devotion. Those who cannot read, he said, should be taught by pictures, but pictures are valuable only because they point to Him whom we adore as incarnate, crucified, sitting at the right hand of God. As they came, they sang, and Bede says: "they sang litanies, entreating the Lord for their own salvation and that of those for whom and to whom they came." The litany ended when they came to the king, and then Augustine preached the word. He declared, says an old English writer of later days, "how the merciful Saviour with His own sufferings redeemed their guilty world, and opened an entrance into the kingdom of heaven to all faithful men."
The king bade them deliver their message, and they {185} sat—for it was no formal sermon, but rather, as we should say, a meditation on the things of God—and "preached the word of life to him and all his gesiths who were present." Bede tells us the answer of the grave thoughtful Aethelbert—"They are certainly beautiful words and promises that you bring; but because they are new and unproved, I cannot give my assent to them and give up those things which I with all the English race have so long observed. But since you are strangers and have come a long way, so that—as I think I can see clearly—you might impart to us that which you believe to be true and most good, I do not wish you any harm, but rather will treat you kindly and see that you have all you need, and we will not hinder you from bringing over to the faith of your own religion all of our people that you can win." And so he gave them lodging in his own city, the metropolis, as Bede, as it were by prophecy, calls it, of Canterbury. [Sidenote: The litanies.] Towards Canterbury they went, still with litany and procession, and thus, Bede tells us, it is said they sang—still carrying the holy cross and the picture of the great King, our Lord Jesus Christ.—
"We beseech Thee, O Lord, according to all Thy mercy, that Thy wrath and Thine anger may be turned away from this city, and from Thy holy house; for we have sinned. Alleluia."
A tradition that lasted down to Bede's own day thus handed down their words. There is great interest in this picture of Christian worship in the heathen land, our own, that was to be won for Christ. It illustrates the worship of the land the missionaries came from, as well as serves as a pattern for the worship which the {186} English, under Augustine's guidance, should follow. What was this litany? Litanies at Rome were regulated by S. Gregory himself, and he was very likely only revising and setting in order a form of service already well known. But this very litany S. Augustine and his companions had most likely heard during their passage through Gaul. There the Rogation litanies had been over a hundred years in use; and these words form part of a Rogation litany used long after in Vienne, through which doubtless Augustine travelled. Thus the missionaries were using a part of the Gallican service-books, and not of the Roman; and the legation procession, which lasted so long in England, which still lingers in some places in the form of "beating the bounds," and which in late years has been here and there revived among us, comes to us with Augustine from Gaul, and not from Rome, where it was not yet in use. "Alleluia!" too, a strange ending to a penitential litany in modern ears, was the close of Gallican litanies at Rogationtide, as later in Christian England itself, and its use outside the Easter season was especially authorised by Gregory the Great. And if Augustine's own first public prayers were Gallican, so most probably was the use of the chapel of the Kentish Queen Bercta, who was daughter of the West Frankish king, and who had with her a Frankish bishop, Liudhard. But his own use would be the Roman, just as his own manner of chanting, long preserved at Canterbury, was after the manner of the Romans. And thus, with the strong sense of unity natural to a man trained in the school of the great Gregory, Augustine was startled at the contrast of customs when it came to him in practical guise. Why, {187} the faith being one, are there the different customs of different churches, and one manner of masses in the holy Roman church, another in that of the Gauls? So he asked the great teacher who had sent him. A wise answer came from the wise pope, disclaiming all peculiar authority or special sanctity for the use of Rome. "Things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of things." "Select, then," he advises, "from many churches, whatever you have found in Gaul, or in Rome, or in any other church, that is good; make a rite for the new church of the English, such as you think pious and best."
[Sidenote: English uses.]
All this, when Augustine's position is remembered, will be seen to show how far Rome then was from arrogating to herself any strange supremacy such as later days have brought. The first primate of the English was allowed freedom to make an English rite. But, on the other hand, we have no evidence that he did so. He preferred, we have every reason to believe, the Roman rite, with only here and there a few changes or additions. The Council of Clovesho, presided over by Cuthbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 747, followed in his steps, taking in regard to rites "the model which we have in writing from the Roman Church." But none the less later English service-books show very considerable Gallican influence. Celtic missionaries, and the connection four centuries later with Gaul and Burgundy, left traces in the way in which the service was performed; and England, up to the Reformation, like all other countries indeed, had some distinct customs of its own. Throughout the long history of conversion which spreads over the whole island, it is noteworthy {188} that preaching and the singing of litanies, as at the first coming of Augustine, are conspicuous in the methods of the saints who won England to Christ.
[Sidenote: The Eucharist in the sixth century.]
What then was the service of the Holy Communion, as S. Augustine celebrated it, and our English forefathers first came to know it? If, as we suppose, it was the Roman, it would proceed thus. First an antiphon, which came to be called an introit, or psalm of entrance, with a verse having special reference to the lesson of the day or season, was sung, as the priest, wearing a long white surplice or alb and a chasuble (the robe worn alike by lay and by clerical officials), entered with two deacons, wearing probably similar garments. In the Gallican rite, as in the eastern, there followed the singing of the "Trisagion": and in both Gallican and Roman the "Kyrie Eleeson," as in our own office to-day, though we now add to it a special prayer for grace to keep the Commandments. Then in the Roman rite was sung the "Gloria in Excelsis," while in the Gallican the "Benedictus" took its place. This was introductory. Now came the collect, the prayer when all the people were gathered together. Then the Lesson from the Old Testament, the Epistle, and the Gospel. Between the Old Testament Lesson and the Epistle was sung the "Gradual," a psalm sung from the steps of the ambo or pulpit, but gradually the use of Rome was followed all over Europe, and the Old Testament reading was omitted altogether. After the Epistle was sung "Alleluia" or the psalm called the Tract. Then the Gospel was sung, introduced with special solemnity. The deacon mounted the pulpit, seven candles being carried before him, and the choir {189} chanting "Glory be to Thee, O Lord." After the deacon had read the Gospel, a sermon was generally preached, but the Creed was at this time not said. A short common prayer followed (in the Gallican rite a litany), and then the mass of the catechumens was over, and those who were unbaptized or unworthy to remain at that time for the consecration departed from the church, a custom which has survived in England under changed conditions.
Then, when the faithful only remained, the offertory was sung, and the bread and wine and water were offered (the ceremonial was different and much longer in the Gallican rite, and included the kiss of peace). S. Augustine, if he followed the Roman use, would offer the bread and wine himself, with the laity assisting: the Gallican use was to prepare the elements beforehand, and now bring them into church in procession. The priest then washed his hands and said privately a collect, while in the Gallican rite he read from the diptychs, or tablets of the church, the names of those departed who were to be especially commemorated.
Then followed the prayer called the Preface, and the singing of "Holy, Holy, Holy." After this, in the Gallican rite, came a special prayer, and then, as still in the Mozarabic, followed the recital of our Lord's institution of the Sacrament, as in the English Prayer-book now; but the Roman rite had also prayers for the Church, for the living and dead, and both united in the prayer (called paraklesis) that the elements might receive consecration from God, which was the consecration itself until much later. Then the dead and living were again prayed for, and the fruits of the earth were dedicated by prayer.
{190}
The Lord's Prayer, by the order of S. Gregory himself, concluded this part of the service, which came to be known as the Canon, the invariable part of the Mass. In the Roman rite the kiss of peace followed, the faithful kissing each other according to the ancient custom. Then the priest broke the bread, and said the Lord's Prayer alone till the last clause. Then he placed a piece of the bread in the cup, and received the Sacrament himself, afterwards giving it in one kind to the clergy and laity, while the deacon followed with the chalice. Before the Communion it was a custom taken from Gaul, which lasted in England up to the Reformation, that the Bishop, if present, should bless the people. A hymn was sung during the communion of the people; the ancient "Draw nigh and take the Body of the Lord" remains still to us from a Celtic source for use at this time. The service ended with a "Let us pray" and collect after Communion, closely followed by the second of the alternative post-communion prayers now in our English office. Immediately after this prayer the deacon said "Ite, missa est" ("Go: it is the dismissal").
In the English services to-day, while much is changed, and the language is our own, we can still trace very much that has been used continuously since the day when S. Augustine first said the whole office of the Church on British soil.
Much more might be said; but this may suffice to illustrate the interest and importance which belong to sacraments and liturgical rites in the ages of which we speak.
[1] Edmund Bishop, "The Genesis of the Roman Rite," in Essays on Ceremonial, 1904.
{191}
[Sidenote: The end of the age.]
As we draw to the close of the long period which, through the conversion of the barbarian races and the growth of a central power in the Church at Rome, so profoundly influenced the future of the world, we are met by some outstanding facts which mark an epoch of crisis and of reformation. They are—the widening breach in matters religious, as earlier in matters political, between East and West; the influences which served to strengthen the theory of the papal monarchy even at the time of its greatest practical weakness; and the strength of the Empire under the Saxon Ottos as a power to unite Western Europe and to reform the Western Church.
[Sidenote: The papacy of Nicolas I., 858-67.]
Nicolas, who was elected in 858, was a great pope. He asserted the moral force of Christianity in a way in which his predecessors very frequently followed him, by vindicating the indissolubility of the marriage tie. Chlothochar, King of Lotharingia, separated from his wife Theudberga, bringing against her foul charges, which a council of clergy at Aachen accepted. Nicolas intervened: again and again he endeavoured to control the Frankish clergy and rescind the divorce; but it was {192} only in 863 by a council at Rome, where the archbishops of Cologne and Trier were present, that he was able to proceed to extremities. He excommunicated those two prelates, and deposed them with all those who had assisted them: he warned Hincmar of Rheims of what he had done. The emperor Louis, Chlothochar's brother, marched on Rome and captured the city; but there, through illness it appears, he completely submitted to the pope. Nicolas enforced his decision on the Frankish king, the Frankish bishops, on Hincmar, the great archbishop of Rheims himself. In a letter he developed the theory that the Empire owed its confirmation to the authority of the Apostolic See, and that the sword was conferred on the emperor by the pope, the vicar of S. Peter. Truly it was said of this pope by one who wrote a century after his death, "Since the days of Gregory to our own sat no prelate on the throne of S. Peter to be compared to Nicolas. He tamed kings and tyrants and ruled the world like a monarch: to holy bishops he was mild and gentle: to the wicked and unconverted a terror; so that truly may we say that in him arose a new Elijah."
Of equal though different importance was the action of the papacy in regard to the East. What is known as the Photian schism is the divergence between the churches of Constantinople and Rome, which became critical during the pontificate of Nicolas I.
[Sidenote: The Photian schism.]
Photius, a man of great learning and experience, a scholar and theologian of the familiar Greek type, was elected Patriarch of Constantinople on Christmas Day, 857. At the time when Michael III. determined on his appointment he was not even ordained: in six days he {193} received the different orders and was made patriarch. But his election was uncanonical. Ignatius the patriarch, who was still living, was deposed because of his censures of the emperor's evil life. Photius announced his election to Pope Nicolas, but Ignatius refused to surrender his rights; both parties excommunicated each other; and the emperor mocked at both. But he also asked the pope to send legates to a council which should restore order to the Church. The Council met in 861. It confirmed Photius in his office, and the papal legates assented. Nicolas refused to accept the decision and took upon him to annul it, to depose Photius, to declare the orders conferred by him invalid, and to announce his decision to the other patriarchs and to the metropolitans and bishops who owed obedience to Constantinople. Neither the emperor nor Photius would submit; and in 867 Photius issued, in a council at Constantinople, an encyclical letter, in which he repudiated the papal claim of jurisdiction (which was complicated by assertions of supremacy over the Bulgarian Church), and denounced a number of tenets held by Westerns, [Sidenote: The Philioque controversy.] and most notably the addition of the word Filioque to the Nicene Creed, as asserting the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. He ended by excommunicating the pope.
In the year 867 Nicolas died, Michael was deposed, Photius followed him into retirement, Basil the Macedonian ascended the throne, and Ignatius was restored to the patriarchate. A council was held in 869 at which papal legates attended, which approved these acts, and which is counted by the Roman Church as {194} the Eighth Oecumenical Council. This Council confirmed the Church's decision as to image-worship. Ignatius held his throne till his death in 877, when Photius was reinstated. His return was signalised by a new agreement with Rome, in which Pope John VIII. repudiated the insertion of the Filioque, and declared that it was inserted by men whose daring was due to madness, and who were transgressors against the Divine Word. Another council at Constantinople (879-80) confirmed the reinstatement, declared Photius to be lawful patriarch, and anathematised the Council of 869. This is reckoned by the Greeks as the Eighth Oecumenical Council. [Sidenote: End of the schism.] Then the schism was for the time healed. It made no difference that a new emperor, Leo VI., the Wise, deposed Photius again and appointed his own brother. The union remained formally throughout the tenth century. But though the eleventh century opened with a nominal agreement, it was not destined to endure. The points of severance must be dealt with in a later volume. It may here suffice to say that the position of the Greeks was rigidly conservative, of the popes aggressively authoritative.
It was an age of growing papal claims; and the claims had now found a new basis.
[Sidenote: The forged decretals.]
The promises, true and legendary, of Pippin, and the spurious donation of Constantine, had still further extension in the False Decretals. These were first used by Nicolas I., who was pope from 858 to 867. During his pontificate the collection of Church laws, with the canons of the Oecumenical Councils, the letters of the most important bishops and the like, with the ecclesiastical laws of the {195} emperors, which were practically becoming a corpus juris canonici, received a notable addition. The genuine decretals of the popes begin with Siricius (384-98); but there now (between 840 and 860) appeared fifty-nine more, professing to date from the second and third centuries, and also thirty-nine became interpolated among the genuine documents, which ranged from 386 to 731. These were put forth by a skilful forger as the collection of Isidore of Seville, and they were incorporated in the authentic collection made by him. A most remarkable series of documents was this, in every point supporting the claims now put forth by the Roman See to political as well as ecclesiastical supremacy, deciding questions of discipline and right such as were then vexed, and supplying a veritable armoury for the advocates of papal claims to rule everywhere, over all persons, and in all causes. The forged decretals, now known as the pseudo-Isidorian, had their origin among the Franks, and showed the aims and the needs of the Frankish reformers. They set forth three great objects—"freedom from the secular power, establishment of the ecclesiastical hierarchy with a firm discipline, and centralisation of organisation upon which all could depend." [1] They represented, in fact, a scheme of reform and the way in which a somewhat unscrupulous reformer imagined it could best be carried out. Probably the forged decretals were concocted at Rheims, or possibly at Mainz, and they were first used in a critical case in 866, when a bishop of Soissons, deposed by Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, appealed to the pope on the ground that the power of deposition by the decretals belonged to him alone. It is difficult {196} to believe that when Nicolas I. accepted them he was not aware that they were not the genuine writings of the popes whose work they professed to be: he can hardly have thought that Spain (where it was said that they had been discovered) was more likely to have kept papal documents safely than the Roman Chancery itself. Their importance was, however, not evident at first. In the ninth and tenth centuries comparatively little was made of them. It was in the eleventh and the centuries which followed that a gigantic edifice of papal assumption was to be built upon them by popes who were fired with a true zeal to reform the world, and who, not doubting their authenticity, found in them an instrument ready to their hands.
[Sidenote: The decay of the papacy.]
The weakness of the papacy in the tenth century was indeed such that no theory could give it respect in Europe. The weakness of the Church was heralded by that of the Empire. The Carling house expired in contempt almost as great as that which had fallen on the Merwings. In Gaul the Norman had won fair provinces on the coast; and the house of the Counts of Paris came in the tenth century to rule over the Franks. There the Church remained strong as the State decayed, and it was the great archbishopric of Rheims which gave the crown to the line of Hugh the Great. In Germany the dynasty of the Carlings became extinct. In Rome the power over the city fell into the hands of the local nobility; and the period was made infamous by the lives of Theodora and Marozia, who were the paramours of popes. The tale of the age of disgrace which marks the greater part of the tenth century is of no importance in the history of the Church. A succession of {197} popes, whom their contemporaries certainly did not believe to be infallible, followed each other in rapid procession. John X. alone (914-28) has any claim to greatness; but he, like the others, was deeply stained with the vices, political if not moral, of his age. It was not until the Saxon Otto came to Italy like a knight-errant to redress the wrongs of the Northern princes, and was crowned at Rome in 962, that the Church in Italy began to revive from its ashes. He deposed and set up popes; and he gave to the papacy something of the bracing ideals which the new life of Gaul and Germany inspired.
The moral weakness of the papacy, the political weakness of Italy, had founded the Empire anew, as it had been founded anew in 800. The revival of the Empire under Charles the Great, and again under Otto, was not due to political considerations only; it was due also to the force of religious ideas.
[Sidenote: The religious revival of the Empire under the Saxons.]
One great characteristic of the revived Empire in German hands was the important part played in its policy by missions, and, it must be added, missionary wars. It was said of Charles the Great by his eulogists that he converted Saxons and Vandals and Frisians by the Word and the sword: and this thought was embodied in a series of wars which have been somewhat fancifully compared to the Crusades of later days. Otto I. thrice invaded the land of the Slavs and made all the barbarians from the Oder to the Elbe admit his lordship. Six new bishoprics were founded as his sway spread, and the bishop of Magdeburg was raised to be "archbishop and metropolitan of the whole race of the Slavs beyond the Elbe which has {198} been, or still remains to be, converted to God." But though it was a real work of civilisation, a work which made for peace, that the German Caesars undertook, it was not a Crusade. A Crusade was a war to win back from the infidel what had once been the patrimony of the Crucified: the wars of the Ottos were directed to extend their own sway, and, as ever, the true work of the converting Church was not helped but hindered by the arms and enterprises of soldiers and statesmen. When the tribes revolted against the government of the Germans, they often disowned their Christianity and destroyed their churches. Under Otto III. the Empire did not recover what she had lost, and the province of Magdeburg remained for nearly half its extent in heathen hands. [Sidenote: Otto the Great's endowment in Germany.] The Church suffered from this association. Where the mission of S. Boniface had been purely spiritual, the work of his successors was often hampered by the ambition of the emperors. In the lands alike of Eastern and Western Franks the Church was often led to lean on the State, and the results, of slackness, corruption, weakness, were inevitable. The rich endowments which were poured upon the Church were not always wisely given or wisely used. The Caesars themselves showered gifts: Otto the Great surpassed all his predecessors in lavishness,[2] and his dynasty followed in his steps. But the honours and riches were given quite as much for political as for religious objects. In the bishops and abbats the sovereigns found the wisest servants, the most capable administrators. As among the West Franks under the {199} Merwings, so now among the East Franks, the great ecclesiastics were the supports of the monarchy, the real governors of the country. It was thus that they came to owe their position—if not their election always yet certainly their confirmation—to the imperial will. As in Rome the emperors were stretching forth a hand to control the elections to the papacy, so in Germany there was growing up at the end of the tenth century the practice of imperial control over the things of the Church. The policy of the Ottos and the reformation of the papacy were certain ultimately to lead to the contest concerning investitures. High clerical office had come too often to be bought and sold, and the churches were becoming mere appanages of the great principalities. It was wise of Otto I. to try to win from the dukes the power they had obtained: but it was not for the good of the Church that the power should be even in the imperial hands.
[Sidenote: Otto III. and the popes.]
Otto I. died in 973. He had begun the reformation of the papacy. His son and grandson succeeded him, Otto II. in 973, Otto III. in 983. In 996 died Pope John XV., a Roman whom the Frankish chronicler, Abbo of Fleury, declares to have been lustful of filthy lucre and venal in all his acts. To Otto the clergy, senate, and people of Rome submitted the election of his successor. He chose his own cousin Bruno, "a man of holiness, of wisdom, and of virtue,"—news, to quote the same saintly writer, more precious than gold and precious stones. His throne was insecure: the Roman noble Crescentius drove him from it, but he won his way back and overcame one who had been set up as an anti-pope. He died in 999.
{200}
At the close of the tenth century a pope and an emperor of great ideas stand forth from the blackness of an age when, according to the evidence of councils and of monastic chronicles alike, vice was rampant—"the more powerful oppress the weaker, and men are like fishes in the sea, which everywhere in turn devour one another"—and the bishops and clergy alike neglected their duties. Otto III. (983-1002), the offspring of the German who sat on the imperial throne and the daughter of the Caesars of the East, made himself a real ruler of the Empire in Church as well as in State, and after the disputed succession of his cousin Bruno (Gregory V., 996-99) placed on the papal throne the first of the great line of later medieval popes. Gregory V. was the first pope of transalpine birth imposed by the Germans; Gerbert was the first of the French popes. It needed the imperial army to keep Gregory on the throne, and to crush the last of the Roman princelets who had made the papacy infamous; Gerbert (Silvester II., 999-1003) was only able to remain in the eternal city so long as Otto was there to protect him. [Sidenote: Gerbert.] But Gerbert's greatness belonged to a sphere far wider than that of the local papacy. He was a scholar in the ancient classics, a logician, mathematician, astronomer and musician, a great collector of books and a great teacher of men. An Aquitanian by birth, he was brought up at Aurillac, and then passed from one place of study to another, till, by the influence of the Emperor Otto I., he settled at Rheims in 972. His school was a famous one: among those whom he taught were many bishops, Robert the future king of the Franks and Otto the future emperor. From Rheims he went as abbat to {201} Bobbio, where the necessary severity of his rule provoked such opposition that he was obliged to return to Gaul. [Sidenote: In Gaul] He returned in time to win the influence of the great see of Rheims on behalf of the child heir of Otto II., who died at the end of 983, and to take part in the diplomacy which ended in the transfer of the West Frankish crown to Hugh the duke of the Franks. When Arnulf, of the very Karling house which had been dispossessed, became archbishop, and tried to hand over Rheims to his kindred, Gerbert, the steadfast supporter of the "Capetians," was made his successor. The election was of more than doubtful legality, and the politics, papal and imperial, of the time still further complicated the question: it was only settled by the transference of Gerbert, on the nomination of his old pupil, Otto III., to the see of Ravenna, From 998 he remained in Italy till his death. [Sidenote: and in Italy.] In 999 he became pope, and then he gave himself, heart and soul, to forward the great schemes, missionary, reforming, imperial, which were indeed as much his own as those of the enthusiastic genius of the young emperor. The old offices of the "republic" were revived and harmonised, as in the East, with the Christian character of the imperial power. Pope and emperor worked hand in hand for the conversion of the barbarians: it is said that it was Silvester who gave the kingship to the Hungarian Duke Stephen, as a son of the Christian Empire and the holy see of the imperial city. In the unquiet days of his papacy he was yet able to set an example of wisdom, counsel, godliness, charity, which formed an epoch in the regeneration of the Roman episcopate. Zealous, loyal, inspired by an overpowering sense of duty, {202} Silvester II. in a short time fulfilled a long time and left a mark on the history of the Middle Ages such as was made by but few even of its greatest men. [Sidenote: Pope Silvester II.] At his death in 1003 the age of reform had started on its way; and his was the light which had directed its beginnings. Thus in the West the end of the period shows the Empire and the papacy of one mind, eager for a spiritual reform in the Church, for Christian and missionary ideals in the State, not careful to delimit the provinces of Church and State, but eager rather for unity of action as well as sentiment in the cause of Christian extension and endeavour.
[Sidenote: The end of the Dark Age.]
Though the contest was not yet over, it might be said with confidence that the Church of Christ had won over the barbarians. Missionaries and martyrs had changed the face of Europe, and the fierce tribes which were pouring over the Continent in the fifth century, barbarous and heathen, were now for the most part tamed and converted to the love of Christ. Out of a land which had been wild and barbarous, and where one of the greatest of saints and missionaries had met his death, had come a revival in Christian form of the old imperial idea, and the great men who had been nourished by it had given new health to the central Church of Europe. For the moment, the Empire and the Papacy, Germany and the new temporal State in the hands of the Roman bishop, were united to lead the Christian nations and to convert the heathen on their borders. In the East remained the magnificent fabric of the immemorial Empire, active still in missionary labour and setting an example of the union of Church and State in {203} agreement to which the West could never attain. The eleventh century was to bring to East and West alike, with new responsibilities, new difficulties in action and new problems in thought. Everywhere it was for unity men strove, the unity which if in its main aspect it was political, was on its spiritual and ideal side embodied in the visible Church of Christ.
[1] Dr. O. L. Wells, The Age of Charlemayne, p. 434.
[2] See H. A. L. Fisher, The Medieval Empire, ii. p. 65; Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, iii. 57-9.
{205}
457 Leo I.
461 Hilarus 461 Severus
————-
467 Anthemius
468 Simplicius
472 Olybrius
473 Glycerius
474 Julius Nepos 474 Zeno
475 Romulus
Augustulus
483 Felix III.
————-
491 Anastasius I.
492 Gelasius I.
496 Anastasius II.
498 Symmachus
514 Hormisdas
518 Justin I.
523 John I.
526 Felix IV.
527 Justinian I.
530 Boniface II.
532 John II.
535 Agapetus I.
536 Silverius
537 Vigilius
555 Pelagius I.
560 John III.
565 Justin II.
574 Benedict I.
578 Pelagius II. 578 Tiberius II.
582 Maurice
{206}
590 Gregory I.
602 Phocas
604 Sabinianus
607 Boniface III.
607 Boniface IV.
610 Heraclius
615 Deusdedit
618 Boniface V.
625 Honorius I.
638 Severinus.
640 John IV.
641 ( Heracleonas
( Constantine III.
642 Theodorus I. 642 Constans II.
649 Martin I.
654 Eugenius I.
657 Vitalianus.
668 Constantine IV.
672 Adeodatus
676 Domnus I.
678 Agatho
682 Leo II.
683 Benedict II.
685 John V. 685 Justinian II.
687 Sergius I.
694 Leontius
697 Tiberius III.
701 John VI.
705 John VII. 705 Justinian II.
(restored)
708 Sisinnius
708 Constantine
711 Philippicus
713 Anastasius II.
715 Gregory II. 715 Theodosius III.
717 Leo III.
731 Gregory III.
741 Zacharias 741 Constantine V.
752 Stephen II.
752 Stephen III.
757 Paul I.
768 Stephen III.
(or IV.)
772 Hadrian I.
775 Leo IV.
779 Constantine VI
795 Leo III.
797 Irene
{207}
800 Charles I.
802 Nicephorus I.
811 Stauracius
811 Michael I.
813 Leo V.
814 Louis I.
816 Stephen IV.
817 Paschal I.
820 Michael II.
824 Eugenius II.
827 Valentinus
827 Gregory IV.
829 Theophilus
840 Lothar I.
842 Michael III.
844 Sergius II.
847 Leo IV.
855 Benedict III. 855 Louis II.
(in Italy)
858 Nicolas I.
867 Hadrian II. 867 Basil I.
872 John VIII.
875 Charles II.
(West Franks)
882 Marinus I. 882 Charles III.
(East Franks)
884 Hadrian III.
885 Stephen V.
886 Leo VI.
891 Formosus 891 Guido (in Italy)
894 Lambert
(in Italy)
896 Boniface VI. 896 Arnulf
896 Stephen VI. (East Franks)
897 Romanus
897 Theodorus II.
898 John IX.
900 Benedict IV.
901 Louis III.
(in Italy)
903 Leo V.
—————
903 Christopher
904 Sergius III.
911 Anastasius III.
912 Constantine VII.
(till 958)
{208}
913 Lando 912 Alexander )
914 John X. 919 Romanus I. ) co-
( Constantine ) emperors
915 Berengar 944 ( VIII )
928 Leo VI. (in Italy) ( Stephanus )
929 Stephen VII.
931 John XI. ———— 936 Leo VII. 939 Stephen VIII. 942 Marinus II. 946 Agapetus II.
955 John XII.
958 Romanus II.
962 Otto I.
963 Leo VIII. 963 Basil II. )
[964 Benedict V.] 963 Nicephorus )
965 John XIII. II. ) co-
973 Benedict VI. 973 Otto II. 969 John I. ) emperors
974 Domnus II. 976 Constantine )
974 Benedict VII. IX. )
983 John XIV. 983 Otto III.
985 John XV.
996 Gregory V.
999 Silvester II.
1002 Henry (II.)
1003 John XVII.
NOTE.—This list is for the most part that adopted by Dr. Bryce, Holy
Roman Empire; but the dates might be slightly varied by reference to
Duchesne, K. Müller, and Funk (Weltzer and Welte, Kirchenlexicon).
It may also be noted that the popes were frequently not elected till
the year after the death of their predecessors.
{209}
I. A list of original authorities for the whole of the period 461-1003 would be too long in proportion to the text of this book, but a few of the most important may be mentioned for the sake of those who wish to begin to study the period at first hand. Any such study should include:—
Evagrius, ed. Bidez and Parmentier, 1898. Zachariah of Mitylene [translation], ed. Hamilton and Brooks, 1899. Bede, ed. Ch. Plummer, 1895. Procopius, ed. Haury (in course of publication). Joannes Diaconus, Vita S. Gregorii, ed. Migne, and Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie, XI., 158-73. Gregory the Great, Letters, ed. Ewald and Hartmann, 1887, etc. Paulus Diaconus, ed. Waitz, 1878. Monumenta Moguntina, ed. Jaffé, 1866. Gregory of Tours, ed. Arndt and Krusch, 1884-5. Liber Pontificalis, ed. Duchesne, 1886-92. Liudprand, ed. Dümmler, 1877. Letters of Gerbert, ed. Havet, 1889. Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, ed. Jaffé, 1851, 2nd ed. 1885. Mansi, Concilia, 1759-98. Einhard, Vita Caroli Magni, ed. Pertz and Waitz, 1880.
II. Reference to the other authorities can be most easily found through modern works, from which the following is a selection:—
Milman, History of Latin Christianity.
Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ed. Bury).
{210}
Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire.
Bryce, Holy Roman Empire.
Oman, The Dark Ages.
Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders.
Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands.
Harnack, Dogmengeschichte.
Duchesne, Les Églises Separées.
" Les Premiers Temps de L'État Pontifical.
H. Leclercq, L'Afrique chrétienne.
" L'Espagne chrétienne.
M. J. Labourt, Le Christianisme dans l'Empire perse.
P. J. Pargoire, L'Église byzantine, de 527 à 847.
A. J. Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt.
Diehl, L'Afrique byzantine.
" Justinien.
" Études sur l'administration byzantine dans l'Exarchat de
Ravenne.
F. H. Dudden, Gregory the Great.
Hefele, History of the Councils.
Gasquet, L'Empire byzantin et la Monarchie franque.
Hutton, The Church of the Sixth Century.
Besse, S. Wandrille.
Du Bourg, S. Odon.
Martin, S. Colomban.
Hodgkin, Charles the Great.
Davis, Charlemagne.
Fisher, The Medieval Empire.
Hunt, The English Church, 597-1066.
Margoliouth, Mohammed.
Gardner, Theodore of Studium.
Marin, De Studio Constantinopolitano.
Lavisse (ed.), Histoire de France.
Marignan, Études sur la civilisation française (la sociéte
mérovingienne).
Lützow, Bohemia.
Morfill, Poland.
Rambaud, Histoire de la Russie.
Poole, Illustrations of Medieval Thought.
Kraus, Geschichte der Christlichen Kunst, I.
Potthast, Bibliotheca Medii Aevi.
{211}
Aachen, 167; councils at(809), 81; (860), 190
Abasgi, a Caucasian people, converted, 95
Abbassides, dynasty of Khalifs, descendants of Muhammad's
uncle Abbas, 156
Abbats, lay, 168-9, 172; in the Rule of S. Columban, 171;
Cluniac, 174-5
Abbo of Fleury, Frankish chronicler, 199
Abder Rahman I., Ommeyad Khalif of Cordova (755), 146
Abyssinian Church, Monophysite, 9, 23, 111
Acacius, patriarch of Constantinople, 7, 8, 10
Acca, bishop of Hexham (709-32), 169
Adalbert, S. (Voytech), bishop of Prague, 125-6, 129
Adalwald, Lombard king, 63
Adam of Bremen, 130
Adamuan's Life of Columba, 115-16
Adiaphorites, 86
Adoptianist heresy, 72; in the West, 78-9, 81, 168;
in the East, 79, 80, 156
Aelfeah (Alphege), bishop, 121
Aelfric, abbat of Eynsham, 121
Aethelbert, king of Kent, 183-5
Aethelred, king of England, 121
Aethelstan, king of England, 131
Aethelwold, bishop of Winchester, 119
Africa, the Church in North, 5, 17, 20, 103-10; increase of papal
power, 65, 67, 69, 107-8; Eucharist, 179; survival of
Christian customs to modern times, 23, 110; Vandals in, 103;
reconquered by Belisarius, 105; Muhammadan conquest, 5, 108, 109
Agapetus (Agapitus), Pope, 15, 38
Agatho, Pope, 88
Agde, 146
Agilulf, Lombard king, 62, 134
Agnellus, archbishop of Ravenna, 33
Agriculture, cared for by the Benedictines, 36; by Gregory
the Great, 65
Aidan, S., 116
Airulf, Lombard king, 68
Aistulf, Lombard king, 148, 149
Akoimetai, 8, 14, 161
Aktistetes, 86
Alamanni, 42, 135
Alans, Mongol barbarians, in Gaul, 41
Albagrians of the Caucasus, converted, 95
Albinus, abbat of Canterbury (d. 732), 169
Alcuin, 81, 116, 141, 152, 167-70
Aldhelm, S., of Malmesbury, 115, 171
Alexandria, Church and Patriarchate of, 8, 10, 16, 17, 24,
64, 65, 84, 87, 110; Eucharist, 179; conquered by the Arabs, 109
Alfred the Great, king of England, 32, 118
Alodaei, Soudanese people, converted, 111
Althing, Icelandic assembly, 132
Amalric, Wisigothic king in Spain, 74
Ambo (pulpit), 188
Ambrosian Rite (so called from S. Ambrose, bishop of Milan,
374-97), 183
Amöneburg (Hessen), monastery, 136
Anastasius, emperor, 7, 9, 47
Anastasius, patriarch of Antioch, 63
Anastasius, patriarch of Constantinople, (703-53), 155, 157
Anastasius of Sinai, S., 180.
Andover, 121
Angarii, tribe allied with the Saxons, 140
Annegray, S. Columban's settlement at, 55
Anselm, S., archbishop of Canterbury (died 1109), 160, 171
Ansgar, S., archbishop of Hamburg, 129-30
Anthimus, patriarch of Constantinople, 15
Antioch, Church and Patriarchate of, 8, 10, 16, 17, 23, 24,
84, 87, 156; Eucharist, 179; synod at (541 or 542), 16
Antirrhetici of S. Theodore the Studite, 164
Antistes (bishop), 66
Antony, archbishop of Novgorod (c. 1200), 161
Aphthartodocetes, 21, 85
Apocrisiarius, papal envoy at Constantinople, 63
Aquilea, patriarch of, 21, 39
Aquitaine, 49
Arabia, conquered by Muhammad, 101; Arabian Christians in
Persia, 110; Christianity in S. Arabia, 111
Arabs. See Muhammadans.
Architecture, Byzantine, 25-8, 100, 106
Arcona (Isle of Rügen), heathen temple at, 127
Arianism, extinct in the East, 9; of the Goths in Italy, 29, 30,
60; its suppression a political necessity, 33; the Frankish
struggle against, 47-8; of the Vandals in Africa, 103-5; of
the Lombards, 56, 61; in Spain, 73, 74, 75
Arles, 46, 49, 50, 146
Armagh, monastery, 53
Armenia, 3; Church of, 13, 84, 85, 95, 156; Monophysite, 23,
110; Adoptianiats in, 79; Paulicians in, 80
Arnulf, S., bishop of Metz, 58, 135, 139, 144, 145
Arnulf, archbishop of Rheims, 201
Asser, bishop of Sherborne, 118
Assyria, Christians in, 93, 96 n.
Athanagild, Wisigothic king in Spain, 74
Athanasian Creed, 81-2
Athens, 99
Augustine of Canterbury, S., 62, 69, 113, 117, 182-90
Augustine of Hippo, S., 3, 72, 103, 106, 170; De Civitate Dei, 154
Aurillac, 200
Austrasia, Eastern Frankish kingdom, 43, 49, 135, 145-6;
Synod in (742), 138
Autun, Council of (670), 59
Avars, Mongol race, 135, 141
Avignon, 146
Avitus, bishop of Vienne, 81
Axum, Ethiopic kingdom, 111-12
Baghdad, 96, 97
Bangor (Ireland), monastery, 54-5; Antiphonary of, 115
Baptism, 176-8; of Chlodowech, 42; of Borivoj, 128; of the
people of Kiev, 127; of Olaf Trigvason, 132
Basil the Great, S. (329-79), his Rule, 163
Basil I. the Macedonian, emperor, 80, 193
Basil II., emperor, 126
Baume, monastery at, 173
Bavarians, 135, 138
Bede (Baeda), 68 n., 115-16, 118, 167, 169, 170, 179, 180, 183-5
Belisarius, 30, 61, 105
Benedict Biscop, 115, 169
Benedict of Nursia, S., 34-9, 53, 58, 163; his Rule, 35-7, 58-9,
69, 119, 121, 171, 173, 175; the Benedictines, 35-8, 60, 62, 137
Bercta, Kentish queen, 186
Berno, abbat of Cluny, 173-4
Besançon, 56, 173
Béziers, 146
Bishops, their position under Justinian, 24-5; share in the
civil government of Italy, 33-4; without dioceses in the Celtic
Church, 114; "Universal Bishop," 66, 175; bless the
people at the Eucharist, 190
Blemmyes, Ethiopic tribe, converted, 111
Bobbio, 53, 56, 201
Boethius, 32
Bohemia, Christianity in, 127-9;
Bohemian princess brings about the conversion of Poland, 125
Boïar, title of Bulgarian magnates, 124
Boleslav I., duke of Bohemia, brother of S. Wenceslas (died
967), 128
Boleslav II., "the Pious," duke of Bohemia (967-99), 128, 129
Boniface, S. (Winfrith), 130, 136-40, 142, 147, 198
Boris, Bulgarian king, 124
Borivoj, Bohemian duke, baptized, 128
Boso, bishop of Merseburg, 126
Braga, councils at (563, 572), 74
Bremen, archbishopric, 130, 142
Bretislav II., king of Bohemia (1092-1100), 127
Britain, 83, 88; Christianity in, 113 ff; early British Church,
183; ritual in the British Church, 183. See England
Brittany, 115
Brunichild, 13, 48-9, 56, 74-5, 171
Bruno (Pope Gregory V.), cousin of Otto III., 199, 200
Bruno, missionary to the Prussians, 125
Brythons, Celts of Britain, their Church, 113, 183
Bulgarians, a Finnish race, conversion of, 124; they and their
Church, 13, 23, 44, 84, 128, 193
Burgundians, 41; Frankish kings of, 49, 55-6, 135
Bury, Dr. J. B., quoted, 21 n., 46-7, 113
Byzacene, African see, 106
Byzantine architecture, 25-8, 100, 106; Church and Patriarchate,
91, and see Constantinople; Empire, see Umpire, Eastern
Caelian Hill at Rome, 60, 64
Caesarius, bishop of Arles, 72, 81
Calabria, 157, 162
Candace, title of the queens of Abyssinia, 111
Canons, collection of, 85; canon law, 194-5; canon of the Mass,
181-2, 190
Canterbury, 115, 185-6
Capetians, House of Hugh the Great, duke of the Franks, 201
Carisiacum (Quierzy), 151
Carling House. See Karlings
Carloman, son of Charles Martel, brother of Pippin the Short,
114-5, 147, 149
Carloman, son of Pippin the Short, brother of Charles the Great,
148, 150-1
Carthage, taken by the Vandals, 103; by the Muhammadans,
77, 109; Church of, survival, 110; bishop of, 67, 103-6, 108
Cassiodorus, 30, 38
Catholicos, primate of the Monophysite Armenian Church, 84,
95; of the "Church of the East," 96; of the Persian
Church, 93-4, 99
Celibacy of the clergy. See Marriage
Celtic Church, 113-17, and see Ireland; Celtic Easter, 55, 114;
Celtic influence on the English liturgy, 187, 190; Celtic
missionaries and Boniface, 138
Ceremonial, 181-90
Ceylon, 96
Chad, S., 116, 169
Chalcedon, Council of (451), 2, 7, 9, 10, 18, 24, 65-6, 79, 85-6,
89, 95
Chaldeaecan Church, 23, 93
Châlons, Battle of, 41
Charles Martel, Frankish mayor of the palace, 135, 137, 141, 146
Charles I., the Great, 50, 136, 182, 197; anointed king, 148;
revives the Empire, 152-4; destroys the Lombard kingdom,
150, 152; supposed donation of, 151-2; theocratic ideas
of, 139; religious wars, 127, 140-2; his share in the
Adoptianist controversy, 80; his learning and piety, 166-70;
aspirations, 172
Charles II., the Bald, emperor, son of Louis I., the Pious, 170
Charles the Simple, sole king of the West Franks (898-922), 174
Cherson, near the mouth of the Dnyepr, 126
Childebert I., Frankish king, 39
Childebert II., Frankish king, son of Sigebert and Brunichild, 49
Childerich III., last of the Merwings, 147
Chilperich I., Frankish king of Neustria, son of Chlothochar I.,
43, 51, 54, 75
China, Nestorian missions in, 96, 98
Chlodowech, king of the Franks, baptized, 42, 177; dies, 43;
his aim, 46; receives the consulate, 47; his daughter, 74
Chlothochar I., Frankish king, son of Chlodowech, 43, 47, 54, 74
Chlothochar II., Frankish king, son of Chilperich I. and
Fredegund, 56, 58, 145
Chlothochar (Lothar), king of Lotharingia, son of the emperor
Lothar I. (855-69), 191-2
Chora, Church of the, at Constantinople, 26
Chosroes II., Persian king (590-628), 101
Chosroes, Persian king (800-50), 80
Christmas baptisms, 177; communion, 179
Christology, 98. See Heresies
Chrotechild (Clotilda), wife of Chlodowech, 42
Church, The, her task in fifth century, 1; organisation, 2, 24;
tendency to separation in East and West, 3, and see Schism;
Churches of Rome and Constantinople held to be one, 10;
East and West differ in use of Quicunque, 81-2
Church, the Eastern, strengthens the Empire, 4; her firm position
in 527, 11; united with the State, 12; history, 6-28, 83-92,
155-65; conservative character, 165, 194. See Constantinople,
Schism
Church, the Western: Church property and jurisdiction under
the Gothic kings in Italy, 30-1; determines the development
of the Frankish nation, 45; maintains imperial tradition,
45-6; her aggressive claims, 194; subject in Germany and
Italy to the control of the Saxon emperors, 191, 197-201.
See Papacy, Rome, Schism
"Church of the East," Nestorian, 96-7
Clonard, monastery, 53, 55
Clonfert, monastery, 53
Clonmacnoise, monastery, 53
Clotilda, Clotilde. See Chrotechild, Hlothild
Clovesho, Synod of (747), 138, 187
Cluniacs, monks of Cluny, 174-5
Cluny, monastic reform of, 169, 171-5; abbey of, 173-4; Rule
of, 174-5; congregation of, 174
Cologne, archbishop of, 192
Columba, S., 114-16
Columban, S., 53-8, 116; his Rule, 55, 171; monastery at Baume, 173
Communion, Holy, 178-90; received by the Stylites, 25. See
Eucharist
Confirmation, 178; of Olaf Trigvason, 121
Consolation of Philosophy, The, by Boethius, 32
Constans II., emperor, 109
Constantine I., emperor, 12, 40; donation of, 154
[Constantine IV.], emperor, 89
Constantine V., Copronymus, 80, 155, 158, 162, 165
Constantine, pope, 91
Constantine of Thessalonica (S. Cyril), 123
Constantine, founder or reviver of Eastern Adoptianism, 79-80
Constantinople, theological bent of its people, 8; buildings at,
25-7; captured by the Turks (1453), 163; modern, 158, 161
Constantinople, Church of, its growing isolation, 13; a witness
for religious liberty, 14; valuable services to the Church
Universal, 20; quarrel with Rome over the Ecthesis and
Type, 88; missions to Bulgarians, 124; to Russians, 126-7;
to Moravians and Czechs, 128; theology in, 156. See
Church, Eastern; Schism
Constantinople, councils at: Fifth General (553), 15, 17, 18, 20-2,
39, 63-4, 86, 106-7, 161; synod of 588, 66; Sixth General
(680-1), 21, 84-5, 88; Council of 681, 67; in Trullo (691),
85, 89-92; Council of 692, 67; iconoclastic synod of 754, 165;
Councils of 861 and 867, 193; Eighth General (869), 193-4;
Council (879-80), 194
Constantinople, Patriarchate of, 24, 67, 85, 90, 124, 192-4
Constantinople, patriarchs of, 87-8; claim the title of
Oecumenical, 65. See Acacius, Germanus, Ignatius, John the
Cappadocian, Mennas, Methodius, Nicephorus, Paul, Photius,
Sergius, Tarasius
Coptic Church, 9, 23, 84, 101, 110, 112; Copts resist Saracens, 109
Corbie (New Korvey), monastery, on the Weser, 130, 170
Corbinian, S., 135
Corinth, bishops of, 67
Cornwall, early British Church of, 113, 117
Corsica, 151
Cosmas, sixth-century traveller, 97
Councils, valuable work of the, 19. See Aachen, Antioch,
Austrasia, Autun, Braga, Chalcedon, Clovesho, Constantinople,
Frankfort, General, Gentilly, Hatfield, Mâcon, Orange,
Regensburg, Rome, Toledo, Whitby
Cracow, relics at, 125
Creed, at the Council of Chalcedon, 2; proposal to reform, 14;
importance of a logically tenable, 19; Pope Leo III. discourages
additions to, 81; Athanasian, 81-2; Nicene, 193
Crescentius, John, patrician of Rome, 199
Crete, bishops of, 67
Croatia, Croats, 84, 124
Cross, the Holy, 100-2; tolerated by the iconoclast emperor Leo
III., 159; sign of the, in baptism, 177; used by S. Augustine
in his mission, 184-5
Crusades, true and false, 197-8
"Culdees," Celtic monks, 119
Cumbria (or Strathclyde), early British Church of, 113
Cuthbert, M., 116, 121, 169
Cuthbert, archbishop of Canterbury, 187
Cyprus, Church of, 21
Cyril, S., patriarch of Alexandria (412-44), opponent of Nestorius,
10, 18, 22
Cyril, S. (Constantine), apostle of the Slavs, 123-4, 126, 128
Czechs, Slav race of Bohemia, 127
Dagobert I., Frankish king, son of Chlothochar II., 44, 58, 145
Danes ravage England and Scotland, 117-19, 121; settle, and
are converted, 118; Danish invasions, 122; conversion of
Denmark, 129, 131
David, S., 118
Decretals, false, 194-6
Deira, northern kingdom of England, 63
Denmark, conversion of, 129, 131
Desiderius (Didier) of Cahors, S., 58
Dionysius the Areopagite, Platonist so called, 89
Dnyepr (Dnieper), Russian river, baptisms in, 127
Dokkum, S. Boniface martyred at, 139
Donation of Constantine, 154; of Pippin, at Quierzy, 149, 151;
of Charles the Great, 151-2
Donatists, 103, 107
Double procession of the Holy Ghost, 76, 80-1, 193-4
Druidism favoured the growth of Christian monasticism, 53
Dublin, conversion of Danes at, 122; Norse king of, 132
Duchesne, Mgr., quoted, 40, 208
Dudden, F. H., quoted, 50, 75 n.
Dunstan, S., 115, 119-21
Durham, see of, 121
Eadgar, king of England, 119
East, the, large number of ecclesiastics in, 25
East and West, reunion of, after the quarrel of pope and emperor,
in 519, 10; political severance completed, 149; breach widens,
191; divergence, Photian schism, 192-4; nominal reunion
throughout tenth century, 194. See Schism
Easter baptisms, 177; communion, 179; use of the alleluia, 182;
Celtic Easter, 55, 114
Eastern Church, orthodox, securer than the West in its
Christianity, 7; its intense conservatism, 27; dictates
to the papacy under Vigilius and Pelagius, 40. See Church,
Constantinople, Schism
Ebbo, archbishop of Rheims, 129, 141
Ebroin, mayor of the palace in Neustria, 146
Ecthesis, issued by Heraclius, 87, 89
Edessa, 93, 96, 110
Education, 166-7, 175. See Learning
Egbert, archbishop of York, 167, 179
Egypt, 9; National Church, 13; Monophysite Church, 23; sects,
110; Church, 112; Holy Communion, 180; Muhammadan
invasion, 84, 108. See Alexandria, Coptic
Einhard, biographer of Charles the Great, 142, 153, 167
Eligius, S., 58
Elipandus, archbishop of Toledo, 78-9, 168
Ellesthaeos, Ethiopian king, 112
Eloi (Eligius), S., 58
Emly, monastery, 53
Emmeran, Emmeram, S., missionary in Bavaria, 135
Empire, the, becomes a Christian power, 1; obsolescent, 2;
representative of Christian unity, 3; invaded by barbarians, 1, 3;
its vitality, 3
Empire, Eastern, relations with the Franks, 46-7; its strength
renders the Nestorian missions possible, 98; becomes more
purely Oriental, 113; end of the imperial power in Italy, 147-8;
its recognition of the Western Umpire of Charles the
Great, 153. See Constantinople
Empire, Western, ends with Romulus Augustulus (476), 28;
tradition preserved by the Church, 45-6; revival of the
imperial idea, 172; Charles the Great restores the Empire,
139, 144, 152; origin of the "Holy Roman Empire," 153;
papal theory of the Empire, 192; weakness of the Empire in ninth
and tenth centuries, 196; revival under the Saxon Ottos,
191, 197-202
England, conversion of, 62-3, 69, 117, 183-7; Church of,
117-21; its independent attitude towards Rome, 117, 120,
121; kings the nursing fathers of the Church, 27; English
missionaries to Germany, 136-9, 141-2; ritual in, 183-90
Ennismore, monastery, 53
Epiphanius, bishop of Pavia, 29
Epiphany baptisms, 177; communion, 179
Etherius, chaplain and notary to Charles the Great, 151
Ethiopian Church, 110-12
Eucharist, celebration of, in sixth century, 188; doctrine of,
controversy concerning, 170-1; Aelfric's doctrine of, 120;
reservation of, 180-1. See Communion, Mass
Eugenius, S., bishop of Carthage, 104-5
Eutychian heresy, 7
Evagrius, ecclesiastical historian (period 431-594), 21 n.
Exarch of Ravenna, 34, 40, 91; the Exarchate, 61-2, 69, 147-9,
151, 157
Facundus, bishop of Hermione, 106
Fasting Communion, 180; Saturday fast in tenth century, 131
Faustus, bishop of Riez, a semi-Pelagian, 72
Felix II., pope, 8
Felix, bishop of Urgel, 78-9, 168
Ferrand, African deacon, writer in the "Three Chapters"
controversy, 106
Feudalism, rise of, 44-5, 172-3
Filioque ("and [from] the Son"), word added to the Nicene Creed
in the West, leads to controversy with the East, 193-4
Fontaine, monastery, 55
Fontenelle, abbey, 57
Fortunatus, bishop of Carthage, 108
Frankfort, Council of (794), 79, 168
Franks in Gaul, 42; conversion of, 4, 43, 177; their imperfect
Christianity, 43-4, 54; staunch Catholicism, 42, 47-8, 177;
break up of their kingdom, 44; formative influence of the
Church, 45; relations with the Eastern Empire, 46-7; alliance
with the papacy, 49; their Church's relations with Rome,
50; greatly influenced by monasticism, 58; they invade
Spain, 74; laxity and corruption of their Church, 138, 144;
Karling reformation, 144; Frankish missal, 183; relations
with England, 186; Frankish clergy concoct the forged decretals, 195
Fredegund, wife of Chilperich I., 43
Frederic, Saxon bishop in Iceland, 132
Freeman, Edward Augustus, quoted, 3
Freising, see of, 138
Frisians, 197; English missionaries to, 136, 139
Fritzlar, abbey, 140
Fuero Jusgo, the Wisigothic code, 74, 76
Fulda, monastery, 81, 140
Fulgentius, S., African bishop, 105
Gaiseric (Genseric), king of the Vandals, 103-4
Gall, S., 56, 116
Gallican Church, 39, 41-59, see Franks, Gaul; Gallican liturgy
and ritual, 47, 181-3, 186, 188-90; influence on the English
liturgy, 186-7
Galswintha, wife of Chilperich I. of Neustria, 48
Gaul, Roman, 41; Christianity in, 41-59, 83, 176; Gregory
the Great in, 48-51, 65, 69; monasticism in, 171; feudalism,
172; Normans in, 196
Gelasian Sacramentary (so named from pope Gelasius I., 492-6), 182-3
Gelimer, Vandal king, 105
General Councils, first four, 76; Third (of Ephesus, 431), 96;
Fourth (of Chalcedon, 451), 2, 7, 9-10, 18, 24, 65-6, 79, 85-6,
89, 95; Fifth (of Constantinople, 553), 15, 17, 18, 20-2,
39, 63-4, 86, 106-7, 161; Sixth (of Constantinople, 680-1),
21, 84-5, 88; Seventh (of Nicaea, 787), 155, 165; Eighth
(of Constantinople, 869), 193-4; Eighth, according to the
Greeks (of Constantinople, 879-80), 194
Gentilly, Council of (767), 81
Georgia, Church of, 23, 95
Gerbert of Aurillac (Silvester II.), 200-2
Germanus, S., patriarch of Constantinople, 155
Gildas, British historian, 183
Glastonbury, monastery, 115, 119
Gnesen, archbishopric of, 125
Goidels, Celtic stock in Ireland, 53; Goidelic language, 119
Goths, Eastern (Ostrogoths), in Italy, 4, 29-32; Western, see
Wisigoths
Grado, archbishop of, 157
Gradual, 188
Greece, iconoclasm causes a rising in, 157; Greek Church, its
character, 6: the Eastern Empire in its religious aspect, 13.
See also Church, Constantinople, Eastern, Schism
Greenland, mission to, 132
Gregorian Sacramentary, 182
Gregory I., the Great, S., pope, 21, 25, 34, 40, 55, 76, 113, 134,
171, 180-2, 184, 186, 190, 192; his life and work, 60-71; his
relations to Gaul, 48-51, 65, 69; to Africa, 107; to missions, 69;
to monasticism, 69; to classical learning, 52, 70; his claim to
jurisdiction, 68; claimed no special authority for the use of
Rome, 187; his theology, 70-1; his writings, 35, 60, 63-5
Gregory II., pope, 136-7, 157
Gregory III., pope, 137, 147, 157
Gregory IV., pope, 130
Gregory V. (Bruno), pope, 199, 200
Gregory of Tours, bishop and historian, 43-5, 51-2, 58, 66 n.,
145, 171
Gregory, abbat of Utrecht, 136
Gregory, patrician, upstart emperor, 109
Guntchramn (Guntram), king of the Burgundian Franks, 55
Haakon (Hacon) the Good, king of Norway, 131
Hadrian I., pope, 151, 154, 182
Hadrian II., pope, 123-4
Hamburg, archbishopric, 129-30
Harnack, A., referred to, 22
Harold Bluetooth, king of Denmark (died 978), 131
Harold, Danish king in 822, 129
Harold Haarfager (Fairhair), king of Norway, 131
Hatfield, Council of (680), 88
Helena, empress, 100
Henotikon, the, 7, 8, 10
Henry I., "the Fowler," first German king of the Saxon
House(919-36), 126
Heraclius, emperor, 22-3, 83-4, 100-1, 109, 158; as a theologian, 87
Herat, Nestorian bishopric of, 98
Heresy, not a unifying power, 134; real danger of sixth and seventh
century heresies, 19; heresy akin to patriotism in the East,
13; an expression of national independence, 23; baptism of
heretics, 178. See Adoptianist, Aphthartodocetes, Arianism,
Donatists, Eutychian, Jacobite, Monophysites, Monothelites,
Nestorians
Hermenigild (Hermenegild), Wisigothic king in Spain, 75
Heruls, a Teutonic tribe, 29, 94
Hessen, 136-8
Hieria, iconoclastic synod at, 155
Hieroclea, author of the Synekdemos, 24
Hilarus, papal official under Gregory the Great, 107
Hilda, S., 116
Hilderic, Vandal king, 105
Himyarites, Christians in South Arabia, 111-12
Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, 170, 192, 195
Hira (in Persia), Monophysite bishop of, 110
Hlothild (Chlothildis), daughter of Chlodowech, 74
Hodgkin, Dr. Thomas, quoted, 32-3, 48, 75 n, 135, 144
Homerites (Himyarites) in South Arabia, Christian, 111-12
Honorius I., pope, 87-8; condemned by the Sixth General
Council, 85
Hormisdas, pope, 9-10, 90
Hugh the Great, duke of the Franks (923-56), 196
Hugh Capet, duke (956), and king (987-96) of the Franks, 201
Hugh, S., abbat of Cluny, 174
Hungary, 141; received a Christian king, 201
Hunneric, Vandal king, 104
Huns, 41, 94
Hymns, 15 n, 81, 156, 162, 168, 190
Ibas of Edessa, 16-18
Iberians of Georgia, 95
Iceland, 115; conversion of, 132-3
Iconoclastic controversy, 12, 143, 147, 155-65, 194
Ignatius, patriarch of Constantinople, 193-4
Illyria, Illyricum, 65-7, 157
Image-worship. See Iconoclastic
Incarnation, doctrine of the, the Church's tenacity of, 19;
endangered by iconoclasm, 160, 164. See Heresies
India, 9, 23, 96-8
Ingunthis, Frankish princess, daughter of Sigebert and Brunichild,
wife of Hermenigild of Spain, 48, 75
Iona, 116-17
Ireland, Christian and outside the Empire, 3; the Church in, 53,
113-16, 121-2, 183; Irish learning, 169-71; missionaries in
Thuringia, 136; monks in Iceland, 132; priests at
Glastonbury, 115, 119
Irene, Empress, 154, 164
Irminsul, the, a column worshipped by the Saxons, 140
Isidore of Seville, 76, 195
Isis, worship of, 111
Islam, 98. See Muhammadanism
Istria, 63-4, 68, 151
Italy, conquered by Goths, 4, 29; reconquered by Belisarius and
Narses, 32; Imperial restoration, 33; Church in, 29-40;
S. Columban in, 56; saved from Arianism, 60; liturgy, 183; end
of the Eastern Imperial power, 143, 147-8; Charles the Great,
150-4; the Saxon Ottos, 197-201
Italy, Northern, long refuses to accept the Fifth General
Council, 21; Gregory the Great's activity, 65, 69; Bavarian
kings in, 135
Italy, Southern, Benedictines in, 62; effect of iconoclasm on,
157, 162
Jacobite sect, 109-10; in Syria, 23, 84
James, Studite monk, 162
Jarrow, monastery, 116
Jerusalem, Church and patriarchate of, 8, 16-17, 84, 87,
100-1, 156; councils at (553), 20; (628), 101
Jews, Gregory the Great tries to convert, 69; persecuted in
Spain, 77; Jews in Syria, 100; influence Muhammad, 101;
Jews in Arabia, 111-12
Joannicius, S., Bulgarian recluse, 124
John I., pope, martyred, 31
John II., pope, 15
John VIII., pope, 194
John X., pope, 197
John XI., pope, 174
John XV., pope, 199
John XVI., anti-pope set up by Crescentius (997-8), 199
John of Biclaro (Joannes Biclarensis), bishop of Gerona, 62 n.,
95 n., 75
John the Cappadocian, patriarch of Constantinople, 10, 90
John of Damascus (John Damascene), S., 87, 159-60
John the Deacon, biographer of Gregory the Great, 64, 182
John of Ephesus, Monophysite bishop and Syriac writer of
sixth century, 24, 111
John Maro, 89
John of Nikiu, Jacobite bishop, 86, 109
John the Patrician, recaptures Carthage from the Arabs, 109
John the Scot (Johannes Scotus "Erigena"), 170-1
Julian of Halicarnassus, 86
Justin I., emperor, 10, 32, 112
Justin II., emperor, 21-2
Justinian I., emperor, 86, 89, 90, 94, 99-100, 107, 110-12, 143,
153, 177; his birthplace, 24, 67-8, 91; building, 26, 27, 100,
106; Christian legislation of, 28; controversies of his reign,
14-22; corresponds with the pope, 10, 14; deals with the
Monophysites, 15; his alleged heresy, 15, 21, 22; summons
Fifth General Council, 17; intervenes in Africa, 105-6;
his relations with the Franks, 47; restores the imperial rule
in Italy, 33; Spanish war, 74; hymn-writer, 15 n.
Justinian II., 90-1
Justiniana Prima, 67, 91
Jutes in Britain, 117; of Jutland, converted, 130
Karlings, Frankish royal house, 57, 139, 144, 147, 196, 201
Kerait, Tartar kingdom of, 96-7
Key of Truth, The, book of the Armenian Paulicians, 80
Khalifs of Baghdad, 97, 99; Khalif Omar, 101
Khartoum, Christian remains near, 111
Khorassan, 93
Kiev, town on the Dnyepr, becomes Christian, 127
Kothransson, Thorwald, Icelander, 132
Kristián, tenth-century Bohemian historian, 128
Lateran synod (649), 88
Leander, archbishop of Seville, 63, 75-6
Learning, 5, 38, 123; survival of, 5; at the court of the
Merwings, 51; classical, taught to Gregory the Great, 60;
yet he opposed classical learning in bishops, 52; classical,
of the Irish Church, 115; in England, 115; of the Irish monks,
121-2; of the Studite monks, 163; revival of, under Charles the
Great, 154, 166-70. See Aelfric, Bede, Gerbert, Education,
Literature
Lebanon, 84; Monothelites in, 22
Leger (Leodegar), S., 81, 146
Lent, 36, 140
Leo I., the Great, S., pope, 6, 7, 10, 29, 63, 89
Leo III., pope, 81, 152
Leo III., the Isaurian, emperor, 109, 155, 157-8
Leo IV., the Chazar, emperor, 155
Leo V., the Armenian, emperor, 165
Leo VI., the Wise, emperor, 194
Leodegar, Leodgar, (S. Leger), bishop of Autun, 81, 146
Leontius of Byzantium, 86
Leovigild, Wisigothic king in Spain, 48, 75
Lerins, abbey, 81
Liber Pontificalis, 39 n., 151
Liberatus, sixth-century theological writer in Africa, 106
Limoges, 150, 174
Lindisfarne, 117
Litanies, 184-6
Literature in North Africa, 106; literary renaissance under
Charles the Great, 166. See Boethius, Cassiodorus, Gregory
the Great, Gregory of Tours, John of Damascus, Learning,
Paul the Silentiary, Procopius, Venantius Fortunatus,
Theodore of the Studium
Liturgies, 181-90
Liudhard, Frankish bishop in Kent, 186
Lombards, 40, 147-50, 152; invade Italy, 34, 61; pope negotiates
with, 62; conversion from Arianism to Catholicism, 4, 56, 63, 134
Lothar (Chlothochar) II., king of Lotharingia, 191-2
Louis I., the Pious, emperor, son of Charles I., 129
Louis II., emperor, son of the Emperor Lothar I., 192
Louis the German, king of Bavaria (840-76), son of Louis the
Pious, 128
Louis d'Outremer, king of the West Franks (936-54), son of
Charles the Simple, 174
Ludmilla, S., of Bohemia, 128
Luxeuil, S. Columban's monastery at, 55-6
Mâcon, Second Council of (585), 180
Magdeburg, archbishopric, 126, 197-8
Maieul (Majolus), abbat of Cluny, 174
Mainz, 195; S. Boniface, archbishop of, 137-8
Malmesbury, abbey, 115, 171
Manichaeans, 104, 178
Mansi, G. D., Italian theologian (1692-1769); his Concilia
referred to, 15 n., 17 n., 21 n., 76
Maraba, catholicos of Persia, 99
Mark, S., evangelist, 64
Maron, John, founder of the Maronites, 84
Maronite Church, 23, 89
Marozia, paramour of Pope Sergius III., mother of Pope John
XI., 196
Marriage of the clergy, 25, 91, 119-20; in the Greek Church,
85; marriage of spiritual relations forbidden, 177
Martel, Charles, Frankish mayor of the palace, 135, 137, 144, 146
Martial, S., monastery at Limoges, 174
Martin, S., monastery at Tours, 168, 173
Martin I., pope, 88
Martin, S., bishop of Braga, 74
Martyrdom of S. Adalbert, 125, 129; S. Boniface, 139, 202;
Pope John, 31; S. Theodosia, 158; S. Wenceslas, 128-9
Mary, the Blessed Virgin, 18, 80; images of, 156-7
Mass, the, 15 n.; Mass of the presanctified, 179; the Roman
Mass, fifth to eighth century, 180-2: sixth century, 188-90;
"ite, missa est," 190
Maurice, emperor, 22, 62, 66
Maurice, S., 125
Maximus, orthodox African abbat and controversialist, 89, 108
Meccah, 101
Media, 93
Medinah, 101
Melkites, orthodox, in Egypt, 84, 110
Mellitus, bishop, 176
Melrose, monastery, 116
Mennas, patriarch of Constantinople, 15, 17
Merovech, son of Chilperich I., 43
Merovingians. See Merwings
Merv, Nestorian Church of, 98
Merwings, Frankish royal house, 43-7, 138, 144, 147, 196, 199;
encourage literature, 51; their sins, 52-4: their age called
golden by Mabillon, 57; decay of their kingdoms, 135
Mesopotamia, national Church of, 13
Methodius, S., patriarch of Constantinople (843-7), 12, 156
Methodius, S., archbishop of
Moravia, 123-4, 128-9
Metz, capital of Austrasia, 135; bishop of, 144
Michael III., "the Drunkard," emperor, 192-3
Mieczyslaw, king of Poland, 125
Milan, archbishop of, 39; church of, 183
Mir (Theodemir), king of the Suevi in Spain, 74
Missale Francorum, 183
Missions, important in this period, 2, 3; Byzantine, 6, 84;
supported by the emperors, 23; missions from Rome, 62, 117,
183-90; Nestorian, 6, 96-8; Monophysite, 24, 111; missionary
zeal of the Irish Church, 116, 121-2; missions of the
ninth century, 123; to the Bulgarians, 124; to the Slavs,
124-9; to Northmen, 129-32; to Frisians, 136, 139; missions
checked by the iconoclastic controversy, 156; mission of
S. Augustine, 183-90; missionary wars of Charles the Great,
139-42, and of the Saxon emperors, 197; zeal of Otto III. and
Silvester II. for missions, 201-2
Monasticism, in the East, 25, 161-3; its debt to S. Benedict,
37; to S. Columban, 53; Irish, 53, 114; monasticism in Gaul,
54, 171; a defence against the secularisation of the Frankish
Church, 57; in Persia, 99; in Scotland, 119; missionary fruits
of, 130; close connection with learning, 167; Alcuin's attitude
to, 168; decay in ninth century, 172; revival at Cluny, 173-5;
the Studium at Constantinople, 161-3; kings become monks, 77, 145
Mongols, 100
Monophysites, Monophysitism, 23, 83, 85, 110, 156, 159;
Eastern attempts at compromise rejected by Rome, 7-8;
Justinian studies the question, 10-11, and condemns it, 15;
its condemnation necessary to the acceptance of a logically
tenable creed, 19; Monophysite missions, 24, 111; Monophysitism
in Abyssinia, 112; Arabia, 101; Armenia, 95; India, 97; Persia,
98-9; Syria, 101
Monothelites, Monothelitism, 22-3, 84-9, 159; its condemnation
necessary, 19; favoured the progress of Islam, 102; weakened
African Christianity, 108
Montanists, heretical followers of the second-century fanatic
Montanus, 178
Monte Cassino, monastery, 35, 39, 61, 145
Monza, Lombard relics at, 69
Moors, heathen, of fifth century, 103; Muhammadan, in Spain
and Gaul, 73, 146
Moralia of Gregory the Great, 63
Moravia, 124, 127-9
Mosaics at Constantinople and Ravenna, 26
Mozarabic rite, Christian liturgy which survived the Moorish
occupation and is still in use in Spain, 189
Mugurrah (Nubia), visited by missionaries, 111
Muhammad (Mohammed), the prophet, 101
Muhammad II., conqueror of Constantinople in 1453, 27
Muhammadans, Muhammadanism, theocratic ideal of, 139-40;
absorb the attention of the Eastern emperors, 143;
contributes to the iconoclastic movement, 158; conquests, 84;
conquest of Arabia, etc., 112; Merv, 98; Persia, 99; Syria,
101; Egypt, 102; Africa, 5, 108-9; Soudan, 111; Spain,
72-3, 77-8, 146; defeated in Gaul by Charles Martel, 146
Naples, 143
Narses, general of Justinian, 32, 34, 61
Nationalism, a complicating factor in theological controversy, 9;
nationalism of the Spanish Church, 73; nationalism and
heresy, 110
Negus, title of the ruler of Abyssinia, 111
Nerses III., Armenian "Catholicos," 84-5
Nestorians, Nestorianism, 9, 23, 83; missions, 6, 96-8; in
Armenia, 95; in Persia, 93-6, 98-9; Nestorianism and
Muhammad, 101; Nestorian "Church of the East" 96
Neustria, Western Frankish kingdom, 43, 135-6, 146
Neutra (in modern Hungary), Christian Church at, 127
Nevers, S. Columban at, 56
Nicaea, First General Council (325), 89; Seventh General Council
(787), 165
Nicene Creed, 193
Nicephorus I., emperor, 80
Nicephorus, patriarch of Constantinople, 160
Nicetius, bishop of Trier, 47, 86
Nicolas I., pope, 124, 191-6
Nîmes, 75, 77, 146
Nisibis, Nestorian school of theology at, 95-6
Nobadae, a people of the Soudan, converted, 111
Nona, bishop of, 125
Normans, 150, 172, 196
Northmen, ravages of, 169; pillage Hamburg, 130; converted,
129-33. See Danes
Northumbria, 116-17; schools of, 116, 167. See Deira
Norway, conversion of, 121, 131-2
Nubia, missionaries in, 111
Odilo, abbat of Cluny, 174
Odo, S., abbat of Cluny, 163, 171-5
Oecumenical Councils, canons collected, 194; the Eighth
disputed, 193-4. See General Councils
Oecumenical patriarch, 65-6
Olaf, king of Sweden (in 853), 130
Olaf Trigvason, king of Norway (995-1000), 121, 132-3.
Olaf, S., king of Norway (1017-29), 132
Olaf, Norse king of Dublin, 132
Olga, S., a "ruler of Russia," baptized, 126
Omar, Khalif, 101
Ommeyads, dynasty of Khalifs, descended from Omeyya, 156
Orange, synod at (529), 72
Ordination, anointing the hands at, 183
Origen, his doctrines condemned, 16; Origenists, 15-16
Oswald, king of Northumberland, 116
Oswald, bishop of Worcester, 119
Oswiu, king of Northumbria, 117
Otto I., emperor, revives the Empire and reforms the papacy,
197; ecclesiastical policy in Germany and Italy, 198-9;
patron of Gerbert, 200; overlord of Poland, 125; Slav
missions, 126; intervenes in Bohemia, 129; and Denmark, 131
Otto II., emperor, 199, 201
Otto III., emperor, 125, 198-202
Ouen, S., bishop of Rouen, 58
Paderborn, 152
Palestine, Church in, 15-16, 100. See Jerusalem, Syria
Pallium, its significance, 67-8; sent to S. Boniface, 137;
to S. Ansgar, 130
Pannonia, 124
Papacy and the popes: Papacy rises as the Empire decays, 4;
wins political power, 5, 61, 149; acquires rights of jurisdiction,
31; popes act as envoys of Arian Gothic kings, 15, 31;
papal elections confirmed by the emperor or the exarch, 34, and
controlled by the Saxon emperors, 199; papacy supported
by the Benedictines, 37, as afterwards by the Cluniacs, 173-5;
degradation of the papacy in sixth century, 39; papal
infallibility not dreamt of in sixth century, 39-40, nor in the
early tenth, 197; growth of new ideals, popes begin to intervene
in politics, 61; pope styled "oecumenical archbishop and
patriarch," 65; papal power increases in Africa, 107-8; papacy
preserves the traditions of the Empire, 143; alliance of the
papacy with the Karlings, 147; growth of the temporal power,
143, 149; beginning of the Papal States, 149; loss of the
Bulgarian Church, 134; papacy foments strife between the Slavs
and Constantinople, 125; popes oppose iconoclastic emperors,
157; pope crowns Charles the Great emperor, 152-3; Nicolas
I. claims to be the source of the Empire, 192; degeneracy of the
popes in ninth and tenth centuries, 172, 196-7, 199; papal
monarchy grows in theory at the time of its practical weakness,
191; papacy supports its claims by the forged decretals, 194-6;
papacy reformed by the Saxon emperors, 197, 199-202; list of
popes, 205-8. See Rome
Paschasius Radbertus, abbat of Corbie (died about. 865), 170
Passau, see of, 138
Patriarchates, the five, 24; question of supremacy, 90; their
jurisdictions not considered unalterable, 91; patriarchal rights
over the Bulgarian Church, 124; Illyria lost to Rome, 157.
See Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Rome
"Patrician of the Romans," title conferred on Pippin the Short,
148; borne by Charles the Great, 152
Patrick, S., 57, 113-14, 183
"Patrimony of S. Peter," 65, 148
Paul the Deacon, 62 n., 65, 134, 167
Paul, patriarch of Constantinople, 164
Paul of Samosata, 80
Paul the Silentiary, 25-6
Paulicians, 80, 156
Pelagius, founder of the Pelagian heresy in fifth century, 72
Pelagius, I., pope, 16, 21, 34, 39-40, 107
Pelagius II., pope, 62, 64-6
Persecution of Catholics by Arians, 32, 74-5, 103-5; of Catholics
by Moslems, 78; in the iconoclastic controversy, 155, 158,
165; of Jews, 77; of Nestorians by Muhammadans, 99
Persia, 12, 22-3, 80, 83, 110; the Church in, 93-5, 98-9; kings
of, 93-5, 100, 102
Peter, S., 117, 120; Confessio of, 152; patrimony of, 65, 148;
Charles the Great's gift of lands to, 151; popes act in the name
of, 148-50
Peter the Stammerer, bishop of Alexandria, 8
Phantasiasts, 86
Philae, temple of, 111
Phocas the Cappadocian, emperor, 22
Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, 124, 192-4
Picts, heathens in Scotland, 114, 116
Pippin the Short, Frankish king, 150; anointed by S. Boniface
(751), 139, 147; by Pope Stephen II. (754), 148; relations
with the papacy, 144, 147-9; donation of, 149, 151, 194
Poictiers, Battle of, 146
Poland, conversion of, 125
Pomerania, 125
Poppo, bishop, missionary to the Danes, 131
Posen, bishopric of, 125
Pragmatic Sanction of Justinian for the government of Italy, 33-4
Prague, see of (bishopric, 973; archbishopric, 1343), 125, 129
Primasius, sixth-century theological writer in Africa, 106
Privilegia to monasteries granted by Gregory the Great, 69;
to the Cluniacs, 173-4
Procession of the Holy Ghost, Double (i.e. from the Father
and the Son), 76, 80-1, 193-4
Proconsularis (i.e. Africa Proconsularis, the modern Tunis
and Tripoli), 104
Procopius, 11, 26, 91 n., 94, 100, 112
Prussians, missions to, 125, 129
Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, 195
Pyrrhus, Monothelite heresiarch, 89, 108
Quicunque vult, 81-2
Quierzy (on the Oise), donation of, 151
Quini-sextan Council at Constantinople (in Trullo), 85, 89-92
Rabanus Maurus, 81
Radegund, S., Frankish princess, 51; monastery of, 171
Ratramnus of Corbie (died 868), 170
Ravenna, 85, 147, 149, 151, 201; Odowakar's capital, captured by
Goths, 29; recaptured by Belisarius, 30; mosaics at, 26;
archbishopric, 68, 157
Reccared, Wisigothic king in Spain, 73, 75-6, 80
Recceswinth, Wisigothic king in Spain, 76
Regensburg (Ratisbon), Bohemians baptized at, 128; see
of, 129, 138; Council of (792), 79
Remigius, S., baptizes Chlodowech, 43
Remismond, Suevic king in Spain, 73
Reparatus, bishop of Carthage, 106
Reunion of Eastern and Western Church (in 519), 10; sought by
Justinian, 11; nominal, after the Photian Schism, 194
Rheims, 195-6, 200-1
Rimbert, S., archbishop of Bremen, 130-1
Rome, Church and patriarchate of, 24, 65-6, 157; insists on
obsolete claims, 14; its supremacy repudiated at Constantinople,
85, 90; quarrel with Constantinople over the Ecthesis
and Type, 98; authorises the missions of S. Augustine, 117,
and S. Boniface, 136-9; attitude of S. Boniface to, 139;
connection with Ireland, 113-15, 122; with the East, 123; with
England, 117, 120-1; assumes the political rights of the
exarchate, 148-9; Eucharist, 179; councils at (680), 88;
(731), 157; (863), 192. See Church (Western), Papacy
Rome, city of, its peculiar history, 143; dominated by the local
nobles, 196
Romulus Augustulus, 29
Rügen, isle of, 127
Rule of Bangor, 54-5; of Basil, reformed by Theodore the
Studite, 163; of S. Benedict, 35, 58-9, 69, 119, 121, 171,
173, 175; of Cluny, 174-5; of S. Columban, 55, 171
Rupert, S., missionary in Bavaria, 135
Russia, conversion of, 6, 126-7; modern Russian Church, 95
Sabas, S., 15
Sabbas, archimandrite of the Studium, 162
Sabellians, followers of the heretic Sabellius (third century), 178
Sacramentary of Pope Gelasius I. (492-6), 182-3; of Gregory the
Great, 182
Sacraments, 176-181
Saints, Celtic "age of saints," 53; Merwing, 51; images of
the, 156-7
Salzburg, archbishopric, 127, 135, 138
Samaritans, 100
Samarkand, Nestorian bishopric of, 98
Sancho the Great, king of Navarre (970-1035), 78
Sapor II., king of Persia, 93
Saracens, 77, 158, 172; in Africa, 109; in Spain and Gaul, 146.
See Muhammadans.
Saxons, 135; forcible conversion by Charles the Great, 140-2,
197; the Saxons in Britain, 113, 117-18, 176; "Old"
Saxons of the Continent, 180
Schism between East and West, formal beginning due to
Monophysitism, 8; schism of 484-519, 68; schism of 649-81 caused
by the Ecthesis and Type, 88; steps towards, 149; the Photian,
192-4
Schleswig, converted, 130
Scholarship, 5, 38, 55. See Learning
Scholastica, S., sister of S. Benedict, 37
Scilly Isles, 132
Scotland, Church in, 114, 116-17, 119
Scotus, Johannes. See John the Scot
Sebert, king of the East Saxons, 176
Seleucia, see of, 93
Semi-Pelagianism, 72, 81
Septimania, 77, 146
Serbia, Church of, 124
Serbian Church, 23, 84
Sergius I., pope, 91
Sergius I., patriarch of Constantinople, 83, 87
Sermons, 64-5, 120, 163, 185, 188
Severus, Monophysite patriarch of Antioch, 10, 15, 86
Severus, patriarch of Aquileia, 62
Sigambrians, a Teutonic tribe, allied to the Franks, 43
Sigebert (Sigibert), Frankish king of Austrasia, 43, 54, 75
Silvester II., pope, 7, 125, 200-2
Simplicius, pope, 8
Siricius, pope, 195
Slaves, slavery, 130; freed by Gregory the Great, 65; Jews
enslaved in Spain, 77
Slavs, 44, 84; Charles the Great allied with heathen, 141;
conversion of, 123-9; attacked by Otto I., 197
Smbat, supposed author of the Paulician Key of Truth, 80
Soissons, 139, 195
Sophia, S., the Church of the Divine Wisdom, at Constantinople,
25-7; Church of, at Kiev, 127
Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, 87
Soracte, monastery, 145
Spain, 172, 196; Gregory the Great active in, 65; invaded by
the Franks, 74; Dagobert I. influential in, 44; Charles the
Great in, 140; conflict of Arianism and Catholicism in,
48; Catholicism wins, 62-3, 73, 75; conquered by the
Muhammadans, 77-8; Church has to contend with Islam, 72;
Catholicism survives in the North, 78; Eucharist, 179; Spanish
rite, 183; literature, 73
Squillace, monastery, 38-9
Stephen II. (or III.), pope, 148-9
Stephen III. (or IV.), pope, 151
Stephen, king of Hungary, 201
Strathclyde, early British Church of, 113
Studium, the, monastery at Constantinople, 161-3
Stylites, 25
Subiaco, S. Benedict at, 35
Suevi (a Teutonic confederate people) in Gaul, 41. See Mir,
Remismond
Sweden, missions to, 129-30
Syagrius, bishop of Autun, 49, 67 n.
Symmachus, Senator, father-in-law of Boethius, executed, 32
Syntagma, a collection of canons, compiled, 85, 178
Syria, 100-1, 156; Syrian Church, Monophysite and Nestorian, 9;
National Church, 13; monks disregard the Fifth General
Council, 20; Jacobites in, 23, 84; Adoptianism in, 79;
Monophysitism, 110; Monothelitism, 89; Muhammadan invasion, 108
Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople, 164
Tartars, 96-7
Tauresium, 91. See Justiniana Prima
Tebessa (in modern Algeria), monastery, 106
Thaddeus, Studite monk, 162
Theandric energy, 87, 89
Theodebert I., Frankish king, 47
Theodelind, Lombard queen, 56, 69, 134-5
Theoderic III., king of Neustria, 146
Theodora, empress (842), wife of Theophilus, 165
Theodora, paramour of Pope John X., mother of Marozia, 196
Theodore of Mopsuestia, 16-18
Theodore of the Studium (or the Studite), S., 124, 156, 160-4
Theodore of Tarsus, 115, 117, 169
Theodoret of Cyrrhus, 16-18
Theodoric the Ostrogoth, king of Italy, 29; his tolerant
ecclesiastical policy, 30; executes Symmachus and Boethius, 32;
aims at a united Italy, 60
Theodoric II., Frankish king of Burgundy, son of Childebert II., 56
Theodosia, S., 158
Theodosius II., emperor, 67
Theology, important in this period, 1; the predominant interest
in the literature, 5; the theology of statesmen and
military men, 9, 87; theology at Constantinople, 8, 156;
iconoclastic, 158-9; theology of S. John Damascene, 159-60
Theophanes, Greek chronicler (758-817), 111
Theophilus, emperor, 165
Thessalonica, 67-8, 123
Theudberga, wife of Chlothochar, king of Lotharingia, 191
Theudis, Wisigothic king in Spain, 74
Thomas of Edessa, 99
Thormod, missionary priest in Iceland, 132
Thorwald Kothransson, Icelander, 132
Thrace, Paulicianism in, 80
"Three Chapters," controversy of the, 16-20, 22, 62-3, 72, 99, 106-7
Thuringia(ns), 135-8
Tiberius II., emperor, 22
Tithes, 140
Toledo, cathedral of, 76; councils, 72; Third Synod (of 589), 76,
80; Fourth (of 633), 81; Sixteenth (of 695), 77
Tome of S. Leo, 63
Tomi, monks of, 14
Tonnenna, Victor of, 106-7
Totila, Gothic king, 37
Tours, 168; battle of, see Poictiers. See also Gregory of Tours
Transubstantiation, 171
Trier (Trèves), archbishop of, 192
Trullian Council (691) at Constantinople, 85, 89-92
Tunis, survival of the Church of, 110
Type, issued by Constans II., 88
Tzani, Asiatic people, converted, 94
Unity, the central idea of the period, 2, 154, 203; need of
unity in the Church, 70
"Universal bishop," title declined by Gregory the Great, 66;
Cluniac ideal, 175
Urban II., pope (1088-99), 174
Vandals, 197; in Gaul, 41; in Africa, 103-5
Venantius Fortunatus, bishop of Poictiers, 51, 75
Veni Creator Spiritus, 81
Venice, 143, 151, 157
Victor, bishop of Carthage, 108
Victor of Tonnenna (Victor Tununensis), 106-7
Victor Vitensis, 104-5
Vienne, 186
Vigilists, 15. See Akoimetai.
Vigilius, pope, 17, 20, 39-40, 106
Vivarium, monastery of, 38
Vladimir, S., of Russia, 126-7
Wales, Church of, 113, 118, 122; West Wales (i.e. Cornwall), 113
Wallachian Church, 23
Wamba, Wisigothic king in Spain, 76
Wandrille, S., 57
Wenceslas of Bohemia, S., 128-9
Wends, missions to the, 126
Whitby, Synod of (664), 116
Wilfrith (Wilfrid) of Ripon, S., 88, 117-18, 121, 169
Willehad, archbishop of Bremen, 142
William of Aquitaine, founder of the abbey of Cluny, 173
Willibald, biographer of S. Boniface, 138
Willibrord, S., Northumbrian missionary in Frisia, 136
Winfrith of Crediton (S. Boniface), 121, 136-40, 142
Wisigoths in Spain, 73-8; corruption of society, 73-4; accept
Catholicism, 5, 62-3, 73, 75; their monarchy falls before the
Moors, 146
Würzburg, 138, 147
York, school of, 116, 167
Zacharias, pope, 147
Zacharias, patriarch of Jerusalem, 101
Zeno, emperor, 7