Читать книгу A Short History of Italy (476-1900) - Henry Dwight Sedgwick - Страница 16

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One great political effect of the Lombard conquest was the opportunity which it gave the Papacy, while Lombard and Byzantine were buffeting each other, to grow strong and independent. Had Italy remained a Greek province the Pope would have been a mere provincial bishop, barely taking ceremonial precedence of the metropolitans of Ravenna, Aquileia, and Milan; had Italy become a Lombard kingdom, the Pope would have been a royal appointee; but with the Lombard kings fighting the Byzantine Exarchs, each side needing papal aid and sometimes bidding for it, the Pope was enabled to become master of the city and of the duchy of Rome, and the real head of the Latin people as well as of the Latin clergy. In fact, the growth of the Roman Catholic Church is the most interesting development in this period. The Lombards gave it the opportunity to grow strong and independent, but the power to take advantage of the opportunity came from within. This power was compact of many elements, secular and spiritual. From the ills of the world men betook themselves with southern impulsiveness to things religious; they sought refuge, order, security in the Church. In the greater interests of life among the Latins the rising ecclesiastical fabric had no competitor. Paganism had vanished before Christianity, philosophy before theology. Literature, art, science had perished. Italy had ceased to be a country. The ancient Empire of Rome had faded into a far-away memory. The wreck of the old nobility left the ecclesiastical hierarchy without a rival. In the midst of the general ruin of Roman civilization the Church stood stable, offering peace to the timid, comfort to the afflicted, refinement to the gentle, a home to the homeless, a career to the ambitious, power to the strong. By a hundred strings the Church drew men to her; in a hundred modes she sowed the prolific seeds of ecclesiastical patriotism. She was essentially Roman, and gathered to herself whatever was left of life and vigour in the Roman people. With a structure and organization framed on the Imperial pattern, she slowly assumed in men's minds an Imperial image; and Rome, a provincial town whose civil magistrates busied themselves with sewers and aqueducts, again began to inspire men with a strange confidence in a new Imperial power.

In addition to the strength derived from her immense moral and spiritual services, the Church had the support of two potent forces, ignorance and superstition. The general break-up of the old order had lowered the common level of knowledge. Everybody was ignorant, everybody was superstitious. The laws of nature were wholly unknown. Every ill that happened, whether a man tripped over his threshold, or a thunderbolt hit his roof, was ascribed to diabolic agencies. The old pagan personification of natural forces, without its poetry, was revived. The only help lay in the priest, a kind of magical protector, who with beads, relics, bones, incense, and incantation defended poor humanity from the assaults of devils. Thus, while all civil society suffered from ignorance, while every individual suffered from the awful daily, hourly, presence of fear, the Church profited by both.

Beside these intangible resources, the Church, or to speak more precisely the Papacy, had others of a material kind. For centuries pious men, especially when death drew near, had made great gifts of land to the bishops of Rome, until these bishops had become the greatest landed proprietors in Italy. Most of their estates were in Sicily, but others were scattered all over Italy, and even in Gaul, Illyria, Sardinia, and Corsica. In extent they covered as much as eighteen hundred square miles, and yielded an enormous income. This income enabled the Popes to maintain churches and monasteries, schools and missionaries, to buy off raiding armies of Lombards, and also to equip soldiers of their own. These estates the Church owned as a mere private landlord. During the Gothic dominion and the restoration of Imperial rule, she had no rights of sovereignty. But later on, during the disturbed period of border war between Lombards and Greeks, we find the Popes actually ruling the duchy of Rome.

The corner-stone of the great papal power, however, was laid by the genius of one man, who organized the monastic sentiment of the sixth century and put it to the support of the Papacy. There had been monks in Italy long before St. Benedict (480–544), but as civil society disintegrated, men in ever greater numbers fled from the world, and sought peace in solitude and in monastic communities. St. Benedict perceived that the monastic rules and customs derived from the East were ill suited to the West; so he devised a monastic system, and formulated his celebrated Rule, which became the pattern for all other monastic rules in Europe. He founded a monastery at Subiaco, a little village near Rome, and afterwards the famous abbey on Monte Cassino, a high hill midway between Rome and Naples, which became the mother of all Benedictine monasteries and shone like a light in the Dark Ages. Benedict's ideal was to help men shut themselves off from the temptations of life and realize, as far as they could, the prayer "Thy kingdom come … on earth as it is in Heaven." He ordained community of property, and required a novitiate. Most strictly he forbade idleness, and with special insistence exhorted his brethren to till the ground with their own hands. Intellectual interests followed; and Benedictine monks became the teachers not only of agriculture, but of handicraft, of art and learning. His Order spread fast over Italy and Gaul, and in time over Spain, England, and Germany. Its communities, like the old castra romana, upheld the authority of Rome and enforced her dominion.

The attractions of the monastic life at Monte Cassino are well set out in a letter written (after St. Benedict's day) to one of the abbots, by a man of the world who had once lived there: "Though great spaces separate me from your company, I am bound to you by a clinging affection that can never be loosed, nor are these short pages enough to tell you of the love that torments me all the time for you, for the superiors and for the brethren. So much so that when I think about those leisure days spent in holy duties, the pleasant rest in my cell, your sweet religious affection, and the blessed company of those soldiers of Christ, bent on holy worship, each brother setting a shining example of a different virtue, and the gracious talks on the perfections of our heavenly home, I am overcome, all my strength goes, and I cannot keep tears from mingling with the sighs that burst from me. Here I go about among Catholics, men devoted to Christian worship; everybody receives me well, everybody is kind to me from love of our father Benedict, and for the sake of your merits; but compared with your monastery the palace is a prison; compared with the quiet there this life is a tempest."[4]

What Benedict did for the monastic orders, another great man, St. Gregory (540–604), did for the Papacy itself. Gregory the Great, the most commanding figure in the history of Europe between Theodoric and Charlemagne, was a Roman, made of the same stuff as Scipio and Cato, and presented the interesting character of a Christian and an antique Roman combined. Born of a noble Roman family, Gregory was educated in Rome, and entered the service of the state, in which he rose to the high office of prefect of the city; but, dissatisfied with civil life, he abandoned it and became a monk. He wanted to give himself up wholly to a monastic life, but deemed it his duty to accept office in the papal service, and filled the distinguished position of papal ambassador (to use a modern term) at the Imperial court at Constantinople. In 590 he was elected Pope, half against his will, for he desired to be either a monk or a missionary; but he felt that the hopes of civilization and the future of religion lay in the Papacy, and he applied himself with energy to his new task. This task was as complex and multifarious as possible. It concerned all Europe, from Sicily to England. Rome itself was in a deplorable condition, left undefended by the Exarch, and threatened by the Lombards of Spoleto, who harried the country to the very gates, murdering some Romans and carrying others off as slaves. Gregory had to take complete control of the city, military and civil. He wrote: "I do not know any more whether I now fill the office of priest or of temporal prince; I must look to our defence and everything else. I am paymaster of the soldiers." He kept up the courage of the Romans, and tried to draw spiritual good out of their plight. It was impossible for a contemporary eye to see that under present wretchedness lay germinating the seeds of empire; yet Gregory acted as if he beheld them. In spite of apprehensions of the end of the world he organized the Church to endure for centuries. Both at home and abroad he displayed a tireless activity.

Among the foreign events of his pontificate are the conversion of England by Augustine (597) and the ministry of St. Columbanus (543–615) among the Franks, Alemanni, and Lombards. It was Gregory who saw the handsome fairhaired boys from England standing in the market-place and said, "Non Angli sed angeli." He had the true imperial instinct, and always encouraged the clergy in distant parts of Europe to visit Rome and to apply to Rome for counsel and aid. The respect in which he was held may be inferred from the titles given him by Columbanus: "To the holy lord and father in Christ, the most comely ornament of the Roman Church, the most august flower, so to speak, of all this languishing Europe, the illustrious overseer, to him who is skilled to inquire into the theory of the Divine causality, I, a mean dove (Columbanus), send Greeting in Christ." Gregory also maintained close relations with the clergy in Africa, and received homage from the Spanish bishops, for Spain had recently been converted from Arianism to Catholicism. He was by no means content to confine his dealings to the clergy, but was in frequent correspondence with kings and queens of western Europe, as well as with the Emperor and Empress in Constantinople. His immense energy made itself felt everywhere. He made rules for the liturgy; and mass is still celebrated partly according to his directions. He reformed church music and founded schools for the Gregorian chant. He administered the papal revenues, superintending the management of farms, stables, and orchards. He founded monasteries, he supported hospitals and asylums.

Benedict and Gregory are the two great figures of this period, and, though no worthy successor followed for several generations, they did their work so well that the Papacy, like a great growing oak, continued to spread its power conspicuously in the eyes of the world, and also, out of sight, in the hearts and habits of men.

The relations between the Papacy and the Empire were difficult. The Popes were subjects of the Emperor. The whole ecclesiastical organization throughout the Empire was subject to the Imperial will, just as the civil or military service was. The Papacy did not like this position of subordination and resented any interference in papal affairs. Though Odoacer, Theodoric, and Justinian had always asserted their right to exercise a supervision over papal elections, the Popes had never acquiesced willingly, and even in those early days showed a marked disposition to take exclusive control of what they deemed their own affairs. It might be supposed that the Papacy, mindful of the great danger of a Lombard conquest of Rome, would have clung to the Empire; but after the Lombards had become Catholics the gap between the Romans and the Greco-Oriental Empire was nearly as wide as that between them and the Lombards. There was a fundamental difference between the Greek mind, floating over metaphysics and speculative theology, and the Roman mind, bound to political conceptions and practical ends. A theology which would satisfy a congregation in St. Sophia would not suit the worshippers in St. Peter's. The Empire, obliged to adapt theological niceties to political necessities, favoured any creed of compromise, which should promote political concord and unity. Rome, with its despotic, imperial instincts, felt that orthodoxy was its strength, and maintained an inflexible creed. The two were an ill-yoked pair, and quarrels were inevitable.

The relations between the Papacy and the Lombards were more simple. They varied between war, and friendship real or feigned. In the beginning, and even, as we have seen, in Gregory's time, there was war; but then began the conversion of the Lombards to Christianity, and intervals of peace followed, during which the Lombard king saluted the Pope as "Most Holy Father," and the Pope replied "My well-beloved Son."