Читать книгу Crux Ansata - H.G. Wells - Страница 10

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AN interesting amateur in theology who was destined to drive a wedge into the solidarity of the Christian system was the Emperor Charlemagne, Charles the Great, the friend and ally of King Alfred of Wessex. The wedge was unpremeditated. The learned, investing history with the undeserved dignity their scholarly minds craved, have endowed Charles with an almost inhuman foresight. He was the son of Pepin, who had been Mayor of the Palace to the last of the Merovingia Kings, and, on the strength of his being de facto King, he appealed to the Pope to transfer the Crown to his head. This the Pope did. Everywhere in Europe the ascendant rulers seized upon Christianity as a unifying force to cement their conquests. Christianity became a banner for aggressive chiefs—as it did in Uganda in Africa in the bloody days before that country was annexed to the British Empire.

Charlemagne was most simply and enthusiastically Christian, and his disposition to sins of the flesh, to a certain domestic laxity—he is accused among other things of incestuous relations with his daughters—merely sharpened his redeeming zeal for the Church. An aggressive Church had long since decided that sins of the flesh are venal sins when weighed against unorthodoxy, and he was able to offer up vast hecatombs of conquered pagans to appease the more and more complaisant Catholic Church. He insisted on their becoming Christians, and to refuse baptism or to retract after baptism were equally crimes punishable by death. After he was crowned Emperor he obliged every male subject over the age of twelve to renew his oath of allegiance and undertake to be not simply a good subject but a good Christian.

A new Pope, Leo III, in 795, made Charlemagne Emperor. Hitherto the court at Byzantium had possessed a certain Indefinite authority over the Pope. Strong emperors like Justinian had bullied the Popes and obliged them to visit Constantinople; weak emperors had annoyed them ineffectively. The idea of a breach, both secular and religious, with Constantinople had long been entertained at the Lateran, and in the Frankish power there seemed to be just the support that was necessary if Constantinople was to be defied.

So upon his accession Leo III sent the keys of the tomb of St. Peter and a banner to Charlemagne as the symbols of his sovereignty in Rome as King of Italy. Very soon the Pope had to appeal to the protection he had chosen. He was unpopular in Rome; he was attacked and ill-treated in the streets during a procession, and obliged to fly to Germany (799). Eginhard says his eyes were gouged out and his tongue cut off. He seems, however, to have had both eyes and tongue again a year later. Charlemagne brought him back to Rome and reinstated him (800).

Then occurred a very important scene. On Christmas Day in the year 800, as Charles was rising from prayer in the Church of St. Peter, the Pope, who had everything in readiness, clapped a crown upon his head and hailed him Caesar and Augustus. There was great popular applause. But Eginhard, the friend and biographer of Charlemagne, says that the new Emperor was by no means pleased by this coup of Pope Leo's. If he had known this was to happen, he said, "he would have not entered the Church, great festival though it was."

No doubt he had been thinking and talking of making himself Emperor, but he had evidently not intended that the Pope should make him Emperor. He had had some idea of marrying the Empress Irene, who at that time reigned in Constantinople, and so becoming monarch of both Eastern and Western Empires. But now he was obliged to accept the title in the manner that Leo had adopted, as a gift from the Pope, and in a way that estranged Constantinople and secured the separation of Rome from the Byzantine Church.

At first Byzantium was unwilling to recognise the imperial title of Charlemagne. But in 811 a great disaster fell upon the Byzantine Empire. The pagan Bulgarians, under their prince Krum, defeated and destroyed the armies of the Emperor Nicephorus, whose skull became a drinking cup for Krum. The great pat of the Balkan peninsula was conquered by these people. After this misfortune Byzantium was in no position to dispute this revival of the empire in the West, and in 812 Charlemagne was formally recognised by Byzantine envoys as Emperor and Augustus.

The defunct Western Empire rose again as the "Holy Roman Empire". While .its military strength lay north of the Alps, its centre of authority was Rome. It was from the beginning a divided thing, a claim and an argument rather than a necessary reality. The good German sword was always clattering over the Alps into Italy, and missions and legates toiling over in the reverse direction. But the Germans never could hold Italy permanently, because they could not stand the malaria that the ruined, neglected, undrained country fostered. And in Rome, as well as in several other of the cities of Italy, there smouldered a more ancient tradition, the tradition of the aristocratic republic, hostile to both Emperor and Pope.

In spite of the fact that we have a.life of him written by his contemporary, Eginhard, the character and personality of Charlemagne are difficult to visualise. Eginhard was a poor writer; he gives many particulars, but not the particulars that make a living figure. Charlemagne, he says, was a tall man, with a rather feeble voice; and he had bright eyes and a long nose. "The top of his head was round," whatever that may mean, and his hair was "white". Possibly that means he was a blond. He had a thick, rather short neck, and "his belly too prominent". He wore a tunic with a silver border, and gartered hose. He had a blue cloak, and was always girt with his sword, hilt and belt being of gold and silver.

He was a man of great animation and his abundant love affairs did not interfere at all with his incessant military and political labours He took much exercise was fond of pomp and religious ceremonies, and gave generously. He was a man of considerable intellectual enterprise, with a self-confident vanity rather after the fashion of William II, the ex-German Emperor, who died at Doorn so unimpressively the other day.

His mental activities are interesting, and they serve as a sample of the intellectuality of the time. Probably he could read; at meals he "listened to music or reading, but he never acquired the art of writing; "he used," says Eginhard, "to keep his writing book and tablets under his pillow, that when he had leisure he might practise his hand in forming letters, but he made little progress in an art begun too late in life." He certainly displayed a hunger for knowledge, and he took pains to attract men of learning to his Court.

These learned men were, of course, clergymen, there being no other learned men then in the world and naturally they gave a strongly clerical tinge to the information they imparted. At his Court, which was usually at Aix-la- Chapelle or Mayence, he whiled away the winter season by a curious institution called his "school", in which he and his erudite associates affected to lay aside all thoughts of worldly position, assumed names taken from the classical writers or from Holy Writ, and discoursed upon learning and theology. Charlemagne himself was "David". He developed a considerable knowledge of theology, and it is to him that we must ascribe the proposal to add the words filioque to the Nicene Creed—an addition that finally split the Latin and Greek Churches asunder. But it is more than doubtful whether he had any such separation in mind. He wanted to add a word or so to the Creed, just as the Emperor William II wanted to leave his mark on the German language and German books, and he took up this filioque idea, which was originally a Spanish innovation. Pope Leo discreetly opposed it. When it was accepted centuries later, it was probably accepted with the deliberate intention of enforcing the widening breach between Latin and Byzantine Christendom.

The filioque point is a subtle one, and a word or so of explanation may not seem amiss to those who are uninstructed theologically. Latin Christendom believes now that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son; Greek and Eastern Christians, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, without any mention of the Son. The latter attitude seems to incline a little towards the Arian point of view. The Catholic belief is that the Father and the Son have always existed together, world without end; the Greek orthodox idea is tainted by a very human disposition to think fathers ought to be at least a little senior to their sons. The reader must go to his own religious teachers for precise instruction upon this point.

The disposition of men in positions of supreme educational authority in a community, to direct thought into some particular channel by which their existence may be made the more memorable, is not uncommon: The Emperor William, for instance, helped to make the Germans a people apart, and did much for the spectacle-makers of Germany, by using his influence to sustain the heavy Teutonic black letter and insisting upon the rejection of alien words and roots from the good old German vocabulary. "Telephone" for instance was anathema, and "Fernsprecher" was substituted; and wireless became "drahtlos". So nationalism in Germany achieved the same end as the resistance of English stupidity to orthographic changes, and made the language difficult for and repulsive to foreigners.

The normal speech of Charlemagne was Frankish. He may have understood Latin, more particularly if it was used with consideration, but he could have had no opportunity of Greek. He made a collection of old German songs and tales, but these were destroyed by his son and successor, Louis the Pious, because of their paganism.