Читать книгу Crises in the History of the Papacy - Joseph McCabe - Страница 6

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During the half-century which followed the death of Damasus occurred two of the decisive events in the transformation of the Roman Empire into Christian Europe. Paganism was destroyed, and the Empire was shattered. Jerome had, with rhetorical inaccuracy, described the great temple of Jupiter as squalid and deserted in the days of Damasus. Now it was in truth deserted, for the imperial seal was set on its closed doors; and the same seal guarded the door of the temples of Isis and Mithra. The homeless gods had sheltered for a time in the schools and in patrician mansions, but these also had fallen with the Empire. The southern half of Europe became a disordered, semi-Christian world, over which poured from the northern forests fresh armies of barbarians. The City of Man was wrecked; and it was not unnatural that the Papacy should aspire to make its old metropolis the centre of the new City of God.

Two Popes of weak ability had followed Damasus, and witnessed, rather than accomplished, the ruin of the old religion. It was Ambrose who had directed the convenient youth of Gratian and Valentinian II., and had dislodged the pagans and other rivals at the point of the spear. Innocent I. (402-417) was a greater man: an upright priest, an able statesman, a zealous believer in the divine right of Popes. Milman has finely drawn him serenely holding his sceptre at Rome while the Emperor cowered behind the fortifications at Ravenna. While Rome tumbled in ruins about him, he continued calmly to tell the bishops of Gaul and Spain and Italy what the "Apostolic See" directed them to do. His puny yet bombastic successor, Zosimus, maintained the solitary blunder, without the redeeming personality, of Innocent, and might have wrecked the Papacy if he had not died within a year or so. The worthier Boniface and still worthier Celestine restored Roman prestige in some measure, and, in 440, after the edifying but undistinguished Pontificate of Sixtus III., Leo the Great entered the chronicle.

Leo, a Roman of Tuscan extraction, was the chief deacon of the Roman Church, and corresponded with Cyril of Alexandria on Eastern affairs. It was probably at his instigation that the learned Cassianus wrote his treatise On the Incarnation of Christ. In 440, Leo was sent by the Emperor to reconcile the generals Aetius and Albinus, who quarrelled while the Empire perished. Sixtus died in his absence, and Leo was unanimously elected to the Papacy. Toward the close of September he returned to Rome, and glanced about the troubled world which he had now to rule.

The dogmatic Papal conception, which we find dawning in the mind of Damasus and see very clear in the mind of Innocent I. and his successors, reached its full development, on the spiritual side, in the mind of Leo the Great. This development was inevitable. There were Eastern, and even some Western, bishops who maintained, against Leo, that the prestige of the Roman See was merely the prestige of Rome, but the answer of the Papacy was easy and effective. In the Gospels which Europe now treasured, Peter was the "rock" on which the Church was built, and to him alone had been given the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Had the Church lost its foundation when Peter died? Were the keys buried beside the bones of Peter in that marble tomb at the foot of the Vatican? There was, from the clerical point of view, logic in the Roman bishop's claim to have inherited the princedom. Leo from the first hour of his Pontificate was sincerely convinced of it. His sermons are full of it. To him is committed "the care of all the Churches": a phrase which he bequeaths to his successors. He is the new type of Roman, blending the ideas of Jerome and Augustine. The wreck of the City of Man matters little. What matters is that these Arian Goths and Vandals are trampling on the City of God: that the churches of Gaul and Spain and Italy and Africa and the East are in disorder, and the successor of Peter must restore their discipline. He is so absorbed in his divine duty that he does not notice how the circumstances favour him. Every other lofty head in the Empire is bowed, and from the seething and impoverished provinces hundreds are looking to the strong man at Rome.

His early letters are the letters of a Supreme Pontiff. The African bishops, he hears, suffer dreadful disorders in their churches. Elections to church-dignities are bought and sold: even laymen and twice-married clerics become bishops. With serene indifference to the earlier history of the African Church and its tradition of independence, he peremptorily recalls the canons and insists on their observance.47 Fortunately for him, the long struggle against the Donatists and the devastating onset of the Vandals have enfeebled, almost annihilated, the African Church, and there is none to question his authority.

He hears that Anatolius has been made Bishop of Thessalonica, and writes48 to remind him that he is the "vicar" of the Roman bishop, the successor of Peter, "on the solidity of which foundation the Church is established." When, at a later date, Anatolius uses his power harshly, he sternly rebukes him. And it is interesting to notice what the discipline is on which he insists in this letter.49 Even subdeacons shall not marry, or, if they are married, shall not know their wives. We are very far away from Callistus.

Another aspect of Leo's character appears in his treatment of the Manichæans at Rome: an interesting illustration of how he kept the strength and serenity of the old Roman though lacking his culture. Leo had a terribly sombre idea of the Manichæans. They lingered in obscure corners of the metropolis, and met stealthily, just as Christians had done two centuries earlier; and of them were told, as had been told of the obscure Christians, dreadful stories. Leo conducted a great inquisition in 444, and brought the Manichæan bishop, with his "elect," to a solemn judgment before the clergy and nobles of Rome. There, he says,50 they all confessed that the violation of a girl of ten years was part of their ritual. He called down upon them the secular arm, and crushed them in Rome and Italy. What sort of a judicial process was employed to elicit this extraordinary confession—so utterly at variance with all that we know of the ascetic Manichæans—we are not told. But we are painfully reminded of a similar declaration of Augustine in his old age.51

In Gaul, the Pope encountered one of the last opponents of Papal aims in the West. The province was completely demoralized by the triumphant barbarians and by the arrival of lax clergy from Africa. In a letter of uncertain date,52 Leo gives us a dark picture of the state of things in the southern provinces, and this is more than confirmed in the work of the Marseilles priest Salvianus, De Gubernatione Dei. Laymen pose as bishops, Leo says: priests sleep with their wives, and marry their daughters to men who keep concubines: monks serve in the army, or marry: and so on. From this disordered world men were ever ready to appeal to the authority of Rome, and, in 445, a Bishop Celidonius came to complain of the harshness of his metropolitan, the austere and saintly Hilary of Arles. Hilary followed his Bishop to Rome, and, when Leo decided against him, the saint made use, says Leo,53 of "language which no layman even should dare to use and no priest to hear," and then "fled disgracefully" from Rome.

Again we are in a dilemma between two saints, and we must weigh as best we can the letters of Leo against the biography of Hilary. It will be found a general truth of early Papal history that the man who appeals to Rome is heard more indulgently than the opponent who did not appeal. Hilary, who had deposed the Bishop in plain accordance with the rules, resented Leo's conduct, and scoffed at his supposed supremacy. He then apprehended violence, and stealthily left Rome for Gaul. Leo thereupon—or after hearing new charges against Hilary—wrote to the bishops of Vienne54 that they were released from obedience to Hilary, who was thenceforward to confine himself to Arles. Whether Hilary ever submitted or no we have no certain knowledge, but the affair had an important sequel. In the same year (449), an imperial rescript,55 confessedly obtained by Leo, confirmed the sentence, and added:

We lay down this for ever, that neither the bishops of Gaul nor those of any other province shall attempt anything contrary to ancient usage, without the authority of the venerable man, the Pope of the Eternal City.

Even in the height of this quarrel other provinces were not neglected, as a few letters of the year 447 amply show. The letter to the Spanish Bishop Turribius of Astorga56 is notable as the first explicit Papal approval of the execution of a heretic. It is usual to point out that the errors of Priscillian, the heretic in question, were believed to include magical practices (then a legal and social crime) as well as Manichæan and Gnostic tenets. But we must recognize one of the most terrible principles of the Middle Ages, and something far more than social zeal, in the following words of Leo:

Although ecclesiastical mildness shrinks from blood-punishments, yet it is aided by the severe decrees of Christian princes, since they who fear corporal suffering will have recourse to spiritual remedies.

Here is no reference to legal or social crimes, but to an error which concerns the ecclesiastic. Similar letters, enforcing discipline in the accents of an undisputed head of the Church, were sent to the bishops of Sicily,57 the bishop of Beneventum,58 and the bishop of Aquileia.

These quotations from the letters and sermons of Leo will suffice, not only to show the untiring energy and lofty aim of the man, but to convince us that the primacy of Rome in the West is now won. West of the Adriatic, St. Hilary is the last great rebel against the Roman conception. It is true that this spiritual supremacy is still, in part, reliant on "the severe decrees of Christian princes," but the imperial authority is fast fading into nothing, and in another generation the Papal autocracy will stand alone. Leo was not ambitious. Something of the instinctive masterliness of the older Roman may be detected in his actions, but he was a profoundly religious man, seeking neither wealth nor honours of earth, convinced at once that he discharged a divine duty and exerted an authority of the most beneficent value to that disordered Christendom. The calamities of Europe had changed the empty glories of a Damasus into a power second only to that of Octavian.

When we turn to the East we have not only a most valuable indication of the evolution of Christendom into two independent and hostile Churches, but an even more interesting revelation of subtle and unexpected shades in the character of Leo. The great Pope, aided by the very calamities of the time, fastens his primacy on Europe; and, with even mightier exertions and the most tense use of all his resources, he proves that an extension of that primacy to the East is for ever impossible.

His friendly correspondence with Cyril of Alexandria was resumed in the year 444, and, in the adjustment of their differences, Leo made concessions. In the same year, Cyril died, and his successor Dioscorus was addressed with the same recognition of equality. There are differences in points of discipline, but Leo is content to say59: "Since the blessed Peter was made chief of the apostles by the Lord, and the Roman Church abides by his instructions, it is impossible to suppose that his holy disciple Mark, who first ruled the Church of Alexandria, gave it other regulations." Five years later, however, Leo received from the East an appeal against the Bishop of Constantinople, and a notable conflict began.

In the unending struggle in the East over the nature of Christ, the monks, a fierce and turbulent rabble living on the fringes of the great cities, had been the most effective champions of orthodoxy, and great was their excitement when the archimandrite (or abbot) of one of their large monasteries outside Constantinople was accused of heresy. The heresy is really diagnosed as such by the proper authorities, but it is not superfluous for the historian to observe that the monk Eutyches was godson of the most powerful eunuch at the court, and this eunuch was detested by the virtuous Empress Pulcheria and by Flavian, the Bishop of Constantinople. Eutyches was condemned by a synod in 448, and he appealed to Leo. I have observed that the appealer—especially from a province where Roman authority was disputed—always had a gracious hearing at the Lateran. In February, 449, Leo wrote to Flavian60 to express his surprise that he had not sent a report of the proceedings to Rome and that he had disregarded the appeal which the monk had made from his sentence to Rome. However, since appeal has been made to Leo, "we want to know the reasons of your action, and we desire a full account to be communicated to us." Flavian's reply61 curtly described the heresy and trusted that Leo would see the justice of the sentence.

In the early summer, the Emperors of East and West issued a joint summons to the bishops of Christendom to assemble in Council at Ephesus, and Leo's letters indicate a feverish activity. His chief work was to write a long dogmatic letter62 on the nature of Christ—a very able theological essay—to be read by his Legates at the Council. Dioscorus of Alexandria presided over this imposing assembly of 360 bishops and representative clergy, in the presence of two imperial commissioners, the Papal Legates, and the patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem, yet it has passed into Western ecclesiastical history under the opprobrious title, given to it by Leo,63 of "The Robbers' Meeting." It is quite true that the sittings dissolved in brawls, and monks and soldiers brandished their ominous weapons over the heads of the bishops, but that was not unprecedented. The main fact was that Dioscorus contemptuously refused to hear the Roman Legates, as Leo says, and induced the Council to restore Eutyches and depose Flavian. Deacon Hilary, one of the Legates, fled in terror of his life, and unfolded these enormities to Leo, whose correspondence now became intense and indignant.

For a few months, Leo made strenuous efforts to redeem the prestige of his See. We know, since 1882, that Flavian in turn appealed to Rome, but Leo needed no new incentive. He wrote repeatedly to the pious Pulcheria, to Theodosius, to his "vicar" in Thessalonica, and to the monks, priests, and people of Constantinople. He knew the situation well. Alexandria had defied Constantinople, but the case of Constantinople was weakened by the division of court-factions and the monkish support of Eutyches. It seemed an admirable occasion for Rome to adjudicate, and Leo pressed Theodosius and Pulcheria64 to summon an Ecumenical Council at Rome. In the thick of the struggle (February, 450), Valentinian III. visited Rome with the court, and Leo, with tears in his eyes, besought the Empress Galla Placidia to work for the Roman Council. Galla Placidia knew no more than the monks about theology, and was more concerned about her wayward daughter Honoria, but she urged Pulcheria to ensure the holding of the Council at Rome. Presently there came from Constantinople the news that Theodosius was dead, Pulcheria was mistress of the court, the eunuch-godfather had been executed, the monk exiled, and the Archbishop Flavian restored to his See.

But the more agreeable aspect of this situation was soon darkened by a report that the people of Constantinople had compelled Pulcheria to contract a virginal marriage with Marcian, and the new Emperor had summoned an Ecumenical Council in the East. Leo, for reasons which we may understand presently, now made every effort to prevent the holding of a Council,65 but the Emperor would not endanger his position by flouting the Eastern Church, and, on October 8th, some six hundred bishops gathered at Chalcedon. Four Legates represented Leo, and were awarded a kind of presidency of the Council. Leo's great doctrinal letter was received with thunders of applause, and, when it was speedily decided to condemn Dioscorus (who had gone the length of excommunicating Leo), it was one of the Papal Legates who pronounced the sonorous sentence. But all knew that these compliments were the prelude to a very serious struggle.

After the fourteenth session, the Papal Legates and imperial commissioners affected to believe that the business of the day was over. Later in the day, however, a fifteenth session was held, and the two hundred bishops present framed the famous twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon. It runs:

As in all things we follow the ordinances of the holy fathers and know the recently read canon of the hundred and fifty bishops [of the Council of Constantinople], so do we decree the same in regard to the privileges of the most holy Church of Constantinople. Rightly have the fathers conceded to the See of Old Rome its privileges on account of its character as the Imperial City, and, moved by the same considerations, the one hundred and fifty bishops have awarded the like privileges to the most Holy See of New Rome.66

This drastic restriction of the Roman bishop to the West, and disdainful assurance that the prestige of the city of Rome was the only basis of his primacy, was read in the next session, and the Papal Legates were gravely disturbed. There can be very little doubt that, as Hefele says, the Legates had abstained from the fifteenth session because they knew that this canon would be discussed and passed. There was no secrecy about it, and there was much in previous sessions that led to it. Indeed, it is clear that Leo himself knew of the design, and this probably explains his resistance, which has puzzled many, to the holding of the Council. In the heat of the discussion, the Roman Legate, Boniface, produced this instruction from Leo: "If any, taking their stand on the importance of their cities, should endeavour to arrogate anything to themselves, resist them with all decision."67 Bishop Eusebius of Dorylæum (the accuser of Eutyches) then said that he had read the third canon of Constantinople to Leo at Rome some time before the Council, and that Leo had assented to it. Leo afterwards denied this, but we must assume that he merely denied having consented, not the reading of the canon to him. It is quite clear that Leo prepared his Legates for this discussion.

It implies no reflection whatever on the character of Leo that he should instruct his Legates diplomatically to obstruct the passing of a canon which he regarded as contrary to a divine ordination. But the next act of his Legates is more serious. Bishop Paschasinus, the chief Legate, produced and read, in Latin, the sixth canon of the famous Council of Nicæa, and the Greeks were amazed to learn, when it was translated, that it awarded the primacy to Rome. There is now no doubt that this was a spurious or adulterated canon, and the feelings of the Greeks, when they consulted the genuine canon, can be imagined. The session closed in a weak compromise. The Legates were allowed to protest that the twenty-eighth canon was passed in their absence, and was injurious to the rights of their Bishop, "who presided over the whole Church." The Greeks politely registered their protest, endorsed the canon, and proceeded to indite a very Greek letter to the Roman Bishop. They express to Leo68 their deep joy at the successful congress, their entire respect for "the voice of Peter," their loving gratitude that, through his Legates, he had presided over them "as the head over the members"; but they admit that one of their canons did not commend itself to his Legates and they trust that he will at once gratify their Emperor by endorsing it! Christendom was divided into two parts.

The sequel matters little. The Legates returned and declared that the signatures to the canon had been extorted (as Leo afterwards wrote), though this point had been raised in their presence by the imperial commissioners, and its falsity put beyond dispute. To Marcian, to Pulcheria, and to the new Bishop of Constantinople, Anatolius, Leo wrote acrid letters, denouncing the miserable vanity and ambition of Anatolius and the violation of the (spurious) canons of Nicæa. Marcian curtly requested him—almost ordered him69—to confirm the results of the Council without delay, and Leo signed the doctrinal decisions. There the matter ended. Rome affected to treat the famous canon as invalid, and the East genially ignored the absence of Leo's signature.70

In the midst of his feverish efforts to defeat this Eastern rebellion, Leo was summoned to meet the terrible King of the Huns, and the memory of his triumph, gathering volume from age to age, has completely obliterated his failure to dominate the Greeks. Italy, painfully enfeebled by the Goths, now saw "the scourge of God" slowly descend its northern slopes and prepare for a raid on the south. Leo and a group of Roman officials met Attila on the banks of the Mincio, and the ferocious King and his dreaded Huns meekly turned their backs on Italy and retired to the East. Pen and brush and legend have embellished that wonderful deliverance until it has become a mystery and a miracle, but it was neither mystery nor miracle to the men who first made a scanty record of it. Jornandes71 following the older historian Priscus, says that Attila was hesitating whether to advance on Rome or no at the moment when Leo and his companions arrived; his officers were trying to dissuade him, and were appealing to his superstition with a reminder of the fate of Alaric after he had sacked Rome. Prosper merely says in his Chronicle that Leo was well received, and succeeded. Idatius, Bishop of Aquæ Flaviæ at the time, does not even mention Leo in his Chronicle. The Huns, he says, were severely stricken by war, by famine, and by some epidemic, and, "being in this plight, they made peace with the Romans and departed."72 But Rome at the time knew nothing of these fortunate circumstances, and, in the delirious joy of its deliverance, imagined the savage Hun shrinking in awe before its venerable Bishop: kept on imagining, indeed, until some pious fancy of the eighth century believed that the holy apostles had appeared beside the Pope.

When, a few years later (455) a fresh invasion threatened Rome—when the vicious incompetence of the court amid all its desolation set afoot another feud and brought the Vandals from Africa—Leo went out once more to plead for the impoverished city. Genseric was not a savage; the Vandals are libelled by the grosser implication we associate with their name today. Yet he altered not one step of his onward course at the petitions or the threats of the venerable Pontiff. To say that he consented to refrain from slaying or torturing those who submitted, and from firing the city, is merely to say that Leo failed to wring any concession from the largely civilized Vandal. The aged Pontiff sadly returned with his clergy, and for a whole fortnight had to listen in the Lateran Palace to the shrieks of the women who were dragged from their homes, and to receive accounts of the plundering of his churches. The Church of St. Peter and, probably, the Lateran Church alone were spared. And when the Vandal ships had sailed away with their thousands of noble captives, including the Empress Eudoxia, and their mounds of silver, bronze, and marble, Leo had to melt down the larger vessels of the great basilicas to find the necessary chalices for his priests.

Ancestral feelings must have stirred unconsciously in the mind of Leo when he beheld this second ravage of the city of his fathers, but he at once resumed his Pontifical rule. On his return from the north of Italy, he had found occasion to act once more in the East as if the canon of the last Council were forgotten. Now the monks of Palestine had asserted their unyielding zeal, had driven the patriarch of Jerusalem from his seat, and had won to their cause the romantic Empress Eudoxia (of the Eastern court) whose suspected amours had brought on her a polite sentence of exile. Leo at once, somewhat superfluously, called the pious Marcian's attention to the ecclesiastical disorders in his kingdom, and, apparently at that Emperor's request, wrote paternal admonitions to Eudoxia and to the monks. It was gratifying to be able to report presently that the disorders were at an end.

Later (in 453) the monks of Cappadocia gave trouble; and the monks and other supporters of the deposed Dioscorus at Alexandria entered upon a far graver agitation, and murdered their new archbishop. The pious Marcian, to make matters worse, died (457), and, by one of those strange intrigues which disgraced the Eastern court, Leo the Isaurian, an astute peasant, mounted the golden throne. On this man Leo's diplomatic mixture of courtly language and high sacerdotal pretensions made little impression. In spite of Leo's protests73 he called another General Council, and Leo had to be content to send Legates to inform the assembled bishops what is "the rule of apostolic faith"; which he again set forth in a long dogmatic epistle.74 To the last year, Leo maintained, serenely and unswervingly, his calm assumption of jurisdiction over the East. Whether he wrote to the patriarch of Antioch,75 or the patriarch of Constantinople,76 or the patriarchs of Jerusalem and Alexandria, he spoke as if his sovereignty had never been questioned. "The care of all the churches" lies on his shoulders. He disdains diplomacy and argument. His tone is arrogant and dogmatic in the highest degree, yet no man can read reflectively those long and imperious epistles and not realize that he spoke, not as the individual Leo, demanding personal prestige, but as the successor of Peter, obeying a command which, he sincerely believed, Christ had laid upon him.

So the Papacy was built up. Leo went his way on November 10, 461, and was buried, fitly, in the vestibule of St. Peter's. He had formulated for all time the Papal conception that the successor of Peter had the care of all the churches of the world. A bishop shall not buy his seat in Numidia: a rabble of monks shall not rebel in Syria: a prelate shall not harshly treat his clergy in Gaul, but the Bishop of Rome must see to it. How that gaunt frame of duty was perfected in the next two centuries, and how the prosperity of later times hid the austere frame under a garment of flesh, is the next great chapter in the evolution of the Roman Pontificate.