Читать книгу Crises in the History of the Papacy - Joseph McCabe - Страница 7

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Seventeen Pontiffs successively ruled in the Lateran Palace during the hundred and thirty years which separate the death of Leo I. and the accession of Gregory I. The first seven were not unworthy to succeed Leo, although one of them, Anastasius (496-498), is unjustly committed to Dante's hell for his liberality.77

During their tenure of office the Arian Ostrogoth Theodoric set up his promising kingdom in Italy, and the stricken country partly recovered. But the succeeding Popes were smaller-minded men, looking darkly on the heresy of Theodoric and longing to see him displaced by the Catholic Eastern Emperor. Their unfortunate policy was crowned by a betrayal of Rome to the troops of Justinian; and its fruit was the establishment on the throne of Peter, by the unscrupulous Theodora, of the sorriest adventurer that had yet defiled it (Pope Vigilius), the reduction of Italy to the state of a province of the corrupt and extortionate East, and a lamentable dependence of the See of Rome on the whim of the Byzantine autocrat. Seeing its increasing feebleness, a new and fiercer tribe of the barbarians, the Lombards, poured over Italy; and it was a city of ruins, a kingdom of desolation, a continent of anarchy, which Gregory I. was, in the year 590, forced to undertake to control.

At Rome the monuments of what was shudderingly called a pagan age were falling, year by year, into the soil which would preserve them for a more appreciative race. In Gregory's day, across the Tiber from the old quarter, there were to be seen only the mouldering crowns of the theatres and amphitheatres, the grass-girt ruins on the Capitol and on the Palatine, and the charred skeletons of thousands of patrician mansions on the more distant hills. Forty thousand Romans now trembled where a million had once boasted their eternal empire. And, as one sees in some fallen forest, a new life was springing up on the ruins. Beside the decaying Neronian Circus rose the Basilica of St. Peter's, to which strange types of pilgrims made their way under the modest colonnade leading from the river. From the heart of the old Laterani Palace towered the great Basilica of the Saviour (later of St. John) and the mansion of the new rulers of the world. The temples were still closed, and tumbling into ruins; for no one yet proposed to convert into churches those abodes of evil spirits, which one passed hurriedly at night. But on all sides churches had been built out of the fallen stones, and monks and nuns trod the dismantled fora, and new processions filed along the decaying streets. If you mounted the hills, you would see the once prosperous Campagna a poisonous marsh, sending death into the city every few years; and you would learn that such was the condition of much of Italy, where the Lombard now completed the work of Goth and Greek, and that from the gates of Constantinople to the forests of Albion this incomprehensible brood of barbarians was treading under foot what remained of Roman civilization.

The book of what we call ancient history was closed: the Middle Age was beginning. Gregory was peculiarly adapted to impress the world at this stage of transition. His father, Gordianus, had been a wealthy patrician, with large estates in Sicily and a fine mansion on the Cælian hill. De Rossi would make him a descendant of the great family of the Anicii, but the deduction is strained. Gregory's mother was a saint. He inherited vigour and administrative ability, and was reared in the most pious and most credulous spirit of the time. He was put to letters, and we are told that he excelled all others in every branch of culture. Let us say, from his works, that—probably using the writings of the Latin fathers as models—he learned to write a Latin which Jerome would almost have pronounced barbarous, but which people of the sixth century would think excellent, at times elegant. There was very little culture left in Rome in Gregory's days.78 About the time when Gregory came into the world (540), Cassiodorus was quitting it to found a monastic community on his estate, and he had the happy idea of rescuing some elements of Roman culture from the deluge; though to him culture meant Donatus and Martianus Capella rather than the classics. He succeeded, too, in engaging the industry of the Benedictine monks, to some extent, in copying manuscripts. Culture was, happily, not suffered to die. In Rome, however, it sank very low, and, for centuries, the Latin of the Papal clerks or the Popes is generally atrocious.

Gregory, in 573, was Prefect of Rome when it was beset by the Lombards. The desolation which ensued may have finally convinced him that the end of the world approached: a belief which occurs repeatedly in his letters and sermons. In the following year, he sold his possessions, built six monasteries in Sicily, converted his Roman mansion into the monastery of St. Andrew, and, after giving the rest of his fortune to the poor, began a life of stern asceticism and meditation on the Scriptures. One day he saw some Anglo-Saxon slaves in the market, and he set off to convert these fair, blue-eyed islanders to the faith. But Pope Benedict recalled him and found an outlet for his great energy in secretarial duties at the Lateran.

Pelagius, who in 578 succeeded Benedict, sent Gregory to Constantinople, to ask imperial troops for Italy, and he remained there, caring for Papal interests, for about eight years. On its pretentious culture he looked with so much disdain that he never learned Greek,79 while the general corruption of clerics and laymen, and the fierce dogmatic discussions, did not modify his belief in a coming dissolution. He maintained his monastic life in the Placidia Palace, and began the writing of that portentous commentary on the book of Job which is known as his Magna Moralia: a monumental illustration of his piety, his imagination, and his lack of culture, occupying about two thousand columns of Migne's quarto edition of his works. He returned to Rome about the year 586, without troops, but with the immeasurably greater treasure of an arm of St. Andrew and the head of St. Luke. Amid the plagues and famines of Italy, he returned to his terrible fasts and dark meditations, and awaited the blast of the archangel's trumpet. An anecdote, told by himself, depicts his attitude. One of his monks appropriated a few crowns, violating his vow of poverty. Gregory refused the dying man the sacraments, and buried him in a dunghill. He completed his commentary on Job, and collected endless stories of devils and angels, saints and sinners, visions and miracles; until one day, in 590, the Romans broke into the austere monastery with the news that Pelagius was dead and Gregory was to be his successor. He fled from Rome in horror, but he was the ablest man in Italy, and all united to make him Pope.

If these things do not suffice to show that Gregory was the first mediæval Pope, read his Dialogues, completed a few years later; no theologian in the world to-day would accept that phantasmagoria of devils and angels and miracles. It is a precious monument of Gregory's world: the early mediæval world. There is the same morbid, brooding imagination in his commentary on the prophecies of Ezekiel, which he found congenial; and in many passages of the forty sermons in which, disdaining flowers of rhetoric and rules of grammar, he tells his people the deep-felt, awful truths of his creed.

Characteristic also is the incident which occurred during his temporary guidance of the Church—while he awaited an answer to the letter in which he had begged the Emperor to release him. A fearful epidemic raged at Rome. Without a glance at the marshes beyond, from which it came, Gregory ordered processions of all the faithful, storming the heavens with hymns and litanies. The figure over the old tomb of Hadrian (or the Castle of Sant' Angelo) at Rome tells all time how an angel appeared in the skies on that occasion, and the pestilence ceased. But the writers who are nearest to the time tell us that eighty of the processionists fell dead on the streets in an hour, and the pestilence went its slow course.

Yet when we turn from these other-worldly meditations and other-worldly plans to the eight hundred and fifty letters of the great Pope, we seem to find an entirely different man. We seem to go back some centuries, along that precarious line of the Anicii, and confront one of the abler of the old patricians. Instead of credulity, we find a business capacity which, in spite of the appalling means of communication, organizes and controls, down to minute details, an estate which is worth millions sterling and is scattered over half a continent. Instead of self-effacement, we find a man who talks to archbishops and governors of provinces as if they were acolytes of his Church, and, at least on one occasion, tells the Eastern autocrat, before whom courtiers shade their eyes, that he will not obey him. Instead of holy simplicity, we find a diplomacy which treats with hostile kings in defiance of the civil government, showers pretty compliments on the fiery Brunichildis or the brutal Phocas, and spends years in combating the pretensions of Constantinople. Instead of angelic meekness, we find a warm resentment of vilification, an occasional flash of temper which cows his opponent, a sense of dignity which rebukes his steward for sending him "a sorry nag" or a "good ass" to ride on. We have, in short, a man whose shrewd light-brown eyes miss no opportunity for intervention in that disorderly world, from Angle-land to Jerusalem; who has in every part of it spies and informers in the service of virtue and religion, and who for fourteen years does the work of three men. And all the time he is Gregory the monk, ruining his body by disdainful treatment, writing commentaries on Ezekiel: a medium-sized, swarthy man, with large bald head and straggling tawny beard, with thick red lips and Roman nose and chin, racked by indigestion and then by gout—but a prodigious worker.

To compress his work into a chapter is impossible; one can only give imperfect summaries and a few significant details. He had secretaries, of course, and we are apt to forget that the art of shorthand writing, which was perfectly developed by the Romans, had not yet been lost in the night of the Middle Ages. Yet every letter has the stamp of Gregory's personality, and we recognize a mind of wonderful range and power.

His episcopal work in Rome alone might have contented another man. Soon after his election he wrote a long letter on the duties and qualifications of a bishop, which, in the shape of a treatise entitled The Book of Pastoral Rule, inspired for centuries the better bishops of Europe. His palace was monastic in its severity. He discharged from his service, in Rome and abroad, the hosts of laymen his predecessors had employed, and replaced them with monks and clerics: incidentally turning into monks and clerics many men who did not adorn the holy state. He said mass daily, and used at times to go on horseback to some appointed chapel in the city, where the people gathered to hear his sermons on the gospels or on Ezekiel. Every shade of simony, every pretext for ordination, except religious zeal, he sternly suppressed. When he found that men were made deacons for their fine voices, he forbade deacons to sing any part of the mass except the Gospel, and he made other changes in the liturgy and encouraged the improvement of the chant. Modern criticism does not admit the Sacramentary and the Antiphonary which later ages ascribed to him, but he seems to have given such impulse to reform that the perfected liturgy and chant of a later date were attributed to him.80

His motive in these reforms was purely religious; those who would persuade us that Gregory I. had some regard for profane culture, at least as ancillary to religious, forget his belief is an approaching dissolution, and overlook the nature of profane culture. It was indissolubly connected with paganism, and Gregory would willingly have seen every Latin classic submerged in the Tiber; while his disdain of Greek confirmed the already prevalent ignorance which shut the Greek classics out of Europe, to its grave disadvantage, for many centuries. Happily, many monks and bishops were in this respect less unworldly than Gregory, and the greater Roman writers were copied and preserved. Gregory's attitude toward these men is well known. He hears that Bishop Desiderius of Vienne, a very worthy prelate, is lecturing on "grammar" (Latin literature), and he writes to tell Desiderius that he is filled with "mourning and sorrow" that a bishop should be occupied with so "horrible" (nefandum) a pursuit.81 It has been frivolously suggested that perhaps Desiderius had been lecturing on the classics in church, but Gregory is quite plain: the reading of the pagan writers is an unfit occupation even for "a religious layman."82 In the preface to his Magna Moralia he scorns "the rules of Donatus"; and so sore a memory of his attitude remained among the friends of Latin letters that Christian tradition charged him with having burned the libraries of the Capitol and of the Palatine and with having mutilated the statues and monuments of older Rome.83

The work of Gregory in Rome, however, was not confined to liturgy and discipline. The tradition of parasitism at Rome was not dead, and, as there was now no Præfectus Annonæ to distribute corn to the citizens, it fell to the Church to feed them; and the Romans were now augmented by destitute refugees from all parts. Gregory had to find food and clothing for masses of people, to make constant grants to their churches and to the monasteries, to meet a periodical famine, and to render what miserable aid the ignorance of the time afforded during the periodical pestilence. Occasionally he had even to control the movements of troops and the dispatch of supplies; at least, in his impatience of the apparent helplessness of the imperial government and his determination to hold Catholic towns against the Lombards, he undertook these and other secular functions.

The control of the vast Papal income and expenditure might alone have sufficed to employ a vigorous man. In Sicily, there were immense estates belonging to the Papacy, and other "patrimonies," as they were called, were scattered over Italy and the islands, or lay as far away as Gaul, Dalmatia, Africa, and the East. Clerical agents usually managed these estates, but we find Gregory talking about their mules and mares and cornfields, and the wages and grievances of their slaves and serfs, as familiarly as if he had visited each of them. It has been estimated, rather precariously, that the Papacy already owned from 1400 to 1800 square miles of land, and drew from it an annual income of from £300,000 to £400,000. Not a domestic squabble seems to have happened in this enormous field but Gregory intervened, and his rigid sense of justice and general shrewdness of decision command respect. Then, there was the equally heavy task of distributing the income, for the episcopal establishment cost little, and nothing was hoarded. In sums of ten, twenty, or fifty gold pieces, in bales of clothing and galleys of corn, in altar-vessels and the ransom of captives, the stream percolated yearly throughout the Christian world, as far as the villages of Syria. Monks and nuns were especially favoured.

Within a few years, there spread over the world so great a repute of Gregory's charity and equity that petitions rained upon Rome. Here a guild of soap-boilers asks his intervention in some dispute: there a woman who, in a fit of temper at the supposed infidelity of her husband, has rushed to a nunnery and now wants to return home, asks his indulgence, and receives it. From all sides are cries of oppression, simony, or other scandal, and Gregory is aroused. Jews appeal to him frequently against the injustice of their Christian neighbours, and they invariably get such justice as the law allows. The Zealots who have seized their synagogues (if of long standing—they were forbidden by law to build new ones) must restore them, or pay for them84; impatient priests who would coerce them into "believing" are rebuked. There is only one weakness—a not unamiable weakness—in his treatment of the Jews. Those who abandon their creed are to have their rents reduced: to encourage the others, he says cheerfully.85 For the pagans, however, he has no mercy, as we shall see. He sanctions compulsion and persecution with mediæval frankness. It should be noted, too, that, while he approved the manumission of slaves, he never condemned the institution as such. Vast regiments of slaves worked the Papal estates, though the ease, if not advantage, of converting them into serfs must have been apparent. Still no slave could enter the clergy—lest, as Leo the Great had declared, his "vileness" should "pollute" the sacred order—and a special probation was imposed on slaves if they wished to enter monasteries: a wise regulation this, for many thought it an easy way to freedom. Still no slave could contract marriage with a free Christian, as Gregory expressly reaffirms.86

These details of his work will, however, be more apparent if we pass from Rome to the provinces which he controlled, and observe the success or failure of his intervention. It will at once be understood that his intervention almost invariably means that there is an abuse to correct, and, therefore, the world which we find reflected in Gregory's letters is fearfully corrupt. The restless movements and destructive ways of the barbarians had almost obliterated the older culture, and no new system either of education or polity had yet been devised. The influence of the East had been just as pernicious. The venality and corruption of its officers had infected the higher clergy, and simony prevailed from Gaul to Palestine. Over and over again Gregory writes, in just the same words, to prelates of widely separated countries: "I hear that no one can obtain orders in your province without paying for them." The clergy was thus tainted at its source. Ambitious laymen passed, almost at a bound, to bishoprics, and then maintained a luxurious or vicious life by extorting illegal fees. The people, who had been generally literate under the Romans, were now wholly illiterate and helpless. But Gregory has his informants (generally the agents in charge of the patrimonies) everywhere, and the better clergy and the oppressed and the disappointed appeal to him; and a sad procession of vice and crime passes before our eyes when we read his letters. This anarchic world needed a supreme court more than ever; the Papacy throve on its very disorders.

Italy was demoralized by the settlement of the Arian Lombards over the greater part of the country, and by their murderous raids in all directions. Parts which remained Catholic were often so isolated from Rome that a spirit of defiance was encouraged, and Gregory had grave trouble. Milan, for instance, was in the hands of the Lombards, but the Catholic clergy had fled to Genoa with their archbishop, and they retained something of the independence of the Church of St. Ambrose. We see that they must now have their selection of a bishop approved by Gregory, and that the Pope often quietly reproves the prelate for his indiscretions; but we find also that when, on a more serious occasion, Gregory proposes to have Archbishop Constantius tried at Rome, the latter acridly refuses.

Ravenna, the seat of the Eastern Exarch, who is generally hostile to Gregory, occasions some of his least saintly letters. He hears that Archbishop John wears his pallium on forbidden occasions, and he reproves John with an air of unquestioned authority.87 John partly disputes the facts, and partly pleads special privileges of Ravenna, but Gregory finds no trace of such privileges and orders him to conform.88 Then he hears that John and the fine folk of the court are poking fun at him, and his honest anger overflows89: "Thank God the Lombards are between me and the city of Ravenna, or I might have had to show how strict I can be." John dies, and we see that the clergy of Ravenna must submit the names of two candidates to Gregory. He rejects the Exarch's man, and chooses an old fellow-monk and friend, Marinianus. But the new Archbishop is forced to maintain the defence of the supposed privileges of Ravenna, and the dispute seems to reach no conclusion during the life of Gregory.

In the isolated peninsula of Istria, the spirit of independence has gone the length of flat defiance, or schism, because the Papacy has acquiesced in the endorsement by the Eastern bishops of the Three Chapters: three chapters of a certain decree of Justinian. The schism is of long standing, and when Gregory is made bishop he sends a troop of soldiers to the patriarch of Aquileia, commanding that prelate and his chief supporters to appear at Rome forthwith, "according to the orders of the most Christian and most Serene lord of all." The use of the Emperor's name seems to have been, to put it politely, not strictly accurate, for when Bishop Severus appealed to Maurice, the Emperor curtly ordered Gregory to desist. We have another indication of the mediæval aspect of Gregory's ideas when, in the following year, he refused to contribute to the relief-fund for the victims of a great fire at Aquileia. His monies were "not for the enemies of the Church," he said. He went on to weaken the schism by other means, partly by bribes, and when Maurice died in 602 and a friendly Exarch was appointed, he at once urged physical force.90 "The defence of the soul is more precious in the sight of God than the defence of the body," he enacted. He was legislating for the Middle Ages.

His relations with the Lombards and the civil power reveal another side of his character. Small Catholic towns, and even Rome, were constantly threatened by the Lombards, yet Constantinople was unable to send troops, and the Exarch remained inactive behind the marshes and walls of Ravenna. Gregory indignantly turned soldier and diplomatist. He appointed a military governor of Nepi, and later of Naples; and many of his letters are to military men, stirring them to action and telling of the dispatch of troops or supplies. In 592, the Lombards appeared before Rome, and Gregory fell ill with work and anxiety. He then purchased a separate peace from the Lombards91 and there was great anger at Ravenna and Constantinople. Gregory's sentiment was hardly one of patriotism, which would not be consistent with his philosophy; he was concerned for religion, as he was bound to be since the Lombards were Arians. On the other hand, he acknowledges that if he makes a separate peace with the Lombards, it will be disastrous for other parts of the Empire92; and it is clear from the sequel that the Exarch had a policy and was not idly drifting.

A later legend, which some modern writers strangely regard as credible,93 makes Gregory meet the Lombard king outside Rome, and strike a bargain. A bargain was certainly struck, but the angry Exarch issued from Ravenna with his troops and cut his way to Rome, where his conversation with the Pope cannot have been amiable. The Lombards were back in 593, but were either bribed, or found Rome too strong to be taken. They returned again in 595. Gregory now wrote to a friend in Ravenna94 that he proposed again to purchase peace, and the Emperor Maurice seems to have written him a scalding letter. From Gregory's indignant reply95 we gather that Maurice called him "a fool," and hinted that he was a liar and traitor. The government idea evidently was that Gregory was a simple-minded victim of the cunning Lombards, as is very probable; but we must take account of his sincere concern for religion and his longing for peace. His policy of bribes would have been disastrous. At Ravenna, some person posted on the walls a sarcastic "libel" about his statesmanship, and another fiery letter appears in Gregory's register.

In other parts of Italy, he had grave ecclesiastical abuses to correct, and some strange bishops are immortalized in his letters. In 599, he had to issue a circular letter,96 forbidding bishops to have women in their houses, and ordering priests, deacons, and subdeacons to separate from their wives. Sicily, controlled by his agents, gave him little trouble, but his informers reported that in Sardinia and Corsica the clergy and monks were very corrupt, and the pagans, who were numerous, bribed the officials to overlook the practice of their cult. The metropolitan at Cagliari was an intemperate and avaricious man, and Gregory, after repeated warnings, summoned him to Rome; but there is a curious mixture of indulgence and sternness in the Pope's letters, and Januarius did not go to Rome or alter his wicked ways. As to the pagans, Gregory, at first, merely urged the Archbishop to raise the rents and taxes of those who would not abandon the gods.97 When this proved insufficient, he ordered physical persecution. If they were slaves, they were to be punished with "blows and tortures"; if they were free tenants, they were to be imprisoned. "In order," he says, in entirely mediæval language, "that they who disdain to hear the saving words of health may at least be brought to the desired sanity of mind by torture of the body."98

With other provinces of the old Empire, his correspondence is mainly directed to the correction of grave abuses. His letters to Spain show that Papal authority was fully recognized there, and it is of interest to find a Spanish bishop bemoaning, when Gregory urges that only literate men shall be promoted to the priesthood, that they are too few in number. Africa virtually defied his efforts to reform the Church. The province had recovered a little under Byzantine rule, but its bishops and civic officials took bribes from the Donatists.99 They refused to persecute the schismatics, when Gregory ordered them to do so, and they defeated his attempt to break up their system of local primacies.100 He was compelled to leave them in their perverse ways. The same condition of simony and clerical laxity prevailed generally throughout the Roman-Teutonic world, and Gregory could do little more than press for the election of good men to vacant bishoprics.

The diplomatic side of his character appears in his relations with Gaul, where the fiery and wilful Brunichildis was his chief correspondent.101 It is true that her graver crimes were committed after Gregory's death, but he was particularly well informed, and one cannot admire his references to her "devout mind" or appreciate his belief that she was "filled with the piety of heavenly grace." When, in 599, she asked the pallium for her obsequious Bishop Syagrius of Autun, Gregory granted it: on condition that Syagrius convoked a synod for the correction of abuses and that Brunichildis attacked paganism more vigorously. When, on the other hand, the learned and devout Bishop Desiderius of Vienne, who was hated by Brunichildis for his courage in rebuking her, asked the pallium, Gregory found that there was no precedent and refused. It is true that Brunichildis was generous to the clergy and, in her way, pious; but Gregory must have known the real character of the woman whose influence he sought to win. His sacrifice, moreover, was futile. A few synods were held, but there is no trace of any diminution of simony, drunkenness, and vice among the Frankish priests and monks.

His interest in the neighbouring island of Angle-land is well known. He began, early in his Pontificate, to buy Anglo-Saxon youths and train them for missionary work, but, in 596, he found a speedier way to convert the islanders. The all-powerful Ethelbert was married to the Christian Bertha, and Gregory's friendly relations with Gaul opened the way to his court. He sent the historic mission of monks under Augustine, and, in a few years, had the converted King transforming the pagan temples into churches and driving his people into them. It was Gregory who planned the first English hierarchy.

The monks, who ought to have been Gregory's firmest allies in the reform of Christendom, had already become an ignorant and sensual body, sustaining the ideal of Benedict only in a few isolated communities, and Gregory's efforts to improve them were not wholly judicious. He insisted that they should not undertake priestly or parochial work, and he forbade the bishops to interfere with their temporal concerns. There can be little doubt that this tendency to free them from episcopal control made for greater degeneration. Here again, also, we find a curious illustration of his diplomatic liberality. As a rule he was very severe with apostate monks, yet we find him maintaining through life a friendly correspondence with a renegade monk of Syracuse. Venantius had returned to his position of wealthy noble in the world, and had married a noble dame. Gregory, it is true, urged him to return to his monastery, but the amiability of his language is only explained by the position and influence of the man. The last phase of this part of Gregory's correspondence is singular. Venantius died, and left his daughters to the guardianship of the Pope; and we find Gregory assuring these children of sin that he will discharge "the debt we owe to the goodness of your parents."102

We have already seen that Gregory's relations with the eastern Emperor were painful, and another episode must be related before we approach Eastern affairs more closely. The Archbishop of Salona, who was one of the typical lax prelates of the age and who had smiled at Gregory's admonitions and threats, was removed by death, and the Pope endeavoured to secure the election of the archdeacon, a rigorous priest who had been the Pope's chief informer. Neither clergy nor laity, however, desired a change in the morals of the episcopal palace, and they secured from Constantinople an imperial order for the election of their own favourite. Gregory alleged bribery and excommunicated the new archbishop. When the Emperor ordered him to desist, he flatly refused, and a compromise had to be admitted. In another town of the same frontier province, Prima Justiniana, the Emperor proposed to replace an invalid bishop with a more vigorous man, and Gregory refused to consent.103

A graver conflict had arisen in the East. Constantinople, with its million citizens and its superb imperial palace, naturally regarded its archbishop as too elevated to submit to Rome, and its ruling prelate, John the Faster,—a priest who rivalled Gregory in virtue and austerity,—assumed the title of "Ecumenical Bishop." Gregory protested, but the Emperor Maurice, with his customary bluntness, ordered the Pope to be silent. A few years later, however, some aggrieved Eastern priests appealed to Rome, and Gregory wrote, in entirely Papal language, to ask John for a report on their case. When John lightly, or disdainfully, answered that he knew nothing about it, the Pope lost his temper. He told his ascetic brother that it would be a much less evil to eat meat than to tell lies: that he had better get rid of that licentious young secretary of his and attend to business: that he must at once take back the aggrieved priests: and that, although he seeks no quarrel, he will not flinch if it is forced on him.104 John made a malicious retort, by inducing the Empress Constantina to make a request for relics which Gregory was bound to refuse.

The priests were eventually tried at Rome. Whether Gregory's sentence was ever carried out in the East, we do not know, but John took the revenge of styling himself "Ecumenical Bishop" in his correspondence with Gregory, and the Pope then tried to form a league with the patriarchs of the apostolic Sees of Antioch and Alexandria against the ambitious John. In his eagerness to defeat John, he went very near to sharing the Papacy with his allies. Peter, he said, had been at Antioch before Rome, and Mark was a disciple of Peter; therefore the three were in a sense "one See."105 He added that Rome was so far from aspiring to the odious title that, although it had actually been offered to the Popes by the Council of Chalcedon, neither Leo nor any of his successors had used it.106

To John himself Gregory sent a withering rebuke of his pride. To the Emperor Maurice he described John as "a wolf in sheep's clothing," a man who claimed a "blasphemous title" which "ought to be far from the hearts of all Christians"! John may "stiffen his neck against the Almighty," he says, but "he will not bend mine even with swords."107 He assured the Empress Constantina that John's ambition was a sure sign of the coming of Anti-Christ.108

Gregory's peculiar diplomacy only excited the disdain of the subtler Greeks. His position is, in fact, so false—repudiating as "blasphemous" a title which, the whole world knew, he himself claimed in substance—that it has been suggested that he thought the term "Ecumenical Bishop" meant "sole bishop." Such a suggestion implies extraordinary ignorance at Rome, but there is no need to entertain it. To his friends Anastasius of Antioch and Eulogius of Alexandria, Gregory complained that the phrase was an affront, not to all bishops, but merely to the leading patriarchs, and the whole correspondence shows that there was no misunderstanding. Gregory lacked self-control. Anastasius of Antioch, though very friendly, ignored his letters; Eulogius advised him to be quiet, and hinted that people might suggest envy; the Emperor treated him with silent disdain. John died, but his successor Cyriacus actually used the offensive title in telling Gregory of his appointment. There was another outburst, and Maurice impatiently begged the Pope not to make so much fuss about "an idle name." Eulogius of Alexandria, who had some sense of humour, addressed Gregory as "Universal Pope," saying gravely that he would obey his "commands" and not again call any man "Universal Bishop." Possibly Eulogius knew that Gregory had, a few years before, written to John of Syracuse: "As to the Church of Constantinople, who doubts that it is subject to the Apostolic See?"109 Gregory protested in vain until the close of his life. The Greeks retained their "blasphemous" title: the Latins continued to assert their authority even over the Greek bishops.

Toward the close of the year 602, the Emperor Maurice, now a stricken old man of sixty-three, was driven from his throne by the brutal Phocas; his five boys were murdered before his eyes and he was himself executed. Phocas sent messengers to apprise Gregory of his accession. We may assume that these messengers would give a discreet account of what had happened and, possibly, bring an assurance of the new Emperor's orthodoxy; and we do not know whether Gregory's assiduous servants at Constantinople sent him any independent account. Yet, when we have made every possible allowance, Gregory's letters to Phocas are painful. The first letter110 begins, "Glory be to God on high," and sings a chant of victory culminating in, "Let the heavens rejoice and the earth be glad." The bloody and unscrupulous adventurer must have been himself surprised. Two months later, Gregory wrote again, hailing the dawn of "the day of liberty" after the night of tyranny.111 In another letter he112 saluted Leontia, the new Empress,—a fit consort of Phocas,—as "a second Pulcheria"; and he commended the Church of St. Peter's to her generosity. These two letters were written seven months after the murders, and it is impossible to suppose that no independent report had reached Gregory by that time. Nor do we find that, though he lived for a year afterwards, he ever undid those lamentable letters. It is the most ominous presage of the Middle Ages.

Gregory died on March 12, 604. The racking pains of gout had been added to his maladies, and plague and famine and Lombards continued to enfeeble Italy He had striven heroically to secure respect for ideals—for religion, justice, and honour—in that dark world on which his last thoughts lingered. He had planted many a good man in the bishoprics of Europe. He had immensely strengthened the Papacy, and a strong central power might do vast service in that anarchic Europe. Yet the historian must recognize that the world was too strong even for his personality; simony and corruption still spread from Gaul to Africa, and the ideas which Gregory most surely contributed to the mind of Europe were those more lamentable or more casuistic deductions from his creed which we have noticed. Within a year or so—to make the best we can of a rumour which has got into the chronicles—the Romans themselves grumbled that his prodigal charity had lessened their share of the patrimonies, and we saw that more bitter complaints against him were current in the Middle Ages. Yet he was a great Pope: not great in intellect, not perfect in character, but, in an age of confusion, corruption, and cowardice, a mighty protagonist of high ideals.