The Papal Monarchy

William Barry

• Publisher: Jovian Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781537809977
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Renaissance européenne

Alaric, King of the Western Goths, entered Rome with his army, by the Salarian Gate -- outside of which Hannibal had encamped long ago--and took the Imperial City. Eleven hundred and sixty-four years had passed since its legendary foundation under Romulus; four hundred and forty-one since the battle of Actium, which made Augustus Lord in deed, if not in name, of the Roman world. When the Gothic trump sounded at midnight, it announced that ancient history had come to an end, and that our modern time was born. St. Jerome, who in his cell at Bethlehem saw the Capitol given over to fire and flame, was justified from an historical point of view when he wrote to the noble virgin Demetrias, "Thy city, once the head of the universe, is the sepulchre of the Roman people." Even in that age of immense and growing confusion, the nations held their breath when these tidings broke upon them. Adherents of the classic religion who still survived felt in them a judgment of the gods; they charged on Christians the long sequel of calamities which had come down upon the once invincible Empire. Christians retorted that its fall was the chastisement of idolatry. And their supreme philosopher, the African Father St. Augustine, wrote his monumental work, "Of the City of God, " by way of proving that there was a Divine kingdom which heathen Rome could persecute in the martyrs, but the final triumph of which it could never prevent. This magnificent conception, wrought out in a vein of prophecy, and with an eloquence which has not lost its power, furnished to succeeding times an Apocalypse no less than a justification of the Gospel. Instead of heathen Rome, it set up an ideal Christendom. But the center, the meeting-place, of old and new, was the City on the Seven Hills.

FROM PETER TO LEO THE GREAT (67-461)

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BUT OUR FIRST GLIMPSES, WHICH are tantalizing in their brevity, of the Christians at Rome, show us the Church rather than the Bishop. Clement admonishes the Corinthians in its name, not in his own; Ignatius of Antioch, if his epistle be authentic, addresses “the Church presiding in charity in the country of the Romans”; and Pope Soter speaks as representing a community so late as 170 A.D. Thus the Bishop did not stand alone; like the Pontifex Maximus he was head of a College of clergy; and the Roman Church, by its central position in the world’s Capital; by its beneficent use of the wealth which it soon acquired; and by its familiarity with the laws and even the fashions of the Metropolis;–was marked out for distinction as the Christian system molded itself on the Imperial, and Bishops fell into their places, according to the importance of the cities over which they ruled. Not even Jerusalem could have resisted a movement so natural and widespread; but the Jewish war had made an end of Jerusalem; and what other city could vie with Rome? By the year 274, Aurelian is found deciding that the Christian Church property at Antioch, which was in dispute, shall be dealt with as the Bishops of Rome and Italy think fit. Cyprian of Carthage, in 256, recognizes that Rome is the Chair of Peter, “whence the unity of the priesthood took its rise.” These words, and this conception, were to furnish the Magna Charta of the Papacy. For the Popes attribute to themselves all that the “Prince of the Apostles” would claim, were he living on through the centuries. They fuse into one great idea the spiritual prerogatives of their founder and the legal supremacy of Rome over the whole Empire. Rome can be second to none; St. Peter is the first among his brethren. If the Churches of the world ever came into the form of a confederation or a Hierarchy, and they tended to do so from their earliest days, the Roman Church would of necessity be supreme.

As we see in Clement, the old and deeply-ingrained conception of law and order, which is distinctively Roman, had passed over at once into the Christian mind. These converts, whether Jews or Pagans, did not indulge in speculation; they started no new philosophy; and such has been the character of the Church in Rome ever since. It dealt with practice, ritual, discipline; it developed a government, not a school like Alexandria; it held aloof from the wide and remarkable effort of the Gnostics, or “Intellectuals,” who attempted during the second century to resolve the tenets of the Gospel into a theosophic romance. The Latin mind neither comprehended nor was drawn to these dreams of an Orientalized Greek fancy. In like manner, as it was averse to the speculations of the philosophers, so was the Roman Church unwilling to narrow the bounds of conformity by a regimen too severe for the multitudes, who were now thronging about its doors. It would not permit an esoteric creed to split up the congregation of the faithful into “enlightened” and “ignorant.” It refused to shut out sinners from its penance, as the unbending Montanists and Novatians demanded. While conservative in doctrine, it exhibited a sagacious largeness in discipline, and while suffering the strongly forensic mind of Tertullian to model its tradition, it neither approved nor condemned the venturesome thought of Origen and the Alexandrian Clement. None of the early Popes were masters or pupils in philosophy; but this negative wisdom counted for not a little in the respect which was paid to them by the subtle and restless East.

Not individual genius, therefore, but an endemic “custom of the City,” acting on a creed not fully developed, and in the strength of what was allowed to be Apostolic tradition, enabled this Church at the center to grow in pre-eminence. It gave no theologians to Christendom; it produced neither monks nor thinkers; in the list of thirty-two Popes before Constantine, there is only a single illustrious name, that of Clement. But with the fourth century we enter on a new era. The Imperial Government takes the cross and begins by its laws and policy to make the Empire Christian. Constantinople is founded; Rome ceases to be the capital. And an interminable succession of quarrels on the philosophy of the Creed, associated forever with the names of Arius, Apollinaris, Macedonius, Nestorius, and Eutyches, rends the East into factions, the Pope looking on from afar, not entangling himself in the nets of metaphysicians, receiving appeals from all sides, sitting umpire in the midst of a theological chaos. Had he played the philosopher, humanly speaking, he might have gone astray. But the Pontifex Maximus was a Roman and a statesman. He left to others the wrangling over terms of Greek art; for him it was enough to insist upon what had been handed down. These gladiatorial displays of logic went on for well-nigh a hundred and seventy years, during which time the only Pope who furnished a statement of any length to the combatants was Leo I.; and his manner is the Roman, sententious and judicial, not argumentative. The Latin language, copious in legal phrase, abounding in the technicalities of ritual, was neither delicate nor flexible enough to express the finer shades of heresy. It was the language of command: strong, plain, and matter of fact. The Eastern Bishops degenerated into sophists; the Roman found himself a ruler in a deserted but always august city.

Though long incorporated with the Empire, Gaul, Spain, and Germany had never exerted the political influence which was a characteristic of the Latin races; nor could they pretend to the charm, or contest the supremacy, of Greek culture. Outlying provinces, on the extreme line of defense, they lay open to attacks from the wandering tribes of the North. At Treves or Milan the Emperor lived in camp; he was at home only in Central Italy, or in the stately Eastern cities, like Nicomedia, which displayed the riches, the polish, and too often the luxurious softness that were an inheritance from classic Hellas. Taken as a whole, the East was compact in its geography, it had boundless resources of wealth, and could draw upon the mountaineers of the Balkans or the Cilician Taurus to recruit its armies; it could even make good use of Goths arid other untamed auxiliaries, without falling a prey to their strong right arm. Considerations such as these weighed with the sagacious but hardly great Emperor Constantine, when he turned the course of the Roman eagles towards the rising sun and left the Eternal City shorn of its crown of dominion. Henceforth, East and West would go their several ways. Europe was to be Latin, Frankish, German, in its political forms; in religion it was to be Papal and Protestant; while the Greeks became more and more Asiatic, and detested their Christian brethren, the Franks, almost as deeply as they feared the armed disciples of Mohammed.

Modern historians have seen in the founding of Constantinople (330 A.D.) a necessary sequel to the Edict of Toleration, published from Milan in 313, by which the Christian Faith was made one of the religiones licitæ. The Emperor could not have laid the foundation of his new Church and State on the Palatine, which was still the headquarters of Paganism. Arguments, these, of politicians, plausible enough; but in the Middle Ages legend threw the motives of Constantine into a picturesque and gruesome story, to the glorification of Pope Silvester and the Holy Apostles. Leprosy, that mysterious and almost sacred disease, had laid its taint upon the Emperor; he was tempted to cleanse himself in a bath of children’s blood; when Silvester, warned in a dream, stepped between him and this awful experiment; persuaded him to descend into the waters of baptism; and brought him out thence, purified like Naaman in body and soul. Hereupon, Constantine made over to the Pontiff Rome and Italy, with the Islands of the West. He established the Pope where Augustus had reigned, gave him the tokens and state of royalty, and withdrew from the Holy Place. This was the Donation of Constantine, as first told in the eighth century, and believed down to the end of the fifteenth.

It is a prophecy after the event. Paganism, abandoned and soon to be persecuted by its Pontifex Maximus, without the conviction that makes martyrs, and long a hollow formality, was dying. Christians had the State in their hands. What was more, they showed the fiery zeal, the proselytizing spirit, the exuberance in quarrels among themselves, which are signs of a youth rich in hopes, bent upon shaping its own victorious future. Heathen Rome invited them to subdue it. Public policy required that the center of administration should be at the heart of the Empire. The balance of power was displaced. Neither Pope Silvester nor any Pope for centuries dreamt of disowning the Imperial rule; from the Goths in Italy they suffered grievous things as the first subjects of Constantinople. But Rome left to itself was Rome in the hands of the Papacy, fronting the West and the Barbarians. Constantine had imitated Alexander the Great, who, in setting up his throne at Babylon in 330 B.C.—a curious coincidence—and assuming the tiara, left Europe free to follow its own fortunes. Such was the real Donation, not understood at the time by Pope or Emperor, which never lost its force until the Northern nations grew into a world as rich, as cultivated, and as haughtily self-conscious, as the Greek.

Paganism, it may be briefly said, was to furnish Roman Christianity with many of its holiday or outward shows. And the strange phenomena of heresy were to bring to light its powers of government, which, used at the beginning in disputes of local churches or contending sects, were afterwards applied to provinces and kingdoms. The Pope, we have seen, did not affect a speculative genius; he administered rule—a busy and extensive rule in so frequented a place as Rome—according to the tradition of the first age; he would never hear of innovations on the Creed. “Let there be none such, but only what has been delivered,” said Pope Stephen in a quaint phrase to Cyprian (254 A.D.). Now the heretical movement, dating chiefly from Antioch and the Syrian literalists, was an endeavor to lighten the difficulties of the Creed by bringing down its “mysteries” to the capacity of human thought; a process at all times foreign to the spirit of Rome. For Rome, as Döllinger says, “took the world ready-made.” It would not vex itself with philosophic inquiries, whether in its former heathen or its present Christian stage. In discipline it was accommodating, in dogma inflexible, and this from of old. When, therefore, conservative Easterns, such as the unconquerable Athanasius, the golden-mouthed Chrysostom, or the violent Cyril, looked round for help in their struggle with the party of Rationalism, it was a matter of course that they should appeal to Rome. And Rome stood by them. The Pope was at a safe distance from Court; he could not easily be taken or sent into banishment; his unswerving attitude, by which he seemed only to be maintaining that which had always been the rule, made him respected in an age when Bishops lost their dignity by engaging in hot and acrimonious disputes. It is significant that the three Popes who have proved embarrassing to Roman apologists—Liberius, Vigilius, and Honorius—were all charged with innovation. There was never any danger in holding to what had been received. Hence the Popes, unlike the Eastern Fathers, do not meet the arguments of heretics with counter-arguments; they decide, but they decline to reason the matter out. They attend no Councils, if they can help it, away from the Lateran. The only creeds which they approve are those of Nicæa in 325 and of Constantinople in 381. Pope Cœlestine imposes on the Council of Ephesus (431) his own judgment by the imperious hands of Cyril; the session begins and ends in a summer’s day. Leo the Great sends his “Tome,” which is by no means a treatise, to Chalcedon (451), and with the open assistance of Emperor and Empress compels six hundred Bishops to accept it. In a later controversy, Hormisdas (519), relying on the secular arm, makes his creed law throughout the length and breadth of Asia; it is subscribed, or acquiesced in, by perhaps two thousand five hundred Bishops.

But all the writings on divinity of the Roman Pontiffs down to Gregory the Great would not fill a volume of considerable size. Even where they approve, they content themselves with as few words as possible. Contrast the folios of Augustine, to whom they were benignant, with what Innocent, Zosimus, and Cœlestine did not write, on a subject so momentous as that of grace and free will. To others they resigned the task of explaining or defending Christian truth by methods adapted to the intellect. They put down heresy by cutting off the heretic from their communion. In this way, Rome exercised the functions of a Supreme Court of Appeal, and its judgments anticipated those of the General Councils, which were held in the Emperor’s presence or that of his lieutenant.

We cannot describe the Popes of the fourth century as men of rare personal qualities. One of them, Damasus (367-384), has some features, in his tumultuous election and his worldly pomp, which forecast the days of Avignon or the Renaissance. Another, Siricius, who followed him immediately, is the first of whom we possess any genuine Decretal, as the letters were styled that the Roman Chancery sent to Bishops on points concerning which its opinion was asked. Yet the Church was steadily mounting towards pre-eminence. The Latin Fathers—this is their golden age—could not but magnify it by their character, their eloquence, and their achievements. Even Cyprian, who a hundred years earlier had quarreled vehemently with Rome, “did far more,” says Milman, “to advance her power by the primacy which he assigned to St. Peter, than he impaired it by his steady and disdainful repudiation of her authority, whenever it was brought to the test of submission.”

But Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (375-398), was the most saintly of Western prelates—a true Roman born out of due time—and his reverence for the Apostolic See, during a long pontificate, summed itself up in the famous expression, imitated from the legists, “Where is Peter, there is the Church.” On this classic sentence the policy of excommunication, interdict, and even deposition—which is the story of the Middle Ages—may be made to depend. The language of Jerome (342-420), most learned, lively, and provoking of the Fathers, is identical; and he who smiles at the frivolous elegance of Damasus or his clerics, yet cries out to him, “I am with thy blessedness, that is, with the Chair of Peter.” When he undertakes his immortal work, the translation of the Bible, it is with the approval of the same Pope; and the Vulgate, which was the Scripture of the West for nearly twelve hundred years, might almost be reckoned among the genuine Decretals. Then came Augustine (354-430), whose inexhaustible fertility in dispute never drew him into controversy with Rome, though his deep or ingenious commentaries on received doctrine were, in the great break-up which we call the Reformation, turned against her by those most resolute enemies, Luther, Calvin, and Jansenius. But Augustine did more than all the Fathers to lift up the Papacy as on a visible height—to idealize it as the new Jerusalem and the Christian Sion—when he put forth his vision of the City of God. There was no place known to men except Rome which could fulfil so large and sovereign a mission; and that some distinct sanctuary it must be, the Middle Ages would have asserted no less confidently than the Greeks, who beheld the temple of the Sun, not in the open sky above them, but on the island of Delos or in the mountain-gorges of Delphi.

Marcus Aurelius, the crowned philosopher and Stoic (161-180), had in a touching apostrophe made invocation to the “dear City of God,” which was to embrace all mankind. At that very time Christians were beginning to define their own society as the “Catholic Church,” and to oppose against the multitude of Gnostic rites its mystic and divine unity. It was impossible that converts from heathenism should lose the sentiment, universal since Augustus, that Rome was the sacred capital of a world-wide civilization, the meeting-place of all worships, and the center of religion. This great idea can never have died out. Nor would it fail to be kept alive by the progress of the new creed, since it spread from the Imperial cities to their dependencies, and the Roman Province became the Metropolitan circle, with bishops occupying the rank of prefects, or subordinate to them, on the lines of the civil organization. The primitive Church was the Empire taken a second time, but for spiritual and heavenly purposes. In every metropolis, says Bingham (whose evidence has stood the test of modern research), as there was a magistrate over the magistrates of each city, so there was a Bishop over the local bishops. That arrangement the Council of Nicæa confirmed. Constantine had new modelled the Empire. This first of the General Councils (325) acknowledged, in accordance with his dispositions, three great Patriarchates—Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. The Bishop of Rome, it observes in its sixth Canon, already exercised his rights over “the Suburbican churches,” which are understood to mean the churches of the “Diocese of Italy.” What the Popes did actually claim, as time went on, was a supreme right of interference in the “Prefectures” of Italy, in the two Gauls, which included Spain, and in Eastern Illyricum. Besides these particular jurisdictions, of which the last was frequently contested, they held, as appears from Athanasius, who cites a letter of Julius I. to this effect, that it was against the tradition to assemble councils and proceed to grave resolutions without their concurrence. All this betokens a close and increasing communion among the different local bodies of Christians. It is the old Roman vision of a world-empire expanding and realizing itself as a Catholic Church, which if not yet governed by a Supreme Head, was by all its institutions calling for one.

The division of the Empire, which followed on Constantine’s death, gave this problem a fresh turn. Of the Easterns it must be said, in general, that they were Erastians, if we may apply the language of the seventeenth century to the fourth. In the Emperor they owned a Divine right of superintending the Church; he was a kind of lay Bishop, and it was impossible to say where his power ended. The secular arm executed the decrees of Councils, drove heretics into exile, and through all the controversies which tore Christendom wielded the sword of the Lord. It seemed a conclusion from this Old Testament view that the Imperial city ought to share in its master’s prerogatives. Constantinople, which as Byzantium had been the suffragan of Heraclea, would not submit to be reckoned among the inferior churches. It aspired to independence; and though it dared not vie with “Old Rome” at first, it elbowed aside not only Antioch but the ever-orthodox Alexandria, and boldly insisted on taking the second place. Nor, as was shown in the sequel, did it pause when that was attained. Its Patriarch, John the Faster, wrote himself “Universal Bishop” in 590. His successors are still denominated “Œcumenical,” which is the title he usurped; but neither they nor he establish their claim on a direct descent from one of the Apostles. The ground taken was frankly political; the city of the Emperor must be supreme.

In two General Councils, one held within the walls of Constantinople (381), the other in sight of its towers and palaces at Chalcedon (451), this demand was formulated as a Canon, or rule of law. The Popes, without losing a moment, raised the cry of alarm. They felt the danger which this Erastian principle would bring on their own policy of independence and freedom. Damasus, in a statement which might have been dictated by Hildebrand, asserts emphatically the idea to be henceforward echoed in every tone by the Apostolic See. To the temporal greatness of the Empire he opposes (381) the voice of the Lord Himself, who has given to Rome the primacy in Peter. It owes nothing to synods; it is above all other Churches, because of the text in the Gospels. Even Alexandria is “the second See,” as being “consecrated in the name of Peter,” through his disciple, Mark the Evangelist; on a like account Antioch is honorable, “for Peter took up his abode there, before he came to Rome.”

In these declarations, and in the acts to which they were an answer, we note the beginnings of the great schism that has divided the East from the West. Constantinople is Erastian; Pope Damasus is Ultramontane. The answer to Constantinople was the Papal Monarchy.

Disputes concerning precedence among Bishops may seem the vainest of quarrels; but we cannot fail to perceive that the races of men and the systems of philosophy extant within the Roman Empire were struggling here mightily against one another, like the winds on the great sea in Daniel’s vision. Egypt had been from of old the home of a mystical and ascetic religion, of which Neo-Platonism and the Christian teachers had borrowed as much as they would. Antioch and its vast dependencies were now covered with schools, in which the Greek spirit of reasoning and contention exercised full sway. To this side Constantinople was drawn by the habits of its indolent population; but though they welcomed a Syrian of genius, like St. John Chrysostom, in their Archbishop’s chair, they would not submit to rank below a provincial city on the Orontes. And Rome, which was neither given with the Egyptians to ecstatic dreaming, nor involved in the subtle syllogisms of the Asian Greeks, but which held fast by law and tradition, sided now with one of these parties and now with another, as the interests of orthodox government demanded. The history of the fifth and sixth Centuries does but exhibit the three Eastern capitals weakening one another by internecine wranglings, with their accompaniments of riot and persecution, until Syria and Egypt lay defenseless before Islam, and Constantinople trembled within her sea-girt fortifications. By the time of Gregory the Great, the two Patriarchal Churches associated with the name of St. Peter had almost run their course. Rome was left as the sole Apostolic See, founded on the rock.

We may watch this conception growing ever more luminous in the utterances of the Pontiffs themselves. It was to be strenuously acted upon, after the taking of Rome by Alaric, in matters of Church government as of dogmatic teaching, when Innocent I., Cœlestine, and Leo the Great displayed their conviction that in them and through them the Prince of the Apostles ruled. Innocent (402-417) declared that all the Churches of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Sicily had been founded by Peter and his successors; it was incumbent on them to follow the “use” of Rome. He reminds the Bishops of Macedonia that they must send an account of their proceedings to the “head of the Churches.” He takes the part of Chrysostom; excommunicates the usurper of his See, Acacius; is urgent against the Donatist schism in Africa; condemns Pelagius, who brings into the fifth century such a modern air of “Naturalism”; and strives to enforce upon the prelates at Carthage the power of receiving appeals which he grounds on the Canons of Nicæa. He was met, in this instance, with a counter- claim for verification; th...