Curiosities of Christian History Prior to the Reformation

by James Paterson

THE FORGED DECRETALS ABOUT CONSTANTINE (795).

Pope Adrian I., who died 795, in his troubles with emperors and kings, finding Charlemagne a rising power, wrote a letter to him exhorting him to imitate the liberality and revive the name of the great Constantine. He used for that purpose a legend for which he vouched, and which was to this effect: The first of the Christian emperors was healed of the leprosy, and purified in the waters of baptism by St. Sylvester, the Roman bishop, and the physician was gloriously recompensed, for that emperor withdrew from the seat and patrimony of St. Peter, declared his resolution of founding a new capital in the East, and resigned to the Popes the free and perpetual sovereignty of Rome, Italy, and the provinces of the West. By this plausible story it was made to appear that the Popes were made by the best of titles supreme; and such were the ignorance and credulity of the times, that this absurd fable was received with equal reverence in Greece and France. It turned out that the story was a forgery concocted near the end of the eighth century by one Isidore, a scribe. It was, nevertheless, accepted and handed down as a magna charta of papal rights, until some opposition to its authenticity proceeded from a Sabine monastery about 1100. In the revival of letters, an eloquent critic and Roman patriot, named Laurentius Valla, who died 1457, completed the exposure of the forgery, to the amazement of his contemporaries, and before the end of the next age the imposture was rejected with the contempt of all the historians. But it served its purpose. As Gibbon observes, “The Popes themselves have indulged a smile at the credulity of the vulgar, but a false obsolete title still sanctifies their reign; and by the same fortune which has attended these forged decretals, and the Sibylline oracles, the edifice has subsisted after the foundations have been undermined.”

POPE NICOLAS AND THE FALSE DECRETALS (867).

One of the clever stratagems by which Pope Nicolas I., who died in 867, tried to establish his supremacy over the whole world in all things spiritual was the promulgation of the false decretals. This Pope was said to have tamed kings and tyrants, and to have ruled the world like a sovereign. A rebel Transalpine prelate, Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, had disputed the jurisdiction of the Pope, but was compelled to submit. On a sudden, at the nick of time, there was promulgated a new code, including thirty-nine (false) decrees of Popes and councils. These not only asserted the supremacy of the Pope, his dignity and privileges, but included a whole system of Church discipline on Church property, sacraments, festivals, rites, and ceremonies. The whole is composed with an air of profound piety and reverence, and a specious purity of tone. But for the too manifest design, the aggrandisement of the whole clergy in subordination to the See of Rome; but for the monstrous ignorance of history, which betrayed itself in glaring anachronisms, and in the utter confusion of the order of events and the lives of distinguished men—the former awakening keen and jealous suspicion, the latter making the detection of the spuriousness of the whole easy, clear, irrefragable—the false decretals might still have maintained their place in ecclesiastical history. They are now given up by all; not a voice is raised in their favour. The utmost done is to palliate the guilt of the forger, who fortunately is unknown.

SEPARATION OF THE GREEK AND LATIN CHURCHES (1054).

The restoration of the Western Empire by Charlemagne was speedily followed by the permanent separation of the Greek and Latin Churches. About 850 Photius, an ambitious layman and captain of the guards, was promoted to the office of Patriarch of Constantinople, thereby superseding Ignatius, who had a large following. Both appealed to Pope Nicolas I., a proud and aspiring pontiff, who embraced the welcome opportunity of judging and condemning his rival of the East. The patriarch had the aid of his own court, and deposed the Pope; but in turn he and his patrons lost ground, and the original patriarch, Ignatius, was restored. Thereafter the feud continued more or less fiercely, till at last, in 1054, the then patriarch was excommunicated in Constantinople by the Pope’s legates. Shaking the dust from their feet, they deposited on the altar of St. Sophia a direful anathema, which enumerated seven mortal heresies of the Greeks, and consigned the Eastern Church, its teachers and sectaries, to everlasting damnation. Though the forms of civility thereafter were sometimes maintained, the Greeks never recanted the errors and the Popes never repealed their sentence. This aversion of the Greeks and Latins was nourished and manifested in the three first expeditions to the Holy Land. The Eastern Christians never gave a cordial welcome to the Crusaders, and rather treated them as schismatics, and sometimes took part in thwarting them. In 1183 the Greeks carried out a massacre, in which the Latins were slaughtered in houses and streets, their clergy burnt in the churches, and the sick in their hospitals. The Greek monks and priests actually chanted a thanksgiving to the Lord when the head of a Roman cardinal, the Pope’s legate, was severed from his body, fastened to the tail of a dog, and dragged in savage mockery through the city.

EARLY CONTENTIONS OF JEW AND CHRISTIAN.

In the fourth century, after miraculous powers ceased to attend the progress of Christianity, and a system of wonder-working was established, the Jews, who had long watched with jealousy the advance of their rivals, began to think that they could also become adepts in pious frauds. Next one party took to magical arts as weapons of superiority. A conference is said to have taken place in the presence of Constantine and the devout empress-mother Helena between the Jews and the Christians. Pope Sylvester had already triumphed in argument over his infatuated opponents, when the Jews had recourse to magic. A noted enchanter commanded an ox to be brought forward; he whispered into the ear of the animal, which instantly fell dead at the feet of Constantine. The Jews shouted in triumph, for it was the word Ham-semphorash, the ineffable name of God, at the sound of which the awestruck beast had expired. Sylvester, with some shrewdness, observed, “As he who whispered the name must be well acquainted with it, why does not he fall dead in like manner?” The Jews answered contemptuously, “Let us have no more verbal disputations; let us come to actions.” “So be it,” said Sylvester; “and if this comes to life again at the name of Christ, will ye believe?” They all assented. Sylvester then raised his eyes to heaven, and said with a loud voice, “If He be the true God whom I preach, in the name of Christ arise, you ox, and stand on your feet.” The ox sprang up and began to move and feed. The legend then adds that the whole assembly was baptised.

JULIAN INCITING THE JEWS TO REBUILD THE TEMPLE.