It is true that the Western Church did not lay definite claim to any such total independence as Cyprian vindicated for his African communities: the good offices and arbitration of St. Peter’s successor were sought in disputed and doubtful cases, even if we cannot admit of positive appeals to the Roman curia: the bishops of Burgundy, Provence and Spain, early found that union with the oldest and most respected church of the West offered an important defence of orthodoxy threatened by the Arian and semi-Arian dogma of the barbarians who had wrested those fine provinces from the empire: and the popes were not unwilling to encourage a tendency which helped to realize the idea of a pre-eminence in their church over all the Christian communities.[[834]] The institution of Missi, or special commissioners, was familiar: they adopted it, and at a very early period we find papal vicars exercising some sort of authority in Gaul, and perhaps even in Britain.
The conversion of Clovis to the orthodox faith, instead of that which he might have learned from his Arian neighbours, was not only a source of power and importance to the Catholic bishops of Gaul, but ultimately of the greatest moment to the bishop of Rome. We must admit that under the Merwingian kings, the popes enjoyed some authority and great consideration in Gaul, though not enough to endanger the independence and freedom of the Gallican church: but under the family of Pipin they necessarily occupied a very different position. For during the earlier years of the imperial constitution, Rome was a city, and its bishop to a certain extent an officer, of the empire, and the power and influence of the popes was advanced by the Frankish emperor as best might suit his own purposes. It is assuredly not true that under Charlemagne those bishops ventured upon any of the usurpations which they succeeded in substantiating under later emperors.
During the reign of Hluduuig indeed, a pious but weak prince, they obtained various concessions which in process of time bore fruit of power[[835]]. It was reserved for later days to witness the triumph of Roman independence through the combination of communal with priestly tendencies. This combination first darkly arose when the nationality of Rome itself burst forth, encouraged by the vigour with which the bishop made head against the invading Saracens in Italy, supported the orthodox prelates of the southern kingdoms, Arles, Burgundy and Spain against Arian dukes and governors, and regulated the internal affairs of the city, neglected by its Frankish patricians and missi. At this time too Rome had no competitor: Africa had fallen, Constantinople had abdicated her imperial position, the cities and the sees of the East had vanished together; Rome—at least one of the oldest—was now unquestionably the most powerful of the Christian churches. She had all the prestige of the old empire, and all the support of the new one which she had helped to found upon the ruins of the old.
But this gradual advance and this commanding power could not at first have been contemplated. It is a common error to suppose that great results, which seem necessarily produced by a long series of combined causes, have from the first been prepared and foreseen. The spectator in his own struggle after a logical unity rejects the accidental and accessory facts, to fix his eyes upon the apparently essential development; and supposes everything to have been grasped together, because his intellect cannot conceive the whole variety of occurrences without so grasping them. The relations of Rome with the Franks were hardly the consequence of any deliberate or well-considered plan. The Frankish kings had been selected as patrons merely because they could afford the protection which was looked for in vain from Constantinople, or indeed any other quarter; and had Italy not been overrun by Germanic invaders of various race, from whose power there seemed no refuge, save in other and still more barbarous Germanic defenders, the Western empire might never have been restored: but when once it was so restored,—from the moment when Pope Leo and the Roman municipality agreed to place the command of the city, and the rights of the ancient Caesars, in the hands of a barbarian king,—but one capable of appreciating and securing all the advantages of his great position,—Rome itself became not only identified with the new views, but necessary to their fulfilment[[836]]. Had the new emperor been a Roman, or had he selected Rome as his residence, and thus made it the local as well as real and political centre of his power, the Papacy would probably never have attained its territorial authority. But the Frankish king remained true to the habits of his people and of his predecessors, resided in peaceful times at Ingleheim or Aix la Chapelle, and spent years in wandering from one royal vill to another, or in the duties of active warfare upon the several confines of his empire; and thus the government of the eternal city practically fell into the hands of Frankish officers, dukes, missi, counts palatine, and ministerials, who gradually proved no match for the enlightened skill, unwearied diplomacy and increasing power of the pontiffs, the Roman aristocratic families, and the resuscitated municipality: yet the popes had hardly succeeded in attaining to a complete independence of the German Caesars, when the son of Hugues, called Capet, expelled the last Caroling from the soil of France; though in the course of a policy long inexorably pursued, they had gone far to prepare for a dismemberment of the empire which was to be of more important consequence to the world than even that separation[[837]]. In 956—the year in which Eádwig, the mark of monkish calumny, came to the throne of England, the Patrician Octavian, son of Alberic of Spoleto, and through him grandson of the scandalous Marozia, caused himself to be elected Pope; and thus united the highest worldly and spiritual authorities in the city, concentrating in his own person all the rights both of the empire and the papacy[[838]].
Three hundred and sixty years earlier, Gregory, then bishop of Rome, had despatched a missionary adventure to this country.
The zeal of modern polemics has dealt more hardly with Gregory than justice demands[[839]]. Who shall dare to attribute to him, or to any other man, entire freedom from human error, or total absence of those faults which, for the very happiness of man, are found to chequer the most perfect of human characters? But even if we admit that he shared, to not less than the usual degree, in the weakness and selfishness of our nature, it is impossible to withhold the meed of our admiration from the man whose intellect could combine, whose prudence could direct, and whose courage could cope with, all the details of a conversion such as that of Saxon England. Let us only consider the circumstances under which he found himself placed at home, and we shall the better comprehend the power of mind which could devise and execute the vast design of a spiritual colonization, a transplantation of religion as it were from Rome the centre, to Britain the extreme, the least known, and most barbarous point of the ancient empire[[840]]. Temporal as well as spiritual ruler of the city, abandoned by those miserable intriguers who inherited from the emperors nothing but their title and their vices, and pressed on every side by the vigorous advance of the Langobardic arms, it was Gregory’s fate or fortune to pass in the midst of political excitement a life which he had hoped to devote to pious meditation. But he possessed a character capable of moulding itself to all the exigencies of his situation; whether reluctantly or not, he flung himself into the gap, and comprehended, with a perfect singleness of insight, that to whom belongs the post of greatest honour, on him lies also the burthen of the greatest toil and greatest danger. By turns soldier, captain, negotiator, and priest,—now wielding the pen to instruct, now the sword to protect or to chastise,—now pouring passionate exhortations from his pulpit, now providing for the resources of his commissariat, or superintending the builders engaged on the material defences of his walls,—we see in him one of those men whom troublous times have often educated to cope with themselves, and whose names have thus justly become the very landmarks and pivots of history.
A great writer, who sometimes suffers his hostility against Christianity and its professors to outweigh the calmer judgment of the historian, has left us this graphic account of the condition of Rome at the end of the sixth century[[841]].
“Amidst the arms of the Lombards, and under the despotism of the Greeks, we again inquire into the fate of Rome[[842]], which had reached, about the close of the sixth century, the lowest period of her depression. By the removal of the seat of empire, and the successive loss of the provinces, the sources of public and private opulence were exhausted; the lofty tree, under whose shade the nations of the earth had reposed, was deprived of its leaves and branches, and the sapless trunk was left to wither on the ground. The ministers of command and the messengers of victory no longer met on the Appian or Flaminian Way, and the hostile approach of the Lombards was often felt and continually feared. The inhabitants of a potent and peaceful capital, who visit without an anxious thought the garden of the adjoining country, will faintly picture in their fancy the distress of the Romans; they shut or opened their gates with a trembling hand, beheld from the walls the flames of their houses, and heard the lamentations of their brethren, who were coupled together like dogs, and dragged away into distant slavery beyond the sea and the mountains. Such incessant alarms must annihilate the pleasures and interrupt the labours of a rural life; and the Campagna of Rome was speedily reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness, in which the land is barren, the waters are impure, and the air is infectious. Curiosity and ambition no longer attracted the nations to the capital of the world: but if chance or necessity directed the steps of a wandering stranger, he contemplated with horror the vacancy and solitude of the city, and might be tempted to ask, Where is the senate, and where are the people? In a season of excessive rains, the Tiber swelled above its banks, and rushed with irresistible violence into the valleys of the seven hills. A pestilential disease arose from the stagnation of the deluge, and so rapid was the contagion, that fourscore persons expired in an hour in the midst of a solemn procession, which implored the mercy of heaven[[843]]. A society in which marriage is encouraged and industry prevails, soon repairs the accidental losses of pestilence and war; but as the far greater part of the Romans was condemned to hopeless indigence and celibacy, the depopulation was constant and visible, and the gloomy enthusiasts might expect the approaching failure of the human race[[844]].”
It was in the midst of scenes such as these that Gregory found time to organize the mission of Augustine to Britain. In the absence of definite information, derived from his own account, or the relations of his friends and contemporaries, it is impossible to penetrate the motives which led the pontiff to this step. They have been variously interpreted by the zeal of opposing historians, who have construed them by the light of their own prejudices, in favour of the conflicting interests of their respective churches. Nor, with such insufficient means, do we attempt to reconcile their differences: human motives are rarely unmixed, rarely all good or all evil: it is possible that there may be some truth in all the conflicting views which have been taken of this great act; that while an earnest missionary spirit, and deep feeling of responsibility, led the Pope to carry the blessings of an orthodox Christianity to the distant and benighted tribes of Britain, he may have contemplated—not without pardonable complacency—the growth of a church immediately dependent upon his see for guidance and instruction. It may be that some lingering whispers of vanity or ambition spoke of the increase of wealth or dignity or power which might thus accrue to the patriarchate of the West. Nay, who shall say that, looking round in his despair upon Rome itself and the disject members of its once mighty empire, he may not even have thought that England, inaccessible from its seas, and the valour of its denizens, might one day offer a secure refuge to the last remains of Roman faith and nationality, and their last, but not least noble, defender?
To the pontiff and the statesman it was not unknown that the Britannic islands were occupied by two populations different alike in their descent and in their fortunes; the elder and the weaker, of Keltic blood; the younger and the conquering race, an offshoot of that great Teutonic stock, whose branches had overspread all the fairest provinces of the empire, and had now for the most part adopted something of the civilization, together with the profession, of Christianity. He was aware that commercial intercourse, nay even family alliances, had already connected the Anglosaxons with those Franks, who, in opposition to the Arian Goths, Burgundians and Langobards, had accepted the form of faith considered orthodox by the Roman See[[845]]. The British church, he no doubt knew, in common with others which claimed to have been founded by the Apostles[[846]], still retained some rites and practices which had either never been sanctioned or were now abandoned at Rome: but still the communion of the churches had been maintained as well as could be expected between such distant establishments. British bishops had appeared in the Catholic synods[[847]], and the church of the Keltic aborigines reverenced with affectionate zeal the memory of the missionaries whom it was the boast of Rome to have sent forth for her instruction or confirmation in the faith[[848]]. On the other hand, it had reached the ears of the Pope, that the Germanic conquerors themselves yearned for the communication of the glad tidings of salvation; that tolerance was found in at least one court,—and that, one of preponderating influence; while an unhappy instinct of national hatred had induced the British Christians to withhold all attempts to spread the Gospel among their heathen neighbours[[849]].