Still bolder is the claim made in a letter in which Nicholas sought to control the conversion of the Danes. No new national Church must be founded without his authority, he says, since "according to the sacred decrees even a new basilica cannot be built without the command of the Pope."[163] In this he outran not only the genuine, but the forged, Decretals. He had in mind, no doubt, a decree of Gelasius on the subject of church-building, but this merely forbade the erection of a church, without authority, in the Roman diocese itself. At the other extremity of Europe Nicholas made elaborate efforts to bring the Bulgarians under his authority. He sent legates to King Boris, and wrote a very long and curious reply to a large number of questions—ranging from the most exalted points of faith to the wearing of trousers by women—which the Bulgarians submitted to him. He did not live to see the relapse of the deceitful and ambitious Slavs.
These are the outstanding features of the voluminous correspondence of Nicholas the Great. They bring before us the portrait of a man who is raised above the disorder of his time, not so much by strength of personality as by the exaltation of his sacerdotal creed. In a more orderly Christendom Nicholas might have seemed an exemplary and not greatly distinguished bishop, but chaos has ever been the native element of such creative genius as he possessed. Since all men now bowed in theory to the Christian ideal, their very disorders lent authority to the Pope's anathemas. He hears that a set of young bishops are devoted to hunting and even to less reputable pastimes, and his scorn is irresistible.[164] He hears that the sons of Charles the Bald have quarrelled with their royal father, and, though they are now reconciled, "we direct that you present yourselves humbly at a synod to be held in a place appointed by us, to which we will send legates of the apostolic authority."[165] He has little time or inclination for the material decoration of Rome. He restores St. Peter's and the Trajan aqueduct; he organizes the distribution of charity; but his life-work is the consolidation of the spiritual supremacy of the Popes. He is, pre-eminently, the smiter of the powerful; and, in smiting them, he strengthens the Papal arm. Fortunately for him and the Papacy, he has to deal with a degenerate, ignorant, and superstitious generation: the night of the Dark Age is drawing in—a night which is not disproved by showing, as Maitland does, that there was a little lamp here and there. And when we contemplate that world of murder, incest, rape, spoliation, and monastic and priestly corruption which is reflected in the Pope's letters, we feel that it was well for Europe to have such a master.
On the other hand, we do assuredly find Nicholas, and each succeeding great Pope, yielding to that most natural temptation of the moralist and priest in face of grave disorder—acting on the unformulated principle that the end sanctifies the means. The question whether Nicholas relied on the Forged Decretals has now been so fully discussed that it is possible to give a precise answer; at least when we consider certain passages in his letters which have been overlooked. On the origin and spread of the Decretals I need only summarize accepted results.[166] The collection originated in France about the year 850, though it is still disputed whether it was composed in the diocese of Tours or (as seems more probable) that of Rheims. It follows from this origin that the forgery was perpetrated, not in the interest of the Papacy, but of the bishops and lower clergy, to whom it gave the right of appeal to a central authority against the (often unjust) sentences of higher prelates and the aggression of lay nobles. The book, however, is not merely concerned with questions of jurisdiction and appeal. It is further agreed that, though the successor of Nicholas, Hadrian II., certainly used the Forged Decretals, they were little used by the Popes before the middle of the eleventh century; but it is equally agreed that they were of immense service to the Papacy in spreading a conviction of the antiquity of its most advanced claims and in promoting the practice of appeal to it.
The chief point in dispute is whether Nicholas knew and employed the forgery, and with this I may deal more fully. The first letter in the Pope's Register is a reply to Wenilo, Archbishop of Sens, in regard to the deposition of a bishop. Servatus Lupus, the learned abbot of Ferrières, had written on behalf of Wenilo—the letter is fortunately preserved—to say that men were quoting a certain Decretal of Pope Melchiades which reserved to the Papacy the deposition of bishops.[167] This was evidently a quotation from the Forged Decretals, yet in his reply Nicholas completely ignores the supposed Decretal on which his opinion was expressly asked. Whether or no we may infer from this silence that Nicholas was ignorant of the source of the quotation, we may surely conclude that so industrious a canonist would make immediate inquiries about this remarkable document, if he were not already acquainted with it. Since, however, he made no reply to the question whether the deposition of a bishop was reserved to the Papacy, I infer that he was unaware of the existence of the Decretals; and this is strongly confirmed by a letter which he wrote in 862. He tells King Solomon of Brittany that a bishop may be deposed by twelve bishops, on the evidence of seventy-two witnesses, and he refers to Pope Silvester as the authority for this mythical ordinance.[168] In this he relies on a spurious document, but a document not contained in the Isidorean collection. The main point is that he allows the local deposition of bishops, and enjoins recourse to Rome only in case of dispute. He does not yet seem to know the Decretals, but, as Hincmar had used them in 857 (possibly in 853), we can hardly imagine such a Pope as Nicholas remaining long unaware of the existence in France of this strong foundation of his authority; especially when, as I said, his attention had been plainly drawn to it by Servatus Lupus.
Then came the case of Rothrad,[169] and Nicholas, as we saw, wrote to Hincmar that the case ought to have been remitted to Rome whether Rothrad had appealed or no[170]; but it is clear that he is speaking of a vague duty imposed by general respect for the Apostolic See, not of a duty enforced by canonical obligation. If, he says, Hincmar were "not disposed" to send the case to Rome (si id agere noluisses), he ought at least to have respected Rothrad's actual appeal. But when we come to 865, and the famous letter (lxxv.) which the Pope wrote to Hincmar and his colleagues, Nicholas is quite clear. "Even if," he says, "he [Rothrad] had not appealed to the Apostolic See, you had no right to run counter to so many and such important decretal statutes and depose a bishop without consulting us."[171] The French prelates had complained that such Decretals were not found in their collection: the Dionysian collection given to Charlemagne by Hadrian in 774. It does not matter, Nicholas replies, whether they have them or not; all Decretals approved at Rome are to be respected. And he makes it perfectly clear that he is referring, not to genuine Decretals which may not be in the Dionysian collection, but to the Isidorean. They make use of these Decretals themselves, he says, when it suits their purpose; we know that Hincmar had done so, and possibly Nicholas had learned this from Rothrad. But he makes it still plainer that he is not referring to Decretals in the Roman archives, but to the Isidorean forgeries, when he says that he is thinking of the Decretals of "ancient" (prisci) Pontiffs, not merely those of Gregory and Leo; and he leaves no room whatever for doubt when he includes letters written by the Popes in "the times of the pagan persecutions."
We must not, however, exaggerate the Pope's reliance on this imposture. M. Roy has made a careful analysis of the letters of Nicholas, and he maintains that only four of his quotations are from spurious Decretals: that three of these are not in the Isidorean collection: and that the one which is common to Nicholas and pseudo-Isidore had already been in circulation before the imposture was published.[172]
Father de Smedt further points out that Nicholas made no use of Isidorean Decretals which would, especially in his conflict with Photius, have been useful to him, and that, when he does use documents which are in the Isidorean collection, he gives their genuine words or assigns them to their real authors. These are generally valid claims, but they do not conflict with my conclusion. Nicholas plainly endeavoured to use the Forged Decretals, but he had a learned and acute antagonist in Hincmar and he dare not quote them individually or in their crude Isidorean form. One is almost reminded of the smiles of Roman augurs when one considers these two great ecclesiastical statesmen, using a forged document or watching with complacency the use of it, yet checking each other when it affects their own interests. There is no answer to Milman's sober charge that Nicholas saw the spread of the work and did not protest. He knew well the contents of the Roman archives—he had a number of scribes studying them—and he must have known as well as we do that there were no genuine Decretals before the time of Gelasius.
The analysis made by M. Roy must be supplemented by that of J. Richterich,[173] from which it appears beyond question that Nicholas made a very extensive use of spurious documents; as we have found Roman officials doing from the fourth century. Father de Smedt[174] "does not altogether deny" that, as Hinschius says, Nicholas sometimes, in quoting genuine Decretals, alters their meaning in accordance with the Isidorean. Roy himself has to admit that Nicholas goes far beyond the words and meaning of Gelasius in saying that no church may be built without the Pope's permission.[175] He goes equally beyond genuine precedent in claiming that no bishop can be deposed without his authority; hitherto there had been only the vague understanding that "grave cases" were reserved to the Pope. He advances equally beyond precedent in claiming that no council can be held without his sanction. Roy[176] calls this "a pseudo-Isidorean principle," and says that Nicholas nowhere asserted it. But Nicholas plainly asserts it in Ep., xii., and is just as plainly straining a vague early claim of Pope Gelasius.[177]
We must conclude that, however beneficent may have been the spiritual centralization which Nicholas so ably elaborated, and however impersonal and religious his aim may have been, he proceeded at times on principles which no cause can sanctify: principles which it was dangerous to bequeath to less spiritual successors. He died in 867, after nine and a half years of heroic work for his ideal: a type of ecclesiastical statesman that it needs a peculiarly balanced judgment to appreciate. The pleasures and thrills of the world he despised, and it would be a deep injustice to conceive him as other than entirely indifferent to the personal prestige of his position. His personality was entirely merged in his office: he was, indeed, not a personality, but the vicar of a greater personality. The phrase which too often in Hadrian's letters is a mere artifice for obtaining wealth and power—"the Blessed Peter"—was to him the expression of a living and awful reality. If the Papacy did not tower above all the other thrones in Christendom, the intention of Christ was made void. Nicholas would have it realized. In that spirit he added strength to the frame of the Papal system. The historian must do justice to his aim and to the salutary tendency of his moral control of Europe; he must be no less candid in denouncing the sentiment that the end justifies the means.
FOOTNOTES: