Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance

by P. L. Jacob

The fathers of the Church endeavoured to oppose to the schools of philosophy, which had done so much harm to religion, purely ecclesiastical schools, for the teaching of the faithful and in order to protect them from the seductions of heretical learning. The school of Edessa was the most flourishing of these Eastern schools during the third and fourth centuries.

Fig. 308.—Dream of St. Basilius the Great.—The Martyr of Cesarea, St. Mercurius, sent from heaven by Christ, is in the act of stabbing the Emperor Julian the Apostate, whom he has thrown to the ground (see the text, p. 399).—After a Greek Painting of the Sixteenth Century, though the style is that of the Eleventh, in the Library of M. Firmin-Didot. The matters relating to this subject will be found collected in the “Mélanges d’Archéologie” of P. Cahier, vol. i., p. 39 et seq.

The part taken by the emperors themselves in the dogmatic disputes of the Christians, and the notoriety acquired by the rhetoricians who attacked or defended the truth, had made a number of vain nonentities rival each other in extravagance and recklessness in their endeavours to become celebrated: they tried to attract public notice by an excess of zeal against the heretics, by the austerity of their habits, by some eccentric practice, or by the rashness of their attacks against the discipline of the Church, notably against the worship paid to the Virgin. Such were Coluthus, Aetius, Bonosus, Helvidius, Jovinian, the Barefooted Friars, the Messalians, the Priscillianists, &c. Civil dissensions broke out and blood was shed, and the Court of Byzantium felt, through the great officers of the empire—and especially through the women, who took a passionate interest in these abstractions of dogma—the effect of every religious collision.

During the fourth century Arianism, which only saw in the Word a superior being created to intervene between God and man, was the prevailing heresy. The fifth century was agitated by the Pelagians, disciples of Pelagius, a native of Great Britain. This man, who was wanting neither in talent nor in ability, endeavoured to promulgate his doctrine, based upon the negation of original sin; he maintained that man could observe the commandments of God and work out his own salvation without the supernatural aid of divine grace—this was a virtual denial of Christ’s word, “Without me ye can do nothing.” Celestius, one of his followers, promulgated this heresy in Africa, where it was eloquently combated by St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippona. The council of Carthage (415) condemned it, and, upon the demand of the Fathers there present, Pope Innocent I. issued his anathema against Pelagius and his adherents. It was then that St. Augustine pronounced the celebrated sentence, “Rome has spoken, the judgment of the African bishops is confirmed by letters from the pope, the cause is at an end—pray God that the error may be also!” (Roma locuta est, causa finita est). But the leader of the sect wrote to Zosimus, Innocent’s successor, a respectful letter of justification, and, his envoy Celestius having presented to the new pope an insidious profession of faith, by which he undertook to condemn anything which should be reprobated by the Holy See, Zosimus intervened with the African bishops on behalf of Pelagius, whom he sincerely believed to be attached to the true faith. Those bishops represented to the pontiff that his credulity had been imposed upon, and that the heretic, before receiving absolution, ought to be made to abjure his errors formally and explicitly. The pope then saw the trickery which had been attempted, and again condemned Pelagius and his followers. The latter appealed to the Council, but St. Augustine proved that the heresy imputed to them had been fully inquired into by the African bishops and irrevocably condemned by the Holy See, and that all that remained to be done was to put it down. The Emperor Honorius, considering the political troubles which were engendered, in the East more especially, by religious dissensions, decreed that whoever should persist in upholding the errors of Pelagianism should be punished with exile.

The heresy did not, however, altogether disappear, but underwent a modification of form, and the semi-Pelagians, whose doctrine was formally expounded by Cassianus the monk, while admitting original sin, maintained that God had given to man the innate and natural power of walking in the way of salvation, of believing and of freeing himself from the fetters of sin without the help of divine grace. This was appropriating the religious to the philosophical notion of free-will. These abstract questions may to us seem very subtle, but in these early centuries they were the great questions which occupied the attention of society. A new heretic, Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, created a vast sensation throughout Christianity by maintaining that Jesus Christ embodied two distinct persons. Hitherto all Christians had believed as the Church taught them, that the divine and the human nature of Jesus Christ belonged to one person—the Word, the second person of the Trinity. Nestorius attacked this fundamental dogma indirectly, declaring that the Virgin should be called the Mother of Christ, but not the Mother of God. This doctrine, implying that in Christ there were two distinct persons, was so repulsive to the faithful that, when the bishop expounded it to them for the first time, they immediately left the church for fear of seeming to approve this new heresy. The Emperor Theodosius the younger, seeing what disturbance the preaching of Nestorius was giving rise to in Constantinople, assembled a council at Ephesus, which was presided over by St. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, on behalf of the pope. The heresiarch refused to appear, and his doctrine was examined, discussed, and condemned.

The people of Ephesus gave marked evidence of their satisfaction when they found that the title of Mother of God was confirmed to the Virgin. But the ambassador of Theodosius, a devoted ally of Nestorius, intercepted the despatch of the proceedings of the Council, and sent to Constantinople a garbled account. The approaches to the imperial palace were so well guarded, that there seemed to be little hope of acquainting the emperor with what had really taken place, until a deputy of the council resorted to the ruse of disguising himself as a beggar and conveying the true written report in the hollow of his staff. Theodosius then shut up Nestorius in a monastery at Antioch, and, as he continued to promulgate his dogma, exiled him to Egypt.

A zealous monk, Eutyches, superior of a monastery near Constantinople, while combating the heresy of Nestorius, fell into the opposite error, alike contrary to orthodox teaching. Instead of respecting the letter of the dogma, he in his turn became a schismatic, as he maintained that there was only one nature in Jesus Christ—the divine; that this had absorbed the human nature as the ocean absorbs a drop of water. Condemned at Constantinople, he appealed from the sentence to another council assembled at Ephesus, the decrees of which were confirmed by Theodosius II. At the accession of Justinian, the orthodox religion regained all its authority; Eutychianism no longer dared to attack it, but Arianism extended even into Gaul in the track of the victorious armies of Theodoric, Egidius, Odoacer, Totila, and the long-haired kings.

The reign of Leo the Isaurian opened up fresh opportunities for error. The sacred images, which had been held in veneration from the earliest ages, became a cause of dispute in the East, where they were disapproved of by Mahomet and forbidden by the Koran. It was alleged that the figurative representation of human beings was subjected to certain astral and diabolical influences, and that it was contrary to religion, not to say sacrilegious, thus to disturb the quiet repose of their souls. Leo the Isaurian, who had imbibed this idea, which was, moreover, taught in oriental magic, issued against all kinds of images the celebrated edict which was excommunicated by the pope, and which convulsed the whole Eastern world. Luitprand, King of the Lombards, the Venetians, Charles Martel and his Franks, were summoned to the aid of the Eternal City, menaced by the forces of the empire, which was determined to impose the condemnation of images upon the Western Church. Charles Martel, by his overthrow of the victorious Saracens on the plains of Poitiers (732), rendered a service of inestimable value to the Christian religion as well as to France, for Islamism was upon the point of subjugating all Christian Europe.