Antioch fell under it in 637. From that time forth, the so-called patriarch began often to live at Byzantium. The patriarchate, which, down to the heresies of the third and fourth centuries, had probably, in Christian population, in learning, in the distinction which its bishops enjoyed each in their own city, been the most flourishing portion of the Church, began to decline. The deposition of St. Eustathius, in 330, cost its capital a schism of nearly a hundred years. The partisanship of its patriarch with its countryman, Nestorius, prejudiced both its rank and its unity. What proportion of its once eleven provinces and 161 bishops belonged to it at the time of the Mohammedan invasion might be difficult to ascertain. But how great and wide its circuit was is shown by the instance of Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, which, though an undistinguished see, contained in it no less than eight hundred parishes,[70] and was under Hierapolis, as seat of the Metropolitan.
After 638, the Antiochene patriarch never more lifted his diminished head as the holder of one of the three great Petrine Sees, whom St. Innocent I. and St. Gregory I. had acknowledged with themselves as representatives of St. Peter.
In all this, we behold the consummation of a fearful history, and I will take the words of one who witnessed the [pg 138] northern wandering of the nations to illustrate, rather perhaps, to account for, the much more terrible wandering of the nations in the south. It was more than two hundred and forty years before this new kingdom arose that St. Jerome, from his solitude at Bethlehem, addressed a friend. It was in the year immediately succeeding the death of the great Theodosius. His rapid view of the generation which had just passed will inspire many thoughts. He is consoling the bishop, Heliodorus, for the loss of his nephew, the priest, Nepotian, a dear friend of his own: “and why,” he says, “am I trying to heal a wound which time and thought, as I believe, have already soothed? Why do I not rather bring before you the miseries of royalty so near to us? Our time has such calamities that it were well not so much to mourn one on whom this light has ceased to shine as to congratulate the escape from such misfortunes. Constantius, the patron of the Arian heresy, in the midst of preparing for the enemy's onset, and rushing to the fight, dies in the village of Mopsis, and, in great sorrow, left his empire a prey to his foe. Julian, betrayer of his own life, and slaughterer of an army that was Christian, acknowledged in Media the power of that Christ whom he had first denied in Gaul. Striving to extend the Roman frontiers, he lost what they had already gained. Jovian had but a taste of imperial power, and died suffocated by charcoal fumes: an instance to all men of what human dominion is. Valentinian laid waste his own native land, and, [pg 139] leaving it unavenged, broke a blood-vessel and died. His brother, Valens, in the war with the Goths, was defeated in Thrace, and found a tomb on the spot of his death. Gratian, betrayed by his own army, and not received by the cities which he approached, suffered the mockery of enemies: and thy walls, O Lyons, bear the impression of the blood-stained hand. The young Valentinian, scarcely beyond boyhood, after flight, after banishment, after recovering the empire with great blood-shedding, was slain near the city, guilty of his brother's death: and his lifeless body suffered the ignominy of the halter. Then there was Procopius, and Maximus, and Eugenius, who, when they were in power, struck their opponents with terror. All stood captives before their conquerors: and suffered that utmost misery of those once powerful: to be reduced to slavery, and then slaughtered.
“Some one may say, this is the lot of kings, and lightnings strike high summits. Pass to private ranks, and only within the last two years. Let us take but the different ends of three lately Consuls. Abundantius is in poverty and exile at Pityuns. The head of Ruffinus was carried on a pike to Constantinople; his right hand was cut off, and, to mark his insatiable greed, taken begging from door to door. Timavius, hurled suddenly from the loftiest ranks, thinks it an escape to live nameless at Assa. It is not the calamities of the miserable which I relate, but the frailty of man's condition. It strikes with horror to follow out the ruins of our times. It is [pg 140] more than twenty years since Roman blood is shed daily between Constantinople and the Julian Alps. In Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Dardania, Dacia, Thessaly, Achaia, Epirus, Dalmatia, and all the Pannonias, Goth and Sarmatian, Quade, Alan, and Hun, Vandals and Marcomans, waste, drag away, and plunder. How many matrons, how many consecrated virgins, how many free and noble persons, have fallen a prey to these brutes! Bishops captured; priests and the various ranks of clergy slain; churches ruined; horses stabled at Christ's altars; relics of martyrs dug up. Mourning and death in every shape on all sides. The Roman world falls in pieces, but our stiff neck is not bent. What spirit, think you, have Corinthians, Athenians, Lacedæmonians, Arcadians, and all Greece, in the gripe of barbarians? I have named few cities which were not formerly strong powers. The East seemed free from these scourges: bad tidings only terrified it. When lo! last year, from the farthest heights of Caucasus, wolves, not of Arabia, but of the North, were let loose upon us. They overran at once great provinces. How many monasteries were captured! How many rivers changed into human blood! Antioch was besieged, and the cities which the Halys, Cydnus, Orontes, Euphrates traverse. Crowds of captives carried away. Arabia, Phœnicia, Palestine, Egypt, trembling with fright. Had I a hundred tongues and mouths, and a voice of iron, I could not enumerate all the tortures suffered. I did not propose to write a history; [pg 141] but in few words to lament our miseries; otherwise, adequately to set forth these things. Thucydides and Sallust would both be mute.” The whole period of two hundred and forty years, between the time when St. Jerome, as a spectator, wrote thus, and the time of the Mohammedan inroad, is expressed in the words which follow. “It is long since we felt that we are offending God, but we do not appease Him. It is by our own sins that the barbarians prevail. It is by our own vices that the Roman army is conquered. And, as if this was not enough for our losses, our civil wars have consumed almost more than the edge of the enemy's sword. Unhappy we who are so displeasing to God that His wrath breaks forth on us through the fury of savages. The greatness of the reality surpasses language: all words are less than the truth.”
For, indeed, the time was come, through the extraordinary wickedness of two hundred years, when the very sanctuaries from which St. Jerome was writing, the sanctuaries of the birth and death of Christ, Bethlehem and Calvary, were to fall, not by a sudden inroad, but a permanent occupation into the hands of His chief enemies. The time was also come when the see of the great confessor whose name we identify with the battle of faith against the world, the see of Athanasius himself, the Pope of the East, the next in hierarchical order to the Universal Pope, was to fall, and to fall for ever, from its high estate. “Almost from the death of Athanasius began the spiritual declension of his see and Church.”—“Pride [pg 142] is not made for man; not for an individual bishop, however great, nor for an episcopal dynasty. Sins against the law of love are punished by the loss of faith. The line of Athanasius was fierce and tyrannical, and it fell into the Monophysite heresy. There it remains to this day. A prerogative of infallibility in doctrine, which it had not, could alone have saved the see of Alexandria from the operation of this law.”[71]
During the ten years of Omar's chalifate the great patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch, and the smaller patriarchate of Jerusalem, which contained the places of pilgrimage dear to every Christian heart, visited by the faithful from all lands, not only the birth-place in Bethlehem, not only Nazareth consecrated by the angel's announcing of that birth, and by the secret life of the divine Boyhood and Manhood, but—
The sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world's ransom, Blessed Mary's Son.[72]
fell together into bondage under the special enemy of the Cross. In this bondage the hierarchies of the three patriarchates, as distinct wholes, almost disappear from history. It is well to consider here the condition in which they had been even from the time of the Arian heresy.[73] The declension of Antioch had been of as long standing as the declension of Alexandria. At the end of the fourth century St. Chrysostom bore witness to its [pg 143] hundred thousand Christians. But in the course of the fifth the great third see of the Church lost much of its reputation and power. Partly it fell into weak hands, as John I., from 428 to 441, who held but a poor position in the Nestorian conflict, while Domnus II. took part in the robber council of 447. Then, at Chalcedon, the elevation of Jerusalem to a patriarchate took from its jurisdiction the three Palestines. But especially the encroachments of the see of Byzantium told upon it. The bishops of the royal city claimed to consecrate the already-named patriarchs. Anatolius ordained Maximus, who was substituted for Domnus II. when deposed in spite of his subservience to Dioscorus. In this he disregarded the rights of the bishops of the Antiochene patriarchate, and the Byzantine bishops forthwith turned that precedent into a right. Maximus was followed by Basilius, Acacius, and Martyrius. The Monophysite Peter Fullo formed such a party against the last that he resigned in despair. This usurper resisted the Emperor Zeno's condemnation to banishment, and put himself, first secretly, then openly, as patriarch against Julian. He so persecuted the Catholics, that Julian died of sorrow. The Emperor Zeno banished the heretical Peter Fullo to Pityuns. He was succeeded by the equally heretical John II., Kodonatus. But this patriarch was deposed in three months by the exertion of the bishops. The Monophysites already prevailed. They murdered in the sacred place itself the new Catholic patriarch, Stephen II., and threw his mangled body into the Orontes. The emperor punished the crime, [pg 144] and Acacius, Bishop of Constantinople, put in his place Stephen III. Pope Simplicius censured this violation of the canons, and prohibited it for the future, which did not prevent Acacius renewing his encroachments when, after the death of Stephen in 482, he consecrated Colendion. Colendion was afterwards banished by the Emperor Zeno, and had to yield to the old heresiarch, Peter Fullo, who kept his patriarchate to his death in 488, and was succeeded by the equally heretical Palladius. Almost all Syria rose against the Catholic patriarch Flavian; the monk Severus got hold of the patriarchate, and kept it for six years. He fled in 519, under the Emperor Justin I., to Egypt. His successors, Paul II., who resigned in 521 through fear of an accusation, and Euphrasius of Jerusalem, could no longer secure superiority to the Catholics. Patriarch Ephrem followed from 526 to 545. He held a Synod against Origenism. Patriarch Domnus III. took part in the Fifth Council in 553. He was followed by the distinguished Anastasius I., and after St. Gregory I. by Anastasius II. The See remained a long time vacant. Those who then followed, Athanasius, Macedonius, and Macarius, were Monothelites. The two latter from the time the Saracens took Antioch, in 637, resided in Constantinople for safety. After George, who is said to have subscribed the Trullan Council in 692, the See was vacant forty years, and the patriarchs had often to endure extortions, ill-treatment, and banishment.
How well Alexandria had prepared itself for the Mohammedan captivity may be seen by the following [pg 145] facts. Under the violent Dioscorus the see of St. Mark not only declined from its distinction when ruled by St. Cyril, but threw the whole of Egypt into wild confusion by espousing the Monophysite error. The Catholic patriarch, Proterius, was murdered in 457: and the heretical Timotheus Ailouros set up by his party instead. He, though condemned by the emperor, Leo I., to banishment, maintained himself stubbornly against the Catholic patriarch, Solophakialos. After his death, Peter Mongus was able to expel the Catholic, John Talaia: and then, from 490 to 538, Alexandria had a succession of five Monophysite patriarchs. Under Justinian, from 538, during forty years, we find four Catholic patriarchs. So, again, in Eulogius, the friend of St. Gregory, and John the alms-giver. But during this time the Monophysites also had their patriarchal succession, and that even from different sects of the heresy. The end of it was that the bitterest enmity arose between the Melchite or Royalist, and the Monophysite party. The former, being a small minority, held by favour of the Byzantine emperor and his troops in Egypt the possession of authority. The Copts, being a great majority, considered themselves oppressed, and welcomed as deliverers, in 638, the conquering Arabs. The Melchite party sunk so low that their patriarchal place was vacant during eighty years, and the number of their bishops greatly sank. After 750, the Christian inhabitants of Egypt were more and more exposed to Mohammedan brutality. Sharp laws against them were issued: distinguishing marks and clothes prescribed.