Now, again, there has been a struggle for 44 years, in which ten Popes, subjects of the eastern emperor, and liable as such to be summoned by him to his capital, where one of them was indeed condemned to death, stood likewise as one man. They dwelt in a Rome no longer recognised as the head of the empire. Of this whole seventh century the special historian of the city says that for Rome it was “the most frightful, the most devastating of all”.[135] Civil power was not in their hands. Their election itself had to be confirmed by the exarch [pg 258] as representing the emperor, or by the emperor himself. The first of the ten, Pope Severinus, had to wait nineteen months for it, after which he sat two months. The last of the ten, St. Leo II., began to sit eighteen months after the death of his predecessor, St. Agatho, and then only sat ten months. During the whole of this period, from the death of Honorius in 638, to the ratification of the Sixth Council in 682, the yielding of any one of these ten Popes would have carried with it the subjection of the whole church to the Monothelite error. They saved the East, they saved the Royal City, the seat of all power, in spite of its four patriarchs condemned as heretics. That Heraclius and Constans did not destroy the faith in the seventh century is as much their work and merit as that Zeno and Anastasius did not destroy it in the fifth. Perhaps the test which by the force of circumstances was applied to the Popes from the time Rome was governed from Constantinople as a captive city in the second half of the sixth and the whole of the seventh century was even more severe than that applied to them in the fifth. Their condition was more helpless, inasmuch as the Byzantine subjection was heavier than the Arian Gothic control, while the pillaged Italy of the exarchs was wretched, and the prosperous realm of Theodoric guarded jealously the last remains of imperial grandeur. He at least was a king in Italian Ravenna and Verona, and Rome was both great and dear to him. But Justinian and those who followed him were task-masters on the Bosphorus, who placed a tax-collector at Ravenna to wring out the last drop of Italy's blood, and plunder, [pg 259] as occasion served, the treasury of the Church in the Pope's Lateran Patriarcheion.
In what consisted the power by which twenty-nine Popes from Pelagius I. in 555, to Gregory II. in 715 bore so fearful a strain? Solely in one thing: in the belief that the throne of St. Peter had been fixed at Rome, and that St. Peter had received by a direct gift from Christ, and his successor had inherited, the charge to feed and govern the universal Church. The five times captured Rome lived on in this belief, and was become the city of the Popes. The eye of a conqueror, legislator and ruler, had chosen with a wisdom which all posterity has acknowledged the fairest and the strongest of cities for the seat of his power. He made it a royal residence; he could not make it an apostolic see. When at length his city fell, the empire fell with it. In the day of its pride it sought to trample on the elder Rome by the privileges of new Rome. The second of these attempts was foiled by the ten successors of Pope Honorius.
The danger to the Christian faith in these fifty years which begin, it is to be noted, at the death of Mohammed and the election of a chalif in his stead, has been touched upon; but the danger to the empire must not be dissociated from it. All the tyranny, the extortion, the spiritual encroachment of the empire could not sever the links which bound it to the Church. Heraclius had been warned by his former minister Maximus how perilous to his empire his meddling with the creed would be.[136] “It is not a time for such things,” he said. “It is a [pg 260] time of blood on account of our sins, not of theologising; a time of lamentation, a time of imploring God's mercy, not of sophistical contradiction, moving Him to greater indignation.” The Greek[137] chronographer in the ninth century marks the rise of the Arabian enemy as a scourge of Christian sins. He traces the whole calamitous series of events to the seduction of Heraclius, by a certain Athanasius, full of native Syrian guile, whom he promised to make and did afterwards make patriarch of Antioch: Heraclius was confused by his use of new terms. He consulted Sergius, and also Cyrus, then bishop of Phasis. He found the three agree. He followed them. He translated Cyrus from Phasis to Alexandria. Then Heraclius issued an imperial edict on doctrine. When Constans had succeeded as emperor another imperial edict on doctrine, drawn up by another bishop of Constantinople, appeared, which St. Martin condemned in his Council at Rome. Then the emperor Constans, full of wrath, carried St. Martin and St. Maximus to Constantinople, tortured them and banished them to the Chersonese, and punished many of the western bishops besides. But Agatho, being elected Pope, and moved by the zeal of God, also summoned a holy Council and put under ban the Monothelite heresy. Upon all his narrative the conclusion of Theophanes is: “The Church being thrown into disorder by emperors and impious bishops, Amalek the child of the [pg 261] desert rose up to scourge us, the people of Christ. The Roman army met with a great defeat on the Yarmuk. There followed the capture of Palestine, of Cæsarea, of Jerusalem, then the loss of Egypt, then the captivity of inland and islands, and all Romania; the utter destruction of the Roman force in Phœnicia, the dissolution of all Christian peoples and places, which did not cease till the persecutor of the Church perished miserably in his bath in Sicily.”
Thus when the Sixth Council met at Constantinople not only had the emperor Constantine the Bearded declined far from the position held by Justinian, at the time in which he made Rome a garrison city in a servile province, a hundred and thirty years before, but his empire was not half so great as that of his great grandfather Heraclius, after the triumph of the Persian war. Not only were Syria and Egypt, and all Roman land on the side of Persia, and northern Africa as far as Kairowan, lost to the empire, but it had just escaped utter destruction by repelling the fleet of Muawiah after a conflict of several years from the waters of the Bosphorus. And the great and abiding difference to the eastern monarch was that he had lost this vast amount of territory to an enemy who had put the propagation of a different creed, antagonistic in its first principles to the Christian faith, into the hands of a single man. That single man, a chalif, wielding an absolute civil power, appertinent to the prophet's spiritual authority, had fixed the seat of his dominion in the heart of Rome's former domain in the East. The Mohammedan now [pg 262] moved upon Constantinople from his basis at Damascus. He had advanced upon Sicily likewise, and had taken Syracuse in 669, and from that time forth southern Italy had to dread his descent upon its coasts. By his union of spiritual and civil power in his person as chalif, he had now the whole Saracen force by land and sea at his command.
What were the Avars of the North or the Persians of the East compared to this new enemy, whose war-cry was, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His prophet”; whose meaning was, “There is no Christ, and no Mother of God, and no saints and no sacrifice, no kingdom in heaven to be gained by penance and humility. But there is the reign of a prophet on earth; receive his successor and you shall be our equals, refuse him and you, your wives and your children will be the captives of his sword.”
These were the wounds struck by the Monothelite heresy on the Christian Church and the eastern empire in the first fifty years which ran from the death of Mohammed.
Constantine IV. died in 685, leaving the throne to his son Justinian II. He had reigned since the murder of his father in 668, and the whole course of his reign showed a very favourable contrast with that of Constans II. But greater still, if possible, was to be the contrast presented to his government by that of his son, who succeeded at a most immature age, and showed himself without counsel, self-command, and reason in all that he did. He was the first of several bad and incapable [pg 263] rulers. His tyranny deprived him of the throne after ten years. He was deposed with the Byzantine penalty of an amputated nose. Upon this deposition, in 695, the following twenty-two years produced seven revolutions, putting the imperial power into new hands and new families. One of these violent changes replaced Justinian II., maimed and dishonoured as he was, after a banishment of ten years. But he had learned no prudence, and the inhumanity of his last six years in his second reign exceeded that of his first reign.
In those first ten years from 685 to 695 events happened of importance to the Church, which also illustrate the spirit dominant at Constantinople. The condition of the empire required the strictest union with the West. It was pressed severely by the Mohammedan advance. To meet this effectually the reconciliation which had taken place at the Sixth Council was needed to be wisely and temporately maintained. But Justinian II. summoned a Greek Council to meet in the same hall of his palace, called the Dome, in which that Council had been held. It passed a number of canons on discipline, many of which were injurious to the West and only calculated to increase the mutual estrangement. Inasmuch as the Fifth and Sixth General Councils had passed no canons of discipline, this Council held in 692 was to complete that omission. It called itself the Quinisext. The later Greeks even confounded it with the Sixth Council, others contented themselves with saying that “it was held five or six years after it, and by nearly the same Fathers”. It issued a hundred and two [pg 264] canons on discipline. “It seemed as if the bishops of this Council in their disgust at the undeniable superiority of the Roman Church in matters of faith, in which its authority had always at last prevailed and determined the issue, were bent on making good their right of autonomy at least in matters of discipline, and sought to avenge themselves by disapproving Roman customs for that superiority burdensome to Greek vanity.”[138] As a matter of fact these canons had the effect of widening the breach between Latins and Greeks. It is true that in the eighth century all Greeks did not yet count them ecumenical, but in the Iconoclast contest they gained great consideration, and in the ninth century scarcely a Byzantine doubted any longer that they were ecumenical.[139]
The chief value of this Council now lies in the picture which it presents to us of the actual state and temper of the eastern Church at that time, the closing ten years of a century about which we possess so little detailed information. I am here concerned especially with two things—one, the position of the emperor as regards both the Pope and the Church; the other, the position of the patriarch of Constantinople; on both this Council casts light.
As to the emperor, not only was it convoked[140] by his command and assembled in a hall of his palace, but its [pg 265] canons were subscribed by the emperor first with the imperial vermilion, and the second place was left vacant for the Pope's signature.[141] Then followed the subscriptions of Paul of Constantinople, Peter of Alexandria, Anastasius of Jerusalem, George of Antioch; on the whole, of 211 bishops, or their representatives, all Greeks and Orientals, including Armenians. It styled itself ecumenical, and the emperor tried to impose it as such. In its address to the emperor it said by that it was called[142] by him “to restore to order the Christian life, and root out the remains of Jewish and heathen perversity,” while it ended by addressing to him the words, “as thou hast honoured the Church by convoking us, so also be pleased to confirm what we have decreed”.