Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

by T. W. Allies

As to the Bishop of Constantinople, this Council said in its 36th canon, “renewing the decrees of the Second and Fourth General Councils, we decree that the see of Constantinople enjoy the same prerogatives as that of old Rome, and in ecclesiastical matters be as great as it, counting as the second after it. After it comes the see of Alexandria, then that of Antioch, then that of Jerusalem.”

In order to comprehend what this canon gave to the see of Constantinople, it is requisite to bear in mind the actual condition of the eastern Church at the time. We are now at the year 692, that is full fifty years since the other eastern patriarchates fell under Saracen [pg 266] dominion.[143] They had become more and more powerless. They depended upon the alms and the support given to them from Constantinople. In fact at this time the archbishop of the Grecian capital was the only real patriarch in the diminished empire. The courtiers of Constantinople, as we have seen thirty years before in the persecution of St. Maximus, affected to consider the conquests of the Saracen barbarians as transitory. Since then Constantinople itself had only been saved by hurling the Greek fire on the assailing Saracen fleet. A shadow only of their old right remained in the Saracen provinces of Alexandria and Antioch; they had still their old names. These were put down for them, if, as is supposed, they were not present at this council, because there were none at the moment. Four years later Carthage was taken by the Saracens; within eight years the whole Roman domination in Africa to the Atlantic was at an end. The empire had not yet lost everything in the West, for there were still some Byzantine troops and possessions in Italy. The Pope still acknowledged the emperor as his sovereign; and to Pope Sergius the emperor Justinian II. sent these canons, with the request that he would sign them. It is obvious that the position given in them to the bishop of Constantinople was no longer mere rank as in the first step taken in this direction by the Council of 381 under the great Theodosius. It was a higher jurisdiction similar in the East to that which the Pope held in the West. The Byzantine conception, as shewn in this Council, is clearly that the [pg 267] emperor was head of the Church, who, as he did it the honour to call it together, so he did it the further honour to confirm its decrees. Not, as in the case of the first Constantine, that he should make them laws of the empire, over and above their intrinsic spiritual force, as canons of those to whom Christ had committed the government of His Church, but that the emperor's signature, in the same way as he created a law in civil matters, made a canon in spiritual.

So ten years after the emperor Constantine IV. in the Sixth Council and the Council itself asked from the Pope for the confirmation of its decrees, his son Justinian II. required the Pope as his subject to accept as one of five patriarchs, three of whom it may be said were nonentities, a position of subjection to himself in the spiritual domain. The place left for the Pope's signature after that of the emperor and before that of the bishop of Constantinople graphically represents the idea which Justinian II. was seeking to impose. The Pope was to sign as patriarch and first of the five, not as the successor of St. Peter, who in virtue of his Primacy “set his seal,” according to the expression of the Sixth Council, on the whole. In the Trullan canons, the Byzantine idea having evolved itself with undeviating encroachment during three centuries, appears complete. Its completeness is shewn in two things. Constantine IV. asked the Pope to confirm the Council; his son Justinian confirms it himself, and the council which he would confirm exhibits an eastern primacy seated at Constantinople. It admits not only the priority, but in a certain sense [pg 268] the superiority of the Roman primacy; but it would keep both the eastern and the western primacy under the imperial control. The eastern primacy would make itself the chief instrument of this control, and so practically put itself above the western.

As has been seen above, the emperors through four patriarchs of their capital tried during forty years to force the Monothelite heresy on the Popes. In like manner from the Trullan Council they tried to force the Greek discipline and the eastern primate upon the Popes. Had they succeeded the ambition of the Byzantine prelates would have reached its full success.[144] The imperial residence on the Bosphorus would have taken the place of old Rome. The city of Constantine, fighting for very existence with the ever-advancing Mohammedan, tried this last stroke in its hour of greatest weakness.

Turning to Rome at this time we find a very rapid succession of Popes, for which we have no information enabling us to account. They are also frequently Greeks or Orientals; and here the suspicion arises that the exarch of the emperor had influenced the election in the hope that some national feeling might affect them in the administration of their office. St. Agatho, who died in January, 681, was a Sicilian of Palermo, St. Leo II., who succeeded in 682 and died 683, was likewise a Sicilian. The next, Benedict II., a Roman, sat only from June, 684, to May, 685; his successor, John V., a Syrian, of Antioch, only from July, 685, to August, 686, and [pg 269] Conon, a Thracian, from October, 686, to September, 687. The following election was remarkable. There were two parties among the electors[145]—one for the archpriest Theodore, the other for the archdeacon Paschalis. Both were in the Lateran palace. Here both sides agreed to elect the priest Sergius. One of the rival candidates, Theodore, did him homage at once; the other, Paschalis, very unwillingly, and he secretly called in the exarch from Ravenna to his aid. The exarch, John Platina, came suddenly to Rome. He convinced himself that the choice of Sergius was canonical and that of the large majority, but as Paschalis had promised him a donation of a hundred pounds' weight of gold, he insisted upon being paid this sum from the Church's treasury. Sergius was obliged to submit, and thereupon was consecrated in December, 687, and sat till 701.

Pope Sergius was born at Palermo, of Syrian parentage, his father having settled there from Antioch. He had come to Rome in the time of Pope Adeodatus, had recommended himself by his ability, and had passed through the various ranks of the clergy. His eastern parentage did not prevent his offering as strenuous an opposition to the heretical suggestions of the Greek emperor as his predecessors had shewn.[146] One and the same spirit lived in all the Popes: the will and the genius of government. The natural quality of the old Romans had been transfigured by the supernatural gift belonging to the Church. The restless spirit of Byzantium, [pg 270] inexhaustible in the production of new theological doctrines, which at least maintained a continuous interest on the popular mind, tried in vain all the arms of Greek sophistry and dialectic skill against the rock of Peter. They recoiled from the sturdy Roman understanding and only helped the Popes in their work of massing the western fabric of concentrated discipline.

The rank of Rome[147] as the holy city, reverence for the head of the universal Church, veneration of the apostle Peter, had mounted higher and higher at this time in the West. If St. Peter had already enjoyed, at the period of the Gothic denomination, a worship which impressed the Greeks, his influence now had become more decided, characteristic, and world-wide. It dwelt not so much on his martyrdom, on his high rank as an apostle, but rather on his being the founder of the Roman Church and its see. The invisible saint in heaven was the possessor in title of many domains and patrimonies on earth: the theocratic king of Rome. He had begun to consider its people as his own, he counted upon its political government, which he transmitted like a celestial fief to the Popes his successors. His golden tomb at Rome in a Basilica radiant with gold had gradually become the symbol of the Church and of the salvation which the world received from this his institution. Pilgrims from the furthest lauds now streamed to venerate it. The Anglo-Saxons especially, in the glow of their first conversion, were impelled by a passionate [pg 271] yearning to Rome. At the moment that the East sent its pilgrims to Mecca and Medina, swarms of pious pilgrims from Gaul, Spain, and Britain descended the Alps to cast their eyes upon eternal Rome and prostrate themselves before St. Peter's tomb, which had become the sanctuary of the West.

In the year 689 the young king of Wessex, Cadwalla, excited the greatest admiration. After many battles at home, he sheathed his sword and undertook the long journey to Rome to receive baptism from Pope Sergius himself. There on Easter eve the long-haired barbarian king was seen in the white dress of the illuminated at the porphyry baptismal font of the Lateran, with the wax candle in his hand, and received the name of Peter. He lived but eight days after, and was buried in the atrium of St. Peter's, with a long inscription, still extant. It said how King Cadwalla, for the love of God, left his throne, his family, his country, all that the valour of his ancestors and his own had gained him, coming far over land and sea as a royal guest to behold Peter, and Peter's see. He died at thirty years of age, in the reign of the Lord Justinian, in the second year of the pontificate of the apostolic man, Pope Sergius.

Cadwalla's appearance at Rome was a prelude to those long centuries wherein the Teutonic West would bow before the spiritual authority of the Pope. Twenty years later two other Anglo-Saxon kings, Conrad of Mercia, and Offa of Essex, came to Rome, not to be baptised, for they were already Christians, but to change the royal robe for the monkish cowl. Their long hair was cut off [pg 272] and dedicated to the apostle, and after living as monks under the shadow of the Vatican, they received a grave in the atrium of the Basilica, as a pledge that they had entered the company of the saints. It was not long before Rome had a Saxon colony in the neighbourhood of the Vatican.

Sergius raised a monument to St. Leo the Great in St. Peter's itself. It was the first example, as hitherto the Popes had either been buried in the cemeteries outside the walls or in the atrium of the Basilica. But from the time that in 688 Pope Sergius had translated the body of St. Leo into the transept itself, and raised an altar over it, other very distinguished Popes received the like honour.