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

by T. W. Allies

In the year 717 Leo the Isaurian mounted the throne thus vacated, and entering by the golden gate on the 25th March, 717, was crowned in Sancta Sophia by the [pg 290] patriarch Germanus, after he had taken before him the oath to maintain the faith of the Church intact.

On the 8th April, 715, Pope Constantine died, after a pontificate of seven years, “a strenuous and successful defender of Rome's orthodox faith, and a worthy predecessor of greater successors, under whom Rome was delivered from the Byzantine yoke”.[161] After forty days St. Gregory II. became Pope on the 19th May, 715.

Between the two Popes St. Gregory I. and St. Gregory II. lies a period of 111 years, marked with disasters to the Christian people and religion such as no preceding century can show. At the death of St. Gregory I. in 604, all the shores of the Mediterranean were in possession of Christians. The authority of the eastern emperor extended from Constantinople over Asia Minor, Syria, and the region up to the Euphrates, Egypt, and the long range of Northern Africa, embracing the present Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco, to the Atlantic. The beginning of Christian kingdoms, looking up with filial affection to their spiritual Father in Rome, was apparent to the eye of the first Gregory. Gaul and Spain and Africa, lately recovered by Justinian, had a network of spiritual provinces, in which each Metropolitan received from Rome the pallium, the token of apostolic authority and unity. St. Gregory himself had added to these by the mission of Augustine, and the chair of unity founded at Canterbury. Full as these countries were of violence, mutual aggression, and unsubdued ferocity, the Teutonic invaders had nevertheless [pg 291] accepted the law of Christ from Rome, and the first principles of human order had been fused with their natural traditions of freedom. Above all, the Arian heresy had been dispossessed, and there was no appearance of a religion counter to the Christian arising. In every city of a vast region the bishop was regarded by his people with veneration, the very source of which lay in a power which he held by imposition of hands. A spiritual head to those around him, he was himself a link in the chain of that universal hierarchy the head of which was at Rome.

At the accession of Gregory II. the whole coast line from Cilicia at least to Mauritania on the Atlantic, had been lost to the Roman empire, and in a very great degree to the Christian Church as well. It was all now in the occupation of a single power, the head of which was termed the successor. The successor that is of the Arabian who had set himself in the place of Christ, who had conquered the Christians in this vast range of territory, and would allow them to live only on tenure of subjection. Instead of the remnant of primeval tradition which formed the mythology and influenced the customs of the northern tribes at the time of their descent on the western empire, the Arabian prophet and his successors had impregnated their people with a furious and fanatical belief to be imposed by force. It was a chief part of that belief that it ought to be imposed by force on all outside. And they who fell in such a holy war were held to be martyrs, as indeed they witnessed and imitated the life of Mohammed from the [pg 292] time of the Hegira. Thus the possession of the world was attached to the profession of one God and Mohammed as his prophet. In the century next after the death of the prophet those who retrace the deeds of his followers must admit that every possible disregard of human life and of the things most hallowed in Christian society had been shown by them in the construction of a kingdom now stretching from the Atlantic to the Indus. The religion under whose inspiration all this had been done, was framed in essential antagonism to the Christian faith. For indeed the mystery on which the Christian faith rested, that the Son of God had assumed human nature for the redemption of man, was denounced by it as derogatory to the very conception of God. Mohammedans proscribed Christians as associators of a creature with the Creator. This association they called idolatry. The northern wandering of the nations might receive Christian belief and be formed into a Christendom. The southern wandering of the nations, since it rested on a prophet the personal antagonist of the Christian founder, could only substitute Islamieh for Christendom.

This it had done over the empire which as we have seen was constructed at the time St. Gregory II. became Pope, and Leo III. after six revolutions became emperor at Constantinople.

Between the two Gregories twenty-four Popes occupied the throne of St. Peter, from Pope Sabinian to Pope Constantine. Of these three only, Honorius, Vitalian, and Sergius, sat over ten years each; the three together [pg 293] occupied forty-one years, leaving seventy years in the gross for the remaining twenty-one pontificates. But a considerable portion of these years must be deducted for the time which intervened between their election, and the allowing of their consecration by the consent of the emperor or the exarch as his viceroy. In that interval Greek arts were applied, to induce the Pope elect to consent to some thing desired by the emperor. Thus Pope Severinus on the death of Honorius was kept out of his see for nineteen months and sixteen days, to obtain, if possible, his consent to the doctrine put forth by Heraclius in the Ecthesis. In this manner the pontificate of Severinus was reduced to two months and three days, in which he found time to condemn the emperor's Ecthesis. So again on the election of St. Sergius in 687, the exarch hurried down from Ravenna to prevent it if possible; but he was too late, and could only plunder the Church's treasury of one hundred pounds weight of gold. These are samples, but the action continued over the whole period. Historians remark that the seven last Popes who sat during it were all Greeks, and conclude that the emperors thought compliance might be hoped for in such cases. This series of seven began with John VI. in 685. The seven Popes were all faithful not to the exacting demands of emperors, but to the charge of St. Peter, and during the thirty years in which they occupied the Holy See seven revolutions of emperors took place at Constantinople. Three emperors perished by public execution; a fourth was only blinded; a fifth having become a priest, and attempted to regain the throne was [pg 294] then executed as a traitor by its actual tenant. The worst of the six was the fifth emperor in the line of Heraclius, whose head was sent to Rome as a ghastly but indisputable witness that Italy was delivered from his tyranny.

During the whole one hundred and eleven years Italy was governed as a province which had no civil rights. I recur to the words of St. Agatho in his letter[162] to the Sixth Council for the importance of his acknowledging the sad condition of learning, as a result of the miserable danger and uncertainty of the time. Not often does a Pope say of his own legates, “How should they who gained their daily bread by manual labour with the utmost hazard, possess accurate and abundant learning?” But he gave assurance that “with simplicity of heart and without faltering they maintained the faith handed down from their fathers, making their one and their chief good that nothing should be diminished, nothing changed, but the words and the meaning both kept untouched”.

Whatever pomp and glory remained to the empire was centered in Constantinople. Rome and the Pope were powerless as to material strength. So St. Martin, when accused at his trial of favouring an enemy of the emperor, replied: “What was I to resist an exarch, without any force of my own?” At that time Constantinople was probably the greatest as well as the richest city in the world. When Constans II. eight years after visited Rome he swept away whatever works of art pleased him [pg 295] for the further adornment of his capital. In the four centuries down to Leo III. which elapsed since the consecration of the capital by its founder, every successor had made it a point of honour to improve the beauty and increase the strength of the imperial residence.

Thus those twenty-four Popes from the first to the second Gregory were dwelling in a Rome which continued to exist only as the seat of their own primacy, drawing successive generations to it, and visited year by year through the pilgrims who came to it from all parts of the world, since they sought the tomb of the chief apostle when the sepulchre of the Master was enthralled by the Saracen. Beside that tomb they stood with Roman fortitude against Byzantine fluctuation. Heraclius published an Ecthesis, and Constans II. a Typus. Ten Popes condemned both, and then Constantine IV. humbly admitted that both were worthless. He further undid the heresy of four successive patriarchs by putting them under anathema. He received as the living Peter the successor of one whom his father had stolen from Rome and martyred in the Crimea; just as his son Justinian fell at the feet of Pope Constantine, after he had tried to repeat the crime of his grandfather Constans on the person of Pope Sergius. So in 680 Theodore, then patriarch of Constantinople, urged on by another patriarch who lived at Constantinople since his own Antioch was become a spoil of the Saracen, expunged from the diptychs the names of all the Popes after Honorius to his own time. Theodore was himself deposed while the Sixth Council sat, and Macarius, his [pg 296] adviser, was deposed by that Council, but Theodore lived to be restored and to die as patriarch with a sounder faith than he had shown at the beginning. It is remarkable that after the four Monothelite patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, who were condemned at the Sixth Council, three patriarchs, Thomas II., 667-8, John V., 669-674, and Constantine I., 674-6,[163] “leant to orthodoxy,” and so escaped the censure of the Council, while Theodore was heretical from 678 to 680, and orthodox when restored from 683 to 686.

Thirty years after the Sixth Council the patriarch, John V., after presiding at the council summoned by the Emperor Philippicus, who attempted by it to re-establish the Monothelite heresy, besought pardon of Pope Constantine as the head whose function it was to heal all the wounds of the body. I know not what proof of the Roman primacy surpasses in force, to those who have eyes to see, this proof arising from the alternate persecution and confession of Byzantine emperors and patriarchs, compared with the unbending fortitude and unalterable faith of the twenty-four Popes in that long century when Rome served as a slave in the natural order, and was worshipped in the spiritual kingdom as a sanctuary.