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

by T. W. Allies

“Fathers and mothers, bearing in their arms little children [pg 317] fresh from baptism, leading the youth and those who have come in from the heathen, point with their finger to the histories, build them up in faith, and carry their minds and their hearts aloft to God. You have deprived the poor of these things, and have plunged them into idle talk, gossip, songs, castanets, pipings, and trifling. Instead of thanksgiving and glorifying you have taught them to babble. Have your portion with the speakers of idle words.

“O emperor, listen to our humility, and cease. Follow holy Church as you found and received it. Dogmas belong not to emperors, but to bishops. It is we who have the mind of Christ. One is the discipline of the Church's commands; another, the perception of secular things. That military, ill-omened, rude mind, which you have for secular management, you cannot use for the spiritual treatment of doctrine. I point out to you the difference between palace and church, between emperors and pontiffs. Acknowledge it, and save yourself, and be not contentious. Were any one to take from you the royal robes, the purple, the diadem, the mantle, the several marks of rank, you would seem, in the sight of men, unseemly, shapeless, worthless; so you have made the churches. As you would then be, you have stripped the churches, and reduced them to tatters. For, just as the pontiff has no authority to enter the palace, and to make royal appointments, so the emperor has no authority to enter into the church, to make elections of the clergy, to consecrate and handle the symbols of the sacred mysteries, nor even [pg 318] to participate in them without the priest. Let each of us remain in the vocation wherein he was called by God. O emperor, do you see the difference between bishops and kings? If any one sins against you, O emperor, you confiscate his house, and leave him naked of all but his life, and, at last, you hang or behead him, or banish him, and make him a stranger to his children, and all his relations and friends. Pontiffs do not this. But if any one has sinned and confessed, instead of hanging and beheading, they put upon his neck the gospel and the cross, they guard him in their treasury, banish him to where the deacons and catechumens attend, put fasting on his stomach, vigil on his eyes, thanksgiving on his tongue. And when they have well disciplined and chastised him, they set before him the precious Body of the Lord, and give him to drink His holy Blood. And having restored him to be a vessel of election, cleansed from sin, they help him forward, pure and blameless, to the Lord. Emperor, do you see the difference between church and palace? Emperors who have reigned piously in Christ have neither disobeyed nor afflicted pontiffs. You, O emperor, transgressor and perverter, wrote with your own hand and subscribed, that he who removes the boundaries of the Fathers is accursed. Therein you condemned yourself, and separated the Holy Spirit from you: you punish and tyrannise over us with the soldier's arm of flesh. We, unarmed and undefended, having no earthly and carnal armies, invoke the sovereign ruler of all creation, Christ, whose seat is in [pg 319] heaven, who leads the hosts of the heavenly powers that He may send to you a demon, according to the Apostle's words, to ‘deliver over such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,’ that the spirit may be saved. See, O emperor, into what a depth of shamelessness and inhumanity you have thrust yourself. You have cast your soul into abysses and precipices, because you would not humble yourself, nor bend your stubborn neck. For, when bishops, by good instruction and teaching, are able to present kings to God blameless, and exempt from errors and faults, they lay up a store of praise and glory before Him for the great Resurrection, when God will make manifest our hidden deeds in the presence of His angels. We, the humble, will then be ashamed, not to have reclaimed you through your disobedience. The pontiffs, before us, who each, in his own time, present their emperors to God, shame our poverty, in that we do not, in our days, present an emperor in honour and glory, but one disgraced and counterfeit. Once again we invite you: repent and be converted: enter into the truth: maintain what you found and received: give honour and glory to our holy and renowned fathers and teachers, who, following God's guidance, opened the blindness of our hearts and eyes, until they recovered sight. Your letter said, ‘Why was nothing said about images in the six Councils?’ Most true, O emperor, neither was anything said about bread and water, eating or not eating, drinking or not drinking. From the very beginning these things were given for the life of man. So, too, [pg 320] were images handed down. Bishops carried them into councils. No traveller, loving Christ and God, went on a journey without pictures, as men of virtue, and in God's favour. We pray you become bishop at once, and emperor, as you wrote. If, as emperor, you are ashamed to call yourself to account, write to all the countries which you have scandalised, by saying that Gregory, the Pope of Rome, has erred in the matter of images, and also Germanus, the patriarch of Constantinople. Then we take upon ourselves the guilt of your sin, as those who have received from the Lord authority and warrant to loose and to bind things on earth and things in heaven. And we will make you without charge as to this. You refuse. We, as those who shall give account to Christ our Master, have exhorted, have instructed you, as we were taught by the Lord. You recoiled: you refused to obey us, weak as we are: and Germanus, your bishop: and our fathers, the holy and glorious wonder-workers and teachers. You followed men perverse and rotten, erring from truth of doctrine. Take your portion with them. As we wrote to you before, we, by the grace of God, are following the road to the interior of the West for those who seek baptism. I have sent thither bishops and clergy of our holy Church. Their princes have received them, and bow their heads to be illuminated. They ask for me in person to receive them. On this path, by God's grace, we are bent: that we may not be condemned for neglect.

“May God grant you understanding and repentance to return to the truth which you have deserted, and restore [pg 321] the humble populations to Christ, the One Shepherd, and to the one fold of orthodox churches and priests. And may our Lord and God grant peace to the whole world now and for ever and ever. Amen.”

These letters, which I have given entire, were written at the end of the third decade of the eighth century. They mark the breaking out of the Iconoclast persecution. They seem to me to give a complete picture not merely of the personal character in the two great factors of the time, Pope St. Gregory II. and the Isaurian emperor, Leo III., but of the power and influence of the Pope and the bishops in the spiritual life, and of the eastern ruler in the civil commonwealth. What the Pope claims, he puts forth in the most distinct language, and through all his letters it comes out that his predecessors have ever both possessed and exercised it. It is matter of simple history. Again we see incidentally from the words which he uses regarding the images and pictures, that, when he wrote, they were as much part of the Church's ritual as the prayers. To expel them from the Church was at once a complete interference with the inner life and conduct of Christians, and also had the effect to make at least in appearance the sacred places themselves synagogues and mosques, instead of habitations wherein Christ, His holy Mother and the saints had a dwelling. The conjunction of tyranny with impiety in Leo's attempt is made manifest.

Again, the relation between kings who rule the secular commonwealth, and the Pope, who, with the bishops throughout the world, presides over the one fold of Christ, [pg 322] is marked as simply and also as decisively as words can mark it. The Pope recognises in the amplest terms the temporal king as God's minister in his own domain, not a mandatory appointed by the people, who might be called to account by the people, and be deposed at its will, but the image of God, and one who administers the authority of God for the government of human society. As simply and as distinctly he mentions himself as holding, by express grant of God, power to bind and to loose things in earth and things in heaven. The king has no more power to enter the Church and touch the things of God therein than he himself has to enter the palace, and make appointments in matters of State. But there is this great difference—he has to answer for the conduct of kings in spiritual matters. Kings have to answer for how they treat him; but cannot call him to account for his administration of the divine power committed to him. In all things that concern sin the spiritual supremacy is complete. Its giver is God alone, and to God alone it is subject. This root of the spiritual power is brought out by the whole tenor of his words, in which the exact mediæval relation of the two powers is implicitly contained. The supreme minister of God in temporal things is the first son, but likewise the subject of the Church in spiritual things. In all this Pope Gregory II. in the year 727 may be said exactly to repeat what Pope Gelasius said in the year 494, both unarmed Popes speaking to emperors, lords of armies and absolute in civil power.

The relation between East and West is also very distinctly stated. The East lies crouching almost helpless beneath an unalloyed despotism, whilst all the nations of the West look up to St. Peter in Rome “as a God upon earth”. When this was written just ninety years had passed since the sepulchre of Christ had fallen into subjection to the infidel and no less anti-Christian Saracen. The pilgrims who could no longer go to the sepulchre of Christ went to the sepulchre of the fisherman, and saw in the statue of St. Peter in his own Basilica the symbol of Christ reigning. But likewise all the kings of the West looked upon the successor of St. Peter as no less seated on the throne of justice, of peace, of concord, of charity, than as the supreme oracle of the Christian faith. What the patriarch Sophronius had said of him in the agony of the holy city before the impure Omar, the nations of the West knew and felt him to be. As Leo III. threatened to destroy the statue of Peter, so they went to him for baptism, so their kings were already buried in peace beneath the shadow of the Vatican. In 716, the year before the accession of Leo III., Theodon, Duke of Bavaria, came to Rome, being the first German prince who made a pilgrimage to the tomb of the apostles, as later on in 726, the very year in which the nefarious proceedings of Leo III. began, Ina, king of Wessex, with his queen Ethelberga came and began the school of the English in Rome, and made his land tributary to the Romescot.[170] So Constantine the Bearded had acknowledged the authority which his [pg 324] successor was trying to diminish, while he sought to reduce the Christian Church, instinct with the presence, the miracles, the sufferings of our Lord, His Mother, and His Saints, to the bareness of the Jewish synagogue and the Mohammedan mosque.

It may be observed also that the Pope associates his own office with that of bishops throughout the world, especially with that of Germanus, as bishop of the imperial city. In his mind the bishops belong to the Pope, and the Pope no less to the bishops. There is no jealousy of them in his supremacy, nor of him in their subordinate jurisdiction. He censures Leo III. for not consulting his patriarch, Germanus. The authority which he so clearly describes is one and the same in the whole episcopate, where St. Gregory II. himself according to the language used three centuries before of St. Leo the Great is “princeps episcopalis coronæ”.

All these things come out not in the way of controversy but in an uncontroversial and authoritative exhortation of a Pope to an emperor. The Pope is clad in spiritual armour only in the midst of a captive province; the emperor is the master of fleets and legions behind the walls of Constantine.

No history written afterwards at a distance of time could set forth these things with so great a force as the words of a Pope issued to the chief actor in a desperate struggle at the very beginning of the conflict. The immediate result is to be noted. In the year 730 the emperor, finding that he could not make Germanus, the nonagenarian patriarch of Constantinople, further his design [pg 325] in stripping the churches of their ornament, deposed him and put a compliant instrument in his stead, Anastasius, a priest and officer of the great Church, who held the see three and twenty years to the time of Leo's son Kopronymus, with what effect and what ending will be afterwards seen. St. Gregory II. died in 731. In the four years which elapsed from the first letter to his death he was rewarded for it by the emperor Leo in five attempts to have him murdered. All these attempts were frustrated by the fidelity of those about the Pope, and by the awakened solicitude of the Italian people, who saw in Leo the most cruel and remorseless of tyrants, in Gregory not only the champion of their faith, but the defender of their temporal well-being, of every moral as well as religious liberty.[171]

The Greek chronographer, Theophanes, the main part of whose life belongs to this same eighth century, calls Pope Gregory II. “the most holy apostolic man, the assessor[172] of Supreme Peter in his chair, conspicuous in word and deed”. His resistance to the rude soldier on the eastern throne won him great praise from the subjects of that throne. The rude soldier met him only with scorn and violence, as he met the murmuring of his people. Greece itself had taken arms in defence of its violated churches. Leo, by means of the Greek fire, destroyed the fleet of the insurgent Cyclades, and punished with the utmost severity his opponents in the capital. He carried on with greater violence the attack [pg 326] on the images. In many cases it passed on to the relics. The patriarch Germanus made one more attempt to persuade the emperor. He reminded the emperor of the oath taken at his coronation to maintain the faith of the Fathers. This brought matters to an open breach. St. John of Damascus attests that “the blessed Germanus, distinguished in his life and his words, was scourged and banished”. Another Greek historian, Cedrenus, adds that the emperor called him an idolater and struck with his own hands the patriarch of ninety years, who laid upon the altar of the great church the omophorion, the symbol of his rank, and departed into exile, with the words, “If I am Jonas, cast me into the sea, but I cannot touch the faith without a General Council be held”. Germanus had sat for fifteen years; St. John Chrysostom and he the noblest who ever sat on that perilous throne. He retired to his paternal house, and did not cease his courageous struggle against the Iconoclast. He died in most extreme old age, it is supposed in 740.