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

by T. W. Allies

The sun of imperial Rome set for ever when the degenerate grandson of the great Theodosius, great grandson also of Valentinian, whose name he covered with infamy, perished by the stroke of an assassin in the Campus Martius, the result of a life in which he imitated the crime of Tarquin. But Tarquin's crime led to Rome's freedom, the crime of Valentinian III. brought the end [pg 370] of the imperial city, and the substitution of a Rome built upon revealed truth and eternal justice for the Rome of secular pride and unjust conquest.

In these three hundred years the brother Apostles, the fisherman and the tentmaker, took the place of the robber brothers, Romulus the slayer, and Remus the slain, when the twelve centuries of augured dominion were exactly fulfilled, and in the time of St. Leo the Great the twelve vultures had had their full flight.

The three hundred years begin with the formal acknowledgement of St. Leo's primacy, as consisting in the descent from St. Peter, bearer of the keys and feeder of the flock, made to him by the Council of Chalcedon in the letter soliciting the confirmation of their decrees by him; a letter to which the eastern emperor Marcian, husband of the noble grand-daughter and heiress of Theodosius, adds his own request for confirmation, and with his wife, St. Pulcheria, in his character as the head of the temporal power, acknowledges St. Leo, the Pope, as “the very person entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the vine”.

The three hundred years end with the Pope emerging a temporal sovereign from the Iconoclast persecution. The eastern empire also has fulfilled its work in these three centuries, and the soldier of fortune, who, at the end of many revolutions has become the successor of Marcian, has ridden his warhorse into the Church of God, and attempted to substitute himself as its governor for the successor of St. Peter, to dictate its creed, and interfere with its worship. In recompense he is expelled from the [pg 371] Italy which he and his predecessors had stripped and sacrificed during two hundred years. Then the crown of temporal sovereignty is added to the papal mitre of spiritual power, which Leo the Isaurian had sought to displace. And, moreover, the “advocate of the Church,” who, “as Christian prince and Roman emperor,” had used against the Church the very God-given power which it was his first duty to use for her, was on the eve of seeing the same powerful race which had enfranchised Rome and dowered the Roman See exalted to the imperial throne in the face of both the Byzantine and the Saracen. The emperor of the East had lowered his dignity to the poor ends of ambition, and the task of degrading God's Church. In Leo the Isaurian, and in his son Kopronymus we see, in fact, that the man who sits on the throne of the first Christian emperor is become the chief enemy of the Church. The deeds of Heraclius and Constans II. had given adequate cause for the Divine Providence to allow the rise of Mohammed and the severance of its eastern and southern provinces for ever from the empire of Constantine and Theodosius. Thereupon Leo and his son Kopronymus interpreted the lesson thus given as entitling them to meet the assumption of the prophet-emperor enthroned in the Damascus which had ceased to be theirs with equal arrogance in the counter assumption to be emperor-priest. The enemy from Mecca had seized Both Powers in his claim to be prophet; the enemy at Byzantium seized both as emperor. Civil power was the appendage to Mohammed, but became the root of spiritual authority to Leo the Isaurian.

Let us now retrace the period of civic disaster which the Popes encountered from the last years of St. Leo the Great. The following may be considered the main causes:—

First of all is the domination, not of barbarians only, but of heretical barbarians, as Pope Gelasius termed Odoacer.[195] In that passage of his letter the Pope says that when “Odoacer occupied the realm of Italy he had enjoined things to be done which were not lawful, but to which we, by the help of God, would, as is well known, not submit”. He speaks in the name of his see, but what the acts alluded to were we do not know. The domination of Odoacer and of Theodorich after him was Arian. It lasted at least sixty years, from 476 to 536. It was the policy of Theodorich to treat Rome well, in its civil aspect. He fostered the Senate, keeping it in quiet subjection to himself. He professed to treat Italian and Goth on equal terms. As long as the Acacian schism lasted, which effectually prevented unity of action between the emperors Zeno and Anastasius and the Popes who had ceased to be their subjects, but who regarded the Roman emperor with all the consideration required by Roman loyalty to the head of the Roman name, the Gothic king observed this conduct of neutrality; but when a new emperor, Justin I., had acknowledged all the demands of Pope Hormisdas and began to act as a Catholic emperor, Theodorich dropped the mask and appeared as he was, the head and bond of the whole Arian league in the West. Pope [pg 373] Symmachus died in 514. The Acacian schism at that time was in full force; the emperor Anastasius full of enmity and deceit against the Pope. Theodorich allowed Hormisdas to be elected Pope after a vacancy of the see for one single day. Hormisdas died in 523, and a vacancy of six days only ensued, when Pope John I. was allowed to be freely elected. In the meantime the acts of the emperor Justin I. roused the full Arian spirit in Theodorich. He allowed Pope John I. to be freely elected, which did not prevent him from compelling that Pope to go as his ambassador to Constantinople in order to gain indulgence for the eastern Arians. And he uttered the threat that he would fill Italy with blood if his demands were not complied with. And when Pope John I. came back crowned with honours rendered to him as the first Pope who had ever visited the eastern capital, Theodorich threw the Pope into prison, and he never came out alive from the royal dungeon at Ravenna.

This fact throws back a full and disastrous light upon the whole Arian domination in Italy. A poet of our day has put in the mouth of the doomed Gothic princess, the royal-hearted Amalasunta, words of her father:—

“I never loved that Apostolic Throne!”[196]

the truth of which is a striking epitome of history. No Arian ruler could love that Apostolic Throne. But we learn from the fact what the Popes must have gone [pg 374] through from the period when Rome fell under the rule of northern condottieri to the expulsion of the Goths under Belisarius and Narses. It is impossible that one who denied the Godhead of the Master should look, with love and veneration, upon the successor of the Disciple. If the Shepherd of shepherds be not God Himself, the Shepherd, who acts in His name, will not be received, as invested with supreme and universal spiritual power.

Let us examine the connection of Arian domination over Rome and Italy, as exercised, first, by Odoacer, and, secondly, by Theodorich, with the eastern throne's position and claim.