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

by T. W. Allies

Thus when St. Gregory II. succeeded to the throne of Peter in 715, and Leo III. to the throne of Constantine in 717, the position of the Christian Faith before Islam seemed to stand in terrible danger.[253] The sons of Mohammed, lords of Asia, Egypt, Africa, and Spain, were besetting, with long prepared fleet and army, the last remains of the Greek power in Constantinople on the East, and on the West had only to look to the conquest of France. If they became masters of France, there was no strength left to resist them, neither Italy divided between Lombards, Greeks, and the old inhabitants, subjects of one or the other, nor Germany divided among various peoples. The whole world seemed to be reserved for the anti-Christian kingdom of Mohammed: all nations about to pass under the hard servitude of a conquering Arabian tribe, instinct with hatred to the Christian life; all women to become slaves of man's passion: all reason to endure subjection to a lie imposed by the scimitar. What we have since seen of Mohammedan rule in Asia and in Africa during [pg 474] twelve hundred years, seemed then on the point of becoming the general doom.

That was the time chosen by the eastern emperor, after a reign of ten years, to attempt the imposition of a fresh heresy upon Pope Gregory II. The man who was formally bound by his position as Roman emperor, and by the oath taken at his coronation to defend the Church as it had come down to him from the seven preceding centuries, was filled with a desire to remodel the practice of that Church in all its worship. He advanced claims which were not only an invasion of its independence by the civil power, but in themselves rested only upon the practice and the sentiments of the Church's two great enemies, the Jew and the Saracen. The Jew abhorred the relative worship paid to the images and pictures of our Lord, of His Mother, and of the saints, because he utterly denied the fact of the Incarnation, which these images and pictures were ever presenting in the daily worship of the faithful. The Mohammedan shared this abhorrence, because he denounced the Christian as an idolater for his belief in our Lord, as Son of God. Leo III. took up the mind of the Jew and the Saracen into his own rude and unformed nature, and bent the whole force of the imperial power to subdue the Pope to his will. Spain had just fallen into Mohammedan hands: and the lord at Damascus ruled from the Atlantic to Samarcand. Under his rule, which was the bitterest ignominy to every Christian, lay more than half the empire which Justinian had left. Then, in 726, a contest, the most unequal [pg 475] which can be conceived, began between Pope Gregory II. and the emperor Leo III. It continued fifty years under Leo and his son, Kopronymus, who died in 776. In the course of it, Leo sent a great fleet against the coast of Italy, whose commander was instructed to take and plunder Ravenna, to proceed to Rome, to put down all opposition to the imperial heresy, and to carry Pope Gregory captive to Constantinople, after the fashion used in the preceding century to Pope St. Martin. Pope Gregory II. endured to his death the joint heresy and tyranny of the eastern lord, and induced the irritated populations of Italy still to keep allegiance to him. His successor, Pope Gregory III., used the same forbearance. Pope Zacharias for ten years went on enduring, while the Frank nation accepted, on his judgment, a new dynasty. For twenty-eight years, from 726 to 754, no amount of wrong could induce four successive Popes to throw off the allegiance which had pressed upon Italy as a servile province since the conquest of Justinian. At length, the fourth Pope, Stephen II., was deserted in his utmost need by the emperor himself: was threatened with a Lombard poll tax laid upon Rome, and the position of vassal to an Aistulf in the city of St. Peter. Then the eastern servitude at last dropped, and the issue of the most unequal combat, begun in 726, was terminated by the compact ratified at Quiersy in 754, and carried out at Pavia in 756. This compact secured to Pope Stephen and his successors the position of sovereign princes in Rome, and the territory attached to it. In [pg 476] 756 Pope Stephen II. re-entered Rome as its acknowledged civil sovereign. Yet, in the eighteen years following this event, the last king of the Lombards renewed the ambition of Liutprand and Aistulf, to become the lord of Rome, and the renewal of Pipin's gift by Charlemagne, in 774, alone closed the momentous contest which, beginning in 726 with an attack on the unarmed Pope, ended in the deliverance of Italy from the most cruel of thraldoms, and made the Pope, who had long been Rome's only support and benefactor, its temporal as well as its spiritual head.

At the time of that event, more than four centuries had passed since Constantine, in 330, consecrated his city on the Bosphorus to be Nova Roma, pursuing his idea to found a capital which should be Christian from its birth, and the centre of a great Christian empire. Five years before the Church had met for the first time in General Council. The object of its meeting was to refute and censure an attack upon the Godhead of its Founder, and the place at which it met was a city immediately on the Asiatic side of the strait, on which what was then Byzantium stood. The position taken by Constantine was to guard with the imperial sword the chamber in which the Church's bishops sat, to accept their decrees as the utterance of Christ himself, and to add the force of imperial law to the spiritual authority which he acknowledged them of themselves to possess.

From the baptism of Byzantium as Nova Roma in 330, fifty years succeed to 380, in which Constantinople [pg 477] becomes the chief seat of the very heresy condemned by the Church at the Council of 325. Its see is sought after immediately as the prize of worldly ecclesiastics in the East. Eusebius, the man who presently became its bishop, deceives Constantine into fostering the heresy which he abhorred: its bishop, Macedonius, was the docile servant of the emperor Constantius in his attempt to change the faith of the Church: its bishop, Eudoxius, nurtured the emperor Valens in the same heresy. But the succession of Popes in Julius, Liberius, and Damasus, frustrated these efforts of the bishops of Nova Roma in the first half century of its promotion: and when Theodosius sat on the throne of Constantine, with his colleagues, Gratian and Valentinian, their law of 380 called upon their peoples “to hold the religion which is proved to have been delivered to the Romans by the divine apostle, Peter, since it has been maintained there from his time to our own”.[254]

But the terrible effects wrought upon the eastern episcopate by the Arian assault had not been finally overcome. The next attack upon the Person of our Lord proceeded from the eloquent Syrian, Nestorius, who had been put in the see of Constantinople. It required all the energy of Pope Celestine and the patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, to overcome that heresy which still attacked the Incarnation, and was supported by court favour at the eastern capital, and the jealousy of its emperor for his bishop. It is remarkable that the First Council at Ephesus, in 431, should have been followed by [pg 478] a Second Council at the same place in 447. This second Council was, so far as its convocation and its constitution went, regularly entitled to be a General Council. Its decree was in favour of an opposite heresy to that of Nestorius, on the same subject of our Lord's Person, and its originator was the monk Eutyches, in high repute at the head of a monastery at Constantinople. The Council after its completion was rejected, and the heresy overthrown, by the single arm of St. Leo the Great. The whole Church at Chalcedon accepted his act and acknowledged his Primacy. But this Monophysite heresy had driven its roots deep into the Greek mind. During two hundred years, to the time of Mohammed himself, its effects may be traced, corrupting the unity of belief in the eastern patriarchates, encouraging perpetual party spirit, breaking constantly the succession of bishops in the hierarchy. In the time of St. Leo, the patriarch Proterius, who succeeded the deposed Dioscorus, was murdered by the Monophysite faction. A few years later the bishop of Constantinople used this heresy for the purpose of exalting his see against Rome, which had just been deprived of its emperor, and its government left in the hand of barbarians, who were also heretics. Thus supported by imperial power, Acacius brought about a schism which lasted for thirty-five years. The resistance of seven Popes, the last of whom, Hormisdas, obtained the full result which his predecessors had sought for, frustrated this second century of Byzantine aggression upon the faith and government of the Church.

Indeed, so striking and unquestionable was the submission [pg 479] of the Byzantine sovereign, and the recognition by the Byzantine bishop of the Papal authority, that from this time forth a somewhat new course was pursued by the eastern emperor and patriarch in regard to that authority. The purpose of Justinian in his subsequent reign was, while he acknowledged in very ample terms the papal primacy, to subject it in its practical execution to his own civil power. Thus when he had become by conquest immediate lord of Rome, he summoned Pope Vigilius to attend him at Constantinople. During eight years he subjected him to perpetual mortifications. He issued doctrinal decrees and required the Pope to accept them. His laws fully admitted the Pope's rank; he never denied his succession from St. Peter: but his pretension was to make the five patriarchs use their great authority in submission to himself; and he included the first of the patriarchs in this overweening claim, as his namesake Justinian II. signed his council in Trullo at the head of all, and left a line between himself and the patriarch of Constantinople for the signature of Pope Sergius, which was never given.

The result of Justinian's oppression of Pope Vigilius was to create temporary schisms in some parts of the West, through dread of the bishops that something had been conceded to the usurpation of the civil power. Not until the time of Gregory the Great could the Apostolic See recover the injury thus inflicted. But Justinian did much more than persecute a particular Pope. I think it may be said with truth, that from the conquest of Italy under his generals, Belisarius and Narses, it was the [pg 480] continual effort of the Byzantine emperors to subject the Papacy to the civil power in the exercise of its spiritual supremacy. From Justinian to Constantine Kopronymus—a period of more than two hundred years—that is the relation between the Two Powers which the eastern emperors carried in their minds and executed as far as they were able.

The fourth century of Nova Roma's exaltation opened with the strongest assertion of this claim which had yet been seen. The able and unscrupulous Sergius had become patriarch of Constantinople, and was prime minister of the emperor Heraclius. The whole East was teeming with Monophysite opinions, and every city, in proportion to its size and dignity, torn with party conflicts arising out of dissension respecting the Person of our Lord. Sergius thought he had devised a remedy by that Monothelite statement which, as he imagined, enabled him to present in a more conciliating form the old heresy put down by St. Leo and the Council of Chalcedon. He led the emperor Heraclius to publish this heresy in the imperial name. Then four successive patriarchs of Constantinople were found to put all their spiritual rank at the service of two emperors, Heraclius and Constans II., to formulate the heresy, and force it, if possible, on the Popes. Ten successive Popes resisted—one to martyrdom itself—and after a struggle of fifty years, Popes Agatho and Leo II. at the Sixth Council—when the eastern emperor for the moment became orthodox, and his patriarch and bishops followed him—condemned and expelled the heresy. But this [pg 481] fatal attempt of Sergius and Heraclius had been exactly coincident with the rise of Mohammed. The Greek contention respecting the Person of Christ had lasted three hundred years, from the Nicene Council, when the success of the false prophet led vast countries, once the most flourishing of Christian provinces, to yield to the human authority of a robber, and to put him in the place of the God-man whom by their works they had so often denied. And so the fourth century from the exaltation of Nova Roma had been completed.

Yet still it was reserved for the fifth century to Constantinople, at a time of its extreme humiliation, when for ninety years it had only just obtained from a new and undisclosed invention the power to keep the all-conquering Saracen outside its walls—to make its final and most absolute attack upon the elder sister whom it acknowledged as the leader of the Christian faith. Syria and Egypt and Africa and Spain were gone, and the Persian monarchy, for so many hundred years the rival of the Roman, equally was absorbed in the enormous Saracen dominion, and the cities of Asia Minor were in daily dread of the same foe prevailing over their religion and desecrating their homes. Such was the condition of things when the yet remaining Christian emperor assumed over the Christian Church the power of Mohammed's chalifs in the territory which they ruled in Mohammed's name. Another fifty years occur in which, when after the orthodox patriarch Germanus had been forced to lay the insignia of his rank on the altar of Sancta Sophia and depart, three Iconoclast patriarchs [pg 482] in succession, Anastasius from 730 to 753, Constantine from 753 to 766, and Nicetas I. from 766 to 780, placed themselves at the disposal of their emperors to corrupt the faith and subject the government of the Church, until at the Seventh Council once again an eastern emperor became orthodox: and an eastern orthodox patriarch followed again in Tarasius; and Adrian I. was received as Pope, being no longer a vassal of Constantinople, but a sovereign prince.

Upon these antecedents ensued the temporal sovereignty of the Pope. What is the witness of history to the spiritual action of the Popes during this long period of 426 years, from 330, when Byzantium became Constantinople, to 756, when the people of Rome welcomed with universal jubilee the return of their Pope, Stephen II., as sovereign?—when again in 774 Charles at the beginning of his great career approached St. Peter as a pilgrim, and renewed to him his father Pipin's act of munificent piety.