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

by T. W. Allies

Let us follow the course of the heresies which, during four centuries and a half from the Nicene Council in 325, to the defeat of the Iconoclasts at the Seventh Council, attacked the faith of the Church. They turn upon the Person of our Lord: upon that mighty fact of the Incarnation which filled all men's minds. The Arian denied that He was God; the Nestorian and Monophysite sought in opposite methods to deal with His two natures. The Monothelite pursued the question to its inmost point as it touched the two natures in the operation of the Will; his error in its root was especially [pg 483] Eutychean. When the question began the original eastern patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch were in their primal state and glory. They held their descent from Peter, like the See of Rome. Like the Apostolic See their chairs were at the head of a great mass of bishops, Antioch in particular having a crowd of metropolitans governing important provinces, who looked up to the great see of the East, who, when the patriarchate was vacant, voted for the election, as they received from him the confirmation of their own election. Alexander in the mother see of Egypt had been the first to condemn his own insurgent priest, Arius, and at the Nicene Council he was attended by his deacon, Athanasius, who was soon to succeed to his place, and raise during his episcopate of forty-six years the See of St. Mark to its loftiest renown. Eustathius, at the same Council, the twenty-fourth bishop of Antioch, was a noted confessor, and with Alexander contributed to its decision; while Pope Silvester threw the whole weight of the West, which had no doubt as to the Godhead of Christ, in favour of the same result. As yet Constantinople was not; and the See of Jerusalem, though highly honoured, was in the hierarchy a simple bishopric suffragan to the metropolitan of Cesarea. There could be no controversy more reaching to the inmost heart of faith in the Church than that which concerned the Person of the Lord. Taking the four centuries and a half as a whole we find that the eastern patriarchates failed under the trial. The first of them, Alexandria, had for its two greatest teachers Athanasius and Cyril, both doctors of [pg 484] the Church, both renowned in their defence and illustration of the doctrine that God became man. But no sooner had Cyril died than his see became the centre of the Monophysite error. Almost the whole Christian people of Egypt followed its bad lead, and when the Saracen chief took Egypt and Alexandria in the name of Mohammed he found support rather than opposition in the mass of the Christians, who, in their bitter party hatred, called the remnant of Catholics still remaining Melchites or Royalists as the most opprobrious epithet they could devise. And in process of time, under Omar and his successors, the country of Athanasius has become the heart of Mohammedan learning and zeal.

Scarcely less melancholy is the history of Antioch and its twelve provinces of metropolitans, with their 163 bishops.[255] Eustathius was speedily deposed by the Arian faction, even before Athanasius, and during ninety years a perpetual schism preyed upon the dignity of the great eastern see. In the fifth century it was unable to prevent the advance of Constantinople. It fell a speedy prey to the Mohammed's chalif, and from that time the man who bore the name of its patriarch was often a dependent and pensioner at the eastern capital. Jerusalem had succeeded in obtaining the patriarchal dignity at the Council of Chalcedon. But in less than two hundred years Omar polluted its holy place by his presence, and the most stirring voice uttered by its patriarchs is that cry of its noble Sophronius, bidding his chief bishop go to the throne of Peter, “where the [pg 485] foundations of holy doctrine are laid,” and invite the sitter on that throne, who was Honorius, to rescue the faith imperilled by his brother patriarchs, Sergius at Constantinople, and Cyrus at Alexandria, leaders of the Monothelite heresy.

When therefore the emperor Constantine Kopronymus, in 754, took by the hand Constantine whom he had chosen to be ecumenical patriarch, and presented him as the elect of the emperor to the Council of more than three hundred bishops, whom he had convoked to sanction his own heresy, while twelve years afterwards, as the sequel of many torments, he executed him and had his body dissected; we may say that the eastern patriarchs had utterly failed to defend either the faith or the hierarchy of the Church. Mohammed did not appear to complete the work of Arius, until the descendants of those who condemned Arius in 325 had obscured by interminable disputes during three hundred years what their spiritual ancestors had declared to be the faith of the Church. The causes of this failure had been internal. There had been great bishops in the East during this period. Chrysostom had sat in Constantinople, suffered, confessed, and been exiled before Nestorius, who sat there also, and was exiled for his heresy. Germanus, in the same see, did not yield to Leo III., and in that worst time confessed, and his place was forthwith taken by Anastasius, who subscribed all Leo's evil will. Kopronymus strove to exterminate the monks, who suffered every extremity for their maintenance of the faith. But as the main result the Byzantine despotism had overcome [pg 486] the eastern episcopate. I do not know how more telling proofs of that evil victory could be shown than that Philippicus Bardanes, in 711, during his ephemeral reign, should be able to assemble a council at Constantinople, which he required to restore the Monothelite heresy, condemned at the Sixth Council, and scarcely met with an episcopal opponent; and again that Kopronymus could assemble another large council in 754, to establish his Iconoclast aggression, which was received without dissent.

How then was the faith preserved during these four hundred and sixty years?

From Pope Sylvester to Pope Stephen II. we count sixty-one Popes. In that long period of time the doctrine of the Godhead and the Person of Christ with all its manifold consequences was fully drawn out. The variation which had been seen in the patriarchal and episcopal sees of the East was never found at Rome. All political and external help may be said to have failed the Popes. They lost their own western emperor, and the sole remaining eastern emperor turned against them. More also, he set up against them a new bishop who at the beginning of the time did not exist, the bishop of the eastern capital. The eastern lord added from generation to generation rank and influence to this bishop. He made him his own intermediate instrument of communication with all the bishops of his eastern realm, to whom it had been the continual policy of Justinian and his successors to grant great political privileges, making them in large degree partakers of civil authority. [pg 487] They sought to rule the East throughout its manifold divided interests by the authority of the local bishops; and they sought to rule the bishops themselves by their own patriarch. Rome, from being the head of the Roman monarchy at the beginning of the period, ceased to be the capital even of a “servile” Italy, the captive of Belisarius. The Popes passed through Odoacer, Theodorich, Theodatus, also Vitiges and Totila, also Liutprand, Aistulf, and Desiderius. Their elections, when made, were delayed in their recognition, or even controlled in their choice. They saw a crowd of northern raiders take possession of the whole West, and at one time the very heresy which at the beginning of the period had been condemned by the Church, was in possession of all the governments of the West but that of the Franks, and had for the chief ruler of its councils and the head of the regal league against the faith of Rome the greatest man whom the northern tribes can show during their time of immigration, and he had made Italy powerful and respected, and cultivated Rome with extreme solicitude. When St. Silvester sat in St. Peter's chair, Rome was the single capital of the whole empire; when St. Leo sat there he witnessed the fall of the West, but stood imperturbable before Attila and Genseric; when St. Gregory sat there, he divined from the temporal ruin and desolation of Rome, which he saw perishing piecemeal around him, that the world's last time was coming. When St. Martin sat there, he was torn from his sick bed by the eastern master to die in the Crimea; when St. Gregory II. sat there, the same eastern [pg 488] master threatened to break in pieces the statue of St. Peter in his Basilica. But in all the four hundred and sixty years from the first to the second Nicene Council, the witness of Rome to the Divine Person of her Lord was clear and distinct. Neither the greatest nor the worst of her opponents had subdued that witness, or rendered it faltering or indistinct. For this reason it was that the Pope, whose life the Iconoclast soldier, when clothed with the imperial purple, five times attempted, could reply to his threat, that all the West looked upon St. Peter as a God upon earth; that the one Teuton king before whose victorious reign that of Theodorich is pale and colourless, ascended on his knees the steps before St. Peter's tomb, laid upon the altar over his body the gift of temporal sovereignty, and went forth from that moment the predestined civil head of that new Christendom which St. Peter had made out of the northern adventurers.

Taking in all this time the simple witness of history, I ask if in it the words of our Lord to Peter were not palpably fulfilled: “Thou art the Rock, and upon this Rock I will build My Church”. If the Rock had not been, each one in this long line of heresies would have destroyed the Church. The line of St. Athanasius was not infallible; the line of St. Ignatius of Antioch was annulled after frequent falls by the Mohammedan captivity; the line of Byzantium had some saints, but was prolific in heretics, and the last utterance of Jerusalem before it fell, when the Saracen ascetic voluptuary trod its courts, was uttered by its patriarch [pg 489] from Calvary itself, when he adjured his messenger: “Go swiftly from end to end of the earth, until thou reach the Apostolic See, in which the foundations of our holy doctrine rest”.

The state of the eastern Church from the Council of Chalcedon to the final assault of the emperor Leo III. upon the whole fabric of Church government is one continual descent. It has certain recoveries, as the cessation of the Acacian schism, in 518; as the reversal of the Monothelite tyranny, under Constantine Pogonatus, in 680; as the repudiation of the still greater Iconoclast tyranny a century later, at the Seventh Council in 787, under Pope Adrian and the patriarch Tarasius. But even General Councils were attacked by eastern emperors in the last excesses of their overgrown domination. As Philippicus Bardanes got together a great Council in 711 to denounce the Sixth Council, so the Emperor Leo the Armenian had deposed an unbending patriarch, Nicephorus, in 815, supplied his place with the yielding Theodotus, and found another council in the same year to anathematise the work of the Seventh Council. Three more Iconoclast patriarchs—Theodotus from 815 to 821, Antonius I. from 821 to 832, John VII. from 831 to 841—close this evil list of heretical bishops. The feast of orthodoxy was established in 842. The incessant attempts of the Greek emperors to meddle with the faith took presently another development. They could no longer oppress as their subject a sovereign Pope. When they could not oppress him, they learnt to deny him. In less than another generation the schism of Photius began.

Such was the first century running from the time that Leo the Isaurian made, in 733, his creature Anastasius ecumenical in the sense that all the remaining Greek empire was put under his patriarchal jurisdiction. But it is plain that long before this, the Greek empire, so far as its own episcopate was concerned, had ceased to possess any inflexible rule of doctrine. The most venerable of its authorities, the original patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, had yielded before the Nestorian and Monothelite storms; had perpetual interruptions in their succession, sometimes had a double succession—one Catholic, another Monophysite—had submitted to the State-patriarch set over them at Constantinople; and being found in this condition by the Mohammedan flood, had seen their former dignity all but overwhelmed in its swelling waves. The western Church, which from the time of the northern wandering of the nations had been visited by unnumbered catastrophes, had, on the contrary, possessed in its bosom exactly that inflexible rule of doctrine which the East wanted: a rule of doctrine not imposed by civil despotism, but the very root as well as the bond of its episcopate. The Ostrogoth had made his kingdom in Italy, and the Visigoth his kingdom in Spain; the Frank, the Burgundian, and many more set up realms in France and Germany, whose limits were in perpetual fluctuation; seven or eight little Saxon kingdoms were dividing in Britain the old Roman unity. These Teuton tribes had two qualities in common—great personal valour and the most persisting spirit of division. Endless were the intestine quarrels and separations [pg 491] between those of the same northern race, who in political condition had hardly passed the tribal state. Every invading army whose commander became a king in the conquered territory had its own local interests, but none of that great political sense which had nurtured the empire of the Cæsars. The one Ostrogoth who had such a sense had grown up a hostage at Constantinople, and though it is said that he could not read, had certainly divined and carried off with him into the Italy which he captured the imperial secret of government: that is, the force of unity, justice, and subordination of the part to the whole; and Theodorich had come to the conclusion that he could not make Italian mind and Gothic manners coalesce in the structure of a kingdom. His device to rule them equally and separately scarcely lasted for his life. After ruling with equity, he died in remorse. No stronger instance of this great defeat can be found than the custom of the Merovingian race to the end. Their monarchy was in their eyes a family property. When their father died they took the throne as a part of the paternal inheritance. It was not delivered down in whole as a mighty trust of the nation itself. If there were several children, their swords cut the patrimony into slices, and each carried off his bit, like a wild beast. No political sense presided here. The sole solicitude of each was that his lot might not be of less value than his brother's.[256]

There exists no history giving in detail the most wonderful event of these troubled centuries—that is, the [pg 492] process by which the Arian heresy, which, in the time of Theodorich, had possession of all these peoples—except the Franks, and the Saxons, who were pagans—finally became Catholic: a conquest of the northern warriors which one of the greatest enemies of the Christian faith seems to consider a more wonderful deed than the conquest of the former Roman world, so far as it was achieved at the time of Constantine's conversion.

At Rome the Pope sat through all these centuries, the visible representative of all that was good in the Roman empire, of law, justice, order, besides holding in himself the inflexible rule of faith. The Chair of Peter had no rival in the West, the eldest of its bishops looked up with reverence to his single and immemorial pre-eminence. Their local influence had in each of them its weight with their own people. For instance, St. Gregory of Tours was of an old senatorian Gallic family: all the interests of the population around him, whether Frank or Gallic, known to him as a native of the soil. In this double position much nearer and dearer to him was the Petrine descent, by consecration of which he maintained as bishop the Christian faith. Thus in the see of Tours he protected the temporal rights of his people, and resisted in particular the violent acts of king Chilperic. The faith itself was to him the strong exemplar of political sense: the one family of Christ bore in its very bosom the society of nations. He could not say the creed without feeling that the centre of faith was the natural centre of all humanising influence. The Saxon bishop in Northumberland would recognise the Saxon bishop in Kent in [pg 493] spite of intervening Mercia. The episcopate set up among the German tribes by St. Boniface in the name of the Popes, was the form of such unity as afterwards led these separate tribes to coalesce in an empire. And they coalesced with such difficulty as to show that without the spiritual bond they would have remained in their original antagonism.