The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I

by T. W. Allies

THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS.

"Rome's ending seemed the ending of a world. If this our earth had in the vast sea sunk, Save one black ridge whereon I sat alone, Such wreck had seemed not greater. It was gone, That empire last, sole heir of all the empires, Their arms, their arts, their letters, and their laws. The fountains of the nether deep are burst, The second deluge comes. And let it come! The God who sits above the waterspouts Remains unshaken." —A. de Vere, Legends and Records—"Death of St. Jerome".

I ended the last chapter by drawing out that series of events in the Church's internal constitution and of changes in the external world of action outside and independent of the Church which combined in one result the exhibition to all and the public acknowledgment by the Church of the Primacy given by our Lord to St. Peter, and continued to his successors in the See of Rome. I showed St. Leo as exercising this Primacy by annulling the acts of an Ecumenical Council, the second of Ephesus, legitimately called and attended by his own legates, because it had denied a tenet of what St. Leo declared in a letter sent to the bishops and accepted by them to be the Christian faith upon the Incarnation itself. I showed him supported by the Church in that annulment, by the eastern episcopate, which attended the Council of Chalcedon, and by the eastern emperor, Marcian. Again, I showed him confirming the doctrinal decrees of the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, which followed the Council annulled by him, while he reversed and disallowed certain canons which had been irregularly passed. This he did because they were injurious to that constitution of the Church which had come down from the Apostles to his own time. And this act of his, also, I showed to be accepted by the bishop of Constantinople, who was specially affected, and by the eastern emperor, and by the episcopate: and also that the confirmation of doctrine on the one hand, and the rejection of canons on the other, were equally accepted. I also showed this great Council in its Synodical Letter to the Pope acknowledging spontaneously that very position of the Pope which the Popes had always set forth as the ground of all the authority which they claimed. The Council of Chalcedon addressed St. Leo "as entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the Vine". But the Vine in the universal language of the Fathers betokened the whole Church of God. And the Council refers the confirmation of its acts to the Pope in the same document in which it asserts that the guardianship of the Vine was given to him by the Saviour Himself. This expression, "by the Saviour Himself," means that it was not given to him by the decree of any Council representing the Church. It is a full acknowledgment that the promises made to Peter, and the Pastorship conferred upon him, descended to his successor in the See of Rome. It is a full acknowledgment; for how else was St. Leo entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the Vine? Those who so addressed him were equally bishops with himself; they equally enjoyed the one indivisible episcopate, "of which a part is held by each without division of the whole".[3] But this one, beside and beyond that, was charged with the whole—the Vine itself. This one point is that in which St. Peter went beyond his brethren, by the special gift and appointment of the Saviour Himself. The words, then, of the Council contain a special acknowledgment that the line of Popes after a succession of four hundred years sat in the person of Leo on the seat of St. Peter, with St. Peter's one sovereign prerogative.

It is requisite, I think, distinctly to point out that Christians, whoever they are, provided only that they admit, as confessing belief in any one of the three creeds, the Apostolic, the Nicene, or the Athanasian, they do admit, that there is one holy Catholic Church, commit a suicidal act in denying the Primacy as acknowledged by the Church at the Council of Chalcedon. For such a denial destroys the authority of the Church herself both in doctrine and discipline for all subsequent time. If the Church, in declaring St. Leo to be entrusted by our Lord with the guardianship of the Vine, erred; if she asserted a falsehood, or if she favoured an usurpation, how can she be trusted for any maintenance of doctrine, for any administration of sacraments, for any exercise of authority? This consideration does not touch those who believe in no Church at all. They are in the position of that individual whom the great Constantine recommended to take a ladder and mount to heaven by himself. But it touches all who profess to believe in an episcopate, in councils, in sacraments, in an organised Church, in authority deposited in that Church, and, finally, in history and in historical Christianity. To all such it may surely be said, as the simplest enunciation of reasoning, that they cannot profess belief in the Church which the Creed proclaims while they accept or reject its authority as they please. Or to localise a general expression: A man does not follow the doctrine of St. Augustine if he accepts his condemnation of Pelagius, but denies that unity of the Church in maintaining which St. Augustine spent his forty years of teaching. The action of all such persons in the eyes of the world without amounts to this, that by denying the Primacy they disprove the existence of the Church. Their negation goes to the profit of total unbelief. Asserters of the Church's division are pioneers of infidelity, for who can believe in what has fallen? or is the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ a kingdom divided against itself? They who maintain schism generate agnostics.

But I was prevented on a former occasion by want of space from dwelling with due force upon some circumstances of St. Leo's life. These are such as to make his time an era. I was occupied during a whole volume with the attempt to set forth in some sort the action of St. Peter's See upon the Greek and Roman world from the day of Pentecost to the complete recognition of the Universal Pastorship of Peter as inherited by the Roman Pontiff in the person of St. Leo.

I approach now a further development of this subject. I go forward to treat of the Papacy, deprived of all temporal support from the fall of the western empire, taking up the secular capital into a new spiritual Rome, and creating a Christendom out of the northern tribes who had subverted the Roman empire.

There is, I think, no greater wonder in human history than the creation of a hierarchy out of the principle of headship and subordination contained in our Lord's charge to Peter. It has been pointed out that the constitution of the Nicene Council itself manifested this principle, and was the proof of its spontaneous action in the preceding centuries, while its overt recognition, as seated in the Roman Pontiff, is seen in the pontificate of St. Leo.

There is a second wonder in human history, on which it is the purpose of this volume to dwell. The Roman empire, in which the Pax Romana had provided a mould of widespread civilisation for the Church's growth, was at length broken up in the western half of it, by Teuton invaders occupying its provinces. These were all, at the time of their settlement, either pagan or Arian. There followed, in a certain lapse of time, the creation of a body of States whose centre of union and belief was the See of Peter. That is the creation of Christendom proper. The wonder seen is that the northern tribes, impinging on the empire, and settling on its various provinces like vultures, became the matter into which the Holy See, guiding and unifying the episcopate, maintaining the original principle of celibacy, and planting it in the institute of the religious life through various countries depopulated or barbarous, infused into the whole mass one spirit, so that Arians became Catholics, Teuton raiders issued into Christian kings, savage tribes thrown upon captive provincials coalesced into nations, while all were raised together into, not a restored empire of Augustus, but an empire holy as well as Roman, whose chief was the Church's defender (advocatus ecclesiæ), whose creator was the Roman Peter.

It is not a little remarkable that this signal recognition by the Fourth General Council of the Roman Pontiff's authority coincided in time with the utter powerlessness to which Rome as a city was reduced. That city, on whose glory as queen of nations and civiliser of the earth her own bishop had dwelt with all the fondness of a Roman, when, year by year, on the least of St. Peter and St. Paul, he addressed the assembled episcopate of Italy, ran twice, in his own time, the most imminent danger of ceasing to exist. Italy was absolutely without an army to give her strongest cities a chance of resisting the desolation of Attila. Rome was without a force raised to save it from the pitiless robbery of Genseric. Without escort, and defended only by his spiritual character, Leo went forth to appeal before Attila for mercy to a heathen Mongol. There is no record of what passed at that interview. Only the result is known. The conqueror, who had swept with remorseless cruelty the whole country from the Euxine to the Adriatic Sea, who was now bent upon the seizure of Italy itself, and in his course had just destroyed Aquileia, was at Mantua marching upon Rome. His intention was proclaimed to crown all his acts of destruction with that of Rome. This was the dowry which he proposed to take for the hand of the last great emperor's granddaughter, proffered to him by the hapless Honoria herself. At the word of Leo the Scourge of God gave up his prey: he turned back from Italy, and relinquished Rome, and Leo returned to his seat. In the course of the next three years he confirmed, at the eastern emperor's repeated request, the doctrinal decrees of the great Council; but he humbled likewise the arrogance of Anatolius, and not all the loyalty of Marcian, not all the devotion of the empress and saint Pulcheria, could induce him to exalt the bishop of the eastern capital at the expense of the Petrine hierarchy. But during those same three years he saw, in Rome itself, Honoria's brother, the grandson of Theodosius, destroy his own throne, and thereupon the murderer of an emperor compel his widow to accept him in her husband's place, in the first days of her sorrow. He saw, further, that daughter of Theodosius and Eudoxia, when she learnt that the usurper of her husband's throne was likewise his murderer, call in the Vandal from Carthage to avenge her double dishonour. This was the Rome which awaited, trembling and undefended, the most profligate of armies, led by the most cruel of persecutors. Once more St. Leo, stripped of all human aid, went forth with his clergy on the road to the port by which Genseric was advancing, to plead before an Arian pirate for the preservation of the capital of the Catholic faith. He saved his people from massacre and his city from burning, but not the houses from plunder. For fourteen days Rome was subject to every spoliation which African avarice could inflict. Again, no record of that misery has been kept; but the hand of Genseric was heavier than that of Alaric, in proportion as the Vandal was cruel where the Ostrogoth was generous. Alaric would have fought for Rome as Stilicho fought, had he continued to be commanded by that Theodosius who made him a Roman general; but Genseric was the vilest in soul of all the Teuton invaders, and for fifty years, during the utter prostration of Roman power, he infested all the shores of the Mediterranean with the savagery afterwards shown by Saracen and Algerine.

This second plundering of Rome was no isolated event. It was only the sign of that utter impotence into which Roman power in the West had fallen. The city of Rome was the trophy of Cæsarean government during five hundred years—from Julius, the most royal, to Valentinian, the most abject of emperors. And now its temporal greatness was lost for ever. It ceased to be the imperial city, but by the same stroke became from the secular a spiritual capital. The Pope, freed from the western Cæsar,[4] gave to the Cæsarean city its second and greater life: a life of another kind generating also an empire of another sort. The raid of Genseric in the year 455 is the first of three hundred years of warfare carried on from the time of the Vandal through the time of the Lombard, under the neglect and oppression of the Byzantine, until, in the year 755, Astolphus, the last, and perhaps the worst, of an evil brood, laid waste the campagna, and besieged the city. St. Leo, in his double embassy to Attila and Genseric, was an unconscious prophet of the time to come, a visible picture of three hundred years as singular in their conflict and their issue as those other three hundred which had their close in the Nicene Council. During all those ages the Pope is never secure in his own city. He sees the trophy of Cæsarean empire slowly perish away. The capital of the world ceases to be even the capital of a province. The eastern emperor, who still called himself emperor of the Romans, omitted for many generations even to visit the city which he had subjected to an impotent but malignant official, termed an Exarch, who guarded himself by the marshes of Ravenna, but left Rome to the inroads of the Lombards. The last emperor who deigned to visit the old capital of his empire came to it only to tear from it the last relic of imperial magnificence. But then Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of the infidel, and Christian pilgrims, since they could no longer visit the sepulchre of Christ, flocked to the sepulchre of his Vicar the Fisherman. And thus Rome was become the place of pilgrimage for all the West. Saxon kings and queens laid down their crowns before St. Peter's threshold, invested themselves with the cowl, and died, healed and happy, under the shadow of the chief Apostle. When the three hundred years were ended, the arm of Pepin made the Pope a sovereign in his own newly-created Rome. During these three centuries, running from St. Leo meeting Genseric, the pilot of St. Peter's ship has been tossed without intermission on the waves of a heaving ocean, but he has saved his vessel and the freight which it bears—the Christian faith. And in doing this he has made the new-created city, which had become the place of pilgrimage, to be also the centre of a new world.