"Your Majesty, who is appointed by God, watches, among the other cares of your empire, with the uprightness of a spiritual zeal over the preservation of sacerdotal charity. For, with piety as well as truth, you think that no one can rule well the things of this world unless he knows how to treat divine things, and that the peace of the human commonwealth depends on the peace of the universal Church. For, most gracious emperor, what power of man, what masterful arm of flesh, would presume to lay unholy hands upon the dignity of your most Christian empire, if the bishops were with one accord of mind to beseech their Redeemer for you by their words, and, if need be, by their deservings? Is there any nation so ferocious as to use its sword so cruelly for the destruction of the faithful, unless our life, who are called but are not bishops, had upon it the stain of the worst actions? While, deserting what belongs to us, and aiming at what is beyond us, we add our own sins to the brute strength of barbarians. Our guilt sharpens the swords of our enemies, and weighs down the strength of the State. What excuse can we make who press down the people of God, over which we unworthily preside, with the burden of our sins? Who preach with our tongues and kill by our examples? Whose works teach iniquity, while their words make a show of justice? We wear down the body with fasts, while the mind swells with arrogance. This puts on poor apparel; that has more than imperial pride. We lie in ashes, and despise dignities. We teach the humble, and lead the proud, and hide the wolf's teeth in the sheep's face. What result has all this but that, while we impose on men, we are made known to God? Thus it is with the greatest wisdom that your Majesty seeks the peace of the Church as the means of stilling the tumults of war, and would make the hearts of bishops rest once more in its solid structure. That is my wish: in that to the utmost of my power I obey you.
"But since it is not my cause but God's, and since not I only but the whole Church is thrown into confusion; since sacred laws, since venerable councils, since the very commands even of our Lord Jesus Christ are disturbed by the invention of this haughty and pompous language, let the most pious emperor lance the wound and overcome the sick man's resistance by the force of the imperial authority. If you bind up that wound, you raise up the State; and by cutting off such abuses, contribute to the length of your reign.
"For to all who know the Gospel it is notorious that the charge of the whole Church was entrusted by the voice of the Lord to the holy Apostle Peter, chief of all the Apostles." And he then cites, as so many of his predecessors cited, the three great words. He concludes: "Peter received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the power of binding and loosing, the charge of the whole Church, the Principate over it; yet he is not called the universal Apostle, and John, my colleague as bishop, endeavours to be called universal bishop.
"All things in Europe are delivered over to the power of barbarians. Our cities are destroyed, our fortresses overthrown, our provinces depopulated. The ground remains untilled. Day by day idolaters exercise their rage upon the faithful, who are cruelly slaughtered; and bishops who should lie in dust and ashes seek for themselves vanitous names: glory in new and profane titles.
"Am I in this defending a cause proper to myself? Am I resisting my own special injury? Nay, it is the cause of Almighty God: the cause of the universal Church. Who is he who, in spite of the commands of the Gospel, in spite of the decrees of councils, presumes to usurp a new title for himself? I would that he who has agreed to be called universal may be himself one, without the diminution of others.
"And we know, indeed, that many bishops of Constantinople have fallen into the gulf of heresy; have become not heretics only but heresiarchs. Thence came Nestorius, who, deeming Jesus Christ, the Mediator of God and man, to be two persons, because he did not believe that God could become man, went even to the extent of Jewish unbelief. Thence came Macedonius, who denied the Godhead of the Holy Spirit, consubstantial with the Father and the Son. If, then, anyone seizes upon that name for himself, as in the judgment of all good men he has done, the whole Church—which God forbid—falls from its state when he who is called universal falls. But far from the hearts of Christians be that blasphemous name in which the honour due to all bishops is taken away, while one madly arrogates it to himself.
"I know that in honour of St. Peter, prince of the Apostles, that title was offered to the Roman Pontiff during the venerable Council of Chalcedon. But no one of them ever consented to use this name of singularity; lest while something peculiar was given to one, all bishops should be deprived of the honour due to them. Do we, then, not seek the glory of this name, even when offered to us, and does another catch at it for himself, when it is not offered?
"Your Majesty, then, must bend that neck which refuses obedience to the canons. He must be restrained, who does an injury to the whole Church; who is proud in heart; who has a greed after a name given to none other; who by such a singular name throws a slur upon your empire also in putting himself over it.
"We are all scandalised at this: let the author of the scandal return to right, and all contest between bishops will cease. For I am the servant of all bishops so long as they live like bishops. But whoever, through vainglory and contrary to the statutes of the Fathers, lifts his neck against Almighty God, I trust in Almighty God that he will not bend me even with the sword."
As Gregory quotes the three words said to Peter, with application of them to his own see, it seems needless to repeat other passages in which he says the same thing. But there is a letter to Eulogius,[189] patriarch of Alexandria, which begins by saying that this patriarch had written to him much concerning the See of Peter, and that he sat in it in his successors down to Gregory's own time. Whereupon Gregory, before himself citing the three words, says: "Who does not know that holy Church is founded on the solidity of the chief Apostle, whose name expressed his firmness, being called Peter from Petra". Then he calls the attention of Eulogius to the fact that all the three patriarchal sees were sees of Peter, with this remarkable inference, that "though there were many Apostles, only the see of the prince of the Apostles, which is the see of one in three places, received supreme authority in virtue of its very principate".[190]