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

by T. W. Allies

Let us attempt to gather the meaning of the various statements quoted from St. Gregory, and see whether they do not form a coherent whole.

He claims, like all his predecessors, the three great texts concerning Peter, as conveying the charge of the whole Church, the Principate, to Peter and his heirs, that is, the Popes preceding him.

He contrasts in the most pointed manner this charge with the name of Ecumenical, which he translates universal, patriarch, as assumed by the bishop of Constantinople, and he contrasts not the name only, but the thing which he conceives to be meant by the name and carried in it.

He contrasts likewise the moderation of his predecessors, who, though inheriting Peter's charge over the whole Church, declined to accept a name which seemed to exclude other bishops from their proper honour.

Peter's charge over the whole Church, then, in the judgment of Gregory, had descended to himself, as he wrote to the empress, "though the sins of Gregory, who is Peter's unworthy servant, are great, the sins of the Apostle are none," to justify the treatment he has met with in this assumption by another of the title Ecumenical. In a word, the charge is a command of the Gospel, the assumption is "a name of blasphemy and diabolical pride, and a forerunner of Antichrist".

I conceive that we may interpret St. Gregory's mind in this way. When he so wrote he had behind him rather more than five full centuries since St. Peter and St. Paul had given up their lives in Rome for the Christian faith, and become its patron saints. In all that time Gregory had seen the hierarchy founded by the bearer of the keys fill the earth. Peter, as a token of his Principate, had put his name in the three chief sees, sitting himself as bishop in Antioch for seven years; sitting also himself in Rome, as bishop, and dying there; sending also his disciple Mark from Rome to Alexandria. Our Lord's gift and charge to Peter was the source of unity in His Church. He Himself being mediator between God and man united His Church with the Divine Trinity in unity. Then He gave the keys of His kingdom to Peter, in whom unity was secured through the three patriarchs and the other bishops. Such was the constitution which stood without a break before St. Gregory from the Apostles to the Nicene Council. From St. Sylvester to his own time the Popes had been maintaining that constitution. But now the claim of the bishops of Constantinople was directly against this constitution. Pope Gelasius, his predecessor, had told that bishop in his day that he had no rank above that of a simple bishop.[191] For all their adventitious rank they rested, not upon God, not upon Jesus Christ, not upon St. Peter, but upon the residence of the emperors in their city. That was the ground upon which they called themselves ecumenical, a title which Gregory interpreted universal. Their first step in moving beyond the position of simple bishop was when the 150 bishops at Constantinople in 381 attempted to give them the second place in rank. And this they did not upon any ground of apostolic descent, but because Constantinople was Nova Roma. As to their act in doing this Gregory writes to Eulogius: "The Roman Church up to this time does not possess, nor has received, the canons or the acts of that council; it has received that council so far as it condemned Macedonius".[192] Their next step was at the Council of Chalcedon to attempt passing a canon, to the effect that the Fathers had given its rank to Rome because it was the capital, that the 150 Fathers had therefore given the second rank to Constantinople, because it was the new capital; and that, therefore, the Pontic, the Arian, and the Thracian exarchs of Cæsarea, Ephesus, and Heraclea should be subjected to it. This canon St. Leo had absolutely rejected, and the emperor Marcian had accepted his rejection. In the 130 years from St. Leo to himself, St. Gregory had seen the assumptions of the bishops of Constantinople continually increasing. They rested upon the imperial favour. And now in the case of John the Faster they had gone so far that he prefixed his assumed title of ecumenical patriarch to the very documents which he sent to the Pope for revision. And this though the cause had been settled by himself, and had now come before the Pope, whose power therefore to revise the sentence of one who called himself ecumenical patriarch he did not dispute.

Nor, indeed, did it appear over what domain he claimed to be universal. It might be over the eastern bishops; it might be over the two patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, with the later patriarch of Jerusalem; it might be over the actual Roman empire; it might be, finally, over the whole Church. But whichever it might be, the claim would equally be, in Gregory's judgment, unlawful, based simply and solely upon imperial power; resting also in its origin upon a direct untruth, which assaulted the whole foundation whereon the charge of the whole Church, the Principate of Gregory, rested; couched, moreover, in language which would enable future generations of Greeks to draw the conclusion that, since the Primacy of Rome proceeded from its being the capital, when Rome ceased to be the capital, and Constantine's city became the capital, the Primacy also passed to it.

Thus, in the whole assumption of the bishops of Constantinople, it was presupposed that the spiritual power and the hierarchy of the Church descended not from Jesus Christ, but from the emperors.[193] So it is clear that this empty title, which seemed to the emperor Mauritius a meaningless word, a mere nothing, contained in itself the whole system of Antichrist. The Pope saw it, and his words are the more significant when we remember that at the time he uttered them the man had already reached full manhood who was to cut the empire of Justinian in half, to deprive of their liberty three of the eastern patriarchs, destroy a multitude of the Christian people, and be parent of the religion which through the course of 1200 years has shown itself to be specially anti-Christian. There in his Arab tent, as yet the faithful husband of an old wife, was the future Khalif, in whom the spiritual and the temporal power would be joined together; who would set up in a false theocracy that usurpation which Constantine's eastern successors were striving to carry out in the Christian Church. Mahommed would consecrate that very false principle which was at the root of the ecumenical patriarch's arrogance. Thus the strongest word used by Gregory of John the Faster's assumption, that it was "a name of blasphemy, of diabolical pride, and a forerunner of Antichrist," received its exact verification within a generation after Gregory had spoken it.

But Gregory's charge and Principate were of divine creation, and did not exclude the proper power and jurisdiction either of every bishop or of the whole episcopate, at the head of which it stood, and through which it worked, carefully maintaining what had been from the beginning, preserving the rank and place of each, consolidating all in the one structure.[194] The intruder set up by the imperial power deposed Alexandria and Antioch to make them subject to himself; the lawful shepherd maintained Alexandria and Antioch because they grew upon the tree of which he was the trunk. His charge did not exclude, but did indeed include them. The reasoning of St. Gregory in his letter to the emperor of the day, and his very words in his letter to the patriarch Eulogius, have become a matter of faith by their enrolment in the decree of the Vatican Council. That decree defines the Principate to be an episcopal power of jurisdiction, which is immediate, over the whole Church. By it the whole Church becomes one flock, under one shepherd. And it further defines that, "It is so far from being true that this power of the Supreme Pontiff is injurious to the ordinary and immediate power of episcopal jurisdiction, by which bishops placed by the Holy Spirit have succeeded the Apostles, and as true pastors feed and rule the flocks severally assigned to them, each his own, that this jurisdiction is asserted, strengthened, and maintained by the supreme and universal pastor, according to St. Gregory's words: 'My honour is the honour of the universal Church; my honour is the solid strength of my brethren; then am I truly honoured when his due rank is given to each'."[195]

It may be observed that Gregory's position against the assumption of John the Faster is the same as St. Leo's position against Anatolius. In both cases the Popes discerned the hostile power located in the see of Nova Roma which was at work against the original order of the Church, and the Pope who was at the head of it. The only difference lies in the great advance which the hostile power had made on one hand, and on the other hand the excessively difficult temporal position in which St. Gregory had to fight the battle for the cause, as he said, of the universal Church. Yet the speech of the Pope beleaguered by the Lombards in a decimated and subject Rome is as strong as the speech of the Pope who had the imperial grandchildren of Theodosius for friends and supporters, and, when they failed, saved Rome by her two Apostles from the destruction menaced by Attila and Genseric.