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

by T. W. Allies

At his death, overclouded with the pangs of remorse, the Arian rule which he had fostered with so much skill showed itself to have no hold upon an Italy to which he had given a great temporal prosperity. The Goths, whom he had seemed to tame, were found incapable of self-government, and every Roman heart welcomed Belisarius and Narses as the restorers of a power which had not ceased to claim their allegiance, even through the turpitudes and betrayals of Zeno and Anastasius.

The best solution which I know for this wonderful result, brought about in so many countries, is contained in a few words of Gibbon: "Under the Roman empire the wealth and jurisdiction of the bishops, their sacred character and perpetual office, their numerous dependents, popular eloquence and provincial assemblies, had rendered them always respectable and sometimes dangerous. Their influence was augmented by the progress of superstition" (by which he means the Catholic faith), "and the establishment of the French monarchy may in some degree be ascribed to the firm alliance of a hundred prelates who reigned in the discontented or independent cities of Gaul."[212] But how were these prelates bound together in a firm alliance? Because each one of them felt what a chief among them, St. Avitus, under an Arian prince, expressed to the Roman senate in the matter of Pope Symmachus by the direction of his brother bishops, that in the person of the Bishop of Rome the principate of the whole Church was touched; that "in the case of other bishops, if there be any lapse, it may be restored; but if the Pope of Rome is endangered, not one bishop but the episcopate itself will seem to be shaken".[213] If the bishops had been all that is above described with the exception of this one thing, the common bond which held them to Rome, how would the ruin of their country, the subversion of existing interests, the confiscation of the land, the imposition of foreign invaders for masters, have acted upon them? It would have split them up into various parties, rivals for favour and the power derived from favour. The bishops of each country would have had national interests controlling their actions. The Teuton invaders were without power of cohesion, without fraternal affection for each other; their ephemeral territories were in a state of perpetual fluctuation. The bishops locally situated in these changing districts would have been themselves divided. In fact, the Arian bishops had no common centre. They were the nominees and partisans of their several sovereigns. They presented no one front, for their negation was no one faith. We cannot be wrong in extending the action assigned by Gibbon to the hundred bishops of Gaul, to the Catholic bishops throughout all the countries in which a poorer Catholic population was governed by Arian rulers. The divine bond of the Primacy, resting upon the faith which it represented, secured in one alliance all the bishops of the West. Nor must we forget that the Throne of Peter acknowledged by those bishops as the source of their common faith, the crown of the episcopate, was likewise regarded by the Arian rulers themselves as the great throne of justice, above the sway of local jealousies and subordinate jurisdictions. It represented to their eyes the fabric of Roman law, the wonderful creation of centuries, which the northern conquerors were utterly unable to emulate, and made them feel how inferior brute force was to civil wisdom and equity.

In the constitution of the Visigothic kingdom of Spain from the time of Rechared, when it became Catholic, we see the first fruits of the Church's beneficent action on the northern invaders. The barbarian monarchy from its original condition of a military command in time of war, directing a raid of the tribe or people upon its enemies, becomes a settled rule, at the head of estates which meet in annual synod, and in which bishops and barons sit side by side. Government reposes on the peaceable union of the Two Powers. In process of time this sort of political order was established everywhere throughout the West, by the same action and influence of the Church. In the Roman empire the supreme power had been in its origin a mandate conferred by the citizens of a free state on one of their number for the preservation of the commonwealth. The notion of dynastic descent was wanting to it from the beginning. But the power which Augustus had received in successive periods of ten years passed to his successors for their life. Still they were rather life-presidents with royal power than kings. And it may be noticed that in that long line no blessing seemed to rest on the succession of a son to his father; much, on the contrary, on the adoption of a stranger of tried capacity guided by the choice of the actual ruler. But in the lapse of centuries the imperial power had become absolute. Especially in the successors of Constantine, and in the city to which he had given his name and chosen for the home of his empire, not a shadow of the old Roman freedom remained. One after another the successful general or the adventurer in some court intrigue supplanted or murdered a predecessor, and ascended the throne, but with undiminished prerogatives. Great was the contrast in all the new kingdoms at whose birth the influence of the Church presided. There the kings all sat by family descent, in which, however, was involved a free acceptance on the part of their people. The bishops who had had so large a part in the foundation of the several kingdoms had a recognised part in their future government. Holding one faith, and educated in the law of the Romans, and joined on to the preceding ages by their mental culture as well as their belief, they contributed to these kingdoms a stability and cohesion which were wanting to the Teuton invaders in themselves. They incessantly preached peace as a religious necessity to those tribes which had been as ready to consume each other as to divide the spoils of their Roman subjects. This united phalanx of bishops in Gaul conquered in the end even the excessive degeneracy, self-indulgence, and cruelty of the Merovingian race. Thanks to their perpetual efforts, while the policy of a Clovis made a France, the wickedness of his descendants did not destroy it, but only themselves, and caused a new family to be chosen wherein the same tempered government might be carried on.

It is remarkable that while the Byzantine emperors, from the extinction of the western empire, were using their absolute power to meddle with the doctrine of the Church which Constantine acknowledged to be divine, and to fetter its liberty which he acknowledged to be unquestionable, the Popes from that very time were through the bishops, to whom they were the sole centre in so many changes and upheavals, constructing the new order of things. Through them the Church maintained her own liberty, and allied with it a civil liberty which the East had more and more surrendered.

In the East, the Church in time was younger than the empire; in the West, she preceded in time these newly formed monarchies. Amid the universal overthrow which the invaders had wrought she alone stood unmoved. The heresy which had so threatened her disappeared. On Goths, and Franks, and Saxons, and Alemans, she was free to exercise her divine power.[214] It is in that sixth century of tremendous revolutions that she laid the foundation of the future European society. Byzantium was descending to Mahomet while Rome was forecasting the Christian commonwealth of Charles the Great. In the Rome of Constantine, while the old civilisation had accepted her name, the old pagan principles had continually impeded her action. The civil rulers especially had harked back after the power of the heathen Pontifex Maximus; but in these new peoples who were not yet peoples, but only the unformed matter (materia prima) out of which peoples might be made, the Church was free to put her own ideal as a form within them. They had the rudiments of institutions, which they trusted her to organise. They placed her bishops in their courts of justice, in their halls of legislation. The greatest of their conquerors in the hour of his supreme exaltation, which also was received from the Pope, was proud to be vested by her in the dalmatic of a deacon.

Of this new world St. Gregory, in his desolated Rome, stood at the head.

There is yet another aspect of this wonderful man which we have to consider. We possess about 850 of his letters. If we did but possess the letters of his sixty predecessors in the same relative proportion as his, the history of the Church for the five centuries preceding him, instead of being often a blank, would present to us the full lineaments of truth. The range of his letters is so great, their detail so minute, that they illuminate his time and enable us to form a mental picture, and follow faithfully that pontificate of fourteen years, incessantly interrupted by cares and anxieties for the preservation of his city, yet watching the beginnings and strengthening the polity of the western nations, and counterworking the advances of the eastern despotism. The divine order of greatness is, we know, to do and to teach. Few, indeed, have carried it out on so great a scale as St. Gregory. The mass of his writing preserved to us exceeds the mass preserved to us from all his predecessors together, even including St. Leo, who with him shares the name of Great, and whose sphere of action the mind compares with his. If he became to all succeeding times an image of the great sacerdotal life in his own person, so all ages studied in his words the pastoral care, joining him with St. Gregory of Nazianzum and St. Chrysostom. The man who closed his life at sixty-four, worn out not with age, but with labour and bodily pains, stands, beside the learning of St. Jerome, the perfect episcopal life and statesmanship of St. Ambrose, the overpowering genius of St. Augustine, as the fourth doctor of the western Church, while he surpasses them all in that his doctorship was seated on St. Peter's throne. If he closes the line of Fathers, he begins the period when the Church, failing to preserve a rotten empire in political existence, creates new nations; nay, his own hand has laid for them their foundation-stones, and their nascent polity bears his manual inscription, as the great campanile of St. Mark wears on its brow the words, Et Verbum caro factum est. These were the words which St. Gregory wrote as the bond of their internal cohesion, as the source of their greatness, permanence, and liberty upon the future monarchies of Europe.

What mortal could venture to decide which of the two great victories allowed by Gibbon to the Church is the greater? But we at least are the children of the second. It was wrought in secrecy and unconsciousness, as the greatest works of nature and of grace are wrought, but we know just so much as this, that St. Gregory was one of its greatest artificers. The Anglo-Saxon race in particular, for more than a thousand years, has celebrated the Mass of St. Gregory as that of the Apostle of England. Down to the disruption of the sixteenth century, the double line of its bishops in Canterbury and York, with their suffragans, regarded him as their founder, as much as the royal line deemed itself to descend from William the Conqueror. If Canterbury was Primate of all England and York Primate of England, it was by the appointment of Gregory. And the very civil constitution of England, like the original constitutions of the western kingdoms in general, is the work in no small part of that Church which St. Augustine carried to Ethelbert, and whose similar work in Spain Gibbon has acknowledged. Under the Norman oppression it was to the laws of St. Edward that the people looked back. The laws of St. Edward were made by the bishops of St. Gregory.

How deeply St. Gregory was impressed with the conviction of his own vocation to be the head of the whole Church we have seen in his own repeatedly quoted words.[215] What can a Pope claim more than the attribution to himself as Pope of the three great words of Christ spoken to Peter? Accordingly, all his conduct was directed to maintain every particular church in its due subordination to the Roman Church, to reconcile schismatics to it, to overcome the error and the obstinacy of heretics. Again, since all nations have been called to salvation in Christ, St. Gregory pursued the conversion of the heathen with the utmost zeal. When only monk and cardinal deacon, he had obtained the permission of Pope Pelagius to set out in person as missionary to paganised Britain. He was brought back to Rome after three days by the affection of the people, who would not allow him to leave them. When the death of Pope Pelagius placed him on the papal throne, he did not forget the country the sight of whose enslaved children had made them his people of predilection.

With regard to the churches belonging to his own patriarchate, a bishop in each province, usually the metropolitan, represented as delegate the Roman See. To these, as the symbol of their delegated authority as his vicarii, Gregory sent the pallium. All the bishops of the province yielded them obedience, acknowledged their summons to provincial councils. A hundred years before Pope Symmachus had begun the practice of sending the pallium to them, but Gregory declined to take the gifts which it had become usual to take on receiving it. St. Leo, fifty years before Symmachus, had empowered a bishop to represent him at the court of the eastern emperor, and had drawn out the office and functions of the nuncio. Like his great predecessor, St. Gregory carefully watched over the rights of the Primacy. Upon the death of a metropolitan, he entrusted during the vacancy the visitation of the churches to another bishop, and enjoined the clergy and people of the vacant see to make a new choice under the superintendence of the Roman official. The election being made, he carefully examined the acts, and, if it was needed, reversed them. As he required from the metropolitans strict obedience to his commands, so he maintained on the one hand the dependence of the bishops on their metropolitans, while on the other he protected them against all irregular decisions of the metropolitan. He carefully examined the complaints which bishops made against their metropolitan; and when bishops disagreed with each other, and their disagreement could not be adjusted by the metropolitan, he drew the decision to himself.