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

by T. W. Allies

Gregory also held many councils in Rome which passed decisions upon doctrine and discipline. We may take as a specimen that which he held in the Lateran Church on the 5th April, 601,[216] with twenty-four bishops and many priests and deacons. It is headed: "Gregory, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to all bishops". The Pope says that his own government of a monastery had shown him how necessary it was to provide for their perpetual security: "Since we have come to the knowledge that in very many monasteries the monks have suffered much to their prejudice and grievance from bishops ... we therefore, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the authority of the blessed Peter, prince of the Apostles, in whose place we preside over this Church, forbid that henceforth any bishop or layman, in respect of the revenues, goods, or charters of monasteries, the cells or buildings belonging to them, do in any manner or upon any occasion diminish them, or use deceit or interference". If there be a contest whether any property belong to the church of a bishop or to a monastery, arbitrators shall decide. If an abbot dies, no stranger, but one of the same community, must be chosen by the brethren, freely and concordantly, for his successor. If no fitting person is found in the monastery itself, the monks are to provide that one be chosen from another monastery. In the abbot's lifetime no other superior may be set over the monastery, except the abbot have committed transgressions punishable by the canons. Against the will of the abbot no monk may be chosen to be set over another monastery or receive holy orders. The bishop may not make an inventory of the goods of the monastery, nor mix himself, even after the abbot's death, in the concerns of the monastery; he may hold no public mass in the monastery, that there be no meeting of people, or women, there; he may set up no pulpit there, and without the consent of the abbot make no regulation, and employ no monk for any church service.

All the bishops answered: "We rejoice in the liberties of the monks, and confirm what your Holiness has set forth as to this".

As metropolitan of the particular Roman province, Gregory was equally active. The political circumstances of Italy had exerted the most prejudicial effect on the Church. Ecclesiastical life was impaired. The discipline both of monks and clergy was weakened. Bishops had become negligent in their duties; many churches orphaned or destroyed. But at the end of his pontificate things had so improved that he might well be termed the reformer of Church discipline. He watched with great care over the conduct and administration of the bishops. In this the officers called defensors, that is, who administered the patrimony of the Church in the different provinces, helped him greatly in carrying out his commands. In the war with the Lombards, many episcopal sees had been wasted, and many of their bishops expelled. Gregory provided for them, either in naming them visitors of his own, or in calling in other bishops to their support. He rebuilt many churches which had been destroyed. He carefully maintained the property of churches: he would not allow it to be alienated, except to ransom captives or convert heathens. The Roman Church had then large estates in Africa, Gaul, Sicily, Corsica, Dalmatia, and especially in the various provinces of Italy. These were called the Patrimony of Peter. They consisted in lands, villages, and flocks. In the management of these Gregory's care did not disdain the minutest supervision. His strong sense of justice did not prevent his being a merciful landlord, and especially he cared for the peasantry and cultivators of the soil.

The monastic life which in his own person he had so zealously practised, as Pope he so carefully watched over that he has been called the father of the monks. He encouraged the establishment of monasteries. Many he built and provided for himself out of the Roman Church's property. Many which wanted for maintenance he succoured. He issued a quantity of orders supporting the religious and moral life of monks and nuns. He invited bishops to keep guard over the discipline of monasteries, and blamed them when transgressions of it came to light. But he also protected monasteries from hard treatment of bishops, and, according to the custom of earlier Popes, exempted some of them from episcopal authority.

In restoring schismatics to unity he was in general successful. He wrought such a union among the bishops of Africa that Donatism lost influence more and more, and finally disappeared. He dealt with the obstinate Milanese schism which had arisen out of the treatment of the Three Chapters. He won back a great part of the Istrians. He had more trouble with the two archbishops of Constantinople, John the Faster and Cyriacus; and his former friend the emperor Mauritius turned against him, so that he welcomed the accession of Phocas, as a deliverance of the Church from unjust domination. The unquestioning loyalty with which, as a civil subject, he welcomed this accession has been unfairly used against him. As first of all the civil dignitaries of the empire he could only accept what had been done at Constantinople. But in all his fourteen years neither the difficulty of circumstances nor the consideration of persons withheld him from carrying out his resolutions with a patience and a firmness only equalled by gentleness of manner. From beginning to end he considered himself, and acted, as set by God to watch over the maintenance of the canons, the discipline enacted by them, and so doing to perfect by his wisdom as well as to temper by his moderation the vast fabric of the Primacy as it had grown itself, and nurtured in its growth the original constitution of the Church during nearly six hundred years.

We may now say a few words upon the Primacy itself as exerted by St. Leo at the Council of Chalcedon, and the Primacy as exerted by St. Gregory in the fourteen years from 590 to 604; also on the interval between them, and the relative position of the bishop of Constantinople to Leo in the person of Anatolius, and to Gregory in the person of John the Faster. We see at once that the intention which Leo discerned in Anatolius, which he sternly reprehended and summarily overthrew, has been fully carried out by John the Faster, who, in documents sent to the Pope himself for revision, as superior, terms himself ecumenical patriarch. Who had made him first a patriarch and then ecumenical? The emperor alone. He is so called in the laws of Justinian. The 140 years from Leo to Gregory are filled with the continued rise of the Bishop of Nova Roma under the absolute power of the emperor. He has succeeded not only in taking precedence of the legitimate patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch; he has more than once stripped of their rights the metropolitans and bishops subject to the great see of the East, and himself consecrated at Constantinople a patriarch of Antioch by order of the emperor of the day. This Acacius did, humbly begging the Pope's pardon for such a transgression of the due order and hierarchy, and repeating the offence against the Nicene order and constitution on the first opportunity. In the same way he has interfered with the elections at Alexandria. We learn from the instruction given by Pope Hormisdas to his legates that all the eastern bishops when they came to Constantinople obtained an audience of the emperor only through the bishop of Constantinople. The Pope carefully warns his legates against submitting to this pretension. Pope Gelasius told the bishop in his day that his see had no ecclesiastical rank above that of a simple bishop. We laugh, he said, at the pretension to erect an apostolical throne upon an imperial residence. But, in the meantime, Constantinople has become the head of all civil power. The emperor of the West has ceased to be. The Roman senate, at the bidding of a Herule commander of mercenaries, has sent back even the symbols of imperial rank to the eastern emperor; and in return Zeno has graciously made Odoacer patricius of Rome, with the power of king, until Theodorick was ready to be rewarded with the possession of Italy for services rendered to the eastern monarch, with the purpose likewise of diverting his attention from Nova Roma. Therefore, in spite of the submission rendered by all the East, the bishops, the court, the emperor, and by Justinian himself; in spite, also, of two bishops successively degraded by an emperor, the bishop of Constantinople ever advances. The law of Justinian, which acknowledges the Pope as first of all bishops in the world, and gives him legal rank as such, makes the bishop of the new capital the second. Presently Justinian becomes by conquest immediate sovereign of Rome. The ancient queen and maker of the empire is humbled in the dust by five captures; is even reduced to a desert for a time; and when a portion of her fugitive citizens comes back to the abandoned city, a Byzantine prefect rules it with absolute power. A Greek garrison, the badge of Rome's degradation, supports his delegated rule. Presently the seat of that rule is for security transferred to Ravenna, and Rome is left, not merely discrowned, but defenceless. All the while the bishop of Constantinople is seated in the pomp of power at the emperor's court; within the walls of the eastern capital his household rivals that of the emperor; in certain respects the public worship gives him a homage greater than that accorded to the absolute lord of the East. He reflects with satisfaction that the one person in the West who can call his ministration to account is exposed to the daily attacks of barbarians: is surrounded with palaces whose masters are ruined, and which are daily dropping into decay. The Pope, behind the crumbling walls of Aurelian, shudders at the cruelties practised on his people: the bishop of Constantinople, by terming himself ecumenical, announces ostentatiously that he claims to rule all his brethren in the East—that he is supreme judge over his brother patriarchs. One only thing he does not do: he claims no power over the Pope himself; he does not attempt to revise his administration in the West. He acknowledges his primacy, seated as it is in a provincial city, pauperised, and decimated with hunger and desertion.

In this interval the Pope has seen seven emperors pass like shadows on the western throne, and their place taken first by an Arian Herule and then by an Arian Goth. Herule and Goth disappear, the last at the cost of a war which desolates Italy during twenty years, and casts out, indeed, the Gothic invader and confiscator of Italy, but only to supply his place by the grinding exactions of an absent master, followed immediately by the inroad of fresh savages, far worse than the Goth, under whose devastation Italy is utterly ruined. Whatever portion of dignity the old capital of the world lent to Leo is utterly lost to Gregory. It has been one tale of unceasing misery, of terrible downfal to Rome, from Genseric to Agilulf. It may seem to have been suspended during the thirty-three years of Theodorick, but it was the iron force of hostile domination wielded by the gloved hand. When the Goth was summoned to depart, he destroyed ruthlessly. The rage of Vitiges casts back a light upon the mildness of Theodorick; the slaughters ordered by Teia are a witness to Gothic humanity. No words but those of Gregory himself, in applying the Hebrew prophet, can do justice to the temporal misery of Rome. The Pope felt himself silenced by sorrow in the Church of St. Peter, but he ruled without contradiction the Church in East and West. Not a voice is heard at the time, or has come down to posterity, which accuses Gregory of passing the limits of power conceded to him by all, or of exercising it otherwise than with the extremest moderation.

Disaster in the temporal order, continued through five generations, from Leo to Gregory, has clearly brought to light the purely spiritual foundation of the papal power. If the attribution to the Pope of the three great words spoken by our Lord to St. Peter, made to Pope Hormisdas by the eastern bishops and emperor, does not prove that they belong to the Pope and were inherited by him from St. Peter, what proof remains to be offered? If the attribution is so proved, what is there in the papal power which is not divinely conferred and guaranteed? Neither the first Leo, nor the first Gregory, nor the seventh Gregory, nor the thirteenth Leo, ask for more; nor can they take less.

If St. Gregory exercised this authority in a ruined city, over barbarous populations which had taken possession of the western provinces, over eastern bishops who crouched at the feet of an absolute monarch, over a rival who, with all the imperial power to back him, did not attempt to deny it, how could a greater proof of its divine origin be given?

In this respect boundless disaster offers a proof which the greatest prosperity would have failed to give. Not even a Greek could be found who could attribute St. Gregory's authority in Rome to his being bishop of the royal city. The barbarian inundation had swept away the invention of Anatolius.