But this very time was also that in which the heresy whose leading doctrine was denial of the Godhead of the Church's founder came from a threatening of supremacy to an end. In Theodorick Arianism seemed to be enthroned for predominance in all the West. His civil virtues and powerful government, his family league of all the western rulers,—for he himself had married Andefleda, sister of Clovis, and had given one daughter for wife to the king of the Vandals in Africa, and another to the king of the Visigoths in France,—was a gage of security. In Gregory's time the great enemy has laid down his arms. He is dispossessed from the Teuton race in its Gallic, Spanish, Burgundian, African settlements. Gregory, at the head of the western bishops who in every country have risked life for the faith of Rome, has gained the final victory. One only Arian tribe survives for a time, ever struggling to possess Rome, advancing to its gates, ruining its Campagna, torturing its captured inhabitants, but never gaining possession of those battered walls, which Totila in part threw down and Belisarius in piecemeal restored. And Gregory, too, is chosen to stop the Anglo-Saxon revel of cruelty and destruction, which has turned Britain from a civilised land into a wilderness, and from a province of the Catholic Church to paganism, from the very time of St. Leo. Two tribes were the most savage of the Teuton family, the Saxon and the Frank. The Frank became Catholic, and Gregory besought the rulers of the converted nation to help his missionaries in their perilous adventure to convert the ultramarine neighbours, still savage and pagan. He also ordered their chief bishop to consecrate the chief missionary to be archbishop of the Angles. As there was a Burgundian Clotilda by the side of Clovis, there was a Frankish Bertha by the side of Ethelbert; and these two women have a glorious place in that second great victory of the Church. The Visigoth and Ostrogoth with their great natural gifts could not found a kingdom. Their heresy deprived the Father of the Son, and they were themselves sterile. Those who denied a Divine Redeemer were not likely to convert a world.
But all through Gregory's life the Byzantine spirit of encroachment was one of his chief enemies. The claim of its bishop to be ecumenical patriarch stopped short of the Primacy. But one after another the bishops of that see sought by imperial laws to detach the bishops of Eastern Illyria from their subjection to the western patriarchate. Their nearness to Constantinople, their being subjects of the eastern emperor, helped this encroachment.
It would appear also that in Gregory's time—a hundred years after Pope Gelasius had put the bishop of the imperial city in remembrance that he had been a suffragan to Heraclea—the legislation of Justinian had succeeded in inducing the Roman See to acknowledge that bishop as a patriarch. His actual power had gone far beyond. There can be no doubt that, while the Pope had become legally the subject of the eastern emperor, the bishop of Constantinople had become in fact the emperor's ecclesiastical minister in subjugating the eastern episcopate. The Nicene episcopal hierarchy subsisted indeed in name. To the Alexandrian and Antiochene patriarchs two had been added—one at Jerusalem, the other at Constantinople. But the last was so predominant—as the interpreter of the emperor's will—that he stood at the head of the bishops in all the realm ruled from Constantinople over against the Pope as the head of the western bishops in many various lands.
The bishops were in Justinian's legislation everywhere great imperial officers, holding a large civil jurisdiction, especially charged with an inspection of the manner in which civil governors performed their own proper functions; most of all, the patriarchs and the Pope.
But that episcopal autonomy—if we may so call it—under the presidence of the three Petrine patriarchs, which was in full life and vigour at the Nicene Council, which St. Gregory still recognised in his letter to Eulogius, was greatly impaired. While barbaric inundation had swept over the West, the struggles of the Nestorian and Eutychean heresies, especially in the two great cities of Alexandria and Antioch, had disturbed the hierarchy and divided the people which the master at Constantinople could hardly control. That state of the East which St. Basil deplored in burning words—which almost defied every effort of the great Theodosius to restore it to order—had gone on for more than two hundred years. The Greek subtlety was not pervaded by the charity of Christ, and they carried on their disputes over that adorable mystery of His Person in which the secret of redeeming power is seated, with a spirit of party and savage persecution which portended the rise of one who would deny that mystery altogether, and reduce to a terrible servitude those who had so abused their liberty as Christians and offered such a scandal to the religion of unity which they professed.
From St. Sylvester to St. Leo, and, again, from St. Leo to St. Gregory, the effort of the Popes was to maintain in its original force the Nicene constitution of the Church. Well might they struggle for the maintenance of that which was a derivation from their own fountainhead—"the administration of Peter"[217]—during the three centuries of heathen persecution by the empire. It was not they who tightened the exercise of their supreme authority. The altered condition of the times, the tyranny of Constantius and Valens, the dislocation of the eastern hierarchy, the rise of a new bishop in a new capital made use of by an absolute sovereign to control that hierarchy, a resident council at Constantinople which became an "instrument of servitude" in the emperor's hands to degrade any bishop at his pleasure and his own patriarch when he was not sufficiently pliant to the master,—these were among the causes which tended to bring out a further exercise of the power which Christ had deposited in the hands of His Vicar to be used according to the needs of the Church. No one has expressed with greater moderation than St. Gregory the proper power of his see, in the words I have quoted above:[218] "I know not what bishop is not subject to the Apostolical See, if any fault be found in bishops. But when no fault requires it, all are equal according to the estimation of humility." In Rome there is no growth by aid of the civil power from a suffragan bishop to an universal Papacy. The Papacy shows itself already in St. Clement, a disciple of St. Peter's, "whose name is written in the book of life,"[219] and who, involving the Blessed Trinity, affirms that the orders emanating from his see are the words of God Himself.[220] This is the ground of St. Gregory's moderation; and whatever extension may hereafter be found in the exercise of the same power by his successors is drawn forth by the condition of the times, a condition often opposed to the inmost wishes of the Pope. Those are evil times which require "a thousand bishops rolled into one" to oppose the civil tyranny of a Hohenstaufen, the violence of barbarism in a Rufus, or the corruption of wealth in a Plantagenet.
Between St. Peter and St. Gregory, in 523 years, there succeeded full sixty Popes. If we take any period of like duration in the history of the world's kingdoms, we shall find in their rulers a remarkable contrast of varying policy and temper. Few governments, indeed, last so long. But in the few which have so lasted we find one sovereign bent on war, another on peace, another on accumulating treasure, another on spending it; one given up to selfish pleasures, here and there a ruler who reigns only for the good of others. But in Gregory's more than sixty predecessors there is but one idea: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it," is the compendious expression of their lives and rule. For this St. Clement, who had heard the words of his master, suffered exile and martyrdom in the Crimea. For this five Popes, in the decade between 250 and 260, laid down their lives. The letter of St. Julius to the Eusebian prelates is full of it. St. Leo saw the empire of Rome falling around him, but he is so possessed with that idea that he does not allude to the ruin of temporal kingdoms. St. Gregory trembles for the lives of his beleaguered people, but he does not know the see which is not subject to the Apostolic See. In weakness and in power, in ages of an ever varying but always persistent adversity, in times of imperial patronage, and, again, under heretical domination, the mind of every Pope is full of this idea. The strength or the weakness of individual character leaves it untouched. In one, and only one, of all these figures his dignity is veiled in sadness. Pope Vigilius at Constantinople, in the grasp of a despot, and with the stain of an irregular election never effaced from his brow, is still conscious of it, still has courage to say, "You may bind me, but you will not bind the Apostle St. Peter". Six hundred years after St. Gregory, when accordingly the succession of Popes had been rather more than doubled, I find the biographer of Innocent III. thus commenting on his election in 1198: "The Church in these times ever had an essential preponderance over worldly kingdoms. Resting on a spiritual foundation, she had in herself the vigour of immaterial power, and maintained in her application of it the superiority over merely material forces. She alone was animated by a clearly recognised idea, which never at any time died out of her. For its maintenance and actuation were not limited to the person of a Pope, who could only be the representative, the bearer, the enactor, for the world of this idea in its fullest meaning. If here and there a particular personality seemed unequal to the carrying out such a charge, the force of the idea did not suffer any defect through him. Most papal governments were very short in their duration. This itself was a challenge to those whose life was absorbed in that of the Church to place at its head a man whose ability, enlightened and guided by strength of will, afforded a secure assurance for the exercise of an universal charge. From the clear self-consciousness of the Church in this respect proceeded that firm pursuance of a great purpose distinctly perceived. It met with no persistent or wisely conducted resistance on the part of the temporal power. On one side all rays had their focus in one point. In temporal princes the rays were parted. Few of these showed in their lives a purpose to which all their acts were made consistently subordinate. As circumstances swayed them, as the desire of the moment led them away, they threw themselves, according to their personal inclinations, with impetuous storm and violence upon the attainment of their wishes. They had to yield in the end to the power of the Church, slower, indeed, but continuous, pursued with superiority of spirit, moreover with the firm conviction of guidance from above, and of the special protection from this inseparable, and so attaining its mark. One only royal race ventured on a contest with the Church for supremacy; for one only, the Hohenstaufen, were conscious of a fixed purpose. They encountered a direct struggle with the Church; but the conflict issued to the honour of the Church. The Popes who led it came out of it with a renown in the world's history, which without that conflict they would never have so gloriously attained. If we look from these events before and afterwards upon the ages, and see how the institution of the Papacy outlasts all other institutions in Europe, how it has seen all States come and go, how in the endless change of human things it alone remains unchanged, ever with the same spirit, can we then wonder if many look up to it as the Rock unmoved amid the roaring billows of centuries?" And he adds in a note, "This is not a polemical statement, but the verdict of history".[221]
The time of St. Gregory in history bore the witness of six centuries; the time of Innocent III. of twelve; the time of Leo XIII. bears that of more than eighteen centuries to the consideration of this contrast between the natural fickleness of men and of lives of men, shown from age to age, and the persistence, on the other hand, of one idea in one line of men. The eighteen centuries already past are yet only a part of an unknown future. But to construct such a Rock amid the sea and the waves roaring in the history of the nations reveals an abiding divine power. It leaves the self-will of man untouched, yet sets up a rampart against it. The explanation attempted three hundred and fifty years ago of an imposture or an usurpation is incompatible with the clearness of an idea which is carried out persistently through so many generations. Usurpations fall rapidly. But in this one case the divine words themselves contain the idea more clearly expressed than any exposition can express it. The King delineates His kingdom as none but God can; it must also be added that He maintains it as none but God can maintain.
We may return to St. Gregory's own time, and note the unbroken continuity of the Primacy from St. Peter himself. It is a period of nearly six hundred years from the day of Pentecost. Just in the middle comes the conversion of Constantine. Before it Rome is mainly a heathen city, the government of which bears above all things an everlasting enmity against any violation of the supreme pontificate annexed by the provident Augustus to the imperial power, and jealously maintained by every succeeding emperor. To suffer an infringement of that pontificate would be to lose the grasp over the hundred varieties of worship allowed by the State. Yet when Constantine acknowledged the Christian faith, the names of St. Peter and St. Paul were in full possession of the city, so far as it was Christian. They were its patron-saints. Every Christian memory rested on the tradition of St. Peter's pontifical acts, his chair, his baptismal font, his dwelling-place, his martyrdom. The impossibility of such a series of facts taking possession of a heathen city during the period antecedent to Constantine's victory over Maxentius, save as arising from St. Peter's personal action at Rome, is apparent.
In the second half of this period, from Constantine to St. Gregory, the civil pre-eminence of Rome is perpetually declining. The consecration of New Rome as the capital of the empire, in 330, by itself alone strikes at it a fatal blow. Presently the very man who had reunited the empire divided it among his sons, and after their death the division became permanent. Valentinian I., in 364, whether he would or not, was obliged to make two empires. From the death of Theodosius, in 395, the condition of the western empire is one long agony. The power of Constantinople continually increases. At the death of Honorius, in 423, the eastern emperor becomes the over-lord of the western. During fifty years Rome lived only by the arm of two semi-barbarian generals, Stilicho and Aetius. Both were assassinated for the service; and in the boy Romulus Augustulus a western emperor ceased to be, and the senate declared that one emperor alone was needed. After fifty years of Arian occupation, the Gothic war ruined the city of Rome. In Gregory's time it had ceased to be even the capital of a province. Its lord dwelt at Constantinople; Rome was subject to his exarch at Ravenna.