Adoptianism had in the East a greater success and a longer history than in the West. In Syria and Armenia vast numbers joined the sect founded, or revived, by one {80} Constantine in the middle of the seventh century. He lived near Samosata, and probably inherited the teaching of the earlier heretic, Paul of that place. The sect came to be called Paulicians. They rejected the real divinity of Christ and placed themselves in opposition to very much else which belonged to the earliest Christian tradition, as in their rejection of the Old Testament and the perpetual virginity of the Lord's Mother. Armenia became the headquarters of a large and prosperous sect, towards which emperors alternately were persecuting or favourable. Nicephorus I. (802-11) was friendly to it, but his successor put it down with relentless savagery; and after it had led to a formidable rebellion, its votaries were finally suppressed by the generals of Basil the Macedonian, 871. But its tenets lingered on in Thrace, whither it had been transported when some of its disciples were expropriated by Constantine V., till the eighteenth century, and still later in Armenia itself. The authoritative book of the Armenian Paulicians, the Key of Truth, has been thought to have been completed by one Smbat, minister of Chosroes of Persia, whose date is 800-50,[5] but the history of those days is certainly very confused and may have been distorted.
The intervention of Charles the Great in this controversy is but one illustration of the importance of theological questions in the outlook of the reviver of the Empire in the Catholic West. Other theological doctrines had a like interest in his view and in that of his house; and in some of them also Spain was concerned. At Toledo, in 589, Reccared, when he accepted the Catholic creed, had inserted his belief in {81} the double procession of the Holy Ghost. This was again discussed in 767 at Gentilly, and at Aachen in 809.
[Sidenote: The "Veni Creator.">[
Alcuin, as in the Adoptianist controversy, played a great part in stating the view which the West was coming generally to accept. Leo III. was consulted, and advised that no addition should be made to the Creed for fear of widening the breach with the East. It would seem that the great hymn, "Veni Creator Spiritus," is the expression of this doctrine by the ninth century, and is the work of Rabanus Maurus, a monk of the famous house of Fulda.
[Sidenote: The "Quicunque Vult.">[
While this sums up in devotional form the Christian thought as to one of the mysteries of faith, the hymn of a character more distinctly credal, called "Quicunque vult," enshrines it in another aspect. The "Quicunque" has, indeed, a much earlier history. In 633 the Fourth Council of Toledo quoted many of its clauses. Leodgar, Bishop of Autun (663-78), directed his clergy to learn it by heart; and it became a not uncommon profession of faith to be made by a bishop at his consecration. At the end of the eighth century it seems to have been widely recited in church. But it certainly goes back very much earlier. Caesarius, Bishop of Arles (501-43), the opponent of semi-Pelagianism, has been proved to have used the creed continually: it was quoted also by his rival, Avitus, Bishop of Vienne (490-523), and it is probable that it represents the teaching of the great abbey of Lerins in the controversies of the beginning of the sixth century. It was decisively a Western creed: it {82} never came into the offices of the orthodox Church of the East. In the West it became a popular means of instruction and a popular confession of the joy of Christian faith. It was sung in procession, recited in the services, meditated on by the clergy. It formed a model of orthodox expression of belief in days of confusion and controversy.
[1] This story is discredited by a recent writer, Mr. Dudden, S. Gregory the Great, i. 407 (following F. Görres), but I see no reason to doubt that S. Gregory was rightly informed, and I accept what Dr. Hodgkin (Eng. Hist. Rev., ii. 216) states as the facts.
[2] Mansi, Concilia, ix. 977-1010.
[3] See below, p. 109.
[4] See B. L. Ottley, Doctrine of the Incarnation, ii. 152-4.