Peter's Rock

In

Mohammed's Flood

From St. Gregory The Great to St. Leo III.

Being the Seventh Volume of

The Formation of Christendom

By

Thomas W. Allies, K.C.S.G.

London: Burns & Oats, Ld.

New York: Catholic Publication Society Co.

1890

[pg v]

Prologue To The Seven Volumes Of The Formation Of Christendom.

This work being from the beginning one in idea, I place here together the titles of the fifty-six chapters composing it. For each of these was intended to be complete in itself, so far as its special subject reached; but each was likewise to form a distinct link in a chain. The Church of God comes before the thoughtful mind as the vast mass of a kingdom. Its greatest deeds are but parts of something immeasurably greater. The most striking evidence of its doctrines and of its works is cumulative. Those who do not wish to let it so come before them often confine their interest in very narrow bounds of time and space. Thus I have known one, who thought himself a bishop, accept Wycliffe as the answer of a child to his question, Who first preached the Gospel in England? And not only this. They also seize upon a particular incident, or person, and so invest with extraordinary importance facts which they suppose, and which so conceived are convenient for their purpose, but in historical truth are anything but undisputed. In this tone of mind, or shortness of vision, that which is gigantic becomes puny, that which is unending becomes transient. The sequel and coherence of nations, the mighty roll of the ages spoken of by St. Augustine, are [pg vi] lost sight of. Again, in English-speaking countries alone more than two hundred sects call themselves Christian. Their enjoyment of perfect civil freedom and equality veils to them the horror of doctrinal anarchy, in virtue of which alone they exist. By this anarchy the very conception of unity as the corollary of truth is lost to the popular mind. But through the eight centuries of which I have treated, the loss of unity was the one conclusive test of falsehood, and the Christian Faith stood out to its possessors with the fixed solidity of a mountain range whose summit pierced the heaven.

It has been my purpose to exhibit the profound unity of the Christian Faith together with the infinite variety of its effects on individual character, on human society, on the action of nations towards each other, on universal as well as national legislation. Like the figure of the great Mother of God bearing her Divine Son in her arms, and so including the Incarnation and all its works, the Faith stands before us in history, “veste deaurata, circumdata varietate”. And as the personal unity appears in the symbol of the Divine Love to man expressed in her Maternity, so it appears also in the figure of the Church through the ages in which that Divine Love executes His work. A divided creed means a marred gospel and an incredulous world.

I offer this work as a single stone, though costing the labour of thirty years, if perchance it may be accepted in the structure of that Cathedral of human thought and action wherein our Crucified God is the central figure, around which all has grown.

Be it allowed me to quote here words of the present Sovereign Pontiff addressed on the 18th August, 1883, to the Cardinals de Luca, Pitra, and Hergenröther:—

“It is the voice of all history that God with the most careful providence directs the various and never-ending movements of human affairs. Even against man's intention he makes them serve the advancement of His Church. History says further that the Roman Pontificate has ever escaped victorious from its contests and the violence employed against it, while its assaulters have failed in the hope which they cherished, and have wrought their own destruction. Not less openly does history attest the divine provision made concerning the city of Rome from its very beginning. This was to give for ever a home and seat to the successors of St. Peter, from which as a centre, being free from all control of a superior, they might guide the whole Christian commonwealth. And no one has ventured to resist this counsel of the divine Providence without sooner or later perceiving the vanity of his efforts.

“It cannot be expedient, nor is it wise counsel, to fight with a power for whose perpetuity God has pledged Himself, while history attests the performance of the pledge. Since Catholics throughout the whole world pay it religious veneration, it is their interest to defend it with all their power. Nay even the rulers of secular governments must acknowledge this, and lay it to heart, especially in times so dangerous, when the very foundations on which human society rests appear well nigh to shake and totter.”

Contents To The Seven Volumes Of The Formation Of Christendom.

VOLUME I.

INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 1854.—THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE INDIVIDUAL.

Chapter I.

The Consummation of the Old World.

Chapter II.

The New Creation of Individual Man.

Chapter III.

Heathen and Christian Man compared.

Chapter IV.

Effect of the Christian People on the World.

Chapter V.

New Creation of the Primary Relation between Man and Woman.

Chapter VI.

The Creation of the Virginal Life.

VOLUME II.

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND SOCIETY.

Chapter VII.

The gods of the Nations when Christ appeared.

Chapter VIII.

The First and the Second Man.

Chapter IX.

The Second Man verified in history.

Chapter X.

The First Age of the Martyr Church.

Chapter XI.

The Second Age of the Martyr Church.

Chapter XII.

The Third Age of the Martyr Church.

Chapter XIII.

The Christian Church and the Greek Philosophy, I.

Chapter XIV.

The Christian Church and the Greek Philosophy, II.

VOLUME III.

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY.

Chapter XV.

The Foundation of the Roman Church, the Type and Form of every particular Church; its contrast with Philosophy, and its development of the Judaic embryo.

Chapter XVI.

Neostoicism and the Christian Church.

Chapter XVII.

The First Resurrection of Cultured Heathenism in the Neopythagorean School.

Chapter XVIII.

Standing-ground of Philosophy from the accession of Nerva to that of Severus.

Chapter XIX.

The Gospel of Philosophic Heathenism.

Chapter XX.

The Neoplatonic Philosophy and Epoch.

Chapter XXI.

The respective power of the Greek Philosophy and the Christian Church to construct a Society.

Chapter XXII.

The Church reconstructing the Natural Order by the Supernatural.

VOLUME IV.

CHURCH AND STATE IN THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM.

Chapter XXIII.

Prologue.—The Kingdom as prophesied and as fulfilled.

Chapter XXIV.

Relation between the Civil and the Spiritual Powers from Adam to Christ.

Chapter XXV.

Relation between the Spiritual and the Civil Powers after Christ.

Chapter XXVI.

Transmission of Spiritual Authority from the Person of our Lord to Peter and the Apostles, as set forth in the New Testament.

Chapter XXVII.

Transmission of Spiritual Authority as witnessed in the history of the Church from a.d. 29 to a.d. 325.

Chapter XXVIII.

The One Episcopate resting upon the One Sacrifice.

Chapter XXIX.

Independence of the Antenicene Church shown in her organic growth.

Chapter XXX.

Independence of the Antenicene Church shown in her mode of positive teaching and in her mode of resisting error.

Chapter XXXI.

The Church's battle for independence over against the Roman Empire.

VOLUME V.

THE THRONE OF THE FISHERMAN BUILT BY THE CARPENTER'S SON, THE ROOT, THE BOND, AND THE CROWN OF CHRISTENDOM.

Chapter XXXII.

The witness of Eighteen Centuries to the See of Peter.

Chapter XXXIII.

From St. Peter to St. Sylvester, No. 1.

Chapter XXXIV.

From St. Peter to St. Sylvester, No. 2.

Chapter XXXV.

Constantine and the Church.

Chapter XXXVI.

Constantine and his Sons: Julian, Valentinian, Valens.

Chapter XXXVII.

From Constantine at Nicæa to Theodosius at Constantinople.

Chapter XXXVIII.

Church and State under the Theodosian House.

Chapter XXXIX.

Church and State and the Primacy from 380 to 440.

Chapter XL.

The flowering of Patristic Literature, No. 1.

Chapter XLI.

The flowering of Patristic Literature, No. 2.

Chapter XLII.

St. Leo the Great.

VOLUME VI.

THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS: LEO I. TO GREGORY I.

Chapter XLIII.

The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations.

Chapter XLIV.

Cæsar fell down.

Chapter XLV.

Peter stood up.

Chapter XLVI.

Justinian.

Chapter XLVII.

St. Gregory the Great.

VOLUME VII.

PETER'S ROCK IN MOHAMMED'S FLOOD.

Chapter XLVIII.

The Pope and the Byzantine.

Chapter XLIX.

Pope Martin: his Council, and his Martyrdom.

Chapter L.

Heraclius betrays the Faith, and cuts his empire in two.

Chapter LI.

Christendom and Islam.

Chapter LII.

Old Rome and New Rome.

Chapter LIII.

An Emperor-Priest and four great Popes.

Chapter LIV.

Rome's Three Hundred Years, 455-756, from Genseric to Aistulf, between the Goth, the Lombard, and the Byzantine.

Chapter LV.

From Servitude to Sovereignty.

Chapter LVI.

The Making of Christendom.

Preface.

This volume is strictly in continuance of the two which it follows—“The Throne of the Fisherman built by the Carpenter's Son,” and “The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations”. It is bulk alone which prevents my offering the three in one cover as historic proof, from original documents, of the first eight centuries that the Holy See by the institution of Christ is the Root, the Bond, and the Crown of Christendom. The works chiefly used in it are before and above all the letters of the Popes in their office of governing the Christian Commonwealth, which are contained in the great collection of Mansi, thirty-one volumes folio. The full titles of other works chiefly referred to are Cardinal Hergenröther, to whose work, Photius, Patriarch von Constantinopel, sein Leben, seine Schriften, und das griechische Schisma, and to his Handbuch der allgemeinen Kirchengeschichte, I owe great obligations—they are each in three volumes; Alfred von Reumont, [pg xvi] Geschichte der Stadt Rom, in three volumes; Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, in eight volumes; Kurth, Les origines de la Civilisation moderne, in two volumes; Jungmann, Dissertationes, in seven volumes; the German edition of Rohrbacher's History, vol. x. by Rump, vol. xi. by Kellner; Hefele, Concilien-Geschichte, in seven volumes; Muratori, Annali d'Italia; Brunengo, Le Origini della Sovranità Temporale dei Papi, and I primi Papi-Re e l'ultimo Re dei Longo-bardi; F. von Hoensbroech, Enstehung und Entwicklung des Kirchenstaates; Niehues, Kaiserthum und Papstthum, Döllinger, Muhammed's Religion, nach ihrer inneren Entwicklung und ihrem Einflusse auf das Leben der Völker. Regensburg, 1838.

Contents

Chapter I. The Pope And The Byzantine.

I have hitherto conducted the history of the Throne of the Fisherman built by the Carpenter's Son in unbroken succession from St. Peter to St. Gregory the Great. It is a period of 575 years from the Day of Pentecost a.d. 29 to St. Gregory's death in a.d. 604. This period is very nearly bisected by the conversion of Constantine. The first half contains the action of the Primacy over against a hostile heathen empire. The second half contains its action upon an empire which, at least in principle, acknowledged union with the Catholic Church as a duty, a privilege, and a necessity. The testimony rendered by Councils and by Fathers to the Roman Primacy may be said to be complete in the time of St. Gregory. Subsequent Councils can only add a closer precision to the testimony of the Council of Chalcedon. Subsequent acts of the Eastern empire can scarcely go beyond the submission of its episcopate, its emperor, and its nobles to Pope Hormisdas. The point of that submission consists in the solemn acceptance of the line [pg 002] of Roman bishops as inheriting the charge given by our Lord to St. Peter. Subsequent legislation can but apply in detail the acceptance by Justinian of the Pope's right to examine everything which belongs to the doctrine or concerns the conduct of the Church throughout the world. And force is even added to this acceptance, because it was made when the Pope, John II., to whom it was made, was not in fact his temporal subject.

I propose to treat in this volume of a period embracing two hundred years. It runs from the time of St. Gregory the Great to the founding of the holy Roman empire, in the person of Charlemagne, by Pope St. Leo III.

But, before entering on this treatment, it seems to me called for to make one remark on all which I have hitherto written or am hereafter to write, and to draw out distinctly a principle which affects every line of my narrative. This is the necessity of considering the Church as the one kingdom of Christ in all ages: one and the same polity from the Day of Pentecost to the Day of Judgment. This idea has always been before me as the rule of faith in writing the six preceding volumes. It has been the major premiss of my whole argument. To a Catholic the unity of the Church is as necessary as the unity of God; and, equally, to say that the Church is fallible is to deny the existence of any such thing as the kingdom of God upon earth. The sooner that anything which is fallible is swept away the better. The one duty which we owe to fallibility is to label it. The thing called public opinion[1] is fallible, and, [pg 003] accordingly, every generation sweeps it away and substitutes a fresh fallibility, destined to disappear after a similar ascendency, which waxes and wanes in varying durations of time. Division is the strongest proof of fallibility in that which is divided, as unity is of truth in that which remains one mass. For this cause those who substitute national churches in a particular country under the political head of that country, whether king, president, or parliament, for the one divine polity in all countries, are divided from my argument by an impassable gulf. They no more believe in the Church which is “the house of God, the pillar and basis of the truth,” than he who sets up three gods believes in one Infinite Creator and Rewarder of His creatures. The decrees of a General Council in matters of faith are not recognised by them as part of the divine deposit; for to them they are not acts of the Sovereign Lord in His plenary council. The lessons of history fail to convey any definite impressions to minds in which this idea is wanting. Rather the lessons of history affect them as the heathen was affected who heard the description of our Lord's sufferings undergone for his redemption only to exclaim, “Was it not a long time ago?” There are facts, but no connection. A strong instance of this is that the want of written records in the first three centuries is not made up to them by the acts of the Church in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, because to them the Church is not a polity instinct with one life and following from the beginning identical rules of government. On the contrary, they argue from the [pg 004] silence of perished documents in the three earliest centuries against the recorded practice of the three centuries following. Thus to them the acts of the Church in the Council of Ephesus in 431,[2] the next ecumenical council to the Nicene, throw no light upon the acts of the Church in the Nicene, of which no full record exists. Nor, again, do the acts of the Council of Chalcedon illustrate to them the antecedent constitution of the Church. And the supplication of the Eastern emperor, Marcian, to Pope St. Leo to confirm those acts tells them nothing as to the relation of the Council to the Pope in the time of the Nicene Council. Less even than infidels, who reject the Christian revelation altogether, but have a regard for historical sequence, do the nurslings of a national church, especially if it was in origin a queen's love-child, and then dandled on the knees of successive kings, understand the majesty of the Apostolic See, as set forth in the words of our Lord, or as unfolded in the course of ages. If the political constitution under which they live be a system of compromise, they are tempted to make the constitution of the Church a similar system, in which a change of ministry alters or even reverses the policy of a kingdom. “The holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints,” is not an entity to such minds. Therefore they fail to appreciate the proof of the one polity at the head of which St. Peter's successor stands. [pg 005] For some that polity ceased to exist in the fifth century; for others in the ninth; for others in the sixteenth; for all such it is non-existent in the nineteenth. It is for them as the human soul for the infidel surgeon: he cannot find it under his knife. Or as God for the infidel astronomer: he cannot see God in the order of the universe, though he will receive what physicists tell him, that the universe is absolutely one.

But I write for those to whom history is intelligible, because it is an order of events unrolling itself as a drama at once human and divine; to whom the human soul makes itself known by its acts; to whom “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork—day unto day utters speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.” To whom likewise there is one “Jesus Christ yesterday and to-day, and the same for ever”: yesterday at Pentecost with St. Peter and the apostles and our Blessed Lady; to-day with Leo XIII. at Rome and nineteen hundred years of doctors, martyrs, and saints; “the same for ever” at the Day of Judgment.

And now I turn another leaf in the book of human actions, which our Lord holds on His knees and unfolds in His history of His one Church.

During the whole pontificate of St. Gregory he was defending himself against the deceit and despotism of the man whom he acknowledged as his lawful sovereign, the Byzantine emperor. The despotism usually veiled itself in deceit, while the deceit rested upon the despotism rooted in the heart of the eastern that he was [pg 006] lord of the world.[3] Worse than the Lombards, who pursued to the very gates of Rome the people nourished by Gregory on the Church's patrimonium, who spoiled, maimed, and tortured those whom they could catch, were the intrigues of the imperial lieutenants, the exarchs of Ravenna, plotting with the Lombards, enemies of the emperor, against his subjects, the Pope and his Romans. With this state of things the seventh century begins, and so it continues to the end. We have to consider the great events which took place in this century, and especially to point out their connection with this fact of the Byzantine temporal despotism as it was turned upon the spiritual power.

Again, during his whole pontificate, St. Gregory was resisting the attempts of the bishops of Constantinople to extend their power. In his own time it would seem to have been an effect of Justinian's legislation that the Roman See accepted them as patriarchs, which Pope Gelasius denied them to be. Not only so but in every step of their advancement they were backed by the emperors to go on yet further by pushing their See under the title of Ecumenical to a position over the eastern empire parallel to that of the Pope over the West, while it was subordinate at the same time to the emperor himself. The four-and-twenty immediate successors of St. Gregory, from Pope Sabinian, elected in 604, to Pope Constantine, who died in 715, were exposed to the full force of this attempt. The bearing of it upon [pg 007] the rise of the Mohammedan empire will appear more and more as we proceed in the history of this terrible century.

The first event on which we must dwell for a time on account of its great effect upon the history of the century, is the long continued hostility between the eastern and the Persian empires. In the year 602 the general Phocas had deposed the emperor Mauritius.[4] From his reign most Byzantine historians date the ever increasing calamities of the empire. The popular feeling that a bad ruler is a judgment from God was expressed in the story that a pious monk once asked, O God, why hast Thou set this man over us as emperor? when he received for answer, Because I could find none worse. Phocas reigned about seven years, and his end was as follows. The patriarch Thomas had, by his entreaties, drawn to Constantinople Theodore of Siceon, who enjoyed a great reputation for holiness. The mind of patriarch Thomas had been greatly moved by auguries of misfortune which as it were filled the air. He urged the saint to pray and then to give him his advice. The saint at last yielded to his entreaties and said, “It was my mind not to disturb you. It is not for your good to know these things. But since you will have it so, learn that the incident which troubles you betokens many great misfortunes. Many will leave our religion. Incursions of barbarians will follow, and great blood-shedding. Devastation and insurrection through the whole world. Churches will be deserted. The fall of [pg 008] the divine service and of the empire is approaching: and the adversary is nigh at hand.”

Whilst St. Theodore was at Constantinople the emperor Phocas suffered from gout in hands and feet. He sent for the saint, who laid his hands upon him and prayed for him. The emperor felt relief, and commended himself and his realm to Theodore's prayers. The saint replied that if he wished such a prayer to be heard he must cease from oppression and shedding of blood. Phocas had great need of such warning, but profited little by it. Narses was the ablest and bravest general whom he had to send against the Persians, but he broke his word, and had him burnt alive. This frightful execution moved the patrician Germanus to try after the place of emperor which Phocas had once offered to him. He planned a conspiracy with Constantina, widow of the emperor Mauritius. She had taken asylum with her daughters in Sancta Sophia. This was in 606. At the sight of her the people flocked together and took up arms. Phocas sent orders to bring out Constantina with her daughters. The patriarch Cyriakus refused: only when he had compelled Phocas to swear that no harm should be done to them, he gave them up. Phocas kept his word, and only confined them in a monastery. Germanus was forced to become a priest. In the next year, 607, Germanus and Constantina with other persons of high rank made a new conspiracy. It was discovered. Germanus with his daughter, the widow of prince Theodosius, eldest son of the preceding emperor Mauritius, was beheaded. The same lot befel Constantina and her [pg 009] daughters at Chalcedon, on the spot where, five years before, the emperor Mauritius had witnessed the execution of five sons, one after another, uttering at each stroke only the words: “Just art Thou, O Lord, and just is Thy judgment”: and then offering his own head to the sword. Phocas put to death the other conspirators with fearful tortures. Such executions were followed by fresh conspiracies, and these by similar punishments. At last, Crispus, the very stepson of Phocas, rose against him, and invited Heraclius, governor of Africa, to depose the emperor. Heraclius despatched a fleet under the command of his son, bearing the same name. Only as it drew near Constantinople did Phocas hear of it. He prepared for defence, but Crispus secretly traversed all his efforts, pretending to be on his side. After a bloody engagement the fleet appeared before the walls of the capital on Sunday the 4th October, 610. The next morning a senator, whose wife Phocas had dishonoured, appeared with a troop of soldiers at the palace. Phocas was seized, stripped of the purple, his hands bound behind his back, and carried through the city and the fleet before the young Heraclius, who was still on board his vessel. “Wretch,” said Heraclius, “hast thou governed the empire so?” “And wilt thou,” answered Phocas, “govern it better?” Heraclius trampled on him, cut off his hands and feet, and then his head, in sight of the vast throng which lined the shore. His head and limbs were carried on spears through the city, the trunk dragged through the streets, and all at last burnt.

Heraclius, accompanied by Crispus, disembarked. He [pg 010] invited Crispus to put on the imperial robe, since he was not come to invest himself with it, but only to avenge Mauritius and his children. Crispus refused, and then Heraclius had nothing to oppose to the request of the patriarch Sergius, who had just succeeded Thomas, that he should be crowned by him. Crispus was given the government of Cappadocia: but becoming a few years later unfaithful to Heraclius, as he had been to his stepfather Phocas, was compelled to receive the torture, and pass the rest of his days in banishment.

It may here be said that the dynasty thus begun occupied the throne for five generations. Justinian II., great-great-grandson of Heraclius, was more cruel if possible, than Phocas: he was deposed by an adventurer in 695, and his nose cut off to incapacitate him for any future recovery of the throne. His successor lasted three years: and another for seven; after which Justinian, who wore a golden nose for the one which he had lost, recovered the throne; practised during five years atrocious cruelties, was deposed by a third adventurer, Philippicus Bardanes in 711: put to death, and his head carried to Rome to assure all men that they were delivered from a tyrant, and a special oppressor of the Church.

Such in personal conduct was the manner of men who sat on the eastern throne of the great Constantine during the seventh century: whom four-and-twenty Popes found themselves bound to acknowledge as “Christian kings and Roman princes”. What they were in this capacity, which was the first and greatest of all their duties, as [pg 011] recognised by the imperial laws, will be seen as the narrative proceeds. Under these men the Popes, utterly deprived of temporal power, in the midst of a province an outlying domain of a distant despot, had to maintain the unity of the Christian faith, and the independence of the Holy See as its guardian. In the midst of these things the chalifs of Mohammed broke upon the eastern empire, and severed from it its fairest provinces. It is requisite to follow closely the series of events, and the connection of times.

Upon his accession to the throne in 603 Phocas had sent an embassy to the Persian emperor Chosroes, expressing his desire to maintain peace with him. But Chosroes under pretext of avenging his benefactor, the late emperor Mauritius, began a war which lasted more than four and twenty years, inflicted fearful sufferings on both empires, and had the most important consequences by leaving them in a state of great weakness to meet the assault of a new enemy, the Mohammedan chalifate.

During the first eighteen years of this war, that is, from 604 to 622, the Greek empire suffered a series of defeats and disasters. Through the whole East, from the ruins of Babylon to the Bosphorus, cities were burnt and destroyed, the country ravaged and left without cultivation, the inhabitants slain or carried away into slavery. The Persians tore from the empire province after province—Armenia, Mesopotamia, Cappadocia. In 610 they came up to the walls of Chalcedon. The accession of Heraclius produced no pause in their [pg 012] destructive course. In 611 they took Edessa, Apamea, and Antioch. In 615 they plundered Palestine, and took Jerusalem. The Church of Gethsemane, on the Mount of Olives, and Constantine's Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre were destroyed or burnt. Among the inhabitants carried away was the patriarch Zacharias. The Persians seized in plunder all that was valuable, and the priceless relic of the Holy Cross was taken away by the fire-worshipper Chosroes. The Sponge and the Lance were saved by the patrician Nicetas, who purchased them at a high price from a Persian soldier, and then brought them to Constantinople, where they were exposed for veneration of the faithful.

It is to be noted that in 610 the Jews at Antioch had an insurrection, and massacred a great number of the most considerable inhabitants. They seized the patriarch Anastasius II., whom we have seen St. Gregory treat with such regard; they frightfully maimed him, dragged him by the feet through his city, and finished by casting him upon a funeral pile. When Jerusalem was captured in 615, the Jews of Palestine bought of the Persians as many Christians as they could get, for the pleasure of strangling them. It is recorded that they murdered seventy thousand in this manner.

Eight days before the taking of Jerusalem the fortress monastery of Mar Sabas, 2000 feet above the Dead Sea, then, as now, of the greatest renown, was assaulted by the Arabs. All but fourty-four of the oldest monks had fled, but these remained, and, after its capture, suffered first grievous tortures, and at last martyrdom. [pg 013] When the monks who had fled returned, they found the bodies of their brethren unburied; the abbot Modestus gave them holy burial. He afterwards superintended the diocese of Jerusalem during the absence of the captive patriarch. What Monte Cassino is to Italy, and Mount Athos to Greece, Mar Sabas was then and is now to Palestine.

At this time St. John the Almsgiver—the last great patriarch of Alexandria—gave every help to the fugitives from the Persian seizure of the Holy Land. It is a sign of the secular power wielded by the Egyptian patriarch that he ordered the confiscation of the goods of those who used in his city false weights and measures. After he had lovingly received and supported the fugitives from Syria and Palestine, he had, in the next year, 616, to fly himself in order to escape the sword of the Persians. He was on his way with the patrician Nicetas to Constantinople, when, at Rhodes, he had a vision, in consequence of which he said to his companion: “You invite me to the king of this world, but the Lord of heaven comes before you”. He told Nicetas the vision, and left him to go to Amathus in Cyprus, his birthplace. There he made his will in these words: “I thank Thee, O Lord, that Thou hast heard my prayer, and that only one-third of one gold piece remains to me, though at my consecration I found 8000 pounds' weight of gold in the bishop's house at Alexandria, not reckoning those countless sums which I have received from the friends of Christ. Therefore, I order that this small remnant be given to Thy servants.” Ten years he sat [pg 014] in the See of Alexandria. George was his successor. But from this time nothing more is known of this Church's history. Alexandria fell first under the Persians, and then under Amrou, the Mohammedan. The Arabian domination supported Christian errors only, and from that time the Church of St. Athanasius has never lifted its head again, and the land of the Desert Fathers is become the chief seat of the religion which puts an impostor in the place of the Redeemer.

In the year 616, the Persians broke into Egypt, took and plundered Alexandria, and carried their ravages to the borders of Æthiopia. Another Persian army besieged Chalcedon. Still Heraclius remained inactive. He only sent an embassy to Chosroes. In 619 he sent another, beseeching mercy in the name of the senate. Chosroes replied: “I will spare the Romans when they renounce their Crucified One and worship the sun”. He remembered not that he had to thank the Romans for his crown, that in his time of trouble he had found help only from the God of the Christians. Heraclius lost courage at this answer. Since the loss of Egypt Constantinople was suffering from famine, as well as a grievous pestilence. The emperor resolved to quit his capital, and take refuge with his father in Africa. He embarked his chief treasures, and directed the fleet to Carthage. Most of it was wrecked in a storm. A panic fell on his people, and they besought him with tears and cries not to forsake them. The patriarch Sergius went to the palace, led Heraclius to Sancta Sophia, and compelled him before the altar to swear [pg 015] aloud not to desert his capital. Heraclius submitted against his will.

In 619 he was very nearly taken captive by the Khan of the Avars, who had asked him for an interview, ostensibly to settle terms of peace, in reality to secure his person and riches, and to fall upon Constantinople. The emperor came in great pomp, was surprised, and scarcely escaped in disguise. The Avars obtained an immense booty, and, according to the patriarch Nicephorus, carried away captive beyond the Danube 270,000 men, women, and children.

At length, in the twelfth year of his reign, Heraclius awoke from his torpor, and his awakening was one of the most marvellous events recorded in history. His treasury was empty and his credit not good enough to borrow; but he resolved to attack the Persians in their own country. To secure Constantinople he made peace with the Avars, and to hold them in check he ceded provinces to other races, Slaves, Croatians, and Servians. He made churches and monasteries supply a forced loan. He took even the candlesticks and holy vessels of Sancta Sophia and coined them. When all was ready for his departure, he declared his eldest son, Heraclius Constantinus, ten years old, regent of the kingdom under tutorship of Sergius the patriarch and Bonosus, patrician. Then he celebrated the Easter festival, 4th April, 622. The next day he went to Sancta Sophia, threw himself before the altar and cried: “Lord, deliver us not for the punishment of our transgressions to our enemies, but look upon us in Thy [pg 016] mercy and grant us victory, that the wicked cease to exalt themselves and to mock Thine inheritance”. Then he turned to the patriarch Sergius with the words: “My city and my son I leave to God's protection, the Blessed Virgin's, and thine”. Upon this he took into his hands an image of our Saviour, which was said not to have been made by hands, marched to the Bosphorus and crossed over to Asia.

A train of defeats by the Persians had demoralised the Greek soldiers. Heraclius reinforced his army with allied troops, amongst them a number of Turks. He spent some months at first in restoring courage to his forces. “See,” he said, “my children, how the enemies of God trample on our land, lay waste our cities, burn our sanctuaries, desecrate our altars, pollute our churches with the vilest abominations.” When he had thus enheartened them he reviewed them together, and swore to fight with them and on equal terms unto death, to share all their dangers, to be inseparable from them as a father with his children. And moreover, he kept his word.

Heraclius was ever at the head of his soldiers: he united valour with caution: he entered Armenia and defeated the Persians in several battles. Then he made a show of taking up his winter-quarters in Pontus, but suddenly burst into Persia, and utterly discomfited a large force. He took the enemy's camp, together with immense treasure. His troops were astounded at their own victories, and he wintered them in Armenia. The next campaign was no less glorious. He kept Easter [pg 017] Day in 623, which fell on the 27th March, with his family at Nicomedia. By the 20th April he was in Persia. He had written to Chosroes, and offered him peace. The Persian king not only rejected his offer, but put the bearers of it to death. Heraclius used all these circumstances to give courage and confidence to his troops. He penetrated to the heart of Persia: he burnt the cities and villages which he passed on his way, and marched on Ganzac, now Tauris, where Chosroes was encamped with forty thousand men. At the first onset, Chosroes took flight. His troops were mown down, captured, or scattered. Ganzac was the capital of Atropatene. The Persian kings kept there a treasure, said to be that of Crœsus and to have been brought thither by Cyrus. The most renowned fire-temple of the chief god of the Persians was in this city. Here Zoroaster, the founder of that worship, had been born and lived. There was also here a colossal statue of Chosroes. He was seated in the middle of the palace under a great baldachin representing heaven. Round him were the sun, moon and stars, and angels bearing sceptres. The statue, by means of machinery, caused rain to fall, and thunder to sound. In fact, Chosroes assumed here divine worship. The emperor ordered the statue to be overthrown and broken to pieces. Heraclius burnt palace and temple, with part of the city. Then he marched into Albania for the winter, and, out of pity, set free fifty thousand Persian prisoners, to whom he likewise gave maintenance. This humanity so won their hearts that they burst [pg 018] into tears, and prayed that he might restore freedom to Persia, and put to flight Chosroes, whom they called the Waster of the human race—so hateful had he made himself by oppression and cruelty.

In the campaign of 624, Chosroes brought up three armies against the emperor. Heraclius defeated them in three great battles. He made so sudden a night attack upon what remained that their general, Sarbar, wakened by the clash of arms, had scarcely time to spring from his bed on horseback, and ride away at full speed, while the conqueror took possession of his golden shield, and even his clothes. In his fourth campaign, that of 625, Heraclius was also victorious. Chosroes avenged the defeat of his troops by falling on the churches of Persia, which he stripped of all their ornaments: and to punish the emperor, he compelled the Christians of his realm to become Nestorians. Fifteen years before, he had, to please his physician, compelled the inhabitants of Edessa to become Eutycheans. Chosroes rallied all his forces for the campaign of 626. He raised three great armies, composed indifferently of freemen and slaves, of natives and foreigners. Sarbar led one of these armies to Chalcedon to besiege Constantinople, on the Asiatic side, while the Khan of the Avars, breaking truce, appeared on the European side, to demand the surrender of the city and all its wealth. Its inhabitants, however, defended themselves with such valour as to repulse both Avars and Persians. The fall of the Avar power begins at this moment. It was henceforth occupied by intestine [pg 019] struggles. Sais led the second army of Chosroes, which was defeated by Theodore, brother of the emperor Heraclius. Heraclius himself broke the third army under the command of Rhazates, at Nineveh, on the 12th December, 627. The battle began in early morning, and ended only in the evening. The Persians lost, besides the commanding general, his three lieutenants, almost all their officers, and nearly the half of their soldiers. The Romans had only fifty killed, but many thousands wounded. These the emperor tended with so much care that only ten died.

Nineveh, at that time, was only a village on the ruins of the old capital. Heraclius marched thence upon Ctesiphon, the capital of Persia, built upon the remains of old Babylon, at a little distance. On his road he passed palaces, seats, and chaces wherein the Persian nobles pursued their hunting. Heraclius suffered his soldiers to sack and burn them all. Chosroes fled from city to city. Heraclius made him new peace-proposals at the beginning of 628. Chosroes refused them all, and became perfectly hated by the Persians. He thought not of the justice of God, which was pursuing him. Thirty-eight years before he had murdered his father Hermisdas to obtain his throne. What he had done to his father was to happen to him from his eldest son. He had been struck by a violent dysentery: and wished to make Medarses, his son by his favourite wife Syra, a Christian, his successor in the throne. His eldest son, Siroes, irritated by this preference, gained the nobles and the army, was [pg 020] proclaimed king, and sent an embassy to Heraclius. Chosroes was captured in his flight, and brought to Ctesiphon, on the 24th February, 628. He was put in chains and imprisoned in the strong tower, Tenebres, which he had built to keep his treasures. The next day Siroes was crowned: the first act of his government was to condemn his father to die of starvation. “Let him eat,” he said, “the gold for which he has desolated the world, and condemned so many to die of hunger.” The Satraps and all his enemies were made to mock the fallen ruler, and spit in his face. Siroes ordered Medarses and all his brethren to be strangled before his father's eyes: and, as the old king was still living on the fifth day, had him shot to death with arrows. So ended Chosroes, king of Persia, murdered by his son as he murdered his father.

These victories the emperor Heraclius reported at Constantinople, and also sent a letter, in which Siroes announced his coronation, and proclaimed his wish for peace. This letter was read from the ambo of Sancta Sophia on the Feast of Pentecost, 15th May, 628.

Siroes, in fact, established a stable peace with the emperor. He restored him all Christian prisoners in Persia, among them, Zacharias, patriarch of Jerusalem. He delivered to him also the true Cross, which Sarbar had taken away fourteen years before at the capture of Jerusalem. This was at first carried to Constantinople: but in the following year, 629, the emperor took ship to bring it back to Jerusalem, and give thanks to God for his victories. Here he replaced the Cross on its old spot. [pg 021] It had remained in its case, as it was taken away. The patriarch, with his clergy, recognised the seal as intact, opened with its key the shrine, worshipped the Cross, and showed it to the people. The Church celebrates, by the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, this event on the same day, the 14th September, on which she had before celebrated the apparition of the Cross to Constantine. Heraclius, in the same year, came to Edessa, and restored to the Catholics the church which Chosroes had given to the Nestorians. And he paid back, in the shape of a yearly income to Sancta Sophia and its clergy, the sums which he had borrowed for the costs of the war.

Let us dwell for a moment on these acts of Heraclius, from 622 to 629.

No Roman emperor, in the course of many hundred years, during the whole time in which Rome and Persia stood as rivals over against each other, obtained such a triumph over the king of kings, as did Heraclius. He surpassed by far Trajan at the culmination of the empire. Heraclius, commending his city and his son to the protection of God, of our Blessed Lady, and of the bishop of his city, God's representative, went forth on what seemed a desperate expedition, borrowing from churches and monasteries the means to equip it. For seven years victory crowned his course. Trajan stopped at the Mesopotamian provinces. Julian perished in them. Mark Antony won no honour of Rome's eastern rival: Crassus and his host never returned. Galerius was stuffed and served as a footstool for the great king to [pg 022] mount on horseback. Into the heart of that eastern realm Heraclius threw himself fearlessly. He made his own army out of divers peoples, and shared their dangers. Host after host he overthrew, as only the son of Philip, the conqueror without his match, had done before him. In the end, on the very spot where a Roman emperor, the special despiser of the Nazarene, and fostering in his heart the destruction of the Church as the crowning work of his reign, to be achieved upon his return as conqueror, perished by a Persian lance, Heraclius, after driving to despair the great king, the persecutor of the Cross, its possessor by conquest, saw him dethroned, famished, and at last shot to death by his son. He received from that son, the successor of the murdered father, abundant satisfaction for the wrongs which the Roman empire had suffered from its great rival of so many hundred years.

But, moreover, during these very seven years in which Heraclius won a perpetual victory in the name of the Cross—the wood of which he brought back as a conqueror to Jerusalem, giving thanks and worship, and replaced it with the seal which guarded it unbroken in its old sanctuary—an Arabian trafficker who had gained his living by carrying goods from city to city, and lived virtuously with one wife much his elder, upon her death, when he was more than fifty years of age, was assuming the name of a prophet and the position of a conqueror. The year in which Heraclius started is the same in which this pretension was set up. His claim to be a prophet is exactly coincident with the years in which he was [pg 023] taking to himself wife after wife, in which, entering suddenly the tent of his adopted son, he was seduced by a casual glance on that wife's beauty to desire her, to obtain her, and to forge a permission from the Most High to take as many wives as he pleased, and the wives of others—a forgery as yet unique in all the history of imposture; for many bad men have taken the wives of others, but no one except Mohammed has pretended to have a divine sanction for an act which treads under foot all human justice, and pulls down for the lust of one man the very foundation of domestic life.

It is of this man that one who has analysed his religion and described its course opens his work with these words[5]:—

“Since the beginning of the world has no other man—mere man—ever exerted so boundless an influence on the human race in the relations of religion, morality, and polity as Mohammed, the Arab. A man, by no means one of those rare spirits whom Providence at times evokes and endues with genius to open a path for a new world—a man rather whose mind was enclosed in narrow limits, poor in ideas for the construction of a new religion: a man such as this has for twelve hundred years cast his net of artless yet impenetrable links of doctrine round a hundred million souls—roots of teaching which have sunk into the marrow of men's minds, have taken up into themselves and mastered the whole of life, and impressed a uniform stamp on the thoughts and deeds of races as well as individuals.”

The seven years of Heraclius form part of the ten years of this Mohammed, in which the trader turns prophet and the reformer of religion endeavours to put a divine sanction on polygamy, in conjunction with a boundless concubinage of which captives were the prey.

As eighteen years of continual defeat by the Persians, from 604 to 622, had reduced the Eastern empire to a state of demoralised weakness, so the seven succeeding years, from 622 to 629, in which Heraclius wrought a full revenge on the Persian king, inflicted no passing collapse upon the empire resuscitated by the Sassanides in the third century. King Siroes did not long enjoy the fruit of his parricide. He reigned six months and then he died—some say of the plague, some of remorse. After his death the throne of Persia seemed to become a seat of murder. His young son, Ardeschir, or Artaxerxes, was killed after reigning seven months by his uncle, the general Sarbar. Sarbar kept the throne two months and was killed. Devanschir took his place. He was followed by Borane, a daughter of Chosroes. She was replaced by a certain Tschaschindeh, who was followed by Borane's sister, Azermidokt. A certain Kesra, or Chosroes, succeeded, and he gave way to a Ferokzad. Finally, Jezdedjerd, a grandson of the last Chosroes, was crowned in the year 632. Thus in the short space of four years about nine persons succeeded to the throne by murder. Jezdedjerd III. began his reign in the year Mohammed died. He is called by Theophanes, Hormisdas. He had the honour to be the last king of Persia and to end his days by the sword of [pg 025] the Arab in 651. His son, Peroxes, became a captain in the life-guards of the emperor of China at Singapore, and left no posterity.

After this glimpse at the action of the Byzantine and Persian empires on each other during the thirty years which follow immediately on the death of St. Gregory, we turn to consider the conduct of the temporal liege-lord of the Pope towards him whom he recognised as successor of St. Peter.

The emperor Phocas, following in this his predecessor Justinian, had expressly enjoined on the patriarch of Constantinople to recognise the Primacy of Rome.[6] What the chroniclers remark is important, that Boniface III., the next to succeed St. Gregory, received a decree from Phocas, in which he solemnly declared that the See of the Roman Church was to be considered the head of Christendom. It may be remarked here that Phocas did not say a word more than his predecessor, Marcian, said to St. Leo a hundred and fifty years before. Phocas may be named a tyrant, but Marcian has left an unspotted reputation as a Christian king and Roman prince, who received the empire with the hand of Pulcheria, heiress of the great Theodosius, and the only descendant worthy of his greatness, whose name stands also on the diptychs of the Catholic Church as a virgin saint.[7]

Upon the history of the City of Rome during the first [pg 026] half of the seventh century the greatest obscurity rests.[8] It was indeed the most frightful and destructive century for the former queen-city of the world. The Book of the Popes by Anastasius[9] trickles in a slender thread amid war, famine, and pestilence, and inundations of the Tiber; but it is all we have to look at.

With the death of the great Pontiff, who guarded and fed his city while the calamities which he saw all round the sphere of his vision over the whole Church led him to look for the end of the world, the See of Peter remained half a year unfilled until his successor, Sabinianus of Volterra, formerly Papal Nuncio at the Byzantine court, received the confirmation of his election from the exarch or the emperor. The confirmation of each pope's election was, as a rule, obtained either from the exarch or direct from the emperor. It was a business both costly and protracted. It also made the spiritual head of Rome dependent for his recognition on the imperial court. I find that in the period of 111 years, running from the death of St. Gregory in 604 to the death of Pope Constantine in 715, twenty-four popes succeeded. Of these the first, Sabinian, in 604, had to wait six months. Phocas confirmed the election of Boniface III., the next pope, after a year. He died in November, 607, and Boniface IV. following took his seat in August, 608. When he died, Pope Deusdedit waited five months. At his death Boniface V. succeeded after a year, in 619. [pg 027] Pope Honorius followed Boniface in five days and sat during thirteen years, but at his death the confirmation of his successor, Pope Severinus, was delayed by Greek intrigue, and for a purpose hereafter to be mentioned, during nineteen months and sixteen days, so that he only sat from the 28th May to the 1st August, 640. St. Martin in 649 did not wait for the imperial confirmation; he was first banished and then martyred by the emperor Constans II., who put in by threats his successor, Eugenius, during his lifetime. St. Leo II. waited eighteen months in 682, after the death of Pope Agatho, and the next Pope, Benedict II., a year in 684.

This privation of its original freedom, according to which the Pope's consecration followed at once upon his complete and legitimate election by clergy and people, the Roman Church owed to the Arian Herule Odoacer, during his occupation of Italy. It was eagerly grasped, after Theodorich and Theodatus had exercised it, by Justinian, when he became, by conquest, lord of Rome. I have already recorded the infamous violence exerted by Belisarius as soon as he had entered Rome, at the bidding of the Empress Theodora, upon St. Silverius. Now we have the eastern emperors, through the seventh century, exerting, sometimes directly, sometimes by delegation to their exarch, this stolen privilege. It was taken by Odoacer ostensibly for the preservation of order in the election, and the prevention of violence. I suppose it is the furthest reach of disloyalty to exercise a power which has been entrusted for protection to the injury of the party protected. This disloyalty was perpetually [pg 028] shown by the eastern emperors to the Popes, whose Primacy over the Church they acknowledged, until they finally lost the opportunity by the new-creation of the Western empire, and the acquisition of temporal sovereignty by the Popes.

At the accession of Honorius I., in 625, it is stated to have been the custom, upon the death of a Pope, that the Archpriest, the Archdeacon, and the first of the Notaries signified his death to the exarch. The Acts of the new election, subscribed by clergy and laity, were deposited in the archives of the Lateran. A copy of them was sent to the emperor. The report sent to the exarch was the more important. This Viceroy of Italy was humbly besought for his consent: nay, even the Archbishop and Judges of Ravenna were asked to obtain it from him. The clergy and people of Rome had to look to the exarch, the emperor's delegate, even more than to the emperor, since he stood in more immediate relation to Rome, and determined the decision of the Byzantine court. The Romans, suffering from the delay of their bishop's consecration, would entreat the emperor to lessen the time of disturbance by allowing the exarch to confirm their choice.[10]

In the short pontificates of the Popes, who sat from St. Gregory to Honorius, we may note one remarkable fact. Full six centuries after its erection by Agrippa, as the vestibule of his baths in the centre of the Campus Martius, stood what was called the Pantheon, with its [pg 029] superb portico of granite pillars and white marble capitals, untouched in their beauty—the fairest relic of ancient Rome. It had withstood all the inundations of the Tiber: all the devastations of the Gothic war: all the injuries of time. Every winter the floods forced themselves up over its floor: day and night the dome, through its aperture, received the waters of heaven. The images of Augustus[11] and Agrippa probably stood still in their niches: the beams of gilded brass supported its roof, covered with the gilt tiles of bronze, which neither Vandal, nor Goth, nor Byzantine robber had yet carried away. Pliny had given it the name of Pantheon: Dio Cassius had seen in it the statues of Mars and Venus, and of the deified Cæsars. A tablet of the Fratres Arvales has been found, dating from the year 59, in Nero's time, and showing that worship to the pagan gods was then offered in it.

Pope Boniface IV. beheld this wonder of ancient art, and longed to make a church of that beautiful dome which hung like the vault of heaven over the broadest expanse ever covered by a roof. He asked it of the emperor Phocas, and received it as a gift. He assembled the clergy of Rome, and a procession, singing hymns, entered that noble doorway, and the Pope sprinkled with holy water the marble-encrusted walls, from which every vestige of heathendom was cleared away. The “Gloria in Excelsis” resounded for the first time in that dome from which Michael Angelo took his most beautiful creation. The temple of all the demons was [pg 030] purified: and Pope Boniface IV. preserved it for all succeeding ages, under its dedication to the Ever-virgin Mother of God, and all martyrs. So it was saved from becoming, in mediæval times, the hold of some noble robber. And from it the devotion to All Saints, on the 1st November, and for All Souls, on the 2nd, was propagated amongst the nations of the West. What was originally a Roman festival passed beyond the Alps and the dome of Agrippa, the partner of Augustus and the husband of Julia, and through her progenitor of Cæsars, became the shrine from which the glorious office of all the saints in the Church triumphant, and that of intercession for all souls in the Church suffering, went forth to the Christian world.

From 604 to 625, five Pontiffs had ascended the Roman chair, and all had to wait, after their election, for the good pleasure of the Byzantine emperor, that they should take their seat. In 625, there succeeded a man of great distinction. He was a Campanian of high birth, and he strove to follow the example of his master, St. Gregory. Honorius I. sat for 13 years, and with Vitalian, a.d. 657-672, and Sergius, 687-701, alone reached that length of pontificate, while twenty-one other Popes share between them, including vacancies and delays interposed by the Byzantine, the remaining 69 years. We have no documents existing to account for such a number of short pontificates. Honorius busied himself much in the conversion of the southern Saxon kingdoms in England, where St. Bede[12] attests [pg 031] that the Bishop Birinus came by his instance. Anastasius gives a long account of the gifts which he bestowed on the churches of Rome; among them, that he covered the confession of St. Peter with pure silver, weighing 187 pounds: and the whole church with brazen tiles which, with the consent of the emperor Heraclius, he took from the temple of Roma: that he built the church of St. Agnes, and made her a silver shrine, weighing 252 pounds; also, the church of the Four-crowned. Of his character, the Abbot Jonas, near his time, writes: he was “a venerable prelate, sagacious, strong in counsel, clear in doctrine, powerful by his gentleness and humility”. He also clothed with silver plates, weighing 975 pounds, the middle or royal door of St. Peter's, on which there was an inscription, calling him “Honorius, the good bishop, the leader of the people. Your own prelate, blessed Peter, made your doors of silver; O doorkeeper of heaven, maintain for this in tranquillity all the times of your flock.” And there, in the great Basilica, he was buried in all honour.

But, in his person, one of the State-made patriarchs of Constantine's city is able to make the solitary boast that he once deceived one Roman Pontiff. Sergius, who sat in that See, from 610 to 638, and who seems to have obtained as great a mastery over the mind of the emperor Heraclius as his predecessor, Acacius, had over the emperor Zeno, constructed a doctrinal exposition called the Ecthesis, which he induced the emperor to father and promulgate. He was desirous, above all things, to obtain the Pope's approval of the doctrine [pg 032] which he afterwards set forth in this document. He wrote to the Pope letters, the purpose of which the successor of St. Peter, instead of seeing through, appears to have misconceived. After the death of Honorius, the Monothelite emperors and patriarchs claimed to have received the support of that Pope. His not having detected, and actively condemned the deceit of Sergius, brought upon the memory of Honorius the heavy rebuke that Pope St. Leo. II. assented so far to the sentence of the Sixth General Council in 682, as to have written to the Spanish bishops:—“Those who had been traitors to the purity of the Apostolic tradition were punished with eternal condemnation: they are Theodore of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus, Petrus of Constantinople, together with Honorius, who, instead of extinguishing, when it began to arise, the flame of heretical doctrine, fostered it by his neglect”.[13]

Much light would appear to be thrown upon the belief of Pope Honorius by the history of the forty years succeeding his death.

He sat within a few days of thirteen years. He was buried, says Anastasius, on the 12th October, 638, in St. Peter's, and the See remained vacant one year seven months and seventeen days. Why did it so remain vacant?

The era and the question are both most important to note. The following narrative[14] will explain why the [pg 033] Papal See was kept vacant nineteen months after the election of a successor to Pope Honorius.

In the year 638, Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, composed in the name of the emperor Heraclius an edict which he called Ecthesis or exposition, as if it were merely an exposition of the Catholic faith respecting the dispute about the One or the Two Operations in our Lord. He then brought about that the emperor subscribed and published it. Perhaps Sergius wished to take advantage of the vacancy in the Papal See to make the Monothelite error a law of the State, and to compel the future Pope to subscribe it, for which he wished to get the imperial subscription making it a law.

The Ecthesis begins with a confession of faith in the Holy Trinity which is quite orthodox. It then enlarges upon the Incarnation, and draws out the distinction of the Two Natures and the Unity of the Person. It proceeds:—“We acknowledge one Son and Lord Jesus Christ, who is at once capable and incapable of suffering, visible and invisible. We teach that the miracles and the sufferings belong to one and the same; we ascribe all divine and human Operation to one and the same Word become flesh; we offer ... to Him one adoration, and allow no man to hold and teach either One or Two Operations in the Divine Incarnation of the Lord; but rather, according to the tradition of the holy General Councils, that one and the same only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, works both the divine and the human actions, and that the whole Operation belonging at once to God and to man proceeds from [pg 034] one and the same Incarnate God, the Word, indivisibly and unconfusedly, and is to be referred to one and the same. Since the expression, One Operation, if used by some fathers, still sounds strange and disturbs the ears of some who conceive that it is used for the doing away of the Two Natures personally united in Christ our God, and in like manner the expression Two Operations offends many, as not used by any one of the chief doctors of the Church, and because there follow from it two Wills opposed to each other, as if God the Word willed to fulfil His saving passion, while His Manhood resisted that will of His, and so two are introduced willing contrary things, an impious thing opposed to Christian doctrine. For even the impious Nestorius, though he divided the divine taking of the manhood from the Lord, and introduced two Sons, did not venture to speak of two Wills. Rather he taught identity of will in the two persons invented by him. How then can they who confess the right faith, and glorify one Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the true God, receive two Wills and those opposed to each other in Him? Following, therefore, the holy Fathers in all things and in this, we confess One Will of our Lord Jesus Christ, the true God, so that at no time did His Flesh, animated by the mind, make a natural movement of itself separately and by its own impulse, which was contrary to the bidding of God the Word personally united with it; but when and such and as much as God the Word Himself willed ... and we exhort all Christians to be so minded, and so to hold, adding [pg 035] nothing and taking away nothing. I, Heraclius, the faithful emperor in Jesus Christ our Lord, have subscribed.”

Sergius did not fail to have the Ecthesis confirmed by a council at Constantinople. He died himself in December, 638, but before this he had it read, probably, to his Resident Council, and asked for the judgment of its members. The bishops answered, like good courtiers, “The exposition of our great and most wise Emperor agrees in truth with the teaching of the Apostles. This is the doctrine of the Fathers, this the support of the Church. This the confessions of the Five Councils teach; by this the unity of the Christian people is assured, the weakness of the simple strengthened. This works the salvation of mankind. This we also believe; this we confirm; with this we agree.” Sergius gave his solemn confirmation, and added, “If any one henceforth, disregarding the prohibition of the Emperor and the Council, dares to teach that there is One Operation or that there are Two in Christ he shall, if he be bishop, priest, deacon, or clerk, be deposed; but if monk or layman, be excluded from Communion in the Body and Blood of our Lord until he return to his duty”. Thereupon the Ecthesis was attached publicly to the narthex of Sancta Sophia.

The Ecthesis had been specially drawn up against the teaching of the champion of orthodoxy in the East, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, who had appealed to Pope Honorius, and expressed full trust in his defence of the truth. But before its appearance Sophronius was [pg 036] already dead, and his see had come into the hands of the Monothelite Sergius, Bishop of Joppa. Macedonius had, contrary to the canons, been imposed on the see of Antioch, and consecrated by Sergius of Constantinople. It is true he had never entered his city, which was already captured by the Arabs. He had remained in Constantinople.

Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, in an epistle read afterwards at the Roman Council of Pope St. Martin, expressed to his spiritual brother and fellow-ministrant, Sergius of Constantinople, his intense delight at the Ecthesis which his great sovereign had drawn up in behalf of the faith, which was ready to be sent to the exarch Isaac at Ravenna, and was to be accepted by his brother Severinus, elected at Rome. I have read it, he said, not once or twice but many times. I admire an exposition brilliant as the sun's light, announcing with unswerving accuracy the true faith; and I sung praises to God who had bestowed on us so wise a governor, guiding to harbour the holy churches. He has saved us once, twice, and thrice from tyrannous power, from Persian boastfulness, from Saracen domination.[15]

In the meantime Sergius had died, and Heraclius had put his friend Pyrrhus, who shared his Monothelite heresy, in his place at Constantinople. We learn from the letter just quoted that the death of Pope Honorius and the choice of Severinus to succeed him had already been made known at Constantinople before the Ecthesis [pg 037] was sent to Rome,[16] which was, therefore, never presented for acceptance to Honorius.

I will now take another narrative[17] of what was happening at Rome. Honorius died on 12th October, 638, and was buried in peace and great renown at St. Peter's. The Romans chose their countryman Severinus, son of Labienus, for his successor. The confirmation was delayed during nineteen months and sixteen days, as it seems, because the elected refused to subscribe the Ecthesis of the patriarch Sergius, being a formulary favouring Monothelism.

Before Severinus was yet consecrated the imperial officers practised a robbery upon the treasury of the Church, in which the violence exercised reminds of the dealing of Turkish pashas, with whom in general Byzantine ministers may be compared. The treasures of the Roman Church were kept in the vestiary of the episcopal palace.[18] There were the costly presents which various Christian emperors, patricians, and consuls had left to the blessed Apostle Peter for the redemption of their souls, to be given, as occasion might be, in alms to the poor or for ransoming of captives. There was a report that Honorius had stored up vast sums, and his magnificent buildings caused full credence to be given to this report. Isaac, the exarch in Ravenna, found himself in want of money. The imperial troops riotously demanded to be paid. Isaac had long cast his eyes on [pg 038] the Church's treasury, and now devised a plan to get possession of it. The Book of the Popes gives a detailed description of this incident, and it is not only an exception to the scantiness of historical accounts about Rome, but casts a passing light on the circumstances of the city.

The chartular Mauritius was then at Rome, perhaps as Magister Militum and commander of the Roman army. This consisted of troops in Byzantine pay, but no doubt was already organised as a city militia. Mauritius led by deceit against the Church of God, and taking counsel with certain ill-minded persons, stirred up this Roman force. What good, he said, is it that such a mass of money has been laid up by Pope Honorius in his Lateran Palace while your wages are not paid, which our lord the emperor has sent, and the holy man has put them in his treasury? Kindled by these words, all the armed men in the city of Rome, young and old, flocked to the Lateran Palace. They could not force an entrance, because those who attended on Severinus, the Pope elect, resisted. Mauritius, seeing this, encamped his army there for three days. Then he summoned the judges, that is, the high officers of the city, who were in his counsel. They broke in and set the imperial seal upon the treasure. Then Mauritius wrote an account of what he had done to the exarch Isaac at Ravenna, saying that he had put his seal on the treasury and they could take without harm anything which they liked. When Isaac learnt this he came to Rome; he banished all the chief persons of the church who resided in the several cities, [pg 039] so that none of the clergy could resist him, and, after some days, he entered the Lateran Palace; he stayed there eight days, and plundered everything. Part he sent to the emperor in the imperial city, part he gave to the troops, part he kept for himself. Anastasius concludes with the words: After this the most holy Severinus was consecrated, and Isaac returned to Ravenna. The meaning of which seems to be that Isaac had come to Rome under pretence of confirming the election of Severinus, which he made the elected Pope pay for by the plunder of his treasury.[19]

In the meantime Roman Commissioners were urging upon the emperor Heraclius at Constantinople to issue the imperial consent to the consecration of the Pope. After many negotiations, the chief of the clergy there showed them a doctrinal writing, the Ecthesis, and said, “We will only support you in your matter if you promise us to persuade the Pope to subscribe this act and to recognise without reserve the doctrines therein contained”. The Commissioners, who perceived the drift of the act, and that on account of this the first See of Christendom had so long remained unfilled, answered calmly and prudently: “In this affair we can do nothing. A message has been entrusted to us, but no order given us to make a confession of faith. We will give you the assurance that we will inform the Elect of everything that you have said; that we will show him this paper and beseech him, if he approve of [pg 040] its contents, to subscribe it. Be so good, therefore, as to put no hindrance to our mission for this matter, to do us no violence, and not to detain us without end. None can do violence to another, especially in a matter of faith; for in such a case even the weakest becomes very strong, even the quietest feels himself a hero; and since he strengthens his soul with the word of God, the most violent attacks serve only to confirm not to weaken him. And how much more does this apply to the Church and clergy of Rome, who, from the beginning to the present, as eldest of all the churches under the sun, presides over all! Having received this privilege according to the canons, as well from councils and apostles as from their supreme Head, in this matter of succession in the Pontificate, it is subject to no writings whatsoever, to no issue of synodical documents; but in all these matters all are subject to it according to sacerdotal law.” This is what with a most sacred and becoming confidence, fearing nothing, those intrepid ministers[20] of the immovable Rock said to the clergy of Constantinople; who thereupon ceased from their pretension, and promised to obtain for them the imperial confirmation.

Pope Severinus, after suffering the double humiliation of having the treasury of the Church sacked by the emperor's viceroy, and his own election unconfirmed for nearly twenty months, ascended the throne of Peter on the 28th May, 640, and sat two months and six days. “He loved the clergy, and was most liberal to them all,” [pg 041] says of him the Book of the Popes; “holy, benignant above all men, a lover of the poor, large-handed, most gentle.” In this short Pontificate he found time to reject the imperial decree, called the Ecthesis.

Had Pope Severinus at this moment failed in his duty, the whole Church would have been involved in the Monothelite heresy. Not only Pope Severinus, but his successors during forty years, were the sole stay of the Church against a heresy—the last root of the condemned Eutychean heresy—which overthrew the true doctrine of the Incarnation, making our Lord Jesus Christ not God and Man in one Person, but a Person compounded out of God and Man, and therefore not Man at all. The whole temporal power of the Byzantine sovereign, at that time despotic lord of Rome, and backed by subservient patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus, and Peter, was exerted to compel the Popes who sat during these forty years to accept the false doctrine presented to them in an imperial decree.[21] The successive Popes in this time, Severinus, John IV., Theodore I., St. Martin I., St. Eugenius I., St. Vitalian, Deusdedit, Donus I., rejected and condemned the decision urged upon them by the imperial and patriarchal pressure, all of them at the risk of every sort of persecution—one, St. Martin, at the cost of a singularly painful and glorious martyrdom. The next Pope, St. Agatho, condemned the heresy in a General Council allowed at Constantinople itself by an orthodox emperor over which his legates presided. The Pope succeeding him, [pg 042] St. Leo II. ratified the condemnation by the Council of four successive Byzantine patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus and Peter, as heretics, and censured the negligence of Honorius in not extinguishing at once so dangerous a flame. In truth it had held the life of the Church in suspense during more than forty years. Had one of the ten successors of Honorius failed, all would have been lost, so near to the precipice was the Byzantine despotism and the State patriarchate, subservient to it, and supplying it obediently with theological knowledge sufficient to formulate heresy, allowed by the Divine Providence in that fearful century to drive the Church. And precisely during these years the new Arabian conqueror—the chalif of Mohammed—cut in two the empire which was attempting this parricide. When Heraclius went forth committing his city and his son to God, to the holy Mother of God, and to his bishop, he triumphed for the only time in the long Roman history over Rome's eastern rival, and brought back the Cross from Persia to Constantinople, and then carried it in dutiful homage to be replaced in its old shrine where our Lord suffered at Jerusalem. When at the bidding of that very bishop Sergius he tampered with the Christian faith, and oppressed the successor of St. Peter, he lost Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, with the great provinces which belonged to them. Out of the four patriarchates of his empire, three became subject to the Mohammedan chalif. The subjection came suddenly, but has lasted with a short interval from that time to this. The conquest, as yet [pg 043] unbroken, of Mohammed over Christian peoples dates from the perfidy of Heraclius and of his grandson Constans II. and the heresy propagated by four Byzantine patriarchs.

Returning to the history of this time we find that the successor of Pope Severinus, John IV., was consecrated 24th December, 640, and held a council at Rome immediately after his accession, and condemned under anathema the Monothelite heresy. Heraclius died February 11th, 641. Upon his death Pope John IV. sent a letter to his successors, Constantinus-Heraclius, and Heracleonas, setting forth the same faith. He also informed the new Patriarch, Pyrrhus, that he had condemned the Ecthesis: and St. Maximus informs us that Heraclius I., to turn away the Western displeasure at the Ecthesis from his own person, at the beginning of the year 641 wrote to Pope John IV. that “the Ecthesis is not mine, nor did I command it to be drawn up, but the patriarch Sergius prepared it five years ago, and besought me on my return from the East to publish it with my subscription”. The purpose of John IV. in writing to the new emperors was to set forth the doctrine of the two Operations and Wills in Christ, and in doing this to defend the orthodoxy of his predecessor Honorius. It is to be observed that after the death of Honorius, when the eastern patriarchs began to assert that Honorius in his answers to Sergius, which up to that time had been private, favoured the heresy which Sergius had imposed upon the eastern bishops, and was trying to put upon the Pope, his successors denied with much care that [pg 044] Honorius had any such meaning. Thus in this document of Pope John IV. directed to the sons of Heraclius, which bears the title,[22] Defence of Pope Honorius, he says:—

“My predecessor, teaching concerning the mystery of Christ's Incarnation, said that there were not in Him, as there are in us, opposing wills of the spirit and the flesh. Certain men, twisting this to their own meaning, threw out the suspicion that he had taught that there was one Will of the Godhead and the Manhood, which is utterly contrary to the truth. I could wish them to reply to my question, in regard to which nature do they assert that there is one Will of Christ our God? If it be only in regard to the Divine Nature, what is their reply concerning His Human Nature? For he is likewise Perfect Man, lest they be condemned with Manichæus. If they speak in regard to the Manhood of Christ that this Will is Perfect God, let them see whether they do not fall under the condemnation of Photinus and Ebion. But if they assert that in the Two Natures there is only one Will, they will confuse not only the Natural Wills but the Natures themselves, so that neither the one nor the other, that is, the Divine and the Human, can be understood. For as we do not, like the impious Nestorius, suffer Two Natures to make up one Christ, so we do anything but deny, yet neither do we confuse, the difference of Natures, inasmuch as we confess the Two Natures united in the one Person of Christ our God with an agreement which language is not able to express. For in that they assert One Will of Christ's Godhead and [pg 045] Manhood and at the same time one Operation, what else do they assert than that one Nature of Christ our God operates according to the division of Eutyches and Severus. As a last argument, the orthodox Fathers, who have flourished in the whole world, are proved to teach in full accordance at once Two Natures and Two Wills and Operations.”

In these words, which John IV. writes as Pope to the immediate successors of Heraclius within three years after the death of Honorius, he would seem not only to have set forth in plain language the immense importance of the doctrine itself, but to be an unimpeachable witness of the meaning of Honorius, one of whose priests he had been, and as such well acquainted with his doctrine.

The pontificate of John IV., for the confirmation of which he had to wait four months, lasted only twenty-one months, and was disquieted throughout by the conflict with the Byzantine court and patriarch respecting the Ecthesis.[23] There was war between the exarch and the Lombard king, Rotharis, but it did not touch Rome. All misfortunes which threatened it came from Byzantium. The struggle against the eastern heresy embittered the feeling of Constantinople to Rome. At the same time, the Byzantine court was disturbed by intestine revolutions. Heraclius ended his reign of 31 years in February, 641. His eldest son, Heraclius Constantinus, succeeded, but, after seven months, was poisoned by his stepmother, Martina, and the Monothelite [pg 046] patriarch Pyrrhus was charged with concurrence. In a few months, Martina's own son, Heracleonas, was deposed by an insurrection. His nose was cut off, and the tongue of the empress Martina cut out, and both were banished. The grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., became emperor in 642, a boy of twelve years, and reigned 26 years, until 668. The reign of this emperor is much to be noted, because it is contemporaneous with the second, third, and fourth chalifs: Constans II. stands in history over against Omar, Osman, and Ali.

On the death of John IV., Theodorus, a Greek of Jerusalem, was made Pope: it is supposed by the influence of the exarch Isaac. He was the first of many Greeks, who, in this period, were made Popes: of all of whom, without exception, it is recorded that their integrity, as Popes, was in no way affected by any national feeling: they sacrificed nothing to Byzantine policy.

At the beginning of this pontificate, Mauritius, the officer called chartular, whose proceeding in the robbery of the Lateran treasury has been recorded above, raised a rebellion in Rome. He found people, nobility, and army embittered by the Byzantine domination, and used this feeling for his own purposes. He spread a report that Isaac was striving to be king, made party with those same turbulent Romans who had joined in the attack upon the Lateran, and induced the garrisons in all the castles of the Roman territory to refuse obedience to the exarch. When Isaac heard this, that all the army of Italy had taken the oath to Mauritius, he [pg 047] sent Donus as commander with an army to Rome. Thereupon the Roman army gave up Mauritius, and joined Donus. Mauritius took asylum at St. Mary of the Crib.[24] He was taken out and sent with an iron collar about his neck, as well as the others implicated in the insurrection, to the exarch at Ravenna: but, before he arrived there, was beheaded, and his head carried to Ravenna and impaled. Isaac kept the other conspirators in prison, collared in the same way, but they escaped execution by the death of Isaac himself. Isaac was buried in the beautiful church of St. Vitale, in Ravenna, and his epitaph is preserved in Greek, and being a picture not only of the man, but of his time, is worth transcribing. It runs thus:—

“Here lies one, a brilliant commander, who for six years, preserved Rome and the West without injury for our serene lords, Isaac, the fellow-worker with emperors, the great ornament of all Armenia, where he was of illustrious race. Upon his death in great renown, his wife Susannah mourns over her loss like a chaste dove, the loss of a husband who gained glory by his labours both in the East and in the West, for he commanded the army of both.”

Isaac may be considered as the ideal exarch, and by contemplating his deeds, we may attain to a knowledge of the race of exarchs, viceroys of Italy, and images, in common clay, of their masters in marble, towards whom, for 200 years, St. Gregory and his successors had to exercise the virtue of loyalty.

Upon the accession of Constans II., in 642, the patriarch Pyrrhus, under suspicion of complicity with the empress Martina in the poisoning of the emperor Heraclius Constantinus, fled to Africa. His place was taken by Paulus, a still more zealous Monothelite. Pyrrhus, coming to the West, which was unanimous in rejecting that heresy, represented himself to have been convinced by the eloquence of the Abbot Maximus, in an African Council in 645, and came to Rome to lay the confession of his faith at the feet of the Apostle Peter. Pope Theodorus received the repentant patriarch with great ceremony in the Vatican Basilica before the assembled clergy and people, to whom he solemnly condemned his own errors. But, when he went to Ravenna, Pyrrhus fell back again. Pope Theodorus thereupon condemned him in a Roman Council.[25]

In 646, the African bishops, in four councils, had condemned the Monothelite doctrine with the Ecthesis. Pope Theodorus, in accordance with the wish of these African Councils, admonished the new patriarch, Paulus II., at Constantinople, to return to the faith of the Church. Paulus sent a long answer,[26] in which he expressed the Monothelite doctrine. Pope Theodorus condemned him after his nuncios at Constantinople had in vain endeavoured to draw from him an orthodox confession. At the same time Pope Theodorus [pg 049] named Stephen, Bishop of Dor, Apostolic Vicar for Palestine, with the charge to resist the heresy which Sergius, Bishop of Joppa, was spreading, and to depose the bishops intruded by him. The patriarchal chair at Jerusalem was, in fact, vacant, and the patriarchate laid waste by this usurper. Hence the Pope took charge of it. So afterwards John of Philadelphia was appointed Apostolic Vicar.

Paulus did not give way. He moved the emperor Constans II. in 648 to issue a new doctrinal decree, drawn up by himself, called the Typus, which was to take the place of the Ecthesis, and prepare in another way the spread of Monothelite error. It was to forbid under the severest secular punishments any dispute respecting One or Two Operations in our Lord or One or Two Wills. In itself it seemed intended to quiet the westerns, but in the actual state of things only for the prejudice of Catholics. Maximus the Confessor shewed that in it truth and error were alike intended to be suppressed. The eastern bishops were again compelled to subscribe. Those who refused were persecuted, even the papal legates. Their altar in the Placidia palace was destroyed, and they were forbidden to celebrate, and severe ill-treatment added.

While the Greek emperor, led by his patriarch Paulus, was issuing his edict concerning the Christian faith, Muawia, as general of the third chalif, Osman, with a fleet of 1700 ships, great and small, being already in possession of Syria, had made a descent on Cyprus, [pg 050] occupied the city of Constantia, subjected and laid waste the whole island.[27]

Pope Theodorus is recorded in the book of the Popes as “a lover of the poor, large-handed, kind to all, and very merciful”.

Chapter II. Pope Martin, His Council, And His Martyrdom.

Martinus prærogativa martyrii ter maximus nuncupandus.

Baronius, Tom. viii., Preface.

In the mean time Pope Theodorus, having during the seven years of his pontificate maintained the faith against the aggression of the Byzantine emperor and patriarch with the same resolution as his predecessors, Popes Severinus and John IV., died on the 13th May, 649, and was buried at St. Peter's. His death occurred just after the Typus had been issued, and perhaps before he had seen it. On the 5th of the following July, Martin was chosen to succeed him.[28] Martin was then a Roman priest, had been a nuncio at Constantinople, a man distinguished by his virtue and knowledge, as well as by his personal beauty. By the fifteenth letter of this Pope we learn that the Roman clergy would not wait for the imperial consent to his consecration, and so in due time the Greeks pretended that he had taken possession of the episcopate irregularly. This pontiff, one of the most remarkable and vigorous that ever sat on the throne of St. Peter, although aware of the [pg 052] penalty imposed by the emperor Constans, in his Typus, shrunk not the least, but was rather kindled with greater zeal to summon immediately a council of the Bishops of Italy, which met on the 5th October in this year at the Sacristy of the Lateran Basilica.

Anastasius,[29] the librarian, gives the following narrative of events which now took place concerning Pope Martin:—

“In his time Paulus, bishop of Constantinople, inflated with the Spirit of pride against the holy Church of God, presumed in his audacity to go against the definitions of the Fathers. Moreover he took pains to veil his own error for the seduction of others, so that he induced the emperor also to set forth the Typus for the destruction of Catholic belief. In this he deprived of their strength all the voices of the holy Fathers by the expressions of the worst heretics, laying down that one should confess neither One nor Two Wills or Operations in Christ our Lord.

“In defending his own perversion he did a deed which no former heretic had ventured to do. He pulled down the altar belonging to our Holy See[30] in the chapel of the Placidia palace, prohibiting our nuncios from offering therein to God the adorable and immaculate Victim, or receiving the sacraments of communion. These nuncios by command of the apostolic authority had enjoined him to desist from his heretical intention. They also [pg 053] bore witness in suffering diverse persecutions with other orthodox men, and venerable priests, some of whom he imprisoned, some he banished, some he scourged. Well nigh the whole world being thus disturbed, many of the orthodox brought up complaints from various places to our Apostolic See, intreating that the web of all this malice and destruction might be rent by the Apostolic authority, so that the disease of their Ecthesis might not break up the whole body of the Catholic Church. Then most blessed Martin, the bishop, sent and assembled 105 bishops in the city of Rome, and called a Synod according to the institution of the orthodox Fathers in the church of the Saviour at the Lateran episcopal palace. Bishops and priests sitting, deacons and the whole clergy standing, they condemned Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paulus, patriarchs of Constantinople, who presumed to mix up their innovations with the immaculate faith. That is, in their haste to exclude this, they dressed up a confusion of heretical dogmas against God's Catholic church, for which they were smitten with anathema. This council now forms part of the Church's archives. And the Pope causing copies to be made, sent them throughout the East and West, placing them in the hands of the orthodox faithful. At that very time the emperor sent into Italy his chamberlain and exarch Olympius, to be viceroy of the whole land. His commands were:—‘You are to carry out what Paulus, patriarch of this heaven defended city, has suggested to us. And if you find the province itself agreeing in the Typus set forth by us [pg 054] then lay hold of all the bishops, landed proprietors, dwellers, and strangers, and let them subscribe it. But, if, as Plato, the patrician, and Euphranius have suggested to us, you can carry with you the armed force there, we command you to lay hold of Martin, who was nuncio here, in the imperial city. And afterwards let all the churches read afresh the orthodox Typus, because it has been made by us, and let all the bishops in Italy set their names to it. But if you find the armed force opposed, keep it secret till you have got possession of the province, and are able to have on your side the army of the Roman city, and of Ravenna, that you may be able to execute our commands as soon as possible.’ The said Olympius, coming to Rome, found the holy Church of Rome united with all the bishops of Italy, whether priests or clergy, and wishing to execute the commands received he tried, by help of the army, to make a schism in the Church. This took a long time, and Almighty God did not permit him to accomplish what he was trying to do. Seeing then that he was overcome by the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of God, he thought it necessary to veil his bad intention, and to accomplish what he had not been able to do with the armed hand in heretical fashion at mass in the Church of God's Holy Mother, the Ever-virgin Mary, at the Crib. For while the holy Pope was giving him communion he had instructed one of his guards to murder him. But, Almighty God, who is wont to protect His orthodox servants, and to deliver them from all evil, Himself blinded the eyes of the swordsman of [pg 055] the exarch Olympius, and he was not allowed to see the Pontiff at the moment of giving communion, or the kiss of peace, that he might shed his blood and subject to heresy the Catholic Church of God. The soldier attested this afterwards on his oath to several. So Olympius, seeing that the hand of God protected the holy Pope Martin, thought it necessary to agree with him, and to disclose the commands which he had received. Then having made peace with the Church, he collected his army and went to Sicily against the Saracens who were there. And through the sin a great destruction fell on the Roman army, and then the exarch died of disease.”

In the Council of the Lateran, held by Pope Martin in 649, the Pope carefully examined the whole history and documents concerning the attempt of the patriarch Sergius, and the emperor Heraclius, and the succeeding patriarchs at Alexandria, Constantinople, and Antioch, to alter the faith of the Church. The imperial documents, the Ecthesis of Heraclius, composed by Sergius, the Typus of Constans II. composed by the sitting patriarch, Paulus, both of them one after the other imposed by violence on the eastern episcopate, letters from many bishops, documents, in fact, of every kind, were subjected to careful reading. The Council drew up twenty canons which it imposed under anathema. The Pope at the head of the Bishops, subscribed in these words: “I, Martin, by the grace of God, Bishop of the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the City of Rome, ordain and subscribe this definition, confirmatory [pg 056] of the orthodox faith, and condemning Sergius, formerly Bishop of Constantinople, Cyrus, Bishop of Alexandria, Theodorus, Bishop, Pyrrhus, and Paulus, also, Bishop of Constantinople, together with their heretical writings”. Then follow the signatures of the Bishops of Italy, the Archbishop of Aquileia and Grado first, the Archbishop of Milan adding his assent afterwards.

Pope Martin also wrote to the emperor Constans II., sending him the acts of the Council, together with a Greek translation. Thus, with the utmost force, and with the presentiment of hard trials, he strove to prevent the further spread of Monothelite error. He also declared himself against the heretical patriarchs, Peter of Alexandria and Macedonius of Antioch, deposed Paul, Archbishop of Thessalonica, and provided for sending Catholic bishops and clergy to the East.

In these events, we have this very striking fact, that within eleven years after the death of Pope Honorius in 638, we find four Popes his immediate successors, Severinus, John IV., Theodorus, and Martin, opposing two emperors, Heraclius, and his grandson, Constans II., censuring three patriarchs of Constantinople, Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paulus, besides other eastern patriarchs, and the last of them solemnly condemning “the impious Ecthesis and still more impious Typus,” and all manner of heretical expositions, whether made by patriarchs, or imposed by emperors. There can be no doubt that all these four Popes had been clergy of Honorius himself, and as little doubt that they were maintaining the [pg 057] doctrine which he held. There is no appearance that any one at Rome was the least inclined to the Monothelite heresy, and the insidious manner in which it was propagated by those who held it is conspicuous on every occasion. Nor must it be forgotten that the publication of this judgment of Pope Martin fulfils all the conditions of a judgment ex cathedra.

But the events which now took place are of so great an importance for all subsequent time that it seems necessary to enlarge upon the epitome of them just given, and to draw out the full range of their bearing, not only on the doctrine of the Church, but on its government at the time.

We are witnessing a deliberate attempt by successive patriarchs of Constantinople to alter the faith of the Church as it had been laid down at the Council of Chalcedon. And not this only, but to make the mouth of their emperor the instrument for disseminating their heresy, and to use the whole material power of that emperor as despotic lord of Rome to overthrow the defence of the faith by the Roman See, the superior authority of which, at the same time, neither emperor nor patriarch denied. This attempt continues during forty years from the death of Pope Honorius in 638, and in the whole of that time, it was the constancy of the Roman See, the purely spiritual power of the successor of St. Peter, in the midst of the greatest danger and a helpless temporal position, which preserved the life of the Church, and foiled the Byzantine oppressor, together with the underplay of the Byzantine patriarch.

I take from the Acts of the Lateran Council of 649 the following:—

“Pope Martin said, ‘Let the copy of the Typus lately composed against the orthodox faith, by persuasion of Paul, Bishop of Constantinople, be brought before our consideration’.

“Theophylact, first of the notaries of the Apostolic See, said, ‘I bear in my hands the copy of the Typus ordered by your Beatitude’.

“Pope Martin said, ‘Let it be read in the presence of the holy Council, that we may accurately examine its meaning’.

“Theodoras, regionary notary of the Apostolic See, read it thus, translated from the Greek into Latin.” It must be remembered that the following are words of the emperor, spoken in that character.

“Since we are accustomed to do everything and to consider everything which concerns our Christian polity, and especially whatever touches the purity of our faith, through which we look for all our prosperity, we recognise how greatly our orthodox people has been disturbed. Some of them maintain One Will in the dispensation of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and His One Operation in divine and human things. Others maintain Two Wills and Two Operations in the same dispensation of the Incarnate Word. The one support themselves by saying that our Lord Jesus Christ, because of the One Person, wills and operates both divine and human things in the two natures, without confusion, and without separation. The others [pg 059] say, because in one and the same Person two natures are bound together without division, their distinction from each other remains, and according to the quality of the natures one and the same Christ operates both what is divine and what is human. Hence our Christian polity has been led into much variance and strife; the parties do not agree, and thus it is injured in many ways. Led therefore by Almighty God, we thought it fit to quench the flame of dissension thus enkindled, and not allow it further to feed upon human souls. We therefore proclaim to our subjects, who continue in orthodoxy, and the immaculate Christian faith, and belong to the Catholic and Apostolic Church, that it is no longer open to them to introduce any question, strife, or contention with each other concerning One Will or One Operation, or Two Operations or Two Wills. This we command, not as taking anything away from the pious belief of the holy approved Fathers concerning the dispensation of our Incarnate God the Word, but intending to put a stop to further contest on account of the said questions, and in these to follow and be satisfied with the sacred Scriptures and the traditions of the five holy Ecumenical Councils, and the simple unquestioned usages and expressions of the holy approved Fathers. Their dogmas, canons, and laws are those of the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Add to them nothing of your own: take from them nothing: interpret them not according to your own view, but keep the form which existed everywhere before the contention upon these questions arose. None then laid [pg 060] down One Will or One Operation, or Two Wills or Two Operations, under any contention.... Now to ensure perfect unity and concord, and to leave no opportunity to those who would contend for ever, we have ordered the documents (i.e., the Ecthesis) attached to the narthex of the great church in our imperial city, which contain the questions above mentioned, to be removed. Now those who transgress these commands will first be subject to the judgment of Almighty God, and then to the severe imperial indignation for contempt. If it be a bishop or clerk, he shall be deposed from his particular rank; if a monk, he shall be banished; if noble or military, he shall be deposed. If they be private persons, when of rank, their property shall be confiscated; when of low degree, they shall be scourged and banished for ever. So that all shall be restrained by the fear of God, and seeing the punishments respectively threatened, shall maintain unshaken and undisturbed, the peace of God's holy Churches.”

As[31] one Bishop of Constantinople, Sergius, composed the Ecthesis, so another, his second successor, Paul, composed the Typus, but as Sergius did not give to his work the fitting form of an imperial decree, but the theological form of a creed, Paul showed himself more skilful, and dressed his Typus in imperial clothing. Constans himself says that he meant to restore the peace of the Church by this new decree. There is no reason to doubt this, since, in tearing down the Ecthesis from the wall of Sancta Sophia, he plainly purposed to [pg 061] quiet the minds of the Westerns and those who held with them. It is further clear that while the Ecthesis forbade contention concerning One or Two Operations, it inconsistently proclaimed One Will, that is Monothelism. But the Typus consistently rejected not only One Operation, but One Will. It wished in this to be impartial. This apparent impartiality is likewise the chief distinction between the Typus and the Ecthesis, for they are like each other in the main thought, which is, that the development of doctrine should remain at the point to which it had come in the five general councils, and that further questions should not be entered into. However, that impartiality is but a false via media, for it puts the true doctrine of the Two Wills upon the same footing with the heresy, and forbids both one and the other. Another distinction between the Ecthesis and the Typus lies in this, that the Ecthesis only required obedience in general. Constans, on the contrary, threatened every transgressor of his Typus with the severest civil punishments, and these he executed with the utmost cruelty.

The Typus is the fifth specimen of doctrinal despotism proceeding from the Byzantine emperors since the time of St. Leo. In all these the effort was the same. So far as the relation between the emperor and the Pope is concerned, the principle at issue is whether the Byzantine emperor, with the Byzantine patriarch as his chief agent, should dictate the creed and direct the government of the Church, or the Pope and the bishops.

The first attempt proceeds from Basiliscus, who, by [pg 062] insurrection got possession of the imperial throne for about twenty months, and in that short time issued the Encyclikon, in which Timotheus Ailouros, patriarch of Alexandria, helped him as to the composition, and 500 Greek bishops were found to accept and praise it. Basiliscus with his wife and children, was presently starved to death by the emperor Zeno.

The second attempt was by Zeno, when he had recovered the throne, and fallen into the hands of his patriarch Acacius. He then issued the Henoticon, which Acacius had drawn up, which was imposed by force on the bishops, and which Fravita, Euphemius, Macedonius, and Timotheus, successive patriarchs of Constantinople, submitted to subscribe, the first under Zeno, the following three under Anastasius. The wisdom and firmness of successive Popes frustrated this attempt, and Hormisdas finally obtained a full reparation, and the acknowledgment of his own charge over the whole Church, by the gift of Christ to St. Peter, which the bishops of the Apostolic See inherited.

Yet, notwithstanding this most solemn confession on the part of the bishop of Constantinople, of the emperor, and of the nobles of the East, some thirty years later, Justinian, having become direct lord of Rome, and having summoned Pope Vigilius as his temporal subject, to go to Constantinople, makes a third attempt, and issues to the Fifth General Council his own “Confession of Faith,” which a recreant court-archbishop, Theodore Askidas, supplies him with, and which the patriarch of Constantinople, Eutychius, then, [pg 063] by the emperor's nomination, presiding over the Council, as well as the eastern bishops in the Council, receive. The whole attitude and conduct of Justinian at the Fifth Council show how deeply this most distinguished of the eastern emperors was imbued with the doctrinal despotism of his throne. And from that time, the contention of his successors is still more pronounced, and their temporal power over the Pope, as their subject, is unsparingly exercised, not to deny his spiritual supremacy in itself, but to make its exercise subject to their imperial power, and in this the patriarchs of Constantinople, assuming by and with the consent of the emperors, the title of Ecumenical Patriarch, serve their sovereign as the chief instrument for reducing the Church to servitude. It is to be observed that Justinian conferred this title upon them in his laws. From that time they one and all clung to it.

The fourth attempt is made by Heraclius at the end of his long reign, when he had fallen under the influence of Sergius, as his predecessor, Zeno, had fallen under the influence of Acacius. Not only did Sergius hold the great see of the capital during twenty-eight years from 610 to 638, but things recorded of him seem to indicate that he was a man of extraordinary resolution. He had preserved Heraclius from deserting his capital, and flying back for refuge to his father at Carthage, after a long series of defeats from the Persians. He had acted as guardian of his son, and administrator of the empire during the marvellous six years when Heraclius, shaking off twelve years of [pg 064] apathy, and going forth in the name of God, and in publicly uttered commendation of his kingdom to the Blessed Mother of God, had triumphed over the Great King. Servius finally supplied him with the exposition, which was to present in seeming concord the wrangling episcopacy of his eastern empire, and overcome the Roman Pontiff in his maintenance of the faith.

The fifth attempt was made by Constans II., grandson of Heraclius, for whom Paul II., patriarch of Constantinople, invested his heresy in fitting language, and presented it in the Typus as an imperial decree which all were to accept under punishment to property, freedom, or life. And Pope Martin I. had to fight the old battle of the Church as a subject to a sovereign who was at once without mercy and without scruple.

The Typus is the perfect specimen of the theologising emperor, who begins by attributing to himself the charge over the whole Church, and puts himself precisely in the place of the Pope and the bishops in formulating the true Christian doctrine, wherein he claims the initiative, and the ultimate decision.

It need only be added that in all this succession of attempts to deprive the Church of God of her liberty, and the Pope of that guardianship of the faith which alone is adequate to its maintenance, the successors of Constantine departed essentially from the position which the first of Christian emperors took at the first General Council. He did not sit in that Council. He placed himself with the sword of empire at the entrance to guard the approach. He made the decrees of the [pg 065] Council laws of the Roman empire; but he acknowledged that the power to make them rested in the bishops alone.

Nor would it be unhistorical to note that in proportion as the emperors, whose seat was Byzantium, encroached upon the liberty of the Church, and sought domination over the successor of St. Peter, in whose prerogatives that liberty was seated, their temporal empire declined. The despotism which flung itself with insolence and violence against the Church became odious to its own subjects. We shall see an instance of this which almost passes belief when the patriarchate of St. Athanasius embraces the Moslem conqueror, to escape the Byzantine sovereign, and terms the defenders of the Christian faith Melchites, that is, Royalists, because, while they rejected the Eutychean heresy, they were likewise loyal to the eastern emperor.

Let us see how Pope Martin meets this attempt. No sooner is he invested with “the great mantle,”[32] than he summons a Council to meet in the basilica of Constantine, then called the Church of the Saviour, now St. John Lateran, adjoining the papal palace, the Mother Church of Rome. He called this council in order to judge the doctrine which two emperors, using two Byzantine patriarchs, and at the same time used by them, seek to impose upon the Church, instead of the doctrine of St. Leo the Great, accepted and set forth at the Council of Chalcedon. It held from the 5th to the 31st October, 649, five sittings. It was attended by [pg 066] 105 bishops, chiefly from Italy (excluding the Lombard dominion), Sicily and Sardinia, with some African, and a few foreign. The acts have come to us complete, both in Greek and Latin, the former being the proper language of the two documents, the Ecthesis and Typus. I give the following epitome of the Pope's speech to the Council:—

“Christ has commanded pastors to be watchful: this concerns us also, and especially must we watch over the purity of the faith, since certain bishops, who do not deserve this name, have lately sought to spoil our confession of belief by new invented expressions. Everyone knows them, since they have come forward openly to injure the Church: such are Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius of Constantinople, and his followers, Pyrrhus and Paulus. Cyrus eighteen years ago taught in Alexandria One Operation in Christ, and published from the pulpit nine heads of doctrine. Sergius approved this, issued somewhat later the Ecthesis under the name of the emperor Heraclius, and taught One Will and One Operation, which leads to One Nature of Christ. The Fathers distinctly taught that Operation answers to Nature, and whoever has like Operation must likewise be of like Nature. Since then the Fathers teach Two Natures in Christ, it follows that Two Wills and Operations are united without mixture and without division in one and the same Incarnate Word. That both are naturally one thing is not possible. Pope Leo also taught Two Wills, and so holy Scripture indicates. So Christ wrought what belonged to the Godhead [pg 067] corporeally, since He manifested it through His flesh animated by a reasonable soul; but what belonged to the Manhood, He wrought by the Godhead, since He took upon Him freely for our sake human weaknesses, that is, sufferings, but without sin. Cyrus, in issuing his nine heads of doctrine, Sergius, in issuing the Ecthesis, contradicted the doctrine of Leo, and of the Council of Chalcedon. But Pyrrhus and Paulus spread the error more widely; in particular, Pyrrhus by threats and flatteries seduced many bishops to subscribe his impiety. When he had afterwards come to shame, he came hither and presented to our Holy See a writing in which he anathematised his former error. But he returned as a dog to his vomit, and was therefore rightly deposed. But Paulus went even beyond his predecessor; he confirmed the Ecthesis, and contradicted the true doctrine.

“Therefore he also was deposed by the Holy See. Specially imitating Sergius, to cover his error he counselled the emperor to issue the Typus, which annuls the Catholic doctrine, denies to Christ properly all will and all operation, and therewith likewise each nature, for nature is shown by its operation. He has done what hitherto no heretic has dared; he has destroyed the altar of our Holy See in the Placidia Palace, and forbidden our Nuncios to celebrate thereon. He has persecuted those nuncios because they exhorted him to give up his error, as well as other orthodox men, imprisoning some, banishing others, beating others. As these men (that is, Sergius and the rest) have disturbed well-nigh [pg 068] the whole world, complaints both written and oral have come to us from various sides urging us to put down the falsehood by apostolic authority. Our predecessors have both by writing and by their nuncios tried to correct them, but without success. We have, therefore, thought it needful to convoke you, to consider together with you them and the new teaching.”[33]

Pope Theodorus had named Stephen, Bishop of Dor, in Palestine, to be Apostolic Vicar in that province. He was the prelate whom the patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, had sent to Rome in the time of Honorius to solicit support for the faith of that Pope, and to set before him the dangerous state of affairs. He was introduced in the Lateran Council at its second sitting, and read to it the following memorial:—[34]

“To the holy Apostolic Council held by the grace of God and the regular authority of most blessed Pope Martin presiding, in the great city of the elder Rome, for the confirmation and defence of the definitions received from our fathers and councils, I, Stephen, Bishop, and sitting in the first see of the council under the throne of Jerusalem, make the following report:—Jerusalem was in peace and tranquillity when the tempest broke upon it. For first of all Theodorus, Bishop of Pharan, then Cyrus, Bishop of Alexandria, then Sergius, Bishop of Constantinople, and Pyrrhus and Paulus, who succeeded him, set up afresh the doctrine of the heretics Apollinaris [pg 069] and Severus. By these men the whole Catholic Church has been thrown into confusion. I speak to your supreme see, which is set over all sees, for the healing of every wound, for this it has been accustomed to do with power from of old and from the beginning by apostolical authority. Since Peter, the great head of the Apostles, was manifestly invested not only with the keys of heaven to open to those who believe and to close to those who disbelieve the gospel, but he first had the charge to feed the sheep of the whole Catholic Church—to convert and confirm his spiritual brethren of the same order, as he received this dignity over all, given to him providentially by God Himself for our sakes incarnate.

“Knowing which things, Sophronius, of blessed memory, formerly patriarch of Christ's holy city, took me and placed me on the holy spot of Calvary, and there indissolubly bound me with these words:—Thou shalt answer to God Himself who on this spot chose to be crucified for us, when He comes at His glorious epiphany to judge the living and the dead, if thou delayest and disregardest His endangered faith, for I myself am bodily prevented from doing this by the Saracen invasion which has come upon us for our sins.[35] Go, then, swiftly from end to end of the earth, until thou reach the Apostolic See in which the foundations of our [pg 070] holy doctrines rest. Not once, not twice, but again and again make known to the holy men there what is being here mooted, until with apostolic prudence they bring forth judgment to victory, and effect, according to the canons, a complete annulment of these innovating doctrines. Shuddering at the adjuration put on me in this most holy spot, remembering also the episcopal dignity granted to me by God, further bearing in mind the entreaties from almost all the bishops of the East and their Christian people, agreeing with Sophronius, who is now among the saints, as first of the Episcopal Council of Jerusalem, I gave no sleep to my eyes nor slumber to my eyelids in fulfilling this command. This now is the third time that I take refuge at your apostolical feet, beseeching you, as all beseech you, to help the faith of Christians in its danger. The enemy pursue me from place to place to have me imprisoned and delivered to them in fetters, but the Lord has saved me from my persecutors. Nor has God failed to the prayers of His supplicants, but has raised up your predecessors, the apostolic prelates, to no slight exertions in correcting these men, though they would not be softened, and now he has raised up the most blessed Pope Martin.... I beseech you, therefore, not to despise the earnest entreaties of the orthodox bishops and peoples throughout the East, and of my now sainted lord Sophronius, brought to your blessedness now by me the least of all.”

In further sittings of this Council abundant testimony from the Greek and Latin fathers was presented to show how contrary to them was the teaching which the emperors [pg 071] and the patriarchs of Byzantium were seeking by crude force to impose on bishops and people. In the end the Council passed twenty canons fully setting forth the true doctrine, and condemning the heresy as contrary to what had been taught up to that time: especially “the most impious Ecthesis which was made by Heraclius, formerly emperor, under persuasion of Sergius, against the orthodox faith”; and with it “the atrocious Typus lately drawn up by the most serene prince, the Emperor Constans, against the Catholic Church, by persuasion of Paulus”.

In[36] rank this council stands near to the General Councils; its twenty canons being issued by Pope Martin under anathema upon matters of faith are as binding on the Church now as when they were first published. The creed of this Council is a simple repetition and exhibition of the creed of the Council of Chalcedon, until we come to the addition which at once transfixes the heresy and sets forth the faith. After the words “we believe one and the same only-begotten Son, God, the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ,” the addition runs, “and we believe as Two Natures of the same, united without confusion, so likewise Two Natural Wills, the divine and the human, and Two Natural Operations, the divine and the human, for the perfect and unfailing assurance that He is truly perfect God and perfect Man in very deed, one and the same our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, willing and working divinely and humanly our salvation, as the prophets of old and our Lord Jesus [pg 072] Christ Himself taught us, and the creed of the holy fathers handed down, and in general all the holy universal Councils and the whole band of approved doctors in the Catholic Church. This, in agreement with them all according to their inspired teaching, we one and all confess and define.”

Among the documents read at the Lateran Council was one from the whole African episcopate addressed to Pope Theodorus three years before, in 646, in the following titles: “To our most blessed Lord, seated in the apostolic headship, the Father of Fathers, Theodorus, most holy Pope and Chief Shepherd of all Prelates, Columbus Bishop of the first See of the Byzacene Council, and Reparatus Bishop of the first See of the Mauritanian Council, and with us all the bishops of the three Councils of Africa.” It is to be noted that the Archbishop of Carthage is not mentioned, for Fortunatus was elected somewhat later to take the place of a Monothelite. “No one can question that a great and neverfailing spring of grace wells forth from your Apostolic See, enriching all Christians. Thence in abundance rivulets come forth, irrigating the whole Christian world, whence, O Father of Fathers, in honour of most holy Peter, your Apostolic See has been appointed, by divine decree in a peculiar and unique manner, to search into and to treat the sacred doctrines of the Church, receiving which as truly handed down it is the most necessary function of the high priest of that supreme and apostolic See to certify.” Then the African bishops, by quoting, made their own that famous [pg 073] answer given by Pope Innocent I. to the African bishops in the time of St. Augustine, 230 years before. “This obedience,” they proceed, “we humbly render to your apostolic supremacy, and beseech the Pope to do away with the hateful novelty which has sprung up in the Church of Constantinople.”

This letter has a double interest, being one of the last recorded acts of the ancient African episcopate, which was already in conflict with the Mohammedan assault, and about fifty years later was entirely swept away. It would be difficult to find stronger words than it uses to describe the Papal authority and the special gift which it recognises as belonging to the See of Peter by divine ordinance.[37]

Several of the letters written by Pope Martin after the Lateran Synod testify his zeal to overthrow the Monothelite heresy. Among these is his answer to the just-quoted letter,[38] which he addresses to the Church of Carthage, and all the bishops, clergy, and laity subject to it. He praises them for the synodical letters drawn up by the Church's glorious orator, Augustine, through the Holy Ghost, to his Apostolic See, alluding to that great confession of his[39] Primacy which we have in the letters of the Saint, and which, he says, their words repeat, and so he presents to them the acts of the Lateran Council.

Particularly remarkable is the Pope's letter[40] to the bishops under the Sees of Jerusalem and Antioch, that is, the patriarchates which had fallen under Mohammedan domination. He announces to them that, after due examination, he had condemned “the Exposition of the Emperor Heraclius, and the formula of the present serene emperor,” and he deplores the havoc which heretics had made in the East, irregularly setting up a false bishop at Antioch, the heretic Macedonius, and another, Peter, at Alexandria. The Pope adds that in his anxiety to build up the Church of God, which they were laying waste, he had, according to the power given him by the Lord in the person of blessed Peter, ordered his brother John, Bishop of Philadelphia, to supply his place in all ecclesiastical matters through the East, and to create in all cities episcopally subject to the Sees of Antioch and Jerusalem bishops, priests, and deacons, and he begs them as sons of obedience “to help our Vicar set by Apostolic authority”.

The Bishop of Thessalonica, in the course of 200 years since St. Leo and the succeeding Popes had made him their Vicar for the great province of Eastern Illyricum, had become a prelate of very high rank. Paul was actually bishop, but he favoured the new heresy, and the Pope, after warning him in vain,[41] wrote deposing him, unless he received without the least omission everything which had been synodically ratified and defined at the Council. At the same time he wrote to the people of [pg 075] Thessalonica, enjoining them to have no society, agreement, or connection with such a man.

Thus, in the case of any diocese, whether that of a simple bishop, or a primate, or a patriarch, the Pope does not hesitate to tell their several diocesans that they are set free from all duty of obedience to one condemned by him. No act can show the superior authority of the universal Primate more strongly than this. St. Gregory the Great had said that all bishops were equal when performing their respective work in their own diocese; but if that work is not duly performed, he knows of no bishop who is not subject to the Apostolic See. The power of the Primacy is essentially for edification of the whole Church, and so is exerted whenever the Church and the faith of the Church are anywhere in danger. The acts of St. Martin I. at a crisis of singular danger follow exactly the rule of St. Gregory. If an emperor supports heresy, he condemns his act, though he may be a lawful sovereign; if a patriarch is false to the faith, he sets a vicar of his own to appoint fresh bishops in the patriarchate. If his own vicar sins against the power which appointed him, he dissolves the primary bond according to which the people of that diocese is bound to their own bishop.

But the supreme authority of the Roman See is indicated most plainly in the encyclical letter issued by the Pope. It is addressed[42] “Martin, Servant of the Servants of God, by grace Bishop of God's holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the Romans, together with the [pg 076] Synod of Bishops here canonically assembled with us for the confirmation of the true dogmas of the Catholic Church, to those who have inherited the like precious faith as we of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through the laver of regeneration, who sojourn in holiness and justice in every part of His dominion, our brethren the bishops, priests, deacons, heads of monasteries, monks, ascetics, and to the whole sacred plenitude of the Catholic Church”.

I give the main contents of this letter thus addressed to the whole world to announce the decision of the Council by Pope Martin. It expresses in every line, supported by constant quotations of Scripture, the solicitude of the Pope for the maintenance of the doctrine concerning the Person of the Lord which had been held from the beginning. “Our predecessors, the Pontiffs of Catholic memory, have not ceased to admonish the innovators to recede from this their heresy. Bishops from various provinces, and, what is more, general synods, have not only by their own writings called upon them to amend their heresy, but conjure our Apostolic See to exercise its regular authority, and not to suffer to the end this innovation to make a prey of the churches. Meeting, therefore, in this Roman most Christian city, we have confirmed by our sentence the holy Fathers; we have anathematised the heretics with their most depraved doctrines, the impious Ecthesis and the most impious Typus, in order that all you who dwell over the whole earth, recognising that these things have been piously done by us for the safeguard of the Catholic Church, [pg 077] may carry them out together with us.” “The Lord says, every kingdom divided against itself shall not stand, and every sentence, every law divided against itself shall not stand; and if the Typus destroys the Ecthesis, and the Ecthesis destroys the Typus, the one asserting that our Lord has one will and operation, the other denying it, then both are divided; and how shall the heresy stand, being shown to be invalid and empty by itself, rather than destroyed by us?” This, the never-ending refutation of heresy, runs through the whole letter, and against it is set “the manifestation of God through apostles, prophets, doctors, and the five Universal Councils, whose decrees are the law of the Catholic Church”. “Behold the Judge stands before the door joyfully promising crowns to those who suffer for His sake.”

Thus the Lateran Council of 649, presided over by Pope Martin, who directs all the proceedings, who informs the emperor of the condemnation of the Typus, composed by this emperor's own patriarch, and issued by himself as a law, who addresses an encyclical letter to all bishops and their people, summing up its acts, who writes to various provinces, and in particular to the eastern patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem, appointing his vicar over them, gives us in full detail a picture of the discipline existing in the Church just at the middle of the seventh century. As to doctrine, the Lateran Council stands precisely on that set forth two hundred years before at the Council of Chalcedon by the great authority of St. Leo. In condemning the [pg 078] Monothelite heresy, espoused by two emperors and three successive patriarchs of Constantinople, it alleges the tradition of the Fathers from the beginning, and the doctrinal decrees of the five Councils, then accepted as General. During these five centuries the East has been agitated almost without ceasing by the efforts of the Eutychean heresy and its last progeny, the Monothelite, to overthrow the true faith concerning the Incarnation, on which the whole economy of human salvation rests. The eastern patriarchates have utterly failed to secure the occupants of the sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, from the prevailing error. Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, and Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, are the chief patrons of this error. After them, Pyrrhus, and then Paul, are using the utmost power of the emperor from their seat in the capital to impose it by force: and the ecumenical patriarch especially is using it as a lever against the Roman Primacy, and in drawing up decrees of doctrine fathered by the imperial power is practically denying the Roman Primacy to be the guardian of the Christian faith, and striving to transfer that guardianship to himself, always under the wing of the emperor. Had the Popes yielded to the Ecthesis or the Typus, both the faith of the Church would have been altered, and its government transferred from Old Rome to Roma Nova. St. Martin, as the first act of his pontificate, plays this most remarkable part of summoning a Council which defeats this double aggression. And the moment at which it is done may be marked as that in which the [pg 079] temporal weakness of Rome touches its lowest point. The subsequent treatment of the Pope, which I have now to mention, is an incontestable proof how entirely he was exposed to the machinations, the violence, and the despotic tyranny of his enemies, especially to the malevolent union of emperor and patriarch. Yet it is to be observed that neither emperor nor patriarch even affects to deny the authority of St. Peter's successor; what they attempt to do is to control and subject him in the exercise of it.

History is silent as to events in Rome from the end of the Council of 649 to 653. What the exarch Olympius, by special command of the emperor Constans II. did while it was being held, has been narrated above. Olympius was dead, but another exarch, Theodore Kalliopas, was sent from Constantinople to execute the work in which Olympius had failed. On the 15th June, 653, Kalliopas came to Rome. Concerning his purpose, Pope Martin himself wrote to his friend Theodorus in these words:[43] “Your charity has desired to know how I was carried away from the See of the Apostle, St. Peter, like a solitary sparrow from the house-top. I am surprised at your question since Our Lord foretold of evil times to His own disciples: for ‘there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now; and unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved. But he who perseveres unto the end shall be [pg 080] saved.’ Therefore that you may know how I was removed and carried off from the city of Rome, you shall hear no false report. Through the whole time I knew what was preparing. And taking with me all my clergy, I remained by myself in the church of our Saviour, named after Constantine, which was the first built and endowed in all the world by that emperor of blessed memory, beside the bishop's palace. There we all stayed by ourselves from Saturday, when Kalliopas entered the city with the army of Ravenna, and the chamberlain Theodorus. I sent them some of the clergy to meet him, whom he received in the palace,[44] and thought I was with them. But, finding I was not, he mentioned it to the chief clergy. Because it was our purpose to do him homage,[45] but on the next day, which was Sunday, we would present ourselves and salute him, as on that day we could not. On Sunday he sent men to that church, suspecting that there was a great multitude there, being Sunday, and he reported that, being very tired with his journey, he could not come that day, but we should certainly meet the next day, ‘and we will do homage to your Holiness’. Now I myself had been very sick from October to that 16th of June. On Monday then he sent at dawn his chartular and certain attendants, and said, ‘You have prepared arms and you [pg 081] have armed men inside, and you have heaped up a quantity of stones for resistance. This is not necessary; do not allow any such thing.’ I heard this myself, and to remove their suspicions, thought it necessary to send them all over the episcopal palace, that, if they saw arms or stones, they might themselves give evidence. They went and found nothing, upon which I suggested to them that they had always acted thus, and proceeded against us by intrigue and false accusation, as when, at the coming of the infamous Olympius, they said that I might have repelled him by arms. Now I was lying in my bed before the altar of the church, and scarcely half-an-hour later the army came with them into the church. All were covered, bearing lances and swords, shields, and bows ready bent; and they did things there which are not to be uttered. For, as when the winter wind blows violently, the leaves fall from the trees, the candles of the church were struck down, and resounded in their fall upon the pavement. And the clash of arms sounded like a horrible thunder in the church, together with the vast number of broken candles. Upon this their sudden inroad, order was issued by Kalliopas to the priests and deacons who surrounded me, that I had, in violation of rule and law, taken undue possession of the bishop's office, and was not worthy to be in the Apostolic See, but was by all means to be sent to this imperial city, and a bishop elected in my stead. This has not yet been done, and I trust will never be done; since, in the absence of the pontiff, the archdeacon, the archpriest, and the first notary take his place. I have [pg 082] already told you the acts which had been doing concerning the faith. But, as we were not prepared for resistance, I thought it better to die ten times over than that anyone's blood should be shed in vain. And this was done without risk to anyone, after many evils displeasing to God had been effected. So I gave myself up at once to be taken before the emperor without resistance. I must admit that some of the clergy cried out to me not to do this, but I did not listen, lest murders should instantly take place. But I said to them: Let some of the clergy necessary to me, bishops, priests, and deacons, and, indeed, such as I choose, come with me. Kalliopas answered: By all means let such as will come. We use compulsion on no one. I answered, My clergy are in my own hands. Some of the priests cried out: We live and we die with him. Then Kalliopas himself and these who were with him began saying, Come with us to the palace. I did not refuse, but on that same Monday went out with them to the palace. On Tuesday all the clergy came to me, and many had prepared to sail with me, and had already put their baggage on board; some others also, both clergy and laity, were hastening to join us. On that same night then, preceding Thursday, the 19th June, about the sixth hour, they carried me from the palace, thrusting back all who were with me in the palace, and without even things necessary for my journey and for me when here, and they took me from the city with only six pages and a single drinking vessel. We were put on board a bark, and about four hours after dawn reached Porto. [pg 083] As soon as we left Rome the gates were closed, and kept closed that no one might go out and reach us at Porto before we sailed thence. Thus we were compelled to leave at Porto all the goods of those who had put them on board, and the same day we departed. On the 1st July we came to Miseno, where was the ship, that is, my prison. Now I met with no compassion, not in Miseno only but also in Calabria; nor in Calabria only, which is subject to the great city of the Romans, but in many islands in which we were detained for our sins as long as three months, save only in the island of Naxus, for there we spent a year, I was allowed to take two or three baths, and was a guest in a house. And now for seven and forty days I have not been allowed to wash in warm or cold water. I am sick and cold through and through; for both on board and on land to the present hour my stomach has allowed me no rest. When in my hunger I am about to take something, my whole body is so shaken that I cannot take anything to strengthen nature. I have an utter disgust against what I have. But I believe in the power of God, who beholds all things, for when I am relieved from this present life all my persecutors will be called to account, so that at least they may be drawn to repent, and so converted from their iniquity. God preserve you my very dear son.”

The allusion above concerning the things done as to the faith is explained in a former letter to the same friend, wherein he says: “When I left the Lateran Church, where armed men had shut me in, they cried out in the presence of the exarch, Whoever says or [pg 084] believes that Martin has changed or will change one iota of the faith, let him be anathema. And whoever remain not in their orthodox faith to death, let them be anathema. When Kalliopas heard this he began to excuse himself that there was no other faith than what we held, and that he had no other. And I would have you know, most dear brother, concerning the faith, and likewise those calumnies which they are putting out against the truth, that by the help of your prayers, and those of all faithful Christians who are with you, whether living or dying, I will defend the faith of our salvation, and as St. Paul teaches, ‘to me to live is Christ, and to die gain’. But as to those false accusations which heretics are newly making, casting aside the truth of Christ our God, what truth can they speak to men who resist God's truth? Therefore, I make answer to you, dearest brother, by Him Who will judge this world by fire, and render to every one according to his work, I never sent letters to the Saracens, nor how they should understand a certain tome, nor ever sent money, except some alms to servants of God going thither, to whom we gave a little for their needs, by no means for the Saracens. And as to our Lady, the glorious ever-virgin Mary, who brought forth Jesus Christ our God and Lord, whom all holy and Catholic fathers call the Mother of God, inasmuch as she bore the God-man, unjust men have borne false witness against me—rather against their own souls. Whoever does not honour and worship her who is blessed above every creature and human nature save Him who was born of her, the venerable ever-virgin Mother [pg 085] of our Lord, let him be anathema both in this world and in the next. But men who seek occasion throw up scandals for the offence of many. God preserve you, most loving son.”

In addition to these letters of the Pope himself, we also possess from the hand of a contemporary[46] “a narration of the deeds done cruelly and without respect of God by the adversaries of truth to the apostolic confessor and martyr Martin, Pope of Rome”. Concerning this the writer says: “Some incidents I learnt from others; of very many I was an eye-witness”. He speaks with horror of the swords drawn against the Pope as he lay sick on his couch in the Lateran Basilica; how the preacher of truth was torn from his apostolic throne by the powerful of this world who were worthy of such a ministry; how he was carried off secretly in a small vessel; how, as his ship touched at various places, the bishops and faithful brought him gifts, which the brutal guards laid their hands upon, abusing those who brought them, and saying: If you love him you are enemies of the State. “When at last that blessed man reached Byzantium on the 17th September, the guards left him from morning until the tenth hour lying in his couch on the ship, a spectacle to angels and men. For a number of men came to him—wolfish from their manners I should call them—as I conjecture hired to do against the holy Pope things which should not be mentioned to Christians. Now I remained on the shore walking up and down the whole day, mourning over him [pg 086] whom I saw in such a state; and hearing what some heathens said against him, I was ready to expire with grief. About sunset a certain scribe named Sadoleva came with many warders. They took him from the ship and carried him in a portable chair to the guardhouse, Prandiaria, and shut him up under strict charge that no one in the city should know that he was kept in guard. Thus the holy apostolical remained without exchanging a word with anyone for ninety-three days. On the ninety-third day they took him early out of guard and put him in the fiscal's cell. They had summoned the whole Senate to meet. They had him brought in upon his chair, for he was ill from what he had suffered on board and the long imprisonment. The fiscal, who presided with the other chief persons, eyed him from a distance, and bade him rise from his couch. Some attendant said he could not stand. The fiscal called out in a fury, and some one of the warders, Let him stand up, though he be supported on both sides. This was done. Then the fiscal said: Speak, wretch, what harm has the emperor done thee? Has he taken anything? Has he oppressed thee? But he held his peace. Then the fiscal said to him with imperious voice: Answerest thou nothing? Now shall thy accusers come in. Then many accusers were brought in against him. But they were all sons of falsehood, and disciples of those who killed our Lord Jesus Christ. But they contradicted the holy man, as they had been told; for their words were arranged and prepared. Now some of them tried to speak the truth, but those who directed [pg 087] this conflict got disturbed, and began to threaten them violently until they were induced to say what told for the death of this just man. When the Pope looked at them as they entered to bear witness, he said with a smile: Are these the witnesses? That is the rule. Some of these had been with Olympius. They were sworn on the Gospels, and so bore witness. The first of all the accusers was Dorotheus, patrician of Sicily. He swore that if Martin had fifty heads he ought not to live, since he alone subverted and destroyed all the West, and was in fact in the counsel of Olympius, and an enemy who slew the emperor and the Roman civilisation. When that just man saw them coming in and swearing unsparingly, out of compassion to their souls he said to those who presided: For God sake do not make them swear, but let them say what they please on their simple word; and yourselves, do what pleases you. Why should they lose their souls by swearing? One witness came in and said that the Pope had conspired with Olympius, and tampered with soldiers to make them take an oath. When he was asked if this was true, he answered: If you will hear the truth, I will tell you. And he began to speak: ‘When the Typus was made and sent to Rome by the emperor—’ At these words he was stopped, and Troilus cried out: Do not introduce before us matters of faith; you are now on trial for treason, since we are both Romans, and Christian, and orthodox. Would to God, said the Pope; but on that day of tremendous judgment you will find me a witness in this also. As [pg 088] the witnesses were accusing, Troilus, the prefect, said to him: What a man art thou to have seen and heard the attempts of Olympius against the emperor, yet not to have forbidden him, but to have consented with him. To whom the Pope instantly replied: Lord Troilus, tell us when George, as you know and we have heard, who had been a monk, and was become a magistrate, entered into this city from the camp, and said and did such and such things, where were you and those with you to offer no resistance, though he harangued you and banished from the palace such as he chose? And again, when Valentine, at the emperor's command, put on the purple and sat by his side, where had you gone? Were you not here? Why did you not forbid him to meddle with things not belonging to him? Did you not all take part with him? How was I to stand against such a man who wielded the whole force of Italy? Did I make him exarch? I entreat you by the Lord to do quickly what is your pleasure to do with me. For God knows that you bestow on me the greatest of gifts by whatever death you kill me. The fiscal enquired of one of the officers, Sagoleva: Are there many more witnesses? There are many, my lord, he said. But the presidents, being foiled by the holy man standing before them, because the Holy Spirit supported him, said it was sufficient. A certain Innocentius was turning into Greek the Pope's words, and the fiscal, feeling them like fiery darts shot upon them, turned to Innocentius in a fury: Why do you translate his words? Repeat them not. And rising with his assessors he went in to report [pg 089] to the emperor what he chose. But they led the holy apostolic man, seated in his chair, away from the cell of judgment—I should rather say from the hall of Caiphas—and put him in the middle of a court opposite the imperial stable, where all the people used to meet and await the entry of the fiscal. The guards surrounded him, and it was a sight striking awe into the crowd. Presently they placed him in the open, that the emperor might look at him from his dining-couch, and see what followed. Now there was a great multitude of people crowded together as far as the hippodrome. So they placed the most reverend man in the middle of that open space in presence of the whole Senate, propped up on both sides. Suddenly there was a great press, and the fiscal issuing from the emperor, with the doors of the dining-room opened, ordered all the people to make way for him. And, coming up to the holy Martin, the Apostolicus said to him: See how God has led thee and delivered thee into our hands. What hope hadst thou in struggling against the emperor? Thou hast deserted God, and God has deserted thee. And the fiscal calling on one of the warders standing by ordered him instantly to take away the mantle of the chief pastor of all Christians, who had confirmed the orthodox confession of the holy Fathers and Councils, that is, the Faith, and had canonically and in council put under anathema the authors of the new error, the new heretics, with their impious doctrines. So when the warder had torn away his mantle and the straps of his sandals, the fiscal delivered him over to the prefect of the city, [pg 090] saying: Take him, my lord prefect, and immediately cut him in pieces. At the same time he bade all who were present anathematise him, which they did, but only about twenty souls. But all who saw this deed, and knew that there is a God in heaven who beheld what was being done, went away disturbed, with eyes cast down and in great sorrow.

“Then the executioners taking him, stripped off the pallium of the sacerdotal stole, and rending the sides of his garment, which was woven from the top throughout, put iron chains upon his holy neck, and dragging his whole body violently, did not allow him to rest a moment and recover himself, but led him from the palace, making a show of him and dishonouring him through the midst of the city to the pretorium. And the sword was borne before him. Now, that blessed one was in great and unspeakable pain. He was utterly worn out and without strength, ready to expire from the pressure of sufferings and his emaciation. Nevertheless, rejoicing in hope, he was comforted in the Lord, and the greater the affliction and violence with which he was dragged along, the more that Just One followed with serene countenance and unbroken spirit. He had but one garment, which was rent from top to bottom, and no girdle; but he was girded with faith and the grace of the Lord. You might see a man so full of God subject to such disgrace that his flesh might be seen naked. When the people saw many things which happened they groaned and sobbed. But a few of those ministers of Satan rejoiced and mocked, and shaking their heads, as [pg 091] is written, they said, Where is his God, and where is his faith, and where is his teaching? And when he had come to the pretorium in this dishonour, and surrounded by the executioners with drawn swords, they cast him into a prison with murderers, and about an hour later carried him thence to the guard-house of Diomedes, in the court of the prefect. But they drew him in his fetters with such haste and force that his legs and thighs were torn, and blood shed in ascending the stairs of the guard-house, which were very ragged, rough and steep. Now the blessed one was very nigh to escape the tortures of the present life by expiring before the sword came when he had no strength to mount the steps with the men dragging him. When at last they got him somehow into the guard-house, after many falls and risings again, they put him on a bench clothed in fetters. For when he was delivered by Caiphas, that is, the prefect, to Pilate[47] to be crucified, immediately when the executioners were stripping him, he suffered greatly from the cold, for it was a bitter season. They put on [pg 092] him the heaviest iron fetters, and there was no man of his own to help him, save one young cleric, who stayed with him in custody, and stood weeping over his master, like Peter. The chief warder also was fastened to him, it being the custom that a criminal condemned to the sword should be bound to the chief warder.

“Now, there were two women, a mother and a daughter, who kept the keys of the guard-house. These witnessed the unendurable suffering of that holy man (for besides all his other punishments he was shivering with cold) and out of compassion sought to show some mercy to him and to cover him, but did not venture because of the warder who was bound to him. For they thought that the order for his execution would come at once. But after some hours when some soldiers below had summoned the chief warder he went down, and one of these women, touched with pity, came, and folding in her arms the champion of Christ and apostolic father, carried him and rested him on her own bed, carefully covering him and wrapping him. Now he remained to the evening without uttering a word. But in the evening Gregorius, the eunuch, prefect of the chamberlains, sent his majordomo with a little food to refresh him, saying, Faint not in your tribulations; we trust in God you will not die. The blessed one groaned at this increase of his troubles. Immediately they took off his fetters.

“The next day the emperor went to the patriarchal palace to visit the patriarch Paul, for he was near death. The emperor told him all that had been done to the holy man. But Paul groaned, and turning his face to [pg 093] the wall he said: Woe is me, this also has been done to multiply the judgments upon me. The emperor asked why he said this. He replied: Is it not miserable, my Lord, that pontiffs should suffer such things. Then he earnestly adjured the emperor that the past sufferings were sufficient, and that he should bear no more. When this was heard by that apostolical man, who did not receive what he was expecting, he was not pleased with that promise, but was made quite sad, for he was longing to finish a good fight, and to depart unto Him Whom he desired.

“The patriarch Paul died, and Pyrrhus who had been patriarch before him was trying to recover his seat, but the retractation which he had offered to the Pope Theodorus was brought up against him. The emperor sent an officer, an assistant of the fiscal, to examine Pope Martin about it. Demosthenes entering said to the Pope: See in what great glory you were, and to what you have reduced yourself. Nobody did this to you, but you did it to yourself. The Pope made no answer except, Glory and thanksgiving for all things to the sole immortal King. His majesty, said Demosthenes, has instructed you thus: inform us of what passed in the case of the expatriarch Pyrrhus here, and at Rome afterwards. Why did he go to Rome? Was it by order, or of his own accord? The Pope answered, Of his own accord. Demosthenes said, How did he draw up that paper? Under any one's compulsion? The Pope replied, Under none but of himself. Demosthenes said: When Pyrrhus came to Rome, how did [pg 094] Pope Theodorus, your predecessor, receive him? as a bishop? The Pope replied with tranquillity, And why not? Before Pyrrhus came to Rome, blessed Theodorus wrote hither, that is to Paul, who had acted unfittingly, and invaded another's see. When afterwards Pyrrhus came to Rome, to the threshold of St. Peter, how should not my predecessor receive and honour him as a bishop? Demosthenes said, That is most true. But where did he get what was most needful for his support? The Pope said, Clearly from the Roman patriarchal palace. The assistant remarked: What sort of bread was given to him? The Pope said, My Lords, do you not know the Roman Church? For I tell you whoever in however poor a plight comes hither to lodge, all things for his need are given him, and St. Peter sends away none who come without his gifts; the best bread and various wines are given both to him and to his attendants. If this is done in the case of the abject, when one comes in the honour of a bishop, what treatment should he receive? Demosthenes said, We have been informed that Pyrrhus was forced to make that statement at Rome, that he bore wooden fetters, and suffered much. The Pope replied, Nothing of the kind was done. For unless some are kept in their place by fear, they cannot speak out the truth. There are many at Constantinople who were then at Rome, and know what took place there. The patricius Plato survives, who was then exarch, and who directed some of his men then to Pyrrhus at Rome. Ask him if I speak falsely about this. But why enquire further? I am in your hands. Do with me what you [pg 095] will. As God allows, it is in your power. If you cut me to pieces, as when you delivered me to the prefect, you ordered, I do not communicate with the Church of Constantinople. I am here: examine me, and try, and you will find by experience the grace of God and of His faithful servants. Again Pyrrhus was mentioned, who had been so often anathematised, and stripped of the sacred honour. Demosthenes and his assistant were astonished at the tranquil Pope's boldness and constancy for Christ unto death. For this his chalice of passion was ordained. The attendants also were amazed: they made a copy of all which the blessed man had said and retired.

“Now the most reverend Pope passed in that same guard-house of Diomedes eighty-five days after the first ninety-three, that is, in all one hundred and seventy-eight days. Then Sagoleva the scribe came, saying, I am commanded to take you hence, and to remove you to my house, and after two days to conduct you whither the fiscal shall command. The Pope asked whither he was to be taken; the other refused to say. Then the holy man asked that he might be allowed to remain in the same guard-house until he was banished, and might be taken direct from it, which also was refused him. But about sunset the venerable Pope said to those who were in the prison: Approach, brethren, and let us take leave; behold he is at hand who will take me hence. And as he said this they each drank of the chalice. And rising with serene countenance, with much firmness and thanksgiving he said to one of those [pg 096] present dear to him: Sir, my brother, come and give me the kiss of peace. Now the heart of that brother, as he told me himself at that very time, was, I conceive, such as the heart of that disciple who watched his Lord upon the cross. And as he was giving the kiss of peace to the most holy Pope, through the depth of their affection they shed a flood of tears. But all present broke into a terrible lamentation. The blessed man distressed at this, besought them not to do so, looking at them undisturbed. And placing his venerable hands upon his head, said with a smile: Sir, my brother, this is good, this is seasonable—should you act thus? Is it for our peace? Rather you should rejoice over me now. To whom the brother with deep contrition answered: Servant of Christ, God knows. I rejoice in the glory with which Christ our God has deigned that you should suffer all these things for His Name's sake; but I am sad for the perdition of all. Then all paying him their respects retired. So the scribe coming forth at once took him away and brought him to his own house. It was said then that he was banished to Cherson, and a few days afterwards we learnt that the holy Apostolical man had been carried thither in a vessel secretly.

“Upon his arrival he wrote a letter after a few days to a most dear friend in Byzantium, one of those who loved him for the Lord's sake and for his right faith. And this our father was in banishment and great tribulation, and on account of his many and severe bodily sicknesses, and the every way defective supply of that [pg 097] country, where nothing was to be found, particularly bread, which they knew by name, but not in fact, asked for certain things to be sent him. Thus he wrote, attesting upon oath that a small bark touched there, carrying a little wheat in exchange for salt, and they were scarcely able to get a bushel of wheat for four coins, and that with much entreaty. That holy soul wrote that he was suffering various distresses there, not only from his own body, but through the oppression of those who ruled there, under direction from the lord in Byzantium, so that he was dying miserably. I then, your humble and sinning servant, beseech you, Fathers honourable in God, since I have declared to you what I myself saw and most carefully heard from others, that is, the trials pressing on our most blessed Pope for his right confession in Christ our Lord, and for his anathema uttered upon the new heretics. Short as is my account out of many things, but the best I could send you, do you for your part set forth these things to those who have zeal for God's worship, and beseech them to imitate him, and to maintain the traditions of the holy fathers, as he has done, and to hold no communion with those of an opposite mind. Entreat also for me, your unworthy servant, the writer, that, together with him and with you, I may find mercy from Christ our Lord for ever. Amen.”

We possess two letters written by the Pope from the Crimea to his friend in Byzantium, which would seem to be the letters referred to by the writer I have just quoted. In them the Pope declares the extreme need [pg 098] of necessaries for life, in which he suffers. In the first he says, “If St. Peter thus supports strangers at Rome, what shall we say of ourselves, who are his proper servants, and at least for a time ministered to him, and are in such a banishment and affliction”. In the second his words are still more pressing: “I am astonished at the inattention and want of compassion of all who once belonged to me, of my friends and relations who are so utterly forgetful of my misery and care not to know, as I find by experience, whether I am or am not upon the earth. Much more still do I wonder at those who are of the most holy Church of the Apostle Peter, since they have taken such pains for their own body and member—that is, for their affection to us—that we may be without solicitude. For if the Church of St. Peter possess not gold, at least, by the grace of God, it is not without wheat and wine and other necessaries whereby at least to show a moderate care of us. What fear has fallen upon men that they should not do the commands of God? Have I appeared such an enemy to the whole fulness of the Church, and an adversary to them? But may God, who wishes all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth by the intercession of St. Peter, establish their hearts in the orthodox faith, and confirm them against every heretic and person adversary to our Church, and maintain them unshaken, especially the pastor who is now declared to rule them, so that failing, declining, surrendering no whit of the things which they have writtenly professed in the sight of our Lord and his holy Angels, they may, together with my humility, receive the [pg 099] crown of justice belonging to the orthodox faith from the hand of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. As for this my poor body, the Lord Himself will care as it pleases Him to order, whether for sorrows without end or for moderate relief. For the Lord is at hand, and for what am I solicitous? I hope in His mercy that He will not long delay to finish my course, as He has appointed.”[48]

The “present pastor,” whom Pope Martin thus seems to recognise was Pope Eugenius, elected at Rome in his lifetime, through dread, it is said, of the clergy there that the Emperor Constans II. would force upon them some Monothelite of his own to sit in the See of Peter.

The last scene is thus described, as appended to the foregoing narrative:—

“The most holy thrice blessed Apostolical, Martin the Pope, a true confessor and martyr of Christ our God, died in his banishment in the Crimea, according to his own petition to our Lord God, offered to Him with tears at the moment that he disembarked and trod that land—that is, that in it he might finish his life, fighting the good fight, finishing his course of martyrdom, keeping the good faith, on the 16th September, the day on which in the year's course the most precious and blessed memory is kept of the martyr Euphemia, guardian of the orthodox faith.[49] He was buried about a stadium outside the walls of the city of Cherson, in the Church of Our Lady, the most chaste, immaculate, most excellent [pg 100] of all creatures, the fullest of grace, the maker and giver of joy, the ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of God. By the intercessions of which Virgin and confessor may Christ our true God and Saviour, who came forth from her for the human race in a manner ineffable and without seed, guard and protect us, and all faithful hearers, and all the people whom He has acquired unto sincere faith and practice, in peace and charity, and all justice to the end.”

So Pope Martin I. gave up his life for the faith of Christ and for the independence of the Church, and no less for that guardianship of both which is vested in the Holy See. For he was thus treated because he held a Council at the Lateran expressly condemning an imperial document of the reigning sovereign called a Typus, and as Pope placed it under anathema, and published his Encyclical “to the whole sacred plenitude of the Church”. And he was condemned as a traitor, exactly repeating the passion of his Lord, as he sat in the seat of him to whom our Lord said, Follow thou Me. And further, he followed his great predecessor, Pope Clement I., the personal friend both of St. Peter and St. Paul, and the third successor of St. Peter, dying in the Crimea, where St. Clement died by command of the great heathen emperor Trajan, as St. Martin died by command of Constans II., a successor of Constantine, and by his office as “Christian prince and Roman Emperor” the first son and defender of the Church.

Chapter III. Heraclius Betrays The Faith, And Cuts His Empire In Two.

We left the emperor Heraclius carrying back the true Cross in triumph to Jerusalem from its captivity under the Persian fire-worshipper, whose empire he had wounded to death. This was in the year 629, in the pontificate of Honorius, and in that act the emperor seated at Byzantium, on the throne of Constantine, at the head of the empire which was the proper creation of Constantine, seemed to have made himself the champion of the faith which is embodied in the Cross. Had Heraclius then died it would have been with a halo not only of human but of Christian glory surrounding his head. But he survived during twelve years in which his inertness, considered by some to be unexplained, suffered the eastern empire to undergo irreparable losses. These, moreover, came from a foe of whose mere existence he was indeed conscious, but of whom he had no fear at the time of that triumphal entry into Jerusalem. An obscure Arabian raider was striving to gain a mastery among some savage tribes in that little known peninsula. The lord of the golden city, seated as queen of Europe and Asia on broad-flowing Hellespont, would [pg 102] hardly deign to cast his eyes upon an incursion of southern robbers, made on an empire which for three hundred years had been watching war-clouds big with tempests from the north, or matching itself with difficulty against the restored Sassanid kingdom. This at last was beaten down. Might not Constantinople hail in security the return of an emperor who had conquered Persia? But we, looking back over the ages, may think that the act of Heraclius replacing the Cross in the Holy City and in the church which Constantine had built over the sepulchre of Christ may be called with much truth the last act of the real Cæsarean empire, inasmuch as during the twelve succeeding years it lost for ever its greatest provinces to the very foe whose advent as a conqueror Heraclius had not even suspected.

We have now to follow briefly one of the greatest revolutions which has ever occurred in human affairs. It is a revolution which not merely sets up one kingdom instead of another, or alters the persons of individual rulers; but which changes human society to its very depths, provides a different standard of morals, and, so far as it succeeds, but only so far, reverses the course of Christian civilisation, and undoes in certain countries the greatest conquests which the Christian Church had obtained for the good of the human race. Not States only are changed, but fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters: in fine, Græco-Roman heathenism has disappeared, but instead of it arises a religion borne on the shoulders of a temporal rule, and a legislation compared with which in certain respects [pg 103] that old heathenism was pure and benignant. The revolution reaches in fact man's belief in the nature of God Himself: and a change of belief in the nature of God involves a change in all His relations to His moral creatures, and in their relations to each other. The creature in all action reproduces what it holds concerning the Creator. The religion of self-sacrifice springs from a God who sacrifices Himself: the religion of self-indulgence from a God from whose worship sacrifice has been expunged.

It[50] appears that even before the triumphal entry of Heraclius into Jerusalem with the recovered cross he had met in the Persian campaigns, in 622 or 623, with a certain bishop named Cyrus, then holding the see of Phasis, in Armenia. But Cyrus himself had for years before been in communication with Sergius, the powerful patriarch of Constantinople, the guide and inspirer of the emperor. Sergius had held the see of the capital since the year 610, in which the accession of Heraclius took place. It had been all along his dream to reconcile the various monophysite sects which troubled his master's empire. In the political point of view such a reconciliation could not but appear very important. In Egypt alone the Monophysites numbered about six millions, against three hundred thousand orthodox.[51] How deeply their national feeling was mixed up with their heresy is shown by the name of Melchites or Royalists, which they gave to their opponents. The patriarch Sergius and the [pg 104] emperor Heraclius fell upon the device of gaining the heretical party, not only in Egypt, but in the Eastern empire generally, to at least an outward union with the orthodox by introducing the formula “One Operation” as a theological expression for the acts of our Lord. St. John of Damascus[52] describes in his treatise on heresies the 99th as that of the Monothelites “who derived their origin from Cyrus of Alexandria, and their strength from Sergius of Constantinople. These men maintained two Natures in Christ, and one Person, but assert one Will and one Operation, by which they destroy the duality of natures, and strongly adhere to the doctrines of Apollinarius.” Now Sergius, uniting great ability and strong character to his position as bishop of the capital city and minister of the Emperor Heraclius, dominated his mind. Heraclius exerted himself greatly to disseminate the formulary of these two patriarchs. His purpose was that of drawing together his own distracted empire. This purpose of Heraclius is carried back so far at least as the year 628. Nay, at the beginning of his campaign against the Persians he recommended it. How much more when by the peace of the year 628 he recovered the provinces which had been taken from him.[53] It would seem that the faltering of Heraclius in the faith, which he was willing to subject to a deceptive compromise the doctrine of the incarnation itself, was coincident in time with the opening of the Mohammedan era, the hegira or flight of Mohammed from Mecca, which marks his assumption of the claim to propagate [pg 105] by force a conquering religion. That claim was in a few years to cost Heraclius the half of his empire. It is certain that about the year 630 he promoted Cyrus to be patriarch of Alexandria. He also put a certain Athanasius of like doctrine into the see of Antioch, and thus three patriarchal sees at once were in favour of the heresy. And Sergius wrote to Pope Honorius commending it as a wonderful mode of restoring unity to the Church in the East.

Cyrus drew up nine heads of doctrine, by which he thought that he had reconciled the Theodosians and other powerful sects in Egypt. His announcement was received with exceeding joy by Sergius at Constantinople. Sergius wrote to Pope Honorius describing the action of Cyrus in these words: “Certain dogmatic heads were agreed upon between the two sides, in consequence of which those who but yesterday were parted into divisions and acknowledged the wicked Dioscorus and Severus as their ancestors, were united to the one most holy Catholic Church, and all the people of Alexandria, beloved by Christ, and besides this we may say all Egypt and Thebais and Libya, and the other dioceses of the Egyptian province, became one flock of Christ our true God. They who were until then to be seen an innumerable multitude of divided heresies, now, by the good pleasure of God and the zeal well-pleasing to Him of the most holy prelate of Alexandria, have all become one, with one voice and unity of spirit, confessing the true doctrines of the Church.”[54]