The vast event by which the Christian Church had become a ruling power in the commonwealth had affected from that time forth the whole being of Church and State. Christian emperors had come to see in bishops the Fathers and Princes of such a Church, consecrated by God to that office, not appointed by men.[170] As such they had honoured them, committed to their wisdom and guidance the salvation of their own souls, and the weal itself of the commonwealth; not hindered them in the performance of their duties, not hampered them by restrictive laws. Rather they had protected them by external force from hindrance when invited thus to show their protection as heads of the State. Circumstances led them on to a more immediate entrance into the Church's special domain, and the things which happened in that domain led to this their entrance. It kept even pace with the developments and disturbances caused by heresy therein.

Christ had committed to the whole episcopate, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the task of spreading the seed of Christian doctrine over the earth, of watching its growth, of eradicating the false seed sown in night-time by the enemy. In proportion as the empire's head took part in this work, his influence on the episcopate could not but increase. If his participation was confined within its due limits, if the temporal ruler hedged the Church round from irruption of external power, if he rooted the tares out of her field only to clear her enclosure, his relation to the bishops remained merely external. But if he went on himself to lay down the limit of the Church's domain, or even if he only took an active part in such limitation; if he made himself the judge what was wheat and what was tares, in so doing he had won an influence on the bishops which did not belong to him. Then Church and State ran a danger of seeing their respective limits confused. Thus the relation of the bishops to the ruler of the State became then, and remains always, an unfailing standard of the Church's freedom and independence.

Now, striking and peremptory as the eastern submission to Pope Hormisdas was, in which Justinian, then a man of thirty-six, had taken large part; clear and unambiguous as in his legislation appears the recognition of the Two Powers, sacerdotal and imperial, which make together the joint foundation of the State, and are a necessity of its wellbeing; distinct, likewise, as is the imperial proclamation of the Pope as the first of all bishops in his laws, his letters, confirmed by his reception of the Popes Agapetus and Vigilius in his own capital city; frank and unembarrassed as his acknowledgment of St. Peter's successors, yet, when he had reached the mature age of seventy, and was lord by conquest of Rome reduced to absolute impotence, and of Italy as a subject province, his treatment of the first bishop, in the person of Vigilius, was a contradiction of his own laws as to the two domains of divine and human things. He passed beyond the limits which marked the boundaries of the two powers. He made himself the supreme judge of doctrine. He convoked a General Council without the Pope's assent; he terminated it without his sanction; he treated the Pope as a prisoner for resisting such action. It is true that St. Peter's successor—and this with a stain upon him which no successor of St. Peter had worn before him—escaped with St. Peter's life in him unimpaired; but so far as the action of Justinian went it was unfilial, inconsistent with his own laws, perilous in the extreme to the Church, dishonouring to the whole episcopate. The divine protection guarded Vigilius—that Vigilius whom an imperious woman had put upon the seat of a lawful living Pope—from sacrifice of the authority to which, on the martyrdom of his predecessor, he succeeded. He died at Syracuse, and St. Peter lived after him undiminished in the great St. Gregory. The names mean the same, the one in Latin, the other in Greek; but no successor ever took on himself the blighted name of Vigilius, while many of the greatest among the Popes have chosen for themselves the name of Gregory, and one at least of the sixteen has equalled the glory of the first.

In judging the conduct of Justinian, both in treatment of persons and in dealing with doctrine, we cannot fail to see that the imperial duty of protection passed into the imperial lust for mastery. If his treatment of Vigilius, whom he acknowledged in the clearest terms as Pope, was scandalous and cruel, still worse, if possible, was the assumption of a right to interpret and to define the Church's doctrine for the Church. The usurper Basiliscus had been the first to issue an imperial decree on doctrine. This was in favour of heresy. He was followed in this by the legitimate emperors Zeno and Anastasius, also in favour of heresy. On the contrary,[171] the edicts of Justinian were generally in conformity with the decisions of the Church: generally occasioned by bishops, often drawn up by them. But in the council called by him at Constantinople in 553, he issued decrees on doctrines which only the Church could decide. In doing this he infringed her liberty as grossly as the three whose unlawful act he was imitating. The whole effect of his reign was that State despotism in Church matters lowered the dignity of the spiritual power. The dependence of his bishops on the court became greater and greater. The emperor's will became law in the things of the Church. He persecuted Vigilius: he deposed his own patriarch Eutychius. His example, as that of the most distinguished Byzantine monarch, told with great force upon his successors, for the persecution of future Popes and the deposition of future patriarchs.

The Italy which he had won at the cost of its ruin as to temporal wellbeing was, after his death in 565, speedily lost as to its greater portion, and the Romans[172] of the East did little more for it. The Rome which he had reduced almost to a solitude, and ruled through a prefect with absolute power, escaped in the end from the most cruel and heartless despotism inflicted by a distant master on a province at once plundered and neglected. His own eastern provinces suffered terribly from barbarian inroads, and the end of the thirty-seven years' domination, which had seemed a resurrection at the beginning, showed the mighty eastern empire from day to day declining, the western bishops under the action of the Pope more and more exerting an independence which the East could not prevent, the patriarch of Constantinople more and more advancing as the agent of the imperial will in dealing with eastern bishops. What the See of St. Peter was at the end of the sixth century it remains to see in the pontificate of the first Gregory, who shares with the first Leo the double title of Great and Saint.

NOTES:

[115] Mansi, viii. 795-99.

[116] This refers to the reunion of a great portion of the eastern Church, which had fallen a prey to the most manifold errors since the Council of Chalcedon.—Riffel, p. 543.

[117] Savigny, Geschichte des roemischen Rechts im Mittelalter, 1834, i. 36. Quoted by Rump, ix. 72.

[118] Ep. xi. 2: Sedes illa toto orbe mirabilis licet generalis mundo sit praedita.

[119] Nov. cxxxi. c. 2: thespizomen ton hagiotaton tes presbyteras Rhomes papan proton einai panton ton hiereon.... te gnome kai orthe krisei tou ekeinou sebasmiou thronou katergethesan. Nov. ix. init.: Pontificatus apicem apud eam (Romam anteriorem) esse nemo est qui dubitet.—Photius, p. 156.

[120] Translated from Photius, p. 156.

[121] "Cesare fui e son Giustiniano, Che, per voler del primo amor ch'io sento, Dentro alle leggi trassi il troppo e il vano." —Paradiso, vi. 10.

[122] This paragraph translated from Rump, ix. 70.

[123] Rump, viii. 487.

[124] Account from Rump, ix. 172-4, compressed.

[125] Respondeat mens illa Sancto Spiritui serviens.

[126] Mansi, viii. 808.

[127] Mansi, viii. 849.

[128] See Baronius, A.D. 535, sec. 40; Hefele, ii. 736-8; Rump, ix. 174-6; Novell. xxxix. De Africana Ecclesia.

[129] Photius, i. 153-4: words of Hergenroether, who quotes eastern historians, who call him megaloprepesteros anakton ton proteron ... megalourgos krator.

[130] Mansi, viii. 846.

[131] Photius, i. 160-2; Rump, ix. 181.

[132] Photius, i. 163. The words which concern the conduct of Vigilius are taken from Cardinal Hergenroether. Baronius, A.D. 538, sec. 5, gives from Anastasius the words of the empress, and the Pope's answer, and the following narrative.

[133] Gregorovius, i. 372. See Liberatus, Breviarium, ch. xxii.

[134] Liberatus, Breviarium.

[135] Reumont, ii. 49.

[136] St. Gregory, Dialogues, ii. 14, 18.

[137] The following drawn from Reumont's narrative, ii. 50-6.

[138] The narrative drawn from Reumont, ii. 56-7; Gregorovius, i. 448-9.

[139] Mansi, viii. 969; Photius, i. 163.

[140] Mansi, viii. 1149.

[141] Mansi, ix. 35-40.

[142] Narrative drawn from Photius, i. 165-6, down to "Ferrandus," p. 232, below.

[143] Mansi, ix. 487-537.

[144] Hefele, ii. 790.

[145] Hergenroether, K.G., i. 344-5; Photius, i. 166.

[146] Translated from Hergenroether's K.G., i., pp. 345-351, from p. 232, above, "at this point Justinian sought," &c., with reference also to the life of Photius.

[147] Hergenroether, Photius, i. 174; Rump, K.G., ix. 283.

[148] See Reumont, ii. 58-62; Gregorovius, i. 453-9.

[149] Reumont, 60.

[150] Gregorovius, 455.

[151] Ibid., 456.

[152] Reumont, 61.

[153] Gregorovius, 450-2.

[154] See vol. v. 281.

[155] Constitutio, lxxxii. 667.

[156] Honestatem quam illis obtenentibus credimus.

[157] Constitutio, vi. 48.

[158] 119. De ecclesiasticis titulis, p. 940. Sancimus. This word in Roman law in the time of Justinian is equivalent to the English formula, "Be it enacted by the Queen's most excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons in Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same". There lies in these two formulae, expressing the supreme legislative authority, a comparison between the constitution of the lower Roman empire and the medieval constitutions established everywhere by the influence of the Church under guidance of the Popes.

[159] Riffel, 611-12, translated.

[160] See Justinian, Gloss. v., directed to the patriarch of Constantinople, Epiphanius. Epilogus, p 48: Haec igitur omnia sanctissimi patriarchae sub se constitutis Deo amabilibus metropolitis manifesta faciant, at illi subjectis sibi Deo amabilibus episcopis declarent, et illi monasteriis Dei sub sua ordinatione constitutis cognita faciant, quatenus per omnia Domini cultura maneat undique in eos incorrupta.

[161] Riffel, p. 615, translated.

[162] Riffel, p. 617.

[163] Kurth, ii. 35.

[164] See Riffel, p. 624.

[165] Riffel, p. 625.

[166] Ibid., pp. 629-35.

[167] See St. Gregory, Epis., x. 51 (vol. ii. 1080), where he writes to the ex-consul Leontius, in Sicily, who had beaten with rods the ex-prefect Libertinus: "Si mihi constare potuisset quia justas causas de suis rationibus haberent, et prius per epistolas vos pulsare habui; et si auditus minime fuissem, serenissimo Domino Imperatori suggererem".

[168] Riffel, p. 635.

[169] Mansi, xii. 1130.

[170] Riffel, 562.

[171] Photius, p. 155.

[172] Photius, 173.



CHAPTER V.

ST. GREGORY THE GREAT.

"The banner of the Church is ever flying! Less than a storm avails not to unfold The Cross emblazoned there in massive gold: Away with doubts and sadness, tears and sighing! It is by faith, by patience, and by dying That we must conquer, as our sires of old."

—AUBREY DE VERE, "St. Peter's Chains".

The historian,[173] who has carefully followed the fortunes of Rome as a city during a thousand years, describes it as beginning a new life from the time when Narses, in the year 552, came to reside there as imperial prefect and representative of the absent eastern lord Justinian. Narses so ruled for fifteen years, but when he was recalled there ensued a long time of terrible distress and anxiety—a time of temporal servitude, but one also of spiritual expansion. The complete ruin of Rome as a secular city, the overthrow of all that ancient world of which Rome was the centre and capital, had been effected in the struggle ended by the extinction of the Gothic kingdom. By degrees the laws, the monuments, the very recollections of what had been, passed away. The heathen temples ceased to be preserved as public monuments. The Capitol, on its desolate hill, lifted into the still air its fairy world of pillars in a grave-like silence, startled only by the owl's night cry. The huge palace of the Caesars still occupied the Palatine in unbroken greatness, a labyrinth of empty halls yet resplendent with the finest marbles, here and there still covered with gold-embroidered tapestry. But it was falling to pieces like a fortress deserted by its occupants. In some small corner of its vast spaces there might still be seen a Byzantine prefect, an eunuch from the court of the eastern despot, or a semi-Asiatic general, with secretaries, servants, and guards. The splendid forums built by Caesar after Caesar, each a homage paid by the ruler of the day to the Roman people, whom he fed and feared, became pale with age. Their history clung round them like a fable. The massive blocks of Pompey's theatre showed need of repairs, which were not given. The circus maximus, where the last and dearest of Roman pleasures—the chariot races—were no longer celebrated, stretched its long lines beneath the imperial palace covered with dust and overgrown with grass. The colossal amphitheatre of Titus still reared its circle perfect, but stripped of its decorations. The gigantic baths, fed by no aqueduct since the ruin wrought by Vitiges the Goth, rose like fallen cities in a wilderness. Ivy began to creep over them. The costly marble mantle of their walls dropped away in pieces or was plundered for use. The Mosaic pavements split. There were still in those beautiful chambers seats of bright or dark marble, baths of porphyry or Oriental alabaster. But these found their way by degrees to churches. They served for episcopal chairs, or to receive the bones of a saint, or to become baptismal fonts. Yet not a few remained in their desolation till the walls dropped down upon them, or the dust covered them for centuries. In course of time the rain perforated the uncared-for vaultings of these shady galleries. Having served for refuge to the thief, the coiner, or the assassin, they became like dripping grottoes.

Thus stood the temples, triumphal arches, pillars, and statues before the eyes of a young Roman noble, one out of the few patrician families still surviving. These were the sights with which St. Gregory, who claimed kindred with the Anician race, was familiar from his boyhood, so that the desolation of Jerusalem rose before his mind as the state of his own Rome pressed on his eyes and seared his heart.

This skeleton of a city was scarcely inhabited by the remnant of a people, decimated by hunger and pestilence, and in perpetual fear to see its ill-defended gates broken into by Lombard savages. The walls of Aurelian, half demolished by Totila and hurriedly repaired by Belisarius, alone saved it year after year from the horrors which fell upon captured cities; and would not have saved it but for the indomitable spirit, the perpetual wisdom, foresight, and courage of a son who had been exalted to the Chair of Peter.

While Old Rome lay thus, the shadow of its former self, bereft of all political power, looking to the imperial exarch at Ravenna for its temporal rule, in danger moreover of inundation from its own Tiber, whose banks were no longer maintained with unremitting care, New Rome beside the Bosporus rioted in all the pomp and circumstance of a court still the head of a vast empire. The tributes of all the East, of numberless cities in Asia Minor, in Syria, in Egypt, were still borne unceasingly within its walls, which rose as an impregnable fortress between Europe and Asia. Its emperor still thought himself the lord of the world; its bishop assumed the title of Ecumenical Patriarch. Both emperor and bishop cast but a disdainful glance on the widowed rival which threatened to sink into the grave of waters brought down by her own river. Constantinople could raise and pay armies from all the races of the North and East. A single imperial regiment was quartered at Rome, which, being ill-paid, became disaffected and neglectful of its charge, and could not be counted upon by the Pope for vigorous defence against the ever-pressing danger of a Lombard inroad.

So began the Church's Rome.[174] Enslaved politically to Byzantium, wherein the so-called Roman State, with Greek subtlety, carried on the principles of the old heathen government and practised a remorseless despotism, the city of the ancient Caesars and the people they fed on "bread and games" ceased to exist, and was changed into the holy city, whose life was the Chair of Peter. From the time of Narses, during all the two hundred years of Lombard assault and Byzantine neglect and exaction, the Pope alone, watchful and unceasingly active, carried out the fabric of the Roman hierarchy.[175] Its gradual increase, its springing up out of the dust of the old Roman State under the most difficult circumstances, will ever claim the astonishment of the after-world as the greatest transformation to be found in history.

Let us approach the secret of this transformation in the person of the man who best represents it.

Gregory was born about the year 540, and so was witness from his childhood of the intense misery and special degradation of Rome produced by the Gothic war. He was himself the son of Gordian, a man of senatorial rank, from whom he inherited great landed property. Through him he was the great grandson of that illustrious Pope Felix III., whom we have seen resist with success the insolence of Acacius and the despotism of Zeno. Gregory had therefore a doubly noble inheritance—that of a true Roman noble's spirit, and that of the Church's championship. His paternal house stood on that well-known slope of the Coelian hill, opposite the imperial palace on the Palatine, from which in after-time he sent forth St. Augustine with the monks his brethren to be the Apostle of paganised England. He founded six monasteries in Sicily upon his property, and changed his father's palace into a seventh, in which he followed the Benedictine Rule. In early manhood he had been praetor or prefect of the city, being probably the most eminent of all its citizens in wealth and rank. But his mother St. Silvia, a woman of fervent piety, had educated him with great care. He turned from the secular to the religious life, following perhaps her example, since on the death of his father she became a nun. He was a monk on the Coelian hill when Pope Benedict in the year 577 named him seventh deacon of the Roman Church. Pope Pelagius II. sent him as nuncio to Constantinople, an office equally difficult and honourable. The emperor Tiberius was then reigning, with whom he became intimate, and with his successor Mauritius. Gregory dwelt in the imperial palace, with some monks of his own monastery whom he had brought with him, pursuing the Rule in all pious observances, winning also the esteem and friendship of many distinguished men, and making himself fully acquainted with the mechanism of the eastern court. He also delivered the patriarch Eutychius from a false Origenistic notion, that the bodies of the blessed after the resurrection were not glorified, but lost their quality as bodies.[176] There also he became warmly attached to St. Leander, who afterwards, as archbishop of Seville, greatly helped him in recovering Spain from Arianism to the Catholic faith. The charge of Pope Pelagius to his nuncio Gregory throws a vivid light upon the condition of Rome at the time. His instructions ran: "Lay before our lord the emperor that no words can express the calamities brought upon us by the perfidy of the Lombards, breaking their own engagements. Our brother Sebastian, whom we send to you, has promised to describe to him the necessities and dangers of all Italy. Join him in that entreaty to succour us, for the commonwealth is in such distress, that unless God inspire him to show us his servants the mercy of his natural disposition, and move him to give us a single Magister militum and a single Dux, we are utterly destitute, for Rome and its neighbourhood are specially defenceless. The exarch writes that he can give us no help, for he has not force enough to guard Ravenna. Therefore, may God command the emperor quickly to succour us, before the army of that most wicked nation take the places still remaining to us."[177]

Gregory returned from Constantinople in 585, and lived as one of the seven deacons on the Coelian hill, when, on 8th February, 590, Pope Pelagius died of the pestilence, and Gregory was unanimously chosen to succeed him.

It was a moment of the greatest depression. The Tiber had in the winter overflowed a large portion of the city. The destruction wrought had been followed by a terrible plague. Gregory strove to escape the charge put upon him, and besought the emperor not to confirm his election. In the meantime, the clergy and people urged upon him the provisional exercise of the episcopal charge. As such he ordered a sevenfold procession to entreat the cessation of the plague. The clergy of Rome, the abbots, the abbesses with their nuns, the children, the laymen, the widows, and the married women, each company separately arranged, were to start from seven different churches, and to close their pilgrimage together at the basilica of St. Maria Maggiore.

During the procession itself eighty victims to the plague fell dead. But as Gregory was passing over the bridge of St. Peter's, a heavenly vision consoled them in the midst of their litanies. The archangel Michael was seen over the tomb of Hadrian, sheathing his flaming sword in token that the pestilence was to cease. Gregory heard the angelic antiphon from heavenly voices—Regina Coeli, laetare, and added himself the concluding verse—Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia.

The assent of the emperor Mauritius arriving from Constantinople about six months after his election compelled Gregory to become Pope. At first, indeed, he disguised himself and took to flight, and hid himself in the woods.[178] The people fasted and prayed three days for his discovery. He was found, and then permitted himself to be taken back to Rome, where he was received with great rejoicing. He was led, according to custom, to the "Confession" of St. Peter, where he made his profession of faith. He was then consecrated, the 3rd September, 590. Nor can any words but his own adequately express his feelings, together with the character of the time in which he lived. With heavy heart he approached the burden laid upon him. Neither then nor ever after did he deceive himself as to the gravity of the situation. "Since," are his words, "I submitted the shoulders of my spirit to this burden of the episcopal office, I can no longer collect my soul, distracted as it is on so many sides. At one time I have to consider the affairs of churches and monasteries, often taking into account the lives and actions of individuals. At another time I have to represent my fellow-citizens in their affairs. Again, I have to groan over the swords of barbarians advancing to storm us, and to dread the wolves which lie in wait for a flock huddled together in fear. Then, again, I must charge myself with the care of public affairs, to provide means even for those to whom the maintenance of order is entrusted, or I must patiently endure certain depredators, or take precautions against them, that tranquillity be not disturbed." In another place he says: "Daily I feel what fulness of peace I have lost, to what fulness of cares I have been exalted. If you love me, weep for me, since so many temporal businesses press on me that I seem as if this dignity had almost excluded me from the love of God. Not of the Romans only am I bishop, but bishop of the Lombards, whose right is the right of the sword, whose favour is punishment. The billows of the world so surge upon me, that I despair of steering into harbour the frail vessel entrusted to me by God, while my hand holds the helm amid a thousand storms." Again, in his synodical letter[179] announcing his accession to the patriarchs, he says: "Especially, whoever bears the title of Pastor in this place is grievously occupied by external cares, so that he is often in doubt whether he is executing the work of a Pastor or that of an earthly lord". Thus thirteen hundred years ago spoke the Pope. Does his language in the nineteenth century differ much from his language in the sixth? Shortly after his accession, preaching to his people in St. Peter's, he said:[180] "Where, I pray you, is any delight to be found in this world? Mourning meets us everywhere; groans surround us. Ruined cities, fortresses overthrown, lands laid waste, the earth reduced to a desert. The fields have none to till them. There is scarcely a dweller in the cities. Yet even these poor remnants of the human race are smitten daily and without ceasing. The scourge of heaven's justice strikes without end, because even under its strokes our bad actions are not corrected. We see men led into captivity, beheaded, slain before our eyes. What pleasure, then, does life retain, my brethren? If yet we are fond of such a world, it is not joys but wounds which we love. We see the condition of that Rome which anon seemed to be mistress of the world: worn down by sorrows which have no measure, desolate of inhabitants, assaulted by enemies, filled with ruins. We see in it fulfilled what long ago our prophet said against Samaria: 'Set on a vessel; set it on, I say, and put water into it. Heap together into it the pieces thereof.' And then: 'The seething of it is boiling hot; and the bones thereof are thoroughly sodden in the midst thereof.' And further: 'Heap together the bones, which I will burn with fire: the flesh shall be consumed, and the whole composition shall be sodden, and the bones shall be consumed. Then set it empty upon burning coals, that it may be hot, and the brass thereof may be melted.' Now the vessel was set on when our city was founded. The water was put into it and the pieces heaped together, when there was a confluence of peoples to it from all sides. Like boiling water they bubbled up with the world's actions; like bits of flesh they were boiled in their own heat. He says well, 'The seething of it is boiling hot, and the bones thereof are thoroughly sodden in the midst thereof'. For great, indeed, in it at first was the heat of secular glory; but presently the glory itself and those who followed it burnt out. Bones mean the powerful of the world; flesh its various peoples: as bones support flesh, so the powerful of the world rule the weakness of the masses. But now, behold, all the powerful of this world have been taken from it. The bones, then, are thoroughly sodden. The peoples are gone; the flesh, then, is boiled up. There follows then: 'Heap together the bones, which I will burn with fire; the flesh shall be consumed, and the whole composition shall be sodden; and the bones shall waste away'. For where is the senate? where any longer a people? The bones are wasted, the flesh consumed; all pride of secular dignities is perished out of it. The whole composition is sodden. Yet every day the sword, every day innumerable sorrows press upon us, the poor remaining remnant. So, then, this also applies: 'Set it empty upon burning coals'. For since there is no senate, since the people has died out, and yet sorrow and suffering are multiplied day by day on the few that remain, Rome is empty, and yet it burns. We apply this to men, but we see the very structures destroyed by the multiplication of ruins. So that he adds, upon the empty city, 'Burn it and melt its brass'. For it is come to the vessel itself being destroyed, in which before both flesh and bones were consumed. For when the dwellers have fallen away even the walls fall. But where are those who once rejoiced in its glory? Where is their pomp and pride, and those ecstasies of frequent transport?

"In Rome are fulfilled the prophet's words against Niniveh: 'Where is the dwelling of the lions, and the feeding-place of the young lions?'[181] Were not its commanders and its princes lions who overran the whole world, and ravened, and slaughtered the prey? Here the young lions found their feeding-place, because the boyhood, the youth, the flower of manhood, from generation to generation, flocked hither, when they sought to get on in the world. Now Rome is desolate, worn down, full of sorrows. No one comes to it to get on in the world; no man of power or violence remains to raven on the prey. Then may we say, 'Where is the dwelling of the lions, and the feeding-place of the young lions?' Upon it has fallen the lot of Judea, foretold by the prophet: 'Enlarge thy baldness as the eagle'.[182] For man is wont to be bald upon the head alone; but the eagle's baldness is over all his body. When very old, his plumes and feathers fall from his whole body. The city which has lost its inhabitants, in losing its feathers, has enlarged its baldness as the eagle. Shrunk also are its wings, with which it used to fly to the prey, for all its men of might, by whom it ravened, are extinguished."

We may here contrast the language concerning the Rome which lay before their eyes of the two Popes St. Leo and St. Gregory. They spoke with an interval between them of 140 years. The first spoke still of the actual queen of the world, of the secular empire subdued and inherited by the spiritual. The feathers of Leo's eagle shone to him with celestial light; the talons of the royal bird traversed the earth not to raven, but to feed a conquered world with Christian doctrine. St. Gregory speaks of the eagle as bald; but we shall see that he who day by day guarded the gates of defenceless Rome against the Lombard spoiler, barbarian also and heretic, fed no less the ends of the earth with Christian doctrine. It was he who brought the Ultima Thule, and its inhabitants the penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos again under the yoke of Christ, and taught the sea-kings humanity.

A little later St. Gregory closed his exposition of the prophet Ezechiel in St. Peter's with these sorrowful words: "So far, dear brethren, by the gift of God, we have searched out hidden meanings for you. Let no man blame me if I close them here, because, as you all witness, our sufferings have grown enormous. On every side we are encircled with swords: on every side we are in imminent peril of death. Some return to us maimed of their hands; of others we hear that they are captured; of others, again, that they are slain. My tongue can no longer expound, when my spirit is weary of my life. Let no one ask me to unfold the Scriptures; for my harp is turned to mourning, and my voice to the cry of the weeper. The eye of my heart no longer keeps its watch in the discussion of mysteries; my soul droops for weariness. Study has lost its charm for me. I have forgotten to eat my bread for the voice of my groaning. How can one who is not allowed to live take pleasure in the mystical sense of Scripture? How can one whose daily chalice is bitterness present sweets for others to drink? What remains for us but while we weep to give thanks for the strokes of the scourge which we suffer for our iniquities. Our Creator is become our Father by the Spirit of adoption whom He has given to us: sometimes He feeds His sons with bread; sometimes He corrects them with the scourge; because He schools us by sorrows and by gifts for the unending inheritance."[183]

This was the Rome in which Gregory ruled as Pope for fourteen years, since he saw the archangel's sword sheathed over the castle of St. Angelo, into which name the pagan mausoleum was baptised. Pestilence in the city, where the remnant of a people wandered disconsolate by the mighty halls and vast spaces of the old emperors—swords of pagan or Arian barbarians all round the patched-up walls of Aurelian. City after city through the hapless Italy reported as plundered or ruined by the Lombard devastation. Presently the trials of a sick-bed and frequent attacks of gout were added to his daily tale of sorrows. In the last years of Gregory it came to pass that the universal Church was governed from the sick-bed of one worn down, not by years—for he died at sixty-four—but by sufferings of body and mind. The prisoner of the Lombards had to struggle perpetually with the spirit of Byzantine despotism and the aggressive arrogance of a prelate whom successive eastern sovereigns had nursed from a suffragan of Heraclea to be the claimant of an ecumenical patriarchate. Yet the eyes of Gregory were bent likewise on the northern conquerors who had seized the provinces of the West. Before he was Pope he had observed in the slave-market of Rome the fair-haired Angles whom he would fain make angels; when Pope he sent forth from his father's house, which he had given to the great Father Benedict, those who were to carry the banner of that father into the isle lost to Christ. In that island he appointed the primate of Canterbury, and designed the primate of York. Through St. Leander and St. Isidore, and the martyr St. Hermenegild, he recovered Spain from the Arian blight; through the queen Theodelinda he made some impression upon Lombard cruelty and misbelief; through the Frankish monarchy he won back France from dissolution and heresy. As he saw the palaces around him deserted, and the broken aqueducts mourn over their intercepted streams in a wasted Campagna, and the glory of Trajan's forum become paler day by day, he thought that the end of the world was coming—and so thinking and so saying, he founded Christendom. In Rome itself, the almsgivers whom he had organised traversed the streets daily, carrying food to the hungry, medicine and medical aid to the sick. Every month he allotted portions of corn, wine, oil, cheese, fish, vegetables. The Church seemed to be the general provider. Every day he fed at his table twelve poor pilgrims, and served them himself. The nuns who took refuge in Rome, from the destruction of their monasteries by the Lombards, amounted to three thousand, whom Gregory supported, especially during the severe winter of 597. He wrote to the sister of the emperor Mauritius: "To their prayers and tears and fasts Rome owes its delivery from the sword of the Lombards".[184] Other cities also he saved, and so he distributed the vast patrimony of the Roman Church in Southern Italy, Sicily, Africa, France, Illyricum, with such wisdom and so beneficent a mercy, that historians trace to him the beginning of that temporal sovereignty which two hundred years after him the Popes were to take in change for the cruel abandonment, paired with incessant exaction, of Byzantine despotism; and the most loyal of subjects were called to be the most beneficent of sovereigns; and the people who had found them fathers from age to age rejoiced to see the fathership united with kingship.

What had happened to the Italy recovered by the arms of Belisarius and Narses, to the unity of the Roman empire, which caused the calamitous state described by Gregory?

Both Belisarius and Narses had enrolled a multifarious host of adventurers under the banner which professed to deliver Rome and Italy from the Gothic occupation. Narses especially had awakened the greed of the Lombards by the sight of Italy's fair lands. Scarcely had he ceased to govern Rome, in 567, when the effect of this became visible. What Alaric, what Odoacer, what Theodorick, had done, Alboin did with yet more terrible results; and the fourth captivity which Nova Roma had prepared for her mother, become in her mind a hated rival, was the hardest, the longest, the most destructive of all. It is doubtful whether the retort of the eunuch Narses to the empress Sophia, when she recalled him from his government to ply, as she said, the spindle, that he would spin for her such a thread as in her life she would not disentangle, is authentic, but it undoubtedly presents historic truth. Whether or not Narses called the Lombards into Italy, their king Alboin came from Pannonia over the Carnian Alps into the plain which has ever since borne their name; and this was in the next year—568—to the recal of Narses. The Goth and the Herules had worked much woe and wrought great destruction; but the Goths compared to the Lombards were as knights compared to villains. The Lombards, inferior to them by far in strength both of body and of mind, this rudest of Teuton races seemed incapable of receiving culture. It had, moreover, fewer elements in it capable of being worked into the stable order of a state. In belief it was partly Arian and partly pagan. It had also a mixture of Sarmatian blood. When they broke into Italy, the cities of that land, however wasted and depopulated through Attila and the Gothic wars, yet retained their Roman form, yet were full of ancient monuments, splendid still in desolation. Now, one after another fell under the sword of those barbarians. Milan surrendered to Alboin in the autumn of 569, and after three years' siege he entered as conqueror into Theodorick's palace in Pavia. Only Rome, Ravenna, and the cities of the coast still carried the imperial flag. The Romans themselves regarded as a marvel the maintenance of their scarcely defended city. Alboin aimed at making the palace of the Caesars his royal residence. His warriors advanced with terrible devastation from Spoleto to the very walls of Rome in the time of Pope John III., who died, after nearly thirteen years' government, the 13th July, 573.

Rome was then so severely pressed that the See of Peter remained more than a year unfilled; for the Lombards were encamped before Rome, and hindered communication with Byzantium, whence Benedict I., the newly-elected Pope, had to wait for the imperial confirmation. The Book of the Popes recites that during his four years' government the Lombards overran all Italy, and that pestilence and hunger consumed her people. Rome, also, was visited by both. The emperor Tiberius tried to succour it by sending corn from Egypt to the harbour Porto.

Alboin had been murdered, and Kleph had succeeded him, on whose death, in 575, the Lombards fell into anarchy, and were divided into thirty-six dukes, and Faroald, the first duke of Spoleto, held Rome besieged when Benedict I. died, in 578; and so his successor, Pelagius II., a Roman of Gothic descent, was consecrated without the emperor's confirmation. The beleaguered Pope sent a cry of distress by an embassy to the eastern emperor, together with a gift of 3000 pounds' weight of gold from the impoverished city. But the emperor, engaged in a Persian war, could only send insufficient troops to Ravenna, more precious to him than Rome, declined the Roman gold, and advised to corrupt with it the Lombard commanders. Zoto, the Lombard duke of Beneventum, returning from Rome, which had ransomed itself, destroyed St. Benedict's monastery of Monte Cassino, in 580. The monks escaped to Rome, carrying with them the Saint's autograph of his Rule. Pope Pelagius II. received them in the Lateran basilica. There they founded the first Benedictine monastery in Rome. They named it after St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, and so Constantine's basilica, or the Church of the Saviour, became in after-times St. John Lateran. Monte Cassino lay in ruins 140 years, during which time the great Order had its chief seat in Rome.

Thus did Rome and Italy learn what they had gained by reunion with the eastern empire under Justinian. The pitiless financial exaction of that empire was exerted wherever it had power. War and pestilence ravaged town and country. It cost the Church a labour of 200 years to turn the Lombards from Arians and savages into Catholics who should one day be capable of resisting a Barbarossa and generating a Dante.

What, during these 200 years, an imperial exarch at Ravenna was like Gregory tells us in a letter to his friend Sebastian, bishop of Sirmium: "Words cannot express what I suffer from your friend, the lord Romanus. I may say that his malice against us is worse than the swords of the Lombards. The enemies who slay us seem to us kinder than the magistrates of the commonwealth, who wear our hearts out with their malignity, their plundering, and their deceit. At one and the same time to superintend bishops and clergy, monasteries also and the people, carefully to watch against insidious attacks of our enemies, and be perpetually on guard against the treachery and ill-treatment of our rulers, you, my brother, can the better judge what labour and sorrow is here in proportion to the purity of your affection for me who suffer it."[185]

This glimpse will be enough of the generation which preceded the accession of St. Gregory to the Chair of Peter. The whole fifty years of his life up to that time were for his country like the prophet's scroll, inscribed with lamentation and mourning and woe. And in his words to the bishop of Sirmium he gives a faithful picture of the position which his successors held until the time when at length they invoked the king of the Franks to come to the succour of St. Peter.

The calamities which fell upon Italy, and especially upon Rome, in the five captures of the Gothic war, in the subsequent descent of the Lombards, in the subjection of the old capital to a distant and despotic lord, were so great that eye-witnesses declare no language could express them. That they were to the Popes themselves unspeakably distressing, that the Popes did all in their power to avert them, the letters of the Popes remain to testify. I must now dwell for a time on the singular result which they had upon the Roman Primacy. When temporal calamities less than these fell upon the cities of Alexandria and Antioch, the seats of the other two original Petrine patriarchates, the authority of their prelates sunk almost to nothing. Before these calamities they had yielded up a large portion of their dignity and autonomy to the overreaching see of the eastern capital, the rank of which, above that of a simple bishopric, rested on nothing but the emperor's will to concentrate spiritual power in his own hands, by making its seat for the whole eastern empire the city of the Bosporus. But when Rome was ruined in the Gothic war nothing of the kind took place. St. Gregory inherited his place as successor of St. Peter without the least impairment of the authority which his see had held from the beginning. One wound, indeed, had been inflicted upon it by the Herule Odoacer, when in occupation of the sovereign power which he held over Italy, in name, by delegation of the emperor Zeno, in fact, as head of the foreign mercenaries, he had claimed a right to confirm the election of the Pope when chosen. Theodorick and Theodatus had continued to exert that right—and from the Goths Justinian had taken it—and Gregory himself, as we have seen, had applied to the imperial power at Constantinople to frustrate his own election by clergy and people. But the Pope, when once recognised, entered upon his full and undiminished authority. All that St. Leo had been St. Gregory was, though Rome had been almost destroyed, and was in the temporal rule subject to the emperor's officer, the exarch at Ravenna. I do not know any fact of history which brings out more distinctly the character of the Pope as inheriting the charge over the whole Church committed by our Lord to St. Peter. That was not a charge depending on the city in which it might be exercised. It was a charge committed to the chief of the Apostles. As our Lord promised to be with the apostolic body to the consummation of the world, as all their spiritual powers depended on His being with them, so, above all, most of all, the spiritual power of their head. Rome might be absolutely destitute of inhabitants after Totila's victory, but the Pope was not touched. Rome might cease to be capital even of a province, but the Pope was not touched. And it was a series of the most terrible disasters which revealed this prerogative of the Pope as head of the Christian hierarchy. The Pope might be a captive at Constantinople, scorned, deceived, torn away even from the refuge of the altar, surrounded with spies, betrayed by subservient bishops and patriarchs, and, worst of all, be labouring under the stigma of an election originally enforced by arbitrary violence; a despotic emperor might do his worst, but the Pope's successors carried on his prerogatives unimpaired. The walls of Aurelian preserved Rome from the Lombard, but the Pontiff who kept guard over them was not contained in them. His rule was intangible by material attack as it was beyond the reach of material despotism. Italy might be ruined, and a new Rome made out of its ruins, but the Pope would be the maker of it. And the most terrible calamity was chosen to reveal this singular prerogative. The death of Senatus populusque Romanus discovered even to the outside world the life which proceeded from St. Peter's body, as each archbishop received from St. Peter's successor the pallium which had been laid upon it. Thus was conveyed to the mind by the senses that participation of the Primacy, in which consisted all the authority which he exercised over other bishops. The violence of the Teuton, the misbelief of the Arian, the despotism of the Byzantine, were unconsciously co-operating to this result.

For it must be added that the Rome which survived after the conquest by Justinian only lived by the Primacy of which it was the seat. Two historians[186] of the city, writing from quite opposite points of view, one a Catholic Christian, the other a rationalistic unbeliever, unite in witnessing that from the time of Narses the spiritual power of the Primacy was the spring of all action. Not only such new buildings as arose were churches and the work of the Popes; St. Gregory also fed the city from the patrimonium of the church which he administered. Rome had been made by her empire, which the political wisdom and valour of her citizens had formed through so many centuries. When at length the wandering of the nations had broken up that empire, and the northern soldiers whom the emperors, specially from Constantine onwards, had enrolled in her armies and taken for their ministers and generals, followed the example of Alaric and Ataulph, and assumed the rule for themselves, the situation of Rome offered it no protection. The emperor who, at the beginning of the fifth century, took refuge from Alaric in Ravenna was followed a century later by the Gothic king, whose body, still reposing in his splendid tomb at Ravenna, was a memorial that this fortress had been the centre of his power. Theodorick was succeeded by the exarch, the permanent representative of an absent lord. We are following the fortunes of Rome in the 300 years from Genseric to Astolphus. In the second and third of these three centuries Rome would have ceased to exist, but for the imperishable life which did not come from her but was stored up in her. That life was the form of her new body; otherwise it would have been a carcase lying prostrate in the dust of mouldering theatres and desolated baths. Their patriarchs saved neither Antioch nor Alexandria; but the Papacy not only saved Rome, but created her anew.

Out of such a Rome St. Gregory poured forth his sorrows to the empress Constantine, wife of Mauritius: "It is now seven-and-twenty years since we have been living in this city among the swords of the Lombards".[187] He was writing in the year 595, and he reckons from the descent of Alboin in 568. "What the sums called for from the Church in these years day by day to live at all have been I cannot express. I may say in a word that as your Majesties have, with the first army of Italy at Ravenna, a chancellor of the exchequer who supplies daily wants, so in this city for the like purpose I am such a person. And yet this same church which at one and the same time is at such endless expense for the clergy, the monasteries, the poor, the people, and moreover for the Lombards, is pressed also by the affliction of all the churches, which groan over the pride of this one man, yet do not venture to utter a word."

And Gregory, referring just before to the pride of this one man, who had the audacity to put in a letter to the Pope himself, a superscription in which, according to the Pope's judgment, he claimed to be sole bishop in the Church, used words which will serve to indicate what Gregory conceived his own authority to be, as well as the source on which it rested: "I beseech you, by Almighty God, not to permit your Majesty's time to be polluted by one man's arrogance. Do not in any way give your consent to so perverse an appellation. By no means let your Majesty in such a cause despise me the individual, for the sins of Gregory are indeed so great as to deserve such treatment, but there are no sins of the Apostle Peter that he should deserve in your time such treatment. Wherefore, I again and again entreat you, by Almighty God, that as former princes, your progenitors, have sought the favour of the holy Apostle Peter, so you also would seek it and preserve it for yourselves. Nor let his honour be in your mind the least diminished by our sins, his unworthy servant: that he may be now your helper in all things, and hereafter be able to pardon your sins."

I quote the following passage from a letter[188] to the emperor Mauritius himself, not only because Gregory alleges as the root of his own authority the three great words spoken by our Lord to Peter, but for the description of the times in which he lived, and the vast importance of union between the two great powers. This, he says, if faithfully maintained on both sides, would have protected them from such calamities.

"Your Majesty, who is appointed by God, watches, among the other cares of your empire, with the uprightness of a spiritual zeal over the preservation of sacerdotal charity. For, with piety as well as truth, you think that no one can rule well the things of this world unless he knows how to treat divine things, and that the peace of the human commonwealth depends on the peace of the universal Church. For, most gracious emperor, what power of man, what masterful arm of flesh, would presume to lay unholy hands upon the dignity of your most Christian empire, if the bishops were with one accord of mind to beseech their Redeemer for you by their words, and, if need be, by their deservings? Is there any nation so ferocious as to use its sword so cruelly for the destruction of the faithful, unless our life, who are called but are not bishops, had upon it the stain of the worst actions? While, deserting what belongs to us, and aiming at what is beyond us, we add our own sins to the brute strength of barbarians. Our guilt sharpens the swords of our enemies, and weighs down the strength of the State. What excuse can we make who press down the people of God, over which we unworthily preside, with the burden of our sins? Who preach with our tongues and kill by our examples? Whose works teach iniquity, while their words make a show of justice? We wear down the body with fasts, while the mind swells with arrogance. This puts on poor apparel; that has more than imperial pride. We lie in ashes, and despise dignities. We teach the humble, and lead the proud, and hide the wolf's teeth in the sheep's face. What result has all this but that, while we impose on men, we are made known to God? Thus it is with the greatest wisdom that your Majesty seeks the peace of the Church as the means of stilling the tumults of war, and would make the hearts of bishops rest once more in its solid structure. That is my wish: in that to the utmost of my power I obey you.

"But since it is not my cause but God's, and since not I only but the whole Church is thrown into confusion; since sacred laws, since venerable councils, since the very commands even of our Lord Jesus Christ are disturbed by the invention of this haughty and pompous language, let the most pious emperor lance the wound and overcome the sick man's resistance by the force of the imperial authority. If you bind up that wound, you raise up the State; and by cutting off such abuses, contribute to the length of your reign.

"For to all who know the Gospel it is notorious that the charge of the whole Church was entrusted by the voice of the Lord to the holy Apostle Peter, chief of all the Apostles." And he then cites, as so many of his predecessors cited, the three great words. He concludes: "Peter received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the power of binding and loosing, the charge of the whole Church, the Principate over it; yet he is not called the universal Apostle, and John, my colleague as bishop, endeavours to be called universal bishop.

"All things in Europe are delivered over to the power of barbarians. Our cities are destroyed, our fortresses overthrown, our provinces depopulated. The ground remains untilled. Day by day idolaters exercise their rage upon the faithful, who are cruelly slaughtered; and bishops who should lie in dust and ashes seek for themselves vanitous names: glory in new and profane titles.

"Am I in this defending a cause proper to myself? Am I resisting my own special injury? Nay, it is the cause of Almighty God: the cause of the universal Church. Who is he who, in spite of the commands of the Gospel, in spite of the decrees of councils, presumes to usurp a new title for himself? I would that he who has agreed to be called universal may be himself one, without the diminution of others.

"And we know, indeed, that many bishops of Constantinople have fallen into the gulf of heresy; have become not heretics only but heresiarchs. Thence came Nestorius, who, deeming Jesus Christ, the Mediator of God and man, to be two persons, because he did not believe that God could become man, went even to the extent of Jewish unbelief. Thence came Macedonius, who denied the Godhead of the Holy Spirit, consubstantial with the Father and the Son. If, then, anyone seizes upon that name for himself, as in the judgment of all good men he has done, the whole Church—which God forbid—falls from its state when he who is called universal falls. But far from the hearts of Christians be that blasphemous name in which the honour due to all bishops is taken away, while one madly arrogates it to himself.

"I know that in honour of St. Peter, prince of the Apostles, that title was offered to the Roman Pontiff during the venerable Council of Chalcedon. But no one of them ever consented to use this name of singularity; lest while something peculiar was given to one, all bishops should be deprived of the honour due to them. Do we, then, not seek the glory of this name, even when offered to us, and does another catch at it for himself, when it is not offered?

"Your Majesty, then, must bend that neck which refuses obedience to the canons. He must be restrained, who does an injury to the whole Church; who is proud in heart; who has a greed after a name given to none other; who by such a singular name throws a slur upon your empire also in putting himself over it.

"We are all scandalised at this: let the author of the scandal return to right, and all contest between bishops will cease. For I am the servant of all bishops so long as they live like bishops. But whoever, through vainglory and contrary to the statutes of the Fathers, lifts his neck against Almighty God, I trust in Almighty God that he will not bend me even with the sword."

As Gregory quotes the three words said to Peter, with application of them to his own see, it seems needless to repeat other passages in which he says the same thing. But there is a letter to Eulogius,[189] patriarch of Alexandria, which begins by saying that this patriarch had written to him much concerning the See of Peter, and that he sat in it in his successors down to Gregory's own time. Whereupon Gregory, before himself citing the three words, says: "Who does not know that holy Church is founded on the solidity of the chief Apostle, whose name expressed his firmness, being called Peter from Petra". Then he calls the attention of Eulogius to the fact that all the three patriarchal sees were sees of Peter, with this remarkable inference, that "though there were many Apostles, only the see of the prince of the Apostles, which is the see of one in three places, received supreme authority in virtue of its very principate".[190]

Let us attempt to gather the meaning of the various statements quoted from St. Gregory, and see whether they do not form a coherent whole.

He claims, like all his predecessors, the three great texts concerning Peter, as conveying the charge of the whole Church, the Principate, to Peter and his heirs, that is, the Popes preceding him.

He contrasts in the most pointed manner this charge with the name of Ecumenical, which he translates universal, patriarch, as assumed by the bishop of Constantinople, and he contrasts not the name only, but the thing which he conceives to be meant by the name and carried in it.

He contrasts likewise the moderation of his predecessors, who, though inheriting Peter's charge over the whole Church, declined to accept a name which seemed to exclude other bishops from their proper honour.

Peter's charge over the whole Church, then, in the judgment of Gregory, had descended to himself, as he wrote to the empress, "though the sins of Gregory, who is Peter's unworthy servant, are great, the sins of the Apostle are none," to justify the treatment he has met with in this assumption by another of the title Ecumenical. In a word, the charge is a command of the Gospel, the assumption is "a name of blasphemy and diabolical pride, and a forerunner of Antichrist".

I conceive that we may interpret St. Gregory's mind in this way. When he so wrote he had behind him rather more than five full centuries since St. Peter and St. Paul had given up their lives in Rome for the Christian faith, and become its patron saints. In all that time Gregory had seen the hierarchy founded by the bearer of the keys fill the earth. Peter, as a token of his Principate, had put his name in the three chief sees, sitting himself as bishop in Antioch for seven years; sitting also himself in Rome, as bishop, and dying there; sending also his disciple Mark from Rome to Alexandria. Our Lord's gift and charge to Peter was the source of unity in His Church. He Himself being mediator between God and man united His Church with the Divine Trinity in unity. Then He gave the keys of His kingdom to Peter, in whom unity was secured through the three patriarchs and the other bishops. Such was the constitution which stood without a break before St. Gregory from the Apostles to the Nicene Council. From St. Sylvester to his own time the Popes had been maintaining that constitution. But now the claim of the bishops of Constantinople was directly against this constitution. Pope Gelasius, his predecessor, had told that bishop in his day that he had no rank above that of a simple bishop.[191] For all their adventitious rank they rested, not upon God, not upon Jesus Christ, not upon St. Peter, but upon the residence of the emperors in their city. That was the ground upon which they called themselves ecumenical, a title which Gregory interpreted universal. Their first step in moving beyond the position of simple bishop was when the 150 bishops at Constantinople in 381 attempted to give them the second place in rank. And this they did not upon any ground of apostolic descent, but because Constantinople was Nova Roma. As to their act in doing this Gregory writes to Eulogius: "The Roman Church up to this time does not possess, nor has received, the canons or the acts of that council; it has received that council so far as it condemned Macedonius".[192] Their next step was at the Council of Chalcedon to attempt passing a canon, to the effect that the Fathers had given its rank to Rome because it was the capital, that the 150 Fathers had therefore given the second rank to Constantinople, because it was the new capital; and that, therefore, the Pontic, the Arian, and the Thracian exarchs of Caesarea, Ephesus, and Heraclea should be subjected to it. This canon St. Leo had absolutely rejected, and the emperor Marcian had accepted his rejection. In the 130 years from St. Leo to himself, St. Gregory had seen the assumptions of the bishops of Constantinople continually increasing. They rested upon the imperial favour. And now in the case of John the Faster they had gone so far that he prefixed his assumed title of ecumenical patriarch to the very documents which he sent to the Pope for revision. And this though the cause had been settled by himself, and had now come before the Pope, whose power therefore to revise the sentence of one who called himself ecumenical patriarch he did not dispute.

Nor, indeed, did it appear over what domain he claimed to be universal. It might be over the eastern bishops; it might be over the two patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, with the later patriarch of Jerusalem; it might be over the actual Roman empire; it might be, finally, over the whole Church. But whichever it might be, the claim would equally be, in Gregory's judgment, unlawful, based simply and solely upon imperial power; resting also in its origin upon a direct untruth, which assaulted the whole foundation whereon the charge of the whole Church, the Principate of Gregory, rested; couched, moreover, in language which would enable future generations of Greeks to draw the conclusion that, since the Primacy of Rome proceeded from its being the capital, when Rome ceased to be the capital, and Constantine's city became the capital, the Primacy also passed to it.

Thus, in the whole assumption of the bishops of Constantinople, it was presupposed that the spiritual power and the hierarchy of the Church descended not from Jesus Christ, but from the emperors.[193] So it is clear that this empty title, which seemed to the emperor Mauritius a meaningless word, a mere nothing, contained in itself the whole system of Antichrist. The Pope saw it, and his words are the more significant when we remember that at the time he uttered them the man had already reached full manhood who was to cut the empire of Justinian in half, to deprive of their liberty three of the eastern patriarchs, destroy a multitude of the Christian people, and be parent of the religion which through the course of 1200 years has shown itself to be specially anti-Christian. There in his Arab tent, as yet the faithful husband of an old wife, was the future Khalif, in whom the spiritual and the temporal power would be joined together; who would set up in a false theocracy that usurpation which Constantine's eastern successors were striving to carry out in the Christian Church. Mahommed would consecrate that very false principle which was at the root of the ecumenical patriarch's arrogance. Thus the strongest word used by Gregory of John the Faster's assumption, that it was "a name of blasphemy, of diabolical pride, and a forerunner of Antichrist," received its exact verification within a generation after Gregory had spoken it.

But Gregory's charge and Principate were of divine creation, and did not exclude the proper power and jurisdiction either of every bishop or of the whole episcopate, at the head of which it stood, and through which it worked, carefully maintaining what had been from the beginning, preserving the rank and place of each, consolidating all in the one structure.[194] The intruder set up by the imperial power deposed Alexandria and Antioch to make them subject to himself; the lawful shepherd maintained Alexandria and Antioch because they grew upon the tree of which he was the trunk. His charge did not exclude, but did indeed include them. The reasoning of St. Gregory in his letter to the emperor of the day, and his very words in his letter to the patriarch Eulogius, have become a matter of faith by their enrolment in the decree of the Vatican Council. That decree defines the Principate to be an episcopal power of jurisdiction, which is immediate, over the whole Church. By it the whole Church becomes one flock, under one shepherd. And it further defines that, "It is so far from being true that this power of the Supreme Pontiff is injurious to the ordinary and immediate power of episcopal jurisdiction, by which bishops placed by the Holy Spirit have succeeded the Apostles, and as true pastors feed and rule the flocks severally assigned to them, each his own, that this jurisdiction is asserted, strengthened, and maintained by the supreme and universal pastor, according to St. Gregory's words: 'My honour is the honour of the universal Church; my honour is the solid strength of my brethren; then am I truly honoured when his due rank is given to each'."[195]

It may be observed that Gregory's position against the assumption of John the Faster is the same as St. Leo's position against Anatolius. In both cases the Popes discerned the hostile power located in the see of Nova Roma which was at work against the original order of the Church, and the Pope who was at the head of it. The only difference lies in the great advance which the hostile power had made on one hand, and on the other hand the excessively difficult temporal position in which St. Gregory had to fight the battle for the cause, as he said, of the universal Church. Yet the speech of the Pope beleaguered by the Lombards in a decimated and subject Rome is as strong as the speech of the Pope who had the imperial grandchildren of Theodosius for friends and supporters, and, when they failed, saved Rome by her two Apostles from the destruction menaced by Attila and Genseric.

But there was no one in the eastern Church—neither the emperor Mauritius, nor the patriarch John the Faster, nor the patriarch Eulogius—who failed to acknowledge the Pope's charge over the whole Church, grounded on the three texts to Peter. Gregory himself reprehends the patriarch Eulogius for giving him in the superscription of his letter the title "universal Pope". He chose for himself, in opposition to the bishop John's arrogated title of ecumenical patriarch, that of "servant of the servants of God". The title chosen indicated the temper in which St. Gregory exercised the vast charge which he had inherited. For if there is any one principle which seems to serve as the favourite maxim of his whole pontificate, it is that expressed in a letter to the bishop of Syracuse. That bishop had been speaking of an African primate who had professed that he was subject to the Apostolic See. St. Gregory's comment is: "If a bishop is in any fault, I know not any bishop who is not subject to it. But when no fault requires it, all are equal according to the estimation of humility."[196] Natalis, archbishop of Salona, in Dalmatia, had given the Pope much trouble. The Pope deals with him tenderly in more than one letter. But he says: "After the letters of my predecessor (Pelagius) and my own, in the matter of Honoratus the archdeacon, were sent to your Holiness, in despite of the sentence of us both, the above-mentioned Honoratus was deprived of his rank. Had either of the four patriarchs done this, so great an act of contumacy could not have been passed over without the most grievous scandal. However, as your brotherhood has since returned to your duty, I take notice neither of the injury done to me, nor of that to my predecessor."[197]

Of the immense energy shown by St. Gregory in the exercise of his Principate, of the immense influence wielded by him both in the East and in the West, of the acknowledgment of his Principate by the answers which emperor and patriarch made to his demands and rebukes, we possess an imperishable record in the fourteen books of his letters which have been preserved to us. They are somewhat more than 850 in number. They range over every subject, and are addressed to every sort of person. If he rebukes the ambition of a patriarch, and complains of an emperor's unjust law, he cares also that the tenants on the vast estates of the Church which his officers superintend at a distance should not be in any way harshly treated. He writes to his defensor in Sicily: "I am informed that if anyone has a charge against any clerks, you throw a slight upon the bishops by causing these clerks to appear in your own court. If this be so, we expressly order you to presume to do so no more, because beyond doubt it is very unseemly. If anyone charges a clerk, let him go to his bishop, for the bishop himself to hear the case, or depute judges. If it come to arbitration, let the so-deputed judges cause the parties to select a judge. If a clerk or a layman have anything against a bishop, you should act between them either by hearing the cause yourself, or by inducing the parties to choose judges. For if his own jurisdiction is not preserved to each bishop, what else results but that the order of the Church is thrown into confusion by us, the very persons who are charged with its maintenance.

"We have also been informed that certain clerks, put into penance for faults they had committed by our most reverend brother the bishop John, have been dismissed by your authority without his knowledge. If this is true, know that you have committed an altogether improper act, worthy of great censure. Restore, therefore, at once those clerks to their own bishop, nor ever do this again, or you will incur from us severe punishment."[198]

I have quoted already his letters on eastern affairs. They might be enlarged upon to any extent. As to those who held the highest rank, he has warm sympathy with a deposed patriarch of Antioch, sending him a copy of the letter which announced his accession, as well as to the sitting patriarchs. After twenty years' deposition Anastasius was restored. He has also close friendship with Eulogius, patriarch of Alexandria, to whom he writes gracefully: "Besides our mutual affection, there is a peculiar bond uniting us to the Alexandrian Church. All know that the Evangelist Mark was sent by his master Peter; thus we are clasped together by the unity of the master and the disciple. I seem to sit in the disciple's see for the master's sake, and you in the master's see for the sake of the disciple. To this we must add your personal merits; for we know how you follow the institutions of him from whom you spring. Thus we are touched with compassion for what you suffer; but we shrink from telling you what we endure ourselves by the daily plundering, killing, and maiming of our people by the Lombards."[199]

Let us here take a short view of Gregory's incessant activity among the western nations in process of formation. In his struggle to tame the ferocity, lawlessness, and unbelief of the Lombards, he betakes himself to the illustrious Catholic queen Theodelinda. He strives to use her influence with her husband Agilulf, on behalf of Rome, ever the object of oppression. Knowing her to be a good Christian, he sent her his Dialogues. He also set before her the supremacy of his see, because she had been misled into withdrawing from the communion of the new archbishop of Milan, Constantius. The Pope assures her that the archbishop, as well as himself, venerates the doctrinal decisions of the Four Councils. He adds: "Since, then, by my own public profession you know the entireness of our belief, it is fitting that you have no further scruple concerning the Church of St. Peter, prince of the Apostles. But persist in the true faith, and ground your life on the rock of the Church, that is, in his confession: lest your many tears and your good works avail nothing, if they be separated from the true faith. For as branches wither without a root, so works, however good they seem, are nothing if separated from the solidity of the faith."[200]

Ten of his letters are addressed to Brunechild, the terrible queen of the Franks. But his letter to all the Gallic bishops in the kingdom of Childebert will best set forth his authority. That king then reigned over nearly all France. The Pope began by saying that the universe itself was ruled by graduated orders of spirits. If there was such distinction of ranks even in the sinless, what man should hesitate to obey a disposition to which angels are subject? "Since, then, each individual office is happily fulfilled when there is a superior to whom application can be made, we have thought it good, following ancient custom, to make our brother Virgilius, bishop of Arles, our representative in the churches which are in the kingdom of our most illustrious son king Childebert. We do this in order that the integrity of the Catholic faith, that is, of the Four holy Councils, may by God's protection be carefully preserved; and that, if any contention should arise between our brethren and fellow-bishops, he may, by virtue of his authority, as holding the place of the Apostolic See, reduce it by discreet moderation. We have also enjoined him, that if any contest should arise requiring the presence of others, he should collect a sufficient number of our brethren and fellow-bishops, discuss the matter equitably, and determine it in conformity with the canons. But if, which the divine power avert, contest should arise on a matter of faith, or some business emerge about which there is great hesitation, and which for its magnitude requires the judgment of the Apostolic See, after diligent examination of the facts, he is to make report to us, that we may terminate all doubt thereon by a fitting sentence."[201]

In this letter we are at a hundred years after the conversion of Clovis. The Catholic kingdom has swallowed up its Arian competitors whether at Toulouse or at Lyons, and over it stands the protecting vigour of Gregory, as a hundred and fifty years before that of Leo strove to support the falling empire. Arles receives the pallium for the Frankish kingdom, as it held it for the Theodocian empire, from Rome. Leo saw the imperial line expire at Rome; from Rome Gregory places the bishops "of his most illustrious son Childebert" under the old primacy of Arles. This is the "solidity" of the rock of Peter in which Gregory recommends the queens Theodelinda and Brunechild to place themselves.

We know how Gregory, while yet a Roman deacon and monk, walking one day from the palace which he had made a monastery, scarcely more than a stone's-throw to the forum in which a slave-market was held, was moved to pity at the sight of the fair-haired Angles; how he was minded to leave Rome himself on a mission to convert them; how he was kept back by the affection of the Romans; how Pope Pelagius suddenly died of the plague, and Gregory, in spite of all his efforts, was made to succeed him; how from the See of Peter he sent out Augustine and his forty monks to the lost island in the Atlantic, where, since Stilicho withdrew the Roman armies, every cruelty had revelled, and every pagan abomination had been practised by the Saxon invaders. To many, no doubt, the subsequent success of Gregory's venture to convert the Anglo-Saxon England has served to disguise its danger and difficulty at the time. When Augustine reached the shores of Kent, the successive invasions of the Saxon pirates had set up eight petty kingdoms upon the ruin of the Roman civilisation and the Christian Church. The miseries which are covered under those five generations of unrecorded strife are supposed to have exceeded the misery endured in France, Spain, Italy, and the Illyrian provinces during the same time. The old inhabitants were reduced to slavery, or exterminated, or driven to the three corners of Cornwall, Wales, and Strathclyde. So bitter was the British feeling under the destruction of their country and the wrongs they had endured, that it overcame all Christian principle in them, and the Welsh refused all aid to the Roman missionary in the attempt to convert a race so cruel. It required all St. Gregory's firmness to induce his own monks to persist. In all the annals of Christian enterprise during eighteen centuries, there is probably not one which presented less hope of success than St. Gregory's resolution to add the spiritual beauty of the Christian to the physical beauty which he admired in the captives of the Roman forum.

Among those to whom he applied to assist and further his purpose was the great queen of the Franks. To Brunechild he directed a letter saluting her, he says, with the charity of a father: "We hear that, by the help of God, the English people is willing to become Christian; and we recommend the bearer of these, the servant of God, Augustine, to your Excellency, to help him in all things, and to protect his work".[202]

It was also to Virgilius, bishop of Arles, and primate of all the Gallic bishops, as we have seen, by Gregory's own appointment, that he sent Augustine, after his first success with Ethelbert, to receive episcopal consecration.

From Gregory's own hand, and in virtue of his apostolic power, England in its second spring received its division into two provinces, one to be seated at Canterbury, the other at York. His letters to St. Augustine still exist to show how he entered into all the difficulties of the missionary, all the needs of a land in conversion from paganism. From him date the great prerogatives of the see of Canterbury, extending over the whole island, inasmuch as it was the matrix of the Church in England. If sons may deny their father, Englishmen may deny Gregory, and add to schism the guilt of parricide.

But Gregory was hardly less active in restoring Spain from the Arian blight than in giving birth to a new Christian England. He writes, in 594: "We have heard from many who have come from Spain how lately Hermenegild, son of Leovigild, king of the Visigoths, has been converted from the Arian heresy to the Catholic faith by the preaching of Leander, bishop of Seville, long united to me in intimate friendship. His Arian father, by bribes and threats alike, tried to bring him back. Not succeeding, he deprived him of his rank and all his possessions. When this also failed, he put him in close imprisonment, fettering both neck and hands. So Hermenegild learnt to despise the earthly kingdom, and to yearn after the heavenly, while he lay in bonds and sackcloth. When Easter came, his father sent him in the middle of the night an Arian bishop that he might receive communion sacrilegiously consecrated, and so recover his favours. Hermenegild repulsed the bishop with strong reproaches. The father, hearing his report, burst into fury and sent officers to destroy him. They split open his skull with an axe, and so destroyed the life of the body which he had disregarded. Miracles followed. Psalms were heard about the body of the royal martyr—royal, indeed, because he was a martyr."[203]

Writing to St. Leander, archbishop of Seville, Gregory says: "I am so tossed by this world's waves that I cannot steer to harbour this old weather-beaten bark which the secret dispensation of God has committed to my care. Shipwreck creaks in its worn-out planks. Dearest brother, if you love me, stretch out the hand of your prayers to me in this tempest. Your reward for helping me will be greater success in your own labours.

"No words of mine can express the joy which I feel at hearing the perfect conversion of our common son, king Rechared, to the Catholic faith."[204]

On another occasion Gregory writes to Leander, sending him the pallium, "blessed by Peter, prince of the Apostles," only to be used at Mass: "I see by your letter that burning charity which kindles others. He who is not himself on fire cannot inflame others. I always call to mind your life with great veneration. But as for me I am not what I was: 'Call me not Noemi, which is fair; call me Mara, for I am full of bitterness'. Following the way of my Head, I had resolved to be the scorn of men, the outcast of the people. But the burden of this honour weighs me down; innumerable cares pierce me like swords. There is no rest of the heart. I was tranquil in my monastery. The tempest arose; I am in its waves, suffering with the loss of quiet a shipwreck of mind. The gout oppresses you; I also am terribly pained by it. It will be well if, under these strokes of the scourge, we perceive them to be gifts, by which the sense of the flesh may atone for sins which delights of the flesh may have led us to commit.

"The shortness of my letter will show how weak and how occupied I am, who say so little to one whom I love so much."[205]

St. Gregory tells us that king Rechared, after the martyrdom of his brother St. Hermenegild, was converted from the Arian heresy, and brought the whole Visigothic nation to the Catholic faith. "The brother of a martyr fitly became a preacher of the faith. If Hermenegild had not died a martyr, this he would not have been able to do; for 'except the grain of wheat falling into the ground dieth, itself remaineth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit'. This we see to be doing in the members which we know to have been done in the Head. In the nation of the Visigoths one died that many might live."[206]

A letter of St. Gregory to this king Rechared is extant, which one of the greatest French bishops, Hincmar of Reims, nearly three hundred years after it was written, thought worthy to be sent as a present to the emperor Charles the Bald. I quote portions of it:[207]

"Most excellent son, words cannot tell the delight which I receive from your work and from your life. When I hear the power of that new miracle wrought in our days, that by means of your Excellency the whole nation of the Goths has been brought over from the error of the Arian heresy to the solidity of the right faith, I exclaim with the prophet, 'This is the change of the hand of the Most High'. Is there a heart of stone which would not be softened on hearing of so great a work into praises of Almighty God and affection for your Excellency? Often, when my sons meet, it is my pleasure to tell them of the deeds wrought by you, and to join my admiration with theirs. I get angry with myself that I am lazy, useless, and inert, while kings are labouring for the gain of the heavenly country by the ingathering of souls. What, then, shall I allege to the Judge at that tremendous tribunal, if I come before Him then with empty hands, while your Excellency leads a long train of the faithful whom you have drawn into the grace of the true faith by zealous and continuous preaching? But by God's gift this is my great consolation, to love in you that holy work which I have not in myself. When your acts move me to a great exultation, I make mine by charity what is yours by labour. Thus, in your work and our exultation over it, we may cry out with the angels over the conversion of the Goths, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will'. But how joyfully St. Peter, prince of the Apostles, has received your offerings is borne witness to all men by your life.

"You tell me that the abbots, who were carrying your offering to St. Peter, were driven back by a bad sea passage into Spain. Your gifts, which afterwards arrived, were not refused, but the courage of their bearers was tried. The adversity which good intentions encounter is a trial of virtue, not a judgment of reprobation. When St. Paul came to preach in Italy, how great was the blessing he brought; yet he was shipwrecked in coming, but the ship of his heart was not broken by the waves of the sea.

"Also, I am told that your Excellency issued a certain decree against the misbelief of the Jews, which they strove by a bribe to have modified. This bribe you despised, and in the desire to please God preferred innocence to gold. This brought to my mind king David's act. He longed for a draught from the fountain of Bethlehem, which the enemy's host encompassed. His soldiers risked their lives to bring it. But he refused, saying: 'God forbid that I should drink the blood of these men. So he offered it to the Lord.'[208] If an armed king made a sacrifice to God of the water which he refused, think what a sacrifice to Almighty God that king presented who for His love refused to receive, not water, but gold. Therefore, most excellent son, I say confidently that the gold which you refused to receive against God you offered to Him. These are great deeds, the glory of which is due to God....

"Government of subjects should be tempered with great moderation, lest power steal away the judgment. A kingdom is ruled well when the glory of ruling does not overmaster the spirit. Provide also against fits of anger, lest unlimited power be used hurriedly. Anger in punishing even delinquents should not anticipate judgment like a mistress, but follow reason as a servant, coming when she is called. If it once is in possession of the mind, it puts down to justice even a cruel deed. Therefore it is written: 'The wrath of man worketh not the justice of God'; and again: 'Let everyone be swift to hear but slow to speak'. I do not doubt but that by God's help you practise all this. But as opportunity offers, I creep behind your good works, that when an adviser adds himself to what you do without advice, you may not be alone in your doing. May Almighty God stretch forth His heavenly hand to protect you in all your acts, granting you prosperity in the present life, and, after long years, eternal joy.

"I enclose a small key from the most sacred body of the Apostle St. Peter, with his blessing. It contains an iron filing from his chains, that what bound his neck for martyrdom may deliver yours from all sin. I have also given the bearer of these a cross for you: it contains some of the wood of the Lord's cross, and hair of St. John Baptist; by which you may always be consoled by our Saviour through the intercession of His precursor. To our most reverend brother and fellow-bishop Leander we have sent the pallium from the See of the Apostle St. Peter, in accordance with ancient custom, with your life, with his own goodness and dignity."