This letter of St. Gregory had been drawn forth by one from king Rechared to him, in which the king said he had been minded to inform of his conversion one who was superior to all other bishops, that he had sent a golden jewelled chalice which he hoped might be found worthy of the Apostle who was first in honour. "I beseech your Highness, when you have an opportunity, to find me out with your golden letters. For how truly I love you is not, I think, unknown to one whose breast the Lord inspires, and those who behold you not in the body, yet hear your good report; I commend to your Holiness with the utmost veneration Leander, bishop of Seville, who has been the means of making known to us your good will. I am delighted to hear of your health, and beg of your Christian prudence that you would frequently commend to our common Lord in your prayers the people who, under God, are ruled by us, and have been added to Christ in your times, that true charity towards God may be strengthened by the very distance which divides us."[209]

The fact commemorated in these letters was indeed one for which the Pope might well use the angelical hymn of praise. "The bishops of Spain,"[210] says Gibbon, "respected themselves and were respected by the public; their indissoluble union confirmed their authority; and the regular discipline of the Church introduced peace, order, and stability into the government of the State. From the reign of Rechared, the first Catholic king, to that of Witiza, the immediate predecessor of the unfortunate Roderic, sixteen national councils were successively convened. The six metropolitans—Toledo, Seville, Merida, Braga, Tarragona, and Narbonne—presided according to their respective seniority; the assembly was composed of their suffragan bishops, who appeared in person or by their proxies; and a place was assigned to the most holy or opulent of the Spanish abbots. During the first three days of the convocation, as long as they agitated the ecclesiastical questions of doctrine and discipline, the profane laity was excluded from their debates, which were conducted, however, with decent solemnity. But on the morning of the fourth day the doors were thrown open for the entrance of the great officers of the palace, the dukes and counts of the provinces, the judges of the cities, and the Gothic nobles; and the decrees of heaven were ratified by the consent of the people. The same rules were observed in the provincial assemblies, the annual synods which were empowered to hear complaints and to redress grievances; and a legal government was supported by the prevailing influence of the Spanish clergy.... The national councils of Toledo, in which the free spirit of the barbarians was tempered and guided by episcopal policy, have established some prudent laws for the common benefit of the king and people. The vacancy of the throne was supplied by the choice of the bishops and palatines; and after the failure of the line of Alaric, the regal dignity was still limited to the pure and noble blood of the Goths. The clergy who anointed their lawful prince always recommended the duty of allegiance; and the spiritual censures were denounced on the heads of the impious subjects who should resist his authority, conspire against his life, or violate by an indecent union the chastity even of his widow. But the monarch himself, when he ascended the throne, was bound by a reciprocal oath to God and his people that he would faithfully execute his important trust. The real or imaginary faults of his administration were subject to the control of a powerful aristocracy; and the bishops and palatines were guarded by a fundamental privilege that they should not be degraded, imprisoned, tortured, nor punished with death, exile, or confiscation, unless by the free and public judgment of their peers."

We have here the historian, who is one of the bitterest enemies of the Christian Church and Faith, avowing that the barbarian Visigoths received from the hands of that Church and Faith, at the end of the sixth century, the great institutions of a limited Christian monarchy, consecrated by the Church, in which the king at his accession solemnly avowed his responsibility for his exercise of the immense functions entrusted to him; also of parliaments, in which clergy and laity sat together in common deliberation upon the affairs of the State, grievances were redressed, and laws for the benefit of king and people passed; in fact, a reign of legal government, based upon law and justice, and confirmed by religious sanction.

And in all this the hand of the Pope was seen, sending to the chief bishop of Spain the pallium direct from the body of St. Peter, on which it had been laid, as the visible symbol of apostolic power dwelling in the Apostle's See, and radiating from it.

This is the first instance, and not the least striking, of a fact which lies at the foundation of modern Europe; for so the Teuton war leaders became Christian kings, and so the northern barbarians were changed into Christian nations. For that which Gibbon here describes took place in all the Teuton peoples who accepted the Catholic faith. He has elsewhere said: "The progress of Christianity has been marked by two glorious and decisive victories: over the learned and luxurious citizens of the Roman empire, and over the warlike barbarians of Scythia and Germany, who subverted the empire and embraced the religion of the Romans".[211]

Of this latter victory we can celebrate the accomplishment, as St. Gregory did, in the words of the angelic hymn, but the details have not been preserved for us, even in the scanty proportion which we possess concerning the former. Fighting for thirty years with the Lombards for the very existence of Rome, Gregory was the contemporary and witness of this second victory. Not until the Arian heresy was subdued by the Catholic faith could it be said to be accomplished. The pontificate of his ancestor in the third degree, Pope Felix III., might be called heroic, in that, while under the domination of the Arian Herule, Odoacer, he resisted the meddling with the received doctrine of the Church by the emperor Zeno, guided by the larger mind and treacherous fraud of Acacius, the bishop of Constantinople, who ruled its emperor. Then the Arian Vandals bitterly persecuted the Church in Africa, and the Visigoth Arians had possession of France from the Loire southwards, and of Spain. Nowhere in the whole world was there a Catholic prince. The north and east of France and Belgium was held by the still pagan Franks. By the time of Gregory, Clovis and his sons had extinguished the Arian Visigoth kingdom and the Arian kingdom of Burgundy, and ruled one Catholic kingdom of all France. Under Rechared, the Arian Visigoth kingdom in Spain became Catholic. Gregory also announced to his friend, the patriarch Eulogius, that the pagan Saxons in England were receiving the Catholic faith by thousands from his missionary. The taint which the wickedness of the eastern emperor Valens had been so mysteriously allowed to communicate to the nascent faith of the Teuton tribes, through the noblest of their family, the Goths, was, during the century which passed between Pope Felix and Pope Gregory, purged away. It was decided beyond recal that the new nations of the West should be Catholic. Five times had Rome been taken and wasted: at one moment, it is said, all its inhabitants had deserted it and fled. The ancient city was extinct: in and out of it rose the Rome of the Popes, which Gregory was feeding and guarding. The eastern emperor, who called himself the Roman prince, in recovering her had destroyed her; but the life that was in her Pontiff was indestructible. The ecumenical patriarch was foiled by the Servant of the servants of God: in proportion as the eastern bishops submitted their original hierarchy, of apostolic institution, and the graduated autonomy which each enjoyed under it, to an imperial minister, termed a patriarch, in Constantinople, all the bishops of the West, placed as they were under distinct kingdoms, found their common centre, adviser, champion, and ruler in the Chair of Peter, fixed in a ruined Rome. If Gregory, in his daily distress, thought that the end of the world was coming, all subsequent ages have felt that in him the world of the future was already founded. In the two centuries since the death of the great Theodosius, the countries which form modern Europe had passed through indescribable disturbance, a misery without end—dislodgement of the old proprietors, a settlement of new inhabitants and rulers. The Christian religion itself had receded for a time far within the limits which it had once reached, as in the north of France, in Germany, and in Britain. The rulers of broad western lands, with the conquering host which they led, had become the victims first, and then the propagators, of the same fatal heresy. The conquered population alone remained Catholic. The conversion of Clovis was the first light which arose in this darkness. And now, a hundred years after that conversion, Paris and Bordeaux, and Toulouse and Lyons, Toledo and Seville, were Catholic once more, and Gregory, a provincial captive in a collapsing Rome, was owned by all these cities as the standard and arbiter of their faith, and the king of the Visigoths thankfully received a few filings from the chains of the Apostle Peter as a present which worthily celebrated his conversion.

It is to be observed that this absolute defeat of the Arian heresy in several countries is accomplished in spite of the power which, in all of them, was wielded by Arian rulers. In vain had Genseric, Hunnerich, Guntamund, and Thrasimund oppressed and tortured the Catholics of Africa, banished their bishops, and set up nominees of their own as Arian bishops in their places for a hundred years. No sooner did Belisarius land on their soil than the fabric reared with every possible deceit and cruelty fell to the ground. The Arian Vandal king was carried away in triumph, as the spoil of a single battle, to Constantinople, and the Catholic bishops, while they hailed Justinian as their deliverer, met in plenary council, acknowledging the Primacy of Peter, as in the days of St. Augustine. In vain had the powerful Visigoth monarchy, seated during three generations at Toulouse, persecuted with fraud and cruelty its Catholic people. A single blow from the arm of Clovis delivered from their rule the whole country from the Loire to the Pyrenees. In vain had Gondebald and his family in Burgundy wavered between the heresy which he professed and the Catholic faith which he admired. The children of Clovis absorbed that kingdom also. But the strongest example of all remains. In vain, too, had Theodorick, after the murder of his rival Odoacer when an invited guest in the banquet of Ravenna, covered over the savage, and governed with wisdom and moderation a Catholic people, whom he soothed by choosing their noblest—Cassiodorus, Symmachus, and Boethius—for his ministers. He had formed into a family compact by marriages the Arian rulers in Africa, Spain, and Gaul. His moderation gave way when he saw the eastern emperor resume the policy of a Catholic sovereign. He put on the savage again, and he ended with the murder not only of his own long-trusted ministers, but of the Pope, who refused to be his instrument in procuring immunity for heresy from a Catholic emperor.

At his death, overclouded with the pangs of remorse, the Arian rule which he had fostered with so much skill showed itself to have no hold upon an Italy to which he had given a great temporal prosperity. The Goths, whom he had seemed to tame, were found incapable of self-government, and every Roman heart welcomed Belisarius and Narses as the restorers of a power which had not ceased to claim their allegiance, even through the turpitudes and betrayals of Zeno and Anastasius.

The best solution which I know for this wonderful result, brought about in so many countries, is contained in a few words of Gibbon: "Under the Roman empire the wealth and jurisdiction of the bishops, their sacred character and perpetual office, their numerous dependents, popular eloquence and provincial assemblies, had rendered them always respectable and sometimes dangerous. Their influence was augmented by the progress of superstition" (by which he means the Catholic faith), "and the establishment of the French monarchy may in some degree be ascribed to the firm alliance of a hundred prelates who reigned in the discontented or independent cities of Gaul."[212] But how were these prelates bound together in a firm alliance? Because each one of them felt what a chief among them, St. Avitus, under an Arian prince, expressed to the Roman senate in the matter of Pope Symmachus by the direction of his brother bishops, that in the person of the Bishop of Rome the principate of the whole Church was touched; that "in the case of other bishops, if there be any lapse, it may be restored; but if the Pope of Rome is endangered, not one bishop but the episcopate itself will seem to be shaken".[213] If the bishops had been all that is above described with the exception of this one thing, the common bond which held them to Rome, how would the ruin of their country, the subversion of existing interests, the confiscation of the land, the imposition of foreign invaders for masters, have acted upon them? It would have split them up into various parties, rivals for favour and the power derived from favour. The bishops of each country would have had national interests controlling their actions. The Teuton invaders were without power of cohesion, without fraternal affection for each other; their ephemeral territories were in a state of perpetual fluctuation. The bishops locally situated in these changing districts would have been themselves divided. In fact, the Arian bishops had no common centre. They were the nominees and partisans of their several sovereigns. They presented no one front, for their negation was no one faith. We cannot be wrong in extending the action assigned by Gibbon to the hundred bishops of Gaul, to the Catholic bishops throughout all the countries in which a poorer Catholic population was governed by Arian rulers. The divine bond of the Primacy, resting upon the faith which it represented, secured in one alliance all the bishops of the West. Nor must we forget that the Throne of Peter acknowledged by those bishops as the source of their common faith, the crown of the episcopate, was likewise regarded by the Arian rulers themselves as the great throne of justice, above the sway of local jealousies and subordinate jurisdictions. It represented to their eyes the fabric of Roman law, the wonderful creation of centuries, which the northern conquerors were utterly unable to emulate, and made them feel how inferior brute force was to civil wisdom and equity.

In the constitution of the Visigothic kingdom of Spain from the time of Rechared, when it became Catholic, we see the first fruits of the Church's beneficent action on the northern invaders. The barbarian monarchy from its original condition of a military command in time of war, directing a raid of the tribe or people upon its enemies, becomes a settled rule, at the head of estates which meet in annual synod, and in which bishops and barons sit side by side. Government reposes on the peaceable union of the Two Powers. In process of time this sort of political order was established everywhere throughout the West, by the same action and influence of the Church. In the Roman empire the supreme power had been in its origin a mandate conferred by the citizens of a free state on one of their number for the preservation of the commonwealth. The notion of dynastic descent was wanting to it from the beginning. But the power which Augustus had received in successive periods of ten years passed to his successors for their life. Still they were rather life-presidents with royal power than kings. And it may be noticed that in that long line no blessing seemed to rest on the succession of a son to his father; much, on the contrary, on the adoption of a stranger of tried capacity guided by the choice of the actual ruler. But in the lapse of centuries the imperial power had become absolute. Especially in the successors of Constantine, and in the city to which he had given his name and chosen for the home of his empire, not a shadow of the old Roman freedom remained. One after another the successful general or the adventurer in some court intrigue supplanted or murdered a predecessor, and ascended the throne, but with undiminished prerogatives. Great was the contrast in all the new kingdoms at whose birth the influence of the Church presided. There the kings all sat by family descent, in which, however, was involved a free acceptance on the part of their people. The bishops who had had so large a part in the foundation of the several kingdoms had a recognised part in their future government. Holding one faith, and educated in the law of the Romans, and joined on to the preceding ages by their mental culture as well as their belief, they contributed to these kingdoms a stability and cohesion which were wanting to the Teuton invaders in themselves. They incessantly preached peace as a religious necessity to those tribes which had been as ready to consume each other as to divide the spoils of their Roman subjects. This united phalanx of bishops in Gaul conquered in the end even the excessive degeneracy, self-indulgence, and cruelty of the Merovingian race. Thanks to their perpetual efforts, while the policy of a Clovis made a France, the wickedness of his descendants did not destroy it, but only themselves, and caused a new family to be chosen wherein the same tempered government might be carried on.

It is remarkable that while the Byzantine emperors, from the extinction of the western empire, were using their absolute power to meddle with the doctrine of the Church which Constantine acknowledged to be divine, and to fetter its liberty which he acknowledged to be unquestionable, the Popes from that very time were through the bishops, to whom they were the sole centre in so many changes and upheavals, constructing the new order of things. Through them the Church maintained her own liberty, and allied with it a civil liberty which the East had more and more surrendered.

In the East, the Church in time was younger than the empire; in the West, she preceded in time these newly formed monarchies. Amid the universal overthrow which the invaders had wrought she alone stood unmoved. The heresy which had so threatened her disappeared. On Goths, and Franks, and Saxons, and Alemans, she was free to exercise her divine power.[214] It is in that sixth century of tremendous revolutions that she laid the foundation of the future European society. Byzantium was descending to Mahomet while Rome was forecasting the Christian commonwealth of Charles the Great. In the Rome of Constantine, while the old civilisation had accepted her name, the old pagan principles had continually impeded her action. The civil rulers especially had harked back after the power of the heathen Pontifex Maximus; but in these new peoples who were not yet peoples, but only the unformed matter (materia prima) out of which peoples might be made, the Church was free to put her own ideal as a form within them. They had the rudiments of institutions, which they trusted her to organise. They placed her bishops in their courts of justice, in their halls of legislation. The greatest of their conquerors in the hour of his supreme exaltation, which also was received from the Pope, was proud to be vested by her in the dalmatic of a deacon.

Of this new world St. Gregory, in his desolated Rome, stood at the head.

There is yet another aspect of this wonderful man which we have to consider. We possess about 850 of his letters. If we did but possess the letters of his sixty predecessors in the same relative proportion as his, the history of the Church for the five centuries preceding him, instead of being often a blank, would present to us the full lineaments of truth. The range of his letters is so great, their detail so minute, that they illuminate his time and enable us to form a mental picture, and follow faithfully that pontificate of fourteen years, incessantly interrupted by cares and anxieties for the preservation of his city, yet watching the beginnings and strengthening the polity of the western nations, and counterworking the advances of the eastern despotism. The divine order of greatness is, we know, to do and to teach. Few, indeed, have carried it out on so great a scale as St. Gregory. The mass of his writing preserved to us exceeds the mass preserved to us from all his predecessors together, even including St. Leo, who with him shares the name of Great, and whose sphere of action the mind compares with his. If he became to all succeeding times an image of the great sacerdotal life in his own person, so all ages studied in his words the pastoral care, joining him with St. Gregory of Nazianzum and St. Chrysostom. The man who closed his life at sixty-four, worn out not with age, but with labour and bodily pains, stands, beside the learning of St. Jerome, the perfect episcopal life and statesmanship of St. Ambrose, the overpowering genius of St. Augustine, as the fourth doctor of the western Church, while he surpasses them all in that his doctorship was seated on St. Peter's throne. If he closes the line of Fathers, he begins the period when the Church, failing to preserve a rotten empire in political existence, creates new nations; nay, his own hand has laid for them their foundation-stones, and their nascent polity bears his manual inscription, as the great campanile of St. Mark wears on its brow the words, Et Verbum caro factum est. These were the words which St. Gregory wrote as the bond of their internal cohesion, as the source of their greatness, permanence, and liberty upon the future monarchies of Europe.

What mortal could venture to decide which of the two great victories allowed by Gibbon to the Church is the greater? But we at least are the children of the second. It was wrought in secrecy and unconsciousness, as the greatest works of nature and of grace are wrought, but we know just so much as this, that St. Gregory was one of its greatest artificers. The Anglo-Saxon race in particular, for more than a thousand years, has celebrated the Mass of St. Gregory as that of the Apostle of England. Down to the disruption of the sixteenth century, the double line of its bishops in Canterbury and York, with their suffragans, regarded him as their founder, as much as the royal line deemed itself to descend from William the Conqueror. If Canterbury was Primate of all England and York Primate of England, it was by the appointment of Gregory. And the very civil constitution of England, like the original constitutions of the western kingdoms in general, is the work in no small part of that Church which St. Augustine carried to Ethelbert, and whose similar work in Spain Gibbon has acknowledged. Under the Norman oppression it was to the laws of St. Edward that the people looked back. The laws of St. Edward were made by the bishops of St. Gregory.

How deeply St. Gregory was impressed with the conviction of his own vocation to be the head of the whole Church we have seen in his own repeatedly quoted words.[215] What can a Pope claim more than the attribution to himself as Pope of the three great words of Christ spoken to Peter? Accordingly, all his conduct was directed to maintain every particular church in its due subordination to the Roman Church, to reconcile schismatics to it, to overcome the error and the obstinacy of heretics. Again, since all nations have been called to salvation in Christ, St. Gregory pursued the conversion of the heathen with the utmost zeal. When only monk and cardinal deacon, he had obtained the permission of Pope Pelagius to set out in person as missionary to paganised Britain. He was brought back to Rome after three days by the affection of the people, who would not allow him to leave them. When the death of Pope Pelagius placed him on the papal throne, he did not forget the country the sight of whose enslaved children had made them his people of predilection.

With regard to the churches belonging to his own patriarchate, a bishop in each province, usually the metropolitan, represented as delegate the Roman See. To these, as the symbol of their delegated authority as his vicarii, Gregory sent the pallium. All the bishops of the province yielded them obedience, acknowledged their summons to provincial councils. A hundred years before Pope Symmachus had begun the practice of sending the pallium to them, but Gregory declined to take the gifts which it had become usual to take on receiving it. St. Leo, fifty years before Symmachus, had empowered a bishop to represent him at the court of the eastern emperor, and had drawn out the office and functions of the nuncio. Like his great predecessor, St. Gregory carefully watched over the rights of the Primacy. Upon the death of a metropolitan, he entrusted during the vacancy the visitation of the churches to another bishop, and enjoined the clergy and people of the vacant see to make a new choice under the superintendence of the Roman official. The election being made, he carefully examined the acts, and, if it was needed, reversed them. As he required from the metropolitans strict obedience to his commands, so he maintained on the one hand the dependence of the bishops on their metropolitans, while on the other he protected them against all irregular decisions of the metropolitan. He carefully examined the complaints which bishops made against their metropolitan; and when bishops disagreed with each other, and their disagreement could not be adjusted by the metropolitan, he drew the decision to himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But this very time was also that in which the heresy whose leading doctrine was denial of the Godhead of the Church's founder came from a threatening of supremacy to an end. In Theodorick Arianism seemed to be enthroned for predominance in all the West. His civil virtues and powerful government, his family league of all the western rulers,—for he himself had married Andefleda, sister of Clovis, and had given one daughter for wife to the king of the Vandals in Africa, and another to the king of the Visigoths in France,—was a gage of security. In Gregory's time the great enemy has laid down his arms. He is dispossessed from the Teuton race in its Gallic, Spanish, Burgundian, African settlements. Gregory, at the head of the western bishops who in every country have risked life for the faith of Rome, has gained the final victory. One only Arian tribe survives for a time, ever struggling to possess Rome, advancing to its gates, ruining its Campagna, torturing its captured inhabitants, but never gaining possession of those battered walls, which Totila in part threw down and Belisarius in piecemeal restored. And Gregory, too, is chosen to stop the Anglo-Saxon revel of cruelty and destruction, which has turned Britain from a civilised land into a wilderness, and from a province of the Catholic Church to paganism, from the very time of St. Leo. Two tribes were the most savage of the Teuton family, the Saxon and the Frank. The Frank became Catholic, and Gregory besought the rulers of the converted nation to help his missionaries in their perilous adventure to convert the ultramarine neighbours, still savage and pagan. He also ordered their chief bishop to consecrate the chief missionary to be archbishop of the Angles. As there was a Burgundian Clotilda by the side of Clovis, there was a Frankish Bertha by the side of Ethelbert; and these two women have a glorious place in that second great victory of the Church. The Visigoth and Ostrogoth with their great natural gifts could not found a kingdom. Their heresy deprived the Father of the Son, and they were themselves sterile. Those who denied a Divine Redeemer were not likely to convert a world.

But all through Gregory's life the Byzantine spirit of encroachment was one of his chief enemies. The claim of its bishop to be ecumenical patriarch stopped short of the Primacy. But one after another the bishops of that see sought by imperial laws to detach the bishops of Eastern Illyria from their subjection to the western patriarchate. Their nearness to Constantinople, their being subjects of the eastern emperor, helped this encroachment.

It would appear also that in Gregory's time—a hundred years after Pope Gelasius had put the bishop of the imperial city in remembrance that he had been a suffragan to Heraclea—the legislation of Justinian had succeeded in inducing the Roman See to acknowledge that bishop as a patriarch. His actual power had gone far beyond. There can be no doubt that, while the Pope had become legally the subject of the eastern emperor, the bishop of Constantinople had become in fact the emperor's ecclesiastical minister in subjugating the eastern episcopate. The Nicene episcopal hierarchy subsisted indeed in name. To the Alexandrian and Antiochene patriarchs two had been added—one at Jerusalem, the other at Constantinople. But the last was so predominant—as the interpreter of the emperor's will—that he stood at the head of the bishops in all the realm ruled from Constantinople over against the Pope as the head of the western bishops in many various lands.

The bishops were in Justinian's legislation everywhere great imperial officers, holding a large civil jurisdiction, especially charged with an inspection of the manner in which civil governors performed their own proper functions; most of all, the patriarchs and the Pope.

But that episcopal autonomy—if we may so call it—under the presidence of the three Petrine patriarchs, which was in full life and vigour at the Nicene Council, which St. Gregory still recognised in his letter to Eulogius, was greatly impaired. While barbaric inundation had swept over the West, the struggles of the Nestorian and Eutychean heresies, especially in the two great cities of Alexandria and Antioch, had disturbed the hierarchy and divided the people which the master at Constantinople could hardly control. That state of the East which St. Basil deplored in burning words—which almost defied every effort of the great Theodosius to restore it to order—had gone on for more than two hundred years. The Greek subtlety was not pervaded by the charity of Christ, and they carried on their disputes over that adorable mystery of His Person in which the secret of redeeming power is seated, with a spirit of party and savage persecution which portended the rise of one who would deny that mystery altogether, and reduce to a terrible servitude those who had so abused their liberty as Christians and offered such a scandal to the religion of unity which they professed.

From St. Sylvester to St. Leo, and, again, from St. Leo to St. Gregory, the effort of the Popes was to maintain in its original force the Nicene constitution of the Church. Well might they struggle for the maintenance of that which was a derivation from their own fountainhead—"the administration of Peter"[217]—during the three centuries of heathen persecution by the empire. It was not they who tightened the exercise of their supreme authority. The altered condition of the times, the tyranny of Constantius and Valens, the dislocation of the eastern hierarchy, the rise of a new bishop in a new capital made use of by an absolute sovereign to control that hierarchy, a resident council at Constantinople which became an "instrument of servitude" in the emperor's hands to degrade any bishop at his pleasure and his own patriarch when he was not sufficiently pliant to the master,—these were among the causes which tended to bring out a further exercise of the power which Christ had deposited in the hands of His Vicar to be used according to the needs of the Church. No one has expressed with greater moderation than St. Gregory the proper power of his see, in the words I have quoted above:[218] "I know not what bishop is not subject to the Apostolical See, if any fault be found in bishops. But when no fault requires it, all are equal according to the estimation of humility." In Rome there is no growth by aid of the civil power from a suffragan bishop to an universal Papacy. The Papacy shows itself already in St. Clement, a disciple of St. Peter's, "whose name is written in the book of life,"[219] and who, involving the Blessed Trinity, affirms that the orders emanating from his see are the words of God Himself.[220] This is the ground of St. Gregory's moderation; and whatever extension may hereafter be found in the exercise of the same power by his successors is drawn forth by the condition of the times, a condition often opposed to the inmost wishes of the Pope. Those are evil times which require "a thousand bishops rolled into one" to oppose the civil tyranny of a Hohenstaufen, the violence of barbarism in a Rufus, or the corruption of wealth in a Plantagenet.

Between St. Peter and St. Gregory, in 523 years, there succeeded full sixty Popes. If we take any period of like duration in the history of the world's kingdoms, we shall find in their rulers a remarkable contrast of varying policy and temper. Few governments, indeed, last so long. But in the few which have so lasted we find one sovereign bent on war, another on peace, another on accumulating treasure, another on spending it; one given up to selfish pleasures, here and there a ruler who reigns only for the good of others. But in Gregory's more than sixty predecessors there is but one idea: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it," is the compendious expression of their lives and rule. For this St. Clement, who had heard the words of his master, suffered exile and martyrdom in the Crimea. For this five Popes, in the decade between 250 and 260, laid down their lives. The letter of St. Julius to the Eusebian prelates is full of it. St. Leo saw the empire of Rome falling around him, but he is so possessed with that idea that he does not allude to the ruin of temporal kingdoms. St. Gregory trembles for the lives of his beleaguered people, but he does not know the see which is not subject to the Apostolic See. In weakness and in power, in ages of an ever varying but always persistent adversity, in times of imperial patronage, and, again, under heretical domination, the mind of every Pope is full of this idea. The strength or the weakness of individual character leaves it untouched. In one, and only one, of all these figures his dignity is veiled in sadness. Pope Vigilius at Constantinople, in the grasp of a despot, and with the stain of an irregular election never effaced from his brow, is still conscious of it, still has courage to say, "You may bind me, but you will not bind the Apostle St. Peter". Six hundred years after St. Gregory, when accordingly the succession of Popes had been rather more than doubled, I find the biographer of Innocent III. thus commenting on his election in 1198: "The Church in these times ever had an essential preponderance over worldly kingdoms. Resting on a spiritual foundation, she had in herself the vigour of immaterial power, and maintained in her application of it the superiority over merely material forces. She alone was animated by a clearly recognised idea, which never at any time died out of her. For its maintenance and actuation were not limited to the person of a Pope, who could only be the representative, the bearer, the enactor, for the world of this idea in its fullest meaning. If here and there a particular personality seemed unequal to the carrying out such a charge, the force of the idea did not suffer any defect through him. Most papal governments were very short in their duration. This itself was a challenge to those whose life was absorbed in that of the Church to place at its head a man whose ability, enlightened and guided by strength of will, afforded a secure assurance for the exercise of an universal charge. From the clear self-consciousness of the Church in this respect proceeded that firm pursuance of a great purpose distinctly perceived. It met with no persistent or wisely conducted resistance on the part of the temporal power. On one side all rays had their focus in one point. In temporal princes the rays were parted. Few of these showed in their lives a purpose to which all their acts were made consistently subordinate. As circumstances swayed them, as the desire of the moment led them away, they threw themselves, according to their personal inclinations, with impetuous storm and violence upon the attainment of their wishes. They had to yield in the end to the power of the Church, slower, indeed, but continuous, pursued with superiority of spirit, moreover with the firm conviction of guidance from above, and of the special protection from this inseparable, and so attaining its mark. One only royal race ventured on a contest with the Church for supremacy; for one only, the Hohenstaufen, were conscious of a fixed purpose. They encountered a direct struggle with the Church; but the conflict issued to the honour of the Church. The Popes who led it came out of it with a renown in the world's history, which without that conflict they would never have so gloriously attained. If we look from these events before and afterwards upon the ages, and see how the institution of the Papacy outlasts all other institutions in Europe, how it has seen all States come and go, how in the endless change of human things it alone remains unchanged, ever with the same spirit, can we then wonder if many look up to it as the Rock unmoved amid the roaring billows of centuries?" And he adds in a note, "This is not a polemical statement, but the verdict of history".[221]

The time of St. Gregory in history bore the witness of six centuries; the time of Innocent III. of twelve; the time of Leo XIII. bears that of more than eighteen centuries to the consideration of this contrast between the natural fickleness of men and of lives of men, shown from age to age, and the persistence, on the other hand, of one idea in one line of men. The eighteen centuries already past are yet only a part of an unknown future. But to construct such a Rock amid the sea and the waves roaring in the history of the nations reveals an abiding divine power. It leaves the self-will of man untouched, yet sets up a rampart against it. The explanation attempted three hundred and fifty years ago of an imposture or an usurpation is incompatible with the clearness of an idea which is carried out persistently through so many generations. Usurpations fall rapidly. But in this one case the divine words themselves contain the idea more clearly expressed than any exposition can express it. The King delineates His kingdom as none but God can; it must also be added that He maintains it as none but God can maintain.

We may return to St. Gregory's own time, and note the unbroken continuity of the Primacy from St. Peter himself. It is a period of nearly six hundred years from the day of Pentecost. Just in the middle comes the conversion of Constantine. Before it Rome is mainly a heathen city, the government of which bears above all things an everlasting enmity against any violation of the supreme pontificate annexed by the provident Augustus to the imperial power, and jealously maintained by every succeeding emperor. To suffer an infringement of that pontificate would be to lose the grasp over the hundred varieties of worship allowed by the State. Yet when Constantine acknowledged the Christian faith, the names of St. Peter and St. Paul were in full possession of the city, so far as it was Christian. They were its patron-saints. Every Christian memory rested on the tradition of St. Peter's pontifical acts, his chair, his baptismal font, his dwelling-place, his martyrdom. The impossibility of such a series of facts taking possession of a heathen city during the period antecedent to Constantine's victory over Maxentius, save as arising from St. Peter's personal action at Rome, is apparent.

In the second half of this period, from Constantine to St. Gregory, the civil pre-eminence of Rome is perpetually declining. The consecration of New Rome as the capital of the empire, in 330, by itself alone strikes at it a fatal blow. Presently the very man who had reunited the empire divided it among his sons, and after their death the division became permanent. Valentinian I., in 364, whether he would or not, was obliged to make two empires. From the death of Theodosius, in 395, the condition of the western empire is one long agony. The power of Constantinople continually increases. At the death of Honorius, in 423, the eastern emperor becomes the over-lord of the western. During fifty years Rome lived only by the arm of two semi-barbarian generals, Stilicho and Aetius. Both were assassinated for the service; and in the boy Romulus Augustulus a western emperor ceased to be, and the senate declared that one emperor alone was needed. After fifty years of Arian occupation, the Gothic war ruined the city of Rome. In Gregory's time it had ceased to be even the capital of a province. Its lord dwelt at Constantinople; Rome was subject to his exarch at Ravenna.

Yet from Constantine and the Nicene Council the advance of Rome's Primacy is perpetual. In Leo I. it is universally acknowledged. At the fall of the western empire Acacius attempts his schism. He is supported while living by the emperor Zeno, and his memory after his death by the succeeding emperor Anastasius, who reigned for twenty-seven years, longer than any emperor since Augustus had reigned over the whole empire. All the acts of these two princes show that they would have liked to attach the Primacy to their bishop at Constantinople. Anastasius twice enjoyed the luxury of deposing him through the resident council. But Anastasius died, and the result of the Acacian schism was a stronger confession of the Roman Primacy made to Pope Hormisdas, the subject of the Arian Theodorick, by the whole Greek episcopate, than had ever been given before. The sixth century and the reign of Justinian completed the destruction of the civil state of Rome; and the Primacy of its bishop, St. Gregory, was more than ever acknowledged.

Not a shadow of usurpation or of claim to undue power rested upon that unquestioned Primacy which St. Gregory exercised. While he thought the end of the world was at hand, while he watched Rome perishing street by street, he planted unconsciously a western Christendom in what he supposed all the time to be a perishing world. Civil Rome was not even a provincial capital; spiritual Rome was the acknowledged head of the world-wide Church.

I know not where to find so remarkable a contrast and connection of events as here. Temporal losses, secular ambitions, episcopal usurpations, violent party spirit, schism and heresy in the great eastern patriarchates, and amid it all the descent of the Teutons on the fairest lands of the western empire, the establishment of new sovereignties in Spain, Gaul, and Italy, under barbarians who at the time of their descent were Arian heretics, and afterwards became Catholic, with the result that Gregory has to keep watch within the walls of Rome for a whole generation against the Lombard, still in unmitigated savagery and unabated heresy, and that the world-wide Church acknowledges him for her ruler without a dissenting voice. The "Servant of the servants of God" chides and corrects the would-be "ecumenical patriarch," who has risen since Constantine from the suffragan of a Thracian city to be bishop of Nova Roma and right hand of the emperor; who has deposed Alexandria from the second place and Antioch from the third, but cannot take the first place from the See of Peter. The perpetual ambition of the bishops of Nova Roma, the perpetual fostering of that ambition for his own purpose by the emperor, only illustrates more vividly the inaccessible dignity which both would fain have transferred to the city of Constantine, but were obliged to leave with the city of Peter. As the forum of Trajan sinks down stone by stone, the kings of the West are preparing to flock in pilgrimage to the shrine of Peter. This was the answer which the captives in the forum made to the deliverer of their race.

There is nothing like this elsewhere in history.

Constantine, Valens, Theodosius, Justinian, and, no less, Alaric and Ataulph, Attila and Genseric, Theodorick and Clovis, Arius, Nestorius, Eutyches, as well as St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St. Ambrose, St. Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Cyril, and, again, Dioscorus, Acacius, and a multitude of the most opposing minds and beliefs which these represent, contribute, in their time and degree, for the most part unconsciously, and many against their settled purpose, to acknowledge this Primacy as the Rock of the Church, the source of spiritual jurisdiction, the centre of a divine unity in a warring world. In St. Gregory we see the power which has had antecedents so strange and concomitants so repulsive deposited in the hands of a feeble old man who is constantly mourning over the cares in which that universal government involves him, while the world for evermore shall regard him as the type and standard of the true spiritual ruler, who calls himself, not Ecumenical Bishop, but Servant of the servants of God. It is a title which his successors will take from his hand and keep for ever as the badge of the Primacy which it illustrates, while it serves as the seal of its acts of power. He calls himself servant just when he is supreme.

In St. Gregory the Great, the whole ancient world, the Church's first discipline and original government, run to their ultimate issue. In him the patriarchal system, as it met the shock of absolute power in the civil sovereign, and the subversion of the western empire by barbarous incursions, accompanied by the establishment of new sovereignties and the foundation of a new Rome, the rival and then the tyrant of the old Rome, receives its consummation. The medieval world has not yet begun. The spurious Mahometan theocracy is waiting to arise. In the midst of a world in confusion, of a dethroned city falling into ruins, the successor of St. Peter sits on an undisputed spiritual throne upon which a new world will be based in the West, against which the Khalifs of a false religion will exert all their rage in the East and South, and strengthen the rule which they parody. A new power, which utterly denies the Christian faith, which destroys hundreds of its episcopal sees and severs whole countries from its sway, will dash with all its violence against the Rock of Peter, and finally will have the effect of making the bishop who is there enthroned more than ever the symbol, the seat, and the champion of the Kingdom of the Cross.

NOTES:

[173] See Gregorovius, ii. 3, 4.

[174] Gregorovius, ii. 6.

[175] Ibid., ii. 5, literal.

[176] Nirschl, iii. 534.

[177] Third letter of Pelagius II.; Mansi ix., p. 889: Nefandissima gens.

[178] Attested by St. Gregory of Tours, who heard it from a deacon of his church then at Rome.

[179] Ep. i. 25, p. 514.

[180] Homily xviii. on Ezechiel, tom. i. 1374.

[181] Nahum ii, 11.

[182] Micheas i. 16.

[183] End of the Homilies on Ezechiel, tom. i. 1430.

[184] Quoted by Reumont, ii. 90.

[185] Ep. v. 42, p. 769.

[186] Reumont and Gregorovius.

[187] Ep. v. 21, p. 751.

[188] Ep. v. 20, tom. ii. 747.

[189] Ep. vii. 40, p. 887.

[190] I have drawn attention to this fact, and the idea which it represents as attested by Popes earlier than St. Gregory, in vol. v., pp. 53-60, of the Formation of Christendom, "The Throne," &c.

[191] Rump, ix. 501-2; see his words quoted above, p. 107.

[192] Ep. vii. 34, p. 882.

[193] Rump, ix. 502.

[194] Providentissime piissimus Dominus ad compescendos bellicos motus pacem quaerit ecclesiae atque ad hujus compagem sacerdotum dignatur corda reducere.-Ep. v. 20, p. 747.

[195] De vi et ratione Primatus Romani Pontificis—c. iii., quoting the letter of St. Gregory to Eulogius, viii. 30.

[196] Ep. ix. 59, p. 976.

[197] Ep. ii. 52, p. 618.

[198] Ep. xi. 37, p. 1120.

[199] Ep. vi. 60, p. 836.

[200] Ep. iv. 38, p. 718.

[201] Ep. v. 54, p. 784.

[202] Ep. vi. 59, p. 835.

[203] Dialog., iii. 31, p. 345, A.D. 594.

[204] Ep. i. 43, p. 531.

[205] Ep. ix. 121, pp. 1026-8, shortened.

[206] Dialog., iii. 31, p. 348.

[207] Ep. ix. 122, p. 1028.

[208] Paralipom. i. 11, 18.

[209] Ep. ix. 61, p. 977.

[210] Gibbon, ch. xxxviii.: a sneer or two have been omitted.

[211] Gibbon, ch. xxxix.

[212] Ch. xxxviii.

[213] See above, p. 141.

[214] See Kurth, ii. 25-6.

[215] See in the Kirchen-lexicon of Card. Hergenroether the article on Gregory I., vol. v., p. 1079.

[216] See Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, iii., p. 56; St. Gregory, ii., p. 1294; Mansi, x., p. 486.

[217] S. Siricius, Ep.

[218] P. 308.

[219] Philippians iv. 3.

[220] See St. Clement's epistle, sec. 59. "Receive our counsel and you shall not repent of it. For, as God liveth, and as the Lord Jesus Christ liveth, and the Holy Spirit, and the faith and the hope of the elect, he who performs in humility, with assiduous goodness, and without swerving, the commands and injunctions of God, he shall be enrolled and esteemed in the number of those saved through Jesus Christ, through whom be glory to Him for ever and ever. Amen. But if any disobey what has been ordered by Him through us, let them know that they will involve themselves in a fall, and no slight danger, but we shall be innocent of this sin."

[221] Hurter's Geschichte Papst Innocenz des Dritten, i. 85-7.



INDEX.

Acacius, bishop of Constantinople, 471-489, 65; his conduct to the year 482, 66; induces Zeno to publish a formulary of doctrine, 70; deposed by Pope Felix, 75; rejects the Pope's sentence, 83; attempts superiority over the eastern patriarchates, 84-86; position taken up by him against the Pope, 84-91; dies after five years of excommunication in 489, defying the Pope, 83; his name erased from the diptychs, 168; summary of his conduct and aims, 174-6

Agapetus, Pope, his accession, 202; confirms all his old rights to the Primate of Carthage, 203; confirms Justinian's profession of faith, at the emperor's request, 204; goes to Constantinople, deposes Anthimus and consecrates Mennas patriarch, 205

Agnostics, generated by schismatics, 5

Alexandria and Antioch, fearful state of their patriarchates, 184; the vast difference between their patriarchs and the Primacy, 185

Anastasius II., Pope, 496-8, 120; his letter to the emperor asserts that as the imperial secular dignity is pre-eminent in the whole world, so the Principate of St. Peter's See in the whole Church, 120; both are divine delegations, 121; writes to Clovis upon his conversion, 122; anticipates the great results to follow from it, 123

Anastasius, eastern emperor in 491, made emperor when a Silentiarius in the court, 518, 83; summary of his reign in the "libellus synodicus," 100-1; four Popes—Gelasius, Anastasius, Symmachus, and Hormisdas—have to deal with him, 102; tries to prevent the election of Pope Symmachus, 129; he is obliged to allow the Roman See not to be judged, 143; he deposes Euphemius, and puts Macedonius in his stead at Constantinople, 143; exalts Timotheus to the see of Constantinople, 148; fills the eastern patriarchal sees with heretics, 149; being pressed by Vitalian, betakes himself to Pope Hormisdas, 150; receives his conditions, except those concerning Acacius, 159; his treachery and cruelty, 160; his sudden death, 162

Anatolius, bishop of Constantinople, crowns the emperor Leo I., dies in 458, 64; his ambition seen and checked by St. Leo, 60; is to Leo what John the Faster is to Gregory, 307

Anicius Olybrius, Roman emperor, 20

Anthemius, Roman emperor, 18

Arianism, propagated among the Goths by the emperor Valens, 49; communicated by them to the Teuton tribes, 29; prevalent throughout the West, 50; fails in the Vandal, Visigothic, Burgundian, and Ostrogothic kingdoms, 327-9

Aspar, Arian Goth, makes Leo I. emperor, and is slain by him, 62

Ataulph, marries Galla Placidia, his judgment upon the Goths and Romans, 43

Avitus, St., bishop of Vienne, in Gaul, his character of Acacius, 93; his letter to Clovis on his conversion, 124; urges his duty to propagate the faith in the peoples around him, 126; writes to the Roman senate that the cause of the Bishop of Rome is not one bishop but that of the Episcopate itself, 140

Avitus, Roman emperor, 13

Augustine, St., the great victory of the Church which he did not foresee, 57

Baronius, quoted, 76, 79, 202, 207

Basiliscus, usurper, first of the theologising emperors, 46

Belisarius, reconquers Northern Africa, 199; begins the Gothic war, and enters Rome, 205; deposes Pope Silverius, 207; defends Rome against Vitiges, 210; captures Rome the third time, 207

Benedict, St., his monastery at Monte Cassino destroyed by the Lombards, 290; his Order has its chief seat for 140 years at St. John Lateran, 290; rebukes and subdues Totila, 215

Byzantium, the over-lordship of its emperor acknowledged, 18, 23; the succession to its throne, 61; its constitution under Justinian contrasted with the medieval constitution of England, 250

Cassiodorus, his letter as Praetorian prefect to Pope John II., 195

Church, Catholic, its two great victories, 5, 25; attested and described by Gibbon, 325

Civilta Cattolica, quoted, 103, 104, 128

Constantinople, its seven bishops who follow Anatolius, 180; submission of its bishop, clergy, emperor, and nobles to Pope Hormisdas, 187; service of its cathedral under Justinian, 244; growth of its bishop from St. Leo to St. Gregory, 342; all the work of the imperial power, 344; perpetual encroachment of its bishops, 348, 359

Cyprian, St., quoted, "De Unitate Ecclesiae," 3

Dante, quoted, 184; on Justinian, 197

Diptychs, their meaning and force, 83

Ennodius, St., bishop of Pavia, asserts that God has reserved to Himself all judgment upon the successors of St. Peter, 142; his character of Acacius, 93

Euphemius, in 490 succeeds Fravita at Constantinople, 96; opposes the emperor Anastasius, but signs his Henotikon, 97; begs for reconciliation with Pope Felix, but will not give up Acacius, 97; recognises the authority of Pope Gelasius, 103-5; deposed by the emperor through the Resident Council in 496, 114

Eutychius, patriarch of Constantinople, 239; presides over the Fifth Council, 240; consecrates Santa Sophia in 563, 244; is deposed by Justinian in 565, 245

Felix III., Pope, 483-492, 71; his letter to the emperor Zeno, stating his succession from St. Peter, 72; his letter to Acacius, 73; holds a council in 484 and deposes Acacius, 75; his sentence, recounting the misdeeds of Acacius, 76-8; the synodal sentence signed by the Pope alone, which is justified by the Roman synod, 79; denounces Acacius to the emperor Zeno, 80; his utter helplessness as to secular support when he thus writes, 82, 88; writes afresh to the emperor Zeno that the Apostle Peter speaks in him as his Vicar, 94; delays to grant communion to Fravita, successor of Acacius, 94; dies after nine years of pontificate, 97.

Filicaja, quoted, 91

Franks, made great by the Catholic faith, 44, 348; so found a kingdom, while Ostrogoths and Visigoths lose it, 348

Fravita, succeeds Acacius at Constantinople, and begs for the Pope's recognition, 93; dies after three months, 96

Gelasius, Pope, 492, 98; condition of the Empire and Church at his accession, 98-9; writes to Euphemius, who will cede everything except the person of Acacius, 103-5; the bishops of Eastern Illyricum profess their obedience to the Apostolic See, 105-6; to whom the Pope declares that the see of Constantinople has no precedence over other bishops, 107; that the Holy See, in virtue of its Principate, confirms every council, 109; his great letter to the emperor Anastasius defines the domain of the Two Powers, 110; the Primacy instituted by Christ, acknowledged by the Church, 111; in the Roman synod of 496, declares the divine Primacy of the Roman See, the second rank of Alexandria, and the third of Antioch, as sees of Peter, 113; the three Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus in 431, and Chalcedon, to be general, 116; omits the Council of Constantinople in 381, 116; death of Gelasius, and character of the time of his sitting, 118; calls Odoacer "barbarian and heretic," 68

Gennadius bishop of Constantinople, 458-71, 64

Gibbon, acknowledges the two great victories of the Church, 325; and the work of the Church in the Spanish monarchy, 322; and the influence of bishops in establishing the French monarchy, 329

Glycerius, Roman emperor, 21

Gregorovius, "Geschichte der Stadt Rom.," quoted, 9, 11, 13, 14, 23, 42, 208, 222, 245, 247, 272-3, 275

Gregory, St., the Great, his ancestry, 276; state of Rome described by his predecessor Pope Pelagius, 277; elected Pope, 590—tries for six months to escape, 278; describes the work he was undertaking, 279; and the misery of Rome in the words of Ezechiel, 281; the Rome of St. Leo and the Rome of St. Gregory, 284; his works done out of this Rome, 285-7; the Lombard descent on Italy, 288; alludes to a strange occurrence in St. Agatha dei Goti, 21; refers to his great-grandfather, Pope Felix III., 81; describes St. Benedict rebuking Totila, 215; his right of reporting injustice to the emperor, 260; his Primacy untouched by Rome's calamities, 292; describes his Primacy to the empress Constantina, 295; identifies to her his authority with that of St. Peter, 296; also to the emperor Mauritius, 299; and to the Lombard queen Theodelinda, 312; and to the king of the Franks, 312; and to Rechared, Gothic king of Spain, 319; and in the appointment of the English hierarchy, 315; his inference from the original patriarchal sees being all sees of Peter, 301; exposes the contrast between the assumed title of the patriarch of Constantinople and his own Principate, 302-7; his title, "Servant of the servants of God," expresses his administration, 308; as fourth Doctor of the western Church, 334; as chief artificer in the Church's second victory, 335; England indebted to him, both for hierarchy and civil constitution, 336; his action as bishop, metropolitan, patriarch, and Pope, 337; councils held by him at Rome, 338; defends the liberties of monasteries against bishops, 339; and as metropolitan succours distressed bishoprics, 340; called the father of the monks, 341; compared with St. Leo in the exercise of the Primacy, 342; continues the struggle of the Popes from St. Sylvester to maintain the Nicene constitution, 350

Gregory of Tours, St., notes the prospering of the Catholic, and the decline of the Arian kingdoms, 123; attests St. Gregory's flight from the papacy, 279

Guizot, his witness to the action of the hierarchy, 54

Hefele, "Conciliengeschichte," quoted, 93, 100, 114, 116, 128, 136, 137, 139, 142, 202, 232

Hergenroether, Card., quoted, "Kirchengeschichte," 26, 114, 185, 232, 244; "Photius, sein Leben," 46, 47, 68, 75, 78, 83, 92, 93, 104, 128, 129, 143, 159, 165, 170, 187, 196, 203, 205, 207, 228, 230, 232, 245, 270, 271

Hilarus, Pope, 16

Hormisdas, deacon, elected Pope in 514, 149; sends a legation to the emperor Anastasius, who had applied to his fatherly affection, 150; instruction given to his legates, 151-8; orders them not to be introduced by the bishop of Constantinople, 157; conditions of reunion proposed by him to the emperor, 158; is deceived by the emperor, and denounces the treachery of Greek diplomacy, 160; is appealed to by the Syrian Archimandrites, 161; resolves how to terminate the Acacian schism, 164; his formulary of union accepted by the East, 167; dies in 523, 193

Hurter's "Geschichte Papst Innocenz des Dritten," the papal idea carried out through generations, 353-5

Ignatius, St., of Antioch, quoted, 12

Jerome, St., the result which he did not foresee, 57

John, patriarch of Constantinople, accepts the formulary of Pope Hormisdas, 166

John I., Pope, martyred by Theodorick, 193

John II., Pope, praises Justinian for acknowledging the Primacy, and confirms his confession of faith, 191

John Talaia, elected patriarch of Alexandria, 68; offends Acacius, 69; flies for refuge to Pope Simplicius, 71; is supported by Pope Felix, 75; made bishop of Nola by Pope Felix, 92

John The Faster, patriarch of Constantinople, assumes a scandalous title, 299; holds to Gregory the position of Anatolius to Leo, 307

Justin I., made emperor, 162; writes to Pope Hormisdas, 163; announces to him the condemnation of Acacius, 169; his reign of nine years, 198

Justinian, his origin, 162; entreats Pope Hormisdas to restore unity, 164; acknowledges to Pope John II. his Primacy, 189; enacts the Pandects, 192; acknowledged the Pope's Primacy all his life, 195; his character as legislator, 197; recovers North Africa, 199; begins the Gothic war, 206; domineers over the eastern Church, 227-32; acknowledges the dignity of Pope Vigilius, 232; persecutes him, 232-40; issues dogmatic decrees, 236, 242; issues Pragmatic Sanction for Italy, 243; deposes his patriarch Eutychius, 244; is conception of Church and State, 248-56; makes bishops and governors exercise mutual supervision, 257; completeness and cordiality of his alliance with the Church, 261; his spirit the opposite to that of modern governments, 262; how far he maintains, how far goes beyond, the imperial idea, 264-9; result spiritual and temporal of his reign, 270

Kurth, quoted "Les Origines de la Civilisation modern," 41; on the policy of Justinian, 255; the Church's power over the new nations, 333

Leander, St., archbishop of Seville, becomes an intimate friend of St. Gregory during his nunciature at Constantinople, 277; receives the pallium from St Gregory, 317, 321

Leo I., St., his universal Pastorship acknowledged by the Church in General Council, 1-3; and the succession of the Popes during 400 years, from St. Peter, 3; rescues Rome from Attila, and from Genseric, 7-8; his character, acts, and times, 15; stands between the two great victories of the Church, and represents both, 25-6; the result which St. Leo did not foresee, 57; his prescience of usurpation from the Byzantine bishop, 60; his prescience of what the bishops of Constantinople aimed at, 307; draws out the office and functions of the nuncio, 338

Leo I., emperor, 467, 62; dies in 474, 63

Leo II., an infant, succeeds for a few months, 63

Liberatus, "Breviarium," quoted, 208, 209

Libius Severus, Roman emperor, 16

Lombards, their descent on Italy and uncivilised savagery, 287-91; for ever strive to possess Rome, but never succeed, 347

Macedonius, bishop of Constantinople, feels his unlawful appointment, 143; persecuted during fifteen years, and finally deposed by the emperor Anastasius, 144-8; refuses to give up the Council of Chalcedon, but will not surrender the memory of Acacius, and never enjoys communion with the Pope, 144-8

Majorian, Roman emperor, 14

Martyrdom, Papal, of 300 years, 10, 54

Mausoleum of Hadrian, stripped of its statues, 211; an apparition of St. Michael changes its name, 278

Mennas, patriarch of Constantinople, 228-239

Nepos, Roman emperor, 21

Odoacer, extinguishes the western emperor, 22; named Patricius of the Romans by the emperor Zeno, 35; slain by Theodorick, 38; his exaltation foretold by St. Severinus, 22

Olybrius, Roman emperor, 20

Orosius, an important anecdote preserved by him, 43

Pallium, sent by the Pope to the chief bishop in each province, 337; the duties and powers which it carried with it, 337

Papal election, the freedom of, assailed by Odoacer, 194, 292; by Theodorick and Justinian, 210, 292

Pelagius II., Pope, 578-590, describes the state of Rome, 277

Petra Apostolica, in the sixty Popes preceding Gregory, 352; in the Popes from St. Gregory to Innocent III., 353; in the Popes from Innocent III. to Leo XIII., 355; sustained by opposing forces, 359

Philips, "Kirchenrecht," his judgment of Theodorick, 41; on Byzantine succession, 61

Primacy, the Roman, its denial suicidal in all who believe one holy Catholic Church, 3-4; the creator of Christendom, 5, 6, 10, 57-8; tested by the division of the empire, 51; still more by the extinction of the western emperor, 53; witness to it by Guizot, 55; saves, in the seven successors of St. Leo, the eastern Church from becoming Eutychean, 179-86; developed by the sufferings of sixty years, 188; acknowledged by the Council of Africa after the expulsion of the Vandals, 201; defined by the Vatican Council, as held by St. Gregory I., 307; saves the western bishops from absorption in their several countries, 330; preserver of civil liberties, 333; resister of Byzantine despotism, 333; its development from St. Leo I. to St. Gregory I., 342; confirmed and illustrated by civil disasters, 346; as Rome, the secular city, diminishes, the Primacy advances, 357

Rechared, king of the Spanish Visigoths, converted, 318; his letter to St. Gregory informing him of his conversion, 321

Reumont, "Geschichte der Stadt Rom.," quoted, over-lordship of Byzantium, 19; Odoacer, Patricius at Rome, 35; picture of Theodorick, 36; of his government, 38; sparing of St. Peter's and St. Paul's, 213; Totila's deeds, 215; Narses made Patricius of Rome, 245; the Pragmatic Sanction, 246

Riffel, "Kirche und Staat," quoted, 190, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 267

Roehrbacher, the German edition of the history, quoted, 128, 142, 162, 192, 198, 199, 200, 202, 205, 245, 303, 305

Rome, its fall as a city coeval with the universal recognition of the Papal Primacy, 6-10; this fall and this recognition traced from Constantine to St. Gregory, 356-8; imperial, its death agony of twenty-one years, 23; its sufferings in the Gothic war, 210-23; the new city, from Narses, lives only by the Primacy, 294; its extreme misery in the days of St. Gregory, 281, 284

Romulus Augustulus, Roman emperor, 21

Saxons, rudest of Teuton tribes, humanised by St. Gregory, 348

Sidonius Apollinaris, picture of the Roman senate, 17; description of Rome in 467, 18; makes Rome acknowledge the over-lordship of the East, 19; describes the Roman baths, 19

Silverius, St., Pope, elected in 536, 205; deposed by Belisarius, at the instigation of Theodora, 208; martyred in the island of Palmaria, 209

Simplicius, Pope, his outlook from Rome, 45; his letter to the emperor Zeno, 66

Symmachus, elected Pope in 498, 128; his letter to the eastern emperor, 129; compares the imperial and the papal power, 131; they are the two heads of human society, 133; Catholic princes acknowledge Popes on their accession, 134; inferences to be deduced from this letter, 136; the Synodus Palmaris refuses to judge the Pope, 136; addressed by eastern bishops in their misery as a father by his children, 149; dies in 514, 149

Theodora, empress, her promises to Vigilius, 208; her violent deposition of Pope Silverius, 209

Theodorick, the Ostrogoth, how nurtured, 36; marches on Italy, 37; which he conquers, and slays Odoacer, 38; character of his reign, 39; slays Pope John I., and his own ministers, Boethius and Symmachus, 41, 329; judgment of him by St. Gregory, 41; contrast with Clovis, 42; his kingdom came to nothing, 43; asks the title of king from the emperor Anastasius, 128; determines the election of Pope Symmachus against Laurentius, 129; induced to send a bishop as visitor of the Roman Church, 137; said by the emperor to have the charge of governing the Romans committed to him, 159; his ability and family connections, 177; final failure of his state, his family, and people, 328-9; his attempt to maintain Arianism in the West foiled, 347

Thierry, "Derniers temps de l'Empire d'Occident," 20

Tillemont, quoted, 64

Totila, elected Gothic king, 214; is warned by St. Benedict, 215; takes Rome, 216; takes Rome, its fourth capture, 218; killed at Taginas, 219

Valens, emperor, poisons the western empire with Arianism, 50, 92

Valentinian III., his edict in 447 terms the Pope, Leo I., principem episcopalis coronae, 56; murdered by Maximus, 13

Vere, A. de, quoted, "Legends and Records," 1, 12; "Chains of St. Peter," 272

Vigilius, made Pope by Belisarius, 209; summoned to Constantinople by Justinian, 226; his persecution there, 232-243; his dignity as Pope left unimpaired, 293

Vitiges, besieges Rome, and ruins the aqueducts and Campagna, 210-13; carried a captive to Constantinople, 214

Wandering of the nations, 26-35

Zeno, eastern emperor, 63; second of the theologising emperors, 47; his conduct and character, 63; matched with the emperor Valens, 92; his death, 91, 99



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