by Will Durant
He mourned every minute given to earthly concerns, and apologized to his congregation for his inability to preach comforting sermons amid the worldly cares that troubled his mind. In the few years of peace allowed him he turned happily to the task of spreading the Gospel through Europe. He brought the rebellious bishops of Lombardy to submission, restored orthodox Catholicism in Africa, received the conversion of Arian Spain, and won England with forty monks. While Abbot of St. Andrew’s he had seen some English captives exposed for sale in a slave market at Rome; he was struck, says the patriotic Bede, by their
white skin and comely countenance and hair of excellent beauty. And beholding them awhile he demanded, as they say, out of what region or land they had been brought. And it was answered that they came from Britain, where such was the appearance of the inhabitants. Again, he asked whether the people of that island were Christian men … and answer was made that they were paynims. Then this good man … “alas,” quoth he, “it is a piteous case that the author of darkness possesseth such bright beautied people, and that men of such gracious outward sheen do bear a mind void of inward grace.” Again, therefore, he enquired what was the name of that people. Answer was given that they were called Angles. Whereon he said, “Well are they so called, for they have an angel’s face, and it is meet that such men were inheritors with the angels in heaven.”15
The story—too pretty to be credible—goes on to say that Gregory asked and received of Pope Pelagius II permission to lead some missionaries to England; that Gregory started out, but was halted by a locust dropping upon the page of Scripture that he was reading; “locusta!” he cried; “that means loco sta”—stay in your place.16 Impressed soon afterward into the papacy, he did not forget England. In 596 he sent thither a mission under Augustine, Prior of St. Andrew’s. Arrived in Gaul, the monks were turned back by Frank stories of Saxon savagery; those “angels,” they were informed, “were wild beasts who preferred killing to eating, thirsted for human blood, and liked Christian blood best of all. Augustine returned to Rome with these reports, but Gregory reproved and encouraged him, and sent him back to accomplish peaceably in two years what Rome had transiently achieved by ninety years of war.
Gregory was not a philosopher-theologian like the great Augustine, nor a master of style like the brilliant Jerome; but his writings so deeply influenced and expressed the medieval mind that beside him Augustine and Jerome seem classical. He left behind him books of popular theology so rich in nonsense that one wonders whether the great administrator believed what he wrote, or merely wrote what he thought it well for simple and sinful souls to believe. His biography of Benedict is the most pleasing of these books—a charming idyl of reverence, with no pretense to critical sifting of legend from fact. His 800 letters are his best literary legacy; here this varied man reveals himself in a hundred phases, and gives unconsciously an intimate picture of his mind and times. His Dialogues were loved by the people because they offered as history the most amazing tales of the visions, prophecies, and miracles of Italy’s holy men. Here the reader learned of massive boulders moved by prayer, of a saint who could make himself invisible, of poisons rendered harmless by the sign of the cross, of provisions miraculously supplied and increased, of the sick made whole and the dead restored to life. The power of relics ran through these dialogues, but none more marvelous than the chains that were believed to have bound Peter and Paul; Gregory cherished these with adoration; he sent filings from them as presents to his friends; and with one such offering he wrote to a sufferer from ailing eyesight: “Let these be continually applied to your eyes, for many miracles have been wrought by this same gift.”17 The Christianity of the masses had captured the mind or pen of the great Pope.
His deeper venture into theology took the form of the Magna moralia—a six-volume commentary on the Book of Job. He takes the drama as literal history in every line; but also he seeks in every line an allegorical or symbolical significance, and ends by finding in Job the full Augustinian theology. The Bible is in every sense the word of God; it is a complete system of wisdom and beauty in itself; and no man should waste his time and debase his morals by reading the pagan classics. However, the Bible is occasionally obscure, and is often couched in popular or pictorial language; it needs careful interpretation by trained minds; and the Church, as custodian of sacred tradition, is the only proper interpreter. Individual reason is a weak and divisive instrument, not designed to deal with supersensual realities; and “when the intellect seeks to understand beyond its powers, it loses even that which it understood.”18 God is beyond our understanding; we can only say what He is not, not what He is; “almost everything that is said of God is unworthy, for the very reason that it is capable of being said.”19 Hence Gregory makes no formal attempt to prove the existence of God. But, he argues, we can adumbrate Him by considering the human soul: is it not the living force and guide of the body? “Many of our time,” says Gregory, “… have often seen souls departing from the body.”20 The tragedy of man is that by original sin his nature is corrupt, and inclines him to wickedness; and this basic spiritual malformation is transmitted from parent to child through sexual procreation. Left to himself, man would heap sin upon sin, and richly deserve everlasting damnation. Hell is no mere phrase; it is a dark and bottomless subterranean abyss created from the beginning of the world; it is an inextinguishable fire, corporeal and yet able to sear soul as well as flesh; it is eternal, and yet it never destroys the damned, or lessens their sensitivity to pain. And to each moment of pain is added the terror of expected pain, the horror of witnessing the tortures of loved ones also damned, the despair of ever being released, or allowed the blessing of annihilation.21 In a softer mood Gregory developed Augustine’s doctrine of a purgatory in which the dead would complete their atonement for forgiven sins. And like Augustine, Gregory comforted those whom he had terrified by reminding them of the gift of God’s grace, the intercession of the saints, the fruits of Christ’s sacrifice, the mysterious saving effect of sacraments available to all Christian penitents.
Perhaps Gregory’s theology reflected his health as well as the frightening chaos of his time. “In eleven months,” he wrote in 599, “I have rarely been able to leave my bed. I am so tormented with gout and painful anxieties that… every day I look for the relief of death.” And in 600: “For nearly two years I have been confined to my couch, so afflicted with pain that even on festivals I can hardly get up for three hours to celebrate Mass. I am daily at the point of death, and daily being driven back from it.” And in 601: “It is long since I have been able to leave my couch. I look longingly for death.”22It came in 604.
He dominated the end of the sixth century as Justinian had dominated its beginning; and his effect on religion was exceeded in this epoch only by that of Mohammed. He was not a learned man, nor a profound theologian; but because of his simplicity he influenced the people more deeply than the Augustine whose lead he followed with engaging humility. In mind he was the first completely medieval man.23 While his hand managed a scattered empire, his thought dwelt on the corruption of human nature, the temptations of ubiquitous devils, and the approaching end of the world. He preached with power that religion of terror which was to darken men’s minds for centuries; he accepted all the miracles of popular legend, all the magical efficacy of relics, images, and formulas; he lived in a world haunted with angels, demons, wizards, and ghosts. All sense of a rational order in the universe had departed from him; it was a world in which science was impossible, and only a fearful faith remained. The next seven centuries would accept this theology; the great Scholastics would toil to give it the form of reason; it would constitute the tragic background of The Divine Comedy.
But this same man, superstitious and credulous, physically shattered with a terrified piety, was in will and action a Roman of the ancient cast, tenacious of purpose, stern of judgment, prudent and practical, in love with discipline and law. He gave a law to monasticism, as Benedict had given it a rule; he buil
t the temporal power of the papacy, freed it from imperial domination, and administered it with such wisdom and integrity that men would look to the papacy as a rock of refuge through tempestuous centuries. His grateful successors canonized him, and an admiring posterity called him Gregory the Great.
III PAPAL POLITICS: 604–867
His early successors found it hard to live up to his height of virtue or power. For the most part they accepted domination by exarch or emperor, and were repeatedly humiliated in their efforts to resist. The Emperor Heraclius, anxious to unify his rescued realm, sought to reconcile the Monophysite East—which held that there was but one nature in Christ—with the orthodox West, which distinguished two; his manifesto, Ekthesis (638), proposed an agreement through the doctrine of monothelism—that there was but one will in Christ. Pope Honorius I agreed, adding that the question of one or two wills was “a point which I leave to grammarians as a matter of very little importance”;24 but the theologians of the West denounced his compliance. When the Emperor Constans II issued a proclamation (648) favoring monothelism, Pope Martin I rejected it. Constans ordered the exarch of Ravenna to arrest him and bring him to Constantinople; refusing to yield, the Pope was banished to the Crimea, where he died (655). The Sixth Ecumenical Council, meeting at Constantinople in 680, repudiated monothelism, and condemned Pope Honorius, post mortem, as “a favorer of heretics.”25 The Eastern Church, chastened by the loss of Monophysite Syria and Egypt to the Moslems, concurred in the decision, and theological peace hovered for a moment over East and West.
But the repeated humiliations of the papacy by the Eastern emperors, the weakening of Byzantium by Moslem expansion in Asia, Africa, and Spain, by Moslem control of the Mediterranean, and by the inability of Constantinople or Ravenna to protect the papal estates in Italy from Lombard assaults, drove the popes to turn from the declining Empire and seek aid from the rising Franks. Pope Stephen II (752-7), fearful that a Lombard capture of Rome would reduce the papacy to a local bishopric dominated by Lombard kings, appealed to the Emperor Constantine V; no help came thence; and the Pope, in a move fraught with political consequences, turned to the Franks. Pepin the Short came, subdued the Lombards, and enriched the papacy with the “Donation of Pepin,” giving it all central Italy (756); so was established the temporal power of the popes. This brilliant papal diplomacy culminated in the coronation of Charlemagne by Leo III (800); thereafter no man could be an accepted emperor in the West without anointment by a pope. The harassed bishopric of Gregory I had become one of the greatest powers in Europe. When Charlemagne died (814), the domination of the Church by the Frank state was reversed; step by step the clergy of France subordinated its kings; and while the empire of Charlemagne collapsed, the authority and influence of the Church increased.
At first it was the episcopacy that profited most from the weakness and quarrels of the French and German kings. In Germany the archbishops, allied with the kings, enjoyed over property, bishops, and priests a feudal power that paid only lip service to the popes. Apparently it was the resentment of the German bishops, irked by this archiépiscopal autocracy, that generated the “False Decretals”; this collection, which would later fortify the papacy, aimed first of all to establish the right of bishops to appeal from their metropolitans to the popes. We do not know the date or provenance of these Decretals; probably they were put together at Metz about 842. The author was a French cleric who called himself Isidorus Mercator. It was an ingenious compilation. Along with a mass of authentic decrees by councils or popes, it included decrees and letters that it attributed to pontiffs from Clement I (91-100) to Melchiades (311-14). These early documents were designed to show that by the oldest traditions and practice of the Church no bishop might be deposed, no Church council might be convened, and no major issue might be decided, without the consent of the pope. Even the early pontiffs, by these evidences, had claimed absolute and universal authority as vicars of Christ on earth. Pope Sylvester I (314-35) was represented as having received, in the “Donation of Constantine,” full secular as well as religious authority over all western Europe; consequently the “Donation of Pepin” was but a halting restoration of stolen property; and the repudiation of Byzantine suzerainty by the pope in crowning Charlemagne appeared as the long-delayed reassertion of a right derived from the founder of the Eastern Empire himself. Unfortunately, many of the unauthentic documents quoted Scripture in the translation of St. Jerome, who was born twenty-six years after the death of Melchiades. The forgery would have been evident to any good scholar, but scholarship was at low ebb in the ninth and tenth centuries. The fact that most of the claims ascribed by the Decretals to the early bishops of Rome had been made by one or another of the later pontiffs disarmed criticism; and for eight centuries the popes assumed the authenticity of these documents, and used them to prop their policies.*
By a happy coincidence the “False Decretals” appeared shortly before the election of one of the most commanding figures in papal history. Nicholas I (858-67) had received an exceptionally thorough education in the law and traditions of the Church, and had been apprenticed to his high office by being a favored aide of several popes. He equaled the great Gregorys (I and VII) in strength of will, and surpassed them in the extent and success of his claims. Starting from premises then accepted by all Christians—that the Son of God had founded the Church by making Peter her first head, and that the bishops of Rome inherited their power from Peter in direct line—Nicholas reasonably concluded that the pope, as God’s representative on earth, should enjoy a suzerain authority over all Christians—rulers as well as subjects—at least in matters of faith and morals. Nicholas eloquently expounded this simple argument, and no one in Latin Christendom dared contradict it. Kings and archbishops could only hope that he would not take it too seriously.
They were disappointed. When Lothaire II, King of Lorraine, wished to divorce his Queen Theutberga and marry his mistress Waldrada, the chief prelates of his kingdom granted his wish (862). Theutberga appealed to Nicholas, who sent legates to Metz to examine the matter; Lothaire bribed the legates to confirm the divorce; the archbishops of Trier and Cologne brought this decision to the Pope; Nicholas discovered the fraud, excommunicated the archbishops, and ordered Lothaire to dismiss his mistress and take back his wife. Lothaire refused, and marched with an army against Rome. Nicholas remained for forty-eight hours in St. Peter’s in fasting and prayer; Lothaire lost courage, and submitted to the Pope’s commands.
Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims, and the greatest prelate in Latin Europe after the Pope himself, dismissed a bishop, Ratherad, who appealed to Nicholas (863). Having reviewed the case, Nicholas ordered Ratherad reinstated; when Hincmar hesitated, the Pope threatened to lay an interdict—a suspension of all church services—upon his province; Hincmar fumed and yielded. To kings as well as prelates Nicholas wrote as one having supreme authority, and only Photius of Constantinople dared gainsay him. In nearly every case later developments showed the Pope to have been on the side of justice; and his stern defense of morality was a lamp and tower in a decadent age. When he died, the power of the papacy was acknowledged more widely than ever before.
IV. THE GREEK CHURCH: 566–898
The patriarchs of the Eastern Church could not admit the overriding jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome for a simple reason: they had long since been subordinated to the Greek emperors, and these would not till 871 abandon their claim to sovereignty over Rome and its popes. The patriarchs occasionally criticized, disobeyed, even denounced, the emperors; but they were appointed and deposed by the emperors, who called ecclesiastical councils, regulated church affairs by state law, and published their theological opinions and directives to the ecclesiastical world. The only checks on the religious autocracy of the emperor in Eastern Christendom were the power of the monks, the tongue of the patriarch, and the vow taken by the emperor, at his coronation by the patriarch, that he would introduce no novelty into the Church.
Constantinople—indeed all the
Greek East—was now dotted with monasteries and nunneries in far greater number than in the West. The monastic passion captured some of the Byzantine emperors themselves: they lived like ascetics amid the luxury of the palace, heard Mass daily, ate abstemiously, and bemoaned their sins as sedulously as they committed them. The piety of emperors and of the moribund rich enlarged and multiplied the monasteries with gifts and legacies; men and women of high rank, frightened by omens of death, sought admission to monasteries, and brought with them an ingratiating wealth that would no longer be subject to taxation; others deeded some of their property to a monastery, which then paid them an annuity. Many monasteries claimed to possess relics of revered saints; people credited the monks with control of the wonder-working power of these relics, and offered their coins in the hope of making an unreasonable profit on their investments. A minority of the monks disgraced their faith with idleness, venery, faction, and greed; the majority were reconciled to virtue and peace; altogether the monks enjoyed a popular veneration, a material wealth, and even a political influence that no emperor could ignore. Theodore (759-826), Abbot of the monastery of Studion in Constantinople, was an exemplar of monastic piety and power. Dedicated to the Church by his mother in his childhood, he accepted the Christian mood so thoroughly that in his mother’s last illness he complimented her on her approaching death and glory. He drew up for his monks a code of labor, prayer, chastity, and intellectual development that could stand comparison with that of Benedict in the West. He defended the use of religious images, and boldly denied, before the Emperor Leo V, that the secular power had any jurisdiction over ecclesiastical affairs. Four times he was banished for this intransigeance; but from his exile he continued to resist the Iconoclasts till his death.
