A Key to the Knowledge of Church History Part 17

Section 9. The Church of Russia.

[Sidenote: Decay of the Church after its first planting in Russia.]

The Church, founded in the South of Russia by St. Andrew, appears not to have spread to the other parts of this vast country, and to have died out, perhaps under the influence the hordes of barbarians who poured westward from Asia to Europe.

[Sidenote: Foundation of the present Church.]

The Church of Russia, as it now exists, owes its foundation chiefly to Greek Missionaries, who began their labours about A.D. 866, amongst the tribes bordering on the dominions of the Eastern Empire. Before the middle of the next century Christianity had gained a footing in the ancient capital of Kiev, and about A.D. 933 the Princess Olga was baptized at {140} Constantinople. [Sidenote: It flourishes under Vladimir.] In the reign of her grandson, Vladimir (A.D. 986-A.D. 1014), the Church made great progress in Russia. Vladimir made a public recognition of Christianity, and by his marriage with the sister of the Greek Emperor strengthened the links which bound Russia to Constantinople. The Greek missionaries were aided in their labours, churches and bishoprics were founded, and the Holy Scriptures and Service Books translated into the native Sclavonic language; the Greek monks, Cyril and Methodius, who have been already mentioned as instrumental in the conversion of Bohemia and Moravia, taking also an active share in the Christianizing of Russia. [Sidenote: Independence of the Russian Church,] In the reigns of Yaroslav and his successor (A.D. 1019-A.D. 1077), the empire became completely Christian, and the Church of Russia was placed on an independent footing, with a native primate at its head. Innocent III. (A.D. 1198-A.D. 1216) attempted to win over Russia to the Roman communion, by offering to confer the t.i.tle of King on Prince Roman, but his offer was at once rejected.

[Sidenote: which it has steadily refused to give up,] Russia suffered severely from the ravages of the Mongul Tartars, A.D. 1223, and Pope Innocent IV. took advantage of the distressed condition of the Russian church and the removal of the Greek Patriarchate from Constantinople to Nicaea, to make another attempt at detaching Russia from communion with the Greeks. David, Prince of Galicia, professed himself willing to receive the crown and t.i.tle of king from Rome, but this arrangement was not of long duration, and about A.D. 1230 a Metropolitan of the Russian Church was consecrated by the Greek Patriarch, to fill up the vacancy which had taken place {141} ten years before during the Tartar invasion. Kiev, the original seat of the Russian Patriarchate, was burnt and pillaged by the Tartars, and the see was transferred to Vladimir, A.D. 1299, and thence during the early part of the next century (A.D. 1320) to Moscow, where it has since remained.

[Sidenote: and has preserved unbroken.]

For more than two centuries, until A.D. 1462, Russia was oppressed by the yoke of the unbelieving Tartars, but the Church still maintained her independence, and steadily resisted the various attempts which were made to bring about a reunion between East and West, by the subjugation of the former to the unjust claims of the latter.

[1] The preaching Friars having been in vain employed for the conversion of the Albigenses, their efforts were supplemented by the inst.i.tution of the Inquisition.

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CHAPTER XII

The Mediaeval Church in Great Britain and Ireland

A.D. 500-A.D. 1500

Section 1. _The Church of England._

[Sidenote: Trials of the English Church under the Saxons.]

We have seen (p. 74) that the native Church of England had not succeeded in converting the Anglo-Saxon invaders who gradually took possession of the country, and that such as remained of the Bishops and Clergy had been compelled for the most part to take refuge in mountainous, and therefore inaccessible, districts. It was, however, only in A.D. 587, that Theonas, Bishop of London, and Thadiocus, Bishop of York, retreated from their sees, and they were both living in exile in Wales, when, ten years later, St. Augustine was sent by Pope Gregory to found a mission in England.

[Sidenote: Roman usurpation.]

It seems uncertain whether St. Gregory was aware of the previous existence of a Church in these islands; at any rate, he acted as if ignorant of the fact, by bestowing on St. Augustine a spiritual supremacy over the whole country; and the good Italian missionary, when brought into actual contact with the living representatives of a national Church already five hundred years old, appears to have considered himself justified in endeavouring to bring its {143} Liturgy and usages into agreement with the Roman pattern. [Sidenote: Consequent disputes.] All this was not unnatural, especially under the circ.u.mstances of weakness and depression in which the Church of England was then placed; but it was equally natural that such interference should be felt to be an usurpation, and resented accordingly, and that much misunderstanding and bitterness should be the consequence. There probably was a recognition of the claims of the elder race of English Bishops in the fact, that St. Augustine was consecrated to the see of Canterbury rather than to that of London, of which the rightful occupant was still living, and that neither the latter diocese, nor that of York, appear to have been filled up until after the deaths of Theonas and Thadiocus. [Sidenote: English independence partially recognized.] It was also eventually found expedient to leave to the English Church its own national Liturgy and ritual (originally derived through a Gallican channel from that of Ephesus), instead of insisting upon an exact conformity to Roman rites. [Sidenote: Some account of the English Liturgy.] This ancient English Liturgy, revised in the seventh century by St. Augustine, underwent a second revision at the hands of Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury, about A.D. 1083; and, though certain variations existed in some dioceses, the "Use of Sarum," as it was called, became the general "use" throughout the southern portion of England, and was even at length considered to be _the_ Liturgy of the country. It is from this Sarum Use that our present Post-Reformation Liturgy is derived.

A very considerable amount of new life and energy was infused into the Church of England by the mission of St. Augustine. Though the native Bishops and Clergy could not bring themselves to look cordially on those {144} whose religious zeal was not always tempered with justice or courtesy towards their predecessors in the field of their missionary labours, still both foreigners and natives worked for the same cause, each in their own way, and a new evangelization of the freshly-heathenized population ensued[1]. [Sidenote: Amalgamation of English and Roman successions.] By degrees the two lines of Bishops became blended in one succession, which has continued unbroken until the present day.

[Sidenote: English missionary zeal.]

The Church of England, thus strengthened and quickened, soon began to give abundant proofs of its vitality by sending out missionaries to convert the heathen in other lands. A large part of Germany and the Netherlands owes its Christianity to English Bishops and Clergy, such as Winfrith or Boniface, Willebrord, and a host of other less well-known or altogether forgotten names. The eighth century was especially distinguished by these missionary labours abroad, whilst, at home, were to be found such good and learned men as the Venerable Bede (A.D. 672 or '3-A.D. 735), an early translator of the Holy Scriptures, and his friend Egbert (A.D. about 678-A.D. 776), Archbishop of York, and founder of a famous school in that city, where the ill.u.s.trious Alcuin (about A.D. 723-A.D. 804) was a scholar.

[Sidenote: Invasion, and conversion of the Danes.]

In A.D. 787, the Church of England began to suffer severely from the ravages of the heathen Danes or Northmen; but, by the wisdom and valour of the good King Alfred (A.D. 871-A.D. 901), {145} they were for a while subdued, and numbers of them settled as peaceable colonists in England, where they gradually embraced Christianity.

[Sidenote: King Alfred.]

Alfred was very zealous in his endeavours to repair the spiritual and intellectual losses which the Church of England had undergone during the contest with the Danes, whose ravages had almost entirely swept away all native scholarship. The king was especially eager to secure a literature in the vernacular for his subjects, and himself translated into "simple English" parts of the Holy Bible, and other religious books. In these labours he was a.s.sisted by a small body of learned men, including the two Aelfrics, Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and Wulfstan, supposed to have been Bishop of Worcester. The conversion of the Danes who had first settled in England to Christianity prepared the way for the evangelizing of later colonists; and when, through the crimes and weakness of the later Anglo-Saxon princes, the country fell altogether into the hands of Danish invaders, Canute the Great (A.D. 1016-A.D. 1033) not only embraced Christianity himself, but secured for his native country the services of English missionaries. [Sidenote: Evangelization of Scandinavia.] In fact, at this time Scandinavia seems to have been the chief mission-field of the English Church.

[Sidenote: Roman influence comparatively small under the Saxons.]

We can hardly be wrong in gathering from all this, that Roman influence had only to a certain limited extent been introduced into the Church of England by St. Augustine's mission, and that, as time pa.s.sed on, the foreign element had become absorbed in the national one. With the Norman conquest of A.D. 1066, the {146} case was, however, altered.

[Sidenote: Much increased under the Normans.] The claims of the Popes to temporal as well as to spiritual authority were by that time definite and authoritative; the Conquest itself had been undertaken by the permission of Alexander II., and the authority of the foreign conquerors, (as the Norman and early Plantagenet kings continued to be,) required foreign support. Hence the Bishops of Rome gained an amount of political influence in England which was thoroughly unconst.i.tutional, and which could probably never have been attained by any foreign power, had the English sovereigns immediately after the Conquest felt themselves more firmly fixed upon the throne they had seized.

[Sidenote: Denationalizing of the Episcopate.]

The appointment of foreigners to the highest ecclesiastical offices in England, was one means by which the Norman sovereigns sought to secure themselves against disaffection amongst their new subjects; but the real result of this policy was to foster the claims of the Popes to religious and secular supremacy in this country; for these foreign ecclesiastics, though English Bishops, were not loyal subjects of the English crown, nor were their interests identical with those of their flocks. [Sidenote: Lanfranc.] Thus the Italian Lanfranc, when appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by William the Conqueror (A.D.

1070), did not hesitate to obey the summons of the Pope to Rome for the purpose of receiving the pall, and thus acknowledging that he held his Bishopric from the Papal see. [Sidenote: St. Anselm.] His successor, St. Anselm (A.D. 1093), also an Italian, and a man of great learning and holiness, was prepared to carry out a similar line of conduct; but the covetous and irreligious tyrant, William Rufus, was seeking at {147} the same time to reduce Bishops to the state of mere nominees and va.s.sals of the crown, and a long contest ensued[2]. The dispute was carried on into the next reign; and at length, in A.D. 1107, a compromise was agreed upon, by which it was arranged that Bishops should receive invest.i.ture from the Pope, and, at the same time, take an oath of allegiance to the king. [Sidenote: St. Thomas of Canterbury.] Anselm's unflinching advocacy of Papal claims cost him years of exile from his diocese, and much suffering; but, in the following century, similar conduct involved still more serious consequences to St. Thomas a Becket, the then Archbishop of Canterbury.

The new question in dispute was the right of clerical offenders to be tried in the spiritual courts, instead of coming under the jurisdiction of the civil power; but, in reality, it was only another form of the constant endeavours of the English monarchs to free themselves from the foreign bondage which was, to some extent at least, self-imposed.

Becket fell a martyr to his own sense of duty and the king's displeasure, A.D. 1170.

[Sidenote: Roman influence strongest in England.]

Papal usurpation in England reached its height when, in A.D. 1208, Innocent III placed the kingdom under an Interdict, for refusing to receive as Archbishop of Canterbury his nominee, Stephen Langton, who was unacceptable both to king and people; and soon after proceeded to excommunicate John, and depose him from his throne. The king's cowardly and unconst.i.tutional conduct in resigning his kingdom into the {148} hands of the Pope's legate (A.D. 1213), and receiving it again at the end of three days as a tributary va.s.sal of the Roman see, caused England to be looked upon for some years as only a fief of Rome.

[Sidenote: Kept up by the Friars;]

In the reign of Henry III. (A.D. 1216-A.D. 1272), Roman influence in England was greatly sustained by the introduction of the Preaching Orders of Franciscan and Dominican Friars, who, being many of them foreigners, and all of them independent of any episcopal control, and subject to Papal jurisdiction only, were very energetic in their endeavours to maintain and extend the authority of the popedom.

[Sidenote: by the habit of appeals;]

By this time, too, appeals to Rome against the decisions of English courts had come to be a great bar to national independence. Such appeals had been altogether unrecognized in England until the days of Stephen, and the practice was again forbidden in Henry II.'s reign by the Const.i.tutions of Clarendon (A.D. 1164); but, after Becket's death, the prohibition was once more repealed. It is easy to see how seriously this system of appeals must have delayed and interfered with the regular course of justice in this country, and how capable it was of being made a political engine in the hands of the Pope, or of those who held with him. The exemption of most of the monasteries from the supervision of the Bishops was also a serious evil, interfering as it did with the Divinely-appointed functions of the episcopacy, and opening the door to disorders which the distant and usurped authority of the Popes had not power to remedy.

[Sidenote: by large money payments.]

In the fourteenth century another means was resorted to of increasing the power of the Popes at expense of the monarch and people of {149} England, by the payment of annates, or first-fruits, on the appointment of each Bishop; and so heavy did this burden become, that between A.D.

1486 and A.D. 1531, 160,000 pounds (or about 45,000 pounds a year of our money) was paid to Rome under the head of annates.

[Sidenote: All these evils borne under protest.]

It is not to be supposed that these encroachments of a foreign power were accepted without a murmur or remonstrance on the part of the people of England; on the contrary, there was a constant undercurrent of discontent, which found occasional expression in some official or popular protest. Such, on the one hand, was the statute of _praemunire_, pa.s.sed in the reign of Richard II. (A.D. 1389), to prohibit Papal interference with Church patronage and decisions in ecclesiastical causes; and, on the other, the irregular proceedings of Wickliffe and the Lollards, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which, though they eventually degenerated into seditious agitation, had their rise in a feeling of opposition to Romish abuses and usurpations.

This feeling was increased by the fearful state of profligacy into which Rome, and indeed all Italy, was plunged during the fifteenth century, which effectually destroyed the character formerly enjoyed by the Roman Church, whilst it could not but affect the spiritual health of the other Churches over which Rome exercised so wide an influence.

Wiser and calmer men than Wickliffe saw the need of some reformation, though they questioned, and, as the event showed, rightly, the wisdom and the justice of the steps he took towards his object. Wickliffe's teaching in the fourteenth century had, in fact, little or nothing to do with the real Reformation of two hundred years later, except that some of his dangerous theories on political matters took deeper root than did his {150} religious peculiarities, and bore fruit in much of the unprincipled licence which was an unhappy, though by no means an essential, feature of the Reformation era.

[Sidenote: English longings for reformation.]

England, in common with the other nations of Europe, was willing to hope for great benefit from the councils of the Church held in the fifteenth century; and, at each of them, we find English Clergy making grave and urgent protests against the abuses which they saw around them, and pleading for a return to purer and better ways. Thus, at the Council of Pisa, A.D. 1400, one of the English Bishops who attended it presented a memorial which complained of the evils resulting from the want of episcopal control over the monasteries, from the practice of appeals to Rome, and from the ease with which dispensations for non-residence and pluralities were obtained[3]. Again, at the Council of Constance (A.D. 1415) a sermon was preached by Dr. Abendon, an Oxford professor, which painted in very strong language the worldliness and covetousness of the non-resident Bishops and Clergy; and these protests were followed up by an official appeal to the Pope for a reformation, on the part of the Kings of France and England, A.D. 1425, as well as by official instructions given to the English deputation despatched to the Council of Basle (A.D. 1431), to use their influence for the same end.

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Section 2. _The Church of Ireland._

The Church of Ireland was not, like the Church of Great Britain, to which it owes its foundation, a prey to the depressing influences of the heathen Saxons; and, at the time of the mission of St. Augustine, the daughter was in some measure enabled to repay to the mother the benefits which the British St. Patrick had conferred on the scene of his missionary labours. A constant intercourse was kept up between the numerous monasteries of Ireland and those of Wales and Scotland, some of the abbeys in the latter countries being founded and frequented by Irishmen. [Sidenote: Early reputation of Ireland.] Ireland, in the sixth and seventh centuries, had a great reputation for learning and missionary zeal, both of which were called into play to help in the reconversion of a large portion of England, as well as to encourage the efforts of English Churchmen in retaining in the National Church the national characteristics, with the loss of which it was threatened from the large admixture of foreign elements introduced by St. Augustine.