The Church and the Barbarians Part 14

determined on his appointment he was not even ordained: in six days he {193} received the different orders and was made patriarch. But his election was uncanonical. Ignatius the patriarch, who was still living, was deposed because of his censures of the emperor's evil life.

Photius announced his election to Pope Nicolas, but Ignatius refused to surrender his rights; both parties excommunicated each other; and the emperor mocked at both. But he also asked the pope to send legates to a council which should restore order to the Church. The Council met in 861. It confirmed Photius in his office, and the papal legates a.s.sented. Nicolas refused to accept the decision and took upon him to annul it, to depose Photius, to declare the orders conferred by him invalid, and to announce his decision to the other patriarchs and to the metropolitans and bishops who owed obedience to Constantinople.

Neither the emperor nor Photius would submit; and in 867 Photius issued, in a council at Constantinople, an encyclical letter, in which he repudiated the papal claim of jurisdiction (which was complicated by a.s.sertions of supremacy over the Bulgarian Church), and denounced a number of tenets held by Westerns, [Sidenote: The Philioque controversy.] and most notably the addition of the word _Filioque_ to the Nicene Creed, as a.s.serting the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. He ended by excommunicating the pope.

In the year 867 Nicolas died, Michael was deposed, Photius followed him into retirement, Basil the Macedonian ascended the throne, and Ignatius was restored to the patriarchate. A council was held in 869 at which papal legates attended, which approved these acts, and which is counted by the Roman Church as {194} the Eighth Oec.u.menical Council. This Council confirmed the Church's decision as to image-worship. Ignatius held his throne till his death in 877, when Photius was reinstated.

His return was signalised by a new agreement with Rome, in which Pope John VIII. repudiated the insertion of the Filioque, and declared that it was inserted by men whose daring was due to madness, and who were transgressors against the Divine Word. Another council at Constantinople (879-80) confirmed the reinstatement, declared Photius to be lawful patriarch, and anathematised the Council of 869. This is reckoned by the Greeks as the Eighth Oec.u.menical Council. [Sidenote: End of the schism.] Then the schism was for the time healed. It made no difference that a new emperor, Leo VI., the Wise, deposed Photius again and appointed his own brother. The union remained formally throughout the tenth century. But though the eleventh century opened with a nominal agreement, it was not destined to endure. The points of severance must be dealt with in a later volume. It may here suffice to say that the position of the Greeks was rigidly conservative, of the popes aggressively authoritative.

It was an age of growing papal claims; and the claims had now found a new basis.

[Sidenote: The forged decretals.]

The promises, true and legendary, of Pippin, and the spurious donation of Constantine, had still further extension in the False Decretals.

These were first used by Nicolas I., who was pope from 858 to 867.

During his pontificate the collection of Church laws, with the canons of the Oec.u.menical Councils, the letters of the most important bishops and the like, with the ecclesiastical laws of the {195} emperors, which were practically becoming a _corpus juris canonici_, received a notable addition. The genuine decretals of the popes begin with Siricius (384-98); but there now (between 840 and 860) appeared fifty-nine more, professing to date from the second and third centuries, and also thirty-nine became interpolated among the genuine doc.u.ments, which ranged from 386 to 731. These were put forth by a skilful forger as the collection of Isidore of Seville, and they were incorporated in the authentic collection made by him. A most remarkable series of doc.u.ments was this, in every point supporting the claims now put forth by the Roman See to political as well as ecclesiastical supremacy, deciding questions of discipline and right such as were then vexed, and supplying a veritable armoury for the advocates of papal claims to rule everywhere, over all persons, and in all causes. The forged decretals, now known as the pseudo-Isidorian, had their origin among the Franks, and showed the aims and the needs of the Frankish reformers. They set forth three great objects--"freedom from the secular power, establishment of the ecclesiastical hierarchy with a firm discipline, and centralisation of organisation upon which all could depend." [1]

They represented, in fact, a scheme of reform and the way in which a somewhat unscrupulous reformer imagined it could best be carried out.

Probably the forged decretals were concocted at Rheims, or possibly at Mainz, and they were first used in a critical case in 866, when a bishop of Soissons, deposed by Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, appealed to the pope on the ground that the power of deposition by the decretals belonged to him alone. It is difficult {196} to believe that when Nicolas I. accepted them he was not aware that they were not the genuine writings of the popes whose work they professed to be: he can hardly have thought that Spain (where it was said that they had been discovered) was more likely to have kept papal doc.u.ments safely than the Roman Chancery itself. Their importance was, however, not evident at first. In the ninth and tenth centuries comparatively little was made of them. It was in the eleventh and the centuries which followed that a gigantic edifice of papal a.s.sumption was to be built upon them by popes who were fired with a true zeal to reform the world, and who, not doubting their authenticity, found in them an instrument ready to their hands.

[Sidenote: The decay of the papacy.]

The weakness of the papacy in the tenth century was indeed such that no theory could give it respect in Europe. The weakness of the Church was heralded by that of the Empire. The Carling house expired in contempt almost as great as that which had fallen on the Merwings. In Gaul the Norman had won fair provinces on the coast; and the house of the Counts of Paris came in the tenth century to rule over the Franks. There the Church remained strong as the State decayed, and it was the great archbishopric of Rheims which gave the crown to the line of Hugh the Great. In Germany the dynasty of the Carlings became extinct. In Rome the power over the city fell into the hands of the local n.o.bility; and the period was made infamous by the lives of Theodora and Marozia, who were the paramours of popes. The tale of the age of disgrace which marks the greater part of the tenth century is of no importance in the history of the Church. A succession of {197} popes, whom their contemporaries certainly did not believe to be infallible, followed each other in rapid procession. John X. alone (914-28) has any claim to greatness; but he, like the others, was deeply stained with the vices, political if not moral, of his age. It was not until the Saxon Otto came to Italy like a knight-errant to redress the wrongs of the Northern princes, and was crowned at Rome in 962, that the Church in Italy began to revive from its ashes. He deposed and set up popes; and he gave to the papacy something of the bracing ideals which the new life of Gaul and Germany inspired.

The moral weakness of the papacy, the political weakness of Italy, had founded the Empire anew, as it had been founded anew in 800. The revival of the Empire under Charles the Great, and again under Otto, was not due to political considerations only; it was due also to the force of religious ideas.

[Sidenote: The religious revival of the Empire under the Saxons.]

One great characteristic of the revived Empire in German hands was the important part played in its policy by missions, and, it must be added, missionary wars. It was said of Charles the Great by his eulogists that he converted Saxons and Vandals and Frisians by the Word and the sword: and this thought was embodied in a series of wars which have been somewhat fancifully compared to the Crusades of later days. Otto I. thrice invaded the land of the Slavs and made all the barbarians from the Oder to the Elbe admit his lordship. Six new bishoprics were founded as his sway spread, and the bishop of Magdeburg was raised to be "archbishop and metropolitan of the whole race of the Slavs beyond the Elbe which has {198} been, or still remains to be, converted to G.o.d." But though it was a real work of civilisation, a work which made for peace, that the German Caesars undertook, it was not a Crusade. A Crusade was a war to win back from the infidel what had once been the patrimony of the Crucified: the wars of the Ottos were directed to extend their own sway, and, as ever, the true work of the converting Church was not helped but hindered by the arms and enterprises of soldiers and statesmen. When the tribes revolted against the government of the Germans, they often disowned their Christianity and destroyed their churches. Under Otto III. the Empire did not recover what she had lost, and the province of Magdeburg remained for nearly half its extent in heathen hands. [Sidenote: Otto the Great's endowment in Germany.] The Church suffered from this a.s.sociation.

Where the mission of S. Boniface had been purely spiritual, the work of his successors was often hampered by the ambition of the emperors. In the lands alike of Eastern and Western Franks the Church was often led to lean on the State, and the results, of slackness, corruption, weakness, were inevitable. The rich endowments which were poured upon the Church were not always wisely given or wisely used. The Caesars themselves showered gifts: Otto the Great surpa.s.sed all his predecessors in lavishness,[2] and his dynasty followed in his steps.

But the honours and riches were given quite as much for political as for religious objects. In the bishops and abbats the sovereigns found the wisest servants, the most capable administrators. As among the West Franks under the {199} Merwings, so now among the East Franks, the great ecclesiastics were the supports of the monarchy, the real governors of the country. It was thus that they came to owe their position--if not their election always yet certainly their confirmation--to the imperial will. As in Rome the emperors were stretching forth a hand to control the elections to the papacy, so in Germany there was growing up at the end of the tenth century the practice of imperial control over the things of the Church. The policy of the Ottos and the reformation of the papacy were certain ultimately to lead to the contest concerning invest.i.tures. High clerical office had come too often to be bought and sold, and the churches were becoming mere appanages of the great princ.i.p.alities. It was wise of Otto I. to try to win from the dukes the power they had obtained: but it was not for the good of the Church that the power should be even in the imperial hands.

[Sidenote: Otto III. and the popes.]

Otto I. died in 973. He had begun the reformation of the papacy. His son and grandson succeeded him, Otto II. in 973, Otto III. in 983. In 996 died Pope John XV., a Roman whom the Frankish chronicler, Abbo of Fleury, declares to have been l.u.s.tful of filthy lucre and venal in all his acts. To Otto the clergy, senate, and people of Rome submitted the election of his successor. He chose his own cousin Bruno, "a man of holiness, of wisdom, and of virtue,"--news, to quote the same saintly writer, more precious than gold and precious stones. His throne was insecure: the Roman n.o.ble Crescentius drove him from it, but he won his way back and overcame one who had been set up as an anti-pope. He died in 999.

{200}

At the close of the tenth century a pope and an emperor of great ideas stand forth from the blackness of an age when, according to the evidence of councils and of monastic chronicles alike, vice was rampant--"the more powerful oppress the weaker, and men are like fishes in the sea, which everywhere in turn devour one another"--and the bishops and clergy alike neglected their duties. Otto III. (983-1002), the offspring of the German who sat on the imperial throne and the daughter of the Caesars of the East, made himself a real ruler of the Empire in Church as well as in State, and after the disputed succession of his cousin Bruno (Gregory V., 996-99) placed on the papal throne the first of the great line of later medieval popes. Gregory V. was the first pope of transalpine birth imposed by the Germans; Gerbert was the first of the French popes. It needed the imperial army to keep Gregory on the throne, and to crush the last of the Roman princelets who had made the papacy infamous; Gerbert (Silvester II., 999-1003) was only able to remain in the eternal city so long as Otto was there to protect him. [Sidenote: Gerbert.] But Gerbert's greatness belonged to a sphere far wider than that of the local papacy. He was a scholar in the ancient cla.s.sics, a logician, mathematician, astronomer and musician, a great collector of books and a great teacher of men. An Aquitanian by birth, he was brought up at Aurillac, and then pa.s.sed from one place of study to another, till, by the influence of the Emperor Otto I., he settled at Rheims in 972. His school was a famous one: among those whom he taught were many bishops, Robert the future king of the Franks and Otto the future emperor. From Rheims he went as abbat to {201} Bobbio, where the necessary severity of his rule provoked such opposition that he was obliged to return to Gaul. [Sidenote: In Gaul]

He returned in time to win the influence of the great see of Rheims on behalf of the child heir of Otto II., who died at the end of 983, and to take part in the diplomacy which ended in the transfer of the West Frankish crown to Hugh the duke of the Franks. When Arnulf, of the very Karling house which had been dispossessed, became archbishop, and tried to hand over Rheims to his kindred, Gerbert, the steadfast supporter of the "Capetians," was made his successor. The election was of more than doubtful legality, and the politics, papal and imperial, of the time still further complicated the question: it was only settled by the transference of Gerbert, on the nomination of his old pupil, Otto III., to the see of Ravenna, From 998 he remained in Italy till his death. [Sidenote: and in Italy.] In 999 he became pope, and then he gave himself, heart and soul, to forward the great schemes, missionary, reforming, imperial, which were indeed as much his own as those of the enthusiastic genius of the young emperor. The old offices of the "republic" were revived and harmonised, as in the East, with the Christian character of the imperial power. Pope and emperor worked hand in hand for the conversion of the barbarians: it is said that it was Silvester who gave the kingship to the Hungarian Duke Stephen, as a son of the Christian Empire and the holy see of the imperial city. In the unquiet days of his papacy he was yet able to set an example of wisdom, counsel, G.o.dliness, charity, which formed an epoch in the regeneration of the Roman episcopate. Zealous, loyal, inspired by an overpowering sense of duty, {202} Silvester II. in a short time fulfilled a long time and left a mark on the history of the Middle Ages such as was made by but few even of its greatest men. [Sidenote: Pope Silvester II.] At his death in 1003 the age of reform had started on its way; and his was the light which had directed its beginnings. Thus in the West the end of the period shows the Empire and the papacy of one mind, eager for a spiritual reform in the Church, for Christian and missionary ideals in the State, not careful to delimit the provinces of Church and State, but eager rather for unity of action as well as sentiment in the cause of Christian extension and endeavour.

[Sidenote: The end of the Dark Age.]

Though the contest was not yet over, it might be said with confidence that the Church of Christ had won over the barbarians. Missionaries and martyrs had changed the face of Europe, and the fierce tribes which were pouring over the Continent in the fifth century, barbarous and heathen, were now for the most part tamed and converted to the love of Christ. Out of a land which had been wild and barbarous, and where one of the greatest of saints and missionaries had met his death, had come a revival in Christian form of the old imperial idea, and the great men who had been nourished by it had given new health to the central Church of Europe. For the moment, the Empire and the Papacy, Germany and the new temporal State in the hands of the Roman bishop, were united to lead the Christian nations and to convert the heathen on their borders.

In the East remained the magnificent fabric of the immemorial Empire, active still in missionary labour and setting an example of the union of Church and State in {203} agreement to which the West could never attain. The eleventh century was to bring to East and West alike, with new responsibilities, new difficulties in action and new problems in thought. Everywhere it was for unity men strove, the unity which if in its main aspect it was political, was on its spiritual and ideal side embodied in the visible Church of Christ.

[1] Dr. O. L. Wells, _The Age of Charlemayne_, p. 434.

[2] See H. A. L. Fisher, _The Medieval Empire_, ii. p. 65; Hauck, _Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands_, iii. 57-9.