The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations Part 11

But so far the empire was maintaining by its secular authority the proper laws and inst.i.tutions of the Church. Justinian went far beyond this.[163]

His legislation a.s.sociated the bishop with the count in the government of cities and provinces. It gave up to him exclusively the superintendence of morality and the protection of moral interests, the control of public works and of prisons. It bestowed on him a large jurisdiction--even more, put under his supervision the conduct of public functionaries in their administration, and conferred on him a preponderating influence on their election. In a word, it by degrees displaced the centre of gravity in political life by investing the episcopate with a large portion of temporal attributions.

To give in detail what is here summed up would involve too large a s.p.a.ce. A few specimens must suffice. The bishop in his own spiritual office would have a great regard for widows and orphans.[164] Parents when dying felt secure in recommending children to their protection against the avarice of secular judges. Hence the custom had arisen that bishops had to watch over the execution of wills, especially such as were made for benevolent purposes. They could in case of need call in the a.s.sistance of the governor. Their higher intelligence and disinterested character were in such general credit that they had no little influence in the drawing up of wills. But the State under Justinian was so far from regarding: this with jealousy, that he ordered, if a traveller should die without a will in an inn, the bishop of the place should take possession of the property, either to hand it over to the rightful heirs, or to employ it for pious purposes.

If the innkeeper were found guilty of embezzlement, he was to pay thrice the sum to the bishop, who could apply it as he wished. No custom, privilege, or statute was allowed to have force against this. Those who opposed it were made incapable of testing. Down to the sixth century[165]

we find no law of the Church touching the testamentary dispositions of Christians. Justinian is the first of whom we know that he entrusted the execution of wills specially to the supervision of bishops. That he did this shows the great trust which he placed in their uprightness.

It was to be expected that bishops should have a special care for the city which was their see.[166] Various laws of Justinian gave them here privileges in which we cannot fail to see the foundation of the later extension of episcopal authority and influence over the whole sphere of secular life. With their clergy and with the chief persons in the city, they took special part in the election of _defensors_ and of the other city officers; so also in the appointment of provincial administrators. It was their duty to protect subjects against oppressions from soldiers and exaction of provision, as well as against all excessive claim of taxes and unlawful gifts to imperial officers. A governor on a.s.suming the province was bound to a.s.semble the bishop, the clergy, and the chief people of the capital, that he might lay before them the imperial nomination, and the extent of the duties which he was to fulfil. Thus they were enabled to judge on each occasion whether the representative of the emperor was fulfilling his charge. Magistrates, before entering on office, had to take the prescribed oath before the metropolitan and the chief citizens. The oath itself was an act made before G.o.d, and as such under cognisance of the bishop. But special regulations enjoined him to watch over the whole conduct and each particular act of the governor. If general complaints were made of injustice, he was to inform the emperor. If only an individual had suffered wrongs, the bishop was judge between both parties. If sentence was given against the accused, and he refused to make satisfaction, the matter came before the emperor in the last resort. The emperor, if the bishop had decided according to right, condemned his governor to death, because he who should have been the protector of others against wrong had himself committed wrong. If a governor was deposed for maladministration, he was not to quit the province before fifty days, and he could be accused before the bishop for every unjust transaction. Even if he was removed or transferred to another charge, and had left behind him a lawful subst.i.tute, the same proceeding took place before the bishop. On this account civil orders also were sent to the bishops to be publicly considered by them, and kept among the church doc.u.ments, their fulfilment supervised, and violations reported to the emperor. But, to complete this picture, it must be remarked that this supervision was not one-sided. The emperor sent even his ecclesiastical regulations not only through the patriarch of Constantinople to the metropolitans, but through the Praetorian prefect to the governors of provinces. He directed them to support the bishops in their execution, but he likewise enjoined them to report neglect of them to the emperor. Especially they were to watch the execution of imperial decrees upon Church discipline, and monasteries in particular. The rules, so often repeated because so frequently broken, respecting the inalienability of Church property, were to be specially watched, and also the celebration, as prescribed, of yearly synods. But the civil magistrates were only recommended to keep a supervision, which did not extend to the right of official exhortation; far less that they were allowed in any ecclesiastical matter, in which the bishop might be at all in fault, to act upon their own authority, or receive an accusation against him from whomsoever and for whatsoever it might be. But the bishop could act in his quality of judge between a party and the governor himself, if the party had called upon him. Especially, Justinian allowed bishops a decisive influence upon legal proceedings in certain branches. The inspection of forbidden games, public buildings, roads, and bridges, the distribution of corn, was under them. They were to examine the competence of a security.

The curators of insane persons took oath before them to fulfil their duty.

If a father had named none, the bishop took part in the choice of them; the act was deposited among the church doc.u.ments. If the children of an insane father wished to marry, the bishop had to determine the dowry and the nuptial donation. In the absence of the proper judge, the bishop of the city could receive complaints from those who had to make a legal demand on another, or to protect themselves from a pledge falling overdue. The proofs of a wrong account could, in the accountant's absence, be made before the bishop, and had legal force. If the ground-lord would not receive the ground-rent, the feoffee should consign it at Constantinople to the Praetorian prefect or the patriarch, in the provinces to the governor, or in his absence to the bishop of the city where the ground-lord who refused to receive it had his domicile. Whoever found no hearing, either in a civil or criminal matter, before the judge of the province, was directed to go to the bishop, who could either call the judge to him, or go in person to the judge, to invite him to do justice to the complainant according to the strict law, in order that the bishop might not be obliged to carry the refusal of justice by appeal to the imperial court.[167] If the judge was not moved by this, the bishop gave the complainant a statement of the whole case for the emperor, and the delinquent had to fear severe penalties, not alone because he had been untrue to his office, but because he did not allow himself, even at the demand of the bishop, to do what, without it, lay in the circle of his duties. But this referring to the bishop was not arbitrary--that is, not one which it lay in the will of the complainant to use or not, but necessary, so that anyone who appealed to the imperial court without this endeavour incurred, whether his complaint was founded or not, the same punishment as the judge who refused to give a decision at the bishop's request. Even if the complainant only suspected the judge, he was bound to apply to the bishop to join the judge in examining the matter, and to bring it to a strict legal issue. In the face of such honourable confidence which was placed in the bishops, and which was also justified in general by a happy result, we ought not to be surprised if either the emperor himself or inferior magistrates committed to them the termination of entangled processes, in which they exercised just such a jurisdiction as may either in general be exercised by delegates, or was committed to them for the special occasion.

The emperor[168] in his legislation left no part of the Church's discipline unregarded. His purpose was in all respects to make the State Christian; and he considered no part of divine and human things, whether it were dogma or conduct,--which, together, made up the Church's life,--withdrawn from his care and guardianship. Observances which had begun in custom, and gradually been drawn out definitely and enacted in canons, he took into his _Digest_, not with the intention of giving them greater inward force or stronger grounds as duties, but to show the unity of his own effort with that of the Church. He willingly put the imperial stamp on her salutary regulations. He showed his readiness to help her with external force wherever the inviolable sanct.i.ty of her laws seemed to be threatened by the opposition of individuals. In this he recognised the unchangeable order which is so deeply rooted in the nature both of Church and State, that order which is the greatest security for the wellbeing and prosperity of both. And the Church in the course of her long life had hitherto almost universally maintained this order; always, at least, in principle. If it was anywhere transgressed, it was either because the secular power was acting under special commission and approval of the Church, or, if that power acted without such approval, it met with open contradiction whereby not only the illegality of the particular action was marked, but the principle of the Church's freedom and independence was preserved.

There is a pa.s.sage in the address of the eastern bishops to Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople, quoted in the Second Nicene Council of 789,[169] the Seventh General, which cites the words of Justinian given above in one of his laws. The bishops say in their own character--and they are bishops who describe themselves "as sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, that is, of the Arabian impiety"--"It is the priesthood which sanctifies the empire and forms its basis; it is the empire which strengthens and supports the priesthood. Concerning these, a wise king, most blessed among holy princes, said: The greatest gift of G.o.d to men is the priestly and the imperial power, the one ordering and administering divine things, the other ruling human things by upright laws."

If we considered the principles of Justinian alone as exhibited in his legislation, without regard to his conduct, we might, like the eastern bishops, take these words as the motto of his reign and the key to his acts as legislator. Indeed, it may be said that this legislation cannot be understood except by presupposing throughout the cordiality of the alliance between the Two Powers. In the election and the lives of bishops, in the discipline of religious houses, in the strict observance of the celibate life which has been a.s.sumed with full consent of the will by clergy and by monks, the emperor is as strict in his laws as the Church in her canons.

The ruler of the State, who makes laws with a single word of his own mouth, who commands all the armies of the State, who bestows all its offices, who is, in truth, the autocrat, the impersonated commonwealth, shows not a particle of jealousy towards the Church as Church. He enjoins the strict observance of her canons in the fullest conviction that the end which she aims at as Church is the end which he also desires as emperor; that the good life of her bishops and priests is essential for the good of society in general; that the perfect orthodoxy of her creed is the dearest possession, the pillar and safeguard, of his own government. Heresy and schism are, in his sight, the greatest crimes against the State, as they are the greatest sins against the Church and against G.o.d. In the course of the two hundred years from Constantine to Justinian the Roman State, as understood by the Illyrian peasant who ruled it for thirty-eight years, had intertwined itself as closely with the Catholic Church as ever it had with Cicero's "immortal G.o.ds" in the time of Augustus, or Trajan, or Decius. It was the special pride and glory of Justinian to maintain intact this alliance as the palladium of the empire. And, therefore, his legislation touched every part of the ecclesiastical government, every dogma of the Church's creed, and only on account of this alliance did the Church acquiesce in such a legislation. I suppose that no greater contradiction can ever be conceived than that which exists between the mind of Justinian and the mind which now, and for a long time, has directed the nations of Europe, so far as their governments are concerned in their att.i.tude towards the Church of G.o.d. In Europe are nations which are nurtured upon heresy and schism, whether as the basis of the original rebellion which severed them from the communion of the Church or as the outcome of "Free-thought" in their subsequent evolution through centuries of speculation unbridled by spiritual authority; nations, again, bisected by pure infidelity, or struggling with the joint forces of heresy and infidelity which strive to overthrow const.i.tutions originally Catholic in all their structure. In one empire alone the att.i.tude of Constantine and Justinian towards the Church is still maintained. It is that wherein the emperor rules with an amplitude of authority such as Constantine and Justinian held, whose successor he claims to be; where, also, an imperial aide-de-camp, booted and spurred, sits at the council board of a synod called holy, and is by far the most important member of it, for nothing can pa.s.s without his sanction--a synod which rules the bishops, being itself nothing but a ministry of the State, drawing, like the council of the empire, its jurisdiction from the emperor.

Justinian was a true successor of the great Theodosius in so far as he upheld orthodoxy, and endeavoured to unite all his subjects in one belief and one centre of unity. The greatest of the Roman emperors had for their first and chief motive, in upholding this first principle of imperial policy, the conviction that thus only they could hope to maintain the peace and security of the empire. Schism in the Church betokened rebellion in the State. In the fourth century heresy had driven the empire to the very brink of destruction. Besides this, all the populations converted from heathendom were accustomed to see a complete harmony between religion and the State, which appeared almost blent into one. Again, we must not forget that at this time the Christian religion had been lately accepted distinctly as a divine inst.i.tution, and that it embraced the whole man with a plenitude of power which the indifference and division of our own times hardly allow us to conceive. Those who would realise this grasp of the Christian faith, transforming and exalting the whole being, may reach a faint perception of it by reading the great Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries--St.

Basil, St. Ambrose, St. Chrysostom, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and St. Leo.

They were not in danger of taking the moral corruption of an effete civilisation for the Christian faith. Again, the emperors, living in the midst of this immense intellectual and moral power--for instance, Justinian himself practising in a court the austerities of a monastery--recognised the confession of the same faith as the strongest band which united subjects with their prince. They thought that those who were not united with them in belief could not serve them with perfect love and fidelity.

And, lastly, they hoped that their own zeal in maintaining the Church's unity unimpaired would make them worthier of the divine favour, and give success to all their undertakings. Let us take the words of Theodosius, one of the greatest and best among them, to his colleague the younger Valentinian, who up to the time of his mother Justina's death had been unjust to the Catholic cause and favoured the Arian heresy: "The imperial dignity is supported, not by arms, but by the justice of the cause.

Emperors who feared G.o.d have won victories without armies, have subdued enemies and made them tributary, and have escaped all dangers. So Constantine the Great overcame the tyrant Licinius in a sea-fight. So thy father (the first Valentinian) succeeded in protecting his realm from its enemies, won mighty victories, and destroyed many barbarians. On the contrary, thy uncle Valens polluted churches by the murder of saints and the banishing of priests. Hence by guidance of Divine Providence he was besieged by the Goths, and found his death in the flames. It is true that he who has not unjustly expelled thee does not worship Christ aright. But thy perverse belief has given this opportunity to Maximus. If we do not return to Christ, how can we call upon His aid in the struggle?" The following emperors were of the same judgment: so that they attached to each decree which concerned ecclesiastical matters the motive of meriting thereby G.o.d's approval, since they not only took pains to please Him, but also led their subjects to do so. We employ, says Justinian, every care upon the holy churches, because we believe that our empire will be maintained, and the commonwealth protected by the favour of G.o.d, but likewise to save our own souls and the souls of all our subjects.

Justinian likewise would have a keen remembrance of the degradation from which his uncle had restored the empire. None knew better than he how the ign.o.ble reigns of the usurper Basiliscus, of Zeno, and of Anastasius, by perpetual tampering with heresy and ruthless persecution of the orthodox, had well-nigh broken that empire to pieces. Had he not thrown all his energy, as the leading spirit of his uncle's realm, into that great submission to Pope Hormisdas which rendered its beginning ill.u.s.trious?

Nevertheless a dark blot lies upon the name and memory of Justinian. He was not only successor of the great Theodosius in his ardent zeal for the Church's doctrine and unity, but likewise of Constantine, when he sullied his greatness and risked all the success of his former life by falling into the hands of the Nicomedian Eusebius.

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES:

[115] Mansi, viii. 795-99.

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

[117] Savigny, _Geschichte des romischen Rechts im Mittelalter_, 1834, i.

36. Quoted by Rump, ix. 72.

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

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

156.

[120] Translated from Photius, p. 156.

[121] "Cesare fui e son Giustiniano, Che, per voler del primo amor ch'io sento, Dentro alle leggi tra.s.si il troppo e il vano."

--_Paradiso_, vi. 10.

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

[123] Rump, viii. 487.

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

[125] Respondeat mens illa Sancto Spiritui serviens.

[126] Mansi, viii. 808.

[127] Mansi, viii. 849.

[128] See Baronius, A.D. 535, sec. 40; Hefele, ii. 736-8; Rump, ix. 174-6; _Novell._ x.x.xix. _De Africana Ecclesia._

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

megalourgos krator.

[130] Mansi, viii. 846.

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

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

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

[134] Liberatus, _Breviarium_.

[135] Reumont, ii. 49.

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

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

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

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

[140] Mansi, viii. 1149.

[141] Mansi, ix. 35-40.

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