The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations Part 12

[143] Mansi, ix. 487-537.

[144] Hefele, ii. 790.

[145] Hergenrother, _K.G._, i. 344-5; Photius, i. 166.

[146] Translated from Hergenrother's _K.G._, i., pp. 345-351, from p. 232, above, "at this point Justinian sought," &c., with reference also to the life of Photius.

[147] Hergenrother, Photius, i. 174; Rump, _K.G._, ix. 283.

[148] See Reumont, ii. 58-62; Gregorovius, i. 453-9.

[149] Reumont, 60.

[150] Gregorovius, 455.

[151] _Ibid._, 456.

[152] Reumont, 61.

[153] Gregorovius, 450-2.

[154] See vol. v. 281.

[155] _Const.i.tutio_, lx.x.xii. 667.

[156] Honestatem quam illis obtenentibus credimus.

[157] _Const.i.tutio_, vi. 48.

[158] 119. _De ecclesiasticis t.i.tulis_, p. 940. _Sancimus_. This word in Roman law in the time of Justinian is equivalent to the English formula, "Be it enacted by the Queen's most excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons in Parliament a.s.sembled, and by the authority of the same". There lies in these two formulae, expressing the supreme legislative authority, a comparison between the const.i.tution of the lower Roman empire and the medieval const.i.tutions established everywhere by the influence of the Church under guidance of the Popes.

[159] Riffel, 611-12, translated.

[160] See Justinian, _Gloss._ v., directed to the patriarch of Constantinople, Epiphanius. _Epilogus_, p 48: Haec igitur omnia sanctissimi patriarchae sub se const.i.tutis Deo amabilibus metropolitis manifesta faciant, at illi subjectis sibi Deo amabilibus episcopis declarent, et illi monasteriis Dei sub sua ordinatione const.i.tutis cognita faciant, quatenus per omnia Domini cultura maneat undique in eos incorrupta.

[161] Riffel, p. 615, translated.

[162] Riffel, p. 617.

[163] Kurth, ii. 35.

[164] See Riffel, p. 624.

[165] Riffel, p. 625.

[166] _Ibid._, pp. 629-35.

[167] See St. Gregory, _Epis._, x. 51 (vol. ii. 1080), where he writes to the ex-consul Leontius, in Sicily, who had beaten with rods the ex-prefect Libertinus: "Si mihi constare potuisset quia justas causas de suis rationibus haberent, et prius per epistolas vos pulsare habui; et si auditus minime fuissem, serenissimo Domino Imperatori suggererem".

[168] Riffel, p. 635.

[169] Mansi, xii. 1130.

[170] Riffel, 562.

[171] Photius, p. 155.

[172] Photius, 173.

CHAPTER V.

ST. GREGORY THE GREAT.

"The banner of the Church is ever flying!

Less than a storm avails not to unfold The Cross emblazoned there in ma.s.sive gold: Away with doubts and sadness, tears and sighing!

It is by faith, by patience, and by dying That we must conquer, as our sires of old."

--AUBREY DE VERE, "St. Peter's Chains".

The historian,[173] who has carefully followed the fortunes of Rome as a city during a thousand years, describes it as beginning a new life from the time when Na.r.s.es, in the year 552, came to reside there as imperial prefect and representative of the absent eastern lord Justinian. Na.r.s.es so ruled for fifteen years, but when he was recalled there ensued a long time of terrible distress and anxiety--a time of temporal servitude, but one also of spiritual expansion. The complete ruin of Rome as a secular city, the overthrow of all that ancient world of which Rome was the centre and capital, had been effected in the struggle ended by the extinction of the Gothic kingdom. By degrees the laws, the monuments, the very recollections of what had been, pa.s.sed away. The heathen temples ceased to be preserved as public monuments. The Capitol, on its desolate hill, lifted into the still air its fairy world of pillars in a grave-like silence, startled only by the owl's night cry. The huge palace of the Caesars still occupied the Palatine in unbroken greatness, a labyrinth of empty halls yet resplendent with the finest marbles, here and there still covered with gold-embroidered tapestry. But it was falling to pieces like a fortress deserted by its occupants. In some small corner of its vast s.p.a.ces there might still be seen a Byzantine prefect, an eunuch from the court of the eastern despot, or a semi-Asiatic general, with secretaries, servants, and guards. The splendid forums built by Caesar after Caesar, each a homage paid by the ruler of the day to the Roman people, whom he fed and feared, became pale with age. Their history clung round them like a fable. The ma.s.sive blocks of Pompey's theatre showed need of repairs, which were not given.

The circus maximus, where the last and dearest of Roman pleasures--the chariot races--were no longer celebrated, stretched its long lines beneath the imperial palace covered with dust and overgrown with gra.s.s. The colossal amphitheatre of t.i.tus still reared its circle perfect, but stripped of its decorations. The gigantic baths, fed by no aqueduct since the ruin wrought by Vitiges the Goth, rose like fallen cities in a wilderness. Ivy began to creep over them. The costly marble mantle of their walls dropped away in pieces or was plundered for use. The Mosaic pavements split. There were still in those beautiful chambers seats of bright or dark marble, baths of porphyry or Oriental alabaster. But these found their way by degrees to churches. They served for episcopal chairs, or to receive the bones of a saint, or to become baptismal fonts. Yet not a few remained in their desolation till the walls dropped down upon them, or the dust covered them for centuries. In course of time the rain perforated the uncared-for vaultings of these shady galleries. Having served for refuge to the thief, the coiner, or the a.s.sa.s.sin, they became like dripping grottoes.

Thus stood the temples, triumphal arches, pillars, and statues before the eyes of a young Roman n.o.ble, one out of the few patrician families still surviving. These were the sights with which St. Gregory, who claimed kindred with the Anician race, was familiar from his boyhood, so that the desolation of Jerusalem rose before his mind as the state of his own Rome pressed on his eyes and seared his heart.

This skeleton of a city was scarcely inhabited by the remnant of a people, decimated by hunger and pestilence, and in perpetual fear to see its ill-defended gates broken into by Lombard savages. The walls of Aurelian, half demolished by Totila and hurriedly repaired by Belisarius, alone saved it year after year from the horrors which fell upon captured cities; and would not have saved it but for the indomitable spirit, the perpetual wisdom, foresight, and courage of a son who had been exalted to the Chair of Peter.

While Old Rome lay thus, the shadow of its former self, bereft of all political power, looking to the imperial exarch at Ravenna for its temporal rule, in danger moreover of inundation from its own Tiber, whose banks were no longer maintained with unremitting care, New Rome beside the Bosporus rioted in all the pomp and circ.u.mstance of a court still the head of a vast empire. The tributes of all the East, of numberless cities in Asia Minor, in Syria, in Egypt, were still borne unceasingly within its walls, which rose as an impregnable fortress between Europe and Asia. Its emperor still thought himself the lord of the world; its bishop a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of Ec.u.menical Patriarch. Both emperor and bishop cast but a disdainful glance on the widowed rival which threatened to sink into the grave of waters brought down by her own river. Constantinople could raise and pay armies from all the races of the North and East. A single imperial regiment was quartered at Rome, which, being ill-paid, became disaffected and neglectful of its charge, and could not be counted upon by the Pope for vigorous defence against the ever-pressing danger of a Lombard inroad.

So began the Church's Rome.[174] Enslaved politically to Byzantium, wherein the so-called Roman State, with Greek subtlety, carried on the principles of the old heathen government and practised a remorseless despotism, the city of the ancient Caesars and the people they fed on "bread and games"

ceased to exist, and was changed into the holy city, whose life was the Chair of Peter. From the time of Na.r.s.es, during all the two hundred years of Lombard a.s.sault and Byzantine neglect and exaction, the Pope alone, watchful and unceasingly active, carried out the fabric of the Roman hierarchy.[175] Its gradual increase, its springing up out of the dust of the old Roman State under the most difficult circ.u.mstances, will ever claim the astonishment of the after-world as the greatest transformation to be found in history.

Let us approach the secret of this transformation in the person of the man who best represents it.

Gregory was born about the year 540, and so was witness from his childhood of the intense misery and special degradation of Rome produced by the Gothic war. He was himself the son of Gordian, a man of senatorial rank, from whom he inherited great landed property. Through him he was the great grandson of that ill.u.s.trious Pope Felix III., whom we have seen resist with success the insolence of Acacius and the despotism of Zeno. Gregory had therefore a doubly n.o.ble inheritance--that of a true Roman n.o.ble's spirit, and that of the Church's championship. His paternal house stood on that well-known slope of the Coelian hill, opposite the imperial palace on the Palatine, from which in after-time he sent forth St. Augustine with the monks his brethren to be the Apostle of paganised England. He founded six monasteries in Sicily upon his property, and changed his father's palace into a seventh, in which he followed the Benedictine Rule. In early manhood he had been praetor or prefect of the city, being probably the most eminent of all its citizens in wealth and rank. But his mother St. Silvia, a woman of fervent piety, had educated him with great care. He turned from the secular to the religious life, following perhaps her example, since on the death of his father she became a nun. He was a monk on the Coelian hill when Pope Benedict in the year 577 named him seventh deacon of the Roman Church. Pope Pelagius II. sent him as nuncio to Constantinople, an office equally difficult and honourable. The emperor Tiberius was then reigning, with whom he became intimate, and with his successor Mauritius. Gregory dwelt in the imperial palace, with some monks of his own monastery whom he had brought with him, pursuing the Rule in all pious observances, winning also the esteem and friendship of many distinguished men, and making himself fully acquainted with the mechanism of the eastern court. He also delivered the patriarch Eutychius from a false Origenistic notion, that the bodies of the blessed after the resurrection were not glorified, but lost their quality as bodies.[176] There also he became warmly attached to St.

Leander, who afterwards, as archbishop of Seville, greatly helped him in recovering Spain from Arianism to the Catholic faith. The charge of Pope Pelagius to his nuncio Gregory throws a vivid light upon the condition of Rome at the time. His instructions ran: "Lay before our lord the emperor that no words can express the calamities brought upon us by the perfidy of the Lombards, breaking their own engagements. Our brother Sebastian, whom we send to you, has promised to describe to him the necessities and dangers of all Italy. Join him in that entreaty to succour us, for the commonwealth is in such distress, that unless G.o.d inspire him to show us his servants the mercy of his natural disposition, and move him to give us a single _Magister militum_ and a single _Dux_, we are utterly dest.i.tute, for Rome and its neighbourhood are specially defenceless. The exarch writes that he can give us no help, for he has not force enough to guard Ravenna.

Therefore, may G.o.d command the emperor quickly to succour us, before the army of that most wicked nation take the places still remaining to us."[177]

Gregory returned from Constantinople in 585, and lived as one of the seven deacons on the Coelian hill, when, on 8th February, 590, Pope Pelagius died of the pestilence, and Gregory was unanimously chosen to succeed him.

It was a moment of the greatest depression. The Tiber had in the winter overflowed a large portion of the city. The destruction wrought had been followed by a terrible plague. Gregory strove to escape the charge put upon him, and besought the emperor not to confirm his election. In the meantime, the clergy and people urged upon him the provisional exercise of the episcopal charge. As such he ordered a sevenfold procession to entreat the cessation of the plague. The clergy of Rome, the abbots, the abbesses with their nuns, the children, the laymen, the widows, and the married women, each company separately arranged, were to start from seven different churches, and to close their pilgrimage together at the basilica of St.

Maria Maggiore.

During the procession itself eighty victims to the plague fell dead. But as Gregory was pa.s.sing over the bridge of St. Peter's, a heavenly vision consoled them in the midst of their litanies. The archangel Michael was seen over the tomb of Hadrian, sheathing his flaming sword in token that the pestilence was to cease. Gregory heard the angelic antiphon from heavenly voices--_Regina Coeli, laetare_, and added himself the concluding verse--_Ora pro n.o.bis Deum, alleluia_.