acknowledging the pretensions of the Roman bishop was indicated at this very council, where a titular and honorary precedence was granted him, at the same time that equality in other respects was claimed for the Bishop of Constantinople, on account of his being bishop of "New Rome." Leo was cut to the quick by this proceeding of the council, which placed his authority on so precarious a foundation by making it dependent solely on the political importance of the city where it was exerted. He repels the declaration of the council with great warmth, and asserts that the authority of spiritual Rome is founded on the fact that it is the see of Peter. But Leo does not renounce the advantages to be derived from the commanding political position of Rome, but skillfully interweaves this with the more vital consideration just named. He claims that the Roman Empire was built up with reference to Christianity, and that Rome, for this reason, was chosen for the bishopric of the chief of the Apostles. This idea as to the design of the Roman Empire passed down to later times. It is implied in the lines of Dante, where, speaking of Rome and the Empire, he says: : "Fur stabiliti per lo loco santo U' siede il successor del maggior Piero." 1 . If we watch the course of history for several centuries after the second, we observe that the attempts of the Roman bishops to exercise judicial or legislative functions in relation to the rest of the Church, now succeed and again are repulsed; but on the whole, under all these fluctuations, their power is increasing. The accession of Constantine (311) found the Church 80 firmly organized under its hierarchy that it could not be absolutely merged in the state, as might have been the result had its constitution been different. But under 1 "Were established as the holy place, wherein Inferno, ii. 23-24. AUGMENTED POWER OF ROMAN BISHOPS. 21 him and his successors, the supremacy of the state and a large measure of control over ecclesiastical affairs were maintained by the emperors. General councils, for example, were convoked by them and presided over by their representatives, and conciliar decrees published as laws of the Empire. The Roman bishops felt it to be an honor to be judged only by the emperor. In the closing period of imperial history, the emperors favored the ecclesiastical primacy of the Roman see, as a bond of unity in the Empire. Political disorders tended to elevate the position of the Roman bishop, especially when he was a person of remarkable talents and energy. In such a case the office took on new prerogatives. Leo the Great (440-461), the first, perhaps, who is entitled to be stylei Pope, with the more modern associations of the title, proved himself a pillar of strength in the midst of tumult and anarchy. His conspicuous services, as in shielding Rome from the barbarians and protecting its inhabitants, facilitated the exercise of a spiritual jurisdiction that stretched not only over Italy, but as far as Gaul and Africa. To him was given by Valentinian III. (445) an imperial declaration which made him supreme over the Western Church. The fall of the Western Empire (476) in one important particular was of signal advantage to the popes: it liberated them from subjection to the civil power. The fate of the Eastern Church and of the see of Constantinople might have been the fate of the Western Church and of Rome, had its political situation been equally unpropitious. The slavish condition to which the Roman bishops were reduced in the brief period of the full Greek rule in Italy, after the conquest of Justinian (539-568), proves how closely the vigor and growth of the papal institution were dependent on favoring political circumstances. From this ignoble servitude it was lib1 Gieseler, II. i. 3, § 92. erated by the Lombard invasion, which broke down the Greek power in the peninsula. But the direct consequences of the fall of the Roman dominion in the West had been disastrous to the Church and to the Papacy. Christian Britain had been conquered by the heathen Saxons from the continent. Arianism had spread far and wide among the Germanic tribes. The Greek Church, which became more and more distinct from the Latin, in language, creed, and ritual, attached itself with increasing loyalty to the Patriarch of Constantinople. As Arianism was, step by step, displaced by orthodoxy through the conquests of the Franks, the authority of the Papacy was not proportionately advanced. Even the power of metropolitans in the different countries sank, and the government of the Church rested in the hands of the kings and of the aristocracy of nobles and bishops. The bishops under the Merovingian kings amassed wealth, but led unholy lives, with little concern for the interests of religion. The disorder in the Frank Church reached its height under Charles Martel. At this time the heretical Lombards had founded their kingdom in the heart of Italy; and the Arabs, having carried their dominion over Africa and Spain, were advancing apparently to the conquest of Europe. The fortunate alliance of the Papacy with the Franks was the event on which its whole medieval history turned. They counted at their conversion, in the fifth century, only about five thousand warriors. They gained the ascendency over the Burgundians and Goths, and thus secured the victory of the Catholic faith over the Arian type of Christianity. This alone was an event of signal moment, in its ultimate bearing on the papal dominion. Then under Charles Martel, at Poitiers (732), they defeated the Moslems who, in their victorious progress, were encircling Christendom and threatening not only to crush the Pa 1 Giesebrecht, Die Deutsche Kaiserzeit, i. 92. THE PAPACY AND THE FRANKS. 23 pacy but even to extirpate Christianity itself. Under the shield of the Franks, Boniface went forth to accomplish the conversion of the Germans; himself an Anglo-Saxon, of the nation which had been won from heathenism by missionaries sent directly from that pontiff whose reign separates the ancient or classical from the mediaval era of the Church, Gregory the Great. The usurpation of Pepin, the founder of the Carlovingian line, was hallowed in the eyes of his subjects by the sanction obtained from Pope Zacharias (750). The political renovation of the Frankish monarchy was attended by an extension of the influence of the papal see. The Frankish Church was brought into closer connection with Rome. The primacy of Peter was universally recognized; it even acquired, through the labors of Boniface, a far higher significance than it had ever before possessed. After the Lombards had wrested from the Greeks their provinces in Italy, and were threatening Rome, at a time, too, when, by the controversy about the worship of images, the Western Church was separated from the East and the Roman bishop was left to protect himself, he turned to the Franks for assistance against his heretical and aggressive neighbors. The deliverance achieved first by Pepin (754-55), and then by Charlemagne, resulted in the coronation of the latter n Christmas day, 800, in the Basilica of St. Peter by the hands of the Pope. Thus Charles became in form what he had made himself in fact, the Emperor of the West. The idea of the perpetuity of the Roman Empire was never lost from the minds of men. In the coronation of Charles, the Pope virtually proceeded in the character of a representative of the Roman people, and his act signified the revival of the Roman Empire. Charlemagne, while he recognized the Pope as the spiritual head of the Church, demeaned himself as a master in reference. to him, as in relation to his own bishops. But while the foundation 1 Giesebrecht, i. 97. was laid for the papal kingdom in Italy by the grants of Pepin and Charlemagne, a plausible ground was also furnished for the subsequent claim that the Pope, by his own authority, had transferred the Empire from the East to the West, and selected the individual to fill the throne.1 In later times the coronation of Charles lent color to the pretended right of the pontiffs to exert a governing influence in civil not less than in ecclesiastical affairs. As the divisions and conflicts of Charlemagne's empire after his death tended to exalt the bishops who were called in to act as umpires among rival aspirants or courted for the religious sanction which they could give to successful ambition, so did this era of disorder tend to magnify the power of the recognized head of the whole episcopate. In this period appeared the False or PseudoIsidorian Decretals, which formulized, to be sure, tendencies already rife, but still imparted to those tendencies an authoritative basis and an augmented strength. The False Decretals brought forward principles of ecclesiastical law which made the Church independent of the State and elevated the Roman See to a position unknown to preceding ages. The immunity and high prerogatives of bishops, the exaltation of primates, as the direct instruments of the popes, above metropolitans who were closely dependent on the secular rulers, and the ascription of the highest legislative and judicial functions to the Roman Pontiff, were among the leading features of this spurious collection, which found its way into the codes of canon law and radically modified the ancient ecclesiastical system. There was only needed a pope of sufficient talents and energy to give practical effect to these new princi 1 For the history of the papal kingdom in Italy, see the work of Sugenheim, Geschichte der Entstehung u. Ausbildung des Kirchenstaates (Leipzig, 1854); also, a review of this work in the New Englander, vol. xxvi. (Jan. 1867). 2 On the date of the Pseudo-Isid. Decretals, see Niedner, Kirchengeschichte, p. 396. They first appeared about the middle of the ninth century. |