| #### 4. THE ROMAN SEE AND ITALY |

| #### #### St. Leo, pope from 440 to- 461, is the first of the three popes who alone of the long line are popularly styled "the Great." He was not Roman by birth, but from an early age he was one of the Roman clergy. He rose to be one of the seven deacons, and he was by 430 sufficiently important for St. Cyril of Alexandria to enlist his support against Nestorius. He was the friend also of Cassian, and with Cassian he assisted Celestine I in the Nestorian trouble. So, too, a few years later, it was his advice that guided Sixtus III in the final despatch of Julian of Eclanum. The imperial court, also, realised his worth and made use of his diplomatic talents. He was, in fact, acting as its ambassador in Gaul when, Sixtus III dying (August, 440), he was elected pope. As pope he was destined to fulfil all his early promise, to be, above all, the firm administrator and ruler, the touch of whose hands of steel an apostolic diplomacy kept ever from harshness. To this invaluable asset of a truly Roman spirit informed by the charity of the Gospel, St. Leo added intellectual attainments of a very high order. He was master of a singularly beautiful Latinity, clear, simple, and strong as his own disposition, and he was that rare thing among popes, a constructive theologian. He is almost the last pope to use as his mother tongue the Latin of classical antiquity, and the only pope to add his personal quota to the corpus of early Catholic theology. With St. Leo the golden age of the fathers reaches its term. His theological competence found full scope in the controversy as to the relations of the human and the divine in Our Lord which, twenty years after Nestorius, still divided the East, and which issued, in St. Leo's time, in the two great opposing councils at Ephesus (the Latrociniunm and at Chalcedon (431 and 451). [ ] #### The West knew the pope rather as an administrator and, in the domain of faith, as the most brilliant exponent so far of the prerogatives o f his primatial see. How he exercised that superior authority in the distant churches of Gaul and Spain has already been noted. He was equally active in what provinces of the diocese of Africa remained to the empire. From the most of them he was cut off once the anti-Catholic Vandals were possessed of them, but for fifteen years yet western Numidia and Mauretania Cesariensis escaped Genseric; and during that time St. Leo's intervention, in the traditional manner, is constant. He had heard of disorders in the matter of episcopal elections and in a letter to the hierarchy of the province of Mauretania he commissioned the bishop, Potentius, to enquire into the matter in his name. The enquiry proved the accusations true. Men had been consecrated who were the husbands of widows, or who had themselves been twice married. Others again had been elected who were not already clerics. St. Leo acted with moderation. Except for the bigamists (in the canonical sense) he would overlook what had been done, confirming these irregularly elected bishops but insisting that the law must be observed for the future. A convert Donatist bishop -- for from the moment of the Vandal invasion the penal code against the sect was no longer enforced and it revived in more than one place -- he allowed to keep his rank and authority over his people converted with him. Other cases he left to the judgement of the local bishops. Finally he directed that, for the future, care should be taken not to create sees outside the cities. To set up bishops in the villages would bring the episcopate to ridicule. #### To appreciate as it deserves the record of St. Leo's intervention in Africa, we need to recall the relations between the African bishops and Rome twenty years earlier, in the days when St. Leo was still but a deacon of the apostolic see. [ ] The pope makes no apology for his intervention, nor does he seem to think the occasion has come for any comment on the anti- Roman legislation of the famous Council of 427. Nor does he propose himself as the obvious substitute for that great annual council whose operation the invasions have so rudely interrupted. Like his predecessors before him, he makes the fact of his holding the Roman See the sole reason for all he says and does, in Africa as elsewhere. All that the Africans in 426 had protested the pope must not do -- hear appeals from Africa, send legates into Africa to hold enquiries and execute his judgements -- St. Leo, twenty years later, continues to do, and this as simply as though none had ever questioned these rights of his see. He was of course fully aware of the delicate susceptibilities of these African bishops and, if he was resolute in his practical affirmation of the rights of Rome, he could, on occasion, study their sensibilities. So it was, for example, in the case of the bishop Lupicinus who had appealed to him from their excommunication, and whose case he sent back to them to be re-tried. Nevertheless the pope desires that in all future cases where there is question of litigation between the bishops, a full report shall be sent to him of the matters in dispute and the solution arrived at, so that it may be strengthened by his sentence too. #### St. Leo was the pope in whose time fell Attila's invasion of Italy and Genseric's descent on Rome. Tradition describes him as warding off the first from the threatened city by the sheer might of his own holy personality, and history records how he persuaded Genseric to retire with what booty he cared to take. The saintly pope is already creating the role in which the medieval bishop was so often to figure, the protector of his people in temporals no less than in spirituals. In the affair of the Manichees -- the one domestic event of his reign known to us in any detail -- it may be conceived that he protected them in both. #### It was the fate of Manicheeism to be universally persecuted. On account of the moral aberrations it harboured and encouraged, it was proscribed by pagan emperors like Diocletian, by Buddhists in India and China, and of course by Catholic princes too. Already before the conversion of Constantine, Manicheeism was reduced, in the Roman Empire, to the condition of a secret society. From time to time there were arrests, trials, and revelations of disgusting moral disorder. Rome was the scene of such an exposure in 443. The ancient capital had been for some years a natural place of refuge for the Africans in flight from the Vandal invasion. They brought with them a proportion of Manichees, to swell the ranks of the existing organisation in Rome. The expansion of the sect did not escape St. Leo. He brought the matter to the notice of the civil authority and soon, at Rome, too, there were arrests and trials and revelations. Those proved guilty were condemned to life imprisonment. St. Leo did more. He circularised the bishops of Italy, communicating the official reports of the trials and bidding them guard their people from the new contamination. The emperor, Valentinian III, on his side, renewed the law of his pagan predecessor, but, it is interesting to note, he did not renew the penalty of death by fire there enacted. #### Rome itself was by the time of the death of St. Leo (November 11, 461) a Catholic city at last. All that was left of the old religion were the temples, unoccupied, empty, falling slowly into ruin (for as yet none had been consecrated to Catholic uses), and the social habits of such feasts as the Lupercalia. It was Gelasius I (492-496) who finally brought about their suppression. Year by year the churches increased in number, and around them a first beginning of the system of parishes. The dissident heretics who, in one degree or another, had troubled the unity of the Roman church for two centuries were gone, Donatists, Novatians, Manichees and their "Bishops of Rome" with them. Gone too were the Pelagians, although sufficient of these survived in Venetia to provoke from St. Leo a strong reminder to the metropolitan of Aquileia of his duty as guardian of the purity of the faith. Thirty years later still and Pope Gelasius is again exhorting to the same effect. To this universal submission of Rome to its bishop there was but one exception. The Barbarians who were now Rome's real rulers were Arians, and the popes had perforce to submit to the facts of Arian churches in their own city and an Arian bishop. To distinguish themselves from the heretical titulary they signed themselves " Bishop of the Catholic Church of Rome," or " Bishop of the Catholic Church," a style which has survived to this day as the consecrated formula for certain official acts. #### These years so barren, in the West, of events of ecclesiastical importance are years in which the routine of administration becomes more and more of a tradition; and for all that the new "national" frontiers are proving more and more of a barrier to easy communication between the pope and the bishops of the more distant sees, the tradition of intervention, of appeal and judgement, never weakens, is never lost. The opportunities are fewer, the intervention less efficacious. But the Roman habit remains, nor is it ever repudiated by the churches of these countries now politically independent of that power on which, in its last years, the popes had begun to rely as on the effective agent through whom their sanctions might function. #### The main centre of interest in the Church History of the fifth century is of course east of the Adriatic, in the great Christological controversies associated with the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451), and in the long drawn out social and political crisis which follows this last. [ ] Syria and Egypt are, during this half-century, the scene of a never ending religious warfare that strains all the resources of the imperial government, until, to save the empire's political unity it devises a compromise between Catholics and heretics. This is the famous Henoticon of the emperor Zeno (482). Its author is the Catholic Bishop of Constantinople, Acacius. For his share in it he is excommunicated by that zealous guardian of orthodoxy Pope Felix III (483-492), and his church -- and indeed all Eastern Catholicism -- supporting him, there begins, in 484, the long Acacian Schism (448-519). The century ends with the pope in a curious isolation. Throughout the West the rulers, with one exception, are heretical Arians: and the exception is the one real Barbarian among them, and a Catholic of very recent conversion. The ruler of the East, the Roman Emperor, is a heretic too, a Monophysite; and the Catholics of the empire, thanks to Acacius, are in schism. It is at this lamentable time that the ambition and jealousy of some of the leading Roman clergy inaugurate a series of disputes which are to trouble the peace of Rome itself for nearly forty years. Before they are healed there is once more a Catholic emperor at Constantinople. The peaceful relations of the Arian king in Italy, Theodoric, with the Empire are broken. There is a kind of persecution, and the pope dies in Theodoric's prison (526), and the last great intellectual of Christian Antiquity, Boethius, is put to death at his command. The truce between Italy and the desolation, which until now has spared her, is at an end; nor will] peace return until Italy, the old Italy, is burnt and ravaged as was no other part of this unhappy empire. #### The Roman Church itself had been singularly fortunate during this century of political revolution. While the empire was fast disappearing, and while everywhere in the West Catholicism was becoming subject to Arian rulers, its calm, ordered life went on with hardly any disturbance. But as the century drew to its close this happy state of things came to an end, and, thanks very largely to clerical ambition, an age of bitter dissension succeeded, marked by schisms and destined to leave to future generations more than one mischievous precedent in the matter of papal elections. #### The choice of the Roman bishop, like the choice of every other bishop, had originally been the exclusive business of his own church. Disputed elections were not unknown, even in the days of the persecutions, nor scandalous attempts to enthrone a rival to the pope. It was one of the inevitable consequences of the growth of the Church after Constantine, and its new status as a body recognised and protected by the emperor, that, henceforward, such disputes passed rapidly into the political life of the city, so that the government could no longer be indifferent to the circumstance of the election. Twice in the fourth century, when the hostility of the rival parties had developed into riots and pitched battles in the streets, the government had intervened in the interests of public order. The first occasion was during the reign of the usurper Maxentius (307-312). We know almost nothing about it, except that a faction set up Heraclius in opposition to the pope, Eusebius, that the emperor banished both pope and anti-pope, that the pope died shortly afterwards, and that the Roman See then remained vacant for nearly two years. #### The second occasion was the much more serious affair of Ursinus fifty years later. This dispute went back to the exile of Pope Liberius in 356 for his opposition to the Arian emperor, Constantius II. Liberius exiled, the government installed in his place Felix, his archdeacon. Three years later Liberius was allowed to return and, although the government seems to have had in mind a regime where Liberius and Felix would together rule the Roman Church, the faithful were of another mind. They rose and Felix fled. Later he returned, and made another bid for power. He was once more defeated and thenceforward lived in retirement until his death (365) when, thanks to the tact and clemency of Liberius, his followers submitted and unity was restored. Nine months later, however, before there had been time for the old bitterness to disappear, and while the expediency of Liberius' policy was still a subject of bitter disagreement, Liberius too died. The minority of intransigents whom the dead pope's mercy had scandalised, thereupon elected Ursinus. The majority elected Damasus -- a one-time supporter of Felix. The immediate sequel to the election was a siege of the basilica held by the Ursinians and a three days' riot in which many lives were lost. The government recognised Damasus. Ursinus and his supporters were banished. None the less, so long as Damasus reigned (366-384), they continued to be a menace to the peace of his Church. #### Thirty years after Damasus the civil authority once more had occasion to intervene, and again on the ground of public order. This time, however, it seems to have made its own convenience the rule by which it decided which of the rivals was the legitimate bishop. Pope Zosimus, as the story of his intervention in the affair of Pelagius has shown, was as headlong in his methods as he was imperious in his tone. Long before the end of his short reign there were complaints from his clergy and petitions to the emperor. These were still undecided and Zosimus occupied with the petitioners when, somewhat unexpectedly, he died (December 27, 418). The division in the Church showed immediately. While the majority of the clergy were burying the pope at St. Laurence-outside-the-walls, his chief assistant Eulalius assembled his supporters at the Lateran and had himself elected. The next day, ignoring this coup de main, the rest of the clergy met in accordance with canonical custom, and elected the priest Boniface. The government decided for Eulalius and Boniface was banished. He appealed against the decision and, thanks to the influence of the Empress Galla Placidia, the emperor [ ] now allowed that the election was doubtful and summoned both parties to Ravenna where a council would judge the matter. The council, however, could not come to a decision, and a greater council was thereupon convoked to meet at Spoleto in six months. Meanwhile neither Eulalius nor Boniface were to return to Rome. This pact Eulalius broke, in his ambition to pontificate at Easter in the Lateran basilica. He was, however, arrested and expelled while, under the protection of the soldiery, the Bishop of Spoleto, whom the emperor had appointed to administer the Roman Church until the coming council, carried out the accustomed solemnities. This raid of Eulalius ended the government's dilemma. He was simply set aside and Boniface recognised without further formality. The council at Spoleto was revoked, and the incident closed. The twelve weeks it had lasted were the sole brief interruption of a peace otherwise unbroken for a hundred and twenty years (379-498). #### The disturbances that marked the end of the fifth century were of a more serious character. Their cause did not lie solely in differences of policy, but, to some extent, in the increasing attraction of the papacy as a source of wealth and power. The see had been liberally endowed by Constantine, and the social importance of the pope fifty years later had been the subject of the pagan Prefect of Rome's reply to Damasus asking when he too would become a Christian, "To-morrow -- if you will make me Bishop of Rome." Now, in 483, the Pope Simplicius -- either to check a growing custom or to provide against an abuse that threatened -- forbade and annulled in advance any alienation of church property by a future pope made as a reward to those who had hoped to elect him. The decree witnesses certainly to a decline from the primitive simplicity of the Roman clerical life. #### In the two elections which followed, those of 492 and 496, the decree does not seem to have been transgressed, but when Anastasius II died, in 498, there was a double election and a division which lasted throughout the whole pontificate of the new pope Symmachus (498-514), and in the course of this schism the decree of 483 was renewed in a rather curious fashion. Anastasius II, like Liberius in the previous century, had alienated many of the clergy by his conciliatory policy towards repentant schismatics. At his death each party elected its pope, the intransigents Laurence and the late pope's supporters Symmachus. As in 418, and in 366, there were riots, battles in the streets between the two parties, sieges of basilicas, general disorder and not a few deaths. There was no longer any emperor in Italy. It fell to the Gothic king Theodoric to intervene, and Theodoric was an Arian. He decided in favour of Symmachus and Laurence made his submission. #### It was, however, a submission in name alone, for Laurence turned next to direct a campaign against his rival’s good name and he was so successful that Symmachus was summoned to Ravenna to clear himself, while Theodoric appointed a Visitator at Rome to rule the see until the affair was judged. It was Theodoric again who chose the judges -- a council of bishops which met in Rome in May, 500. Symmachus, after a first consent, refused to appear. The bishops, refusing to judge an absent man, wished to go home. Theodoric constrained them to remain. The deadlock was complete and it lasted for eighteen months until in October, 501, the council solemnly left the question of the pope's guilt to God. They would not condemn where they had not judged, nor would they consent to judge the accused in his absence. It was indeed “absolution by default." [ ] 'The council then broke up and, to add to the trouble, Laurence reappeared, strong this time in support of Theodoric. The riots and the street fighting were resumed. #### Symmachus, free from the royal council, now called his bishops together and in November, 502, solemnly protesting that his see was beyond man's judgement, he consented to clear himself of the charges made. It had been alleged that he had contravened the decree of 483. This he did not so much deny as declare the crime impossible since the decree, from the circumstances in which it was made, was null and void. Now, remodelled, he presented it to the council. It was accepted, and confirmed, too, by Theodoric. Symmachus, however, did not manage to secure more than a minority of his clergy, and despite the council of 502 the miniature civil war continued for another five years, until Theodoric abandoned Laurence, whereupon his party collapsed. Symmachus, for the remainder of his reign, was undisturbed, but it was not until his death (514) and the election of Hormisdas that the dissentients really submitted and that unity was restored. #### Hormisdas (514-523) owes his place in Church History to the settlement of a greater scandal than the local dissensions in Rome. This was the schism of Acacius, which for thirty-five years had divided East and West, and given the Monophysites a whole generation in which to entrench themselves unhindered in Syria and Egypt. The religious reunion involved of course a renewal of relations between pope and emperor, between, that is to say, these Roman subjects of the Gothic king and their distant sovereign at Constantinople who was also, nominally, Theodoric s sovereign too. The schism -- which antedated Theodoric's coming into Italy -- had certainly helped to make his independence a reality. Its termination might be expected to have some reaction on his standing. Theodoric had also been intimately concerned with the affairs of the Roman Church, and it was very natural that when, in 515, the new pope first approached the emperor, the Gothic king should be consulted. He made no objection to the scheme which would bring together once more his Catholic subjects and their ancient sovereign. Perhaps the fact that the sovereign was himself as little a Catholic as Theodoric -- Monophysite where the Goth was Arian -- made it easy to acquiesce. The negotiations, however, failed. #### Four years later, in very different circumstances, the matter was reopened. The Monophysite emperor was now dead. His successor was a Catholic and, a thing unknown for more than a hundred years, a Latin. This was Justin I, and to seek reconciliation with Rome was the first act of his reign. Hormisdas stated his terms -- the famous Formula of Hormisdas [ ] which all the bishops of the East were to sign, renewing their belief in the traditional primacy of the Roman See -- and soon the Eastern Empire was the scene of a vigorous restoration of Catholicism directed by the imperial government. One of its features was the renewal of the old policy against religious dissidents. The remnants of the old heretical sects were persecuted, their property confiscated, and their churches handed over to the Catholics. Among these sects were the Arians. #### Theodoric moved by the complaints of his co-religionists, undertook their defence. The news of the persecution, apparently, fanned into flame Theodoric's growing suspicion -- bred of the new frequency of relations since the healing of the schism -- of a plot between his Romans and the emperor. A timely denunciation led to the arrest and trial for treason of three officers of high rank, almost the last representatives in public life of the old consular stock, the Patrician Albinus, Boethius, and Symmachus his father-in-law. They were judged by the senate and unanimously judged guilty. After a longish interval they were put to death. That interval Boethius employed to write the classic ever since associated with his name, De Consolatione Philosophiae, one of the world's great books. But in Boethius the Gothic king's fury slew a much greater man than even the author of this famous meditation. Boethius was perhaps the last man in the West to possess, as his natural inheritance, the philosophic and scientific culture of classical antiquity. He was a Catholic and a theologian and, most important of all for the historian of the medieval culture, a student of Aristotle. His translations and commentaries of Aristotle were, in fact, almost the only source through which the early Middle Ages knew anything at all of the thought which its greatest mind was one day to use to make good the insufficiencies of St. Augustine and to give the Christian faith, at last, an exposition rationally adequate. [ ] #### Boethius and his companions were not Theodoric's only victims. To save the Arians the king despatched an embassy to Constantinople with the request that the forcibly converted should be given back their religious liberty, and that the confiscated churches should be restored to them. It was a request for the restoration of Arianism, and to lead the embassy that made it, Theodoric chose the pope. This was John I, who had succeeded Hormisdas two years before. The mission made its way to the capital and the pope, the first pope ever to set foot in Constantinople, was received with every imaginable honour. But his diplomacy gained nothing for Theodoric, and on their return, empty handed, the king threw the ambassadors into prison. There, in May, 526, the pope died of his sufferings. [ ] #### Three months later Theodoric, too, was dead, but not before he had made over the Catholic churches of his capital to the Arians. Also he had perpetrated the striking innovation of naming the new pope -- Felix IV, ex iussu Theodorici regis, to quote the simple phrase of the Liber Pontificalis which is all we know of the affair. With this heretic king's nomination of Felix IV in 526 there opened for the Roman See a highly disturbed ten years. Felix, pope by grace of Theodoric's innovation, proceeded, by an innovation still more striking, to nominate the cleric who was to be his own successor, giving as his reason that this method would save the expense of the inevitable disputes. He first of all made certain of the support of the new king who had succeeded Theodoric, and then named the man of his choice, the archdeacon Boniface. The senate, too, supported him, and all went well until, November 22, 530, Felix died. His procedure had been novel and it had also flagrantly broken the law of Symmachus, not yet thirty years old, which forbade such preoccupation with the succession while the pope was yet alive. The majority of the clergy, therefore, ignored the late pope's nomination and elected Dioscoros, an able Greek to- whom had been owing the final victory of Symmachus over his foes, and who had been the chief agent of the peace with the East in the time of Hormisdas. Boniface of course had his partisans. Both were consecrated, and only the sudden death of Dioscoros saved Rome from a renewal of the scenes of 499. His party were sufficiently disinterested not to give him a successor but to recognise Boniface. Once more all seemed well. #### Boniface, however, was not of those whom success chastens. He treated the one-time supporters of his rival with contumely and then, but more solemnly, in full synod, imitating Felix IV, proceeded also to name his successor -- the deacon Vigilius. Some time afterwards he rescinded the decree as being beyond his powers, and then, October 17, 532, his short but not uneventful reign ended. At his death the disorders, to whose presence the unseemly transactions of the last few years point so unmistakably, broke out in all their unpleasantness: intrigues, of course, riots, and bribes, to pay which even the church plate was sold, are what the history of the vacancy has to record, and one of the chief acts of the pope who followed -- John II -- is a strong law against simony. #### John II reigned for little longer than his predecessor (532-535) and his successor, Agapitus I, died abroad -- at Constantinople, where he had gone as the envoy of the Gothic king in a hopeless attempt to ward off Justinian's impending reconquest of Italy. It so happened that his arrival at Constantinople coincided with an attempt of the empress, Theodora, to install a Monophysite there as bishop. The pope was- able to defeat her and to secure the succession-for a-Catholic, whom he himself consecrated. Whence, on the pope's sudden death (536) the not unnatural scheme on the part of the empress to secure the election- as pope of one who would be her tool. Her choice fell on one of the dead pope's entourage -- the deacon Vigilius who had been Pope Boniface II's nominee in 532. Vigilius, with this illustrious patronage to support him, hurried home to find, however, the election over and-the new pope, Silverius, consecrated. It was not, of course, too late to intrigue. Silverius was given his chance of making the concessions the empress desired. He refused. The Gothic army, meanwhile, had begun the siege of Rome, and Vigilius presented to the imperial commander, Belisarius, forged letters according to which the pope promised to deliver to the enemy the gate nearest his palace of the Lateran. Silverius was summoned to the palace. An interview with Belisarius followed at which Vigilius alone assisted, and Silverius disappeared. It was announced that he had gone to be a monk and that the see was vacant. At the assembly of the clergy Belisarius presented Vigilius as the imperial candidate and he was elected. A few months later Silverius died of starvation, on the island off the Italian coast whither he had been exiled. [ ] #### Theodora's plan had succeeded and the precedent of imperial intervention in papal elections thus set was to hold for the next two hundred years. For in the Gothic war just beginning the empire was victorious. Its practical result was the annexation of Italy to that Eastern political system whose centre was Constantinople -- the empire that had long ceased to be Roman and was already Byzantine -- and although in the election of the pope the clergy kept their freedom, it was henceforward the practice that their choice should be confirmed by the emperor before the pope-elect was consecrated. ####  |