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The hundred years that follow St. Gregory's great effort, the years
between his death and the appearance of the next outstanding European
personality, Charles Martel, are years that see an interesting
diversity of development in the Catholicism of the new Western realms
-- Italy, Gaul, Spain, England and Ireland now begin their national
history.
In Spain, from the moment of the conversion of the Arians (589) the
Church had a unique position in the national life. It was, very
evidently, the only source from which unity could come. So far there
had been in Spain two laws, one for the conquering Visigoths, the other
for the "Romans." The Church, on the other hand, had never made any
distinction between the two races. The kings, henceforth, regularly
employed the clergy in the service of the administration. The church
councils, now held regularly, and meeting year by year in all the great
cities turn by turn, were attended also by the royal officials. Civil
business was transacted there as well as ecclesiastical. They became
national councils in a very real sense, and a final court of appeal.
The Church, with its permanent, stable, objective law and teaching, was
all the more important since the monarchy of the Visigoths was elective
-- a political weakness whose ultimate effect was to leave Spain an
easy prey to such an organised despotism as the Arabs were, at this
time, developing. Church and State in Spain tended to become one thing.
It was the king who summoned these national councils, and the decrees
passed by the bishops about religious matters became thereby the law of
the land. The Church of Visigothic Spain, not unnaturally, was one of
the first to produce a body of canon law, the famous collection
Hispana. The Spanish Church was well organised. The sees and the
metropolitans, too, were grouped round the primatial see of Toledo, and
the primacy of Toledo was a reality. It was, for example, the primate
who, in concert with the king, nominated all the other bishops.
Relations with Rome, if always good, were very interrupted. Spain was
more and more at the end of the world. The route by land lay through
the territory of the Lombards and Franks and little ordered security,
while the sea route, since the Arab advance, was no less dangerous.
Certainly the mention of Rome in the affairs of Spain is rare during
all this time (604- 715). Only eight letters survive of whatever
correspondence passed from Rome to Spain. There is one of Honorius I
urging the bishops to show greater eagerness in religious matters, and
not to be dumb dogs who never bark. There are the letters of Leo II
communicating the decisions of the General Council of 680, and two
letters of Benedict II (684-685). To Pope Honorius the Council of
Toledo, in 638, sent an official reply protesting the virtue of the
bishops. To Benedict II's first letter, also, a Council of Toledo (the
fourteenth) sent a reply which the Primate of Toledo, Julian, composed.
The pope found his letter -- an acceptance of the condemnation of
Monothelism -- unorthodox in its expressions and desired him to correct
his words. This Julian did -- with none too good a grace.
The isolation of the Spanish Church, the long severance of relations
with Rome, the civil importance of the bishops, the royal interference
in their nomination, were, it has been suggested, beginning to tell. A
new spirit of national self- sufficiency was developing.
The greatest figure of this Spanish Catholicism of the seventh century
is the Bishop of Seville, St. Isidore. He was the brother, as well as
the successor, of St. Gregory's friend St. Leander who had played so
important a part in the troubles that preceded the great reunion of
589. Leander died in 600 and for the next thirty-six years Isidore
ruled in his stead. He had been a monk before his appointment and, as a
bishop, he composed a monastic rule. One of its characteristics is a
most rigorous insistence on the obligation of the enclosure. The
monastery is to have but one door and it is to be well guarded. The
monks are to renew annually their vow of poverty. The abbot, three
times a week, is to preach them a homily, and the monastic day opens
with a distribution of manuscripts for the community to study. This
last prescription is what we should expect from St. Isidore, for he was
the one scholar of his age. To his contemporaries he seemed the equal
of any of the Fathers, as the early writers now begin to be styled, and
if he never makes any show of original thought, and quotes very often
only at second-hand, it is certain that his erudition was really very
great. Never had the authority of the Fathers, as a witness to
tradition, stood higher, and-it was in the collection, from their
writings, of texts to illustrate and prove particular doctrines that
St. Isidore excelled. The philosophical presentation of Catholicism he
ignored entirely. Like every Latin writer of the previous two centuries
he makes St. Augustine's teaching on the Trinity his own, though he
makes no mention of the work of Boethius that was to influence in
centuries to come the great medieval scholastics. It is St. Gregory he
follows in his teaching that the origin of the human soul is unknown,
but that it is in no way corporeal. He accepts the teaching of the
council of 529 that grace is necessary for man's very first movements
towards God, and that his free will is of itself incapable of sustained
and lasting moral good. In the other great controversy which survived
from St. Augustine's intervention, he follows St. Augustine faithfully.
Predestination is absolute, and independent of God's foreknowledge of
merits and faults, Who is "just to those whom He rejects, merciful to
those whom He chooses." Children who die unbaptised expiate in hell the
guilt of original sin -- another Augustinian influence without even St.
Augustine's apologetic adjective that makes the prospect almost
inviting. It is St. Augustine again whom he follows in his explanation
of man as redeemed from the power of the devil by the devil’s abuse of
his power over humanity in the death of Christ. The Church is not an
assembly of saints. It does not cease to be the Church because some of
its children show themselves evil livers. Whoever deserts the Church
turns his back on salvation.
The close union of Church and State in St. Isidore's time leaves a very
evident trace in his teaching that " as the heavenly kingdom advances
by means of the kingdoms of this world, so those who, placed within the
Church, conspire against its faith and discipline should be crushed by
the power of the State." St. Isidore's explanation of the sacraments is
Augustinian in its distinction between the rite and the grace it
produces. But he adheres to a much older theory when he attributes the
effect of the sacrament to the blessing previously given to the matter
used in its administration. It is to the fact that the baptismal water
has been duly blessed that the baptised owes his baptism. Only thus
does the divine force latent in the sacrament operate. In the debated
question as to the validity of heretical baptism St. Isidore, like St.
Gregory and St. Leo before him, follows St. Augustine and the constant
practice of the Roman Church -- the sacrament is not to be repeated,
for although the heretic who receives it is not thereby cleansed from
sin, he is none the less baptised. Such heretics when converted to
Catholicism were, in the Spain of St. Isidore, admitted to the Church
in the rite of Confirmation. Confirmation, otherwise given immediately
after baptism, is an imposition of hands followed by an anointing of
the forehead with chrism. [ ] Its usual minister is the bishop. Should
a priest administer Confirmation the chrism he uses must have been
blessed by a bishop. St. Isidore's teaching on the Holy Eucharist is
slightly influenced by the Eastern theory that the bread and wine are
changed in the Mass, not by the words of consecration, but at the
prayer invoking the Holy Spirit's action which follows. As to the use
of the Holy Eucharist, St. Augustine, in the heat of the Pelagian
discussion, had taught that even children must receive It as a
condition of salvation. St. Isidore, who does not follow him here,
follows him in his insistence that It may be received even daily
provided that the recipient is free from serious sin and motivated by
religious devotion and humility. The Holy Eucharist is, again, a
sacrifice that Christ Himself has instituted and St. Gregory's doctrine
of the power of the sacrifice to atone for the sins of the dead finds
an echo, too, in the Spanish bishop.
Christian marriage, since it is a figure of the indissoluble union
between Christ and the Church, is itself indissoluble. It was to be
blessed by the priest and religious considerations had their role in
the matrimonial relations.
St. Isidore, in whose writings the Middle Ages found an encyclopaedia
of human knowledge, is certainly not one of the greatest names in
theological history. In the general history of the Church, however, he
is more important, for he is one of the chief links between the golden
age of the Fathers and that of the medieval scholastics; and he is
almost the last writer for four centuries to merit the name of
theologian at all. His work has this additional importance, for us,
that it mirrors the belief and life of the Church on the eve of the
next catastrophe to overwhelm it.
The history of Catholicism in Spain after the century which followed
the reunion of 589 is not well known to us. If it produced an Isidore
of Seville, it had never a Gregory of Tours nor a Bede. There are the
scanty records of Roman intervention, there are the canons of the
innumerable councils, and that is almost all. The picture we construct
from such materials can hardly be complete. For whatever it is worth,
it shows us a Church which is in many respects a department of the
State. The kings named the bishops, and, in time of crisis, the bishops
lent all their religious prestige to the kings. In this sense they were
patriotic enough, though we are hardly in a position to decide whether
they would not have done better for the Church and for Spain by
throwing their influence against the continuance of the elective
monarchy. The same evils afflicted the Spanish hierarchy that are to be
noted in seventh-century Gaul -- personal loose living and, above all,
simony. One result of the closer connection with the State -- the
closest to obtain in any of those barbarian kingdoms -- was the almost
complete failure of the bishops to act independently of the king, save
occasionally in political matters. We find bishops who share in plots
and rebellions: we find none who come to their death through an
apostolic fearlessness that rebukes the royal sins to the sinner's
face. Here the Spanish episcopate apparently falls below the standard
of the bishops of Gaul. The bishops suffered as the whole of the Church
suffered, and the nation too, from the country's isolation. There was
never a Columbanus nor an Augustine to stimulate with the vitality of
difference the sluggish evenness of national piety. Nor did the
Benedictine rule penetrate into Spain, in all the two centuries that
lay between St. Benedict and the Arab conquest. Nation and Church
stagnated together, and as they had lived so they fell. To blame the
Spanish Church for the national unpreparedness is to reverse the logic
of facts, for the Spanish Church was very largely what the Spanish
kings had made it. It was thanks to them that it had become part of the
nation, dependent on the nation, and therefore powerless to renew its
life. One thing alone could have saved Spanish Catholicism and through
it the nation -- effective intervention from outside. By the end of the
seventh century, with Spain, Europe and the Papacy as they were then
organised, this was out of the question. And it is questionable whether
Spain would have welcomed it. The significant fact remains, that the
first of these barbarian Christianities to fall was the state-ridden
Church of what had been the least barbarian of all the western
provinces of the old empire.
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