Chapter VII: Rome’s Three Hundred Years, 455-756 From Genseric to Aistulf, (2)

The Council of 787, called in the time of another Constantine, the grandson of Kopronymus, when the eastern emperor had returned for the moment to the orthodox faith, has denounced this Council of 754 as claiming most unlawfully the title of ecumenical. Being confirmed by Pope Adrian I., it enjoys that title itself, and its utter condemnation of the Council of 338 bishops which met at the request of Kopronymus can be trusted. Here it is sufficient to say that this Council of 754 covered Kopronymus and his little son Leo with acclamations for having destroyed idolatry. When the emperor and the new patriarch Constantine and the rest of the bishops appeared in the square at Constantinople they published the decree of the Council, and renewed their anathemas against the patriarch Germanus and St. John Damascene. When the decree reached the provinces, Catholics were everywhere dismayed; the Iconoclasts began to sell the holy vessels and disorganise the churches. The images were burnt, the pictures torn down or whitewashed; only landscapes and the figures of birds and beasts were retained, especially pictures of theatres, hunts, and races. To bow before the images of Christ and of the saints was forbidden; to bow before the emperor was retained, and any insult to his figure upon a coin punished with death.

In 754, Kopronymus, holding Constantine by the hand, presented him to the assembled bishops as his own choice for ecumenical patriarch. Not only was the individual his choice, but his father, Leo, twenty years before, had made the office by constituting the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops of the capital conterminous with the empire, in that he deprived the Pope in his quality of the first patriarch of the ten provinces which from the beginning had acknowledged his patriarchal superintendence.

We may follow to his end the ecumenical patriarch who had this beginning.

It seems that neither a bishop nor a secular priest in the eastern empire ventured to oppose the decree of this Council. But monks suffered the most fearful persecution.(209) They were driven away and their monasteries destroyed. Nor were these the worst blows which the emperor dealt upon their institution. He invented truly devilish means to make them contemptible and abhorred. Some who had been banished from Constantinople yielded to his will, subscribed the edict against images, quitted their dress and married. Thereupon they returned to the city, recovered all their civil rights, were marked with favour, received the emperor’s personal attention. But those who remained true to their faith and their habit experienced his utmost severity. A month after his return from the war, the 24th August, 766, on which day he had appointed a chariot-race, he caused the monks in the neighbourhood of Constantinople to be brought together into the racecourse. There, as the rows of seats were crowded with people, he compelled each monk to pass in procession with a woman of bad life beside him. Thus they suffered every indignity which an excited populace could put upon them. The bad courtiers saw that it was an evil stroke of the emperor. Those who had not the secret thought that they had been taken in company with these women.

This spectacle so pleased the emperor that, four days afterwards, he repeated it with nineteen of his chief officers, whom he charged with a conspiracy against him. The real offence was the maintenance of the right belief, the having had relation with the banished Stephen in his exile at Proconnesus, and more than once to have praised his constancy in suffering. He caused them to be led round the racecourse, and made the crowd spit on them and revile them. The two of highest account were beheaded: two patricians, brothers, Constantine, who had been controller-general of the posts, and Strategius, officer in the life guards; the rest were blinded and banished to an island, nor did Kopronymus forget every year that he lived to send thither executioners to inflict on each a hundred strokes of oxhide. When he found that the people grieved over the execution of Constantine and Strategius, had not forborne tears, and even murmured, he put down this to the fault of the prefect Procopius, who ought to have suppressed these seditious cries; he had him scourged and deprived.

The patriarch Constantine had received from the emperor extraordinary and unfitting honours. They were followed by public disgrace. The emperor learnt that he had had intercourse with one of the accused for conspiracy. He put up witnesses who declared that they had heard expressions from him against the emperor. This the patriarch absolutely denied, and proof was not forthcoming. The emperor caused them secretly to confirm their statement by an oath taken on the holy Cross. Thereupon, without further proof he set seals upon the door of the patriarchal palace, and banished the patriarch to Prince’s Island. Constantine was thus deposed on the 30th August, 766, and on the 16th November the emperor, without regarding any canonical form, named Nicetas to his place. The new patriarch was yet more unfitted for so eminent a rank, being a eunuch and slave by birth. From his youth he had only been accustomed to attend on women, had scarcely learnt to read; but the emperor, on recommendation of certain ladies of the court, had caused him to be made a priest and given him a post in the Church of the Apostles. Upon entering the patriarchal palace Nicetas showed himself worthy of the imperial choice, for he caused the magnificent mosaics on the walls to be destroyed. These his two predecessors had spared for their beauty.

By similar services the highest dignitaries of the kingdom were obtained. A zealous Iconoclast was in the eyes of the emperor qualified for every civil or military post. Thus Michael of Melissene, brother of the empress Eudocia, was made governor of Phrygia, Lachanodracon of Asia, and Manes of Galatia. At the beginning of 767 Constantine sent these new and yet more severe governors into the provinces, having just before imposed an oath on all his subjects not to honour images. Then began a general persecution of the orthodox. Those governors showed themselves in the provinces obedient instruments of their emperor’s rage. They profaned churches, persecuted monks, and destroyed pictures. They tore relics of the saints from their sanctuaries, and cast them into rivers or drains. They mixed them with bones of animals, and burnt them together, so that the ashes might not be distinguished. The relics of the martyr St. Euphemia, in whose church at Chalcedon the great Council had been held, were its chief treasure. The emperor had the shrine cast into the sea, changed part of the church into an arsenal, and made the other part a place where all the rubbish of the city might be shot. The waves carried the shrine to the Isle of Lemnos, whose inhabitants fished it up. Twenty years after the death of Kopronymus, Irene, then reigning with her son Constantine, caused this treasure to be brought back to Chalcedon, the church to be purified and restored to its former condition.

The deposed patriarch Constantine had endured the hardest treatment at Prince’s Island during thirteen months. The emperor had learnt that this unhappy prelate had told to others an impious remark concerning the Mother of God, which the emperor had made, and enjoined silence about it. Furious in his wrath he ordered him to be brought to Constantinople; he had him beaten till he could not stand, and had him carried in a litter to Sancta Sophia to be degraded. He was cast down on the steps of the sanctuary. A court-secretary read in presence of the whole assembly, called together by the emperors order, a detailed accusation with loud voice, and as he read each detail struck him with it in the face. In the meantime Nicetas had mounted the patriarchal chair, and presided over each insult which his benefactor suffered. When the reading was finished, Nicetas took the act of accusation, had Constantine carried to the tribune, where he was held upright by several, that the people might see him, made one of his suffragans go up to pronounce the anathema, to take off the episcopal robes, and with insulting expressions to expel him from the church, from which he had to go backwards.

The next day, a day of games in the circus, his beard, eye-brows, and hair were torn out; he was dressed in a short woollen smock without sleeves, put backwards on an ass, and led through the circus by a nephew whose nose had been cut off. The parties of the circus reviled him and spat on him. At the end of the circus he was thrown down, trodden under foot, and put upon the stone which terminated the circus to be exposed there, so long as the games lasted, to the jeers of the riders as they passed. He was then thrown into prison, where he lay almost forgotten to the 15th August of the following year, 768. That day was the last of his sufferings. The emperor sent two patricians to him to ask what he thought of the emperor’s belief and the doctrine of the council. The sufferer, to the last a courtier, thought by a submissive answer to alleviate his punishment. He replied: “The emperor’s belief is holy, and the council has issued a holy confession”. The patricians said at once: “That is just the admission which we wished to have from thy godless mouth. Nothing more remains for thee but death.” They then pronounced his condemnation, and led him into the amphitheatre, where his head was struck off. It was fastened by the ears to the mile-stone, where it served the mob three days for a spectacle. The body was dragged to the Pelagium, a spot where the church of St. Pelagia had stood, which the emperor had pulled down, to make a court where the bodies of the condemned were thrown after execution; in the same way as on the other side the water he had pulled down St. Andrew’s church to make a place of execution. The body was also said to have been dissected for the good of science.(210) This was the reward which the patriarch received for having sacrificed his faith and conscience in giving sanction to his master’s impieties.

This degradation by Kopronymus of the man whom he had made and called ecumenical patriarch, and to make him had persisted in his father’s overthrow of the Church’s order from the beginning, by an act of despotic power breaking into her constitution, is it not also a token of the condition into which the most ruthless tyranny had reduced the episcopate of that eastern realm? Those bishops who, at the bidding of an adventurer, successful for the moment and presently swept away, had met at Constantinople in 710 to overthrow the Sixth Council and the faith of the Church; and again, the three hundred and thirty-eight who had met at the same place at the bidding of Kopronymus to make the whole order of divine worship subject to his will, did the spirit of St. Basil, St. Athanasius, St. Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria live in them still, or were they in possession indeed of unquestioned episcopal rank and all the powers which belong to consecration, but in fact the most abject minions of the most debased human will—the will of a Byzantine despot? The will of one fined already of one half his empire by the divine Hand which raised up the most abject of savages to punish a debased Christian realm. Yet ruler after ruler had not received the lesson which faith derives from chastisement. Leo III. surpassed his predecessors, and his son surpassed the father, in imitating the arrogance of a false theocracy. He carried his civil autocracy into interference with the doctrine and the worship of the Church. This interference the laws of his own empire warned him against, as cited by St. Gregory II. in the examples of the greatest emperors.

It is not too much to say that the despotism wielded by those who occupied the Byzantine throne from Justinian to Kopronymus had eaten out the courage and dulled the sense of divine things which we admire in the Fathers of the fourth century. Athanasius denounced a Constantius, and Basil a Valens, but the eastern bishops of the eighth century crouched before Leo and Kopronymus, and if there had not been a succession of Popes, in whom the spirit of St. Leo lived on, and the doctrine of St. Leo was maintained, the Church herself would have yielded to the most debasing despotism ever seen. But it must not be forgotten that the bishops of the West were faithful to the teaching and emulated the stedfastness of the Popes. A despotic patriarch, nominee and instrument of a despotic emperor, made a servile episcopate. A martyr Pope, such as St. Martin, likewise made an army of martyrs. The several character of bishops in the East and West completes the contrast which we have been drawing out.

In the patriarch Constantine the ecumenical patriarchate received its completed form. Kopronymus chose him; took him by the hand, presented him to the 338 bishops who held an illicit and heretical council at his bidding; having used him for his purposes, deposed, beheaded him, treated his lifeless body with extreme dishonour.

In the same Kopronymus, the two hundred years of secular lordship begun by Justinian’s conquest of Rome came to an end. He had disregarded the appeal of Pope Stephen to defend his own dominion from the Lombards. Pipin had deprived them of that dominion, and then bestowed it upon St. Peter. Kopronymus asked Pipin to give it back to him. Pipin refused, and after thirty-four successive Popes had endured a dominion which began with the deposition of St. Silverius by a shameless woman, and perhaps cannot show a single act of generous defence in return for loyal service during two centuries, the attempt inaugurated by Justinian, and finished by Kopronymus, to reduce the successor of St. Peter to a patriarch whom they might treat as the patriarch Constantine was treated, failed finally and for ever. Stephen II., an infirm old man who had crossed the Alps at the risk of his life, deserted by Kopronymus and threatened by Aistulf, sat at the grave of the chief Apostle, Prince as well as Bishop of Rome, and the Christian faith was not left to be determined by soldiers of fortune on the throne of Byzantium, but saved by and for the guardianship of the living Peter.

From Metrophanes,(211) the first recorded bishop of Byzantium, not yet Constantinople, in the time of the Nicene Council to Methodius, in the year 842, when the Iconoclast contest came to a final end, fifty-eight bishops sat on the chair of the Greek capital. The first was simple bishop of a suffragan city to the Thracian metropolis of Heraclea. As soon as Constantine in the year 330 had consecrated his new capital as Nova Roma, there began a continual exaltation, the work of the eastern emperors for their own purposes; after four centuries the bishops of Constantinople had in 733 reached the culmination of their hopes by receiving from the emperor Leo III. ten provinces out of the Roman jurisdiction, and twenty bishoprics of his own birth-land, Isauria, previously belonging to the patriarch of Antioch. They were in a Greek sense ecumenical, not because their authority extended over the world, but because by imperial gift it had become conterminous with that portion of the world which was considered by the Greek emperor the habitation of men,(212) that is, his subjects. The original and true patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch had fallen under Mohammedan domination. So likewise had Jerusalem, which attained patriarchal rank only in the middle of the fifth century. The name of each as patriarch was carefully maintained, especially for appearance in the list of Greek councils, but in each case, and for hundreds of years, it was little more than “magni nominis umbra”.(213) Of the fifty-eight bishops of the capital many have gained for themselves imperishable honour, many are venerated in the number of the saints by Greeks and Latins, and looked up to as intercessors and protectors, others have at least left behind them in one or other respect a distinguished memory. But more than a third, one and twenty, are branded as heretics or favourers of heresy. Almost as many were for various reasons deposed, partly by heretical, partly by orthodox emperors. Several, also, of them received at the same time dishonouring treatment, such as Kallinikus, Anastasius, and Constantine. In three cases, those of St. Chrysostom, Eutychius, and Pyrrhus, deposed prelates, were restored, a case which much oftener recurs in later Byzantine history.

In the fourth century the names of Eusebius, Macedonius, Eudoxius, and Demophilus in the see of the capital are marked as supporters of the Arian heresy. In the fifth century the Nestorian heresy springs from its author in the very chair of Constantinople. Fifty years later the Acacian schism springs in like manner from the ambition of its author in the same chair, and the names of four successors, Fravitas, Euphemius, Macedonius II, and Timotheus are struck from the diptychs of their own church, when the schism was terminated under Pope Hormisdas. In less than twenty years after this, Anthimus, put into the see of the capital by the intrigues of the same empress Theodora who violently deposed Pope St. Silverius, was deposed by Pope Agapetus in his visit to Constantinople, as a Monophysite heretic. In the sixth century the Monothelite heresy was owing mainly to the political intrigues of Sergius, sitting for twenty-eight years in the see of Constantinople, also the prime minister and guide of the emperor Heraclius; he and his three successors, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, were the main-stay of that most insidious and stubborn heresy, which for forty continuous years kept the Church in peril, and strove to overthrow the efforts of ten Popes to maintain the faith, and brought one of them to die a martyr under the rule of Constans II. But in the seventh and eighth centuries, the most terrible Iconoclast persecution found in six bishops of Constantinople its main support, in that they put to the service of the emperors Leo III. and Constantine Kopronymus, Leo V. and Theophilus, these immense ecclesiastical powers with which the emperors themselves had invested them over the eastern bishops. The single patriarch had himself become a despot in wielding the tyranny of the civil despot as his chief instrument. These six ecumenical patriarchs wielded their authority under Iconoclast emperors for a long time: Anastasius I. from 730 to 753; Constantine II. from 754 to 766; Nicetas I. from 766 to 780; then an orthodox sovereign brought with him an orthodox council. The patriarch Tarasius and union with the West might seem to have secured a deliverance from a renewed reign of the Iconoclast violence. On the contrary, three succeeding patriarchs, Theodotus from 815 to 821; Antonius I. from 821 to 832, and John VII. from 832 to 841, did what they could to carry out the wishes of their masters for that heresy.

Such was the conduct, as guardian of the faith, of the line of pseudo-popes set up by state policy at Constantinople, in virtue of the pretension that the bishop of Nova Roma should enjoy equal rights with the bishop of Old Rome.

It is to be noted that in this period the whole doctrine concerning the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ went through the most complete sifting and discussion in the Councils of the Church. During it, from St. Silvester to Gregory IV., seventy pontiffs sat in the chair of Peter. They lived in full five hundred years of perpetual struggle. One after another “apparent diræ facies inimicaque Troiæ numina”—Arius in the foreground heralding Mohammed in the rear; Nestorius and Eutyches tearing the unity of the Church on opposite sides; an able bishop of Constantinople seizing the moment of Rome’s temporal captivity under Arian strangers to raise his see to parity: the East well nigh devoured by opposing sects. After this, an insidious Byzantine couple, Heraclius and Sergius, emperor and patriarch, covering up deep wounds with ambiguous words, and sacrificing the empire by their sacrifice of the faith; and lastly, emperors who disregard things human and divine, and mark their mastery over doctrine by the subversion of worship, a Leo III. and a Constantine Kopronymus. All secular power is in the hands of Nova Roma which Constantine has set up to be the Christian city from its cradle: the seven greater hills to take the place of the hills by the Tiber, and in these very hills of Constantine from age to age the evil vision nestles—his successor and his patriarch are the chief performers in this ever recruited drama of heresy. But through all these attacks the seventy successors on St. Peter’s throne have kept the doctrine of the Church, that is the doctrine of the Incarnation itself, one and unchanged. The infidel has trampled upon Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem; but while the old Christendom has sunk from debased nations into Saracen serfdom, a new Christendom has arisen among Teuton settlers, making their first steps in national life. Nova Roma has been false to the purpose for which Constantine founded it; and Old Rome has found among those whom the rival counts as barbarians, one more faithful as well as more powerful than she has been. Charlemagne stands at the end of the vista which Constantine begins. Of the two, does he not merit most in the Church of God?

But to estimate at its due value this long series of historic facts, it must be remembered that during at least three centuries of this period, the seventy Popes work as captives, the fifty-eight bishops of Constantinople work as the right hand of emperors. From the time indeed when St. Silvester passed from the catacombs to the Lateran palace, to the time when the Vandal robbers desolated Rome under the eyes of St. Leo, the Popes were not captives. They had severe persecution at times to undergo: especially under Constantius I., the whole fifty years of Arian trial were a special test of their fortitude, their clear undoubted maintenance of the Godhead of our Lord, their unfaltering trust in their apostolic right. But so long as there was a Christian western emperor he had a regard to the Apostolic See of the West: even a Valentinian III. could acknowledge St. Leo in an imperial edict in 447 as “Principem episcopalis coronæ”; words which present the very idea of St Peter’s majesty, as the root, the bond, and the crown of the episcopate. But with the inroad of barbarians, as soldiers of fortune and civil masters of Rome, another time begins. And when to barbarous manners and brute force was added the Arian spirit, a period ensued which was calculated to test to the utmost the dowry of truth bestowed on the Apostolic See. Justinian as a civil ruler may be deemed worse than Odoacer, worse even than Theodorich. What the Popes did, they did often after being nominated without free election, often with the postponement of their confirmation after election (as when after the death of Pope Honorius, Pope Severinus had his three years diminished to two months, in the hope of Heraclius to bend him to the Monothelite heresy), sometimes with unjust depositions, as St. Silverius by Theodora, as St. Martin by Constans II., as St. Sergius attempted by Justinian II., as John VI. attempted by Apsimar, the emperor of a day: again by unlawful substitution for a living Pope, as Eugenius to St. Martin, when condemned but not yet martyred. Then again the eleven years preceding the great Pope Sergius from 676 to 687 witness the appointment of six Popes. At this time there is a series of Popes who show eastern lineage, as if the emperor’s hand were busy in the choice of them. But no one of them fails, and St. Sergius and St. Gregory III., both easterns, are of the very greatest and most stedfast in the whole time of Popes.

Add to this that the civil condition of these Popes, from the entrance of the Lombards to the end of the exarchs, was often most perilous. It was plaintively alluded to by St. Agatho in addressing the Sixth Council, when forty years after the death of Honorius he set forth in most absolute language the unfaltering integrity of faith which had marked the Apostolic See to his own time, language; which the Council accepted.

It is to be noted that a Pope, whose election had been long delayed by the mere arbitrary will of emperor or exarch, as soon as he was consecrated, entered into the full possession of his unrestricted rights. The exarch who had power to delay, who had power to plunder the Lateran treasury of the Church, as Isaac and John Platina did, had no power to lessen the dignity of St. Peter’s succession when once acknowledged. Even Vigilius is admitted to have emancipated himself from the thraldom of Theodora; and Eugenius, forced upon the Romans by the tyranny of Constans II., was a blameless Pope, who did not yield to the heresy of Constans.

What manner of men were they who were loyal vassals to the most iniquitous rulers, and when solicited by their own faithful peoples to break an abhorred yoke yet held them back, and adhered to those who gave them neither protection nor justice? They did not rule as Satraps in a kingdom worn down to prostration by centuries of arbitrary power, but were acknowledged as sitting in the apostolic throne of Faith and Justice by rough lords from the North, to whom obedience in spiritual things was a Christian virtue learned with great difficulty by those who inherited a natural independence. Interminable intestine quarrels among the western potentates, who yet accept the voice of an unarmed Pope as the interpreter of faith, and the most upright arbiter of human justice, are a proof the more how deeply the rule of St. Peter had sunk into the western mind.

What guarantee of truth can be offered by the course of human things if this be not one? That is the testimony of the three centuries from Genseric the Vandal to Aistulf the Lombard. The testimony of Teuton conquerors, who burn what they once worshipped, and worship what they once burnt, who enter on their dominion as spoilers and develop into Christian monarchs. The testimony of Constantine’s imperial successors, who own the papal succession to St. Peter, while they try to bend it to their will, and in the attempt subject half their empire to an anti-Christian tyranny. Lastly, the testimony of St. Leo the Great and fifty-one successors to the time when St. Leo III., invested with civil sovereignty, employed the acknowledged greatness of his spiritual power to restore the empire which the first Leo saw sinking in ruins.