Chapter I: Origin and Rise of the Papacy (2)

In the time of Gregory the worship of the Virgin had not assumed that rank in Latin Christianity to which it rose in later centuries, though that second great impulse towards this worship, the unbounded admiration of virginity, had full possession of his monastic mind. With Gregory celibacy was the perfection of human nature; he looked with abhorrence on the contamination of the holy sacerdotal character, even in its lowest degree, by any sexual connection. No subdeacon, after a certain period, was to be admitted without a vow of chastity; no married subdeacon to be promoted to a higher rank. In one of his expositions he sadly relates the fall of one of his aunts, a consecrated virgin; she had been guilty of the sin of marriage. Of all his grievances against the exarch of Ravenna, none seems more worthy of complaint than that he had encouraged certain nuns to throw off their religious habits and to marry. Gregory does not seem to have waged this war against nature, however his sentiments were congenial with those of his age, with his wonted success.[86] His letters are full of appeals to sovereigns and to bishops to repress the incontinence of the clergy; even monasteries were not absolutely safe.

ANGELS AND DEVILS

It was not around the monastery alone, the centre of this preternatural agency, that the ordinary providence of God gave place to a perpetual interposition of miraculous power. Every Christian was environed with a world of invisible beings, who were constantly putting off their spiritual nature and assuming forms, uttering tones, distilling odours, apprehensible by the soul of man, or taking absolute and conscious possession of his inward being. A distinction was drawn between the pure, spiritual, illimitable, incomprehensible nature of the Godhead, and the thin and subtile but bodily forms of angels and archangels. These were perceptible to the human senses, wore the human form, spoke with human language; their substance was the thin air, the impalpable fire; it resembled the souls of men, but yet, whenever they pleased, it was visible, performed the functions of life, communicated not with the mind and soul only but with the eye and ear of man.

The hearing and the sight of religious terror were far more quick and sensitive. The angelic visitations were but rare and occasional; the more active demons were ever on the watch, seizing and making every opportunity of beguiling their easy victims. They were everywhere present, and everywhere betraying their presence. They ventured into the holiest places; they were hardly awed by the most devout saints; but, at the same time there was no being too humble, to whose seduction they would not condescend--nothing in ordinary life so trivial and insignificant but that they would stoop to employ it for their evil purposes. They were without the man, terrifying him with mysterious sounds and unaccountable sights. They were within him, compelling all his faculties to do their bidding, another indwelling will besides his own, compelling his reluctant soul to perform their service. Every passion, every vice, had its especial demon; lust, impiety, blasphemy, vainglory, pride were not the man himself, but a foreign power working within him. The slightest act, sometimes no act at all, surrendered the soul to the irresistible indwelling agent. In Gregory’s _Dialogues_[k] a woman eats a lettuce without making the sign of the cross; she is possessed by a devil, who had been swallowed in the unexorcised lettuce. Another woman is possessed for admitting her husband’s embraces the night before the dedication of an oratory.

MARTYRS AND RELICS

Happily there existed, and existed almost at the command of the clergy, a counterworking power to this fatal diabolic influence, in the perpetual presence of the saints, more especially in hallowed places, and about their own relics. These relics were the treasure with which the clergy, above all the bishops of Rome, who possessed those of St. Peter and St. Paul with countless others, ruled the mind; for by these they controlled and kept in awe, they repaired the evils wrought by this whole world of evil spirits. Happy were the churches, monasteries, whose foundations were hallowed and secured by these sacred talismans. To doubt their presence in these dedicated shrines, in the scenes of their martyrdom, obstinately to require the satisfaction of the senses as to their presence, was an impious want of faith; belief, in proportion to the doubtfulness of the miracle, was the more meritorious. Kings and queens bowed in awe before the possessors and dispensers of these wonder-working treasures.

Relics had now attained a self-defensive power; profane hands which touched them withered; and men who endeavoured to remove them were struck dead. Such was the declaration of Gregory himself, to one who had petitioned for the head or some part of the body of St. Paul. It was an awful thing even to approach to worship them. Men who had merely touched the bones of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Lawrence, though with the pious design of changing their position or placing the scattered bones together, had fallen dead, in one case to the number of ten. The utmost that the church of Rome could bestow would be a cloth which had been permitted to touch them; and even such cloths had been known to bleed. If, indeed, the chains of St. Paul would yield any of their precious iron to the file, which they often refused to do, this, he writes, he would transmit to the empress; and he consoles her for the smallness of the gift by the miraculous power which it will inherently possess.

Gregory doled out such gifts with pious parsimony. A nail which contained the minutest filings from the chains of St. Peter was an inestimable present to a patrician, or an ex-consul, or a barbaric king. Sometimes they were inserted in a small cross; in one instance with fragments of the gridiron on which St. Lawrence was roasted. One of the golden nails of the chains of St. Peter had tempted the avarice of a profane, no doubt a heathen or Arian, Lombard; he took out his knife to sever it off; the awe-struck knife sprang up and cut his sacrilegious throat. The Lombard king Authari and his attendants were witnesses of the miracle, and stood in terror, not daring to lift the fearful nail from the ground. A Catholic was fortunately found, by whom the nail permitted itself to be touched; and this peerless gift, so avouched, Gregory sends to a distinguished civil officer.

SANCTITY OF THE CLERGY

That sanctity which thus dwelt in the relics of the saints, was naturally gathered, as far as possible, around their own persons by the clergy, hallowed as they were and set apart by their ordination from the common race of man; and if the hierarchy had only wielded this power for self-protection, if they had but arrayed themselves in this defensive awe against the insults and cruelties of barbarians, such as the Lombards are described, it would be stern censure which would condemn even manifest imposture. We might excuse the embellishment, even the invention of the noble story of the bishop Sanctulus, who offered his life for that of a captive deacon, before whom the Lombard executioner, when he lifted up his sword to behead him, felt his arm stiffen, and could not move it till he had solemnly sworn never to raise that sword against the life of a Christian. But this conservative respect for the sanctity of their order darkens too frequently into pride and inhumanity; the awful inviolability of their persons becomes a jealous resentment against even unintentional irreverence. A demoniac accused the holy bishop Fortunatus of refusing him the rights of hospitality; a poor peasant receives the possessed into his house, and is punished for this inferential disrespect to the bishop by seeing his child cast into the fire and burned before his eyes. A poor fellow with a monkey and cymbals is struck dead for unintentionally interrupting a bishop Boniface in prayer.

The sacred edifices, the churches, especially, approachable to all, were yet approachable not without profound awe; in them met everything which could deepen that awe; within were the relics of the tutelar saint, the mysteries, and the presence of the Redeemer, of God himself; beneath were the remains of the faithful dead.

Burial in churches had now begun; it was a special privilege. Gregory dwells on the advantage of being thus constantly suggested to the prayers of friends and relatives for the repose of the soul. But that which was a blessing to the holy was but more perilous to the unabsolved and the wicked. The sacred soil refused to receive them; the martyrs appeared and commanded the fetid corpses to be cast out of their precincts. They were seized by devils, who did not fear to carry off their own even from those holy places. But oblations were still effective after death. The consecrated host has begun to possess in itself wonder-working powers. A child is cast forth from his grave, and is only persuaded to rest in quiet by a piece of the consecrated bread being placed upon his breast. Two noble women, who had been excommunicated for talking scandal, were nevertheless buried in the church; but every time the mass was offered, their spirits were seen to rise from their tombs and glide out of the church. It was only after an oblation had been “immolated” for them that they slept in peace.

STATE AFTER DEATH

The mystery of the state after death began to cease to be a mystery. The subtile and invisible soul gradually materialised itself to the keen sight of the devout. A hermit declared that he had seen Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king, at the instant of death, with loose garments and sandals, led between Symmachus the patrician and John the pope, and plunged into the burning crater of Lipari. Benedict, while waking, beheld a bright and dazzling light, in which he distinctly saw the soul of Germanus, bishop of Capua, ascend to heaven in an orb of fire, borne by angels.

Hell was by no means the inexorable dwelling which restored not its inhabitants. Men were transported thither for a short time, and returned to reveal its secrets to the shuddering world. Gregory’s fourth book is entirely filled with legends of departing and of departed spirits, several of which revisit the light of day. On the locality of hell Gregory is modest, and declines to make any peremptory decision. On purgatory, too, he is dubious, though his final conclusion appears to be that there is a purgatorial fire which may purify the soul from very slight sins. Some centuries must elapse before those awful realms have formed themselves into that dreary and regular topography which Dante partly created out of his own sublime imagination, partly combined from all the accumulated legends.

The most singular of these earlier journeys into the future world are the adventures of a certain Stephen, the first part of which Gregory declares he had heard more than once from his own mouth, and which he relates, apparently intending to be implicitly believed. Stephen had to all appearance died in Constantinople, but, as the embalmer could not be found, he was left unburied the whole night. During that time he went down into hell, where he saw many things which he had not before believed. But when he came before the Judge, the Judge said, “I did not send for this man, but for Stephen the smith.” Gregory’s friend Stephen was too happy to get back, and on his return found his neighbour Stephen the smith dead. But Stephen learned not wisdom from his escape. He died of the plague in Rome, and with him appeared to die a soldier, who returned to reveal more of these fearful secrets of the other world, and the fate of Stephen. The soldier passed a bridge, beneath it flowed a river, from which rose vapours, dark, dismal, and noisome. Beyond the bridge (the imagination could but go back to the old Elysian fields) spread beautiful, flowery, and fragrant meadows, peopled by spirits clothed in white. In these were many mansions, vast and full of light. Above all rose a palace of golden bricks; to whom it belonged he could not read. On the bridge he recognised Stephen, whose foot slipped as he endeavoured to pass. His lower limbs were immediately seized by frightful forms, who strove to drag him to the fetid dwellings below. But white and beautiful beings caught his arms, and there was a long struggle. The soldier did not see the issue of the conflict.

Such were among the stories avouched by the highest ecclesiastical authority, and commended it might seem by the uninquiring faith of the ruling intellect of his age--such among the first elements of that universal popular religion which was the Christianity of ages. This religion gradually moulded together all which arose out of the natural instincts of man, the undying reminiscences of all the older religions, the Jewish, the pagan, and the Teutonic, with the few and indistinct glimpses of the invisible world and the future state of being in the New Testament, into a vast system, more sublime perhaps for its indefiniteness, which, being necessary in that condition of mankind, could not but grow up out of the kindled imagination and religious faith of Christendom. And such religion the historian who should presume to condemn as a vast plan of fraud, or a philosopher who should venture to disdain as a fabric of folly only deserving to be forgotten, would be equally unjust, equally blind to its real uses, assuredly ignorant of its importance and its significance in the history of man. For on this, the popular Christianity, turns the whole history of man for centuries.

It is at once the cause and the consequence of the sacerdotal dominion over mankind; the groundwork of authority at which the world trembled; which founded and overthrew kingdoms, bound together or set in antagonistic array nations, classes, ranks, orders of society. Of this, the parent, when the time arrived, of poetry, of art, the Christian historian must watch the growth and mark the gradations by which it gathered into itself the whole activity of the human mind, and quickened that activity till at length the mind outgrew that which had been so long almost its sole occupation. It endured till faith, with the schoolmen, led into the fathomless depths of metaphysics, began to aspire after higher truths; with the reformers, attempting to refine religion to its primary spiritual simplicity, gradually dropped, or left but to the humblest and most ignorant, at least to the more imaginative and less practical part of mankind, this even yet prolific legendary Christianity, which had been the accessory and supplementary Bible, the authoritative and accepted, though often unwritten, Gospel of centuries.[b]

GREGORY’S SUCCESSORS

[Sidenote: [604-649 A.D.]]

Gregory left the papal chair far more securely settled on the lofty eminence where it had been placed than it was when he ascended it. But Sabinian, who succeeded him, expressed little gratitude for the service he had thus performed; indignant at finding the treasury exhausted of its gold, he accused him of having ruined the see by his liberality; and would have proceeded, but for the menaces of both the clergy and the people, publicly to burn his writings. He did not live long after this attempt; and his sudden death was ascribed to a blow on the head inflicted by the angry shade of the departed saint. A truer cause, however, may be found, perhaps, in the fact that he had made himself hated by the populace, by withdrawing the accustomed alms, that he might heal, as he pretended, the injuries inflicted by the liberality of Gregory; a mode of proceeding so little relished by his flock, that, whatever share they might have in his death, they conveyed his breathless body with contempt out of the city.

It was during the pontificate of Boniface III, who resided as Gregory’s legate at the court of Constantinople, and owed his elevation to the emperor, that the Roman pontiff was first dignified with the much-disputed title of universal bishop. For this honour Boniface was indebted to the enmity existing between Phocas and the patriarch of his imperial city. He lived to enjoy his triumph only a few months; and several of his successors seem to have contented themselves with the duties of their station, without entering into direct collision with any rival in authority. It is, however, a singular circumstance, that to the attempts of Boniface IV, who obtained the papal dignity immediately after the pontiff just named, to bring back the separatists from Rome to her communion, a resistance was made by the celebrated Irish apostle Columbanus, breathing much of the freedom and intelligence of later days.

Honorius, who succeeded to the papacy after the two unimportant pontificates of Deusdedit (Deodatus or Adeodatus I) and Boniface V, made a vain attempt to influence the Lombards to restore their king, Adalwald (Adalvaldus), whom they had deposed as a madman, and elected in his place an Arian named Ariwald (Ariovaldus). But the most conspicuous circumstance in his career was his agreement with Sergius, the patriarch of Constantinople, in establishing the celebrated edict by which it was intended to put an end to the monothelite controversy,[87] and render the renewal of it a crime against the laws of the empire. Yet Honorius, in the Sixth General Council, was solemnly anathematised, and classed with the known and most violent supporters of the monothelite heresy.

The death of this pontiff was followed by the pillage of the palace of the Lateran--an outrage which had its origin with the emperor, and was committed by his own officers. Severinus was then placed in the papal chair, but his pontificate was not marked by any important event. The same observation applies to those of his successors, John IV and Theodore. Theodore was succeeded by Martin I, the earliest act of whose pontificate was the calling of a council to condemn the principles of the monothelites, and the late acts of the emperors. The assembly held its first session October 5th, 649; in the fifth and last, which was held on the 31st of October, twenty articles were drawn up against the heresy in question, and its authors, Theodorus, Cyrus, Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paul, together with all such as should embrace their opinions, were formally anathematised.

The Roman pontiff was by this proceeding brought into immediate collision with the emperor; and the power of the greatest potentate of the church was thus measured with that of the highest in the state. In this respect the issue of the controversy deserves particular note. Martin was a zealous and active churchman, learned and conscientious, strongly impressed with a sense of the importance of unity, and disposed to exercise the authority he possessed to the utmost in its favour. No sooner had the council given its decision, than he despatched letters to all orders of the clergy, acquainting them with the event and with the acts it had passed. But the information which the emperor Constans received of these proceedings filled him with the most violent indignation; and he at once resolved to punish the contempt with which his edict, and that of his predecessor, had been treated. He communicated his wishes to Calliopas, exarch of Italy, who soon after made the pontiff a prisoner and conveyed him to the island of Naxos. For three months he was kept nearly continually on board a ship, and carried from one place to the other, without being allowed even the commonest necessaries of life. At Naxos he remained twelve months in captivity; and was then taken to Constantinople, being exposed, during his passage thither, to a treatment which would have been cruel to a condemned malefactor. On his arrival, fresh indignities and barbarities awaited him. He was cast into a miserable prison, in which he lay apparently forgotten for more than three months, and when carried before the tribunal of justice was examined like a common criminal. The part he had taken in the late events, so far as they strictly pertained to religion, was not considered even by his fiercest opponents as involving a guilt sufficient to justify their severities. He was, therefore, arraigned as an enemy of the state. Twenty witnesses, of whom the greater part were soldiers, and who are said to have been bribed for the occasion, appeared as his accusers.

[Sidenote: [649-682 A.D.]]

This mockery of a trial being concluded, the pontiff was carried to an open terrace, where, exposed at once to the gaze of the emperor and the populace, the base servants of the court insulted him in so gross a manner that even the multitude pitied his fate. His outward mantle having been torn off, the officers took him, and stripping off the best of his habits, left only his tunic remaining, which they next rent down on each side, from top to bottom. An iron collar was then fastened round his neck, and he was led from the palace through the midst of the city, chained to one of the keepers of the prison, and preceded by another bearing the sword with which he was to be executed. As they dragged him along, his lacerated feet stained the pavement with blood; and he presented an appearance of humiliation and misery which might well humble the spirits of the haughtiest churchmen of either Rome or Constantinople. But his sufferings did not terminate here. Instead of being executed he was sent into the Chersonesus where he lingered through four months of the severest hardship, then expired. He was succeeded as pope by Eugenius, indebted for his elevation to the influence of the imperial court and his too ready tolerance of its reigning errors. He was consequently regarded at Rome with equal suspicion and dislike. Vitalian, the successor of Eugenius, had the merit of being a strict disciplinarian, and of sending Theodore to England as archbishop of Canterbury. At his death, Adeodatus (Deodatus II) was elected. It was in the pontificate of his successor Domnus that the church of Ravenna became permanently incorporated with that of Rome.

Agatho, the next pope, was not less conspicuous for the devoutness of his character; and the story which is told of his curing by a kiss some leprous person whom he accidentally met, indicates not merely the growing superstition of the age, but the influence which the pontiff’s piety had made upon the minds of the people. At his request it was that the emperor Constantine Pogonatus assembled the Sixth General Council; and it is somewhat singular to find that one of the main objects which his legates laboured at obtaining was a reduction of the sum usually paid by the newly elected pontiff into the imperial treasury. For this indulgence, Agatho willingly confirmed the ancient law, that no pope should be ordained till his election had been formally recognised and confirmed at Constantinople. The harmony which thus existed between the emperor and Agatho was happily continued through the pontificate of Leo II, in whose favour the monarch decreed that the new archbishop of Ravenna should receive his ordination at the hands of the pope. He possessed sufficient interest at the court of the emperor to obtain the important privilege for the Roman pontiffs, of being confirmed in their authority by the exarch of Ravenna, instead of having to make the long and difficult journey to Constantinople.

[Sidenote: [682-701 A.D.]]

The pontificate of John V was as unimportant as it was short; he was succeeded by Conon. Next, Sergius occupied the papal chair to the beginning of the eighth century; but, at the commencement of his pontificate, he saw himself opposed by two powerful rivals, and the palace of the Lateran was for some time besieged with open force by the partisans of these pretenders to the papacy. The contest was continued for a considerable period. Sergius, though supported by imperial influence, had to endure a seven years’ exile before he could possess himself of the dignity; and on his refusal to recognise the canons of the council _in trullo_,[88] was assailed by Justinian II with all the weapons of imperial authority. The conflict was thus renewed, which had so long disturbed the peace of Christendom; and another starting-point given, from which the two great candidates for universal and unlimited power were to begin the race. It is evident that the pontiff had not yet acquired strength sufficient to oppose his rival with certainty of success. At the council of Toledo, held in the year 688, the archbishop of that city obtained a resolution in favour of his opinions, which not simply established his creed in opposition to that of the pontiff, but was couched in terms of haughty defiance and rebuke. The contest, therefore, was as yet unattended by palpable prognostics of the final triumph of the papacy.

(From a miniature in the Bibliothèque du Havre)]

The troubles which the church had suffered from the continual motions of half-barbarian hordes were many and severe, but they produced an equivalent advantage. Amid all the struggles to which churchmen were urged by ambition, they displayed, as a body, some of the noblest instances of charity, of care for the poor and distressed, which the world had seen. Pressed by the frequent prospect of immediate ruin, they simultaneously acquired the virtues of resignation and the skill of politicians. It was to them the people owed their preservation when threatened on the one side by foreign enemies, and on the other by the tyranny of their rulers; and till they themselves became oppressors, popular liberty found its best champions among the heads of the church. But when the progress of Christianity itself is considered--that is, the very interests for which the church, with all its attendant powers, was called into existence--doubt and dissatisfaction are almost the invariable result of the inquiry. In Rome, piety was shocked by the open contests which repeatedly took place by candidates for the papal dignity, and by the little less disgraceful plots with which the contending parties prepared for the onset. The provinces, perpetually appealed to on the subject of obedience to the supreme pontiff, saw their own pastors at one time yielding with submissive complacence to his decrees, at another resisting them both openly and in secret.

[Sidenote: [701-731 A.D.]]

Sergius was succeeded by John VI (701), in whose pontificate Campania was invaded by the Lombards, under Gisulf, duke of Benevento. His successor, John VII (705), is noted only for having been guilty of the weakness of returning the canons of the council _in trullo_ to the emperor Justinian, without a single alteration. In his pontificate, moreover, the king of the Lombards restored the lands of which he had despoiled the church, and the deed which contained the grant was written in letters of gold. Sisinius was the next pontiff; but he died a few days after his election, and left the see to Constantine, a native of Syria, who retained it about seven years. He was summoned by Justinian to the capital of the East; but the object which the emperor had in view is unknown, and the only result of his journey seems to have been the restoration of Felix, the archbishop of Ravenna, to his diocese and honours. That unfortunate prelate had made an effort to recover the independence possessed by the former bishops of his see; but, though aided by the warlike masters of the district, his attempt failed; and the emperor sending a body of troops from Sicily, the walls of Ravenna were beaten down, and Felix, loaded with chains, was carried a prisoner to Constantinople. There he had to endure the punishment inflicted on the basest criminals. His eyes were put out, and he was banished to the inhospitable shores of Pontus--a punishment, it is said, which was regarded at Rome as the infliction of divine justice.

Notwithstanding the want of positive evidence as to the express object of Constantine’s journey, it is usually believed to have been occasioned by the emperor’s unceasing anxiety to secure the co-operation of the Roman hierarchy in the establishment of the late decrees. It is also argued, and with seeming reason, that his attendance on the imperial commands is a proof of the still unavoidable subjection which the pontiffs had to endure; while his failing to oppose the canons so objectionable to his church affords a similar proof of his weakness and his fears.

[Sidenote: [715-741 A.D.]]

Gregory II, by whom he was succeeded (715), pursued a bolder line of conduct.[89] The part which he took in opposition to Leo the Isaurian has been already stated; and his determined attack on the Lombards, who made themselves masters of one of the Neapolitan fortresses, indicated the spirit which, in later times, placed Christian prelates at the head of mail-clad armies. Gregory was in all respects the firm defender and zealous advocate of papal authority. At one moment engaged in open hostilities with the emperor, he was at another employed in directing the labours of missionaries and founding monasteries. Germany, at his direction, was traversed by the ardent and pious Boniface; and in Italy the rule of St. Benedict became, under his patronage, the universal canon of monastic institutions.

The pontificate of Gregory II lasted sixteen years, and he was succeeded by a priest of the same name, whom the people elected by some sudden impulse, while engaged in the obsequies of the former. Gregory III (731-741) carried the principles which had actuated his predecessor to a far greater extent. Unable to withdraw the emperor Leo, either by persuasion or threats, from the vigorous persecution of iconoclasm, he proceeded to the daring measure of excommunicating the sovereign, and then made known to the celebrated Charles Martel his readiness to proclaim him consul of Rome, on condition that he would enable him to support his separation from the dominion of the empire. Leo resented the conduct of the pontiff, by depriving him of part of his revenues and rejecting his legates. But the step which Gregory had taken led directly to the establishment of the papacy on the basis of temporal power and grandeur. A new career, new motives to exertion, were opened to the politicians of the church; and it was no longer with rival prelates the bishops of Rome were to contend, but with states and princes. The prizes for which they were henceforth to strive were to be tributary crowns and sceptres--the triumphs they were to celebrate, not those of truth over heresy, but of arbitrary superstition over the free-will, the natural sentiments, and the evangelical knowledge of Christian nations.[g]

That reign of terror known as the struggle of the iconoclasts has been alluded to already in the history of the Byzantine Empire. It may also be summed up here with its consequences.

DRAPER ON THE ORIGIN OF ICONOCLASM

Three causes gave rise to iconoclasm, or the revolt against image-worship; first, the remonstrances and derision of the Mohammedans; second, the good sense of a great sovereign, Leo the Isaurian, who had risen by his merit from obscurity, and had become the founder of a new dynasty at Constantinople; third, the detected inability of these miracle-working idols and fetiches to protect their worshippers or themselves against an unbelieving enemy. Moreover, an impression was gradually making its way among the more intelligent classes that religion ought to free itself from such superstitions. So important were the consequences of Leo’s actions, that some have been disposed to assign to his reign the first attempt at making policy depend on theology; and to this period they therefore refer the commencement of the Byzantine Empire. Through one hundred and twenty years, six emperors devoted themselves to this reformation. But it was premature. They were overpowered by the populace and the monks, by the bishops of Rome, and by a superstitious and wicked woman.

It had been a favourite argument against the pagans how little their gods could do for them when the hour of calamity came, when their statues and images were insulted and destroyed; and hence how vain was such worship, how imbecile such gods. When Africa and Asia, full of relics and crosses, pictures and images, fell before the Mohammedans, those conquerors retaliated the same logic with no little effect. There was hardly one of the fallen towns that had not some idol for its protector. Remembering the stern objurgations of the prophet against this deadly sin, prohibited at once by the commandment of God and repudiated by the reason of man, the Saracen caliphs had ordered all the Syrian images to be destroyed. Amid the derision of the Arab soldiery and the tears of the terror-stricken worshippers, these orders were remorselessly carried into effect, except in some cases where the temptation of an enormous ransom induced the avengers of the unity of God to swerve from their duty. Thus the piece of linen cloth on which it was feigned that our Saviour had impressed his countenance, and which was the palladium of Edessa, was carried off by the victors at the capture of that town, and subsequently sold to Constantinople at the profitable price of twelve thousand pounds of silver. This picture, and also some other celebrated ones, it was said, possessed the property of multiplying themselves by contact with other surfaces, as in modern times we multiply photographs. Such were the celebrated images “made without hands.”

[Sidenote: [726 A.D.]]

It was currently asserted that the immediate origin of iconoclasm was due to the caliph Yazid, who had completed the destruction of the Syrian images, and to two Jews, who stimulated Leo the Isaurian to his task. However that may be, Leo published an edict (726 A.D.), prohibiting the worship of images. This was followed by another directing their destruction, and the whitewashing of the walls of churches ornamented with them. Hereupon the clergy and the monks rebelled; the emperor was denounced as a Mohammedan and a Jew. He ordered that a statue of the Saviour in that part of the city called Chalcopratia should be removed, and a riot was the consequence. One of his officers mounted the ladder and struck the idol with an axe upon its face; it was an incident like that enacted centuries before in the temple of Serapis at Alexandria. The sacred image, which had often arrested the course of nature and worked many miracles, was now found to be unable to protect or to avenge its own honour. A rabble of women interfered in its behalf; they threw down the ladder and killed the officer; nor was the riot ended until the troops were called in and a great massacre perpetrated. The monks spread the sedition in all parts of the empire; they even attempted to proclaim a new emperor. Leo was everywhere denounced as a Mohammedan infidel, an enemy of the mother of God; but with inflexible resolution he persisted in his determination as long as he lived.[h]

MILMAN ON ICONOCLASM

Iconoclasm was an attempt by the Eastern emperor to change by his own arbitrary command the religion of his subjects. No religious revolution has ever been successful which has commenced with the government. Such revolutions have ever begun in the middle or lower orders of society, struck on some responsive chord of sympathy in the general feeling, supplied some religious want, stirred some religious energy, and shaken the inert strength of the established faith by some stronger counter emotion.

Whatever the motives of the emperor Leo the Isaurian (and on this subject, as in all the religious controversies where the writings of the unsuccessful party were carefully suppressed or perished through neglect, authentic history is almost silent), whether he was actuated by a rude aversion to what perhaps can hardly yet be called the fine arts with which Christianity was associating itself, or by a spiritual disdain and impatience of the degrading superstition into which the religion of the Gospel had so long been degenerating, the attempt was as politically unwise and unseasonable as the means employed were despotic and altogether unequal to the end. The time was passed, if it had ever been, when an imperial edict could change, or even much affect, the actual prevailing religion of the empire. For this was no speculative article of belief, no question of high metaphysical theology, but a total change in the universal popular worship, in the spirit and in the essence, if not of the daily ritual, of countless observances and habitual practices of devotion. It swept away from almost all the churches of the empire objects hallowed by devotion, and supposed to be endowed with miraculous agency; objects of hope and fear, of gratitude and immemorial veneration. It not merely invaded the public church, and left its naked walls without any of the old remembrancers of faith and piety; it reached the private sanctuary of prayer. No one could escape the proscription; learned or unlearned, priest or peasant, monk or soldier, clergyman or layman, man, woman, and even child were involved in the strife. Something to which their religious attachments clung, to which their religious passions were wedded, might at any time be forcibly rent away, insulted, trampled under foot; that which had been their pride and delight could only now be furtively visited, and under the fear of detection.

Nor was it possible for this controversy to vent itself in polemic writings. Here actual, personal, furious collision of man and man, of faction and faction, of armed troops against armed troops, was inevitable. The contending parties did not assail each other with mutual anathemas, which they might despise, or excommunication and counter excommunication, the validity of which might be questioned by either party. On one side it was a sacred obligation to destroy, to mutilate, to dash to pieces, to deface the objects on which the other had so long gazed with intense devotion, and which he might think it an equally sacred obligation to defend at the sacrifice of life. It was not a controversy, it was a feud; not a polemic strife, but actual war declared by one part of Christendom against the other. It was well perhaps for Christendom that the parties were not more equally balanced; that, right or wrong, one party in that division of the Christian world, where total change would have been almost extermination, obtained a slow but complete triumph.[b]

Milman then goes on to plead eloquently for the encouragement of the fine arts by the church which produced a Raphael and a Michelangelo, as the Greek religion produced and employed its Phidias and Praxiteles. He then proceeds to describe the ferocity of the dissension.[a]

THE WAR OF ICONOCLASM

[Sidenote: [726-731 A.D.]]

A formidable insurrection broke out in Greece and in the Ægean islands. A fleet was armed, a new emperor, one Cosmas, proclaimed, and Constantinople menaced by the rebels. The fleet, however, was scattered and destroyed by ships which discharged the Greek fire; the insurrection was suppressed, the leaders either fell or were executed, along with the usurper. The monks here and throughout the empire, the champions of this as of every other superstition, were the instigators to rebellion. Few monasteries were without some wonder-working image; the edict struck at once at their influence, their interest, their pride, their most profound religious feelings.

But the more eminent clergy were likewise at first almost unanimous in their condemnation of the emperor. Constantine, bishop of Nacolia, indeed, is branded as his adviser. Another bishop, Theodosius, son of Apsimarus, metropolitan of Ephesus, is named as entering into the war against images. But almost for the first time the bishops of the two Romes, Germanus of Constantinople and Pope Gregory II, were united in one common cause. Leo attempted to win Germanus to his views, but the aged patriarch (he was now ninety-five years old) calmly but resolutely resisted the arguments, the promises, the menaces of the emperor.

But the conduct of Gregory II, as leading to more important results, demands more rigid scrutiny. The Byzantine historians represent him as proceeding, at the first intimation of the hostility of the emperor to image-worship, to an act of direct revolt, as prohibiting the payment of tribute by the Italian province. This was beyond the power, probably beyond the courage, of Gregory. The great results of the final separation of the West from the inefficient and inglorious sovereignty of the East might excuse or palliate, if he had foreseen them, the disloyalty of Pope Gregory to Leo. But it would be to estimate his political and religious sagacity too highly to endow him with this gift of ambitious prophecy, to suppose him anticipating the full development of Latin Christianity when it should become independent of the East.

Like most ordinary minds, and if we are to judge by his letters Gregory’s was a very ordinary mind, he was merely governed by the circumstances and passions of his time without the least foreknowledge of the result of his actions. The letter of Pope Gregory to the emperor (729 A.D.) is arrogant without dignity, dogmatic without persuasiveness; in the stronger part of the argument far inferior, both in skill and ingenuity, to that of the aged Germanus, or the writer who guided his pen. The strange mistakes in the history of the Old Testament, the still stranger interpretations of the New, the loose legends which are advanced as history, give a very low opinion of the knowledge of the times.

[Sidenote: [731-742 A.D.]]

When Gregory addressed this and a second letter to the emperor Leo, the tumult in Constantinople, the first public act of rebellion against iconoclasm, had taken place; but the aged bishop Germanus was not yet degraded from his see. Germanus, with better temper and more skilful argument, had defended the images of the East. Before his death (731), he was deposed or compelled to retire from his see. He died most probably in peace; his extreme age may well account for his death. His personal ill treatment by the emperor is the legend of a later age to exalt him into a martyr.

But these two powerful prelates were not the only champions of their cause whose writings made a strong impression on their age. It is singular that the most admired defender of images in the East was a subject not of the emperor but of the Mohammedan sultan. John of Damascus was famed as the most learned man in the East, and it may show either the tolerance, the ignorance, or the contempt of the Mohammedans for these Christian controversies, that writings which became celebrated all over the East should issue from one of their capital cities, Damascus.

In the West, all power, almost all pretension to power, excepting over Sicily and Calabria, expired with Leo;[90] and this independence partly arose out of and was immeasurably strengthened by the faithful adherence of the West to image-worship.

CONSTANTINE COPRONYMUS (741-775 A.D.)

Leo was succeeded by his son Constantine. The name by which this emperor was known is a perpetual testimony to the hatred of a large part of his subjects. Even in his infancy he was believed to have shown a natural aversion to holy things, and in his baptism to have defiled the font. Constantine Copronymus sounded to Greek ears as a constant taunt against his filthy and sacrilegious character.

The accession of Constantine (741), although he had already been acknowledged for twenty years with his father as joint emperor, met formidable resistance. The contest for the throne was a strife between the two religious parties which divided the empire. During the absence of Constantine, on an expedition against the Saracens, a sudden and dangerous insurrection placed his brother-in-law, Artavasdes, on the throne. Constantinople was gained to the party of the usurper by treachery. The city was induced to submit to Artavasdes only by a rumour, industriously propagated and generally believed, of the death of Constantine. The emperor on one occasion had been in danger of surprise, and escaped by the swiftness of his horses.

[Sidenote: [742-746 A.D.]]

In the capital, as throughout Greece and the European part of the empire, the triumph of Artavasdes was followed by the restoration of the images. Anastasius, the dastard patriarch of Constantinople, as he had been the slave of Leo, now became the slave of the usurper, and worshipped images with the same zeal with which he had destroyed them. He had been the principal actor in the deception of the people by the forged letters which announced the death of Constantine. He plunged with more desperate recklessness into the party of Artavasdes. The monks, and all over whom they had influence, took up the cause of the usurper; but the mass of the people, from royal respect for the memory of Leo, or from their confidence in the vigorous character of Constantine and attachment to the legitimate succession, from indifference or aversion to image-worship, still wavered, and submitted rather than clamorously rejoiced in the coronation of Artavasdes.

But Constantine Copronymus with the religious opinions inherited the courage, the military abilities, and the popularity with the army which had distinguished his father Leo. After some vicissitudes, a battle took place near Ancyra, fought with all the ferocity of civil and religious war. After an obstinate resistance, and after having suffered all the horrors of famine, Constantinople was taken. Artavasdes was punished by the loss of his eyes.

Constantine was a soldier, doubtless of a fierce temper; the blinding and mutilation of many, the beheading a few of his enemies, the abandonment of the houses of the citizens to the plunder of his troops, was the natural course of Byzantine revolution; and these cruelties have no doubt lost nothing in the dark representations of the emperor’s enemies, the only historians of the times. But they suffered as rebels in arms against their sovereign, not as image-worshippers. The fate of the patriarch Anastasius was the most extraordinary. His eyes were put out, he was led upon an ass, with his face to the tail, through the city; and after all this mutilation and insult, for which, considering his tergiversation and impudent mendacity, it is difficult to feel much compassion, he was reinstated in the patriarchal dignity. The clergy in the East had never been arrayed in the personal sanctity which, in ordinary occasions, they possessed in the West; but could Constantine have any other object in this act than the degradation of the whole order in public estimation?

THIRD COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE (746 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [746-766 A.D.]]

For ten years Constantine refrained from any stronger measures against image worship. In the tenth year of Constantine rumours spread abroad of secret councils held for the total destruction of images. Either the emperor must have prepared the public mind for this great change with consummate address, or reverence for images must have been less deeply rooted in the East than in the West, otherwise it can scarcely be supposed that so large a number of the clergy as appeared at the Third Council of Constantinople (746) would have slavishly assented to the strong measures of the emperor. Three hundred and forty-eight bishops formed this synod.

Part of the proceedings of this assembly have been preserved in the records of the rival council, the second held in Nicæa. The passages are cited in the original words, followed by a confutation, sanctioned apparently by the Nicene bishops. The Council of Constantinople proscribes the lawless and blasphemous art of painting. The fathers of Constantinople assume, as boldly as the brethren of Nicæa their sanctity, that all images are the invention of the devil; that they are idols in the same sense as those of the heathen. Nor do they hesitate to impute community of sentiment with the worst heretics to their opponents. They thought that they held the image-worshippers in an inextricable dilemma. If the painters represented only the humanity of Christ, they were Nestorians; if they attempted to mingle it with the divinity, they were Eutychians, circumscribing the infinite and confounding the two substances. It was impiety to represent Christ without his divinity, Arianism to undeify him, despoil him of his godhead.

The Council of Nicæa admits the perfect unanimity of the Council of Constantinople. These 348 bishops concurred in pronouncing their anathema against all who should represent the incarnate Word by material form or colours, who should not restrict themselves to the pure spiritual conception of the Christ, as he is seated, superior in brightness to the sun, on the right hand of the Father; against all who should confound the two natures of Christ in one human image, or who should separate the manhood from the Godhead in the second person of the indivisible Trinity; against all who should not implore the intercession of the Virgin in pure faith, as above all visible and invisible things; against all who should set up the deaf and lifeless images of saints, and who do not rather paint the living likenesses of their virtues in their own hearts. All images, whether statues or paintings, were to be forcibly removed from the churches; everyone who henceforth should set up an image, if a bishop or priest, was to be degraded; if a layman, excommunicated. They proceed to curse by name the principal asserters of image-worship. “Anathema against the double-minded Germanus, the worshipper of wood! Anathema against George (of Cyprus), the falsifier of the traditions of the fathers! Anathema against Mansar (they called by this unchristian-sounding name the famous John of Damascus), the Saracen in heart, the traitor to the empire--Mansar the teacher of impiety, the false interpreter of Holy Scripture!”

Thus was image-worship proscribed by a council, in numbers at least of weight, in the severest and most comprehensive terms. The work of demolition was committed to the imperial officers; only with strict injunctions, not perhaps always obeyed, to respect the vessels, the priestly vestments, and other furniture of the churches, and the cross, the naked cross without any image. The crucifix was of a later period.

THE WAR ON MONASTERIES

[Sidenote: [766-775 A.D.]]

But if the emperor had overawed, or bought, or compelled the seemingly willing assent of so large a body of the eastern clergy, the formidable monks were still in obstinate implacable opposition to his will. It was now fanaticism encountering fanaticism. Everywhere the monks preached resistance to the imperial decree, and enough has been seen of their turbulent and intractable conduct to make us conclude that their language at least would keep no bounds. Stephen, the great martyr of this controversy, had lived as a hermit in a cave near Sinope for thirty years.

The emperor sent the patriarch to persuade him to subscribe the decrees of the Council of Constantinople. The patriarch’s eloquence was vain. The emperor either allowed or compelled the aged monk to retire to the wild rock of Proconnesus, where, to consummate his sanctity, he took his stand upon a pillar. His followers assembled in crowds about him, and built their cells around the pillar of the saint. But the zeal of Stephen would not be confined within that narrow sphere. He returned to the city, and in bold defiance of the imperial orders denounced the iconoclasts. He was seized, cast into prison, and there treated with unusual harshness. But even there the zeal of his followers found access. Constantine exclaimed, in a paroxysm of careless anger, “Am I or this monk the emperor of the world?” The word of the emperor was enough for some of his obsequious courtiers; they rushed, broke open the prison, dragged out the old man along the streets with every wanton cruelty, and cast his body at last into the common grave of the public malefactors.

The emperor took now a sterner and more desperate resolution. He determined to root out monkery itself. The monks were driven from their cloisters, which were given up to profane and secular uses. Consecrated virgins were forced to marry; monks were compelled, each holding the hand of a woman, doubtless not of the purest character, to walk round the Hippodrome among the jeers and insults of the populace. Throughout the whole empire they were exposed to the lawless persecutions of the imperial officers. Their zeal or their obstinacy was chastised by scourgings, imprisonments, mutilations, and even death. The monasteries were plundered, and by no scrupulous or reverent hands; churches are said to have been despoiled of all their sacred treasures, the holy books burned, feasts and revels profaned the most hallowed sanctuaries.

Multitudes fled to the neighbouring kingdoms of the less merciless barbarians; many found refuge in the West, especially in Rome. The prefect of Thrace was the most obsequious agent of his master’s tyranny. The patriarch himself was accused of having used disrespectful language towards the emperor. Already he had been required to acquit himself of imputing Nestorianism to his master; now his accusers swore on the cross that they had heard him hold conference with one of the conspirators. Constantine ordered the imperial seal to be affixed on the palace of the patriarch, and sent him into banishment.