BOOK III.
FROM THE DEATH OF THE EMPEROR THEODOSIUS I TO THE PONTIFICATE OF GREGORY THE GREAT.A.D. 395-590.
CHAPTER VII.
SEMIPELAGIANISM.—MISSIONS.—DECLINE OF ARIANISM IN THE
WEST.
It has been mentioned that the Semipelagian opinions
became popular in Gaul, and that Augustine was induced by Prosper of Aquitaine
and Hilary to write against them. The controversy was kept up with great zeal
and activity by Prosper himself, who attacked the “Massilians”
not only in treatises of the usual form, but in a poem of a thousand lines and
in epigrams. In the year after Augustine’s death, Prosper and Hilary went to
Rome for the purpose of soliciting Celestine to issue a condemnation of Semipelagianism; and, in consequence of this application,
the bishop wrote a letter to his Gaulish brethren, in which, while he highly
eulogized Augustine, he censured such persons as pursued unprofitable inquiries
and introduced novelties of doctrine. These expressions, however, were capable
of more than one application, and the Semipelagians did not fail to turn them
against the advocates of the Augustinian system. The abbey of Lerins, founded
in the beginning of the fifth century by Honoratus, afterwards archbishop of
Arles, was a chief stronghold of Semipelagianism.
Vincent, a celebrated monk of that society, was perhaps the author of a direct
attack on the doctrines of Augustine; it has even been supposed that his Commonitory, which came to be regarded as the very rule of
orthodoxy, was written with a covert intention of proscribing them by its
well-known tests of truth—antiquity, universality, and consent.
Having failed to effect the suppression of Semipelagianism by authority, Prosper continued to combat
it vigorously with his pen. Both he and those who followed him on the same
side were careful to mitigate such parts of the Augustinian system as might
seem to be subversive of the obligation to religious living, or inconsistent
with the ideas of the divine love and justice. Some of these points Prosper
attempted to exempt from discussion by referring them to the secret things of
God. “God (he said) has chosen the whole world out of the whole world, and all
men are adopted to be His children out of all mankind”. Every one who is
rightly baptized receives forgiveness both of original and of actual sin; if
such persons afterwards fall away to unbelief or ungodliness, they are
condemned, not for their original sin, but for their own misdeeds—not through
an irrespective reprobation, but because God foresaw that they would abuse
their free-will. Predestination relates to such things only as are of God, and
sin is not among these; we must not therefore say that He predestines to sin,
but only that He predestines to punishment.
Semipelagianism still continued to prevail in Gaul. One of its most eminent champions
was Faustus, a native either of Britain or of Brittany, who at the date of
Vincent’s Commonitory was abbot of Lerins, and in 456
was raised to the bishopric of Riez. He was famous for strictness of life, and
for a power of eloquence which his contemporary Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of
Clermont, extols in hyperbolical terms. After having vainly endeavoured to
convince a presbyter named Lucidus, who held extreme predestinarian opinions,
Faustus, about the year 475, brought him before a synod held at Arles, where
Lucidus was obliged to retract many of his doctrines, and to acknowledge that
both grace and human exertion are requisite for obedience to the Divine will. The
synod commissioned Faustus to write a confutation of the errors of Lucidus and
his party; and another synod, held at Lyons, requested him to make some
additions to the work, which thus had an appearance of sanction from the church
of Gaul. It opens with a refutation of the grosser tenets of Pelagianism, and
then attacks the Augustinian system, which the writer charges with
Antinomianism. Faustus, who had been banished by the Arian Euric, in 481, but
recovered his see on that prince's death, three years later, died about 491-3,
at a very advanced age. His memory was celebrated in his own country as that of
a saint; but Avitus, bishop of Vienne, Caesarius, bishop of Arles, and
Claudianus Mamertus, a presbyter of that city, wrote against his opinions; and
soon after his death his writings were condemned by Pope Gelasius in a decretal
epistle, which is memorable as containing the earliest Roman catalogue of
forbidden books. The treatise of Faustus On Grace and Free-will, after a
time found its way to Constantinople, where it excited much commotion among the
brotherhood of Scythian monks.
These were already in correspondence with Caesarius,
who held the see of Arles from 501 to 542, and was revered for the wisdom and
charity which he displayed in the trying circumstances of his age and country,
procured a condemnation of the Semipelagian tenets by the Gaulish bishops in a
synod held at Orange in 529. In this judgment all that might startle or shock
in the predestinarian doctrine was carefully avoided. The opinion of a
predestination to sin and condemnation was rejected with abhorrence, and with
the expression of a doubt whether it were really entertained by any one; while
it was laid down that sufficient grace is bestowed on all the baptized—a
doctrine incompatible with the notions of irresistible grace and absolute
decrees. The decisions of Orange were soon after affirmed by another council at
Valence, and in the year following they were ratified by Pope Boniface II.
Thus, in so far as formal condemnation could reach, Semipelagianism was suppressed in the west. But the Conferences of its founder maintained their
popularity, especially in the monasteries, and the opinions of Cassian were
often really held where those of Augustine were professed.
The reigns of Justin the elder and Justinian witnessed
the conversion of the Lazi, in Colchis, who thereupon forsook the Persian for
the Roman alliance; of the Abasgi, near Mount
Caucasus; and of the fierce nation of the Heruli, who
had been allowed to cross the Danube in the time of Anastasius. The wild tribes
about the river Don were also visited by missionaries. A powerful impression
was made on the nomads of the east by Symeon the stylite and other ascetics
whom they met with in the course of their wandering life; one Saracen chief was
not only converted, but, having exchanged in baptism the name of Aspebethos for that of Peter, was consecrated to exercise a
superintendence over his own and other tribes, under the title of “Bishop of
the Camps”, and sat in the general council of Ephesus.
In some quarters the Catholics contended with the
new sects in missionary exertion; but in the remoter regions the heretics were
the more active. The monophysites, in addition to
their gains in countries where orthodox Christianity had already been planted,
converted Nubia from heathenism; while the preachers of Nestorianism found out
new fields for their labour in the east. In the sixth century the Nestorian
school of Nisibis was the only regular institution for the training of clergy.
The sectaries who had been driven from the empire strengthened the kingdom of
Persia by their immigration; their religious hostility to the Christianity of
the emperors secured for them the countenance of the Persian monarchs; and
Nestorianism was established as the only form of Christianity to be tolerated
in Persia—thousands of Catholics and monophysites being slain for refusing to conform to it. Persian missionaries penetrated into
the heart of Asia, and even into China, from which country two of them, in the
reign of Justinian, introduced the silkworm into the Greek empire. Cosmas, a
Nestorian of Egypt—originally a merchant and afterwards a monk, who from his
expeditions into the east is known, by the name of Indicopleustes (the Indian voyager),—found Christians of his own communion, with bishops and
clergy from Persia, in Ceylon, in Malabar, and elsewhere on the Indian coasts.
As to Ceylon, however, he expressly states that the natives and their kings
were still heathens; and on the whole it would seem that the Christianity of
those regions extended as yet but little beyond the pale of the Persian
commercial settlements.
There were religious wars between the Abyssinians and
the Homerites or Hamyarites,
a people of southern Arabia, who professed the Jewish faith; but the accounts
of these wars are much embarrassed by inconsistencies and other difficulties.
In the west, the conquests of the Franks extended
Christianity wherever they penetrated, and revived that which had been before
planted in some districts—as, for example, along the course of the Rhine.
The religion of the western converts was too generally
tainted both by their own barbarism and by the corruption of the worn-out
nations with whose civilization they were brought into contact. Much of heathen
superstition lingered in combination with Christianity; Gregory of Tours
reports it as a popular saying in Spain, that “it is no harm if one who
has to pass between heathen altars and God’s church should pay his respects to
both”. Much vice was tolerated by the clergy, who, although their condition was
highly prosperous, did not as yet feel themselves strong enough to check the
passions of the great and powerful. The fate of Praetextatus, bishop of Rouen,
who, in consequence of having offended the notorious Queen Fredegund, was
stabbed in his cathedral at high mass on Easter-day, was a warning to such of
his brethren as might be inclined to take a bolder line. The depravity of the
Frankish princes, in particular, was frightful—perhaps even unparalleled in the
records of history; and the tone which the bishop of Tours, although himself a
good and pious man, employs in speaking of such characters, affords abundant
proof that his own ideas were far from any high Christian standard. The
evangelical principle of forgiveness for sin was abused to sanction
licentiousness and atrocity. Fredegund, in instigating two of her servants to
assassinate Sigebert, assured them that, if they lived, she would highly honour
them, but if they perished in their attempt, she would give largely in alms for
their souls; murderers were allowed to take sanctuary in churches, and might
not be dragged out without an oath for the safety of their lives. Pretended
miracles were wrought in vast numbers for the purpose of imposing on the
credulous. Among the clergy themselves, from the bishops downwards, there was
much of vice and even of crime; Fredegund, in one of her many murders, found
two ecclesiastics to act for hire as the assassins. There was a natural
tendency to rely on mere rites and outward pomp of worship; yet good men, such
as Caesarius of Arles, were never wanting to assert the necessity of a really
living faith and a thoroughly religious practice; and throughout all the evils
of the time the beneficial effects of the gospel are to be traced in humane and
civilizing legislation.
During the reign of Justinian’s successor, Justin II,
Alboin, king of the Lombards, descended on Italy (563) with a host of
adventurers collected from many nations and professing a variety of religions—heathenism,
Arianism, and orthodox Christianity. The exarch Narses, who had been affronted
by the emperor and superseded in his government, is supposed to have shared in
inviting the Lombards, and, although he returned to his allegiance, death soon removed
him from the path of the invaders. Justin was obliged to yield to them the
north of Italy and a part of the centre; Pavia became the Lombard capital and
about twenty years later the duchy of Beneventum was added to their
territories. Arianism, which had been extirpated from Italy by the arms of
Belisarius and Narses, was again introduced by the new conquerors : and it was
among them that it remained latest as a national faith.
In Gaul, Arianism had given way to the progress of the
Frankish power, which everywhere enforced orthodoxy by the sword. Clovis, as we
have seen, made a zeal against heresy the pretext for his invasion of the
Visigothic kingdom; and we are told that, when the walls of Angouleme had
fallen down before him by miracle, he butchered the Gothic inhabitants for
their misbelief. Sigismund, king of the Burgundians, who had become a convert
to the catholic doctrine before his accession in 517, endeavoured, under the
prudent guidance of Avitus, bishop of Vienne, to draw his subjects over after
him, but among the Burgundians, as elsewhere, it was by the victory of the
Franks that Arianism was suppressed. When the Gothic garrisons were withdrawn
from the north of the Alps to encounter Belisarius in Italy, the Goths ceded
Provence to the Franks; the cession was afterwards confirmed by Justinian, and
thus the heresy was expelled from that region.
In Spain, the Suevi, under Theodomir, returned to the
catholic faith about a century from the time when their forefathers abandoned
it. Amalaric, grandson of the great Theodoric, who had succeeded to the
Visigothic dominions in Spain, and in Gaul westward of the Rhone, married
Clotilda, a daughter of Clovis, and endeavoured, by very violent means, to
convert her to Arianism. Her brother Childebert, roused to indignation by
receiving from her a handkerchief stained with her blood, as a proof of the
treatment to which she was subjected by her husband, made war on Amalaric,
defeated, and killed him. Under the next king of the Visigoths, Theudis, the Catholics enjoyed a free toleration, with
the liberty of holding synods; and the same policy was followed by his successors,
until the latter part of Leovigild’s reign. On the marriage of Hermenegild, son
of this prince, with a daughter of Sigebert, king of the Austrasian Franks, the Gothic queen, Goswintha, who was
grandmother to the young princess as well as stepmother to her husband,
exercised great cruelty towards her in the attempt to seduce her from the
orthodox faith. Hermenegild was banished from the court, and was soon after
induced, by the persuasions of his wife, and of Leander, bishop of Seville, to
become a catholic—a step which offended Leovigild, not only on religious
grounds, but because there was room for apprehending political danger from the
connexion into which the prince was thus brought with the catholic portion of
his father's subjects. Hermenegild was consequently deprived of his share in
the government. Supported by foreign princes of his new communion, he rebelled
against his father; but the rebellion was suppressed, and Hermenegild, as he
firmly refused to return to Arianism, and gave Leovigild reason to apprehend a
renewal of his insurrection, was put to death. Leovigild had been provoked by
his son's conduct to exercise severities against the Catholics. One of their
bishops had apostatized, and had submitted to rebaptism; but the king, wishing
to facilitate conversion to his heresy, had prevailed on an Arian council to
acknowledge the baptism of the church. After the death of Hermenegild, he
subdued the Suevi and united their kingdom to his own ; and both in the old and
in the new portions of his dominions the Catholics were under persecution until
his death in 586. His son Recared, who then succeeded
to the throne, avowed himself a catholic—the persuasives to his change of
belief being, as in many other cases of this age, partly of a miraculous kind.
Conspiracies were set on foot against him by the widowed queen Goswintha, and others of the Arian party; but he succeeded
in suppressing them, and a synod of seventy bishops, held at Toledo in 589,
established the catholic faith among his people. Thus, at the end of the period
embraced in this book, the Lombards were the only nation who continued to
adhere to Arianism.
While the British church was pent up in the mountains,
and Saxon heathenism overspread the rest of the land, the church of Ireland was
in a very flourishing condition. Columba, an Irish abbot of royal descent,
after having founded monasteries in the north of Ireland, set forth with twelve
companions in the year 563,—in obedience (it is said) to the command of a
hermit, who had charged him to expiate by a life of exile and of missionary
labour the part which he had taken in the sanguinary feuds of his countrymen.
It has been supposed that he was invited into Scotland by Conall, king of the Dalriads, who was his kinsman; and in addition to gaining
an influence over that prince and his successor Aidan, whose title he confirmed
by a solemn coronation, he converted Brud, king of
the northern Picts, whom he visited at his castle near Inverness. For
thirty-four years Columba laboured indefatigably, both on the mainland and in
the Hebrides, occasionally revisiting his native land, which he had never
ceased to regard with passionate regret. His chief residence was in the island
of Hy (afterwards called from him Icolumbkille or
Iona), where he established a monastery which was long famous as a seat of
religion and learning, and became the nursery of clergy whose labours extended
not only over Scotland, but far into the southern division of Britain, and
northwards to the Orkneys and the islands beyond—perhaps even to Iceland. The
abbots of Hy were at the head of a great society which had its monasteries both
in Scotland and in Ireland; and out of respect for the memory of the founder,
who had himself been only a presbyter, even the bishops of the district, by
what Bede terms an “unusual arrangement”, were in some respects subject to
them. Columba died at the age of seventy-six, in 597, the same year in which
the Roman mission for the conversion of the English landed in the Isle of
Thanet.
The British churches, in consequence of their
remoteness and of the want of communication with Rome, retained some
peculiarities which afterwards became subjects of controversy. Among these was
the time of observing Easter; but although, like the quartodecimans of Asia, the Britons professed to derive their practice from St. John, they
were not quartodecimans, inasmuch as they always
celebrated the festival on a Sunday. British bishops had sat (as we have seen)
in the council of Arles, and had doubtless concurred in its approval of the
Roman rule as to Easter. Constantine, in his letter written after the Nicene
council, had spoken of “the Britains” as agreeing
with other countries in the paschal reckoning of Rome; and it is recorded that
in the year 453 the British church conformed to an order of Leo the Great on
this subject. It would seem, in truth, that the difference which is found at a
somewhat later time between the British and the Roman usages arose from an
adherence of the British to the earlier cycle of the Roman church itself, which
had in the meantime been superseded at Rome by other and more accurate
calculations.
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