ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER VII.
THE DONATION OF CONSTANTINE.
It is one of the commonplaces of history, that in considering the causes
which have produced any given event, we have often to deal not only with that
which is True and can be proved, but also with that which though False is yet
believed. The undoubted fable of the descent of the founders of Rome from the
defenders of Troy distinctly influenced the policy of the Republic both in
Greece and Asia. Some effect on Jewish history was produced by the story of
Judas Maccabeus' treaty with Rome engraved on a tablet of brass. The shadowy
and almost fabulous claim of the Saxon kings to lordship over Scotland
suggested the wars of Edward the First with the northern kingdom. The so-called
‘Will of Peter the Great'—almost certainly spurious—has been a mighty
rallying-cry both to friends and foes of the extension of the dominion of the
Tsars in Europe and Asia. But there is no need to multiply instances, when the
one eminent instance of the fable of the greased cartridges as a plot against
the religion of the Sepoy, a fable which so nearly lost us India, is present to
the memory of us all.
Just such a fable was working powerfully on the minds of men, at any
rate of Roman citizens and ecclesiastics, in the middle of the eighth century;
a fable which dealt with the acts and deeds of the great Emperor Constantine
and of his contemporary Pope Silvester. Though the body of the Caesar had been
for more than four centuries mouldering in its vault in the great church of the
Holy Apostles at Constantinople, and though sixty pontiffs had sat in the
patriarchal chair of the Lateran since Silvester was carried to his grave, it
may be safely said that these two men, or rather not these two men but a
mythical Constantine and a mythical Silvester, were then exerting as great an
influence as any living Emperor or Pope on the politics of Europe.
In fewest possible words let us recall the events in the life of the
historic Emperor Constantine the Great. Born about the year 274, the son of an
emperor who though a heathen was conspicuously favourable to the Christians, he
was acclaimed as Caesar by the soldiers of his deceased father at Eburacum in the year 306. For eighteen years he was engaged
more or less continuously in struggles with other wearers of the Imperial
diadem. Maximian, Maxentius, Licinius fell before him, until at last, in 324,
he emerged from a series of deadly civil wars, sole ruler of the Roman world.
At each step of his upward progress some burden was taken off the Christian
Church, which from the beginning of his career recognized in him its patron and
protector. In the year 313, in concert with his partner in the empire,
Licinius, he issued the celebrated Edict of Milan which secured full toleration
to the Christians. His own personal relation to the new faith, at least during
the middle years of his life, is somewhat obscure. In spite of the story of the
miraculous Labarum affixed to his standards in his campaign against Maxentius
(312) he appears for some years to have professed, or at all events practised,
a kind of eclectic theism, seeking to combine a reverence for Christ with some
remains of the paganism which had been hitherto the official religion of the
Roman state. But always even during this transition period he took a kindly and
intelligent interest in the affairs of the Christian Church, labouring
especially for the preservation of its internal harmony. Thus his famous
presidency at the council of Nicaea (325) was entirely in keeping with his
previous attitude towards the Church ever since he had assumed the diadem.
Within three or four years after that celebrated event he wrought his other
even more world-famous work, the foundation of the city of Constantinople.
Still, though more and more showing himself as the patron of Christianity and
making it now not only a permitted but a dominant, almost a persecuting form of
faith, he himself postponed for a long while his formal reception into the
Christian Church. This took place at last at his villa of Ancyrona in Bithynia, where in the spring of 337 Eusebius the Arian bishop of Nicaea
administered to him the rite of Christian baptism, which in a few days was
followed by his death.
Contemporary with Constantine during the greater part of his reign was
Silvester, who held the office of bishop of Rome from 314 to 335. He was a man
apparently of no great force of character, who probably ruled his diocese well
(since we hear of no complaints or disputes during his long episcopate), and
who was excused on the score of age from attending at the council of Nicaea, at
which he was represented by two presbyters. It seems probable that Silvester
was the Pope who received from Constantine the gift of the Lateran Palace in
the south-east of Rome, with a large and doubtless valuable plot of ground
adjoining it, on which the Emperor may have built the great basilica which
bears the proud title, ‘Omnium ecclesiarum in orbe sedes et caput'. It is quite
possible that other estates in the city and in the Italian provinces may have
been bestowed upon the Roman see during the papacy of Silvester by the first
Christian emperor, who was undoubtedly a generous giver to the Churches throughout
his empire.
Such in outline are the figures of the historic Constantine and the
historic Silvester. Now let us see how they are drawn and coloured by the
legends of later and barbarous centuries.
The Vita Silvestri, a book written probably about the year 500,
that is to say nearly two centuries after Silvester's pontificate, describes in
the usual style of religious biography the youthful virtues of its hero, his
hospitality, his courageously manifested sympathy with Timotheus, a martyr
during the persecution of Diocletian, his ordination as deacon and as priest,
and his involuntary elevation to the papacy on the death of Miltiades (314). It
then goes on to relate some of the marvellous works performed by the new Pope,
chief among them the chaining up of a certain noisome dragon which by its
baleful breath poisoned the whole city, dwelling as it did in a subterranean
cave under the Tarpeian rock, reached by a staircase of three hundred and
sixty-five steps. After this event a cruel persecution of the Christians is
said to have been set on foot by the Emperor Constantine. Silvester, bowing his
head to the storm, departed from Rome and took refuge in a cave on Mount ‘Syraption', which later transmitters of the story have identified
with Soracte. While he was still in hiding, the
Emperor Constantine, as a punishment for his cruelties towards the Christians,
was afflicted with a grievous leprosy. The physicians were unable to cure him,
and he sought the aid of the priest of the Capitol, who assured him that he
could only be healed by bathing in a laver filled with the blood of newly-born
infants. A multitude of sucklings from all parts of
the empire were collected for the ghastly purification, but with the babes came
of course then mothers, who rent the air with such piteous cries that
Constantine, moved with pity, countermanded the massacre, declaring that he
would rather continue to suffer from his disease than purchase health at the
cost of so great sorrow. That night in a dream two venerable figures appeared
to him, and as a reward for his forbearance told him that if he would send for
Silvester he should by his means be healed of his malady. Messengers were
accordingly sent to Soracte, who brought Silvester
into the presence of the Emperor. Two pictures were exhibited by the Pope, and
Constantine at once recognized in them the likenesses of the personages who
appeared to him in his dream.
“What are the names of these gods,” says the Emperor, “that I may
worship them?”
“They are no gods,” replies the Pope, “but the holy Apostles Peter and
Paul, servants of the living God and of His Son Jesus Christ” : and thereupon
he expounds to him the rudiments of Christianity. Constantine expresses his
willingness to receive baptism; they journey to Rome, and the rite is
administered in a porphyry vase in the Lateran. At the moment of immersion a
bright light dazzles his eyes and the eyes of the beholders. He rises from the lustral
waters cured of the plague of leprosy. Constantine then proceeds to issue
various edicts on behalf of his new faith. Christ is to be adored throughout
his Empire; the blasphemers of His name are to be severely punished; the
churches are to be inviolable places of refuge; new churches are to be built
out of the proceeds of tithes levied on the imperial domains; the bishops of
the whole Empire are to be subject to the Pope, even as the civil magistrates
are subject to the Emperor. Constantine himself repairs to the Vatican hill and
begins to dig the foundations of the new church of St. Peter. Next day he
commences a similar work at the Lateran. He convenes a great assembly of the
senate and people of Rome in the Basilica Ulpiana, announces his own conversion
in the presence of the senators (who for the most part adhere absolutely to
their old idolatry), but declares that faith shall be free and that no one
shall be forced to become Christian against his will. At this point, however,
he receives a letter from his mother, the widowed Empress Helena, residing in
Bithynia, who while congratulating him on having renounced the worship of
idols, implores him to adopt, not Christianity, but the only true religion,
Judaism. Hereupon a disputation is held as to the merits of the two religions,
between the Pope on one side and twelve Rabbis on the other. After argument is
exhausted, recourse is had to the test of miracles. A bull is brought in, and
the Rabbi who champions the faith of Moses whispers in its ear the mysterious
Name revealed on Sinai. The bull falls dead, and all the bystanders feel that
the Jew has triumphed; but then Silvester draws near and whispers in the
creature's ear the name of Christ, whereupon the bull comes to life again and
stands upright on its feet. Then the Christian cause is admitted to have
triumphed. Constantine sets off for the East to found Constantinople, and
Helena repairs to Jerusalem where she discovers the Holy Cross.
Such is the farrago of nonsensical romance which, at the period that we
have now reached, passed generally current as the true history of the baptism
of the first Christian emperor. There is no need to point out how utterly at
every turn the story contradicts the undoubted facts of history. The marvellous
thing is that these facts had been fully and correctly stated by authors of
high repute in the Church, such as Eusebius and Jerome, and the slightest
acquaintance with their works must have shown any Roman ecclesiastic that it
was impossible that the story told in the Gesta Silvestri could be true. When and where it originated can only be a matter
of conjecture. Abbe Duchesne, the learned and impartial editor of the Liber Pontificalis (into which, strange as it may appear,
this extravagant fiction has made its way), thinks that it probably had its
origin in the Church of Armenia. Dollinger, without expressing a decided
opinion on this point, agrees with Duchesne in the conclusion which has been
already stated that the fable obtained credence in Rome about the end of the
fifth century, at which time it is alluded to in some of the treatises called
forth by the trial of Pope Symmachus From the decision of such experts as these
there can be no appeal; but it is certainly difficult to understand how such a
wild travesty of the facts could have been believed little more than a century
after the death of the son of Constantine; and it is also hard to reconcile the
existence of the story in the year 500 with the entire silence respecting it
which we find in all the writings of Gregory the Great, yet a hundred years
later. Remembering how large a part of his papal life was occupied in
controversy with the Patriarch of Constantinople or respectful opposition to
his master the Emperor, we find it difficult to understand why there should
never be an allusion to a story which, if it had been true, would have so
greatly enhanced the glory of the see of Rome at the expense of the see of
Constantinople. Possibly the difficulty may be explained by Abbe Duchesne's
suggestion that the currency of the story and even the authority of the Liber Pontificalis were at this time confined to the
less educated portion of the Roman clergy and laity, and that scholars and
statesmen, such as Gregory I, did not confute, because they too utterly
despised them.
However, preposterous as this story of the conversion of Constantine
might be, by frequent repetition through barbarous and ignorant ages it
succeeded in getting itself accepted as truth. Even at this day not only the
unlettered peasant from the Campagna, but many of the better educated foreign
visitors to Rome, who enter the interesting fortress-church of the Quattro Incoronati, between the Colosseum and the Lateran, little
know what an audacious travesty of history is represented in the quaint
frescoes on its walls. They see the unhappy Emperor covered with the spots of
leprosy, the glad mothers with their babes restored, the two Apostles appearing
to the dreaming sovereign, the gay horsemen seeking Pope Silvester in his cave,
the recognition of St. Peter and St. Paul, Constantine standing in the
regenerating waters, Constantine kneeling before the Pope and offering him a
diadem, Constantine leading Silvester's horse into Rome and walking groomlike by his stirrup : they see all this, and imagine
that they are looking on a representation, quaint indeed but not impossible, of
events that actually occurred, nor do they grasp the fact that they are looking
on a great pictured falsehood, the memory of which and the consequences of
which, perturbing all the relations of the Christian Church and the civil
ruler, dividing Guelf from Ghibelin and Swabian from
Angevin, prolonged for centuries the agony of Italy.
A fiction like that of the Roman baptism of Constantine once taken home
into the minds of the people soon gathers round it other fictions. Thus it came
to pass that at some uncertain time in the eighth century there was brought to
birth the yet more monstrous fiction of The Donation of Constantine. The
document which purports to contain this donation is of portentous length,
containing about five thousand words, and there are in it many repetitions
which suggest the idea that its fabricator has added one or two codicils to his
original draft, as points occurred to him on which a fuller explanation might
be expedient. I extract a few of the more important sentences.
“In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity, Father, Son and Holy
Ghost, the Emperor Caesar Flavius Constantinus, . . . faithful, gentle,
mightiest, beneficent, conqueror of the Goths, of the Sarmatians, of the
Germans, of the Britons and of the Huns (!), pious, fortunate, conqueror and
triumpher, ever Augustus, to the most holy and blessed Father of Fathers,
Silvester, bishop of Rome and Pope, and to all his successors in the seat of
St. Peter to the end of the world... and to all the most reverend.. .Catholic
bishops in the whole world who are by this our imperial decree made subject to
the same Holy Roman Church,... Grace, peace, charity, joy, long-suffering and
compassion from God the Father Almighty, and from Jesus Christ His Son, and the
Holy Ghost, be with all of you.”
After a long exposition of his new creed and a repetition of the story
of the leprosy, the vision, the baptism and miraculous cure, the Emperor
continues:—
“Therefore we, along with all our Satraps (!) and the whole Senate,
Nobles and People subject to the Roman Church, have thought it desirable that
even as St. Peter is on earth the appointed Vicar of God, so also the Pontiffs
his vicegerents should receive from us and from our empire power and
principality greater than belongs to our earthly empire. For we choose the same
Prince of the Apostles and his vicars to be our patrons before God, and we
decree that even like unto our own earthly imperial power so shall the sacrosanct
Church of Rome be honoured and venerated, and that higher than our terrestrial
throne shall the most sacred seat of St. Peter be gloriously exalted.
“Let him who for the time presides over the holy Church of Rome have
supremacy over the four sees of Alexandria, of Antioch, of Jerusalem, and of
Constantinople, and let him be sovereign of all the priests in the whole world,
and by his judgment let all things which pertain to the worship of God or the
faith of Christians be regulated.
“We wish all nations in the whole world to be informed that we have
within our Lateran palace reared from its foundations a church to our Saviour
and Lord God, Jesus Christ; and know ye that we have from the foundations
thereof borne on our own shoulders twelve baskets-full of earth according to
the number of the twelve Apostles. Which most holy church we decree shall be
called the head and summit of all churches in the whole world, and shall be
venerated and proclaimed as such, even as we have ordained in other our
imperial decrees. We have also built churches for the blessed Peter and Paul,
chiefs of the Apostles, enriching them with gold and silver, and have laid
their most sacred bodies therein with great reverence, making for them coffins
of amber (which is surpassed in strength by none of the elements), and on each
of these coffins we have placed a cross of purest gold and most precious gems,
fastening them thereto with golden nails.
“On these churches, for the maintenance of the lights
burned in them, we have bestowed sundry farm- properties, and have enriched
them with divers estates both in the East and the West, in the North and the
South, namely in Judaea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, Africa and Italy, as well as in
divers islands. All these are to be administered by the hands of our most
blessed father Silvester, Summus Pontifex, and his
successors.
“We grant to the said Silvester and his successors the imperial palace
of the Lateran, and also the diadem or crown, and the Phrygium : moreover the superhumerale or necklace which is
wont to surround our imperial neck : the purple mantle also and scarlet tunic
and all the imperial trappings, as well as the dignity of the imperial mounted
guards. We bestow upon him also the imperial sceptre, with all standards and
banners and similar imperial ornaments, and in short the whole array of our
imperial dignity and the glory of our power.
“To the men of a different rank, namely the most reverend clergy of the
Roman Church, we grant the same height of dignity wherewith our most
illustrious Senate is adorned, namely that they be made patricians and consuls,
and we announce that they shall be adorned with other imperial dignities.
“And as our own civil service hath its special decorations, so we decree
that the clergy of the holy Roman Church shall be adorned: and that the said
Church be ministered unto by janitors and chamberlains, such as those who wait
upon us, the Emperor. And that the pontifical splendour may shine forth as
brilliantly as possible, we decree that the clergy of the Roman Church ride on
horses adorned with saddle-cloths and trappings of the purest white : and like
our senators, let them wear udones or white shoes :
and thus let the heavenly ranks, like the earthly ranks, be adorned for the
greater glory of God.
“The blessed Silvester and his successors shall have the power of
enrolling whom they will in the number of the clergy, none presuming to say
that they have acted arrogantly herein.
“We have already decreed that he and his successors should wear a diadem
such as ours of purest gold and precious stones. But the most blessed Pope
would not consent to use a golden crown besides the crown of clerisy which he wears to the glory of the most blessed
Peter. We have however with our own hands placed on his most holy head a tiara
of dazzling whiteness, symbolizing the resurrection of our Lord; and holding
the bridle of his horse we have performed for him the duties of a groom out of
our reverence for the blessed Peter; ordaining that his successors shall use
the same tiara in processions, in imitation of our imperial style.”
The reader who has had the patience to proceed thus far may very likely
think that though the document is tedious, sometimes inconsistent with itself,
and instinct with all an ecclesiastic's love for goodly raiment, there is
nothing which need have made the Donation of Constantine, whether true or
false, a landmark in the history of Italy. The important paragraph is that
which follows, and which, as every word is here of weight, shall be translated
literally
“Wherefore, that the pontifical crown may not grow too cheap, but may be
adorned with glory and influence even beyond the dignity of the earthly empire,
lo! we hand over and relinquish our palace, the city of Rome, and all the
provinces, places and cities of Italy and [or] the western regions, to the most
blessed Pontiff and universal Pope, Silvester; and we ordain by our pragmatic
constitution that they shall be governed by him and his successors, and we
grant that they shall remain under the authority of the holy Roman Church.
“Wherefore we have thought it fitting that our empire and our royal
power be transferred to the Eastern regions, and that a city bearing our name
be built in an excellent place in the province of Byzantia,
and that there our empire be founded, since where the sovereign of priests and
the head of the Christian religion has been placed by the Heavenly Emperor, it
is not fitting that there the earthly emperor should also bear sway.”
The document ends with solemn injunctions to all future Emperors, to all
nobles, ‘satraps', and senators, to keep this grant for ever inviolate.
Anathemas are uttered on any one who shall dare to infringe it; and hell-fire
is invoked for his destruction. As the fabricator of the document must have
known that he was, on the most favourable construction of his conduct, writing
a mere ecclesiastical romance, these references to eternal punishment should
not have been included. The document is laid on the body of the blessed Peter
as a pledge to the Apostle that Constantine on his part will keep it ever
inviolable.
It bears date on the third day before the Kalends of April (30th of
March), Constantine being for the fourth time consul, with Gallicanus for his colleague. No such consulship exists in the Fasti. The Emperor was for
the fourth time consul in 315, with his brother-in-law and coEmperor Licinius for his colleague. The consulship of Gallicanus was in 330, five years after the council of Nicaea, and the Emperor Constantine
was not his colleague.
A few words must be said as to the place and time wherein this
extraordinary fiction had its birth. An attempt has been made to cast off upon
some Greek ecclesiastic the responsibility for its authorship, but this attempt
is now generally admitted to have failed. It undoubtedly springs from Rome,
probably from the papal chancery in Rome. The earnestness with which the writer
exerts himself to secure for the Roman clergy the use of mappulae et linteamina makes it probable that he was one
of the favoured persons who had the right to perambulate the streets of ruined
Rome on a steed covered with a horsecloth of dazzling whiteness. The general
similarity of style to some of the eighth-century lives in the Liber Pontificalis suggests the thought that the author of the
Donation may have been one of the scribes who in the pages of that compilation
denounced the ‘most unutterable' Aistulf or celebrated the mildness of the
‘quasi-angelic' Stephen.
For, to come to the question of date, there is not its date, much doubt
that this document belongs to the middle or possibly the later half of the
eighth century. It is already included in the so-called Decretals of Isidore,
published about 840, and in the collection of Formulae of S. Denis of about the
same period. But we may probably trace it to an earlier date than this; for it
is almost certain that Pope Hadrian alludes to this document in a letter which
he wrote to Charles the Great in 772, and there is some force in Dollinger's
argument that a document of this kind would not have been fabricated after 774,
when the Frankish king showed his determination to found a kingdom for himself
on the ruins of the Lombard monarchy. There is therefore much to be said for
the view that the Donation was fabricated shortly before the year 754. But on
this subject there may probably for some time be considerable variation of
opinion, as one theory after another is advanced by scholars to account for the
original concoction of a document so wildly at variance with historical fact.
With any more detailed discussion on this point I do not think it
necessary to trouble my readers. Nor do I feel myself bound even to speak of it
as a forgery, much less to impute complicity with the forgery to any one of the
Popes who cross the stage of my history. In an absolutely ignorant and
uncritical age many a fiction passes for fact without deliberate and conscious
imposture on the part of any single individual. There were doubtless romancers
and story-tellers after their dull fashion in that eighth century as in our
own, for the human imagination has never been lulled into absolute torpor. What
if some clerk in the papal chancery amused his leisure by composing, in a style
not always unskilfully imitated from that of Justinian or Theodosius, an edict
which the first Christian Emperor might have published on the morrow of that
Roman baptism which, though itself imaginary, was then firmly believed to be
real? What if this paper, recognized at the time by all who knew its author as
a mere romance, was left in the papal archives and (it may be years after the
death of its author) was found by some zealous exceptor eager for material wherewith to confute the Lombard or convince the Frank? In
some such way as this it is surely possible that, without any deliberate act of
fraud on any one's part, the lie may have got itself recognized as truth.
Into the after-history of this fabrication I must not now enter
minutely, though there is something almost fascinating in the subject, and
indeed the story of the Donation of Constantine fully told would almost be the
history of the Middle Ages. It was hidden, as it were, for a time under a
bushel, and was not made so much use of by the Popes of the ninth and tenth
centuries as we should have expected. But towards the end of the eleventh
century we find it put in the forefront of the battle by the advocates of
Hildebrand's world-ruling papal theocracy. Under Innocent III, Gregory IX,
Boniface VIII, it is constantly appealed to in support of their pretensions to
rule as feudal suzerains over Italy, over the Holy Roman Empire, over the
world. For three centuries after this, the canonists take the Donation as the
basis of their airy edifices, some expanding, some restricting its purport, but
none of them apparently entertaining any suspicion of the genuineness of the
document itself.
So long-lived and so mighty is Falsehood. Like the Genie in the Arabian
Nights, this story of an imperial abdication in favour of the Pope, which had
crept out of that dark scriptorium in the Lateran palace grew and swelled and
overshadowed all Europe. Then came a scholar of the Renaissance and uttered a
few words of caustic doubt, and the Genie shrank back into the bottle and was
hurled into the depths of the sea, whence it can no more emerge to trouble the
nations.
The ‘Declamatio' of Laurentius Valla, too
declamatory as it is and not always attacking from the right quarter (for he
seems to accept the Roman baptism of the Emperor as an undoubted fact), still
had the effect of piercing the bubble which had so long befooled the world.
Some feeble attempts were made to restore the credit of the Constantinian
Donation, but they were judged hopeless by the rapidly growing scholarship of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and when at last even Cardinal Baronius, that staunch supporter of papal claims, who
fought even for the baptism of the Emperor by Silvester, abandoned the edict
which was said to have followed it, all Europe knew that this question at least
was laid to rest, and that it would hear no more of any claims seriously urged
in right of the Donation of Constantine.
We have glanced at the circumstances attending the death of the fable,
but our business is with its birth. As I have said, I do not propose to discuss
the question whether it first took shape on parchment in 750 or 770; whether
the first scribe who wrote the Donation intended a harmless romance or planned
a wicked forgery. All these discussions are beyond my present purpose, which is
to deal with what the Donation tells us as to the state of men's minds in Rome
about the middle of the eighth century. We are conscious at once of a great
gulf separating the ideas of that age from those which were prevalent at the
beginning of the seventh century. We then saw a Pope, perhaps the greatest of
all the Popes, Gregory the Great, struggling for liberty, almost for life,
‘between the swords of the Lombards'. The necessities of his position forced
him sometimes to over-step the strict limits of his spiritual realm, to appoint
a tribune of soldiers, to rebuke a careless general, to conclude a provisional
treaty; and his contest with the Patriarch of Constantinople extorted from him
sometimes bitter cries and complaints against the Emperor into whose ear the
Patriarch was whispering. But through all I think we may say that Gregory the
First bore himself as the loyal, though often the deeply- dissatisfied subject
of the Emperor, and there is never a hint of a disposition on his part to claim
temporal dominion as against his Sovereign or to pose as the rightful civil
ruler of Italy. Now we see that there is a change. In the middle of the eighth
century it is evidently the feeling of the clerics of the Lateran, not only
that they should ride on horses covered with white saddle-cloths—that they
probably did in the days of Gregory;—not only that the Pope, since he waived
the right of wearing the imperial diadem, ought to wear a tiara with a circlet
of gold, the mark of his clerisy, and should be
waited upon by janitors, chamberlains, guards, in imitation of imperial
magnificence; but also that he ought to govern, as a king or an emperor, ‘the
city of Rome, and all the provinces and cities of Italy and of the West',
whatever extension of his rule might be intended by these last words of awful
and ambiguous import.
Henceforth when we hear, as we often shall do, of the rights and claims
and privileges of Peter, we must remember that, at least in the thoughts or the
aspirations of some Roman ecclesiastics, these words include a large measure of
temporal sovereignty for their head, the Bishop of Rome. The claim to
undisturbed possession of the property with which the Papal See has been
endowed, the so-called ‘Patrimonies of St. Peter’, is included in these words
as it was included in them during the pontificate of the first Gregory, but
there is also something more, further reaching, more world-historical in their
purport. We are dealing now not merely with estates, but with kingdoms. And in
this connection we have to remember the nature of the process by which the Pope
became Pope. Zacharias or Stephen, Paul or Hadrian, is not a hereditary ruler,
he is the elected head of a mighty corporation, wielding the strongest moral
and intellectual forces at that time existing in the world. When he seeks to
establish and to extend his temporal dominion he is not merely ‘fighting for
his own hand', he is not merely seeking to gratify his own arrogance and
ambition—though these very human qualities undoubtedly played their part—but he
is also striving for the honour and glory of the great college of ecclesiastics
which has chosen him for its head, and by means of which he has risen from
obscurity to greatness. If we may borrow an illustration from modern politics,
the jealousy of a British First Lord of the Treasury for the dignity and honour
of Parliament represents the jealousy of an eighth-century Pope for the glory
and aggrandizement of the chair of St. Peter.
As I have said, however, we shall find that the claims of Peter as urged
by Stephen II are an entirely different quantity from those same claims as
urged by Gregory I. Whence comes the change which has been wrought in those
hundred and fifty years? Partly no doubt from the dense ignorance which has
overspread Rome and the west of Europe and which has made such a fable as that
of Constantine's Donation possible. We are moving now through a region of mist
and twilight, and the few forms that we can discern loom larger through the
darkness. The collapse of the Teutonic royalties in Gaul and Spain may have
helped somewhat, leaving the Pope of Rome greater by comparison. The
estrangement between Italy and Constantinople on the question of the worship of
images undoubtedly was a factor in the problem, though its influence has been
sometimes exaggerated. It seems possible that the uprise of the religion of
Mohammed strengthened the position of the Papacy, exhibiting as it did great
religious leaders such as the early Caliphs in command of mighty armies and
lords of a worldwide empire. Moreover, the very danger at which Christian
Europe shuddered when it saw Islam overspreading the world, may have suggested
the necessity of discipline and the union of Christendom under one spiritual
head.
But after all it was probably our own countrymen who bore the chief part
in the exaltation of St. Peter’s chair. The Gallican Church had been lukewarm,
the Celtic missionaries had been all but hostile, but the new Anglo-Saxon
converts, the spiritual children of Augustine and Theodore, could scarcely find
words to express their passionate loyalty and devotion to the Bishop of Rome.
We have seen a little of what Boniface and his companions were doing in Germany
and Gaul. To these men whom I have already called, from this aspect of their
work, the Jesuits of the eighth century, must in great measure be attributed
the lordlier tone in which the Popes with whom we are now dealing utter their
mandates to the nations.
One word in conclusion, not by way of polemic, but in order to make it
possible to avoid polemic in the pages that are to follow. It will be seen that
I treat the claims to temporal dominion urged in the name of St. Peter as
absolutely fantastic and visionary. The Apostle himself, the rock-like stay and
support of his brethren in the first age of Christianity, is of course no myth,
but a historical personage as real as Xavier or Livingstone. The theory that he
was bishop of Rome, and that, in fulfillment of words
spoken to him by Jesus Christ, supernatural gifts for the teaching and guidance
of the Church have been bestowed on all his successors, is a theory which,
though it finds no foothold in the mind of the present writer, has been held by
too many generations of devout and earnest Christians to be mentioned here with
anything but respect and sympathy. But the notion common in the Middle Ages,
that the holy man, from his resting-place in the Paradise of God, is acutely
interested in the precise delimitation of the boundaries of his successors'
kingdom, and by supernatural means seeks to retain for them Perugia or
Comacchio—this notion, which is I believe no part of the essential teaching of
the Roman Church and which has faded or is fading out of the minds of men,
seems to me mere mythology, as much so as the story of the intervention of Juno
and Venus in the wars of Troy. But even mythology has often influenced history.
It was in the name of the Delphic Apollo and to avenge the encroachments of the Phocians on the territory of the god that those
Sacred Wars were waged which brought Philip of Macedon into the heart of Greece
and indirectly gave Alexander the supremacy of the world.
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