READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
BOOK V.FROM THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE TO THE DEPOSITION OF POPE GREGORY VI,A.D. 814-1046.
CHAPTER II.
THE FRANKISH CHURCH AND THE PAPACY. FROM THE DEATH OF
LEWIS THE PIOUS TO THE DEPOSITION OF CHARLES THE FAT. A.D. 840-887.
The history of the Carolingians after the death of
Lewis the Pious is marked by a continuance of those scandalous enmities between
the nearest kinsmen which had given so unhappy a character to his reign.
Sometimes these enmities were carried out into actual war; but after the battle
of Fontenailles, in 841, where the loss is said to
have amounted to 40,000 on one side, and on the other to 25,000 or 30,000, they
more commonly took the form of intrigues, of insincere alliances, and selfish
breaches of treaties.
Charlemagne had found great difficulty in keeping
together the various elements of which his vast empire consisted. As often as
he led his troops into any quarter, for the purpose of conquest or of
suppressing rebellion, an insurrection usually broke out behind him. In order
to conciliate the nationalities which were united under his sceptre, he
appointed kings to govern them, as in Aquitaine and in Italy. By his system,
which was continued under Lewis, these kings were to be subordinate to the
senior or head of the family; the whole empire was to be regarded as one,
subject to the chief. But in the beginning of the period now before us, this
system is broken up; the delegated government by kings is found to have been
the means of organizing the different nations for resistance to the idea of
unity, and for asserting their independence of each other. Language played an
important part in the dissolution of the empire. From the time of the Frank
conquest of Gaul, Latin had been the language of the church and of the state,
while German had been that of the army. The king and the chiefs were familiar
with both; but in the south the Latin—(or rather the rustic Roman, which
differed from the more correct official Latin)—was native, and the German was
acquired by learning, while the reverse was the case in the northern and
eastern territories. The populations which used these different languages as
their mother-tongues now became separate. At the treaty of Strasburg, in 842,
Lewis of Bavaria took an oath in German, while Charles of Neustria swore in the
Romance dialect, and they addressed their subjects in the same tongues
respectively. The Romance oath is the oldest monument of French; the other is
the oldest specimen of German after the baptismal renunciation of St.
Boniface’s time. A like scene was enacted at Coblentz in 860, when, in pledging
themselves to the observance of certain articles, Lewis and the younger Lothair
employed the German language, and Charles the Romance.
The treaty of Verdun, by which the empire was divided
in 843 between the three sons of Lewis, established each of them in entire
independence. The portion of the second brother, Lewis, may be broadly spoken
of as Germany; Charles the Bald’s share may with a like latitude be styled
France; while Lothair, the emperor, had a territory lying between the two—long
and for the most part narrow, reaching from the mouths of the Weser and the
Scheldt to the frontier of the duchy of Benevento, and including the two imperial
cities—Rome, the ancient capital of the world, and Aix, the chief seat of
Charlemagne’s sovereignty. The Rhine served throughout a large portion of its
course as the eastern boundary of this territory : but a deviation was made
from it, in order that Lewis might include within his dominions Mayence, the see of Boniface and ecclesiastical metropolis
of Germany, with the suffragan dioceses of Worms and Spires; while this cession
was compensated to Lothair by a tract to the east of the river in the region of
Berg and Cleves. Lothair’s kingdom, not being marked out by any older
boundaries of population or language, was called from him Lotharingia. By a
later partition, the portion of it north of the Alps was divided between Lewis
and Charles the Bald, when Lewis added to his dominions the countries of the
German and Belgic tongues, and Charles acquired those in which the Romance
prevailed
The feeling of nationality also showed itself in the
rebellion of the Bretons under Nomenoe, who compelled
Charles to acknowledge him as king, and established a new hierarchy under the
archbishop of Dol, independent of the Roman connection; in the revolts of the
Saxons, who killed or drove out their governors, and resumed the profession of
paganism and in the subdivision of France towards the end of the century into a
great number of petty principalities, although other causes also contributed to
this result.
Charlemagne had endeavoured to provide a defence
against the northern pirates by fortifying the mouths of rivers; but this
policy was now neglected. No longer content with ravaging the coasts, the
fierce barbarians of the north made their way in their serpent barks
up every river whose opening invited them, from the Elbe to the Adour. They
repeatedly plundered the more exposed cities, such as Hamburg, Dorstadt, and Bordeaux; they ascended the Rhine to Mayence, and even to Worms; the Moselle to Treves; the
Somme to Amiens; the Seine to Rouen and to Paris, once the Merovingian capital,
and still the chief city of Neustria, rich in churches and in treasures, and
having the royal monastery of St. Denys in its immediate neighbourhood. From
Paris they made their way up the Marne to Meaux and Châlons, up the Yonne to
Sens and Auxerre. The Loire gave them a passage to Tours, the city of St.
Martin, and to Orleans; the Vienne, to Limoges: the Charente, to Saintes and
Angouleme; the Garonne, to Toulouse. They sailed on to the Spanish peninsula,
plundered Lisbon, passed the strait of Gibraltar, and successfully encountered
the Arabs of Andalusia; even the coast of Italy felt their fury. Everywhere
they pillaged, burnt, slew, outraged women, and carried off captives. After a
time, growing bolder through impunity, they would leave their vessels on the
great rivers, and strike across the unresisting country to pillage inland
places of noted wealth—such as Ghent, Beauvais, Chartres, Bourges, Reims, Laon,
and Charlemagne’s own city of Aix, where they stabled their horses in the
imperial palace. They established permanent camps, often on islands in the
great rivers, and ravaged in a wide circle around them. Many of these pirates
were exiles or adventurers who had fled from other countries to the regions of
the north; many were men who had suffered from the forcible means employed by
Charlemagne for the conversion of the pagans, or were the offspring of such
men. Their enmity against Christianity was therefore fierce and unsparing;
there was religious hatred, as well as the lust of spoil, in the rage which
selected churches and monasteries as its especial objects. Wherever the
approach of the Northmen was reported, the monks deserted their abodes, and fled,
if possible, leaving their wealth to the invaders, and anxious only to rescue
the relics of their patron saints. The misery caused by these ravages was
extreme. From dread of them, husbandry was neglected, and frequent famines
ensued; even wolves were allowed to prey and to multiply without any check. The
condition to which Aquitaine was reduced may be inferred from the fact that a
bishop was translated from Bordeaux to Bourges on the ground that his former
diocese had been rendered utterly desert by the pagans. Many monks who had been
driven from their cells threw off the religious habit, and betook themselves to
a vagabond life. And a striking proof of the terror inspired by the invaders is
found in the insertion of a petition in the Gallican liturgies for deliverance
“From the fury of the Northmen”
However divided by dissensions among themselves, the
Northmen always acted in concert as to the course which their expeditions
should take. They kept a watch on the movements of the Carolingian princes, and
were ready to take advantage in every quarter of their discords and of their
weakness. Sometimes, it would seem, they were not only attracted by the hope of
booty, but were bribed by one of Charlemagne’s descendants to attack the
territories of another.
The martial spirit of the Franks had been exhausted by
the slaughter of Fontenailles. Many of the free
landholders—the body on which the whole Frankish system mainly relied for
national defence—sought a refuge from the miseries of the time by becoming
serfs to abbots or nobles who were strong enough to protect them; and thus
their military service was lost. The Franks were distracted by faction, and,
instead of combining to resist the common enemy, each party and each class was
intent on securing its own selfish interests. The nobles in general stood
aloof, and looked on without dissatisfaction while the Northmen pillaged towns
or estates which belonged to the crown or to the church. In a few cases the
invaders met with a vigorous resistance—as from Robert the Strong, the ancestor
of the Capetian line, and from his son Odo or Eudes,
who, with the bishop, Gauzelin, valiantly defended
Paris in 885. But a more usual course was that of paying them a large sum as an
inducement to depart for a time—an expedient which pressed heavily on the
people, who were taxed for the payment, while it insured the return of the
enemy after a short respite. A better, although not uniform, success attended
the attempt to appease the northern chiefs with grants of land. They settled on
these estates; they and their followers were baptized and took wives of the
country, by means of whom the northern language was soon extinguished among
their offspring; they became accustomed to their new homes, and gradually laid
aside their barbarian ferocity.
To the East, the Slave populations pressed on the
German portions of the empire, and engaged its sovereigns in frequent wars; and
in the south of France, as well as in Italy, the Saracens were a foe not less
terrible than the Northmen on the other coasts of the empire. An expedition
from Spain had made them masters of Crete in 823. Four years later they landed
in Sicily, and by degrees they got possession of the whole island, although it
was not until after half a century (A.D. 876) that Syracuse fell into their
hands. They seized on Cyprus and Corsica, devastated the Mediterranean coast of
France, sailed up the Tiber, carried off the altar which covered the remains of
St. Peter, and committed atrocious acts of rapine, lust, and cruelty. The
terror inspired by these adventurers—the offscourings of their race, which in
Spain and in the east had become more civilized, and had begun to cultivate
science and literature—drove the inhabitants of the defenseless towns to seek refuge in forests and among mountains. Some of the popes showed
much energy in providing the means of protection against them. Gregory IV
rebuilt and fortified Ostia, to which he gave the name of Gregoriopolis.
Leo IV, who was hastily raised to the papal chair on an emergency when the
Saracens threatened Rome, took very vigorous measures. He fortified Portus, in
which he planted a colony of Corsican refugees; drew a chain across the mouth
of the Tiber, and repaired the walls of Rome. With the approbation of the
emperor Lothair, who contributed largely to the expense, he enclosed within a
wall the Transtiberine district which contained the
church of St. Peter and the English Burg; and to this new quarter he gave
the name of the Leonine City. Nicolas I also contributed to the defence of Rome
by strengthening the fortifications and the garrison of Ostia. But in the south
of Italy the Saracens were triumphant. They established a sultan at Barih although after a time that city was recovered from
them by the united forces of the western and eastern emperors, Lewis II and
Basil the Macedonian.1Naples, Amalfi, Salerno, and other cities, finding
resistance impossible, entered into alliance with them, and joined them in
plundering. But for dissensions among themselves, the Moslems would probably
have become masters of the whole Italian peninsula.
The royal power in France was greatly impaired by the
changes of this period. Among the earlier Franks there had been no class of
nobility, properly so called, but consideration had depended on wealth and
power alone; nor had the counts originally been landholders, but officers of
the sovereign, invested with a dignity which was only personal and temporary.
But from the time of the civil wars between Lewis the Pious and his sons, the
Frankish princes found themselves obliged to pay those on whom they depended
for support by a diminution of their own prerogatives and property. The system
was continued; at the diet of Quiercy, in 877,
Charles the Bald, with a view of securing the consent of his chiefs to his
projected expedition into Italy, granted that their lands should descend by
inheritance, and only reserved to the sovereign the choice of a successor
in cases where the tenant should die without male issue; nay, as we shall see
hereafter, in his eagerness to gain aid towards the extension of his dominions,
he even consented that his crown should be regarded as elective. The nobles,
thus erected into a hereditary order, became more independent; they took
advantage of the weakness of the sovereign; and, by the end of the century, the
dismemberment of the empire had been so much imitated on a smaller scale that
France was broken up into no fewer than twenty-nine independent states.
The Frankish clergy suffered severely in their
property during the troubles of the time. Not only did Lewis and his sons
habitually employ the old resource of rewarding partisans with gifts of
ecclesiastical benefices, but they even carried it further than before, by
extending it to religious houses which had hitherto been regarded as exempt
from this kind of danger. The abbey of St. Martin’s itself—the most revered, as
well as the richest, of all the sanctuaries of Gaul—was granted by Charles in
benefice to Robert the Strong. Almost every council has its piteous complaint
that the property of the church is invaded in a manner more fitting for pagan
enemies than for her own sons; that the poor, the strangers, the pilgrims, the
captives are deprived of the endowments founded for their relief; that
hospitals, especially those of the Scots, are diverted from their object, so
that not only are guests not entertained, but those who had dwelt in them from
infancy are turned out to beg from door to door; that some lands are alienated
in such a way as to cut off all hope of recovery; that the sovereigns grossly
abuse their patronage by bestowing spiritual offices on laymen. The only weapon
which the church could wield against the rapacious laity was excommunication;
but neither spiritual terrors nor tales of judicial miracles were sufficient to
check the evil. Another frequent complaint relates to the decay of letters
among the Franks. Charles the Bald was a patron of learned men, and took
pleasure in their society; but, while literature enjoyed this courtly and
superficial encouragement, the institutions by which Charlemagne had endeavoured
to provide for the general instruction of his subjects were allowed to fall
into neglect.
But in other respects the clergy gained greatly. The
sixth council of Paris, in 829, had asserted for them a right to judge kings.
This power had been exercised against Lewis by the rebellious bishops at
Compiègne, and his restoration had not been accomplished without a formal act
of the church. Charles the Bald admitted it, as against himself, at the council
of Savonnières, in 859; and in all the disagreements
of the Carolingians each prince carried his grievances to the pope—thus
constituting the Roman see a general court of appeal, and weakening the rights
of all sovereigns by such submission. Ecclesiastical judgments were popularly
regarded as the judgments of God. Bishops asserted for themselves an exclusive
jurisdiction in all matters relating to the clergy, and, by the superintendence
which they exercised over morals, they were able to turn every scandal of the
royal house to the advantage of the church. They became more and more active in
politics; they claimed the power of bestowing the crown, and Charles appears to
have acknowledged the claim. Yet, although they endeavoured to gain for
themselves an exemption from all secular control, that prince still kept a hold
on them by means of his missi.
The most prominent among the French ecclesiastics of
this time was Hincmar, a man of strong, lofty, and resolute character, of a
mind at once subtle and eminently practical, of learning which, although
uncritical and indifferently digested, raised him above almost all his
contemporaries, and of great political talent. Hincmar was born in 806, of a
noble family in Neustria, and at an early age entered the monastery of St.
Denys, where he became a monk under Hilduin. He took an active part in
restoring the discipline of the house, and to the end of his days he observed
the monastic severity of life. His attachment to his abbot was shown by
becoming the companion of Hilduin’s exile in 830; but
notwithstanding this, and although his own feelings were no doubt in favour of
the unity of the empire, he withstood all Hilduin’s attempts to draw him into rebellion, and to the last preserved the favour of
Lewis, by means of which he was able to effect his superior’s recall. In 845 he
was promoted to the archbishopric of Reims, which had not been regularly filled
since the deposition of Ebbo, ten years before. He accepted the see on
condition that the property which had been alienated from it to laymen during
the vacancy should be restored; and he held it for thirty-nine years. His
province, and even his diocese, were partly in Neustria and partly in
Lotharingia—a circumstance which brought him into connection with the
sovereigns of both countries. To him, as the successor of St. Remigius, it
belonged to crown kings, and to take the chief part in state solemnities; and
he gave full effect to his position. His political influence was immense; he
steadily upheld the cause of the church against both the crown and the nobles,
and in its behalf he often opposed the princes to whose interests in other
respects he was zealously devoted. But most especially he was the champion of
the national church and of the rights of his sovereign against the growing
claims of the papacy.
The popes endeavoured to take advantage of the
weakness of Charlemagne’s descendants in order to shake off the golden chains
with which the great emperor had bound them, and in this endeavour they were
greatly aided by the effect of the partition of the empire; inasmuch as they
were thenceforth in no way subject to any prince except the one who held the
imperial title and the kingdom of Italy, while they were yet brought into
relation with all the Carolingian sovereigns, and became general arbiters
between them.
On the death of Gregory IV, in 844, Sergius II, after
some tumultuary opposition from a rival named John, was consecrated without
waiting for the imperial confirmation. Lothair, indignant at the slight thus
shown to his authority, sent his son Lewis to call the new pope to account. The
prince was accompanied by Drogo, bishop of Metz, with a numerous train of
prelates and counts, and was at the head of a large army, which is said, in its
advance towards Rome, to have committed much wanton slaughter and devastation,
and to have lost many of its soldiers, who, in punishment of their misdeeds, as
was believed, were slain by lightning. Sergius received Lewis with the usual honours,
but would not permit his troops to enter the city; nor would he allow the doors
of St. Peter’s to be opened to him, until, in answer to a solemn adjuration,
the prince had professed that he came without any evil intention, for the good
of Rome and of the church. The pope crowned him as king of the Lombards, but
resisted a proposal that the Romans should be required to swear allegiance to
him, on the ground that such oaths were due to the emperor alone. He consented,
however, that a fresh oath should be taken to the emperor. Drogo returned to
France with a commission appointing him primate and papal vicar, and conferring
on him in that character large privileges and jurisdiction; but on finding that
some question was raised as to the reception of this instrument by a synod to
which he exhibited it, he refrained from urging his pretensions.
Sergius died after a pontificate of three years, and
Leo IV was chosen by general acclamation. The Romans were in great perplexity;
the imminent danger with which they were threatened by the Saracens required
them to proceed to an immediate consecration, while they were afraid to repeat
their late offence against the Frank empire. They therefore fell on the
expedient of consecrating Leo with an express reservation of the imperial
rights, and it would seem that this course was allowed to pass without objection.
Towards the end of Leo’s pontificate, Lothair, having been informed that a high
Roman officer had expressed himself against the Frankish connection, and had
proposed a revolt to the Greek empire, went to Rome, and held an inquiry into
the case. The librarian Anastasius tells us that the charge was proved to be
imaginary, and that the accuser was given up to the accused, from whom the
emperor begged him. But the pope was required, probably in consequence of this
affair, to promise obedience to the emperor and his commissioners. A remarkable
innovation was introduced by Leo in his correspondence with sovereigns, by
setting his own name before that of the prince to whom he wrote, and omitting
the word Domino in the address—a change which intimated that St. Peter's
successors no longer owned any earthly master.
Benedict III was elected as the successor of Leo; but
he met with a very serious opposition from Anastasius,— probably the same with
a cardinal of that name who under the last pontificate had been deposed,
chiefly for his attachment to the Frankish interest. Anastasius got possession
of St. Peter’s and of St. John Lateran, and (perhaps in the hope of
recommending himself to the Franks, whom he may have possibly supposed to be
iconoclasts) he is said to have broken and burnt the images which adorned the churches.
He was aided by Frankish soldiers, and gained over the envoys who were sent to
ask the imperial confirmation of his rival’s election; he stripped Benedict of
his robes, insulted him, and beat him. But the clergy and people of Rome
adhered to Benedict, and their demonstrations prevailed on the emperor's
commissioners to sanction his consecration.
Benedict was succeeded by Nicolas I, who, according to
a contemporary annalist, owed his elevation rather to the presence and favour
of Lewis II, Lothair’s successor in the empire, than to the choice of the Roman
clergy. At his consecration it has been commonly said that the new
ceremony of coronation was introduced—a ceremony which may have had its origin
in the fable that a golden crown had been bestowed on Sylvester by Constantine,
and which was intended to assert for the pope the majesty of an earthly sovereign,
in addition to that higher and more venerable dignity which claimed not only
precedence but control over all earthly power. And when, soon after, Nicolas
visited the camp of Lewis, the emperor, after the pretended example of the
first Christian emperor, did him reverence by holding his bridle, and by
walking at his side as he rode. Nicolas was one of those popes who stand forth
in history as having most signally contributed to the advancement of their see.
The idea entertained of him shortly after his death is remarkably expressed by
Regino of Prum, who speaks of him as surpassing all his predecessors since the
great Gregory; as giving commands to kings and tyrants, and ruling over them as
if lord of the whole world; as full of meekness and gentleness in his dealings
with bishops and clergy who were worthy of their calling, but terrible and
austere towards the careless and the refractory; as another Elias in spirit and
in power. He was learned, skillful in the management
of affairs, sincerely zealous for the enforcement of discipline in the church,
filled with a sense of the importance of his position, ambitious, active, and
resolute in maintaining and advancing it. He took advantage of the faults or vices
of the Frank princes—their ambition, their lust, or their hatred—to interpose
in their affairs, and with great ability he played them against each other. His
interposition was usually in the interest of justice, or in the defence of
weakness; it was backed by the approbation of the great body of the people, who
learnt to see in him the representative of heaven, ready everywhere to assert
the right, and able to restrain the wicked who were above the reach of earthly
law; and doubtless he was able to conceal from himself all but what was good in
his motives. But those of his acts which in themselves were praiseworthy, were
yet parts of a system which in other cases appeared without any such creditable
veil—a scheme of vast ambition for rendering all secular power subject to the
church, and all national churches subject to Rome.
Of the controversies or disputes of this time—which
must be treated severally, since it is a less evil to sacrifice the display of
their simultaneous progress than for its sake to throw the narrative into
hopeless confusion—two related to important points of doctrine—the Eucharistic
Presence, and Predestination.
We have already seen that, with respect to the
Eucharist, there had been a gradual increase of mystical language; and that
expressions were at first used rhetorically and in a figurative sense, which,
if literally construed, would have given an incorrect idea of the current
doctrine. In the west the authority of St. Augustine had generally acted as a
safeguard against materializing views of the Eucharistic presence; but an
important step toward the establishment of such views was now made by
Paschasius Radbert, abbot of Corbie. Paschasius had been brought up in that
monastery under Adelhard and Wala, whose biographer he afterwards became. He
had been master of the monastic school, and had laboured as a commentator on
the Scriptures. In 844 he was elected abbot; but the disquietudes which were
brought on him by that dignity induced him to resign it in 851, and he lived as
a private monk until his death in 865.
In 831, Paschasius, at the request of his old pupil
Warin, who had become abbot of the daughter monastery of New Corbey, on the
Weser, drew up a treatise on the Eucharist for the instruction of the younger
monks of that society. Soon after his appointment to the abbacy of his own
house, in 844, he presented an improved edition of the work to Charles the
Bald, who had requested a copy of it. In this treatise the rhetoric of earlier
writers is turned into unequivocally material definitions. Paschasius lays it
down that although after the consecration the appearance of bread and wine
remain, yet we must not believe anything else to be really present than the
body and blood of the Saviour— the same flesh which was born of the blessed
Virgin— the same in which He suffered on the cross and rose from the grave.
This doctrine is rested on the almighty power of God; the miracles of Scripture
are said to have been wrought in order to prepare the way for it and to confirm
it; that the elements remain unchanged in appearance and in taste, is intended,
according to Paschasius, as an exercise of our faith. The miraculous production
of the Saviour’s body is paralleled with his conception as man. Tales are
adduced of miracles by which the reality hidden under the appearance of the
elements was visibly revealed. The doctrine afterwards known as
Transubstantiation appears to be broadly expressed; but, contrary to the later
practice of Rome, Paschasius insists on the necessity of receiving the cup as
well as the eucharistic bread.
Paschasius had professed to lay down his doctrine as
being that which was established in the church; but protests were immediately
raised against it. Raban Maur, Walafrid Strabo,
Florus, and Christian Druthmar all of them among the
most learned men of the age, objected to the idea of any other than a spiritual
change in the Eucharist, and denounced it as a novelty. Even among his own
community, the views of Paschasius excited alarm and opposition. One of his monks
named Frudegard expressed uneasiness on account of
the abbot’s apparent contradiction to St. Augustine, so that Paschasius found
it necessary to defend himself by the authority of earlier writers, among whom
he especially relied on St. Ambrose. And the chief opponent of the doctrine was
another monk of Corbie, Ratramn, who examined the
abbot’s book at the request of Charles the Bald, and answered it, although, in
consideration of his relation to Paschasius, he did not name the author. Ratramn divides the question into two heads : (1) Whether
the body and blood of Christ be present in figure or in truth; (2) Whether it
be the same body which was born of the Virgin, suffered, rose again, and
ascended. He defines figure to mean that the reality is veiled under something
else, as where our Lord styles himself a vine; and truth to mean, that the
reality is openly displayed. Although, he says, the elements remain outwardly
the same as before consecration, the body and blood of Christ are presented, in
them, not to the bodily senses, but to the faithful soul. And this must be in a
figurative way; for otherwise there would be nothing for faith, “the evidence
of things not seen”, to work on; the sacrament would not be a mystery, since in
order to a mystery there must be something beyond what is seen. The change is
not material, but spiritual; the elements, while in one respect they continue
bread and wine, are in another respect, by spirit and potency, the body and
blood of Christ, even as the element of water is endued with a spiritual power
in order to the sacrament of baptism. That which is visible and corruptible in
them feeds the body; that which is matter of belief is itself immortal,
sanctifies the soul, and feeds it unto everlasting life. The body of Christ
must be incorruptible; therefore that which is corruptible in the sacrament is
but the figure of the reality. Ratramn clears the
interpretation of the passages which had been quoted from St. Ambrose in favour
of the opposite view. He cites St. Augustine and St. Isidore of Seville as
agreeing in his own doctrine; and argues from the liturgy that the Saviour’s
presence must be spiritual and figurative, since the sacrament is there spoken
of as a pledge, an image, and a likeness.
John Scotus, who will be more particularly mentioned
hereafter, is said to have also written on the question, at the desire of
Charles the Bald; but if so, his book is lost. His other works contain grounds
for thinking that he viewed the Eucharist as a merely commemorative rite, and
that on this, as on other points, he was regarded as heterodox. While the most
learned divines of the age in general opposed Paschasius, his doctrine appears
to have been supported by the important authority of Hincmar, although it is
doubtful whether the archbishop really meant to assert it in its full extent,
or is to be understood as speaking rhetorically; and Haymo, bishop of
Halberstadt, a commentator of great reputation, lays it down as strongly as the
abbot of Corbie himself. The controversy lasted for some time; but the doctrine
of Paschasius, which was recommended by its appearance of piety, and by its
agreement with the prevailing love of the miraculous, gained the ascendency
within the following century.
Throughout the west St. Augustine was revered as the
greatest of all the ancient fathers, and the chief teacher of orthodoxy; yet
his system was not in general thoroughly held. The councils which had been
assembled on account of the Pelagian doctrines had occupied themselves with the
subject of Grace, and had not given any judgment as to Predestination; and the
followers of Augustine had endeavoured to mitigate the asperities of his tenets
on this question. The prevailing doctrine was of a milder tone; in many cases
it was not far from Semipelagianism, and even where
it could not be so described, it fell so far short of the rigid Augustinianism
that a theologian who strictly adhered to this might have fairly charged his
brethren with unfaithfulness to the teaching of the great African doctor.
Gottschalk, the son of a Saxon count, was in boyhood
placed by his father in the monastery of Fulda. On attaining to man’s estate,
however, he felt a strong distaste for the life of a monk, and in 829 he
applied for a release from his vows to a synod held at Mayence under Archbishop Otgar. His petition was granted, on the ground that he had
been devoted to the monastic profession before he could exercise any will of
his own. But the abbot of Fulda, Raban Maur, the pupil of Alcuin, and himself
the greatest teacher of his time, appealed to Lewis the Pious, arguing that
persons offered by their parents, although without their own choice, were bound
by the monastic obligations; and the emperor overruled the synod’s decision.
Although compelled to remain a monk, Gottschalk was
allowed to remove from Fulda, where his relation to Raban would have been
inconvenient, to Orbais, in the diocese of Soissons.
Here he gave himself up to the study of Augustine and his followers; he
embraced their peculiarities with enthusiasm, and such was his especial love
for the works of Fulgentius that his friends usually called him by the name of
that writer. It is a characteristic circumstance that one of the most eminent
among these friends, Servatus Lupus, abbot of Ferrières,
in a letter of this period, charges him with an immoderate fondness for
speculation, and exhorts him to turn from it to matters of a more practical
kind. Hincmar, on the report of the abbot of Orbais,
describes Gottschalk while there as restless, changeable, bent on perversities,
addicted to argument, and apt to misrepresent what was said by others in
conversation with him; as scorning to be a disciple of the truth, and
preferring to be a master of error; as eager to gain an influence, by
correspondence and otherwise, over persons who were inclined to novelty and who
desired notoriety at any price. With a view, no doubt, to qualify himself for
preaching his doctrines, Gottschalk procured ordination as a priest from a
chorepiscopus of Reims, during the vacancy of that see after the deposition of
Ebbo. This act appears to have been a token of disaffection to the episcopal
body, with which the chorepiscopi were then on very unfriendly terms; it was
censured as irregular, inasmuch as Gottschalk belonged to the diocese of
Soissons, and as the chorepiscopus had no authority from any superior to confer
the priestly ordination at all.
The doctrine on which Gottschalk especially took his
stand was that of Predestination. The usual language in the church had been,
that the righteous are predestined, and that the wicked are foreknown, while
the rigid Augustinianism spoke of the wicked as reprobate; but Gottschalk
applied the term predestinate to
both classes. There is, he said, a twofold predestination—a term for which he
cited the authority of Isidore of Seville. In both cases predestination is to
good; but good is twofold, including not only the benefits of grace but the
judgments of justice. As life is predestined to the good, and they to it, so is
evil predestined to the wicked, and they to it. His opponents usually charged
him with maintaining that the wicked were irresistibly and irrevocably doomed
to sin, as well as to its consequences. But it would seem, even by Hincmar’s
own avowal, that Gottschalk did not admit this representation of his opinions;
he maintained only that, as the perseverance in evil of the devil, his angels,
and wicked men was foreknown, they were predestined to righteous punishment. He
denied that Christ died for any but the elect, and explained the texts which
speak of God’s willing all men to be saved as applicable to those only who
actually are saved. And, unlike Augustine, he held that even the first human
pair were subject to a predestination. The view which his adversaries took of
his opinion may be in some degree excused by the violence with which he
insisted on his difference from them, and by his zeal in condemning
them—circumstances which could not but lead them to suppose the difference far
greater than it appears to have really been.
Gottschalk was returning from a visit to Rome, in 847,
when at the house of Eberhard, count of Friuli, a son-in-law of Lewis the
Pious, he met Notting, who had been lately nominated to the see of Verona. He
propounded his doctrine of twofold predestination, at which Notting was greatly
startled. The bishop soon after mentioned it to Raban Maur, whom he found at
the court of Lewis of Germany; and Raban, who had now become archbishop of Mayence, wrote both to Notting and to Eberhard, in strong
condemnation of Gottschalk’s opinion, which he declared to be no doctrine of
St. Augustine. Predestination, he said, could only be a preparation for grace;
God foreknows evil, but does not predestine to it; all who yield their corrupt
will to the guidance of Divine grace may be saved. Count Eberhard, on receiving
the archbishop’s letter, dismissed his dangerous visitor, who then travelled
slowly homeward through Southern Germany; and it would seem to have been on
account of his proceedings in these already Christian lands that Hincmar speaks
of him as having visited barbarous and pagan nations for the purpose of
infecting them with his errors. In 848 Gottschalk appeared before a synod held
by Raban at Mayence in the presence of King Lewis.
His attendance was probably voluntary, and, as if prepared for a disputation,
he carried with him an answer to Raban’s objections, in which he charged the
archbishop with following the heresy of Gennadius and Cassian, and reasserted
the doctrine of a double predestination. His opinions, as might have been
expected, were condemned by the synod; he was obliged to swear that he would
never again enter the dominions of Lewis; and he was sent to his own
metropolitan, Hincmar, with a letter in which Raban styled him a vagabond,0 and
recommended that, as being incorrigible, he should be confined.
In the following year, Gottschalk was brought by
Hincmar before a synod at Quiercy on the Oise, where,
according to the archbishop, he behaved like a possessed person, and, instead
of answering the questions which were put to him, broke out into violent
personal attacks. He was flogged severely, in the presence of King Charles,—a
punishment for which the rule of St. Benedict and the canons of Agde were quoted as a warrant, although not without some
straining of their application. When exhausted with this cruel usage, he was
required to throw his book into the fire, and had hardly strength enough to do
so. Hincmar long after told Pope Nicolas that he had been obliged to take the
matter into his own hands, because the bishop of Soissons, Rothad, was himself infected
with novelties; and for the same reason Gottschalk, who was condemned by the
synod to perpetual silence, was removed to the monastery of Hautvilliers,
within the diocese of Reims. His zeal was rather quickened than daunted by his
imprisonment. He refused to subscribe a declaration sent to him by Hincmar,
which would have had the effect of releasing him on condition of his admitting
that there might be divine foresight without predestination. He denounced the
opposite party under the name of Rabanists; and, in
one of two confessions which he sent forth, he speaks of them as heretics whom
it was his bounden duty to avoid. In these confessions he lays down his
doctrine of a twofold predestination—predestination of good angels and men,
freely, to bliss; of the evil to punishment, justly, on foreknowledge of their
guilt. In the longer confession, which (probably in imitation of St. Augustine)
is composed in the form of an address to God, he breaks out into a prayer that
an opportunity might be granted him of testifying the truth of his opinions, in
the presence of the king, of bishops, clergy, monks, and laity, by plunging
successively into four casks of boiling water, oil, fat, and pitch; and lastly
by walking through a blazing pile. This wish has been variously traced to
humility and to hypocrisy—qualities which seem to have been alike foreign to
Gottschalk’s character. It would accord better with the rest of his history, if
we were to seek the motive in a proud and self-important, but sincere,
fanaticism.
The doctrines for which Gottschalk was suffering now
found champions of name and influence, although these varied somewhat among
themselves, while all (like Gottschalk himself) disavowed the opinion of an
irresistible predestination to sin. Among them were—Prudentius, a Spaniard by
birth, bishop of Troyes; Servatus Lupus, abbot of Ferrières,
an old pupil of Raban, who had great weight in the French church, and was
highly esteemed by Charles the Bald; and Ratramn, who
in this controversy, as in that on the Eucharistic presence, wrote at the
king’s request and for his information. Hincmar found it necessary to seek for
assistance against these writers. Raban, to whom he applied, excused himself,
chiefly on the plea of age and infirmity, and added that in many points he
agreed with Gottschalk, although he thought him mistaken as to the
predestination of the wicked. But Hincmar found allies in Amalarius, an
ecclesiastic of Metz, who was distinguished as a ritualist, and in Amulo, archbishop of Lyons, the pupil and successor of
Agobard.
The most remarkable work in opposition to Gottschalk’s
views, however, was that of John Scotus, whose name has already been mentioned
in connection with the Eucharistic question. The circumstances of this
celebrated man’s life are enveloped in great obscurity. The name Scotus, like
that of Erigena, which was given to him at a later time, indicates that he was
a native of Ireland, a country which furnished many others of the learned men
who enjoyed the patronage of Charles the Bald. From his knowledge of Greek (in
which language he even wrote verses, although with an utter disdain of prosody)
it has been supposed that he had travelled in the east; but the supposition is
needless, as Greek was then an ordinary branch of education in his native
country and in Britain. That he was acquainted with Hebrew has often been said,
but without sufficient proof. Like the scholars of his time in general, John
appears to have belonged to some order of the clergy, although this cannot be
considered as certain. He had for some years found a home in the court of
Charles, and had restored the reputation of the palatine school, which had sunk
during the distractions of the preceding reign; while, among other literary labours,
he had executed a translation of the works ascribed to Dionysius the
Areopagite, which had been sent as a present by the Greek emperor Michael to
Lewis the Pious. Scotus was better versed in Greek than in Latin theology, so
that even as to the question of the Holy Spirit's procession he inclined to the
oriental side. But in truth he had a far greater affinity with the ancient
philosophers—especially the Neoplatonists—than with the theologians of his own
age. His bold and rationalizing mind plunged into questionable, or evidently
heretical, speculations; he startled his contemporaries by denying the literal
sense of some parts of the scriptural narrative, and there are passages in his
works which indicate an almost undisguised pantheism. Of his latter years
nothing is known, except that Pope Nicolas, on the ground that his orthodoxy
was suspected, requested Charles to send him to Rome, or at least to prevent
his longer residence at Paris, where his teaching might do mischief. It would
seem that, notwithstanding this denunciation, Charles continued to protect
Scotus, and that the philosopher ended his days in France; although many
writers have supposed that, after the death of his patron, he removed into
England, and aided the great Alfred in his labours for the education of his
people.
The controversy thus far had differed from those of
the earlier ages in appealing exclusively to authority. Augustine and the other
fathers had exercised their original thought in the definition of doctrine; but
hitherto the question as to predestination did not relate to the truth of
Christian doctrine, but to the manner in which that doctrine had been
determined by St. Augustine. Scotus, however, took a different course from the
theologians who had preceded him on either side. Like them, indeed, he professed
to appeal to Scripture and the fathers—especially to the great teacher on whom
the opposite party chiefly relied; but both Scripture and fathers (he said) had
condescended to the weakness of their readers, and much of their language was
to be figuratively understood. Thus a principle was laid down by which their
most positive expressions might be set aside, and anything which seemed to
disagree with the philosopher’s own speculations might be explained away.
Scotus wrote at the request of Hincmar, and inscribed
his book to him and to his associate in the cause, Pardulus,
bishop of Laon. He sets out with a somewhat ostentatious parade of
philosophical method, and declares that true philosophy and true theology are
identical. He treats Gottschalk as a heretic—a tool of the “old enemy”—and
traces his errors to a want of liberal culture, especially to ignorance of the
Greek language and theology. It is, he says, an impropriety to speak of
“predestination” or “foreknowledge” in God, since to Him all time is present;
but, admitting the use of such words, he holds that predestination is eternal,
and is as much a part of God Himself as any other of his attributes. It can,
therefore, only be one; we can no more suppose two predestinations in God than
two wisdoms or two knowledges. He disallows Gottschalk’s distinction of one
“twofold predestination”; the Divine predestination must be truly one, and must
be to good only; and such (he maintains) is the use of the term, not only in
Scripture, jut in Augustine’s own writings, if rightly understood. Yet the
number both of those who shall be delivered by Christ and of those who are to
be left to their wickedness is known, and may be said to be predestined; God
has circumscribed the wicked by his law, which brings out their wickedness,
while it acts in an opposite manner on the good. Scotus strongly asserts the
freedom of the will to choose not only evil (to which Lupus had limited it),
but good; free-will (he says) is a gift with which our nature is endowed by
God—a good gift, although it may be employed for evil; whereas Gottschalk, by
referring all virtue and vice to predestination, denies both the freedom of the
will and the assistance of grace, and thus falls at once into the errors of the Pelagians and of their extreme opponents.
Predestination and foreknowledge in God are one, and relate only to good; for
God can foresee only that which has a being, whereas sin and punishment are
not. Sin is, as Augustine had taught, only the defect of righteousness;
punishment is but the defect of bliss. If the soul has the capacity of
blessedness, the longing for bliss without the power of attaining it is the
keenest possible torment; thus the true punishment is that which sin inflicts
on itself, secretly in the present life, and openly in that which is to come,
when those things which now appear to be the pleasures of sin will become the
instruments of torment. That which is punished is not our nature (which is
God’s work), but the corruption of our nature; nor is God properly the author
of punishments; He is only so spoken of inasmuch as He is the creator of the
universe in which they are; the wicked will be tormented by their own envy; the
righteous will be crowned by their own love. The fire (whether it be corporeal,
as Augustine thinks, or incorporeal, according to Gregory) is not needed for
the punishment of the wicked—even of the evil, whose pride would suffice for
its own chastisement; it is one of the four elements which form the balance and
completeness of the universe. It is in itself good; the blessed will dwell in
it as well as the wicked, and it will affect each kind according to their
capacities even as light produces different effects on sound and on ailing
eyes. “Forasmuch as there is no bliss but eternal life, and life eternal is the
knowledge of the truth, therefore there is no other bliss than the knowledge of
the truth. So, if there is no misery but eternal death, and eternal death is
the ignorance of the truth, there is consequently no misery except ignorance of
the truth”.
If Hincmar, in inviting Scotus to take part in the
controversy, aimed at counteracting the influence of Lupus and Ratramn over Charles the Bald, he was in so far successful;
for from that time the king was steadily on his side. But in other respects he
found the philosopher a very dangerous and embarrassing ally, so that he even
felt himself obliged to disavow him.
The excitement raised by the novelties of Scotus was
very great. Wenilo, archbishop of Sens, whom Hincmar
had studiously, and hitherto successfully, endeavoured to conciliate now sent a
number of propositions, extracted from the book, to Prudentius, with a request
that he would examine, and, if necessary, refute them. The bishop of Troyes
thereupon wrote against Scotus with great asperity, and he was followed by
Florus, a deacon and master of the cathedral school at Lyons. These writers
charge Scotus with Pelagianism, to which Prudentius adds accusations of
Origenism and Collyridianism. They complain of him
for imputing imaginary errors to his opponents; they censure him for
substituting philosophy for theology, and sophistical subtleties for arguments from Scripture and ancient authorities. Hincmar and Pardulus entreated Amulo of Lyons
again to assist them; but he died in 852, and his successor, Remigius, answered
the application by writing, in the name of his church, a book on the opposite
side—taking up the case of Gottschalk more expressly than those who had
preceded him, censuring the cruelty with which he had been treated, and
defending the impugned opinions, with the exception of that which limited the
exercise of free-will since the Fall to the choice of evil.
Finding that the literary contest was turning against
him, Hincmar resolved to fortify himself with the authority of a council, and
at Quiercy, in 853, four decrees on the subject of
the controversy were passed. It is laid down that man fell by the abuse of his
free-will; that God, by his foreknowledge, chose some whom by his grace He predestined
to life, and life to them : but as for those whom He, by righteous judgment,
left in their lost estate, He did not predestine them to perish, but
predestined punishment to their sin. “And hereby”, it is said, “we speak of
only one predestination of God, which relates either to the gift of grace or to
the retribution of justice”. It is defined that our free-will was lost by the
Fall, but was recovered through Christ; that we have a free-will to good,
prevented and aided by grace, as well as a free-will to evil, deserted by
grace; that God would have all men to be saved, and that Christ suffered for
all; that the ruin of those who perish is to be ascribed to their own desert.
Prudentius, who was present when these decrees were
passed, subscribed them, but afterwards put forth four propositions against
them; and Remigius, who, as a subject of Lothair, felt himself independent of
the influence of Charles the Bald, wrote, in the name of his church, a book
against the articles of Quiercy. Of Scotus the
archbishop says that he is ignorant of the very words of Scripture, and that,
instead of being consulted on points of faith, he ought either to be pitied as
a man out of his right mind, or to be anathematized as a heretic. Remigius,
however, maintains the necessity of free-will in order to responsibility.
Against the authority of the council of Quiercy was
set that of one which met under the presidency of Remigius in 855 at Valence,
in Lotharingia. This assembly condemned nineteen propositions extracted from
Scotus, which, by a phrase borrowed from St. Jerome’s attack on Coelestius, it characterized as “porridge of the Scots”. It
laid down moderate definitions as to free-will and as to the extent of the
benefit of the Redeemer’s death. But it censured the four articles of Quiercy as useless, or even noxious and erroneous; and it
forbade, in the name of the Holy Spirit, any teaching contrary to its own. The
decrees of Valence were confirmed by a council held near Langres in 859, although, at the instance of Remigius, the offensive expressions
against the articles of Quiercy were omitted. The
subject was again considered by a greater council, to which that of Langres was preliminary, and which met a fortnight later at Savonnikres, a suburb of Toul. At this meeting
Remigius acted in a spirit of conciliation, and the decision was adjourned to a
future synod.
In the meantime Gottschalk was not inactive in his
seclusion. Hincmar had altered an ancient hymn of unknown authorship, in which
the application of the word trine to the Godhead seemed to suggest a threefold
difference in the nature of the Divine Persons. But Ratramn defended the term, and Gottschalk—eager, it would seem, to provoke his powerful
enemy in all ways—put forth in its behalf a tract in which he charged Hincmar
with Sabellianism. The archbishop replied in a work of which the substance was
shown to Gottschalk, in the hope of converting him, although it was not
completed until after his death. He meets the charge of Sabellianism with one
of Arianism; he exhorts monks to keep clear of novelties in a style which seems
to intimate that his opponent had many adherents among that class; and he gives
very significant hints of the bodily and spiritual punishments to which an
imitation of Gottschalk would render them liable. Hincmar was not further
molested about this affair; but the word to which he had objected, although his
objection was supported by the authority of Raban, kept its place in the
Gallican service.
In 859, a monk of Hautvilliers named Guntbert, whom Gottschalk had gained, privately left the monastery, and
carried an appeal from the prisoner to Rome. It appeared as if the new pope,
Nicolas, were disposed to take up the matter. Hincmar wrote to him, professing
his willingness to act as the pope should direct—to release Gottschalk, to
transfer him to other custody, or even to send him to Rome (although he spoke
of the two synods which had condemned the prisoner as a bar to this course);
but he refused to appear with him before the pope’s legates at Metz in 863, on
an occasion which will be related hereafter. From a letter written by Hincmar
to Egilo, archbishop of Sens, who was about to set out for Rome, we learn some
details as to Gottschalk’s condition. It is said that in respect of food,
drink, and fuel, he was as well treated as any of the monks among whom he lived
: that clothes were supplied, if he would receive them; but that, ever since he
was placed at Hautvilliers, he had refused to wash
not only his body, but even his face and hands. From another writing of Hincmar
it appears that the unfortunate man had become subject to strange delusions,
and had visions in which the imagery of the Apocalypse was applied to foreshow
the ruin of his chief enemy. His long confinement and sufferings, acting on his
vain, obstinate, and enthusiastic temper, had partially overthrown his reason.
The synodal discussion of the predestinarian
controversy, to which the council of Savonnières had
looked forward, was never held. But a council at Toucy,
near Toul, in October 860, which was attended by Charles the Bald, Lothair II,
and Charles of Provence, by twelve metropolitans, and by bishops from fourteen
provinces, adopted a letter drawn up by Hincmar, which is in part a general
statement of doctrine, and in part is directed against the invasion of
ecclesiastical property. In this letter the freedom of man’s will, the will of
God that all men should be saved, the necessity of grace in order to salvation,
the Divine mercy in choosing and calling men from out of the “mass of
perdition”, and the death of Christ “for all who were debtors unto death”, are
distinctly stated, but in such a manner as rather to conciliate than to repel
those who in some respects had been the archbishop’s opponents. Hincmar, at the
desire of Charles the Bald, employed himself at intervals, from 859 to 863, in
composing a work of great length on predestination and the kindred subjects,
chiefly in defence of the articles of Quiercy, which
he had before maintained in a book of which the preface only is extant. He
labours to bring the theology of Augustine, Fulgentius, and others into
accordance with his own opinions, which are rather those of the time before the
Pelagian controversy arose. He quotes very profusely; but most of the passages
which he relies on as St. Augustine’s are from a work falsely ascribed to that
father, which had already been employed by Scotus, and declared by Remigius to
be spurious. He admits the expression of one twofold predestination, but
differs from Gottschalk in saying that, while the righteous are predestined to
life, and it to them, punishment is predestined to the reprobate, but they
are not predestined to it; that God did not predestinate them, but forsook them. With this work the controversy ceased.
Gottschalk remained in captivity twenty years. In 869,
the monks of Hautvilliers perceived that his end was
approaching, and sent Hincmar notice of the fact, with an inquiry whether they
should allow him to receive the last sacraments. It was replied that they might
do so, if he would sign a confession embodying the archbishop’s views as to
predestination and the Trinity. But Gottschalk was still unbending, and refused
with much vehemence of behaviour and language. In consequence of this refusal,
he died without the sacraments and under the ban of the church; he was buried
in unhallowed earth, and was excluded from prayers for the repose of his soul.
On the question of Gottschalk’s orthodoxy or
heterodoxy, very opposite opinions have been pronounced—a result rather of the
opposite positions of those who have judged him than of any differences between
them as to the facts of the case. Yet as to these facts there is room for an
important question—whether his two confessions embody the whole of his doctrine
on the subject of predestination, or whether he also held that opinion of an
irresistible doom to sin, as well as to punishment, which his adversaries usually
imputed to him. A moral judgment of the case is easier. Gottschalk’s sincerity
and resolute boldness were marred by his thoroughly sectarian spirit; but the
harshness with which he was treated has left on the memory of Hincmar a stain
which is not to be effaced by any allowances for the character of the age,
since even among his own contemporaries it drew forth warm and indignant
remonstrances.
From controversies of doctrine we proceed to some
remarkable cases in which questions of other kinds brought the popes into
correspondence with the Frankish church.
In 855 the emperor Lothair resigned his crown, and
entered the monastery of Prum, where he died six days after his arrival. While
his eldest son, Louis II, succeeded him in the imperial title and in the
kingdom of Italy, the small kingdom of Arles or Provence fell to his youngest
son, Charles, and the other territory north of the Alps, to which the name of
Lotharingia was now limited, became the portion of his second son, Lothair II.
Lothair II in 856 married Theutberga, daughter of the
duke or viceroy of Burgundy, and sister of Humbert or Hucbert,
abbot of St. Maurice. He separated from his wife in the following year, but
Humbert, who was more a soldier than a monk, compelled him by a threat of war
to take her back. In 859 Theutberga was summoned before a secular tribunal, on
a charge of worse than incestuous connection with her brother before her
marriage; and the abbot’s profession was not enough to disprove this charge, as
the laxity of his morals was notorious.
It now appeared that, in desiring to get rid of his
wife, Lothair was influenced by love for a lady named Waldrada, with whom he
had formerly been intimate. Two archbishops—Gunther of Cologne, arch-chaplain
of the court, and Theutgaud of Treves, a man who is described as too simple and
too ignorant to understand the case—had been gained to the king’s side, and
insisted that Theutberga should purge herself by the ordeal of boiling water :
but, when she had successfully undergone this trial by proxy, Lothair declared
it to be worthless. In the following year the subject came before two synods at
Aix-la-Chapelle, in which Wenilo, archbishop of Sens,
and another Neustrian prelate were associated with the Lotharingian bishops.
Theutberga—no doubt influenced by ill-usage, although she professed that she
acted without compulsion—acknowledged the truth of the charges against her,
while she declared that she had not consented to the sin; whereupon the bishops
gave judgment for a divorce, and, in compliance with the unhappy queen’s own
petition, sentenced her to lifelong penance in a nunnery. A third synod, held
at Aix in April 862, after hearing Lothair’s representation of his case—that he
had been contracted to Waldrada, that his father had compelled him to marry
Theutberga, and that his youth and the strength of his passions rendered a
single life insupportable to him—gave its sanction to his marrying again; and
on the strength of this permission his nuptials with Waldrada were celebrated,
and were followed by her coronation. Gunther’s services were rewarded by the
nomination of his brother Hilduin to the see of Cambray; but Hincmar refused to
consecrate the new bishop, and Pope Nicolas eventually declared the appointment
to be null and void.
The partisans of Lothair had represented Hincmar as favourable
to the divorce; but in reality he had steadfastly resisted all their
solicitations. A body of clergy and laity now proposed to him a number of
questions on the subject, and in answer he gave his judgment very fully. There
were, he said, only two valid grounds for the dissolution of a marriage—where
either both parties desire to embrace a monastic life, or one of them can be
proved guilty of adultery; but in the second case, the innocent party may not
enter into another marriage during the lifetime of the culprit. Among other
matters, he discusses the efficacy of the ordeal, which some of Theutberga’s enemies had ridiculed as worthless, while
others explained the fact that her proxy had escaped unhurt by supposing either
that she had made a secret confession, or that, in declaring herself clear of
any guilt with her brother, she had mentally intended another brother instead
of the abbot of St. Maurice. Hincmar defends the system of such trials, and
says that the artifice imputed to her, far from aiding her to escape, would
have increased her guilt, and so would have ensured her ruin. With respect to a
popular opinion that Lothair was bewitched by Waldrada, the archbishop avows
his belief in the power of charms to produce the extremes of love or hatred
between man and wife, and otherwise to interfere with their relations to each
other; and he gives instances of magical practices as having occurred within
his own knowledge. He strongly denies the doctrine which some had propounded,
that Lothair, as a king, was exempt from all human judgment; for, he said, the
ecclesiastical power is higher than the secular, and when a king fails to rule
himself and his dominions according to the law of God, he forfeits his immunity
from earthly law. He says that the question of the marriage, as it is one of
universal concern, cannot be settled within Lothair’s dominions; and, as it was
objected that no one but the pope was of higher authority than those who had
already given judgment on it, he proposes a general synod, to be assembled from
all the Frankish kingdoms, as the fittest tribunal for deciding it.
Theutberga had escaped from the place of her
confinement, and had found a refuge with Charles the Bald, who, in espousing
her cause, would seem to have been guided less by any regard for its justice
than by the hope of turning his nephew’s misconduct to his own advantage. She
now appealed to the pope, whose intervention was also solicited by others, and
at last by Lothair himself, in his annoyance at the opposition of Hincmar and
the Neustrian bishops. In answer to these applications, Nicolas declared that,
even if the stories against Theutberga were true, her immoralities would not
warrant the second marriage of her husband; he ordered that a synod should be
assembled, not only from such parts of the Frankish dominions as Lothair might
hope to influence, but from all; and he sent two legates to assist at it, with
a charge to excommunicate the king if he should refuse to appear or to obey
them.
The synod was held at Metz in 863, but no bishops
except those of Lotharingia attended. The legates had been bribed by Lothair;
one of them, Rodoald, bishop of Portus, had already displayed his corruptness
in negotiations with the Byzantine church. Without any citation of Theutberga,
or any fresh investigation of the case, the acts of the synod of Aix were
confirmed. Nicolas represents the tone of the bishops as very violent against
himself, and says that when one bishop, in signing the acts, had made a reservation
of the papal judgment, Gunther and Theutgaud erased all but his name. These two
prelates set off to report the decision to the pope—believing probably, from
what they had seen of Rodoald that at Rome money would effect all that they or
their sovereign might desire. But in this they found themselves greatly
mistaken. Nicolas, in a synod which appears to have been held in the ordinary
course, annulled the decision of Metz, classing the council with the notorious Latrocinium of Ephesus, and ordering that, on account of
the favour which it had shown to adulterers, it should not be called a synod
but a brothel. He deposed Gunther and Theutgaud, and declared that, if they
should attempt to perform any episcopal act, they must not hope for
restoration. He threatened the other Lotharingian bishops with a like sentence
in case of their making any resistance; and he announced his judgment to the
Frankish sovereigns and archbishops in letters which strongly denounced the
conduct of King Lothair—if (it was said) he may be properly styled a king who
gives himself up to the government of his passions. Rodoald was about to be
brought to trial for his corruption, when he escaped from Rome by night. It was
evident from the manner of the pope’s proceedings that the indignation which he
sincerely felt on account of Theutberga’s wrongs was
not the only motive which animated him; that he was bent on taking advantage of
the case to establish his power over kings and foreign churches.
Gunther and Theutgaud, in extreme surprise and anger,
repaired to the emperor Lewis II, who was then at Beneventum, and represented
to him that the treatment which they had received was an insult not only to
their master, but to the whole Frankish church, and to all princes—especially
to the emperor himself, under whose safe-conduct they had come to Rome. On this
Lewis immediately advanced against Rome, and, without attempting any previous
negotiation with the pope, entered the city. Nicolas set on foot solemn
prayers, with fasting, for the change of the emperor’s heart. Penitents moved
about the streets in long processions, and offered up their supplications in
the churches; but as one of these penitential trains was about to ascend the
steps of St. Peter’s, it was violently assaulted by some of the imperial
soldiers. Crosses and banners were broken in the fray; one large cross of
especial sanctity, which was believed to be the gift of the empress Helena to
St. Peter’s see, and to contain a piece of the wood on which the Redeemer
suffered, was thrown down and trodden in the mire, from which the fragments
were picked up by some English pilgrims. Nicolas, in fear lest he should be
seized, left the Lateran palace, crossed the river in a boat, and took refuge
in St. Peter’s, where for two days and nights he remained without food. But in
the meanwhile signs which seemed to declare the wrath of heaven began to
appear. The soldier who had broken the precious cross died. Lewis himself was
seized with a fever, and in alarm sent his empress to mediate with the pope. A
reconciliation was thus effected, and, after having committed many acts of
violence, the troops withdrew from Rome. The emperor ordered Gunther and
Theutgaud to leave his camp and to return home, and it would seem that Nicolas
had stipulated for freedom of action in his proceedings as to the case of
Lothair.
Gunther had drawn up, in his own name and in that of
his brother archbishop, a protest against their deposition, conceived in terms
which Hincmar described as diabolical and altogether unprecedented. In this
document Nicolas is charged with madness and tyrannic fury, with extravagant
pride and assumption, with fraud and cunning, with outrageous violation of all
the forms of justice and ecclesiastical law; the archbishops declare that they
spurn and defy his accursed sentence—that they are resolved not to admit him
into their communion, “being content with the communion and brotherly society
of the whole church” ; and they conclude by asserting that Waldrada was not a
concubine but a wife, inasmuch as she had been contracted to Lothair before his
union with Theutberga. With this paper Gunther now sent his brother Hilduin to
the pope, charging him, if it were refused, to lay it on the high altar of St.
Peter’s; and Hilduin executed the commission, forcing his way into St.
Peter’s with a party of Gunther’s adherents, who beat the guardians of the
church and killed one of them who resisted. Gunther also circulated the protest
among the German bishops, and sent a copy of it to Photius, of Constantinople,
with whom Nicolas was by this time seriously embroiled. The other Lotharingian
bishops, however, were terrified by the pope's threats, or were gained by his
promises, and made submission to him in very abject terms.
Gunther had hurried from Rome to Cologne; in defiance
of the pope’s sentence he had performed episcopal functions; and he had made a
compact with his canons, by which, at a great sacrifice both of power and of
revenue, he drew them into concurrence in his proceedings. The pusillanimous
Lothair—partly influenced by the demonstrations of his uncles against him—now
abandoned the cause of the deposed metropolitans. He gave up Gunther
altogether, and expressed horror at his acts, while he entreated that Theutgaud,
in consideration of his simple character, and of his obedience to the pope’s
judgment, might be more leniently dealt with. As for himself, he professed
himself willing to go to Rome, and to obey the pope like one of the meanest of
men. Gunther, indignant at finding himself thus sacrificed, declared an
intention of exposing all the king’s proceedings, and set out for Rome,
carrying with him as much of the treasures of his see as he could lay hands on,
in the hope that by such means he might be able to propitiate the pope. But he
was again disappointed; Nicolas in a synod renewed the condemnation which had
been passed both on him and on Theutgaud. In the meantime Lothair bestowed the
archbishopric of Cologne on Hugh, abbot of St. Bertin’s, whom Hincmar describes
as a subdeacon, but of habits which would have been discreditable to a layman.
The preferment was probably a reward for the exertion of the abbot’s influence
with Charles the Bald, to whom he was maternally related.
The meanness of Lothair’s behaviour served only to
increase the contempt and disgust with which Nicolas had before regarded him.
The pope wrote to the other Frankish princes, desiring them not to interfere in
the matter, as it was for his own judgment alone; and it is remarked by Hincmar
that in these letters he made no use of such terms of courtesy as had been
usual in the letters of Roman bishops to sovereigns. He sent Arsenius, bishop
of Orba, as his legate, with orders to visit Lewis of Germany and Charles; but
it was declared that, unless Lothair would give up Waldrada, the legate must
hold no communication with him, nor would the king be admitted to an audience
if he should repair to Rome. Arsenius received Theutberga from the hands of
Charles, and delivered her to Lothair, who, in terror at the pope’s threats of
excommunication, swore on the Gospels and on a fragment of the true cross that
he would always treat her with the honour due to a queen, imprecating on
himself the most fearful judgments, both in this world and in the next, if he
should fail. Twelve of his nobles joined in the oath, and the reunion of the
royal pair was sealed by a new coronation. Waldrada was committed to the care
of the legate; but in the course of his return to Rome both she and another
royal lady of light character, Ingeltrude, wife
of Count Boso, contrived to make their escape from him, and Waldrada rejoined
Lothair, by whom her escape had been planned. The king had cast aside all
regard for his oath almost immediately after having sworn it. His
submissiveness towards the pope was forgotten. He ejected Hugh from Cologne,
confirmed Gunther’s arrangement with the canons, and put Hilduin into the see
as nominal arch, bishop, while both the power and the revenues were really in
the hands of Gunther.
Theutberga now again escaped from her husband, and,
worn out by the miseries to which she had been subjected, petitioned the pope
for a dissolution of the marriage. She went so far as even to own Waldrada to
be the rightful wife of Lothair, and she requested leave to repair to Rome and
tell all her story. But Nicolas was firm in asserting the rights which the
unhappy queen had been wrought on to abandon. He solemnly excommunicated
Waldrada, and charged the Frankish bishops to hold Lothair separate from the church
until he should repent of his misdeeds. He told Theutberga that he could not
comply with a request which was evidently made under constraint; that, if
Lothair’s marriage were to be dissolved, the precedent would enable any man to
get rid of his wife by ill-usage; that she must consider herself as under the
protection of the apostolic see; that, instead of travelling to Rome, she
should persuade Lothair to send Waldrada thither for trial: and in all his
letters he insisted on celibacy on Lothair’s part as a necessary condition of
any separation. Lothair again attempted to pacify the pope by flattery; he
assured him that he had not cohabited with Waldrada, or even seen her, since
her return from Italy; but Nicolas was unmoved, and appeared to be on the point
of pronouncing a sentence of excommunication against the king, when he was
arrested by death in May 867.
The increase of the papal power under this pontiff was
immense. He had gained such a control over princes as was before unknown. He
had taken the unexampled steps of deposing foreign metropolitans, and of
annulling the decisions of a Frankish national council by the vote of a Roman
synod. He had neglected all the old canonical formalities which stood in the
way of his exercising an immediate jurisdiction throughout the western church.
And in all this he had been supported by the public feeling of indignation
against Lothair and his subservient clergy, which caused men to overlook the
novelty and the usurping character of the pope’s measures. The other Frank
princes had encouraged him in his proceedings against Lothair. The great
prelates of Lotharingia, strong in position and in family interest, had
rendered themselves powerless before the bishop of Rome by espousing a
discreditable and unpopular cause. The pope appeared, not as an invader of the
rights of sovereigns and of churches, but as the champion of justice and
innocence against the oppressors of the earth.
Adrian II, the successor of Nicolas, had already twice
declined the papacy, and was seventy-five years of age at the time of his
election. The partisans of the late pope apprehended a change of policy, by
which the recent acquisitions might be lost. But in this they were mistaken.
Adrian appears to have been urged on by a feeling that he was expected to show
want of energy, and by a wish to falsify the expectation. He soon cast aside
the air of humility and of deference towards the emperor which he had at first
displayed. The losses which the papacy suffered under him arose, not from a
reversal of his predecessor’s policy, but from the attempt to carry it on in an
exaggerated form, without the skill of Nicolas, without understanding the
change of circumstances, or the manner of adapting his measures to them.
The beginning of Adrian’s pontificate was marked by a
tragedy among his own nearest connections. The pope, himself the son of a
bishop, had been married—a circumstance which contributed to the alarm felt at
his election, as Nicolas, like other chief agents in the exaltation of the
papacy, had been strenuous for the celibacy of the clergy. Adrian’s wife, and a
daughter, the offspring of their marriage, were still alive; but, within a few
days after his election, the daughter, who had been betrothed to a nobleman,
was carried off, together with her mother, by Eleutherius, a son of Arsenius of
Orba. Eleutherius, on being pursued, killed both the women, but was himself
taken prisoner. Arsenius, with whose intrigues this affair was connected, did
not long survive. It is said that on his deathbed he was heard to discourse
with friends, and that he departed without receiving the Eucharist. At the
instance of Adrian, the emperor appointed commissioners for the trial of
Eleutherius, who was put to death by their sentence.
Lothair conceived fresh hopes from the change of
popes, and wrote to Adrian in terms expressive of high regard for his
predecessor, while he complained that Nicolas had wronged him by listening to
idle rumours. At his request, Adrian released Waldrada from her
excommunication, and the king himself was invited to Rome. “Rome”, the pope
wrote, “is never unjust, and is always willing to receive the penitent. If you
are conscious of innocence, come for a blessing; if guilty, come for the remedy
of a suitable repentance”. Theutberga was persuaded by Lothair to renew her
application for a divorce. She went to Rome in person, and, in addition to the
old grounds, alleged that she had ailments which rendered it impossible for her
to perform the duties of a wife. But Adrian, like Nicolas, refused her request,
on the ground that she was acting under constraint, and desired her to return
home.
The absolution of Waldrada had included the condition
that she should not keep company with Lothair. By artfully affecting to obey
this order, she goaded his passion to madness, so that he resolved at all
risks— even leaving his territories open to the restless ambition of his uncle
Charles—to sue in person to the pope for a dissolution of his union with
Theutberga. He was made to pay heavily for the means of approach to the
pontiff, who, by the intervention of Ingilberga, wife
of the emperor Lewis, was prevailed on to meet him at Monte Cassino, where it
was supposed that Adrian might be more tractable than when surrounded by the
partisans of Nicolas at Rome. Adrian refused to dissolve the marriage, but, in
consideration of a large sum of money, agreed to administer the holy Eucharist
to the king—a favour which Lothair desired in order to dissipate the popular
opinion, which regarded him as virtually excommunicate. “If”, said the pope at
the solemnity, “thou hast observed the charge of Nicolas, and art firmly
resolved never to have intercourse with Waldrada, draw near, and receive unto
salvation; but if thy conscience accuse thee, or if thou purpose to return to
wallow in thine uncleanness, refrain, lest that which is ordained as a remedy
for the faithful should turn to thy damage”. Lothair, in surprise and
agitation, received the consecrated symbols. His nobles, after being adjured as
to their consent or privity to any breach of his oath, communicated after him;
and Gunther, the survivor of the deposed archbishops, who had once more
repaired to Italy in the hope of obtaining a release, was admitted to
communicate as a layman, on presenting a written profession of submission, and
swearing that he would never again exercise any spiritual office unless the
pope should be pleased to relieve him from his disability.
The king followed Adrian to Rome, but a change had
come over the pope’s disposition towards him. Instead of being received with
the honours usually paid to sovereigns, he found no one of the clergy to meet
him when he presented himself at St. Peter’s, and he was obliged to approach
the Apostle’s tomb unattended. On retiring to his lodging in the papal palace,
he found it unfurnished, and even unswept; and when,
on the following day, which was Sunday, he again repaired to the church, no
priest appeared to say mass for him. Next day, however, he dined with the pope
in the Lateran palace, and after an exchange of presents, in which the king's
vessels of gold and silver were requited with a woollen cloak, a palm-branch,
and a rod—they parted on friendly terms. The pope resolved to examine the case
of the divorce in a council which was to be held at Rome in the following year.
With a view to this investigation, he summoned the bishops of the three
Frankish kingdoms to send representatives to the council; and he was about to
send commissioners across the Alps for the purpose of inquiry, when he received
tidings of Lothair’s death. The king had left Rome in the middle of July. At
Lucca a fatal sickness broke out among his attendants. He himself died at
Piacenza, on the 8th of August; and it is said that before the end of the year
all who had partaken of the communion at Monte Cassino were dead, while the few
who had abstained from it survived. Theutberga became abbess of a monastery,
and bestowed large sums for the soul of the husband who had so cruelly injured
her. Waldrada also took refuge in a cloister.
In the question of Lothair’s divorce, Nicolas and
Hincmar were led by the common interests of justice and morality to act in
harmony with each other. But in other cases, where the claims of Rome
conflicted with the archbishop's attachment either to his sovereign or to the
national church of France, the popes found in him a decided and formidable
opponent.
One of these cases arose out of the conduct of Ebbo,
who, as we have seen, had been deprived of the see of Reims for his acts of
rebellion against Lewis the Pious. During the contests between that emperor’s
sons, Reims for a time fell into the possession of the emperor Lothair, with
whom Ebbo had ingratiated himself. The archbishop returned to his see, carrying
with him, in addition to the imperial mandate for his restoration, the favourable
judgment of a synod held at Ingelheim, under Lothair’s influence, and under the
presidency of Drogo of Metz, who had also presided at his deposition. His
penitential professions at Thionville were now explained away by the assertion
that, in declaring himself “unworthy” of his see, he had meant nothing more
than what was signified by the same word in the ordinary style of bishops; he
had humbled himself (he said), and therefore had now risen in greater strength
than before.
After the battle of Fontenailles,
Ebbo fled from Reims in fear of Charles the Bald. He in vain attempted to
obtain restitution by means of Sergius II; but the pope, overruling the ancient
canons against the translation of bishops, sanctioned his appointment to
Hildesheim, on the nomination of Lewis the German, in 844.
Hincmar, soon after his promotion to the archbishopric
of Reims in 845, found that some clerks, of whom one Wulfad was the most prominent, had been ordained by Ebbo during his second occupation
of the see. He denied the validity of orders conferred by one whom he regarded
as an intruder, and, on the application of the clerks to a synod held at
Soissons in 853, the case was investigated by a commission of bishops, who
declared Ebbo’s restoration to have been uncanonical, and the orders which he
had given to be void. Wulfad and his brethren would
have been excluded even from lay communion, on the ground that, by charging
some members of the synod with having received their consecration from Ebbo,
they had incurred the sentence denounced by the council of Elvira against those
who should slander bishops; but at the request of Charles the Bald they were
released from this penalty. Hincmar, as being a party in the case, and as the
regularity of his own appointment had been impugned, desired that the synod’s
judgment might be fortified by the highest authority, and requested Leo IV to
confirm it. The pope refused, on the ground (among other things) that the
clerks had appealed to Rome; but Lothair, hitherto the archbishop’s enemy,
interceded for him, and Leo sent him the pall, by which he was constituted
primate of Neustria. Benedict III on Hincmar’s application confirmed the
privileges thus bestowed on him, and declared that there should be no appeal
from his judgment, saving the rights of the apostolic see; he also confirmed
the deposition of Wulfad and his companions, provided
(as he expressly said) that the facts of the case were as they had been
represented to him. And Nicolas, in 863, renewed both the grant to Hincmar and
the judgment as to the clerks, with the same condition which had been stated by
his predecessor.
But three years later this pope professed to have
discovered great unfairness in the statements on which the applications to
Benedict and to himself had been grounded, and ordered that Hincmar should
restore the clerks, or else should submit the matter to a council, with leave
for them, if its judgment should be unfavourable, to appeal to the apostolic
see. A second synod was accordingly held at Soissons. Hincmar handed in four
tracts, in justification of Ebbo’s deposition, of his own appointment, and of
the proceedings against the clerks—to whose restoration, however, he professed
himself willing to consent, provided that it could be granted without prejudice
to the laws of the church. The council decided that the deposition had been
right in point of justice, but that it might be reversed by the higher law of
mercy, according to the precedent of the Nicene judgment as to the Novatianists, and to the provisions of the African church
for the reconciliation of the Donatists. But Nicolas, instead of confirming the
acts, strongly censured the council for having omitted to cancel the judgment
of that which had been held in 853; he blamed it for having sanctioned the
promotion of Wulfad by Charles the Bald to the see of
Bourges without requesting the papal consent; he told the bishops that they
ought to have sent him all the documents relating to Ebbo, and that they must
now do so; and in letters to them, to Charles, and to Hincmar, he charged the
archbishop with falsehood, fraud, cunning, and injustice. At the same time he
wrote to Wulfad and his brethren, exhorting them to
pay due reverence to Hincmar.
The deposition of Ebbo and the appointment of his
successor again came into question before a council assembled from six
provinces at Troyes in October 867. The decision was in favour of Hincmar; but
the council did an important service to the papal interest by requesting
Nicolas to decree that no archbishop or bishop should be deposed without the
consent of the apostolic see. Hincmar and Nicolas were at last brought nearer
to each other on this question by their respective dangers from other quarters.
The archbishop was afraid of the influence which Wulfad had acquired over Charles the Bald, while the pope, who was now engaged in a
formidable struggle with the patriarch Photius and the eastern church, was
unwilling to tempt the Franks to side with his opponents. On receiving the
envoys whom Hincmar had sent to Rome after the synod of Troyes, Nicolas
expressed approbation of his proceedings, and wrote to request that he and
other learned men of France would assist in the controversy with the Greeks.
With this request the archbishop complied; and Nicolas was soon after succeeded
by Adrian, who confirmed Wulfad in the see of Bourges
and bestowed the pall on him, but at the same time behaved with great respect
to Hincmar.
Thus the dispute ended peacefully. But in the course
of it much had been done to infringe on the independence of the Frankish
church. Nicolas claimed that the Frankish synods should be called by order of
the pope; that the parties in a cause might appeal from such synods to Rome
either before or after judgment; that the synods should report to the pope
before pronouncing the sentence; that the bishops who acted as judges should be
compelled to go to Rome for the purpose of justifying their decision; that the
pope should have the power of annulling all their acts, so that it should be
necessary to begin the process anew. Hincmar and his party, while they had the
ancient laws of the church in their favour, felt themselves unable to struggle
against the complication of political interests; the archbishop found himself
obliged to concede the principle of an appeal to Rome, according to the canon
of Sardica, although Charlemagne had excluded that canon from his collection,
and it owed its insertion among the Frank capitularies to the forger Benedict
the Levite. And the petition of the council of Troyes—suggested, no doubt, by
the punishments to which Ebbo and others had been subjected on account of their
acts against Lewis the Pious—shows how, under the idea of securing themselves
against other powers, the Frankish prelates contributed to aggrandize Rome by
investing it with universal control in the character of general protector of
the church.
At the same time with the affair as to Ebbo’s
ordinations another controversy was going on between Nicolas and Hincmar, which
exhibited in a yet more striking manner the nature of the new claims set up in
behalf of the papacy.
Rothad, bishop of Soissons, in the province of Reims,
had occupied his see thirty years, and had long been on unfriendly terms with
the archbishop. The accounts which we have of the differences between the
bishop and his metropolitan must be received with caution, as they come for the
most part from Rothad, or from the Lotharingian bishops, who were hostile to
Hincmar on account of his proceedings in the case of Theutberga; while they are
in part directly contradicted by Hincmar himself.
Rothad, according to his own report, with the consent
of thirty-three bishops, deposed a presbyter who had been caught in the act of
unchastity. The man carried his complaint to Hincmar, who, after having imposed
on him a penance of three years, restored him to his benefice, excommunicated
and imprisoned the clerk whom Rothad had put into it, and persecuted the bishop
himself for his share in the affair. Even by this account, it would seem that
Rothad had ventured to invade the rights of his metropolitan by holding a synod
independently of him. But in addition to this, Hincmar, while disclaiming all
personal malice against the bishop of Soissons, charges him with long
insubordination, with notorious laxity of life, and with dilapidating, selling,
or pledging the property of his see. However their disagreement may have
arisen, Hincmar in 861 suspended Rothad from his office until he should become
obedient, and threatened him with deposition; whereupon the bishop appealed to
Rome.
In the following year, Rothad appeared at a synod held
at Pistres, as if no censure been passed against him. His presence was objected
to, on which he again appealed to the pope, and asked leave to go to Rome,
which Charles the Bald at first granted. But the case was afterwards, with the
concurrence of Charles, examined by a synod at Soissons in the end of the same
year, when Rothad, who had been imprisoned for his contumacy in refusing to
appear, was sentenced to deposition, while an abbey was assigned to him for his
maintenance, and another person was appointed to his see. According to Hincmar,
he was content with this arrangement, until some Lotharingian bishops, wishing
to use him as a tool against the great opponent of their sovereign's divorce,
persuaded him to resume his appeal to the pope. Rothad’s own statement is, that Hincmar, having got possession of a letter in which he
requested a continuance of support from some bishops who had befriended him at
Pistres, wrongly represented this as an abandonment of his appeal, and a
reference of his cause to those Frankish bishops.
Hincmar and the prelates who had met at Soissons, by
way of obviating the pope’s objections to their proceedings, requested Nicolas
to confirm their acts, while, in excuse for their disregard of Rothad’s appeal, they alleged that the old imperial laws
forbade such cases to be carried out of the kingdom. But Nicolas had received
representations of the affair from the bishops of Lotharingia, and replied by
censuring the synod very strongly for the insult which it had offered to St
Peter by presuming to judge a matter in which an appeal had been made to Rome.
In consequence of that appeal, he declared its judgment to be null. Temporal
laws, he said, are good against heretics and tyrants, but are of no force when
they clash with the rights of the church. He tells the members of the assembly
that they must either restore Rothad to his see, or within thirty days send
deputies to assert their cause against him before the apostolical tribunal.
With his usual skill, he assumes the character of a general guardian of the
church by remarking that the same evil which had happened to Rothad might
befall any one of themselves, and he points out the chair of St. Peter as the
refuge for bishops oppressed by their metropolitans. At the same time Nicolas
wrote to Hincmar in terms of severe censure. He tells him that, if Rothad had
not appealed, he must himself have inquired into the matter—a claim of
right to interfere which had not before been advanced by Rome. He asked with
what consistency Hincmar could apply to the Roman see for a confirmation of his
privileges as metropolitan, or how he could attach any value to privileges
derived from Rome, while he did all that he could to lessen its authority; and,
as the first letter received no answer, the pope wrote again, telling the
archbishop that within thirty days he must either reinstate Rothad, or send him
and some representatives of his accusers to Rome, on pain of being interdicted
from the celebration of the Eucharist until he should comply. He also wrote to
Rothad, encouraging him to persevere in his appeal unless he were conscious of
having a bad cause; and, notwithstanding the importunities of Charles and his
queen, who entreated him to let the matter rest, he desired the king to send
Rothad to Rome. The second letter to Hincmar, and two which followed it,
remained unanswered; and Nicolas then wrote a fifth, but in a milder tone, as
he was afraid to drive the archbishop to extremities, lest he should join the
party of Gunther.
In the beginning of 864, Rothad obtained permission to
go to Rome. Hincmar also sent two envoys—not, he said, as accusers, but in
order to justify his own proceedings. They carried with them a letter of great
length, in which, with profuse expressions of humility and reverence towards
the apostolic see, he admits the right of appeal as sanctioned by the Sardican canon, but says that, according to the African
canons and to Gregory the Great, Rothad, by referring the case to judges of his
own choosing, had foregone the right of carrying it to any other tribunal. He
tells the pope that Rothad had for many years been unruly and had treated all
remonstrances with contempt, so that he himself had incurred much obloquy for
allowing a man so notoriously unfit and incorrigible to retain the episcopal
office. He dwells much on the necessity that bishops should obey their
metropolitans, and endeavours very earnestly to obtain the pope's confirmation
of his past proceedings, assuring him that Rothad shall be well provided for.
Hincmar’s envoys were detained on the way by the
emperor Lewis, but the letter was sent onwards and reached the pope. Rothad was
allowed to proceed to Rome, and, six months after his arrival, presented a
statement of his case. On Christmas eve, three months later, Nicolas ascended
the pulpit of St. Mary Major, and made a speech on the subject. Even if
Hincmar’s story were true, he said, it was no longer in the power of Rothad,
after he had appealed to the apostolic see, to transfer his cause to an inferior
tribunal; since Rothad professed himself willing to meet all charges, and since
no accuser had appeared against him, the pope declared him to be worthy of
restoration; and, after having waited until the feast of St Agnes, he
publicly invested the bishop with pontifical robes, and desired him to
officiate at mass before him.
As Rothad maintained that he had never abandoned his
appeal, and as his accusers had suffered judgment to go by default, the
proceedings of Nicolas thus far might have been justified by the Sardican canon, which suspended the execution of sentence
against a bishop until the pope should have submitted the cause to a fresh
examination; and Hincmar had failed in the observance of that canon by
appointing another bishop to Soissons. But, in letters which he wrote on the
occasion, the pope gave vent to some startling novelties—that the decretals of
his predecessors had been violated; that the deposition of Rothad was invalid,
because the council which had pronounced it was held without the apostolic
permission, and, further, because the deposition of a bishop was one of those
“greater judgments” which belong to the apostolic chair alone. He required
Hincmar, under pain of perpetual deposition, either at once to restore Rothad
unconditionally, or to reinstate him for the time, and to appear at Rome for
the further trial of the question.
Nicolas had originally stood on the Sardican canon, but he now took very different ground; and
the change was the more striking, because the new principles which he advanced
were really unnecessary to his cause. These principles were derived from the
pretended decretals of Isidore, which are for the first time mentioned as being
known at Rome in the letter of Nicolas to the French bishops. In 860, Lupus of Ferrières, at the instigation of Wenilo,
archbishop of Sens, had written a letter in which he hinted a reference to them
by saying that pope Melchiades, the contemporary of
Constantine, was reported to have laid down that no bishop could be deposed
without the pope’s consent; and the abbot had requested that Nicolas would send
a copy of the decretal as preserved at Rome. From the pope’s silence as to this
point in his answer, it is inferred that he then knew nothing of the forged
collection; and the same was the case in 863, when he spoke of the decretals of Siricius as the oldest that were known. But now—only
one year later—he is found citing those of the Isidorian collection: and when some of the French bishops expressed a doubt respecting
them, on the ground that they were not in the code of Dionysius Exiguus, he
answered that on the same ground they might suspect the decretals of Gregory
and other popes later than Dionysius — nay, they might even suspect the
canonical Scriptures; that there were genuine decretals preserved elsewhere;
that, as Innocent had ordered all the canonical books to be received, so had
Leo ordered the reception of all papal decretals; that they themselves were in
the habit of using these epistles when favourable to their own interest, and
questioned them only when the object was to injure the rights of the
apostolical see. It would seem, therefore, that Nicolas had been made
acquainted with the forged decretals during Rothad’s stay at Rome—most probably by Rothad himself. That the bishop of Soissons was
privy to the forgery, appears likely from the facts that he was already a
bishop when it was executed, and that he was connected with the party from
which it emanated. But we need not suppose that Nicolas knowingly adopted an
imposture. The principles of the decretals had been floating in the mind of the
age; on receiving the forgeries, the pope recognized in them his own ideal of
ecclesiastical polity, and he welcomed them as affording a historical
foundation for it. We may therefore, (in charity at least,) acquit him of
conscious fraud in this matter, although something of criminality will still
attach to the care with which he seems to have avoided all examination of their
genuineness, and to the eagerness with which he welcomed these pretended
antiquities, coming from a foreign country, in disregard of the obvious
consideration that, if genuine, they must have all along been known in his own
city.
Hincmar made no further active opposition, but
acquiesced in the restitution of Rothad, although in his chronicle of the time
he speaks of it as effected by might in defiance of rule, and argues that it
was inconsistent with the Sardican canon. The act was
performed by Arsenius, during the mission which has been mentioned in
connection with the history of Lothair’s marriages, and Rothad appears to have
died soon after, in the beginning of Adrian’s pontificate.
If even Nicolas had found Hincmar a dangerous
antagonist, Adrian was altogether unequal to contend with him.
On the death of Lothair II, in 869, Charles the Bald
immediately seized his dominions. Adrian felt that, after the part which his
predecessor and he himself had taken to make the world regard the papal see as
the general vindicator of justice, he was bound to interfere in behalf of the
nearer heirs — the emperor Lewis, and his uncle the king of Germany. He
therefore wrote in terms of strong remonstrance to Charles, to the nobles of
Lotharingia, and to the Neustrian bishops; he sent envoys who, during the performance
of divine service at St. Denys, threatened the wrath of St. Peter against the
king; he wrote to Hincmar, blaming him for his supineness, desiring him to
oppose his sovereign’s ambitious projects, and charging him, if Charles should
persist in them, to avoid his communion; and, as his letters received no
answer, he wrote again, threatening, apparently in imitation of Gregory IV, to
go into France in person for the redress of the wrong which had been attempted.
In the meantime Hincmar had placed the crown of Lotharingia on the head of
Charles, who by the partition of Mersen had made an accommodation with Lewis of
Germany, and consequently felt himself independent of the pope. The archbishop
took no notice of Adrian’s first communication; but he returned a remarkable
answer to the second. He disclaimed all judgment of the political question as
to inheritance; his king, he says, had required his obedience, and he had felt
himself bound to obey. He complains of it as a novel hardship that he should be
required to avoid the communion of Charles : for the Lotharingian bishops had
not been obliged to break off communion with their late sovereign, although he
lived in adultery; the popes themselves had not broken off communion with
princes who were guilty of crimes, or even of heresy; and Charles had not been
convicted of any breach of faith which could warrant his bishops in refusing to
communicate with him.
But the most striking part of the letter was where
Hincmar professed to report the language held by the nobles of Lotharingia—a
significant hint of his own opinion, and of the reception which the pope might
expect if he were to follow out the line of conduct on which he had entered. He
tells Adrian that they contrast his tone towards Charles with the
submissiveness of former popes towards Pipin and Charlemagne; they recall to
mind the indignities which Gregory IV had brought on himself by his interference
in Frankish affairs; they loudly blame the pope for meddling with politics, and
for pretending to impose a sovereign on them; they wish him to keep to his own
affairs, as his predecessors had done, and to defend them by his prayers and by
the prayers of the clergy from the Normans and their other enemies; they
declare that a bishop who utters unjust excommunications, instead of excluding
the objects of them from eternal life, only forfeits his own power of binding.
The pope was greatly incensed. He countenanced a
rebellion raised against Charles by one of his sons, Carloman, who had been
ordained a deacon; he forbade the French bishops to excommunicate the rebel
prince when their sovereign required them to do so. But Hincmar and his
brethren, in despite of this, pronounced sentence of degradation and
excommunication against Carloman,0 who, on being taken, was condemned to death,
but escaped with the loss of his eyes, and received the abbey of Epternach from the charity of Lewis the German. And Adrian,
after having committed himself by threats and denunciations in a style
exaggerated from that of Nicolas, found himself obliged to let these acts of
defiance pass without taking any further measures against those who were
concerned in them.
A yet more remarkable collision arose out of the
conduct of Hincmar, bishop of Laon. The archbishop of Reims had in 858 obtained
the see of Laon for his nephew and namesake, who is described as entirely
dependent on him for the means of subsistence; but he soon found reason to
repent of this step, which appears, from the younger Hincmar’s character, to
have been prompted by family or political considerations rather than by a
regard for the benefit of the church. The bishop of Laon received from Charles the
Bald a distant abbey and an office at court. For these preferments he neglected
his diocese; he made himself odious both to clergy and to laity by his
exactions; and he treated his uncle’s authority as metropolitan with contempts. In consequence of a disagreement with the king,
he was tried before a secular court in 868; he was deprived of his civil
office, and the income of his see was confiscated. On this occasion, the elder
Hincmar, considering that the cause of the church was involved, forgot his
private grounds for dissatisfaction with his kinsman’s conduct, and came to the
bishop’s support. In a letter to Charles (in which, among other authorities, he
cites some of the forged decretals), he declared that bishops were amenable to
no other judgment than that of their own order; that the trial of a bishop by a
secular tribunal was contrary to the ancient laws of the church, to those of
the Roman emperors, and to the example of the king’s predecessors; that it was
a sign that the end of the world was at hand; that royalty is dependent on the
episcopal unction, and is forfeited by violation of the engagements contracted
at receiving it. At the diet of Pistres, in 868, the archbishop maintained his
nephew’s interest, and the younger Hincmar, on entreating the king’s
forgiveness, recovered the revenues of his see.
But fresh disagreements very soon broke out between
the kinsmen, and the bishop of Laon involved himself in further troubles by the
violence which he used in ejecting a nobleman who was one of the tenants of his
church. The king, after citing him to appear, and receiving a refusal, ordered
him to be arrested; whereupon he took refuge in a church and placed himself
beside the altar. In April 869 he appeared before a synod at Verberie; but he declined its judgment, appealed to the
pope, and desired leave to proceed to Rome for the prosecution of his appeal.
The permission was refused, and he was committed to prison. Before setting out
for Verberie, he had charged his clergy, in case of
his detention, to suspend the performance of all divine offices, including even
baptism, penance, the viaticum of the dying, and the rites of burial, until he
should return, or the pope should release them from the injunctions The clergy,
in great perplexity and distress, now applied to the archbishop of Reims for
direction in the matter. Hincmar by letter desired his nephew to recall the
interdict; on his refusal, he cancelled it by his own authority as
metropolitan, and produced ancient authorities to assure the clergy that, as
their bishop’s excommunication was irregular and groundless, they were not
bound to obey it.
About the time of Charles’s coronation in Lotharingia,
the bishop of Laon was set at liberty, his case being referred to a future
synod. He forthwith renewed his assaults on his uncle, whom he denounced as the
author of his late imprisonment; he espoused the cause of the rebel Carloman;
and he sent forth a letter in which he asserted for all bishops a right of
appealing to Rome — not against a sentence of their brethren (which was the
only kind of appeal hitherto claimed), but in bar of the jurisdiction of local
synods. For this claim he alleged the authority of the forged decretals. The
archbishop replied, not by denying the genuineness of these documents—which,
however he may have suspected it, he was not, after his own use of them, at
liberty to impugn —but by maintaining that, as they had been issued on
particular occasions, their application was limited to the circumstances which
called them forth; that they were valid only in so far as they were agreeable
to the ecclesiastical canons, and that some of them had been superseded by the
determinations of councils later than their professed date. Such a view of the
decretals was evidently even more prejudicial to the new Roman claims than an
assertion of their spuriousness would have been.
While Charles was engrossed by the affairs of
Lotharingia, the case of the younger Hincmar was postponed. But he was brought
before synods at Gondreville and Attigny in 870, and
pamphlets were exchanged between him and his uncle—one, by the archbishop,
extending to great length, and divided into fifty-five chapters. At Attigny the
bishop of Laon submitted to swear obedience to the authority of his sovereign
and of his metropolitan; and, after having in vain renewed his request for
leave to go to Rome, he asked for a trial by secular judges, who pronounced a
decision in his favour. The elder Hincmar was indignant, both because his
nephew had abandoned the clerical privileges in submitting to a lay tribunal,
and on account of the result of the trial.
The bishop was again brought before a synod which met
at Doucy, near Mousson, on the Maas, in August 871,
when fresh misdemeanours were laid to his charge—that he had made away with the
property of his see, that he had sided with Carloman, had refused to sign the
excommunication uttered against the rebel, and had slandered Charles to the
pope. It was not until after the third summons that the accused condescended to
appear. He charged the king with having invaded his dignity; the archbishop of
Reims with having caused his imprisonment : and on these grounds he refused to
be judged by them. Charles repelled the charges against himself, and joined
with the nobles who were present in swearing that the imputation against the
archbishop was false. In reply to his claim of a right to appeal to Rome, the
bishop was reminded of the canons which ordered that every cause should be
terminated in the country where it arose, and was told that he could not appeal
until after a trial by the bishops of his own province. Notwithstanding his
persistence in refusing to answer, the synod proceeded to examine the matter;
and the elder Hincmar, after having collected the opinions of the members,
pronounced sentence of deposition against his nephew, reserving only such a
power of appeal as was sanctioned by the council of Sardica. The synod then
wrote to the pope, stating the grounds of their judgment, and expressing a hope
that, in consideration of the bishop's incorrigible misconduct, he would
confirm the sentence. They limit the right of appealing agreeably to the Sardican canon, and desire that, if the pope should
entertain the appeal which had been made to him, he would commit the further
trial of the cause to bishops of their own neighbourhood, or would send envoys
to sit with the local bishops for the purpose; and they beg that in any case he
would not restore Hincmar to his see without a provincial inquiry, but would
proceed according to the canons.
Adrian replied in a very lofty tone. He censured the
synod for having ventured to depose the accused without regard to his appeal,
and charged them to send him to Rome, with some of their own number, in order
to a fresh inquiry. The answer of the Frankish bishops was firm and decided.
They professed that they could only account for Adrian's letter by supposing
that, in the multiplicity of his engagements, he had been unable to read the
whole of the documents which they had sent to him; they justified their proceedings,
and declared that, if the pope should persist in the course which he had
indicated, they were resolved to stand on the rights of their national church.
Adrian’s letter to the synod had been accompanied by
one in a like strain addressed to Charles, who was greatly provoked by it, and
employed the elder Hincmar to reply. The archbishop executed his task with
hearty zeal. Charles, in whose name the letter was written, is made to tell the
pope that the language which he had held was improper to be used towards a
king, and unbecoming the modesty of a bishop, and desires him to content
himself with writing as his predecessors had written to former sovereigns of France.
For a pope to speak of “ordering” a king is said to be a new and unexampled
audacity. It is denied that Adrian was entitled to evoke the case of the
younger Hincmar to Rome for trial. The privileges of St. Peter depend on the
exercise of justice; the king will not violate the principles of Scripture and
of the church by interposing to defeat justice in a case where the offences of
the accused are so many and so clear. He declines with indignation the office
which the pope would impose on him by desiring him to guard the property of the
see of Laon; the kings of the Franks had hitherto been reckoned lords of the
earth—not deputies or bailiffs of bishops. He threatens, if the matter cannot
be ended at home, to go to Rome and maintain the rightfulness of his
proceedings. The pope had spoken of decrees; but any decree which would affect
to bind a sovereign must have been vomited forth from hell. The letter
concludes by declaring the king’s willingness to abide by the known rules of
Scripture, tradition, and the canons, while he is determined to reject
“anything which may have been compiled or forged to the contrary by any
person”—the plainest intimation that had as yet been given of Hincmar’s opinion
as to the Isidorian decretals.
Adrian again felt that he had committed a mistake in
advancing pretensions which were thus contested; and a league which had just
been concluded between Lewis the German and his nephew the emperor contributed
to alarm the pope as to the consequences which might follow from a breach with
the king of Neustria. He therefore wrote again to Charles, exchanging his
imperious tone for one of soothing and flattery. After some slight allusions to
the style of the king’s letter, he proceeds, (as he says)” to pour in the oil
of consolation and the ointment of holy love”. He begs that he may not be held
accountable for any expressions which might have seemed harsh in his former
letters; and, knowing the intensity of the king’s desire for additional
territory and power, he volunteers an assurance that, if he should live to see
a vacancy in the empire, no other candidate than Charles shall with his consent
be raised to it. The case of the bishop of Laon is treated as of inferior
moment; the pope still desires that he may be sent to Rome, but promises that
he shall not be restored unless a full inquiry shall have shown the justice of
his cause, and that this inquiry shall be held in France. Adrian did not live
to receive an answer to this letter; and Hincmar the younger was kept in prison
until, by taking part in fresh intrigues, he exposed himself to a severer
punishment.
Adrian’s conduct in this affair had been alike
imprudent and unfortunate. The French bishops had set aside the false
decretals; they had insisted on confining the papal right as to appeals within
the limits which had been defined by the council of Sardica; they had denied
that the examination of all weightier causes belonged to the pope alone; they
had denied that he had the right of evoking a cause to Rome before it had been
submitted to the judgment of a national synod, and would only allow him the power
of remitting it, after such judgment, to be again examined by the bishops of
the country in which it arose; and his lofty pretensions had ended in a
humiliating concessions Yet the Roman see had gained something. Hincmar, in all
his opposition to the papal claims, carefully mixes up professions of deep
reverence for the authority of the apostolic chair; his objections to the Isidorian principles, being addressed to his nephew, were
not likely to become much known at Rome, while, as he had not openly questioned
the genuineness of the decretals, the popes might henceforth cite them with
greater confidence; and a feeling that the power of the papacy was useful to
the church restrained him in the midst of his opposition to it. Both bishops
and princes now saw in the papacy something which they might use to their
advantage; and the real benefit of all applications to Rome for aid was sure
to redound to the Roman see itself.
The circumstances of John VIII’s election as the
successor of Adrian are unknown; but he appears to have belonged to the
Frankish party among the Roman clergy, and there is no reason to doubt that the
emperor consented to his appointment. In 875 the death of the emperor Lewis II
without issue opened up to Charles the Bald the great object of his ambition;
and the time was now come for the pope to assume the power of disposing of the
empire—an assumption countenanced by the fact that his predecessors had long
acted as arbiters in the dissensions of the Carolingian princes. Setting aside
the stronger hereditary claims of Lewis the German, John invited Charles to
Rome, and on Christmas-day—seventy-five years after the coronation of
Charlemagne—placed the imperial crown on his head. Although the pope afterwards
declared that this was done in obedience to a revelation which had been made to
his predecessor Nicolas, it would appear that influences of a less exalted kind
had also contributed to the act. The annalist of Fulda, whose tone towards the
“tyrant” of France is generally very bitter, tells us that, in order to obtain
the empire, Charles had made a prodigal use of bribery among the senators,
“after the fashion of Jugurtha”; nor did the pope himself fail to benefit on
the occasion. A writer of later date d is undoubtedly wrong in saying that
Charles ceded to him certain territories which are known to have then belonged
to the Greek empire; but there is reason to believe that he gave up the control
of elections to the papacy, released the pope from the duty of doing homage,
and withdrew his resident commissioners from Rome, leaving the government in
the hands of the pope, while the title of Defender still served to connect the
emperor with the city, and entitled the Romans and their bishops to look to him
for aid.
Charles now professed that he owed the empire to John,
and during the remainder of his days he was solicitous to serve the author of
his dignity. Proceeding northwards, he was crowned as king of Italy at Pavia,
in February 876, when the estates declared that, as God, through the vicar of
St. Peter and St. Paul, had called him to be emperor, so they chose him king.
The acts of Pavia were confirmed in an assembly held some months later at Pontyon, where the Neustrian clergy and nobles professed
that they chose him for their sovereign, as he had been chosen by the pope
and by the Lombards. This change of title from a hereditary to an elective
royalty appeared to hold out to the pope a hope of being able to interfere in
the future disposal of the Neustrian and Italian kingdoms; but an attempt which
was made in his behalf at Pontyon, although zealously
supported by the emperor, met with a strenuous opposition from the Frankish
clergy. The papal legate, John, bishop of Tusculum, read a letter by which Ansegis, archbishop of Sens, was constituted vicar
apostolic and primate of Gaul and Germany, with power to assemble synods, to
execute the papal orders by the agency of bishops, and to bring all important
matters to Rome for decision. Hincmar and his brethren requested leave to
examine the document; to which the emperor replied by asking them whether they
would obey the pope, and telling them that he, as the pope’s vicar in the
council, was resolved to enforce obedience. He ordered a chair to be set for Ansegis beside the legate; and at his invitation the
archbishop of Sens walked past the metropolitans who had held precedence of
him, and took his seat in the place of dignity. But Hincmar and the other
bishops behaved with unshaken firmness. They repeated their request that they
might be allowed to see the pope’s letter, and to take a copy of it. They
protested against the elevation of Ansegis as
uncanonical—as infringing on the primacy granted to the see of Reims in the
person of Remigius, and on the privileges bestowed on Hincmar by Benedict,
Nicolas, and Adrian; nor could they be brought to promise obedience to the
pope, except such as was agreeable to the canons, and to the example of their
predecessors. One bishop only, Frotair, was disposed
to comply, in the hope of obtaining a translation from the diocese of Bordeaux,
which had been desolated by the Northmen, to that of Bourges but his brethren
objected to the translation as contrary to the laws of the church. The emperor,
provoked by Hincmar’s opposition, required him to take a new oath of fealty in
the presence of the assembly, as if his loyalty were suspected—an unworthy
return for the archbishop’s long, able, and zealous exertions for the rights of
the crown and of the national church. The council broke up without coming to
any satisfactory determination, and Hincmar soon after produced a strong
defence0 of the rights of metropolitans against the new principles on which the
commission to Ansegis was grounded. Charles was
induced by political reasons to act in a spirit of conciliation,0 and the pope
got over the difficulty as to Ansegis by conferring
the primacy of Gaul on the see of Arles, to which it had been attached before
the Frankish conquest. But amid the commotions of the time this arrangement had
no practical effect.
In the meantime the pope was greatly disquieted at
home by the factions of his city, by the petty princes and nobles of the neighbourhood,
and by the Saracens, who, since the death of Lewis II, carried on their ravages
without any effectual check. Sometimes the nobles made alliance with the
enemies of Christendom. Naples, Gaeta, Amalfi, and Sorrento, after having
suffered much at their hands, entered into a league with them, and united with
them in the work of devastation and plunder. Sergius, duke of Naples, made
frequent incursions into the papal territory, and John, after having in vain
employed gentler means, uttered an anathema against him. On this, the duke’s
brother, Athanasius, bishop of Naples, took on himself the execution of
the sentence, seized Sergius, put out his eyes, and sent him to the pope, who
requited the bishop with a profusion of thanks and commendations, quoting the
texts of Scripture which enjoin a preference of the Saviour over the dearest
natural affections. Athanasius now annexed the dukedom to his spiritual office.
But he soon discovered that he was unable to cope with the Saracens, whereupon
he allied himself with them, harassed the pope after the same fashion as his
brother, and obliged John to buy him off with a large sum of money, in
consideration of which he promised to break off his connection with the
infidels. But the promise was not fulfilled, and the pope, with a Roman synod,
uttered an anathema against the duke-bishop. Beset and continually annoyed as
he was by such enemies, John implored the emperor to come to his assistance,
and Charles was disposed to comply with the entreaty; but the unwillingness of
the Frank chiefs to consent to such an expedition may be inferred from the
heavy price which the emperor paid for their concurrence, by allowing the
office of his counts to be converted into an hereditary dignity at the council
of Quiercy in 887. The pope, on being informed of his
protector’s approach, set out to meet him, and on the way held a council at
Ravenna, where he passed some canons by which, in accordance with the pseudo-Isidorian principles, the power of bishops was exalted,
while that of metropolitans was depressed. He met the emperor at Vercelli, and
proceeded in his company to Tortona, where Richildis,
the wife of Charles, was crowned as empress. But the emperor, instead of
prosecuting his expedition, retired before the advancing force of Carloman, the
son and successor of Lewis the German; and he died in a hut on the pass of Mont
Cenis. The concessions which this prince had made both to Rome and to his
nobles had greatly weakened the power of the Frankish crown, and the policy
which he had lately followed in ecclesiastical affairs was very dangerous to
the rights of the national church. Yet although, for the sake of his private
objects, he had in his latter days behaved with much obsequiousness to the
pope, it is clear that he had no intention of allowing the principles of the
decretals to be established in their fullness within his dominions north of the
Alps.
After the death of Charles, the empire was vacant
until 884. The pope, finding himself continually annoyed by Lambert, marquis of
Spoleto, and other partisans of the German Carolingians,0 declared his
intention of seeking aid in France, and, after some forcible detention, which
he avenged by anathemas against Lambert and Adalbert of Tuscany, he had
embarked on board ship, and landed at Genoa. The reception which he at first
met with in France was not encouraging. He had offended the clergy by his
attempts against the national church, and especially by the commission to Ansegis; while all classes were irritated on account of the
costly and fruitless expedition which he had induced their late sovereign to
undertake. John wrote letters to all the Frankish princes, urgently summoning
them and their bishops to attend a council at Troyes; but the bishops of Gaul
only appeared, and the only sovereign present was the king of France, Lewis the
Stammerer, who was crowned anew by the pope, although, in consequence of an
irregularity in his marriage, he was unable to obtain that the queen should be
included in the coronation. At Troyes, as at Ravenna, John proposed and passed
some canons which raised the episcopal privileges to a height before unknown,
and he dealt about anathemas with his usual profusion. The bishops joined with
him in condemning Adalbert, Lambert, and his other Italian enemies, and in
return obtained from him a sentence against the invaders of their own property.
But they resolutely stood out for their national rights, insisting on the Sardican canon which limited the power of the Roman see as
to appeals, and on those ancient laws of the church which forbade translations
such as that of Frotair. And when the pope produced a
grant of Charles the Bald, bestowing the abbey of St. Denys on the Roman see,
they met him with a positive denial that the king could alienate the
possessions of the crown.
John was greatly provoked by Hincmar’s steady
resistance to the pretensions of Rome; and some of the archbishop’s enemies now
took advantage of this feeling to annoy him by bringing forward his nephew,
who, after having been imprisoned and banished, had at last been blinded by
order of Charles on account of his connection with an invasion from the side of
Germany. The unfortunate man was led into the place of assembly, and petitioned
for a restoration to his see. But the pope, besides that he may have been afraid
to venture on a step so offensive to the metropolitan of Reims, was restrained
by the circumstance that he had confirmed the deposition of the younger
Hincmar, and had consecrated his successor, Hildenulf.
He therefore only in so far favoured the petition as to give the deposed bishop
leave to sing mass, and to assign him a pension out of the revenues of Laon,
while he refused to accept the resignation of Hildenulf,
who alleged that his health disqualified him for the performance of his duties.
The enemies of the elder Hincmar, however, were resolved to make the most of
the matter as a triumph over him; they arrayed the blind man in episcopal
robes, and, after having with great ceremony presented him to the pope, led him
into the cathedral, where he bestowed his benediction on the peopled. It does
not appear what answer the pope obtained to his request for assistance; but it
is certain that no assistance was sent.
John had conceived the idea of carrying his claim to
the power of bestowing the empire yet further by choosing a person whose
elevation should be manifestly due to the papal favour alone—Boso, viceroy of
Provence, who had gained his friendship on occasion of his visit to France. The
project, however, was found impossible, nor was the pope more successful in an
attempt to secure the kingdom of Italy for his candidate. But, on the death of
Lewis the Stammerer, Boso was chosen by a party of bishops and nobles as king
of Provence, which was then revived as a distinct sovereignty; and it
would seem that a belief of the pope’s support contributed to his
election, although John soon after wrote to the archbishop of Vienne, reproving
him for having used the authority of Rome in behalf of Boso, whom the pope
denounces as a disturber of the kingdom. John died in December 882; it is said
that some of his own relations administered poison to him, and, finding that it
did not work speedily, knocked out his brains with a mallet.
In the same month died the great champion of the
Frankish church. Towards the end of his life Hincmar had had a serious dispute
with Lewis III as to the appointment of a bishop to Beauvais. In answer to the
king’s profession of contempt for a subject who attempted to interfere with his
honour, the archbishop used very strong language as to the relations of the
episcopal and the royal powers. He tells him that bishops may ordain kings, but
kings cannot consecrate bishops; and that the successors of the apostles must
not be spoken of as subjects. “As the Lord said, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I
have chosen you’, so may I say in my degree, ‘You have not chosen me to the
prelacy of the church, but I, with my colleagues and the other faithful ones of
God, have chosen you to be governor of the kingdom, under the condition of duly
keeping the laws’.” Hincmar was at length compelled to leave his city by the
approach of a devastating force of Northmen. He set out m a litter, carrying
with him the relics of St. Remigius, and died at Epernay, on the 21st of
December. The Annals of St. Bertin, which are the most valuable record of the
period, are supposed to have been written by him from the year 861 to within a
month of his death.
The first and second successors of John in the papacy,
Marinus (A.D. 882) and Adrian III. (A.D. 884), appear to have been chosen
without the imperial licence, and by means of the German interests. On the
death of Adrian, which took place as he was on his way to Germany in 885,
Stephen V was consecrated without any application for the consent of the
emperor, Charles the Fat; but Charles expressed great indignation at the
omission, and had already taken measures for deposing the pope, when a Roman
legate arrived at the imperial court, and succeeded in appeasing him by
exhibiting a long list of bishops, clergy, and nobles who had shared in the
election.
Charles the Fat, a younger son of Lewis the German,
had received the imperial crown from John VIII in 881, and, by the deaths of
other princes, had gradually become master of the whole Carolingian empire. But
his reign was disastrous; in 887 he was deposed by Arnulf, an illegitimate son
of his brother Carloman; and, after having been supported for some months by
alms, he died in the following year—whether of disease or by violence is
uncertain. The popular feeling as to this unfortunate prince, the last legitimate
descendant of Charlemagne, may be inferred from the tone in which he is spoken
of by the annalists of the time. They tenderly dwell on his virtues and amiable
qualities; they express a trust that the sufferings which he patiently bore in
this world may be found to have prepared his way to a better inheritance; it is
even said that at his death heaven was seen to open, and to receive his soul.
CHAPTER III.THE GREEK CHURCH—PHOTIUS. AD. 843-898.
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