The Eighteen Christian Centuries. James White
of all the chief pastors of the Church, that we owe this solemn declaration against the pretensions of the ambitious John of Constantinople.
But Constantinople itself was about to fade from the minds of men. Dissatisfied with the opposition to its supremacy, the Eastern Church became separated in interest and discipline and doctrine from its Western branch. The intercourse between the two was hostile, and in a short time nearly ceased. The empire also was so deeply engaged in defending its boundaries against the Persians and other enemies in Asia, that it took small heed of the proceedings of its late dependencies, the newly-founded kingdoms in Europe. It is probable that the refined and ostentatious court of Justinian, divided as it was into fanatical parties about some of the deepest and some of the most unimportant mysteries of the faith, and contending with equal bitterness about the charioteers of the amphitheatre according as their colours were green or blue, looked with profound contempt on the struggles after better government and greater enlightenment of the rabble of Franks, and Lombards, and Burgundians, who had settled themselves in the distant lands of the West. The interior regulations of Justinian formed a strange contrast with the grandeur and success of his foreign policy. By his lieutenants Belisarius and Narses, he had reconquered the lost inheritance of his predecessors, and held in full sovereignty for a while the fertile shores of Africa, rescued from the debasing hold of the Vandals; he had cleared Italy of Ostrogoths, Spain even had yielded an unwilling obedience, and his name was reverenced in the great confederacy of the Germanic peoples who held the lands from the Atlantic eastward to Hungary, and from Marseilles to the mouth of the Elbe. But his home was the scene of every weakness and wickedness that can disgrace the name of man. Kept in slavish submission to his wife, he did not see, what all the rest of the world saw, that she was the basest of her sex, and a disgrace to the place he gave her. Beginning as a dancer at the theatre, she passed through every grade of infamy and vice, till the name of Theodora became a synonym for every thing vile and shameless. Yet this man, successful in war and politic in action, though contemptible in private life, had the genius of a legislator, and left a memorial of his abilities which extended its influence through all the nations which succeeded to any portion of the Roman dominion, and has shaped and modified the jurisprudence of all succeeding times. He was not so much a maker of new laws, as a restorer and simplifier of the old; and as the efforts of Justinian in this direction were one of the great features by which the sixth century is distinguished, it will be useful to devote a page or two to explain in what his work consisted.
The Roman laws had become so numerous and so contradictory that the administration of justice was impossible, even where the judges were upright and intelligent. The mere word of an emperor had been considered a decree, and legally binding for all future time. No lapse of years seems to have brought a law once promulgated into desuetude. The people, therefore, groaned under the uncertainty of the statutes, which was further increased by the innumerable glosses or interpretations put upon them by the lawyers. All the decisions which had ever been given by the fifty-four emperors, from Adrian to Justinian, were in full force. All the commentaries made upon them by advocates and judges, and all the sentences delivered in accordance with them, were contained in thousands of volumes; and the result was, when Justinian came to the throne in 526, that there was no point of law on which any man could be sure. He employed the greatest jurisconsults of that time, Trebonian and others, to bring some order into the chaos; and such was the diligence of the commissioners, that in fourteen months they produced the Justinian Code in twelve books, containing a condensation of all previous constitutions. A.D. 527.In the course of seven years, two hundred laws and fifty judgments were added by the emperor himself, and a new edition of the Code was published in 534. |A.D. 533.|Under the name of Institutes appeared a new manual for the legal students in the great schools of Constantinople, Berytus, and Rome, where the principles of Roman law are succinctly laid down. The third of his great works was one for the completion of which he gave Trebonian and his assessors ten years. It is called the Digest or Pandects of Justinian, because in it were digested, or put in order in a general collection, the best decisions of the courts, and the opinions and treatises of the ablest lawyers. All previous codes were ransacked, and two thousand volumes of legal argument condensed; and in three years the indefatigable law-reformers published their work, wherein three million leading judgments were reduced to a hundred and fifty thousand. Future confusion was guarded against by a commandment of the emperor abolishing all previous laws and making it penal to add note or comment to the collection now completed. The sentences delivered by the emperor, after the appearance of the Pandects, were published under the name of the Novellæ; and with this great clearing-out of the Augean stable of ancient law, the salutary labours of Trebonian came to a close. In those laws are to be seen both the virtues and the vices of their origin. They sprang from the wise liberality of a despot, and handle the rights of subjects, in their relation to each other, with the equanimity and justice of a power immeasurably raised above them all. But the unlimited supremacy of the ruler is maintained as the sole foundation for the laws themselves. So we see in these collections, and in the spirit which they have spread over all the codes which have taken them for their model, a combination of humanity and probity in the civil law, with a tendency to exalt to a ridiculous excess the authority of the governing power.
This has been a century of wonderful revolutions. We have seen the kingdom of the Ostrogoths take the lead in Europe under the wise government of Theodoric the Great. We have seen it overthrown by an army of very small size, consisting of the very forces they had so recently triumphed over in every battle; and finally, after the victories over them of Belisarius and Narses, we have seen the last small remnant of their name removed from Italy altogether and eradicated from history for all future time. But, strange as this reassertion of the Greek supremacy was, the rapidity of its overthrow was stranger still. A new people came upon the stage, and established the Lombard power. The empire contracted itself within its former narrow bounds, and kept up the phantom of its superiority merely by the residence of an Exarch, or provincial governor, at Ravenna. The fiction of its power was further maintained by the Emperor’s official recognition of certain rulers, and his ratification of the election of the Roman bishops. But in all essentials the influence had departed from Constantinople, and the Western monarchies were separated from the East.
In the Northwest, the confederacy of the Franks, which had consolidated into one immense and powerful kingdom under Clovis, became separated, weakened, and converted into open enemies under his degenerate successors.
But as the century drew to a close, a circumstance occurred, far away from the scene of all these proceedings, which had a greater influence on human affairs than the reconquest of Italy or the establishment of France. This was the marriage of a young man in a town of Arabia with the widow of his former master. In 564 this young man was born in Mecca, where his family had long held the high office of custodiers and guardians of the famous Caaba, which was popularly believed to be the stone that covered the grave of Abraham. But when he was still a child his father died, and he was left to the care of his uncle. The simplicity of the Arab character is shown in the way in which the young noble was brought up. Abu Taleb initiated him in the science of war and the mysteries of commerce. He managed his horse and sword like an accomplished cavalier, and followed the caravan as a merchant through the desert. Gifted with a high poetical temperament, and soaring above the grovelling superstitions of the people surrounding him, he used to retire to meditate on the great questions of man’s relation to his Maker, which the inquiring mind can never avoid. Meditation led to excitement. He saw visions and dreamed dreams. He saw great things before him, if he could become the leader and lawgiver of his race. But he was poor and unknown. His mistress Cadijah saw the aspirations of her noble servant, and offered him her hand. He was now at leisure to mature the schemes of national regeneration and religious improvement which had occupied him so long, and devoted himself more than ever to study and contemplation. This was Mohammed, the Prophet of Islam, who retired in 594 to perfect his scheme, and whose empire, before many years elapsed, extended from India to Spain, and menaced Christianity and Europe at the same time from the Pyrenees and the Danube.
SEVENTH CENTURY
Nennius, (620,) Bede, (674-735,) Aldhelm, Adamnanus.
THE SEVENTH