Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III. Allies Thomas William
the pastor who is now declared to rule them, so that failing, declining, surrendering no whit of the things which they have writtenly professed in the sight of our Lord and his holy Angels, they may, together with my humility, receive the crown of justice belonging to the orthodox faith from the hand of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. As for this my poor body, the Lord Himself will care as it pleases Him to order, whether for sorrows without end or for moderate relief. For the Lord is at hand, and for what am I solicitous? I hope in His mercy that He will not long delay to finish my course, as He has appointed.”
The “present pastor,” whom Pope Martin thus seems to recognise was Pope Eugenius, elected at Rome in his lifetime, through dread, it is said, of the clergy there that the Emperor Constans II. would force upon them some Monothelite of his own to sit in the See of Peter.
The last scene is thus described, as appended to the foregoing narrative: —
“The most holy thrice blessed Apostolical, Martin the Pope, a true confessor and martyr of Christ our God, died in his banishment in the Crimea, according to his own petition to our Lord God, offered to Him with tears at the moment that he disembarked and trod that land – that is, that in it he might finish his life, fighting the good fight, finishing his course of martyrdom, keeping the good faith, on the 16th September, the day on which in the year's course the most precious and blessed memory is kept of the martyr Euphemia, guardian of the orthodox faith. He was buried about a stadium outside the walls of the city of Cherson, in the Church of Our Lady, the most chaste, immaculate, most excellent of all creatures, the fullest of grace, the maker and giver of joy, the ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of God. By the intercessions of which Virgin and confessor may Christ our true God and Saviour, who came forth from her for the human race in a manner ineffable and without seed, guard and protect us, and all faithful hearers, and all the people whom He has acquired unto sincere faith and practice, in peace and charity, and all justice to the end.”
So Pope Martin I. gave up his life for the faith of Christ and for the independence of the Church, and no less for that guardianship of both which is vested in the Holy See. For he was thus treated because he held a Council at the Lateran expressly condemning an imperial document of the reigning sovereign called a Typus, and as Pope placed it under anathema, and published his Encyclical “to the whole sacred plenitude of the Church”. And he was condemned as a traitor, exactly repeating the passion of his Lord, as he sat in the seat of him to whom our Lord said, Follow thou Me. And further, he followed his great predecessor, Pope Clement I., the personal friend both of St. Peter and St. Paul, and the third successor of St. Peter, dying in the Crimea, where St. Clement died by command of the great heathen emperor Trajan, as St. Martin died by command of Constans II., a successor of Constantine, and by his office as “Christian prince and Roman Emperor” the first son and defender of the Church.
Chapter III. Heraclius Betrays The Faith, And Cuts His Empire In Two
We left the emperor Heraclius carrying back the true Cross in triumph to Jerusalem from its captivity under the Persian fire-worshipper, whose empire he had wounded to death. This was in the year 629, in the pontificate of Honorius, and in that act the emperor seated at Byzantium, on the throne of Constantine, at the head of the empire which was the proper creation of Constantine, seemed to have made himself the champion of the faith which is embodied in the Cross. Had Heraclius then died it would have been with a halo not only of human but of Christian glory surrounding his head. But he survived during twelve years in which his inertness, considered by some to be unexplained, suffered the eastern empire to undergo irreparable losses. These, moreover, came from a foe of whose mere existence he was indeed conscious, but of whom he had no fear at the time of that triumphal entry into Jerusalem. An obscure Arabian raider was striving to gain a mastery among some savage tribes in that little known peninsula. The lord of the golden city, seated as queen of Europe and Asia on broad-flowing Hellespont, would hardly deign to cast his eyes upon an incursion of southern robbers, made on an empire which for three hundred years had been watching war-clouds big with tempests from the north, or matching itself with difficulty against the restored Sassanid kingdom. This at last was beaten down. Might not Constantinople hail in security the return of an emperor who had conquered Persia? But we, looking back over the ages, may think that the act of Heraclius replacing the Cross in the Holy City and in the church which Constantine had built over the sepulchre of Christ may be called with much truth the last act of the real Cæsarean empire, inasmuch as during the twelve succeeding years it lost for ever its greatest provinces to the very foe whose advent as a conqueror Heraclius had not even suspected.
We have now to follow briefly one of the greatest revolutions which has ever occurred in human affairs. It is a revolution which not merely sets up one kingdom instead of another, or alters the persons of individual rulers; but which changes human society to its very depths, provides a different standard of morals, and, so far as it succeeds, but only so far, reverses the course of Christian civilisation, and undoes in certain countries the greatest conquests which the Christian Church had obtained for the good of the human race. Not States only are changed, but fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters: in fine, Græco-Roman heathenism has disappeared, but instead of it arises a religion borne on the shoulders of a temporal rule, and a legislation compared with which in certain respects that old heathenism was pure and benignant. The revolution reaches in fact man's belief in the nature of God Himself: and a change of belief in the nature of God involves a change in all His relations to His moral creatures, and in their relations to each other. The creature in all action reproduces what it holds concerning the Creator. The religion of self-sacrifice springs from a God who sacrifices Himself: the religion of self-indulgence from a God from whose worship sacrifice has been expunged.
It appears that even before the triumphal entry of Heraclius into Jerusalem with the recovered cross he had met in the Persian campaigns, in 622 or 623, with a certain bishop named Cyrus, then holding the see of Phasis, in Armenia. But Cyrus himself had for years before been in communication with Sergius, the powerful patriarch of Constantinople, the guide and inspirer of the emperor. Sergius had held the see of the capital since the year 610, in which the accession of Heraclius took place. It had been all along his dream to reconcile the various monophysite sects which troubled his master's empire. In the political point of view such a reconciliation could not but appear very important. In Egypt alone the Monophysites numbered about six millions, against three hundred thousand orthodox. How deeply their national feeling was mixed up with their heresy is shown by the name of Melchites or Royalists, which they gave to their opponents. The patriarch Sergius and the emperor Heraclius fell upon the device of gaining the heretical party, not only in Egypt, but in the Eastern empire generally, to at least an outward union with the orthodox by introducing the formula “One Operation” as a theological expression for the acts of our Lord. St. John of Damascus describes in his treatise on heresies the 99th as that of the Monothelites “who derived their origin from Cyrus of Alexandria, and their strength from Sergius of Constantinople. These men maintained two Natures in Christ, and one Person, but assert one Will and one Operation, by which they destroy the duality of natures, and strongly adhere to the doctrines of Apollinarius.” Now Sergius, uniting great ability and strong character to his position as bishop of the capital city and minister of the Emperor Heraclius, dominated his mind. Heraclius exerted himself greatly to disseminate the formulary of these two patriarchs. His purpose was that of drawing together his own distracted empire. This purpose of Heraclius is carried back so far at least as the year 628. Nay, at the beginning of his campaign against the Persians he recommended it. How much more when by the peace of the year 628 he recovered the provinces which had been taken from him. It would seem that the faltering of Heraclius in the faith, which he was willing to subject to a deceptive compromise the doctrine of the incarnation itself, was coincident in time with the opening of the Mohammedan era, the hegira or flight of Mohammed from Mecca, which marks his assumption of the claim to propagate by force a conquering religion. That claim was in a few years to cost Heraclius the half of his empire. It is certain that about the year 630 he promoted Cyrus to be patriarch of Alexandria. He also put a certain Athanasius of like doctrine into the see of Antioch, and thus three patriarchal sees at once were in favour of the heresy. And Sergius wrote to Pope Honorius commending it as a wonderful mode of restoring unity to the Church in the East.
Cyrus drew up nine heads of doctrine, by which he thought that he had reconciled the Theodosians