The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I. T. W. Allies

"Rome's ending seemed the ending of a world. If this our earth had in the vast sea sunk, Save one black ridge whereon I sat alone, Such wreck had seemed not greater. It was gone, That empire last, sole heir of all the empires, Their arms, their arts, their letters, and their laws. The fountains of the nether deep are burst, The second deluge comes. And let it come! The God who sits above the waterspouts Remains unshaken." —A. de Vere, Legends and Records—"Death of St. Jerome".

I ended the last chapter by drawing out that series of events in the Church's internal constitution and of changes in the external world of action outside and independent of the Church which combined in one result the exhibition to all and the public acknowledgment by the Church of the Primacy given by our Lord to St. Peter, and continued to his successors in the See of Rome. I showed St. Leo as exercising this Primacy by annulling the acts of an Ecumenical Council, the second of Ephesus, legitimately called and attended by his own legates, because it had denied a tenet of what St. Leo declared in a letter sent to the bishops and accepted by them to be the Christian faith upon the Incarnation itself. I showed him supported by the Church in that annulment, by the eastern episcopate, which attended the Council of Chalcedon, and by the eastern emperor, Marcian. Again, I showed him confirming the doctrinal decrees of the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, which followed the Council annulled by him, while he reversed and disallowed certain canons which had been irregularly passed. This he did because they were injurious to that constitution of the Church which had come down from the Apostles to his own time. And this act of his, also, I showed to be accepted by the bishop of Constantinople, who was specially affected, and by the eastern emperor, and by the episcopate: and also that the confirmation of doctrine on the one hand, and the rejection of canons on the other, were equally accepted. I also showed this great Council in its Synodical Letter to the Pope acknowledging spontaneously that very position of the Pope which the Popes had always set forth as the ground of all the authority which they claimed. The Council of Chalcedon addressed St. Leo "as entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the Vine". But the Vine in the universal language of the Fathers betokened the whole Church of God. And the Council refers the confirmation of its acts to the Pope in the same document in which it asserts that the guardianship of the Vine was given to him by the Saviour Himself. This expression, "by the Saviour Himself," means that it was not given to him by the decree of any Council representing the Church. It is a full acknowledgment that the promises made to Peter, and the Pastorship conferred upon him, descended to his successor in the See of Rome. It is a full acknowledgment; for how else was St. Leo entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the Vine? Those who so addressed him were equally bishops with himself; they equally enjoyed the one indivisible episcopate, "of which a part is held by each without division of the whole".[3] But this one, beside and beyond that, was charged with the whole—the Vine itself. This one point is that in which St. Peter went beyond his brethren, by the special gift and appointment of the Saviour Himself. The words, then, of the Council contain a special acknowledgment that the line of Popes after a succession of four hundred years sat in the person of Leo on the seat of St. Peter, with St. Peter's one sovereign prerogative.

It is requisite, I think, distinctly to point out that Christians, whoever they are, provided only that they admit, as confessing belief in any one of the three creeds, the Apostolic, the Nicene, or the Athanasian, they do admit, that there is one holy Catholic Church, commit a suicidal act in denying the Primacy as acknowledged by the Church at the Council of Chalcedon. For such a denial destroys the authority of the Church herself both in doctrine and discipline for all subsequent time. If the Church, in declaring St. Leo to be entrusted by our Lord with the guardianship of the Vine, erred; if she asserted a falsehood, or if she favoured an usurpation, how can she be trusted for any maintenance of doctrine, for any administration of sacraments, for any exercise of authority? This consideration does not touch those who believe in no Church at all. They are in the position of that individual whom the great Constantine recommended to take a ladder and mount to heaven by himself. But it touches all who profess to believe in an episcopate, in councils, in sacraments, in an organised Church, in authority deposited in that Church, and, finally, in history and in historical Christianity. To all such it may surely be said, as the simplest enunciation of reasoning, that they cannot profess belief in the Church which the Creed proclaims while they accept or reject its authority as they please. Or to localise a general expression: A man does not follow the doctrine of St. Augustine if he accepts his condemnation of Pelagius, but denies that unity of the Church in maintaining which St. Augustine spent his forty years of teaching. The action of all such persons in the eyes of the world without amounts to this, that by denying the Primacy they disprove the existence of the Church. Their negation goes to the profit of total unbelief. Asserters of the Church's division are pioneers of infidelity, for who can believe in what has fallen? or is the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ a kingdom divided against itself? They who maintain schism generate agnostics.

But I was prevented on a former occasion by want of space from dwelling with due force upon some circumstances of St. Leo's life. These are such as to make his time an era. I was occupied during a whole volume with the attempt to set forth in some sort the action of St. Peter's See upon the Greek and Roman world from the day of Pentecost to the complete recognition of the Universal Pastorship of Peter as inherited by the Roman Pontiff in the person of St. Leo.

I approach now a further development of this subject. I go forward to treat of the Papacy, deprived of all temporal support from the fall of the western empire, taking up the secular capital into a new spiritual Rome, and creating a Christendom out of the northern tribes who had subverted the Roman empire.

There

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