The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I. T. W. Allies
alike trampled out by the northern pirates Hengist and Horsa, and successive broods of their like. The Franks, still pagan, had advanced from the north of Gaul to its centre, destroyers as yet of the faith which they were afterwards to embrace. What did the Pope still possess in these populations? The common people, a portion of the local proprietors, and the Catholic bishops who had in him their common centre, as he in them men regarded with veneration by the still remaining Catholic population.
In all this there is one fact so remarkable as to claim special mention. How had it happened that the Catholic faith was considered throughout the West the mark of the Roman subject; and the Arian misbelief the mark of the Teuton invader and governor? Theodosius had put an end to the official Arianism of the East, which had so troubled the empire, and so attacked the Primacy in the period between Constantine and himself. During all that time the Arian heresy had no root in the West. But the emperor Valens, when chosen as a colleague by his brother Valentinian I., in 364, was counted a Catholic. A few years later he fell under the influence of Eudoxius, who had got by his favour the see of Byzantium. This man, one of the worst leaders of the Arians, taught and baptised Valens, and filled him with his own spirit; and Valens, when he settled the Goths in the northern provinces by the Danube, stipulated that they should receive the Arian doctrine. Their bishop and great instructor Ulphilas had been deceived, it is said, into believing that it was the doctrine of the Church. This fatal gift of a spurious doctrine the Goth received in all the energy of an uninstructed but vigorous will. As the leader of the northern races he communicated it to them. A Byzantine bishop had poisoned the wells of the Christian faith from which the great new race of the future was to drink, and when Byzantium succeeded in throwing Alaric upon the West, all the races which followed his lead brought with them the doctrine which Ulphilas had been deceived into propagating as the faith of Christ. So it happened that if the terrible overthrow of Valens in 378 by the nation which he had deceived brought his persecution with his reign to an end in the East, yet through his act Arianism came into possession, a century later, of all but one of the newly set up thrones in the West.
In truth, at the time the western empire fell the Catholic Church was threatened with the loss of everything which, down to the time of St. Leo, she had gained. For the triumph which Constantine's conversion had announced, for the unity of faith which her own Councils had maintained from Nicæa to Chalcedon, she seemed to have before her subjection to a terrible despotism in the East, extinction by one dominant heresy in the West. For here it was not a crowd of heresies which surrounded her, but the secular power at Rome, at Carthage, at Toulouse and Bordeaux, at Seville and Barcelona, spoke Arian. Who was to recover the Goth, the Vandal, the Burgundian, the Sueve, the Aleman, the Ruge, from that fatal error? Moreover, her bounds had receded. Saxon and Frank had largely swept away the Christian faith in their respective conquests. Who was to restore it to them? The Rome which had planted her colonies through these vast lands as so many fortresses, first of culture and afterwards of faith, was now reduced to a mere municipium herself. The very senate, with whose name empire had been connected for five hundred years, at the bidding of a barbarous leader of mercenaries serving for plunder, sent back the symbols of sovereignty to the adventurer, whoever he might be, who sat by corruption or intrigue on the seat of Constantine in Nova Roma.
This thought leads me to endeavour more accurately to point out the light thrown upon the Papal power by the various relations in which it stood at different times to the temporal governments with which it had to deal.
The practical division of the Roman empire in the fourth century, ensuing upon the act of Constantine in forming a new capital of that empire in the East, made the Church no longer subject to one temporal government. The same act tested the spiritual Primacy of the Church. It called it forth to a larger and more complicated action. I have in a former volume followed at considerable length the series of events the issue of which was, after Arian heretics had played upon eastern jealousy and tyrannical emperors during fifty years, to strengthen the action of the Primacy. But assuredly had that Primacy been artificial, or made by man, the division of interests ensuing upon the political disjunction of the East and West would have destroyed it. Julius and Liberius and Damasus would not have stood against Constantius and Valens if the heart of the Church had not throbbed in the Roman Primacy. Still more apparent does this become in the next fifty years, wherein the overthrow of the western empire begins. Then the sons of Theodosius, instead of joining hand with hand and heart with heart against the forces of barbarism, which their father had controlled and wielded, were seduced by their ministers into antagonism with each other. Byzantium worked woe to the elder sister of whom she was jealous. Under the infamous treasons of Rufinus and Eutropius, the words might have been uttered with even fuller truth than in their original application—
"Suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit".
Thus Alaric first took Rome. But he did not take the Primacy. Pope Innocent lost no particle of his dignity or influence by the violation of Rome's secular dignity. It was only seven years after that event when St. Augustine and the two great African Councils acknowledged his Principate in the amplest terms. The heresy of Pelagius and the schism of Donatus were stronger than the sword of Alaric. And only a few years later, when a most fearful heresy, broached by the Byzantine bishop, led to the assembly in which then for the first time the Church met in general Council since Nicæa, the most emphatic acknowledgment of the Primacy as seated in the Roman bishop by descent from Peter was given by bishops, the subjects of an emperor very jealous of the West, to a Pope who could not live securely in Rome itself.
In all these hundred years it is seen how the division of the empire enlarged and strengthened the action of the Primacy. But this it did because the Primacy was divine. The events just referred to, but described elsewhere at length, would have destroyed it had it not been divine.
But this course of things, which is seen in action from the Nicene to the Chalcedonic Council, comes out with yet stronger force from the moment when Rome loses all temporal independence. We may place this moment at the date of its capture by Genseric. But it continues from that time. The events which took place at Rome in the twenty-one following years, the nine sovereigns put up and deposed, the subjection to barbarous leaders of hireling free-lances, the worse plundering of Ricimer seventeen years after that of Genseric—these were events grieving to the heart St. Leo and his successors; but yet not events at Rome alone—the whole condition of things in East and West which Pope Simplicius had to look upon outside of his own city, despotic emperors in the East, with bishops bending to their will, allowing the apostolic hierarchy to be displaced, and the apostolic doctrine determined by secular masters; Teuton settlements in the West ruled by the heresy most inimical to the Church; the Catholic population reduced in numbers and lowered in social position; whole countries seized by pagans, and forced at once into barbarism and infidelity—in the midst of all these the Pope stood: his generals were the several bishops of captured cities, whose places were assaulted by heretical rivals, supported by their kings. Gaul, Spain, Britain, Africa, Illyricum, Italy itself, no longer parts of one government, but ruled by enemies, any or all of these would have rejected the Roman Primacy if it had not come to them with the strongest warrant both of the Church's past history and her present consciousness.
Such was the new world in which the Pope stood from the year 455; and he stood in it for three hundred years. The testimony which such times bear is a proof superadded to the words of Fathers and the decrees of Councils.
But there is one other point in the political situation on which a word must be said.
From the time named, the Roman Primacy is the one sole fixed point in the West. All else is fluctuating and transitional. To the Pope the bishops, subject in each city to barbarian insolence, cling as their one unfailing support. Without him they would be Gothic, or Vandal, or Burgundian, or Sueve, or Aleman, or Turciling—with him and in him they are Catholic. Let me express, in the words of another, what is contained in this fact. The Church, says Guizot, "at the commencement of the fifth century, had its government, a body of clergy, a hierarchy, which apportioned the different functions of the clergy, revenues, independent means of action, rallying points which suit a great society, councils provincial, national, general, the habit of arranging in common the society's affairs. In a word, at this epoch Christianity was not only a religion but a Church. If it had not been a Church, I do not know what would have become