THE structure of the Christian church in these centuries hinged, as has been said above (pp. 68–69), on territorial responsibility and jurisdiction: the bishop had a paternal jurisdiction over his see, he was grouped with other bishops in a province under the metropolitan, and the metropolitans looked for guidance in emergency to some see, patriarchate or archbishopric, which had, in most cases, converted that region by its missionaries. The patriarchates, that is, had all been great missionary sees in the early days of Christianity: and, as was natural in such cases, they had all been cities of world-wide importance. Jerusalem was an exception: but it had been the first centre of Christian expansion: Antioch was the capital of the middle east when St Paul started on his missionary journeys: Alexandria was the great port of the eastern trade: Rome was the capital of the west. It is accepted that, in the late Roman empire and that of the new barbarian kingdoms, Christian organization followed secular: the bishop had his see in a civitas and ruled the secular province (or the territorium in the west) administered by the civitas. Metropolitan jurisdiction also followed secular; and if the secular authority divided a province, erecting two cities to the rank of provincial capitals, the church also provided two bishops and two sees. But all this acceptance of geographical delimitation as a thing indifferent, involved indeed by the need to supply spiritual care for large population groups, does not in the least explain the Christian conception of the church. The historian will not expect to understand this without regard to the climate of opinion of the day: to the beliefs held by all Christians, and so generally that, in the various crises and disputes of Christian history, all conceded them as a common standing ground.
When the church came up out of the catacombs and was made a legal religion by the edict of Milan in 313, the great disputes over the definition of the Christian faith still lay ahead: but certain institutions and a certain conception of the church, were already taken for granted. The church was the body of Christ, in whom he still lived and worked, and co-extensive with the whole body of Christians, excluding heretics, who were not accepted as Christians at all. The church, in the language of theologians, had four marks: she was one, holy, catholic and apostolic. All Christians, whether in Persia or Armenia (for there were already Christian missionaries there), the Greek east or the Latin west, had the same faith, sacraments and church order: they were ruled by bishops; they were one, though in the difficult communications of the first three centuries, a local church might have little knowledge of distant churches. Contact was rather by travellers and missionaries and the letters they brought than by a diffused rule of the church, even by the patriarchates. In emergency, however, unity was maintained by synods or councils of bishops: after Constantine’s day, by the great universal or oecumenical councils.
All thus confessed one church, and all similarly confessed her holy: the disciplinary canons of councils struggled to put in practice a moral ideal. It is still, in fact, part of the climate of opinion of the day that the church should be holy.
The other two marks of the church are today, however, less generally understood. The church was Catholic, as holding the faith ‘once for all delivered to the saints’, as well as held in the famous phrase of Vincent of Lérins ‘always, everywhere, by all men’.
And she was ‘apostolic’, as holding the faith delivered to the apostles, and handed on by their successors. This fourth ‘mark’ of the church is of great historical importance for the understanding of her structure.
The first teachers of the faith, as all held, were the apostles, who had been taught by the Lord himself in Galilee, and who knew his mind and were his friends. The Christian faith was the apostolic teaching, passed on, in the main, verbally. The Christian scriptures were not written when the apostles set out from Jerusalem to teach in the year A.D. 33, and though by the end of the first century the books of the New Testament had been written, so had other Christian writings and there was as yet no canon of scripture, no ‘Bible’. (The first written evidence of a Christian canon of scripture, of the setting of certain books within the ‘Bible’ and the leaving of others outside, is that of the list in the Muratorian fragment, which certainly dates from the lifetime of the learned anti-pope, Hippolytus, d. A.D. 230, and may have been his work). For over 200 years, that is, there was no Bible as final authority about the Christian faith, and for much later than that, written scriptures were so costly and rare, that the plain man in process of being converted to Christianity could certainly not have studied them. He lived in a world, for five or six centuries at least, where knowledge was passed on orally: if he desired to be secure that the faith he was being taught was, in fact, that taught by the Lord in Galilee, his only guarantee was security about his teacher. Many strange religions penetrated the west from the east in these early centuries, and they were all passed on orally. Men lived in a world of oral information, not of books. The Greco-Roman merchant might scribble his accounts on his papyrus: the greatest Christian teachers wrote letters to the churches they had founded and left, and they were treasured and read later, by the church to whom they had been sent: but the general means of Christian instruction was not that of the written word. The common man did not read the Christian books, and this was not strange because he did not read any books. Books were scarce and precious. Even the rhetors, lecturing in the public scolae, taught orally, commenting on texts which they dictated orally to their scholars. The sign of the magisterium, the office of teacher, was the chair on which he sat to teach, his scholars standing in a circle round him, and not the representation of some learned tome. The Roman empire was a great user of the written word for contracts and legal business: but even the Roman empire could only teach orally.
Hence it came about that the Christian faith was passed on orally, by the apostles and first Christian missionaries, to those who succeeded them in the care of the local churches, and the safeguarding of this handed-on faith, this paradosis, was the chief charge and duty of these Christian shepherds. The Greek paradosis (the Latin ‘tradition’) was the faith itself, not any mere outlying region of the faith, and for the first two centuries there could be no appeal from the paradosis to a canon of scripture: each great church used certain scriptural books, but they were guaranteed as in accordance with the faith by the local paradosis, and not vice versa. The third century saw a certain conflict between views as to the canonical scriptures held by the great churches, and out of this conflict finally emerged the recognized canon; but for 300 years the faith had been safeguarded by the paradosis. This paradosis was from the founder of the church to the ‘supervisor’, episcopos, bishop who had succeeded him, and who had transmitted it in turn. Hence the importance of the office of bishop. In the days of persecution the bishop held no office of secular importance; he was, it is true, the great minister of the sacraments in his see, for as yet only he baptized (after long instructions by himself or his presbyters), only he ordained his own clergy, and he was the normal celebrant of the liturgy, but his chief charge was the defence of the faith committed to him, and that to the point of martyrdom.
Hence it followed that each church guarded carefully the memory of its succession of bishops from the founder of the see, in which doctrinal orthodoxy was as important as sacramental validity. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (†c. 190), when he wrote his Adversus haereses against the Gnostics, appealed to the original teaching of the apostles, as handed on in the paradoses of the churches of Jerusalem, Rome, Ephesus, etc., continuing:
Yet because it would be a very lengthy proceeding in a book such as this to set out the series of succession belonging to all the churches, we are proposing to show that the existing faith of that most noble, ancient and well-known church, founded and established at Rome by the two most famous apostles, Peter and Paul, the faith I say which it still holds, and which comes down to our time by means of a series of succession of bishops, is actually identical with the paradosis given by the apostles, that is, the faith proclaimed to all mankind.
The connexion of the bishop’s office with the paradosis appears in very early patristic writings; the Letter of Clement of Rome, of c. A.D. 95, speaks of the apostles as ‘taught the gospel for our sakes at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ … Having therefore received his instructions … they went forth with full conviction from the holy spirit and preached that the kingdom of God was soon to come. And so, as they preached in the country and in the town, they appointed the first fruits of their work to be episcopoi and deacons among them that should believe … No less did the apostles know that through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife over the dignity of a bishop’s office. For this very reason they appointed the aforesaid bishops and deacons and ordained that at their death their ministry should pass into the hands of other tried men.’ Polycarp, martyr and bishop of Smyrna, Irenaeus wrote, had been taught by the apostles and ‘conversed much with them who had seen our Lord … and these things he taught ever which he had learned from the apostles, which moreover the church handed down and which alone are true. He was a true witness of the apostolic paradosis’ The monarchical rule of the bishop in his see throughout the middle ages followed from this conception: as did the reverence to be paid to sees of apostolic foundation. A special magisterium attached to the see of Antioch, where Peter taught, to Alexandria where Mark, the disciple of Peter taught, and to Rome, where Peter and Paul, princes of the apostles, taught and were martyred.
Apostolic foundation did not in itself render a Christian see a patriarchate, or secure its survival. St John, as Irenaeus wrote, handed on at Ephesus the paradosis published by himself: but Ephesus could not send out missions on the scale to render itself a great mother see and patriarchate. The importance of Jerusalem waned, though the city remained a patriarchate. Antioch and Alexandria were great theology schools and centres of missions, the one to Syria, Armenia, Persia and even India, the other up the Nile valley, along the coast of north Africa, and to Ethiopia. Two other great churches not of apostolic foundation merited by their secular importance and zeal in the sending out of missions to be erected into patriarchates (if this could be without apostolic foundation): Constantinople and Seleukia-Ctesiphon.
The claim of the church of Constantinople to apostolic foundation was but tenuous: but from the time of its building in 336–339 and Constantine’s removal of his capital thither, it was in fact New Rome, the seat of government, and a great missionary church. Constantine’s conversion had meant the conversion of the Roman empire, and so great an apostolate, to the Greek theologians, merited for him the title of ‘equal to an apostle’, Isapostolos. New Rome was, in fact, Old Rome carried to the Golden Horn, and she carried with her, as it were, the grace of apostolic foundation. To this, however, the holder of St Peter’s see at Old Rome would never agree; though personally the pope was the emperor’s subject, yet it was the pope who held Peter’s chair, and in him alone Peter spoke. The council of Chalcedon, 451, in its 28th canon (following the 3rd canon of Constantinople, 381), declared Constantinople as New Rome equal in primacy and privilege to Old Rome: declared it, in fact, a patriarchate. The sees of Antioch and Alexandria subscribed the canon: but pope Leo the Great refused to accept it. Though unity was still preserved after Chalcedon, relations between the two primatial sees of east and west were uneasy. The chief cause of this uneasiness was, it is true, political. Old Rome and New Rome were, in a sense, rivals within the Roman empire, and their interests often interlocked, more especially in the provinces of Illyricum, which included the whole of Greece and Crete, and were claimed by the popes as part of the Roman patriarchate.
Christianity took its rise in a province near the limes of the Roman empire, and could, in fact, easily pass that limes and expand outside the empire to the east and south. From the Syriac church of Edessa, on the upper waters of the Euphrates, it spread into Persia (Iran), an autonomous state outside the empire, but federate and also Syriac speaking. The Iranian plateau, commanding the cross roads between west and east, and also the roads to the Caspian, to Mongolia, and to India, was a position of great strategic importance to a missionary church. Christianity spread along the Tigris and into all parts of the Persian empire without hindrance from its kings, and their Parthian successors after A.D. 226 offered asylum to Christians fleeing from persecution in the Roman empire. Under the Sassanid kings Christianity was usually treated with tolerance, though it never became the official religion of the kingdom, as it was in the Roman empire after the time of Constantine. The bishop of Seleukia-Ctesiphon, the royal residence, began early to claim a certain ascendancy over the other Persian sees; and a certain parallelism appears between the conversion of the barbarians within the Roman empire by the sees of Old and New Rome, and that of the heathen, including the Mazdaites, in the Persian empire and the east generally, by Seleukia-Ctesiphon.
The faith and the organization of the Persian church in no way differed from that of Christians within the Roman empire: bishops, metropolitans and, from 410, a quasi-patriarch ruled territorial sees and provinces. There was a certain consciousness of unity with the Christians ‘of the west’, i.e. within the Roman empire, and remembrance of the origin of the Persian church from Edessa. When in 410, at the famous synod which met at Seleukia-Ctesiphon, the primate of Persia adopted the title of katholikos, the canons of the council of Nicaea were formally accepted, and ecclesiastical appeal could still be made to the patriarchs of ‘the west’. In 424, however, the autocephalous (recognizing the authority of no mother church, but only of the canons of oecumenical councils) position of the church of Seleukia-Ctesiphon was further emphasized: ‘Easterners shall not complain of their own patriarch to the western patriarchs: any case that cannot be settled by him shall await the tribunal of Christ.’ Seleukia-Ctesiphon became, in fact, a patriarchate of the sees its first missionaries had converted: as the patriarch of Constantinople similarly came to preside over the bishops of Bulgaria, Roumania and Serbia.
All these eastern patriarchates cherished their right of independence, their autocephalia, and none were averse from the use of the vernacular of their converts for the scriptures and the mass; the churches of Armenia and Ethiopia were in a way to becoming similar, quasi-national churches. Where Greek or Persian missionaries converted pagans in a countryside not using Greek or Persian, no effort was made to teach them to use these tongues for Christian rites. The contrast in this respect with the missionaries of the Latin west arose, as it were, by accident, because the western missionaries found the pagan provincials using Latin generally, and even in their pagan cults. There was no case for using a language other than Latin. But this difference of liturgical language among the Greeks, Persians and their missionary sees, and the uniform use of Latin in the west, made for a subsequent division between Rome and Constantinople, rather than between the sees originally within the Roman empire and those outside.
Some space has thus been given to a description of the patriarchates, their origin and their concept of church order, because it represents the state and extent of the church at the mid-fifth century, when the church meant much more than the Latin west, and also because it explains the weakness of these distant, autocephalous churches under Muslim attack. Before Chalcedon, these churches were orthodox: but when this council condemned the Nestorian and Monophysite heresies, their leaders left the immediate rule of Constantinople for Antioch, Alexandria and (as imperial suppression became more searching) for yet more distant sees. The Syriac and Persian churches became largely Nestorian, and the Egyptian and Ethiopian churches Monophysite, before they were overrun by Islam.
Against this background, this regard for the faith as guaranteed by the paradosis of a great church to be apostolic, the rise of the Roman see to the effective rule of the whole western church, and its claim to primacy over the whole church, can be seen as a matter of Christian thought and acceptance, and not merely a result of historical circumstance. The climate of opinion accepted the Roman primacy in the west, as in the east the climate of opinion accepted the autocephalia of the great churches, within the limits of an orthodox holding of the apostolic faith.
To mention first, the theory of the Roman primacy, and then the circumstances contributing to the rise of papal power in the west:
The Roman claim to primacy in the church rested upon the apostolic foundation of the Roman see by the two greatest of the apostles, Peter and Paul; and upon the Petrine declaration of our Lord to Peter: Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meant. The above-mentioned letter of Clement (p. 168) appears to imply the apostolic foundation of the church at Rome, and was itself a letter of reprimand to the church at Corinth, implying at least a paternal supervision of that church. Ignatius of Antioch, writing c. 110–117, allowed to the Roman church a primacy of good work, a ‘presidency of love’, and spoke of her as ‘she who hath the presidency in the region of the Romans’. Irenaeus, writing c. 185, spoke of her as ‘the most great and ancient and universally known church, founded and established at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul’, and, elsewhere, of all Christians resorting to this church as to the most eminent of the great sees where the apostolic tradition was duly conserved; he was careful to give a list of bishops succeeding each other in the apostolic see. Cyprian also, bishop of Carthage (d. 258), wrote to the pope and clergy of Rome, as having a pre-eminence in matters of the faith, although he was careful to emphasize, both in word and deed, that this authority was not above, and separate from, that of the whole episcopate.
But above all, the work and writings of the statesman pope, Leo the Great (440–461), crystallized Latin theological thought about the primacy of Peter in the Petrine see. His words, addressed as sermons to great concourses gathered in St Peter’s basilica usually on the feast of the apostles, June 29, or some other great festivity, were echoed by later popes throughout the middle ages:
This gathering lacks not, I trust, the benevolent kindness and faithful love of Peter the apostle, nor does he leave unregarded your devotion, whose reverence has gathered you together. For he indeed rejoices in your love and welcomes in those who share in the honour bestowed on him the observance of that which the Lord commanded, and proves the ordered charity of the whole church, which embraces Peter in Peter’s see, and in the love of so great a shepherd grows not weary of the person of so unworthy a successor … In this manner, beloved, is today’s festival celebrated with a reasonable service, when in my humble self he is indeed honoured in whom abides the care of all the shepherds and of the flocks committed to them … This devotion is shown in the first place to him whom they know to be the head of this see and primate of all bishops … Peter ceases not to be head of his see, in that he has obtained unfailing fellowship with the eternal priest; that stability which he, being made a rock, has received from Christ the rock, he conveys to his successors; and when aught of stability is shown, there without doubt is seen the strength of the shepherd.
Within the context of a church whose bishops were successors of the apostles, the primacy of Peter among them followed from the text of the gospels. In the world of space and time and historical development, however, certain steps can be traced to the rise of papal power in the west, between the year A.D. 64 when, traditionally, Peter was crucified on the Vatican mount, and Paul beheaded on the road to Ostia (both in the Neronian persecutions), and the rule of Odovacar in Italy. Perhaps the first was the papacy of Victor I, c. 189–198, when the Greek-speaking church of Rome adopted Latin; the old Roman creed and half the inscriptions in the catacombs had been in Greek: early bishops of Rome had written in Greek. But now Victor wrote (minor) theological tracts in Latin, and his pontificate saw a general Latinizing of the Roman see, though the language of the mass at Rome continued Greek till the beginning of the fourth century. Nevertheless, a foreign religious sect in Rome now itself became Roman. The second landmark was the transfer of the seat of empire to New Rome under Constantine, which permanently removed the bishop of Rome from the overshadowing influence of the emperor. Moreover, the drift of Greeks Romewards towards the imperial court now changed to a drift eastwards to Constantinople, and Rome remained the bulwark of the Latin tradition. The work of Augustine, bishop of Hippo, may be taken as the third landmark (see p. 90), and that of pope Leo I, 440–461, as the fourth. The prestige of the Roman see grew, as Leo faced the barbarian invaders, Attila and Gaiseric, and as he protested against the decree of the council of Chalcedon equating the prestige and privilege of Constantinople with those of Rome. Moreover, he defended the papal jurisdiction in Illyricum, and asserted the papal primacy more effectively than any of his predecessors.
In view of the weight attached by Christians to the office of bishop and patriarch, the method of choice of these officers and its history is of importance. Even in the Letter of Clement of Rome reference is made to ‘strife over the dignity of a bishop’s office’. But what had been merely the affair of a local religious sect before the edict of Milan assumed political importance when Christianity became the state religion: a new factor appears to influence what had been a local choice, the wishes of emperor, barbarian king or local magistrate or chieftain. A bishop’s election, and still more, a papal election was sometimes complicated, more often simplified, by this overriding consideration. But before dealing with this subject of episcopal elections, something must be said briefly of the great popes between the days of Odovacar and Charlemagne.
Leo I had preached a lofty conception of the primacy of the Petrine see in the days of the failing empire of the west; Gelasius I, in a short but notable papacy (492–496), wrote of the relation of the secular and spiritual powers in Christendom in a manner to win acceptance down to the eleventh century or Hildebrandine reform. Gelasius was an African who had, however, long been a member of the Roman clergy, and become a theologian of some importance: he had written against the Monophysites and the Pelagians, and as pope, to secure the due training of the clergy, he wrote insisting on the observances of the ‘interstices’, or due intervals between the reception of the minor orders. He was pope while Theoderic was conquering north Italy from Odovacar, a time of violence, and his pontificate was unmarked by any concessions. In a letter to the emperor Anastasius I he wrote of the divine appointment of two powers to rule the world:
There are two, O august emperor, who share between them in chief the rule of the world: the sacred authority of the popes and the royal power. And of these two, the burden of the sacerdotes is the heavier, for they must render account for kings as for themselves in the day of judgment.
The word sacerdos at the time, as an offerer of holy things, is usually translated ‘priest’; but now and later was used above all of ‘bishop’, who alone, as yet, offered the holy mysteries. The priestly episcopal power, particularly in the see of Peter, is set over against the power of the emperor, recognized in the Greek east as also religious in character (see p. 146).
In the period following, the question of a Greek preponderance in the affairs of the church underlay the troubles of the successive pontificates. Anastasius II (496–498) showed himself entirely complaisant to the emperor Anastasius, whose orthodoxy was suspect; when he died, the party supporting the Latin tradition at Rome was ranged against the followers of Anastasius II. While the majority of the clergy elected the deacon (and therefore the right-hand man) of Gelasius, Symmachus, in the Lateran basilica, the Byzantinist section of the clergy and the majority of the senate acclaimed the archpriest Lawrence, who stood for a conciliatory policy to the emperor. King Theoderic, hearing of the disturbance, came to Rome and declared pope Symmachus (498–514) validly elected. Troubles continued, however, throughout his pontificate, over one of which, the question of the dating of Easter, Theoderic sided against Symmachus.
This question of the dating of Easter, which was to cause difficulties between the Celtic and Roman Christians later, hinged upon the mathematical difficulty of determining a calendar, when it was only known that a solar year consisted of 365 days and a fraction still undetermined. The church had laid down that Easter day should fall upon the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. In the east, the mathematicians of Alexandria made their calculations based upon a vernal equinox on 21 March; but at Rome the staunch upholders of the Latin tradition remained faithful to the calendar of Julius Caesar, which set the equinox at 25 March. Moreover, at Rome tradition disallowed the celebration of Easter before 25 March or after 21 April, a ruling unobserved in Alexandria. Again, to calculate the month (the lunar months) the Alexandrians were now using the cycle of Meton, a cycle of nineteen years, while the Romans used an older and less satisfactory cycle of eighty-four years. Thus Rome, calculating for the west, might arrive at an Easter date a week or even a month different from that of Alexandria, which calculated for the Greek east. In 501 Symmachus solemnized Easter, according to the Roman tradition, on 25 March, while the other Christian churches left it till 22 April. Theoderic commanded Symmachus’ presence at Ravenna, and, when he did not obey, sent an episcopal legate to Rome to review the old difficulties which had arisen again between Symmachus and Lawrence, certain charges against Symmachus, and this Easter question. The bishop, arriving at Rome, quashed the election claims of both Symmachus and Lawrence, and celebrated Easter all over again on 22 April. Schism nevertheless followed between the clergy supporting the two popes, accompanied by rioting and massacre and polemical writing: when Symmachus died in 514, he had not been reconciled with the Greek church.
Out of the polemical writing of the schism, however, emerged an important historical record, the Liber Pontificalis, or history of the popes. This series of papal biographies stretched from St Peter to (eventually) Pius II (d. 1464). Duchesne has shown that the author of the first series of biographies was a contemporary of Anastasius II and Symmachus, writing probably in the pontificate of Symmachus’ successor, Felix III (d. 530). For the Liber Pontificalis the fourth century Liberian Catalogue of Roman bishops was a primary authority: and to write the ‘series of successions’ of Roman bishops meant, to write in some sense the history of the see. Many of the biographies before Anastasius II, as Duchesne showed, are full of historical errors, but from Anastasius II onwards the information about the popes is historically valuable; after this first part of the Liber Pontificalis, a single compilation, the histories of the popes seem to have been added unsystematically down to the ninth century. The compiler of the first part, though following the traditional form of the biographies, appears to have sympathized with Symmachus as against Lawrence: he regards him as validly elected; he recounts in detail his good works, his ransoming of prisoners, and the additions he made to the Roman churches, particularly to St Peter’s, which was for many years his cathedral. On the other hand, the adherents of Lawrence appear to have compiled a variant version of the Liber Pontificalis with evident partiality; and some years later, a partisan of Symmachus composed a Liber Pontificalis in vulgar Latin, full of fanciful traditions and apocryphal detail, a manifest piece of propaganda. Both sides in the Symmacho-Laurentian schism desired to get their candidate accepted in the line of the Roman popes, and the schism was thus a valuable stimulus to the keeping of a record.
Another polemical document belonging to the second half of the fifth century, and arising from the tension between Rome and Byzantium over Zeno’s Henotikon (484) rather than that between Rome and Theoderic, was the historical romance (W. Levison) known as the Actus beati Silvestri. The basis of the imperial claim to rule the church and even define dogma was the isapostolic position of Constantine, in virtue of his conversion of the Roman empire: the Actus beati Silvestri was written to challenge the isapostolic claim, by showing that it was pope Silvester, represented as the ideal Latin bishop, who had accomplished the baptism of Constantine, healing him also of his leprosy. Constantine had been, in fact, baptized in 337, a few days before his death, by Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia; but this new life of Silvester represented Silvester as hastening at Constantine’s request ad montent Seraptim (or Syraptim), healing him of his leprosy, and supervising his catechumenate and immersion. As part of his catechumenate Silvester bade Constantine retire to his cubiculum, lay aside his royal garments and give himself to prayer and penitence: the significance of this laying aside of the royal insignia was to be emphasized and reinterpreted later in the great eighth-century forgery, the Donation of Constantine. Meanwhile, the Latin text of the Actus won widespread authority in the west from its acceptance as a source in the Liber Pontificalis, and was later translated into Greek and Syriac. This unscrupulous fiction was to be of the greatest importance in the development of the papal claim, not only to spiritual but also to temporal supremacy, though in the document itself it is the spiritual implications of the baptism by Silvester rather than Constantine’s cession of the imperial insignia at the pope’s request that was emphasized.
Another class of records important in the history of the early middle ages, and like the Liber Pontificalis of ecclesiastical origin, were the liturgical calendars. They were built up gradually by all great churches and monasteries, for the practical purpose of securing that each saint had his due commemoration as the year went round on his dies natalicia (birthday into heaven, day of martyrdom or death). Not only does this establish some dates in an obscure period, but by custom the lessons of the second nocturn of the saint’s night office, said before his mass, gave examples of the good deeds, holiness and some events of his life, or of his martyrdom. Such short lives, or accounts of death, must have been recited in the office and became the germ of the later saints’ lives, passages from which came to supplant them later in the office itself.
Meanwhile, from the issue of the emperor Zeno’s Henotikon or reunion edict in 482, a schism had endured between the sees of Rome and Constantinople. The condemnation by the council of Chalcedon of both the Nestorians who emphasized our Lord’s human nature at the expense of his divine, and the Monophysites, who did exactly the opposite, had been acceptable to the west, for it embodied the theology of pope Leo I’s Tome; but had not been held decisive by either of the condemned sects in the east. Zeno, in his desire for peace, issued a terse and nearly orthodox theological pronouncement in the Henotikon: but it quietly dropped the decision of Chalcedon and Leo’s Tome. Pope Hormisdas entered into negotiations with Anastasius about the schism of 515, but they failed: the schism ended with the accession of the orthodox Justin in 518 and a papal embassy to Constantinople in that year, after which the names of the upholders of the Henotikon, Zeno, Anastasius and certain bishops, were erased from the diptychs. Pope Hormisdas lived till 523, and was called on to deal with another effort to reinterpret or go behind the decisions of Chalcedon: certain Scythian monks at Rome adopted a formula directed against the surviving sympathizers with Nestorianism, but Hormisdas declared that the decisions of Chalcedon sufficed. The Scythians found a sympathizer in the learned computist and canonist, Dionysius Exiguus, also resident at Rome during their visit; but not to the point of his following them when Hormisdas requested them to leave Rome.
The difficulties of pope John I (523–526) with Theoderic have been related (p. 43), and those of pope Vigilius with Justinian belong rather to the general history of his reign (see p. 163), as do imperial efforts to conciliate the Monophysites to those of his successors.
The papacy of Gregory I (590–604) was clearly one of decisive importance for the Roman see and for the history of Italy itself: through Gregory’s influence the Lombard invaders obtained an unwilling recognition of their conquests from the emperor, and the harried Italian provincials obtained peace. In many respects, Gregory’s action influenced secular history as well as religious, but possibly we should be less well aware of the fact had not Gregory been a great letter writer and keeper of orderly records. His letters open a window on the sixth century, and were either much more numerous than those of earlier popes or (probably) were more carefully preserved. It was possible to compile an extensive register later from the loose papyrus sheets. As a specimen letter not of the greatest importance, but showing the detailed instructions Gregory was in the habit of giving his agents, his letter to a bishop about the payment of his clergy, may be quoted:
First, that you should without delay offer [praebere] a whole fourth of the rents of your church to the clergy, according to the merit or office or labour of each, as you shall see fit to give to each one. And from the offerings of the faithful also you shall not delay to give a fourth part, in money [solidi] or in food [cellario], according to early custom, the remainder of all moveables remaining however at your own disposal. But real estate (immoveables) shall be added to the revenues of the church, that as these grow in value, the fourth part of your clergy shall, with God’s grace, be increased.
Gregory lived at a time when all the Mediterranean world looked to the Greek east: his name, meaning ‘watchful’, would fifty years earlier have been Vigilius. Yet he was as much a guardian of the Latin tradition against an eastern preponderance as Leo I or Sym-machus or Vigilius. He lived also in times of extreme difficulty. The Arian Lombards were still at the stage of piecemeal conquest when he became pope: war was ever at the gate: men fought and starved. Rome had been ravaged by the Gothic wars and was not yet rebuilt. The very accession of Gregory in 590 was due to the pestilence that ravaged Italy and carried off his predecessor Pelagius II (578–590). It fell to Gregory to direct the military defence of central Italy, care for the plague-stricken and feed the hungry at Rome, as well as guide the church, and that through a great part of his pontificate.
He was prepared for his task by a great inheritance and a triple training. He was a Roman citizen, brought up in a Rome owing obedience to the exarch at Ravenna (see p. 180), to the praetorian prefect and the civil hierarchy. He was a Catholic Christian, the son of a regionary notary: for the popes used the old, lay notaries, and had divided the city into seven regions for the registration of martyrdoms in their region and the transaction of ecclesiastical business; Gregory’s father, Gordianus, must have been one of the seven. His family must have been in touch with the papal curia and devout: his sisters became dedicated virgins, living in their own house.
In the Roman literary inheritance too, he must have had some share, though the public rhetoric schools in Rome appear to have broken down in the Gothic wars; Gregory was trained, however, for the civil service, the secular militia, and he had enough classics and rhetoric to read Augustine and the Fathers, and to become a doctor of the church. The encyclopedias of Boethius and Cassiodorus were accessible to him, as well as patristic commentaries on the scriptures and theological treatises, and the works on canon law of Dionysius Exiguus: but Gregory himself wrote as a shepherd of souls, passing on to others the reflections of a well-informed mind. His Dialogues, the Moralia and, above all, the Regula Pastoralis were read throughout the middle ages. What his works lacked in originality they made up for in moral earnestness. The thought of the starving: the familiar sight of prisoners of war, yoked together as beasts and led off to the slave market at Marseilles were ever with him, as well as the imminence of final judgment. Day by day, he wrote, all things are driven onwards, and we are brought nearer to the trial we shall have to endure before the eternal, the terrible judge. Life was like a voyage; whatever the passengers did, all the time the ship was bearing him onwards to the final goal: ‘every day, every moment, we draw nearer the end’: and the end was a reckoning.
Beyond his inheritance, Gregory’s work as pope rested upon three kinds of training. He entered the civil service and went up its ladder till he was praetorian prefect, with jurisdiction a hundred Roman miles round the city: Roman administrative experience lay behind his achievement as bishop of Rome, as it had lain behind that of Ambrose at Milan. Then, at the summit of his career, he threw all his chances away to embrace the life of monastic ascesis and contemplation: he renounced his possessions, selling them and giving to the poor and founding six monasteries on his Sicilian patrimony. He turned his paternal villa at the Clivus Scauri into a seventh, dedicating it to St Andrew, and becoming a simple monk there himself under the abbot Valentius; the practice of the house is inferred to have been Benedictine from Gregory’s insertion of a long account of St Benedict in his Moralia. Gregory thus shared the training in the monastic life of complete self-devotion which was to have such effect in Europe. Thirdly, he was taken from the monastery by pope Pelagius and initiated into the work of a great clerical household: he was ordained one of the seven Roman deacons who already shared in the notarial work of the papal curia, and were specially charged with the relief of the poor. For several years, however, Gregory served as Pelagius’ apocrysarius (secretary) or foreign envoy at Constantinople, meeting Leander of Seville, and the emperor Maurice. After his return, in a year of calamity when the Tiber overflowed and plague decimated the city, Gregory was elected pope by direct acclamation of the people. The emperor’s consent was awaited for some weeks, and when it was received, Gregory was consecrated on 3 September 590.
He was pope for fourteen years, living at the Vatican with a few monks to help him to preserve the monastic intention of a life now full of activity. His Lombard policy finally prevailed over the emperor’s. The Lombards under Alboin had taken Milan in 569: but though they besieged Pavia in 572, the king was murdered and various duces were left to try to occupy Italy piecemeal; in 572 the Lombards took Ravenna. The emperors Justin II and Maurice were not uninterested in the loss of Italy, but they had heavy commitments on the Danube frontier and in the east (see p. 214). Maurice (d. 602) never renounced Justinian’s reconquest of the Mediterranean basin, for which the loss of Italy was a disaster: but his troops were insufficient for all fronts. He created an exarch to be a real vice-emperor for Italy, to reside at Ravenna and head both the civil and military government, but he had only weak forces to give him. Smaragdus, exarch 585–589, and Romanus, 589–596, nevertheless retook some cities from the Lombards and bought off certain Lombard chiefs; but Romanus’ attempt to buy Frankish help resulted only in abortive expeditions. Conditions for the provincials in this war-ridden Italy were deplorable: but to the emperor at Constantinople the game seemed by no means lost.
To the city of Rome, the Lombards in the north were less of a danger than Ariulf, duke of Spoleto, a Lombard possession in the Apennines blocking the Via Flaminia from Rome to Ravenna. In the summer of 592 Ariulf suddenly attacked Rome and it was left to Gregory to direct the defence of the city, as he had earlier by letter directed the defence of central Italy. The duke of Benevento this year also attacked Naples, threatening to hem in the Campagna and Rome itself: and in the north the exarch Romanus gave no help. When king Agilulf appeared at Rome, Gregory signed a peace treaty with him, promising the payment of a tribute in return for peace; an action in direct opposition to the policy of Maurice and Romanus, who desired no respite in the Lombard war. In the end, Gregory’s policy prevailed: Romanus was recalled, a new exarch, Callinicus, sent to replace him, and he signed a peace treaty with the Lombards in 598 (renewed in 603).
The feeding of the poor also preoccupied Gregory. The free corn from Egypt had long ceased, and yet it was both a traditional obligation of the Roman magistrate and the Christian bishop that the poor should be fed. The normal division of a bishop’s revenue included a portion, a fourth or a third, for the poor; and Gregory, like all good bishops, maintained his guesthouse (xenodochium) for the poor and travellers, and fed the poor from his own table. Beyond that, to serve the exceptional needs of the time, he used the food rents from the papal patrimony and his own, to feed the poor. Some of the food rents had, according to the imperial systems, been commuted for money payments, but supplies of corn, oil, vegetables, eggs, bacon and wine were still laboriously brought to Rome and distributed. Arrangements for transport were a great business, and Gregory closely supervised it, writing detailed letters of instruction to the conductores who managed the Sicilian farms. On the first day of every month distributions in kind were made to the poor from the ‘monasteries’ of the seven Roman deaconries: the deacon and some clerks in minor orders, that is, lived communally and gave out the food.
Gregory’s correspondence has been mentioned; he wrote to kings, queens and the distant emperor: to Recared the Visigoth and Leander, and to Theodelinda the Lombard queen: to bishops, about the chaotic finances of their sees, and about the scandal they caused by ploughing up their neighbour’s landmark, about the transfer of clergy to serve some desolated parish. His correspondence with the bishop of Ravenna and the patriarch of Constantinople had special interest.
The relations of the bishop of Ravenna with the popes were necessarily difficult. The exarch, or the Lombard king holding court at Ravenna, required the exaltation of the bishop: but historically Gregory had grounds for resisting this desire. Italy in the mid-fourth century had been divided between two ecclesiastical jurisdictions: suburbicarian Italy, depending on the pope, included all Italy south of the Apennines and the Italian islands; Italy north of the Apennines depended on the metropolitan of Milan, the only area excluded being the old bishopric or patriarchate of Aquileia, regarded as metropolitan at the end of the fourth century. The bishop of Ravenna was a simple bishop in the suburbicarian province of the pope, but in 431 Valentinian III had made the see metropolitan by adding to it certain sees subtracted from the jurisdiction of Milan. Yet though now a metropolitan as regards these sees, the archbishop of Ravenna continued to depend entirely on the pope, whose consent had to be sought for his election, and who alone could consecrate him, and at Rome. He had a dual character, remaining a simple bishop of the primatial see of Rome, though metropolitan as regards that part of his province that had been subtracted from Milan. Under the Byzantine exarchs and the Lombard kings, he desired perhaps naturally to rank with the metropolitans of Milan and Aquileia, and even with the auto-cephalous patriarchates of the east; during the reign of archbishop Maurus (648–671) the see of Ravenna practically enjoyed such autocephalia.
The issue between Gregory and the archbishop turned upon the latter’s wearing of the pallium not merely at the solemnity of the mass, but at other times, and even in the streets. Archbishop John of Ravenna was reprimanded for this practice through the notary Castorius, and a sharp correspondence followed, the archbishop defending his action as a privilege of his church. When he died in 595, Gregory obtained the appointment of a monk from his own monastery of St Andrew, carefully outlining for him the manner in which it was allowed to him to wear the pallium; but the exarch’s influence was dominant in Ravenna, and Gregory had occasion to complain that, in the matter of obtaining Romanus’ assent to a peace treaty, he suspected the archbishop had ‘gone to sleep’.
In Gregory’s relations with the patriarch of Constantinople, the use of the title ‘oecumenical bishop’ was the chief source of difficulty, involving an oblique disrespect for the Petrine see, by the patriarch of Constantinople who used it. Justinian in his legislation had freely accorded a primacy of honour, a paternal authority and a principal guardianship of the faith to the see of Peter: but when his political needs led to a theological clash with papal views, he had always subtly distinguished between the person of the pope and the authority of the apostolic see. In 588, however, the patriarch John the Faster assumed with prominence a title used earlier of Constantinople and other patriarchates but never by a patriarch of himself: pope Pelagius had protested to the emperor. Gregory, through his envoy, did likewise, and was told to let the matter rest. He then wrote to the patriarch himself, explaining that ’oecumenical’ could only mean ‘sole’ bishop, a proud and sinful title: but the patriarch continued its use. Gregory was willing to accord a share in the apostolic primacy to Antioch and Alexandria, where Peter and Peter’s disciple had taught, but not to Constantinople: much less the use of oecumenical as an exclusive title. In effect, he could not compel its disuse, and within a hundred years all the patriarchs, including the popes themselves were found using it.
Finally, Gregory’s zeal for the faith, and for missions, extended the limits of his own patriarchate. He saw the conversion of Visigothic Spain, and rejoiced at the orthodox baptism of the child of Agilulf and Theodelinda in 602. This completed the return to orthodoxy of the old patriarchate of the west, for the Franks were already orthodox. But when Gregory despatched Augustine and a band of thirty monks to convert the bretwalda of the Anglo-Saxons, he brought a new area under papal jurisdiction. The action was bold, for though Gregory must have known of the Catholicism of the Frankish princess married as long ago as 560 to the young prince of Kent, Æthelbert, paganism was very strong among the Anglo-Saxons. All depended on whether Augustine and the queen could win over the bretwalda; once that was done, in 597, the missionaries made a safe lodgment in Kent. Gregory wrote to Augustine, giving him instructions for the eventual setting up of metropolitans and their provinces: at Canterbury (and, or, London) and York. Since the rulers of London (East Anglia) and York (Northumbria) were as yet unconverted, it may be suspected that Gregory was aware that bishops from London and York had attended the council of Aries in 314. Not only was ‘the church of the English’ added to the Roman patriarchate, but, as a consequence, the later English missionary, Boniface, added to the patriarchate regions beyond the Rhine that had never formed part of the old empire.
In the beginning of the seventh century the church in the west was entering on her most constructive work for the new Europe under Germanic rule, while the eastern church was about to suffer the incursions of Islam. The western church had provided a system for training clergy and bishops by which clerks, receiving the tonsure of episcopal adoption at an early age, passed some years in each of the grades of doorkeeper, exorcist, lector, acolyte, sub-deacon, deacon, priest. The bishop’s control over and responsibility for all his clergy was already safeguarded in the canons. The west had adopted from Egypt the monastic life, and spread it from Lérins in the fifth century, from Ireland and Monte Cassino in the sixth; the Benedictine life was to spread still further through the work of Gregory the Great, and to be one of the formative influences of the new society growing up.
Another ecclesiastical institution, the use of election or free choice by clergy or monks of their spiritual ruler, had already been formalized in both eastern and western churches: it had its origin in the Greco-Roman world and became part of lex Romana, familiar to notaries and the higher clergy. It was a process of reasoned selection in which all those who made the choice had the right to express their opinion: they had a vox, a voice, a vote. It differed from the Germanic method of making a choice, a decision, for there the deciding body, some folk-moot or witan, was conceived of as an entity whose single will had to be elicited. The Greco-Roman procedure, however, not the Germanic, was finally adopted for the summoning of popular assemblies to counsel the king or hear his will. Medieval ecclesiastical elections (see pp. 296, 240) were to be of great importance in the development of secular government and of corresponding interest.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best modern general history of the church, without bibliographies but with good footnotes, is that of A. Fliche and V. Martin, Histoire de l’église depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours: the relevant volumes include iii, De la paix constantinienne à la mort de Théodose (Bardy and Palanque); iv, De la mort de Théodose à l’avènement de Grégoire le Grand (Bardy, Bréhier and Plinval); v, Grégoire le Grand (Bréhier and Aigrain); vi, L’époque carolingienne (757l–888) (E. Amann); vii, L’église au pouvoir des laiques (888l–1057) (Amann and Dumas). For a short account, M. Deanesly, History of the Medieval Church, 1954 ed. For early church history, L. Duchesne’s Histoire ancienne de l’église, 4 vols., 1909, is classical. For an enlightening short account of the early patriarchates and the use of vernacular liturgies in the east, see F. Dvornik, National Churches and the Church Universal, 1944: for apostolic tradition, the papacy, and the episcopate, T. G. Jalland, The Church and the Papacy, 1944; H. E. Symonds, The Church Universal and the See of Rome, 1939; C. Mirbt, Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums, 1911 (most of the authorities quoted are in Latin); for the Liber Pontificalis, see T. Mommsen, Gesta Pontificum Romanorum, vol. i, 1897; for a short but clear exposition, Western Canon Law, by R. C. Mortimer; for patristic (and Carolingian) study of the scriptures, B. Smalley’s Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed. 1952; for early medieval canonization, E. W. Kemp’s Canonization and Authority in the Western Church, 1948. The best text of the Benedictine rule is that edited by d. Cuthbert Butler, Sancti Benedicti Regula Monasteriorum, 1935: for another text in Latin and English see d. O. Hunter Blair’s Rule of St. Benedict, 1934. In view both of the importance of the Benedictine life for monasticism and for the transmission of Greco-Roman learning, see also d. C. Butler’s Benedictine Monachism, 1924, and d. J. Chapman’s Saint Benedict and the Sixth Century, 1929. See also T. Jalland, Pope Leo the Great, 1941, and for a long study of Gregory the Great, with many quotations from his letters, see F. H. Dudden, Gregory the Great, 2 vols., 1905. For the Greek and Latin texts of the canons of councils, see G. D. Mansi, Sanctorum Conciliorum … collectio, 1758–98, etc.; for a French collection, H. Leclercq and C. J. Hefele, Histoire des Conciles, 1907, etc. For an abridged collection in English, with the council names arranged alphabetically, see E. H. Landon, Manual of Councils, 2 vols., 1909. See also H. Wheeler Robinson (editor), The Bible in its Ancient and English Versions, new ed. 1954. See also T. Klauser, The Western Liturgy and its History, 1952.