Chapter 2

FOOTNOTES:[8]It is preserved in Eusebius,Ecclesiastical History, vi., 43.[9]De Fuga a Persecutione, xiii.[10]The number of interments in the Catacombs cannot very well be regarded as evidence. Archæologists differ by millions in estimating the number, and the populous Church after Constantine still buried in the Catacombs, at least until the Pontificate of Damasus.[11]V., 13.[12]Epistle, v.[13]See Eusebius, ii., 15, and iii., 40, for the words of Papias, and ii., 25, for the testimony of Dionysius.[14]Letter to Romans, iv.[15]Even the names and order are given differently in early writers. I follow, as is now usual, the order given by Epiphanius (xxvii., 6) and Irenæus.[16]Bunsen's four-volumeHippolytus and his Age(1852) was sharply attacked by Döllinger (Hippolytus and Callistus, English translation, 1876) and more judiciously handled by G.B. de Rossi in hisBulletino di Archeologia Cristiana(1866, pp. 1-33). Milman (History of Latin Christianity, vol. i.) and Ch. Wordsworth (St. Hippolytus and the Church of Rome, 1853) supported Bunsen. The work itself is translated inThe Ante-Nicene Library, vol. vi.[17]This anonymous catalogue of the Popes, which I must often quote, is a quaint mixture of accurate archives and inaccurate rumours. The first part seems to have been written in the sixth century, and it was continued as a semi-official record. See the Introduction to Duchesne's edition.[18]Fuscianus was Prefect between the years 186 and 189, so that we have an approximate date of these events.[19]De Pudicitia, i. Döllinger, on no apparent ground, and against all probability, refers this to Zephyrin, and some older writers think that the indignant Puritan is quoting an African bishop. We must agree with De Rossi that Tertullian has Callistus in mind, especially when we find Hippolytus saying that he was "the first" to do this. An earlier attempt of an Eastern bishop might easily have escaped Hippolytus.[20]Vol. vi., p. 346. This is a fair, if inelegant, rendering of the Greek text given by Duncker and Schneidewin in their edition of theRefutation, and it corresponds with the Latin translation given by those editors and with De Rossi. Döllinger is alone in his interpretation.[21]Confessions, viii., 2.[22]XLVIII.[23]VI., 18.[24]Neither this church nor the Basilica S. Callisti can have been the original meeting-place, though the latter may have been founded on it.[25]History of Rome and the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, i,. 313.

FOOTNOTES:

[8]It is preserved in Eusebius,Ecclesiastical History, vi., 43.

[9]De Fuga a Persecutione, xiii.

[10]The number of interments in the Catacombs cannot very well be regarded as evidence. Archæologists differ by millions in estimating the number, and the populous Church after Constantine still buried in the Catacombs, at least until the Pontificate of Damasus.

[11]V., 13.

[12]Epistle, v.

[13]See Eusebius, ii., 15, and iii., 40, for the words of Papias, and ii., 25, for the testimony of Dionysius.

[14]Letter to Romans, iv.

[15]Even the names and order are given differently in early writers. I follow, as is now usual, the order given by Epiphanius (xxvii., 6) and Irenæus.

[16]Bunsen's four-volumeHippolytus and his Age(1852) was sharply attacked by Döllinger (Hippolytus and Callistus, English translation, 1876) and more judiciously handled by G.B. de Rossi in hisBulletino di Archeologia Cristiana(1866, pp. 1-33). Milman (History of Latin Christianity, vol. i.) and Ch. Wordsworth (St. Hippolytus and the Church of Rome, 1853) supported Bunsen. The work itself is translated inThe Ante-Nicene Library, vol. vi.

[17]This anonymous catalogue of the Popes, which I must often quote, is a quaint mixture of accurate archives and inaccurate rumours. The first part seems to have been written in the sixth century, and it was continued as a semi-official record. See the Introduction to Duchesne's edition.

[18]Fuscianus was Prefect between the years 186 and 189, so that we have an approximate date of these events.

[19]De Pudicitia, i. Döllinger, on no apparent ground, and against all probability, refers this to Zephyrin, and some older writers think that the indignant Puritan is quoting an African bishop. We must agree with De Rossi that Tertullian has Callistus in mind, especially when we find Hippolytus saying that he was "the first" to do this. An earlier attempt of an Eastern bishop might easily have escaped Hippolytus.

[20]Vol. vi., p. 346. This is a fair, if inelegant, rendering of the Greek text given by Duncker and Schneidewin in their edition of theRefutation, and it corresponds with the Latin translation given by those editors and with De Rossi. Döllinger is alone in his interpretation.

[21]Confessions, viii., 2.

[22]XLVIII.

[23]VI., 18.

[24]Neither this church nor the Basilica S. Callisti can have been the original meeting-place, though the latter may have been founded on it.

[25]History of Rome and the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, i,. 313.

CHAPTER II

ST. DAMASUS AND THE TRIUMPH

Inthe year 355, the Christians of the imperial city startled their neighbours by a series of violent and threatening demonstrations. Armed crowds of them filled the streets, and monks and sacred virgins hid themselves from the riot. An inquiring pagan would have learned that the Emperor Constantius, who had waded to supremacy through a stream of blood, was attempting to force on their Bishop and themselves the damnable heresy of Arius. A few weeks before, Constantius had sent his eunuch with rich presents to Liberius, suavely asking him to condemn a certain fiery Athanasius who resisted the heresy. Liberius had courageously refused, and, when the eunuch had cunningly left the gifts beside the tomb of St. Peter, the Bishop had had them cast out of the church. When the exasperated eunuch had returned to the Emperor at Milan, the Christian community had prepared for drastic action, and it was presently known that the civic officials at Rome had received orders to seize the Bishop and send him to Milan. The Christians threatened resistance, and for a few days the city was enlivened by their turbulence. At last, Liberius was dragged from his house at night and taken to Milan; and, since he bravely resisted the Emperor to his face, he was sent on to remote and inhospitable Thrace.Then the clergy, and as many of the faithful as could enter, gathered in their handsome newbasilicaon the site of the Laterani Palace and swore a great oath that they would know no other bishop as long as Liberius lived. One, at least, of the clergy set out—no doubt amidst the cheers of the people—to accompany his Bishop into exile; this was the deacon Damasus, who was destined to be the next Pope of prominence in the Roman calendar.

The scene reminds us forcibly of the dramatic transformation which had taken place since, a century before, Pope and Anti-Pope had been sent in chains to the mines. For fifty years after that date theLiber Pontificalisis a necrology, a chronicle of gloomy life in the Catacombs. Eleven Popes out of the thirteen who followed Urban I. are—most of them wrongly—described as martyrs, and the record of their actions shrinks to a few lines. At last, with Bishop Eusebius, the chronicle brightens and lengthens; and then, under the name of Silvester, it swells to thirty pages and glows with tokens of imperial generosity. The darkest hour of the Church has suddenly changed into a dazzling splendour.

The historical revolution reflected in this early chronicle of the Popes is well known. For eighty years after the death of Callistus, the hope of the faithful was painfully strained. The Decian persecution (249-251) sent some to the heroic death of the martyr, many to the corrupt officials who sold false certificates of apostasy, and very many back to the pagan temples. Then another schism and another Anti-Pope appeared; and the alliance with St. Cyprian and the African bishops, which had at first promised aid against the schismatics, ended in a contemptuous repudiation by the Africanbishops of Rome's claim to jurisdiction. The Valerian persecution dissolved the feud in blood, and, then, forty years of peace enabled the Roman Christians to recover and to extend their domain. Two or three smallbasilicæwere erected or adapted. But, in the year 303, the new hope was chilled by the dreaded summons of the persecutor, and, for the last time, stern-set men and gentle maidens set out to face the headsman. Rome did not suffer much in the next seven years of persecution, but one can imagine the feelings of the faithful when they saw century thus succeed century without bringing any larger hope even of a free place in the sun. And then, in rapid succession, came the triumph of Constantine, the issue of their charter of liberty (the Edict of Milan, 313), the imperial profession of Christianity, the grant to the Christian clergy of the privileges of Roman priests, and the building of largebasilicæand scattering of gold and silver over their marble altars. Even the transfer of the court to Constantinople hardly dimmed the new hope. It remained "a new form of ambition to desert the altars," the pagans murmured, and no one dare thwart the zeal of the clergy.

So, by the year 355, when deacon Damasus makes an inglorious entrance into history, Rome had a large Christian community and at least half a dozen churches. But Christendom was now overcast by the triumph of Arianism and an Arian Emperor, and the struggle put an insupportable strain on the character of the faithful. At first, the prospect at Rome was brave and inspiring. They would all be true to their martyr-bishop; with that thrilling cry in his ears the deacon set out for Thrace. In a very short time, he was back in Rome, having changed his mind: "fired with ambition," his critics said. And, in another short time, the chief deacon Felix,who also had taken the oath, listened to the Arian court and became Bishop of Rome; and Damasus and most of the clergy transferred their loyalty to him. Then, in two or three years, Liberius grew tired of Thrace, and signed some sort of heretical formula, and came back to Rome; and the bloody struggle of Pope and Anti-Pope led to a train of sorrows which darken the life of St. Damasus.

He had been born, probably at Rome, though his father is said to have been a Spaniard, about the year 304.[26]The father had been a priest in the service of the littlebasilicaof St. Lawrence in the city—I am not impressed by Marucchi's contention that he was a bishop—and had brought up Damasus in the same service. The mother Laurentia was pious: the sister Irene consecrated her virginity to God. Damasus became, and remained, a deacon, and was at least in his fiftieth year when he turned his back upon the heroic road to Thrace. He was popular in the new Christian Rome, which Jerome describes so darkly; envious folk called him "the tickler of matrons' ears," and even worse. But we lose sight of him again for ten years after his first appearance.[27]

The events of those ten years are, however, important for the understanding of Damasus and his Church, and must be briefly reviewed. That the clergy had, in the presence of the people, sworn to be true to Liberius, and that the majority of them broke their oath, is confirmed by St. Jerome in his Chronicle. Jerome, a decisive authority, tells also of the fall of Liberius, and this is also recorded by Athanasius, who writes the whole story. When Felix consented to be made bishop, the people were so infuriated that he had to be consecrated by the Emperor's Arian bishops in the palace: a group of eunuchs nominally representing the people, who raged without. Most of the clergy accepted Felix, but a minority, with the mass of the people, refused to do so, and, for two years, he gave his blessing to very thin congregations, or to empty benches. Then the Emperor came to Rome, and an imposing deputation of noble Christian ladies prevailed on him to recall Liberius. The Great Circus provided a new sensation for its 400,000 idlers when an imperial messenger announced that henceforward Liberius and Felix would rule their respective flocks side by side in Rome. "Two circus-factions, so two bishops," the pagan majority ironically replied: but the Christian laity ominously thundered, "One God, one Christ, one Bishop." So when Liberius, "overcome by the weariness of exile and embracing the heretical perversity" (says St. Jerome in his Chronicle), returned to Rome, he was received "as a conqueror." His loyal flock, finely indifferent to the way in which he had purchased his return, lined the route as men had done to welcome a triumphing general in the old days.

This must have been about the end of 357 or the beginning of 358, and we shall not dwell on the scenes which followed. Felix and his followers were drivenout of the city. Getting reinforcements, apparently, they returned and took possession of the Basilica Julii in the Transtiberina; but the mass of the faithful, led by Christian senators or officers, took the church by storm, and again swept them out of Rome. TheLiber Pontificalisrecords that a number of the clergy were slain in the battle, and, becoming hopelessly confused between Pope and Anti-Pope, it awards these followers of Felix the palm of martyrdom. But it appears that the Felicians were strong, and for six years held several of the smaller churches; rival clerics and laymen could not meet in the baths and streets without violent results. However, Felix died in 365, and Liberius wisely adopted his clerical supporters.[28]

Damasus remains in decent obscurity during these years, and we may assume that he repented his mistake, and renewed his allegiance to Liberius. But Liberius followed his rival in the next year (366) and the real career of Damasus opened. A well-known passage in theRes Gestæof the contemporary pagan Ammianus Marcellinus[29]tells how, by that time, the Bishop of Rome scoured the city in a gorgeous chariot, gave banquets which excelled those of the Emperor, and received the smiles and rich presents of all the fine ladies of Rome; and the querulous old soldier is not surprised, he says, that Damasus and his rival Ursicinus(as the name runs in official documents) were "swollen with ambition" for the seat, and stirred up riots so fierce that the Prefect was driven out of Rome, and, after one fight, a hundred and thirty-seven corpses were left on the floor of one of the "Christian conventicles." Jerome,[30]Rufinus,[31]and other ecclesiastical writers of the time place the fatal rioting beyond question, and we may therefore, with a prudent reserve, follow the closer description given in theLibellus.

As soon as the death of Liberius became known, in September, 366, the remnant of his original supporters met in the Basilica Julii, across the river, and elected the deacon Ursicinus, who was at once consecrated by a provincial bishop. It was an act of defiance to Damasus, the popular candidate, whom they were determined to exclude. Then, say these writers, Damasus gathered and bribed a mob, armed with staves, and for three days there was a bloody fight for the possession of the basilica. A week after the death of Liberius (or on October 1st), Damasus marched with his mob, now effectively reinforced by gladiators, to the Lateran Basilica, and was consecrated there. After this, he bribed the Prefect Viventius to expel seven priests of the rival party, but the people rescued them and conducted them to the Basilica Liberii, or Basilica Sicinini (now Sta. Maria Maggiore), in the poor quarter across the river. In this chapel the rebels were at worship in the early morning of October 26th when a crowd of gladiators, charioteers, diggers (or guardians of the Catacombs), and other ruffians (in the pay of Damasus, of course) fell on them with staves, swords, and axes, and an historic fight ensued. The Damasians stormed the barricaded door, fired the sacred building, mountedthe roof, and flung tiles on the Ursicinians. In the end the corpses of one hundred and sixty—Ammianus was too modest—followers of Ursicinus, of both sexes, lay on the floor of the blood-splashed chapel, and Ursicinus and his chief supporters were sent into exile.

Such is the tale of woe of the priests Faustinus and Marcellinus, and there is no doubt whatever that for months the most savage encounters desecrated the chapels and Catacombs of Rome. As to whether Damasus was or was not elected in his Church of St. Lawrence in the citybeforethe election of Ursicinus the authorities are not agreed; and it must be left to the decision of the reader whether those who secured his triumph were really a hired mob of gladiators and diggers or a troop of pious and indignant admirers. Jerome, whose modern biographer, Amédée Thierry,[32]plausibly contends that he was studying in Rome at the time, expressly says that the followers of his patron Damasus were the aggressors, and that many men and women were slain. Rufinus is more favourable to the cause of Damasus, but he admits that the churches were "filled with blood."

The Emperor seems not to have been convinced by the report of the triumphant faction, and in the following year he permitted Ursicinus and his followers to return to Rome. But the trouble was renewed, and the Anti-Pope was again banished. His obstinate admirers then met in the Catacombs, and another fierce and fatal fight occurred in the cemetery of St. Agnes, where the servants of Damasus surprised them. It is clear that Damasus had the support of the wealthy and the favour of the pagan officials, but his rival must have controlled a very large, if not the larger, part of thepeople. The forces engaged, and the growth of the Christian body, may be estimated from the fact that, as Ammianus says, the Prefect Viventius was compelled to retire to the suburbs. He was promptly replaced, in the attempt to control the rioters, by the ruthless and impartial Maximinus, the Prefect of the Food-distribution; and clerics and laymen were indiscriminately put to the torture and punished. At length, in 368, one of the last of the sober old Roman patricians, Prætextatus, became Prefect, and put an end to the riots. The reflections of Prætextatus and Symmachus and other cultivated pagans are not recorded, but we are told by St. Jerome that, when Damasus endeavoured to convert the Prefect, he mischievously replied: "Make me Bishop of Rome and I will be a Christian."

Ursicinus went to din his grievances into the ears of provincial bishops, and there seems to be good ground for the statement in theLibellusthat some of these were indignant with Damasus. It is at least clear that Damasus went on to obtain from the Emperor a concession of the most far-reaching character. The imperial rescript making this concession—one of the really important steps in the history of the Papacy and of the Church—has strangely disappeared, but we find the bishops of a later Roman synod (in 378 or 379) writing to Gratian and Valentinian that, when Ursicinus was banished, the Emperors had decreed that "the Roman bishop should have power to inquire into the conduct of the other priests of the churches, and that affairs of religion should be judged by the pontiff of religion with his colleagues."[33]A later rescript of Gratian indicates that the Bishop of Rome was to have five or seven colleagues with him in these inquiries[34]; and further light is thrown on the matter by St. Ambrose who observes[35]that, by a decree of Valentinian, a defendant in a religious dispute was to have a judge of a fitting character (a cleric) and of at least equal rank. Possibly the truculent impartiality of Maximinus was the immediate occasion for asking this privilege, and Valentinian would not find it unseemly that bishops should adjudicate on these new types of quarrels. But we have in this last document the germ of great historical developments. The clergy were virtually withdrawn from secular jurisdiction; the spiritual court was set up in face of the secular. Moreover, if defendants were to be judged only by their equals, who was to judge the Bishop of Rome?

Damasus at once used his powers. He convoked a synod at Rome, and we may realize the enormous progress that the Church had made in fifty years when we learn that ninety-three Italian bishops responded to his summons. On a charge of favouring Arianism, which seems to cloak a real charge of favouring Ursicinus, the bishops of Parma and Puteoli were deposed by the synod, and they appealed in vain to the court. Henceforward bishops—under the presidency of the Bishop of Rome—were to judge bishops. The cultivated and courtly Auxentius of Milan was next condemned, but he was too secure in the favour of the Empress to do more than smile. Neither he nor his great successor, St. Ambrose, acknowledged any authority over them on the part of the Roman bishop.

From this synod, moreover, the bishops wrote to the Emperor to ask that secular officials should be instructed to enforce their jurisdiction and sentences, and we shall hardly be unjust if we suspect the direct orindirect suggestion of Damasus in their further requests. They asked that bishops might be triedeitherby the Bishop of Romeorby a council of fifteen bishops, and that the Bishop of Rome himself might, "if his case were not laid before an (episcopal) council," defend himself before the Imperial Council.[36]This bold attempt of the Roman bishop to judge all bishops, yet be judged by none, seems to have displeased the Emperor, who may have consulted the Bishop of Milan. We have, at least, no indication that the privilege was granted. But the other points were granted, and instructions were issued to the secular officers, in Gaul as well as in Italy, apprising them of the juridical autonomy of the Church and of their duty to enforce its decisions. Out of his troubles Damasus had won a most important step in the making of the Papacy.

Unfriendly critics might suggest that Damasus paid a price for these powers. A curious passage in the historian Socrates[37]tells us that, in the year 370, Valentinian decreed that every man might henceforward marry two wives. The statement is often rejected as preposterous, but we know that Valentinian had, shortly before, divorced his wife, Severa, in favour of the more comely Justina, and it is probable enough that he passed a law of divorce. The learned Tillemont blushes when he finds no ecclesiastical protest at the time against this flagrant return to pagan morals.

However that may be, Damasus, from his palace by the Lateran Basilica, continued to strengthen his new authority and to regulate the disordered Church. Rome still harboured numbers of rebels, and they seem to have caused him serious annoyance by a persistent charge that, in earlier years, he had sinned with aRoman matron. A converted and relapsed Jew was put forward as the chief witness to the charge, and, when the young Emperor Gratian had failed to impress Rome by his personal assurance that Damasus was innocent, a Roman synod of forty-four bishops professed to investigate and dismiss the accusation. Ursicinus was now, however, living at Milan, and it is not implausibly suggested that his insistence made some impression on the puritanical young Emperor. The case was submitted to the Council of Aquileia in 380, at which St. Ambrose presided, and the bishops declared the innocence of Damasus and demanded the secular punishment of his accusers, who were now scattered over Europe. The Roman rebels then masked their hostility by joining an eccentric, though orthodox, sect in the capital whose ascetic leader bore the name of Lucifer. On these Luciferians in turn the hand of Damasus fell with ruthless severity. Their renowned Macarius, the champion faster of the time outside the Egyptian desert, was physically dragged into court and banished, and the "police" pursued them from one secret meeting-place to another. It is at this time that Faustinus and Marcellinus, who had joined the rigorous sect, addressed theirLibellusto the Emperors.

Over the remainder of Italy and over Gaul Damasus did not press the virtual primacy which he had won from the imperial authorities, and the later language of Leo and Gregory makes it advisable for us to grasp clearly the situation in the fourth century. There was no question of Papal supremacy. No important decision was reached by Damasus apart from a synod, and the See of Milan was not regarded as subordinate in authority to that of Rome; though St. Ambrose naturally expressed a peculiar respect for the doctrinal tradition ofa church that had been founded by the great apostles. When the Spanish Priscillianists applied to Italy for aid, they appealed, says Sulpicius Severus, "to thetwobishops who had the highest authority at that time." When the great struggle with the pagan senators over the statue of Victory took place in 382, it was Ambrose who championed Christianity, Damasus merely sending to him the Roman petition. But Damasus knew the theoretical strength of his position, and knew, as a rule, when to enforce it. In 378, the Emperors severed Illyricum (Greece, Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia) from the Western Empire. Damasus at once contrived that its bishops should look not to the Eastern churches but to himself for direction and support, and from that time onward the Bishop of Thessalonica became the "Vicar" of the Bishop of Rome.

We must leave this vague and imperfect primacy in the West, with its secular foundations, and turn to the more interesting and adventurous course of the diplomacy of Damasus in the East. The narrow limits within which each of these sketches must be confined forbid me to attempt to depict the extraordinary confusion of the Eastern Church. It must suffice to say, in few words, that the struggle against paganism was almost lost in the fiery struggle against heresy, and that the hand of the Arian Valens smote the orthodox as violently and persistently as the hand of any pagan emperor had done. The various refinements of the Arian heresy, the lingering traces of old heresies, and the vigorous beginnings of new heresies, rent each church into factions as violent as those of Rome, and made each important See the theatre of a truculent rivalry. Constantinople, or New Rome as it loved to call itself, was the natural centre of the Eastern religious world, but itwas overshadowed by the Arian court and its growing pretensions were watched by the apostolic churches of Antioch and Alexandria almost as jealously as by Old Rome. The triumph over paganism had, before it was half completed, given place to a dark and sanguinary confusion, from the shores of the Euxine to the sands of the Thebaid.

In 371 St. Basil appealed to Damasus for assistance. He sent the deacon Dorotheus with a letter[38]asking the Italians to send to the East visitors who might report to them the condition of the churches. Damasus, not flattered by the lowliness of the embassy or by the smallness of the request, and still much occupied in the West, merely sent his deacon Sabinus. To a further impassioned appeal from Basil he gave no clearer promise of aid, and Basil indignantly observed that it was useless to appeal to "a proud and haughty man who sits on a lofty throne and cannot hear those who tell him the truth on the ground below."[39]Basil made further futile appeals to the West, though not to Damasus, and at length, in 381, the Eastern bishops met in the Council of Constantinople, discussed their own affairs, and, in a famous canon, awarded the See of Constantinople a primacy in the East. Shortly afterwards a synod was held in Italy, under Ambrose, and it sent to the Emperor Theodosius a letter in which the concern of the Italians was plainly expressed.[40]The bishops ask Theodosius to assist in convoking an Ecumenical Council at Rome, and say that "it seems not unworthy that they [the Eastern bishops] shouldsubmit to the Bishop of Rome and the other Italian bishops"; though they "do not claim any prerogative of judgment." It is interesting to note at this stage how the Bishop of Rome does not yet stand apart from the other Italian bishops or claim jurisdiction over the East. In a letter written by Damasus somewhere about this time to certain oriental bishops, there is question of "reverence for the Apostolic See" and of the foundation of that See by Peter, but such language is rare and premature, and is not implausibly ascribed to St. Jerome, who was then at Rome.[41]To the Eastern emperor and to the Eastern patriarchs it is not addressed.

Theodosius ignored the request, and sanctioned the holding of another Council at Constantinople. The Westerns had, in the meantime, announced an Ecumenical Council at Rome for the summer of 382, and invited their Eastern brethren. From one cause or other, the proceedings at Rome were delayed, and, while the Italians still anxiously awaited the response to their invitation, a letter came with the message that the Eastern bishops had settled the questions in dispute, and they regretted that they had not "the wings of a dove" in order that they might fly from "the great city of Constantinople" to "the great city of Rome." The letter is a model of polite and exquisite irony.[42]The statesmanship of Damasus had hopelessly miscarried, and the Eastern and Western branches of Christendom were farther than ever from uniting under his presidency.

A more intimate aspect of the character of Damasus is disclosed when we consider the condition of the Roman clergy during his Pontificate. It almost suffices to recall that an imperial rescript of the year 370 forbadepriests and monks to visit the houses of widows and orphans, and declared that legacies to them were invalid. St. Jerome himself deplores that there were solid reasons for thus depriving the clergy of a privilege which every gladiator enjoyed, and that the law was shamefully frustrated by donations.[43]Indeed, in 372, the law was extended to nuns and bishops, and for nearly a hundred years the Roman clergy bore the stigma which was implied by such a prohibition.

Jerome's letters ruthlessly depict the condition of the Roman community. Fresh from his austerities in the desert of Chalcidia, the impulsive monk was as ready to denounce vice as to encourage virtue, and evidences of singular laxity mingle with heroic virtue in his vivid pages. On the one hand he directed, in the sobered palace of Marcella on the Aventine, a group of noble dames in the practice of the most rigorous piety and the cultivation of sacred letters. The populace even threatened to fling him into the river, when the lovely and high-born Blesilla terminated her austerities by a premature death, and even Christian writers fiercely contested this introduction into Rome of the ideals of the Egyptian desert. But, on the other hand, Jerome's directions to his pupils incidentally betray that, beyond his little school of virtue and learning, he saw nothing but sin and worldliness. In plain and crude speech he warns his pupils to shun their Christian neighbours and distrust the priests. Sombre as are many of the letters which Seneca wrote in the days of Nero, not one of them can compare with Jerome's lengthy letter to the gentle maiden Eustochium.[44]He fills her virgin mind with a comprehensive picture of frailty and frivolity, and tells her that she may regard, not as a Christian,but as a Manichæan, any austere-looking woman whom she may meet on the streets of Rome. He denounces "the new genus of concubines," the "spiritual brothers and sisters," who share the same house, even the same bed, and, if you protest, complain that you are evil-minded. Eustochium is to avoid gatherings of Christian women, and must never be alone with these clerics, who, exquisitely dressed, their hair curled and oiled, their fingers glittering with rings, spend the livelong day wheedling presents out of their wealthy admirers. I omit the graver details given in this and other letters of the outraged monk.

The impartial historian cannot regard with reserve the criticisms which Ammianus passed on his pagan fellows and then literally accept Jerome's more severe strictures on his fellow-Christians. There is exaggeration on both sides. Yet no one now questions that the Christian community at Rome, lay and clerical, had in the days of Damasus fallen far below its ideals, and it is not pleasant that we find little or no trace of an episcopal struggle against this corruption. It is sometimes said that the rescript which prevented priests from inheriting was passed at the request of the Pope. For this statement there is no historical ground whatever, and it is in the highest degree improbable. It is clear that prosperity had lowered the character of the Church, from its bishop down to its grave-diggers; and the laments of St. Ambrose at Milan, of St. Chrysostom at Antioch and Constantinople, and of St. Augustine in Africa, indicate a general relaxation. The Roman world must pass through another severe and searching trial before men like Leo I. and Gregory I. arise in it.

This conception of Damasus as a courtly and lenientprelate is not materially modified when we regard his more strictly religious work. He restored the Church of St. Lawrence, in which he and his father had served: he built a tinybasilica—little more than a princely tomb for himself, Marucchi believes—on the Via Ardeatina: he erected a new baptistery at St. Peter's. These are not exceptionally impressive works of piety in so prosperous an age.

Damasus was an artist: not—if we judge him by hisEpigrams—a man of much inspiration, but one who perceived the value of art in the service of religion. Jerome tells us that he wrote in prose and verse on the beauty of virginity, but we know his very modest poetical talent only from the surviving fifty or sixty inscriptions with which he adorned the graves of the martyrs or the chapels.[45]He had a genuine passion for the adornment and popularization of the Catacombs. They were already falling into decay, and Damasus cleared the galleries, made new air-shafts, and decorated the more important chambers with marble slabs and silver rails. No doubt he did this in part with a view to attracting the pagans, but there can be little doubt that he had a strong personal sentiment for the work.

With the assistance of Jerome, he also endeavoured to improve the literary standard of the Church. Jerome revised the "Old Italian" translation of the Bible; and it seems probable that the canon of the Scriptures which has until recently been regarded as part of a "Gelasian Decree" was composed by Jerome, under the authority of Damasus, and promulgated by a Roman synod. The canon can hardly be due to the pen which wrote the rambling and uncultivated list of books which follows it; probably a later hand united the two and ascribed them to Gelasius.[46]

The eighteen years' Pontificate of Damasus came to a close in 384. He is not in the line of heroic Popes. He was, at his elevation, in his seventh decade of life and his remaining energy was largely spent in struggling against the disastrous consequences of his election. He succeeded rather by geniality of temper and the services of others than by strong personal exertion. But he was lucky in his opportunities. He had control of the new wealth of the Papacy, and the Emperors with whom he had to deal were the indifferent or undiscerning Valentinian and the pious and youthful Gratian. Hence he added materially to the foundations of the mediæval Papacy. One might almost venture to say that the dogmatic Roman conception of a primacy inherited from Peter dates from the scriptural discussions of Damasus and Jerome. They were not the authors of that conception, but it would henceforward form the essential part of the Papal attitude.

FOOTNOTES:[26]His latest biographer, the learned Father Marucchi, says 305, but St. Jerome does not say that he was "eighty years old" at death (in 384); he says, "nearly eighty." See Father Marucchi'sIl Papa Damaso(1907) andChristian Epigraphy(English trans. 1912), M. Rade'sDamasus, Bischof von Rom(1882) is a little more critical.[27]The less flattering statements about Damasus are generally taken from a certainLibellus precum, or petition, which was presented to the Emperors by two hostile, though esteemed and orthodox, priests about the year 384. The attack on Damasus is, however, in a preface to the petition, which was probably not put before the Emperors. We must make allowance for bitter hostility, but we shall find some of their strangest statements confirmed by the highest authorities. TheLibellusis reproduced in Migne'sPatrologia Latina, vol. iii.[28]TheLiber Pontificalis, which gives these events, first lets the schismatic Felix die in peace, and then introduces into the series of Pontiffs a Felix II., saint and martyr! To this day the fortunate Felix bears these honours in the liturgy. It was discovered, in 1582, that the Anti-Pope Felix had been confused with a real saint and martyr of that name, and the question of displacing him was debated at Rome. But the miraculous discovery of an inscription in his favour put an end to criticism. The genuine authorities are agreed that Felix died comfortably in his house on the road to the Port of Rome.[29]XXVII., 3.[30]Year 369.[31]II., 10.[32]Saint Jerome, 1867.[33]Mansi,Sacrorum Conciliorum Collectio, iii., 625.[34]Mansi, iii., 628.[35]Ep., xxi.[36]Mansi, iii., 624.[37]IV., 26.[38]Ep., lxx.[39]Ep., ccxv.; see alsoEp., ccxxxix. and cclxvi., for violent language. All the letters of the Popes, up to Innocent III., are in this work quoted from the Migne edition.[40]Mansi, iii., 631.[41]The letter is in Theodoret,Ecclesiastical History, v., 10.[42]Theodoret, v., 9.[43]Ep., lii.[44]Ep., xxii.[45]The best collection is Ihm'sDamasi Epigrammata(1895).[46]There is a third part of this "Gelasian Decree," which assigns to the Papacy an absolute primacy derived from Peter. It is improbable that this was due to Damasus. A letter hitherto ascribed to Pope Sirianus (Ep., x. in Migne) has lately been claimed for Damasus (Babut,La plus ancienne décrétale, 1904), but there is not enough evidence to date it. It is a series of directions, better known asCanons of the Romans to the Bishops of Gaul, on the subject of clerical celibacy, fallen virgins, etc.

FOOTNOTES:

[26]His latest biographer, the learned Father Marucchi, says 305, but St. Jerome does not say that he was "eighty years old" at death (in 384); he says, "nearly eighty." See Father Marucchi'sIl Papa Damaso(1907) andChristian Epigraphy(English trans. 1912), M. Rade'sDamasus, Bischof von Rom(1882) is a little more critical.

[27]The less flattering statements about Damasus are generally taken from a certainLibellus precum, or petition, which was presented to the Emperors by two hostile, though esteemed and orthodox, priests about the year 384. The attack on Damasus is, however, in a preface to the petition, which was probably not put before the Emperors. We must make allowance for bitter hostility, but we shall find some of their strangest statements confirmed by the highest authorities. TheLibellusis reproduced in Migne'sPatrologia Latina, vol. iii.

[28]TheLiber Pontificalis, which gives these events, first lets the schismatic Felix die in peace, and then introduces into the series of Pontiffs a Felix II., saint and martyr! To this day the fortunate Felix bears these honours in the liturgy. It was discovered, in 1582, that the Anti-Pope Felix had been confused with a real saint and martyr of that name, and the question of displacing him was debated at Rome. But the miraculous discovery of an inscription in his favour put an end to criticism. The genuine authorities are agreed that Felix died comfortably in his house on the road to the Port of Rome.

[29]XXVII., 3.

[30]Year 369.

[31]II., 10.

[32]Saint Jerome, 1867.

[33]Mansi,Sacrorum Conciliorum Collectio, iii., 625.

[34]Mansi, iii., 628.

[35]Ep., xxi.

[36]Mansi, iii., 624.

[37]IV., 26.

[38]Ep., lxx.

[39]Ep., ccxv.; see alsoEp., ccxxxix. and cclxvi., for violent language. All the letters of the Popes, up to Innocent III., are in this work quoted from the Migne edition.

[40]Mansi, iii., 631.

[41]The letter is in Theodoret,Ecclesiastical History, v., 10.

[42]Theodoret, v., 9.

[43]Ep., lii.

[44]Ep., xxii.

[45]The best collection is Ihm'sDamasi Epigrammata(1895).

[46]There is a third part of this "Gelasian Decree," which assigns to the Papacy an absolute primacy derived from Peter. It is improbable that this was due to Damasus. A letter hitherto ascribed to Pope Sirianus (Ep., x. in Migne) has lately been claimed for Damasus (Babut,La plus ancienne décrétale, 1904), but there is not enough evidence to date it. It is a series of directions, better known asCanons of the Romans to the Bishops of Gaul, on the subject of clerical celibacy, fallen virgins, etc.

CHAPTER III

LEO THE GREAT, THE LAST POPE OF IMPERIAL ROME

Duringthe half-century which followed the death of Damasus occurred two of the decisive events in the transformation of the Roman Empire into Christian Europe. Paganism was destroyed, and the Empire was shattered. Jerome had, with rhetorical inaccuracy, described the great temple of Jupiter as squalid and deserted in the days of Damasus. Now it was in truth deserted, for the imperial seal was set on its closed doors; and the same seal guarded the door of the temples of Isis and Mithra. The homeless gods had sheltered for a time in the schools and in patrician mansions, but these also had fallen with the Empire. The southern half of Europe became a disordered, semi-Christian world, over which poured from the northern forests fresh armies of barbarians. The City of Man was wrecked; and it was not unnatural that the Papacy should aspire to make its old metropolis the centre of the new City of God.

Two Popes of weak ability had followed Damasus, and witnessed, rather than accomplished, the ruin of the old religion. It was Ambrose who had directed the convenient youth of Gratian and Valentinian II., and had dislodged the pagans and other rivals at the point of the spear. Innocent I. (402-417) was a greater man: an upright priest, an able statesman, a zealous believerin the divine right of Popes. Milman has finely drawn him serenely holding his sceptre at Rome while the Emperor cowered behind the fortifications at Ravenna. While Rome tumbled in ruins about him, he continued calmly to tell the bishops of Gaul and Spain and Italy what the "Apostolic See" directed them to do. His puny yet bombastic successor, Zosimus, maintained the solitary blunder, without the redeeming personality, of Innocent, and might have wrecked the Papacy if he had not died within a year or so. The worthier Boniface and still worthier Celestine restored Roman prestige in some measure, and, in 440, after the edifying but undistinguished Pontificate of Sixtus III., Leo the Great entered the chronicle.

Leo, a Roman of Tuscan extraction, was the chief deacon of the Roman Church, and corresponded with Cyril of Alexandria on Eastern affairs. It was probably at his instigation that the learned Cassianus wrote his treatiseOn the Incarnation of Christ. In 440, Leo was sent by the Emperor to reconcile the generals Aetius and Albinus, who quarrelled while the Empire perished. Sixtus died in his absence, and Leo was unanimously elected to the Papacy. Toward the close of September he returned to Rome, and glanced about the troubled world which he had now to rule.

The dogmatic Papal conception, which we find dawning in the mind of Damasus and see very clear in the mind of Innocent I. and his successors, reached its full development, on the spiritual side, in the mind of Leo the Great. This development was inevitable. There were Eastern, and even some Western, bishops who maintained, against Leo, that the prestige of the Roman See was merely the prestige of Rome, but the answer of the Papacy was easy and effective. In the Gospels whichEurope now treasured, Peter was the "rock" on which the Church was built, and to him alone had been given the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Had the Church lost its foundation when Peter died? Were the keys buried beside the bones of Peter in that marble tomb at the foot of the Vatican? There was, from the clerical point of view, logic in the Roman bishop's claim to have inherited the princedom. Leo from the first hour of his Pontificate was sincerely convinced of it. His sermons are full of it. To him is committed "the care of all the Churches": a phrase which he bequeaths to his successors. He is the new type of Roman, blending the ideas of Jerome and Augustine. The wreck of the City of Man matters little. What matters is that these Arian Goths and Vandals are trampling on the City of God: that the churches of Gaul and Spain and Italy and Africa and the East are in disorder, and the successor of Peter must restore their discipline. He is so absorbed in his divine duty that he does not notice how the circumstances favour him. Every other lofty head in the Empire is bowed, and from the seething and impoverished provinces hundreds are looking to the strong man at Rome.

His early letters are the letters of a Supreme Pontiff. The African bishops, he hears, suffer dreadful disorders in their churches. Elections to church-dignities are bought and sold: even laymen and twice-married clerics become bishops. With serene indifference to the earlier history of the African Church and its tradition of independence, he peremptorily recalls the canons and insists on their observance.[47]Fortunately for him, the long struggle against the Donatists and the devastating onset of the Vandals have enfeebled, almost annihilated,the African Church, and there is none to question his authority.

He hears that Anatolius has been made Bishop of Thessalonica, and writes[48]to remind him that he is the "vicar" of the Roman bishop, the successor of Peter, "on the solidity of which foundation the Church is established." When, at a later date, Anatolius uses his power harshly, he sternly rebukes him. And it is interesting to notice what the discipline is on which he insists in this letter.[49]Even subdeacons shall not marry, or, if they are married, shall not know their wives. We are very far away from Callistus.

Another aspect of Leo's character appears in his treatment of the Manichæans at Rome: an interesting illustration of how he kept the strength and serenity of the old Roman though lacking his culture. Leo had a terribly sombre idea of the Manichæans. They lingered in obscure corners of the metropolis, and met stealthily, just as Christians had done two centuries earlier; and of them were told, as had been told of the obscure Christians, dreadful stories. Leo conducted a great inquisition in 444, and brought the Manichæan bishop, with his "elect," to a solemn judgment before the clergy and nobles of Rome. There, he says,[50]they all confessed that the violation of a girl of ten years was part of their ritual. He called down upon them the secular arm, and crushed them in Rome and Italy. What sort of a judicial process was employed to elicit this extraordinary confession—so utterly at variance with all that we know of the ascetic Manichæans—we are not told. But we are painfully reminded of a similar declaration of Augustine in his old age.[51]

In Gaul, the Pope encountered one of the last opponents of Papal aims in the West. The province was completely demoralized by the triumphant barbarians and by the arrival of lax clergy from Africa. In a letter of uncertain date,[52]Leo gives us a dark picture of the state of things in the southern provinces, and this is more than confirmed in the work of the Marseilles priest Salvianus,De Gubernatione Dei. Laymen pose as bishops, Leo says: priests sleep with their wives, and marry their daughters to men who keep concubines: monks serve in the army, or marry: and so on. From this disordered world men were ever ready to appeal to the authority of Rome, and, in 445, a Bishop Celidonius came to complain of the harshness of his metropolitan, the austere and saintly Hilary of Arles. Hilary followed his Bishop to Rome, and, when Leo decided against him, the saint made use, says Leo,[53]of "language which no layman even should dare to use and no priest to hear," and then "fled disgracefully" from Rome.

Again we are in a dilemma between two saints, and we must weigh as best we can the letters of Leo against the biography of Hilary. It will be found a general truth of early Papal history that the man whoappealsto Rome is heard more indulgently than the opponent who did not appeal. Hilary, who had deposed the Bishop in plain accordance with the rules, resented Leo's conduct, and scoffed at his supposed supremacy. He then apprehended violence, and stealthily left Rome for Gaul. Leo thereupon—or after hearing new charges against Hilary—wrote to the bishops of Vienne[54]that they were released from obedience to Hilary, who was thenceforward to confine himself to Arles. Whether Hilary ever submitted or no we have no certain knowledge, but the affair had an important sequel. In the same year (449), an imperial rescript,[55]confessedly obtained by Leo, confirmed the sentence, and added:

We lay down this for ever, that neither the bishops of Gaul nor those of any other province shall attempt anything contrary to ancient usage, without the authority of the venerable man, the Pope of the Eternal City.

Even in the height of this quarrel other provinces were not neglected, as a few letters of the year 447 amply show. The letter to the Spanish Bishop Turribius of Astorga[56]is notable as the first explicit Papal approval of the execution of a heretic. It is usual to point out that the errors of Priscillian, the heretic in question, were believed to include magical practices (then a legal and social crime) as well as Manichæan and Gnostic tenets. But we must recognize one of the most terrible principles of the Middle Ages, and something far more than social zeal, in the following words of Leo:

Although ecclesiastical mildness shrinks from blood-punishments, yet it is aided by the severe decrees of Christian princes, since they who fear corporal suffering will have recourse to spiritual remedies.

Here is no reference to legal or social crimes, but to an error which concerns the ecclesiastic. Similar letters, enforcing discipline in the accents of an undisputed head of the Church, were sent to the bishops of Sicily,[57]the bishop of Beneventum,[58]and the bishop of Aquileia.

These quotations from the letters and sermons of Leo will suffice, not only to show the untiring energy andlofty aim of the man, but to convince us that the primacy of Rome in the West is now won. West of the Adriatic, St. Hilary is the last great rebel against the Roman conception. It is true that this spiritual supremacy is still, in part, reliant on "the severe decrees of Christian princes," but the imperial authority is fast fading into nothing, and in another generation the Papal autocracy will stand alone. Leo was not ambitious. Something of the instinctive masterliness of the older Roman may be detected in his actions, but he was a profoundly religious man, seeking neither wealth nor honours of earth, convinced at once that he discharged a divine duty and exerted an authority of the most beneficent value to that disordered Christendom. The calamities of Europe had changed the empty glories of a Damasus into a power second only to that of Octavian.

When we turn to the East we have not only a most valuable indication of the evolution of Christendom into two independent and hostile Churches, but an even more interesting revelation of subtle and unexpected shades in the character of Leo. The great Pope, aided by the very calamities of the time, fastens his primacy on Europe; and, with even mightier exertions and the most tense use of all his resources, he proves that an extension of that primacy to the East is for ever impossible.

His friendly correspondence with Cyril of Alexandria was resumed in the year 444, and, in the adjustment of their differences, Leo made concessions. In the same year, Cyril died, and his successor Dioscorus was addressed with the same recognition of equality. There are differences in points of discipline, but Leo is content to say[59]: "Since the blessed Peter was madechief of the apostles by the Lord, and the Roman Church abides by his instructions, it is impossible to suppose that his holy disciple Mark, who first ruled the Church of Alexandria, gave it other regulations." Five years later, however, Leo received from the East an appeal against the Bishop of Constantinople, and a notable conflict began.

In the unending struggle in the East over the nature of Christ, the monks, a fierce and turbulent rabble living on the fringes of the great cities, had been the most effective champions of orthodoxy, and great was their excitement when the archimandrite (or abbot) of one of their large monasteries outside Constantinople was accused of heresy. The heresy is really diagnosed as such by the proper authorities, but it is not superfluous for the historian to observe that the monk Eutyches was godson of the most powerful eunuch at the court, and this eunuch was detested by the virtuous Empress Pulcheria and by Flavian, the Bishop of Constantinople. Eutyches was condemned by a synod in 448, and he appealed to Leo. I have observed that the appealer—especially from a province where Roman authority was disputed—always had a gracious hearing at the Lateran. In February, 449, Leo wrote to Flavian[60]to express his surprise that he had not sent a report of the proceedings to Rome and that he had disregarded the appeal which the monk had made from his sentence to Rome. However, since appealhasbeen made to Leo, "we want to know the reasons of your action, and we desire a full account to be communicated to us." Flavian's reply[61]curtly described the heresy and trusted that Leo would see the justice of the sentence.

In the early summer, the Emperors of East and Westissued a joint summons to the bishops of Christendom to assemble in Council at Ephesus, and Leo's letters indicate a feverish activity. His chief work was to write a long dogmatic letter[62]on the nature of Christ—a very able theological essay—to be read by his Legates at the Council. Dioscorus of Alexandria presided over this imposing assembly of 360 bishops and representative clergy, in the presence of two imperial commissioners, the Papal Legates, and the patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem, yet it has passed into Western ecclesiastical history under the opprobrious title, given to it by Leo,[63]of "The Robbers' Meeting." It is quite true that the sittings dissolved in brawls, and monks and soldiers brandished their ominous weapons over the heads of the bishops, but that was not unprecedented. The main fact was that Dioscorus contemptuously refused to hear the Roman Legates, as Leo says, and induced the Council to restore Eutyches and depose Flavian. Deacon Hilary, one of the Legates, fled in terror of his life, and unfolded these enormities to Leo, whose correspondence now became intense and indignant.

For a few months, Leo made strenuous efforts to redeem the prestige of his See. We know, since 1882, that Flavian in turn appealed to Rome, but Leo needed no new incentive. He wrote repeatedly to the pious Pulcheria, to Theodosius, to his "vicar" in Thessalonica, and to the monks, priests, and people of Constantinople. He knew the situation well. Alexandria had defied Constantinople, but the case of Constantinople was weakened by the division of court-factions and the monkish support of Eutyches. It seemed an admirableoccasion for Rome to adjudicate, and Leo pressed Theodosius and Pulcheria[64]to summon an Ecumenical Council at Rome. In the thick of the struggle (February, 450), Valentinian III. visited Rome with the court, and Leo, with tears in his eyes, besought the Empress Galla Placidia to work for the Roman Council. Galla Placidia knew no more than the monks about theology, and was more concerned about her wayward daughter Honoria, but she urged Pulcheria to ensure the holding of the Council at Rome. Presently there came from Constantinople the news that Theodosius was dead, Pulcheria was mistress of the court, the eunuch-godfather had been executed, the monk exiled, and the Archbishop Flavian restored to his See.

But the more agreeable aspect of this situation was soon darkened by a report that the people of Constantinople had compelled Pulcheria to contract a virginal marriage with Marcian, and the new Emperor had summoned an Ecumenical Council in the East. Leo, for reasons which we may understand presently, now made every effort to prevent the holding of a Council,[65]but the Emperor would not endanger his position by flouting the Eastern Church, and, on October 8th, some six hundred bishops gathered at Chalcedon. Four Legates represented Leo, and were awarded a kind of presidency of the Council. Leo's great doctrinal letter was received with thunders of applause, and, when it was speedily decided to condemn Dioscorus (who had gone the length of excommunicating Leo), it was one of the Papal Legates who pronounced the sonorous sentence. But all knew that these compliments were the prelude to a very serious struggle.

After the fourteenth session, the Papal Legates andimperial commissioners affected to believe that the business of the day was over. Later in the day, however, a fifteenth session was held, and the two hundred bishops present framed the famous twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon. It runs:

As in all things we follow the ordinances of the holy fathers and know the recently read canon of the hundred and fifty bishops [of the Council of Constantinople], so do we decree the same in regard to the privileges of the most holy Church of Constantinople. Rightly have the fathers conceded to the See of Old Rome its privileges on account of its character as the Imperial City, and, moved by the same considerations, the one hundred and fifty bishops have awarded the like privileges to the most Holy See of New Rome.[66]

This drastic restriction of the Roman bishop to the West, and disdainful assurance that the prestige of the city of Rome was the only basis of his primacy, was read in the next session, and the Papal Legates were gravely disturbed. There can be very little doubt that, as Hefele says, the Legates had abstained from the fifteenth session because they knew that this canon would be discussed and passed. There was no secrecy about it, and there was much in previous sessions that led to it. Indeed, it is clear that Leo himself knew of the design, and this probably explains his resistance, which has puzzled many, to the holding of the Council. In the heat of the discussion, the Roman Legate, Boniface, produced this instruction from Leo: "If any, taking their stand on the importance of their cities, should endeavour to arrogate anything to themselves, resist them with all decision."[67]Bishop Eusebius of Dorylæum (the accuser of Eutyches) then said that he had read the third canon of Constantinople to Leo at Rome some time before the Council, and that Leo had assented to it. Leo afterwards denied this, but we must assume that he merely denied having consented, not the reading of the canon to him. It is quite clear that Leo prepared his Legates for this discussion.

It implies no reflection whatever on the character of Leo that he should instruct his Legates diplomatically to obstruct the passing of a canon which he regarded as contrary to a divine ordination. But the next act of his Legates is more serious. Bishop Paschasinus, the chief Legate, produced and read, in Latin, the sixth canon of the famous Council of Nicæa, and the Greeks were amazed to learn, when it was translated, that it awarded the primacy to Rome. There is now no doubt that this was a spurious or adulterated canon, and the feelings of the Greeks, when they consulted the genuine canon, can be imagined. The session closed in a weak compromise. The Legates were allowed to protest that the twenty-eighth canon was passed in their absence, and was injurious to the rights of their Bishop, "who presided over the whole Church." The Greeks politely registered their protest, endorsed the canon, and proceeded to indite a very Greek letter to the Roman Bishop. They express to Leo[68]their deep joy at the successful congress, their entire respect for "the voice of Peter," their loving gratitude that, through his Legates, he had presided over them "as the head over the members"; but they admit that one of their canons did not commend itself to his Legates and they trust that he will at once gratify their Emperor by endorsing it! Christendom was divided into two parts.

The sequel matters little. The Legates returned and declared that the signatures to the canon had been extorted (as Leo afterwards wrote), though this point had been raised in their presence by the imperial commissioners, and its falsity put beyond dispute. To Marcian, to Pulcheria, and to the new Bishop of Constantinople, Anatolius, Leo wrote acrid letters, denouncing the miserable vanity and ambition of Anatolius and the violation of the (spurious) canons of Nicæa. Marcian curtly requested him—almost ordered him[69]—to confirm the results of the Council without delay, and Leo signed the doctrinal decisions. There the matter ended. Rome affected to treat the famous canon as invalid, and the East genially ignored the absence of Leo's signature.[70]

In the midst of his feverish efforts to defeat this Eastern rebellion, Leo was summoned to meet the terrible King of the Huns, and the memory of his triumph, gathering volume from age to age, has completely obliterated his failure to dominate the Greeks. Italy, painfully enfeebled by the Goths, now saw "the scourge of God" slowly descend its northern slopes and prepare for a raid on the south. Leo and a group of Roman officials met Attila on the banks of the Mincio, and the ferocious King and his dreaded Huns meekly turned their backs on Italy and retired to the East. Pen and brush and legend have embellished that wonderful deliverance until it has become a mystery and a miracle, but it was neither mystery nor miracle to the men who first made a scanty record of it. Jornandes[71]following the older historian Priscus, says that Attila was hesitating whether to advance on Rome or no at the moment when Leo and his companions arrived; his officers were trying to dissuade him, and were appealing to his superstition with a reminder of the fate of Alaric after he had sacked Rome. Prosper merely says in hisChroniclethat Leo was well received, and succeeded. Idatius, Bishop of Aquæ Flaviæ at the time, does not even mention Leo in hisChronicle. The Huns, he says, were severely stricken by war, by famine, and by some epidemic, and, "being in this plight, they made peace with the Romans and departed."[72]But Rome at the time knew nothing of these fortunate circumstances, and, in the delirious joy of its deliverance, imagined the savage Hun shrinking in awe before its venerable Bishop: kept on imagining, indeed, until some pious fancy of the eighth century believed that the holy apostles had appeared beside the Pope.

When, a few years later (455) a fresh invasion threatened Rome—when the vicious incompetence of the court amid all its desolation set afoot another feud and brought the Vandals from Africa—Leo went out once more to plead for the impoverished city. Genseric was not a savage; the Vandals are libelled by the grosser implication we associate with their name today. Yet he altered not one step of his onward course at thepetitions or the threats of the venerable Pontiff. To say that he consented to refrain from slaying or torturing those who submitted, and from firing the city, is merely to say that Leo failed to wring any concession from the largely civilized Vandal. The aged Pontiff sadly returned with his clergy, and for a whole fortnight had to listen in the Lateran Palace to the shrieks of the women who were dragged from their homes, and to receive accounts of the plundering of his churches. The Church of St. Peter and, probably, the Lateran Church alone were spared. And when the Vandal ships had sailed away with their thousands of noble captives, including the Empress Eudoxia, and their mounds of silver, bronze, and marble, Leo had to melt down the larger vessels of the greatbasilicasto find the necessary chalices for his priests.

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