Boniface was truly attached to the popes, truly respectful to the Roman See: but he preserved his independence. His attitude towards the secular power was precisely similar. He was a great churchman, a great statesman, a great missionary; but his religious and political opinions cannot be tied down to the limits of some strict theory. His was a wide, genial nature, in things spiritual and in things temporal genuine, sincere; a true Saint, a true Apostle. Through the lives and sacrifices of such men it was that the Church came to exercise so profound an influence over the politics of the Middle Age.
[Sidenote: The Emperors and missions.]
The work which S. Boniface began was continued by weapons other than his own. When the Empire of the Romans was revived (as we shall tell in the next chapter) by the chiefs of the Arnulf house, when a Catholic Caesar was again acclaimed in the Roman churches, the ideas on which the new monarchy was to rest were decisively Christian and Catholic. Charles the son of Pippin was a student of theology, among many other things. He believed firmly that it was a real kingdom of God which he was called to form and govern upon earth. The spirit which inspired the followers of {140} Muhammad inspired him too. He was determined not to leave to priests and popes the propagation of the faith which he believed.
[Sidenote: Charles and the Saxons.]
For thirty-two years Charles the Great, as his people came to call him, was engaged in a war which claimed to be waged for the spread of the Christian faith. Charles was before all things in belief (though not always in life) a Christian, and it was intolerable to him that within the German lands should remain a large and powerful body of heathens. In 772 he marched into the land of the Angarii and destroyed the Irminsul, a column which was representative of the power which the Saxons worshipped. It was destroyed, and the army after its victories returned in triumph. In 774 the Saxons turned the tables and burnt the abbey of Fritzlar which had been founded by S. Boniface. In 775 Charles resolved to avenge this loss, but made little progress. In 776 he was more successful, and a great multitude of Saxons submitted and were baptized. In 777 there was another great baptism, but, says the chronicler, the Saxons were perfidious. In 778 when Charles was in Spain the Saxons devastated a vast tract of land, and even for a time stole the body of S. Boniface from its tomb at Fulda. Charles crushed the resistance, and from 780 he set himself to organise the Church in the Saxon lands, issuing severe edicts which practically enforced Christianity on the conquered Saxons with the penalty of death for the performance of pagan rites, and even for eating meat in Lent. A law was also decreed that all men should give a tenth of their substance and work to the churches and priests. Still the conquest was not {141} durable, for a terrible insurrection in 782 slew a whole army of the Germans and massacred priests and monks wherever they could be found. Then came years of carnage: once Charles—it is said—caused 4,500 Saxons to be beheaded in one day. In 793 there was a new outbreak. The Saxons "as a dog returneth to his vomit so returned they to the paganism they had renounced, again deserting Christian faith and lying not less to God than to their lord the king." Churches were destroyed, bishops and priests slain, and the land was again defiled with blood. They allied with the Avars, and Charles was thus beset with heathen foes in Hungary and in North Germany at once. He tried every measure of devastation and exile; but it seems that by 797 he had come more clearly to see the Christian way. "Let but the same pains be taken," he wrote—or the English scholar Alcuin wrote for him—"to preach the easy yoke and light burden of Christ to the obstinate people of the Saxons as are taken to collect the tithes from them or to punish the least transgression of the laws imposed on them, and perhaps they would be found no longer to repel baptism with abhorrence." But he was far from always acting up to this view, and he even allied with heathen Slavs to accomplish the subjugation of his enemies. As he conquered he mapped out the land in bishoprics and planted monasteries at important points: he took Saxon boys to his court and sent them back trained, often as ecclesiastics, to teach and rule. Among such was Ebbo, afterwards Archbishop of Rheims, the "Apostle of Denmark." From abroad too came other missionaries, and notable among them was another Englishman, Willehad of {142} Northumbria, who became in 788 the first bishop of Bremen. At last Christianity was, at least nominally, in possession from the Rhine to the Elbe, and in the words of Einhard "thus they were brought to accept the terms of the king, and thus they gave up their demon worship, renounced their national religious customs, embraced the Christian faith, received the divine sacraments, and were united with the Franks, forming one people."
Under Charles the organisation of the German Church, begun by Boniface, received a great extension. It was possible, after his death, to regard Germany as Christian and as organised in its religion on the lines of all the Western Churches.
[1] Hodgkin,Italy and her Invaders, v. 203.
[2] See p. 1-14.
[3] This seems to me the most probable date. Cf. Hauck,Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, i. 448.
{143}
[Sidenote: Growth of papal power.]
The growth of the temporal power of the bishops of Rome was due to two causes, the withdrawal of the imperial authority from Italy and the conversion of the barbarians. As the emperors at Constantinople became more and more busied with affairs Eastern, with the encroachments of barbarians, heathen and Muhammadan, and the imperial rule in Italy was destroyed by the Lombards, the popes stood out as the one permanent institution in Northern and Central Italy. As gradually the barbarians came to accept the faith they received it at the hands of the great ecclesiastical organisation which kept together the traditions, so strangely transformed, of the Old Rome. The legislation of Justinian also had given great political power to the popes: and this power was greatly increased when the papacy found itself the leader in the resistance of the great majority of Christian peoples against the policy of the Iconoclastic emperors. The history of Rome began to run on very different lines from that of Venice, Naples, or other great cities. It became for a while a conflict between the local military nobility and the clergy under the rule of the pope. The {144} struggle was a political one, just as the assumption of power by the popes, of power over the country and a considerable district around it, was a political act.
The popes had but very slight relations with the kings of the Merwing house. It was different when the Karlings came into power. Zacharias, both directly and through S. Boniface, came into close connection with Pippin and Carloman. At first he was concerned simply with reform in the Frankish Church, but before long he found himself able to intervene in a critical event and to take part in the inauguration of the Karling House, the revival as it claimed to be of the Empire in the West.
[Sidenote: The Karling reformation.]
The growth of the papal power was closely associated with two other historic events: the growth of the Karling house among the Franks, and the process of revival in the Church's spiritual activity, showing itself in missions without and reforms within. The last leads back to the first.
Whatever may be thought of the Karling reformation, it cannot be denied that for the century before Charles assumed the Imperial crown the Church showed many signs of corruption. The darkness of the picture is relieved only by the lives of some remarkable saints.
[Sidenote: The Karling House.]
The first, of course, is S. Arnulf, Bishop of Metz, the great-grandfather of Charles Martel. Born about 582, he died in 641, and the holy simplicity of his life as statesman and priest comes like a ray of sunshine in the gloom of the days of "half heathen and wholly vicious" kings. Mr. Hodgkin, with an eye no doubt to modern affairs, comments thus on the career of the prelate so different from the greedy, turbulent, and licentious men whom {145} Gregory of Tours describes: "In reading his life one cannot but feel that in some way the Frankish nation, or at least the Austrasian part of it, has groped its way upwards since the sixth century." [Sidenote: S. Arnulf.] Arnulf was a type of the good bishops of the Middle Ages, strong, able to hold his own with kings, a friend of the poor, eager to pass from the world to a quiet eventide in some monastic shade. The tale that is told of him is typical of the sympathies and passions of his age. Bishop of Metz, and chief counsellor of Dagobert whose father Chlothochar he had helped to raise to the throne, when he expressed his wish to retire from the world the king cried out that if he did he would slay his two sons. "My sons' lives are in the hands of God," said Arnulf. "Yours will not last long if you slay the innocent"; and when Dagobert drew his sword on him he said, "Would you return good for evil? Here am I ready to die in obedience to Him Who gave me life and Who died for me." Queen and nobles cried out, and the king fell penitent at the bishop's feet. Like S. Arnulf's is the romantic figure of his descendant Carloman, who turned from the rule of kingdoms and the command of armies to the seclusion of Soracte and Monte Cassino. The "great renunciation" is a striking tale. The disappearance, the long days of patient submission to rule, the discovery of the real position of the humble brother, and then the last dramatic appearance to follow an unpopular cause, make a story as striking as any which have come to us from the Middle Age. But before Carloman come many other noble figures. The fifty years that followed Arnulf's death are but a dreary tale of anarchy and blood. It is broken here and there {146} by records of Christian endurance or martyrdom: bishops who tried to serve the State often served not wisely but too well and met the fate of unsuccessful political leaders. Leodegar, Bishop of Autun, who helped Ebroin to raise Theoderic III to the throne of Neustria, was blinded, imprisoned and at length put to death and appears in the Church's calendar as S. Leger.
The crisis came when the long march of the successful Muhammadans was stayed by the arms of S. Arnulf's descendant Charles Martel, mayor of the palace to the King of Austrasia 717, to all the kingdoms from 719, who lived till 741. In 711 the Wisigothic monarchy of Spain had fallen before the infidels: in 720 the Moors entered Gaul. From then to 731 there was for Abder Rahman an almost unbroken triumph. The power of the Prophet reached from Damascus to beyond the Pyrenees. Then Charles Martel came to the relief of Southern Gaul, and on an October Sunday in 732 the hosts of Islam were utterly routed at Poictiers by the soldiers of the Cross. [Sidenote: The defeat of the Saracens.] It was a great deliverance; and there is no wonder that imagination has exaggerated its importance and thought that but for the Moorish defeat there might to-day be a muezzin in every Highland steeple and an Imám set over every Oxford college. Charles had still to reconquer Septimania and Provence. Arles and Nîmes, the great Roman cities, had to be recovered from the Arabs who had seized them, and Avignon, Agde, Beziers, cities whose future was as wonderful as was the others' past, were also won back by the arms of the Christian chief.
Charles died in 741. He had refused to help Pope {147} Gregory III. in 739 against the Lombards. It was reserved for his son Pippin to make that alliance between the papacy and the Karling house which dictated the future of Europe. [Sidenote: Pippin.] To Pippin came the lordship of the West Franks, to Carloman his brother that of the East Franks, when their father died. They conquered, they reformed the Church among the Franks, with the aid of Boniface, and then came that dramatic retirement of Carloman in 747 which showed him to be true heir of S. Arnulf. Four years later the house of the Karlings became the nominal as well as the real rulers of the Franks. In 751 the bishop of Würzburg for the East Franks, and the abbat of S. Denis for those of the West, went to Rome to ask the pope's advice. Were the wretched Merwings "who were of royal race and were called kings but had no power in the realm save that grants and charters were drawn up in their names" to be still called kings, for "what willed themajor domusof the Franks, that they did?" Zacharias answered as a wise man would, that he who had the power should bear the name. And so, blessed by the great missionary S. Boniface, Pippin was "heaved" on the shield, and became king of the Franks, and Childerich, the last of the Merwings, went to a distant monastery to end his days.
[Sidenote: The end of the Imperial power in Italy.]
But this was only a beginning. The pope was threatened by the barbarians, neglected by the emperors who reigned at Constantinople, and at last was in actual conflict with those who tried to impose Iconoclasm upon the Church. In 751 the exarchate, the representation of the Imperial power in Italy, with its seat at Ravenna, was overwhelmed by the {148} arms of Aistulf, the Lombard king. The time had come, thought Pope Stephen II. (752-7), when the distant barbarians, now orthodox, should be called to save the patrimony of S. Peter from the barbarians near at hand. In S. Peter's name letters summoned Pippin to the rescue of the church especially dear to the Franks.[1] But before this Stephen had made Pippin his friend. In 753 he left Rome and failing to win from Aistulf any concession to the Imperial power made his way across the Alps, and on the Feast of the Epiphany, 754, met in their own land Pippin and his son who was to be Charles the Great. The pope fell at the king's feet and besought him by the mercies of God to save the Romans from the hands of the Lombards. Then Pippin and all his lords held up their hands in sign of welcome and support. Then Stephen on July 28, 754, in the great monastery which was to become the crowning-place of Frankish kings, anointed Pippin and his sons Charles and Carloman as king of the Franks and kings in succession.
[Sidenote: The crowning of Pippin.]
A point of special interest in this event is the title given to Pippin at his crowning at Saint Denis. The title of Patrician of the Romans was given by the pope, as commissioned by the emperor, "to act against the king of the Lombards for the recovery of the lost lands of the Empire." Pippin was made the officer of the distant emperor, and the pope would say as little as possible about the rights of him who ruled in Constantinople, and as much as he could about the Church which ruled in Rome. It was a step in the assertion of {149} political rights for the Roman Church. A new order of things was springing up in Italy. The popes were asserting a political power as belonging to S. Peter. They were asserting that the exarchate had ceased in political theory as well as in practical fact. In this new order Pippin was to be involved as supporter of the protectorate which the papacy assumed to itself.
Then the Franks came forward to save Rome from the Lombards. The last act of the romantic life of Carloman was to plead for justice to Aistulf,—that what he had won should not be taken from him,—and to be refused. Twice Pippin came south and saved the pope: and then the cities he had won he refused to give up to the envoys of the distant emperor and declared that "never should those cities be alienated from the power of S. Peter and the rights of the Roman Church and the pontiff of the Apostolic See." From this dates the Roman pope's independence of the Roman emperor, the definite political severance of Italy from the East, and therefore a great stop towards the schism of the Church. Iconoclasm and the independence of the popes alike worked against the unity of Christendom.
[Sidenote: The papal power.]
Pope Stephen, thanks to Pippin, had become the arbitrator of Italy. The keys of Ravenna and of the twenty-two cities which "stretched along the Adriatic coast from the mouths of the Po to within a few miles of Ancona and inland as far as the Apennines" were laid on the tomb of S. Peter. The "States of the Church" began their long history, the history of "the temporal power."
And this new power was seen outside Italy as well {150} as within. From the eighth century, at least, the popes are found continually intervening in the affairs of the churches among the Franks and the Germans, granting privileges, giving indulgence, writing with explicit claim to the authority which Christ gave to S. Peter. Into the recesses of Gaul, among Normans at Rouen, among Lotharingians at Metz, to Amiens, or Venice, or Limoges, the papal letters penetrated; and their tone is that of confidence that advice will be respected or commands obeyed. And this is, in small matters especially, rather than in great. The popes at least claimed to interfere everywhere in Christian Europe and in everything.[2] Within Italy events moved quickly.
The first step towards a new development was the destruction of the Lombard kingdom by Charles, who succeeded his father Pippin in 768. At first joint ruler with his brother he became on the latter's death in 771 sole king of all the Franks. In 772 Hadrian I., a Roman, ambitious and distinguished, succeeded the weak Stephen III. on the papal throne. He reigned till 795 and one of his first acts was to summon Charles and the Franks to his rescue against the Lombards. [Sidenote: Charles the Great and Rome.] In the midst of his conquests—which it is not here our part to tell—Charles spent the Holy Week and Easter of 774 at Rome. Thus the one contemporary authority tells the tale of the great alliance which was made on the Wednesday in Easter week: "On the fourth day of the week the aforesaid pontiff with all his nobles both clerkly and knightly went forth to S. Peter's Church and there {151} meeting the king in colloquy earnestly prayed him and with paternal affection admonished him to fulfil entirely that promise which his father of holy memory the dead king Pippin had made, and which he himself with his brother Carloman and all the nobles of the Franks had confirmed to S. Peter and his vicar Pope Stephen II. of holy memory when he visited Francia, that they would grant divers cities and territories in that province of Italy to S. Peter and his vicars for ever. And when Charles had caused the promise which was made in Francia at a place called Carisiacum (Quierzy) to be read over to him all its contents were approved by him and his nobles. And of his will and with a good and gracious mind that most excellent and most Christian king Charles caused another promise of gift like the first to be drawn up by Etherius his most religious and prudent chaplain and notary, and in this he gave the same cities and lands to S. Peter and promised that they should be handed over to the pope with their boundaries set forth as is contained in the aforesaid donation, namely: From Luna with the island of Corsica, thence to Surianum, thence to Mount Bardo, that is to Vercetum, thence to Parma, thence to Pihegium, and from thence to Mantua and Mons Silicis, together with the whole exarchate of Ravenna, as it was of old, and the provinces of the Venetia and Istria; together with the whole duchy of Spoletium and that of Beneventum." [3] The donation was confirmed, says the chronicler, with the most solemn oaths.
Now if this records the facts, and if two-thirds of Italy were given by Charles (who possessed very little {152} of it) to the popes, it is almost incredible that his later conduct should have shown that he did not pay any regard to it. But the question is of political rather than ecclesiastical interest, and it may suffice to say that there are very strong reasons for believing the passage to be a later interpolation.[4]
[Sidenote: The revival of the Empire, 800.]
Within four mouths Charles had subdued the Lombards and become "rex Francorum et Langobardorum atque patricius Romanorum." For nearly a quarter of a century Charles was employed in other parts of his empire: he dealt friendly but firmly with the pope; but he kept away from Rome. But in 799 the new pope Leo III., attacked by the Romans probably for some harshness in his rule, fled from the city and in July came to Charles at Paderborn to entreat his help. It is probable that the great English scholar, Alcuin, who has been called the Erasmus of the eighth century, had already suggested to the great king that the weakness of the Eastern emperors was a real defeasance of power and that the crown imperial might be his own. However that may be Charles came to Rome and made a triumphal entry on November 24, 800. The charges against the pope were heard and he swore to his innocence. On the feast of the Nativity, in the basilica of S. Peter, when Charles had worshipped at theconfessio, the tomb of S. Peter, Leo clothed him with a purple robe and set a crown of gold upon his head. "Then all the faithful Romans beholding so great a champion given them and the love which {153} he bore towards the holy Roman Church and its vicar, in obedience to the will of God and S. Peter the key-bearer of the kingdom of heaven, cried with one accord in sound like thunder 'To Charles the most pious Augustus, crowned of God, the Emperor great and peaceable, life and victory!'"
Thus the Roman pope and the Roman people claimed to make anew in Rome the Roman Empire with a German for Caesar and Augustus. It was not, if we believe Charles's own close friend Einhard, a distinction sought by the new emperor himself. "At first he so disliked the title ofImperatorandAugustusthat he declared that if he had known before the intention of the pope he would never have entered the church on that day, though it was one of the most holy festivals of the year." [5] It may well be that Charles, who had corresponded with the Caesars of the East, hesitated to take a step of such bold defiance. Men still preserved the memories of how the soldiers of Justinian had won back Italy from the Goths. Nor was Charles pleased to receive such a gift at the hands of the pope. He did not recognise the right of a Roman pontiff to give away the imperial crown. What could be given could be taken away. It was a precedent of evil omen.
But none the less the coronation of Charles the Great, as men came to call him, was the greatest event in the Middle Age. It allowed the vitality of the idea of empire which the West inherited from the Romans, and it showed that idea linked to the new power of the popes. It founded the Holy Roman Empire. Twelve years later the Empire of the West won some sort of recognition from the Empire of the East. In 812 an ambassage from Constantinople came {154} to Charles at Aachen, and Charles was hailed by them as Imperator and Basileus. The Empire of the West was an accomplished and recognised fact.
[Sidenote: Results of the revived Empire.]
Its significance was at least as much religious as poetical. Charles delighted in the works of S. Augustine and most of all in theDe Civitate Dei; and that great book is the ideal of a Christian State, which shall be Church and State together, and which replaces the Empire of pagan Rome. The abiding idea of unity had been preserved by the Church: it was now to be strengthened by the support of a head of the State. The one Christian commonwealth was to be linked together in the bond of divine love under one emperor and one pope. That Constantine the first Christian emperor had given to the popes the sovereignty of the West was a fiction which it seems was already known at Rome: Hadrian seems to have referred to the strange fable when he wrote to Charles the Great in 777. It was a legend very likely of Eastern fabrication, and it was probably not as yet believed to have any claim to be authentic; but when the papacy had grown great at the expense of the Empire it was to be a powerful weapon in the armoury of the popes. Now it served only, with the revival of learning at the court of Charles the Great, to illustrate two sides of the great movement for the union of Europe under two monarchs, the spiritual and the temporal. The coronation of Charles was indeed a fact the importance of which, as well as the conflicts which would inevitably flow from it, lay in the future. But it showed the Roman Church great, and it showed the absorption of the great Teutonic race in the fascinating ideal of unity at once Christian and imperial.
[1]Cod. Car.in Muratori,Rer. Ital. Script., iii. (2) 90.
[2] Cf. Dr. J. von Pflugk-Hartung,Acta Pontificum Romanorum inedita, 1880, 1884.
[3]Liber Pontificalis, i. 498.
[4] The question may be read in Mgr. Duchesne's Introduction to theLiber Pontificalis, ccxxxvii.-ccxlii.; and Dr. Hodgkin,Italy and her Invaders, vii. 387-97.
[5]Liber Pontificalis, ii. 6.
{155}
We have spoken already of two important periods in the history of theEastern Church. We must now briefly sketch another.
[Sidenote: Sketch of the period, 725-847.]
The third period (725-847) is that of Iconoclasm. Of this, the originator was the emperor Leo III., one of those soldiers who endeavour to apply to the sanctuary the methods of the parade-ground. He issued a decree against the reverence paid to icons (religious images and pictures), and, in 729, replaced the patriarch S. Germanus by the more supple Anastasius; a docile assembly of bishops at Hieria, under Constantine V. (Copronymus), passed a decree against every image of the Lord, the Virgin, and the saints. A fierce persecution followed, which was hardly ended before the accession to power of Irene, widow of Leo IV., under whom assembled the Seventh General Council at Nicae in 787, a Council to which the West and the distant East sent representatives. This Council decreed that icons should be used and receive veneration (proskuêsis) as did the Cross and the book of the Gospels. A persecution followed, as bitter as that of the iconoclastic emperors, and the troubled years of the first half of the ninth century, stained in Byzantium by every crime, found almost their only brightness in the patriarchate (843-7) of S. Methodius, a wise ruler, an {156} orthodox theologian, a charitable man. In Antioch and Jerusalem, about the same period, orthodox patriarchs were re-established by the toleration of the Ommeyads and the earlier Abbasaides; but on the European frontiers of the Empire conversion was at a standstill during the whole period of iconoclastic fury and reaction, while in the north-east of Syria and in Armenia the heresy of the Paulicians (Adoptianism) spread and flourished, and the Monophysites still throve on the Asiatic borders. In theology the Church of Constantinople was still strong, as is shown by the great work of S. Theodore of the Studium, famous as a hymn-writer, a liturgiologist, and a defender of the faith.
Such are the facts, briefly summarised, of the history of rather more than a century in the East. But we must examine more attentively the meaning of the great strife which divided the Eastern Church.
[Sidenote: The orthodox doctrine of images.]
The orthodox doctrine, as it is now defined, is this—that "the icons are likenesses engraved or painted in oil on wood or stone or any sort of metal, of our Saviour Christ, of the Mother of God, and of the holy men who from Adam have been well-pleasing to God. From earliest times the icons have been used not only to give internal dignity and beauty to every Christian church and house, but, which is much more essential, for the instruction and moral education of Christians. For when any Christian looks at the icons, he at once recalls the life and deeds of those who are represented upon them, and desires to conform himself to their example. On this account also the Church decreed in early times that due reverence should always be paid {157} by Christians to the holy icons, which honour of course is not rendered to the picture before our eyes, but to the original of the picture." This statement represents the views of the orthodox Eastern theologians of the eighth as clearly as it does the teaching of the nineteenth century. It represents also the opinions of the popes contemporary with the Iconoclastic movement, who withstood the emperors to the face. Leo was threatened by Gregory II., and the patriarch who had yielded to the storm, Anastasius, was excommunicated. The pope advocated, in clear dogmatic language, the use of images for instruction of the ignorant and encouragement of the faithful. In Greece there was something like a revolution, but it was sternly repressed. [Sidenote: The acceptance in the West.] In 731 a council, at which the archbishops of Ravenna and Grado were present, and ninety-three other Italian prelates, with a large representation of the laity, under Pope Gregory III., ordered that if anyone should stand forth as "a destroyer, profaner, and blasphemer against the veneration of the holy images, that is of Christ and His sinless Mother, of the blessed Apostles and the Saints, he should be excluded from the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and from all the unity and fabric of the Church." The answer to this, it would seem, was the separation of the Illyrian territories and sees from the Roman patriarchate, as well as the sees in Sicily and Calabria: the pope's authority was restricted to the territory of the exarchate, including Rome, Venice and Ravenna. In Constantinople the resistance of the people to the Iconoclastic decrees was met by a bitter persecution, which Constantine V. began in 761. Under {158} his father Leo III. the virgin Theodosia was martyred, who is revered among the most popular of the Saints in Constantinople to-day. [Sidenote: The Iconoclastic persecution.] The position of the people who clung to their old ways of worship in the eighth century was indeed not unlike that of those who to-day struggle on, always in dread of active persecution, under the Muhammadan rule. Muhammadanism, with its stern suppression of all representation of things divine or human, was believed to have been one of the suggesting forces which brought about the Iconoclastic movement. Leo III. had been brought into intimate association with the Saracens; and it was said in his own day that he had learned his fury against images from one of them. The tale was a fable, but it showed how entirely Leo's action was contrary to the religious feeling of his time.
[Sidenote: Iconoclastic theology.]
It is difficult perhaps for a Western, or at least an Anglican, to-day to form a just estimate of the strong feeling of the majority of the Eastern Christians in favour of "image-worship." It is easy to see how the stern simplicity of the Muhammadan worship, which in all the strength of the creed that carried its disciples in triumphant march over continents and over ancient civilisations was present to the eyes of the soldiers of Heraclius and Leo, appealed to all those who knew the power and the need of stern self-restraint. That Islam should seem to be more spiritual than Christianity seemed irony indeed, but an irony which seemed to have facts to prove it. An age of superstition, an age of credulous limits after the miraculous, an age when materialism made rapid progress among {159} the courtiers of the great city, was an age, it might well seem, which needed a protest against "iconoduly," as the iconoclasts termed the custom of the Eastern Church. And if the controversy could have been kept away from the field of pure theology it might well have been that an Iconoclastic victory would not have been other than a benefit to religion. Leo was content to replace the crucifix by a cross. But it is impossible to sunder the symbol from the doctrine, and the Greeks would never rest satisfied with a definition, still less with a practical change, without probing to its inner meaning. This feeling was expressed in form philosophical and theological by one of the last of the great Greek Fathers, S. John Damascene, and by the united voice of the Church in the decision of the Seventh General Council.
[Sidenote: S. John Damascene.]
S. John of Damascus, who died about 760, was clear in his acceptance of all the Councils of the Church, clear in his rejection of Monophysitism and Monothelitism. He described in clear precision the two natures in one hypostasis, the two wills, human and Divine, with a wisdom and knowledge related to each; but he was equally clear that the composite personality involves acommunicatio idiomatum(antidosis idiômatôn). The human nature taken up into the Divine received the glory of the Divinity: the Divine "imparts to the human nature of its own glories, remaining itself impassible and without share in the passions of humanity." S. John Damascene taught then that our Lord's humanity was so enriched by the Divine Word as to know the future, though this knowledge was only manifested progressively as He increased in age, and {160} that only for our sakes did He progressively manifest His knowledge. While he declared that each Nature in the Divine Person had its will, he explained that the One Person directed both, and that His Divine will was the determinant will. It might well seem that in his desire to avoid Nestorianism he did not attach so full a meaning to our Lord's advance in human knowledge as did some of the earlier Fathers. But the practical bearing of S. John's writings was in direct relation to the great controversy of his age, to which he devoted three addresses in particular. He defined the "worship" of the icons as all based upon the worship of Christ, and attacked iconoclasm as involving ultimately an assault upon the doctrine of the Incarnation. On this ground S. Theodore of the Studium and Nicephorus the patriarch of Constantinople, who was driven from his see by the emperor, are at one with S. John Damascene.
[Sidenote: S. Theodore of the Studium.]
Theodore of the Studium occupies a place in Greek thought which is, perhaps, comparable to that of S. Anselm in the Latin Church. If there never was anything in the East exactly corresponding to the era of the schoolmen in the West, if the theology of Byzantium throughout might seem to be a scholasticism, but a scholasticism apart, still it would not be untrue to describe S. Theodore as the last of the Greek Fathers. He came at a time in Byzantine history when a great crisis was before the Church and State, so closely conjoined in the Eastern Empire. Born in the last half of the eighth century, and dying on November 11th, 826, Theodore lived through the most vital period of the Iconoclastic struggle, and he left, in his {161} theological and familiar writings, the most important memorial of the orthodox position which he did so much to render victorious.
Theodore of the Studium is a striking example of the influence of environment, tradition, andesprit de corps. His life is inextricably bound up with the history, and his opinions were indubitably formed to a very large extent by the influence, of the great monastery of S. John Baptist of the Studium, founded towards the close of the fourth century by Fl. Studius, a Roman patrician, the remains of which still charm the traveller who penetrates through the obscurest part of Constantinople to the quarter of Psamatia. The house was dedicated to S. John Baptist, and according to the Russian traveller, Antony of Novgorod, it contained special relics of the Precursor. A later description shows the extreme beauty, seclusion, severity of the place, surrounded by cypress trees and looking forth on the great city which was mistress of the world. Even to-day the splendid columns which still remain and the impressive beauty of the crypt make the church, though in an almost ruinous condition, a striking object in Constantinople. The monastery first became famous as the home of the Akoimetai, or Sleepless Monks, (as they were called from their hours of prayer,) when they withstood the heresies of the later fifth century,[1] and fell themselves into error, but from the date of the Fifth General Council to the outbreak of the Iconoclastic controversy they remained in comparative obscurity.
The era of Iconoclasm, which did so much to devastate the East, and which, by the emigration of some {162} 50,000 Christians, cleric and lay, to Calabria, exercised so important an influence on the history of Southern Italy, might have cast a fatal blight on the Church in Constantinople had it not been for the stand made by the Monks of the Studium. [Sidenote: The Monks of the Studium and the Iconoclastic Controversy.] The age of the Iconoclasts was the golden age of the Studite monks. Persecuted, expelled from their house by Constantine Copronymus, they were restored at his death in 775, but had dwindled, it seems, to the number of twelve. A new era of power began for them under their Archimandrite Sabbas, and this was increased by his successor, Theodore, whose life covered the period of the greatest theological importance in the history of Iconoclasm. When the patriarchal see was held for seven-and-twenty years by Iconoclasts, Theodore upheld the spirits of his brethren, and even in exile contrived to be their indefatigable leader and support. His was never a submissive, but always an active resistance to the imperial attempt to dragoon the Church, and a typical audacity was the solemn procession with all the monastery's icons, the monks singing the hymn "Tên achranton eikona sou proskunoumen,agathe" which caused his expulsion. His exile produced a series of impressive letters in which, with every vigour and cogency of argument of which a logical Greek was capable, he exhorted, encouraged, and consoled those who, like himself, remained steadfast to their faith. The Studium gave, too, its actual martyrs, James and Thaddeus, to the traditional belief; and Theodore in exile, who would gladly have borne them company in their death, commemorated their heroism and {163} implored their intercessions. Theodore's whole life was one of resistance, active or passive, to the attempt of the emperors to dictate the Church's Creed; and though he did not live to see the conclusion of the conflict, its final result was largely due to his persistent and strenuous efforts. For a while after his death there is silence over the history of the Studites, till, in 844, we find them bringing back his body in solemn triumph from the island of Prinkipo. Till the middle of the ninth century they remained a potent force; from that time up to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, if they retained their fame, their activity was diminished.
[Sidenote: The rule of the Studium.]
Professor Marin[2] has collected interesting details from many sources as to the rule of the house, its dress, liturgical customs, learning, discipline. The liturgy was said at six on days when the fast lasted till nine, at three on other days; and the monks were expected to communicate daily. While the house was essentially a learned society, a community of sacred scholars, Theodore stands out from its whole annals as a great preacher, and no less for the charm of his personal character. It was he, fitly, who gave to the house that special Rule, which stood in the same relation to the general customary observance by Eastern monks of that somewhat vague series of laws known as "the Rule of Basil," that the reform of Odo of Cluny stood to the work of S. Benedict himself. It was an eminently sensible codification of floating custom in regard to monastic life. All that Theodore did—and this applies with special force to the sermons which he {164} preached—seems to have been eminently practical, charitable, and sane. There is an underlying force of the same kind in the argument of his threeAntirrhetici, in which he triumphantly vindicates the worship of Christ in His Godhead and His manhood as being inseparable and essential to the true knowledge of the faith as it is in Jesus. There can be no rivalry between icon and prototype: "The worship of the image is worship of Christ, because the image is what it is in virtue of likeness to Christ."
This was the point on which the orthodox met the theologians who defended iconoclasm: the iconoclasts in seeking to destroy all images were seen to strike at a vital truth of the Incarnation, the true humanity of Jesus. The theologians demanded the preservation and worship,—reverence rather than worship in the modern English use of the words,—of the icons as a security for the remembrance of the Manhood of the Lord. The worship was notlatreia, which can be paid to God alone, butproskunêsis schetikê. Christ, said S. Theodore, was in danger of losing the quality of being man if not seen and worshipped in an image.
The long dispute ended, as we have said, after the accession of the Empress Irene, who, unworthy though she was to have part in any great religious movement, yet had always been attached to the traditional opinions of the Greek people. The monks of Constantinople had exercised a steady influence during all the years of disturbance: and they were to triumph. [Sidenote: The Seventh General Council, 787.] The Empress Irene replaced the patriarch Paul in 783 by her own secretary Tarasius, and it was determined at once to reverse the decrees that {165} had been passed at Constantinople in 754. In 787 for the second time a council met at Nicaea, across the Sea of Marmora, which became recognised as the Seventh General Council. To it came representatives of East and West, and the decision which was arrived at was practically that of the whole Church.
The persecution of the orthodox was renewed for a time under Leo V. (813-20), and it is said that more perished in his time than in that of Constantine V. Theophilus (829-42) was almost equally hostile. It was not till his widow Theodora assumed the reins of power in 842 as regent for her son that the final triumph of orthodoxy was assured; and this was followed by the five years' patriarchate of S. Methodius, a man of peace and of wisdom.
To some the action of the emperors in attacking image worship has seemed a serious attempt at social reform, an endeavour to raise the standard of popular worship, and through that to affect the people themselves intellectually, morally, and spiritually. But history has spoken conclusively of the violence with which the attempt was made, and theology has decisively pronounced against its dogmatic assertions.
The long controversy is important in the history of the Church because it so clearly expresses the character of the Eastern Church, so decisively demonstrates its intense devotion to the past, and so expressively illustrates the close attachment, the abiding influence, of the people and the monks, as the dominant factor in the development of theology and religious life.
[1] See above, pp. 8, 14.
[2]De Studio Coenobio Constantinopolitano, Paris, 1897.
{166}
Something has been said in earlier chapters of the relation of several great Churchmen towards education, towards the ancient classics, and towards the studies of their own times. Something has been said, too, in the last chapter, of Greek monastic life. The period which begins with the eighth century deserves a longer mention, inadequate though it be; for there was over a great part of Europe in the days of Charles the Great a veritable literary renaissance which broke upon the long period which men have called the dark ages with a ray of light.
[Sidenote: Learning at the court of Charles the Great.]
Charles the Great had all the interests of a scholar. He knew Latin well and Greek passably. He delighted to listen to the deeds of the past, or to theological treatises, when he dined, after the fashion of monks. His interest in learning centred in his interest in the teaching and services of the Church. Most reverently, we are told by his biographer, and with the utmost piety did he cultivate the Christian religion with which he had been imbued from his infancy. He was a constant church-goer, a regular worshipper at the mass. Near to his religious interest was his interest in education. A famous letter of his to the abbats of monasteries {167} throughout the Empire, written in 787, is a salient example of the close connection between learning and monasticism in his day. He urged that "letters" should be studied, students selected and taught, that all the clergy should teach children freely, and that every monastery and cathedral church should have a theological school. "Although right doing is better than right speaking," he wrote, "yet must the knowledge of what is right go before the doing of it."
What he tried to do throughout his empire was a reflection of what he did in his own court. He delighted to surround himself at Aachen with learned men. Most notable among them were Paul the Deacon, the historian of the Lombards, and Alcuin the Northumbrian whom he had met in Italy and whom he made prominent among his counsellors.
Charles, says Einhard, spent much time and labour in learning from Alcuin, and that not only in religion, but "in rhetoric and dialectic and especially astronomy"; and he "carefully reformed the manner of reading and singing; for he was thoroughly instructed in both, though he never read publicly himself, nor sang except in a low voice, and with the rest of the congregation."
[Sidenote: Alcuin of Northumbria.]
Alcuin connects the learning of England with the revival on the Continent. He had been trained in the school at York by Archbishop Egbert, who was himself a pupil of Bede. He had studied the ancient classics in Greek as well as Latin and knew at least a little of Hebrew. The library at York is known to have contained books in all those languages, and Aristotle was among them. Vergil, he said, when he was a boy he cared more for [Transcriber's note: a line appears to be missing here] than the vigils of the Church and the chanting of the {168} psalms. About 782 he took charge of the schools which Charles had founded at his court, and he became a very close friend and trusted adviser of the emperor himself. With him (but for a short return to England) he lived till in 796 he had leave to retire to Tours, where he was abbat of the great monastery of S. Martin, and where he died in 804. He was a great teacher; a writer of books of education and books of Church practice, of lives of the saints, of hymns, epigrams, prayers, controversial tracts; a compiler of summaries of patristic teaching; a leader in the reform of monastic houses. Among the many notable points in his career, as illustrating the life of learned churchmen of his age, are two especially to be observed. The first is his "humanism." He was a scholar of an ancient type; and the society in which he lived delighted to believe itself classical as well as Christian. In a contemporary description of the life at Charles's court Alcuin is called "Flaccus" and is described as "the glory of our bards, mighty to shout forth his songs, keeping time with his lyric foot, moreover a powerful sophist, able to prove pious doctrines out of Holy Scripture, and in genial jest to propose or solve puzzles of arithmetic." As a theologian he was most famous for his books against Felix of Urgel and Elipandus of Toledo, on the subject of the Adoptianist heresy (see above, ch. vi), and there is no doubt that his was an important influence in the Council of Frankfort which condemned them. The second is his attitude towards the monastic life. He admired the monastic life, but he had not been trained as a strict Benedictine, indeed he was probably no more than a secular in deacon's orders. He held abbeys as their superior, just as many {169} laymen did; but he never seems to have been inclined to take upon him any strict rule. His example shows how natural was the next step in monastic history which is associated with the abbey of Cluny.
[Sidenote: The schools of Europe.]
In Alcuin England was linked to the wider world of Christendom. This has been summarily expressed by a great English historian thus: "The schools of Northumbria had gathered in the harvest of Irish learning, of the Franco-Gallican schools still subsisting and preserving a remnant of classical character in the sixth century, and of Rome, itself now barbarised. Bede had received instruction from the disciples of Chad and Cuthbert in the Irish studies of the Scriptures, from Wilfrid and Acca in the French and Roman learning, and from Benedict Biscop and Albinus in the combined and organised discipline of Theodore. By his influence with Egbert, the school of York was founded, and in it was centred nearly all the wisdom of the West, and its great pupil was Alcuin. Whilst learning had been growing in Northumbria, it had been declining on the Continent; in the latter days of Alcuin, the decline of English learning began in consequence of the internal dissensions of the kings, and the early ravages of the Northmen. Just at the same time the Continent was gaining peace and organisation under Charles. Alcuin carried the learning which would have perished in England into France and Germany, where it was maintained whilst England relapsed into the state of ignorance from which it was delivered by Alfred. Alcuin was rather a man of learning and action than of genius and contemplation like Bede, but his power of organisation and of teaching was great, and his services {170} to religion and literature in Europe, based indeed on the foundation of Bede, were more widely extended and in themselves inestimable." [1]
[Sidenote: John Scotus.]
Side by side with the career of Alcuin, of which much is known, may be placed that of another scholar who was at least equally influential, but of whose life little is known. John the Scot, whose thought exercised a profound influence on the ages after his death, was one of the Irish scholars whom the famous schools of that island produced as late as the ninth century. He became attached to the court of Charles the Bald, as Alcuin had been to that of Charles the Great. He became like Alcuin a prominent defender of the faith, being invited by Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, to answer the monk Gottschalk's exaggerated doctrine of predestination, which went much farther than S. Augustine, and might be described as Calvinist before Calvin; but his arguments were also considered unsound, and his opinions were condemned in later synods. The argument that, evil being the negation of good, God could not know it, for with Him to know is to cause, was certainly weak if not formally heretical, and his subtleties seemed to the theologians of his time to be merely ineptitudes. He was also, it is at least probable, engaged in the controversy on the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist which began about this time, originating in the treatise of Paschasius Radbertus,de Sacramento Corporis et Sanguinis Christi. In 1050 a treatise bearing John the Scot's name was condemned; but it seems that this was really written by Ratramnus of Corbie. The view of Radbert was that which was {171} afterwards formalised into Transubstantiation. The view attributed to John was a clear denial of any materialising doctrine of the Sacrament. Later writers say that John returned to England, taught in the abbey school at Malmesbury, the famous school originated by Irish monks and illustrated by the fame of S. Aldhelm, and there died. His chief work was thede Divisione Naturae, in which he seems to anticipate much later philosophic argument (notably that of S. Anselm and Descartes as to the existence of God) and to have been the precursor if not the founder of Nominalism.
With John the Scot it is clear that both the old literature and philosophy survived and were fruitful and that new interests, which would carry theology into further developments, were arising. A revival of learning was naturally the growth of the monastic system; but that system was itself far from secure at the time of which we speak.
[Sidenote: The Benedictine rule.]
The Benedictine rule did not win its way over Europe without some checks; nor was it always able to retain its hold in an age of general disorder. Much depended upon the abbat in each particular house. In Gaul, the rule of S. Columban had made him absolute. But such a submission was never accepted in central and southern Gaul. From the end of the sixth century it is clear that monasticism was beginning to slacken its devotion. The history of the monastery of S. Radegund as given by Gregory of Tours shows this; so does the letter of Gregory the Great to Brunichild. Nor did the milder rule of S. Benedict long remain unaltered in practice.
A new revival is connected with the names of Odo and Cluny.
{172}
[Sidenote: The decay of monasticism in the ninth century.]
Saint Odo emerges from an age in which the most striking feature was the reassertion of the imperial power and the imperial idea. The ninth century, as it began, witnessed a remarkable revival, the revival of a decayed and dormant institution—the Roman Empire—in whose ashes there had yet survived the fire which had inspired the rulers of the world in the past. The great idea of imperialism was reborn in the person of a man of extraordinary physical and mental power, a sovereign who, while he had not a little of the weaknesses of his age, had also in a remarkable degree centred in himself its highest philosophic aspirations. The early ninth century is dominated by the figure of Charles the Great. The result was inevitable. Lay power, lay over-lordship or supremacy, extends everywhere, intrudes into the recesses of monastic life, and dictates even in things purely spiritual. And as the new tide of barbarian invasion, Saracen or Norman, sweeps on in Spain or Gaul, the Church, for very physical needs, seeks refuge under the protection of lay barons, princes, and kings. Feudalism is rising. The monastic houses fall often under the arrogant rule of lay abbats. And the popes, not rarely a prey themselves to the vices of the age, sink into impotence and become enmeshed in worldly, often shameful, intrigue and disorder. The canons of Church councils show that it was below as it was above. Secularity was general, vice was far from rare.
The Divine spirit and the past history of Christianity made it certain that a revival of life must come. The dry bones would feel the breath and would live {173} again. [Sidenote: S. Odo.] On the borders of the lands of Maine and Anjou was born in 879, of a line of feudal barons, Odo, the regenerator of monasticism, the ultimate reviver of the papacy, the spiritual progenitor of Hildebrand himself. Promised to God at his birth, he was long held back by his father for knighthood and the life of a warrior such as he himself had led; a grievous sickness gave him, on his recovery, to the monastic life. The disciple alike of S. Martin and S. Benedict, he took inspiration from them to revive the strict monastic rule. From a canon he became a monk, after a noviciate at Baume, the foundation of Columban in the wild and beautiful valley between the Seille and the Dard, in the diocese of Besançon. For a time he tasted the life of the anchorite and the coenobite. Then he passed to the abbey of Cluny, founded in 910 by William of Aquitaine in the mountains above the valley of the Grosne, and ruled till 927 by Berno, who came himself from Baume. On his death Odo became abbat; and to him the great development of the revival of strict monasticism is due.
[Sidenote: Cluny.]
Cluny became the type of the exempted abbeys, and the highest representative of the monastic privileges. It embodied in itself the best expression of the resistance to feudalism; it became the most powerful support of the papacy and of the much-needed movement for the reform of the Church. The first necessity of the new monasticism was an absolute independence of the lay power. Thus the founder attached it from the first to the Roman Church, and gave up all his own rights of property. Its situation, in the heart of Burgundy, {174} removed it from the power of the king. Charles the Simple permitted its foundation, Louis d'Outremer confirmed its privileges. When Urban II., a militant Cluniac, became pope the interests of Cluny and Rome were more than ever identified. The monks elected their abbat without exterior interference. To prevent this becoming an abuse, the first abbats always proposed their coadjutors as their successors. Thus it was with Berno(910-27), Odo (927-48), Maieul (948-94), Odilo (990-1049). After that there arose the custom of appointing the grand prior as successor—as in the case of S. Hugh (1049-1109). From the confirmation of its foundation in 931 by John XI. Cluny received the greatest favours at the hands of the papacy, its abbats being created archabbots with episcopal insignia; and it was made entirely independent of the bishops.
[Sidenote: The rule of Cluny.]
Cluny soon attracted attention, wealth, and followers. Corrupt old communities or new foundations sought the guidance or protection of its abbats. When each monastery was independent and isolated it was impossible to reform a lax community, or for it to defend itself from feudal violence and the hostility of the secular clergy. Odo, the saint who saw these evils, therefore started what soon became the Congregation of Cluny. The daughter-houses were regarded not as independent, but as parts of Cluny. There was only one abbat, the arch-abbat of Cluny, who was the head of all. Necessary local control was exercised by the prior, responsible to and nominated by the abbat. Some houses resisted annexation to Cluny, such as S. Martial at Limoges, which kept up the contest from 1063 to 1240. Contact {175} between the abbey and its dependencies was preserved by visitation of the abbat; and the dependent houses sent representatives to periodical chapters, which met at Cluny under the abbat. In the eleventh century these were merely consultative, but in the thirteenth they had become political, administrative, and judicial, even subjecting the abbat to their control. The rule of S. Benedict was followed in the abbey and its dependencies. The monks did some manual labour, but devoted themselves chiefly to religious exercises, to teaching the young, to hospitality and almsgiving.
But the Cluniacs, protected by the papacy, and enriched by the offerings of the faithful all over Europe, taught an extreme doctrine as to the power of the Holy See. Their ideal was the absolute separation of Church from State, the reorganisation of the Church under a general discipline such as could be exercised only by the pope. He, in their ideal, was to stand towards the whole world as the Cluniac abbat stood towards each Cluniac priory, the one ultimate source of jurisdiction, the Universal Bishop, appointing and degrading the diocesan bishops as the abbat made and unmade the priors.
How much of all this did the great Odo plan? Not very much. But it was his work to revive the discipline, the holiness, the self-sacrifice, which, through the reformed monasteries, should touch the whole Church.
And thus monasticism at the beginning of the eleventh century was a wholly new force in the life of Christendom. It was destined to reform the papacy itself.
[1] Bp. Stubbs inDict. of Christian Biography, vol. i. p. 74.
{176}
[Sidenote: Baptism.]
In the centuries with which we deal the importance of Baptism cannot be overrated. It was everywhere, in all the missions of the Church, regarded as the critical point of the individual life and the indispensable means of entrance to the Christian Church. When the children of Sebert the king of the East Saxons wished to have all the privileges of Christians, which their father had had, and "a share in the white bread" though they were still heathen, Mellitus the bishop answered, "If you will be washed in that font of salvation in which your father was washed, then you may also partake of the holy bread of which he used to partake: but if you despise the laver of life you cannot possibly receive the bread of life"; and he was driven from the kingdom because he would not yield an inch. The tale however shows also that there were still on the fringe of Christianity persons who were not baptized, not catechumens, yet still interested in the religion and to some extent anxious to be sharers in its life. Throughout the early history of Gaulish Christianity the same is to be observed, and it is doubtless the reason why a number of semi-pagan customs still survived among those who were nominally Christians, {177} as well as those who still stood outside the Church. Baptism in the case of many was a critical point in the history of a tribe or nation. The baptism of Chlodowech was the greatest historical event in the history of the Franks: it was of critical importance that the Franks, with him, accepted orthodox Christianity, that he, robed in the white vesture which West and East alike considered meet, and which was sometimes worn for the octave after baptism, confessed his faith in the Blessed Trinity, was baptized in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and was anointed with the holy chrism and signed with the sign of the cross. Baptism not only admitted into the Christian Church, but was invested with the associations of the human family, and thus had transferred to it some of the conditions in which students of anthropology find such interesting survivals, of primitive ideas. The conception of spiritual relationship was endowed with the results which belonged to natural kinship. The sponsors became spiritual parents. The code of Justinian forbade the marriage of a godchild and godparent, because "nothing can so much call out fatherly affection and the just prohibition of marriage as a bond of this kind, by means of which, through the action of God, their souls are united to one another." This led to the growth of as elaborate a scheme of spiritual relationships as that which already hedged round among many tribes the eligibility for marriage among persons even remotely akin to one another. In the East, as in the West, baptism was most frequently conferred at the time of the great Christian festivals, Christmas (as in the case of Chlodowech), Epiphany, and especially Easter; and Easter Eve became, later {178} on, especially consecrated to the sacred rite. In the East baptism was often postponed till the infant was two years old; and everywhere there was for long a tendency even among Christian parents to hold back children from the laver of regeneration for fear of the consequences of post-baptismal sin. It was thus that a name was often given, and a child received into the Church, some weeks or even months before the baptism took place. The Greek Syntagma of the seventh century contains interesting information as to the baptism of heretics. It is ordered that Sabellians, Montanists, Manichaeans, Valentianists and such like shall be baptized just as pagans are, after instruction and examination in the faith, and, after insufflation, by triple immersion.
[Sidenote: Confirmation.]
Throughout these centuries baptism was not separated from Confirmation, except in the case of some converts from heresy. The two rites were regarded as parts of the same sacrament, or at least the former was not considered complete without the latter. The sacramental life of the individual in fact was to begin with his entrance into the Church and never to be intermitted. Even infants were present throughout the celebration of the sacred mysteries and partook of the Communion, a custom which was only abandoned in the West because of the difficulty of frequent giving of Confirmation and the consequent delay of that rite till later years.
[Sidenote: The Holy Communion.]
Baptism and Confirmation was the gate by which the Christian was admitted to the Sacrament of the Lord's Body and Blood. The celebration of that Sacrament was the chief act of the Church's worship every Sunday and holy day, and in {179} Spain, Africa, Antioch, daily, in Rome every day except Friday and Saturday, in Alexandria except on Thursday and Friday: indeed by the end of the sixth century it seems probable that in most parts of the Church a daily celebration was usual. From the seventh century the mass of the presanctified, when the priest communicated from elements previously consecrated, is found in use on certain days, and in the East throughout except on Saturdays and Sundays. [Sidenote: Frequent Communion.] It seems clear that at least up to the sixth century it was usual for all who were confirmed to communicate whenever they were present, unless they were under penance; but the custom of noncommunicating attendance was growing up. In the East a spiritual writer said, "it is not rare or frequent communion which matters, but to make a good communion with a prepared conscience"; while in the West Bede's letter to Archbishop Egbert of York supplies an excellent illustration of custom. [Sidenote: Bede.] The people are to be told, he advises, "how salutary it is for all classes of Christians to participate daily in the body and blood of our Lord, as you know well is done by Christ's Church throughout Italy, Gaul, Africa, Greece, and all the countries of the East. Now, this kind of religion and heavenly devotion, through the neglect of our teachers, has been so long discontinued among almost all the laity of our province, that those who seem to be most religious among them communicate in the holy mysteries only on the Day of our Lord's birth, the Epiphany, and Easter, whilst there are innumerable boys and girls, of innocent and chaste life, as well as young men and women, old men and old women, who without any scruple {180} or debate are able to communicate in the holy mysteries on every Lord's Day, nay, on all the birthdays of the holy Apostles and martyrs, as you have yourself seen done in the holy Roman and Apostolic Church." It would seem from this that frequent communion was inculcated by the first missionaries to England in the sixth century. Bede tells also how in his day two Anglian priests went on a mission to the heathen Saxons, and, while waiting for the decision of the "satrap," "devoted themselves to prayer and psalm-singing, and daily offered to God the sacrifice of the Saving Victim, having with them sacred vessels and a hallowed table to serve as an altar."
[Sidenote: Fasting Communion.]
The Sacrament was received in both kinds and fasting, and the priest was forbidden to celebrate after taking any food; some exception to this rule may be inferred from a canon of the Second Council of Mâcon in 585 enforcing it, and the ecclesiastical historian Socrates (whose History extends from 306 to 439) states that some in Egypt did not receive "as the custom is among Christians," but after a meal. The presence of the Lord in the Eucharist was recognised and adored. [Sidenote: The doctrine of the Sacrifice.] S. Anastasius of Sinai, probably of the sixth century, writes: "After the bloodless sacrifice has been consecrated, the priest lifts up the bread of life, and shows it to all." The Eucharist is continually spoken of as the holy Sacrifice, the offering of the Saving Victim, the Celestial Oblation; and it was offered, as the writings of Gregory the Great show, in special intercession for the dead as well as the living. From the beginning of the fifth century it seems to have been, at least occasionally, {181} reserved in church as well as sent to the sick in their own houses.
[Sidenote: The Roman mass.]
During the fifth and sixth centuries it would seem that the Roman mass, the rite which has slowly superseded the local forms of service in most parts of Europe, was undergoing the modifications which brought it to the stereotyped form it now has. The severe, terse, practical nature of the liturgy, in words, ritual, ceremonial, which is so characteristic of the Roman nature, was being altered by the admixture of other elements. This was especially the case, it is said, in France and Germany, during the ninth century. Earlier changes had been made by Gregory the Great, partly from Eastern sources. [Sidenote: The fifth century.] At the middle of the fifth century the rite, in words and action alike, was a simple one. The choir sang an introit, the priest a collect, epistle and gospel were read, and a psalm was sung: the gifts were offered, the prayer or "preface" of the day was followed by the Sanctus, as in the East, and then came the Canon or actual Consecration. After this was the Lord's Prayer, communion of priests, clergy and people, a psalm and a collect and the end. The ceremonial was equally simple, and was connected almost exclusively with the entrance of the celebrant and his ministers, at which incense was used, and with the reading of the gospel, where also lights and incense were prominent. All else was simple and of dignified reticence. "Mystery never flourished in the clear Roman atmosphere, and symbolism was no product of the Roman religious mind. Christian symbolism is not of pure Roman birth, not a native product of the {182} Roman spirit." [1] This reticent character is most clearly found in the Gregorian missal, which has been believed to represent the period of Gregory the Great. More probably the assertion of John the Deacon that Gregory revised the Gelasian Sacramentary is an error, and what is called the Gregorian Sacramentary is simply the book which was sent by Pope Hadrian I. to Charles I. between 784 and 791. But that S. Gregory did make certain alterations is certain. They were three in the Liturgy, two in the ceremonial of the mass. The Alleluia was ordered to be more frequently chanted than before; and we find it used outside the Easter season almost immediately after this by S. Augustine in England. He added words to the "Hanc igitur" in the Canon of the mass, praying for peace and inclusion in the number of the elect. He inserted the Lord's Prayer immediately after the Canon. He also forbade the deacons to sing any of the mass except the gospel and the subdeacons to wear chasubles at the altar.
[Sidenote: The eighth century.]
It is thought that the great change, which made the Roman mass into the elaborate rite it became, is due to the influence, at the end of the eighth century, of Charles the Great, who with the determination of a ruler and the interest of a liturgiologist made one rite to be observed throughout his dominions, but enriched the Gregorian book with details and ceremonies derived from uses already common in France. The study of liturgies became common in the ninth century, and in Gaul additions were made to the book sent by Pope Hadrian {183} to Charles the Great, which were finally accepted throughout the greater part of Italy, the Ambrosian rite in the province of Milan remaining different throughout the changes.
It is natural that English readers should desire to know more particularly of the first English Christian worship. How did the Church's worship first begin in our own land?
[Sidenote: The rites of the Western isles.]
No doubt the Christians who received conversion during the Roman occupation of Britain, and those of Ireland who were won by the preaching of S. Patrick, worshipped according to the same rite as the churches of Spain or the churches of Gaul, following that use which survived in Spain generally till the eleventh century and in Gaul till the ninth. Gildas, who wrote during the stress of the conquest of the Christian Brythons by the heathen English, mentions one custom which undoubtedly was Gallican, and which is preserved in the Gelasian Sacramentary and theMissale Francorum, the one a Roman collection which contains Gallican uses, the other a Gallican rite. It is that of anointing the hands of priests, and perhaps deacons, in ordination, and the custom was kept up after the conversion of the English, at least in some parts of England in the tenth and eleventh centuries. But the influence of the British Church was slight. It is of more interest to us to know what was the first worship offered in this land by those who were to convert our own forefathers.
Bede tells us how first Augustine prayed when he came before the heathen king of Kent. Some days after their landing Aethelbert received the monks from {184} Rome. [Sidenote: S. Augustine in Kent.] They had tarried, it seems probable, under the walls of the old Roman fortress of Richborough. They had waited, in prayer and patience, for the beginning of their Mission. It was on prayer that they still depended when they were summoned before the king. On a ridge of rocks overlooking the sea sat Aethelbert and his gesiths, and watched the band of some forty men draw near. Slowly they came, and the strange sound of the Church's music was wafted to the ears of the heathen company as they drew near. Before them was borne a tall silver cross, and a banner which displayed the pictured image of the Saviour Lord,
The Cross preceding Him who floats in air,The pictured Saviour.
S. Gregory, the great pope who had sent the mission, who had himself long dwelt at the court of the emperors in Constantinople, had learnt the value oficons, of sacred pictures, as texts for an appeal, or as stimulants to devotion. Those who cannot read, he said, should be taught by pictures, but pictures are valuable only because they point to Him whom we adore as incarnate, crucified, sitting at the right hand of God. As they came, they sang, and Bede says: "they sang litanies, entreating the Lord for their own salvation and that of those for whom and to whom they came." The litany ended when they came to the king, and then Augustine preached the word. He declared, says an old English writer of later days, "how the merciful Saviour with His own sufferings redeemed their guilty world, and opened an entrance into the kingdom of heaven to all faithful men."