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

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СКАЧАТЬ removing the Pope's name from the diptychs. This invites us to consider the position which he assumed.

      From the year 482 (that is, four years after Zeno had recovered the empire), Acacius appears in possession of full influence over the emperor. The position of the bishop at Constantinople was, in itself, one of immense dignity. He was undoubtedly the second person in the imperial city, surrounded with a pomp and deference only yielding to that accorded to the emperor, but in some respects superior to it. He was regarded as sacrosanct: all the respect which the Church received in the minds of the good was centred in his person. And as he had risen to all this dignity in virtue of Constantinople being the capital, there was a special connection between the capital and its bishop, which led it to sympathise with every accession of power which he received. There can be no doubt that the right acquired by that bishop over the great sees of Ephesus, Cæsarea in Pontus, and Heraclea in Thrace was extremely popular at Constantinople; and that when he proceeded further to show his hand over the patriarchate of Antioch – as, for instance, in nominating one of its archbishops at Tyre, as the Pope reproached him – the capital was still better pleased. Most of all when, breaking through all the regulations which the Nicene Council had consecrated by its approval, – which, however, it had not created, but found in immemorial subsistence, – he ventured to ordain at Constantinople a patriarch of Antioch. Thus Stephen II., patriarch of Antioch, had been murdered in 479 by the fanatical Monophysites, in the baptistry of the Barlaam Church, and his mangled body thrown into the Orontes. The incensed emperor punished the criminals, and charged his patriarch Acacius to consecrate a new bishop for Antioch. Acacius seized the favourable opportunity, after the example of Anatolius, to advance himself, and appointed Stephen III. Emperor and patriarch both applied to Pope Simplicius to excuse this violation of the rights of the Syrian bishops, alleging the pressure of circumstances, and promising that the example should not occur again. Simplicius, so entreated, excused the fault, recognised the patriarch of Antioch – though he had been consecrated in Constantinople by its bishop – but insisted that such a violation of the canons should not be repeated. Presently Stephen III. died, upon which Acacius committed the same fault anew, and in 482 consecrated Calendion patriarch of Antioch. Calendion brought back from Macedonia the relics of his great and persecuted predecessor, St. Eustathius; but presently Zeno and Acacius displaced Calendion. Acacius was using the power which he possessed over the emperor to advance his own credit in the appointment of patriarchs, and to establish two notorious heretics – Peter the Fuller at Antioch, and Peter the Stammerer at Alexandria. All this meant that the bishop of Constantinople's hand was to be over the East, as the bishop of Rome's hand was over the West. Then, ever since the Council of Chalcedon, the two great eastern patriarchates had been torn to pieces by the conflicts of parties. The Eutychean heresy fought a desperate battle for mastery. As to Antioch, from the time that Eusebius of Nicomedia had brought about the deposition of St. Eustathius, preparatory to that of Athanasius in 330, the great patriarchate of the East had been declining from the unrivalled position which it had held. As to Alexandria, from the time that the 150 fathers at Constantinople, in 381, had attempted to make Constantinople the second see, because it was Nova Roma, the see of St. Mark bore a grudge against the upstart which sought to degrade it. In spite of the unequalled renown of its two great patriarchs, St. Athanasius and St. Cyril, it was sinking. And now heresy, schism, and imperial favour seemed to have joined together to exhibit Acacius as not only the first patriarch of the East, but as exercising jurisdiction even within their bounds, and as nominating those who succeeded to their thrones. All which would only tend to increase the power and popularity of the bishop of Constantinople in his own see.

      Acacius had now been eleven years bishop. He had gained at once the emperor Leo; he had appeared to defend the Council of Chalcedon when Basiliscus attacked it; he had further gained mastery over Zeno; but, more than all this, he had seen Rome sink into what to eastern eyes must have seemed an abyss. St. Leo had compelled Anatolius to give up the canons he so much prized; since then northern barbarians had twice sacked Rome, and Ricimer's most cruel host of adventurers had reaped whatever the Vandal Genseric had left. If there was a degradation yet to be endured it would be that a Herule soldier of fortune should compel a Roman senate to send back the robes of empire to Constantinople, and be content to live under a Patricius, sprung from one of the innumerable Teuton hordes, and sanctioned by the emperor of the East; and Acacius would not forget that in the councils of that emperor he was himself chief.

      If New Rome held the second rank because the Fathers gave the first rank to Old Rome, in that it was the capital, what was the position of New Rome and its bishop when Old Rome had ceased in fact to be a capital at all? At that moment – thirty years after St. Leo had confirmed the greatest of eastern councils and been greeted by it as the head of the Christian faith – the Rome in which he sat had been reduced to a mere municipal rank, and its bishop, with all its people, lived under what was simply a military government commanded by a foreign adventurer. Odoacer at Ravenna was master of the lives and liberties of the Romans, including the Pope.

      Acacius had had this spectacle for some years before him, when Pope Felix, succeeding Pope Simplicius, called him to account for entirely reversing the conduct which he had pursued at the time when Basiliscus had usurped the empire. Then he defended the Council of Chalcedon and its doctrine; then he denounced to the Pope Peter the Stammerer as a heretic and a man of bad life, and had called for his condemnation and obtained it. He had now taken upon himself not even to ask from the Pope this man's absolution, but to absolve himself the very heretic he had caused to be condemned, and to put him into the see of Alexandria, with the rejection of the bishop legitimately elected, and approved at Rome, and to compose for the emperor a doctrinal decree, which he subscribed himself first as the first of the patriarchs, and was compelling all other bishops to sign under pain of deprivation; when, behold, St. Leo's third successor called him to account in exactly the same terms as St. Leo would have used, and required him to meet at Rome the accusation brought against him by John Talaia, a duly elected patriarch of Alexandria, just as St. Julius, a hundred and forty years before, had invited the accusing bishops at Antioch to meet St. Athanasius before his tribunal. He who resided in a state only second to the emperor in the real capital of the empire to go to a city living in durance under the northern barbarians, and submit to the judgment of one whose own tribunal was in captivity to such masters!

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      1

      Nova Patrum bibliotheca, p. vi.: In Pontificum reapse epistolis tota ecclesiæ administratio cognoscitur.

      2

      See p. 351 below; also Church and State, pp. 198-200, for the full statement of this passage.

      3

1

Nova Patrum bibliotheca, p. vi.: In Pontificum reapse epistolis tota ecclesiæ administratio cognoscitur.

2

See p. 351 below; also СКАЧАТЬ