Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III. Allies Thomas William

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ order given us to make a confession of faith. We will give you the assurance that we will inform the Elect of everything that you have said; that we will show him this paper and beseech him, if he approve of its contents, to subscribe it. Be so good, therefore, as to put no hindrance to our mission for this matter, to do us no violence, and not to detain us without end. None can do violence to another, especially in a matter of faith; for in such a case even the weakest becomes very strong, even the quietest feels himself a hero; and since he strengthens his soul with the word of God, the most violent attacks serve only to confirm not to weaken him. And how much more does this apply to the Church and clergy of Rome, who, from the beginning to the present, as eldest of all the churches under the sun, presides over all! Having received this privilege according to the canons, as well from councils and apostles as from their supreme Head, in this matter of succession in the Pontificate, it is subject to no writings whatsoever, to no issue of synodical documents; but in all these matters all are subject to it according to sacerdotal law.” This is what with a most sacred and becoming confidence, fearing nothing, those intrepid ministers of the immovable Rock said to the clergy of Constantinople; who thereupon ceased from their pretension, and promised to obtain for them the imperial confirmation.

      Pope Severinus, after suffering the double humiliation of having the treasury of the Church sacked by the emperor's viceroy, and his own election unconfirmed for nearly twenty months, ascended the throne of Peter on the 28th May, 640, and sat two months and six days. “He loved the clergy, and was most liberal to them all,” says of him the Book of the Popes; “holy, benignant above all men, a lover of the poor, large-handed, most gentle.” In this short Pontificate he found time to reject the imperial decree, called the Ecthesis.

      Had Pope Severinus at this moment failed in his duty, the whole Church would have been involved in the Monothelite heresy. Not only Pope Severinus, but his successors during forty years, were the sole stay of the Church against a heresy – the last root of the condemned Eutychean heresy – which overthrew the true doctrine of the Incarnation, making our Lord Jesus Christ not God and Man in one Person, but a Person compounded out of God and Man, and therefore not Man at all. The whole temporal power of the Byzantine sovereign, at that time despotic lord of Rome, and backed by subservient patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus, and Peter, was exerted to compel the Popes who sat during these forty years to accept the false doctrine presented to them in an imperial decree. The successive Popes in this time, Severinus, John IV., Theodore I., St. Martin I., St. Eugenius I., St. Vitalian, Deusdedit, Donus I., rejected and condemned the decision urged upon them by the imperial and patriarchal pressure, all of them at the risk of every sort of persecution – one, St. Martin, at the cost of a singularly painful and glorious martyrdom. The next Pope, St. Agatho, condemned the heresy in a General Council allowed at Constantinople itself by an orthodox emperor over which his legates presided. The Pope succeeding him, St. Leo II. ratified the condemnation by the Council of four successive Byzantine patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus and Peter, as heretics, and censured the negligence of Honorius in not extinguishing at once so dangerous a flame. In truth it had held the life of the Church in suspense during more than forty years. Had one of the ten successors of Honorius failed, all would have been lost, so near to the precipice was the Byzantine despotism and the State patriarchate, subservient to it, and supplying it obediently with theological knowledge sufficient to formulate heresy, allowed by the Divine Providence in that fearful century to drive the Church. And precisely during these years the new Arabian conqueror – the chalif of Mohammed – cut in two the empire which was attempting this parricide. When Heraclius went forth committing his city and his son to God, to the holy Mother of God, and to his bishop, he triumphed for the only time in the long Roman history over Rome's eastern rival, and brought back the Cross from Persia to Constantinople, and then carried it in dutiful homage to be replaced in its old shrine where our Lord suffered at Jerusalem. When at the bidding of that very bishop Sergius he tampered with the Christian faith, and oppressed the successor of St. Peter, he lost Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, with the great provinces which belonged to them. Out of the four patriarchates of his empire, three became subject to the Mohammedan chalif. The subjection came suddenly, but has lasted with a short interval from that time to this. The conquest, as yet unbroken, of Mohammed over Christian peoples dates from the perfidy of Heraclius and of his grandson Constans II. and the heresy propagated by four Byzantine patriarchs.

      Returning to the history of this time we find that the successor of Pope Severinus, John IV., was consecrated 24th December, 640, and held a council at Rome immediately after his accession, and condemned under anathema the Monothelite heresy. Heraclius died February 11th, 641. Upon his death Pope John IV. sent a letter to his successors, Constantinus-Heraclius, and Heracleonas, setting forth the same faith. He also informed the new Patriarch, Pyrrhus, that he had condemned the Ecthesis: and St. Maximus informs us that Heraclius I., to turn away the Western displeasure at the Ecthesis from his own person, at the beginning of the year 641 wrote to Pope John IV. that “the Ecthesis is not mine, nor did I command it to be drawn up, but the patriarch Sergius prepared it five years ago, and besought me on my return from the East to publish it with my subscription”. The purpose of John IV. in writing to the new emperors was to set forth the doctrine of the two Operations and Wills in Christ, and in doing this to defend the orthodoxy of his predecessor Honorius. It is to be observed that after the death of Honorius, when the eastern patriarchs began to assert that Honorius in his answers to Sergius, which up to that time had been private, favoured the heresy which Sergius had imposed upon the eastern bishops, and was trying to put upon the Pope, his successors denied with much care that Honorius had any such meaning. Thus in this document of Pope John IV. directed to the sons of Heraclius, which bears the title, Defence of Pope Honorius, he says: —

      “My predecessor, teaching concerning the mystery of Christ's Incarnation, said that there were not in Him, as there are in us, opposing wills of the spirit and the flesh. Certain men, twisting this to their own meaning, threw out the suspicion that he had taught that there was one Will of the Godhead and the Manhood, which is utterly contrary to the truth. I could wish them to reply to my question, in regard to which nature do they assert that there is one Will of Christ our God? If it be only in regard to the Divine Nature, what is their reply concerning His Human Nature? For he is likewise Perfect Man, lest they be condemned with Manichæus. If they speak in regard to the Manhood of Christ that this Will is Perfect God, let them see whether they do not fall under the condemnation of Photinus and Ebion. But if they assert that in the Two Natures there is only one Will, they will confuse not only the Natural Wills but the Natures themselves, so that neither the one nor the other, that is, the Divine and the Human, can be understood. For as we do not, like the impious Nestorius, suffer Two Natures to make up one Christ, so we do anything but deny, yet neither do we confuse, the difference of Natures, inasmuch as we confess the Two Natures united in the one Person of Christ our God with an agreement which language is not able to express. For in that they assert One Will of Christ's Godhead and Manhood and at the same time one Operation, what else do they assert than that one Nature of Christ our God operates according to the division of Eutyches and Severus. As a last argument, the orthodox Fathers, who have flourished in the whole world, are proved to teach in full accordance at once Two Natures and Two Wills and Operations.”

      In these words, which John IV. writes as Pope to the immediate successors of Heraclius within three years after the death of Honorius, he would seem not only to have set forth in plain language the immense importance of the doctrine itself, but to be an unimpeachable witness of the meaning of Honorius, one of whose priests he had been, and as such well acquainted with his doctrine.

      The pontificate of John IV., for the confirmation of which he had to wait four months, lasted only twenty-one months, and was disquieted throughout by the conflict with the Byzantine court and patriarch respecting the Ecthesis. There was war between the exarch and the Lombard king, Rotharis, but it did not touch Rome. All misfortunes which threatened it came from Byzantium. The struggle against the eastern heresy embittered the feeling of Constantinople to Rome. At the same time, the Byzantine court was disturbed by intestine revolutions. Heraclius ended his reign of 31 years in February, 641. His eldest son, Heraclius Constantinus, succeeded, but, after seven months, was poisoned by his stepmother, Martina, and the Monothelite patriarch Pyrrhus was charged with concurrence. In a few months, СКАЧАТЬ