Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (9 page)

For the churches of Gaul, Africa and Spain, therefore, the characteristic expression of papal primacy was not a matter of executive rule from Rome, which they would certainly have rejected. Instead, the Petrine ministry was experienced in the form of occasional interventions, almost always in response to local requests, designed to give the added solemnity of apostolic authority to the decisions and actions of the local churches. During the controversy over the teachings of Pelagius on free will and grace, for example, St Augustine and his fellow African bishops sent an account of the synodal decisions to Pope Innocent I. In pouring ‘our little trickle back into your ample fountain’, Augustine wrote, ‘we wish to be reassured by you that this trickle of ours, however scant, flows from the same fountain-head as your abundant stream, and we desire the consolation of your writings, drawn from our common share of the one grace’.
²⁶
The African bishops, it should be noticed, had asked not for guidance, but for a clinching final endorsement of their own decisions, a recognition that the doctrinal question had in fact been settled – that, in Augustine’s words,
causa finita est
(‘the debate is over’). Revealingly, however, Pope Innocent treated their letter as a request not for a seal of approval, but for an authoritative decision. Where the strongly collegial language of the African bishops spoke of the stream of their authority and that of Rome issuing from the same source, Innocent spoke of
all
streams as issuing from Rome. It was a difference of emphasis full of significance for the future claims of the papacy.

In the East it was yet another matter. There the papal primacy of
honour derived from the succession to Peter, was indeed acknowledged, but the practical consequences the popes deduced from it were ignored or denied outright. Rome was seen as the senior patriarchate, one of five, the Pentarchy, whose harmony and agreement was the fundamental apostolic underpinning of the Church’s authority. In Eastern thought, for example, the recognition of a council by the Pentarchy came to be seen as the decisive mark of a ‘general’ council, whereas, in the West, recognition by the Pope alone was the crucial criterion. Above all, the claim of Constantinople to be ‘New Rome’ was a constant threat to papal primacy, which the popes actively tried to counteract. From the 380s onwards the popes established a vicariate at Thessalonica, giving the Bishop extensive delegated powers in the appointment of new bishops and related matters, to prevent traditional papal influence in the Balkans passing to Constantinople. This vicariate was threatened in 421 when the Eastern Emperor transferred ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the area, now an official part of the Eastern empire, to the Patriarch. Pope Boniface fought a successful rearguard action to preserve his rights there, asserting papal oversight of all the churches, even in the East.

All these developments came together in the most remarkable Pope of the early church, Leo the Great (440–61), elected after acting as an extremely influential deacon under Celestine and Sixtus III (432–40). Leo, though not a Roman by birth, took on himself the mantle of
Romanitas
which had become the distinctive mark of the popes of late antiquity. He kept the anniversary of his consecration, 29 September, as his ‘birthday’, and in a series of sermons preached then and on the feasts of Peter and Paul he hammered home the identity of the papacy with Peter. Leo’s sense of this identity was almost mystical. Peter was eternally present in Peter’s see, and Leo, though an ‘unworthy heir’, was the inheritor of all Peter’s prerogatives. Indeed, Peter himself spoke and acted in all that Leo did – ‘And so if anything is rightly done and rightly decreed by us, if anything is won from the mercy of God by our daily supplications, it is of his work and merit whose power lives and whose authority prevails in his See.’ To be under the authority of Peter was simply to be under the authority of Christ, and to repudiate the authority of Peter was to put oneself outside the mystery of the Church.
²⁷
For Leo, the coming of Peter to the centre of empire had been a providential act, designed so that from Rome the Gospel might spread to all the world. Christian Rome, refounded on Peter and Paul
as ancient Rome had been founded on Romulus and Remus, was the heart of the Church.

Leo acted on these convictions, harnessing his immense talents to strengthening papal authority throughout the West. His surviving correspondence reveals the sheer range of his activities – long letters of admonition to the bishops of Africa, Gaul and Italy, combating heresy, rebuking deviation from Roman customs, prescribing remedies for schism, disorder and irregularities in clerical appointment and conduct. He strengthened papal control over Milan and the north Italian bishoprics. When Hilary of Aries stepped out of line by assuming patriarchal powers over the bishops of Gaul, he confined him to his own diocese, and mobilised the Emperor of the West into a formal recognition of papal jurisdiction over all the Western churches. Leo was intensely conscious of his own responsibility for ensuring the teaching of the orthodox faith. He took vigorous measures against the Manichees in Rome, using the police against them as well as ecclesiastical censures, and he organised the bishops of Spain against the Priscillianist heresy there.

Leo had not a word of Greek, but he had made many Eastern contacts while still a deacon. As pope he worked to extend papal influence in the East, though he was conscious of the need to tread carefully. He savagely rebuked Anastasius, the Bishop of Thessalonica, his vicar in Illyricum, for overstepping his powers, invading the rights of the local metropolitans (archbishops with jurisdiction over the other bishops of a province), and generally offending the local bishops. Anastasius was merely a representative, he insisted, and did not have the
plenitudo potestative
, the fullness of power, which was Peter’s, and Leo’s.

Leo’s extensive use of the language of intervention and of authority, however, was not a matter of domination, nor of the simple exertion of power. His writings are also characterised by a language of service, and in them the Petrine ministry is seen as a vocation to vigilance on behalf of the whole Church, a commission to ensure that all is according to the traditions of the Apostles and the canons of the Church. ‘If we do not watch with the vigilance which is incumbent upon us,’ he declared, ‘we could not excuse ourselves to Him who willed that we should be the sentinel.’ The prerogatives of Rome are gifts for the building up of the whole Christian community: ‘The Lord shows a special care for Peter and prays in particular for the faith of Peter, as if the future situation would be more secure for others
if the spirit of the leader remains unconquered. Thus in Peter the courage of all is fortified and the aid of divine grace is so arranged that the strength which comes to Peter through Christ, through Peter is transmitted to the Apostles’.
²⁸

It was heresy in the East which provided the opportunity for the greatest single exercise of papal ministry as Leo understood it. In 431 a general council at Ephesus had affirmed the divinity of Christ by declaring that Mary his mother was not merely the mother of Jesus, but ‘the God bearer’, ‘Mother of God’. In the wake of Ephesus, dispute had arisen about the precise nature of the union of the divine and human in Christ. Was Jesus’ human nature absorbed into his divine nature? Were there two natures in him after the incarnation, human and divine – in which case was Christ really divine – or just one – in which case was he really human? The disputes became as fraught as the Arian problem had ever been, and combatants on both sides looked to Rome for support. One of them, Eutyches, taught that there was only one nature in Christ after the Incarnation, and that as a result his humanity was fundamentally different from ours. When this man appealed to Leo, the Pope was horrified. He composed a treatise on the Incarnation, refuting Eutyches and teaching that in Christ there are two natures, human and divine, unmixed and unconfused, yet permanently and really united in a single person, so that it is possible to attribute to the humanity of Jesus all the actions and attributes of his divinity, and vice versa.

This ‘Tome’, which took the form of a letter to Flavian, Bishop of Constantinople, was not particularly original, but it was clear, precise and strikingly phrased, and it became the basis for the settlement of the question at the General Council of Chalcedon in 451, at which Leo’s legates presided. The Council Fathers greeted the reading of Leo’s document with enthusiasm, declaring that ‘Peter had spoken through Leo.’ This was no more than Leo’s belief about
all
papal utterances, and he took the view that the Council adopted his teaching because it was the teaching of the Pope. Since the time of Damasus, Roman theologians had considered that it was papal endorsement which gave general councils their special authority and marked them off from other assemblies of bishops. The bishops at Chalcedon, however, made no such assumption. They acknowledged the special dignity and honour of the apostolic see, but they did not therefore assume that whatever its bishop said must be true,
and seemed to have believed that
on this particular occasion
Peter had spoken through Leo. They had adopted his solution to the problem, therefore, not merely because it was his, but because they judged it true. To underline this, in canon 28 of the Council they restated the teaching of the Council of Constantinople that Constantinople took precedence after Rome ‘because it is new Rome’. There could not have been a clearer demonstration of the gap between Eastern and Western views of the papacy, and Leo delayed his acceptance of Chalcedon for two years on the strength of it.

Leo the Great gave the papacy its definitive form in the classical world, and set the pattern of its later claims. Already around him the ruin of ancient Rome was visible, as barbarian armies, once viewed as potential recruits for the Roman legions, ravaged Italy. He had witnessed the sack of Rome by Goths in 410, an event which had rocked the civilised world. Jerome, far away in his hermitage in the Holy Land, thought it the end of the world. When he tried to dictate a letter on the subject, he could not speak for tears:
capta est urbs quae totum cepit orbem
– captured is the city which once held the whole world captive. Worse was to come, however. In 452 ‘for the sake of the Roman name’, as the
Liber Pontificalis
expresses it, Leo had to travel to Mantua to persuade Attila the Hun to turn back his armies from Rome, and, miraculously, he succeeded. In 455, however, the best he could manage was to persuade the armies of Gaiseric the Vandal to content themselves with looting the city, and not to put it to the torch. For fourteen days, Rome lay at their mercy. When they had gone, he set himself to patch up the damage, melting down silver ornaments at St Peter’s from the great days of Constantinian Rome to make chalices for the devastated city’s churches.

Rome, for Leo, was indeed the
caput orbis
, the head of the world. But it was Christian Rome which was the Eternal City, not the thousand-year old wonder that he saw dissolving around him. The empire had been born so that Christianity might triumph. The spiritual Rome, built on the blood of the Apostles and alive in Peter’s heir and spokesman, could not be ruined. Even in the palmy days of Constantine’s conversion, the popes had had to make a distinction between Church and empire, for all around them the signs of empire were pagan. The trials of Pope Liberius and the defiance of Ambrose had taught the churches of the West that God and Caesar, allied as they might be, were not the same. In Leo’s vision of the papacy as the
head of an
imperium
which was not of this world, the Church had found an ideal which would carry it through the collapse of the classical world, and into the future.

CHAPTER TWO

‘BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES’
461–1000

I U
NDER
G
OTHIC
K
INGS

In the year 476 the last Emperor of the West was deposed by the Germanic General Odoacer the Rugian, and Italy became a barbarian kingdom. The change from empire to kingdom, from toga to trousers, however, was to take generations to make its full imaginative impact. The barbarian kings of Italy pursued their own interests, but they ruled, to begin with at least, in the name of the distant Emperor in Constantinople, maintaining and honouring the Roman Senate, and accepting the honorific title ‘Patrician of the Romans’. Even Odoacer’s ferocious successor Theoderic, a man who could sign his own name only with the help of a stencil cut from a plate of gold, accepted and exploited the fiction of empire. Theoderic adopted Roman dress, and his coinage carried the image of the Emperor. The Gothic kings based themselves on the Adriatic coast, in the old capital of the Western empire at Ravenna, and the glamour of Rome persisted. As Theoderic himself declared, ‘Any Goth who can, wants to be a Roman: no Roman wants to be a Goth.’

The papacy was the West’s most concrete link with the Roman past and with the living empire. Inheritors of Leo’s vision of Christian Rome as the providential instrument of God, first citizens of the ancient capital and the most powerful men in central Italy, the popes led the Senate in honouring the Emperor’s image at the inauguration of each new reign. The popes looked east, and their loyalty to the Emperor was increased by the fact that the kings of Italy were Arians, heretics who denied the divinity of Christ. Gothic supremacy in northern Italy decimated the Catholic hierarchy there, and the Popes’ authority cut no ice with Theoderic’s Arian bishops.

In such a situation the papacy might easily have come to seem no
more than a Byzantine chaplaincy within barbarian Italy. But all was not well between Pope and Emperor, for in the late fifth century Constantinople and Rome were in conflict over fundamental Christian beliefs. The Council of Chalcedon owed its fundamental teaching to the Tome of Pope Leo, and the Church of Rome took the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon as the definitive expression of the Christian faith. Chalcedon had asserted both the full divinity of Jesus Christ, and his full humanity, two natures joined without confusion in one person. For Western theologians this ‘two natures’ formulation was an essential safeguard of Christ’s solidarity with the human race he had come to redeem – it proclaimed the real involvement of human nature in the process of salvation. For many Eastern Christians, by contrast, to emphasise a two-nature Christology was to deny the reality of Christ’s divinity, and to threaten the overwhelming truth that in the man Jesus the eternal God himself had suffered and died. For Christians of this outlook, Christ’s humanity was absorbed and overwhelmed within the majesty of his divine nature, like a drop of water mingled in a cup of wine.