Part 14 (1/2)

determined on his appointment he was not even ordained: in six days he {193} received the different orders and was made patriarch. But his election was uncanonical. Ignatius the patriarch, who was still living, was deposed because of his censures of the emperor's evil life.

Photius announced his election to Pope Nicolas, but Ignatius refused to surrender his rights; both parties excommunicated each other; and the emperor mocked at both. But he also asked the pope to send legates to a council which should restore order to the Church. The Council met in 861. It confirmed Photius in his office, and the papal legates a.s.sented. Nicolas refused to accept the decision and took upon him to annul it, to depose Photius, to declare the orders conferred by him invalid, and to announce his decision to the other patriarchs and to the metropolitans and bishops who owed obedience to Constantinople.

Neither the emperor nor Photius would submit; and in 867 Photius issued, in a council at Constantinople, an encyclical letter, in which he repudiated the papal claim of jurisdiction (which was complicated by a.s.sertions of supremacy over the Bulgarian Church), and denounced a number of tenets held by Westerns, [Sidenote: The Philioque controversy.] and most notably the addition of the word _Filioque_ to the Nicene Creed, as a.s.serting the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. He ended by excommunicating the pope.

In the year 867 Nicolas died, Michael was deposed, Photius followed him into retirement, Basil the Macedonian ascended the throne, and Ignatius was restored to the patriarchate. A council was held in 869 at which papal legates attended, which approved these acts, and which is counted by the Roman Church as {194} the Eighth Oec.u.menical Council. This Council confirmed the Church's decision as to image-wors.h.i.+p. Ignatius held his throne till his death in 877, when Photius was reinstated.

His return was signalised by a new agreement with Rome, in which Pope John VIII. repudiated the insertion of the Filioque, and declared that it was inserted by men whose daring was due to madness, and who were transgressors against the Divine Word. Another council at Constantinople (879-80) confirmed the reinstatement, declared Photius to be lawful patriarch, and anathematised the Council of 869. This is reckoned by the Greeks as the Eighth Oec.u.menical Council. [Sidenote: End of the schism.] Then the schism was for the time healed. It made no difference that a new emperor, Leo VI., the Wise, deposed Photius again and appointed his own brother. The union remained formally throughout the tenth century. But though the eleventh century opened with a nominal agreement, it was not destined to endure. The points of severance must be dealt with in a later volume. It may here suffice to say that the position of the Greeks was rigidly conservative, of the popes aggressively authoritative.

It was an age of growing papal claims; and the claims had now found a new basis.

[Sidenote: The forged decretals.]

The promises, true and legendary, of Pippin, and the spurious donation of Constantine, had still further extension in the False Decretals.

These were first used by Nicolas I., who was pope from 858 to 867.

During his pontificate the collection of Church laws, with the canons of the Oec.u.menical Councils, the letters of the most important bishops and the like, with the ecclesiastical laws of the {195} emperors, which were practically becoming a _corpus juris canonici_, received a notable addition. The genuine decretals of the popes begin with Siricius (384-98); but there now (between 840 and 860) appeared fifty-nine more, professing to date from the second and third centuries, and also thirty-nine became interpolated among the genuine doc.u.ments, which ranged from 386 to 731. These were put forth by a skilful forger as the collection of Isidore of Seville, and they were incorporated in the authentic collection made by him. A most remarkable series of doc.u.ments was this, in every point supporting the claims now put forth by the Roman See to political as well as ecclesiastical supremacy, deciding questions of discipline and right such as were then vexed, and supplying a veritable armoury for the advocates of papal claims to rule everywhere, over all persons, and in all causes. The forged decretals, now known as the pseudo-Isidorian, had their origin among the Franks, and showed the aims and the needs of the Frankish reformers. They set forth three great objects--”freedom from the secular power, establishment of the ecclesiastical hierarchy with a firm discipline, and centralisation of organisation upon which all could depend.” [1]

They represented, in fact, a scheme of reform and the way in which a somewhat unscrupulous reformer imagined it could best be carried out.

Probably the forged decretals were concocted at Rheims, or possibly at Mainz, and they were first used in a critical case in 866, when a bishop of Soissons, deposed by Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, appealed to the pope on the ground that the power of deposition by the decretals belonged to him alone. It is difficult {196} to believe that when Nicolas I. accepted them he was not aware that they were not the genuine writings of the popes whose work they professed to be: he can hardly have thought that Spain (where it was said that they had been discovered) was more likely to have kept papal doc.u.ments safely than the Roman Chancery itself. Their importance was, however, not evident at first. In the ninth and tenth centuries comparatively little was made of them. It was in the eleventh and the centuries which followed that a gigantic edifice of papal a.s.sumption was to be built upon them by popes who were fired with a true zeal to reform the world, and who, not doubting their authenticity, found in them an instrument ready to their hands.

[Sidenote: The decay of the papacy.]

The weakness of the papacy in the tenth century was indeed such that no theory could give it respect in Europe. The weakness of the Church was heralded by that of the Empire. The Carling house expired in contempt almost as great as that which had fallen on the Merwings. In Gaul the Norman had won fair provinces on the coast; and the house of the Counts of Paris came in the tenth century to rule over the Franks. There the Church remained strong as the State decayed, and it was the great archbishopric of Rheims which gave the crown to the line of Hugh the Great. In Germany the dynasty of the Carlings became extinct. In Rome the power over the city fell into the hands of the local n.o.bility; and the period was made infamous by the lives of Theodora and Marozia, who were the paramours of popes. The tale of the age of disgrace which marks the greater part of the tenth century is of no importance in the history of the Church. A succession of {197} popes, whom their contemporaries certainly did not believe to be infallible, followed each other in rapid procession. John X. alone (914-28) has any claim to greatness; but he, like the others, was deeply stained with the vices, political if not moral, of his age. It was not until the Saxon Otto came to Italy like a knight-errant to redress the wrongs of the Northern princes, and was crowned at Rome in 962, that the Church in Italy began to revive from its ashes. He deposed and set up popes; and he gave to the papacy something of the bracing ideals which the new life of Gaul and Germany inspired.

The moral weakness of the papacy, the political weakness of Italy, had founded the Empire anew, as it had been founded anew in 800. The revival of the Empire under Charles the Great, and again under Otto, was not due to political considerations only; it was due also to the force of religious ideas.