The Church and the Barbarians Part 1

The Church and the Barbarians.

by William Holden Hutton.

PREFACE

It has seemed to me impossible to deal with the long period covered by this volume as briefly as the scheme of the series required without leaving out a great many events and concentrating attention chiefly upon a few central facts and a few important personages. I think that the main results of the development may thus be seen, though there is much which is here omitted that would have been included had the book been written on other lines.

Some pages find place here which originally appeared in _The Guardian_ and _The Treasury_, and a few lines which once formed part of an article in _The Church Quarterly Review_. My thanks are due for the courtesy of the Editors. I have reprinted some pa.s.sages from my _Church of the Sixth Century_, a book which is now out of print and not likely to be reissued.

I have to thank the Rev. L. Pullan for help from his wide knowledge, and Mr. L. Strachan, of Heidelberg, of whose accuracy and learning I have had long experience, for reading the proofs and making the index.

W. H. H.

S. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD, _Septuagesima_, 1906.

THE CHURCH AND THE BARBARIANS

CHAPTER I

THE CHURCH AND ITS PROSPECTS IN THE FIFTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: The task of the Church]

The year 461 saw the great organisation which had ruled and united Europe for so long trembling into decay. The history of the Empire in relation to Christianity is indeed a remarkable one. The imperial religion had been the necessary and deadly foe of the religion of Jesus Christ; it had fought and had been conquered. Gradually the Empire itself with all its inst.i.tutions and laws had been transformed, at least outwardly, into a Christian power. Questions of Christian theology had become questions of imperial politics. A Roman of the second century would have wondered indeed at the transformation which had come over the world he knew: it seemed as if the kingdoms of the earth had become the kingdoms of the Lord and of His Christ. But also it seemed that the new wine had burst the old bottles. The boundaries of the Roman world had been outstepped: nations had come in from the East and from the West. The {2} system which had been supreme was not elastic: the new ideas, Christian and barbarian alike, pressed upon it till it gave way and collapsed. And so it came about that if Christianity had conquered the old world, it had still to conquer the new.

[Sidenote: The decaying Empire.]

Now before the Church in the fifth century there were set several powers, interests, duties, with which she was called upon to deal; and her dealing with them was the work of the next five centuries. They were,--the Empire, Christian, but obsolescent; the new nations, still heathen, which were struggling for territory within the bounds of the Empire, and for sway over the imperial inst.i.tutions; the distant tribes untouched by the message of Christ; and the growth, within the Church itself, of new and great organisations, which were destined in great measure to guide and direct her work. Politics, theology, organisation, missions, had all their share in the work of the Church from 461 to 1003. In each we shall find her influence: to harmonise them we must find a principle which runs through her relation to them all.

[Sidenote: The need of unity.]

The central idea of the period with which we are to deal is unity. Up till the fifth century, till the Council of Chalcedon (451) completed the primary definition of the orthodox Christian faith in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, Christians were striving for conversion, organisation, definition. All these aims still remained, but in less prominence. The Church's order was completed, the Church's creed was practically fixed, and the dominant nations in Europe had owned the name of Christ. There remained a new and severe test. Would the {3} Church win the new barbarian conquerors as she had won the old imperial power? There was to be a great epoch of missionary energy. But of the firm solidity of the Church there could be no doubt. Heresies had torn from her side tribes and even nations who had once belonged to her fold. But still unity was triumphant in idea; and it was into the Catholic unity of the visible Church that the new nations were to be invited to enter. S. Augustine's grand idea of the City of G.o.d had really triumphed, before the fifth century was half pa.s.sed, over the heathen conceptions of political rule. The Church, in spite of the tendency to separate already visible in East and West, was truly one; and that unity was represented also in the Christian Empire. "At the end of the fifth century the only Christian countries outside the limits of the Empire were Ireland and Armenia, and Armenia, maintaining a precarious existence beside the great Persian monarchy of the Sa.s.sanid kings, had been for a long time virtually dependent on the Roman power." [1] Politically, while tyrants rise and fall, and barbarian hosts, the continuance of the Wandering of the Nations, sweep across the stage, we are struck above all by the significant fact which Mr. Freeman (_Western Europe in the Fifth Century_) knew so well how to make emphatic:--"The wonderful thing is how often the Empire came together again. What strikes us at every step in the tangled history of these times is the wonderful life which the Roman name and the Roman Power still kept when it was thus attacked on every side from without and torn in pieces in every quarter from within." And the reason for this indubitably was that the {4} Empire had now another organisation to support it, based on the same idea of central unity. One Church stood beside one Empire, and became year by year even more certain, more perfect, as well as more strong. In the West the papal power rose as the imperial decayed, and before long came near to replacing it. In the East, where the name and tradition of old Rome was always preserved in the imperial government, the Church remained in that immemorial steadfastness to the orthodox faith which was a bond of unity such as no other idea could possibly supply. In the educational work which the emperor had to undertake in regard to the tribes which one by one accepted their sway, the Christian Church was their greatest support.

In East as well as West, the bishops, saints, and missionaries were the true leaders of the nations into the unity of the Empire as well as the unity of the Church. [Sidenote: The Church's conquest of barbarism.]

The idea of Christian unity saved the Empire and taught the nations.

The idea of Christian unity was the force which conquered barbarism and made the barbarians children of the Catholic Church and fellow-citizens with the inheritors of the Roman traditions.

If the dominant idea of the long period with which this book is to deal is the unity of the Church, seen through the struggles to preserve, to teach, or to attain it, the most important facts are those which belong to the conversion, to Christ and to the full faith of the Catholic Church, of races new to the Western world. The gradual extinction in Italy of the Goths, the conversion of the Franks, of the English, of many races on distant barbarian borderlands of civilisation, the acceptance of Catholicism by the Lombards and {5} the Western Goths, do not complete the historical tale, though they are a large part of it: there was the falling back in Africa and for a long time in Europe of the settlements of the Cross before the armies of the Crescent. There were also two other important features of this long-extended age, to which writers have given the name of dark. There was the survival of ancient learning, which lived on through the flood of barbarian immigration into the lands which had been its old home, yet was very largely eclipsed by the predominance of theological interests in literature. And there was the growth of a strong ecclesiastical power, based upon an orthodox faith (though not without hesitations and lapses), and gradually winning a formidable political dominion. That power was the Roman Papacy.

[1] Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_, p. 13, ed. 1904.

{6}

CHAPTER II

THE EMPIRE AND THE EASTERN CHURCH

(461-628)

When the death of Leo the Great in 461 removed from the world of religious progress a saintly and dominant figure whose words were listened to in East and West as were those of no other man of his day, the interest of Church history is seen to turn decisively to the East.

[Sidenote: Character of the Greek Church.]

The story of Eastern Christendom is unique. There is the fascinating tale of the union of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology, and its results, so fertile, so vigorous, so intensely interesting as logical processes, so critical as problems of thought. For the historian there is a story of almost unmatched attraction; the story of how a people was kept together in power, in decay, in failure, in persecution, by the unifying force of a Creed and a Church. And there is the extraordinary missionary development traceable all through the history of Eastern Christianity: the wonderful Nestorian missions, the activity of the evangelists, imperial and hierarchical, of the sixth century, the conversion of Russia, the preludes to the remarkable achievements in modern times of orthodox missions in the Far East.

Throughout the whole of the long period indeed {7} which begins with the death of Leo and ends with that of Silvester II., though the Latin Church was growing in power and in missionary success, it was probably the Christianity of the East which was the most secure and the most prominent. Something of its work may well be told at the beginning of our task.

[Sidenote: The Monophysite controversy.]

The last years of the fifth century were in the main occupied in the East by the dying down of a controversy which had rent the Church. The Eutychian heresy, condemned at Chalcedon, gave birth to the Monophysite party, which spread widely over the East. Attempts were soon made to bridge over the gulf by taking from the decisions of Chalcedon all that definitely repudiated the Monophysite opinions. [Sidenote: The Henotikon.] In 482 the patriarch Acacius of Constantinople, under the orders probably of the Emperor Zeno (474-91), drew up the _Henotikon_, an endeavour to secure the peace of the Church by abandoning the definitions of the Fourth General Council. No longer was "one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged _in two natures_, without fusion, without change, without division, without separation."

But it is impossible to ignore a controversy which has been a cause of wide divergence. Men will not be silent, or forget, when they are told. Statesmanlike was, no doubt, the policy which sought for unity by ignoring differences; and peace was to some extent secured in the East so long as Zeno and his successor Anastasius (491-518) reigned.

But at Rome it was not accepted. Such a doc.u.ment, which implicitly repudiated the language of Leo the Great, which the Fourth General Council had adopted, could {8} never be accepted by the whole Church; and those in the East who were theologians and philosophers rather than statesmen saw that the question once raised must be finally settled in the dogmatic decisions of the Church. Had the Lord two Natures, the Divine and Human, or but one? The reality of the Lord's Humanity as well as of His Divinity was a truth which, at whatever cost of division and separation, it was essential that the Church should proclaim and cherish.

In Constantinople, a city always keen to debate theology in the streets, the divergence was plainly manifest; and a doc.u.ment which was "subtle to escape subtleties" was not likely to be satisfactory to the subtlest of controversialists. The Henotikon was accepted at Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, but it was rejected by Rome and by the real sense of Constantinople. In Alexandria the question was only laid for a time, and when a bishop who had been elected was refused recognition by Acacius the Patriarch of Constantinople and Peter "the Stammerer,"

who accepted the Henotikon, preferred to his place, a reference to Rome led to a peremptory letter from Pope Simplicius, to which Acacius paid no heed whatever. Felix II. (483-92), after an ineffectual emba.s.sy, actually declared Acacius excommunicate and deposed. The monastery of the Akoimetai at Constantinople ("sleepless ones," who kept up perpetual intercession) threw itself strongly on to the side of the advocates of Chalcedon. Acacius, then excommunicated by Rome because he would not excommunicate the Monophysite patriarch of Alexandria, retorted by striking out the name of Felix from the diptychs of the Church.

{9}

[Sidenote: Schism between East and West.]

It was the first formal beginning of the schism which,--temporarily, and again and again, healed,--was ultimately to separate East and West; and it was due, as so many misfortunes of the Church have been, to the inevitable divergence between those who thought of theology first as statesmen and those who thought first as inquirers after the truth.

The schism spread more widely. In Syria Monophysitism joined Nestorianism in the confusion of thought: in Egypt the Coptic Church arose which repudiated Chalcedon: Abyssinia and Southern India were to follow. Arianism had in the East practically died away; Nestorianism was powerful only in far-away lands, but Monophysitism was for a great part of the sixth century strong in the present, and close to the centre of Church life. The sixth century began, as the fifth had ended, in strife from which there seemed no outway. Nationalism, and the rival claims of Rome and Constantinople, complicated the issues.

Under Anastasius, the convinced opponent of the Council of Chalcedon and himself to all intents a Monophysite in opinion, some slight negotiations were begun with Rome, while the streets of Constantinople ran with blood poured out by the hot advocates of theological dogma.

In 515 legates from Pope Hormisdas visited Constantinople; in 516 the emperor sent envoys to Rome; in 517 Hormisdas replied, not only insisting on the condemnation of those who had opposed Chalcedon, but also claiming from the Caesar the obedience of a spiritual son; and in that same year Anastasius, "most sweet-tempered of emperors," died, rejecting the papal demands.

{10}

The accession of Justin I. (518-27) was a triumph for the orthodox faith, to which the people of Constantinople had firmly held. The patriarch, John the Cappadocian, declared his adherence to the Fourth Council: the name of Pope Leo was put on the diptychs together with that of S. Cyril; and synod after synod acclaimed the orthodox faith.

Negotiations for reunion with the West were immediately opened. The patriarch and the emperor wrote to Pope Hormisdas, and there wrote also a theologian more learned than the patriarch, the Emperor's nephew, Justinian. "As soon," he wrote, "as the Emperor had received by the will of G.o.d the princely fillet, he gave the bishops to understand that the peace of the Church must be restored. This had already in a great degree been accomplished." But the pope's opinion must be taken with regard to the condemnation of Acacius, who was responsible for the Henotikon, and was the real cause of the severance between the churches. [Sidenote: Reunion, 519.] The steps towards reunion may be traced in the correspondence between Hormisdas and Justinian. It was finally achieved on the 27th of March, 519. The patriarch of Constantinople declared that he held the Churches of the old and the new Rome to be one; and with that regard he accepted the four Councils and condemned the heretics, including Acacius.

The Church of Alexandria did not accept the reunion; and Severus, patriarch of Antioch, was deposed for his heresy. There was indeed a considerable party all over the East which remained Monophysite; and this party it was the first aim of Justinian (527-65), when he became emperor, to convince or to subdue. He was the {11} nephew of Justin, and he was already trained in the work of government; but he seemed to be even more zealous as a theologian than as a lawyer or administrator.

The problem of Monophysitism fascinated him. [Sidenote: The Emperor Justinian.] From the first, he applied himself seriously to the study of the question in all its bearings. Night after night, says Procopius, he would study in his library the writings of the Fathers and the Holy Scriptures themselves, with some learned monks or prelates with whom he might discuss the problems which arose from their perusal.

He had all a lawyer's pa.s.sion for definition, and all a theologian's delight in truth. And as year by year he mastered the intricate arguments which had surged round the decisions of the Councils, he came to consider that a _rapprochement_ was not impossible between the Orthodox Church and those many Eastern monks and prelates who still hesitated over a repudiation which might mean heresy or schism. And from the first it was his aim to unite not by arms but by arguments.

The incessant and wearisome theological discussions which are among the most prominent features of his reign, are a clearly intended part of a policy which was to reunite Christendom and consolidate the definition of the Faith by a thorough investigation of controverted matters.

Justinian first thought out vexed questions for himself, and then endeavoured to make others think them out.

From 527, in the East, Church history may be said to start on new lines. The Catholic definition was completed and the imperial power was definitely committed to it. We may now look at the Orthodox Church as one, united against outside error.

{12}