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

Cardinal Mai has left recorded his judgment that, "in matter of fact, the whole administration of the Church is learnt in the letters of the Popes". 1 1 Nova Patrum bibliotheca , p. vi.: In Pontificum reapse epistolis tota ecclesiæ administratio cognoscitur.

I draw from this judgment the inference that of all sources for the truths of history none are so precious, instructive, and authoritative as these authentic letters contemporaneous with the persons to whom they are addressed. The first which has been preserved to us is that of Pope St. Clement, the contemporary of St. Peter and St. Paul. It is directed to the Church of Corinth for the purpose of extinguishing a schism which had there broken out. In issuing his decision the Pope appeals to the Three Divine Persons to bear witness that the things which he has written "are written by us through the Holy Spirit," and claims obedience to them from those to whom he sends them as words "spoken by God through us". 2 2 See p. 351 below; also Church and State , pp. 198-200, for the full statement of this passage.

If the decisions of the succeeding Popes in the interval of nearly two hundred and fifty years between this letter of St. Clement, about the year 95, and the great letter of St. Julius to the Eusebianising bishops at Antioch in 342, had been preserved entire, the constitution of the Church in that interval would have shone before us in clear light. In fact, we only possess a few fragments of some of these decisions, for there was a great destruction of such documents in the persecution which occupied the first decade of the fourth century. But from the time of Pope Siricius, in the reign of the great Theodosius, a continuous, though not a perfect, series of these letters stretches through the succeeding ages. There is no other such series of documents existing in the world. They throw light upon all matters and persons of which they treat. This is a light proceeding from one who lives in the midst of what he describes, who is at the centre of the greatest system of doctrine and discipline, and legislation grounded upon both, which the world has ever seen. One, also, who speaks not only with a great knowledge, but with an unequalled authority, which, in every case, is like that of no one else, but can even be supreme , when it is directed with such a purpose to the whole Church. Every Pope can speak, as St. Clement, the first of this series, speaks above, claiming obedience to his words as "words spoken by God through us".

In a former volume I made large use of the letters of Popes from Siricius to St. Leo. I have continued that use for the very important period from St. Leo to St. Gregory. Especially in treating of the Acacian schism I have gone to the letters of the Popes who had to deal with it – Simplicius, Felix III., Gelasius, Anastasius II., Symmachus, and Hormisdas. I have done the same for the important reign of Justinian; most of all for the grand pontificate of St. Gregory, which crowns the whole patristic period and sums up its discipline.

I am, therefore, indebted in this volume, first and chiefly, to the letters of the Popes and the letters addressed to them by emperors and bishops, stored up in Mansi's vast collection of Councils (1759, 31 volumes). I am also much indebted to Cardinal Hergenröther's work Photius, sein Leben, und das griechische Schisma , and to his Handbuch der allgemeinen Kirchengeschichte , as the number of quotations from him will show. Again, I may mention the two histories of the city of Rome, by Reumont and Gregorovius, as most valuable. I acknowledge many obligations to Riffel's Geschichtliche Darstellung des Verhältnisses zwischen Kirche und Staat , with regard to the legislation of Justinian. The edition of Justinian referred to by me is Heimbach's Authenticum , Leipsic, 1851. I have consulted Hefele's Conciliengeschichte where need was. I have found Kurth's Origines de la Civilisation moderne instructive. I have used the carefully emended and supplemented German edition of Röhrbacher's history, by various writers – Rump and others. St. Gregory is quoted from the Benedictine edition.

As these works are indicated in the notes as they occur with the single name of the author, I have given here their full titles.

The present volume is the sixth of the Formation of Christendom , though it has a special title indicating the particular part of that general subject which it treats. I have, therefore, added to the numbering of the chapters in the Table of Contents the number which they hold in the whole work.

September 11, 1888.

I ended the last chapter by drawing out that series of events in the Church's internal constitution and of changes in the external world of action outside and independent of the Church which combined in one result the exhibition to all and the public acknowledgment by the Church of the Primacy given by our Lord to St. Peter, and continued to his successors in the See of Rome. I showed St. Leo as exercising this Primacy by annulling the acts of an Ecumenical Council, the second of Ephesus, legitimately called and attended by his own legates, because it had denied a tenet of what St. Leo declared in a letter sent to the bishops and accepted by them to be the Christian faith upon the Incarnation itself. I showed him supported by the Church in that annulment, by the eastern episcopate, which attended the Council of Chalcedon, and by the eastern emperor, Marcian. Again, I showed him confirming the doctrinal decrees of the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, which followed the Council annulled by him, while he reversed and disallowed certain canons which had been irregularly passed. This he did because they were injurious to that constitution of the Church which had come down from the Apostles to his own time. And this act of his, also, I showed to be accepted by the bishop of Constantinople, who was specially affected, and by the eastern emperor, and by the episcopate: and also that the confirmation of doctrine on the one hand, and the rejection of canons on the other, were equally accepted. I also showed this great Council in its Synodical Letter to the Pope acknowledging spontaneously that very position of the Pope which the Popes had always set forth as the ground of all the authority which they claimed. The Council of Chalcedon addressed St. Leo "as entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the Vine". But the Vine in the universal language of the Fathers betokened the whole Church of God. And the Council refers the confirmation of its acts to the Pope in the same document in which it asserts that the guardianship of the Vine was given to him by the Saviour Himself. This expression, "by the Saviour Himself," means that it was not given to him by the decree of any Council representing the Church. It is a full acknowledgment that the promises made to Peter, and the Pastorship conferred upon him, descended to his successor in the See of Rome. It is a full acknowledgment; for how else was St. Leo entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the Vine? Those who so addressed him were equally bishops with himself; they equally enjoyed the one indivisible episcopate, "of which a part is held by each without division of the whole". 3 3 "Episcopatus unus est cujus a singulis in solidum pars tenetur." – S. Cyprian, De Unitate Ecclesiæ . But this one, beside and beyond that, was charged with the whole – the Vine itself. This one point is that in which St. Peter went beyond his brethren, by the special gift and appointment of the Saviour Himself. The words, then, of the Council contain a special acknowledgment that the line of Popes after a succession of four hundred years sat in the person of Leo on the seat of St. Peter, with St. Peter's one sovereign prerogative.