but the autonomy which had been denied them under Aurelius
was maintained to the end, that is to say, up till the Mahommedan
conquest.
During the 4th century it is to be noticed that, generally speaking, the Roman Church played a comparatively insignificant part in the west. From the time of popes Damasus and Siricius various affairs were referred to Rome from Africa, Spain or Gaul. The popes were asked to give decisions, and in answer to those demands The Roman Church in the 4th Century. drew up their first decretals. However, side by side with the Roman see was that of Milan, which was also the capital of the Western Empire. From time to time it seemed as if Milan would become to Rome what Constantinople was to Alexandria. However, any danger that menaced the prestige of Rome disappeared when the emperor Honorius removed the imperial residence to Ravenna, and still more so when the Western emperors were replaced in the north of Italy by barbarian sovereigns, who were Arians.
In Spain, Gaul, Brittany and the provinces of the Danube,
similar political changes took place. When orthodox Christianity
had gained the upper hand beyond the Alps and the
Pyrenees, the episcopate of those countries grouped
itself, as it had done in the East, around the
sovereigns. In Spain was produced a fairly strong
The Church in the Teutonic Kingdoms.
Restriction
of the Papal Authority.
religious centralization around the Visigothic king and the metropolitan
of Toledo. In Gaul there was no chief metropolitan; but
the king’s court became, even sooner than that of Spain, the
centre of episcopal affairs. The Britons and Irish, whose remoteness
made them free from restriction, developed still more decided
individuality. In short, the workings of all the Western episcopates,
from Africa to the ocean, the Rhine and the Danube, lay
outside the ordinary influence of the Roman see. All of them,
even down to the metropolitan sees of Milan and
Aquileia, practised a certain degree of autonomy, and
in the 6th century this developed into what is called
the Schism of the Three Chapters. With the exception
of this schism, these episcopates were by no means in opposition
to the Holy See. They always kept up relations of some
kind, especially by means of pilgrimages, and it was admitted
that in any disputes which might arise with the Eastern Church
the pope had the right to speak as representative of the whole
of the Western Church. He was, moreover, the only bishop of a
great see—for Carthage had practically ceased to count—who
was at that time a subject of the Roman emperor.
This was the situation when St Gregory was elected pope in 590. We may add that in peninsular Italy, which was most clearly under his ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the Lombards had spread havoc and ruin; so that nearly ninety bishoprics had been suppressed, either temporarily or definitively. The pope could act directly only on the bishoprics of the coast districts or the islands. Beyond this limited circle he had to act by means of diplomatic channels, through the governments of the Lombards, Franks and Visigoths. On the Byzantine side his hands were less tied; but here he had to reckon with the theory of the five patriarchates which had been a force since Justinian. According to Byzantine ideas, the Church was governed under the supreme authority, of course, of the emperor—by the five patriarchs of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Rome had for a long time opposed this division, but, since some kind of division was necessary, had put forward the idea of the three sees of St Peter—Rome, Alexandria and Antioch—those of Constantinople and Jerusalem being set aside, as resulting from later usurpations. But the last named were just the most important; in fact the only ones which counted at all, since the monophysite secession had reduced the number of the orthodox in Syria and Egypt practically to nothing. This dissidence Islam was to complete, and by actually suppressing the patriarchate of Jerusalem to reduce Byzantine Christendom to the two patriarchates of Rome and Constantinople.
There was no comparison between the two from the point of view of the East. The new Rome, where the emperor reigned, prevailed over the old, which was practically abandoned to the barbarians. She was still by courtesy given the precedence, but that was all; the council in Trullo (692) even claimed to impose reforms on her. When Rome, abandoned by the Rome and Constan-tinople. distant emperors, was placed under the protection of the Franks (754), relations between her and the Greek became gradually more rare, the chief occasions being the question of the images in the 8th century, the quarrel between Photius and Ignatius in the 9th, the affairs of the four marriages of the emperor Leo VI. and of the patriarch Theophylact in the 10th. On these different occasions the pope, ignored in ordinary times, was made use of by the Byzantine government to ratify measures which it had found necessary to adopt in opposition to the opinion of the Greek episcopate.
These relations were obviously very different from those which had been observed originally, and it would be an injustice to the Roman Church to take them as typical of her relations with other Christian bodies. She had done all she could to defend her former position. Towards the end of the 4th century, when southern Illyricum (Macedonia, Greece, Crete) was passing under the authority of the Eastern emperor, she tried to keep him within her ecclesiastical obedience by creating the vicariate of Thessalonica. Pope Zosimus (417) made trial of a similar organization in the hope of attaching the churches of the Gauls more closely to himself. It was also he who began the struggle against the autonomy of Africa. But it was all without effect. From the 6th century onwards the apostolic vicars of Arles and Thessalonica were merely the titular holders of pontifical honours, with no real authority over those who were nominally under their jurisdiction.
It was Gregory I. who, though with no premeditated intention,
was the first to break this circle of autonomous or dissident
Churches which was restricting the influences of the
apostolic see. As the result of the missions sent to
England by him and his successors there arose a
church which, in spite of certain Irish elements, was and remained
Gregory
the Great,
590–604.
Roman in origin, and, above all, spirit and tendency. In it the
traditions of old culture and religious learning imported from
Rome, where they had almost ceased to bear any fruit, found a
new soil, in which they flourished. Theodore, Wilfrid, Benedict
Biscop, Bede, Boniface, Ecgbert, Alcuin, revived the fire of learning,
which was almost extinct, and by their aid enlightenment
was carried to the Continent, to decadent Gaul and barbarian
Germany. The Churches of England and Germany, founded, far
from all traditions of autonomy, by Roman legates, tendered
their obedience voluntarily. In Gaul there was no hostility
to the Holy See, but on the contrary a profound veneration
for the great Christian sanctuary of the West. The Carolingian
princes, when Boniface pointed them towards Rome, followed
him without their clergy offering any resistance on grounds of
principle. The question of reform having arisen, from the apostolic
see alone could its fulfilment be expected, since in it, with
the succession of St Peter, were preserved the most august
traditions of Christianity.
The surprising thing is that, although Rome was then included within the empire of the Franks, so that the popes were afforded special opportunities for activity, they showed for the most part no eagerness to strengthen their authority over the clergy beyond the Alps. Appeals and other matters of detail were referred to them more often than under the Merovingians. They gave answers to such questions as were submitted to them; the machinery moved when set in motion from outside; but the popes did not attempt to interfere on their own initiative. The Frankish Church was directed, in fact, by the government of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. When this failed, as happened during the wars and partitions which followed the death of Louis, the fate of this Church, with no effective head and under no regular direction, was very uncertain. It was then that aThe False Decretals. clerk who saw that there was but an uncertain prospect of help from the pope of his time, conceived the shrewd idea of appealing to the popes of the past, so as to exhort the contemporary generation through the mouth of former popes, from Clement to Gregory. This design was
