OF GOD
During the three following centuries the history of the developing Papacy is bound up with the life of the Empire as a whole. Political priority was now established in the East and Rome became estranged from its imperial master. Migrating Germanic tribes erected new states inside the Empire, which waged wars on each other and on the Empire as a whole, with the result that the kingdom of the Franks was firmly established. The political movements of the time are interwoven with spiritual and religious upheavals, for example, the ferment which arose out of efforts to assimilate ancient heathen ele- ments into the new Christian system. The struggle for priority be- tween East and West went on side by side with philosophical, dog- matic debates concerning the unity of teaching in the West Roman, East Roman and Germanic sections of Christianity.
In the year 330 Constantine dedicated his Roma Nova on the soil of ancient Byzantium. The chariot of the sun-god rolled into the market square, beside him stood the reigning Tychon with the Cross on his head, and a choir chanted the Kyrie eleison. Thus, with blended Christian and heathen tradition, this third city of destiny proceeded arm in arm with Rome and Jerusalem into what was to be the history of a realm lasting a thousand years. All the world was to see in this newly-founded Empire a sign that times had changed. But not everything had been renewed. In a city freshly adorned with gold and marble, the Cassars besought the Galilean to be their God as Jupiter and the unconquerable Sun had been the deities of their fathers. Constantine placed religion in the service of the state in the same spirit that had actuated Diocletian and all ancient emperors, though his was a different creed. The Church he confronted was so much like a state and so firmly established that the idea of welding it to the Empire was eminently natural. There could be no objection to the union in so far as the Church was of the nature of the ancient Politeia. But this Church was conscious of being something more, something greater: a communion founded in the beginning of time, transcending states and centuries in its devotion to the purposes of the eternal realm which had called it into being. Therefore a state
47
48 CONSULS OF GOD
Church, in the sense of Constantine and his successors, was for the deepest reasons incompatible with the nature of the state and of the Church. The new monarchy, which sought to be church and state at one and the same time and was therefore neither church nor state, was comparable to a mother who in order to prove the fullness of her affection stifles her beloved ones in a vigorous embrace. The basilicas of Constantinople arose in alien air. Every sentence of the Gospel, which was read there as if it were the true code of the Empire, struck at the Basileus, divinely crowned, who, on his throne beside the altar, termed himself the earthly husk of Christus Itnperator. The Church was in the state, but the state was not in the Church.
After Constantine's rime, the great Councils met in the East. The emperors who convened them and presided over them knew how to affirm their royal priesthood, now in a wordly sense as abstinence and again in a spiritual sense as influence. Wearing the Cross as their sceptre, preaching before the assembled court, and proclaiming their laws acts of Providence which would redound to the eternal salvation of their subjects, they so nearly identified their persons with the Divine Will that only a step remained to be taken. Based on formula: of this kind, a dangerous belief that all powers had really been united in one representative of God on earth began to spread already during the century of Constantine. The diadem of Byzantium suffered as a consequence, even as would the tiara of Rome later on.
After the division of the Empire under Theodosius the First (395) the will to achieve political unity still existed, it is true, but the Church was the only force that actually held East and West together. But it, too, was forced to be on guard lest the opposition between East and West destroy its own unity. The Western dioceses were ce- mented more and more firmly to Rome. In the East a consciousness of solidarity against Rome became stronger after the Patriarchates were established. Moreover, the pressure brought to bear by the Imperial Protector on the Bosphorus, and the spiritual genius of Central Asian, Syrian and Egyptian thought were bound in the end to seem alien to the Christian West, despite the dominance there of Greek culture. East- ern Christianity seemed sometimes merely a chill cult of the state, sometimes a fitful fever of the intellect, and sometimes the self-immola- tion of a spirit fled into the desert. In Rome and in territories adjacent
THE EASTERN EMPIRE 49
to Rome, the norm was action on the basis of reflective reason, the transfer of religious insight into visible work, and active life deriving strength from the unfathomable secret fountains of the Church. The spirit of Pope Dionysius who, in the third century, addressed his brother of the same name in Alexandria as a teacher and insisted that he assent to the ideas of Rome concerning the relation between Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and desist from complex subtleties of interpreta- tion, indicates how in this classic time the dogmatic meditation of Rome differed from the philosophical unrest of the Orient. And as if they were governed by a higher plan, leaders in the Roman West, Ambrose and Augustine, for example, dug deep into the thought of Greece and the Orient, while eastern Romans, among them Athanasius of Alexandria and Jerome of Dalmatia, both of them familiar with the soil of Rome, wrote in the very spirit of the western Church. Thus an exchange of ideas fruitful to both sides made it less difficult tor the Popes to hold together the ecclesia universalis.
Christianity had answered the declaration of Constantine with unanimous acclaim. The victory of the One God, Alpha and Omega, was now apparent; and in the apses of the basilicas Christ, the Judge and Victor, began His reign. Yet the people who looked up to Him in fear of the Lawgiver, and half in gratitude to the Bringer of peace, did not become Christians overnight. The masses resembled the Pantheon of the Emperor who a hundred years before Constantine's time had placed the Christ of the "new people" amongst the ancient gods. Long after Christian houses of worship in great numbers had been erected throughout the Empire in Rome a basilica of vast dimensions stood on Vatican Hill and the pagan Lateran had been transformed into a Church Julian the Apostate bade the old gods return. Though this austere heathen's dream of erecting out of the ruins of the old religion a rival church came to naught, his romantic plan was supported by a part of that strength with which the Christian Church had to reckon in debating with its philosophic opponents or in educating the illiterate masses which flocked to it. This strength lay in the fundamental urge of religious man which can carry him to the vety extremes of spiritual life as well as far into the domain of sensuality. This twofold tendency grows out of the dual nature of man. From Paul's time on confessors and preachers of the Gospel
50 CONSULS OF GOD
had sought to arrive at more than a covenant of toleration with the heathens. They saw in the old gods, images representative of faith in One Power which, despite the changing world, is everywhere active and present, governing all things throughout every transformation. The philosophers were found to have voiced truth that sprang from a wisdom they had received in advance from the Eternal Word, who had since become Man in Christ. Myth was viewed as a guide toward the Logos; and the mysteries were believed to foreshadow im- aginatively the spirit of the new Kingdom.
Eusebius in the East and Augustine in the West considered Chris- tianity historically and essentially in agreement with what before its coming had always been the veritable religion of mankind. The Church was Catholic and therefore at each moment of its existence embraced the whole of history and the whole of human nature. To it belonged both body and soul and the sum-total of the living. From its Founder it had inherited the obligation to embrace all peoples, though He had predicted also that by no means all would welcome that embrace. From the beginning it would remain a field both flourishing and untidy, producing both grain and weeds. The length of time it took Christianity to assimilate pagan tradition made a very sombre impression upon many men of the time. They saw that in its agony declining Rome threatened to destroy its rescuer, too. At the close of the 4th century the Christian Emperors Gratian in the West and Theodosius in the East declared the practice of the heathen religion a punishable offense. The Church could not avoid receiving on board its ship, without quarantine, the masses who now clung to a myriad wrecks. It had to take them as they were. Con- temporaries wrote almost morbid descriptions of the worldliness they beheld descending upon the Church. Salvian asked whether virtually the whole of the Christian community might not be termed the "mask of vice." The morals of the barbarians were, he maintained, putting those of Christian Rome to shame. Yes, the Vandals of Spain and Africa were compelled to rid the cities of Christian houses of prostitu- tion!
When the Germans poured like two tidal waves over Eastern and Western sections of the Empire, they invigorated even as they devas- tated the soil. As mercenaries they had long since permeated the
EARLY MONASTICISM 51
army. Now the bloody conflicts they inaugurated seemed to reflec- tive contemporaries the beginning of a new community of peoples inside which the Roman culture would become common property under the roof of the new religion. The division of Christiandom into Catholic and Arian Churches after the beginning of the 4th century, impeded this development for a long time because the larger number of Germans clung to the heretical faith. Nevertheless the final result of this inner and outer collision of peoples was the union of healthy new energy with a tradition, though centuries would of course have to pass before that union would bear full fruit. The pure and lofty strength of the Church was not lost during the process which saved antique civilization by transforming the Roman state into the Church a transformation which meant that the Church in inherit- ing the degenerate masses bequeathed by the state necessarily received much that was utterly rotten.
Now monasticism arose strengthening and purifying the Church, even as the Germans regenerated the human materials of the Empire. The monastic idea did not originate with Christianity, but it received from this a new content, a far-reaching modification of the ancient Oriental ideal of dying in order to live. When men severed their lives from society and abandoned all that could be abandoned, they did not always do the same thing. In both East and West the Church saw that the heroic gesture of world renouncement might lead to the peril of world condemnation. It saw ascetics band together in deplorable isolation from the whole of the Church. As the new school of the nations, it could not desire that a rigid self-contempla- tion and self-culture of the personality be set over and against it as a higher form of Christianity. It was deeply anxious to embody what is eternally valuable in monasticism into its scheme of life. Men like Basil in the East, who, despite his struggles and tiring labours as Archbishop of Caesarea, was not tempted to return to the pleasant her- mitage where he had cared for his garden and drawn a cart of dung just as cheerfully as he later engaged in learned study, was an exemplar of a monasticism which was entirely in consonance with the Church and could serve it like a right hand. In the West a great bishop, Severin, was a similar shepherd of his people. The paradox of a man who in action says "yes" to the world because he has said "no" to it per-
52 CONSULS OF GOD
sonally is of unlimited fruitfulness. That conquest of things which comes from keeping them at a distance, the whole mystery of a crea- tiveness which grows out of renouncement of the created, the ora and labora which are so simple and majestic a way of human life (yes, the simplest and most majestic of all ways) : this the Church, as fire from Heaven and salt of the earth, had to master and retain. But the flame which soon burned on hundreds of hearths when Benedict of Nursia, both a perfector and a pioneer, wrote his Rule in the sixth century, was also in immediate need of a guardian who could tend it when it smouldered or burned too fiercely, lest the house as a whole suffer injury. Like all things human, the Church and its monasticism were in danger of losing sight of the proportion between the whole and its parts.
As a political institution the Church necessarily required leadership which could keep under control the life which coursed through his- torical space and time. If its Catholicism implied bringing together all values into one complex totality, nothing was more urgent than scrutiny of these values before they were accepted. The foundation had to be strengthened as more was added to the building.
In a state that wished to establish the government of One Shepherd and One Fold amidst the turbulence of earthly life, the value of a monarchical unity of leadership was self-evident. It was a law of Christ's Kingdom that its teacher was to be like unto the master of a house who takes both old and new out of his chest; it was to preserve what had been handed down, to sift what was in the making, to make young growth conform to the logic of the old, and to blend the old with the new. The restive creativeness of the human spirit had from the beginning thrown the Church into struggle concerning what was false and what true in her teaching. The dogmatic conflicts of the fourth and fifth centuries at first sight read like a chronique scandaleuse* Though all sides earnestly wished to serve the cause of Christ, the issue at bottom was whether the new religion was to live or die. The thing that held all the separate camps together was a position against Rome, ot rather the common bond was Rome's opposition to their teachers and their doctrines*
Thus there existed in North Africa a sectarian Church of ultta- asccrics. These were the Donatists. No one known to have sinned
DOGMATIC CONFLICTS 53
was permitted inside their community. They denied that those who had weakened during a persecution could rightfully become bishops, and they maintained as Tertullian had maintained in his time that the priestly office was valid only when held by men of stainless moral purity. In their opinion the Church was holy, not in itself, not as God's gift and Christ's foundation, but only in so far as it was a com- munion of holy men. The Catholic synods of Rome and Aries con- demned the Donatists, whom Constantine later deprived of their churches while exiling their bishops. Yet even then the movement was not curbed. On the contrary: the Emperor's sternness fanned the fanaticism of these "soldiers of Christ," who proceeded to belabour Catholics with robbery, murder and arson. This attempt by a na- tionalistically minded mass-feeling to build a free, regional church sundered from Rome, lasted a hundred years. Egypt and Armenia had soon followed the example given. Then, about 400 A.D., Au- gustine, who as Bishop of Hippo was a proximate witness of their lawless conduct, opened his literary attack on the Donatists. He saw in the world-embracing community of the Church the result of an historical development which blended good with evil as a net contains good and bad fish, as a herd consists of sheep and goats, as a field is sown with wheat and weeds, but which is holy none the less because God is its Founder and its Shepherd. With a heavy heart, and also after a tragic farewell to his own convictions, the most illustrious teacher of the Church abandoned his former view that one must not make honest heretics Catholics by force. He now adopted what seemed to him the unavoidable conclusion that unity must be achieved by force when words no longer avail. Men bind the insane with fetters and drive stampeding cattle back to the herd with whips; and so also must heretic and schismatic come under the dictum of the giver of the feast in the Gospel: "Go ye out into the highways and into the fields and force them to come." In thus issuing the first summons to the power of the state for aid in behalf of the unity of the Church, Augustine, the greatest student and confessor of the human heart, gave the next thousand years a sword to wield against freedom of worship and conscience. His solution of the problem was not dictated by Rome, but breathed its spirit, and never faded from the memory of the Church and its Popes. After the religious debates of 411 in
54 CONSULS OF GOD
Carthage, where 286 Catholic and 279 Donatist bishops met but could not agree, only the Empire's penal legislation could bring the sectarians to terms; and in quite the same way many a danger to the unity of the Church and therewith also the unity of Europe was put down only by fire, sword and rope before which the flesh proved mightier than the spirit.
Not the nature of the Church but of Christianity itself was the issue in the dogmatic struggles of the East. Who was Jesus? Primi- tive Christianity had also known those who answered that He had been merely a man. Their contentions could be disproved by citing writ- ten and oral tradition concerning the person and deeds of the Galilean. The conviction triumphed that He was the promised Messiah, the Son of God, the Christ. Yet this response of the Evangelists and Paul suggested many another question to later generations. The Old and the New Testaments, Greek and Jewish philosophic definitions, tended to meet in a lucid synthesis in which the simple "Father," the undefined "Spirit" and the "Son" were brought into an inner essential relationship not incompatible with the concept, the unity and the singleness of the Divine Nature. From Alexandria, in that time the world's market-place for ideas, the question as to what was the nature and the significance of Jesus led to both light and darkness. Some beheld in Him the Mediator between Heaven and earth, God and man. Therefore He must belong to both realms and have in Him something of God and of man. The East, where Greeks and Jews philosophized in Platonic manner, could not agree to let simple faith take the place of knowledge in the study of what Jesus had been. And once they had seized the mystery of Christ in their thoughts, an antique dread of anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine made them hesitate to believe that God could have appeared in man. The divine cannot, they said, ever act directly on what is earthly. How then can it have been made flesh? Therefore Christ also could not be in essence the Son of God. He could only be created mediate being, doubtless the first-born of all creatures, who creates and governs all things. Though this view had been approximately that of earlier thinkers, it was Arias, a priest who came from Libya to the Alex- andrine school, who gave it definitive form. He seems to have been a composite of vanity and earnestness. His teaching was inchoate, for
ARIANISM AND THE COUNCIL OF NICE 55
the eternal uncreated foundation of all things was held to be the creator of the mediate being who makes all things, but still himself unable to create. In the attempt to avoid lapsing into polytheism by as- suming that there were two primal causes, Arius posited a demi-god of whom the Scriptures say not a word. As a result of very effective propaganda his teachings gained a tremendous popular following.
Constantine did everything he could to salvage Church unity, so valuable to the Empire which his tireless efforts had unified. He called together the first great Council, that of Nice. Pope Sylvester's ambassadors acted as chairmen. The Council decided against Arius: Christ was proclaimed to be truly God, born of the true God and like in nature to the Father. But this verdict of the Council was also the inception of a drama which kept the Empire in a state of excitement for more than half a century. Under Constantine's successors, the Arians gained control of the secular power and also made some head- way in the West. During this springtime flood of the most powerful heresy since the days of the Gnostics, the Papacy could act only as a protecting dam. The See of Peter was sure that its was the true teaching. It maintained its claim to the highest pastoral authority and used whatever influence it possessed when the persecuted bishops of the Orthodox East asked for help. Nevertheless the Popes exer- cised no such influence as did Athanasius, the real leader of the Catholic forces. He has often been termed one of the greatest men of all times. The whole of his long life was dedicated to the upbuilding of the Church. Often viciously attacked, persecuted and exiled, he was a man of brilliant mind and unflinching character, and his was a soul which found God in the contemplative inner life, though it always tingled with zest for battle. In him were joined together, as con- temporaries already said, the nature of two precious stones: those who struck him found that he was a diamond, and those who were sundered from him realized that he was a magnet. Fellow Christians saw in the purity of his life a norm of the episcopacy, and in his theology a canon of orthodoxy. The odyssey of this warrior, who defended the Church against the power of the state as passionately as he fought for her against the heretics, also describes the hour of Pope Liberius' weakness: he had gone into exile for the cause of Athanasius, but there had conceded so much to the Arians that he was on the verge
56 CONSULS OF GOD
of sacrificing the Saviour of the Church. Nevertheless this policy of conciliation, which Pope Damasus continued after Liberius' death, helped the great theologian of the East to conquer Arianism, which had meanwhile split into so many factions inside the Empire that the Emperors Theodosius and Gratian could require their subjects to profess the Creed of Nice. It was now 380 AJD. But at the same rime the forbidden teaching won the hearts of the Germanic peoples, and its grip on them was not loosed until well into the seventh century.
It was not Rome but the Church as a whole which through the voice of its bishops had proclaimed the dogma that God had become man in the Son. Yet the import of these Greek sentences had already previously been the faith of Rome. How to preserve this unity of teaching was the great problem of the fifth century. By no means all doubts or all questions which reason may put to the mystery of the Incarnation had been foreseen. A series of great Councils, sometimes brilliant and edifying but occasionally also repellent, were needed before the things that are Christ's could be cleansed by fire from every lofty and mean passion to which man is subject in both Church and State. Doubtless the voice of Rome did not always prevail in these conflicts, but the decisions as a result of its utterances were linked by the laws of an inner logic into a coherence which was the seal of truth also in the eyes of Rome. Creative insight was the property of phi- losophers and the devout, indeed of all who were actuated by a living faith, regardless of whether they were giving or receiving citizens of the Church. But that which tested the rising human waters of the intellect and the soul by the inner loadstone of the Church, that which drained them off or channelled them into the oasis of the institution which authoritatively represents the divine leadership of mankind: this was, more or less patently, the common will of the theologians and Popes of the Old Church. They confronted a gigantic task which almost baffled fulfilment. They were exteriorly to build a Church out of the chaos of races and peoples. Interiorly they were to adjust the still immature form of the Church to the sum-total of human needs. It was given to one man to complete the major part of this spiritual task in so far as the Western World was concerned.
This man was Augustine. The political tasks were performed by Leo I and Gregory I, the two great Popes of the fifth and sixth cen-
SAINT AUGUSTINE 57
tunes. Augustine meant litde to the Papacy of his time, and im- measurably much to the Papacy ever afterward. His shadow covers the whole Western World for a thousand years and still lies over all that calls itself Christian. According to his own saying he had sun- dered himself from those that love the world. His journey from the things that seem to the things that are is described in his Confessions the most realistic of all novels and the most personal book in world literature. Here one sees the antique world burst like a pod because the fruit it has so long nurtured can no longer be restrained. It half clings to that fruit still, half falls off. Past and future are embraced in the unexampled richness of Augustine's mind. This is not the only sense in which he mirrors the duality of Janus. His human lim- itations are the limitations of human nature. Thence comes the fact that his ascent from the level plain to the heights is all too knowing, all too rich in fruit. Bidden to climb beyond himself, this most earth- bound of all religious men seeks the dizziest spiritual heights. / am and the best in me is my soul. But this soul is not all, though its all is the Good which is the only all. Certain of these things, Augus- tine the self analyst could endure being human. Indeed, he per- fected his self and then made it a memorial in a life work with which the development of countless years and countless men has conformed. Whatever stirred his time, stirred him, too; and yet there were many things that stirred him alone, and because of these he has moved time and the seasons. His life bridged the span of years during which Church and State had already formed a fateful partnership which with a thousand thongs bound the Heavenly Kingdom of the Gospels to the earth of the Empire. Christianity had conquered the world, but the world had also conquered Christianity. The blessings and dis- asters resulting from this interplay of forces the ferment in the Church, the pressure of the barbarians upon the Empire all this was the deep concern of this Christian and Roman, this thinker and bishop.
The Goths under Alaric conquered Rome in 410 and once more the ancient reproach was heard that the dethroned gods were taking vengeance on the Christian empire. Then Augustine, the Roman citizen, wept over the city's fall, but Augustine, the philosopher of the orbis universes Christianas, began to write De Civitate Dei. It is
58 CONSULS OF GOD
Impossible to summarize the contents of this book in a few terse sen- tences, because being a book of destiny written during several decades, it is a rambling structure in which the trends of thought run in par- allel and then finally interweave. The author, who had realized and understood that he himself was a drama growing out of the conflict between divine and human will, here beheld history as a process dur- ing which God and His beloved are sundered from the kingdom of all which has abjured Him. Realization of this cleavage leaves only a choice between a state of self-love and a state of selfless self-sacrificing love. Though there may be little goodness to be found under the sun, though evil and good are intertwined mysteriously throughout history, it is nevertheless in the here-and-now that the die is cast for the eternal and the beyond. The peril in which earthly states live of succumbing to evil grows out of their lust for power. They keep themselves in order only in so far as they surrender to the heavenly Kingdom, which is the Kingdom of everlasting rest. Herewith the song of Pax Romana was ended. But is this Heavenly Kingdom the Church? Yes and no. It is so in the sense that the Church is the communion of saints, conceived before the beginning of time a communion of those whom God has summoned to live with Him in the past, the present and the future. But it is not the Heavenly King- dom in so far as its temporal existence is concerned, for during this it is a compound of good and evil men just as the secular state is a com- pound of such men. Nevertheless, being the continuation of Old Testament theocracy, the Church here below is the true soil on which a Civitas Dei can be erected. It is solid and more receptive than is the purely temporal state, which tends always toward egotism. The goal of this Civitas is to be Christian, free of the personal ambitions of princes, and able to administer justice in the spirit of service to God. The Emperor is the best servant of the state when he is the best servant of the Church.
The political theology of Augustine is so rich in corollaries that it never loses actuality. In spite of its inner contradictions, which re- sult above all from its definition of the Church and its relation to the Civitas Dei, this theology is, on the whole, of undiminishing and un- dying importance. It is unified by the conception of God's reign which everywhere informs it. Augustine sees in the theocracy of the
SAINT AUGUSTINE 59
Old Testament the precursing shadow, the basis and threshold, of the ecclesiastical theocracy of the new world era which is builded by Christ and in turn is built on Him. Synagogue and Christian Church are associated inseparably, since God willed it so* The new form which the life of mankind must take on is the Church which, building mys- tically on Christ the God-man, is the communion of all who, living in Him and striving toward Him, are elected to and desire salvation* It is an organism through which there courses a supernatural soul; but it is also a union in which no member loses his independent per- sonal significance, because Jesus Christ is the source of the law which governs the life both of the individual soul and of the community. But in order to preach, preserve and carry out this law by which men are to be guided and the world transformed, the Church needs the concrete, visible, active authority whose function it is to restore all things in Christ. This high historical purpose is binding upon the bearer of every authority, even political authority. Jesus said that His Kingdom is not of this world; but He did not say that it is not within the world, or that it would not enter this world even as yeast pervades dough. It was to men who live in the world that He said:
- Ye are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.*' "For of
what was His Kingdom if not of those who believe in Him?" asked Augustine. "For here His Kingdom shall abide until the end of time, and shall mingle weeds with its wheat until the day of harvest. But the harvest is the end of the world, when the reapers come who are the angels, and weed from His Kingdom all that giveth offense. Yet these things could not happen were his Kingdom not here be- low." The immanent demand of the trancendental (tsternttm in- ternttm) is always that which really keeps both soul and human his- tory ceaselessly active. But if man becomes another being in Chris- tianity, is filled with new wine and sent off toward new horizons, the ancient forms of civic life that antedate Christ cannot but be under- mined. Although he seems in many ways still deeply rooted in an- tique habits of thinking, Augustine struggled to create a new political theology based on the Christian union of soul and world, in which theology all earthly institutions, including the state, would be set forth as agents of the Divine, The Highest Good and Christian salva- tion do not obligate the ecclesiastical state alone, but they must (for
60 CONSULS OF GOD
this is sublime commission given to humanity and history) be the ultimate concern and raison d'etre of every community and every gov- ernment. Justice too, though a brutal Roman state may have thought otherwise, consists in fostering purposes and attitudes which conform with the life and work of the Church. As a result of the ideal mar- riage of world-state and believing-state, all authority in the Christian- ized world is stamped with the character of a kingly priesthood or a priestly royalty. But what happens to this transcendental unity of the theocratic ideal amid the turbulence of earthly history? Is it like the bow and the lyre of Heraclitus a union born of disparate tendencies, a coalescence which struggles to be sundered?
Out of Augustine's vision of a civic entity having a religious soul, the Mater Ecclesia gazed dreamingly into the future, her features still mobile in youth. He confronted her with almost too many ideas. He gave her so many goals to reach and showed her so many ways in which to reach them, that as a consequence she could hardly avoid coming into conflict with herself. Always a warrior fighting on two fronts at the same time, Augustine created an arsenal of spiritual weapons from which all camps in the Church could draw. He wrote a program of genuine tolerance, and nevertheless became the Father of the Inquisition. He taught that the highest obedience was that with which the soul followed counsels of conscience; and yet as a Roman lover of order he strengthened the arm of authority. Fight- ing against the Manicheans and their fatalistic lalssez faire, he drew the idea of human freedom as taut as an overstrained bow. Against the English Pelagius and his "self made man," he emphasized Chris- tianity all too vehemently as a conception of God as the Sole Cause, who inclines hearts toward good and evil according to His divine plan. Thus this prodigally wealthy mind bequeathed to Christianity such vast horizons, so many ways and manners of being a Christian inside the Catholic Church, that the very gain of inner freedom of move- ment could also become a danger to unity. Augustine recognized the primacy of the Apostolic See as this itself understood and practised that primacy. His declaration that the debate with Pelagius was ended when Rome had spoken found the immortal phrase Roma locuta, CAUSA finite. But, to a greater extent than he could have imagined, a firm Rode was needed amidst the flood of the life he himself had created.
LEO I 61
When the Bishop of Hippo closed his eyes in 430, the Vandals were storming the city. Yet he still clung firmly to the belief that Rome was the meaning and the substructure of world society. Al- ready the magic light of glamour and power lay on the See of Peter. Gifts from rich families enabled the spiritual masters of Rome to for- get the simplicity of the Fisherman of Capharnaum. The seriously devout were scandalized at their pomp and feasting. It was not al- ways noble passion that divided the electorate into parties. It was only after bloody street fighting that the Spaniard, Pope Damasus (366-384) , could make use of an imperial edict to maintain himself in power against his rival. His private secretary, St. Jerome, waxed satirical when he described the spiritual Beau Brummels of the hier- archy. Perfume and curling irons, fashionable clothes and gilded horses! Were these clerics or amorous swains? Nevertheless be- hind this too, too human facade there was much courage and vigour. Damasus reopened and readorned the ruined catacombs and entrusted to his friend, the self-same Jerome, who slept with Cicero and Aristoph- anes under his pillow, the translation of the Bible into Latin. His immediate successors strove energetically to strengthen the position of their See quite as if they were aware of coming storms and sought to make it a safe haven for Western society. The city council, which still bore the proud name of Senate and was the sole surviving organ of Imperial Rome and its provincial cities, became a mere shadow com- pared to the true Friend and Shepherd of the people.
In as far as we are able to determine historically, Leo I (440-461) was the first truly great Pope. Possessing the qualities that make a Caesar, he lent his throne a dignity that in turn reflected upon him. To him Peter, with Paul, the founder of a more fortunate Rome, is the eter- nal bishop of the Church, mystically present in his See, which is the symbol of the rights and duties conferred by the Master upon the "Rock." The Roman Empire and all its numerous wars were in- struments of Providence working to prepare the way for the Empire of the Pax Christiana. The great city had, he declared, been conse- crated anew by the throng of thousands who had worn the purple of martyrdom. In them the firmness of Peter had been manifested a firmness of Faith that would abide as an example. Just as what Peter believed concerning Christ shall always endure, so shall there
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abide forever what Christ established in Peter. In his See there lives on also His power and authority. "Our apostolic office," Leo said, "is never in lack of Christ's eternal succour. He is the strength of the foundation above which the whole Church arises. All its offices are united with the one chair of Peter, even as the limbs of the body are united with the head."
This Pope was the first who proceeded to deduce clearly, impres- sively and fully from the doctrine of the Roman primacy the conclu- sion that, as the successor of Peter, the Pope is the highest shepherd and teacher of the Ecclesia universal**. He did not correlate new ideas or new rights with his position; he transformed the immanent law of the past (vetustatis norma, he terms it) into a broad and lofty con- ception of the Papacy which the Middle Ages were to take over but would not amend in any essential way. Leo was a born ruler who realized to the full the loftiness of his office, but he also took this to mean service to humanity. He loved the words auctoritas and po- testas, but no less dear to him were bttmanitas and consulere as char- acteristic of the leader Providence itself had set over Christianity. Re- mote as only a Roman can be from all the hidden confidences of mysticism, he warned against efforts to understand God in human terms or to think of him otherwise than as the Eternal One who is always everywhere in Himself a perfect wholeness. There is a vir- ginal shyness in the manner in which he counsels letting the mysteries of faith rest within themselves as being the inviolable seal put upon human dignity and moral order. He was no defender of supersti- tion. He upbraided church-goers who bowed before the spring sun according to Manichean custom as they came up the steps of St. Pe- ter's Church and entered the portico of the basilica. What are the stars more, he asks, than a reflection of the divine beauty? Similarly he censured the outlook of nominal Christians by saying that it was not enough to change deities and worship the Trinity in palaces and churches, if at the same time one took no heed of moral habits by which the real Christian first proves himself steadfast. But whenever the teaching of the Church was under question, Leo pointed out the orthodox view with clear vision and persistent strength. He forbade his Romans to associate with Egyptian merchants, who on the wharves along the Tiber peddled heresies of the Orient with their wares. He
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cook the lead in warding off aberrations from the faith in Italy, Spain, Gaul and Aquileia. In a memorable doctrinal epistle he drew up the basis on which the Council of Chalcedon the greatest assembly the Church had known until then in 451 concurred in the decision that Christ is truly Man just as He is truly God, and that therefore He must be worshipped as one Lord in two natures. The Occident did not prevail at this Council without the powerful influence of the Em- press Pulcharia and her aged husband Marcian.
Just at this time the East, shaken by spiritual turmoil, was awaiting Attila's attack. But Leo understood how to use the goodwill of the civil authority, which regarded the Church as also its concern, without being false to the religious mission of Christianity. Indeed, almost against the will of the crumbling Christendom of the Orient, he once more accorded it a place of refuge inside the realms of the Imperial Church. The basic characteristic of his political point of view was a strong determination to salvage from the collapse of the Imperial unity the religious unity of all peoples under the dominion of the Roman See. He battled against the Manicheans, who poisoned Christian life in Rome and Italy, resorting even to the arm of the state in order to stamp out their dens of vice in the cities. He warded off the wolves who in the East and West of the Empire had broken into the sheepfold of Christ, nor did he concern himself greatly in what dark places of the soul, the intellect or folk tradition, the hereti- cal teaching had been born. At the very outset of his reign he ob- tained an imperial edict recognizing the primacy of the Holy See as based upon the priority of Peter, the dignity of Rome and the decisions of the Sacred Synods. Thus legal status was given to Papal decrees. His conception of the Roman leadership and resolute Papal guidance of the Church did not grow out of a personal passion to rule but rather out of the profound realization which he as a representative had of the weight and worthiness of the power he represented. His writ- ings, his words of advice to delegated authorities, combine the Stoic trait of equal respect for all men and peoples with the idea of a mo narchically ruled Empire of Christ and an awareness of the unplumb- able depths and inviolable unity of the Revelation given to mankind* His mood was that of one who would shepherd the peoples in the name of Christ and administer the legacy of Peter in the spirit of
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service to all. Thus he began the transformation of the Augustinian Civitas from a nebulous Utopia into a reality.
As a statesman of this Civitas Dei he also rode out to meet Attila, the Hun, hoping thus to save Rome from ravage by these hordes. We do not know if it was the bearing and address of the Pope alone, or whether it was also the military situation which induced the barbarian leader to stop short of marching on Rome and visiting upon it still more dreadful woes than Genseric, the Vandal, would a few years later. The people of Rome loudly praised the deed of Leo and then soon forgot it. When the anniversary of the rescue came the Pope preached to only a few faithful. The mob was satisfied with its Pope so long as the mills on the Janiculum saw to it that no one went to the circus hungry. Leo is remembered, however, primarily as the saviour of Rome. The legend which says that the Prince of the Apos- tles appeared girded with a sword when Leo and Attila met, has been immortalized by Raphael in the frescoes of the Vatican. They reflect the conception which at heart the Pontifex had of his activities. He knew that he was the agent of the eternal Peter. He called his See a place of trembling responsibility; and if he also had a dark awareness of the future he sundered the honour and sacredness of the office from the worthiness or unworthiness of its custodians.
After Leo's death a century of bitter conflict passed over Rome, The Germans secured control of Italy. Ottocar, the Herculean Scyth- ian, exiled Romulus, the pretty, weeping boy who could term him- self the last Emperor of the West, to the ancient Lucullian estate on the slopes of the Mysenium (476). He then made himself king, and remained in office until 495 when Theodoric struck him down at a feast of reconciliation in Ravenna. The King of the Goths made the first great attempt to weld Germanic and Roman natures into a unity, the foundation of which was to be the superior Roman culture. The thirty years of his reign and the sixty years of his East-Gothic kingdom brought the Papacy face to face with a situation not unlike that of a sailor caught between Scylla and Charybdis. When the Patriarch Acasius of Constantinople favoured the teachings of the Monophy- sites, the first great schism between the Church of Rome and the East was at hand. After a peaceful understanding with the Arian Theo- doric, Pope Gelasius proved himself a master of the Emperor of By-
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zantium. The world, he said, had two appointed rulers the sacred authority o the bishops, and the kingly power; but the significance of the bishops must be greater because they would also be summoned to give an account before the Divine Judge of what the kings had done. The Christian Emperors had need of the bishops for their eternal sal- vation, and the bishops for their part needed the laws of the sovereign in so far as this world is concerned. The self-same Pope also gave expression to the ties which welded the born Roman and the rightful monarch of a newer Rome together, and thus manifested a universal- istic consciousness of the ancient co-ordination of the two halves of the Empire.
Anastasius II, the successor of Pope Gelasius, sought to reunite the Churches, but went so far in conciliating the East that Rome itself was split into parties. Then Anastasius died, two Popes were elected, and both East and West asked Theodoric to act as arbitrator. He was already involved in personal political conflicts with Byzantium, and decided in favour of the candidate of the Rome-minded group and against the choice of the minority friendly to the East. But no sooner was the schism which separated East and West ended, than the political opposition between Rome and the Arian Goths waxed stronger. This was understandable enough. In 518, Justin, an or- thodox Catholic, ascended the throne in the East and began to perse- cute the fellow countrymen and co-religionists of Theodoric; the Popes meanwhile were subjects of an heretical king; and in Italy almost every city had both a Catholic and an Arian Church and generally two rival bishops as well. When Byzantium had weakened the Monophysites and so made it easier for Italy to rejoin the Empire, Theodoric, who had now been forsaken by his Vandal allies, turned the tables and wrote on them the sombre message of his last years to the world. A Pope, John I, also felt his heavy hand. Theodoric called him to Ra- venna, forced him to ease the lot of the Arians in Constantinople and threw him into prison when he returned because the results attained were not satisfactory. There death released him a few days after- ward.
During the same year (526) Theodoric also died, leaving his plans unfulfilled. He had succeeded neither in effecting harmony between the Romans and the East Goths, nor in establishing a Germanic fed-
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eration of states. Thirty years later the Empire builded by his coura- geous Goths fell under the strokes of the Romaic generals. Once more, the Papacy leaned on the unsteady pillars of the Byzantine throne, but this was the last time. Justinian, the great figure of this- era, who had risen from amidst Macedonian farmers to become Em- peror, controlled the destinies of the Empire and also of the Church. His wife Theodora, who had previously been a dancer in the Manege,, was his true helpmate. He would have disturbed the peace of even greater Popes than those who flourished during his long reign. In order to renew the Roman Empire on a Christian basis, he wanted to hold all offices in his hand and did so. He was a lawyer and his codification of Roman law, the Codex Justiniani, has become the text- book of mankind. He was a builder and enriched Byzantium and Ravenna, the city of the exarch, with marvels of art. Viewed from a distance he looked like a Caesar comparable to the greatest of the past. He was interested in and studied everything. Unfortunately thb meant that like his wife he claimed to be a theologian, too.
In this Ccesar Papa there was incarnate the most destructive idea a ruler can entertain the idea of theocratic despotism. Regis voluntas suprema lex. In order that the whole implied tragedy of this maxim should be unfolded it was necessary only that there should be on the throne of Peter an opponent of equal determination. But none was there. The result was only a small handful of glorious and inglorious episodes in Papal history. The saddest is associated with the name of Pope Vigilius. Theodora, who was heretically minded, expected that this favourite, whom she had managed to place on the Papal throne as a successor of his exiled predecessor, would follow a political trend ac- cording to her own heart. At the beginning he resisted, but during the later dogmatic troubles he swayed weakly between "yes" and "no" and "no" and "yes" when the teaching of the Church was deeply in- volved. The Church of the West held its ground against its spirit- ual head. The bishops of Northern Africa severed their relations with him, and ecclesiastical provinces of Milan and Acjuileia per- sisted for a long while in their separation from Rome. The guilty Pope was the victim of grave maltreatment while at the altar, but the Catholic West did not immediately live down the moral upheaval that had shaken his throne. Since the baptism of Clovis in 496,
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temporal and spiritual lords of the steadily growing kingdom of the Franks had noted very clearly the justice and injustice, the strength and weakness, of the vassals of the East enthroned in the city of Peter. Circumstances there now pointed more and more toward a separation from Byzantium. The government of Justinian, hollowed out by wars, the cost of luxurious splendour and confiscatory taxes, was unable to help Rome and its Popes during the time of tribulation at the hands of the barbarians, plagues, and inner conflicts. The situation became utterly hopeless when the Lombards, the last migrant Germanic tribe, invaded Italy, They did not conquer the whole of the country but they broke it asunder politically and were the causes of its long- enduring impotence. The Greek Empire retained Rome and the ad- joining territory, Ravenna and the Pentapolis. To the south it re- tained the region of Naples, Calabria, and Sicily. If the Church was to be the fundamental society, it must now imperatively find leaders able to preserve its social and spiritual authority. And the men it needed appeared.
"I, unworthy and feeble man, took over an old ship which the waves had battered severely. The waters poured in from all sides, and the rotten planks whipped daily by storms foreshadowed imminent ship- wreck." So wrote Gregory the Great (590604) shortly after he had been elected Pope. Comparable for strength of will and active energy to Leo I, he nevertheless bore a good-natured smile on his paternal features. He was a monk by disposition; but despite the fact that he was tired of this world, he sowed the seeds of the future on a vast field. The last "Roman" looked from the height of a ruined building at the fierce melee of peoples roundabout and placed his hope when he dared hope in gathering and unifying all peoples, even the bar- barians of the north, inside the educational institutions founded by Christ. Throughout all the subsequent history of the Church, this man and his achievement have remained the great exemplars of what a successor of Peter can be and can accomplish.
Gregory was the son of a rich Roman patrician family, and during his early manhood had become a prefect of the city. He was a born lawyer, an administrator and a lover of brilliant display, who managed the police, the judges, the tax officials and others subordinate to his office in a manner pleasing to the Romans. When his father died
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he inherited a vast fortune, but meanwhile he had reflected upon the meaning of life, the condition of the world contemporary with himself, and the future of Rome. Thereupon the rich ruler of a city became a poor monk. He built six monasteries on his estates near Palermo and erected a seventh (San Andrea) in his paternal mansion on the Monte Cadius, the most patrician quarter of Rome. He gave away literally everything, even his last possession the silver dish in which his mother sent him vegetables every day. He was not the first Roman who had gladly sought his happiness in the new vita socialis. But this man, who fled from life and looked down upon a devastated Rome and its ruined amphitheatre from a seclusion devoted to higher things, as a monk and builder according to the Rule of Benedict, became a pioneer of Western monasticism.
In the monastic life Gregory sought to conform with the spirit of its founder. The object was to obtain a common sanctification of existence in a cloistered life of prayer and work. The daily tasks in a house set apart were to be performed according to the prescribed rhythm and to be based upon contemplation of eternal things assur- ing depth and consecration to such tasks. The values of eternal life wrung from contemplation were to bear fruit in practical work. Ben- edict had not by any means desired to found an order for pious scholars, but what he established was, like all foundations of its kind, to give witness unto the law that those who seek the Kingdom of God shall have all else given them. This law, the tragic nucleus of which is also evident, has revealed itself again and again throughout Christian history. While bustling, active careers often leave not a trace behind, even as water seeps through sand, it is possible that the most secluded existence can win for itself a very great sphere of in- fluence. Quiet, directed toward the inner life, surrender of the world and concentration on seemingly most unreal things, can prove itself the source of the most fruitful public influence, and the lever of a powerful incision into the processes of world history. Then, of course, it may turn upon its first authors like a strange hostile force. The Order of St. Benedict was still far from witnessing any such turn of events, but the scholarly culture of pagan origin which Cassiador, Theodoric's statesman who had become a monk, took on board the ship of the Church soon after Benedict's death in 543, implied a change
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in the spirit of the Rule. The incalculable service thus rendered to all time is not ascribable either to monasticism's holy founder nor to his imitator, Pope Gregory. Nothing was further removed from cither's mind than the thought of rescuing the treasures of antique culture. For the Pope, the care of souls was the art of arts, and this he taught and practised as a friend of wisdom dwelling in simplicity. His Regula Pastorates was the wise, nobly proportioned basic text of pastoral action he bequeathed to the Catholic Church. The whole Middle Ages were to drink deep from all his writings, so notable for their lucidity, their warm spiritual content and their gracious and force- ful form. Yet there was also a tendency toward the primitive in the nature of this preacher standing above the ruins, and this tendency had a profound and lasting effect upon the devotions of the Church. Gregory did all he could to make men love the Invisible, but he like- wise did all he could to make the Invisible visible. In this respect he satisfied a natural human desire to give outward expression to the inner life, but he also increased the danger that the external might affect the interior life and so helped to lay the foundation for a later reversal to the opposite danger. Still more serious is the fault that lies in his legalistic, often mathematical view of what Heaven will do for men who do something for it. Nevertheless it became evident as time went on that Gregory had done the "state of the Lord" a service when he gave it a form more discernible by the senses and more op- timistic from the religious point of view than the tragic Civitas Dei of the more intellectual Augustine. The Church also owes him undy- ing gratitude for what he accomplished as the fashioner of her liturgy and the restorer of liturgical music.
As a shaper of ecclesiastical policy, Gregory cut deep and broad across the life of history. Previous Popes had summoned this experi- enced official from the retirement of the cloister to curialistic and dip- lomatic service. He spent six years in Constantinople as Papal am- bassador and here gathered information, insight into human nature and breadth of vision for the tasks he was to perform in Rome later on. Upon his return he directed the affairs of the Roman See as Sec- retary to Pope Pelagius II. Then in 590 he himself became Pope at the age of fifty. Now he experienced the truth of his own saying:; "Men listen gladly to one they love." In view of the economic col-
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lapse of the Western Empire, which had long since seen its last cargo of Egyptian grain, it was his first care to give the people bread. Only after that could he say to them that man does not live by bread alone! As steward of the city and all the ecclesiastical estates within and out- side of Italy estates which had been accumulated as a result of gifts and bequests he inaugurated a great reform by building a system of ecclesiastical self-management upon the idea of rational use and highest returns. To him the purpose of ecclesiastical economy was to supply the needs of the poverty-stricken, the proletariat, the horde of those who fled from regions desolated by the Lombards, and the prisoners whose freedom he could purchase. The spirit which actu- ated his method of organizing work was in consonance with the pur- pose of his charitable enterprises. The chief officials were Roman clerics, directly responsible to the Pope; and a system of leases and payments curbed the danger that some would seek to enrich them- selves. In all this Gregory opposed Mammonism of every kind, and directed his attention in particular to simonistic bishops who demanded payment for administering the Sacrament of Holy Orders. He re- gretted deeply that the needs of the time compelled him to be so much engrossed in worldly business (he even had to take a hand in selling cows and oxen) and he therefore strove to emphasize doubly the spirit of Christian kindliness and the eternal meaning of all earthbound industry. To his clergy he preached the motto of service rather than lordship, holding up before them the picture of a Christ who had driven the money-lenders out of the temple.
Gregory mastered the troubled situation in Church and State in a spirit of lofty nobility blended with the prudence and wisdom of a political calculator. He did what was possible at every given mo- ment, but over and beyond that proved himself able to frame a long range policy. Against the East he defended the infallible teaching authority of the Roman Church as emphatically as he could in view of the tragic vagueness of which Pope Vigilius had been guilty. This he excused by referring to the false impression under which Peter had laboured in the beginning concerning the mission to the heathen. He opposed to the arrogant attitude of the "ecumenical patriarch" of Byzantium a description of himself as servtts servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God. He also succeeded in defending his Lombard
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policy against the rude, soldierly Emperor Mauritius and against Pho- <a$, Mauritius' assassin, whom he conciliated with an official message -of recognition. The Pope had called Italy "my country" in a letter written to Mauritius, and the future was to prove him right. It was not merely his industrial skill, but also his activity in behalf of the Roman See and above all his efforts to conciliate the ever-threatening Lombards which saved Rome and the provinces and, outside their boundaries, the idea of Rome, In the famous "funeral oration 51 which he delivered during the siege of 593 he could repeat the Vision of Ezekiel: the meat in the vessel is eaten, even the bone has been boiled, and now the empty vessel (the city) is burning and melting away over the fire. For 300 years the Church had paid day after day some tribute to the barbarians in order to stave off the worst and now, too, a peace with Agilulf was purchased with the treasure of Peter. The Papal patriot described in his sermon the sad remnant of ancient Rome now visited by famine and the pest, war and floods. It was a de- scription of a bald, featherless eagle, but to this eagle he was mean- while giving the strength of the Phoenix.
Gregory had never lost sight of the trailing thread which bound Rome to the East, but perhaps it was a feeling that better times were approaching which led him to formulate a West-European policy of his own. Now the successor to the Fisher of Men threw his net into the sea of the Germanic peoples in order to assemble them as peaceful conquerors in the unity of a spiritual order under the primacy of the Roman See. The viceroy of Christ raised the staff of the shepherd of the peoples which was to become both sceptre and lance in the hands of later Popes. Blessing, pacifying, building up, he based the paternal authority of the Papacy upon the rising kingdoms and na- tions which would eventually call themselves France, Spain and Eng- land. He petitioned Theodelinda, the Catholic princess of the Lom- bards, to induce her Arian husband to enter "the community of the res publicana Christiana" Against the will of the imperial govern- ment, he tried to persuade those who threatened Rome to accept spirit- ual membership in a Catholic confederation of peoples. "If," he said, "my object had been to destroy the Lombards, this people would to- day have neither king nor duke, nor count, and would have become a prey of hopeless disunity. But because I feared God, I did not wish
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to make myself guilty of destroying anything or anybody/' In him the idea of the Pax Romana had the greatest of its unarmed protago- nists. He firmly reminded the provincial churches of the primacy of his See, but to each he allowed a liberal measure of self-government be- cause he had a high regard for the episcopal office and for the individ- uality of each people. He could say, "We are defending our rights," but also, "We respect the rights of the several churches." Recogniz- ing fully the future significance of the Prankish kingdom for the Cath- olic totality, he was persistently careful to do all he could to improve and unite the corrupt churches involved in the political conflicts then decimating the Merovingian territories. Having a great objective constantly before his eyes, he overlooked the moral deficiencies of the notorious Franconian Queen Brunhilde when he needed her power and influence in his struggle against simony and surviving heathenism. In order not to break off the first slender thread of a Franco-Roman relationship, he also resisted the project of Columba, a fiery missionary who wanted to force the Irish date of the feast of Easter upon the Gauls and Romans. This Celt addressed to the Papal See, "The no- blest flower of the whole declining Europe," one of the curtest letters which Rome ever received from one of its own messengers. But Greg- ory ignored it. He also paid no attention to a threat that the Celtic Church would go its own way in schism; and by this silence he re- tained the help of an opponent whose violence was also useful.
The Pope had very little success with the Franks, but they spurred him on rather than hindered him in his attempt to win the Anglo- Saxons for the European cultural community and for intimate union with Rome. For the first time Rome sent its own missionaries Prior Augustine of the Monastery of St. Andrew and a small company of monks to these barbarians. Rumours of Anglo-Saxon savagery induced these messengers of the faith to turn round when they had reached the Rhone, but Gregory did not budge from his resolve and sent them out again, making provision this time for French support. Their success after landing in Kent rapidly paved the way for progress among princes and peoples. For they did not come as emissaries of a foreign political power and had been authorized by the Pope to exercise great freedom in their missionary methods. One readily feels that there hovers over his answers to their anxious questions the supe-
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nor smile with which a grown man listens to the prattle of children, who in their effort to make out the letters o the alphabet do not yet gather the meaning of what they are reading. "Why should one not be allowed to baptize a pregnant woman? In the eyes of the Al- mighty, fruitfulness is certainly not a fault. What is given to human nature as a gift of God cannot possibly be an obstacle to the grace of baptism." The customs of the people, he says, ought to be tolerated and then gradually and wisely filled with Christian meaning. His first advice was to destroy the heathen temples; but then "after long reflection upon the matter of the Angles" he reached another conclu- sion. No, they ought to remain. Only the images of the gods should be destroyed. Altars should then be erected, the walls sprin- kled with holy water, and relics placed within the altar stones. The fact that a given place had long been associated with the cult should prove advantageous also to the worship of the new true God. If here- tofore the Angles have sacrificed oxen to the demons, they may hence- forth butcher them and eat them in praise of God. For it is impossi- ble to take away everything at once from hearts hardened by custom. If one wishes to climb a high mountain, one cannot run up it but must proceed slowly, step by step. Very gradually and persistently the monks of St. Benedict carried the faith and morals of Rome from the cities of Canterbury and York to the far corners of the British Isles. Soon the vigour of the Anglo-Saxon Church was felt on the continent. Csesar had landed with six legions to carry out the first Roman con- quest of Britain; Gregory had effected the second with forty monks. By so much is, as Gibbon himself must admit, the glory of the Pope greater than that of Caesar.
It is said that as an old man stricken with gout he lay abed instruct- ing students in Church music. Regardless of what his part in the creation or renewal of "Gregorian" choral may really have been, this anecdote by his biographer characterizes the inner nature of the great- est educator in early Christian Europe. There is something of music in everything to which he gave expression. Friends and defenders of culture who laugh at him and his style in writings which influenced centuries more deeply, perhaps, than any others, misunderstand Greg- ory's own smile at "the wisdom of men." To him the life of the mind was not an end in itself, but only a means to help bring about
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the moral maturity needed to begin a life of a higher kind. He cre- ated culture as and because he sought more than culture. He was a herald of social justice, the saviour and liberator of Italy, and a man of genius in the administration of the patrimony of Peter which only later, under other Pontiffs, became the "temporal power" of the Church. The prophet of a federation of peoples led by Rome in which the Church "unites what is separate, gives order to what is in disorder, harmonizes dissonance, perfects the imperfect, not for its own sake but for the sake of human society," he was the model of all Popes of goodwill who followed him and the first great pattern of a shepherd of peoples. So illustriously did he represent the greatness of the Papacy through service that despite all that time has changed in countless hearts he can still enkindle a desire for divine authority on the earth. Yes, Gregory was really and truly what is written on his tomb a "Consul of God."
THE