The Historians' History of the World 08

It is at once the cause and the consequence of the sacerdotal dominion over mankind; the groundwork of authority at which the world trembled; which founded and overthrew kingdoms, bound together or set in antagonistic array nations, classes, ranks, orders of society. Of this, the parent, when the time arrived, of poetry, of art, the Christian historian must watch the growth and mark the gradations by which it gathered into itself the whole activity of the human mind, and quickened that activity till at length the mind outgrew that which had been so long almost its sole occupation. It endured till faith, with the schoolmen, led into the fathomless depths of metaphysics, began to aspire after higher truths; with the reformers, attempting to refine religion to its primary spiritual simplicity, gradually dropped, or left but to the humblest and most ignorant, at least to the more imaginative and less practical part of mankind, this even yet prolific legendary Christianity, which had been the accessory and supplementary Bible, the authoritative and accepted, though often unwritten, Gospel of centuries.b

GREGORY’S SUCCESSORS

[604-649 A.D.]

Gregory left the papal chair far more securely settled on the lofty eminence where it had been placed than it was when he ascended it. But Sabinian, who succeeded him, expressed little gratitude for the service he had thus performed; indignant at finding the treasury exhausted of its gold, he accused him of having ruined the see by his liberality; and would have proceeded, but for the menaces of both the clergy and the people, publicly to burn his writings. He did not live long after this attempt; and his sudden death was ascribed to a blow on the head inflicted by the angry shade of the departed saint. A truer cause, however, may be found, perhaps, in the fact that he had made himself hated by the populace, by withdrawing the accustomed alms, that he might heal, as he pretended, the injuries inflicted by the liberality of Gregory; a mode of proceeding so little relished by his flock, that, whatever share they might have in his death, they conveyed his breathless body with contempt out of the city.

It was during the pontificate of Boniface III, who resided as Gregory’s legate at the court of Constantinople, and owed his elevation to the emperor, that the Roman pontiff was first dignified with the much-disputed title of universal bishop. For this honour Boniface was indebted to the enmity existing between Phocas and the patriarch of his imperial city. He lived to enjoy his triumph only a few months; and several of his successors seem to have contented themselves with the duties of their station, without entering into direct collision with any rival in authority. It is, however, a singular circumstance, that to the attempts of Boniface IV, who obtained the papal dignity immediately after the pontiff just named, to bring back the separatists from Rome to her communion, a resistance was made by the celebrated Irish apostle Columbanus, breathing much of the freedom and intelligence of later days.

Honorius, who succeeded to the papacy after the two unimportant pontificates of Deusdedit (Deodatus or Adeodatus I) and Boniface V, made a vain attempt to influence the Lombards to restore their king, Adalwald (Adalvaldus), whom they had deposed as a madman, and elected in his place an Arian named Ariwald (Ariovaldus). But the most conspicuous circumstance in his career was his agreement with Sergius, the patriarch of Constantinople, in establishing the celebrated edict by which it was intended to put an end to the monothelite controversy,[87] and render the renewal of it a crime against the laws of the empire. Yet Honorius, in the Sixth General Council, was solemnly anathematised, and classed with the known and most violent supporters of the monothelite heresy.

The death of this pontiff was followed by the pillage of the palace of the Lateran—an outrage which had its origin with the emperor, and was committed by his own officers. Severinus was then placed in the papal chair, but his pontificate was not marked by any important event. The same observation applies to those of his successors, John IV and Theodore. Theodore was succeeded by Martin I, the earliest act of whose pontificate was the calling of a council to condemn the principles of the monothelites, and the late acts of the emperors. The assembly held its first session October 5th, 649; in the fifth and last, which was held on the 31st of October, twenty articles were drawn up against the heresy in question, and its authors, Theodorus, Cyrus, Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paul, together with all such as should embrace their opinions, were formally anathematised.