The Historians' History of the World 08

Nicholas the Great had not lived to triumph even in the first fall of Photius. In the West his success was more complete; he had the full enjoyment of conscious power exercised in a righteous cause. Not merely did he behold one of Charlemagne’s successors prostrate at his feet, obliged to abandon to papal censure and to degradation even his high ecclesiastical partisans, but in succession the greatest prelates of the West, the archbishop of Ravenna, the archbishops of Cologne and Trèves, and even Hincmar, the archbishop of Rheims, who seemed to rule despotically over the church and kingdom of France, were forced to bow before his vigorous supremacy.

The matrimonial cause which for many years distracted part of France, on which council after council met, and on which the great prelates of Lorraine came into direct collision with the pope, and were reduced to complete and unpitied humiliation under his authority, was that of King Lothair and his queen Theutberga, as elsewhere described. He threatened the king with immediate excommunication if he did not dismiss the concubine Waldrada, and receive his repudiated queen. He then betook himself to Attigny, the residence of Charles the Bald. He peremptorily commanded the restoration of the bishop Rothrad, who had been canonically, as it was asserted, deposed by Hincmar his metropolitan, and was now irregularly, without inquiry or examination, replaced by the arbitrary mandate of the pope. Hincmar murmured and obeyed; the trembling king acquiesced in the papal decree.

But Nicholas did not live to enjoy his perfect triumph; he died in November, 867 A.D.—a pontiff who, if he advanced no absolutely unexampled pretensions to supremacy in behalf of the Roman see, yet, by the favourable juncture and auspicious circumstances which he seized to assert and maintain that authority, did more than all his predecessors to strengthen and confirm it. During all his conflicts in the West with the royal and with the episcopal power, the moral and religious sympathies of mankind could not but be on his side. If his language was occasionally more violent, even contemptuous, than became the moderation which, up to this time, had mitigated the papal decrees, he might plead lofty and righteous indignation; if he interfered with domestic relations, it was in defence of the innocent and defenceless, and in vindication of the sanctity of marriage; if he treated kings with scorn, it was because they had become contemptible for their weakness or their vices; if he interfered with episcopal or metropolitan jurisdiction, the inferior clergy, even bishops, would be pleased to have a remote, and possibly disinterested tribunal, to which they might appeal from prelates, chosen only from aristocratic connections, barbarians in occupation and in ferocity; if he was inexorable to transgressors, it was to those of the highest order, prelates who had lent themselves to injustice and iniquity, and had defied his power; if he annulled councils, those councils had already been condemned for their injustice, had deserved the reproachful appellation with which they were branded by the pope, with all who had any innate or unperverted sentiment of justice and purity. Hence the presumptuous usurpation even of divine power, so long as it was thus beneficently used, awed, confounded all, and offended few. Men took no alarm at the arrogance which befriended them against the oppressor and the tyrant.

But this vast moral advancement of the popedom was not all which the Roman see owes to Nicholas I; she owes the questionable boon of the recognition of the False Decretals as the law of the church.

THE FALSE DECRETALS

[858-869 A.D.]

Nicholas I not only saw during his pontificate the famous False Decretals take their place in the jurisprudence of Latin Christendom; if he did not promulgate, he assumed them as authentic documents; he gave them the weight of the papal sanction; and with their aid prostrated at his feet the one great transalpine prelate who could still maintain the independence of the Teutonic church, Hincmar archbishop of Rheims.