The Historians' History of the World 08

Up to this period the decretals, the letters or edicts of the bishops of Rome, according to the authorised or common collection of Dionysius, commenced with Pope Siricius, towards the close of the fourth century. To the collection of Dionysius was added that of the authentic councils, which bore the name of Isidore of Seville. On a sudden was promulgated, unannounced, without preparation, not absolutely unquestioned, but apparently overawing at once all doubt, a new code, which to the former authentic documents added fifty-nine letters and decrees of the twenty oldest popes from Clement to Melchiades (Miltiades), and the donation of Constantine; and in the third part, among the decrees of the popes and of the councils from Silvester to Gregory II, thirty-nine false decrees, and the acts of several unauthentic councils. In this vast manual of sacerdotal Christianity the popes appear from the first the parents, guardians, legislators of the faith throughout the world. The False Decretals do not merely assert the supremacy of the popes—the dignity and privileges of the bishop of Rome—they comprehend the whole dogmatic system and discipline of the church, the whole hierarchy from the highest to the lowest degree, their sanctity, and immunities, their persecutions, their disputes, their right of appeal to Rome.

But for the too manifest design, the aggrandisement of the see of Rome and the aggrandisement of the whole clergy in subordination to the see of Rome; but for the monstrous ignorance of history, which betrays itself in glaring anachronisms, and in the utter confusion of the order of events and the lives of distinguished men—the former awakening keen and jealous suspicion, the latter making the detection of the spuriousness of the whole easy, clear, irrefragable—the False Decretals might still have maintained their place in ecclesiastical history. They are now given up by all; not a voice is raised in their favour; the utmost that is done by those who cannot suppress all regret at their explosion, is to palliate the guilt of the forger, to call in question or to weaken the influence which they had in their own day, and throughout the later history of Christianity.

The author or authors of this most audacious and elaborate of pious frauds are unknown; the date and place of its compilation are driven into such narrow limits that they may be determined within a few years, and within a very circumscribed region. The False Decretals came not from Rome; the time of their arrival at Rome, after they were known beyond the Alps, appears almost certain. In one year Nicholas I is apparently ignorant of their existence, the next he speaks of them with full knowledge. They contain words manifestly used at the Council of Paris (829 A.D.), consequently are of later date; they were known to the Levite Benedict of Metz, who composed a supplement to the collection of capitularies by Adgesil, between 840-847 A.D. The city of Metz is designated with nearly equal certainty as the place in which, if not actually composed, they were first promulgated as the canon law of Christendom.

The state of affairs in the divided and distracted empire might seem almost to call for, almost to justify, this desperate effort to strengthen the ecclesiastical power. All the lower clergy, including some of the bishops, were groaning, just at this time, under heavy oppression. By the constitution of Charlemagne, which survived under Louis the Pious, and, so long as the empire maintained its unity, asserted the independence of the transalpine hierarchy of all but the temporal sovereign, the clergy were under strict subordination to the bishop, the bishop to the metropolitan, the metropolitan only to the emperor. Conflicting popes, or popes in conflict with Italian enemies, or with their own subjects, had reduced the papacy to vassalage under the empire. Conflicting kings, on the division of the realm of Charlemagne, had not yet, but were soon about to submit the empire to the Roman supremacy. All at present was anarchy. The Germans and the French were drawing asunder into separate rival nations; the sons of Louis were waging an endless, implacable strife. Almost every year, less than every decade of years, beheld a new partition of the empire; kingdoms rose and fell, took new boundaries, acknowledged new sovereigns; no government was strong enough to maintain the law; might was the only law.