The Historians' History of the World 08

Nor must be overlooked, perhaps, the more important result of the acceptance of the pseudo-Isidorian statutes as the universal, immemorial, irrepealable law of Christendom. It established the great principle which Nicholas I had before announced, of the sole legislative power of the pope. Every one of these papal epistles was a canon of the church; every future bull therefore rested on the same irrefragable authority, commanded the same implicit obedience. The papacy became a legislative as well as an administrative authority. Infallibility was the next inevitable step, if infallibility was not already in the power asserted to have been bestowed by the Lord on St. Peter, by St. Peter handed down in unbroken descent, and in a plenitude which could not be restricted or limited, to his successors.

ADRIAN II

Nicholas was succeeded (November, 867) by Adrian II, a rigid and lofty churchman, who, though his policy at first appeared doubtful, resolutely maintained, but not with equal judgment and success, the principles of his predecessor. Adrian (he was now seventy-five years old) had been married before he became a priest. At the intercession of the emperor Louis, he took off the ban of excommunication from Waldrada, and restored her to the communion of the church. By this lenity he might seem to lure King Lothair to the last act of submission. The king of Lorraine arrived in Italy. The pope seemed to yield to the influence of Louis and the empress Ingelberga; at least he accepted the munificent presents of the king.

[869-876 A.D.]

From Monte Cassino, where they first met, Lothair followed the pope to Rome. There, instead of being received as a king, and as one reconciled with the see of Rome, when he entered the church all was silent and vacant; not one of the clergy appeared; he retired to a neighbouring chamber, which was not even swept for his reception. The next day was Sunday, and he hoped to hear the mass chanted before him. The pope refused him this honour. He dined, however, the next day with the pope, and an interchange of presents took place. At length Adrian consented to admit him to the communion.

Pope Adrian seized the occasion of the contest for the kingdom of Lothair to advance still more daring and unprecedented pretensions. But the world was not yet ripe for this broad and naked assertion of secular power by the pope, his claim to interfere in the disposal of kingdoms. Directly he left the strong ground of moral and religious authority, from which his predecessor Nicholas had commanded the world, he encountered insurmountable resistance. With all that remained of just and generous sympathy on their side popes might intermeddle in the domestic relations of kings; they were not permitted as yet to touch the question of royal succession or inheritance. The royal and the episcopal power had quailed before Nicholas; the fulminations of Adrian were treated with contempt or indifference: and Hincmar of Rheims in this quarrel with Adrian regained that independence and ascendency which had been obscured by his temporary submission to Nicholas.

Nicholas I and Adrian II thus, with different success, imperiously dictating to sovereigns, ruling or attempting to rule the higher clergy in foreign countries with a despotic sway, mingling in the political revolutions of Europe, awarding crowns, and adjudging kingly inheritances, might seem the immediate ancestors of Gregory VII, of Innocent III, of Boniface VIII. But the papacy had to undergo a period of gloom and degradation, even of guilt, before it emerged again to its height of power.

The pontificate of John VIII (872) is the turning-point in this gradual, but rapid and almost total change; among its causes were the extinction of the imperial branch of the Carlovingian race and the frequent transference of the empire from one line of sovereigns to another; with the growth of the formidable dukes and counts in Italy, which overshadowed the papal power and reduced the pope himself to the slave or the victim of one of the contending factions. The pope was elected, deposed, imprisoned, murdered. In the wild turbulence of the times not merely the reverence but the sanctity of his character disappeared. He sank to the common level of mortals; and the head of Christendom was as fierce and licentious as the petty princes who surrounded him, out of whose stock he sprang, and whose habits he did not break off when raised to the papal throne.