THE _FALSE DECRETALS_

[1Sidenote: [858-869 A.D.]]

2Nicholas 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.

3Up 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.

4On 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.

5The _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.

6But 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.

7The 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.

8The 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.

9Conflicting 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.

10The hierarchy, if not the whole clergy, had taken the lead in the disruption of the unity of the empire; they had abased the throne of Louis; they were for a short disastrous period now the victims of that abasement. Their wealth was their danger. They had become secular princes, they had become nobles, they had become vast landed proprietors. But during the civil wars it was not the persuasive voice, but the strong arm, which had authority; the mitre must bow before the helmet, the crosier before the sword. Not only the domains, the persons of the clergy had lost their sanctity. The persecution and oppression of the church and the clergy had reached a height unknown in former times.

11[Illustration: AN EXTRACT FROM ST. AUGUSTINE’S PSALTER]

12It might occur to the most religious that for the sake of religion; it might occur to those to whom the dignity and interest of the sacerdotal order were their religion, that some effort must be made to reinvest the clergy in their imperilled sanctity. There must be some appeal against this secular, this ecclesiastical tyranny; and whither should appeal be? It could not be to the Scriptures, to the Gospel. It must be to ancient and venerable tradition, to the unrepealed, irrepealable law of the church; to remote and awful Rome. Rome must be proclaimed in an unusual, more emphatic manner, the eternal, immemorial court of appeal.

13The tradition must not rest on the comparatively recent names of Leo the Great, of Innocent the Great, of Siricius, or the right of appeal depend on the decree of the Council of Sardica. It must come down from the successors of St. Peter himself in unbroken succession. The whole clergy must have a perpetual, indefeasible sanctity of the same antiquity. So may the idea of this, to us it seems, monstrous fiction have dawned upon its author; himself may have implicitly believed that he asserted no prerogative for Rome which Rome herself had not claimed, which he did not think to be her right.

14It is even now asserted, perhaps can hardly be disproved, that the _False Decretals_ advanced no pretensions in favour of the see of Rome which had not been heard before in some vague and indefinite, but not therefore less significant, language. The boldness of the act was in the new authority in which it arrayed these pretensions. The new code was enshrined, as it were, in a framework of deeply religious thought and language; it was introduced under the venerated name of Isidore of Seville; it was thus attached to the authentic work of Isidore, which had long enjoyed undisputed authority.

15Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, as the most powerful, so, perhaps, the most learned transalpine ecclesiastic, who might at once have exposed the fiction, which he could hardly but know to be a fiction, co-operated more than anyone else to establish its authority. So long as he supposed it to advance or confirm his own power, he suppressed all intrusive doubts; he discovered too late that it was a trap (a mousetrap is his own undignified word) to catch unwary metropolitans. Hincmar was caught, beyond all hope of escape.

16In the appeal of Rothrad, bishop of Soissons, against Hincmar, metropolitan of Rheims, Pope Nicholas I at first alleges no word of the new decretals in favour of his right of appeal; he seemingly knows no older authority than that of Innocent, Leo, Siricius, and the Council of Sardica. The next year not merely is he fully master of the pseudo-Isidorian documents, but he taunts Hincmar with now calling in question, when it makes against him, authority which he was ready to acknowledge in confirmation of his own power. Hincmar is forced to the humiliation of submission. Rothrad, deposed by Hincmar, deposed by the Council of Senlis, is reinstated in his see.

17This immediate, if somewhat cautious, adoption of the fiction, unquestionably not the forgery, by Pope Nicholas, appears less capable of charitable palliation than the original invention. Nor did the successors of Nicholas betray any greater scruple in strengthening themselves by this welcome, and therefore only unsuspicious aid. It is impossible to deny that, at least by citing without reserve or hesitation, the Roman pontiffs gave their deliberate sanction to this great historic fraud.

18Nor 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.