SYNOD AT CONSTANTINOPLE

[1Sidenote: [867 A.D.]]

2In the year 867 Photius had summoned a council at Constantinople; the obsequious prelates listened to the arraignment, and joined in the counter excommunication of Pope Nicholas. Photius drew up eight articles inculpating in one the faith, in the rest the departure, of the see of Rome from ancient and canonical discipline. Among the dreadful acts of heresy and schism which were to divide forever the churches of the East and West were: (1) the observance of Saturday as a fast; (2) the permission to eat milk or cheese during Lent; (4) the restriction of the chrism to the bishops; (6) the promotion of deacons at once to the episcopal dignity; (7) the consecration of a lamb, according to the hated Jewish usage; (8) the shaving of their beards by the clergy.

3The fifth only of the articles objected to by Photius, the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son, was an error so awful as to deserve a thousand anathemas. The third, condemning the enforced celibacy of the clergy, was alone of high moral or religious importance. “From this usage we see in the West,” says Photius, “so many children who know not their fathers.” These, however, were but the pretexts for division. The cause lay deeper, in the total denial of the papal supremacy by the Greeks; their unequivocal assertion that with the empire that supremacy had passed to Constantinople.

4The decree of the council boasted the signature of the emperor (obtained, it was said, in an hour of drunkenness); of Basil the Macedonian, averred (most improbably) to have been forged; of the three eastern patriarchs; of the senate and the great officers; of abbots and bishops to the number of nearly one thousand. But the episcopal messenger who was to bear to Rome this defiance of the church of Constantinople and the counter-excommunication of the pope, had proceeded but a short way on his journey when he was stopped by the orders of the new emperor. A revolution in the palace was a revolution in the church of Constantinople. The first act of Basil the Macedonian was to depose Photius. Photius is said to have refused the communion to the murderer Basil. From this time a succession of changes agitated the empire; Photius rose or fell at each successive change.

5Leo the Philosopher, the son of Basil, once more ignominiously expelled him from his throne. Yet, though accused of treason, Photius was acquitted and withdrew into honoured retirement. He did not live to witness or profit by another revolution. Though the schism of thirty years, properly speaking, expired in his person, and again a kind of approximation to Rome took place, yet the links were broken which united the two churches. The articles of difference, from which neither would depart, had been defined and hardened into rigid dogmas. During the dark times of the papacy which followed the disruption, even the intercourse became more and more precarious. The popes of the next century were too busy in defending their territories or their lives to regard the affairs of the East. The darkness which gathered round both churches shrouded them from each other’s sight.

6[Sidenote: [860-867 A.D.]]

7Nicholas 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.

8The 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.

9But 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.

10If 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.

11Hence 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.

12But 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.