CHAPTER I. ORIGIN AND RISE OF THE PAPACY

[1Sidenote: [42-842 A.D.]]

2Like almost all the great works of nature and of human power in the material world and in the world of man, the papacy grew up in silence and obscurity. The names of the earlier bishops of Rome are known only by barren lists, by spurious decrees and epistles inscribed, centuries later, with their names; by their collision with the teachers of heretical opinions, almost all of whom found their way to Rome; by martyrdoms ascribed with the same lavish reverence to those who lived under the mildest of the Roman emperors, as well as those under the most merciless persecutors. Yet the mythic or imaginative spirit of early Christianity has either respected, or was not tempted to indulge its creative fertility by the primitive annals of Rome. After the embellishment, if not the invention, of St. Peter’s pontificate, his conflict with Simon Magus in the presence of the emperor, and the circumstance of his martyrdom, it was content with raising the successive bishops to the rank of martyrs without any peculiar richness or fullness of legend.

3The dimness and obscurity which veiled the growing church, no doubt threw its modest concealment over the person of the bishop. He was but one man, with no recognised function, in the vast and tumultuous population. He had his unmarked dwelling, perhaps in the distant Transteverine region, or in the then lowly and unfrequented Vatican. By the vulgar, he was beheld as a Jew, or as belonging to one of those countless eastern religions, which, from the commencement of the empire, had been flowing, each with its strange rites and mysteries, into Rome. The emperor, the imperial family, the court favourites, the military commanders, the consulars, the senators, the patricians by birth, wealth, or favour, the pontiffs, the great lawyers, even those who ministered to the public pleasures, the distinguished mimes or gladiators, when they appeared in the streets, commanded more public attention than the Christian bishop, except when sought out for persecution by some politic or fanatic emperor. Slowly, and at long intervals, did the bishop of Rome emerge to dangerous eminence.

4Christianity itself might seem, even from the first, to have disdained obscurity--to have sprung up or to have been forced into terrible notoriety in the Neronian persecution and the subsequent martyrdom of one at least, according to the vulgar tradition, of its two great apostles. What caprice of cruelty directed the attention of Nero to the Christians, and made him suppose them victims important enough to glut the popular indignation at the burning of Rome, it is impossible to determine. The cause and extent of the Domitian persecution is equally obscure. The son of Vespasian was not likely to be merciful to any connected with the fanatic Jews. Its known victims were of the imperial family, against whom some crime was necessary, and an accusation of Christianity served the end.

5At the commencement of the second century, under Trajan, persecution against the Christians is raging in the East. That, however, was a local or rather Asiatic persecution, arising out of the vigilant and not groundless apprehension of the sullen and brooding preparation for insurrection among the whole Jewish race (with whom Roman terror and hatred still confounded the Christians), which broke out in the bloody massacres of Cyrene and Cyprus, and in the final rebellion during the reign of Hadrian, under Barchochebas (Bar Koziba). But while Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, is carried to Rome to suffer martyrdom, the Roman community is in peace, and not without influence. Ignatius entreats his Roman brethren not to interfere with injurious kindness between himself and his glorious death.

6The wealth of the Roman community, and their lavish Christian use of their wealth, by contributing to the wants of foreign churches, at all periods, especially in times of danger and disaster (an ancient usage which lasted till the time of Eusebius), testifies at once to their flourishing condition, to their constant communication with more distant parts of the empire, and thus incidentally, perhaps, to the class, the middle or mercantile class, which formed the greater part of the believers.

7But the history of Latin Christianity has not begun. For some considerable (it cannot but be an undefinable) part of the first three centuries, the church of Rome, and most, if not all the churches of the West, were, if we may so speak, Greek religious colonies. Their language was Greek, their organisation Greek, their writers Greek, their Scriptures Greek; and many vestiges and traditions show that their ritual, their liturgy, was Greek. Through Greek the communication of the churches of Rome and of the West was constantly kept up with the East; and through Greek every heresiarch, or his disciples, having found his way to Rome, propagated with more or less success his peculiar doctrines. Pope Leo I (440-461) was the first celebrated Latin preacher, and his brief and emphatic sermons read like the first essays of a rude and untried eloquence, rather than the finished compositions which would imply a long study and cultivation of pulpit oratory. Compare them with Chrysostom.

8[Sidenote: [42-312 A.D.]]

9Africa, not Rome, gave birth to Latin Christianity. Tertullian was the first Latin writer, at least the first who commanded the public ear; and there is strong ground for supposing that, since Tertullian quotes the sacred writings perpetually and copiously, the earliest of those many Latin versions, noticed by Augustine, and on which Jerome grounded his Vulgate, were African. Cyprian kept up the tradition of ecclesiastical Latin. Arnobius, too, was an African.

10Thus the Roman church was but one of the confederation of Greek religious republics, founded by Christianity. As of apostolic origin, still more as the church of the capital of the world, it was, of course, of paramount dignity and importance. It is difficult to exaggerate the height at which Rome, before the foundation of Constantinople, stood above the other cities of the earth; the centre of commerce, the centre of affairs, the centre of empire. The Christians, like the rest of mankind, were constantly ebbing and flowing out of Rome and into Rome. The church of the capital could not but assume something of the dignity of the capital; it was constantly receiving, as it were, the homage of all the foreign Christians, who, from interest, business, ambition, curiosity, either visited or took up their residence in the Eternal City.

11But if Rome, or the church of Rome, was thus the centre of the more peaceful influences of Christianity, and of the hopes and fears of the Christian world, it was no less inevitably the chosen battle-field of her civil wars; and Christianity has ever more faithfully recorded her dissensions than her conquests. In Rome every feud which distracted the infant community reached its height; nowhere do the judaising tenets seem to have been more obstinate, or to have held so long and stubborn a conflict with more full and genuine Christianity. In Rome every heresy, almost every heresiarch, found welcome reception.

12All new opinions, all attempts to harmonise Christianity with the tenets of the Greek philosophers, with the oriental religions, the cosmogonies, the theophanies, and mysteries of the East, were boldly agitated, either by the authors of the gnostic systems or by their disciples. Valentinus the Alexandrian was himself in Rome, so also was Marcion of Sinope. The Phrygian Montanus, with his prophetesses, Priscilla and Maximilla, if not present, had their sect, a powerful sect, in Rome and in Africa. In Rome their convert, for a time at least, was the pope; in Africa, Tertullian. Somewhat later, the precursors of the great Trinitarian controversy came from all quarters.

13Praxeas, an Asiatic; Theodotus, a Byzantine; Artemon, an Asiatic; Noetus, a Smyrniote, at least his disciples the deacon Epigenes and Cleomenes, taught at Rome. Sabellius, from Ptolemais in Cyrene, appeared in person; his opinions took their full development in Rome. Not only do all these controversies betray the inexhaustible fertility of the Greek or eastern imagination, not only were they all drawn from Greek or oriental doctrines, but they must have been still agitated, discussed, ramified into their parts and divisions, through the versatile and subtile Greek. They were all strangers and foreigners; not one of all these systems originated in Rome, in Italy, or in Africa.

14On all these opinions the bishop of Rome was almost compelled to sit in judgment; he must receive or reject, authorise or condemn; he was a proselyte, whom it would be the ambition of all to gain.

15Thus, down to the conversion of Constantine, the biography of the Roman bishops, and the history of the Roman episcopate, are one; the acts and peculiar character of the pontiffs, the influence and fortunes of the see, excepting in the doubtful and occasional gleams of light which have brought out Victor, Zephyrinus, Calixtus, Cornelius, Stephen, into more distinct personality, are involved in a dim and vague twilight. On the establishment of Christianity, as the religion if not of the empire, of the emperor, the bishop of Rome rises at once to the rank of a great accredited functionary; the bishops gradually, though still slowly, assume the life of individual character. The bishop is the first Christian in the first city of the world, and that city is legally Christian.

16The supreme pontificate of heathenism might still linger from ancient usage among the numerous titles of the emperor; but so long as Constantine was in Rome, the bishop of Rome, the head of the emperor’s religion, became in public estimation the equal, in authority and influence immeasurably the superior, to all of sacerdotal rank. The schisms and factions of Christianity now become affairs of state. As long as Rome is the imperial residence, an appeal to the emperor is an appeal to the bishop of Rome. It was the slow and imperceptible accumulation of wealth, the unmarked ascent to power and sovereignty, which enabled the papacy to endure for centuries.

17[Sidenote: [312-395 A.D.]]

18The obscurity of the bishops of Rome was not in this alone their strength. The earlier pontiffs (Clement is hardly an exception) were men who of themselves commanded no great authority, and awoke no jealousy. Rome had no Origen, no Athanasius, no Ambrose, no Augustine, no Jerome. The power of the hierarchy was established by other master-minds; by the Carthaginian Cyprian, by the Italian Ambrose, the prelate of political weight as well as of austere piety, by the eloquent Chrysostom. The names of none of the popes, down to Leo and Gregory the Great, appear among the distinguished writers of Christendom. This more cautious and retired dignity was no less favourable to their earlier power, than to their later claim of infallibility. If more stirring and ambitious men, they might have betrayed to the civil power the secret of their aspiring hopes; if they had been voluminous writers, in the more speculative times, before the Christian creed had assumed its definite and coherent form, it might have been more difficult to assert their unimpeachable orthodoxy.

19The removal of the seat of empire to Constantinople consummated the separation of Greek and Latin Christianity; one took the dominion of the East, the other of the West. Greek Christianity has now another centre in the new capital; and the new capital has entered into those close relations with the great cities of the East, which had before belonged exclusively to Rome. Alexandria has become the granary of Constantinople; her Christianity and her commerce, instead of floating along the Mediterranean to Italy, pour up the Ægean to the city on the Bosporus. The Syrian capitals, Antioch, Jerusalem, the cities of Asia Minor and Bithynia, Ephesus, Nicæa, Nicomedia, own another mistress. The tide of Greek trade has ebbed away from the West, and found a nearer mart; political and religious ambition and adventure crowd to the new eastern court. That court becomes the chosen scene of Christian controversy; the emperor is the proselyte to gain whom contending parties employ argument, influence, intrigue.

20That which was begun by the foundation of Constantinople, was completed by the partition of the empire between the sons of Constantine. There are now two Roman worlds, a Greek, and a Latin. In one respect, Rome lost in dignity, she was no longer the sole metropolis of the empire; the East no longer treated her with the deference of a subject. On the other hand, she was the uncontested, unrivalled head of her own hemisphere; she had no rival in those provinces, which yet held her allegiance, either as to civil or religious supremacy. The separation of the empire was not more complete between the sons of Constantine or Theodosius, than between Greek and Latin Christianity.[b]

21[Sidenote: [42-395 A.D.]]

22The advance of Christianity involved an emancipation of religion from all political elements, and this was inevitably followed by the establishment of a distinct ecclesiastical body, with a constitution peculiar to itself. In this separation of the church from the state consists, perhaps, the most important and most effectually influential peculiarity of Christian times. The spiritual and temporal powers may come into close contact--they may remain in the most intimate communion; but a perfect coalition can only take place occasionally, and for short periods of time. In their reciprocal relations and position with regard to each other, has since then been involved one of the most important questions presented by all history.

23[Illustration: ST. RADEGONDE, WIFE OF KING CLOTAIRE, RECEIVING RELIGIOUS