Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/516

Rh 496 P P E D O M the better to enforce the papal claims, a confusion was designedly and skilfully introduced of the honorary primacy derived from St Peter with the actual rights of the head of the Roman diocese. The precedents afforded by the former were adduced in support of the universal jurisdiction claimed by the latter, and in an ignorant and uncritical age were with little difficulty represented as affording sufficient warrant for a large proportion of the claims asserted in the 9th century. It is by the light which we derive from these considerations that we are enabled to discern what appears to be the only theory which offers a solution of the tradition respecting St Peter and his successors that is in harmony with the historical evidence. When we consider that in the course of the 5th century papal Rome, partly from the ambition of her pontiffs, partly from the concurring influence of external circumstances, had acquired a position of authority in relation to Christendom at large which afforded the pro spect of yet more complete and general pre-eminence, and that towards the assertion of such pre-eminence her claim to rank as the greatest and most honoured of the &quot;apostolical sedes&quot; seemed to offer effective aid, the appearance of legends and spurious documents tending to support such a claim can excite no surprise in the minds of those familiar with the literature of the period. As in the 2d century the attempt to reconcile two earlier and corrupt traditions respecting St Peter s presence and work in Rome gave rise to the tradition of his five-and-twenty years episcopate, so, we can understand, it was probably sought to substitute for the simple tradition preserved in &quot; Hegesippus &quot; and Irenaeus, with respect to St Peter s suc cessors, official records (purporting to supply details such as no other church had preserved, and such as it is in the highest degree improbable that the church at Rome should have succeeded in preserving) of an early episcopal succes sion ; while the discrepancies of the different lists that profess to record this succession admit, again, of an adequate if not a satisfactory explanation, if we regard them as, for the most part, independent and purely con jectural efforts to invest the earlier episcopal office with an historical importance to which in the first two centuries it certainly had not attained. While the Western primate was thus growing in dignity, wealth, and influence, those ecclesiastical potentates who had once claimed an equal or coordinate rank, with the sole exception of the patriarch of Constantinople, alto gether ceased to exist. The Saracen conquests in Syria and Egypt had involved the loss of Jerusalem to Christen dom (637), and this had been speedily followed by the extinction of the churches of Antioch and Jerusalem. The patriarch of Constantinople represented, accordingly, the only spiritual power which could compare with that of Rome; but, while he continued to be the submissive vassal of the Byzantine court, that court was compelled to see the once no less submissive pontiff of Rome changed into a successful invader of its Italian possessions and into a determined repudiator of its articles of faith. In the Creation year 800 Charles the Great received at the hands of Leo of the HI, in Rome, the imperial crown, and the titles of Roman &quot; em P eror &quot; ancl &quot; Augustus.&quot; The authority by virtue of Empire, which Leo assumed the right to confer such dignities was probably by no means quite clear even to those who were witnesses of the imposing ceremony. It may perhaps be best described as derived partly from his sacerdotal func tion, as displayed in the consecrating rites, and partly from the fact that he also acted as the representative of the people in their capacity of electors. To the Byzantine emperor, the whole ceremony and the titles conferred seemed a direct menace to his own prerogative, and com pleted the estrangement between the West and the East. From that time down to the 15th century Greek institu tions and Greek culture were the special objects of dis like and distrust to the papacy. The use of the Greek language had already been discontinued in the records of the Roman Church ; and the study of its literature was now systematically discouraged. The assumption by Charles of the imperial dignity and the consequent rise of the &quot; Holy Roman Empire &quot; were events on the importance of which it is unnecessary here to dwell. By the theory thus established, a temporal supremacy or &quot;condominium &quot; was created corresponding to the spiritual supremacy of the popedom, and the Roman emperor claimed from all other rulers in Christendom an allegiance corresponding to that which the Roman pontiff claimed from all other ecclesiastical potentates. The imperial authority and papal authority were thus complementary the one to the other. The emperor claimed to confirm the papal elec- The e, tions ; the pope claimed to confer the imperial crown upon i iir e a: the emperor. But the precise adjustment of these respec- tlie I* tive claims, and the further assumptions which they sug- l gested or favoured, according as the empire or the papacy proved for the time the stronger, gave rise to a series of memorable struggles which sometimes assume proportions that constitute them the pivot on which contemporary history throughout Europe may be said to revolve. The compact originally made between the empire and the pope dom, however plausible in theory, was indeed attended with no little danger to both. At one time it appeared probable that the state would overwhelm the ecclesiastical organization and convert it into a machine for political purposes ; at another time it seemed no less likely that the latter would subjugate the former and reduce all Western Christendom to a vast spiritual tyranny. During the three centuries that followed upon the creation of the Holy Roman Empire from the year 800, that is to say, down to the Concordat of Worms (1122) it was chiefly the former contingency that seemed the more probable. During the pontificate of NICHOLAS I. (858-8G7), how- Nich&amp;lt; ever, the papacy again made a perceptible advance. ! Nicholas intervened with signal effect in the disputed succession to the Eastern patriarchate, and asserted more distinctly than it had ever been asserted before the theory of the Roman supremacy. He dared, also, to forbid the divorce of Lothair (the powerful monarch of the vast terri tory which stretched from the German Ocean to the Mediterranean) from his wife Theutberga, thereby estab lishing an important precedent for papal interference in questions of private morality. And, finally, in his arduous struggle with Hincmar, metropolitan of Rheims, he gained an important victory over the powerful prelates on the Rhine in the question of appeal. It must, however, be admitted that this last advantage was gained only by the The ? use of forged documents the pseudo-lsidorian decretals, (1 ecn which seem to have first seen the light about the year 850 ; it was pretended that they had been compiled by Isidore of Seville, an eminent writer and ecclesiastic of the 7th century, and had been brought from Spain to Mainz by Riculfus, the archbishop of that city. This col lection embodied a complete series of letters purporting to have been written by the popes of Rome from the time of Clemens Romanus down to that with which the collec tion by Dionysius Exiguus commences, thus filling up the entire blank, and affording among other data ample prece dent for appeals to Rome of the kind against which Hincmar had protested. When some doubt was raised as to the genuineness of the collection, Nicholas did not scruple to assure Hincmar that the originals had been lying from time immemorial in the Roman archives. Among many other fundamental positions laid down in these decretals was one to the effect that no council of the