Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/80

 62 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. The Western Church had grown, lived, and expanded in Roman or Romanized lands and under the rules of Roman law. Naturally, when the administration of its affairs, temporal and spiritual, had been fully ac- corded to it under the Christian emperors, it drew upon the Roman law for the rules under which its members should live and its property and their prop- erty be governed. Though the Church may never have formally admitted that the Roman law formed part of its law (i.e. of the Canon law), such always has been the fact, a fact, however, which has undergone modifi- cations according to the varying political and ecclesi- astical conditions of the different centuries of the Church's existence. For example, the Constitutions of the Roman emperors from Constantine's time, so far as they affected the Church, formed an integral part of its law down to the destruction of the Western Roman Empire. In other periods the Church drew from such sources of Roman law as were in use at the time.^ It may be remembered that Gratianus, whose work for the Canon law was epoch-making, as the work of the Bologna school was for the Roman, lived in the twelfth century while the Bologna school was flourish- ing, and was himself a monk at the convent of St. Felix in Bologna. Jealousy of Roman law — of the law that regarded emperors rather than popes as om- 1 See Conrat (Cohn), op. cit., pp. 5-30, for references by the clergy to the Roman law, or passages showing a knowledge of it, from the sixth to the eleventh century, as, e.g., in the letters of Gregory I (590-604). Also, for compilations of Roman law for ecclesiastical use in Italy {Lex Romana canonice compta, etc.), see Conrat, op. cit., pp. 205-218, and in France, ib., pp. 252 et seq.