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The Historians' History of the World 08 [Parthians, Sassanids and Arabs; The Crusades and the Papacy]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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The darkest stain on the name of Gregory is his cruel and unchristian triumph in the fall of the emperor Maurice—his base and adulatory praise of Phocas, the most odious and sanguinary tyrant who had ever seized the throne of Constantinople. It is the worst homage to religion to vindicate or even to excuse the crimes of religious men; and the apologetic palliation, or even the extenuation of their misdeeds rarely succeeds in removing, often strengthens, the unfavourable impression.
Gregory was spared the pain and shame of witnessing the utter falsehood of his pious vaticinations as to the glorious and holy reign of Phocas. In the second year of the tyrant’s reign he closed the thirteen important years of his pontificate. The ungrateful Romans paid but tardy honours to his memory. His death (March 10th, 604) was followed by a famine, which the starving multitude attributed to his wasteful dilapidation of the patrimony of the church—that patrimony which had been so carefully administered and so religiously devoted to their use. Nothing can give a baser notion of their degradation than their actions. They proceeded to wreak their vengeance on the library of Gregory, and were only deterred from their barbarous ravages by the interposition of Peter the faithful archdeacon. Peter had been interlocutor of Gregory in the wild legends contained in the Dialogues.k The archdeacon now assured the populace of Rome that he had often seen the Holy Ghost in the visible shape of a dove hovering over the head of Gregory as he wrote. Gregory’s successor therefore hesitated, and demanded that Peter should confirm his pious fiction or fancy by an oath. He ascended the pulpit, but before he had concluded his solemn oath he fell dead. That which to a hostile audience might have been a manifest judgment against perjury, was received as a divine testimony to his truth. The Roman church has constantly permitted Gregory to be represented with the Holy Ghost, as a dove, floating over his head.
The historian of Christianity is arrested by certain characters and certain epochs, which stand as landmarks between the close of one age of religion and the commencement of another. Such a character is Gregory the Great; such an epoch his pontificate, the termination of the sixth century. Gregory, not from his station alone, but by the acknowledgment of the admiring world, was intellectually, as well as spiritually, the great model of his age. He was proficient in all the arts and sciences cultivated at that time; the vast volumes of his writings show his indefatigable powers; their popularity and their authority, his ability to clothe those thoughts and those reasonings in language which would awaken and command the general mind.
His epoch was that of the final Christianisation of the world, not in outward worship alone, not in its establishment as the imperial religion, the rise of the church upon the ruin of the temple, and the recognition of the hierarchy as an indispensable rank in the social system, but in its full possession of the whole mind of man, in letters, arts as far as arts were cultivated, habits, usages, modes of thought, and in popular superstition.
Not only was heathenism, but, excepting in the laws and municipal institutions, Romanity itself absolutely extinct. The reign of Theodoric had been an attempt to fuse together Roman, Teutonic, and Christian usages. Cassiodorus, though half a monk, aspired to be a Roman statesman, Boethius to be a heathen philosopher. The influence of the Roman schools of rhetoric is betrayed even in the writers of Gaul, such as Sidonius Apollinaris; there is an attempt to preserve some lingering cadence of Roman poetry in the Christian versifiers of that age. At the close of the sixth century all this has expired; ecclesiastical Latin is the only language of letters, or rather letters themselves are become purely ecclesiastical. The fable of Gregory’s destruction of the Palatine library is now rejected as injurious to his fame; but probably the Palatine library, if it existed, would have been so utterly neglected that Gregory would hardly have condescended to fear its influence. His aversion to such studies is not that of dread or hatred, but of religious contempt; profane letters are a disgrace to a Christian bishop; the truly religious spirit would loathe them of itself.
What, then, was this Christianity by which Gregory ruled the world? Not merely the speculative and dogmatic theology, but the popular, vital, active Christianity, which was working in the heart of man; the dominant motive of his actions, as far as they were affected by religion; the principal element of his hopes and fears as regards the invisible world and that future life which had now become part of his conscious belief.
Christian Mythology
The history of Christianity cannot be understood without pausing at stated periods to survey the progress and development of this Christian mythology, which, gradually growing up and springing as it did from natural and universal instincts, took a more perfect and systematic form, and at length, at the height of the Middle Ages, was as much a part of Latin Christianity as the primal truths of the Gospel. This growth, which had long before begun, had reached a kind of adolescence in the age of Gregory, to expand into full maturity during succeeding ages. Already the creeds of the church formed but a small portion of Christian belief. The highest and most speculative questions of theology, especially in Alexandria and Constantinople, had become watchwords of strife and faction, had stirred the passions of the lowest orders; the two natures, or the single or double will in Christ, had agitated the workshop of the artisan and the seats in the circus. Christ assumed gradually more and more of the awfulness, the immateriality, the incomprehensibleness, of the Deity, and men sought out beings more akin to themselves, more open, it might seem, to human sympathies. Believers delighted in those ceremonials to which they might have recourse with less timidity; the shrines and the relics of martyrs might deign to receive the homage of those who were too profane to tread the holier ground. Already the worship of these lower objects of homage begins to intercept that to the higher; the popular mind is filling with images either not suggested at all, or suggested but very dimly by the sacred writings; legends of saints are supplanting, or rivalling at least, in their general respect and attention, the narratives of the Bible.
Of all these forms of worship, the most captivating, and captivating to the most amiable weaknesses of the human mind, was the devotion to the Virgin Mary. The worship of the Virgin had first arisen in the East; and this worship, already more than initiate, contributed, no doubt, to the passionate violence with which the Nestorian controversy was agitated, while that controversy, with its favourable issue to those who might seem most zealous for the Virgin’s glory, gave a strong impulse to the worship. The denial of the title “the mother of God,” by Nestorius, was that which sounded most offensive to the general ear; it was the intelligible odious point in his heresy. The worship of the Virgin now appears in the East as an integral part of Christianity. Among Justinian’s splendid edifices arose many churches dedicated to the mother of God. The feast of the Annunciation is already celebrated under Justin and Justinian. Heraclius has images of the Virgin on his masts when he sails to Constantinople to overthrow Phocas. Before the end of the century the Virgin is become the tutelar deity of Constantinople, which is saved by her intercession from the Saracens.