Volume 2, Chapter 2

THE CHURCH AND THE DISRUPTION OF THE IMPERIAL UNITY, 395-537

Section 1: THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SITUATION IN THE FOURTH CENTURY: DIOCLETIAN TO THEODOSIUS, 284-395

Section 2: SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGES DURING THE FIFTH CENTURY, 395-526

Section 3: THE CHURCHES OF THE WEST DURING THE CRISIS SPAIN, AFRICA, GAUL

Section 4: THE ROMAN SEE AND ITALY

Section 5: ST. PATRICK AND THE CONVERSION OF THE IRISH

Section 6: ST. BENEDICT AND THE HOLY RULE

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SITUATION IN THE FOURTH CENTURY: DIOCLETIAN TO THEODOSIUS, 284-395

CATHOLICISM was not the product of the civilisation in which it first appeared; nor did it draw from that civilisation the strength by which it developed and spread abroad. It could not, in the nature of things, be essentially dependent on that civilisation, but it was immensely conditioned by it in all the circumstances of its growth. The Roman roads, the ease of communication, the internal peace and order secured to a whole world through the single political administration, the common languages, the common cultural idiom of Hellenism, all these undoubtedly helped the early propaganda. With the fortunes of the Roman State those of the new religion were, inevitably, very closely linked indeed. Whatever menaced the one would certainly handicap the other.

It so happened that, in little more than two centuries from the first preaching of the Gospel, the political regime we call the Empire was brought to the verge of disruption. The basis of the Empire was military power. The emperor was, in essence, the magistrate to whom the command of the army and dictatorial power were made over for life. Upon the commander-in-chief's hold over the army, therefore, upon the reality of his command, all was based. The senate's delegation of powers, its assent to his nomination were, from the beginning, formalities merely. The real power lay with the army, and increasingly, as the first two centuries went by, it was the man who could manage the army who ruled. Periodically the army got out of hand. Rival armies supported rival claimants to the supreme power, and civil wars had to be fought to settle the issue. There was one such crisis in 68- 69, another in 192-193, and the emperor who emerged victorious from this last, Septimius Severus, summed up for his successors the policy which alone would make the position safe for them, "See that the soldiers have plenty of money. Nothing else matters."

In the seventy years that followed the death of this shrewd realist, the weakness inherent in the State's foundations bred all its fullness of destruction. Emperor after emperor was set up by the soldiers, only to be murdered when he ceased to please them, twenty-six emperors in fifty years. One they slew because he proved an incompetent general in the field; another because he strove to restore military discipline; another because, his private fortune exhausted, he ceased to be able to be generous; others again from sheer boredom. In different parts of the empire different armies set up their own emperors, none of them strong enough even to attempt to suppress his rivals, and for the best part of a generation whole provinces were ruled as independent states. Finally, a succession of able soldiers from Illyria (Diocletian and Constantine the chief of them) halted the long anarchy. The State was now reorganised. Every last vestige of the republic was swept away. The emperor was, henceforth, an absolute monarch of the oriental type; and by a careful redistribution of the powers of his subordinates -- whether generals in the army or governors of provinces -- and a systematic separation of the civil and military authority throughout the administration, barriers were set against any return of the anarchy. Diocletian recognised, too, how inevitable was the competition for the supreme position, and to guard against this he associated others with himself as joint emperors of the one state. There were two emperors from 285 and four from 293.

Even this far reaching change did not immediately succeed. On the retirement of Diocletian and his senior colleague in 306 the new senior looked outside the imperial families for his two new assistants. Whereupon Constantine and Maxentius, the sons of the late emperors, Constantius and Maximian, took up arms, and a new civil war began among the six emperors. It ended in 312 with Constantine master of the West. Eleven years later he had conquered his eastern colleague and was sole lord of the Roman world. He was almost the last to hold that place for any length of time. When he died (337) he left his power by will-betraying thereby an un-Roman conception of political power simply monstrous in its scale -- to his sons and nephews. Organised murder disposed of the nephews, a civil war of the eldest son (340), and for ten years the dyarchy was restored to the profit of Constans and Constantius II. In 350 Constans was murdered, and three years of war followed between his murderer and his surviving brother. Constantius was in the end victorious and thenceforward, until the one surviving nephew of Constantine rose to contest his supremacy in 360, he ruled alone like his father thirty years before. Death came to him in 361, just in time to prevent a new struggle between himself and Julian his cousin. Julian, in his short reign of twenty months, had no rival nor had his successor Jovian in his still shorter reign. But with the accession, on Jovian's death (364), of Valentinian I, the army insisted on his associating his brother as emperor. Thenceforward, except for a brief three months at the end of the reign of Theodosius I (November, 394-January, 395), no one man ever ruled again the lands of the empire of Augustus.

For all who could read, death was written very evidently on the face of the imperial system. It was, indeed, only the chance of the succession of great princes in the second century that had preserved the empire beyond its first hundred years. The empire was a pyramid balanced on its apex and the most marvellous thing about it is that it survived at all. Thanks to Diocletian and to Constantine in the first place, it survived even the wholesale destruction of the third century and, even as a united political system, it was to outlive in the East by many centuries its disappearance from the West. But there was a further fundamental weakness against which even the greatest of emperors could not secure the State -- weakness of an economic nature. It is one of the capital facts of the situation that the political breakdown and the invasions of the fifth century occurred while an economic revolution was in progress.

The world in which the Church was founded and in which it had so far developed, was a world in which the town was all important, and in which the countryside existed only for the sake of the town. It was the towns that were, necessarily, the first centres of the new religion; and the bishops, one in each city, the cells which together made up the Church Universal. By the time of Diocletian's restoration of the Roman State -- or, to look at it from another point of view, by the time of Constantine's conversion -- the first beginnings were, however, apparent of a social revolution whose final effect would be to reverse this relation of town and countryside. The towns were already beginning to lose their primacy as social organisms. During the whole of the fourth century the pace of this new development increased rapidly. It was still in its first stage when the mainstay of the town's importance as against the countryside -- the central imperial government -- disappeared altogether from the West. Simultaneously with that disappearance there broke over the ill-defended frontiers wave after wave of primitive nomadic peoples bent on plunder; and there also took place, through the so-called barbarian troops of the army, the establishment in Spain, Gaul, and Italy itself, of kingdoms which, theoretically within the empire, were in fact autonomous. In-these momentous years were laid the foundations of that new civilisation in which the Catholic Church was to work for the next eight hundred years. To understand at all what the Church did for that civilisation, to understand how the Church's development was in turn conditioned by it, there must be borne in mind something of its leading characteristics as they differentiate it from the older world in which the Church was founded. The army, at the end of that century whose early years saw Constantine's conversion, still kept the frontier. What of the life within?

From about the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (16-1-180) there is observable a slow but unmistakable drift in the economic life of the Roman world, a strong ebb towards a more primitive (or more natural) system. There is a persistent debasement of the coinage (hardly checked until Diocletian). There is that debasement's inevitable effect in a chaotic flux of prices. Money- gold coins which really are gold, silver which really is silver- disappears. All that remains are the copper coins covered with a mere wash of silver, "metal assignats," as Mommsen called them. The State begins to be willing to take its taxes in kind, in goods and services. It even begins to grade and to pay its salaries, too, in kind. The army had always been the empire's greatest burden, and in this third century (Septimius Severus to Diocletian) the army was absolute master, greater than ever, better paid, the empire its prey to be looted at will. The bureaucracy, too, swelled its numbers beyond anything hitherto known. Industries -- the commercialised industries of modern times-there were none to speak of, none to be a source of wealth to the State. Commerce on the large scale, again hardly existed. The one real source of wealth was land. The chief means, apart from land, open to the man who wished to "invest" money was the letting it out at interest or the farming of taxes. The towns in such a system, were parasites, places where the middlemen lived, markets where they traded, barracks where were housed the soldiers who protected the exploitation. For exploitation was really the ultimate end of the system. The very rich grew richer still, the poor remained poor. The middle class disappeared.

Diocletian's success as restorer was, in the economic sphere, inevitably limited. His reforms amounted, often enough, to little more than a legal consecration of existing abuses. He restored the coinage; he simplified, while he extended, the system of imperial taxation; he tried, but failed signally, to stabilise prices by imperial edict; his great feat was to inaugurate a regime in which the whole population of the empire was gradually conscripted and bound down, each class with its descendants -- for the burden was hereditary -- to work for the welfare of the State. The taxes are not excessive, the administration is not extravagant. But every possible source of wealth is surveyed and its owner assessed -- land, cattle, slaves, serfs, peasants and owners too. All are now bound by law to the trade in which they work, and their children are bound to follow them in it -- civil servants, the artificers in the armament factories and in the textile factories where are made the costumes for the court and the uniforms for the army; the ship owners, millers and bakers on whom the population of the cities depends for its daily food-allowance; the various building crafts and trades; the bath keepers, and by no means least, the army of workmen, keepers, charioteers, gladiators, actors -- "slaves of the people's pleasure" the law styles them-who produce the public games given now, at Rome, on 175 days of the year. The free farmer, the colonus, is likewise bound to the land. The owner cannot dispossess this class of tenant. If he sells the land the coloni go with it. It is to the land, rather than to the owner, that the new regime enslaves them. The free peasants of the villages are likewise bound to their village. No man shall escape his due share of the great burden. Nor is this a matter that affects only the trader and the working class. For there is yet another conscription -- of the time and brains of the more leisured class to the service of the city where they live.

The Roman civitas is more than a town. It is the town and the hinterland of countryside, often very extensive, upon which the town lives. It is a thing founded for the purpose of exploiting that countryside. It has its "constitution," its senate and its magistrates. It is a tiny State in itself, with considerable autonomy, and from this point of view it is not incorrect to describe the empire as a federation of self-governing municipalities. For the senate and the high offices there is a considerable property qualification. It is the local aristocracy who rule, and amongst whom the honours, the titles, the social consideration of high office are shared. This cursus honorum entails expense on whoever proceeds through it, expense which is ever increasing. Moreover, the class from which the office-holders are drawn is made responsible for the taxation. In case of deficit or maladministration this class, as a class, is liable. Whence supervision from- the central government and, often enough, an endeavour to escape from the burden of one's rank. Whence conscription here too, and a conscription which, once more, is hereditary. The man born a curialis cannot escape his destiny of ruling the civitas and of being responsible to the State for the quota it should contribute to the imperial revenue. One way out there did remain -- a way only the very wealthiest could take. This was to buy rank as an honorary member of the Roman senate itself. It was a way all who could ultimately went, and these last two centuries of the Empire in the West saw a steady flight of these clarissimi viri from the towns to their country estates.

The towns, then, slowly shrank. They became once again mere centres for bargaining, and for the offices of what local government still went on. The great landed estate, on the other hand, gained a new importance. It was a fiscal unit independent of the civitas and gradually it became, under the protection of its privileged owner, an asylum for all who fled the heavy burden of the urban regime, for the impoverished curialis and the harassed artificer alike. Economically the landed estate had always been self-sufficient. Now it slowly began to acquire a political self- sufficiency too. The owner gradually began to exercise judicial authority over those who lived on his land, settling their disputes, punishing their misdoings. He had his prison. He had his armed guards. The emperors protested and legislated, but in vain. Nor was it merely in an accidental fashion that one wealthier private citizen thus became the master of his co-citizens, and his private will more powerful in their lives than the law. Already, from the beginning of the fourth century, the weaker man had begun consciously and deliberately to surrender himself to the more powerful, the poorer man to the richer, for the sake of the influential patronage he thereby gained. This is the patrocinium and here, too, the emperors legislated in a contrary sense and here, too, they legislated in vain. Here, very notably, the coming "invasion" will wear down to nothing the check of their government.

The federation of self-governing municipalities is, throughout the later fourth century, steadily losing its importance. More and more there is beginning to count this new arrangement of patron and client -- we cannot yet say overlord and vassal -- and the empire in the West is beginning to be a mass of such private associations, based on ownership of land, associations not yet legal, a mass held together by one thing only, the fact -- itself steadily less and less of a reality -- that all these inhabitants are citizens of the one state that the central government protects. That central government is, too, the last support of the importance of the towns, and with the fifth century it is to disappear.

During these centuries of the steady decay of the imperial regime, of alternate chaos and temporary restoration, the Catholic Church has steadily grown and developed. It is the one institution that escapes the universal mortification, the one living free thing amid the new all-embracing mechanical despotism. Here alone does the tradition of individual initiative continue, of spiritual liberty, of social activity. Here alone do men continue to govern themselves, to find an escape from the paralysis to which, ultimately, the over-governed succumb. Popular life can, here, still find corporate expression; personality, stifled elsewhere, save in the army, can flourish. It is no matter for surprise that the best thought of the time is within the Church, that it is the Church alone which continues to breed thinkers and orators and rulers. The only live literature of this dull stagnant time is ecclesiastical, and inevitably the bishop's power and prestige increase enormously. He is indeed, in the city, the "one power capable of counterbalancing and resisting the all-pervading tyranny of the imperial bureaucracy." When that bureaucracy disappears what will be left to rival his place? Moreover, the possession of land is, in this new regime, to be the all- important, determining factor of political importance. The owner of land is to be ruler. In the coming age the Church is to be one of the greatest landowners of all. For in the new system of a rural economy the abbeys are to be, in the flourishing countrysides, what the bishops continue to be in the diminished towns.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGES DURING THE FIFTH CENTURY, 395-526

The Empire which, at the time of Constantine's conversion, had thus, for a good hundred and fifty years already, suffered the continuous strain of these internal weaknesses, had during the same time been obliged to face the menace of troubles no less serious from beyond its frontier -- the menace of the "Barbarians." These were the people who dwelt beyond the frontier -- Picts to the north of Hadrian's wall in Britain, Goths, Franks, Alamans and other tribes of Germanic race to the east of the Rhine and the north of the Danube, Moors and Nubians to the south of Roman Africa. They were pastoral and agricultural peoples, living on the produce of their lands, civilized in various degrees, with a primitive and fluctuating political system and an equally primitive social organisation. For those among them who lived near to the frontier, the life within the empire was a source of perpetual attraction, partly from the comfort its superior material civilisation promised, partly from the greater security and protection of its more settled organisation. For these pastoral Barbarians were, and had been for centuries, at the mercy of peoples still more primitive, the hordes of fierce nomads whose sphere of operation was the vast continent that stretches from the Carpathians across the steppes of Russia beyond the Urals and the Caspian Sea as far as the very wall of China, a world of savage plunderers and destroyers never at rest, yellow-skinned non-Aryan peoples, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Tartars, Mongols, Turks. Against these the pastoral tribes had no defence. The organised might of the Roman world, its guarded frontier, its settled towns promised them security; and from a very early time they sought to enter it.

From the time of Marcus Aurelius (161-180) the defence of the long northern frontier was the chief anxiety of the State, the final reason for the army's domination of its life, political and economic. This anxiety was, in the later empire -- the empire of the third and fourth centuries -- enormously increased by the new developments within the army itself. In the first place the tactics, strategy and system of fortification were so altered by the necessity of this frontier warfare that the army almost disappeared as a mobile thing, before the demands made on it to provide the innumerable garrisons of the new system. It was indeed a serious development that the time had now come when it was hardly possible to put 10,000 troops in the field, for all that the army numbered half a million. But far more serious was the fact that the army had really ceased to be Roman at all. Since Septimius Severus (193-211) it had been more and more recruited from the Barbarians themselves. By the time of Valentinian I (364- 375) it was entirely Barbarian. The words "soldier" and "Barbarian" were henceforward synonymous.

It was a still graver development that the command, too, had ceased to be Roman. In the third century (Gallienus 253-268) the Roman senator and his class had been debarred from the command. The exclusion had then been extended to the provincial aristocracy, both the senatorial and that of the curiales. Already in the time of Constantine's father the officers of this almost Barbarian army were of the lowest ranks of provincial citizens. By the time of Constantine's death (337) they had ceased to be Roman at all. The army was, henceforth, a wholly Barbarian thing, officered by Barbarians, armed as the Barbarians were armed, using their methods as it used their weapons, even beginning to be clad in the once-despised Barbarian dress. Constantine favoured Franks; Theodosius Goths. Vandals and Alans, too, were to be found, and in the very highest posts. As in the third century the low class of officer had produced, inevitably, a low class of emperor in this state where the soldier was ruler, so now the Barbarian-held command brought the supreme posts of the empire within the Barbarians' grasp. No Barbarian, it is true, ever took for himself the imperial crown, but the daughters of Barbarians married the sons of emperors and Theodosius the Great's own grandson was thus half Barbarian in blood.

In addition to the now Barbarianised " regular " army, the empire disposed also of the troops of its allies, the Foederati. These were groups, tribes, "nations" of Barbarians, admitted within the Empire, granted lands on which to live, and giving in return military service. Such a nation were the Goths, settled on the Danube by Valens in 376. These Foederati kept all their national organisation, including their king, and their own laws. As it suited the imperial policy, or as their kings were able to exact the concession, they moved about within the empire for the empire's service.

The difference between the western empire in the fourth and in the fifth centuries is the difference between the first and second stage of a continuous development. In the fifth century that empire as a political unity disappears, but the disappearance is not due to revolution nor to conquest by foreign peoples. It is the term of the previous development -- a development whose pace has been accidentally quickened by unforeseen events, and which has of course been conditioned in its detail by the chance of the particular personalities engaged in it. The emperor has steadily ceased to count. The sixty years which followed the death of Theodosius the Great saw in succession two crowned weaklings -- his son, Honorius (395-423) and his grandson, Valentinian III (423-455) -- inert, incompetent princes who lived in an orientalised retirement at Ravenna while mightier forces decided the fate of their world. The Barbarian elements, already present in overwhelming force in the army of the fourth century had come, in the fifth century, to dominate it entirely and to dominate the court too. Between these Barbarians and what remained of Rome in the high places of the State, the rivalry was continuous. Ravenna is a court of endless intrigue. More than once the all-powerful subject is murdered: Stilicho, a Barbarian, by the order of Honorius; Aetius, the last great man of the Roman line, by Valentinian III -- a miserable debauchee who recalls the last of the Valois. In the next stage (455-476) the Barbarian is more powerful still. He murders Valentinian, the last of the line of Theodosius, and for the next twenty-one years sets up and dethrones and sets up again as emperor whoever seems most likely to play the part as he desires. For a short period there is no emperor at all. The Barbarian has not thought it worth while to nominate one. Finally, in 476, the Barbarian decides that the institution may just as well end. He orders the child who holds the title -- Romulus, whom in a kind of appropriate mockery men called Augustulus -- to resign, and he sends the insignia of the office to the emperor at Constantinople. No more emperors are needed in the West. The Barbarian will continue to rule as for the last fifty years, to rule nominally in the name of the remaining eastern emperor as, for those fifty years, he had ruled through his western colleague.

This period of the passing of the emperors was marked by the most serious breakdown of the frontier yet known, when hordes of the fiercer Barbarian nomads poured into Gaul and Spain and, unhindered, ravaged and plundered for the best part of two years (407-409). From the anarchy of those years the imperial hold on these provinces never really recovered. It was now that the kings of the Barbarian foederati, thanks to accidental combinations of favourable circumstances -- the emperor's weakness, the unstable position of his Barbarian ministers, the jealousies of the court, and the scale of this unprecedented invasion -- were able to wrest unheard-of concessions, and so to achieve the beginnings of real independent political power.

To dislodge the marauding hordes the government at Ravenna could do no better than despatch into Gaul the nation of the Visigoths who, since the death of Theodosius in 395, had been a continual embarrassment. Their king, Alaric, had turned against the eastern emperor in whose territories this people was first settled, and, disappointed in his hopes of advancement, he had then for two years (406-408) ravaged Macedonia and Greece as far as the Peloponnesus. Next, as the price of peace, he was named commander- in-chief of Illyricum -- the key province where the two empires met. He used his position to attempt to dislodge his enemy the Vandal, Stilicho, then supreme at the western court. But Stilicho was too much for him, and Alaric's invasion of Italy from Illyricum was turned back. Stilicho's murder in 408 left the road open, and after an attempt to wring from the western emperor a concession of rank and a commission Alaric and his people swept down upon Italy as far as Rome, which in 410 fell to them. Alaric died shortly after, as he was preparing to cross from Sicily to Africa, and his nation was still in southern Italy when it was "commissioned" to serve in Gaul and Spain to deal with the remnants of the great invasion of 407-409. In southern Gaul the fighting went on in a haphazard, Barbarian fashion for another ten years, Visigoths as foederati in the service of Honorius fighting first against Alans, Suevi and Vandals, and then against the emperor's own Barbarian army under Constantius. The new feature of this war was that it ended in the establishment of the Visigothic king as the emperor's representative in the lands where he had defeated the empire's invaders. The first of the Barbarian kingdoms was thus founded, Toulouse its capital.

The Visigothic king at Toulouse was not independent of the emperor. The cession involved no revolution in law or administration, no wholesale change in ownership. It was not in any sense a conquest. The king of a Barbarian allied nation was now the supreme authority, under the empire, in territory governed for the empire until now by imperial officials. The emperor's hold on these provinces through these officials had been lessening steadily before the change. With the change it shrank to a mere formality. Everything was still done in the emperor's name, but it was the new king's will that settled what should be done. For his own nation he was, as he had always been, master so far as their own law made him so. For the Roman population his rule was exercised through the Roman law and the courts and administrative service which, in the main, the Romans still manned. It cannot be too often emphasised that, in the establishment of these kingdoms, no political revolution was involved. What did accompany them was a wholesale material destruction, towns sacked and burnt, countrysides ravaged. The material organisation by which the ordered central government lived -- means of communication for example -- suffered too. And, the most important point of all, the substitution of Barbarian kings for the centralised rule of the Respublica Romana aided most powerfully that social revolution already in progress by which one class of citizens was becoming the master, the political and juridical lord, of another, and in which ownership of land and political authority were becoming fast associated. This revolution, under the new regime, proceeded, one may say in very general terms, with the positive assistance of the rulers.

The Barbarian kingdoms of this kind, ultimately established within the limits of the Roman Empire of the West, were five in all -- the Visigoths in Spain and Gaul; the Burgundians, from 443, in the valley of the Rhone and the lands between the Rhone and Italy; the Vandals in Africa from 430; the Franks in northern and western Gaul from 486; and the Ostrogoths in Italy from 493.

THE CHURCHES OF THE WEST DURING THE CRISIS SPAIN, AFRICA, GAUL

The transformation of Western Europe in the course of the fifth century was by no means a uniform affair. The Barbarians were not all equally Barbarian. The mode of their establishment differed very greatly, and since the degree of the Catholic conquest, before the upheaval, also differed from province to province, [88] the effect of the transformation was as varied in the religious world as in the political. Two questions naturally arise: the effect upon the papal centralising policy of this violent disintegration of political life; and its effect on the Catholic establishment in the several provinces, in Spain, Africa, Gaul, and Italy.

Spain had suffered greatly in this century of change. There were the invasions of 407-409, then the long war of Visigoths against Vandals, and Suevi. The Vandals soon passed into Africa, but the Suevi remained, established in Portugal and Galicia, to carry on for the next eighty years a sporadic warfare with the Visigoths.

Almost the only incident of the religious history of which any record remains, is the intervention of the pope St. Leo I in the controversy over Priscillian. Not all the losses of the upheaval had diminished that fierce animosity, and at the very beginning of St. Leo's pontificate, in the years 444-447, Turribius Bishop of Astorga in Galicia sent to Rome a kind of memorandum explaining that Priscillianism was by no means dead, that it numbered even bishops among its supporters, and asking the aid of the Roman See. St. Leo, in his reply, refers to the difficulty of communication with this distant country since the breakdown of the imperial system. There is no authority to enforce the old anti- Priscillianist legislation -- so useful a complement, with its heavy sanctions, to the Church's clemency -- synods are no longer held and therefore the heresy has a new lease of life. To sift out the hidden Priscillianists from the hierarchy, the pope sends a syllabus condemning in sixteen propositions the chief doctrines of the sect, and, his only means of intervening, he suggests that a general council of the bishops of Spain be summoned and the syllabus proposed for their signature. Those who refuse to sign are to be excommunicated. If it is not possible to summon a general council the bishops of Galicia, at any rate, should meet.

Neither council could meet. Instead a formulary was drafted and sent to all the bishops. They signed without an exception: more than one, however, with strong reservations. There, apparently, the matter ended. The pope could advise, could command, but in the circumstances of the time, he must leave the execution of his decision to the local council and if this council could not meet the trouble must endure.

Apart from this incident we know little until, seventy years later, there is record of yet another Roman intervention. Spain had, for the time, passed under the rule of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the Barbarian king who from Ravenna had ruled Italy since 493. In a sense Spain and Italy were, for a moment, reunited. The years of Theodoric's rule were years of peace, and it is perhaps to a new facility of communications that we owe the appeal of the Bishop of Ilice to Pope Hormisdas in 517. It was for a decision in disciplinary matters that Rome was approached. There was the question of communion with what Greek clergy came to Spain, for the sees of the East had been in schism for now thirty years and more. There was, too, the eternal question as to the lawfulness of episcopal elections, the ever-increasing complaint of simoniac prelates. Hormisdas replied by letters for all the bishops of Spain. The old laws governing elections were recalled, the sanctions against simony re-enacted. Provincial synods were to be held annually, and to provide for the execution of the reforms the pope named the Bishop of Astorga his vicar. As to the Greeks, they were to be received only on condition that they signed the formulary which the pope sent with his letters. [89]

The Vandal kingdom in Africa was exceptional in its relation to the empire for it was definitely the result of conquest, and the Vandals henceforward continued to be actively hostile to the empire now ruled from Ravenna. The Vandals first came into the empire as a body in the great invasion of 407, and not for nearly a century did they lose their original character of ferocious marauders. From Gaul they passed to the south of Spain, where the province of Andalusia to this day preserves in its name their memory. Thence they crossed the narrow strait into the Roman Mauritania and, at the invitation of its governor, into Africa itself, as his allies in a revolt against the central government. They occupied Africa by conquest, with pitched battles and regular sieges, sacking and pillaging as they went. It was while they were besieging his city of Hippo that St. Augustine, in 430, sickened and died. The fruits of this conquest the government of Ravenna confirmed to the Vandals in a whole series of treaties. The great man of the movement was their king, Genseric, under whom they not only conquered Africa but, taking to the sea, became for half a century the terror of the Mediterranean. Political intrigue had brought them into Africa, and it invited Genseric to Italy too where, in 455, he sacked the ancient capital and carried off into captivity, in true Barbarian fashion, the widow and daughters of the recently murdered Valentinian III. One of these girls was married to a Vandal, and it is with the last of the Vandal kings of Africa that the race of Theodosius finally disappears from history.

The kingdom was exceptional, too, in that the Vandals, alone of these Arian barbarian rulers, were bitter persecutors, and under their rule a last chapter was added to the African Church's martyrology. The Vandals brought with them into Africa an organised clergy, and soon there began what was, to all intents and purposes, a war of Arian revenge on Catholicism. The churches were burnt, all assemblies of Catholics forbidden, the bishops and priests rounded up and deported. After twenty years of this the emperor, Valentinian III, intervened and Genseric answered his pleas to the extent of allowing a Catholic bishop at Carthage. This bishop died in 457 -- two years after Valentinian's murder, at the opening of the last twenty years of the imperial regime -- and Genseric reverted to the policy of repression. It was forbidden to elect a new bishop and for another twenty years the persecution resumed its way. The administrative system had remained unchanged since the days of the Roman governors, and its personnel was still Roman and therefore Catholic. Whence an active Arian propaganda among the official classes and, from the refusals, numerous martyrdoms.

Genseric died, after a reign of fifty years, in 477 and was succeeded by a still more fanatical Arian, Huneric. The new king set himself to exterminate Catholicism within a given time. A great congress of Catholic bishops was summoned -- they still numbered as many as 466 -- and on their refusal to be convinced by their Arian rivals, the king announced that the full Roman law against heretics would now be applied against the Catholics, who were given four months in which to apostatize. The bishops were exiled, some to Corsica where they were set to work in the forests, others to the interior of Africa. The laity found every profession and every trade closed against them unless they could produce a certificate of conformity. There were numerous apostasies, numerous forced baptisms. There were also many martyrs, who died in terrible tortures. Within the year the persecutor was dead, putrefactus et ebulliens vermibus, but the work of extermination continued. The pope, Felix III, and the emperor, Zeno -- excommunicated through the Acacian schism -- both intervened, pleading for a mitigation of the terror, but in vain.

Meanwhile, within African Catholicism chaos reigned. There were no bishops, no churches, hardly any priests, apostates of all degrees, and in 487 the pope, in a council at Rome, drafted a series of rules to regulate the reconciliation of the apostates.

That same year the persecution began to slacken. Once again a bishop was allowed in Carthage and then, in 494, other bishops were recalled from exile and their churches restored to them. In the provinces where the Arians were fewest, there was a kind of peace. Elsewhere the old law of repression was maintained in force.

The peace, such as it was, lasted but a short time. With the accession of Trasimund (500) the bishops were once more deported - - this time to Sardinia. Among them was the most distinguished Latin theologian of the century, St. Fulgentius, Bishop of Ruspe. For the quarter of a century during which Trasimund reigned the persecution continued and then, with the accession of Hilderic in 523,-it ceased as suddenly as it had begun. This king was the son of the savage Huneric by his marriage with the captive daughter of Valentinian III. In him the line of Theodosius the Great plays its last part in history. He recalled the bishops, restored the churches, allowed all the vacant sees to be filled. For the first time in almost a hundred years African Catholicism knew the peace of ordinary life.

In that hundred years Mauritania, the most westerly province had been abandoned to the native tribes; the Moors had occupied Numidia, and from Zeugitana the Church had disappeared entirely. The Vandal kings ruled over an Africa that had shrunk very considerably by comparison with the Africa they had conquered in the last days of St. Augustine's life.

Hilderic, by blood half Roman and the last descendant of the old imperial family, pro-Catholic in his religious sympathies, in friendly relation with the reigning Roman Emperor, Justinian, was too novel a type to win much sympathy from his Vandal nobility. That he was not a soldier increased their hostility, and in 532 a revolt broke out headed by the heir to the throne. Hilderic was captured and dethroned and thereupon Justinian -- braving the warnings of counsellors who recalled the disastrous defeat at sea of the last Roman force that had ventured itself against these barbarians -- intervened with a fleet and an army. Hilderic and his friends were promptly massacred and then, on the 14th September, the imperial general Belisarius laid hold of Carthage. His victory was the beginning of the end of the Vandal regime. With ease, almost, in the next few years he subdued one district after another and by 539 Africa -- as much as the Vandals had managed to keep of it -- was reunited to the empire. The empire's religion was Catholicism and it was now the Arians who were persecuted as heretics.

The Church in Gaul, at the moment when the upheaval of the fifth century began, had just lost its first great historical figure. This was St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, who died in 397 and whose work was the foundation upon which all the later structure of French Catholicism was built, for it was St. Martin who first systematically undertook to convert the pagan countryside. He was not himself a native of Gaul but was born in Pannonia, about the time of Constantine's conversion. His father was a soldier and a successful one and this determined the saint's early career. He, too, though much against his will, must be a soldier. His first preference, for a life of prayer and solitude, survived his military life, however, and a meeting with St. Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers, led to his establishment as a solitary in the wild and inaccessible retreat of Marmoutier, on the Loire, nor far from Poitiers itself. Disciples gathered round him and here, between 360 and 375, there was formed the first monastic settlement of the Western Church.

Like the monks of the earliest Eastern groups, these disciples of St. Martin lived as solitaries, coming together for certain common exercises of piety, and practising heroic austerities. Unlike their Eastern models they lived in the midst of a population wholly Pagan and, inevitably, they added to their monastic occupations the work of their neighbours' conversion. Sermons, instructions, the exposure of the foolishness of the rustic Paganism, the practical exercise of the charity of Christ, the example of their own heroic virtue began gradually to tell. By the time of St. Hilary's death much had been accomplished and more still when, eight years later, the clergy of Tours came to announce to Martin that he was their new bishop. His elevation was for the saint simply an occasion of extending the scope of the work to which he had given himself. He established a new monastery at Tours and, dressed in the same simple costume, he continued as a bishop to live with the same austere simplicity to achieve which he had left the world thirty years before. Long before he died he was the greatest force in the Church of Gaul. Everywhere in the West his monks were sought as bishops. From his death (397) his tomb at Tours became the goal of innumerable pilgrimages, the scene of many miracles, and to Martin were speedily paid the same liturgical honours which, for a long time now, it had been customary to pay to the martyrs. He is the first holy man not a martyr to be regarded officially, as we say now, as a saint.

The west of Gaul had been the field of Martin's apostolate. In the generation that followed his death a new centre of similar work, also monastic, arose in the south. This was the settlement on the island of Lerins, off the coast of Province. The monks, here also, lived a life that followed Eastern fashions, a combination of the solitary and the cenobite, an austerity in the matter of abstinences that verged on the heroic, with an attachment to the practice of manual labour and, also, a devotion to the study of Sacred Scripture.

In the first quarter of the fifth century, as the range of the central power began to shrink, Treves had lost its civil importance; it was Arles that was now the chief town of Roman Gaul. To the west of it the Visigoths were established, with Toulouse as their chief centre. To the east the Burgundians would soon be ceded a similar settlement. But for yet another fifty years or so, the centre of Gaul with Arles for its capital would continue to be occupied by armies and officials obedient to the, by now, distant emperors in Ravenna. Something of the ecclesiastical history of Arles we have seen in Pope Zosimus' exaltation of its bishop as a kind of papal vicar with authority over all the other metropolitans and in the speedy revocation of this novelty by Pope Boniface I. The bishop for whom it had been created, Patroclus, survived by just five years the death of the Emperor Constantius III, whose favour had been the true cause of his temporary greatness. To succeed Patroclus the Church of Arles called in Lerins, electing as bishop the founder of that holy place, Honoratus (426). He reigned, however, for two years only and in his place yet another monk of Lerins was chosen -- Hilary.

St. Hilary of Arles showed himself a true bishop. He continued his life of mortification. He gave himself to preaching and to the conversion of the countryside, to the correction of his clergy and of his suffragans, and to providing good bishops -- very often from Lerins -- as the sees fell vacant. Like every reformer he made enemies, and these appealed complainingly to Rome. Finally, his zeal to correct abuses took him into territories beyond his metropolitan jurisdiction. He was found arranging episcopal successions as far away as Besancon -- and that before the bishop, Celidonius, was really dead. When the bishop recovered and found that, during his illness, St. Hilary had consecrated a good man to take his place there was more than a little trouble. St. Hilary then took it upon himself to summon a council and depose Celidonius.

Celidonius had in his time served the emperor as a judge. The death sentences he had passed on criminals were, it was now said, an obstacle lo his consecration. Again, he had been married and, it was said, he had married a widow. This again made his consecration irregular. Celidonius appealed to Rome (444) and went there in person to see the case through. St. Hilary followed, actually to lecture the pope on the facility with which he listened to complaints from the disaffected and disobedient and then, in his simplicity, to depart with the appeal still pending, in what looked very like flagrant contempt. the trial finished. Celidonius cleared himself. Then the storm broke over the unlucky Bishop of Arles. The pope, unfortunately for Hilary, was St. Leo the Great. Celidonius he reinstated, and in a letter to the bishops of the province he denounced the usurpation of the Bishop of Arles unsparingly. As a punishment he stripped him of all his rights as metropolitan, attaching his province to the see of Vienne and only allowing him to retain his own see as a special act of grace. It was an execution with the full rigour of the law, nor, despite St. Hilary's endeavours, did the pope relent. After St. Hilary's death (448) a new division of provinces was indeed made, and Arles recovered its rank as a metropolitan see, but for as long as St. Hilary lived he was a living witness of the reality of Rome's superior jurisdiction (as was to be, a few years later, a much greater than he, the Patriarch of Alexandria) and of the West's unquestioning acceptance of it.

The year that saw the death of St. Leo (461) saw also the murder of the last emperor to matter in the West -- Maiorian. He was also the first emperor for nearly a century to show himself in Gaul. Three years later the death of the patrician Aegidius removed the last Roman general who remained in touch with Ravenna. The last days, the last hours of the Roman rule were approaching. The Visigoths at Toulouse knew it well and, abandoning the fiction of their status as the emperor's men defending a menaced province, they set themselves to capture what they could of the now deserted centre of Gaul.

One by one the great cities were attacked and fell to them, the inhabitants sometimes resisting not unsuccessfully until orders came from the emperor to surrender. He had found it more convenient to arrange with the enemy.

Of the life, ecclesiastical as well as civil, of this unhappy time, we possess a by no means inconsiderable memorial in the work of St. Sidonius Apollinaris. He was himself of Lyons, sprung from a family of senatorial rank. His wife's father -- Avitus-was for a brief moment emperor, and Sidonius climbed the cursus honorum to its heights, becoming Prefect of Rome in 468. He returned to Gaul and in 470 was elected Bishop of the Auvergne. It needs no great effort to believe how greatly this was against the wishes of this cultured, leisurely aristocrat upon whom, now, the end of all things seemed come. The Visigoths were attacking. He was isolated from Ravenna, even had Ravenna been disposed to help him. He rallied the city to defend itself and resisted stoutly. In 475, however, the end came. The empire -- it was almost its last act -- ceded the city to Euric the Visigothic king. The bishop was carried off a prisoner to Toulouse. From his letters written during this time we learn much of the " Barbarians " -- amongst other things that their Arianism seems to have sharpened with the new spirit of conquest, and that the king had found means to prevent the election of bishops to many of the sees. Two years later Sidonius was allowed to return. Euric had no longer any anxiety that the ex-emperor's son-in-law, the one-time prefect of Rome, might combine with Ravenna against him. Since 476 the emperors had gone. At Ravenna, too. the Barbarian now ruled openly.

During these twenty years that lie between the deaths of St. Leo and of St. Sidonius (461-479) the council of bishops continued to meet, irregularly, haltingly, in a kind of ever feebler decrescendo. The Visigothic advance toward the east, and the Burgundian advance down the valley of the Rhone slowly set up a new barrier against communications with Italy. The action of the Papacy on these now distant churches is felt more and more rarely. To the north of the new Visigothic conquests, however, all isolated Roman army still maintained itself: Its leader was Syagrius whom the Barbarians called "the King of the Romans." He was the son of that Aegidius who died in 464, and he too was about to disappear.

The conquerors of Syagrius were not, however, the hitherto invincible Visigoths. They were the Franks, associated with the empire for two centuries, now as -foes and now as foederati, and settled under their several kings (for they lacked the unity of the Visigoths) on the lower Rhine since the time of Constantine's rather, Constantius I (293-306). The Franks were, of all the foederati, the least civilised. There was still about them a crude brutal bloodthirstiness that had long disappeared from the Goths and the Burgundians, and, another mark of the small effect of their long contact with the empire, they were still pagans. The final stage in their history, in which they, too, begin to occupy the territory of the empire as rulers really independent, begins with the succession of Clovis as king of the Franks centred round Tournai. This was in 481. Five years later he had overcome Syagrius and was master of the north of Gaul as far as the Loire. He then turned on the Alamans whom he drove back across the Rhine, and upon the other kings of his own nation whom he also defeated and slew. In 493 he married, and his wife, a Burgundian, was a Catholic. Three years later he himself became a Catholic and was baptised at Rheims by the bishop, St. Remy. Thousands of his warriors followed his example.

The stupendous importance of this conversion to all the succeeding history of the Church is one of the commonplaces of history. At the moment when it took place not one of the princes who ruled what had been, and what still was, the Roman Empire was a Catholic. The remaining emperor, Anastasius, was a Monophysite and his Catholic subjects were cut off from the head of the Church by the Acacian Schism. [90] The new Barbarian rulers of the West, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Visigoths, and Vandals were, all of them, Arians. That the new conqueror of the north should prefer to be Catholic was the first break in a century of steady loss, the first sign of Catholicism's future grip on the public life of the new Western world.

Its effect upon the future of the Franks was not less momentous. In their case, and in their case alone, there was not between the civilised subjects and the Barbarian ruler the greatest of all barriers, namely, that the one was Catholic and the other anti- Catholic. Here alone was the fusion of Roman and Barbarian possible from the very beginning, and it began from the very moment of the baptism. The bishops, who, when the chaos of the change had passed, were everywhere revealed as the only leaders of what still endured, were, in the kingdom where the Catholic Franks ruled, not merely neutral spectators of the new order but its most active supporters. Alone of these Barbarian kingdoms the kingdom of the Franks survived, and it gave their name to the vast Roman territory where they established it. The Vandals in Africa lasted until 534, the Ostrogoths in Italy till 554, the Visigoths in Spain until 711. But under the Franks, Gaul became France, the fruit of the union between Frank and Gallo-Roman based on their common acceptance of the Catholic Faith. Gibbon was right when he spoke of the French monarchy as founded on the Catholic bishops.

THE ROMAN SEE AND ITALY

St. Leo, pope from 440 to- 461, is the first of the three popes who alone of the long line are popularly styled "the Great." He was not Roman by birth, but from an early age he was one of the Roman clergy. He rose to be one of the seven deacons, and he was by 430 sufficiently important for St. Cyril of Alexandria to enlist his support against Nestorius. He was the friend also of Cassian, and with Cassian he assisted Celestine I in the Nestorian trouble. So, too, a few years later, it was his advice that guided Sixtus III in the final despatch of Julian of Eclanum. The imperial court, also, realised his worth and made use of his diplomatic talents. He was, in fact, acting as its ambassador in Gaul when, Sixtus III dying (August, 440), he was elected pope. As pope he was destined to fulfil all his early promise, to be, above all, the firm administrator and ruler, the touch of whose hands of steel an apostolic diplomacy kept ever from harshness. To this invaluable asset of a truly Roman spirit informed by the charity of the Gospel, St. Leo added intellectual attainments of a very high order. He was master of a singularly beautiful Latinity, clear, simple, and strong as his own disposition, and he was that rare thing among popes, a constructive theologian. He is almost the last pope to use as his mother tongue the Latin of classical antiquity, and the only pope to add his personal quota to the corpus of early Catholic theology. With St. Leo the golden age of the fathers reaches its term. His theological competence found full scope in the controversy as to the relations of the human and the divine in Our Lord which, twenty years after Nestorius, still divided the East, and which issued, in St. Leo's time, in the two great opposing councils at Ephesus (the Latrociniunm and at Chalcedon (431 and 451). [91]

The West knew the pope rather as an administrator and, in the domain of faith, as the most brilliant exponent so far of the prerogatives o f his primatial see. How he exercised that superior authority in the distant churches of Gaul and Spain has already been noted. He was equally active in what provinces of the diocese of Africa remained to the empire. From the most of them he was cut off once the anti-Catholic Vandals were possessed of them, but for fifteen years yet western Numidia and Mauretania Cesariensis escaped Genseric; and during that time St. Leo's intervention, in the traditional manner, is constant. He had heard of disorders in the matter of episcopal elections and in a letter to the hierarchy of the province of Mauretania he commissioned the bishop, Potentius, to enquire into the matter in his name. The enquiry proved the accusations true. Men had been consecrated who were the husbands of widows, or who had themselves been twice married. Others again had been elected who were not already clerics. St. Leo acted with moderation. Except for the bigamists (in the canonical sense) he would overlook what had been done, confirming these irregularly elected bishops but insisting that the law must be observed for the future. A convert Donatist bishop -- for from the moment of the Vandal invasion the penal code against the sect was no longer enforced and it revived in more than one place -- he allowed to keep his rank and authority over his people converted with him. Other cases he left to the judgement of the local bishops. Finally he directed that, for the future, care should be taken not to create sees outside the cities. To set up bishops in the villages would bring the episcopate to ridicule.

To appreciate as it deserves the record of St. Leo's intervention in Africa, we need to recall the relations between the African bishops and Rome twenty years earlier, in the days when St. Leo was still but a deacon of the apostolic see. [92] The pope makes no apology for his intervention, nor does he seem to think the occasion has come for any comment on the anti-Roman legislation of the famous Council of 427. Nor does he propose himself as the obvious substitute for that great annual council whose operation the invasions have so rudely interrupted. Like his predecessors before him, he makes the fact of his holding the Roman See the sole reason for all he says and does, in Africa as elsewhere. All that the Africans in 426 had protested the pope must not do -- hear appeals from Africa, send legates into Africa to hold enquiries and execute his judgements -- St. Leo, twenty years later, continues to do, and this as simply as though none had ever questioned these rights of his see. He was of course fully aware of the delicate susceptibilities of these African bishops and, if he was resolute in his practical affirmation of the rights of Rome, he could, on occasion, study their sensibilities. So it was, for example, in the case of the bishop Lupicinus who had appealed to him from their excommunication, and whose case he sent back to them to be re-tried. Nevertheless the pope desires that in all future cases where there is question of litigation between the bishops, a full report shall be sent to him of the matters in dispute and the solution arrived at, so that it may be strengthened by his sentence too.

St. Leo was the pope in whose time fell Attila's invasion of Italy and Genseric's descent on Rome. Tradition describes him as warding off the first from the threatened city by the sheer might of his own holy personality, and history records how he persuaded Genseric to retire with what booty he cared to take. The saintly pope is already creating the role in which the medieval bishop was so often to figure, the protector of his people in temporals no less than in spirituals. In the affair of the Manichees -- the one domestic event of his reign known to us in any detail -- it may be conceived that he protected them in both.

It was the fate of Manicheeism to be universally persecuted. On account of the moral aberrations it harboured and encouraged, it was proscribed by pagan emperors like Diocletian, by Buddhists in India and China, and of course by Catholic princes too. Already before the conversion of Constantine, Manicheeism was reduced, in the Roman Empire, to the condition of a secret society. From time to time there were arrests, trials, and revelations of disgusting moral disorder. Rome was the scene of such an exposure in 443. The ancient capital had been for some years a natural place of refuge for the Africans in flight from the Vandal invasion. They brought with them a proportion of Manichees, to swell the ranks of the existing organisation in Rome. The expansion of the sect did not escape St. Leo. He brought the matter to the notice of the civil authority and soon, at Rome, too, there were arrests and trials and revelations. Those proved guilty were condemned to life imprisonment. St. Leo did more. He circularised the bishops of Italy, communicating the official reports of the trials and bidding them guard their people from the new contamination. The emperor, Valentinian III, on his side, renewed the law of his pagan predecessor, but, it is interesting to note, he did not renew the penalty of death by fire there enacted.

Rome itself was by the time of the death of St. Leo (November 11, 461) a Catholic city at last. All that was left of the old religion were the temples, unoccupied, empty, falling slowly into ruin (for as yet none had been consecrated to Catholic uses), and the social habits of such feasts as the Lupercalia. It was Gelasius I (492-496) who finally brought about their suppression. Year by year the churches increased in number, and around them a first beginning of the system of parishes. The dissident heretics who, in one degree or another, had troubled the unity of the Roman church for two centuries were gone, Donatists, Novatians, Manichees and their "Bishops of Rome" with them. Gone too were the Pelagians, although sufficient of these survived in Venetia to provoke from St. Leo a strong reminder to the metropolitan of Aquileia of his duty as guardian of the purity of the faith. Thirty years later still and Pope Gelasius is again exhorting to the same effect. To this universal submission of Rome to its bishop there was but one exception. The Barbarians who were now Rome's real rulers were Arians, and the popes had perforce to submit to the facts of Arian churches in their own city and an Arian bishop. To distinguish themselves from the heretical titulary they signed themselves " Bishop of the Catholic Church of Rome," or " Bishop of the Catholic Church," a style which has survived to this day as the consecrated formula for certain official acts.

These years so barren, in the West, of events of ecclesiastical importance are years in which the routine of administration becomes more and more of a tradition; and for all that the new "national" frontiers are proving more and more of a barrier to easy communication between the pope and the bishops of the more distant sees, the tradition of intervention, of appeal and judgement, never weakens, is never lost. The opportunities are fewer, the intervention less efficacious. But the Roman habit remains, nor is it ever repudiated by the churches of these countries now politically independent of that power on which, in its last years, the popes had begun to rely as on the effective agent through whom their sanctions might function.

The main centre of interest in the Church History of the fifth century is of course east of the Adriatic, in the great Christological controversies associated with the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451), and in the long drawn out social and political crisis which follows this last. [93] Syria and Egypt are, during this half-century, the scene of a never ending religious warfare that strains all the resources of the imperial government, until, to save the empire's political unity it devises a compromise between Catholics and heretics. This is the famous Henoticon of the emperor Zeno (482). Its author is the Catholic Bishop of Constantinople, Acacius. For his share in it he is excommunicated by that zealous guardian of orthodoxy Pope Felix III (483-492), and his church -- and indeed all Eastern Catholicism -- supporting him, there begins, in 484, the long Acacian Schism (448-519). The century ends with the pope in a curious isolation. Throughout the West the rulers, with one exception, are heretical Arians: and the exception is the one real Barbarian among them, and a Catholic of very recent conversion. The ruler of the East, the Roman Emperor, is a heretic too, a Monophysite; and the Catholics of the empire, thanks to Acacius, are in schism. It is at this lamentable time that the ambition and jealousy of some of the leading Roman clergy inaugurate a series of disputes which are to trouble the peace of Rome itself for nearly forty years. Before they are healed there is once more a Catholic emperor at Constantinople. The peaceful relations of the Arian king in Italy, Theodoric, with the Empire are broken. There is a kind of persecution, and the pope dies in Theodoric's prison (526), and the last great intellectual of Christian Antiquity, Boethius, is put to death at his command. The truce between Italy and the desolation, which until now has spared her, is at an end; nor will] peace return until Italy, the old Italy, is burnt and ravaged as was no other part of this unhappy empire.

The Roman Church itself had been singularly fortunate during this century of political revolution. While the empire was fast disappearing, and while everywhere in the West Catholicism was becoming subject to Arian rulers, its calm, ordered life went on with hardly any disturbance. But as the century drew to its close this happy state of things came to an end, and, thanks very largely to clerical ambition, an age of bitter dissension succeeded, marked by schisms and destined to leave to future generations more than one mischievous precedent in the matter of papal elections.

The choice of the Roman bishop, like the choice of every other bishop, had originally been the exclusive business of his own church. Disputed elections were not unknown, even in the days of the persecutions, nor scandalous attempts to enthrone a rival to the pope. It was one of the inevitable consequences of the growth of the Church after Constantine, and its new status as a body recognised and protected by the emperor, that, henceforward, such disputes passed rapidly into the political life of the city, so that the government could no longer be indifferent to the circumstance of the election. Twice in the fourth century, when the hostility of the rival parties had developed into riots and pitched battles in the streets, the government had intervened in the interests of public order. The first occasion was during the reign of the usurper Maxentius (307-312). We know almost nothing about it, except that a faction set up Heraclius in opposition to the pope, Eusebius, that the emperor banished both pope and anti- pope, that the pope died shortly afterwards, and that the Roman See then remained vacant for nearly two years.

The second occasion was the much more serious affair of Ursinus fifty years later. This dispute went back to the exile of Pope Liberius in 356 for his opposition to the Arian emperor, Constantius II. Liberius exiled, the government installed in his place Felix, his archdeacon. Three years later Liberius was allowed to return and, although the government seems to have had in mind a regime where Liberius and Felix would together rule the Roman Church, the faithful were of another mind. They rose and Felix fled. Later he returned, and made another bid for power. He was once more defeated and thenceforward lived in retirement until his death (365) when, thanks to the tact and clemency of Liberius, his followers submitted and unity was restored. Nine months later, however, before there had been time for the old bitterness to disappear, and while the expediency of Liberius' policy was still a subject of bitter disagreement, Liberius too died. The minority of intransigents whom the dead pope's mercy had scandalised, thereupon elected Ursinus. The majority elected Damasus -- a one- time supporter of Felix. The immediate sequel to the election was a siege of the basilica held by the Ursinians and a three days' riot in which many lives were lost. The government recognised Damasus. Ursinus and his supporters were banished. None the less, so long as Damasus reigned (366-384), they continued to be a menace to the peace of his Church.

Thirty years after Damasus the civil authority once more had occasion to intervene, and again on the ground of public order. This time, however, it seems to have made its own convenience the rule by which it decided which of the rivals was the legitimate bishop. Pope Zosimus, as the story of his intervention in the affair of Pelagius has shown, was as headlong in his methods as he was imperious in his tone. Long before the end of his short reign there were complaints from his clergy and petitions to the emperor. These were still undecided and Zosimus occupied with the petitioners when, somewhat unexpectedly, he died (December 27, 418). The division in the Church showed immediately. While the majority of the clergy were burying the pope at St. Laurence- outside-the-walls, his chief assistant Eulalius assembled his supporters at the Lateran and had himself elected. The next day, ignoring this coup de main, the rest of the clergy met in accordance with canonical custom, and elected the priest Boniface. The government decided for Eulalius and Boniface was banished. He appealed against the decision and, thanks to the influence of the Empress Galla Placidia, the emperor [94] now allowed that the election was doubtful and summoned both parties to Ravenna where a council would judge the matter. The council, however, could not come to a decision, and a greater council was thereupon convoked to meet at Spoleto in six months. Meanwhile neither Eulalius nor Boniface were to return to Rome. This pact Eulalius broke, in his ambition to pontificate at Easter in the Lateran basilica. He was, however, arrested and expelled while, under the protection of the soldiery, the Bishop of Spoleto, whom the emperor had appointed to administer the Roman Church until the coming council, carried out the accustomed solemnities. This raid of Eulalius ended the government's dilemma. He was simply set aside and Boniface recognised without further formality. The council at Spoleto was revoked, and the incident closed. The twelve weeks it had lasted were the sole brief interruption of a peace otherwise unbroken for a hundred and twenty years (379-498).

The disturbances that marked the end of the fifth century were of a more serious character. Their cause did not lie solely in differences of policy, but, to some extent, in the increasing attraction of the papacy as a source of wealth and power. The see had been liberally endowed by Constantine, and the social importance of the pope fifty years later had been the subject of the pagan Prefect of Rome's reply to Damasus asking when he too would become a Christian, "To-morrow -- if you will make me Bishop of Rome." Now, in 483, the Pope Simplicius -- either to check a growing custom or to provide against an abuse that threatened -- forbade and annulled in advance any alienation of church property by a future pope made as a reward to those who had hoped to elect him. The decree witnesses certainly to a decline from the primitive simplicity of the Roman clerical life.

In the two elections which followed, those of 492 and 496, the decree does not seem to have been transgressed, but when Anastasius II died, in 498, there was a double election and a division which lasted throughout the whole pontificate of the new pope Symmachus (498-514), and in the course of this schism the decree of 483 was renewed in a rather curious fashion. Anastasius II, like Liberius in the previous century, had alienated many of the clergy by his conciliatory policy towards repentant schismatics. At his death each party elected its pope, the intransigents Laurence and the late pope's supporters Symmachus. As in 418, and in 366, there were riots, battles in the streets between the two parties, sieges of basilicas, general disorder and not a few deaths. There was no longer any emperor in Italy. It fell to the Gothic king Theodoric to intervene, and Theodoric was an Arian. He decided in favour of Symmachus and Laurence made his submission.

It was, however, a submission in name alone, for Laurence turned next to direct a campaign against his rival's good name and he was so successful that Symmachus was summoned to Ravenna to clear himself, while Theodoric appointed a Visitator at Rome to rule the see until the affair was judged. It was Theodoric again who chose the judges -- a council of bishops which met in Rome in May, 500. Symmachus, after a first consent, refused to appear. The bishops, refusing to judge an absent man, wished to go home. Theodoric constrained them to remain. The deadlock was complete and it lasted for eighteen months until in October, 501, the council solemnly left the question of the pope's guilt to God. They would not condemn where they had not judged, nor would they consent to judge the accused in his absence. It was indeed "absolution by default." [95] 'The council then broke up and, to add to the trouble, Laurence reappeared, strong this time in support of Theodoric. The riots and the street fighting were resumed.

Symmachus, free from the royal council, now called his bishops together and in November, 502, solemnly protesting that his see was beyond man's judgement, he consented to clear himself of the charges made. It had been alleged that he had contravened the decree of 483. This he did not so much deny as declare the crime impossible since the decree, from the circumstances in which it was made, was null and void. Now, remodelled, he presented it to the council. It was accepted, and confirmed, too, by Theodoric. Symmachus, however, did not manage to secure more than a minority of his clergy, and despite the council of 502 the miniature civil war continued for another five years, until Theodoric abandoned Laurence, whereupon his party collapsed. Symmachus, for the remainder of his reign, was undisturbed, but it was not until his death (514) and the election of Hormisdas that the dissentients really submitted and that unity was restored.

Hormisdas (514-523) owes his place in Church History to the settlement of a greater scandal than the local dissensions in Rome. This was the schism of Acacius, which for thirty-five years had divided East and West, and given the Monophysites a whole generation in which to entrench themselves unhindered in Syria and Egypt. The religious reunion involved of course a renewal of relations between pope and emperor, between, that is to say, these Roman subjects of the Gothic king and their distant sovereign at Constantinople who was also, nominally, Theodoric s sovereign too. The schism -- which antedated Theodoric's coming into Italy -- had certainly helped to make his independence a reality. Its termination might be expected to have some reaction on his standing. Theodoric had also been intimately concerned with the affairs of the Roman Church, and it was very natural that when, in 515, the new pope first approached the emperor, the Gothic king should be consulted. He made no objection to the scheme which would bring together once more his Catholic subjects and their ancient sovereign. Perhaps the fact that the sovereign was himself as little a Catholic as Theodoric -- Monophysite where the Goth was Arian -- made it easy to acquiesce. The negotiations, however, failed.

Four years later, in very different circumstances, the matter was reopened. The Monophysite emperor was now dead. His successor was a Catholic and, a thing unknown for more than a hundred years, a Latin. This was Justin I, and to seek reconciliation with Rome was the first act of his reign. Hormisdas stated his terms -- the famous Formula of Hormisdas [96] which all the bishops of the East were to sign, renewing their belief in the traditional primacy of the Roman See -- and soon the Eastern Empire was the scene of a vigorous restoration of Catholicism directed by the imperial government. One of its features was the renewal of the old policy against religious dissidents. The remnants of the old heretical sects were persecuted, their property confiscated, and their churches handed over to the Catholics. Among these sects were the Arians.

Theodoric moved by the complaints of his co-religionists, undertook their defence. The news of the persecution, apparently, fanned into flame Theodoric's growing suspicion -- bred of the new frequency of relations since the healing of the schism -- of a plot between his Romans and the emperor. A timely denunciation led to the arrest and trial for treason of three officers of high rank, almost the last representatives in public life of the old consular stock, the Patrician Albinus, Boethius, and Symmachus his father-in-law. They were judged by the senate and unanimously judged guilty. After a longish interval they were put to death. That interval Boethius employed to write the classic ever since associated with his name, De Consolatione Philosophiae, one of the world's great books. But in Boethius the Gothic king's fury slew a much greater man than even the author of this famous meditation. Boethius was perhaps the last man in the West to possess, as his natural inheritance, the philosophic and scientific culture of classical antiquity. He was a Catholic and a theologian and, most important of all for the historian of the medieval culture, a student of Aristotle. His translations and commentaries of Aristotle were, in fact, almost the only source through which the early Middle Ages knew anything at all of the thought which its greatest mind was one day to use to make good the insufficiencies of St. Augustine and to give the Christian faith, at last, an exposition rationally adequate. [97]

Boethius and his companions were not Theodoric's only victims. To save the Arians the king despatched an embassy to Constantinople with the request that the forcibly converted should be given back their religious liberty, and that the confiscated churches should be restored to them. It was a request for the restoration of Arianism, and to lead the embassy that made it, Theodoric chose the pope. This was John I, who had succeeded Hormisdas two years before. The mission made its way to the capital and the pope, the first pope ever to set foot in Constantinople, was received with every imaginable honour. But his diplomacy gained nothing for Theodoric, and on their return, empty handed, the king threw the ambassadors into prison. There, in May, 526, the pope died of his sufferings. [98]

Three months later Theodoric, too, was dead, but not before he had made over the Catholic churches of his capital to the Arians. Also he had perpetrated the striking innovation of naming the new pope -- Felix IV, ex iussu Theodorici regis, to quote the simple phrase of the Liber Pontificalis which is all we know of the affair. With this heretic king's nomination of Felix IV in 526 there opened for the Roman See a highly disturbed ten years. Felix, pope by grace of Theodoric's innovation, proceeded, by an innovation still more striking, to nominate the cleric who was to be his own successor, giving as his reason that this method would save the expense of the inevitable disputes. He first of all made certain of the support of the new king who had succeeded Theodoric, and then named the man of his choice, the archdeacon Boniface. The senate, too, supported him, and all went well until, November 22, 530, Felix died. His procedure had been novel and it had also flagrantly broken the law of Symmachus, not yet thirty years old, which forbade such preoccupation with the succession while the pope was yet alive. The majority of the clergy, therefore, ignored the late pope's nomination and elected Dioscoros, an able Greek to- whom had been owing the final victory of Symmachus over his foes, and who had been the chief agent of the peace with the East in the time of Hormisdas. Boniface of course had his partisans. Both were consecrated, and only the sudden death of Dioscoros saved Rome from a renewal of the scenes of 499. His party were sufficiently disinterested not to give him a successor but to recognise Boniface. Once more all seemed well.

Boniface, however, was not of those whom success chastens. He treated the one-time supporters of his rival with contumely and then, but more solemnly, in full synod, imitating Felix IV, proceeded also to name his successor -- the deacon Vigilius. Some time afterwards he rescinded the decree as being beyond his powers, and then, October 17, 532, his short but not uneventful reign ended. At his death the disorders, to whose presence the unseemly transactions of the last few years point so unmistakably, broke out in all their unpleasantness: intrigues, of course, riots, and bribes, to pay which even the church plate was sold, are what the history of the vacancy has to record, and one of the chief acts of the pope who followed -- John II -- is a strong law against simony.

John II reigned for little longer than his predecessor (532-535) and his successor, Agapitus I, died abroad -- at Constantinople, where he had gone as the envoy of the Gothic king in a hopeless attempt to ward off Justinian's impending reconquest of Italy. It so happened that his arrival at Constantinople coincided with an attempt of the empress, Theodora, to install a Monophysite there as bishop. The pope was- able to defeat her and to secure the succession-for a-Catholic, whom he himself consecrated. Whence, on the pope's sudden death (536) the not unnatural scheme on the part of the empress to secure the election- as pope of one who would be her tool. Her choice fell on one of the dead pope's entourage -- the deacon Vigilius who had been Pope Boniface II's nominee in 532. Vigilius, with this illustrious patronage to support him, hurried home to find, however, the election over and-the new pope, Silverius, consecrated. It was not, of course, too late to intrigue. Silverius was given his chance of making the concessions the empress desired. He refused. The Gothic army, meanwhile, had begun the siege of Rome, and Vigilius presented to the imperial commander, Belisarius, forged letters according to which the pope promised to deliver to the enemy the gate nearest his palace of the Lateran. Silverius was summoned to the palace. An interview with Belisarius followed at which Vigilius alone assisted, and Silverius disappeared. It was announced that he had gone to be a monk and that the see was vacant. At the assembly of the clergy Belisarius presented Vigilius as the imperial candidate and he was elected. A few months later Silverius died of starvation, on the island off the Italian coast whither he had been exiled. [99]

Theodora's plan had succeeded and the precedent of imperial intervention in papal elections thus set was to hold for the next two hundred years. For in the Gothic war just beginning the empire was victorious. Its practical result was the annexation of Italy to that Eastern political system whose centre was Constantinople - - the empire that had long ceased to be Roman and was already Byzantine -- and although in the election of the pope the clergy kept their freedom, it was henceforward the practice that their choice should be confirmed by the emperor before the pope-elect was consecrated.

ST. PATRICK AND THE CONVERSION OF THE IRISH

The century in which the central government in the West collapsed, and whose close saw barbarian kings ruling in all the old provinces, was not the most favourable time for propaganda and expansion. Western Catholicism might be thought fortunate, if, amid the new chaos, it contrived to hold what it had already gained. In two respects, however, it did more than this. It converted the Irish and it produced the Benedictine rule, thereby preparing all-unconsciously two of the chief instruments for the future Catholicising of the Western peoples and for the restoration of letters and thought when, after a century yet more barbarian than the fifth, they seemed about to perish entirely from continental Europe.

The agent of the conversion of the Irish was St. Patrick-about whose life we know so much and so little. He was born, where exactly no one knows and all the authorities dispute, somewhere in Britain towards the close of the fourth century. Maximus, the commander of the legions in Britain, had lately crossed with them to the continent to dispute successfully with Gratian the sovereignty of the West, and, more recently still, he had in his turn been defeated and destroyed by Theodosius (388). These were years in which Britain was increasingly the objective of pirate raids from the coasts of Germany and from Ireland, and in one such raid Patrick, a lad of sixteen, was captured by the Irish and sold into slavery. In Ireland he remained for six years, a slave shepherding his master's sheep, and in the long nights of vigil discovering the joys of union with God in prayer. In a vision or dream he was bidden to make his escape, and after an adventurous journey across the whole length of the country, and a sea voyage on a pirate ship, he came to south-western Gaul-then in the throes of the struggle between contending Roman armies. The interval of eighteen years between this escape and the saint's return to Ireland in 432, as a bishop commissioned to preach the faith, he employed in preparation for the work to which already he knew himself divinely called. In Italy, or in Gaul, he embraced the monastic life and, like many another, wandered from one centre to another always seeking yet better teaching. Amongst other places Lerins, then in the glory of its first beginnings under St. Honoratus, almost certainly knew him, and Marmoutier too where the memory of St. Martin, dead only twenty years before, was still fresh. Later, for a long time, Patrick lived at Auxerre. It was here that he was ordained deacon and here, under its famous bishop, St. Germanus, he made his studies and perfected his ascetical equipment. He was still at Auxerre when the great moment of his life came and he was chosen-the first nominee Palladius having seemingly died unexpectedly-to lead this new venture "to the Scots who believed in Christ." [100]

That there were already Catholics in Ireland before St. Patrick's mission is certain, possibly even scattered groups of them, the fruit of commercial relations with the already evangelised Britain and Gaul. They were, however, so few as to be historically unimportant. Irish Catholicism, henceforth an astonishingly permanent feature of the life of the universal church, undoubtedly has St. Patrick for its founder. And the foundation was his personal work. [101] For the next thirty years the saint unceasingly toured the country -- preaching and instructing, establishing centres and ordaining from his converts bishops to rule them. From the beginning the new conquest was markedly monastic in its inclinations. The number of those of both sexes among the first converts who sought to follow the apostle in the perfection of his own monastic life moved his deepest admiration. In this willingness of the first neophytes to embrace a life of ordered austerity, there lay dormant a force which, in the next century, was to revolutionise the new ecclesiastical organisation and produce a most singular anomaly in Church government.

There was in Ireland nothing of that urban organisation of life which characterised the empire in which Patrick was born. There were no cities in which to place his numerous bishops. The seat of the primitive see was a kind of clerical village, founded for the purpose, where dwelt together bishop and clergy, catechists, monks and nuns, a centre of administration and of further propaganda. The distance between such settlements and monasteries of the Eastern type is not very great. In a country already enthusiastic for the life of perfection under a vow of obedience, and in an age of monastic propaganda, that distance was soon bridged. It was from Britain that the first impetus came of that new development, which, sixty years after St. Patrick's death (461), began to sweep all before it and transform the Irish Church. Here, in the dark century which followed the Roman abandonment of the province, the church was organised on strongly monastic lines and the personage to whom the new prestige of monk over cleric, of abbot over bishop, owed its being was, apparently, the British monk St. Gildas. Once this new influence had crossed the Irish Sea with the British-trained Irish monks like St. Enda and St. Finian of Clonard, the clerical settlements became monasteries and their abbots the first ecclesiastical personages of the country. The see is now lost to view behind the monastery. Jurisdiction is no longer confined to bishops, nor even to bishops who are also abbots. It comes, in the course of the sixth century, to be exercised by abbots who are not bishops at all. The line of bishops continues, but, while the government is in the hands of an abbot in priest's orders, the bishop -- one of the monks, chosen for consecration by his abbot -- confines himself to the ritual and sacramental functions proper to his order. All the great names henceforward are abbots and if, at the same time, the abbot is a bishop, it is as the abbot that he is celebrated. Even the metropolitan see fixed by St. Patrick at Armagh ceased to function as such, and the all-conquering prestige of monasticism is witnessed by descriptions of the pope as the Abbot of Rome and, even, of the devil as the Abbot of Hell.

For a hundred years after St. Patrick's death his work steadily developed, and then, the country converted and the church " monasticised," the zeal and asceticism of the Irish monks began to look overseas for new objectives. So there began that astonishing missionary odyssey of the race that is still with us. Upon Britain and Gaul and Germany and Italy they poured out, taking with them much of their own peculiar spirituality, and, through their own stark asceticism, scaring into repentance the decadent Catholics of the now barbarised Roman provinces.

The earliest influences in Irish Monasticism were, it seems agreed, Egyptian, passing to Ireland through such Western centres as Lerins. Obedience to a superior, publicly vowed for life in an explicit formula, is the foundation on which it rests. The earliest rule that has survived -- in the modern sense of a code of regulations -- is that of St. Mochuta (637). The most famous of all, that of St. Columbanus, drawn up for continental monks, reflects Irish conditions and is inspired by the Irish spirit. The-monasteries were of the utmost simplicity, collections of tiny huts of wood or stone with one or more oratories, a kitchen, and a common refectory; the whole enclosed by a wall. There were convents too for women, the oldest known of which is St. Brigid's (450-525) famous foundation at Kildare. The novices were recruited almost exclusively from the higher and middle classes. Monastic life as these Irish founders conceived it, and as their disciples practised it, was a life of continuous, incredible severity -- the " white martyrdom," it was called, in contradistinction to the more suddenly ended "red" martyrdom of persecution. The standard for all was not merely high but heroic: in Irish Monasticism there was no place for mediocrity. Obedience, of course, was absolute, nor could the monk own. There was an absolute avoidance of the other sex, and generally no communication at all with one's family. Prayer, manual work and study filled the monk's day. Prayer, the recitation day by day of the psalter interspersed with readings from Holy Scripture and the Fathers; and prayer, too, as a penance -- with peculiarities that were to mark the Irish and their converts throughout Europe, with endless prostrations and genuflections, and the Endurance of the "crossfigel," prayer, that is to say, with the hands stretched in the form of a cross: prayer too with the pray-er immersed in icy water. Manual work might be agricultural, and it took in all the crafts and the arts necessary to provide for the community's needs. Mass was celebrated, with much diversity of rite, on all Sundays and feasts, and the monks communicated.

Almost every day the monk fasted. His one meal he took about three in the afternoon, vegetables, eggs and fish. Meat he never ate. For drink there was milk, whey and a beer that is likened to whey, and water. To drink nothing but water was a special asceticism, and for the practice of it tradition honoured St. David of Wales as "the Waterman." Silence held the monastery all day. On the rare feast-days there was a milder regime. The tale of the rule's austerity ends with the mention that it allowed as little sleep as was necessary. Breaches against the rule were punished by corporal punishment liberally administered. The monk who broke the silence received six strokes, for leaving the monastery without the abbot's blessing twelve strokes, for needless gossiping conversation fifty, for speaking to a woman a hundred. This particular austerity was all the more shocking in a country where flogging had no place in the civil law. The sick of course were exempted from these rigours and tenderly cared for. The dead were buried with special office and mass for three days-suffrages repeated annually at the anniversary of their death. For the repose of their souls the brethren offered prayers and fasts and alms. By the year 600 there was a certain uniformity of observance along these lines, and we can speak of Irish Monasticism as a definite recognisable force.

The monks also studied. "To the Irish mind an illiterate monk was a contradiction in terms. [102] The summit and crown of their learning was the knowledge of Holy Scripture. It was for this that, in the conning centuries, students were to cross to Ireland in their thousands. All other study was, originally, ancillary to this. The Gospels, the epistles of St. Paul and the Psalms -- these, above all, were the objects of this devoted meditation. The monks learned the text by heart and gave themselves lovingly to the commentaries -- allegorical, in the fashion of the time. It is impossible to exaggerate their familiarity with the Bible. Its imagery, its histories, passed into the common treasury of the writers; and in one saint's life after another the re-appearance of the biblical stories in a new dress witnesses to the lore in which the hagiographers were steeped.

But the Latin bible which they studied was written in a foreign tongue. Western Catholicism was, for the first time, faced with the problem of converting a people to whom its own language was unknown. Whence in these Irish schools a preliminary course of Latin studies, the essential grammar alone at first and with it the Fathers. Then, inevitably, with the study of those last great products of the ancient-classical culture something, little by little, of that culture itself, the Latin poets and orators, the Hellenistic mathematicians and natural philosophers. The accident that for the study of Sacred Scripture -- the aliment without which no monk could live -- the Irish monk must learn the classic Latin language, and learn it, necessarily, in the masterpieces, made the Irish monk something of a cultured scholar at a time when, in the monasteries of the Latin culture itself, such scholarship was frowned on as worldly, and the masterpieces banned.

The accident had thereby another important effect. It did much to preserve for the later centuries a knowledge of the Latin language that was scientific, for it was taught and learnt in Ireland as a dead language, carefully and, if at times pedantically, correctly -- where, universally, throughout the continent, its purity was suffering violence from the tongues of the new Barbarian kings. In the religious homes of this remote isle the light still painfully burned from which, a little later, the continental church was to be re-illumined. The old native Irish culture was at first most carefully shunned as a Pagan thing. Then, as the new faith showed itself unquestionably victorious, this, too, began to influence the monks, and from the end of the sixth century a certain fusion is evident and a mixed Biblical-Classical-National culture is in process of formation. A system of orthography was devised and now, for the first time, the ancient Irish language began to be written with letters.

ST. BENEDICT AND THE HOLY RULE

In St. Patrick's boyhood the Empire still ruled all the West, even his native Britain. He had been dead nineteen years when St. Benedict of Nursia was born (480) and by that time the Empire had disappeared even from Italy. The Italy of St. Benedict was the Italy of the Ostrogoths and Theodoric, of Belisarius and Justinian's war of recovery. The seventy years or so of his life covered that period when plague and famine and war cleaved the abyss that separates Romans from Italians. He himself is one of the last of the Romans, and it may be safely said that the spirit of Rome, baptised now, is the inspiration of all that is new, revolutionary even, in his work. St. Benedict was not, however, Roman by birth, although educated in the ancient capital. He came from Nursia, which is near Spoleto, and his family were wealthy country landowners. At the age of seventeen he fled from Rome to live as a solitary, thirty miles away, in the wild fastness that is now Subiaco (c. 497). Disciples gathered round him whom finally he organised in twelve communities of twelve monks each. There were rebellions against his rule, attempts even to poison him, and twenty years or so after his first coming to Subiaco he moved to Cassinum, half way between Rome and Naples. Here he dwelt for the remaining years of his life, the years that saw the murder of Boethius, the downfall of Theodoric's kingdom and the victories of Belisarius and Narses. Here the Gothic king Totila visited him, and heard the prophecy of his fate. Here, too, most important of all, the saint wrote the Holy Rule. The date of his death is not accurately known. The year which used, traditionally, to be considered correct -- 543 -- is almost certainly wrong and the latest, well-reasoned, theory would place it between 555 and 557.

The circumstances in which the great work was composed are not known. The latest and most ingenious suggestion is that it was written, not for any particular monastery St. Benedict had founded, or was about to found, nor for any particular group to be formed in the future from his own foundations, but simply as a universal rule for monks: that it was compiled to serve for all time as the quasi-official code of monastic life and compiled at the request of some pope, most probably Hormisdas (514-523). [103] We do, however, know of St. Benedict's varied experience through twenty-five years of life as a superior of monks, and the text of the rule itself reveals him as a man thoroughly well acquainted with all the earlier literature of Monasticism. Holy Scripture, the preceding rules of the Egyptians and Eastern founders, the lives of the primitive saints, the works of the Fathers -- especially of John Cassian who, founder of the monastery at Marseilles, was to the West the greatest of all guides in this matter -- a knowledge of all these is easily traced in the rule. It is however no mere mosaic of compilation, but a work of striking originality.

Earlier rules had been little more than lists of prohibitions, or of spiritual maxims, with brief statements of practical details. Now, for the first time, there came into being an ordered practical code, covering every aspect of the monk's life, a code which itself created a way of living and would, ultimately, create a type of monk. Monastic life, so far, had been life in the tradition of some great monastic personality. Henceforward not personalities, but the universal decreed law is to form the monk, the "Holy Rule" (a new expression), the "Mistress Rule" to use the saint's own phrase. Not the abbot as such is supreme, but the rule which he administers and whence he, too, derives. It is the old Roman notion of the rule of law transferred to the service of the religious life, and thence derives one of the rule's leading characters -- it does not counsel but commands. It is objective, permanent, absolute. The superior does but apply it.

The Holy Rule-begins with a succinct survey of current monastic practice, and its decision that monks who "fight under the rule and an abbot" lead a life superior to that of the solitary who is his own lawgiver, ended for all time ill the West the prestige that so easily accrues to more picturesque methods of asceticism. The rule describes itself as "a little rule for beginners." It sets up " a school of divine service," and its whole spirit is described when it orders that "all things must be done in moderation for the sake of those who are less hardy." Again and again this experienced discretion shows itself. The first psalm of the night office is to he said slowly, in order to give the laggard a final chance. The food is to be sufficient and, since what suits one may not suit another, two dishes are always to be provided. Again, " Although we read that 'wine is not the drink of monks at all,' yet, since in our days they cannot be persuaded of this, let us at least agree not to drink to satiety, but sparingly, Because wine maketh even the wise to fall away." [104]

A sufficiency of sleep is prescribed and of clothing too. There is no such thing as corporal punishment, nor any provision for such penitential exercises as hair-shirts, spiked belts, self-inflicted scourgings. Private feats of this nature are sternly discouraged. The monks should do nothing except what the common rule of the monastery and the example of superiors exhorts. Once and for all, with this "Rule for Monks," the extravagance of the East, whose example burdened early Western Monasticism beyond what the ordinary man could bear, is set aside. In the matter of mortification, as in all else, individualism ceases to be set at a premium. Rivalry in such things is not to be tolerated. Association in a common mode of life is the way of the monk's sanctification. This twofold break, with corporal austerities and individual self-maceration, is again revolutionary.

The asceticism of the rule is none the less real. Its basis is, of course, an utter renouncement of one's own will "to walk by another's judgement and command." The routine of prayer, study and work; the frequent fasts; the perpetual abstinence from meat; -- these were the monk's aids, striving ever more earnestly to strip himself of all slavery to self, that he might give himself wholly to God. The monks "do not live by their own free will, or obey their own desires and pleasures, but walk by another's judgement and command." "It is not lawful for monks to have either their bodies or their wills at their own disposal."

The rule carefully prescribes the hours of rising and for sleep, different in winter and summer. It regulates in detail the order of the day's occupations, the different hours for the common prayer, which is "the work of God," for the reading, the manual labour, the meals. Monks who are priests are exceptional, and they are warned against temptations to pride and insubordination which may arise from the distinction.

The nature of the primitive life under the rule of St. Benedict has, in recent years, been the subject of much discussion. The first monasteries, it is suggested, would be founded by the generosity of the wealthy, endowed with lands and all that then necessarily went with the land, its villages, its slaves and its serfs (mancipia and coloni). The rule seems to suggest that agricultural work would be exceptional, a thing to which the monk ought gladly to submit if poverty or local necessity made it inevitable. Abbot Chapman even says, "the idea that monks were agriculturalists would have horrified St. Benedict." What then was the work which occupied the monks? The different arts and crafts necessary for the maintenance of the property, and the household duties: kitchen, cellar, service, garden, wood and metal work; copying, teaching the younger monks "To 'study' or to write books would be rare" [105] and St. Bede is almost the only simple monk of the early times to be an author (as he remains the one Benedictine canonised as a simple monk). "The sixth-century monk was not a scholar nor an author like some of the Maurists, nor a farm labourer like the Trappists. But he worked hard and he read enormously." [106]

The discipline is never that of a regiment, but that of an ordered Christian family whose aim is to realise the gospel ideal. The continuity of this family spirit is based upon yet another of St. Benedict's innovations, the famous vow of stability by which the monk pledges himself, not merely to live as a monk for ever, but to live as a monk for ever in the community which now receives him. This has been described as St. Benedict's most important and most characteristic contribution to Monachism in the West. Since the rule contemplates a family, the superior is primarily a father, and if the rule gives to the abbot practically unlimited discretion, it never ceases to remind him that his authority is paternal and that his pattern in its exercise is Christ Himself- Whose name indeed few pages of the rule are without. Here, again, is to be noted the trace of the saint's experienced humanity -- the abbot is bidden to consider the weaklings and not to allow the strong to set the pace of the monastery's observance, and he is warned "not to be too suspicious, or he will never be at rest." It is the monks who choose their abbot, and they choose him for life. In turn the abbot chooses his assistants -- chooses them and changes them at will.

A compassionate understanding of the weakness of human nature, a serene patience in presence of its failure, a calm confidence in the ultimate attainment of the highest ideals through the perfecting of the ordinary ways of life, an absence of exaggeration -- in the Holy Rule the Gospel finds the greatest of its human reflections. It was to produce in the ensuing centuries hundreds and thousands of communities, and the autonomous self- sufficing monasteries where they dwelt were to be, in the nature of things, centres of economic and social life no less than of religion. With their slaves, their tenants, the pilgrims whom religious motives drew, the abbeys became inevitably centres of trade, fostering the arts and crafts, with a social role like to that of the Roman cities now rapidly decaying. Along with the bishop, the abbey was to be the greatest force staving off the universal tendency to social disruption; and for the Church it was the appointed instrument of apostolic work in the age of transition from an urban to a rural economy.

Endnotes

88: For a documented account Of the Christianised West towards the end of the fourth century, cf. P. DE LABRIOLLE, Monachisme-Morale et Spiritualite La Culture Chretienne in F. & M. III (1937), 299-436. [back]

89: This is the famous Formula of Hormisdas, the basis of the reconciliation of the East six years later; cf., Vol. I, pp. 270- 1; and for the text of the Formula, DENZINGER No. 171 [back]

90: ' For which cf. Vol. I, pp. 266-71. [back]

91: cf. Vol. I, pp. 252-61 [back]

92: vid. supra., pp. 31-36 [back]

93: cf. Vol. I, pp. 236-71. [back]

94: Honorius, brother of Galla Placidia [back]

95: DUCHESNE L'Eglise au VIme siecle, p. 120 [back]

96: cf. Vol. I, pp. 270-1 [back]

97: Boethius left behind him a classification of the sciences, and a general scheme of education that was in great part to preserve the intellectual life of Europe for the next thousand years. He wrote, scientifically, on music, on grammar, on arithmetic on geometry. In theology his " opuscula set the example, which will haunt the best minds of the Middle Ages, of a theology built up scientifically, and, according to his own expression, deduced according to rules from terms previously defined", GILSON La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 150. Boethius set himself to interpret Greek philosophy to the Latin world; and, as a first means, he proposed to translate into Latin the whole of Plato and of Aristotle. This immense task he never indeed realised. But " Boethius, we may say, became through his various treatises Professor of Logic to the whole of the Middle Ages, down to the moment when, in the thirteenth century, the complete Organon of Aristotle himself (i.e. the collection of Aristotle's works on logic) was translated into Latin and directly commented", ibid. 139 for the philosophical achievement and importance of Boethius cf. ib. pp. 138-50 [back]

98: His feast as a martyr is kept on May 22; that of Boethius (St. Severinus Boethius) on Oct. 23 [back]

99: His feast as pope and martyr is kept on June 20 [back]

100: Prosper of Aquitaine [back]

101: Many questions have been revived by T. F. O'Rahilly's book The Two Patricks (Dublin, 1942), discussed at great length in Irish Historical Studies, VIII (1943) Irish Ecclesiastical Record Vol. IX (1942), and Studies Vol. XXXII (1943), by J. O'Doherty, J. Ryan, S.J., G. Murphy, E. MacNeill and F. Shaw. [back]

102: RYAN, S.J., Irish Monasticism [back]

103: CHAPMAN, J., O.S.B., St. Benedict and the Sixth Century, pp. 203-4. [back]

104: The Rule of St. Benedict, ch. xl. Trans. Cardinal Gasquet, London, 1909, p. 75 [back]

105: CHAPMAN, O.S.B., op. cit., p. 172 [back]

106: CHAPMAN, O.S.B., op. cit., p. 172 [back]