CHAPTER VI.

CATHOLICISM AND NATIONALISM IN THE NINTH CENTURY

 

THE empire of Charlemagne had included the countries which are now called France, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, together with part of northern Spain and more than half of Italy. And the conquest of Saxony carried the Frankish frontier quite up to the Elbe and the country of the Slavonic Wends. Charlemagne died in 814 and his immediate descendants had not the requisite ability for holding together countries inhabited by such different races. In 83o the empire was tottering. By 888 Italy had been severed from Frankish rule. One considerable stretch of territory round Besançon formed Burgundy, and another included the strongly Latinized country of Provence, both separated from northern France. Burgundy itself became divided into two distinct kingdoms. The rest of Charlemagne's territory broke up naturally into Western Francia and Eastern Francia, that is, France on the one hand, and on the other hand a great part of Germany, of which Mainz was nearly the centre.

In the western kingdom the language was a corrupted Latin, the Romance which was the forerunner of French. In the eastern kingdom a Teutonic language was spoken, the forerunner of German. The oaths taken at Strasbourg in 842 by the kings Louis the German and Charles the Bald, grandsons of Charlemagne, have been preserved, and form a precious monument of the two languages as they were spoken in the ninth century. From that time forward the idea of one great international empire recedes into the background and is replaced by an increased attachment to race and country.

The crumbling of the Empire and the extension of the Christian faith among the Teutonic races had profound results which can be seen at the end of the Middle Ages and lasted until the most recent times. The words 'Ultramontanism', 'Gallicanism', and 'Anglicanism' are modern enough, but they all represent principles and policies which were actively supported in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. There was the attempt to bring all Christendom under the immediate power of the Pope; there was the wide growth of racial or, more strictly speaking, territorial Churches, under powerful archbishops, and there remained in the British Isles forms of an independent Catholicism, stunted in some directions, highly developed in others, and isolated from the rest of the Christian world. With this exception and that of southern Italy and part of Spain, the whole of the Christian West was both Catholic and touched by Frankish influence. It was also Roman in doctrine and culture. But in government and discipline it was greatly affected by its surroundings, and it was impossible that questions of government should be severed from the questions as to who had the right to govern—Pope or episcopate or civil ruler.

When the Merovingian and Carolingian monarchs, and, we may add, the kings in England, allied themselves with the Church, they expected that the Church would help them. This expectation was strengthened by their knowledge that the Church owned vast and increasing landed estates. The Church had become a great landlord, and the clergy were better educated than the laity and possessed the requisite skill for deriving profit from their estates. The clergy had in principle to submit to the rules of civil justice, pay taxes, and provide military support. If they were exempted, it was due to royal favor. And no bishoprics, abbeys, and parishes could exist in troublous times without state protection. The Church needed the king and the king needed some of the wealth and intelligence of the Church.

Meanwhile the spread of Christianity among the non-Germanic races gave to the emperors, men of German race, fresh opportunities for the increase of their power, both ecclesiastical and civil. They endeavored to unite these newly converted peoples under the rule of German metropolitans. Thus the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen was founded for the Scandi­navians and the people of the Baltic provinces, that of Magde­burg for the Poles and northern Slays, that of Salzburg for the southern Slays and Avars. The union within the imperial Frankish Church and its union with the Lombard, Anglo-Saxon, and other Churches was a very real one, but it could not extinguish national aspirations and preferences. The Churches were both national and Catholic.

But Rome on her part was striving to consolidate a greater and a closer union. If the principles of St. Leo and St. Gregory the Great were to be maintained and developed, the whole Church must be highly centralized in the hands of the Pope and the national elements strictly subordinated to the Roman. Archbishops and bishops were to derive all their authority from the Pope; bishops were to be judged by him alone or by his delegates; councils were to be destitute of validity unless they had his sanction. Such was the ideal. It was an ideal which in practice was modified or abandoned. But it was destined to revive and to become eventually accepted by millions of Christian people. Its triumph was in no small degree caused by the notorious literary work known as the False Decretals, although the principles of the work had been maintained before the book appeared.

These False Decretals were published about 85o and probably written at Reims or Tours. The author, who assumed the name of Isidorus Mercator, rearranged a collection of papal decretals and canons of councils, and mixed them with fabrications which he put forward under the names of early bishops of Rome. The constant idea which underlies this strange collection is the absolute and universal supremacy of the Pope and the freedom of the bishops from the civil power, and what was equally important, from the arbitrary control of their archbishops or metropolitans. In this way the unity of the Church was to be secured in spite of the dissolution of the Empire, and the Pope was to exercise over the whole Christian world the office of guardian which had been exercised by the local Church in each Christian kingdom. This amazing document was quickly regarded as authentic and furnished the papacy with a valuable weapon of defence and aggression. The moment for using it, and the man, were both at hand.

In Nicholas I (858-867) Rome had a pontiff of unusual force of character and strong convictions, and for a short time it seemed that the papacy would exercise all the influence that it had enjoyed in the days of Gregory the Great, and even extend it. He found himself in direct conflict with opposition from the highest quarters in Church and State, and maintained his ground with unflinching determination. Lothair II, the king from which Lotharingia, now Lorraine, takes its name, repudiated his wife, Theutberga, in order to marry his mistress, Waldrada. He tried to justify his conduct by bringing the gravest accusations against his wife. The charge was unproved, but the king's action was supported by councils held at Aix-la-Chapelle and Metz and by the Archbishops of Cologne and Trier. Nicholas summoned the case to Rome, condemned his own envoys for their weakness at Metz, and turned a deaf car to the prayers of Lothair and even to the representations of Theutberga, which he suspected to have been extorted by force. Waldrada was dismissed and Lothair had to be content with his injured spouse. In this affair, with which the monarchs Louis II, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald were all more or less concerned, the Pope acted as the supreme judge of the Christian world. And his success must be reckoned as one of the greatest triumphs ever won by papal firmness and diplomacy.

Nicholas I was equally drastic in his dealings with John, Archbishop of Ravenna, who had seized properties belonging to other persons, both clerical and lay, and defied the Pope's authority. Nicholas went to Ravenna, heard the complaints of the people, and ordered that their goods should be restored.

His action was less admirable when he opposed the illustrious Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims. In 861 Hincmar, in a provincial council, suspended from episcopal functions his own suffragan, Rothad, Bishop of Soissons. Rothad, though clearly in the wrong, appealed to Rome. Nicholas availed himself of the opportunity of asserting his primacy and compelled Hincmar both to reinstate Rothad and to declare that a bishop can never be deposed without the consent of the Pope. It was during this contest that an appeal was first made to the authority of the False Decretals which by now had been brought to Rome. Nicholas also, in opposing Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and supporting the Patriarch Ignatius, asserted in the plainest terms his right to govern and to teach the whole Church, and did this at a time when Hellenism was vigorous and even brilliant. His interest in the East extended beyond the Byzantine empire, for his famous Responsio ad Bulgaros treated many delicate and serious subjects connected with the admission of a barbarous nation into the ranks of the Christian Church. In defending what he believed to be the rights of Rome, and in bravely facing kings in the name of Christ, Nicholas I must be called one of the greatest popes of the ancient undivided Church; and his qualities are thrown into higher relief by the decadence of the age which immediately followed his death.

Hincmar, who became Archbishop of Reims in 844, was for nearly forty years afterwards a tower of strength for the religion of his country. He had been an austere monk of the abbey of Saint-Denis, and as archbishop he was still austere, a vigilant shepherd of his flock. He built a cathedral and a hospital, and founded an excellent school of calligraphy. With his deans, archdeacons, and regular synods he tried to sweep away abuses, and his courageous opposition to the royal adulterer, Lothair II, was a noble protest on behalf of Christian morality. His 'Life of St. Remigius' covered Reims with legendary glories and prepared the way for the future coronation of the kings of France in a later and more lovely cathedral church. In opposing the False Decretals and in objecting to the appointment of the Archbishop of Sens as Primate of the Gauls and Vicar Apostolic of the Pope, Hincmar showed a justifiable zeal for the rights of metropolitans. But he was not more scrupulous in defending the claims of Reims than others were in defending the claims of Rome; and though he has been compared with the Bossuet of a later age, his sense of justice was not united with Bossuet's sense of truth.

The case of Hincmar serves to remind us that the power of the metropolitans, though seriously threatened by the policy and claims of Nicholas I, was at this period important and in some cases increasing. The organization of the Church was being steadily completed, a network of bishoprics was spreading in every direction, and these bishoprics were grouped in a federation of provinces, each under its own metropolitan. When a see became vacant, clergy and people asked the king for his consent to the nomination of a new bishop. Then a neighboring bishop, representing both the king and the metropolitan, arrived on the scene. Prayers and fasts were appointed, canons, archdeacons, representatives of the parochial clergy and the monks, with notable laymen, elected a new bishop, the crowd of laity giving their consent by acclamation. The bishop-elect then appeared before the king, who entrusted him with the administration of the goods of the Church if he were satisfied with the election. The people and the king being in agreement, the bishop-elect was examined by the bishops of the province convoked by the metropolitan. His character and his belief were narrowly scrutinized. If the result was satisfactory, he read a formula that contained the Creed, promised to obey his metropolitan, and was then consecrated by him. If the result was unsatisfactory, the metropolitan claimed the right to appoint a new bishop of his own choice.

It was perhaps inevitable that the king should sometimes encroach upon the rights of others, and in 818 the hierarchy tried to obtain from Charlemagne's son and successor, Louis the Pious, a formal declaration of the rights of the clergy and the people in the election of their bishops. Another difficulty arose in connection with the fact that the bishop-elect had to take an oath of fidelity to the king when the king entrusted him with the temporal property of his see. Had the king only the right to protect, or also the right to dispose of, this ecclesiastical property? The question had hardly become a thorny question as yet, but it was destined to grow into one of serious magnitude in the eleventh century, and it left its mark upon the Church of England at the period of the Reformation.

In addition to questions concerned with the Roman primacy, the ninth century witnessed theological discussions of great interest and importance.

Paschasius Radbertus was for a time Abbot of Corbie near Amiens about 85o and died there about 870. He had an extensive knowledge of Greek theology as well as of the prevalent Augustinianism. He wrote commentaries on St. Matthew and the Lamentations of Jeremiah. But his most famous work was a treatise 'On the Body and the Blood of the Lord'. Paschasius repeats the teaching of St. Chrysostom to the effect that the centre of the sacrificial worship of Christians is in heaven, and he teaches that when the bread and wine are made to be the body and blood of Christ by the power of the Lord and of the Holy Ghost, they are uplifted to the heavenly sphere, offered by Christ as His own sacrifice, and given by Him to the communicants as supernatural food. While he maintains the spiritual character of the presence of Christ, he insists that the sacramental body of Christ is the very body born of Mary, and that when the bread and wine are consecrated they are wholly and substantially converted into the body and blood of Christ.

The doctrine that the Eucharist is the same body as that which was born of the Virgin and suffered on the Cross, was opposed by Rabanus Maurus, who became Archbishop of Mainz in 847. But the difference between the two writers does not appear to be very deep. Rabanus Maurus held, like Paschasius, that the elements are really and spiritually changed into Christ's flesh and blood, but he desired to emphasize the difference between a natural and a supernatural presence, and supposed that the language of Paschasius did not do justice to that difference.

Ratramnus (d. 868), a monk of Corbie like Paschasius, was also deeply involved in the Eucharistic controversy. His 'Book on the Body and Blood of the Lord' is of special interest to English students. It was certainly read in England in the tenth century, as it is reproduced in the teaching of Elfric, who became Abbot of Eynsham near Oxford in 1005. It was highly esteemed by Ridley and therefore had no little influence upon the course of the Reformation in this country. It is not easily understood, and cannot be definitely claimed for the side of Calvin, still less of Zwingli. But Ratramnus unquestionably teaches that the substances of bread and wine are after consecration what they were before, and that the body and blood of Christ are not present in such a way that they can be discerned by the bodily senses, but 'faith receives what it believes', and this is 'the substance of eternal life' and 'the power of the divine Word'.

Another controversy which also foreshadowed those of the sixteenth century was the dispute about predestination. Gottschalk, a monk of Orbais, reminds us of Luther. He was of a violent disposition and felt ill at ease under the yoke of monastic life. He was an ardent student of St. Augustine, and embraced his sternest teaching with regard to the weakness of the human will, to the efficacy of grace, and to predestination. Like the continental reformers, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, he went beyond St. Augustine by teaching that God has predestined some men to damnation. A council held at Kiersy in 849 declared him to be an incorrigible heretic and condemned him to be publicly beaten. He was shut up in a monastery and Hincmar tried to persuade him to recant. He continued to write to his friends, and the controversy became more serious than ever. At last Pope Nicholas I took up the case and summoned Hincmar, who had written against Gottschalk, to a council at Metz, 863. Hincmar did not appear and nothing came of the Pope's action. Gottschalk remained inflexible, and was imprisoned in the monastery of Hautvillers in the diocese of Reims. He died about 868 and was denied the sacraments and even burial in consecrated ground.

John Scotus Erigena, an Irishman, was the most audacious and original thinker of the ninth century. At the request of Hincmar he wrote a tract 'On Predestination' to refute the views of Gottschalk. In this tract he maintained that God could not predestinate anything that is evil, since evil is only the negation of good and therefore lies outside the knowledge of God; otherwise God would be the cause of evil. This embarrassing theory was condemned as 'Scots porridge' at a council of Valence in 855. The next proof of his activity was the translation of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite into Latin at the request of King Charles the Bald. His most important work was not a translation but a work of five books entitled 'On the Division of Nature'. It is an attempt to erect a gigantic philosophic system of a Neoplatonic type. The vague and fervent teaching of Dionysius is put into a cool and definite form with the help of Aristotle. God transcends all human conceptions and cate­gories to such a degree that whatever quality may be asserted of Him may also be denied. The Persons of the Trinity are relative names and the interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity is to the effect that the Father wills, the Son creates, the Spirit makes perfect. Our soul reproduces the Trinity. Creation is a necessary revelation of God, the world proceeding from God through His creative ideas. The accounts of the Creation and the Fall in Genesis are allegorical. But we see God revealed in creation, the Father in the being of all things, the Son or Word in the realm of ideas, and the Spirit in the life which gives individuality and at the last draws all things back to the divine unity. Erigena finds it very difficult to explain the fact of sin. He holds that it is the result of a man thinking that something is good which is not really good, but he excludes it from God's knowledge on the ground that with God to know is to be. If God knew evil, He would be evil. He teaches that at last even the devils will be saved, and all things will rest in God, deified with a knowledge of God which is identical with resumption into the divine essence. This mixture of Platonism and Christianity avowedly placed reason above authority in religion, reason being God thinking in man, and religion one phase of that rational life which is God. For a long time these theories were tolerated, but in 1225 his books 'On the Division of Nature' were suppressed by Pope Honorius III. According to William of Malmesbury, John came to England at the invitation of King Alfred, but there is no evidence to substantiate the tradition. He died about 882, having introduced to the West the mystical and theosophical learning of the East.

The age of the Emperor Louis the Pious and Pope Nicholas I witnessed a fine attempt to bring the Gospel to the races of Scandinavia.

Charlemagne had not entertained the idea of introducing Christianity among the Danes, and in 814 the only two churches which existed in Holstein were at Meldorf and Hamburg. But in 822 Ebo, Archbishop of Reims, after receiving full authority from Louis the Pious and Pope Paschal I, proceeded to Mansterdorf near Itzehoe to act as ambassador and legate. The next year he returned home with a few young Jutes to be educated as teachers of their own countrymen. Shortly afterwards Harald, who claimed the Danish kingdom, was hard pressed by his foes and determined to seek the aid of the Franks and to renounce all connection with paganism. In 826 he arrived with his wife and child at Mainz, where he was met by Louis and received baptism with much attendant pomp. Soon after his return he was followed by Ansgar, a young Frankish monk, who had been educated at the monastery of Old Corbie and was made superior of the monastery of New Corbie in 822. He was accompanied on his missionary journey by a brother monk named Autbert. They founded a school on the frontiers of Slesvig, bought and educated Danish slave youths, and preached in the neighboring country. The next year Harald was driven out of the country and took refuge in the territory of Louis. The two missionaries also left their mission and Autbert died at Corbie. Ansgar, however, went with several companions to Sweden and arrived there after being plundered by Norse pirates. He was well received by King Bjorn, and a church and school were built at Birca. He went back to the Frankish coast to secure a better basis for his work, which was rendered easier by the peace made between the emperor and the Danes in 831. In 834 Louis and Pope Gregory IV appointed Ansgar Archbishop of Hamburg and endowed the new see with the revenues of the rich abbey of Turholt in Flanders. Ansgar, who was to devote himself to work in the North, built a cathedral and a monastery, bought Danish boys to educate for the ministry, and sent Gauzbert and other missionaries to the Swedes.

Then disaster followed disaster. Louis the Pious died in 840, Harald apostatized, the pagan Swedes drove out Gauzbert and his companions, and in 845 the Norse fell upon Hamburg and obliterated church, monastery, and library. To crown all these misfortunes, Charles the Bald, the son of Louis, seized the abbey of Turholt and presented it to a favorite. Ansgar was now a homeless beggar, and when he asked shelter from Leuterich, Bishop of Bremen, he was turned from the door. But he was not without friends. A nobleman's widow gave him a lodging, and when Leuterich died, in 846, King Louis the German, grand­son of Charlemagne, appointed him to the bishopric of Bremen, which Pope Nicholas I united with that of Hamburg and made independent of Cologne. The attempts made to gather together the fragments of the Swedish mission, broken up by Gauzbert's expulsion, failed until Ansgar went to Sweden himself and continued to work there until his death, in 865. He had in the meantime gained a hearing for Christianity in Denmark, being on good terms first with King Honk and afterwards with his successor, Honk the Younger. The outward results of his labor were not very great. He left a church in Slesvig and Ripen (Ribe), and one at Birca, gained some adherents among the nobles and trading classes, and trained a few young Danes for the priesthood. Norway remained untouched, and though his work was continued by his disciple and biographer Rimbert, it was before long shattered by the raids of the vikings. In the next century Archbishop Unni of Bremen (d. 936) resumed mission work in Denmark and Sweden, and definite progress was made under the English priests who arrived there early in the eleventh century. The story of the spread of Christianity in Scandinavia is a story of many perils and vicissitudes; and though St. Ansgar effected little, and never won the crown of martyrdom which he desired, his hard and self-sacrificing life is one of the many beacon-fires of a troubled age.

The growing intellectual life of the Western nations, and their growing national consciousness, lead us to reflect upon certain contrasts between Eastern and Western Christendom in the period before their disruption in 1054.

For a long time in the Eastern world the Gospel was first preached among civilized nations. Most of the early missionaries spoke Greek. But it was never probable that the Egyptians, Syrians, and Armenians would be completely Hellenized, for they had a national culture of their own, and the great majority of them left the Orthodox Church to go their own way. The conversion of the semi-barbarous Slavs changed the situation. It sounded the knell of a Greek numerical predominance, but it prepared for the extension of Greek worship and Greek theology. Oriental Christian belief, persecuted and crushed as it is today, remains in a condition similar to that which it occupied when the Russians became Christian. Since that great event such protests as have been made against the Patriarch of Constantinople have seldom been made against his doctrine. The heretics made their protests long before the eleventh century; whereas the orthodox accept his doctrine even if they dislike his methods. The Bulgarian in Sofia and the Arab Christian in Damascus have little love for Greek politicians, but they do not dispute with the Greek patriarch about creeds and catechisms.

If we turn to the West, we observe that in the fourth century, when the Egyptians, Syrians, and a large proportion of the Armenians were still orthodox as well as civilized, almost the only Teutonic Christians were both heretical and semi-barbarous. And when these races, from about AD 500 onwards, began to accept Catholic Christianity, the organization of the Church was complete, and the nets of that organization were so widely flung that they all were caught in its meshes. In some cases the different tribes were scattered over districts where Roman cities were still the centers of Christian life, where bishops and people spoke a debased Latin, and where the better educated could read Cicero and the Vulgate. The Latin language proved a powerful connecting link between different peoples. The Romance of France and the dialects spoken in Germany were far behind English as a language of culture in the eighth century. There was therefore all the more need for a common continental language, and this language could only be Latin, which was used in both church and school.

This unity of organization and culture under the authority of Rome became menaced when the kings of the newly converted races became Catholic. So long as they remained Arian or heathen, they might be indifferent towards the internal affairs of the Church and the spiritual claims of bishops and popes over their subjects. But when they became Catholics, they regarded themselves as 'the Lord's anointed', and wished to limit the influence of the Pope in their respective dominions. A well-known instance in the seventh century is the opposition of King Egfrid and his Witan to the Pope's division of the dioceses in the north of England. The national feeling was also stimulated by vigorous bishops like Hincmar, men who governed dioceses incomparably larger than the primitive dioceses of Italy and Greece, and often occupied a leading place in the councils of the realm.

In the eighth century this tendency towards decentralization began to be checked by the pressure of a new bond of unity.

The protection exercised over the Church by Pepin 'the Short', Charlemagne, and Louis the Pious seemed likely to secure a union between Church and State similar to that which had existed in the days of Constantine and Theodosius, the Church being at one with herself and yet dependent upon the emperor. The dependence might even have caused the Church to lose her balance. For Rome was not what Rome had been. The rise of the northern nations and the spread of Islam along the shores of the Mediterranean left Rome almost on the circumference of Christian civilization. In 846 a band of Saracen pirates landed on the right bank of the Tiber, and, although they were unable to break through the walls of Rome, they sacked the basilica of St. Peter and appear to have escaped unmolested with their valuable spoils. At the end of the ninth century Rome appeared to be sinking into the condition of a merely provincial Church. With the fall of the Carolingian dynasty the Church once more began to vary in accordance with national characteristics.

The result of the Carolingian settlement was nevertheless profound. The Emperor secured the right of intervening in papal elections, a right which was exercised in 1903 when the Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria intervened at the time of the election of Pope Pius X. On the other hand, the Pope crowned the Emperor, and in the Middle Ages it was naturally believed that the imperial crown could only be granted by the Pope. The chief of bishops and the chief of kings came to be the two pivots on which the history of Europe turned.

The worship and discipline of the Church were also affected. The primitive Roman Apostles’ Creed, modified in countries to the north of Rome, was adopted by the Roman Church in this modified form before AD 700, and was promulgated throughout the West by Boniface and other Benedictine missionaries. The old Latin mass books of Gaul were supplanted by the Roman rite of St. Gregory, though the old rite of Spain still lingers at Toledo. On the other hand, the Roman rite, austere, dignified, and biblical, soon absorbed an abundance of northern elements and lost much of its simplicity. From remote ages the Roman has been conservative in worship. In heathen days he preserved more faithfully than other Aryans the rites of prehistoric times; and within the Christian, as within the pagan period, it has usually happened that everything that is least primitive in Roman worship has been gradually imported into Rome from other and distant regions.

The process of blending different rites had the approval of Charlemagne himself. He had, it has been well said, 'the ruler's instinct'. He had the wisdom to see that the purely Roman missal would seem severe to more sensitive and emotional natures. He therefore promptly caused it to be enriched with a supplement of additions selected from the liturgical books already in use in France. It is probable, and more than probable, that Alcuin was the compiler of this supplement to the Gregorian missal, and that an Englishman was therefore in a large measure responsible for the richness and exuberance of the medieval and modern Roman rite. The process did not end with Charlemagne. During the ninth century the study of sacred rites became a fashionable pursuit in France. Not only Charlemagne himself, but his son also, Louis the Pious, and his grandson, Charles the Bald, were deeply interested in this branch of theological science. Liturgiology was the pastime of emperors.