BOOK III.

FROM THE DEATH OF THE EMPEROR THEODOSIUS I TO THE PONTIFICATE OF GREGORY THE GREAT.A.D. 395-590.

 

CHAPTER VII.

SEMIPELAGIANISM.—MISSIONS.—DECLINE OF ARIANISM IN THE WEST.

 

It has been mentioned that the Semipelagian opinions became popular in Gaul, and that Augustine was induced by Prosper of Aquitaine and Hilary to write against them. The controversy was kept up with great zeal and activity by Prosper himself, who attacked the “Massilians” not only in treatises of the usual form, but in a poem of a thousand lines and in epigrams. In the year after Augustine’s death, Prosper and Hilary went to Rome for the purpose of soliciting Celestine to issue a condemnation of Semipelagianism; and, in consequence of this application, the bishop wrote a letter to his Gaulish brethren, in which, while he highly eulogized Augustine, he censured such persons as pursued unprofitable inquiries and introduced novelties of doctrine. These expressions, however, were capable of more than one application, and the Semipelagians did not fail to turn them against the advocates of the Augustinian system. The abbey of Lerins, founded in the beginning of the fifth century by Honoratus, afterwards archbishop of Arles, was a chief stronghold of Semipelagianism. Vincent, a celebrated monk of that society, was perhaps the author of a direct attack on the doctrines of Augustine; it has even been supposed that his Commonitory, which came to be regarded as the very rule of orthodoxy, was written with a covert intention of proscribing them by its well-known tests of truth—antiquity, universality, and consent.

Having failed to effect the suppression of Semipelagianism by authority, Prosper continued to combat it vigorously with his pen. Both he and those who followed him on the same side were careful to mitigate such parts of the Augustinian system as might seem to be subversive of the obligation to religious living, or inconsistent with the ideas of the divine love and justice. Some of these points Prosper attempted to exempt from discussion by referring them to the secret things of God. “God (he said) has chosen the whole world out of the whole world, and all men are adopted to be His children out of all mankind”. Every one who is rightly baptized receives forgiveness both of original and of actual sin; if such persons afterwards fall away to unbelief or ungodliness, they are condemned, not for their original sin, but for their own misdeeds—not through an irrespective reprobation, but because God foresaw that they would abuse their free-will. Predestination relates to such things only as are of God, and sin is not among these; we must not therefore say that He predestines to sin, but only that He predestines to punishment.

Semipelagianism still continued to prevail in Gaul. One of its most eminent champions was Faustus, a native either of Britain or of Brittany, who at the date of Vincent’s Commonitory was abbot of Lerins, and in 456 was raised to the bishopric of Riez. He was famous for strictness of life, and for a power of eloquence which his contemporary Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont, extols in hyperbolical terms. After having vainly endeavoured to convince a presbyter named Lucidus, who held extreme predestinarian opinions, Faustus, about the year 475, brought him before a synod held at Arles, where Lucidus was obliged to retract many of his doctrines, and to acknowledge that both grace and human exertion are requisite for obedience to the Divine will. The synod commissioned Faustus to write a confutation of the errors of Lucidus and his party; and another synod, held at Lyons, requested him to make some additions to the work, which thus had an appearance of sanction from the church of Gaul. It opens with a refutation of the grosser tenets of Pelagianism, and then attacks the Augustinian system, which the writer charges with Antinomianism. Faustus, who had been banished by the Arian Euric, in 481, but recovered his see on that prince's death, three years later, died about 491-3, at a very advanced age. His memory was celebrated in his own country as that of a saint; but Avitus, bishop of Vienne, Caesarius, bishop of Arles, and Claudianus Mamertus, a presbyter of that city, wrote against his opinions; and soon after his death his writings were condemned by Pope Gelasius in a decretal epistle, which is memorable as containing the earliest Roman catalogue of forbidden books. The treatise of Faustus On Grace and Free-will, after a time found its way to Constantinople, where it excited much commotion among the brotherhood of Scythian monks.

These were already in correspondence with Caesarius, who held the see of Arles from 501 to 542, and was revered for the wisdom and charity which he displayed in the trying circumstances of his age and country, procured a condemnation of the Semipelagian tenets by the Gaulish bishops in a synod held at Orange in 529. In this judgment all that might startle or shock in the predestinarian doctrine was carefully avoided. The opinion of a predestination to sin and condemnation was rejected with abhorrence, and with the expression of a doubt whether it were really entertained by any one; while it was laid down that sufficient grace is bestowed on all the baptized—a doctrine incompatible with the notions of irresistible grace and absolute decrees. The decisions of Orange were soon after affirmed by another council at Valence, and in the year following they were ratified by Pope Boniface II. Thus, in so far as formal condemnation could reach, Semipelagianism was suppressed in the west. But the Conferences of its founder maintained their popularity, especially in the monasteries, and the opinions of Cassian were often really held where those of Augustine were professed.

The reigns of Justin the elder and Justinian witnessed the conversion of the Lazi, in Colchis, who thereupon forsook the Persian for the Roman alliance; of the Abasgi, near Mount Caucasus; and of the fierce nation of the Heruli, who had been allowed to cross the Danube in the time of Anastasius. The wild tribes about the river Don were also visited by missionaries. A powerful impression was made on the nomads of the east by Symeon the stylite and other ascetics whom they met with in the course of their wandering life; one Saracen chief was not only converted, but, having exchanged in baptism the name of Aspebethos for that of Peter, was consecrated to exercise a superintendence over his own and other tribes, under the title of “Bishop of the Camps”, and sat in the general council of Ephesus.

In some quarters the Catholics contended with the new sects in missionary exertion; but in the remoter regions the heretics were the more active. The monophysites, in addition to their gains in countries where orthodox Christianity had already been planted, converted Nubia from heathenism; while the preachers of Nestorianism found out new fields for their labour in the east. In the sixth century the Nestorian school of Nisibis was the only regular institution for the training of clergy. The sectaries who had been driven from the empire strengthened the kingdom of Persia by their immigration; their religious hostility to the Christianity of the emperors secured for them the countenance of the Persian monarchs; and Nestorianism was established as the only form of Christianity to be tolerated in Persia—thousands of Catholics and monophysites being slain for refusing to conform to it. Persian missionaries penetrated into the heart of Asia, and even into China, from which country two of them, in the reign of Justinian, introduced the silkworm into the Greek empire. Cosmas, a Nestorian of Egypt—originally a merchant and afterwards a monk, who from his expeditions into the east is known, by the name of Indicopleustes (the Indian voyager),—found Christians of his own communion, with bishops and clergy from Persia, in Ceylon, in Malabar, and elsewhere on the Indian coasts. As to Ceylon, however, he expressly states that the natives and their kings were still heathens; and on the whole it would seem that the Christianity of those regions extended as yet but little beyond the pale of the Persian commercial settlements.

There were religious wars between the Abyssinians and the Homerites or Hamyarites, a people of southern Arabia, who professed the Jewish faith; but the accounts of these wars are much embarrassed by inconsistencies and other difficulties.

In the west, the conquests of the Franks extended Christianity wherever they penetrated, and revived that which had been before planted in some districts—as, for example, along the course of the Rhine.

The religion of the western converts was too generally tainted both by their own barbarism and by the corruption of the worn-out nations with whose civilization they were brought into contact. Much of heathen superstition lingered in combination with Christianity; Gregory of Tours reports it as a popular saying in Spain, that “it is no harm if one who has to pass between heathen altars and God’s church should pay his respects to both”. Much vice was tolerated by the clergy, who, although their condition was highly prosperous, did not as yet feel themselves strong enough to check the passions of the great and powerful. The fate of Praetextatus, bishop of Rouen, who, in consequence of having offended the notorious Queen Fredegund, was stabbed in his cathedral at high mass on Easter-day, was a warning to such of his brethren as might be inclined to take a bolder line. The depravity of the Frankish princes, in particular, was frightful—perhaps even unparalleled in the records of history; and the tone which the bishop of Tours, although himself a good and pious man, employs in speaking of such characters, affords abundant proof that his own ideas were far from any high Christian standard. The evangelical principle of forgiveness for sin was abused to sanction licentiousness and atrocity. Fredegund, in instigating two of her servants to assassinate Sigebert, assured them that, if they lived, she would highly honour them, but if they perished in their attempt, she would give largely in alms for their souls; murderers were allowed to take sanctuary in churches, and might not be dragged out without an oath for the safety of their lives. Pretended miracles were wrought in vast numbers for the purpose of imposing on the credulous. Among the clergy themselves, from the bishops downwards, there was much of vice and even of crime; Fredegund, in one of her many murders, found two ecclesiastics to act for hire as the assassins. There was a natural tendency to rely on mere rites and outward pomp of worship; yet good men, such as Caesarius of Arles, were never wanting to assert the necessity of a really living faith and a thoroughly religious practice; and throughout all the evils of the time the beneficial effects of the gospel are to be traced in humane and civilizing legislation.

During the reign of Justinian’s successor, Justin II, Alboin, king of the Lombards, descended on Italy (563) with a host of adventurers collected from many nations and professing a variety of religions—heathenism, Arianism, and orthodox Christianity. The exarch Narses, who had been affronted by the emperor and superseded in his government, is supposed to have shared in inviting the Lombards, and, although he returned to his allegiance, death soon removed him from the path of the invaders. Justin was obliged to yield to them the north of Italy and a part of the centre; Pavia became the Lombard capital and about twenty years later the duchy of Beneventum was added to their territories. Arianism, which had been extirpated from Italy by the arms of Belisarius and Narses, was again introduced by the new conquerors : and it was among them that it remained latest as a national faith.

In Gaul, Arianism had given way to the progress of the Frankish power, which everywhere enforced orthodoxy by the sword. Clovis, as we have seen, made a zeal against heresy the pretext for his invasion of the Visigothic kingdom; and we are told that, when the walls of Angouleme had fallen down before him by miracle, he butchered the Gothic inhabitants for their misbelief. Sigismund, king of the Burgundians, who had become a convert to the catholic doctrine before his accession in 517, endeavoured, under the prudent guidance of Avitus, bishop of Vienne, to draw his subjects over after him, but among the Burgundians, as elsewhere, it was by the victory of the Franks that Arianism was suppressed. When the Gothic garrisons were withdrawn from the north of the Alps to encounter Belisarius in Italy, the Goths ceded Provence to the Franks; the cession was afterwards confirmed by Justinian, and thus the heresy was expelled from that region.

In Spain, the Suevi, under Theodomir, returned to the catholic faith about a century from the time when their forefathers abandoned it. Amalaric, grandson of the great Theodoric, who had succeeded to the Visigothic dominions in Spain, and in Gaul westward of the Rhone, married Clotilda, a daughter of Clovis, and endeavoured, by very violent means, to convert her to Arianism. Her brother Childebert, roused to indignation by receiving from her a handkerchief stained with her blood, as a proof of the treatment to which she was subjected by her husband, made war on Amalaric, defeated, and killed him. Under the next king of the Visigoths, Theudis, the Catholics enjoyed a free toleration, with the liberty of holding synods; and the same policy was followed by his successors, until the latter part of Leovigild’s reign. On the marriage of Hermenegild, son of this prince, with a daughter of Sigebert, king of the Austrasian Franks, the Gothic queen, Goswintha, who was grandmother to the young princess as well as step­mother to her husband, exercised great cruelty towards her in the attempt to seduce her from the orthodox faith. Hermenegild was banished from the court, and was soon after induced, by the persuasions of his wife, and of Leander, bishop of Seville, to become a catholic—a step which offended Leovigild, not only on religious grounds, but because there was room for apprehending political danger from the connexion into which the prince was thus brought with the catholic portion of his father's subjects. Hermenegild was consequently deprived of his share in the government. Supported by foreign princes of his new communion, he rebelled against his father; but the rebellion was suppressed, and Hermenegild, as he firmly refused to return to Arianism, and gave Leovigild reason to apprehend a renewal of his insurrection, was put to death. Leovigild had been provoked by his son's conduct to exercise severities against the Catholics. One of their bishops had apostatized, and had submitted to rebaptism; but the king, wishing to facilitate conversion to his heresy, had prevailed on an Arian council to acknowledge the baptism of the church. After the death of Hermenegild, he subdued the Suevi and united their kingdom to his own ; and both in the old and in the new portions of his dominions the Catholics were under persecution until his death in 586. His son Recared, who then succeeded to the throne, avowed himself a catholic—the persuasives to his change of belief being, as in many other cases of this age, partly of a miraculous kind. Conspiracies were set on foot against him by the widowed queen Goswintha, and others of the Arian party; but he succeeded in suppressing them, and a synod of seventy bishops, held at Toledo in 589, established the catholic faith among his people. Thus, at the end of the period embraced in this book, the Lombards were the only nation who continued to adhere to Arianism.

While the British church was pent up in the mountains, and Saxon heathenism overspread the rest of the land, the church of Ireland was in a very flourishing condition. Columba, an Irish abbot of royal descent, after having founded monasteries in the north of Ireland, set forth with twelve companions in the year 563,—in obedience (it is said) to the command of a hermit, who had charged him to expiate by a life of exile and of missionary labour the part which he had taken in the sanguinary feuds of his countrymen. It has been supposed that he was invited into Scotland by Conall, king of the Dalriads, who was his kinsman; and in addition to gaining an influence over that prince and his successor Aidan, whose title he confirmed by a solemn coronation, he converted Brud, king of the northern Picts, whom he visited at his castle near Inverness. For thirty-four years Columba laboured indefatigably, both on the mainland and in the Hebrides, occasionally revisiting his native land, which he had never ceased to regard with passionate regret. His chief residence was in the island of Hy (afterwards called from him Icolumbkille or Iona), where he established a monastery which was long famous as a seat of religion and learning, and became the nursery of clergy whose labours extended not only over Scotland, but far into the southern division of Britain, and northwards to the Orkneys and the islands beyond—perhaps even to Iceland. The abbots of Hy were at the head of a great society which had its monasteries both in Scotland and in Ireland; and out of respect for the memory of the founder, who had himself been only a presbyter, even the bishops of the district, by what Bede terms an “unusual arrangement”, were in some respects subject to them. Columba died at the age of seventy-six, in 597, the same year in which the Roman mission for the conversion of the English landed in the Isle of Thanet.

The British churches, in consequence of their remoteness and of the want of communication with Rome, retained some peculiarities which afterwards became subjects of controversy. Among these was the time of observing Easter; but although, like the quartodecimans of Asia, the Britons professed to derive their practice from St. John, they were not quartodecimans, inasmuch as they always celebrated the festival on a Sunday. British bishops had sat (as we have seen) in the council of Arles, and had doubtless concurred in its approval of the Roman rule as to Easter. Constantine, in his letter written after the Nicene council, had spoken of “the Britains” as agreeing with other countries in the paschal reckoning of Rome; and it is recorded that in the year 453 the British church conformed to an order of Leo the Great on this subject. It would seem, in truth, that the difference which is found at a somewhat later time between the British and the Roman usages arose from an adherence of the British to the earlier cycle of the Roman church itself, which had in the meantime been superseded at Rome by other and more accurate calculations.