Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (11 page)

For Vigilius, however, chickens now began to come home to roost. Justinian badly needed to find ways of conciliating monophysite opinion in the empire, and in 543 his advisers came up with a scheme designed to do just that. They singled out for condemnation the writings of three long-dead writers, all of whom had supported a ‘two-nature’ Christology, and each of whom was a special target of monophysite loathing. The writings in question, known as the ‘Three Chapters’, provided Justinian with a way of distancing himself and his regime from Chalcedon, without actually repudiating the formal teaching of the Council.

With some reluctance, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the other Eastern bishops signed the condemnation of the Three Chapters. But feeling in the West was violently against anything which threatened the authority of Chalcedon, and Vigilius, whatever his private opinions, did not dare comply with the imperial demand. Here, with the imperial campaign to recapture Italy in full swing, was potential disaster. Justinian simply could not afford a pope at odds with the rest of the empire. In November 545 he had Vigilius arrested while he was presiding over the ceremonies for St Cecilia’s
Day, a major festival in Rome, and put aboard a ship for Constantinople via Sicily.

There were few tears shed for Vigilius in Rome. According to the
Liber Pontificalis
, the crowd threw stones and yelled abuse at the Pope as his ship pulled away from the dock, for they blamed the many misfortunes of the city on the sordid way in which he had become pope. He was honourably received by Justinian on his arrival in January 547, however, and once again his ambition ran away with him. After a show of firmness, he resumed communion with the ‘heretical’ Patriarch Menas, and in April 548 he published a solemn
ludicatum
, or judgement, condemning the Three Chapters, only preserving a fig-leaf of consistency by stating that this condemnation in no way impugned the authority of Chalcedon.

Reaction in the West was volcanic. Vigilius was universally denounced as a traitor to Roman orthodoxy. The bishops of Africa solemnly excommunicated him, and many of his own entourage repudiated him. In the face of this hostility, which threatened to pull the empire apart, Justinian allowed the Pope to withdraw his
ludicatum.
He extracted a secret undertaking from him, however, to renew his condemnation of the Three Chapters at an opportune moment. Pope and Emperor agreed that a council was needed to settle the whole matter, but Justinian was not a man to wait on events. In 551 he published a long edict of his own once more condemning the Chapters.

Even Vigilius’ capacity for accommodation to imperial pressure was now exhausted. He was determined to salvage whatever shreds of credibility remained to him in the West, and he organised resistance to the imperial decree. He summoned a synod of all the bishops then in Constantinople, and once more excommunicated the Patriarch. In the ensuing conflict, the Pope fled from imperial troops and sought sanctuary in the palace church of Sts Peter and Paul. Onlookers were treated to the sight of the elderly Pope clinging to the columns of the altar (which gave way and collapsed), while the palace guard attempted to drag him away by his hair, beard and clothing. The scandalised crowd forced the soldiers to leave the successor of St Peter alone. Public feeling obviously ran high, and next day the Emperor sent Belisarius himself to apologise. The Pope knew he was no longer safe, however, and, escaping by night across the Bosphorous, symbolically sought refuge in the church in which the Council of Chalcedon had met.

Had Vigilius died at this point, the scandals of his earlier career might have been forgiven him, for the sake of this heroic stand in defence of the Chalcedonian faith. Instead, he patched up a reconciliation with Justinian, and in May 553 the promised General Council, the fifth, met in Constantinople. Proceedings were dominated by imperial pressure, there were hardly any Westerners present, and no one was left in any doubt about what was required of them.

The Pope boycotted the Council, and issued a careful theological manifesto of his own, condemning some but not all of the writings included in the Three Chapters. Justinian, however, had no longer any need to walk on eggshells in respecting Western sensibilities. His troops had defeated the Gothic forces in Italy, and Rome was safe in Byzantine hands. He therefore decided to neutralise Vigilius once and for all. This he did by sending to the Council a dossier of Vigilius’ secret correspondence with him, exposing for all to read the Pope’s repeated promises to condemn the Three Chapters. Vigilius was totally discredited. The Council condemned not only the Three Chapters, but also the Pope, and Justinian formally broke off communion with Vigilius, while emphasising that it was the man Vigilius, and not the See of Rome, he was rejecting:
non sedem, sed sedentem
(‘not the see itself, but the one who sits in it’). The disgraced Pope was put under house arrest, and his clerical entourage were imprisoned or sent to the mines. Broken in spirit, he published a series of humiliating retractions, before being finally permitted to leave Constantinople in 555. He never reached Rome, however, dying from gallstones on the journey at Syracuse.

The Vigilius affair dealt a series of shattering blows to the papacy. The prestige and leadership gained for Rome over the previous century had been frittered away, the papacy’s reputation dragged through the mire. And the actions of Vigilius cast long shadows. His successor in Rome, Pelagius (556–61), was an elderly aristocrat, who had played a very creditable role in stiffening Vigilius’ theological resistance to imperial pressure over the Three Chapters. He was, however, determined to become pope by hook or by crook, and turned his coat on Vigilius’ death. To secure the Emperor’s support, he suddenly accepted the Fifth General Council’s condemnation of the Three Chapters.

Pelagius’ conversion may just possibly have been genuine – he was perhaps influenced by the fact that both a general council and the
previous Pope had ruled on the matter. His action, however, was universally denounced in the West as self-seeking treachery. His acceptance of the condemnation of the Three Chapters confirmed the failure of Vigilius, and left papal prestige in the West in ruins, especially in northern Italy and the Adriatic provinces. The sees of Milan and Aquilea, and all the bishops of Istria, broke off communion with Rome. It would be fifty years before communion was restored between Milan and Rome, and the Istrian schism was to persist for a century and a half. In Gaul, too, the Catholic bishops looked on him with suspicion, and the close links with Rome established through the papal vicariate at Aries were eroded. Fifty years later, the Irish monk Columbanus in a letter full of Irish wordplay would remind Pope Boniface IV (608–15) of the fall of Vigilius, and warn him of the need to preserve the orthodoxy of the apostolic see: ‘Watch
[vigila]
that it does not turn out for you as it did for
Vigilius
, who was not
vigilant
enough.’ Otherwise ‘the normal situation of the Church will be reversed. Your children will become the head, but you … will become the tail of the Church; therefore your judges will be those who have always preserved the Catholic faith, whoever they may be, even the youngest.’
⁵

The pontificate ofVigilius had also laid bare a fundamental difference of outlook between Emperor and Pope. In the hothouse atmosphere of Constantinople, a theology of empire had evolved which raised the person of the Emperor far above any bishop. Constantine had thought of himself as the thirteenth Apostle, and had made a bridle for his horse from of one of the nails with which Christ was crucified. The emperors of Byzantium proved themselves worthy successors of Constantine. Justinian, like Gelasius, believed that there were indeed two powers set over this world, the imperial and the pontifical, but unlike Gelasius he was certain that the senior partner in that alliance was the Emperor, not the Pope. It was the responsibility of the Emperor to see that bishops performed their share of the work. To the Emperor belonged the care of all the churches, to make and unmake bishops, to decide the bounds of orthodoxy. The Emperor, not the Pope, was God’s vicar on earth, and to him belonged the title
Kosmocrator
, lord of the world, ruling over one empire, one law, one Church. Byzantine court ceremonial emphasised the quasi-divine character of the Emperor’s office. His servants performed an act of solemn adoration, the
proskynesis
, on coming
into his presence, and his decrees were received with divine honours, even the parchment they were written on kissed with reverence as if it carried holy scripture.

The bishops of the East saw no cause to challenge any of this. They accepted the Christian vocation of the Emperor as God-given, and they saw their role as that of obedient collaborators with the Lord’s anointed. To a papacy nurtured in a high sense of apostolic dignity, and based in Rome with its civic traditions and recruitment from senatorial families, such values seemed increasingly alien. Pope and Emperor might have mutual interests, and emperors, when it suited them, might pay genuine homage to the senior Bishop and the successor of St Peter. Between the imperial vision of Byzantium, however, and the theological ethos of Rome, there was a great and growing gap. The experience of the popes as they set themselves to meet the needs of Italy and the West in the years after the imperial reconquest would see that gap widen to a gulf.

II T
HE
A
GE OF
G
REGORY THE
G
REAT

The imperial reconquest of Africa from the Vandals was achieved by Belisarius in one short and brilliant campaign launched in 533. The campaign to recover Italy from the Goths began the following year. It was to drag on for twenty years, but there would be no joy at its ending, for it left Italy depopulated and impoverished. Up to a third of the population had perished, and to the traumas of war and its attendant famines were added natural disaster, as successive waves of plague swept through the peninsula. Politically, too, the overthrow of the Gothic kingdom proved a disaster, not a liberation. The restoration of imperial rule brought no revival of the fortunes of the Roman aristocracy. Instead, every position of importance was filled by career administrators from the East: Italy became a Greek colony. It was expected, moreover, to pay handsomely for the privilege. The burden of imperial taxation proved far more oppressive, and far more efficient, than anything the Goths had imposed – Justinian’s chief tax-collector in Italy was grimly nicknamed ‘the scissor-man’. From the 540s onwards most of the surviving ancient families of Rome in a position to do so migrated east, to Constantinople, where it had become clear that all the opportunities and the fruits of empire lay.

Rome had a double share of the woes of Italy. Stripped of its
traditional ruling class, separated by a long sea journey from the court at Constantinople, it had no real place in the new imperial order. Ravenna would remain the political centre of imperial Italy, as it had been of the Gothic kingdom. There, in the basilica of San Vitale, Justinian and Theodora set up their images behind the altar, unforgettable icons of the Byzantine convergence of regal and priestly authority. There the imperial governor of Italy, the Exarch, would rule in the Emperor’s place. Rome was left to the crows and its own devices. Repeatedly besieged and plundered, it had been captured and devastated by Totila in 546. Its population, 800,000 in
AD
400, had dropped to 100,000 by
AD
500, and was down to 30,000 by the year of Totila’s sack. Pope Pelagius, a man caught, as his epitaph declared, ‘in a falling world’, was reduced to begging clothing and food from bishops in Gaul for the poor – and even the former rich – of the city. The Senate was gone, and the wars had shattered the physical glory of Rome. Many of the great aqueducts which fed the city’s baths, cisterns and fountains, and which had turned the corn-mills on the Janiculum hill, had been deliberately cut by the Goths, or stripped by thieves of their lead linings. They leaked precious water from the mountains into the surrounding plain, beginning the long transformation of the Roman Campagna into the fever-ridden swamp which it would remain till the days of Mussolini.

By the end of the sixth century, the city’s population was creeping up again, to about 90,000. Many of these, however, were refugees from a new invasion. For the imperial conquest, in destroying the Gothic occupiers, had removed the only real obstacle to a far worse scourge, the part-pagan and part-Arian Lombard tribes who descended in their tens of thousands from Austria in 568. In September 569 Milan fell to them, and their king Alboin took the title ‘Lord of Italy’. By 574 the Lombards commanded half the peninsula, and had all but cut the connections between Ravenna and Rome. They were to remain in control for the next two centuries.

This was the inheritance of Gregory the Great (590–604). Gregory, who was born some time around the year 540, was a product of the patrician aristocracy which had suffered so much from the Gothic war. The family had a distinguished tradition of service to Church and city. Gregory was the great-grandson of Pope Felix III and a relative of Pope Agapitus I. He himself, while still in his early thirties, was to serve as prefect, the highest secular office in the city, as
his brother would after him. Gregory’s father, Gordianus, was one of the Church’s regionaries, the lay officials responsible for administering the temporalities of the Roman see. In her widowhood his mother Sylvia became a nun, as did three paternal aunts. They followed a common Roman pattern of vowed life by living in retirement on their own property, where two of the aunts enjoyed visions of their papal ancestor, ‘St’ Felix, shortly before their deaths.

The retreat of the Roman aristocracy from the world into the Church was by no means confined to the womenfolk. In part it reflected the growing dominance of the Church in the life of the West. The call of monastic life, to contemplation instead of action, was powerful in a world in which all action seemed to lead to disaster, and in which the secular order seemed to be near its end. This was certainly so for Gregory: ‘the world grows old and hoary’, he was to write, ‘and hastens to approaching death’. About 575 he resigned his city office, turned his parental home on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to St Andrew, and became a monk. The family’s extensive estates in Italy and Sicily passed into the patrimony of the Roman Church, and on them too Gregory established a series of six monastic houses.