Here is a chapter from Johan Dollinger's book, containing a compilation of how forged documents forged the apostate papacy of the second millennium. Dollinger became an Old Catholic (heretic) in light of his research, and in response to anti-Council Vatican I. While some details within these forged documents may be true, there is no doubt of their fraudulent nature among scholars. Many popes were nevertheless deceived by the early forgeries, as well. The papacy, as modern Catholics understand it, is simply not what Christ planned for His Church.
Matt. 20:25-27 But Jesus called them to Him, and said: You know that the princes of the Gentiles lord it over them; and they that are the greater, exercise power upon them. It shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be the greater among you, let him be your minister. And he that will be first among you, shall be your servant. Even as the Son of man is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a redemption for many.
Pope St. Gregory the Great, Letter 33, To Mauricius Augustus: "Now I confidently say that whosoever calls himself, or desires to be called, Universal Priest, is in his elation the precursor of Antichrist, because he proudly puts himself above all others."
The Pope and the Council, Johan Dollinger, 1869
https://archive.org/details/popecouncil00dl/page/94/mode/2up
Ch. VII Forgeries, pp. 94-150
At the beginning of the ninth century no change had taken place in the constitution of the Church as we have described it, and especially none as to the authority for deciding matters of faith. When the Frankish bishops came to Leo III, he assured them that, far from setting himself above the Fathers of the Council in 381, who made the additions to the Nicene Creed, he did not venture to put himself on a par with them, and therefore refused to sanction the interpolation of Filioque into the Creed. [1]
But in the middle of that century, about 845, arose the huge fabrication of the Isidorian decretals, which had results far beyond what its author contemplated, and gradually, but surely, changed the whole constitution and government of the Church. It would be difficult to find in all history a second instance of so successful, and yet so clumsy a forgery. For three centuries past it has been exposed, yet the principles it introduced and brought into practice have taken such deep root in the soil of the Church, and have so grown into her life, that the exposure of the fraud has produced no result in shaking the dominant system.
About a hundred pretended decrees of the earliest Popes, together with certain spurious writings of other Church dignitaries and acts of Synods, were then fabricated in the west of Gaul, and eagerly seized upon by Pope Nicolas I at Rome, to be used as genuine documents in support of the new claims put forward by himself and his successors. The immediate object of the compiler of this forgery was to protect bishops against their metropolitans and other authorities, so as to secure absolute impunity, and the exclusion of all influence of the secular power. This end was to be gained through such an immense extension of the Papal power, that, as these principles gradually penetrated the Church, and were followed out into their consequences, she necessarily assumed the form of an absolute monarchy subjected to the arbitrary power of a single individual, and the foundation of the edifice of Papal Infallibility was already laid; first, by the principle that the decrees of every Council require Papal confirmation; secondly, by the assertion that the fulness of power, even in matters of faith, resides in the Pope alone, who is bishop of the universal Church, while the other bishops are his servants.
Now, if the Pope is really the bishop of the whole Church, so that every other bishop is his servant, he, who is the sole and legitimate mouth of the Church, ought to be infallible. If the decrees of Councils are invalid without Papal confirmation, the divine attestation of a doctrine undeniably rests in the last resort on the word of one man, and the notion of the absolute power of that one man over the whole Church includes that of his infallibility, as the shell contains the kernel. With perfect consistency, therefore, the pseudo-Isidore makes his early Popes say: "The Roman Church remains to the end free from stain of heresy." [2]
Formerly all learned students of ecclesiastical antiquity and canon law, men like De Marca, Baluze, Constant, Gibert, Berardi, Zallwein, etc. were agreed that the change introduced by the pseudo-Isidore was a substantial one, that it displaced the old system of Church government and brought in the new. Modern writers have maintained that the compiler of the forgery only meant to codify the existing state of things, and give it a formal status, and that the same development would have taken place without his trick. [3] The truth is:
First, Before his fabrication many very efficacious forgeries had won a gradual recognition at Rome since the beginning of the sixth century; and on them was based the maxim that the Pope, as supreme in the Church, could be judged by no man.
Secondly, The Isidorian doctrine contradicted itself, for it aimed at two things which were mutually incompatible,— the complete independence and impunity of bishops on the one hand, and the advancement of Papal power on the other. The first point it sought to effect by such strange and unpractical rules that they never attained any real vitality, while, on the contrary, the principles about the power of the Roman See worked their way, and became dominant under favourable circumstances, but with a result greatly opposed to the views of Isidore, by bringing the bishops into complete subjection to Rome. But that the pseudo-Isidorian principles eventually revolutionized the whole constitution of the Church, and introduced a new system in place of the old. On that point there can be no controversy among candid historians.
At the time when the forged decretals began to be widely known, the See of Rome was occupied by Nicolas I (858-867), a Pope who exceeded all his predecessors in the audacity of his designs. Favoured and protected by the break-up of the empire of Charles the Great, he met East and West alike with the firm resolution of pressing to the uttermost every claim of any one of his predecessors, and pushing the limits of the Roman supremacy to the point of absolute monarchy. By a bold but unnatural torturing of a single word against the sense of a whole code of law, he managed to give a turn to a canon of a General Council, excluding all appeals to Rome, as though it opened to the whole clergy in East and West a right of appeal to Rome, and made the Pope the supreme judge of all bishops and clergy of the whole world. [4] He wrote this to the Eastern Emperor, to the Frankish king, Charles, and to all the Frankish bishops. [5] And he referred the Orientals, and so sharp-sighted a man as Photius, to those fabrications fathered on Popes Silvester and Sixtus, which were thenceforth used for centuries, and gained the Roman Church the oft repeated reproach from the Greeks, of being the native home of inventions and falsifications of documents. Soon after, receiving the new implements forged in the Isidorian workshop (about 863 or 864), Nicolas met the doubts of the Frankish bishops with the assurance that the Roman Church had long preserved all those documents with honour in her archives, and that every writing of a Pope, even if not part of the Dionysian collection of canons, was binding on the whole Church. [6] In a Synod at Rome in 863 he had accordingly anathematized all who should refuse to receive the teaching or ordinances of a Pope. [7] If, indeed, all Papal utterances were a rule for the whole Church, and all decrees of Councils dependent on the Pope's good pleasure, as Nicolas asserted on the strength of the Isidorian forgery, then there would be but one step further to the promulgation of Papal Infallibility, though it has been long delayed. It was thought enough to repeat from time to time that the Roman Church keeps the faith pure, and is free from every stain.
Nearly three centuries passed before the seed sown produced its full harvest. For almost two hundred years, from the death of Nicolas I to the time of Leo IX, the Roman See was in a condition which did not allow of any systematic acquisition and enforcement of new or extended rights. For above sixty years (883-955) the Roman Church was enslaved and degraded, while the Apostolic See became the prey and the plaything of rival factions of the nobles, and for a long time of ambitious and profligate women. It was only renovated for a brief interval (997-1003) in the persons of Gregory V and Silvester II, by the influence of the Saxon emperor. Then the Papacy sank back into utter confusion and moral impotence; the Tuscan Counts made it hereditary in their family; again and again dissolute boys, like John XII and Benedict IX, occupied and disgraced the Apostolic throne, which was now bought and sold like a piece of merchandise, and at last three Popes fought for the tiara, until the Emperor Henry III put an end to the scandal by elevating a German bishop to the See of Rome.
With Leo IX (1048-1054) was inaugurated a new era of the Papacy, which may be called the Hildebrandine. Within sixty years, through the contest with kings, bishops, and clergy, against simony, clerical marriage, and investiture, the Roman See had risen to a height of power even Nicolas I never aspired to. A large and powerful party, stronger than that which two hundred years before had undertaken to carry through the Isidorian forgery, had been laboring since the middle of the eleventh century, with all its might, to weld the States of Europe into a theocratic priest- kingdom, with the Pope as its head. The urgent need of reform in the Church helped on the growth of the spiritual monarchy, and again the purification of the Church seemed to need such a concentration and increase of ecclesiastical power. In Prance this party was supported by the most influential spiritual corporation of the time, the Congregation of Cluny. In Italy, men like Peter Damiani, Bishop Anselm of Lucca, Humbert, Deusdedit, and above all Hildebrand, who was the life and soul of the enterprise, helped on the new system, though some of them, as Damiani and Hildebrand, differed widely both in theory and practice.
It has not perhaps been sufficiently observed that Gregory VII is in fact the only one of all the Popes who set himself with clear and deliberate purpose to introduce a new constitution of the Church, and by new means.
He regarded himself not merely as the reformer of the Church, but as the divinely commissioned founder of a wholly new order of things, fond as he was of appealing to his predecessors. Nicolas I alone approaches him in this, but none of the later Popes, all of whom, even the boldest, have but filled in the outline he sketched.
Gregory saw from the first that Synods regularly held by the Popes, and new codes of Church law, were the means for introducing the new system. Synods had been held, at his suggestion, by Leo IX and his successors, and he himself carried on the work in those assembled after 1073. But only Popes and their legates were henceforth to hold Synods; in every other form the institution was to disappear. Gregory collected about him by degrees the right men for elaborating his system of Church law. Anselm of Lucca, nephew of Pope Alexander II, compiled the most important and comprehensive work, at his command, between 1080 and 1086. Anselm maybe called the founder of the new Gregorian system of Church law, first, by extracting and putting into convenient working shape everything in the Isidorian forgeries serviceable for the Papal absolutism; next, by altering the law of the Church, through a tissue of fresh inventions and interpolations, in accordance with the requirements of his party and the stand-point of Gregory. [8] Then came Deusdedit, whom Gregory made a Cardinal, with some more inventions. At the same time Bonizo compiled his work, the main object of which was to exalt the Papal prerogatives. The forty propositions or titles of this part of his work correspond entirely to Gregory's Dictatus and the materials supplied by Anselm and Deusdedit. [9] The last great work of the Gregorians (before Gratian) was the Polycarpus of Cardinal Gregory of Pavia (before 1118), which almost always adheres to Anselm in its falsifications. [10]
The Preface of Deusdedit to his work is the programme of the whole school whose labours were at length crowned with such complete success. [11] The Roman Church, says the Cardinal, is the mother of all Churches, for Peter first founded the Patriarchal Sees of the East, and then gave bishops to all the cities of the west. Councils cannot be held without the sanction of the Pope, according to the decisions of the 318 Fathers at Nice. The Roman clergy rule without the Pope, when the See is vacant, and therefore Cyprian and the Africans humbly submitted to their decisions before the election of Cornelius, a pet crotchet of the Cardinal's, which Anselm, who was not a Cardinal, did not adopt. He adds, that he writes in order to confirm the authority of Rome and the liberty of the Church against its assailants, and maintains that the testimonies he has collected disprove all objections, on the principle that the lesser must always yield to the greater, i.e. the authority of Councils and Fathers to the Pope. With this one axiom, which not only opened the door wide for the Isidorian decretals, but prevented any attempt to moderate their system by an appeal to the ancient canons, the revolution in the Church was accomplished in the simplest and least troublesome manner.
Clearly and cautiously as the Gregorian party went to work, they lived in a world of dreams and illusions about the past and about remote countries. They could not escape the imperative necessity of demonstrating their new system to have been the constant practice of the Church, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish where involuntary delusion merged into conscious deceit. Whatever present exigencies required was selected from the mythical stores at their command hastily and recklessly; then fresh inventions were added, and soon every claim of Rome could be shown to have a legitimate foundation in existing records and decrees.
It is so far true to say, that without the pseudo-Isidore there would have been no Gregory VII, that the Isidorian forgeries were the broad foundation the Gregorians built upon. But the first object of Isidore was to secure the impunity of bishops, whereas the Roman party, which for a long time had a majority of the bishops against it, wanted to introduce a state of things where the Popes or their legates could summarily depose bishops, intimidate them, and reduce them to complete subjection to every Papal command. The newly invented doctrines about the deposing power contributed to this end. In a word, a new history and a new civil and canon law was required, and both had to be obtained by improving on the Isidorian principles with new forgeries. The correction of history was to some extent provided for in Germany by the monk Bernold, and in Italy by the zealous Gregorian Bonizo, Bishop of Piacenza, who tried, among other things, to get rid of the coronation of Charles the Great. [12] Their other assistants had to invent or adapt historical facts for party purposes, for their new codes of Church law innovated largely on ancient Church history. Gregory himself had his own little stock of fabricated or distorted facts to support pretensions and undertakings which seemed to his contemporaries strange and unauthorized. It was, for instance, an axiomatic fact with him that Pope Innocent I excommunicated the Emperor Arcadius, that Pope Zachary deposed the Frankish King Childeric, and that Gregory the Great threatened to depose the kings who should rob a hospice at Autun. [13] He treated the Donation of Constantine as a valuable and important document; it gave him a right over Corsica and Sardinia. [14] His pupil Leo IX used it against the Greeks, and his friend Peter Damiani against Germany; Anselm and Deusdedit assigned it a prominent place in their legal books.
At the same time, Gregory thought it most important, with all his legislative activity and lofty claims and high-handed measures, not to seem too much of an innovator and despot; he constantly affirmed that he only wished to restore the ancient laws of the Church, and abolish late abuses. When he drew out the whole system of Papal omnipotence in twenty-seven theses in his Dictatus, these theses were partly mere repetitions or corollaries of the Isidorian decretals; partly he and his friends and allies sought to give them the appearance of tradition and antiquity by new fictions. [15]
Gregory's chief work is his letter to Bishop Hermann of Metz, designed to prove how well grounded is the Pope's dominion over emperors and kings, and his right to depose them in cases of necessity. In this he showed his adherents how to manipulate facts and texts, by twisting a passage in a letter of Pope Gelasius to the Emperor Anastasius so skillfully, by means of omissions and arbitrary collocations, as to make Gelasius say just the opposite of what he really said, viz. that kings are absolutely and universally subject to the Pope, whereas what he did say was, that the rulers of the Church are always subject to the laws of the emperors, only disclaiming the interference of the secular power in questions of faith and the sacraments. [16]
How what was a falsification to begin with was falsified again in the interests of the new system, and accentuated to serve the cause of ecclesiastical despotism, may be seen from the eleventh canon of Causa 25, Q. 1, in Gratian. The Council of Toledo in 646 had excommunicated the Spanish priests who took part in the rebellion against the King, and included the King himself in the anathema if he violated this censure (hujus canonis censuram). Out of this Isidore made, two hundred years afterwards, the following: The anathema applied to all kings who violated any canon binding under censure, or allowed it to be violated by others; and this he put into the mouth of Pope Hadrian. [17] In the new text-books compiled by Anselm, Deusdedit, and Gregory of Pavia, the (pretended) decrees of the Popes were put in place of the canons of Councils, and this supplied just what was wanted: a system of ancient Church law to justify the procedures of Gregory VII and Urban II against the princes of their own day; and a Pope would never lack some pretext for threatening excommunication, with all its consequences. [18]
Gregory borrowed one main pillar of his system from the False Decretals. Isidore had made Pope Julius (about 338) write to the Eastern bishops, "The Church of Rome, by a singular privilege, has the right of opening and shutting the gates of heaven to whom she will." [19] On this Gregory built his scheme of dominion. [20] How should not he be able to judge on earth, on whose will hung the salvation or damnation of men ? The passage was made into a special decree or chapter in the new codes. [21] The typical formula of binding and loosing had become an inexhaustible treasure-chamber of rights and claims. The Gregorians used it as a charm to put them in possession of everything worth having. If Gregory, who was notoriously the first to undertake dethroning kings, wanted to depose the German Emperor, he said, " To me is given power to bind and loose on earth and in heaven." [22] Were subjects to be absolved from their oaths of allegiance? Which lie was also the first to attempt, he did it by virtue of his power to loose. Did he want to dispose of other people's property? He declared, as at his Roman Synod of 1080, " We desire to show the world that we can give or take away at our will kingdoms, duchies, earldoms, in a word, the possessions of all men; for we can bind and loose." [23] In the same way a saying ascribed to Constantine, at the Council of Nice, in a legend recorded by Rufinus, was amplified till it was fashioned into a perfect mine of high-flying pretensions. Constantine, according to this fable, when the written accusations of the bishops against each other were laid before him, burned them, saying, in allusion to a verse of the Psalter, that the bishops were gods, and no man could dare to judge them. Nicolas I quoted this to the Emperor Michael. [24] Anselm adopted the story into his collection, Gratian followed, and Gregory himself found in it clear evidence that he, the Pope, the bishop of bishops, stood in unapproachable majesty over all monarchs of the earth. For, as the passage stood in Anselm and Gratian, it was the Pope whom Constantine called a god, and so it has been understood and explained ever since.[25]
A man like Gregory VII, little familiar as he was with theological questions, must have held the prerogative of infallibility the most precious jewel of his crown. His claims to universal dominion, to the deposing power, and the right of dispensing subjects from their oaths, all rested ultimately on his own authority. All was to be believed because he, the infallible Pope, affirmed it. Accordingly, stronger proofs and testimonies than Isidore supplied had to be found for this infallibility of his.
Pope Agatho had said at a Roman Synod, in 680, that all the English bishops were to observe the ordinances made in former Roman Synods for the Anglo-Saxon Church. [26] Cardinal Deusdedit made this into a decree issued by Agatho to all bishops in the world, saying they must receive all Papal orders as though attested by the very voice of Peter, and therefore, of course, infallible. [27] One of the boldest falsifications the Gregorians allowed themselves occurs first in Anselm's, [28] and then in Cardinal Gregory's works, from whom Gratian borrowed it. St. Augustine had said that all those canonical writings (of the Bible) were pre-eminently attested, which Apostolical Churches had first received and possessed. He meant the Churches of Corinth, Ephesus, etc. The passage was corrupted into, "Those Epistles belong to canonical writings which the Holy See has issued"; and thus it came to pass that the mediaeval theologians and canonists, who generally derived their whole knowledge of the Fathers from the passages collected by Peter Lombard and Gratian, really believed that St. Augustine had put the decretal letters of Popes on par with Scripture. [29] When Cardinal Turrecremata, about1450, and Cardinal Cajetan, about 1516, put the Infallibility doctrine into formal shape, they too relied on the clear testimony of St. Augustine, which left no doubt that the first theologian of the ancient Church had declared every Papal utterance to be as free from error as the Apostolical Epistles. [30]
That Papal Infallibility might be more firmly believed, personal sanctity was also ascribed to every Pope. This notion was first invented by Ennodius, deacon and secretary of Pope Symmachus, who wrote in 503 to defend him against certain charges. The Popes, he said, must be held to inherit innocence and sanctity from Peter. [31] Isidore eagerly seized on this, and invented two Roman Synods, which had unanimously approved and subscribed the work of Ennodius. [32] Gregory VII made this holiness of all Popes, which he said he had personal experience of, the foundation of his claim to
universal dominion. [33] Every sovereign, he said, however good before, becomes corrupted by the use of power, whereas every rightly appointed Pope [34] becomes a saint through the imputed merits of St. Peter. Even an exorcist [35] among the clergy, he added, is higher and more powerful than every secular monarch, for he casts out devils, whose slaves evil princes are. This doctrine of the personal sanctity of every Pope, put forward by the Gregorians, and by Gregory VII himself, as a claim made by Pope Symmachus, was adopted into the codes of canon law. But as notorious facts, and the crimes and excesses of many Popes, which no denials could get rid of, were in glaring contradiction to it, a supplementary theory had to be invented, which Cardinal Deusdedit published under the venerated name of St. Boniface, the apostle of Germany. It was to this effect: Even if a Pope is so bad that he drags down whole nations to hell with him in troops, nobody can rebuke him; for he who judges all can be judged of no man; the only exception is in case of his swerving from the faith. That this could have been written nowhere but in Rome, and certainly not by St. Boniface, is self-evident. There were no " innumerable nations" in his day for the Pope to drag down into hell with him like slaves. The words imply past experience of many profligate Popes, and a period of enormously extended Papal power over the nations, and were clearly invented after the pontificate of Benedict IX. Gratian has, of course, adopted them from Deusdedit. [36]
The Gregorian doctrine since 1080 then is, that every Pope, lawfully appointed, and not thrust in by force, is holy and infallible. But his holiness is imputed, not inherent, so that if he have no merits of his own, he inherits those of his predecessor St. Peter. Notwithstanding his holiness, he may drag countless troops of men down to hell, and none of them may withstand or warn him; notwithstanding his infallibility, he may become an apostate, and then he may be resisted. Probably the later distinction between his official or ex cathedra infallibility and his personal denial of the faith was implied here.
Gregory VII seems to have sincerely believed that his infallibility was already acknowledged throughout the Christian world, even in the East. He wrote to the Emperor Henry, "The Greek Church is fallen away, and the Armenians also have lost the right faith, but," he adds, "all the Easterns await from St. Peter (viz. from me) the decision on their various opinions, and at this time will the promise of Peter's confirming his brethren be fulfilled." [37] He wanted then (in 1074) to go at the head of a great army to Constantinople, and there to hold his solemn judgment in matters of faith, for he does not seem to have counted on the voluntary submission of the Greeks; instead of which he contented himself with plunging Germany and Italy into a religious and civil war, the end of which he did not live to see. All history proves, he says, how clearly holiness is connected with infallibility in the Popes. While there are at most only a few kings or emperors who have been holy, out of 153 Popes, 100 have not only been holy, but have reached the highest grade of sanctity." [38] And the Gregorians disseminated the fable, which even the well-known annals of the Popes contradicted, that of the thirty before Constantine all but one were martyrs. [39] The Gregorians busied themselves greatly with the rectification of Papal history, and as the apostasy of Liberius, copied from St Jerome's Chronicle into so many historical works, was not easy to reconcile with Papal infallibility and sanctity, Anselm adopted into his codex the earlier fable, that Liberius, when exiled, had ordained Felix his successor, by advice of the Roman clergy, and abdicated, so that his subsequent apostasy did not matter. [40]
If every Pope is holy and infallible, then, according to the Gregorian view, all Christendom must tremble before him, as before an Asiatic despot whose disfavor is death. Accordingly, Anselm and Cardinal Gregory extracted passages from older forgeries, especially from a spurious speech of St. Peter, to the effect that no one should hold intercourse with a man under the Pope's displeasure. [41] Like the successive strata of the earth covering one another, so layer after layer of forgeries and fabrications was piled up in the Church. This shows itself most conspicuously in the great Church question of Synods, where the two contradictory views of the self-government and administration of the Church by Councils, and of the absolute sovereignty of the Pope and Court of Rome over the whole Church, were at issue. In 342, Pope Julius had written to the Eastern Bishops, who had confirmed the deposition of St. Athanasius at the Synod of Antioch, that they should not have acted for themselves in a matter affecting the whole Church, but, according to ecclesiastical custom, in union with "all of us," i.e. the bishops of the West. [42] Socrates, who welcomed an opportunity of pointing out the ambition of the Roman Church, [43] had twisted this into Julius saying that nothing could be decided without the bishop of Rome. His Latin translator, Epiphanius the Italian, about 500, went a step further, and made the Pope say that no Council could be held without his consent. [44] Isidore worked up these materials, and made Pope Julius write, in two spurious epistles, that the Apostles and the Nicene Council had said no Council could be held without the Pope's injunction. And thus Anselm and the other Gregorian canonists could quote a whole string of primitive decrees resting Councils and all their decisions on the arbitrament of the Pope, and Gratian has borrowed the whole of his seventeenth Distinction from Anselm.
Even this was not enough. Not only were Councils to be made dependent, but the institution itself, as it had existed for nine hundred years, was to be abolished. As the kings who had become absolute in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could no longer endure any representative assemblies, so the Papacy, when it wished to become absolute, found that Synods of particular National Churches were better out of the way altogether. For it was only in and by means of Synods of particular districts, provinces, and National Churches, that a healthy and somewhat independent Church life could spread and maintain itself. These had therefore to be put an end to, or at least broken np and made so difficult that they could only proceed at the beck of Rome. The following forgery was used for the purpose :
The opponents of Pope Symmachus, in 503, in order to show that they could assemble in Rome without him, had affirmed that the annual Provincial Synods prescribed by the Church would not lose their force merely because the Pope was not present at them. Ennodius, in his defense of Symmachus, replied that weighty causes (causae majores) were by the canon of Sardica reserved to the Pope. That was itself a misrepresentation, long current in Rome; the canon only gave a right of appeal to Rome for bishops. Anselm of Lucca, and Cardinal Gregory, and Gratian after him, made out of this the following decree of Pope Symmachus: "The Provincial Councils ordered by the canons to be held annually, have lost their validity from the Pope not being present at them." And the title of the decree is, "Provincial Synods without the Pope's presence have no force" (pondere carent). [45] And thus an ecclesiastical revolution was brought about in three lines.
But a formal prohibition of all Synods was still wanted, and this was attained by Anselm, Cardinal Gregory, and Gratian after them, making Pope Gregory the Great declare that no one ever had been, or ever would be, permitted to hold a particular (not Ecumenical) Synod. [46] The fraud lay in converting what Pelagius I had said, in the particular case of the schism of Aquileia, of a Council assembled against the Fifth Ecumenical, into a general prohibition issued by Gregory I against all Synods, while, by changing the plural into the singular, a reference to the authority of the Apostolic Churches of Alexandria and Antioch was altered into an exaltation of Papal authority. [47] And thus the double end was attained of putting down all meetings of bishops as in itself an illegal act of presumption, and at the same time bringing out prominently the plenitude of the Papal power, which could even withdraw from all Christendom the apostolical institution of Synods at its will.
But Isidore's chief contribution to the designs of Gregory VII was by his inventions about the effect of excommunication, for this, in the extended sense given it by Gregory, was the sharpest weapon in the struggle for Papal domination. Isidore had made the earliest Popes assert that no speech ever could be held with an excommunicated man, whence Gregory and his allies inferred that this applied also to kings and emperors, and that nobody could, even in matters of business, hold any intercourse with them if excommunicated, so that they were no longer fit to reign, and must be deposed. By this extension of the idea, wholly unknown to the ancient Church, and destructive of the entire original character of the institution, an enormous instrument of power was created, which not only might be abused, but was itself a standing abuse, a confusion of things human and divine, and a perpetual source of civil disturbance and division. Bossuet has admitted that it was a false doctrine which Gregory introduced into the Church, by altering and distorting the notion of excommunication. [48] Gregory himself must have known he was the first to make the claim, and that even in the Isidorian decretals there was nothing like it, yet at the Synod of 1078 [49] he grounded it exclusively on the statutes of his predecessors. To make their spiritual arms irresistible, the Gregorians also borrowed from Isidore an alleged rule of Pope Urban I, addressed to all bishops, that even an unjust excommunication by a bishop must be respected, and nobody could receive the condemned man. [50]
If we look at the whole Papal system of universal monarchy, as it has been gradually built up during seven centuries, and is now being energetically pushed on to its final completion, we can clearly distinguish the separate stones the building is composed of. For a long time all that was done was to interpret the canon of Sardica so as to extend the appellant jurisdiction of the Pope to whatever could be brought under the general and elastic term of "greater causes." But from the end of the fifth century the Papal pretensions had advanced to a point beyond this, in consequence of the attitude assumed by Leo and Gelasius, and from that time began a course of systematic fabrications, sometimes manufactured in Rome, sometimes originating elsewhere, but adopted and utilized there.
The conduct of the Popes since Innocent I and Zosimus, in constantly quoting the Sardican canon on appeals as a canon of Nice, cannot be exactly ascribed to conscious fraud. The arrangement of their collection of canons misled them. There was more deliberate purpose in inserting in the Roman manuscript of the sixth Nicene canon, "The Roman Church always had the primacy," of which there is no syllable in the original, a fraud exposed at the Council of Chalcedon, to the confusion of the Roman legates, by reading the original. [51]
Towards the end of the fifth and beginning of the sixth century, the process of forgeries and fictions in the interests of Rome was actively carried on there. Then began the compilation of spurious acts of Roman martyrs, which was continued for some centuries, and which modern criticism, even at Rome, has been obliged to give up, as, for instance, is done by Papebroch, Ruinart, Orsi, and Saccarelli. The fabulous story of the conversion and baptism of Constantino was invented to glorify the Church of Rome, and make Pope Silvester appear a worker of miracles. Then the inviolability of the Pope had to be established, and the principle that he cannot be judged by any human tribunal, but only by himself. For four years before 514 Rome was the scene of a bloody strife about this question; the adherents of Symmachus and his opponent Laurentius murdered one another in the streets, and the Arian Goth, King Theodoric, was as little acceptable as a judge as the Emperor, who was hated in Rome. So the acts of the Council of Sinuessa and the legend of Pope Marcellinus were invented, and the " Constitution of Silvester," viz., the decision of a Synod of 284 bishops, pretended to have been held by him in 321 at Rome, evidently compiled while the bloody scenes in which clerics were murdered or executed for their crimes were fresh in men's minds. There again the principle was inculcated that no one can judge the first See. [52]
Some other records were fabricated at Rome in the same barbarous Latin, such as the Gesta Liberii designed to confirm the legend of Constantine's baptism at Rome, and to represent Pope Liberius as purified from his heresy by repentance, and graced by a divine miracle. Of the same stamp were the Gesta of Pope Xystus III and the History of Polychronius, where the Pope is accused, but the condemnation of his accuser follows, as also of the accuser of the fabulous Polychronius, Bishop of Jerusalem. These fabrications of the beginning of the sixth century, which all belong to the same class, had a refer- ence also to the attitude of Rome towards the Church of Constantinople. It was the period of the long interruption of communion between East and West caused by the Henoticon (484-519), when Felix II even summoned the Patriarch Acacius to Rome, and Pope Gelasius, about 495, for the first time insulted the Greeks and their twenty-eighth canon of Chalcedon, by affirming that every Council must be confirmed and every Church judged by Rome, but she can be judged by none. It was not by canons, as the Council of Chalcedon affirmed, but by the word of Christ, that she received the primacy. [53] In this he went beyond all the claims of his predecessors. Thence came the fictions manufactured at Rome after his death; a letter of the Nicene Council praying Pope Silvester for its confirmation, and the confirmation given by Silvester and a Roman Synod; the declaration in the acts of Xystus III that the Emperor had convoked the Council by the Pope's authority; the History of Polychronius, exhibiting the Pope, as early as 435, sitting in judgment on an Eastern Patriarch; and lastly, the fabulous history of the Synod held by Silvester, which adopted Gelasius's saying about the divine origin of the Roman primacy, and confirmed the order of precedence of the Churches of Alexandria and Antioch next after Rome, making no mention of Constantinople, and thus upsetting the canons of 381 and 451, which gave her the precedence. [54]
While this tendency to forging documents was so strong in Rome, it is remarkable that for a thousand years no attempt was made there to form a collection of canons of her own, such as the Easterns had as early as the fifth century, clearly because for a long time Rome took so very little part in ecclesiastical legislation. No doubt constant appeal was made to the canons of Councils, and Rome professed her resolve to secure their observance with all her might, and by her conspicuous example; but the canon she had chiefly at heart was the third of Sardica, and the Sardican canons were never received at all in the East. [55] When Dionysius gave the Roman Church her first tolerably comprehensive collection of canons, viz. his translation of the Greek canons, with the African and Sardican, more than twenty Synods had been held in Rome since 313, but there were no records of them to be found.
Towards the end of the sixth century a fabrication was undertaken in Rome, the full effect of which did not appear till long afterwards. The famous passage in St. Cyprian's book on the Unity of the Church was adorned, in Pope Pelagius II's letter to the Istrian bishops, with such additions as the Roman pretensions required. St. Cyprian said that all the Apostles had received from Christ equal power and authority with Peter, and this was too glaring a contradiction of the theory set up since the time of Gelasius. So the following words were interpolated: "The primacy was given to Peter to show the unity of the Church and of the chair. How can he believe himself to be in the Church who forsakes the chair of Peter, on which the Church is built ?" [56] The varying judgments of the later Roman clergy on Cyprian, who had up to his death been a decided opponent of Rome, seem to have had an influence on this interpolation. He was at first almost the only foreign martyr whose annual feast was kept in Rome; but after Gelasius had included his writings in a list of works rejected by the Church, it became necessary to find some way of reconciling the high reverence accorded to the man with the disapproval of his writings. This seems to have led to the interpolation, so that the first rank among orthodox Fathers was assigned to Cyprian in the revised edition of the catalogue of Gelasius, in direct contradiction to the passage in the same decree placing him among "apocryphal", viz. rejected authors. [57] But as Cyprian's writings had not spread from Rome, but had long been much read in the Gallican and North Italian Churches, the additions did not get into the manuscripts.
Earlier than this an interpolation of the old catalogue of Roman bishops had been undertaken for a definite purpose, and thus the foundation was laid of the Liber Pontificalis [58] afterwards enlarged. It exists in Schelstrate's edition, in its original form, of about 530. [59] The second edition, and continuation to the time of Conon (687) written about 730, and afterwards brought down to 724 by the same hand, is based on contemporary records for the sixth and seventh century. It is the first edition of 530 which is chiefly to be reckoned as a calculated forgery, and an important link in the chain of Roman inventions and interpolations. It is all composed in the barbarous and ungrammatical Latin common to the Roman fabrications of the sixth century. [60] The objects were, first, to attest the mass of spurious acts of Roman martyrs, and the reiterated statements that the earliest Popes had appointed a number of notaries to compile these acts, and seven deacons to superintend them; secondly, to confirm the existing legends of Popes and Emperors, such as the Roman baptism of Constantino, the stories about Silvester, Felix, and Liberius, Xystus III, and the like; tlirdly, to assign a greater antiquity to some later liturgical usages; fourthly, to exhibit the Popes as legislators for the whole Church, although, apart from the liturgical directions ascribed to them, and the constantly recurring assertion that they had marked out the parishes and the hierarchical grades of the clergy in Rome, no particular ordinances of theirs could be quoted, and people had to be content with stating generally that Damasus or Gelasius or Hilary had made a law binding the whole Church. [61] In the later and more historical portion (from 440 to 530) the Pope is specially represented as teacher of doctrine and supreme judge, with a view to the Greeks. In the first edition every historical notice, except about buildings, sacred offerings, and cemeteries, is false: the author's statements about the fortunes and acts of particular Popes never agree with what is known of their history, but rather contradict it, sometimes glaringly; and thus we must regard as fabulous even what cannot be proved such from sources now accessible to us, for there is almost always an obvious design. [62]
The fictions of the Liber Pontificalis had a far-reaching influence after they became known, and were used first by Bede about 710, in the rest of the West. They supplied the basis for the notion of the Popes having constantly acted from the first as legislators of the whole Church, and they greatly helped on the later fabrication of Isidore, who incorporated these records of Papal enactments into his decretals, and thereby gave them an appearance of. being genuine. This agreement of the forged decretals with the annals of the Popes is what gave the former so long a hold on public belief.
After the middle of the eighth century, the famous Donation of Constantine was concocted at Rome. It is based on the earlier fifth-century legend of his cure from leprosy, and baptism by Pope Silvester, which is repeated at length, and the Emperor is said, out of gratitude, to have bestowed Italy and the western provinces on the Pope, and also to have made many regulations about the honorary prerogatives and dress of the Roman clergy. [63] The Pope is, moreover, represented as lord and master of all bishops, and having authority over the four great thrones of Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Jerusalem.
The forgery betrayed its Roman authorship in every line; it is self-evident that a cleric of the Lateran Church was the composer. The document was obviously intended to be shown to the Frankish king, Pepin, and must have been compiled just before 754. Constantine relates in it how he served the Pope as his groom, and led his horse some distance. This induced Pepin to offer the Pope a homage, so foreign to Frankish ideas, and the Pope told him from the first that he expected, not a gift, but restitution from him and his Franks. [64] The first reference to this gift of Constantine occurs in Hadrian's letter to Charles the Great in 777, where he tells him that, as the new Constantine, he has indeed given the Church what is her own, but that he has more of the old Imperial endowments to restore to her. The Popes had already been accustomed, for several years, since 752, to speak, not of gifts, but restitutions, in their letters; the Italian towns and provinces were to be restored, sometimes to St. Peter, sometimes to the Roman republic. [65] Such language first became intelligible when the Donation of Constantine was brought forward to show that the Pope was the rightful possessor as heir of the Roman Caesars in Italy; for, he being at once the successor of Peter and of Constantine, what was given to the Roman Republic was given to Peter, and vice versa. In this way it was made clear to Pepin that he had simply to reject the demands of the Greek Imperial Court about the restoration of its territory as unauthorized.
It would indeed be incomprehensible how Pepin could have been induced to give the Exarchate, with twenty towns, to the Pope, who never possessed it, and thereby to draw on himself the enmity of the still powerful Imperial Court, merely that the lamps in the Roman churches might be furnished with oil, [66] had he not been shown that the Pope had a right to it by the gift of Constantine, and terrified by the threat of vengeance from the Prince of the Apostles, if his property should be withheld. There was no fear of such documents as the Epistle of Peter and the Donation of Constantine being critically examined at the warlike Court of Pepin. Men who might be written to that their bodies and souls would be eternally lacerated and tormented in hell if they did not fight against the enemies of the Church, believed readily enough that Constantine had given Italy to Pope Silvester. Those were days of darkness in France, and, in the complete extinction of all learning, there was not a single man about Pepin whose sharp-sightedness the Roman agents had reason to dread. [67]
One is tempted to ascribe to the same hand the Epistle of St. Peter to his "adopted son" the King of the Franks, which appeared also at this moment of great danger and distress, as well as of lofty hopes and pretensions, a fabrication which for strangeness and audacity has never been exceeded. Entreating and promising victory, and then again threatening the pains of hell, the Prince of the Apostles adjures the Franks to deliver Rome and the Roman Church. The Epistle really went from Rome to the Rrankish kingdom, and seems to have produced its effect there . [68]
Twenty years later the need was felt at Rome of a more extensive invention or interpolation. Pepin had given the Pope the Exarchate, taken away from the Longobards, with Ravenna for its capital, and twenty other towns of the Emilia, Flaminia, and Pentapolis, or the triangle of coast between Bologna, Comacchio, and Ancona. [69] More he had been unable to give, for this was all the territory the Longobards had shortly before acquired, and were now obliged to give up. In 774 Pepin's son, Charles the Great, after taking Pavia, became king of the Longobardic territory, stretching far southwards. No more could be said about the gift of Constantine ; Charles would have had at once to abdicate. Moreover, a strong Italian sovereign was wanted at Rome, who from his own part of the peninsula could also keep the Papal dominions in subjection; at the same time, the Roman lust for land and subjects and revenues was not long satisfied with the Exarchate and its belongings. So a document was laid before the King in Rome, professing to be his father's gift or promise (promissio) of Kiersy. He renewed it, as it was shown him, and gave away thereby the greater part of Italy, including a good deal that did not belong to him; for the document, as quoted in Adrian's Biography, specifies as territories to be assigned to the Popes all Corsica, Venetia, and Istria, Luni, Monselice, Parma, Reggio, Mantua, the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, and the Exarchate. [70]
It has seemed to every one mysterious and inexplicable that Charlemagne should have made so comprehensive a gift, leaving himself but little of his Italian kingdom Accordingly Muratori, Sugenheim, Hegel, Gregorovius, and Niehues have either declared the passage spurious, or accused the Papal biographer of falsehood ; else, observes Niehues, we must accuse Charles of consciously indorsing a perjury, and Adrian of a cowardly negligence. [71] Abel thinks the suspicions against the genuineness of the passage are strong, but not conclusive, and contents himself with assuming that the gift was really equal to Pepin's, but was very limited. [72] Lastly, Mock accepts the extent of the gift, but rejects its equality to Pepin's, and therefore the truth of Adrian's Biography; and Baxmann, the latest authority, leaves all uncertain. [73] In short, no one has succeeded in unravelling the secret.
But the thing explains itself when we compare the twice printed and wholly fabulous document, [74] professing to be the pact or bond of Pepin, and which really describes the geographical extent of the gift as it is stated in Adrian's Biography, only with the addition of more names of towns. This document is closely related to the Donation of Constantine. Like Constantino, Pepin gives an express account of his relations to the Pope as an explanation to the Greeks and Lombards of his gifts, and disclaims for himself and his successors all interest in the alienated territories, except the right of having prayers offered for the rest of their souls, and the title of a Roman patrician; for those territories were become the lawful property of the Pope through so many imperial deeds of gift. For this document, obviously composed in the style of the Donation of Constantine and the Roman biographies of Popes, it is difficult to assign any other origin or object than the purpose of having it laid before Charlemagne ; [75] and it shows how he was induced to make a promise he found it impossible to keep; for he henceforth vigorously withstood the perpetually renewed demands of the Popes, and made the counter requisition that Rome should prove its title to each particular domain separately.
There have unquestionably been some falsifications in the privileges granted to the Roman See by Emperors later than Charles the Great, though they do not go so far as has often been maintained. The pact or gift of Louis the Pious in 817 bears internal signs of genuineness, but has evidently been interpolated. [76]
It makes the Emperor give the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily, with the opposite coasts, and all Tuscany and Spoleto, to Pope Pascal It is needless to observe that if Louis had really partly given and partly confirmed to the Pope the greater part of Italy in this elastic and unlimited fashion, the whole subsequent history of the Papacy to Gregory VII would be an insoluble riddle; for the Popes neither possessed nor once claimed those territories, which together make up a large kingdom. Innocent III was the first to maintain that all Tuscany belonged to the Popes; no one did so before him. Gregory VII first claimed the duchy of Spoleto. The falsification certainly took place towards the end of the eleventh century, when matters were managed so actively and astutely at Rome; for Gregory VII was also the first to claim Sardinia, but he takes occasion to observe that the Sardinians have hitherto had no relations with the Roman See, or rather, as he thinks, have become as much strangers to it, through the negligence of his predecessors, as the people at the ends of the earth. [77] Urban II, indeed, in 1091, proved that Corsica was a Papal fief, not merely from the gift of Louis or Charlemagne, but from the Donation of Constantine, which, as then interpreted, assigned to Pope Silvester all islands of the West, including the Balearic Isles, and even Ireland. So again with the privileges of the Emperors Otto I in 962, and Henry II in 1020. The documents are in both cases genuine, or copies of genuine ones, in the main, but the statement of the Liber Pontificalis about Charlemagne's Donation was manifestly interpolated wholesale afterwards. [78]
It is well known that the Countess Matilda, who was entirely under the influence of Gregory VII and Anselm of Lucca, gave Liguria and Tuscany to the Roman See in 1077. [79] When we remember that Gregory VII, in 1081, required of the pretender Rudolph an oath that he would restore the lands and revenues which Constantine and Charlemagne had given to St. Peter, [80] that Leo IX had already solemnly appealed to the Donation of Constantine, and that Matilda's adviser, Anselm, had inserted this Donation in his Codex, we may easily judge what document was used to convince her that she was obliged in conscience to make so extensive an abdication or restitution.
We cannot suppose that such a man as Gregory VII would consciously take part in these fabrications, but, in his unlimited credulity and eager desire for territory and dominion, he appealed to the first forged document that came to hand as a solid proof. Thus, in 1081, he affirmed that, according to the documents preserved in the archives of St. Peter's, Charles the Great had made the whole of Gaul tributary to the Roman Church, and given to her all Saxony. [81] A document forged at Rome in the tenth or eleventh century is undoubtedly referred to, which may be found in Torrigio. [82] Charles there calls himself Emperor in the year 797, and his kingdoms are Francia, Aquitania, and Gaul; Alcuin is his Chancellor, and each of his kingdoms is to pay an annual tribute of 400 pounds to Rome.
We have put forward these facts about the deeds of gift, because they set in a clear light the line habitually followed at Rome from the sixth to the twelfth century, and because their authors are undoubtedly the very persons chargeable with the fictions undertaken in the interests of ecclesiastical supremacy. We shall now continue our enumeration and examination of the forgeries by which the whole constitution of the Church was gradually changed.
The pseudo-Isidorian forgery of the middle of the ninth century has been already mentioned. Rome, as we have seen, had no part in that, though she afterwards took full advantage of it for extending her power, the substance of these forgeries being incorporated into the canonical collections of the Gregorian party.
The most potent instrument of the new Papal system was Gratian's Decretum, which issued about the middle of the twelfth century from the first school of Law in Europe, the juristic teacher of the whole of Western Christendom, Bologna. In this work the Isidorian forgeries were combined with those of the Gregorian writers, Deusdedit, Anselm, Gregory of Pavia, and with Gratian's own additions. His work displaced all the older collections of canon law, and became the manual and repertory, not for canonists only, but for the scholastic theologians, who, for the most part, derived all their knowledge of Fathers and Councils from it.
No book has ever come near it in its influence in the Church, although there is scarcely another so chockfull of gross errors, both intentional and unintentional. Not only Anselm, Deusdedit, and Cardinal Gregory, whose works had little circulation, but also the German Burkard (or his assistant, the Abbot Olbert) had pioneered the way for Gratian. Burkard had not only made copious use of the Isidorian fictions in his Collection, compiled between 1012 and 1024, but had also ascribed the ecclesiastical decisions in the capitularies to various Popes, so that from the middle of the eleventh century the erroneous notion took rise that the free determinations of Frankish Synods in the ninth century were the autocratic commands of Popes. All these fabrications, the rich harvest of three centuries, Gratian inserted in good faith into his collection, but he also added, knowingly and deliberately, a number of fresh corruptions, all in the spirit and interest of the Papal system.
It may be shown by certain examples, going deep into the development of the new Church system, how Gratian the Italian forwarded by his own interpolations the grand national scheme of making the whole Christian world, in a certain sense, the domain of the Italian clergy, through the Papacy. The German and West Frankish bishops had already bowed to the Isidorian decretals. Their influence is shown in the decisions of the German National Synod at Tribur in 895. We may see here how deeply the pseudo-Isidore, with the imperial dignity of his Popes, and their dictatorial commands, had penetrated into the very lifeblood of the German hierarchy. It came to this, that the bishops had bound themselves most closely to King Arnulf, who was present, and took a prominent part in the Synod, and that he, desiring the imperial crown, which had already once allured him into Italy, could only obtain it by the favor of Pope Formosus. So they decided that, though the yoke of Rome should become intolerable, it ought to be borne with pious resignation.
How often has this saying been repeated since ! It was ascribed to Charles the Great, just as Constantine is affirmed to have called the Pope a God. And since Gratian adopted it as a capitulary of Charles, and stamped it as a universal canon, [83] it became the current view up to the time of the Council of Constance, albeit sometimes contradicted in act, that it is a duty to endure the unendurable if Rome imposes it.
The corruption of the thirty-sixth canon of the Ecumenical Council of 692 is Gratian's own doing. [84]
It renewed the canon of Chalcedon (451), which gave the Patriarch of New Rome, or Constantinople, equal rights with the Roman Patriarch. Gratian, by a change of two words, gives it a precisely opposite sense, and suppresses the reference to the canon of Chalcedon. He also reduces the five Patriarchs to four; for the ancient equality of position of the Roman bishop and the four chief bishops of the East was now to disappear, though even the Gregorians, as, e.g. Anselm, had treated him as one of the Patriarchs. [85] There was no longer any room for the patriarchal dignity of the Roman See; he who had drawn to himself every conceivable right in the Church could hardly exercise a particular patriarchal power in one portion of it. The plenary powers of the Pope were become a mare magnum, within which there could be no sea or lake of special privileges. [86] This showed itself conspicuously in reference to the provinces of Eastern Illyricum, Macedonia, Thessaly, Epirus and Dardania, which were before under the patriarchal jurisdiction of the Roman bishop, so that the metropolitan of Thessalonica was appointed his vicar over them. The Emperor Leo, the Isaurian, separated those provinces from Rome about 730, and they now belonged to the patriarchate of Constantinople. There was a long dispute about it; the perpetually renewed demands of the Popes gained no attention at Constantinople till the establishment of the Latin Empire there in 1204 gave them power for the moment in these Eastern lands also. And it is significant that Innocent III, far from attempting to resume his ancient patriarchal rights there, made the Bishop of Tornobus Patriarch, an ephemeral creation, soon to be again extinguished. [87]
The canon of the African Synod, that immoveable stumbling block of all Papalists, which forbids any appeal beyond the seas, i.e. to Rome, Gratian adapted to the service of the new system by an addition which made the Synod affirm precisely what it denies. If Isidore undertook by his fabrications to annul the old law forbidding bishops being moved from one see to another, Gratian, following Anselm and Cardinal Gregory, improved on this by a fresh forgery, appropriating to the Pope alone the right of translation. [88] One of the most important of his additions, and also an evidence of the wide divergence between the old and new Church law, is the chapter, also based on Anselm, Deusdedit, and Cardinal Gregory, which elaborated a system of religious persecution. [89] While, on the one hand, by falsifying a canon quoted by Ivo and Burkard, he makes Gregory the Great order that the Church should protect homicides and murderers; [90] on the other hand, he takes great pains to inculcate, in a long series of canons, that it is lawful, nay, a duty, to constrain men to goodness, and therefore to faith, and to what was then reckoned matter of faith, by all means of physical compulsion, and particularly to torture and execute heretics, and confiscate their property. In this he went beyond the Gregorian canonists. He does not fail to urge that Urban II had declared anyone who should kill an excommunicated person, out of zeal to the Church, to be by no means a murderer, and hence draws the general conclusion that it is clear the "bad" (all who are declared "bad" by the Church authorities) are not only to be scourged, but executed.
Still worse things may be found in the work of the Bolognese monk, which, through the instrumentality of the Curia, became the manual and canonical code of the West, to the scandal of religion and the Church, and this medley, not of simple, but complicated and multiplied forgeries, was rich in materials containing the germ of future developments, and cutting deep in their consequences into both the civil and ecclesiastical life of the West. So was it with the idea of heresy, which even then was fashioned into a two-edged sword, and veritable instrument of ecclesiastical domination. Pope Nicolas I had affirmed, in his letter to the Greek Emperor Michael, that by the sixth canon of the Ecumenical Council of 381 (the first of Constantinople), which he grossly distorted, schismatics and excommunicated men were to be treated as heretics. Anselm and Gratian embodied this statement in their new codes; [91] so that at the very time when heresy was stamped as a capital offence, the term received a terrible and unlimited extension, as indeed everything had been done by earlier fabrications to make heretics of all who dared to disobey a Papal command, or speak against a Papal decision on doctrine.
The earlier Gregorians had not laid down so clearly and nakedly as Gratian, that in his unlimited superiority to all law, the Pope stands on an equality with the Son of God. Gratian says that, as Christ submitted to the law on earth, though in truth he was its Lord, so the Pope is high above all laws of the Church, and can dispose of them as he will, since they derive all their force from him alone. [92] This became, and chiefly through Gratian's influence, the prevalent doctrine of the Curia, so that even after the great reforming Councils, Eugenius IV, in 1439, answered King Charles VII, when he appealed to the laws of the Church, that it was simply ludicrous to come with such an appeal to the Pope, who remits, suspends, changes, or annuls these laws at his good pleasure. [93]
In the fifty years between the appearance of Gratian's Decretum and the pontificate of the most powerful of the Popes, Innocent III, the Papal system, such as it had become in its three stages of development, through the pseudo- Isidore, the Gregorian school, and Gratian, worked its way to complete dominion. In the Roman courts Gratian's Code was acted upon; at Bologna it was taught; even the Emperor Frederick I had his son Henry VI instructed in the Decretum and Roman law. [94] The whole decretal legislation from 1159 to 1320 is built upon the foundation of Gratian. The same is true of Aquinas's dogmatic theology on all kindred points, as, indeed, the whole scholastic system in questions of Church constitution was modelled on the favorite science of the clergy of the period, Jurisprudence, as interpreted by Gratian, Raymund, and the other compilers of decretals. The theologians borrowed theory, texts, and proofs, alike from these compilations. As early as the twelfth century, in quoting a passage from Gratian, the Popes used to say, it was "in sacris canonibus" or "in decretis". [95] And about 1570, the Roman correctors of the Decretum, appointed by three Popes, said the work was intrusted to them, that the authority of this most useful and weighty Codex might not be weakened. [96] So high stood the character of this work, saturated through and through as it is with deceit and error and forgeries, which, like a great wedge driven into the fabric of the Church, gradually loosened, disjointed, and disintegrated the whole of its ancient order, not, indeed, without putting another, and, in its way, very strong constitution in its place.
Footnotes
20. Monum. Gregor. (ed. Jaffe), p. 445.
21. By Deusdedit; see Galland. Syll. ii. 745; by Anselm, Maii Spicil. Rom. vi. 317. 23; by Bonizo, Maii Pat. Nov. Biblioth. vii. 3, 47; Gregory's Polycarpus, i. 4, tit. 34.
22. See the form in Mansi, xx. 467.
24. Mansi, xv. 215.
26. Labbe, Condi, vi. 580.
29. The title of the canon in Gratian is, ''luter canonicas Scripturas decretales epistolae annumerantur."
30. Turrecremata, Summa de Eccl. P. ii.; Cajetan, De Primat. Rom. c.14. Alphonsus de Castro has exposed the whole forgery in his work Adv. Haeres. (Paris, 1565) i. 11.
32. Decret. pseudo-lsidor. (ed. Hinsch.), pp. 675, seq.
33. Ep. viii. 21 (Jaffe), p. 463.
34. This proviso was meant to cover the frequent cases of such evil Popes as, e.g. John XII and Benedict IX.
35. {One of the lower ranks of the Catholic clergy. -Tr.}
39. Bonizo, Patr. Nov. Bibl. vii. 3, 37 (ed. Mai).
40. Schelstrate (Antiq. Illustr. i. 456) quotes the passage from Anselm.
42. Ep. Rom. Pont. (ed. Constant), p. 386.
43. Thus he observes (vii.11) that the Roman See, like the Alexandrian, had for some time advanced to dominion over the priesthood.