Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (55 page)

Theoderic and other 'barbarian' rulers who did not match his flamboyance could be seen as protectors of the Western Catholic Church against Byzantine emperors who, from the mid-fifth century, frequently alienated and angered Catholic leaders in the West. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had brought Roman-Byzantine relations back from the brink of rupture (see pp. 225-7) and it was not coincidental that around that time the embattled Pope Leo I began regularly using a description of his office which proclaimed him with a modesty intended as a strident assertion of inherited historic authority, 'the unworthy heir of blessed Peter' (
indignus haeres beati Petri
). That formulation did have the additionally useful effect of suggesting that if a pope was indeed unworthy, he still enjoyed the charismatic inheritance of the Apostle, which later proved useful when popes might have to defend actions which looked discreditable.
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In the aftermath of Chalcedon, with successive emperors desperately trying to placate their Miaphysite subjects and risking Chalcedon's hard-won agreement with the West, relations reached a new nadir in the formal 'Acacian' schism of East and West between 482 and 519 (see p. 234).

During this break, Pope Gelasius I (492-6) was an aggressive upholder of the Chalcedonian formula and, in what proved despite its brevity to be an energetic and long-remembered tenure of the papal throne, he tried to pull Constantinople back into line, in the tradition of Ambrose's consecrated bullying of the Emperor Theodosius. Among his various pronouncements, in 494 Gelasius argued in a letter to the Eastern emperor, Anastasius I, that God had provided two ruling authorities in the world, monarchs and bishops. They were charged to use their powers to work together to promote God's purposes for his people, but 'of these, the burden of the priests is greater in so far as they will have answer to the Lord for the kings of men themselves at the divine judgement'. The Pope paid all due deference to the emperor's worldly authority - unlike some of his successors in later centuries - but he asserted that the emperor ought to defer to the clergy in all matters concerning the faith.
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Beyond the immediate occasion of these pronouncements during the schism, Gelasius had laid down a principle which in the West was respected by monarchs and much exploited and extended by future Church leaders, while in the East it never gained the same hold. Only occasionally did Eastern patriarchs get away with saying similar things to the emperor.

During the schism, there was another event of great significance for the future of western Europe: one powerful barbarian king within the former Western Empire turned his allegiance to Catholic Christianity. His power base was in northern Gaul and his name Clovis; he and his successors took their family name from his grandfather Merovech, to be styled 'Merovingians'. Becoming king of one branch of the Germanic people known as Franks in 481, Clovis proved to be a successful warlord who extended his family's power throughout the former provinces of Gaul - henceforward known as Francia, and more or less the area now represented by France. Like other Germanic leaders, he dallied with Arian Christianity, and members of his family certainly chose Arianism.
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However, he married a Catholic wife, and he developed a devotion to the saint of the Catholic Church who had been first a soldier and then a bishop, Martin of Tours. The God of Martin won Clovis his victories, just as that same God had favoured Constantine two centuries before. The fascination of Rome and its local saintly champion tilted Clovis's beliefs towards his wife's faith.

Bishop Gregory, a great Gallo-Roman aristocrat who was Bishop of Tours, and therefore Martin's successor as well as the saint's devout partisan and biographer, records that Clovis was made a consul by the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius, an honour which Clovis lavishly celebrated in Martin's city of Tours - the date is complicated by problems in interpreting Gregory's account, but is likely to have been 493 or 503.
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The grant of a consular title could not be a real assertion of Byzantine power, but it represented the Emperor's eagerness for alliance with an unexpected Catholic Christian ally against Arian rulers in the West; consular dignity was still a potent link between an old world and a new. Over a period of 1,300 years after Clovis's conversion, eighteen monarchs of what became the kingdom of France were christened with his name, which in its French mutation of the Latin
Ludovicus
became 'Louis'. Now the Latin Church could look to a powerful military patron in the West who was neither an Eastern emperor of dubious orthodoxy nor a heretical Arian like Theoderic. It was a century more before the Visigothic kings of Spain withdrew their loyalty from their ancestral Arianism and embraced the Catholic faith which most of their Christian subjects had defiantly retained. The way in which the history of Catholic Christianity has been told obscures just what a near-miss Arian Christianity proved in the West. If the balance of preferences among barbarian monarchs had been swayed by the Spanish Visigoths rather than by Clovis of the Franks, European Christianity could have remained a decentralized Arianism rather than a Roman monarchy; and the consequences are incalculable. No wonder Clovis remained so celebrated.

At the heart of the Catholic victory was the dead bishop-saint Martin of Tours, now a trophy saint for the Merovingian dynasty. He had become a potent symbol of the triumph of Catholicism over Arianism as far away as Byzantine Italy and the late Arian Ostrogothic kingdom of Ravenna. In the 550s, when the Archbishop of Ravenna celebrated the Byzantine emperor's confiscation of the great Arian chapel royal in Ravenna (now Sant' Apollinare Nuovo) and converted it to a place of Catholic worship, he rededicated the building to Martin the Gaulish saint, even though the archbishop's imperial master in Constantinople could have furnished plenty of Eastern saintly champions against Arianism. It was a significant little gesture to demonstrate that the Western Church was not going to be digested into Eastern Christian practice, even after such a significant victory for Byzantine military power and Catholic Christianity as the reoccupation of Ravenna. In the nave wall mosaics of that church in Ravenna, Martin of Tours still proudly leads the procession of male saints towards the Saviour, even now the church itself has been inconsiderately rededicated to the local hero, St Apollinaris.
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The Frankish Merovingian dynasty survived far longer than any of its Arian or pagan rivals among the former barbarian peoples, and despite its later political divisions and misfortunes, it carried forward in the territories of Francia the sense of a political unit consecrated by a trio of great Catholic Christian saints. Besides Martin of Tours, there was a third-century bishop martyred in northern Gaul in the time of Decius, Dionysius (in later French, Denis); he had been the first bishop of Lutetia, the city which was the forerunner of Paris, which Clovis had refounded as his capital on the island site of the old settlement. These two were joined by an extraordinary woman contemporary of Clovis, a nun called Genovefa (in later French, Genevieve), who had built a tomb for the martyr Denis and is said to have organized Lutetia's resistance to invading Huns in the mid-fifth century.
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Towards the end of her life, she had a great personal influence on Clovis when Lutetia's surrender to his armies became inevitable. She probably played a part in his conversion and his new enthusiasm for Denis. When Genovefa died in 512, the Merovingian royal family guaranteed her instant promotion to sanctity by burying her in a new basilica which overlooked their island capital, and which signalled their new-found loyalty to Rome with its dedication to Peter and Paul. Genevieve's fame eventually saw to the church's rededication in her honour, and the chilly grandeur of its eighteenth-century successor is now secularized as Paris's Pantheon, a shrine to the very different intellectual and cultural achievements of Enlightenment France.

The three great Catholic saintly patrons of the Frankish dynasty thus comprised two bishops, one a monk who was an ex-soldier, together with a saint highly unusual at the time or indeed at any other: a woman who had pioneered the monastic life and also shown the qualities of a soldier. Genevieve the counsellor of a king would in the fifteenth century provide a role model for an equally strange model of female sanctity, Joan of Arc, peasant visionary, intimidating presence at the French Court and formidable military leader against the English. The alliance between these saints and a Christian Catholic monarchy of France remained one of the great political facts about Christianity in western Europe down to the nineteenth century, and later French monarchs came to glory in their title of 'the Most Christian King'. That title stood alongside another potent title which sprang from the eventual downfall of the Merovingians: the 'Holy Roman Emperor' (see pp. 349-50). Over centuries, the rivalry of these two sacred Christian monarchies repeatedly disturbed the peace of Europe. Until within living memory, French politics were still affected and embittered by an intense consciousness of the ancient French alliance between Church and Crown. The reputation of the Merovingians still enthrals many who prefer to construct the past through cloudy esoteric conspiracy theories rather than pay attention to the exciting realities of Christian history.

Another monarchy was also taking shape, in Rome. The end of the Acacian schism in 519 produced renewed assertions of the pope's spiritual authority. It was a moment when the devout and Western-born Emperor Justin was especially eager to conciliate Rome, with the encouragement of his nephew and heir Justinian, who was himself already contemplating the restoration of a single united empire of East and West based on Constantinople. The then pope, Hormisdas (514-23), was determined to drive a hard bargain for restoring the two halves of the imperial Church to communion together. He demanded that the bishops of the Eastern Church should subscribe to a formula of agreement which would leave Rome in an unchallengeable position:

Christ built his Church on St Peter, and so in the apostolic see the Catholic faith has always been kept without stain. There is one communion defined by the Roman see, and in that I hope to be, following the apostolic see in everything and affirming everything decided thereby.
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The Patriarch of Constantinople managed to sidestep a full commitment to this statement of total surrender, but it was destined to have a long future in the armoury of the Bishops of Rome, both in later efforts to force reunion on a weakened Byzantine Church and in their own general self-image: the pronouncement of Papal Infallibility at the first Vatican Council of 1870 (see pp. 824-5) is inconceivable without this foundation.

It was clear to Catholic leaders in the West that Easterners were cold towards Hormisdas's formula and that the Emperor Justinian was still seeking to modify Chalcedon. Given that there was now so much cooperation between Catholic elites, Arian Western monarchs and moreover a Merovingian royal house committed to Catholic Christianity, there was modified rapture among Westerners when in 533 Justinian began his programme of reconquest in Italy, and in 536 publicly proclaimed his programme of reuniting the Mediterranean under Byzantine rule. Silverius, son to Pope Hormisdas, became pope in 536 with the backing of successive Ostrogoth monarchs in Ravenna, and so the papacy became irresistibly drawn into the military confrontation between Ravenna and Constantinople. When Justinian humiliated the Ostrogoths and made Ravenna his western capital, there was an eager potential successor, Vigilius, archdeacon to the Pope, waiting to supplant Silverius. As a result the new pope was a creature of the Emperor - soon, indeed, after an imperial invitation to Constantinople, his virtual prisoner.

Vigilius found that his new dignity had not brought him a free holiday on the Bosphorus, but had led him into a trap in which Justinian was still pursuing a formula to please Miaphysites and needed the pope's approval to the deal. Between 547 and 548 the hapless pope reluctantly added his agreement to imperial edicts ('Three Chapters') which included condemnations of three deceased theologians whose views were undoubtedly Dyophysite, but whom Chalcedon had specifically declared orthodox - among them was no less a figure than the great Theodore of Mopsuestia (see pp. 223-4). A Church council sitting in Constantinople in 553 endorsed the condemnations laid out in the Three Chapters, while blandly reaffirming Chalcedon and making the best of Vigilius's determined absence from its deliberations. Now Vigilius was caught between Western fury and the real prospect of being beaten up by the Emperor's thugs. After miserable wavering, in 554 he returned to his affirmation of the Three Chapters with their condemnations. He was spared from dire consequences in Rome only by dying on the journey home from Byzantium. So much for Gelasius's affirmation of clerical power, or for Hormisdas's stainless faith maintained by the apostolic see: a pope had committed himself to a major statement of heresy, coerced by an emperor.
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So, for the first time since the days of Constantine I, there was now a division in the Church leadership's attitude to the emperor. It was particularly difficult further west in Gaul and Spain to relish any contact with Byzantium: increasingly the survivors of the Classical world in the West would feel that if anything was to remain from the old culture, it would be dependent on those they had once dismissed as 'barbarians'. Arianism was weakening: the Byzantine conquests in Italy had dealt it a severe blow. Yet Justinian's military successes in Italy and North Africa in turn melted away through the ruinous wars of the later sixth century, leaving more scope for papal assertions of Rome's place in the Western Church. Unlike in the East, where Churches in the great cities had competing claims, there was no rival to the pope's position in the West, particularly as the Latin North African Church, once so self-assertive, was laid low by the seventh-century Arab invasions. The Church's constant search for a source of authority to solve its disputes encouraged the trend. For all the honour paid to great oecumenical councils like Nicaea and Chalcedon, the conflicts in their aftermaths, and the messy outcome of the council of 553, revealed the drawbacks in this method of decision-making.