Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (7 page)

These struggles convulsed the Christian East: the fierce monks of the Egyptian deserts, led by St Anthony of Egypt, rallied to Athanasius and the Nicene faith’ But for a generation all this was heard in the West only as a faint echo. Western theologians did not trouble themselves with Greek subtleties, and Latin, which had replaced Greek as the language of the Roman church relatively late in the third century, did not yet even possess adequate technical terminology to handle the debate properly The Pope had played no part at Nicaea, though as a matter of honour his legates signed the Conciliar decrees before all the bishops, immediately after the signature of Hosius of Cordoba, president of the Council. But successive bishops of Rome endorsed the teaching of Nicaea, and saw support for Athanasius as support for the apostolic faith. As a stream of Athanasius’ supporters made their way as refugees into the West, they were received with open arms at Rome, sometimes without much scrutiny of their theological views. In
AD
339 Pope Julius (337–52) publicly received Athanasius himself into communion, and summoned his Arian enemies, gathered at Antioch, to come to Rome for a council to resolve the issue. He received a stinging reply, delayed till the date he had set for the meeting in Rome had passed, challenging his right to receive into communion a man condemned by a synod of Eastern bishops. Rome, they conceded, was a famous church, well known for its orthodoxy. Nevertheless, all bishops were equal, and
the basis of Rome’s spiritual authority, the Apostles Peter and Paul, had come there in the first place from the East. The Pope must choose the communion of a handful of heretics like Athanasius, or the majority of the bishops of the East.

This was a direct challenge to the Pope’s authority. The gap between Eastern and Western perceptions of the place of Rome in the wider Church was clearly growing. Just how wide that gap might become was revealed three years later in 343, at the disastrous Council of Sardica. There had been a bloodbath in the imperial family as rivals scrabbled for power on the death of Constantine, and the empire was now ruled by his two surviving sons. Constantius, in the East, was a declared Arian. Constans, who ruled the West from Milan, was an ardent Catholic, and a strong supporter of Athanasius and Pope Julius. Worried by the theological rift which threatened the fragile unity and stability of empire, the brothers agreed that a joint council of East and West should be held at Sardica (modern Sofia in Bulgaria). Eighty bishops from each side attended, and the assembly was to be chaired by the leader of the Western delegation, Hosius of Cordoba, veteran president of the Council of Nicaea.

Sardica was a fiasco, which widened the rift it had been called to heal. For a start, Athanasius and his friends were allowed to sit as equals among the Western bishops, despite the fact that the Arians now wanted their case reviewed by the Council. The enraged Easterners refused to enter the assembly, and set up their own rival council, which excommunicated Hosius, Athanasius and the Pope. In retaliation the Westerners restored Athanasius, excommunicated his leading opponents, passed a series of canons defining Rome’s right to act as a court of final appeals in all matters affecting other bishops throughout the empire, and sent a dutiful letter to Julius as their ‘head, that is to the See of Peter the Apostle’.
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The Canons of Sardica became fundamental to Roman claims to primacy. They were inscribed in the records of the Roman church in a place of honour immediately after those of Nicaea, and in the course of time they were mistakenly believed to have been enacted at Nicaea. The claim of Rome to be head of all the churches was thus thought to have the strong backing of the first and greatest of all the general councils.

Over the next few years, the unwavering support of Constans bolstered the Catholic party, and Constantius was even pressured into restoring Athanasius (briefly) to his see. But Constans was killed
in 350, and Constantius became master of the whole empire. It was a disaster for the Nicene faith, and for the papacy. Like his father, Constantius saw Christianity as an essential unifying force within the empire. The debates about the person of Christ had to be solved, and he set about solving them by suppressing all support for Athanasius and the creed of Nicaea. Pope Julius died in 352. He had handled the Arian troubles with a firm and steady courage, but also with tact and courtesy to his opponents. His successor, Liberius (352–66), a cleric with an enthusiastic following among the pious matrons of Rome, was equally committed to the Nicene cause, but was a man of less steadiness and skill. Lobbied by Eastern bishops to repudiate Athanasius, Liberius unwisely appealed to Constantius to summon a general council to reaffirm the faith of Nicaea. Instead, at two synods, held at Aries in 353 and Milan in 355, Constantius arm-twisted the assembled bishops into condemning Athanasius. The handful who refused were exiled from their sees.

Liberius was appalled, and repudiated his own legates, who had caved in to pressure and subscribed to the condemnation of Athanasius. The influential court eunuch Eusebius (not to be confused with Eusebius of Caesarea) was sent to Rome to put pressure on the Pope. Liberius turned him away and, when he discovered that he had left an offering from the Emperor at the shrine of St Peter, he had the gift cast out. To the Emperor he wrote that his opposition was not to uphold his own views, but the ‘decrees of the Apostles:… I have suffered nothing to be added to the bishopric of the city of Rome and nothing to be detracted from it, and I desire always to preserve and guard unstained that faith which has come down through so long a succession of bishops, among whom have been many martyrs’.
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The enraged Emperor had the Pope arrested and taken north to Milan, where he confronted him. Arian clergy round the Emperor suggested that Liberius’ resistance was nothing more than a hint of old Roman republicanism, designed to curry favour with the Senate. The Emperor rebuked the Pope for standing alone in support of Athanasius, when most of the bishops had condemned him. Liberius reminded the Emperor that in the Old Testament Shadrach, Mesach and Abednego had stood alone against the idolatrous tyrant Nebuchadnezzar, and scandalised courtiers accused the Pope of treason – ‘You have called our Emperor a Nebuchadnezzar.’ The Pope remained firm, and was exiled to Thrace. In a final act of defiance, he sent back the 500 gold
pieces the Emperor had allocated for his journey expenses, suggesting, with a nod in the direction of Judas, that they should be given to the Arian Bishop of Milan.
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Liberius’ courageous conduct in the face of imperial pressure prefigured the struggles between papacy and empire which would dominate the history of medieval Europe. But his resolve did not last. Constantius detested Liberius, but knew he could not long retain control of the Church without the support of the Pope: the pressure was kept up. In the misery of exile, surrounded by imperial clergy and far from home, Liberius weakened. He agreed to the excommunication of Athanasius, and signed a formula which, while it did not actually repudiate the Nicene Creed, weakened it with the meaningless claim that the
Logos
was ‘
like
the father in being’ and in all things. In 358 he was finally allowed to return to Rome.

He found the city deeply divided. On Liberius’ exile in 355, the Emperor had installed a new pope, Liberius’ former archdeacon Felix. Consecrated by Arian bishops in the imperial palace in Milan, Felix was an obvious fellow traveller, but imperial patronage was a powerful persuader, and many of the Roman clergy had rallied to him. Constantius was now unwilling simply to repudiate Felix, and commanded that Liberius and he should function as joint bishops. The populace of Rome would have none of it. There was tumult in the streets in support of Liberius, the crowds yelling ‘One God, one Christ, one bishop’, and Felix was forced to withdraw. He built himself a church in the suburbs, and lived there in semi-retirement, retaining a following among the city clergy and people. Liberius’ credibility had been badly damaged by his ignominious surrender in exile, but painfully he rehabilitated himself, helping to organise peace-moves among the moderates on both sides of the Arian debate while insisting on loyalty to the Nicene formulas. Athanasius, if he did not quite forgive him, attributed his fall to understandable frailty in the face of pressure.

Liberius’ successor Damasus (366–84), who had served as deacon under both Liberius and Felix, would inherit some of the consequences of his predecessor’s exile. His election in 366 was contested, and he was confronted by a rival pope, Ursinus, whom he only got rid of with the help of the city police and a murderous rabble. Damasus was a firm opponent of Arianism and, with the support of a new and orthodox emperor, would resolutely stamp out heresy within the
city. But the street battles and massacres of Ursinus’ supporters with which his pontificate had begun left him vulnerable to moral attack, and very much dependent on the goodwill and support of the city and imperial authorities.

Damasus was also wary of taking sides in the quarrels which were still tearing apart the Church in the East. Hard-pressed supporters of Nicaea in the East like Basil the Great repeatedly begged his support. Damasus stalled, and sent a series of lofty letters eastwards, addressing his fellow bishops there not as ‘brothers’, the traditional formula, but as ‘sons’, a claim to superiority which was noticed and resented. With no intention of embroiling himself in the nightmare complexities of the Eastern theological debates, he thought the right procedure was for the bishops of the East to establish their orthodoxy by signing Roman formulas. His position was enormously strengthened by the accession as emperor of the Spanish General Theodosius, a devout Catholic who detested Arianism and who in February 380 issued an edict requiring all the subjects of the empire to follow the Christian religion ‘which Holy Peter delivered to the Romans … and as the Pontiff Damasus manifestly observes it’. In the following year Theodosius summoned a general council at Constantinople – the first since Nicaea – and this Council, at which no Western bishops were present and to which Damasus did not even send delegates, succeeded in formulating a creed, incorporating the Nicene Creed, which provided a satisfactory solution to the Arian debates. This Constantinopolitan/Nicene Creed is still recited every Sunday at Catholic and Anglican eucharists.

But, in addition to its doctrinal work, the Council of Constantinople issued a series of disciplinary canons, which went straight to the heart of Roman claims to primacy over the whole Church. The Council decreed that appeals in the cases of bishops should be heard within the bishop’s own province – a direct rebuttal of Rome’s claim to be the final court of appeal in all such cases. It went on to stipulate that ‘the Bishop of Constantinople shall have the pre-eminence in honour after the Bishop of Rome, for Constantinople is new Rome’.
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This last canon was totally unacceptable to Rome for two reasons. In the first place it capitulated to the imperial claim to control of the Church, since Constantinople had nothing but the secular status of the city to justify giving it this religious precedence. Worse, however, the wording implied that the primacy of Rome itself was derived not
from its apostolic pedigree as the Church of Peter and Paul, but from the fact that it had once been the capital of empire. Damasus and his successors refused to accept the canons, and the following year a council of Western bishops at Rome issued a rejoinder, declaring that the Roman see had the primacy over all others because of the Lord’s promise to Peter – ‘Tu es Petrus’ – and because both Peter and Paul had founded the see. The bishops went on to specify that if Rome was the first See of Peter, then the second was not Constantinople, but Alexandria, because it had been founded from Rome by St Mark on the orders of Peter, and the third in precedence was Antioch, because Peter had once been bishop there before he came to Rome.

Damasus’s pontificate exposed the growing rift between Eastern and Western perceptions of the religious importance of Rome. The troubles of Liberius had made it clear that imperial oversight of the Church, and the overwhelming imperial priority of unification, might put Pope and Emperor at odds. But Rome itself was increasingly remote from the centre of imperial affairs. No emperor since Constantine had lived in Rome, and even the Western emperors based themselves in the north – at Trier, Aries and especially Milan. Milan had been the centre of Constantius’ attempts to impose Arianism on the West, and an Arian bishop, Auxentius, remained in office till his death in 374.

Auxentius was succeeded as bishop by an impeccably orthodox career civil servant, the unbaptised Governor of the city, Ambrose, and it was Ambrose, not Damasus or his successor Siricius (384–99), who would become the dominant figure in the life of the Western Church in the last quarter of the fourth century. Ambrose set himself to increase the influence of the see of Milan, taking on the metropolitan role over the north Italian bishoprics formerly exercised by Rome, involving himself in episcopal appointments as far away as the Balkans, attracting clergy and religious to the city from Piacenza, Bologna, even North Africa. He presided over the creation of a series of great churches which would establish Milan as a Christian capital, in a way which Rome itself, still dominated by paganism, could not hope to do. The Basilica Nova at Milan, now buried under the present Duomo, was a gigantic church, almost as big as the Pope’s cathedral church of St John Lateran, and unique outside Rome. Inheriting a bishopric in which Arianism was deeply entrenched, Ambrose set himself at the head of a movement to restore Nicene orthodoxy, mobilising the bishops
of the West behind the Catholic cause. Above all, in a series of confrontations with the imperial family he marked out the boundaries of secular and ecclesiastical power, refusing to surrender any of the city churches for the use of Arian troops in the imperial army, denying the right of the imperial courts to judge in ecclesiastical cases, preventing Church funds being used to rebuild a synagogue destroyed in a religious riot, and finally excommunicating the Emperor Theodosius for having ordered the punitive massacre of civilians at Thessalonica after the murder of an imperial official. Ambrose was the real leader of the Western Church, and his biographer Paulinus significantly remarked of him that he had ‘a concern for all the churches’, a Pauline text often invoked by the popes.