PART 2

CHAPTER 1: THE CHURCH IN THE WEST DURING THE LAST CENTURY OF THE IMPERIAL UNITY, 313-30
1. THE DONATIST SCHISM, 311-393
2. ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE DONATIST SCHISM
3. ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE HERESY OF PELAGIUS
4. THE INFLUENCE OF ST. AUGUSTINE
5. PRISCILLIAN
6. THE ROMAN SEE AND THE WESTERN CHURCHES
CHAPTER 2:THE CHURCH AND THE DISRUPTION OF THE IMPERIAL UNITY, 395-537
1. THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SITUATION IN THE FOURTH CENTURY: DIOCLETIAN TO THEODOSIUS, 284-395
2. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGES DURING THE FIFTH CENTURY, 395-526
3. THE CHURCHES OF THE WEST DURING THE CRISIS SPAIN, AFRICA, GAUL
4. THE ROMAN SEE AND ITALY
5. ST. PATRICK AND THE CONVERSION OF THE IRISH
6. ST. BENEDICT AND THE HOLY RULE
CHAPTER 3: ST. GREGORY THE GREAT AND THE BEGINNINGS OF RESTORATION
1. ST. GREGORY, FOUNDER OF THE MIDDLE AGES
2. ITALY, GAUL AND SPAIN IN THE CENTURY OF ST. GREGORY
3. THE CHURCH IN ROMAN BRITAIN: THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH, 313-735
4. MAHOMET AND THE RISE OF ISLAM
5. SPANISH CATHOLICISM AND ST. ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, 589-711
CHAPTER 4: THE CHURCH AND THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE, 714-814
1. THE HERESY OF THE ICONOCLASTS
2. THE WORK OF ST. BONIFACE
3. THE ORIGIN OF THE PAPAL STATE
4. THE FIRST YEARS OF THE PAPAL STATE
5. CHARLEMAGNE, 768-814
CHAPTER 5: THE SIEGE OF CHRISTENDOM, 814-1046
1. THE BREAK-UP OF CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE, 814-888
2. CAROLINGIAN CATHOLICISM: PIETY, LEARNING, MISSIONS
3. EASTERN CATHOLICISM: THE END OF ICONOCLASM: THE SCHISM OF PHOTIUS: 813-925
4. THE ROMAN SEE AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE EMPIRE, 814-900
5. THE ROMAN SEE AND THE ANARCHY, 900-1046
6. CATHOLIC LIFE DURING THE ANARCHY: ABUSES, REFORMERS, MISSIONARY CONQUESTS
CHAPTER 6: THE RESTORATION OF SPIRITUAL INDEPENDENCE, 1046-1123
1. THE MOVEMENT OF REFORM AND ST. GREGORY VII, 1046-1123
2. THE SCHISM OF CERULARIUS
3. . THE OFFENSIVE AGAINST ISLAM: SICILY, SPAIN, THE EAST. 106-1099
4. THE MONASTIC RENAISSANCE: CHARTREUSE, CITEAUX, PREMONTRE
5. THE RENAISSANCE OF CATHOLIC THOUGHT
6. THE FIRST GENERAL COUNCIL IN THE WEST
CHAPTER 7: THE AGE OF ST. BERNARD, 1123-1181
1. ST. BERNARD
2. THE PROGRESS OF CATHOLIC THOUGHT: ABELARD -- GILBERT OF LA PORREE -- HUGH OF ST. VICTOR -- PETER LOMBARD -- GRATIAN -- ROLAND BANDINELLI
3. THE ROMAN SEE IN THE GENERATION AFTER THE CONCORDAT OF WORMS, 1123-1153
4. THE LATIN EAST, 1100-1151
5. THE IMPERIAL MENACE TO THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION: (I) FREDERICK BARBAROSSA AND ALEXANDER III, 1154-1177
6. THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF 1179
CHAPTER 8: THE CRISIS OF THE MIDDLE AGES, 1181-1198
1. THE IMPERIAL MENACE TO THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION: (2) THE EMPEROR HENRY VI
2. THE DISASTERS IN THE LATIN EAST, 1150-1197
3. CATHOLIC THOUGHT: THE MENACE OF ARISTOTLE AND AVERROES
4. ANTI-CLERICALISM, HERESY AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM: WALDENSES, JOACHIM OF FLORA, ALBIGENSES
CHAPTER 9: INNOCENT III AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION, 1198-1216
1. THE CRUSADE AGAINST THE ALBIGENSES
2. ST. DOMINIC AND THE FRIARS PREACHERS
3. ST. FRANCIS AND THE FRIARS MINOR
4. INNOCENT III AND THE CATHOLIC PRINCES
5, INNOCENT III AND THE LATIN EAST
6. INNOCENT III AND THE REFORM OF CATHOLIC LIFE: THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF 1215
CHAPTER 10: THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY: ACHIEVEMENT AND PROBLEMS, 1216-1274.
1. THE IMPERIAL MENACE TO THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION: (3) THE EMPEROR FREDERICK II.
2. THE CRUSADE OF ST. LOUIS IX, 1247-1254
3. INNOCENT IV AND THE PAPAL MONARCHY
4. THE END OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN: URBAN IV, CLEMENT IV AND CHARLES OF ANJOU
5. THE INQUISITION
6. THE TRIUMPH OF THE CATHOLIC INTELLIGENCE: ST. BONAVENTURE, ST. ALBERT THE GREAT, ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

CHAPTER 1: THE CHURCH IN THE WEST DURING THE LAST CENTURY OF THE IMPERIAL UNITY, 313-30

1. THE DONATIST SCHISM, 311-393

Let us begin by making clear what we mean by " The West." It is the western half of the Roman Empire as Gratian reorganised it in 379, the Pretorian Prefectures of Italy and the Gauls, the dioceses of Italy, Rome, Africa, Gaul, Spain and Britain, all Europe west of the Rhine, south of the Danube and west, roughly, of the meridian of 20 deg. E. with, in Africa, the modern Morocco, Tunis and Tripoli. The West had not been created a separate empire by Diocletian's far-reaching reforms in the administration. It was, in his time, simply the sphere of jurisdiction of the junior of the two partners who, henceforward, were jointly to share the indivisible imperium?.

This new system was only more or less preserved in the next hundred years. For thirteen years (324-337), under Constantine the Great, the Empire had but a single emperor; and after a short interval it was again united under his son Constantius II (351-361). Valentinian I divided it once again in 364, and so it remained until the assassination of Valentinian II nearly thirty years later. This emperor left no heir, and his eastern colleague, mastering the usurper who had murdered Valentinian, now became sole emperor of the Roman world. This was Theodosius, called the Great, destined, though he could not know it, to be the last man to rule effectively the vast heritage in which, since the days of Augustus, the lands that encircle the Mediterranean had been politically and culturally united. Theodosius died (January 28, 395) prematurely, only a few months after his final establishment, and within ten years the forces, to ward off which the best efforts of every great mind in the last hundred years had been directed, surged up yet once again, this time to have their will. They were destined -- these forces which, carelessly and none too accurately, we have come to lump together as the Barbarian Invasions -- so to transform the West that, in the end, it became a new thing, politically and culturally. In that long process political unity disappeared and the Western Emperor, too, who was its symbol and its source. The Catholic Church survived.

To understand what this meant we need to recall how much of Catholicism there was to survive; we must survey the Catholic achievement in the West at the moment when the Barbarian Invasions began, describe the history of the Church in the West between the act of Constantine which definitely gave it legal security and the death of the last great personality whom that new age of the Christian Empire produced, St. Augustine. It is the story of Catholicism in Africa, perhaps the most Catholic province of the West, slowly shaken to pieces by the terrible experiences of the long Donatist schism; the story of Spain similarly disturbed but in less degree by the friends and the enemies of Priscillian; the story of the first attempts to evangelise what was the least Catholic part of all -- the countrysides of Gaul -- and of the Roman See's careful organisation of new means through which to develop the exercise of its traditional primacy. It is the story, too, of a great dogmatic conflict about the fundamentally important truth of the nature of the divine activity in the soul's progress towards God. It is the story, finally, of the life work of St. Augustine, the greatest mind as yet given to the Church.

The Donatist Schism, which, in the fourth century, wrought as much damage to the Church in Africa as did the contemporary Arian trouble to the Church in the East, was a legacy from the persecution of Diocletian. Africa, on that emperor's partition of the State, fell within the jurisdiction of Maximian and although with Maximian's abdication (305) the persecution practically ceased, it had been, for the two years it lasted, a very bitter reality indeed. The Church had suffered particularly from a very stringent inquisition after the sacred books and vessels; and a very great proportion of the numerous nominal apostasies which occurred, had taken the form of surrendering the sacred books and vessels for profanation and destruction.

Against such traditores, now more or less repentant, there was the same indignant feeling that had shown itself fifty years before in the time of St. Cyprian against the semi-apostates of the persecution of Decius. In Egypt, too, and in Rome, the Church was experiencing a similar period of strain. And, in Africa, as elsewhere, amongst those accused, or suspected, of thus throwing the holy things to the Pagans were a number of the bishops.

One such episcopal suspect was the Bishop of Carthage, the Primate of Africa himself, Mensurius. Whatever the degree of his apostasy, [ ] Mensurius had had to face from a number of those whose loyalty won them imprisonment -- the confessors -- the same kind of trouble that had marked the beginning of St. Cyprian's episcopate. History was repeating itself; the confessors, once again, were endeavouring to subordinate episcopal authority to their own personal prestige. The bishop had to take disciplinary action. He made careful distinction between the real victims of the persecution and those who, in danger of the law for other, less avowable, reasons, now used their faith to win alms and help from the charity of the faithful, or who were in prison as the inevitable result of their own acts of bravado. Whereupon the self-created and self-glorified " confessors" declared him cut off from communion with them and therefore from the Church.

Mensurius died in 311. In his place the Church elected the deacon Cecilian who had been his chief ally in the recent troubles, and to whom there had fallen the unpleasant task of carrying out the details of the late bishop's policy in respect of the rebellious " confessors." Immediately all the latent hatreds fused. There were the " confessors," now long freed from prison, and their cliques; there were Cecilian's rivals, embittered since his election; there were his predecessor's trustees whom Cecilian had, at the eleventh hour, just been able to foil in a scheme of embezzlement; there was a pious and wealthy woman -- Lucilla -- mortally offended by Cecilian's refusal to enthuse over her private cult of her own privately canonised " confessor"; there were the bishops of Numidia, already embittered with Mensurius and very willing to embarrass his successor. Finally, there was Donatus, Bishop of Casae Nigrae in Numidia, but living now in Carthage, a born leader of men with a genius for organisation and propaganda. He it was who organised the party, and from him it has its name.

The discontented appealed, then, against Cecilian's election; and the Primate of Numidia, whom it in no way concerned, came into Carthage with seventy bishops to try the case. Cecilian ignored the " council's " summons; he was declared to be an intruder. As " successor " to Mensurius the assembled bishops, and their motley of cranks and fanatics, elected one of Lucilla's clerics, half-chaplain, half-secretary, the lector Maiorinus. But the most serious feature of the affair was not the mere fact that a second Bishop of Carthage had been intruded, but the theological basis by which the intrusion was justified and Cecilian condemned.

Cecilian's consecrator had been the Bishop of Aptonga, Felix; and Felix of Aptonga, it was alleged, had in the recent persecution been among the traditores. Such apostasy, declared the electors of Maiorinus, a fall from grace, entailed necessarily the loss of all spiritual power in the apostate. Felix could no longer be a means of grace: he could no longer baptise, no longer ordain, nor consecrate. It was the old theory of St. Cyprian which Rome had condemned so vigorously, which he had died without retracting, and which had survived him as a peculiar tradition of the African Church, to be used now against his own legitimately elected successor. Cecilian was, then, no bishop, according to this theory; the priests he ordained were no priests; the sacrifices they offered a mere parade, their baptisms a ceremony only. Whoever depended on Cecilian ceased by the fact, necessarily inevitably, to be in the Church at all. Whence from the very beginning of the schism a terrible aggressive bitterness on the part of the schismatics; and within a very short time the quarrel within the Church had become a problem of public order. The civil authority could not but intervene.

Cecilian was elected in 311, Maiorinus in 312 -- in the October of which year, Africa, by the battle of the Milvian Bridge, came under the control of Constantine. It was the very moment of the emperor's conversion, and to arrange the religious troubles of the province was one of his first concerns. He decided in favour of Cecilian, and the letter to the imperial Vicar of Africa, notifying this decision, is interesting witness to the emperor's high conception of his new role as the Church's protector. " I must admit," he wrote, " that I do not feel free to tolerate or to ignore these scandals, which may provoke the Divinity not only against the human race but against myself. For it is an act of the divine good pleasure which has chosen me to rule the world. Should I provoke Him, He may choose another. True and lasting peace I can never achieve, nor can I indeed ever promise myself the perfect happiness which comes from the good will of God Almighty, until all men, united in brotherly love, offer to the most holy God the worship of the Catholic faith."

Constantine, thirty years of age, had marched from victory to victory ever since, on his father's death, he had forced himself on the other emperors as his successor. He was now, thanks to the unfamiliar nature of the problem, to meet a decisive check. His dual role of head of the State and protector of the Faith, his double anxiety for public order and the unity of the Church, were to be his undoing.

He began (313) by recognising Cecilian and ordering the local authorities to effectuate the dispossession of the Donatists where these were in power. The Donatists appealed against the decision, alleging the invalidity of Cecilian's ordination and asking for judges from among the bishops of Gaul; and Constantine agreed that the question should be reopened. He chose three Gallic bishops, ordered others, Italians, to be added to them and with the pope at the head of the tribunal the affair was solemnly judged at Rome (October, 313). This episcopal court, sitting in the Lateran (the first appearance in ecclesiastical history of that famous palace), heard both sides and declared that Donatus had not proved his case. Cecilian was, undoubtedly, the lawfully elected Bishop of Carthage.

The Donatists appealed once more. The affair was spreading rapidly, and already, in most of the African sees, the Catholic bishop had a Donatist competitor. Constantine ordered a new enquiry. Its subject this time was not Cecilian but his consecrator, the alleged traditor Felix of Aptonga, and the enquiry was an affair of State, conducted by the imperial officials in the courts. The police books of the time of the persecution were produced; the magistrate who had ordered the search and the arrest of Felix appeared to give evidence. It was proved that Felix was innocent, that he had in fact never even been arrested during the persecution, and also it transpired that the Donatists had been busy forging an official certificate of Felix's guilt. This evidence the emperor sent to Gaul where, at Aries, a great council from all the West had been convoked to adjudicate on the matter once more. The council (August, 314) examined the whole affair and, noting the Donatists as " crazy fanatics, a danger to Christianity," it declared for Cecilian.

The Donatists appealed yet again, and for a third time Constantine listened to them. He summoned both Cecilian and Donatus [ ] to Brescia, and while he kept them there, sent to Carthage a commission to see if, with both of the leaders away, the rival factions could not be reconciled. Only when this was found impossible and the commission had reported that a decision must be given, did he judge. And once more, after another examination, he decided for Cecilian (November, 316). This decision Constantine followed up by an order that the churches which the Donatists held were to be restored to the Catholics, and that the Donatists were to be forbidden to meet.

Constantine's unwillingness to enforce the judgements of the different judges to whom he had referred the matter and his readiness, time and again, to reopen it, are to be put down to. his anxiety for the preservation of public order. He knew his Africa, and knew that this was no mere question of a theologians' quarrel. It was, then, with the greatest reluctance that he issued the orders which were the logical consequence of the judgement, and the reception which met them must have seemed to justify his hesitation. Everywhere there were riots, destruction and bloodshed; and nowhere more of it all than in Numidia where, in the five years of the agitation, the Donatists had gained the upper hand and had driven the Catholics under.

The movement, like Monophysitism a century later in Egypt, was beginning to draw to itself all that survived of the native tradition below the veneer of Roman civilisation, all that life so long exploited for the benefit of the cosmopolitan capitalist and adventurer, ancient social hatreds which would find in this religious crusade a long awaited opportunity, and which would turn it very soon into a peasants' war of rapine and murder. Wherever the Donatists gained ground, indeed, there soon appeared, as the militant auxiliaries of their bishop, the organised bands of the Circumcellions.

It is not easy to find, in later history, a parallel which would serve to explain them. They were nominally Christian, fanatically attached to their own interpretation of the Gospel's social teaching, self-appointed judges and avengers of social inequality, rigorist in matters of morality in the narrow sense, and wholly unconcerned with its obligations where these stood in the way of their customary procedure. Armed with bludgeons they roamed the countrysides, ravaging the estates of the wealthy, compelling assent by outrage and terror, with forever on their lips the incongruous war cry of Deo Laudes. Their dearest aspiration was to die for the Faith, and if, since there were no longer any persecutors, this was now a matter of some difficulty, then to die at any rate and to seek death at the hands of the chance passer-by. So the tragicomic spectacle, at times, of the peaceful citizen bidden to murder the fanatic under the menace of the like fate for himself. Donatism did not invent the Circumcellions. Their extravagance was a local product of the spirituality of the century, akin to the extravagances of the undisciplined pioneers of monasticism in the deserts further to the East. But Donatism, with its insistence that the Catholics were laxists, the descendants of traditores, and with its profession of a higher and more rigorous sanctity, rallied these bands to the schism. As long as the schism lasted they were the picked agents of its propaganda, terrorists who came to hold whole provinces in their grip. Wherever they gained the upper hand the Catholics who held firm were massacred, those who yielded, re-baptised, and, if clerics, re-ordained. The churches which escaped destruction were washed and re-washed to purify them from the effects of the rites of the traditores, the Blessed Sacrament consecrated by Catholics thrown to the dogs. In the days of the Donatist power whole provinces laboured under this tyranny.

Under these circumstances the policy of repression speedily developed into a local civil war, which another war of propaganda kept active and alive for years; and at last when, in 321, the Donatists made an appeal for toleration, Constantine granted it. He did so in letters which make no secret of his disgust and contempt for the sect. They are not to enjoy the privileges which the Catholics have; nevertheless they may live, and live as Donatists; the Catholics he exhorts to remember the Gospel and the duty of pardoning, and even of loving, those who hate them; the Donatist bishops were freed from prison: and the movement proceeded to consolidate what it had gained.

The regime of tolerance inaugurated by Constantine lasted for just over twenty-five years until his son, Cons tans, in 347, felt himself strong enough to pick up the long-standing challenge. For that quarter of a century had been for the Donatists-especially in Numidia -- a period of licence, in which their violence had had full play. Now at last the Government proposed to come to the aid of the oppressed Catholics. It needed an army to execute the edict. Once more there were riots and massacres, but finally the Donatist bishops were rounded up and exiled, their churches handed over to the Catholics, and for fifteen uneasy years there was peace.

That peace endured until Julian the Apostate, in the acknowledged hope of embarrassing Catholicism, recalled the exiles. Their return was the signal for a renewed reign of terror, and although Julian died the next year (363), his successor, Valentinian I, did not reverse this part of his policy. Valentinian was indeed a Catholic, but his religious belief was most carefully kept out of his public policy. Religious disputes, he held, were the bishops' affair, and he declined to take official notice of them. With his accession there set in for the African Church the worst period of its history so far. From the State it no longer received the protection of a privileged party. Donatist and Catholic were alike in the State's regard.

The Church was dependent entirely on its own resources and unhappily these, at the moment, were not great. Notably it suffered from a lack of leaders, and from a hierarchy in which the proportion of nullities was unduly high. Restitutus, the Catholic primate, had even played a prominent part in that Council of Rimini which a few years earlier (359) had capitulated to the Arian Constantius II, while the Donatist primate -- Parmenian -- was a man of real ability, an organiser, a scholar and a good controversialist. His one competent Catholic opponent was the Bishop of Milevis, Optatus. But despite the logic of Optatus, and despite the jealousy that tore the Donatists into rival factions, and despite the differences which led to the expulsion of their greatest writer Tyconius, the schism maintained its gains. In 372 there was a great native rising against the Roman power. Many of the Donatists were implicated, and henceforward the government of Valentinian was a little less neutral; but for all that, and especially in Numidia, the Donatist supremacy was far from destroyed.

Then, as the century came to an end, three things happened which promised to reverse the history of the thirty years since Julian. In 390 Parmenian died, after ruling his church for thirty-five years, and the Donatists were never again able to produce a leader of his ability. Two years later, by the death of Valentinian II, Africa came under the rule of Theodosius the Great, a convinced and enthusiastic Catholic, a stern Spaniard for whom compromise and half measures had no meaning. But more important, by far, than either of these events was the entry into Catholic life of St. Augustine, ordained priest in 391, Bishop of Hippo from 396.

2. ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE DONATIST SCHISM

St. Augustine's first official connection with Donatism was his attendance at the Council of Carthage in 393. He was then a man close on forty [ ]; he had been a priest two years, and a Catholic for six. He was, like many another in this century of religious transition, the child of a mixed marriage in which the mother was Catholic and the father Pagan. From that mother he had gained, in earliest infancy and childhood, his first notions of Catholicism, a knowledge and love of God and of Jesus Christ which remained, despite the Pagan education of boyhood and adolescence, to be the source of never-ceasing self-questioning and discontented criticism of whatever system of thought attracted his mind. He was intellectually precocious, with the temperament of the artist, and all the frank sensuality of the Pagan. From his very schooldays, in the matter of sexual morality he ran amok, to settle down at the age of eighteen to something like sobriety with the girl who bore him the child Adeodatus.

Meanwhile, amidst all his dissipated recreations and the financial anxieties that accompanied them, the thought of God and the attraction of Christ never left him, and with this, an ever-growing anxiety for intellectual security about God's nature and about the nature and origin of evil. The Church's doctrine on these problems, like many another since, he partly misunderstood and wholly disliked. Catholics, he thought, had an anthropomorphic idea of God (whence their retention of the Old Testament); and a doctrine which made man's free will responsible for evil, not only conflicted with his philosophical creed (which made evil to be a thing material), but conflicted also with his desire to possess Christ and yet follow his own way of life. Cicero's Hortensius set once more aflame his old desire for wisdom -- though he grieved that the wonder book lacked the savour of Christ; and then, at nineteen, he gave himself to the Manichees.

St. Augustine's adherence to Manicheeism is one of the earliest, and perhaps the most noteworthy, of all the contacts between Catholicism and a religion that harassed it for a good thousand years. Mani, its founder, was a Persian, and it was about the year 240 that he began to publish his supplement to the world's revealed religion. Mani, it is his own account of himself, is the herald of a doctrine in which all revelation is summed up and completed, the successor of Buddha, Zoroaster and Our Lord Himself. The Paraclete promised by Our Lord has appeared, revealing all truth to Mani, past and future equally with the present, and Mani is now one body and one soul with the Paraclete. But there is nothing of the Montanist ecstatic about this Persian prophet. Clear, cool-headed reflection marks all his writings. The chief influences upon his thought are eastern. There is in it nothing directly Hellenistic. The prophet never himself crossed the frontiers of the Roman Empire. His religion is not a product of Paganism, but a kind of bastard Christianity, the outcome of Mani's ambition to complete Christianity, and of the accident that his own life coincided with the flood tide of the syncretist movement observable in the religious world since the death of Alexander the Great. It is this Syncretism that is responsible for the curious juxtaposition of Christian and anti-Christian elements in the work. It is responsible, too, for the presence in Manicheeism of a particularly disgraceful mythology. In some respects the system recalls those of the Egyptian Gnostics, and in others Marcionism.

Mani was a capable organiser. He not only prophesied that his religion would conquer the world, but, like Marc ion, he set it in a strong close-knit framework. Like Marcionism it taught a dual origin of life and the universe, and the perpetual antagonism of the two supreme principles, the one good and the other evil. It advocated much the same kind of materially inspired austerity, prohibitions of certain foods and drinks and of marriage. On the other hand the sect was twofold. There were the Elect, bound to all observances, and the Hearers who accepted the system and would one day qualify for salvation by passing into the ranks of the Elect, but who, until then, had no more onerous obligation than to hold fast to their resolution to do so.

For St. Augustine the system had the same general attraction that all Gnostic systems held for the educated mind. It professed, ultimately, to give a purely rational explanation of the riddle of life, of man and his destiny, the nature of God, the problem of evil. It did not, like the Church, offer a teaching which, very often, was above the power of reason to understand. The Manichees knew; and they would, in time, teach the disciple all. There was about the system a great parade of learning, philosophical and astrological; it had all the appearance of being the academic thing it seemed. It had the further advantage, for Augustine, that it offered a way to be at rest intellectually without first regulating the moral disorder of his life.

For nine years he remained in the sect -- never quite so secure as he would have liked; and then came Scepticism, and enough of Aristotle to shake to bits what security he had; and, the great Manichee of the day failing to restore his confidence in the system, Augustine abandoned it. He was back once more in the chaos of conflicting doubts and then, in 383, there came a nomination to the chair of rhetoric in the western capital, Milan.

Augustine accepted it gladly and, with the sermons of the city's bishop, St. Ambrose, at which he most assiduously assisted, his intellectual life passed into another and richer phase. In the first place St. Ambrose, too, was a rhetorician -- though by genius and not profession; and through his oratory something of the thought of the greatest of Christian philosophers hitherto, Origen, came to influence Augustine. Catholicism and philosophy were, then, by no means incompatible. The religion of the Church could survive the test of philosophical discussion, could possibly be the shrine of that Wisdom so long sought. Also the sermons at Milan enlightened Augustine's prejudiced ignorance. Catholics, he knew now, had not an anthropomorphic idea of God.

Nevertheless, Augustine was still far from Catholicism. There still remained his old difficulty that all is matter; and since it was impossible to explain materially the God of the Catholic Theology how could the Church's religion be true? Deliverance came through Neoplatonism, [ ] with its insistence that the spiritual world is a reality, that it is self-sufficient, immutable, its truths necessarily, universally valid, and that to the spiritual the material is, and must be, subject. God then, his reason now acknowledged, was Spirit -- and spirit, too, the soul; evil was no creature but lack of being. The last barrier between Augustine's intellect and the Church was down. There still remained the facts of sense, and the legacy in his soul of the years of moral disorder.

Here, too, alas, his primary deliverer was Neoplatonism -- alas, for just as truly as the Neoplatonic speculation about spirit ran easily to Pantheism, so, in the practical order, it ran to a wrongly ordered asceticism, an asceticism based on the idea of the radical opposition of spirit and matter. The divine in man, the soul, is the prisoner of the material. The soul can never be free, never realise its possibilities until the body is broken by systematic constraint, the sense-nature ruthlessly destroyed. In nothing is the opposition of spirit and matter so evident as in what relates to sex, and after a life of sexual disorder Augustine verged on desperation. faced with the habits that threatened to keep him permanently exiled from the Church and Christ. To the Church he came but, in morals as in intellectual assent, by way of Neoplatonism -- whence the violently-phrased reaction, the language, for example, about sex that is almost a denunciation, the statements that even Christian marriage involves a contamination of spirit. It is a reaction whose colour here is Neoplatonic and not Christian at all. but from it derived a tradition that lived on among Christian writers for centuries. [ ]

The immediate effect upon Augustine of his new discoveries was to drive him yet nearer to despair. Despite the very evident urge of his senses -- Adeodatus' mother had gone, and he had taken a mistress in her place -- he refused to marry. There was a last most violent struggle of all, and then it ended as the saint himself describes in the most famous passage of all his writings-the reading of the heroism of the Christian ascetics, the ensuing hour of despair broken by the child's voice " Tolle, lege" and the happening on the words of St. Paul. "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy: But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences." [ ] Grace alone can set man free from the slavery to sin. Thenceforward he knew only peace, and giving in his name he was prepared for the sacrament, and at Easter, 387, St. Ambrose baptised him.

Since that time Augustine had lived with his friends the life of a monk on what property he retained at Tagaste, the little town in Proconsular Numidia where he was born. He was no doubt the most famous man of the place when, in 391, an accidental circumstance of a visit to Hippo compelled his acceptance of the priesthood. Two years later, and with the Council of Hippo he made his first entry into the history of Donatism.

In the June of that year (393) the domestic quarrels of the Donatists had come to a head and a great council of their bishops at Cabarsussi had deposed the primate, Primian, and installed Maxim Ian in his place. There seemed a chance of appeals from the defeated party for admission to the Catholic Church. One of the matters for which this Council of Hippo was called was to decide the conditions on which such reconciliation should be effected, and at the council St. Augustine, simple priest though he was, was asked to preach to the bishops. Three years later he was himself Bishop of Hippo, in the very heart of the Donatist country, the stronghold of the party of Primian, where the Circumcellions had it all their own way; and where once he came himself very near to death at their hands. He was soon the recognised leader of the Catholics. By his tireless activity, his innumerable letters, his sermons, his treatises, songs he wrote for the people, and anti-Donatist placards to cover the walls, he was gradually putting new life into the laity, while the sudden apparition of a first class mind among the bishops was transforming the hierarchy also.

To win victories in controversy, however, was far indeed from Augustine's aim. It was the re-union of the Church and the convincing of the Donatists that he desired; and side by side with the controversy there went on a persistent effort, maintained with a patience and charity that never tired, to open up negotiations with the Donatist bishops. The council of Catholic bishops decided for this policy in 401, and again in 403. But each time the Donatists held aloof. On the other hand the anti-Catholic violence steadily increased, and after the failure of the last attempt at negotiation the bishops appealed to the emperor, Honorius, (395-423) for protection. The edict of February, 405, was his reply. The Donatists were to be considered as heretics, to be proscribed as such and rooted out.

The new edict was undoubtedly a severe blow. The realisation that the State would now protect the Catholics, lost to the Donatists all those converts whom they had gained through the terror, and it doubtless lost them also a great number of their own more indifferent members. But the edict was by no means so consistently applied as to destroy the sect outright. With the assassination of the all-powerful minister Stilico (408) there came a change of policy. But the bishops appealed, and the edict of 405 was renewed. In 410 the policy was a second time reversed, and an edict of tolerance published. The situation was by this time easily worse than at any time for twenty years.

Once more the bishops appealed, and this time the emperor adopted the often discussed plan of a conference between the two episcopates. It was to take place at Carthage under the presidency of a high imperial official; the procedure was carefully drawn up; official stenographers were appointed, and on June 1, 411, the rival armies of bishops -- 286 Catholics and 279 Donatists, two bishops to almost every see in the country -- came together. It was a weary encounter, as all who knew the history of the controversy could no doubt have foretold. The Donatists had no case in theology, in law or in history. They had no argument except the fact that they had survived for a hundred years. Naturally and necessarily they made the greatest possible use of the only tactics open to them -- obstruction and delay. The president decided that they had no case and must submit, and the following January (412) a new imperial decree confirmed his judgement. All Donatists were ordered to return to the Catholic Church under pain of banishment; their churches and other property were confiscated and handed over to the Catholics. Commissioners appeared everywhere to carry out the decree; and since, this time, there was no reversal of the policy, the end of Donatism seemed assured. But before the Catholics could flatter themselves that the double influence of Catholic propaganda and the imperial laws had converted the mass of the schismatics, the Vandal invasion came (429) to wrest Africa for a century from the rule of Rome and subject it to barbarians who were militant Arians, fanatically anti-Catholic.

3. ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE HERESY OF PELAGIUS

Donatism, for all the importance of the questions it raised as to the nature of the Church and the validity of sacraments, had been, in itself, a purely local matter. It was hardly disposed of by the imperial decree of 412 when there came to Africa a more far-reaching trouble. This was a new theory of the relation in which the restored humanity of the Christian stood to its Restorer, a theory so far-reaching, indeed, that it involved nothing less than a revolution in the traditional idea of the redeeming activity of Jesus Christ. The author of the theory was the British monk Pelagius, important hitherto not so much as a scholar or theologian, for all his learning, but as a director of souls. He was a man of holy life, given to ascetic practices and held in high esteem at Rome, where he lived during the closing years of the fourth century. With him were associated another Briton, Celestius, and, later on, an Italian bishop, Julian of Eclanum, who organised the ideas of Pelagius into a reasoned system of thought. [ ]

Man, according to the new theory, was by his nature free to do evil or not. Whatever his activities they were his alone, and they were the only source of what merit he possessed in the sight of God, his only title to any reward. The human will is all-powerful, and there is nothing to hinder the man who so chooses from living a life of perfection. The traditional Catholic doctrine that the sin of the first man Adam had, for one of its effects, the loss to all Adam's descendants of certain of the privileges with which he was created, and for another the sowing in their souls of an inclination to sin, was rejected. Adam's sin, the Pelagians maintained, affected his progeny as a bad example indeed, but not otherwise. Human nature itself had not in any way suffered by his lapse. As Adam was created so were his descendants, who, therefore, stood in no need of any special divine aid to heal their nature. Nor did they stand in need of any special help in order to act rightly. For this, the free will of their unimpaired human nature was all-sufficient. Divine intervention could make the right choice in action easier, but the choice itself was within the capability of all. Men, since Adam had chosen to choose wrongly, had shown themselves depraved; but, since the nature of man remained unimpaired, no restoration of human nature was called for, no new life needed to replace an old thing tainted and vitiated, no regeneration. Baptism then was not a new birth. The divine action of the Redeemer upon the souls of the baptised, whether in the redeeming action of His death or in His subsequent glorified life, is not a principle animating man from within his very soul, but a thing wholly external -- the stimulus of a moral lesson, enforced indeed by the most powerful of all examples, but nothing more. The mystery of the Redemption, if Pelagius was right, was emptied of its main significance, the Incarnation became a wonder wholly out of proportion with its object. Finally, if in the work of his salvation man can succeed without the divine assistance, what place is there in the scheme of things for religion at all? God becomes a mere inspector of man's chart of duties, any inter-relation of love, confidence, gratitude disappears. Prayer is a non-sense. The theory was, in fact, a most radical deformation of the very essence of Christianity, and it must produce inevitably in all who held it a corresponding deformation of character. The Pelagians, for whom humility was an impossibility, were, in their spiritual life, really cultivating themselves. Their own spiritual achievement was the chief object of their attention, and with their theory all the old harsh pride of the Stoics returned to the Christian Church.

It was as refugees fleeing before Alaric that, in the year of the sack of Rome (410), Pelagius and Celestius came to Africa, Pelagius halting there but for a moment on his way to the East, Celestius staying to seek admission into the presbyterate of Carthage. Carthage, Jerusalem and Rome are the theatres of the different crises of the next ten years.

Celestius, apparently, made no secret of his views and when he applied for ordination found himself denounced to the bishop as a heretic (411). There was an enquiry, Celestius was asked to abjure a series of propositions that summed up his theory, and when he refused he was excommunicated. Whereupon he too left Africa for the East, and, at Ephesus, succeeded in obtaining the ordination he sought. He left behind him in Africa a great number of disciples, drawn chiefly from the better educated classes and from those dedicated to the higher life of asceticism. It was in the endeavour to undo this work of Celestius that St. Augustine first came into the controversy, exposing the tendencies of the theory in private letters, in sermons and in books.

Pelagius himself, meanwhile, was well established in Jerusalem and thanks to the severity of his life, to his powerful friends, and to the Greek ignorance of Latin, he pursued his way unhindered. There was, however, another Latin ascetic in Palestine, a much greater man than Pelagius, and, even in his old age, an utterly tireless hunter-out of novel untraditional theories. This was St. Jerome, and it was only a matter of time before he turned upon Pelagius all the attention of his acute mind -- and his biting pen. The Bishop of Jerusalem, Pelagius' patron, was forced into action, and his protege summoned before a synod to explain himself. He evaded the points at issue by using phrases whose ambiguity was not apparent to the Easterns, inexperienced in the tierce and quart of this particular controversy, and the synod, without condemning Pelagius, recommended that the matter be referred to Rome (July, 415).

St. Jerome was left to prepare his next move. This time he was reinforced by allies from the West -- two bishops of Gaul, exiled through a political revolution, and a young Spanish priest, Orosius, sent by St. Augustine. The Bishop of Jerusalem had proved fallible. The appeal was now made to his superior, the Metropolitan of Cesarea. A new synod was called to meet at Diospolis, and at Diospolis (December, 415) the comedy of the earlier synod was repeated. The bishops from Gaul were kept away by illness; Pelagius again had his skilfully ambiguous submission to offer; and, yet again, the bishops found it satisfactory. Orosius returned to Africa with the news of his failure; and the African bishops determined on a formal joint appeal to Rome. Two great councils were held, at Milevis and at Carthage, and with their exposition of the traditional doctrine there were sent also to the pope -- Innocent I, 402-417 -- letters from the two Gallic bishops, the minutes of Celestius' condemnation in 411 and a letter, drawn up by St. Augustine, explaining the controversy: all this was some time in the late summer, or autumn, of 416. In March of the new year the pope's reply arrived. The African doctrine was approved and the excommunication of Pelagius and Celestius ratified. [ ]

So far the controversy had progressed along the accustomed lines, according to the normal procedure in cases of a charge of heresy. If progress was slow that was but natural, considering the distance which separated the protagonists. But now, in 417, there came into the affair, to add very much to its complexity, the old trouble of ecclesiastical politics, of episcopal ambitions and jealousies. The death of the pope (March 12, 417) was its opportunity.

The new pope, Zosimus, was, for some reason or other, very much under the influence of Proclus, Bishop of Arles, the city which was, at the moment, the most important city of the Western Empire, the seat of government of the day's one strong man, the future Emperor Constantius III. Proclus had helped Constantius and Constantius had made him bishop, and upon the Bishop of Arles the new pope now heaped privilege upon privilege, making him to all intents and purposes a vice-pope in southern Gaul-despite the protests of the other bishops. One urgent motive of their protests was their poor opinion of this favourite of both pope and emperor. Proclus had been installed as bishop in the place of a bishop uncanonically thrust out to make room for him. That predecessor was still alive -- was none other than the chief accuser of Pelagius at the synod of Diospolis! Now, thanks to Proclus' influence with the new pope, the most active adversaries of Pelagius in the East were themselves excommunicated. The hopes of the Pelagian party rose, and Celestius himself went to Rome, offering submission to Zosimus and offering, too, an acceptance of the doctrine of Pope Innocent's letter to Africa, though he still refused to abjure the propositions for maintaining which he had been condemned in 411.

Pelagius, too, made a kind of submission, sending to the pope a long treatise on the freedom of the will in which, more haeretico, carefully chosen ambiguities masked what was new in his teaching.

Influenced by these reasoned protestations Zosimus reopened the case, and wrote to Africa what amounted to a panegyric of Pelagius and Celestius, in which they figured as the calumniated victims of the malice of the bishops! (November, 417). The African bishops sent an elaborate reply, detailing the shiftiness of Pelagius' habitual mode of procedure and the pope (letter of March 21, 418) thereupon capitulated. His letter reached Carthage just as a great council of two hundred and more bishops was about to open. Of this assembly St. Augustine was the soul. It drew up a statement of the faith against Pelagius in nine canons and sent these to Zosimus with a letter asking his approval. Also, to leave no stone unturned, the African bishops approached the emperor, Honorius, and obtained a rescript ordering the pursuit and suppression of Pelagius wherever found. The pope now acted with decision and in a document called the Tractoria [ ] definitely condemned Pelagius and Celestius and their doctrines. About the same time an eastern council, too (at Antioch, in 418), condemned Pelagius, and with this he disappears from history.

Pelagianism was now an officially proscribed heresy, and orders went forth from the government that all the bishops should formally sign a prescribed form of condemnation. In Africa there was nothing but willing support for the measure, but in Italy, while there was no objection to condemning Pelagius, there was a certain reluctance to sign the condemnation if in so doing the signatory was taken as approving the theories of St. Augustine. This was especially the case in southern Italy, among the bishops who were immediately subject to the pope. Eighteen of them openly repudiated what they styled "the African Dogma", and the pope promptly deposed them. With this resistance a new phase of the heresy begins, its leader one of the eighteen, Julian, Bishop of Eclanum.

Julian was a scholar, a master of logic -- an Aristotelian it is interesting to note -- a controversialist, perhaps, rather than a theologian. He it was who worked the ideas of Pelagius into an ordered system, and the history of Pelagianism is, very largely, the history of Julian's controversy with St. Augustine. With Julian, who was personally well known to the saint, as his father had been before him, the whole character of the movement changes. It is no longer merely defensive, resorting to one subterfuge after another in its furtive endeavour to escape condemnation. Henceforward it is a bold and vigorous attack on St. Augustine in the name, of course, of a more primitive and truer faith.

But Julian found himself isolated. He went to the East, as Pelagius had done, and in the East, too, he found hardly a supporter except in the old Bishop of Mopsuestia, Theodore, with the tendencies of whose naturalistic theology [ ] -- he was the real father of the Nestorian heresy soon to trouble the East -- Julian's theories of grace accorded well. In Theodore of Mopsuestia, then, Pelagianism found its last patron, and in far off Cilicia the main movement gradually faded from sight. Julian survived until 454, never reinstated, despite his efforts, as Bishop of Eclanum.

The only other country where, after the condemnation of 418, Pelagianism survived in any force, was Britain. Here, since the Roman general Constantine had led away the legions to assist him in his desperate bid for the imperial throne nine years before, the imperial mandates could safely be ignored. More than one bishop was openly Pelagian, and the heresy seemed likely to prosper. That it ultimately failed, and that its followers were rallied to the Roman faith, was due to Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, whom in 429, and again in 447, the pope, St. Celestine I (422-432), sent to Britain for this purpose. With this triumph of St. Germanus in Pelagius' native country the history of his heresy, as an organised anti-Catholic thing, comes to an end.

4. THE INFLUENCE OF ST. AUGUSTINE

St. Augustine, however, did more than merely fight the Pelagians as the great controversialist he undoubtedly was. The need of the moment brought from him the work which is his chief title to glory as a theologian, the construction of a whole theory to explain the original state of man, the nature and effect of the first man's fall, the nature of the Redemption, and the way in which, in virtue of the Redemption, God acts upon the souls of the redeemed. It is a work in which he had singularly little help from preceding writers, and a work which was to give rise, as it still gives rise, to passionate discussions; a work, too, since proved erroneous in more than one point, but a work which in its main lines has long since passed into the traditional theology of the Catholic Church.

Adam was, by a special act of the divine liberality, created with the gift of immortality, with a will inclined to good, a harmony of reason and senses, with infused knowledge, in habitual justice. He sinned, and his sin is transmitted ever after to all his posterity, as Scripture, the Christian writers, the rite of Baptism and -- a point of which St. Augustine makes very much indeed -- the chronic misery of mankind testify. The universal misery from which no man has ever escaped, the opposition between spirit and flesh, especially in what relates to sex, are for the saint a final culminating argument, and in the anarchic desire for sex pleasure that, of itself, denies all restraints, he sees that effect of Adam's sin through the instrumentality of which it is transmitted to us. "Hoc est malum peccati in quo nascitur omnis homo." [ ]

This is not a radical vitiation of human nature. Human nature is not, since Adam, a thing of simple badness. But it suffers a permanent inherited weakness, a disability that is inherent and is therefore transmitted to all who possess a human nature. The channel by which that transmission is effected is, once again, the anarchic activity of sex-desire which accompanies the act of sex. Adam's progeny then, is, inevitably, born deprived of those special gifts -- immortality and the like -- which graced him, and, deprived of the will's inclination to good, needs henceforward a special divine help if it is to avoid sin. All mankind, since Adam's sin, left to itself is inevitably, eternally, lost: a mass of perdition, a mass condemned -- of itself helpless, in a pit whence nothing but a new divine act can extract it. From this abyss God has in fact delivered us all, creating man anew, giving mankind the beginnings of a new life through the Redeeming death of the God-Man Jesus Christ. For St. Augustine the religion of the Church is essentially a redemption, a redemption based on the Incarnation.

In the new arrangement, God, as always, gives everything, even the first help to arrive at that belief upon which all is built. With the God-Man Jesus Christ, by incorporation with Him, Humanity is to be re-created, made one with Him in Baptism and the Holy Eucharist -- and this not in so many isolated individual unions, but as a corporate body. This idea of the salvation of Humanity as the members of Christ -- members of a body whose head is the God-Man -- is the very heart of St. Augustine's theology. His explanation of the system by which from the head the members receive direction and power to move -- in more technical language his theory of Grace -- is but his application of this theology to a special point.

The Redemption is the work of the Incarnate God in His historical earthly activity. This activity is continued, and continuously manifested thenceforward, in all the subsequent supernatural activity of the redeemed: manifested as the very source and internal principle of that supernatural activity. It is then really Jesus Christ Who prays, Who lives, Who performs the salvific actions in the individual. This is the meaning of St. Augustine's elaborate, well-articulated theory of Grace. It is St. Paul re-thought, the tradition set out afresh with new profundity, new lucidity, with passionate fervour, disciplined logic and a wholly new rhetorical splendour, in answer to the menace of Pelagius' sterilising divorce of man from God in the spiritual life. Thanks to St. Augustine's genius the tradition would conquer and mould anew the piety, the interior life, of all the succeeding centuries. It is this which most of all survives of his work. Far from Grace -- the freely-given divine aid that makes possible man's production of actions supernaturally valuable -- being unnecessary to Christians, Christianity is essentially Grace! and the primary attitude of the Christian is humility, the complete consciousness of his unlimited dependence on God. Nor can the Christian be solitary in his Christianity, for Christianity's very life is the union between all who are Christians, the union between each as a Christian and Christ Himself, so that the whole Church is nothing more than "the one Christ loving Himself." The importance of the Church in St. Augustine's theology it is impossible to overestimate.

The system constructed by St. Augustine had its difficulties-particularly in the matter of adjusting the relations between the divine activity of Grace and man's free-will, difficulties about which, after further centuries, men still dispute as keenly as in St. Augustine's time.

To the Catholics of his own day St. Augustine was the great champion of the church against the Manichees, the Donatists, the Pelagians. To the Catholic of a day fifteen hundred years later he is still the doctor of Grace and Ecclesiology, the builder who set on the stocks every single one of the later treatises of systematic theology. But to Catholics of the thousand years which followed his death he was more even than all this. He was almost the whole intellectual patrimony of medieval Catholicism, a mine of thought and erudition which the earlier Middle Ages, for all its delving, never came near to exhausting. He was the bridge between two worlds, and over that bridge there came to the Catholic Middle Ages something of the educational ideals and system of Hellenism; there came the invaluable cult of the ancient literature, the tradition of its philosophy and all the riches of Christian Antiquity. In St. Augustine were baptised, on that momentous Easter Day of 387, the schooling, the learning, the learned employments, and the centuries of human experience in the ways of thought, which were to influence and shape all the medieval centuries. His own great achievement, and the authority it gave to his genius, legalised for all future generations of Catholics the use in the service of Catholic thought of the old classic culture. For this prince of theologians is no less a prince of the humanities, and in himself he determines, once and for all, the Christian attitude to the pre-Christian arts, poetry and thought. This genius, the range of whose mind is encyclopaedic, gifted with an insatiable desire to know yet more, with a passion for work and the temperament of a poet, the disciplined thinker whose very profession it is to reason and expound, saw Christianity as a whole, with a completeness beyond anything that any of his philosophical predecessors had known. And from his masterly understanding there comes the most masterly presentation hitherto seen, and which will endure for nearly a thousand years without a rival, until there comes another mind, as great as his own, and equipped with still better instruments. [ ]

In theology, beyond what has been already described, St. Augustine is responsible for a philosophically inspired exposition of the teaching on the Trinity which is one of the marvels of Christian thought; and which remains to this day impossible to better. In his teaching on the Incarnation, there is, once again, a richness of new light and a new precision, thanks to his philosophical mind; and as his exposition of the Trinity precludes the difficulties over whose solution Eastern Catholicism tore itself to shreds, so here his solutions leave no place for the misunderstandings out of which Nestorianism and Monophysitism were to rise.

He readily gives philosophy a role in the provinces of faith. Philosophy it is which first of all must test the credentials of faith. If these satisfy the mind, then faith henceforward has the principal role. By faith the mind accepts the mysteries. The office of reasoning is now secondary: the better understanding of truths acquired by faith, the explanation of them and of their mutual harmony. In his own use of reason to explain the truths of faith, St. Augustine employs the philosophy of his adoption, Neoplatonism as he had re-thought it. It was by no means a perfect instrument, as he himself uneasily realised. But with a happy confidence in the ultimate coincidence of all true teaching, relying on the surer way of faith where philosophy failed, he yet managed to build up with Neoplatonism the greatest philosophical exposition of its religion which the Church had yet seen. His was a mind that never ceased to develop, and a recent writer has been able to describe the years of Catholic life to which, with Grace, Neoplatonism brought him as "a continual argument with Neoplatonism. . . a progressive deliverance from Neoplatonism and a growth into essential Christianity". [ ] Something of the Neoplatonist spirit, however, survived all this argument, to provide him with problems he never lived to solve and which, unsolved, remained to confuse the philosophical Catholic until the great deliverance wrought by St. Thomas.

Like his secular master Plato -- and unlike Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas -- St. Augustine has, from the very beginning, been eagerly read far beyond the limited circle of professional philosophers and theologians. "There was passion in his philosophy," [ ] it has been excellently said; and again, equally truly that " everything he writes is inspired by (his own mystical experiences) and looks backward or forward to them." [ ] No other theologian is so personal. Never before nor since, was there given to the sacred sciences a thinker for whom, in this passionate degree, there was but one reality -- the action of God in his own soul -- and a thinker of genius so mighty that, writing all he wrote in the light of this reality, he has somehow written the history of the hearts of all who read him. It is this passion for psychological self-portrayal, the dominant colour of all his work, which has led so many of his admirers to see in him the first of the moderns; and it is undoubtedly the explanation of his unsurpassed hold-which not even his most serious defects have shaken -- on the Christian imagination, affection and understanding. It is also, inevitably, one great source of weakness.

Another source of weakness is the fact that his great corpus of thought and learning lacks systematic organisation. The score of mighty tomes that confronts the student of St. Augustine is the varied production of a man, who, for all that nature cast him for a student, was forced for the best part of his time into the less congenial life of a man of affairs. His works are the productions of a busy bishop, harassed with a thousand temporal cares, from the ordering of diocesan charities to the high business of the State, and it is not surprising that, occasionally, they suffer from a lack of co-ordination and harmony. Thence, too, no doubt, derive in part the apparent and unexplained contradictions -- despite the famous Retractations written as a correction at the end of his days. St. Augustine never had Newman's comparative leisure in which to revise and to bring into harmony the detail of his vast output of half a century's exposition and polemic. Hence it is, that often enough, both sides in a vital dispute can make some claim to call him their master; and that partial study has sometimes been able to make out of him whatever it chooses. But whatever the flaws in the vast work, the work remained and remains. St. Augustine, in the East only a name, is in the West everything for the next eight hundred years, and without some knowledge of him the life of these centuries is unintelligible.

There is one book, especially, of St. Augustine which never ceased to be read and studied for the next thousand years and to influence western thought and even political action -- the De Civitate Dei. [ ] Not only was this a principal means whereby much of the saint's theological teaching passed into the minds of others than the professional theologians, into the minds of schoolmasters and lawyers and administrators and even rulers, forming the mind of the educated layman, but the book was the first attempt to understand the meaning of history, and it was the foundation of all the later Christian speculation about what we now call social philosophy. For a thousand years it was the European's guide to the rights and duties of man vis a vis the state, his vade mecum in the complexity where he found himself, subject at once of his temporal lord and of the spiritual kingdom which was the Church. It is a very lengthy book, [ ] and, in its discursive somewhat meandering fashion, it is encyclopaedic in the generality of problems it raises and endeavours to solve. There is here, in fact. a little of everything: brilliantly written religious apologetic; criticism of non-Christian ideals and solutions, that is humane, humorous, witty; expositions of the Christian mysteries fired with the fervour of a great love. It was the most popular, and to this extent, the most influential, book St. Augustine ever wrote; and its influence is by no means ended yet.

The City of God took the saint something like fourteen years to write, and he published the parts as they were completed, between the years 412 and 426. When he began it he was in the full maturity of his powers; he was an old man of seventy-two when he wrote the last wonderful pages "on the quality of the vision with which the saints shall see God in the world to come," and " of the eternal felicity of the City of God, and the perpetual Sabbath." What inspired the book was the storm of anti-Christian recrimination that followed Alaric's sack of Rome in 410. Had the empire not gone over to Christianity, said the pagans, those things would never have happened. So the saint examines Paganism, and its history, in the light of Christian teaching and ideals. He lays bare what Paganism was, and must be. and what its effects on human nature. And he sets forth, constructively, the positive hope, and achievement, of Christianity and the Catholic Church. The Church as it exists, is not, indeed, adequated with the saint's City of God, any more than the ancient pagan empire is identified with that other "city" which is under the rule of sin. But the vision is presented of the Church, God's creation, as "the new humanity in process of formation, and [of] its earthly history [as] that of the building of the City of God which has its completion in eternity." [ ]

Not only is a solution offered for the difficulties urged by the pagans, [ ] but a solution too for those difficulties which the facts of imperfect Christianity present, only too continuously, to believers also. The work brings out the ideal of the Church "as a dynamic social power," and it expounds a Christian social doctrine, of moral freedom and of personal responsibility, that is necessarily fatal to ideas of the state as superhuman and ever omnipotent, and to an organism so destructive of human personality as was the ancient Roman empire. St. Augustine is commonly declared to be, by this book, the founder of what is called the philosophy of history. It is no less true that the theories he there sets forth "first made possible the ideal of a social order resting upon a free personality and a common effort towards moral ends." [ ]

The City of God was the favourite reading of Charlemagne, whose empire may be fairly considered as the mighty attempt of a somewhat less than saintly Christian genius, to set that City up as an actual political institution; and seven hundred years later still, it was with a series of public lectures on the work that the author of the Utopia introduced himself to London, and to Europe, as a political thinker and reformer.

5. PRISCILLIAN

Of the history of the Church in Spain in the first three centuries after Christ we know almost nothing. St. Paul was, in all likelihood, one of its first evangelists. It gave martyrs to the Church in the persecution of Decius. Fifty years later than Decius, on the eve of the greater persecution of Diocletian, its bishops, to judge from what we know of the Council of Elvira (c. 300-305), were preoccupied with the problems of a Catholicism so extensive and so universally popular that in many respects it had become gravely relaxed. There were Catholics who, even in time of peace, continued to make their offerings to the pagan gods. Marriages between Christians and the heathen priests were not unknown. The clergy showed too keen an inclination to engage in commerce -- bishops no less than priests and deacons. Others practised as moneylenders. The habit or example of idolatry was still strong and, lest they should be worshipped, all pictures were now ordered to be removed from the churches Clerics who are married are to live with their wives as with their sisters, under pain of deposition. Rules are laid down for the cases of conversion from such special classes as the charioteers of the circus, and the comedians from the theatre who, once converted, are strictly forbidden to return to their unhallowed profession. With this council, held in the first ten years of the fourth century, the veil falls once more on our knowledge of the early Spanish Church. When it lifts, some seventy years later, it is to disclose a Church torn by internal controversy, and to reveal one of the most curious figures of all Church history. This was Priscillian. He was a man of great distinction, well-born, cultivated, wealthy, gifted with eloquent speech, with a genius for propaganda, and he was wholly devoted to the cult of the ascetic life.

The different churches in Spain already by this time had each of them its circle of ascetics -- men and women who had specially dedicated themselves by a vow of continency in a spiritual union with Our Lord. They would continue to live in their own homes, but all follow a more or less universal rule, which prescribed special daily prayers, daily reunions in the church, additional fasts, and abstinences, and a sober manner of dress -- the women for example were veiled, wore no jewellery, used no cosmetics. They would be, in Spain as elsewhere, the local church's agents in the organised charities that played so great a part in the primitive Christian life, care of the sick, of widows and orphans, relief of the indigent poor. Priscillian was not in any sense a pioneer in this ascetic movement, but his powerful personality gave it a new impetus and speedily began to transform it.

Gradually, the multitudes whom he influenced -- and his disciples grew in number very speedily indeed -- looked to Priscillian for direction and not to the head of the local church, to Priscillian and his private inspirations. And Priscillian was not limited by the traditional sources of Christian Asceticism. The myths of the Gnostically-inspired, apocryphal gospels served him with ideas no less than the genuine Scriptures. The basis of his ascetic practices again was not Christian, but the old oriental theories of the radical badness of matter, and of the inevitable fundamental opposition between matter and spirit. This showed itself in the exaggerated abstinences to which he was given and which he recommended, condemnation of marriage, of the use of wine, and the use of flesh meats as things bad and to be shunned. Little by little his followers began to have the appearance of a sect apart, to whom other members of the Church were as an inferior race. The Priscillianists -- to anticipate a later name for them-habitually went barefooted. Periodically, at fixed times, they withdrew themselves from the world to give themselves to their own peculiar religious observance in a kind of "retreat." They had their own use of the Holy Eucharist. Women, especially, had an important place in the movement.

It was not long before the genius of Priscillian had completely disturbed the Spanish Church, especially in the west and northwest, in Portugal and Galicia. His ascetic reputation and what was known of the severity of his life, were, for many people, decisive. Thousands joined him and among them even some of the bishops. Other bishops began to question the tendencies of the movement, to suspect the principles that inspired it and then to organise against it. In 379 they sent to consult the pope, Damasus I, and the following year, in a great council at Saragossa, a number of the practices to which the followers of Priscillian were said to be given, were forbidden under the strictest penalties.

How strong, by this time, the movement had grown may be judged from the next event in the story -- the election of Priscillian himself as Bishop of Avila on the very morrow of the Council of 380. Immediately he assumed the offensive, and made a great effort to oust his superior, the Metropolitan of Lusitania. But that bishop, Idace, was not to be easily overthrown. He had an influential friend at the imperial court -- no other indeed than St. Ambrose -- and the only result of Priscillian's manoeuvre was an edict from the emperor, Gratian, in general terms, against "false bishops and Manichees." Already there was, in this, menace of what the future might hold for Priscillian, for the Manichee-to whose anti-social morality his own alleged customs bore so striking a resemblance -- had been under the ban of the empire since long before the conversion of Constantine. Priscillian, with some friends, then set out for Italy, for Rome and Milan to assure himself of the support of both pope and emperor. The pope would not receive them; but from Milan they obtained, in the end, a decree which in effect annulled that from whose execution they had fled.

Once more Priscillian was free to take the offensive, this time with the civil authority behind him. The leaders opposed to him, menaced now by the State as disturbers of the peace, took themselves to Treves, the seat of the pretorian prefecture of the Gauls in which Spain lay. There they found support in the bishops and the high officials, but Priscillian's influence in Milan was still too great to be overthrown. Suddenly the whole situation changed when, in 383, Maximus, the imperial commander in Britain, declared himself emperor. He landed in Gaul with an army and Gratian, marching north to meet him, was assassinated at Lyons. Maximus was master of Britain, of Gaul and of Spain. Of this empire Treves became the capital, and still at Treves was the bishop who was Priscillian's chief enemy -- Ithacus, a man of loose life, worldly, ambitious and, as the enemy of the bishop who had found protectors at the court of Milan, likely to find a favourable hearing with the victorious Maximus.

Maximus was sufficiently won round by Ithacus' charges to order that Priscillian and a like-minded colleague, Instantius, should be arrested and tried at Bordeaux by a council of bishops. Instantius was deposed, but Priscillian, refusing a trial, appealed from the bishops to the emperor. The scene changed to Treves and this time it was to the criminal courts, on criminal charges, that Ithacus denounced his rival. Priscillian was tried on an indictment accusing him of sorcery, of diffusing obscene doctrines, of presiding at midnight reunions of women, and of stripping himself naked to pray. With six associates he was condemned; and, since sorcery was a capital offence, executed.

The sentences and their execution caused a sensation. St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, had protested in advance against any sentence of death. Ithacus, in his plea against Priscillian, had made the most of his congenial opportunity to demonstrate publicly against all asceticism and all ascetics, even to the extent of denouncing St. Martin himself as a Manichee. The saint, undismayed, had continued to urge his plea that in an affair which concerned questions of Catholic doctrine, the lay court had no jurisdiction. The emperor had promised that there should be no question of a death sentence and the bishop returned home. Then, influenced by the anti-Priscillianist bishops, Maximus had ordered an enquiry and, on the prefect's report that Priscillian was guilty of sorcery, had ordered the trial that resulted in the conviction and the executions. Nor was this the end. Commissioners were sent to Spain to deal similarly with Priscillian's adherents.

St. Martin returned to Treves and broke off all relations with the Bishop of Treves and those who had shared in the enquiries and the trial. Nor did he cease to protest against the iniquity of the death sentences, until the emperor promised, as the gauge of his communion, to halt the persecution then beginning in Spain. The pope, too (Siricius, 384-396), asked for an explanation of the proceedings and, fully informed by the emperor, excommunicated Ithacus and his associates. Nor would St. Ambrose when, in the course of the year, a political embassy brought him to Treves, give any recognition to the bishop, "not wishing to have anything to do with bishops who had sent heretics to their death."

For three years, however, despite St. Martin, the repression continued until in 388 Maximus was slain and the West was once more ruled from Milan. With this restoration of Valentinian II, Priscillian came, posthumously, into something like his own. With the other supporters of the late usurper the persecutors of Priscillian paid the inevitable penalty. Ithacus and the others were deposed and exiled. The remains of Priscillian were brought back from Germany with all manner of ceremony to become the centre of a popular cultus, and soon Spain was once more given over to the bitter fights of religious factions, Galicia and the West ever more strongly Priscillianist, Betica and Carthaginia just as strongly orthodox. For years the episcopate was divided. A council at Saragossa (395) excommunicated the Priscillianist bishops and these, reverting to the manoeuvre of their master, fled to Milan to enlist the support of the court. St. Ambrose showed himself sympathetic, but insisted on an abjuration of Priscillian's distinctive doctrines and on the renunciation of the cult of his memory and his remains. The exiles consented, and thereby gained the support not only of St. Ambrose but also of the pope. They returned to Spain only to break their promises, and at a new council (Toledo, 400) they were yet again condemned. This time the condemnation broke the unity of the party, for while some of the bishops submitted, others remained obstinate. Curiously enough the submission was the cause of yet another division. Rome, consulted as to the procedure to be adopted towards the repentant bishops, gave its traditional advice that they should be shown every consideration. Whereupon, as always, a faction ""more Catholic than the pope" showed itself, declining to re-admit the repentant Priscillianists to communion and breaking off all relations with those who did so. There were now three kinds of Christians in Spain, the Priscillianists, the moderate Catholics with whom, thanks to Rome, the repentant Priscillianists were now united, and the fanatical Catholic opponents of the reunion -- a lamentable state of affairs after thirty years of controversy. Before any real improvement could take place there came, in 406, the flood of the great barbarian invasion to submerge for a time, with much else, these evidences of religious weakness and dissension.

6. THE ROMAN SEE AND THE WESTERN CHURCHES

The history of the Roman Church in the first three centuries is noteworthy for two things. First, there is really very little mention of it at all -- for much of the period we have little more than the names of its bishops. Secondly, whatever record of it has survived is almost invariably concerned with its exercise of a supervisory authority in the affairs of the other churches. It is in this role, indeed, that the Roman Church makes its first entry into history with the intervention at Corinth which is the subject of St. Clement's celebrated letter. Later still, the exercise of this primatial power, so to call it, and the reactions to that exercise, are the chief matters of the history of some seventy years -- the years when in turn Rome imperially corrects all the great churches of Africa and the East; Ephesus in Polycrates, Carthage in St. Cyprian, Alexandria in St. Denis. The Roman primacy, whatever the use its bishops made of it, is one of the undeniable features of primitive church history. But it is also a thing which functions only on special occasions.

There existed also, side by side with this universal jurisdiction of the Roman Church, and in addition to its purely local authority over its own actual members, the clergy and the faithful of the city of Rome, yet a third and intermediate kind of jurisdiction whose sphere was originally the bishops of Italy and which eventually grew to be, what it is to-day, an effective, continuous, supervision over all the churches of the Church Universal, really felt in the everyday life of each. That development which has made the papacy of modern times the source and centre of all Catholic life, and thanks to which the popes can, and do, effectively control that life's every movement, has been the work of the sixteen hundred years between Constantine and Pius XII, Trent and the Council of 1870 being its latest stages.

Its first stages are to be observed in the first century in which the Roman Church had any real opportunity to organise the administration of its primacy, the century following Constantine's conversion. It was also the last century, for very long indeed, in which political conditions made any such organising really possible; for it closed with the " Barbarian Invasions " and the dislocation, for generations more, of all organisation but the most primitive. In what relation then -- beyond that of final and ultimate authority -- did the pope stand to the bishops of the West in this last century before the West was transformed into something new? [ ]

The bishops of Italy form the nearest group of extra-Roman churches with whom the pope is in contact. Over them, so the canons of Nicea (325) are witness, he exercises such a supervisory jurisdiction as that possessed by the Bishop of Alexandria in Egypt. Thirty years later the Arian troubles have brought the pope of the day, Liberius, into conflict with the emperor. He has been ordered into exile and an imperialist, Felix, intruded into his see. The Bishop of Milan too, the new Western capital which has now displaced Rome, is exiled for the same good reason, and he, too, is given a successor, the notoriously Arian Auxentius. And the imperial power has gone still further. Henceforward it is the Bishop of Milan who exercises this archiepiscopal jurisdiction over the bishops of northern Italy (the civil diocese of Italia). To Rome are now left only the churches of the civil diocese of Rome. Milan, it might seem, was to be an imperially created rival to Rome in the West as Constantinople was about to become in the East. But when the end of Auxentius' long episcopate (355-374) came, he was succeeded by the most eloquent defender of the Roman Supremacy the Church had yet known, St. Ambrose (374-397); also, within seven years of that great man's death Milan had ceased to be the capital. None the less, the metropolitan jurisdiction of the see endured, save over such churches as it had lost to the new centres Aquileia and Ravenna. Over the churches in central and southern Italy and the islands, about 200 sees in all, the pope, during the fourth century, continued to exercise, then, a close and continual supervision.

Within this sphere no bishop is consecrated without the pope's consent. The local church elects, but its choice must be ratified at Rome, and the newly-elect must be consecrated by the pope. This is a discipline much older than the letter of Pope Siricius (386) in which it is formally recalled. It is the reason for the mention, in the notices of these earlier popes in the Liber Pontificalis, of the number of those they ordained. For example "This pope," it is Fabian, "held five ordinations, [ordaining] 22 priests, 7 deacons, and 11 bishops for various places." In later times the number grows. Damasus (366-384) ordains 62 bishops, Innocent I (402-417) 54, and St. Leo I (440-461) 185! These bishops of the pope's special province meet annually at Rome on the anniversary of the pope's own consecration (Natale Papae) unless, for some special cause, they are explicitly dispensed. To Rome they apply at every turn for advice in difficulties and the Roman practice is a norm to which they endeavour to conform their own administration. At Rome itself the administration is in the hands of the seven deacons. They are the chiefs of the growing ecclesiastical bureaucracy, and it is from their ranks that the pope is usually chosen. The archdeacon is at this time the most important personage after the pope, and the office is very often a last step before the highest office of all. So was it, for example, with St. Leo the Great.

It is to the pope directly that complaints against these bishops are addressed. He investigates, either personally or by delegates, and, when necessary, he deposes the guilty bishop; and the basis and justification of this authority, as the successive popes never tire of repeating, is that they are the heirs of St. Peter.

In the affairs of the other churches of Italy, those subject now to the metropolitan authority of Milan, of Aquileia, of Ravenna, the pope interferes but rarely. Normally he has no share in the election of their bishops nor does he consecrate them. Here, as between each church and the Roman, there is yet no systematic centralisation. For all the community of Faith and the full acceptance of the Roman Supremacy to which, let us say, St. Ambrose witnesses, these churches in their everyday administration went their own way. Only for the greater councils did they go to Rome, and only in cases of disputes and appeals did Rome intervene in elections. Otherwise there is a complete administrative autonomy -- strikingly in contrast with the dependence on Rome in matters of Faith.

Beyond the limits of Italy the churches divide into four main groups, those of the (civil) dioceses of Spain and the Gauls, the churches of Africa, and those of the two dioceses of Dacia and Macedonia. [ ] Like those Italian churches which lie outside the sphere of Rome's special supervision, these churches too enjoy a wide autonomy. Their bishops are normally elected -- and if need be deposed -- without any reference to Rome; and in their ordinary administration they follow each their own interpretation of the traditions. Nevertheless, communication with Rome is frequent, is even continual, and the relation in which these churches all stand to Rome is undoubtedly one of subordination.

Spain, when the century opened, numbered close on fifty bishoprics. Its bishops were represented in the several great councils of the century, at Arles in 314 for example and at Sardica in 343 and one of them, Hosius of Cordova, actually presided at Nicea. But though there were so many sees, the higher organisation was defective. There were several metropolitan sees around which the others were grouped provincially, but there was no one central see and never any real unity among the bishops. How extensive the effects of this disunion could be, the troubles centering round Priscillian made very evident. The detail of their history brings out, also, the role of the Roman Church in this distant Western province. It is from Rome that the bishops seek counsel when first they approach the question of Priscillian's orthodoxy; and it is to Rome that Priscillian goes, for the declaration of the purity of his faith that will reinstate him: "ut apud Damasum obiecta purgarent" says the contemporary historian-Damasus, whom Priscillian salutes as senior omnium nostrum, senior et primus. Later still, after the executions of 385, there is again reference to Rome for direction at every stage of the complex sequel, the question of the reconciliation of Priscillian's followers, and the question, deriving therefrom, of the ultra-rigorist Catholic opponents of the reconciliation.

There is also the famous letter of Pope Siricius in 385. The Spanish bishops had applied for a ruling on a whole series of important matters. The evils to which the Council of Elvira was a witness, eighty years before, still afflict the Church. There are still to be found Christians who dabble in Paganism and clergy who, after ordination, continue to live with their wives as before. The pope's reply is no mere solution of a case of conscience. It is a peremptory reminder of the law -- "the things the Apostolic See has decided". "We order," says the pope, "We decree," and to coerce any reluctance to obey there is the menace of excommunication from Rome, and for justification of the threat and proof of the power there is the reminder that through Siricius it is Peter who is speaking. The Roman Supremacy is writ large all over this letter -- and Rome's consciousness of its universal acceptance in the Church.

Nor is it otherwise in Roman Gaul, the vast tract that stretches from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, whose capital is Treves on the Moselle. Gaul was the one province of the West which Arianism had really troubled -- thanks to the manoeuvres of Constantius II and his Council of Arles in 353. The formation round Saturninus of Arles of a group of pro-Arian bishops, the struggle with them and the easy task of reconciliation once Constantius had disappeared (361) are the most important events of the century which have come down to us. The hero of this struggle and of the restoration was St. Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers, one of the greatest of the earlier Latin ecclesiastical writers, and -- himself, for four years, an exile for his staunch defiance of the Arian emperor -- the chief forerunner of St. Ambrose in the theoretical exposition of the limits of Caesar's rights in the Church of Christ. Related to the events of this restoration of Catholicism is the letter Ad Gallos Episcopos, seemingly of Pope Damasus and dating from about 374. Whatever pope wrote it -- one theory puts it down to Damasus' successor Siricius -- the letter is a reply to an appeal for judgement. Some sixteen points in all are dealt with, the question of consecrated virgins who have broken their vow, of clerical celibacy, and of the conditions requisite for the lawful ordination of clerics and the consecration of bishops. In the reply the typical Roman notes are all immediately observable-the insistence, for example, that no bishop be consecrated without the consent of his metropolitan, since such would be contrary "to the episcopal discipline of the Apostolic See." The pope nowhere suggests that he is enacting a law. Everywhere he is but reminding the bishops of Gaul of existing law, and yet he speaks as though he were its author and the one primarily responsible for its observance. Ten years later and Rome is again intervening to excommunicate the Gallic bishops who had shared in the grave irregularities which preceded the execution of Priscillian, and in 400, fifteen years later still, a council of Italian bishops [ ] continues to refuse these bishops recognition since they have not fulfilled the conditions laid down years before by Ambrose (the late metropolitan of the Italians) and the Roman bishop.

Two replies of Pope Innocent I (402-417) to Gallic bishops-Victoricius of Rouen and Exuperius of Toulouse -- have passed into the very foundations of the great corpus of the Canon Law; and the reign of his successor Zosimus saw the papal intervention suddenly pressed forward to a development that was revolutionary when that pope gave to the Bishop of Arles a kind of superiority over all the metropolitans of Gaul, decreeing that all ordinations of bishops should be referred to him and that through him all the other bishops should henceforward transact all their business with the Roman See. The policy was as unpopular as it was unprecedented, and after a short twelve months it was set aside by the new pope, Boniface I (418-422), and the old regime restored of autonomous provinces each under the rule of its own metropolitan, the Bishop of Narbonne being specifically authorised to disregard the extra-provincial jurisdiction of Arles and to proceed "metropolitani iure munitus et praeceptibus nostris fretus." What the pope was for the scattered churches of Gaul during this century is aptly described in a letter of the pope whose reign brings it to a close -- Celestine I (422-432). The pope, he declares, is in a post of observation and general superintendence, to arrest untimely developments, to decide and to choose, a post such that "no violation of discipline escapes us" -- for so far there is but question of discipline.

With Africa we come to what probably was the most Catholic province of all the West -- certainly the province where the Church was most completely organised. To begin with, it was a region extraordinarily rich in bishops; at the time of the Council of 411 there were 470 of them. And, unlike the bishops of Spain and Gaul, this vast assembly was a well-organised body. The bishops of each of the six civil provinces formed together an autonomous ecclesiastical province over which presided, not the metropolitan of any fixed see, but the senior of the bishops. But, in addition to this machinery of provincial councils, the Bishop of Carthage had, since the beginning of the third century, exercised a superior primatial jurisdiction over all. There was also the Concilium Universale of all Africa, and this, meeting regularly once a year, was, with the primacy of Carthage, a most potent means of unity. The churches of Africa were the most perfectly organised of all, and it is symbolical of that organisation that it was from this group that there came the first code of canon law -- the Codex Canonum Ecclesiae Africanae, published by the Council of Africa of 419.

The African Church had another distinction, the tradition of a singular "insularity" in its activity. In the long fight with the Donatists, for example, it never makes appeal for help to other churches; even in this controversy which, more than any other, brings out African understanding of the nature of the Roman primacy, a controversy in which the fact of that primacy and African acceptance of it is the very foundation of the Catholics' case, there is never an appeal to Rome for assistance. And, it is to be noted, Rome allowed for this "insular" habit when it permitted the Africans in the matter of reconciling the Donatists to depart very seriously from the accepted discipline in such matters. The relations with Rome are continuous and friendly. The faith in Rome's supremacy is as evident here, and at this time, as in any other part of the Church. But the administrative separation could hardly be more complete. Before the period had ended, and the Vandals come in to make an end for ever of Roman Africa, a series of crises were to bring out very strikingly what a high degree of autonomy Rome could allow in matters of administration and discipline where there was no question of the unity of faith.

The history of Pelagius has shown the African bishops turning to Rome once the controversy ceases to be merely local. In this matter where the faith is at stake there is no mention of Milan, the capital, along with Rome. It is to the pope they appeal because " You, from the Apostolic See, speak with greater persuasiveness." And in his reply Innocent r greets them as one episcopate among many who come to drink of the fons apostolicus. "Like yourselves, all bishops, whenever the faith is in question, can do no more than refer it to Peter who is the foundation of all episcopal dignity."

Under Innocent's successor, the rash and hasty Zosimus, the rare pope of whom one is tempted to say he must have been a nuisance to all concerned, the loyalty of the Africans was seriously tried. There was, to begin with, his apparent eagerness to reverse his predecessor's judgement on Pelagius; and next, when the firm and dignified protest from Africa halted him, there was a conflict over appeals to Rome which, for its intensity, recalls that of St. Cyprian with St. Stephen I. The African Church -- by a singular exception to the general practice -- had ceased to allow appeals to Rome from its final judgements, and even menaced with excommunication whoever pursued such appeals. Zosimus not only ignored this legislation, by receiving and deciding appeals, but sent a commission into Africa itself to examine the facts of the case and to bring the bishops to reverse their policy. How the matter would have developed had he lived it is not easy to say, but he died while the dispute was barely begun and his successor, busy with the anxiety of a disputed election, went no further with it. But six months-after Zosimus' death, the Council of Africa (May 419) published its code -- and the law forbidding appeals to be taken overseas, with its penalty for disobedience, appeared in its due place.

Seven years later the conflict broke out once more, and over the same miserable person whose misdeeds had been the occasion of trouble in 419, the priest Apiarius. Pope Celestine acted just as Zosimus had done. He received the appeal and he sent legates to Carthage. The Bishop of Carthage agreed to reopen the case and then, while the Roman legates were eloquently pleading for Apiarius, the wretched fellow made a clean breast of his crimes. As far as Apiarius was concerned the affair was ended. But not so for the African bishops. They determined that the question of Roman intervention in disciplinary matters should be settled once and for all. Accordingly, the Council of 426 made a formal request to the pope that he would not for the future be so ready to receive appeals, and that he would not receive to communion those excommunicated by the African bishops, and that he would not restore those whom the African bishops had in council deposed; that he would not for the future send any more commissioners into Africa, much less commissioners charged to enlist the services of the police, since nowhere can the bishops find these things are allowed by the synods of the past, nor should the pride of this world find any counterpart in the Church of Christ. To this extraordinary remonstrance -- the most extraordinary surely it has ever received -- Rome made no reply. As with the Catholic council of Sardica's attempt to prescribe to Rome the manner in which its primacy should function, [ ] so was it with the attempt of these African bishops, equally loyal in faith. Rome made no sign; but in her own time, and as opportunity called for it, she continued to exercise in respect of Africans, as of Gauls, Egyptians and Orientals, all the fullness of her right.

The prefecture of Illyricum completes the round of these more distant churches of the West; and here, in the last half of the fourth century Rome, to meet a wholly exceptional difficulty, created a really exceptional regime. The difficulty arose from the transference to the Eastern Empire, by Gratian in 379, of the civil dioceses of Dacia and Macedonia. Henceforward in temporal matters they would be ruled from Constantinople. The popes, however, did not intend that in spiritual matters, too, these churches of what was now called Illyricum Orientale should look to Constantinople; and to counteract any influence tending to draw them thither, the popes established the bishop of the chief see of the prefecture, Thessalonica, as their permanent representative for these provinces. He was charged to supervise the elections of all the bishops and, although the existing system of metropolitans was retained, he was given authority over the metropolitans too. All the business between the different bishops and metropolitans was to pass through him, and his jurisdiction was enlarged to try appeals, with discretion to decide himself what appeals were to go forward to Rome. The Bishop of Thessalonica from the time of Pope Damasus (366-384) is the papal agent, a kind of permanent legate, for these border provinces where Greek and Latin meet, acting, as say the letters of Boniface I, vice sedis apostolicae, vice nostra.

Inevitably the system met with opposition. Many of the bishops of Illyricum disliked it, and not least from the barrier it raised against all chance of making an ecclesiastical career via the court at Constantinople. The emperor too, Theodosius II (408-450), showed himself hostile and in 421 a rescript was published attaching the sees of Illyricum to the jurisdiction of Constantinople. The pope, unable or unwilling to make any open reprisal, persuaded the Western Emperor, Honorius (395-423), to intervene with his nephew and, Theodosius giving way, the incident closed. But the ambition of Constantinople persevered, as did also the desire of the Eastern Emperor to see no exception to the rule that all the sees of his empire were grouped around the three great sees of the East, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. The question of the Roman jurisdiction over Illyricum Orientale remained, to be for the next two centuries one of the chronic causes of trouble between West and East.

CHAPTER 2:THE CHURCH AND THE DISRUPTION OF THE IMPERIAL UNITY, 395-537

1. THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SITUATION IN THE FOURTH CENTURY: DIOCLETIAN TO THEODOSIUS, 284-395

CATHOLICISM was not the product of the civilisation in which it first appeared; nor did it draw from that civilisation the strength by which it developed and spread abroad. It could not, in the nature of things, be essentially dependent on that civilisation, but it was immensely conditioned by it in all the circumstances of its growth. The Roman roads, the ease of communication, the internal peace and order secured to a whole world through the single political administration, the common languages, the common cultural idiom of Hellenism, all these undoubtedly helped the early propaganda. With the fortunes of the Roman State those of the new religion were, inevitably, very closely linked indeed. Whatever menaced the one would certainly handicap the other.

It so happened that, in little more than two centuries from the first preaching of the Gospel, the political regime we call the Empire was brought to the verge of disruption. The basis of the Empire was military power. The emperor was, in essence, the magistrate to whom the command of the army and dictatorial power were made over for life. Upon the commander-in-chief's hold over the army, therefore, upon the reality of his command, all was based. The senate's delegation of powers, its assent to his nomination were, from the beginning, formalities merely. The real power lay with the army, and increasingly, as the first two centuries went by, it was the man who could manage the army who ruled. Periodically the army got out of hand. Rival armies supported rival claimants to the supreme power, and civil wars had to be fought to settle the issue. There was one such crisis in 68-69, another in 192-193, and the emperor who emerged victorious from this last, Septimius Severus, summed up for his successors the policy which alone would make the position safe for them, "See that the soldiers have plenty of money. Nothing else matters."

In the seventy years that followed the death of this shrewd realist, the weakness inherent in the State's foundations bred all its fullness of destruction. Emperor after emperor was set up by the soldiers, only to be murdered when he ceased to please them, twenty-six emperors in fifty years. One they slew because he proved an incompetent general in the field; another because he strove to restore military discipline; another because, his private fortune exhausted, he ceased to be able to be generous; others again from sheer boredom. In different parts of the empire different armies set up their own emperors, none of them strong enough even to attempt to suppress his rivals, and for the best part of a generation whole provinces were ruled as independent states. Finally, a succession of able soldiers from Illyria (Diocletian and Constantine the chief of them) halted the long anarchy. The State was now reorganised. Every last vestige of the republic was swept away. The emperor was, henceforth, an absolute monarch of the oriental type; and by a careful redistribution of the powers of his subordinates -- whether generals in the army or governors of provinces -- and a systematic separation of the civil and military authority throughout the administration, barriers were set against any return of the anarchy. Diocletian recognised, too, how inevitable was the competition for the supreme position, and to guard against this he associated others with himself as joint emperors of the one state. There were two emperors from 285 and four from 293.

Even this far reaching change did not immediately succeed. On the retirement of Diocletian and his senior colleague in 306 the new senior looked outside the imperial families for his two new assistants. Whereupon Constantine and Maxentius, the sons of the late emperors, Constantius and Maximian, took up arms, and a new civil war began among the six emperors. It ended in 312 with Constantine master of the West. Eleven years later he had conquered his eastern colleague and was sole lord of the Roman world. He was almost the last to hold that place for any length of time. When he died (337) he left his power by will-betraying thereby an un-Roman conception of political power simply monstrous in its scale -- to his sons and nephews. Organised murder disposed of the nephews, a civil war of the eldest son (340), and for ten years the dyarchy was restored to the profit of Constans and Constantius II. In 350 Constans was murdered, and three years of war followed between his murderer and his surviving brother. Constantius was in the end victorious and thenceforward, until the one surviving nephew of Constantine rose to contest his supremacy in 360, he ruled alone like his father thirty years before. Death came to him in 361, just in time to prevent a new struggle between himself and Julian his cousin. Julian, in his short reign of twenty months, had no rival nor had his successor Jovian in his still shorter reign. But with the accession, on Jovian's death (364), of Valentinian I, the army insisted on his associating his brother as emperor. Thenceforward, except for a brief three months at the end of the reign of Theodosius I (November, 394-January, 395), no one man ever ruled again the lands of the empire of Augustus.

For all who could read, death was written very evidently on the face of the imperial system. It was, indeed, only the chance of the succession of great princes in the second century that had preserved the empire beyond its first hundred years. The empire was a pyramid balanced on its apex and the most marvellous thing about it is that it survived at all. Thanks to Diocletian and to Constantine in the first place, it survived even the wholesale destruction of the third century and, even as a united political system, it was to outlive in the East by many centuries its disappearance from the West. But there was a further fundamental weakness against which even the greatest of emperors could not secure the State -- weakness of an economic nature. It is one of the capital facts of the situation that the political breakdown and the invasions of the fifth century occurred while an economic revolution was in progress.

The world in which the Church was founded and in which it had so far developed, was a world in which the town was all important, and in which the countryside existed only for the sake of the town. It was the towns that were, necessarily, the first centres of the new religion; and the bishops, one in each city, the cells which together made up the Church Universal. By the time of Diocletian's restoration of the Roman State -- or, to look at it from another point of view, by the time of Constantine's conversion -- the first beginnings were, however, apparent of a social revolution whose final effect would be to reverse this relation of town and countryside. The towns were already beginning to lose their primacy as social organisms. During the whole of the fourth century the pace of this new development increased rapidly. It was still in its first stage when the mainstay of the town's importance as against the countryside -- the central imperial government -- disappeared altogether from the West. Simultaneously with that disappearance there broke over the ill-defended frontiers wave after wave of primitive nomadic peoples bent on plunder; and there also took place, through the so-called barbarian troops of the army, the establishment in Spain, Gaul, and Italy itself, of kingdoms which, theoretically within the empire, were in fact autonomous. In-these momentous years were laid the foundations of that new civilisation in which the Catholic Church was to work for the next eight hundred years. To understand at all what the Church did for that civilisation, to understand how the Church's development was in turn conditioned by it, there must be borne in mind something of its leading characteristics as they differentiate it from the older world in which the Church was founded. The army, at the end of that century whose early years saw Constantine's conversion, still kept the frontier. What of the life within?

From about the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (16-1-180) there is observable a slow but unmistakable drift in the economic life of the Roman world, a strong ebb towards a more primitive (or more natural) system. There is a persistent debasement of the coinage (hardly checked until Diocletian). There is that debasement's inevitable effect in a chaotic flux of prices. Money-gold coins which really are gold, silver which really is silver-disappears. All that remains are the copper coins covered with a mere wash of silver, "metal assignats," as Mommsen called them. The State begins to be willing to take its taxes in kind, in goods and services. It even begins to grade and to pay its salaries, too, in kind. The army had always been the empire's greatest burden, and in this third century (Septimius Severus to Diocletian) the army was absolute master, greater than ever, better paid, the empire its prey to be looted at will. The bureaucracy, too, swelled its numbers beyond anything hitherto known. Industries -- the commercialised industries of modern times-there were none to speak of, none to be a source of wealth to the State. Commerce on the large scale, again hardly existed. The one real source of wealth was land. The chief means, apart from land, open to the man who wished to "invest" money was the letting it out at interest or the farming of taxes. The towns in such a system, were parasites, places where the middlemen lived, markets where they traded, barracks where were housed the soldiers who protected the exploitation. For exploitation was really the ultimate end of the system. The very rich grew richer still, the poor remained poor. The middle class disappeared.

Diocletian's success as restorer was, in the economic sphere, inevitably limited. His reforms amounted, often enough, to little more than a legal consecration of existing abuses. He restored the coinage; he simplified, while he extended, the system of imperial taxation; he tried, but failed signally, to stabilise prices by imperial edict; his great feat was to inaugurate a regime in which the whole population of the empire was gradually conscripted and bound down, each class with its descendants -- for the burden was hereditary -- to work for the welfare of the State. The taxes are not excessive, the administration is not extravagant. But every possible source of wealth is surveyed and its owner assessed -- land, cattle, slaves, serfs, peasants and owners too. All are now bound by law to the trade in which they work, and their children are bound to follow them in it -- civil servants, the artificers in the armament factories and in the textile factories where are made the costumes for the court and the uniforms for the army; the ship owners, millers and bakers on whom the population of the cities depends for its daily food-allowance; the various building crafts and trades; the bath keepers, and by no means least, the army of workmen, keepers, charioteers, gladiators, actors -- "slaves of the people's pleasure" the law styles them-who produce the public games given now, at Rome, on 175 days of the year. The free farmer, the colonus, is likewise bound to the land. The owner cannot dispossess this class of tenant. If he sells the land the coloni go with it. It is to the land, rather than to the owner, that the new regime enslaves them. The free peasants of the villages are likewise bound to their village. No man shall escape his due share of the great burden. Nor is this a matter that affects only the trader and the working class. For there is yet another conscription -- of the time and brains of the more leisured class to the service of the city where they live.

The Roman civitas is more than a town. It is the town and the hinterland of countryside, often very extensive, upon which the town lives. It is a thing founded for the purpose of exploiting that countryside. It has its "constitution," its senate and its magistrates. It is a tiny State in itself, with considerable autonomy, and from this point of view it is not incorrect to describe the empire as a federation of self-governing municipalities. For the senate and the high offices there is a considerable property qualification. It is the local aristocracy who rule, and amongst whom the honours, the titles, the social consideration of high office are shared. This cursus honorum entails expense on whoever proceeds through it, expense which is ever increasing. Moreover, the class from which the office-holders are drawn is made responsible for the taxation. In case of deficit or maladministration this class, as a class, is liable. Whence supervision from- the central government and, often enough, an endeavour to escape from the burden of one's rank. Whence conscription here too, and a conscription which, once more, is hereditary. The man born a curialis cannot escape his destiny of ruling the civitas and of being responsible to the State for the quota it should contribute to the imperial revenue. One way out there did remain -- a way only the very wealthiest could take. This was to buy rank as an honorary member of the Roman senate itself. It was a way all who could ultimately went, and these last two centuries of the Empire in the West saw a steady flight of these clarissimi viri from the towns to their country estates.

The towns, then, slowly shrank. They became once again mere centres for bargaining, and for the offices of what local government still went on. The great landed estate, on the other hand, gained a new importance. It was a fiscal unit independent of the civitas and gradually it became, under the protection of its privileged owner, an asylum for all who fled the heavy burden of the urban regime, for the impoverished curialis and the harassed artificer alike. Economically the landed estate had always been self-sufficient. Now it slowly began to acquire a political self-sufficiency too. The owner gradually began to exercise judicial authority over those who lived on his land, settling their disputes, punishing their misdoings. He had his prison. He had his armed guards. The emperors protested and legislated, but in vain. Nor was it merely in an accidental fashion that one wealthier private citizen thus became the master of his co-citizens, and his private will more powerful in their lives than the law. Already, from the beginning of the fourth century, the weaker man had begun consciously and deliberately to surrender himself to the more powerful, the poorer man to the richer, for the sake of the influential patronage he thereby gained. This is the patrocinium and here, too, the emperors legislated in a contrary sense and here, too, they legislated in vain. Here, very notably, the coming "invasion" will wear down to nothing the check of their government.

The federation of self-governing municipalities is, throughout the later fourth century, steadily losing its importance. More and more there is beginning to count this new arrangement of patron and client -- we cannot yet say overlord and vassal -- and the empire in the West is beginning to be a mass of such private associations, based on ownership of land, associations not yet legal, a mass held together by one thing only, the fact -- itself steadily less and less of a reality -- that all these inhabitants are citizens of the one state that the central government protects. That central government is, too, the last support of the importance of the towns, and with the fifth century it is to disappear.

During these centuries of the steady decay of the imperial regime, of alternate chaos and temporary restoration, the Catholic Church has steadily grown and developed. It is the one institution that escapes the universal mortification, the one living free thing amid the new all-embracing mechanical despotism. Here alone does the tradition of individual initiative continue, of spiritual liberty, of social activity. Here alone do men continue to govern themselves, to find an escape from the paralysis to which, ultimately, the over-governed succumb. Popular life can, here, still find corporate expression; personality, stifled elsewhere, save in the army, can flourish. It is no matter for surprise that the best thought of the time is within the Church, that it is the Church alone which continues to breed thinkers and orators and rulers. The only live literature of this dull stagnant time is ecclesiastical, and inevitably the bishop's power and prestige increase enormously. He is indeed, in the city, the "one power capable of counterbalancing and resisting the all-pervading tyranny of the imperial bureaucracy." When that bureaucracy disappears what will be left to rival his place? Moreover, the possession of land is, in this new regime, to be the all-important, determining factor of political importance. The owner of land is to be ruler. In the coming age the Church is to be one of the greatest landowners of all. For in the new system of a rural economy the abbeys are to be, in the flourishing countrysides, what the bishops continue to be in the diminished towns.

2. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGES DURING THE FIFTH CENTURY, 395-526

The Empire which, at the time of Constantine's conversion, had thus, for a good hundred and fifty years already, suffered the continuous strain of these internal weaknesses, had during the same time been obliged to face the menace of troubles no less serious from beyond its frontier -- the menace of the "Barbarians." These were the people who dwelt beyond the frontier -- Picts to the north of Hadrian's wall in Britain, Goths, Franks, Alamans and other tribes of Germanic race to the east of the Rhine and the north of the Danube, Moors and Nubians to the south of Roman Africa. They were pastoral and agricultural peoples, living on the produce of their lands, civilized in various degrees, with a primitive and fluctuating political system and an equally primitive social organisation. For those among them who lived near to the frontier, the life within the empire was a source of perpetual attraction, partly from the comfort its superior material civilisation promised, partly from the greater security and protection of its more settled organisation. For these pastoral Barbarians were, and had been for centuries, at the mercy of peoples still more primitive, the hordes of fierce nomads whose sphere of operation was the vast continent that stretches from the Carpathians across the steppes of Russia beyond the Urals and the Caspian Sea as far as the very wall of China, a world of savage plunderers and destroyers never at rest, yellow-skinned non-Aryan peoples, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Tartars, Mongols, Turks. Against these the pastoral tribes had no defence. The organised might of the Roman world, its guarded frontier, its settled towns promised them security; and from a very early time they sought to enter it.

From the time of Marcus Aurelius (161-180) the defence of the long northern frontier was the chief anxiety of the State, the final reason for the army's domination of its life, political and economic. This anxiety was, in the later empire -- the empire of the third and fourth centuries -- enormously increased by the new developments within the army itself. In the first place the tactics, strategy and system of fortification were so altered by the necessity of this frontier warfare that the army almost disappeared as a mobile thing, before the demands made on it to provide the innumerable garrisons of the new system. It was indeed a serious development that the time had now come when it was hardly possible to put 10,000 troops in the field, for all that the army numbered half a million. But far more serious was the fact that the army had really ceased to be Roman at all. Since Septimius Severus (193-211) it had been more and more recruited from the Barbarians themselves. By the time of Valentinian I (364-375) it was entirely Barbarian. The words "soldier" and "Barbarian" were henceforward synonymous.

It was a still graver development that the command, too, had ceased to be Roman. In the third century (Gallienus 253-268) the Roman senator and his class had been debarred from the command. The exclusion had then been extended to the provincial aristocracy, both the senatorial and that of the curiales. Already in the time of Constantine's father the officers of this almost Barbarian army were of the lowest ranks of provincial citizens. By the time of Constantine's death (337) they had ceased to be Roman at all. The army was, henceforth, a wholly Barbarian thing, officered by Barbarians, armed as the Barbarians were armed, using their methods as it used their weapons, even beginning to be clad in the once-despised Barbarian dress. Constantine favoured Franks; Theodosius Goths. Vandals and Alans, too, were to be found, and in the very highest posts. As in the third century the low class of officer had produced, inevitably, a low class of emperor in this state where the soldier was ruler, so now the Barbarian-held command brought the supreme posts of the empire within the Barbarians' grasp. No Barbarian, it is true, ever took for himself the imperial crown, but the daughters of Barbarians married the sons of emperors and Theodosius the Great's own grandson was thus half Barbarian in blood.

In addition to the now Barbarianised " regular " army, the empire disposed also of the troops of its allies, the Foederati. These were groups, tribes, "nations" of Barbarians, admitted within the Empire, granted lands on which to live, and giving in return military service. Such a nation were the Goths, settled on the Danube by Valens in 376. These Foederati kept all their national organisation, including their king, and their own laws. As it suited the imperial policy, or as their kings were able to exact the concession, they moved about within the empire for the empire's service.

The difference between the western empire in the fourth and in the fifth centuries is the difference between the first and second stage of a continuous development. In the fifth century that empire as a political unity disappears, but the disappearance is not due to revolution nor to conquest by foreign peoples. It is the term of the previous development -- a development whose pace has been accidentally quickened by unforeseen events, and which has of course been conditioned in its detail by the chance of the particular personalities engaged in it. The emperor has steadily ceased to count. The sixty years which followed the death of Theodosius the Great saw in succession two crowned weaklings -- his son, Honorius (395-423) and his grandson, Valentinian III (423-455) -- inert, incompetent princes who lived in an orientalised retirement at Ravenna while mightier forces decided the fate of their world. The Barbarian elements, already present in overwhelming force in the army of the fourth century had come, in the fifth century, to dominate it entirely and to dominate the court too. Between these Barbarians and what remained of Rome in the high places of the State, the rivalry was continuous. Ravenna is a court of endless intrigue. More than once the all-powerful subject is murdered: Stilicho, a Barbarian, by the order of Honorius; Aetius, the last great man of the Roman line, by Valentinian III -- a miserable debauchee who recalls the last of the Valois. In the next stage (455-476) the Barbarian is more powerful still. He murders Valentinian, the last of the line of Theodosius, and for the next twenty-one years sets up and dethrones and sets up again as emperor whoever seems most likely to play the part as he desires. For a short period there is no emperor at all. The Barbarian has not thought it worth while to nominate one. Finally, in 476, the Barbarian decides that the institution may just as well end. He orders the child who holds the title -- Romulus, whom in a kind of appropriate mockery men called Augustulus -- to resign, and he sends the insignia of the office to the emperor at Constantinople. No more emperors are needed in the West. The Barbarian will continue to rule as for the last fifty years, to rule nominally in the name of the remaining eastern emperor as, for those fifty years, he had ruled through his western colleague.

This period of the passing of the emperors was marked by the most serious breakdown of the frontier yet known, when hordes of the fiercer Barbarian nomads poured into Gaul and Spain and, unhindered, ravaged and plundered for the best part of two years (407-409). From the anarchy of those years the imperial hold on these provinces never really recovered. It was now that the kings of the Barbarian foederati, thanks to accidental combinations of favourable circumstances -- the emperor's weakness, the unstable position of his Barbarian ministers, the jealousies of the court, and the scale of this unprecedented invasion -- were able to wrest unheard-of concessions, and so to achieve the beginnings of real independent political power.

To dislodge the marauding hordes the government at Ravenna could do no better than despatch into Gaul the nation of the Visigoths who, since the death of Theodosius in 395, had been a continual embarrassment. Their king, Alaric, had turned against the eastern emperor in whose territories this people was first settled, and, disappointed in his hopes of advancement, he had then for two years (406-408) ravaged Macedonia and Greece as far as the Peloponnesus. Next, as the price of peace, he was named commander-in-chief of Illyricum -- the key province where the two empires met. He used his position to attempt to dislodge his enemy the Vandal, Stilicho, then supreme at the western court. But Stilicho was too much for him, and Alaric's invasion of Italy from Illyricum was turned back. Stilicho's murder in 408 left the road open, and after an attempt to wring from the western emperor a concession of rank and a commission Alaric and his people swept down upon Italy as far as Rome, which in 410 fell to them. Alaric died shortly after, as he was preparing to cross from Sicily to Africa, and his nation was still in southern Italy when it was "commissioned" to serve in Gaul and Spain to deal with the remnants of the great invasion of 407-409. In southern Gaul the fighting went on in a haphazard, Barbarian fashion for another ten years, Visigoths as foederati in the service of Honorius fighting first against Alans, Suevi and Vandals