The Evolution of the Papacy. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1949
It has sometimes been said that Christianity brought civilisation to medieval Europe, but it would be truer to say that civilisation brought Christianity. – C Delisle Burns, The First Europe
‘The Papacy is the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned on the grave thereof.’ This definition of the great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes remains today the classical definition of the Papacy. But a ‘ghost’ cannot by definition function whilst its original survives. In this last respect, the Papacy lived up to its ghost-like character. For it only began to flourish as its original, the secular Roman Empire of the Cæsars, began to decline, that is, in Western Europe. For in the East, where the ‘Lower’ (Byzantine) Roman Empire continued down to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Papacy could never make any headway.
The Roman Empire in the West began to crumble to pieces in the third century of the Christian era, as the result of economic exhaustion, servile discontent and barbarian invasion. Already writing about AD 178 under Marcus Aurelius, the Pagan apologist Celsus had warned the Christians that the Empire was going to pieces, and that it was their duty as patriots to rally to its support. Incidentally, Celsus’ polemic against Christianity, suppressed by the Church after its victory, has been partly preserved in the counter-polemic of the Christian doctor Origen.
As the Russian historian MI Rostovtsev has demonstrated in his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, the third century marked the real exit from the stage of history of the old Roman ruling class, and, since the classical culture was a class culture, of the culture itself of antiquity. As a result of this ‘revolt of the masses’, brutalised and steeped in superstition, as the result of immemorial centuries of servitude, a flood of credulous superstition swept in from the East, and the old Pagan Rationalism embodied in the philosophic schools of the Stoics, Epicureans and Cynics disappeared finally in the self-same century. The intellectual ‘glory that was Greece’ preceded the political ‘grandeur that was Rome’, on the way to oblivion.
The new ruling class that was thrown up by the social upheaval of the third century shared to the full the superstition of the masses from which it sprang. The Roman Emperors of the Decline were men of humble origin, strange to the rational culture of the old ruling class. The greatest of them, Diocletian, was of servile origin, whilst Constantine, ‘the first Christian’ Emperor, was the son of an innkeeper’s daughter.
The triumph of the masses was simultaneously the triumph of religion. In a servile social order, where the majority of the men were unpaid labourers, and the women unpaid prostitutes, and such was the much-trumpeted classical civilisation in its relation to the servile masses – this was inevitable.
The third century marked the end of classical rationalism, the fourth, the beginning of medieval superstition. For this century witnessed the religious conflict between the two chief oriental religions of the day, Christianity and Mithraism (Sun worship). The conflict remained for long undecided before the bigoted Spanish Emperor Theodosius (378 – 395), the first really Christian Emperor (Constantine was a political opportunist rather than a zealous believer), ensured the definite triumph of Christianity and concurrently introduced persecution as a permanent feature into the European life of the next 1200 years. [1]
The Church of Rome and its bishops rose in the world along with Christianity itself. Already by the second half of the fourth century, the Pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus comments on both the splendour and the corruption of the Roman bishops’ entourage, and armed riots in the streets of Rome accompanied the elections to this important and lucrative office.
But the Roman bishop had still a very limited authority even in the Roman Empire. At the epoch-marking Council of Nicæa (325), which marked both the victory of Christianity and the definition of the Trinitarian Dogma, the Roman bishop was not officially represented, and the decrees of the Council were not apparently submitted for his endorsement.
However, the final victory of Christianity, the essential prerequisite for the subsequent dazzling fortunes of the Papacy, led to a fresh development in the status of the Bishops of Rome. For AD 378, the Roman Emperor Gratian issued an Imperial decree constituting the Bishop of Rome and his successors officially as Patriarchs of the West; henceforth, all the bishops of the Western Empire (roughly, Western Europe and North Africa) were subordinated to the Roman See. A landmark in the historic evolution of the Papacy. ‘The birthday of the Papacy’, as the learned historian of Catholic dogma Joseph Turmel has described it.
History was on the side of the newly-christened Papacy, for the fifth century witnessed the final dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West, and a new and much more considerable historical role thereafter devolved upon the Papacy. AD 452, Pope Leo, perhaps the first ‘Pope’ in a recognisable modern sense of the word, effectively stood between Rome and the fury of the Hunnish invader Attila, ‘the scourge of God’. In the succeeding centuries between the final collapse of the Roman Empire (AD 476) and the Papal creation of the Holy Roman Empire (AD 800), the leadership of what was left of Western civilisation devolved on the Papacy.
During those centuries which constitute the ‘Dark Age’, properly so-called – 400 – 800 – when the Nordic and Teutonic barbarians finally overran Western Europe and North Africa, it was the Bishop of Rome, rather than the distant Emperor at Constantinople, who was the effective leader of what had once been the Roman world. The Popes – as we now begin to call them – came before the northern barbarians as the representatives of a culture, that of the vanished world of antiquity, of the ‘mighty men of old’.
Whatever culture survived in the huge slum that was the Europe of the Dark Ages, survived in and through the Church, which preserved whatever was left both of the administration and of the culture of the vanished Empire. It is true that some Freethinkers have rashly denied the social services rendered by the Church to the Europe of the Dark Ages. But this is to make a miracle of the expansion of Christianity. [2]
The ‘ghost of the Roman Empire’ was now replacing its original. Between the sixth and eighth centuries, the Papacy – for the institution of the Universal Bishopric is now emerging from the mists of its pre-history – launched its ecclesiastical cohorts of monks to a reconquest of Europe as effective as, and far more lasting than, its earlier conquest by the Roman legions had been. [3] Between AD 500 and 1000 the barbarian conquerors of secular Rome were converted by ecclesiastical Rome. Ancient ‘Europe’ was being succeeded by medieval ‘Christendom’.
A character in a modern drama is made to observe: ‘Money is made in the dark.’ So, also, was the Papacy! In the darkness of the Dark Ages. The Bishop of Rome went into the Dark Ages a Roman official; he emerged from them as the actual spiritual and cultural ruler of the West. Rome now only required a physical sword to become its temporal ruler as well.
This sword, this political instrument, the Popes acquired in the late eighth century when they called in the military aid of the Franks, the most powerful of the German conquerors of Rome. The immediate cause of this ‘marriage of convenience’, the first of many such which Papal Rome has contracted during the course of its long career, was to resist the newly-arisen rival religion of Mohammed, and also fresh swarms of barbaric invaders from the North and East of Europe. The outward and visible sign of the alliance was witnessed at Rome on Christmas Day 800, when the Pope crowned Charles (Charlemagne), King of the Franks, as ‘Roman Emperor’.
This last event marked the beginning of the ‘Holy’ Roman Empire, the political instrument of the Papacy for the creation of a Christian Europe. It marked in reality the beginning of the Middle Ages, the classic era, the Golden Age of the Papacy, to which it still looks back with nostalgic regret, to the epoch of its totalitarian rule.
1. I have traced this momentous religious revolution in my book Julian the Apostate and the Rise of Christianity (London, 1937).
2. C Delisle Burns, The First Europe.
3. The Benedictine Order, founded by a Roman aristocrat, was the most effective of these missionary cohorts.