Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

Pope Boniface IV. beheld this wonder of ancient art, and longed to make a church of that beautiful dome which hung like the vault of heaven over the broadest expanse ever covered by a roof. He asked it of the emperor Phocas, and received it as a gift. He assembled the clergy of Rome, and a procession, singing hymns, entered that noble doorway, and the Pope sprinkled with holy water the marble-encrusted walls, from which every vestige of heathendom was cleared away. The “Gloria in Excelsis” resounded for the first time in that dome from which Michael Angelo took his most beautiful creation. The temple of all the demons was purified: and Pope Boniface IV. preserved it for all succeeding ages, under its dedication to the Ever-virgin Mother of God, and all martyrs. So it was saved from becoming, in mediæval times, the hold of some noble robber. And from it the devotion to All Saints, on the 1st November, and for All Souls, on the 2nd, was propagated amongst the nations of the West. What was originally a Roman festival passed beyond the Alps and the dome of Agrippa, the partner of Augustus and the husband of Julia, and through her progenitor of Cæsars, became the shrine from which the glorious office of all the saints in the Church triumphant, and that of intercession for all souls in the Church suffering, went forth to the Christian world.

From 604 to 625, five Pontiffs had ascended the Roman chair, and all had to wait, after their election, for the good pleasure of the Byzantine emperor, that they should take their seat. In 625, there succeeded a man of great distinction. He was a Campanian of high birth, and he strove to follow the example of his master, St. Gregory. Honorius I. sat for 13 years, and with Vitalian, a. d. 657-672, and Sergius, 687-701, alone reached that length of pontificate, while twenty-one other Popes share between them, including vacancies and delays interposed by the Byzantine, the remaining 69 years. We have no documents existing to account for such a number of short pontificates. Honorius busied himself much in the conversion of the southern Saxon kingdoms in England, where St. Bede attests that the Bishop Birinus came by his instance. Anastasius gives a long account of the gifts which he bestowed on the churches of Rome; among them, that he covered the confession of St. Peter with pure silver, weighing 187 pounds: and the whole church with brazen tiles which, with the consent of the emperor Heraclius, he took from the temple of Roma: that he built the church of St. Agnes, and made her a silver shrine, weighing 252 pounds; also, the church of the Four-crowned. Of his character, the Abbot Jonas, near his time, writes: he was “a venerable prelate, sagacious, strong in counsel, clear in doctrine, powerful by his gentleness and humility”. He also clothed with silver plates, weighing 975 pounds, the middle or royal door of St. Peter's, on which there was an inscription, calling him “Honorius, the good bishop, the leader of the people. Your own prelate, blessed Peter, made your doors of silver; O doorkeeper of heaven, maintain for this in tranquillity all the times of your flock.” And there, in the great Basilica, he was buried in all honour.

But, in his person, one of the State-made patriarchs of Constantine's city is able to make the solitary boast that he once deceived one Roman Pontiff. Sergius, who sat in that See, from 610 to 638, and who seems to have obtained as great a mastery over the mind of the emperor Heraclius as his predecessor, Acacius, had over the emperor Zeno, constructed a doctrinal exposition called the Ecthesis, which he induced the emperor to father and promulgate. He was desirous, above all things, to obtain the Pope's approval of the doctrine which he afterwards set forth in this document. He wrote to the Pope letters, the purpose of which the successor of St. Peter, instead of seeing through, appears to have misconceived. After the death of Honorius, the Monothelite emperors and patriarchs claimed to have received the support of that Pope. His not having detected, and actively condemned the deceit of Sergius, brought upon the memory of Honorius the heavy rebuke that Pope St. Leo. II. assented so far to the sentence of the Sixth General Council in 682, as to have written to the Spanish bishops: – “Those who had been traitors to the purity of the Apostolic tradition were punished with eternal condemnation: they are Theodore of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus, Petrus of Constantinople, together with Honorius, who, instead of extinguishing, when it began to arise, the flame of heretical doctrine, fostered it by his neglect”.

Much light would appear to be thrown upon the belief of Pope Honorius by the history of the forty years succeeding his death.

He sat within a few days of thirteen years. He was buried, says Anastasius, on the 12th October, 638, in St. Peter's, and the See remained vacant one year seven months and seventeen days. Why did it so remain vacant?

The era and the question are both most important to note. The following narrative will explain why the Papal See was kept vacant nineteen months after the election of a successor to Pope Honorius.

In the year 638, Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, composed in the name of the emperor Heraclius an edict which he called Ecthesis or exposition, as if it were merely an exposition of the Catholic faith respecting the dispute about the One or the Two Operations in our Lord. He then brought about that the emperor subscribed and published it. Perhaps Sergius wished to take advantage of the vacancy in the Papal See to make the Monothelite error a law of the State, and to compel the future Pope to subscribe it, for which he wished to get the imperial subscription making it a law.

The Ecthesis begins with a confession of faith in the Holy Trinity which is quite orthodox. It then enlarges upon the Incarnation, and draws out the distinction of the Two Natures and the Unity of the Person. It proceeds: – “We acknowledge one Son and Lord Jesus Christ, who is at once capable and incapable of suffering, visible and invisible. We teach that the miracles and the sufferings belong to one and the same; we ascribe all divine and human Operation to one and the same Word become flesh; we offer … to Him one adoration, and allow no man to hold and teach either One or Two Operations in the Divine Incarnation of the Lord; but rather, according to the tradition of the holy General Councils, that one and the same only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, works both the divine and the human actions, and that the whole Operation belonging at once to God and to man proceeds from one and the same Incarnate God, the Word, indivisibly and unconfusedly, and is to be referred to one and the same. Since the expression, One Operation, if used by some fathers, still sounds strange and disturbs the ears of some who conceive that it is used for the doing away of the Two Natures personally united in Christ our God, and in like manner the expression Two Operations offends many, as not used by any one of the chief doctors of the Church, and because there follow from it two Wills opposed to each other, as if God the Word willed to fulfil His saving passion, while His Manhood resisted that will of His, and so two are introduced willing contrary things, an impious thing opposed to Christian doctrine. For even the impious Nestorius, though he divided the divine taking of the manhood from the Lord, and introduced two Sons, did not venture to speak of two Wills. Rather he taught identity of will in the two persons invented by him. How then can they who confess the right faith, and glorify one Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the true God, receive two Wills and those opposed to each other in Him? Following, therefore, the holy Fathers in all things and in this, we confess One Will of our Lord Jesus Christ, the true God, so that at no time did His Flesh, animated by the mind, make a natural movement of itself separately and by its own impulse, which was contrary to the bidding of God the Word personally united with it; but when and such and as much as God the Word Himself willed … and we exhort all Christians to be so minded, and so to hold, adding nothing and taking away nothing. I, Heraclius, the faithful emperor in Jesus Christ our Lord, have subscribed.”

Sergius did not fail to have the Ecthesis confirmed by a council at Constantinople. He died himself in December, 638, but before this he had it read, probably, to his Resident Council, and asked for the judgment of its members. The bishops answered, like good courtiers, “The exposition of our great and most wise Emperor agrees in truth with the teaching of the Apostles. This is the doctrine of the Fathers, this the support of the Church. This the confessions of the Five Councils teach; by this the unity of the Christian people is assured, the weakness of the simple strengthened. This works the salvation of mankind. This we also believe; this we confirm; with this we agree.” Sergius gave his solemn confirmation, and added, “If any one henceforth, disregarding the prohibition of the Emperor and the Council, dares to teach that there is One Operation or that there are Two in Christ he shall, if he be bishop, priest, deacon, or clerk, be deposed; but if monk or layman, be excluded from Communion in the Body and Blood of our Lord until he return to his duty”. Thereupon the Ecthesis was attached publicly to the narthex of Sancta Sophia.

The Ecthesis had been specially drawn up against the teaching of the champion of orthodoxy in the East, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, who had appealed to Pope Honorius, and expressed full trust in his defence of the truth. But before its appearance Sophronius was already dead, and his see had come into the hands of the Monothelite Sergius, Bishop of Joppa. Macedonius had, contrary to the canons, been imposed on the see of Antioch, and consecrated by Sergius of Constantinople. It is true he had never entered his city, which was already captured by the Arabs. He had remained in Constantinople.

Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, in an epistle read afterwards at the Roman Council of Pope St. Martin, expressed to his spiritual brother and fellow-ministrant, Sergius of Constantinople, his intense delight at the Ecthesis which his great sovereign had drawn up in behalf of the faith, which was ready to be sent to the exarch Isaac at Ravenna, and was to be accepted by his brother Severinus, elected at Rome. I have read it, he said, not once or twice but many times. I admire an exposition brilliant as the sun's light, announcing with unswerving accuracy the true faith; and I sung praises to God who had bestowed on us so wise a governor, guiding to harbour the holy churches. He has saved us once, twice, and thrice from tyrannous power, from Persian boastfulness, from Saracen domination.

In the meantime Sergius had died, and Heraclius had put his friend Pyrrhus, who shared his Monothelite heresy, in his place at Constantinople. We learn from the letter just quoted that the death of Pope Honorius and the choice of Severinus to succeed him had already been made known at Constantinople before the Ecthesis was sent to Rome, which was, therefore, never presented for acceptance to Honorius.

I will now take another narrative of what was happening at Rome. Honorius died on 12th October, 638, and was buried in peace and great renown at St. Peter's. The Romans chose their countryman Severinus, son of Labienus, for his successor. The confirmation was delayed during nineteen months and sixteen days, as it seems, because the elected refused to subscribe the Ecthesis of the patriarch Sergius, being a formulary favouring Monothelism.

Before Severinus was yet consecrated the imperial officers practised a robbery upon the treasury of the Church, in which the violence exercised reminds of the dealing of Turkish pashas, with whom in general Byzantine ministers may be compared. The treasures of the Roman Church were kept in the vestiary of the episcopal palace. There were the costly presents which various Christian emperors, patricians, and consuls had left to the blessed Apostle Peter for the redemption of their souls, to be given, as occasion might be, in alms to the poor or for ransoming of captives. There was a report that Honorius had stored up vast sums, and his magnificent buildings caused full credence to be given to this report. Isaac, the exarch in Ravenna, found himself in want of money. The imperial troops riotously demanded to be paid. Isaac had long cast his eyes on the Church's treasury, and now devised a plan to get possession of it. The Book of the Popes gives a detailed description of this incident, and it is not only an exception to the scantiness of historical accounts about Rome, but casts a passing light on the circumstances of the city.

The chartular Mauritius was then at Rome, perhaps as Magister Militum and commander of the Roman army. This consisted of troops in Byzantine pay, but no doubt was already organised as a city militia. Mauritius led by deceit against the Church of God, and taking counsel with certain ill-minded persons, stirred up this Roman force. What good, he said, is it that such a mass of money has been laid up by Pope Honorius in his Lateran Palace while your wages are not paid, which our lord the emperor has sent, and the holy man has put them in his treasury? Kindled by these words, all the armed men in the city of Rome, young and old, flocked to the Lateran Palace. They could not force an entrance, because those who attended on Severinus, the Pope elect, resisted. Mauritius, seeing this, encamped his army there for three days. Then he summoned the judges, that is, the high officers of the city, who were in his counsel. They broke in and set the imperial seal upon the treasure. Then Mauritius wrote an account of what he had done to the exarch Isaac at Ravenna, saying that he had put his seal on the treasury and they could take without harm anything which they liked. When Isaac learnt this he came to Rome; he banished all the chief persons of the church who resided in the several cities, so that none of the clergy could resist him, and, after some days, he entered the Lateran Palace; he stayed there eight days, and plundered everything. Part he sent to the emperor in the imperial city, part he gave to the troops, part he kept for himself. Anastasius concludes with the words: After this the most holy Severinus was consecrated, and Isaac returned to Ravenna. The meaning of which seems to be that Isaac had come to Rome under pretence of confirming the election of Severinus, which he made the elected Pope pay for by the plunder of his treasury.

In the meantime Roman Commissioners were urging upon the emperor Heraclius at Constantinople to issue the imperial consent to the consecration of the Pope. After many negotiations, the chief of the clergy there showed them a doctrinal writing, the Ecthesis, and said, “We will only support you in your matter if you promise us to persuade the Pope to subscribe this act and to recognise without reserve the doctrines therein contained”. The Commissioners, who perceived the drift of the act, and that on account of this the first See of Christendom had so long remained unfilled, answered calmly and prudently: “In this affair we can do nothing. A message has been entrusted to us, but no order given us to make a confession of faith. We will give you the assurance that we will inform the Elect of everything that you have said; that we will show him this paper and beseech him, if he approve of its contents, to subscribe it. Be so good, therefore, as to put no hindrance to our mission for this matter, to do us no violence, and not to detain us without end. None can do violence to another, especially in a matter of faith; for in such a case even the weakest becomes very strong, even the quietest feels himself a hero; and since he strengthens his soul with the word of God, the most violent attacks serve only to confirm not to weaken him. And how much more does this apply to the Church and clergy of Rome, who, from the beginning to the present, as eldest of all the churches under the sun, presides over all! Having received this privilege according to the canons, as well from councils and apostles as from their supreme Head, in this matter of succession in the Pontificate, it is subject to no writings whatsoever, to no issue of synodical documents; but in all these matters all are subject to it according to sacerdotal law.” This is what with a most sacred and becoming confidence, fearing nothing, those intrepid ministers of the immovable Rock said to the clergy of Constantinople; who thereupon ceased from their pretension, and promised to obtain for them the imperial confirmation.

Pope Severinus, after suffering the double humiliation of having the treasury of the Church sacked by the emperor's viceroy, and his own election unconfirmed for nearly twenty months, ascended the throne of Peter on the 28th May, 640, and sat two months and six days. “He loved the clergy, and was most liberal to them all,” says of him the Book of the Popes; “holy, benignant above all men, a lover of the poor, large-handed, most gentle.” In this short Pontificate he found time to reject the imperial decree, called the Ecthesis.

Had Pope Severinus at this moment failed in his duty, the whole Church would have been involved in the Monothelite heresy. Not only Pope Severinus, but his successors during forty years, were the sole stay of the Church against a heresy – the last root of the condemned Eutychean heresy – which overthrew the true doctrine of the Incarnation, making our Lord Jesus Christ not God and Man in one Person, but a Person compounded out of God and Man, and therefore not Man at all. The whole temporal power of the Byzantine sovereign, at that time despotic lord of Rome, and backed by subservient patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus, and Peter, was exerted to compel the Popes who sat during these forty years to accept the false doctrine presented to them in an imperial decree. The successive Popes in this time, Severinus, John IV., Theodore I., St. Martin I., St. Eugenius I., St. Vitalian, Deusdedit, Donus I., rejected and condemned the decision urged upon them by the imperial and patriarchal pressure, all of them at the risk of every sort of persecution – one, St. Martin, at the cost of a singularly painful and glorious martyrdom. The next Pope, St. Agatho, condemned the heresy in a General Council allowed at Constantinople itself by an orthodox emperor over which his legates presided. The Pope succeeding him, St. Leo II. ratified the condemnation by the Council of four successive Byzantine patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus and Peter, as heretics, and censured the negligence of Honorius in not extinguishing at once so dangerous a flame. In truth it had held the life of the Church in suspense during more than forty years. Had one of the ten successors of Honorius failed, all would have been lost, so near to the precipice was the Byzantine despotism and the State patriarchate, subservient to it, and supplying it obediently with theological knowledge sufficient to formulate heresy, allowed by the Divine Providence in that fearful century to drive the Church. And precisely during these years the new Arabian conqueror – the chalif of Mohammed – cut in two the empire which was attempting this parricide. When Heraclius went forth committing his city and his son to God, to the holy Mother of God, and to his bishop, he triumphed for the only time in the long Roman history over Rome's eastern rival, and brought back the Cross from Persia to Constantinople, and then carried it in dutiful homage to be replaced in its old shrine where our Lord suffered at Jerusalem. When at the bidding of that very bishop Sergius he tampered with the Christian faith, and oppressed the successor of St. Peter, he lost Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, with the great provinces which belonged to them. Out of the four patriarchates of his empire, three became subject to the Mohammedan chalif. The subjection came suddenly, but has lasted with a short interval from that time to this. The conquest, as yet unbroken, of Mohammed over Christian peoples dates from the perfidy of Heraclius and of his grandson Constans II. and the heresy propagated by four Byzantine patriarchs.

Returning to the history of this time we find that the successor of Pope Severinus, John IV., was consecrated 24th December, 640, and held a council at Rome immediately after his accession, and condemned under anathema the Monothelite heresy. Heraclius died February 11th, 641. Upon his death Pope John IV. sent a letter to his successors, Constantinus-Heraclius, and Heracleonas, setting forth the same faith. He also informed the new Patriarch, Pyrrhus, that he had condemned the Ecthesis: and St. Maximus informs us that Heraclius I., to turn away the Western displeasure at the Ecthesis from his own person, at the beginning of the year 641 wrote to Pope John IV. that “the Ecthesis is not mine, nor did I command it to be drawn up, but the patriarch Sergius prepared it five years ago, and besought me on my return from the East to publish it with my subscription”. The purpose of John IV. in writing to the new emperors was to set forth the doctrine of the two Operations and Wills in Christ, and in doing this to defend the orthodoxy of his predecessor Honorius. It is to be observed that after the death of Honorius, when the eastern patriarchs began to assert that Honorius in his answers to Sergius, which up to that time had been private, favoured the heresy which Sergius had imposed upon the eastern bishops, and was trying to put upon the Pope, his successors denied with much care that Honorius had any such meaning. Thus in this document of Pope John IV. directed to the sons of Heraclius, which bears the title, Defence of Pope Honorius, he says: —

“My predecessor, teaching concerning the mystery of Christ's Incarnation, said that there were not in Him, as there are in us, opposing wills of the spirit and the flesh. Certain men, twisting this to their own meaning, threw out the suspicion that he had taught that there was one Will of the Godhead and the Manhood, which is utterly contrary to the truth. I could wish them to reply to my question, in regard to which nature do they assert that there is one Will of Christ our God? If it be only in regard to the Divine Nature, what is their reply concerning His Human Nature? For he is likewise Perfect Man, lest they be condemned with Manichæus. If they speak in regard to the Manhood of Christ that this Will is Perfect God, let them see whether they do not fall under the condemnation of Photinus and Ebion. But if they assert that in the Two Natures there is only one Will, they will confuse not only the Natural Wills but the Natures themselves, so that neither the one nor the other, that is, the Divine and the Human, can be understood. For as we do not, like the impious Nestorius, suffer Two Natures to make up one Christ, so we do anything but deny, yet neither do we confuse, the difference of Natures, inasmuch as we confess the Two Natures united in the one Person of Christ our God with an agreement which language is not able to express. For in that they assert One Will of Christ's Godhead and Manhood and at the same time one Operation, what else do they assert than that one Nature of Christ our God operates according to the division of Eutyches and Severus. As a last argument, the orthodox Fathers, who have flourished in the whole world, are proved to teach in full accordance at once Two Natures and Two Wills and Operations.”

In these words, which John IV. writes as Pope to the immediate successors of Heraclius within three years after the death of Honorius, he would seem not only to have set forth in plain language the immense importance of the doctrine itself, but to be an unimpeachable witness of the meaning of Honorius, one of whose priests he had been, and as such well acquainted with his doctrine.

The pontificate of John IV., for the confirmation of which he had to wait four months, lasted only twenty-one months, and was disquieted throughout by the conflict with the Byzantine court and patriarch respecting the Ecthesis. There was war between the exarch and the Lombard king, Rotharis, but it did not touch Rome. All misfortunes which threatened it came from Byzantium. The struggle against the eastern heresy embittered the feeling of Constantinople to Rome. At the same time, the Byzantine court was disturbed by intestine revolutions. Heraclius ended his reign of 31 years in February, 641. His eldest son, Heraclius Constantinus, succeeded, but, after seven months, was poisoned by his stepmother, Martina, and the Monothelite patriarch Pyrrhus was charged with concurrence. In a few months, Martina's own son, Heracleonas, was deposed by an insurrection. His nose was cut off, and the tongue of the empress Martina cut out, and both were banished. The grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., became emperor in 642, a boy of twelve years, and reigned 26 years, until 668. The reign of this emperor is much to be noted, because it is contemporaneous with the second, third, and fourth chalifs: Constans II. stands in history over against Omar, Osman, and Ali.