PSEUDO-ISIDORIAN DECRETALS. 387 CHAPTER XIII. The False Decretals.-Nicholas I. governed by Them.-His Character.-— Adrian II. John VIII.-John XII.-Benedict IX.-Three Popes at Same Time.-German Emperors create Popes.-Leo IX.—Hildebrand. -He becomes Pope as Gregory VII.-Principles established by Him.— His Quarrel with Philip of France.-His Bull against Henry IV. -He adopts the False Decretals. -Pius IX. does the Same. -Gregory VII. stirs up Revolt in Germany.-The Emperor Henry IV. in Rome.-Death of Gregory VII.-His Successors maintain his Policy.-Urban II.-Calixtus II.—Adrian IV. grants Ireland to England.—The Gratian Decretals. They authorize Physical Compulsion and Torture.-Arnold of Brescia burned by Adrian IV.-Alexander III. and Victor IV.-Alexander III. releases the Subjects of Frederick Barbarossa from their Allegiance.— His Character.-Submission of Frederick.-The Third Lateran Council. -Decree authorizing Waldenses and Albigenses to be put to Death.— The Thirteenth Century.-Innocent III.-His Ambition and Usurpation. -His Claim of Divine Power. He releases the Subjects of Otho from their Allegiance. -His Bull to put the Vaudois to Death.-The Inquisition.-Boniface VIII.- His Bull Unam Sanctam.-He caused a New Body of False Decretals to be composed. — Opposition of the Gallican Church. -- WE shall leave our investigations incomplete, and our task unfinished, without further notice of the False Decretals and their contribution to the growth of the temporal power, inasmuch as the principles derived from them still remain a part of the canon law of Rome - those of the Encyclical and Syllabus of Pius IX. being taken in part from them and as the present struggles of the papacy and its Jesuit supporters are designed for the purpose of reviving and enforcing them wheresoever they can obtain the power to do so. Although there were many good and pious Christians. among the early popes and clergy of Rome, yet there was enough in the vicious habits of many of those who constituted the priesthood, at the time when these Decretals are alleged to have been dated, to justify the assignment of them to the popes whose names they bear. Many of them yielded to the influence of the example of Pope Victor, and the effect was apparent in their ambition and that of the clergy, which existed to such a degree that religion was almost entirely neglected, except in the mere ceremonial requirements of the Church. We have the authority of Eusebius-who is quoted by all Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authors as reliable authority-for the condition of the priesthood in his time. There is no other author whose history covers the times to which he refers, and as a leading prelate, and a member of the celebrated Council of Nice, he had ample opportunity for ascertaining the true condition of affairs. He says: "But some that appeared to be our pastors, deserting the law of piety, were inflamed against each other with mutual strifes, only accumulating quarrels and threats, rivalship, hostility, and hatred to each other, only anxious to assert the government as a kind of sovereignty for themselves."() And it is said by Cormenin that Marcellinus—who was pope in the year 304, and has been canonized as a sainteven abjured the Christian religion, in order thereby to es cape the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian !(") Even if these things were not true to the extent alleged, they were sufficiently so, beyond all question, to have had an injurious influence upon the cause of true piety, and to have placed the affairs of the Church in an unsettled and preca (1) "Eccl. Hist.," by Eusebius, bk. viii., ch. i. At another place, in his "Book of Martyrs," when speaking of the prelates of the Church, Eusebius says that he had " thought proper to pass by" other events than those related by him—that is, "particularly the circumstances of the different heads of the churches, who, from being shepherds of the reasonable flocks of Christ that did not govern in a lawful and becoming manner, were condemned, by divine justice, as unworthy of such a charge....... Moreover, the ambitious aspirings of many to office, and the injudicious and unlawful ordinations that took place, the divisions among the confessors themselves, the great schisms and difficulties industriously fomented by the factious among the new members against the relics of the Church, devising one innovation after another, and unmercifully thrusting them into the midst of all these calamities, heaping up affliction upon affliction; all this, I say, I have resolved to pass by, judging it foreign to my purpose, wishing, as I said in the beginning, to shun and avoid giving an account of them."-Book of Martyrs, ch. xii., pp. 374, 375. (2) Cormenin, vol. i., p. 48. ROME IN THE NINTH CENTURY. 389 rious condition, the precise extent of which it is now exceedingly difficult to ascertain. And this accounts, in a large measure, for the pertinacity with which these False Decretals have been assigned to those times. Their authors well understood, at the date of their origin, and their defenders understand now, how easy it is to make history, and to make it acceptable to credulous minds, especially where there is no precise detail of facts to expose their falsehoods and assumptions. By all Roman Catholics who accept the teachings of the Church uninquiringly, these Decretals are regarded yet as true and genuine, because they have been put forth and indorsed by infallible popes, and because they are so instructed by their bishops and priests; while the bishops and priests deliberately employ them as the means of continuing their hierarchical power and authority, and thus gratifying their inordinate ambition. Mosheim, after pointing out how different the ecclesiastical system of the ninth century was from that which prevailed in the ancient Church, says that the popes found it "necessary to produce the authority of ancient deeds to stop the mouths of such as were disposed to set bounds to their usurpations;" and he then proceeds: "The bishops of Rome were aware of this; and as those means were deemed the most lawful that tended best to the accomplishment of their purposes, they employed some of their most ingenious and zealous partisans in forging conventions, acts of councils, epistles, and the like records, by which it might appear that in the first ages of the Church the Roman pontiffs were clothed with the same spiritual majesty and supreme authority which they now assumed. Among these fictitious supports of the papal dignity the famous Decretal Epistles, as they are called, said to have been written by the pontiffs of the primitive time, deserve chiefly to be stigmatized. They were the production of an obscure writer, who fraudulently prefixed to them the name of Isidore, Bishop of Seville, to make the world believe that they had been collected by this illustrious and learned prelate. Some of them had appeared in the eighth century, but they were now entirely drawn from their obscurity, and produced, with an air of ostentation and triumph, to demonstrate the supremacy of the Roman pontiffs. The decisions of a certain Roman Council, which is said to have been holden during the pontificate of Sylvester, were likewise alleged in behalf of the same cause; but this council had not been heard of before the present century, and the accounts now given of it proceeded from the same source with the Decretals, and were equally authentic. Be that as it may, the decrees of this pretended council contributed much to enrich and aggrandize the Roman pontiffs, and exalt them above all human authority and jurisdiction."(") Dean Milman, one of the most learned and reliable authors of the present times, says: "The False Decretals do not merely assert the supremacy of the popes-the dignity and privileges of the Bishop of Rome-they comprehend the whole dogmatic system and discipline of the Church, the whole hierarchy from the highest to the lowest degree, their sanctity and immunities, their persecutions, their disputes, their right of appeal to Rome..... But for the too manifest design, the aggrandizement of the see of Rome and the aggrandizement of the whole clergy in subordination to the see of Rome; but for the monstrous ignorance of history, which betrays itself in glaring anachronisms, and in the utter confusion of the order of events and the lives of distinguished men the former awakening keen and jealous suspicion, the latter making the detection of the spuriousness of the whole easy, clear, irrefragable-the False Decretals might still have maintained their place in ecclesiastical history. They are now given up by all; not a voice is raised in their favor; the utmost that is done by those who can not suppress all regret at their explosion is to palliate the guilt of the forger, to call in question or to weaken the influence which they had in their own day, and throughout the later history of Christianity."() That they are now, and have been for many years, regarded as forgeries by candid Roman Catholics, even among the ultramontanes, is undoubtedly true. Marchetti says: "Learned men of great piety have declared against these () Maclaine's "Mosheim's Church History," part ii., ch. ii., 66 p. 216. FORGERIES ADMITTED BY PAPISTS. 391 false collections, which Cardinal Bona frankly calls a pious fraud." "Baronius does not as frankly regard them as a fraud; nevertheless, he would not use them in his 'Ecclesiastical Annals,' lest it should be believed that the Roman Church needed suspicious documents to establish her rights." Marchetti also says: "We may conjecture that Isidore. gathered the decretals of ancient popes which the persecutions of the first centuries had not permitted to be collected, and that, animated by a desire to transmit the collection to posterity, he made such haste that he overlooked some faults and chronological errors, which were afterward corrected by a more exact criticism."(") While they are here rejected as false, or, at least, as suspicious, there is an evident disinclination to give them up. Yet Fleury, the great Roman Catholic historian, is too frank to participate in the imposture or to exhibit any such inconsistency. He thus disposes of them: "The subject-matter of these letters reveals their spuriousness. They speak of archbishops, primates, patriarchs, as as if these titles had existed from the birth of the Church. They forbid the holding of any council, even a provincial one, without permission from the pope, and represent appeals to Rome as habitual. Frequent complaint is therein made of usurpations of the temporalities of the Church. We find there this maxim, that bishops falling into sin may, after having done penance, exercise their functions as before. Finally, the principal subject of these Decretals is that of complaints against bishops; there is scarcely one that does not speak of them and give rules to make them difficult. And Isidore makes it very apparent in his preface that he had this matter deeply at heart."() The purpose and immediate effect of the False Decretals were shown in the last chapter, in the encyclicals, decrees, and letters of Pope Nicholas I. It was during his pontificate that they took " their place in the jurisprudence of Latin Christendom,"() by becoming an essential part of" the law (*) Apud Abbé Guettée, in his late work on "The Papacy," p. 258 (note). () "Eccl. Hist.," by Fleury, liv., xliv.; apud Guettée, p. 260 (note). () "Latin Christianity," by Milman, vol. iii., p. 58. |