10

38

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CHAPTER I.

THE STATE AND THE CHURCH IN EAST AND

WEST.

THE sixth century is one of the great ages of the world's history. It is an age of great soldiers and great statesmen, of lawyers and historians, of missionaries and saints. It is an age of great events as well as of great men. It saw the ruin of the East Gothic power, the restoration of the Empire to almost its widest boundaries, the invasion and settlement of the Lombards, the foundation of the medieval Papacy, the beginnings of English Christianity.

The field of investigation is immense, the materials are extraordinarily copious. Rome and Greece still produced great writers, and

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the barbarians were beginning to acquire the arts of their conquerors. The adequate treatment of the ecclesiastical history of this wonderful age could only be accomplished on a vast scale. In outline it has often been

admirably described. The first of these tasks I cannot, the second I do not wish to, undertake. But it seems to me that the events of the century, looked at from the standpoint of the Church historian, group themselves round certain persons and certain places, and thus the illustration of the period may be confined within certain limits.

The sixth century, as a distinct epoch in the history of the world, seems to me to begin with the reunion of the Churches of East and West in 519, and to end with the consecration of Gregory the Great in 590. It is the period, that is, of a reunited Church, under the leadership of Constantinople rather than of Rome. Doctrinally

it is the period of the controversy concerning the “Three Chapters." (Personally, it seems to me that the interests centre round one man, the Emperor Justinian. Locally the interest centres round two cities, Constantinople and Ravenna.

We have still, it must never be forgotten, to deal with one Empire-with Rome, with all its old claims and all its new peoples. The Empire is one: East and West are terms unmeaning or erroneous in political history: but the Church, although it also is one, yet has local characteristics so strong, sympathies and tendencies in different parts of the world so plainly divergent, that in ecclesiastical matters we may rightly and safely speak of East and West. And the influence of the Church, though, like the influence of the Empire, it is one, yet radiates from two points-from Constantinople, the home of Cæsar, of missionary zeal and dogmatic

definition, the source of law in Church as in State; and from Ravenna, at first the centre of the barbarian power which yet preserved the Roman civilitas, and later the seat of the revived imperial authority. Rome, over whom all the ages have passed, if she bears to-day any marks of her sorrows and her heroism in the age of Theodoric and Belisarius, yet bears them almost unnoticed among her unnumbered honours. But Ravenna, the seat of the Ostrogothic King and the Imperial Exarch, though she holds the body of Dante, yet has for her proudest distinction the unique permanence' which she gives to that one bygone age. Nowhere does the sixth century still live as it lives at Ravenna. But Constantinople, like the old Rome, the mother of many nations and the treasury of many memories, through all the changes which have left her the glorious walls which Heraclius built

and where Constantine fell, and have stamped upon her not indelibly-the marks of a barbarous and infidel domination, has yet preserved, sometimes changed indeed and disfigured, but often with all the imperial majesty of old, the splendid works of the greatest of her builders. The Golden Gate, through which swept the triumph of Belisarius from the paved highway outside which his master had laid along those four miles without the walls from the Golden Horn to

the Sea, still stands--closed indeed, but

unmoved and even for those who know nothing of his law or his theology, the great cists and the churches preserve the name of Justinian.

And this survival, which invites us to-day to seek for the abiding memorials of the sixth century at Ravenna and in the new Rome, is a fit symbol of the great historical fact that in that age the work which