passed into a law. That sagacious ruler, when he received the mutual complaints and accusations of the bishops of the First General Council against each other, put them all into the fire without reading them; and in accordance with this contemptuous but charitable act, an imperial decree was passed on the occasion of the Second Council,* prohibiting bishops to appear against each other in courts of law. Theodosius, however, though unwilling to interfere directly, determined to exercise an indirect influence on the largest scale. He summoned from across the border the only western bishops who were available —those of Macedonia, which, according to the division then established, belonged to the Western Empire. Their appearance might have turned the scale in behalf of Gregory's counsels, but at the same moment that they entered Constantinople, there arrived in the Golden Horn an equal accession to the opposite faction from Egypt. The Egyptian bishops were with their new 66 Pope," and boiling over with indignation against Gregory for his rejection of their old favorite MaxiThe Macedonian bishops also proved more unmanageable than Theodosius had anticipated. They brought with them, as Gregory expresses it, the "rough breath of the NorthWester." Their uncompromising austerity, and the subtle controversial spirit of the eastern prelates, found a common ground in attacking the unfortunate Gregory. There was one joint in his ecclesiastical harness which presented an opening for the darts of the rigid precisians of the time. The Council of Deprivation Nicæa had peremptorily forbidden, on pain of depriof Gregory. vation from orders, any translation-not only from see to see, but from parish to parish. From that hour to this, in every church of Christendom, human ambition and obvious convenience have been too strong for the decree even of so venerable a body as the First Ecumenical Council. But, general as the violation of the decree was, it was only when personal interests could be served by reviving it that attention was called to the practice. Gregory had been Bishop of Sasima before he was elevated to the see of Constantinople. This was enough; and although the fact had been perfectly mus. *Cod. Theod. xi. t. xxxix, 1. 9. As explained, with every appearance of reason, by M. de Broglie (vol. i. p. 434), after Godefroi. + See Chapter IX. known at the time when his election to the see was confirmed by this very Council; although there was no reason for proceeding against him, rather than against any of the many bishops and presbyters who had equally broken the decree of Nicæa; although there was no occasion for reviving the question in his case at this particular moment; yet the leading members of the Council had the meanness to condemn in him what they forgave in those with whom they had no quarrel; to take advantage of his temporary unpopularity to press against him a measure which justice would have required to be pressed against numberless others. To Gregory personally the retirement from his bishopric was no great sacrifice. The episcopate had always been a burden to him; he "neighed like an imprisoned horse for his green pastures* of study and leisure." He determined at once to "make himself the Jonah of the tempest." Yet when it came to the point, even he could not believe that the Council would have the base ingratitude to accept a resignation so nobly and promptly offered. But generosity towards a fallen foe is a difficult virtue. A few, in dis gust at their associates, followed Gregory as he left the Council. The rest remained, and rejoiced in the departure of an honest and therefore a troublesome chief. "I have not time or disposition," says Gregory, "to unravel their intrigues, so I will be silent." He then visited the Emperor, hoping, perhaps in spite of himself, to obtain a reversal of his own sentence. But Theodosius, though far more deeply affected than the Synod, adhered to the resolution of leaving the bishops to settle their own affairs; and after a pathetic and eloquent farewell, delivered in the Church of the Apostles; after a glowing description-true even after the vicissitudes of thirteen hundred years of the great opportunities of Constantinople, “the eye of the world, the knot which links together East and West; the centre in which all extremes combine,"-Gregory quitted that glorious city forever, and hastened to bury his old age and his cares in the solitude of his ancestral home at Nazianzus. He might, perhaps, have acted a more dignified part had he buried in oblivion all remembrance of the causes of his retirement. But history has ratified the truth of the invectives which his *De Vit. 1860-70. vanity or his righteous indignation extorted from him. The pent-up flow of his emotion, as he says, could not be restrained,* and the result is an elaborate picture of the bishops of that time, doubtless of those whom he had known at the Council, and who had cast him out from their ranks as 66 an evil and unholy man." This extraordinary description would be justly considered a libel on any modern ecclesiastical assembly, and is thus instructive, as showing the impression produced on a contemporary and a canonized saint by an institution and an age to which later times have looked back with such unquestioning reverence. "They are actors on a gigantic scale." "They walk on stilts." "They grin through borrowed masks." They seem to him as though they had come in answer to the summons of a herald who had convoked to the Council all the gluttons, villains, liars, false-swearers of the Empire. They are "chameleons that change their color with every stone over which they pass." They are "illiterate, low-born, filled with all the pride of upstarts fresh from the tables of false accountants," "peasants from the plough," or from the spade, "unwashed blacksmiths," "deserters from the army and navy, still stinking from the holds of the ships," or with the brand of the whip or the iron on their bodies. The refined Gregory was doubtless acutely sensitive to the coarseness of vulgarity and "the ignorance which never knows when to be silent." But he is aware of the objection that the Apostles might be said also to have been unlearned men. "Yes," he replies, as if anticipating the argument of the apostolical or papal succession, "but it must be a real Apostle; give me one such, and I will reverence him however illiterate." "But these," he returns to the charge, are time-servers, waiting not on God but on the rise and flow of the tides, or the straw in the wind". angry lions to the small, fawning spaniels to the great"-" flatterers of ladies "_ "snuffing up the smell of good dinners". ever at the gates not of the wise but of the powerful "§-" unable to speak 66 *Ad Episc. (vol. ii. pp. 824, 829). แ 66 +M. de Broglie has evaded some of these dark colors by transferring them to the Arian bishops; much in the same way as the mutual recriminations of the Bishops of Nicea have been disposed of by wrongly referring them to the heretics. But there can be no question that Gregory is speaking of those who dismissed him from his office (see De Episc. 150, Ad Episc. 110), and therefore of the Council collectively. Ad Episc. pp. 200-230. § De Episc pp. 330-350, 635. themselves, but having sufficient sense to stop the tongues of those who can 99 -"made worse by their elevation". -" affecting manners not their own"-"the long beard, the downcast look, the head bowed, the subdued voice"-"the slow walk” "the got-up devotee "* "the wisdom anywhere but in mind." If such is a faithful character of the prelates at the Council, it needed not any special provocation to justify the well-known protests of Gregory, which, in fact, are even tame and flat after these sustained invectives. "Councils, congresses, we greet afar off, from which (to use very moderate terms) we have suffered many evils." "I will not sit in one of those Councils of geese and cranes." "I fly from every meeting of bishops, for I never saw a good end of any such,† nor a termination, but rather an addition, of evils." The Council was thus left without a head, and Constantinople without a bishop. Accordingly one of the chief objects for which the Synod had been called together was by its own folly frustrated. Whilst the Council hesitated, others took the matter into their own hands. The solution was one which forcibly illustrates the ecclesiastical usages of those times, as unlike to those of our time as it is possible to conceive. There was a magistrate at Constantinople named Nectarius, remarkable for his dignified manners. He was a native of Tarsus, and, being on the point of returning home, called Election of on his countryman Diodorus, Bishop of Tarsus, then Nectarius. at the Council, to ask whether he could take any letters for him. Diodorus, perhaps not without the partiality of a fellow-citizen, was so much struck by his venerable white locks and his splendid priestly appearance, that he determined, if possible, to have him raised to the vacant bishopric. He accordingly communicated his name to the Bishop of Antioch, who at first laughed at the notion as preposterous, but at last consented, partly as a favor, partly in jest, to add his name at the end of the list to be submitted to the Emperor. Meantime, the claims of Nectarius appear to have been whispered about in the groups of loiterers who may always be seen in an Eastern city, and thus to have reached the Court. * Πιστὸς ἐσκευασμένος, Ibid. 150. Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 106, 110; De Vit. 855. Sozomen, vii. c. 8. The Emperor, the moment he saw the list, put his finger on Nectarius's name, ran over the other candidates, then came back to Nectarius, and declared him bishop, to the general amazement of the Council, who, nevertheless, at once acquiesced in the decision. Not only, however, was Nectarius a layman and a magistrate, but he was unbaptized, and not only unbaptized, but he had purposely delayed his baptism, according to the bad practice of that age, in order to reserve for the last moment the cancelling of the sins of a somewhat frivolous youth and manhood. But this discovery was made too late, and the Emperor adhered to his decision with an obstinacy so surprising that it was afterwards supposed by Nectarius's admirers that he must have had a special inspiration. In the opinion of some this strange episcopate turned out extremely well. But this is not the natural inference from the facts that we know concerning it. It beginning certainly was not creditable. Nectarius learned his episcopal duties as fast as he could from one of his Cilician friends, Cyriacus, Bishop of Adana, whom, by the advice of Diodorus, he retained with him for some time. He also surrounded himself with a circle of his own countrymen, and amongst others was anxious to ordain as his chaplain and deacon, Martyrius, a physician, who had been formerly one of his boon companions, but who now declined Nectarius's proposal on the characteristic ground, that he, having been baptized long before, had lost the chance of clearing himself which Nectarius, by his postponement of the sacred rite, had so prudently reserved. Such was the new head of the Council and of the clergy of Constantinople to be introduced into his office by an accumulation, in the course of a few days, of the ceremonies of baptism, ordination, and consecration, each of which at that time implied weeks if not years of preparation. The scandal of Nectarius's elevation caused so much talk as to revive once more the hopes of Maximus the Dog, who seduced no less a person than Ambrose and the other bishops of the West to * The bad character of Nectarius's episcopate is fairly brought out by Tillemont, vol. ix. p. 488. + Sozomen, vii. 9. Tillemont, vol. ix. pp. 501, 502. It was on this occasion that Maximus came out with an orthodox book in order to procure the favor of the Emperor. |