CHAPTER XIII

TWO ARCHBISHOPS

Dante, Inferno, xix. 1–4.

On September 27, 397, Nectarius, Patriarch of Constantinople, lay dead in his stately palace.

On the Good Friday of that year (April 4) had died a very different prelate, the great St. Ambrose. He had died immediately after receiving the Sacrament, after lying many hours with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross. His friends, the chief citizens of Milan, who adored him, had entreated him to pray that for the sake of the Church his days might be prolonged, for he was but fifty-seven years old. But he answered, ‘I have not so lived among you that I am ashamed to live; and yet—for the Lord is merciful—I do not fear to die.’ ‘It is a death-blow for all Italy,’ exclaimed the brave Vandal, Stilico, when he heard it. And he was right.

No human being would have dreamed of making any such remark about Nectarius. He was commonplace of the commonplace; he was of the world, worldly; he was a luxurious worldling, profoundly ignorant of theology. When appointed archbishop he was a layman; he had never even been baptised.

He was, indeed, a strange successor to the humble, holy, fervid St. Gregory of Nazianzus, the greatest theologian and one of the greatest orators of his day. But Gregory had shown himself too mild, too noble, and too good for the magnificent office of which he may be said to have created the possibility. When Gregory was carried by 86 force from his humble bishopric at Nazianzus to preside over the little handful of the orthodox at Constantinople, the city, besides being execrably corrupt, was predominantly Arian.

Gregory lived in a lodging, and preached in a single room, which was large enough to receive the shrunken congregation. It was through his earnestness and fame that the room had gradually grown into a chapel, and the chapel into ‘The Church of the Resurrection.’ He was no imposing orator, but short of stature, and though only fifty years old, was pale, meagre, sickly, and prematurely aged, with bald head and beard already sable-silvered. He wore an aspect of continual melancholy; his careworn countenance was often bathed in tears. And so far from valuing the worldly eminence of his rank, his dress was more like that of a mendicant than of the bishop of the queen of cities, the capital of the Eastern world.

It was, of course, impossible that so good a man as Gregory should escape a storm of odium. That is the compliment which vice pays to virtue. He had as many stones flung at him as bad men have roses; his only criticism of them was they were so ill-aimed. His life was often in danger. On one occasion a furious swarm of Arians, headed by ‘beggars who had forfeited their claim to pity, monks who looked like goats or satyrs, and women more frightful than Jezebels,’ armed with sticks, stones, and firebrands, wrecked his church, assaulted his congregation, mingled with blood the wine of the chalice, and nearly murdered him. He escaped, but because one man had been killed in the tumult he was summoned before the magistrates for a breach of the peace. Then he was nearly ousted by the intrigue of one of the basest class of clerical adventurers in whom that age abounded. Gregory hated the place; he hated the work; he hated the prevalent hypocrisy; he hated the universal talk about religion, without a semblance of its reality, which left him hardly anyone whom he could trust.

Utterly against his will he was compelled to accept the archbishopric, which involved the care of the Church of the Apostles. He had not the least desire to be a bishop. He had never cared to hang about the doors of the great. 87 With singular independence, he declared that he had never wished to clasp the bloodstained hands of rulers, ‘under whose hands the whole world is ruled by a little diadem and a small rag of purple.’

He found the presidency of the Second Œcumenical Council the most distasteful of his duties. He describes it as a scene of faction, disorder, jealousies, and disgraceful violence. He found that the assembled ecclesiastics were chiefly interested in personal questions. They appeared as antagonists in a battle, bandying bitter accusations, and leaping from their seats in transports of mutual animosity, until Gregory was thoroughly ashamed of them. He describes them as chattering like cranes and showing their teeth like wild boars, and no sooner had he ended a wise and conciliatory speech intended to raise them to a higher level, than the younger clergy buzzed about him like wasps. It is curious that the two best saints of the fourth century, St. Gregory and St. Martin of Tours, had a rooted dislike of ecclesiastical gatherings. Gregory breathed an earnest prayer that he might have nothing more to do with them, and Martin said that he had never known anything come of them but mischief. The great Bossuet agreed with them. ‘You know’—so he wrote to a friend—’what kind of things these assemblies usually are.’

Warning the congregated bishops that they were become a byword of strife and partisanship, and finding that they were intriguing to get rid of him, he offered to resign. With disgraceful alacrity the assembled Fathers took him at his word. He left his episcopate to be sought for by the restless ambitions of time-servers and hypocrites, ’angry lions to the small and fawning spaniels to the great,’ and, sick at heart, retired ‘to gaze on the bright countenance of truth in the mild and dewy air of delightful studies.’

Nectarius owed his election to the Patriarchate to the most casual incident. He was a Prætor, and as he was going to Tarsus he called on Chrysostom’s old teacher, Diodore, Bishop of Tarsus, to ask if he could take any letters for him to that city. Struck with his venerable appearance and his placid temper, Diodore mentioned him 88 to Flavian as a possible candidate for the vacant archbishopric. Flavian laughed at the notion, but out of compliment to Diodore put down the Prætor’s name at the bottom of the list of selected candidates, which was handed to the Emperor. Theodosius passed his finger down the list, paused at the name of Nectarius, read the list through a second time, and then declared that he chose Nectarius.

‘Nectarius! Who in the world is Nectarius?’ asked everyone in astonishment, and it turned out that he had not even been baptised! But Theodosius had very little opinion of any ecclesiastics except Ambrose, and Ambrose was a layman when the voice of the people had called him to the Archbishopric of Milan. So Nectarius stepped from the baptismal font to the most influential patriarchate of the world, and to the presidency of the Second Œcumenical Council!

But Theodosius was grievously mistaken if he supposed that Nectarius was going to be a second Ambrose.

On the contrary, he was just one of those purpureal, imposing, nugatory personages who, because of his easygoing nullity, his commonplace, worldly shrewdness, and his total absence of zeal and genius, suited the corrupt luke-warmness of a semi-Christian city.

Nectarius rose to the full height of the pomposity which had been impossible to Gregory. He could, indeed, give no help to the Emperor in the intense perplexities caused by theological disputes. The bishops heard a terrifying rumour that Theodosius even meant to consult the heretic Eunomius, who openly argued the Son was unlike the Father. The world, as after the Council of Rimini, might wake with a groan to find itself Arian! As no help was to be obtained from the ignorant Archbishop, Amphilochius, Bishop of Iconium, threw himself into the breach, and determined to give Theodosius a picture-lesson. He went with other bishops to a Court gathering. Theodosius was seated on his throne in all his splendour, and by him sat his little son Arcadius, only eight years old, whom he had recently invested with the diadem, and whom the courtiers were surrounding with flattering homage. Amphilochius saluted the Emperor, and did not 89 take the smallest notice of Arcadius. ‘What!’ said the Emperor, angrily, ‘do you not see my son?’ ‘Oh, said the Bishop, carelessly, ‘I forgot. Good morning, my child!’ and he actually had the audacity to pat the august infant on the cheek and tickle him with his finger! ’Turn that man out!’ roared Theodosius, in a flame of anger. Then Amphilochius, facing him, said, ‘You see, Emperor, you cannot tolerate an indignity to your son. Doubt not, then, that God shares the same feelings, and learn your duty.’ The Emperor was deeply impressed, and the world was saved from the heresy of Eunomius!

Under the courtly archiepiscopate of Nectarius the clergy of Constantinople became utterly corrupt and utterly worldly; but then, Nectarius was such a good manager—he kept everything so quiet, and he gave such good dinners! And under his sway the Church, to use Kingsley’s phrase, ‘swaggered on, arm in arm with the flesh and the devil.’