Glimpses of Church History

 

3. Period 400 – 750 CE

 

St Augustine and Sex

Augustine, an eminent Latin Father and Doctor of the Church, was born in the year 354 of a pagan father, Patricius and a Christian mother, Monica. From the age of 15 to 30, he lived with a woman of Carthage (Roman province in North Africa) and had a son at the age of 18. In 383 he left for Rome and in 386 became a Christian. He was ordained priest in 391 and became bishop of Hippo, a city in the Roman province of Numidia (now in Algeria) in 395. About 400, he wrote his Confessions, exposing the life of sexual indulgence he led before his conversion.

 

He had developed a deep sense of guilt and misery from his past licentiousness. He wrote: “Nothing is so powerful in disturbing the spirit of man as the caresses of a woman”. He never allowed women to set foot into his house, not even his sister and came to regard sex desire as dirty and wicked, even in marriage. In 401, Augustine wrote a treatise, On the Good of Marriage (‘De Bono Congugali’), a book which was to influence the church’s thinking on sex in marriage for well over a 1000 years. He declared that sexual intercourse was an act of lust and always a sin: a ‘venial sin’ if the couple concentrated icily on the child being conceived during the act, but a ‘mortal sin’ if the couple took pleasure in the act.

 

Augustine sermonised repeatedly:

“Husbands, love your wives chastely. Insist on working the flesh only as is necessary to procreate children…” Intercourse had to be cold and passionless. Older couples were advised to give up sex altogether. That sex is exclusively for procreation became official church teaching for centuries. Pope after pope dwelt on sins of ‘impurity’ more than graver ones like the greed of the rich or colonial conquest and plunder.

 

Augustine had defined three distinguishing marks of a Christian marriage: offspring, fidelity and indissolubility. !500 years later, in 1930, Pope XI was to use these same marks in his encyclical Casti Connubii. If any of them was missing, he said, a true marriage was not contracted. Among Augustine’s other works: The City of God (a Christian apologia), Epistles, On Free Will, On the Trinity, On the nature of Grace and Retractions in which he re-assessed earlier views.

 

Unbaptized babies consigned to hell

Pope Innocent I (401-07) was the son of the previous pope, Anastasius I (399-401). With vast lands and endowments by Emperor Constantine and his children, the church found itself rich and increasingly steeped in secular affairs. And with the Roman Empire in the West crumbling under barbarian attacks, the popes became more assertive. Innocent did not hesitate to protest to the eastern Emperor over the removal of the Bishop of Constantinople and attempted, unsuccessfully, to arrange a truce between the western Emperor Honorius and Alaric, the Gothic leader. [From the year 395, Rome had Emperors both in the East and West. The Western Empire came to an end in 476.]

 

At the time, babies who died without baptism were believed to go to hell for all eternity.  But Popes Innocent I and Gelasius I (492-96) went further. [Gelasius was of African descent.] In their view, babies had to receive communion to be saved. If baptized  babies died without communion, they went straight to hell. These papal pronouncements were adjudged to be errors by the Council of Trent in the 16^th century. Nonetheless, the church has declared these two popes saints!

 

Christ found to have two natures

Pope Leo I (440-461), called Leo the Great, is credited with strengthening the primacy of the bishop of Rome over other bishops. In 455, Leo personally confronted Attila the Hun and persuaded him not to invade Rome. He was less successful with the Vandals (another lot of savage tribes) three years later. His greatest triumph was at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 where it was proclaimed that Christ had two natures, divine and human. However, for many decades after, there were doubters. At the time of Pope Agapitus (535 -36), one of the doubters was Bishop Anthimus of Constantinople. The pope got him excommunicated and the Emperor Justinian sent him into exile. The pope died soon after.

 

The next Pope Silverius (536-537) now came under pressure from the Empress to restore Bishop Anthimus. When he refused, he was deposed in the same year 536 (with the connivance of Archdeacon Vigilius) and sent into exile. His treatment was harsh and he died a year later. Vigilius became pope.

 

Two Popes condemned as Heretics

Case 1: Pope Vigilius (537-55) was unpopular for his part in deposing the previous pope. He also lost favour with the Empress and Emperor Justinian summoned him to Constantinople. We are told that as the ship carrying Vigilius set sail, the people threw “stones, branches and cooking pots after him (and shouted):’You treated the Romans badly, may you meet evil where you are going’ “ (Ref 1).

In Constantinople, the Emperor found Vigilius not quite decided about the two natures of Christ and called the Fifth General Council in 553. 165 bishops were present but Vigilius sent his apologies, saying he was sick. The Council declared him a heretic and excommunicated him. The pope in turn condemned the Council decision. The Emperor then exiled to a remote ‘rocky inlet’. By the end of the year, Vigilius gave notice that he had been misled by the ‘wiles of the devil’ and was prepared to retract. He accepted all the decrees of the Council.

 

The Emperor then set him free to return home. The people were not all pleased to see him and were preparing to punish him. Vigilius died before that in 555 and was refused burial at St Peters.

 

Case 2: In the following century, another pope was also condemned for heresy.  This was Pope Honorius (625-38), believed to be a holy man who served the people and a good leader. But he did not care for academic debates and controversies. The matter of Christ’s two natures had been resolved but a new question now surfaced: Did Christ have two wills or one? In a well known letter, Honorius indicated that he was opposed to the idea of two wills and ridiculed those ‘pompous and time-wasting philosophers who croak at us like frogs’. He died before he could give a fuller explanation.

 

The one-will supporters (Monothelites) found an ally in Honorius. Some 40 years after his death, the Emperor decided to settle the matter through a Council. First Pope Agatho (678-81) condemned one-will beliefs at a Synod in Rome in 680 where he also asserted the supremacy of the Roman church. At the Sixth General Council held at the Imperial Palace at Constantinople, the Monothelites were condemned and with them, Honorius.

 

The next Pontiff, Leo II (682-83), confirmed the condemnation, adding: “Honorius tried with profane treachery to subvert the immaculate faith”. From this time on, “all popes were obliged at their consecration to endorse the council’s decision by an oath condemning Pope Honorius’ heresy” (Ref 2).

 

Church acquires imperial outlook. Vast lands become Papal States

Pope Gregory I (590-604), the last of four original Doctors of the Church, came to be known as Gregory the Great. At the time, the Lombards, a barbarian tribe from the Baltic, had entered Italy and settled perilously close to Rome. Gregory went to negotiate with them himself and saved Rome from being overrun by agreeing to pay a yearly tribute. Gregory wholly approved of St Augustine’s views and went even further. He ruled that:

 - original sin manifests itself as lust or concupiscence,

 - the sex act is sinful during pregnancy and lactation,

 - a man who has had sex with his wife cannot enter a church until he has washed himself and done penance.

With the end of the Western Empire in 476 and the effective collapse of Roman civil administration, Gregory was not only Patriarch of the West but became virtual political leader in Italy. He consolidated the vast lands of the church into a single unit which were later to become the Papal States. Power became centralised, bureaucracy grew, and the hierarchy increasingly distanced itself from the ordinary people. “The Bishop of Rome looked like Constantine, dressed like him, lived in palaces, had exactly the same imperial outlook…” (Ref 2).

 

As the influence of the Germanic Christian kingdoms grew, the authority of the Byzantine (Eastern) emperors waned and tensions grew between the Western church and the East. Finally, Pope Gregory II defied Emperor Leo III’s edict against images and by 732 (under Gregory III) all ties with Constantinople were severed. The Popes now pondered the prospect of a revived Western Empire with themselves as head!

 

                                              Note:  Rival popes are indicated by *

 

REFERENCES

1.    Raymond Davis, Book of Pontiffs, Liverpool University Press 1989

2.    Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, Corgi Books 1994

3.    Cheetham, History of the Popes, Nicholas, 1992