that she meant to revolutionize her immemorial discipline in regard to those many important points in which that discipline differed from the new code. For example, the first fifty of the Apostolical Canons form part of the Dionysian code, and the sixth of those canons threatens excommunication against any bishop or priest who should put away his wife under pretence of religion.1 Assuredly Rome never adopted the provisions of that canon, though the canon forms part of a code which she did adopt. Similarly, in the forty-sixth and forty-seventh of the Apostolical Canons heretical baptism is treated as invalid,2 whereas the Roman Church from very early times strenuously maintained its validity. Again, the Dionysian code includes the canons of Ancyra, and the tenth of those canons allows a deacon to marry after his ordination, if before his ordination he gave notice to his bishop that he did not intend to bind himself to celibacy.3 That discipline was never accepted at Rome. I will give one more instance. The canons of Chalcedon are to be found in the code of Dionysius; and in the last clause of the ninth Chalcedonian canon it is laid down that, "if a bishop or clerk has a difference with the metropolitan of his province, he may choose either the exarch of the diocese or the see of imperial Constantinople, and accept judgement from him or from it." Assuredly Rome, in accepting the Dionysian code, had no intention of allowing Sardinian bishops, who might quarrel with their metropolitan at Calaris, to ignore the tribunal of the Roman pontiff, and to cite their archbishop before the court of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

I have, I hope, made it evident that the reception of a code as authoritative does not involve the reception of all the provisions of all the canons contained in the code.

As regards the Sardican canons and the Eastern Church, it is absolutely certain that that church never intended to substitute the Sardican system of appeals to Rome in lieu of her own system of appeals to provincial and patriarchal synods, as set forth in various canons which were just as much part of her code as were the canons of Sardica. Photius, at the end of the prolegomena to his Nomocanon, points out that the Councils of Sardica and Carthage have a place in the Eastern code, which does not agree with their chronological order; and he gives as the reason for this abnormal position the fact that those councils defined many things which had to do with special places and regions, or which

1 See Hefele, i. 460, E. tr.

2 Ibid., i. 477, 478, E. tr.

3 Ibid., i. 210, E. tr. ; and P. L., lxvii. 153.

Ibid., iii. 394, E. tr. ; and P. L., lxvii. 173.

5 The exarch of the diocese means here the superior metropolitan, whether called patriarch or exarch, of the group of provinces, to which the bishop or clerk belongs. Pope Nicholas I., by an absurd perversion of the meaning of the words, interprets the expression "exarch of the diocese" so as to make it in all cases denote the Roman pope (cf. Nicolai i. Ep. lxxxvi., ad Michaelem Imperatorem, P. L., cxix. 944, 945; and Ep. lxxv., ad Úniversos Episcopos Galliae, P. L., cxix. 900). It is not for a moment to be supposed that this perversion of the sense had been thought of, when the see of Rome first began to make use of Dionysius' compilation, more than three hundred years before the time of Nicholas.

were decreed for the sake of the provinces of the West. The fact is certain, though I doubt whether it constitutes the true reason of the abnormal order. Whether this be so or not, it is impossible to point out any trace of the Sardican system of limited appeals to Rome having been ever carried out in the East; and the Council in Trullo, with its strong anti-Roman bias, would have been the last council in the world to ratify any attempt to substitute that system for the totally different system which had grown up in the East.

Mgr. Duchesne sums up very tersely what I have tried to set forth at length. He says, "Le concile de Sardique n'avait été admis que par une fraction de l'Église grecque, par l'épiscopat égyptien. Il entra plus tard dans les collections canoniques byzantines; mais il ne faut pas croire que toutes les lois conciliaires insérées dans un recueil de droit ecclésiastique aient force de loi pour les pays où ces recueils circulent." 3

I take this opportunity of saying that I have removed from the note on p. 153 the reference to Photius' statement about the non-reception of

Cf. Voelli et Justelli, Bibliothec. Jur. Canon. Vet., edit. 1661, tom. ii. p. 795. Similarly, the anonymous compiler of the Nomocanon, which appeared in the reign of Tiberius, speaking in his preface of the African canons which he was bringing for the first time to the knowledge of the Greek Church, dwells on the fact that they are not all capable of application to the Church in the East (cf. Voell. et. Justell., Bibliothec., tom. ii. p. 790). It must be noted that this anonymous compiler's preface is quoted at length by Photius, in the preface to his edition of the Nomocanon, and forms, in fact, the first section of that preface.

2 Perhaps the bishops of Cyprus in the time of S. Epiphanius and the bishops of the province of Arabia at the same epoch may have also accepted the Sardican canons. The Arabians and Cypriots, no less than the Egyptians, sided with Paulinus against S. Flavian (Sozomen., vii. 11), and we can hardly doubt that Paulinus accepted with fervour everything Sardican. On the occasion of the contest between Badagius and Agapius, rival claimants of the see of Bostra, the Arabian bishops seem to have acted on the rules laid down at Sardica about quasi-appeals to Rome. This episode took place during the episcopate of Siricius at Rome and of Theophilus at Alexandria. Siricius very properly refrained from hearing the appeal at Rome, and arranged for it to be heard by Theophilus of Alexandria. Theophilus brought it before a council of bishops, who had come together for the baptism of Rufinus, a prefect of the praetorium, and for the consecration of the basilica which Rufinus had built near Chalcedon. The council was held in September, 394. An account of this solitary instance of action being taken in the East on the lines of the Sardican canons about quasi-appeals to Rome is preserved in a fragment of a memorandum drawn up by the Roman deacon, Pelagius, afterwards pope, against the decisions of the fifth Ecumenical Council (see an article by Duchesne, in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne for December, 1885, pp. 280-284). The fact that the appeal came from Arabia, and that it was the Egyptian patriarch who was commissioned to hear it, explains a proceeding which would otherwise have been incomprehensible. The appeal would naturally have been made from Arabia to Antioch. But at the time when the appeal must, in fact, have gone from Arabia to Rome, viz. in 392 or 393, Evagrius, the successor of Paulinus at Antioch, was in communion neither with Rome nor with Alexandria, and he would therefore have had no bishops in his communion who could sit with him to hear an appeal. The state of things was quite exceptional. It may be added that one of the very few Eastern bishops, who were present at the Council of Sardica, was S. Asterius, Bishop of Petra, in Arabia (cf. S. Athan. Apol. contr. Arian. § 48, et Tom. ad Antiochenos, § 10). He would bring back or send the Sardican canons to his own country.

3 Duchesne, Églises Séparées, p. 204.

the canons of Sardica in the Church of Constantinople,1 not because I am at all convinced that the statement was unjustifiable, but because the refutation of Dr. Rivington's criticisms of it would take up more space than I can afford, and the thesis, which I was illustrating in that note and am defending in this appendix, in no way depends on the accuracy of the statement made by Photius.

1 Cf. Photii, Epistolarum, lib. i. ep. i. ad Nicolaum, P. G., cii. 600, 601.

N

LECTURE V.

THE GROWTH OF THE PAPAL POWER DURING THE SIXTY YEARS WHICH FOLLOWED THE DEATH OF DAMASUS.

IN my last lecture I tried to show you how the popes began, in the middle of the fourth century, to acquire jurisdiction outside the limits of Italy. We saw that the Council of Sardica gave to them a strictly limited power of receiving appeals in the case of deposed bishops. But as the canons of Sardica were for a long while neither received nor known in the greater part of the East, and were only received in certain parts of the West, the jurisdiction derived from the Sardican canons did not go very far. But then we saw how, during the pontificate of Damasus, the Emperors Valentinian and Gratian conferred on the pope a very large measure of jurisdiction over the bishops of the whole Western Empire. This jurisdiction, received from the Emperors, had no proper canonical basis, but it was felt to be power with which the Western churches had to reckon; because the pope, when acting in accordance with the provisions of the imperial constitutions, was able to enforce his authority upon contumacious bishops by the help of the secular magistrates. The result of this was to give a certain legally authoritative character to all the official acts of the popes, and amongst those acts to the letters1 which they from time to time sent out in response to the requests for advice which came to them from the provinces. From very early times it had been customary in the West to consult the see of Rome as being the only Western apostolic see. There was a similar custom in the East of consulting the various Eastern apostolic sees. Whether in the East or in the West, the apostolic sees were consulted, because they were presumed to have retained in special purity the original deposit of tradition, which they had received from the apostles. The answers which arrived from Rome or from other apostolic

1 The imperial constitutions made the pope a court of final appeal for the bishops of the West, and the normal court of first instance for the metropolitans of the West, but they did not define the law which he was to administer. This omission left it free to the popes to make their own law, and they were able to give to their decretal letters a force equivalent to that of the canons.

sees were received with great respect, although it was not supposed that they had the force of law. Sometimes it would happen that some specially valuable letter written by an occupant of one of the great sees, or even occasionally by some bishop of an inferior see who might be in high repute for sanctity and learning, would be received by some council as stating accurately the law or custom of the Church, and such a letter would, by the action of the council, become a canonically authoritative document. This happened not infrequently in the East. For example, the Church in the East accepted as of binding authority what were called the canonical epistles of S. Denys the Great of Alexandria, of S. Gregory the Wonder-worker of Neocaesarea, of S. Peter and of S. Athanasius, both of Alexandria, of S. Basil of Caesarea, of S. Gregory of Nyssa, of S. Gregory of Nazianzus, of S. Amphilochius of Iconium, of Timothy, of Theophilus, and of S. Cyril, all of Alexandria, and of S. Gennadius of Constantinople.1 In the West, although the popes must often have written letters of advice in reply to inquiries, we do not find that any of their letters were accepted as having legal force, until we come to the letters of Siricius (who followed Damasus) and his successors. No doubt Pope Stephen had tried, in the time of S. Cyprian, to legislate for the whole Church, by means of letters, on the subject of the baptism of heretics; but he failed. However, in the time of Siricius the pope had become, by the action of the State, a great potentate in the West, and some of the Western provincial churches were prepared to accept his replies to their inquiries as having force of law. Under these altered circumstances the popes not unnaturally assumed a more authoritative tone. They no longer gave mere advice, but they laid down the law, and in some cases threatened bishops, who should disobey, with the penalty of being cut off from the communion of the Roman Church. They still professed, however, not to be making new law, but to be authoritatively declaring what was the

1 See the second canon of the Council in Trullo (Coleti, Concilia, vii. 1345). 2 But it was not until the time of S. Caesarius of Arles (A.D. 503-543) that papal decretals were regarded by the Gallican Church as having a general authority, and as being on a line with the canons (see the Abbé Malnory's Saint Césaire, pp. 51, 107). The Ballerini have shown (De Antiq. Collection. et Collector. Canonum, pars ii. cap. i. § ii. n. 9, P. L., lvi. 68, 69) that in the suburbicarian regions papal decretals were treated as on a level with canons in the time of Pope Celestine (A.D. 422-432); but in these regions the popes' legislative authority must have been recognized long before S. Celestine.

3 Compare the letter of Pope Innocent I. (A.D. 402-417) to Victricius of Rouen (Coleti, iii. 8): "Non quo nova praecepta aliqua imperentur, sed ea, quae per desidiam aliquorum neglecta sunt, ab omnibus observari cupiamus." Pope Innocent has copied this sentence, almost word for word, from the letter of his predecessor Siricius to the bishops of Africa (Coleti, ii. 1225).