Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo IIIAllies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Islamic
Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III
Allies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Christianity and other religions -- Islam; Church history -- Middle Ages, 600-1500; Papacy; Papacy -- History
He was succeeded by two
Popes, John IV. and Theodore, who behaved with the same decision and
fortitude. But a new emperor had succeeded, after a frightful revolution,
at twelve years of age; and a new patriarch of Constantinople was ready to
draw up a new document for the heresy. It was met by another Pope, whose
first act was to call a great Council at the Lateran, to condemn the
heresy under anathema, and the two documents, of which the first was
fathered by Heraclius, and the second by Constans II. For this act of
courage St. Martin four years afterwards was stolen from Rome, judged at
Constantinople as a traitor by the senate, and sent a prisoner to die of
famine, as is believed, in the Crimea. The emperor, having Rome in full
possession, used such means that Eugenius was put into the see while St.
Martin was still living as a condemned criminal. But Eugenius could not be
compelled to accept the heresy of the Byzantine monarch and patriarch.
There follow five Popes, Vitalian, Adeodatus, Donus, Agatho, and Leo II.
At length, when Constans had perished miserably in his bath at Syracuse,
his son Constantine broke the line of heretical emperors. But he found in
truth the heresy so embedded in his capital that he was obliged to act
with great caution. After repulsing a Mohammedan attack upon his capital
which lasted seven years, and was overcome only by the aid of the Greek
fire, when if the city had been taken the Greek empire would have ended,
and the patriarch of Constantinople have shared the lot of his brethren at
Alexandria and Antioch, the emperor was enabled to invite Pope Donus to
hold a Council at Constantinople which should terminate this long
struggle. It was a struggle in which the whole West followed the Pope, but
much of the East was in favour of the heresy. Pope Agatho had succeeded
Donus; he accepted the request of the emperor, he had Councils held
through the West, and a full patriarchal Council at Rome. So he appeared
by his legates at Constantinople, and was welcomed with the words, “Peter
has spoken by Agatho,” as 230 years before they cried, “Peter has spoken
by Leo”. But Agatho also died before the Council had finished its work,
and the tenth successor of Honorius, Leo II., during his short pontificate
of ten months, set his seal upon the Council, and endured to censure a
predecessor for neglect of his office, and for allowing by that neglect a
heresy to obtain a temporary success. Ten Popes in succession, one of them
actually martyred, all of them vassals of absolute sovereigns, had during
all this interval of forty years alone prevented the heresy being forced
upon the Church. Four patriarchs of Constantinople in succession had
fostered it; and four were together condemned. They were condemned, not
for negligence in allowing others to spread the heresy, but as its
originators; as advisers and mouthpiece of emperors, all whose power had
been bent by them to extort approval of it from Popes, who in their civil
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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