Lecture 19: Leo, Justinian, and Gregory: Three Greats of the Early Middle Ages

The lecture, section by section

1. Closing the canon discussion

   A brief coda to the previous lecture: regional synods at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 and 418 listed the New Testament books, and as with Nicaea and the Trinity, they recognized what the church had received rather than creating it. Those same gatherings did not treat the Apocrypha as canon; Rome finally added those books officially only at Trent, some eleven centuries later, in reaction against the Protestants.

2. Framing the Middle Ages

   The medieval period runs from the fall of Rome in 476 to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, rounded to 500 through 1500, and divides in half at 1054, the year of the great schism between east and west. Dark ages is only half fair: the ninth and tenth centuries were spiritually dark indeed, especially in the papacy, but there were real advances too, like the renaissance under Charlemagne. In the west the feudal system swallowed daily life, lords, knights, and serfs mostly eating or fighting, so scholarship retreated into the monasteries, and Augustine's theology reigned over it all; that thinness is why this course concentrates on the foundational first five centuries.

3. Why Rome stood alone

   The papacy's rise had a simple geography. While the empire stood, Rome's influence was balanced by Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople; but all four counterweights were in the east. When the west fell, Rome remained as the west's one peerless see, and its bishop inherited an authority no western rival could check. Leo, bishop from 440, was the first to invest the office with what we now recognize as papal shape.

4. Leo's three moves

   First, at home in the west, Leo persuaded the feeble emperor Valentinian III to decree Rome's primacy over all western churches. Second, in the east, he made Rome the umpire: when Dioscorus's Robber Synod of 449 strong-armed monophysitism through, refused even to read Leo's letter, and terrorized dissenting monks, Leo declared the council void; after Theodosius II died from his fall, the new emperor Marcian convened Chalcedon, where 370 bishops adopted Leo's Tome, and the council's canons ranked Constantinople second, under Rome, above Alexandria and Antioch. Third, in the city itself, Leo faced Attila in 452 and persuaded him to turn back, later legend supplied angels, historians suspect gold, and in 455 he talked the Vandals out of burning what they plundered. The pastor was doing the empire's diplomacy, and Rome's people learned to look to the bishop rather than the throne.

5. The argument Leo built

   Leo reasoned that Mark founded Alexandria and submitted to Peter, who founded Rome, so Alexandria must submit to Rome; that Peter was chief of the apostles, and that the bishop of Rome is Peter's direct successor and therefore head of the church, the care of the universal church converging on Peter's one seat. The eastern churches saw the five patriarchates as equals and never accepted it, and that exact disagreement, papal primacy pressed on the patriarch of Constantinople, would formally split east and west in 1054, each side excommunicating the other.

6. Testing the rock

   Busenitz takes the claim apart. In Matthew 16 the word rock is feminine in Greek, an awkward referent for the man Peter; the better readings take it as Peter's confession, that Jesus is the Christ, or as the apostolic foundation generally, as Ephesians 2 describes, and the fathers themselves did not read the verse Rome's way. History cooperates no better: Peter did not found the Roman church, for Paul's greetings in Romans 16 do not mention him and believers were in Rome long before he was; Peter also ministered in Jerusalem, Caesarea, Antioch, where tradition says he appointed Ignatius, and Asia Minor, so by Leo's logic Antioch's claim equals Rome's. The line of succession itself frays badly in later history, three rival popes at once in the great papal schism. And succession guarantees nothing: Annas and Caiaphas held a genuinely God-given Aaronic succession and were apostate. Orthodoxy is measured against Scripture, never against a pedigree, and Peter's earliest successors, Linus, Cletus, Clement, never claimed to be apostles at all.

7. Justinian: law and reconquest

   Eastward, Justinian, emperor from 527, revised all Roman law into the Corpus Juris Civilis, the christianized code through which a Judeo-Christian legal inheritance flowed into the whole western world. Believing himself divinely obliged to restore the lost west, he bought peace with Persia and sent his general Belisarius to retake North Africa from the Vandals, southern Spain from the Visigoths, and Italy from the Ostrogoths, at staggering cost, a hundred thousand pounds of gold for Africa, three hundred thousand for Italy. Within a hundred and fifty years every acre was lost again, and many historians judge that the overextension left the east too exhausted to hold its own borders, part of the answer to how Islam's armies moved so fast. His enduring theological contribution came instead at the second council of Constantinople in 553, where the three chapters were condemned and Chalcedon's orthodoxy secured in the east.

8. Gregory the missionary pope

   Gregory the Great, once prefect of Rome, then deacon and ambassador to Constantinople, became pope in 590 and, in the judgment some historians offer, was the most deliberate strategist of Christian expansion since the apostle Paul. Like Leo he governed by default where the state had failed, feeding the poor, rebuilding aqueducts and defenses, making peace with the Lombards, and that blurring of pastor and prince further swelled the office. Unlike Leo he did not claim universal authority, styling himself patriarch of the west, but his practical reach grew anyway, and later popes chose their names accordingly: a Leo to consolidate power, a Gregory to expand the faith.

9. The gospel to the British Isles

   Gregory sent Augustine of Canterbury, a different Augustine, to the Angles and Saxons, whose invasions had pushed the old Roman British church to the island's western edge. Missions in that age converted kings first and kingdoms after, and so an Anglo-Saxon church arose beside the old British one until the Synod of Whitby in the 600s merged them into a single Church of England, Roman until Henry VIII's break in the 1530s; the story is preserved by the Venerable Bede. Ireland had already been reached by Patrick, a British boy kidnapped by Irish pirates who escaped and went back with the gospel, and from Ireland Columba carried it to the Picts of Scotland. Rome fell; Christianity did not, because the tribes that toppled the empire were themselves being won.

10. Calvin on the Greats

    How should Protestants regard popes called Great? Busenitz lets Calvin answer from the Institutes. Calvin treats Leo and Gregory as men of a middle period in whom corruption was present only in seed, quoting Gregory's own lament that the world is full of priests yet laborers in the harvest are rare, and his groaning at being buried in secular affairs. And Calvin turns the papacy's own appeal to them into a weapon: to defend the sixteenth century papacy from Leo and Gregory, he writes, is to borrow the praises of liberty in order to eulogize tyranny. The era still held the gospel, though the obscuring had begun, and the reformers knew the difference.

1. Leo's power grew because he served a city its rulers had abandoned. When does faithful public service rightly earn the church influence, and when does that influence begin to deform it?

2. Gregory sent missionaries while governing a city. What does his example say to churches tempted to choose between mercy at home and mission abroad?

3. Calvin honored what was good in Leo and Gregory while refusing the system built on them. How do you practice that kind of discriminating gratitude toward church history?