Is the Roman Catholic Church the Successor of the Roman Empire? – A History Essay for the Vellacott Prize 2014 by Philipp Ershov

The original frontispiece of Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’ from 1651, the book from which the statement was taken. The sword and sceptre represent earthly and ecclesiastical powers respectively.

This  4000 word essay was written last year for a history essay competition organised by Peterhouse College, Cambridge. The complete list of available question for the 2014 competition can be accessed by clicking on these words. A link to the 2015  Vellacott History Prize, for all Year 12 or Lower Sixth students, is available here as well.

This essay attempted to answer the following question:

‘And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof…’ (Thomas Hobbes). Do you agree?

The Roman Catholic Church is a centralized religious institution located in the Vatican, within the heart of Rome, and unites 1.2 billion people across the globe. Since its founding 20 centuries ago, it has come to play a decisive role in forming western civilization and socio-political establishments, as well as shaping the course of global history, initially within Europe during the Middle Ages and then in the rest of the world during the Age of Discovery and what followed after. At the head of this institution is the Bishop of Rome otherwise known as the Pope. The influence of the papacy on the course of global history and its, at times, aggressive foreign ambitions, has drawn parallels to the Roman Empire that go deeper than the shared location of their respective sees, and inspire many to claim that the papacy is the successor to the Empire. Its role in historical society and geopolitics, its rituals and titles and especially its historical origins all add to that claim. Amongst them is the 17^th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who claims that the papacy now sits “crowned upon the grave of thereof (the Roman Empire)”, For purposes of practicality, this claim will be discussed using the history of the papacy up until publication in Hobbes’ “Leviathan” in 1651, with only brief mentions of subsequent historical and sociological developments regarding the papacy.

Hobbes started off and based his claim on “if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion”, which is exactly what we will start our analysis with. It is a common fact that the Roman Catholic Church in its present form originated and is seated in Rome, the former capital of the Roman Empire. To keep things simple, we will consider as the origins of the papacy in its more or less present form, the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5^th century A.D., at the start of the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church assumed political and social authority in the West. We therefore see that the papacy has assumed the Empire’s mantle in the immediate short term, right after the Empire’s collapse, thus validating the most literal interpretation of ”sitting crowned upon the grave of thereof”.

Upon diving deeper and separating ecclesiastical successiveness from temporal successiveness, we see more reasons for Hobbes’ claim. By 380 Catholicism had become the official religion of the Western Roman Empire, already a successor of sorts to the traditional Roman faith. This allowed Catholicism to be identified with the Roman Empire, so that by the time the Empire collapsed leaving behind just the Catholic Church, the Church, in the eyes of the people of Europe, inherited some of that imperial authority, which played a role in the subsequent behavior of the papacy. Whereas before, under the Empire, its function was mainly spiritual, it now sought to fill in the power vacuum, by becoming an increasingly influential global player in its own right and trying to fill the niche left by the Western Roman Empire. Whilst the Empire attempted to conquer the Barbarian tribes using its armies, the papacy now tried to conquer their souls by evangelisation to Catholicism. Using missionaries such as Augustine of Canterbury instead of generals, the Church expanded its influence by converting Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Slavic people of Europe. Although the lands of those tribes were formally independent from the Church, unlike Roman provinces, its spiritual authority was so strong there that the chiefs of formerly “barbarian” tribes, later becoming princes and kings, answered directly to the Pope, seeing him as the supreme divine authority on Earth which represented God’s will. Religious unity of those tribes allowed them to from more stable and unified kingdoms out of numerous, relatively disorganized tribes, such as the Kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria in Britain, and the likes of Francia, Burgundy and Lombardy in continental Europe, all of which were more akin to traditional and easily administrated Roman provinces than the disjointed, fragmented clutter of pre-Christianised tribal Europe. The rulers of those kingdoms, in turn, started accumulating more powers, exceeding their initial tribal roles either as head priests, chief judges or military commanders(Padberg,1998), making it easier for the papacy to exert influence, as it could now focus it on more specific access points. The result was that for centuries, European monarchs all answered to the Pope, at least until the advent of Protestantism for some of them following the Reformation movement initiated by Martin Luther. Perhaps the most striking example of such papal supremacy is the crowning of Frankish King Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III(Pagden,2008), the consequences of which I will discuss later on.

The sheer extent of papal influence makes it hard to separate temporal successiveness from ecclesiastical successiveness. The Roman Empire had temporal authority, since the Empire’s numerous lands and provinces did not share the official Roman religion and gods, with animistic and pagan religions being prevalent in Europe and Mithraism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Judaism, amongst others, in the Levant and Middle East. It therefore follows that the provinces conformed to Rome for any reasons other than religious ones, which encourage resistance to the Romans rather than subordination. The papacy, on the other hand, likes to make it seem that its authority is purely ecclesiastical, with monarchs looking up to the Pope as the head of the religion they follow. If we leave the Church’s authority at that, we see that it inherited little of it from the Roman Empire. In reality, however, the papacy’s authority was more of a mixture of the two. Many monarchs complied to the Church not only because of religion, but because they feared that in the case of insubordination, they would damage relations with the predominantly Catholic states of Europe, which could, in turn, initiate wars on religious grounds. The reason for there being few revolts against the Roman Empire was mostly fear of retribution, as was seen when the Roman Army crushed the Great Jewish Revolt in Judaea in 73. A similar situation could be observed under the papacy, with the Pope supporting war against non-Catholic “heretics”. For example, Pope Sixtus V allowed Phillip II of Spain to collect crusade tax, granted indulgences to the Spanish men and blessed the Spanish Armada when Phillip decided to use it to invade in response to  Queen Elizabeth’s stance towards Protestantism in 1588. Although the Armada was defeated by the English navy, it serves as an example, had the Spanish won, and of what could befall nations and kingdoms who chose to betray the papacy. The ever-present Holy Roman Empire, whose Emperors were crowned by the Pope personally and whose lands covered most of central Europe, including the Kingdoms of Germany, Italy and Burgundy created a sense of a strong Catholic unity, and if someone chose to break away or defy it, they would face the collective retribution of the whole Empire.

As the name indicates, the Holy Roman Empire saw itself as a natural successor of the West Roman Empire. It was formed in 800 when Pope Leo III crowned the King of the Franks, Charlemagne, as Holy Roman Emperor(Bryce,1968). Although the Empire consisted of areas already conquered by Charlemagne and his ancestors for the Frankish Kingdom, it represented something else entirely. It signified the desire of the papacy to wear the mantle of the West Roman Empire, of which it was once part and the cradle of which it now resided in. Although the short term reasons for the coronation had more to do with Pope Leo III wanting to reward Charlemagne for helping him following an assassination attempt by political adversaries in 799, as well as force out the Lombards, who in 795 were posing a great danger to the Church, the papacy had much more to earn from this unprecedented union between church and state.  It wanted to revive the legal and commercial unity, as well as strength of the Roman Empire by creating a new union, this time of Catholic states, which could work collectively to promote Catholicism across the globe, through war and diplomacy, with just two main sources of authority: the Holy Roman Emperor and the figurehead, the Pope, who only held informal authority as the one who put the crown on the Emperor’s head. By creating this “sacred alliance”, Leo hoped to gain something else entirely in the short term: the usage of Charlemagne’s army to provide the church with much needed military authority which, was one of the key ingredients of temporal authority and the one of the main reasons for the continued existence of the old Roman Empire. He also hoped to use it for support in reducing the influence of the East Roman Empire, seated in Constantinople, in a sense reinstating the rivalry between the old Eastern and Western Roman Empires. It can be argued that even then, the Pope held no real influence(Heather,2013). Charlemagne was the de-facto Head of Church in the new Empire and was in charge of any ecclesiastical reforms, and not Leo. The illusion of the papacy having religious sovereignty in the eyes of the people existed only because Charlemagne’s religious policy allowed it to, and then again only because it added a spiritual backing to his rule. This action, however, did not work out as intended. By 887 this first Holy Roman Empire, known in historiography as the “Carolingian” Empire, had fragmented, prompting Pope John XII to repeat Leo III’s attempt by crowning Otto I as the first Emperor of the new Holy Roman Empire in 960. Even that, however, did not go as planned. Although he originally crowned Otto for conquering new kingdoms in the name of Christianity, such as the defeat of the pagan Magyars in 955, Pope John XII began worried when Otto began expanding his own Empire in Italy, fearing that Otto would turn from protector and hand of the papacy to its de facto head, and so made plans to depose and replace Otto. Instead, Otto replaced John with a new Pope, Leo VIII(Lutwack2009),, going as far as laying siege to Rome in 964 to assert the new Pope’s rule. Ever since then, there were numerous similar power struggles between the Pope and the Emperor, such as the excommunication of Emperor Frederick II not long after his papal coronation in 1220 due to Pope Innocent III’s fear of the Emperor’s accumulated power, meant that the mutually beneficial union between Church and State, as desired by Leo III, was never fully achieved, despite the high point of the Crusades, initiated by Urban II, where the troops of the Holy Roman Empire, along with those of other Christian states, mobilised upon the declaration of a crusade by the Pope, acting just as an Imperial legion would. This was perhaps the closest the papacy ever got to literally succeeding the role of the Roman Empire, but even so, the aim of the crusades was not the expansion of empire, but instead the influence of Christianity, influenced by other political, religious and economic reasons(Davies,1997). By 1419 following internal conflicts within both the Church and the Empire respectively, any hopes of unification of the two were abandoned, with the Emperors even abandoning the formality of a papal coronation, the last one being that of Charles V in 1530. The papacy had therefore ultimately failed to inherit the crown of the Roman Emperor, in its most literal sense, through the Holy Roman Empire, despite its ambitions to do so due to the inability of the papacy to unify with the decentralized complex of the Holy Roman Empire and establishing itself as sovereign, and the occasional political conflicts between the two.

The closest thing the Church ever had to an actual Empire was its small collection of Papal States. These were under direct rule of the pope and, existing from the 6^th century until 1870, had included provinces such as Romagna, Umbria and Lazio and all of Central Italy in the 18^th century. These originated from the popes establishing de-facto control over Italian lands under the Byzantines, and were then expanded by donations from the Frankish kings Pepin (736) and Charlemagne (774). Nevertheless, papal temporal control over these lands varied over the centuries and was usually weak or non-existent. For example, following the signing of the Dimploma Ottonianum between the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I and Pope John XII in the 10^th century, the States started a move towards virtual independence, which they would achieve by 1300. The Papal army, perhaps the only instrument that allowed the papacy to wield any temporal control over the States, was small and unprofessional, being and composed of only a few regiments of volunteers and mercenaries, was only able to maintain any sort of control since it had not had to fight in any major conflict until Garibaldi’s independence movement in the 19^th centuries, which led to the Army’s dissolution in 1870(Coulombe,2008).

We can see the legacy of the Roman Empire be observed in numerous underlying aspects of the papacy(Newcomb,2003). We see it everywhere, from titles and names, to rituals, ceremonies and proceedings, all of which suggest that the papacy has filled the Empire’s cultural niche. Aside from the basic fact that the Roman Catholic Church inherited the official lingua franca of the Roman Empire, Latin, and ensured its continued use and existence, it has also inherited many of the Empire’s titles. The prime example would be the title of “pontifex maximus”. Nowadays, this title is used for the head of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope. Originally, this title belonged to the Roman emperors, starting from the very first: Augustus. Although there are numerous accounts of a culture or state adopting names from previous ones without the adoption carrying any sort of significance, this case is particularly interesting, since it symbolizes the transition of power and cultural wealth from the Empire to the Church. In the Roman Republic and later Empire, the title referred to the Head Priest and spiritual leader of Rome. Up until the imperial acquisition of the title, these priests were gaining more and more political power, and the Emperor gaining this title made him both temporal and spiritual leader of the Empire. The usage of this title in reference to the popes immediately after the collapse of the Empire, starting with Pope Leo I in the 5^th century, suggests just that: the desire of the papacy to assume the role of the Emperor, both temporal and ecclesiastical, by being the spiritual and political leaders of a new Empire. However, the inheritance of this title was more of a symbol of the papacy’s ambitions and a way to create an illusion of a more powerful papacy during the disengagement from religion in the period of Enlightenment, when the title came into more popular use in reference to the pope. In reality, the papacy was claiming the role of the College of the Pontiffs, the highest religious order in the Roman Republic prior to the fusion of church and state, when the Emperor became head of religion. Thus the transfer of the title initially to the Bishops of Rome during the years of the Empire following the establishment of Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire by Theodosius I’s Edict of Thessalonica (380), and subsequently the Popes when the Empire collapsed, was closer to the Emperor giving religious authority back to the priests. Pontifex Maximus therefore signified the papacy’s desire for political authority, atop the already possessed spiritual authority, just like the Emperors of old.

Civic culture, however, is arguably the most certain of what the papacy inherited from the Romans. In both, the citizens fully accepted the authority of the institution, in the Empire largely due to the imperial cult, which elevated some emperors to the rank of divus, alongside official religious deities, and the Empire’s military and administrative might, whilst under the papacy it was almost solely due to the belief in the divinity of the Popes’ rule. Servitude to the state  that arose from those principles was a feature of people’s daily life in both, and essential for both institutions’ survival: Romans would attend prayers whilst men had to conscript to the army, whereas Catholics would have to attend Church together, all establishing a sense of duty to the Emperor and then the grammatical practices of the Latin language.

Where we definitely see the papacy taking over from the Empire is in its treatment of other religions to preserve its role as the dominant faith, as well as in its foreign ambitions. The Holy Inquisition that was carried out by the Catholic Church from the 11^th century onwards was at time eerily similar to the treatment of early Christians by the Roman Empire. Although separate from the more brutal Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions that originated in the 15^th-16^th centuries, in which the Catholic monarchies persecuted, imprisoned and forcibly converted religious minorities, the Papal inquisitions, the root of them all, were no less ruthless. Heretics, those who refused to adhere to the practices or principles of Catholicism, were tortured until confession or tried at a tribunal in a policy that originated in the 12^th century and carried on up until the 19^th. Although the Inquisition began as an instrument to prevent unjust executions(Madden,2005) it soon became a weapon against heresy and non-Catholics that was wielded by monastic orders such as the Benedictines and the Franciscans. The ironical similarity to the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire during the three centuries leading up to the Edict of Milan (313), when Emperors such as the infamous Nero executed, crucified, burnt, tortured Christians and Jews, as well as forcing them into gladiatorial combat, creating martyrs such as Saint Peter and Saint Paul, is evident. This was done in the name of control, so that nobody questioned the divinity of the emperors and the rule of the Gods. Similarly, the Papacy, using God and divine righteousness to justify their religious authority and therefore control, could not tolerate anyone questioning these beliefs, as this could have severe implications on the Papacy’s influence. Both the Popes and the Emperors, therefore, wanted to establish them as religious sovereigns in order to exert influence, with the former inheriting the method from the latter.

Where the global ambitions of the papacy were perhaps most evident and most similar to Roman imperial ambitions was during the Age of Discovery, when Jesuit missionaries were sent all over the globe to convert new peoples to Catholicism. The Society of Jesus, according to its official “Formula”, devised by founder and first leader Ignatius of Loyola in the 16^th century, was set up so that men could serve as “a soldier of God beneath the banner of the Cross in our Society (…) and to serve the Lord alone and the Church (…) under the Roman Pontiff…” to evangelise and baptise peoples all over the known and newly discovered world. Fairly similar in spirit to the sacramentum militare oath given by Roman soldiers pledging loyalty to the emperor, it entailed a service similar in spirit to that of the Roman legionary(Rupke,1990). The Roman aquilla had reached as far North as Britain and as far East as Armenia, whilst the Catholic Cross that succeeded it was carried places as far apart as Japan, Brazil and China. Whilst the soldier would enforce the will of the Empire across new territories using his gladus, the Jesuit would enforce the will, or faith, of the Church using his Bible. These methods were indicative of the differences between the two, with the Church relying purely on spiritual authority and faith to exert influence and the Empire counting on cold steel, perhaps the reason for which the Papacy became only the “ghost” of the latter. However, although not literally, the Jesuit missions resulted in 48.57% of the world’s current Catholics located in the Americas, to Europe’s 23.7%¹, creating a sort of spiritual “empire” all looking up to one person: the Pope. As opposed to the Roman Empire where all the provinces were united administratively, this empire is united through shared faith, something that helped reduce peripheral tension and aided its longevity.

The respective socio-cultural roles of the papacy and the Roman Empire should not be forgotten. During their period of existence, both were incredibly wealthy. This wealth was in turn flaunted to achieve the awe and amazement of the populous, partly to enhance spiritual control of the people, so both establishments became patrons of the arts and of architecture. For example, the Church was the main sponsor of the Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque and other artistic movements, as well as artists such as Da Vinci and Michelangelo(O’Collins). The Romans had built structures such as the Colosseum and Pantheon in Rome, whilst the Papacy erected new equally grand cathedrals and basilicas, like the St. Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican, a method of inspiring awe that was almost certainly taught by the Romans. This is most blatantly obvious in the recycling of Roman buildings to Catholic churches, for example the Pantheon, initially used to worship the Roman gods and being converted to the Catholic Church of “St Mary and the Martyrs”. Not only did that inspire reverence from the people, implanting in their consciousness that first the Roman Empire, and then the Papacy were greater than mere mortals and therefore had to be revered, but also subliminally made the  Papacy’s succession of the Roman Empire obvious, because old Roman buildings were now associated with the Papacy.  This use of art and architecture by both to control the hearts and minds of people placed the two into a similar socio-cultural slot, the sense of grandeur reinforcing their respective divinity and spiritual, as well as material superiority due to the lavishness of Papal property,  over the public, especially to those who were not Latin-speaking.

However, a comparison of the two would be impossible without examining the meaning of Hobbes’ words in the “Leviathan” in their specific context. Publishing it in 1651, Hobbes talked about how the papacy, by spreading a false doctrine, was able to create a ‘Kingdom of Darkness’, “Darkness” here referring to ignorance, which allowed the people to be easily controlled for its own benefit. This was not always the case, as attitudes towards scientific progress within the Church changed on the basis of individual interpretations of scientific claims from the Bible, ranging from Pope Urban VII’s support of Galileo’s work(Pantin,1999), to proclaiming heresy, as seen when Galileo’s support of the Copernican heliocentric model cause him to be proclaimed heretic by the Inquisition in 1633(Finnocchiaro,1989). Either way, this is not something it inherited from the Roman Empire, which condoned technological progress, the arch being discovered during that period. Due to the Empire possessing military and administrative control of a religiously diverse domain, it had no need or ability to impose religious scientific dogmas, meaning that the Church took a completely different approach in this respect.

Nevertheless, Hobbes’ main claim was that the Papacy emerged and rose to power from the ruins of the Roman Empire, immediately after its decline. Indeed, we see that the Empire’s downfall created the perfect opportunity for the Church to ascend and immediately claim the “crown”, which essentially means the Empire’s cultural and socio-political position in the world. The Empire’s heritage is seen in many aspects of the Papacy, albeit diluted in places. Although both united millions of people from across the world, that unity was of an entirely different nature. The Empire maintained control through military might and effective administration, whilst the majority of the Church’s influence being purely ecclesiastical, with the remaining influence being informal, resulting from Church’s immense accumulated wealth. Thus it can be seen that the papacy, although attempting to replace the Roman Empire on numerous counts, became more akin to a scaled up version of the Imperial Cult, filling many of the empty niches left by the Empire with a similar, but fundamentally different material.

 

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