Philip Schaff

“ The “Holy Roman Empire” reluctantly received the impious frauds [3] the East contemptuously resisted. Thus the Papacy was formed on the base of the “Holy Roman Empire,” and arrogated to itself the right to cut off and anathematize the greater part of Christendom, with the old patriarchal Sees. So we have in Nicholas the first figure in history in whose person is concentrated what Rome means by the Papacy. No “Pope” ever existed previously, in the sense of her canon-law; and it was not till two centuries longer that even a “Pope” presumed to pronounce that title peculiar to the Bishop of Rome. ”

“ As yet, these were but “great swelling words of vanity;” but they led to the formulated fraud of the Decretals.
2. Ambition once entering the pale of Catholicity, we find a counter idea to that of the councils at the root of the first usurpation of unscriptural dignity. John “the Faster,” bishop of New Rome, conceived himself not merely equal (as the councils had decreed) to the bishop of Old Rome, but his superior, in view of the decrepitude of the latter, and its occupation by the Goths, while the imperial dignity of Constantinople was now matured. He called himself “Œcumenical Bishop.” ”

“ In regard to the authorship and date of the False Decretals, Dean Milman says: “The author or authors of this most audacious and elaborate of pious frauds are unknown; the date and place of its compilation are driven into such narrow limits that they may be determined within a few years, and within a very circumscribed region. The False Decretals came not from Rome; the time of their arrival at Rome, after they were known beyond the Alps, appears almost certain. In one year Nicholas I. is apparently ignorant of their existence ”

“ These Decretals are full of anachronisms. The consulships and names of consuls mentioned in them are confused and out of order; and, moreover, the true dates of the writers themselves, as Bishops of Rome, do not agree with those assumed in these letters.
“6. Their style is extremely barbarous, full of solecisms; and in them we often meet with certain words never used till the later ages. Also, they are all of one style! How does it happen that so many different Popes, living in divers centuries, should all write in the same manner?” ”

“ But, as the established religion of the “Holy Roman Empire,” the national churches of Western Europe, one by one, succumbed to this revolt from historic Catholicity. The Eastern churches were the more numerous. ”

“ Up to this period the Decretals, the letters or edicts of the Bishops of Rome, according to the authorized or common collection of Dionysius, commenced with Pope Siricius, towards the close of the fourth century. To the collection of Dionysius was added that of the authentic councils, which bore the name of Isidore of Seville. ”

“ Is it credible that the Papacy should have so often appealed to these forgeries for its extended claims, had it any better authorities—distinctive authorities—to fall back upon? Every disputant on the Latin side finds in these forgeries a convincing argument against the Greeks. ‘To prove this,’ the universal jurisdiction of the Pope, said Abbot Barlaam, himself converted by them from the Greek Church, to convert his countrymen, ‘one need only look through the decretal epistles of the Roman pontiffs from St. Clement to St. ”

“ All these Decretals were unknown to all the ancient Fathers, to all the Popes and all the ecclesiastical authors that wrote before the ninth century. Now, what rational man can believe that so vast a number of letters, composed by so many holy Popes, containing so many important points in relation to the discipline of the Church, could be unknown to Eusebius, to St. ”

“ An Epistle of Zephyrinus.—Little importance to be attached to anything from such a source; but Dupin (who lived before his bad character came to light in the writings of Hippolytus) convicts it of ignorance, and shows that it is a patchwork of later ideas and writers. ”

“ It is self-refuted by “the same reasons.”
5. The Fifth Letter to St. James of St. Clement, Bishop of Rome and Successor of St. Peter.
“But,” says Dupin, “as St. James died before St. Peter, it necessarily follows, that this epistle cannot have been written by St. Clement.” Further, “We have one genuine epistle of St. Clement, the style of which is wholly different from that of these Decretals.”
6. The Epistle of Anacletus.—Barbarous, full of solecisms and falsehoods.
7. A Second Epistle of Anacletus.—Filled with passages out of authors who lived long after the times of Anacletus. ”