- The sacerdotal system. Pseudo-Isidor advocates the papal theocracy. The clergy is a
divinely instituted, consecrated, and inviolable caste, mediating between God and the people, as
in the Jewish dispensation. The priests are the "familiares Dei," the "spirituales," the laity the
"carnales." He who sins against them sins against God. They are subject to no earthly tribunal, and
responsible to God alone, who appointed them judges of men. The privileges of the priesthood
culminate in the episcopal dignity, and the episcopal dignity culminates in the papacy. The cathedra
Petri is the fountain of all power. Without the consent of the pope no bishop can be deposed, no
council be convened. He is the ultimate umpire of all controversy, and from him there is no appeal.
He is often called "episcopus universalis" notwithstanding the protest of Gregory I. - The aim of Pseudo-Isidor is, by such a collection of authoritative decisions to protect the
clergy against the secular power and against moral degeneracy. The power of the metropolitans is
rather lowered in order to secure to the pope the definitive sentence in the trials of bishops. But it
is manifestly wrong if older writers have put the chief aim of the work in the elevation of the papacy.
The papacy appears rather as a means for the protection of episcopacy in its conflict with the civil
government. It is the supreme guarantee of the rights of the bishops. - The genuineness of Pseudo-Isidor was not doubted during the middle ages (Hincmar only
denied the legal application to the French church), but is now universally given up by Roman
Catholic as well as Protestant historians.
The forgery is apparent. It is inconceivable that Dionysius Exiguus, who lived in Rome,
should have been ignorant of such a large number of papal letters. The collection moreover is full
of anachronisms: Roman bishops of the second and third centuries write in the Frankish Latin of
the ninth century on doctrinal topics in the spirit of the post-Nicene orthodoxy and on mediaeval
relations in church and state; they quote the Bible after the; version of Jerome as amended under
Charlemagne; Victor addresses Theophilus of Alexandria, who lived two hundred years later, on
the paschal controversies of the second century.^266
The Donation of Constantine which is incorporated in this collection, is an older forgery,
and exists also in several Greek texts. It affirms that Constantine, when he was baptized by pope
Sylvester, a.d. 324 (he was not baptized till 337, by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia),
presented him with the Lateran palace and all imperial insignia, together with the Roman and Italian
territory.^267 The object of this forgery was to antedate by five centuries the temporal power of the
papacy, which rests on the donations of Pepin and Charlemagne.^268 The only foundation in fact is
(^266) The forgery was first suggested by Nicolaus de Cusa, in the fifteenth century, and Calvin (Inst. IV. 7, 11, 20), and
then proved by the Magdeburg Centuries, and more conclusively by the Calvinistic divine David Blondel (1628) against the
attempted vindication of the Jesuit Torres (Turrianus, 1572). The brothers Ballerini, Baronius, Bellarmin, Theiner, Walter,
Möhler, Hefele, and other Roman Catholic scholars admit the forgery, but usually try to mitigate it and to underrate the originality
and influence of Pseudo-Isidor. Some Protestant divines have erred in the opposite direction (as Richter justly observes, l.c. p.
117).
(^267) "Dominis meis beatissimis Petro et Paulo, et per eos etiam beato Sylvestro Patri nostro summo pontifici, et universalis
urbis Romae papae, et omnibus ejus successoribus pontificibus.. concedimus palatium imperii nostri Lateranense ... deinde
diadema, videlicet coronam capitis nostri simulque pallium, vel mitram ..... et omnia imperialia indumenta ... et imperialia
sceptra.. et omnem possessionem imperialis culminis et gloriam potestatis nostrae ... Unde ut pontificalis apex non vilescat,
sed magis amplius quam terreni imperii dignitas et gloriae potentia decoretur, ecce tam palatium nostrum, ut praedictum est,
quamque Pomanae vobis et omnes Italiae seu occidentalium regionum provincias, loca et civitates beatissimo pontifici nostro,
Sylvestro universali papae, concedimus atque relinquimus." In Migne, Tom. 130, p. 249 sq.
(^268) That Constantine made donations to Sylvester on occasion of his pretended baptism is related first in the Acta Sylvestri,
then by Hadrian I. in a letter to Charlemagne (780). In the ninth century the spurious document appeared. The spuriousness was