But the letters are preserved which John wrote on this occasion,¹⁰¹ and in which he applauds Athanasius for having preferred God to his brother, and having, according to the precept of the gospel, ‘plucked out the eye’ that scandalized him. This barbarous, and almost ludicrous, application of a sacred text, opens to our view the character of John VIII. whose three hundred and twenty letters speak so perpetually of excommunication, that this menace presents itself as an ordinary and, as we may say, an indispensable formula.
In 880, John disposed of the imperial crown; he gave it on Christmas-day to the son of Louis the Gorman, Charles-le-Gros, who in 884 became king of France, by the death of Louis III. and of Carlo-man, son of Louis the Stammerer. The names of these princes suffice to remind us of the decline of the Carlovingian race. A bishop of France wrote one day to Louis III.¹⁰²
“It was not you who chose “me to govern the church; but it was I, with my “colleagues, who chose you to govern the kingdom, “on condition of observing its laws.”
¹⁰² Millofs Elem. of Hist, of France, vol. 1. p. 194.
And the bishop who held such language to his king, was the same Hincmar of Rheims, who had so energetically repelled the daring enterprizes of Adrian II. It seemed decreed that the monarch should have for his master, either the national clergy or the bishop of Rome; and already insecure against one of these powers, he inevitably sunk when they united.
John VIII. died in 882, and we may reckon up ten popes after him, in the course of the eighteen last years of the ninth century; none of whom had time to render themselves illustrious by any very great undertaking. We shall only observe, that the election of Stephen V. in 885, was, after his installation, examined and confirmed by Charles-le-Gros;¹⁰³ that the deposition of this emperor in 887, was pronounced, not by the ecclesiastical authority, but by an assembly of the German and French nobles;¹⁰⁴ that Formosus, in interfering in a dispute between Eudes and Charles the Simple, spoke at least a language more evangelical, and less haughty, than in similar circumstances had been held by Nicholas II. Adrian II. and John VIII. Formosus crowned two emperors, Lambert in 892, Amulf in 896: and in both these ceremonies, the Romans took the oath of fidelity to the prince, ‘saving the faith pledged to the Lord Formosus.’¹⁰⁵ This pope, in other respects, is only famous from the proceedings which his memory, and his corpse, experienced from his successors:—deplorable scenes, which are, however, foreign to the subject of which we treat.