Saint Nicholas I

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Saint Nicholas I c.825–867, pope (858–67), a Roman; successor of Benedict III. He was a vigorous and politically active pope who arbitrated both temporal and religious disputes. His decisions often set important precedents, as when the pope upheld the right of the bishop of Soissons to appeal to Rome against his superior, Archbishop Hincmar . Much of his pontificate was concerned with preventing the proposed divorce of Lothair of Lotharingia, who wished to remarry. Even when Holy Roman Emperor Louis II occupied Rome, the pope refused to yield. In the end he forced Lothair to reinstate his wife. Nicholas challenged the right of Photius to occupy the see of Constantinople and attempted to have St. Ignatius of Constantinople restored to it. St. Nicholas worked with Boris I to introduce Roman ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Bulgaria, which had recently been converted by the Byzantines. A letter from the pope to Boris is extant. He was succeeded by Adrian II. Feast: Nov. 13.

Nicholas I, pope (c.820–67). Born in Rome of an aristocratic family, he served in the household of several popes in different offices: he was chosen as pope in 858. He consciously walked in the footsteps of Leo the Great and Gregory the Great and shared their convictions of the primacy of Rome and the Church's right to be free from the interference of princes. When he died, he was called Nicholas the Great, not without reason, but his immediate successors began a period of the domination of the Roman see by powerful local families.

In his rule of less than ten years Nicholas successfully asserted the rights of Roman authority over metropolitan bishops, Frankish emperors, and, with considerable concessions, over Byzantium. He deposed the archbishop of Ravenna after complaints by local bishops that he denied them free access to Rome. He restored a suffragan bishop deposed by Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims. He obliged King Lothair of Lorraine to take again his wife Theutburga whom he had divorced, and excommunicated the archbishops of Cologne and Trier who had supported him. Here he saw the nature of Christian marriage and the fate of a defenceless woman at stake in the welter of Germanic and Frankish law. In these cases, in spite of considerable opposition, his fidelity to principle allied with his strong personality combined to make practical reality out of the theoretical aceptance of papal claims.

In Byzantium he intervened less successfully and repudiated hiw legates' deposition of the Patriarch Ignatius, who was replaced by the famous Photius, in turn deposed by Nicholas. This long and complex case gave rise to the mentality which later resulted in the schism between east and west, but Nicholas denounced the Emperor for interfering in bishops' matters and reminded him of the long history of Eastern schisms and heresies.

Connected with this was the matter of the Bulgarian Church. King Boris had asked for Roman missionaries and Nicholas replied with a long and detailed statement on moral and canonical issues, expounding Western belief and disparaging Constantinople. A concrete sign of his interest was his installation of the relics of Clement in the church of San Clemente, Rome which had been brought by the missionaries Cyril and Methodius.

Nicholas was greatly respected by contemporaries; through him the papacy came to be recognized as the supreme authority in the west in the vacuum caused by the division at Verdun (843) of imperial power. The Liber Pontificalis described him as ‘patient and temperate, humble and chaste…the friend of widows and orphans and the champion of all the people.’ Feast: 13 November.

Bibliography

O.D.P. pp. 107–8; E. Duffy , Saints and Sinners (1997), pp. 79–83; B.L.S. xi, 105–7.