CHAPTER XXIII

THE POWER OF THE PAPACY

By the year 1000, when popular superstition looked for the end of the world, Europe was nominally Christian. The papacy had fallen on evil days prior to Pope Sylvester II, 999-1003, with whose primacy a betterment began. It was however with GREGORY VII-HILDEBRAND-1053-1085, that the papal power took on new forms of self assertion. He sought to strengthen the spiritual authority of the Holy See, so that it might hold supremacy over all other sovereignties in the Western nations. His efforts provoked the bitter Investiture Controversy in which a hundred and sixty publicists, legalists, and canonists took part between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries.

The struggle for papal supremacy may be separated into four eras.

i. 1075-1124.

HILDEBRAND's view of the Church is given in a Letter to his friend Hugo of Cluny.

The Oriental church fallen from the faith, and attacked from without, by the infidels. Casting your eye over the West, South or North, you find scarcely anywhere bishops who have obtained their office regularly, or whose life and conversation correspond to its requirements, and who are actuated in the discharge of their duties by the love of Christ and not by worldly ambition; nowhere, princes who prefer God's honour to their own, and justice before gain.

Among other reforms he proposed to insist upon the celibacy of the clergy. PETER DAMIAN, 1007-1072, gave vehement support to the proposal in The Book of Gomorrah and in seventeen minor works. GERHOH of Reichersberg, 1093-1169, also cordially endorsed the change in a book on the tenth Psalm. On the other hand DIETERIC of Verdun, Cardinal BENNO, HENRY of Speier, and WALTRAM of Naumberg strenuously opposed it.

LAMBERT of Aschaffenberg left a History of Germany in which the story of these contentions is told from the side of the supporters of GREGORY whom he calls

a man much admired both for eloquence and for knowledge of the sacred writings. . . most famous in the

whole Church for every kind of virtue.

The domestic issue was soon overshadowed by the vastly larger question of Investiture, concerning which HILDEBRAND in a Letter to King William I of England asserted that sovereigns must be invested by the action of the Church.

That kingdoms may be ruled after God by the care and ordinance of the apostolical dignity.

To Hermann of Metz he was more explicit:

Who does not know that kings and princes have their origin from those, who, not knowing God, proud, plunderers, false, man-slayers following almost every crime, obviously moved by the prince of the world, the devil, have grasped at lordship over their equals, namely men, by a foul cupidity and an intolerable presumption. His policy of making the Church supreme had the written support of ANSELM of Lucca, BERNOLD of Constance, and GERHOH of Reichersberg. The genuine interest of GERHOH in church politics appears in several works written during the course of the strife. He laid at the feet of Pope Eugene

III an Essay on the confusion between Babylon and Jerusalem. From this grew his later book The Corrupt State of the Church or Exposition of Psalm sixty-four, written, as he says:

With this intention, that the Roman Curia may in part attend to itself and at the same time to the whole Church which it ought to rule, that it may be busy to show itself separate from the Babylonian confusion without spot or wrinkle, for it does not appear to be destitute of this wrinkle, that it is now called the Roman Curia which before was called the Roman Church.

Other works from his hand are The State of the Church under the Emperors Henry IV, Henry V, and Gregory VII with Some Consequences to the Roman Pontificate, The Building of God, An Enquiry Concerning Anti-Christ, A Dialogue on the Differences between the Secular and the Regular Clergy.

Under the name of GREGORY there are a "number of brief maxims relating to the laws and government of the church, called his dictates (dictatus). Although these maxims did not by any means proceed from himself, still, they contain the principles which he sought to realize in his government of the church, the principles of papal absolution. Most of these maxims may be confirmed by passages from his letters."1

The concession of lay investiture forced from Pope Paschalis in 1112 was the subject of much heated argument. The name of Paschalis was handed down as that of "the man who had cowardly betrayed the liberties of the Church." GOTTFRID of Vendome bitterly upbraided him in his Letters. JOACHIM of Calabria said "the servitude of the Church began with him." On the other hand HILDEBERT of Mans 1 Neander, Church History (Bohn's edition), Vol. VII., p. 165.

and Ivo of Chartres excused his action "because it was done under compulsion." Thus Ivo wrote to John of Lyons:

God has permitted the greatest and holiest men, when they have given way to a necessity which seemed to exculpate them or have descended to a prudent accommodation, to fall into such weaknesses, in order that they might thereby be led to a knowledge of their own hearts, learn to ascribe their weaknesses to themselves, and to feel their indebtedness to the grace of God for all the good that is in them.

In the midst of the strife PLACIDUS of Nonantula wrote A Book concerning the Honour of the Church, in which he took up a middle position between those who defended layinvestiture in the interests of the state and those who maintained the absolutism of the papacy. This was the attitude of HUGO of Fleury, f1. 1110-1120, in the book entitled The Royal Power and Sacerdotal Dignity, which he addressed to Henry II of England. He denied the claim of GREGORY that the monarchy was not founded on a divine order, and he advocated that bishops should be elected without secular interference, and after election receive their secular priviliges at the hands of the king. Even GOTTFRID of Vendome, fl. 1070-1100, an ardent devotee of the principles of GREGORY, urged the same plea in a pamphlet addressed to Pope Calixtus II, and also in a tract, The Ordination of Bishops and the Investiture of Laymen, written to Cardinal Peter of Leonis.

If thou sayest what have I to do with the king: then call not the possessions thine; for thou hast renounced the only right by which thou canst call them thine. Whence does he possess whatsoever he does possess? By any human right? For by the divine. right of the Lord is the earth and its fulness his. God

has made the poor and the rich of one blood and one earth supports both rich and poor.

ii. 1124-1198.

Both PETER THE VENERABLE of Cluny, 1092-1157, and BERNARD of Clairvaux, 1091-1153, who were keen antagonists on other issues, supported Innocent III in his contest against Anaclete II for the papacy. BERNARD wrote his last work, Meditation, to win over the French Church to the side of Innocent. The book was as strong in rebuke as it was conciliatory in purpose, and was without result. BERNARD brought the chief opponent of Innocent to submission and ended the lamentable schism by a spectacular use of the bread of the Sacrament.

GRATIAN'S Harmony of Discordant Canons-the Decretum-1149, carried more weight than BERNARD'S Mediation. It was a new collection of the sources of the canon law with thirty-six specimen cases for solution, and a statement of the law respecting Church ritual and the Sacraments. It brought the old and the new ecclesiastical laws together, discussed their differences, and attempted their reconciliation. It gave fresh impetus to the study of canon law, but, as PETER CANTOR complained in his Short Word:

Dismissing liberal arts and heavenly disciplines everybody reads the Codex and enquires after the legalities so that they may go begging for glory and lucre (Chap. 51).

iii. 1198-1261.

Papal claims and papal rights were ably championed by INNOCENT III, 1198-1216, who insisted that the Lord left to Peter the governance not of the Church only but of the whole world.