# The Vatican as a World Power/Chapter 6

During the last days of April 1073, Hildebrand, though ill as a result of the spiritual upheavals through which he had passed, dictated the necessary letters concerning his election. After Alexander's death, he said, the cardinals had fasted and prayed for three days and thus prepared themselves for the new election. But suddenly, as the corpse was being placed in the tomb at the Church of St. Salvator, there was a tumult and shouting among the people and he had been forced to ascend the Papal throne (for which he considered himself utterly unfitted) without having had time or opportunity to discuss or reflect upon the matter.
These events were reminiscent of the election of Gregory the Great, and this new Pope also took the name of Gregory. As the seventh of the name, he looked upon the first as his model, though he resembled him neither in blood nor in temperament. Yes, when he cited say- ings of God's aristocratic consul and he loved to do so in official letters the sound was utterly different, and incompatible with his own words. Then one hears with far more than ordinary clarity what is hard and commanding in the voice of this Lombard from Tuscany. That which informs his words and deeds is a Germanic spirit of force. The fatherly characteristics of the first Gregory are not here, nor can one discern in Hildebrand anything of the whimsicality or irony of his chosen exemplar. Perhaps for that reason the impression given by his personality is so overwhelming and so strange. His slight, ugly form and his pale face aroused the contempt of his enemies; and those who were weaker than he whetted their pride on the autocracy of this plebeian. His father had been a goat-herd, and his mother came from a poor section of the city. Yet the spirit blows where it lists. He might be of humble origin, but he was possessed by the daemon of a task to be performed for mankind. Peter Damien complained that Hildebrand spoke to him as roughly as the north wind. His speeches and his letters constantly seek to make an impression: they command, demand, urge, take by storm. But when they are not so impulsive and flow more quietly, they enable one to glimpse the real nature of the man from whom they spring. He was a homo religiosus a man
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of clean-hearted greatness, dedicated to God. Torn apart from the common life, uncompanionable, lonely and bowed down by the bur- den of a prophetic mission, he was inwardly troubled by doubts con- cerning his Charisma. He hungered and thirsted after justice, and never attained happiness because this justice never assumed the form he visioned in his ardent desire. There is no other word which passed his lips so frequently, so feelingly, as this word justitia the cause of justice, the cause of God, the eternal law, the world-order according to the divine idea. Actuality was to become reasonable, what was rea- sonable was to be realized: this modern phrase would have suited him, if by "reason" were meant the divine spirit of order, which in itself is already a summons to carry on ceaselessly the reform of the world.
The gulf which lies between what mankind is and what it ought to be had tormented Hildebrand almost beyond endurance. Now that he was Pope, he sensed the dreadful command to carry out his office as viceroy of God's Kingdom. He felt the wholeness of Peter's power within himself more deeply, ardently, mystically, than did even Leo the Great. In a letter to Henry he declared that whatever the Emperor said or wrote to him was said or written to the Aposde himself. It was Peter who with unearthly insight divined the con- viction underlying the lines, the words, which die Pope read or lis- tened to. Gregory felt sure that he was in person the Rock, the Bearer of the Keys, the authorized antagonist of Satan. That which was imperious in his nature was not the self-glorification of human genius, as Cassar and Napoleon exemplify it. He lived, acted and gave orders by the power of another, who had seized upon his person in order to act through it.
But the person is also a limitation; and even the holiest human will must make use of human means. Gregory, who had become a monk long ago at Cluny, struggled to bring about the complete, untarnished supremacy of the spirit of the Church, in the priesdy office and the life of the laity. He wanted to make freedom a striving towards the highest goals, and on his side were the heroic counsels of the Gospel. Yet what this Gospel defines as summons and ideal he made law and compulsion. Having put on the armour of that Gospel he gave batde for men's right to renounce for religion's sake blood, tribe and family* Besides there lay embedded in his nature a chill suspicion that the
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vitalistic sub-structure of human nature was of evil. This feeling was stronger in him than in Paul, Dominic, Bernard of Clairvaux, Ig- natius of Loyola, not to mention Francis. It is, however, doubtless the ultimate source of his greatness as an ecclesiastical politician. When he mercilessly enforced the ancient law of clerical celibacy despite all revolts of the flesh and all the tears of those whom the law affected, he gave historical validity to the teaching that a state, the officials of which are unmarried and continent, is unconquerable. More than any other statesman he had the courage and the power to regard politics as the art of the impossible. Though he often failed because reality was stronger than he, it is even more evident that he triumphed over reality in his own time and, by his influence, in later ages. If it is a basic characteristic of the Roman Church to posit its spiritual cosmos against the constant peril of chaos latent in the instincts of man, and to be as hard and determined in so doing as nature itself, sacrificing si- lently and mercilessly the individual to the welfare of the whole, then Gregory was the greatest among those who helped to make that heroic characteristic dominant.
How was his ideal to be realized? With those same things which had always stirred men, had convinced their minds, had enabled them to win victories. He, too, did not escape the tragic fate that lies in every struggle to establish a better world. Believing that the higher right was on his side, he fought to gain control of the greater power. It was not the dignity of his person that he defended nor was it the power of his personality which determined the course of his life. He was simply die steward of a heritage, which he added to and then passed on to the next man in the list on which was written his own name. The Papacy never seems greater than when it bends beneath itself like slaves the greatest of those who represent it. It is an exalted idea and it compels even genius to serve its ends. History never sees in any of the Popes, even in Gregory who was perhaps the greatest among them, the expression of a creative energy existing for its own sake. This monk with a crown upon his head is memorable only because of the tremendous strength and fixity of purpose with which he served the rights and the significance of the spirit through the agency of the Church. Still mightier than his damon was the tiara on his head.
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The struggle between Imperial authority and the Papacy remained at its height during half a century. It began with Gregory's tumul- tuous election in 1073, and ended with the compromise of Worms in 1 1 22. It was the age of triumphant feudalism, when the new ro- mantic ministers were rising, when the new urban freedom and an infant Scholasticism were first arousing interest. New religious or- ders surpassed in youthful heroism the rich Cluny, now already de- clining. But it was also a time when a Manichean spirit of heresy was taking form almost unnoticed, and when Christian armies were marching against Islam in Spain. The Normans were still masters of Southern Italy and of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Yet of all the things which characterized the era, the most far-reaching was the effect of Hildebrand's mind.
This soon found expression in Papal words and deeds. When the Lenten Synods of 1074 and 1075 met, resolutions more severe than any heretofore known were adopted against simony and the sexual lapses of the clergy. The faithful were summoned to enforce these decisions, and to abstain from attending Mass when that was cele- brated by a married priest. The Pope ignored disturbances in Ger- many and elsewhere that grew out of protests organized by prelates. When German and Lombard bishops, including even Councillors of the King, did not obey, he imposed the ban on them. Henry him- self, who at first when he was weak because of the uprising in Saxony, had written to Rome in an obedient and penitential spirit, again be- came the battler of old against Hildebrand once he had gained a vic- tory over his foes. He now made appointments to benefices quite as he had always done, even though the Pope had issued decrees that were to stamp out all the evil at the root. He had denied to the sec- ular ruler the right to give away bishoprics, and forbidden the laity under penalty of the ban to have a hand in the conferring of churchly offices. Gregory was willing for a time to negotiate concerning a modification of this prohibition. He was fully conscious of the grave results which might follow a breach with the German crown, and his objective was not separation between church and state but freedom for the church in the choice of its shepherds.
Henry, meanwhile, set a man of his choice in the See of Milan, and gave prominence once more to the banned councillors. Again Greg-
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oty placed the ban on them and was fully able to reckon with the consequences, though at the rime his own situation was perilous. The leader of the Milan Pataria had fallen in a street fight. Papal friend- ship with the Normans was broken off, the higher German clergy sided with the king, and Cencius, leader of a conspiracy of Roman nobles, seized the Pope's person during a coup which took place during 1075. Seized by the hair during midnight Mass on Christmas Day and dragged off, the wounded and maltreated Pontiff was the victim of female scoffers in Cencius' dungeon until the people liberated him. He forgave the culprit on the spot, and protected him against the wrath of the populace. Brought back to the Church by an enthusi- astic crowd, he finished the interrupted Mass. Courageously, firmly, imperturbably, he took up the battle against the King in the same spirit he had revealed on this night, though the outlook was very unfavourable. Of the King it is said that he provoked the crime of this Christmas Eve. Now Henry also disregarded Gregory's final warning, and at a Synod convened iii Worms declared him deposed. A dangerous enemy of the Pope, Cardinal Hugo Candidas, who had previously been his friend and furtherer but had since been excom- municated, now fanned the flames with the worst of calumnies. Greg- ory, he said, was secretly the paramour of Mathilda of Tuscany, and the most recent Popes had not died without his doing.
The riotous events of the years 1076 and 1077 are familiar to every- one. Henry's fateful letter containing the decisions reached at Worms employed this initial address: "Hildebrand, not the Pope, but the false monk." And in the final sentence the King commanded him, in the name also of the German bishops to "step down, step down." The tumultuous, formless election by which the Pope had risen to power now proved the weakest point in his armour. But the Romans shielded it well. The anger of the throng assembled at the Lateran Synod of 1076 rose against the royal bearer of evil tidings and Greg- ory himself prevented the legate's assassination. In the basilica there also sat as a witness of the Council, Agnes, the King's mother. Long before, this wife of the strict third Henry had turned from her vicious son and had taken the veil in Rome. Now she saw and heard every- thing that happened. The Pope gave the counterstroke and called down the curse of the ban on Henry. The form he chose was that
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of a prayer to Peter: "Thou art my witness," he cried, "that thy Holy Roman Church placed me at the helm against my will. . . By the strength of thy grace, and now by reason of my own deeds, thou wert pleased that thy Christian people should obey me as thy viceroy; and for thy sake there was given me the power to bind and to loose in heaven and on earth. Filled with such confidence, for the honour and protection of thy Church in the name of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, in the strength of thy power, I forbid King Henty, the son of Henry the Emperor, who has risen against thy Church in unheard-of arrogance, to rule over the whole Empire and Italy. I dispense all Christians of the oath given to him or still to be given, and forbid herewith that anyone whatsoever shall obey him as a King ... I bind him in thy stead with the bonds of the curse, so that the peoples may know and bear in mind that thou art Peter, and that upon this Rock, the Son of the Living God built his Church, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail."
This anathema flashed like lightning over the terrified countries. Thus there was unleashed in the twinkling of an eye the ancient storm that hung above the Empire; and the brightness of the lightning fell upon the crumbling structure in which even the holy spirits of its founders stood at the bar of judgment as if they, too, were guilty.
Soon it was lonely for the King. The ban meant exclusion from the communion of the Church, and this in that time was equivalent to being cast out of human society. As long as the curse lay upon him, Henry was unable to perform his duties as ruler. Ecclesiastical and spiritual leaders now turned their backs on him. The Saxons were restive again, and no one came to the King's parliaments. The Papal legates who crossed the lands had an easy task. The princes were agreed that Henry should be deposed if he had not freed himself from die ban within the year. A parliament, to which the Pope was invited, was to convene on Candlemas Day, 1077, to decide the fate of the royal crown.
Enemies to the death were now about to cross swords. Were they only two men, one a King and the other Priest? When placed side by side these words suffice to convey the antagonism of the forces they signified. Hiereus and Basiletts, Sacerdos and Imperator, Pope and
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Emperor, indicate roles in the oldest drama of politically organized humanity. For Christian Europe a clash between these powers was inevitable as soon as both were arrayed against each other in representa- tives of self-confident strength. No one will say that Henry IV was a great man. Nevertheless, he did not speak jestingly of the honour of the Empire; and while his was a wavering figure, it also testified to the fury of the storms which blew across his path. The old Imperial system had been hollowed out when he took the crown. That which under the name of "investiture" constituted the thing over which the battle raged, went down deep to the roots of both Church and State. The structure erected by the Ottos rested upon Germanic conceptions of the law, the essence of which was that the unity of the clergy and officialdom, of ecclesiastical property and Imperial possessions, was to find its symbol and its guaranty in the conferring of spiritual offices by the Emperor's hand. When the rulers were men who had the inter- est of the Church at heart, they chose those who assured the well-being of the Church; but when the system was misused both the Church and the State were led by the necessity latent in human nature to bar- ter for positions, and that meant the simultaneous deterioration of both powers. The State was no longer the State, and the Church was no longer the Church. It was inevitable that the religious movement of reform should take up a position hostile to the Imperial authorities who had gained the upper hand over ecclesiastical administration. The struggle between the two spheres of life, at first a battle over pos- sessions and rights, soon became a conflict to decide which sphere was to be dominant in the Christian world.
If the balance of power in the Christian conception of society was to be shifted, it was not necessary that new ideas should be advanced but only that a powerful man should appear. Hildebrand was this man, and the lever he used was an idea of the Papacy which, from the time Christ had spoken the words of foundation recorded in Matthew until the time of pseudo-Isidore, had consistently remained through good and evil days the most influential idea in the world. Gregory himself developed this idea to its ultimate conclusions in the twenty- seven sentences of his Dictates Ptpa of 1075. Perhaps these are only an improvisation, perhaps also they are only notes he wrote down fot
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his own guidance. The fact remains that nothing could have revealed more clearly his purpose and his determination.
The Roman Church, says the Pope in these sentences, was founded by the Lord alone. Only the Roman bishop can rightly be called universal. He alone has the power to issue new laws, to establish new congregations, to remove bishops without a synodal decree, to divide rich dioceses and to consolidate poor ones. His alone is the right to confer the Imperial insignia. He alone can give all princes his foot to kiss. His name is mentioned in all prayers of the Church the name of "Pope," by which he is called, is reserved to him alone. He has the right to depose Emperors; no synod can be termed general without his assent. There is no appeal from his verdict; he can be judged by no one. All the more important business of all the churches must be brought before the Holy See. The Roman Church, as the Sacred Scriptures testify, has never erred, and will not err in all eternity. When the Roman Pope is canonically consecrated, he becomes holy through the merits of St. Peter. No one can be considered Catholic who is not in whole-hearted agreement with the Roman Church. The Pope can free subjects of the oath of loyalty they have sworn to evil masters.
The Church is, therefore, the true Imperium Romanum, and the Pope is the true Emperor. Not in vain had Leo III anticipated the desire of Charlemagne for the Imperial crown on Christmas morning, 800. And not without reason had the King's biographer referred to his master's surprise. The power which had conferred the diadem, could some day also take it away again; and if it wished to reserve it unto itself, it would also find a way to do so. A law on which Greg- ory could base his daring sentences was not impossible to discover. Not one of these dicta but had its roots in the past, even in Augustine's De Civitate Dei. Another state letter the Pope wrote during his last years enables one to view the anxiety with which he justified his policies in the light of his own conscience. But what ruler would like to stand in front of the "mirror of princes" which this Pope lifts up? It is a dream picture which demands priestly virtue of the same layman in whom, from the height of the hierocratic ideal, it discerns laicist impotence as well as an arrogance "over those like himself," which
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offends against humility of the common Christian spirit. Neverthe- less even the boldest projects of this radical reformer are not Utopian, since the religious fervour of their creator engenders a belief that they can be realized. While under the impression of his powerful per- sonality, one almost forgets that they involve matters alien to the classical character of the older Church. When the Pope summons the people to boycott the Masses of simonistic priests, when he is will- ing to undermine temporal authority even for such a prize as episcopal authority, one senses a last lingering breath of the rigoristic propheti- cism of ancient times a propheticism at bottom a threat to the Pope's own logical system, based entirely as it is upon the divine act of establishing the ecclesiastical realm. This contradiction in Greg- ory's own achievement is reiterated in the dissonance between the fervour with which he struggles to bring about God's state on earth and the coolness and contempt with which he thinks of the people among whom this miracle is to happen. Yet these contradictions arc only a play within the play of his iron will.
The King now had to settle with Gregory. In order to forestall the threatening verdict of Parliament, he suddenly confronted the Pope, who was already under way at Mont Cenis during the winter of 1077, He thought that if he could strip Gregory of the weapon of the ban his own game would be won.
In Canossa there ensued a silent battle between the Empire and the Papacy, which both won and both lost. The Penitent in his miserable garb, who ran to and fro between the hut he occupied below Mathilda's stone castle and the castle gates, shivering like a hungry beast in the cold, knew that above him in the Countess' rooms the Pope sat with a little retinue and some friends, among whom was the gentle Hugo, Abbot of Cluny and his own godfather, debating his case and answer- ing both "yes" and "no" because they could not determine what was best. Then Hildebrand, according to his own narrative, "was over- come by the perseverance of the humbled man and by the prayers and tears of all those who interceded for him, and who wondered at the unusual hardness of our heart and doubtless also said that what guided us was no longer the earnestness of an apostolic decision, but cruelty and tyranny." He finally removed the fetters of the anathema from
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the contrite monarch and gave him the Sacred Host. Men had been of divided mind concerning this occurrence, as they might be upon arrival at a parting of the ways. The eternal crisis that arises out of the fact that man is a citizen of two countries was not of that time alone, but it seems to have been brought to a focus in that scene at Canossa. At bottom both Pope and Emperor found themselves adrift on the same eddy of energies. In Gregory the priest struggled with the statesman; in Henry the honour of the Crown was in con- flict with the demands of the Church. The outcome was that the Pope incurred a political defeat by doing his duty as a priest, while the King secured a political advantage in that he purchased a new freedom of action the price of which, however, was humiliation of the throne beneath the spiritual sceptre.
The consequences of these events was that the Pope, though not the Papacy, was brought to a serious impasse. Spiritual and temporal masters in Lombardy were arrayed against Gregory more resolutely than ever before while the German princes felt that he, their ally, had betrayed them and so made Rudolph of Swabia counter-King. Henry, now free of the anathema, had sufficient followers to beard the Pope, and demanded that his rival should be laid low with the ban. Mean- while Gregory insisted upon clinging to the role of arbitrator, in order that he might show the contenders in whose hand the fate of princes and peoples lay. Finally, however, when both sides refused to ac- cept his plan, he hurled his second thunderbolt it was then the spring of 1080 : against the Penitent of Canossa, who had long since lapsed again, and entrusted the kingdom to Rudolph. There followed a merciless Civil War. Meanwhile the north of Italy also manifested its deep antipathy to the political dominion of the Church, united itself with the German bishops, and set against Hildebrand his old enemy Vibert, Archbishop of Ravenna, as Pope Clement III. After Rudolph had fallen in the battle on the Elster, Henry conducted the widely popular anti-Pope through the domains of Mathilda, then threatened from within and weakened from without by the Imperial arms. She was as ever a self-sacrificing friend of Hildebrand and his aims.
Canossa did not mean that Gregory had ceased to be the man he had always been. Throughout all the world to which the Christian
i ​name could be applied–Spain and France, England and Hungary, Poland and Bohemia—he insisted upon the supreme sovereignty of his See. Whenever he could do so he drew taut all the bonds which united these countries with the Roman centre. But against an enemy in battle array he was not armed.
The city was still loyal to Gregory, and Henry stormed it twice without success. When he appeared for the third time Gregory had still received no aid: the Normans had their hands full with the Grecian wars and forgot their pledge, and the German anti-King to whom Gregory appealed was himself in the field warring against Henry's supporters. As a result Germans and Lombards scaled the Leonine wall during June 1083. The battle raged around St. Peter's, and even inside the basilica itself. Gregory was entrenched at San Angelo, and would rather have sent the King the curse of the ban anew than the desired crown. Then an armistice inaugurated the last act of the drama, which lasted long. The Romans then were not more loyal than Romans have always been. The tired people, the clergy, the College of Cardinals itself, began to drift away from the Pope, who was determined to struggle to the death. The King and his wife received the body contested Imperial crowns from Vibert, the anti-Pope whom Lombard bishops had consecrated on Easter Day 1084. The deserted Pope could look down from the walls of the Mausoleum of Hadrian upon a festive throng on the banks of the Tiber. Henry speedily conquered the city while Gregory's messengers were hastening southward to summon the Normans. Robert Guiscard came with a powerful army, drove the German troops off, freed the beleaguered Pope and led him in triumph back to the Lateran. But the liberators took a dreadful revenge upon the city. Never before and never again has such a sea of horrors flowed over Rome; and all the ruins, all the ashes, all the blood, all the outcries of virgins dragged off to shame, pointed to Gregory as the guilty cause. The people, terrified by the threats of their tormentors, swore a new oath of loyalty to the Pope, but it was impossible for him to remain in the city longer. He left with Robert to escape from the desolation which everywhere called down a curse upon his name. As he went his way into strange regions, he rested awhile in Monte Cassino, the home of Benedict, whose garment he himself had worn. How ​DIES 135
far away he now seemed from the monastic spirit of silent prayer and labour, how remote from the power of the mercy that belonged to those consuls of God who had wrestled with Attila and thrown about Rome a mantle of motherly tenderness! And yet Gregory's only object had been to build up Rome's heritage in accordance with the law laid down long before his time. The ruins he left behind did not deflect his mind and will from the social structure he longed to build. His battle was a world-wide one for the victory of the spiritual prin- ciple over the Centaur of mankind. It was a revolution which pro- ceeded downward from above; and of it the Papacy was to make a permanent uprising.
Even in his final misfortunes he did not swerve from his determina- tion or his conception; and his bitter anger at the ruler who over- powered him dwindled not a drop. While his legates visited the countries of Europe urging a revolt against the Emperor, Gregory dreamed his last dream of returning to the Eternal City with an army. Soon also he uttered his last words: "I have loved justice and hated iniquity and therefore I die in exile." He had spent what remained of his days on earth in Salerno. No Brutus slew this Caesar. Like the Emperor of St. Helena he died sundered from the seed he had sown for all rime. Toward the close of May 1085 shortly before his own death Robert Guiscard buried the Pope in the newly erected Cathedral of that southern city. There the ashes of the greatest Pontiff lie in a simple tomb, quite as if Rome had wished that even the spirit of the dead man should dwell in exile rather than within its own walls.
Gregory's ideas had brought him to grief, but they did not die with him. His plan to make of the world a system of independent sovereign states, of moderate strength and dependent upon the recogni- tion of the Petrine See, dominated Papal policy for the next hundred years. On the basis of the Catholic ecclesiastical state in which civil citizenship and church membership coincided, the Casar Papa had brought into being the Papa Ctesar, the King-priest had summoned the Priest-king. It was eminently natural that the emancipation of the State should bring about the emancipation of the Church, and that the Church, once grown free, should also now seek to give this State,
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or rather the totality of state forms, the same position within its organism that it had previously held in that of the State. The theo- cratic idea, which as a mere theory had so universally and deeply con- cerned the minds of men during the eleventh and twelfth centuries that Gregorians and anti-Gregorians could base their assertions on the same passages of the Old Testament, was soon transformed by those who upheld spiritual Imperialism into a rigid hierocratic ideal of world domination by a Papacy which, as the organic summit of the Civitas Dei on earth, was to embody the fullness of rights and powers. Roman influence upon this political ideology was less pronounced than Germanic Christian influence: its nucleus is the idea, which Gregory shared, that religious belief includes loyal obedience to the governing organs of the Civitas Dei. The one as well as the other is called Fidelitas.
The heritage which Gregory bequeathed to his successors was one of scission in Church and State, but his spirit was also a legacy and it sufficed. Though his friend Desidarius of Monte Cassino, who took the name of Victor III, remained Abbot of his monastery rather than become Pope of Rome, the French Pope Urban II (previously Abbot of Cluny) t and after him the Italian monk, Pascal II, and the Bur- gundian monk, Calixtus II, successfully followed the way pointed out by their master. Progress was slow but sure. After the death of the rival king and the defeat of the Saxons, Henry was strong enough to insure recognition for the anti-pope Vibert of Ravenna and to attack Mathilda with arms. Urban wandered about Southern Italy in poverty for many a year, but the open and secret intrigues of the Papal party and the fateful disarray of Henry's family, which the Papal party had either brought about or taken advantage of, dealt the mon- arch a severe blow. No longer threatened by the Emperor or his followers, Urban could, when he came back to Rome again in 1093, join forces with Mathilda the pious, utterly loyal Amazon, whom despite her forty years he had married off to the nineteen-year-old Duke Guelph of Bavaria. Further help came from the Lombard Pataria, the Normans, and the rebellious German King's son, Conrad, whom the Pope married to the daughter of the Norman Count Roger. Thus he could restore the objectives of the Gregorian Papacy. In the struggle against simony, Urban met with resistance in France but above
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all in Italy. There he imposed the ban on the adulterous King Philip. In England he bolstered up the courage of the new Primate Anselm (Lafiranc's disciple) who had been Archbishop of Canter- bury since 1093, in the struggle with William, the cunning and tyran- nical son of the Conqueror, over the issue of investitures.
Anselm, a Benedictine and a Lombard nobleman whom Scholastic philosophers look upon as their pious and illustrious forbear, was a thinker who profoundly affected the subsequent development of Euro- pean intellectual history. Uniting Roman clarity with Germanic depth, he was in that troubled time a guardian of the religious founda- tions on which the movement for ecclesiastical liberation reposed. He and others, who after him kept alive the flame of his spirit, did much to limit the danger of a new implication of the Church in the world a danger innate in the centralism and absolutism of Gregory's con- ception of the Papacy, but which was also increased by the new move- ment of the Crusades, which throughout Europe menaced the inner life of the Church.
At Urban 's court another great German lived for a short rime. He was the noble Bruno von Gartefaust of Cologne, the Pope's former teacher in Rheims. To him the Pontiff gave a dwelling in his palace in order that he might be close at hand to give council in matters of conscience and of ecclesiastical direction. For this man of deep cul- ture and holy conduct had learned through tragic experience to dis- tinguish between the things that seem and the things that are in the Church. Formerly he had been director of schools in the city and diocese of Rheims, and had afterward as Chancellor of Archbishop Manasse, a shepherd who gave scandal to his flock, become the founder of a monastic society which practiced the strictest retirement from the world. With a handful of followers he had established during 1084 an ascetical community which lived according to the example of the old hermits of the Theban desert in the dreadful wilderness round- about Grenoble. Because this region was called Chartreuse (Car- thusium) , the Order which took its rise from this heroic little band is known as the Carthusian order. This combined in a very striking way the isolation of its members with their life in common. All lived in cells built like tiny houses arrayed at intervals along the wall of the cloistered yard; and each practiced piety and took care of his own
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little garden. Apart from the meal taken in common the sole meal of the day there were only a few occasions on which the monks came together, and these served a spiritual purpose. Isolation, fast- ing and strict silence accompanied the noiseless daily tasks, the whole import of which was directed inward. Neither pastoral duties, nor schools, nor sermons, associated them with the outside world. If we practice what others preach, they said, it will also mean something. The difficult task they accomplished within themselves was the reason for their earthly being; and for Bruno the systole of the individual soul hearkening unto God was the necessary accompaniment of the diastolic working outward of the Church militant. Taken away from the Roman Order when the Pope fled to escape from Henry IV, Bruno founded a second Chartreuse in Calabria. There his great life was ended ten years later (i 101 ) .
It was Urban II who as a refugee in the Norman south brooded over Hildebrand's idea of a European attack on Islam. Then when the hour was ripe he proceeded to act. At the brilliant Synods of Piacenza and Clairmont, this fiery Papal orator won the clergy, the nobles and the masses for his plan. No matter what the motives of all these groups may have been, the effect of the undertaking as a whole was a triumph for the dead Pontiff of Salerno, and for the Papacy. By taking the initiative in a manner unparalleled during the Middle Ages, the Pontifex overshadowed the German Imperial power, the anti-Pope began to lose ground and Rome was compelled by the crusading armies to welcome Urban. The French King, whose sub- jects listened exultantly as the wandering Pope and after him the ecstatically enthusiastic if crippled Peter of Amiens, called everyone to the Cross, soon sensed the loss of a knighthood which had ridden off to battle and submitted to Urban's command in order to escape the ban. The French people, anxious to escape hunger, the plague, and slavery under their feudal masters, rallied in wild zeal. In Brittany, Normandy, Burgundy and Italy crowds likewise gathered to leave for the Holy Land. The action of the Pope made it seem as if Moham- med were drawing a bond of unity round the Christian peoples.
After such successes, it did not matter greatly that Urban's Ger- man policy could not entirely prevail. Disappointed in their expecta- tions of .heritage, the Guelphs separated their young scion from Ma-
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thilda. The older Guelph was reconciled with the Emperor, and the political alliance between the Hildebrand parties in Germany and Italy was severed. Nevertheless the new party was a fact and with it there was given the basis for the later division of minds into Guelphs and Ghibellines into a camp that stood with the Pope for national and urban freedom and independence from the German Emperor, and a camp which supported this Emperor.
As the two great movements of the time the Crusades and the religious reformation gained ground, the imperialistic conception of the Papacy almost automatically grew stronger within and without. Its power was shown clearly under Henry V, when the last act of the investiture drama was played. This second son of Henry IV also rebelled against his father, who was still under the ban, and through devilish treachery robbed him of the crown. The Pope who released him from his oath of fealty was Pascal II, a monk who like Peter Damien strove to follow a policy from which the soul could take no injury. After Henry's sad death in 1106, he entertained the hope that the young King would be well disposed; but the voice with which this monarch spoke as he ascended the throne and vowed to serve faithfully both Pope and Church came from behind the misleading countenance of a man who was in reality a crude, unscrupulous believer in might. When Henry no longer needed the help of the Pope, he thought as little of surrendering the investiture as Pascal thought of ceasing to demand that it be surrendered.
Then in 1 1 u , a tremendous German army drew up before the gates of Rome, and the King demanded both recognition of his ancient rights and the Imperial crown. Difficult negotiations ended in a treaty of Utopian daring. This utterly honest Pope was ready to sacrifice whatever the Church possessed in order to secure that Church's freedom; and he hoped that the ecclesiastical nobles would support his action. A child of light and not a statesman spoke when Pascal proposed that the German Church should give back to the Empire the regalia i. e. the right to sovereignty as well as all the possessions it had received from the Emperor since the time of Charlemagne and should henceforth content itself with tithes and private don*- tions. The Imperial authority for its part was to surrender the right to investiture. Doubtless Pascal foresaw that the bishops would
i ​4 o LIBERATION
offer resistance, but he hoped to prevail over them by recourse to ecclesiastical discipline. The King might well have been content to give in exchange for such gifts an investiture which at bottom was only a claim to the Empire's higher right of possession over the goods of the Imperial Church; but as one who knew the real German situa- tion and believed that the Pope also could not be unaware of it, he looked upon the offer as a gross attempt at fraud in order to make him give up investiture. He assented nevertheless but, realizing that the ecclesiastical dignitaries would not permit themselves to be stripped of rights, goods and honours attendant upon their positions as Im- perial princes through a mere stroke of the Papal pen, and that the worldly princes would be terrified by the enormous growth of the royal power and by the loss of ecclesiastical benefices they had so comfortably enjoyed, the King made a proviso that the agreement must be recog- nized by the Church in Germany and by the Imperial princes.
When the treaty was solemnly signed in St. Peter's a storm of in- dignation seized all those who were affected and therewith the whole Gregorian party. Henry demanded that the right of investiture be restored to him, and likewise insisted upon the crown, Pascal re- fused and that same evening he and his cardinals were imprisoned. That night an indignant city arose to avenge the deed of violence; and after the bloody fighting of the following days the King retreated, dragging the Pope and the Curia outside the walls. There he kept them under strict arrest for sixty days, immuring some in castles and some in a camp on the other side of the Arno; and, with barbaric threats, he tried to wrest from them what he wanted. The petitions of all who in behalf of the beleaguered city and of a Church in dire peril of schism threw themselves at Pascal's feet, finally caused the bewildered Pontiff to give way. The son of Canossa's Penitent ob- tained the Treaty of Ponte Mammolo from an humbled Pope who was not of Gregory's steel. This treaty recognized Henry's un- qualified right of investiture, proclaimed an amnesty without excep- tion, and recorded that the Pope had promised on oath never to im- pose the ban on the King. After he had been hastily crowned in the Leonine no people applauded the deed Henty rode off north- ward. Pope Pascal, however, immediately found himself surrounded by angry ecclesiastics who demanded that the treaty be broken.
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Covered with insults and scorn by those who called him a heretic and a traitor to the Lord, he kept his despair to himself and carried out the will of the Gregorian Party step by step, though he did not himself proclaim the ban which they hurled at Henry. He was still sup ported by the Imperial faction, by the cardinals who had suffered with him (especially those of France, where feeling had risen highest) and by the famous canonist Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, who was a fighter for the liberation of the Church, from the power of the State and for ac- cording recognition to the dignity of even a mistaken Pope. The opponents of Pascal, said Ivo, should resemble the good sons of Noah, and instead of laughing at their father should turn their faces away and cover his nakedness, so that they might receive his benediction.
Nevertheless Pascal was unable to stave off a complete retreat. At the Lateran Synods of 1112 and 1116, he abrogated the Treaty of Ponte Mammolo. During the last named year the Emperor ap- peared again in Rome, though without an army. Despite the fact that the princes had allied themselves with the growing opposition in the German Church, he sought to collect the Imperial loans once given to the recently deceased Countess Mathilda. . He also wanted to get as much as possible for himself of what she had bequeathed to the Church, so that he could make friends with largesse. As he approached the city, the Pope, who had just previously been driven out by a war between the factions, fled for the second rime from the "wolf in sheep's clothing" (who was now inclined to make a peace) to the Normans. Rome paid homage to the Emperor, who scattered gold about him; and Rome also sided with Pascal again, once the Germans had left. The Pope returned to the city to die.
The weather which now hung over Rome and the Church was as troubled as of yore. It mattered not that Henry sought to weaken Gelasius II, the next Pope, whom the Imperial faction of Frangipani had maltreated bodily while the Conclave was still in session, by recognizing an anti-Pope by whom he had already been crowned. The aged, tired Gelasius had no recourse excepting to hurl the weapon of the ban, which by this time had lost much of its effectiveness, at the Emperor and his anti-Pope. But Rome afforded him no protec- tion against Henry's retainers. Having tried ceaselessly and in vain to determine its own political life despite Papacy and Empire, the
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city was an uncertain terrain on which neither of the wrestling powers could ever depend. Chased from his altar with stones and arrows, the aged Pontiff sat one evening in an open field near St. Paul's out- side the walls. He was tired, sad, tearful and still half clothed in liturgical raiment. He looked for all the world like some jokester who had lost his mind. There was nothing he could do but seek refuge in France, of which country one who meditated on this same scene hundreds of years later said that it had always been a haven for the troubled barque of Peter. There he ended the years of suffering which his pontificate had been, dying on the ground clad in the habit of the Benedictines of St. Giles.
The few cardinals who had gone with him elected to the Papal throne France's mightiest prelate, Guido de Vienne, a relative of the Emperor and a Burgundian nobleman. When this choice was as- sented to by Rome, he became (1119) Calixtus II and prepared to go to the end of the road he had long since pointed out, a voice crying in the wilderness of strife. After an effort to reach a peaceful settle- ment had failed, the Council of Rheims imposed the ban anew on the Emperor and his anti-Pope. The hundreds of bishops who as- sented to this deed by throwing their burning candles on the ground seemed to be a new phalanx marshalled by the dead Pontiff of Salerno. Yet the peace was nearer than anyone could have expected. The end- less struggle had caused many minds to weigh the rights of both camps. On each side there were learned speakers who asked what things were God's and what were the Emperor's. They distinguished logically between a spiritual and a temporal aspect of the episcopal office, and drew a line between what was ecclesiastical property and what Im- perial treasure in the diocese, and thus made it easier to conduct the lengthy negotiations out of which a new order emerged. The danger that both Church and State would be disrupted was so great, the pres- sure of the German princes as well as the clamour of bishops and abbots for protection against thundering robber bands was so strong, that both parties were compelled to seek peace. Since there was a com- mon need for self-preservation, a modus vivendi could be arrived at. Soon after he had made his impressive entry into Rome, Calixtus saw the anti-Pope being driven out in an almost clownish way. Seated on his camel, the poor cleric was pelted with stones by the mob. The
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new ruler won the hearts of the Romans by according them good gov- ernment. The desire for peace which he had proclaimed from the beginning and the absolute honesty of his statesmanship indicated that in his dealings with the Imperial authority he would be candid though able to resist aggression.
The agreement which was reached at Worms, the Imperial city, on that memorable day of September 1122, was not a real peace, but it was at any rate an armistice. The meaning of the two documents exchanged was contained in their opening sentences. The Emperor promised: "I, Henry, Roman Emperor by the grace of God, confer on the Holy Catholic Church all investiture through ring and staff, and grant in all churches of my kingdom and empire, ecclesiastical elections and free ordinations. And I give back those possessions and sovereign rights of St. Peter which from the beginning of this struggle until now have been usurped under the governments of my father or myself." For his part the Pope promised: "I, Calixtus, Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God, grant to you, my dear son Henry, Roman Emperor by the grace of God, a promise that the elec- tions of bishops and abbots in the German Kingdom, in so far as these are directly subordinate to that Kingdom, shall take place in your presence without simony or any kind of violence. If there should ensue a dispute between the parties then, upon taking counsel with and receiving the decisions of the archbishops and bishops of the province, you are to endorse and aid the one who has the better right on his side. The elected one, however, shall receive his sovereign rights from you through the sceptre and shall render to you the duties which lawfully ensue from those rights (i. e. the oath to administer a benefice) ." The separation of the symbolic acts and the reference of them to two instances implied that every bishop was the possessor of a two-fold right, and the exerciser of both a spiritual and temporal function. That upon which the Church had been compelled to insist was now secured for her. She conferred the ring and the staff, which were the insignia of mystical marriage with her and the pastoral office.
During the following year, the first General Council of the Lateran confirmed these parchments. The Papacy could proclaim urbi et orbi that it had obtained its freedom and independence from the temporal power; and for its part the Empire could rejoice that it also had gained
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independence and could henceforth uphold the great ideal without which it could not exist the inner justification, the autonomous right of the secular order and of civil society. The rime itself could not yet see what had been accomplished; but is ever a time able to see such things? And if we now ask who won this struggle, the verdict must depend on what response is made to the larger question: which of the liberated powers had retained or lost the deeper energies of human nature? The fact that the Papacy continued to thrive renders the reply obvious. For that which is termed its "power or sovereignty*' is inexplicable without the power and sovereignty of the Church, and this in turn is explained (though only of course in part) by the obvious fact that it is a convincing response to the deepest questions latent in human nature.
After the storm had ceased, both Pope and Emperor were laid to rest. What they had done and left undone would figure in a new, still fiercer (because intellectually deeper) struggle their successors would carry on.
THE