by Will Durant
VII. THE REFORM OF THE CHURCH: 1049–54
Three internal problems agitated the Church at this time: simony in the papacy and the episcopacy, marriage or concubinage in the secular clergy, and sporadic incontinence among the monks.
Simony—the sale of church offices or services—was the ecclesiastical correlate of contemporary corruption in politics. Good people were one source of simony; so the mother of Guibert of Nogent, anxious to devote him to the Church, paid ecclesiastical authorities to make him a cathedral canon at eleven; a church council at Rome in 1099 mourned the frequency of such cases. As bishops in England, Germany, France, and Italy administered profane as well as ecclesiastical affairs, and were feudally endowed with lands or villages or even cities to supply their necessary revenues, ambitious men paid secular powers great sums for such appointments, and greedy potentates overrode all decencies to earn these bribes. In Narbonne a boy of ten was made archbishop on paying 100,000 solidi (1016).61 Philip I of France consoled an unsuccessful applicant for an episcopal see with blithe counsel: “Let me make my profit out of your rival; then you can try to get him degraded for simony; and afterward we can see about satisfying you.”62 The French kings, following a tradition established by Charlemagne, regularly appointed the bishops of Sens, Reims, Lyons, Tours, and Bourges; elsewhere in France the bishops were appointed by dukes or counts.63 Many bishoprics became in the eleventh century the hereditary patrimony of noble families, and were used as provision for bastards or younger sons; in Germany one baron possessed and transmitted eight bishoprics.64 A German cardinal alleged (c. 1048) that the simoniacal buyers of sees and benefices had sold the marble facings of churches, even the tiles from their roofs, to reimburse themselves for the cost of their appointments.65 Such appointees were men of the world; many lived in luxury, engaged in war, allowed bribery in episcopal courts,66 named relatives to ecclesiastical posts, and worshiped Mammon with undivided loyalty; Pope Innocent III would say of an archbishop of Narbonne that he had a purse where his heart should have been.67 The purchase of sees became so usual that practical men accepted it as normal; but reformers cried out that Simon Magus had captured the Church.68
Among the general clergy the moral problem hovered between marriage and concubinage. In the ninth and tenth centuries the marriage of priests was customary in England, Gaul, and north Italy. Pope Hadrian II (867-72) himself had been a married man;69 and Bishop Ratherius of Verona (tenth century) reported that practically all priests in his diocese were married. By the beginning of the eleventh century celibacy in the secular clergy was exceptional.70 It would be a mistake to consider clerical marriage immoral; though often contrary to the canons and ideals of the Church, it was quite in accord with the customs and moral judgments of the times. At Milan a married priest stood higher in public repute than one unmarried;71 the latter was suspected of concubinage. Even concubinage—the regular cohabitation of an unmarried man with an unmarried woman—was condoned by public opinion. The great majority of the European clergy led apparently decent moral lives; and all through the Middle Ages we hear of priests and bishops living in saintly devotion to their flocks. Here and there, however, there were scandalous exceptions. In 742 Bishop Boniface complained to Pope Zachary that bishoprics were being given to “greedy laymen and adulterous clerics,”72 and that some deacons “kept four or five concubines”;73 and the Venerable Bede, in the same century, condemned “some bishops” of England for “laughter, jesting, tales, revelings, drunkenness, and … dissolute living.”74 Towards the end of the first millennium such charges became more numerous. Ralph Glaber described the clergy of that period as sharing in the general immorality of the age. An Italian monk, Peter Damian (1007-72), presented to the Pope a book ominously entitled Liber Gomorrhianus, in which he described, with the exaggerations to be expected from his sanctity, the vices of the clergy; one chapter was “On the Diversity of Sins Against Nature.” Damian strongly urged the prohibition of clerical marriage.
The Church had long since opposed clerical marriage on the ground that a married priest, consciously or not, would put his loyalty to wife and children above his devotion to the Church; that for their sake he would be tempted to accumulate money or property; that he would try to transmit his see or benefice to one of his offspring; that an hereditary ecclesiastical caste might in this way develop in Europe as in India; and that the combined economic power of such a propertied priesthood would be too great for the papacy to control. The priest should be totally devoted to God, the Church, and his fellow men; his moral standard must be higher than that of the people, and must confer upon him the prestige necessary to public confidence and reverence. Several councils had demanded celibacy of the clergy; one—at Pavia in 1018—had decreed a status of perpetual slavery, and disbarment from inheritance, for all children of priests.75 But clerical marriage continued.
Leo IX found the see of Peter impoverished by clerical bequests of Church benefices to clerical offspring, by baronial seizures of Church estates, and by the highway robbery of pilgrims bringing prayers, petitions, and offerings to Rome. He organized protection for the pilgrims, recaptured alienated ecclesiastical property, and set himself to the heavy task of ending simony and clerical marriage. Turning over the domestic and administrative cares of the papacy to the shrewd and devoted monk who was to become Gregory VII, Leo left Rome in 1049, resolved to examine at first hand the morals of the clergy, and the functioning of the Church, in the major cities of Europe. The dignity of his bearing, the unaffected austerity of his life, at once revived the respect that men had held for the highest official of the Church; vice hid its head as he approached; and Godfrey of Lorraine, who had plundered churches and defied kings, trembled under papal excommunication, submitted to be publicly scourged before the altar of the church that he had ruined in Verdun, undertook to repair the church, and labored in the work with his own hands. At Cologne Leo held papal court, and received every honor from a German clergy proud of a German pope. Passing into France, he presided over a tribunal at Reims, and conducted an inquiry into lay and clerical morals, the sale of ecclesiastical offices, the spoliation of church property, the relaxation of monastic rules, and the rise of heresy. Every bishop present was ordered to confess his sins. One after another, including archbishops, accused himself. Leo sternly reproved them, deposed some, forgave some, excommunicated four, summoned others to Rome and public penance. He commanded the clergy to dismiss their wives and concubines, and to forgo the use of arms. The Council of Reims further decreed that bishops and abbots were to be elected by the clergy and the people, prohibited the sale of ecclesiastical offices, and forbade the clergy to receive fees for administering the eucharist, attending the sick, or burying the dead. A council in Mainz (1049), under Leo’s urging, enacted similar reforms for Germany. In 1050 he returned to Italy, presided at the Council of Vercelli, and condemned the heresy of Berengar of Tours.
With his long and arduous visitation of the North Leo had restored the prestige of the papacy, replaced the German emperor as the head of the German Church, brought the French and Spanish episcopates to acknowledge the authority of the pope, and made some progress toward cleansing the clergy of venality and venery. In 1051 and 1052 he made further campaigns in Germany and France; presided over a great ecclesiastical assembly at Worms, and another at Mantua. Returning at last to Rome, he took on the uncongenial task of defending the Papal States by military means. The Emperor Henry III had given him the duchy of Benevento; Duke Pandulf of Capua refused to recognize the grant, and, with the help of Robert Guiscard’s Normans, took and held the duchy. Leo asked for a German army to help him oust Pandulf; he received only 700 men; to these he added some untrained Italians; and at their head he marched against the Normans, whose cavalry alone numbered 3000 buccaneers skilled in war. The Normans overwhelmed Leo’s forces, captured him, and then knelt to ask his pardon for having killed 500 of his men. They took him to Benevento, and there, with all courtesy, kept him prisoner for nine months. Heart
broken, and penitent for having taken the sword, Leo wore nothing but sackcloth, slept on a carpet and a stone, and passed nearly all the day in prayer. The Normans saw that he was dying, and released him. He entered Rome amid universal rejoicing, absolved all whom he had excommunicated, ordered a coffin placed in St. Peter’s, sat beside it for a day, and died at the altar. The lame, the dumb, and the lepers came from all parts of Italy to touch his corpse.
VIII. THE GREAT EASTERN SCHISM: 1054
It was in St. Leo’s pontificate that Greek and Latin Christianity were finally divorced. While Western Europe was shrouded in the darkness, misery, and ignorance of the ninth and tenth centuries, the Eastern Empire, under the Macedonian emperors (867-1057), recovered some of the territory it had lost to the Arabs, reasserted its leadership in south Italy, and experienced a new flowering of literature and art. The Greek Church drew strength and pride from the revived wealth and power of the Byzantine state, won Russia, Bulgaria, and Serbia to the Eastern observance, and resented more sharply than ever the claims of a debased and impoverished papacy to the ecclesiastical monarchy of the Christian world. To the Greeks of this age the Germans, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons of the contemporary West seemed crude barbarians, an illiterate and violent laity led by a worldly and corrupt episcopate. The papal rejection of the Byzantine emperor for the king of the Franks, the papal appropriation of the exarchate of Ravenna, the papal coronation of a rival Roman emperor, the papal drive into Greek Italy—these galling political events, and not the slight diversities of creed, severed Christendom into East and West.
In 1043 Michael Cerularius was appointed Patriarch of Constantinople. He was a man of noble birth, wide culture, keen intellect, and resolute will. Though a monk, he had risen through a political rather than an ecclesiastical career; he had been a high minister of the Empire, and would hardly have accepted the patriarchate if it had involved submission to Rome. In 1053 he circulated a Latin treatise by a Greek monk, which strongly criticized the Roman Church for enforcing clerical celibacy contrary to apostolic example and ecclesiastical tradition, for using unleavened bread in the Eucharist, and for adding filioque to the Nicene Creed. In that same year Cerularius closed all those churches in Constantinople that observed the Latin ritual, and excommunicated all clergy who should persist in its use. Leo, then at the height of his pontificate, despatched a letter to Cerularius demanding that the Patriarch should recognize the supremacy of the popes, and branding any church that refused such recognition as “an assembly of heretics, a conventicle of schismatics, a synagogue of Satan.”76 In a milder mood Leo sent legates to Constantinople to discuss with the emperor and the Patriarch the differences that kept the two branches of Christianity apart. The emperor received the legates cordially, but Cerularius denied their competence to deal with the issues. Leo died in April, 1054, and the papacy remained vacant for a year. In July the legates, taking matters into their own hands, deposited on the altar of St. Sophia a bull excommunicating Cerularius. Michael convened a council representing all Eastern Christianity; it recapitulated the grievances of the Greek against the Roman Church, including the shaving of the beard; it formally condemned the bull of the legates, and “all who had helped in drawing it up, whether by their advice or even by their prayers.”77 The schism was now complete.
IX. GREGORY VII HILDEBRAND: 1073–85
It was a great misfortune for Christianity that an interval of chaos and weakness separated the pontificate of Leo IX from that of one of the strongest popes in the history of the Church.
Hildebrand is a German name, and suggests a German lineage; Gregory’s contemporaries interpreted it to mean Hellbrand, pure flame. He was born of lowly parentage in the hamlet of Sovano in the marshes of Tuscany (1023?). He was educated in the convent of St. Mary on the Aventine at Rome, and entered the Benedictine order. When Pope Gregory VI was deposed and banished to Germany in 1046 Hildebrand accompanied him as chaplain; during that year in Cologne he learned much about Germany that helped him in his later struggle with Henry IV. Soon after his return to Rome he was made a cardinal subdeacon by Leo IX, and was appointed administrator of the Papal States and at the same time legate to France; we may judge from this remarkable elevation of a youth of twenty-five the reputation that he had so soon acquired for political and diplomatic ability. Popes Victor II (1055-7) and Stephen IX (1057-8) continued to employ him in high capacities. In 1059 Nicholas II became Pope largely through Hildebrand’s influence; and the indispensable monk, not yet a priest, was made papal chancellor.
It was at his urging that Nicholas and the Lateran Council of 1057 issued an edict transferring the election of the pope to the College of Cardinals; by that one stroke Hildebrand proposed to rescue the papacy from Roman nobles and German emperors. Already the young ecclesiastical statesman had formulated a far-reaching policy. To secure the papacy from German domination he closed his eyes to the swashbuckling raids of the Normans in southern Italy, recognized their expropriations, and approved their ambitions, in return for a pledge of military protection. In 1073, after serving eight popes for twenty-five years, Hildebrand himself was raised to the papacy. He resisted, preferring to rule behind the throne; but cardinals, clergy, and people cried out, “St. Peter wills Hildebrand to be Pope!” He was ordained priest, was consecrated Pope, and took the honored name of Gregory.
He was small of stature, homely of feature, keen of eye, proud of spirit, strong of will, sure of the truth, and confident of victory. Four purposes inspired him: to complete Leo’s reform of clerical morals, to end lay investiture, to unify all Europe in one church and one republic headed by the papacy, and to lead a Christian army to the East to reclaim the Holy Land from the Turks. Early in 1074 he wrote to the counts of Burgundy and Savoy, and to the Emperor Henry IV, begging them to raise funds and troops for a crusade which he proposed to lead in person. The counts were not moved, and Henry was too insecure on his throne to think of a crusade.
The Lateran Council of 1059, under Nicholas II and Hildebrand, had excommunicated any priest who kept a wife or a concubine, and had forbidden Christians to attend the Mass of a priest known to keep a woman in his house. Reluctant to break up the families of their clergy, many bishops in Lombardy refused to promulgate these decrees, and prominent clerics in Tuscany defended clerical marriage as both moral and canonical. The legislation could not be enforced, and the idea that clergymen living in “sin” could not administer valid sacraments was so enthusiastically taken up by heretical preachers that the papal appeal to the congregations was withdrawn.78 When Hildebrand became Gregory VII (1073) he attacked the problem with uncompromising determination. A synod in 1074 renewed the decrees of 1059; Gregory sent these to all the bishops of Europe with a stern command to promulgate and enforce them; and absolved the laity from obedience to priests who disregarded them. The reaction was again violent. Many priests declared that they would abandon their calling rather than their wives; others deprecated the decrees as making unreasonable demands on human nature, and predicted that their enforcement would promote secret promiscuity. Bishop Otto of Constance openly favored and protected his married clergy. Gregory excommunicated him, and absolved his flock from obedience to him. In 1075 Gregory took the further step of commanding the dukes of Swabia and Carinthia, and other princes, to use force, if necessary, in keeping recalcitrant clergy from performing priestly functions. Several German princes obeyed him; and many priests unwilling to dismiss their wives were deprived of their parishes.79 Gregory was to die without victory; but Urban II, Paschal II, and Calixtus II reaffirmed and executed his decrees. The Council of the Lateran in 1215 under Innocent III issued a final condemnation, and clerical marriage slowly disappeared.
The problem of investiture seemed simpler than that of clerical marriage. Assuming, as kings and popes agreed, that Christ had established the Church, it seemed clear that her bishops and abbots should be chosen by churchmen rather than by laymen; and surely it was scandalous that a king should not only appoint bishops, but (as i
n Germany) invest them with the episcopal staff and ring—sacred symbols of spiritual power. But to the kings an opposite conclusion was equally evident. Admitting, as most German bishops and abbots would have done, that they had been invested by the king with lands, revenues, and secular responsibilities, it seemed meet and just, by feudal law, that these prelates—at least the bishops—should owe their appointment and temporal allegiance to the king, as they had done without demurrer under Constantine and Charlemagne. If they were released from such subordination and loyalty half the land of Germany—which had by this time been granted to bishoprics and monasteries80—would escape control by the state, and their due and wonted service to it. The German bishops, and many Lombard bishops of German origin and appointment, suspected that Gregory was seeking to end their relative ecclesiastical autonomy, and subordinate them completely to the Roman see. Gregory was willing that the bishops should continue their feudal obligations to the king,81 but unwilling that they should surrender the lands they had received by royal grant;82 by the law of the Church the property of the Church was inalienable. Gregory complained that lay appointment had begotten most of the simony, worldliness, and immorality that had appeared in the German and French episcopates. He felt that the bishops must be brought under the papal authority, or else the Western, like the Eastern, Church would become a subservient appendage to the state.
Behind this historic conflict lay the question of papacy versus empire: which should unify and govern Europe? The German emperors claimed that their power was also divine, as being a necessity of social order; had not St. Paul said that “the powers that be are ordained by God”? Were they not, according to the popes themselves, the heirs of the Empire of Rome? They stood for the freedom of the part as Gregory stood for the unity and order of the whole. Privately they resented—so long before the Reformation—the flow of gold in fees and Peter’s pence from Germany to Italy;83 and they saw in the papal policy an effort of Latin Rome to renew its ancient control over what Italy scorned as the barbarian Teutonic North. They freely admitted the supremacy of the Church in spiritual matters, but asserted a like supremacy for the state in temporal or earthly affairs. To Gregory this seemed a disorderly dualism; spiritual considerations, he felt, should dominate material concerns, as the sun dominates the moon;84 the state should be subordinate to the Church—the City of Man to the City of God—in all matters involving doctrine, education, morals, justice, or ecclesiastical organization. Had not the kings of France and the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire implicitly admitted that the spiritual was the source and sovereign of the temporal power by accepting archiepiscopal or papal anointment or consecration? The Church, as a divine institution, merited, universal authority; the pope, as the vicegerent of God, had the right and duty to depose bad kings, and to confirm or reject the choice made of rulers by men or circumstance.85 “Who,” asked Gregory, in a passionate epistle to Bishop Hermann of Metz, “is ignorant that kings and princes had their origin in those who, ignorant of God, and covering themselves with pride, violence, and perfidy, in fact nearly every crime … claimed to rule over their peers—i.e., men—in blind lust and intolerable arrogance?”86 Looking upon the political division, chaos, and wars of Europe, it seemed to Gregory that the only escape from that age-old misery was a world order in which these states should surrender something of their jealous sovereignty, and acknowledge the pope as their feudal suzerain, the majestic head of a universal, or at least a European, Christian Republic.