The Historians' History of the World 08

Controversy was almost dead. In the former century, the predestinarian doctrines of Gottschalk, in general so acceptable to the popular ear, had been entirely suppressed by the sacerdotal authority. The tenets of Berengar concerning the presence of Christ in the Sacrament, had been restrained, and were to be once more restrained, by the same strong hand; and Berengar’s logic was beyond his age. The Manichæan doctrines of the Paulicians and kindred sects were doubtless spreading to a great extent among the lower orders, but as yet in secrecy, breaking out now in one place, now in another, yet everywhere beheld with abhorrence, creating no wide alarm, threatening no dangerous disunion. In all the vulgar of Christendom (and that vulgar comprehended all orders, all ranks) the moral sentiment, as more obtuse, would be less shocked by that incongruity which grieved and oppressed the more religious. The great body of Christians in the West would no more have thought of discussing the character of the pope than the attributes of God. He was to them the apostle, the vicegerent of God, enveloped in the same kind of awful mystery. They feared the thunders of the Lateran as those of heaven; and were no more capable of sound discrimination as to the limits, grounds, and nature of that authority than as to the causes of the destructive fire from the clouds. Their general belief in the judgment to come was not more deeply rooted than in the right of the clergy, more especially the head of the clergy, to anticipate, to declare, or to ratify their doom.

The German line of pontiffs had done much to reinvest the papacy in its ancient sanctity. The Italian Alexander II had been at least a blameless pontiff, and now every qualification which could array the pope in imposing majesty, in what bordered on divine worship, seemed to meet in Gregory VII. His life verified the splendid panegyric with which he had been presented by Cardinal Hugo to the Roman people. He had the austerest virtue, the most simple piety, the fame of vast theologic knowledge, the tried ability to rule men, intrepidity which seemed to delight in confronting the most powerful; a stern singleness of purpose, which, under its name of churchmanship, gave his partisans unlimited reliance on his firmness and resolution, and yet a subtle policy which bordered upon craft. To them his faults were virtues; his imperiousness the due assertion of his dignity; his unbounded ambition zeal in God’s cause; no haughtiness could be above that which became his station. The terror by which he ruled (he was so powerful that he could dispense with love), as it was the attribute of the divinity now exclusively worshipped by man, so was it that which became the representative of God on earth.

The first, the avowed object of Gregory’s pontificate, was the absolute independence of the clergy, of the pope, of the great prelates throughout Latin Christendom, down to the lowest functionary, whose person was to become sacred; that independence under which lurked the undisguised pretension to superiority. His remote and somewhat more indistinct vision was the foundation of a vast spiritual autocracy in the person of the pope, who was to rule mankind by the consentient but subordinate authority of the clergy throughout the world. For this end the clergy were to become still more completely a separate, inviolable caste; their property equally sacred with their persons. Each in his separate sphere, the pope above all and comprehending all, was to be sovereign arbiter of all disputes; to hold in his hands the supreme mediation in questions of war and peace; to adjudge contested successions to kingdoms; to be a great feudal lord, to whom other kings became beneficiaries. His own arms were to be chiefly spiritual, but the temporal power was to be always ready to execute the ecclesiastical behest against the ungodly rebels who might revolt from its authority; nor did the churchman refuse altogether to sanction the employment of secular weapons, to employ armies in his own name, or even to permit the use of arms to the priesthood.

For this complete isolation of the hierarchy into a peculiar and inviolable caste was first necessary the reformation of the clergy in two most important preliminary matters; the absolute extirpation of the two evils, which the more rigid churchmen had been denouncing for centuries, to the suppression of which Hildebrand had devoted so much of his active energies. The war against simony and the concubinage of the clergy (for under this ill-sounding name was condemned all connection, however legalised, with the female sex), must first be carried to a triumphant issue, before the church could assume its full and uncontested domination.[92]

Simony