of the Church" was an ideal which commanded universal homage; and it was
necessary for the most obstinate opponent of ecclesiastical privilege to
make it clear that his policy involved no real attack upon this freedom.
Otherwise, defeat was certain. Thrice in two hundred years the cry for
freedom was raised against the Holy Roman Empire; and three prolonged
conflicts ended in the discomfiture of the most resolute and resourceful
statesmen who ever held that office-Henry IV (1056-1105), Henry V
(1106-1125), Frederic Barbarossa (1152-1190), and Frederic II
(1212-1250). In the first of these great conflicts the question at issue
was the reformation of the national clergy and their emancipation from
secular authority. Henry IV paid for his assertion of prerogative and
custom, both by the ignominious though illusory surrender at Canossa
(1077), and by the unparalleled humiliations of his latter days, when he
was compelled, as the prisoner of his own son, not only to abdicate but
also to sign a confession of infamous offences against religion and
morality. Henry V, reviving the plans of the father whom he had betrayed
and entrapped, was reduced through very weariness to conclude the
Concordat of worms (1122)--a renunciation which only ended in something
less than absolute defeat for the Empire, because the imperial
concessions were interpreted with more regard to the letter than the
spirit. In the second struggle the immediate issue was the freedom of
papal elections, the ultimate question whether Pope or Emperor should
shape the Church's policy; and Frederic Barbarossa was compelled, after
a schism of seventeen years' duration to surrender claims which dated
from the time of Charles the Great, and to make peace with Alexander
III, whom he had sworn that he would never recognise (Treaty of Anagni,
1176). Henry VI, the son of Barbarossa, when he joined the kingdom of
Sicily to the Empire through his marriage with Constance, the heiress of
the Norman throne, sowed the seed of a new conflict, and bequeathed to
Frederic II the perilous ideal of an Italy united under a Hohenstauffen
despotism. Ecclesiastical freedom now became a euphemism for the
preservation of the temporal power, and for the project of a federal
Italy, owning allegiance to a papal suzerain. Frederic II, who came
nearer to success in a more far-reaching policy than any of his
predecessors, was worn out by the steady alternation of successes with
reverses, and left his sons and grandson to reap the bitter harvest of a
failure which he had barely realised.
The moral issue dwindles to smaller proportions in each successive stage
of this titanic duel between the titular representatives of State and
Church; and from first to last the Papacy depended largely upon allies
who were pursuing their own objects in the Church's name. The German
princes, the Normans of Lower Italy and Sicily, the Lombard communes,
all contributed in varying degrees to the defeat of the Henries and the
Frederics. The German princes brought Henry IV to his knees at two
critical moments in the reign; the majority of them held obstinately
aloof from the Italian wars of Barbarossa; and Frederic II, who
endeavoured to buy their neutrality by extravagant concessions, found
himself confronted by German rebels and pretenders towards the close of
his career (1246-1250), when the Italian situation appeared to be
changing in his favour. The Normans intervened more than once in the
Wars of Investitures to shelter a fugitive Pope or rescue Rome from
German armies; the Lombards, as we shall relate elsewhere, were the
chief barrier between Rome and Frederic Barbarossa, between Frederic II
and Germany. Charles of Anjou was the latest and most efficient champion
of the papal cause; and he lives in history as the forerunner of the
conscienceless and shameless statesmanship of the Renaissance epoch. And
yet, when we have allowed for the utility of these alliances, the
question remains why radical communes, rebellious feudatories, and
adventurers in search of kingdoms, found it worth their while to enlist
in the service of the Church, and to endure the restrictions which such
a service inevitably entailed. The true strength of the Church lay in
her moral influence. It was a handful, even among the clergy, who
devoted themselves heart and soul to the ideal of society which she set
up. Still her ideal was in possession of the field; it might be
subjected to a negative and sceptical criticism by an isolated
philosopher, by a heretical sect, or by an orthodox layman smarting
under priestly arrogance; but when the forces of the Church were
mobilised, the indifferent majority stood aside and shrugged their
shoulders. The way of Rome might not be the way of Christ; but if the
Apostolic misinterpreted the lessons of Scripture and tradition, from
whom could a better rule of life be learned? An erring Church was better
than no Church at all. In the thirteenth century, when papal extortions
were a subject of complaint in every European state, Frederic II put
himself forward as the champion of the common interest, and appealed
from the Pope to the bar of public opinion. It was his turn today, he
said with perfect truth; the turn of kings and princes would come when
the Emperor was overthrown. His eloquence made some impression; but his
fellow-sovereigns could not or would not prevent the Pope from taxing
their clergy and recruiting their subjects for the Holy War against the
secular chief of Christendom, the head and front of whose offending was
that he opposed the interests of the State to the so-called rights of
the Church.
It is no mere accident that the heyday of sacerdotal pretensions
coincided with the golden age of the religious orders; that the
Hildebrandine policy took shape when the Cluniac movement was
overflowing the borders of France into all the adjacent countries; that
Alexander III was a younger contemporary of St. Bernard, and that the
death-grapple between Empire and Papacy followed hard upon the
foundation of the mendicant fraternities by St. Francis and St. Dominic.
The monks and the friars were the militia of the Church. Not that the
medieval orders devoted themselves to a political propaganda with the
zeal and system of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century. The
serviceswhich the Cluniacs and the Cistercians, the Dominicans and the
Franciscans, rendered to the militant Papacy were more impalpable and
indirect. From time to time, it is true, they were entrusted with
important missions--to raise money, to preach a crusade, to influence
monarchs, to convert or to persecute the heretic; St. Bernard, the
founder of Clairvaux and the incarnation of the monastic spirit, was for
twenty years (1133-1153) the oracle to whom Pope after Pope resorted for
direction. But even in St. Bernard's time, and even when the reigning
Pope was his nominee or pupil, there was a certain divergence between
the theories for which he stood and the actual policy of the Curia. It
was, for example, against his better judgment that he organised the
Second Crusade in deference to the express commands of Pope Eugenius
III; and on the other hand, the Papacy preserved towards the pioneers of
scholasticism an attitude which he thought unduly lenient. Rome was more
broad-minded than Clairvaux, more alive to realities, more versed in
statecraft and diplomacy; while Clairvaux fostered a nobler conception
of the spiritual life, and was more consistent in withholding the Church
from secular entanglements. The qualities which made the monk
invaluable as a leader of public opinion also made him an incalculable
and intractable factor in political combinations. He was most useful as
the missionary and the embodiment of an ecclesiastical idea which,
unconsciously perhaps but none the less emphatically, attacked the
foundations of the secular State. The founders of the great orders,
whether they found their inspiration (with St. Bernard) in the Rule of
Benedict, or rather strove (with St. Francis) to follow literally the
commission imposed by Christ upon his twelve Apostles, returned upon a
past in which the State and Caesar were nothing to the Christian but
"the powers that be." The monastic or mendicant order, designed as an
exemplar of the Christian society, was a voluntary association governed
by the common conscience, as expressed in the will of representative
chapters and an elected superior. The absolute obedience of the monk or
friar was self-imposed, the consequence of a vow only accepted from one
who had felt the inner call and had tested it in a severe probation. In
virtue of his self-surrender he became dead to the world, a citizen of
the kingdom of heaven upon earth. No secular duties could be lawfully
demanded of him; he had migrated from the jurisdiction of the State to
that of God. The religious orders claimed the right to be free from all
subjection save that of the Church, as represented by the Pope. Though
far from holding the State a superfluous invention--they regarded it as
a Divine instrument to curb the lawless passions of the laity--they
demanded that all other ministers of God, from the archbishop to the
humblest clerk in orders, should enjoy the same exemption as themselves
on condition of accepting the same threefold obligation--Poverty,
Obedience, Chastity. It was consequently in the religious orders that
the chief movements for reforming the medieval clergy found their
warmest partisans; and the same school supplied the theoretical basis
for each new claim of privilege. The Orders were the salt of the Church,
so long as they preserved the spirit of their founders. But they were
also responsible for the insanely logical pretensions which characterise
the Church's policy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and it
was with reason that Wycliffe, the greatest medieval critic of the
sacerdotal theory, attacked the Mendicant Orders as typifying all that
was worst in the hierarchy of his age.
Naturally enough the monastic spirit has been often treated as an
absolute antithesis to the lay statesmanship which it so bitterly
opposed. But in fact they sprang from the same root of a discontent,
which was wholly reasonable, with the anarchical conditions of the early
Middle Ages. The religious reformer, stunned and bewildered by the
wrong-doing of men and the manifest inequity of fortune, argued that a
world so irredeemably bad must be regarded as an ordeal for the faith of
the believer. Man was afflicted in this life that he might realise the
supreme value of the life to come. He was surrounded by evil that he
might learn to hate it. He was placed in society that he might school
himself to control the immoral and non-moral instincts which society
calls into play. The political reformers, at least in their more
disinterested moods, were animated by the same belief in an all-wise
Providence, but drew different deductions from it. The God who created
man as a social being could not have intended that society should remain
perpetually unjust. He must have intended that it should approximate,
however imperfectly, to the idea of justice which He has revealed. The
State is a divine institution, and therefore man must do his best to
reform the State. The lay ruler, as the representative of justice, is
God's steward and even in a sense His priest. Frederic II, whom his
contemporaries denounced as an apostate and blasphemer, only expressed
in a particularly daring form the tradition of medieval royalty when he
styled himself, or allowed his flatterers to style him, the Corner-Stone
of the Church, the Vicar of God, the New Messiah.
Similarly, the heretics and rationalists, whose criticism was even more
dangerous to the Church than the open violence of the State, had more in
common with their opponents than we should infer from the duration and
the character of the disputes which they provoked. In the background of
medieval history, and developing _pari passu_ with the feud of
Papacy and Empire, there was a war, of arguments and persecution,
against free thought, in which the religious Orders figured as the
protagonists of orthodoxy. Berengar of Tours, who challenged the
doctrine of transubstantiation and so endangered the basis of the
sacerdotal theory, lived in the age when a regenerated Papacy was arming
for the war on secularism; it was Hildebrand himself who pronounced the
final sentence on the first of the heresiarchs. The age of Henry V and
of the Concordat of Worms saw the rise of a medieval Puritanism in
Languedoc and Flanders. Between the Concordat of Worms and the schism of
Frederic Barbarossa lies the age of Abelard,--the metaphysical
free-lance who made philosophy the talk of the street-corner and the
marketplace,--and of Arnold of Brescia, who demanded that the Church
should be reduced to apostolic poverty. To the youthful days of Frederic
II belong the Albigensian Crusade, the futile campaign of authority
against Averroes and Aristotle, the heresy-hunts of volunteer
inquisitors in Italy and Germany. While the same Emperor was trying
conclusions with Innocent IV, the Papal Inquisition became a permanent
branch of the ecclesiastical executive; and the Mendicant Orders, who
supplied the inquisitors, simultaneously took upon themselves the harder
task of converting the universities from the cult of Aristotle to a
belief in the Christian scholasticism formulated by Albertus Magnus and
Aquinas. The weapons of this interminable and many-sided controversy
were as rude as the age which forged them: on the one side, coarse
invective and irreverent paradox; on the other, scandalous imputations,
spiritual censures, the sword, the prison, and the stake. For the
medieval attitude towards heterodoxy was unflinching and uncompromising.
To remain sceptical when the Church had defined was as the sin of
witchcraft or idolatry. The existence of the rebel was an insult to the
Most High, a menace to the salvation of the simple; he was a diseased
limb of the body politic, calling for sharp surgery. And yet these
nonconformists were anything but unbelievers. The free-thinkers of the
schools, apart from a few obscure eccentrics, only desired to find a
rational basis for the common creed or to eliminate from it certain
articles which, on moral grounds and grounds of history, they
stigmatised as mere interpolations. The offence of Berengar was that he
attacked a dogma which had been an open question within the last two
hundred years; of Abelard, that he offered his own theories on some
points in regard to which the orthodox tradition was mute or
inconsistent. As for the sectaries, their offence usually consisted in
exaggerating one or other of three doctrines which the Church
acknowledged in a more moderate shape. Either, like the Poor Men of
Lyons, they desired that the Church should return to primitive
simplicity; or, like the Albigeois, they harped upon the Pauline
antithesis between the spirit and the flesh, pushed to extremes the
monastic contempt for earthly ties, and exalted the Christian Devil to
the rank of an evil deity, supreme in the material universe. Or,
finally, with Joachim of Corazzo and the Fraticelli, they developed the
cardinal idea of the more orthodox mystics, the belief in the inner
light, and taught that the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life. In
short, all were guilty, not of repudiating Christianity, but of
interpreting the Christian doctrine in a sense forbidden by authority.
Beneath all differences there was unity; behind the controversy,
agreement. There are no feuds more bitter, no recriminations more
unjust, than those of men who look at the same faith from different
sides.
In justice to the official Church it must be remembered that, whether
she had to deal with kings or heretics, the peculiar nature of her power
forced her to work through instruments which she was powerless to keep
in hand, and in which she had placed her confidence with the temerity of
desperation. There can be no greater contrast than that between the
Hildebrandine programme and the measures by which it was incompletely
realised. To enforce the celibacy of the clergy the mobs of Milan and
the South-German cities were commissioned to rabble married priests. To
make an end of simony the German princes were encouraged in a policy of
provincial separatism, a premium was placed on perjured accusations, and
a son was suborned to betray his father. That the tide of the
Albigensian heresy might be stemmed, Innocent III launched against the
brilliant civilisation of Languedoc the brutal and avaricious feudalism
of the North. Sometimes the error was recognised after it had been
committed. But no experience could cure the official Church of the
delusion that every volunteer must be credited with the purest motives
until the contrary is proved. The same ignorance of human nature
characterised her methods of administrative routine. Even if, for the
sake of argument, we admit the truth of the principles which were
alleged to justify the Papal Inquisition, or the censorship of the
bishops' courts, or the appellate jurisdiction of the Curia, the fact
remains that these institutions were so organised and so conducted that
the most flagrant abuses were only to be expected. A system which, if
staffed with saints, would have been barely tolerable, became iniquitous
when it was committed to the charge of petty officials, ill-paid, ill-
supervised, and ill-selected. To a great extent the crimes and follies
of the medieval Church were those of a complex bureaucracy in a
half-civilised state. Such a system fails through being too ambitious;
the founders have neither the technical experience requisite for a
satisfactory arrangement of details, nor the subordinates who can repair
the defects of the machine by the efficiency and honesty with which they
tend it; and yet because the aim is grandiose, because the supporters of
the scheme proclaim their readiness and their capacity to regenerate the
State and human nature, they are hailed as the prophets of a new order;
they are allowed to plead the excellence of their motives in extenuation
of all and any means; and they end by creating new evils without
appreciably diminishing the old.
But if the Church as a scheme of government was a doubtful blessing to
those who gave her their allegiance, the Church as a home of spiritual
life was invested with a grandeur and a charm which were and are
apparent, even to spectators standing at the outer verge of her domain.
We may compare the religion of the Middle Ages to an alpine range, on
the lower slopes of which the explorer finds himself entangled in the
mire and undergrowth of pathless thickets, oppressed by a still and
stifling atmosphere, shut off from any view of the sky above or the
pleasant plains beneath. Ascending through this sheltered and ignoble
wilderness, he comes to free and windswept pastures, to the white
solitude of virgin snowfields, to brooding glens and soaring peaks robed
in the light or darkness of a mystery which he is as little able to
define as to resist. Far below him, illimitably vast and yet infinitely
little, extends the prospect of the lower levels which, whether
beautiful or sordid, are too remote to seem a part of the new world in
which he finds himself, and strike his senses only as a foil and a
background to the severer hues, the more majestic lines and contours of
the snow-capped mountain-ranges. On such heights of moral exaltation the
medieval mystics built their tabernacles and sang their
_Benedicite_, calling all nature to bear witness with them that God
in His heaven was very near, and all well with a universe which existed
only to fulfil His word. It was a noble optimism; and those who embraced
it are the truest poets of the Middle Ages, none the less poets because
they expressed their high imaginings in life instead of language.
Philosophers they neither were nor sought to be; the temperament which
feels the mystery of things most keenly is not that which probes into
the how and why; but the world of their dreams was at least superior to
ours in being founded upon an ever-present and overwhelming reverence
for the truth behind the veil. The vision of the mountain-peaks, however
clouded, was worth the toil of the ascent; and there was reason in the
docility with which the vulgar bowed themselves before the forms and
ceremonies and rules of outward conduct which the visible Church
prescribed; since they believed that so they might find the way, in this
life or a better, to that higher rule of service, exemplified in the
finest characters of their experience, which as Scripture said and the
saints testified was perfect life and freedom. It is no wonder that they
were disposed to go further still; to stake their earthly fortunes and
the future of society on the bidding of those among the elect who from
time to time descended among them, like Moses from the mountain, with
transfigured faces and the message of a new revelation. And if the
result was sometimes calamitous or pitiable, there were compensating
gains; a matter-of-fact prosperity is not altogether preferable to
enlistment in the forlorn hope of idealism. Had medieval society been
more consistently secular and sceptical, it might have been more
prosperous, more stable, the nursery of more balanced natures and the
theatre of more orderly careers. But there would have been the less to
learn from the ethical and political conceptions of the age. What
appeals to us in the medieval outlook upon life is, first, the idea of
mankind as a brotherhood transcending racial and political divisions,
united in a common quest for truth, filled with the spirit of mutual
charity and mutual helpfulness, and endowed with a higher will and
wisdom than that of the individuals who belong to it; secondly, a
profound belief in the superiority of right over might, of spirit over
matter, of the eternal interests of humanity over the ambitions and the
passions of the passing hour. Without Christianity these articles of
faith could scarcely have passed into the common heritage of men; and,
without the Church, it is in the last degree improbable that
Christianity would have survived that age of semi-barbarism in which the
foundations of the modern world were laid.
VII
THE MEDIEVAL STATE