in the second week of Lent, 1076, beneath the sculptured roof of the
Vatican, arrayed in the rich and mystic vestments of pontifical
dominion, and the papal choir were chanting those immortal anthems which
had come down from blessed saints and martyrs, when the messenger of
the Emperor presented himself before the assembled hierarchy of Rome,
and with insolent demeanor and abrupt speech delivered the sentence of
the German council." He was left unharmed by the indignant pontiff; but
the next day ascending his throne, and in presence of the dignitaries of
his Church, thus invoked the assistance of the pretended founder of
his empire:--
"Saint Peter! lend us your ears, and listen to your servant whom you
have cherished from his infancy; and all the saints also bear witness
how the Roman Church raised me by force and against my will to this high
dignity, although I should have preferred to spend my days in a
continual pilgrimage than to ascend thy pulpit for any human motive. And
inasmuch as I think it will be grateful to you that those intrusted to
my care should obey me; therefore, supported by these hopes, and for the
honor and defence of the Church, in the name of the Omnipotent
God,--Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,--by my authority and power, I
prohibit King Henry, who with unheard-of pride has raised himself
against your Church, from governing the kingdoms of Germany and Italy; I
absolve all Christians from the oath they have taken to him, and I
forbid all men to yield to him that service which is due unto a king.
Finally, I bind him with the bonds of anathema, that all people may know
that thou art Peter, and that upon thee the Son of God hath built His
Church, against which the gates of hell cannot prevail."
This was an old-fashioned excommunication; and we in these days have but
a faint idea what a dreadful thing it was, especially when accompanied
with an interdict. The churches were everywhere shut; the dead were
unburied in consecrated ground; the rites of religion were suspended;
gloom and fear sat on every countenance; desolation overspread the land.
The king was regarded as guilty and damned; his ministers looked upon
him as a Samson shorn of his locks; his very wife feared contamination
from his society; his children, as a man blasted with the malediction of
Heaven. When a man was universally supposed to be cursed in the house
and in the field; in the wood and in the church; in eating or drinking;
in fasting or sleeping; in working or resting; in his arms, in his legs,
in his heart, and in his head; living or dying; in this world and in the
next,--what could he do?
And what could Henry do, with all his greatness? His victorious armies
deserted him; a rival prince laid claim to his throne; his enemies
multiplied; his difficulties thickened; new dangers surrounded him on
every side. If loyalty--that potent principle--had summoned one hundred
thousand warriors to his camp, a principle much more powerful than
loyalty--the fear of hell--had dispersed them. Even his friends joined
the Pope. The sainted Agnes, his own mother, acquiesced in the sentence.
The Countess Matilda, the richest lady in the world, threw all her
treasures at the feet of her spiritual monarch. The moral sentiments of
his own subjects were turned against him; he was regarded as justly
condemned. The great princes of Germany sought his deposition. The world
rejected him, the Church abandoned him, and God had forsaken him. He was
prostrate, helpless, disarmed, ruined. True, he made superhuman efforts:
he traversed his empire with the hope of rallying his subjects; he flew
from city to city,--but all in vain. Every convent, every castle, every
city of his vast dominions beheld in him the visitation of the Almighty.
The diadem was obscured by the tiara, and loyalty itself yielded to the
superior potency of religious fear. Only Bertha, his neglected wife, was
faithful and trusting in that gloomy day; all else had defrauded and
betrayed him. How bitter his humiliation! And yet his haughty foe was
not contented with the punishment he had inflicted. He declared that if
the sun went down on the 23d of February, 1077, before Henry was
restored to the bosom of the Church, his crown should be transferred to
another. That inexorable old pontiff laid claim to the right of giving
and taking away imperial crowns. Was ever before seen such arrogance and
audacity in a priest? And yet he knew that he would be sustained. He
knew that his supremacy was based on a universally recognized idea. Who
can resist the ideas of his age? Henry might have resisted, if
resistance had been possible. Even he must yield to irresistible
necessity. He was morally certain that he would lose his crown, and be
in danger of losing his soul, unless he made his peace with his
dangerous enemy. It was necessary that the awful curse should be
removed. He had no remedy; only one course was before him. He must
yield; not to man alone, but to an idea which had the force of fate.
Wonder not that he made up his mind to submit. He was great, but not
greater than his age. How few men are! Mohammed could renounce
prevailing idolatries; Luther could burn a papal bull; but the Emperor
of Germany could not resist the supposed vicegerent of the Almighty.
Behold, then, the melancholy, pitiable spectacle of this mighty
monarch in the depth of winter--and a winter of unprecedented
severity--crossing, in the garb of a pilgrim, the frozen Alps, enduring
the greatest privations and fatigues and perils, and approaching on foot
the gloomy fortress of Canossa (beyond the Po), in which Hildebrand had
intrenched himself. Even then the angry pontiff refused to see him.
Henry had to stoop to a still deeper degradation,--to stand bareheaded
and barefooted for three days, amid the blasts of winter, in the
court-yard of the castle, before the Pope would promise absolution, and
then only at the intercession of the Countess Matilda.
What are we to think of such a fall, such a humiliation on the part of a
sovereign? What are we to think of such haughtiness on the part of a
priest,--his subject? We are filled with blended pity and indignation.
We are inclined to say that this was the greatest blunder that any
monarch ever made; that Henry--humbled and deserted and threatened as he
was--should not have stooped to this; that he should have lost his crown
and life rather than handed over his empire to a plebeian priest,--for
he was an acknowledged hero; he was monarch of half of Europe. And yet
we are bound to consider Henry's circumstances and the ideas with which
he had to contend. His was the error of the Middle Ages; the feeblest of
his modern successors would have killed the Pope if he could, rather
than have disgraced himself by such an ignominy.
True it is that Henry came to himself; that he repented of his step. But
it was too late. Gregory had gained the victory; and it was all the
greater because it was a moral one. It was known to all Europe and all
the world, and would be known to all posterity, that the Emperor of
Germany had bowed in submission to a foreign priest. The temporal power
had yielded to the spiritual; the State had conceded the supremacy of
the Church. The Pope had triumphed over the mightiest monarch of the
age, and his successors would place their feet over future prostrate
kings. What a victory! What mighty consequences were the result of it!
On what a throne did this moral victory seat the future pontiffs of the
Eternal City! How august their dominion, for it was over the minds and
souls of men! Truly to the Pope were given the keys of Heaven and Hell;
and so long as the ideas of that age were accepted, who could resist a
man armed with the thunders of Omnipotence?
It mattered nothing that the Emperor was ashamed of his weakness; that
he retracted; that he vowed vengeance; that he marched at the head of
new armies. No matter that his adherents were indignant; that all
Germany wept; that loyalty rallied to his aid; that he gained victories
proportionate with his former defeats; that he chased Gregory from city
to city, and castle to castle, and convent to convent, while his
generals burned the Pope's palaces and wasted his territories. No matter
that Gregory--broken, defeated, miserable, outwardly ruined--died
prematurely in exile; no matter that he did not, in his great reverses,
anticipate the fruits of his firmness and heroism. His principles
survived him; they have never been lost sight of by his successors;
they gained strength through successive generations. Innocent III.
reaped what he had sown. Kings dared not resist Innocent III., who
realized those three things to which the more able Gregory had
aspired,--"independent sovereignty, control over the princes of the
earth, and the supremacy of the Church." Innocent was the greater pope,
but Hildebrand was the greater man.
Yet, like so many of the great heroes of the world, he was not destined
in his own person to reap the fruits of his heroism. "I have loved
righteousness and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile,"--these
were his last bitter words. He fancied he had failed. But did he fail?
What did he leave behind? He left his great example and his still
greater ideas. He left a legacy to his successors which makes them still
potent on the earth, in spite of reformations and revolutions, and all
the triumphs of literature and science. How mighty his deeds! How great
his services to his Church! "He found," says an eloquent and able
Edinburgh reviewer, "the papacy dependent on the emperor; he sustained
it by alliances almost commensurate with the Italian peninsula. He found
the papacy electoral by the Roman people and clergy; he left it
electoral by papal nomination. He found the emperor the virtual patron
of the Roman See; he wrenched that power from his hands. He found the
secular clergy the allies and dependents of the secular power; he
converted them into inalienable auxiliaries of his own. He found the
patronage of the Church the desecrated spoil and merchandise of princes;
he reduced it to his own dominion. He is celebrated as the reformer of
the impure and profane abuses of his age; he is more justly entitled to
the praise of having left the impress of his gigantic character on all
the ages which have succeeded him."
Such was the great Hildebrand; a conqueror, however, by the force of
recognized ideas more than by his own strength. How long, you ask, shall
his empire last? We cannot tell who can predict the fortunes of such a
power. It is not for me to speculate or preach. In considering his life
and career, I have simply attempted to paint one of the most memorable
moral contests of the world; to show the power of genius and will in a
superstitious age,--and, more, the majestic force of ideas over the
minds and souls of men, even though these ideas cannot be sustained by
reason or Scripture.
AUTHORITIES.
Epistles of Gregory VII.; Baronius's Annals; Dupin's Ecclesiastical
History; Voigt, in his Hildebrand als Gregory VII.; Guizot's Lectures on
Civilization; Sir James Stephens's article on Hildebrand, in Edinburgh
Review; Dugdale's Monasticon; Hallam's Middle Ages; Digby's Ages of
Faith; Jaffe's Regesta Pontificum Romanorum; Mignet's series of articles
on La Lutte des Papes contre les Empereurs d'Allemagne; M. Villemain's
Histoire de Grégoire VII.; Bowden on the Life and Times of Hildebrand;
Milman's Latin Christianity; Watterich's Romanorum Pontificum ab
Aequalibus Conscriptae; Platina's Lives of the Popes; Stubbs's
Constitutional History; Lee's History of Clerical Celibacy; Cardinal
Newman's Essays; Lecky's History of European Morals; Dr. Döllinger's
Church History; Neander's Church History; articles in Contemporary
Review of July and August, 1882, on the Turning Point of the
Middle Ages.
SAINT BERNARD.
* * * * *
A.D. 1091-1153.
MONASTIC INSTITUTIONS.
One of the oldest institutions of the Church is that which grew out of
monastic life. It had its seat, at a remote period, in India. It has
existed, in different forms, in other Oriental countries. It has been
modified by Brahminical, Buddhistic, and Persian theogonies, and
extended to Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. Go where you will in the East,
and you see traces of its mighty influence. We cannot tell its remotest
origin, but we see everywhere the force of its ideas. Its fundamental
principle appears to be the desire to propitiate the Deity by penances
and ascetic labors as an atonement for sin, or as a means of rising to a
higher religious life. It has sought to escape the polluting influences
of demoralized society by lofty contemplation and retirement from the
world. From the first, it was a protest against materialism, luxury, and
enervating pleasures. It recognized something higher and nobler than
devotion to material gains, or a life of degrading pleasure. In one
sense it was an intellectual movement, while in another it was an insult
to the human understanding. It attempted a purer morality, but abnegated
obvious and pressing duties. It was always a contradiction,--lofty while
degraded, seeking to comprehend the profoundest mysteries, yet debased
by puerile superstitions.
The consciousness of mankind, in all ages and countries, has ever
accepted retribution for sin--more or less permanent--in this world or
in the next. And it has equally accepted the existence of a Supreme
Intelligence and Power, to whom all are responsible, and in connection
with whom human destinies are bound up. The deeper we penetrate into the
occult wisdom of the East,--on which light has been shed by modern
explorations, monumental inscriptions, manuscripts, historical records,
and other things which science and genius have deciphered,--the surer we
feel that the esoteric classes of India, Egypt, and China were more
united in their views of Supreme Power and Intelligence than was
generally supposed fifty years ago. The higher intellects of Asia, in
all countries and ages, had more lofty ideas of God than we have a right
to infer from the superstitions of the people generally. They had
unenlightened ideas as to the grounds of forgiveness. But of the
necessity of forgiveness and the favor of the Deity they had no doubt.
The philosophical opinions of these sages gave direction to a great
religious movement. Matter was supposed to be inherently evil, and mind
was thought to be inherently good. The seat of evil was placed in the
body rather than in the heart and mind. Not the thoughts of men were
evil, but the passions and appetites of the body. Hence the first thing
for a good man to do was to bring the body--this seat of evil--under
subjection, and, if possible, to eradicate the passions and appetites
which enslave the body; and this was to be done by self-flagellations,
penances, austerities, and solitude,--flight from the contaminating
influences of the world. All Oriental piety assumed this ascetic form.
The transition was easy to the sundering of domestic ties, to the
suppression of natural emotions and social enjoyments. The devotee
became austere, cold, inhuman, unsocial. He shunned the habitations of
men. And the more desirous he was to essay a high religious life and
thus rise in favor with God, the more severe and revengeful and
unforgiving he made the Deity he adored,--not a compassionate Creator
and Father, but an irresistible Power bent on his destruction. This
degrading view of the Deity, borrowed from Paganism, tinged the
subsequent theology of the Christian monks, and entered largely into the
theology of the Middle Ages.
Such was the prevailing philosophy, or theosophy--both lofty and
degraded--with which the Christian convert had to contend; not merely
the shameless vices of the people, so open and flagrant as to call out
disgust and indignation, but also the views which the more virtuous and
religious of Pagan saints accepted and promulgated: and not saints
alone, but those who made the greatest pretension to intellectual
culture, like the Gnostics and Manicheans; those men who were the first
to ensnare Saint Augustine,--specious, subtle, sophistical, as acute as
the Brahmins of India. It was Eastern philosophy, false as we regard it,
which created the most powerful institution that existed in Europe for
above a thousand years,--an institution which all the learning and
eloquence of the Reformers of the sixteenth century could not subvert,
except in Protestant countries.
Now what, more specifically, were the ideas which the early monks
borrowed from India, Persia, and Egypt, which ultimately took such a
firm hold of the European mind?
One was the superior virtue of a life devoted to purely religious
contemplation, and for the same end that animated the existence of
fakirs and sofis. It was to escape the contaminating influence of
matter, to rise above the wants of the body, to exterminate animal
passions and appetites, to hide from a world which luxury corrupted. The
Christian recluses were thus led to bury themselves in cells among the
mountains and deserts, in dreary and uncomfortable caverns, in isolated
retreats far from the habitation of men,--yea, among wild beasts,
clothing themselves in their skins and eating their food, in order to
commune with God more effectually, and propitiate His favor. Their
thoughts were diverted from the miseries which they ought to have
alleviated and the ignorance which they ought to have removed, and were
concentrated upon themselves, not upon their relatives and neighbors.
The cries of suffering humanity were disregarded in a vain attempt to
practise doubtful virtues. How much good those pious recluses might have
done, had their piety taken a more practical form! What missionaries
they might have made, what self-denying laborers in the field of active
philanthropy, what noble teachers to the poor and miserable! The
conversion of the world to Christianity did not enter into their minds
so much as the desire to swell the number of their communities. They
only aimed at a dreamy pietism,--at best their own individual salvation,
rather than the salvation of others. Instead of reaching to the beatific
vision, they became ignorant, narrow, and visionary; and, when learned,
they fought for words and not for things. They were advocates of subtile
and metaphysical distinctions in theology, rather than of those
practical duties and simple faith which primitive Christianity enjoined.
Monastic life, no less than the schools of Alexandria, was influential
in creating a divinity which gave as great authority to dogmas that are
the result of intellectual deductions, as those based on direct and
original declarations. And these deductions were often gloomy, and
colored by the fears which were inseparable from a belief in divine
wrath rather than divine love. The genius of monasticism, ancient and
modern, is the propitiation of the Divinity who seeks to punish rather
than to forgive. It invented Purgatory, to escape the awful burnings of
an everlasting hell of physical sufferings. It pervaded the whole
theology of the Middle Ages, filling hamlet and convent alike with an
atmosphere of fear and wrath, and creating a cruel spiritual despotism.
The recluse, isolated and lonely, consumed himself with phantoms,
fancied devils, and "chimeras dire." He could not escape from himself,
although he might fly from society. As a means of grace he sought
voluntary solitary confinement, without nutritious food or proper
protection from the heat and cold, clad in a sheepskin filled with dirt
and vermin. What life could be more antagonistic to enlightened reason?
What mistake more fatal to everything like self-improvement, culture,
knowledge, happiness? And all for what? To strive after an impossible
perfection, or the solution of insoluble questions, or the favor of a
Deity whose attributes he misunderstood.
But this unnatural, unwise retirement was not the worst evil in
the life of a primitive monk, with all its dreamy contemplation
and silent despair. It was accompanied with the most painful
austerities,--self-inflicted scourgings, lacerations, dire
privations, to propitiate an angry deity, or to bring the body
into a state which would be insensible to pain, or to exorcise
passions which the imaginations inflamed. All this was based on
penance,--self-expiation,--which entered so largely into the theogonies
of the East, and which gave a gloomy form to the piety of the Middle
Ages. This error was among the first to kindle the fiery protests of
Luther. The repudiation of this error, and of its logical sequences, was
one of the causes of the Reformation. This error cast its dismal shadow
on the common life of the Middle Ages. You cannot penetrate the spirit
of those centuries without a painful recognition of almost universal
darkness and despair. How gloomy was a Gothic church before the eleventh
century, with its dark and heavy crypt, its narrow windows, its massive
pillars, its low roof, its cold, damp pavement, as if men went into that
church to hide themselves and sing mournful songs,--the _Dies Irae_ of
monastic fear!
But the primitive monks, with all their lofty self-sacrifices and
efforts for holy meditation, towards the middle of the fourth century,
as their number increased from the anarchies and miseries of a falling
empire, became quarrelsome, sometimes turbulent, and generally fierce
and fanatical. They had to be governed. They needed some master mind to
control them, and confine them to their religious duties. Then arose
Basil, a great scholar, and accustomed to civilized life in the schools
of Athens and Constantinople, who gave rules and laws to the monks,
gathered them into communities and discouraged social isolation, knowing
that the demons had more power over men when they were alone and idle.
This Basil was an extraordinary man. His ancestors were honorable and
wealthy. He moved in the highest circle of social life, like Chrysostom.
He was educated in the most famous schools. He travelled extensively
like other young men of rank. His tutor was the celebrated Libanius, the
greatest rhetorician of the day. He exhausted Antioch, Caesarea, and
Constantinople, and completed his studies at Athens, where he formed a
famous friendship with Gregory Nazianzen, which was as warm and devoted
as that between Cicero and Atticus: these young men were the talk and
admiration of Athens. Here, too, he was intimate with young Julian,
afterwards the "Apostate" Emperor of Rome. Basil then visited the
schools of Alexandria, and made the acquaintance of the great
Athanasius, as well as of those monks who sought a retreat amid
Egyptian solitudes. Here his conversion took place, and he parted with
his princely patrimony for the benefit of the poor. He then entered the
Church, and was successively ordained deacon and priest, while leading a
monastic life. He retired among the mountains of Armenia, and made
choice of a beautiful grove, watered with crystal streams, where he gave
himself to study and meditation. Here he was joined by his friend
Gregory Nazianzen and by enthusiastic admirers, who formed a religious
fraternity, to whom he was a spiritual father. He afterwards was forced
to accept the great See of Caesarea, and was no less renowned as bishop
and orator than he had been as monk. Yet it is as a monk that he left
the most enduring influence, since he made the first great change in
monastic life,--making it more orderly, more industrious, and less
fanatical.
He instituted or embodied, among others, the three great vows, which are
vital to monastic institutions,--Poverty, Obedience, and Chastity. In
these vows he gave the institution a more Christian and a less Oriental
aspect. Monachism became more practical and less visionary and wild. It
approximated nearer to the Christian standard. Submission to poverty is
certainly a Christian virtue, if voluntary poverty is not. Chastity is a
cardinal duty. Obedience is a necessity to all civilized life. It is the
first condition of all government.