At the moment, Adrian IV. took his seat behind the helm of Peter's
bark, the winds and waves raged furiously against her, nor ceased to
do so, during the whole time that he steered her course. That time,
though short, was yet long enough to prove him a skilful and fearless
pilot,--as much so as the very foremost of his predecessors or
successors, who have acquired greater fame than he, simply because a
more protracted term of office enabled them to carry out to completer
results than he could do, designs in no wise loftier than Adrian's;
and, in so doing, to unveil before the world more fully than was
permitted to him, characters not, therefore, nobler or more richly
endowed than his.
The first difficulty with which the English pope had to grapple, on
his accession to power, was the refractory spirit of the citizens of
Rome, among whom Arnold of Brescia had, some time before, stirred up
the republican mania.
Arnold was a native of the city, indicated by his surname, and was
born there most likely about the year 1105. His was one of those proud
and ambitious natures, in which imagination and enthusiasm are mixed
up in far greater proportions, than judgment and sobriety. From his
childhood he developed shining parts and an ardor for study,
calculated to elicit their full force. To pursue his studies with as
little interruption as possible, he adopted, while yet a boy, the
clerical habit, and not long afterwards obtained minor orders. [1]
In those days, events were passing, at home and abroad, well adapted
to excite all that extravagance, which was to be expected from a
character like his. In Italy, it was the era of the spread of those
republican principles, which were at last fought out so heroically and
through such perils by the cities of Lombardy, against local barons
and transalpine emperors; in Europe, at large, it was the era of the
bloom of intellectual chivalry, whose seat was Paris, whose foremost
champion, Abailard. But it was also the era of a wide-spread
demoralization of the clergy, among whom simony and concubinage were
the order of the day; and, consequently, every other disorder which
naturally follows in the wake of those two capital vices. In the midst
of such a complicated state of things, requiring so much steadiness of
eye to view it properly, so as not to be misled,--on the one hand by a
false admiration, and on the other by a false disgust,--the youth
Arnold devoured the pages of Livy; and imbibed from him, as well as
from other Roman classics, those principles of heathen republicanism,
which he subsequently sought to restore to practice, in the metropolis
of Christendom, with such fatal results to society and himself.
On the completion of his studies at home, he repaired, thirsting for
deeper draughts of knowledge, to Paris; and became one of the most
devoted scholars of Abailard; whose rationalist invasions of the
domain of theological doctrine,--by which the supreme authority of the
Church in matters of faith was threatened,--accorded with Arnold's
tone of mind. In fact, he soon arrived, by the line of argument which
the lessons of his master and his own feelings led him to adopt, at
the firm persuasion that he alone had hit upon the true plan for
reforming, not only the political, but the religious abuses of the
age; and, moreover, that none but he could carry that plan out. Under
this hallucination, which the fumes of pagan principles of
statesmanship and rationalist principles of Christianity, fermenting
together, had hatched in his brain, he returned, after a few years'
stay at Paris, to Brescia; not failing to visit, at his passage of the
Alps, the Waldenses, and other sects, with whose tenets he secretly
sympathized.
On his arrival at Brescia, he opened his career by a series of pulpit
philippics against the temporal government of the Prince Bishop, and
the immoral lives of the clergy. With fiery eloquence, that told all
the more by reason of the sanctity of the preacher's exterior--a
precaution which he took so well that even St. Bernard admitted its
success--Arnold opposed the doctrines and practice of Holy Writ to the
vices and luxuries which he denounced; affirming that the corruption
of the Church was caused by her having overstepped the boundaries of
her domain. That she had done so, was proved, he said, by the wealth
and political power which she had acquired, contrary to the spirit and
example of apostolic times; to whose simplicity she must return if she
was to be reformed as she ought to be, and as, for the good of
society, it was indispensable she should be. Of course, this line of
argument received all that applause which it never fails to do
whenever urged. For the reformation of the Church, by reducing her to
the poverty of the apostolic ages, involves,--besides such purely
spiritual advantages as are set forth at large in the plan,--others of
a material kind, which, if not usually paraded with the first, are not
the less kept steadily in view. For instance, that those who carry out
the reforms in question will be sure to get well paid for their pains;
seeing that the transaction necessarily passes so much money and goods
through their fingers, as well to private, as public profit. And,
then, there is the secret satisfaction naturally felt above all by the
rich and lax, at seeing the clergy, by means of this very reformation,
deprived of much formidable influence--such as wealth always bestows
on its possessors--and which is surely as necessary to the Church as
to any other public corporation, to the end that she may carry out
efficiently the affairs of her vast mission; keep up her dignity amid
an irreverent world; shield her oppressed; relieve her poor members,
and strike respect into powerful sinners, who would not only scorn but
trample on her too, if she had nothing but words to oppose to blows.
In consequence of Arnold's sermons--preached not only at Brescia, but
also in other towns of Lombardy,--and which, besides their virulent
censure of the existing abuses in Church and State, broached opinions
contrary to orthodox faith, especially in regard to infant baptism,
and the sacrament of the Eucharist,--an insurrection broke out against
the Prince Bishop Manfred, in the year 1138, and lasted through the
next.
Manfred made a vigorous stand to begin with; then seemed on the point
of giving way, when an unexpected event turned the scales in his
favour. This was the calling by Pope Innocent II., in the year 1139,
of all the bishops and abbots of the Church to an oecumenical council
at Rome, to condemn the memory of his late rival, the anti-pope
Anacletus II. Among the rest, the Bishop Manfred and the abbots of
Brescia appeared; and did not fail to seize the opportunity of
denouncing the actions and opinions of Arnold to the pope and the
curia. The proper course was forthwith taken; the proceedings of so
pernicious a disturber of the public peace were condemned; himself
warned to hold his tongue in future, and banished out of Italy under
an oath not to return thither, without an express papal permission.
Arnold now betook himself again into France; and smarting with wounded
pride and ambition, vindictively espoused the party of his old master
Abailard, just then embroiled in his famous dispute with St. Bernard.
For the abbot of Clairvaux had found out that it would never do to
allow that honest, but mistaken man to go on spreading his views any
longer unopposed, if the orthodox faith was to be preserved intact in
Christendom; and so, after more than once privately warning him of his
errors to no purpose, accepted a challenge which Abailard at last
vauntingly sent him to a public disputation. This disputation came off
at the Synod of Sens, A. D. 1140, and resulted in the total defeat of
the philosopher by the monk. But Abailard appealed from the synod to
the pope; whereupon the synod suspended its farther measures, and
advised the Holy See through St. Bernard of what had transpired. In
doing so, the latter took care to expose the fatal consequences to
revealed religion involved in Abailard's opinions, and, in one of his
letters on this subject, stated the case thus: "That inasmuch as
Abailard is prepared to explain everything by means of reason, he
combats as well Faith as Reason: for, what is so contrary to Reason,
as to wish to go beyond the limits of Reason by means of Reason? and,
what more contrary to Faith, than to be unwilling to believe that
which one is unable to reach by means of Reason?"
Abailard fared no better at Rome than at Sens. His defeat was ratified
by that authority from which there is no appeal. Moreover, he was
commanded to desist from holding any more lectures; and all persons
who should obstinately maintain his errors were excommunicated.
Foremost among these was Arnold of Brescia, who scorned to imitate
Abailard's submission to the authority of the Church, and blamed his
penitential retreat at Clugny, where he shortly died an edifying
death.
St. Bernard,--who had previously formed an ill opinion of Arnold from
the reports which preceded him out of Italy,--no sooner saw him at
Sens actively interested for Abailard, than he penetrated the entire
duplicity of his character; at the same time that he felt fully alive
to the damage, which the victory just won over error might yet suffer
from a man so able and resolute. Wherefore, as it was not his custom
to serve the cause of truth by halves, the saint resolved to include
the scholar with the master in his denunciations to the pope; who, at
his instance, ordered that Arnold too, as well as Abailard, should be
incarcerated in a convent. But the crafty Italian managed to elude his
doom by a timely flight; and after running many dangers by reason of
the keen chace which St. Bernard gave him, found a safe retreat at
Zurich.
In that age Zurich, by reason of the trade of Germany and Italy
passing through it, was the most flourishing town of Switzerland.
Trading communities are commonly as fond of novelty in opinion as in
wares. Zurich verified this assertion in many ways; for, owing to its
free government, its proximity to the republics of Lombardy, and to
the settlements of the Waldenses in the Alps, the place swarmed with
that motley tribe of political and religious dreamers which Liberty is
ever doomed to tolerate in her train. Of course, Arnold had his clique
among the rest. His reception by the citizens was enthusiastic; a
public situation was given to him; and he resided in the city for the
next six years. During that interval, he confined his activity to
Zurich and the cantons bordering it. In these he propagated his
doctrines with success, and seems to have been forgotten by the public
of France and Italy. No doubt, he may be viewed as having helped to
pave the way for Zwingli in the 16th, and Strauss in the 19th,--both
of whom, like Arnold, spread the poison of their ideas from Zurich.
In the meantime, events were transpiring at Rome which were destined
to call Arnold from his retreat, and produce him again on the great
stage of the world in a part more important than ever. These were the
attempts of the Romans to restore their ancient republic on the ruins
of the papal government. These attempts were not peculiar to the 12th
century, but had been made in preceding ages, invariably to no other
purpose than anarchy to the city, and scandal to the world. Indeed,
there seems always to have been a party at Rome whose adherents, more
pagan than Christian in their hearts, perversely mistook the destiny
of the city; and far from viewing its new spiritual empire as nobler
than its old material one, held the former as something meanly
inferior to the latter; wholly blind to the fact that the senate and
emperors had been merely types of the hierarchy and the popes, and
that in these, and not in those, God had decreed, from the time of
Romulus himself, the true power and majesty of Rome should eventually
reside. This party then,--who viewed the pope as the Jews viewed our
Saviour, whom they would not accept as their Messias, but reviled him
as an impostor because he possessed no worldly-power; this party it
was that, at the end of the 8th century, treated Leo III. with such
impious cruelty in their first recorded attempt to overthrow the papal
government; that in the 10th century not only dethroned, but
imprisoned and murdered, by the hands of the consul Crescentius,
Benedict VI., and plunged the state into such disorders as to render
necessary the bloody but just intervention of Otho III. Emperor of
Germany, who delivered the Holy See from the oppression and
indignities which overwhelmed it. About the middle of the 12th
century, the example of the cities of Lombardy, roused to their
struggle for freedom to a great degree by the eloquence of Arnold of
Brescia, again awoke the republican faction at Rome; where other
elements of lawlessness unhappily existed in the papal schism which
then raged, and in which the anti-pope Anacletus drove from the Holy
See Innocent II., the lawful pope. On the death of Anacletus and the
return of Innocent, the sentence of the council, above mentioned,
against Arnold of Brescia, still more embittered the revolutionary
spirits of the city, worked up to wild enthusiasm by the temporary
presence of that arch-demagogue on the spot to defend his cause. At
last the pope's conduct to the citizens of Tivoli burst the storm of
rebellion over his head.
During the late schism, Tivoli had sided with Anacletus, and on his
death still refused to acknowledge Innocent. A Roman army was
accordingly marched out to reduce the place to obedience, but was
defeated by a sudden sally of the besieged. A fresh army which was
shortly raised behaved better, and Tivoli was reduced. Burning with
shame at the disgraceful failure of their first attempt, the Romans
clamoured for the total destruction of a hated rival and the
dispersion of its inhabitants. But the pope, satisfied with the
triumph of his authority, would lend no countenance to so guilty a
severity, and concluded with his chastised children a fatherly peace.
For thus checking the bad passions of his subjects, he incurred their
displeasure; whereupon, the republican leaders, perceiving their
opportunity seized it at once, and, by their virulent denunciations to
the mob of the pretended tyranny of priests, soon stirred up an
insurrection; and got the citizens to hold a congress in the Capitol,
at which the papal government was declared at an end, and the ancient
republic restored. Innocent strove to counteract this revolution, and
called a synod at the Lateran; before which he protested against any
right of the laity to interfere with his government, much less to
alter it. But his efforts were vain; and he took his ill-fortune so
much to heart that he sickened and died of grief.
Celestine II., his successor, had, as papal legate in France, formerly
befriended Arnold of Brescia: a circumstance that could not fail to
make him popular, and conduce to give effect to his efforts at
conciliation; so that he completely succeeded in allaying the
revolutionary storm during his short reign, which his death terminated
in the spring of the following year.
Under Lucius II., who was next elected to the papal throne, the public
disorders burst forth again in an aggravated degree. Lucius deeply
offended the Romans by seeking to secure himself against their fickle
loyalty in an alliance with Roger, the Norman king of Sicily. In
resentment of this proceeding, the newly elected senate first caused
the strongholds of the Frangipani, and of other adherents of the papal
party within the city, to be demolished, and then sent an embassy to
Conrad III. of Germany to invite him to come and assume the imperial
crown under their auspices, and act as counter-check to the king of
Sicily. But Conrad, mistrusting the high-flown letter containing the
invitation, and feeling moreover little sympathy with rebels against
the pope, declined it.
Hereupon, Lucius thought it the proper time to strike a blow towards
recovering his authority. To this end he marshalled his cardinals and
other dignitaries in all their pomp; put himself at their head, and,
escorted by an armed array of lay partisans, set out for Rome with the
intention of besieging the Capitol.
At first the people, awed by so solemn and resolute an appearance of
the Supreme Pontiff, showed signs if not of helping, at least, of not
resisting his attempt. But the agents of the senate, actively at work
among the crowd, succeeded in dissipating this fatal apathy, and in
rousing, in its stead, so furious a spirit of hostility, that the
result announced itself in a sacrilegious shower of stones, which
rained cruelly on the heads of the priestly host, wholly scattering
it, and hitting the pope himself on the temples; who shortly died from
the effects of the contusion. This catastrophe happened January 25th,
1145.
The next day the dispersed cardinals came together again in St.
Caesarius' church, and set the thorny tiara on the head of a stranger
to their order. This was the abbot of the Cistercian convent of St.
Anastasius in Rome, formerly a monk under St. Bernard at Clairvaux. He
took the name of Eugenius III. He bore the reputation of a mild and
conciliating man; which fact would probably weigh all the more with
the conclave under existing circumstances, from the recollection of
Celestine II., whose gentleness had tamed what it appeared sternness
could not subdue.
But Eugenius now showed that he was not wanting in one set of
qualities, because it had hitherto served his purpose to display
another. For, rather than recognize the new senate, which the
republican party wished to make him do, he quitted the city overnight
with all his suite; went through the ceremony of his installation at
the convent of Forsa; and then retired to Viterbo.
Here he resided some months, and vainly endeavoured through St.
Bernard's agency to induce the Emperor Conrad to arm in his behalf. At
last, losing all patience at the lengths to which the Romans--encouraged
by his absence--had begun to carry things, he levied at
Tivoli, and other well affected places, recruits in his service, took
himself the command, and marched to attack his rebellious subjects.
His expedition was crowned with success; the republicans were humbled,
and sued for peace. This was granted to them on the conditions, that
for the future the pope should nominate the senators; that his Prefect
should be restored and their Patrician abolished. Eugenius then held
his triumphant entry into Rome amid demonstrations of enthusiastic
loyalty, and celebrated there the Christmas of 1145. But it was not
long before the clouds of disaffection gathered again as blackly as
ever, and discharged such a tempest, on the refusal of Eugenius to
give up Tivoli to the implacable hatred of the Romans, that he was
forced to flee over the Tiber, amid a volley of darts and stones,
hurled after him by the mob. Such in fact were the straits to which
the unfortunate pontiff was now reduced, that he at length found it
expedient to pass into France.
It was at this juncture (A. D. 1142,) that Arnold of Brescia received
an invitation from the Roman senate, now wholly rid as it would seem
of its great foe, to visit the eternal city, and lend his aid in
completing, as far as possible, the restoration of the old republic.
Such a golden opportunity of realizing the dearest dream of his
ambition was irresistible. He accepted the invitation at once; and
glowing with the thought of shortly reviving in his own person a Roman
tribune of the ancient stamp, he crossed the Alps at the head of a
fanatical rabble of Swiss, whom, under the hopes of sharing the
glories of the expedition, he had seduced to follow him as a guard
amid its perils.
At his passage through Lombardy, where his name was so popular, new
bands joined his march. On reaching Rome, he and his men were received
in triumph. The citizens, when they heard him in his speeches, set off
by quotations from Livy and St. Paul, style them "Quirites," when they
heard him give his florid descriptions of the greatness of the ancient
republic, and launch his thunders of denunciation at the disgrace of
priestly rule, set no bounds to their enthusiasm, but forthwith
invested the orator with dictatorial powers. No sooner was this done,
than the indefatigable demagogue began his political reforms. These
comprised, among the rest, laws for restoring the equestrian rank, and
the tribunes of the people; for more strictly excluding the pope from
all part in the government; and for reducing to the narrowest limits
the prerogatives of the German emperors, as the first step towards
shaking off their yoke entirely.
At the end of three years, Pope Eugenius returned to Italy, and
addressed a letter from Brescia, in July 1148, to the Roman clergy,
warning them against the proceedings of Arnold, whom he denounced as a
"schismatic," and as the "main tool of the arch enemy of mankind;"
calling on them to desist from abetting rebellion, and to return under
the obedience of their lawful Superior: otherwise to incur
excommunication.
But neither this letter of Eugenius, nor three successive attempts
made by him in the course of the next four years,--at one time by
negotiation, at another by arms,--to enter his capital, availed his
purpose. At last, a fourth attempt towards the end of 1152, by means
of a treaty, under which he agreed to acknowledge the power of the
senate, succeeded.
Nevertheless he did not cease to suffer, during the short remainder of
his reign, bitter mortifications from the insolence of the senate, and
the dictator, Arnold of Brescia, who continued to reside in Rome in
all his greatness, and shortly before the pontiff's death in 1153,
aware of his repugnance to the republic, and alarmed at his growing
favour with the people, defied him openly, by increasing the number of
the senators, from fifty to a hundred, and by giving them as
presidents, two consuls after the ancient plan, instead of the
patrician till then in use.
It was for Eugenius III. that his old preceptor, St. Bernard, composed
at his disciple's request, his famous book "de Consideratione;" in
which the subject handled is, on the duties of a pope; and in which is
given such a graphic description of the degenerate character of the
Romans, as also of the Roman clergy in that age. The following extract
will not be out of place here:
"What is so well known to the world as the license and pride of the
Romans? They are a people opposed to peace, and ever given to
sedition; wild and hard to deal with from all time; who only know how
to obey when they can no longer resist; who possess understanding,
only that they may do evil by it, not to do good. Detested by heaven
and earth, they have impiously outraged both. They are criminals
before God, profaners of his sanctuary, rebels against themselves,
enviers of their neighbours, monsters towards those who do not belong
to them. They love no one, and are beloved by no one. They strive
after the show of being feared by all, while in fact they themselves
fear every body. They cannot endure any submission; but yet know not
how to rule. They are false to their superiors, and oppress their
subjects. They are shameless in their demands, and reject petitions
with a haughty front. With blustering and impatience they press for
presents, and are thankless when they have received them. They are
great talkers with the tongue, but helpless creatures when it comes to
act. They are spendthrifts in promises, niggards in the performance;
the most crawling sycophants, and the most venomous slanderers; who
feign the most honest simplicity, and are the most malicious of
deceivers." [2]
[1] Niccolini, Vita di Arnaldo da Brescia. (Prefixed to his tragedy.)
Francke, Arnold von Brescia und Seine Zeit.
[2] De Consideratione, lib. iv. cap. 2. (Cited by Francke, page 190.)