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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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2. The Establishment of the Medieval Order. The
real recovery of Europe from what can justifiably be
regarded as “Dark Ages” dates from the latter half of
the tenth century, when the Germans halted the
Magyars, nomadic hordes from Asia, who had carried
their raids across the length and breadth of the conti-
nent. Henceforward the west of Europe was guarded
against the worst of its dangers by the consolidation
of Germany and the establishment of the Magyars in
a sedentary Christian state in Hungary, as well as the
development also of Christian monarchies in Poland,
Bohemia, and Scandinavia. The establishment of a
“Roman Empire” under Otto I in 962 opened at last
a period of comparative stability, and there emerged
something like the shape of the Western Europe we
know—a Europe which by 1053 had lost a great deal
of its connection with the Orthodox Church. Trade and
industrial production increased again, and the Medi-
terranean, which in 972 “like the Baltic, was a hostile
sea,” saw important developments which brought
Venice, Genoa, and Pisa to the front. The period be-
tween 1050 and 1150 was to prove one of the most
creative epochs in European history, and its great
achievement was that it established the real bases of
the medieval system. In this period intellectual influ-
ences from the more highly developed Islamic world
provided an important stimulus; but it was only one
factor in the case. The intellectual leadership had
passed to the northern part of France and to Lorraine.
The promotion of the study of logic (which goes back
to Gerbert in Rheims, A.D. 972, and was based at first
on the writings of Boethius) became “the most impor-
tant feature in the advancement of learning in northern
Europe.”

But from the time of Otto I the Church had become
still more the prey of the laity and a low-water mark
was reached when the Emperor Henry III (1039-56)
deposed three popes and installed his own nominees.
From the Church's point of view, the main problem
to be solved was the question of the independence of
the spiritual authority; for the existing system led to
many abuses and obstructed any attempt to bring the
clergy under discipline. A monastic reform which
started in Cluny in 910, though it did not attack this
problem, established centers of piety over a very wide
area. Another such movement in Lorraine can be seen
from 1046 making a specific call for the absolute inde-
pendence of the spiritual authority. The demand for
change arose in the provinces therefore, and it was
a band of people connected with the Lorraine move-
ment who brought this latter program to Rome and
became influential in that city. They supported their
cause by a study of the canon law, and if on the one
hand they made use of what we know as the “False
Decretals” (produced two centuries earlier in the
province of Tours) they also found more imposing
evidence, including documents from the time of
Gregory the Great.

Perhaps their labors would have been ineffectual if
the Emperor Henry III, though nominating popes, had
not appointed some worthy people to the Holy See.
Their efforts at a time when the next emperor, Henry
IV, was a minor, led in 1059 to a crucial decree which
excluded the laity—whether the emperor or the Roman
aristocracy—from any part in the appointment of a
pope and prescribed an independent election by cardi-
nals. A great development of ecclesiastical litigation
and an increasing number of appeals to Rome may
have represented another way in which action from
the provinces helped to elevate and transform the
papal office. The Lorraine reformers had been equally
anxious—indeed, it would seem to have been their
initial anxiety—that local ecclesiastical authorities
should be liberated from subservience to a powerful
laity. During the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073-85)
the zeal of the pope for the reform of the Church at
large, and particularly the Church in Germany—the
determination to get rid of such evils as simony—led
to that conflict between papacy and empire which was
to form one of the great themes of medieval history.
In any case, the essential system of the Middle Ages
now took shape.

At first it was a controversy as to whether the mon-
arch should choose his own bishops and invest them
with the insignia of the spiritual office. And here the
Church was faced with problems that arose out of the
character of its new entanglement with the world.
Bishops in Germany had vast temporal possessions and
might be the heads of considerable principalities. An
emperor could not be indifferent to the appointment


382

of such formidable dignitaries. What was called the
“Investiture Contest” was in fact open to compromise,
and one pope, in what seems like a fit of absent-
mindedness, accepted the interesting idea of turning
the bishops into purely spiritual officers—a thing which
had no chance of being tolerated by the German epis-
copate. The pope possessed weapons—he could use
discontented magnates, or incite foreign powers, or
foment public opinion, against an emperor. Before
long, pope and emperor were presuming to depose one
another.

There can be little doubt that the assertion of the
independence of the spiritual authority, and the result-
ing conflict between “spiritual” and “temporal,” were
amongst the factors that were to give to Western his-
tory its remarkable dynamic quality. The controversy
directed the thought of men to the question of the
origin and basis of government, whether secular or
ecclesiastical, and produced a literature that has little
parallel in the history of Byzantine Christianity. At
times it led to a confrontation between the theory or
the assumptions of the canon law and the principles
that lay behind Roman Law. The fervor for political
theory in Europe in the centuries from the time of
the Renaissance may owe something (just as medieval
thought itself owed something) to the influence of the
ancient world. But many of the modern ideas rise more
directly out of the politico-ecclesiastical controversies
of the Middle Ages. This point became a great feature
in the historical thinking of Lord Acton, who summed
up the matter by saying that Saint Thomas Aquinas
had been “the first Whig.”

In the age of the Reformation many of the medieval
patterns of thought are still visible, whether in the
theory of the divine right of kings, or the notion of
a contract between king and people, or the idea of
constitutional limitations on monarchical authority, or
the controversy over tyrannicide. At a later period still,
it is possible to trace the actual secularization of what
had once been politico-religious ideas. Without what
under various forms was an epic conflict between the
secular authority and the spiritual, a Western Europe
under a predominant religious faith might have
hardened into something like the Byzantine or oriental
systems.

Gregory VII and the restored papacy stood for the
idea of a Christian Commonwealth—not a “state” but
a “religious society” existing for the glory and the
service of God. The whole was to be managed by a
secular arm and a spiritual arm, and these were sup-
posed to cooperate with one another. Often the two
did cooperate, the Church not only offering its prayers
and its spiritual services—not merely giving a vague
support to the whole order of things—but allying with
the monarch because, for example, it had an interest
in preserving the larger territorial unit from disruption.
The ecclesiastics might introduce the monarchy to
ideas of law, notions of property, the use of written
deeds—techniques of an older civilization which they
were in a position to remember, and perhaps to need
for themselves. Monarchs in turn defended and
endowed the Church; and at a desperate moment an
emperor had helped to produce that reformed papacy
which was to harass his successors. When the two
clashed, it was almost in the logic of the medieval
system that the conflict should be long and that the
spiritual arm should ultimately prevail, but only to its
own detriment. Already, for Gregory VII, the pope
represented Christ, the real governor of the world, and
it was for him to guide the destiny of the “religious
society,” directing and coordinating its larger purposes.
The most signal illustration of this in the latter half
of the eleventh century was the way in which Gregory
VII and his successor took up the idea of a Crusade
assuming that Rome should have the role of inspirer
and director. At a time when monarchs were in revolt
against the Holy See, and Germany in particular with-
held its support, it was the pope, not the emperor, who
launched the First Crusade (1096-99) and showed
himself the leader of Western Europe.