FROM JUSTINIAN TO LUTHER

IX

EMPIRE AND INVESTITURE

 

THE Holy Roman Empire, taking the term in its ordinary sense, denotes the sovereignty of Germany and Italy vested in a Germanic prince. It was the creation of Otto I, though it was in a large measure a prolongation and revival of the empire which had been framed by the genius of Charles the Great in AD 800. To the modern student the long strife between the papacy and this empire seems perplexing, ignoble, and very carnal. Yet we must remember that in this strife there were on both sides men who acted with sincerity and learning, and that they were face to face with a religious problem of the greatest importance. The relation of the Christian Church to a non-Christian State is often difficult, but the relation of the Christian Church to a Christian State is sometimes more delicate. The men of the Middle Ages had derived from St. Augustine something of his magnificent idea of a divine society, the Civitas Dei, whose regal authority is independent of any earthly sovereign. They believed firmly that it was the will of God that all mankind should be embraced in this society, and they saw that it has necessarily two aspects, one concerned primarily with this life and the other with the life to come. And these two aspects of civilized and Christian life were by the will of God embodied in two orders, Sacerdotium and Imperium, the first spiritual and the second temporal. Christ is the head of the whole community with its two distinct orders, and the emperor is the guardian of the secular order and the sphere of human life. But what of the Pope?

The separation of Eastern from Western Christendom left the Pope in a position of enhanced and solitary dignity. He was the vicar and the representative of Christ. As such he claimed authority over the whole of the divine society on earth, and disputed the right of any emperor who maintained that in the secular sphere the emperor was God's vicar. The advocates of the papal theory were able to allege an argument of startling simplicity: viz. the Almighty has entrusted the Pope with all possible authority as His representative, this authority includes the temporal sphere no less than the spiritual, therefore any power which the emperor derives from God, he derives through the Pope. Some difference of opinion existed as to the degree of divine sanction given to the temporal power. But it was regarded generally on the papal side as a sanction given grudgingly and of necessity. Pope Gregory VII was quite explicit on this point. Kings have derived their power from men who have gained it by 'pride, plunder, perfidy, murder', and have been instigated by the prince of this world, namely, the devil. Kingly rule is, on the whole, evil, tolerated by God rather than approved by God. Gregory VII does indeed compare the spiritual and the secular power to the two eyes in one man's head, but this intelligible symbol represents his attitude of mind less correctly than his comparison of the two powers respectively to the sun and the moon and to a man's soul and his body.

In practice the papal theory meant that the Pope might supervise and correct any possible action performed by the emperor or any secular ruler whatever. So long as this supervision was exercised in favor of justice and mercy, the doctrine upon which it was founded could not be opposed with much prospect of success. But the doctrine met with disaster when men realized that papal interference with imperial politics had been commonly actuated by avarice and ambition, and that the morality of the Vicar of Christ was identical with that of 'the prince of this world.

Short of any disastrous schism, some serious contention between popes and emperors was almost inevitable, even in the days of high-minded pontiffs. And contention blazed over the question of lay investiture, the nature of which must now be described.

Investiture was an installation into office which symbolized the relation between a vassal and his suzerain. The suzerain, after receiving an oath of fealty from his vassal, handed to him some symbol, such as a banner or a branch. At a later date a sword and a scepter were given to important vassals as signs of military and judicial authority. A contract was thus made between the two parties; protection was promised by the superior and honorable service by the inferior. The vassal became the tenant of lands, great or small, on condition that he rendered such aid as his lord required. This aid took more especially the form of military service, though in a feudal state there was hardly any service owed by a man to the state which was not somewhere included in the duty of certain tenants.

Now the Church had gradually come into possession of a vast amount of land. And it had become the custom for kings to invest bishops with emblems of their office as a sign that in return for the safe enjoyment of these lands they must render certain services to the king. In Germany the Church lands were so important that if the bishops had refused to own any obligations to the sovereign, the State would have been threatened with total ruin. And in return for the bishop's oath of fealty, it was the custom for the emperor to invest him with the ring and the pastoral staff, symbols of the bishop's marriage to the Church and his spiritual authority over his flock. Against such an investiture the strongest protest was naturally made by the reforming party in the Church. Their objections were based not only upon the obvious fact that the investiture seemed to imply that a bishop derived his spiritual authority from the king and not from the Church, but also upon the very real danger of ecclesiastics purchasing their sacred office from the king as a layman might purchase the use of land by the payment of a rent or fine.

Henry III, Roman Emperor, died in 1056, two years after the breach between Eastern and Western Christendom. Ambitious, strong-willed, capable of ruling in both peace and war, he made the Slays of Bohemia his vassals, gained the friendship of the Poles, and conquered Hungary. He endeavored to maintain justice and quiet throughout his immense dominions, and in this arduous task he turned his eyes towards the Church. We have already noticed how he deposed the three claimants to the papal throne. Associating himself vigorously with the reforming work of the monks, he tried to check abuses at home as well as remove the cancer which was consuming the Church in Italy. He was, consciously or not, preparing for the gigantic struggle in the next century between two great principles, on one hand the domination of an international Church State, and on the other hand the domination of national State Churches controlled by civil rulers. In both England and France the struggle was destined to be difficult. But everything pointed to the fact that it would be on its grandest scale in Germany. The head of the Empire not only, like the kings of England and France, invoked his royal prerogatives and the independence of his temporal authority. He regarded himself as one of the two earthly heads of the Church and, deprived of the right of intervening in the election of popes, he defended with all the more energy his claim to intervene in the election of bishops.

Henry IV (1056-1106) was destined to feel the keen edge of the ecclesiastical discipline which his father had taken so great pains to sharpen. For a time the State was ruled by Anno, Archbishop of Cologne, and then by the more genial Adalbert, Archbishop of Bremen. But Adalbert, and then Henry himself, raised up a swarm of enemies. Henry favored the Swabians, sneered at the Saxons, and offended the nobles whose right to certain old crown lands he disputed and denied. He also encroached on the rights of the peasants and covered the land with forts which the peasants suspected would be used as prisons. Discontent was almost universal, and it found expression in the outspoken utterances of an assembly held at Wormesleben, and then in a general insurrection. The rising of the peasants alarmed the princes, some of whom hastened to support Henry. He entered Saxony with a formidable army and won a decisive victory over the rebels in 1075. Two years earlier, Hildebrand, son of a Tuscan peasant, trained at Rome and imbued with a juristic spirit, a man of commanding genius who had been steadily rising from one honor to another, became Pope, with the title of Gregory VII. To this Pope the Saxons made an appeal.

 

Now it happened that Gregory VII had just issued a decree against the marriage of the clergy and against the practice of laymen investing ecclesiastics with the emblems of spiritual office. The question of lay investiture vitally affected different sovereigns, and no one so much as Henry IV. Threatened by the papal ban, he summoned a synod of German bishops who met at Worms in 1076 and declared Gregory deposed. He himself wrote a letter to the Pope in which he called him 'not pope, but false monk'. Gregory immediately excommunicated him, and Henry found himself in a desperate position. His subjects were openly disaffected, and a Diet held in October 1076 discussed his deposition, and finally decided that he should be judged by an assembly to be held under the presidency of the Pope.

Henry determined to grasp the nettle of humiliation in spite of its sting. He set out to find the Pope and tracked him to the fortress of Canossa in the Apennines. Here, outside the inner walls of the castle, in the midst of the snow, clad only in a coarse woolen shirt, Henry presented himself on Sunday, January the 22nd, 1084. Gregory was inexorable, and refused to see Henry until the evening of the third day. Then, after the emperor had prostrated himself in the snow, the Pope, at the instigation of Hugh, Abbot of Cluny, raised him and gave him the kiss of peace.

The story of this spiritual duel in the snow has burnt itself into the history of Christendom, and we naturally ask, who was the real victor? To some it has seemed that the humiliation of Henry was a victory of spiritual force over worldly power, and to others a victory of arrogance over misfortune. And for the moment the triumph of Gregory VII must have seemed dazzling, though his own words show that even some of his own followers described his action as one of 'tyrannical ferocity' rather than apostolical severity. But Henry had also won a victory. His quick submission divided his opponents. He deprived the German nobility of any just reason for continuing their rebellion, and he deprived the Pope of a most promising opportunity of acting as the supreme judge of the internal affairs of his empire. It was impossible to refuse absolution to a penitent who had performed such a penance, and impossible to disguise the fact that absolution was bestowed.

Henry's refractory nobles felt that they had been outwitted, and promptly chose as a new king Henry's brother-in-law, Duke Rudolf of Swabia. For three years the Pope waited to see the result of their choice, and then, early in 1080, came to the conclusion that Rudolf would keep the throne, and he again thundered a sentence of excommunication against Henry. But before this took effect Henry had gained considerable support from the citizens of the Rhineland and southern Germany, who saw that their liberties were less threatened by Henry than by his nobles. And when the second excommunication was pronounced, it awoke new sympathy with the victim. His military power was now sufficient to defeat Rudolf, who was slain in a battle in October 1080. The next year Henry entered Italy unopposed. He besieged Rome, and, after two years of intermittent siege, obtained possession of all the city except the castle of St. Angelo. He set up a new Pope, Wibert, Archbishop of Ravenna, who took the name of Clement III, and from his hands he received the imperial crown. But his Italian adventures were not yet over. The Eastern emperor, Alexius, persuaded him to attack the Normans in Apulia. The Normans forced him to retire, sacked Rome, and rescued Gregory. Henry returned to Germany. But the Pope could no longer live among the people who had deserted him. He retired with the Normans to Salerno, the Normans who had devastated his city, and died in May 1085 uttering the tragic words, 'I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile'.

The Norman conquest of England in 1066 coincided in time with the influence of Pope Gregory VII. It was fraught with importance for the history of the English Church, which hitherto had been hardly affected by the monastic and religious revival which issued from Cluny.

William I (? 1027-1087) was indubitably a great king and a sincere Christian. He was stern and cruel to his opponents, though the hideous mutilations which he sometimes inflicted on them were too common in the Middle Ages to be considered as a proof that he loved cruelty for cruelty's sake. Faithful in wedded life, temperate, regular in his religious duties, he turned his inflexible will to the improvement of the Church. The English bishops had been slack, and their places were now taken by vigorous foreigners, of whom the most distinguished was Lanfranc, the new Archbishop of Canterbury. The great abbacies were also given to aliens, and new zeal and learning were infused into the Church. This alliance with continental reform brought with it the danger of an unwise subservience of the temporal to the spiritual power; but to prevent such a result, William I fully availed himself of the customary freedom of the English Church in his dealings with the papacy. About 1076 a legate came from Gregory VII demanding that he should do fealty to the Pope and send Peter's pence. He replied that he would send the money as his predecessors had done, but would not do fealty, for he had not promised it and his predecessors had not done it.

To guard against papal interference he laid down three rules as necessary to his kingly rights: (1) that no one should be recognized as Pope in England without his command and no papal letters received without his leave; (2) that no English synods might make enactments which he had not sanctioned; (3) that no barons or officers should be excommunicated without his approval. He retained in his own hands the choice of bishops and abbots, but took the rather hazardous step of separating the ecclesiastical courts from the civil courts. The bishops were allowed to have courts of their own and to enforce obedience to them by excommunication, a right which they had not enjoyed in Saxon times.

 William I and Lanfranc were strong and disinterested in the matter of Church reform and organization; but the balance of power which they maintained between Church and State, Pope and King, was too delicate to survive when men of inferior character came to occupy their places.

 

William Rufus (d.1100) looked upon the Church as a property to be plundered. Lanfranc exacted from him promises that he would govern justly, but died too soon (1089) to check effectually the Red King's career of iniquity. On Lanfranc's death the see of Canterbury was kept in the king's hands till 1093, when, lying sick at Gloucester, he invested Anselm, Abbot of Bec in Normandy, with the see, and also promised to amend his life. Once recovered from his sickness, William sought every possible opportunity for a quarrel with Anselm. He resented the archbishop's protests against the vices of his court, he opposed his endeavors to secure reforms in the Church, and he was indignant with Anselm for definitely siding with Pope Urban II instead of remaining neutral and supporting neither the Pope nor the antipope, Clement III. Constantly harried and thwarted, Anselm requested leave to go to Rome. In 1097 he received permission to go and the king promptly seized the archbishop's estates. Three years later William Rufus was killed while hunting in the New Forest, though no one can tell whether the arrow that smote him was sped by vengeance or by mischance. His bloated body, fiery face, blasphemy, avarice, and loathsome vices made him the object of his nation's scorn. It was no crime on the part of the monks of Winchester that they would chant no requiem for his soul, although they buried his body beneath the cathedral tower. Nor was it wholly foolishness that when that tower fell, seven years afterwards, the common people regarded the fall as a sign that even such a burial was undeserved by such a sinner.

Anselm, a native of Aosta and friend of Lanfranc, was a philosopher and a saint, and one of the greatest and most humble men that ever sat on the throne of St. Augustine. His zeal for learning, justice, and virtue was recognized far beyond the borders of England and Normandy, and Pope Urban received him with flattering cordiality and called him 'Pope of another world'. From Rome he went to Apulia, where, in a mountain village, he finished his famous treatise on the Incarnation, Cur Deus Homo. In October 1098 he attended a large council of bishops at Bari, where he strongly defended against the Greeks the doctrine of St. Augustine concerning the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit 'from the Son' as well as from the Father. The council would probably have excommunicated William Rufus if it had not been for the intercession of Anselm himself. He returned to England in October 1100, having received an earnest request to do so from King Henry I. Unhappily the king and the archbishop soon found that they were divided by a serious difference. Anselm had come back to England pledged to observe the canons made at Bari and Rome, which forbade clerics to receive investiture at the hands of laymen or to do homage for their benefices. Henry required him to do homage for the restitution of the temporalities of the see of Canterbury, of which he had been deprived by William Rufus. This Anselm declined to do. Henry then proposed a truce, and it was agreed to send envoys to Rome to request that in England the ancient customs with regard to investiture and homage should be retained. The new Pope, Paschal II, was inflexible. A second embassy was sent to Rome, and at last Anselm and an envoy from the king went to Rome in 1103. Paschal then excommunicated all who had infringed the new laws, except Henry. This left the question still unsolved. Throughout the dispute Anselm's own action was clear and straightforward. He pressed the Pope to give a plain decision, and at the same time was willing to hold intercourse with the bishops whom Henry invested, so long as he was not himself required to consecrate them. The controversy still dragged on. From the Pope Anselm could only get promises, and from Henry excuses. Determined to force the matter to an issue, he, in 1105 threatened to excommunicate Henry. Henry yielded and a reconciliation was effected.

A formal settlement of the controversy was made in 1107 in London. The king decreed that henceforth no man in England should be invested for bishopric or abbey with staff or ring by any layman, and Anselm promised that no one should be debarred from consecration by the fact of having done homage to the king for his lands. Anselm did not long survive this eminently satisfactory compromise. He died in April 1109, and was buried at Canterbury, where his remains still rest. He was a man in whom an exquisite integrity of character was united with unflinching courage, one in whom an untiring search for truth was quickened by his knowledge of God in Christ.

St. Anselm's chief literary works are the Monologion, the Proslogion, or Address to God, the Cur Deus Homo, or Why God became incarnate, and the Prayers. The two former are logically connected, and the Prayers help to enrich our understanding of his doctrine of Christ's work and Person. That doctrine has been charged with conceiving the incarnation from a legal and feudal standpoint, a conception of God's justice rather than God's fatherhood. Nevertheless, Anselm's teaching contains elements of the highest value. He taught men to face sin seriously, and to know that they cannot strike a bargain with God, or approach Him as a kindly being who forgets rather than forgives. And he dealt a deadly blow to the strange notion that the 'ransom for many' given by the dying Saviour was a price paid to the devil and not an offering freely made to God. The Proslogion contains the famous maxim Credo ut intelligam, 'I believe in order that I may understand,' a maxim which was not intended to cramp free inquiry, but to affirm that religious experience is necessary for the man who is seeking a philosophy of religion. The backbone of the argument is that the very idea of God presupposes His real existence, since we conceive of God as perfect—and He would not be perfect without the attribute of existence. This was criticized by Gaunilo, a monk of Marmoutier, who urged that the mind can create, by synthesis, the idea of a perfect being to which nothing corresponds in the realm of reality. Anselm studied this criticism with pleasure, and replied to it with equal acuteness and courtesy. In his answer he practically admitted that his original statement of the argument was not sufficient, and he put it into a new form which remains sound if we assume that what is most real is not only most satisfactory to thought, but also is approved by our moral consciousness as the best.

 

Under King Henry II (1133-1189) the alliance between Church and State which had been cemented by Henry I and Anselm was again in jeopardy. The point of burning friction was now the relation of the king's court to the ecclesiastical courts.

The early years of Henry's reign were partly devoted to securing peace at home, and partly to schemes of aggrandizement in Ireland, Wales, and France, and the recovery from the Scots of the northern counties of England. During this period the king found a keen and devoted servant in the person of Thomas Becket, who was born of Norman parents in London, and after receiving an excellent education in England and Paris, became an inmate of the household of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. Becket accompanied Theobald to Rome in 1143, and for a time studied canon law at Bologna. In 1154 he became Archdeacon of Canterbury after taking deacon's orders; and the next year Henry, on the recommendation of Theobald, made him chancellor. In this high office he helped the king to break the dependence of the Crown upon its feudal tenants for the supply of a military force, and to sweep away the exemption from taxation enjoyed by knights and by ecclesiastics.

To secure the help of Thomas on a still wider scale, Henry, in 1162, set ecclesiastical propriety at defiance by urging the chapter of Canterbury to elect his deacon-chancellor to fill the vacant see. He was duly elected and consecrated, and the virtuous and vigorous statesman became at once transformed into the ascetic and uncompromising primate. The very next year he opposed, apparently with both justice and success, a project mooted by Henry for a changed method of levying the land-tax. This incident is the first known case of any opposition to the king in the matter of taxation in England. Henry was irritated, and his irritation became more bitter and personal when Thomas came forward as the champion of the privileges of the ecclesiastical courts. His answer to the archbishop was given in the Constitutions of Clarendon, issued in 1164, which professed to define the relations of Church and State according to ancient law and custom. Of the sixteen provisions the most contentious was one declaring that criminous clerks were to be summoned to the king's court and from thence, after formal accusation and defence, sent to the proper ecclesiastical court for trial. If found guilty, they were to be degraded and sent back to the king's court for punishment. By other provisions appeals to Rome without the license of the king were forbidden, and no bishop was allowed to be elected without the king's permission. The opposition of Thomas was a foregone conclusion, and the king summoned him to appear before a council at Northampton. Here he had to meet a series of unjust demands and accusations, and, after appealing to the Pope, he left the council and fled to the Continent. His cause was immediately espoused by Pope Alexander III and Louis, King of France.

Henry's ambition led him at last to commit an extraordinary blunder. He determined to have his heir crowned during his own lifetime and to do this at a most inopportune moment. In spite of the protest of Pope and primate, the young king was crowned by Roger, Archbishop of York, and he was crowned without his wife, the daughter of the King of France. Thomas returned to England and the Pope suspended Roger and all the bishops who had assisted at the coronation. And when Henry was keeping the Christmas of 1170 at Bures near Bayeux, Roger appeared with the bishops of London and Salisbury and told him that Thomas had refused to absolve them from the Pope's sentence. It was then that Henry, always restless and passionate, burst into the exclamation, “What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house that not one of them will avenge me of this one upstart clerk!” It is not likely that he meant to be taken at his word. But four knights who heard him crossed the sea, and killed Thomas in his own cathedral church in the dim light of the December afternoon. As he died he held his cross, and after three cruel blows on the head, he murmured, “For the name of Jesus and for the defence of the Church I am ready to embrace death”. He was canonized in 1172, and two years later the penitent king knelt at his shrine barefoot, and submitted to be scourged by the seventy monks of the cathedral chapter.

Other English saints have perhaps been more saintly than St. Thomas of Canterbury. None was more brave or more popular. No holy place in England attracted so many pilgrims or such costly offerings as his tomb, which was looted by command of Henry VIII in 1538. And if the pilgrim crowds that took their way through Kent were sometimes more merry than devout, we can be grateful to them and to 'the holy blisful martir' for suggesting the immortal prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

We have seen that St. Anselm's name is specially connected with the settlement of the dispute concerning lay investiture, and the name of St. Thomas Becket with the principle that the spiritual body, the Church, must be the judge of spiritual things. But there was a notable member of the Church of England who took part in the actual struggle between the Empire and the papacy which touched the root of all such quarrels. This was the only English pope, Nicholas Brakespeare, who took the name of Hadrian IV. He was an English boy whose father entered a monastery, leaving his son to shift for himself. He went to France and Italy, and by his own merits rose to eminence. Pope Eugenius III, who made him Cardinal of Albano, sent him in 1152 to the Scandinavian kingdoms, and he skillfully promoted the organization of the Churches of Norway and Sweden. Learned and eloquent, he was elected Pope in 1154, and was resolute in his determination to claim for the Roman see everything that had been claimed by Gregory VII. But his assertion of the divine right of the popes was confronted by an equally resolute assertion of the divine right of kings. The mighty Emperor Frederic I Barbarossa (1152-1190), was a lion in his path, a lion that he sometimes wounded but could never tame. Hadrian incensed the Romans by crowning him in St. Peter's Church in 1155, but two years later a breach between them began to widen. A Swedish archbishop was seized and imprisoned in Germany and Frederic refused to procure his release. The Pope then sent to the Diet held at Besançon Cardinal Roland of Siena with a letter which adroitly suggested that the Empire was a papal fief. The cardinal, who was greeted with cries of protest, then exclaimed, “From whom then does the emperor hold the Empire if not from the Pope?” The assembly was so furious that he hardly escaped with his life, and the Pope was obliged to explain away his purposely ambiguous letter. Frederic was satisfied with his explanations, but a lasting peace was impossible, and Hadrian IV was only prevented from excommunicating his opponent by his death in 1159.

The popes continued firmly to maintain the principle that the Pope is so supreme in the Christian Commonwealth that he can refuse to ratify the election of an emperor and can depose an emperor if he thinks fit. In this struggle both the Empire and the papacy approached the brink of ruin, and the papacy only secured a permanent victory over the German imperium by submitting to the yoke of France. France came into the foreground of ecclesiastical and political life very soon after the death of the Emperor Frederic II, in 1250. That versatile monarch, whose love of logic, medicine, and luxury caused it to be said that he was more a Muslim than a Christian, was excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX in 1239 and denounced with apocalyptic vigour. He was again excommunicated and deposed in 1245 by a general council held at Lyons under Pope Innocent IV, and he retaliated by threatening to reduce the Pope and his clergy to a condition of apostolic poverty. After some enjoyment of success his army sustained a crushing defeat in 1248 at Parma, where his harem and his imperial insignia were captured in a sortie made by the garrison. He never recovered from the blow, and died in December 125o. Innocent IV, when he heard of the death of his enemy, repeated the words of Psalm XCVI. II, “Let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad”. The Imperium was conquered and the Sacerdotium was victorious. The popes in a great measure owed their victory to the fact that they leaned upon lasting spiritual principles and the divine promise to St. Peter. But they misused their powers, and ended by appearing among the foremost of temporal monarchs rather than shepherds of the flock of Christ.