§ 3 Growth of the Papacy
One marked result of the triumph of Islam in the East and of barbarism in the West was the growth of the Roman Papacy as the supreme ecclesiastical power in Latin Christendom. So long as an emperor had his seat in Italy, the bishop or patriarch of Rome was kept in subordination to the State; and at Constantinople the subordination of the patriarch never ceased. But even in the period from the reconquest of Italy under Justinian to the final renunciation of Byzantine rule, though the Roman patriarchs depended on the emperor to ratify their election, the curtailment of the eastern empire, narrowing as it did the range of the eastern Church, weakened that relatively to the western; while the absence of local monarchy left the way open for an ecclesiastical rule, calling itself theocratic. Had the Italian kingdom of Theodoric subsisted, the development would certainly have been different. As it was, even he, an Arian, was called in to control the riotous strifes of papal factions in Rome.
It belonged to all the patriarchates, as to all bishoprics, that their tenants should magnify their office; and even in the second century we have seen signs of an ambition in the Roman bishop to rule the rest of the Church. Already, presumably, there existed the gospel text: “Thou art Petros, and upon this rock (petra) I will build my Church”—an interpolation probably made in the Roman interest, and sure to sustain a Roman ambition for general headship. But as late as the fifth century some codices seem to have read simply “Thou hast said”; (σὺ εἶπας instead of σὺ εἶ Πέτρος); and in the third we find Cyprian of Carthage insisting on the independence of his Church while admitting the ceremonial primacy of Rome—a proof that the Roman claim was being pushed. In the fourth century Pope Damasus sought to induce the eastern bishops to go to Rome for the settlement of disputes as to certain eastern bishoprics; but was sardonically admonished by a unanimous eastern council to alter his attitude. While the old empire subsisted, the Roman bishop could get no further than his old ceremonial status as holding the primary see in order of dignity. Neither the emperor nor the patriarch at Constantinople would consent to vest any supreme authority in the bishop of the ancient and relatively effete capital; and Theodosius definitely constituted the patriarch of Constantinople the equal of him of Rome (381), though ceremonially second to him. At the same time, the patriarch of Constantinople was set above those of Antioch and Alexandria, a step which promoted the worst of the later schisms and so helped to lose Egypt and Syria. On every side, the normal egoisms and racial instincts can thus be seen determining the fortunes of the faith. The fling of the Greek Basil at Rome, “I hate the pride of that Church,” is typical. Even while the Roman bishop was pushing his claims to primacy, the see of Constantinople, backed by the emperor, was taking province after province from the Roman jurisdiction; and in 451 the Council of Chalcedon, with the support of the eastern emperor, decreed that the bishop of “New Rome” should enjoy equal honour and privilege with his rival. At the same period the bishop of Jerusalem, claiming primacy in his turn, contrived to gain ground as against those of Antioch and Alexandria. Each patriarchate fought for its own hand. The use of the special title of “Papa” by him of Rome was probably an imitation of Mithraism, in the hierarchy of which the chief priest was “Father of Fathers” as the God was “Father Mithra,” and, like Attis, probably called Papa. In the Eastern Church the name became general, all priests being “popes.”
In the history of the Papacy, it is the two early bishops most distinguished for widening the power of the Church that alone have won the title of “Great”—to wit, Leo I (440–61) and Gregory I (590–604), of whom the first began to build up the Church’s local patrimony on the fall of the western empire, and the second to establish her spiritual reign in the north. It is under the latter that the destiny of the Roman see as the head of the western Churches begins clearly to reveal itself. The patriarch of Constantinople of that day took to himself the title of Œcumenical or Universal; and Gregory, whose predecessors had aimed at that very status, pronounced the claim blasphemous, antichristian, and diabolical. A few years later, he was securing through the lesser Augustine his own supremacy over the previously independent Churches of Britain. He even seems to have cringed to the usurping Byzantine emperor Phocas in order to get him to veto the claim of his rival, a concession which appears to have been granted to Boniface III in 606. Still, the papacy had to fight hard for its claims in Britain, Gaul, and Spain; and towards the end of the seventh century Bishop Julian of Toledo is found rating Benedict II for ignorance and jealousy. As Julian was nevertheless sainted, we may infer that the jealousies of rival candidates for the papacy, leading to changes of policy, often checked its political growth. But events forced a policy. In the eighth century the iconoclastic emperors quarrelled with the papacy (under Gregory II) as well as with Greek orthodoxy; whereupon the northern Lombards sought to become masters of what remained of imperial territory in Italy; and of a series of eight or nine Popes (730–72) the majority were fain to call in the help of the Franks. Charles Martel did not actively respond; but his son Pepin did twice, and as victor presented to the Pope (754) the sovereignty of the exarchate, receiving in return the pontiff’s sanction to depose the last feeble Merovingian king, in whose name the house of Pepin had ruled. The end of the new departure was the conquest of the Lombards by Charlemagne in 774, and the establishment in 800 of the new “Holy Roman Empire,” wherein the Pope was the spiritual colleague of the emperor.
Hitherto the bishop of Rome had been popularly elected like every other, and subject like every other to acceptance by the emperor. But after Pope Zacharias (741–52) the eastern emperor was ignored; and Charlemagne was crowned as the successor, by Roman decision, not of the old emperors of the West, but of the line of emperors which in the East had never ceased. Constantine VI, who had just been deposed by his mother Irene (797), was the sixty-seventh “Roman” emperor in order from Augustus, and Charlemagne was enrolled in the West as the sixty-eighth. He even received, with the diplomatic assent of the Moslem Haroun Alraschid, the keys of the Holy Sepulchre from the Patriarch of Jerusalem—an empty but suggestive honour. It was thus inevitable that the new imperial line should sooner or later seek to hold power over the papacy as the old had claimed to do; and Charlemagne made his force felt very much as Constantine had done, going even further in the way of appointing bishops, and lecturing the pope at times with the consciousness of virtual supremacy. So long as the emperor, needing and using the services of the Church to organize his administration, enriched the hierarchy on all hands, enforcing tithes and protecting the entire priesthood against lay turbulence, his pretensions were naturally allowed. Everything depended on the strength of the ruler; and already under Charlemagne’s good but weak son Louis we find many of the bishops, backed by the pope, supporting the emperor’s rebellious sons and claiming to depose him. About 875, again, we find Pope John VIII not only hectoring the weak Charles the Fat, but claiming the right to choose the emperor. Until, however, there began to rise in Italy a new and vigorous civilization, the papacy was on the whole discreetly subject to the ratification of the northern emperors; and this is perhaps the period of maximum demoralization and dishonour in its history; its economic evolution being very much on the lines of that of the original Church in the centuries from its establishment by Constantine till the humiliation of the empire by the Moslems. Intellectually, the papacy had no prestige within the Church. It was in 824 that a council of Frankish bishops at Paris, following on previous declarations, denounced as absurdity the decrees of the Pope enjoining the worship of images. Even when the Pope Gregory IV entered France to support the bishops who backed the rebellious sons of Louis, and threatened to excommunicate those on the emperor’s side, the latter treated him with indignant contempt.
It is in this period, however, that there begins the process of documentary fraud by which the Church, wielding the power of the pen, gradually circumvented that of the sword. Centuries before, the Roman see had made use of forged documents in its disputes with Constantinople; and the Greeks of the day declared such forgeries to be a special Roman industry. As a matter of fact, most of the early ecclesiastical forgeries had been of eastern origin: for instance, the so-called Apostles’ Creed and the Apostolical Constitutions. Of these the first grew up fortuitously in the third century, and received its name after it won currency. Only in the later middle ages was it adopted by the Latin Church. The Constitutions again were a deliberate compilation; and the Roman Church had invented nothing on the same scale. But in the ninth century there was trumped-up among the Frankish bishops, under the name of Isidore (ostensibly the popular encyclopedist of Seville, d. 636), a collection of professedly ancient but really spurious papal decretals, partly proceeding on previous practice, but greatly developing it as regarded the local independence of bishops and their right of appeal to Rome. The original motive of the fraud was local episcopal interest, the bishops having endless causes of grievance against their archbishops, kings, and lay lords. But Pope Nicholas I (858–67) adroitly adopted the forged decretals, professing to have had ancient copies of them, and thenceforth they were made the basis of the papal claims wherever political circumstances gave a good opportunity. The bishops, being thus delivered over to the papacy, lost much more than they gained. A common use now made of the growing papal power was to give monasteries an exemption from the local bishop’s rule; and as the monks in general at this period had a higher character for sanctity that the bishops, who were often extremely unreverend, local sympathy was apt to go with the former, and with the pope, whose distant misdeeds were little known to the laity.
As in previous ages, nevertheless, the disorders of the papacy itself greatly hampered its advance. In the period from John XVIII to Leo IX (1003–1048) six popes were deposed, two murdered, and one mutilated; prolonged contests for the chair were frequent; and in the main it was disposed of by factions of the Roman and Italian nobility. For a time the counts of Tuscany made it hereditary in their family; and once a Roman courtesan of the higher order decided the election, by help of the general worthlessness of the Roman electoral populace, who, having neither commerce nor industry, were fed by papal doles as of old they had been by the emperors. In the tenth century, the papacy had reached its nadir. The general expectation, based on the Apocalypse and other Christian tradition, that the world would end with the year 1000, seems to have turned the thoughts of the more serious away from worldly questions; while the more reckless types, lawless at best in that age, exhibited something of the wild licence seen at times in cities stricken by pestilence, and ships about to sink. When the dreaded year was passed, riot was even quickened; but in the eleventh century a moral instinct began slowly to assert itself. The elections to the papacy had become so scandalous and ruinous—three pretenders claiming the chair at once—that the clergy themselves conceded to the emperor Henry III, in the year 1047, the right to appoint popes; and he used his power four times with judgment and success.
Naturally, however, the reform strengthened the papacy rather than the emperor. Pope Nicholas II, acting on the advice of his powerful secretary, the monk Hildebrand, who was to be one of his successors, decreed (1059) that the election of all bishops should lie with the local “chapters” and the pope; and that the election of the pope should in future be made by the seven cardinal bishops of the Roman district, with the assent first of the cardinal priests and deacons of the Roman churches, and next of the laity; the choice to be ratified by Henry IV, then a minor, or by such of his successors as should obtain the same privilege. Yet, on the death of Nicholas, Hildebrand procured the election and consecration of Alexander II, without waiting for any ratification; and when he himself became pope as Gregory VII (1073) he was on the alert for his famous struggle with Henry over the claim of the temporal power to appoint bishops. Standing on the forged decretals, with an almost maniacal belief in his divine rights, he claimed as pope not only the sole power to confirm bishops, but the power to take or give the possessions of all men as he would; and he threatened deposition to any king who dared to gainsay him. It was in the course of the struggle with Henry, by the use of the now common weapon of excommunication, that he reduced the emperor to his historic act of self-abasement (1077) at Canossa.
The circumstances were in the main in the pope’s favour. Henry was rebelled against in Germany, and Gregory was well able to manipulate disaffection. At the same time, Gregory’s strenuous efforts to “reform” the Church by forcing celibacy on the entire priesthood had set against him multitudes of the Italian and northern clergy, married and unmarried; and these were indignant at Henry’s surrender. Stimulated by their protests, and by the sympathy of various kings whom the pope had arrogantly menaced, he took heart, put down his rebels and rivals at home, and marched in force into Italy, where he met almost no resistance and was crowned by the antipope Clement III, whom he and his party had appointed. Gregory, besieged by his own flock in the castle of St. Angelo, called in his late-made ally the Norman Robert Guiscard, Duke of Sicily, who in releasing him burnt much of the city, and, after a sack and massacre, sold most of the remaining inhabitants as slaves. Everywhere the pope’s cause was lost, and he died defeated, in exile at Salerno under Norman protection, hated by both priests and people as the bringer of slaughter and misery on Germany and Italy alike. The “reforming” pontiff had wrought far more evil than his most sinful predecessors, and still the Church was not reformed.
Henry, rebelled against by his sons, died broken-hearted like his enemy; and for half a century the strife over “lay investitures” was carried on by popes and emperors. The papacy had thus become the evil genius at once of Italy and of Germany, entering into and intensifying every Italian feud, and giving to German feudalism a fatal ground of combat for centuries. Out of all the strife the papacy made ultimate profit. When the war of the investitures was over, it built up the Decretum of the monk Gratian, a code embodying the Isidorean frauds with others, such as the gross pretence that St. Augustine had declared the Decretals to be of the same status with the canonical scriptures. The war, meantime, had ended in a compromise from which also the papacy substantially gained. The result was to turn it ere long into a vast system of financial exploitation. Every evil in the way of simony and corruption against which Hildebrand had revolted was further developed under papal auspices. The people lost all power of electing their bishops; and the rich chapters, on whom the right devolved, became the field of simony for the nobles; while the pope drew from the sale of his ratifications an immense revenue. So rapid was the effect of the new relation that by the middle of the twelfth century the bulk of the current literature of Europe, serious and satirical, was bitterly hostile to Rome, which now impressed many instructed men chiefly as a great machine for extortion. While the Church officially denounced usury, its own usurers were everywhere drawing interest from prelates who had had to borrow money to buy their investitures. The pretence of making the clergy “unworldly” by enforced celibacy was under such circumstances not edifying. Needless to say, while clerical marriage could be officially put down, clerical concubinage was not.
The strength of the papacy as against its many enemies lay (1) in the strifes of States and nations, in which the pope could always intervene; (2) in the feeling of many serious men that a central power was needed to control strife and tyranny; (3) in the compiled system of canon law, which expanded still further the code of the Decretals and of Gratian, and constantly exalted the papal power; (4) in the orders of preaching friars, who acted as papal emissaries, and kept in partial discredit the local clergy everywhere; and (5) in the power of the pope to appeal to the worst motives of ignorant believers. Thus at the beginning of the thirteenth century Innocent III, a zealous champion of the papal power, was able in the teeth of the common hostility of educated men to evoke an immense outburst of brutal fanaticism by offering indulgences, spiritual and temporal, to all who would join in a crusade of massacre against the Albigensian and other heretics of Languedoc, where the Paulician and other anti-clerical doctrines had spread widely. Twenty years of hideous bloodshed and demoralization went far to create an atmosphere in which criticism could not breathe; and the whole evocation of the eastern Crusades, both before and after this period, was carried on by the popes with a clear perception of the gain to their authority from the armed consensus of Christendom under their appeal, on the proffer of indulgences. They had hoped to extend their rule over the East, Christian and paynim; but though this dream came to nothing they were nonetheless aggrandized by the effort. The revived pretensions to dispose of all unclaimed territory on the globe, to depose heretic princes, and to confer sovereignties, were all reinforced.
When the Crusades had ceased, the papal curia, growing ever more exacting, began to draw all manner of yearly dues from Churchmen throughout its jurisdiction, so that whereas in the thirteenth century it had only one auditor cameræ, in 1370 the pope had more than twenty, and every cardinal had a number in addition, all living like their superiors by traffic in privileges. Under Gregory XI (1370–78), seven bishops were excommunicated by one order for failure to pay their dues. Complaint was universal; but the vested interests made reform impossible. When, therefore, the Renaissance gradually gained ground against all obstacles, and masses of men became capable of judging the papacy in the light of history and reason as well as of its own code, it was inevitable that as soon as local economic interests became sufficiently marked, an institution which was everywhere an economic burden should incur an economic revolution.
In the meantime, the papacy had possessed itself of the power of life and death in the intellectual as well as in the religious sphere. The power it arrogated to itself under the false Isidorean Decretals carried implicitly if not explicitly the attribute of infallibility. To pronounce doctrines true or false had anciently been the function of councils; it now became the function of the pope, who thus treated councils exactly as kings later treated parliaments. Of old, successive popes had notoriously declared for contrary dogmas; many had contradicted themselves; and down to the thirteenth century there had been a score of papal schisms, all of which were surpassed by those of the fourteenth century; but that reflection put no check on later decisions on the most momentous problems. The religion which began in private dissidence from Jewish and pagan orthodoxies had become the most iron dogmatism the world had ever seen; and the whole system of Christian credence had come to turn on the fiat of one man. At his sole veto the sciences must be dumb; and to him must come for sanction those who would found new schools. The faith that had begun as “liberty from the yoke of the law” had come to elevate the negation of mental liberty into a principle of universal polity, translating into the inner life the despotism which the older Rome had placed on the outer.
Latin Christianity had thus duplicated on the one hand the development of ancient Gaulish Druidism, wherein the priests were a sacred and ruling caste and the arch-Druid semi-divine, and on the other hand the evolution of the ancient Egyptian system, under which latterly the priesthood compelled the king to obtain the approbation of the sacred statues before taking any public step, till at length “the true master of Egypt was the Premier Prophet of the Theban Ammon,” interpreter of the God, and priest also of the mediatorial Son-God Khonsu. In all cases alike the sociological causation is transparent from first to last; and equally clear are the special conditions which prevented the Holy Roman Empire from following to the end the path trodden by ancient Egyptian and Roman imperialism.