FROM JUSTINIAN TO LUTHER

XI

THE PAPACY SUPREME

 

FREDERIC I (1152-1190), Roman Emperor, surnamed by the Italians Barbarossa, Redbeard, was determined to realize the ideals of Charlemagne as to Church and State. Chaste and courageous, hard working and sagacious, he was one of the ablest rulers that Germany produced in the Middle Ages. He was chosen German king at Frankfurt in 1152 and after some difficulties with Pope Hadrian IV, whose stirrup he at first refused to hold, he was crowned emperor at Rome in 1155. He was in constant conflict with the Italians, whom he treated as if they were aliens, and with the popes, whom he regarded as rivals. In 1166 he marched on Rome, stormed the Leonine city, and procured the enthronement in St. Peter's of an antipope, Paschal III. He made peace in 1177 with Pope Alexander III, who had previously excommunicated him, kissed his foot, and agreed to submit to arbitration his dispute with the Pope as to which of the two had the right to possess the vast estates which had been left by Matilda, Countess of Tuscany. His quarrel with the papacy was renewed in 1185 when Urban III became Pope. Soon afterwards the great Muslim Saladin took Jerusalem, and Barbarossa was more anxious to conquer the foe of all Christendom than to get the better of a pope. He set out from Regensburg in June 1189 at the head of a fine army, and reached Asia Minor. He was drowned in a river near Seleucia in Cilicia, and the place of his burial remains unknown. His eldest son became emperor as Henry VI.

Henry VI (1190-1197), cruel, capable, and ambitious, hoped to make the imperial dignity hereditary in his family and aspired to an almost universal dominion. In order to gain his own ends he was prepared to make important concessions to the Pope, possibly even the feudal lordship over the whole Empire. He pushed his rule in Italy nearly to the gates of Rome and induced Pope Celestine III to crown him emperor in Rome in 1191. He died in Sicily in 1197 from a cold caught when hunting, leaving as his heir Frederic II, a child of three years. Celestine died the next year, and the path was left clear for the accession of a Pope who raised the papacy to a height unknown before.

Pope Innocent III (d. 1216) was an ecclesiastical Barbarossa, and brought the medieval papacy to the zenith of its power. In the world he was Lotario, Count of Segni, a wealthy aristocrat of mixed German and Roman lineage. Skilled in the study of law and politics, his life was strict and pious. Before he was raised to the papal throne he had written a work on the Scorn of the World, and he showed his self-control by not shortening the canonical time that elapsed before his ordination to the priesthood and the episcopate. He had to face a situation which was complicated with grave difficulties, political, moral, and religious, and he faced it with a resolution that had important and permanent results. The ends which he endeavored to attain were to secure the political freedom and supremacy of the papacy in Italy, to uphold the spiritual supremacy of the papacy in opposition to all secular potentates, to rescue Eastern Christianity from the Muslims and bind it to Rome, and to exterminate heresy, especially in southern France, which was its peculiar hotbed.

Innocent first secured his authority in Rome, and after a struggle made the municipality obedient to his will. This was, even by itself, no insignificant victory; but it was followed by a masterly success in breaking the German ring which surrounded the so-called Patrimony of St. Peter in central Italy. He added Spoleto and Ravenna to his dominions, and became president of a league of Tuscan cities which had formed part of the inheritance of Matilda.

The relations of Innocent III with France vividly illustrate the difficulties which beset the papacy at this period. Philip Augustus, King of France, was a widower, and he resolved to marry Ingeborg, sister of Knut VI, King of Denmark. The Danes had a good navy and were sailors of an old fighting breed. So the French king thought that they would be useful for his intended invasion of England. Knut refused to take part in this adventure, and Philip Augustus demanded with his bride a dowry of 10,000 marks. The Dane considered this sum a high price to pay even for an alliance with France. But he paid it because he was persuaded that France would protect him against German encroachments. The bride was both beautiful and virtuous, and the marriage was celebrated at Amiens in August 1193. The next day, during the ceremony of the coronation, Ingeborg observed that her husband turned pale and showed feelings of aversion towards herself. Contemporaries attributed his behavior to the influence of sorcery, but the problem of its cause is still unsolved. It remains certain that the king was bent upon immediately divorcing his wife, and actually obtained a sentence of divorce from his complaisant clergy. The hapless Ingeborg, on learning her sentence, cried Mala Francia, mala Francia ... Roma, Roma. And to Rome her brother appealed.

Pope Celestine III sent to France letter after letter and legate after legate. Philip Augustus was obdurate, and to render the divorce irrevocable he sought in marriage the hands of at least three princesses. They prudently refused his advances, and he had to content himself with Agnes de Meran, daughter of a Bavarian noble. Ingeborg was removed to castles and monasteries according to the whim of her lord and master, and complained of rudeness, poor food, and the want of the consolation of religion.

In the meantime Innocent III had become Pope. He told Philip Augustus that the dignity of a king was not to be set above the duties of a Christian, and he put France under an interdict. The king resisted for several years, then professed to yield, and on September the 8th, 1200, the interdict was removed. The next year a Council was held at Soissons at which both sides of the question were elaborately argued, until a simple priest, coming forward from a crowd of spectators, defended the cause of Ingeborg with an eloquence that threatened to carry all before it. The king said that he would be reconciled with his wife. He went off to the abbey of Notre-Dame, where she was living, placed her on his own horse, and rode off at a gallop. This does not mean that he abandoned Agnes de Meran, but her death that year seems to have frightened him into a desire to make peace with Rome, and Innocent met him half-way by pronouncing legitimate the two children of Agnes.

This, however, did not end the quarrel. Philip Augustus continued to demand a divorce, and Innocent III showed miracles of diplomacy in dealing with the two contending parties.

In 1213, when the conflict had lasted twenty years, the king yielded. He took back Ingeborg, if not as his wife, yet as his queen, and she kept her royal rank until her death in 1223. His motive was probably a fresh desire to conquer England. Otherwise he would have continued to flout the papacy as he had flouted it for twenty years, even in a grave matter where he was wholly in the wrong.

Innocent's relations with England must now claim our attention.

 

In 1206 a vacancy occurred in the see of Canterbury, and the right to choose a new archbishop was disputed between the bishops of the province and the monks of the monastery of Christchurch. King John thrust in a man chosen by himself. Innocent then took the matter into his own hands and with rare discernment appointed Stephen Langton, a prebendary of York, educated in Paris. John resisted, with the result that the country was laid under an interdict. The king himself was excommunicated in 1209, and in 1212 declared to be deposed. John was now afraid of Philip Augustus, who had patched up his quarrel with the Danes. He therefore accepted Stephen Langton and surrendered his kingdom to the Pope. He received g back as a papal fief and agreed to pay the Pope an annual tribute. So far Innocent's triumph was complete. Still chafing under the conviction that the English barons intended to demand reforms which he was not ready to grant, John sent an embassy to the Emir of Morocco, though it is doubtful whether he did, or did not, offer to embrace the religion of Muhammad. Reduced to temporary impotence by the defeat of his army at Bouvines in France, he signed in 1215 Magna Carta, which was in fact a treaty between himself and his own subjects, in which the liberties of all classes were secured. John was frantic with vexation, fortified his castles, garrisoned them with mercenaries, and procured from the Pope letters excommunicating his enemies. The excommunication was published, Langton left England, and John seized the estates of his see. The Pope sharpened his sentence of excommunication by excommunicating the rebel lords by name, and his legate, Gualo, forbade Louis, son of the King of France, to invade England. Louis defied the Pope, landed in Kent, and gained many strong adherents. The whole country was torn with strife until John, who is said to have surfeited himself with peaches and ale, died of dysentery and fever after sending a letter commending his children to the new Pope, Honorius.

John was succeeded by his son Henry III. Pope Honorius III was bound in honor and self-interest to protect him. The new King of England was crowned without delay at Gloucester, where he did homage to his suzerain the Pope in the person of Gualo, and in 1220, by the Pope's directions, he was crowned at Westminster by Stephen Langton. Henry lived to rebuild the abbey church of Westminster almost as it stands today, and erected within it a gorgeous shrine for Edward the Confessor.

 

Langton is one of the great figures of this crucial period. He was learned and sincere, essentially English in his combined love of law and love of liberty. It is to Langton more than any other man that England owes the great charter of her freedom. And his resolute attitude towards the king had a parallel in his opposition to the Pope, who in vain commanded him to excommunicate the barons who curbed the king's injustice.

To exterminate heresy in the south of France was among the great desires of Innocent III. He has been denounced for inaugurating a crusade of Christians against Christians. But the Cathari cannot fairly be described as Christians, and Innocent at least showed that he preferred persuasion to persecution. In 1194 the powerful Raymond VI became Count of Toulouse. His morals were entirely Oriental and he was probably indifferent to all creeds, but he openly favored the Cathari, and was said to have allowed his son to be brought up in their tenets. Among the clergy there were a few like Azevedo, Bishop of Osma, and Dominic, the subsequent founder of the Dominicans, who tried to combat heresy by fervent preaching, and by lives of apostolic hardship. Others like Folquet, Bishop of Marseilles, and a papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, were in favor of harsher measures, and these measures the Pope was ultimately persuaded to adopt. Folquet became Bishop of Toulouse in 1206. Pierre excommunicated Raymond VI, and in revenge a squire of the count mortally wounded the legate in January 1208. Pierre, after praying to God to forgive his murderer, received the Holy Communion and died the next day at dawn. Innocent was deeply moved when he heard the news, and took the solemn step of renewing the excommunication of Raymond, absolving his subjects from their oath of allegiance and giving to all Catholics the right to pursue his person and occupy his lands.

Raymond bent beneath the storm. He was ready to accept the hardest conditions imposed by the Pope. He surrendered seven castles, took an oath to expel the heretics, and submitted to being led, naked to the waist, by a papal legate into the church of Saint-Gilles, where he was first thrashed and then absolved. This dramatic scene was enacted on June the 18th, 1209. But it was too late to save Languedoc. An army of Catholics from northern and central France with a throng of bishops and Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, had assembled at Lyons and in July the war began.

The first triumph of the invaders was the capture of Beziers, a town belonging to Raymond Roger, a patron of the heretics, like the Count of Toulouse. Men, women, and children were massacred without mercy. Castle after castle and town after town fell before the fanatical crusaders, who manifested peculiar joy whenever there fell into their hands one of the so-called Perfect, the highest caste of the Cathari. Many of the victors returned home after they had fulfilled their vow of fighting for forty days. Others remained, some of them hoping to settle in a promised land nearer than the Jerusalem sought by the soldiers of previous crusades. By 1215 the independence of Languedoc was a thing of the past, the country was under a new government, both military and sacerdotal, and the common people accepted a regime which at least was some protection against the feudal anarchy from which they had previously suffered. Innocent did not behave with the same bitterness as his legates. He received the unfortunate Raymond at Rome and showed the same consideration towards his son and his ambassadors.

The almost world-wide power of Innocent III was demonstrated in 1215, when he convened the fourth Lateran Council, reckoned by the Roman Catholic Church as the twelfth Ecumenical Council. It was attended by plenipotentiaries of the emperor and of many kings and princes. There were 412 bishops and some 800 priors and abbots. The extraordinary personal ascendancy of the Pope was shown by the fact that though the states represented were vitally concerned with some of the business transacted, the vast assembly did not discuss, but simply endorsed, what the Pope decreed. The seventy decrees began with a confession of faith directed against the Cathari and the Waldensians. The first chapter contains the following important statement in regard to transubstantiation:

“There is one universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is in a state of salvation. In this Church Jesus Christ himself is both priest and sacrifice; and His body and blood are really contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood by the power of God, so that, to effect the mystery of unity, we ourselves receive of that which is His, what He himself received of that which is ours. And moreover, no one can consecrate this sacrament except a priest who has been duly ordained according to the keys of the Church, which Jesus Christ himself gave to the apostles and their successors”.

Students of medieval theology will observe that this statement is much more restrained than some other statements found in medieval writers, for it contains nothing that suggests a material presence of Christ and does not definitely assert that only the “accidents” of bread and wine remain when transubstantiation has taken place.

The Council further declared it to be the duty of every Christian, of either sex, who had arrived at years of discretion, to confess sins at least once a year and to receive the Eucharist at least at Easter. Laymen were to confess to their own priest, but with his permission they might have recourse to a 'discreet and cautious' priest outside. Severe penalties were threatened in the case of a priest who betrayed any secret confided to him in confession. Such a one was to do perpetual penance in a strict monastery. The Lateran Council of 1215 thus makes a mile­stone in the history of the Church's penitential system. For it shows the whole Western Church definitely accepting what had for some time been the common custom both south and north of the Alps, the custom of private confession and private absolution with the priest as the minister of reconciliation. The public features of the older Western, and specially Roman, system disappear, and the confession is made before a priest, and not necessarily before a bishop or a priest who is the bishop's special delegate. The newer method first took its origin among the Celtic Christians of Great Britain and Ireland, so it was from northern Europe that Rome learned the value of private and recurring sacramental confession.

 

The far-reaching nature of papal rule at this period can be illustrated from every quarter of ecclesiastical life. The power of the metropolitans was weakened and their dependence upon Rome continued to be proclaimed by their wearing round their necks the pallium without which they could exercise no jurisdiction. The papal recommendations to vacant sees (Preces, whence those so recommended were called Precistae) were, from the time of Innocent III, changed into Mandata. The right of confirming all episcopal elections was claimed by Alexander III. The authority of the bishops was reduced by papal absolutions, dispensations to break Church rules, and the right of canonization which Alexander III, in 1181, claimed as an exclusively papal prerogative. The popes were represented abroad by legates who were charged with diplomatic negotiations, visitations of churches, and the function of presiding at provincial councils. The Roman Curia, which embraced the various tribunals and departments for dealing with the general business of the Church, deriving its authority from the Pope, increased in bulk and importance. The cost of maintaining it was enormous, and had to be defrayed by the fees levied for the granting of the pallium, confirmation of elections, dispensations, and the more ordinary offerings such as Peter's pence.

In the meantime the decisions already given by the popes were gathered into a body of doctrine and promulgated as laws for the Christian world. Innocent III, Honorius III, and Gregory IX employed their jurists to collect the more important of these rulings, and Gregory's decrees became 'the definite repository of the canon law'.

The Pope was therefore the supreme legislator, as he was the universal judge, of what was in Western Christendom acknowledged to be the entire Church of Christ. He was an absolute monarch, the indispensable head of the episcopate and of the Church itself. The doctrine of papal infallibility, if not already contained in germ in the action of the popes, is plainly akin to the whole idea of an absolute papal monarchy. St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, taught that the Pope, when giving his decisions as head of the Church, is infallible. Thus infallibility in practice came to be followed by infallibility in dogma, though the dogma had to wait several centuries before it was finally accepted.

The age of Innocent III, a period of political, social, and religious ferment, became focused in the lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic, the founders of the mendicant orders.

 

Francis was born in or near 1182, the son of Pietro Bernadone, a rich cloth merchant of Assisi, and of Pica, his wife. Pica is said to have been a native of Provence, and from her it is most probable that Francis derived his love for France, and some knowledge of the sects which criticized the wealth and luxury of the Church. With great refinement of manners he united a love of music and song, and he delighted in all the works of God, sun and moon, flowers and birds. After a year as a prisoner of war in Perugia, he had a long illness, and when convalescent found to his wonder that he could no longer feel his former joy in the scenery of Umbria, the Eden of Italy. He began to be silent and absent-minded; and we hear of his meeting with a leper, hearing a voice from a crucifix in a ruined church, leaving his father's house, and appearing as a beggar amid a jeering crowd in the streets. His father was furious with vexation, and father and son appeared together in the bishop's court to decide the right to certain moneys which belonged to Bernadone, but had been appropriated to pious uses by his son. The bishop naturally decided against Francis, who not only paid back the moneys but at once stripped off his clothes because his father had paid for them. In this scene Dante discerned the espousals of the saint with Poverty, his bride. But he had as yet no clear views as to what his work should be.

He fixed his home near the lonely chapel of Santa Maria della Porziuncula, 'the little portion', which was to become the birth­place of his order. And at Mass on a day in February 1209 he heard the words of the Gospel, 'Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves.'

He went back to Assisi and preached in the streets. He won disciples immediately, men who, like himself, sold all that they had and gave to the poor. When they numbered twelve they went to Rome and Pope Innocent III gave his verbal sanction to their rule. The Pope was cautious, but the evident earnestness of Francis and his companions overcame his scruples. They returned to Umbria and wandered about the country, preaching and singing, working in the fields for food, or begging when no wages were paid to them. They possessed nothing but the rough clothes that they wore. Not even a book was allowed them, for books were costly things.

In 1212 a young and noble lady of Assisi, Clara Scifi, left her father's house and fled to the Porziuncula. She put herself under the direction of Francis and became the founder of the order of Poor Clares. No one understood him better, and she was his firm friend until he died, and his body was brought to her convent to receive the last farewell of herself and her sisters. Happy in the friendship of St. Clara, he was no less fortunate in the support which he received from Cardinal Ugolino. This eminent canonist became the 'Protector' of the order, and it was probably he who suggested a better organization of it, including the institution of separate 'provinces' with 'ministers' over them. Leaving two vicars to exercise his authority during his absence, Francis went to the East, and in 1219 had his famous interview with the Sultan of Egypt near Damietta. The sultan was not unfriendly, and wished to give him presents, which were declined by the intrepid missionary. Before returning to Europe Francis planted the first Franciscan colony in the Holy Land. Shortly afterwards he resigned the generalship of the order in favor of Elias of Cortona, a resolute and prudent guide.

Ugolino gave a fresh proof of his wisdom by supporting the Third Order of lay people who lived in the world but did not desire to be of the world. It was an admirable means of reviving Christianity among the classes which were most in danger of being alienated from the faith. Men and women were able to go about their ordinary work, undertaking certain duties which bound them to one another and to the Church, and filled them with a new enthusiasm. The success of this institution was so great that it can hardly be measured: in a few years' time half of Christendom was penetrated by the lives of people who had a sense of the Gospel message, and while they were servants of the Pope they were also witnesses to Christ. Francis revised his rule in 1221 and again two years later, inflexibly maintaining his opposition to the possession of books by any member of the order. He took the draft to Rome and submitted it to Pope Honorius III, who solemnly approved it, though the nature of holy poverty was left undefined, and a cause of serious trouble was thereby bequeathed to future times.

The Christmas after his rule was finally settled he was in the hermitage of Greccio, when he instituted the simple and touching Christmas custom of having a representation of the manger, the 'crib', of the Babe of Bethlehem. The next August, in the still wilder retreat of Alvernia, after a prolonged season of loneliness and meditation, he saw the vision of the seraph crucified, and began to bear in his body the 'stigmata' of the five wounds of the Redeemer. The fact that he was thus marked appears to be beyond dispute, and is corroborated by modern cases of a similar character. Suffering alike from great weakness and failing eyesight, he set out to visit a physician at Rieti. On his way he stopped at San Damiano to see Sister Clara, and after a night of acute suffering he uttered his most famous song, the 'Canticle of Brother Sun'. He was carried to Rieti, to Siena, and to Assisi. There he bade two brothers sing that last Canticle, but he interrupted their words with the 142nd Psalm, and died after blessing the brothers, bidding them to love God and poverty and 'to put the Holy Gospel before all other ordinances'. The day was October the 3rd, 1226.

It is doubtful whether any other man did as much as Francis to rescue Christianity from being submerged by utter worldli­ness and by fantastic heresies, and his secret lay in his complete devotion to Jesus Christ and in his love of every person and everything that God created.

The unique place which St. Francis has always occupied in the affection and piety of the Christian world has tended to obscure the fame of his great contemporary, St. Dominic.

 

St. Dominic was born in 1170 at Calaroga in Old Castile. After spending several years in study at Palencia, he was ordained and became a canon in the cathedral church of Osma. The bishop persuaded his canons to follow the rule of St. Augustine, and Dominic soon became the prior of the cathedral community of Augustinian canons. He repaired to Rome with his bishop and was charged by Innocent III with the duty of preaching to the Albigenses in Languedoc. He devoted himself to this work for about ten years (1205-1215). The fundamentally destructive character of the Albigensian heresy, and the devas­tating war by which it was exterminated, have been already described. It remains to be added that, although he was on good terms with the ruthless Simon de Montfort, there is no proof that Dominic acted as Inquisitor during the Albigensian war, or that he abandoned his spiritual campaign against the heretics to take part in the crusade. His method was to travel about the country on foot and barefooted in utter poverty, preaching, teaching, and disputing. He made a considerable number of converts, but by no means as many as he desired. And his last sermon in Languedoc threatened that blows might avail where blessings had accomplished nothing.

The order of Dominicans, the 'Preaching Friars', grew out of a band of volunteers who had joined him in his work among the Albigenses. He became filled with the idea that this band might grow into a body of men specially devoted to preaching. The idea was fostered by the Bishop of Toulouse, and in 1216 Pope Honorius III gave his full sanction to the plan. Two general chapters held at Bologna in 1220 and 1221 gave the order a definite form. A special dress was adopted, a white woolen habit with a black cloak, the rule of the Augustinian canons was blended with that of the Premonstratensians, the order was divided into provinces, each under its own provincial, and all under a supreme master-general residing in Rome. At the desire of St. Dominic, and in direct imitation of the Franciscans, it was determined that the poverty of the friars should not be merely individual poverty, as among the monastic orders, but corporate. The order was to have no possessions except its buildings, it was to be a mendicant order, living on charity and by begging.

Dominic died in 1221, having never been able to fulfill his desire of preaching to the Kuman Tatars on the Dnieper and the Volga. But his friars spread rapidly, first through the Latin countries, then to the Slavonic countries, and soon into Greece, Palestine, and central Asia. St. Hyacinth, a Pole received by St. Dominic, travelled in Tibet and northern China, and in the fourteenth century the Dominicans had missions in China, Persia, and India. They were in Oxford in 1221, and by the end of that century had fifty friaries in England. The name of Blackfriars in London, like the name of the Franciscan Grey-friars in Edinburgh, testifies to the former activity of the mendicant orders in our cities. The scholastic organization of the Dominicans is inseparably connected with their work in and beyond Europe. They quickly established in their different provinces veritable schools of arts—logic, natural science, ethics, and politics. To their initiative in this direction the Dominicans owed their predominance in culture. From the first their theology bore a philosophic stamp, and they produced the most famous philosophers of the thirteenth century. The general chapter of 1236 gave an impulse to the study of Oriental languages by ordering that in all provinces of the order the languages of the country must be learned. In this way Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew were studied. The Dominicans also took a preponderating part in the life of the great European universities. In some cases the Dominican schools of theology were simply juxtaposed to the universities which did not possess a theological faculty, and later these universities included the Dominican schools, as had been previously done by Paris and Oxford, which had faculties of theology before the Dominican order was founded.

In St. Francis and St. Dominic the religion of authority met and espoused the religion of the spirit.