Medieval Political Ideas (Routledge Revivals)

Volume II

Ewart Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415642255
• eBook ISBN: 9781136170546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea medieval

First published in 1954, this book explores the political ideas of the Middle Ages. It covers the period from the investiture struggle to the end of the fifteenth century and provides comprehensive readings of otherwise inaccessible source material. Each chapter begins with an introductory essay on the subject at hand that leads to a number of translated passages, numerous enough to display a variety of opinion and long enough to indicate the process of thought as well as its conclusions.

This book is the second of a two volume set and will be useful to teachers and advanced students of political theory and medieval history. Topics discussed in this volume include authority in the Church, the problem of the Empire and the relationship between the Church and the State.

Chapter Eight

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REGNUM AND SACERDOTIUM

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THE relation between kingship and priesthood was the dominant problem of medieval political thought. The political speculation of the Middle Ages was not, of course, entirely focused on this one continuing and complex issue: there were other practical problems on which the grave tides of medieval opinion broke into agitated debate; there were eddies of active if not immediately practical argument where two streams of tradition met. As we have seen, there was scarcely any topic among the permanent problems of political philosophy which was not to some extent a theme of medieval discussion. But those who write the history of medieval political thought in terms of the conflict between secular and spiritual authority do not greatly distort the historical picture. Of all conflicts, this was by far the most enduring and the most comprehensive; its practical stakes were enormous and its theoretical complexities elaborate.¹

It was essentially a question of the mutual adjustment of the authority of two sets of offices serving two sets of human purposes. It appeared as a problem because of the appearance of empirical conflicts between these offices, but it appeared to medieval minds as a problem capable of rational solution because they regarded such conflicts as occurring within a single society destined by God to be harmonious. It was funda- mentally not a problem of state versus church, as modern language too glibly puts it, but of rifts within the single respublica Christiana.² Certainly in its first emergence it is best spoken of as a conflict between regnum and sacerdotium—between kingship and priesthood; and though later corporate conceptions tended to round out the regnum into a state, the sacerdotium into a church, yet medieval thought never came to conceive them as two completely separate societies, or detached them from the matrix of that one commonwealth of believers whose different purposes they differently served.

The medieval question has some analogy to the question, raised particularly by modern pluralists, of the relations among the multiple associational forms of modern life; but the analogy is imperfect. The basis of the problem for medieval minds was not the prolific human individual, entering with his fellows into a variety of free-will associations, sharing his loyalty and interest among them in proportions determined only by himself. It was rather founded on the divine plan in which all human needs and purposes were rooted; thus, however secular and spiritual authorities might in practice conflict, the principles of order and harmony that might control such conflicts must be believed to have objective existence, needing only to be found. This guarantee of an ultimate unity in the divine plan had varying effects. On the one hand, it encouraged one group of thinkers to hope that a solution could be found through harmonious coordination and precise articulation of spheres of authority without the institutional subordination of one to the other. On the other hand, the very assumption that an underlying unity existed led others to the conviction that that unity ought to be expressed and made effective in institutional organization flowing from a single apex of authority; and they could hold that conviction without fear of despotism because of their belief that such organization would be guided and controlled by the rational order of the divine plan. Thus for both sides the question seemed to be that of the institutional means through which a proper distribution of functions to secure both specialization and coordination might be achieved. The best modern analogy is the question of the proper relations among the specialized parts of a single governmental system.

The medieval problem was partly shaped by its historic origins. The church grew up inside a state. The Christian emperors, heirs of the emperor-gods of pagan Rome, not unnaturally regarded themselves as still, at least, supreme pontiffs with a general authority over an institution whose organization, policies, and doctrines profoundly affected the political stability of the empire; and the prelates of those early centuries were often only too glad to encourage imperial intervention in ecclesiastical affairs so long as that intervention supported their own convictions and interests. Their first ambition went no further than the assertion that the souls of emperors like those of all believing Christians were subject to ecclesiastical discipline. ‘The emperor is within the church, not above it.³ Yet as the church developed it moved on to assert its claim to autonomy in matters of faith and in the discipline of its own officers. When Gelasius I in the fifth century outlined the spheres of the ‘two powers by which principally this world is ruled’ and asserted that the obedience of priests to kings in matters pertaining to ‘the order of public discipline’ should be balanced by a corresponding deference of secular powers to the independent authority of pontiffs in matters of religion, he was making a bold claim for the period.⁴

So long as the Roman empire endured, the path to caesaropapism, as illustrated by the ultimate development of the eastern church, remained open. But the disappearance of the western empire closed this path in the west, leaving behind only a legacy of phrases and precedents to support the more modest and occasional ambitions of medieval kings. In the era that followed even the rough division of function blocked out by Gelasius became blurred. He had spoken of kingship and priesthood as dividing authority in ‘the world’; with the disappearance of the empire and the extension of Christianity, ‘the world’ became synonymous with Christendom: priests and kings could be construed as two powers within the single community of the church. In an often-quoted passage, Isidore of Seville spoke of secular princes as holding ‘heights of power within the church,’ to reenforce priestly teaching by the power of the sword.⁵ Again a division of function was assumed, but without emphasis on a division of spheres of authority; instead the emphasis was on an active cooperation in which kings and priests shared the common purpose of man's salvation but served it in different ways.

The consecration of kings expressed and reenforced the notion that there was something sacred about the royal office, even while it laid an undesigned foundation for the later theory that the royal power was derived from the priestly. The idea that the king was himself a kind of priest became current. Ecclesiastical thought in general stressed the duty of the king to protect the interests of the church and to enforce its faith and discipline; and in the practical exigencies of the early medieval situation, the fact that such protection often took the form of direct intervention in the affairs of the hierarchy itself met no theoretical objection. Pious churchmen, not yet sensitive to the problem of jurisdiction, could only welcome the Carolingian era of reform, even though that reform was determined and enforced by the emperor. In the same way, the reforms of tenth century emperors, which included an active part in the election and deposition of popes, seemed preferable to the alternative debasing of the church through the involvement of the papacy in Roman municipal politics. Thus precedents were laid for the idea that kings, and especially the emperor, had the right and duty of intervention in ecclesiastical affairs when the church needed it. The very document which, by setting up the college of cardinals, attempted to free papal elections from corrupting secular influences made a vague allusion to the rights of the emperor.⁶

Even as kings had become involved in the developing constitution of the church, so the higher clergy had become a part of the developing structure of secular government. As the lords of great fiefs, bishops and abbots represented concentrations of feudal power which no ruler could afford to ignore; they also formed the class from which early medieval rulers tended to draw their most valuable councillors and administrators. The emperors—and other kings—were thus inevitably interested in how vacant bishoprics were filled. In principle this was a matter of election by ‘the clergy and people’ of the diocese, but the right of the ruler to approve candidates had been recognized by sixth-century church councils,⁷ and the practice of royal investiture of the newly-elected bishop with the symbols of his twofold authority easily turned into the practice of making nominations that reduced canonical election to a mere formality. It followed, of course, that many bishops were more secular-minded than was appropriate to their role in the church and also that simony, or the buying of ecclesiastical office, become a commonplace scandal.

Against the secularization of the clergy there were several waves of reform,⁸ which finally culminated in the programme of Gregory VII. The reform party had at first no idea of abolishing the system of lay investiture but intended only to modify and restrict it. Gregory's decree of 1075, prohibiting all lay investiture, was thus a radical step. More clearly than any of his contemporaries, Gregory saw that in order to fulfil its spiritual mission the church must have control of its own officers. But the time-honoured control over the bishoprics was equally essential to the emperor. Thus Henry IV refused to accept Gregory's decree and attempted to counterattack by securing the deposition of Gregory as having overstepped his proper functions. To this Gregory responded by deposing and excommunicating Henry. This unprecedented move opened a second issue: whether the church had the right to seek her own purposes and her own autonomy through what was in effect an attack on the autonomy of temporal rule. This issue produced a sudden and voluminous outburst of pamphlets.⁹ In the statements of Gregory and Henry and their supporters the question of the relations of regnum and sacerdotium became for the first time the subject of explicit and eager analysis.

Gregory did not claim that the church had any authority over the empire as such. He accepted the Gelasian theory of the mutual independence of two coordinate powers. His originality consisted in the extreme practical conclusions that he drew from premises already familiar and generally unquestioned. He began with a consciousness of his own power and responsibility as head of the spiritual order and as heir of all the spiritual authority entrusted by Christ to Peter for the welfare of the human souls of which he was the shepherd. He based his deposition of Henry specifically on the spiritual power to bind and loose¹⁰; as judge in the court of conscience the pope could absolve men from the binding effect of a bad oath. He argued elsewhere¹¹ that there was no reason why kings should be exempt from papal power: ‘Are they not among the sheep which the Son of God entrusted to the blessed Peter?’ Early precedents and quotations from Scripture and the Fathers supported his claim that rulers as Christians were subject to the jurisdiction of the church. Moreover, he argued, since kingship had originated in human pride inspired by the devil, it could scarcely claim such dignity as would raise it above priestly jurisdiction. This was a careless argument, inconsistent with his calmer opinion that, whatever its historical origins, kingship derived its authority from God.¹² Aside from such impetuous and casual polemics, his main line of argument stressed the admittedly greater dignity and importance of the spiritual compared to the secular power and found in the spiritual power itself a potentially illimitable authority to do anything whatever that was necessary for the fulfilment of its ends. Contemplating the tremendous language in which the power of the keys was given, one might, indeed, be unable to respect any claim to exemption from it; and the heart of Gregory's position on the deposition of the emperor may be summed up in the quotation he borrowed from St. Paul: ‘Do you not know, because we shall judge angels, how much more secular things!’¹³

Though there was nothing revolutionary in Gregory's premises, his application of them shocked the imperialists. Like Gregory, they began with an assertion of the Gelasian principle; but they refused to accept Gregory's claim that the excommunication and deposition of a ruler could be construed as incidents of a purely spiritual authority. However spiritual his purpose and his methods, their effect was undoubtedly exerted within the temporal sphere. Thus they accused Gregory of trying to extend his control to an area which had been entrusted by God to royal authority. Some writers went on to deduce that Gregory was an unworthy pope and that the emperor properly used his authority to protect the church by the temporal sword in attempting to secure the deposition of Gregory. For this a series of respectable precedents could be cited, though these in turn could be attacked by the papal party as inconsistent with the Gelasian principle. Whether or not the imperialists defended Henry's counterattack on Gregory, they were emphatic in asserting that his position as emperor could not be subject to papal determination. Here they showed themselves more capable than was Gregory of theoretical abstraction. Gregory had treated Henry simply as a man, subject to the jurisdiction which the church had over all souls; the imperialists tended to separate the man from the office and to insist that the imperial dignity must be immune from ecclesiastical interference, whatever the merits of the man who occupied it. Some went so far as to argue that the emperor was responsible to God alone for his use of the temporal power. Henry's own answer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• VI. The Structure of Authority in the Church
• VII. The Problem of the Empire
• VIII. Regnum and Sacerdotium
• Bibliographical Note
• Index