Periodically I have to write 4-5 page papers on my seminar readings. The purpose of these papers is to jump-start the seminar conversation. One seminar has me doing a bunch of these shorter papers instead of a final term paper, so that's what I've spent much of my fall composing. Not blog posts. But since I'm one of these bloggers who, A. Gets anxious when I'm not posting a lot, and B. Doesn't have time to blog a lot, I've decided to put some of these class papers up here. This one, on Church-State issues, is where this earlier post about wrestling over the mantle of John Howard Yoder came from. These might not be everyone's cup of tea, but if they suit, you are welcome, as usual, to comment.
This paper will focus on the investiture controversy as is represented by primary source documents in part II of Brian Tierney’s The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300.
In a letter to the young King Henry IV, Peter Damian acknowledged that church and state held distinct responsibilities, but did not arrange the two institutions in a hierarchy. Rather, Peter saw their relationship as one of mutual aid and comfort. What king, no matter how many knights under his command, could hope to stand without the divine favor curried on his behalf by the clergy? What priesthood would have time and leisure to pray to God were it not for the king’s sword restraining violence and chaos? Therefore, when Peter turns to the serious matter that has occasioned his letter, the Salian dynasty’s support of a schismatic claimant to the papacy, he finds fault with Henry in terms of dereliction of duty rather than disobedience to ecclesiastical authority. Peter threatens Henry with the wrath of God, not of Holy Mother Church (Letter to King Henry IV, Tierney 38-9).
As for the investiture controversy itself, Peter sought to curb abuses in the system, rather than overthrow the system. While Peter’s contempt for sycophants trolling for ecclesiastical appointments leaps off the pages of his letter to Bishop Boniface (Letter to the cardinal-bishop Boniface of Albano, Tierney 37), Peter was not opposed to a lay role in the selection of church officials, provided that no money or special favors changed hands. With equally lively language comparing the deceased King Henry III to a dragon slayer, Peter effusively praised him for eliminating simony from clerical appointments. Such virtue, in Peter’s mind, made Henry worthy to choose the man to serve as Pope in Rome (Liber Gratissimus, I, Tierney 37-8)!
“Let not princes, led astray by carnal affection, set their own sons over that flock for whom Christ shed his blood if a better and more suitable man can be found” (Letter of Gregory to Bishop Hermann of Metz, Tierney 72). In isolation, such words could easily represent Damian’s views on investiture, but they were in fact uttered by Peter’s radical colleague Hildebrand, who as Pope Gregory VII granted them a far more sweeping meaning. Where Peter sought to reform lay investiture, Hildebrand sought to abolish the practice entirely as a means to building a new social order in which the popes ruled kings as fathers rule their unruly sons. When Henry IV resisted the Pope’s decree to abolish lay investiture, Gregory VII deposed and excommunicated the Emperor.
Gregory VII outlined his program in a polemical letter to Bishop Hermann of Metz. In short, secular rulers have no business meddling in ecclesiastical affairs because they are, to a man, wicked. All princes, not just a few or even most, are “led astray by carnal affections.” A pious serf is more a king than the evil men who occupy royal offices. Gregory can count on one hand the monarchs who have saved themselves from eternal fire, but time would fail to tell of the good men who have sat on Peter’s chair. Just as exorcists can command devils, so can the church command kings, whose impiety proves they are demon-possessed. Jesus himself despised worldly kingdoms; therefore, “All Christians… who desire to reign with Christ are to be warned not to reign through ambition for worldly power” (Letter to Hermann, Tierney 71).
Hildebrand supplemented his ad hominem attack on the state with examples from scripture, theology and tradition. Just as the soul rules the body, so the church ought to rule the state. Jesus said to Peter, “Whatsover thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,” prompting the Pope to ask, in effect, “What part of whatsoever don’t you understand?” Did not Pope Gelasius tell the emperor Anastasius that “all the faithful should submit themselves to all priests who perform their sacred functions properly” (Letter to Hermann, Tierney 67)? Hildebrand’s is a tortured reading of Gelasius’ letter, for while Gelasius did defend clerical prerogatives in sacred matters from secular encroachment, it by no means followed that clerics enjoyed a right to remove an emperor from his throne (cf. Letter to the emperor Anastatius, Tierney 13-4).
At bottom the Pope was arguing that due to the moral and ontological superiority of the clergy to the princes, temporal power must be subordinate to spiritual power. The church must reign as a super-state in Christendom.
The flaw in this reasoning is as obvious as the lack of irony in Hildebrand’s exhortation to the Bishop to eschew “ambition for worldly power.” Is not Hildebrand the most ambitious of them all? To despise the kingdom of this world is, to paraphrase Alanis Morissette, the good advice that Hildebrand just can’t take.
It is a baffling blind spot that stretches all the way through Tierney’s book and beyond. The popes cannot claim a monopoly on this disability. When one reads of King Frederick II pining for the good old days when the clergy were poor in spirit and rich in miracles (Letter of Frederick to the kings of Christendom, Tierney 146), he sounds like the apocryphal Presbyterian elder who prayed for his new minister, “Lord, you keep him humble, and we’ll keep him poor.” It seems that Christian virtue is the cure for what ails… other people.
Bernard of Clairvaux was a near contemporary of Hildebrand’s who did seem to recognize the blind spot in a worldview of papal supremacy. Unlike Peter Damian, but like Gregory VII, Bernard asserted the superiority of church to state, but for this very reason, the Church needed to disentangle itself from secular affairs. If ecclesiastical officials are giving all of their time to adjudicating the sordid business of secular courts, “What leisure hast thou left for prayer?” (Treatise on Consideration, Tierney 92). While some medieval exegetes interpreted the two swords Peter discovered in the Garden of Gethsemane to mean that the Pope ought to wield supreme temporal and spiritual power, Bernard emphasized Jesus’ statement, “Put up thy sword into the scabbard,” to draw a different conclusion: sheathing the one sword means that the church ought to delegate the use of temporal power to other agents in society.
Note that Bernard is not calling for an Anabaptist withdrawal from public life, or for the erection of a Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state. Bernard does believe that the church ought to direct the state, but at a distance, its hands clasped in prayer rather than grappling the levers of state machinery. In Bernard’s thought, Peter Damian’s division of labor has returned to modify Gregory VII’s hierarchical arrangement of church and state.
Long after Henry IV and Hildebrand departed the scene, Pope Calixtus II and King Henry V signed the Concordat of Worms and settled the lay investiture controversy. The settlement and the changed political scene represented a more severe curtailing of imperial power than Peter Damian sought, but fell short of Hildebrand’s ambitions. Bishops would be selected by canonical elections, not imperial appointment, but such elections were subject to the emperor’s approval. In the case of a divided vote, the emperor could choose the candidate he judged most worthy. Ecclesiastical officials, not secular rulers, would present the candidate with the ring and staff, symbolic of the sacred power to correct and care for souls (Concordat of Calixtus II and Henry V, Tierney 91).
In sum, the princes retained considerable de facto power in selecting bishops, but due in part to the long feud between Henry and Hildebrand, the cause of German unity under Salian hegemony was permanently weakened. Peter’s dream (and Hildebrand’s nightmare) of a Salian emperor choosing the Pope would not be realized. A newly assertive papacy would never play court chaplain to the Holy Roman Emperor.
Legacy. The Investiture Controversy did not end the conflict between church and state. In the 12th century both sides engaged in a bureaucratic arms race, exploiting the newly discovered Code of Justinian to further their respective institutional ends. Eventually the state gained the upper hand. The Thomistic idea that the state is an expression of natural human sociability allowed the state to emerge from the long shadow of Augustinian pessimism, of which Hildebrand’s harangue to the Bishop of Metz is an extreme version. The popes did themselves no favors in squandering their spiritual treasure on nakedly temporal goals. At the dawn of the 14th century, the kings needed neither a theory of divine right to rule, which had lain long dead in the snows of Canossa, nor ecclesiastical warrant, which the popes insisted was necessary. A well-oiled bureaucratic machine and natural law were all that the kings needed to justify their supremacy in late medieval Christendom.
Lastly, the seeds of lay empowerment that Hildebrand scattered here and there (Letter of Gregory to Otto, bishop of Constance, Tierney 52; Letter to Hermann, Tierney 70) would germinate down through the ages in a variety of lay revolts against both princes and clerics. Thanks to Hildebrand, medieval civilization would be revolutionized, but not at all in the ways he envisioned.
In a letter to the young King Henry IV, Peter Damian acknowledged that church and state held distinct responsibilities, but did not arrange the two institutions in a hierarchy. Rather, Peter saw their relationship as one of mutual aid and comfort. What king, no matter how many knights under his command, could hope to stand without the divine favor curried on his behalf by the clergy? What priesthood would have time and leisure to pray to God were it not for the king’s sword restraining violence and chaos? Therefore, when Peter turns to the serious matter that has occasioned his letter, the Salian dynasty’s support of a schismatic claimant to the papacy, he finds fault with Henry in terms of dereliction of duty rather than disobedience to ecclesiastical authority. Peter threatens Henry with the wrath of God, not of Holy Mother Church (Letter to King Henry IV, Tierney 38-9).
As for the investiture controversy itself, Peter sought to curb abuses in the system, rather than overthrow the system. While Peter’s contempt for sycophants trolling for ecclesiastical appointments leaps off the pages of his letter to Bishop Boniface (Letter to the cardinal-bishop Boniface of Albano, Tierney 37), Peter was not opposed to a lay role in the selection of church officials, provided that no money or special favors changed hands. With equally lively language comparing the deceased King Henry III to a dragon slayer, Peter effusively praised him for eliminating simony from clerical appointments. Such virtue, in Peter’s mind, made Henry worthy to choose the man to serve as Pope in Rome (Liber Gratissimus, I, Tierney 37-8)!
Gregory VII outlined his program in a polemical letter to Bishop Hermann of Metz. In short, secular rulers have no business meddling in ecclesiastical affairs because they are, to a man, wicked. All princes, not just a few or even most, are “led astray by carnal affections.” A pious serf is more a king than the evil men who occupy royal offices. Gregory can count on one hand the monarchs who have saved themselves from eternal fire, but time would fail to tell of the good men who have sat on Peter’s chair. Just as exorcists can command devils, so can the church command kings, whose impiety proves they are demon-possessed. Jesus himself despised worldly kingdoms; therefore, “All Christians… who desire to reign with Christ are to be warned not to reign through ambition for worldly power” (Letter to Hermann, Tierney 71).
Hildebrand supplemented his ad hominem attack on the state with examples from scripture, theology and tradition. Just as the soul rules the body, so the church ought to rule the state. Jesus said to Peter, “Whatsover thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,” prompting the Pope to ask, in effect, “What part of whatsoever don’t you understand?” Did not Pope Gelasius tell the emperor Anastasius that “all the faithful should submit themselves to all priests who perform their sacred functions properly” (Letter to Hermann, Tierney 67)? Hildebrand’s is a tortured reading of Gelasius’ letter, for while Gelasius did defend clerical prerogatives in sacred matters from secular encroachment, it by no means followed that clerics enjoyed a right to remove an emperor from his throne (cf. Letter to the emperor Anastatius, Tierney 13-4).
At bottom the Pope was arguing that due to the moral and ontological superiority of the clergy to the princes, temporal power must be subordinate to spiritual power. The church must reign as a super-state in Christendom.
The flaw in this reasoning is as obvious as the lack of irony in Hildebrand’s exhortation to the Bishop to eschew “ambition for worldly power.” Is not Hildebrand the most ambitious of them all? To despise the kingdom of this world is, to paraphrase Alanis Morissette, the good advice that Hildebrand just can’t take.
It is a baffling blind spot that stretches all the way through Tierney’s book and beyond. The popes cannot claim a monopoly on this disability. When one reads of King Frederick II pining for the good old days when the clergy were poor in spirit and rich in miracles (Letter of Frederick to the kings of Christendom, Tierney 146), he sounds like the apocryphal Presbyterian elder who prayed for his new minister, “Lord, you keep him humble, and we’ll keep him poor.” It seems that Christian virtue is the cure for what ails… other people.
Bernard of Clairvaux was a near contemporary of Hildebrand’s who did seem to recognize the blind spot in a worldview of papal supremacy. Unlike Peter Damian, but like Gregory VII, Bernard asserted the superiority of church to state, but for this very reason, the Church needed to disentangle itself from secular affairs. If ecclesiastical officials are giving all of their time to adjudicating the sordid business of secular courts, “What leisure hast thou left for prayer?” (Treatise on Consideration, Tierney 92). While some medieval exegetes interpreted the two swords Peter discovered in the Garden of Gethsemane to mean that the Pope ought to wield supreme temporal and spiritual power, Bernard emphasized Jesus’ statement, “Put up thy sword into the scabbard,” to draw a different conclusion: sheathing the one sword means that the church ought to delegate the use of temporal power to other agents in society.
Note that Bernard is not calling for an Anabaptist withdrawal from public life, or for the erection of a Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state. Bernard does believe that the church ought to direct the state, but at a distance, its hands clasped in prayer rather than grappling the levers of state machinery. In Bernard’s thought, Peter Damian’s division of labor has returned to modify Gregory VII’s hierarchical arrangement of church and state.
Long after Henry IV and Hildebrand departed the scene, Pope Calixtus II and King Henry V signed the Concordat of Worms and settled the lay investiture controversy. The settlement and the changed political scene represented a more severe curtailing of imperial power than Peter Damian sought, but fell short of Hildebrand’s ambitions. Bishops would be selected by canonical elections, not imperial appointment, but such elections were subject to the emperor’s approval. In the case of a divided vote, the emperor could choose the candidate he judged most worthy. Ecclesiastical officials, not secular rulers, would present the candidate with the ring and staff, symbolic of the sacred power to correct and care for souls (Concordat of Calixtus II and Henry V, Tierney 91).
In sum, the princes retained considerable de facto power in selecting bishops, but due in part to the long feud between Henry and Hildebrand, the cause of German unity under Salian hegemony was permanently weakened. Peter’s dream (and Hildebrand’s nightmare) of a Salian emperor choosing the Pope would not be realized. A newly assertive papacy would never play court chaplain to the Holy Roman Emperor.
Legacy. The Investiture Controversy did not end the conflict between church and state. In the 12th century both sides engaged in a bureaucratic arms race, exploiting the newly discovered Code of Justinian to further their respective institutional ends. Eventually the state gained the upper hand. The Thomistic idea that the state is an expression of natural human sociability allowed the state to emerge from the long shadow of Augustinian pessimism, of which Hildebrand’s harangue to the Bishop of Metz is an extreme version. The popes did themselves no favors in squandering their spiritual treasure on nakedly temporal goals. At the dawn of the 14th century, the kings needed neither a theory of divine right to rule, which had lain long dead in the snows of Canossa, nor ecclesiastical warrant, which the popes insisted was necessary. A well-oiled bureaucratic machine and natural law were all that the kings needed to justify their supremacy in late medieval Christendom.
Lastly, the seeds of lay empowerment that Hildebrand scattered here and there (Letter of Gregory to Otto, bishop of Constance, Tierney 52; Letter to Hermann, Tierney 70) would germinate down through the ages in a variety of lay revolts against both princes and clerics. Thanks to Hildebrand, medieval civilization would be revolutionized, but not at all in the ways he envisioned.
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