First of all, as in the East, they were falsely attributed to that Dionysius the Areopagite whom the Acts of the Apostles indicates as having hearkened to the message of St. Paul on his missionary visit to Athens. Such a scriptural pedigree gave them a greater significance in the traditionalist mind than they otherwise might have had. Secondly, this “Pauline” author was then associated in the West with St. Denis (Dionysius, d. c. 250), the proto-martyr of Paris, a man who was deeply honored by the Christian Kingdom of the Franks in general and by its Carolingian rulers in particular. The corpus of Pseudo-Dionysian writings was presented by Emperor Michael II (820-829) to Emperor Louis the Pious in 827 and kept at the Abbey of Saint Denis near Paris. Abbot Hilduin (d. 840) translated it into a Latin whose accuracy was improved slightly later by John Scotus Eriugena (815-877).

Westerners gained a twofold lesson from the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. On the one hand, they learned from them of the majesty of a hierarchically structured order of existence that was operative throughout God’s supernatural Creation, from the life of the angelic hosts on down. They drew from this omnipresent supernatural order the necessity of its logical extension to the temporal, historical realm as well. What this meant was that life in a Christian world that was engaged in a pilgrim journey to God had to be organized as a hierarchically ordered procession paralleling the highly structured eternal act of divine adoration in the heavens.

On the other hand, western interpreters of Pseudo-Dionysius argued that God in His Providence had entrusted the task of hierarchical ordering of the pilgrim procession to a Church specifically protected by the Franks and their Carolingian king-emperors. The Carolingian ruler was said to play a central role in guiding mankind’s earthly journey to its supernatural destination. He himself had been “ordained” for this task through the ceremony of anointment. His whole being was changed through unction, and his intellect along with it, making him a teacher—or, to use the old rhetorical term for his function, an orator. Guarantor of the Pax Christi, like Constantine before him, he was thus called upon to work vigorously to shape the “wholeness” of existence, aided by his fellow orators, the bishops. Once the Carolingian king-emperors and their bishops took their responsibilities as hierarchical organizers of the dance of life through nature seriously, all that could humanly be accomplished to ensure the successful completion of the pilgrimage of Christians to the Father of Lights was finished, unchangeably and for good. God could ask no more spiritual engagement from mankind.⁷

Here, certainly, were all the elements necessary for a “good story”. But accounts of this sacred, Roman, Frankish Carolingian task took on more and more of the characteristics of an “appropriate justification” of personal power and riches rather than a description both of an historical reality as well as the substantive and flexible application of the corrective and transforming message of the Word to political, social, and individual life. Manifestations of the dangers flowing from such a flawed and ossifying western imperial “truth” were apparent even as the “ink” signing the Franco-Papal alliance had not yet fully dried.

For one thing, the Emperors in Constantinople, who stubbornly considered Byzantium alone to be the legitimate heir of Roman power, could always contest any assertion of an eternal Carolingian role in the sacred imperial mission of guidance of the procession to God. The East was outraged by Pippin’s alliance with the Papacy, although that anger was more focused on the traitorous Roman Pontiffs, whose position the imperial government consistently sought to undermine, than on their boorish, upstart Frankish friends. Eastern irritation with the Carolingians increased, however, with the adoption by Charlemagne of the imperial title. Byzantium’s annoyance also grew as westerners highlighted the Greek as opposed to Roman character of the regime in Constantinople. The Empire’s Hellenic flavor had indeed become more pronounced from the days of Heraclius onwards, when Greek officially replaced Latin as the political and legal language of the State. Frankish leaders called attention to this fact and taunted exasperated eastern rulers as Roman emperors who did not even know the tongue of the city on which they based their legitimacy.⁸

Despite the modus vivendi that generally maintained civility between Constantinople and the Franks, tension between East and West remained constant. This made it clear that the supposedly unified earthly procession of the Christian people to God actually involved two imperial Roman lines of march that might, in theory, come to blows with one another. Ingrained hostility and fear of potential conflict worked mightily to politicize all religious questions, with missionary campaigns at the top of the list of affected matters. This made pagan peoples’ final decision to convert to Christianity often less of a religious than a secular one: an issue of whether the Slavic peoples of Central Europe, the Bulgars, or the Kievan Rus wished to accept a “Roman and Christian” influence that was either more Frankish or more Greek in character. Missionaries whose desire to evangelize was motivated by a proper pilgrimage spirit were thereby troubled in their immediate endeavors, while new nations entered Christendom with political and cultural “doctrinal” baggage that might not be crucial or even acceptable for a properly prepared journey to God.⁹

A second problem emerged in the West due to Carolingian manifestations of an all too familiar Caesaro-Papist mentality. Already under Charles the Hammer, the closer Carolingian embrace of things Roman had proven to be a bear hug, accompanied, as it was, by a conviction that ecclesiastical temporal possessions were there to serve the secular order, justifying an open robbery of Church property. Besides this, Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, and the Roman Pontiffs had differing opinions regarding what the protective role vouchsafed the new Frankish guides of the western dance of life actually meant in practice with respect to the internal affairs of the Papacy, the Eternal City, and the surrounding areas of central Italy. Worse still, Charlemagne horrified Rome by expressing painfully iconoclast sympathies. These were emphasized in a parochial-minded royal synod rejecting the canons of the Second Council of Nicaea and intimating Frankish independence in other serious doctrinal and liturgical matters as well. After all, if “Frank” and “Catholic” were synonymous, a papal Rome and a patriarchal Constantinople in disagreement with the Carolingians had ipso facto nothing to teach this true People of God.¹⁰

Yet another western problem was the Carolingian approach to the work of conversion, which clearly emphasized military, financial, and ethnic submission more than it did achieving a substantive religious change of heart. Alcuin bitterly lamented the forcible measures used against the Saxons by Charlemagne.¹¹ Such tactics may, perhaps, have become somewhat subtler over time, but they nevertheless continued to illustrate the same basic inversion of religious and secular values. Papal support for missionaries like St. Cyril (827-869) and St. Methodius (815-882), the Apostles to the Slavs, and that of Pope St. Nicholas I (858-867) for the conversion of the Bulgars, remained as sensitive to the nuances required in dealing with different peoples’ paths to Christianity as that of St. Gregory the Great in suggesting how to approach the evangelization of the Angles and Saxons in past centuries.¹² But such nuances were lost amidst the immediate dynastic and ethnic politics of the western powers-that-be. And this lack of flexibility in spiritual matters, as usual, tended to work to the detriment of the long-term progress even of Carolingian military goals as well.

Finally, there remained the much more broad and troublesome question of the actual commitment of the Frankish people, high and low, to realization of the grand worldview asserted by their political and religious leaders. It was quite understandable that the tribe as a whole would need a great deal of time to digest the heady concepts of ordered, hierarchical, governmental, and spiritual mission taught to them by Charlemagne, Alcuin, and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. Unfortunately, divisions within the very Carolingian Family itself did not permit this luxury. Already under Louis the Pious, filial disputes regarding the treatment of the Empire as a shared family property rather than an indivisible Greco-Roman polis had led to civil war. Upon his death, and after further conflict among his progeny, imperial Carolingian Christianity found itself with three anointed kings rather than one. They were presided over by Lothair (840-855), the eldest of the lot, who also kept the title of Emperor but lacked the substantive powers thereof. Still further warfare, along with predictably unexpected births and deaths, provided sometimes more, sometimes fewer in the way of ordained leaders of the “single” earthly procession to eternity. The Emperor Charles the Fat (d. 888) proved to be the last of the Carolingians to unite—quite ingloriously, we might add, given his inability and even apparent unwillingness effectively to confront external Viking threats—the entirety of the realm under an illusory and ineffective control.

Frankish counts, as well as the soldiers who served them, expected personal rewards for their efforts. A divided realm, with a variety of kings competing for their labors, allowed warriors to play one Carolingian ruler against another for increasingly higher stakes. Even worse, it permitted some to usurp illegitimate powers on their own behalf. Persistent, new, and often unforeseen Viking, Saracen, and Magyar onslaughts wreaked much further havoc with the established, “eternally-fixed” hierarchical order. These, in turn, encouraged parochial responses to complex local dilemmas, increasing the need for hasty, haphazard, on-the-spot military recruitment. Such recruitment encouraged the rise to power of self-interested castle keepers and often quite brutal soldiers of fortune with no theological or philosophical bonds tying them either to the earthly imitation of celestial hierarchies or to the building of a New Athens in the forests of Gaul and Germany.¹³

Hence, the grand Christian-Roman mission of the Franks under Carolingian rule lay in ruins. The organized Pseudo-Dionysian pilgrimage to the Father of Lights disintegrated, its participants shading their eyes from the glare of all too complicated truths and running for cover to the simple, obscurantist verities scratched onto the back wall of Plato’s cave. All seemed lost. The late 800’s, 900’s, and, in many places the 1000’s as well, presented the picture of an almost totally disordered, violent, purposeless jungle that only a libertarian or neo-conservative warmonger could find appealing.

In fact, western imperial Christendom had dissolved into a classic example of Thomas Aquinas’ definition of a chaotic state of existence: namely, a situation where there was complexity without order.¹⁴ As Bishop Adalbero of Laon (died c. 1030) remarked in the beginning decades of the eleventh century: “The laws are dissolving, all peace is evaporating, the customs of men are changing, and the order {of things} is changing as well”.¹⁵ “Laws are silent in the presence of arms”, Gerbert of Aurillac (c. 955-1003), the future Pope Sylvester II (999-1003), noted.¹⁶ Willful, illegitimate force had overruled proper, organized, God-given authority. Sin-driven villains rode roughshod astride the virtuous and the representatives of legitimate rule. “Divine and human law are confused because of the enormous greed of excessively evil men”, Gerbert lamented; “and only what passion and force can extort in the manner of brutes is considered as one’s right.”¹⁷

What had happened, more specifically, was that half-barbaric, half-pagan, familial, personal, and customary concerns for the satisfaction of the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” had triumphed over Christian and classical understandings of how the Word and the natural “logos of things” were to be understood and made manifest. Tenth century documents and literature give us a good idea as to just what this meant in individual and social life. Much of what they tell us may appear to be indifferent or even childishly amusing in character, such as the exaggerated pride exhibited by contemporary strong men in their possession of appealing carpets and large numbers of horses and dogs, as well as their success at maintaining a spirit of jollity while drinking among their subordinates. Most of it is definitely not innocent or comical, with the bulk of the problem flowing from the unending and violent hunt of soldiers high and low for the earthly wherewithal to continue and augment their military careers.

In the environment of economic collapse accompanying the external invasions and the internal free-for-all of the age, what this signified, in practice, was an obsessive and aggressive hunt for land for one’s family and for oneself. Religious and secular clerics were by no means free of this “obvious” demand of Mother Nature to place the search for private control over the means of production above all other considerations. Monks, such as those at the great abbey of Farfa, north of Rome, actually began to think of dividing up the communal patrimony for the benefit of their illicit, individual families. They would have been lucky to do so, however, for lay soldiers regularly robbed church lands if the abbots and bishops nominally in charge of them could not themselves be lured away from their proper tasks to serve the work of blood and iron directly. The result was that many monasteries, parishes, and whole dioceses ended up by as private, military-minded, proprietary holdings. Bishops and priests were named, and monastic livelihoods endowed, chiefly in order to serve family military ambitions. Clerics were sometimes even enslaved if this proved suitable to the designs of any particular clan.¹⁸

One important victim of the rampage was the ideal of clerical celibacy, which weakened along with the entire Benedictine concern for a life of poverty, prayer, study, and work. Men already convinced of the supreme and unquestioned value of family and personal affairs could not be bothered with the counsel of chastity. Bishops Rather of Verona (890-974) and Adalbert of Bremen (c. 1000-1072) were by no means alone in dealing with the consequences of the abandonment of celibacy by appeals to prudence rather than obedience to Canon Law. Abandoning principle in face of the “common sense” realities of the times, such bishops begged clerics who could not abstain from the commerce with women forbidden by Church law at least to have the decency to marry their concubines.

In fact, everything that Canon Law had prescribed was ignored. Bishop Rather bitterly lamented that “no one in Christendom… from the lowest to the highest, from the most ignorant to those who fancied themselves the wisest, from laymen to the pope himself, bothered himself about the canons.”¹⁹ “The entire population”, Dr. Fichtenau, the great German historian of this era observes, “lived in a state of dichotomy,” rhetorically praising Christ and His Mystical Body and yet regularly violating in practice all of the holiest and most ancient dictates of God and the Church.²⁰ In short, the rules and the “common sense” of a fallen nature had pushed aside the superior claims of the message of the Word in history. Contemporaries might tell a good tale about their Christian character, but practicing followers of Christ they certainly were not.

Even the Roman Pontiffs were eventually dragged into this chaotic and effectively naturalist black hole, although not, at least early on, without admirably kicking and screaming in protest against their own humiliation. At first, throughout much of the ninth century, they had worked energetically to keep the Carolingians moving along the respectable pilgrimage route these Frankish leaders were themselves supposed to be guiding. A string of impressive popes, including the aforementioned Nicholas I and John VIII, regularly exhorted Charlemagne’s descendants to attend to their proper duties as armed defenders of the Pax et Regnum Christi. Better still, they encouraged a strong but legitimate exercise of imperial authority while at the same time openly opposing Caesaro-Papist dogmatic and political distortions of the Church’s spiritual mission.

Unfortunately, the Papacy could not resist engaging in unacceptable rhetorical games of its own in support of its labors on behalf of the Word. In doing so, it joined in an activity that became a western European parlor sport during this age of growing chaos. For what the popes did, on the one hand, was simply to appropriate the work of bishops in the Kingdom of the Franks who had sought to protect their own local powers with reference to a set of Church canons emphasizing episcopal prerogatives. Known today as the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, these canons were actually written in the ninth century under the name of Isidore Mercator but claimed an elegant pedigree rooted as far back in time as the first six hundred years of Church History. But since they founded French bishops’ rights on grants from the still greater authority of popes ranging from St. Clement I to St. Gregory the Great, they proved not only useful for emphasizing episcopal authority but also for what would soon be described as the “plenitude of papal power”. The implications of that doctrine, which insisted upon the papacy’s practical as well as theoretical control over the affairs of the Universal Church, was to be at the center of much of the history and many of the struggles of the whole of the remaining medieval era.

Another flimsy rhetorical weapon in the contemporary armory of the physically ever more helpless Papacy was the so-called Donation of Constantine. Forged by Roman officials of that same prolific ninth century, this document transformed Constantine’s real gift of various properties to the Holy See into a fictitious grant of extensive powers that supported papal claims to independence in Italy and supremacy over all other authorities in the western part of the empire. “Any port in a storm” rather than “back to the message of the Word Incarnate” seems to have been the Church of Rome’s marred and all too human response to the dilemmas of the moment. She was to pay an embarrassing price for her abandonment of good judgment in exchange for a good story. This payment eventually came when Renaissance humanists uncovered the mischief underlying the “donation” and passed their findings into the hands of the anti-Roman Grand Coalition of the Status Quo.²¹

Whether through the memory of past deeds or the momentary success of present forgeries, papal prestige did remain high among western Christians in the midst of the current crisis, especially outside Italy. Its “good press” was to prove immensely valuable, since those believers who lived on the spot, in the midst of the Roman Pontiffs reigning in the era of chaos, knew just how badly their structural situation as well as their own personal integrity had deteriorated by the turn of the tenth century. Papal independence and ability to perform the exalted spiritual role that St. Maximus the Confessor and St. Martin I had died to delineate were by that point continually under threat from a host of enemies. Some troublemakers were foreign, like the Saracens. Others were closer to home, such as the local Carolingian Kings of Italy and their successors: the Dukes of Spoleto, Roman families of dubious “nobility”, and the manifold, unseemly forces that all of these could mobilize to in aid of their mundane “common sense” projects.²²

Failures of appeals for imperial help in maintaining the Pax et Regnum Christi, the last under Pope Formosus (891-896), led to the domination of Rome by the Theophylact Family: first of all under Theophylact the Vestararius and Magister militum and then through his daughter Marozia (890-937), who eventually ruled together with her son, Pope John XI (931-935). A second offspring, Alberic the Younger (923-954), overturned Marozia’s regrettable dominion. The happily rebellious Alberic, referred to as Glorious Prince and Senator, passed his power down to his own child, who then united both secular and ecclesiastical authority in one set of hands as Pope John XII (955-964). Alberic left behind him a credible record of decent civil and religious actions, especially impressive given the nature of the times. John, however, despite the possible exaggerations of his opponents, has never been defended by anyone as a badly misunderstood model of commitment to exalted communal and spiritual ideals.

Perhaps the greatest evil of the age was a widespread confusion over who was actually legitimately entitled to the power that he possessed; a power from which the ability to effect corrective change for the better might someday arise. Ancestry meant much less under these strange new circumstances, and success due to military prowess and cunning—something that the Germans referred to as Heil—correspondingly much more. Marks of honor, ranging from who sat where at a meeting of warlords to who might be handed his sword first when that gathering was concluded, were scrutinized carefully to determine the levels of presumed entitlement of given troublemakers. As always, monks, priests, and bishops were also seduced into participation in this pathetic carnival. The hunt for marks of honor amidst the confusion of authority led to the invention and intense cultivation of highly fanciful, Isocrates-like foundation stories stretching back to ancient Roman times “proving” why a particular diocese, parish, or monastery was more important than another. Even prayer life—the daily performance of the Opus Dei—was marred by the humiliation of less powerful clerics by more noble colleagues who demanded various forms of deferment from the lowly while offering a common worship to Almighty God.²³

Confusion regarding who was warranted exactly what level of authority made substantive treatment of real problems concerning the common good of both Church and State seemingly impossible. It was this that led Gerbert of Aurillac to comment that “to take part in public life is madness today”.²⁴ If a man tried to be loyal to a given set of proscriptions he would certainly violate another, or, barring that, become subject to the even more pressing whims of the strongest local warmonger—for however long his particular willful writ would run. “Laws are silent in the presence of arms”, the long-suffering Gerbert sighed; “if someone deviates a bit from the holy canons, it is not out of wickedness but out of necessity.”²⁵ At the Synod of Trosly in 909 “the assembled bishops complained that people were fearlessly swearing by God and all the saints, by the relics of the saints, by their own souls or those of their parents and friends”, all of this, obviously, in order to find a way to save their constantly threatened skins.²⁶ One consequence of such madness was a comical succession of mutual excommunications. “There was hardly anyone in the Kingdom who was not excommunicated for having been in contact with another excommunicate”, the Abbo of Fleury (c. 945-1004) bemoaned.²⁷ Still, the more that everyone began to excommunicate everyone else, and with ever more virulent accusations, calumnies, and curses, the less such actions seemed to have any practical effect.

Calls to end the chaos were regularly made through arbitrary insistence upon the need for universal obedience to what really amounted to one batch of potentially appropriate rules as opposed to another. Well-meaning efforts to overcome disorder merely led to new bewilderment. Abbo of Fleury, pointing to the variety of competing “authorities” engaged in such activities, complained that “what is prescribed by one ecclesiastical synod is proscribed by another.”²⁸ Hence the irritation of the monks of Monte Cassino as to why “some in rough arrogance and in proud contempt presume without reflection to substitute an admittedly good custom for another which is perhaps just as good if not better.”²⁹

Disarray at the heart of Christendom helps to explain the less than pious response of a number of pagan peoples on its borders to the missionary efforts directed at their conversion. Potential Danish converts seem to have treated catechetical sessions merely as occasions for milking profitable gifts from competing Christians pursuing their obvious parochial political agendas. Notker the Stammerer (c. 840-912) relates the following incident illustrating the “rules of the game” as Danish candidates for baptism were concerned:³⁰

Each received a white robe from the Emperor’s wardrobe, and from his sponsors a full set of Frankish garments, with arms, costly robes and other adornments. This was done repeatedly and more and more {Danes} came each year, not for the sake of Christ but for mundane advantages. They used to hurry over on Easter Eve to pay homage to the Emperor, more like faithful vassals than foreign envoys. On one occasion as many as fifty arrived. The Emperor asked them if they wished to be baptized. When they had confessed their sins, he ordered them to be sprinkled with holy water. As there were not enough linen garments to go round on that occasion, Louis ordered some old shirts to be cut up and tacked together to make tunics or to be run up as overalls. When one of these without more ado was put on a certain elderly envoy, he regarded it suspiciously for some time. Then he lost control of himself completely and said to the Emperor: ‘Look here! I’ve gone through this ablutions business about twenty times already, and I’ve always been rigged out before with a splendid white suit; but this old sack makes me feel more like a pig-farmer than a soldier! If it weren’t for the fact that you’ve pinched my own clothes and not given me any new ones, with the result that I’d feel a right fool if I walked out of here naked, you could keep your Christ and your reach-me-downs, too!’

Chieftains did, of course, still actually become “believers”, though this, as elsewhere previously, essentially meant merely that they fit one more divinity into their generous array of gods and goddesses. And how could more ancient believers effectively criticize them for their religious syncretism anyway? For the entire western Christian world itself seemed to be slipping back into idolatrous and magical practices that it most likely had never been effectively weaned from in the first place. Such weaning would have required the honest labor of truly practical Christian men—not participants in the fun and word merchandising that passed for natural and supernatural wisdom in this awful mid-medieval time and cave.

From what we know, the truly believing part of the Christian population was deeply troubled by the deck games on their ship of fools and desperately wished to break them up. If the faithful were still on pilgrimage, they seemed to sensible Catholics to be assembled along a line of march that was as lost in the woods as Dante was to find himself at the opening of The Divine Comedy. At best, their average fellow Christians appeared to view God as the supernatural equivalent of a secular patron who permitted basic survival in exchange for unreflective obeisance to the demands of a ritualistic “business as usual”. At worst, they displayed signs of panic, paralysis, anger, disbelief, and desire for vengeance against their oppressors, all as earthbound and ultimately mindless in its character as their tormentors’ ambitions and unmerited successes. Blind chance—tyche—looked as though it ruled a universe that perhaps only manipulative magical spells might bend slightly to one’s favor. A hopeless and basically naturalist cynicism had grown so widespread that real reformers of truly exalted spirit often found themselves accused of hypocrisy, their call to sanctity treated as a sanctimonious, rhetorically appropriate explanation of their own hunt for satisfaction of secret passions and perversions.³¹

Only one serious path to correction of all the ills described above lay open, and that was definitely not the path of beating the enemy at his own “common sense”, “business as usual”, “nature as is” game. A Catholic common sense required a totally different mentality; one formed by a solid reliance on the corrective and transforming Word in history, backed by an authoritative whip scattering the currently powerful, warmongering, and perhaps unconscious members of the all too familiar Grand Coalition of the Status Quo. Individual and social health could only be found on the road that led back to the acceptance of the fullness of nature’s truly God-given gifts, along with their purification and regeneration in Christ.

Would regaining that highway also effect a return to the original intent of the founders of the sacred imperial Carolingian order and a strengthening of unquestioning faith in the ability of its structures eternally to set things straight? Would it reaffirm the fundamental principles of the founders of the Byzantine concept of a symphonia of Church and State under the authority of the emperor and the Patriarch of Constantinople? Or would the changed conditions of the dance of life teach men who were enlivened by the proper pilgrim spirit new steps to be executed in a somewhat differently appointed ballroom than was customary; a ballroom wherein the full message of the Word might actually be better understood and the path to eternity more suitably paved than beforehand? The history of the High Middle Ages gives us the intriguing answer to these crucial questions.

B. Rooting the Good Story in the True Story

Tenth century Frankish adherents of the vision of an ordered, historical pilgrimage to God could not give up devotion to their worldview without admitting permanent cosmic consequences too dreadful for them even to begin to contemplate. Nevertheless, they were divided in their understanding of what needed to be done to recall the believing community and individual pilgrims back onto the line of march that led heavenwards. Two distinct approaches to this difficult pilgrim enterprise and what it might or might not entail gradually came to debate the basic shape of the project in question.

One of these approaches accepted and addressed the reality of the changed conditions of western life head on. While in no way opposed to “tradition” as such, its pragmatic spirit ultimately came to recognize the inadequacies of the “good story” regarding the Carolingian system. It began to understand that the “tradition” that this embraced and exalted was not fully the Christian Tradition with a capital “T” at all, but one adjusted to fit a set of long established “customs”. In fact, it saw that the arguments used to defend those customs disguised as the Tradition actually prevented an accurate understanding of the full meaning of the Eternal Word Incarnate and His impact on history, both in theory as well as in changing practical reality. Seeking to root the message of the Word more profoundly in daily life, this pilgrim-spirited approach, ready to contemplate new steps in the dance of life, unleashed a spiritual revival creating that moment, from the 1000’s through the 1200’s, when, to quote once more the vivid and useful phrase mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, “values descended to the earth”. And that revival would spur a pilgrimage that amounted to a new ascent of Mount Tabor.

Many of the supporters of this only superficially “non-traditional” approach were energetic bishops who came from the more disturbed southern Frankish lands where the authority of the two most important successors of the Carolingians—the German and French Kings—was either unknown or meaningless. Raoul Glaber (before 1000-c. 1050), the renowned contemporary chronicler, tells us of men like the Bishop of Narbonne, who had to deal with local renegade counts whose already illegitimately usurped power itself then disappeared easily into the hands of castle keepers and other aggressive riffraff. Instead of looking to the “good story” of a fixed hierarchical order guided by impotent emperors and kings to re-launch the proper procession to God, such pastors turned to an immediate and total mobilization of the entirety of their various flocks against the numerous disturbers of the peace around them. Gathering the faithful outside of their old Roman towns in fields that were large enough to host their number, they pressed the Catholic population at large to take public oaths to work for tranquility in their region.

Although fasts and other penitential practices aimed at personal spiritual development were part of such bishops’ modus operandi, one does sniff more than a touch of liberation theology at the heart of their strategy; a sense that a “diocese in arms”, marshaled behind the relics of its favorite saints and then hurled into battle against the forces of evil, would necessarily ensure the movement of men back towards God; a conviction that the Silent Majority would somehow be less subject to temptation and sin, were this truly noble force to replace the wicked strong men currently brutalizing their territory. “Good stories” of their own were enlisted to back the call to populist social activism, with a Holy Letter fallen from Heaven in 1024 cited before the tribunal of the Christian People as one of the many supernatural proofs that God was on its side.³²

A variation on the same approach came from out of a number of different Frankish monastic communities with influence in England and Italy as well as at home. St. Gerald of Brogne (d.959) and John of Gorze (900-974) were two figures central to this development. But most celebrated in its rise were men working out of the Burgundian abbey of Cluny, founded in 910 with the backing of William the Pious, Count of Auvergne and Duke of Aquitaine (875-918). A succession of powerful Clunaic abbots, from Odo (927-942) through Aymard (942-948) and Mayeul (948-994), to Odilo (994-1048) and Hugh the Great (1049-1109), rapidly extended that monastery’s vision and influence. They took advantage of William’s initial grant of independence to construct a network of reformed Benedictine houses. These monasteries were then supported by an equally extensive and eclectic grid of friendly political authorities, from pacific castle keepers to counts to the new king-emperors who emerged from out of Germany in the course of the tenth century.³³

Cluny had no essential quarrel with the Dionysian concept of the need for a hierarchically-organized public guidance of the pilgrimage to God. Nevertheless, what counted most in its eyes was not who the hierarchs were but whether they wanted to carry out their tasks properly and had real power to do so. For Cluny, the transformation in Christ of whoever constituted the effective leadership of a given land was the primary key to success in setting a population on the path to eternal union with the Father of Lights. This, ironically, was the same theme that the first Carolingians had themselves happily taken over from St. Isidore of Seville to justify their replacement of their incompetent Merovingian predecessors. The Clunaics and their allies were to adopt that fruitful principle anew and deepen its significance and impact considerably.

Central to the Clunaic plan for re-launching the pilgrimage to God was the awakening of all men, individually, to their need to work actively for its success. Each and every human person in the line of march, the Christian agmen, was called upon by it to pray, to fast, and to do penance if the entire enterprise were to prosper. Such tasks were not the province of anointed king orators and their consecrated episcopal advisors alone. Everyman was called to holiness as well. This general invitation to dance the dance to sanctity was symbolized by the Feast of All Saints, which quickly became a Clunaic favorite, demonstrating as it did that Heaven’s population included more than the highest princes and prelates. The success or failure of any one individual who accepted such an invitation to enter the Christian ballroom was therefore seen to impact mightily upon the viability of the whole communal pilgrimage of the People of God. Although they did not say so openly, the Clunaics obviously implied that Carolingian inspired efforts to guide that procession failed precisely due to their blindness to this need for a general participation in the dance of life. Renewed calls to pilgrimage would fail again miserably if the unchanging procession were resuscitated without making this needed change.

Nevertheless, inchoate mobilizations of “dioceses-in-arms” were also equally doomed. All men were sinful, and failure to recognize that fact would make any attempt to correct one’s own flaws correspondingly more difficult. The recruitment of the silent majority under the banner of their local saints for the violent overthrow of bad authorities would prove to be utterly useless if unaccompanied by a painstaking, life-long dedication to attainment of the personal sanctification in and through Christ of each and every member of the Christian community without exception.

In order to achieve the cherished goal of a proper reordering of the pilgrimage to God, spiritual militants had first and foremost to be formed. Where else could one do so but in monasteries, the traditional school for saints in the Christian world? Forming such men required the creation of other monastic polis like Cluny that possessed the same freedom to treat the attainment of personal sanctity as their primary task. But the formation of militants was not an end in itself. Men are not isolated atoms but communal beings, and this meant that spiritual militants would also have the social responsibility to reform others; to go back into the darkness of Plato’s cave to lead those chained within it away from their contentment with “nature as is” and towards the fullness of the correcting and transforming supernatural light of Christ.

Social responsibility involved the true conversion, in practice and not in name only, of everyone, from monks in houses that were still subject to corruption all the way up to kings and emperors and their courtiers. Still, for immediate prudential reasons, Cluny placed a premium upon the need, first and foremost, to arouse the wretched mass of renegade counts, castle keepers, and soldiers of fortune that had usurped authority in much of Western Europe to some spiritual sense of the responsibilities their illegitimate but de facto political power demanded of them. If they, the worst of the troublemakers, could be made to take up their Dionysian task of “pilgrimage ordering” in the full and proper Clunaic understanding of what this entailed, the peace necessary for the rest of the population to make its own commitment to spiritual progress would be provided.

Cluny did not attempt to obtain influence over what people referred to as the malitia (the evil force) instead of the militia (the soldiery) by giving an “appropriate explanation and justification” of their hideously disordered, passion-filled lives. The bands of soldiers in question were tragically dedicated to the pointless “business as usual” demands of “nature as is”. Cluny went about its work by seeking to control and redirect the malefactors’ passions and wills; by taming these wild beasts; by, as the saying then went, “binding the rhinoceros”.³⁴ Two tools for achieving the goal of putting such unnatural naturalist upstarts in their proper place were employed; two weapons for ordering or “ordaining” them to their truly natural and supernatural Christian roles; two modes of correcting and ultimately transforming them in Christ.

The first, a via negativa, involved pressuring them to take a public oath to work for the Truce and the Peace of God— the tactic that activist bishops had already used in creating their “dioceses-in-arms”. Monks of Cluny appealed to the threat that could indeed come from a united and mobilized silent majority if someone were revolutionary enough actually to evoke it. Abbots of the Burgundian monastery traveled widely. Wherever they went, they celebrated solemn masses attended by the whole population of a given region. Odo of Cluny, filled with the wisdom of serpents, milked such occasions to deliver fire and brimstone sermons regarding the sins of warmongering and the social injustices flowing from them.³⁵

How then are these robbers Christians, or what do they deserve who slay their brothers for whom they are commanded to lay down their lives?

You have only to study the books of antiquity to see that the most powerful are always the worst. Worldly nobility is due not to nature but to pride and ambition. If we judged by realities we should give honour not to the rich for the fine clothes they wear but to the poor who are the makers of such things—nam sudoribus pauperum praeparatur unde potentiores saginantur (for the banquets of the powerful are cooked in the sweat of the poor).

Odo and his fellow monks adopted this tone in order to arouse the mass of peace loving men to a fever pitch and aim their impassioned ire at the troublemakers present. Some of the latter were sincerely moved to repentance by the preaching; most were alarmed by the violence that could potentially be unleashed against them or the long-term stigma of being branded contumacious public sinners. The result, in both cases, was often the agreement to take the solemn public oaths to support that Peace and Truce of God that the bishops had already sought to promote. Such oaths, in effect, defined combatants and non-combatants, separating them out from one another, and giving some hope for a limitation of the consequences of previously uncontrolled and totally self-serving warfare.³⁶

Cluny’s via positiva centered round a correction of the disordered existence that seemed so “natural” to these actually unnatural human beasts; round a growth in Christ that led them to a life conformed to virtue. Here, liberation theology gave way to transformation theology. This entailed placing soldiers in an “order” based upon a real recognition of the primacy of the spiritual in shaping their peculiar group activity that would be as thoroughgoing for them as it was for the monks. Living a liturgical, prayerful, and penitential routine modeled on the “customs” of Cluny, the reformers were convinced, would be exceedingly helpful in achieving this goal. Still, it had to be a model appropriate to—“ordained” to—their own particular natural vocation, which was obviously one that was dedicated to arms. Thus, it had to be a model open to the modifications that the idiosyncratic character of that life demanded.

The traditional theme of the pilgrimage provided an innovative means of shaping a general need for growth in holiness to fit their particular earthly vocation. In this case, the pilgrimage in question was the increasingly popular procession to the tomb of St. James the Greater at Compostella in western Spain. What better way of guiding unruly warriors in love with physical coercion to a correct fulfillment of the function of authority than by giving them a soldiering mission that was truly justifiable—that of defending unarmed pilgrims against marauding bandits and Moors? What better context for “binding the rhinoceros”, for transforming their “profession”, for teaching them to pray, to fast, to do penance, and to see all of life as a meaningful wandering towards God than the rather lengthy “time out of time” that the pilgrimage to Compostella offered? Such warmongers were trapped in a rut from which they might only escape by means of this startling and quite exotic break with their daily low-level routine.

Lessons taught through the two Clunaic approaches ultimately had their effect. Renegade counts, castle keepers, and their soldiers were shown the path to a Christian knighthood that Abbot Odo’s biography of Gerald of Aurillac (c. 855-909) well describes. Families of re-ordered soldiers, focusing spiritually on Cluny and its offshoots, praying for the souls of their dead ancestors, and using their example as a beacon light for their children, developed a sense of nobility—of Christian nobility. And this would be expanded upon and infinitely more seriously refined on those “armed pilgrimages” called the Crusades, which we will discuss later in this chapter.³⁷

Two final points must be made about the value of this activist, episcopal and Clunaic approach to dealing with chaotic western Christendom. First of all, its lack of concern for the traditional legal status of the men it targeted made it especially appealing to “outsiders” of all sorts. Transformation theology gave everyone from downright criminals to Danish invaders of the British Isles to recent Slavic and Hungarian converts the means to fit both theoretically and practically into the otherwise seemingly eternally closed sacred, imperial, Roman Catholic order of things. And, secondly, as historical precedents had already well demonstrated, “outsiders” could themselves help revive and deepen an incarnational sense among “insiders” who had tragically lost it. That is to say, “outsiders” could help “insiders” trapped in the rut of a “natural order” ruled by long-standing but inadequate or corrupt customs disguised as “traditions” and actually divinizing mere “business as usual”. This had happened with the Greek wanderers into Rome in the seventh century. Something similar had taken place through the aid of Frankish and English enthusiasts for Christ, Rome, and Roman culture a bit later in Merovingian Gaul. And it would now happen again with the “outsider” influence of Cluny and its supporters on the “insiders” in the corrupt tenth and eleventh century city of Rome.

Clunaics and fellow reformers ready to accept new steps in the dance of life designed to deal with a changed historical reality were harshly criticized by supporters of the second approach to overcoming chaos. These critics accused them of being dangerous innovators engaged in a monstrous overturning of true Tradition. Most prominent among the detractors were Bishop Adalbero of Laon (d. 1030/1031), who outlined his critique in his 434-line poem, Carmen for King Robert (1025), and his fellow prelate, Gerard of Cambrai (c. 975-1051).³⁸

Very conservative in outlook, such men saw the pilgrimage to God as indeed being fixed in the mode indicated by the earlier Carolingian interpreters of Pseudo-Dionysius. The task of reconstruction for them was, in consequence, one of simply getting the traditional political hierarchy firmly back into the saddle. It was for the consecrated bishops and the anointed kings of Germany and France who worked in union with them—the oratores—to do the job of leading that pilgrimage. It was also up to them to undertake the prayer, fasting, and penance that were its spiritual sustenance. The task of the bellatores—the anointed rulers who were the link with the spiritual leadership, along with counts whom they designated and the soldiery that they and they alone recruited—was to maintain the order of the pilgrim line of march. Everyone else’s job—that of the agricoltores and the laboradores who made up the vast bulk of the Christian pilgrim population—was limited to physical labor and reproduction. Certainly, they were not meant to rule, to guide, or to fight. Their spiritual purification was to be achieved indirectly and inertly, in that it required no particular extra penitential effort on their part. Sanctification, for them, came through the sanctification of their political and spiritual superiors, defined as such by their family heritage and noble pedigree. In short, God did not intend the average man to dance the dance of life openly and with all the energy that lay within him. Only his social betters were meant to do so.

Given this vision, men like the activist orator Bishop of Narbonne were turning the world upside down, taking over the bellatores’ role, and, in effect, that of the king in particular. Moreover, by transforming agricoltores and laboradores into bellatores in requiring them to take the oath to insure the Peace and Truce of God, and then by pressing them to pray and fast as well, they were also inspiring invasion of the proper realm of the oratores. This did not permit the “form” required by the recognized hierarchy of the pilgrimage to do the work demanded of it. Those going down such a pathway were thus at war with the heavenly defined order as much as the earthly structure of things.

Monks were even worse offenders in such a twisted enterprise. Not only were they, like “liberation theology” bishops, not anointed for the work of achieving peace; most of them were not ordained clergymen at all. Even those who were ordained insisted upon being recognized as going about their task qua monk, not priest. This made lay monks into oratores who then had the audacity to associate illegitimate warriors into their topsy-turvy oratores-bellatores scheme of things. And, most alarming of all, these revolutionaries had proven so charismatic as to seduce and gain the approval of men at the highest levels of society, from consecrated bishops such as Fulbert of Chartres (952/970-1028), to Roman Pontiffs, to the very anointed kings of France and Germany themselves.

Mention of the latter authorities brings us to an examination of the situation as it was developing in the Kingdom of Germany. This provides a unique and interesting example both of the continuing nobility of the Christian imperial vision and its own openness to the pilgrimage spirit as well as its tragic inability to deal with certain undeniably changed historical realities. While failure seems to have the edge over success in the following story, aspects of it are so moving as to remind us that it, too, like the events recounted in the previous chapter, offers us a message of permanent value to consider even today. The truth of that permanent value is something that will not fully emerge until the last, nationalism- plagued chapters of this book.³⁹

Openness in Germany to a pilgrimage spirit cognizant of changing historical circumstances is perhaps not all that surprising. The Romanization promoted by Pippin and Charlemagne had never proceeded as far in this, their eastern realm, as it had in Gaul. Instead of many counts active in as many counties, the direct subordinates of the King were a smaller number of more powerful leaders, closely tied to their specific tribes, whom we refer to by the more militarily-charged Roman title of dux, or duke. German dukes were already independent-minded enough not to feel compelled to invite Charles the Simple (898-922), the legitimate Carolingian heir from the Kingdom of France, to take his seemingly appropriate place as their ruler upon the death of the last direct descendant of Charlemagne’s grandson, Louis the German (840-876), in 911. They chose Duke Conrad of Franconia (911-918) instead.

Conrad, however, did not feel that he possessed the proper charism—again, the proper Heil—to assume the title of King of Germany. On his deathbed, he urged that his power be passed on to a man who seemed to merit it: the Duke of Saxony, Henry I (919-936). Henry indeed proved capable of rebuilding royal power and prestige in Germany, transmitting it to his still more illustrious son, Otto I (936-974), who gave his name to the whole of this extraordinary line of rulers: the Ottonian Dynasty. His descendants continued to rule Germany under Otto II (973-983), Otto III (983-1002), and Henry II (1002-1024). The Ottonians and their early Salian Dynasty successors, Conrad II (1024-1039) and Henry III (1039-1056), built a system that “worked”, at least for a while, which is certainly all that one can hope for from any political order in the ever-changing earthly pilgrim realm. They did so by invoking the help of both the approaches discussed above: the conservative vision of Adalbero as well as the innovative outlook of the bishops and monasteries like Cluny. These they then modified to fit the specific Germanic circumstances of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

On the one hand, the German kings of the Ottonian system exploited their anointed character and sacral role to the fullest. With military successes indicating that they definitely possessed Heil, their spiritual aura demonstrated to their subjects that they were additionally endowed with Heiligkeit. As anointed rulers, they were living images of Christ, and, as such, defenders of the Pax et Regnum Christi. This sacred role compelled them to make the most of opportunities to rebuild the collapsed Western Empire, leading them to intervene in the affairs of Italy and Burgundy and, as a logical consequence of their labors, to obtain the imperial crown as well. That crown, and the accompanying Holy Lance that was presumed to contain a nail from the Cross of Christ and date from the time of Constantine the Great, symbolically emphasized sacred imperial responsibilities of all kinds. Not the least of these were the defense of the Papacy, the general encouragement of Greco-Roman culture—the Seeds of the Logos—and assistance to missionaries working to build a family of new Christian nations united with and subordinated to the universal Emperor.

Here, innovative ties with episcopal and monastic reformers entered into the German dynastic enterprise. Yes, it is true that in one sense the Imperial Church, the Reichskirche, with clerics trained in the Royal Chapel to become bishops closely linked with the work of the king-emperor, seems to reflect nothing other than Adalbero’s idea of how the oratores should cooperate with the legitimate ruler. Such cooperation was appreciated by both the Ottonians and the early Salians, and not only for theoretical reasons. A primary reliance on the help of celibate prelates with a broader vision than that nourished by purely family and tribal oriented dukes offered more practical hope for loyalty and flexibility in a governing elite with Christendom-wide responsibilities to fulfill.

Nevertheless, in order to obtain committed, celibate prelates with the requisite broader vision, from the Roman Pontiff down to the local bishop, the assistance of reformers who wanted priests to break with their enslavement to “business as usual” to serve the correcting and transforming message of the Word was required. This entailed soliciting the advice of men who, in Adalbero’s eyes, were not oratores; men like the monks of St. Odilo, Abbot of Cluny from 994-1048, and, even worse, individual hermits alongside them. In fact, the work of politically and socially shaping Christian order was regularly given over to abbots of important monasteries as well as to bishops. Moreover, both abbots and bishops were expected to perform functions that went beyond advice and prayer. The Servitium regis often involved exercising judicial authority—what was called the ban—and even raising troops for the army. If need be, it also entailed going on military expedition in aid of the imperial image of Christ, whenever he needed to fight on behalf of His community as a living, political reality on the march towards eternity.⁴⁰

Perhaps the best way of grasping the full character of the Ottonian and early Salian approach to restoring Christian order is by examining the story of Otto III, whose half German and half Byzantine blood gave added substance to the imperial vision from his very birth. King of Germany by the age of three, his premature death at twenty-two cut off his plans for a marriage which might have helped him fend off his constant temptation to sins of the flesh. It left him heirless as well. Personal problems aside, he possessed both an undeniable piety and an excellent classical education, both of which gave him the chance to put his superior military training to work on behalf of a broad, meaningful understanding of the full message of the Word, the nature of Christendom, and how the latter ought to be guided.⁴¹

It was his visit to Rome in 996, at the age of 16, in answer to the call of Pope John XV (985-996) for help against the local familial pest—at that time, the Crescentii brood—which turned out to be the single most formative experience of Otto’s life. Accompanied by many of the great Church leaders of the day, most importantly, Gerbert of Aurillac—master scholar, Abbot of Bobbio, and sometime Archbishop of Rheims—the king’s march looked more like a religious procession than a regal train. At its head was the Holy Lance. In Italy, the young king met a number of charismatic figures who further confirmed his already strong sense of political-religious mission: men like St. Romualdo (950-1027), the founder of Camaldoli, and St. Adalbert of Prague (956-997). The former was a hermit who understood how to translate zeal for sanctity into an effective tool for quieting the social disorder unleashed by the restless counts, vassals, and other assorted “common sense” hoodlums of the day. The latter, adored by Otto as a model of both humility and love for the Church, and certainly a quite unique personality from any man’s standpoint, was destined to end his life a martyr while on mission among pagans still pointlessly worshipping “nature as is” in the north of Europe.

Finding Pope John XV dead on his arrival and the Papacy indeed the slave of local factionalism, the King installed his young cousin Bruno on the papal throne as Gregory V (996-999). Gregory then presided over Otto’s imperial coronation at St. Peter’s on May 21, 996. Here, the emotionally overwhelmed king-emperor was cloaked with a robe and a crown portraying the magnificence of the cosmos, evoking the Old and New Testament, and clearly focusing the meaning of his reign within the context of the divine plan, at the service of the greater glory of God. Otto now understood still more fully the mission that his passion and education had shaped him to fulfill: the need to secure the order of an all too fragile Western Christendom, and to do so by exalting Christ’s Church, with her visible center in Rome. According to the document through which he would later appoint his chaplain and enthusiastic supporter Leo (d. 1026) as Bishop of Vercelli, the Emperor’s task was one of making certain “that the Church of God remain free and safe; that she prosper throughout our Empire…that the power of the Roman People be extended and the State re-established, so that We might merit from living in this world honorably and thus fly more honorably from the prison of this life…”⁴²

Returning to Germany, our emperor-on-mission was soon to learn that the swamp of Roman politics was deeper and much more murky than he may originally have guessed. The Crescentii, aided and abetted by an eastern imperial authority in Constantinople irritated by this youthful competitor for Roman glory, quickly exploited Otto’s absence from town. They tossed Gregory V out of Rome and placed the young man’s former Greek tutor and disloyal friend, John Philagathos, on the throne of St. Peter as the Antipope John XVI (997-998). The emperor’s first stab at correction and transformation in Christ of the popes and the Patrimony of St. Peter had proven to be an all too fragile endeavor.

Otto and his many scholarly, reformer friends now saw that their work of revival required a lot more muscle behind it to make it stick. A new and fully armed procession set forth to Italy at the end of 997, with men like Gerbert of Aurillac, the above-mentioned Leo of Vercelli, the great Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim (960-1022), and St. Odilo of Cluny on hand to emphasize the ultimately spiritual aim of this temporarily clenched, German fist. Rome was reached in 998 and the head of the Crescentii Clan, who held out for three months at the Castel Sant’Angelo, finally captured and decapitated. Antipope John was disgraced, rather brutally punished, and imprisoned. Gregory V regained his throne. The re-entry of pope and emperor into St. Peter’s, and their joint responsibility for rule, reform, and the growth of the Roman State and Church were celebrated in a prayer-hymn written by Bishop Leo:⁴³

Refrain: Christ hear our prayers; cast your glance upon your city of Rome; in your goodness renew the Romans, awaken the forces of Rome, permit Rome to revive under the Empire of Otto III.

VI. Otto, rule yourself; be attentive and vigilant, you who according to the Apostle have charge of the bodies of men; it is for the punishment of sinners that you bear an invincible sword.

X. Rejoice, Pope, rejoice Caesar; let the Church exult with happiness, let the joy be great in Rome, let the imperial palace rejoice. Under the power of Caesar, the Pope reforms the age.

XI. O, you two luminaries throughout the lands, illuminate the churches, put darkness to flight. May the one {the Emperor} prosper by the sword, may the other {the Pope} give resonance to his word.

Our young missionary, the better to fulfill his responsibilities, both natural and supernatural, decided to take up permanent residence on the Palatine Hill, the home of the old Roman Emperors. There, he began to adopt Byzantine imperial customs, to seek for himself a bride from his eastern imperial colleague, and to preside, together with the pope and the bishops, as a thirteenth apostle at reforming Synods throughout Italy. When another temporary absence from the city led to a revival of the old, parochial, Roman shenanigans and perhaps even the poisoning of Pope Gregory V, the emperor’s determination to renew and transform his era grew but greater still.

Otto named his impressive scholar friend and fellow visionary, Gerbert, as his cousin’s successor. Gerbert took the name of Sylvester II, apparently to emphasize his desire to cooperate loyally with the new Constantine---just as the first Sylvester had worked in tandem with Constantine the Great. An Ottonian document of January, 1001, probably prepared by Leo of Vercelli, once again clearly spelled out the imperial commitment to extricating the Papacy from the sewer of Roman politics, while, interestingly enough, also denouncing the exaggerated papal political ambitions outlined in the “good story” recounted by the fraudulent Pseudo-Donation of Constantine discussed above. This latter document, readers will remember, was a bit of ill-advised word merchandising seeking to prop up papal authority in the years after the Caesaro-Papism latent in Carolingian imperialism became obvious:⁴⁴

Otto, slave of the Apostles and according to the will of the Saviour God, august Emperor of the Romans. We proclaim Rome capital of the world. We recognize that the Roman Church is the mother of all the churches, but also that the carelessness and incompetence of her pontiffs have for a long time now tarnished the titles of her brightness. In fact, these pontiffs have not only sold and alienated through certain dishonest practices the possessions of St. Peter outside of the city, but—and We do not affirm this without sorrow—the goods that they possessed from our own imperial city. With still greater license, they allowed these goods to pass into common use at the price of gold; they despoiled St. Peter, they despoiled St. Paul and their altars themselves. Instead of restoration they have always sowed confusion. In disdain of pontifical precepts and disdaining the Roman Church herself, certain popes so pushed their arrogance as to confuse the greater part of our Empire with their own apostolic power. Without caring for what they lost through their fault, without preoccupying themselves with that which their personal vanity caused them to waste, they replaced their own squandered goods…by turning towards (exploitation) of foreign ones—that is to say, ours and those of our Empire. {Hence} the lies forged by them, by means of which the Cardinal-Deacon John (surnamed Mutilated Fingers) drafted in gilded letters a privilege which he fallaciously rooted very deep in the past and placed under the name of the great Constantine.

Otto appears to have been the primary captain of the revived ship of Church and State, a man who took his role as thirteenth apostle quite literally. However, lest one think that his position was questioned by the great spiritual leaders of the day, St. Odilo’s testimony is there as a corrective. So enamored of Otto and his work was the reform abbot that he penned an enthusiastic poem exulting in the extent of the emperor’s glory, giving no hint of any fear concerning where such exaggerated adulation might possibly lead.⁴⁵

Magnificent as the work of the Ottonians was, historical realities, as some of the incidents described above already readily indicate, did not quite fit together with the Romano-German imperial vision. Liutprand of Cremona’s (c. 922-972) account of an embassy of Otto the Great to Constantinople shows that relations with the Eastern Empire were neither particularly fraternal nor even respectful. Involvement in Italy left room for problems to develop in Germany and among newly converted Slavic peoples. Outbursts of violence in the north regularly required a return to the homeland stimulating a recrudescence of difficulties further south.

And, indeed, by 1002, the grand vision of renovatio was finished. In the year 1000, while Otto was away on a truly exhilarating political-religious missionary expedition which took him as far away as present day Poland, and through which he also tightened the bonds linking Hungary with the family of western Christian nations, revolt brewed back in the peninsula. The emperor returned, only to find the malaise spreading to Rome by the beginning of 1001. Even though soon quelled, the experience of being so easily trapped on the Palatine Hill made it clear that the Eternal City was unsafe for Otto and his imperial-reformer entourage. The poignancy of his disappointment is captured by the speech to his rebellious subjects that Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim puts in Otto’s mouth on the third day of the siege: ⁴⁶

Listen to the words of your father, pay attention to them, meditate upon them carefully in your hearts. You are no longer my Romans. Because of you I left my fatherland, my family; through love for you I neglected my Saxons, all the Germans, those of my own blood. I have led you into the farthest regions of our Empire, into places where your ancestors, when they submitted the world to their power, never placed their feet. And why have I done this, if not to extend your glory to the ends of the world? I have adopted you as my children. I have preferred you to all others. Because I have raised you up from your fate, because of you, I say, I have aroused jealousy and hatred against myself. And you, in exchange for all this, you have rejected your father; you have caused many of my intimate friends to perish by a cruel death; you have rejected me. But you cannot reject me since I would never allow anyone to remove from my heart those whom I paternally embrace.

Emperor and pope nevertheless fled to Ravenna. There they consulted some of their closest supporters, Odilo of Cluny and St. Romualdo among them. The latter warned against any attempt to return to Rome as tantamount to an act of suicide. Otto ignored the great founder of Camaldoli, moved back southwards, and reached the very outskirts of the Eternal City, only to die from what was perhaps a recurrence of malarial fever. St. Bruno of Querfurt (970-1009), Apostle to the Prussians and beneficiary of Otto’s missionary vision, described his death on 24 January, 1002 as that of a true Christian monarch. “Cry world, cry Rome, and let the Church lament”, Leo of Vercelli sang in a poem capturing the misery of all of Otto’s friends. “Let the chants in Rome fall quiet. Let sorrow scream out to the palace, since, through the absence of Caesar, trouble extends across the world”.⁴⁷

The men of that first decade of the new millennium would have known that this announcement of great trouble was no exaggeration. Sylvester II experienced it without delay. Returning to the Eternal City, he saw the Crescentii fortunes immediately rise. The pope had the good luck to die just one year later, 63 years old, still a noble figure, but broken by the Waiting Game—the wait for a revival of the Papacy, of Rome, of the Empire, of Christendom, of the whole correcting and transforming message of the Word Incarnate in history. His second and Crescentii-tormented successor, Sergius IV (1009-1012), who knew him well, wrote an epitaph for him and for the work of Otto III on his tomb at the Lateran, praising their cooperative vision and lamenting that, with their passing, “the world was chilled with horror”.⁴⁸

These years were indeed not happy ones for Rome, the Papacy, and their friends. It is true to say that many details are lacking to our knowledge of the whole of that decade, and that several of those that survive are even thinly positive. Nevertheless, in general, the first decade of the new millennium was part of a less than optimum slice of time wracked with plague, renewed Saracen activity, and contest over the kingship of Italy between St. Henry II of Germany (1002-1024) and an ambitious nobleman named Arduin of Ivrea (955-1015). Much more importantly still, at least from our standpoint, it was a decade of intense Church humiliation. This was due to papal subservience to the strong-arm tactics wielded with depressing effectiveness through the continued influence of the local Crescentii gang. And that band of hooligans was inspired by a self-serving and intensely parochial vision of the role of the Papacy in the life of a Christendom wretchedly enslaved to the demands of “nature as is”.⁴⁹

Sad to say, worse was yet to come. The Crescentii managed to bully one more decent Pope, the same Sergius IV mentioned above, into basic helplessness. Yes, the Crescentii finally lost their grip after 1012 due to several untimely family deaths, an all too brazen attempt to bulldoze their own candidate onto the papal throne without even the semblance of an election, and the loss of prestige coming from their backing of several unsuccessful antipopes. But their place as masters of the Seven Hills was then taken over by a branch of the Theophylact Family, the Counts of nearby Tusculum.

These Tusculani, as they are generally styled, had enjoyed such a domineering position once before, and had sometimes even exercised it with more respectability than their debased predecessor. Unfortunately, they were soon to provide one of the worst of the possessors of the papal dignity, Benedict IX. Probably only twenty years old at his accession, Benedict sat three distinct times on the throne of St. Peter (1032-1044, 1045, and 1047-1048). This was due not only to political pressures but also to a corruption so great as to permit him literally to sell his own position and then try to steal it back after pocketing the dough. Vividly attacked as a demon from hell in the disguise of a priest by St. Peter Damian (1007-1072) in his aptly named Liber Gomorrhianus, Benedict was dismissed much more off-handedly by a future successor, Blessed Victor III (1086-1087), as being simply utterly unspeakable. Rome might still retain her prestige to good purpose in far-off Christian lands, but her closer inspection by pilgrim crowds could not help but make them realize that in many respects she stank zum Himmel.⁵⁰

Thankfully, help was on the way. Some of the disappointed believers in the papal and Roman mission who had waited so many years for a revival they had hoped to witness as a result of the reigns of Otto III, Gregory V, and Sylvester II, survived long enough to experience practical earthly proof that broad hopes can eventually overcome enormous obstacles and become realities. In fact, they survived to see the beginnings of a longer-lasting reform of “head and members” destined to mount a hugely important attack upon the supporters of “business as usual” that would retain its impact down to our own day.

Renewed reformation continued to involve the work of the sacred emperor. Otto’s immediate successor, St. Henry II (1002-1024), understood the realities of imperial strengths and weakness and focused his attentions on improving the situation in the north of Europe. But by the time of Henry III (1039-1056), under the stimulus of another generation of innovative reformers and with reference to his traditional legal role in Rome, the king-emperor, the living image of Christ, was ready to intervene anew in Italian affairs. That involvement led to the Synod of Sutri in 1046, the deposition of three simoniac popes, and their replacement by German pontiffs: Clement II (1046-1047), Damasus II (1048), and, most importantly, St. Leo IX (1049-1054). “Outsiders” filled with the pilgrim spirit had once again found their pilgrimage leading them to save Rome. When they arrived in the Eternal City, they were to add a new step to the Christian dance of life. And this was destined to veer the agmen we call the Church onto a different and in many respects quite unexpected highway on her pilgrim journey to her same unchanging goal.

C. The Second Wave of Reform & the Plenitude of Papal Power

After a century and more of generally embarrassing, uninspiring, or impotent figures on the throne of St. Peter, Leo IX was a radically new kind of pope. He and his successors, Victor II (1055-1057), Stephen X (1057-1058), Nicholas II (1059-1061), and Alexander II (1061-1073), now took charge of the movement of innovative Christian restoration. The local Roman nobility began to be unseated with the help of a collective cosmopolitan leadership including Hugh the White of Remiremont (c. 1020-c. 1099), Humbert of Moyenmoutier (d. 1061), Frederick of Liège (d. 1058), St. Peter Damian of Fonte Avellana, Desiderius (c. 1026-1087), the Abbot of Monte Cassino, and the subdeacon Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII (1073-1085).⁵¹

These impressive men built the remnants of the crumbling papal administrative machinery into that more serious apparatus that by the end of the eleventh century finally deserved the title of “Roman curia” as we understand it today. Most importantly, Rome’s continued prestige was exploited in order to enhance the power of the Papacy. Leo IX practiced a form of itinerant kingship, traveling outside the Eternal City to effect reform at synods in Salerno, Pavia, Vercelli, Mantua, Rheims, and Mainz. He thus enhanced papal esteem by bringing the person of the pope directly before the eyes of the European Catholic population. Priestly and monastic simony, the abandonment of celibacy, and the general failure of the clergy to understand the primacy of their spiritual mission were chastised severely at the hand of the highest authority in the Church---personally, in a way that masses of people could witness. The consequences were nothing less than electrifying.

In effect, what had happened was that the Papacy had shown that it, too, was ready to take up its staff and go on pilgrimage throughout Christendom for the cause of the Word. It thus began vigorously to extract itself from its parochial rut and its own depressing enslavement to the demands of “business as usual”. But it proved to be a different kind of reform movement that took shape around it, one that was more conscious of current feudal political realities than its predecessor had been. Hence, it was skeptical of both the viability as well as the suitability of an imperial revival of the kind envisaged by Otto III. This was a reform movement that, while grateful for the aid given to it by the Empire, decided that the Church needed more independence than the customary sacred imperial concept had ever proven willing to allow her, at least up until the present moment.

Always committed to the crucial importance of joint Church-State labors for the construction of Christendom, this second wave of the reform movement placed its most profound hopes for the success of the corrective and transforming message of the Word in the struggle for personal sanctity and sense of responsibility not just of emperor, pope, and bishops but also of every Christian without exception. For it, too, like the monks of Cluny before it, insisted that only the liberation of all of us from the tunnel vision of materialism and sin; only the willingness of all of us to see the world from the perspective of the Creator and Redeemer God could build the society of which holy tenth and eleventh century victims of “complexity without order” had so long dreamed.

This second wave built up steam rather swiftly. With the death of Henry III and the regency of his wife Agnes over their infant son, the Papacy declared its independence from direct control by the emperor. Stephen X (1057-1058), one of the reforming members of the Curia noted above, was elected without reference to the wishes of the imperial government. The Lateran Synod of 1059 transformed the cosmopolitan leadership of the budding Roman curia into the College of Cardinals, entrusting this body with the election of future pontiffs. Emperors, now viewed as simple laymen and no longer the extraordinary living images of Christ, were rather unceremoniously shunted off to the religious sidelines. As though this were not enough, outspoken figures like Humbert of Moyenmoutier began to insist that the entire Reichskirche, with her bishops and abbots chosen by and in aid of the throne, was actually herself part of the problem that the Church as a whole faced; that she herself was guilty of massive encouragement of what he called the “heresy” of simony. The implication was that the sacred Empire, rather than being a God-given secular aid to the work of the Word, actually stood in the way of the corrective and transforming mission of the Mystical Body of Christ.

Although the actions of St. Leo IX already clearly emphasized the Papacy’s readiness to utilize what was to be referred to as the “plenitude of papal power”, there has never been any doubt that Pope St. Gregory VII most vigorously expressed both the specific theme of the fullness of Roman authority as well as the entire spirit of the second wave of the reform movement in general. Elected by popular acclaim, Gregory was the darling of both reformers and the city when he began his reign. Insistence on the plenitude of papal power in the life of Christendom and the political independence sufficient to be able to utilize it, was, for him, the absolute, scripturally-grounded precondition for further reform. Papal authority and its religious justification were the real keys, practically, to serious work for individual and social improvement. For the pope was Peter, qui nunc in carne vivit, and Peter was what later Roman Pontiffs would call the Vicar of Christ.

In Lenten Synods between 1075 and 1078, as well as in the famous Dictatus Papae, practically every aspect of the theme of the plenitude of papal power—from the ultimately subordinate position of local bishops, who simply “shared” in his responsibilities, to the need, for the sake of the victory of spiritual truths, for secular powers to bend to higher, supernatural authority—was enunciated. Questions involving heresy, simony, celibacy, and marriage problems, according to this doctrine, were now to be resolved under the ultimate supervision of Rome. More than that, all of life was to be touched by her decisions. For if God gave the Apostolic See the power to judge spiritual matters, then, given man’s existence as a social creature of flesh and blood, her rulings must also impact upon worldly matters.⁵²

Legates were sent to proclaim the message of the plentitude of papal power throughout the whole of the Christian world. Outsiders of all kinds—whether the activist, reform minded, lay group called the pataria of Milan, the Normans, or the representatives of distant and quite recently converted Catholic peoples—were called to the Papacy’s support in its struggle to protect its ability to perform its Christ-given duty. The assistance that they gave to it, as Leo IX indicated and St. Anselm of Lucca (1036-1086) explained later in greater detail, could even justifiably involve a help that was armed and warlike in intent. For if anyone needed knights to defend him in his work to secure a successful pilgrimage of the People of God to Heaven, who more so than the successor to St. Peter?

The result of all of this was a short-term disaster. A renewed sense of papal primacy and plenitude of power ran head on against a Greek world filled with that intense sense of ethnic self-importance and patriarchal power discussed at the beginning of this chapter. How could Patriarch Cerularius (1043-1058) not be expected to react violently against an embassy of Pope Leo IX filled with outspoken papalists like Humbert and Frederick? After all, let us remember that eastern imperial law referred to him as the “living image of Christ”. Cerularius was the representative of a Greek national spirit that by this point saw in the liturgical customs of other peoples, such as the use of unleavened bread for the Eucharist in the Latin world, heresy plain and simple. How was a man who as patriarch was closing Latin churches and confiscating Latin monasteries to accept commands from a barbarous upstart in the German dominated world? The very concept was unthinkable---on religious and unchangeable, classical Roman grounds. Schism ensued; a schism that has proven to be almost impossible to eradicate, despite the numerous attempts to resolve it that we shall address in the pages to follow.⁵³

Moreover, not all reformers appreciated the hardening of tone that was represented most clearly by Humbert in his famous work Against the Simoniacs. St. Peter Damien and St. Hugh of Cluny were convinced that cooperation of Mother Church and Sacred Empire could continue to be as fruitful in the future as in the past. The validity of their criticisms of the second wave of the reform movement will be confronted in detail in the next chapter. For the moment, it is enough for us to indicate that the chief shock of this change in tone involved the fact that it brutally contradicted traditional language accepted by large numbers of contemporaries regarding a Christian order that was thought to be both God-given as well as eternal in character. For many good and decent contemporaries, including a significant number of the most fervent believers, it represented a horrifying innovation that was also a recipe for a divisive rocking of the ship of both Church and State. How could it therefore be anything other than highly anti-Catholic and perhaps even diabolical in inspiration? Hence the complaints of the author of De Unitate Ecclesiae Conservanda:⁵⁴

Peace, says the Lord, I leave to you, My peace I give unto you. Wherefore, whenever the sons of the Church are compelled to make war, they do this not by the teaching of Christ and the tradition of the Church, but from necessity, and by a certain contagion of Babylon, the earthly city, through which the sons of Jerusalem journey during their earthly life.

What a mystery of iniquity is now being worked by those who call themselves monks and, confounding the Church and the state in their perverse doctrine, oppose and set themselves up against the royal power…{so that} for seventeen years and more, everywhere in the Roman Empire there are wars and seditions, the burning of churches and monasteries, bishop is set against bishop, clergy against clergy, people against people, and father against son, and brother against brother.

But for St. Gregory VII, it was the defenders of the imperial order who were the real innovators, their novelties disguised by the fact that their vision of the relationship of Church and State had, in one form or another, been the dominant one since the days of Constantine. Having become a “custom” and been treated as a given for the constitution of a Christian order, this vision’s centuries-old existence was then cited as proof positive of its unquestionable holiness. Unfortunately, cooperation on this basis was a fraudulent abuse, no matter how ancient the pedigree of the error involved. When “the Lord says ‘I am the Truth and the Life’”, Gregory noted, citing Tertullian, “he did not say ‘I am custom’ but ‘I am Truth’ (non dixit sum consuetudo, sed Veritas)”.⁵⁵ The Eternal Word trumped words, no matter how many times these were solemnly reiterated. His triumph now required a determined break with the familiar, whatever the human pain involved.

Had Gregory known of it, he might also have made reference to the battle of Plato and Isocrates and the hunt for a full understanding of the Logos as opposed to an “appropriate explanation” of a “foundation vision” rooted in the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” in support of his argument. Still, even though the essence of the contemporary struggle was indeed similar to the earlier conflict on the intellectual level, it was not precisely the same on the practical plane. For the imperialists were not necessarily the die-hard supporters of the natural status quo that the second wave of reformers generally made them appear to be. And, unfortunately, it was to prove to be through the exaggeration of otherwise solid principles and in their elaboration by means of a “good story” arguing for the resolution of all problems by excessive appeal to papal authority that future tragedy would lie.

D. The New Ascent of Mount Tabor

Conflict between the supporters of Gregorian reform ideals and their opponents was thus inevitable. It began immediately. Nevertheless, a discussion of that conflict must wait if we are to keep the main themes of this set of reflections on Church History marshaled properly in line. Contemporary struggles forming part of that broad and long-lasting counterattack leading to the emergence of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo from the early medieval shadows and the modern-day dominance of the appropriate explanations of reality its talented rhetoricians were to produce are more suitably addressed in the next chapter. It is of greater importance first to complete our reforming pilgrimage in what was to prove to be a new, Christendom-wide ascent of Mt. Tabor. What needs to be done now is to bring the medieval reform movement, with its profound concern for the unfolding of the meaning of the Incarnate Word in history and its desire to see all things through the eyes of Christ, to its full fruition.

Rather than attempting to discuss this growth chronologically, it seems best to summarize it as a unit from the standpoint of two pontificates: that of Innocent III (1198-1216) primarily and, to a lesser degree, that of Blessed Gregory X (1271-1276). This is because Innocent most firmly dotted the “i’s” and crossed the “t’s” on the character and goals of the reform movement, both as man and as pontiff. It is also because Gregory repeated this labor, having set himself the task at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 of reaffirming all that Innocent had sought to accomplish—and at a moment when the obstacles to achieving reform goals that his predecessor had already identified had become much more ominous. Innocent was aided in this dramatic enterprise by a century and more of predecessors in reform; Gregory by men like St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), who were themselves brilliant beneficiaries of Innocent’s manifold labors. The work of these two popes, therefore, fixes our attention on the authoritative, accepting, correcting, transforming, compassionate, and pilgrimage-minded character of the Incarnate Word unfolding His meaning in history in all its ineffable complexity. Meanwhile it simultaneously introduces us to the very forces that have worked to arrest the new ascent of Mt. Tabor and create the tragically limited world that we see around us today: a world that is trapped in a naturalist journey to nowhere and yet uses certain high minded themes from its Christian past, deconstructed to serve the cause of “business as usual”, to celebrate its fall into meaninglessness.⁵⁶

Lothair dei Segni (1160-1216), the future Innocent III, was born at Gavignano, near Segni, south of Rome. We know of him through many sources, including his own Gesta and letters, along with numerous other official and private documents of the age. Educated both in Rome as well as at those new centers of higher learning in Bologna and in Paris that he would do so much to promote, he also traveled, while a student on the Left Bank, to England. Here, as he himself tells us, a visit to the tomb of St. Thomas à Becket (1118-1170) left an especially powerful impression upon him, important to the regenerative work he would later undertake as Roman Pontiff with regard to the relationship of Church and State.

Varied is the word one must use to describe the intellectual and cultural interests of Lothair. He had a taste for music, literature, and poetry. His own rhetorical skills were so appealing that his sermons and books were collected and much used by believers throughout Europe for centuries after his death. As pope, he developed a reputation as a major legal thinker, even though there is some uncertainty regarding the exact character of his studies at the faculty of law in Bologna. But he himself looked upon an interest in theology, pursued still further while working in Paris, as the most significant concern of his life.

Subdeacon in 1187, and both deacon and cardinal by 1190, Lothair was elected and installed as pope on the very day of the death of his predecessor, Celestine III (1191-1198). He was then swiftly ordained a priest and consecrated as bishop. His rapid advancement to the highest position in the Mystical Body of Christ at the age of only thirty eight seems to reflect a feeling on the part of the College of Cardinals that a younger man was needed after a number of pontificates that were either too short or led by octogenarians. In addition, it demonstrates a clear conviction that Lothair was the most obvious available candidate for the post. So extraordinary was the character of his election that the new pontiff felt obliged to explain it in his first missive to the Christian world. He then set about the work that so brilliantly summarized the spirit and goals of the entirety of the medieval ascent of Mt. Tabor and its effort to see all things in the transforming light of God.

Every act of Innocent’s pontificate exudes that spirit of confident and yet humble authority marking it off as supremely Catholic. The confidence came from an absolute conviction that the sole ground for the validity and use of papal prerogatives arose from the firm union of the Papacy with the life and teaching of the God-Man. In fact, Innocent was the first pope to popularize the claim that the pontiff was the Vicar not of St. Peter but of Christ. The humility came from his personal intelligence and piety, his sense of political and historical reality, and his never-failing prudential spirit—in short, from the fact that he was in no way the man that later black legends would make him out to be. And he was authoritative because he possessed the unfailingly militant crusading mentality that was the most visible characteristic of the whole of the contemporary reform movement.

At this point, it is incumbent upon us to emphasize the significance of that crusading mentality. Yes, the movement for reform was firmly rooted in the recognition of the primacy of the hunt for spiritual perfection in each and every individual’s life. Still, that sense of the primacy of things spiritual emerged as a practical force for change in the precise historical way that it did through the specific stimuli provided by the need to form zealous crusaders and then define the nature of the armed Crusades they were called upon to undertake.⁵⁷

As we have already noted, this development flowed from the recognition by reform-minded monks that to follow the Rule of St. Benedict freely they must first find a way to tame the lawless soldiers ravaging much of contemporary western Christendom. Hence, the restraining of the soldiery reflected in their promotion of the oath to the Peace and Truce of God. Hence, also, the training of the representatives of this “bound rhinoceros” as monks-in-arms, concerned, simultaneously, for prayerful growth in Christ and various defensive services in aid of just causes: as guards for pilgrims on the road to Compostella; as Knights of St. Peter at the command of St. Leo IX, guided by the advice of St. Anselm, Bishop of Lucca; and, most famously, as noble warriors fighting, from the eleventh century onwards, for the re-conquest of Spain and the Holy Land from a long-lasting but illicit Moslem control.

We all know the enthusiasm that this “Way of God”—as the Crusade in the East was called—unleashed, most potently, to begin with, among the noble families of the Franks and the “outsider” Normans. With the seemingly miraculous fall of Jerusalem to the Crusaders in 1099 and the need to succor the Crusading States established in the Levant, such enthusiasm eventually spread to the soldiery of western Christendom as a whole. Emperors and kings joined in crusading enterprises, with the French Capetian Family in particular gaining for itself a reputation for commitment to the movement. More intense associations dedicated to prayer and soldiering took shape in the process—communities of the sort that Werner Jaeger argues Plato himself longed to see. Knights of the Temple and the Hospital, Teutonic Knights, and numerous other innovative “military orders” were created for work in the Holy Land, Spain, and the pagan Baltic regions, all of them judged proper spheres of crusading activity.

Crusading in the Holy Land brought manifold spiritual consequences in its train. Jesus Christ as an active historical figure became much more real to those who walked the same roads and passed through the same villages that He had done. Christ, Mary, and the Holy Family seemed more human and approachable, and the Divine work of the God-Man more achievable and therefore all the more pressing. Through Crusading on Christ’s own home territory, the immediacy of the Kingdom of God was made palpable in a way that even the finest of sermons in churches north of the Alps could never match.

Moreover, discussion of the nature of the sacrifice shouldered by those who went on Crusade promoted a deeper understanding both of penitential practice as well as the ineffable solidarity achieved through membership in a Mystical Body of Christ quickened by God’s gracious love. For it was out of the Crusading Movement that the doctrine of indulgences was clarified. This doctrine, far from reducing spiritual concerns to the mechanical calculations satirized by later generations, was utterly sublime in its central vision. It taught that any sacrificial act on the part of a repentant sinner would be met by a still greater outpouring of love from a God who sacrificed His only begotten Son for mankind; and that an integral aspect of this overwhelming love was that it allowed the merits of those heroes of charity whom we call the saints in heaven to spill over in aid of those in need. Just as a mother’s superabundant love and self-sacrifice could overflow to the benefit of an errant child through the mediation of the Redeemer, that of the saints could overflow to the help and perfection of the lesser works of their weaker brethren in the Body of Christ.⁵⁸

Friends of the Crusading Movement soon came to see that “taking up one’s cross” and going on armed pilgrimage ennobled more aspects of an individual soldier’s life than his military vocation alone might indicate. This was true even on a purely natural level. After all, a man exchanging shoddy footwear for the finest shoes cannot ignore dealing with the rest of his shabby wardrobe without appearing ridiculous. On the spiritual plane the consequences were still more significant. In order to avoid becoming “a house divided”, a penitential soldier could not focus on fighting morally acceptable wars while sinning against truth, beauty, and goodness in non-military matters. Hence, the recognition on the part of heroes, poets, and theologians of the Crusading Movement that the dedicated crusader had to be a unified whole: a just soldier and a fighter for culture in general, all under the aegis of that Incarnate Word who alone could harmonize every aspect of life in the proper hierarchy of values.

In short, a true crusading soldier had to be “an officer and a gentleman”, constantly striving for sainthood even as he sought for military victory. King warriors like St. Louis IX (1215-1270) of France enthusiastically taught such a message. In varying degrees, it was also instilled in the hearts of medieval man by the composers of the many so-called Chansons de geste—“Songs of the Deed”—ranging from that of Roland to the Arthurian Cycle and the tales of the Cid, all of them celebrating the accomplishments of “armed pilgrims”. Its most important theological standard bearer was St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), mystic, preacher, and propagandist for the work of the knight-monks of the bright, new, Christian and “Platonic” crusading orders. This message entered into the education of all future crusaders. As a result, a real change indeed did take place in the vision of the mission of soldiering as a whole; one similar to that regarding the mission of Rome in ancient times.⁵⁹

It is useful for us to glance backwards to that ancient change to underline, through yet another Seed of the Logos, what now happened once again in medieval times, after the Word Incarnate had arrived on the earth. Ancient Rome had conquered the Mediterranean world for a wide variety of less than elevated motives. The logic of its self-interested actions can be demonstrated through the confusion of events, just as the logic of the coronation of Charles the Great can be traced back to the many different decisions of Clovis and Pippin. How did the literal motives responsible for Rome’s conquests actually influence the general movement of history? They affected it little at all. But one cannot say the same for the symbolic meaning of its victories.

This was outlined by Greek historians like Polybius (200-118 B.C.), who emphasized Rome’s character as a place of law, order, and justice, along with her task of bringing the blessings of peace to an unruly world. An ecumene pacified by Rome, Polybius argued, would then benefit from the fruits of Hellenic culture. Rome’s mission would be accomplished. The works written by such historians were used to educate the children of Roman notables. Subsequent generations thus publicly spoke as though this law-and-order-giving duty, which rendered worldwide cultural growth possible, were indeed the real cause for the growth of the Empire. Rome became a concrete model for international organization and justice by no means warranted by her original intentions and activity. And it is in this form that Rome continues to have meaning for us today---an eternally valuable, correcting, and transforming meaning.

Similarly, soldiers brought up on the vision presented by the preaching of St. Bernard, the example of St. Louis IX, and the message of at least certain aspects of the Songs of the Deed, would feel ashamed publicly to admit motivation by other, contrary goals—even if they actually did see soldiering merely as an opportunity for unrestrained cruelty and pillaging. It required but a fraction of a behavioral change on the part of even a small number of influential military commanders and their men to set in motion a long-term substantive transformation for the better. For it is through such small changes on the part of even the tiniest minority that most progress combating the “business as usual” mentality of the vast majority of mankind accepting “nature as is” has taken place in the past and will continue to take place in the future. Anyone comparing the transgressions of the developed crusading soldiery with the evils perpetrated by their forefathers of the 900’s—or their wayward heirs in the twentieth century—can note that a change of the sort did, at least for a time, begin to take root. And even if end results are not what we wish, beginnings are often enough, in the mind of God, to gain the men engaged in them an entry into His eternal kingdom.

Once again, I am now only discussing the positive aspects of the new, medieval ascent of Mount Tabor. Enormous problems plagued the actual military Crusading Movement, just as they did every other fruit of the crusading mentality. It is sufficient for us at this point merely to indicate that the practical military failures of crusading by the time of Pope Innocent III were symbolized by the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1189 and the inability of the Third Crusade under the combined leadership of the emperor and the kings of France and England to recapture it. These disasters formed the background landscape of Innocent’s reign and made a basic impact upon the whole program of his unique pontificate. Again, responding to the needs of the failing crusading movement was not the ultimate ground and explanation of the pope’s actions in all of the many fields of transformation in Christ in which he labored. But it was most certainly the strongest stimulus pressing him into motion.

Ultimate grounds for Innocent’s actions can be found in his books. His most famous work, On the Misery of the Human Condition (1194-1195), is not sufficient to this task because he intended to complete it with another “positive” volume that he never had a chance to finish: On the Dignity of Human Nature. A much more complete guide to the spirit of Innocent’s thought is his Fourfold Character of Marriage. For Innocent, all of life is symbolized by marriage. In this book, he shows that the marriage of man and wife is one of the glorious, sacramental tools raising the individual to eternal life with a God who is married to the soul because of the marriage of the Logos with human nature and of Christ with His Church. Through these marriages, the fruitful, sublime, corrective, transforming union of nature and the supernatural can take place and have its effect upon the world. Unfortunately, however, because of the misery of the human condition after the sin of Adam, rendering them fruitful requires a great deal of difficult and humbling effort on our part.⁶⁰

It was here, Innocent thought, that one could identify the problem with the contemporary Crusading Movement. If it were not succeeding, it must be because Christians were not correcting those sins in their daily lives that prevented marriage of the soul with God. This left them in a wretched, uncorrected natural condition rendering them unworthy of success in any of their endeavors. Victory in the external crusade for the defense of the Holy Land was therefore intimately connected with victory in an internal European crusade against the individual sins preventing this transforming marriage from taking place. If sham Christians—both among the fighting men abroad and that vast majority of believers who remained at home—could honestly be turned into true Catholics, then the success of the external Crusade would perhaps be guaranteed. Victory in such an internal conflict could only be achieved by intensifying an awareness of the primacy of the spirit in every vocation in life, not just that of soldiering.

This intensification brought with it two further consequences, the first of which was the universal application of the militant crusading spirit. Medieval Christian culture might have taken on a different flavor if bakers had been the initial problem for Clunaic monks rather than the malitia. As it was, however, once the redirection of the soldier’s vocation to proper Christian goals became the first object of the reformers’ attention, it was inevitable that a certain military “feel” would serve as a model for similar endeavors in other spheres of life, working smoothly together with the basic human sense of being engaged in a battle for daily survival. Hence the adoption by St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) of the language of a crusading knight committed to deeds of derring-do on behalf of his Lady, Apostolic Poverty. Hence, the soldierly and chivalric character of his mission to Egypt to convert the Sultan, and that of his fellow Franciscans crossing the Silk Road alongside Mongol warriors in the hope of evangelizing the Great Khan. Hence, also, the militant crusade against heresy undertaken by St. Dominic (1170-1221) and his followers.

A second consequence, also already obvious in the work of reformers in the generations before Innocent’s appearance on the scene, flowed from the acceptance of the need to bring spiritual correction to so many varied natural spheres. This underscored the importance of developing pastoral strategies appropriately proportioned to the different character of each specific human activity. In the same way that the essence of soldiering had to be identified, corrected, and transformed, the “logos” of every other activity shaping the daily lives of men and women had to be pinpointed and raised more militantly to God. A pastoral theology highly conscious of the value of making distinctions depending upon “who” was targeted doing “what” was of particular concern to Peter Cantor (d. 1197), who was an influential teacher in Paris at the time of Innocent’s studies there. The young Lothair seems to have been powerfully affected by its precepts.⁶¹

Innocent’s spiritual, militant, and pastorally variegated summary of the medieval ascent of Mount Tabor is most fruitfully discussed by dividing his own labors into two distinct parts. One of these concerns measures that were aimed primarily at strengthening the backbone of the Church, the State, and Christian individuals in general in their crusading battle against the obvious sinfulness preventing true marriage of souls with God. The second illustrates his fervent embrace of that pilgrim spirit open to the unexpected twists and turns of the dance of life, and therefore ready to experiment to attain the same unchanging goal of transformation in Christ dictated by the fact that the Kingdom of God was now at hand. Both types of labor were visible in the decrees of that magnificent “summary of the summary” of the path leading to a new ascent of Mount Tabor—the Fourth Lateran Council, called by Innocent to meet in 1215.

In strengthening the backbone of the Church, Innocent did nothing other than build on what St. Leo IX had begun with the tightening and internationalization of a Curia designed to make the plenitude of papal authority felt throughout the Christian world. This, by the late twelfth century, had involved the construction of a large, sophisticated, administrative apparatus in Rome, with representatives traveling the length and breadth of Christendom. Curial machinery was both difficult to pay for and to supervise, two problems at the root of manifold evils destined to prosper in the centuries to come and to serve as the meat for much of the sad tale to be recounted in the following chapters.

Innocent added immeasurably to the standard operating procedure, strength, and efficiency of the Roman administrative machine, especially with respect to tax collection on behalf of new crusades and other papal undertakings. But he did this while ruthlessly removing rapacious officials hungry for fees for expediting papal business. Both competent and scrupulous in his own Roman diocese, he wanted to insure the same high standards in the episcopacy that “shared his cares” as a whole. As he wrote in a letter to the Bishop of Liège: ⁶²

It is proper that the pope should be irreproachable, and that he to whom the care of souls falls should shine like a torch in the eyes of all by reason of his learning in doctrine and his example. Thus, every time someone informs us that one of our brothers in the episcopate does not exude the perfume of pastoral modesty and ruins or tarnishes his good reputation in some way, we experience deep sorrow and trouble; in order to track down such faults minutely, and to correct them with the requisite severity, we force ourselves to apply the remedy of apostolic solicitude.

Oversight of the episcopacy involved a great deal of papal watchfulness. First of all, Innocent sought to supervise the choice of individual bishops. He expected that, once approved by him, these bishops had to be gently but firmly pressed to hold national and provincial councils and regularly visit their dioceses, all for the purpose of knowing and correcting the priestly and pastoral activities as well as the personal behavior of their own lower clergy. Periodic trips to Rome to report on successes and failures were also demanded of them. The sense of solidarity from the top to the bottom of the agmen that this papal guidance helped to intensify would then hopefully prove useful in fending off continued efforts to steal Church property or redirect its use to the primarily secular and even totally anti-spiritual purposes of the lovers of “nature as is”.

Innocent had a profound sense of the value of the State in the transformation of all things in Christ, and thus sought the strengthening of its activity to serve this noblest of purposes as well. It was the responsibility of the State to use its authority to insure the proper peace of the Church, especially by preventing contemporary heretics who denied the goodness of nature from insinuating their way into positions of influence over the political and social environment. It was the duty of the State to stand guard over economic justice as well. And this, Innocent realized, was a particularly urgent matter given the impressive twelfth century expansion in merchant enterprise, the increasing influence of money, the growth of usurious debt, and the discernable sense of uncontrollable and negative change beginning to be felt by large segments of the European population, both urban and rural. We will also address these matters at greater length in the dramatic chapters to come.

One of the reasons Innocent was so keen on building order in the States of the Church was that he wanted to provide an example for the rest of Christendom of just what a responsible government, guided by both Faith and Reason, was called upon to do. For Innocent, this clearly did not mean “anything that it could do”. For the pope was also acutely aware of just how easily even a State under papal control could be led astray from its proper tasks to serving those of a “business as usual” mentality. It was because of this awareness that he disliked hearing his own officials indulge in flights of rhetorical humbug, attempting to concoct “appropriate explanations” of their exaggerated and erroneous administrative and policing actions with reference to the “sacred” work they were performing for the Holy See.⁶³

Future black legends to the contrary, Innocent insisted that the Church’s labor with respect to “toughening up” the State was basically an indirect one. Yes, the pope did claim a direct role in imperial affairs, in confirming or rejecting a candidate for the position of emperor, but this in no way emerged from any dogmatic teaching on his part. As far as he was concerned, the papal-imperial connection was merely an historical fact of life, rooted in the action of the Papacy in transferring control of the Western Empire from Constantinople to the Carolingians. Aside from this peculiar responsibility, the Church’s role was that of a teacher who interfered politically and socially only when correction was required, de ratione peccati, by reason of sin. Such correction most often concerned the behavior of rulers or officials as individual members of the Body of Christ, with—not surprisingly, given Innocent’s concern for marriage as a symbol the whole of man’s relationship to God—the marital infidelities and attempted divorces of various kings and princes at the top of the list.⁶⁴

Strengthening the backbone and correcting the behavior of all individual Christians, through Church, State, and pastoral strategies varying from those aimed at crusaders all the way down to others designed for rescuing prostitutes, was a central focus of the whole of Innocent’s pontificate. This can be seen most clearly in Fourth Lateran Council’s legislation concerning parish life. Innocent, in effect, asked the Fathers of the council to consider the difficulties believers would face in changing their lives if they did not belong to a parish community where the moral consequences of their supernatural Faith were regularly offered to them, according to their different vocations in life. He pressed them to work to transform the Old Adam into the New by giving all of the faithful a clear teaching of what each of the Seven Sacraments was meant to accomplish and of the practical context in which each was to be used. It is interesting to note, in this regard, that the pope’s and the council’s hopes were pinned upon stimulating Christians to at least one parish confession and communion per year. Clearly, at least in a sacramental respect, the new ascent of Mt. Tabor was truly only at its beginning—and this, more than twelve hundred years after the appearance of the Word in human history.

Innocent’s encouragement of a pilgrim’s attitude to the unpredictable and ever-changing dance of life is both highly significant and illustrative of the spirit of the second wave of the reform movement in its entirety. His pilgrim testimony is best summarized with respect to two measures in particular: support for institutions of higher learning and backing for the new mendicant orders. Both were especially dear to the pope as tools for tackling manifest deficiencies in the already existing ecclesiastical structure and for providing superior teaching and guidance for the dance of life of the Christian community in general.

Historians today are more aware than ever before just how much continuity there was between ancient and medieval culture. Still, everyone admits that there were losses, some permanent and many temporary, regarding knowledge of specific skills, themes, and venerable authors. The Carolingian Renaissance had provided a valuable reinforcement to sagging classical studies. The subsequent Ottonian Renaissance worked to the same positive effect. Although learning in monastic centers declined thereafter, a number of the cathedral schools first encouraged by Charlemagne and Louis the Pious remained quite active, while the study of Latin literature was enhanced and remained strong far into the High Middle Ages, especially in such important French cities as Chartres.

One realm in which western loss of ancient wisdom was clear was that of Roman Law. Knowledge of the fullness of this law, as embodied in the Code of Justinian, had indeed suffered. The early Middle Ages generally worked with that shortened version of the earlier Theodosian Code contained in the so-called Breviary of the King of the Visigoths, Alaric II (d. 507). But this gap was filled from the eleventh century onwards, through the efforts of men such as Irnerius (c. 1050-after 1125) and Gratian (1000’s-1100’s). The consequences of a deeper understanding of Roman Law for both Civil and Canon Law, which were numerous and serious, are best discussed in the following chapter in union with the highly charged debate over the nature of Church and State that it also nurtured.

Lacunae in philosophy were confronted in the era of the new ascent of Mount Tabor as well. Interest in Neo-Platonism, especially due to the influence of Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, was primary at the beginning of the age. Nevertheless, the intense study of logic, and the rush of Aristotelian translations that took place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, accompanied by the commentaries of the Moslem scholars Avicenna (c. 980-1037) and Averroes (1126-1198), ended by at least temporarily eclipsing the sway of the Academy and its offshoots.

Peter Abelard (1079-1142) and Peter Lombard (1100-1160) were the most well known figures active in the early stages of this move towards logic and Aristotle; St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and Blessed Dun Scotus (c. 1265-1308) dominated its latter days. Whatever the current popular understanding of the respective attitudes of these varied thinkers to Aristotle might be, all of them, without exception, found the use of peripatetic arguments to be indispensable to their work. And we shall soon see that through their labors, the Seed of the Logos provided by this, the greatest of Plato’s pupils, was separated out from the dangerous uses to which it might be put, harmonized with the Faith, and stored in the corrective and transforming armory of the agmen of the Word marching splendidly through history.⁶⁵

Due to any number of factors—including the presence of already existing schools, geographical and political utility, and the fortuitous combination of certain vibrant teachers and enthusiastic pupils—Bologna and Paris rose to the forefront of the legal and philosophical studies thus enriched. In these two cities there developed those new corporations of masters and students, along with such innovative practices as the insistence upon a basic curriculum and the awarding of degrees, which guaranteed the creation of the first true historical universities. With the birth of the universities, for the first time in history, a well-defined scholarly “polis” operating within the larger political and social community, became a palpable reality.⁶⁶

Lothair dei Segni studied in both these academic commonwealths. We especially know a good deal about his love for his teachers and his time in Paris. As Innocent III, he provided them much assistance, granting papal protection to their corporate freedom so that they could work in peace and quiet. He did this for two reasons. The pope nurtured universities, first of all because, as a paladin of a Christian and classical culture that grasped the importance of social and individual cooperation in all spheres of life, he understood that only a social environment could provide the proper framework for successful individual intellectual activity. It was solely through membership in a scholarly polis that the individual mind could be steered away from madness and self-destruction to fruitful, human, fraternal achievement. And, secondly, Innocent gave his consistent assistance to the growth of the scholarly polis because he recognized the promise that universities held for the future, as “think tanks” preparing warriors for the battle against “nature as is” on behalf of the correction and transformation in Christ of the whole of Christendom. If the flaws of crusading were to be addressed by toughening up the militant crusade for transformation in Christ in all vocations in life, the marshalling of scholarly resources in just such militant camps of higher learning had to be pressed forward with special papal fervor. Only thus could the beneficial results of human thought successfully be put to the service of struggling Christians in all their varied endeavors.

Let us now turn briefly to the question of the relationship of Innocent to the mendicant orders. We must begin this task by noting once again that the general spiritual awakening, together with the greater diversification of the social order accompanying the growth of material wealth in the twelfth century, had also enriched awareness of the distinct temptations of varying social groups in western Christendom and the differing religious remedies required to overcome them. The reform movement had simultaneously called attention to the deficiencies of the clergy of the western Christian agmen, along with its inability to respond militantly to all these dangerous seductions and positive needs. Efforts to deal with clerical insufficiencies led to the numerous and sometimes quite contrasting liturgical and preaching concerns of Clunaic, Carthusian, and Cistercian monks. They also had engendered formation of the many types of so-called Canons Regular, designed to provide a more organized spiritual direction and preaching focus to the daily activities of secular diocesan priests.⁶⁷

Recognition of the new dilemmas of a wealthier society, the possible sinfulness accompanying the accumulation of riches, and the insufficiency of the current spiritual response to the problems of affluence and luxury was central to the emergence of the movement in favor of living and preaching a life of Apostolic Poverty as well. As its name indicates, this movement praised a form of existence that was thought to be in special conformity with that taught by Christ, practiced by his immediate disciples, and somehow lost in the course of time. It took many forms, a number of them seemingly or openly heretical, in ways that will be addressed more fully in the following chapters. Let it suffice to say at the moment that the errors of some of the proponents of Apostolic Poverty had made the whole movement so suspect in the eyes of the Church by the time that Innocent was elected pope that it appeared highly unlikely that he would have lent his support to any of its followers and their projects.

And yet this is precisely what he did do, reviewing and accepting the Apostolic Poverty of the already existing Umiliati in Lombardy and, most importantly, enthusiastically approving the new Mendicant Orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis. Here, as with the Universities of Paris and Bologna, Innocent saw an initiative both innovative and yet better suited to completing the pastoral work of the unchanging Eternal Word under changed and changing circumstances than anything available to him through the aid of the existing secular clergy and traditional monasticism alone. In taking them under his wing, the pope began the alliance that would make of the mendicants the chief Christendom-wide arm of the Holy See for the correction and transformation of all things in Christ for the remainder of the Middle Ages.⁶⁸

Innocent’s labors, both in giving backbone to Church, State, and individual Christian life as well as in promoting pilgrim solutions for dealing with new steps in the dance of life, did not go uncontested. Universities, the nature of the studies cherished therein, and the intrusion of these upstart Dominican and Franciscan beggars into academic and pastoral enterprises all proved to be repellent to many of his contemporaries. Their opposition, as the following chapter will make clear, grew ever more intense as the thirteenth century advanced. Opposition was accompanied, every step of the way, by the hold that the spirit of inertia always has over all men if it is not fought forthrightly with every weapon at their disposal. Still, despite the many and often quite intense problems connected with Innocent’s initiatives, the Holy See’s support for all of them continued unabated in the immediate following pontificates. Blessed Gregory X was to offer especially emphatic confirmation of the mendicants in the face of often thunderous condemnation by bishops and abbots at the second greatest of medieval councils, that of Second Lyon, in 1274.⁶⁹

Appropriately enough, he was to do so in the context of calling for yet another external crusade. For Gregory, like Innocent, and like the whole of the age of the new ascent of Mount Tabor, was a crusader, stimulated by the same crusading spirit that stirred the entire second wave of the reform movement. He was on mission in the Holy Land at the time of his election to the throne of St. Peter, and was deeply conscious of the crisis threatening to bring an end to the Christian presence in the region at any moment. Bringing that awareness of crisis back to Rome with him, he set about preparing for a new “armed pilgrimage” just as his great predecessor would have done—by insisting upon an intense internal struggle against the personal sins of Christendom threatening the success of any external crusading enterprise.

Following still further in Innocent III’s footsteps, Gregory believed that the greatest of these internal Christian sins was the Schism of East and West. Second Lyons was therefore also called by him for the purpose of healing this scandalous wound, and negotiating with the Byzantine Empire, recently re-established in its traditional capital of Constantinople under the rule of Michael Paleologus (1259-1282), to do so. Through the graces obtained by restoring firm unity to the Body of Christ, Gregory hoped that a lasting victory over the Moslems controlling Jerusalem would finally be merited. A solidly united Christendom would then move forward from strength to strength, completing the work of the Word Incarnate in history.⁷⁰ The sad reality of what actually did transpire is, thankfully, not the task of this chapter, whose purpose, which was that of outlining the high medieval understanding of the equipment needed for a new scaling of Mount Tabor, must now be fulfilled and summarized.

E. The True and the Good Story United

The underlying greatness of the western medieval reform movement lay in its initial recognition that the Christian pilgrimage to God in the changing earthly realm can never be totally organized in some complete and unchangeable form. It was this that enabled it to see the deficiencies of the admittedly great “words” and glorious vision of Imperial Christendom and move on to accept the need for innovative steps in the performance of the always dramatic dance of life. As it analyzed the changed contemporary situation in the light of those aspects of the message of past ages that were of permanent value, it added its own eternally valid contribution for the necessary instruction of future pilgrims who might themselves face yet other, different problems and socio-political conditions.

For high medieval Western Christendom, like its imperial predecessor, indeed had something of unchanging significance to pass on to posterity. It had come to understand the fact that the message of the Eternal Word had meaning for every single individual person and aspect of Creation, and that communicating this message required an authoritative, militant, compassionate mobilization of each and every tool that could give pastoral guidance to the myriad of different “chapters” taking part in the general Christian pilgrimage to God. In short, the underlying spirit of the High Middle Ages taught Christian posterity that the true story of the dance of life was a more complicated and dramatic tale than perhaps even the Church Fathers themselves had recognized.

On the intellectual plane, this achievement was the work of the great thinkers noted above who confronted the dilemmas presented by Aristotle through the commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes in that packed, logic-rich, “question, objection, and answer” style that we identify as the scholastic method. Although much of what these scholastics had to say has to be approached in the context of the crises to be detailed in the following chapter, let us nevertheless identify three brilliant, Word-friendly contributions of permanent value in their labors at this particular juncture.

Most important among these contributions was a pronounced emphasis upon the glory of the individual. This grew in response to Averroes’ presentation of Aristotle as teaching an eternally necessary universe in which there was no room for the Christian doctrine of personal immortality. For the Seed of the Logos to be found in Aristotle, as a St. Thomas Aquinas cultivated it---in the light of Faith---yielded insights into individual human personality of extraordinary clarity: ⁷¹

A capital text of the Summa contra gentiles draws forth the double consequence that the acceptance of a personal God, creator and savior of human persons, brings with it. The first is that divine Providence, and, in consequence, universal order, does not seize individual humans through the species, but equally as individuals. The second is that the human person participates in universal order, not only as all other realities in submitting to the law of the species, but on addressing himself directly to God.

Yes, the debates within the scholastic camp were profound ones. We shall soon see that they were tragically all too divisive as well. But nevertheless, at least in the work of the thinkers we are discussing at the moment—that of men like Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Scotus, all of whom left something of permanent value for awakened Christian minds to digest— the common emphasis upon the importance of individual personality is quite pronounced. The objections of the two Franciscans to their Dominican colleague, whatever their strengths or flaws, are rooted in individual and personal concerns that point to a universe of incredible diversity. In the concept of the inexhaustible richness of the multiplicity to be found in God’s cosmos, both Aquinas and Scotus are in union with one another. The Creation that they depict for us is the total antithesis of a laborious, unthinking, and involuntary machine. It is a universe of real, distinct, human beings on the highway to perfection in Christ.

Secondly, the true story of distinct, free, individual human action as told by the scholastics—although in this case, in the work of Aquinas and his followers much more than in that of their colleagues—is one in which the positive role of the State and its ability to aid men in their endeavors is fearlessly embraced. An embrace of the State and its authority as innately beneficial forces, through which the overall order of the cosmos and the real mechanisms that are at work in the universe might be investigated and put to use for temporal as well as supernatural goals by free Christian men, reveals the powerful influence of Aristotle’s Politics alongside a Catholic concern for validating every aspect of God’s created nature. God’s eternal order is shown to have a positive temporal counterpart that guides man’s pilgrimage not only with the laws of heaven but with laws built into the structure of nature itself that thinking men must learn to grasp and use as well. Contrary to what any continued Neo-Platonist enthusiast might think, “human persons are not fallen gods”, somehow caught in “the snares of a material world” in which they are ultimately strangers. Quite the contrary. “They insert themselves into the world, which responds to their own nature; they must take sides with it to raise it to the commanded dignity that is in its nature, and they have a mission to bring it to perfection”.⁷² Nature had its laws, but these were meant for men to use to achieve a common good. The common good was different from that which each of them as individuals might seek, and yet it was beneficial to them as distinct persons nonetheless. Even if such a teaching might unleash an enthusiasm for projects dealing with temporal life that, in the hands of men like Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1294), could seem technocratic and exaggeratedly elitist in character, such side effects were compensated by the general sense of meaningfulness that it gave to all of thinking man’s endeavors.

Finally, the opening of scholastic eyes to the reality of a temporal order, guided by natural laws, that must be studied in all of its unique, God-given complexity, allowed for their witness to the existence, the rights, and the riches of a multiform, medieval, corporate society that a man like Aristotle could never have imagined. Having accepted the reality---and also the actual beauty---of a world of distinct corporations interacting with one another in God’s multiform Creation, scholastics sought, with the use of Aristotle’s Politics, to discuss how such societies were to work for the specific common good of their members while simultaneously taking part in the hunt for the higher common good guided by the State. Most importantly of all, these thinkers underlined corporate need to submit to the supernatural Word and gain the supreme good emerging from His law of love. For they did not provide an “appropriate explanation of the deeply felt desires of medieval corporations” and thereby bend their knees before the “business as usual” demands of a new swarm of supporters of “nature as is”. Instead, scholastic students of the satisfaction of individual man’s temporal needs and his ascent to God through the positive aid provided by a praiseworthy network of medieval social institutions understood that none of this could take place without the corrective and transforming teaching and grace that comes from the Mystical Body of Christ alone:⁷³

Let us conclude that an entire class of theologians knew how to understand the teachings of the corporate order that they were witnesses of. They drew its philosophy from it without sacrificing to its excesses while doing so. As the Church had tried to sublimate the feudal order, they tried to elevate above itself the corporate order, penetrating it with the divine sense of justice and charity. To these collectivities jealously closed in their particularism, they taught the sense of the universal. To these corporate authorities, often more ferocious than individual signories, they recalled before Shakespeare that they must not ‘separate goodness from power’. Gilles of Rome tells us: “Love and charity have the maximum unifying and conjoining strength’.

The light that is shed by the Word on all of nature and on nature’s mission to glorify God might, at times, be obscured, and therefore “missed” by limited human persons weighed down by the burdens and sufferings of daily life. Nevertheless, the same underlying spirit of intense interest in the full meaning of the Word in history also gave to the age of the new ascent of Mount Tabor an ability to tell a good story about this complex, true story. So well did it do this, and so much did that good story enter into the marrow of high medieval culture, that it may be that only those who actually lived its life fully, from birth to death, would ever adequately be able to explain the sublime truths their world came to take for granted as obvious givens.

Clearly, high medieval culture told this good story to the mind, through its encouragement of the life of the universities of Paris, Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, and elsewhere. Extremely important speculative thought in theology, philosophy, and law was to be produced through these organs for the unending enlightenment of believers. The work that was accomplished by a man like St. Thomas Aquinas in his great Summae gave to the Christian world an ability logically to tie its beliefs together and explain them systematically that far exceeded the accomplishments of past generations of the most admirable thinkers and apologists. One must say the same thing about their achievement that we insisted upon in discussing the contribution of the Church Fathers: namely, that their labors have eternal significance, and that no one learning and defending the Faith in any future age can ever neglect them without exposing himself and all of Christendom to pointless risk—as well as to the unnecessary labor of painfully having to rediscover what they already had grasped and offered to posterity. The proof of this point will, sadly, become all to clear in the chapters to follow.

Medieval man in his new ascent of Mt. Tabor also told this good story—not an allegory fit for lesser beings but the exact same tale—to man’s heart and soul, through the preaching and poetry of St. Norbert (c. 1080-1134), St. Bernard, and St. Francis of Assisi. He also recounted it through the buildings that he constructed, especially those designed for the daily worship of the Triune God. How many of these masterpieces testified to the unending diversity of nature in its union with grace in lifting man’s mind, heart, and soul to his eternal goal! One sees some aspects of this cornucopia in the playfulness of the floral and animal elements entering into the supports of the pulpits from which the Word of God was preached in Romanesque churches like the cathedral of Ravello outside Amalfi. One sees others in the stained glass windows of the subsequent Gothic style of architecture, encouraged by the Abbot Suger (c. 1081-1151) through the renovation of his monastic church of St. Denis and imitated in so many of the principal houses of worship throughout Christendom in the years to come. Here, especially, the riot of gorgeous light that those church windows brought before the human eye reminded men that God’s Creation offered more than either the unaided sinful soul could perceive or the word merchants limiting “philosophy” to “appropriate explanations of desire” for securing the dominance of “business as usual” wanted it to perceive.⁷⁴

How can one complete this chapter without reference to the epic that summarized the character of the new ascent of Mount Tabor as brilliantly as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid captured the spirit of archaic Greek and Augustan Roman culture: the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321). Steeped in the corporate society of his day, deeply attached to the concept of the State in its imperial manifestation, and awed by the scholastic achievement, this greatest of medieval poets presented in his threefold epic the whole of the drama of God’s relationship with man and that of men with one another.

What does he tell us? He explains that all of us, wandering through the confusion of life, must look to the Seeds of the Logos in our environment for guidance. These he introduces us to in the form of Virgil, Dante’s ancient Roman predecessor, who shepherds us to wisdom first of all by demonstrating nature’s misuse at the hands of the suffering souls in Hell. But “nature as is”, even at its best, cannot lead us to eternal life with God. That can only be accomplished through the law of love and the life of grace, which, in Dante’s poem, is, of course, represented by his beloved Beatrice.

And what is it that we see when we finally reach Paradise and the souls—obviously still without their bodies, whose resurrection must await the end of time and the Final Judgment—in union with Almighty God? We see the promise of the Word fulfilled, to the benefit of all of the distinct individuals whose divinization the Church Fathers preached and whose personal dignity the scholastics, in a quite different but complementary way, so profoundly emphasized.⁷⁵ In Cantos thirty and thirty-one, through the use of the image of a rose, Dante struggles brilliantly to demonstrate how all the varied forces of mind, heart, and will, corrected and transformed through the grace of God, work together to ensure the ecstasy of the blessed. He depicts everyone firmly fixed on the adoration of God, with the consequence being that all are divinized in their proper place, true to nature, but completely surpassing natural limitations and its insufficient modes of expression and explanation. A more magnificent medieval hymn to the multiplicity arising from unity in Christ can hardly be imagined.⁷⁶

So, ranged aloft all round about the light,
Mirrored I saw in more ranks than a thousand
All who above there have from us returned.
And if the lowest row collect within it
So great a light, how vast the amplitude
Is of this Rose in its extremest leaves!
My vision in the vastness and the height
Lost not itself, but comprehended all
The quantity and quality of that gladness.
There near and far nor add nor take away;
For there where God immediately doth govern,
The natural law in naught is relevant.

Human hopes for scaling Mt. Tabor anew had thus been aroused as never before. Unfortunately, the anger of the supporters of “nature as is” had also been greatly stimulated along with the opposing passion for finding and fulfilling the deeper meaning of Creation. The potential for such underground anger to erupt into the public arena was growing all through the period under study in this chapter. Individual Christians, the corporate “chapters” in the pilgrimage to God to which they belonged, and the decisions for good or ill that they took in guiding the Church and human society were to play a central role in determining whether that eruption would be staunched or the fires behind it encouraged and even more warmly welcomed than the embrace of the Redeeming Word.

Chapter 5

Counterattack and Resistance “On the Cheap”

A. The Long March to the Triumph of the Will

External and internal crusaders of the period stretching from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries laid out a fundamental network of routes along which future soldiers of the Word could bring its full message of natural and supernatural fulfillment more swiftly and effectively than ever before. Without reference to the more familiar modern term “transformation of all things in Christ”, Catholic heroes of the High Middle Ages acted as though this were indeed the goal of their militant activity. They had propelled the Mystical Body onto a much more authoritative, self-confident march forward. Due to their cultivation of the proper pilgrimage spirit, they had also learned new steps in the dance of life as their understanding of their mission expanded. Moreover, their ability to tell a “good story” about their noble enterprise proceeded accordingly. Plato’s vision of the proper union of rhetoric with the deeper hunt for the Logos was thus becoming a reality, since the “good story” that was being told and propagated was finally one in aid of a “true story” as well. And this true story, through the philosophical and theological work of men like St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and Blessed Duns Scotus, had been ordered systematically in a way that would have been the envy of the founder of the Academy as well as many of the early Church Fathers.

But the friends of the corrective and transforming message of the Word in history were not without their limitations, self-destructive fears, and flaws. Moreover, they were met by resistance from the partisans of acceptance of the rut of an unchanging and unchangeable life every step of the way. Over the course of the centuries of the new ascent of Mount Tabor, the efforts of the latter to transform the dance of life into a “Long March” away from the teaching of Christ were to grow. And, as always, they would once again come to involve all of the tactics employed by Isocrates when drawing first blood in this war of the words and the Word.

Readers will remember that these strategies included a hunt for noble ideas and aspirations that might be redirected to serve as appropriate explanations of the need to satisfy the immediate passions of “the natural man”. The rhetorician repeatedly emphasized two points once some such appropriate explanation was found. First of all, he insisted that men could find this teaching regarding “nature as is” clearly manifested in a society’s “foundation principles”---but as these principles were interpreted by the inspired “words” of the rhetorician himself and the powerful, successful actions of heroic leaders. Secondly, he argued that individuals had before them a dramatic “either-or” choice they could never escape: either an embrace of “nature as is”, with all the rewards that came from an acceptance of the world on its own obvious terms; or entry onto the tedious dead end path of the corrective and transforming message of the supporters of the search for the Logos.

Such ancient strategies were now to be resuscitated, but in the new and much more intellectually and spiritually charged environment created out of the successes of the servants of the Word made flesh. Through their redeployment, the armory of the soldiers of the rut of life would be stocked with arguments of proven value in blackening the labors of all those men, women, and institutions undertaking a new ascent of Mount Tabor. An alternative vision to one that was solidly Catholic would be constructed in the process. We shall be the tragic witnesses of the step-by-step advance of this counterattack of the supporters of the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is”. We shall see that with many noble words of concern for the foundation principles of Christianity on their lips, they would step-by-step construct a death camp guided by one consistent law alone: that of the triumph of the will.

B. Apocalypse Now?

It might seem to Catholics of our own time that the age “when values descended to the earth”, giving a mighty stimulus to a renewed effort to ascend Mount Tabor, would have been the least likely of any to fall for the kind of simplistic tales regarding the imminent arrival of the Holy Spirit that would render serious labor on behalf of the Word in history superfluous. After all, many zealous believers continue to argue today that the centuries in question were the greatest in human history. Ironically, however, apocalyptic beliefs of a millenarian nature, dangerous to positive work for Christ, returned with a particular fury precisely at this very moment.⁷⁷

Historians know that such a development had nothing to do with any “panic of the year 1000”, which is yet another legend invented by later mythmakers from the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo.² In any case, the reasons for a recrudescence of millenarian and apocalyptic concepts were deeper and ultimately much more destructive than any crude superstitious terror could explain. Two different and seemingly contradictory sentiments fed this longing for an immediate and radical change in the human condition from inside the Catholic camp itself.

Even though one of them appears to betray Gnostic tendencies, it is probably best to identify it much more simply, as the reflection of a certain degree of spiritual timidity and fearfulness. It pointed to a deep, nagging feeling on the part of some Christians that each new manifestation of Church influence over the material world might not be as positive as authorities seemed to believe; that seeming victories for Christ could actually represent a dangerous collaboration with evil aspects of the natural environment; and that this sleeping with the devil would bring on a spiritual disease crying out to God for vengeance.

A second sentiment was fundamentally more solid, even while leading to terribly flawed conclusions: the demoralization of strong supporters of the concept of transformation in Christ in the face of each fresh display of self-interested parochialism and humbug on the part of individuals and corporations publicly claiming to serve the Church’s cause. Such dismayed and disillusioned Catholics ended either in a despair that paralyzed their desire to act vigorously for the good or in hopes for an all too swift and simple solution to the problems of dealing with the natural world, achieved through the irresistible aid of the Holy Spirit. Both these spiritually timid as well as rationally dismayed religious sentiments sought, for quite conflicting reasons, a common and definitive “closure” in all natural realms where serious problems had arisen in the work of transformation in Christ.

Popular Catholic hopes that any coming sea change would definitely be one for the better were given intellectual form through the writings of the biblical exegete, Joachim of Fiore (1145-1202). Joachim associated all of human history, divided into three parts, with different Persons of the Blessed Trinity. Each of these eras, he argued, was characterized by its own kinds of institutions and spirit. Joachim claimed that the age of God the Father was over, and that that of God the Son was to give way to the final and liberating reign of God the Holy Spirit beginning around 1260. This third historical era was to be somewhat of an Age of Aquarius, where all need for authority and punitive law would disappear, as would the institutions associated with them.

Joachim’s ideas were condemned at the Fourth Lateran Council. Despite this, they continued to spread and prosper. His apparently accurate prediction of the creation of an innovative religious order committed to an Apostolic Poverty crucial to ushering in the new age of the Spirit made what he had to say especially appealing to many of the so-called Spiritual Franciscans, about whom more anon. Peter John Olivi (1248-1298), a southern French friar from the Spiritual camp, offered important intellectual support to Joachim’s thesis, allowing its influence to continue into the later thirteenth century and beyond. He was by no means alone in this enterprise.³

In any case, heroic Catholic activists of the High Middle Ages were the first to admit that much more still needed to be said and done on behalf of the profound Drama of Truth that they themselves played a splendid part in carrying forward. They also knew that there could never be a full and absolutely unshakeable development of the meaning of the Word active in human history. So long as time lasted, the appearance of new, free, individual persons, together with their distinct ability to aid or hinder the understanding and progress of a supernatural intervention in man’s affairs, made perfect growth theoretically impossible at the same time as it rendered existing levels of achievement precarious. For we must repeatedly remind ourselves that a terrible reality of the dance of life is that it is precisely a Drama of Truth. One aspect of drama is tragedy. And part of the tragedy of the Christian Drama of Truth is the fact that any given generation can totally forget what its predecessor had seemingly already learned and even come to accept as a “common sense” given; that a later age might need to engage in what amounted to a painstaking “crawl” back to an earlier but nevertheless higher rung on the ladder leading to the fullness of Light.

Aside from recognizing the need for more work on the part of future generations, our Catholic heroes were also painfully aware of the limitations of their own labors amidst their flawed contemporaries, as magnificent as these achievements may now seem to us to have been. Unfortunately, they were all too correct in their assessment. Not only was it the case that ordinary human sinfulness marred the splendid icon painted by Christians in the High Middle Ages. Even well-meaning Catholic thinkers and activists themselves placed new obstacles in the path of a complete understanding of the full message of the Word in those splendid centuries---and at the very moment that they themselves were contributing mightily to developing it.

Perhaps it is the case that some truth lurks behind every intellectual and popular rumbling. For, even if a millenarian change did not arrive in 1260, an apocalypse in miniature did make itself more clearly felt at just that precise moment. A seemingly endless succession of calamities, arriving by the mid-thirteenth century, lasting throughout the whole of the fourteenth, and continuing, fitfully, down through the 1500’s, signaled a seemingly conclusive end to the authoritative, self-confident, broadly conceived, nuanced, pilgrim-spirited reformed medieval vision of transformation in Christ.

More importantly still, the determined enemies of the Word Incarnate were able to tap into the malaise that had fed millenarian expectations in the first place. As these opponents began to leave their private hiding places and move back into the public forum, they played upon Catholic sinfulness and failure of imagination, built upon the deep disillusionment of believers who recognized the inadequacies of an otherwise impressive fresh ascent of Mount Tabor, and began the rebuilding of that Grand Coalition of the Status Quo that now dominates our own time and place. One might once again appropriate the argument of St. Justin Martyr to tragic purpose and say that “Seeds of the words” were effectively planted in the era under discussion in this chapter and the next. These seeds, all of them immensely valuable to the proponents of “business as usual”, were to emerge definitively into the full light of day with Martin Luther’s public proclamation in the years after 1517 of his doctrine of the total depravity of a nature devastated by Original Sin: a cornerstone of our modern death camp and the triumph of the will.

Adversaries of the Word were thus able to begin putting together that counter “story” concerning the character and the impact of the Catholic outlook in history already rooted in the ancient attack on the Socratics. In doing so, they were able to count upon continued Catholic weaknesses and disappointments that worked to prevent the friends of the Word from fully recognizing and employing their own true and good story in their defense. Catholic failures in this regard meant that the faithful were offered partial explanations and incomplete or hypocritical excuses for problems of both theory and practice. Believers were thus directed away from that full lifting up of hearts and correction of the natural man and his social order that were essential to the achievement of a truly Christian victory.

A detailed review of this minor apocalypse can do much to help us come to terms with the troubled Catholic present. It is useful for a variety of reasons. It shows us—as do all historical studies--that crises do not emerge out of nowhere, and that a given generation’s miseries generally have been prepared in a previous age suffering from perhaps more fundamental, even though insufficiently recognized woes. Furthermore, it demonstrates, once again, that resolution of the specifics of any given ecclesiastical disaster may not proceed precisely “by the book”, especially if the problems involve new elements in the pilgrim dance of life that have not adequately been confronted by theologians and canonists beforehand. Last, but not least, it points to the fact that the Church’s full awakening from a nightmare which diverts her energies away from her real mission is a very difficult enterprise indeed; that it cannot be accomplished “on the cheap”, by playing with mere rhetorical phrases shaped into myths of her own; that if it is to take place at all, it must be built not only upon a humble digestion of the lessons taught by recent adversity but also on a deeper inspection of all of the wisdom that the treasury—the jewel box—of her entire Tradition contains. Only thus can she truly arouse herself from her doctrinal and pastoral slumber and prepare better arms for the next inevitable battle with her innumerable outer and inner demons.

Our work in recounting these historical developments will be a tripartite project. First of all, we shall delineate all the problems and failures within the ranks of Catholics conducive to the rebuilding of the ancient coalition against the Word. Next, we must discuss the series of disasters afflicting Christendom from the middle of the thirteenth century onwards, each of which aided immensely in weakening the organs through which “values descended to the earth”, further stimulating the already threatening revival of the old enemy alliance. Finally, continuing into the next chapter, we shall examine three major consequences of this mini-apocalypse: the emergence into the open air of the “Seeds of the words” in ecclesiastical, political, and social life, ending with the first serious historical “incarnation” of the anti-Logos position; the effective public propagation of the initial batch of black legends concerning the whole of the Catholic Faith; and, in the midst of disaster, the first suggestion of hope that the damage done might still somehow be reversed. Such hope was desperately needed. For the entire story of the Long March away from the work of transformation in Christ and towards the modern death camp and the triumph of the willful is a dismal one to tell.

C. Catholic Tunnel Vision and the Seeds of the Words

Most prescient prelates, preachers, and men of letters of the High Middle Ages, conscious that their era was no Golden Age definitively breaking the Catholic mold, repeatedly chastised the horrific anti-Christian behavior that they recognized everywhere around them. They, of course, did so primarily for the sake of stirring an awareness of personal sinfulness and obtaining immediate moral reform. Our concern is a different one. We are not interested here in assessing the extent of individual guilt on any given issue but in broad failures of Catholic spirit and action. We are interested in such an assessment for the purpose of determining exactly how a movement for transformation in Christ that was innately good lost its momentum and ultimately was forced to compete with a belief in a totally depraved universe. One highly useful way of coming to grips with such a tragic historical development is by turning our attention to an innate problem of fallen human persons, much intensified due to the increased self-consciousness of the men of the era in question: a self-destructive “tunnel-vision”.

Tunnel vision can have a variety of conflicting causes, some of them seemingly good, with love itself at the top of the list of the positive factors. Human love almost always begins with an obsessive focus on the one, adored, object of affection. Perhaps this is necessary in order to ensure the permanent commitment that should go along with appreciation of the intrinsic value of that which is beloved. Thankfully, many lovers eventually do learn to put their sentiment in perspective over the course of time, admitting the intrinsic beauty of other objects of affection—those cherished by their fellow men among them—in the process. But if they do not do so, tunnel vision sets in, with nefarious results for the lover, the beloved, and everything else that is lovable in the outside world.

High medieval tunnel vision was in one sense very much a product of this kind of intense love—a love engendered by the feeling of intimate association with a particular idea or social institution, its past achievements, and its future possibilities for glory. And such love was stimulated, whether consciously or unconsciously, by the general Catholic awareness of the value of all the different aspects of the natural world redeemed by the Word and their corresponding utility as tools for living properly and reaching God.

Objects of affection included a wide diversity of theological, philosophical, devotional, and legal concepts, as well as that myriad of corporations representing distinct vocations in life that were analyzed so brilliantly by some of the scholastics. Almost all of these ideas and corporations laid claim to an ancient history—a foundation story—often much older than they actually deserved and sometimes even totally mythical in character. This gave them still greater prestige in the eyes of their already smitten admirers. Whatever the truth of their pedigree, people fell passionately in love with the principles and institutions concerned, as well as their most renowned paladins. Unfortunately, for many, the initial and highly understandable infatuation definitely did not wear off, bringing tunnel vision, sophistic word merchandising on their all too parochial behalf, and inevitable conflicts with other ideas and corporations—and the full message of the Word—in its train.⁴

Tunnel vision was nourished by a negative and many-headed terror as well as by a positive love. Men were fearful that the object of their affection, whatever it might be, would not be offered the honor that was its proper due. Their dread was also shaped by an avarice that grew amidst the commercial boom of the twelfth century and the downward spiraling economic “correction” that characterized the thirteenth. Avarice manifested itself in a given social group’s single-minded determination to exploit all opportunities for gain while denying them to others. It was increased still more by bewilderment and terror over the laborious, Christian pastoral work involved in reconciling one idea, one association, and one set of desires with a kaleidoscope of others, as identified by men such as Peter Cantor, Pope Innocent III, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Hence, fear as well as love could lead to conflicts with the full message of the Word. And this, once again, is a teaching that should inspire affection for the accomplishments of all ages, ideas, corporations, and persons, harmonized together in a proper hierarchy of values that then lifts Creation heavenwards to the greater glory of God.⁵

One last point regarding tunnel vision needs to be made. Yes, this primarily concerned a destructive infatuation with certain specific ideas, corporations, and their leaders. Nevertheless, given the growing Catholic perception that everything natural was ultimately designed for the benefit of individual human persons who were destined to be divinized through Christ, another object of exaggerated love was emerging ever more clearly from the shadows: the infatuated love of self. Ironically, it was becoming more and more possible that the idea or the corporation divinized to the exclusion of all others was being adored not primarily for its own sake but because the self-loving, self-obsessed individual had desired and chosen to adore it. In other words, it was the individual’s will in and of itself that was threatening to become of greatest importance in daily life. This should have been a shrill warning bell in the ears of the followers of a social-minded religion; a religion demanding the true supernatural correction and transformation in Christ of men and women always sorely tempted to accept the willful demands of “nature as is” to conduct their petty “business as usual”.

Let us tackle the consequences of infatuation the way that Popes Innocent III and Blessed Gregory X might have done, by first examining their possible impact on the external crusade. Were there signs of the sickness and distortion caused by tunnel vision noticeable in the Crusading Movement, even in the centuries of its greatest glory? Did these lead to earthbound actions, encouraging unredeemed nature rather than its correction and transformation? And were the stories that crusaders told the world about their activities true ones, or merely good yarns appropriately justifying intense passions that masqueraded actions detrimental to the cause of honest Christian progress?

Some might argue that the greatest example of tunnel vision in this realm was the failure on the part of reformers from the time of Cluny down to that of Blessed Gregory X to see that the “idea” of the external Crusading Movement that they cherished was really itself ultimately only secondary in importance. That criticism is undeniably true for most individuals, although the growing insistence of popes and councils upon the internal preparations that Christendom had to make in order for its external labors to be successful seemed to indicate a progressive development of a proper appreciation of the hierarchy of values on the part of the leadership of the Mystical Body. Moreover, it is clear, both from St. Francis’ evangelical visit to the Sultan in Egypt as well as from much of the high-level mendicant advice given to the popes during the course of the thirteenth century, that a number of the most influential Christian activists were increasingly thinking of external crusading with reference to militant missionary work rather than outright military maneuvers.⁶ And, then again, events in the not too distant future—namely, the arrival on the European scene of the Ottoman Turks—would begin to make it seem as though the problem of Christendom regarding crusading involved a different kind of tunnel vision: a national and local parochialism committed to blocking out serious consideration of the outside dangers threatening the independence and survival of the entire believing community.

Still, it ought to come as no surprise to anyone, especially Catholics, that all warfare exposes men to unhealthy, narrow, corporate and personal temptations, even as it calls them to self-sacrifice, honor, and glory. Any examination of the facts as opposed to the theory of external crusading reveals that the crusades were no exception, and that self-interested tunnel vision troubled the movement every step of the way. Desire for fame, envy, squabbles over political power, property, and immediate advantage, exploitation of defenseless peoples, and the settling of scores with perceived enemies at home and abroad who really had little or nothing to do with the ultimate crusading vision, mar the whole of its history. No one escaped the temptation to indulge such passions entirely: neither popes, nor emperors and kings, nor commercial powers such as Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, nor the leadership of the Crusading States of the Levant, nor military orders, nor individual crusaders, whether noble or common in background.

Historically, the hideous sack of Christian cities during the Fourth Crusade, Constantinople in 1204 chief among them, stands out most vividly as an example of self-destructive crusading activity.⁷ Nevertheless, misappropriation of funds for parochial purposes was the most consistent problem, and probably did much more damage to the credibility of the whole movement in the mind of contemporaries. Unfortunately, such misappropriation became all the more tempting and embarrassing to the reform movement the more that the Papacy made collection of taxes for crusading purposes both general and efficient.

Sad to say, minds were also misappropriated along with funds. The stories told to stir up crusading emotions often played fast and loose with theology and human passion. Popular rabble-rousers in the 1090’s presented crusading as a response to a supposed appeal from the crucified Christ to take up weapons to avenge Him through the brutal destruction of His enemies. Many enthusiasts, preying upon economic hardships, promoted each new call to Crusade as a means of reaching not the earthly but the heavenly Jerusalem. Dubious and all too familiar letters from heaven, along with tales of the glory of charismatic charlatans, were regularly evoked to arouse increased participation. Teutonic Knights justified a crusading movement in the Baltic that struck at Christians as much as pagans by insisting that “Lithuania was Mary’s dowry”, and that everything done on “her” behalf there was good. All of these words encouraged and camouflaged a violence and rapine having little if anything to do with just warfare but a lot to do with corporate and individual willfulness. In fact, the word merchants behind such sinful behavior were often bitterly attacked by popes, saintly crusading preachers, and representatives to church councils, even at the very moment these regrettable abuses were first propagated. Still, the damage was done, and popular appreciation of the trickery involved can be identified in later medieval vernacular idioms equating “calling a crusade” with “telling a whopper”.⁸

We have noted how much the thirteenth century Papacy came to consider the healing of the East-West Schism dividing the Body of Christ as the essential foundation stone of the Internal Crusade. Here, again, failings on both the scores mentioned above may readily be noted. Everyone, Greek and Latin, seems to have recognized that Blessed Gregory X, along with a number of Franciscans engaged as intermediaries in East-West negotiations, had the interests of the Church as a whole at heart. One could make the same case for Patriarch John XI Beccus (1275-1282) as well. But this was certainly not the spirit motivating the many western contenders for the throne of the captured and sacked imperial city of Constantinople, including, most importantly, the Normans of Sicily, their French successor, Charles of Anjou (1226-1285), and the rapacious Venetians, Genovese, and bands of mercenaries eager to ransack the remnants of a troubled Byzantium at the drop of a crusading hat. Neither was religious zeal particularly noticeable in the ecclesiastical policy of the various eastern rivals contending for the recapture of Constantinople from the Latins, with the victorious Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus at the top of the list. All of them seem to have viewed religious union basically from the standpoint of its political and military advantages or disadvantages, and this regardless of pronounced outward shows of piety.

Good stories frequently replaced true stories in both the hunt for and the opposition to Gregory’s proposed East-West Union. On the western front, these were constructed around the idea that the easterners really were everything that the pejorative word “Byzantine” indicated: namely, purely political-minded beings, whose Caesaro-Papist emperors could bring about union through personal edicts backed by the prestige of imperial prerogatives and military strength alone. Hence, the fundamental Latin failure to take seriously the strength of the theological, mystical, ecclesiastical, and lay opposition to repeated efforts to obtain a solid union. Similarly, most eastern “Unionists” apparently believed the “good story” of the all-powerful pope, capable of winning unquestioned military support for a precarious East after the signing of a purely formal “paper” end to the Schism. And, finally, convinced eastern enemies of reunion popularized and seemingly came to believe their own flawed account of events. This rightly chastised the West for the evil done during the sack of Constantinople of 1204. Nevertheless, it conveniently neglected incidents that had helped to embitter westerners against Greeks in the first place; incredibly brutal acts of violence---the mass slaughter of the Latin population living in the imperial capital in 1182 chief among them.⁹

Tunnel vision manifested itself in the intellectual and spiritual labor crucial to the guidance of the Internal Crusade as well. This is true even in the university think tanks nurtured with great hope and enthusiasm by Innocent III. Such institutions proved to be as much breeding grounds for contending parochial-minded scholars as they were sources of help for the complex cause of the Word Incarnate. This became especially true once academic talents became entangled in the political battles of the age of Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII, to be discussed below. Hence, instead of just enlightening believers, they also aided mightily in the sowing of a deeper confusion and cynicism in their ranks, both clerical and lay.

Part of the problem was corporate and psychological in character. If the hunt for the truth had taken first place in the minds and hearts of the masters and students at the universities, clerical distinctions and troublesome personality differences might have been held in greater check. Ideas would have been judged more upon their merits rather than their source, and both the wariness of defenders of long accepted philosophical arguments as well as the sense of legitimate discovery on the part of pilgrim spirited speculative thinkers would have been much more seriously appreciated. But, as it was, a good number of the secular clergy greeted the arrival of the mendicant friars onto the university teaching scene with a great bitterness that spilled into the intellectual arena. Anger over disagreements in the philosophical realm and their consequences in theology was often purposely provoked for extraneous reasons, to the detriment of a calmer dialogue that might have produced a more profound common understanding of the truth.¹⁰

Nevertheless, ideas were involved, especially those reflecting that commitment to the use of logic in conjunction with the works of Aristotle that had stirred the imaginations of so many brilliant minds. Logical and Aristotelian studies had taken deep root in the embryonic University of Paris already before Innocent’s regularization of its legal status. Enthusiasm for them is associated with the arrival among the faculty of extremely charismatic and self-confident teachers like Peter Abelard. We have seen that they also grew in tandem with the first wave of translations of peripatetic writings, accompanied by the Arab commentaries of the man known to the West as Avicenna. A second wave of translations intensified their hold, this one escorted by the commentaries of Averroes.

Averroes’ work was still more problematic than that of Avicenna in that it emphasized those Aristotelian teachings that underlined the eternity of the universe and the rational impossibility of accepting the Christian concept of personal immortality. We know precious little about the Parisian logicians and Aristotelians who, while openly proclaiming their belief in a Creator God and eternal life, insisted upon the need for probing ancient philosophical positions that actually contradicted their Faith. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that they made their voices heard. And some of them espoused an “all or nothing” approach towards dealing with the pagan and anti-Christian guides whom they had passionately embraced. Hence, the following sentiments, expressed toward the end of the thirteenth century:¹¹

Do we not read in {Averroes’} works that nature shows us in Aristotle the pattern of the final perfection of human nature? That Providence gave him to us that we might know all that can be known?... Aristotle’s writings are a whole, to be taken or left, they form the system of the written reason, so to say…{All} that we now need to do is to study again the master’s theses as Averroes interprets them.

All open-minded men, especially those convinced of the immense value of the Aristotelian achievement for elucidating principles of central importance to the Christian life, found this mentality to be not just highly dangerous to doctrinal purity but also irrational. In fact, it is safe to venture that it was recourse to the name of Aristotle rather than any real familiarity with his philosophy that many of those who evoked it counted upon to gain support for their own positions, hoping thereby to gain the aura of higher wisdom accompanying the Greek thinker’s well-earned intellectual prestige. Whatever their philosophical or theological expertise may have been, however, it certainly cannot be denied that such a spirit of exclusivity worked against that open consideration of all of nature’s messages that the full teaching of the Word Incarnate dictates and men like Aquinas had clearly taken to heart.¹²

But an equally stubborn, closed-minded resistance to the use of logic in general, and Aristotle in particular, also emerged, both inside the University of Paris and without. Although this opposition was primarily concerned with their impact on theology, it also affected attitudes towards the innate value of Reason and philosophy as a whole. Resistance began along with the very first manifestations of the Parisian love affair with the ancient contributors to the world of thought. It grew in intensity through St. Bernard’s often quite brutal assault on the work and person of the admittedly often equally bristly Abelard. The tragedy of such resistance lies in the fact that the anti-logic, anti-Aristotle, and ultimately anti-philosophy camp became ever more influential precisely at a dramatic moment in time: precisely when those highly nuanced cathedrals of thought, crucial to harmonizing Faith and Reason and elaborating, through both, the complementary nature of the Church, the State, corporate society, and the perfection of the individual human personality, were in the process of construction at the hands of the greatest of the scholastics.¹³

An anti-rational “tunnel vision” mentality was able to strengthen its grip by taking advantage of the clashes of the disciples of St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus over the differing use of Aristotelian, Augustinian, and Neo-Platonic ideas to be found in their masters’ writings. Many of these followers were more concerned with the use of the logic-drenched scholastic method to expose weaknesses in their opponents’ positions and score points against them than to uncover natural and supernatural truths. Meanwhile, they ignored, or rather did not even contemplate the possibility of undertaking the battle that really ought to have concerned them: one of a common defense against the infinitely more deadly enemies of any union of Faith and Reason.

It was just such enemies who were to benefit from their uncharitable squabbles. These anti-philosophers were to prevent the further construction of the truly pilgrim spirited cathedrals of thought begun by the scholastics, to obscure and distort knowledge of the work that their architects and builders had already accomplished, to move into the perceived gaps, and to dismantle the entirety of their intellectual contribution to the new ascent of Mount Tabor. What they were then to do was to add their muscle to construction of the coming death camp: the one whose “order of the day” was to be a mind-obliterating triumph of the will.

Anti-rational tunnel vision struck a major blow with the Great Condemnation of philosophical studies promulgated by Bishop Etienne Tempier of Paris in 1277. This hasty and haphazard Blitz hit not only at the Averroists but also at the reputation of the recently deceased Aquinas. Historians have differed in their interpretation of the full effects of the bishop’s intervention, with some of them stressing the positive stimulus that it gave to the seemingly less risky studies of the natural sciences. Friends of speculative philosophy and theology can point to the fact that the document’s flaws deprived it of much of the impact it might otherwise have had, thereby actually strengthening the long-term prospects of logic and Reason. An outraged St. Albertus Magnus (1193/1206-1280), the great teacher of Aquinas working in Cologne, swiftly took up the case for the defense, as did the cantankerous Roger Bacon in Britain. Moreover, the omnibus Condemnation of 1277 did nothing to stop either the rise of Dun Scotus, who had not yet even entered onto the scholastic stage when it was released, or Dominican acceptance of St. Thomas as the primary philosophical guide of their Order, which would only come sometime afterwards, in the first half of the fourteenth century.¹⁴

On the other hand, 1277 gave at least some aid and comfort to that anti-rational spirit that was to become the most important weapon in the armory of the enemies of a meaningful philosophy with practical impact on man and society. It was that spirit that gave the greatest clout to the more extreme supporters of the Nominalist position in the medieval intellectual conflict. Masters of critical logical thought in their own right, extreme Nominalists were to develop what is referred to as the via moderna in philosophical studies. The via moderna specialized in rigorously drawing forth the meaning of words (nomina) and their usage. It took pleasure in critically employing logic to uncover flaws indicating that the speculative thinkers of the via antiqua—which was concerned for extracting real, substantive, significant, universal concepts from philosophical labors—explained less about the world than they thought that they had done.

The general Nominalist call back to a critical focus on the meaning of the words themselves and the weaknesses in the speculative theologians’ systems was in and of itself a highly valuable endeavor. In some respects, it might be viewed as differing little from the practical Aristotelian’s task of reining in some of the wilder fancies of the brilliant Platonic vision. Moreover, the via moderna’s eagerness to discredit philosophical humbug was linked together with one project that all the speculative thinkers of the via antiqua could equally appreciate: hostility to Averroes and his vision of a universe where everything was dictated by an ironclad necessity.

Unfortunately, however, the extremists’ mode of attack would bring terrible long-term harm to the entire cause of the Word in history. In their war against the evils of belief in a necessary universe, they so emphasized the freedom of the divine will as to reject all “capturing and binding” of reality by speculative reason in any way whatsoever. Universal concepts, for them, were impossible, since these implied a subordination of the omnipotent supernatural God to dependent natural minds. If Reason had any function at all, which they thought it did, it had to focus on knowledge of individual existing beings and objects—whose character and truth Nominalists seemingly believed must impose themselves infallibly upon human minds created to receive their message.

Extreme Nominalists insisted that the whole purpose of their logical assault on the system building of the great speculative philosophers and theologians was that of exposing its fragility. Through this spiritually meritorious project they would cement man’s commitment to the only solid ground of unchangeable universal Truth, which was faith in Divine Revelation. Faith seeking rational understanding had led to interminable battles threatening to the very belief that the use of philosophy was supposed to strengthen. Faith in Faith alone—in other words, Fideism—was subject to no such religion-threatening danger. For the Faith was simply the Faith, and, therefore, the via moderna suggested, clear and obvious in all regards. Yes, extreme Nominalists mischievously hinted, the omnipotent God, through His irresistible divine will, could, from one moment to the next, change the rules of Faith, and the character and significance even of those individual existing realities that supposedly imposed themselves irresistibly upon human minds. In effect, He could make today’s “evil”, tomorrow’s “good”; today’s pathway to eternal salvation, tomorrow’s highway to perdition. But having ventured this horrible possibility, they then went on to assure men that God’s promise of fidelity guaranteed that such a psychologically devastating change of program would never come to pass. Faith in Faith was, therefore, a “no lose” proposition.

However, by playing the extreme Nominalist game ourselves, and imagining a world in which a man trained in its precepts were, per impossibile, to lose his faith in God, we can see that he could readily turn into a dangerous disturber of the peace of Christendom and become useful to the cause of “business as usual”. In the case of conflict with his fellow men, and in the absence of an authoritative God whose divine will must unquestionably be followed, he would be left with his own intuitive knowledge alone to make decisions of all kinds. This knowledge could never produce universal concepts that his Reason might claim to be definitive for forming laws existentially valid for the natural world around him as a whole. Conceptual knowledge of the via antiqua sort was a blessing for the godless individual, for it could, after all, like ancient Seeds of the Logos, eventually lead a man back to the Faith. Be that as it may, the ex-believer’s knowledge under the Nominalist dispensation would be that of specific, individual bits of potentially changeable data alone. And this meant the individual “facts” of “nature as is”, shut off from the hunt even for their natural corrective logos, much less that of the transforming Word Incarnate. If clashes with his fellow man, under these conditions, were to arise, which they inevitably would, they would become clashes of earthbound, individual human wills, each of which would be absolutely certain that it was operating with infallible intuitive information. In such clashes, it would be the strongest man with the strongest faith in the obvious truth of his immediate perceptions whose views would win the day.¹⁵

Tunnel-vision judgments opposing logic, Aristotle, or the hunt for real, meaningful, natural truths to be found in the great scholastics of the via antiqua, were matched by other willful choices exaggerating one or the other specific spiritual path to knowledge of God and union with Him. Once again, the question at issue here was not that of seeking a “space” for a certain approach to play a role in the life of Christendom—or, for that matter, even the overriding role in the work of a given individual or group. There were, of course, at this moment in history, as at all times, serious and holy spiritual writers and mystics who understood that truth and were doing nothing other than adding new tools to the rich armory of believers seeking the correction and transformation of their souls in Christ. Some of these men and women, like Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-c. 1327), appreciated the intellectual achievement of the great scholastic system builders and used it in their own labors. Continued cooperation of spiritual and intellectual endeavors would have been valuable to their work, since trained scholastic philosophers and theologians recognized the often dangerously ambiguous character of mystical language. They understood the ease with which its pronouncements, distorted by limited or fanatical followers, could end by serving a wide range of unwanted heretical purposes. As Philip Hughes, a brilliant commentator on all such late medieval foibles, explains:¹⁶

It is not hard to understand that, once out of the hands of men really masters of their task, really theologians as well as holy men, such an apostolate could easily go astray. The subtle explanations of the soul’s mystical union with God could, and did, give rise to idle and mischievous debates among the less learned and the half-learned; the delicate business of the practical relation of the workaday moral virtues to the high theological virtues could be neglected, and men and women, who visibly reeked of pride, insubordination, injustice and intemperance of every sort, could ignore their sins while they busied themselves with the higher prayer. And, of course, the movement will not have been spared its host of camp followers, many times larger than the army of disciples—infinitely noisier and much more in evidence—whose main occupation was to exchange gossip masked in the phrases of high theological learning, to turn these into party slogans, and, in the devil’s eternal way, accomplish to perfection all the complicated maneuvers of the religious life while their hearts were wholly unconverted, their wills obstinately unrepentant.

Returning once again to the tunnel vision syndrome, it was the conviction of some thinkers that all Christians must recognize the paramount value of one specific spiritual pathway to God that was to imperil the future work of the Word in history. Often central to this conviction was a Nominalist-like frustration with the eternal squabbling and uncharitable inadequacies of those using Reason as a staff on which Catholic pilgrims to eternity could profitably lean. Thus, a number of influential writers began to insist that an ultimately non-rational and even anti-rational mystical union with God was the only thing that “really” counted in the life of those “truly” pious Christians eager to fulfill the message of the Incarnation and gain the promise of corrective transformation in Christ.

Many such men and women were mystics who entertained fewer theological pretensions than those of the school of Meister Eckhart. Mystical teachers of this camp attempted to describe an ineffable union with God in terms of that intimacy with the more historical-scriptural Christ that crusading contact with the Holy Land had nurtured and saints like St. Francis had popularized. These more “sentimental” mystics tended to explain themselves in a deeply passionate, emotive discourse that found logical and rational labors to be pathetically inadequate and pretentious. We will have a great deal more to say about such mystics’ anti-rational hunt for intimacy with Christ in the next chapter. But among those pursuing this approach by the late 1200’s were, as might well be expected, many Franciscans, including those numerous Spirituals who were especially disturbed by the philosophical endeavors of some of their own brothers in religion, like St. Bonaventure.¹⁷

Still, Spiritual Franciscan concerns in this regard were swallowed up by their more intense commitment to preaching the supreme and overriding value of a life of Apostolic Poverty in the work of complete transformation in Christ. Spiritual Franciscans were certain that they, with their concern for the full embrace of the life of voluntary impoverishment, were the only true followers of the founder of the order and, through their loyalty to his principles, guides for the life of Christendom as a whole. We shall have much more to say on this question as well, but our ability to do so must wait upon ecclesiastical and secular political developments yet to be introduced into the equation. Let it suffice to note for the moment that dedication to the doctrine of Apostolic Poverty so dominated the Spirituals’ vision that they ended by convincing many potential friends and friendly critics, alongside their truly ill-willed opponents, that they had entirely forgotten the need to cultivate the superior virtue of Christian charity.¹⁸

Meanwhile, no introduction to the problems of a tunnel-vision mentality of a spiritual character would be complete without some tentative reference to the eastern Hesychast Movement. This essentially quietist approach, which traced its roots back to the early Christian mystical tradition, looked for its immediate historical inspiration to Simeon the New Theologian. It would eventually gain its most influential expression in the work of Gregory Palamos (1296-1359). Many Hesychasts claimed to have found a method for achieving individual union with God based upon continual employment of a simple “Jesus Prayer”, along with a cultivation of the proper physical position and environment in which to recite it. Commitment to their method, they argued, allowed for a quiet divinization of its mystical practitioner, the depiction of whose sanctity, which glowed with the kind of light that illumed Christ on Mount Tabor, then provided a major subject for iconographers.

Hesychasm became very strong in eastern monastic circles, gradually driving the earlier, communal minded Stoudite monastic vision into the shadows. Although they generally looked upon all things western with suspicion, Hesychasts nevertheless shared with many Latin “mystics of intimacy” a similar dislike for scholastic theology and its intellectual pathway to an understanding of God. They were especially horrified that such logical, speculative thought had even begun to win some powerful eastern adherents. Hesychasts had good reason to be concerned. For Eastern friends of scholasticism united with their Latin colleagues in criticizing a spirituality one of whose main effects was to deprive man of the mental tools needed to separate an erroneous from an acceptable form of mysticism.

Criticism of Hesychasm generally focused on the form that this spirituality took through the teachings of Palamos. From the standpoint of opponents, East and West, Hesychasm, in Palamos’ hands, was a particularly potent recipe for a theological and spiritual nightmare. Critics were horrified by his apparent claim that the Hesychast could achieve a union with God while on earth that was equivalent to that to be experienced in eternity. Worse still, they insisted that the unity he spoke of was not a complete one. Rather, it was limited to a union with God’s so-called “operations”; his “uncreated light”; the light that shown down on Mount Tabor. It thus appeared to recoil from the idea that even the blessed in heaven could touch the actual “core” of divinity and see God fully, in His very essence.

Separating the essence of God from His uncreated light, critics argued, was tantamount to positing the existence of two divinities—one that man could somehow reach fully, even perhaps in this life, and through one particular path to transformation in Christ alone; and another “god” who would remain forever unknown and unknowable. Whatever the outraged objections of the undeniably passionately iconodule Hesychasts might be, this meant that they once again had thrown the doctrinal work completed with the defeat of Iconoclasm into jeopardy. The total divinization of man in Christ and the proper estimation of the glory of the universe were thereby precluded, with both the individual and the fullness of nature shut off from the truly inclusive, transforming embrace of God. Other complaints were to emerge over time, especially regarding the role of lay spiritual directors in the Hesychast Movement and the disdain its followers expressed for different forms of mysticism and transformation in Christ—including that of a St. Francis of Assisi who had actually won for himself many eastern admirers. But these objections are best left to a discussion of events unfolding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to arguments heard in Russian émigré circles by the ears of the present author himself.¹⁹

Tunnel vision also manifested itself on the practical level in the endlessly expanding and intensifying quarrels over privileges and honors indulged in by the mass of corporate institutions active in the society of the High Middle Ages. Such conflicts took place from the lowest to the highest levels. In order to advance their position and mark themselves off more clearly from the common herd, the nobility armed the most basic of corporations—their families—with ever more precise crusading pedigrees stretching far into its highly savage barbarian past. Major and minor guilds in the growing cities of Italy and Flanders joined in the genealogical fun. Each of these two groups looked to its own individual benefit and stood on guard, one against another. On the other hand, both types of guilds, together, were conscious of their common distinction from the property-less “little people” working in their enterprises and increasingly enraged by their employers’ oppressive pretensions in their own right. Bourgeois communes created to deal with general merchant needs in growing commercial centers were at odds with local lords and bishops contesting their claims to autonomy. They were also angered by clerical insistence upon exemption from taxation and secular legal chastisement in the towns that came totally under merchant control. Nations—larger, corporate, ethnic entities of a potentially much more vigorous variety—participated in the hunt for distinctions as well, creating legendary histories for themselves that were highly entertaining but damaging to their commitment to the existence of an international Christian Roman community. Many contemporary thinkers---most famously John of Salisbury (c. 1120-1180), Bishop of Chartres, in his Policraticus---attributed the growing bitterness of these disputes, which were so destructive to man’s overall spiritual health, to the new avarice that twelfth century economic progress had encouraged; the avarice that Innocent III had sought to bring more consistently under the Church’s corrective and transforming purview.²⁰

It is certainly true that the most noble of the orthodox proponents of the Apostolic Poverty movement—St. Francis of Assisi in particular, with his concern that his followers must always work and live as “little people”, ut sint minores—were, to a large degree, reacting against the new temptation to look to the protection of one’s own wealth, luxury, and distinctions above all spiritual and supernatural concerns. Still, there were many voices claiming that the Franciscans, as yet another corporate body, like the austere but industrious and now wealthy Cistercians before them, had also fallen prey to the avarice they had precisely been created to battle. Bishops and diocesan clergy complained bitterly about the competition for the spiritual guidance of parishioners offered by these mendicants, and we have seen that the equally self-conscious and defensive secular priests active in the faculties at the University of Paris joined them in their lamentations. We have also noted that such anti-mendicant complaints were voiced in the highest assemblies, at the Second Council of Lyons in particular. Here, as already mentioned, the Papacy staunchly defended the Franciscans and Dominicans, whose yeoman labors on behalf of the Holy See it cherished. In fact, Blessed Gregory X and the council he inspired openly chastised their critics for being driven by their own obvious obsession with honors and privileges; honors and privileges that were, in their case, pointedly identified as being palpably undeserved.²¹

This, of course, brings us to the painful question of the tunnel vision displayed in matters of the internal crusade by the social institution that had taken charge of the reform movement as a whole, claiming a “plenitude of power” in doing so—the Papacy. Ironically, papal tunnel vision emerged from an overwhelming passion to find guarantees for an independence that would precisely allow it not to become subject to tunnel vision. The Papacy fell prey to the tunnel vision syndrome in two ways: by placing too much emphasis upon the value of its administrative and legal machinery on the one hand and through its obsession with the threat presented by the Holy Roman Empire on the other.

Determined papal efforts to guide the universal Church, along with the European wide passion for backing up legal claims with judgments issued by the highly sophisticated and prestigious Roman courts, led to a vast increase in the work of the Holy See in the period between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. The administrative machinery of the Roman Curia, with its secretarial, financial, and legal arms, thus grew accordingly. Its obvious, undeniable value to the effective exercise of the plenitude of papal power seems to have inspired a corresponding belief that the refinement of administrative organs, canon law, and canonical procedures were the key to dealing with all day-to-day Church problems.²²