The Historians' History of the World 08

Hildebrand was now pope; the great contest for the dominion over the human mind, the strife between the temporal and spiritual power, which had been carried on for some centuries as a desultory and intermitting warfare, was now to be waged boldly, openly, implacably, to the subjugation of one or of the other. Sacerdotal, or rather papal Christianity, had not yet fulfilled its mission, for, the papal control withdrawn, the sacerdotal rule would have lost its unity, and with its unity its authority must have dissolved away. Without the clergy, not working here and there with irregular and uncombined excitement on the religious feelings of man, awakening in one quarter a vigorous enthusiasm, while in other parts of Europe men were left to fall back into some new Christian heathenism, or into an inert habitual Christianity of form; without the whole order labouring on a fixed and determined system, through creeds sanctified by ancient reverence and a ceremonial guarded by rigid usage; without this vast uniform, hierarchical influence, where, in those ages of anarchy and ignorance, of brute force and dormant intelligence, had been Christianity itself? And looking only to its temporal condition, what had the world been without Christianity?

The papacy has still the more splendid part of its destiny to accomplish. It has shown vital power enough to recover from its seemingly irrecoverable degradation. It might have been supposed that a moral and religious deprivation so profound, would utterly have destroyed that reverence of opinion which was the one groundwork of the papal power. The veil had been raised; and Italy at least, if not Europe, had seen within it, not a reflex of divine majesty and holiness, but an idol not only hideous to the pure moral sentiment, but contemptible for its weakness. If centuries of sanctity had planted deeply in the heart of man his veneration for the successor of St. Peter, it would have been paralysed (the world might expect) and extinguished by more than a century of odious and unchristian vices. A spiritual succession must be broken and interrupted by such unspiritual inheritors. Could the head of Christendom, living in the most unchristian wickedness, perpetuate his descent, and hand down the patrimony of power and authority, with nothing of that piety and goodness which was at least one of his titles to that transcendent power?

But that idea or that opinion would not have endured for centuries, had it not possessed strength enough to reconcile its believers to contradictions and inconsistencies. With all the Teutonic part of Latin Christendom, the belief in the supremacy of the pope was coeval with their Christianity; it was an article of their original creed as much as the redemption; their apostles were commissioned by the pope; to him they humbly looked for instruction and encouragement, even almost for permission to advance upon their sacred adventure. Augustine, Boniface, Ebbo, Anskar, had been papal missionaries. If the faith of Italy was shaken by too familiar a view of that which the Germans contemplated with more remote and indistinct veneration, the national pride, in Rome especially, accepted the spiritual as a compensation for the loss of the temporal supremacy; it had ceased to be the centre of the imperial, it would not endure not to be that of ecclesiastical dominion. The jealousy of a pope elected, or even born, elsewhere than in Italy, showed the vitality of that belief in the papacy, which was belied by so many acts of violence towards individual popes.

The religious minds would be chiefly offended by the incongruity between the lives and the station of the pope; but to them it would be a part of religion to suppress any rebellious doubts. Their souls were deeply impressed with the paramount necessity of the unity of the church; to them the papacy was of divine appointment, the pope the successor of St. Peter; all secret questioning of this integral part of their implanted faith was sin. However then they might bow down in shame and sorrow at the inscrutable decrees of heaven, in allowing its vicegerent thus to depart from his original brightness, yet they would veil their faces in awe, and await in trembling patience the solution of that mystery. In the Christian mind in general, or rather the mind within the world of Christendom, the separation between Christian faith and Christian morality was almost complete. Christianity was a mere unreasoning assent to certain dogmatic truths, an unreasoning obedience to certain ceremonial observances.

A Pope of the Eleventh Century

(Based on an effigy)