Social-Psychological Causes and Consequences of the Papal Revolution

Mention has been made of three aspects of the new social consciousness that emerged during the eleventh and twelfth centuries -- a new sense of corporate identity on the part of the clergy, a new sense of the responsibility of the clergy for the reformation of the secular world, and a new sense of historical time, including the concepts of modernity and progress.

The first aspect, the corporate self-consciousness of the clergy (it would be called class consciousness today) was essential to the revolution, both as cause and as consequence. Of course, the clergy had always had some sense of their own group identity; yet it was at best a sense of spiritual unity, a unity of belief and of calling, and not a sense of political or legal unity. Politically and legally, the clergy prior to the eleventh century had been dispersed locally, with very few links to central ecclesiastical authorities. Even the sense of spiritual unity was flawed by the sharp division between the "regular" clergy and the "secular" clergy; the regular clergy were the "religious" ones, the monks and nuns, who having died to "this world," lived out their membership in the Eternal City; the secular clergy were the priests and bishops, who were almost wholly involved in the political, economic, and social life of the localities where they lived.

More than any other single factor, the Cluniac Reform laid the foun-

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dation for the new sense of corporate political unity among the clergy of Western Christendom. The zeal of the reformers helped to give a new consciousness of common historical destiny to both the regular and the secular clergy. In addition, Cluny provided a model for uniting the clergy in a single translocal organization, since all Cluniac houses were subject to the jurisdiction of the central abbey.

In adopting the principal aims of the Cluniac Reform, including the celibacy of the priesthood and the elimination of the purchase and sale of church offices, the papal party in the 1050s and 1060s appropriated the moral capital of the earlier movement, including the clerical class consciousness that it had helped to develop. To those older aims was joined the new cry for "the freedom of the church" -­that is, its freedom from control by "the laity." This was both an appeal to clerical class consciousness and a stimulation of it. Moreover, by the very act of denouncing imperial control of the church, Gregory shattered the old Carolingian ideal. The clergy were confronted with a choice between political unity under the papacy and political disunity among new national churches, which would have inevitably arisen in the various polities of Europe if the papacy had lost the battle. The investiture struggle made that clear. Ultimately the question of investiture was settled by separate negotiations between each of the principal secular rulers, representing his secular polity, and the papacy, representing the entire clergy of Western Christendom. The Papal Revolution itself thus helped to establish the clerical class consciousness on which it was based.

The clergy became the first translocal, transtribal, transfeudal, transnational class in Europe to achieve political and legal unity. It became so by demonstrating that it was able to stand up against, and defeat, the one preexisting universal authority, the emperor. The emperor had no such universal class to support him. From the twelfth century to the sixteenth the unity of the clerical hierarchy in the West could only be broken by a few powerful kings. Even the Norman kings of Sicily, who in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were able to exclude papal control over a clergy nominally subordinate to Rome, agreed to submit to the pope any disputed elections of bishops.

The term "class" has been used here to describe the clergy partly to emphasize that the Papal Revolution, like the German (Protestant) Revolution, the English Revolution, the French and American revolutions, and the Russian Revolution, involved the interactions not only of individuals or elites but also of large social groups that performed major functions in the society.

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play an important role in the production of economic wealth, since the church owned between one_ fourth and one_third of the land; bishops and abbots were lords of manors with the same economic interests as their nonecclesiastical counterparts; the struggle against lay investiture was in part a struggle to wrest economic power from lay lords and to transfer it to the church. However, it was not primarily the economic interests of the clergy that gave them their class character. It was, rather, their role as producers of spiritual goods as father confessors, as performers of marriage

ceremonies, as baptizers of infants, as ministers of last rites, as preachers of sermons, and also as expounders not only of the theology of Western society but also of its basic political and legal doctrines.

The growth of the class consciousness of the clergy was associated with the second aspect of the new social consciousness of the eleventh and twelfth centuries -- the development of a new sense of the clergy's mission to reform the secular world. On the one hand, the new tendency to identify the church primarily with the clergy, the "hierarchy," led to a sharp distinction between the clergy and the laity. On the other hand, this distinction carried the implication that the clergy were not only superior to, but also responsible for, the laity. In other words, the class consciousness of the clergy was at the same time a social consciousness in the modern sense, a conscientiousness with respect to the future of society.

This was reflected in a sharp change in the meaning of the word "secular." In classical Latin, saeculum meant "an age," "a time," "a generation," or "the people of a given time" (as in "the younger generation"); it also came to mean "a century." The church fathers in the second, third, and fourth centuries used saeculum to refer to the world of time -- the "temporal" world -- as contrasted with the eternal kingdom of God.

Contrary to what is sometimes supposed, St. Augustine did not identify the City of God with the Christian Church as such, nor did he identify the Earthly City with the Roman Empire or with the state in general. For him both the Church and the Empire were living in evil

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times, the saeculum. The Christian, however, was distinguished by the fact that he yearned ardently _________ again in Brown's words "for a country that is always distant but made ever present by the quality of his love and hope." 28 Thus for St. Augustine the true Christian, whether priest or layman, lived in both "cities," that is, in both the earthly and the heaverily society. 29_

The negative view of the saeculum reflected in the writings of St. Augustine and, indeed, of most Christian thinkers in the first thousand years of the church's history, contributed to a sharp division between the regular clergy and the secular clergy. The former lived farther away from the saeculum and closer to the City of God. That may be why, in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the papal party, which championed the secular as well as the regular clergy, often preferred to speak of the "temporal" rule of emperors and kings, and of "temporal" law, rather than of "secular" rule and "secular" law, although the two terms were synonymous.

Who does not know that kings and princes derive their origin from men ignorant of God who raised themselves above their fellows by pride, plunder, treachery, murder -- in short by every kind of crime -- at the instigation of the Devil, the prince of this world, men blind with greed and intolerable in their audacity?... Kings and princes of the earth, seduced by empty glory, prefer their own interests to the things of the spirit, whereas pious pontiffs, despising vainglory, set the things of God above the things of' the flesh... The former, far too much given to worldly affairs, think little of spiritual things, the latter, dwelling eagerly upon heavenly subjects, despise the things of this world. ³⁰

The imperial authority, according to its enemies, lacked spiritual, that is, holy or "heavenly," qualities. One of Gregory's propagandists addressed the emperor as follows: "you say that your authority has stood unchallenged for seven hundred years, and so you would have a right to it by prescription? But no more than a thief is able to transfer title to stolen goods can the devil transfer property rights to an unjust power." 31_And again: "The least in the kingdom of the spiritual sword is greater than the Emperor himself, who wields [only] the secular sword." 32

The Papal Revolution started with this attempt by the papacy to reduce the Holy and Most Christian Emperor -- who for centuries had played the leading role in the life of the church -- to the status of a simple

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layman, lower than the lowest priest. The fact that emperors and kings, being laymen, wielded only the secular sword, that is, were responsible only for temporal affairs, the things of this world, placed them in subordination to those who wielded the spiritual sword and were responsible for spiritual affairs, and who "dwell eagerly upon heavenly subjects"; for the laity were inferior to the clergy in matters of faith and morals, and the secular was less valuable than the spiritual.

Yet Gregory VII and his supporters never doubted that secular government, though subordinate to the church in spiritual matters and even -- though only indirectly -- in secular matters, represented divine authority, that the power of the secular ruler was established by God, and that secular law flowed ultimately from reason and conscience and must be obeyed. Despite his harsh denunciation of secular rulers, Gregory was full of hope for the future of secular society -- under papal tutelage. In this, he and his followers were poles apart from St. Augustine.

Indeed, the most radical of the papal claims, namely, that not only the spiritual sword but the temporal sword, too, belongs ultimately to the church, which confers it on the secular ruler, contains a paradox. In the words of John of Salisbury, the king "is a minister of the priestly power, and one who exercises that side of the sacred offices which seems unworthy of the hands of the priesthood." ³³ Unworthy -­nevertheless, sacred. The very division between the spiritual and the secular-which the church ardently maintained when claiming its freedom, but often violated when seeking to expand its power -- provided defenses against the papal attempt to assert jurisdiction over the sinfulness attributed to secular rulers pursuing secular policies.

Ultimately, compromises were reached in the struggle between the papalists and their opponents. It was out of that struggle and those compromises that Western political science-and especially the first modern Western theories of the state and secular law-were born. As K.J. Leysers has written, "Political ideas in the classical sense only appear in the polemics of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries incoherently, in flashes... There [was at that time] no theory of the secular state as such, but as a result of the great crisis it was all ready to be born." ³⁴

The new meanings of secular were derived from the struggle between supporters of the secular and spiritual authorities, respectively. Those who denied altogether the papacy's distinction between secular and spiritual, and who insisted on maintaining the sacral character of imperial or royal rule, were generally defeated. But the actual boundaries between the two realms -- the specific allocations of functions -- were worked out by reconciliation and compromise between opposing forces. They could not, by the very nature of the problem, be defined abstractly.

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Closely related to both the clergy's sense of corporate identity and its sense of mission to reform the world was a third aspect of the new social consciousness that emerged in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, namely, a new sense of historical time, including the concepts of modernity and of progress. This, too, was both a cause and a consequence of the Papal Revolution.

A new sense of time was implicit in the shift in the meaning of saeculum and in the new sense of mission to reform the world. A relatively static view of political society was replaced by a more dynamic view; there was a new concern with the future of social institutions. But there was also a fundamental revaluation of history, a new orientation toward the past as well as the future, and a new sense of the relationship of the future to the past. The distinction between "ancient" and "modern" times, which had occasionally been made in previous centuries, became common in the literature of the papal party. In the twelfth century there appeared the first European historians who saw the history of the West as moving from the past, through stages, into a new future -- men such as Hugo of St. Victor, Otto of Freising, Anselm of Havelberg, Joachim of Floris, and others. These men saw history as moving forward in stages, culminating in their own time, which some referred to as modern times or modernity (modernitas). Joachim of Floris and his disciples considered that a new age of the Holy Spirit was about to replace the age of the Son, which had come to an end. Otto of Freising wrote that secular history had entered into sacred history and was intertwined with it. ³⁵

Like the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, the Papal Revolution pretended to be not a revolution but a restoration. Gregory VII, like Cromwell, claimed that he was not innovating, but restoring ancient freedoms that had been abrogated in the immediately preceding centuries. As the English Puritans and their successors found precedents in the common law of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, largely passing over the century or more of Tudor-Stuart absolutism, so the Gregorian reformers found precedents in the patristic writings of the early centuries of the church, largely passing over the Carolingian and post-Carolingian era in the West. The ideological emphasis was on tradition, but the tradition could only be established by suppressing the immediate past and returning to an earlier one. Writings of leading Frankish and German canonists and theologians of the ninth and tenth centuries were simply ignored. In addition, the patristic writings were interpreted to conform to the political program of the papal party, and when particular patristic texts stood in the way of that program they were rejected. Faced with an obnoxious custom, the Gregorian reformers would appeal over it to truth, quoting the aphorism of Tertullian and St. Cyprian, "Christ said, 'I am the truth.' He did not say 'I am the custom.' " Gregory VII quoted this against Emperor Henry IV.

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Becket quoted it against King Henry II. It had special force at a time when almost all the prevailing law was customary law.

It is the hallmark of the great revolutions of Western history, starting with the Papal Revolution, that they clothe their vision of the radically new in the garments of a remote past, whether those of ancient legal authorities (as in the case of the Papal Revolution), or of an ancient religious text, the Bible (as in the case of the German Reformation), or of an ancient civilization, classical Greece (as in the case of the French Revolution), or of a prehistoric classless society (as in the case of the Russian Revolution). In all of these great upheavals the idea of a restoration -- a return, and in that sense a revolution, to an earlier starting point -- was connected with a dynamic concept of the future.

It is easy enough to criticize the historiography of the revolutions as politically biased and, indeed, purely ideological. This, however, is to impose on revolutionaries the standards of objectivity asserted by modern historical scholarship, which is itself a product of its times and has its own biases. Moreover, it is important to recognize that the revolutionaries were perfectly aware that they were reinterpreting the past and adapting historical memories to new circumstances. What is significant is that at the most crucial turning points of Western history a projection into the distant past has been needed to match the projection into the distant future. Both the past and the future have been summoned, so to speak, to fight against the evils of the present.