Papacy

Paschal II., 1099-1118.

History has not fully recognized the Italian monk Paschal II., who was the equal of Urban in private virtues, personal disinterestedness, and religious con viction, but was surpassed by him in ardour and rigidity of con duct. Altered circumstances and tendencies of opinion called for a policy of conciliation. In France, Paschal granted absolution to Philip I.—who had many times been anathematized by his prede cessors—and reconciled him solemnly with the Church, on the sole condition that he should swear to renounce his adulterous marriage. The pope could be under no delusion as to the value of this oath, which indeed was not kept ; he merely regularized for mally a state of affairs which the intractable Urban II. himself had never been able to prevent. As for the French question of the investitures, it was settled apparently without any treaty being expressly drawn up between the parties. The kings of France contemporary with Paschal II. ceased to practise spiritual inves titure, or even to receive feudal homage from the bishops. They did not, however, renounce all intervention or all profit in the nominations to prelacies, but their intervention was no longer exhibited under the forms which the Hildebrandine party held to be illegal. In England, Paschal II. put an end to the long quarrel between the royal government and Anselm of Canterbury by accepting the Concordat of London (I107). The crown in England also abandoned investiture by the pastoral staff and ring, but, more fortunate than in France, retained the right of receiving feudal homage from the episcopate. As for Germany, the Emperor Henry V. wrung from the pope, by a display of force at Rome, concessions which provoked the indignant clamours of the most ardent reformers in France and Italy. It must not, how ever, be forgotten that, in the negotiations at Sutri, Paschal had pride and independence enough to propose to the emperor the only solution of the conflict that was entirely logical and essentially Christian, namely, the renunciation by the Church of its temporal power and the renunciation by the lay lords of all intervention in elections and investitures—in other words, the absolute separa tion of the priesthood and the state. The idea was contrary to the whole evolution of mediaeval Catholicism, and the German bishops were the first to repudiate it. At all events, it is certain that Paschal II. prepared the way for the Concordat of Worms.

On the other hand, with more acuteness than his predecessors, he realized that the papacy could not sustain the struggle against Germany unless it could rely upon the support of another Chris tian kingdom of the West ; and he concluded with Philip I. of France and Louis the Fat, at the Council of Troyes (1107), an alliance which was for more than a century the salvation of the court of Rome. It is from this time that we find the popes in moments of crisis transporting themselves to Capetian territory, installing their governments and convening their councils there, and from that place of refuge fulminating with impunity against the internal and external foe. Without sacrificing the essential prin ciples of the reformation, Paschal II. practised a policy of peace and reaction in every way contrary to that of the two preceding popes, and it was through him that the struggle was once more placed upon the religious basis.

Calixtus II. (1119-24).

Guy, archbishop of Vienne, who had been so keen to disavow the policy of Paschal II., was obliged to continue it when he assumed the tiara under the name of Calixtus II. By the Concordat of Worms, which he signed with the Emperor Henry V. in 1122, the investiture was divided between the ecclesiastical and the lay powers, the emperor investing with the sceptre, the pope with the pastoral staff and ring. The work did honour to the perseverance and ability of Calixtus, but it was merely the application of the ideas of Paschal II. and No of Chartres. The understanding, however, between

the two contracting parties was very far from being clear and complete, as each party still sought to attain its own aim by spread ing in the Christian world divergent interpretations of the con cordat and widely differing plans for reducing it to its final form. The two great agitations directed by the papacy at the end of the irth century and the beginning of the 12th—the reformation and the crusade—were of capital importance for the foundation of the immense religious monarchy that had its centre in Rome; and it is from here that the papal monarchy actually dates.

The entry of the Christians into Jerusalem produced an extra ordinary effect upon the faithful of the West. In it they saw the most manifest sign of the divine protection and of the super natural power of the pope, the supreme director of the expedition.

At its inception the Latin kingdom of the Holy Land was within a little of becoming an ecclesiastical principality, ruled by a patri arch under the authority of the pope. Daimbert, the first patriarch of Jerusalem, was convinced that the Roman Church alone could be sovereign of the new state, and attempted to compel Godfrey of Bouillon to hand over to him by a solemn agreement the town and citadel of Jerusalem, and also Jaffa. The clergy, indeed, received a large share ; but the government of the Latin princi pality remained lay and military, the only form of government possible for a colony surrounded by perils and camped in a hostile country. Not only was the result of the crusade extremely favour able to the extension of the Roman power, but throughout the middle ages the papacy never ceased to derive almost incalculable political and financial advantages from the agitation produced by the preachers and the crusading expeditions.

As for the reformation, which under Urban II. and his imme diate successors was aimed not only at the episcopate but also at the capitulary bodies and monastic clergy, it, too, could but tend to a considerable extension of the authority of the successors of St. Peter, for it struck an irremediable blow at the ancient Christian hierarchy. The first manifest result of the change was the weakening of the metropolitans. The visible symptom of this decadence of the archiepiscopal power was the growing frequency during the Hildebrandine conflict of episcopal confirmations and consecrations made by the popes themselves or their legates. From an active instrument of the religious society, the archiepis copate degenerated into a purely formal power; while the episco pate itself, which the sincere reformers wished to liberate and purge in order to strengthen it, emerged from the crisis sensibly weakened as well as ameliorated. The episcopate, while it gained in intelligence and morality, lost a part of its independence. It was raised above feudalism only to be abased before the two direct ing forces of the reformation, the papacy and the religious orders. To place itself in a better posture for combating the simoniacal and concubinary prelates, the court of Rome had had to multiply exemptions and accelerate the movement which impelled the monks to make themselves independent of the bishops. Even in the cities, the seats of the episcopal power, the reformation encour aged the attempts at revolt or autonomy which tended everywhere to diminish that power. The cathedral chapters took advantage of this situation to oppose their jurisdiction to that of the bish ops, and to encroach on their prerogatives. When war was de clared on the schismatic prelates, the reforming popes supported the canons, and, unconsciously or not, helped them to form them selves into privileged bodies living their own lives and affecting to recognize the court of Rome as their only superior authority.