GREGORY pre-eminently the historical representative of the temporal claims of the mediaeval papacy, was b., about 1020, at Saona, a village in the southern border of Tuscany. Whether his family belonged to the burgher or the noble class, is disputed by his biographers. His family name, Hildebrand, would imply a Teutonic descent; but by birth and education, at least, he was Italian. His youth was passed at Rome, in the monastery of St. Mary on the Aventine, of which his uncle, Laurence (afterwards bishop of Amalfi), was abbot. From Rome lie passed into France, where he entered the celebrated monastery of Cluny, in the schools of which he completed his education; and from the strict ascetic observances there practiced by him, lie acquired those habits of austerity which distinguished his entire life. He visited the court of Henry III., and obtained by his preaching the reputation of great eloquence. On his return to Rome, he became the chaplain of Gregory VI., but after the death of that pontiff, he again withdrew to his former retreat at Cluny, from which be was only recalled by the earliest appeal of the new and zealous pope, Leo IX., whom he accompanied to Rome, in 1049. Under this active and devoted pontiff, Hildebrand exercised great influence. He now, for the first time, entered into holy orders, and was eventually created cardinal. Besides the important domestic employments which were assigned to him, he was sent as legate to the important council of Tours, in which the cause of Berengar was examined. Under all the short but important pontificates of the successors of Leo IX., who are known in history as the German popes—Victor II., Stephen IX., 'Benedict X., and Alexander IL—Hildebrand continued to exercise the same influence, and by inspiring into their government of the church the great principles to which his life was vowed, he prepared the way for the full development of his own theory of the papacy. He was unanimously elected at Rome, without awaiting the imperial author ization, three days after the death of Alexander II. The German bishops, who feared the strong arm of those reforms of which his-name was endeavored to pre vent the emperor Henry IV. from assenting tb the election; Nit Heliry gave his approval, and the new pope was crowned, July 10, 1073. From the date of his election, the pontificate of Gregory was one life-long struggle for the assertion of the principles with which he believed the welfare of the church and the regeneration of society itself to be inseparably bound up. Regarding as the great evil of his time the thoroughly secular ized condition of the church in a great part of Europe, and especially in Germany and northern Italy, lie directed against this all his efforts. The position occupied by the higher clergy as feudal proprietors, the right of investiture with the temporalities of benefices claimed by the crown, the consequent dependence of the clergy upon the sovereign, and the temptation to simony (see SIMONY) which it involved, were, in the mind of7Gregory, the cause of all the evils under which Europe was groaning; and of all these lie regarded investiture (see LNVEST1TURE) as the fountain and the source. While, therefore, he labored by every species of enactment, by visitations, by encyclical letters, and by personal exhortations, precepts, and censures, to enforce the observance of ell the details of discipline—celibacy, the residence of the clergy, the instruction of the people—and to repress simony and pluralism, it was against the fundamental abuse of investiture that his main efforts were directed. In the year after his election he prohibited this practice, under pain of excommunication both for the investor and the invested, and in the following year he actually issued that sentence against several bishops and councilors of the empire. The emperor Henry IV. (see HENRY IV.), disregarding these menaces, and taking the offending bishops under his protection, Gregory, cited him to Rome, to answer for his conduct. Henry's sole reply was a haughty defiance; and in a diet at Worms, in 1076, lie formally declared Gregory deposed from the pontificate. Gregory was not slow to retaliate by a sentence of
excommunication; and in this sentence, unless revoked or removed by absolution in twelve months, by the law of the empire at the time, was involved the forfeiture of all civil rights, and deposition from every civil and political office. Henry's Saxon sub jects appealing to this law against him he was compelled to yield, and, by a humiliating penance, to which lie submitted at Canossa, in Jan., 1077, he obtained absolution from the pope in person. This submission, however, was but feigned; and on his subsequent triumph over his rival, Rudolf of Swabia, Henryresumed hostilities with the pope, and in 1080 again declared him deposed, and caused to be appointed in his place the anti pope Guibert, archbishop of Ravenna, under the name of Clement III. After a pro tracted siege of three years, Henry, in the year 1084, took possession of Rome. Gregory shut himself up in the castle of St. Angelo. Just, however, as Gregory was on the point of falling into his enemy's hands, Robert Guiscard, the Norman duke of Apulia, entered the city, set Gregory free, and compelled Henry to return to Germany; but the wretched condition to which Rome was reduced obliged Gregory to withdraw first to Monte Cassino, and ultimately to Salerno, where he died, May 25, 1085. His dying words are a deeply affecting, but yet a stern and unbending profession of the faith of his whole life, and of the profound convictions under which even his enemies acknowl edge him to have acted. " I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die an exile." The character of Gregory VII., and the theory of church-polity which lie represents, are differently judged by the different religious schools; but his theory is confessed by all, even those who most strongly reprobate it as an excess, to have been grand in its conception, and unselfish in its object. "The theory of Augustine's city of God," says Milman, "no doubt swam before his mind, on which a new Rome was to rise, and rule the world by religion." In his conception of the constitution of Christian society, the spiritual power was the first and highest element. It was to direct, to command the temporal, and, in a certain sense, to compel its obedience; but as the theory is explained by Fenelon, by Gosselin, and other modern Catholics, the arms which it was authorized to use for the purpose of coercion were the arms of the spirit only. It could compel by penalties, but these penalties were only the censures of the church; and if, in certain circumstances, temporal forfeitures (as in the case of Henry IV.) were annexed to these censures, this, it is argued, was the result of the civil legis lation of the particular country not of any general ecclesiastical law. Thus, in the case of Henry, the imperial crown was forfeited, according to the Swabian code, by the mere fact of the emperor's remaining for twelve months under excommunication with out obtaining absolution from the sentence. Moreover, whatever may be said of the power in itself, or of the lengths to which it has at times extended, the occasion and the• object of its exercise in the hands of Gregory were always such as to command the sympathy of the philosophical student of the history of the middle age. By his firm and unbending efforts to suppress the unchristian vices which deformed society, and to restrain the tyranny which oppressed the subject as much as it enslaved the church, lie taught his age "that there was a being on earth whose special duty it was to defend the defenseless, to succor the suceorless, to afford a refuge to the widow and orphan, and to be the guardian of the poor." Dean Milman sums up his history of Gregory as of one who is to be contemplated not merely with awe, but in some respects, and with some great drawbacks, as a benefactor of mankind.—See Milman's Latin Christianity, vol. iii.; Bowden's Life of Gregory VII. (1840); Voigt's Hildebrand als Papst; Ville main's (1872) and Langeron's (1874) lives of Gregory.