The Church and the Empire | Page 5

it was held by the papalists that there was nothing done
by the Emperor in any capacity which it was not within the competence
of the Pope to supervise.

CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHURCH REFORM
Previous to the eleventh century there had been quarrels between
Emperor and Pope. Occasional Popes, such as Nicholas I (858-67), had
asserted high prerogatives for the successor of St. Peter, but we have
seen that the Church herself taught the co-ordinate and the mutual
dependence of the ecclesiastical and secular powers. It was the
circumstances of the tenth century which caused the Church to assume
a less complacent attitude and, in her efforts to prevent her absorption

by the State, to attempt the reduction of the State to a mere department
of the Church.
[Sidenote: Lay investiture of ecclesiastics.]
With the acceptance of Christianity as the official religion of the
Empire the organisation of the Church tended to follow the
arrangements for purposes of civil government. And when at a later
period civil society was gradually organising itself on that hierarchical
model which we know as feudalism, the Church, in the persons of its
officers, was tending to become not so much the counterpart of the
State as an integral part of it. For the clergy, as being the only educated
class, were used by the Kings as civil administrators, and on the great
officials of the Church were bestowed extensive estates which should
make them a counterpoise to the secular nobles. In theory the clergy
and people of the diocese still elected their bishop, but in reality he
came to be nominated by the King, at whose hands he received
investiture of his office by the symbolic gifts of the ring and the
pastoral staff, and to whom he did homage for the lands of the see,
since by virtue of them he was a baron of the realm. Thus for all
practical purposes the great ecclesiastic was a secular noble, a layman.
He had often obtained his high ecclesiastical office as a reward for
temporal service, and had not infrequently paid a large sum of money
as an earnest of loyal conduct and for the privilege of recouping
himself tenfold by unscrupulous use of the local patronage which was
his.
[Sidenote: Clerical marriage.]
Furthermore, in contravention of the canons of the Church, the secular
clergy, whether bishops or priests, were very frequently married. The
Church, it is true, did not consecrate these marriages; but, it is said,
they were so entirely recognised that the wife of a bishop was called
Episcopissa. There was an imminent danger that the ecclesiastical order
would shortly lapse into an hereditary social caste, and that the sons of
priests inheriting their fathers' benefices would merely become another
order of landowners.

[Sidenote: Church reform.]
Thus the two evils of traffic in ecclesiastical offices, shortly stigmatised
as simony and concubinage--for the laws of the Church forbade any
more decent description of the relationship--threatened to absorb the
Church within the State. Professional interests and considerations of
morality alike demanded that these evils should be dealt with.
Ecclesiastical reformers perceived that the only lasting reformation was
one which should proceed from the Church herself. It was among the
secular clergy, the parish priests, that these evils were most rife. The
monasteries had also gone far away from their original ideals; but the
tenth century had witnessed the establishment of a reformed
Benedictine rule in the Congregation of Cluny, and, in any case, it was
in monastic life alone that the conditions seemed suitable for working
out any scheme of spiritual improvement. The Congregation of Cluny
was based upon the idea of centralisation; unlike the Abbot of the
ordinary Benedictine monastery, who was concerned with the affairs of
a single house, the Abbot of Cluny presided over a number of
monasteries, each of which was entrusted only to a Prior. Moreover, the
Congregation of Cluny was free from the visitation of the local bishops
and was immediately under the papal jurisdiction. What more natural
than that the monks of Cluny should advocate the application to the
Church at large of those principles of organisation which had formed so
successful a departure from previous arrangements in the smaller
sphere of Cluny? Thus the advocates of Church reform evolved both a
negative and a positive policy: the abolition of lay investiture and the
utter extirpation of the practice of clerical marriages were to shake the
Church free from the numbing control of secular interests, and these
were to be accomplished by a centralisation of the ecclesiastical
organisation in the hands of the Pope, which would make him more
than a match for the greatest secular potentate, the successor of Caesar
himself.
[Sidenote: Chances of reform.]
It is true that at the beginning of the eleventh