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One of the disappointments as one studies the history of the Middle Ages is
the scantiness of personal information about the great men whose acts, and
effect upon subsequent ages, are yet really well known to us. Only too
often is the personage himself a mere silhouette against the gold and
scarlet of the event. Pope Alexander III, who summoned the eleventh General
Council, is an instance in point, for in the history of the Church, by his
effect, he stands out as one of the six or seven greatest popes of all, one
whose laws and creative institutional work still influence the life of the
Church. His reign, again, is one of the longest of all, close on twenty-two
years. And yet, much as we know about his career, the man himself escapes
us utterly.
As to what this pope accomplished, a French scholar of our own time, the
author of the most complete study yet made of Alexander III, can say that
he "is one of the chief founders of the Roman all-powerfulness over the
clergy of the Church, with a very high idea of his office, ruling the
clergy by the aid of trustworthy assistants, and thanks to means of
government that are steadily being improved, intervening everywhere
throughout the Church by his legates, setting in order and controlling the
jurisdiction of the archbishops in their provinces and the bishops in their
sees, and everywhere seeking to strengthen the links that bind the Holy See
to the various local establishments"[234]; such is Alexander III, the first
pope effective on the grand scale in the whole daily life of the universal
church.
When, eighty years after his death, and after the more recent pontificates
of Innocent III and Innocent IV, an ambassador writes from Rome to his
sovereign of the newly elected Urban IV, it is not to these famous men that
he goes for a comparison. "Men here are saying," he reports, "that the new
pope will be another Pope Alexander."
There was a special reason for this spectacular achievement of this great
pope. He was one of those who, at a crucial moment of history, sometimes
appear in the high places of government, with the very personality the time
requires, and with the trained competence to make this effective. This rare
combination is writ large, for the trained observer at least, in the laws
of Alexander's General Council of 1179. These laws are the work of a legal
genius; and they are but a fraction of what passed directly from him into
the fundamental law of the Catholic Church.
Gregory VII, anxious to bring home to a world reluctant to be reformed,
that what he demanded was not a perfection hitherto unheard of, but simply
a return to what had always been, set in motion a great movement of
research into the past legal history of the Church. And the age when, in a
score of able legal-minded writers, these discoveries were attaining
something like completeness, knew a still wider legal renascence, the
rebirth of "the divinely reasonable" law of ancient Rome. Here was
something that was a collection of laws, and a philosophy of law, and
almost Law itself as a living creation, before which the reasonable man
gladly bent in reverent acceptance, something than which nothing could be
more welcome to rulers everywhere.
Also the age, the early years of the twelfth century, produced the man we
know as Gratian, a monk who was a lawyer? a lawyer turned monk?--a legally
trained mind, author of a book that was the first complete, scientifically
planned epitome of the Church's law. On this scholar's work the whole
magnificent fabric of the Canon Law was to be built--in his spirit and
following his pattern. And the first part of the great work called the
Corpus Iuris Canonici, which was the Catholic Church's law book down to
1918, is the Decretum of Gratian. Alexander III--Roland Bandinelli--was the
pupil of Gratian, and the first of the hundreds of lawyers who were to
publish commentaries on Gratian's book. And then, as pope, sitting in
judgment on appeals of every kind that poured in from every part of Europe,
he was so to decide the cases that, in judging them, he developed law,
created law. It is simply not possible to exaggerate the influence of his
twenty-one years of legal activity in the highest place of all. And yet,
outside this work, and his other public activities as pope, we scarcely
know the man.
The other public activities--a seventeen years' struggle against the
determination of the emperor Frederick I (called Barbarossa) to make
himself master of the Church, and reduce the papacy to an imperial
dependency.[235]
This extremely serious affair was for Alexander III an inheritance from the
days of his predecessor, the English pope Adrian IV. The emperor, young,
ambitious, warlike, and crafty as a fox, allowed by two weak popes to do as
he liked with the Church, now meant to make himself even more completely
master of Italy than he was of Germany. Against the vast military power
which he could assemble, the pope's main hope was the Norman king of
Sicily. His own state, effectively, was little more than the city of Rome
and its environs, and the city had for some time been enjoying the status
of an antipapal republic. The only protection to the north was the fragile
hope that the cities of Lombardy, Milan and the rest, would unite against
their common foe. But upon Frederick's invasion in 1158 the cities
everywhere had to yield, and submit to be ruled by governors he appointed.
Lombardy was still seething with discontent, and Adrian IV meditating an
alliance of the Lombards and Normans when September 1, 1159, he died, most
unexpectedly.
And now the tragedy of thirty years before was repeated--a double election.
The details of this affair are fairly well known, and what case can be made
out for the lawfulness of the election of the cardinal who received only
four votes, where Roland Bandinelli received twenty-two, depends in part
upon a current idea that the election, to be valid, had to be unanimous,
and in part upon the principle that the majority needs to be not merely the
greater part, but the morally better part--a principle whose end is surely
anarchy, but which then had its place in the general law about
ecclesiastical elections, and had been successfully invoked by St. Bernard
in the affair of 1130. But it was to matter much more that Roland
Bandinelli had been Adrian IV's right-hand man in the contest with
Barbarossa, and that his rival was the emperor's man.
Frederick did not now make the mistake of marching on Rome, with what
troops he still had in Italy. His policy was rather to suggest a kind of
congress of princes before whom the rivals could state their case. The
princes--Frederick, in his own mind--would then decide. To this Alexander
III, from the first, opposed a blunt refusal, and from this position he
never moved. His rival, who called himself Victor IV, accepted, and became
henceforth all but a part of the imperial machine.
The schism lasted eighteen years nearly, "Victor IV" being followed by
"Pascal III" (who, to make still more evident the sacredness of the
emperor's cause, canonised Charlemagne for him in 1167) and he by "Calixtus
III." For only two of these years was Alexander III able to live in Rome.
The contrast between his masterly ruling of the Church, of which we have
spoken, during these years, and his own personal insecurity is most
striking. For years he lived in France, and then in the country to the
south of Rome, close to the frontier of the friendly kings of Sicily,
constantly in movement. At Rome the antipope was lord, and in St. Peter's
he crowned Barbarossa and his empress.
This coronation was in 1167--the emperor's third or fourth invasion of
Italy, and a highly spectacular success until, on the very morrow of the
sacrilegious rite the plague struck his army, and troops and notables died
like flies. The hated emperor had to disguise himself to get out of the
country alive. Seven years later, after long preparation, Frederick
returned, to meet at Legnano (in 1176) with a surprising and wholly
disastrous defeat at the hands of the Lombard League. Of this league of
city states Alexander III had been the real inspiration, and its steadfast
counsellor in matters of alliance and diplomacy. The freedom of the Italian
cities and the freedom of religion had become one thing in these tense
years. For Frederick, Legnano was the end. He tried, of course, to make
peace with the pope without the league, and with the league at the expense
of the pope. But Alexander was loyalty itself. A peace congress came
together at Venice, in 1177, terms were agreed, and the emperor made his
submission to the pope--not, however, with the spectacular gestures of the
frescoes that, at Siena and Venice, commemorate the event, for such was not
Alexander's nature. The bad precedent of 1139 was not followed, and when
the last of the antipopes came in to make his submission, in the following
year, Alexander received him as a guest and provided for him. After all, in
the distant days when Adrian IV was pope, had they not been cardinals
together?
The General Council of 1179 was the outcome of these Venetian events, and
it needs to be seen as such: as the council then promised to the emperor,
in which, as will be understood, a whole world of reorganisation had to be
faced--for example, Germany had, in a way, been out of the Church for
nearly twenty years. And as well as reorganisation, there was the ever
needed exhortation to reform, and the restraint of the abuses,
ecclesiastical and lay, that are the perpetual scandal of church life.
Of the council itself we know all too little, for its acts have not
survived. It opened March 5, 1179, and there were three public sessions,
but whether the second and third were March 7 and 19 or March 12 and 23 is
not certain. The number of bishops who attended was about three hundred.
The greater part came from France and the various Italian states, but there
were 19 from Germany and as many from Spain, 6 from Ireland and another 6
from the England of Henry II, with 12 from his French dominions. A
Hungarian is mentioned and a Dane, and there were 7 bishops from the
various Latin states of the Holy Land. Abbots and priors were still more
numerous, and the bishop of Assisi in his sermon at the opening was able to
say that the "universal assembly" could be seen to have been brought
together from almost the whole of the world. There was even an observer
from those Greek churches of the East with which, for generations now,
there had been so little direct contact. "The senate of the whole Christian
republic was come together," as the preacher said, "to consider and to give
judgment to the universe. To Rome alone, of all the royal cities [Antioch,
Alexandria, Byzantium, Jerusalem were the others] had it been given to rule
with supreme power over all the other sees, with the power of the keys, the
power to judge; Rome alone had the power to summon a General Council, to
make new canons, to abrogate the old." As for the reigning pope, the
benefits of his rule were felt as far away as the Indies.[236]
In this rare sermon we are given, for a fraction of a second, a glimpse of
the particular and personal. We could have exchanged it for some slight
knowledge of how the council transacted its business. For of this we know
just nothing at all. One of the chroniclers who treat of the council speaks
of twelve canons proposed which the bishops rejected, and that is the only
hint that has survived of all the discussions of those three weeks of March
1179. Were there no critics among the bishops? Was the pope's new system
the very thing all of them desired? A passage in Alexander's letter
convoking the council has been taken as a hint to the bishops that their
presence was chiefly required in order to give the decrees a more rapidly
effective publicity. Another critic was the English humanist John of
Salisbury, present at the council as bishop of Chartres. He wondered
whether there were not enough laws already. Was not the Church staggering
under their weight? Would it not be better to keep to the simple Gospel, so
long neglected these days by so many? Will our Lord not say to us also, "Ye
let go the commandment of God and hold fast to the tradition of men"?[237]
This curious anticipation of the simplist solutions of Erasmus is hardly
likely to have influenced the world-weary and experienced old pope, who had
twenty-seven canons[238] to propose to the bishops, practical regulations in
all conscience, with appropriate punishments provided for those who ignored
them. For the most part they concern the clergy, and especially bishops.
Eleven are new laws, the rest repeat and renew canons already enacted.
The pope's first thought, naturally, is to amend the law of 1059 about
papal elections. There must be no uncertainty about the meaning of such a
law. As Alexander III now rewrote it the law has lasted until this present
day.[239] Nor were there ever again disputed elections of the type of 1130
and 1159. What this first canon of 1179 decreed was as follows. Should the
cardinals, through the malice of the devil, be unable to achieve a
unanimous choice, and there be two thirds in agreement and the other third
unwilling to join them, or presuming to choose another, then the one chosen
by the two thirds is to be taken as the pope. Should it happen that,
relying on his choice by one third only, a man usurps the name of pope (for
he cannot take the reality), both himself and all who take him as pope are
excommunicated, and deprived of whatever ordination has given them, so that
communion is denied them except as Viaticum at the hour of death. Should
they die unrepentant their lot is that of Dathan and Abiron.[240] Moreover,
if anyone receives a majority of the votes but less than two thirds, let
him not dare to take on himself the office of pope, or he falls under all
the penalties just mentioned. The law states that it does not affect the
principle about "the morally better part" which rules in other
ecclesiastical elections, for if disputes arise about these there is a
superior who can decide the matter. "But in the case of the Roman see there
is a special arrangement, since it is not possible here to have recourse to
a superior."[241]
"Following the example of our predecessor Innocent [II]," all ordinations
made by the antipopes, and by those whom these ordained, are quashed, and
the benefices which these schismatics granted are to go back to their
rightful owners. All who, of their own free will, took oaths to uphold the
schism, are suspended from their orders and their dignity.[242]
As to bishops, no one is to be made a bishop who is under thirty years of
age, of legitimate birth and demonstrably suited by his life and education.
Elected, the election confirmed, the new bishop having taken over the
administration of the see and received consecration, the superior whose
duty it is will then fill the benefices vacated by his promotion.
Archdeacons, rural deans, parish priests [i.e., pastors] are not to be
appointed if under twenty-five, and the first named must at least receive
deacon's orders and the rest the priesthood, within the time fixed by law.
Clerics who elect contrary to this law lose all future right to elect, and
are for three years suspended from their benefices.[243]
One never ceasing complaint is that bishops' official visitations tend to
be ruinously expensive for the places they visit. Their train--officials,
guards, servants--is now cut down: archbishops to a maximum of 40 to 50
horses, according to the country and its resources, cardinals 25, bishops
20 to 30, archdeacons 7; deans are told to be contented with 2. No hunting
dogs, no hawks and falcons. "And let them not demand sumptuous feasts, but
gratefully take the seemly sufficiency set before them." Bishops are not to
burden their subjects with taxes. Parents, as Scripture says, should enrich
their children, not children their parents. What has been said about the
prelate's train is, of course (sane), said as the maximum that is to be
tolerated, something allowable in well-to-do places, parishes with ample
revenues.[244] Should a bishop ordain anyone priest or deacon who has not
any legal right to an ecclesiastical income, the bishop is to maintain him
until he is placed.[245]
No cleric is to be appointed to a place which is not yet vacant, or to be
promised appointment at the next vacancy--lest men begin to wish for the
death of others. Promises of this kind were forbidden in the pagan laws of
old. How shameful, and inviting the wrath of God, that there should be such
expectations in God's Church. Bishops are to fill vacancies within six
months. If they neglect to do so, the canons of the diocese are to appoint.
If all concerned are negligent, the archbishop of the province is to
act.[246]
There are "bitter complaints," says canon 9, from bishops about the way in
which certain religious orders make a mockery of penitential discipline by
so using the privileges granted them by the popes as to provide influential
sinners with loopholes--they gladly accept from the lay lords grants of
tithes and benefices, admitting these personages to the sacraments although
excommunicated, giving them Christian burial, and where the order was
allowed during times of interdict to have mass said once a year in that
country, taking this to mean once in each of the monasteries of the order.
The orders moreover had confraternities of laymen associated with them, and
to these it was conveyed that such membership took them out of the bishop's
jurisdiction. The new military orders, the Templars and the Knights
Hospitalers, were especially complained of, regarding these gravely
scandalous practices. The canon insists that in all these matters the
bishop's authority holds good, over the priests who serve the parishes
which the order "owns" and over the members of these various fraternities.
Two canons (16, 17) rule that in differences between the canons of
cathedral chapters and others the will of the maior et sanior pars[247] of
the chapter is to prevail, and that where there are several patrons of a
church the candidate who has the majority of the patrons for him is to be
appointed: never are there to be as many pastors as there are disputing
patrons.
Abuses in the matter of appeals from the lower ecclesiastical courts are
corrected by canon 6. The legal trick of suddenly excommunicating the man
thought to be about to appeal, is forbidden and, on the other hand, the man
charged with an offence is not allowed to appeal before his case has been
tried. Especially are monks and other religious not to adopt such a tactic
as this against their superior correcting them according to the rule, "but
let them humbly and devoutly receive what has been commanded for their
spiritual good."
Canon 18 has a more general interest, and it touches on a problem of
medieval history that has been all too little explored--the way in which
the rank and file of the parochial clergy were trained. In order that all
may have a chance of education, even the poor who cannot expect their
parents to pay school fees, every bishop is to arrange that among the
members of his cathedral chapter there shall be one who will teach gratis
the clerics of that church and poor students too, and the same shall be
done in other churches and in monastic churches. No one who is qualified to
teach shall be denied permission. From the general terms of the canon, this
is not the foundation of a system so much as an order for its restoration.
There are as yet no universities in the formal sense of the word, but one
has only to recall such a name as that of Abelard, dead now these thirty
years, to be aware that in one cathedral city after another there were
already remarkably flourishing schools of the liberal arts, and theology.
This reforming pope sees no reason why there should not be at least the
beginnings of such a school in every diocese.
Of the remaining canons which mostly renew the old laws, we may note how
the clergy are now forbidden to accept offerings from the accursed gains of
the usurer. Clergy who have accepted such offerings, or given a usurer
Christian burial? are to be suspended until they have returned what they
accepted.[248] Neither Jews nor Saracens are, on any pretext, to have
Christian slaves. Christians who live with them are excommunicated. In all
suits a Christian's word is to be preferred against the testimony of Jews,
and whoever does the reverse of this is to be excommunicated, for Jews
should be subject to Christians and be kindly treated by Christians from
human kindness merely.[249]
There is a long and very detailed decree about the restraint of heretics,'
declared to be numerous in Gascony, and around Albi and Toulouse, "Cathars
as they are called," who make no secret of what they are and openly work to
make converts. Both the heretics and those who protect them are
excommunicated; no one is to give them shelter, or allow them in his
territory, or to do business with them. If they die in their sin mass is
not to be offered for them, nor are they to receive Christian burial. As to
the wandering bands of marauders and plunderers, they are to be treated
like heretics, and the pope calls on all good men to associate and, meeting
violence with violence, destroy these pests of society; and to those who
thus manfully organise all the indulgences are granted which the Crusaders
in Spain and the Holy Land enjoy. The canon ends with an exhortation to the
bishops to be brave themselves, in supporting this movement to protect the
community from these powerfully organised hordes. Cowardly bishops and
priests are to be deprived of their office.
The last of these laws that regard the social, as well as the spiritual,
life of the Catholic, treats of the lepers--an increasingly large section
of society since the crusades. Clergy are not to prevent lepers from having
churches of their own, and cemeteries, and their own priest. And from the
lepers no tithes are to be asked, whether of produce or of their
beasts.[250]
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