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For the first thirty years or so of the period, Carolingian Catholicism
continued to advance: the reform of Catholic life, the activity of the
missionaries, and the fundamentally important work of intellectual
revival. Louis the Pious did not share his father's failure to
understand the real importance of monasticism. For him the monasteries
were not merely centres of civilisation and intellectual life: they
were primarily settlements of monks, sanctuaries wherein the primitive
ideals of the Gospel, the perfect following of Jesus Christ, the life
of prayer, were cherished and the best of opportunity provided for
their realisation. Louis was the friend as well as the patron of St.
Benedict of Aniane, and seconded the efforts of that great monastic
reformer, as also those of his successors Arnulf of Marmoutiers and
Jonas of Orleans. An imperial decree of 817 made the rule of St.
Benedict obligatory on all monasteries, and laid especial emphasis on
the necessity of manual labour and ascetic practices. In the same year
the emperor issued, also, a rule for the canons regular and one for the
nuns.
Alcuin's work for liturgical uniformity was continued by his pupil
Amalric, Bishop of Treves (811-850). It is from his antiphonary, and
the treatises which he wrote to explain and defend it -- a combination
of the Roman antiphonary and that of the church of Metz -- that the
modern Roman rite largely derives. In the countrysides, the movement to
establish parishes independent of those in the towns continued to make
headway and, despite inevitable opposition, the movement to free these
parishes from the power of the local lord. On the other hand the king,
more than ever, kept the nomination of bishops in his own hands. and,
for all his patronage of the monastic life, he continued, as the needs
of policy dictated, to make over the abbeys to laymen.
Nor did the missionary movement die with Charlemagne. Ebbo, Archbishop
of Rheims, and foster brother of Louis the Pious, turned from his
labours for the State to initiate the conversion of Denmark (822),
whose king he baptised in 826. But the great name here is that of yet
another Benedictine, Ansgar, a monk of Corbie. He was scarcely
twenty-five when he went north to take up Ebbo's work and for nearly
seventy years he spent himself to do for Denmark and the north of
Germany what Boniface had done for the centre, and the Irish monks for
the south. Like St. Boniface he was the pope's legate; and in Hamburg
he created a second Fulda, cathedral, monastery, library and school.
The apostolate in Sweden was at the same time given to Ebbo's nephew,
Gauzbert.
The intellectual life of this second generation of Carolingian
Catholicism, the fruits of Alcuin's genius, was richer and more
striking than that of the first. One of its leaders was the most famous
of all Alcuin's pupils, Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda in 822 and
Archbishop of Mainz from 847: no original thinker certainly, but a
trained mind and a lover of learning of the type of Isidore of Seville,
concerned to re-edit for his own generation, and to save for the future
lest it should perish, the thought of the Christian past. He wrote
Manuals of Grammar and Philosophy, commentaries on Holy Scripture, on
the Canon Law, controversial writings on Predestination against
Gottschalk, and an encyclopaedia that left no knowledge unexplored. As
Abbot of Fulda, Rabanus Maurus formed Walafrid Strabo, the poet of the
century and yet another commentator on Holy Scripture; and he formed
Gottschalk too. Fulda, in his time, was the greatest of all the schools
of the continent. Elsewhere, too, the work went on: lectures on the
Bible, St. Augustine, Boethius, discussions of the old questions of
Grace and Free Will, of the Infinite and the Finite, the existence and
nature of Universals.
In the political struggles which filled this unhappy century, churchmen
had as prominent a place as they had occupied in the routine
administration of the previous generation. Agobard, Archbishop of
Lyons, and Ebbo of Rheims were the chiefs of the party that fought
against the partition policy of Louis the Pious. When this finally
triumphed, the bishops again worked strongly to set up, in place of the
now destroyed unity of the single emperor, a system of permanent
alliances based on the Gospel principles of brotherly love. They were
successful up to a point. The kings solemnly swore to keep inviolate
the rights of charity and brotherhood, and their fraternal pacts were
ratified as such by the assemblies of the notables. From the royal
alliances. thus inspired by the teaching of the Gospel, the peace of
Christ would descend to nobles and people alike. The City of God on
earth seemed a long step nearer to realisation. St. Augustine, the new
age's greatest prophet, had come into his own.
The idea, and these practical policies that enshrined it, provoked a
new interest in the morality of politics, and produced a whole new
literature -- the De Institutione Regia of Jonas of Orleans, the Via
Regia of Smaragdus, the De Rectoribus Christianis of Sedulius Scottus
and, above all, the De Regis Persona of Hincmar, Ebbo's successor at
Rheims after 845. Not since the days of St. Ambrose had the claim for
the Church's moral supremacy in life been so insistently set forth, and
never, even then, had the practical conclusions of the doctrine been
proclaimed more bluntly. Political duties are moral duties; kings are
as much bound to keep the moral law in their public life as ordinary
men in their private lives; the Church is the divinely appointed
guardian of morality, and thereby the chief power in the State.
"Bishops, " said Hincmar, "are the equals of kings. More, they are
superior to the king since it is they who consecrate him. As it is
their privilege to anoint him, so it is their right to depose him. " So
far had theory travelled since the introduction into Gaul, a hundred
and twenty years earlier, of the practice of consecrating the ruler. In
the Christendom of Charlemagne's successor, where Church and State
continued to be one, the roles were now apparently to be reversed. The
king might name the bishops, but they were to be the judges of his
activities. The same ideas, but expressed with far greater force and
related to the most powerful tradition in Christendom, are to be seen
at work in the activities of the greatest of the contemporary popes,
St. Nicholas I (858-867).
With the papacy of Nicholas I there reappears the explicit assertion of
the Roman See's primitive claim to a universal primacy of jurisdiction
over the Church as the consequence of Our Lord's promise to St. Peter.
Thence derives Rome's unique power of summoning synods and of giving
life and real value to their acts. The pope is the supreme judge of all
ecclesiastical suits and the only judge in such greater causes as those
to which a temporal sovereign is a party or those that concern the
deposition of a bishop. In this last matter Nicholas I develops the
earlier practice, according to which the popes, while reserving to
themselves decisions that touched patriarchs, primates and
metropolitans, left the deposition of bishops to their immediate
superiors. A bishop may still be deposed by the provincial council, but
the pope is insistent that the council’s decision, to be effective,
must have his confirmation. Not on appeal alone, does the pope show
himself the immediate superior of the local episcopate.
This restorer of the idea of the papal monarchy within the Church faced
110 less boldly the great contemporary difficulty of the relations of
the Church with its defender: the consecrated, Church-created empire.
In the fifty years that followed Charlemagne's death the Church slowly
but steadily reacted against his implied relegation of the bishops --
and the pope -- to the sanctuary. The conception that the cleric s sole
clerical duty was prayer and study, while the emperor would take on
himself the actual management and direction of Church affairs, was
increasingly challenged. In this reaction the local episcopate led the
way. It was not until Nicholas I that the papacy began to dominate the
reaction. Church and State for this pope are definitely not one thing,
and he urges this insistently, against the ideas implicit in the
actions of Carolingians in the west and of the Byzantine emperor in the
east. In its own domain each of these powers is sovereign. The State,
therefore, must not interfere in Church matters. It is, however, the
State's duty to assist the Church -- a principle which in a few
centuries will be developed as far as the theory that the State is an
instrument in the Church's hands for the realisation of the Christian
ideal. Nicholas I, however, does not go so far. Nevertheless, quoting
frequently the forty-fourth psalm, "Thou hast set them princes over all
the earth, " he is conscious of the pope's duty to correct even kings
should they break God's law. They, too, are subject to the penalty that
shuts them out of the divine society. But while excommunication remains
for princes, too, a possible ultimate sanction, it is not an
excommunication to which any temporal consequences are attached; there
is no hint that the pope may, or must, depose the excommunicated
prince; and, of course, none at all of the later idea of a holy war to
drive him forth.
The question has been raised as to the sources of Nicholas I's doctrine
and as to his own share in its formulation. The main ideas are, of
course, not his own at all. They are the traditional policy of the
Roman See and he could find the classic texts that express it in the
collection of canons of Denis the Short, [ ] the decretals, that is to
say, of the popes of the fourth and fifth centuries and the canons of
the earlier councils. He had, too, in the well-stocked armoury of the
archives of his see the letters of later popes, among which the
decisions of Pelagius I (556-561) and St. Gregory the Great had a
special importance. Was the contemporary collection which we call the
False Decretals, among the sources Nicholas I employed? The question
has, apparently, never been settled absolutely. M. Fournier speaks of
"un certain parfum isidorien" as discernible in his writings after 865.
At the most these fabrications did no more than give new support to
ideas already traditional and formed from other sources. No one,
certainly, will ever again accuse the great pope of being, through his
possible use of them, " a conscious liar. " The material was not, then,
of the pope's own creation. But he so used it to meet the particular
problem of the day, and he restated it in forms so precise and so
useable that, through his letters, something of his personality passed
into all the collections and thereby did much to form the mind of all
the later Middle Ages.
There is a further aspect of the Carolingian attempt to restore the
institutions of civilised government which must be noticed, namely the
desire of the scholars who were the agents of Charlemagne and his son
to relate their work to something more enduring than expediency, than
the necessity of the moment or the convenience of the prince. The
ultimate object of all their endeavours was the restoration of the rule
of Law, and their first task, here, was to rediscover the Law. This was
especially true of the movement to reform the Church, its clerics and
laity alike. In the enthusiasm of these eighth- and ninth-century
reformers, and in their desire to strengthen their case by the adducing
of the best authority, are to be found the beginnings of the new
science of ecclesiastical jurisprudence. These clerics are the
ancestors of the systematised Canon Law of the later Middle Ages.
By the time of Charlemagne's accession (768) the confusion in the minds
of ecclesiastics as to the detailed rights deriving from, what all
accepted, the Church's universal commission to save men's souls, was
complete and entire. Three hundred and fifty years of continuous war
and civil disturbance -- of a general breakdown of civilisation in fact
-- had done their work. To the question what powers did the Church
claim to possess according to the canons, or what powers had the Church
exercised in the past, no one, anywhere, could give a satisfactory
reply.
Nearly three hundred years earlier, by the end of the fifth century,
that is to say, in the time of Pope Gelasius I (492-496), there had
been formed a carefully noted collection of all the canons of the
councils so far, and of the decrees of the different popes deciding
cases and enunciating thereby the principles by which future cases
would be decided. Then came the complete break up of the old political
unity. For the next two hundred and fifty years, Spain and Gaul went
their own way. In Gaul this patrimony of the law was scattered, and in
great part lost to sight. In Spain, on the other hand, where alone in
these outlying lands the centralisation of the hierarchy round a single
primatial see -- Toledo-survived, the collection continued to grow
through the seventh century. But by 720 Spain, as an effective
influence in Christendom, was dead, thanks to the Mohammedans; and
Africa, the first real home of the collection of the canons, had, from
the same cause, ceased to matter. The Church in Gaul was entering upon
the most chaotic period of its history, and to the confusion from
internal causes there was now added -- in this matter of the difficulty
of knowing what was the Church's authentic tradition of law -- a new
confusion from outside. This was the introduction into Gaul, through
the monk-missionaries from Ireland and England, of the innumerable
Penitentials -- privately compiled lists of offences and sins with
arbitrarily decreed penances assigned to each.
Again, from the time of St. Boniface the movement had never flagged
that aimed at a complete renovation of the discipline of Christian
life, in both clergy and laity, a renovation based on a reorganisation
of the hierarchy; from 742 councils began to be held once more, and
frequently: whence innumerable new canons of discipline and, thanks to
the caesaro-papism of the Frankish kings, innumerable royal
capitularies to supplement them.
The confusion of laws was thus, ultimately, greater than ever. The idea
still, however, persisted that the new laws were but attempts to
restore the ancient discipline -- as the one means to restore the
ancient world-unity -- and, in the minds of those who made these new
laws, more important by far was the old law which lay preserved in some
of the ancient collections. In these it was realised, lay salvation
from the chaos. The practical problem was to decide which of the
several collections of the old law was to be taken as official.
It was under these circumstances that Charlemagne asked for, and
received from, Pope Adrian I (772-795) the official collection used by
the Roman Church itself. The book sent to Charlemagne -- which we call
the Hadriana -- was made up of an early Roman collection, as arranged
by Denis the Short for Pope Hormisdas (514-523), and the texts of the
later African collection. It now spread rapidly through the empire, its
prestige easily outdistancing that which any other collection could
claim. The reformers had in it a code and precedents that put all
lesser codes out of court. The Penitentials, for example, began to be
condemned in one council after another. As the ninth century went by,
the influence of the Hadriana, in conjunction and combination with the
Spanish collection (the Hispana), grew steadily. But although much of
the old confusion was thereby lessened, this ancient law was not
sufficient to serve as a basis for the correction of later-day wrongs,
nor to defend the Church against the new kinds of abuses which. in
ninth-century Gaul, threatened its very nature. Particularly was the
old law deficient in means to stem the development by which the
Church's property was gradually passing into lay hands. Charles Martel,
in the eighth century, had looted the Church to finance the State; his
grandson, Charlemagne, in the ninth, had turned the abuse into a
legalised form of government. Deriving from the scandals was a
wholesale anarchy in nomination to abbeys and sees that was still more
shocking. The most pressing problem, for the reformers of the time of
Charlemagne's own grandchildren (for example Charles the Bald,
840-877), was how to defend the Church from the new danger of legalised
secularisation.
In the first place the bishops protested, and as their motives were
open to the imputation that they sought their own aggrandisement, they
turned for support to the impersonal argument of Sacred Scripture. To
the new growing law of the State the Church must, ultimately, oppose
its own older law -- the law that must exist, since the Church's claim
was just and, in this matter, the State a usurper. The law must be
fully stated; it must not be mere generality but deal with particular
cases; most important of all it must possess a prestige greater than
anything that the Carolingian State and the Church in Gaul could
create; to serve its purpose it must be Roman, decrees of the ancient
popes dealing with these very abuses in times gone by and expressing in
legal form the Church's rights and claims.
Here we approach a most extraordinary happening -- extraordinary to us,
but hardly so, to such a degree, in a time which had other literary
habits. The collection desiderated by the Carolingian reformers did not
exist. Whereupon some of them deliberately created it; they composed,
that is to say, of set purpose -- probably in the diocese of Le Mans,
about the year 850, and for the defence of the rights of that see -- a
whole body of law, assigning each decree to a particular council or
pope, going as far back as the second century in their desire to
heighten the prestige of what they produced. These are the famous False
Decretals, once -- when all that was known about them was that they
were forgeries -- a powerful weapon in the quiver of the anti-Roman
controversialist.
They served their purpose sufficiently for knowledge of them to spread.
In an age that was enthusiastic for whatever bore the mark of the
ancient Roman unity -- an age that knew not the science of criticism --
they were accepted for what they professed to be. Gradually they came
into use at Rome too, and by the middle of the eleventh century were
accepted there in their entirety.
The real importance of the False Decretals is the new detail they bring
in support of the already existing acceptance of the Roman Primacy.
They were devised to help Le Mans, and the best way in which Le Mans
could be helped was by the invocation of Rome -- magni nominis umbra.
The invention, of its own nature, turned ultimately to help Rome. It
showed the Roman primacy in function in numerous detailed ways and it
expressed the rights of the primacy so functioning in apt legal
formulae; it undoubtedly assisted the development of systematic routine
appeals to Rome in cases that involved the bishops; it developed a new
system in which the importance of the metropolitan declined; it
assisted the extension of the Church's privilege to try delinquent
clerics in her own courts; and it did very much indeed to secure
recognition of the sacred character of ecclesiastical property.
On the other hand, the general effect of the acceptance of the False
Decretals, the effect of them as an agent to resolve the existing
confusion of the law, was slight. The differences continued:
differences between the cited authorities, differences between the
books which inspired the reformers in different parts of the empire. As
the ninth century drew to its close the Carolingian empire disappeared,
and in the dreadful anarchy that ensued, the chances of the effective
functioning of a central authority in the Church seemed as hopeless as
the chances of the imperial authority itself. With the eleventh century
the work of restoration had to begin yet once again.
But this work of preserving the existing knowledge, the careful
encyclopaedic surveys of Rabanus Maurus, the bold revival of St.
Ambrose in Hincmar and St. Nicholas I, by no means exhaust the
intellectual life of this renaissance doomed to disappear so soon. In
the second half of the century, the years that saw the Northmen
established on every frontier of the empire, and even in his own native
country, there appeared in Gaul an Irishman of genius, the greatest
speculative mind since Boethius three hundred years before. This was
John Scotus Erigena.
Erigena's learning was in its origin not Carolingian but Irish. [ ] Of
his early life we know nothing. He makes his first appearance at the
court of Charles the Bald in 847, and for thirty years he is the chief
figure of this last generation of Carolingian culture. Then, after 877,
history loses all trace of him. He had the advantage over all his
contemporaries of a superior understanding of Greek, and he was the
Catholic West's one really constructive mind between Boethius and St.
Anselm. His influence on the first development of medieval philosophy
was very great indeed.
It is not hard to trace the intellectual pedigree of this Irish
thinker: the two most philosophical of all the fathers, St. Augustine
and St. Gregory of Nyssa -- Neoplatonists both -- St. Maximus the
Confessor and, above all, the anonymous writer for so long called --
and thought to be -- Denis the Areopagite.
This writer, who now for the first time begins to be a power in Western
thought, had long been known in the East. [ ] The literary device
behind which he hid caused him to be identified with that Athenian
whose conversion was almost the sole recorded fruit of St. Paul’s
famous visit. [ ] This identification -- whose truth the Middle Ages
took for granted -- gave an immense prestige to the doctrines his works
contained. Here was a contemporary of the apostles, no less, using the
philosophy of Plato to expound his new faith. It had almost the effect
of an apostle himself philosophising. The reality was very different.
The author of these various books -- pseudo-Denis so to call him -- was
no Athenian but a Syrian, not a contemporary of the apostles but a monk
of the late fifth century. Nor was he a Catholic, though a convert from
Paganism, but a Monophysite. He was a contemporary of Proclus (411-485)
and of the furious controversies that were the aftermath of the Council
of Chalcedon. [ ]
The first reference to his works that has come down is, in fact, from
the arch-heretic Severus in his controversial writings against the
Church in the early sixth century. Later the Catholic theologian
Leontius of Byzantium also cites him and in the next century, thanks to
the prestige resulting from his glorious pseudonym, he has passed into
the corpus of Catholic writers, and is used extensively as a witness
against heresy. He is known and used by St. Gregory the Great, St.
Sophronius of Jerusalem and St. Maximus the Confessor. It was probably
the last named saint whose use of pseudo-Denis gave to these writings
the last needed touch of orthodox warrant. For the pope St. Martin I at
the Lateran Synod of 649 he is " Denis of blessed memory. " Pope Agatho
cites him, too, in his letter to the General Council of
680; and the next General Council (Nicea II in 787) quotes Denis
against the Iconoclasts. It was through the Greek monks in Rome that a
knowledge of these books first began to spread in the West. Pope Paul I
(757-767) sent a copy of them to Pepin; and Hilduin, abbot of St. Denis
and arch-chaplain to Louis the Pious, translated them into Latin. But
it was the translation, annotated, of John Scotus Erigena that was the
real beginning of their striking effect on medieval thought. [ ]
To translate Denis into Latin was one of the greatest things Erigena
ever did. His other great achievement was to provide the first
generation of medieval thinkers with a completed system which explained
Catholicism as a philosophical whole. The inspiration of all this work
was Neoplatonic, and, except for his use of Aristotle's dialectic,
Erigena was himself nothing if not a Neoplatonist. Medieval philosophy
had made its great start, and had made it with the initial confusion
that it was not to work out of its system for centuries. The weakness
and the strength were apparent in Erigena's own contribution to that
philosophy, the De Divisione Naturae which appeared after his
translation of Denis, somewhere about 867. In this book we are
presented with the most ambitious effort of the Catholic mind since St.
Augustine himself, a philosophical discussion of the whole vast subject
of God and His universe. [ ] This elaborate attempt to explain the
Catholic view of the universe through Neoplatonism was a rock of
offence to Erigena's contemporaries, and to the orthodox of later
generations. Its author's confidence in the power of reasoning to
explain the date of Revelation is boundless. His own use of logic is as
strong as it is subtle. But, too often, he is ruined by a love of
paradox, by an artist's delight in phrase-making, and by an exuberance
of language that, at times, does grave injustice to his thought. It is
not difficult to understand how, for all his good intentions, he was
criticised and condemned as a Pantheist. The universe, as Erigena
conceives its origin, is not too easily distinguishable from its
Creator. The well-worked-out scheme of the flux and reflux of creation
from the Creator leaves no place for the fact of evil and its eternal
consequences. His theory of human knowledge breaks under the criticism
of facts, and his claim for reason as the all-availing expounder of
mystery can again only lead to disaster. It is not to be wondered that
Erigena was repeatedly condemned, at Valence and at Langres in his own
lifetime and later, in 1050, with Berengarius whom to some extent he
inspired.
Erigena, nevertheless, had not lived in vain. He had stated the
problems that were to occupy all the thinkers of the next four hundred
years, the relations of faith and reason, the rational exposition of
the data of faith, of the universe and its relation to God. He had
produced, in his unsuccessful attempt to solve the problem, the first
ordered systematic work of this kind that Latin Catholicism had so far
seen. [ ]
The intellectual revival had, in the main, been a work of restoration.
Alcuin and the lesser men had been chiefly concerned first to amass
themselves, and then to transmit to their pupils, whatever could be
found of the erudition of the ages before the barbarian invasions.
Grammar, rhetoric, the rules of reasoning, arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, music, medicine, the meaning of the Scriptures, the
theological work of the fathers, particularly of St. Augustine and St.
Gregory -- of all that these had to offer they made themselves living
encyclopaedias. They were essentially schoolmasters; facts rather than
ideas were their chief interest, and their writings inevitably tended
to be compilations and manuals for the instruction of those less
learned than themselves. The revival, in its first generation, could
hardly do more. And before, in the next generation, scholars could,
from this erudition, develop an interest in ideas, in intellectual
speculation and the beginnings of a philosophical revival, the new
invasions and the collapse of Charlemagne's political system had
brought the whole movement to an end.
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