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That preaching ceased, that the sacraments were neglected, that
superstition only too often did duty for faith, that the traditional
Catholic piety suffered indescribably needs but to be stated. And the
old poison of Manichee doctrine began to run again, a thin stream
indeed but virulent, through the arteries of Christendom. A few more
years and what trace would there anywhere be left in the lives of
Catholics of the life and teaching of Christ?
Catholicism was, nevertheless, on the eve of a restoration so speedy in
its realisation and so magnificent in its scale that, even yet, no one
has adequately described it as a whole. The chief figure in that
restoration was the monk Hildebrand whom Gregory VI, in 1045, took from
his monastery to be his secretary. But the foundations on which
Hildebrand built, the materials with which he worked, were not of his
creation. Like himself they were part of the tradition of Catholic
thought and practice which not all the devastation of two centuries of
dissolution and barbarism had destroyed. The fact of that destruction
and some of its worst effects have been noted. Something must be said
of what escaped. Even in this darkest age there was light. The
universal "dark ages" never existed, unless in the minds of those who
had no means of reading their history.
To begin with, in no country at any time during these years of
desolation were there lacking saints, men in whose lives the gospel
ideals were realised through the practice of virtue that was no less
than heroic. In Italy there were priests such as Bernard of Menthon
whose pastoral zeal made him the apostle of the Alps, monks like St.
John of Parma, St. Nil and the two founders of new orders, St. Romuald
and St. John Gualbert. In every part of France, too, saints are to be
met, Gerard of Aurillac, Thibaut of Champagne, Fulbert of Chartres,
Abbo of Fleury and Gerard of Broigne who led a great revival of the
ideals of St. Benedict's rule. Throughout Flanders, and in the lands
between the Meuse and the Moselle, new foundations sprang up. Bishops
like St. Gerard of Toul assisted the revival. The spirit was already
active -- and nowhere so evident as at Cluny -- which will produce
Carthusians, Cistercians, and the great order of Premontre.
In Germany, where, despite a more barbarous way of life, the Church had
less to suffer in essentials than in Italy and Gaul, the missionary
labours inaugurated by St. Ansgar, and so long interrupted, were now
resumed. New sees were created in the Danish peninsula (948), the king
was baptised (965) and, after a brief anti-Catholic reaction Sweyn,
too, his successor. Sweyn's son Canute, King of England as well as of
Denmark, was a most pious prince, multiplying monasteries and, in his
devotion, even reviving the old English tradition of the royal
pilgrimage to Rome. In Norway the mission prospered as in Denmark. By
the time of St. Olaf (king 1014-1030) the new faith was everywhere
victorious. As in Denmark, it was the kings who had been the most
powerful and earnest of propagandists. Iceland and Greenland had been
won over at the turn of the century (c. 1000) and in 1050 the episcopal
see of Gardar in Greenland was founded. Sweden was more obstinately
pagan. King Olaf was indeed baptised in 1002, but a pagan reaction
drove out his Catholic successors. Sweden remained a stronghold of
paganism until well into the twelfth century. One centre of this
mission to Scandinavia was Hamburg but Englishmen, too, had a very
large share in it.
Other missionaries, from central Germany, were engaged, in the last
half of the tenth century, in a work equally arduous -- the conversion
of the Slavs. Here again it was in part a work of restoration. In
Scandinavia the hardy zeal of these monastic apostles endeavoured to
convert peoples never as yet in relation with the empire: in eastern
Germany, however, the mission had accompanied the victories of the
German kings. Otto I's conquest of the Wends and Adobrites had been
followed (946- 949) by the foundation of sees at Havelburg, Brandenburg
and Stargard. Twenty years later Merseburg, Meissen and Zeitz were
founded, dependent on the new metropolitan see of Magdeburg which, in
the emperor's plan, was to be the centre of all this missionary
activity. As everywhere else, the speedy conquest was followed by a
pagan reaction. As late as the year of the Norman Conquest, the pagans
inflicted a bloody defeat on this attempt to form a Catholic kingdom of
the Wends (Battle of Lenzen 1066); Mecklenburg was ravaged, Hamburg
once again destroyed, and in thanksgiving to the gods priests were
burnt alive in solemn sacrifice.
The movement to convert the Slavs -- not unwilling to listen to the
teaching of Christ -- was also complicated by national hatreds. They
suspected the German missionaries, allies doubtless of the German
bishops who fought in the armies of the German king, much as the pagan
ancestors of these same Germans had, in the days of St. Boniface,
suspected the missionaries who were Franks. The appearance of the
English monks had delivered the Faith from this impasse in the eighth
century. In the ninth it was from the east that deliverance came to the
Slavs of Moravia, when the Emperor Michael III sent to them two priests
from Salonika, the brothers Cyril and Methodius (863). They were men of
culture and wealth, sprung from distinguished families and had, both of
them, abandoned brilliant careers in the service of the State to follow
the monastic life. At the moment when the emperor's summons came to
them their energies were employed in a mission to convert the Khazars.
The success of their new mission to the Slavs naturally did not please
the German bishops. They were denounced to Rome for such novelties as
the use of the Slavonic tongue in the liturgy, and, Constantinople at
the moment being in schism and the centre of a violent and instructed
anti-Roman propaganda, the pope, St. Nicholas I was alarmed and
summoned the brothers to Rome to explain themselves (867). By the time
they arrived Nicholas I was dead. It was Adrian II who heard their
case. Far from condemning their activities, he raised them both to the
episcopate and sanctioned their liturgical innovation. Henceforth the
pope was to be to them what his eighth-century predecessors had been to
St. Boniface. Cyril died in Rome (869) but his brother returned to the
difficult mission, to meet again the hostility of the German king and
his bishops, to be imprisoned and repeatedly denounced to Rome.
Adrian's successor, John VIII, as repeatedly protected him, but
Methodius died (885) with his work not yet completed. Then came the
Hungarian invasion, from which Moravia suffered more than most places,
and the hope of a Slav Catholicism evangelised in direct dependence on
Rome was destroyed for ever.
Not Moravia but Bohemia, where SS. Cyril and Methodius had never been
able to penetrate, was to be the centre whence would come the
conversion of the Slavs of the north. Of the first apostles of the
Czechs little enough is known. As early as 845 fifteen of their chiefs
received baptism at Ratisbon, and from 894 all their dukes were
Catholic, the most famous of them the martyr St. Wenceslaus I
(925-935). These were, all of them, supporters of the mission, and the
see of Prague was founded in 973. Nevertheless the work was so slow,
the relapses so frequent, that the greatest of the early bishops, St.
Adalbert, lost heart and left Bohemia to preach to the still more
barbarian Prussians. There in 997 he met a martyr's death. It was
another fifty years before the Czechs were really converted.
Nevertheless, long before that time, there were Czechs who were
missionaries, and these were already busy beyond the frontiers of
Bohemia with the conversion of the Poles. A grand-daughter of St.
Wenceslaus had married the Duke Miecislas and in 966 he was baptised.
Two years later the see of Poznan was founded, dependent at first on
Magdeburg, and in the year 1000 the second see of Gniezno, in the place
where St. Adalbert had met his death. New sees at Cracow, Kolberg and
Breslau were made subject to it. The first of these Catholic dukes had
recommended his realm to St. Peter, receiving it back as St. Peter's
vassal and thus inaugurating that close attachment to Rome which has
ever since been so characteristic of Polish Catholicism. In Poland,
too, there was, however, to be a pagan reaction, and it was not until
the time of St. Casimir, king from 1041-1051, that paganism was finally
destroyed.
One of the chief hindrances to the conversion of the Slavs had been the
Hungarian invasions that filled the first fifty years of the tenth
century. They thrust like a wedge between the northern and southern
Slavs, and they destroyed utterly the nascent Catholicism of the
Moravians. Here, too, the reign of Otto I marks a turning point. At a
great battle on the Lech (955) he destroyed the military power of the
Magyars for ever. They ceased to be a race of wandering plunderers,
and, settling down as tillers of the soil, they willingly received the
missionaries who now began to pour in. The first to organise this new
activity was Frederic Archbishop of Salzburg, appointed papal legate
for the purpose by Benedict VI. From Ratisbon and Freising, too, came
assistance, but the great hero of the work was Piligrim, appointed
Bishop of Passau by Frederic of Salzburg. The mission was his personal
occupation, and one fruit of his zeal was that the next king of this
newly converted people was not merely Catholic but a saint. This was
St. Stephen, crowned by the pope in the year 1000, king from 997-1038?
whose long reign saw new sees established, monasteries built, and a
Church organised independent of the Church in Germany, under the
Archbishop of Gran, his capital city.
Further still to the east, beyond the Hungarians and Poles, lay Russia,
and the tenth century saw the beginnings of Russian Catholicism too,
evangelised, however, directly from Constantinople, Byzantine from its
very beginnings. Byzantine also was to be the Catholicism of the
Bulgarians, for all that their first teachers had been Latins. The
greatest of these was the austere Formosus, and when Adrian II (870)
refused to give him to them as their bishop -- since he was already
Bishop of Porto, and the Latin tradition frowned on episcopal
translations -- the Bulgarians turned to Constantinople. John VIII made
more than one attempt to regain the immediate Roman hold on this
distant nation, but in vain. The more loosely organised Catholicism of
their powerful neighbour the Byzantine emperor, and possibly its
greater political pliancy, made a stronger appeal. Bulgaria henceforth,
like Russia, would follow Constantinople
While then, in the tenth century, the Church in its older provinces
suffered, almost to death, from the general chaos of civilisation, it
produced for its new conquests a host of obscure heroic souls who very
slowly, but continuously, with immense toil, laboured to carry the good
news that the kingdom of God is at hand to thousands of souls as
obscure as themselves, in lands until now veiled from the knowledge of
civilisation. The eternal, divine love of God for man had by no means
failed to find a faithful reflection in the Church of Christ.
Nor was it entirely dead in the older provinces of the West. In more
than one place, as the invasions ceased, as the invaders were beaten
back, or converted, new signs of life were evident. In England the
reigns of the first conqueror of the Danes, Alfred the Great (871-901),
of his son, Edward the Elder (901-924), and his grandson, Athelstan
(924-940), were a time of vigorous restoration, economic, intellectual
and spiritual, the very centre of which was the restoration of
religious life. It was now that St. Dunstan was formed, to be another
St. Boniface for his native country, scholar, musician, monastic
reformer, reforming bishop, and as Archbishop of Canterbury the first
of the great ecclesiastical statesmen of the English Middle Ages. In
Gaul too -- which by the tenth century we may begin to speak of as
France -- the intellectual and religious renaissance went hand in hand,
at Rheims and Chartres, at Angers, Laon, Orleans and Paris where,
around he restored cathedrals, the episcopal schools began to be
founded whence were to come the scholastic philosophy and the first
universities.
Most striking sign of all, new orders of religious appear. The first,
and the most important, of these was the Benedictine renaissance whose
centre was the abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, founded in 910 by William
the Pious, Duke of Aquitaine. From its beginnings Cluny was freed from
the jurisdiction of the local bishop and directly subject to the Holy
See. It was Benedictine, but with a difference. Corporal austerities
were added to the rule, and it acquired a regimental rigour that
testified to a view of human goodwill less optimistic than that of St.
Benedict. The new venture was uniquely blessed in that, for a hundred
years and more, it was directed by an unbroken succession of great
saints -- Berno (910-927), Odo (927- 942), Maieul (942-994), Odilo
(994-1048) -- all of them personalities of the first order. The popes
-- the amazing popes of the tenth century -- encouraged them.
authorised them to reform the other monasteries, lavished privileges on
their work. It was, for example, John XI -- Marozia's son, John XII's
uncle -- who set St. Odo to his work of reform in Burgundy and central
France. The same saint restored Subiaco and Monte Cassino, and he
founded at Rome the monastery that was to form Hildebrand. Under St.
Odilo the movement spread to the tiny Catholic kingdoms of Spain. The
number of houses dependent on Cluny rose from 37 to 65, and there was
now established the practice which gave to the work of Cluny its
peculiar strength. The old Benedictine principle that each abbey was
completely autonomous was abandoned. the houses reformed by Cluny
formed a kind of religious order, whose members all owed obedience to
the Abbot of Cluny. The superiors of the dependent houses, the priors
-- for the Cluniacs know only one abbot, the Abbot of Cluny -- were not
elected by their monks but nominated from Cluny. The Abbot of Cluny was
no hermit. He had the duty of visiting the dependencies, and the charge
of maintaining good order throughout his immense family. Periodically
all the priors met at Cluny in a general chapter. In that age of
general dislocation, when unity of any kind seemed but an impossible
dream, and when alone the monasteries retained a semblance of
stability, the importance of the new departure that bound up in one
huge federation all these cells of new religious life, can hardly be
exaggerated. It was the most powerful arm for the restoration of good
living, and for the preservation of the ideals of a good life, yet
given to the Church. It was to the centuries which saw it rise what the
Capuchins and Jesuits were to be for the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
The first Abbots of Cluny were inevitably great travellers Spain,
France, Italy and Rome saw them continually. They advised the popes;
kings called them in to arbitrate. Such all abbot as St. Odo or St.
Odilo was perhaps the greatest figure in the Church in his time.
Assuredly faith and charity were far from extinct in the tenth century
despite the undoubted losses, the indescribable scandals.
Not that these were hidden, nor that men shrank from facing the problem
they presented to the loyalty of practising Catholics. At a council of
French bishops and notables in 991, [ ] for example it was proposed
that the Archbishop of Rheims, Arnoul, should be deposed. His guilt --
treason to the first of the Capetian kings-was admitted. But the pope
alone could depose a bishop, and though the king's advocates set out in
detail the atrocities of the contemporary pontifical life as an
argument to dispense with the pope's jurisdiction in the matter, and
though the bishops elected a new archbishop, the popes quashed the
judgement and in the end prevailed. the new archbishop -- Gerbert,
afterwards Pope Silvester II -- resigned and Arnoul was restored.
Throughout the councils of the time evidence is not lacking that
Catholics still held, in the words of the Abbot of Fleury at this very
council of 991, that "the Roman Church, like the key-bearer of the
heavenly kingdom who was the chief of the apostolic college, has the
privilege of giving life to all the churches, which dispersed
throughout the world, arc, as it were, its limbs. Whoever resists the
Roman Church separates himself from among its members and becomes a
member of the body of Christ's enemy. " The one source of metropolitan
jurisdiction is Rome, and its sign is the pallium of lamb's wool
blessed by the pope and conferred by him alone. As for the scandals,
they must be borne until the providence of God removes them. "Although
the yoke imposed by the Holy See can scarce be borne, " said a council
of the time, " nevertheless let us bear it and endure. " [ ] Not the
least sign that the divine life still continues in the Church is this
faith of its members in the divine institution of the primacy, despite
the degradation with which men have for centuries covered it. That
faith was soon to be rewarded, for it was from the papacy that there
was to come, what could not come otherwise, whether from individual
saints or from such a corporation of saints as Cluny aspired to be, a
general restoration of Catholic life and a new spiritual age.
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