The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

Western monasticism had been greatly extended and organised by Benedict of Nursia and his rule--comprised in silence, humility, and obedience. Monasticism became possessed of the papal chair in the person of Gregory the Great. Of noble descent and of great wealth, which he devoted to religious uses as soon as he became master of it, he had also the characteristics which were held to denote the highest holiness. In austerity, devotion, and imaginative superstition, he, whose known virtue and capacity caused him to be forced into the papal chair, remained a monk to the end of his days.

But he became at once an exceedingly vigorous man of affairs. He reorganised the Roman liturgy; he converted the Lombards and Saxons. And he proved himself virtual sovereign of Rome. His administration was admirable. He exercised his disciplinary authority without fear or favour. And his rule marks the epoch at which all that we regard as specially characteristic of mediæval Christianity--its ethics, its asceticism, its sacerdotalism, and its superstitions--had reached its lasting shape.

Gregory the Great had not long passed away when there arose in the East that new religion which was to shake the world, and to bring East and West once more into a prolonged conflict. Mohammedanism, born in Arabia, hurled itself first against Asia, then swept North Africa. By the end of the seventh century it was threatening the Byzantine Empire on one side of Europe, and the Gothic dominion in Spain on the other. On the other hand, in the same period, Latin Christianity had decisively taken possession of England, driving back that Celtic or Irish Christianity which had been beforehand with it in making entry to the North. Similarly, it was the Irish missionaries who began the conversion of the outer Teutonic barbarians; but the work was carried out by the Saxon Winfrid (Boniface) of the Latin Church.

The popes, however, during this century between Gregory I. and Gregory II. again sank into a position of subordination to the imperial power. Under the second Gregory, the papacy reasserted itself in resistance to the Emperor Leo the Isaurian, the "Iconoclast," the "Image-breaker," who strove to impose on Christendom his own zeal against images. To Leo, images meant image-worship. To his opponents, images were useful symbols. Rome defied the emperor's attempt to claim spiritual dictatorship. East and West were rent in twain at the moment when Islam was assaulting both West and East. Leo rolled back the advancing torrent before Constantinople, as Charles Martel rolled it back almost simultaneously in the great battle of Tours; but the Empire and the West, Byzantium and Rome, never presented a united front to the Moslem.

The Iconoclastic controversy threw Italy against its will into the hands of the image-worshipping Lombards; and hate of Lombard ascendancy turned the eyes of Gregory's successors to the Franks, to Charles Martel; to Pepin, who obtained from Pope Stephen sanction for his seizure of the Frankish crown, and in return repressed the Lombards; and finally to Charles the Great, otherwise Charlemagne, who on the last Christmas Day of the eighth century was crowned (Western) emperor and successor of the Caesars.

II.--The Western Empire and Theocracy

Charlemagne, the first emperor of the restored or Holy Roman Empire, by his conquests brought into a single dominion practically all Western Europe from the Elbe and the Danube to the Ebro. He stood the champion and the head of Western Christendom, palpably the master, and not even in theory the subordinate, of the Pontiff from whom he received the imperial crown. But he established ecclesiastics as a territorial nobility, counteracting the feudal nobility; and when the mighty emperor was gone, and the unity of what was nominally one empire passed away, this ecclesiastical nobility became an instrument for the elevation of the spiritual above the temporal head of Christendom. The change was already taking place under his son Louis the Pious, whose character facilitated it.

The disintegration of the empire was followed by a hideous degradation of the papacy. But the Saxon line of emperors, the Ottos, sprung from Henry the Fowler, once more revived the empire; the third of them established a worthy pope in Silvester II. But both emperor and pope died just after the eleventh century opened. Elections of popes and anti-popes continued to be accompanied by the gravest scandals, until the Emperor Henry III. (Franconian dynasty) set a succession of Germans on the papal throne.

The high character of the pontificate was revived in the persons of Leo IX. and Victor II. (Gebhard of Eichstadt); many abuses were put down or at least checked with a firm hand. But Henry's death weakened the empire, and Stephen IX. added to the rigid enforcement of orthodoxy more peremptory claims for the supremacy of the Holy See. His successor, Nicholas II., strengthened the position as against the empire by securing the support of the fleshly arm--the Normans. His election was an assertion of the right of the cardinals to make their own choice. Alexander II. was chosen in disregard of the Germans and the empire, and the Germans chose an anti-pope. At the back of the Italian papal party was the great Hildebrand. In 1073 Hildebrand himself ascended the papal throne as Gregory VII. With Hildebrand, the great struggle for supremacy between the empire and the papacy was decisively opened.