Chapter 7: THE AGE OF ST. BERNARD, 1123-1181

ST. BERNARD

ABOVE the richly crowded pageant that filled the thirty years after the triumphant council of 1123, popes, emperors, crusaders, philosophers and theologians, one figure stands in solitary grandeur — St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux. Nothing of importance passed in those years without his active, and often decisive, intervention. For a lifetime he dominated the whole Christian scene, and after seven hundred and fifty years his influence is still active wherever Christian men, even outside the Catholic Church, use in their relations with God the phrases of loving informal devotion. The first foundation of the power he exercised over his own time was the completeness of his own surrender to God, made through the austere dedication of the new order of Citeaux. Sense he so disciplined, that it might no longer disturb his soul's converse with God, that for years he moved among men like a being from another world. He was known to all his contemporaries as the finest flower of a fine supernatural asceticism.

The material thus perfected by the supernatural was in itself singularly rich. The natural man had all the fiery ardour of the French nobles of the First Crusade, and it burnt a hundredfold more brightly in the setting of his religious humility. He had the passionate heart of the poet, and, in addition to the poet's gift, a natural eloquence which made of him such an orator as the Church had not known since St. Ambrose. The vast amount of his writing that has come down shows the astonishing variety of his appeal. There are ascetical treatises for his monks, admonitions to popes, hundreds of the most marvellously moving sermons, often as effective to-day as when he delivered them, polemical works in which his poetic genius forges a terrible invective against the apparent enemies of the faith, stern denunciations of clerical negligence and avarice that still burn white-hot, and a vast correspondence that shows him the willing servant and counsellor of clients in every rank of the life of his time.

He took the great congregation of Cluny to task for the degree in which, so it appeared to him, Cluny had developed away from St. Benedict's ideal. The disappearance of manual labour, the rich ceremonial, the studies, the dress, the food, all these are the subjects of a final devastating criticism. The papacy itself was not too high for his courage to admonish and warn it, particularly when that highest of dignities fell to one who, for a time, had been a monk of his own abbey of Clairvaux. It was then that he wrote, for the disciple's guidance in that high place where so easily a man might lose his soul, the De Consideratione ad Eugenium papam. It is a lengthy examination of conscience in which the pope is invited to consider how, almost necessarily, the new centralisation affords occasion for injustice and sin, with its legates, its reception of appeals, its exemptions. Eugene is to be pope, but never to cease to be, first, a father. One famous passage clamours for quotation, verbatim, for the light it throws, not only on St. Bernard's personal hardiness, but on the fierce directness that marks all the medieval saints when brought up against whatever may tarnish the beauty of God's Church.

"Scio ubi habitas; increduli et subversores sunt tecum. Lupi non oves sunt: talium tamen tu es pastor. Utilis consideratio, qua forte inveneris, quomodo, si fieri possit, convertas eos, ne ipsi subvertant te. . . . Hic, hic, non parco tibi, ut parcat Deus. Pastorem te populo huic certe aut nega aut exhibe. Non negabis: ne cuius sedem tenes, te neget haeredem. Petrus hic est, qui nescitur processisse aliquando vel gemmis ornatus, vel sericis; non tectus auro, non vectus equo albo, nec stipatus milite, nec circumstrepentibus septus ministris. Absque his tamen credidit satis posse implere salutare mandatum: Si amas me, pasce oves meas. In his successisti non Petro, sed Constantino."221

The sources of St. Bernard's prayer and theological exposition are not numerous. First of all there is the Bible, which indeed he must have known by heart, and especially — besides the Gospels — the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms. Of the earlier Catholic writers he uses very frequently St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, the latter very frequently indeed. Of the Greeks Origen only, and Origen simply for his exegesis.

As a theologian St. Bernard is content to state the doctrine in the terms in which he finds it, or rather — to express his mind here more adequately — he criticises unsparingly the attempts of private enterprise further to explore the meaning of the traditional faith. Thus, to try and explain how the teaching that in God there are three Persons is not contrary to reason is an impiety that courts disaster. It is enough to know, on the authority of the infallible Church, that it is so. For the rest, man spends his time more profitably in veneration before the mystery than in trying to analyse its meaning

But it is through the commentaries on Sacred Scripture and, above all, through the sermons that St. Bernard's originality, his undoubted genius, shows itself. In a new way that marks him as the founder of a new spirituality, he gives a place to the humanity of the human element in the mysteries of the life of Our Lord, of His mother and the saints. The considerations which are, if the word may be used, the commonplaces of the ordinary man's spirituality, and which have been so for centuries, the hardships of Mary and Joseph as, in the last hours before the Divine Child was born, they sought for a home, the mixed anguish and joy of the first Christmas, or the sorrows and agonies of the Passion, of Mary at the foot of the Cross and of Jesus looking down upon her suffering innocence — these and a thousand like moving considerations, which, moving the will through an overwhelming stirring of the emotions, must be permanently effective when they are the means by which a whole-hearted devotion conveys itself from the preacher — all this spirituality has in St. Bernard its first great founder. Inevitably he has been, above all others, the prayer writer of later generations, more quoted, ever since his time, than any other devotional writer, with the solitary exception of St. Augustine. He stands at the head of the particular tradition of sacred eloquence which, even to-day, is perhaps the most effective of all, and his apparently inexhaustible riches continue to be a source of spiritual life to millions.

THE PROGRESS OF CATHOLIC THOUGHT: ABELARD — GILBERT OF LA PORREE — HUGH OF ST. VICTOR — PETER LOMBARD — GRATIAN — ROLAND BANDINELLI

How, amid this general revival of Catholic spirituality, did the movement fare which strove to construct a reasoned exposition of Catholicism? At first, it seemed fated to decline. From the moment when this tendency to satisfy rationally the interest of the human intelligence in the truths revealed through the Church first began to show itself, it had met with opposition; and especially with opposition from ascetics. Studies of this kind were, they declared roundly, a menace to the faith of those who engaged in them. What the Church taught should suffice; and where this presented difficulties to human understanding, man should be content to bow his head and humbly accept the difficulties without seeking further to resolve them. Such had been the attitude of St. Peter Damian in the time of Lanfranc and Berengarius; such was now the attitude of St. Bernard. The eleventh century opponent of these studies had been largely influenced by the spectacle of the new difficulties into which the none too competent logicians had tumbled. The like catastrophes were not lacking in St. Bernard's time, also, to serve as a powerful argument against the new attempt to satisfy the never-old, innate desire to know.

With Abelard, for instance, the three Persons in God appeared simply as God's power, His wisdom and His love; Original Sin was an impossibility; the fall made no difference to man's ability to do good; Jesus Christ is united to God by a union that is no more than moral, and the supreme value of His life lies in its appeal to love and in its example. The tendencies of the masters at Chartres — still the chief centre of philosophical studies — were not more reassuring. Here Neoplatonism was influential, and the Neoplatonist inclination to Pantheism is evident in more than one of the works that issued from Chartres. God is the essential form of all things; His presence in created things is their whole being; apart from that they are nothing, cannot exist. Such was the teaching of Thierry, head of the school from 1141 to 1150.

His predecessor, Gilbert of la Porree, Bishop of Poitiers from 1142 to 1154,222 was Aristotelian rather, possibly because of his devotion to Boethius, who was indeed his favourite author and upon whose work he wrote more than one commentary. Gilbert adapted the theory of knowledge propounded by his master Bernard — Thierry's elder brother. There are three kinds of being God, matter and ideas. Ideas are the eternal types of all individual things. They exist eternally in the mind of God. From them come, in some way unknown, the copies which, being united to matter, give rise to individual things. It is in the identity of characteristics among the individuals of a class, and in their common resemblance to the ideas in the divine mind, that the fact of universality exists. So far Gilbert shows himself pupil of the Platonists. When he proceeds to relate this theory to the mode of human knowledge we recognise the commentator of Boethius and the author of one of the earliest Western works on Aristotle's Logic.223 We acquire our knowledge of the universal by abstracting, as we study the individual, this copy of the idea that exists in the divine mind, dissociating the form from the matter, comparing the dissociated forms and noting their resemblance. From the knowledge of the copy thus acquired, we proceed to the knowledge of the idea itself. Gilbert, apparently, used this theory of the dissociation of the universal from the individual, as a method of explaining the doctrine of the Trinity. He was accused of dissociating the divinity from the Persons, and of teaching that in God, too, in the divine nature as well as in each Person, there is matter and form. Gilbert more than once came into controversy with Abelard, but he was Abelard's ally in the general battle against the opponents of the application of dialectic to theology.224

St. Bernard, then, had ample material to hand to support his case against the new theologians; and to destroy their influence was, for a good ten years, one of the main concerns of his busy life. The battle opened with an assault on Abelard, provoked by that, alas, incurably bellicose person himself.

Abelard had resumed his lectures at Paris in 1136, and soon the old complaints, that had brought about his condemnation in 1121, began to be heard once more. A Cistercian abbot, William of St. Thierry, begged St. Bernard to intervene and the saint approached Abelard. The logician, apparently, was so far persuaded that he promised for the future to use more discretion in his theological expositions. But temperament was too much for him and, with a return of his old arrogance, he challenged St. Bernard to debate at the coming Council of Sens. Very reluctantly the Cistercian consented, but when the council met (1140) it resolved itself rather into a judicial examination of Abelard's orthodoxy than into the scholastic tournament he had planned. St. Bernard had prepared a list of extracts from Abelard's works in which all could read how far from the traditional faith his use of dialectic had taken him. These theses Abelard was now asked to deny or to abjure. He did neither but, appealing to Rome walked out of the assembly.

In his absence the council continued the discussion, and the theses extracted by St. Bernard were sent to the pope, to be condemned, resoundingly if somewhat vaguely, and to earn their author a sentence of perpetual imprisonment in a monastery.

The condemnation of the theses was inevitable. They destroyed the very foundations of historic Christianity. For all Abelard's good intentions, his immense influence was steadily undermining the Faith. Nevertheless, good his intentions certainly were. He was never in any sense a freethinker, and he now showed that it was not merely for the look of the thing that he had given authority, and the Church, a place in his system. Whereas the humiliation of Sens had momentarily brought out some of the worst in his character, the sympathy and kindness of the Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, worked a general reconciliation. Abelard made his submission, was reconciled to the pope and even to St. Bernard. For the short remainder of his life he lived under Peter's protection, and in one of the abbey properties he died (1142).

Four years after Abelard's death the battle was renewed and this time it was the work of Chartres, or rather of Chartres's greatest luminary, Gilbert of la Porree, that was in question.

Gilbert had been consecrated Bishop of Poitiers in the year Abelard died, and it was his exposition, as a bishop, of the theories he had been teaching for years that brought him up against St. Bernard. An address to his diocesan synod in 1146 provoked a strong protest from his archdeacons who, furthermore, denounced the bishop to Rome. The pope — Eugene III (1145-1153) — referred the matter for examination to a council which met at Paris the next year. But the prosecution, so to call it, mismanaged the case. They had no definite texts to allege against Gilbert, and in the debate Gilbert skilfully brought out their own mutual contradictions. The pope thereupon put off the examination. It came up a second time at a council in Rheims in 1148.

What accounts of this council survive differ in their details. It seems certain, however, that a party of the French bishops were strong enough to draw up a profession of faith and that some of the cardinals present prevented its acceptance, since they saw in the action a movement on the part of St. Bernard and the bishops to dictate to Rome. The profession was, however, published at Rheims after the council and, later, it was approved by Eugene III. It is certain, too, that Gilbert submitted. As the four propositions225 were read out in which his alleged errors were contained he declared to the pope, after each one of them, ' If you believe otherwise, I believe as you believe.,' Finally, it was forbidden to read or to make copies of Gilbert's commentary on Boethius until he had corrected it in accordance with his submission

Gilbert, to the end of his life, believed he had been misunderstood. He rewrote the prologue to his book and he changed the expressions which had caused the trouble. But he refused to discuss the matter with St. Bernard, inviting the saint, as a necessary preliminary, to take some lessons in the elements of logic. Six years after the council he died (September 4, 1154), still Bishop of Poitiers, undisturbed since the condemnation of Rheims, and for many years an object of great veneration.

Gilbert, not equal to Abelard in power of personality, was one of the first schoolmen to show a knowledge of Aristotle that goes beyond the logical treatises. So far Aristotle stood for logic and for little more. With Gilbert — who evidently knew the fourth book of the Physics and the De Coelo et Mundo — the revolution to be consummated in St. Thomas makes an important advance. Of Gilbert's later influence it is not easy to say much. His Liber Sex Principiorum did indeed win him the rare distinction of being cited, with Aristotle, as an "authority" in the schools. It was one of the classical texts upon which all the thinkers of the next centuries commented. But, this apart, he had little influence, and as a theologian none except on the Calabrian Cistercian, Joachim of Flora, in whose mystico-prophetical writings Gilbert's exposition of the mystery of the Trinity becomes the basis of a real distinction between the roles of the Three Persons in the history of the world. But on the work of those who, in Gilbert's own time, laid the foundation upon which all subsequent theological study in the Church has been built, Gilbert's own theories had, seemingly, no effect at all.

Three of these contemporaries must be noticed. They are Hugh of St. Victor, the greatest theologian of the century; Peter Lombard, whose Book of Sentences226 (Liber Sententiarum) fixed for many centuries the mould in which the theological teaching of beginners was cast; and Roland Bandinelli, canonist as well as theologian, and later on, as Alexander III, the first of the great lawyer popes.

Although the chief centres of this intellectual revival lay in the north of France, the leaders were of very varied origin; Abelard, for example, was a Breton, Lanfranc and St. Anselm Italians. With Hugh of St. Victor it was the German mind that made it appearance in philosophy.227 He was perhaps twenty years of age when in 1116 he entered the abbey of St. Victor at Paris to become an Augustinian canon, just ten years after William of Champeaux — since then Bishop of Chalons — had founded its school of theology on his own retirement thither after his defeat by Abelard. Of that school Hugh was to be the most distinguished product. His most important work was done in a very short time, between his entry in 1116 and his election as prior in 1133. Eight years later and he was dead, cut off prematurely at forty-five.

Hugh wrote voluminously, commentaries on Sacred Scripture, treatises on mythology, on theology, ascetical guides, discussions of mysticism and its phenomena, works of pure literature, a history, some philosophy. His most important work is the De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei, a compendium of the whole of the Church's teaching. There exists, too, a still shorter compendium, the Summa Sententiarum, often attributed to Hugh, but about whose authorship authorities are by no means agreed. The Eruditio Didascalica deals with methods of study and the interrelation of the different sciences, while the De Institutione Novitiorum and the Expositio in regulam beati Augustini contain the essence of his teaching on mysticism.228

Hugh never confounds the natural processes of knowledge with the supernatural, and this careful distinction, consistently preserved through all his work, is one of the chief sources of its value. We can know God by reasoning, and we can know God by believing God's revelation of Himself. This revelation is, in turn, made known to us normally by external teaching presented to our minds, but, sometimes, by an internal illumination. Thus Hugh escapes entirely the cloudy legacy of the Neoplatonic doctrine of divine illumination as the source of natural knowledge which, coming into Catholic thought through St. Augustine and the self-styled Areopagite, had done so much to confuse its development. As a theologian he makes the consequent clear distinction between the knowledge of God we can have through reasoning about revealed truths — the proper office of Theology-and that which comes through processes above the natural, through contemplation (to use his own terminology). For all knowledge of truths which are supernatural, Faith is essential. Faith as an instrument of knowledge is superior to reason, since the object to which it can reach is superior. But reason can work on the truths obtained for it by Faith, examining their content and showing the reasonableness of belief.

Like his predecessors, Abelard and St. Anselm, Hugh made the mistake of over-estimating the extent of the field in which reason isolated from faith can work. The full understanding of the nature of the reasoning process, of the meaning of rational certitude and proof, escaped him. Like those predecessors, and like others after him, he set reason tasks for which, by its nature, it is not apt, as, for instance, when he set it to discover that in God there are three Persons.

As a writer on mysticism, to use in its technical sense that much abused word, he makes a careful analysis of those special divine interventions which, without initiative on the part of those whom they favour, raise such souls to a knowledge and love of God altogether beyond the normal. He describes this mystical ascent, m which man is made passive by the divine action, and attempts to analyse its nature. In his mystical theology he is not a Neoplatonist, for all his reading of the Neoplatonic authors.

Hugh of St. Victor is no mere compiler, but a highly original thinker, influenced, of course, by his sources, but influenced chiefly to think out the problems anew in their spirit. Aristotle he knew so far as Boethius could make him know; Plato and Plotinus through St. Augustine. Of all the Fathers it is St. Augustine, of course, who most affects him, although here too, like St. Anselm, Hugh is a new thinker after St. Augustine's pattern, rather than a restorer. Abelard, his somewhat older contemporary, influenced him immensely. From the Introductio ad Theologiam and the Sic et Non came the new severity of dialectic which characterises Hugh's work, and its fusion of patristic evidence with argument from reasoning. Thence also there came the idea of condensing into a single orderly synthesis the vast whole of Catholic teaching. Hugh, in his turn, repaid his magnificent creditor, for it was largely due to his use of Abelard that, after the master's condemnation, Abelard's valuable spirit and technique were preserved, to be safely used by the most orthodox.

Hugh of St. Victor died prematurely, and his name was soon to be overshadowed by that of Peter Lombard, for Peter Lombard wrote the first and the most celebrated of all theological textbooks. But through Peter Lombard it is Hugh of St. Victor who still, very often, is speaking. Peter's own manuscript has its margins filled with references to Hugh. Idea, expression, text, even whole pages from the De Sacramentis and the Summa, reappear in the Liber Sententiarum. Another pupil of Hugh was Peter of Poitiers, master of the canonist who became Pope Innocent III. A third pupil was Gandulph of Bologna, through whom Hugh's thought influenced all that great school, too. In the next great century Alexander of Hales, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas himself, were to speak of Hugh with singular veneration. The famous bull Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII, in defining the relations between the spiritual and the temporal power, made use of Hugh's very words; and another passage of his sacramental teaching passed through St. Thomas to find its final official sanction in the Catechism of the Council of Trent. Hugh of St. Victor stands out as the one really great theologian of his century, the first to effect a real reconciliation between the new scholastic method and orthodoxy.229

Hugh of St. Victor was a thinker, Peter Lombard a compiler only; but he was a compiler of genius, and his famous book brought it about that the right of the intelligence to use all possible means in its appreciation of revealed truth was, henceforward, accepted universally wherever theology was studied.

Of Peter Lombard's early life we know nothing, save that he came from Novara. The year 1139 found him studying at Paris, where St. Bernard was his first patron. In 1142 he wrote his commentaries on St. Paul, and six years later his reputation was already such that he took part in the Council of Rheims as an opponent of Gilbert of la Porree, and was one of those whom Eugene III consulted in that thorny business. He had completed his great work, The Sentences, by 1152 and, St. Bernard again intervening, the pope rewarded him with a canonry at Beauvais. In 1159 he was consecrated Bishop of Paris, and within a year he had died.

The Liber Sententiarum is a student's manual of theology. Its author does not attempt, like St. Anselm, to show, independently of Scripture and Tradition, the reasonableness of belief. The work lacks the originality of Hugh, as it lacks the subtlety of Abelard. Its philosophical data are scanty; hardly anywhere is there a trace of metaphysics. Peter hesitates often to declare himself, and at times the hesitation is willed. In all this the book marks a falling back from the achievement of contemporaries.

It had, however, two great merits. It was impersonal, concerned, that is to say, not to instruct the student as to Peter's theories, hut to set before him all available opinions. Next, it was rigorously orthodox in its spirit. It provided the student with a vast ordered collection of authorities, texts from Sacred Scripture and from the Fathers; it neglected none of the contemporary thinkers; it was clear, brief, not encumbered with digression; and while it made good use of the fashionable dialectic. it did so with extreme moderation, chiefly to harmonise conflicting authorities, to discuss contemporary opinion, and only rarely for personal speculation. peter had no sympathy for the victims of logical extravagance-garruli ratiocinatores, he styles them — and his studied moderation may be fairly attributed in part to his association with St. Bernard, and with the great abbot's campaign. It is another merit of his book that it is entirely free from the spirit of controversy, although not one of the conflicting opinions of the day fails to find a mention in it. But Peter's one aim is to expound the traditional doctrine, and the principal part of the book is not its dialectic — for all the immense importance. historically, of the appearance of systematic dialectic in the work — but in the multitude of its citations. So complete, indeed, is the Sentences in this respect that henceforward ii was a rare scholar indeed — St. Thomas Aquinas, for example — who did more than read his texts in Peter Lombard. "Egregius collector," as a none too friendly contemporary described him, Peter borrowed often, and as literally as he borrowed liberally. To his great contemporaries, Abelard. Gratian, Hugh of St. Victor and the author of the Summa Sententiarum, he is especially indebted, but to Abelard, whom he never names, most of all. It is Abelard's principles that guide his interpretation of conflicting texts, and Abelard's Sic et Non supplied him with most of his patristic erudition. What the extent of Peter Lombard's own reading was, it is hard to say. A good ninetenths of his texts are from St. Augustine, from whom there are a thousand citations, while from the next best used — St. Hilary he takes but eighty. Denis the Areopagite is only twice cited, and no one of the Greek Fathers more than once, except St. John Damascene, referred to thirty times.

Peter Lombard's success, for all the merits of his work, was hardly won. Opposition to the method of his book showed itself immediately, and opposition also to some of his teaching. The first weak point 011 which hostile critics seized was the defective theory, which he had inherited from Abelard, to explain how Jesus Christ Our Lord is both divine and human. This theory taught, in accordance with the tradition, that He is perfect man and truly God, but it failed to understand all that is meant by the truth that that union is hypostatic, that the Humanity with the Divinity is one person. Concerned to avoid the Nestorian error, that makes the humanity itself a person, the Abelardian theory denied that the humanity is a substantial reality. The Word s man is not, according to this theory, a new reality. It has merely received a new mode of being, the full and perfect humanity being the instrument of the full and perfect divinity.

The question, eagerly debated in the rising schools for thirty years, was raised at the Council of Tours in 1163. A hundred and twenty-seven bishops were present and the pope himself, Alexander III, presided, who, in his own works, written while a master in the schools, had shown himself also a defender of the new theory. It was in connection with this controversy that the first attempt was made to bring about the condemnation of the Liber Sententiarum. It failed, however, as did the related endeavour to secure a decision on the dogmatic question. At a second great council, held at Sens in the following year, the pope contented himself with a strong prohibition of idle and useless discussions. But six years later, owing perhaps to the writings of John of Cornwall, the pope reopened the matter. A letter of May 28, 1170, renewed a command, already given, to the Archbishop of Sens charging him to see that "the erroneous opinion of Peter Lombard, one-time Bishop of Paris" is abandoned, the opinion namely that Christ according to His humanity is not a substantial reality.230 The masters are, on the contrary, to teach that as Christ is perfect God, so is He perfect man and truly man formed of body and soul.231 A further letter, of June 2 of the same year, repeated this instruction; and finally a third, dated February 2, 1177, ended the controversy, establishing sanctions to enforce the teaching.

The history of this so-called Adoptionist controversy is interesting for many reasons. It affords the spectacle of a pope condemning as pope the theories he had taught years before as a private individual, and, more important by far, it witnesses to a considerable theological progress since the comparatively crude controversies that centered around Berengarius.

The decree of 1177 was, of course, for the enemies of Peter Lombard's work an opportunity not to be lost. They took advantage of the change in Alexander III to attempt yet once again, at the General Council of 1179, what they had failed to secure in 1163. The story of the manoeuvre is extremely obscure. Walter of St. Victor, here our one source, represents the pope as willing to condemn the master of the Sentences, and only deterred by the wholesale opposition of his cardinals. Walter was, at any rate, one of the most bitter of Peter's critics, as his pamphlet- provoked by Peter of Poitiers, great commentary on the Lombard, the first of hundreds — shows. It is called Against the Four Labyrinths of France, and attacks with a violence that knows no limits, Abelard, Gilbert of la Porree, Peter Lombard and Peter of Poitiers. Another, equally violent, critic was Joachim of Flora his exaggerations led him into manifest heresy and, after his death, to the resounding condemnation of the General Council of 1215. This marked the end of the manoeuvres to condemn the Sentences, for not only did this council condemn the latest of Peter's foes, but it paid Peter the greatest compliment any Catholic writer has ever known, of associating him by name with the decree on the Faith, "We, the sacred and universal council approving believe and confess, with Peter Lombard. . . ."

The propositions censured by Alexander III were quietly set aside, and in the course of time others went to join them. They were listed, a score of them, at the beginning or the end of the manuscripts and a simple, "Here the Master is not followed" marked that, without any solemn condemnation on these points Peter's opinions had been abandoned. By 1220 he was established in the position he was to hold until, nearly three hundred years later, St. Thomas displaced him, as the inevitable, universal text on which the teaching of theology was built; and in all the new colleges the "Bachelor of the Sentences" was as permanent an institution as the "Bachelor of Sacred Scripture."

The history of the False Decretals has shown how great an influence in the development of church law, as a branch of learning, were the necessities of the ruling authority. But for all the energy of these primitive ninth-century bishops and scholars, the difficulties against which they strove persisted, still hampering the ecclesiastical reformer and the movement to re-establish the old order of Christian life. The confusion in knowledge as to what the law was, due largely to the presence of so many divergent collections, still continued. Authorities — the collections of canons, that is, which were cited as such — differed, and even the collections to which the reformers appealed were by no means always in agreement. Anarchy ever menaced this age of institutions half-created, that so lacked any acknowledged central lay authority, that was so frequently lacking in practical respect for the acknowledged central spiritual authority.

Realisation of the ever present trouble produced various attempts to remedy it; the new collection of ancient decrees made by Burchard, Bishop of Worms about 1020, for example, and the Collection in Five Books made about the same time in Italy. But even these collections, compiled as they were in order to guard against the faults of the earlier collections, still contained too many doubtful texts. Nor did either of them successfully establish the great desideratum whence alone an effective unity of law could;. issue — the active supremacy within the church of a single, strong, central, legislative and executive power.

But from about the middle of that same eleventh century the tide began to turn. The movement of papally-directed reformation that began with St. Leo IX and St. Gregory VII had its inevitable effect on the development of legal studies. Thanks to St. Gregory VII especially, systematic researches were undertaken in all the libraries of Italy, always in the hope of finding precedents to justify the new, revolutionary use he was making of the papacy's traditional supremacy. Towards the end of that century a wholly new kind of collection began to appear. of which that made by Anselm of Lucca — nephew of Pope Alexander II — is one of the best examples. Doubtful texts are now eliminated. New authentic texts, fruit of the recent researches, are inserted and along with these the new legislation which promulgates the reform principles as laws to be obeyed universally. All these new collections emphasise the rights of the Holy See, its effective primacy throughout the Church, its infallibility. They also bring texts to solve the eagerly debated contemporary question whether the sacraments administered by ecclesiastics who had themselves bought their consecration are valid. Anselm of Lucca, in particular, had a great share in translating into the facts of everyday Catholic life throughout the Church the traditional belief in the primacy of Rome.232

The new collections, scientifically considered, were an immense advance on all that had gone before. Nevertheless the old faulty collections did not, even yet, disappear. They were still used and extensively, partly for the simple reason that they were old, partly because of the frequent, local repugnance to the new strict centralisation that flowed from the new texts as their inevitable practical sequel.

The first effect of the spread of the "Hildebrandine" collections was, then, the appearance of yet more of the hybrid books where the old-world influence and the new appeared side by side-Burchard for example with "Hildebrandine,' texts — and even of new apocrypha. St. Ives of Chartres, the most distinguished canonist of the generation that followed St. Gregory VII, is an instance in point. His Decretum is interesting, too, for the vast amount of space theology occupies in it — fruit of the Berengarian controversies on the Holy Eucharist. In this new fashion of setting together theological texts and decisions of law, yet another hindrance appeared to the development of Canon Law as an independent science, and therefore to the establishment of a universal reign of law within the Church as part of the Church's daily life. The first quarter of the twelfth century is then, in these respects, a period where, so far as concerns law, the progress of Catholic thought comes to a halt.

The need for a homogeneous code was, however, greater than ever. With a reform party active in every kingdom and diocese, new conflicts were continually arising which no texts clearly solved. The whole spirit of the time was towards greater certainty, greater clearness, a simplifying and a unifying of all religious knowledge. The spirit of St. Anselm and of Abelard could not but affect the canonists too. Then, from the end of the eleventh century, the Digest of Justinian began to be studied again, after being lost to Western sight for centuries. It offered the nascent Canon Law the stimulus of the conception of Law as a body of thought, the example of a scientific system of jurisprudence, with a proper and adequate classification and a system of interpretation. The time was at hand, and nothing now could delay it much longer, when, from laws, there would at last be produced the Canon Law.

The first moving force, in this last stage, was Urban II. No one of St. Gregory VII's disciples was more loyal to the cause of the reform, but it was one of the great merits of Urban II that he saw the possibility, and the need, of compromise within the limits of the essential Hildebrandine principles. The necessities of the situation as it had developed since, in 1084, the Normans drove out the emperor and rescued the pope, left Urban II no choice but to endeavour to harmonise this conflict by a careful interpretation of the laws; compelled him, for example, to distinguish between the necessary and the contingent. This initiative was developed in the next few years by St. Ives of Chartres and Bernold of Constance, who may be fairly considered the founders of critical jurisprudence within the Church. They did for the Church's law something of what Abelard, in his Sic et Non, did for the Church's theology.233 What they did well another man, born during their own lifetime, was to do with genius. This was Gratian.

Of Gratian's life we know almost nothing, except that he was monk of the order of Camaldoli, that he taught at the school of Bologna and that he wrote the great work which is the foundation of the science of ecclesiastical jurisprudence. We do not, know when he was born nor when he died, but the book which D gives him his unique place in history was written, apparently, by 1142. That book is commonly called, was universally called, Gratian's Decretum. Its author's own title — Concordantia Discordantium Canonum, that is, A Harmony of Conflicting Canons-expresses best what it is, a vast collection of decrees of popes and councils with texts from the Fathers too, arranged systematically according to their subject matter and so treated as to make, of the vast miscellany, a single, ordered whole. It is a book to teach not merely laws but law, in which there is everywhere at work the practical desire to adapt the texts, intelligently, to all the actual needs of the Church. By his application, throughout the whole vast field of ecclesiastical legislation, of Abelard's critical principles for the interpretation of warring authorities, Gratian did much more than add to existing collections a newer, and best, collection of all. He produced a book of a new kind altogether, a private work indeed, but one which had the distinction not only of serving as the basis of all subsequent teaching in Canon Law, but also as the exemplar of all subsequent ecclesiastical legislation.

With Gratian the science of ecclesiastical jurisprudence is born, and thence begins the series of great lawyer popes thanks to whom the Roman Church's newly organised supremacy is, in the end, triply armed, with the great Corpus Iuris Canonici, wherein the subordination of each member to the whole Church — realised as so essential an element of the religion of the Church since the days of St. Paul himself — is ordered in as careful a detail as each member's faith, too, is beginning to be ordered. All earlier collections had had in view some particular practical end; they were, for example, handbooks of useful information for whoever had charge of a see, and the selection of texts they contained was influenced, very largely, by local needs and by recent local history. Gratian's achievement is fundamental. His sole aim is the law itself. From now on, the canonist ceases to occupy himself with theology, and the collections of canons discard the purely theological decrees and texts. While, until Gratian, the pioneers of the nascent theological science had quarried in the collections of the canonists, henceforward the process is reversed and the canonist, free of theology, will use the theologians as material out of which to develop his scientific law. Gratian's separation of Canon Law from theology is not the least part of his fundamental service to the development of thought.

Gratian, it has been said, made use of Abelard's critical legacy. But, much more than in Gratian, Abelard's influence is evident in one of Gratian's pupils, his first great commentator, the Bolognese professor, Roland Bandinelli, whose personality was to dominate the second half of the twelfth century as St. Bernard's had dominated the first.

The early life of Roland Bandinelli is wrapt in the same tantalising uncertainty that obscures Gratian, his master, and Peter Lombard, his contemporary. He was born — when we know not — at Siena. He came to teach at Bologna, then the chief centre of intellectual life in Italy, somewhere in the thirties of the twelfth century and he won the name of being the foremost professor of Sacred Scripture and Canon Law of his generation. He was rewarded with a canonry at Pisa and, in 1147, with a like appointment in the Lateran. In 1150 Eugene III made him one of the cardinal-deacons, and the next year cardinal-priest. In 1153 he became Chancellor of the Roman Church and thereby the most influential person in the Curia after the pope. Six years later he was himself elected pope, Alexander III.

Of the works of the Cardinal Roland Bandinelli two survive, to justify the immense reputation he enjoyed among his contemporaries as a scholar. The first is his Stroma, an abridgment of the second part of Gratian's book made for the use of students. It is remarkable for its order and for the singular clarity of the exposition. The second work, the Sententiae, is a theological summa. in which the influence of Abelard is evident throughout, in the method of exposition and in the scientific spirit which inspires it. Roland Bandinelli is, however, no mere compiler, and many of the master's errors are corrected in his work, the Abelardian theory of original sin, for example, the teaching on the Trinity and on the nature of faith. But other errors of Abelard he took over; that, for example, on the nature of the union in Jesus Christ of the divine and the human, which many years later he was, as pope, to condemn.

The errors into which Abelard and Gilbert had fallen, and their spectacular defeat at the hands of St. Bernard did not, then, by any manner of means, ruin the movement towards a more scientific theology which they led. The spirit which had inspired them inspired in Peter Lombard and Roland Bandinelli the two most influential minds of the next generation also. It was to meet the opposition of those who claimed to be St. Bernard's disciples but who lacked his genius as they lacked his sanctity. Then, after a sharp crisis, it was finally to establish itself, as the official tradition of theological exposition.

THE ROMAN SEE IN THE GENERATION AFTER THE CONCORDAT OF WORMS, 1123-1153

The strong French pope, whose diplomacy had brought to a victorious end the fifty years' controversy with the emperor, did not long survive his triumph. He died in the year which followed the Lateran Council, on December 13 or 14, 1124. His successor, Honorius II — the cardinal Lambert — had a long experience in the central government of the Church, that went back to the days of Urban II. Pascal II had made him a cardinal; he had been the companion of Gelasius II in that pope's flight and exile; he had been a power in the conclave that elected Calixtus II and had been, throughout the reign, that pope's most trusted adviser; as such he had played an influential part in the negotiations that preceded the Concordat of Worms, and his known conciliatory temper had won him the goodwill of the Roman nobility; it had been a career to which election as pope came as a very natural crown. Yet the election was made unwillingly, and in circumstances that might easily have led to schism, and which did, six years later, actually lead to schism.

The Roman nobility, whose interest in the frequent changes in their temporal ruler had been from the first beginnings of the Papal State, and could hardly fail to be, one of the major permanent anxieties of the popes, were still as willing as ever, at the death of Calixtus II, to attempt to renew their ancient hold on the papacy. In place of the Crescentii, the Theophylacts, the Cencii of previous centuries there were now the Pierleoni and the Frangepani. Each faction had its candidate, and the Pierleoni now triumphed, electing the cardinal Tommaso Buccapecci who took the name of Celestine II. But while the Te Deum was still in progress, the Frangepani leader broke in, tore from the shoulders of the newly-elected the papal mantle and bade him resign. The which, apparently very willingly, he did; and the terrified cardinals then elected Lambert, who took the name of Honorius II. For a few days the party of Celestine held out. But by St. Thomas's Day December 21, they had followed their leader; and then Honorius, too, resigned, to be immediately re-elected in more canonical fashion.

Almost immediately he had to face a serious crisis, for in 1125 his old adversary, the emperor Henry V, died leaving no direct heir. For a century now the imperial crown had passed from father to son, and it was as important for the popes, as for the imperial feudatories, to take full advantage of the opportunity now offered to safeguard the principle of its electoral character against any claims of family. It was no less important to secure that the new emperor should be a prince sympathetic to the settlement of 1122, and that there should be no risk of a renewal of the controversy about Investiture. To election therefore, Honorius sent his legates, and in combination with the archbishops and bishops of Germany they secured the choice of Lothair of Supplimburg. When Lothair besought the pope's confirmation of his election the principles of St. Gregory VII were given an ideal recognition, and the emperor showed that the petition was no merely formal act of goodwill by an important modification of the Concordat. Elections of bishops and abbots were henceforward to be absolutely free, "neither extorted by fear of the king nor influenced by his presence as the use has been, nor restricted by any convention."234 It is to the bishop thus freely elected and canonically consecrated that investiture of the temporalities is to be conferred by the touch of the sceptre.

In his relations with France Honorius was equally happy, although his tactful handling of Louis VI, in a quarrel that involved the French king and the bishops, brought him a stiff letter of reproof from the young St. Bernard.

Italian affairs were more troublesome. Much against his will the pope was forced, by losses in the field, to acknowledge the Norman hold on Apulia; and the Roman faction-fighting in which his reign was born continued through all its six years. It raged even around his very death-bed, for the Frangepani, who had so nearly lost in 1124, were determined to maintain their hold. They gathered in the palace where the pope lay dying, set it about with guards, and, the pope no sooner dead, all the cardinals present elected as his successor, the cardinal Gregory, who took the name of Innocent II (February 14, 1130). Unhappily the electors, for all their unanimity, were but a minority of the electoral college, and a few hours later their colleagues, outraged at the unseemliness of the uncanonical proceeding, elected-without any reference to Innocent's election — the cardinal Peter Pierleoni. He called himself Anacletus II.

The Church had a practical problem without a precedent since the new system of papal elections introduced in 1059. Which of the two was really pope? The first elected? or the elect of the majority? That neither was pope, since both were the elect of fragments only — greater or less — of the electoral college, is a view no one seems to have taken. The law of the papal election did not as yet specify any particular majority of the votes as necessary for validity. Nor was there any machinery to decide between the rivals. Anacletus had Rome in his support, and maintained himself there until his death (1138). Innocent meanwhile, driven from Rome, followed the well-worn track of persecuted popes over the Alps to France, to win, ultimately, recognition from the majority of the Catholic bishops and princes.

The chief factor in that general recognition was the recognition accorded by Louis VI of France and the French bishops, and what determined their decision was the immense influence of St. Bernard at the Synod of Etampes. What principle, it may be asked, guided St. Bernard? Apparently the very simple one that, of the two rivals, Innocent was the better man, "une espece de divination de sa conscience."235 Pierleoni was the chief of the faction that had brought about his own election, an ecclesiastical politician primarily. Innocent, although the choice, perhaps even — in the election — the tool, of a faction, was at any rate not its leader. His election had not about it that air of self-election which, in his rival's case, was so sinister a reminder of the worst days of. the last century. And Innocent had played a distinguished part in the struggle against Henry V. He must now have been advanced in years, for the earliest thing recorded of his clerical career is his service with the rival of St. Gregory VII, the anti-pope Clement III dead now these thirty years. Pascal II had made him a cardinal in 1116, he had shared the exile of the next pope, and then, in the time of Calixtus II, he had been the colleague of the cardinal Lambert — the future Honorius II — in the negotiation of the Concordat of Worms.

What the influence of St. Bernard did in France, that of St. Norbert did in Germany. By the end of the year 1131 Innocent was recognised everywhere, except in Rome and southern Italy where Roger of Sicily remained true to Anacletus.

It was inevitably a troubled pontificate, and even after 1138, when the death of Anacletus brought Innocent II universal recognition, some shadow of its origins continued to darken it. The emperor, Lothair, for all his exemplary action at his election in 1125, and despite his several expeditions against Anacletus, threatened to reopen the Investiture struggle, and only the influence of St. Bernard and St. Norbert kept him loyal to the Concordat. The French king, too, was not always satisfactory and his interference in the freedom of episcopal elections drew down on France an interdict. For Innocent II, despite his misfortunes, was no weakling. St. Bernard championed a spirit fashioned like his own. The work of reform went forward, the pope maintaining the tradition of local councils where he himself presided, correcting abuses and devising guarantees to prevent their repetition. The culmination of these, and the pope's greatest achievement, was the General Council of April, 1139, held in the Lateran, that marked the restored unity of Christendom after the death of Anacletus.

The history of this great council, at which some five or six hundred bishops and abbots assisted, is curiously obscure. Its canons indeed survive, but no record of the council has come down written by anyone who was even in Rome at the time. Its canons, for the most part,236 repeat the legislation of earlier reforming councils. Of the new canons one regulates the dress of clerics, three are concerned with nuns — they are formally deprived of the power to contract a valid marriage, they are not to sing the Divine Office in company with the monks, and spurious nuns who live privately at home are to be suppressed. Two new canons reflect the Church's care for religion as a social force, one against usurers a d the other against the use of catapults and bows in wars against Christians. Finally the ordinations of Anacletus are declared null and void. Two older canons are re- enacted, one against incendiaries and another against violators of the Truce of God.

The council has, too, a certain doctrinal importance, not so much perhaps for its condemnation of Arnold of Brescia — who as yet had not developed all his latent possibilities — as for its condemnation (Canon 23) of the new, Manichee tendencies which were, seventy years later, to menace the very existence of Catholicism in southern France. For the first time for many years there is no canon touching the matter of investiture. On the other hand three canons deal once more with the question of clerical celibacy, and, in even stronger terms than in 1123, declare null and void marriages contracted by clerics in major orders.

The principal work before the council was to remove the last traces of the late schism. Following the precedent of 1123, of Urban II in 1095 and of St. Gregory VII before that, the ordinations of the late anti-pope were annulled — a proceeding that, in the mind of its chief historian, raises the greatest difficulty which the whole history of re-ordination presents. Innocent II was not content with this, nor with the submission of those who had followed his rival. There were numerous deprivations, and the altars these bishops had consecrated were destroyed. One victim,. especially, of the pope's revengeful spirit was the Cardinal Peter of Pisa, who had indeed been one of the anti-pope's chief supporters, but whom St. Bernard had won over to make his. submission even before the anti-pope's death. He had been a most valuable recruit to Innocent, who had received him gladly and confirmed him in his dignities. In the movement to secure the submission of the party of Anacletus, Peter had played a great part, but Innocent, now secure, thought only of the past and deprived him. Nor, despite all St. Bernard's pleading, did he ever restore him.

For all its circumstance, the council was destined to very slight success. The pope's rigour made too unhappy an impression, he was soon involved in the disastrous war with Sicily, and there began twenty years of domestic political anxiety in Rome which effectively slowed down the papacy's European activity.

Innocent II had triumphed, but to the end things continued to go badly in Rome and the south. The King of Sicily was excommunicated at the Lateran Council, and the pope himself prepared to carry out the sentence and depose him. But Roger was the better general. He captured the pope and compelled him not only to lift the excommunication but also, once more, to recognise the Norman claims to the Italian mainland. The Romans were angered by the pope's refusal to sanction the destruction of the rival Latin town of Tivoli. The new spirit of the Commune that now evidently possessed Rome as it did the whole north of Italy, showed itself in another way when Innocent was compelled to make a grant of local self-government. This developed, and a republic was proclaimed. In the midst of these new troubles the unhappy pope died, September 24, 1143.

He was succeeded by the short-lived Celestine II (September, 1143- March, 1144) who had been one of Abelard's pupils and, when Cardinal Legate in France presiding at the condemnation of Arnold of Brescia — of whom more immediately — had been rebuked by St. Bernard for his neglect to use that disturber of the peace more severely. As pope he reigned long enough to revoke Innocent II's concessions to the King of Sicily, thus leaving to his own successor, Lucius II, an additional worry to embarrass his endeavours to suppress the new republic.

Lucius II had been one of the legates thinks to whom Lothair III was elected emperor in 1125. The next pope had made him Chancellor of the Roman Church, and upon his election (March 12, 1144) he turned all his diplomacy to extricate the papacy from the domestic chaos in which its temporal affairs were rapidly submerging. He arranged a truce with Sicily. He allied himself with the Frangepani — the more easily because the Pierleoni supported the Republic — and with their aid proceeded to military measures. While besieging the Capitol he was however killed by a chance shot, after a reign of less than a year.

In his place, that same day (February 15, 1145), the cardinals elected the abbot of SS. Vincent and Anastasius. He was Cistercian, won to the monastic life fifteen years before by St. Bernard, and after some years spent at Clairvaux, under the saint's direction, he had gone into Italy to undertake, at the request of Innocent II, the reform of the great abbey of Farfa. The election over, pope and cardinals fled from the hostile city, and it was in the abbey church of Farfa that, as Eugene III, its one-time abbot was consecrated. Rome meanwhile was given up to anarchy and pillage and then, in reaction against the horrors the pope was invited to return. But his stay was of short duration. The arch-disturber of his age now appeared there, the mystical revolutionary Arnold of Brescia, and in the January of 1146 Eugene III was once more an exile, destined not again to see Rome until a few months before his death in 1153.

Arnold of Brescia, the ruler of Rome henceforward for a good nine years, is as typical a figure of the time as the popes he opposed, as Abelard, or as St. Bernard himself, who knew him well and whom in many respects he greatly resembled. He was much the same age as St. Bernard, born at Brescia in the last years of the eleventh century. He was ordained priest, became a canon-regular and even prior of his monastery. Like St. Bernard he was a man of amazing austerities. He was a famous speaker and gifted with a singularly charming personality. In Brescia he rapidly acquired fame as an eloquent critic of contemporary abuses, and, like many another clerical critic of clerical habits, he passed easily into a denial of the good of that he saw abused. The Church, for example, had no right to own property. Pope and bishops, by owning, were guilty of mortal sin; the Church was contaminated by the presence of such men; it ceased to be the Church; the pope was no longer pope; people should, therefore, refuse to receive the sacraments such men offered; better far, indeed, to confess to each other. Finally, he invited the attention of the emperor, to the miserable state of matters ecclesiastical. "It is in your power," he wrote to the emperor, "to arrange that for the future no pope shall be elected without your good pleasure.,'

Arnold speedily came into conflict with his own bishop, for his share in making the commune of Brescia independent of the bishop. He was denounced at the Lateran Council of 1139 and deposed from his monastic office and banished from Italy, not to return without the pope's permission. France was his place of refuge, and 1141 found him at Abelard's side at the Council of Sens. With Abelard he was sentenced by Innocent II to lifelong confinement in a monastery. The sentence was never carried into execution, and Arnold passed to Paris where, hike an anti-clerical St. Bernard. he denounced in his lectures the wealth and vices of the clergy.

St. Bernard's influence with Louis VII brought about his expulsion from France. He wandered into Switzerland, he spent some time in Bohemia in the company of the papal legate there, and then, in 1145, at Viterbo, he made a complete abjuration to Eugene III. Before the year was out he was the head and centre of the new revolt that drove the pope forth, and for the next nine years the object of rich reprobation as the most subversive enemy of the whole social order.

The chief event, however, of Eugene III's reign (1145-1153) was the Second Crusade.

THE LATIN EAST, 1100-1151

The success of the crusading armies in 1098-1099 was, in no small measure, due to the fact that they delivered their assault at a moment when the Moslem world was rent with bitter internal strife. The subsequent history of the Catholic hold on Syria and Palestine was to be the history of a long defensive war against the dispossessed Mohammedan, with the defenders even less united than had been the Moslem in the hour when they overcame him. To understand the quasi-inevitableness of the Mohammedan recovery it is essential to know something of the way in which the Crusaders organised their conquest.

The war had been a holy war at whose origin the Church had officially presided. The motive was the delivery of Christians from infidel tyranny, and the spirit in which this was achieved was, in theory, that of sinners working out satisfaction for their misdeeds by an heroic act of fraternal charity. The logic of the situation would have placed what conquests were made at the discretion of the Church. More even than over his own city of Rome, might the pope expect to preside over the destinies of the lands which the faithful, at his bidding and with his blessing, had wrested, for the love of God, from the infidel. The result was, however, far different.

Bohemond retained his hold on Antioch, Raymund of Provence on Tripoli, Baldwin of Flanders on Edessa; and an assembly of the nobles in August, 1099 elected Godfrey de Bouillon to be ruler of Jerusalem. His humility forbade him to call himself king. He would be simply the Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. But his brother Baldwin of Edessa, who succeeded him a year later, had no such scruples and was crowned first King of Jerusalem on Christmas Day, 110 (), in the basilica at Bethlehem.

The new states were a curious transplantation of Western feudalism to an Eastern soil. They were very French, and they were necessarily. from the beginning, in very close contact with the papacy, to which at every crisis they must turn as the source through which assistance would chiefly, would indeed wholly, come. Politically the founders of the new states — which soon came to be related, the rest to Jerusalem, as vassals to their suzerain — were the nobles. It was the nobles who elected the King of Jerusalem and the king's actions were wholly controlled by them. He was little more than a primus inter pares. The kingdom was doomed from its beginnings, and it needed only the shock of a united foe to bring it down. From an ecclesiastical point of view, too, the result of the Crusade was a transplantation of the West to the East. The victors continued to be Latin in their Catholicism. A Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem was set up, with four metropolitans and seven suffragan bishops depending from it. This Church was well endowed and became exceedingly wealthy, the greatest of all the landed proprietors. The patriarch was almost the king's equal, and the occasional struggles between kings and patriarchs were one of the many hindrances- to the growth of real unity.

The weakness of the State was reflected in its military organisation. As in every other feudally-organised State, the army was made up of the contingents brought in by the different nobles, and the contingent's first loyalty was, often, to its own immediate leader. Each castle was in some sense a little state, perpetually striving to escape the control of the king. Again, many of the fighting men were Armenian and Syrian mercenaries. The loyalty of this cosmopolitan feudal army to the ideals of 1095 could not but be uncertain.

To meet the situation one of the most characteristic of medieval institutions was created — the religious order vowed to arms for the defence of the Holy Places. The first of these, the Order of the Knights Hospitallers, grew out of a work of charity whose object was the care of sick pilgrims. It was already a highly successful institution, supported from Europe by a well-organised system of begging when, in 1113, Gerard du Puy transformed it to meet the new problem of military defence. Five years later a second order began, called, from the site of its first home, the Order of the Temple. These new orders were made up of knights, all of noble birth, of serjeants, and of clerics for their spiritual service. All took the three religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. But the knights and serjeants were forbidden fasting and such corporal austerities as would lessen their fighting efficiency. For habit they wore, over their armour, a cloak Or distinctive character — with, for the Hospitallers, a black cross and, for the Templars, a red cross. The new orders found no difficulty in recruiting their numbers. Fiefs, in Europe no less than in the East, were liberally conveyed to them, and while France and England were soon covered with the houses which served them as recruiting centres, in the new states of the East they rapidly became the leading military power. The orders were autonomous. The grand-master of each was, like the chief superior of every other religious order, subject only to the pope. But the constitution within a kingdom already too little centralised, of these powerful, but independent, supporters was to prove ultimately a very great weakness. King, patriarch, barons, the nulitary orders, so many forces acknowledging no subordination — it would have required a marvellous religious spirit, an almost miraculous devotion to the ideah, to combine them a11 in any harmonious effort. It is matter of history how far from that ideal the Latin Catholics of Syria came to live. The climate, and the new luxuries and refinements of the Mohammedan civilisation were, only too often, as powerfully destructive of their morale as they had been, time and again, with their fellows who fought the Moor in Spain.

For the new Catholic settlements — and such these kingdoms and principalities really were — the war was never to end. The gains of the campaigns of 1098 and 1099 had to be supported by yet other gains; and then the ceaseless raids of the Mohammedans, from the north and south, must be beaten off and these in their turn raided. Egypt was weak, and for years not a serious danger. The states of the north, and the Emirs of Damascus, Kaifa and Mosul — though stronger and more aggressive — were mutually hostile. Then in 1127, Zengi, the ruler of Mosul, succeeded in creating a new unity that had only Damascus for a rival. The years 1131-1143 were for him a period of uninterrupted success against Antioch, Tripoli and the kingdom of Jerusalem too. Luckily for the kingdom, Damascus to some extent held off. Zengi, and, finding Jerusalem useful, its emir concluded a formal alliance with the kings which lasted until 1147.

But while the Catholics, strengthened by the reinforcements which never ceased to come, more or less numerous and well-provided, from Europe, thus maintained their hold against the Turks. they had to wage another kind of war, on another front, against the Greek emperor at Constantinople. For the Greeks, these several Latin states were so many imperial fiefs, owing the emperor homage. More than one of the princes had, in circumstances of difficulty, promised and even done homage to them as to his suzerain. None of the princes, however, willingly endured such a regime. Hence a readiness on the part of Constantinople to support any one of the Latins against the rest. So it was that the emperor Alexis Comnenus (1081-1118) aided Raymund to establish Tripoli as a counterweight to Bohemond at Antioch. Later still his son John (1118-1143) and his grandson Manuel (1143-1180) found much richer opportunities for intervention. Raymund, prince of Antioch, was compelled in h 1137, by the appearance of an imperial army to do homage to John; and although the pope, Innocent II, in the following March, forbade alliances between the Latins and the Greek emperor to the detriment of other crusading states, the troubles began again in 1142. This time it was the people of Antioch who called in the emperor against Raymund. In 1143 the emperor, John, was murdered, and Raymund seized the opportunity to invade the Byzantine possessions. John's successor, Manuel, replied vigorously, sending an army and fleet to Antioch, and Raymund was obliged to do homage once more, this time at Constantinople, and even to accept as patriarch at Antioch, a priest chosen by the emperor from the schismatic clergy of his capital. This marked the highwater mark of the Byzantine success, the nearest it arrived to what Alexis Comnenus had promised himself when the crusades began in 1095. The empire had secured Asia Minor and the Latin states had made a beginning of doing homage.

In that same year 1144 a much greater disaster befell them. On Christmas Day Zengi captured Edessa. He was murdered shortly afterwards, but in his son, Nureddin, the crusaders had to face a still more dangerous enemy, for to his father's political ability and military skill he joined an unspoiled religious enthusiasm which transformed the whole character of the campaigns. They became a renewal of the Holy War, not a mere anti-crusade.

When the news reached the pope that one of the Christian states had fallen to the Saracens, it was to the King of France, Louis VII, that he turned. Louis enlisted the aid of St. Bernard and, at a great assembly at Vezelay (March 31, 1046), along with hundreds of his nobles, knights and lesser subjects the king took the cross. St. Bernard conceived the grandiose plan of a crusade in which all Christendom should at the same time attack all its enemies, the Saracens in the east, the Moors in Spain and the still pagan tribes to the east of the Elbe. He himself led the campaign of preaching and, on Christmas Day, 1146, the emperor, Conrad III, after some resistance, followed the French king's example. By sermons, by writings, by personal exhortation St. Bernard gradually roused the West from its apathy, and soon both the emperor and the King of France had at their disposal armies of some 70,000 men.

For all its promise, however, this first crusade to enlist the personal support of the powerful kings was destined to fail. It had failed, indeed, before it set out. The Greeks, as always, made it a condition of their assistance that all conquests should be held as fiefs of Constantinople. There were disputes as to the route, which masked a more fundamental dispute, namely whether to support the Greeks or Roger of Sicily who was on the verge of war with them. Finally, the attempt to realise St. Bernard's plan had no other result than to disperse the strength-of the movement or to delay its concentration. Many of the Germans went off to fight the Wends. The English and Brabancon contingent, travelling by the sea-route, halted to take Lisbon from the Moors.

The main armies reached Constantinople by the land-route through Hungary and Thrace, the French in good order, the Germans pillaging so badly that the Greek emperor had to send an army to protect his own people. At Adrianople the Greeks fought and defeated the crusaders. Conrad III refused point blank to do homage to Manuel Comnenus; whereupon the Greek refused even to see him, and the crusaders were hurried across the Bosphorus with all possible speed. The French had a more favourable reception from the emperor, but, even so, relations between the two forces were severely strained and some of Louis VII's advisers were eager to inaugurate the crusade by taking Constantinople. After a succession of disasters, their armies very much smaller, the king and the emperor at last reached Jerusalem in the spring of 1148. To regain Edessa was more than they could hope. The King of Jerusalem, Baldwin IV, proposed instead that they should assist him — and his Mohammedan ally, the Emir of Basra — to take Damascus. In July, 1148, the expedition marched. The Viceroy of Damascus managed, however, to break up the coalition. The crusaders won one battle, failed in another, and, raising the siege, retired.

This was the end of the wretched affair. Conrad and Louis returned to Europe, and their armies with them, to spread, as widely as the area whence they had been recruited, the tale of the great disaster. The damage done to the very idea of the crusade was huge, and the one definite change in the situation was the destruction of the alliance between Jerusalem and Damascus, the disappearance of the one force that stood between the kingdom and the aggressive Nureddin.

In 1150 St. Bernard endeavoured to reorganise the affair, but he found no one to listen to him. Kings and lords alike, for that generation, had had their fill.

THE IMPERIAL MENACE TO THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION: (I) FREDERICK BARBAROSSA AND ALEXANDER III, 1154-1177

The new reluctance of Catholicism to rally to the defence of the Holy Places was significant. The forces active within the Church in the first generation of the great spiritual revival were beginning to languish. The disinterested idealism which, for sixty years now, had so marvellously inspired the universality of the Church had almost spent itself. St. Bernard, in whom the spiritual revival and its popularity were symbolised, died in 1153, and the morrow of the crusade for which he had so devotedly, but unsuccessfully, spent himself was a new struggle between the Church and the Catholic prince. It was not a struggle, this time, to regain from the prince rights of jurisdiction which had lapsed to him through the disorder of centuries, but, more fundamentally still, a struggle to determine the respective positions of pope and emperor with the Church; a struggle in which the emperor challenged the pope at the same time that his ambition challenged also the liberties of the Italian city states. The pope, in this contest, had from the beginning allies bound to him by the political danger in which they, too, stood from the foe who was the foe of the papacy.

Thus the imperial attempt consciously to restore Justinian and the Carolingians provoked a struggle complicated by political considerations, a struggle to be fought out therefore, on both sides, by the full lay apparatus of alliances and armies, as well as by the resources of ecclesiastical censure and prayer. There is about this necessary, and inevitable, preoccupation of the popes with the new Hohenstaufen emperor a certain worldly air. It lacks the pure idealism of the earlier struggle. None of the papal champions in it — for all the real goodness of their lives — has even come near to canonisation. The only saint of the struggle, the one purely ideal figure, is the English Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Thomas Becket, and his idealism, it is true to say, more than once gravely embarrassed the pope at a critical moment.

The prince who willed to revive in himself all the old universal power of Justinian, was the Emperor Frederick I, elected in the very last year of St. Bernard's life, 1152. Tall and fair — from his red beard called ever afterwards Barbarossa — the typical German in bodily figure, as in his vague political idealism, he was at the time of his election a man thirty years of age, younger than St. Bernard by just a generation. His dream of transforming the idea of the Roman Empire into reality was soon given its opportunity. Invitations to come, armed, into Italy were not wanting. The nobles wished him to suppress the communes. In Sicily there were those who wished to see the Normans driven out. The pope desired the defeat of Arnold of Brescia.

Not until the autumn of 1154 was Frederick ready to advance. By the time he came to Italy Eugene III was dead, and his short-lived successor too. The pope whom Barbarossa met was the one Englishman to whom that high dignity has fallen, Nicolas Brakespeare, Adrian IV, a solemn, austere figure, a simpleminded reformer who had already made a name as the second founder of Norway's Christianity. Arnold of Brescia, driven out for a time in 1154, had returned to Rome. The city welcomed him, and restored the republic until, with unheard-of directness, Adrian laid Rome itself under an interdict. The measure was so far successful that Arnold's supporters deserted him, and he fled to friends outside Rome. Easter 1155 saw the pope and the Romans reconciled.

Barbarossa meanwhile had crossed the Alps, and was steadily advancing through Lombardy, where city after city opened its gates to him. Milan held out, but Frederick for the moment ignored it and passed through Tuscany towards Rome. At Campo Grasso pope and emperor met, and Frederick gave an unmistakable sign of his dispositions by utterly refusing the customary act of homage. Adrian, just as inflexibly, refused to proceed until it was given. It was three days before Frederick yielded, and when, immediately afterwards, the senate which, in Arnold's days, had ruled Rome, waited on him with a mixture of petitions and directions, he broke out violently against them. On Whit Sunday (June 18, 1155) Adrian crowned him emperor in St. Peter's. The Romans, irritated by the reception he had given the senate, attacked his troops, and the day ended in slaughter, and in Frederick's withdrawal — with the pope, for his own safety, in the emperor's company.

The last weeks of Frederick's advance had also seen the end of Arnold of Brescia. It had been part of the pact between pope and emperor that Frederick should capture and deliver Arnold over to the pope. The heresiarch was taken and confined in the papal prison. Thence he was taken out and hanged, his body burned, and the ashes thrown into the Tiber. About his end there stilllingers a great deal of obscurity. It is not really known by whose authority he was put to death, whether by that of the pope, or of the emperor, or, as one account states, by the Prefect of Rome, without the pope's knowledge, for some private reason.

Frederick, crowned and consecrated emperor, returned into Germany. Adrian, left to himself, turned to the old diplomacy of alliance with the Normans and negotiations with the turbulent Romans. But to the emperor this Sicilian policy was most unwelcome, and at the diet held at Besancon (October, 1157) his indignation was given its opportunity. To the diet Adrian had despatched two legates — one of them Roland Bandinelli, cardinal since 1150 and Chancellor of the Roman Church. The legates were charged to remind Frederick that as emperor it was his duty to defend the Church, the occasion of the admonition being the recent murder of the primate of Denmark. The emperor, the legate proceeded to say, must not forget that it was the Holy Roman Church which conferred on him the "signal favour of the crown", and that it was proposed to add favours still more valuable. When this part of the message was read out tumult shook the assembly. The word used by the pope to mean favour (beneficium) had also the more restricted technical meaning of fief, and at the suggestion that, as emperor, Frederick must acknowledge the pope as suzerain, the great feudatories turned on the legates. " From whom then does the emperor hold the empire if not from the pope?" said Bandinelli, a founder of the Canon Law speaking through the legate. Whereat only Frederick's personal intervention saved him from the sword of an angry German. The legates were expelled; the diet broke up.

Both parties now prepared for the struggle, Frederick organising Germany against the papal claims, protesting that the empire was not a papal fief, Adrian protesting as widely against the insult of the expulsion of his legates. The German bishops, in the main, showed as much sympathy with the emperor as, without a breach with the pope, was possible.

In the spring of 1158 Frederick once more invaded Italy. The papal legates sent to assure him that he had misunderstood the famous admonition,237 that beneficium meant no more than a useful favour, were ignored; and the emperor advanced 011 Milan. It speedily submitted and at the Diet of Roncaglia (November, 1158) the new imperial position was clearly set forth. The Archbishop of Milan proclaimed that the imperial will was law for the emperor's subjects, and legists from Bologna gave the sanction of the new learning to this resurrection of pagan theory.238 The new concept of law was rapidly translated into practical regulations. Commissioners were sent to all the cities of Lombardy to secure for the emperor his newly declared rights, the chief of them the nomination of each city's rulers.

The pope could not but be anxious. Italy being, by the new theory, a province of Frederick's empire, how soon would it be before he proceeded to exercise his imperial authority in Rome itself? What was the pope's political status for the future, if not that of a vassal to the emperor? The "Roman Question" was entering on a new chapter in its long and stormy history. If the Church's lately recovered freedom to elect its head were to survive, and that head's own independence in action, the emperor must, at all costs, be prevented from becoming the real ruler of Italy. The task was to occupy all the popes for the next hundred years.

Adrian's reply to the menace of Roncaglia was to demand imperial recognition of the papal claim to Ferrara and the lands made over to the Roman See by the Countess Matilda. Furthermore, he sought a pledge that Frederick would disclaim any right as suzerain in Rome, for Rome being papal could not be imperial. Frederick refused. "If I, Emperor of the Romans," he declared, "have no rights in Rome, I have no rights anywhere."

In April of the next year (1159) the war began. Milan revolted and Adrian, with his ally the King of Sicily, encouraged the Milanese. Frederick, in retaliation, revived the ghost of the commune and the pope was driven out of Rome. The next few months were filled with diplomatic duels. The pope endeavoured to unite the various Italian States against the emperor, while Frederick set out his claim to be, as Constantine's successor, the source of all the pope's authority as a temporal ruler. In official state documents he had begun to place his own name and style before those of the pope, and the pope's protest against the innovation only provoked the retort that a monster of pride now sat in St. Peter's chair.

At this moment, when everything was set for the conflict, and, the imperialist party among the cardinals finally convinced, on September 1, 1159, the unexpected happened, the death of the pope. Fortune had given the emperor an immense advantage, striking down his practised adversary in the very opening of the duel. Moreover, he had the further advantage that the new pope might be one of his own, for all that the emperor was too far away from the scene to be able to influence the election personally. He would indeed hardly be aware of the Pope's death before the news arrived of his successor's election.

Since the death of Urban II (1099) it had been common practice to choose the new pope the very day his predecessor died. But the emperor had his supporters even in the sacred college, and they won the first point in the struggle when they secured that the conclave should open, not at Anagni — where Adrian, still in exile, had died — but at Rome, on a territory hostile to Adrian and all he stood for. The English pope, then, was buried in St. Peter's — where in the sarcophagus of red granite he still rests- and the cardinals proceeded to elect his successor. The matter occupied them for the then unusual space of three days, and the result was a double election. The majority had elected Adrian's chief adviser, no less a personage than Roland Bandinelli. He took the name of Alexander III. The rest, three voters, had chosen a friend of Barbarossa, the Cardinal Octavian, who called himself Victor IV. For the third time in less than forty years the Church was threatened with schism, this time at a moment when it was facing the greatest peril it had known for a century.

The emperor did not make the mistake of immediately declaring for Octavian. He proclaimed himself neutral until the matter was settled by a council, and he did his utmost to keep the Kings of France and England neutral too. Next he summoned a council to meet at Pavia, and cited Alexander — as Roland Bandinelli-and Octavian, as Victor IV, to appear before it. Alexander refused to appear, denying the emperor's right to call a council without the pope's consent. To which, when the council opened (February 5, 1160), Frederick replied by a renewal of his claims "to have a right to call the council as emperor. It is well known that Constantine, Theodosius, Justinian, Charlemagne and the others called councils, and I am their successor." Fifty bishops, German and Italian, attended and after a preliminary harangue Frederick left them to their task. They were by no means of one mind. Some of the Italians were for delaying the matter until a truly universal council met. But slowly, under the influence of pressure, those who could not escape yielded, and before the week was out the desired unanimity was attained, and Octavian declared true pope. On February 12, Frederick solemnly acknowledged him as such.

Outside the empire he was less successful. By the end of the year France and England had decided for Alexander; by 1163 Spain, too, and Hungary, Scotland and Ireland. Even in Germany he had his supporters, led by the Bishop of Salzburg, and prominent among them the two new orders of Carthusians and Cistercians.

Alexander excommunicated the emperor and his anti-pope, and once more Frederick's army moved into Lombardy. Milan was again forced to surrender and the emperor ordered it to be destroyed. His treatment of the Milanese terrorised the other cities of Lombardy into immediate submission. Bologna, too, admitted him and Alexander was forced to flee from Rome (1161). Nowhere in Italy was he really safe and he finally found a home in France. The year 1162 was perhaps the most critical in the whole struggle. The pope's scheme for a league against Frederick had broken down; his chief supporters, Louis VII of France and the English king, Henry II, were quarrelling over a marriage; Frederick was master of Lombardy; and when Alexander supported Henry II — as indeed he could not but do-Louis began to negotiate with Frederick. Thanks in very large part to the German's lack of finesse the negotiation failed — even ludicrously (St. Jean de Losne, August 29, 1162), and though Frederick held at Dole in Burgundy the council he had planned, the kings (reguli was the term his new imperialism used to describe them) were absent. Once more the emperor declared that, since Rome was a city of his empire, he must be allowed his say in the election of its bishop.

The next year saw the breach between the English king and the Archbishop of Canterbury over a particular application of the same principle that divided Alexander and the emperor; and for the next two years the diplomacy of the harassed pope was taxed to the utmost to keep Henry II from going over to Frederick, and yet not surrender in England the rights for whose defence in Italy he was endeavouring to combine all Christendom.

Octavian died in 1164, and Frederick gave him a successor in the Bishop of Cremona, known as Pascal III. To accredit his new pope he summoned the diet of Wurzburg (Pentecost, 1165) and there it was decided that all bishops and abbots, monks and priests should swear an abjuration of Alexander under pain of deposition, loss of goods, mutilation and exile. There followed an intensive campaign throughout Germany to impose the oath. Against the new tactics Alexander was powerless. His scheme for an anti-imperialist coalition never matured, the position in England remained unsatisfactory; France was merely passive in its support; and, in 1166, the King of Sicily died leaving a child to succeed him. The pope's one hope, and he knew it well, was Lombardy and the communes' realisation that his interests were theirs too.

In 1167 the war began anew, Frederick marching once more into Lombardy, beating down on his way the resistance offered by the Bishop of Salzburg. He only halted in Lombardy to hold, at Lodi, a council which recognised Pascal III and then, heedless of the restored Milan and the incipient Lombard league, he made for Rome and Alexander. It was only a matter of time before he was inside the Leonine city; and while Alexander fled, to continue the resistance from the Colosseum, Frederick's troops ravaged and plundered, sparing not in the sack the very basilica of St. Peter. Master of the Apostle's shrine, the emperor now proposed a compromise. Both Alexander and Pascal should resign and a new election take place. This Alexander would not even discuss. Just in time he made his way out of Rome, while Pascal was enthroned and, on the morrow, crowned Frederick a second time.

The emperor's triumph, however, did not last long. Plague fell upon his army, claiming thousands of victims, and so suddenly that contemporaries saw in the disaster the avenging hand of God. The emperor had no choice but to abandon his conquest, and through an Italy now really hostile he made his way north, to find himself hemmed in, unable to advance, too weakened to attack. Only the feint of a submission to Alexander saved him.

Then (September, 1168) Pascal III died, to receive as a successor Calixtus III — an imperial nomination that preceded a new offer of peace to Alexander, which, inevitably, failed since it refused him recognition as pope. Alexander developed his Italian policy. He sent new blessings to the league of communes, protecting it against defaulters by threats of excommunication, and in return the league named the new strong place it was building Alessandria in honour of the patriot pope.

For the next five years there was a lull in the hostilities, emperor and pope waging a war of diplomacy in which Alexander, if he did not succeed in wielding his heterogeneous supporters — Greeks, Sicilians, Lombard Communes — into an alliance, at any rate kept them from each other's throats and defeated the emperor's attempts to win them from him.

Then in 1174, fifteen years since the struggle began, Barbarossa resolved on a fourth invasion of Italy. It was even more elaborately conceived than the one which had ended so badly in 1167. But both at Ancona and at Alessandria the Imperialists were thwarted. Behind Frederick's back Germany seethed with discontent, and once again he turned to negotiations. In the March of 1176 he was, however, once more in the field and made a sudden move against Milan. It was the prelude to the end, for, after years of organisation, the exasperated Lombards were now ready for him. The army of the League did not wait to be locked up, and in the fiercely fought battle of Legnano (March 29, 1176) they routed the emperor and destroyed his army. For three days it was thought that Frederick himself had fallen, and then, a solitary dishevelled fugitive, he stumbled into Pavia, alive but broken finally.

It was, however, long indeed before his haughty spirit would accept the fact. In October he made an effort to separate the pope from his Lombard allies, offering him recognition as pope, restoration of all the usurped rights and fiefs, and the surrender of the Matildine lands.239 Alexander was too loyal to be caught, and proposed a council at Ferrara at which the Lombards and the Sicilians too should be represented. The council appointed commissioners to meet in Venice and prepare there a definitive treaty. When it seemed that the discussion over the Matildine lands would wreck the conference Alexander's diplomacy proposed a compromise. There should be a truce for six years, Frederick acknowledging Alexander as pope and the question of the Matildine lands being left for a further fifteen years; meanwhile they were to remain in the emperor's hands. Frederick's entourage brought him round to accept and on July 25, 1177, outside St. Mark's, he knelt before the pope begging for absolution. Pope and emperor together entered the great church, and eight days later the Peace of Venice was solemnly ratified. Alexander's "active patience" had been indeed rewarded, and in April, 1178 he was once more in occupation of Rome.

For the first time since his election, nearly nineteen years before, the pope was free to devote himself wholly to the normal work of the Church. His situation resembled not a little that of Calixtus II in 1123, and the shrewd mind of this first of the lawyer popes resolved to inaugurate in a new General Council the recovery of a spirituality brought low, inevitably, by twenty-five years of bitter division.

THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF 1179

It was not the least of the tragedies of Barbarossa's aggression that it deprived the Church of a great constructive reformer, Alexander III, nineteen years of whose long reign the emperor contrived to fill with a struggle where life itself was the issue. Roland Bandinelli is, after St. Bernard, the greatest personage of his century. He was essentially of his age, in sympathy with all its aspirations, a pioneer of the new theological method and, as became Gratian's first great commentator, possessed of a mind that read principles behind decrees, tendencies in events. That. such a man should be elected pope in the very maturity of his powers, and that such a pope should reign for the almost unprecedented period of two-and-twenty years, ought to have sufficed to undo all the mistakes of the many less gifted pontiffs who, since the death of Urban II, had endeavoured to reap the harvest of the great age of St. Gregory VII. It was, however, fated that Roland Bandinelli came to his high destiny at a moment of crisis so terrible that the work of St. Gregory's generation seemed about to be destroyed. The scholar and thinker must perforce show himself man of action. Not until the new danger was laid could the slow quiet task be taken up again of renewing a right spirit within the different members of Christ's mystical body. Alexander was an old man, close on eighty years of age in all likelihood, when, in 1179, he managed to summon the General Council240 that would seem the natural place for his great gifts to bear their fruit.

It was in fact convoked as a reform council, and as a general council so that the reform decrees might have greater prestige. It opened, apparently, on the first Monday of Lent (March 5), 1179, and among its three hundred bishops were representatives of the new Latin hierarchies of the East. There was also present an envoy from the Greek Churches, in schism now for a century.

The details of the discussions are less than scanty. There were three public sessions for the promulgation of the decrees, and the council's twenty-seven canons created, by their form, a new precedent in ecclesiastical legislation. They are longer and fuller than those of the earlier councils, nor are they set down as mere regulations, but as the expression of a legislating mind. They are much more detailed and the reasons that promote the law are given with it. The whole legislation bears the mark of the trained legal mind that had called the council and had governed it. Especially is the new spirit shown in such canons as those241 which, together, set up the law creating and detailing the right of higher authority to intervene in collations to ecclesiastical benefices wherever the competent, lower authority neglects to do so, or again in the canon242 regulating the procedure by which bishops may judge their subjects, and their subjects appeal against their judgement.

Seven canons that deal with abuses show the pope to have been keenly aware of the damage wrought by the desire of wealth in clergy and laity alike. The exaction of fees for spiritual services — burials for example — or by reason of installations is forbidden. The pomp and circumstance of prelates on visitation — and therefore the expense to their subjects — is carefully regulated. No cleric is to hold a plurality of benefices, nor is he to dispose of ecclesiastical property by will. The custom that exists in some churches of paying a certain sum on appointment as dean is abolished. The laity are forbidden to dispose of ecclesiastical benefices and forbidden, also, to levy taxes on churches. There is, for the first time in many years, no repetition of the law forbidding clerical marriage, but the customary canon against clerical concubinage is repeated. There is, too, a new prohibition that the clergy are not to frequent convents of women unless that is their special work; penalties are enacted against delinquents.

The schism lately patronised by the emperor finds an echo in the annulment of all ordinations by all the successive anti-popes — though Alexander showed himself more lenient here than Innocent II, depriving none of the repentant bishops, merely exacting a public oath of recognition and loyalty. Of more permanent importance was the legislation on papal elections that now completed the work of the Roman council of 1059. Then it had been decided that to elect the pope was the business of the cardinal clergy of Rome alone. Now — with the memory of the schisms in 1130 and 1159 fresh in the mind — it was laid down that a two- thirds majority of the voters was necessary for a valid election. Another canon fixed the age for the episcopate at thirty years and the priesthood at twenty-four. Clerics were forbidden henceforward to act as lawyers in the civil courts or as surgeons and physicians. The power of the bishops was strengthened against the encroachment of some of the new centralised exempt orders. Monks were to confine their spiritual activities to their monasteries. The principle that in capitular discussions the will of the maior et sanior pars should decide was given the highest, formal, legal sanction. In cases where more than one person had the right of presentation to a church and where the patrons could not agree, the appointment was to rest with higher authority, the custom of installing two or more rectors with joint authority being condemned.

Like the two first Lateran Councils, the council of 1179 was concerned with social problems no less than with religious questions properly so called. Tournaments were strictly forbidden. Although the sacraments might be given to those fatally injured in them — if truly repentant — on no account, should they die, were they to receive ecclesiastical burial. The Truce of God was once more proclaimed; pilgrims and all those who worked for the production of food were taken under the Church's special protection, military commanders who molested them being excommunicated. Usurers were once more banished from the Church, and the rights of lepers to the benefits of the sacraments, and even to a priest and church of their own where their numbers made this feasible, were reasserted. Christians who assisted the Saracens were heavily censured; those, too, who lent themselves out in service to them, or to the Jews. Excommunication was also laid down as the penalty for those who robbed and pillaged the victims of shipwreck.

A very celebrated canon denounced the new menace to the Church and to civilisation presented by the neo-Manichees, and also by the bands of unemployed mercenary soldiers. Against the heretics the canon appealed to the Christian princes. Against the vagabond soldiery, brigands who terrorised whole countrysides, it endeavoured to raise the whole body of the faithful in a kind of crusade for the home front. The people were bidden to take courage and to fight manfully against these devils, and to be assured that, whoever died fighting them, died in a holy war, meriting thereby pardon for his sins and a blessed eternity.243 Finally the council made it obligatory for every bishop to establish in his cathedral city a school where clerics and poor scholars might be taught, such instruction to be given without payment.

The day had not yet come when popes were to proclaim that, as God's vicars, they had a universal right of supervising earthly governments, but, as if in preparation for that claim, the newly centralised papal government of the Church was taking under its strong protection the cause of the weak and defenceless wherever found. That strength, of which the Roman Church was more and more aware as it more and more consciously centralised the organisation of its primacy, it was also beginning to use to strengthen the episcopal power throughout the world against lay usurpation and clerical acquiescence in it. To this noteworthy development, where St. Gregory VII is the pioneer, Alexander III is one of the chief contributory forces and nowhere more than in his General Council of 1179.

Notes

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