CHRISTENDOM
701
CHRISTENDOM
the empire that he could hope at that stage of history
to make its influence universal in the West. Europe
was so unformed politically that the long reign of a
« ise and determined emperor backed up by the
Church might perhaps have changed its future his-
tory, have brought together into one broad and rather
indefinite channel the small but already divergent
streams of national tendencies, and built up Europe
on the basis of a Christian federalism. But Otto,
mirabile mundi, died at the age of twenty-two,
and the dream of a Christian empire faded away.
Never again did a successor of his make a serious
attempt to throw off his German character and to
make the sphere of his rule conterminous with Chris-
tendom. Fascinating as is the theory of the Holy
Roman Empire, and great as was its influence on
history and speculation, it was always something of
a sham. It claimed in political matters a sphere of
action as wide as that of the popes in things spiritual;
but, unlike the spiritual, this political plena potestas
was never admitted. Even before the War of Investi-
tures and the First Crusade had made so wide a breach
in the imperial prestige, an Abbot of Dijon of Italian
origin could contrast the still enduring unity of the
Church with the disruption of the civil power. The
empire is generally held to have reached its zenith in
the middle of the eleventh century, but that is not the
century in which we find the ideal of a united Christen-
dom nearest its realization.
Political unity in the West was never restored after the fall of the ( 'arlovingian Empire, religious unity Is ted till the Reformation, but in the twelfth century we find, in addition, a very large measure of what may compendiously be called "social unity". Before that time isolation, disorder, and the predominance of feudalism had kept men apart; after it the develop- ment of national distinctions was to have something of the same effect. The twelfth century is therefore the period in which Christian cosmopolitanism can best be studied. The Church was naturally the chief unifying force ; in the darkest days she had preached the same gospel to Frank, Saxon, and Gallo-Roman, and her organization had been, at critical moments when the civil power had almost sunk under the flood, the only bond which linked together the populations of the West. The opening century found the Church in the midst of that Hildebrandine movement, in favour of clerical celibacy and against simony, which was necessary to save the spiritual character of the clergy from being obliterated by too close a contact with temporal administration and the material ambi- tions of feudal society. The reform, though its cen- tre was at Rome, was a European movement. Its forerunners had been found in the monasteries of Burgundy and among the students of canon law in tin Rhine cities; at the height of the struggle its lead- ers included Italians, Lorrainers, Frenchmen, and a German monastic revival. When Paschal II showed f faltering, the movement was carried on almost in spite of him by the zeal of French reformers. Even Spain, England, and Denmark caught the saving in- fection, and the eventual settlement between Church and empire was foreshadowed in the concordat, de- vised probably by a French canonist, which was agreed to by St. Anselm and Henry I. Thus did all the nations which were to be have their share in the victory of Hildebrandine principles, and there was roused throughout the West a revival of the spiritual life. The ideals of the clergy were raised, or rather they acquired strength and confidence to pursue ideals which they hail always, though despairingly, acknowlcdgi d. 'I hi- crusade against selfishness, pas- sion, and weakness brought together the clergy of the West, a.s the attack on more material foes united its peoples, and as a consequence the ecclesiastical body in the twelfth century is a real society almost con- temptuous of political or racial frontiers. We find
Frenchmen and an Englishman in the chair of St.
Peter ; an Italian, St. Anselm, at Canterbury ; a Savoy-
ard, St. Hugh, at Lincoln ; an English John of Salis-
bury at Chartres: instances such as those could be
multiplied almost indefinitely. In medieval Latin
this vast society possessed a language suited to the
varied wants of the age, and it is as living as any
vernacular if we read it in a letter of St. Anselm, a
sermon of St. Bernard, a poem of Adam of St. Victor,
the " Polycraticus" of John of Salisbury, an assize of
Henry II, the desultory chronicle of Ordericus Vitalis,
or the finished history of William of Tyre. It was a
language which might have had a greater literature
if the less simple amongst those who wrote had not
been continually harking back to classical models.
The spirit of Catholicity in the Church was guarded and prompted by the ever increasing power of the popes. The days when the Holy See had had to be rescued by the emperors from the petty and passion- ate Roman nobility must have seemed far off, and the most definite result of the War of Investitures was a second liberation, the conquest of the complete inde- pendence of papal elections. Never was the papal power in Europe so great as in the years between the end of that war in 1122 and the great disaster of the Second Crusade. Besides being the guardian of the Faith, the papacy was fast becoming the central court of Christendom. For close on two centuries, from Nicholas I to Leo IX in the middle of the eleventh century, the plenary powers of the pope had teen but exceptionally exercised north of the Alps, though they had been acknowledged in principle, but in this most legal of centuries the exercise of papal jurisdiction be- comes habitual. The Curia was treated as a court of first instance as well as a court of appeal. Hardly any subject was too small or too local to be referred to Rome: the pope, for instance, decided whether or not the Duke of Lorraine might have a castle within four miles of Toul. Papal legates might be met on all the highways of Christendom; papal courts sat in every land. Canon law grew fast, and the " Decretum " of Gratian, about the middle of the century, though it was not an authoritative collection, provided legates and judges with an admirable synthesis of papal pro- nouncements. St. Bernard was much troubled at the amount of legal business which poured in upon the pope; it must, he. considered, interfere with the more spiritual duties of his high office. But the movement was irresistible; the papacy had become de facto the centre of a vast Christian nation. The empire was, as we have seen, out of court. It was in the papacy that Christendom, a temporal as well as a spiritual society, found its head in temporal and spiritual things alike.
After the faith and the hierarchy of the Church the monastic orders have usually formed the strongest bond of Catholic union, and in the twelfth century the monastic spirit was full of life. In the previous epoch the Cluniac Benedictines had played an essen- tial part in the work of reconstruction; but life was now more complicated, and monasticism took many forms. The contemplative spirit of the old hermits inspired the Carthusian foundation of St. Bruno, "the only ancient order which has never been reformed and never required reforming", the increased demand for parish work led to the revival of regular canons, and in part to the foundation of the Premonstratensians, the Crusades produced the military orders, while in the Cistercians the new spiritual fervour with its ascetical and mystical tendencies found appropriate expression. Seldom has a new order spread with such rapidity throughout Europe as these white Bene- dictines, and St. Bernard, their great representative, is the most marvellous instance of the power of a sin- gle man, without official position, over all classes and different nations. The settlement of a disputed papal election practically depended on his verdict, he ap-
