of no discussion and which he had never doubted. Again, this
very superiority of the church implied in his eyes a superiority
of the papacy, and he did not shrink from drawing the extreme
conclusions from these premises. In other words, he claimed
the right of excommunicating and deposing incapable monarchs,
and of confirming the choice of their successors. This habit of
thought needs to be appreciated in order to understand his
efforts to bring individual states into feudal subjection to the
chair of St Peter. It was no mere question of formality, but the
first step to the realization of his ideal theocracy comprising each
and every state.
Since this papal conception of the state involved the exclusion of independence and autonomy, the history of the relationship between church and state is the history of one continued struggle. In the time of Gregory it was the question of appointment to spiritual offices—the so-called investiture—which brought the theoretical controversy to a head. The preparatory steps had already been taken by Leo IX., and the subsequent popes had advanced still further on the path he indicated; but it was reserved for Gregory and his enactments to provoke the outbreak of the great conflict which dominated the following decades. By the first law (1075) the right of investiture for churches was in general terms denied to the laity. In 1078 neglect of this prohibition was made punishable by excommunication, and, by a further decree of the same year, every investiture conferred by a layman was declared invalid and its acceptance pronounced liable to penalty. It was, moreover, enacted that every layman should restore, under pain of excommunication, all lands of the church, held by him as fiefs from princes or clerics; and that, henceforward, the assent of the pope, the archbishop, &c., was requisite for any investiture of ecclesiastical property. Finally in 1080 the forms regulating the canonical appointment to a bishopric were promulgated. In case of a vacancy the election was to be conducted by the people and clergy under the auspices of a bishop nominated by the pope or metropolitan; after which the consent of the pope or archbishop was to be procured; if any violation of these injunctions occurred, the election should be null and void and the right of choice pass to the pope or metropolitan. In so legislating, Gregory had two objects: in the first place, to withdraw the appointment to episcopal offices from the influence of the king; in the second, to replace that influence by his own. The intention was not to increase the power of the metropolitan: he simply desired that the nomination of bishops by the pope should be substituted for the prevalent nomination of bishops by the king. But in this course of action Gregory had a still more ambitious goal before his eyes. If he could once succeed in abolishing the lay investiture the king would, ipso facto, be deprived of his control over the great possessions assigned to the church by himself and his predecessors, and he could have no security that the duties and services attached to those possessions would continue to be discharged for the benefit of the Empire. The bishops in fact were to retain their position as princes of the Empire, with all the lands and rights of supremacy pertaining to them in that capacity, but the bond between them and the Empire was to be dissolved: they were to owe allegiance not to the king, but to the pope—a non-German sovereign who, in consequence of the Italian policy of the German monarchy, found himself in perpetual opposition to Germany. Thus, by his ecclesiastical legislation, Gregory attempted to shake the very foundations on which the constitution of the German empire rested, while completely ignoring the historical development of that constitution (see Investiture).
That energy which Gregory threw into the expansion of the papal authority, and which brought him into collision with the secular powers, was manifested no less in the internal government of the church. He wished to see all important matters of dispute referred to Rome; appeals were to be addressed to himself, and he arrogated the right of legislation. The fact that his laws were usually promulgated by Roman synods which he convened during Lent does not imply that these possessed an independent position; on the contrary, they were entirely dominated by his influence, and were no more than the instruments of his will. The centralization of ecclesiastical government in Rome naturally involved a curtailment of the powers of the bishops and metropolitans. Since these in part refused to submit voluntarily and attempted to assert their traditional independence, the pontificate of Gregory is crowded with struggles against the higher ranks of the prelacy. Among the methods he employed to break their power of resistance, the despatch of legates proved peculiarly effective. The regulation, again, that the metropolitans should apply at Rome in person for the pallium—pronounced essential to their qualifications for office—served to school them in humility.
This battle for the foundation of papal omnipotence within the church is connected with his championship of compulsory celibacy among the clergy and his attack on simony. Gregory VII. did not introduce the celibacy of the priesthood into the church, for even in antiquity it was enjoined by numerous laws. He was not even the first pope to renew the injunction in the 11th century, for legislation on the question begins as early as in the reign of Leo IX. But he took up the struggle with greater energy and persistence than his predecessors. In 1074 he published an encyclical, requiring all to renounce their obedience to those bishops who showed indulgence to their clergy in the matter of celibacy. In the following year he commanded the laity to accept no official ministrations from married priests and to rise against all such. He further deprived these clerics of their revenues. Wherever these enactments were proclaimed they encountered tenacious opposition, and violent scenes were not infrequent, as the custom of marriage was widely diffused throughout the contemporary priesthood. Other decrees were issued by Gregory in subsequent years, but were now couched in milder terms, since it was no part of his interest to increase the numbers of the German faction. As to the objectionable nature of simony—the transference or acquisition of a spiritual office for monetary considerations—no doubt could exist in the mind of an earnest Christian, and no theoretical justification was ever attempted. The practice, however, had attained great dimensions both among the clergy and the laity, and the sharp campaign, which had been waged since the days of Leo IX., had done little to limit its scope. The reason was that in many cases it had assumed an extremely subtle form, and detection was difficult when the simony took the character of a tax or an honorarium. The fact, again, that lay investiture was described as simony, inevitably brought with it an element of confusion, and, in the case of a charge of simoniacal practices, enormously accentuates the difficulty of determining the actual state of affairs. The war against simony in its original form was undoubtedly necessary, but it led to highly complicated and problematic issues. Was the priest or bishop, whose ordination was due to simony, actually in the possession of the sacerdotal or episcopal power or not? If the answer was in the affirmative, it would seem possible to buy the Holy Ghost; if in the negative, then obviously all the official acts of the respective priest or bishop—which, according to the doctrine of the church, presupposed the possession of a spiritual quality—were invalid. And, since the number of simoniacal bishops was at that period extremely large, incalculable consequences resulted. The difficulty of the problem accounts for the diversity of solutions propounded. The perplexity of the situation was aggravated by the fact that, if the stricter view was adopted, it followed that the sacrament of ordination must be pronounced invalid, even in the cases where it had been unconsciously sought at the hands of a simoniac, for the dispenser was in point of fact no bishop, although he exercised the episcopal functions and his transgressions were unknown, and consequently it was impossible for him to ordain others. In the time of Gregory the conflict was still swaying to and fro, and he himself in 1078 declared consecration by a simoniac null and void.
The pontificate of Gregory VII. came to a melancholy close, for he died an exile in Salerno; the Romans and a number of his most trusted coadjutors had renounced him, and the faithful band in Germany had shrunk to scant proportions. Too much
