238 



CHURCH HISTORY 



Valla demonstrated its untenability. For centuries 

 this clumsy forgery formed one or the supports of 

 the Papacy in its struggle for universal supremacy. 

 The connection between the churches of the East 

 and West had been already loosened by the schism 

 of 484-519 during the Monophysite controversy, 

 and by the iconoclastic policy of the emperors 

 from Leo to Theophilos (717-842). At length the 

 progressive centralisation of the Western Church 

 under the Roman see, to whose authority the 

 ' oecumenical bishops ' of Constantinople could not 

 submit, and in the llth century the transfer by the 

 Bulgarians of their allegiance from Constantinople 

 to Rome, led to a final rupture. The patriarch 

 Photius already in 867 laid down the dogmatic 

 basis of the Schism as consisting in the western 

 deviations from the dogmas, customs, and constitu- 

 tional forms of the ancient church, especially the 

 addition of the ' filioque ' clause to the creed of 

 Nicpea and Constantinople, teaching that the Holy 

 Spirit proceeds not only from the Father, but also 

 from the Son. The severance was completed on 

 the 16th July 1054, when the papal legates laid 

 the anathema on the altar of St Sophia in Con- 

 stantinople. 



The growth of Monasticism, from the beginning 

 a lay movement in pursuit of the old ideal of 

 Christian perfection, which men felt that a 

 worldly priesthood no longer represented, entered 

 at first into competition with the clergy, but 

 gradually became subservient to Catholic aims. In 

 the East, where the contemplative life prevailed, 

 the best function of the monasteries was as nurseries 

 of the priesthood, while the monks of the West 

 christianised Germany and Britain, cultivated 

 wildernesses, preserved the classic treasures of 

 antiquity, ana were the diligent teachers of the 

 common people. Above all the monastic orders, 

 the Benedictines can claim the glory of conspicuous 

 services to Christian missions and intellectual 

 culture. ' In the 9th and 10th centuries,' says 

 Gibbon, ' the reign of the gospel and of the Church 

 was extended over Bulgaria, Hungary, Bohemia, 

 Saxony, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, and 

 Russia. . . . The admission of the barbarians into 

 the pale of civil and ecclesiastical society delivered 

 Europe from the depredations by sea and land of 

 the Normans, Hungarians, and Russians. The 

 establishment of law and order was promoted by 

 the influence of the clergy ; and the rudiments of 

 art and science were introduced into the savage 

 countries of the globe.' In the West, men held 

 that the Holy Roman Empire, consolidated by 

 Charles and Otto the Great, was the embodiment 

 of the ideal state, and that God had two vicars on 

 earth, the emperor in temporal things, and the 

 pope in spiritual things. 'The analogy of the 

 two,' says Bryce, 'made them appear parts of one 

 great world-movement towards unity ; the coincid- 

 ence of their boundaries, which had begun before 

 Constantine, lasted long enough after him to 

 associate them indissolubly together, and make 

 the names of Roman and . Christian convert- 

 ible. . . . The Holy Roman Church and the Holy 

 Roman Empire are one and the same thing in two 

 aspects ; and Catholicism, the principle of the 

 universal Christian society, is also Romanism ; that 

 is, rests upon Rome as the origin and type of its 

 universality, manifesting itself in a mystic dual- 

 ism which corresponds to the two natures of its 

 Founder. As divine and eternal, its head is the 

 pope, to whom souls have been intrusted ; as 

 human and temporal, the emperor, commissioned to 

 rule men's bodies and acts.' In the first half of the 

 middle ages the Church believed herself to be co- 

 extensive with the Kingdom of God, the realisation 

 of the noblest ethical ideal, and her servants con- 

 ceived it their highest duty to labour to make the 



whole field of human life subject to her supremacy. 

 Not even the moral declension of the Papacy in 

 the centuries succeeding Charles the Great, espe- 

 cially during the sixty years' so-called Pornocracy 

 ( 904-963 ), could quench the ardour of the Church's 

 faith in that ideal ; and the cloister, purged and 

 strengthened by successive reforms, saved the autho- 

 rity of the Church by uniting in Gregory VII. the 

 monastic ideal of self-renunciation with the ecclesi- 

 astical ideal of the conquest of the world. 



At the great Lateran Council under Pope 

 Innocent III. in 1215, the Catholic Church was at 

 the zenith of its power. Innocent was the sun, 

 and from him the princes of Christendom held their 

 light in fee. The Crusaders, though unable to 

 hold Jerusalem, had enhanced the prestige of the 

 Papacy ; and Scholasticism placed its skill and 

 learning at the service of the Church. TheWald- 

 enses and Albigenses were to be crushed relent- 

 lessly, and the Inquisition was now established for 

 their permanent repression. No persecutions which 

 the Church had ever suffered are to be compared for 

 determined cruelty with those which in this period 

 she inflicted on the heretics of southern France 

 and of the Netherlands. Emperors and kings 

 might contend with Rome for temporal authority ; 

 they were ready to decree the burning of heretics 

 as much as she desired. But this unrestricted sway 

 brought its own downfall. After the Papacy in the 

 Avignon sojourn (1305-77) had become the tool 

 of French policy, and after all the contrivances of 

 pious fraud had been resorted to, during the Schism 

 of 1378 to 1409, to fill the coffers of rival popes 

 at Avignon and at Rome, the people began to lose 

 faith in the holiness of the hierarchy, and the ever 

 louder cry for ' reformation of the Church in its head 

 and members ' became irresistible. The Schism of 

 thirty years, during which two popes claimed the 

 same divine prerogative, was the most direct con- 

 tradiction of the doctrine that had obtained in the 

 Catholic Church since the time of Hildebrand, that 

 the Papacy was the unifying centre of Christendom. 

 The conviction gained ground that even its autho- 

 rity was subject to that of an oecumenical council. 

 In the development of this idea a twofold tendency 



B'esented itself. One party, that of Gerson and 

 'Ailly, which prevailed at the councils of Pisa and 

 Constance, regarded the council as representative 

 only of the hierarchy, and, while recognising the 

 Papacy as a divine institution, aimed at restricting 

 the absolutism of the papal see by the co-rule of a 

 spiritual aristocracy, consisting of the bishops and 

 the doctors of the universities. The other, mainly 

 composed of German theologians, made the first 

 attempt within the medieval Church to undermine 

 the Roman Catholic conception of the Church by a 

 distinction between the ecclesia universalis the 

 spiritual community of all believers and the 

 ecclesia Romana, of which the pope was head. 

 The second party regarded this una catholica ecclesia 

 alone as infallible, and held that the council repre- 

 sented not only all classes of the hierarchy, but all 

 classes of Christendom ; and that church reform 

 was a duty that fell to the secular power, not only 

 the princes, but also the entire body of the laity. 

 But all the resolutions of the three great re- 

 forming councils were made void by the pitiful 

 issue of the Council of Basel in the Concordat of 

 Vienna in 1448, when the fathers of the council 

 recognised Nicholas V., and received the holy 

 father's forgiveness. Thus ended the last attempt 

 towards the reformation of the Church on its old 

 foundations. 



At length the teaching of the Lollards and 

 Hussites, the failure of the councils, and the 

 shameless traffic in indulgences ; the impotent 

 conclusion of Scholasticism that philosophy and 

 religion might both be true, though contradic- 



