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Also in the Collected Studies Series: RENEMETZ La femme et l'enfant dans Ie droit canonique medieval MARCELPACAUT Doctrines politiques et structures ecclesiastiques en Occident medieval REINHARD ELZE Papste-Kaiser-K6nige und die mittelalterliche Heerschaftssymbolik
C. R. CHENEY The Papacy and England , 12th-14th Centuries
Holiness and Politics in Early Medieval Thought
STEPHAN KUTTNER Gratian and the Schools of Law, 1140-1234 STEPHAN KUTTNER The History of Ideas and Doctrines .of Canon Law in the Middle Ages JEAN GAUDEMET La societe ecclesiastique dans I'Occident medieval JEAN GAUDEMET Eglise et societe en Occident au Moyen Age YVESCONGAR Droit ancien et structures ecclesiales YVESCONGAR Thomas d'Aquin . Sa vision de theologie et de I'EgJise PETER LINEHAN Spanish Church and Society, 1150-1300 YVES DOSSAT Eglise et heresie en France au XUIe siecle ARYEH GRABOIS Civilisation et societe dans I'Occident medieval RAYMONDE FOREVILLE Thomas Becket dans la tradition historique et hagiographique BERNARD HAMILTON Monastic Reform, Catharism and the Crusades (900-1300)
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Kar 1 F. Morrison ///
L Holiness and Politics
in Early Medieval Thought
Professor Karl F. Morrison
VARIORUM REPRINTS London 1985
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Morrison, Karl F. Holiness and politics in early medieval thought. - (Collected studies series; CS219) 1. Sociology, Christian - History - Middle Ages, 600--1500 1. Title 261.1'094 BT738
CONTENTS
ISBN 0--86078-167-4 Copyright©1985 by
Variorum Reprints
Introduction I
Rome and the City of God. An Essay on the Constitutional Relationships of Empire and Church in the Fourth Cen tury
vii-ix
3-55
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 54 part 1. Philadelphia, 1964
II
"Unum ex multis": Hincmar of Rheims' Medical and Aesthetic Rationales for Unification
583-712
Nascita dell' Europa ed Europa Carolingia: un'equazione da verificare. XXVII Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sul/'alto medioevo (Spoleto, 1979). Spoleto, 1981
III
Published in Great Britain by
Variorum Reprints 20 Pembridge Mews London Wl1 3EQ
Printed in Great Britain by
Galliard (Printers) Ltd Great Yarmouth Norfolk VARIORUM REPRINT CS219
The Church, Reform and Renaissance in the Early Middle Ages
143-159
Life and Thought in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Robert S. Hoyt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967
IV
Canossa: a Revision Traditio XVIII. New York, 1962
121-148
VI
v
The Structure of Holiness in Othloh 's Vita Bonifatii and Ebo's Vita Ottonis
131-156
Law, Church and Society . Essays in Honor of Stephan Kuttner, ed. Kenneth Pennington and Robert Somerville. Philadelphia: Uni versity of Pennsy lvania Press, 1977
VI
Otto of Freising's Quest for the Hermeneutic Circle
INTRODUCTION
207-236
Speculum 55. Cambridge, Mass. , 1980
1-6
Index
This volume contains a total of 302 pages.
The essays collected in this volume address three moments in the formation of Europe: the age of the Church Fathers, the Carolingian era, and the Investiture Conflict, together with its aftermath. The moments were scattered over a range of 900 years; their great dramas were enacted in widely dissimilar circumstances, lands , and cultures. Yet, they were alike. For, at each juncture, Christians were compelled, both to reflect upon their place in the world , and to reform the world according to their doctrines. At the conversion of the Roman Empire , the most decisive revolution in western history before the twentieth century; again , after the fall of Rome, at the grafting of Christianity and the Church hierarchy onto the political order of Germanic tribes; and, finall y, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at the first great clash between pope and emperor, the two heads of Latin Christendom , Christians heard from the Gospel the same lordly call to transform the political order into an instrument of holiness. There were constants in the ebb and flow of centuries and cultures . This continuity existed , in large part , because Christians in every age considered Scripture the only infallible rule of life. Thus , at every age , writers invoked the same commandments, parables , and events from Scripture as guides for infusing politics with holiness. However, there were perplexities, even in the constant letter of Scripture. Scripture, for example, commanded Christians both to hate the world that rejected them and to love their enemies , both to withdraw from and to overcome the world, both to lay aside and to acquire the sword. Relating texts from dead societies to living institutions posed other practical difficulties. Thus , ambiguities and contradictions were part of Scripture itself, and these difficulties at the source ramified through the varied and often mutually repellent interpretations drawn from Scripture. Much depended on the results , including the relation of the secular power of kings to the spiritual authority of bishops , and the place of coercion in the service of faith.
viii
ix
During the long centuries when Europe was formed, therefore, political thinking was for Christians an effort to apply God's eternal truths to the world's changing circumstances; but, departing from the same principles, minds reached different and sometimes contradictory conclusions. The following essays describe some of the quandaries repeatedly encountered as the tradition of political thought in the West lengthened and matured. Throughout the nine centuries represented here, fundamental questions persisted; conclusions regarding the proper relation between temporal and spiritual orders of government likewise fell within the same range. However, between question and answer came a process of reasoning. How did a given writer reach, verify, and defend his assertions? What method of inference made his conclusions thinkable to him? What formative movement led to up, and was incorporated in, the finished doctrine? While questions and answers remained constant, processes of moving from the one to the other differed. Most of the following essays describe examples of such transitional methods. It will be readily apparent that my address to those intervening processes has changed over the years. As I reflected on political doctrines and the ways of thinking that they incorporated, I slowly realized that the bewildering array of analogues, metaphors, and allegories in which writers expressed their doctrines actually made up a coherent, if remarkably variable, structure of inference. That structure revolved about the poles of likeness and unlikeness; its dynamic principle was imitation (or mimesis). It gradually became obvious to me that the recognition of likeness and unlikeness, and the play of imitation, fundamental in the mental formation of children, had been taken up into philosophy and theology to elucidate the formation of societies and, indeed, of all human experience, in the panorama of history. As to political thought, the dynamic of mimesis reconciled what might have appeared to be the contrary demands of eternal truth and changing circumstances. No temporal image could fully reproduce an eternal model. Thus, in the quest for spiritual perfection, Christians believed, history could rush onward, in an ever-widening river of innovation, as mankind grew in likeness to the archetype according to which it had originally been made. Mankind progressed by imitation. As part of the tradition of formal thought (and not simply of everyday experience, endlessly repeated), the mimetic structure of inference was not limited to the centuries represented in
this book. It originated in the classical world, matured during the formation of Europe, and persisted, with many variations, to the present day. I attempted to describe its career in my book, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, 1982). Quite understandably, the later essays in this volume express a clearer awareness of the mimetic structure of inference, and of the mimetic tradition as a whole, than do the earlier ones. However, it is instructive to detect, even in the earliest essays, the language and syntax of mimesis . Without my knowing it, the evidence was able even there to speak for itself, demanding continual reform in the interplay of holiness and politics, glorifying want, pain, and death in warfare against spiritual wickedness and unbelief, and still teaching that the kingdom of God was not of this world. Experience in the three ages considered here ingrained this idealist, relentless, and militant questing into the character of Europe. KARL F. MORRISON
Lawrence, Kansas March 1985
I ROME AND THE CITY OF GOD An Essay on the Constitutional Relationships of Empire and Church in the Fourth Century
CONTENTS
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
PAGE
The articles in this volume, as in all others in the Collected Studies Series , have not been given anew, continuous pagination. In order to avoid confusion, and to facilitate their use where these same studies have been referred to elsewhere, the original pagination has been maintained wherever possible. Each article has been given a Roman number in order of appearance, as listed in the Contents . This number is repeated on each page and quoted in the index entries.
Introduc tion ..... , ..........•.........•. P ART I : Legal principle-s ..... . . .. .. . • . .. ....• ••• ..... 1. Civitas Dei . . . . . . . . ... . . . . .. ....••. .. 2. The alien empire . ......... . P ART II: Theological principles 3. 5S. Athanasius and Hilary
4. S. Ambrose
20 28 28 40
...
51
..... _.,
53 55
Conc1usion
Bibliography Index
3 8 8
"Christianity has been long ~r.ough in the world to justify us in dealing with it as a fact in the world's history . . . . It has from the first had an objective existence, and has thrown itself upon the great concourse of men. Its home is in t he world; and to know what it is, we must seek it in the world, and hear the world's witness to it."-John Henry Ne\vman, In troduction to An Essa.y on the Dt"l'clopm "Ht of Christian Doc/rille. London, 1848.
INTRODUCTION
*
Modern corporative theory owes much to mediaeval th ought concerning Church-State relations: out of that early thought ultim~tely came the present·day legal constructs according to which autonomous institutions coexist in the same society_ A critical element in the formulation of those doctrines was the concept of the Church as the City of God; a critical time in their formulation was t he fourth century, when that concept first achieved practical importance. When SI. Ambrose and his contemporaries wrote that the Church
* This essay reviews the: background of some ecclesiological positions which cante to importance in \OVes tern thought through St. Augustine's Cits of God and the later works of mediaeval Latin authors on the relations . of ecclesiastical and civil powers. Consequently, it does not consider the works of the Cappadocian Fathers, which were ultimately less influential in the W es t than were the writings of Athanasius as known in Latin translation and as reflected in the works of St. Hilary_ See G. B. Ladner, Th. Id.a of Reiorm (Harvard, 1959), p. 132, atld passim. On the Cappadocians, see F. Bauer, De.> hdligCll. Johannes Chr)!sostowllS L~ht"e iibtr den Staat mId die Kirchc uud ihr gl'gcnsntiges Verhiiltnis, Diss. Vienna, 1946. R. E. Carter, USaint John Chrysostom's Rhetorical Use of the Socratic Distinction Between Kingship and Tyranny," Tradit£o 14 (1958): 367-371. G. F. Reilly, Imperium a11d Sacerdotimn t/ccordillg to St. Basil 1/" Great (Washington, 1945 ). S. Verosta, Johannes Chr.\'soslo11UlS, Stoalsphilosoph lmd Gesthichtsthea/oge (Vienna, 1960) . L. Welse rheimb, ~'Das Kirchenbild
was the City of God, they joined two independent principles of early Christian thought: that the Church, the Kingdom of Christ, was in fact a legal corporation discrete from the civil government, and that its nature was theological. From these premises, the Fathers went on to examine the place of the City of God in this world, and particularly the relationShips of the Heavenly Kingdom to the Roman Empire. Their thought in this dimension is complex, fo r it is both theological and jurisprudentiaL Its most lasting product was the doctrine of dualism: that Christian society was rightly governed in its religious character by the Church and in its temporal character by the legally discrete institutions of the civil authority. Theological enquiries and general histories of the Church alike have tended to ignore the legal framework to which the Fathers sought to relate their doctrinal positions. Particularly, they have not taken into account the historical and intellectual continuity and parallels between the Synagogue and the Church, continuity which the Fathers frequently acknowledged. Historians of the Jewish people have pointed out the liturgical, administrative, and juristic analogies-even affinities-which persisted between the New Israel and the Old into the Ii. fth century. Ecclesiastical h isto rians, however, have been slow to prosecute this line of enquiry; and they have in practice treated the Church qua corporation as beginning anew with the conversion of Constantine, striking out in uncharted ways to find a modus vivendi with the civil power. This has also been the argument of legal historians, even of Gierke. Seeing analogies der griechischen Vaterkommentare tum Hohen Lied," Z eitschrift liir Katholischc Tlu%gie 70 ( 1948): 393-449. I ho pe to
Historia Arianorum, c. 54 (Migne, Patrologia. Graeca 2S:
760 ), with more than a touch of irony : 4'ln doing this, Constantius certainly upheld ecclesiastical canons."
14
the emperor as representing such a government in religious matters, but it rather saw him as having the power to refer general questions to proper and authoritative courts qualified to judge them. In this light, the imperial power supplemented the juridical organs of the Church, without itself being one of them or altering them in any way. Historians have been inclined to judge that the ro le of the emperors in fourth-century synodal history was incipient Caesaropapism, and that theology and ecclesiastical institutions were twisted to serve either greater imperial interests or merely the personal convictions of the emperors. This is only partially true. St. Athanasius clearly sensed the dangers of imperial intervention when he maintained that Constantius was transforming the Church into a civil senate. But the transformation was then far from complete. Relations between Church and Empire had not yet come to the point they reached under Justinian, when synodal bs ; an
resb ters who desired to attend the enquIry w~re not per~itter to do so while the said enquiry respecting th~ c p and the Table :.vas carried on before the Prefect an. IS band and in the presence of heathens and Jews. ThIS at
h'
first 'seemed incredible, but it was proved to. have been so from the reports which caused g-reat astomshment to bUS,
as I suppose, de~rly beloved, it does to yo.u also. Pres y-
ters, who are the ministers o~ the rnystt:nes, ar~ r;otbf!d mitted to attend but an enquIry concermng ChrIst s .
and Christ's body is carried on before an external Judge, in the. presence of catechumens, nay,. worse th.an that, be-
fore heathens and Jew" who are in III repute III regard to Christianity. Even supposing ~hat ap offense had. been committed it should have been lllvestIgated legally In ~e Church "';d by the clergy, not by heathens who abhor e Word and know not the Truth.''' The enquiry had been continued at the Synod ?f Tyre. But when Athanasius saw that "a Count preSIded, an executioner attended, an usher instead of the deacons of the Church introduced us into court, and the Count only spoke, while all present held their peace, or rather obeyed his directions,"'" he had appealed to