Church and State by FPB
The eloquent historian Mr Barbieri sums of the history of the struggles between Caesar and Pontiff nicely, ending with the observation that “history is the greatest of comedian and the master ironist of all ironists.”
Here is the opening paragraphs:
The history of the Western Church begins with the Pope recognized as the ultimate court of appeal. Kings were crowned by bishops and therefore could, in extreme cases, be uncrowned (as Pope Innocent did to King John Lackland, and Gregory VII to Emperor Henry). But in the late middle ages, the kings – beginning with the king of France – began to realize that they could bring the Church under their own control, and make themselves effectively lords and masters. The Great Schism was the result of this, with the king of France and his allies manipulating the Avignon succession, the Italian states (then immensely powerful) and varying numbers of allies behind the Rome succession, and eventually a third line of Popes based in Spain. This was obviously intolerable, and in the end unity was restored, but in the meanwhile Czech Bohemia had gone off on its own tangent, the Hussite revolt, which demonstrated that a whole state could break off from the Roman communion and not only survive (at least for a while) but become powerful and threatening. By the time of the Reformation, the idea of breaking away from Rome and remaking the church in whatever image the ruling classes wanted it had already become reality, which is why the revolt caught on so fast. Luther was not much of an innovator – even his public personality was pretty much imitated from that of earlier Dominican preachers, especially Tauler. But while two centuries earlier anyone would have been horrified, as if by the ending of the world, at the notion of breaking up the Church and renouncing Roman allegiance – the reason why France and the other kingdoms had tried to pull the Papacy to themselves, ripping it up in the process, was that they still thought only in terms of one Church led by one Pope – the idea could now be easily entertained, especially by lords who bordered on Bohemia and whose fathers and grandfathers had suffered from Hussite raids within living memory.
The point is that the Reformation is by no means the only assault that the papacy had to suffer in the transition from the Middle to the Modern ages. Equally poisonous, and possibly even more dangerous, was the increasing nationalization of the local Catholic churches by all the great powers – Empire/Austria, Venice, France, Spain, Portugal. By 1600, the Pope had almost no right of intervention in anything but the most shocking affairs in local churches, and the local sovereigns treated church institutions and patrimony as their own to be dealt out as they saw fit. In France, abbacies were given to women and bishoprics to atheists. In a sense, Henry VIII had blundered: the example of the kings of France and Spain showed that he could pretty much have done as much with the Church and its goods as they did, without quarrels or excommunications. The only difference between the churches of France and of England until the revolutionary age was that, while the Anglican body was open to infiltration from outright Protestants, especially Calvinists, because of its claim to be “reformed” and its general theological weakness, the Church of France was not, and the Calvinists, however strong they were in France (which was, after all, the country of origin of Calvinism), remained an excluded minority and had to develop their own institutions. But that did not spare England from a civil war very much like France’s, between the Calvinist minority and the majority – Catholic in one case, Anglican in the other. In both cases, the result was a pyrrhic victory for the Calvinists: Henry of Navarre became king of France, but had to accept the Catholic faith to be able to rule it; Parliament defeated Charles I of England, but made such a botch of governing that it was overthrown by the military leader Cromwell, and eventually had to re-admit the king and the Anglican Church.In all this, and in every other religious conflict in the seventeenth century, the struggle was about controlling the one form of Church in the State. The Puritans were certainly not fighting for religious freedom, as is shown not only by their behaviour during the English civil war but also by the kind of commonwealth they set up in north America when they had the chance. Except for late creations such as Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, state churches were the rule (the state church of Connecticut was not disestablished until1831) and intrusive religious control the norm. But this was not, it must be clear, a direct result of the mediaeval norm, so much as a perversion. In the Middle Ages, the Church was independent of the State, and judged it when necessary. It also tried to mitigate the cruel customs of the time. (It is no coincidence that slavery was legislated almost out of use in mediaeval Europe.) It did not serve the State, in so far as such a thing as the State existed – which was in fact a welter of lordships bound together by written law and personal obligation. The idea that the State could possess the Church, rather than the reverse, is a late-comer to western civilization.
Read the whole thing, here:http://fpb.livejournal.com/618317.html?nc=1#t4638029
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
