Might the “big R” Reformation of the sixteenth century and the “big R” Revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth owe something to the first great revolution that made Old Europe in the first place?

It has been noted that historians are creatures professionally invested in change. We should therefore suspect them when they speak of revolutions, reformations, and renaissances. Having thus alerted the reader and done my due diligence, I shall proceed to do as historians are wont to do. If pressed to stake my professional reputation on the most significant revolution in the history of Western Civilization—excluding Agricultural Revolutions, which are the best sorts of revolutions insofar as they give life rather than take it—I’d put my money on the Gregorian Reform movement (c. 1046-1122/and beyond…)—a revolution that disturbed l’ancien régime of sacred kingship that preexisted medieval Christendom. The consequences of this revolution are still with us.

In the year 1046, the soldiers of Henry III, Emperor of the Romans, evicted the disgraced and dissolute Pope Benedict IX from the Lateran Palace for the final time. After a brief pontificate by Pope Damasus II, there came to the Petrine throne a monk named Bruno who took the name of Leo IX. Pope Leo IX was committed to the program of reform—a discourse of ecclesiastical purity and “freedom” from the authority of laymen incubated in the transalpine monasteries of the tenth and eleventh centuries. In becoming pope, the reforming monk had sacrificed nothing of this uncompromising vision. Indeed, now that the papacy would become the instrument for this discourse to break out of monastic confinement and metastasize throughout the limbs of the universal Church with irreversible effects.

The lords of Christendom—from local strongman all the way up to the emperor—were at first only too willing to assist the reformers. This only made sense. Afterall, the Imperium Christianum of Charlemagne and his descendants had essentially run off of the “prayer-wattage” churned out at monasteries. In the understanding of the Carolingians, their armies rose and fell with the hands of the priests and monk-priests extended in prayer and supplication—so those hands had better be spotless. Amidst the wreckage of the Imperium—torn apart in the ninth and tenth centuries by civil war and heathen armies—the Christians had sheltered around their monasteries as beleaguered citadels of God under siege by the forces of Satan. Great lords and ladies took the monasteries and churches into their own hands and gave them their protection. But the flipside of that coin is control. At the local level, monasteries and churches were the property of armed men. At the highest levels, kings appointed bishops and invested them with staff and ring—the symbols of their sacred office. Meanwhile, by the sacred oil and blessings of coronation, churchmen assured kings of the sacrality of their office (whilst reminding them of their duties to the Church). By his anointing the king was nothing less than a christ—the anointed of the Lord—as had been Saul, David, and Solomon of old. And though the emperor now spoke German, not Latin or Greek, still he was hailed as the visible Bridegroom of God’s Holy Roman Church—just as Eusebius had once envisioned Constantine as God’s icon.

If this all sounds very bizarre to you, that is proof of how successful the Gregorian Reformers in fact were. The thoroughness of their work is revealed by how we have come to see the working arrangement between king and priest that was old Christendom as somehow “foreign” or “unnatural” to the spirit of the “West.” Rather, we look on the specter of the “priest-king” as a wraith out of the “decadent” Orient.

But how did that coup happen? At first, the church liberty movement aimed at the purification of the clergy. This movement began in the monasteries. In 909/910, Duke William the Pious of Aquitaine established the monastery of Cluny in Burgundy. The charter he issued establishing the community is in certain respects entirely conventional: his motives for so doing are both pious and self-interested. He and his family will be depending upon the constant prayers of these monks for their salvation—the best hope for men and women entangled in the flesh-and-blood transactions of the feudal world. But the prayers of these monks at Cluny will be especially effective, it is hoped, insofar as these monks will be free. And this is where Duke William did something strange. He made Cluny independent of every lord and patron—including himself, the King of France, and even the local bishop—save only for the holy Apostles Peter and Paul and, by extension, vague rights of oversight given to the pope of Rome. This should leave the monks free to dedicate themselves to the constant round of liturgical prayer upon which Duke William had staked the salvation of his soul.

This unprecedented act of self-divestment of lordly authority began a trend. It spread like a fire from region to region as local lords did likewise and surrendered their monasteries to Cluny, which was becoming a great monastic empire. Although it is possible to emphasize too much the connection between Cluniac monasticism and the reformer popes of the eleventh century, the transalpine monastic freedom movement provides an essential background to the coming of the reform movement to Rome.

During the pontificate of Pope Leo IX, the Roman Church transformed herself into the champion of reform and church liberty. If the Church would be free, then her priests must be pure, and this requires their separation from a world that turned upon the principles of inheritance and gift-exchange—which is to say, upon sex and money. Hence the reformers identified simony (the exchange of money for sacerdotal grace) and “nicolaitism” (priestly marriage) as the two main factors of contagion infecting the Latin clergy. The papacy went on the offensive. Pope Leo IX actually crossed the Alps in order to wage war on simony and the marriages of priests within the heart of Germanic Christendom. He and his skilled collaborators—men such as Peter Damian, Humbert, and Hildebrand—won over the Christian people, into whose minds they planted demands for clerical purity; assisted by the people, the pope and his men confronted “unreformed” bishops throughout Francia, humiliated them publicly, and deposed or reinstituted them at will. A fire was burning over what had once been Charlemagne’s Christian Empire. Through the reformers’ efforts, the faithful people became troubled by the idea that money changing hands from the candidate for holy orders to his bishop might well impede the flow of sacramental grace from the latter to the former, with disastrous implications for the validity of the sacraments imparted by those simoniac priests thereafter. And even if the reformers did not manage to convince the majority of rank-and-file clergy to give up their women, they managed to rebrand the priest’s wife as the priest’s “concubine.”

In so doing, the reform movement successfully distinguished the clergy from the laity, even if this distinction was all too often normative rather than a lived reality. Hence, in theoretical terms a tripartite social paradigm—distinguishing between three orders of “those who work” (peasants), “those who fight” (aristocrats), and “those who pray” (clergy)—would come to supersede the older dichotomous model of the “powerful” versus “the poor.” These three orders would remain with us until the era of the modern revolutions.

But the reformers were not done yet. If the “powerful” had given way to “those who fight” and “those who pray,” both of which constituted integral castes within a coherent Christian society, the question remained: who’s in charge here? Since Constantine, theorists of Christian society had imagined royal power and priestly authority as equally sourced out of divine authority—only terminologically distinct, but in reality inextricably entangled in one imperium sacrum. It was hard to pit the priest against the king when both were charged with one and the same sacred aura. But now that priest had been distinguished from king in terms starker than ever: as spirit is to flesh, so the priest is to the king—mutually antagonistic until the latter is subjected utterly to the former.

This then brings us to the great dramatic act of the Gregorian Reform: The War of the Investitures, which pitted Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) against the German King Henry IV (1054-1106). The occasion for controversy was typically medieval in that it was a matter of liturgy and ritual: did the king have the authority to hand over to bishops-elect their crozier and ring, the symbols of their episcopal office? But behind this question of ritual prerogative lay the deeper question: is the king the visible head of Christendom, such that the episcopal office is subject to his bequest? In the Middle Ages liturgy is never simply ceremony. Nor was the conflict between Gregory and Henry a mere metaphorical war of words—although it certainly included that—men took up arms and cities were put under siege. The antagonists knew full well what was at stake: nothing less than the correct ordering of the Christian cosmos. Driven by these high stakes to acts ever more desperate, Pope Gregory released Henry’s vassals from their oaths of loyalty and so attempted to dissolve the fabric of feudal society itself through the might of St. Peter. (Among Pope Gregory’s favorite Biblical quotations was Jeremiah 48:10: Maledictus qui prohibet gladium suum a sanguine). King Henry would march on Rome and put it under siege for four long years and forced the pope to flee ignominiously to foreign protectors. “I have loved justice and hated iniquity,” the pope uttered from his sickbed, “and therefore I die in exile.” The conflict was inherited and fought out by the antagonists’ successors. When the dust settled in 1122 a compromise between king and priest was brokered. The king had lost control of “his” bishops. He had surrendered the right to invest with ring and staff. And down with it went the sacred king. To be sure—some uncomfortable vestiges of the priest-king remained: the liturgy of his coronation, his anointing, his healing touch. But in the post-Gregorian West the priest-king had lost his place. Constantine and Charlemagne were remembered as good kings not because they were priestly, but because they were obedient to priests.

But what of consequences? In my view, the Gregorian Reform and its highpoint in the War of the Investitures brought in its wake results both immediate and delayed, political as well as ideological. Immediately and politically, the cohesion of the Germanic Reichskirche was shattered. Although the Hohenstaufen would give the papacy trouble in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, ever after the Empire was a shattered kaleidoscope of more-or-less autonomous polities. The legacy of the Roman Empire in the West would be perpetuated by the Roman pontiff, not the German emperor. In the short term ideologically, the arrangement of powers in Christendom came to be described by a series of analogies that became recurrent memes in politico-ecclesial discourse: kingship is the body, priesthood is the soul; kingship is the moon, priesthood is the sun; there are two swords: the spiritual sword retained by the priest and the carnal sword he delegates to the king so that he might draw blood. Such cliches disclose the Gregorian ordering of the Christian cosmos.

What about results more delayed, but also more serious? Is it possible that the same men who promoted the idea of the tri-partite society (clergy, aristocrats, peasants) might have, at the same time, sown the seeds for its overthrow? (Of course, it should always be emphasized that theories are theories and realities were always more complex and shifting). Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution are the 3 “R words” that we have associated (rightly or wrongly) with the dawn of Modernity. This picture deserves to be complicated—that is what this modest essay is trying to do anyway. We have heard of medieval renaissances in the ninth and twelfth centuries. Reformation, moreover, was a Latin Christian habit of mind well before the sixteenth century. We can even detect deeper continuities spanning the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and linking them together into one “Old Europe.”

All that said, might the “big R” Reformation of the sixteenth century and the “big R” Revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth owe something to the first great revolution that made Old Europe in the first place? Maybe it sounds fanciful, but consider the following. Crossing hither and yon over Western Europe in quest of a Church that was free and pure, medieval reformers left in their wake radicalized Christians. Even if the reformers had not always succeeded in their concrete efforts, they had certainly succeeded in sowing the minds of “the people” with expectations that the Church ought to be pure, even if her ministers so often fell below that standard. We take it for granted that clergy should behave especially well, but it isn’t inevitable: why should your priest be morally upright when he can do really awesome tricks like make the bread and wine into God’s Body and Blood? But what if the priest’s ability to do that depended on his purity? Many reformers shied away from going to that extreme, but they got awfully close. Unless there had been radical Christians throughout Western Europe harboring expectations of clerical purity and forever disappointed by clerical realities, could the magisterial Reformation of the sixteenth century have happened?

And then there is Revolution. It seems only by the slenderest of threads that we could connect the agitation of Pope Gregory VII and his associates with the upheavals of 1789 and 1848. And yet, I would draw attention to the fact that the Gregorian reformers essentially engaged in a discourse of anti-kingship: not because they preferred democracy, but because they preferred priesthood. Pope Gregory VII made the argument that mere monarchy is inherently profane—there is nothing sacred about it—until it is legitimated by God through his high priest. Indeed, Pope Gregory VII—as had his predecessor Pope Gregory II in his letters against Byzantine Emperor Leo III—characterized kingship as an occupation for thugs. In so doing, the revolutionaries were striking back against a tradition of sacral monarchy that, in its Christian incarnation, stretched back to Eusebius and the Emperor Constantine—which is to say the beginning of the Church as a public institution. The distances that the priest-revolutionaries would go in making their case may be observed in the polemic of Manegold of Lautenbach, who actually argued that if a king can be deposed by his people as a result of violating their mutual compactand he can be so deposed!—then, a fortiori, the Roman pontiff can depose a king. Dangerous words.

If there is something to this, we are left with a supreme irony. The very architects of Old Europe apparently concealed in the foundations of that edifice the ideas and “memes” that would ultimately destroy it. I am not saying that Pope Gregory VII and his followers intended this. Far from it: they were sincerely committed to liberating the Church. But long before Martin Luther invoked the common priesthood of all believers against the “Romanists,” a Roman pontiff invoked the common kingship of all believers against the imperialists. And if we recognize ourselves to live in a “Secular Age,” we reflect that it is to Hildebrand and his comrades—priests of the eleventh century—that we owe our modern concept of the “secular” in the first place.[*]

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RECOMMENDED READING:

R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution (c. 970-1215) (Blackwell Publishing, 2000)

Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300 (University of Toronto Press, 1988, reprinted 2004)

Schafer Williams, ed., The Gregorian Epoch: Reformation, Revolution, Reaction? Problems in European Civilization (D.C. Heath and Company, 1964)

[*] Certainly, I am not suggesting that the term saecularis -e (derived from saeculum) was not used before the eleventh century. Nor am I asserting that political theorists did not distinguish between kingship (regnum) and priesthood (sacerdotium) in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages. However, in articulating a discourse of kingship (qua kingship) as inherently profane, the reformers expressed a view of political authority that is emptied of sacrality—that is, something approaching our notions of the “secular.” My thanks to John Yost, M.A., for his critical comments and suggestions.

The featured image is an illustration from The Lives and Times of the Popes by Chevalier Artaud de Montor, (New York: The Catholic Publication Society of America, 1911), originally published in 1842, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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