The more perfect the institutions of a state are, the more possible it is to leave ideas to influence men simply with their own inherent weight. In the time of a king like William Rufus, they needed a special organisation to give them a chance of being listened to. The system of entrusting the direction of Church affairs to the king and his Witan had not worked well. The Church might be regarded as identical with the nation, but it did not rise above the nation, did not, except in rare instances, produce men who could teach the nation to be better than it was. The performance of the duties of the clergy threatened to sink into mere routine, and their morals threatened to become no better than those of the laity around them. There was a danger lest clerical offices should sink into hereditary positions bringing no help to the souls of those for whose sake those offices had been erected. It was precisely against these evils that the great spiritual movement of the age was directed. Springing from the monastery of Cluny, it gained a hearing from emperors and popes. The remedies which it proposed were the abolition of simony, that is to say, of the purchase of Church offices, and the abolition of clerical marriage. With all allowance for the evil caused by the stringent enforcement of the latter demand, so far as it could be enforced at all, it is impossible not to see that in some form or other these ideas were indispensable to the progress of the world. It is hardly possible for us, even in imagination, to conceive a danger to modern civilisation similar in kind to that which threatened the men of the eleventh century from feudal brutality, with its contempt for mental thought and its hatred of the bonds of morality. Yet it is only by steadily keeping before us the existence of this danger, that it is possible to pass a fair judgment on the drastic remedies proposed by the medieval churchmen. Nor must it be forgotten that, in СНАР. III. $9. The Hildebrandine Papacy and the the eleventh century marriage was likely to interfere with the work of the clergy in a way in which it would not interfere with it at a later time. It was not merely that the married priest would be entangled in worldly affairs, but that it would be almost impossible to escape from a lowering influence in his own home. Medieval education was a male education. According to the ideal of the reformers of the eleventh century the priest was to be mentally as well as spiritually far above his fellow For women, save in exceptional cases, there was no education, no cultivation of the higher powers. The ideal of modern marriage, that mutual helpfulness in the higher aims of life, was impossible when the wife must of necessity be rude, untaught, familiar only with the lower and material side of the world. She would be a drag on the upward course, not a consoler and a helper. The true remedy no doubt lay not in clerical celibacy but in female education. The choice of the former is only one of the many instances which history affords of the application of a partial and unsatisfactory relief as an escape from acknowledged evils, because the complete and satisfactory relief has not entered as yet within the sphere of vision. The abolition of simony and of clerical marriage did not make up the whole of the papal programme. By degrees a third idea was added to the other two. At first Conqueror, even Hildebrand would have been content to see the remedies which he valued worked out by kings and emperors. It was only when, as Pope Gregory VII, he found that this could not be, that he gradually added the third demand for the erection of a universal clerical state of which the pope should be the absolute head, and of which the clergy in all parts of Christendom should be the willing and subservient instruments, bound by the closest ties to Rome, and by no ties at all to the society in the midst of which they lived. CHAP. § 10. The and the Temporal Pow Such an arrangement would be most objectionable in the nineteenth century; but it does not follow that it was not an object for which good men might spiritual reasonably contend in the eleventh century. Both now and then the great object is that a morality higher than the morality of ordinary men, and a knowledge deeper than the knowledge of ordinary men, shall find a standing ground from which to raise the low standard which exists. To achieve such a standing ground without disturbance of existing arrangements is to secure the real spiritual power against the temporal, and to solve the problem of the two authorities which grew up in the days of the Roman Empire, and which distracted the States of the Middle Ages. Gradually the civilised world has come to the perception that the domain of thought, of morality, and of religion is best left to the safeguard of freedom, assured by the settled conviction of peoples and governments that so it is best for all. In the eleventh century no such conviction was possible. Thought still ran in very definite channels, and had no tendency to strike out new and untrodden paths. The society of men in the world hung loosely together, troubling itself about little else than material enjoyments. The state itself was nowhere constituted as a state should be. Government in the hands of the Norman kings gave protection to the masses, but there was no welding together of governors and subjects into a harmonious whole. The arrangement made by the Conqueror was therefore perhaps, as long as his own life was prolonged, better calculated than any other to meet the difficulties of the case. He separated the bishops from all temporal affairs, and gave them courts of their own with jurisdiction over ecclesiastical offences and persons. He thus gave to the Church, the sole depositary of mental and moral authority, a position independent of Norman baron E CHAP. § 11. The Church under William Rufus. and of English freeholder. Bishops were no longer to be made without real qualifications for their office. Clergy were no longer to be upheld unless they came up to a higher standard than contented the rude peasants amongst whom they ministered. On the other hand, William, whilst outwardly acknowledging the new papal claims, practically set them at defiance. In conjunction with Lanfranc, the scholar and statesman, whom he had placed on the metropolitan throne of Canterbury, he was himself the organiser of the English Church. It was he who encouraged learning and virtue, and who selected for ecclesiastical posts such men as came up to the high continental standard, and who would not allow the pope to give orders in England which were not first submitted to himself. It was all well enough as long as the Conqueror lived. The Red King seemed to have come into the world to justify the wildest extravagance of the popes. The brute force of the king was sharpened by supereminent powers of intellect without the slightest tinge of morality. His chief minister, Ranulf Flambard, sprung from the ranks of the clergy, turned his knowledge and skill to purposes of sheer oppression. The Norman barons learned that their tenure of land subjected them to penal exactions, the right to which might logically be deduced from the conditions under which their land was held. The clergy learned that when a see was vacant, the king claimed not to provide a better occupant than his English predecessors had been content with, but to keep it vacant, in order that he might gather the revenues for himself, or when at last he gave way, might fill it with some base favourite of his own who would do all his bidding, or with some unworthy purchaser who had money to offer. For five years after Lanfranc's death the see of Canterbury itself was thus kept vacant. At last, on a sick-bed, even the Red King inclined to concession. He appointed a successor to Lanfranc, and that successor was Anselm. CHAP. selm III. Anselm was the flower of medieval monasticism,-of § 12. Anthose societies in which the obedience flowing from and Monvoluntary submission stood in such startling contrast to asticism. the obedience from fear or interest, which was the motive power of the state over which William Rufus presided. At Bec, the Norman monastery over which the Italian stranger from the Val d'Aosta ruled as Lanfranc had ruled before him, the community was bound together by ties of mutual respect. The warfare against the world, to which the brethren were called by their profession, was waged not so much by startling acts of asceticism, as by a constant persistence in humility. The precept, Confess your sins one to another, was here as a perpetual reality, as each monk in turn acknowledged his faults in the presence of all the others, humbly listening, without an angry word, to their accusations and reproofs, or submitting without a murmur even to the corporal chastisement which the brotherhood, by the voice of its chosen head, adjudged him to have deserved. The time would come, doubtless, when this order too would deservedly pass away to make room for another, in which there was more spontaneity and less rigid discipline. But as yet, the world needed an example of discipline, not of spontaneity. Nor was the work of the monks ended here. Amongst them were to be found what seeds of intellectual culture were scattered abroad. It was from a monastery that sounded forth the voice which, when all others had been hushed, still continued that tale of our national history in our old national speech, which was to be taken up in the more universal Latin by Orderic from St. Evroul and by William from Malmesbury. It was from Bec itself that Anselm proclaimed that he had fathomed the depths of the |
