Ideas
Page 60
There are three main candidates for this change in sensibility. One was the growth of cities. These promoted the development of different professions outside the church–lawyers, clerks, teachers. Suddenly there was more choice than ever before. A second candidate was the changing ownership of land, which encouraged a trend to primogeniture, brought in to slow the division of estates, which made them vulnerable to attack. One important side-effect of this was that younger sons, denied their birthright, were forced elsewhere in search of their fortunes. As often as not, this involved attaching themselves to other courts, as fighters. Such a society soon evolved a taste for heroic literature (younger sons seeking their fortunes), and it was amid this set of circumstances that the ideas of chivalry and courtly love emerged (though there were other reasons). All at once the intimate emotions moved centre-stage. For example, the focus on love stimulated an interest in personal appearance, meaning that the twelfth century was a time of daring innovation in dress, another way in which a growing individuality was expressed.50
A third stimulant to change was the renaissance of the twelfth century, the rediscovery of classical antiquity, which among other things forced people to acknowledge the shortcomings of the immediate past, to admit that the classical authors had shown that men may vary in their motives, in the way they solve common problems, and even that a full life was possible outside the church.51 No less important, the new scholasticism showed that the great authorities of the past sometimes disagreed and disagreed profoundly. People were thus forced to rely on themselves, to find new solutions–their own–and to fashion a new doctrine. And this produced what was perhaps the most revolutionary idea of all: individual faith.52 It was summed up, says Richard Southern, by the phrase ‘Know yourself as a way to God’. The basic idea was that each soul was coloured by the individual’s mind, that individuals had a lot in common with each other but that they also differed in the extent to which they approached God.53 This change should not be overstated. It mainly affected the elite. There was added variety in worship but for the masses they still looked upon themselves as groups, as congregations.
An associated reason was the arrival, and passing, of the millennium, the year AD 1000 in the chronology of the time. While there were those who, around 1000, still expected an apocalyptic change in the order of life on earth, as the eleventh century progressed, and nothing happened, a belief in the resurrection of the body could not be sustained for ever. As a result, mystical thought increased and there was a rise in so-called Jerusalem literature, mainly in the form of new hymns. This involved a change in the meaning of Jerusalem. The city was no longer expected to descend from heaven, to form paradise on earth–instead the aim was to reach the New Jerusalem in heaven. This was a major shift because it implied that not everyone would be saved, only those who earned it. In turn, this promoted the idea of individual salvation.54 These new ideas were reflected in an important change in the representation of the crucifix in art. In the early Middle Ages, there was a fairly standard iconography, in which the triumphant Christ is nailed to the cross, watched by Mary and John. The figure of Christ is alive and upright, feet side-by-side on a support. His eyes are open, his arms straight, he shows no sign of suffering. His face is often beardless and young. It is a remarkable fact that in the first thousand years of the church’s history, years in which death was all around and threatening to most people, the figure of the dead Christ was almost never depicted. ‘The crucifix was conceived as an expression of the triumph of Christ, the Lord of all things’ (Pantocrator).55 Christian tradition was uneasy about considering Christ as a suffering man, and preferred to see in him the expression of divine power. In the eleventh century, in contrast, we suddenly find Jesus slumped in agony, or dead, dressed in a flimsy loincloth and all too human in his degradation. The concern now is with the sorrow of Jesus, his inward suffering.
The old, pre-change mentality was evident most in the liturgy of the church.56 The kings and aristocracy were so concerned to maintain monastic ritual that the government of the time has been described with justification as ‘the liturgical state’. For example, at Cluny, the biggest and most influential monastic centre of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the liturgy grew so much and became so complicated that it swallowed up the time allotted to study and manual labour. The bloated liturgy, together with the proliferation of vast buildings despite the fact that the peasants routinely lacked many of the bare necessities of life, and not least the conduct of ritual in a language incomprehensible to most of the laity–all this underlined the lack of individuality, as did the monastic practice of world-renunciation.57 Amid all this the ordinary, lay individual was allowed only to witness the re-enactment of God’s victory in Christ, not take part.58 The brutality and violence of the Middle Ages also played a part, for in the unhappy world of the tenth century, withdrawal seemed to many the only path to salvation.59 This very different psychology is reinforced by the fact that, until about 1100, Christians believed that man had been created in order to make up for the number of fallen angels. In other words, man’s purpose was not human but angelic. Man should not expect to develop his own nature, ‘but to become something quite different’.60 Hymns at this stage are communal, not personal.
Colin Morris notes that, in the literature of the early Middle Ages, especially in epic poetry, the stories inevitably narrate conflicts of loyalty and formal obligations in a rigid aristocratic and hierarchical society. There is next to no scope for personal initiative, or for the representation of the more intimate emotions.61 But this too broke down in the eleventh century. Now we find an increased desire for self-expression. For example, there was in the period 1050–1200 a huge increase both in the preaching of sermons and in the extent to which individual interpretations of the gospel was advocated. Here is Guibert of Nogent: ‘Whoever has the duty of teaching, if he wishes to be perfectly equipped, can first learn in himself, and afterwards profitably teach to others, what the experience of his inner struggles has taught…’62 It is important to add that Guibert, though he saw himself as an intellectual rebel, was so only within strictly defined limits.
Parallel changes were seen in the church’s disciplinary arrangements. Before the middle of the eleventh century, those who sinned had to be forgiven before the full assembly of the church following, in the case of serious offences, a period of exclusion from full membership. This had been supplanted by punishment of a specific penance. Southern quotes as an example the penalties imposed on the army of William the Conqueror after the battle of Hastings in 1066. Anyone who had killed a man had to do penance of a year for each man he had killed. Men who had wounded others had to do forty days per person they had struck. Anyone who didn’t know how many he had killed or wounded had to do penance one day a week for the rest of his life. The point here is that there was no allowance for motive or for contrition, in short for the interior feelings of the soldiers. That is what changed in the twelfth century.63 There was an awareness now that external penance was less important than inner repentance. Eventually, this stress on inward sorrow led to the wider adoption of individual confession. At first the use of confession was rare–an affair of the deathbed, or a pilgrimage, say. But, at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 an annual confession was imposed as a minimal requirement for every member of the church, so that the faithful might listen to the ‘voice of the soul’. ‘The pursuit of an interior religion had now gone beyond the elite to everyone.’64
These changes were mirrored outside worship. In the paintings of the period, according to Georges Duby, for the first time in Italian history, the various figures ‘give vent to their deepest feelings’: tenderness, veneration, desperation.65 There was a growth of literature written in the first-person, the verb ‘to earn’ came into common use and, ‘some time between 1125 and 1135, the stone cutters working on the porch of Saint Lazare in Autun apparently were ordered by those responsible for the iconography to forego abstraction and give individualised expression to eac
h figure’.66 There developed an obsession with cleanliness, Duby says, and then with bathing and nudity, making people more self-conscious about their bodies. For those who could afford it, houses began to have rooms that offered privacy–e.g., studies.67 More and more people had personal names, and in particular nicknames, which stressed individual characteristics. For example, in the 1140s three canons of the cathedral of Troyes were called Peter and each had his identifying nickname (in Latin, of course): Peter the Squinter, Peter the Drinker and Peter the Eater.68 Autobiography, almost unknown in the ancient world, also saw an increase from the late eleventh century on.69 So too with biography and letter-collections, which often explored the inner lives of the correspondents, their reactions to one another, their self-examination, a parallel to what was happening in confession.70 (At least, it seems so to us.) And in strong contrast to the attitude in Byzantium, we read of identifiable artists who for the first time expressed pride in their works.71 For example, here is Eadwine, the scribe or designer of a psalter produced at Canterbury in about 1150: ‘I am the prince of writers; neither my fame nor my praise will die quickly…Fame proclaims you in your writing for ever, Eadwine, you who are to be seen here in the painting.’72
Art was changing in other ways too. After 1000 we see an increase in the personal details included in portraits. Colin Morris argues that in fact the portrait as we understand it was lost around the second century AD and did not return until the eleventh/twelfth century ‘to form a new concept’.73 For example, royal portraits and tomb sculpture become more explicit, less idealised, less often figures representing the virtues, following instead a more characteristically modern way of seeing the human form.74 ‘The figure of Eve, carved at Autun before the middle of the century by its sculptor Gislebert, has been called the first seductive female in western art since the fall of Rome.’75 Memorial sculptures, virtually unknown before the late eleventh century, now become progressively more common.
A final aspect to this set of changes, linking individualism, psychology, and the church, was what one historian has called ‘The Love Revolution’. The eleventh century saw an explosion of love literature which was no less accomplished–and maybe more so–than the greatest poets of Rome. More than one historian has said that all of European poetry derives from the love poetry of the High Middle Ages. What was new, certainly among the troubadours, whom we know most about, was the (highly stylised) subservience of the men to the women. The poets tried hard, on the page if not so much in real life, to be different in their reactions to everyone else and unrequited love became, if not an ideal, then a widespread preoccupation. One important reason for this was because it differed from the love of God. One could never know in this life how one compared with others in one’s love of God–not until Judgement Day. On the other hand, unrequited love of a woman threw men back on themselves and forced them to consider why they had failed and how they might improve.76
And have we given enough consideration to the monasteries? The foundations for the monastic revival were laid between 910 and 940, while the numerical strength of the monastic world increased out of all proportion between 1050 and 1150. For England, where the figures are known fairly accurately, the number of monasteries for men rose between 1066 and 1154 (the accession of Henry II) from just under fifty to about five hundred, and Christopher Brooke calculates that the number of monks and nuns rose seven- or eight-fold in just under a hundred years.77 The Cistercian order alone built 498 monasteries between 1098 and 1170.78 In Germany the numbers of houses for women rose from about seventy in 900 to five hundred in 1250.79 This revival had a massive impact on architecture and on art, in particular on stained glass, book illumination, but above all, perhaps, on sculpture and on attitudes to women and womanhood. The great build-up of the monasteries, and then of the cathedrals (which are introduced in the next two chapters), fostered an explosion of sculptures which, besides being glories in their own right, would spark an interest in perspective, which was to become such a feature in the modernisation of art.80 It was in the monasteries of the eleventh and twelfth centuries that the cult of the Blessed Virgin was established and developed. As well as providing a (male-conceived) ideal for women, worship of the Virgin was one aspect of the new variety of worship available to the faithful. ‘There is copious evidence…of a strong demand for greater opportunities for women in the religious life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.’81 Women turned inward, as well as men.
‘The discovery of the individual,’ says Colin Morris, ‘was one of the most important cultural developments in the years between 1050 and 1200.’82 But did it contribute to the emergence of the distinctively Western view of the individual? It certainly seems to have been a cause or a symptom of a fundamental change in Christianity, which itself had done so much to help unify the continent. The new religious orders of the High Middle Ages, Franciscan rather than Benedictine, stressed vocation rather than organisation, and conscience won out over hierarchy. ‘If any one of the ministers gives to his brothers an order contrary to our rule or to conscience, the brothers are not bound to obey him.’83
John Benton has argued that if men and women did turn inward in the years between 1050 and 1200 they must have had more self-esteem than their predecessors and that it was this change in mentality, combined with a greater (verbal and visual) vocabulary in considering the self that eventually gave rise to the increasing self-confidence of the West, the age of discovery and the Renaissance.
The case is not proved. But change did occur. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a hinge period, when the great European acceleration began. From then on, the history of new ideas happened mainly in what we now call the West. Whatever the reason, it was a massive change that cannot be overestimated.
PART FOUR
AQUINAS TO JEFFERSON
The Attack on Authority, the Idea of the Secular and the Birth of Modern Individualism
16
‘Half-way Between God and Man’:
the Techniques of Papal Thought-Control
To Chapter 16 Notes and References
Towards the end of January 1077, in the middle of a bitter winter, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV arrived in Canossa, twenty miles south-east of Parma in north Italy. Henry was barely twenty-three at the time, a large energetic man, with blue eyes and flaxen hair, a typical Teuton. He was in Canossa to see the pope, Gregory VII, ‘the Julius Caesar of the papacy’, who was staying in the fortress there. Gregory, then in his early fifties, would later be canonised by the church but, as the church historian William Barry has said, he was in reality ‘what men of the world call a fanatic’. Earlier that month he had gone so far as to excommunicate the emperor–ostensibly because Henry had dared to appoint bishops in Germany, and because he had taken no action to stamp out the then-widespread practice of simony, the buying of offices, or the equally common practice of allowing the clergy, bishops included, to be married.1
On the 25th of the month, Henry was admitted to the precincts of the castle. In deep snow, barefoot, fasting and dressed in only a long shirt, he was, according to legend, made to wait in the freezing cold for three days before Gregory consented to see him, and absolve him. This very public humiliation was a dramatic turning point in a quarrel that had been brewing for years and would continue for two more centuries.
At the end of the previous year, in a work he wrote for himself, called Dictatus papae (The pope’s dictate), Gregory proclaimed that ‘the Roman church has never erred, nor will it err in all eternity’. He claimed that the pope himself ‘may be judged by no one’, and that ‘a sentence passed by him may be retracted by no one’. Gregory claimed moreover that a pope ‘may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men’, and that ‘of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet’, that the pope ‘may be permitted to depose emperors’ and that ‘he alone may use the imperial insignia.’2
This great quarrel, what became known as the Investiture Struggle, was a protracted conflict with secul
ar authorities for control of Church offices, where Gregory was merely the first in a long line of popes who followed his lead.3 The process he began culminated in 1122 in the Concordat of Worms (during the reign of the French pope Calixtus II, 11191124), whereby the emperor agreed to give up spiritual investiture and allow free ecclesiastical elections. To historians, the Investiture Struggle, or Contest, was part of a wider movement appropriately called the Papal Revolution.4 Its most immediate consequence was that it freed the clergy from domination by emperors, kings, and the feudal nobility. With control over its own clergy, the papacy soon became what one observer called an ‘awesome, centralised bureaucratic powerhouse’, an institution in which literacy, a formidable tool in the Middle Ages, was concentrated.5 The papacy reached the pinnacle of its power more than a century later in the pontificate of Innocent III (11981216), perhaps the most powerful of medieval and maybe of all popes, who frankly proclaimed that ‘As God, the creator of the universe, set two great lights in the firmament of heaven, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night [Genesis, 1:15, 16], so He set two great dignities in the firmament of the universal church the greater to rule the day, that is, souls, and the lesser to rule the night, that is, bodies. These dignities are the papal authority and the royal power. And just as the moon gets her light from the sun, and is inferior to the sun in quality, quantity, position and effect, so the royal power gets the splendour of its dignity from the papal authority.’6