Читать книгу The Empire and the Papacy, 918-1273. Investiture Contest, Crusades & The Famous Conflicts онлайн

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Brought under the immediate jurisdiction of Rome, at a time when monastic immunities from episcopal authority had not become common, the Cluniacs taught from the beginning a high doctrine as to the power of the apostolic see. They saw that the great danger to religion was in the feudalisation of the Church. Bishops were in danger of becoming barons in mitres. Kings looked upon prelates as officials bound to do them service, and patrons sold benefices to the highest bidder. Monasteries were often in danger of absolute secularisation. So corrupt and lax were even the better sort of regulars that the Saxon monk Widukind, the historian of his people, naïvely complains of the ‘grave persecution’ which beset the poor religious of his time, and laments the erroneous doctrines of some bishops who maintained that it was better that there should be a few ascetic regulars than houses filled with negligent monks, forgetting, as he innocently adds, that the tares and the wheat were ordered to grow up together until the harvest time. The chief dangers of the Church were simony and the marriage of clerks. To keep the Church apart from the world seemed to the Cluniac leaders the only possible way of securing a better state of things. Their ideal was the separation of the Church from the State, and the reorganisation of the Church under discipline such as could only be exercised by the Pope, who was to stand to the whole Church as the abbot of Cluny stood to each scattered Cluniac priory—the one ultimate source of jurisdiction, the universal bishop, appointing and degrading the diocesan bishops as the abbot made and unmade the Cluniac priors. The bishop, the secular priest, even the monk, had no rights of his own that were not ultimately derivative from the unique source of ecclesiastical authority, the chair of St. Peter. ⁵¹ The Forged Decretals supplied convenient arguments for such a system. The necessities of the times supplied a sort of justification for it. Feudal anarchy made it natural for good men to identify the secular power with the works of darkness, and regard the ecclesiastical power as alone emanating from God. After-ages were to show that the remedy was almost as bad as the disease, and that there was as much danger of secular motives, greed for domination, for wealth and influence in the uncontrolled exercise of ecclesiastical authority, as in the lay power that they dreaded. But the early Cluniacs had faith in their principles, and sought in realising them to promote the kingdom of God on earth. They lived holy and self-denying lives in an age of brutal violence and lust. A moral and an intellectual reformation preceded and prepared the way for the ecclesiastical reformation that was preached from Cluny with the fervour of a new gospel.