But more. Out of this singular position grew a doctrine, which looks to us irrational now, but was by no means so then. If the Church derived her rights from the extinct Roman Cæsars, how could the Teuton conquerors interfere with those rights? If she had owed allegiance to Constantine or Theodosius, she certainly owed none to Dietrich, Alboin, or Clovis. She did not hold their lands of them; and would pay them, if she could avoid it, neither tax nor toll. She did not recognize the sovereignty of these Teutons as ‘ordained by God.’
Out of this simple political fact grew up vast consequences. The Teuton king was a heathen or Arian usurper. He was not a king de jure, in the eyes of the clergy, till he was baptized into the Church, and then lawfully anointed king by the clergy. Thus the clergy gradually became the makers of kings; and the power of making involved a corresponding power of unmaking, if the king rebelled against the Church, and so cut himself off from Christendom. At best, he was one of ‘the Princes of this world,’ from whom the Church was free, absolutely in spiritual matters, and in temporal matters, also de jure, and therefore de facto as far as she could be made free. To keep the possessions of the Church from being touched by profane hands, even that they might contribute to the common needs of the nation, became a sacred duty, a fixed idea, for which the clergy must struggle, anathematize, forge if need be: but also—to do them justice—die if need be as martyrs. The nations of this world were nothing to them. The wars of the nations were nothing. They were the people of God, ‘who dwelt alone, and were not reckoned among the nations;’ their possessions were the inheritance of God: and from this idea, growing (as I have shewn) out of a political fact, arose the extra-national, and too often anti-national position, which the Roman clergy held for many ages, and of which the instinct, at least, lingers among them in many countries. Out of it arose, too, all after struggles between the temporal and ecclesiastical powers. Becket, fighting to the death against Henry II., was not, as M. Thierry thinks, the Anglo-Saxon defying the Norman. He was the representative of the Christian Roman defying the Teuton, on the ground of rights which he believed to have existed while the Teuton was a heathen in the German forests. Gradually, as the nations of Europe became really nations, within fixed boundaries, and separate Christian organizations, these demands of the Church became intolerable in reason, because unnecessary in fact. But had there not been in them at the first an instinct of right and justice, they would never have become the fixed idea of the clerical mind; the violation of them the one inexpiable sin; and the defence of them (as may be seen by looking through the Romish Calendar) the most potent qualification for saintship.
Yes. The clergy believed that idea deeply enough to die for it. St. Alphege at Canterbury had been, it is said, one of the first advisers of the ignominious payment of the Danegeld: but there was one thing which he would not do. He would advise the giving up of the money of the nation: but the money of his church he would not give up. The Danes might thrust him into a filthy dungeon: he would not take the children’s bread and cast it unto the dogs. They might drag him out into their husting, and threaten him with torture: but to the drunken cry of ‘Gold! Bishop! Gold!’ his only answer would be—Not a penny. He could not rob the poor of Christ. And when he fell, beaten to death with the bones and horns of the slaughtered oxen, he died in faith; a martyr to the great idea of that day, that the gold of the Church did not belong to the conquerors of this world.
But St. Alphege was an Englishman, and not a Roman. True in the letter: but not in the spirit. The priest or monk, by becoming such, more or less renounced his nationality. It was the object of the Church to make him renounce it utterly; to make him regard himself no longer as Englishman, Frank, Lombard, or Goth: but as the representatives by an hereditary descent, considered all the more real because it was spiritual and not carnal, of the Roman Church; to prevent his being entangled, whether by marriage or otherwise, in the business of this life; out of which would flow nepotism, Simony, and Erastian submission to those sovereigns who ought to be the servants, not the lords of the Church. For this end no means were too costly. St. Dunstan, in order to expel the married secular priests, and replace them by Benedictine monks of the Italian order of Monte Casino, convulsed England, drove her into civil war, paralysed her monarchs one after the other, and finally left her exhausted and imbecile, a prey to the invading Northmen: but he had at least done his best to make the royal House of Cerdic, and the nations which obeyed that House, understand that the Church derived its rights not from them, but from Rome.
This hereditary sense of superiority on the part of the clergy may explain and excuse much of their seeming flattery. The most vicious kings are lauded, if only they have been ‘erga servos Dei benevoli;’ if they have founded monasteries; if they have respected the rights of the Church. The clergy too often looked on the secular princes as more or less wild beasts, of whom neither common decency, justice, or mercy was to be expected; and they had too often reason enough to do so. All that could be expected of the kings was, that if they would not regard man, they should at least fear God; which if they did, the proof of ‘divine grace’ on their part was so unexpected, as well as important, that the monk chroniclers praised them heartily and honestly, judging them by what they had, not by what they had not.
Thus alone can one explain such a case as that of the monastic opinion of Dagobert the Second, king of the Franks. We are told in the same narrative, seemingly without any great sense of incongruity, how he murdered his own relations and guests, and who not?—how he massacred 9000 Bulgars to whom he had given hospitality; how he kept a harem of three queens, and other women so numerous that Fredegarius cannot mention them; and also how, accompanied by his harem, he chanted among the monks of St. Denis; how he founded many rich convents; how he was the friend, or rather pupil, of St. Arnulf of Metz, St. Omer, and above all of St. Eloi—whose story I recommend you to read, charmingly told, in Mr. Maitland’s ‘Dark Ages,’ pp. 81-122. The three saints were no hypocrites—God forbid! They were good men and true, to whom had been entrusted the keeping of a wild beast, to be petted and praised whenever it shewed any signs of humanity or obedience.
But woe to the prince, however useful or virtuous in other respects, who laid sacrilegious hands on the goods of the Church. He might, like Charles Martel, have delivered France from the Pagans on the east, and from the Mussulmen on the south, and have saved Christendom once and for all from the dominion of the Crescent, in that great battle on the plains of Poitiers, where the Arab cavalry (says Isidore of Beja) broke against the immoveable line of Franks, like ‘waves against a wall of ice.’
But if, like Charles Martel, he had dared to demand of the Church taxes and contributions toward the support of his troops, and the salvation both of Church and commonweal, then all his prowess was in vain. Some monk would surely see him in a vision, as St. Eucherius, Bishop of Orleans, saw Charles Martel (according to the Council of Kiersy), ‘with Cain, Judas, and Caiaphas, thrust into the Stygian whirlpools and Acherontic combustion of the sempiternal Tartarus.’
Those words, which, with slight variations, are a common formula of cursing appended to monastic charters against all who should infringe them, remind us rather of the sixth book of Virgil’s Æneid than of the Holy Scriptures; and explain why Dante naturally chooses that poet as a guide through his Inferno.
The cosmogony from which such an idea was derived was simple enough. I give, of course, no theological opinion on its correctness: but as professor of Modern History, I am bound to set before you opinions which had the most enormous influence on the history of early Europe. Unless you keep them in mind, as the fixed and absolute background of all human thought and action for more than 1000 years, you will never be able to understand the doings of European men.