General History of Civilisation in Europe, From the Fall of the Roman Empire Till the French Revolution. A Treatise on Death Punishments.

by François Guizot

When the barbarians were finally established and converted, and some ties formed between them and the church, it did not cease to incur great danger from them. The brutality and recklessness in the barbarian manners were such, that the new creed, and the sentiments with which it had inspired them, exercised very little sway over them. Violence soon reassumed the upper hand, and the church was a victim to it equally with the rest of society. As a means of defence, it proclaimed a principle formerly asserted, although more indefinitely, under the Empire—namely, the separation of spiritual from temporal power, and their reciprocal independence. By the aid of this principle it was that the church continued unmolested by the barbarians. The church maintained that force could have no action upon a system of religious articles, hopes, and promises, and therefore that the temporal world was completely severed from the spiritual.

The salutary consequences resulting from this principle are discernible at a glance. Independently of the temporary utility it was to the church, it had the inestimable advantage of placing on the basis of right the separation of the two powers, and of controlling them by means of each other. Furthermore, by sustaining the independence of the intellectual world in general, in its full extent, the church prepared the way for the independence of individual intellect and of thought. The church said that the system of religious belief could not fall under the yoke of force, so each individual was tempted to use the same language on his own account. The principle of free discussion or examination, and of liberty for individual thought, is exactly the same as that of the independence of the general spiritual authority with respect to the temporal power.

Unfortunately, it is an easy matter to pass from the want of liberty to the lust of dominion. The church exhibited a proof of it at this period. By a tendency natural to human ambition and pride, the church endeavoured to establish for the spiritual power not only independence, but supremacy over the temporal power. Yet we must not believe that this pretension had no other source than the failings of humanity; there were others still deeper, which it behoves us to inquire into.

When liberty reigns in the intellectual world, when the human thought and conscience are not subjected to a power which denies them the right of discussion and decision, and employs force to crush them—when, in fact, there is no visible and constituted spiritual government, arrogating and exercising the right of dictating opinions—then is the idea of the dominion of a spiritual order over a temporal impossible. Such is pretty nearly the present state of the world. But when there exists, as in the tenth century did exist, a government of the spiritual order; when thought and conscience come under laws, institutions, and powers, which assert a right to command and coerce them; in a word, when the spiritual power is constituted, when it has taken effective possession, under the sanction of right and of force, of human reason and conscience, it is natural that it should be tempted to lay claim to dominion over the temporal order, and that it should exclaim, 'How! I have right and sway over what is most lofty and independent in man—over his reason, his inward will, his conscience—and shall I not have right over his outward, material, and fleeting interests? I, who am the interpreter of justice and truth, shall I be debarred from regulating earthly matters according to justice and truth?' By the mere provocative of this reasoning, the spiritual order was sure to be urged into an invasion of the temporal order. And this was still more certain when the spiritual order monopolised all the developments of the human mind then possible: there was but one science, theology; but one spiritual order, the theological: all the other sciences, rhetoric, arithmetic, even music, everything was comprised in theology.

The spiritual power thus finding itself at the head of the whole activity of the human brain, naturally fell into a self-assumption of the general government of the world.

A second cause was equally powerful in urging it to this appropriation—namely, the frightful state of the temporal order, and the violence and iniquity which prevailed in the temporal government of all communities.

We can speak of the rights of the temporal power without difficulty; but at the epoch under review, the power in question was a mere brute force, an intractable ruffianism. The church, however imperfect its notions of morals and of justice might still be, was infinitely superior to such a government, and the cry of the people was continually raised, beseeching it to take its place. When a pope or a few bishops proclaimed a sovereign denuded of his rights, and his subjects freed from the oath of fidelity, such an intervention, although doubtless open to serious abuses, was often in particular cases legitimate and salutary. In general, whenever liberty has been wanting to mankind, its restoration has been the work of religion. In the tenth century, the people were not in a state to defend themselves, or to make their rights available against civil violence, and religion came to the rescue in the name of Heaven. This is one of the reasons which have mainly contributed to the victories of the theocratic principle.

There is a third cause for the arrogation of the spiritual order, which has been too little noticed, arising out of the complexity in the situation of the chiefs of the church, and the variety of aspects under which they appeared in society. On the one hand they were prelates, members of the ecclesiastical order, part and parcel of the spiritual power, and by right thereof independent; on the other they were vassals, and, as such, engaged in the bonds of civil feudalism. And, furthermore, they were not only vassals, but also subjects: some portion of the old relations of the Roman emperors with the bishops and clergy had passed into those formed between the priesthood and the barbarian kings. By a series of causes which it would be too tedious to develop, the bishops had been led to regard, to a certain extent, the barbarian sovereigns as successors of the Roman emperors, and to attribute to them all their prerogatives. The chiefs of the clergy had therefore a triple character—an ecclesiastical character, and, as such, independent; a feudal character, and, as such, bound to certain duties, and holding by certain services; and the character of a simple subject, and, as such, held to obey an absolute sovereign. Now, the temporal sovereigns, who were not less greedy or ambitious than the bishops, frequently availed themselves of their rights as lords or sovereigns to encroach upon the spiritual independence, and to possess themselves of the presentation to benefices, the nomination to bishoprics, &c. On their side, the bishops often intrenched themselves behind their spiritual independence, to get rid of their obligations as vassals or subjects. In this manner there was an almost inevitable tendency leading the sovereigns, on the one hand, to destroy the spiritual independence; and the chiefs of the church, on the other, to make that independence an instrument to work out universal dominion.