So such principles persisted through the time of the hostile and then the favouring Roman Empire. And when the Empire in fact crumbled and fell, what de facto and de jure authority was best fitted to take the place of the imperial supremacy? The Empire represented a universal secular dominion; the Church was also universal, and with a universality now reaching out beyond the Empire’s shrinking boundaries. In the midst of political fragments otherwise disjoined, the Church endured as the universal unity. The power of each Teutonic king was great in fact and law within his realm. Yet he was but a local potency, while the Church existed through his and other realms. And when the power of one Teutonic line (the Carolingian) reached something like universal sway, the Church was also there within and without. It held the learning of the time, and the culture which large-minded seculars respected; and quite as much as the empire of Charlemagne, it held the prestige of Rome. Witness the attitude of Charles Martel and Pippin toward Boniface the great apostle, and the attitude of Boniface toward the Gregories whose legate he proclaimed himself, and upon whose central authority he based his claims to be obeyed. Through the reforms of the Frankish Church, carried out by him with the support of Charles Martel and Pippin, the ecclesiastical supremacy of Rome was established. Charlemagne, indeed, from the nature and necessities of his own transcendent power, possessed in fact the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman emperors, whom men deemed his predecessors. But after him the secular power fell again into fragments scarcely locally efficient, while the Church’s universality of authority endured.
In the unstable fragmentation of secular rule in the ninth century, the Isidorean Decretals presented the truth of the situation as it was to be, although not as it had been in the times of the Church dignitaries whose names were forged for that collection. And thereafter, as the Church recovered from its tenth-century disintegration, it advanced to the pragmatic demonstration of the validity of those false Decretals, on through the tempests of the age of Hildebrand to the final triumph of Innocent III. at the opening of the thirteenth century. Evidently the canon law, whatever might be its immediate or remote source, drew its authority from the sanction of the Roman Catholic Church, which enunciated it and made it into a body corresponding to the Church’s functions. It was what the Church promulgated as the law of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the kingdom of God on earth. It should be the temporal and legal counterpart of the Church’s spiritual purposes. Its general tendency and purpose was the promotion of the Church’s saving aim, which regarded all things in the light of their relationship to life eternal. Therefore the Church’s law could not but define and consider all worldly interests, all personal and property rights and secular authority, with constant regard to men’s need of salvation. The advancement of that must be the final appellate standard of legal right.
Such was the event. The entire canon law might be lodged within those propositions which Hildebrand enunciated and Innocent III. realized. For the salvation of souls, all authority on earth had been entrusted by Christ to Peter and his successors. Theirs was the spiritual sword; secular power, the sword material, was to be exercised under the pope’s mandate and permission. No king or emperor, no layman whatsoever, was exempt from the supreme authority of the pope, who also was the absolute head of the Church, which had become a monarchy. “The Lord entrusted to Peter not only the universal Church, but the government of the whole world,” writes Innocent III., whose pontificate almost made this principle a fact. In private matters no member of the clergy could be brought before a secular court; and the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts over the laity threatened to reduce the secular jurisdiction to narrow functions.[407] The property of the Church might not be taxed or levied on by any temporal ruler or government; nor could the Church’s functions and authority be controlled or limited by any secular decree. Universally throughout every kingdom the Church was a sovereignty, not only in matters spiritual, but with respect to all the personal and material relationships that might be connected in any way with the welfare of souls.[408]
V
The exposition of the Corpus juris civilis in the school of the glossators was of great moment in the evolution of mediaeval political theory, which in its turn yields one more example of the mediaeval application of thoughts derived from antique and patristic sources. Political thinking in the Middle Ages sought its surest foundation in theology; then it built itself up with concepts drawn from the philosophy and social theory of the antique world; and lastly it laid hold on jurisprudence, using the substance and reasoning of the Roman and the Canon law.
Mediaeval ideas upon government and the relations between the individual and his earthly sovereign, started from theological premises, of patristic origin: e.g. that the universe and man were made by God, a miraculous creation, springing from no other cause, and subject to no other fundamental law, than God’s unsearchable will, which never ceases to direct the whole creation to the Creator’s ends. A further premise was the Scriptural revelation of God’s purpose as to man, with all the contents of that revelation touching the overweening importance of man’s deathless soul.
Unity—the unity of the creation—springs from these premises, or is one of them. The principle of this unity is God’s will. Within the universal whole, mankind also constitutes a unit, a community, specially ordained and ordered. The Middle Ages, following the example of the patristic time, were delivered over to allegory, and to an unbridled recognition of the deductions of allegorical reasoning. Mankind was a community. Mankind was also an organism, the mystical body whereof the head was Christ. Here was an allegory potent for foolishness or wisdom. It was used to symbolize the mystery of the oneness of all mankind in God, and the organic co-ordination of all sorts and conditions of men with one another in the divine commonwealth on earth; it was also drawn out into every detail of banal anthropomorphic comparison. From John of Salisbury to Nicholas Cusanus, Occam and Dante, no point of fancied analogy between the parts and members of the body and the various functions of Church and State was left unexploited.[409]
Mankind then is one community; also an organism. But within the human organism abides the duality of soul and body; and the Community of Mankind on earth is constituted of two orders, the spiritual and temporal, Church and State.[410] There must be either co-ordination between State and Church, body and soul, or subordination of the temporal and material to the eternal and spiritual. To evoke an adjustment of what was felt to be an actually universal opposition, was the chief problem of mediaeval polity, and forms the warp and woof of conflicting theories. The Church asserted a full spiritual supremacy even in things temporal, and, to support the claim, brought sound arguments as well as foolish allegory—allegory pretending to be horror-stricken at the vision of an animal with two heads, a bicephalic monstrosity. But does not the Church comprise all mankind? Did not God found it? Is not Christ its head, and under Him his vicegerent Peter and all the popes? Then shall not the pope who commands the greater, which is the spiritual, much more command the less, the temporal? And all the argumentation of the two swords, delivered to Peter, comes into play. That there are two swords is but a propriety of administration. Secular rulers wield the secular sword at the pope’s command. They are instruments of the Church. Fundamentally the State is an ecclesiastical institution, and the bounds of secular law are set by the law spiritual: the canon law overrides the laws of every State. True, in this division, the State also is ordained of God, but only as subordinate. And divinely ordained though it be, the origin of the State lies in sin; for sin alone made government and law needful for man.[411]
On the other hand, the partisans of the State upheld co-ordination as the true principle.[412] The two swords represent distinct powers, Sacerdotium and Imperium. The latter as well as the former is from God; and the two are co-ordinates, although of course the Church which wields the spiritual sword is the higher. This theory creates no bicephalic monster. God is the universal head. And even as man is body as well as soul, the human community is State as well as Church; and the State needs the emperor for its head, as the Church has the pope. The Roman Dominion, imperium mundi, was legitimate, and by divine appointment has passed over to the Roman-German emperor. Other views sustaining the scheme of co-ordination upheld a plurality of states, rather than one universal Imperium. Of course these opposing views of subordination or co-ordination of State and Church took on every shade of diversity.
As to both Church and State, mediaeval political theory was predominantly monarchical. Ideally this flowed from the thought of God as the true monarch of the universe. Practically it comported with mediaeval social conditions. Under Innocent III., if not under Gregory VII., the Church had become a monarchy well-nigh absolute.[413] The pope’s power continued plenary until the great schism and the age of councils evoked by it. For the secular state, the common voice likewise favoured monarchy. The unity of the social organism is best effected by the singleness of its head. Thomas Aquinas authoritatively reasons thus, and Dante maintains that as the unifying principle is Will, the will of one man is the best means to realize it.[414] But monarchy is no absolute right existing for the ruler’s benefit, rather it is an office to be righteously exercised for the good of the community. The monarch’s power is limited, and if his command outrages law or right, it is a nullity; his subjects need not obey, and the principle applies, that it is better to obey God than man. Even when, as in the days of the Hohenstaufen, the civil jurists claimed for the emperor the plenitudo potestatis of a Roman Caesar, the opposite doctrine held strong, which gave him only a limited power, in its nature conditioned on its rightful exercise.