[199] Dialogues, bk. iii.
HILDEBRAND
The historian might almost venture to say that the Papacy was not evolved, but created. It has assuredly, in its varying fortunes, reflected as faithfully as any other institution the changes of its human environment, yet for each new adaptation to favouring circumstances it has had to await the advent of a great Pope. Seven men, one might say, created the Papacy: Gelasius I., Leo I., Gregory I., Hadrian I., Nicholas I., Gregory VII., and Innocent III. Each one of these deepened the foundations and enlarged the fabric of the great religious principality. They have had illustrious successors, and, in some respects, the frame of the Papacy has been further strengthened; but, on the whole, the last five hundred years have been filled with a mighty and unavailing struggle against disintegration.
Of the seven men I have enumerated Gregory VII., or Hildebrand as historians still like to call him, was the most romantic and the most singularly creative. He was born about the year 1025, of humble parents, in a Tuscan village near Sovana. An uncle of his was abbot of a monastery on the Aventine at Rome, and young Hildebrand was at an early date sent to be educated under his direction. We recognize in this accident the chief clue to the personality and achievements of Gregory VII. A century earlier a group of monks at Cluny had reformed their ways, and their stricter ideas had slowly spread from one isolated monastery to another. The monastery of St. Mary on the Aventine was one of these rare centres of sincere asceticism, and in it the boy would hear talk of the appalling degradation which had come over the Church of Christ. It seems, however, very doubtful whether he ever made the vows of a monk. He certainly wore the monk's habit, and no epithet is more common on the lips of his opponents than "vagabond monk"; while, on the other hand, his admirers accept the monastic title, and justify the "vagabondage," by various unreliable stories about his connexion with the Benedictines. But he never describes himself as a monk, and he is not so described in the most reliable documents. The point is of slight importance, since Hildebrand certainly adopted the sentiments of the monastic reformers, and I will not linger over the extensive and conflicting evidence.[200] Gregory's fiery and aggressive nature would not suffer him to contemplate the triumph of evil from the remote impotence of a monastery, but he learned his lesson from monks and would rely on them throughout life.
He went also to the Lateran School, where John Gratian, whom we described in the last chapter as buying the Papacy from his nephew Benedict IX., was a teacher. Gratian marked the ecclesiastical promise of the dark and ill-favoured little Tuscan, and, when he bought the title of Gregory VI., made him one of his capellani: at that time a body of lay officials. The work suited Hildebrand, who was even more of a soldier than a monk. The road to Rome was lamentably beset by brigands; the houses of many of the nobles in the city itself were, in fact, little better than the fortified dens of wealthy banditti, and the crowds of pilgrims might have their gifts torn from their hands at the very steps of Peter's altar. So Hildebrand organized a militia and made some impression on the robbers.
Gregory VI. was a more religious man than his purchase of the See would suggest. He was conspicuous for chastity at a time when, a caustic contemporary said, it was regarded at Rome as an angelic virtue. There is every reason to believe that he bought the Roman See with the best of intentions. Unhappily, Benedict IX. exhausted his treasury and returned to claim his dignity; while another faction of the Romans set up a pretender under the name of Silvester II. Gregory ruled his flock—there was very little Papal ruling of the world in those days—from Sta. Maria Maggiore: Silvester controlled St. Peter's and the Papal mansion on the Vatican: Benedict held the Lateran. This squalid spectacle must have sunk deep into the soul of the young reformer. But there were religious men in Rome, and the virtuous Henry III. was summoned from Germany. The remedy was almost as humiliating as the disorder. Henry scattered the rivals and, observing that there was no member of the Roman clergy fit to occupy the See, he put into it one of his German bishops, with the title of Clement II.
Hildebrand went with his patron, in the King's train, to Germany, but the more rigorous climate soon made an end of John Gratian. It is said, but is by no means certain, that Hildebrand then went to Cluny for a time. It is at all events certain that in 1049, the Roman climate having killed two German Popes in two years, Hildebrand returned to Italy in the train of Bishop Bruno. Under the name of Leo IX. this handsome, stately, and deeply religious Pontiff spent the next six years in a devoted effort to reform the Church. The magnitude of his task may be measured by that appalling indictment of clerical and monastic vice, the Book of Gomorrha, which Peter Damiani wrote under Leo IX., and with his cordial approval. Leo visited the chief countries of Europe, but he could make little impression on that stubborn age and he died almost broken-hearted. Under him Hildebrand served his apprenticeship. He became a cardinal-subdeacon, a guardian of St. Peter's, and rector of the monastery of St. Paul: in which, to his fine disgust, he found women serving the monks. He went also as legate to France, where he dealt leniently with and learned to esteem the chief heretic of the age, Bérenger. Hildebrand had little insight into character and less into speculative theology. To the end of his life he befriended Bérenger.