ecclesiastical offices or benefices for money or money’s worth. Since the landed proprietors disposed of churches and convents, and the kings of bishoprics and abbeys, it became possible for them too to commit the sin of simony; hence a final expansion, in the 11th century, of the meaning of the term. The Pseudo-Isidorian idea being that all lay control over things ecclesiastical is wrong, all transferences by laymen of ecclesiastical offices or benefices, even though no money changed hands in the process, were now classed as simony (Humbert, Adversus Simoniacos, 1057–1058). Thus the lord who handed over a living was a simonist, and so too was the king who invested a bishop. On this question the battle began. The Church at first refrained from contesting the rights of the landowners over their own churches, and concentrated her attack upon investiture. In 1059 the new system of papal election introduced by Nicholas II. ensured the occupation of the Holy See by a pope favourable to the party of reform; and in 1078 Gregory VII. issued his prohibition of lay investiture. In the years of conflict that followed Gregory looked far beyond this point; he set his aim ever higher; until, in the end, his idea was to concentrate all ecclesiastical power in the hands of the pope, and to raise the papacy to the dominion of the world. Thus was to be realized the old dream of Augustine: that of a Kingdom of God on earth under the rule of the Church. But it was not given to Gregory to reach this goal, and his successors had to return again to the strife over investiture. The settlement of 1111 may be said to have embodied the only solution of the great question that was right in principle, since it pronounced in favour of a clear distinction between the spiritual and temporal spheres. However, a solution that was right in principle proved impossible in practice, and the long struggle ended in a compromise by the Concordat of Worms (1122). The essential part of this was that the Empire accepted the canonical election of bishops, and allowed the metropolitan to confer the sacred office by gift of ring and pastoral staff; while the Church acknowledged that the bishop held his temporal rights from the Empire, and was therefore to be invested with them by a touch from the royal sceptre. A similar solution was arrived at in England. Henry I. also renounced his claim to bestow ring and pastoral staff, but kept the right of induction into the temporalities (1106–1107). In France the demands of the Church were successful to the same degree as in England and Germany, but without any conflict. Thus the Germanic element in the law regarding appointment to bishoprics was eliminated. Somewhat later it disappeared also in the case of the churches of less importance, patronal rights over these being substituted for the former absolute ownership. The pontificate of Alexander III. (1159–1181) decided this.
Since the time of Charlemagne Germanic influence had preponderated in the West, as is shown in the expansion of the Church no less than in matters of ecclesiastical law. The whole progress of Christianity in Europe from the 9th to the 12th century was due—if we exclude Eastern Christendom—to the Teutonic nations; neither the papacy nor the peoples of Latin race were concerned in it. German priests and bishops carried the Christian faith to the Czechs and the Moravians, laboured among the Hungarians and the Poles, and won the wide district between the Elbe and the Oder at once for Christianity and for the German nation. Germany, too, was the starting-point for the conversion of the Scandinavian countries, which was completed by English priests with the assistance of native princes.
But, even while the Teutonic peoples were thus taking the lead, we can see the Latin races beginning to assert themselves. The monastic reform movement was essentially Latin in origin; and even more significant was the fact that scholasticism, the new theology, had its home in the Latin countries. Aristotelian dialectics had always been taught in the schools; and reason as well as authority had been appealed to as the foundation of theology; but for the theologians of the 9th and 10th centuries, whose method had been merely that of restatement, ratio and auctoritas were in perfect accord. Then Berengar of Tours (d. 1088) ventured to set up reason against authority: by reason the truth must be decided. This involved the question of the relation in theology of authority and reason, and of whether the theological method is authoritative or rational. To these questions Berengar gave no answer; he was ruined by his opposition to Radbert’s doctrine of transubstantiation. The Lombard Anselm (d. 1109), archbishop of Canterbury, was the first to deal with the subject. He took as his starting-point the traditional faith; but he was convinced that whoever has experience of the truths of the faith would be able to understand them. In accordance with this principle he pointed out the goal of theology and the way to its attainment: the function of theology is to demonstrate dogmas sola ratione.
It was a bold conception—too bold for the medieval world, for which faith was primarily the obligation to believe. It was easy, therefore, to understand why Anselm’s method did not become the dominant one in theology. Not he, but the Frenchman Abelard (d. 1142), was the creator of the scholastic method. Abelard, too, started from tradition; but he discovered that the statements of the various authorities are very often in the relation of sic et non, yes and no. Upon this fact he based his pronouncement as to the function of theology: it must employ the dialectic method to reconcile the contradictions of tradition, and thus to shape the doctrines of the faith in accordance with reason. By teaching this method Abelard created the implements for the erection of the great theological systems of the schoolmen of the 12th and 13th centuries: Peter Lombard (d. 1160), Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1275). They adventured a complete exposition of Christian doctrine that should be altogether ecclesiastical and at the same time altogether rational. In so doing they set to work at the same time to complete the development of ecclesiastical dogma; the formulation of the Catholic doctrine of the Sacraments was the work of scholasticism.
Canon law is the twin-sister of scholasticism. At the very time when Peter Lombard was shaping his Sentences, the monk Gratian of Bologna was making a new collection of laws. It was not only significant that in the Concordia discordantium canonum ecclesiastical laws, whether from authentic or forged sources, were gathered together without regard to the existing civil law; of even greater eventual importance was the fact that Gratian taught that the contradictions of the canon law were to be reconciled by the same method as that used by theology to reconcile the discrepancies of doctrinal tradition. Thus Gratian became the founder of the science of canon law, a science which, like the scholastic theology, was entirely ecclesiastical and entirely rational (See Canon Law).
Like the new theology and the new science of law, the new monasticism was also rooted in Latin soil. In the first of the new orders, that of the Cistercians (1098), the old monastic ideal set forth in the Rule of Benedict of Nursia still prevailed; but in the constitution and government of the order new ideas were at work. In the Premonstratensian order, however, founded in 1120 by Norbert of Xanten, a new conception of the whole function of monachism was introduced: the duty of the priest-monk is not only to work out his own salvation, but, by preaching and cure of souls, to labour for others. This was the dominant idea of the order of friars preachers founded in 1216, on the basis of the Premonstratensian rule, by Dominic of Osma (see Dominic, Saint, and Dominicans). It was also the basis of the order of friars minor (Franciscans, q.v.), founded in 1210. For the foundation of Francis of Assisi came into existence as a society of itinerant preachers: no one was more deeply convinced than Francis of the duty of working for others, and his own mission was, as he said, to win souls. But with this idea he fused another, namely, that it is the task of the monk to imitate the humility and poverty of Jesus; and his order thus became a mendicant order. From the earliest times the monks had renounced all private property, and no individual monk, but only the order to which he belonged, could acquire possessions. For Francis this was not enough: he put “holy poverty” in place of renunciation of private property, and allowed neither monk nor monastery to have any possessions whatever; for only thus is the following of Jesus complete. So
