With Hildebrand's pontificate, which in truth began before he sat in Peter's chair, the reforming spirits among the clergy, aroused to his keen policy, set themselves to the uplifting of their order. In all countries the Church, heavy with its possessions, seemed about to become feudal and secular. Bishops and abbots were appointed by kings and the great feudatories, and were by them invested with their lands as fiefs, for which the clerical appointee did homage, and undertook to perform feudal duties. Church fiefs failed to become hereditary only because bishops and abbots could not marry; yet in fact great numbers of the lower clergy lived in a state of marriage or "concubinage." Evidently the celibacy of the clergy was a vital issue in Church reform; and so were investitures and the matter of simony. Under mediaeval conditions, the most open form of this "heresy" called after Simon Magus, was the large gift from the new incumbent to his feudal lord who had invested him with abbey or bishopric. Such simony was not wrong from the feudal point of view, and might properly represent the duty of bishop or abbot to his lord.
Obviously, for the reform and emancipation of the Church, and in order that it should become a world-power, and not remain a semi-secular local institution in each land, it was necessary that the three closely connected corruptions of simony, lay investitures, and clerical concubinage should be destroyed. To this enormous task the papacy addressed itself under the leadership of Hildebrand.[1] In his pontificate the struggle with the supreme representative of secular power, to wit, the Empire, came to a head touching investitures. Gregory's secular opponent was Henry IV., of tragic and unseemly fame; for whom the conflict proved to be the road by which he reached Canossa, dragged by the Pope's anathema, and also driven to this shame by a rebellious Germany (1076, 1077). Henry was conquered, although a revulsion of the long-swaying war drove Gregory from Rome, to die an exile for the cause which he deemed that of righteousness.
Between the papacy and the secular power represented
- ↑ For the matter of clerical celibacy, and the part played by monasticism in these reforms, see post, Chapter XV.
