THRONE OF THE WORLD
The text in St. Luke which reads, "See Lord, here are two swords,** had long ago been interpreted as a divine counsel that the sword of worldly power was to serve the Church. The Papacy continued to think and act in the spirit of Hildebrand's testament, which it wished to fulfil to the last letter by making real what had long been an ideal. Then in 1300 the too tautly drawn bow was broken. In a sense one can say that the time which intervened between the Concordat of Worms and this catastrophe was the period of a triumphant Papal temporal power. But with deeper justice one can term it the hour when, voluntarily or otherwise, the modern spirit was severed from the spirit of the Papacy. The word "mediaeval" is vulgarly associated with any number of things, but it cannot, if one looks more deeply, obscure the truth that the supposed unity of the Middle Ages was full of vivid contradictions and gaping breaches. On this stage there is missing no sharp conflict between intellects, no character in the wholly natural drama born of the fact that men are of different kinds, no form of social organization. Here are all the ideas which, it would seem, permanently recur to the human race. In the midst of the conflict between time and eternity, which involves the innermost rhythm of the life of man wrestling both with himself and the world about him, the Papacy, too, battles with the Demon whose three temptations could not prevail over the Master but who could so weaken even that one of His disciples who had been elected Rock of the Church that three times he denied Him in the night.
The first Crusade ended victoriously. The conquest of the Eastern coast lands of the Mediterranean had broadened the field of history and had given the Empire greater power and a new reason for being. The people looked upon themselves as the constituents of Christendom as a mystically formed whole, the unity of which also demanded unified leadership. Pope or Emperor: which was to be the master? No answer had been given by the Concordat of Worms. That had opened up a gap in the German monarchical authority, but at the same
MS
146
