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THE THRONE OF THE WORLD

ancient episcopal city then surrendered to Innocent. In the midst of these events the Pope died. The second of his short-lived succes- sors was slain when a stone was hurled at him during an uprising. On the Capitoline Hill there had resided since the autumn of 1 144 the officials of a new Roman Republic. They proudly called themselves the Senate and sealed their letters with S.P.Q.R. in memory of the Senate of a thousand years previous.

This Roman communal movement was a source of trouble from the beginning of the very active pontificate of Pope Eugene III. Born in Pisa, he was a disciple of Bernard, and had also been a Cistercian Abbot. He was consecrated outside the city in the two-choired basilica of the Sabine Imperial Monastery at Farfa. Because he was often forced to flee by the Roman Senate and by Arnold of Brescia, the restorer of the Republic, Pope Eugene lived in Viterbo, France and Trier, more than he did in Rome. Bernard said that now his son had become his father; but he could not change the universal opinion that he and not Eugene was the real Pope.

The teacher and master could permit himself to send his disciple, the Pope, an ever memorable essay on the ideals of the Papacy (De Consideratione) . In this mirror for spiritual princes, Bernard the mystic and Bernard the political theoretician are strangely interwoven. The one demands that the Pope, indeed the Papacy as such, should steep itself in the consciousness of its religious mission, harangues like a prophet of old against the secularization of the Divine office, and as if the object were to keep off a black and burdensome future em- phasizes over and over again as the ideal of spiritual dominion a dominion of the mind and of a humanism perfect in the Christian sense. Bernard's Pope has not unrightiy been compared with Plato's Philosopher King. Yet there is another Bernard in this treatise who, despite all his insight into the fact that lust for power is worse than poison and the dagger and all his conviction that not force but the Word alone is the true weapon of the Good Shepherd, encourages the Pope to cling to the teaching of the two swords, one of which the priest himself should use and the other of which was to be drawn by a secular soldier at the bidding of the Emperor to whom the priest gives a sign. Therefore this majestic program of ecclesiastical administration, de- rived though it be from the spirit of the Scripture, reveals the con-


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