a novel awareness of the individual as seen in the development of self-portraits, deepened explorations of affect in troubadour love songs, and meditations on friendship between pairs thought to mirror one another’s soul. Through these practices the humanists cultivated new, inward attitudes and mores, offering a meaningful alternative to the careerism of ecclesiastical affairs.
The trend toward the individualized consciousness influenced religious no less than secular life. The concern for the judgment of the individual implicit in Anselm’s satisfaction theory, the increased devotional emphasis on participation in Christ’s sufferings, and the inward turn that permeated such writings as Hugh of Fouilloy’s On the Cloister of the Soul prove the presence of a religious personality conceived in relative detachment from the outward affairs of church and society. In the spirit of the worldly monks who preceded Gregory VII, Hugh argued that a holy man attentive to the thoughts and commitments of the inner cloister can engage in worldly activity without detriment to his soul. Like the institutional breach separating the kingdom from the church, the break between the body and the soul had progressed enough that the pious could posit a soul protected by its distance from bodily habits.
The new focus on man’s inner life as opposed to outward action also influenced the Western practice of confession. The popes in the eleventh century had altered the traditional pattern of confession, penance, and reconciliation so that reconciliation followed the admission of sin. This change preceded the twelfth century’s turn to inner sorrow as the crucial element in the sinner’s restoration before God, a stress that went hand in hand with a wider and more consistent adoption of confession among Christians. Though the church did not impose annual confession upon every member until the Lateran Council in 1215, the spirit that recognized its necessity had matured over the course of the 1100’s, advancing with an accent on the remorse of the penitent rather than the absolution given by the priest. In this age men became more concerned with the inner state of the confessing sinner, and in lieu of the focus on externals indicative of earlier penal codes one finds a penchant for self-examination among the devout. Men as prominent as Bernard of Clairvaux developed their conceptions of the spiritual life around the notion of intention, while Peter Abelard defined sin according to the individual’s inner aims in Ethics: or, Know Yourself. The confession booth became an important locus for the assurance of salvation at the same time that the purity of one’s conscience measured the soul’s standing before God.
The age had much to confess in the eyes of the satirists, who saw the ascendance of the managerial class as the betrayal of the church’s ideals. Viewing the technocratic order from the outside and despising the church’s machinery as an arena for opportunists, the satirists felt that things had gone mournfully awry in both the spiritual and temporal orders. They perceived the distortion of reality that lurches behind a society flushed with its sense of progress, whose optimism confuses the accumulation of worldly power with the advance of God’s will. Writing in the latter decades of the twelfth century, Walter of Châtillon contrasted the lawful order of the natural world with the disjuncture that man faced within his society and his nature:
God, who by a fourfold rule
Chaos regulated
Things unequal equalized
And by laws related
All interrelationships
Duly calculated—
Why do you leave only man’s
Nature dislocated?
The discontent inspired by social conditions and the felt fragmentation of man led Walter and his ilk to espouse eschatological views. It seemed to them that the disorder among men presaged the antichrist and the return of Jesus, for how could a state of affairs in which greed and ambition had run rampant go unpunished? How could the Lord not return to set right what had gone wrong?
More than others in this era the satirists apprehended the docetic spirit in their midst, recognizing the fraying of the form that holds man together. The law by which man knows his nature as embedded in institutions, those mediations meant to train him away from sin, was dissolving. By the twelfth century those institutions had lost sight of their purpose just as man felt his abstraction from them, an alienation manifest in his pronounced awareness of the inner life. Thus appeared that simultaneous experience of expectation and uneasiness that accompanies man as his form slides from solidity into possibility, the internal dialectic of raising and lowering that reflects the rise and fall of institutions that throw off their boundaries. The proliferation of ecclesiastical canons and their scholastic study, though they tempted him with the hope of a just society grounded in the rule of the church, signaled man’s ontological distance from the divine law and the undoing of the church’s institutional form as the body of Christ. Through these canons and their twin in the individualized consciousness one discovers man slouching toward universality, approaching the formlessness in which he celebrates his indifference to God’s command. Man imperceptibly melts into the scattering as the principle of his existence, though this movement had yet to achieve the religious validation that would enhance its assault.
That assault raised the war between church and kingdom to ecclesiastical crisis during the reign of emperor Frederick Barbarossa, whose decisions eventuated in dual popes for nearly two decades. From the 1150s into the 1170s one pope claimed authority under the emperor while another proclaimed himself the leader of an independent Rome. During these same decades papal jurists developed arguments that sought to augment papal rights over the temporal sphere. The claim that the church as the soul had priority over the kingdom as the body had been advanced since the time of Cardinal Humbert, with papists often grossly distorting the doctrine in support of Roman aims. They now argued that the “power of the keys” conferred to Saint Peter included the pope’s right to crown emperors, though historically this affirmation derived from Leo’s crowning of Charlemagne. By the end of the century some among the papacy’s advocates leaned toward a theory of papal world-monarchy in which the pope possessed complete sovereignty over temporal and spiritual government.
This theory found its nearest embodiment in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216), whose rule presents the apex of the Grand Dialectic. In Innocent multiple forms of the infinitizing movement came to a head: his willful exercise of supreme authority in temporal as well as spiritual government, his push for the Crusade that finalized the Eastern schism, and his codification of a mountain of Roman laws dovetail in a singularly potent expression of the finite’s transgression of its limits. Innocent sums up the advance in which the church breaks from its nature by striving to bottle the infinite within the finite. He is the docetically-empowered giant whose height foreshadows the depths to which the papacy would fall.
Innocent never bluntly argued that the pope possesses supreme temporal authority when justifying his interventions in international affairs, but his theological rationale and his actions imply this conviction. In addition to informing the emperor at Constantinople that the priesthood surpassed the kingship as the soul over the body, Innocent construed the position of the pope by reference to the description of Jesus as a priest of the order of Melchizedek, a man who had been both priest and king. By this argument and others like it Innocent reserved the supreme right of judgment in worldly affairs for the papacy, a right put to work in his resolution of the dispute between two aspirants to the throne of the Western emperor and in his arbitration of controversies between the kings of France and England. Innocent also deposed a king in Norway and had another established in Bulgaria, while laboring to enlarge the Papal States in Italy. Innocent wielded papal power with an authority relatively undisputed by the temporal dignitaries involved, as if all recognized that the augmentation of spiritual powers into temporal rule reflected the order desired by God. This is the unique achievement of his papacy, the height to which no pope before or after would ascend.
The expansion of Innocent’s power reached no less to the East, although the bad consequences of the Fourth Crusade resulted more from indecision than arrogance.
