863 Nicholas ordered that Photius step down, declaring the supremacy of Rome over the whole church in spite of the protesting emperor. These actions put Rome and Constantinople in a temporary state of schism.
The rivalry that soon developed between Rome and the Byzantines over the lands of Moravia and Bulgaria intensified the breach. Both parties believed that they possessed the right to proselytize these lands, with the Byzantine missionaries first arriving and establishing their churches. When the Roman missionaries followed, they were reported to have attacked Eastern clerical customs regarding marriage and to have insisted on inserting the filioque into the Nicene Creed. Photius and the other patriarchs would not tolerate this doctrinal addition, considering it mistaken and unauthorized by the councils. In light of these developments Photius convened a synod in 867 that deposed and excommunicated Nicholas, who passed away before news of the decision arrived at Rome.
Though the schism did not last long, it highlighted questions of papal authority and the legitimacy of the filioque that would eventually lead to permanent division. Indeed, the course of the papacy under Nicholas represents the dual movement at the heart of the docetic dialectic. The separation of the Western church from its natural union with the East as exemplified in the schism, a break resulting on the Western side from unwarranted claims of papal power, is the break of the soul from its nature as it grasps for a knowledge beyond its limit. At the same time, in Nicholas the papacy manifested the upward movement of the docetic dialectic in which the soul leaps away from the temporal body—the political kingdom—before becoming confused with it, the latter a sign of the fall below that body that is to come. For in Nicholas the papacy ascended to a height from which it would soon descend.
The initial fall of the Western church occurred not long after Nicholas, when from the second half of the ninth century into the eleventh the papacy suffered devastating corruption. With the decline of the Carolingian Empire the popes found themselves without an external protector, with the result that they became the victims of local power brokers. Prominent Roman families and their factions engineered sedition against pope after pope, occasionally submitting the pontiff to brutal treatment. The popes themselves collaborated in plots to preserve their position while indulging in various immoralities. There were many low points during the nearly two centuries of the fall, with perhaps the lowest coming during the reign of Stephen VI (896–897). The pope ordered that the corpse of his predecessor Formosus be exhumed and placed on trial for numerous crimes, finding lifeless flesh guilty and punishing it for infractions supposedly committed during Formosus’ pontificate.
Though still respected by the church throughout Europe as the throne of Saint Peter, during this era the papacy became practically irrelevant to wider religious and secular affairs. Europe faced external enemies from multiple directions and lacked rulers with the strength to maintain peace on the local level. The people lived under a more or less constant threat of conflict, while congregations continued under local military aristocracies that reigned through a combination of military and spiritual authority. In this context the appointment of local clerics by temporal rulers took a turn toward the overt subordination of the church to the kingdom. The buying and selling of bishoprics by local rulers introduced morally unworthy characters into the service of God, sullying the sanctity of the spiritual office under political affairs. The priestly ranks swelled with simoniacs who cared predominantly for their livelihood with little thought for delivering grace to parishioners. Just as Leo had placed the crown on Charlemagne’s head before bowing in homage, the church descended from papal superiority over temporal rulers in Nicholas to the decay of the papacy and the servitude of the church before local magnates.
In addition to the subordination of the spiritual beneath the temporal, the fall during this time was characterized by externality in the religious life of the individual. As late as the eleventh century practices of penance, which followed confession and preceded absolution, had no noticeable emphasis on inward sorrow. This is not to say that the individual’s motives were irrelevant, but that the idea of reconciliation with God consisted principally in bodily activity without a complimentary recognition of the turning of desire to God’s will. Confession occurred rarely and possessed a character more communal than individual, concentrating on obvious and heinous infractions against God’s law and the well-being of the group. The idea of searching one’s heart to its depths, discovering the multitude of one’s sins and laying them before God for pardon, had yet to flower in the Christian mind. In the 900s, officers in the church would have considered such an exercise unnecessary if not impossible. The practical understanding of the religious life and its devotion, in its diminished attention to the inner man, resonated with a social reality in which the kingdom trampled over the church and local clerics had scant regard for the qualities required by the religious office.
By the first half of the eleventh century the initial rumblings of a second iteration of rise and fall, the medieval Grand Dialectic, had begun to appear. The monastic tradition of the tenth century typified by the monks at Cluny had advocated a life of withdrawal into the cloister, discipline according to the Rule of Benedict, and prayer for a disordered world. The monastery during that century provided a singular alternative to the chaos of secular existence, and during the eleventh century much of that singularity remained. But an alternative also grew to prominence during the early 1000’s that embodied the docetic dialectic in both its arc as the greater-lesser and its tendency to strife. Energized by the disease of simony and driven toward the reform of society, independent monks and occasionally entire monasteries appeared that modified the tradition of Benedictine and Cluniac monasticism in favor of a more active engagement with the society beyond the cloister.
The monks advancing the new perspective saw themselves as paradigms of Benedictine obedience, practicing a severe eremitical life or hailing from monasteries that maintained an unusually strict observance of the Rule. They were not dropouts or apostates from the Benedictine way but its perfecters, super-monks whose rigor outperformed the common monastic habit. The attitude of moral superiority inherent in such self-recognition ironically justified contact with the laity, a practice forbidden by traditional interpretations of the Rule. The confidence of being the greater coincided with the practice of the lesser as those supposedly above the Rule granted themselves the liberty to break it. Citing caritas as their motivation, the new monks poured over the boundaries of the monastery, leaving the neighbor-love enclosed within it in order to purge the secular church of simoniac clergy. Their harangues against tainted representatives of Christ threw the church into turmoil in various places, threatening it with local schism as the price of purification.
The attitude and activities of the reforming monks illustrate the contradictions inherent in the docetic ethos. On one hand they viewed themselves as justified in preaching to society because of their moral holiness, but on the other their arguments in support of their activities referred to the duties of Christians considered in general. The monks therefore appeared as a higher and distinct order vis-à-vis other monks and the laity at the same time that they defended their activities by reference to “universal” Christian principles. The ideological paradox that joins the especially separate and holy to the universal and common went hand-in-hand with the monks’ habit of contact with the laity in breach of the Rule. The monks are among the earliest examples of the higher lawbreakers that reappear as Docetism’s vanguard of social conflict and division, a group so possessed of its superiority that it can fuse with average men without sacrificing its sense of privilege. This pattern of confusion and separation emerged on a larger and more destructive scale as the Grand Dialectic matured into the war of the church against the kingdom, a conflict in which the church affirmed its distinction from the temporal order only to use that distinction as a rationale for lording over temporal affairs.
The interests of reforming monks and the papal leadership intersected only occasionally, but found a mutual champion in Leo IX (1049–1054). Two months after assuming the pontificate he convened a synod in Rome that denounced simony and violations of clerical marriage, the first papal proclamation regarding these issues in the eleventh century. Yet the most important events ascribed to Leo’s reign do not concern the denunciations, which he did not vigorously enforce, but the divisive affair in Constantinople involving legates acting in his name.
