controversy included intransigent and volatile figures on both sides, with Cardinal Humbert sent as a Roman legate to negotiate with Michael Cerularius, the patriarch in Constantinople. Cerularius had heard that Roman leaders in Norman Italy were prohibiting Greek forms of worship in their territories, and used this as an excuse to return the favor by prohibiting Roman-style worship in the Byzantine capital. The papacy dispatched its legates in response, hoping to settle the differences between the two sees. Their efforts resulted in a series of miscommunications and inflammatory exchanges that worsened the conflict, which culminated in July of 1054. Fed up with Greek insouciance and led by Cardinal Humbert, the legates strode into the Church of Saint Sophia and presented a Bull excommunicating Michael Cerularius and his high officials. The Bull refused the title of patriarch to Cerularius and accused him of multiple crimes, condemning him for failing to insert the filioque into the Greek version of the Nicene Creed. When news of the Bull spread through the city, the people exploded into riots. The emperor then demanded that the Bull be publicly burnt and the legates anathematized in order to restore calm. By this time the legates had embarked for Rome, declining to return to negotiate a new concord when summoned by the emperor.
The Eastern emperor and Cerularius did not envision a permanent break with the papacy in the wake of these events, pinning the blame on the legates rather than the papal office per se. A later pope could have acted to reverse the growing ill will between the two sees without losing face as the patriarch of Rome, still regarded as primus inter pares by the remaining sees. The officials at Rome interpreted the matter differently, lending to it the centrality that it has maintained in the Roman tradition as the beginning of the Great Schism. The legates had friends of high rank in Rome, including the future Pope Gregory VII, and from this circle the view took hold in the West that the pope’s representatives had acted with righteousness and that the excommunication of Cerularius was legitimate. The legates, it was thought, had acted upon the authority of the pope as ruler among the patriarchs, justly expressing the papacy’s qualitatively higher position. Though the papal team had not included the church in Constantinople in the excommunication of its leader, the West would come to see its Eastern counterpart as continuing to elect and approve of schismatic bishops. The West had a stronger consciousness of its break with both the leaders and the laymen of the East, a consciousness that bore tremendous significance for the vigor of Docetism.
The Grand Dialectic presumed the break of the church from its nature not only in the growing chasm between West and East, but in the West’s confirmation of that distance as righteous on the grounds of its ecclesiastical superiority. At the fall, the soul breaks from its limit in an unwarranted and disobedient grasping for knowledge, an illegitimate attempt to rise above its station. In like manner, the papacy broke from the East in an assertion of authority unwarranted in light of the tradition of the councils. Thus the papacy initiated the first aspect of the double movement in which the church, like the disobedient soul, becomes divided from its nature at the same time that it rises as a prelude to its fall. With the debacle in 1054 Rome unwittingly turned its attention toward the infinite, a trajectory raised to violence during the reign of Gregory VII.
The dialectical rise and fall began in earnest during the reign of Gregory, who initiated the church’s laborious and painful division from the kingdom. Taking up the problem of simony with a determination well beyond his predecessors, Gregory rejected the lay right of investiture as the solution to the church’s ailment. In February of 1075 he issued a decree making lay investiture illegal, and in the next month the papal register records the Dictatus Papae, a series of proclamations that asserted unheard-of powers for the pope in the spiritual and the temporal realms. The Dictatus proclaimed that “the pope alone can depose or reinstate bishops,” that “the Roman Pontiff alone is rightly called universal,” that “the Pope is the only one whose feet are to be kissed by all princes,” and that “he himself may be judged by no one.” These affirmations signaled the elevation of the papacy to a power in excess of its limit and representative of the infinitizing dialectic, summoning the spirit of Nicholas I while declaring the supremacy of the pope before spiritual and temporal authorities. Nor did the Dictatus stop with these pronouncements, going on to declare that the pope “may depose emperors” and that he “may absolve subjects of unjust men from their fealty.” Gregory’s affirmation of these rights insulted Europe’s royalty and threw society into an uproar, consequences he tolerated in light of the authority he believed that God had bestowed upon his office.
Lay investiture remained the principle point of contention, bringing the pope and the kings into direct conflict. Temporal rulers were used to installing men they trusted as bishops—often relatives and cronies—and did not look favorably on having local bishoprics, with their land and wealth, transferred to papal control. In this context, Gregory’s proclamations split local officials of the temporal and spiritual orders according to their loyalty: would they side with the local temporal ruler or, in the case of Germany, with the emperor? Or would they join the reform instigated by the pope? The emperor Henry IV refused the pope’s demand to invest German bishops, and Gregory answered by deposing and excommunicating him. Henry’s enemies in Germany then took the side of the pope, using papal policies as grounds to incite a revolt against the emperor. The friends of the deposed ruler subsequently viewed the lord of Rome as having facilitated civil war across German lands, castigating him as a disingenuous and belligerent pontiff whose severance of the church from the kingdom had provoked the flow of blood.
Gregory defended his program of reform by assembling a team of legal advisers and tasking them with the development of arguments that would substantiate his agenda. From roughly 1080 forward the pamphlets distributed in support of papal claims display a preoccupation with grounding the pope’s positions in reputable authorities. Both the papists and the imperialists soon showed a concern to bolster their rationale by appeal to biblical verses and canonical traditions. The papists produced the “Collection in Seventy-Four Titles,” a compilation of ecclesiastical rules culled from the Church Fathers and presented as a guide for settling disputes in Germany. In the archives of the Lateran the pope’s advisors also found the tomi, accounts of early papal correspondence that made their way into Cardinal Deusdedit’s Collectio canonum. Similar collections took shape in the hands of papal advocates like Anselm of Lucca, whose work gathered the rules of the Fathers and the early councils into a single book of laws. In this manner the pope’s legal specialists sowed the seeds for the most insidious and devastating form of infinity that struck the church. The development of the ecclesia as a legal institution with codices distinct from theology and liturgy, a tendency that ran amok in the twelfth century and beyond, defined the church’s alienation from its nature and its path toward indefinition. It laid the groundwork both for man as the scattering and for the Christ-Idol who validates him.
Shades of the scattering were outlined in the work of Manegold of Lautenbach, a supporter of Gregory’s excommunication of Henry and of the papal right to release subjects from unjust kings. In Manegold one finds the scattering intimated from the perspective of both the individual and the universal, though in each case in an understated and embryonic way. In the first instance, whereas a generation earlier Peter Damian had employed the notion of officium to justify the power of the office over potential moral lapses in the individual holding it, claiming that the grace of the priesthood overcame the deficiencies of those who gained their position by simony, Manegold reversed the logic with respect to temporal rule such that morally insufficient individuals negated the power of good order inherent in royal station. He shifted the crucial consideration to the moral worthiness of the office-wielder rather than the good of the office, subtly denying the efficacy of the office to correct the wayward holder. Such an attack suggests the new consciousness of man qua individual that flowered in later centuries in both religious affairs and in society on the whole, witnessing to the gestation of the scattering in the Gregorian era.
Manegold introduced another important shift by altering the theoretical relation of the people to their temporal rulers. The notion of contract, which based royal authority upon the will of the people (that is, the nobles) rather than divine ordination, had already appeared in the writing of Bernhard of Hildesheim, a member of Manegold’s circle. This development was momentous on its own, but Bernhard restricted it by arguing that in the wake
