king the people had no right to remove him. Manegold denied a permanent rule based in the contract in favor of the people’s judgment on whether and when the king might have broken the agreement through injustice, at which point they could legitimately overthrow him. By this theory Manegold justified revolution in temporal affairs given appropriate circumstances, a rationale that he exploited in support of Gregory’s conflict with Henry. In addition to suggesting an advanced awareness of the individual as office bearer in lieu of consideration of the office borne, Manegold fought for a new consciousness of the popular will as sitting in judgment on temporal rulers. He abstracts both the individual person and the collective from the outward office or law that would prescribe the boundaries for action, empowering the abstraction as an element potent enough to overturn its limits. Man rises above the law that would contain him in a logic that foreshadows the fuller emergence of the scattering.
Gregory died ignominiously in 1085, but the docetic spirit that had stormed through him continued after his passing. To the forms of infinity birthed during his reign, including claims of universal papal jurisdiction and the seeds of a distinct legal consciousness in the church, the papacy presently added a third. Under Pope Urban II, the Western church embarked on the first of its Crusades, the military and economic ventures that projected Western might over international boundaries in search of conquest. Of the forms of infinity that Docetism introduces into religious and temporal affairs, international expansion is perhaps the most obvious. The docetic spirit can hardly survive apart from such expansion, which has accompanied its development from these early centuries until the present day.
The First Crusade manifests Docetism’s recurring treachery, here personified in the high expectations of Urban. He believed that the Crusades would help mend the breach between Eastern and Western Christians, pleasing the Eastern churches and the Byzantine emperor while uniting Christendom against a pagan enemy. Urban did not understand the docetic logic and its deception. He did not comprehend the infinitizing content of international military action nor its destabilizing tendencies, but unintentionally used that which divides in the hope that it would bind Christians together. So the Crusades, developed with the best papal intentions, exacerbated the divergence between West and East. Besides engaging in a holy war whose concept was suspicious to the Greeks and conducting themselves in an unruly and disrespectful manner while traversing Byzantine lands, the Crusaders aroused the ire of the Eastern sees by forcing the sitting patriarch out of occupied Antioch and replacing him with a Latin bishop. Their supposed Latin benefactors consequently appeared to ecclesiastical leaders in the East as foreigners rather than fellow-Christians, an impression worsened by the expedition against Constantinople in 1107. The march on the city had the blessing of then-pope Paschal II, whose approval was viewed in the East as a declaration of Holy War on the empire. The venture was short and an unqualified failure, but it cast a long psychological shadow. In conjunction especially with the ousting of the Antiochian patriarch, the military threat against Constantinople heightened the antipathy of the East toward the West in the opening decades of the twelfth century. The advances begun with high papal hopes terminated in unforeseen and utterly contrary results, irritating the rift that Urban had hoped to close.
The twelfth century saw the maturation of the three modes of infinity initiated in the eleventh: the popes launched new Crusades from the middle of the century to its conclusion, intensifying the breach between West and East; they embraced exalted estimates of papal supremacy vis-à-vis temporal rulers and fought to impose their might in worldly affairs; and the Roman church progressively transformed into an institution with a distinct legal identity. The last of these stands above the others, for the expansion of ecclesiastical law beyond its roots in theology and liturgy constitutes the side of the infinitizing movement that most directly brings man to his consummation in universality. The detachment and growth of the law intertwines with the consciousness of the individual qua individual, who knows himself in abstraction from his public and institutional life to the extent that those institutions embrace an expansive legal platform. As the institution devolves through an alien and limitless law, so the individual regards his new self-consciousness with both delight and confusion. It comes as no surprise that the twelfth century embodied both sides of this phenomenon in a single age, boasting a burgeoning ecclesiastical edifice met step-for-step with a graduated emphasis on the individual.
In that time the Western church spawned a new kind of cleric concerned less with the administration of the sacraments than the business of administration. A managerial class swelled the ranks of Catholic officials, men trained in law and prepared for political careers as much or more than the holier duties of their order. They directed the Western ethos toward legal philosophy, system, and logic, dedicating their energies to the justification of the church’s political prerogatives as an institution at once set apart by its spiritual functions and licensed to weigh in on if not decide temporal disputes. As the church widened its distance from the kingdom, protecting the separation of the two spheres, it also broke with its own theological consciousness, infusing a new and evolving body of law into the institution through experts trained at universities. These new schools responded to the demand for men capable of constructing arguments that would validate the changing ecclesiastical order and its claims regarding the temporal realm. Soon the universities began supplying lawyers on both the papal and royal sides of political disputes, serving as centers of learning for an age confident in its ability to reform society despite persistent legal conflict.
The revolutionary upheavals that pitted the church versus the kingdom provoked a new method for solving the problems of law that they implied. The dialectical reasoning of the twelfth century, which seems innocent enough on the surface, stands as the first instance of a philosophical pattern that reflects the docetic dialectic as a systematic intellectual phenomenon. Mirroring the practical quandary of the law of the pope set against the law of the king, the dialectical method begins not with a single, indisputable authority but with questions raised by gaps or contradictions between authoritative legal texts or within the same text. The dialectic places the contradictions side by side in the effort to establish a new harmony, resolving the contrasting elements until rules that appeared broken or antithetical are reconciled within a broader synthesis. In this way the method hoped to find unity where there was discord.
The dialectical method presumed a view of the law largely unknown in the West. Whereas the Roman legal texts that medieval lawyers used as a starting point did not necessarily imply general maxims or a comprehensive understanding of law, handling particular cases in their particularity and without extending them into universal rules, dialectical legal philosophy sought a system defined by its universal scope and which integrated separate matters of legal doctrine into a coherent whole. This method found itself in a state of contradiction illustrative of the docetic logic. Beginning in the uncertainty of questions and contradictions, the method rises upward in the reconciliation of opposing cases into a new maxim. The new maxim, however, forms the first of two new competing principles that require adjudication, a recognition that submerges what had risen into discernible legal guidance under a new antagonism. While seeking a comprehensive, unified system of legal truth, the dialectic ends up with an asymptotic approximation of that truth that never achieves final answers. The psychological consequence of such an undertaking is not pride at the approximation but despair at a truth that appears more distant as it comes closer, for the comprehensive and systematic grasp of truth for which the system strives is increasingly understood as an impossible goal. In the process the law—and in medieval times this included both natural and ecclesiastical law—becomes seen as programmatic, growing, and reformable, but by that same standard also pliable and, in an implication with which the optimistic legal technicians of the day would not have agreed, unstable. The dissemination of laws in works such as Gratian’s Decretum (1140) testify to an age that hastened legal development while lacking a consciousness of its negative implications. These surfaced only later and in a more personal setting, leading to the dialectical innovations of the docetic genius Martin Luther.
The ballooning class of clerical administrators and lawyers did not ascend without opposition. Humanists of letters and learning, men of literature, poetry, and the arts whose activities define the twelfth century as a time of renaissance, looked on the managerial class with a mixture of concern and disdain. While religious humanists
