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Author: C .T.

Categories
Thomas Aquinas

Dominion, 13

The Inquisition as a subject belongs more to Karlheinz Deschner’s series, which I will continue in the future. I rather use Tom Holland’s book to show how Christianity inverted the values of the white man. But it is worth picking up other passages from the chapter we started quoting yesterday:

Anxieties in Paris were heightened by the discovery in 1210 of various heretics whose reading of Aristotle had led them to believe that there was no life after death. The reaction of the city’s bishop was swift. Ten of the heretics were burned at the stake. Various commentaries on Aristotle were burned as well. Aristotle’s own books on natural philosophy were formally proscribed. ‘They are not to be read at Paris either publicly or in private.’

One thing that is completely overlooked on the racial right is that it is impossible to heal after Christian infection unless we repudiate the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. No wonder the medieval freethinkers who began to question this dogma ended up at the stake. No fear of hell, no Church power.

But the ban failed to hold. In 1231, Gregory IX issued a decree that guaranteed the university effective independence from the interference of bishops, and by 1255 all of Aristotle’s texts were back on the curriculum. The people best qualified to learn from them, it turned out, were not heretics, but inquisitors. The days of annihilating entire towns on the grounds that God would know his own were over.

The author refers to Caedite eos: Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius! (‘Kill them: the Lord knows those that are his own!’), a phrase reportedly spoken by the commander of the Albigensian Crusade to eliminate Catharism in France.

The responsibility for rooting out heresy had now been entrusted to friars. Taking the lead was an order that had been established by papal decree back in 1216, to provide the Church with a shock force of intellectuals. Its founder, a Spaniard by the name of Dominic, had toured where the good men were to be found, matching them in all their austerities, and harrying them in debate. In 1207, two years before the annihilation of Béziers, he had met with a good man just north of the city, and argued publicly with him for over a week. To friars schooled in this tradition of militant preaching, Aristotle had come as a godsend. [pages 265-266]

‘…before the annihilation of Béziers’. Holland refers to the massacre of so-called heretics at Béziers, France on 22 July 1209.

The labour of reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian doctrine did not come easily. Many contributed to it; but none more so than a Dominican called Thomas, a native of Aquino, a small town just south of Rome. The book he worked on between 1265 and his death in 1274, a great compendium of ‘things pertaining to Christianity’, was the most comprehensive attempt ever undertaken to synthesise faith with philosophy.

Thomas Aquinas himself died thinking that he had failed in his efforts, and that, before the radiant unknowability of God, everything he had written was the merest chaff; in Paris, two years after his death, various of his propositions were condemned by the city’s bishop. It did not take long, though, for the sheer scale of his achievement to be recognised and gratefully acknowledged. In 1323, the seal was set on his reputation when the pope proclaimed him a saint. The result was to enshrine as a bedrock of Catholic theology the conviction that revelation might indeed co-exist with reason. A century after the banning in Paris of Aristotle’s books on natural philosophy, no one had to worry that the study of them might risk heresy.

Yet this very sublimity had its shadow. If all of eternity were Christian, then it rendered those who persisted in the ways of heresy, obdurate in their folly, only the more damnable. The slaughter of the Albigensians had set a precedent that was not readily forgotten. [pages 266-267]

European beauty

Rainbow Falls, Switzerland

Categories
Inquisition So-called saints

Dominion, 12

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

Before quoting the book, we should recall the pride shown in the Greco-Roman world for the Aryan nude in the form of public statuary, something that both Jews and Christians abhorred. The so-called Catholic saints only show a monstrous reversal of these values, as can be seen in the hagiographies rephrased by Tom Holland in his chapter ‘Persecution: 1229 Marburg’:

The Lady Elizabeth had been born to greatness. Descended from a cousin of Stephen, Hungary’s first truly Christian king, she had been sent as a child to the court of Thuringia, in central Germany, and groomed there for marriage. At the age of fourteen, she had joined Louis, its twenty-year-old ruler, on the throne. The couple had been very happy. Elizabeth had borne her husband three children; Louis had gloried in his wife’s demonstrable closeness to God. Even when he was woken in the night by a maid tugging on his foot, he had borne it patiently, knowing that the servant had mistaken him for his wife, whose custom it was to get up in the early hours to pray. Elizabeth’s insistence on giving away her jewellery to the poor; her mopping up of mucus and saliva from the faces of the sick; her making of shrouds for paupers out of her finest linen veils: here were gestures that had prefigured her far more spectacular self-abasement in the wake of her husband’s death. Her only regret was that it did not go far enough. ‘If there were a life that was more despised, I would choose it.’ When Count Paviam urged Elizabeth to abandon the rigours and humiliations of her existence in Marburg, and return with him to her father’s court, she refused point blank…

Clerks in the service of the papal bureaucracy and scholars learned in canon law had long been toiling to strengthen the foundations of the Church’s authority. They understood the awful responsibility that weighed upon their shoulders. Their task was to bring the Christian people to God. ‘There is one Catholic Church of the faithful, and outside of it there is absolutely no salvation.’ So it had been formally declared during Elizabeth’s childhood, in 1215, at the fourth of a series of councils convened at the Lateran. To defy this canon, to reject the structures of authority that served to uphold it, to disobey the clergy whose solemn prerogative it was to shepherd souls, was to follow the path to hell. [pages 247-249]

One thing that is completely absent on the intellectual right today is the historical memory of what the doctrine of eternal damnation meant for the mental health of medieval Europeans. I touched on the subject in my books on family tragedy; and more succinctly in ‘On Erasmus’, collected in one of the books of the featured post.

In 1206, a one-time playboy by the name of Francis, a native of the Italian city of Assisi, had spectacularly renounced his patrimony. Taking off his clothes, he had handed them over to his father. ‘Moreover he did not even keep his drawers, but stripped himself naked before all the bystanders.’ The local bishop, impressed rather than appalled by this display, had tenderly covered him with his own cloak, and sent him on his way with a blessing. Here, with this episode, had been set the pattern of Francis’ career. His genius for taking Christ’s teachings literally, for dramatising their paradoxes and complexities, for combining simplicity and profundity in a single memorable gesture, would never leave him. [page 251]

Above, St Francis’ renunciation of worldy goods by Giotto.

He served lepers; preached to birds; rescued lambs from butchers. Rare were those immune to his charisma. Admiration for his mission reached to the very summit of the Church. Innocent III, the pope who in 1215 had convened the Fourth Lateran Council, was not a man easily impressed. Imperious, daring and brilliant, he gave way to no one, overthrowing emperors, excommunicating kings. Unsurprisingly, then, when Francis, at the head of twelve ragged ‘brothers’, or ‘friars’, first arrived in Rome, Innocent had refused to see him. The whiff of heresy, not to mention blasphemy, had seemed altogether too rank. Francis, though, unlike Waldes, never stinted in his respect for the Church, in his obedience to its authority. Innocent’s doubts were eased. Imaginative as well as domineering, he had come to see in Francis and his followers not a danger, but an opportunity. Rather than treating them as his predecessors had treated the Waldensians, he ordained them a legally constituted order of the Church. ‘Go, and the Lord be with you, brethren, and as He shall deign to inspire you, preach repentance to all.’ [pages 251-252]

By 1217, less than a decade after this proclamation, a Franciscan mission had reached Germany. Elizabeth would grow up profoundly inspired by its example. By dressing in secret as a beggar, she had been paying tribute to Francis. Other demonstrations of her enthusiasm for his teachings were more public. In 1225, she provided the Franciscans with a base at the foot of the Wartburg, in the town of Eisenach. Three years later, following the death of her husband, she made her way there and formally renounced her ties to the world. Yet no matter how desperately she longed to do so, she did not then go begging from door to door. Elizabeth had properly absorbed the lessons of Francis’ example. She understood that to embrace poverty without obedience was to risk the fate of Waldes. [page-252]

While Waldes was very similar to Elizabeth and Francis in terms of mortifications of the flesh (which today would be considered a mental disorder, self-harm), in the eyes of the Church he was reprehensible because, unlike Elizabeth and Francis, he didn’t faithfully obey his ecclesiastical superiors: enough for him to be considered a heretic.

No mortification, no gesture of abasement, could possibly be undertaken unless at the command of a superior. Here, for a princess, the mistress of many servants, was a realisation that was itself a form of submission. So Elizabeth, even as she sat enthroned by her husband’s side, had employed a magister disciplinae spiritualis: a ‘master of spiritual discipline’. Not just any master, either. ‘I could have sworn obedience to a bishop or an abbot who had possessions, but I thought it better to swear obedience to one who has nothing and relies totally on begging. And so I submitted to Master Conrad’…

Even before Louis’ death, he had punished her for missing one of his sermons with a beating so violent that the stripes were still visible three weeks later… To suffer was to gain redemption. In 1231, when Elizabeth died of her austerities at the tender age of twenty-four, Conrad did not hesitate to hail her as a saint. As gold is purified by fire, so had she been purged of sin. The same strictness that had brought her to an early grave had brought her to heaven. [pages 252-253]

Elizabeth of Hungary submits to her master of spiritual discipline. This image appears in Holland’s book. Conrad was tireless in his defence of the Church and its authority:

In 1231, there came a fresh refinement. A new pope, Gregory IX, authorised Conrad not merely to preach against heresy, but to devote himself to the search for it—the inquisitio. No longer was it the responsibility of a bishop to bring heretics to trial, and sit in judgement on them, but rather that of a cleric especially appointed to the task. Even though, as a priest, Conrad could not himself ‘decree or pronounce a sentence involving the shedding of blood’, he was licensed by Gregory to compel the secular authorities to impose it. Never before had power of this order been given to a campaigner against heresy. Now, when Conrad rode on his mule from village to village, summoning the locals to answer his interrogation of their beliefs, he did so not merely as a preacher, but as a whole new breed of official: an inquisitor.

‘In all things he broke her will, to ensure that the merit of her obedience to him would increase.’ So Conrad had justified his handling of Elizabeth. Now, with all of Germany his to discipline, he could not afford to soften. The truest kindness was cruelty; the truest mercy harshness. The swarm of heretics that confronted Conrad were not readily to be redeemed from damnation. Only fire could smoke them out. Pyres needed to be stoked as they had never been stoked before. The burning of heretics—hitherto a rare and sporadic expedient, only ever reluctantly licensed, if at all—was the very mark of Conrad’s inquisition. In towns and villages along the Rhine, the stench of blackened flesh hung in the air. ‘So many heretics were burned throughout Germany that their number could not be comprehended.’ Conrad’s critics, unsurprisingly, accused him of a killing spree. They charged him with believing every accusation that was brought before him; of rushing the process of law; of sentencing the innocent to the flames. No one, though, was innocent. All were fallen. Better to suffer as Christ had suffered, tortured in a place of public execution for a crime that he had not committed, than to suffer eternal damnation. Better to suffer for a few fleeting moments than to burn for all eternity.

With Master Conrad, the yearning to cleanse the world of sin, to heal it of its leprosy, had turned murderous. That made it no less revolutionary. The suspicion of the worldly order that had brought Gregory VII to humble an anointed king before the gates of Canossa was one that Conrad more than shared. As Elizabeth’s master, he had forbidden her to eat food ‘about which she did not have a clear conscience’. Anything on her husband’s table that might have derived from exploitation of the poor, that might have been extracted from peasants as a tribute or a tax, she had dutifully spurned. ‘As a result, she often suffered great penury, eating nothing but rolls spread with honey.’ The Lady Elizabeth had been a saint. Her peers were not. In the summer of 1233, Conrad dared to accuse one of them, the Count of Sayn, of heresy. A frantically convened synod of bishops, in the presence of the German king himself, threw out the case. Conrad, nothing daunted, began to prepare charges against further noblemen.

Then, on 30 July, as he was returning from the Rhine to Marburg, he was ambushed by a group of knights and cut down. The news of his death was greeted with rejoicing throughout Germany. In the Lateran, though, there was indignation. As Conrad was laid to rest in Marburg, by the side of the Lady Elizabeth, Gregory mourned him in sombre terms. The murderers, so the Pope warned, were harbingers of a rising darkness. All of heaven and earth had shuddered at their crime. Their patron was literally hellish: none other than the Devil himself. [pages 254-256]

Categories
Conservatism

Laje

Something that bothers me about my blogging career is that the more philosophically mature I get, the fewer visits I receive. And this is even more pronounced on my Spanish blog, which I have decided to abandon after a recent post on Evropa Soberana because no Spanish speaker wants to argue with me.

On the other hand, the Argentinian Agustín Laje, whom I have already mentioned on this site and whom the press slanders as an ultra-right-winger receives such an immense number of visits that he has been invited countless times to many Spanish-speaking countries to give lectures.

I would like to translate some passages I have already written in Spanish about Laje:
 

Agustín Laje’s books

First, to use my metaphor of crossing the psychological Rubicon, Laje is still in Normieland. A normie could be defined as one who doesn’t rebel against the egalitarian dogma of racial, gender and sexual preference: today’s holy trinity in the West.

Take Norberto Bobbio’s excellent definition of what exactly is right and left on page 378 of Laje’s La batalla cultural. It all revolves around egalitarianism. ‘In effect’, Laje comments, ‘that which embraces increasing doses of equality is placed on the left, and the opposite on the right’ (my translation). Laje constantly claims to be right-wing. But from this angle he is left-wing. Not as crazy left as Woke but left at the end of the day because he believes in racial equality, gender equality and sometimes sort of fails to condemn some sexual aberrations (Laje wouldn’t be considered right-wing in, say, Franco’s Spain.) His failure to embrace Bobbio’s definition of what exactly is left and right is due to his fear of validating racial hierarchy (for example, whites as well as some Asians and Jews, have higher IQs than blacks).

Like YouTubber Matt Walsh, Laje only rebels at gender ideology and the trans movement: the most psychotic phase of Wokism that has now involved even children. Here I also refer to Laje’s previous bestseller, which he wrote together with another Argentinian, Nicolás Márquez: El libro negro de la nueva izquierda, published in 2016. In 2022, a book I bought in a common bookstore as La batalla cultural has by necessity to be the book of someone who doesn’t blaspheme against the new trinity. Books by real dissidents have been banned from bookshops!

In other words, since Laje and his mentor Márquez simply reject third-wave feminism, that marks them out as liberals, not true traditionalists. Compare this pair with what we say about feminism in On Beth’s Cute Tits: one of the books that the printer that printed it for me has refused to republish, and is now only available as a PDF (see ‘Our Books’).

Laje never touches the Jewish question. Nor does he mention white nationalists, who do analyse the JQ. Nor does Laje mention the most privileged minds who rebelled after 1945: the European Savitri Devi (1905-1982) and the American William Pierce (1933-2002).

If we compare the young Laje with the old critic of the Latin American left, Octavio Paz (1914-1998), the latter stated that he disliked the term political scientist; that his classical training made him approach human reality from the point of view of history. It is precisely history that ‘political scientists’ like Laje ignore. Think not only of the real history of Christianity, but also of the Hellstorm holocaust committed by the Allies after the Second World War; although, to be fair to Laje, Paz and his ilk also ignored these histories. Precisely because they ignore history, Laje, Márquez and all those of the Latin American new right—and the old right like that of the late Paz—have also ignored the fact that this is the second time the West has fallen into a state of mass psychosis, not the first. The first occurred in the 4th century, with Constantine.

The good thing about Laje is that he makes feminists freak out in a lot of YouTube videos. For that, he is very good, as well as for winning debates with progressives. But progressivism has reached such levels of delirium that a little common sense looks good to an audience whose mother tongue is the language of Cervantes.

Laje could not respond, on the other hand, to academics who reject not only the third feminist wave, but the second. Remember Roger Devlin’s seminal essays published years ago in Counter-Currents. Unlike Laje, Devlin is a true conservative; and we are more radical than Devlin, in that we reject even the first wave of feminism.

Laje has just published another book, Generación idiota (Generation Idiot). If nothing else, such books could serve as stepping stones for Spanish-speaking normies who don’t want to get their feet wet to start crossing the psychological Rubicon. The problem, as we have said several times before, is that hardly anyone wants to go beyond their first baby steps to the other side of the river. That’s why the more mature I get, the fewer visits I receive…

Categories
Racial right

Dominion, 11

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

The following passages are taken from the section ‘Laying Down the Law’ of chapter ‘Revolution, 1076 Cambrai’ of Dominion:

[Pope] Urban’s speech had reverberated to miraculous effect. A great host of warriors drawn from across the Latin West had taken a familiar road. As pilgrims had been doing since the time of the millennium, they had journeyed across Hungary to Constantinople; and then from Constantinople to the Holy Land. Every attempt by the Saracens to halt them had been defeated. Finally, in the summer of 1099, the great army of warrior pilgrims had arrived before Jerusalem. On 15 July, they stormed its walls. The city was theirs. Then, once the slaughter was done, and they had dried their dripping swords, they headed for the tomb of Christ. There, in joy and disbelief, they offered up praises to God. Jerusalem—after centuries of Saracen rule—was Christian once again.

So extraordinary was the feat as to be barely believable—and the news redounded gloriously to the credit of the papacy. Urban himself died a fortnight after the city’s capture, too soon for news of the great victory that he had inspired to reach him; but the programme of reform to which he had devoted his life was much burnished by the winning of the Holy City. Emperors since the time of Charlemagne had fought wars of conquest beneath the banner of Christ; but none had ever sent an entire army on pilgrimage. Warriors present at the capture of Jerusalem reported having seen ‘a beautiful person sitting atop a white horse’—and there were some prepared to wonder if it might not have been Christ himself. Whatever the truth of the mysterious horseman’s identity, one thing was clear: the Holy City had been won, not in the name of any king or emperor, but in that of a much more universal cause.

But what name to give this cause? Back in the Latin West, the word starting to be used was one that, until the capture of Jerusalem, had barely been heard. The warrior pilgrims, so it came to be said, had fought under the banner of Christianitas: Christendom. Such a categorisation—divorced as it was from the dynasties of earthly kings and the holdings of feudal lords—was one well suited to the ambitions of the papacy. Who better to stand at the head of Christendom than the heir of Saint Peter? Less than a century after Henry III had deposed three popes in a single year, the Roman Church had carved out a role of leadership for itself so powerful that Henry’s grandson, the son of Henry IV, was brought in 1122 to sue for peace. In that year, in Worms, where his father had once commanded Gregory VII to abdicate, Henry V agreed to a momentous concordat. By its terms, the fifty-year-old quarrel over the investiture of imperial bishops was finally brought to an end. Although ostensibly a compromise, time would demonstrate that victory was decisively the papacy’s. Decisive too was the increasing acceptance of another key demand of the reformers: that the clergy distinguish themselves from the great mass of the Christian people— the laicus, or ‘laity’—by embracing celibacy. By 1148, when yet another papal decree banning priests from having wives or concubines was promulgated, the response of many was to roll their eyes. ‘Futile and ludicrous—for who does not know already that it is unlawful?’

Increasingly, then, the separation of church from state was an upheaval manifest across the whole of Christendom. Wherever a priest was called upon to minister to the laity, even in the humblest, the most isolated village, there the impact of reformatio could be felt. The establishment of the Roman Church as something more than merely a first among equals, as ‘the general forum of all clergy and all churches’, gave clerics across the Latin West a common identity that they had not previously possessed. In the various kingdoms, fiefdoms and cities that constituted the great patchwork of Christendom, something unprecedented had come into being: an entire class that owed its loyalty, not to local lords, but to a hierarchy that exulted in being ‘universal, and spread throughout the world’.

Emperors and kings, although they might try to take a stand against it, would repeatedly find themselves left bruised by the attempt. Not since the age of Constantine and his heirs had any one man exercised an authority over so wide a sweep of Europe as did the bishop of the ancient capital of the world. His open claim was to the ‘rights of heavenly and earthly empire’; his legates travelled to barbarous lands and expected to be heard; his court, in an echo of the building where the Roman Senate had once met, was known as the ‘Curia’. Yet the pope was no Caesar. His assertion of supremacy was not founded on force of arms, nor the rank of his ministers on their lineage or their wealth. The Church that had emerged from the Gregorian reformatio was instead an institution of a kind never before witnessed: one that had not merely come to think of itself as sovereign, but had willed itself into becoming so. ‘The Pope,’ Gregory VII had affirmed, ‘may be judged by no one.’ All Christian people, even kings, even emperors, were subject to his rulings. The Curia provided Christendom with its final court of appeal. A supreme paradox: that the Church, by rending itself free of the secular, had itself become a state. [pages 233-235]

Once the papal state was formed, Tom Holland mentions the formation of the first university and, very relevant to our research, the formation of so-called canon law. He then writes:

[St] Paul’s authority on this score was definitive. ‘The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’ Here, for Gratian, was the foundation-stone of justice. So important to him was the command that he opened the Decretum by citing it. Echoing the Stoics much as Paul had done, he opted to define it as natural law—and the key to fashioning a properly Christian legal system. All souls were equal in the eyes of God [bold by Ed.]. Only if it were founded on this assumption could justice truly be done. Anything obstructing it had to go. ‘Enactments, whether ecclesiastical or secular, if they are proved to be contrary to natural law, must be totally excluded.’

Much flowed from this formulation that earlier ages would have struggled to comprehend. Age-old presumptions were being decisively overturned: that custom was the ultimate authority; that the great were owed a different justice from the humble; that inequality was something natural, to be taken for granted. Clerks trained in Bologna were agents of revolution as well as of order. Legally constituted, university-trained, they constituted a new breed of professional. Gratian, by providing them with both a criterion and a sanction for weeding out objectionable customs, had transfigured the very understanding of law. No longer did it exist to uphold the differences in status that Roman jurists and Frankish kings alike had always taken for granted. [Remember: for the Merovingian and Frankish kings it was not the same to kill a blond-haired, blue-eyed man as it was to kill a Mediterranean mudblood—Ed.] Instead, its purpose was to provide equal justice to every individual, regardless of rank, or wealth, or lineage—for every individual was equally a child of God…

Image of pages from the Decretum of Burchard of Worms, an 11th-century book of canon law.

How, for instance, were the Christian people to square the rampant inequality between rich and poor with the insistence of numerous Church Fathers that ‘the use of all things should be common to all’? The problem was one that, for decades, demanded the attention of the most distinguished scholars in Bologna. By 1200, half a century after the completion of the Decretum, a solution had finally been arrived at—and it was one fertile with implications for the future. A starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so, according to a growing number of legal scholars, iure naturali—‘in accordance with natural law’. As such, they argued, he could not be reckoned guilty of a crime. Instead, he was merely taking what was properly owed him. It was the wealthy miser, not the starving thief, who was the object of divine disapproval. Any bishop confronted by such a case, so canon lawyers concluded, had a duty to ensure that the wealthy pay their due of alms. Charity, no longer voluntary, was being rendered a legal obligation.

That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was—in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers—a human ‘right’.

Law, in the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing revolution. [pages 238-239]

Countless times I have said that white nationalists, who are generally sympathetic to Christianity even though they are not all Christians, are ignorant of the history of the West in general and of the Church in particular. It is amusing to see them anathematise the current pope, as if his liberalism were a phenomenon of our century. They constantly complain in their forums: ‘Alas, the Jews have subverted Christianity!’ In fact the first, baby steps to equalise men by law, based on St Paul the Jew, had already been taken a millennium earlier.

Categories
Daybreak Publishing

Cute books…

These days I have sent the first copies of Savitri Devi’s book to two buyers.

Unfortunately, as these leather bindings are made by a professional bookbinder, they are costing me a lot of money together with the shipping either to the USA or to the UK.

As soon as I have the financial means to get a workshop to bind them myself, it will be a pleasure to print & bind the Savitri copies and other books in ‘Our Books’ except for Hellstorm and Letter to mom Medusa, which are already available without traditional binding.

Dominion, 10

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

The chapter ‘Revolution, 1076 Cambrai’ begins by explaining how the Catholic Church decided to expand the vow of celibacy, which already existed for alienated monks, to all priests.

This, from my point of view, was a step that led to the abuse of children and pubescents in the Church throughout the next millennium, as now even the clergy could not marry, burning themselves in celibacy and masturbation. Such an aberrant step has to do with the Christian view of the human soul, which assumes that lust doesn’t exist in a pure soul, but that we simply indulge in impure thoughts, concupiscence.

A millennium later such a view of the human soul would become, in secularised form, in the trans movement that assumes that we are not sexualised animals but that we can simply ‘choose’ our sexes. In the following pages, Tom Holland mentions a milestone in the mentality of Europeans regarding the increasing power of the Church:

‘The Pope is permitted to depose emperors.’ This proposition, one of a number of theses on papal authority drawn up for Gregory’s private use in March 1075, had shown him more than braced for the inevitable blow-back. No pope before had ever claimed such a licence; but neither, of course, had any pope dared to challenge imperial authority with such unapologetic directness. Gregory, by laying claim to the sole leadership of the Christian people, and trampling down long-standing royal prerogatives, was offending Henry IV grievously. Heir to a long line of emperors who had never hesitated to depose troublesome popes, the young king acted with the self-assurance of a man supremely confident that both right and tradition were on his side. Early in 1076, when he summoned a conference of imperial bishops to the German city of Worms, the assembled clerics knew exactly what was expected of them. The election of Hildebrand, so they ruled, had been invalid. No sooner had this decision been reached than Henry’s scribes were reaching for their quills. ‘Let another sit upon Saint Peter’s throne.’ The message to Gregory in Rome could not have been blunter. ‘Step down, step down!’

But Gregory also had a talent for bluntness. Brought the command to abdicate, he not only refused, but promptly raised the stakes. Speaking from the Lateran, he declared that Henry was ‘bound with the chain of anathema’ and excommunicated from the Church. His subjects were absolved of all their oaths of loyalty to him. Henry himself, as a tyrant and an enemy of God, was deposed. The impact of this pronouncement proved devastating. Henry’s authority went into meltdown. Numerous of his princely vassals, hungry for the opportunity that his excommunication had given them, set to dismembering his kingdom. By the end of the year, Henry found himself cornered. To such straits was his authority reduced that he settled on a desperate gambit. Crossing the Alps in the dead of winter, he headed for Canossa, a castle in the northern Apennines where he knew that Gregory was staying. For three days, ‘barefoot, and clad in wool’, the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne stood shivering before the gates of the castle’s innermost wall. Finally, ordering the gates unbarred, and summoning Henry into his presence, Gregory absolved the penitent with a kiss. ‘The King of Rome, rather than being honoured as a universal monarch, had been treated instead as merely a human being—a creature moulded out of clay.’

Henry IV, King of Germany from 1054 to 1105, King of Italy and Burgundy from 1056 to 1105, and Duke of Bavaria begging forgiveness of Pope Gregory VII at Canossa, the castle of the Countess Matilda, 1077.

The shock was seismic. That Henry had soon reneged on his promises, capturing Rome in 1084 and forcing his great enemy to flee the city, had done nothing to lessen the impact of Gregory’s papacy on the mass of the Christian people. For the first time, public affairs in the Latin West had an audience that spanned every region, and every social class. ‘What else is talked about even in the women’s spinning-rooms and the artisans’ workshops?’…

The humiliation of Henry IV had made visible a great and awesome prize. The dream of Gregory and his fellow reformers—of a Church rendered decisively distinct from the dimension of the earthly, from top to bottom, from palace to meanest village—no longer appeared a fantasy, but eminently realisable. A celibate clergy, once disentangled from the snares and meshes of the fallen world, would then be better fitted to serve the Christian people as a model of purity, and bring them to God…

Nevertheless, deep though the roots of Gregory’s reformatio lay in the soil of Christian teaching, the flower was indeed something new. The concept of the ‘secular’, first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West, ‘for the first time and permanently’. A decisive moment…

It was no longer enough for Gregory and his fellow reformers that individual sinners, or even great monasteries, be consecrated to the dimension of religio. The entire sweep of the Christian world required an identical consecration. That sins should be washed away; the mighty put down from their seats; the entire world reordered in obedience to a conception of purity as militant as it was demanding: here was a manifesto that had resulted in a Caesar humbling himself before a pope. ‘Any custom, no matter how venerable, no matter how commonplace, must yield utterly to truth—and, if it is contrary to truth, be abolished.’ So Gregory had written. Nova consilia, he had called his teachings—‘new counsels’.

A model of reformatio had triumphed that, reverberating down the centuries, would come to shake many a monarchy, and prompt many a visionary to dream that society might be born anew. The earthquake would reach very far, and the aftershocks be many. The Latin West had been given its primal taste of revolution. [pages 227-231]

Categories
Painting

Venusberg Tannhäuser

Venusberg Tannhäuser by John Collier, oil on canvas,
Atkinson Art Gallery Collection Bensenville.

Dominion, 9

by Tom Holland

  A bare couple of decades after Charlemagne’s death in 814, a Saxon poet, writing in praise of the god brought by the Franks to his people, had contrasted ‘the bright, infinitely beautiful light’ of Christ with the waxing and waning of mortals. ‘Here in this world, in Middle Earth, they come and go, the old dying and the young succeeding, until they too grow old, and are borne away by fate.’ The coronation of Otto in the ancient capital of the world bore potent witness to just how unpredictable were the affairs of men. The throne of empire had stood vacant for over half a century. The last descendant of Charlemagne to occupy it had been deposed, blinded and imprisoned back in 905. The Regnum Francorum, the ‘Kingdom of the Franks’, had fractured into a number of realms. Of these, the two largest were on the western and eastern flanks of the one-time Frankish empire: kingdoms that in time would come to be known as France and Germany. The dynasty to which Otto belonged, and which had been elected to the rule of eastern Francia in 919, had no link to Charlemagne’s. Indeed, it was not even Frankish. Otto the Great, the heir of Constantine, the shield of the West, the wielder of the Holy Spear, was sprung from the very people who, less than two centuries before, had been so obdurate in their defiance of Christian arms: the Saxons…

  Meanwhile, in the northern seas, the forces of Christian order were recovering from near implosion. In 937, a great Viking invasion of Britain was defeated by the king of Wessex, a formidable warrior by the name of Athelstan. The triumph, though, was not Athelstan’s alone. For three generations, under his father and grandfather, the West Saxons had been locked in a desperate struggle for survival. They alone, of all the Anglo-Saxon peoples, had managed to preserve their kingdom from Viking conquest—and even then, only just. For a spell, the very future of Christianity in the lands cast by Bede as a new Israel had seemed to hang by a thread. God, though, had saved it from being cut. Not only had the Vikings been brought to submit to Christ, but an entire new Christian kingdom had been built out of the ruins of the old. Athelstan had emerged from a lifetime of relentless campaigning as the first king of a realm that, by the time of his death, stretched from Northumbria to the Channel. ‘Through God’s grace he ruled alone what previously many had held among themselves.’ Redeemed from the brink of disaster, Bede’s vision of the Angles and the Saxons as a single people had been fulfilled.

   Great conquerors such as Otto and Athelstan stood in no barbarian’s shadow. After a long century of reverses and defeats, Christian kingship had recaptured its swagger, its mystique. What god could possibly rival the power of the celestial emperor who had brought the Saxons from sinister obscurity to such greatness, or the House of Wessex to feed so many of their foes to the wolves and the ravens? It was only natural for a pagan warlord defeated by Christian arms to ponder this question long and hard. Battle was the ultimate testing-ground of a god’s authority. Not only that, but the rewards of suing for terms from Christ were evident. To accept baptism was to win entry into a commonwealth of realms defined by their antiquity, their sophistication and their wealth. From Scandinavia to central Europe, pagan warlords began to contemplate the same possibility: that the surest path to profiting from the Christian world might not be to tear it to pieces, but rather to be woven into its fabric. Sure enough, two decades after the great slaughter of his people beside the Lech, Géza, the king of the Hungarians, became a Christian. Reproached by a monk for continuing to offer sacrifice ‘to various false gods’, he cheerily acknowledged that hedging his bets ‘had brought him both wealth and great power’. Only a generation on, the commitment to Christ of his son, Waik, was altogether more full-blooded. The new king took the name Stephen; he built churches across the Hungarian countryside; he ordered that the head be shaved of anyone who dared to mock the rites performed within them; he had a rebellious pagan lord quartered, and the dismembered body parts nailed up in various prominent places. Great rewards were quick to flow from these godly measures. Stephen, the grandson of a pagan chieftain, was given as his queen the grand-niece of none other than Otto the Great. Otto’s own grandson, the reigning emperor, bestowed on him a replica of the Holy Spear. The pope sent him a crown. In time, after a long and prosperous reign, he would end up proclaimed a saint.

   By 1038, the year of Stephen’s death, the leaders of the Latin Church could view the world with an intoxicating sense of possibility. It was not just the Hungarians who had been brought to Christ. So too had the Bohemians and the Poles, the Danes and the Norwegians. Ambitious chieftains, once they had been welcomed into the order of Christian royalty, were rarely tempted to renew the worship of their ancestral gods. No pagan ritual could rival the anointing of a baptised king. The ruler who felt the stickiness of holy oil upon his skin, penetrating his pores, seeping deep into his soul, knew himself joined by the experience to David and Solomon, to Charlemagne and Otto. Who was Christ himself, if not the very greatest of kings? Over the course of the centuries, he ‘had gained many realms and had triumphed over the mightiest rulers and had crushed through his power the necks of the proud and the sublime’. It was no shame for even the most peerless of kings, even the emperor himself, to acknowledge this. From east to west, from deepest forest to wildest ocean, from the banks of the Volga to the glaciers of Greenland, Christ had come to rule them all.

   Yet there was a paradox. Even as kings bowed the knee to him, the hideousness of what he had undergone for humanity’s sake, the pain and helplessness that he had endured at Golgotha, the agony of it all, was coming to obsess Christians as never before. The replica of the Holy Spear sent to Stephen served as a sombre reminder of Christ’s suffering. Christ himself—unlike Otto—had never borne it into battle. It was holy because a Roman soldier, standing guard over his crucifixion, had jabbed it into his side. Blood and water had flowed out. Christ had hung from his gibbet, dead. Ever since, Christians had shrunk from representing their Saviour as a corpse. But now, a thousand years on, artists had begun to break that taboo. In Cologne, above the grave of the archbishop who had commissioned it, a great sculpture was erected, one that portrayed Christ slumped on the cross, his eyes closed, the life gone from his body. Others beheld a similar scene in their visions. A monk in Limoges, rising in the dead of night, saw ‘the image of the Crucified One, the colour of fire and deep blood for half a full night hour’, high against the southern sky, as if planted in the heavens. The closer that 1033, the millennial anniversary of Christ’s death, drew near, so the more did vast crowds, in an ecstasy of mingled yearning, and hope, and fear, begin to assemble. Never before had a movement of such a magnitude been witnessed in the lands of the West. Many gathered in fields outside towns across France, ‘stretching their palms to God, and shouting with one voice, “Peace! Peace! Peace!”, as a sign of the perpetual covenant which they had vowed between themselves and God’. Others, taking advantage of the land-route that the conversion of the Hungarians had opened up, followed the road to Constantinople, and thence to Jerusalem. The largest number of all set out in 1033, ‘an innumerable multitude of people from the whole world, greater than any man before could have hoped to see’. Their journey’s end: the site of Christ’s execution, and the tomb that had witnessed his resurrection.

  What were they hoping for? If they declared it, they did so under their breath. Christians were not oblivious to Augustine’s prohibition. They knew the orthodoxy: that the thousand-year reign of the saints mentioned in Revelation was not to be taken literally. In the event, the millennium of Christ’s death came and went, and he did not descend from the heavens. His kingdom was not established on earth. The fallen world continued much as before. Nevertheless, the longing for reform, for renewal, for redemption did not fade. On one level, this was nothing new. Christ, after all, had called on his followers to be born again. The longing to see the entire Christian people purged of their sins had deep roots [bold by Ed.]. It was what, some two and a half centuries previously, had inspired Charlemagne in his great project of correctio. Yet though his heirs still claimed the right to serve as the shepherds of their people, to rule—as Charlemagne had done—as priest as well as king, the ambition to set the Christian world on new foundations was no longer the preserve of courts. It had become a fever that filled meadows with swaying, moaning crowds, and inspired armies of pilgrims to tramp dusty roads…

  Arnold was right to foretell upheaval. Much that had been taken for granted was on the verge of titanic disruption. Revolution of a new and irreversible order was brewing in the Latin West.  [pages 216-221]

Categories
Architecture

European beauty

Dedicated to Helios, the Roman god of the sun, the Garni temple was built by the Armenian King Tiridates I in the 1st century c.e.