Church and State - for Eliskimo

[fpb]

The history of the Western Church begins with the Pope recognized as the ultimate court of appeal. Kings were crowned by bishops and therefore could, in extreme cases, be uncrowned (as Pope Innocent did to King John Lackland, and Gregory VII to Emperor Henry). But in the late middle ages, the kings - beginning with the king of France - began to

Comments

[captainpeabody]

As has been said, a brilliant essay. The only thing I would add to it (and I'm sure you're well aware) is that the western church, and especially the Papacy, were not wholly unused to dealing with the idea and reality of state control of the Church before the 14th century. Most of the dealings of the eastern and western churches for many centuries had hung on the central and controlling power of the Byzantine Emperor over the eastern church, and his pretensions to a sort of universal quasi-papacy over the entire church. Justinian, to take one of the more drastic examples, seemed to think little of kidnapping Popes, calling ecumenical councils without participation by either the Pope or so much as a single Western bishop, and issuing religious condemnations at his whim, for whatever political or religious end he wished--and his actions were hardly an aberration, as the martyrdom of Pope St. Martin, the entire iconoclast controversy, and a hundred other examples would testify. The freedom of the papacy and the western church from Imperial control was not easily won.
Again, a brilliant essay. I've very much enjoyed and learned from your historical writings here, and I've even taken a stab at reading through your work on British history. Good stuff.

[fpb]

I would not call Justinian I typical of anything; I am more apt to call him one of history's more hideous monsters. He may not have been the worst human being ever to sit on the throne of Constantinople, but he was in the top five, certainly. The Liber Pontificalis compares him to Diocletian. But I take your point. And it's not just Constantinople either; as late as the early eleventh century, the Western Emperor had to intervene in Rome to put an end to the increasingly degenerate series of "Popes as city bosses" that had been going on for well over a century. And even the restoration of Papal unity in the early fifteenth century was largely the work of temporal sovereigns, prominent among whom were the Emperor Sigismund and Henry V of England. It can happen, when the Papacy is really afflicted beyond its own forces to reform, that an external force can come into play.