Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, (London, 1972)
Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, (London, 1972; 2nd ed. 2003)
Ullman views that the Catholic Church is a hierocracy ruled by the pope. Councils summoned by the pope serve as consultative organs. The papacy, he argues, was strong because it embodied the idea of a law emanating - proceeding - from the divine of which the papacy was an organ, originating in the fourth century. Individual popes were, in Ullmann’s view, “organs who were charged with the application and execution of the idea… transmitters and instruments of the papal idea itself.”(1,2) Hence, it is the papal institution, not the individual popes, that are the focus of Ullmann’s work. This institution was founded on “an objective world order laid down once and for all.” (269)
The thirteenth century and humanism brought the individual pope to the foreground, ultimately dooming the papacy as an institution of universal government. This, and further the Reformation, brought the “objective world order” (327) of the papacy into decline.
Ullmann clearly views that this idea of law and objective world order were present in the institution of the papacy from the beginning, clearly formulated and implemented. He sees this as developing in dialogue with the Eastern Empire, where the historical agenda of the Empire clashed with the ideological one of the papacy, while both claimed to rule the same “body public”, (xiii). Where the church in the East was maintained by the state, the West had to develop based on its inner force, the ideal of the papacy. With the papal coronation of Charlemagne in 800 this idea was transformed onto the Empire in the form of an Empire based on faith (as defined by the church), not on history, like the Byzantine Empire.
Hence the Emperor was essentially a papal creation. However, the merge of a Germanic society with an ideological, church oriented one was not complete and the differences emerged in the controversy over lay investiture. Here, Ullmann views that kingship embodied the Germanic, and the Emperorship the idea of Christian society, hence the pope, Gregory VII, should have targeted the Emperor, not the king, who had begun using Roman law to define the imperial ideology in the absence of a Germanic one. After the Investiture controversy the papal ideology of Christian society under law as emanating from the divine and defined by the papacy, specifically under Innocent III, was spread with increasing success across Europe. In this moment of triumph, however, the idea of the papacy had its greatest setback: Frederick II (1194-1250), trying to assume the role of the historic Roman Emperor, and in raiding the papal stat, questioned the person of the pope rather than the office. This caused the pope to seek help from the French, weakening the position and the idea of the papacy. While Frederick failed, it set wheels in motion that would have repercussions the papacy never fully recovered from. In successive conflicts with rulers popes continued to use arguments honed against emperors, not kings.
The late medieval papacy also undermined its own idea by over extended its plenitudo potestatis through its bureaucracy, alienating the faithful, culminating under Boniface VIII (1235-1303) and the selling of indulgences. The Reformation was merely the final blow to this undermining of the papal idea of divine law manifest in the papal office.
While the book posits a bold and interesting argument of the papal idea embodied in an institution, not the individual men under the tiara, there are many weaknesses in the book. Above all the self-awareness that Ullmann seems to attribute the papacy is questionable and does not seem to be founded in the documents themselves. Hence, Ullmann’s own idea of the papal institution is paralleled with the idea of the papacy: they are both powerful and compelling, but poorly documented. It may be all very well to frown on divorcing ideas from facts, but to combine them without adequate evidence is equally unsavory, no matter how smoothly you write and energetically you argue. While he focuses on the institution of the papacy, not the individuals, he sees the outside world’s influence on the papacy in the persons of emperors and kings, not society as a whole, such as changes in piety, to name an example.