Papal Revolution

Rosenstock-Huessy says that the Papal revolution led by Gregory VII was the first total revolution It was a mutiny against the papacy’s defense on the palace: “The papacy cut the direct and domestic relation between throne and altar in every manor or palace, and claimed the right to be guardian and spokesman for every local representative of the spirit.” The key issue was the election of the Pope, and “what the reform party did tackle immediately was the exclusion of the Roman nobility from the election of the pope.”

The papacy became obsessed with the orb, the world. Rome had been the center of the world in ancient times, and the papacy revived that centrality in various ways. Popes announced their decisions urbi et orbi, as the urbs came to contain the entire orbis. The Pope’s summons to Crusade went over the heads of the various political rulers, and the investiture controversy reduced the emperor to just one king among man. “By summoning the Christians to Jerusalem, the papacy resuscitated the maritime character of the old Roman Empire.” In all these ways, the Pope became the “true emperor” of Europe.

Popes saw this as a revival of Pauline spirit. Though claiming to be successors of Peter, Paul was invoked because of his universality. Peter Damian wrote, Paul “is the right arm of God, held out over the whole breadth of the earth, presiding over all churches.” Paul was also called upon to support the doctrine of two swords; as a Benjamite, he was associated with spiritual and temporal authority. Thus, the new papal power was defended by appeals to both Peter and Paul: “The symbol of St. Paul, now reclaimed from the emperor, ceased to lead the unorganized movements in the Church against the established order. This prophetic function was forgotten for four hundred years, until it was re-invoked by Luther.” When later medievals attacked the Papacy, they did it in the name of John, and hoped not for a Pauline but for a Johannine age to dawn.

ERH places the Papal revolution in a series of revolutions, which proclaimed their agendas to increasingly larger audiences. Dictatus Papae, Gregory claimed, was given by the Spirit, and was kept in his private collection. Luther nailed theses to a door, and a bit over a century later printed copies of the Great Remonstrance were sold to the public. By the time we get to 1917, the Revolution is proclaimed everywhere by radio.

Dictatus Papae, ERH says, “is the revolution. For how could the infallible have mere thoughts about his office.” The revolution took place “in the breast of one man,” the breast which held the “political secrets of the Holy See.” This “established once and for all a . . . power of political inspiration, an immediate connection of the spiritual leader with the inspiration of his day.”

After the Gregorian Revolution, a principle of dualism was implanted in the political world, and this dualism of two sovereign powers, ERH claims, “created European freedom.” By asking the kings to given back the power of investiture, they “expressed the idea of a new sovereign,” and realized “the idea of a trans-local organization, a corporation.”

The revolutionary inspiration was embodied in the architecture of the Gothic cathedrals: “Man has to be inspired to overcome his inertia. When he does that, he re-creates creation. The Papal Revolution goes against the laws of gravity.”

For the Papal reformers, the orb of Christendom constituted a single city. The symbol of the dawning of the new age was the depiction of the pope as a sun, a symbol once used for emperors. The popes saw themselves as virtually Christ incarnate, and thi changed the notion of the sacraments: “Before the Crusades, in the night of the world, every act of the Church had seemed an act of atonement to God, a lightning worthy to be called sacrament . . . . Now the arch of reality made a vault over the earth. A thousand years of sacrament could be summed up.” Thus, along with the Papal revolution came a new science, the science of theology, now pursued as an effort to summarize and systematize the previous 1100 years of Christian thought.

Scholasticism was not merely an academic pursuit, but a social and political one. It “developed a Christian doctorate, an inner doctorate for a worldly outwardly orthodox, but completely pagan under the surface.” Its goal was “to unify and to Christianize the people of its time because they were slipping back into paganism.” Scholastics were as much Crusaders as Richard the Lion-Hearted, and “the subject of their crusade of restoration was Christendom, all and every man united.” Scholasticism had long lasting effects on the development of European thought: “It forced upon European thought its dialectical sagacity and its comprehensive power of thinking in paradoxes and in contradictions.”

The church of the Papal revolution was a visible church. Hundreds of books were written with the word “speculum” in the title, and changes in the performance of the Eucharist also highlighted its visibility: “By granting [the real presence] to mankind, the Lord seemed to have revealed the unique secret of the whole structure. In order to make this secret visible, no effort was spared. The Corpus Christi festival was part of this movement.

From the Papal revolution, the “liberty of the Church was and remained the great warcry for four centuries.” The liberties of the post-Reformation revolutions were modulations on this original cry: “The Rights of Man were a translation of the Rights of the Christian People, the Rights of the Christian people were a translation of the Rights of the Universal Priesthood and the Rights of Priesthood were deduced from the Rights of the Trustee of Priesthood, the Pope.”