The Church and the Empire, D. J. Medley [librera reader TXT] 📗

Emperor. It was no fault of his that he never visited Rome. Bernard’s influence caused him to postpone his immediate duties for a work which every Christian of the time regarded as of paramount importance. The first Crusade had met with a measure of success only because the Mohammedan powers were divided.

The Crusaders were organised into the kingdom of Jerusalem and the principalities of Tripoli, Antioch, and Edessa. But they quarrelled incessantly. Meanwhile Imad-ed-din Zangi, the Atabek or Sultan of Mosul on the Tigris, extended his arms over all Mesopotamia and Northern Syria, and in 1144 he conquered the Latin principality of Edessa. The whole of Europe was shocked at the disaster. Pope Eugenius delegated to Bernard the task of preaching a new crusade. The young King, Louis VII of France, had already taken the Crusader’s vow, but so far the earnest entreaty of his minister, Suger, Abbot of St.

Denys, had kept him from his purpose. But at the Council of Vezelai in 1146 the eloquence of Bernard bore down all considerations of prudence. Conrad III was much harder to persuade, for he felt the need of his presence at home. But Bernard was not to be denied, and by working upon Conrad’s feelings at the moment of the celebration of the Mass he entirely overcame the better judgment of the German King.

Events proved in every way the mischievous nature of Bernard’s influence. The Crusade was a total failure. Only a small remnant of the force which followed either King reached Palestine; and the only offensive operation undertaken—an attack upon Damascus—had to be abandoned. Nothing had been done to break the growing power of Zangi’s son, Noureddin, the uncle and predecessor of the great Saladin.

[Sidenote: The divorce of Louis VII.]

The effects were scarcely less disastrous in Western Europe. Suger supplied Louis with money and defended his throne against plots, and ultimately persuaded him to return to France. But during the Crusade Louis and his wife Eleanor, the daughter and heiress of William X of Aquitaine, had quarrelled bitterly. Louis had disgusted his high-spirited wife by behaving more like a pilgrim than a warrior; while Eleanor had attempted to divert the French troops to the aid of her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. Suger alone preserved some sort of harmony between the ill-assorted pair; but he died in 1151, and Bernard, who had never approved of the marriage on canonical grounds, lent his support to Louis’ desire for a declaration of its invalidity, though Louis and Eleanor had been married for thirteen years and there were two daughters. The dissolution of the marriage was pronounced by an ecclesiastical Council in 1152, and in the same year Eleanor, taking with her all her extensive lands, married the young Henry of Anjou and Normandy, who two years later became King of England.

[Sidenote: Bernard as defender of the Faith.]

Bernard and Suger were friends; but while the predominant work of Suger’s life had been the supremacy of the House of Capet, it is vain to attempt to trace in Bernard any prejudice in favour of a growing French nationality. He represents the cosmopolitan Church of the Middle Ages; and his career is a supreme instance of the power which results from an absolutely single-minded devotion to a lofty cause. In masterful vehemence he challenges comparison with Hildebrand; but unlike the Pope, he never identified the Church with his own interests. He steadfastly refused all offers of advancement for himself, although he did not dissuade his own monks from accepting preferment. He would have preferred to live out his life as the obscure head of a poor and secluded community; and even if the political condition of the time had not brought constant appeals for help to him, his duty to the Church would have made him a public character. For the work of his life which was perhaps most congenial to him was the defence of the doctrine of the Church against heretical teachers. He has been called “the last of the Fathers,” and his whole conception and methods were those of the great Christian writers of the early centuries. To the great saint self-discipline through obedience to the ordinances of the Church was the cure for all evil suggestions of the human heart; while as for the intellect, its duty was to believe the revealed faith as propounded by the authorities of the Church. Like St. Augustine, Bernard did not despise learning; but he would confine the term to the study of religion. Secular learning was for the most part not only a waste of precious time, but an actual snare of the devil. Thus Bernard stood for all that was most uncompromising in the theological attitude of the time. Speculative discussion was an abomination; for the end of conversation was spiritual edification, not the advancement of knowledge; and what to strong minds might be mental gymnastics, in the case of weaker brethren caused the undermining of their faith. Against heretics of the commoner sort, such as the Petrobrusians, who impugned the whole system of the Church and appealed to the mere words of Scripture, there was only one line to be taken. But Bernard was no persecutor.

During his preaching of the Crusade a monk perverted the popular excitement to an attack upon the Jews in the cities of the Rhineland: Bernard peremptorily interfered and crushed the rival preacher.

Similarly with heretics. He trusted to his preaching—attested, as it was commonly supposed, by miracles—to convince the people; while the leaders when captured were subjected to monastic discipline.

[Sidenote: Abailard.]

But such popular forms of unbelief were merely the outcome of the speculations of subtler minds, which it was necessary to stop at the fountain-head. The arch-heretic of the time was Peter Abailard, who routed in succession two great teachers—William of Champeaux in dialectic in the great cathedral school of Paris, and Anselm of Laon, a pupil of Anselm of Canterbury, in theology. He gathered round him on the Mount of Ste. Genevi�ve, just outside Paris, a large band of students, in whom he inculcated his rationalistic methods. For his was a definite attempt to obtain by reason a basis for his faith. How could such teaching be allowed to continue unreproved by Bernard, who held that the sole office of the reason was to lead the mind astray?

But in the height of his fame Abailard, still quite young, loved the beautiful and erudite Heloise. He abused her trust, and when she in her infatuation for his genius refused to monopolise for herself by marriage the talents which were for the service of the world, she and he both entered the monastic life. Abailard passed through several phases of this—a monk at St. Denys; a hermit gradually gathering a band of admirers round a church which they built and he dedicated to the Third Person of the Trinity, the Paraclete; and finally the abbot of a poor monastery in his own native Brittany. While an inmate of St.

Denys a work of his on the Trinity was condemned at a Council at Soissons presided over by the papal legate (1121). It was twenty years before he was again subjected to the censures of the Church. But, meanwhile, he had more than once fallen foul of Bernard, and had not hesitated to flout with his gibes the one man before whom the whole of Catholic Europe bent in awestruck reverence. But the time came when Bernard, noting the spread of the Petrobrusian heresy, determined to strike at the source of these errors. He appealed for assistance to the friends of orthodoxy from the Pope downwards. Abailard determined to anticipate attack and desired to be heard before an assembly to be held at Sens (1140). Bernard reluctantly consented to take part in a public controversy. But when they met, Abailard, probably feeling himself surrounded by an unsympathetic audience, suddenly refused to speak and appealed to the Pope. On his way to Rome he fell ill at Cluny, where the saintly abbot, Peter the Venerable, received him as a monk. He made a confession which chiefly amounted to a regret that he had used words open to misconstruction, and he died in 1142 the inmate of a Cluniac house.

Bernard remained upon the alert, intent on checking any further spread of the teaching of Abailard’s followers. But he had pushed matters to an extreme, and there were many in high place who resented his efforts to dictate the doctrine of the Church. Thus Gilbert de la Porr�e, Bishop of Poictiers, a pupil of Abailard, was accused at the Council of Rheims (1148) of erroneous doctrines regarding the being of God and the Sacraments. Bernard tried to use his influence over Pope Eugenius in order to procure the bishop’s condemnation, and stirred up the French clergy to assist him. The Cardinals addressed an indignant remonstrance to the Pope, pointing out that as he owed his elevation from a private position to the papacy to them, he belonged to them rather than to himself, that he was allowing private friendship to interfere with public duty, and that “that abbot of yours” and the Gallican Church were usurping the function of the See of Rome. Bernard had to explain away the action of his party, and the Council contented itself with exacting from the accused a general agreement with the faith of the Roman Church, and this was represented by Gilbert’s friends as a triumph.

Bernard’s death restored the leadership of Christendom to the official head, and the removal of several others of the chief actors of the time opened the way not only for new men, but for the emergence of new questions. In 1152 Conrad III ended his well-intentioned but somewhat ineffectual reign. In 1153 Pope Eugenius died at Rome, to which he had at length been restored a few months previously. Six weeks later St.

Bernard followed him to the grave. It was not long before the papal act ratified the general opinion of Christendom, and in 1174 Alexander III placed his name among those which the Church desired to have in everlasting remembrance.