СНАР, III. Such an arrangement would be most objectionable in the nineteenth century; but it does not follow that it was not an object for which good men might Spiritual reasonably contend in the eleventh century. Both now and the Temporal and then the great object is that a morality higher than Powers. the morality of ordinary men, and a knowledge deeper than the knowledge of ordinary men, shall find a standing ground from which to raise the low standard which exists. To achieve such a standing ground without disturbance of existing arrangements is to secure the real spiritual power against the temporal, and to solve the problem of the two authorities which grew up in the days of the Roman Empire, and which distracted the States of the Middle Ages. Gradually the civilised world has come to the perception that the domain of thought, of morality, and of religion is best left to the safeguard of freedom, assured by the settled conviction of peoples and governments that so it is best for all. In the eleventh century no such conviction was possible. Thought still ran in very definite channels, and had no tendency to strike out new and untrodden paths. The society of men in the world hung loosely together, troubling itself about little else than material enjoyments. The state itself was nowhere constituted as a state should be. Government in the hands of the Norman kings gave protection to the masses, but there was no welding together of governors and subjects into a harmonious whole. The arrangement made by the Conqueror was therefore perhaps, as long as his own life was prolonged, better calculated than any other to meet the difficulties of the case. He separated the bishops from all temporal affairs, and gave them courts of their own with jurisdiction over ecclesiastical offences and persons. He thus gave to the Church, the sole depositary of mental and moral authority, a position independent of Norman baron E СНАР. SII. The Church under William Rufus. and of English freeholder. Bishops were no longer to be made without real qualifications for their office. Clergy were no longer to be upheld unless they came up to a higher standard than contented the rude peasants amongst whom they ministered. On the other hand, William, whilst outwardly acknowledging the new papal claims, practically set them at defiance. In conjunction with Lanfranc, the scholar and statesman, whom he had placed on the metropolitan throne of Canterbury, he was himself the organiser of the English Church. It was he who encouraged learning and virtue, and who selected for ecclesiastical posts such men as came up to the high continental standard, and who would not allow the pope to give orders in England which were not first submitted to himself. It was all well enough as long as the Conqueror lived. The Red King seemed to have come into the world to justify the wildest extravagance of the popes. The brute force of the king was sharpened by supereminent powers of intellect without the slightest tinge of morality. His chief minister, Ranulf Flambard, sprung from the ranks of the clergy, turned his knowledge and skill to purposes of sheer oppression. The Norman barons learned that their tenure of land subjected them to penal exactions, the right to which might logically be deduced from the conditions under which their land was held. The clergy learned that when a see was vacant, the king claimed not to provide a better occupant than his English predecessors had been content with, but to keep it vacant, in order that he might gather the revenues for himself, or when at last he gave way, might fill it with some base favourite of his own who would do all his bidding, or with some unworthy purchaser who had money to offer. For five years after Lanfranc's death the see of Canterbury itself was thus kept vacant. At last, on a sick-bed, even the Red King inclined to concession. He appointed a CHAP. III. successor to Lanfranc, and that successor was Anselm. selm Anselm was the flower of medieval monasticism,-of § 12. Anthose societies in which the obedience flowing from and Monvoluntary submission stood in such startling contrast to asticism. the obedience from fear or interest, which was the motive power of the state over which William Rufus presided. At Bec, the Norman monastery over which the Italian stranger from the Val d'Aosta ruled as Lanfranc had ruled before him, the community was bound together by ties of mutual respect. The warfare against the world, to which the brethren were called by their profession, was waged not so much by startling acts of asceticism, as by a constant persistence in humility. The precept, Confess your sins one to another, was here as a perpetual reality, as each monk in turn acknowledged his faults in the presence of all the others, humbly listening, without an angry word, to their accusations and reproofs, or submitting without a murmur even to the corporal chastisement which the brotherhood, by the voice of its chosen head, adjudged him to have deserved. The time would come, doubtless, when this order too would deservedly pass away to make room for another, in which there was more spontaneity and less rigid discipline. But as yet, the world needed an example of discipline, not of spontaneity. Nor was the work of the monks ended here. Amongst them were to be found what seeds of intellectual culture were scattered abroad. It was from a monastery that sounded forth the voice which, when all others had been hushed, still continued that tale of our national history in our old national speech, which was to be taken up in the more universal Latin by Orderic from St. Evroul and by William from Malmesbury. It was from Bec itself that Anselm proclaimed that he had fathomed the depths of the CHAP. III. § 13. Anselmi and William Rufus. §14. Anselm and Henry I. mysteries of Christianity in the work which formed the basis of Christian theological arguments, even in times when men had broken away from the moorings at which the medieval Church lay anchored. All the learning, and all the piety and righteousness of monasticism, were concentrated in Anselm. Well might he shrink from accepting the archbishopric from the hands of William. As soon as the king recovered his health, he plunged into his old contemptuous scorn of God and man. A quarrel soon sprang up between the two men on various grounds, chiefly on the question of the recognition of Pope Urban, the pope of the Church, or of Pope Clement, the anti-pope supported by the emperor. William wanted to keep the question open, and alleged truly that his father had prohibited the recognition of any pope without license from himself. The declaration was evidently something very different in the mouths of the two kings. It was Anselm's clear duty to announce that there was a realm of conscience into which mere force, clothing itself in the forms of state expediency, could not be allowed to enter. Urban, he declared, was pope and not Clement. All the threats of the king could not make it otherwise. In vain the time-serving bishops ranged themselves on the king's side. Anselm cared for none of their threats. William was obliged to give way. Then the quarrel blazed up afresh, and Anselm asked and obtained permission to return to the Continent to confer with the pope. The Red King was left to his sins and to his bloody death in the New Forest. In Henry I. Anselm had another kind of man to deal with. Cautious and self-controlled, if it were but for the sake of the strength which he gained by it, Henry established in England the rule of stern inflexible justice, except where his special ends were to be served. Anselm, too, had learned upon the Continent views which he had not entertained when he first took possession of the see of Canterbury. He had then received investiture from William, as his predecessors had received investiture before him, by the reception of the pastoral staff. He found that by the pope and the churchmen by whom the pope was surrounded, this acceptance of an ecclesiastical dignity at the hands of a layman was condemned as scandalous and illegal. It has been said that he adopted this new view from mere subservience to the papal authority. But it should not be forgotten that since he had received investiture from William, a bitter experience had taught him what a miserable bondage it was to be beaten about hither and thither at the caprice of a rude and godless king. The pastoral staff might be nothing in itself, but it was the symbol of a rule and guidance which rested on another basis than that of material force. Yet he could not but acknowledge that Henry too had right on his side. If bishops and archbishops had broad lands at their disposal, and warlike knights at their command, it could not be a matter of indifference to a king who tried-as in some sort Henry was trying to fulfil the duties of his office, who it was who held positions of such authority, and in what spirit towards the realm they fulfilled the duties incumbent upon them through those positions. The Concordat by which the dispute was settled acknowledged both these rights. Investiture by the delivery of the staff was to come from the pope, but homage was to be done, as by a feudal baron, to the king. It is easy to speak contemptuously of Anselm for grasping at the shadow and flinging away the substance. No man flings away the substance who cares only to announce the truth. It was an eternal truth for all time that there was a sphere of the mind and heart CHAP. III. $15. Principles involved in the Quarrel. |