The Holy Roman Empire. Viscount James Bryce

the width of his conquests, by the peculiar connection which already subsisted between him and the Roman Church, by his commanding personal character, by the temporary vacancy of the Byzantine throne. The causes of its revival under Otto must be sought deeper. Making every allowance for the favouring incidents which have already been dwelt upon, there must have been some further influence at work to draw him and his successors, Saxon and Frankish kings, so far from home in pursuit of a barren crown, to lead the Italians to accept the dominion of a stranger and a barbarian, to make the Empire itself appear through the whole Middle Age not what it seems now, a gorgeous anachronism, but an institution divine and necessary, having its foundations in the very nature and order of things. The empire of the elder Rome had been splendid in its life, yet its judgment was written in the misery to which it had brought the provinces, and the helplessness that had invited the attacks of the barbarian. Now, as we at least can see, it had long been dead, and the course of events was adverse to its revival. Its actual representatives, the Roman people, were a turbulent rabble, sunk in a profligacy notorious even in that guilty age. Yet not the less for all this did men cling to the idea, and strive through long ages to stem the irresistible time-current, fondly believing that they were breasting it even while it was sweeping them ever faster and faster away from the old order into a region of new thoughts, new feelings, new forms of life. Not till the days of the Reformation was the illusion dispelled.

      Mediæval theories.

      The explanation is to be found in the state of the human mind during these centuries. The Middle Ages were essentially unpolitical. Ideas as familiar to the commonwealths of antiquity as to ourselves, ideas of the common good as the object of the State, of the rights of the people, of the comparative merits of different forms of government, were to them, though sometimes carried out in fact, in their speculative form unknown, perhaps incomprehensible. Feudalism was the one great institution to which those times gave birth, and feudalism was a social and a legal system, only indirectly and by consequence a political one. Yet the human mind, so far from being idle, was in certain directions never more active; nor was it possible for it to remain without general conceptions regarding the relation of men to each other in this world. Such conceptions were neither made an expression of the actual present condition of things nor drawn from an induction of the past; they were partly inherited from the system that had preceded, partly evolved from the principles of that metaphysical theology which was ripening into scholasticism100. Now the two great ideas which expiring antiquity bequeathed to the ages that followed were those of a World-Monarchy and a World-Religion.

      The World-Religion.

      Before the conquests of Rome, men, with little knowledge of each other, with no experience of wide political union101, had held differences of race to be natural and irremovable barriers. Similarly, religion appeared to them a matter purely local and national; and as there were gods of the hills and gods of the valleys, of the land and of the sea, so each tribe rejoiced in its peculiar deities, looking on the natives of another country who worshipped other gods as Gentiles, natural foes, unclean beings. Such feelings, if keenest in the East, frequently shew themselves in the early records of Greece and Italy: in Homer the hero who wanders over the unfruitful sea glories in sacking the cities of the stranger102; the primitive Latins have the same word for a foreigner and an enemy: the exclusive systems of Egypt, Hindostan, China, are only more vehement expressions of the belief which made Athenian philosophers look on a state of war between Greeks and barbarians as natural103, and defend slavery on the same ground of the original diversity of the races that rule and the races that serve. The Roman dominion giving to many nations a common speech and law, smote this feeling on its political side; Christianity more effectually banished it from the soul by substituting for the variety of local pantheons the belief in one God, before whom all men are equal104.

      Coincides with the World-Empire.

      It is on the religious life that nations repose. Because divinity was divided, humanity had been divided likewise; the doctrine of the unity of God now enforced the unity of man, who had been created in His image105. The first lesson of Christianity was love, a love that was to join in one body those whom suspicion and prejudice and pride of race had hitherto kept apart. There was thus formed by the new religion a community of the faithful, a Holy Empire, designed to gather all men into its bosom, and standing opposed to the manifold polytheisms of the older world, exactly as the universal sway of the Cæsars was contrasted with the innumerable kingdoms and republics that had gone before it. The analogy of the two made them appear parts of one great world-movement toward unity: the coincidence of their boundaries, which had begun before Constantine, lasted long enough after him to associate them indissolubly together, and make the names of Roman and Christian convertible106. Œcumenical councils, where the whole spiritual body gathered itself from every part of the temporal realm under the presidency of the temporal head, presented the most visible and impressive examples of their connection107. The language of civil government was, throughout the West, that of the sacred writings and of worship; the greatest mind of his generation consoled the faithful for the fall of their earthly commonwealth Rome, by describing to them its successor and representative, the 'city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God108.'

      Preservation of the unity of the Church.

      Of these two parallel unities, that of the political and that of the religious society, meeting in the higher unity of all Christians, which may be indifferently called Catholicity or Romanism (since in that day those words would have had the same meaning), that only which had been entrusted to the keeping of the Church survived the storms of the fifth century. Many reasons may be assigned for the firmness with which she clung to it. Seeing one institution after another falling to pieces around her, seeing how countries and cities were being severed from each other by the irruption of strange tribes and the increasing difficulty of communication, she strove to save religious fellowship by strengthening the ecclesiastical organization, by drawing tighter every bond of outward union. Necessities of faith were still more powerful. Truth, it was said, is one, and as it must bind into one body all who hold it, so it is only by continuing in that body that they can preserve it. Thus with the growing rigidity of dogma, which may be traced from the council of Jerusalem to the council of Trent, there had arisen the idea of supplementing revelation by tradition as a source of doctrine, of exalting the universal conscience and belief above the individual, and allowing the soul to approach God only through the universal consciousness, represented by the sacerdotal order: principles still maintained by one branch of the Church, and for some at least of which far weightier reasons could be assigned then, in the paucity of written records and the blind ignorance of the mass of the people, than any to which their modern advocates have recourse.

      Mediæval Theology requires One Visible Catholic Church.

      There was another cause yet more deeply seated, and which it is hard adequately to describe. It was not exactly a want of faith in the unseen, nor a shrinking fear which dared not look forth on the universe alone: it was rather the powerlessness of the untrained mind to realize the idea as an idea and live in it: it was the tendency to see everything in the concrete, to turn the parable into a fact, the doctrine into its most literal application, the symbol into the essential ceremony; the tendency which intruded earthly Madonnas and saints between the worshipper and the spiritual Deity, and could satisfy its devotional feelings only by visible images even of these: which conceived of man's aspirations and temptations as the result of the direct action of angels and devils: which expressed the strivings of the soul after purity by the search for the Holy Grail: which in the Crusades sent myriads to win at Jerusalem by earthly arms the sepulchre of Him whom they could not serve in their own spirit nor approach by their own prayers. And therefore it was that the whole fabric of mediæval Christianity rested upon the idea of the Visible Church. Such a Church could be in nowise local or limited. To acquiesce in the establishment of National Churches would have appeared

100

I do not mean to say that the system of ideas which it is endeavoured to set forth in the following pages was complete in this particular form, either in the days of Charles or in those of Otto, or in those of Frederick Barbarossa. It seems to have been constantly growing and decaying from the fourth century to the sixteenth, the relative prominence of its cardinal doctrines varying from age to age. But, just as the painter who sees the ever-shifting lights and shades play over the face of a wide landscape faster than his brush can place them on the canvas, in despair at representing their exact position at any single moment, contents himself with painting the effects that are broadest and most permanent, and at giving rather the impression which the scene makes on him than every detail of the scene itself, so here, the best and indeed the only practicable course seems to be that of setting forth in its most self-consistent form the body of ideas and beliefs on which the Empire rested, although this form may not be exactly that which they can be asserted to have worn in any one century, and although the illustrations adduced may have to be taken sometimes from earlier, sometimes from later writers. As the doctrine of the Empire was in its essence the same during the whole Middle Age, such a general description as is attempted here may, I venture to hope, be found substantially true for the tenth as well as for the fourteenth century.

101

Empires like the Persian did nothing to assimilate the subject races, who retained their own laws and customs, sometimes their own princes, and were bound only to serve in the armies and fill the treasury of the Great King.

102

Od. iii. 72: —

ἢ μαψίδιως ἀλάλησθε,οἷά τε ληϊστῆρες, ὑπεὶρ ἅλα, τοίτ' ἀλόωνταιψυχὰς παρθέμενοι, κακὸν ἀλλοδαποῖσι φέροντες;

Cf. Od. ix. 39: and the Hymn to the Pythian Apollo, I. 274. So in II. v. 214, ἀλλότριος φώς.

103

Plato, in the beginning of the Laws, represents it as natural between all states: πολεμὸς φύσει ὑπάρχει πρὸς ἁπάσας τὰς πόλεις.

104

See especially Acts xvii. 26; Gal. iii. 28; Eph. ii. 11, sqq.; iv. 3-6; Col. iii. 11.

105

This is drawn out by Laurent, Histoire du Droit des Gens; and Ægidi, Der Fürstenrath nach dem Luneviller Frieden.

106

'Romanos enim vocitant homines nostræ religionis.' – Gregory of Tours, quoted by Ægidi, from A. F. Pott, Essay on the Words 'Römisch,' 'Romanisch,' 'Roman,' 'Romantisch.' So in the Middle Ages, Ῥωμαῖοι is used to mean Christians, as opposed to Ἕλληνες, heathens.

Cf. Ducange, 'Romani olim dicti qui alias Christiani vel etiam Catholici.'

107

As a reviewer in the Tablet (whose courtesy it is the more pleasant to acknowledge since his point of view is altogether opposed to mine) has understood this passage as meaning that 'people imagined the Christian religion was to last for ever because the Holy Roman Empire was never to decay,' it may be worth while to say that this is far from being the purport of the argument which this chapter was designed to state. The converse would be nearer the truth: – 'people imagined the Holy Roman Empire was never to decay, because the Christian religion was to last for ever.'

The phenomen may perhaps be stated thus: – Men who were already disposed to believe the Roman Empire to be eternal for one set of reasons, came to believe the Christian Church to be eternal for another and, to them, more impressive set of reasons. Seeing the two institutions allied in fact, they took their alliance and connection to be eternal also; and went on for centuries believing in the necessary existence of the Roman Empire because they believed in its necessary union with the Catholic Church.

108

Augustine, in the De Civitate Dei. His influence, great through all the Middle Ages, was greater on no one than on Charles. – 'Delectabatur et libris sancti Augustini, præcipueque his qui De Civitate Dei prætitulati sunt.' – Eginhard, Vita Karoli, cap. 24.