Cathedral and Crusade Studies of the Medieval Church

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Cathedral and Crusade: Studies of theMedieval Church, 1050 - 1350, byHenri Daniel-Rops, translated by JohnWarrington. E. P. Dutton. $10.

AS THE DIVINE DRAMA, recorded by St.Luke, mounts toward its climax, there oc-curs a cryptic text (22: 38) when OurLord, warning the disciples that they willhenceforth be regarded as outlaws, ad-vises them to sell their cloaks and to buyswords; whereupon, See, Lord, they toldhim, here are two swords. And he said tothem, That is enough. For the heirs ofthe Apostles, the men of the great periodof Christendom, 1050-1350, this text be-came the basis of a famous medieval the-ory of power, the Doctrine of the TwoSwords, which founds its best expression inthe words of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, forwhom the two swords represented thespiritual and the temporal power: Bothbelong to Peter; one of them he actuallywields, the other is at his disposal as andwhen circumstances require. Referring tothe latter, our Lord told his Apostle: Putup thy sword in its scabbard. It was Pe-ters sure enough, but not to draw with hisown hand.

The development of the Doctrine ofthe Two Swords, the attempts to implementit, its vicissitudes, triumphs, and failures,these are the threads suggesting the motifof the third volume, the first to be trans-lated into English, of Mr. Henri Daniel-Kops monumental (the word here is usedmost advisedly) Histoire de lEglise ~ Z LChrist, under the title of Cathedral andCrusade. Vast as is the scope of M. Daniel-Rops Histoire, which has now been ex-tended through a fourth volume, LEglise

de la Renaissance et d e la Re forme (Li-brairie Arthhme Fayard, 1955) the volumenow available to English readers is coni-plete in itself, requiring no previous studyof the earlier parts, L&glise des Aphtreset des Martyres (1948) and LEglise desTemps Barbares (1950). Standing alone,Cathedral and Crusade is history in thegrand manner, luminous and penetrating,such as rarely appears in the twentieth orany other century, such as is worthy amember of 1Academie Francaise to whichM. Daniel-Rops was elected in 1955 simul-taneously to his being invested by PiusXI1 with the order of the Grand Cross ofSt. Gregory.

Where G. G. Coulton, despite his crabbedand curious erudition, has succeeded onlyin piecing together unsympathetic and dis-torted medieval panoramas which arepatchwork, M. Daniel-Rops has woven atapistry depicting fully the abundant va-riety without sacrificing the unit of atruly great era, heralded late in the ninthcentury by Pope John VIIIs applicationof the term Cfcristiaiiiias (hitherto . . .used in an abstract sense, to signify theFaith of Christ, or the fact of being aChristian) to a concrete entity, the tem-poral society of mankind. Christendomwas born, and to the world of the eleventhcentury, its significance dawned high in theApennines, in 1077, when the EmperorHenry IV, barefoot and in sackcloth, shiv-ered three wintry days at Canossa, whilethe Countess Matilda and cardinals plead-ed with Gregory VI1 until the deposed peni-tent prostrated himself before the stockylittle man in whom shone forth the powerof the Apostle. Christendom comes ofage, hopefully, in the year 1111, with ayouthful Bernard of Clairvaux, surveyingacross a lush Burgundian scene, the patchof dark forest concealing a monastery, theversatile and poised spiritual athlete whosewords keynote the age: I am not oneof those who say that the peace and free-dom of the Church is harmful to the Em-pire, or that the Empires prosperity is


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harmful to the Church. On the contrary,God, who is the author of both, has linkedthem in a common destiny on earth, notfo r the sake of internecine strife but thatthey may strengthen one another.

Christendom reaches its meridian, per-haps, if not in Bernards hopeful vision, onthe field of Legnano, the corpse of the ini-perial standard bearer stiffening, whileBarbarossa dutifully held the stirrup ofAlexander 111 and received from him thepapal kiss of peace; while the great ca-thedrals of Notre Dame, Canterbury, andSoissons were a-building; while BaldwinIV of Jerusalem, his flesh rotting fromleprosy, heroically hurled back the forcesof Saladin. In the full sun of Christen-doms afternoon, St. Francis wagered theSultan of Egypt his divinely impulsive life,in a fiery oven, against that embarrassedpaynims baptism; St. Thomas, confessingthat mystical contemplation had taughthim things compared with which all writ-ings are mere straw, precisely adjustedthe parts of his Summa; St. Louis in hishairshirt, held holy sway over France, dy-ing a s a crusader, of cholera, in Tunisia;Innocent 111, the ablest of the Popes, ad-ministered the See of Peter, guardian ofSicily, suzerain of England.

But history cannot stay the arc of thesun in whose rays Boniface VI11 mistak-enly thought he could still bask, when, in1300, appearing too confidently in public,wearing the imperial insignia, he was pre-ceded by two swords and the cry of hisheralds: I am Czsar! I am the Emperor!Three years later, the sun suddenly droppedbelow the horizon, when the minions ofPhilip the Fair of France, l ~ ~ r s t i n goorsupon a deserted and praying Boniface,placed him under an arrest which an out-raged populace thwarted, to return himfrom Agnani to Rome, where a monthlater he died of a humiliation that is theold age of Christendom. And an era hasended to the sound, or dubious rumor ofthe sound, heard round the world, of theblow i n the face which Sciarra Colonna

was alleged to have struck Boniface atAgnani; but, rumor or $act, Dante, be-holding his enemy Boniface succumb tothe insult, cried out in horror at thissudden collapse of Peters throne. In thetwilight of an epoch, it remained for thepoet to write the epical summa which wasChristendoms epitaph; to lament (Inferno,XIX, 115-17) the Donation of Constantinewith bitter tears of human hindsight: Ah,Constantine! to how much ill gave birth,not thy conversion, but that dower whichthe first rich Father took from thee; todiagnose (Purgator io , XVI, 127-9) thefatal malady: The Church of Rome, byconfounding two powers in herself, fallsinto the mire, and fouls herself togetherwith her burden.

But the burden was not that only ofthe Church; i t was that of all Christendom,the Two Swords, which for three centurieswas not only a Doctrine, but a problemextending down to the ruins of time. Wecan do no better than to quote M. Daniel-Rops (p. 167) statement of it:

The spiri tual and moral problemwhich the Church endeavored so cour-ageously to solve was not the only onewith which she was confronted; for inorder to accomplish her supernaturalmission, it was necessary that she shouldclarify her relations with the civil pow-er: The two realms of authority appearat first sight to be unconnected; actu-ally they are inseparable. Christ Him-self emphasized that the Church is not01 this world; her essential purity tendsto raise her above the things of earth.Nevertheless, her works lie in thisworld, among men, within the frame-work of their interests and institutions.She can no more be indifferent to thelaws upon which her freedom dependsthan to those material resources whichenable her ministers to carry out theirsupernatural function. She is a spiritualsociety, foreshadowing the City of God;but she is obliged to maintain close con-


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tact with the City of the World, and thatis no easy task.

The problem is everlasting. It is themost difficult of all those which Chris-tendom has been called upon to solve;and i i no satisfactory solution has yetbeen found, i t is surely because noneexists, because it is in the nature ofthings that there should be continualtension between the spiritual and tem-poral order. , Three situations are pos-sible. The secular power may be op-posed to the Church upon ideologicalgrounds, which means persecution; orthe State may ignore religious activityand treat the spiritual society as non-existent, which means neutrality. Butpersecution had ended in the fourthcentury, and neutrality was quite un-thinkable in the Middle Ages; so thereremained a third possibility, collabora-tion.

Except when Peter impetuously drew thesword of temporal power, which was hissure enough, but not to draw with hisown hand, the choice of persecution, newtrality, or collaboration was that of thecivil power, not of the Church, which oc-cupied the position, perilously difEcult butnot impossibly anomalous, of a societywithin a society. As much collaboration(in the admirable root sense of that word)as the Church could actually get, or real-istically expect, would come from a greatsaint, a Louis IX of France, who, evermindful of the duties of his secular magis-tracy and remembering his spiritual obli-gations, could reconcile the double burden,while, at the same time, he did not hesi-tate to speak his mind . . . upon excessiveincreases of ecclesiastical taxation, norpermit interference from Rome with hisown politic^.^' From such a magistrate asSt. Louis, the Church could hope for ;acollaboration freely cooperative, born ofcharity and based on justice. But not allmonarchs were so obviously saints as wasLouis, who was canonized in the hearts of

of Boniface VI11 made official the recogni-tion of the Church. Yet where, in varyingdegrees, such collaboration a s that of St.Louis did exist, born of a love dyed inthe blood of Christ, Christendom, care-fully distinguished by M. Daniel-Rops fromthe Church, which was its major premise:did exist, and more than did exist, didflourish, producing the marvellous accom-plishments of th e Middle Ages. Such wasChristendom under the Doctrine of the Tw oSwords, which were sometimes extendedparallel in the cause of Christ, sometimescrossed, sometimes standing at cautiouslylowered points, but never both sheathed atone and the same time for three centuries.

Yet Cathedral and Crusade is more thanthe history of the Doctrine of the TwoSwords; it is truly the history of theChurch of the God-Man, i n its broadest,most Catholic and even catholic sense, ofa society baptized in His Name, wayfaringpilgrims passing through the three cen-turies of Christendom. What is Christen-dom? One may bound it in time, as doesM. Daniel-Rops, between 1050 and 1350.One may describe it geographically, as ex-tending from Scandinavia and Iceland inthe North to north African missions in theSouth; from schismatic (but still Chris-tian) Byzantium, the short-lived LatinKingdom of Jerusalem, and Poland in theEast, to Spain of the Reconquista and Ire-land in the West; its spiritual center inRome, its intellectual i n Paris. Still onewould not have described it. Even less couldone comprehend it, in the phrase of Glan-vi11 and the late Carl Becker, as a climateof opinion. True, it lasted its three cen-turies, which, in the eye of God, may be asthe day which passes over mens heads. RutChristendom did not pass over, northrcugh EI~BB heads, It was anchoredin their hearts, whose blood they shed atthe sieges of Jerusalem and Antioch, andit soared above the spires and vaultings oEthe cathedrals. If we must define it, per-haps we can say that Christendom was a


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of the Holy Spirit; that it was nothingmore, nor less, than the love generated, ona gigantic communal scale, between ChristsChurch and Society, and mutually recip-rocated.

If this definition s eem to claim toomuch for the three centuries of Cathedraland Crusade, we can offer here only asmall earnest of detail from the wealthof M. Daniel-Rops pages, which convinc-ingly limn a Christendom that animatedthe great architects of the cathedrals, aVillard de Honnecourt, a Master Jean Mig-not of Paris; which induced powerfulmen, proud of their birth as their wealthto harness themselves with penitentialprayers to carts with loads so heavy thatmore than a thousand persons, men andwomen, were needed to draw a singlecart. Thus was built Notre-Dame de Char-tres, so loved by Henry Adams, whereasthe Cathedral of Paris was financed large-ly . . . with the farthings of old women,except for a chalice or a window (suchwas medieval discretion that we are notsure which) offered by the guild of pros-titutes and unobtrusively accepted by theBishop, who had satisfied his misgivingsafter consulting a theologian. Whateverthe theologian told the Bishop, it is easierfor us to accept M. Daniel-Rops simplyprofound two-word explanation: They be-lieved.

True, Christendom had its heretics, suchheretics as only Christendom could have,and M. Daniel-Rops devotes a brilliantchapter to sketching the perils, which weregenuine, of heresy, from Manichaeism toCatharism, the Waldensians and the Al-bigenses, but often enough, if not always,these heretical doctrines were, as Chester-ton says, Christian truths gone mad.Were there then no absolute skeptics inthis Chistendom? A few, perhaps, the mostnotorious of whom was supposed to beFrederick I1 of Sicily, whose contempor-aries took him for antichrist, the beastrising from the sea, its mouth full ofblasphemy, with the claws of a bear, the

body of a leopard, and the fury of a lion. Perhaps we can better conceive him as anamalgam of Si r Epicure Mammon, the ,Baron dHolbach, and the Marquis deSade. Frederick had nurtured himself intoinfidelity by inviting to his court Moslemscholars who introduced him to the studyof physics and chemistry, and thereby per-suaded him that Christian dogmas had DOmeaning. He maintained an orientalharem, but his intellectual lust was evenmore notorious. According to one legend,he had a man sealed hermetically in a bar-rel to prove that when i t was opened nosoul would fly up to heaven. Yet, andperhaps more than even Christendomspeaks in that yet, Frederick died andwas buried in a Cistercian cowl.

It would be easy to continue a list ofdetails from Cathedral and Crusade, buteven Christendom, as the book reminds us,had an end. Why? M. Daniel-Rops exam-ines three tentative, partial, and certainlynot original explanations: I) too manyChristians, even among the higher clergy,were . . . unfaithful to their vocation; 2 jthe Church was too closely linked withthe fate of secular society; and 3) therewas an intellectual revolt against the dataof Revelation. But none of these reasonssatisfies M. Daniel-Rops, any more thando the cyclical theories of Spengler, Toyn-bee, and Sokorin. Perhaps, he suggests,the answer . . . is one that transcendsthose founded upon direct historical oh-servation. Certainly in Ca thedra l and Cr:L-sade there is sufficient direct historical ob-servation for its readers to agree or dis-agree with M. Daniel-Rops, but it wouldbe unfair to ignore his speculation:

Maybe it was simply that medieval so-ciety, which had emerged from the fieryfurnace of a barbarian age, had grownfeeble after a triumphant career ofthree hundred years. Earthly suc-cesses are always transient; having 3t-tained their zenith, they start immedi-ately to decline. And this is even moretrue in the case of a human society


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whose end is not temporal glory, whoseMaster chose to conquer the world bydefeat and death. . . . In a differentage, and in many respects, a new equi-librium had to be found. The Churchof Christ would have to play a part inthis new world. . . . She would effect anew synthesis between the transientfacts of history and the eternal princi-ples of Christ.

Beyond M. Daniel-Rops meditative re-quiem for Christendom, let any reader ofhis Calhedral and Crusade go, if he wouldaccount for the demise of Christendom.Ru t after such a reader has surveyed thismass of direct historical observation, hemight be reminded of the statement of thephilosopher Imlac in Rasselas : I knownot what reason can be given, but the un-searchable will of the Supreme Being.Reviewed by W A R R E N L. FLEISCHAUEK

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Cathedral and Crusade Studies of the Medieval Church