Sure, thirty-one, the Amber and the Amble, and the Topic here is Church and State. The prayer comes from Stephen Langton. Stephen Langton was an Englishman who served as Archbishop of Canterbury before he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. He's spent about twenty years in Paris as a student and as a teacher. He was a first-class scholar, but I expect that although hardly anybody knows this about Stephen Langton, I expect that he is most famous because most remembered because he is the man that divided the Bible into chapters until Stephen Langton, whole books of the Bible, would be copied without any chapter divisions. And the chapter divisions of Stephen Langton were taken over when printing began, thus every copy of the Bible has become a memorial to this Archbishop of Canterbury. He also wrote some commentaries on the Bible and he wrote a poem directed to the Holy Spirit called the Golden Sequence and the prayer that I want to use now, which is a wonderful prayer, which emphasizes God's grace, comes from Stephen Langton and the Golden Sequence. Let's pray. Our strength renew on our dryness, poor thy dew, wash the stains of guilt away, bend the stubborn heart and will, melt the frozen, warm the chill, guide the steps that go astray. Amen. There was no issue in the middle ages more vexing to people than the issue of authority, where does ultimate authority, ultimate power reside? Does it reside in the church or does it reside in the state? Does it reside in Paris or does it reside in Rome to put it another way? The church in the state goes all the way back to the time of Constantine, but in the middle ages it has some very dramatic episodes, rather than trying to talk theoretically about all of his history, church, state, struggle, as to who is going to be superior. I would like to illustrate it in describing the struggle between Thomas Beckett and Henry the Second. The views that were common in the middle ages were two. One could be drawn this way, of course this is the view the Pope is going to advocate. That is above all things, but under God there is the Pope and under the Pope the king and under the king and the Pope the people. So the Pope has authority, not only in the church, but in the state as well. Not everybody agreed with that, namely the kings, and another way of thinking about ultimate authority was this, there is God, and under God there is the king, and under the king the Pope and the church, and under both the king and the Pope the people. So that sets up the conflict between church and state. Of course in the middle ages there is no division of church and state like we have today. So the question was always there, who is going to have the last say about something. Of course at times it really did not matter, but when say the policy of a king conflicted with the will of a Pope then there was a showdown and a conflict which resulted in much struggle and an happiness in the whole period of the middle ages. That is illustrate that struggle from this episode in English history Thomas Beckett, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Henry II, the king of England. And for this we go back to the 12th century. You can see the dates of Beckett 1120 to 1170. Thomas Beckett at first was the chancellor, the king's right hand man, and a very good one. And King Henry and chancellor Thomas Beckett were good friends. They liked each other and they trusted each other. And Beckett did everything he could to serve his king for eight brilliant years. He was the chancellor under Henry II. He was a polished gentleman, not particularly noted for his piety, but not very worldly either. He was able to lead a decent life despite his office in the kingdom. But those days there was another important office even more important than being chancellor and that was being archbishop of Canterbury, the most important church office in England. And when that office came vacant, the king decided to appoint his trusted friend and chancellor Thomas Beckett to that post. The problem was that Beckett was not even a priest. He had not been ordained as a priest. He had not been interested in a clerical life. He was quite happy serving in the state. But Henry was so concerned to get his man in that position that he appointed Beckett. That happened from time to time in the Middle Ages. It's called lay investiture. That is rather than the church, namely the pope, appointing someone like the archbishop the king would, king is a layman. And he makes the appointment here despite the fact that the church claimed that only the church could appoint an archbishop. But the king did it anyway and created a problem. In fact, lay investiture had been a practice in England for a long time. And strong kings in England and France and elsewhere would try to get their own people into these high clerical offices because if they were really going to control the kingdom, they had to control these offices. Many issues like this would arise when the king wanted to raise taxes. He would levy taxes to raise money. And sometimes he would tax the clergy. The pope said, you can't tax the clergy. Only the church can tax the clergy. And so there would be a conflict between the king and the pope over an issue like this and the king wanted to have a sympathizer in an office like the archbishop of Tanivary in order to be able to further his program in England. And so he appointed Thomas Beckett, thinking that Thomas would serve him as archbishop just as he had served him as chancellor. And something happened when Thomas between archbishop, he took it seriously as a church office and not an office of the state. In fact, Thomas went to Rome and resigned as archbishop of Tanivary so that he could receive that office back from the pope's hands and earlier than the king's hands. And you can see now the scene set for a clash between these two friends because Thomas who appeared to be the man that would do the king's bidding in the highest clerical office in England turns out to be not the king's man, but the pope's man. Why that happened, we don't really know why Thomas Beckett made that dramatic and sudden change. King Henry could never figure it out either. He felt that Thomas had let him down. He kept hoping that Thomas would come to his senses and come back to his side. But Thomas Beckett never did. And the scene was set for a clash between the archbishop and the king, between the hammer and the anvil. That's the title I used for this lecture and it comes from the play by T. S. Eliot, called Murder in the Cathedral, which is the story of Henry II and Thomas Beckett. One writer on English church history put it this way, Beckett was determined to be as magnificently the hero archbishop as he had been the hero chancellor. Well, maybe that explains it, maybe not. The only thing we know for sure is that for eight years, Thomas Beckett was a hero chancellor. And for eight years, he was a hero archbishop. When he was chancellor, he did everything he could to promote the cause of Henry. And when he was archbishop, he did everything he could to oppose the policies of Henry that he felt conflicted with the interest of the church. The result, of course, you know, from reading Gonzales, and probably know this anyway because it's a famous moment in history in the year 1170. Thomas Beckett was murdered in the Canterbury Cathedral. He had been in England for some time. He had been in France for some time. He left England in order to escape the wrath of the king. And then felt at last, he should return to England to fill the office that he served as archbishop. And he was murdered in the cathedral by four zealous knights of Henry, the second, who had overheard Henry say, I wish somebody would get rid of that troublesome priest. Henry probably didn't mean it exactly like that. Did not think anybody would take him literally, although he should have known better because he was king and the four knights rode to Canterbury, and they are confronted Thomas Beckett right in the cathedral. T.S. Eliot wrote the play murder in the cathedral, was first performed at Canterbury Cathedral in 1935. I saw it performed at Graham Chapel at Washington University, 1988. That was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of T.S. Eliot in St. Louis, as you may know. St. Louis honored Eliot, although Eliot didn't particularly care for St. Louis and left as soon as he could, and moved to England, became an English subject. But nonetheless, we honored T.S. Eliot, and the play murder in the cathedral was performed in Graham Chapel, which is not a cathedral, but it looks like a little cathedral as a medieval look to it, a very beautiful chapel on the campus of Washington University. It was very interesting to go to Eliot's play, performed in the chapel, because the action took place all over the place, in the balcony, in the back, outside, in the front, and of course, the people were sitting in the middle, and we kind of followed the action as people ran in and out of the church, and it produced an exciting evening for us all. It is a very great piece of work, one of the finest statements of the Christian faith from the pen of T.S. Eliot. I would recommend that you read murder in the cathedral sometime. When Thomas goes to the cathedral and the priest are there, they know the enemies are coming, they know that there is danger, and the priest and Thomas go into the interior of the cathedral, and the priest say, in the words of Eliot, in the play, bar the door, bar the door. The door is barred, we are safe, we are safe, they dare not break in, they cannot break in, they have not the force, we are safe, we are safe. Like this, it seemed to happen, as the priest locked the doors of that great church, it's not the same cathedral that is there now in Canterbury, but one that preceded the present cathedral at Canterbury. They locked the doors, and they felt they could resist. And then Eliot has Thomas say this, and these are magnificent words, I think, that have more meaning than just for that moment in history in the year 1170. Thomas says, unbar the doors, throw open the doors. I will not have the house of prayer, the church of Christ, the sanctuary, turned into a fortress. The church shall protect her own in her own way, not as oak and stone, stone and oak decay. Give no stay, but the church shall endure. The church shall be open, even to our enemies, open the door. That was a great speech, and the door was open, and the result was that the four nights came in, and near the altar, killed Thomas Beckett. Well we have the Chancellor, the Archbishop, and now the saint, because it's not long just three years after he was killed, that he was canonized, became saint Thomas Beckett, King himself did penance three days after he heard of the death of his former friend, Henry stayed in his room, fasting, and weeping. It's hard to know what was going on in Henry's heart, is there a genuine repentance here, or is there frustration, or exactly what is happening, but eventually, Henry went to Canterbury and stood before the shrine of Thomas Beckett and did public penance. My Henry may genuinely have repented, but think of what's happening here, this is a conflict between church and the state, and the church has some very strong weapons, I mean the king can kill the Archbishop, he wants to, but the church can retaliate, and Henry knew that the church could retaliate. One way the church could retaliate was by excommunication. Henry could be excommunicated, which meant that he would be cut off from the sacraments of the church, and we saw, in the last lecture, how important the sacraments were, or medieval Roman Catholics, but there was another weapon the church had, which was even more powerful, and that was the interdict. The Pope could not only excommunicate the king, but he could place the whole kingdom under an interdict, which meant that no services could be held, none of the sacraments could be performed, nothing could take place. In the churches, sacramental system would be stopped, and the whole kingdom would be shut off from the means of salvation for as long as it took. Well, when people really believed that that was happening, King would not dare risk an interdict, because it would create a popular revolution that would make for great trouble in the kingdom. The interdict was used frequently in the Middle Ages, not only by popes for nations and bishops for smaller areas, but there are even frivolous uses of the interdict when a bishop, for instance, imposed an interdict on the people of a certain area and the Holy Roman Empire because they would not permit a monastery to have the exclusive right to make and sell beer in that area. People did not like the monastery's product and wanted to make their own, and the bishop then pronounced an interdict upon the people of that town. Well, it was a powerful weapon, even if it was frivolously used, because if you believe that salvation comes from the exercise of the sacraments and those sacraments are cut off and salvation is cut off. So the King, Henry, may have been genuinely repented, but he was also fearful, I'm sure, of the reprisals of the Pope because Thomas immediately became a hero, a martyr, hero saint, canonized in the year 1173, and he became a popular figure in the religious piety of the people of England. We're talking in the last lecture about the importance of pilgrimages, and in England after 1173, the place to go was Canterbury. In fact, there was the pilgrims' way through the south of England, occasionally people still walk the pilgrims' way to go to Canterbury, and pilgrims went to Canterbury in order to visit the shrine and tomb of Thomas Beckett, Charles's Canterbury Tales is the story of a group of pilgrims on the pilgrims' way going to Canterbury, and spending the time entertaining themselves by telling different stories as they go. I think two of the reasons why Thomas Beckett became such a hero to the English people, kind of Christian hero, was first that he did not resist. He was not a saint before he died in one sense of the word. He could be a very sharp-tonged person at his animosities and his bitterness, but at the last moment he did not resist, you know, to open the door. Christ's church should be open even to its enemies, and people remembered that. Secondly, when he died, it was discovered that under his robe he wore a hair shirt. Now, that was a particular kind of garment that some particularly pious people would wear in the Middle Ages, just to become more uncomfortable. It apparently was a very uncomfortable thing, not scratched, and it was not something you'd want to wear next to your skin, but in order to afflict the flesh and suffer somewhat, some people wore hair shirts, and when it was discovered that the Archbishop of Canterbury did that, it was then viewed that he was a particularly holy man. Stephen Langton, whose prayer we use to begin the class, became a later Archbishop, and promoted the Jubilee of Beckett's death, so that the shrine of Thomas Beckett became very central, as I have said, in the piety of the people of England. Well, that's a famous story, and it illustrates the point of this lecture that is, will the king dominate the church, or can the church dominate the king? Let's move on to 1294. Thomas Beckett died in 1170, 1294. 80-year-old man became Pope. He took the name Boniface the Eighth. He reigned until 1300 and three. Someone has written to him, he came in like a fox, he reigned like a king, and he died like a dog. Well, perhaps not a very complimentary or kind sentence to utter about Boniface the Eighth, but it does touch on some elements of his life. Boniface had his battle too, not with the king of England, but with the king of France. Boniface struggled with Philip IV of France. Some of the same issues that we talked about earlier in England, taxation of the clergy, the appointment of people to clerical offices by, it's called Unum Santum Eclasion, one holy church, and it's a kind of classical formulation of the people claim to supremacy of the preceding centuries as well as of the following centuries. It sums up this view that under God there is the Pope, and then the king, and then the people. It sometimes described as the two swords. Boniface and Popes before him and Popes after him would talk about the two swords. The church had one sword and the state had one sword, but the church had the superior sword. The sword of the church was superior to the sword of the state. The bull, one holy church, says, since spiritual power exceeds the temporal in honor, spiritual power, greater than temporal power, it may be used against the temporal, and it must be used if the temporal is an era. So if there is an era in the state, the king does something wrong, then spiritual power is above temporal power and must correct the temporal power. If the spiritual power airs, he or it will be judged by the supreme power who is the Pope. If there is a mistake, an era on the spiritual side at some lower level, then the Pope judges that. If the supreme power airs, that is the Pope, he can only be judged by God. He is responsible to know but God has illustrated in the chart there. Now all of that was not new, but Boniface states it with great force, and then adds something that is new, and that is that salvation requires subjection to the papacy. The church had said for a long, long time that there could be no salvation outside the church, but now this Pope is saying there could be no salvation without subjection to the papacy. Well it sounds strong, and it was strong, but it was a bit hollow because by the time Boniface writes these famous words, the Pope is not in much of a position to enforce them because a new phenomenon has arisen in Europe. We haven't talked about this yet, but eventually we will. We could describe it as nationalism. People are beginning to think of themselves now as English, French, Spanish, not just as part of the church, and nationalism is going to favor the king and not the Pope. So when Boniface VIII tries to suppress, fill up the fourth of France by this bull, and by threats of excommunication and the interdict, but with nationalism on the rise, those threats are not as strong as they had been in the past. Fill up simply responded by encouraging Italian and French nobility to raise an army and go down to Rome and deal with the Pope. The Pope was attacked by this coalition, made a prisoner, and quite soon died in humiliation.
Then begins a long line of Pope's, I think seven of them, who don't live in Rome but live in France. France takes over the papacy and moves the location of the head of the church from Rome where it had been for centuries to southern France, to the town of Avignon. This is called the Babylonian captivity of the church. Seven folks lived in Avignon for about 70 years. That's why it's called the Babylonian captivity of the church, because for about 70 years the papacy was captured, so to speak, by the French kings. Seven popes, French colleges of Cardinals, the papacy really becomes French at this point. And centers in unmistakable extravagance in Avignon until finally Gregory the 11th, the last of the Avignon popes reluctantly returned the papacy to Rome and then promptly died, which created even bigger problem, because it goes back to Rome and dies, the College of Cardinals meets and under pressure from the Roman people who want to poke in Rome again. They elect an Italian to serve as Pope, but then as soon as most of these Cardinals got out of town they were sorry about what they did and they annulled that election and elected someone else as Pope. But that meant that there were two popes. The Pope in Rome stayed in Rome, the other Pope went back to Avignon and now there are two popes, what we call the great sissum in the history of the church from 1378 to 1417. Now with all these problems and these are huge problems, people beginning to think that the church is not organized correctly, something is wrong. One of the people who came up with a new idea as to how church and state should be organized is the famous poet of Florence Don T. He wrote not only the divine comedy but he wrote on monarchy in which he set forth ideas that we could diagram this way. Neither the Pope nor the king is head of the other, but both are responsible to God. Under God there is the Pope who is over the people as far as the church is concerned. And under God there is the king who is over the people as far as the state is concerned. Well that's a much more modern view and Don T. felt that it was necessary for the papacy to surrender its temporal claims. This would mean the papacy would become now just a church in the view of the Pope's, the papacy was both a state and a church with its own tax, its own armies, its own ambassadors, just like any other state. But Don T. says the church should be a church and the state should be the state, both are responsible to God and to God alone. You might know if you read the divine comedy this scene, I don't know how many people read the divine comedy anymore, but certainly worth reading, especially in the Dorothy Sayers translation and especially for her footnotes. You can read through the divine comedy and you need the footnotes because there are a lot of names and it's difficult without the footnotes. But Sayers footnotes are a wonderful way to become at home in the political and ecclesiastical world of Middle Ages. There have been more recent translations of the divine comedy, but I don't think any are superior to Dorothy Sayers and nobody has come close to her notes in setting forth the theological significance of what Don T. writes about. But in the 19th canto of Inferno, hell, Don T. and his guide, find the popes. Here's a medieval Italian scholar and poet. He's writing about hell, he's putting the popes in hell. And these popes are in hell in unusual circumstances. One was head down in a crack in the earth with his legs pointed upward. They see this person with his head. And this crack in the ground. And someone asked, oh, wretched soul, who so thou art, the deepest upside down, planted like a stake, say a word if thou can'tst, who are you there with your head in the ground like a tree or a stake. And he cried out, art thou already standing there, bonifist. Now bonifist was the Pope I was just talking about, who produced the bull one holy church. And what Don T. is saying here is that the next Pope would come and press the earlier Pope on down through that fissure totally in the hell. And then another Pope would do the same thing for that Pope. This was the way a Pope was being punished. He was waiting and his successor, bonifist VIII, would push him more deeply into hell. Now that's pretty striking, that's pretty strong. And remember that's not Luther or Talban or John Knox. That's a medieval Catholic poet, Don T. describing the Pope's that way. It was another Italian. Don T. was from Florence. Marcilio was from Patoa. Later became Rector of the University of Paris. And wrote a book called Defender of the Peace. It's even more radical than Don T.'s view. Because Marcilio Patoa said that people should begin to think this way. There is God. God never changes. He's always up here. But look what's happened to the people. I've always been on the bottom before. And now they're right under God. So God gives authority to the people who through an assembly can elect the king and through a council can set forth its will for the Pope. God working through the people in the state and in the church through an assembly and through a council to direct the officer of the assembly and the people who is the king and the officer of the council in the church who is the Pope. Well, understandably, neither kings nor popes cared for Marcilio Patoa's book. One of the Pope said it was the most heretical book he had ever read. And you can see why. Well, that's an amazingly modern view. And it doesn't get out of the abstract area in the Middle Ages. Later, modern times it will become much more significant as actual practice. But new ideas are occurring. And people are trying to determine how to solve the great problem that the church had got itself into. One of the ways in which the church tried to solve the problem was through conciliarism or through the idea of the council. Perhaps a council can meet. If the popes can't solve the problem of the church, then a council could meet and solve the problems of the church. The problem was that one Pope would excommunicate the other Pope and then place under interdict all the people that were following that Pope which meant eventually everybody in Christodum was excommunicated. Here's a map that shows how the great sism worked out. If you have two popes, then you've got to decide which one to go with. And in blue here, you have land giving allegiance to Avignon. You would expect France to do that. Also parts of Spain, Kingdom of Naples. And Scotland way up here because Scotland was linked with France and the ol' alliance. And England was going to go the other way and whatever England did, Scotland did the opposite. Land giving allegiance to Rome and part of Italy, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia. And then the Holy Roman Empire in Portugal just could not make up their minds which way to go. It was an important decision. If you chose the wrong Pope, then you got an invalid sacramental system because the system depended upon the Pope being the right Pope and being able to guarantee the efficacy of all the sacraments. We must attempt to imagine what it meant for people at that time. It seems ludicrous to us in some ways, certainly unfortunate but it was a tragedy for the people in Europe or Christianity and for people that were taking the Church seriously. The idea was to bring in a council now. If the popes cannot get it right, perhaps a council can. And so a council was called at Pisa in Italy and elected a new Pope, deposing both the Roman Pope and the Avignon Pope, but neither of those popes was impressed with the decision of the council of Pisa. And rather than ending up with one Pope, they made the situation worse by not resigning and the church now was divided among three popes. The peasant Pope, Alexander V, soon died and was succeeded by John the 23rd. John the 23rd is a very interesting character. Not incompetent man, although he had a reputation that he brought with him to the papacy. He had been a soldier. That was the polite way to put it. He really had been a pirate. And he ruled then as the third Pope, John 23rd. You might recall that Giuseppe Runcale, when he became a Pope in 1958, beloved Pope. It took the name John the 23rd. So for almost 500 years, no Pope had used the name John up until the second peasant Pope. There had been 22 popes named John because John is such a vegetable name in Christian history, but no Pope dared risk the name John after John the 23rd. And there's the second John the 23rd because the first John the 23rd is not considered a true Pope by the Catholic Church today because he was a peasant Pope and not a Roman Pope. I think when John the 23rd, the modern John the 23rd took that title, it said something to people that his pontificate was going to be somewhat unusual because he dared risk taking a name that was honored but dishonored and his short reign of five years was very unusual because Vatican II was called during that time with all the changes that it brought to the Catholic Church. But to go back to this period, now three popes of people talked about the cursed Trinity, rather than the blessed Trinity because there were three popes. I've been young, Pisa and Rome. Finally, another council was called the Council of Constance. One of the most important councils of the late Middle Ages had met for four years, over four years. And this council did a number of things. We'll see later something else that it did but the main point that I want to make now is that in the council of Constance, conciliarism, trium, the council was able to force all three popes to resign and to establish the idea that the church now would be ruled by a council, not by a pope. You can read in the syllabus the heart of the statement of the Council of Constance, which says that the Roman Catholic Church is a conciliar church governed by a council and the council would meet periodically in order to govern the church. Well, started off well, but the new pope, Martin V, elected at Constance, almost immediately prohibited a appeal from a pope to any other court. And before too many years, Pope Pius II prohibited any and all appeals to a council over a pope. You might say when the popes were weak and divided, the council was strong. But when there's one single pope again, the council becomes divided and weak and the papacy is able to reestablish its supremacy in the Roman Catholic Church, which has continued down to the present. There was the council of Trent in the 16th century, but that had to be ratified by the pope before any decision to be accepted. There was Vatican I in the 19th century, which set forth the dog of papal infallibility. And once that is clearly in place, then what's the role of a council? The pope is infallible when he speaks ex-Petigra. There was Vatican II in the 1960s that Vatican II was clearly a council call to advise the pope and had no independent authority. I think even though conciliarism failed in the Catholic Church, it was not without effect. We're close to the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant churches are going to organize themselves quite differently from the Catholic Church. Conciliarism viewed the church as a community of believers. It set forth some sort of idea of representative church government and it stressed the importance of lay people, community of believers, representative church government, the importance of the layity, and even though those ideas failed in the Catholic Church, the conciliar ideas would prevail in different forms in the Protestant churches of the 16th century. Grass withers, flower, balls, but the word of our God will endure forever.