Pope by pope
MICHAEL BORRIE
The Medieval Papacy Geoffrey Barraclough (Thames and Hudson 35s) It is, as one would expect, a stimulating ex- perience to see Professor Barraclough wearing
his mediaeval hat in public again. In this short and valuable book he looks anew at the fas- cinating institution through the study of which
he first made his mark as a historian thirty
years ago. The time is certainly propitious for such a work. The papacy is news. It retains its power to excite extremes of devotion and dis- like. To its noisy critics within and without the Church it is an outmoded institution, an antique curiosity, irrelevant and perverse, an obstacle to 'progress' and an affront to reason. With so many nails poised over the papal coffin, it would seem that the only decent thing left for the twitching corpse to do is to climb in and pull down the lid. But the papacy seems obstinately unaware of its progressive duty to go away. Indeed, it has recently had the im- pudence to behave as though it still had some authority over the Roman Catholic Church.
An organisation with such extraordinary powers of survival cannot fail to be of absorb- ing interest. It is therefore rather surprising that we have had to wait until now for a good, popular history of the mediaeval papacy in English. In this field it is the Germans who have made all the running; and Professor Barraclough writes with the great advantage, enjoyed by few other English scholars, of a lifetime's immersion in the suffocating but quite indispensable mass of Teutonic verbiage on the subject.
This has had, mercifully, no effect whatever on the author's style, which is clear, brisk and to the point. The narrative whisks us along at a cracking pace. Pope succeeds pope and gets his meed of praise or blame (unlike some his- torians, the author does not get instant paralysis of the pen at the thought of a good, old- fashioned, swingeing, subjective value-judg- ment). Against a background of the crash of empires and the ruin of civilisations the papal monarchy slowly takes on its familiar shape. It formulates the concepts of the Petrine power and the vicariate of Christ, and, armed with these formidable ideological weapons, it gradu-
ally establishes its spiritual, juridical and administrative supremacy over western Chris- tendom.
Time and again it sinks into decline and is reinvigorated. Even to those who look askance at the dogmatic theology which underpins the papacy, its capacity for revival must seem almost miraculous. Who would imagine that it could survive the depths of degradation plumbed in the ninth and tenth centuries under the ministrations of John VIII (murdered 882), Stephen VI (strangled in prison 897), John XII (elected at eighteen; died, according to a chronicler, of 'amorous excesses' in 964), Bene- dict VI (smothered 974) and John XIV (mur- dered in Sant' Angelo 984)? Yet by the thirteenth century the papacy had reached the summit of its prestige and freed itself from the
last traces of theoretical restraint on its powers over the whole corpus Chrisiianorum, kings,
bishops, priests and people. In the ringing words of Innocent III's consecration sermon, the pope was 'indeed the vicar of Jesus Christ, the successor of Peter, the Lord's anointed . . . set in the midst between God and man . . . less than God but greater than man, judge of all men and judged by none.'
Professor Barraclough dislikes the institu- tional papacy of the later Middle Ages and makes no bones about it. But he is fair to the popes themselves, regarding them mostly as well-intentioned but helpless prisoners of an impossible system. And he does not neglect to stress the most important point of all in papal history: that the papal monarchy and its vast administrative machine came into being more in response to the needs of the contemporary Church than through any cunningly hatched long-term plan for spiritual aggrandisement by the bishops of Rome.
It is only to be expected that the compres- sion of such a mighty theme into 200 pages occasionally leads the author into judgments that need considerable qualification : as, for example, his statements that 'Because all roads led to Rome no initiative remained with the local prelates, and the diocese—formerly the basic unit of church government—became an empty shell' (pp. 125-6) and (p. 127) 'Under Alexander 111 . . . the rights of [lay] patrons were whittled away, until they became a mere formality.' But given the small format of the book, Professor Barraclough's deft handling of an overwhelming mass of material would be hard to better. There are no footnotes (they
should surely have been supplied at least for direct quotations from authors), but there is an excellent critical bibliography and an index. There are also a great many interesting illustrations. The emetic colours can be for- given, since the pictures are not the point of the book, but the absence of precise references to the manuscripts from which they are mostly drawn cannot.
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