The historical rise of the Christ-Idol conforms in a general way to the anthropological pattern exemplified at the fall. Through various personalities, political intrigues, machinations, and misunderstandings between well-meaning men, in short, in and through the details of history and men freely willing their place in history, Docetism accomplished its purposes as a guiding dialectical spirit, goading man to rise before compelling his fall. This transformation occurred over the medieval era, intensifying and proceeding from hints, unforeseen implications, occasional brazen announcements, and critical periods of corruption, schism, and war, until the infinitizing dialectic had opened the chasm necessary for the Christ-Idol. Just as the soul in deciding to eat the fruit exceeds its measure and rends its nature away from its proper form, so the papacy in its excessive assumption of primacy divorced the Western church from the East. Just as the soul achieves this rending in the grasp toward infinity, so the medieval papacy raced after the infinite in a plurality of ways. From the desire to reform the world to the papal excommunication of Eastern patriarchs; from claims of universal jurisdiction and theories of world-monarchy to the Crusades; and, most importantly, in the transformation of ecclesiastical law away from liturgy and theology and into a distinct system of statutes, with the church established as a legal institution; through all these the church seized the infinite and abandoned the law of its being. Just as the soul dies in its distance from God at the fall, suffering the loss of its being at the same time that it struggles under the flesh, so the papacy lost touch with its spiritual purposes as a prelude to falling to the French kings and eventually enduring the Western Schism. All the while the scattering, the universal man, germinated in consciousness and power until the docetic dialectic culminated at the Reformation, the breakthrough in which the infinite law was exhausted, divine law annulled, and the Christ-Idol raised on high.
The first cycle of rise and fall began with the crowning of Charlemagne by Leo III, a stratagem by which the pope secured a protector for Rome against the Lombards. Leo never intended to have a hand in docetic processes, not foreseeing the claims of papal power that later arose on the authority of his action. Nor did he desire a break from the Eastern church, taking care on other fronts not to offend the Eastern sees by including the filioque in the Western creed. Yet in establishing a new emperor Leo brought to life the docetic dialectic in both the Roman Church’s break from its ecclesiastical nature (i.e., its union with the other sees) and its dismissal of a stable form for the transition of the greater-lesser. Though one should not overstate the impact of his action at the Constantinopolitan court and among the Eastern patriarchs, none of whom considered it schismatic, they were dumbfounded that their Roman brother should concoct a new emperor in an unheard-of assertion of papal prerogatives. The application of that prerogative symbolized the docetic dialectic at this embryonic stage, for after crowning the emperor as one authorized to institute his empire, Leo paid homage by humbling himself. Some say that Leo knelt before Charlemagne and others that he kissed the ground, but in either case the spiritual authority that had risen above the temporal proceeded to fall below it. In a most surreptitious and obscure way, the crowning of Charlemagne set in motion the series of events by which the church would fall and the scattering would rise.
Only occasionally does the docetic dialectic concentrate in a single event or individual man, more often tracing its arc from rise to fall over generations and centuries. Here the rise of the church and of Western lands continued from Charlemagne through the Carolingian Renaissance, with the papacy asserting its power under Nicholas I (858–867). Bolstered by confidence in his office as God’s representative on earth, Nicholas initiated that separation and confusion between the church and the kingdom that approximates the corruption of soul and body at the fall. On one hand he decreed that no secular authority could appoint men to ecclesiastical office, fighting in particular cases to overturn a practice common at least since Charlemagne. In this way Nicholas announced the separation of the church as independent from the kingdom. Nicholas simultaneously exercised his power to force the hand of kings and discipline them when they did not pay him respect, invading their affairs in order to safeguard the dignity and interest of the church. “By me kings reign, and princes decree justice; by me princes rule, and nobles, and even all the judges of the earth,” Nicholas wrote to Charles the Bald, manifesting the papacy’s rise above its limits.10 The rhetoric of separation that justified Nicholas’s reasoning regarding ecclesiastical appointments, and which would defend the distinct position of the church, combined with a supposed right of supervision over temporal affairs whose rationale allowed the pope to interfere in the lower order, to include judging temporal laws and mandating the resistance of clerics against kings when he deemed it necessary. Whereas it would define itself as a higher spiritual authority, the church confused its jurisdiction with the temporal, lording over the business of the body as well as the soul.
Events during the reign of Nicholas also temporarily rent the Western church from its Eastern brethren, introducing issues of lasting importance for the Great Schism. The sudden appointment of the lay scholar Photius to the patriarchate of Constantinople dismayed Nicholas, who considered the controversy that developed between the two sees as an opportunity to assert the primacy of Rome. Though he at first refused to recognize Photius as the legitimate patriarch, Nicholas later offered to accept his title on the condition that the lands of Sicily and Illyricum be handed over to the supervision of Rome. Neither Photius nor the Eastern emperor would yield to these terms, which so incensed Nicholas that he excommunicated Photius without consulting the other patriarchs. At the Lateran Council of 863 Nicholas ordered that Photius step down, declaring the supremacy of Rome over the whole church in spite of the protesting emperor. These actions put Rome and Constantinople in a temporary state of schism.
The rivalry that soon developed between Rome and the Byzantines over the lands of Moravia and Bulgaria intensified the breach. Both parties believed that they possessed the right to proselytize these lands, with the Byzantine missionaries first arriving and establishing their churches. When the Roman missionaries followed, they were reported to have attacked Eastern clerical customs regarding marriage and to have insisted on inserting the filioque into the Nicene Creed. Photius and the other patriarchs would not tolerate this doctrinal addition, considering it mistaken and unauthorized by the councils. In light of these developments Photius convened a synod in 867 that deposed and excommunicated Nicholas, who passed away before news of the decision arrived at Rome.
Though the schism did not last long, it highlighted questions of papal authority and the legitimacy of the filioque that would eventually lead to permanent division. Indeed, the course of the papacy under Nicholas represents the dual movement at the heart of the docetic dialectic. The separation of the Western church from its natural union with the East as exemplified in the schism, a break resulting on the Western side from unwarranted claims of papal power, is the break of the soul from its nature as it grasps for a knowledge beyond its limit. At the same time, in Nicholas the papacy manifested the upward movement of the docetic dialectic in which the soul leaps away from the temporal body—the political kingdom—before becoming confused with it, the latter a sign of the fall below that body that is to come. For in Nicholas the papacy ascended to a height from which it would soon descend.
The initial fall of the Western church occurred not long after Nicholas, when from the second half of the ninth century into the eleventh the papacy suffered devastating corruption. With the decline of the Carolingian Empire the popes found themselves without an external protector, with the result that they became the victims of local power brokers. Prominent Roman families and their factions engineered sedition against pope after pope, occasionally submitting the pontiff to brutal treatment. The popes themselves collaborated in plots to preserve their position while