The twelfth century saw the maturation of the three modes of infinity initiated in the eleventh: the popes launched new Crusades from the middle of the century to its conclusion, intensifying the breach between West and East; they embraced exalted estimates of papal supremacy vis-à-vis temporal rulers and fought to impose their might in worldly affairs; and the Roman church progressively transformed into an institution with a distinct legal identity. The last of these stands above the others, for the expansion of ecclesiastical law beyond its roots in theology and liturgy constitutes the side of the infinitizing movement that most directly brings man to his consummation in universality. The detachment and growth of the law intertwines with the consciousness of the individual qua individual, who knows himself in abstraction from his public and institutional life to the extent that those institutions embrace an expansive legal platform. As the institution devolves through an alien and limitless law, so the individual regards his new self-consciousness with both delight and confusion. It comes as no surprise that the twelfth century embodied both sides of this phenomenon in a single age, boasting a burgeoning ecclesiastical edifice met step-for-step with a graduated emphasis on the individual.
In that time the Western church spawned a new kind of cleric concerned less with the administration of the sacraments than the business of administration. A managerial class swelled the ranks of Catholic officials, men trained in law and prepared for political careers as much or more than the holier duties of their order. They directed the Western ethos toward legal philosophy, system, and logic, dedicating their energies to the justification of the church’s political prerogatives as an institution at once set apart by its spiritual functions and licensed to weigh in on if not decide temporal disputes. As the church widened its distance from the kingdom, protecting the separation of the two spheres, it also broke with its own theological consciousness, infusing a new and evolving body of law into the institution through experts trained at universities. These new schools responded to the demand for men capable of constructing arguments that would validate the changing ecclesiastical order and its claims regarding the temporal realm. Soon the universities began supplying lawyers on both the papal and royal sides of political disputes, serving as centers of learning for an age confident in its ability to reform society despite persistent legal conflict.
The revolutionary upheavals that pitted the church versus the kingdom provoked a new method for solving the problems of law that they implied. The dialectical reasoning of the twelfth century, which seems innocent enough on the surface, stands as the first instance of a philosophical pattern that reflects the docetic dialectic as a systematic intellectual phenomenon. Mirroring the practical quandary of the law of the pope set against the law of the king, the dialectical method begins not with a single, indisputable authority but with questions raised by gaps or contradictions between authoritative legal texts or within the same text. The dialectic places the contradictions side by side in the effort to establish a new harmony, resolving the contrasting elements until rules that appeared broken or antithetical are reconciled within a broader synthesis. In this way the method hoped to find unity where there was discord.
The dialectical method presumed a view of the law largely unknown in the West. Whereas the Roman legal texts that medieval lawyers used as a starting point did not necessarily imply general maxims or a comprehensive understanding of law, handling particular cases in their particularity and without extending them into universal rules, dialectical legal philosophy sought a system defined by its universal scope and which integrated separate matters of legal doctrine into a coherent whole. This method found itself in a state of contradiction illustrative of the docetic logic. Beginning in the uncertainty of questions and contradictions, the method rises upward in the reconciliation of opposing cases into a new maxim. The new maxim, however, forms the first of two new competing principles that require adjudication, a recognition that submerges what had risen into discernible legal guidance under a new antagonism. While seeking a comprehensive, unified system of legal truth, the dialectic ends up with an asymptotic approximation of that truth that never achieves final answers. The psychological consequence of such an undertaking is not pride at the approximation but despair at a truth that appears more distant as it comes closer, for the comprehensive and systematic grasp of truth for which the system strives is increasingly understood as an impossible goal. In the process the law—and in medieval times this included both natural and ecclesiastical law—becomes seen as programmatic, growing, and reformable, but by that same standard also pliable and, in an implication with which the optimistic legal technicians of the day would not have agreed, unstable. The dissemination of laws in works such as Gratian’s Decretum (1140) testify to an age that hastened legal development while lacking a consciousness of its negative implications. These surfaced only later and in a more personal setting, leading to the dialectical innovations of the docetic genius Martin Luther.
The ballooning class of clerical administrators and lawyers did not ascend without opposition. Humanists of letters and learning, men of literature, poetry, and the arts whose activities define the twelfth century as a time of renaissance, looked on the managerial class with a mixture of concern and disdain. While religious humanists lambasted the new officialdom in satires, others indulged a novel awareness of the individual as seen in the development of self-portraits, deepened explorations of affect in troubadour love songs, and meditations on friendship between pairs thought to mirror one another’s soul. Through these practices the humanists cultivated new, inward attitudes and mores, offering a meaningful alternative to the careerism of ecclesiastical affairs.
The trend toward the individualized consciousness influenced religious no less than secular life. The concern for the judgment of the individual implicit in Anselm’s satisfaction theory, the increased devotional emphasis on participation in Christ’s sufferings, and the inward turn that permeated such writings as Hugh of Fouilloy’s On the Cloister of the Soul prove the presence of a religious personality conceived in relative detachment from the outward affairs of church and society. In the spirit of the worldly monks who preceded Gregory VII, Hugh argued that a holy man attentive to the thoughts and commitments of the inner cloister can engage in worldly activity without detriment to his soul. Like the institutional breach separating the kingdom from the church, the break between the body and the soul had progressed enough that the pious could posit a soul protected by its distance from bodily habits.
The new focus on man’s inner life as opposed to outward action also influenced the Western practice of confession. The popes in the eleventh century had altered the traditional pattern of confession, penance, and reconciliation so that reconciliation followed the admission of sin. This change preceded the twelfth century’s turn to inner sorrow as the crucial element in the sinner’s restoration before God, a stress that went hand in hand with a wider and more consistent adoption of confession among Christians. Though the church did not impose annual confession upon every member until the Lateran Council in 1215, the spirit that recognized its necessity had matured over the course of the 1100’s, advancing with an accent on the remorse of the penitent rather than the absolution given by the priest. In this age men became more concerned with the inner state of the confessing sinner, and in lieu of the focus on externals indicative of earlier penal codes one finds a penchant for self-examination among the devout. Men as prominent as Bernard of Clairvaux developed their conceptions of the spiritual life around the notion of intention, while Peter Abelard defined sin according to the individual’s inner aims in Ethics: or, Know Yourself. The confession booth became an important locus for the assurance of salvation at the same time that the purity of one’s conscience measured the soul’s standing before God.
The age had much to confess in the eyes of the satirists, who saw the ascendance of the managerial class as the betrayal of the church’s ideals. Viewing the technocratic order from the outside and despising the church’s machinery as an arena for opportunists, the satirists