God, who by a fourfold rule
Chaos regulated
Things unequal equalized
And by laws related
All interrelationships
Duly calculated—
Why do you leave only man’s
Nature dislocated?
The discontent inspired by social conditions and the felt fragmentation of man led Walter and his ilk to espouse eschatological views. It seemed to them that the disorder among men presaged the antichrist and the return of Jesus, for how could a state of affairs in which greed and ambition had run rampant go unpunished? How could the Lord not return to set right what had gone wrong?
More than others in this era the satirists apprehended the docetic spirit in their midst, recognizing the fraying of the form that holds man together. The law by which man knows his nature as embedded in institutions, those mediations meant to train him away from sin, was dissolving. By the twelfth century those institutions had lost sight of their purpose just as man felt his abstraction from them, an alienation manifest in his pronounced awareness of the inner life. Thus appeared that simultaneous experience of expectation and uneasiness that accompanies man as his form slides from solidity into possibility, the internal dialectic of raising and lowering that reflects the rise and fall of institutions that throw off their boundaries. The proliferation of ecclesiastical canons and their scholastic study, though they tempted him with the hope of a just society grounded in the rule of the church, signaled man’s ontological distance from the divine law and the undoing of the church’s institutional form as the body of Christ. Through these canons and their twin in the individualized consciousness one discovers man slouching toward universality, approaching the formlessness in which he celebrates his indifference to God’s command. Man imperceptibly melts into the scattering as the principle of his existence, though this movement had yet to achieve the religious validation that would enhance its assault.
That assault raised the war between church and kingdom to ecclesiastical crisis during the reign of emperor Frederick Barbarossa, whose decisions eventuated in dual popes for nearly two decades. From the 1150s into the 1170s one pope claimed authority under the emperor while another proclaimed himself the leader of an independent Rome. During these same decades papal jurists developed arguments that sought to augment papal rights over the temporal sphere. The claim that the church as the soul had priority over the kingdom as the body had been advanced since the time of Cardinal Humbert, with papists often grossly distorting the doctrine in support of Roman aims. They now argued that the “power of the keys” conferred to Saint Peter included the pope’s right to crown emperors, though historically this affirmation derived from Leo’s crowning of Charlemagne. By the end of the century some among the papacy’s advocates leaned toward a theory of papal world-monarchy in which the pope possessed complete sovereignty over temporal and spiritual government.
This theory found its nearest embodiment in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216), whose rule presents the apex of the Grand Dialectic. In Innocent multiple forms of the infinitizing movement came to a head: his willful exercise of supreme authority in temporal as well as spiritual government, his push for the Crusade that finalized the Eastern schism, and his codification of a mountain of Roman laws dovetail in a singularly potent expression of the finite’s transgression of its limits. Innocent sums up the advance in which the church breaks from its nature by striving to bottle the infinite within the finite. He is the docetically-empowered giant whose height foreshadows the depths to which the papacy would fall.
Innocent never bluntly argued that the pope possesses supreme temporal authority when justifying his interventions in international affairs, but his theological rationale and his actions imply this conviction. In addition to informing the emperor at Constantinople that the priesthood surpassed the kingship as the soul over the body, Innocent construed the position of the pope by reference to the description of Jesus as a priest of the order of Melchizedek, a man who had been both priest and king. By this argument and others like it Innocent reserved the supreme right of judgment in worldly affairs for the papacy, a right put to work in his resolution of the dispute between two aspirants to the throne of the Western emperor and in his arbitration of controversies between the kings of France and England. Innocent also deposed a king in Norway and had another established in Bulgaria, while laboring to enlarge the Papal States in Italy. Innocent wielded papal power with an authority relatively undisputed by the temporal dignitaries involved, as if all recognized that the augmentation of spiritual powers into temporal rule reflected the order desired by God. This is the unique achievement of his papacy, the height to which no pope before or after would ascend.
The expansion of Innocent’s power reached no less to the East, although the bad consequences of the Fourth Crusade resulted more from indecision than arrogance. Animosity had grown between average Byzantines and the Westerners who had settled in their lands, flaring in the massacre of Latins in Constantinople in 1182. The Crusade of 1204 returned the insult with an intensity not sought by Innocent but not stridently condemned by him. While Innocent had roused Europe to a Crusade meant to reassert the Christian presence in the Holy Land, the nobles who executed the assault turned their eyes upon the Byzantine capital. Prince Alexius, the son of the dispossessed Byzantine emperor Isaac Angelus, had approached the Crusaders with promises of money if they should install him as ruler of the empire. The nobility did not consult the pope in taking up the prince’s cause, which failed with the riots that immediately followed his establishment by Latin hands.
Seeing that the coffers in Constantinople were empty, and that they consequently would not receive the expected payment, the Crusaders conspired to seize Constantinople and make it the capital of a new Latin empire. This plan was concocted again without notifying the pope. The three-day sack of the city ensued, in which the Crusaders perpetrated one of the most heinous and unruly crimes in the history of the West. They set the Byzantine libraries on fire, destroying ancient manuscripts and decimating collections of antique art, while committing outrages against Byzantine men, women, and children as well as monks, nuns, and priests. It is reported that a French prostitute strolled through the Church of Saint Sophia and sat on the patriarchal throne while Latin soldiers paid her homage. The Crusaders helped themselves to whatever they pleased, compiling a trove of booty so enormous that it included the city’s priceless treasures as a fraction of the take. The desecration of the city and its shrines grieved the Easterners deeply, especially as a crime committed by supposed brothers in Christ. The memory of Constantinople’s ruin and the sacrilege involved catapulted the dissonance of earlier disputes into overt schism, permanently severing the East from the West.
Innocent’s reaction to the seizure of the city exacerbated Eastern discontent. In fairness, the first report he received did not mention the horrors that the Crusaders had poured out upon the people. Innocent was frustrated to learn that the Crusade had diverted its focus from the Holy Land to Constantinople, but he exulted at the prospect of an eastern Latin Empire that seemed, for the moment at least, to bind the whole of Christendom under Roman rule. His congratulations of the new Latin emperor stung the Byzantine population, while his later dismay upon hearing the details of the sack did nothing to mitigate the resentment inspired by his initial reaction. Far from resolutely denouncing the Western assault upon the city and its churchmen, Innocent supported the imposition of a Latin patriarch in Greek lands, a sign that he accepted the overthrow of Constantinople despite the obscenities carried out during the conquest. The leaders of the Eastern sees and their parishioners could not help but conclude that the Romans were no longer Christian brothers, for how could the pope tolerate such abuses and indulge the illusion of a unified Christendom?
Neither Innocent nor his followers had a satisfying answer to such questions, soon turning from Rome’s relationship with the East to business more pertinent to the Western churches. About a decade after the Crusade Innocent