Download PDF | Gerd Tellenbach - The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
428 Pages
This is a comprehensive survey of the history of the church between around 900 and around 1125, considered both as a set of institutions and as a spiritual body. The emphasis of the first half is on the structures of religious belief and practice in the period between 900 and around 1050: conversion and mission; religious life and experience; the church hierarchy; rulers and the churches in their kingdoms; monasticism; currents of orthodox and heterodox thought. The second half concentrates on the revolutionary changes associated with the rise of the papacy to a new position of rulership within the church. It shows how far one can talk of a 'reform movement' and what the relations were between those who sought for a renewal of Christian life and those who wished to assert the authority of the papacy over all Christians, lay and clerical. It also does justice to the 'opposition', stressing the deep religious convictions of those who on certain issues came to oppose popes and 'reformers', and showing also how fragmentary were the advances of the 'reform movement'.
Tellenbach's survey is the book of a scholar who has been working in the field for sixty years, characterised by the freshness and the maturity of its judgements, which cuts through many fashionable theories and shows how thin is the evidence for them. No other work on the topic offers the same range, depth, and authority.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
In 1983 I published a draft of an introduction to this book.1 Contrary to my intention then, I shall not repeat what I wrote there, merely refer to it. Only a few points necessary for the understanding of this period of church history will be set out here by way of a prelude. He who concerns himself with church history must be constantly aware of the fact that it is a whole of which all isolated happenings are merely a part; for it is determined by divine foreknowledge. However puzzling may be the connections between its transcendental origins and destination on the one hand and its human, sometimes all too human course on the other, this unity is nowadays seen as a crucial element of church history by church historians of all confessions, whatever they may understand by the term church history.
Even an author like Joseph Lortz regarded it as fruitless 'to acknowledge the existence of certain questionable episodes in church history and the history of theology'. It would be to diminish God's control over history if one were small-mindedly to try to explain away its many weaknesses, scandals, and contradictions; God rules the world and makes human error a tool of his will - even human guilt is made use of in this way and becomes felix culpa.2 Such a conception allows full freedom to a scholarly study of church history. Nothing need be touched up or passed over in an apologetic spirit. The history of the church needs no human advocate. The famous dispute about whether the history of the church since the time of the primitive church is to be seen as one of progress and development or as one of decline becomes pointless, since both rise and fall are subsumed in God's plan for man's salvation. What men think about the history of the church and of human salvation is historically determined and subject to historical change.
The middle ages tended to see God's hand everywhere in earthly events. The prophetic spirit was accustomed to interpret history on the basis of the Old and New Testaments, and not just the whole course of history but individual events as well. The sacred texts were interpreted inventively and without preconceptions, symbolically, allegorically, and literally, and these interpretations were made to serve both the religious life and also quite concrete earthly interests. It was thought possible to look to the world beyond and determine God's intentions. Nowadays one is generally more modest and more cautious in interpreting the significance for the history of salvation of particular characteristics and changes in the history of the church; nevertheless, many prominent theologians and historians still occasionally risk crossing this frontier. The author of this book belongs to those who refuse strictly to draw any parallels between the visible history of the church and the mystery of divine intentions. Historical periodisations, if they are not purely chronological, can often be of assistance to the understanding of historical connections, but they also carry the danger of arbitrary or at least one-sided interpretations. Since we nevertheless need a beginning and an end for every survey, the question arises:
what could make the history of the church in the tenth and eleventh centuries a coherent period within the history of the church as a whole? To survey such a period might be justified either on the grounds that both centuries have so much in common that they appear by contrast with the periods before and after to form a unity, or on the quite opposite grounds that changes of such significance took place during them that afterwards conceptions of the nature of the church were quite different from those which had prevailed before. There are convenient labels available for this period: 'Cluny', 'Church reform', 'Gregorianism', 'Reform papacy', 'freeing of the church from lay control'. But do these not, even where they have not simply become cliches, tend if inadequately defined to overstress certain aspects of the historical process and so to conceal more than they explain?
The subtitle of my book of 1936 - 'The church and the ordering of the world in the age of the Investiture Contest' — was already intended to refer primarily to the changes in ecclesiology. In Yves Congar's Die Lehre von der Kirche the fifth chapter on the reform of the church in the eleventh century has the subtitle 'the ecclesiological turning point'. In it he writes, among other things, 'The Ecclesiology of the Latin church followed the path which we shall describe: the development of papal authority, juristification, clericalisation, a challenge to secular power which brought the church to see itself as a power'.3 And Gilles Gerard Meersseman has explained from a new perspective the changes in the relations between clerics and laymen in the life of the church.4
These few references may help to suggest that the second half of the eleventh century was an epoch of church history whose importance can only be understood in connection with its preconditions and its consequences. In this sense the period dealt with in this book is determined not so much by its bracketing dates of c. 900 and c. 1100, as above all by the critical era of the second half of the eleventh century and the early twelfth century.
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