Morbidity and Vitality in the History of the Early Medieval Papacy

Abstract

The Catholic Historical Review VOL. LXXXIOCTOBER, 1995No. 4 MORBIDITY AND VITALITY IN THE HISTORY OF THE EARLY MEDIEVAL PAPACY BY Thomas F. X. Noble* The papal historian August Franzen says ofhis subject that "to arrive at truth one mustwade through a swamp ofcalumnies and leave behind a forest oflegends and anecdotes."1 Franzen was speaking in particular of the history of historical writing about the papacy, an important topic that has never been satisfactorily handled. In very brief outline, that history might look something like this. In Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, papal history was only one among many histories that competed for the attention of contemporary historiographers and that continues to compete for the attention of modern historians. After *Mr. Noble is a professor of history in the University of Virginia. This essay began as apaper at the 1992 meeting ofthe MedievalAcademy ofAmerica. Developing versions were presented as lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Pennsylvania. A near-final draft was written in the incomparable surroundings of the Institute for Advanced Study. The author acknowledges with gratitude the criticisms of Robert Brentano, Peter Brown, Donald Bullough, Gerald Caspary, Giles Constable, Ann Matter, Karl Morrison, Glenn Olsen, Edward Peters, Julia Smith, and John Van Engen. 1In Franzen and Remigius Bäumer, Papstgeschichte: Das Petrusamt in seiner Idee und seinergeschichtlichen Verwirklichung in derKirche, 3d ed. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1982), p. 13. 505 506MORBIDITY AND VITAIiTY IN THE HISTORY OF THE EARLY MEDIEVAL PAPACY the eleventh century, papal and church history seemed to merge as the papacy attained the high point of its ecclesiastical and secular domination. With only minor and occasional deviations, the story continued to be told that way until the early sixteenth century, when Robert Barnes, an English Protestant, fled to Wittenberg and wrote there under Luther's protection a papal history designed to prove that the popes were the "vastatoresfidei." Shortly thereafter, the Catholic writer Michael Buchinger produced a papal history that reiterated the link between papal and church history. Protestants could neither let that link remain unbroken, nor ignore the long period of papal prominence in church history. Consequently, down to the eighteenth century , more papal histories were written by Protestants than by Catholics. Indeed, Harald Zimmermann, the greatest living Protestant historian ofthe papacy, once said that it almost appears as ifthe writing of papal history were a Protestant invention.2 Protestants kept telling the story their way so as to rebut Catholic claims about the identification of papal and church history, and also to advance the thesis that papal history revealed the "mysterium iniquitatis." So things stood until changes were wrought by four modern developments , three of them products of the nineteenth century and one of them more recent. The first was the emergence of the "higher criticism" that forced new, and less palpably confessional, readings of the essential biblical texts concerning authority, charisma, and power in the Early Church. The second, during the pontificate ofPius IX, was the decree of the First Vatican Council, Pastor Aeternus, on papal infallibility, which attracted little Protestant attention, because it seemed so characteristically arrogant and unhistorical as to require little comment, but which shattered Catholic consensus about the historical role of the papacy.3 Third, the opening of the Archivio Segreto by Leo XIII in 1881, because of the nature of its contents, turned much papal historical writing into a subset of diplomatic and political history. Finally, the ecumenical movement has tended to temper po2Zimmermann , Das Papsttum im Mittelalter Eine Papstgeschichte im Spiegel der Historiographie (Stuttgart, 1981); idem, Ecclesia als Objekt der Historiographie: Studien zur Kirchengeschichtsschreibung im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit ("Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften," philosophischhistorische Klasse, Band 235 [Vienna, I960]). 'The reverberations are still being felt in this area. Witness the reactions to Brian Tierney's The Origins ofPapal Infallibility, 1050-1350: A Study of the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 1972). Cf. Alfons M. Stickler, "Papal Infallibility—A Thirteenth-Century Invention? Reflections on a Recent Book," Catholic Historical Review, 60 (1974), 427-441. BY THOMAS F. X. NOBLE507 lemical rhetoric among Christians who belong to...