Roots of the Reformation XXVI: A Final Word on the Ottonian Reform

The Cathedral of Bamberg
one of the Sees established to
evangelize and push out the boundaries
of the Empire under the Ottonians
Burial Place of Henry II, Saint Henry,
the last of the Ottonian dynasty

The Ottonian Reformation was a successful reform of the Church in as that it removed the papacy from the control of the Roman families that were fighting to control it and it  brought stability to the central administration of the Church.  The papacy was as much in need of reform as any other aspect of Church life but was not able to reform itself.  It took outside power—in this case the Holy Roman Emperors Otto I,II, and III.  But reform came at a price.  The papacy found itself in the gift of the Emperors—they had acquired the ability to name who would be pope.  This was not bad as long as you had good men on the imperial throne, but a disaster should the Emperors want to manipulate the Church for their own ends and that was an irresistible temptation. 

     It was not only the papacy that had fallen under control of the Emperor.  Throughout the Empire, but especially in Germany and in the new lands conquered to the East—modern day Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and parts of Poland where the Emperors were pushing out the boundaries of their reign, they used the Church for political ends.  This was not all bad. The Emperors helped the Church evangelize the peoples and the newly Christianized peoples and their kings or nobles submitted themselves and their peoples under Imperial control.  They brought advanced levels of civilization to these lands—learning, laws, and the arts as well as faith.  Part of the evangelization effort was to establish monasteries which became centers of learning.  Bishops and their diocesan organization helped the kings and nobles in setting up schools as well as a coherent system of civil law.  It was for the most part a win-win situation.  The various cultures were Christianized but otherwise remained intact.   Even many of their stories and sagas remained but were given Christian interpretations.  Sometimes their ancient kings and heroes found new identities as Christian saints.  To accomplish all this Emperors needed good bishops, men of character, and found them in folk like Adalbert of Prague, Adelbert of Magdeburg, and Eberhard of Bamberg.  The Emperor regularly “nominated” his candidates to the various cathedral chapters to be elected bishops or to monastic chapters to be elected as abbots of the more important monasteries.  As long as the Empire needed the Church to stabilize the newly conquered lands and as long as the Emperors were men of good character this worked.  But what would happen when the new lands had been Christianized, the Church and political order stabilized, and Emperors came along whose need was not evangelization but reward for faithful retainers or enticements for political alliances?  Would the Church no longer be a partner in good rule but a tool for political supremacy?  Otto III was seceded by Henry II, Saint Henry, the last of the Ottonians and—as his title implies—a great friend of the Church.  A change of dynasty would bring the Salians—and a very different ecclesiastical policy.  The Church would no longer be able to afford being under the imperial thumb.

      The question we might ask ourselves is how can the Church be reformed when it is incapable of reforming itself?   We no longer have—nor would wish to have—an Emperor, and even if we did Emperors long ago proved unreliable in matters ecclesiastical as we shall in the Gregorian Reform.  We find ourselves today in a situation however where the institutional Church has shown itself to be ineffectual (at best) in addressing vital issues of Reform from clerical sex abuse  to financial transparency.  The quality of episcopal leadership being appointed from Rome is, at least in the United States, lamentable.   Rome itself, at least if situations such as that surrounding the veto of Lesley-Ann Knight give any indication, seems to be degenerating into a quagmire of pettiness and reprisal.  With Marxism effectively eliminated, the ecclesiastical “leadership” seems to find its chief enemies in seventy year old women such as Joan Chittester, Sandra Schnieders, Elizabeth Johnson and every American nun who has misplaced her veil.   At the same time the Pope keeps citing the Second Vatican Council, his minions both here in the States and in Rome seem to be dismantling liturgical reform, ecumenical and interfaith collaboration, and empowerment of the faithful piece by piece and at an alarming rate.  The result of all this is not only a drastic decline in Church attendance but the loss of credibility of the once strong and prophetic voice of Pope and bishops.  That the Church needs reform today is a given.  It needs reform in every age. Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda.  But if not the Emperor, then who? 

Roots of the Reformation XXIII: The Ottonian Reformation falters (briefly)

Otto II

Sorry--our network was down last evening when I went to post this. 

It is unfortunate that Otto II died so young—at only 28—and that his heir was only three years old  when he came to the throne because Otto and his father (Otto I) had managed to make some remarkable headway into securing good order in both Church and State and a regency provided both the German nobles and the Roman families with the opportunity to undo the political and religious progress that had been accomplished.  Otto’s widow, Theophanu, gets mixed reviews as regent, though the negative opinons of her own day might be biased against her being a woman and her being Greek.  She seems to have preferred Italy to Germany, probably because it was more like her native Greece but also because she was detested in Germany for her sophistication which made her seem affected and pretentious.  Raised in the imperial court of Constantinople where her uncle reigned, she was given to a high degree of luxury and her preference for rich fabrics and elegant jewelry made her appear decadent to the more battle-hardened Germans.  Among her “affectations,” she seems to have been the one who introduced the use of the fork to Europe.  She had a two pronged golden instrument with which she lifted meat and other greasy foods to her mouth. The Germans couldn’t understand this—why, after all, had God given us fingers if not to slobber grease-dripping  globs of fat into our mouths?  On the other hand, lazy, sunny decadence was familiar to Rome and the Romans (where it is still the fashion), and while Italy may not be Greece, at least it wasn’t the frigid, Spartan forests north of the Alps. 
Germany was in turmoil through much of Otto’s childhood due to the rebellion of Henry the Quarrelsome whom Otto II had deposed as Duke of Bavaria.  At one point Henry had actually kidnapped the young Otto III and in his rebellion he tried to seize the imperial crown for himself.  It is never healthy for a kingdom or an empire to have a child on the throne.  Quarrelsome Henry's quarrels were not the only issue causing trouble in Germany.  Hungarians ravaged the eastern fringe of the empire, Vikings the north.  France, under Lothair IV used the chaos created by Henry the Quarrelsome to make itself independent of Imperial oversight.  On the other hand, Theopanu was able to arrange for Bohemia under Duke Boleslaus II to become part of the Empire. 

Otto, or rather his regent and mother, Theophanu, had better luck with their Roman policy.   You may remember that one of Otto II’s last acts was to name John XIV as pope, but with Otto’s death five months into that papacy, John was left vulnerable to the enemies of the Imperial party and the antipope Boniface VII had returned from exile and imprisoned John in the Castle Sant’ Angelo where he was murdered.  Boniface held the Chair of Peter for a year until he died.  (He is the one whose corpse was dragged naked through the streets and flung at the statue of Marcus Aurelius.)  John XV was elected to succeed him.  John was a client of Theophanu and the Imperial party and her presence (at times personal, at times through a strong envoy) kept him safe. 

As pope John was not remarkable in any way other than to say he was noted for his love of luxury and a tendency to enrich family and retainers with Church offices.  Those are not virtues in a pope, though they were common enough faults. There are two important events in his papacy however. 

The first event was that the new King of France, Hugh Capet, who had replaced the old Carolingian dynasty wanted to depose Arnulf, the Archbishop of Reims who was a relative of Hugh’s rival for the French Crown, Charles of Lorraine.  When John XV failed to act promptly at Hugh’s request, the French King convoked a synod and deposed Arnulf choosing the abbot Gerbert of Aurillac to succeed him.  We will hear more—much more—about Gerbert later.  Instead of being angry at the King, Arnulf turned on the pope saying of John XV:

Are any bold enough to maintain that the priests of the Lord all over the world are to take their law from monsters of guilt like these—men branded with ignominy, illiterate men, and ignorant alike of things human and divine? If, holy fathers, we are bound to weigh in the balance the lives, the morals, and the attainments of the humblest candidate for the priestly office, how much more ought we to look to the fitness of him who aspires to be the Lord and Master of all priests! Yet how would it fare with us, if it should happen that the man the most deficient in all these virtues, unworthy of the lowest place in the priesthood, should be chosen to fill the highest place of all? What would you say of such a one, when you see him sitting upon the throne glittering in purple and gold? Must he not be the "Antichrist, sitting in the temple of God and showing himself as God"?

This might be the first time that the Pope has been termed the Antichrist.  That is a theme that would be picked up by Luther at his Reformation, shared by other Protestant Reformers, and still a popular theme today among some of the more exotic millenarians on the right fringe of Christianity.  Hugh's evaluation of John might be more out of anger that John wasn't supporting him in his struggles for the French throne, but it does serve as a warning that people are not necessarily impressed by papal pomp. 

The other event that made John’s papacy noteworthy from a historical point of view is that on January 31 995, just a year before his death, John canonized Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg.  This is the first record of a papal canonization of a saint.  John died in March of 996 as he was preparing to crown the young Otto III as emperor.   Otto III named his 24 year old cousin, Bruno of Carinthia, as Gregory V.  At this point in history we see that the papacy is totally in the control and gift of the Emperor.  By amd large, the imperial popes were good popes, or at least not bad popes--certainly better than the ones the Romans tended to elect.  We will see Bruno's efforts at Reform and then his successor who is one of the better popes, and one of the most idiosyncratic, of the period. 

Roots of the Reformation XXI: The Ottonian Reformation 2

Otto I with Knights and Nobles

Well, we have strayed a bit from our theme of Reformation and the “Ottonian” Reformation of the Emperors Otto I, II, and III in particular.  The power of Otto I’s daughter, the Abbess Matilida, led us into a digression on women and ecclesiastical authority and then we looked a bit at the issue of Same Sex Marriage due to the passage of a bill legitimating gay marriage in New York State.  So let’s return to the Emperor Otto I and his attempts to reform the Church.

Otto had to carve out the position of Holy Roman Emperor after the title had fallen into disuse in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, but as King of Germany he had great power north of the Alps.  He tried to clean up the papacy which was going through one of its most discreditable periods in history, if not the single most discreditable period, but he did not have great luck.  He had allied himself with the reprobate John XII with the Diploma Ottonium in which he agreed to serve as protector of the Church, but the last thing John—one of the most immoral of popes—wanted was the Emperor interfering in the Church and any curtailment of John’s own power.  When John turned against Otto and his authority, Otto deposed him and saw that Leo VIII was elected in his place.  Church historians today see such a deposition as “invalid,” but at the time it was seen as a legitimate prerogative of the Emperor and the election of Leo was seen as valid. The Romans never accepted Leo—they saw him as a creature of the Emperor and resented the “foreign” interference in the election of their bishop.  John fled to the mountains outside Rome where he gathered an army from among family, friends, and retainers.  Otto was no sooner on his way back to Germany when John’s army attacked Rome and caused Leo to flee.  Otto turned around determined to beat John once and for all, but God called John to judgment before Leo had his chance to do the same.  With John dead, the Roman’s chose Benedict V but Otto was determined for Leo and had Benedict deposed and Leo re-installed as Pope.  Modern Church historians recognize Leo as the legitimate pope from this time (965) on.  Poor Benedict had a somewhat remarkable decline from the papacy.  Leo personally ripped the palium (the sign of his office as pope) frm his shoulders and his papal staff (crozier) was snapped in two over his head and he was reduced to the rank of deacon and sent into exile in Hamburg, Germany—about as far from Rome as you can get.  When Leo died, John XIII became pope—a compromise candidate acceptable to both the Emperor and the Roman Populace, though the first choice of neither.  John and Otto had some success in reforming the Church though no significant reform in Rome itself where the vested political interests of the different Roman noble families would resist change.  John and Otto established a number of new Archbishoprics in Germany—pushing missionary efforts eastward towards what is today the Czech Republic and southern Poland and northward into the Baltic.  John also established several Latin Archbishoprics in southern Italy which still had ties to Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire and where Christianity tended to follow the Greek rather than Roman pattern.  John’s expanding of his authority into the southern reaches of Italy shifted that alliance so that when the break between Rome and Constantinople occurred in 1054, the southern parts of Italy and Sicily remained in the Roman orbit rather than moving with Orthodoxy. 

If Otto’s success in Church reform south of the Alps was not as prolific as he might have wished, he had far greater influence in Germany where his power was stronger.  He was very proactive in the selection of bishops and abbots, choosing men who would be loyal to him (and thus balancing the nobles who resented the diminution of their power) and who saw eye to eye with him on Church matters.  He was particularly successful in pushing missionary activity along the eastern borders of his realm which not only won souls to Christ but subjects to his crown.  Otto had his son Otto II crowned in 961 while he, Otto I, was still alive in order to guarantee the succession.  The nobles having the right to elect the German King, Otto needed to be alive to make sure the election came out the way he wanted.  Otto lived for twelve more years, father and son nominally reigning jointly but the father holding on to power to the very end.  He died in 973 and was buried in the cathedral of Magdeburg, one of the Archiepiscopal Sees he created.