Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (49 page)

The
Codex Iuris Canonici
in force in the Catholic Church today was spawned, embryonically, in the twelfth century.
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Canon law became a kind of juridical equivalent to the Gothic cathedral. The Gothic cathedral, of course, is an architectural form embedded in the worldview and technical limitations of the long-ago, yet the Catholic imagination clings to its soaring arches and shadowed vaults as the stone ideal of sacred space. Just so, the Catholic Church can never quite shake its attachment to law as the fulcrum of faith. When the age of anarchy passed, and with it the need for an overemphasized code of law, that attachment calcified in a regulation of minutiae. The spirit of medieval legalism still blows, a chill wind in the Church, yet it still serves a purpose. The
Codex Iuris Canonici
enshrines, above all, the divinely ordained pyramid of the hierarchy, with the pope as supreme head not only of the Church but, implicitly now, of creation.

The exquisitely balanced tension of this Gothic social system sustained a vitality that even an American boy of the 1950s could happily respond to. Yet because that system depended on the tensions of balance, it could be upset. That was why every non-Catholic posed a threat, which even that American boy could sense. Why else was he subtly encouraged to stay among his own? For confirmation of the timeless truth of Catholicism, he needed go no further than his parish church, with its pamphlet racks in the vestibule stuffed with copies of
The Pope Speaks.
The periodical always featured the same cover: the stern, bespectacled face of Pius XII, a canon lawyer who had served as the major-domo of the 1917 promulgation of canon law, about which we will see more later. The merest glimpse of the pope's hawk-like profile always put the boy in his place. But the point was, in this threatening, doom-laden cosmos of ours—the Dark Ages were only yesterday—we exiled children of Adam and Eve were lucky to have a place.

My own childhood experience of the consolations of an all-encompassing religious community allows me to understand that what jolted Christendom awake in the twelfth century was an electric impulse fueled by basic human need. As we have seen, this was not the first time such a need had made itself felt. The same unifying impulse had motivated Constantine, but this time there was a difference in the way an overarching authority expressed itself. Constantine had demonstrated his authority over bishops by convening the Council of Nicaea. The empire was unified under Constantine as supreme head, with the leaders of the Church subservient to him.

But things changed. The power struggle between secular and ecclesiastical rulers, beginning with Canossa in 1076 and continuing with Frederick Barbarossa's invasions of Italy a century later, would be a permanent feature of European life, but now a definitive tilt in the pope's favor occurred. In 1184 Frederick convened the so-called Great Diet of Mainz, wanting to duplicate Constantine's achievement at Nicaea. At the cathedral in the city on the Rhine, he brought together, as legend has it, seventy princes and seventy thousand knights and most of the bishops of Germany. The climax of the pageant was the dubbing as knights of his two sons, prior to their taking up the cross on the Third Crusade, which Frederick himself would lead. It was beginning now that Mainz would be known as "the Second Rome," but this accumulation of power in the heart of Germany in fact allowed the pope to consolidate his power in Rome itself, absolutely focused in the papacy. Princes and emperors embarked on the Crusades, but these great expeditions, by empowering princes at the heads of armed contingents and by quickening a mass devotion to the cause of the Church as the popes defined it, undercut emperors and boosted popes, leaving a legacy in Germany of a weak monarchy. Thus the Crusades, launched by Urban II twenty years after Canossa, had been an opening salvo in a campaign for papal power that would culminate in the claims of Innocent III (1198–1216).

As Frederick Barbarossa had emphasized his title as Holy Roman Emperor, Innocent III embraced the title
Vicarius Christi,
Vicar of Christ, marking a shift away from the traditional and, by comparison, modest emphasis on the pope as successor to Peter.
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Innocent's was an unprecedented claim to a place "between God and man, lower than God but higher than man, who judges all and is judged by no one."
⁴
Instead of standing in the Shoes of the Fisherman, the pope now was seen as standing at the right hand of God; the title of Vicar was an emblem of a new claim to absolute spiritual authority. Innocent's genius was in understanding that a putative renunciation of political and material power in the name of moral and spiritual power was the surest route to political and material power. No longer would popes vie with emperors as competing peers, with disputes limited, for the most part, to the lines of authority over bishops, abbots, and Church property. Now the pope would possess the universal authority proper to Christ's deputy. The pope's sway extended to the afterlife, a claim that, in a doom-shadowed era, decisively established his power over this life. Thus Innocent would order the king of France to be reunited with his estranged wife, and would be obeyed (1198). By laying a sanction on all of England (1208), he would require its king, John, to accept him as England's feudal lord. Acting as such, he would declare null and void the upstart barons' Magna Carta (1215), which nevertheless survived the pope's dismissal to become the foundation of constitutional government. And as for the emperor, Innocent asserted the right of assent over imperial elections, and accordingly chose one claimant over the other.

Like popes before him, Innocent III launched Crusades, but his were different. He wanted to assert his own power within Europe, as much as Christendom's over Iberia, Asia Minor, and the Levant. Instead of merely targeting "infidels," Innocent's crusaders attacked Christian heretics in the south of France. "Catholics who take the Cross," Innocent's council declared, "and gird themselves up for the expulsion of heretics shall enjoy the same indulgence ... as those who go to the aid of the Holy Land."
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The Holy Land still beckoned, of course, and under Innocent's aegis, the Fourth Crusade set out for Jerusalem in 1202. But this Crusade vented its fury on Christian—but schismatic—Constantinople, which fell to the Latin knights after a savage sacking. Innocent denounced the pillaging of Constantinople, but the armies he'd launched were still at the service of his vision. The Crusades had thus become a means of imposing doctrinal and political unity within the Church, instead of outside it. When Innocent appointed a Latin patriarch to rule in the East, he thought he'd ended the Christian schism, but in fact he and his crusaders guaranteed that Eastern hatred of the West would be permanent.

As there were early, familial shadows cast over Constantine's claim to authority, so too with Innocent, born Lothair of Segni. His noble Roman family, tinged with German blood, would produce eight popes. He was himself the nephew of a pope, who made him a cardinal even though he was not a priest. A subsequent pope shunted him aside, but such were the quick turns in Vatican politics that, when that pope died, Lothair was elected to succeed him. He was only thirty-seven years old, and before being consecrated as pope, he had to be ordained to the priesthood.
⁶

As Constantine had sought to establish unity and control by means of the Council of Nicaea, Innocent, after laying the groundwork for a decade and a half, sought the same absolute power for himself at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). It would be simplistic to define these similar ambitions as driven only by a thirst for self-aggrandizement. The emperor and the pope can each be seen to have been attempting a humane response to chaotic and violent epochs. To draw order out of chaos can be the ruler's highest moral mandate, and no doubt Innocent conceived of his purpose in such terms, as Constantine did. That the new order in each instance involved, for some, a new chaos was no more the pope's concern than it had been the emperor's. Innocent's council was aptly named, since the Lateran Basilica in Rome was thought to have originated as Constantine's palace.
⁷

The Fourth Lateran Council, sometimes called the Great Council, was the most important ecumenical gathering held to that point, with more than four hundred bishops and archbishops, eight hundred priors and abbots, and the ambassadors of Europe's kingdoms and cities. The Byzantine Church was unrepresented, but otherwise it seemed that the whole continent had come together in unity under the sway of the pope.
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Innocent established with final clarity the papacy's claim to monarchical authority. The pope was the feudal overlord of the world—
societas Christiana
⁹
—and at last Europe's emperors, kings, and barons by and large agreed.

The legislation passed by the Fourth Lateran Council put in place the main elements of the Catholic culture as we know it. The seven sacraments, from baptism to extreme unction, were defined. The Eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation, equating the communion bread with the real presence of Christ, was promulgated. The seal of confession, binding priests to secrecy, was imposed. Clerical discipline was established. An elaborated creed, taking off from the Nicene, was articulated. A program of spiritual uniformity was adopted to match the political uniformity of an absolute monarchy. "There is indeed one universal church of the faithful," the council's opening canon reads, "outside of which nobody at all is saved, in which Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrifice." The perfect symbol of this unity is the Eucharist, perfectly controlled. "No one can effect this sacrament except a priest who has been properly ordained according to the Church's keys, which Jesus Christ himself gave to the apostles and their successors."
¹⁰

It was Innocent's council that first promulgated crucial Church resolutions designed to isolate, restrict, and denigrate Jews. What had until then been merely local indignities were now made universal. For example: "Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province, and at all times, shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other people through the character of their dress."
¹¹
We can recognize here the precursor of the infamous yellow badge.

The importance of the Fourth Lateran Council for the future of Jewish-Catholic relations cannot be exaggerated. "It was not the riots in connection with the First Crusade in 1096," Hans Küng writes, "but this council which fundamentally changed the situation of the Jews, both legally and theologically. Because the Jews were 'servants of sin,' it was concluded that they should now be the servants of Christian princes. So now, in Constitution
68
of the council, for the first time a special form of dress was directly prescribed for Jews, which would isolate them; they were banned from taking public office, forbidden to go out during Holy Week, and had a compulsory tax imposed on them, to be paid to the local Christian clergy."
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It is striking that this unprecedented systematizing of anti-Jewish practices should have been achieved at the moment of the Church's arrival at an unprecedented universal authority. One of the questions lurking beneath the surface of this inquiry is whether the universalist absolutism of Roman Catholic claims is causally related to the unleashing of Catholic anti-Judaism. The more "total" the Church's claim on the soul of the world, the more dramatically Jews stand out as "the original and quintessential dissenters" from that claim, as I have called them elsewhere.
¹³

As with the absolutizing program of Constantine, only more so, the Church's medieval movement, through Crusade and reform, to impose a radical new unity on the world, under the pope, had direct, negative, epoch-shaping consequences for Jews. And, as always, the emblem of that movement was the cross. As we saw, it was at the symbolic center of Constantine's culture-creating achievement, not only his vision at Milvian Bridge in 312, but his construction of a myth of that vision at Nicaea in 325—followed by both the unifying Nicene Creed, which put the crucifixion at the core of faith, and Helena's "discovery" of the True Cross in Jerusalem. In Ambrose's later telling, that event named the Jews as the Church's last problem.

And something like all of this happened again in the age of the Crusades, the next great age of the cross. We have seen it: Peter the Hermit's vision in the Holy Sepulcher; Urban I Is mandate to rescue the place of the cross; the cross as the martial standard and as indictment of the Jews. As the politics and theology of the cross mirrored each other in Constantine's era, so now. As Constantine's ecclesiastical partners were the fathers of Nicaea, so the popes would have the fathers of Fourth Lateran. The Constantinian project had Ambrose of Milan, the greatest theologian of his age; the Crusades had the equivalent in Anselm of Canterbury—the patron, as it happens, of my own adolescent absolutism.

Saint Anselm (1033–1109), a monk and bishop, a philosopher and theologian, ranks with the greatest figures in the history of the Church. It was he who developed a true theology of the cross, one that is still preached today. Anselm provided the ex post facto rationale for the cross-centered creedal affirmation of Nicaea. He supplied a justification that the ubiquitous cults of crucifix veneration and relic worship had heretofore lacked.

St. Anselm's School in Washington, D.C.: I can still picture the miter-headed portrait of the bishop-monk hanging in the terrazzo lobby. I passed it every day, and came to think of Anselm as someone I knew. The monks of my school were attached to a congregation of English Benedictines. They were Anglophilic to the core, and loved Anselm for having been Britain's primate. In fact, he was an "Anselmo," born to a noble family in Piedmont. He entered the Benedictines at an early age and became abbot of one of the great monasteries, Bee in Normandy, still not yet in England.