More than any other human institution the Papacy has
suffered from a supposed necessity of justifying every forward step by
precedent and reference to authority. Twice in the course of sixteen
centuries the Holy See has ventured on a startling change of front, and
has been sorely embarrassed to rebut the charge of inconsistency. One such
change was silently effected at the close of the seventeenth century, when the Popes
ceased to concern themselves more than was unavoidable with international
affairs. This was a great change; yet not so great as that made in the latter
part of the eleventh century, by Gregory VII. For he revolutionised the whole
theory of papal prerogative. Neither a profound lawyer nor a profound
theologian, he regarded the past history of his office with the idealism of a
poet, and looked into its future with the sanguine radicalism of a Machiavelli
or a Hobbes.
Gregory VII conceived of Christendom as an undivided state; of a
state as a polity dominated by a sovereign; of a sovereign as a ruler who must
be either absolute or useless. And who, he asked, but the heir of the Prince of
the Apostles could presume to claim a power so tremendous? For us the audacity
of his pretensions is excused by the lofty aims which they were meant to serve.
To conciliate contemporary opinion it was necessary that the new claims should
be represented as the revival of old rights, as the logical corollaries of
undisputed truths. And this course involved as its consequence an industrious,
if partially unconscious, perversion of past history. For the Popes who had
gone before him claimed powers which, though extensive, were capable of
definition; which, though startling, could in the main be defended by appeal to
well-established usage. The new policy led to this paradoxical situation, that
precedents were diligently invoked to prove the Pope superior to all
precedents.
