INVESTITURES, Investiture Controversy. - It is the struggle between the Roman Church and the Empire over the conferral of ecclesiastical benefices (bishoprics, abbeys, parishes): it forms the substantial juridical question from which popes and emperors rise to the general competition for the dominium mundi. The Germanic conception of the Church as private property and the feudalization of the Church in the post-Carolingian age had brought about as an inevitable consequence the violation of canonical principles. The early Christian age had already created the tradition that bishops were designated by the clergy, in concord with the community of the faithful, and consecrated by the metropolitan of the province or by another bishop; thus the true transfer of spiritual power took place. In the age of the barbarian dominions, royal authority intervened actively in episcopal election. The prince who, in harmony with imperial legislation, was the natural protector of the Church and had within his territory episcopates and bishops, found no difficulty in intervening to control elections contested by local divisions, and could later even substitute himself for the canonical electors themselves. In the post-Carolingian age the episcopatus also assumed a properly feudal character on a par with the comitatus: just as the king invested the count with his civil office (honor) and together with the relative beneficiary domains (res de comitatu), so it was held permissible to invest the bishop both with the beneficiary rights annexed to the episcopate and, with that, also with its religious functions. The bishop, thus receiving the episcopatus, received together the civil office and the religious office, becoming at one and the same time religious pastor and feudal lord. The delivery of the episcopatus took place through the ceremony of traditio ad investituram; the king pronounced the phrase accipe Ecclesiam while handing to the elect the pastoral staff, to which in the 11th century the ring was also added. Such investiture concerned the episcopatus in its totality, without any distinction being made between spiritual and temporal. Theoretically the principle of canonical election remained intact, but it was emptied of content: the people were left only to applaud, the clergy only to proceed to the consecration of one who had been made bishop by the prince. Similar was the situation for the great abbeys.
The question of parish churches built by landowners on their properties and endowed by them with goods for worship was likewise analogous: they considered themselves masters of the church, of the goods—whatever their origin—and of the revenues of the worship celebrated in them; they had the right to provide for the religious service in their churches by placing in them whatever ecclesiastics they pleased, through a ceremony also called investiture, which concerned together the religious office and the feudal property inherent to it.
The Church never recognized this right of the lay proprietor to intervene in the appointment of the priest, and always took care to prevent churches from passing into the hands of incapable and unworthy persons: the conciliar canons always required that in the assignments of churches the bishop be consulted and his assent sought; in the 10th and 11th centuries it was required that the bishop be admitted to intervene in order to check the qualifications of the one to be elected. Canons little respected, just as little respected was the fundamental canon that the founding of new churches should take place only with the consent of the ecclesiastical authorities. As for bishoprics, the Church on several occasions did not hesitate to recognize election as a royal prerogative.
This association of the ecclesiastical and the civil organization, which for a certain period had great importance, was an expression of the substantial unity in medieval life of religious and civil activity, and also contributed to the Christianization of a great part of the Carolingian Empire. The grave abuses that derived from it were pointed out by the ecclesiastical reformers of the 11th century: simony and Nicolaitism; and the work of the emperors who in the 11th century concerned themselves with the moral reform of the Church, from Henry II to Henry III, had scant possibility of succeeding, inasmuch as it started from the intention of respecting the rights of the State by framing the Church within the sphere of the State itself.
The reform movement that in the middle of the 11th century bursts forth powerfully from the center of the Church and that concerns itself with saving the independent character of the Church itself, places in the forefront the problem of lay investiture, when at the Synod of Reims of 1049 Leo IX promulgates a canon that represents a return to tradition: let no one rise to ecclesiastical offices without the ritual election by the clergy and the people. Lay investiture is struck at there only indirectly. The Pope comments on the canon with his attitude in various episcopal elections. In 1058 appears the famous book of the Lorraine reformer Humbert of Silva Candida, Adversus Simoniacos. It proclaims the necessity of returning to the observance of the canons; princes have no faculty whatsoever to confer the investiture of religious offices, because the investiture of such offices is a religious act; the pastoral staff represents the pastoral care, the ring the magisterium; whoever has received the delivery of the two symbols has already obtained the entire pastoral office; whoever grants it performs a religious act. Cardinal Humbert thus develops his theory theologically: ecclesiastical investiture is a spiritual act, bound to a Sacrament. Thus he denies that proprietors have any right over the churches they founded and endowed; the endowment is an offering of goods to God, it is a sacred thing, withdrawn from the authority of the laity; the former proprietor no longer has any right over it, still less over the goods that came to the Church by other means. The thought of Humbert of Silva Candida informs the action of the Roman Church from this moment on. In the Council of 1059 Nicholas II forbids every ecclesiastic to have churches from laymen nec gratis nec pretio. It is an affirmation of principle, it is not yet a condemnation with sanctions. The decree that regulates papal election by excluding imperial intervention and restoring it to the canonical electors nevertheless falls within the program against lay investitures. Alexander II in the Council of 1063 reconfirms the canon of 1059. At his side is St. Peter Damian, who polemicizes with the defenders of lay investiture: he rejects their theory that lay investiture concerns only ecclesiastical goods and not the religious office, and says: Sane cum baculum ille tuis manibus tradidit, dixitque: accipe terras atque decimas illius Ecclesiae, an potius quod certum est: accipe Ecclesiam?
But if the reformers were agreed in rejecting the intrusion of civil power into the Church by means of lay investiture, there was nevertheless some hesitation regarding the evaluation of the rights of the State: here one went from the absolute rigorism of Humbert of Silva Candida, inclined to recognize only the traditional consensus of the prince, to the conciliatorism of St. Peter Damian, disposed to leave to the laity the investiture of goods, provided the canonical election had taken place.
Gregory VII begins his pontificate by continuing the struggle against simony and Nicolaitism: the evils to be combated. Only in the Council of 1075 does he take up again the canon of 1059 against lay investiture, but with a certain trepidation. It is debated whether Gregory VII made a distinction between the element spiritual element and the temporal element: Scharnagl believes so, Fliche does not, and perhaps he is right. For Gregory VII, as for his contemporaries (including St. Peter Damian), the episcopatus is an absolute unity with its spiritual and temporal prerogatives, a whole from which no part could be severed. Gregory VII insists on this in the Synods of 1078 and 1080, directing his blows directly against the political authorities of Germany and Italy. The polemic unfolds vigorously: on the imperial side it is observed that the Church has received protection and riches from the Empire, that the bishops are the administrators of these goods and that therefore their appointment belongs to the sovereign. Gregory VII is accused of wanting to destroy all the traditions of the politico-religious unity of Christendom on the pretext of wishing to re-establish a utopian evangelical ideal. The question becomes complicated: all the other questions of the relations between State and Church enter into it, along with that—less grave in itself but more thorny—of the personal relations between Gregory VII and Henry IV. The struggle leads the Pope around 1080 to rigid conclusions: he denies that the prince can have any right to the consensus; the election of the bishop must take place in the presence of a representative of the metropolitan or of the Apostolic See; the pope, by virtue of his unlimited powers, reserves to himself the decision in the case of a contested election.
The absolute contrast between the papal thesis and the imperial one was therefore insoluble. Urban II took up Gregory VII's position; Cardinal Deusdedit at his side reproduced the rigorous thought of Humbert of Silva Candida.
Under Paschal II and Henry V, after so many years of struggle, direct negotiations for a way out were finally resumed. This seemed to be offered by the elimination of the very object of the conflict: investiture. The agreements of Sutri in 1111 were based on the Church's renunciation of all lands and rights deriving from the authority of the prince, who would for his part renounce any involvement in episcopal elections. But such a de facto separation between State and Church did not appear conceivable in a society based on the accord of the two institutions. Paschal II was therefore disapproved of by the German episcopate: the agreement came to nothing, and the Emperor took advantage of this to accuse the Pope of projects hostile to religion, impracticable and heretical: having imprisoned him, he forced him, after two months of detention in the German camp below Rome, to sign an act in which he recognized the legitimacy of lay investiture (11 April 1111).
Paschal II's surrender provoked protests in the camp of the reformers, accusations of heresy and threats of schism; the Pope, moreover, did not delay in deploring and condemning the "pravilegium" of 1111. When this attempt to resolve the problem had also failed, the new negotiations between Callistus II and Henry V hinged on the point of view that had already prevailed in the negotiations over investiture in France and England: a distinction within the episcopatus between the religious element and the temporal element; a double investiture—to the Church, the lay investiture of the cura animarum with the baculus and the anulus; to the Kingdom, the lay investiture of feudal goods and of the regalia with the sceptre. Only in this way, as Yves de Chartres and Hugues de Fleury had taught, was the necessary reconciliation between State and Church possible. Along this path the negotiations reached port with the Concordat of Worms of 23 September 1122, by means of a twofold declaration: Henry V declared that he abandoned to the Church every investiture by ring and pastoral staff, that is, religious investiture, and that he recognized full freedom for episcopal election and consecration. Callistus II for his part declared that he was content that the bishops and abbots of the Kingdom of Germany be elected in the presence of the king, without simony and violence; in the case of discord between the parties, the king would intervene in aid of the more worthy party, following the counsel and opinion of the metropolitan; to the elected prelate, the king would grant the regalia with the sceptre before consecration; in the other parts of the Empire (Italy, Burgundy) the king would grant the regalia with the sceptre within six months of the election. Provisions that were not very clear and, for Germany, somewhat contradictory: what freedom could elections held in the presence of the king have, when his intervention was foreseen in case of uncertainty? One must suppose that in 1122 it was believed that the solution to the grave problem had truly been found, or only a provisional means of quieting the violence of the conflict, postponing the solution to the future. Only for the regions south of the Alps could the question be said to be equitably resolved; for Germany, experience was soon to show that the kings now had in the act of 1122 a legal and recognized means of directing episcopal elections. Nevertheless, a principle had been saved, and through the struggle the Roman Church had closed its ranks and attained a prestige, within the ecclesiastical organization and among the princes, so high as to suggest that it had truly won a great battle for its spiritual independence, notwithstanding that the Concordat of Worms had derogated from the rigid principles of Humbert of Silva Candida.
Bibliography3 works
Francesco Cognasso