Millenium Read Free Page A

years slipped by, however, and the world did not end, so people found themselves obliged to grope about for different explanations. A formidable task indeed. The three decades that preceded the show­down at Canossa, and the four that followed it, were, in the judgement of one celebrated medievalist, a period when the ideals of Christendom, its forms of government and even its very social and economic fabric 'changed in almost every respect'. Here, argued Sir Richard Southern, was the true making of the West. 'The expansion of Europe had begun in earnest. That all this should have happened in so short a time is the most remarkable fact in medieval history.' 10
    And, if remarkable to us, then how much more so to those who actually lived through it. We in the twenty-first century are habituated to the notion of progress: the faith that human society, rather than inevitably decaying, can be improved. The men and women of the eleventh century were not. Gregory, by presuming to challenge Henry IV, and the fabulously ancient nimbus of tradition that hedged emper­ors and empires about, was the harbinger of something awesome. He and his supporters might not have realised it - but they were intro­ducing to the modern West its first experience of revolution.
    It was a claim that many of those who subsequently set Europe to shake would no doubt have viewed as preposterous. To Martin Luther, the one-time monk who saw it as his lifetime's mission to reverse everything that Gregory had stood for, the great Pope appeared a lit­erally infernal figure: 'Hollenbrand, or 'Hellfire'. In the wake of the Enlightenment too, as dreams of building a new Jerusalem took on an ever more secular hue, and world revolution was consciously enshrined as an ideal, so it appeared to many enthusiasts for change that there existed no greater roadblock to their progress than the Roman Catholic Church.

    Not that one necessarily had to be a radical, or even a liberal, to believe the same. 'We shall not go to Canossa!'" So fulminated that iron chancellor of a reborn German Empire, Prince Bismarck, in 1872, as he gave a pledge to the Reichstag that he would never permit the papacy to stand in the way of Germany's forward march to modernity. This was to cast Gregory as the very archetype of reaction: a charac­terisation that many Catholic scholars, albeit from a diametrically opposed perspective, would not have disputed. They too, like the Church's enemies, had a stake in downplaying the magnitude of what Canossa had represented. After all, if the papacy were to be regarded as the guardian of unchanging verities and traditions, then how could it possibly have presided over a rupture in the affairs of Europe no less momentous than the Reformation or the French Revolution?
    Gregory, according to the conventional Catholic perspective, was a man who had brought nothing new into the world, but rather had laboured to restore the Church to its primal and pristine state. Since this was precisely what Gregory himself had always claimed to be doing, evidence for this thesis was not hard to find. But it was misleading, even so. In truth, there existed no precedent for the upheaval exemplified by Canossa- neither in the history of the Roman Church, nor in that of any other culture. The consequences could hardly have been more fateful. Western Europe, which for so long had languished in the shadow of vastly more sophisticated civilisations, and of its own ancient and vanished past, was set at last upon a course that was to prove irrevocably its own.
    It was Gregory, at Canossa, who stood as godfather to the future.

     
    Ever since the West first rose to a position of global dominance, the ori­gins of its exceptionalism have been fiercely debated. Conventionally, they have been located in the Renaissance, or the Reformation, or the Enlightenment: moments in history that all consciously defined themselves in opposition to the backwardness and barbarism of the so- called