When Catholicism was fun: The investiture of Antipope Victor IV

[Smoke]

From John Julius Norwich, The Middle Sea.

Pope Adrian had died in 1159. Clearly, from [Emperor] Frederick's point of view, much depended on the choice of his successor, and he was well aware that by far the most likely candidate was Cardinal Roland Bandinelli, who was, like Adrian, strongly opposed to his claims. To what degree he was responsible for what followed is uncertain; it can only be said that the investiture which was held two days after Roland's election in St Peter's on September 7 was the most grotesquely undignified in papal history. The scarlet mantle of the Papacy was produced and the new Pope, after the customary display of reluctance, bent his head to receive it. At that moment Cardinal Octavian of S. Cecilia suddenly dived at him, snatched the mantle and tried to don it himself. A scuffle ensued, during which he lost it again, but his chaplain instantly brought forward another -- having presumably foreseen just such an eventuality -- which Octavian this time managed to put on, unfortunately back to front, before anyone could stop him.

There followed a scene of scarcely believable confusion. Wrenching himself free from the furious supporters of Roland who were trying to tear the mantle forcibly from his back, Octavian -- whose frantic efforts to turn it right way round had succeeded only in getting the fringes tangled round his neck -- made a dash for the papal throne, sat on it and proclaimed himself Pope Victor IV. He then charged off through the basilica until he found a group of minor clergy, whom he ordered to give him their acclamation -- which, seeing the doors burst open and a band of armed cut-throats swarming into the church, they obediently did. For the moment at least, the opposition was silenced; Roland and his adherents slipped out while they could and took refuge in the fortified tower of St Peter's. Meanwhile, with the cut-throats looking on, Octavian was enthroned a little more formally than on the previous occasion and escorted in triumph to the Lateran -- having, we are told, been at some pains to adjust his dress before leaving.
​

Now that's an investiture.

 

[Zardoz]

...Now that's an investiture.

:biglaugh: sounds like one of my family reunions...

 

[sthitpradnya]

smoke can you throw some light on these points? never was clear on the evolutuion of the christian faith.

1) after having cruicified jesus as a heretic why and how did the romans adopt christianity as their religion? when and how did the vatican become the supreme authority of christianity?

2) what elements of their earlier pagan religion have survived in catholicism.has their earlier religion shaped catholicism in any way?

3) i have heard that christ's approach during his lifetime was more that of a mystic and that the later disciples and the catholic popes distorted this early christianity beyond recognition - papal army and papal states,inquisitions and whatnot.in fact christianity ended up being a replica of the judaic faith that christ attempted to reform in the palestine.how true?

 

[Levite]

...At that moment Cardinal Octavian of S. Cecilia suddenly dived at him, snatched the mantle and tried to don it himself. A scuffle ensued, during which he lost it again, but his chaplain instantly brought forward another -- having presumably foreseen just such an eventuality -- which Octavian this time managed to put on...made a dash for the papal throne, sat on it and proclaimed himself Pope Victor IV....
Now that's an investiture.

That...is beautiful. You just don't get drama like that elsewhere.... I wish I could have been there, with popcorn....

1) after having cruicified jesus as a heretic why and how did the romans adopt christianity as their religion? when and how did the vatican become the supreme authority of christianity?

The Roman Empire officially adopted Christianity as a state religion during the reign of the Emperor Constantine. At first, Constantine merely issued edicts tolerating Christianity, and prohibiting the persecution of Christians-- around 313 CE, if I recall right. He himself seems to have been rather hesitant in his Christianity: he offered tributes and sacrifices to pagan gods as well; but his mother, Helena, seems to have been a relatively faithful Christian, and may have wielded her influence over her son. Constantine was instrumental in arranging the Council of Nicaea in 325, at which early Christianity solidified various extremely vital matters of dogma and doctrine, such as trinitarianism and the divinity of Jesus, but which also severed some of the last links between Christianity and Judaism. Constantine is said to have been baptized and formally converted to Christianity on his deathbed, which was about 337, if memory serves. From his successor, Constantine II, and onward, Christianity increasingly became the sole state religion of the Roman Empire.

The Pope was originally the Bishop of Rome. As the Bishop of the central city of the ancient world, he wielded great authority in Christianity, which only grew as the Empire became Christian. When the Western Roman Empire fell, somewhere around 475-480, give or take, the Bishop of Rome began assuming ever more power as the structure of social authority crumbled, and the Church became the central institution of greatest stability. As power within the Church became more centralized, and more formalized in hierarchy, and as Christian dogma and doctrine became ever more fixed, the Church agglomerated more and more social powers, until the Pope eventually became not only the absolute ruler of the Western Church hierarchy, but the absolute ruler of tremendous tracts of Italian lands, including some territories that eventually ended up Swiss, French, and Austrian. The Pope's claim to total supremacy of authority within the church has been historically contested by the Patriarch of Constantinople, the traditional head of the Eastern Church. They quarrelled over it, sometimes even coming to violence, until the Christian Church finally split in the great Schism of 1056. The Pope was acknowledged as supreme in authority over all those Christians who used Latin for their rituals; the Patriarch of Constantinople was acknowledged supreme by all those who conducted their rituals in Greek. The Slavic and Russian churches, who tend to conduct rites in their own languages, have historically nominally acknowledged the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople, although some small communities look to the Vatican, instead. Since the majority of the European colonial powers were Catholic (Western Church), the areas once conquered and colonized by Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium have ended up dominated by Catholicism, which is how the Western Church came to outnumber the Eastern Church so sweepingly. And all those countries, as they were converted, were made to acknowledge the Pope's authority.

2) what elements of their earlier pagan religion have survived in catholicism.has their earlier religion shaped catholicism in any way?

That is a very complex question, and is subject to considerable debate. There are those scholars who would say that much of Christianity is based on mystery cults, gnostic sects, and various old mythologies of gods with savior sons who had remarkable birth stories-- of which there were many. Some say the influence was more refined, filtered, a gradual syncretism of this element or that element over a long time. Modern Catholicism is shaped greatly by the history of the Catholic church. To what degree it is truly shaped by pre-Christian beliefs and practices is hard to say, and probably requires a more thorough understanding of Christianity than I have, since it is neither my field nor my religion.

3) i have heard that christ's approach during his lifetime was more that of a mystic and that the later disciples and the catholic popes distorted this early christianity beyond recognition - papal army and papal states,inquisitions and whatnot.in fact christianity ended up being a replica of the judaic faith that christ attempted to reform in the palestine.how true?

The simple truth is that Jesus was a Jew, speaking to other Jews. He was almost certainly trained in a Rabbinic academy, though he seems to have left it and acquired ideas from non-Rabbinic sources as well-- probably one of the ascetic sects common to the Negev and the Judean hills at that time. Jesus seems to have been less of a mystic, and more of a social reformer, in the tradition of the Prophets-- an agenda common to the Rabbis at that time. While he seems certainly to have been interested in spirituality, he seems to have been much more interested in excising hypocrisy, greed, selfishness, and lack of compassion for others. That part of his charisma came from being a popular healer and wonder-worker was in fact quite common to sectarian leaders, and also Rabbis, of his time, many of whom were popular healers and worked wonders.

Christianity became something separate from Jesus the man as soon as they began proclaiming Jesus' divinity, and as soon as they began accepting non-Jewish Christians who had not converted to Judaism. And once Paul came around, he really changed Christianity into something powerfully different than any kind of Judaism.

However, the Christian Church as it later became bore little resemblance to Judaism in Jesus' era. The only similarity is that it was often corrupt, as was the Temple priesthood in Jesus' time, though the Temple priesthood corruption was for very different reasons, much of which had to do with the control of the priesthood being taken up quite illegitimately by the kings, who at that time weren't even Jewish; and that what with medieval Christian sectarianism being often suppressed by brutal violence and Christians turning upon one another, there was some similarity to the backbiting and internal faithlessness that plagued Jews pinned under the thumb of the Roman Empire in Jesus' era.

But in practice, in ritual, in theology, and for the most part in society, there has never been any real resemblance between the Christian Church and Judaism of any era.

 

[sthitpradnya]

thanks for the explicit reply levite. another query of mine i would like to address to you as you .
muhammad and the first three caliphs almost wholly converted the arab peninsula and part of palestine to islam when christ happened to have walked the same land barely five centuries ago. why did the arabs and the persians not embrace christianity in great numbers during or after christ's lifetime? contrarily why did they readily convert to islam almost en masse in the islamic onslaught? did christianity not appeal to them? were they genetically/temperamentally more suited for islam? esp the radical facets of islam -zealotry,intolerance,monotheism,savagery and so on? i am not being racial here but this has always made me wonder - whay were there no takers for christianity in the land of its origin? whereas it spread quite fast elsewhere.

 

[Levite]

thanks for the explicit reply levite. another query of mine i would like to address to you as you .
muhammad and the first three caliphs almost wholly converted the arab peninsula and part of palestine to islam when christ happened to have walked the same land barely five centuries ago. why did the arabs and the persians not embrace christianity in great numbers during or after christ's lifetime? contrarily why did they readily convert to islam almost en masse in the islamic onslaught? did christianity not appeal to them? were they genetically/temperamentally more suited for islam? esp the radical facets of islam -zealotry,intolerance,monotheism,savagery and so on? i am not being racial here but this has always made me wonder - whay were there no takers for christianity in the land of its origin? whereas it spread quite fast elsewhere.

There are a number of answers to that question, I think; only a few of which I would presume to speculate about.

For one thing, Christianity didn't "take" amongst the Jews because by the time it really became its own religion, it automatically was excluding itself from most of the Jewish people. This is a little tough to fully comprehend: Judaism is not just a religion, in the sense that Christianity is just a religion. Judaism is what is technically called a socioreligious ethnicity. In other words, there are elements to Judaism that are religion, but there are also elements of ethnicity (common descent, or adoption into a society of common descent; endogamy-- that is, Jews only marry other Jews...at least that's how it's supposed to work; and a common language), and elements of a culture (common body of literature, of philosophy, of certain worldviews, of certain kinds of humor, even of cooking and clothing, to certain limited degrees). And these elements of culture, ethnicity, and religion are inextricably intertwined: you can't be Jewish only culturally, or only ethnically, or only religiously. You are all three or nothing, which is why people are either born Jewish (to a Jewish mother) or they must go through a ritual of conversion, where they symbolically and (in terms of Jewish law) legally shed their previous cultural, social, and religious identity, and take on instead a new identity of Jewishness.

So, one cannot be a Jewish Christian or a Jewish Muslim, in the way that one could be, say, an Arab Christian or an Arab Muslim, but in either case one is still Arab. Jews are only Jewish. If they commit apostasy (attempt to convert to another religion), according to Jewish law they remain Jews, merely sinning and heretical Jews.

But if you ask why Christianity did not create the kind of mass conversions among Arabs that Islam did, who can say? Perhaps it simply did not suit them. But it may also have something to do with early Islam being often spread at the point of the sword. Muhammad and his followers, and the early Caliphs, essentially gave those whom they conquered little choice about accepting Islam.

It is unfortunate, but many religions, Judaism included, have some unfortunate conquests in their earliest histories. These things happen. However, that aside, I would really want to take issue with the characterizations of Islam as savage and intolerant. For most of the history of Islam, Muslim lands were the height of civilization in many ways, and were often far more tolerant than their Christian neighbors. And as far as I have been able to tell, Islam was not overly tainted by zealotry and intolerance (no more than any other large religion) until the rise of Wahhabism in the 18th Century. There is no reason to think that Islam cannot shed the trends of zealotry and intolerance it has been enmeshed in, and progress to more productive forms of its own tradition.

Also, I am unable to understand what would be objectionable about monotheism, which you list side-by-side with zealotry and intolerance?

 

[sthitpradnya]

monotheism as professed by islam leaves no space for tolerating other religions that are polytheistic.they call it "shirkat" meaning sharing which is among the top three blasphemous things according to islam.

 

[Levite]

monotheism as professed by islam leaves no space for tolerating other religions that are polytheistic.they call it "shirkat" meaning sharing which is among the top three blasphemous things according to islam.

There are probably ways in Islam, just as there are in Judaism, to modify the aggressive intolerance of polytheism to a more passive disapproval. Muslim scholars may not currently be exploring those ways much, but I bet they're there.