Return of the Heroic Papacy

with their intense realization of the burden of inherited evil under which the human race labored and their conception of divine grace as a continually renewed source of supernatural energy which transforms human nature and changes the course of history—all this had become part of the spiritual patrimony of the Western Church and, above all, of Western monasticism, and Christendom had only to return to this tradition to recover is dynamic energy. 21

As advocates of traditional Christianity, everywhere monks looked they beheld a Church invaded by the world and its spiritually untransformed passions. For them the world was the nemesis of paradise, not its means of fulfillment. Life in such a world, it seemed, could only lead to estrangement from God.

Secure behind the walls of an autonomous monastery like Cluny, however, monks could live out the remainder of their lives in a state of personal reformation. Augustine may have been pessimistic about the capacity of man to experience the kingdom of heaven while living on earth, but reformed monasticism came pretty close.

As the Great Division drew near, then, the West still retained the paradisiacal culture it had inherited from the Christendom of the first millennium, and which, Carolingian ideology notwithstanding, it continued to share with the East. But to many it was like the failing wick of a neglected altar candle, flickering and guttering and on the verge of extinction.

What was needed for its revival was a person—or institution—that could carry the reformation beyond the walls of the cloister.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR WAS one candidate. Heir to Otto the Great, Henry III (r. 1046–1056) had a complex relationship to the reformers. Through a firm hold on Germany and its newly acquired western territories (which included Burgundy, the home of Cluny), he kept some of the chaos

21 Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (New York: Image Books, 1991), 122.