We now therefore marvel the more at the unreasonable dealing of
the bishop of Rome, who, knowing what was the emperor’s right,
when the church was well ordered, knowing also that it is now a
common right to all princes, forsomuch as kings are now fully
possessed in the several parts of the whole empire, doth so without
consideration assign that office alone to himself, and take it
sufficient, in summoning a general council.^201
Second, the Investiture Contest provided significance from a
historiographical perspective. In Gerd Tellenbach’s treatment of the
Investiture Contest, the eleventh century saw the confluence of three
distinct views of the Christian society, of which only two could exist
compatibly: the imperially ordered society, and the secular, parochially
ordered society. For the Empire and the various other nations and
independent principalities, the Emperor or monarch, the duke or the
count, had a divine prerogative in the affairs of the Church. For the
secular parish clergy, the mission of the Church was one primarily of
conversion, and consequently the dispensing of the means of grace in the
sacraments. In these two views the question of the necessary piety of the
parish priest was largely indifferent, as the dispensing of grace did not
necessarily depend on the spiritual status of the priest.^202 As a result,
questions of simony and lay investiture were never the concerns that they
would assume for the Gregorians. With the enthronement of the
reformer bishop Bruno of Toul as pope Leo IX – an act initiated,
overseen and effected by the German Emperor Henry III – a third world
view entered: that which embraced a morality apposite of monks.^203 The
contrast between the monastic and the secular model of the Christian
society can be simply drawn: while it may not be morally acceptable for
the local priest to retain a concubine or a common law wife, the
administration of the sacraments was not materially affected by this vice;
in the case of the duties of monks, such actions would be fatal, for a
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 109
(^201) Jewel,Works, III, pp. 98–99. Cf. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A
Study in Medieval Political Theology(Princeton, 1952), pp. 51–52. fn. 20. Kantorowicz
notes Jewel’s affinity with the Norman Anonymous.
(^202) The question of whether purity of life and conduct is required of the celebrant of the
sacrament for the sacrament’s efficacy goes back to the Donatist controversy, in which
Augustine gave the definitive answer that the efficacy of the sacrament does not depend on
the one administering it, but on the words of institution and the Spirit of God in the
Church.
(^203) Bruno himself was not a monk, but the scion of Alsatian nobility, related to the
imperial house. Though having received his episcopal see at the nomination of Conrad II,
and the papacy at the instigation of Henry III, he was a violent critic of simony, a practice
at that time not yet identified with lay investiture. Most of the men Bruno surrounded
himself with in Rome were monks, dominated by Cluniac notions of reform. Cf.
Tellenbach Church in western Europe, pp. 144–47.