monk’s sole vocation is prayer, the opus Dei. Should the monk fail in
piety of what avail were his prayers? The Gregorian Reformers,
operating under this monastic temperament, sought to impose a new,
morally stringent ideal on the Church: one without common law wives
for priests; and one without the practice of simony, the buying of an
ecclesiastical office. As simony was so closely related to the practice of
lay investiture, the latter must go as well. The Church needed its
independence from the state that the prerequisite purity of morals may
be realized in the clergy. Not surprisingly, some of the Gregorians were
Donatists.^204
In an ironic twist of categories and players, the Reformers also saw
the need to purify the morals of the clergy, separating them from
corrupting institutions, but now, far from the Gregorian idea of
integrating monasticism into the life of the Church and separating it
from any ties to the temporal powers,^205 the Reformers, in an almost
direct inversion of the Investiture contest, allied their enterprise with the
state. To Luther, the Church needed to be delivered from the church, a
church whose spirituality and sacramental system leaned heavily on the
centrality of monasticism and its bifurcation of the temporal and the
spiritual domains.^206 Thomas Cranmer, in responding to the Pilgrimage
of Grace in 1536, believed that the clergy as a body were the greatest
hindrance to the cause of reform.^207 The Gregorians focused on morality
and the necessity of guarding the purity of the Church against the
corruption inherent in the world, as well as the source of pollution, that
is, lay investiture. This promptly elicited the basic monastic motif of
retreat from society and the emphasis on personal morality. Likewise the
Reformers saw a need not only to correct abuses, but to guard against
the source of these abuses, namely, the whole Catholic sacramental
system, predicated upon a sacerdotal priesthood, the corollary system of
the magisterial Church, and the medieval system of merit tied closely to
both monasticism and the priesthood.
The Reformers replayed the Investiture Contest, though with the
necessary inverting of the means to attain reform. Jewel was keenly
aware of this antinomy, as in his defense of the English Settlement he
took especial aim at Hildebrand, generally remembered as pope St
110 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^204) Tellenbach, Church, State, and Christian Society, pp. 108–11.
(^205) Although the Reformers violently opposed even a purified notion of monasticism
(Cf. Jewel, Works, IV, 798–801), they themselves inculcated numerous monastic notions of
piety, transforming a communal asceticism for an individualistic one. In Calvinist circles,
the abbot was replaced with the authority of lay elders.
(^206) Martin Luther, The Pagan Servitude of the Church, in John Dillenberger, ed. Martin
Luther: Selections from His Writings(New York, 1961), pp. 310–12.
(^207) MacCulloch,Cranmer, pp. 173–81.
http://www.ebook3000.com