regnant
meaning, and got dogmatic and political connotations.[471] In the
eleventh century all Christendom was reduced to civic fragments in which
tyranny, oppression, and strife prevailed. It was not strange that
"catholicity" was revived as an idea of a peace pact by means of which
the church might unite Christendom into a peace group for the welfare of
mankind (sec. 14). This was a grand idea. If the Christian church had
devoted itself to the realization of it, by forms of constitutional
liberty, the history of the world would have been different. The church,
however, used "catholicity" as a name for universal submission to the
bishop of Rome and for hierarchical discipline, and used all means to
try to realize that conception. By the Inquisition and other apparatus
it attempted to enforce conformity to this idea, and exercised a
societal selection against all dissenters from it. The ecclesiastics of
Cluny, in the eleventh century, gave form to this high-church doctrine,
and they combined with it a rational effort to raise the clergy to honor
for learning and piety, as a necessary step for the success of their
church policy. The circumstances and ideas of the time gave to these
efforts the form of a struggle for a monarchical constitution of the
church. In the thirteenth century this monarchy came into collision with
the empire as the other aspirant to the rule of Christendom. Already the
papacy was losing moral hold on its subjects. The clergy were criticised
for worldliness, arrogance, and tyranny, and the antagonism of the
dynastic states, so far as they existed, found expression in popular
literature. Walter von der Vogelweide is regarded as a forerunner of the
Reformation on account of his bitter criticisms of the hierarchy.[472]
It is, however, very noteworthy that, in spite of the popular language
of the writers and their appeals to common experience, they did not
break the people away from their ecclesiastical allegiance, and also
that the church authorities paid little heed to the criticisms of these
persons. The miracle and moral plays were in the taste of the age
entirely. Besides being gross, they were irreligious and blasphemous.
Ecclesiastics tolerated them nevertheless.[473] The authorities moved
only when "the faith" was brought in question. "The faith," therefore,
acquired a technical signification of great importance. It was elevated
to the domain of sentiment and duty and surrounded with pathos (sec.