Saint Henry's Cathedral in Bamberg,
still looking good one thousand years later.
There was a time when I could devour a serious book in mere days; I peaked with Anna Karenina in two. Now, not only is my attention span damaged by the infernal machine, and my eyes by the passage of time, but so also my brain simply takes longer to comprehend anything of substance. The last book I finished was (another) Cormac McCarthy novel, on which I am still mentally chewing, and from which emotionally I am still recovering. It took me about four months to read that.
Why I thought I could handle the book I have taken up now, I have no idea. I found it on a friend’s shelf as I traveled last month, and it followed me home. Yes, I asked permission. It is history, and an academic book at that (lots of footnotes), so potentially dry as dust. At least I knew its demands would not be emotional! But already in one week I have enjoyed almost a quarter of Before the Gregorian Reform: the Latin Church at the Turn of the Millennium, and I am laughing at myself for it.
Why on earth would I pick up such a book, much less enjoy it? It’s a funny chain of events – funny for me, anyway – but the answer is that I really know very little about what was happening at that time, and more to the point, recently I have been reminded about how much was going on at that time about which I know only a little.
For example, July 13 is the Feast of Saint Henry, whom I always claim is the first saint I “met.” My junior year in college I had a semester in Germany; it was my first trip abroad and my first trip on a jet, in fact. We visited Bamberg and its ancient cathedral where Henry and his wife Cunegunda are buried. There are neither emperors nor saints buried in Alabama, where I grew up, so he was my first. Anyway, he did great things for the Church in central Europe in the early years of the eleventh century.
The other thing I knew about the eleventh century was from the excavations under the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome, where the old basilica, which dates back to the fourth century, was enclosed and reduced by new masonry walls, walls that look like they were built by a middle-school shop class. Romans, whose masonry work from two thousand years ago you can still admire all over Europe, had forgotten by one thousand years ago how to build a brick wall. Sad. One of the reasons for this deterioration was that Rome’s population then was reduced by about ninety-seven percent from its imperial peak, and it had just been sacked by the Normans. Yes, those Normans – the ones from Normandy, which we all know is very far away in France, who were, in fact, Catholics. So it seemed that the eleventh century was an epically stinky time for the Church.
Then, in 1099, to cap off the eleventh century, Pope Urban II called the first Crusade. And I could not help but wonder – how did we get there?
So I found this book and it is fascinating. The history of the Latin Church, as the author calls it, is my history and our history and the history of human development and the world. This time in that history however draws to the fore people from my own ethnic background, which is largely Frankish, specifical East and Central Franks, that is, the people along the Rhine River who became Germans, Dutch, and Alsatians, who were very much at the heart of what was happening in those centuries (see Saint Henry, above) from the time of Charlemagne (about 800 AD). The remainder of my ancestry is English, and the Anglo-Saxons were quite closely involved in these same developments as well.
I also find it fascinating that a modern academic treatise, or a modern academic author, cannot or will not acknowledge Jesus Christ and faith in Him and life in His Church is a motivation that is distinct and different from political or economic or ethnic/racial or tribal or hegemonic or organizational or any of the other templates that are used now to categorize individual and social human behavior.
The author grapples with the very term “reform” and tries to explain it from civic necessity and from imposition by authority, but evades the acknowledgement that the encounter with Christ necessarily is a call to reform: repent, and believe in the Gospel! It is organic, or better, intrinsic to the Christian cultures that called not only themselves but also the peoples who raided and pillaged them – the Northmen who became Normans, for example – to conversion, that is, to belief and change of life in a communion and a culture.
No other template explains this blossom in the pavement except the life of Christ in the Church. And this was the great engine of the civilization that roared back to life after depredation and disintegration. To read the catalog of disasters that befell every effort of Christians in their civic and ecclesial identities for several centuries, and then to find this great gleaming life that arose and reaches out in myriad concrete realities even unto our own day is to take hope in the face of our own day’s depredations and disintegrations.
Human history is my history. Church history is our history. Salvation history is our past and our present, as Jesus Himself is at work in the world in His Church, which includes and involves you and me. There is nothing dry or distant about an account of events, artifacts, and personalities from a sweep of time in which many hearts turned as one toward the Lord Jesus and found life, and found it in abundance.
Christian civilization, the marvelous terrestrial architecture of man’s redemption and salvation in Christ, happens in time and becomes intelligible over a great sweep of time. Maybe I am not entirely ridiculous for reading this book after all, even if it might take me months to finish.
Monsignor Smith
