Background
Gregory was born in 1015 as Ildebrando di Soana in Sovana, in the county of Grosseto, now southern Tuscany, central Italy. He was said to be of humble origins.
Gregory was born in 1015 as Ildebrando di Soana in Sovana, in the county of Grosseto, now southern Tuscany, central Italy. He was said to be of humble origins.
As a youth he was sent to study in Rome at the monastery of St. Mary on the Aventine. Among his masters were the erudite Lawrence, archbishop of Amalfi, and Johannes Gratianus, the future Pope Gregory VI.
He was elected by stormy popular acclamation on Apr. 22, 1073, in disregard of the recent election decree in the framing of which he himself, as Archdeacon Hildebrand, had had a large share.
He personified the idea of government bequeathed to him by preceding papal generations. The hallmark of his pontificate was the translation into practice of ancient and traditional papal doctrine.
There had been attempts before Gregory VII to eradicate these two sources of resistance; and with particular fervor he himself began his pontificate by renewing the prohibition of concubinage and simony.
These measures were the signal for widespread revolts, especially in Germany, France, and Northern Italy.
But Gregory inflexibly stuck to his decrees, deposing and suspending bishops, abbots, etc. , and withholding penalties against lay people who, in execution of papal orders, had revolted against censured clerics.
Although in his own time little result could be seen in regard to clerical celibacy and simony, Gregory's standpoint gradually became accepted in the twelfth century.
However, in some parts of Europe, such as Silesia, Poland, and Scandinavia, it took considerably longer to enforce these demands, and then there were numerous exceptions to the rule. Closely allied to the demand for celibacy and the prohibition of simony stood the demand for abolition of lay investiture.
The reasoning behind this was that under this practice clerical officers were invested by a layman who could not give away what he himself did not rightfully possess, and who by virtue of this investiture established a very close relationship with the cleric.
Further, Henry IV was, again for historical reasons, the obvious claimant to Roman emperorship, for which reason he was extremely susceptible to papal influence and control.
Unperturbed by Gregory's rather clear warnings, Henry anticipated the action threatened by the pope, convoked a Diet at Worms in January 1076 and there, with the consent of twenty-six bishops, declared the pope to be deposed.
Gregory's reaction culminated in the Lenten Synod of Feb. 22, 1076, with the preliminary deposition and excommunication of the German king.
It was accompanied by very bitter, acrimonious warfare and fulminations on both sides; and Germany, who lost all along the line, was never to recover from the defeat. Henry's baronage--fickle, unstable, and unreliable--put before him the alternatives of either obtaining absolution from the pope or being deposed by them.
Henry chose the former and in an abject manner sought absolution, which was granted by Gregory at Canossa in February 1077.
But this absolution was more in the nature of a truce and did not settle any of the outstanding points.
In the following three years Henry managed to gather his forces and almost regained his former position and strength.
In the Lenten Synod of 1080 the pope excommunicated him a second time and finally deposed him. The civil war which in the meantime had been raging in Germany was thereby intensified.
Rudolf of Swabia had become the candidate for the vacant royal throne through election by a number of princes in 1077 and was now recognized by Gregory as the rightful German king.
He was killed in battle in October 1080 and his place as anti-king taken by Hermann of Salm.
The archbishop took the name of Clement III.
Gregory, in order to escape capture by the Germans, called on the help of his vassal, the Norman Duke Robert Guiscard.
The Duke's troops devastated Rome, with the result that Rome itself now rose against Gregory, thus forcing him to retreat with the fleeing Norman militia.
The issues which brought forth the investiture contest between Germany and the papacy were equally noticeable in England and France.
Although Gregory was as adamant there, no serious conflict broke out, partly because neither country was so closely tied to the papacy as Germany was, and partly because Gregory realized that if he pressed papal claims to their fullest possible extent against these two countries, he would have virtually the whole of Europe as an enemy.
In other words, the pope acted expediently and for understandable reasons.
However, it was this soft-pedaling of England and France which enabled these two countries to gather enormous strength, because, unlike the German kings, they never lost the effective control of their own higher clergy. Gregory's Significance.
The historic importance of Gregory's pontificate may be summed up as follows.
He enunciated in practice the basic principles which were to underlie a Christian society, upholding the argument that as members of the Church the most powerful kings, as well as the lowliest villeins, were subject to the rulings of the pope.
Since above all the king was entrusted by God with certain specific tasks, the judgment as to whether or not he fulfilled this trust was to be the pope's alone; and therefore the pope had the right to depose an unworthy or unsuitable ruler.
It was during Gregory's pontificate that the means to translate this ideology into practice was provided.
It was also during this period that an elaborate papal ceremonial was adopted.
This is particularly noticeable in the garments of the pope and the cardinals, which were closely modeled on Byzantine patterns (red shoes, red stockings, etc. ) so as to bring into clear relief the true monarchic position of the papacy, by means easily understandable to contemporaries. Furthermore, under Gregory, the Roman curia, like every other curia, adopted the feudal principle of enfeoffment.
For the first time in European history there came into being a publicistic literature which left its mark on the following ages. In Gregory's time the exercise of papal authority was confined to the West.
In order for it to be truly universal and effective, the East--separate since 1054--would also have to come under papal authority.
This realization made Gregory VII the originator of the Crusades idea.
Although he was denied the execution of this plan, the idea lived on and was put into practice by his successor, Urban II. In the long history of the papacy there is no other pontificate which, though only lasting twelve years, was so instrumental in realizing papal principles of government, and precisely those which had been developed by preceding papal generations and which were potently to influence all succeeding ages.
One of the great reforming popes, he is perhaps best known for the part he played in the Investiture Controversy, his dispute with Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor that affirmed the primacy of papal authority and the new canon law governing the election of the pope by the College of Cardinals. It was from this pontificate that the papacy began to reach the dizzy heights of power.
Gregory VII is one of the very few medieval popes who have been canonized.
Gregory VII was beatified by Pope Gregory XIII in 1584 and canonized on 24 May 1728 by Pope Benedict XIII.
His lifework was based on his conviction that the Church was founded by God and entrusted with the task of embracing all mankind in a single society in which divine will is the only law; that, in her capacity as a divine institution, she is supreme over all human structures, especially the secular state; and that the pope, in his role as head of the Church, is the vice-regent of God on earth, so that disobedience to him implies disobedience to God: or, in other words, a defection from Christianity. But any attempt to interpret this in terms of action would have bound the Church to annihilate not merely a single state, but all states.
Above all, he knew what he wanted; he knew the power of the spoken and the written word; he knew what to say and how to say it at the right time and in the right place; he knew the temper of the time and with unfailing grasp sensed the flaw in his opponent's argument; he possessed will power, resolution, and courage to a degree which had no parallel in the medieval world; he was impetuous and yet knew how to tread warily.
Joseph McCabe describes Gregory as a "rough and violent peasant, enlisting his brute strength in the service of the monastic ideal which he embraced. " In contrast, the noted historian of the 11th century H. E. J. Cowdrey writes, "[Gregory VII] was surprisingly flexible, feeling his way and therefore perplexing both rigorous collaborators . .. and cautious and steady-minded ones . .. His zeal, moral force, and religious conviction, however, ensured that he should retain to a remarkable degree the loyalty and service of a wide variety of men and women. "
