Sunday 19 October 2008, 22 after Trinity

‘We will not go to Canossa’ Otto von Bismarck told the Reichstag in 1872. He was not discussing his colleagues’ travel plans, but was referring to a journey made to a northern Italian city eight hundred years earlier. The Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, had very rashly claimed for his Imperial throne the right to invest all the bishops of his Empire. For this trespass on the rights of the Church, Pope Gregory VII excommunicated him.

Henry made his way to the fortress at Canossa in January 1077, dressed as a penitent in a hair shirt. When he arrived the Pope made him wait outside in the snow for three days before receiving him with a kiss and accepting his penance. Canossa was thus the moment when temporal power accepted that it had no authority over spiritual power. It is a seminal moment in European history, comparable to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon or the Paris mob’s storming of the Bastille.

Bismarck’s successors, the statesmen and stateswomen of modern Europe and of the United States, will in recent weeks have been less occupied with ecclesiastical matters than was he when he addressed the Reichstag. Still, the next time they meet they might well consider whether Canossa would be an appropriate venue for their meeting. For in these last weeks we have witnessed an encounter which may prove to be every bit as significant as was that of Gregory and Henry. The encounter has changed geopolitical relationships in ways which seemed unimaginable only a few weeks ago. It may have marked the end of an era. It will almost certainly shape the one to come. It’s just that the parties to the encounter are different. At Canossa the Empire met the Church. In October 2008 the private sphere met the public sphere; the bankers met the elected leaders. And exactly who prevailed is not yet clear.

‘Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s’. Henry’s submission to Gregory allowed prince and prelate to put Christ’s command into effect. By making Henry wait in the January cold Gregory punctured the medieval obsession with the all-encompassing near divinity of emperors and their courts. The reforms of his pontificate were directed to the development of critical distance between the spheres of influence dominated by church and state. The great irony is that - arguably - it was this division that would in later centuries allow the state to insist on the rights of religious minorities and, more recently, of people of no faith. Modern secularism and contemporary multiculturalism have their roots in the reforms of a medieval Pope. It’s an irony probably lost on Richard Dawkins.

So does the history of Canossa have anything to teach us about the encounter between public and private through which we are living? The banks’ acceptance of subsidies can be caricatured as Henry-like, and the politicians’ use of public funds as Gregory-like. And just as the thirteenth century did not witness the development of either theocracy or atheist autocracy the twenty-first is unlikely to herald an era of either centralized control or unfettered laissez-faire.

But perhaps it will see a new balance emerge, as it did in the era after Canossa. Perhaps it will see more effective regulation and more effective control of excess. And perhaps that balance will set the banks free to serve the economy in ways which at present they cannot; perhaps such balance will also prevent politicians from promising a cost-free, ever more affluent future, in which the value of property will rise in perpetuity and the earth’s resources will be deemed inexhaustible.

If we are at the beginning of a new chapter of Western history, at a new balance between the modern powers, then what can the Church contribute to the narrative? Ought she content herself with Gregory’s sphere, the post-Canossa settlement which concentrates on the things that are God’s and leaves the emperor to the mercies of Darling, Paulson and the bankers? I suggest she cannot. For at the heart of whatever economy emerges from the trauma will still be human beings, bringing with them human needs and human emotions, human vices and human virtues.

‘A modern market economy cannot do without a measure of moral corrosion’ writes John Gray, emeritus professor at the LSE. Greed and envy are powerful economic stimulants in the marketplace; thrift and caution are not. How does the Church speak into the balance? As public and private adjust to a new relationship she must counsel and warn, advise and admonish, prophesy and proclaim, recalling always that God’s people are more than customers and investors. The denarius, of course, bore the image and likeness of Caesar; God’s people bear the image and likeness of God.

And God’s people are citizens not just of Europe or the United States. They are citizens of God’s kingdom. Theophan the Recluse writes of the transplanting of humankind’s treasure and of humankind’s hopes, a transplanting from the temporary realm to the eternal. This ‘makes man essentially a pilgrim on earth, seeking his fatherland, the heavenly Jerusalem’. And the heavenly Jerusalem of which Theophan writes is a kingdom which has no market but that of grace freely given; that has no economy but that of salvation; that has no law but that of love. Only through the recalling of that citizenship can we gain a proper perspective on our contemporary way to Canossa. Amen.


Sunday 19 October 2008,
22 after Trinity,
Matthew 22: 15-22