Page 210 - Culture Society and the Media

200 COMMUNICATIONS, POWER AND SOCIAL ORDER
the Church itself, notably between the episcopacy and the monastic order. The
rise of papal government, as a number of scholars (for example, Brooke, 1964;
Southern, 1970; Richards, 1979) have convincingly shown, was thus partly the
result of the dexterity with which the papacy harnessed the interests and
influence of competing power-groups to build up its own power.
But neither the papacy’s imperial and apostolic legacy nor its policy of divide
and rule adequately account for the transformation of a local bishop into a papal
emperor. In particular, it does not explain why (as opposed to how) the papacy
should have profited so greatly from its interventions in the power politics of
medieval Europe, nor does it adequately explain why the papacy managed quite
rapidly to expand its power over the Church far beyond the authority accorded to
it by the Roman emperors. The rise of the papacy can only be properly
understood in terms of its early dominance over institutional processes of
ideological production that created and maintained support for its exercise of
power. As St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote perceptively to the Pope in 1150:
‘Your power is not in possessions, but in the hearts of men’ (quoted in Morris,
1972, p. 14).
The expansion of the Christian Church in early modern Europe provided the
institutional basis of papal hegemony. It created a new communications network
capable of transmitting a common ideology throughout western Europe. Rome
could not exploit this network, however, until it had asserted its authority over
(5)
the western Church . During the fourth century, the papacy upgraded the status
accorded to it by the emperors in the east by claiming leadership of the Church
on the basis of scriptural authority. Its claim rested upon a passage in St Matthew’s
Gospel in which Jesus hails St Peter as ‘this rock (upon) which I will build my
church…’ As a title-deed, it left much to be desired, not least because it made no
reference to the See of Rome. The omission was made good, however, by the
production of a spurious letter, the Epistola Clementis, whose author was stated
to be Clement, the first historic bishop of Rome, informing St James of the last
dispositions of St Peter which designated the bishops of Rome as his successors.
This was followed by additional forgeries of which the most influential was the
Donation of Constantine, which purported to document how the Emperor
Constantine had formally handed over large, but mostly unspecified, provinces in
the western hemisphere to Pope Silvester; and a collection of canon law called
Pseudo-Isidore, which included fraudulent canons of the early Christian
Councils and equally spurious decrees of early bishops of Rome, representing the
pope as the primate of the early Christian Church. Distinguished early popes
added to this myth-making by proclaiming as fact obviously false stories about
(6)
the development of the early Christian Church . The papacy and its allies thus
set about reinterpreting history—a practice common to all great ideologies,
although in this case conducted with unusual thoroughness by the actual
fabrication of historical sources.
The ideological strength of the papacy was based, however, not so much on a
single biblical text (important though this was), or on a selective view of history,