Page 211 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 201
but on what Kantorowicz (1957) calls ‘the monopolization of the Bible’—the
selective interpretation of the Bible in a way that constituted a compelling way
of viewing the world. Papal and ecclesiastical propaganda provided a
teleological view of existence in which all actions of Christians were directed
towards the attainment of salvation. According to this perspective, the pope as
the supreme ruler of the Church had the duty to direct all men towards the goal
of salvation by means of the law. And since every aspect of human life was
encompassed within the corporate and indivisible body of the Christian Church,
the pope as head of the Church had a universal sovereignty. There was,
according to papal ideology, no inherent right to power or property, because
these derived from the grace of God and could be revoked or suspended by
God’s appointed agents. In short, the papacy constructed an ideological system
based on two central premises: (a) that all power derived from God; and (b) that
the Church was indivisible. These premises provided the foundation for an
elaborate superstructure of thought that expanded the bishop of Rome’s claim to
headship of the Church into a divine-right, absolutist authority over mankind
(Ullmann, 1970).
The hierocratic themes of the papacy were mediated within the Church
through the established hierarchical channels of communication. The papal curia
had the largest collection of records and archives and the most sophisticated team
of scholars and polemicists in the western hemisphere during the early and
central middle ages. It reiterated with relentless insistence the central tenets of
papal propaganda in correspondence, official pronouncements and legal
judgements.
To some extent the mediation of papal themes within the institution of the
Church also occurred independently of curial supervision. Ullmann (1969)
shows, for instance, that the Frankish episcopacy during the Carolingian period
stressed the sovereignty of the papacy, and the assumptions that underlay it, in an
attempt to establish their autonomy from royal and feudal control. There was
thus a natural affinity of interest between the papacy, in remote Italy, and the
ecclesiastical hierarchy in other parts of Christendom that resulted in a partly
unco-ordinated assertion of the sovereignty of the papacy and the primacy of the
clergy in an impersonal ecclesiastical order. This facilitated, in turn, the
extension of papal control over the Christian Church in the west. Through
increased influence over senior ecclesiastical appointments, insistence upon
regular visits to Rome by bishops, and the extension of direct papal control over
the monastic order, the papacy was able to exercise increasingly centralized
power over the Catholic Church and to harness its resources to the advancement
of its power and authority within western Europe.
The Catholic Church translated the sophisticated, hierocratic ideology of the
papacy into graphic and readily comprehensible forms in an age when the
overwhelming majority of the population—including the nobility— were
illiterate. Such has been the preoccupation of medievalists with literary sources,
however, that surprisingly little attention has been given to the role of non-verbal