Page 214 - Culture Society and the Media

204 COMMUNICATIONS, POWER AND SOCIAL ORDER
mediated papal hierocratic themes. And from the thirteenth century onwards, the
growing number of travelling friars, who often combined their evangelical role
with reporting ‘the news’ to curious listeners, became an effective propaganda
arm of the papacy.
The ecclesiastical hierarchy also decisively shaped élite culture in ways that
supported the exercise of papal authority. Monasteries dominated book
production until the development of university scriptoria from the thirteenth
century onwards. As a result, texts supporting or expounding papal ideology
were generally copied at the expense of texts that explicitly or implicitly
challenged an ecclesiastical view of the universe. The clerical and monastic
order also dominated the transmission of knowledge through formal education
during the early and central middle ages. Until the eleventh century, education
was confined largely to the clergy and its content was decisively shaped by the
ecclesiastical hierarchy from at least the ninth century (Laistner, 1957; Leff,
1958). It was only in the twelfth century that there was a substantial increase in
lay education and lay centres of learning, and even many of these centres came
under direct or indirect ecclesiastical supervision (Cobban, 1969).
The nature of this cultural domination is illustrated by the steps taken to
contain the threat posed by Aristotle. His teaching challenged the dominant
perspective of a single political-religious society, an indivisible Church that
underpinned papal hegemony. Perhaps for this reason, the principal works of
Aristotle were allowed to ‘disappear’ during the early middle ages. When they
were rediscovered, their study was banned at Paris University until such time as
they had been ‘purified’. And when William of Moerbeke finally translated
Aristotle from Greek into Latin in the thirteenth century, he was obliged to use
words like politicus (political) and politia (government) with which most of his
colleagues were unfamiliar. Even to make a distinction between religious and
political matters, between Church and State, a distinction that directly challenged
a key premise of papal ideology, required the learning of new terms. The
principal medium of communication between the cultured élite, the universal
language of Christendom, was thus itself shaped and defined by the precepts of
papal ideology (Ullmann, 1975).
It was thus not simply the power of religious faith that sustained papal
authority. The success of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in shaping the dominant
culture led, for a long time, to the general (but not total) exclusion of ideas and
concepts that might undermine papal ascendancy. Scholars were induced to
perceive and, therefore, to ‘experience’ reality in a way that sustained papal rule
regardless of whether they were or were not pious members of the Church.
The papacy’s cultural domination, even during the meridian of its power in the
central middle ages, was admittedly far from complete. There is ample evidence
of a lay culture expressing ‘secular’ values in song, dance, story-telling and
poetry, existing independently of, but overlapping with, a more church-centred
religious culture (Southern, 1959). The secular organization of medieval society
also often functioned on very different principles from those of the eccesiastical