The Idea of the Ecclesia Primitiva in the Writings of the Twelfth-Century Canonists

Abstract

Much recent scholarship on the period of the Investiture Struggle and the reform of the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries has suggested that the origins of these reforms lay not merely in the desire for moral regeneration, but in the conscious wish to return to the antique, Biblical, patristic, and Roman models of the Christian life represented by the early, pre-feudal Church. What modern historians have sometimes called ‘Germanic Christianity’ or ‘feudal Christianity’ was felt to be a pattern of institutions which had at least partly corrupted the life of the early Church. This explains the great concern of the Hildebrandine Party to rid the Church of those abuses which they felt had grown ‘especially since the time when the government of our church passed to the Germans. … But we, having searched out the Roman Order and the ancient custom of our church, imitating the old Fathers, have ordered things to be restored as we have set out above.’ The reaction against the immediate past in favor of a more perfect antique model manifested itself in the notion, expressed throughout the period, that custom must always be judged by natural law and by truth: ‘the Lord said: “I am the Truth.” He did not say: “I am the custom”; but “I am the Truth.” The reformers became impassioned to restore the ancient discipline, to rediscover the ancient laws of the Church, to bring monasticism back to its original purity, and in all this to use what they believed to be the ancient forms of the Christian life as a model by which to compare and criticize the Christianity of their own times. An extensive and varied literature appeared dealing with the problem of what the ancient ideal of the Christian life had been, a literature which began both to speak frequently of the ecclesia primitiva, and to use this idea as a model by which to reform the Church. Often this literature passed beyond the use of the idea of the ecclesia primitiva as a tool of reform to the use of the idea as a basis for the discussion of the more basic problem of what the perfect form of the Christian life had been or should be. In this regard, ‘reform’ signified not only the restoration and reestablishment of the forms of the Christian life of the past, but also the search for the continuing perfection of both the individual and the Church. The nexus of ideas associated with the Augustinian reformatio in melius was in this respect close to the idea of ‘renewal.’ Men not only returned to the forms of the past, but also explored ways of introducing new structures and forms of life into the Church.

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