I know this is going to be heavy going for some, so I'm preparing some commentary. There are two institutions in particular on which I wish to focus: the papacy and monasticism.
Let's begin with the papacy. I mentioned in class that this originated as the Bishop of Rome. Bishops in the early church were overseers; they had as their mandate the administration of groups of parishes, under the ministry of parish priests. An overseer would be someone to whom parishes were responsible; without a structure of this kind in place, every congregation might have ended up doing its own thing. That may sound perfectly okay to us modern Americans, but in the early church there was a sense of a need for unity; otherwise, how was one to know what the true faith was? So parishes had overseers, or bishops, located in major metropolitan areas.
Now some cities were more important than others, and in western Europe, no city was more imprtant than Rome. During the late 2nd century Tertullian, one of the church fathers, fleshed out a doctrine of apostolic succession. Based on Christ's words to Peter in Matthew 16:18--19, "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,m and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven," the doctrine held that Peter was in fact the first pope, who handed down this power in succession to subsequent popes in Rome. And so the Roman bishop came to be called "papa," pope.
This was all well and good, but the papacy didn't amount to the same thing in everyone's eyes or at every point in history. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory I, St. Gregory, was extremely effective in building the church by sponsoring missionary work all over Europe, including England and Germany. By the nineth century, popes were under the control of a powerful dynasty of Frankish kings related to the line of Charlemagne. Under this king, the ideal of imperial Rome was restored in his coronation as Emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Eve, 800 A.D.
Successors of this imperial mandate tended to control the papacy and the appointment of bishops until the late 11th century, when the papacy spearheaded a major reform. The object of the reform was to purge the church of its reliance on the power of secular rulers. By the early 13th century, the papacy was the most powerful single force in Europe. However, by the later Middle Ages it had begun to disintegrate into chaos. The Papal Schism in 1378, which split European Christendom between two and at one point three popes, was a major scandal and almost pulled the church apart. In 1417 the Council of Constance was able to depose all three popes and appoint a single pope who successfully took up residence in Rome as the sole pope.
The term "conciliar," which Strauss introduces on p. 11, refers to a number of theorists who believed that the true power of the church rested not in the papacy but in the representatives of the faithful in full church councils. After all, it had been a council that rescued the church when the papacy was derelict. In the period following, the papacy never regained its leadership, but acted more as a regional power in Italy. You can be sure, however, that these popes resisted calling or depending on church councils, out of fear of conciliarists, and the conciliarist movement eventually died out. The Renaissance period marks a low point in papal esteem; several Renaissance popes were notorious as womanizers, gluttons, extravagent, ruthless, and power-hungry (although others were perfectly well-intentioned).
Now on to the monasteries: the monastic impulse had its origins in the east, in the deserts of Egypt and Syria, where the earliest Christian monks withdrew to pursue a path of penance and contemplation. These early monks lived solitary lives, but later monks found living in community was a more effective vehicle for pursuing a life of devotion to God. The foundational text for western monasticism is the Rule of St. Benedict, who lived in the sixth century. Orders of men or women, living in community, took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to their leader, called an abbot (from the word "Abba," "father"). They were originally self-sufficient and committed to working with their hands, although as time went on they were the beneficiaries of charitable donations of estates, complete with semi-free laborers called serfs.
Monastic life became the victim of its own success: pious noblemen and women donated money, land, and buildings to the growing monastic orders, which became wealthy and worldly. The reproductive strategies of noble and royal families resulted in sons and daughters being sent to monasteries as an alternative to dividing estates among multiple children. Many of these peoople had no sense of vocation, although numbers of people raised in the monasteries from early childhood grew into adult monks famous for their spiritual vitality. However, as monasteries came to control property, they became entangled in the power structure of the great feudal families.
Calls for renewal and reform were frequent throughout the Middle Ages. In 910 a pious nobleman and his wife founded a new order of Benedictine monks at Cluny. They were supposed to be responsible only to the pope, and to recognize no other leadership. This took them out of the loop of the local elites, and engendered a revival that was tremendously successful. However by the late 11th century, the Cluniac monks were becoming wealthy and once again entangled in the affairs of the world. A new order, the Cistercians, of whom Bernard of Clairvaux was the most famous member, promised a return to more primitive conditions.
In the early 13th century another impulse followed, that of the mendicants, or "beggars." These religious orders did not live in cloisters as did traditional monks, but carried out active ministries in the towns and countryside, helping the sick, preaching sermons, and hearing confessions. St. Francis of Assissi interpreted in the strictest possible terms the admonition to sell everything, give to the poor, and follow Christ. He held a symbolic marriage ceremony in which he took Lady Poverty as his wedded wife, to have and to hold for as long as he lived. The Strauss article refers to a split in the ranks of Franciscans after St. Francis's death, some of whom wanted to relax the command to poverty, while others wanted a strict adherence. The Spirituals, the strict constructionists, so to speak, were eventually ruled heretical, because their example served as such a sharp reproach to the material life of the rest of the church.
What I'd like you to do in reading this piece is take note of the many references to reform that occur in the article. Note the language in which the concept of reform is couched, the sources generating calls for reform, and the types of reform that seize people's imaginations. You can even put together a list of these occurrences. This will give you a good basis for understanding the article as a whole.