Page:Vactican as a World Power.djvu/191

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THIRTEENTH CENTURY 177

misuse, Easter duty, the curbing of a monasticism grown too luxuriant, and the uprooting of heresy. The ban was once more imposed on Otto IV, and Frederic the Hohenstaufen was recognized as the duly elected Emperor.

During the next year Innocent set out for Lombardy with the ob- ject of settling the war between Genoa and Pisa. But he died in Perugia and was buried there. Soon a German chronicler set down the legend that the restless soul of the dead Pope had appeared again on earth, surrounded by the flames of Purgatory: driven by the whips of the Devil through the world, it finally reached the foot of the Cross and cried aloud for the prayers of the faithful. This story enshrined the truth that the Popes remained as conscious of the dan- gers and temptations latent in the temporal power of the Church as were the early Christians. During the nineteenth century, Leo XIII erected a monument to the Pontiff of the thirteenth century who served him as a revered model: in the semidarkness of the basilica, Innocent sleeps with hands folded and with the tiara on his head, looking as young as when Giotto had drawn him in his pictures of St. Francis.

The great concerns of Innocent's pontificate had been Emperor and Empire, Mendicant Orders and heresy. The same things were to bring joy and sorrow to his successors. The cosmos of the Catholic Church is a perfect co-ordination of antitheses which hover in constant tension, maintaining themselves and mutually softening one another. In it the rights of the divine and the human, of the temporal and the timeless, of the material and the spiritual, of the soul and the intellect, of freedom and subservience, of mastery and service, tend like spokes of a wheel towards the point of rest at the centre, in which all the energies moving in and out part company and join forces alike. It is just this fullness of life in balance which makes the Church a cosmos. But the separate energies which it embraces and fosters, harnessing each to the rest, are always in conflict when seen as historical realities. Each wishes to be alone and to dominate. In addition it always seems right at any given moment that one certain idea should be emphasized above all others. Therefore it is eminently natural that as a rule the richest and most active eras are those which most violently oppose the Church's system of doctrine and life. The Church of the thirteenth


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