Everyone agrees that Innocent III was undoubtedly a great pope--some would say the greatest of all popes--but opinions differ as to what he did that set him apart from and above other popes. Some would say that Innocent's success was relative, because on the one hand he claimed greater rights for the papacy than had any of his predecessors, though less than his successors, while on the other hand, more than any other pope, he succeeded in exercising pontifical power as he conceived it. Others, including John Moore, would emphasize his immense impact on contemporary events without considering these in the larger context of the development of papal monarchy. To do so certainly presents a picture of an active, intelligent, and successful leader, but it fails to explain why his pontificate was truly epoch making. Yet every medievalist knows that the years of his reign (1198-1216) mark the division between, not only the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but also between the formative years of the Latin Church, monumentalized in Migne's Patrologia Latina, and the consolidated, triumphalist form that characterized it in the Later Middle Ages. In liturgy, in canon law, and especially in ecclesiology, Innocent's pontificate was a watershed that runs down to the present day, and in my view it is this immense impact that above all defines Innocent's greatness.
John C. Moore takes a more modest, not to say moderate, view of Innocent's importance. Moore, now an emeritus professor of Hofstra University, has devoted an active scholarly life to Innocent's pontificate, and the present book distills his long and extensive experience. In the Preface, he accurately defines the distinctive characteristics of his book: it is addressed primarily to the general reader, whom he hopes "will find here a comprehensive and reliable introduction to Pope Innocent III" (xiv). And indeed, the general reader will not be disappointed. Moore writes well by any standard, but with an eye to everyman: his style is genial, light in tone, and if a bit bland nonetheless enriched with humor, analogy, anecdote, and vivid descriptions of places in the Roman Campania. The two near-contemporary portraits of Innocent are strikingly reproduced in color. Key points are supported with extensive quotations, mostly from Innocent's registers and always in English, that more than adequately convey the turgid and convoluted elegance of curial Latin, though not all readers will welcome the consequent interruption in the smooth flow of Moore's own pellucid prose.
Scholars are warned in the Preface that this book is not primarily addressed to them. "The book is not intended to revisit the many controversies surrounding Innocent and his pontificate but to give as clear and full a picture as possible of Innocent the man and of his life as he experienced it." (xiv) Nonetheless, as the author insists, the book is "solidly based on evidence," which is meticulously but succinctly documented in proper footnotes that are infrequently discursive. Accordingly, the author explains, "I hope that even well-informed scholars, while testing my assertions against the evidence cited, can learn something from this approach . . ." (xiv).
How then is the scholarly reviewer to judge this work? I suppose that he might imagine that he is a peer evaluator sitting in on one of Professor Moore's classes, and assuming this role, I can only report that the author must be a superlative classroom teacher. The issues he foregrounds are those that interest students; the answers he offers to controversial questions are likewise those that would satisfy undergraduates more often than experts. As Moore hoped, I did indeed learn something from him, but I was also stimulated to raise objections, suggest qualifications, and otherwise intervene. Because this is a scholarly review, I will share these reactions; but before beginning my critique, I must assure college librarians that you must buy this book, for it will be standard reading for students for several generations at the least. Happily, the publisher has produced a book with a remarkably sturdy binding and acid-free paper, so it will survive the hard use it deserves.
Students who protest against a topical presentation, saying that it "jumps around," will find Moore's organization reassuring, but only superficially so. Contrary to the practice of Achille Luchaire--Innocent's most distinguished biographer--Moore proceeds chronologically, dividing the eighteen years of the pontificate into eight chapters, so that readers can learn "how Innocent experienced his pontificate from day to day and how the events in one area of his experience may have influenced his reaction to events in others". (xi) But this is no read through the registers, for the chapters are of course organized topically, so that the complaint of chronologically-minded students is met only halfway. Nonetheless, Moore does attain his goal of delineating the complexity of curial business and Innocent's moments of triumph and depression. Given the strictly chronological progression of the chapters, it would be pointless to list them and summarize their contents. Instead, let us proceed to review first the principal topics Moore does treat fully, and then several that he does not. I shall especially note areas in which the author has distinctive and even controversial opinions, because teachers who assign this work should be aware of what it does and does not do.
The most important question about Innocent III was posed in the subtitle of James Powell's still useful selection of scholarly opinions: Innocent III: Vicar of Christ or Lord of the World? (1963, reissued 1997). Moore's answer, correctly I think, is that Innocent claimed to be both, and never more clearly than when he received John of England as his vassal, "so that kingdom and priesthood, like body and soul, for the great good and profit of each, might be united in the single person of Christ's Vicar". (259) Moore, however, never explains the novelty of Innocent's use of the title "sole vicar of Christ," which in the first year of his pontificate he linked to the companion concept of papal "plenitude of power," so that from then on he and his successors could claim to be Christ's authoritative arbiters on earth. Although Moore does not emphasize Innocent's unparalleled efforts to make the kings of Christendom his vassals, he does rightly stress the importance of the pope's determination to become the sovereign lord of the papal "patrimony" in central Italy, which was the lordship that mattered most to the Roman curia.
In 1198, when for the first time in centuries the papacy found itself surrounded by a single power--caught, as it were, in a Hohenstaufen nutcracker--the cardinals responded to the crisis by electing an unprecedentedly young and energetic pope, and Innocent did not disappoint them. Moore traces Innocent's shifting support of imperial candidates, from Otto to Philip, then back to Otto, and finally to Frederick, though he is all too prone to accept Innocent's official explanations without regard to possible underlying motives, and he insists, against the misgivings of German historians from Haller to Tillmann, that Innocent's arguments concerning the Empire "do not seem dishonest or deceptive". (267; cf. 277) Instead, the author contends that "The German nation should not be listed among the things that Innocent destroyed." (267) This is to ignore the fact that Innocent provided the papacy with the silver bullet that made possible the Great Interregnum, namely the pope's power to veto imperial elections in effect by refusing to crown any candidate whom he considered to be unsuitable. Innocent extracted this novel and unprecedented concession first from Otto IV (1208) and later from Frederick II (1213) as part of the heavy price they had to pay for papal recognition.
The ruination of the Empire and the dismemberment of Germany are not topics of general concern to anglophone readers, but the crusades are, given our postcolonial world and the resurgence of Islam. In this regard, Innocent was embarrassingly enthusiastic. He was obsessed with the need to recapture Jerusalem because he was convinced "that the recovery of the earthly Jerusalem was the only certain sign of God's approval of Christendom and of his own pontificate". (286) And, as Moore repeatedly stresses, Innocent firmly believed that divine judgments on human affairs were revealed in the outcome of events: indeed, his chosen motto was "Show me, Lord, a sign of thy favor." (254) It is difficult for me to see how this pope could prohibit the Church's participation in ordeals because they "tempted God" and yet, without contradiction, could ceaselessly promote trials by battle with Islam. Although Innocent was forever insisting on his love of peace, it was an end to be attained by means of threats and coercion, for if his enemies--and especially Muslims and heretics--did not submit to his will voluntarily, they were to be forced to do so. Moore apologizes for this reliance on violence by assuring us that that was how things had to be done in the thirteenth century (263; cf. 267); but he overlooks that fact that by negotiation and compromise, rather than by violence, Frederick II--Innocent's contemporary--was able to secure for Christians both access to Jerusalem and possession of their holy places.
Moore is prepared to admit that Innocent's invention of the Albigensian Crusade was a mistake, an inadvertent miscalculation (268), but he fails to explain how it was made. Innocent simply did not understand how the feudal system worked in Languedoc; he thought that Raymond VI could control his vassals, which he could not. For a more evenhanded treatment of the murder of the papal legate, which sparked the crusade, one should consult instead J. R. Strayer, The Albigensian Crusades, pp. 50-52 (cf. Moore, pp. 175 and 181). Perhaps Innocent's ignorance was an excuse at the beginning, but not at the Fourth Lateran Council, where he personally favored the restoration of Raymond's lands but "bowed to the will of the majority" when two-thirds of the bishops counseled otherwise. (234) Moore fails to note that Innocent was not bound by the advice of his council; out of expediency, he evidently acted contrary to his convictions, which tells us something extremely important about him as a political pope.
As his book's subtitle indicates, Moore takes care to balance Innocent's negative, destructive efforts against his positive, creative contributions. It is especially in this regard that the book disappointed me, because it hardly notices Innocent's major contributions to liturgy, to canon law, and to ecclesiology. He left his mark on all three areas, and in each case the imprint was so deep and indelible that it has determined the subsequent character of the Latin church. He transformed the liturgy, for example, by commissioning a new set of service books for the curia, which became the Roman standard that slowly but surely spread until it became all but universal after the council of Trent. Of these changes, the most important was in his mass book, which replaced the old-style sacramentary with the first missal, the "Missal according to the Rite of the Roman Church," which was rapidly spread throughout Christendom by the Franciscans, who adopted it as their own. [1] He also invented the breviary, the abbreviated daily offices to be said by the secular clergy, which similarly was prepared for the Roman curia and disseminated by the Franciscans. [2] Likewise, the Roman Pontifical was revised under Innocent, and the result, the so-called "Pontifical of the Roman Curia in the Thirteenth Century," which, together with a later compilation by William Durandus, remained in widespread use until 1596. [3] To be sure, Innocent himself only initiated these influential liturgical projects, but they reflect not only his personal interest in the liturgy but also his influence and originality as its interpreter in his treatise on The Sacred Mystery of the Altar, which introduced a bible-centered commentary on the mass that became the standard approach in the later Middle Ages. [4] Such matters may not appeal to the general reader of today as much as the topics that Moore treats at length, such as tournaments or the Jews, but they were undoubtedly more important for Innocent and should be for anyone who seeks to understand his mentality.
Moore's neglect of the Innocentian impact on canon law and ecclesiology is perhaps more excusable because the former has not yet been thoroughly explored, while the latter, though well known enough, [5] cannot be understood without involved, technical, and undeniably difficult discussions of political theology, such as Brian Tierney's classic analysis of the decretal "Per venerabilem," with which a generation of undergraduates has wrestled in James' Powell's problem book cited above. Moore paints a vivid picture of Innocent delighting in his role as judge, but he is seen from the perspective of the papal registers, where anything the chancery wanted to remember was recorded, rather than from that of the Gregorian Decretales, which constituted the principal code of canon law until 1916. Innocent himself had initiated the first official codification of these decretals, or papal judgments, and his own decisions--some 586 of them!--outnumber those of any other pope in its final, Gregorian version. In gross, then, it is clear that he transformed the law of the Church; what has yet to be done is to trace in detail the process by which the changes were accomplished. As I have suggested above and elsewhere, Innocent was empowered to produce this outpouring of new, judge-made law by his determination, in the early years of his pontificate, that the pope's plenitude of power, which he exercised as God's sole vicar on earth, conferred on him a broad discretionary power to intervene on God's behalf in human affairs, including secular cases that were either "difficult or ambiguous." [6] Thus the Roman curia became, in Maitland's felicitous phrase, "the omnicompetent court of appeal" for all Christendom. In sum, to appreciate Innocent's greatness, one must account for his legislation as a judge, and accordingly my complaint is that Moore does not explain why Innocent, more than any other pope, issued so many decretals that changed the law of the Church in so many ways.
Therefore, I must conclude that, although this well-written book should satisfy the incurious general reader, it presents only a superficial view of Innocent's achievement. The documentation is praiseworthy, and researchers will benefit from the ample and current bibliography, [7] although inexplicably there is no reference to Horace K. Mann's two-volume, 625-page biography of Innocent, (The Lives of the Popes in the Middle Ages, vols. 11 and 12, 2nd ed., London, 1925) which despite its apologetic stance is thoroughly documented and may still be consulted with profit by the judicious anglophone reader.
NOTES
[1] Joseph A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, trans. F. A. Brunner, rev. C. K. Riepe (New York, 1959), p. 76.
[2] The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2: 791.
[3] Jungmann, Mass of the Roman Rite, pp. 83-84.
[4] Wilhelm Imkamp, Das Kirchenbild Innocenz' III (Stuttgart, 1983); cited in Moore's bibliography.
[5] Michel Andrieu, Le Pontifical romain au moyen-age, vol. 2: Le Pontifical de la curie romaine au XIIIe siecle, Studi e testi 87 (Vatican City, 1940), pp. 310-311.
[6] Richard Kay, Dante's Swift and Strong (Lawrence, 1978), pp. 131-141.
[7] I noted only two corrigenda: Constance has a bishop, not an archbishop (p. 204), and "pariticpation" (p. 244).