He became civilly
independent of the Roman Empire, and had only spiritual relations
with it. To the new powers that sprang up in Europe he appears
never to have acknowledged any civil subjection, and uniformly
asserted, in face of them, his civil as well as spiritual
independence.
This civil independence the successors of Charlemagne, who
pretended to be the successors of the Roman Emperors of the West,
and called their empire the Holy Roman Empire, denied, and
maintained that the Pope owed them civil allegiance, or that, in
temporals, the emperor was the Pope's superior. If, said the
emperor, or his lawyers for him, the civil power is from God, as
it must be, since non est potestas nisi a Deo, the state stands
on the same footing with the church, and the imperial power
emanates from as high a source as the Pontifical. The
emperor is then as supreme in temporals as the Pope in
spirituals, and as the emperor is subject to the pope in
spirituals, so must the Pope be subject to the emperor in
temporals. As at the time when the dispute arose, the temporal
interests of churchmen were so interwoven with their spiritual
rights, the pretensions of the emperor amounted practically to
the subjection in spirituals as well as temporals of the
ecclesiastical authority to the civil, and absorbed the church in
the state, the reasoning was denied, and churchmen replied: The
Pope represents the spiritual order, which is always and
everywhere supreme over the temporal, since the spiritual order
is the divine sovereignty itself.
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