‘A discussion of Mickey Mouse’s ears introduces Klimt’s strange vision of Water Nymphs,’ PAGE 22


Peter’s heirs


Ten Popes Who Shook the World Eamon Duffy


YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 176PP, £14.99 ■Tablet bookshop price £13.50 Tel 01420 592974


s Lord Acton’s dictum about power corrupting always true, asks Eamon Duffy, when he comes to consider Innocent III, Pope from 1198 to 1217. After all, “for much of the Middle Ages, the popes were, quite simply, the most powerful men in the world.” Innocent was a good test case. He came to the papacy with the energy of a man of 37, the first university-educated Pope, with no doubt of his authority. Adopting systematically the title “Vicar of Christ”, he took to himself a text from Jeremiah: “I have set you over nations and over kingdoms”. Having placed Otto IV on the imperial throne, he calmly deposed him when he turned out badly. He saw nothing wrong with the use of force in a just cause, and extended the scope of crusades to the winning for Christendom of pagan peoples in northern and eastern Europe, and to the defeat of the alarming Cathar heretics in southern France. But, appalled on hearing in 1204 that the crusading army recruited to aid Byzantium had turned on its fellow Christians and sacked great Constantinople, he denounced the atrocity. So far, Innocent might be judged to have arrogated power and bodged its use. Where he managed to apply surprising imagination was in recognising the lay religious movements then sweeping Europe in opposition to wealthy institutional privilege. The zeal and creativity of these movements were in peril of being forced outside the official Church. Innocent reversed the authorities’ polarising tendency, and met the enthusiasts halfway. He saw the value of the poor evangelist followers of Dominic Guzman in confronting the austere Cathars. When Francis Bernardone from Assisi arrived in Rome with 11 other ragged men, seeking his blessing, he gave them permission to preach love and repentance (as long as they didn’t trespass on theology). The impetus that Innocent thus gave to these Dominicans and Franciscans reflected, in Professor Duffy’s view, a rare appreciation of both charisma and structure. “Just for once,” he writes, “absolute power had been wielded to make room for the visionaries.” By contrast, Pius IX was elected in 1846


I Pope Paul III, after a portrait by Titian


because he seemed “altogether less fearful, less clenched against modernity” than his predecessor Gregory XVI, who wouldn’t even let railways into the Papal States. But


he came to believe, as his long reign continued, that “the infallible papacy was God’s antidote to the universal collapse of values”. It was, Duffy judges, Pio Nono’s misfortune to be Pope during a time of unprecedented political and intellectual turmoil: the age of the Communist Manifesto’s response to industrialisation, which brought prosperity and destitution on an unprecedented scale. Closer to home, the Risorgimento had turned the Vatican into a defiant enclave. “A subtler and cleverer mind might have fostered a deeper and less confrontational theology; a more pragmatic politician might have been able to come to terms with the terrifying dismantling of the territorial arrangements which had safeguarded the papacy’s freedom of action for a thousand years.” Yet it was the contrary avoidance of confrontation and a reliance on diplomacy that became the tragic flaw of Pius XII. The attempts of Benedict XV to end the horrors of the First World War by impartial mediation made a deep impression on Eugenio Pacelli, sent as nuncio to Germany in 1917. Duffy deals carefully and without blinking with Pius XII’s virtual silence in the next war about the Nazis’ mass murder of the Jews. For all his diplomatic virtues, “there still seems something lacking, something frozen in Pacelli’s response, even in his humanity”, he concludes. The 10 sketches in this short book were broadcast in an acclaimed series on Radio 4 in 2007. They work well on the page, achieving brilliantly something hard to pull off: vivid brief lives that are accurate, fair and engaging. The first focuses on St Peter as the foundation of Rome’s claims. Then, after two “greats” from the end of the world of antiquity, Leo and Gregory, come Gregory VII and Innocent from the high


Middle Ages and the extraordinary Renaissance figure of Paul III. From the world made familiar (on the surface) by photography come Pius IX, Pius XII, John XXIII and John Paul II. None of the author’s judgements is second-hand. There is always significant detail: the future Paul III having himself ordained a priest 26 years after being created a cardinal, “a sign of deepening religious seriousness”; the venerable gold and silver gifts given by Constantine himself being melted down by Leo to make chalices for the churches of Rome looted by the Vandals; the “peasant” John XXIII enjoying tripe à la Bergamo and polenta with game sauce. Impressively, he brings perspective to the most recent pontificate, the 26 years of John Paul II. Part of the trick in telling the tale is in careful modulation of tone, for the conclusion of that sketch proves remarkably moving. In The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon


Duffy changed the way we looked at England on the eve of the Reformation. His Ten Popes provokes us to rethink the way the bishops of Rome made world history. Christopher Howse


OUR REVIEWERS


Andrew Lycett is the author of The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: the life and times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.


Christopher Howse writes The Daily Telegraph’s Sacred Mysteries column.


John McEwenis a former art critic of The Sunday Telegraph.


Richard Ormrodis a freelance journalist.


Suzi Feay is a recent literary editor of The Independent on Sunday.


Sarah Hayes is an award-winning children’s writer, currently working on her first adult novel.


Julian Margaret Gibbs is a freelance writer.


Lucy Popescu is the author of The Good Tourist, a book about human rights and ethical travel.


12 November 2011 | THE TABLET | 21


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