Chapter 11

Chapter 11

With the freeing of the Church from the imperial and feudal power and the
contention of the spiritual power set at liberty new spiritual forces and
created the new international society of medieval Christendom. The church
had a major helping in the reforming movement in the Middle Ages which had a
huge impact and influence on the surrounding culture. In fact, the culture
owns its unity to this fact. When the connection between the governing power
in the Church and the cultural leadership, broke near the end of the
thirteen century that unity and the creative power slowly dissipated. The
abbey was turned into a whole and not an ends, by the Cluniac movement,
which put all the hierarchy of monastic groups under the complete power of
Abbot of Cluny. This was a cause and effect of the reforming movement. The
victory of the church forced it to make use of temporal means. St. Bernard
condemned the things that were secularizing the Church and placing confusion
between spiritual authority and temporal power. The need for spiritual
reform ran heavily through the twelfth century. The transition from
orthodoxy to heresy was a major factor in the rising and declining of the
culture. The Franciscan movement influenced medieval religion and culture
through its ecclesiastical organization as a new religious Order. There was
also the movement of the Dominicans. "For three centuries the development of
Western Europe had been centripetal towards the unity of Christendom and the
creation of an intellectual and spiritual synthesis. For the second half of
the thirteenth century this movement is reversed and a centrifugal process
begins witch continues throughout the later Middle Ages until it culminates
in the religious devision and social changes of the sixteenth century.