Book Review: The gift of the West

Robert Louis Wilken reviews The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West by Tom Holland at First Things: “Although Gregory VII is not as well known as the reformers of the sixteenth century or the philosophes of the eighteenth century, a case can be made that Gregory’s studied rebuff of royal power in ecclesiastical affairs worked far greater changes in European political and religious life than did the upheavals of the Reformation or the Enlightenment . . . Holland’s central point is well taken. Something genuinely novel did come out of the medieval conflict between pope and king, and the initiative came from the Church’s leaders and thinkers, not Europe’s temporal rulers. Gregory VII was the bearer of a tradition that reached back to the gospels (‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’), to Ambrose and Augustine, and to Pope Gelasius, who said that the ‘two principles’ that give order to the world—political authority and spiritual authority—were distinct.”