Gafney Response to Cantor

Cantor, "Ecclesia and Mundus"

In his chapter, “Ecclesia and Mundus,” Cantor describes the way in which the world of the church and the political (and to a large extent, social) worlds of the medieval feudal state were inexorably bound together. He summarizes his position neatly as follows:

Ecclesiastical and secular political ideas, leadership, and resources were inextricably joined together in the creation and progress of these states. The same interpenetration of ecclesia and mundus, the church and the world, can be seen at work all over tenth-century Europe… (Cantor, 205).

In faithfully recounting the symbiotic relationship of church and political governing structures in the Norman feudal state, the Ottonian Empire, and the Cluniac system, Cantor gives credence to his assertion. The chapter is as useful as a historical review as it is a piece of critical literature.

While I feel that Cantor is mostly right, I do wonder whether the way in which the tensions between the church and the world are described and the attempts at reconciling such tensions that we see over and over in romances and chivalric literature do demonstrate a certain ambivalence about the linking of ecclesia and mundus that might have been even generally felt. Wolfram’s Parzival, for example, may be read as a chivalric narrative that posits the “worldy” court of King Arthur against the (arguably) superior “spritiual” court of the Grail King. Though Cantor is right that the church and the world were intimately related, and that that relationship was instrumental in the founding of the feudal state, I think that examples like Parzival demonstrate some serious misgivings about this linkage.