ABSTRACT
I count it a great courtesy to be invited to comment on these three papers; also an act of courage on the organisers’ part. We academics get a permanent imprint from the subject of our rst postgraduate research, and mine was Pope Gregory VII. Gregory had his own views on authority, far from identical to those held in the Byzantine church. He agreed with the Greeks about most other things. ey were his brothers as Christians. When Gregory thought Byzantium was threatened by ‘pagan’ invaders (he used that word for the Turks, by then Muslim, though Gregory did not know; with peaceful Muslims he was on the best of terms), Gregory had no hesitation in rallying the west to go urgently their aid, in the enterprise which, after much ‘mission creep’, in later hands and in other circumstances, became known as the crusade.1 Gregory and his like-minded successors longed for complete unity with their eastern brethren, repeatedly, up to 1439 and beyond, oering them dotted lines to sign on, always with a sad outcome. ere were two dotted lines: one, hair’s-breadth dierences in Trinitarian doctrine comprehensible only to theologians, who discussed it endlessly;2 but the other, the ultimate sticking point, authority, which for Gregory VII lay nally with the bishop of Rome.
