A Brill Calendar: December 29

"Murder in the Cathedral"

Few elements of European civilizations during the second half of the Middle Ages were more fundamental for emanation than that of a peculiar awareness of justice - its theory and practice – affecting the complementary relationship between church and state, between earthly and heavenly matters, between civil and canon law.

Separating both worlds completely from one another would have been a sin of sacrilege in a world steeped in Christian belief. The duality – ‘sicut in coelo et in terra’: as in heaven so on earth – didn’t only deal with spiritual salvation, but as well with yielding power and exercising authority in all fields of jurisprudence. Small wonder then, that during the dawn of a new way of learning – an unprecedented one, even in classical antiquity, a thoroughly European novelty and idea, the University – study of both civil and canon law mirrored the one of theology.

The biography of Thomas à Becket (London, c. 1118 – Canterbury, December 29, 1170) provides dramatic evidence for this interdependence. This highly ambitious son of a Norman merchant studied not only at the City of London School to make his way in the world, but also in Paris and Bologna; it prepared him first for the coveted position as Chancellor of the realm of King Henry II; next for the highest ecclesiastic See of the British Isles as Archbishop of Canterbury; and finally for his death, butchered in his own cathedral by four knights of Henry’s court.

It is seldom that the scene of a crime became so quickly a holy shrine for all Europeans for so long (already well before Chaucer’s masterpiece and up to and including T. S. Eliot’s stage-play ‘Murder in the Cathedral’(1935)’; another token of appreciation for the conundrum posed by a bi-polar legal structure. When Leyden University was being founded, some four centuries after 1170, the duality still existed, albeit in a Christian world then beyond organizational and systemic unity.