BEFORE 1054: CENTERS AND PERIPHERIES, UNIVERSALITY AND PARTICULARITY IN THE CHURCH LAW AT THE TIME OF ST. SIMEON OF SYRACUSE/TRIER († 1035)

Abstract

St. Symeon was a Byzantine monk of Sicilian origin who ended his life in Trier, where his memory is venerated since the year of his death (1035). The story of his life shows the intensity of the communication processes between the Latin Church and the Byzantine Church in the early 11th century, and is taken as the starting point of a study on the shaping of the legal system of the Latin Church between the end of the first Millennium and the first decades of the second. The research therefore focuses attention on the institutional experience of the «imperial Church», articulated around the two poles of the empire and the papacy. The ecclesiological and political ideal of collaboration between civil and ecclesiastical power found expression in the initiatives of Church reform promoted by emperors such as Henry II and Henry III and supported by some of the best popes of the first half of the 11th century. Some canonical collections engaged in the effort to select and coordinate the sources of canon law in order to satisfy the purposes of reform of the Church life.