attributes to the Council of Nicæa the introduction of celibacy, seems
inclined to justify the change assumed to have been then made, by
alluding to the forged donation of Constantine. That the temporalities
of the church could only be entrusted to men cut off from family ties
was an axiom in his day, and though he does not himself draw the
conclusion, he clearly regarded the supposed accession to the landed
estates of the church as a satisfactory explanation of the prohibition
of marriage to its ministers in the fourth century.[23] Shortly
afterwards, Pius II., one of the most learned of the popes, had no
scruple in admitting that the primitive church was administered by a
married clergy.[24] Just before the Reformation, Geoffroi Boussard,
dean of the faculty of theology of Paris, published, in 1505, a
dissertation on priestly continence, in which he positively assumes,
as the basis of his argument, that the use of marriage was universally
permitted to those in holy orders, from the time of Christ to that of
Siricius and Innocent I.; and this may be assumed to be the opinion
of the University of Paris, for Boussard formally submitted his tract
to that body, and its approbation is to be found in the fact that he
was subsequently elevated to its chancellorship, and was sent as its
delegate to the Council of Pisa.[25]
Even after the Reformation, unexceptionable orthodox authority is
found to the same effect. In 1564, Pius IV. admitted it in an epistle
to the German princes, and explained it by the necessity of the
times.[26] Zaccaria, probably the most learned of Catholic polemics
on the subject, endeavors to reconcile his belief in the Apostolic
origin of clerical celibacy with the indubitable practice of the
primitive church, by suggesting that while the Apostles commanded the
observance of the rule by the clergy in general, yet in special cases
they discreetly dispensed with it to avoid greater scandals; and that
with the gradual increase of these dispensations the clergy came at
length to assume the indulgence as a matter of course without asking
for special licenses.[27] More logical is the argument brought forward
by a priest named Taillard, resisting in 1842 some efforts made to
introduce priestly marriage in Prussian Poland. He coolly reasons that
if celibacy was not enforced in the primitive church, it ought to have
been—“if the celibacy of the priesthood be not from the beginning of
Christianity, it ought to have been there, for, as our holy religion
comes from God, it should contain in itself all the means possible to
elevate the nations to the highest point of liberty and happiness.”[28]
II.
THE ANTE-NICENE CHURCH.
Although no thought existed in the mind of Paul, and of his co-laborers
in founding the church of the Gentiles, of prohibiting to his disciples
the institution of marriage, there was a distinct flavor of asceticism
in some of his teachings, which might readily serve as a warrant to
those whose zeal was greater than their discretion, to mortify the
flesh in this as in other ways. The Apostle, while admitting that the
Lord had forbidden the separation of husband and wife, said of the
unmarried and widowers:
“It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot
contain let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn.”
And though in one passage he seems to indicate a belief that woman
could only be saved by maternity from the punishment incurred by
the disobedience of Eve, in another he formally declares that “he
that giveth her in marriage doeth well; but he that giveth her not
in marriage doeth better,” thus showing a marked preference for the
celibate state, in which the devout could give themselves up wholly to
the service of the Lord.[29]
The Apostle’s discussion of these subjects shows that already there
had commenced a strong ascetic movement, raising questions which he
found hard to answer, without on the one hand repressing the ardor of
serviceable disciples, and on the other, imposing burdens on neophytes
too grievous to be borne. He foresaw that the former would soon run
beyond the bounds of reason, and he condemned in advance the heresies
which should forbid marriage;[30] but that the tendency of the faithful
lay in that direction was inevitable. In those times, no one would
join the infant church who did not regard the things of earth as
vile in comparison with the priceless treasures of heaven, and the
more fervent the conviction, the more it was apt to find expression
in mortifying the flesh and purchasing salvation by the sacrifice of
passions and affections. Such especially would be the tendency of the
stronger natures which lead their fellows; and the admiration of the
multitude for their superior virtue and fortitude would soon invest
them with a reputation for holiness which would render them doubly
influential.
There was much, indeed, in the teaching of the church, and in its
relations with the Gentiles, to promote and strengthen this tendency.
The world into which Christianity was born was hopelessly corrupt.
Licentiousness, probably, has never been more defiant than amid
the splendors of the early Empire. The gossip of Suetonius and the
denunciations of Juvenal depict a society in which purity was scarce
understood, and in which unchastity was no sin and hardly even a
reproach. To reclaim such a population needed a new system of morality,
and it is observable that in the New Testament particular stress is
laid upon the avoidance of fornication, especially after the faith had
begun to spread beyond the boundaries of Judea. The early Christians
thus were a thoroughly puritan sect, teaching by example as well as by
precept, and their lives were a perpetual protest against the license
which reigned around them.[31] It therefore was natural that converts,
after their eyes were opened to the hideous nature of the prevailing
vices, should feel a tendency to plunge into the other extreme, and
should come to regard even the lawful indulgence of human instincts as
a weakness to be repressed. Civilization, indeed, owes too much to the
reform which Christianity rendered possible in the relations of the
sexes, for us to condemn too severely even the extravagances into which
it was sometimes betrayed.
That it was becoming not uncommon for Christians to follow a celibate
life is shown by various passages in the early fathers. St. Ignatius
alludes to abstinence from marriage in honor of God as a matter not
uncommon, but which was wholly voluntary and to be practised in
humility and secrecy, for the virtue of continence would be much more
than counterbalanced by the sin of pride.[32] The Apologists, Justin
Martyr about the year 150, Athenagoras about 180, and Minucius Felix
about 200, all refer to the chastity and sobriety which characterized
the sect, the celibacy practised by some members, and the single
marriage of others, of which the sole object was the securing of
offspring and not the gratification of the passions. Athenagoras,
indeed, condemns the exaggerations of asceticism in terms which show
that already they had made their appearance among the more ardent
disciples, but that they were strongly disapproved by the wiser portion
of the Church. Origen seems to regard celibacy as rather springing
from a desire to serve God without the interruptions arising from
the cares of marriage than from asceticism, and does not hesitate
to condemn those who abandoned their wives even from the highest
motives.[33] The impulse towards asceticism, however, was too strong
to be resisted. Zealots were not wanting who boldly declared that to
follow the precepts of the Creator was incompatible with salvation,
as though a beneficent God should create a species which could only
preserve its temporal existence by forfeiting its promised eternity.
Ambitious men were to be found who sought notoriety or power by the
reputation to be gained from self-denying austerities, which brought to
them followers and believers venerating them as prophets. Philosophers
were there, also, who, wearied with the endless speculations of
Pythagorean and Platonic mysticism, sought relief in the practical
morality of the Gospel, and perverted the simplicity of its teachings
by interweaving with it the subtle philosophy of the schools, producing
an apparent intoxication which plunged them either into the grossest
sensuality or the most rigorous asceticism. Such were Julian Cassianus,
Saturnilus, Marcion, the founder of the Marcionites, Tatianus, the
heresiarch of the Encratitians, and the unknown authors of a crowd of
sects which, under the names of Abstinentes, Apotactici, Excalceati,
etc., practised various forms of self-mortification, and denounced
marriage as a deadly sin.[34] Such, on the other hand, were Valentinus
and Prodicus who originated the mystic libertinism of the Gnostics;
Marcus, whose followers, the Marcosians, were accused of advocating
the most disgusting practices, Carpocrates who held that the soul was
obliged to have experience of all manner of evil before it could be
elevated to God; Basilides whose sectaries honored the passions as
emanating from the Creator, and taught that their impulses were to be
followed. Even the Ebionites did not escape the taint, if Epiphanius
is to be believed; and there was also a sect advocating promiscuous
intercourse, to whom the name of Nicolites was given in memory of the
story of Nicholas, the deacon of the primitive church, who offered
to his fellow-disciples the wife whom he was accused of loving with
too exclusive a devotion—a sect which merited the reproof of St.
John, and which has a special interest for us because in the eleventh
century all who opposed clerical celibacy were branded with its name,
thus affording to the sacerdotal party the inestimable advantage of
stigmatizing their antagonists with an opprobrious epithet of the most
damaging character, and of invoking the authority of the Apocalypse for
their destruction.[35]
The church was too pure to be led astray by the libertinism of the
latter class of heresiarchs. The time had not yet come for the former,
and men who, in the thirteenth century, might perhaps have founded
powerful orders, and have been reverenced by the Christian world as new
incarnations of Christ, were, through their anachronism, stigmatized
as heretics, and expelled from the communion of the faithful. Still,
their religious fervor and rigorous virtue had a gradually increasing
influence in stimulating the development of the ascetic principle,
if not in the acknowledged dogmas, at all events, in the practice
of the church, as may be seen when, towards the close of the second
century, Dionysius of Corinth finds himself obliged to reprove Pinytus,
Bishop of Gnosus, for endeavoring to render celibacy compulsory among
his flock, to the manifest danger of those whose virtue was less
austere.[36] In all this, unquestionably, the ascetic ideas of the
East had much to do, and these were chiefly represented by Buddhism,
which, since the reign of Asoka, in the third century B.C., had been
the dominant religion of India. A curious allusion in St. Jerome to
Buddha’s having been born of a virgin,[37] shows a familiarity with
details of Buddhist belief which presupposes a general knowledge of
that faith; and though the divinized Maya, wife of Suddhodana, is not
absolutely described as a virgin in eastern tradition, yet she and
her husband had taken a vow of continence before Buddha, from the
Tushita heaven, to fulfil his predestined salvation of mankind and
establishment of the kingdom of righteousness, had selected her as
the vehicle of his incarnation. Much in the legend of his birth, of
the miracles which attended it, of his encounter with the Tempter,
and other details of his life, is curiously suggestive of the source
whence sprang the corresponding legend of the life of Christ, more
particularly as related in the pseudo-gospels.[38] Not only this, but
many of the observances of Latin Christianity can scarce be explained
save by derivation from Buddhism, such as monasticism, the tonsure,
the use of rosaries, confession, penance, and absolution, the sign of
the cross, relic-worship, and miracles wrought by relics, the purchase
of salvation by gifts to the church, pilgrimages to sacred places,
etc. etc. Even the nimbus which in sacred art surrounds the head of
holy personages, is to be found in the sculptures of the Buddhist
Topes, and the Sangreal, or Holy Cup of the Last Supper, which was the
object of lifelong quest by the Christian knight, is but the Patra
or begging-dish of Buddha, which was the subject of many curious
legends.[39] It is no wonder that when the good Jesuit missionaries
of the sixteenth century found among the heathen of Asia so much of
what they were familiar with at home, they could not decide whether
it was the remains of a preëxisting Catholicism, or whether Satan, to
damn irrevocably the souls of men, had parodied and travestied the
sacred mysteries and ceremonies, and introduced them in those distant
regions.[40] We are therefore safe in ascribing to Buddhist beliefs
at least a portion of the influence which led the church into the
extravagances of asceticism.
The first official manifestation of this growing tendency, applied
to the relations of the sexes, is to be seen in the legislation with
regard to second marriages. In the passages alluded to above from
Athenagoras and Minucius Felix, the fact is referred to that second
marriages were already regarded as little better than adulterous, while
Justin Martyr denounces them as sinful, in spite of the permission so
freely granted by St. Paul for such unions.[41] Though this opinion
was branded by the church as heretical when it was elevated into an
article of belief by the Montanists and Cathari, or Puritans, and
though even the eminence and piety of Tertullian could not save him
from excommunication when he embraced the doctrine, yet the orthodox
came very near accepting it, for the Council of Neocæsarea, in 314,
forbade priests from honoring with their presence the festivities
customary on such occasions, as those who married a second time were
subject to penance, and that of Laodicea, in 352, deemed it a matter
of indulgence to admit to communion those who contracted such unions,
after they had redeemed their fault by fasting and prayer for a certain
time—a principle repeated by innumerable councils during the succeeding
centuries. So far did this prejudice extend that as late as 484 we
find the Pope, St. Gelasius, obliged to remind the faithful that such
marriages are not to be refused to laymen.[42] It is by no means
impossible that this opposition to repeated wedlock may have arisen, or
perhaps have been intensified, by a similar feeling which existed among
the Pagans, at least with regard to the second marriages of women.
Moreover, in Rome the Flamen Dialis was restricted to a single marriage
with a virgin, and such was the strictness with which this was observed
that as the assistance of the Flaminica, his wife, was necessary to
the performance of some religious rites, he was obliged to resign when
left a widower.[43]
Although the church forbore to prohibit absolutely the repetition
of matrimony among the laity, it yet, at an early though uncertain
period, imitated the rule enforced on the Flamen Dialis, and rendered
it obligatory on the priesthood, thus for the first time drawing a
distinct line of separation between the great body of the faithful and
those who officiated as ministers of Christ. It thus became firmly and
irrevocably established that no “digamus” or husband of a second wife
was admissible to holy orders. As early as the time of Tertullian we
find the rule formally expressed by him, and he even assures us that
the whole structure of the church was based upon the single marriages
of its ministers. Indeed, the holy rites came to be regarded as so
entirely incompatible with repetition of wedlock that the Council of
Elvira, in 305, while admitting that in cases of extreme necessity a
layman might administer baptism, is careful to specify that he must not
be a “digamus.”[44]
Yet this restriction on the priesthood was not easily enforced,
and already we begin to hear the complaints, which have followed
uninterruptedly for more than fifteen hundred years, of the evasion
or disregard of the regulations whereby the church has sought to
repress the irrepressible instincts of humanity. In the early part of
the third century Hippolytus, Bishop of Portus, in his enumeration
of the evil ways of Pope Calixtus, taxes the pontiff with admitting
to the priesthood men who had been married twice, and even thrice,
and with permitting priests to marry while in orders. Even the great
apostle of celibacy, St. Jerome, expresses surprise that Oceanus should
object to Carterius, a Spanish bishop, on the ground that he had had a
wife before baptism, and a second one after admission to the church.
The world, he adds, is full of such prelates, not only in the lower
orders but in the episcopate, the digamous members of which exceed in
number the three hundred prelates lately assembled at the Council of
Rimini. Yet this was the formal rule of the church as enunciated in
the Apostolic Constitutions and Canons—bodies of ecclesiastical law
not included, indeed, in the canon of Scripture, but yet so venerable
that their origin was already lost sight of, and they were everywhere
received as authoritative expositions of primitive discipline.[45]
The introduction of this entering-wedge is easily explicable. St.
Paul had specified the monogamic condition—“unius uxoris vir”—as a
prerequisite to the diaconate, priesthood, and episcopate, and the
temper of the times was such as to lead irresistibly to this being
taken in its literal sense, rather than to adopt the more rational view
that it was intended to exclude those among the Gentiles who indulged
in the prevalent vice of concubinage, or who among the Jews had fallen
into the sin of polygamy—or those among either race who had taken
advantage, either before or after conversion, of the disgraceful laxity
prevalent with regard to divorces, for, as we learn from Origen, the
rule was by no means obeyed which forbade a divorced person to marry
during the lifetime of the other spouse.[46]
When once this principle was fairly established, and when at the same
time the efforts of the Montanists to render it binding on the whole
body of Christian believers had failed, a distinction was enforced
between the clergy and the laity, as regards the marriage-tie, which
gave to the former an affectation of sanctity, and which was readily
capable of indefinite expansion. It is therefore easy to comprehend
the revival, which shortly followed, of the old Levitical rule
requiring the priesthood to marry none but virgins—a rule which was
early adopted, though it took long to establish it in practice, for
as late as 414 we find Innocent I. complaining that men who had taken
widows to wife were even elevated to the episcopate, and Leo I. devoted
several of his epistles to its enforcement.[47] A corollary to this
speedily followed, which required a priest whose wife was guilty of
adultery to put her away, since further commerce with her rendered him
unfit for the functions of his office; and this again, as subsequent
authorities were careful to point out, afforded a powerful reason for
requiring absolute celibacy on the part of the clergy, for, in view of
the fragility of the sex, no man could feel assured that he was not
subject to this disability, nor could the faithful be certain that
his ministrations were not tainted with irregularity.[48] We thus
reach the state of ecclesiastical discipline at the close of the third
century, as authoritatively set forth in the Apostolical Constitutions
and Canons—bishops and priests allowed to retain the wives which they
may have had before ordination, but not to marry in orders; the lower
grades, deacons, subdeacons, etc., allowed to marry after entering
the church; but all were to be husbands of but one wife, who must be
neither a widow, a divorced woman, nor a concubine.[49]
Meanwhile, public opinion had moved faster than the canons. Ascetic
sects multiplied and increased, and the highest authorities in the
church could not always resist the contagion. A fresh incitement,
indeed, had been found in the neo-platonic philosophy which arose in
the beginning of the third century. Ammonius Saccas, its founder, was
a Christian, though not altogether orthodox, and his two most noted
disciples, Origen and Plotinus, fairly illustrate the influence which
his doctrines had upon both the Christian and the Pagan world. As to
the latter, neo-platonism borrowed from Christian and Indian as well
as Greek philosophy, evolving out of them all a system of elevated
mysticism in which the senses and the appetites were to be controlled
as severely almost as in the Sankhya and Buddhist schools. Commerce
between the sexes was denounced as a pollution degrading to the soul,
and the best offering which a worshipper could bring to the Deity
was a soul absolutely free from all trace of passion.[50] Although
neo-platonism engaged in a hopeless struggle to stay the advancing
tide of Christianity, and thus became its most active opponent, yet the
lofty asceticism which it inculcated could not be without influence
upon its antagonists, were it only through inflaming the emulation of
those who were already predisposed to regard the mortification of the
flesh as a means of raising the soul to communion with God.[51]
How these motives worked upon an ardent and uncompromising temperament
is seen in the self-sacrifice of Origen, showing how absorbing was
the struggle, and how intense was the conviction that nature must be
conquered at all hazards and by any practicable means, although he
himself afterwards condemned this practical rendering of the text
(_Matt. xix. 12_) on which it was founded. Origen was by no means the
first who had sought in this way to gain the kingdom of heaven, for
he alludes to it as a matter by no means unexampled, and before him
Justin Martyr had chronicled with approbation a similar case. In fact,
there is said to have been an obscene sect which under the name of
Valesians followed the practice and procured proselytes by inflicting
forcible mutilation upon all who were unhappy enough to fall into their
hands; and though their date and locality are unknown to those who
allude to them, it would be rash, in view of similar eccentricities
existing in more modern times, to pronounce them wholly apocryphal.
The repeated prohibitions of the practice, in the canons of the
succeeding century, show how difficult it was to eradicate the belief
that such self-immolation was an acceptable offering to a beneficent
Creator. Sextus Philosophus, an ascetic author of the third century,
whose writings long passed current under the name of Pope Sixtus II.,
did not hesitate openly to advocate it, and though his arguments were
regarded as heretical by the church, they were at least as logical as
the practical application given to the texts commonly cited in defence
of the prohibition of marriage.[52]