well illustrated by an incident at the council of Tours, in 925,
where two priests, _father and son_, Ranald and Raymond, appeared as
complainants, claiming certain tithes detained from them by another
priest. They gained the suit, and the tithes were confirmed to them and
their successors forever.[326] Even more suggestive is the complaint,
some thirty years later, of Ratherius, Bishop of Verona, who objects
strenuously to the ordination of the children sprung from these
illegal marriages, as each successive father made his son a priest,
thus perpetuating the scandal indefinitely throughout the church;
and as he sorrowfully admits that his clergy could not be restrained
from marriage, he begs them at least to bring their children up as
laymen.[327] This, however, by his own showing, would not remove the
material evil, for in another treatise he states that his priests and
deacons divided the church property between them, that they might have
lands and vineyards wherewith to provide marriage portions for their
sons and daughters.[328] This system of appropriation also forms the
subject of lamentation for Atto, Bishop of Vercelli, whose clergy
insisted on publicly keeping concubines—as he stigmatizes those who
evidently were wives—to whom they left by will everything that they
could gather from the possessions of the church, from the alms of
the pious, or from any other source, to the ruin of ecclesiastical
property and to the deprivation of the poor.[329] How well founded were
these complaints is evident from a document of the eleventh century
concerning the churches of St. Stephen and St. Donatus in Aretino.
The priests in charge appropriated to themselves all the possessions
of the churches, including the revenues of the altars, the oblations,
and the confessional. These they portioned out among each other and
handed down from father to son as regularly as any other property,
selling and exchanging their shares as the interest of the moment might
suggest, and the successive transmission of each fragment of property
is detailed with all the precision of a brief of title. The natural
result was that for generations the religious services of Aretino were
utterly disregarded. Sometimes the priestly owners would hire some one
to ring the bells, light the candles, and minister to the altar, but
in the multitude of ownerships the stipends were irregularly paid,
and the officiator refused continually to serve, candles were not
furnished, bell-ropes were not renewed, and even the leathers which
attached the clappers to the bells were neglected. The church of St.
Stephen was the cathedral of Aretino, yet the bishops were powerless
to correct these abuses. The marriages of their priests they do not
seem to have even attempted to repress, and were quite satisfied if
they could occasionally get a portion of the revenues devoted to the
offices of religion.[330] The same condition of affairs existed among
the Anglo-Saxons. “It is all the worse when they have it all, for they
do not dispose of it as they ought, but decorate their wives with what
they should the altars, and turn everything to their own worldly pomp
... Let those who before this had the evil custom of decorating their
women as they should the altars, refrain from this evil custom, and
decorate their churches, as they best can; then would they command for
themselves both divine counsel and worldly worship. A priest’s wife is
nothing but a snare of the devil, and he who is ensnared thereby on to
his end, he will be seized fast by the devil.”[331]
It will be observed that, as the century advanced, sacerdotal marriage
became more and more common. Indeed, in 966, Ratherius not only
intimates that his clergy all were married, but declares that if the
canon prohibiting repeated marriages were put in force, only boys would
be left in the church, while even they would be ejected under the rule
which rendered ineligible the offspring of illicit unions;[332] and,
in spite of his earnest asceticism, he only ventures to prohibit his
clergy from conjugal intercourse during the periods likewise forbidden
to laymen, such as Advent, Christmas, Lent, etc.[333] It was not that
the ancient canons were forgotten,[334] nor that strenuous efforts were
not made to enforce them, but that the temper of the times created
a spirit of personal independence so complete that the power of the
ecclesiastical authorities seemed utterly inadequate to control the
growing license. About the year 938, Gerard, Archbishop of Lorsch
and Papal Legate for Southern Germany, laid before Leo VII. a series
of questions relating to various points in which the ancient canons
were set at naught throughout the region under his supervision. Leo
answered by a decretal addressed to all the princes and potentates
of Europe, in which he laments over Gerard’s statement of the public
marriages of priests, and replies to his inquiry as to the capacity of
their children for ecclesiastical promotion. The first he pronounces
forbidden by the canons, and those guilty of it he orders to be
deprived of their benefices. As for the offspring of such marriages,
however, he says that they are not involved in the sins of their
parents.[335]
The unusual liberality of this latter declaration, however, was not
a precedent. The church always endeavored to prevent the ordination
of the children of ecclesiastics, and Leo, in permitting it, was only
yielding to a pressure which he could not withstand. It was a most
dangerous concession, for it led directly to the establishment of the
hereditary principle. An effort was soon after made, by an appeal to
the temporal power, to recover the ground lost, and about the year 940
Otho the Great was induced to issue an edict prohibiting the sons of
deacons, priests, and bishops from occupying the positions of notary,
judge, or count[336]—the bare necessity of which shows how numerous and
powerful the class had already become.
* * * * *
Although, as early as 925, the council of Spalatro seemed to find
nothing to condemn in a single marriage, but threatened excommunication
against those who so far forgot themselves as to contract a
second,[337] and though by the middle of the century the practice had
become generally established, yet some rigid prelates continued to
keep alive the memory of the ancient canons by fruitless protests and
ineffectual efforts at reform. In 948, the synod of Engelheim, under
the presidency of Marino, Bishop of Ostia and Papal Vicar, condemned
such marriages as incestuous and unlawful.[338] In 952, at the council
of Augsburg, the assembled German and Italian prelates made a further
and more desperate effort. Deposition was pronounced against the
subdeacon, deacon, priest, or bishop who should take to himself a
wife; separation of those already married was ordered, and even the
lower grades of the clergy, who had not previously been subjected to
any such rule, were commanded to observe the strictest continence. An
attempt was also made to prevent concubinage by visiting suspected
women with stripes and shaving; but there evidently was some difficulty
anticipated in enforcing this, for the royal power is invoked to
prevent secular interference with the sentence.[339]
This stringent legislation of course proved utterly nugatory, but,
futile as it was, it yet awakened considerable opposition. St. Ulric,
in whose episcopal town of Augsburg the council was held, addressed
a long epistle to the Pope, remonstrating against his efforts to
enforce the rule of celibacy, and arguing the question, temperately
but forcibly, on the grounds both of scriptural authority and of
expediency. He pointed out how much more obnoxious to Divine wrath
were the promiscuous and nameless crimes indulged in by those who
were foremost in advocating the reform, than the chaste and single
marriages of the clergy; and the violent distortion of the sacred
texts, by those who sought authority to justify the canon, he not
unhappily characterized as straining the breast of Scripture until it
yielded blood in place of milk.[340]
Despite the inefficiency of these attempts, the clergy were not always
allowed to enjoy their unlawful domestic ties in peace, and, where
the votaries of asceticism were bold and determined, the contest was
sometimes severe. The nature of the struggle is well illustrated by the
troubles which arose between Ratherius of Verona and the ecclesiastics
of his diocese. In April, 967, John XIII. held a council at Ravenna
which commanded those who were in holy orders to give up at once
either their wives or their ministry, and Otho the Great was induced
to issue a precept confirming this peremptory decree. Ratherius had
long been vainly wishing for some authority on the subject more potent
than the ancient and now obsolete canons, and on his return from
Ravenna he summoned a synod for the purpose of promulgating the new
regulations. His clergy got wind of his intention; very few of them
obeyed the summons, and most of those who came boldly declared that
they would neither be separated from their wives nor abandon their
functions; in fact, they did not scruple to maintain that marriage was
not only permissible, but even necessary to protect the church from
the most hideous vices. The utmost concession he could obtain, indeed,
came from a few who endeavored to excuse themselves on the ground of
poverty, which did not enable them to live without the assistance of
their wives, and who professed to be willing to separate from them if
they could be assured of a regular stipend.[341] Ratherius had passed
through too many vicissitudes in his long and agitated career to shrink
from the collision, now that he was backed by both the papal and
imperial authority. He promptly threw the recalcitrant pastors into
prison, declaring that they should lie there until they paid a heavy
fine for the benefit of the cathedral of the Virgin, and he further
commanded the presence of those who had failed to appear. The clergy
of the diocese, finding that the resistance of inertia was unavailing,
took more decided steps, and appealed for protection to the temporal
power, in the person of Nanno, Count of Verona. He promptly espoused
their cause, and his _missus_ Gilbert forbade their obedience to the
summons of their bishop for a year. Ratherius remonstrated vehemently
against the assumption of Nanno that the priests were his vassals,
subject to his jurisdiction, and entitled to protection, and he lost
no time in invoking the power of Otho, in a letter to Ambrose, the
Imperial Chancellor.[342] The clergy were too powerful; the imperial
court decided against the bishop, and before the end of the year
Ratherius was forced to retire from the unequal contest and to take
refuge in the peaceful abbey of Lobbes, whence he had been withdrawn a
quarter of a century before to fill the see of Verona. Three times had
he thus been driven from that city, and an intermediate episcopate of
Liége, with which one of his periods of exile was gratified, had been
terminated in the same abrupt manner by the unruly clergy, unable to
endure the severity of his virtue.[343] How great was the revolution,
to the unavailing repression of which he sacrificed his life, is shown
by his declaration, two years before, that ecclesiastics differed from
laymen only in shaving and the tonsure, in some slight fashioning of
their garments, and in the careless performance of the church ritual.
The progress of sacerdotal marriage during the preceding quarter of a
century is shown by a similar comparison drawn by Ratherius some thirty
years before, in which matrimony is included among the few points of
difference, along with and the tonsure.[344]
That the Veronese clergy were not alone in obtaining from the secular
potentates protection against these efforts on the part of reforming
bishops, is evident from the lamentations of Atto of Vercelli. That
estimable prelate deplores the blindness of those who, when paternally
warned to mend their evil ways, refuse submission, and seek protection
from the nobles. If we may believe him, however, they gained but little
by this course, for their criminal lives placed them at the mercy of
the secular officials, whose threats to seize their wives and children
could only be averted by continual presents. Thus they not only
plundered the property of their churches, but forfeited the respect and
esteem of their flocks; all reverence for them was thereby destroyed,
and, living in perpetual dread of the punishment due to their excesses,
in place of commanding obedience, they were exposed to constant
oppression and petty tyranny.[345]
* * * * *
When prelates so sincere and so earnest as Ratherius and Atto were
able to accomplish so little, it is easy to understand what must have
been the condition of the dioceses intrusted to the great mass of
bishops, who were rather feudal nobles than Christian prelates. St.
Wolfgang of Ratisbon might issue thousands of exhortations to his
clergy, inculcating chastity as the one indispensable virtue, and
might laboriously reform his monasteries in which monks and nuns led
a life almost openly secular;[346] but he was well-nigh powerless for
good compared with the potentiality of evil conveyed by the example of
such a bishop as Segenfrid of Le Mans, who, during an episcopate which
lasted for thirty-three years, took to himself a wife named Hildeberga,
and who stripped the church for the benefit of his son Alberic, the
sole survivor of a numerous progeny by her whom he caused to be
reverenced as his _Episcopissa_;[347] or of Archembald, Archbishop
of Sens, who, taking a fancy to the Abbey of St. Peter, drove out the
monks and established a harem of concubines in the refectory, and
installed his hounds and hawks in the cloister.[348] Guarino of Modena
might hope to stem the tide of license by refusing preferment to all
who would not agree to hold their benefices on a sort of feudal tenure
of chastity;[349] but he had much less influence on his age than such a
man as Alberic of Marsico, whose story is related as a warning by Peter
Damiani. He was married (for, in the language of Damiani, “obscæna
meretricula” may safely be translated a wife), and had a son to whom
he transferred his bishopric, as though it had been an hereditary
fief. Growing tired of private life, however, he aspired to the abbacy
of Monte Casino. That humble foundation of St. Benedict had become a
formidable military power, of which its neighbors the Capuans stood in
constant dread. Alberic leagued with them, and a plot was laid by which
the reigning abbot’s eyes were to be plucked out and Alberic placed in
possession, for which service he agreed to pay a heavy sum, one-half
in advance, and the rest when the abbot’s eyes should be delivered to
him. The deed was accomplished, but while the envoys were bearing to
Alberic the bloody tokens of success, they were met by tidings of his
death, and on comparing notes they found that he had expired at the
very moment of the perpetration of the atrocious crime.[350]
So St. Abbo of Fleury might exhaust his eloquence in inculcating the
beauty and holiness of immaculate purity, and might pile authority
on authority to demonstrate the punishments which, in this world and
the next, attended on those who disobeyed the rule;[351] yet when he
endeavored, in the monastery of La Réole, a dependency on his own great
abbey of Fleury, to put his precepts into practice, the recalcitrant
monks flew to arms and murdered him in the most brutal manner, not
even sparing the faithful Adalard, who was reverently supporting the
head of his beloved and dying master.[352] Damiani might well exclaim,
when bewailing the unfortunate fate of abbots, on whom was thrown the
responsibility of the morals of their communities—
Phinees si imitatur,
Fugit vel expellitur;
Si Eli, tunc irridetur
Atque parvipenditur;
Odiosus est, si fervens,
Et vilis, si tepidus.[353]
How little disposed were the ecclesiastical authorities in general to
sustain the efforts of puritans like St. Abbo was clearly shown in the
council of St. Denis, convened in 995 for the purpose of restoring the
neglected discipline of the church, when, passing over the object of
its assembling, the reverend fathers devoted their whole attention to
the more practically interesting question of tithes.[354]
All prelates, however, were not either feudal chiefs or ascetic
puritans. Some, who were pious and virtuous, had so far become infected
with the prevailing laxity that they regarded the stricter canons
as obsolete, and offered no opposition to the domestic aspirations
of their clergy. Thus Constantine, Abbot of the great house of St.
Symphorian of Metz, in his life of Adalbero II., who was Bishop
of Metz from 984 to 1005, actually praises him for his liberality
in not refusing ordination to the sons of priests, and attributes
discreditable motives to those bishops who insisted on the observance
of the canons prohibiting all such promotions.[355] As Constantine
was a monk and a disciple of Adalbero, the tone which he adopts
that the higher prelates and the regular clergy were beginning to
recognize sacerdotal marriage as a necessity of the age. This view is
strengthened by the fact that no effort to reform an abuse so universal
was made at the great synod of Dortmund, held in 1005 for the special
purpose of restoring the discipline of the church.[356]
How completely, indeed, marriage came to be regarded as a matter of
course is manifest when, in 1019, an assembly of German bishops, with
the Emperor St. Henry at their head, gravely deliberated over the
knotty question whether, when a noble permitted his serf to enter into
holy orders, and the serf, presuming upon his new-born dignities and
the wealth of his benefices, married a free woman and endeavored to
withhold his children from the servitude which he still owed to his
master, such infraction of his master’s rights could be permitted out
of respect to his sacerdotal character. Long and vehement was the
argument among the learned prelates, until finally St. Henry decided
the point authoritatively by pronouncing in favor of the servitude of
the children.[357]
But perhaps the most instructive illustration of the character and
temper of the age may be found in the three prelates who for more than
a century filled the rich and powerful archiepiscopal see of Rouen.
Hugh, whose episcopate lasted from 942 to 989, was nominated at a
period when William Longsword, Duke of Normandy, was contemplating
retirement from the world to shroud his almost regal dignity under the
cowl of the monk, yet what little is known of his archbishop is that,
though he was a monk in habit, he was an habitual violator of the laws
of God[358]—in short, we may presume, a man well suited to the wild
half-pagan times which witnessed the assassination of Duke William
and the minority of Richard the Fearless. On his death, in 989, Duke
Richard, whose piety was incontestably proved by the liberality of his
monastic foundations and by his zeal for the purity of his monkish
protégés,[359] filled the vacant see with his son Robert, who held the
position until 1037. Robert was publicly and openly married, and by
his wife Herleva he had three sons, Richard, Rodolf, and William, to
whom he distributed his vast possessions. Ordericus, the conscientious
cenobite of the twelfth century, looks, in truth, somewhat askance
at this disregard of the rules accepted in his own time,[360] yet
no blame seems to have attached to Robert in the estimation of his
contemporaries. The family chronicler characterizes him as “Robert bons
clers, honestes hom,” and assures us that he was highly esteemed as a
wise and learned prelate
Li secunz fu genz e aperz
Et si fu apelez Roberz.
Clerc en firent, mult aprist bien,
Si fi sage sor tote rien;
De Roem out l’arcevesquié
Honoré fu mult e preisié.[361]
His successor, Mauger, son of Duke Richard II., and archbishop from
1037 to 1054, was worthy of his predecessors. Abandoned to worldly and
carnal pleasures, his _legitimate_ son Michael was a distinguished
knight, and half a century later stood high in the favor of Henry I. of
England, in whose court he was personally known to the historian.[362]
The times were changing, however, and Mauger felt the full effects of
reformatory zeal, for he was deposed in 1054; the see was bestowed on
St. Maurilio, a Norman, who as abbot of Santa Maria in Florence had
been driven out and nearly poisoned to death by his monks on account
of the severity of his rule, and the Norman clergy, as we shall see
hereafter, experienced their share of suffering in the mutation of
discipline.
* * * * *
Notwithstanding this all-pervading laxity, the canons of the church
remained unaltered, and their full force was theoretically admitted.
Hopeless efforts, moreover, were occasionally made to re-establish
them, as in the council of Anse in 990, which reminded the clergy that
intercourse with wives after ordination was punishable with forfeiture
of benefice and deprivation of priestly functions;[363] and in that
of Poitiers about the year 1000, which prohibited concubines under
pain of degradation.[364] In a similar spirit, a Penitential of the
period recapitulates the severe punishments of a former age, involving
degradation and fearfully long terms of penance.[365] All this,
however, was practically a dead letter. The person who best represents
the active intelligence of the age was Gerbert of Aurillac, the most
enlightened man of his time, who, after occupying the archiepiscopal
seats of Rheims and Ravenna, finally became pope under the name of
Silvester II. The lightness with which he treats the subject of
celibacy is therefore fairly a measure of the views entertained by the
ruling spirits of the church, beyond the narrow bounds of cloistered
asceticism. Gerbert, describing in a sermon the requisites of the
episcopal and sacerdotal offices, barely refers to the “unius uxoris
vir,” which he seems to regard in an allegorical rather than in a
literal sense; he scarcely alludes to chastity, while he dilates with
much energy on simony, which he truly characterizes as the almost
universal vice of his contemporaries.[366] So when, in 997, he convened
the council of Ravenna to regulate the discipline of his church,
he paid no attention whatever to incontinence, while strenuously
endeavoring to root out simony.[367] At an earlier period, while Abbot
of Bobbio, in an epistle to his patron, the Emperor Otho II., refuting
various calumnies of his enemies, he alludes to a report of his having
a wife and children in terms which show how little importance he
attached to the accusation.[368]
Such, at the opening of the eleventh century, was the condition of
the church as regards ascetic celibacy. Though the ancient canons
were still theoretically in force, they were practically obsolete
everywhere. Legitimate marriage or promiscuous profligacy was almost
universal, in some places unconcealed, in others covered with a thin
veil of hypocrisy, according as the temper of the ruling prelate might
be indulgent or severe. So far, therefore, Latin Christianity had
gained but little in its struggle of six centuries with human nature.
Whether the next eight hundred years will show a more favorable result
remains for us to develop.
Before proceeding, however, to discuss the events of the succeeding
century, it will be well to cast a rapid glance at a portion of
Christendom, the isolation of which has thus far precluded it from
receiving attention.
XI.
SAXON ENGLAND.
Whatever of virtue or purity may have distinguished the church of
Britain under Roman domination was speedily extinguished in the
confusion of the Saxon occupation. Gildas, who flourished in the
first half of the sixth century, describes the clergy of his time as
utterly corrupt.[369] He apparently would have been satisfied if the
bishops had followed the Apostolic precept and contented themselves
with being husbands of one wife; and he complains that instead of
bringing up their children in chastity, the latter were corrupted by
the evil example of their parents.[370] Under Saxon rule, Christianity
was probably well-nigh trampled out, except in the remoter mountain
districts, to be subsequently restored in its sacerdotal form under the
direct auspices of Rome.