excommunication, that no priest who openly took a concubine (or
rather a wife), or who did not forthwith separate himself from such
a connection already existing, should dare to perform any sacred
function, or enjoy any portion of ecclesiastical revenue.[477]
Hildebrand, who was all-powerful at the papal court—his enemies accused
him of keeping Nicholas like an ass in the stable, feeding him to do
his work—has the credit of procuring this legislation.[478] Nicholas,
whether acting under the impulsion of Hildebrand and Damiani, or from
his own convictions, followed up the reform with vigor. During the same
year he visited Southern Italy, and by his decided proceedings at the
council of Melfi endeavored to put an end to the sacerdotal marriages
which were openly practised everywhere throughout that region, and the
Bishop of Trani was deposed as an example and warning to others.[479]
Damiani was also intrusted with a mission to Milan for the same
purpose, of which more anon.
Nor did Nicholas confine his efforts to Italy. His legates in other
countries endeavored to enforce the canons, and apparently had little
difficulty in obtaining the adoption of stringent regulations—the more
easily acceded to that they were utterly disregarded. Thus his legate
Stephen, early in 1060, held councils at Vienne and Tours, where the
prohibitions of the synod of Rome were agreed to, and those who did not
at once abandon either their women or their benefices were declared to
be degraded forever, without hope of restitution.[480]
In practice, however, all these measures of reform were scarcely felt
except by the lower grades of the ecclesiastical body. The prelates,
whose lives were equally flagitious, and far more damaging to the
reputation and purity of the church, were enabled virtually to escape.
The storm passed beneath them, and with few exceptions persecuted only
those who were powerless to oppose anything but passive resistance.
The uncompromising zeal of Damiani was not likely to let a temporizing
lenity so misplaced and so fatal to the success of the cause remain
unrebuked; and he calls to it the attention of Nicholas, stigmatizing
the toleration of episcopal sins as an absurdity no longer to be
endured.[481] The occasion of this exhortation was a commission
intrusted by the pope to Damiani, to hold a friendly conference with
the prelates, and to induce them to reform their evil ways without
forcing the authorities to the scandal of public proceedings. The fear
of such results and the fiery eloquence of Damiani were alike unheeded.
The bishops confessed themselves unequal to the task of preserving
their chastity, and indifferent to the remote contingency of punishment
which had so often been ineffectually threatened that its capacity for
exciting apprehension had become exhausted. With all the coarseness of
monastic asceticism, Damiani describes the extent of the evil, and its
public and unblushing exhibition; the families which grew and increased
around the prelates, the relationships which were ostentatiously
acknowledged, and the scandals perpetrated in the church of God. In the
boldest strain he then incites the pope to action, blames his misplaced
clemency, and urges the degradation of all offenders, irrespective of
rank, pointing out the impossibility of reforming the priesthood if
the bishops are allowed full and undisturbed license.[482]
This shows that even if the machinery of ecclesiastical authority was
at work to correct the errors of the plebeian clergy, it was only
local and sporadic in its efforts. In some favored dioceses, perhaps,
blessed with a puritan bishop, the decrees of the innumerable councils
may have been put in force, but in the great body of the church the
evil remained unaltered. During this very year, 1060, Nicholas again
found it necessary to promulgate a decretal ordering priests to quit
their wives or resign their position, and this in terms which prove how
utterly futile had been all previous fulminations. He also manifested
some consideration for temporal necessities by allowing the discarded
wives to live with their husbands under proper supervision.[483]
How complete was the disregard of these commands is well illustrated
by an epistle which about this time Damiani addressed to the chaplains
of Godfrey the Bearded, Duke of Tuscany. From this we learn that
these prominent ecclesiastics openly defended sacerdotal marriage,
pronounced it canonical, and were ready to sustain their position in
controversy.[484] As Duke Godfrey, with the pious Beatrice his wife,
was the leading potentate in Italy, and as his territories were in
close proximity to Rome itself, it is evident that the reform so
laboriously prosecuted for the previous ten or fifteen years had thus
far accomplished little.
* * * * *
Parties were now beginning to define themselves. The reformers,
irritated by their want of success, were for more stringent measures,
and when the canonical punishments of degradation and excommunication
were derided and defied, they were ready, as we shall see hereafter
at Milan, to have recourse to the secular arm, and to invoke the aid
of sword and lance. The clergy, finding that passive resistance did
not wear out the zeal of their persecutors, that the storm promised to
be endless, and warned by the fate of the Milanese, were prepared to
adopt an aggressive policy, and to seek their safety in revolutionizing
the central authority. Perhaps the bishops, whose silence had been
secured by the toleration so distasteful to Damiani, began to feel the
pressure which he was bringing to bear upon them, and to look forward
with apprehension to the unknown evils of the future. If so, they
were ready to make common cause with their flocks, and throw into the
scale the immense influence due to their sacred character and temporal
power. Thus only the occasion was wanting for an open rupture, and that
occasion was furnished by the death of Nicholas in July, 1061.
* * * * *
The factions of the day had alienated a powerful portion of the Roman
barons from the papal party as represented by Hildebrand. They at
once united with the Lombard clergy in addressing a deputation to the
young Henry IV., who was still under the tutelage of his mother Agnes,
offering him a golden crown and the title of Patrician. The empire was
not indisposed to vindicate its old prerogatives, recently annulled by
the initial act of Nicholas limiting the right of papal election to the
Roman clergy. The overtures were therefore welcomed, and while Anselmo,
Bishop of Lucca, was chosen in Rome, October 1st, 1061, assuming the
name of Alexander II., on the 28th of the same month a rival election
took place in Germany, by which Cadalus, Bishop of Parma, was invested
with the perilous dignity of Antipope, and divided the allegiance
of Christendom under the title of Honorius II. At least two Italian
bishops lent their suffrages to these proceedings—those of Vercelli
and Piacenza—as representatives of the Lombard interest; and, if the
testimony of Damiani is to be believed, they were men whose dissolute
lives fitly represented the license which the reformers asserted to be
the principal object of the schismatics.[485]
The married or concubinary clergy were now no longer merely isolated
criminals, to be punished more or less severely for infractions
of discipline. They were a united body, who boldly proclaimed the
correctness of their course, and defended themselves by argument as
well as by political intrigues and military operations. They thus
became offenders of a far deeper dye, for the principles of the church
led irrevocably to the conclusion, paradoxical as it may seem, that
he who was guilty of immorality, knowing it to be wrong, was far
less criminal than he who married, believing it to be right.[486]
What before had been a transgression, to be redeemed by penance and
repentance, became heresy—an awful word in those fierce times. The
odious name of Nicolites was speedily fastened on the schismatics,
and the Apocalyptic denunciations of St. John were universally held
applicable to them. According to Damiani, they supported Cadalus in
the expectation that his success would lead to a modification in the
discipline of the church, by which the license to marry would be
accorded to all ecclesiastics.[487]
That support was efficient, and it was shortly needed. A revolution
suddenly occurred in the politics of Germany. Some dissatisfied nobles
and prelates conspired to obtain power by overthrowing the regency of
the dowager Empress Agnes. A stroke of daring treachery put them in
possession of the person of the boy-king, and the arch-conspirator
Hanno of Cologne earned his canonization by reversing at once the
policy of the previous administration. In a solemn council held
at Osber in 1062, the pretensions of Cadalus were repudiated, and
Alexander II. was recognized as pope. Still Cadalus did not despair,
but with the aid of the Lombard clergy he raised forces and marched on
Rome, relying on his adherents within the walls. They admitted him into
the Leonine city, where he threw himself into the impregnable castle
of San Angelo. Immediately besieged by the Romans, he resolutely held
out for two years, in spite of incredible privations, but at length
he sought safety in flight with but a single follower. Meanwhile his
party, as a political body, had become broken up, and though Henry,
Archbishop of Ravenna, still adhered to him, he was powerless to
maintain his claims. Finally, in 1067, Alexander held a council
at Mantua, cleared his election of imputed irregularity, and was
universally recognized.
During this period, the “Nicolitan” clergy by no means abandoned their
tenets. In 1063, as soon as he could feel reasonably assured of his
eventual success, Alexander assembled more than a hundred bishops in
council at Rome, where he emphatically repeated the canon promulgated
in 1059 by Nicholas II., which was not only a proclamation of his
fidelity to the cause of reform, but an admission that the legislation
of his predecessor had thus far proved fruitless. Damiani, also,
labored unceasingly with argument and exhortation, but the vehemence
of his declamation only shows how widely extended and how powerful the
heresy still was. We shall see hereafter that on a mission to Milan,
to reduce the married clergy to obedience, he barely escaped with his
life; and on another to Lodi, with the same object, the schismatics,
after exhausting argument, in support of priestly marriage, threatened
him with arms in their hands, and again his saintly dignity came near
being enhanced by the honors of martyrdom.[488] Even the restriction
upon second marriages was occasionally lost sight of, and such most
irregular unions were celebrated with all the ceremony and rejoicings
that were customary among laymen in their public nuptials.[489] Yet,
notwithstanding the pious fervor which habitually stigmatized the wives
as harlots and the husbands as unbridled adulterers, Damiani himself
allows us to see that the marriage relation was preserved with thorough
fidelity on the part of the women, and was compatible with learning,
decency, and strict attention to religious duty by the men. Urging the
wives to quit their husbands, he finds it necessary to combat their
scruples at breaking what was to them a solemn engagement, fortified
with all legal provisions and religious rites, but which he pronounces
a frivolous and meaningless ceremony.[490] So, in deploring the
habitual practice of marriage among the Piedmontese clergy, he regards
it as the only blot upon men who otherwise appeared to him as a chorus
of angels, and as shining lights in the church.[491]
Such considerations as these, however, had no influence in diminishing
Damiani’s zeal. To Cunibert, Bishop of Turin, whose spiritual flock he
thus so much admired, he addressed, about 1065, an epistle reproaching
him with his criminal laxity in permitting such transgressions in his
diocese, and urging him strenuously to undertake the reform which was
so necessary to the purity of the church.[492] Cunibert apparently
did not respond to the exhortation, for Damiani proceeded to appeal
to the temporal sovereign of Savoy and Piedmont, Adelaide, widow of
Humbert-aux-Blanches-Mains, who was then regent. In an elaborate
epistle he urges her to attack the wives, while her bishops shall
coerce the husbands; but if the latter neglect that duty, he invites
her to interpose with the secular power, and thus avert from her house
and her country the Divine wrath which must else overtake them.[493]
That so strict a churchman as Damiani should not only tolerate but
advise the exercise of temporal authority over ecclesiastics, and this,
too, in a matter purely ecclesiastical, shows how completely the one
idea had become dominant in his mind, since he was willing to sacrifice
to it the privileges and immunities for which the church had been
struggling, by fair means and foul, for six centuries. It would appear,
moreover, that this was not the first time that potentates had been
allowed, or had assumed, to exercise power in the matter, for Damiani
cautions the Countess Adelaide not to follow the example of some
evil-minded magnates and make the pretence of reformation an excuse for
spoiling the church.[494]
The zeal of the indefatigable Damiani continued to be as unconquerable
as the stubbornness of his adversaries, and some two years later we
find him again at work. The date of 1067 is generally attributed to a
letter which he addressed to Peter, Cardinal Archpriest of the Lateran,
stimulating him to renewed exertions in extirpating this foul disgrace
to the church, and arguing at great length in reply to the reasons and
excuses with which the clerical Benedicks continued to defend their
vile heresy.[495]
In all this controversy, it is instructive to observe how Damiani
shows himself to be the pure model of monkish asceticism, untainted
with any practical wisdom and unwarped by any earthly considerations.
When Hildebrand struggled for sacerdotal celibacy, the shrewdness of
the serpent guided the innocence of the dove, and he fought for what
he knew would prove a weapon of tremendous power in securing for the
church the theocracy which was his pure ideal of human institutions.
Not a thought of the worldly advantages consequent upon the reform
appears to have crossed the mind of Damiani. To him it was simply a
matter of conscience that the ministers of Christ should be adorned
with the austere purity through which alone lay the path to salvation.
Accordingly the arguments which he employs in his endless disputations
carefully avoid the practical reasons which were the principal motive
for enforcing celibacy. His main reliance is on the assumption that, as
Christ was born of a virgin, so he should be served and the Eucharist
be handled only by virgins; and his subsidiary logic consists of
mystical interpretations of passages in the Jewish history of the Old
Testament. Phineas, of course, affords a favorite and oft-repeated
argument and illustration. Allusions to Ahimelech can also be
understood, but the reasoning based upon the tower of Sichem, the linen
girdle of Jeremiah, and the catastrophe of Cain and Abel is convincing
only as to the unworldliness of the recluse of Avellana.
Notwithstanding all his learning and eloquence, the authority of
his name, the lustre of his example, and the tireless efforts of
his fiery energy, the cause to which he had devoted himself did not
advance. The later years of Alexander’s pontificate afford unmistakable
indications that the puritan party were becoming discouraged; that
they were disposed to abate some of their demands, and were ready to
make concessions to the refractory spirit which refused obedience
in both principle and practice. Thus, in 1068, a decretal addressed
to the authorities of Dalmatia merely threatens suspension until
satisfaction is made by those who marry in orders or who refuse to
abandon their wives.[496] A somewhat different position was taken
with the Venetians. An epistle to the Patriarch of Grado orders the
deprivation of those who live in open and undisguised concubinage,
but significantly confines its penalties to notorious infractions
of the rule, and leaves to God the investigation of such as may be
prudently concealed.[497] This manifests a willingness to temporize
with offenders whose respect for papal authority would induce them to
abstain from defiant disobedience—a pusillanimous tempting of hypocrisy
to which the bolder Hildebrand could never have given his consent. A
principle of great importance, moreover, was abandoned when, in 1070,
Alexander assented to the consecration of the bishop-elect of Le Mans,
who was the son of a priest;[498] and when he stated that this was not
a precedent for the future, but merely a concession to the evil of the
times, his laxity was the more impressive, since he thus admitted his
violation of the canons. He subsequently even enlarged this special
permission into a general rule, with merely the saving clause that the
proposed incumbent should be more worthy than his competitors.[499]
Alexander, moreover, maintained in force the ancient rule that no
married man could assume monastic vows unless his wife gave her free
consent, and entered a convent at the same time.[500] We shall see
that in little more than half a century the progress of sacerdotalism
rendered the sacrament of marriage powerless in comparison with the
vows of religion.
Alexander clearly had not in him the stuff of which persecutors and
reformers are made, as, indeed, his merciful liberality in extending
over the Jews throughout Europe the protection of the Holy See
would sufficiently demonstrate. At length he, too, was released from
earthly cares, and on the day after his decease, on April 22, 1073,
his place was filled by the man who of all others was the most perfect
impersonation of the aggressive churchmanship of the age.
Before proceeding, however, to sketch the stormy pontificate of
Hildebrand in its relation to our subject, I must pause to relate the
episode of the Milanese clergy. The struggle in that city to enforce
the ascetic principles of the reformers gives so perfect an inside view
of the reformation itself, and its various stages have been handed down
to us with so much minuteness by contemporary writers, that it deserves
to be treated by itself as a disconnected whole.
XIII.
MILAN.
In the primitive ages of the church, Milan was at the head of the
Northern Vicariate of Italy, as Rome was of the Southern. When the
preponderance of the latter city became established, the glory of
St. Ambrose shed a lustre over his capital which the true Milanese
fondly regarded as rivalling that of St. Peter and the superiority of
Rome was grudgingly admitted. In the eleventh century, Milan is found
occupying the chief place among the Lombard cities, virtually governed
by its archbishop, whose temporal as well as spiritual power rendered
his position one of great influence and importance. Yet even at that
early period, the republican spirit was already developed, and the city
was divided into factions, as the nobles and citizens struggled for
alternate supremacy.
Milan was moreover the headquarters of the hidden Manichæism which,
after surviving centuries of persecution in the East, was now secretly
invading Europe through Bulgaria, and had already attracted the
vigilant attention of the church in localities widely separated. Its
earliest open manifestation was in Toulouse, in 1018; at Orleans, in
1023, King Robert the Pious caused numerous sectaries to expiate their
heresy at the stake, where their unshrinking zeal excited general
wonder. At Cambrai and Liége similar measures of repression became
necessary in 1025; the Emperor Henry III. endeavored at Goslar, in
1052, to put an end to them with the gallows; and traces of them are
to be found at Agen about the year 1100; at Soissons in 1114; at
Toulouse in 1118; at Cologne in 1146; at Périgord in 1147; in England
in 1166, until we can trace their connection with the Albigenses, whose
misfortunes fill so black a page in the history of the thirteenth
century. Calling themselves Cathari, and stigmatized by true believers
under various opprobrious names, of which the commonest was Paterins,
their doctrines were those of the ancient Manichæans, their most
characteristic tenets being belief in the dualistic principle, and the
abhorrence of animal food and of marriage.[501] The prevalence of these
dogmas among the Milanese populace furnishes a probable explanation of
much that took place during the contest between Rome and the married
priests.
* * * * *
Eriberto di Arzago, who filled the archiepiscopal chair of Milan from
1019 to 1045, was one of the most powerful princes of Italy, and
though unsuccessful in the revolt which he organized in 1034 against
the Emperor Conrad the Salic, his influence was scarcely diminished
after his return from the expulsion which punished his rebellion.[502]
At the time of his death, Milan was passing through one of its
accustomed civil dissensions. The Motta, or body of burgesses, had
quarrelled with the nobles and archbishop, and, under the leadership
of an apostate noble named Lanzo, had expelled them from the city—an
ejection which was followed by an unsuccessful siege of three years.
At length, in 1044, Lanzo obtained promise of armed assistance from
Henry III., which reduced the nobles to subjection, and they returned
in peace. Eriberto died the following year, and the election of his
successor caused great excitement. Erlembaldo, the popular chief
(dominus populi), called the citizens together to nominate candidates,
and induced them to select four. One of these was Landolfo Cotta, a
notary of the sacred palace, who was brother to Erlembaldo; another
was Anselmo di Badagio, Cardinal of the Milanese church, subsequently
Bishop of Lucca, and finally, as we have seen, pope, under the name of
Alexander II.; the third was Arialdo, of the family of the capitanei
of Carinate; and the fourth was Otho, another Milanese cardinal. These
four were sent to the Emperor, for him to make his selection; but the
faction of the nobles despatched a rival in the person of Guido di
Valate, who already held the appointment of secretary from the emperor,
and who had recommended himself by zealous services, which now claimed
their reward. Henry gave the coveted dignity to Guido, to the great
surprise and indignation of the popular nominees. Their expostulations
were unavailing, and both parties returned—Guido to assume an office
harassed by the opposition of the people on whom he had been forced,
and the disappointed candidates to brood over the wrongs which had
deprived them of the splendid prize.[503] We shall see how thoroughly
three of those candidates avenged themselves.
It is observable from this transaction that Milan was completely
independent of Rome. The sovereignty of the distant emperor, absorbed
in the dissensions of Germany, could press but lightly on the powerful
and turbulent city. Rome was not even thought of in creating the
archbishop, whose spiritual and temporal power were granted by the
imperial investiture. But when, soon after, the German popes had
rescued the papacy from the contempt into which it had fallen, its
domination over Milan became a necessary step in its progress to
universal supremacy, and lent additional vigor to the desires of the
reformers to restore the forgotten discipline of the church in a city
so influential.