1230, the civil authorities of Zurich sacrilegiously ordered them to
dismiss their women. They resolutely replied that they were flesh
and blood, unequal to the task of living like angels, and unable to
attend to the kitchen and other household duties. The townsmen entered
into a league against them, and succeeded in driving away some of the
sacerdotal consorts, when the Bishop of Constance and his chapter,
allowing perhaps the pride of the churchman to get the better of
ascetic zeal, interfered with a threat of excommunication on all who
should presume to intervene in a matter which related specially to the
church. He absolved the leaguers from the oaths with which they were
mutually bound, and thus restored security to the priestly households.
About the same time Gregory IX. appointed a certain Boniface to the
see of Lausanne. On his installation, the new bishop commenced with
ardor to enforce the canons, but the clergy conspired against his life,
and were so nearly successful that he incontinently fled, and never
ventured to return.[855]
If the irregular though permanent connections which everywhere
prevailed had been the only result of the prohibition of marriage,
there might perhaps have been little practical evil flowing from it,
except to the church itself and to its guilty members. When the desires
of man, however, are once tempted to seek through unlawful means the
relief denied to them by artificial rules, it is not easy to set bounds
to the unbridled passions which, irritated by the fruitless effort at
repression, are no longer restrained by a law which has been broken or
a conscience which has lost its power. The records of the Middle Ages
are accordingly full of the evidences that indiscriminate license of
the worst kind prevailed throughout every rank of the hierarchy.
Even supposing that this fearful immorality were not attributable to
the immutable laws of nature revenging themselves for their attempted
violation, it could readily be explained by the example set by the
central head. Scarcely had the efforts of Nicholas and Gregory put an
end to sacerdotal marriage in Rome when the morals of the Roman clergy
became a disgrace to Christendom. How little the results of the reform
corresponded with the hopes of the zealous puritans who had brought it
about may be gathered from the martyrdom of a certain Arnolfo, who,
under the pontificate of Honorius II., preached vehemently against the
scandals and immorality of the ecclesiastics of the apostolic city.
They succeeded in making away with him, notwithstanding the protection
of Honorius, and the veneration of the nobles and people who regarded
him as a prophet.[856] When such was the condition of clerical virtue,
we can scarcely wonder that sufficient suffrages were given in 1130 by
the sacred college to Cardinal Pier-Leone to afford him a plausible
claim to the papacy, although he was notoriously stained with the
foulest crimes. Apparently his children by his sister Tropea, and his
carrying about with him a concubine when travelling in the capacity of
papal legate, had not proved a bar to his elevation in the church, nor
to his employment in the most conspicuous and important affairs.[857]
A severer satire on the standard of ecclesiastical morality could
scarcely be imagined than the inculcation by such a man, in his
capacity as pope, of the canons requiring the separation of priests
from their wives, on the plea of the spotless purity required for the
service of the altar.[858]
What were the influences of the papal court in the next century may be
gathered from the speech which Cardinal Hugo made to the Lyonese, on
the occasion of the departure of Innocent IV. in 1251 from their city,
after a residence of eight years—“Friends, since our arrival here,
we have done much for your city. When we came, we found here three
or four brothels. We leave behind us but one. We must own, however,
that it extends without interruption from the eastern to the western
gate”—the crude cynicism of which greatly disconcerted the Lyonese
ladies present.[859] Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, therefore
only reflected the popular conviction when, on his deathbed in 1253,
inveighing against the corruption of the papal court, he applied to it
the lines—
Ejus avaritiæ totus non sufficit orbis,
Ejus luxuriæ meretrix non sufficit omnis.[860]
A hundred years later saw the popes again in France. For forty years
they had bestowed on Avignon all the benefits, moral and spiritual,
arising from the presence of the Vicegerent of Christ, when Petrarch
recorded, for the benefit of friends whom he feared to compromise by
naming, the impressions produced by his long residence there in the
household of a leading dignitary of the church. Language seems too weak
to express his abhorrence of that third Babylon, that Hell upon Earth,
which could furnish no Noah, no Deucalion to survive the deluge that
alone could cleanse its filth—and yet he intimates that fear compels
him to restrain the full expression of his feelings. Chastity was a
reproach and licentiousness a virtue. The aged prelates surpassed their
younger brethren in wickedness as in years, apparently considering
that age conferred upon them the license to do that from which even
youthful libertines shrank; while the vilest crimes were the pastimes
of pontifical ease.[861] Juvenal and Brantôme can suggest nothing
more shameless or more foul. Nor was the tone of morality heightened
when, fifty years later, Nicholas de Clemanges takes up the tale.
His brief reference to the adulteries and vileness with which the
cardinals befouled the papal court, and the obscenities in which their
families imitated their example, shows that the matter was so generally
understood that it needed no details.[862]
The Great Schism perhaps could scarcely be expected to improve the
morals of the papal court. Yet when the church universal, to close
that weary quarrel, agreed to receive one of the competitors as its
head, surely it might have selected, as the visible representative of
God upon earth, some more worthy embodiment of humanity than Balthazar
Cossa, who, as John XXIII., is alone, of the three competitors,
recognized in the list of popes. When the great council of Constance in
1415 adopted the awful expedient of trying, condemning, and deposing a
pope, the catalogue of crimes—notorious incest, adultery, defilement,
homicide, and atheism—of which the fathers formally accused him, and
which he confessed without defending himself,[863] is fearfully
suggestive of the corruption which could not only spawn such a monster,
but could elevate him to the highest place in the hierarchy, and
present him for the veneration of Christendom. It affords a curious
insight into the notions of morality prevalent in the Papal court to
observe that when he had as chamberlain of Boniface IX., scandalized
Rome by openly keeping his brother’s wife as a concubine, the remedy
adopted for the disorder was to create him Cardinal and send him as
legate to Bologna, while the lady was conveyed to her husband in
Naples. The result of this course of procedure was that during his sway
at Bologna two hundred maids, matrons, and widows, including a few
nuns, fell victims to his brutal lust.[864] So obtuse, in fact, were
the sensibilities of the age, that after his release from the prison to
which he had been consigned by the fathers of Constance, his successor,
Martin V. consoled him in his degradation by creating him Dean of the
Sacred College.
If the Councils of Constance and of Bâle worked some apparent reform
in the outward morality of the papacy, their effect soon passed away.
The latter half of the fifteenth century scarcely saw a supreme
pontiff without the visible evidences of human frailty around him, the
unblushing acknowledgment of which is the fittest commentary on the
tone of clerical morality. Sixtus IV. was believed to embody the utmost
possible concentration of human wickedness,[865] until Borgia came to
divide with him the preëminence of evil. The success of Innocent VIII.
in increasing the population of Rome was a favorite topic with the wits
of the day;[866] but the epitaph which declared that filth, gluttony,
avarice, and sloth lay buried in his tomb[867] did not anticipate the
immediate resurrection of the worst of those vices in the person of his
successor Alexander VI. If the crimes of Borgia were foul, their number
and historical importance have rendered them so well known that I may
be spared more than a passing allusion to a career which has made his
name synonymous with all that can degrade man to a level at once with
the demon and the brute.[868]
Such men as Alexander can hardly be deemed exceptional, save inasmuch
as brilliant talents and native force of character might enable them
to excel their contemporaries in guilt as in ambition. They were the
natural product of a system which for four centuries had bent the
unremitting energies of the church to securing temporal power and
wealth, with exemption from the duties and liabilities of the citizen.
Such were the fruits of the successful theocracy of Hildebrand, which,
intrusting irresponsible authority to fallible humanity, came to regard
ecclesiastical aggrandizement as a full atonement for all and every
crime. That the infection had spread even to the ultimate fibres of
the establishment can readily be believed, for the supremacy of the
Papal authority gave it the power of controlling the character of every
parish in Christendom. We shall see hereafter, as we have already seen,
how that power was habitually abused, and how the nullification of the
canons was a recognized source of income to the successor of St. Peter
and his needy officials. The evil was one that had long been recognized
and complained of since Hincmar of Rheims so emphatically denounced
it. St. Bernard declared that Rome was the acknowledged refuge of all
ambitious and licentious men who desired either promotion or to retain
the preferment which they had forfeited.[869] In the fiery zeal with
which he warns his protégé, Eugenius III., not to be deceived by such
suitors, he shows us how useless were local efforts at reformation
when they could be so readily set aside and rendered nugatory by the
venal influences at work in the Apostolic court. But the abuse was
too profitable to be suppressed, and it continued until after the
Reformation had shown the necessity of some decent reticence in the
exercise of powers no longer regarded as wholly irresponsible.
* * * * *
My object has been to consider the subject of ascetic celibacy as
a portion simply of ecclesiastical history, and yet I cannot well
conclude this section without a hasty glance at its influence on
society at large. That influence, as far as the secular clergy were
its instruments, was evidently one of almost unmixed evil. The parish
priest, if honestly ascetic, was thereby deprived of the wholesome
common bond of human affections and sympathies, and was rendered less
efficient for good in consoling the sorrows and aiding the struggles
of his flock. If, on the other hand, he was a hypocrite, or if he had
found too late that the burden he had assumed was too heavy for his
strength, the denial of the natural institution of marriage was the
source of immeasurable corruption to those intrusted to his charge,
who looked up to him not only as a spiritual director, but as a
superior being who could absolve them from sin, and whose partnership
in guilt was in itself an absolution.[870] That such was the condition
of innumerable parishes throughout Europe, there is unfortunately no
reason to doubt, and all of the severer churchmen of the period, in
attacking the vices of the clergy, give us to understand that either
their example led the laity into evil, or that their immorality
rendered it impossible for them to correct the vices of the flocks. As
Cæsarius of Heisterbach says, “Since the priesthood mostly lead evil
and incontinent lives, they soothe rather than excite the consciences
of the worldly.”[871] The incongruity of this may perhaps explain to
some extent the anomaly of the practical grossness of the Middle Ages,
combined with the theoretical ascetic purity which was held out as the
duty of every Christian who desired to be acceptable to his Creator.
The curious contrasts and confusion of the standard of morality,
arising from this striving against nature, are well illustrated by
a homily of the thirteenth century against marriage, addressed to
youthful nuns, which exhausts all the arguments that the ingenuity
of the writer could suggest. On the one hand he appeals to the pride
which could be so well gratified by the exalted state of virginity;
he pictures the superior bliss vouchsafed in heaven to those who were
stained by no earthly contamination, confidently promising them a
higher rank and more direct communing with the Father than would be
bestowed on the married and the widowed; he rapturously dwells upon
the inward peace, the holy ecstasy which are the portion of those who,
wedded to Christ, keep pure their mystic marriage vow; and his ascetic
fervor exhausts itself in depicting the spiritual delights of a life of
religious seclusion. Mingled inextricably with these exalted visions of
beatific mysticism, he presents in startling contrasts the retribution
awaiting the sin of licentiousness and the evils inseparable from
a life of domestic marriage. With a crude nastiness that is almost
inconceivable, he minutely describes all the discomforts and suffering,
physical and mental, attendant upon wifehood and maternity, entering
into every detail and gloating over every revolting circumstance that
his prurient imagination can suggest. The license of Shakespeare, the
plain speaking of Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the mediæval trouvères show
us what our ancestors were, and what they were is easily explained when
such a medley of mysticism and grossness could be poured into the pure
ears of innocent young girls by their spiritual director.[872]
Thus, with the fearful immorality of which we have seen such ample
evidence, the church still presented the same exaggerated asceticism
as her guiding principle. The rhapsodies of St. John Chrysostom and
St. Aldhelm were rivalled in an age when the priest was forbidden to
live in the same house as his mother, because experience had shown the
danger of such propinquity. How the estimate placed on purity increased
as virtue diminished is fairly illustrated in a characteristic legend
which was very popular with ecclesiastical teachers in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. It relates how a pagan entering a heathen
temple saw Satan seated in state on a throne. One of the princes of
Hell entered, worshipped his master, and proceeded to give an account
of his work. For thirty days he had been engaged in provoking a war,
wherein many battles had been fought with heavy slaughter. Satan
sharply reproached him with accomplishing so little in the time, and
ordered him to be severely punished. Another then approached the throne
and reported that he had devoted twenty days to raising tempests at
sea, whereby navies had been wrecked and multitudes drowned. He was
likewise reproved and punished for wasting his time. A third had for
ten days been engaged in troubling the wedding festivity of a city,
causing strife and murder, and he was similarly treated. A fourth then
entered and recounted how for forty years he had been occupied in
tempting a hermit to yield to fleshly desire, and how he had that night
succeeded. Then Satan arose and placed his crown on the head of the
new-comer, seating him on the throne as one who had worthily achieved
a signal triumph. The spectator, thus seeing the high estimate placed
by the Evil One on ascetic chastity, was immediately converted, and
forthwith became a monk.[873]
While thus attaching so fanciful a holiness to virginity, the church
came practically to erect a most singular standard of morality, the
influence of which could but be most deplorable on the mass of the
laity. In the earlier days of celibacy, the rule was regarded by
the severer ecclesiastics as simply an expression of the necessity
of purity in the minister of God. Theophilus of Alexandria, in the
fifth century, decided that a man, who as lector had been punished
for unchastity and had subsequently risen to the priesthood, must be
expelled on account of his previous sin.[874] We have seen, however,
how, when celibacy was revived under Damiani and Hildebrand, the
question of immorality virtually disappeared, and the essential point
became, not that a priest should be chaste, but that he should be
unmarried, and this was finally adopted as the recognized law of the
church. In 1213 the Archbishop of Lunden enquired of Innocent III.
whether a man who had had two concubines was ineligible to orders as
a _digamus_, and the pontiff could only reply that no matter how many
concubines a man might have, either at one time or in succession, he
did not incur the disability of digamy.[875] When such was the result
of seven centuries of assiduous sacerdotalism in a church which was
daily growing in authority; when the people thus saw that sexual
excesses were no bar to ecclesiastical preferment in that church which
made extravagant pretensions to purity; when the strict rules which
forbade ordination to a layman who had married a widow, were relaxed
in favor of those who were stained with notorious impurity, it is no
wonder that the popular perceptions of morality became blunted, and
that the laity did not deny themselves the indulgences which they saw
tacitly allowed to their spiritual guides.
Nor was it only in stimulating this general laxity of principle that
the influence of the church was disastrous. The personal evil wrought
by a dissolute priesthood was a wide-spreading contagion. The abuse
of the awful authority given by the altar and the confessional,
was a subject of sorrowful and indignant denunciation in too many
synods for a reasonable doubt to be entertained of its frequency or
of the corruption which it spread through innumerable parishes and
nunneries.[876] The almost entire practical immunity with which these
and similar scandals were perpetrated led to an undisguised and cynical
profligacy which the severer churchmen acknowledged to exercise a
most deleterious influence on the morals of the laity, who thus saw
the examplars of evil in those who should have been their patterns of
virtue.[877] In his bull of 1259, Alexander IV. does not hesitate to
declare that the people, instead of being reformed, are absolutely
corrupted by their pastors.[878] Thomas of Cantinpré, one of the early
lights of the Dominican order, indeed, is authority for the legend
which represents the devil as thanking the prelates of the church for
conducting all Christendom to hell;[879] and the conviction which thus
expressed itself is justified by the reproach of Gregory X., who, in
dismissing the second council of Lyons, in 1274, told his assembled
dignitaries that they were the ruin of the world.[880] Unfortunately,
his threat to reform them if they did not reform themselves, remained
unexecuted, and the complaint was repeated again and again.[881]
That this state of things was clearly understood by the laity is only
too visibly reflected in contemporary records. When, in 1374, the
dancing mania, one of those strange epidemics which afflicted the
Middle Ages, broke out through Germany and Flanders, the populace
called to mind the forgotten regulations of Damiani and Hildebrand,
and found a ready explanation of the visitation by assuming it to be
a consequence of the vitiated baptism of the people by a concubinary
priesthood.[882] Chaucer, with his wide range of observation and shrewd
native sense, took a less superstitious, and more practical view of the
evil, and in the admirable sermon which forms his “Persone’s Tale” he
records the convictions which every pure-minded man must have felt with
regard to the demoralizing tendencies of the sacerdotal licentiousness
of the time.[883]
How instinctively, indeed, the popular mind assumed the immorality of
the pastor is illustrated by a passage in the earliest French pastoral
that has reached us, dating from the latter half of the thirteenth
century
WARNIERS. Segneur je sui trop courechiés.
GUIOS. Comment?
WARNIERS. Mehalès est agute,
M’amie, et s’a esté dechute;
Car on dist que ch’est de no prestre.
ROGAUS. En non Dieu! Warnier, bien puet estre;
Car ele i aloit trop souvent.
WARNIERS. Hé, las! jou avoie en couvent
De li temprement espouser.
GUIOS. Tu te puès bien trop dolouser,
Biaus très dous amis; ne te caille,
Car ja ne meteras maaille,
Que bien sai, à l’enfant warder.[884]
Those who were heretically disposed were keen to take advantage of a
weakness so general and so universally understood. The author of the
“Creed of Piers Ploughman” does not hesitate to assert with Gregory X.
that the clergy were the corruption of the world—
For falshed of freres
Hath fullich encombred
Manye of this maner men,
And made hem to leven
Her charité and chastité,
And shosen hem to lustes,
And waxen to werly,
And wayven the trewethe,
And leven the love of her God.[885]
The widely received feeling on this subject, perhaps, finds its fittest
expression in a satire on the mendicant friars, written by a Franciscan
novice who became disgusted with the order and turned Wickliffite.
The exaggerated purity and mortification of the early followers of
the blessed St. Francis had long since yielded to the temptations
which attended on the magnificent success of the institution, and the
asceticism which had been powerful enough to cause visions of the holy
Stigmata degenerated into sloth and crime which took advantage of
the opportunities afforded by the privilege to hear confessions. The
grosser accusations of the writer are, perhaps, unfit for quotation,
but the spirit in which the Franciscan friars were regarded is
sufficiently indicated by the following lines:
For when the gode man is fro hame
And the frere comes to oure dame,
He spares, nauther for synne ne shame,
That he ne dos his will.
* * * * *
Ich man that here shal lede his life
That has a faire doghter or a wyfe
Be war that no frer ham shryfe
Nauther loude ne still.[886]
When such was the moral condition of the priesthood, and such were
the influences which it cast upon the flocks intrusted to its
guidance, it is not to be wondered at if those who deplored so
disgraceful a state of things, and whose respect for the canons
precluded them from recommending the natural and appropriate remedy
of marriage, should regard an organized system of concubinage as a
safeguard. However deplorable such an alternative might be in itself,
it was surely preferable to the mischief which the unquenched and
ungoverned passions of a pastor might inflict upon his parish; and
the instances of this were too numerous and too glaring to admit of
much hesitation in electing between the two evils. Even Gerson, the
leader of mystic ascetics, who recorded his unbounded admiration for
the purity of celibacy in his “Dialogus Naturæ et Sophiæ de Castitate
Clericorum,”[887] saw and appreciated its practical evils, and had no
scruple in recommending concubinage as a preventive, which, though
scandalous in itself, might serve to prevent greater scandals.[888]
It therefore requires no great stretch of credulity to believe the
assertion of Sleidan that in some of the Swiss Cantons, it was the
custom to oblige a new pastor, on entering upon his functions, to
select a concubine, as a necessary protection to the virtue of his
female parishioners, and to the peace of the families intrusted to
his spiritual direction.[889] Indeed, we have already seen, on the
authority of the council of Palencia in 1322, that such a practice was
not uncommon in Spain.