THE EUCHARIST AS AN ORDEAL.
From ancient times in India there has been in common use an ordeal
known as _cosha_, consisting of water in which an idol has been
washed. The priest celebrates solemn rites “to some tremendous deity,”
such as Durga or the Adityas, whose image is then bathed in water.
Three handfuls of this water are then drunk by the accused, and if
within fourteen days he is not visited with some dreadful calamity
from the act of the deity or of the king, “he must indubitably be
acquitted.”[1093]
In adapting the ordeal system to Christianity the natural substitute
for this pagan ceremony was the administration of the Eucharist. This,
indeed, formed a portion of the preparatory rites in all the judgments
of God, the Host being given with the awful adjuration, “May this body
and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ be a judgment to thee this day!”
The apostle had said that “he that eateth and drinketh unworthily
eateth and drinketh damnation to himself” (I. _Corinth._ xi. 28, 29),
and the pious veneration of the age accepted the admonition literally.
Mediæval literature is full of legends showing the miraculous power
of the Eucharist in bringing sinners to repentance and exposure,
even without any special invocation; and the absolute belief in this
fetishism, even by the irreligious, is fairly illustrated by the
case of a dissolute priest of Zurich, in the fourteenth century. An
habitual drunkard, gambler, and fornicator, he yet celebrated mass
daily with exemplary regularity. On being warned of the dangers to
which he was thus exposing himself in partaking of the Eucharist, he
at length confessed that he never consecrated the host, but that he
carried about him a small round piece of wood, resembling the holy
wafer, which he exhibited to the people and passed it off for the body
of Christ. The honest chronicler fairly explodes with indignation
in relating the subterfuge, and assures us that while the priest
succeeded in escaping one danger he fell into a much greater, as
he was the cause of leading his flock into the unpardonable sin of
idolatry. Apparently his parishioners thought so too, for though they
had patiently endured the scandals of his daily life, as soon as this
trick became known they drove him away unceremoniously.[1094] What this
pastor, but for his ingenious device, might have reasonably dreaded
is to be learned from the story of a volunteer miracle vouchsafed to
an unchaste priest at Lindisfarne, who being suddenly summoned to
celebrate mass without having had time to purify himself, when he came
to partake of the sacramental cup, saw the wine change to an exceeding
blackness. After some hesitation he took it, and found it bitter to the
last degree. Hurrying to his bishop, he confessed his sin, underwent
penance, and reformed his life.[1095] Even more edifying was a case
related as happening in France about the year 1200. A priest yielded
to the temptation of the flesh immediately before celebrating mass on
Christmas eve, when, after consecrating the body and blood, and before
he could touch them with his polluted lips, a white dove appeared which
drank the wine and carried off the wafer. It happened that he could
find no one to replace him during the ceremonies of the festival,
and, though appalled by the miracle, he could not refuse to perform
his functions without exposure, so that a second and a third time he
went through the canon with the same result. Finally he applied to an
abbot, and confessed his sin with due contrition. The abbot postponed
inflicting penance until the priest should officiate again, when the
dove reappeared, bearing in its beak the three wafers, and returning
to the chalice all the wine it had taken. Filled with rejoicing at
this evidence that his contrition was accepted, the priest cheerfully
undertook three years’ pilgrimage in the Holy Land, prescribed for him
by the abbot, and on his return entered a convent.[1096]
A still more striking manifestation of the interposition of God by
means of the Eucharist to vindicate innocence is to be found in the
case of Erkenbald de Burban, a noble of Flanders, who was renowned for
his inflexible administration of justice. While lying on his death-bed,
his favorite nephew and heir endeavored to violate one of the maidens
of the castle. Erkenbald ordered him to be hanged, but his followers
were afraid to execute the sentence; so, when after an interval, the
youth approached his uncle for a reconciliation, the latter put his
arm affectionately round his neck, and drove a dagger up to the hilt
in his throat. When Erkenbald made his final confession preparatory
to the last sacrament, he refused to include this deed among his
sins, claiming that it was an act of righteousness, and his bishop
consequently refused to administer the Host. The dying man obdurately
allowed him to depart; then ordering him recalled, asked him to see
whether he had the wafer in his pyx. On the latter being opened it
was found empty, and Erkenbald exhibited it to him in his mouth. The
Eucharist which man had refused, God had ministered to the righteous
judge.[1097]
It is, therefore, easy to understand the superstition of the ages of
faith which believed that, when the consecrated wafer was offered
under appropriate adjurations, the guilty could not receive it; or
that, if it were taken, immediate convulsions and speedy death, or
some other miraculous manifestation would ensue, thus constituting
its administration for such purposes a regular and recognized form of
ordeal. This is well illustrated by a form of exorcism preserved by
Mansi: “We humbly pray thy Infinite Majesty that this priest, if guilty
of the accusation, shall not be able to receive this venerated body of
thy Son, crucified for the salvation of all, and that what should be
the remedy of all evil shall prove to him hurtful, full of grief and
suffering, bearing with it all sorrow and bitterness.”[1098] What might
be expected under such circumstances is elucidated by a case which
occurred in the early part of the eleventh century, as reported by the
contemporary Rodolphus Glaber, in which a monk, condemned to undergo
the trial, boldly received the sacrament, when the Host, indignant
at its lodgment in the body of so perjured a criminal, immediately
slipped out at the navel, white and pure as before, to the immense
consternation of the accused, who forthwith confessed his crime.[1099]
The antiquity of this mode of trial is shown in its employment by
Cautinus, Bishop of Auvergne, towards the close of the sixth century.
A certain Count Eulalius was popularly accused of parricide, whereupon
he was suspended from communion. On his complaining of thus being
punished without a trial, the bishop administered the sacrament under
the customary adjuration, and Eulalius, taking it without harm,
was relieved from the imputation.[1100] It was usually, however,
a sacerdotal form of purgation, as is shown by the Anglo-Saxon
laws,[1101] and by the canons of the council of Worms in 868, embodied
in the _Decretum_ of Gratian.[1102] Thus, in 941, Frederic, Archbishop
of Mainz, publicly submitted to an ordeal of this kind, to clear
himself of the suspicion of having taken part in an unsuccessful
rebellion of Henry, Duke of Bavaria, against his brother, Otho the
Great.[1103] After the death of Henry, slander assailed the fame of
his widow, Juthita, on account of an alleged intimacy between her
and Abraham, Bishop of Freisingen. When she, too, died, the bishop
performed her funeral rites, and, pausing in the mass, he addressed
the congregation: “If she was guilty of that whereof she was accused,
may the Omnipotent Father cause the body and blood of the Son to be
my condemnation to just perdition, and perpetual salvation to her
soul!”—after which he took the sacrament unharmed, and the people
acknowledged the falsity of their belief.[1104] In 1050, Subico, Bishop
of Speyer, sought to clear himself of a similar accusation at the
council of Mainz, in the same manner, when according to one version he
succeeded, while another less friendly account assures us that his jaw
became paralyzed in the very act, and remained so till the day of his
death.[1105]
Perhaps the most striking instance recorded of its administration
was, however, in a secular matter, when in 869 it closed the unhappy
controversy between King Lothair and his wives, to which reference has
been already made. To reconcile himself to the Church, Lothair took a
solemn oath before Adrian II. that he had obeyed the ecclesiastical
mandates in maintaining a complete separation from his pseudo-wife
Waldrada, after which the pontiff admitted him to communion, under an
adjuration that it should prove the test of his truthfulness. Lothair
did not shrink from the ordeal, nor did his nobles, to whom it was
given on their declaring that they had not abetted the designs of the
concubine; but leaving Rome immediately afterwards, the royal _cortége_
was stopped at Piacenza by a sudden epidemic which broke out among the
courtiers, and there Lothair died, August 8th, with nearly all of his
followers—an awful example held out by the worthy chroniclers as a
warning to future generations.[1106]
In this degradation of the Host to the level of daily life there was
a profanity repugnant to a reverential mind, and we are therefore not
surprised to find King Robert the Pious, in the early part of the
eleventh century, raising his voice against its judicial use, and
threatening to degrade the Archbishop of Sens for employing it in this
manner, especially as his biographer informs us that the custom was
daily growing in favor.[1107] Robert’s example was soon afterwards
imitated by Alexander II., whose pontificate lasted from 1061 to
1073.[1108] The next pope, however, the impetuous Hildebrand, made use
of it on a memorable occasion. When, in 1077, the Emperor Henry IV. had
endured the depths of humiliation before the castle gate of Canossa,
and had at length purchased peace by submitting to the exactions
demanded of him, the excommunication under which he had lain was
removed in the chapel. Then Gregory, referring to the crimes imputed to
himself by the emperor’s partisans, said that he could easily refute
them by abundant witnesses; “but lest I should seem to rely rather on
human than on divine testimony, and that I may remove from the minds of
all, by immediate satisfaction, every scruple, behold this body of our
Lord which I am about to take. Let it be to me this day a test of my
innocence, and may the Omnipotent God this day by his judgment absolve
me of the accusations if I am innocent, or let me perish by sudden
death if guilty!” Swallowing the wafer, he turned to the emperor, and
demanded of him the same refutation of the charges urged against him
by the German princes. Appalled by this unexpected trial, Henry in an
agony of fear evaded it, and consulted hurriedly with his councillors
how to escape the awful test, which he finally declined on the ground
of the absence of both his friends and his enemies, without whose
presence the result would establish nothing.[1109] In estimating the
mingled power of imagination and conscience which rendered the proposal
insupportable to the emperor, we must allow for the influence which
a man like Hildebrand with voice and eye can exert over those whom
he wishes to impress. At an earlier stage of his career, in 1055, he
improvised a very effective species of ordeal, when presiding as papal
legate at the Council of Lyons, assembled for the repression of simony.
A guilty bishop had bribed the opposing witnesses, and no testimony was
obtainable for his conviction. Hildebrand addressed him: “The episcopal
grace is a gift of the Holy Ghost. If, therefore, you are innocent,
repeat, ‘Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost!’”
The bishop boldly commenced, “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and
to—” here his voice failed him, he was unable to finish the sentence;
and, confessing the sin, he was deposed.[1110]
Henry’s prudence in declining the Eucharistic ordeal was proved by the
fate of the unfortunate Imbrico, Bishop of Augsburg, who, in the same
year, 1077, after swearing fealty to Rodolph of Suabia, abandoned him
and joined the emperor. Soon after, while saying mass before Henry,
to prove the force of his loyal convictions, he declared that the
sacrament he was about to take should attest the righteousness of his
master’s cause; and the anti-imperialist chronicler duly records that a
sudden disease overtook him, to be followed by speedy death.[1111] In
the case of William, Bishop of Utrecht, as related by Hugh of Flavigny,
the Eucharist was less an ordeal than a punishment. He dared, at the
Assembly of Utrecht, in 1076, to excommunicate Gregory, at the command
of Henry IV.; but when, at the conclusion of the impious ceremony, he
audaciously took the Host, it turned to fire within him, and, shrieking
“I burn! I burn!” he fell down and miserably died.[1112]
According to a Spanish theologian in the sixteenth century, when the
Eucharist was administered as an ordeal it was to be taken without
previous sacramental confession—presumably in order that the accused
might not escape in consequence of absolution.[1113] After the
Reformation, the Protestants who denied the real presence naturally
rejected this form of ordeal, but Del Rio, writing in 1599, compares
them to frogs swelling themselves against an elephant; and Peter
Kluntz, in 1677, assures us that it was still commonly used in his
day.[1114]