XIV. HILDEBRAND
Alexander II. died April 21st, 1073, and within twenty-four hours the Archdeacon Hildebrand was elected as his successor—a promptitude and unanimity which showed the general recognition of his fitness for the high office. For more than twenty years he had been the power behind the throne which had directed and given purpose to the policy of Rome, and the assertion of his biographers that his disinclination for the position had alone prevented his previous elevation may readily be believed. Whether he was forced on the present occasion to assent to the choice of the conclave, against his earnest resistance, is, however, more problematical.
Hildebrand was the son of a poor carpenter of Soano, and had been trained in the ascetic monachism of Cluny. Gifted by nature with rare sagacity, unbending will, and indomitable spirit, imbued with the principles of the False Decretals, and firmly believing in the wildest pretensions of ecclesiastical supremacy, he had conceived a scheme of hierarchical autocracy, which he regarded not only as the imprescriptible right of the church, but also as the perfection of human institutions. To the realization of this ideal he devoted his life with a fiery zeal and unshaken purpose that shrank from no obstacles, and to it he was ready to sacrifice not only the men who stood in his path, but also the immutable principles of truth and justice. All considerations were as dross compared with the one object, and his own well-being and life were ventured as recklessly as the peace of the world.
Such a man could comprehend the full importance of the rule of celibacy, not alone as essential to the ascetic purity of the church, but as necessary to the theocratic structure which he proposed to elevate on the ruins of kingdoms and empires. The priest must be a man set apart from his fellows, consecrated to the one holy purpose, reverenced by the world as a being superior to human passions and frailties, devoted, soul and body, to the interests of the church, and distracted by no temporal cares and anxieties foreign to the welfare of the great corporation of which he was a member. We have seen the strenuous efforts which, for a quarter of a century, successive pontiffs had unceasingly made to accomplish this reform, and we have also seen how fruitlessly those efforts were expended on the passive or active resistance of the priesthood. When Hildebrand took the reins into his vigorous grasp, the change at once became manifest, and the zeal of his predecessors appears lukewarm by comparison. He had had ample leisure to note how inefficient was the ordinary machinery to accomplish the result, and he hesitated not to call to his assistance external powers; to give to the secular princes authority over ecclesiastics at which enthusiastic churchmen stood aghast, and to risk apparently the most precious immunities of the church to secure the result. The end proved his wisdom, for the power delegated to the laity for a special object was readily recalled, after it had served its purpose, and the rebellious clerks were subdued and rendered fit instruments in the lapse of time for humiliating their temporary masters. In one respect, however, Hildebrand’s policy proved a blunder. The faithful readily submitted to the restoration of clerical immunity, but the idea that ecclesiastics forfeited their privileges by sin became a favorite one with almost all heretics, as we shall see hereafter in the case of the Albigenses, Waldenses, Wickliffites, and Hussites, costing the church many a desperate struggle.
To Gregory, as we must hereafter call him, was generally attributed, by his immediate successors, the honor of introducing, or of enforcing, the absolute chastity of the ministers of the altar. Some chroniclers mention Alexander II. or Leo IX. as participating in the struggle, but to his vigorous management its success was popularly conceded.[533] He earned the tribute thoroughly, for during his whole pontificate it seems to have been ever present to his thoughts, and whatever were his preoccupations in his fearful struggle with the empire, on which he risked the present and the future of the papacy, he always had leisure to attend to the one subject in its minutest details and in the remotest corner of Christendom.
Perhaps in this there may have been an unrecognized motive urging him to action. Sprung from so humble an origin, he may have sympathized with the democratic element, which rendered the church the only career open to peasant and plebeian. He may have felt that this was a source of hidden power, as binding the populations more closely to the church, and as enabling it to press into service an unknown amount of fresh and vigorous talent belonging to men who would owe everything to the establishment which had raised them from nothingness, and who would have no relationships to embarrass their devotion. All this would be lost if, by legalizing marriage, the hereditary transmission of benefices inevitably resulting should convert the church into a separate caste of individual proprietors, having only general interests in common, and lazily luxuriating on the proceeds of former popular beneficence. To us, retrospectively philosophizing, it further appears evident that if celibacy were an efficient agent in obtaining for the church the immense temporal power and spiritual authority which it enjoyed, that very power and that authority rendered celibacy a necessity to the welfare of civilization. When even the humblest priest came to be regarded as a superior being, holding the keys of heaven in his hand, and by the machinery of confession, absolution, and excommunication wielding incalculable influence over each member of his flock, it was well for both parties that the ecclesiastic should be free from the ties of family and the vulgar ambition of race. It is easy to see how the churchmen could have selected matrimonial alliances of the most politic and aggrandizing character; and as possession of property and hereditary transmission of benefices would have necessarily followed on the permission to marry, an ecclesiastical caste, combining temporal and spiritual power in the most dangerous excess, would have repeated in Europe the distinctions between the Brahman and Sudra of India. The perpetual admission of self-made men into the hierarchy, which distinguished the church even in times of the most aristocratic feudalism, was for ages the only practical recognition of the equality of man, and was one of the most powerful causes at work during the Middle Ages to render rational liberty eventually possible with advancing civilization. Looking therefore upon the church as an instrumentality to effect certain beneficent results in the course of human improvement, we may regard celibacy as a necessary element of sacerdotalism, the abolition of which would have required the entire destruction of the papal system and the fundamental reconstruction of ecclesiastical institutions.
What we may now readily discern to have been a means, to Gregory, however, was an end, and to the enforcement of celibacy as necessary to that object he devoted himself with unrelenting vigor. The belief that he was appointed of God, and set apart for the task of cleansing the church of the Nicolitan heresy which had defied his predecessors is well illustrated by the contemporary legend of some pious Pisans, who, spending the night before his election in prayer in the basilica of St. Peter, saw that holy saint himself traverse the church accompanied by Hildebrand, whom he commanded to gather some droppings of mares with which the sacred edifice was defiled, to place them in a sack, and to carry them out on his shoulders.[534] The severe austerity of his virtue, moreover, was displayed by his admirers in the story that once, when dangerously ill, his niece came to inquire as to his health. To relieve her anxiety he played with her necklace, and jestingly asked if she wished to be married; but on his recovery he found that he could no longer weep with due contrition over his sins, and that he had lost the grace of repentance. He long and vainly searched for the cause, and finally entreated his friends to pray for him, when the Virgin appeared to one of them, and sent word to Gregory that he had fallen from grace in consequence of the infraction of his vows committed in touching the necklace of his niece.[535]
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His first movement on the subject appears to have been an epistle addressed in November, 1073, to Gebhardt Archbishop of Salzburg, taking him severely to task for his neglect in enforcing the canons promulgated not long before in Rome, and ordering him to carry them rigidly into effect among his clergy.[536] This, no doubt, was a circular letter addressed to all the prelates of Christendom, and it was but a preliminary step. Early in Lent of the next year (March, 1074), he held his first synod, which adopted a canon prohibiting sacerdotal marriage, ordering that no one in future should be admitted to orders without a vow of celibacy, and renewing the legislation of Nicholas II. which commanded the people not to attend the ministrations of those whose lives were a violation of the rule.[537] There was nothing in the terms of this more severe than what had been decreed in innumerable previous councils—indeed, it was by no means as threatening as many decretals of recent date; but Gregory was resolved that it should not remain, like them, a mere protest, and he took immediate measures to have it enforced wherever the authority of Rome extended.
The controversy as respects Italy has already been so fully described that to dilate upon it further would be superfluous. Even though Alexander II. in his later years had shrunk somewhat from the contest, yet from Naples to the Tyrol the question was thoroughly understood, and its results depended more upon political revolutions than on ecclesiastical exertions. Beyond the Alps, however, the efforts of preceding popes had thus far proved wholly nugatory, and on this field Gregory now bent all his energies. The new canon was sent to all the bishops of Europe, with instructions to promulgate it throughout their respective dioceses, and to see that it was strictly obeyed; while legates were sent in every direction to support these commands with their personal supervision and exertion.[538]
That the course which Gregory thus adopted was essentially different from that pursued by his predecessors is amply attested by the furious storm which these measures aroused. The clergy protested in the most energetic terms that they would rather abandon their calling than their wives; they denounced Gregory as a madman and a heretic, who expected to compel men to live as angels, and who in his folly, while denying to natural affection its accustomed and proper gratification, would open the door to indiscriminate licentiousness; and they tauntingly asked where, when he should have driven them from the priesthood, he expected to find the angels who were to replace them.[539] Even those who favored celibacy condemned the means adopted as injudicious, contrary to the canons, and leading to scandals more injurious to the church than the worst of heresies.[540] Gregory paid little heed to threats or remonstrances, but sent legate after legate to accuse the bishops of their inertness, and to menace them with deposition if they should neglect to carry out the canon to the letter, and he accompanied these measures with others of even more practically efficient character.
The bishops, in fact, were placed in a most embarrassing position, which may be understood from the adventures of three prelates, who took different positions with regard to the wishes of Gregory—Otho of Constance, who leaned to the side of the clergy; St. Altmann of Passau, who was an enthusiastic papalist; and Siegfrid of Mainz, who was a trimmer afraid of both parties.
To Otho, Gregory, in 1074, sent the canons of the synod inhibiting marriage and simony, with orders to use every exertion to secure the compliance of his clergy. Otho apparently did not manifest much eagerness to undertake the unpopular task, and Gregory lost little time in calling him to account. Before the year expired, we find the pope addressing a second epistle to the bishop, angrily accusing him of disobedience in permitting the ministration of married priests, and summoning him to answer for his contumacy at a synod to be held in Rome during the approaching Lent. Nor was this all, for at the same time he wrote to the clergy and people of the diocese, informing them of the disobedience of their bishop and of his summons to trial, commanding them, in case of his persistent rebellion, to no longer obey or reverence him as bishop, and formally releasing them from all subjection to him. Otho doubtless considered it imprudent to show himself at the synod of 1075; consequently in that of 1076 he was excommunicated and deprived of his episcopal functions. During the autumn of the same year, however, the legate Altmann of Passau restored him to communion at Ulm, but without granting him the privilege of officiating. Otho disregarded this restriction, and not only persisted in exercising his functions, but openly favored and protected the married clergy. For this Gregory absolved his flock from all obedience to him, whereupon Otho abandoned the Catholic party and formally joined the imperialists, who were then engaged in the effort to depose Gregory. From some motives of policy, the pope granted the hardened sinner three years for repentance, at the expiration of which, in 1080, he sent Altmann to Constance to superintend the election of another bishop. The new incumbent, however, proved incapable through bodily infirmity; and, in 1084, Otto of Ostia was sent to Constance, and under his auspices Gebhardt was elected bishop, and duly consecrated in 1085.[541] Evidently Gregory was not a man to abandon his purpose, and those who opposed him could not count upon perpetual immunity.
St. Altmann of Passau was renowned for his piety and the strictness of his religious observance. When the canon of 1074 reached him, he assembled his clergy, read it to them, and adjured them to pay to it the respect which was requisite. His eloquence was wasted; the clerks openly refused obedience, and defended themselves by immemorial custom, and by the fact that none of their predecessors had been called upon to endure so severe and unnatural a regulation. Finding the occasion unpropitious, the pious Altmann dissembled; he assured his clergy that he was perfectly willing to indulge them if the papal mandate would permit it, and with this he dismissed them. He allowed the matter to lie in abeyance until the high feast of St. Stephen, the patron saint of the church, which was always attended by the magnates of the diocese. Then, without giving warning of his intentions, he suddenly mounted the pulpit, read to the assembled clergy and laity the letters of the pope, and threatened exemplary punishment for disobedience. Though thus taken at advantage and by surprise, the clerks were not disposed to submit. A terrible tumult at once arose, and the crafty saint would have been torn to pieces had it not been for the strenuous interference of the nobles, aided, as his biographer assures us, by the assistance of God. The clergy continued their resistance, and when, not long after, the empire and papacy became involved in internecine strife, they sought the protection of Henry IV., who marched upon Passau, and drove out St. Altmann and his faction. How unbending was this opposition, and how successfully it was maintained, is manifest from the fact that when St. Altmann at length returned to his diocese as papal legate, about the year 1081, even Gregory felt it necessary to use policy rather than force, and instructed him to yield to the pressure of the evil times, and to reserve the strict enforcement of the reform for a more fortunate period.[542] The political question had thus, for the moment, overshadowed the religious one.
The archiepiscopate of Mainz was, both temporally and spiritually, one of the most powerful of the ecclesiastical principalities of Germany. To the Archbishop Siegfrid, Gregory sent the canon of 1074 with instructions similar to those contained in his epistle to Otho of Constance. In reply, Siegfrid promised implicit obedience; but, recognizing the almost insuperable difficulties of the task assigned him, he temporized, and gave his clergy six months in which to make up their minds, exhorting them to render willing obedience and relieve him from the necessity of employing coercion. At the expiration of the period, in October, 1074, he assembled a synod at Erfurt, where he boldly insisted that they should give up their wives or abandon their functions and their benefices. Their arguments and entreaties were in vain. Finding him immovable, they retired for consultation, when some proposed to separate and return home at once, without further parley, and thus elude giving sanction to the new regulations; while bolder spirits urged that it would be better to put the archbishop to instant death, before he could promulgate so execrable a decree, thus leaving for posterity a shining example, which would prevent any of his successors from attempting so abominable an enterprise.
Siegfrid’s friends advised him of the turn which affairs were likely to take. He therefore sent to his clergy a request that they would reassemble in synod, promising that he would take the first opportunity to apply to Rome for a relaxation of the canon. They agreed to this, and, on meeting them the next day, Siegfrid astutely started the question of his claims on the Thuringian tithes, which had shortly before been settled by the Saxon war. Indignant at this, the Thuringian clergy raised a tumult, flew to arms, and the synod broke up in the utmost confusion. In December, Gregory wrote to the shuffling archbishop an angry letter, reproaching him with his lukewarmness in the cause, and ordering him to present himself at the synod announced for the coming Lent. Siegfrid obediently went to Rome, but was with difficulty admitted to communion. What promises he made to obtain it were not kept, for again in September, 1075, Gregory addressed him with commands to enforce the canons. Stimulated by this, Siegfrid convoked a synod at Mainz in October, where the Bishop of Coire appeared with a papal mandate threatening him with degradation and expulsion if he failed in compelling the priests to abandon either their wives or their ministry. Thus goaded, Siegfrid did his best, but the whole body of the clergy raised such a clamor and made demonstrations so active and so formidable that the archbishop saw little prospect of escaping with life. The danger from his mutinous flock was more instant and pressing than that from the angry pope; his resolution gave way, and he dissolved the synod, declaring that he washed his hands of the affair, and that Gregory might deal as he saw fit with a matter which was beyond his power to control. Thus placed between the upper and the nether millstone, it is not to be wondered at if Siegfrid took refuge in the party of the imperialists, nor that his name stands at the head of the list of bishops who in 1076 passed judgment on Gregory, and pronounced that he had forfeited all claim to the papacy; neither is it surprising that Gregory lost no time in excommunicating him at the Roman synod of the same year.[543]
These examples are sufficient to illustrate the difficulties with which Gregory had to contend, and the manner in which he endeavored to overcome them. The incidents are by no means exceptional, and his marvellous vigor and energy in supervising the movement everywhere, encouraging the zealous co-worker and punishing the lukewarm and indifferent, are abundantly attested by his correspondence. He apparently had an eye on every corner of Europe, and lost no opportunity of enforcing his views with threats or promises, as the case might seem to demand.[544]
It did not take long, however, to convince him that he could count upon no efficient assistance from the hierarchy, and that if the church was to be purified, it must be purified from without, and not from within. To the unutterable horror of those strict churchmen who regarded the immunity from all temporal supervision or jurisdiction as one of the most precious of ecclesiastical privileges, he took, as early as 1074, the decided and unprecedented step of authorizing the laity to withdraw their obedience from all prelates and priests who disregarded the canons of the Holy See on the subjects of simony and incontinence.[545] This principle, once adopted, was followed up with his customary unalterable resolution. In October, 1074, he wrote to a certain Count Albert, exhorting him not to mind what the simoniacal and concubinary priests might say, but, in spite of them, to persist in enforcing the orders which emanated from Rome. Still more menacing was an epistle addressed in January, 1075, to Rodolf, Duke of Swabia, and Bertolf, Duke of Carinthia, commanding them—“whatever the bishops may say or may not say concerning this, do you in no manner receive the ministrations of those who owe promotion or ordination to simony, or whom you know to be guilty of concubinage ... and, as far as you can, do you prevent, by force if necessary, all such persons from officiating. And if any shall presume to prate and say that it is not your business, tell them to come to us and dispute about the obedience which we thus enjoin upon you”—and adding a bitter complaint of the archbishops and bishops who, with rare exceptions, had taken no steps to put an end to these execrable customs, or to punish the guilty.[546]
These extraordinary measures called forth indignant denunciations on the part of ecclesiastics, for these letters were circulars sent to all the princes on whom he could depend, and he insured their publicity by causing similar orders to be published in the churches themselves. Thus Theodoric, Bishop of Verdun, who had inclined to the side of Gregory and had secretly left the Assembly of Utrecht in 1076 to avoid countenancing by his presence the excommunication then pronounced against the pope, in a letter to Gregory bitterly reproaches his own folly in promulgating the decretal and in not foreseeing its effect as destructive to the peace of the church, to the safety of the clerical order, and as creating a disturbance which threatened even the Christian faith.[547] So Henry, Bishop of Speyer, indignantly denounced him as having destroyed the authority of the bishops and subjected the church to the madness of the people;[548] and when the bishops, at the Diet of Worms, threw off their allegiance to him, one of the reasons alleged, in Henry’s letter to him, is the surrender which he had made of the church to the laity.[549] Yet Gregory was not to be diverted from his course, and he was at least successful in rousing the Teutonic church from the attitude of passive resistance which threatened to render his efforts futile. The princes of Germany, who were already intriguing with Gregory for support in their perennial revolts against their sovereign, were delighted to seize the opportunity of at once obliging the pope, creating disturbance at home, and profiting by the church property which they could manage to get into their hands by ejecting the unfortunate married priests. They accordingly proceeded to exercise, without delay and to the fullest extent, the unlimited power so suddenly granted them over a class which had hitherto successfully defied their jurisdiction; nor was it difficult to excite the people to join in the persecution of those who had always held themselves as superior beings, and who were now pronounced by the highest authority in the church to be sinners of the worst description. The ignorant populace were naturally captivated by the idea of the vicarious mortification with which their own errors were to be redeemed by the abstinence imposed upon their pastors, and they were not unreasonably led to believe that they were themselves deeply wronged by the want of purity in their ecclesiastics. Add to this the attraction which persecution always possesses for the persecutor, and the license of plunder so dear to a turbulent and barbarous age, and it is not difficult to comprehend the motive power of the storm which burst over the heads of the secular clergy, and which must have satisfied by its severity the stern soul of Gregory himself.
A contemporary writer, whose name has been lost, but who is supposed by Dom Martène to have been a priest of Trèves, gives us a very lively picture of the horrors which ensued, and as he shows himself friendly in principle to the reform attempted, his account may be received as trustworthy. He describes what amounted almost to a dissolution of society, slave betraying master and master slave; friend informing against friend; snares and pitfalls spread before the feet of all; faith and truth unknown. The peccant priests suffered terribly. Some, reduced to utter poverty, and unable to bear the scorn and contempt of those from whom they had been wont to receive honor and respect, wandered off as homeless exiles; others, mutilated by the indecent zeal of ardent puritans, were carried around to exhibit their shame and misery; others, tortured in lingering death, bore to the tribunal on high the testimony of blood-guiltiness against their persecutors; while others, again, in spite of danger, secretly continued the connections which exposed them to all these cruelties. In the midst of these troubles, as might be expected, the offices of religion were wholly neglected; the new-born babe received no holy baptism; the dying penitent expired without the saving viaticum; the sinner could cleanse his soul by no confession and absolution; and the devotee could no longer be strengthened by the daily sacrifice of the mass.[550] Another writer, of nearly the same date, relates with holy horror how the laity shook off all the obedience which they owed to their pastors, and, despising the sacraments prepared by them, trod the Eucharist under foot and cast out the sacred wine, administered baptism with unlicensed hands, and substituted for the holy chrism the filthy wax collected from their own ears.[551]
When such was the fate of the pastors, it is easy to imagine the misery inflicted on their unfortunate wives. A zealous admirer of Gregory relates with pious gratulation, as indubitable evidence of divine vengeance, how, maddened by their wrongs, some of them openly committed suicide, while others were found dead in the beds which they had sought in perfect health; and this being proof of their possession by the devil, they were denied Christian sepulture. The case of Count Manigold of Veringen affords a not uninstructive instance of the frightful passions aroused by the relentless cruelty which thus branded them as infamous, tore them from their families, and cast them adrift upon a mocking world. The count had put in force the orders of Gregory with strict severity throughout his estates in the Swabian Alps. One miserable creature thus driven from her husband swore that the count should undergo the same fate, and, in the blindness of her rage, she poisoned the Countess of Veringen, whose widowed husband, overwhelmed with grief, sought no second mate.[552]
Nor was the customary machinery of miracles wanting to stimulate the zeal of the faithful in this pious work, and to convince the doubters whose worldly wisdom or humanity might shrink from the task assigned them. Unchaste priests at Mass would find sudden blasts of wind overturn the cup, and scatter the sacred wine upon the ground, or the holy wafer would be miraculously snatched out of their polluted hands. The saintly virgin Herluca saw in a vision the Saviour, with his wounds profusely bleeding, and was told that if she desired to escape a repetition of the horrifying spectacle, she must no longer be present at the ministrations of Father Richard, the officiating priest of her convent—a revelation which she employed effectually upon him and his parishioners. The same holy maiden being observed staring intently out of the window, declared, upon being questioned, that she had seen the soul of the priest of Rota carried off by demons to eternal punishment; and, on sending to his habitation, it was found that he had expired at the very moment.[553] Puerile as these tales may seem to us, they were stern realities to those against whose weaknesses they were directed, and whose sufferings were thus enhanced by every art which bigotry could bring to bear upon the credulous passions of a barbarous populace.
It cannot be a matter of surprise if men, who were thus threatened with almost every worldly evil, should seek to defend themselves by means as violent as those employed by their persecutors. Their cruel intensity of fear is aptly illustrated by what occurred at Cambrai in 1077, where a man was actually burned at the stake as a heretic for declaring his adhesion to the Hildebrandine doctrine that the masses of simoniacal and concubinary priests were not to be listened to by the faithful.[554] So, in the same year, when the pseudo-emperor Rodolf of Swabia was elected by the papalists at the Diet of Forcheim as a competitor to Henry IV., he manifested his zeal to suppress the heresies of avarice and lust by refusing the ministration of a simoniacal deacon in the coronation solemnities at Mainz. The clergy of that city, who had so successfully resisted, for two years, the efforts of their archbishop Siegfrid to reduce them to subjection to the canons, were dismayed at the prospect of coming under the control of so pious a prince, who would indubitably degrade them or compel them to give up their wives and simoniacally acquired churches. They therefore stirred up a tumult among the citizens, who were ready to espouse their cause; and when Rodolf left his palace for vespers, he was attacked by the people. The conflict was renewed on his return, causing heavy slaughter on both sides, and though the townsmen were driven back, Rodolf was forced to leave the city.[555]
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This incident affords us a glimpse into the political aspects of the reform. In the tremendous struggle between the empire and papacy, Gregory allied himself with all the disaffected princes of Germany, and they were careful to justify their rebellions under the specious pretext of zeal for the apostolic church. They of course, therefore, entered heartily into his measures for the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline, and professed the sternest indignation towards those whom he placed under the ban. Thus, after Henry, in 1076, had caused his bishops to declare the degradation of Gregory, when the revolted princes held their assembly at Tribur, and in turn decreed the deposition of Henry, they used the utmost caution to exclude all who had communicated with Henry since his excommunication, together with those who had obtained preferment by simony, or who had joined in communion with married priests.[556] The connection, indeed, became so marked that the papalists throughout Germany were stigmatized by the name of Patarini—a term which had acquired so sinister a significance in the troubles of Milan.[557] In this state of affairs it was natural that common enmities and common dangers should unite the persecuted clergy and the hunted sovereign. Yet it is a curious illustration of the influence which the denunciations of sacerdotal marriage had exercised over the public mind, that although Henry tacitly protected the simoniacal and married ecclesiastics, and although they rallied around him and afforded him unquestionable and invaluable aid, still he never ventured openly to defend them. Writers both then and since have attributed the measure of success with which he sustained the fluctuating contest, and the consequent sufferings of the unbending pope, to the efforts of the recalcitrant clergy who resisted the yoke imposed on them by Rome.[558] Yet Henry had formally and absolutely pledged his assistance when Gregory commenced his efforts, and had repeated the promise in 1075;[559] and from this position he never definitely withdrew. Even when the schismatic bishops of his party, at the synod of Brixen, in 1080, pronounced sentence of deposition on Gregory, and filled the assumed vacancy with an anti-pope, the man whom they elected never ventured to dispute the principle of Gregory’s reforms, although the Lombard prelates, at that very time, were warmly defending their married and simoniacal clergy.[560] Indeed, Guiberto of Ravenna, or Clement III., took occasion to express his detestation of concubinage in language nearly as strong as that of his rival, although he threatened with excommunication the presumptuous laymen who should refuse to receive the sacraments of priests that had not been regularly tried and condemned at his own papal tribunal.[561] In thus endeavoring to place himself as a shield between the suffering priesthood and the persecuting populace, he was virtually striving to annul the reforms of Gregory, since in no other way could they be carried into effect; but he was forced to coincide with Gregory as to the principle which dictated those reforms. Notwithstanding all these precautions, however, the papalists were not disposed to allow their opponents to escape the responsibility of the alliance which brought them so much strength by dividing the church, and no opportunity was lost of stigmatizing them for the license which they protected. When Guiberto and his cardinals were driven out of Rome in 1084 by Robert Guiscard and his Normans, the flying prelates were ridiculed, not for their cowardice, but for their shaven chins, and the wives and concubines whom they publicly carried about with them.[562]
At length Henry and his partisans appear to have felt it necessary to make some public declaration to relieve themselves from the odium of supporting and favoring a practice which was popularly regarded as a heresy and a scandal. When the papalists, under their King Hermann, at the Easter of 1085 (April 20th), convened a general assembly of their faction at Quedlinburg and again forbade all commerce with women to those in orders,[563] the imperialists lost no time in putting themselves on the same record with their rivals. Three weeks later Henry gathered around him, at Mainz, all the princes and prelates who professed allegiance to him, for the purpose of securing the succession to his eldest son, Conrad, as King of Germany, and there, in that solemn diet, marriage was formally prohibited to the priesthood.[564] Gregory was then lying on his dying bed in the far off castle of Salerno, and ere the news could reach him he was past the vanities of earthly triumph. Could he have known, however, that the cause for which he had risked the integrity and independence of the church had thus received the support of its bitterest enemies, and that his unwavering purpose had thus achieved the moral victory of forcing his adversaries to range themselves under his banner, his spirit would have rejoiced, and his confidence in the ultimate success of the great theocratic system, for the maintenance of which he was thus expiring in exile, would have softened the sorrows of a life which closed in the darkness and doubt of defeat.
XV. CENTRAL EUROPE
Hildebrand had passed away, leaving to his successors the legacy of inextinguishable hate and unattained ambition. Nor was the reform for which he had labored as yet by any means secured in practice, even though his opponents had been reduced to silence or had been forced to render a formal adhesion to the canons which he had proclaimed so boldly.
The cause of asceticism, it is true, had gained many adherents among the laity. Throughout Germany, husbands and wives separated from each other in vast numbers, and devoted themselves to the service of the church, without taking vows or assuming ecclesiastical garments; while those who were unmarried renounced the pleasures of the world, and, placing themselves under the direction of spiritual guides, abandoned themselves entirely to religious duties. To such an extent did this prevail, that the pope was applied to for his sanction, which he eagerly granted, and the movement doubtless added strength to the party of reform.[565] Yet but little had thus far been really gained in purifying the church itself, notwithstanding the fearful ordeal through which its ministers had passed.
As for Germany, the indomitable energy of Henry IV., unrepressed by defeat and unchilled by misfortune, had at length achieved a virtual triumph over his banded enemies. But four bishops of the Empire—those of Wurzburg, Passau, Worms, and Constance—owed allegiance to Urban II. All the other dioceses were filled by schismatics, who rendered obedience to the anti-pope Clement. In 1089 the Catholic or papalist princes offered to lay down their arms and do homage to Henry if he would acknowledge Urban and make his peace with the true church. The emperor, however, had a pope who suited him, and he entertained too lively a recollection of the trials from which he was escaping to open the door to a renewal of the papal pretensions, which he had at length successfully defied, nor would he consent to stigmatize his faithful prelates as schismatics.[566] He therefore pursued his own course, and Guiberto of Ravenna enjoyed the honors of the popedom, checkered by alternate vicissitudes of good and evil fortune, until removed by death in the year 1100,[567] his sanctity attested by the numerous miracles wrought at his tomb, which only needed the final success of the imperialist cause to enrich the calendar with a St. Clement in place of a St. Gregory and a St. Urban.[568]
Under such auspices, no very zealous maintenance of ecclesiastical discipline was to be expected. If Clement’s sensibilities were humored by a nominal reprobation of sacerdotal marriage, he could scarcely ask for more or insist that Henry should rekindle the embers of disaffection by enforcing the odious rules which had proved so powerful a cause of trouble to their authors and his enemies. Accordingly, it cannot surprise us to observe that Urban II., in following out the views of his predecessors, felt it necessary to adopt measures even more violent than those which in Gregory’s hands had caused so much excitement and confusion, but whose inefficiency was confessed by the very effort to supplement them. In 1089, the year after his consecration, Urban published at the council of Amalfi a decree by which, as usual, married ecclesiastics were sentenced to deposition, and bishops who permitted such irregularities were suspended; but where Gregory had been content with ejecting husbands and wives, and with empowering secular rulers to enforce the edict on recalcitrants, Urban, with a refinement of cruelty, reduced the unfortunate women to slavery, and offered their servitude as a bribe to the nobles who should aid in thus purifying the church.[569] If this infamous canon did not work misery so wide-spread as the comparatively milder decretals of Gregory, it was because the power of Urban was circumscribed by the schism, while he was apparently himself ashamed or afraid to promulgate it in regions where obedience was doubtful. When Pibo, Bishop of Toul, in the same year, 1089, sent an envoy to ask his decision on various points of discipline, including sacerdotal marriage (the necessity of such inquiry showing the futility of previous efforts), Urban transmitted the canons of Amalfi in response, but omitted this provision, which well might startle the honest German mind.[570] Perhaps, on reflection, Urban may himself have wished to disavow the atrocity, for in a subsequent council, when again attacking the ineradicable sin, he contented himself with simply forbidding all such marriages, and ordering all persons who were bound by orders or vows to be separated from their wives or concubines, and to be subjected to due penance.[571]
Yet even in those regions of Germany which persevered in resisting Henry and in recognizing Urban as pope, the persecution of twenty years was still unsuccessful, and the people had apparently relapsed into condoning the wickedness of their pastors. In an assembly held at Constance in 1094, it was deemed necessary to impose a fine on all who should be present at the services performed by priests who had transgressed the canons.[572] When this was the case in the Catholic provinces, it is easy to imagine that in the imperialist territories the thunders of Gregory and Urban had long since been forgotten, and that marrying and giving in marriage were practised with as little scruple as ever. A fair illustration, indeed, of the amount of respect paid to the rules of discipline is afforded by a discussion on the choice of a successor to Cosmo Bishop of Prague, who died in 1098. Duke Brecislas, in filling the vacancy with his chaplain Hermann, endeavored to rebut the arguments of those who objected to the foreign birth of the appointee by urging that fact as a recommendation, since, as a stranger, he would not be pressed upon by a crowd of kindred nor be burdened with the care of children, thus showing that the native priesthood, as a general rule, were heads of families.[573] For this, moreover, they could not plead ignorance, for a Bohemian penitential of the period expressly prohibits priests from having companions whose society could give rise to suspicion of any kind.[574]
* * * * *
At length the duel which, for more than thirty years, Henry had so gallantly fought with the successors of St. Peter drew to a close. Ten years of supremacy he had enjoyed in Germany, and he looked forward to the peaceful decline of his unquiet life, when the treacherous calm was suddenly disturbed. Papal intrigues in 1093 had caused the parricidal revolt of his eldest born, the weak and vacillating Conrad, whose early death had then extinguished the memory of his crime. That unnatural rebellion had gained for Rome the North of Italy; and as the emperor’s second son, Henry, grew to manhood, he, too, was marked as a fit instrument to pierce his father’s heart, and to extend the domination of the church by the foulest wrongs that man can perpetrate. The startling revolution which in 1105 precipitated Henry from a throne to a prison, from an absolute monarch to a captive embracing the knees of his son and pleading for his wretched life, established forever the supremacy of the papacy over Germany. The consequent enforcement of the law of celibacy became only a question of time.
As the excuse for the rebellion was the necessity of restoring the empire to the communion of Rome, one of the first measures of the conspirators was the convocation of a council to be held at Nordhausen, May 29, 1105, and one of the objects specified for its action was the expulsion of all married priests.[575] The council was duly held, and duly performed its work of condemning the heresy which permitted benefices to be occupied and sacred functions exercised by those who were involved in the ties of matrimony.[576] Pope Paschal II. was not remiss in his share of the ceremony, by which he was to receive the fruits of his treacherous intrigues. The following year a great council was held at Guastalla, where, after interminable discussions as to the propriety of receiving without re-ordination those who had compromised themselves or who had been ordained by schismatics, he admitted into the fold all the repentant ecclesiastics of the party of Henry IV.[577] The text of the canon granting this boon to the imperialist clergy bears striking testimony to the completeness of the separation which had existed between the Teutonic and the Roman churches in stating that throughout the empire scarce any Catholic ecclesiastics were to be found.[578] It scarcely needed the declaration which Paschal made in 1107 at the synod of Troyes, condemning married priests to degradation and deprivation,[579] to show that the doctrines of Damiani and Hildebrand were thenceforth to be the law of the empire.
The question thus was definitely settled in prohibiting the priests of Germany from marrying or from retaining the wives whom they had taken previous to ordination. It was settled, indeed, in the rolls of parchment which recorded the decrees of councils and the trading bargains of pope and kaiser, yet the perennial struggle continued, and the parchment roll for yet awhile was powerless before the passions of man, who did not cease to be man because his crown was shaven and his shoulders wore cope and stole.
Cosmo, who was Dean of Prague, who had been bred to the church, and had been promoted to the priesthood in 1099, chronicles, in 1118, the death of Boseteha, his wife, in terms which show that no separation had ever occurred between them; and five years later he alludes to his son Henry in a manner to indicate that there was no irregularity in such relationship, nor aught that would cause him to forfeit the respect of his contemporaries in acknowledging it.[580] Even more to the point is the case of a pious priest, his friend, who, on the death of his wife (“presbytera”), made a vow that he would have no further intercourse with women. Cosmo relates that the unaccustomed deprivation proved harder than he had expected, and that for some years he was tortured with burning temptation. Finding at length that his resolution was giving way, he resolved to imitate St. Benedict in conquering the flesh; and having no suitable solitude for the execution of his purpose, he took a handful of nettles to his chamber, where, casting off his garments, he thrashed himself so unmercifully that for three days he lay moribund. Then he hung the nettles in a conspicuous position on his wall, that he might always have before his eyes so significant a memento and warning.[581] Cosmo’s admiration for this, as a rare and almost incredible exhibition of priestly virtue and fortitude, shows how few were capable of even remaining widowers, while the whole story proves that not only the clergy were free to marry, but also that it was only the voluntary vow that prevented a second marriage. At the close of the century Pietro, Cardinal of Santa Maria in Via Lata, sent as Legate to Bohemia by Celestin III., was much scandalized at this state of affairs; and when a number of postulants for holy orders were assembled in the church of St. Vitus at Prague, before ordaining them he pronounced a discourse on the subject of celibacy and demanded that they should all swear to preserve continence. Thereupon all the priests who were present rushed forward and urged them not to assume an obligation hitherto unknown, and when the Cardinal ordered the Archdeacon to repress their somewhat active demonstrations, they proceeded to pummel that unhappy official and the tumult was with difficulty repressed by the soldiery who were summoned. The legate sentenced some of the rioters to be starved to death in prison and the rest to be exiled—a wholesome severity which broke the spirit of the Bohemian priesthood and led to the introduction of celibacy.[582]
That this state of things was not confined to the wild Bohemian Marches, but obtained throughout Germany in general, is sufficiently attested by the fact that when Innocent II. was driven out of Rome by the anti-pope Anaclet, and was wandering throughout Europe begging recognition, he held, in conjunction with the Emperor Lothair, in 1131, a council at Liége, where he procured the adoption of a canon prohibiting priestly marriage or attendance on the mass of married priests. Not only does the necessity of this fresh legislation show that previous enactments had become obsolete, but the manner in which these proceedings are referred to by the chroniclers plainly indicates that it took the Teutonic mind somewhat by surprise, and that the efforts of Gregory and Urban had not only remained without result, but had become absolutely forgotten.[583]
If these proceedings of Innocent had any effect, it was only to make matters worse. The pious Rupert, Abbot of Duits, writing a few years later, deplores the immorality of the priesthood, who not only entered into forbidden marriages, but, knowing them to be illegal, had no scruple in multiplying the tie, considering it to be, at their pleasure, devoid of all binding force.[584] And in Liége itself, where Innocent had held his council, Bishop Albero, whose episcopate commenced in 1135, permitted his priests to celebrate their marriages openly, so that, as we are told, the citizens rather preferred to give their daughters in marriage to them than to laymen; and the naïve remark of the chronicler that the clergy gave up keeping concubines in secret and took wives openly would seem to show that the cause of morality had not gained during the temporary restriction imposed by Innocent.[585] It was not to much purpose that Albero was deprived of his see for this laxity, for the same state of things continued. No province of Germany was more orthodox than Salzburg, yet the archdeacon of the archiepiscopal church there, writing in 1175, bewails the complete demoralization of his clergy, whom he was utterly unable to reform. Priests who were content with their own wives and did not take those of other men were reputed virtuous and holy; and he complains that in his own archidiaconate he was powerless to prevent the ordination and ministry of the sons of priests, even while they were living in open adultery with women whom they had taken from their husbands.[586] How little sympathy, indeed, all efforts to enforce the rule called forth is instructively shown by the wondering contempt with which a writer, strictly papalist in his tendencies, comments upon the indiscreet reformatory zeal of Meinhard, Archbishop of Trèves. Elevated to this lofty dignity in 1128, he at once undertook to force his clergy to obey the rule by the most stringent measures, and speedily became so odious that he was obliged to leave his bishopric within the year; and the chronicler who tells the story has only words of reprobation for the unfortunate prelate.[587] Even as late as the end of the twelfth century, a chronicler of the popes, writing in southern Germany, calls Gregory VII. an enforcer of impossibilities—“præceptor impossibilium”—because he had endeavored to make good the rule of celibacy;[588] and a council of Ratisbon, in the thirteenth century, while lamenting the fact that there were few priests who did not openly keep their concubines and children in their houses, quotes the canon of Hildebrand forbidding the laity to attend at the ministrations of such persons, but without venturing to hint at its enforcement.[589]
* * * * *
Hungary had been Christianized at a time when the obligation of celibacy was but lightly regarded, though it had not as yet become obsolete. In reducing the dreaded and barbarous Majjars to civilization, the managers of the movement might well smooth the path and interpose as few obstacles as possible to the attainment of so desirable a consummation. It is probable, therefore, that restrictions on marriage, as applied to the priesthood, were lightly passed over, and, not being insisted on, were disregarded by all parties. Even the decretals of Nicholas II. and the fulminations of Gregory VII. appear to have never penetrated into the kingdom of St. Stephen, for sacerdotal celibacy seems to have been unknown among the Hungarians until the close of the century. The first allusion to it occurs in the synod of Zabolcs, held in 1092, under the auspices of St. Ladislas II., and is of a nature to show not only that it was an innovation on established usages, but also that the subject required tender handling to reconcile it to the weakness of undisciplined human nature. After the bitter denunciations and cruelly harsh measures which the popes had been promulgating for nearly half a century, there is an impressive contrast in the mildness with which the Hungarian church offered indulgence to those legitimately united to a first wife, until the Holy See could be consulted for a definitive decision;[590] and though marriages with second wives, widows, or divorced women were pronounced null and void, the disposition to evade a direct meeting of the question is manifested in a regulation which provided that if a priest united himself to his female slave “uxoris in locum,” the woman should be sold; but if he refused to part with her, he was simply to pay her price to the bishop.[591] Whether or not the pope’s decision was actually sought, we have no means of knowing; if it was, his inevitable verdict received little respect, for the Synod of Gran, held about the year 1099 by the Primate Seraphin of Gran, only ventured to recommend moderation to married priests, while its endeavor to enforce the rule prohibiting marriage after the assumption of orders shows how utterly the recognized discipline of the church was neglected. The consent of wives was also required before married priests could be elevated to the episcopate, and after consecration separation was strictly enjoined, affording still further evidence of the laxity allowed to the other grades. The iteration of the rules respecting digami and marriage with widows also indicates how difficult was the effort to resuscitate those well-known regulations, although they were universally admitted to be binding on all ecclesiastics.[592]
King Coloman, whose reign extended from 1095 to 1114, has the credit of being the first who definitely enjoined immaculate purity on the Hungarian priesthood. His laws, as collected by Alberic, have no dates, and therefore we are unable to affix precise epochs to them; but his legislation on the subject appears to have been progressive, for we find edicts containing injunctions respecting digami and irregular unions in terms which indicate that single marriages were not interfered with; and these may reasonably be deemed earlier than other laws which formally prohibit the elevation to the diaconate of an unmarried man without exacting from him a vow of continence, or of a married man without the consent of his wife. The import of this latter condition is explained by another law, which provided that no married man should officiate at the altar unless his wife professed continence, and was furnished by her husband with the means of dwelling apart from him.[593] As these stringent regulations form part of the canons of a council held by Archbishop Seraphin about the year 1109,[594] they were probably borrowed from that council by Coloman, and incorporated into his laws at a period somewhat later.
I have not met with any indications of the results of the legislation which thus combined the influence of the temporal and ecclesiastical authorities. That it effected little, however, is apparent from the evidence afforded by Dalmatia, at that time a province of Hungary. Shortly before it lost its independence, its duke, Dimitri, resolved to assume the crown of royalty, and purchased the assent of Gregory VII. at the price of acknowledging him as feudal superior. Gregory took advantage of Dimitri’s aspirations to further the plans of reform, of which he never lost sight; for, in the coronation oath taken in 1076 before Gebizo, the papal legate, the new king swore that he would take such measures as would insure the chastity of all ecclesiastics, from the bishop to the subdeacon.[595] The new dynasty did not last long, for before the end of the century St. Ladislas united the province of Dalmatia to the kingdom of Hungary; but neither the oath of Dimitri, the laws of Coloman, nor the canons of the national councils succeeded in eradicating the custom of priestly marriage. When we find, in 1185, Urban III. in approving the acts of the synod of Spalatro, graciously expressing his approbation of its prohibiting the marriage of priests, and desiring that the injunction should be extended so as to include the diaconate,[596] we see that marriage must have been openly enjoyed by all ranks, that the synod had not ventured to include in the restriction any but the highest order, and that Urban himself did not undertake to apply the rule to subdeacons, although they had been specially included in Dimitri’s oath. Yet still pope and synod labored in vain, for fourteen years later, in 1199, another national council complained that priests kept both wives and benefices. It therefore commanded that those who indulged in this species of adultery should either dismiss their partners in guilt, and undergo due penance, or else should give up their churches; while no married man should be admitted to the diaconate, unless his wife would take a vow of continence before the bishop.[597] Even yet, however, the subdiaconate is not alluded to, although the legates who presided over the council were those of Innocent III.
Of how little avail were these efforts is shown by the national council held at Vienna as late as 1267, by Cardinal Guido, legate of Clement IV. It was still found necessary to order the deprivation of priests and deacons who persisted in retaining their wives; while the special clauses respecting those who married after taking orders prove that such unions were frequent enough to require tender consideration in removing the evil. The subdiaconate, also, was declared liable to the same regulations, but the resistance of the members of that order was probably stubborn, for the canons were suspended in their favor until further instructions should be received from the pope.[598]
* * * * *
Poland was equally remiss in enforcing the canons on her clergy. The leaning of the Slavonic races towards the Greek church rendered them, in fact, peculiarly intractable, and marriage was commonly practised by the clergy at least until the close of the twelfth century.[599] At length the efforts of Rome were extended to that distant region, and in 1197 the papal legate, Cardinal Peter of Capua, held the synod of Lanciski, when the priests were peremptorily ordered to dismiss their wives and concubines, who, in the words of the historian, were at that time universally and openly kept.[600] The result of this seems to have amounted to little, for in 1207 we find Innocent III. sharply reproving the bishops of the province of Gnesen because married men were publicly admitted to ecclesiastical dignities, and canons took no shame in the families growing up around them. The children of priests were brought up to the sacred profession of their fathers, assisted them in their ministrations, and succeeded to their benefices. Whether or not the other disorders which Innocent designated as infecting the churches were the result of the carnal affections which thus superseded the spiritual we may fairly doubt, in view of the abuses still prevailing in more favored regions.[601] The effort was continued, and was apparently at length successful, at least in the western portions of the Polish church, for at the council of Breslau, held in 1279, there is no mention of wives, and the constitution of Guido, legate of Clement IV., is quoted, depriving of benefices those who openly kept concubines.[602]
* * * * *
The church of Sweden was no purer than its neighbors. That the rule was recognized there at a tolerably early period is shown by the fact that when the people of Scania, about the year 1180, revolted against the exactions of Waldemar I. of Denmark, they demanded to be released from the oppression of tithes and that the clergy should be married. Singularly enough, the clerks stood by their bishop, Absalom, when he laid an interdict on the province, and the arms of Waldemar speedily subdued the revolt.[603] Not much, however, was gained for church discipline by this. In 1204, the Archbishop of Lunden reported to Innocent III. that he had used every endeavor to enforce the canons and had brought many of his priests to observe chastity, but that there still were many who persisted in retaining their women, whom they treated as though they were legitimate wives, with fidelity and conjugal affection. To this Innocent replied that the recalcitrants must be coerced by suspension, and, if necessary, by deprivation of benefice.[604] How little result this achieved is evident when we find the archbishop again writing to Innocent III. complaining that the Swedish priests persisted in living with their wives, and that they moreover claimed to have a papal dispensation permitting it. Innocent, in reply, cautiously abstained from pronouncing an opinion as to the validity of these pretensions until he should have an opportunity of examining the document to which they appealed.[605] The efforts at this time were fruitless, for, in 1248, we find the Cardinal of St. Sabina as legate of Innocent IV. holding a council at Schening, of which the principal object was to reform these abuses, and so firmly were they established, that the Swedes were considered as schismatics of the Greek church, in consequence of the marriage of their priests. The council supported by the royal power, succeeded in forcing the Swedish ecclesiastics to give up their wives, by a liberal use of all the punishments then in vogue, together with the significant threat of abandoning them to the tender mercies of the secular tribunals.[606]
* * * * *
In Denmark and along the northern coasts of Germany, there was equal delay in enforcing the canon of celibacy. It is suggestive of some powerful intercession in favor of the married clergy when we see Paschal II., in 1117, writing to the King of Denmark that the rule was imperative, and that he could admit of no exceptions to it.[607] His insistence, however, was of little avail. In 1266, Cardinal Guido, legate of Clement IV., held a council at Bremen, where he was obliged to take rigorous measures to put an end to this Nicolitan heresy. All married priests, deacons, and subdeacons were pronounced incapable of holding any ecclesiastical office whatever. Children born of such unions were declared infamous, and incapable of inheritance, and any property received by gift or otherwise from their fathers was confiscated. Those who permitted their daughters, sisters, or other female relatives to contract such marriages, or gave them up in concubinage to priests, were excluded from the church. That a previous struggle had taken place on the subject is evident from the penalties threatened against the prelates who were in the habit of deriving a revenue from the protection of these irregularities, and from an allusion to the armed resistance, made by the married and concubinary priests with their friends, to all efforts to check their scandalous conduct.[608]
In Friesland, too, the efforts of the sacerdotalists were long set at naught. In 1219 Emo, Abbot of Wittewerum, describing the disastrous inundations which afflicted his country, considers them as a punishment sent to chastise the vices of the land, and among the disorders which were peculiarly obnoxious to the wrath of God he enumerates the public marriage of the priests, the hereditary transmission of benefices, and the testamentary provision made by ecclesiastics for their children out of the property which should accrue to the church; while his references to the canon law inhibiting these practices, show that these transgressions were not excusable through ignorance.[609] The warning was unheeded, for Abbot Emo alludes incidentally, on various subsequent occasions, to the hereditary transmission of several deaneries as a matter of course.[610] The deans in Friesland were ecclesiastics of high position, each having six or more parishes under his jurisdiction, which he governed under legatine power from the Bishop of Munster. When, in 1271, the people rose against them, exasperated by their intolerable exactions, in some temporary truce the deans gave their children as hostages; and when, after their expulsion, Gerard of Munster came to their assistance by excommunicating the rebels, the latter defended the movement by the argument that the deans had violated the laws of the church by handing down their positions from father to son, and that each generation imitated the incontinence of its predecessor.[611] Hildebrand might have applauded this reasoning, but his days were past. The church by this time had gained the position to which it had aspired, and no longer invoked secular assistance to enforce its laws. Even Abbot Menco, while admitting the validity of the popular argument, claimed that such questions were reserved for the decision of the church alone, and that the people must not interfere.
* * * * *
After thus marking the slow progress of the Hildebrandine movement in these frontier lands of Christendom, let us see what efforts were required to establish the reform in regions less remote.
XVI. FRANCE
Gregory VII. had not been so engrossed in his quarrels with the Empire as to neglect the prosecution of his favorite schemes of reform elsewhere. If he displayed somewhat less of energy and zeal in dealing with the ecclesiastical foibles of other countries, it was perhaps because the political complications which gave a special zest to his efforts in Germany were wanting, and because there was no organized resistance supported by the temporal authorities. Yet the inertia of passive non-compliance long rendered his endeavors and those of his successors equally nugatory.
As early as 1056 we find Victor II., by means of his vicars at the council of Toulouse, enjoining on the priesthood separation from their wives, under penalty of excommunication and deprivation of function and benefice.[612] This was followed up in 1060 by Nicholas II., who sought through his envoys to enforce the observance of his decretals on celibacy in France, and under the presidency of his legate the council of Tours in that year adopted a canon of the most decided character. All who, since the promulgation of the decretal of 1060, had continued in the performance of their sacred functions while still preserving relations with their wives and concubines were deprived of their grades without hope of restoration; and the same irrevocable penalty was denounced against those who in the future should endeavor to combine the incompatible duties of husband and minister of Christ.[613]
In what spirit these threats and injunctions were likely to be received may be gathered from an incident which occurred, probably about this time. A French bishop, as in duty bound, excommunicated one of his deacons for marrying. The clergy of the diocese, keen to appreciate the prospect of future trouble, rallied around their persecuted brother, and rose in open rebellion against the prelate. The latter, apparently, was unable to maintain his position, and the matter was referred for adjudication to the celebrated Berenger of Tours. Although, in view of the papal jurisprudence of the period, the bishop would seem to have acted with leniency, yet Berenger blamed both parties for their precipitancy and quarrelsome humor, and decided that the excommunication of a deacon for marrying was contrary to the canons, unless rendered unavoidable by the contumacy of the offender.[614]
Even more significant was the scene which occurred in 1074 in the council of Paris, where the holy St. Gauthier, Abbot of Ponthoise, undertook to sustain the decretal by which Gregory VII. prohibited attendance on the masses of married and concubinary priests. The assembly manifested its disapprobation of the measure in a manner so energetic that its unlucky advocate, after being furiously berated and soundly pummelled, was glad to escape with his life from the hands of his indignant brethren.[615]
When such was the spirit of the ecclesiastical body, there was little to be expected from any internal attempt at reform. At the stormy synod of Poitiers, in 1078, the papal legate, Hugh, Bishop of Die, succeeded in obtaining the adoption of a canon which threatened with excommunication all who should knowingly listen to the mass of a concubinary or simoniacal priest,[616] but this seems to have met with little response. Coercion from without was evidently requisite, and in this case, as we have seen, Gregory did not shrink from subjecting the church to the temporal power. In Normandy, for instance, a synod held at Lisieux in 1055 had commanded the degradation of priests who resided with wives or concubines. This was, of course, ineffective, and in 1072 John, Archbishop of Rouen, held a council in his cathedral city, where he renewed that canon in terms which show how completely all orders and dignitaries were habitually liable to its penalties.[617] The Norman clergy were not disposed to submit quietly to this abridgement of their accustomed privileges, and they expressed their dissent by raising a terrible clamor and driving their archbishop from the council with a shower of stones, from which he barely escaped alive.[618] At length, in view of the utter failure of all ecclesiastical legislation, the laity were called in. William the Conqueror, therefore, in 1080, assisted the Archbishop of Rouen in holding a synod at Lillebonne, where the stern presence of the suzerain prevented any unseemly resistance to the adoption of most unpalatable regulations. All who were in holy orders were forbidden, under any pretext, to keep women in their houses, and if, when accused of disobedience, they were unable to prove themselves innocent, their benefices were irretrievably forfeited. If the accusation was made by the ecclesiastical officials, the offender was to be tried by the episcopal court, but if his parishioners or feudal superior were the complainants, he was to be brought before a mixed tribunal, composed of the squires of his parish and the officials of the bishop. This startling invasion of the dearest privileges of the church was declared by William to proceed from no desire to interfere with the jurisdiction of his bishops, but to be a temporary expedient, rendered necessary by their negligence. Nor was this remarkable measure the only thing that renders the synod of Lillebonne worthy of note, for it affords us the earliest authoritative indication of a practice which subsequently became a standing disgrace to the church. The fifth canon declares that no priest shall be forced to give anything to the bishop or to the officers of the diocese beyond their lawful dues, and especially that no money shall be exacted on account of women kept by clerks.[619] A tribute known as “cullagium” became at times a recognized source of revenue, in consideration of which the weaknesses of human nature were excused, and ecclesiastics were allowed to enjoy in security the society of their concubines. We shall see hereafter that this infamous custom continued to flourish until the sixteenth century, despite the most strenuous and repeated endeavors to remove so grievous a scandal.
It is probable that the expedient of mixed courts for the trial of married and concubinary priests was not adopted without the concurrence of Gregory, who was willing to make almost any sacrifice necessary to accomplish his purpose. That they were organized and performed the functions delegated to them is shown by a reference in a charter of 1088 to one held at Caumont, which required a priest to abandon either his wife or his church.[620] So far, indeed, was Gregory from protesting against this violation of ecclesiastical immunities, that he was willing even to connive at the abuses which immediately crept into the system, and to purchase the assistance of the laity by allowing them to lay sacrilegious hands on the temporalities of the church. Many of the nobles who thus assisted in expelling the offending clergy seized the tithes and retained them. The papal legate, Hugh, Bishop of Die—better known by his subsequent primatial dignity of Lyons—proceeded against these invaders of church property in the usual manner, and excommunicated them as a matter of course. Gregory, however, who under ordinary circumstances would have promptly consigned the spoilers to the bottomless pit, now virtually took their side. He discreetly declined to confirm the excommunication, reproved his legate for superserviceable zeal, and ordered him in future to be more guarded and temperate in his proceedings.[621]
Church and state—the zeal of the ecclesiastic and the avarice of the noble—vainly united to break down the stubbornness of the Norman priesthood, for marriage continued to be enjoyed as openly as ever. The only effect of the attempted reform, indeed, appeared to be that when a priest entered into matrimony he took a solemn vow never to give up his wife, a measure prompted doubtless by the fears of the bride and her kindred. The nuptials were public; male issue succeeded to benefices by a recognized primogeniture, and female children received their fathers’ churches as dower, when other resources were wanting. About the beginning of the twelfth century, three enthusiastic ascetic reformers, the celebrated Robert d’Arbrissel, founder of Fontevrault, Bernard Abbot of Tiron, and Vitalis of Mortain traversed Normandy and preached with great earnestness against these abuses, the result of which was that they nearly came to an untimely end at the hands of the indignant pastors and their more indignant spouses. On one occasion, when Bernard was preaching at Coutances, a married archdeacon assailed him, with a crowd of priests and clerks, asking how he, a monk, dead to the world, presumed to preach to the living. Bernard replied that Samson had slain his foes with the jaw-bone of a dead ass, and then proceeded with so moving a discourse on Samson, that the archdeacon was converted, and interfered to save him from the mob.[622]
If William the Conqueror found his advantage in thus assisting the hopeless reform within his duchy of Normandy, he had no hesitation in obstructing it when his policy demanded such a course in his subject province of Britanny. During the three and a half centuries through which the Breton church maintained its independence of the archiepiscopal see of Tours, its metropolis was Dol. Judhaël, who occupied its lofty seat, not only obtained it by simony, but sullied it by a public marriage; and when the offspring of this illicit union reached maturity he portioned them from the property of the church. This prolonged violation of the canons attracted the attention of Gregory soon after his accession, and in 1076 he informed William that he had deposed the offender. William, however, saw fit to defend the scandal, and refused to receive Evenus, Abbot of St. Melanius, whom Gregory had appointed as a successor.[623] Judhaël, indeed, was no worse than his suffragans. For three generations the diocese of Quimper was held by father, son, and grandson; while the Bishops of Rennes, Vannes, and Nantes were openly married, and their wives enjoyed the recognized rank of countesses, as an established right.[624] How much improvement resulted from the efforts of Gregory and his legate Hugh may be estimated from the description, in general terms, of the iniquities ascribed to the Breton clergy, both secular and regular, in the early part of the next century, by Paschal II. when granting the pallium to Baldric, Archbishop of Dol. All classes are described as indulging in enormities hateful to God and man, and as having no hesitation in setting the canons at defiance. In Britanny, as in Wales and Spain, the centralizing influence of Rome was at fault, and priestly marriage was persevered in long after it had been abrogated elsewhere.[625]
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In Flanders, Count Robert the Frisian and Adela, his mother, were well disposed to second the reformatory measures of Gregory, but, doubting their right to eject the offenders, they applied to him, in 1076, for instructions. His answers were unequivocal, urging them to the most prompt and summary proceedings.[626] The spirit in which the clergy met the attack was manifested by the incident already described, when, in 1077, an unfortunate zealot was burned at the stake in Cambrai for maintaining the propriety of the papal decretals. The same disposition, though fortunately leading to less deplorable results, was exhibited in Artois. At the instance of Adela, Robert, in 1072, had founded the Priory of Watten, near St. Omer. Despite this powerful interest and patronage, the house had a severe struggle for existence, as its prior, Otfrid, lent his influence to support the reform and to enforce the decrees of Gregory. Reproaches and curses were showered upon the infant community, and it was openly threatened with fire and sword, until the unfortunate brethren felt equally insecure within their walls and abroad. At length the Countess Adela took Otfrid with her on a pilgrimage to Rome, and there the holy man procured from Gregory a confirmation of the privileges of his house. On his return, he found that this instrument only made the persecution more vehement. Accusations of all kinds were made against the priory, and its enemies succeeded in causing the brethren to be brought for trial before the local synod, where the production of the papal charter was ordered. It was at once pronounced a forgery, was taken away by force, and was retained by the Bishop, Drogo of Terouane, in spite of all remonstrance.[627]
The opposition of the clergy was not lessened by the manner in which the secular authorities exercised the power bestowed upon them. Count Robert saw the advantages derivable from the position of affairs and seems to have been resolved to turn it thoroughly to account. Among other modes adopted was that of the “jus spolii,” by which he seized the effects of dying ecclesiastics, turning their families out of doors and disinheriting the heirs. These arbitrary proceedings he defended on the ground of the incontinence of the sufferers, boldly declaring that wicked priests were no priests—as if, groaned the indignant clerks, sinful men were not men.[628] In 1091, the Flemish priests complained of these acts to Urban II., and he vainly endeavored to interfere in their behalf.[629] Finding this resource fail, they appealed to their metropolitan, Renaud, Archbishop of Rheims, who by active measures succeeded in putting an end to the abuse in 1092.
Amid all this the church proved powerless to enforce its laws, and again it called upon the feudal authority for assistance—this time in a manner by which it admitted its impotence on a question so vital. In 1099, Manasses of Rheims held a provincial synod at St. Omer, which instructed the Count of Flanders, Robert the Hierosolymitan, to seize the wives of all priests who after excommunication declined to abandon their guilty partners; and in this he was not to ask or wait for the assent of the bishop of the diocese. The sturdy Crusader would doubtless have carried out this order to the letter, with all its attendant cruelty and misery, but the clergy of the province united in remonstrances so vehement that Manasses was forced to abandon his position. He accordingly requested Robert on no account to disturb the married priests and their wives, or to permit his nobles to do so, except when assistance was demanded by the bishops. He acknowledged the injustice he had committed in overslaughing the constituted authorities of the church, and deprecated the rapine and spoliation which so ill-advised a proceeding might cause. At the same time he admonished his suffragans to proceed vigorously against all who married in orders, and to call on the seigneurial power to coerce those who should prove contumacious.[630]
Harsh and violent as were the measures thus threatened, there appears to have been extreme hesitation in carrying them out. A certain clerk known as Robert of Artois committed the unpardonable indiscretion of marrying a widow, and openly resisted all the efforts of his bishop to reduce him to obedience. Not only his original crime, but his subsequent contumacious rebellion would assuredly justify the severest chastisement, yet both the secular and ecclesiastical powers of the province seem to have been at fault, for it was found necessary to ask the interference of no less a personage than Richard, Bishop of Albano, then enjoying the dignity of papal legate in France. In 1104 the legate accordingly addressed the Count of Flanders with the very moderate request that the obstinate rebel and his abettors should be held as excommunicate until they should reconcile themselves to their bishop. Robert finally appealed to Rome itself, but in the end was obliged to succumb. Similar was the case of two Artesian deacons who refused to abandon their wives until Lambert, the bishop of Artois, excommunicated them, when they travelled to Rome in hopes of reconciliation to the church. Paschal II. absolved them on their taking a solemn oath upon the Gospels to live chastely in future, and he sent them back to Lambert with instructions to keep a careful watch upon them.[631] These cases, which chance to remain on record, show how obstinately the clergy held to their wives and how difficult it was to convince them that the authorities of the church were determined to enforce the canons. We therefore need not be surprised to find Paschal II., after the year 1100, writing to the clergy of Terouane, expressing his astonishment that, in spite of so many decretals of popes and canons of councils, they still adhered to their consorts, some of them openly and some secretly. To remedy this, he has nothing but a repetition of the old threat of deprivation.[632]
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The confusion which this attempted reformation caused in France was apparently not so aggravated as we have seen it in Germany, and yet it was sufficiently serious. Guibert de Nogent relates that in his youth commenced the persecution of the married priests by Rome, when a cousin of his, a layman of flagrant and excessive licentiousness, made himself conspicuous by his attacks on the failings of the clergy. The family were anxious to provide for young Guibert, who was destined to the church, and the cousin used his influence with the patron of a benefice to oust the married incumbent and bestow the preferment on Guibert. The priest thus forcibly ejected abandoned neither his wife nor his functions, but relieved his mind by excommunicating every day, in the Mass, Guibert’s mother and all her family, until the good woman’s fears were so excited that she abandoned the prebend which she had obtained with so much labor.[633] We can readily conceive this incident to be a type of what was occurring in every corner of the kingdom, when, in an age of brute force, the reverence which was the only defence of the priesthood was partially destroyed, and the people hardly knew whether they were to adore their pastors as representatives of God or to dread them as the powerful ministers of evil.
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When the religious ardor of Europe rose to the wild excitement that culminated in the Crusades, and Pope Urban II. astutely availed himself of the movement to place the church in possession of a stronger influence over the minds of men than it had ever before enjoyed, it was to no purpose that the great council of Clermont, in 1095, took the opportunity to proclaim in the most solemn manner the necessity of perfect purity in ministers of the altar, to denounce irrevocable expulsion for contravention of the rule, and to forbid the children of ecclesiastics from entering the church except as monks or canons.[634] It was the weightiest exposition of church discipline, and was promulgated under circumstances to give it the widest publicity and the highest authority. Yet, within a few years, we find Gualo, Bishop of Paris, applying to Ivo of Chartres for advice as to what ought to be done with a canon of his church who had recently married, and Ivo in reply recommending as a safe course that the marriage be held valid, but that the offender be relieved of his stipend and functions.[635] His answer, moreover, is written in a singularly undecided tone, and an elaborate argument is presented as though the matter were still open to discussion, although Ivo’s laborious compilations of the canon law show that he was thoroughly familiar with the ancient discipline which the depravity of his generation had rendered obsolete.[636] Hardly less significant is another epistle in which Ivo calls the attention of Daimbert, Archbishop of Sens, to the conduct of one of his dignitaries who publicly maintained two concubines and was preparing to marry a third. He urges Daimbert to put an end to the scandal, and suggests that if he is unable to accomplish it single-handed, he should summon two or three of his suffragans to his assistance.[637] Either of these instances is a sufficient confession of the utter futility of the ceaseless exertions which for half a century the church had been making to enforce her discipline. Nor, perhaps, can her ill-success be wondered at when we consider how unworthy were the hands to which was frequently intrusted the administering of the law and the laxity of opinion which viewed the worst transgressions with indulgence. The archdeacons were the officials to whom was specially confided the supervision over sacerdotal morals, and yet, when a man occupying that responsible position, like Aldebert of Le Mans, publicly surrounded himself with a harem, and took no shame from the resulting crowd of offspring, so little did his conduct shock the sensibilities of the age that he was elevated to the episcopal chair, and only the stern voice of Ivo could be heard reproving the measureless scandal.[638]
* * * * *
Equal looseness pervaded the monastic establishments. Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans, made numerous fruitless attempts to restore discipline in the celebrated abbey of Euron, the monks of which indulged in the grossest licentiousness, and successfully defied his power until he was obliged to appeal to the papal legate for assistance.[639] Albero of Verdun, after fruitless attempts to reform the monastery of St. Paul, in his episcopal city, was obliged to turn out the monks by force and replace them with Premonstratensians, who were then in the full ardor of their new discipline.[640] The description which Ivo of Chartres gives of the convent of St. Fara shows a promiscuous and shameless prostitution, on the part of the nuns of that institution, even more degrading.[641] Instances like these could be almost indefinitely multiplied, such as that of St. Mary of Argentueil, reformed by Heloise, the great foundation of St. Denis, previous to the abbacy of Suger, and that of St. Gildas de Ruys in Britanny, as described by Abelard;[642] who, moreover, depicts the nuns of the period, in general terms, as abandoned to the most hideous licentiousness—those who were good-looking prostituting themselves for hire, those who were not so fortunate hiring men to gratify their passions, while the older ones, who had passed the age of lust, acted as procuresses.[643] Innocent III. may therefore be absolved from the charge of exaggeration when, in ordering the reform of the nuns of St. Agatha, he alludes to their convent as a brothel which infected with its evil reputation the whole country around it.[644] A contemporary chronicler records as a matter of special wonder that John of Salisbury, Bishop of Chartres, forced his canons to live in cloisters according to the Rule of St. Augustin; and he adds that, stimulated by this example, his uncle, John of Lisieux, and his successor, Geoffrey of Chartres, attempted the same reform, but without success.[645] It is true that some partial reform was effected by St. Bernard, but the austerities of the new orders founded by enthusiasts like him and St. Bruno, Robert d’Arbrissel and St. Norbert, did not cure the ineradicable vices of the older establishments.
* * * * *
With such examples before us, it is not difficult to believe the truth of the denunciations with which the celebrated Raoul of Poitiers, whose fiery zeal gained for him the distinctive appellation of Ardens, lashed the vices of his fellows; nor can we conclude that it was mere rhetorical amplification which led him to declare that the clergy, who should be models for their flocks, were more shameless and abandoned than those whose lives it was their duty to guide.[646] Peter Cantor, indeed, deplores the superiority of the laity to the clergy as the greatest injury that afflicted the church.[647]
The natural result of such a state of morals was the prevalence of the hereditary principle against which the church had so long and so perseveringly striven. How completely this came to be regarded as a matter of course, is shown by a contemporary charter to the ancient monastery of Bèze, by which a priest named Germain, on entering it bestowed upon it his holding, consisting of certain specified tithes. This deed of gift is careful to declare the assent of the sons of the donor, showing that the title of the monastery would not have been considered good as against the claims of Germain’s descendants had they not joined in the conveyance.[648] Even as late as 1202 we find Innocent III. endeavoring to put a stop to the hereditary transmission of benefices in the bishopric of Toul, where it was practised to an extent which showed how little impression had as yet been made by the unceasing efforts of the last hundred and fifty years.[649]
When in the presence of so stiff-necked and evil disposed a generation, all human efforts seemed unavailing to secure respect for the canons of councils and decretals of popes, we need scarcely wonder if recourse was had to the miraculous agencies which so often proved efficacious in subduing the minds of men. Wondrous stories, accordingly, were not wanting, to show how offended Heaven sometimes gave in this world a foretaste of the wrath to come, awaiting those who lived in habitual disregard of the teachings of the church. Thus Peter the Venerable relates with much unction how a priest, who had abandoned himself to carnal indulgences, died amid the horrors of anticipated hell-fire. Visible to him alone, the demons chuckling around his death-bed heated the frying-pan of burning fat in which he was incontinently to be plunged, while a drop flying from the sputtering mass seared him to the bone, as a dreadful material sign that his agony was not the distempered imagining of a tortured conscience. A miracle equally significant wrung a confession of his weakness from the Dean of Minden in 1167.[650]
If Heaven thus miraculously manifested its anger, it was equally ready to welcome back the repentant sinner. In the first energy of the reforms of St. Bernard, a priest entered the abbey of Clairvaux. The rigor of the Cistercian discipline wore out his enthusiasm; he fled from the convent, returned to his parish, and, according to the general custom, (“sicut multis consuetudinis est”) took to himself a concubine, and soon saw a family increasing around him. The holy St. Bernard chanced to pass that way and accepted the priest’s warm hospitality without recognizing him. When the Saint was ready to depart in the morning he found that his host was absent performing his functions in the church, and, turning to one of the children, he sent him with a message to his father. Though the child had been a deaf-mute from birth, he promptly performed the errand. Roused by the miracle to a sense of his iniquity, the apostate rushed to the Saint, threw himself at his feet, confessed who he was, and entreated to be taken back to the monastery. St. Bernard touched by his repentance, promised to call for him on his return. To this the priest objected, on the ground that he might die during the interval, but was comforted with the assurance that if he died in such a frame of mind, he would be received by God as a monk. When St. Bernard returned, the repentant sinner was dead. Inquiring as to the ceremonies of his interment, he was told that the corpse had been buried in its priestly garments; whereupon he ordered the grave to be opened, and it was found arrayed, not in its funeral robes, but in full Cistercian habit and tonsure, showing that God had fulfilled the promises made in his name.[651]
Such was the condition of the Gallican church when, in 1119, Calixtus II. stepped from the archiepiscopal see of Vienne to the chair of St. Peter. His first great object was to end the quarrel with the empire on the subject of investitures, the vicissitudes of which rendered the papacy at the time of his accession an exile from Italy; his second was to carry out the reforms so long and so fruitlessly urged by his predecessors. To accomplish both these results he lost no time in summoning a great council to assemble at Rheims, and when it met in November, 1119, no less than fifteen archbishops, more than two hundred bishops, and numerous abbots responded to the call, representing Italy, France, Aquitaine, Spain, Germany, and England. The attempted reconciliation with the Emperor Henry V. failed, but the vices and corruptions of the church were vigorously attacked and sternly prohibited for the future. All commerce with concubines or wives was positively forbidden under pain of deprivation of benefice and function. No choice was granted the offender, for continuance in his sin after expulsion was punishable with excommunication; and the hereditary transmission of ecclesiastical dignities and property was strictly prohibited.[652] Whether it was the lofty character of the new pope, his royal blood and French extraction, or whether the solemnity of the occasion impressed men’s minds, it is not easy now to guess, but unquestionably these proceedings produced greater effect upon the Transalpine churches than any previous efforts of the Holy See. Calixtus was long regarded as the real author of sacerdotal celibacy in France, and his memory has been embalmed in the jingling verses which express the dissatisfaction and spite of the clergy, deprived of their ancestral privileges.
O bone Calliste, nunc clerus odit te; Olim presbyteri poterant uxoribus uti; Hoc detruxisti quando tu papa fuisti, Ergo tuum festum nunquam celebratur honestum.[653]
Calixtus was not a man to rest half way, nor was he content with an empty promise of obedience. Under the pressure of his influence, the French prelates found themselves obliged to take measures for the vigorous enforcement of the canons. What those measures were, and the disposition with which they were received, may be understood from the resultant proceedings in Normandy. Geoffrey, Archbishop of Rouen, on leaving the council of Rheims, promptly called a synod, which assembled ere the month was out. The canon prohibiting female intercourse roused abhorrence and resistance among his clergy, and they inveighed loudly against the innovation. Geoffrey singled out one who rendered himself particularly prominent in the tumult, and caused him to be seized and cast into prison; then, leaving the church, he called in his guards, whom, with acute anticipation of trouble, he had posted in readiness. The rude soldiery fell upon the unarmed priests, some of whom promptly escaped; the rest, grasping what weapons they could find, made a gallant resistance, and succeeded in beating back the assailants. A mob speedily collected, which took sides with the archbishop. Assisted by this unexpected reinforcement, the guards again forced their way into the church, where they beat and maltreated the unfortunate clerks to their heart’s content; when, as the chronicler quaintly observes, the synod broke up in confusion, and the members fled without awaiting the archiepiscopal benediction.[654]
The immediate effect of the reformation thus inaugurated may perhaps be judged with sufficient accuracy by the story of Abelard and Heloise, which occurred about this period. That Abelard was a canon when that immortal love arose, was not, in such a state of morals, any impediment to the gratification of his passion, nor did it diminish the satisfaction of the canon Fulbert at the marriage of his niece, for such marriages, as yet, were valid by ecclesiastical law. In her marvellous self-abnegation, however, Heloise recognized that while the fact of his openly keeping a mistress, and acknowledging Astrolabius as his illegitimate son, would be no bar to his preferment, and would leave open to him a career equal to the wildest dreams of his ambition, yet to admit that he had sanctified their love by marriage, and had repaired, as far as possible, the wrong which he had committed, would ruin his prospects forever. In a worldly point of view it was better for him, as a churchman, to have the reputation of shameless immorality than that of a loving and pious husband; and this was so evidently a matter of course that she willingly sacrificed everything, and practised every deceit, that he might be considered a reckless libertine, who had refused her the only reparation in his power. Such was the standard of morals created by the church, and such were the conclusions inevitably drawn from them.
Nor were these conclusions erroneous, if we may judge by an incident of the period. An archdeacon of Angoulême had committed the unpardonable crime of seducing the abbess of a convent in the district under his charge. When the results of the amour could be no longer concealed, and the Count of Angoulême ventured to remonstrate with Gérard, the bishop of the diocese, that worthy prelate protected the offender by dismissing the charge with a filthy jest. Yet so far was Gérard from forfeiting the respect of his contemporaries by this laxity, that he was soon afterwards appointed papal legate.[655] Somewhat similar is the conclusion to be drawn from an occurrence about the same time in the diocese of Comminges, where a deacon was entangled in a guilty connection and was summoned with his paramour before the bishop, St. Bertrand. The reproof of the holy man reduced the deacon to contrition, but the woman was defiant. He escaped punishment, while she was seized by demons and expired on the spot.[656]
Yet there are evidences that the efforts of Calixtus, and of the fathers whose assembled authority was concentrated at Rheims, did not by any means eradicate a custom which had now become traditional. Soon afterwards King Louis-le-Gros, in granting a charter to the church of St. Cornelius at Compiègne, felt it necessary to accompany the privileges bestowed with a restriction, worded as though it were a novelty, to the effect that those in holy orders connected with the foundation should have no wives—a condition which shows how little confidence existed in the mind of the sagacious prince as to the efficacy of the canons so portentiously promulgated by the rulers, and so energetically resisted by the ruled.[657] That he was justified in this lack of confidence is evident when we see, further on in the century, an epistle of Alexander III., undated, but probably written about 1170, complaining of the canons of St. Ursmar and Antoin who openly kept concubines in their houses, while some of them did not hesitate to marry;[658] while as late as 1212 a council of Paris was obliged to adopt canons forbidding clerks married in the lower orders to hold parishes while retaining their wives, and suspending from benefice and functions all those who marry while in holy orders.[659]
XVII. NORMAN ENGLAND
We have already seen what was the condition of the Anglo-Saxon church when William the Manzer overran the island with his horde of adventurers. Making all due allowance for the fact that our authorities are mostly of the class whose inclination would lead them to misrepresent the conquered and to exaggerate the improvement attributable to the conquest, it cannot be doubted that the standard of morality was extremely low, and that the clergy were scarcely distinguishable from the laity in purity of life or devotion to their sacred calling.
If the reformatory efforts of the popes had not penetrated into the kingdom of Edward the Confessor, it was hardly to be expected that they would excite attention amid the turmoil attendant upon the settlement of the new order of political affairs and the division of the spoils among the conquerors. Accordingly, even the vigilance of Gregory VII. appears to have virtually overlooked the distant land of Britain, conscious, no doubt, that his efforts would be vain, even though the influence of Rome had been freely thrown upon the side of the Norman invader, and had been of no little assistance to him in his preparations for the desperate enterprise. In fact, though William saw fit to aid in the suppression of matrimony among the priests of his hereditary dominions, and had thereby earned the grateful praises of Gregory himself,[660] he does not seem to have regarded the morals of his new subjects as worthy of any special attention. It is true that in his system of transferring all power from the subject to the dominant race, when Saxon bishops were to be ejected and their places filled with his own creatures, it was necessary for him to effect his purpose in a canonical way, and to procure the degradation of his victims by the church itself, as it was impossible for him to lay unhallowed hands upon their consecrated heads, or to remove prelates from their sees on questions of mere political expediency. To accomplish this, the scandals and irregularities of their lives afforded the promptest and most effective excuse, and it was freely used. The vigor with which these changes were carried into effect is visible in the synods of Winchester and Windsor in 1070, where numerous bishops and abbots were deprived on various pleas; and the character of the prelates removed may be assumed from the description of the Bishop of Litchfield (Chester) by Lanfranc, in a letter of the same year to Alexander II., where his public maintenance of wife and children is alleged, in addition to other crimes of which he was accused.[661] Though a puritan, like Lanfranc, bred in the asceticism of the Abbey of Bec, might seek to enforce the canons in an individual case, as when he orders Arfastus, Bishop of Thetford, to degrade a deacon who refused to part with his wife,[662] yet that no general effort was made to effect a reform in the ranks of the clergy is evident from an epistle addressed in 1071 to William by Alexander II., in which, while praising his zeal in suppressing the heresy of simony, and exhorting him to fresh exertion in the good work, no mention whatever is made of the kindred error of Nicolitism, which is usually inseparable in the papal diatribes of the period.[663] Equally conclusive is the fact that when, in 1075, Lanfranc held a national council in London for the purpose of reforming the English church, canons were passed to restrain simony, to prevent incestuous marriages, and to effect other needful changes, but nothing was said respecting sacerdotal marriage, at that time the principal object of Gregory’s vigorous measures.[664]
How thoroughly, indeed, clerical marriage and the hereditary descent of benefices was received as legitimate by common consent is manifested by a case quoted by Camden from the MS. records of the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul of Shrewsbury. Under the Conqueror, Roger de Montgomery in founding that house bestowed upon it the church of St. Gregory, subject to the life estate of the canons then holding it, whose prebends as they died should fall within the gift of the monks. The children of the canons, however, disputed the gift, claimed that they had a right to their fathers’ holdings, and actually gave rise to a great lawsuit to defend their position.[665]
* * * * *
The first steps to check the irregularities of the priesthood appear to have been taken in 1076, at the council of Winchester, and the extreme tenderness there displayed by Lanfranc for the weakness of his flock shows how necessary was the utmost caution in treating a question evidently new, and one which deprived the English clergy of a privilege to which no taint of guilt had previously been attached. We have seen by the instance related above that when Lanfranc could act according to his own convictions, he was inclined to enforce the absolute rule of celibacy, and we may therefore conclude that on this occasion he was overruled by the convictions of his brother prelates that it was impossible to obtain obedience. All that the council would venture upon was a general declaration against the wives of men in orders, and it permitted parish priests to retain their consorts, contenting itself with forbidding future marriages, and enjoining on the bishops that they should thereafter ordain no one in the diaconate or priesthood without a pledge not to marry in future.[666]
Such legislation could only be irritating and inconclusive. It abandoned the principle for which Rome had been contending, and thus its spirit of worldly temporizing deprived it of all respect and influence. Obedience to it could be therefore invoked on no higher ground than that of an arbitrary and unjustifiable command, and accordingly it received so small a share of attention that when, some twenty-six years later, the holy Anselm, at the great council of London in 1102, endeavored to enforce the reform, the restrictions which he ordered were exclaimed against as unheard of novelties, which, being impossible to human nature, could only result in indiscriminate vice, bringing disgrace upon the church.[667] The tenor of the canons of this council, indeed, proves that the previous injunctions had been utterly disregarded. At the same time they manifest a much stronger determination to eradicate the evil, though they are still far more lenient than the contemporary Continental legislation. No archdeacon, priest, or deacon could marry, nor, if married, could retain his wife. If a subdeacon, after professing chastity, married, he was to be subjected to the same regulation. No priest, as long as he was involved in such unholy union, could celebrate mass; if he ventured to do so, no one was to listen to him; and he was, moreover, to be deprived of all legal privileges. A profession of chastity was to be exacted at ordination to the subdiaconate and to the higher grades; and, finally, the children of priests were forbidden to inherit their father’s churches.[668]
One symptom of weakness is observable in all this. The council apparently did not venture to prescribe any ecclesiastical punishment for the infraction of the rules thus laid down. If this arose from timidity, St. Anselm did not share it, for, when he proceeded to put the canons in practice, we find him threatening his contumacious ecclesiastics with deprivation for persistence in their irregularities. A letter of instruction from him to William, Archdeacon of Canterbury, shows the earnestness with which he entered upon the reform, and also affords an instructive insight into the difficulties of the enterprise, and the misery which the forcible sundering of family ties caused among those who had never doubted the legality and propriety of their marriages. Some ecclesiastics of rank sent their discarded wives to manors at a distance from their dwellings, and these St. Anselm directs shall not be molested if they will promise to hold no intercourse except in the presence of legitimate witnesses. Some priests were afraid to proceed to extremities with their wives, and for these weak brethren grace is accorded until the approaching Lent, provided they do not attempt meanwhile to perform their sacred functions, and can find substitutes of undoubted chastity to minister in their places. The kindred of the unfortunate women apparently endeavored to avert the blow by furious menaces against those who should render obedience, and these instigators of evil are to be restrained by threats of excommunication.[669] Another letter to the Bishop of Hereford, who had applied for instructions on the subject, directs him to replace recalcitrant priests with monks and to stir up the laity to drive from the land the obstinate parsons and their wives.[670] In the enforcement of these reforms he seemed to meet with questions for which he was not prepared, for about this time we find him seeking instructions from Paschal II. on several knotty points: whether a priest living with his wife can be allowed to administer the viaticum at the death-bed in the absence of one professing continence; and what is to be done with him if he refuses his ministration on the ground that he is not allowed to celebrate mass. Paschal replies, sensibly enough, that it is better to have the ministrations of an unchaste priest than to die unhouselled, and that a priest refusing his offices under such circumstances is to be punished as a homicide of souls. This abandoned the Hildebrandine theory and practice, and Anselm was more consistent when he assumed that a layman could perform baptism in preference to an unchaste priest.[671]
Notwithstanding these zealous efforts of the primate, and the countenance of Henry Beauclerc, in whose presence the council had been held, Eadmer is forced sorrowfully to admit that its canons received but scant respect. Many of the priests adopted a kind of passive resistance, and, locking up their churches, suspended the performance of all sacred rites.[672] Even in Anselm’s own diocese, ecclesiastics were found who obstinately refused either to part with their wives or to pretermit their functions, and who, when duly excommunicated, laughed at the sentence, and continued to pollute the church with their unhallowed ministry.[673] Soon after this Anselm fell into disfavor with the king and was exiled. His absence promised immunity, and the clergy were not slow to avail themselves of it. In 1104 one of his friends, in writing to him, bewails the utter demoralization of the kingdom, of which the worst manifestation was that priests still continued to marry; and two years later another letter informs him that those who had apparently reformed their evil ways were all returning to their previous life of iniquity. Finally, Henry I. resolved to turn to account this clerical backsliding, as a financial expedient to recruit his exhausted treasury. All who were suspected of disobedience to the canons of the council of London were seized and tried, and the property of those who could be proved guilty was confiscated. By this time Anselm had been reconciled to the king, and he promptly interfered to check so gross a violation of ecclesiastical immunity. His remonstrances were met by Henry with well-feigned surprise, and finally the matter was compromised by discharging those who had not been fined, while those who had been forced to pay were promised three years’ undisturbed possession of their positions.[674]
That it was impossible to effect suddenly so great a change in the habits and lives of the Anglican clergy was, indeed, admitted by Paschal II. himself, when, in 1107, he wrote to Anselm concerning the questions connected with the children of priests. While reminding him of the rules of the church, he adds that as, in England, the larger and better portion of the clergy fall within the scope of the prohibition, he grants to the primate power of dispensation, by which, in view of the sad necessity of the times, he can admit to the sacred offices those born during their parents’ priesthood, who are fitted for it by their education and purity of life. A second epistle on the same subject attests the perplexity of the pope, recalling to Anselm’s recollection his former injunctions, and recommending that, as there was no personal guilt involved, those of the proscribed class who were in orders should, if worthy of their positions, be allowed to retain them, without the privilege of advancement.[675] The question, indeed, was hotly debated. There is extant a letter written about this time by Thibaut of Étampes, a dignitary of Oxford, to a certain Rosceline, who with more zeal than discretion had promulgated the doctrine that the sons of priests were canonically ineligible to ordination. Thibaut characterizes this as not only an innovation, but a blasphemy, and seems utterly unconscious that there was any authority for such a rule.[676]
* * * * *
It may be remarked that thus far the proceedings of the reformers were directed solely against the marriage of ecclesiastics. It may possibly be that this arose from general conjugal virtue, and that, satisfied with the privilege, no other disorders prevailed among the clergy; but it is more probable that the heresy of marriage was so heinous in the eyes of the sacerdotalists, that it rendered all other sins venial, and that such other sins might be tacitly passed over in the endeavor to put an end to the greater enormity. Be this as it may, the stubborn wilfulness of the offenders only provoked increasing rigor on the part of the authorities. We have seen that the council of 1102 produced little result, and that when the secular power interfered to enforce its canons, the church, jealous of its privileges, protested, so that many priests retained their wives, and marriage was still openly practised. King Henry, therefore, at length, in 1108, summoned another council to assemble in London, where he urged the bishops to prosecute the good work, and pledged his power to their support.[677] Fortified by this and by the consent of the barons, they promulgated a series of ten canons, whose stringent nature and liberal denunciation of penalties prove that the prelates felt themselves strengthened by the royal co-operation and thus able to compel obedience. The Nicene canon was declared the unalterable law of the church; those ecclesiastics who had disregarded the decrees of the previous council were debarred from performing their functions if longer contumacious; any priest requiring to see his wife was only to do so in the open air and in the presence of two legitimate witnesses; accusations of guilt were to be met by regular canonical purgation, a priest requiring six compurgators, a deacon four, and a subdeacon two, each of his own order. Disobedience to these canons was declared punishable with deprivation of function and benefice, expulsion from the church, and infamy. Only eight days of grace were allowed; further persistence in wrong-doing being visited with instant excommunication, and confiscation to the bishops of the private property of the transgressors and of their women, together with the persons of the latter. A very significant clause, moreover, shows that grasping officials had discovered the speculative value of previous injunctions, and that the degrading custom of selling indulgence was already in common use, for the council required of all archdeacons and deans, under penalty of forfeiture, an oath that they would not receive money for conniving at infractions of the rule, nor permit priests who kept women to celebrate mass or to employ vicars to officiate for them.[678]
From the account of the historian, we may assume these to be rather acts of parliament than canons of a council, and that the assembly was convened for the special purpose of devising measures for subduing the recalcitrant clergy. The temporal power was thus pledged to enforce the regulations, and as so enterprising and resolute a monarch as Henry had undertaken the reform, there can be little doubt that he prosecuted it with vigor. Anselm died in 1109, and the clergy rejoiced in the hope that their persecution would cease with the removal of their persecutor, but the king proceeded to enforce the regulations of the council of London with more vigor than ever, and soon obtained at least an outward show of obedience. Eadmer darkly intimates that this resulted in a great increase of shocking crimes committed with those relatives whose residence was allowed, and he is at some pains to argue that Anselm and his attempted reforms were not responsible for an effect so little contemplated in their well-meant endeavors. Finally, the ardor of the king cooled off; ecclesiastical officials were found readily accessible to bribes for permitting female intercourse, and those who had grown tired of the wives from whom they had been separated found no difficulty in forming more desirable unions with new ones. Eadmer sorrowfully adds that by this time there were few indeed who continued to preserve the purity with which Anselm had labored so strenuously to adorn his clergy.[679]
The evil influences of this laxity in the Anglican church were not altogether confined to Britain. At that period the Swedish bishoprics were frequently filled by Englishmen, and it is quite possible that from them was derived the laxity which, as we have seen, at a later period, caused the Swedes to be regarded as heretics adhering to the Greek schism. An incident occurring about this time shows the wisdom of the church in her endeavors to sunder the earthly ties of her ministers. An English priest named Edward was promoted to the Swedish episcopate of Scaren. Unluckily, he had left a wife behind him in England, and, after a short residence in his new dignity had enabled him to collect together the treasures of his see, he absconded with them to his spouse, leaving his diocese widowed and penniless.[680]
At length the condition of the church in England attracted the attention of the pontiffs who had bestowed so much fruitless energy on the morals of the Continental priesthood; and Honorius II. sent Cardinal John of Crema to England, for the purpose of restoring its discipline. In September, 1126, the legate held a council in London, where he caused the adoption of a canon menacing with degradation all those in orders who did not abstain from the society of their wives, or of other women liable to suspicion;[681] and the expressions employed show that previous legislation had been altogether nugatory. That the cardinal’s endeavors excited the opposition of at least a powerful portion of the clergy is fairly deducible from the unlucky adventure which put a sudden termination to his mission. After fiercely denouncing the concubines of priests and expatiating on the burning shame that the body of Christ should be made by one who had but just left the side of a harlot, he was that very night surprised in the company of a courtesan, though he had on the same day celebrated mass; and the suggestion that he had been entrapped by his enemies, while it did not palliate his guilt, may be assumed to indicate the power and determination of those who opposed his reforms.[682]
The energy of the reformers and the stubborn obstinacy of the clergy are alike manifested by the council of Westminster, held the following year, which found it necessary to repeat the prohibition and to guard it with stringent provisions, based upon those of 1108.[683] This, however, proved as ineffectual as its predecessors, and another effort was made the next year under auspices which promised a happier result. King Henry seemed suddenly to recover the holy zeal which had lain dormant for a score of years, and in the summer of 1129 he convened a great assembly of all the bishops, archdeacons, abbots, priors, and canons of England, who found that they were summoned to meet for the purpose of putting an end to the immorality of the clergy. After long discussion, it was decreed that all who should not put away their wives by St. Andrew’s day (November 30th) should be deprived of their functions, their churches, and their houses; and the assembly separated, intrusting to the zealous sovereign the execution of the decree. Perhaps Henry remembered how St. Anselm had interfered in 1106 to protect the guilty clergy from the royal extortioners; perhaps the experience of his long reign had shown him the fruitlessness of endeavoring to impose an impossible virtue on carnal-minded men. His exchequer, as usual, was in danger of collapse. The whole transaction may have been a deeply-laid scheme to extort money, or the sudden promptings of temptation may have been too powerful for his self-denial—who now can tell? We only know that he at once put into action an extended system of “cullagium,” and having, by the blind simplicity of his prelates, the temporalities of nearly all the minor clergy in his power, he proceeded to traffic in exemptions shamelessly and on the largest scale. As a financial device, the plan was a good one; he realized a vast sum of money, and his afflicted priests were at least able to show their superiors a royal license to marry or to keep their concubines in peace.[684]
* * * * *
The repetition of almost identical enactments, year after year, with corresponding infinitesimal results, grows wearisome and monotonous. If, therefore, I refer to the synod of Westminster, held in 1138, by the papal legate Alberic, Bishop of Ostia, which deprived of function and benefice all married and concubinary ecclesiastics,[685] it is only to observe that no notice was taken of the doctrine of the invalidity of sacerdotal marriage, which at that period Innocent II. was engaged in promulgating. So, if I allude to an epistle of Lucius II. in 1144, reprehending the general English custom by which sons succeeded to the churches of their fathers, it is merely to chronicle the commencement of the direct efforts of the popes, fruitlessly continued during the remainder of the century, to abolish that wide-spread and seemingly ineradicable abuse.[686]
What was the condition of the church resulting from these prolonged and persistent efforts may be guessed from one or two examples. When, in 1139, Nigel, Bishop of Ely, revolted against King Stephen, he intrusted the defence of his castle of Devizes to his concubine, Maud of Ramsbury. She bravely fulfilled her charge and repulsed the assaults of the king, until he bethought him of a way to compel a surrender. Obtaining possession of Roger, son of Maud and Nigel, the unhappy youth was brought before the walls, and preparations were made to hang him in his mother’s sight. At this her courage gave way, and she capitulated at once.[687] Though the monkish chronicler stigmatizes Maud as “pellex episcopi,” she may probably have been his wife—in either case the publicity of the connection is a sufficient commentary on the morals and manners of the age which took no exception to the elevation of Richard Fitz-Neal, another son of the same reverend prelate, to the bishopric of London and to the post of treasurer to King Henry II.
If this be attributed to the unbridled turbulence of Stephen’s reign, we may turn to the comparatively calmer times of Henry II., when Alexander III., amid his ceaseless efforts to restore the church discipline of England, in 1171, ordered the Bishops of Exeter and Worcester and the Abbot of Feversham to examine and report as to the evil reputation of Clarembald, abbot-elect of St. Augustine’s of Canterbury. In the execution of this duty they found that that venerable patriarch had seventeen bastards in one village; purity he ridiculed as an impossibility, while even licentiousness had no attraction for his exhausted senses unless spiced with the zest of publicity.[688] That a man whose profligacy was so openly and shamelessly defiant could be elected to the highest place in the oldest and most honored religious community in England is a fact which lends color to the assertion of a writer of the time of King John, that clergy and laity were indistinguishably bad,[689] and perhaps justifies the anecdote told of Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, who assumed that the clergy were much worse than the laity.[690] How little these scandals shocked the public is shown by the fact that it required papal interference to cause the reformation of the nunnery of Avesbury. The abbess had borne three children and the nuns, as the chronicler informs us, were worse than their superior, but when Alexander forced an investigation no canonical punishment was inflicted on the guilty. Such of the nuns as promised to live chastely in future were allowed to remain, and the rest were simply dismissed, while the abbess was pensioned liberally with ten marks a year to preserve her from disgrace and want. The vacancies thus created were filled with nuns from Fontevraud, who proved to be as bad as those whom they replaced.[691] The same insensibility is manifested in a legal transaction of the period, when Witgar, the priest of Mendlesham, desired to secure the reversion of his benefice to his son Nicholas, and applied to the patron of his church, Martin, Abbot of Battle Abbey, who agreed to conform to his wishes on condition that the annual payment exacted from the church in question should be increased from ten shillings to forty. Witgar agreed, and on an appointed day, accompanied by his son, he met the abbot and his attendants at Colchester, where oaths were publicly interchanged and a formal agreement was entered into.[692]
* * * * *
The efforts of Alexander and his successors were seconded by frequent national and local synods, to whose special injunctions it is scarcely worth while to refer in full. One noticeable point about them, however, is that the term “wife” disappears, and is replaced by “concubina” or “focaria”—the latter meaning a person who was a permanent occupant of the priest’s hearth, but was not recognized by the authorities as a lawful wife. Deans and archdeacons were enjoined to hunt up these illegal companions, but from the frequency of the injunctions, we may safely conclude that the search was not often successful, and that the officials found the duty assigned to them too difficult or too unprofitable for execution. That it was not impossible, however, when earnestly undertaken, is shown by the readiness with which King John unearthed the unfortunate creatures when it suited his policy to do so. During the long dispute over the election of Giraldus Cambrensis to the see of St. David’s, the king, who was resolved that no Welshman should hold that preferment, instructed his officers, in 1202, to seize the women of all the cathedral chapter who persisted in supporting Giraldus.[693] The measure was doubtless an efficacious one, and he repeated it when, in 1208, he persecuted the clergy in his blind impotence of wrath at the interdict set upon his kingdom by Innocent III. Discerning in these quasi-conjugal relations the tenderest spot in which to strike those who had rebelled against his authority by obeying the interdict, and at the same time as the surest and readiest means of extorting money, among his other schemes of spoliation he caused all these women to be seized, and then forced the unfortunate churchmen to buy their partners back at exorbitant prices.[694]
The ease, indeed, with which the eyes of the officials were blinded to that which was patent to the public was the subject of constantly recurring legislation, the reiteration and increasing violence of which bears irrefragable testimony at once to its necessity and its impotence. Not only in grave synods and pastorals was the abuse reprehended and deplored, but it offered too favorable a subject for popular animadversion to escape the shafts of satire. In the preceding century, Thomas à Becket, in a vehement attack upon simony, includes this among the many manifestations of that multiform sin—
Symon auffert, Symon donat; Hunc expellit, hunc coronat; Hunc circumdat gravi peste, Illum nuptiali veste.[695]
There were few more popular poems in the Middle Ages than the “Apocalypsis Goliæ,” the more than doubtful authorship of which, at the close of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century, is claimed for Walter Mapes in England and Gautier de Châtillon in France; and the enduring reputation of which is attested by an English version as late as the sixteenth century. The author, whoever he be, inveighing against the evil courses of the archdeacons, assumes that the extortion of the “cullagium” was almost universal.
Seductam nuntii fraude præambuli Capit focariam, ut per cubiculi Fortunam habeat fortunam loculi, Et per vehiculum omen vehiculi. Decano præcipit quod si presbiteri Per genitivos scit dativos fieri, Accusans faciat vocatum conteri, Ablatis fratribus a porta inferi.[696]
Towards the middle of the thirteenth century, Peter de Vinea also has his fling at the same corruption, and though the part he took in the fierce quarrels between his master Frederic II. and the papacy renders him perhaps a prejudiced witness, still his ample experience of the disorders of the church makes him an experienced one.
Non utuntur clerici nostri vestimentis: Sed tenent focarias, quod clamor est gentis— —Dehinc reum convocant, et, turba rejecta, Dicunt: Ista crimina tibi sunt objecta; Pone libras quindecim in nostra collecta, Et tua flagitia non erunt detecta. Reus dat denarios, Fratres scriptum radunt; Sic infames plurimi per nummos evadunt: Qui totam pecuniam quam petunt non tradunt, Simul in infamiam et in pœnam cadunt.[697]
The example which King John had set, however instructive, was not appreciated by the ecclesiastical authorities, and the “focariæ” were allowed to remain virtually undisturbed, at least to such an extent as to render them almost universal. Although by rigid churchmen they were regarded as mere concubines, there can be little doubt that the tie between them and the priests was of a binding nature, which appears to have wanted none of the rites essential to its entire respectability. Giraldus Cambrensis, who died at an advanced age about the year 1220, speaks of these companions being publicly maintained by nearly all the parish priests in England and Wales. They arranged to have their benefices transmitted to their sons, while their daughters were married to the sons of other priests, thus establishing an hereditary sacerdotal caste in which marriage appears to have been a matter of course.[698] In 1202 the Bishop of Exeter complained to Innocent III. of the numerous sons of parish priests and vicars who seized their churches and claimed to hold them of right, actually appealing to Rome when he sought to interfere with them. Innocent of course ordered their removal and subjection to discipline without appeal: but the evil continued, and in 1205 we find him writing on the subject to the Bishop of Winchester whom he required to eject the sons of priests who in many cases held their father’s benefices.[699] The propriety of the connection, and the hereditary ecclesiastical functions of the offspring are quaintly alluded to in a poem of the period, wherein a logician takes a priest to task for entertaining such a partner—
L.—Et præ tot innumeris quæ frequentas malis, Est tibi presbytera plus exitialis.
P.—Malo cum presbytera pulchra fornicari, Servituros domino filios lucrari, Quam vagas satellites per antra sectari: Est inhonestissimum sic dehonestari.[700]
Even the holy virgins, spouses of Christ, seem to have claimed and enjoyed the largest liberty. To this period is attributed a homily addressed to nuns, which earnestly dissuades them from leaving their blessed state and subjecting themselves to the cares and toils inseparable from matrimony. The writer appeals to no rules of ecclesiastical law that could be enforced to prevent them from following their choice, but labors drearily to prove that they would not better their condition, either in this world or the next, by forsaking their heavenly bridegroom for an earthly one.—“And of godes brude. and his freo dohter. for ba to gederes ha is; bicumeth theow under mon and his threl to don al and drehen that him liketh.”[701]
* * * * *
Innocent III. had not overlooked such a state of discipline, especially after the transactions between himself and John had rendered him the suzerain of England, and doubly responsible for the morals of the Anglican Church. Thus as early as 1203 we find him expressing to the Bishop of Norwich his surprise that priests in his diocese contend that they can retain their benefices after having solemnly contracted marriage in the face of the church. All such are peremptorily ordered to be removed without appeal, either by the bishop himself, or by his superior in cases in which he had personally conferred the preferment.[702] His zealous efforts to effect an impossible reform are chronicled by a rhymer of the period, who enters fully into the dismay of the good pastors at the prospect of the innovation, and who argues their cause with all the sturdy common-sense of the Anglo-Saxon mind.
Prisciani regula penitus cassatur, Sacerdos per hic et hæc olim declinabatur; Sed per hic solummodo nunc articulatur, Cum per nostrum præsulem hæc amoveatur.
* * * * *
Quid agant presbyteri propriis carentes? Alienas violant clanculo molentes, Nullis pro conjugiis fœminis parcentes, Pœnam vel infamiam nihil metuentes.
* * * * *
Non est Innocentius, immo nocens vere, Qui quod Deus docuit studet abolere; Jussit enim Dominus fœminas habere, Sed hoc noster pontifex jussit prohibere.
Gignere nos præcipit vetus testamentum; Ubi novum prohibet nusquam est inventum. A modernis latum est istud documentum, Ad quod nullum ratio præbet argumentum.[703]
Nor were the Anglican bishops remiss in seconding the efforts of the pope to break down the opposition which thus openly defied their power and ventured even to justify the heresy of sacerdotal marriage. Councils were held which passed canons more stringent than ever; bishops issued constitutions and pastorals denouncing the custom; inquests were organized to traverse the dioceses and investigate the household of every priest. The women especially were attacked. Christian sepulture was denied them; property left to them and their children by their partners in guilt was confiscated to the bishops; churching after childbirth was interdicted to them; and, if still contumacious after a due series of warnings, they were to be handed over to the secular arm for condign punishment.[704] How much all this bustling legislation effected is best shown by the declaration of the legate, Cardinal Otto, in 1237, at the great council of London. He deplores the fact that married men received orders and held benefices while still retaining their wives, and did not hesitate to acknowledge their children as legitimate by public deeds and witnesses. After descanting upon the evils of this neglect of discipline, he orders that all married clerks shall be deprived of preferment and benefice, that their property shall not descend to wife or children, but to their churches, and that their sons shall be incapable of holy orders unless specially dispensed for eminent merit; then turning upon concubinary priests, he inveighs strongly against their licentiousness, and decrees that all guilty of the sin shall within thirty days dismiss their women forever, under pain of suspension from function and benefice until full satisfaction, persistent contumacy being visited with deprivation. The archbishops and bishops are commanded to make thorough inquisition throughout all the deaneries, to bring offenders to light, and also to put an end to the iniquitous practice of ordaining the offspring of such connections as successors in their father’s benefices.[705]
This legislation produced much excitement, and the legate even had fears for his life. Some prelates, indeed, maintained that it only was binding on the church of England during the residence of Otto, but they were overruled, and it remained at least nominally in force and was frequently referred to subsequently as the recognized law in such matters. Its effect was considerable, and some of the bishops endeavored to carry out its provisions with energy, as may be presumed from a constitution of William of Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, issued in 1240, ordering his officials to investigate diligently whether any of the clergy of the diocese had concubines or were married.[706]
To this period and to the disturbance caused by these proceedings are doubtless to be attributed several satirical pieces of verse describing the excitement occurring among the unfortunate clerks thus attacked in their tenderest spot. The opening lines of one of these poems indicate the novelty and unexpectedness of the new regulations:—
Rumor novus Angliæ partes pergiravit, Clericos, presbyteros omnes excitavit,
* * * * *
Nascitur presbyteris hinc fera procella: Quisquis timet graviter pro sua puella.
The author then describes a great council, attended by more than ten thousand ecclesiastics, assembled to deliberate on the course to be pursued in so delicate a conjuncture. An old priest commences—
Pro nostris uxoribus sumus congregati; Videatis provide quod sitis parati, Ad mandatum domini papæ vel legati, Respondere graviter ne sitis dampnati.[707]
Another poem of similar character describes a chapter held by all orders and grades to consider the same question. The various speakers declare their inability to obey the new rule, except two, whose age renders them indifferent. A learned doctor exclaims—
Omnis debet clericus habere concubinam; Hoc dixit qui coronam gerit auro trinam: Hanc igitur retinere decet disciplinam.
The general belief in the legality of the connection is shown by the remark of another—
Surgens unus presbyter turba de totali ... “Unam” dixit “teneo amore legali, Quam nolo dimittere pro lege tali.”
Another expects to escape by paying his “cullagium”—
Duodecimus clamat magno cum clamore: “Non me pontifex terret minis et pavore: Sed ego nummos præbeam pro Dei amore, Ut in pace maneam cara cum uxore.”
Another urges the indiscriminate immorality attending upon the attempt to enforce an impossible asceticism—
Addidit ulterius: “Sitis memor horum, Si vetare præsul vult specialem torum, Cernet totum brevi plenum esse chorum Ordine sacrorum adulterorum.”
And at length the discussion closes with the speech of a Dominican, who ends his remarks by predicting—
Habebimus clerici duas concubinas: Monachi, canonici totidem vel trinas: Decani, prælati, quatuor vel quinas: Sic tandem leges implebimus divinas.[708]
Notwithstanding these flights of the imagination, no organized resistance was offered to the reform. The clergy sullenly acquiesced, and submitted to a pressure which was becoming irresistible. The triumph of the sacerdotal party, however, was gradual, and no exact limit can be assigned to the recognition of the principle of celibacy. In 1250 the idea of married priests was still sufficiently prevalent to lead the populace of London to include matrimony among the accusations brought against Boniface, Archbishop of Canterbury, when his tyranny had aroused general resistance;[709] and in 1255 Walter Kirkham, Bishop of Durham, still felt it necessary to prohibit the marriage of his clergy under pain of suspension and deprivation.[710] It is perhaps noteworthy, however, that, not long after this, Horne, in his Myrror of Justice, when treating of exceptions to the benefit of clergy, specifies second marriages, but not single marriages, as depriving clerks of the privilege of ecclesiastical trial.[711]
By this time, however, priestly marriage may be considered to have become nearly obsolete in England. When, in 1268, the Cardinal-legate Ottoboni held a great national council in London, and renewed the constitutions of his predecessor Otto, he made no allusion to marriage, and only denounced the practice of concubinage, which he endeavored to eradicate by commanding all archdeacons to make a thorough inquisition annually into the morals of the clergy under their jurisdiction.[712] These constitutions of Otto and Ottoboni long remained the law of the English church, and we find them constantly referred to in the canons of councils and pastorals of bishops, ceaselessly laboring to effect the impossible enforcement of discipline; even as late as 1399 the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered his suffragans to have them read and explained in the vernacular in all their episcopal synods.[713] How hard was the task may be readily conceived when we see, in 1279, the primate Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, applying to Rome for assistance in prosecuting a certain bishop against whom he had long been vainly endeavoring to bring the law to bear. A concubine had confessed to having borne five children to the offender;[714] he had himself admitted his guilt in a private interview with Peckham, for which he had afterwards claimed the seal of the confessional; yet the archbishop complains that his efforts will be unsuccessful unless he is fortified with letters from the pope himself. His strict injunctions of secrecy on his correspondent, and his evident dread lest the criminal’s agents in Rome should get wind of the application, show how difficult was the enterprise, and how rarely prelates could be expected to undertake duties so arduous and so unpromising.[715]
Perhaps the man to whom the church owed most for his energy and activity in promoting the cause of reform was the celebrated Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. The leading part which he took in the political troubles of the stormy reign of Henry III. has thrown his ecclesiastical character somewhat into the shade, and he is better known as the friend of Leicester than as the untiring churchman. Notwithstanding his consistent opposition to Henry III. and to the encroachments of the papacy, he was the inflexible enemy of clerical irregularities, and he enforced the decretals throughout his diocese with as firm a hand as that which he raised in defence of the rights of the nation and the privileges of the Anglican church. Thus, in 1251, he made a rigorous inquisition in his bishopric, forcing all his beneficed clergy to the observance of the strictest chastity, removing from their houses all suspected women, and punishing transgressors with deprivation. It is not easy to approve of his brutal expedient for testing the virtue of the inmates of his nunneries,[716] the adoption of which could only be justified and suggested by the conviction that general licentiousness was everywhere prevalent; and though such treatment of the spouses of Christ was to the last degree degrading, yet it was doubtless more efficacious than the ordeal of the Eucharist, which was frequently resorted to in special cases. Not only, however, did he thus endeavor to reform the morals of his flock, but he made the closest scrutiny into the character of applicants for ordination. In this he was largely aided by his ascetic friend and admirer, Adam de Marisco, and the correspondence between them shows not only the importance which they reasonably attached to the subject, but the sleepless vigilance required to counteract the prevalent immorality of the clergy, and the incredible laxity with which the patrons of livings bestowed the benefices in their gift.[717]
The rule was now fairly established and generally acknowledged; concubinage, though still prevalent—nay, in fact almost universal—was not defended as a right, but was practised with what concealment was possible, and was the object of unremitting assault from councils and prelates. To enter into the details of the innumerable canons and constitutions directed against the ineradicable vice during the succeeding half century would be unprofitable. Their endless iteration is only interesting as proving their inefficacy. A popular satirist of the reign of Edward II. declares that bribery of the ecclesiastical officials insured the domestic comfort of the clergy and their female companions;[718] while in time the canon law seems to have lost all its terrors. One of the earliest acts of the reign of Henry VII. was a law empowering the ecclesiastical officials to imprison “priests, clerks, and religious men” convicted of incontinence, and guaranteeing them against prosecution by the offenders.[719] That the aid of the secular legislator should thus have been invoked for protection under such circumstances showed the audacity resulting from long immunity, and is the abject confession that the ceaseless labor of four centuries had utterly failed.
* * * * *
In one part of England, however, the reform seems to have penetrated even more slowly. We have seen above, on the testimony of Giraldus Cambrensis, that in the early part of the thirteenth century the marriage of priests and the hereditary transmission of benefices were almost universal in Wales. As in the wild fastnesses of the Principality the ecclesiastical regulations seemed powerless, recourse was had to the secular law, which was employed to inflict various disabilities on offenders and their offspring, and the repetition of these shows how obstinately the custom was adhered to by the clergy until a comparatively late period. Thus, in the Gwentian and Dimetian Codes there is a provision that the son of a married priest, born after the ordination of his father, shall not share in the paternal estate;[720] and this provision is retained and repeated in a collection of laws which contains the date of 2 Henry IV., showing it to be posterior to the year 1400.[721] The same collection enumerates married priests among “thirteen things corrupting the world, and which will ever remain in it; and it can never be delivered of them.”[722] In the same spirit, the Book of Cynog, which is of uncertain date, declares “nor is a married priest, as he has relinquished his law, to be credited in law,” and it therefore directs that the testimony of such witnesses shall not be receivable in court;[723] while another collection of laws, occurring in a MS. of the fifteenth century, repeats the provision—“their testimony is not to be credited in any place, and they are excluded from the law, unless they ask a pardon from the pope or a bishop, through a public penance.”[724] In fact, we may, perhaps, almost hazard the conclusion that, notwithstanding the efforts of both ecclesiastical and secular legislators, sacerdotal marriage scarcely became obsolete in Wales before it was once more recognized as legitimate under the Reformation.
XVIII. IRELAND AND SCOTLAND
In a previous section it has already been shown that the rule of celibacy was observed by the Celtic churches of the British Islands during a period in which their Christianity was a model for the rest of Europe. Their religion, however, could not preserve its purity and simplicity amid the overwhelming barbarism of those dreary ages. From an ancient commentary on the “Cain Patraic,” or Patrick’s Law, of uncertain date, but probably belonging to the ninth or tenth century, it would seem as though there were at that time two classes of bishops, one bound by monastic vows, the other permitted to marry; and, what is somewhat singular, the law appears to favor the latter, for the “cumad espuc,” or virgin bishop, is condemned to perpetual degradation or to the life of a hermit for offences which the “bishop of one wife” can redeem by prompt penance.[725]
The Feini, prior to the advent of St. Patrick, were far in advance of the contemporary barbarian tribes, and their conversion to Christianity introduced a new and powerful element of progress. It was not lasting, however, and they lapsed into a condition but little removed from that of savages. The marriage-tie was virtually unknown or habitually disregarded among the laity.[726] What was the condition of the clergy may be inferred from the fact that the episcopates were regarded as the private property of certain families in which they descended by hereditary succession. Thus, in the primatial see of Armagh, fifteen archbishops were of one house, the last eight of whom were married. At length Celsus, who died about the year 1130, bequeathed the dignity to his friend St. Malachi. The kindred rose in arms at this infringement of their rights, and two of their members successively occupied the position, which Malachi was not able to obtain until the anger of God had miraculously destroyed the whole family.[727]
During all this period the Irish church had been completely independent of the central authority at Rome, but the extension of influence resulting from the labors of Hildebrand and his successors soon began to make itself felt. In the quarrels concerning the succession of Archbishop Celsus, there figures a certain Bishop Gilbert, who is described as being the first papal legate seen in Ireland.[728] When Malachi abandoned Armagh and revived the extinct episcopate of Down, he resolved on a pilgrimage to Rome to obtain the pallium, a powerful instrument of papal authority, until then unknown on the island; and perhaps the opposition manifested to his wishes by his friends as well as by the authorities may be attributable to a repugnance towards the gradual encroachments of Romanizing influence.[729]
Malachi returned from Rome armed with legatine powers, and proceeded vigorously with the reforms which he had long before commenced. He held numerous councils, extirpating abuses everywhere, renovating the ancient rules of discipline and introducing new ones, bending all his energies to abrogating the national institutions and replacing them with those of Rome.[730] The earnest asceticism of his nature, exaggerated by the training of his youth, led him to give a strongly monastic character to the church of which he was thus the second founder. On his journey homeward from Rome, he had tarried a second time at Clairvaux to see his friend St. Bernard, and had left there four of his attendants to be exercised in the severe Cistercian discipline that they might serve as missionaries and as models for his compatriots, who had heard, indeed, of monkhood, but had never seen it.[731] His efforts, in this respect, were to a considerable extent successful, at least in a portion of the island, though his death in 1149, at the comparatively early age of 54, cut short his labors before they could yield their full fruit.[732]
The incongruous character thus imparted to the Irish church is described by Giraldus Cambrensis some forty years later. The prelates were selected from the monasteries, and the church was completely monastic. Chastity was the only rule of discipline thoroughly preserved, and Giraldus confesses his wonder that it could be maintained, in contradiction to all former experience, when gluttony and drunkenness were carried to excess. The monastic principle of selfishness was all-pervading, and the pastors took no care of their flocks. Among the people, marriage was still unknown, incest was of common occurrence, even the rudiments of Christian faith were left untaught, and the church was regarded without reverence.[733] His account of the absence of regular stipends and tithes is confirmed by the fact that an Irish bishop attending the council of Lateran in 1179, in complaining of the condition of his native church, stated that his only revenues were derived from three milch cows, which his flock were bound to replace as they became dry.[734] This poverty, however apostolic in itself, can only, in an age of magnificent sacerdotalism, be regarded as an indication of a church whose degradation could command neither the respect nor the support of its children. That the reforms of Malachi, one-sided as they were, extended only over a portion of the island, is evident from the inquiry which, a few years later, the Archbishop of Cashel addressed to Clement III. as to whether the children of bishops could receive orders and hold benefices; and the exceptional character of the Irish establishment was recognized by the pope when he decided that they could, provided they were born in wedlock, and were otherwise worthy of position.[735] This requisite of legitimacy was apparently not imposed in ignorance, for at the council of Cashel in 1171 we find an effort made to enforce Christian marriage among the people, who are still described as indulging in unrestricted polygamy and disregarding the nearest ties of consanguinity.[736]
When about this period the English commenced the conquest which was to lead to five centuries of cruel anarchy, they of course carried with them their civil and ecclesiastical institutions. The original conquerors—the Butlers, the Clares, and the Fitzgeralds—speedily became incorporated with the native race, and were as Irish as the O’Briens and the McCauras. Although the royal authority was limited practically to the confines of the Pale, and embraced little beyond the Ostman ports, yet it is easy to understand that the clerical license habitual to the English spread beyond the political boundaries, and the monastic spirit of the Hibernians was grievously wounded by the unchastity which was disseminated like a contagion from the dissolute priests who followed in the wake of Strong-bow and Prince John.[737] Not twenty years after the first invasion, a council, summoned in 1186 by John in Dublin, was troubled by a quarrel between the Saxon priests of Wexford, who mutually accused each other of publicly marrying and keeping wives. This being duly proved, they were promptly degraded, to the intense satisfaction of the Irish clergy, triumphant in their own comparative purity of morals.[738] When, therefore, in 1205, Innocent III. specially ordered his legate, Cardinal Julian, to put an end to the hereditary transmission of benefices common in Ireland, the abuse to which he referred was probably confined to the English Pale.[739] The church establishments, in fact, were distinct, and consequently when an Irish synod was held in Dublin, in 1217, its canons cannot be considered as having authority beyond the narrow territory through which the king’s writ would likewise run. Those canons show us that the morality of the Saxon priesthood had not improved by the example made of the priests of Wexford. The denunciations of concubinage indicate the prevalence of that vice, and the severities threatened against the unfortunate women contrast strangely with the lenity shown to their more guilty partners.[740] A century later, if we may believe the declaration of the synod of Ossory in 1320, the evil continued to flourish, open, avowed, and universal, resisting alike the authority of the church and the efforts to repress it by severity.[741] Whether the offenders dismissed their consorts after the thirty days’ grace allowed by the synod may well be doubted. With the spread of English domination, the purity of the native church disappeared, and so great became the general disregard of the canons that shortly before the Reformation it was not an unusual thing for Irish priests to be openly married, nor do those who did so seem to have thereby forfeited the esteem of their neighbors.[742]
* * * * *
In Scotland, the Christianity introduced by St. Columba had fallen into the hands of the Culdees. These were originally monks of a more than ordinary strictness of discipline, to whom the earliest recorded allusion occurs in Ireland towards the close of the eighth century—the name, Céle-dé (Keledeus, or Servus Dei) meaning simply Servant of God. In the course of time the Culdees had so relaxed their rule that they reappear in the eleventh century as an order nominally of monks, yet fulfilling the functions of the secular clergy, and enjoying free permission to marry, only abstaining from their wives when employed in the actual ministry of the altar. With marriage had come the hereditary transmission of the endowments of the church to their children, so that the ancient abbeys and churches were well-nigh stripped of all their possessions, and the distinction between clergy and laity was rather in term than in fact. It may please the poet to construct a world of his own, peopled by imaginary beings of angelic purity—
Peace to their shades! The pure Culdees Were Albyn’s earliest priests of God, Ere yet an island of her seas By foot of Saxon monk was trod, Long ere her churchmen by bigotry Were barred from wedlock’s holy tie. ’Twas then that Aodh, famed afar, In Iona preached the word with power, And Reullura, beauty’s star, Was the partner of his bower—
but in sober truth the Culdees were pure as long as they kept the tradition of their founder, and it was not until they sank to a level with their savage compatriots that they transgressed the rule and became worldly and corrupt.[743] In 1125 the Cardinal-legate, John of Crema, whose unlucky adventure in London has been already alluded to, visited Scotland in the execution of his reformatory mission. There he found on the throne David I., a prince whose life was devoted to rescuing his subjects from their primæval barbarism. We know few details of the history of those times, but it is fair to conjecture that the exhortations of the legate had a share in arousing David to a realization of the deficiencies and the corruptions of the Scottish church, and in guiding him to the course which he adopted in its reformation. After some fruitless efforts to restore the order of Culdees to its original condition, he resolved on the sweeping measure of removing all who should prove incorrigible. They were accordingly turned out bodily from their establishments, such property as could be traced was restored, and donations on an extended scale were made both to the old foundations and to the new ones which the royal reformer established—donations which gained for him, from an ungodly descendant, the appellation of “Ane soir sanct for the crown.” These foundations were then filled with regular clergy, brought from France and England—chiefly canons of the order of St. Augustin—and the unfortunate Culdees were turned adrift unless they would promise to observe the strictness of monastic rule. It is probable that in a few places they did so, for references to Culdees still occur occasionally even in the next century, but these measures were effective and practically they and their customs disappeared together.[744]
In a church thus constructed from the regular clergy, the heresy of marriage could find no foothold, especially as it had been so sternly punished in the expulsion of the Culdees. Still was the desired purity not yet attained. In 1181, during the long quarrel between William the Lion and the papacy on the subject of the archbishopric of St. Andrews, an interdict was pronounced on all ecclesiastics who should refuse to recognize the papal candidate John, whereupon the King persecuted those who obeyed the mandate, and the chronicler, in expatiating upon his cruelty, is careful to mention that he did not spare their children, even to babes in their mothers’ arms, who were remorselessly driven into exile.[745] The state of things indicated by this remained without improvement. In 1225, Honorius III. ordered the Scottish ecclesiastics to assemble in council for the correction of the many enormities which were committed with impunity; and the council held in obedience to the papal command denounced the shameless licentiousness of the clergy as a disgrace to the church.[746] Inquests to detect the offenders, suspension and deprivation to punish them, were ordered with all the verbal energy of which we have already witnessed so many examples, and were attended with the same plentiful lack of success. With what disposition the clergy regarded these efforts for their improvement we may guess from the reception which they gave to the constitutions of Cardinal Ottoboni. Reference has already been made to the council held by that legate in London in 1268. The church of Scotland had been ordered to join in this council, and had sent two bishops and two abbots as its representative delegates. These took home with them the constitutions of Ottoboni, which the clergy of Scotland utterly refused to obey.[747]
XIX. SPAIN
We have already seen (p. 121) that among the Wisigoths of Spain the rule of celibacy had never been successfully enforced, and that during the later period of the Gothic dynasty the demoralization of the clergy was daily increasing. The Saracenic invasion, and the subsequent struggles of the Christians, who founded petty kingdoms among the wild mountainous regions of the North and East of the Peninsula, were not favorable to the growth of regular discipline and settled observances. The centralized sacerdotalism of Rome, which took so remarkable an extension in the ninth and tenth centuries, and which penetrated every portion of the Carlovingian empire, was powerless to intrude into the strongholds of the Jalikiah, whence the descendants of Pelayo and his companions gradually extended their frontiers from Oviedo to Toledo. Communication with the apostolic city was rare. The nominal subjection of Barcelona and Navarre to the Carlovingians, indeed, brought the eastern provinces of Spain under the domination of the Archbishops of Narbonne, and kept them, to a certain extent, under the influences which were moulding the rest of Europe; but the kingdoms of Leon and Castile grew up in complete ecclesiastical independence. Even at the close of the eleventh century a Spanish ecclesiastic describes his contemporary brethren as rude and illiterate, owning no obedience to the mother church of Rome, and governed by the discipline of Toledo.[748] Wild and insubordinate as was a large portion of the European clergy, the ecclesiastics of Spain were even wilder and more insubordinate. Another writer of the period, himself a canon of Compostella, and subsequently Bishop of Mondonego, speaking of his brother canons previous to the reforms of Diego Gelmirez, denounces them as reckless and violent men, ready for any crime, prompt in quarrel, and even occasionally indulging in mutual slaughter.[749] How little, indeed, there was to distinguish the clerk from the layman is evident from a regulation promulgated by the council of Compostella in 1113. It provides that all priests, gentlemen, and peasants shall devote themselves to wolf-hunting on every Sunday, except Easter and Pentecost, under a penalty of a fine of five sols for the priest and gentleman, and one sol, or a sheep, for the peasant—visitation of the sick being the only excuse exempting the priest from the performance of this duty. Every church, moreover, was bound to furnish for the hunt seven iron-tipped reeds.[750] A similar condition of society is indicated at the other end of Spain, where, in 1027, the Synod of Elna, in Roussillon, had forbidden, under pain of excommunication, any one to attack a monk or a clerk who was without arms.[751]
In such lack of social organization it is easy to imagine that the rule of celibacy received little attention. According to Mariana, the clergy of the period were, for the most part, publicly married;[752] and when, in 1056, the council of Compostella specifically forbade to bishops and monks all intercourse with women, except with mothers, aunts, and sisters wearing the monastic habit,[753] the inference is fair that even so elementary a prohibition was an innovation, and that the secular clergy, below the episcopate, were not regarded as subject to any restriction.
In the comprehensive efforts, however, made during the later half of the eleventh century by the Roman church to bring all Christendom under its domination, the rising states of Spain were not likely to remain undisturbed in their independent isolation; nor was it to be expected that so complete a defiance of the canons would be passed unobserved by the pontiffs who were convulsing the rest of Europe in their efforts to reform the church. Accordingly, in 1068, we find the Cardinal Hugo of Silva Candida, as legate of Alexander II., assembling a council at Girona, and procuring the adoption of a regulation reducing to the condition of laymanship all who, in holy orders, either entered into matrimony or kept concubines; while those who should dismiss their wives were promised immunity for the past and security for the future.[754] In 1077, Gregory VII. sent a certain Bishop Amandus as his legate, with an epistle addressed to the Spaniards, in which he told them that Spain had anciently belonged to St. Peter and the Roman church; that the carelessness of his predecessors, and the Saracenic conquest, had caused the papal rights to be forgotten, but that the time had come for them to be revendicated, and that he consequently claimed implicit obedience.[755] Accordingly, in 1078, we find the legate presiding over another council at Girona, which confirmed the canons of the previous one, and added several others to prevent the ordination of sons of priests, and the hereditary transmission of benefices.[756] Such slender reforms as may have resulted from these efforts were probably confined to Catalonia and Aragon; but not long afterwards influences were brought to bear upon the rest of Spain, which had a powerful effect in extending the authority of Rome over the Peninsula. Constance of Burgundy, Queen of Alfonso VI. of Castile and Leon, prevailed upon her husband to ask of Gregory a legate to reform the church, and to condemn the Gothic or Mozarabic ritual, which was jealously preserved by the people as a symbol of their independent nationality. The prayer, of course, was granted. Richard, Abbot of Marseilles, was sent, and in 1080 he held a council at Burgos, where he commanded the ordained clergy to put away their wives. The novelty and hardship of this order created great excitement. The pope, who was rightly regarded as its author, became the object of no little abuse and insult, and was held up to popular derision in innumerable lampoons.[757]
All of these efforts were nugatory. The Spaniards, engaged in an interminable and often doubtful struggle with the Infidel, might well claim consideration from the Holy Father, while the independent spirit which they manifested in their resistance to the introduction of the Roman ritual was a warning that it would be prudent not to proceed too abruptly in the process of bringing them within the fold of St. Peter. Whatever be the motives, indeed, which induced such strenuous apostles of celibacy as Gregory, Urban, Paschal, and Calixtus to abstain from urging upon them the reform which was so earnestly enforced elsewhere, certain it is that little effort was made to deprive the Spanish clergy of their wives. In all the epistles of the popes up to 1130 I can find but one allusion to the subject, though communication between Spain and Italy became daily more frequent, and the papal authority was constantly exercised with greater decisiveness in the internal affairs of the Spanish church.
When, in 1101, Diego Gelmirez succeeded in obtaining the see of Compostella, Paschal II. addressed him an epistle, reproaching him with the utter contempt of discipline in his diocese, and commanding a reform. He chiefly complained of the incongruous common residence of monks and nuns, which he severely condemned and peremptorily prohibited, but he made some concession to the necessities of the time in permitting the ordination of the sons of those priests who had, “according to the ordinary custom of the country,” married prior to the promulgation of what the pope significantly termed the Roman law; and he carefully abstained from ordering a separation between them and their wives, or even an enforcement of the canons for the future.[758]
Diego, who possessed no common measure of vigor and ambition, and who needed the particular favor of the popes for the success of his plans in elevating and aggrandizing his see, accordingly proceeded to reform his clergy. There is extant a minute and circumstantial contemporary history of his episcopate, written by his admiring disciples, who dwell with much instance on his labors and success in reducing to discipline the refractory canons of his cathedral seat; but in the numerous allusions to these reforms there is no mention of the enforcement of celibacy, while the fact that he would not allow them to minister at the altar without canonical vestments is made the subject of repeated gratulation and praise.[759] The absolute silence of the authors with respect to the clergy at large shows that the reticence of Pope Paschal was not misunderstood, and that there was no effort made to bring the secular priesthood under subjection to the Roman discipline. In the twenty-five canons of the council of Compostella in 1113 it therefore need not surprise us that there is no reference whatever to the subject, beyond an allusion to the children of ecclesiastics, whose nurses were declared entitled to clerical privileges, thus giving them a recognized and highly prized position.[760]
That Diego’s reforms, indeed, did not extend to the abrogation of clerical marriage is evident from several incidental circumstances. Thus, in 1114, the lords of the monastery of Botoa made it over to the church of Santiago of Compostella, reserving to themselves their life interest, with a reversion to any of their descendants who should be ecclesiastics, and who might be willing to profess celibacy, showing that the matter was optional with the secular clergy.[761] That even the canons were bound by no absolute rules on the subject is manifested by a very curious transaction which may be worth recounting as illustrative in several aspects of the spirit of the age. In 1127, Diego, at the head of his Gallician troops, accompanied Alfonso VIII. on an expedition into Portugal. On their return, the army halted at Compostella, where the archbishop received and entertained his sovereign. They were bound by the closest ties, for Diego had baptized, knighted, and crowned him, and had, moreover, constantly stood his friend throughout his stormy youth, in the endless civil wars which marked the disastrous reign of his mother, Queen Urraca. Yet, prompted by evil counsellors who were jealous of Diego, the king suddenly demanded of him an enormous sum of money, to pay off the army, under threat of seizing and pillaging the city. After considerable resistance, Diego was forced to submit, and to pay a thousand marks of silver. He then sought a private interview, in which he solemnly and affectionately warned Alfonso of the ruin of his soul which would ensue if he did not undergo penance for thus impiously spoiling the Apostle Santiago. Alfonso listened humbly, and professed entire willingness to repent, but for the difficulty that he had always been taught that penitence was fruitless without restitution, and restitution he was unable and unwilling to make. Diego then suggested that he should meet the chapter and discuss the case, to which he graciously assented. In the assembly which followed, Diego proposed that the king should follow the example of his father, Raymond of Gallicia, in commending himself to the peculiar patronage of Santiago, and in bequeathing his body to be buried in their church, promising, moreover, that if he should do so they would pray specially for him, which, from the promise of his youth, bade fair to be no easy task. Alfonso was delighted to escape so easily: he eagerly accepted the proposition, and added that he would like to become a canon of their church, in order to enjoy the fullest possible share in the Masses of such holy men. To this the chapter assented at once; he was forthwith duly installed as a canon of the church which he had just despoiled, and his conscience was set at rest, while the church felt that it had acquired a moral supremacy over the spoiler.[762] In thus formally becoming a canon, there could have been no assumption of celibacy, expressed or implied. Alfonso was but twenty-one years of age, and in the following year he married Berengaria, daughter of the Count of Barcelona.[763]
In fact, in the absence of urgency on the part of Rome, the question of sacerdotal celibacy seems to have been virtually ignored in Spain. How little importance was attached to the preëminent sanctity of asceticism becomes evident when we are told that in the whole of Gallicia there was no convent of nuns until Diego, in 1129, founded the house of S. Maria of Conjo.[764] Equal indifference is manifested in the legislative assemblies of the church. The council of Leon and Compostella, in 1114, only prohibited the residence of such women as were forbidden by the canons,[765] which, in the existing discipline of the Spanish church, may safely be presumed to offer no impediment to the marriage relation; and a synod held at Palencia in 1129 is even more significant in its reticence, for it merely provides that notorious concubines of the clergy shall be ejected, without apparently venturing to threaten any punishment on the reverend offenders.[766]
Towards the close of his restless life, however, Archbishop Diego found time, amid his military, political, and ecclesiastical schemes of aggrandizement, to undertake the much needed reform of a single monastery. The Abbot of S. Pelayo de Antealtaria was a paragon of brutish sensuality, who wasted the revenues of his house in riotous living and took no shame in a numerous progeny. The archbishop remonstrated with him long and earnestly, both in public and private: seven times in the general chapter of the diocese he admonished and threatened the offender without result. At length, in 1130, after forbearance so remarkable, Diego held a chapter in the abbey for his trial, when he was proved by competent witnesses to have kept no less than seventy concubines. He was accordingly deposed, but was so far from being canonically punished that a benefice in the abbey lands was assigned for his support. A new abbot was then appointed, who swore to observe the Benedictine rule as far as he should find himself able to do so.[767] It is a significant commentary on the state of discipline and opinion to find so weak an effort to remove and punish the grossest licentiousness characterized by the biographer of Diego with the warmest expressions of wondering admiration as a work which doubtless gave ineffable satisfaction to the Divine Omnipotence, and which was without example in previous history.
It is very evident that the pontiffs who so energetically enforced the rule of celibacy throughout the rest of Europe were content to offer little opposition to the obstinacy of the Celtiberian priesthood. We can safely conclude, indeed, that matters were allowed to remain virtually undisturbed, and that the clergy were permitted to retain their wives. A council held in Gallicia in the early part of the thirteenth century, for the purpose of reforming ecclesiastical discipline, preserves absolute silence on the subject of marriage and concubinage;[768] and, about the middle of the same century, we find Alfonso the Wise of Castile obliged to formally interdict matrimony to those in holy orders. In the elaborate code drawn up by that monarch and known as “Las Siete Partidas,” there is a law punishing sacerdotal marriage with deprivation of function and benefice; while the wives, if vassals of the church, are to be reduced to servitude, and if serfs, are to be sold and the proceeds appropriated for the benefit of the church of the offender. The wording of the law would seem to indicate that it was an enactment intended to repress existing disorders, and not merely a well-known provision inserted in the code for the purpose of completing a compilation of statutes;[769] while the existence in secular legislation of such invasions of the province of ecclesiastical law is a convincing proof of the continued independence of Rome asserted by the Spanish church and state. The prelates were further authorized to command the assistance of the secular power in enforcing these barbarous penalties to their full measure of severity, and this secular legislation seems to have accomplished what the ecclesiastical authorities had so utterly failed to effect. After this we hear little of regular marriage, which was replaced by promiscuous concubinage or by permanent irregular unions.
In Valencia a council in 1255 prohibited the residence with priests of all women, except mothers and sisters and such others as were beyond suspicion, but no penalty was prescribed for infractions of the rule; and the character of the clergy with whom the council had to deal is sufficiently shown by its complaint that the priests of the country parishes frequented the city too much and indulged there in disgraceful excesses, for which reason it forbids them from visiting the city more often than twice a month, and requires them to return home the same day.[770] Arnaldo de Peralta, Bishop of Valencia, not long after, deplores the utter contempt with which all previous efforts to suppress clerical concubinage had been received, and the prevalence of the custom by which ecclesiastics endowed their bastards with the spoils of the church. Yet the only punishment he finds himself able to threaten is a fine of thirty maravedis on public concubinarians and of five on parish priests who connive at such offences or neglect to report them to the bishop. Ecclesiastics, indeed, are directed to put away their children, but no penalty is indicated for disobedience.[771] The council of Gerona in 1257 was more energetic, for it decreed the deprivation of all concubinary priests who persisted in their sin, but this apparently was not effectual, for in 1274 the threat was repeated, with the addition that the women should be excommunicated and should receive after death the burial of asses;[772] and very similar was the legislation of the council of Peñafiel in 1302.[773] However well meant these efforts were, they proved as useless as all previous ones, for in 1322 the council of Valladolid, under the presidency of the papal legate William Bishop of Sabina, animadverts strongly on the indecency of ecclesiastics, from the highest prelates down, officiating at the nuptials of their children, both legitimate and illegitimate. For those who publicly kept concubines it provides a graduated scale of confiscation, ending in the deprivation of the persistently contumacious who gave no prospect of amendment, the exceedingly elaborate regulations prescribed showing at once the difficulty of the subject and the importance attached to it. The acts of this council, moreover, are interesting as presenting the first authentic evidence of a custom which subsequently prevailed to some extent elsewhere, by which parishioners were wont to compel their priest to take a female consort for the purpose of protecting the virtue of their families from his assaults. The iniquity of this precaution seems to have especially scandalized the legate, and he treats the audacious laymen concerned in such transactions with much less ceremony than the concubinary clergy.[774] The elaborate regulations promulgated by this council produced little effect. The council of Salamanca in 1335 renews the previous repressive legislation, adding a threat of ipso facto excommunication for those who give Christian burial to priestly concubines, including all who are present on such occasions, who are not to be absolved until they shall have paid a fine of fifty maravedis to the cathedral church.[775] At length, in 1388, a national council held at Palencia under Cardinal Pedro de Luna, papal legate, made a determined effort to eradicate the ineradicable vice. It renewed the regulations of the council of Valladolid, which it stated were not obeyed, and added to them a clause by which all benefices were held under a sort of tenure of chastity, and subject to forfeiture. Besides this, all ecclesiastics who, within two months of death, had kept concubines, were declared incapable of testating, and their property was adjudged, one-third to the fabric of their churches, one-third to the Ordinary of the diocese, and one-third to the fund for the redemption of captives under the care of the Orders of Trinidad and Mercede, who were empowered to seize their share. Moreover, all bishops were commanded to appoint official Visitors, who were to report at annual synods, to be held thereafter, all cases of infraction of the rules.[776] The desolation which the enforcement of such regulations would have wrought may be inferred from the description which a contemporary, Alvarez Pelayo, Bishop of Silva in Portugal, gives us of his fellow ecclesiastics. He states that many of the clergy in holy orders throughout the Peninsula publicly associated themselves with women, frequently of noble blood, binding themselves against separation by notarial acts and solemn oaths, endowing their consorts with the goods of the church, and celebrating with the kindred these illegal espousals as joyously as though they were legitimate nuptials. Yet even this flagrant defiance of the canons was better than the wickedness common between confessors and their penitents, or than the promiscuous and unrestrained licentiousness of those who were not fettered by the forms of marriage, whose children, as Pelayo asserts, almost rivalled in number those of the laity.[777] These excesses were not suppressed by the council of Palencia. In 1429 the council of Tortosa, under the presidency of the Cardinal de Foix, papal legate, renewed the lament that the canons of Valladolid remained unobserved, and in repeating them it added a penalty of incarceration for pertinacious offenders, indicating, moreover, one of the worst abuses to which the subject gave rise, in forbidding all officials to take bribes from those who transgressed the rules.[778] This effort was as fruitless as all previous ones had been, and we shall see hereafter that the same state of affairs continued until the sixteenth century was well advanced.
XX. GENERAL LEGISLATION
In a former section we have seen the efforts made by Calixtus II. to enforce the received discipline of the church, and we have noted the scanty measure of success which attended his labors. He apparently himself recognized that they were futile, and that some action of more decided character than had as yet been attempted was necessary to accomplish the result so long and so energetically sought, and so illusory to its ardent pursuers. On his return to Italy, and his triumph over his unfortunate rival, the anti-pope Martin Burdino, he summoned, in 1123, the first general council of the West, to confirm the Concordat of Worms, which had just closed half a century of strife between the papacy and the empire. Nearly a thousand prelates obeyed his call, and that august assembly promulgated a canon which not only forbade matrimony to those bound by vows and holy orders, but commanded that if such marriages were contracted they should be broken, and the parties to them subjected to due penance.[779]
This was a bold innovation. With the exception of a decretal of Urban II. in 1090, to which little attention seems to have been paid, we have seen that, previous to Calixtus, while the sacrament of marriage was held incompatible with the ministry of the altar and with the enjoyment of church property, it yet was respected and its binding force was admitted, even to the point of rendering those who assumed it unfitted for their sacred functions. At most, and as a concession to a lax and irreligious generation, the option was allowed of abandoning either the wife or the church. At Rheims, Calixtus had deprived them of this choice, and had ordered their separation from their wives. He now went a step further, and by the Lateran canon he declared the sacrament of marriage to be less potent than the religious vow: the engagement with the church swallowed up and destroyed all other ties. This gave the final seal to the separation between the clergy and the laity, by declaring the priestly character to be indelible. When once admitted to orders, he became a being set apart from his fellows, consecrated to the service of God; and the impassable gulf between him and the laity bound him forever to the exclusive interests of the church. It is easy to perceive how important an element this irrevocable nature of sacerdotalism became in establishing and consolidating the ecclesiastical power.
The immensity of the change thus wrought in the practice, if not in the doctrine, of the church can best be understood by comparing the formal command thus issued to the Christian world with the unqualified condemnation pronounced in earlier times against those who attempted to dissolve marriage under religious pretexts.[780] And in all ages the church has regarded the chastity of the monastic orders as even more imperative than that of the secular clergy.
Revolutions never go backwards. Perhaps the Lateran fathers who adopted the canon scarcely realized its logical conclusions. If they did, they at all events shrank from expressing them openly and fully, and left the faithful to draw their own deductions as to the causes and consequences of such an order. Time, however, familiarized the minds of ardent churchmen with the idea, and it was seen that if the practice thus enjoined was correct, doctrine must be made to suit and to justify it. To this end an additional stimulus was afforded by the failure of the canon to accomplish the results anticipated from it, for the custom of sacerdotal marriage was as yet by no means eradicated. The council of Liége, held by Innocent II. in 1131, referred to in a preceding section, and those of Clermont and Rheims, over which he likewise presided, in 1130 and 1131, show how little had been accomplished, and how generally the clergy of Europe disregarded the restrictions nominally imposed upon them, and the punishments which they so easily escaped.[781] In the canons of these councils not only is it observable that the question of marriage and celibacy is treated as though it were a matter now for the first time brought to the attention of the clergy, but also that the innovation attempted by the council of Lateran, only seven or eight years previous, is prudently suppressed and passed over without even an allusion.
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Innocent, restored to Rome and to power, was bolder than when wandering through Europe, soliciting the aid of the faithful. Surrounded by a thousand bishops at the second great council of Lateran, in 1139, he no longer dreaded to offend the susceptibilities of the clergy, and he proceeded to justify the canon of 1123 by creating a doctrine to suit the practice there enjoined. After repeating the canons of Clermont and Rheims, he unhesitatingly pronounced that a union contracted in opposition to the rule of the church was not a marriage.[782] He draws no argument from the conflict of sacraments assumed to be incompatible; a simple vow dissolves the sacrament of marriage, and renders it null and void—or rather destroys its efficacy and anticipates its existence.
The abounding wickedness of a perverse generation caused this decree of the loftiest Christian tribunal to fall still-born and abortive as its forerunners had done.[783] The church, however, was irrevocably committed to the new doctrine and to all its consequences. When Eugenius III. was driven out of Rome by Arnold of Brescia, he presided, in 1148, over a council held at Rheims, where eleven hundred bishops and abbots from Northern and Western Europe assembled to do honor to the persecuted representative of St. Peter, and to condemn the teachings of Gilbert de la Porrée. From this great assembly he procured the confirmation of the new dogma by their adoption of the Lateran canon; while the repetition of that of Clermont and Rheims (of 1130 and 1131) shows that the evil which it was intended to repress still existed in full force.[784] The vague assertion of Eugenius that he was but following in the footsteps of the holy fathers, and a special reference to Innocent II. as his authority, render it probable that the members of the council demurred in committing themselves to the new principle, and that it was only by showing that the matter was already decided under the irrefragable authority of a general council that the consent of the Transalpine churches was obtained.
St. Bernard himself, the impersonation of ascetic sacerdotalism, hesitated to subscribe to the new dogma, and when the monks of Chartres asked him to reconcile it with the teachings of Augustin and Gregory the Great he candidly confessed that his dialectical skill was unequal to the task.[785] So when an abbot applied to him for advice in the case of one of his monks, who had left the convent and married, St. Bernard stigmatized the act as highly improper, but hesitated to pronounce it unlawful. He recommended that an attempt be made to convince the parties that they were perilling their salvation, and if this failed he thought that perhaps they might be separated by episcopal authority.[786] In fact, four years after the council of Rheims, St. Bernard reproached Eugenius with having caused the adoption of canons which no one pretended to obey. If he thought that they were enforced, he grievously erred; if he did not think so, he had sinned either by decreeing what was not to be observed or in neglecting to punish their non-observance—and no one was punished for his disobedience.[787]
Even in Rome itself the point was still disputed. At that very time Gratian, the greatest canonist of the age, was engaged in the compilation of his “Concordia discordantium Canonum,” a work undertaken at the request of the papal curia to restore to the canon law the preëminence which it was fast losing in consequence of the recently revived study of the Justinian jurisprudence. Published in 1151 under the auspices of Eugenius himself, and presented to the world as the authoritative exposition of the laws and discipline of the church, it was everywhere received with acclamation, and has remained to this day the foundation of the canon law. Yet Gratian himself, in this work without appeal, distinctly declares his opposition to the doctrine of Innocent and Eugenius, asserting that a deacon can lawfully marry if he chooses to abandon the ministry, and that the sacrament of marriage is so potent that no antecedent vow can render it void.[788]
The new law was long in winning its way to general respect, nor can it be a subject of wonder if those who disregarded the acknowledged canons of the church by marrying in orders, or by permitting such marriages in those under their charge, should neglect a rule of recent origin and of more than doubtful propriety. The church, however, was committed to it, and, moreover, could see in its eventual recognition a more effectual means of accomplishing the long desired object than in any expedient previously tried. By destroying all such marriages, pronouncing them null and void, inflicting an ineffaceable stigma on wife and offspring, subjecting the woman to the certainty of being cast off without resource and without option on the part of the husband, the position of the wife of an ecclesiastic would become most unenviable; her kindred would prevent her from exposing herself to such calamities, and no priest could succeed in finding a consort above the lowest class, whose union with him would expose him to the contempt of his flock.
How slender was the immediate result of the efforts of Innocent and Eugenius, however, is manifested by the allusions of Geroch, Provost of Reichersperg, who, writing about the middle of the century, complains that any one who would shun intercourse with Nicolitan and simoniacal heretics must quit the world, for it was full of them, and he maintains the propriety of calling them heretics because they openly defended and justified their evil courses.[789] Indeed, so shamelessly were their transgressions displayed, that the faithful were sometimes scandalized by the sight of the priests’ wives assisting their husbands in the ministry of the altar;[790] while conventual discipline had sunk so low that nuns were in the habit of deferring their formal vows until the lassitude of old age should render the restraints thereby assumed easy to be endured,[791] and canons led a life which was only distinguishable from that of the laity by its shamelessness.[792] Nor was this confined to Germany. In France, Hugh, Archbishop of Rouen, complains that those who married in orders openly defended their evil practices and quoted Scripture to sustain themselves.[793]
In England, as seen in a preceding section, the new theory of Innocent and Eugenius remained a dead letter. Indeed, as late as 1470 Sir John Fortescue incidentally alludes to a recent case in which a priest named John Fringe, who had lived in orders for three years, procured two false witnesses to swear that he had previously been betrothed to a certain maiden, and this preliminary promise of marriage was held by court to supersede his priestly ordination; he was ejected from the priesthood and compelled to marry the girl, with whom he lived fourteen years, until he was executed for treason by the Lancastrians during the wars of the Roses.[794] In Spain, as we have already seen, priestly marriage was forbidden by the secular law as late as the latter half of the thirteenth century, and priests in consequence were wont to protect their partners by entering into the most solemn compacts, the customary employment of which shows that they must have been habitually enforced by the municipal tribunals regardless of the censures of the church.
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The long pontificate of Alexander III., extending from 1159 to 1181, was absorbed for the most part by his deadly strife with Frederic Barbarossa. Yet, even before he was released from that ever-present danger, he found leisure to urge the cause of sacerdotal celibacy; and after the humiliation of his mortal enemy he devoted himself to it with a zeal which earned for him among his contemporaries the credit of establishing its observance.[795] He who, as the legate Roland, had nearly paid, under the avenging sword of Otho of Wittelsbach, the forfeit of his life for his rude boldness at the imperial court, was little likely to abate one jot of the claims which the church asserted on the obedience of layman and clerk; and he recognized too fully the potency of the canons of Lateran and Rheims not to insist upon their observance. The very necessity under which he found himself, however, of repeating those canons shows how utterly neglected they had been, and how successfully the clergy had thus far resisted their reception and acknowledgment. Thus when, in 1163, he held the council of Tours, he was obliged to content himself with a canon which allowed three warnings to those who publicly kept concubines, and it was only after neglect of these warnings that they were threatened with deprivation of functions and benefice;[796] and when, in 1172, his legates presided over the council of Avranches, which absolved Henry II. for the murder of A’Becket, the Norman clergy were emphatically reminded that those who married in holy orders must put away their wives, and this in terms which indicate that the rule had not been previously obeyed.[797] Yet notwithstanding this formal declaration, only a few years later we find the Archbishop of Rheims applying to him for counsel in the case of a deacon who had committed matrimony, to which Alexander of course replied that the marriage was no marriage, and that the offending ecclesiastic must be separated from the woman, and undergo due penance.[798] The persistence of the pope, and the necessity of his urgency, are farther shown by sundry epistles to various English bishops, in which the rule is enunciated as absolute and unvarying;[799] and he takes occasion to stigmatize such marriages with the most degrading epithet, when he graciously pardons those concerned, and permits their restitution after a long course of penitence, on their giving evidence of a reformed life.[800]
Yet even Alexander was forced to abate somewhat of his stern determination, in consideration of the incorrigible perversity of the time, though he seems not to have remarked that he abandoned the principle by admitting exceptions, and that the reasons assigned in such individual cases might, with equal cogency, be applied to the total withdrawal of the rule. When the Calabrian bishops informed him that clerks in holy orders throughout their dioceses committed matrimony, he ordered that priests and deacons should be irrevocably separated from their wives; but, in the case of subdeacons of doubtful morals, he instructed the prelates that they should tacitly connive at the irregularity, lest in place of one woman, many should be abused, and a greater evil be incurred, in the endeavor to avoid a less.[801] This worldly wisdom also dictated his orders to the Bishop of Exeter, in whose diocese subdeacons were in the habit of openly marrying. He directs an examination into the lives and characters of the offenders; those whose regular habits and staid morality afford fair expectation of their chastity in celibacy are to be forcibly separated from their wives; while those whose disorderly character renders probable their general licentiousness if condemned to a single life are not to be disturbed—taking care, however, that they do not minister at the altar, or receive ecclesiastical benifices.[802]
Alexander adopted the principle that a simple vow of chastity did not prevent marriage or render it null, but that a formal vow, or the reception of orders, created a dissolution of marriage, or a total inability to enter into it;[803] but Celestin III. carried the principle still farther, and decreed that a simple vow, while it did not dissolve an existing connection, was sufficient to prevent a future one.[804]
Alexander did not confine himself to this portion of the question, but with ceaseless activity labored to enforce the observance of celibacy in general, and to repress the immorality which disgraced the church throughout Christendom—immorality which led Alain de l’Isle, the “Universal Doctor,” to characterize the ecclesiastics of his time as being old men in their inefficiency and young men in their unbridled passions.[805] Alexander’s efforts were particularly directed to put an end to the practice of hereditary priesthood, and its constant consequence, hereditary benefices. If I have made little allusion to this subject during the century under consideration, it is not that the church had relaxed her exertions to place some limit on this apparently incurable disorder, or that the passive resistance to her efforts had been less successful than we have seen it on previous occasions. The perpetual injunctions of Alexander show at once the universality of the vice, and the determination of the pontiff to eradicate it. At the same time it became a frequent, and no doubt a profitable portion of the duties of the papal chancery, to grant special dispensations when those who held such preferment, or who desired to retain their wives, underwent the dangers and expense of a journey to Rome, and were rewarded for their confidence in the benignity of the Holy Father by a rescript to their bishops, commanding their reinstatement in the benefices from which they had been ejected.[806] The power to grant such dispensations was shrewdly reserved as the exclusive privilege of the papal court;[807] and a high churchman of the period assures us that there was no difficulty in obtaining them.[808] It need not, therefore, surprise us that Alexander’s successor, Lucius III., found the hereditary transmission of the priestly office claimed as an absolute right.[809] And not only did the claims of the papal chancery thus interfere with the execution of the law by its power of granting dispensations, but its appellate jurisdiction was constantly used to avert punishment from the worst offenders. Thus Lucius III., about the year 1181 was obliged to grant to Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris, the right to dispossess of their benefices and functions, without appeal, certain notorious concubinarians who, on being threatened with the application of the law, had defied him by interposing an appeal to Rome.[810] This centralization of all power in the papal court, and the unblushing venality of the Roman officials, meet us in every age as the efficient obstacle to the efforts of reforming prelates throughout Europe.
The uncertainty of this conflicting legislation, at times enforced, and at times dispensed with by the supreme power, led to innumerable complications and endless perplexity in private life. Indeed, a large portion of the canons are founded on responses given by the popes to settle cases of peculiar difficulty arising from ignorance or neglect of the discipline enjoined, and many of these reveal extreme hardship inflicted on those who could be convicted of no intentional guilt. Perhaps the most noteworthy instance of the troubles caused by the new regulations was that of Bossaert d’Avesnes, which resulted in a desperate war to determine the possession of the rich provinces of Flanders and Hainault. As it illustrates the doubts which still environed these particular points, and the conflicting decisions to which they were liable, even from the infallibility of successive popes, it may be worth briefly sketching here.
When Baldwin of Flanders, Emperor of Constantinople, died in 1206, his eldest daughter Jane succeeded to his territories of Flanders and Hainault, while his second child, Margaret, was placed under the guardianship of Bossaert d’Avesnes. Bossaert was a relative of her mother, Mary of Champagne, and though he held the comparatively insignificant position of chantre of Tournay, he was yet a man of great repute and influence. With the assent and approbation of the estates of Flanders, Margaret and Bossaert were married, the issue of the union being three sons. Whether the fact of his having received the subdiaconate was publicly known or not is somewhat doubtful; but he seems at length to have been awakened to a sense of his uncertain position, when he went to Rome for the purpose of obtaining a dispensation and legitimating his children. Innocent III. not only refused the application, but commanded him to restore Margaret to her relatives and to do penance by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Disregarding these injunctions, he lived openly with his wife after his return and was excommunicated in consequence. At length Margaret left him and married Guillaume de Dampierre, while Bossaert was assassinated during a second visit to Rome, where he was seeking reconciliation to the church. When at last, in 1244, the Countess Jane closed her long and weary career by assuming the veil at Marquette, without leaving heirs, the children of Margaret by both marriages claimed the succession, and Margaret favored the younger, asserting, without scruple, that her elder sons were illegitimate. The difficult question was referred to St. Louis for arbitration, and in 1247 the good king assigned Flanders to Gui de Dampierre and Hainault to Jean d’Avesnes, thus recognizing both marriages as legitimate. This, of course, satisfied neither party. Innocent IV. was appealed to, and in 1248 he sent commissioners to investigate the knotty affair. They reported that the marriage of Bossaert had been contracted in the face of all Flanders, and that the d’Avesnes were legitimate, which judgment was confirmed by Innocent himself in 1252. Thus fortified, Jean d’Avesnes resisted the proposed partition, and a bloody civil war arose. The victory of Vacheren placed the Dampierre in the hands of their half-brothers, and promised to be decisive, until Margaret called in Charles de Valois, bribing him with the offer of Hainault to complete the disinheriting of her first-born. The war continued until Louis, returning from the East in 1255, compelled the combatants to lay down their arms, and to abide by his arbitration.[811]
In this case we see Innocent III. deciding that marriage was incompatible with the subdiaconate. Yet it is a striking illustration of the uncertainty which still surrounded the matter to find the same pope, in 1208, commanding a subdeacon of Laon to return to the wife whom he had abandoned on taking orders, and to treat her in all respects as a wife. Innocent is not to be suspected of any temporizing concession to prevailing laxity, and yet in this case he overruled the uninterrupted tradition of the canons that married men taking orders should thenceforth treat their wives as sisters; and the doubts which experienced ecclesiastics entertained with regard to the law are visible in the fact that when the wife complained of her abandonment to the metropolitan authorities at Rheims they did not pretend to give judgment, but sent the testimony in the case at once to Innocent for his decision.[812]
Another curious case occurring about the same time illustrates the complexity of the questions which arose and the manner in which the selfishness of ascetic zeal sometimes eluded even the very slender barriers with which the church limited its gratification. As we have seen, it was an ancient rule that no man could assume monastic vows without the assent of his wife, with the additional condition that she must at the same time enter a nunnery. It appears that a husband desiring to become a monk, and finding his wife obstinately opposed to his designs, enlisted the services of various priests to influence her, carefully concealing from her the obligation which her assent would impose upon her to take the veil. Still she obstinately refused, until at last he threatened to castrate himself, when she yielded and went through the ceremony of placing with her own hands his head on the altar. The wife thus abandoned took to evil courses, and the husband-monk applied in person to Innocent III. to learn whether he ought to remain in his order, seeing that his continence might be responsible for her unchastity. In spite of the deceit practised upon the wife, Innocent resolved his doubts in favor of the maintenance of his vows, giving as a reason that her adulteries deprived her of claim on him. At the same time, nothing was said as to compelling the woman to take the veil.[813]
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In view of these perplexities, it is no wonder that even the resolute spirit of Alexander III., dismayed at the arduous nature of the struggle, or appalled at the ineradicable vices which defied even papal authority, at times shrank from the contest and was ready to abandon the principle. If we may believe Giraldus Cambrensis, who, as a contemporary intimately connected with the highest ecclesiastical authorities in England, was not likely to be mistaken, and whose long sojourn at the court of Innocent III. would have afforded him ample opportunities of correcting a misstatement, Alexander had once resolved to introduce the discipline of the Greek church in Western Europe, permitting single marriages with virgins. To this he had obtained the assent of his whole court, except his chancellor Albert, who was afterwards pope under the name of Gregory VIII. The resistance of this dignitary was so powerful as to cause the abandonment of the project.[814] Alexander, indeed, was not alone in this conviction. Giraldus himself was fully convinced that such a change would be most useful to the church, though as archdeacon of St. David’s he had displayed his zeal for the enforcement of the canon by measures too energetic for the degeneracy of the age, and though he occupies, in his “Gemma Ecclesiastica,” twenty-one chapters with an exhortation to his clergy to abandon their evil courses.[815] Men of high character did not hesitate to take even stronger ground against the rule. The celebrated Peter Comestor, whose orthodoxy is unquestioned, taught publicly in his lectures that the devil had never inflicted so severe a blow on the church as in procuring the adoption of celibacy.[816]
These were but individual opinions. The policy of the church remained unaltered, and Alexander’s successors emulated his example in endeavoring to enforce the canons. Clement III. took advantage of the profound impression which the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin (Oct. 1187) produced on all Europe, when the fall of the Latin kingdom was attributed to the sins of Christendom. He preached a general reformation. Abstinence from meat on Wednesdays and Saturdays for five years, and various other kinds of mortification were enjoined on all, to propitiate a justly offended Deity, but the clergy were the objects of special reproof. Their extreme laxity of morals, their neglect of the dress of their order, their worldly ambition and pursuits, drinking, gambling, and flocking to tournaments, and the unclerical deportment which left little difference between them and the laity, were some of the accusations brought against them. To their incontinence, however, was chiefly attributed the wrath of God, besides the measureless scandals to which their conduct exposed the church, and they were commanded to remove all suspected females from their houses within forty days, under pain of suspension from their functions and revenues.[817] That these rebukes were not the mere angry declamation of an ascetic is shown by the declaration of Celestin III., a few years later, that throughout Germany the custom still prevailed of fathers substituting in their benefices their sons, born during priesthood, so that frequently parent and offspring ministered together in the same church;[818] and the extent of the demoralization is evident when we find the sons of priests and deacons alluded to as a class ineligible to knighthood in a constitution of Frederic Barbarossa in 1187.[819] The regular clergy offered no exception to the general relaxation of discipline. In 1192 Odo, Bishop of Toul, felt himself forced to deplore the wickedness of monks who left their monasteries and publicly took to themselves wives, but he could devise no better means of arresting the scandal than excommunicating them and their growing families.[820]
Yet, with all his ardor, Clement admitted that celibacy was only a local rule of discipline, and that there was nothing really incompatible between marriage and the holy functions of the altar. The time had not yet come when the council of Trent could erect the inviolable continence of the priesthood into an article of faith, and Clement was willing to allow that priests of the Greek church, under his jurisdiction, could legitimately be married and could celebrate mass while their families were increasing around them.[821]
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Innocent III., who, by the fortunate conjunction of the time in which he flourished with his own matchless force of character, enjoyed perhaps the culmination of papal power and prerogative, at length brought to the struggle an influence and a determination which could scarcely fail to prove decisive on any question capable of a favorable solution. By his decretals and his legates he labored assiduously to enforce obedience to the canons, and when, in 1215, he summoned the whole Christian world to meet in the fourth council of Lateran, that august assembly of about thirteen hundred prelates, acting under his impulsion, and reflecting his triumph over John of England and Otho of Germany, spoke with an authority which no former body since that of Nicæa had possessed. Its canons on the subject before us were simple, perhaps less violent in their tone than those of former synods, but they breathed the air of conscious strength, and there was no man that dared openly to gainsay them. A more rigid observance of the rules was enjoined, and any one officiating while suspended for contravention was punishable with perpetual degradation and deprivation of his emoluments. Yet the rule was admitted to be merely a local ordinance peculiar to the Latin church, for, in the effort made by the council to heal the schism with Constantinople, the right of the East to permit the marriage of its priests was acknowledged by a clause visiting with severer penalties those who by custom were allowed to marry, and who, notwithstanding this license, still permitted themselves illicit indulgences. The disgraceful traffic by which in some places prelates regularly sold permissions to sin was denounced in the strongest terms, as a vice equal in degree to that which it encouraged; and the common custom of fathers obtaining preferment in their own churches for their illegitimate offspring was reprobated as it deserved.[822]
There is nothing novel in these canons, nor can they in strictness be said to constitute an epoch in the history of sacerdotal celibacy. They enunciate no new principles, they threaten no new punishments, yet are they noteworthy as marking the settled policy of the church at a period when it had acquired that plenitude of power and vigor of organization which insured at least an outward show of obedience to its commands. The successive labors of so long a series of pontiffs, during more than a century and a half, carrying with them the cumulative authority of Rome, had gradually broken down resistance, and the Lateran canons were the definitive expression of its discipline on this subject. Accordingly, though we shall see how little was accomplished in securing the purity of the priesthood, which was the ostensible object of the rule, yet hereafter there are to be found few traces of marriage in holy orders, except in the distant countries to which reference has already been made.
Yet the readiness to relax the rule when a substantial advantage was to be gained still continued, and when the effort, commenced at the council of Lyons in 1274, to reunite the Greek church under the supremacy of the Holy See was apparently successful, Nicholas III. stoutly insisted upon the addition of “filioque” to the Symbol, but was discreetly silent as to separating the wives of priests from their husbands, promising in general terms that in all that merely concerned ritual observances the way should be made easy for them.[823]
In Southern Italy, when the churches were actually brought together under the domination of Rome, priests of Greek origin were allowed to retain their wives, but married clerks of Latin parentage were not permitted to enter holy orders without separation. It not infrequently happened that the latter endeavored to elude the prohibition by getting themselves ordained in the Greek church, and it became necessary to denounce severe penalties not only against them, but against the prelates who permitted it.[824]