XXI. RESULTS
The unrelaxing efforts of two centuries had at length achieved an inevitable triumph. One by one the different churches of Latin Christendom yielded to the fiat of the successor of St. Peter, and their ecclesiastics were forced to forego the privilege of assuming the most sacred of earthly ties with the sanction of heaven and the approbation of man. Sacerdotalism vindicated its claim to exclusive obedience; the church successfully asserted its right to command the entire life of its members, and to sunder all the bonds that might allure them to render a divided allegiance. In theory, at least, all who professed a religious life or assumed the sacred ministry were given up wholly to the awful service which they had undertaken: no selfishly personal aspirations could divert their energies from the aggrandizement of their class, nor were the temporal possessions of the establishment to be exposed to the minute but all-pervading dilapidation of the wife and family.
If these were the objects of the movement inaugurated by Damiani and Hildebrand, and followed up with such unrelenting vigor by Calixtus and Alexander and Innocent, the history of the mediæval church attests how fully they were attained. It is somewhat instructive, indeed, to observe that in the rise of the papal power to its culmination under Innocent III. it was precisely the pontiffs most conspicuous for their enforcement of the rule of celibacy who were likewise most prominent in their assertion of the supremacy, temporal and spiritual, of the head of the Roman church. Whether or not they recognized and acknowledged the connection, they labored as though the end in view was clearly appreciated, and their triumphs on the one field were sure to be followed by corresponding successes on the other.
Yet in all this the ostensible object was always represented to be the purity of the church and of its ministers. The other advantages were either systematically ignored or but casually alluded to. One warning voice, indeed, was raised, in a quarter where it would have at least commanded respectful attention, had not the church appeared to imagine itself superior to the ordinary laws of cause and effect. While Innocent II. was laboring to enforce his new doctrine that ordination and religious vows were destructive of marriage, St. Bernard, the ascetic reformer of monachism and the foremost ecclesiastic of his day, was thundering against the revival of Manichæism. The heresies of the Albigenses respecting marriage were to be combated, and, in performing this duty, he pointed out with startling vigor the evils to the church and to mankind of the attempt to enforce a purity incompatible with human nature. Deprive the church of honorable marriage, he exclaimed, and you fill her with concubinage, incest, and all manner of nameless vice and uncleanness.[825] It was still an age of faith; and while earnest men like St. Bernard could readily anticipate the evils attendant upon the asceticism of heretics, they could yet persuade themselves, as the Council of Trent subsequently expressed it, that God would not deny the gift of chastity to those who rightly sought it in the bosom of the true church—though St. Bernard himself confessed that crimes which he dared not even to name commonly followed after the fornication, adultery, and incest which specially characterized innumerable ministers of Christ.[826] It remains for us to see what was the success of the attempt thus deliberately to tempt the Lord.
It is somewhat significant that when, in France, the rule of celibacy was completely restored, strict churchmen should have found it necessary also to revive the hideously suggestive restriction which denied to the priest the society of his mother or of his sister. Even in the profoundest barbarism of the tenth century, or the unbridled license of the eleventh; even when Damiani descanted upon the disorders of his contemporaries with all the cynicism of the most exalted asceticism, horrors such as these are not alluded to. It is reserved for the advancement of the thirteenth century and the enforcement of celibacy to show us how outraged human nature may revenge itself and protest against the shackles imposed by zealous sacerdotalism or unreasoning bigotry. In 1208, Cardinal Guala, Innocent’s legate in France, issued an order in which he not only repeated the threadbare prohibitions respecting focariæ and concubines, but commanded that even mothers and other relatives should not be allowed to reside with men in holy orders, the devil being the convenient personage on whom, as usual, was thrown the responsibility of the scandals which were known to occur frequently under such circumstances.[827] That this decree was not allowed to pass into speedy oblivion is shown by a reference to it as still well known and in force a century later, in the statutes of the church of Tréguier.[828] And that the necessity for it was not evanescent may be assumed from its repetition in the regulations of the see of Nismes, the date of which is uncertain, but probably attributable to the close of the fourteenth century.[829] At the same time, we have evidence that Cardinal Guala’s efforts were productive of little effect. Four years later, in 1212, we find Innocent formally authorizing the prelates of France mercifully to pardon those who had been excommunicated under Guala’s rules, with the suggestive proviso that the power thus conferred was not to be used for the purpose of extorting unhallowed gains.[830] Still more significant is the fact that in the same year Innocent dispatched another legate, Cardinal Robert, duly commissioned to renew the endless task of purifying the Gallican church. Guala’s efforts would seem to have already passed into oblivion, for in a council which Cardinal Robert held in Paris, he gravely promulgated a canon forbidding the priesthood from keeping their concubines so openly as to give rise to scandal, and threatening the recalcitrants with excommunication if they should persist in retaining their improper consorts for forty days after receiving notice.[831] That monachism was no less productive of sin in the depraved moral atmosphere of the age is rendered evident by other canons of the same council, which prohibit both monks and nuns from sleeping two in a bed, with the avowed object of repressing crimes against nature.[832] It may well be asked what was the value of the continence aimed at in monastic vows when the whole body of the monastic orders was the subject of such degrading regulations as these.
The clergy of France were not exceptional, and, unfortunately, there can be no denial of the fact that notorious and undisguised illicit unions, or still more debasing secret licentiousness, was a universal and pervading vice of the church throughout Christendom. Its traces amid all the ecclesiastical legislation of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries are too broad and deep to be called into question, and if no evidence remained except the constant and unavailing efforts to repress it, that alone would be sufficient. National and local synods, pastoral epistles, statutes of churches, all the records of ecclesiastical discipline are full of it. Now deploring and now threatening, exhausting ingenuity in devising new regulations and more effective punishments, the prelates of those ages found themselves involved in a task as endless and as bootless as that of the Danaidæ. Occasionally, indeed, it is lost sight of momentarily, when the exactions and usurpations of the laity, or the gradual extension of secular jurisdiction monopolized the attention of those who were bound to defend the privileges of their class; but, with these rare exceptions, it may be asserted as a general truth that scarcely a synod met, or a body of laws was drawn up to govern some local church, in which the subject did not receive a prominent position and careful consideration. It would be wearisome and unprofitable to recapitulate here the details of this fruitless iteration. Without by any means exhausting the almost limitless materials for investigation, I have collected a formidable mass of references upon the subject, but an examination of them shows so little of novelty and so constant a recurrence to the starting-point, that no new principles can be evolved from them, and their only interest lies in their universality, and in demonstrating how resultless was the unceasing effort to remove the uneffaceable plague-spot.
Spasmodic efforts, it is true, occasionally wrought a temporary improvement, as when Alexander IV., in 1259, proclaimed to the world that licentious ecclesiastics were the cause of all the evils under which the church was groaning, for through them the name of God was blasphemed throughout the world, the sacraments were polluted, the Catholic religion lost the reverence of the faithful, the people were deprived of the benefits of divine service, the substance of the church was dissipated, the Word of God was defiled by their impure lips, heretics were encouraged in their opposition, oppressors were emboldened to persecution, and the sacrilegious were able to expose the whole church to mockery and contempt. To alleviate these troubles, he not only ordered the prelates of Christendom to prosecute all offences of this nature with the utmost severity, but, recognizing his own court as an obstacle to reform, he surrendered his appellate jurisdiction in such cases, and forbade all appeals to Rome.[833] His earnestness bore some fruit, and many prelates were stimulated to reform their flocks, causing large numbers of ecclesiastics to be expelled. A contemporary rhymester, Adam de la Halle (better known perhaps as Le Bossu d’Arras), thus alludes to the effects of the Bull:—
“Et chascuns le pape encosa Quant tant de bons clers desposa.— —Romme a bien le tierche partie Des clers fais sers et amatis.”[834]
As in all similar attempts, however, the results were but transitory. Ferry, Bishop of Orleans, would scarce have been murdered, in 1299, by a knight whose daughter he had seduced, had the father felt that there was any chance of punishing the criminal by having the canons enforced against him.[835]
In the confessed nullity of penal legislation it was natural for the church to have recourse to her supernatural armory, and accordingly we have ample store of legends framed with the hope of frightening by spiritual terrors those who were indurated to canon and decretal. The dead concubine of a priest was seen chased by infernal demons, and a knight who sought to protect her had a handful of hair left in his grasp by her mad terror; and the reality of the awful scene was verified on opening her tomb and finding her tresses deficient. So a nun who had yielded to temptation and had sought to conceal her frailty by murdering her child, dying unconfessed, was seen wandering hopelessly with a burning infant clasped to her bosom, which she proclaimed was to be her torment throughout eternity.[836] It is no wonder that the well-meant ingenuity which devised these tales met with slender reward, and that the threat of post-mortem punishment was as powerless as that of temporal penalties, for these tales were counterbalanced by other superstitions, such as that which taught that the most sinful, even among laymen, could obtain eternal salvation by the simple expedient of enveloping himself in a monastic habit on his death-bed. The Benedictines had well-authenticated cases in plenty where the most vicious of men, by adopting this plan, were rescued by St. Benedict himself from the hands of demons conducting them to eternal punishment, in spite of Satan’s complaints that he was defrauded of his rights.[837] The Franciscans contended with the Benedictines as to the efficacy of their respective patrons, and related with pride that St. Francis visited purgatory every year and carried with him to heaven the souls of his followers—a general plan of salvation which gave his vestments a decided superiority over those of the older order. As the practice became more common, it was recognized as equally dangerous to the welfare of the faithful and to the revenues of the church, and was condemned as a pernicious error.[838]
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So open and avowed was the shame of the church that the Neapolitan code, promulgated about 1231 by the enlightened Frederic II., absolutely interfered to give a quasi legitimacy to the children of ecclesiastics, and removed, to a certain extent, their disability of inheritance. The imperial officials were ordered to assign appropriate shares in parental estates to such children, notwithstanding their illegitimacy, conditioned on the payment of an annual tax to the imperial court; and parents were not allowed to alienate their property to the prejudice of such children, any more than in cases of the offspring of lawful wedlock.[839] The numbers and influence of the class thus protected must indeed have been great to induce such interference in their favor.
We have already seen ecclesiastical authority for the assertion that in the Spanish Peninsula the children sprung from such illicit connections rivalled in numbers the offspring of the laity. That they were numerous elsewhere may be presumed when we see Innocent IV., in 1248, forced to grant to the province of Livonia the privilege of having them eligible to holy orders, except when born of parents involved in monastic vows,[840] for necessity alone could excuse so flagrant a departure from the canons enunciated during the preceding two centuries. A similar conclusion is deducible from the fact that in the municipal code in force throughout Northern Germany during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they were deemed of sufficient importance to be entitled to a separate place in the classification of wer-gilds, or blood-moneys; while the aim of the lawgiver to stigmatize them is manifested by his placing them below the peasant, deeming them superior only to the juggler;[841] and that this was not a provision of transient force is clear from the commentary upon it in a body of law dating from the end of the fourteenth century.[842] Nor is the evidence less convincing which may be drawn from the use of the old German word pfaffenkind, or priest’s son, which became generally used as equivalent to bastard.[843] It would not, indeed, be difficult to understand the numbers of this class of the population if ecclesiastics in general followed the example of Henry III., Bishop of Liége, whose natural children amounted to no less than sixty-five.[844]
The direct encouragement thus given to illicit connections, by providing for the children sprung from them, neutralized one of the principal modes by which the church endeavored to suppress them. The innumerable canons issued during this period, forbidding and pronouncing null and void all testamentary provisions in favor of concubines and descendants, prove not only how much stress was laid upon this as an efficient means of repression, but also how little endeavor was made by the guilty parties to conceal their sin. As all testaments came within the sphere of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, it would seem that there should have been no difficulty in enforcing regulations of this kind, yet their constant repetition proves either that those who were intrusted with their execution were habitually remiss, or else that the popular feelings were in favor of the unfortunates, and interfered with the efficacy of the laws.
A single instance, out of many that might be cited, will illustrate this. In 1225 the Cardinal-legate Conrad held, at Mainz, a national council of the German empire, of which one of the canons declared that, in order to abolish the custom of ecclesiastics leaving to their concubines and children the fruits of their benefices, not only should such legacies be void, but those guilty of the attempt should lie unburied, all who endeavored to enforce such testaments should be anathematized, and the church where it was permitted should lie under an interdict as long as the wrong was permitted.[845] The terrible rigor of these provisions shows how deep seated was the evil aimed at; nor were they uncalled for when we see a will, executed in 1218 by no less a personage than Gotfrid, Archdeacon of Wurzburg, in which he leaves legacies to the children whom he confesses to have been born in sin, and of whom he expects his relatives to take charge.[846] Had any earnest attempt been made to enforce the canons of the Legate, they would have been amply sufficient to eradicate the evil; yet their utter inefficiency is demonstrated by the council of Fritzlar in 1246, and that of Cologne in 1260. The former of these was held by the Archbishop of Mainz; it has no canons directed against concubinage, which was as public as ever, but it deplores the dilapidation of the temporalities of the church by the testamentary provisions of priests in favor of their guilty partners and children, and it repeats, with additional emphasis, the regulations of 1225.[847] The latter renews the complaint that priests not only continue their evil courses throughout life, but are not ashamed, on their death-beds, to leave to their children the patrimony of Christ; and another provision is equally significant in forbidding priests to be present at the marriages of their children, or that such marriages should be solemnized with pomp and ostentation.[848] The following year another council, held at Mainz, repeated the prohibition as to the diversion of church property to the consorts and natural children of priests;[849] while that regarding the solemnization of their children’s marriages was renewed by the synod of Olmutz in 1342.[850] In 1416 the synod of Breslau deplored that the old canons were forgotten and despised, and that priests were not ashamed to bequeath to their bastards accumulations of property which would form fit portions for lofty nobles.[851] How thoroughly in fact it was deemed a matter of course for the children of ecclesiastics to marry well and to have good dowries, is to be seen in Chaucer’s description of the wife of “deinous Simekin”, the proud miller of Trompington:——
“A wif he hadde, comen of noble kin; The person of the toun hire father was. With hire he yaf ful many a panne of bras, For that Simkin shuld in his blood allie. She was yfostered in a nonnerie.” (The Reves Tale.)
As time wore on, and the clergy, despite the innumerable admonitions and threats which were everywhere showered upon them, persisted in retaining their female companions, they appear, in some places, to have gradually assumed the privilege as a matter of right; and, what is even more remarkable, they seem to have had a certain measure of success in the assumption. In 1284 the Papal Legate, Gerard Bishop of Sabina, at the Council of Amalfi, renewed and strengthened the decretals of Alexander III. respecting the concubinary priests of the Neapolitan provinces, ordering the ejection of all who should not separate from their partners within a month, suspending all prelates who should neglect to enforce the rule, and fining heavily those who, as in so many other places, made the frailties of their subordinates a source of filthy gain.[852] The severity of these provisions was as unsuccessful as usual, and at length the secular power endeavored to come to the assistance of the ecclesiastical authorities. The pious Charles the Lame of Naples, whose close alliance with Rome rendered him eager in everything that would gratify the head of the church, about the year 1300 imposed a heavy fine on the concubines of priests if they persisted in their sin for a year after excommunication. This law, like so many similar ones, soon fell into desuetude, but in 1317, under his son Robert the Good, the justiciary of the Principato Citra undertook to put it into execution. In the diocese of Marsico the clergy openly resisted these proceedings, boldly laid their complaints before the king, and were so energetic that Robert was obliged to issue an ordinance directing the discontinuance of all processes before the lay tribunals, and granting that the concubines should be left to the care of the ecclesiastical courts alone. These women thus, by reason of their sinful courses, came to be invested with a quasi-ecclesiastical character, and to enjoy the dearly prized immunities attached to that position, at a time when the church was vigorously striving to uphold and extend the privileges which the civil lawyers were systematically laboring to undermine. Nor was the pretension thus advanced suffered to lapse. Towards the close of the same century, Carlo Malatesta of Rimini applied to Ancarono, a celebrated doctor of canon and civil law (“juris canonici speculum et civilis anchora”), to know whether he could impose penalties on the concubines of priests, and the learned jurist replied decidedly in the negative; while other legal authorities have not hesitated to state that such women are fully entitled to immunity from secular jurisdiction, as belonging to the families of clerks—de familia clericorum.[853] When a premium was thus offered for sin, and the mistresses of priests—like the maîtresses-en-titre of the Bourbons—acquired a certain honorable position among their fellows from the mere fact of their ministering to the unhallowed lusts of their pastors, it is not to be wondered at if such connections multiplied and flourished, and if the humble laity came to regard them as an established institution.
Robert of Naples was not the only potentate who found an organized resistance to his well-meant endeavors to restore discipline. When, in 1410, the stout William, Bishop-elect of Paderborn, had triumphed with fire and sword over his powerful foes, the Archbishop of Cologne and the Count of Cleves, he turned his energies to the reformation of the dissolute morals of his monks. They positively refused to submit to the ejection of their women from the monasteries, and he at length found the task too impracticable even for his warlike temper. For seven long years the quarrel lasted, legal proceedings being varied by attempts at poison on the one side, and reckless devastations by the episcopal troops on the other, until the prelate, worn out by the stubbornness of his flock, was obliged to give way.[854]
Equal success waited on the resistance of the Swiss clergy when, in 1230, the civil authorities of Zurich sacrilegiously ordered them to dismiss their women. They resolutely replied that they were flesh and blood, unequal to the task of living like angels, and unable to attend to the kitchen and other household duties. The townsmen entered into a league against them, and succeeded in driving away some of the sacerdotal consorts, when the Bishop of Constance and his chapter, allowing perhaps the pride of the churchman to get the better of ascetic zeal, interfered with a threat of excommunication on all who should presume to intervene in a matter which related specially to the church. He absolved the leaguers from the oaths with which they were mutually bound, and thus restored security to the priestly households. About the same time Gregory IX. appointed a certain Boniface to the see of Lausanne. On his installation, the new bishop commenced with ardor to enforce the canons, but the clergy conspired against his life, and were so nearly successful that he incontinently fled, and never ventured to return.[855]
If the irregular though permanent connections which everywhere prevailed had been the only result of the prohibition of marriage, there might perhaps have been little practical evil flowing from it, except to the church itself and to its guilty members. When the desires of man, however, are once tempted to seek through unlawful means the relief denied to them by artificial rules, it is not easy to set bounds to the unbridled passions which, irritated by the fruitless effort at repression, are no longer restrained by a law which has been broken or a conscience which has lost its power. The records of the Middle Ages are accordingly full of the evidences that indiscriminate license of the worst kind prevailed throughout every rank of the hierarchy.
Even supposing that this fearful immorality were not attributable to the immutable laws of nature revenging themselves for their attempted violation, it could readily be explained by the example set by the central head. Scarcely had the efforts of Nicholas and Gregory put an end to sacerdotal marriage in Rome when the morals of the Roman clergy became a disgrace to Christendom. How little the results of the reform corresponded with the hopes of the zealous puritans who had brought it about may be gathered from the martyrdom of a certain Arnolfo, who, under the pontificate of Honorius II., preached vehemently against the scandals and immorality of the ecclesiastics of the apostolic city. They succeeded in making away with him, notwithstanding the protection of Honorius, and the veneration of the nobles and people who regarded him as a prophet.[856] When such was the condition of clerical virtue, we can scarcely wonder that sufficient suffrages were given in 1130 by the sacred college to Cardinal Pier-Leone to afford him a plausible claim to the papacy, although he was notoriously stained with the foulest crimes. Apparently his children by his sister Tropea, and his carrying about with him a concubine when travelling in the capacity of papal legate, had not proved a bar to his elevation in the church, nor to his employment in the most conspicuous and important affairs.[857] A severer satire on the standard of ecclesiastical morality could scarcely be imagined than the inculcation by such a man, in his capacity as pope, of the canons requiring the separation of priests from their wives, on the plea of the spotless purity required for the service of the altar.[858]
What were the influences of the papal court in the next century may be gathered from the speech which Cardinal Hugo made to the Lyonese, on the occasion of the departure of Innocent IV. in 1251 from their city, after a residence of eight years—“Friends, since our arrival here, we have done much for your city. When we came, we found here three or four brothels. We leave behind us but one. We must own, however, that it extends without interruption from the eastern to the western gate”—the crude cynicism of which greatly disconcerted the Lyonese ladies present.[859] Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, therefore only reflected the popular conviction when, on his deathbed in 1253, inveighing against the corruption of the papal court, he applied to it the lines—
Ejus avaritiæ totus non sufficit orbis, Ejus luxuriæ meretrix non sufficit omnis.[860]
A hundred years later saw the popes again in France. For forty years they had bestowed on Avignon all the benefits, moral and spiritual, arising from the presence of the Vicegerent of Christ, when Petrarch recorded, for the benefit of friends whom he feared to compromise by naming, the impressions produced by his long residence there in the household of a leading dignitary of the church. Language seems too weak to express his abhorrence of that third Babylon, that Hell upon Earth, which could furnish no Noah, no Deucalion to survive the deluge that alone could cleanse its filth—and yet he intimates that fear compels him to restrain the full expression of his feelings. Chastity was a reproach and licentiousness a virtue. The aged prelates surpassed their younger brethren in wickedness as in years, apparently considering that age conferred upon them the license to do that from which even youthful libertines shrank; while the vilest crimes were the pastimes of pontifical ease.[861] Juvenal and Brantôme can suggest nothing more shameless or more foul. Nor was the tone of morality heightened when, fifty years later, Nicholas de Clemanges takes up the tale. His brief reference to the adulteries and vileness with which the cardinals befouled the papal court, and the obscenities in which their families imitated their example, shows that the matter was so generally understood that it needed no details.[862]
The Great Schism perhaps could scarcely be expected to improve the morals of the papal court. Yet when the church universal, to close that weary quarrel, agreed to receive one of the competitors as its head, surely it might have selected, as the visible representative of God upon earth, some more worthy embodiment of humanity than Balthazar Cossa, who, as John XXIII., is alone, of the three competitors, recognized in the list of popes. When the great council of Constance in 1415 adopted the awful expedient of trying, condemning, and deposing a pope, the catalogue of crimes—notorious incest, adultery, defilement, homicide, and atheism—of which the fathers formally accused him, and which he confessed without defending himself,[863] is fearfully suggestive of the corruption which could not only spawn such a monster, but could elevate him to the highest place in the hierarchy, and present him for the veneration of Christendom. It affords a curious insight into the notions of morality prevalent in the Papal court to observe that when he had as chamberlain of Boniface IX., scandalized Rome by openly keeping his brother’s wife as a concubine, the remedy adopted for the disorder was to create him Cardinal and send him as legate to Bologna, while the lady was conveyed to her husband in Naples. The result of this course of procedure was that during his sway at Bologna two hundred maids, matrons, and widows, including a few nuns, fell victims to his brutal lust.[864] So obtuse, in fact, were the sensibilities of the age, that after his release from the prison to which he had been consigned by the fathers of Constance, his successor, Martin V. consoled him in his degradation by creating him Dean of the Sacred College.
If the Councils of Constance and of Bâle worked some apparent reform in the outward morality of the papacy, their effect soon passed away. The latter half of the fifteenth century scarcely saw a supreme pontiff without the visible evidences of human frailty around him, the unblushing acknowledgment of which is the fittest commentary on the tone of clerical morality. Sixtus IV. was believed to embody the utmost possible concentration of human wickedness,[865] until Borgia came to divide with him the preëminence of evil. The success of Innocent VIII. in increasing the population of Rome was a favorite topic with the wits of the day;[866] but the epitaph which declared that filth, gluttony, avarice, and sloth lay buried in his tomb[867] did not anticipate the immediate resurrection of the worst of those vices in the person of his successor Alexander VI. If the crimes of Borgia were foul, their number and historical importance have rendered them so well known that I may be spared more than a passing allusion to a career which has made his name synonymous with all that can degrade man to a level at once with the demon and the brute.[868]
Such men as Alexander can hardly be deemed exceptional, save inasmuch as brilliant talents and native force of character might enable them to excel their contemporaries in guilt as in ambition. They were the natural product of a system which for four centuries had bent the unremitting energies of the church to securing temporal power and wealth, with exemption from the duties and liabilities of the citizen. Such were the fruits of the successful theocracy of Hildebrand, which, intrusting irresponsible authority to fallible humanity, came to regard ecclesiastical aggrandizement as a full atonement for all and every crime. That the infection had spread even to the ultimate fibres of the establishment can readily be believed, for the supremacy of the Papal authority gave it the power of controlling the character of every parish in Christendom. We shall see hereafter, as we have already seen, how that power was habitually abused, and how the nullification of the canons was a recognized source of income to the successor of St. Peter and his needy officials. The evil was one that had long been recognized and complained of since Hincmar of Rheims so emphatically denounced it. St. Bernard declared that Rome was the acknowledged refuge of all ambitious and licentious men who desired either promotion or to retain the preferment which they had forfeited.[869] In the fiery zeal with which he warns his protégé, Eugenius III., not to be deceived by such suitors, he shows us how useless were local efforts at reformation when they could be so readily set aside and rendered nugatory by the venal influences at work in the Apostolic court. But the abuse was too profitable to be suppressed, and it continued until after the Reformation had shown the necessity of some decent reticence in the exercise of powers no longer regarded as wholly irresponsible.
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My object has been to consider the subject of ascetic celibacy as a portion simply of ecclesiastical history, and yet I cannot well conclude this section without a hasty glance at its influence on society at large. That influence, as far as the secular clergy were its instruments, was evidently one of almost unmixed evil. The parish priest, if honestly ascetic, was thereby deprived of the wholesome common bond of human affections and sympathies, and was rendered less efficient for good in consoling the sorrows and aiding the struggles of his flock. If, on the other hand, he was a hypocrite, or if he had found too late that the burden he had assumed was too heavy for his strength, the denial of the natural institution of marriage was the source of immeasurable corruption to those intrusted to his charge, who looked up to him not only as a spiritual director, but as a superior being who could absolve them from sin, and whose partnership in guilt was in itself an absolution.[870] That such was the condition of innumerable parishes throughout Europe, there is unfortunately no reason to doubt, and all of the severer churchmen of the period, in attacking the vices of the clergy, give us to understand that either their example led the laity into evil, or that their immorality rendered it impossible for them to correct the vices of the flocks. As Cæsarius of Heisterbach says, “Since the priesthood mostly lead evil and incontinent lives, they soothe rather than excite the consciences of the worldly.”[871] The incongruity of this may perhaps explain to some extent the anomaly of the practical grossness of the Middle Ages, combined with the theoretical ascetic purity which was held out as the duty of every Christian who desired to be acceptable to his Creator.
The curious contrasts and confusion of the standard of morality, arising from this striving against nature, are well illustrated by a homily of the thirteenth century against marriage, addressed to youthful nuns, which exhausts all the arguments that the ingenuity of the writer could suggest. On the one hand he appeals to the pride which could be so well gratified by the exalted state of virginity; he pictures the superior bliss vouchsafed in heaven to those who were stained by no earthly contamination, confidently promising them a higher rank and more direct communing with the Father than would be bestowed on the married and the widowed; he rapturously dwells upon the inward peace, the holy ecstasy which are the portion of those who, wedded to Christ, keep pure their mystic marriage vow; and his ascetic fervor exhausts itself in depicting the spiritual delights of a life of religious seclusion. Mingled inextricably with these exalted visions of beatific mysticism, he presents in startling contrasts the retribution awaiting the sin of licentiousness and the evils inseparable from a life of domestic marriage. With a crude nastiness that is almost inconceivable, he minutely describes all the discomforts and suffering, physical and mental, attendant upon wifehood and maternity, entering into every detail and gloating over every revolting circumstance that his prurient imagination can suggest. The license of Shakespeare, the plain speaking of Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the mediæval trouvères show us what our ancestors were, and what they were is easily explained when such a medley of mysticism and grossness could be poured into the pure ears of innocent young girls by their spiritual director.[872]
Thus, with the fearful immorality of which we have seen such ample evidence, the church still presented the same exaggerated asceticism as her guiding principle. The rhapsodies of St. John Chrysostom and St. Aldhelm were rivalled in an age when the priest was forbidden to live in the same house as his mother, because experience had shown the danger of such propinquity. How the estimate placed on purity increased as virtue diminished is fairly illustrated in a characteristic legend which was very popular with ecclesiastical teachers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It relates how a pagan entering a heathen temple saw Satan seated in state on a throne. One of the princes of Hell entered, worshipped his master, and proceeded to give an account of his work. For thirty days he had been engaged in provoking a war, wherein many battles had been fought with heavy slaughter. Satan sharply reproached him with accomplishing so little in the time, and ordered him to be severely punished. Another then approached the throne and reported that he had devoted twenty days to raising tempests at sea, whereby navies had been wrecked and multitudes drowned. He was likewise reproved and punished for wasting his time. A third had for ten days been engaged in troubling the wedding festivity of a city, causing strife and murder, and he was similarly treated. A fourth then entered and recounted how for forty years he had been occupied in tempting a hermit to yield to fleshly desire, and how he had that night succeeded. Then Satan arose and placed his crown on the head of the new-comer, seating him on the throne as one who had worthily achieved a signal triumph. The spectator, thus seeing the high estimate placed by the Evil One on ascetic chastity, was immediately converted, and forthwith became a monk.[873]
While thus attaching so fanciful a holiness to virginity, the church came practically to erect a most singular standard of morality, the influence of which could but be most deplorable on the mass of the laity. In the earlier days of celibacy, the rule was regarded by the severer ecclesiastics as simply an expression of the necessity of purity in the minister of God. Theophilus of Alexandria, in the fifth century, decided that a man, who as lector had been punished for unchastity and had subsequently risen to the priesthood, must be expelled on account of his previous sin.[874] We have seen, however, how, when celibacy was revived under Damiani and Hildebrand, the question of immorality virtually disappeared, and the essential point became, not that a priest should be chaste, but that he should be unmarried, and this was finally adopted as the recognized law of the church. In 1213 the Archbishop of Lunden enquired of Innocent III. whether a man who had had two concubines was ineligible to orders as a digamus, and the pontiff could only reply that no matter how many concubines a man might have, either at one time or in succession, he did not incur the disability of digamy.[875] When such was the result of seven centuries of assiduous sacerdotalism in a church which was daily growing in authority; when the people thus saw that sexual excesses were no bar to ecclesiastical preferment in that church which made extravagant pretensions to purity; when the strict rules which forbade ordination to a layman who had married a widow, were relaxed in favor of those who were stained with notorious impurity, it is no wonder that the popular perceptions of morality became blunted, and that the laity did not deny themselves the indulgences which they saw tacitly allowed to their spiritual guides.
Nor was it only in stimulating this general laxity of principle that the influence of the church was disastrous. The personal evil wrought by a dissolute priesthood was a wide-spreading contagion. The abuse of the awful authority given by the altar and the confessional, was a subject of sorrowful and indignant denunciation in too many synods for a reasonable doubt to be entertained of its frequency or of the corruption which it spread through innumerable parishes and nunneries.[876] The almost entire practical immunity with which these and similar scandals were perpetrated led to an undisguised and cynical profligacy which the severer churchmen acknowledged to exercise a most deleterious influence on the morals of the laity, who thus saw the examplars of evil in those who should have been their patterns of virtue.[877] In his bull of 1259, Alexander IV. does not hesitate to declare that the people, instead of being reformed, are absolutely corrupted by their pastors.[878] Thomas of Cantinpré, one of the early lights of the Dominican order, indeed, is authority for the legend which represents the devil as thanking the prelates of the church for conducting all Christendom to hell;[879] and the conviction which thus expressed itself is justified by the reproach of Gregory X., who, in dismissing the second council of Lyons, in 1274, told his assembled dignitaries that they were the ruin of the world.[880] Unfortunately, his threat to reform them if they did not reform themselves, remained unexecuted, and the complaint was repeated again and again.[881]
That this state of things was clearly understood by the laity is only too visibly reflected in contemporary records. When, in 1374, the dancing mania, one of those strange epidemics which afflicted the Middle Ages, broke out through Germany and Flanders, the populace called to mind the forgotten regulations of Damiani and Hildebrand, and found a ready explanation of the visitation by assuming it to be a consequence of the vitiated baptism of the people by a concubinary priesthood.[882] Chaucer, with his wide range of observation and shrewd native sense, took a less superstitious, and more practical view of the evil, and in the admirable sermon which forms his “Persone’s Tale” he records the convictions which every pure-minded man must have felt with regard to the demoralizing tendencies of the sacerdotal licentiousness of the time.[883]
How instinctively, indeed, the popular mind assumed the immorality of the pastor is illustrated by a passage in the earliest French pastoral that has reached us, dating from the latter half of the thirteenth century
WARNIERS. Segneur je sui trop courechiés.
GUIOS. Comment?
WARNIERS. Mehalès est agute, M’amie, et s’a esté dechute; Car on dist que ch’est de no prestre.
ROGAUS. En non Dieu! Warnier, bien puet estre; Car ele i aloit trop souvent.
WARNIERS. Hé, las! jou avoie en couvent De li temprement espouser.
GUIOS. Tu te puès bien trop dolouser, Biaus très dous amis; ne te caille, Car ja ne meteras maaille, Que bien sai, à l’enfant warder.[884]
Those who were heretically disposed were keen to take advantage of a weakness so general and so universally understood. The author of the “Creed of Piers Ploughman” does not hesitate to assert with Gregory X. that the clergy were the corruption of the world—
For falshed of freres Hath fullich encombred Manye of this maner men, And made hem to leven Her charité and chastité, And shosen hem to lustes, And waxen to werly, And wayven the trewethe, And leven the love of her God.[885]
The widely received feeling on this subject, perhaps, finds its fittest expression in a satire on the mendicant friars, written by a Franciscan novice who became disgusted with the order and turned Wickliffite. The exaggerated purity and mortification of the early followers of the blessed St. Francis had long since yielded to the temptations which attended on the magnificent success of the institution, and the asceticism which had been powerful enough to cause visions of the holy Stigmata degenerated into sloth and crime which took advantage of the opportunities afforded by the privilege to hear confessions. The grosser accusations of the writer are, perhaps, unfit for quotation, but the spirit in which the Franciscan friars were regarded is sufficiently indicated by the following lines:
For when the gode man is fro hame And the frere comes to oure dame, He spares, nauther for synne ne shame, That he ne dos his will.
* * * * *
Ich man that here shal lede his life That has a faire doghter or a wyfe Be war that no frer ham shryfe Nauther loude ne still.[886]
When such was the moral condition of the priesthood, and such were the influences which it cast upon the flocks intrusted to its guidance, it is not to be wondered at if those who deplored so disgraceful a state of things, and whose respect for the canons precluded them from recommending the natural and appropriate remedy of marriage, should regard an organized system of concubinage as a safeguard. However deplorable such an alternative might be in itself, it was surely preferable to the mischief which the unquenched and ungoverned passions of a pastor might inflict upon his parish; and the instances of this were too numerous and too glaring to admit of much hesitation in electing between the two evils. Even Gerson, the leader of mystic ascetics, who recorded his unbounded admiration for the purity of celibacy in his “Dialogus Naturæ et Sophiæ de Castitate Clericorum,”[887] saw and appreciated its practical evils, and had no scruple in recommending concubinage as a preventive, which, though scandalous in itself, might serve to prevent greater scandals.[888] It therefore requires no great stretch of credulity to believe the assertion of Sleidan that in some of the Swiss Cantons, it was the custom to oblige a new pastor, on entering upon his functions, to select a concubine, as a necessary protection to the virtue of his female parishioners, and to the peace of the families intrusted to his spiritual direction.[889] Indeed, we have already seen, on the authority of the council of Palencia in 1322, that such a practice was not uncommon in Spain.
In thus reviewing the influences which a nominally celibate clergy exercised over those intrusted to their care, it is perhaps scarcely too much to conclude that they were mainly responsible for the laxity of morals which is a characteristic of mediæval society. No one who has attentively examined the records left to us of that society, can call in question the extreme prevalence of the licentiousness which everywhere infected it. Christianity had arisen as the great reformer of a world utterly corrupt. How earnestly its reform was directed to correcting sexual immorality is visible in the persistence with which the Apostles condemned and forbade a sin that the Gentiles scarcely regarded as a sin. The early church was consequently pure, and its very asceticism is a measure of the energy of its protest against the all-pervading license which surrounded it. Its teachings, as we have seen, remained unchanged. Fornication continued to be a mortal sin, yet the period of its unquestioned domination over the conscience of Europe was the very period in which license among the Teutonic races was most unchecked. A church which, though founded on the Gospel, and wielding the illimitable power of the Roman hierarchy, could yet allow the feudal principle to extend to the “jus primæ noctis” or “droit de marquette,” and whose ministers in their character of temporal seigneurs could even occasionally claim the disgusting right themselves[890] was evidently exercising its influence not for good but for evil.
There is no injustice in holding the church responsible for the lax morality of the laity. It had assumed the right to regulate the consciences of men and to make them account for every action and even for every thought. When it promptly caused the burning of those who ventured on any dissidence in doctrinal opinion or in matters of pure speculation, it could not plead lack of authority to control them in practical virtue. Its machinery was all-pervading, and its power autocratic. It had taught that the priest was to be venerated as the representative of God and that his commands were to be implicitly obeyed. It had armed him with the fearful weapon of the confessional, and by authorizing him to grant absolution and to pronounce excommunication, it had delegated to him the keys of heaven and hell. By removing him from the jurisdiction of the secular courts it had proclaimed him as superior to all temporal authority. Through ages of faith the populations had humbly received these teachings and bowed to these assumptions, until they entered into the texture of the daily life of every man. While thus grasping supremacy and using it to the utmost possibility of worldly advantage, the church therefore could not absolve itself from the responsibilities inseparably connected with power, and chief among these responsibilities is to be numbered the moral training of the nations thus subjected to its will. While the corruption of the teachers thus had necessarily entailed the corruption of the taught, it is not too much to say that the tireless energy devoted to the acquisition and maintenance of power, privileges, and wealth, if properly directed, under all the advantages of the situation, would have sufficed to render mediæval society the purest that the world has ever seen.
That the contrary was notoriously the case resulted naturally from the fact that the church, after the long struggle which finally left it supreme over Europe, contented itself with the worldly advantages derivable from the wealth and authority which surpassed its wildest dreams. If, then, it could secure a verbal submission to its doctrines of purity, it was willing to issue countless commands of chastity and to tacitly connive at their perpetual infraction. The taint of corruption infected equally its own ministers and the peoples committed to their charge, and the sacerdotal theory gradually came to regard with more and more indifference obedience to the Gospel in comparison with obedience to man and subservience to the temporal interests of the hierarchy. As absolution and indulgence grew to be a marketable commodity, it even became the interest of the traders in salvation to have a brisk demand for their wares. When infraction of the Divine precepts could be redeemed with a few pence or with the performance of ceremonies that had lost their significance, it is not surprising if priest and people at length were led to look upon the violation of the Decalogue with the eye of the merchant and customer rather than with the spirit of the great Lawgiver.[891]
The first impulse in the reaction of the sixteenth century was to recur to the Gospel and to interpret its commands in accordance with the immutable principles of human conscience rather than with the cunningly devised subtleties of scholastic theology. The reformers thus stood face to face with God, and, needing no intermediary to negotiate with Him, vice and sin reappeared to them in all their hideous deformity and attended with all their inevitable consequences.[892] For the first time since primitive Christianity was absorbed in sacerdotalism, were the doctrines of morality enforced as the primal laws of man’s being and of human society, and the world was made to see, by the energetic action of Puritan sects, that virtue was possible as the rule of life in large communities. We may smile at the eccentricities of Puritanism, but the rescue of modern civilization from the long heritage of ancient vice, and the decency which characterizes modern society, may fairly be attributed to the force of that fierce reaction against the splendid corruptions of the mediæval church.
* * * * *
In considering, however, the influence of the regular clergy, or monastic orders, we find a more complex array of motives and results. The earlier foundations of the West, as we have seen, to a great extent neutralized the inherent selfishness of monachism by the regulations which prescribed a due proportion of labor to be mingled with prayer. The duty which man owes to the world was to some extent recognized as not incompatible with the duty which he owed to his God, and civilization has had few more efficient instruments than the self-denying work of the earnest men who, from Columba to Adalbert, sowed the seeds of Christianity and culture among the frontier lands of Christendom. When discipline such as these men inculcated could be enforced, the benefits of monachism far outweighed its evils. All the peaceful arts, from agriculture to music, owed to the Benedictines their preservation or their advancement, and it would be difficult to estimate exactly the influence for good which resulted from institutions to which the thoughtful and studious could safely retire from a turbulent and barbarous world. These institutions, however, from their own inherent defects, carried in them the germs of corruption. The claims to supereminent sanctity, which secured for them the privileges of asylums, were inevitably used as means for the accumulation of wealth wrung from the fears or superstition of the sinner. With wealth came the abandonment of labor; and idleness and luxury were the prolific parents of license. True-hearted men were not wanting to combat the irrepressible evil. From Chrodegang to St. Vincent de Paul, the history of monachism is full of illustrious names of those who devoted themselves to the mission of reforming abuses and restoring the ideal of the perfect monk, dead to the seductions of the world, and living only to do the work which he deems most acceptable to God. Many of these mistakenly assumed that exaggerated mortification was the only gateway to salvation, and the only cure for the frightful immorality which pervaded so many monastic establishments. Others, with a truer insight into the living principles of Christianity, sought to turn the enthusiasm of their disciples to account in works of perennial mercy and charity, at a period when no other organizations existed for the succor of the helpless and miserable.
Yet when we reflect how large a proportion of the wealth and intellect of Europe was absorbed in the religious houses, it will be seen that the system was a most cumbrous and imperfect one, which gave but a slender return for the magnitude of the means which it involved. Still, it was the only system existing, and possibly the only one which could exist in so rude a structure of society, individualized to a degree which destroyed all sense of public responsibility, and precluded all idea of a state created for the well-being of its component parts. Thus, the monastery became the shelter of the wayfarer, and the dispenser of alms to the needy. It was the principal school of the poor and humble; and while the Universities of Oxford and Paris were devoting their energies to unprofitable dialectics and the subtle disputations of Aristotelian logic, in multitudes of abbey libraries quiet monks were multiplying priceless manuscripts, and preserving to after ages the treasures of the past. When fanciful asceticism did not forbid the healing of the sick, monks labored fearlessly in hospitals and pest-houses, and distributed among the many the benefactions which they had wrung from the late repentance of the few. As time wore on, even the religious teaching of the public passed almost exclusively into their hands, and to the followers of Dominic and Francis of Assisi the people owed such insight as they could obtain into the promises of the gospel. If the enthusiasm which prompted labors so strenuous did not shrink from lighting the fires of persecution, we must remember that religious zeal, accompanied by irresponsible power, has one invariable history.
While thus, in various ways, the ascetic spirit led to institutions which promoted the progress of civilization, in others it necessarily had a directly opposite tendency. Nothing contributes more strongly to the extension of knowledge and of culture than the striving for material comfort and individual advancement in worldly well-being. Luxury and ambition thus have their uses in stimulating the inquiring and inventive faculties of man, in rendering the forces of nature subservient to our use, and in softening the rugged asperities which are incompatible with the regular administration of law. Every instinct of human nature has its destined purpose in life, and the perfect man is to be found in the proportionate cultivation of each element of his character, not in the exaggerated development of those faculties which are deemed primarily good, nor in the entire repression of those which are evil only when their prominence destroys the balance of the whole. The ascetic selected for eradication one group of human aspirations, which was the most useful under proper discipline, and not perhaps the worst even in its ordinary excess. Only those who have studied the varied aspects of mediæval society can rightly estimate the enormous influence which the church possessed, in those ages of faith, to mould the average habits of thought in any desired direction. It can readily be seen that if the tireless preaching of the vanity of human things and the beatitude of mortification occasionally produced such extravagances as those of the flagellants, the spirit which now and then burst forth in such eruption must have been an element of no little power in the forces which governed society at large, and must have exercised a most depressing influence in restraining the general advance of civilization. Not only did it thus more or less weigh down the efforts of almost every man, but the ardent minds that would otherwise have been leaders in the race of progress were the ones most likely, under the pervading spirit of the age, to be the foremost in maceration and self-denial; while those who would not yield to the seduction were either silenced or wasted their wisdom on a generation which believed too much to believe in them. When idleness was holy, earnest workers had little chance.
The effect of monastic asceticism in moulding the character may be seen in the admiring picture drawn by a disciple in the fifteenth century of a shining light of the Carthusian order in the monastery of Vallis Dei, near Seez in Normandy. He had every virtue, he was an earnest reader and transcriber of MSS., and he practised mortifications even greater than those prescribed by the severe rules of the order. He rarely slept on the couch provided for each brother, but passed his nights in prayer on the steps of the altar. In the hair shirt worn next his skin he cultivated lice and maggots so assiduously that they were often seen crawling over his face, and he scourged himself for every unhallowed wandering thought. He had preserved his virginity to old age, and his life had been passed in the church, yet in his daily confessions he accused himself of every sin possible to man, and he rigorously performed whatever penance was assigned to him. With all this maceration, the flesh would still assert itself, and he was tormented with evil desires which the sharp cords of the discipline failed to subdue. His office of procureur of the abbey required him to make frequent visits on business to the neighboring town, and he never left the gates of his retreat without lamenting and expressing the fear that he should not return to it the same as he left it.[893] If we consider what might have been effected by the energies of thousands of men such as this, had those energies not been absorbed in lifelong asceticism, we may conceive in some measure the retardation of human progress wrought by the influence of monachism.
Another result which may fairly be attributed to the ascetic teachings of the church is the slow growth of population during the mediæval period. Notwithstanding the gross and flagrant disregard of the rule, it was impossible to immure in convents men and women by the hundred thousand during successive generations without retarding greatly the rate of increase of the species. The rudeness of the arts and sciences, war, pestilence and famine were doubtless efficient causes, yet were they less efficient than enforced celibacy. This is evident when we see the rapid rate of growth established on the abrogation or even relaxation of the rule. The suppression of the monastic orders in France followed soon after the reforms by which Joseph II. discouraged them throughout the Austrian empire, and the result is visible in the enormous increase of European population which followed, notwithstanding the fearful destruction of life in the Napoleonic wars. It is calculated that in 1788 Europe numbered 144,561,000 souls, which within fifty years had been augmented to 253,622,000, or about seventy-five per cent. Of late years the birth-rate has decreased in consequence of the severity of conscription in the military monarchies, but the enormous growth in the half-century following the French Revolution is the best commentary on the influences which for so many ages kept the population almost stationary.[894]
* * * * *
It required the unbelief of the fifteenth century to give free rein to the rising commercial energies and the craving for material improvement that paved the way for the overthrow of ascetic sacerdotalism. The fearful corruptions of the church, which indirectly caused and accompanied that awakening of the human mind, will be alluded to hereafter when we come to consider the movements leading to the great Protestant Reformation. At present we must turn aside for a moment to consider one or two external developments of the religious activity of the Middle Ages.
XXII. THE MILITARY ORDERS
The Military Orders were the natural expression of the singular admixture of religious and warlike enthusiasm, reacting on each other, which produced and was fostered by the Crusades. When bishops considered that they rendered a service acceptable to God in leading vast hosts to slaughter the Paynim, it was an easy transition for soldiers to turn monks, and to consecrate their swords to the bloody work of avenging their Redeemer.
When the Hospitallers—Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, or of Malta—first emerged from their humble position of ministering to the afflictions of their fellow-pilgrims, and commenced to assume a military organization under Raymond du Puy, about the year 1120, their statutes required the three ordinary monastic vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity.[895] In fact, they were at first Benedictines; but when they became numerous enough to form a separate body, they adopted the rule of St. Augustin.
When the rule for the Templars—“Regula pauperum commilitonum sanctæ civitatis”—was adopted in 1128, at the council of Troyes, it contained no special injunction to administer a vow of celibacy, but the context shows that such a condition was understood as a matter of course.[896] Some little difficulty was evidently experienced at first, since, from the nature of the case, novices had to be trained warriors who must frequently have been bound by family ties, and whose education had not been such as to fit them for the restraints of their new life. It is probable also that the perpetual nature of the obligations assumed was not easy to be enforced upon the fierce members of the brotherhood, for, in 1183, Lucius III., in confirming the privileges of the order, specially commands that no one who enters it shall be allowed to return to the world.[897]
The history of these two orders is too well known to require it to be traced minutely here. If, with the growth of their reputation and wealth, the austere asceticism of their early days was lost, and if luxury and vice took the place of religious enthusiasm and soldierly devotion to the Cross, they but obeyed the universal law which in human institutions is so apt to render corruption the consequence of prosperity. One conclusion may be drawn, however, from the proceedings by which the powerful order of the Temple was extinguished at the commencement of the fourteenth century. Notwithstanding the open and scandalous licentiousness of the order, it is a little singular that the interminable articles of accusation against the members contain no allusion to unchastity, while crimes most fantastic, practices most beastly, and charges most frivolous are heaped upon them in strange confusion.[898] As the object of those who conducted the prosecution was to excite a popular abhorrence that would justify the purposed spoliation, it is evident that the simple infraction of vows of chastity was regarded as so venial a fault and so much a matter of course that its proof could in no way serve the end of rousing indignation against the accused.
It is somewhat remarkable that the same century which saw the foundation of the orders of the Hospital and Temple also witnessed one which, although bound by the rule of St. Augustin, and subjected to the ordinary vows of obedience, property in common, and inability to return to the world, yet allowed to its members the option of selecting either marriage or celibacy, and even of contracting second marriages. This was the Spanish Order of St. James of the Sword. What we have seen of the want of respect paid by the Spanish church to asceticism may lessen surprise at the founding of an order based upon such regulations, yet it is difficult to understand how so great a violation of established principles could be sanctioned by Alexander III., who confirmed the order in 1175,[899] or by Innocent III. and Honorius III., who formally approved its privileges.[900] Perhaps these military vassals of the pope, to whom they were bound in implicit obedience as their head, were too important a source of power and influence to be lightly rejected. Perhaps, also, Honorius III. may have quieted his conscience when, in confirming their charters in 1223, he commanded that their principal care and watchfulness should be devoted to seeing that those who were married preserved conjugal fidelity, and that those who elected a single life maintained inviolable chastity.
The example was one of evil import in the Peninsula. The Council of Valladolid in 1322 felt itself obliged to denounce under severe penalties the practice of dowering children with the possessions of the community, in which the military orders followed the precedent set them by the church.[901] During the universal license of the fifteenth century, when ascetic vows became a mockery, and the profligacy of those who took them exposed all such observances to contempt, the military orders formed no exception to the general shamelessness. In 1429 the council of Tortosa deplored the destruction and waste of the temporal possessions of the religious knights from the general concubinage in which they indulged, and to effect a cure it promulgated regulations of peculiar severity, threatening with a liberal hand the penalties of excommunication and degradation.[902] These proved as powerless as usual, and not long after a more sensible remedy was adopted by Eugenius IV. when he released the ancient and renowned Order of Calatrava from the obligation of celibacy, for reasons which would have led him to extend the privilege of marriage to the whole church, had the purity of ecclesiastics been truly the object of the rule. He recounts with sorrow the disorderly lives of the knights, and, quoting the text which says that it is better to marry than to burn, he grants the privilege of marriage because he deems it preferable to live with a wife than with a mistress.[903] How could he avoid applying his own reasoning to the church in general?
Similar arguments were employed to extend the same privilege to the Orders of Avis and of Jesus Christ, of Portugal. The former was founded in 1147 by Alfonso I., under the Cistercian rule, and chastity was one of its fundamental obligations;[904] the latter was the continuation of the order of the Temple, which, preserved in Portugal by the humanity of King Dionysius, assumed in the fourteenth century the name of Jesus. Both institutions became incurably corrupted; their preceptories were dens of avowed and scandalous prostitution, and their promiscuous amours filled the kingdom with hate and dissension. When at length, in 1496, King Emanuel applied to Alexander VI. to grant the privilege of marriage, in hopes of reforming the orders, it is interesting to observe how instinctively the minds of men turned to this as the sole efficient remedy for the immorality which all united in attributing to the hopeless attempt to enforce a purity impossible in the existing condition of society. Alexander assented to the request, and bestowed on the orders the right of marriage on the same conditions as those enjoined on the Knights of St. James of the Sword.[905] It is true that Osorius doubts whether the benefits of the change were not exceeded by its evils, as he states that it lowered the character of the orders, opened the door to unworthy members, and led to the dissipation of their property.[906]
There was another Portuguese order of a somewhat different character. Twenty years after founding the Knights of Avis, Alfonso I., in 1167, to commemorate his miraculous victory over the Moors at Santarem, instituted the Order of St. Michael. The knights were allowed to marry once; if widowed, they were obliged to embrace celibacy; and the Abbot of Alcobaça, who was the superior of the Order, was empowered to excommunicate them for irregularity of life, to compel them to give up their mistresses. They were moreover bound to perform the same religious exercises as lay brothers of the Cistercians. The Order is interesting as forming a curious link between the secular, religious, and military elements of the period.[907]
During all this, the knights of St. John adhered to their ancient statutes, and endeavored from time to time to reform the profligacy which seemed inseparable from the institution. When the ascetic Antonio Fluviano, who held the grand mastership from 1421 to 1437, promulgated a regulation that any one guilty of public concubinage should receive three warnings, with severe penalties for contumacy,[908] it suggests a condition of morals by no means creditable to the brethren. So, a century later, the stern Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was forced to declare that any one openly acknowledging an illegitimate child should be forever after incapacitated for office, benefice, or dignity.[909] What the knights were soon afterwards, the scandalous pages of Brantôme sufficiently attest.
The Marian or Teutonic Order, perhaps the most wealthy and powerful of all, was founded in 1190, and adopted the rule of the Templars as regards its religious government, with that of the Hospitallers to regulate its duties of charity and hospitality. For a full century of its existence it was sorely oppressed with poverty,[910] but at length, when transferred from the Holy Land to Northeastern Germany, it bore a prominent part in Christianizing those regions, and what it won by the sword it retained possession of in its own right. With wealth came indolence and luxury, and the order became corrupt, as others had been.[911] Its history offers nothing of special interest to us until, in 1525, the grand master Albert of Brandenburg went over to Lutheranism with many of his knights, founded the hereditary dukedom of Prussia, and married—of which more hereafter. Those of the order who adhered to Catholicism maintained the organization on the rich possessions which the piety of ages had bestowed upon them throughout Germany, until this worn-out relic of the past disappeared in the convulsions of the Napoleonic wars.
XXIII. THE HERESIES
Allusion has already been made to the introduction of Manichæism into Western Europe through Bulgaria and Lombardy. Notwithstanding its stern and unrelenting suppression wherever it was discovered during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, its votaries multiplied in secret. The disorders of the clergy, their oppression of the people, and their quarrels with the nobles over their temporal possessions made them many enemies among the laity; and the simplicity of the Manichæan belief, its freedom from aspirations for temporal aggrandizement, and its denunciations of the immorality and grasping avidity of the priesthood, found for it an appreciative audience and made ready converts. Towards the close of the twelfth century the South of France was discovered to be filled with heretics, in whom the names of Cathari, Paterins, Albigenses, &c., concealed the more odious appellation of Manichæans.
It is not our province to trace out in detail the bloody vicissitudes of Dominic’s Inquisition and Simon de Montfort’s crusades. It is sufficient for our purpose to indicate the identity of the Albigensian belief with that of the ancient sect which we have seen to exercise so powerful an influence in moulding and encouraging the asceticism of the early church. The Dualistic principle was fully recognized. No necessity was regarded as justifying the use of meat, or even of eggs and cheese, or in fact of anything which had its origin in animal propagation. Marriage was an abomination and a mortal sin, which could not be intensified by adultery or other excesses.[912]
Engrafted on these errors were others more practically dangerous, as they were the inevitable protest against the all-absorbing sacerdotalism which by this time had become the distinguishing characteristic of the church. In denying the existence of purgatory, and the efficacy of prayers for the dead and the invocation of saints, a mortal blow was aimed against the system to which the church owed its firmest hold on the souls and purses of the people. In reviving the Hildebrandine doctrine that the sacraments were not to be administered by ecclesiastics in a state of sin, and in exaggerating it into an incompatibility between sin and holding church preferment, a most dangerous and revolutionary turn was given to the wide-spread discontent with which the excesses of the clergy were regarded.[913] So sure a hold, indeed, had such views upon the popular feeling, that we find them reappear with every heresy, transmitted with regular filiation through the Waldenses, the Wickliffites, and the Hussites, so that in every age, from Gregory to the Reformation, the measures with which he broke down the independence of the local clergy returned to plague their inventors.
Yet with all this, the heretics to outward appearance long continued unexceptionably orthodox. Industrious and sober, none were more devoted to all the observances of the church, none more regular at mass and confessional, more devout at the altar or more liberal at the offertory. Hidden beneath this fair seeming, their heresy was only the more dangerous, as it attracted converts with unexampled rapidity. Priests gave up their churches to join the society, wives left their husbands, and husbands abandoned their wives; and when questioned as to their renunciation of the duties and privileges of marriage, they all professed to be bound with a vow of chastity. Yet if so ardent a combatant as St. Bernard is to be believed, their rigorous asceticism was only a cloak for libertinism. It is possible that the enthusiastic self-mortification of the sectaries led them to test their resolution by the dangerous experiments common among the early Christians, and possibly also with the same deplorable results. St. Bernard at least argues that constant companionship of the sexes without sin would require a greater miracle than raising the dead, and as these heretics could not perform the lesser prodigy, it was reasonable to presume that they failed of the greater—and his conclusion is not unlikely to be true.[914] Be this as it may, the virtue of these puritan sects rendered chastity dangerous to the orthodox, for the celebrated Peter Cantor relates as a fact within his own knowledge, that honest matrons who resisted the attempts of priests to seduce them were accused of Manichæism and condemned as heretics.[915]
The orthodox polemics, in controverting the exaggerated asceticism of these heretics, had a narrow and a difficult path to tread. Their own authorities had so exalted the praises of virgin purity, that it was not easy to meet the arguments of those who merely carried out the same principle somewhat further, in fearlessly following out the premises to their logical conclusion.[916] There is extant a curious tract, being a dialogue between a Catholic and a Paterin, in which the latter of course has the worst of the disputation, yet he presses his adversary hard with the texts which were customarily cited by the orthodox advocates of clerical celibacy—“qui habent uxores sint tanquam non habentes,” “qui non reliquerit uxorem et filios propter me non est me dignus,” &c.; and the Catholic can only elude their force by giving to them metaphorical explanations very different from those which of old had been assumed in the canons requiring the separation of man and wife on ordination.[917]
The stubborn resistance of the Albigenses to the enormous odds brought against them shows the unconquerable vitality of the antisacerdotal spirit which was then so widely diffused throughout Southern Europe. In a different shape it had already manifested itself during the first half of the twelfth century, when Pierre de Bruys infected all the South of France with the heresy called, after him and his most noted follower, the Petrobrusian or Henrician. This was an uncompromising revolt against the whole system of Roman Christianity. It not only abrogated pædo-baptism, and promulgated heretical notions respecting the Eucharist, but it abolished the visible symbols and ceremonies which formed so large a portion of the sacerdotal fabric—churches, crucifixes, chanting, fasting, gifts and offerings for the dead, and even the mass. But little is known respecting the Petrobrusians, except what can be derived from the refutation of their errors by Peter the Venerable. He says nothing specifically respecting their views upon ascetic celibacy, but we may assume that this was one of the doctrinal and practical corruptions which they assailed, from a passage in which, describing their excesses, he complains of the public eating of flesh on Passion Sunday, the cruel flagellation of priests, the imprisonment of monks, and their being forced to marry by threats and torments. Even after de Bruys was burned alive in 1146, his disciple, Henry, boldly carried on the contest, and the papal legate, Cardinal Alberic, sent for St. Bernard to assist him in suppressing the heretics. The latter, in a letter written in 1147 to the Count of Toulouse, describes the religious condition of his territories as most deplorable in consequence of the prevalence of the heresy—the churches were without congregations, the pastors without flocks, the people without pastors, the sacraments without reverence, the dying without consolation, and the new-born without baptism. Even making allowance for some exaggeration in all this, there can be no doubt that the heresy received extensive popular support and that it was professed publicly without disguise. At Alby it was dominant, so that when the Cardinal-legate went there, the people received him in derision with asses and drums, and when he preached, scarce thirty persons assembled to hear him; but two days later St. Bernard so affected them with his eloquence that they renounced their errors. He was less successful at Vertfeuil where resided a hundred knights-banneret, who refused to listen to him, and whom he cursed in consequence, whereof they all perished miserably. Though St. Bernard was forced to return to Clairvaux without accomplishing the extirpation of the heresy, Henry was finally captured, and probably died in prison.[918]
In Britanny, about the same period, there existed an obscure sect concerning whom little is known, except that they were probably a branch of the Petrobrusians. Their errors were nearly the same, and the slender traces left of them show that their doctrine was a protest against the overwhelming sacerdotalism of the period. The papal legate, Hugh, Archbishop of Rouen, sought to convert them by an elaborate denunciation of their tenets, among which he enumerates promiscuous licentiousness and disregard of clerical celibacy. Daniel, he gravely assures them, symbolizes virginity; Noah, continence; and Job, marriage. Then, quoting Ezekiel XIV. 13-20, wherein Jehovah, threatening the land with destruction, says, “Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls through their righteousness,” he proceeds triumphantly to the conclusion that recantation alone can save his adversaries from the fate which their errors have deserved.[919]
It was probably another branch of the same sect which was discovered at Liége in 1144, described as brought thither from the south and pervading all France and the neighboring countries. Its followers denied the efficacy of baptism, of the Eucharist and of the imposition of hands; they rejected not only oaths and vows, but marriage itself, and denied that the Holy Spirit could be gained except through good works. These heretics, however, had not in them the spirit of martyrdom, and speedily recanted on being discovered.[920]
Connected probably in some way with these movements of insubordination, was the career of the singular heresiarch, Éon de l’Étoile. During one of the epidemics of maceration and fanaticism which form such curious episodes in mediæval history, Éon, born of a noble Breton family, abandoned himself to the savage life of a hermit in the wilderness. Drawn by a vision to attend divine service, his excited mysticism caught the words which ended the recitation of the collect, “Per eum qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos;” and the resemblance of “eum” with his own name inspired him with the revelation that he was the Son of God. Men’s minds were ready for any extravagance, and Éon soon had disciples who adored him as a deity incarnate. Nothing can be wilder than the tales which are related of him by eye-witnesses—the aureole of glory which surrounded him, the countless wealth which was at the disposal of his followers, the rich but unsubstantial banquets which were served at his bidding by invisible hands, the superhuman velocity of his movements when eluding those who were bent on his capture. Éon declared war upon the churches which monopolized the wealth of the people while neglecting the duties for which they had been enriched; and he pillaged them of their treasures, which he distributed lavishly to the poor. At last the Devil abandoned his protégé. Éon, when his time had come, was easily taken and carried before Eugenius III. at the Council of Rouen, in 1148. There he boldly proclaimed his mission and his power. Exhibiting a forked staff which he carried, he declared that when he held it with the fork upwards, God ruled heaven and hell, and he governed the earth; but that when he reversed its position, then he had at command two-thirds of the universe, and left only the remaining third to God. He was pronounced hopelessly insane, but this would not have saved him had not his captor, the Archbishop of Rheims, represented that his life had been pledged to him on his surrender. He was therefore, delivered to Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, to be imprisoned, and he soon afterwards died. Even this did not shake the faith of his disciples. Many of them, in their fierce fanaticism, preferred the stake to recantation, and numbers of them were thus put to death before the heresy could be extinguished.[921]
* * * * *
When, about the middle of the twelfth century, the sudden death of a companion so impressed Peter Waldo of Lyons that he distributed his fortune among the poor, and devoted himself to preaching the supereminent merits of poverty, nothing was farther from his thoughts than the founding of a new heresy. Ardent disciples gathered around him, disseminating his views, which spread with rapidity; but their intention was to establish a society within the church, and they applied, between 1181 and 1185, to Lucius III. for the papal authorization. Lucius, however, took exception to their going barefoot, to their neglect of the tonsure, and to their retaining the society of women. They were stubborn, and he condemned them as heretics.[922] The enthusiasm which the church might have turned to so much account, as it subsequently did that of the Franciscans and Dominicans, was thus diverted to unorthodox channels, and speedily arrayed itself in opposition. The character of the revolt is shown in a passage of the Nobla Leyczon, written probably not long after this time, which declares that all the popes, cardinals, bishops, and abbots together cannot obtain pardon for a single mortal sin; thus leading directly to the conclusion that no intercessor could be of avail between God and man—
Ma yo aus o dire, car se troba en ver, Que tuit li papa que foron de Silvestre entro en aquest, Et tuit li cardinal et tuit li vesque e tuit li aba, Tuit aquisti ensemp non han tan de potesta, Que ilh poissan perdonar un sol pecca mortal. Solament Dio perdona, que autre non ho po far.[923]
Still, they did not even yet consider themselves as separated from the church, for they consented to submit their peculiar doctrines to the chances of a disputation, presided over by an orthodox priest. Of course, the decision went against them, and a portion of the “Poor Men of Lyons” submitted to the result. The remainder, however, maintained their faith as rigidly as ever. From Bernard de Font-Cauld, who records this disputation, and from Alain de l’Isle, another contemporary, who wrote in confutation of their errors, we have a minute account of their peculiarities of belief. Their principal heresy was a strict adherence to the Hildebrandine doctrine that neither reverence nor obedience was due to priests in mortal sin, whose ministrations to the living and whose prayers for the dead were equally to be despised. In the existing condition of sacerdotal morals, this necessarily destroyed all reverence for the church at large, and Bernard and Alain had no hesitation in proving it to be most dangerously heterodox. Their recurrence to Scripture, moreover, as the sole foundation of Christian belief, with the claim of private interpretation, was necessarily destructive to all the forms of sacerdotalism, and led them to entertain many other heretical tenets. They admitted no distinction between clergy and laity. Every member of the sect, male or female, was a priest, entitled to preach and to hear confessions. Purgatory was denied, and the power of absolution derided. Lying and swearing were mortal sins, and homicide was not excusable under any circumstances.[924] Yet naturally they did not repudiate the ascetic principles of the church, and they regarded continence as counselled, though not commanded, by the Christian dispensation—
La ley velha maudi lo ventre que fruc non a porta, Ma la novella conselha gardar vergeneta.[925]
Though marriage is praised and its purity is to be preserved—
Gardes ferm lo matrimoni, aquel noble convent,[926]
thus showing their disapproval of the Manichæan doctrines of the Cathari and Paterins.
Independence such as this could only result in open revolt against sacerdotalism in general, and it shortly came. The Waldensian exaltation of poverty was grateful to the nobles, who were eager to grasp the possessions of the church; its condemnation of the pride and immorality of the clergy secured for its sectaries the goodwill of the people, who everywhere suffered from the oppression and vices of their pastors. Under such protection the sect multiplied with incredible rapidity, not only throughout France, but in Italy and Germany. Enveloped, with the Albigenses, in merciless persecution, they endured with fortitude the extremity of martyrdom. The Germans and Italians sought refuge in the recesses of the Alpine valleys, and in the Marches of Brandenburg and Bohemia, where they seem to have adopted the custom of sacerdotal marriage, and where in time they merged with the churches of the Orthodox Brethren.[927] Some feeble remnants also managed to maintain an obscure existence in Provence, but their tacit revolt could not be forgotten or forgiven, and at intervals they were exposed to pitiless attempts at extermination. These are well known, and the names of Cabrières and Merindol have acquired a sinister notoriety which renders further allusion to the Waldenses unnecessary, except to mention that in 1538 they formally merged themselves with the German reformers by an agreement of which the 8th and 9th articles declare that marriage is permissible, without exception of position, to all who have not received the gift of continence.[928]
* * * * *
The antisacerdotal spirit, however, did not develop itself altogether in opposition to the church. Devout and earnest men there were, who recognized the evil resulting from the overgrown power and wealth of the ecclesiastical establishment, without shaking off their reverence for its doctrine and its visible head, and the authorities at length saw in these men the effective means of combating the enemy. In thus availing themselves of one branch of the reformers to destroy the other and more radical portion, the chiefs of the hierarchy were adopting an expedient effective for the present, yet fraught with danger for the future. The Franciscans and Dominicans were useful beyond expectation. They restored to the church much of the popular veneration which had become almost hopelessly alienated from it, and their wonderfully rapid extension throughout Europe shows how universally the people had felt the want of a religion which should fitly represent the humility, the poverty, the charity of Christ. Yet when Innocent III. hesitated long to sanction the mendicant orders, he by no means showed the want of sagacity which has been so generally asserted by superficial historians; rather, like Lucius III. with the Waldenses, his far-seeing eye took in the possible dangers of that fierce ascetic enthusiasm which might at any moment break the bonds of earthly obedience, when its exalted convictions should declare that obedience to man was revolt against God.
Before the century was out, the result was apparent. When St. Francis erected poverty into an object of adoration, attaching to it an importance as insane as that attributed to virginity by the early ascetics, he at once placed himself in opposition to the whole system of the church establishment, though his exquisite humility and exhaustless charity might disguise the dangerous tendency of his doctrines.[929] As his order grew in numbers and wealth with unexampled rapidity, it necessarily declined from the superhuman height of self-abnegation of which its founder was the model. Already, in 1261, the council of Mainz can hardly find words severe enough to condemn the mendicant friars who wandered around selling indulgences and squandering their unhallowed gains in the vilest excesses. One of these lights of the order publicly preached, in the horse-market of Strassburg, the doctrine that a nun who surrendered her virtue to a monk was less guilty than if she had an intrigue with a layman.[930] This falling from grace naturally produced dissatisfaction among those impracticable spirits who still regarded St. Francis as their exemplar as well as their patron. The breach gradually widened, until at length two parties were formed in the order. The ascetics finally separated themselves from their corrupted brethren, and under the name of Begghards in Germany, Frèrots in France, and Fraticelli in Southern Europe, assumed the position of being the only true church. Their excommunication at the council of Vienne, in 1311, in no wise disconcerted them. The long-forgotten doctrines of Arnold of Brescia were revived and intensified. Poverty was an absolute necessity to true Christianity; the holding of property was a heresy, and the Roman church was consequently heretic. Rome, indeed, was openly denounced as the modern Babylon.
While thus carrying out to its necessary consequences the sanctification of poverty, which was the essence of Franciscanism, they were equally logical with regard to the doctrines of ascetic purity which had been so earnestly enforced by the church. Their admiration of virginity thus trenched closely on Manichæism, and in combating their errors the church was scarcely able to avoid condemning both the vow of poverty and that of celibacy, which were the corner-stones of the monastic theory.[931] Active persecution, of course, aroused equally active resistance. The Fraticelli espoused the cause of the Emperor Louis of Bavaria, in his long and disastrous quarrel with John XXII., whom they did not hesitate to excommunicate. Exterminated after a prolonged and desperate struggle, their memory was blackened with the slanders disseminated by a priesthood incapable of emulating their ascetic virtues; and principal among these slanders was the accusation which we find repeated on all occasions when an adversary is to be rendered odious—that of promiscuous and brutal licentiousness. No authentic facts, however, can be found to substantiate it.[932]
The Fraticelli form a connecting link in the generations of heresy. Their errors, as taught by one of their most noted leaders, Walter Lolhard, who was burned at Cologne in 1322, had a tinge of the Manichæism of the Albigenses, for Satan was to them an object of compassion and veneration.[933] Their prevalence in Bohemia prepared the ground for Huss, and left deep traces in the popular mind which were not eradicated in the eighteenth century; while their proselytes in England served to swell the party of Wickliffe, and eventually gave to it their name, though their peculiar doctrines bore little resemblance to his.[934] Antisacerdotalism, however, was the common tie, and in this Luther, Zwingli, and Knox were the legitimate successors of Dolcino and Michael di Cesena.
Another precursor of Wickliffe and Huss was John of Pirna, who in 1341 taught the most revolutionary doctrines. According to him, the pope was Antichrist and Rome was the whore of Babylon and the church of Satan. The Silesians listened eagerly to his denunciations of the clergy, and the citizens of Breslau, with their magistrates, openly embraced his heresy. When the Inquisitor, John of Schweidnitz, was sent thither by the Holy Office of Cracow, the people rose in defence of their leader and put the Inquisitor to death. John of Pirna appears to have maintained his position, but after his death the church enjoyed the pious satisfaction of exhuming his body, burning it, and scattering the ashes to the winds.[935] It was easier to do this than to destroy the leaven which was working everywhere in men’s minds. No sooner were its manifestations repressed in one quarter than they displayed themselves in another.
In the ineradicable corruption of the church, indeed, every effort to purify it could only lead to a heresy. Except on the delicate point of Transsubstantiation, Wickliffe proposed no doctrinal innovation, but he keenly felt and energetically sought to repress the disorders which had brought the church into disrepute. His scheme swept away bishop, cardinal, and pope, the priesthood being the culminating point in his system of ecclesiastical polity. The temporalities which weighed down the spiritual aspirations of the church were to be abandoned, and with them the train of abuses by which the worldly ambition of churchmen was sustained—indulgences, simony, image-worship, the power of excommunication, and the thousand other arts by which the authority to bind and to loose had been converted into broad acres or current coin of the realm. In all this he was to a great extent a disciple of the Fraticelli, but his more practical mind escaped their leading error, and he denounced as an intolerable abuse the beggary of the mendicant friars. Indeed, the monastic orders in general were the objects of his special aversion, as having no justification in the precepts of Christ, and his repeated attacks upon them have a bitterness which shows not only his deep-rooted aversion, but his sense of their importance as a bulwark of the abuses which he assailed.[936] He reduced holy orders to two—the priesthood and diaconate—but he maintained the indelible character of ordination as separating the recipient from his fellows, and he urged that all ministers of Christ should live in saintly poverty.[937] All this was unreasonable enough in a perverse and stiff-necked generation, but his unpardonable error was his revival of the doctrine of Gregory VII. regarding the ministrations of unfaithful priests, which he carried out resolutely to its logical consequences.[938] According to him, a wicked priest could not perform his sacred functions, and forfeited both his spiritualities and temporalities, of which laymen were justified in depriving him. Nay more, priest and bishop were no longer priest or bishop if they lived in mortal sin, and his definition of mortal sin was such as to render it scarce possible for any one to escape.[939]
What his opinions were on the subject of clerical celibacy was a mooted point even shortly after his death. Thomas of Walden, the confessor of Henry V., in his Doctrinale Fidei, written to confute the errors of Lollardry, declares that he could not persuade himself that the Wickliffites derived from their leader their opposition to celibacy until he had recently read in Wickliffe’s Sermon on Midsummer Eve the passage which says that “prestis ben dowid and wyflees agens Goddis autorite.... And this is the caste of the fend to kyndle fir in heerdis” &c.,[940] and Mr. Arnold, the latest editor of Wickliffe, seems to entertain no doubt as to the authenticity of the text, or of the views of the reformer as expressed there, and in other passages of tracts attributed to him.[941] Yet had Wickliffe taught this doctrine it would have been as widely known as his other errors, it would have been condemned in the repeated proceedings taken against him and his teachings, and it would not have been left for Thomas of Walden to discover it in one of the numerous sermons which passed from hand to hand as the works of the heresiarch. Wickliffe was too earnest and sincere in his convictions to leave anyone in doubt as to his belief on any point that he thought worth discussion.
What his views were on this subject can perhaps best be sought in the most mature of his works, the Trialogus, the authenticity of which I believe is indisputable. No one can read the chapters on Sensuality and Chastity without seeing that the whole line of argument is directed towards proving the superiority of virginity over marriage, even to the fanciful etymology of “cœlibatus” from the state of the “beati in cælo;” while in the chapter on the riches of the clergy, they are regarded as virgins betrothed to Christ, and the vow of chastity which they take is likened to their similar vow of poverty, and not to be infringed.[942] Wickliffe’s austerity, in fact, was deeply tinged with asceticism, and in aiming to restore the primitive simplicity of the church, he had no thought of relegating its ministers to the carnalities of family life, which would render impossible the Apostolic poverty that was his ideal. Even the laity, in his scheme, were to be so rendered superior to the lusts of the flesh that he pronounced those who married from any other motive than that of having offspring to be not truly married.[943] He evidently had no intention to interfere with clerical celibacy, and the passages which have been cited to the contrary may safely be regarded as supposititious. Either the writings in which they occur have been erroneously ascribed to Wickliffe, or the passages themselves have been interpolated by too zealous disciples, eager to procure the authority of the master for the later development of doctrines that were not his—a pious fraud too common in all ages of the church to excite surprise.
It is easier to start a movement than to restrain it. Wickliffe might deny the authority of tradition, and yet preserve his respect for the tradition of celibacy, but his followers could not observe the distinction. They could see, if he could not, that the structure of sacerdotalism, to the overthrow of which he devoted himself, could not be destroyed without abrogating the rule which separated the priest from his fellow-men, and which severed all other ties in binding him to the church. In 1394, only ten years after Wickliffe’s death, the Lollards, by that time a powerful party, with strong revolutionary tendencies, presented to Parliament a petition for the thorough reformation of the church, containing twelve conclusions indicating the points on which they desired change. Of these, the third denounced the rule of celibacy as the cause of the worst disorders, and argued the necessity of its abrogation; while the eleventh attacked the vows of nuns as even more injurious, and demanded permission for their marriage with but scanty show of respect.[944] This became the received doctrine of the sect, for in a declaration made in 1400 by Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, concerning the Lollard heresies, we find enumerated the belief that those in holy orders could take to themselves wives without sin, and that monks and nuns were at liberty to abandon their profession, and marry at pleasure.[945]
The fierce persecutions of Henry V., to repress what he rightly considered as a formidable source of civil rebellion as well as heresy, succeeded in depriving the sect of political power; yet its religious doctrines still continued to exist among the people, and even sometimes obtained public expression.[946] They unquestionably tended strongly to shake the popular reverence for Rome, and had no little influence in paving the way for the revolt of the sixteenth century.
* * * * *
John Huss was rather a reformer than a heresiarch. Admirer though he was of Wickliffe, even to the point of wishing to risk damnation with him,[947] he avoided the doctrinal errors of the Englishman on the subject of the Eucharist. Yet his predestinarian views were unorthodox, and he shared in some degree Wickliffe’s Gregorian ideas as to the effect of mortal sin in divesting the priesthood of all claim to sacredness or respect. According to his enemies, he asserted that no one could be the vicar of Christ or of Peter unless he were an humble imitator of the virtues of him whom he claimed to represent; and a pope who was given to avarice was only the representative of Judas Iscariot.[948] His friend, Jerome of Prague, maintained with his latest breath that Huss was thoroughly orthodox, and was only inspired by indignation at seeing the wealth of the church, which was the patrimony of the poor, lavished on prostitutes, feasting, hunting, rich apparel, and other unseemly extravagance.[949] In the Bohemian clergy he had an ample target for his assaults, for they were in no respect better than their neighbors. During the latter half of the fourteenth century scarce a synod was held which did not denounce their vices, gambling, drunkenness, usury, simony, and concubinage; and when to put an end to the latter irregularity a strict visitation was made throughout the archiepiscopal diocese of Prague, the cunning rogues sent away or secreted their partners in guilt, and openly recalled them as soon as the storm had passed. The following year, Archbishop Sbinco peremptorily commanded that all concubines should be dismissed within six days, under pain of perpetual imprisonment, but this was evidently regarded as a mere brutum fulmen, for the next year a new device was resorted to, by pronouncing all concubinary priests to be heretics.[950] All this might certainly seem to warrant any effort that might be made to accomplish what the authorities so signally failed in doing, but that any individual should assert the right of private judgment in reforming the church in its head and its members threatened results too formidable to the whole structure of sacerdotalism, and the condemnation of Huss was inevitable. Still, like Wickliffe, he was a devout believer in ascetic purity. His denunciations of the wealth and disorders of the clergy raised so great an excitement throughout Bohemia that King Wenceslas was forced to issue a decree depriving immoral ecclesiastics of their revenues. The partisans of Huss took a lively interest in the enforcement of this law, and brought the unhappy ecclesiastics before the tribunals with a pertinacity which amounted to the persecution of an inquisition.[951]
Unlike the Lollards, the Hussites maintained the strictness of their founder’s views on the subject of celibacy. If the fiercer Taborites cruelly revenged their wrongs upon the religious orders, it was to punish the minions of Rome, and not to manifest their contempt for asceticism; and, at the same time, even the milder Calixtins treated all lapses from clerical virtue among themselves with a severity which proved their sincerity and earnestness, and which had long been a stranger to the administration of the church.[952] One of the complaints against the priesthood formulated in the proclamation of Procopius and the other chiefs in 1431, at the assembling of the Council of Bâle, was that the clergy were all fornicators, committing adultery with men’s wives, or having wives and “presbyterissæ” of their own;[953] and when, in 1562, the Emperor Ferdinand endeavored to procure from the Council of Trent the use of the cup for the Utraquists or Calixtins of Bohemia, he urged in their favor that they would not admit the ministrations of any priest who did not lead a celibate life.[954] Traces of the teachings of the Fraticelli, moreover, are to be found in the doctrines which dissevered temporal from spiritual power, and denied to the clergy all ownership or dominion over landed possessions.[955]
The Hussite movement thus was an efficient protest against some of the forms of sacerdotalism. The nominal reconciliation effected by the Council of Bâle, against the wishes of the papacy, afforded considerable scope for religious liberty, which was strengthened by the alliance between Bohemia and Poland. The reigns of George Podiebrad, Vlasdislav, and Louis, which extended from 1458 to 1525, favored this spirit and prepared the soil for the rapid spread of Lutheranism throughout those regions, which in the sixteenth century narrowly escaped permanent separation from Catholic unity.
One fragment of the Hussites, however, held wholly aloof from reconciliation to Rome and professed to uphold in their purity the doctrines of their founder. These called themselves the Orthodox Brethren, but were stigmatized by their adversaries with the opprobrious name of Picardi, in allusion to an obnoxious heresy of the previous centuries. In process of time they admitted the validity of priestly marriage, though it was discouraged among them in view of the dangers to which they were exposed and the constant risk of martyrdom incurred by all who ventured to be conspicuous among them, for Hussite and Catholic alike sought their extermination. Yet they bravely maintained their existence until the Reformation, when they eagerly fraternized with Luther,[956] such minor differences as existed in the organization of the respective churches being amicably regulated in 1570 by the agreement of Sendomir.[957]
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Wickliffe and Huss were not the only inheritors of the antisacerdotal spirit of the Fraticelli. About the close of the fourteenth century there arose in Thuringia a heresiarch of the flagellants named Conrad Schmidt, whose teachings swept away the forms and observances which had so thickly incrusted the simple doctrines of Christianity. The sacrifice of the mass, image-worship, fasting, feasts, purgatory, confession, and absolution, all fell before the fearless logic of the reformer, and his disciples fondly treasured him in memory as a second incarnation of Enoch. For forty years the sect flourished in secret, but at length it was discovered in Misnia, where its members were known as Brethren of the Cross, and where it was exterminated in 1414 by the fagots of Sangerhausen. The licentious doctrines attributed to them by the monkish chronicler show that sacerdotal celibacy was one of the observances which they repudiated.[958] Similar in its tendency, and almost identical in details, was the heresy which, in 1411, was condemned in Flanders by Peter d’Ailly, Archbishop of Cambrai. Giles Cantor, a layman, and a Carmelite known as William of Hilderniss gathered around them followers who assumed the title of Men of Intelligence. Like Conrad Schmidt, they rejected the empty formalism which had to so great an extent usurped the place of religion. The Atonement had satisfied God for all; there was no necessity for the intervention of sacerdotal ministrations, for confession and absolution were useless, Christ was not present in the sacrament, purgatory did not exist, and all mankind, besides the fallen angels, would in the end be saved. There was, however, little of the temper of martyrs about them, and a public renunciation of their errors at Brussels speedily deprived them of all importance.[959]
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Savonarola can scarcely be classed among heretics. Though he was tortured and put to death by the church for his rebellious attempts to purify it, still his doctrines never varied from strict orthodoxy, and Benedict XIV. even included him in a catalogue of the holy servants of God.[960] Yet Savonarola, when his career was cut short, was rapidly becoming a schismatic, as was inevitable with all reformers of ardent temperament as soon as they discovered the impossibility of removing the corruptions of the establishment. If, instead of the fickle support of the Florentine populace, which betrayed him at his utmost need, he had enjoyed the steadfast protection of such a patron as the Elector Frederic of Saxony, he would doubtless have ripened in time, as Luther subsequently did, into a full-blown heresiarch, though his innate defects of character would scarcely have enabled him, under any circumstances, to conduct successfully so complicated a movement as a separation from the church.
The principal feature of his history which concerns us is the good-natured indifference with which Alexander VI. endured his repeated attacks on the scandals and vices of the papal court. There were so many political interests entangled in Savonarola’s career that it is not always easy to reach the hidden springs of action at work, but it may be assumed that Alexander, if left to himself, would have allowed the reformer to declaim unmolested. More than once he interdicted the Dominican from preaching and ordered him to Rome, but took little heed of disobedience. At length he launched an excommunication, which for nearly a year received as little respect as his previous orders, and when at length a sudden revulsion of feeling among the Florentine mob enabled him to dispose of his adversary under the forms of law, it is probable that even then he would not have pushed matters to such extremity had not Savonarola been led to an act of aggressive rebellion. The Duke of Milan forwarded to the pope intercepted letters in which the reformer, by command of God, urged the monarchs of Europe to call a general council under pretext that the church was without a head, since Alexander was an infidel who had obtained the tiara by simony and had polluted it with unimaginable vices. In his capacity of prophet, Savonarola promised the rulers triumph over their enemies if they would aid in the good work of cleansing the church, and he engaged to prove before the council the truth of his allegations by working miracles.[961] It would probably be unjust to condemn him as an imposter, but such conclusion is only to be escaped by pronouncing him partially insane. That fierce age was not apt to invoke such considerations in palliation of so flagrant an attempt at revolution, and Savonarola was doomed.
* * * * *
While thus trampling out these successive revolts, the church was blind to the lesson taught by their perpetual recurrence. The minds of men were gradually learning to estimate at its true value the claim of the hierarchy to veneration, and at the same time the vices of the establishment were yearly becoming more odious, and its oppression more onerous. The explosion might be delayed by attempts at partial reformation, but it was inevitable.
XXIV. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
Neither the assaults of heretics nor the constant efforts at partial reform attempted by individual prelates had thus far proved of any avail. As time wore on, the church sank deeper into the mire of corruption, and its struggles to extricate itself grew feebler and more hopeless. We have seen that, early in the fifteenth century, Gerson advised an organized system of concubinage as preferable to the indiscriminate licentiousness which was everywhere prevalent. Even more suggestive are the declarations of Nicholas de Clemanges, Rector of the University of Paris and Secretary of Benedict XIII. (Pedro de Luna). He does not hesitate to say that the vices of the clergy were so universal that those who adhered to the rule of chastity were the objects of the most degrading and disgusting suspicions, so little faith was there in the possible purity of any ecclesiastic. He also records the extension of a custom to which I have already alluded when he states that in a majority of parishes the people insisted on their pastors keeping concubines, and that even this was a precaution insufficient for the peace and honor of their families.[962] In another tract he describes the mass of the clergy as wholly abandoned to worldly ambition and vices, oppressing and despoiling those subjected to them and spending their ill-gotten gains in the vilest excesses, while they ridiculed unsparingly such few pious souls as endeavored to live according to the light of the gospel.[963] In most of the dioceses the parish priests openly kept concubines, which they were permitted to do on payment of a tax to their bishops. Nunneries were brothels, and to take the veil was simply another mode of becoming a public prostitute.[964] Cardinal Peter d’Ailly declares that he does not dare to describe the immorality of the nunneries.[965] In a similar indignant mood Gerson stigmatizes the nunneries of his time as houses of prostitution, the monasteries as centres of trade and amusement, the cathedral churches as dens of ravishers and robbers, and the priesthood at large as habitual concubinarians.[966] That he felt these evils to be inseparable from the condition of the church is evident when, in an argument to prove the necessity of celibacy, he is driven to the assertion that it is better to tolerate incontinent priests than to have no priests at all.[967] He argues that the clergy are worthy of as many sentences of damnation as they seduce souls to perdition by their corrupt example, and he asks, when he who destroys himself by his own sins is to be condemned, whether he who draws with him numerous others is not still more worthy of perdition.[968] Theodoric a Niem represents the bishops of Scandinavia as carrying with them their concubines on their pastoral visitations, and as inflicting penalties on such of the parish priests as they found living without similar companions, while these women habitually took precedence in church of the wives of the neighboring gentry—and he adds that the clergy of the south of Europe were no better.[969] Theodoric Vrie, a learned and pious churchman of Saxony, is equally unsparing in his denunciations of the Teutonic clergy[970]—and, indeed, the testimony of the writers of the period is so unanimous that their descriptions of clerical vices cannot be regarded as the mere rhetorical declamation of disappointed reformers.
It was evident that the efforts of local synods were fruitless to eradicate evils so general and so deeply rooted, while the necessity for some reform became every day more apparent. Though Lollardry had been crushed in England under the stern hand of Henry V., yet it was reappearing in Bohemia in a form even more threatening. The council of Pisa had not succeeded in healing the Great Schism, and there arose a general demand for an Œcumenic Council in which the church universal should assemble for the purpose of purifying itself, of eradicating heresy, and of settling definitely the pretensions of the three claimants of the papacy. John XXIII. yielded to the pressure, and the call for the Council of Constance went forth in his name and in that of the Emperor Sigismund.
So powerful a body had never before been gathered together in Europe. It claimed to be the supreme representative of the church, and though it acknowledged John XXIII. as the lawful successor of St. Peter, it had no scruples in arraigning, trying, condemning, and deposing him—an awful expression of its supremacy, without precedent in the past, and without imitation in succeeding ages. As regards heresy, it did the best it could, according to the lights of its age, by burning John Huss and Jerome of Prague. Its functions as a reformer, however, required for their exercise more nerve than even the condemnation of a pope. Many members were thoroughly penetrated with the conviction that reform was of instant necessity, and such men as Gerson, Peter d’Ailly of Cambrai, and Nicholas de Clemanges were prepared to shrink from none of the means requisite for so hallowed an end. In the existing corruption, however, of the body from which representatives were drawn, such men could scarcely form a controlling majority. After the council had been in session for nearly two years, the reformers began to despair of effecting anything, and Clemanges did not hesitate to assert that nothing was to be expected from men who would regard reform as the greatest calamity that could befall themselves;[971] while another of the members of the council declared that every one wanted such a reform as should allow him to retain his own particular form of iniquity.[972] These estimates, indeed, of the character of the majority of the good fathers of Constance is borne out by the contemporary accounts of the multitudes who flocked to it to ply their trades among the assembled dignitaries of the church, showing that they were by no means all devoted to mortifying the flesh.[973]
The feelings of those who sincerely desired reform, as they saw the prospect rapidly fading before their eyes, may be estimated by a sermon of a sturdy Gascon abbot, Bernhardus Baptisatus, preached before the council in August, 1517, about three months before the conservatives succeeded in carrying their point by electing Martin V. He denounces the members of the council as Pharisees, falsely pretending to be devout in order to elude the punishment due to their crimes. The masses and processions, which were the main business of the assemblage, he declares to be valueless in the eye of God, for most of those who so busily took part in them were involved solely in worldly cares, laughing, cheating, sleeping, or demoralizing the rest with their ungodly conversation. The Holy Spirit did not hold the acts of the council acceptable, nor dwell with its unrighteous members.[974] Such a convocation could have but one result.
It is easy therefore to understand the influences that were brought to bear to defeat the expectations of the reformers; how the subject could be postponed until after the questions connected with the papacy and with heresy were disposed of; and how, after the election of Martin V., those who shrank from all reform could assume that it might safely be intrusted to the hands of a pontiff so able, so energetic, and so virtuous. In all this they were successful. The council closed its weary sessions, April 22, 1418, and during its three years and a half of labor it had only found leisure to regulate the dress of ecclesiastics, the unclerical cut of whose sleeves was especially distasteful to the representative body of Christendom.[975]
Still, the reformers had made a stubborn fight, and had procured the appointment of a commission to consider all reformatory propositions and prepare a general scheme for the adoption of the council. This body labored as diligently as though its deliberations were to be crowned with practical results, and various projects of reform proposed by it have been preserved. In one of these the severest measures of repression were suggested to put an end to the scandal of concubinage which was openly practised in the majority of dioceses. Under this scheme, while all the canonical punishments heretofore decreed were maintained in full vigor, deprivation was pronounced against all holders of ecclesiastical preferment, from bishops down, who should not within one month eject their guilty partners; their positions were declared vacant ipso jure, and their successors were to be immediately appointed. Those who did not hold benefices were similarly to be declared ineligible to preferment. It appears that scandals had arisen in many places from the Hildebrandine and Wickliffite heresy whereby parishioners declined the ministrations of those who were living in open and notorious sin; and to avoid these, while the commission declined to pass an opinion on the propriety of such action, it advised that such private judgment should not be exercised.[976] In another elaborate system of reform, which bears the marks of long deliberation, the attempt was made to eradicate the long-standing abuse of admitting to preferment the illegitimate children of ecclesiastics, and it was declared that papal dispensations should no longer be recognized except in cases of peculiar fitness or high rank.[977] The same code of discipline struck a significant blow at the inviolability of the monastic profession when it endeavored to check the prevailing and deplorable licentiousness of the nunneries by decreeing that no woman should be admitted to the vows beneath the age of twenty, and that all vows taken at a younger age should be null and void.[978] These projects are interesting merely as indicating the direction in which the reforming portion of the church desired to move, and as showing that even they did not propose to remove the celibacy which was the chief cause of the evils they so sincerely deplored.
* * * * *
Martin V. had assumed the responsibility of reforming the church, and he did, in fact, attempt it after some fashion, though he apparently took to heart Dante’s axiom—
Lunga promessa, con l’attender corto Ti farà trionfar nell’ alto seggio.
In 1422 Cardinal Branda of Piacenza, his legate, when sent to Germany to preach a crusade against the Hussites, was honored with the title of Reformer General, and full powers were given to him to effect this part of his mission. The letters-patent of the pope bear ample testimony to the fearful depravity of the Teutonic church,[979] while the constitution which Branda promulgated declares that in a portion of the priesthood there was scarcely left a trace of decency or morality. According to this document, concubinage, simony, neglect of sacred functions, gambling, drinking, fighting, buffoonery, and kindred pursuits, were the prevalent vices of the ministers of Christ; but the punishments which he enacted for their suppression—repetitions of those which we have seen proclaimed so many times before—were powerless to overcome the evils which had become part and parcel of the church itself.[980]
What was the condition of clerical morals in Italy soon after this may be learned from a single instance. When Ambrose was made General of the austere order of Camaldoli he set vigorously to work to reform the laxity which had almost ruined it. One of his abbots was noted for abounding licentiousness; not content with ordinary amours, he was wont to visit the nunneries in his district to indulge in promiscuous intercourse with the virgins dedicated to God. Yet Ambrose in taking him to task did not venture to punish him for his misdeeds, but promised him full pardon for the past and to take him into favor, if he would only abstain for the future—a task which ought to be easy as he was now old and should be content with having long lived evilly and be ready to dedicate his few remaining years to the service of God.[981] When a reformer, who enjoyed the special friendship and protection of Eugenius IV., was forced to be so moderate with such a criminal, it is easy to imagine what was the tone of morality in the church at large.
While the Armagnacs and Burgundians were rivalling the English in carrying desolation into every corner of France, it could not be expected that the peaceful virtues could flourish, or sempiternal corruption be reformed. Accordingly, it need not surprise us to see Hardouin, Bishop of Angers, despondingly admit, in 1428, that licentiousness had become so habitual among his clergy that it was no longer reputed to be a sin; that concubinage was public and undisguised, and that the patrimony of Christ was wasted in supporting the guilty partners of the priesthood. That gambling, swearing, drunkenness, and all manner of unclerical conduct should accompany these disorders, is too probable to require the concurrent testimony which the worthy bishop affords us.[982] Alain Chartier, Archdeacon of Paris and Secretary to Charles VI. and Charles VII., confirms this in a more general way, when he attributes to enforced celibacy and the temporal endowments of the church the vices and crimes which rendered the clergy so odious and contemptible to the laity that he looks forward to the speedy advent of Antichrist to wipe out the whole system in universal ruin.[983] Apparently its corruption was too deep-seated to hope for any milder means of reformation. To this we may at least partially attribute the utter loss of respect for sacred things which rendered the churches and their pastors a special mark for pillage and persecution during the dreary civil wars of the period.[984]
In England, which had enjoyed comparative immunity from civil strife, matters were quite as bad. At the request of Henry V., in 1414, the University of Oxford prepared a series of articles for the reformation of the church, whose shortcomings were vehemently attacked by the Lollards. It is not easy to imagine a more humiliating confession than is contained in the 38th article, directed against priestly immorality. The carnal and undisguised profligacy of ecclesiastics is declared to be a scandal to the church, and its impurity to be a dangerous temptation to others. It is therefore recommended that all public fornicators be suspended for a limited time from the ministry of the altar, and that some corporal chastisement be inflicted on them, in place of the trifling pecuniary mulct, which, levied in secret, had no effect in deterring them from their evil courses.[985]
Such was the state of sacerdotal morals when the great council of Bâle attracted to itself the hopes of Christendom as the sole instrument by which the purification of the church could be effected—a purification which was felt to be the only safeguard against a revolutionary uprising of the indignant laity. When Eugenius IV., towards the close of the year 1431, dreading the antagonism between the council and the papacy, sent his Bull ordering its dissolution, his legate, Cardinal Cesarini, took the responsibility of refusing obedience. His letter explaining the reasons of his contumacy affords a curious picture of the internal condition of the church and of the relations existing between it and the laity. The extreme corruption of ecclesiastical morals had been the principal object of convoking the council and had given rise to a feeling of fierce hostility towards the church. To this was attributable the success which had attended the Hussite movement, and unless the people could have reason to anticipate amendment, there was ample cause to fear a general imitation of the Hussites. So many provincial synods were daily held without result that confidence was no longer felt in the ordinary ecclesiastical machinery; the state of the public mind grew constantly more threatening as fresh scandals were wrought by the clergy, and the hopes entertained of the council were the only restraint which prevented the breaking out of a wide-spread revolt. As a proof of his assertions, the legate refers to various local troubles. Magdeburg had expelled her archbishop and clergy, was preparing wagons with which to fight, after the Bohemian fashion, and was said to have sent for a Hussite to command her forces. Passau had revolted against her bishop, and was even then laying close siege to his citadel. Bamberg was engaged in a violent quarrel with her bishop and chapter. These cities were regarded as the centres of formidable secret confederacies, and were believed to be negotiating with the Hussites.[986] The good fathers evidently recognized the full magnitude of the danger. The results of the inaction of the Council of Constance were full of pregnant warnings. The reformers could no longer be brought to trust the papacy, and those who might secretly deprecate reform were fully alive to the threatening aspect of affairs. They therefore addressed themselves resolutely to the removal of the cause. All who were guilty of public concubinage were ordered to dismiss their consorts within sixty days after the promulgation of the canon, under pain of deprivation of revenue for three months. Persistent contumacy or repetition of the offence was visited with suspension from functions and stipend until satisfactory evidence should be afforded of repentance and amendment. Bishops who neglected to enforce the law were to be held as sharing the guilt which they allowed to pass unpunished; and those prelates who were above the jurisdiction of local tribunals or synods were to be remanded to Rome for trial. The council deplored the extensive prevalence of the “cullagium,” by which those to whom was entrusted the administration of the church did not hesitate to enjoy a filthy gain by selling licenses to sin. A curse was pronounced on all involved in such transactions; they were to share the penalties of the guilt which they encouraged, and were, in addition, to pay a fine of double the amount of their iniquitous receipts.[987] In the Pragmatic Sanction, moreover, agreed upon in 1438 between the Emperor Albert II. and Charles VII. of France, the regulation confiscating three months’ revenues of concubinary priests was embodied.[988]
Honest, well-meant legislation this; yet the fathers of the council or the princes of Christendom could hardly deceive themselves with the expectation that it would prove effectual. If legislation could accomplish the desired result, there had already been enough of it since the days of Siricius. The compilations of canon law were full of admirable regulations, by which generation after generation had endeavored to attain the same object by every imaginable modification of inquisition and penalty. Ingenuity had been exhausted in devising laws which were only promulgated to be despised and forgotten. Something more was wanting, and that something could not be had without overturning the elaborate structure so skilfully and laboriously built up by the craft and enthusiasm of ten centuries.
How utterly impotent, in fact, were the efforts of the council, is evident when, within five years after the adoption of the Basilian canons, Doctor Kokkius, in a sermon preached before the council of Freysingen, could scarcely find words strong enough to denounce the evil courses of the clergy as a class;[989] and when, within fifteen years, we find Nicholas V. declaring that the clergy enjoyed such immunity that they scarcely regarded incontinence as a sin—a declaration sustained by the regulations promulgated for the restraint of the officials of his own court, which imply the previous open and undisguised defiance of the canons.[990]
Even in this attempt of Nicholas, however, is to be seen one of the causes which perpetuated the corruption of the church. He orders that all who thereafter persist in keeping concubines in defiance of the regulations shall be incapable of receiving benefices without special letters of indulgence from the Holy See.[991] Shrouded under a thin veil of formality, this in substance indicates the degrading source of revenue which was so energetically condemned in inferior officials. The pressing and insatiable pecuniary needs of the papal court, indeed, rendered it impotent as a reformer, however honest the wearer of the tiara might himself be in desiring to rescue the church from its infamy. Reckless expenditure and universal venality were insuperable obstacles to any comprehensive and effective measures of reformation. Every one was preoccupied either in devising or in resisting extortion. The local synods were engaged in quarrelling over the subsidies demanded by Rome, while the chronicles of the period are filled with complaints of the indulgences sold year after year to raise money for various purposes. Sometimes the objects alleged are indignantly declared to be purely supposititious; at other times intimations are thrown out that the collections were diverted to the private gain of the popes and of their creatures.[992] The opinion which the church in general entertained of the papal court is manifested with sufficient distinctness in a letter from Ernest, Archbishop of Magdeburg, to his ambassador at Rome. The prelate states that he has deposited five hundred florins in Fugger’s bank at Augsburg, for which he desires to procure certain bulls, one to enable him to sell indulgences, the other to compel the chapter of Magdeburg to allow him to dispose of the salt-works of Halle, in defiance of the vested rights of his church—thus taking for granted a cynicism of venality which it would be difficult to parallel in the secular affairs of the most corrupt of courts.[993] Even the power to dispense from the vow of continence was occasionally turned to account in this manner. One of the accusations against John XXIII. was that for 600 ducats he had released Jacques de Vitry, a Hospitaller, from his vows, had restored him to the world, and enabled him to marry.[994] In fact, when a pope like Sixtus IV. was found who openly sold all preferment, who kept a regular scale for every grade from the cardinalate downwards, and who only varied from his fixed prices by putting up at auction some choice benefice,[995] it can hardly be expected that discipline could be enforced or the ideal of chastity realized.
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The aspirations of Christendom had culminated in the council of Bâle in the most potent form known to the church universal. If the results were scarce perceptible while the influences of the council were yet recent, and while the antagonistic papacy was under the control of men sincerely desirous to promote the best interests of the church, such as Nicholas V. and Pius II., we can feel no wonder, if the darkness continued to grow thicker and deeper under the rule of such pontiffs as Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., and Alexander VI. Savonarola found an inexhaustible subject of declamation in the fearful vices of the ecclesiastics of his times, whom he describes as ruffiani e mezzani.[996] In the kingdom of Naples the state sought to share with the church in the profits of impurity, and a regular tax was laid upon the concubines of ecclesiastics. In a document still preserved in the Neapolitan archives, Alfonso I. complains that this tax had not been paid for three years, and directs his bishops to compel its collection in their several dioceses.[997] In the assembly of the Trois États of France, held at Tours in 1484, the orator of the Estates, Jean de Rély, afterwards Bishop of Angers, in his official address to Charles VIII., declared it to be notorious that the religious orders had lost all devotion, discipline, and obedience to their rule, while the canons (and he was himself a canon of Paris) had sunk far below the laity in their morals, to the great scandal of the church.[998]
In England, the facts developed by the examination which Innocent VIII. in 1489 authorized Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, to make into the condition of the religious houses, present a state of affairs quite as bad. Henry VII.’s first Parliament, in 1485, had endeavored to accomplish some reform by passing an Act empowering the episcopal authorities to imprison all priests and monks convicted of carnal lapses,[999] but this, like all similar legislation, whether secular or ecclesiastical, appears to have been useless. Innocent describes the monasteries, in his bull to the archbishop, as wholly fallen from their original discipline, and this is folly confirmed by the results of the visitation. The old and wealthy abbey of St. Albans, for instance, was little more than a den of prostitutes, with whom the monks lived openly and avowedly. In two priories under its jurisdiction the nuns had been turned out and their places filled with courtezans, to whom the monks of St. Albans publicly resorted, indulging in all manner of shameless and riotous living, the details of which can well be spared.[1000] These irregularities were emulated by the secular ecclesiastics. Among the records of the reign of Henry VII. is a memorial from the gentlemen and farmers of Carnarvonshire, complaining that the seduction of their wives and daughters was pursued systematically by the clergy.[1001] That the prevalence of these practices was thoroughly understood is shown in a book of instructions for parish priests drawn up by a canon of Lilleshall about this period. In enumerating the causes for which a parson may shrive a man not of his own parish, he includes the case in which the penitent has committed sin with the concubine or daughter of his own parish priest.[1002]
Spain was equally infected. The council of Aranda, in 1473, denounced bitterly the evil courses by which the clergy earned for themselves the wrath of God and the contempt of man, and it endeavored to suppress the sempiternal vice by the means which had been so often ineffectually tried—visitations, fines, excommunication, suspension, forfeiture of benefice, and imprisonment—but all to as little purpose as before.[1003] The trouble continued without abatement and the council of Seville, in 1512, felt itself obliged to repeat as usual all the old denunciations and penalties, including those against ecclesiastics who officiated at the marriages of their children, which it prohibited for the future under a fine of 2000 maravedis—a mulct which it likewise provided for those who committed the indecency of having their children as assistants in the solemnity of the Mass.[1004]
What was the condition of morals in Germany may be inferred from some proceedings of the chapter of Brunswick in 1476. The canons intimate that the commission of scandals and crimes has reached a point at which there is danger of their losing the inestimable privilege of exemption from episcopal jurisdiction. They therefore declare that for the future the canons, vicars, and officiating clergy ought not to keep their mistresses and concubines publicly in their houses, or live with them within the bounds of the church, and those who persist in doing so after three warnings shall be suspended from their prebends until they render due satisfaction.[1005] In this curious glimpse into the domestic life of the cathedral close, it is evident that the worthy canons were moved by no shame for the publicity of their guilt, but only by a wholesome dread of giving to their bishop an excuse for procuring the forfeiture of their dearly prized right of self-judgment.
The Hungarian church, by a canon dating as far back as 1382, had finally adopted a pecuniary mulct as the most efficacious mode of correcting offenders. The fine was five marks of current coin, and by granting one-half to the informer or archdeacon, and the other to the archiepiscopal chamber, it was reasonably hoped that the rule might be enforced. The guardians were not faithful, however, for two synods of Gran, one in 1450 and the other in 1480, reiterate the complaint, not only that the archdeacons and other officials kept the whole fine to themselves, but also, what was even worse, that they permitted the criminals to persevere in sin, in order to make money by allowing them to go unpunished.[1006] This state of affairs was not to be wondered at if the description of his prelates by Matthias Corvinus be correct. They were worldly princes, whose energies were devoted to wringing from their flocks fabulous revenues to be squandered in riotous living on the hordes of cooks and concubines who pandered to their appetites.[1007] The morals of the regular clergy were no better, for a Diet held by Vladislas II. in 1498 complained of the manner in which abbots and other monastic dignitaries enriched themselves from the revenues of their offices, and then, returning to the world, publicly took wives, to the disgrace of their order.[1008]
In Pomerania the evil had at length partially cured itself, for the female companions of the clergy seem to have been regarded as wives in all but the blessing of the church. Benedict, Bishop of Camin, in 1492, held a synod in which he quaintly but vehemently objurgates his ecclesiastics for this wickedness; declares that no man can part such couples joined by the devil; alludes to their offspring as beasts creeping over the earth, and has his spleen peculiarly stirred by the cloths of Leyden and costly ornaments with which the fair sinners were bedecked, to the scandal of honest women.[1009] His indignation was wasted on a hardened generation, for his successor, Bishop Martin, on his accession to the see in 1499, found the custom still unchecked. The new bishop promptly summoned a synod at Sitten in 1500, where he reiterated the complaints of Benedict, adding that the priests convert the patrimony of Christ into marriage portions for their children, and procure the transmission of benefices from father to son, as though glorying in the perpetuation of their shame. What peculiarly exasperated the good prelate was that the place of honor was accorded as a matter of course to the priests and their consorts at all the merry-makings and festivities of their parishioners, which shows how fully these unions were recognized as legitimate, and, apparently, for prudential reasons, encouraged by the people.[1010]
Similar customs, or worse, doubtless prevailed in Sleswick, for when Eggard was consecrated bishop in 1494, he signalized the commencement of his episcopate by forbidding his clergy to keep such female companions. The result was that before the year expired he was forced to abandon his see, and five years later he died, a miserable exile in Rome.[1011]
The monastic orders were no better than the secular clergy. When Ximenes was made Provincial of the Franciscan order in Spain, he set himself earnestly at work to force the brethren to live according to the Rule. A large portion of them, known as Claustrals, led disorderly lives, almost purely secular, and refused absolutely to submit to the observance of their vows. King Ferdinand being appealed to pronounced sentence of banishment upon them, and they absolutely preferred existence in exile to the insupportable yoke of their Order. Yet they considered themselves so aggrieved that when they left Toledo they marched in procession through the Puerta Visagra with a crucifix at their head, singing the 113th Psalm “In exitu Israel de Egypto.” When Ximenes was promoted to the primatial see of Toledo, the malcontents appealed to the Vicar General of the Order in Rome, who came to Spain and warmly espoused their cause, being only forced to desist by the decided stand taken by Queen Isabella in favor of Ximenes.[1012] It was the same with the other monastic orders. A bull of Alexander VI., issued in 1496 for the purpose of reforming the Benedictines, describes the inhabitants of many establishments of both sexes in that ancient and honored institution as indulging in the most shameless profligacy; and marriage itself was apparently not infrequently practised.[1013] Savonarola did not hesitate to declare that nuns in their convents became worse than harlots.[1014] Even the strictest of all the orders—the Cistercian—yielded to the prevailing laxity. A general chapter, held in 1516, denounces the intolerable abuse indulged in by some abbots who threw off all obedience to the rule, and dared to keep women under pretence of requiring their domestic services.[1015] To fully appreciate the force of this indication, it is requisite to bear in mind the stringency of the regulations which forbade the foot of woman to pollute the sacred retirement of the Cistercian monasteries.[1016]
The efforts constantly made to check these abuses produced little result. A Carthusian monk, writing in 1489, deplores the fact that while monasteries were everywhere being reformed, few if any of them maintained their morals, but returned to their old condition immediately on the death of the zealous fathers who had sought to improve them.[1017] That condition is described by a Benedictine Abbot, the celebrated Trithemius, in general terms, as that of dens in which it was a crime to be without sin, their inhabitants for the most part being addicted to all manner of vices, and being monks only in name and vestment.[1018]
That the clergy, as a body, had become a stench in the nostrils of the people is evident from the immense applause which greeted all attacks upon them. In 1476 a rustic prophet arose in the hamlet of Niklaushausen, in the diocese of Wurzburg, who was a fit precursor of Muncer and John of Leyden. John of Niklaushausen was a swineherd, who professed himself inspired by the Virgin Mary. From the Rhine-lands to Misnia, and from Saxony to Bavaria, immense multitudes flocked to hear him, so that at times he preached to crowds of twenty and thirty thousand men. His doctrines were revolutionary, for he denounced oppression both secular and clerical; but he was particularly severe upon the vices of the ecclesiastical body. A special revelation of the Virgin had informed him that God could no longer endure them, and that the world could not, without a speedy reformation, be saved from the divine wrath consequent upon them.[1019] The unfortunate man was seized by the Bishop of Wurzburg; the fanatical zeal of his unarmed followers was easily subdued, and he expiated at the stake his revolt against the powers that were.
Such being the state of ecclesiastical morality throughout Europe, there can be little wonder if reflecting men sought occasionally to reform it in the only rational manner—not by an endless iteration of canons, obsolete as soon as published, or by ingeniously varied penalties, easily evaded or compounded—but by restoring to the minister of Christ the right to indulge legitimately the affections which bigotry might pervert, but could never eradicate. Even as early as the close of the thirteenth century, the high authority of Bishop William Durand had acknowledged the inefficacy of penal legislation, and had suggested the discipline of the Greek church as affording a remedy worthy of consideration.[1020] As the depravity of the church increased, and as the minds of men gradually awoke from the slumber of the dark ages, and shook off the blind reverence for tradition, the suggestion presented itself with renewed force. At the council of Constance Cardinal Zabarella did not hesitate to suggest that if the concubinary practices of the clergy could not be suppressed it would be better to concede to them the privilege of marriage,[1021] and shortly after the failure of the council to effect a reform had became apparent, Guillaume Saignet wrote a tract entitled “Lamentatio ob Cælibatum Sacerdotum” in which he attacked the existing system, and called forth a rejoinder from Gerson. When the council of Bâle was earnestly engaged in the endeavor to restore forgotten discipline, the Emperor Sigismund laid before it a formula of reformation which embraced the restoration of marriage to the clergy. His orator drew a fearful picture of the evils caused by the rule of celibacy—evils acknowledged by every one in the assembly—and urged that as it had produced more injury than benefit, the wiser course would be to follow the example of the Greek church.[1022] A majority of the council assented to the principle, but shrank from the bold step of adopting it. Eugenius IV. had just been forced to acknowledge the legitimacy of the body as an œcumenic council; the strife with the papacy might again break forth at any moment, and it was not politic to venture on innovations too audacious. The conservatives, therefore, skilfully eluded the question by postponing it to a more favorable time, and the postponement was fatal.
One of the most celebrated members of the council, Cardinal Nicholas Tudeschi, surnamed Panormitanus, whose preëminence as an expounder of the canon law won for him the titles of “Canonistarum Princeps” and “Lucerna Juris,” declared that the celibacy of the clergy was not essential to ordination or enjoined by divine law; and he records his unhesitating opinion that the question should be left to the option of the individual—those who had resolution to preserve their purity being the most worthy, while those who had not would be spared the guilt which disgraced them.[1023] So Æneas Sylvius, who as Pius II. filled the pontifical throne from 1458 to 1464, and who knew by experience how easy it was to yield to the temptations of the flesh, is reported to have said that marriage had been denied to priests for good and sufficient reasons, but that still stronger ones now required its restoration.[1024] Indeed, when arguing before the Council of Bâle in favor of the election of Amedeus of Savoy to the papacy, he had not scrupled to declare that a married priesthood would be the salvation of many who were damned in celibacy.[1025] And we have already seen that Eugenius IV., in 1441, and Alexander VI., in 1496, granted permission of marriage to several military orders, as the only mode of removing the scandalous license prevailing among them.
This question of the power of the pope to dispense with the necessity of celibacy seems to have attracted some attention about this period. In 1505, Geoffroy Boussard, afterwards Chancellor of the University of Paris, published a tract wherein he argued that priestly continence was simply a human and not a divine ordinance, and that the pope was fully empowered to relax the rule in special cases, though he could not abolish wholly an institution of such long continuance which had received the assent of so many holy fathers and general councils. At the same time, one of his arguments in favor of its enforcement shows how little respect was left in the minds of all thinking men for the claims of the church to veneration. He quotes Bonaventura to the effect that if bishops and archbishops had license to marry they would rob the church of all its property, and none would be left for the poor, for, he adds, “since already they seize the goods of the church for the benefit of distant relatives, what would they not do if they had legitimate children of their own?”[1026]
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When the advantages and the necessity of celibacy thus were doubted by the highest authorities in the church, it is no wonder if those who were disposed to question the traditions of the past were led to reject it altogether. In 1479 John Burckhardt, of Oberwesel, graduate of Tubingen, and Doctor of Theology, in his capacity of preacher at Worms, openly disseminated doctrines which differed in the main but little from those of Wickliffe and Huss. He denied the authority of popes, councils, and the fathers of the church to regulate matters either of faith or discipline. The Scripture was the only standard, and no one had a right to interpret it for his brethren. The received observances of religion, prayers, fasts, indulgences, were all swept away, and universal liberty of conscience proclaimed to all. Of course, sacerdotal celibacy shared the same fate, as a superstitious observance, contrived by papal ingenuity in opposition to evangelical simplicity.[1027] Thus his intrepid logic far outstripped the views of his predecessors, and Luther afterwards acknowledged the similarity between his teachings and those of John of Oberwesel. Yet he had not the spirit of martyrdom, and the Inquisition speedily forced him to a recantation, which was of little avail, for he soon after perished miserably in the dungeon in which he had been thrust.[1028]
Still more remarkable as an indication of the growing spirit of independence was an event which in July, 1485, disturbed the stagnation of the centre of theological orthodoxy—the Sorbonne. A certain Jean Laillier, priest and licentiate in theology, aspiring to the doctorate, prepared his thesis or “Sorbonique,” in which he broached various propositions savoring strongly of extreme Lollardry. He denied the supremacy of the pope, and indeed reduced the hierarchy to the level of simple priesthood; he rejected confession, absolution, and indulgences; he refused to acknowledge the authority of tradition and legends, and insisted that the fasts enjoined by the church had no claim to observance. Celibacy was not likely to escape so audacious an inquirer, and accordingly, among his postulates were three, declaring that a priest clandestinely married required no penitence; that the Eastern clergy committed no sin in marrying, nor would the priests of the Western church, if they were to follow the example; and that celibacy originated in 1073, in the decretals of Gregory VII., whose power to introduce the rule he more than questioned. The Sorbonne, as might be anticipated, refused the doctorate to so rank a heretic, and Laillier had the boldness not only to preach his doctrines publicly, but even to appeal to the Parlement for the purpose of forcing his admission to the Sorbonne. The Parlement referred the matter to the Bishop of Paris and to the Inquisitor; Laillier’s audacity failed him, and he agreed to recant.[1029] In Poland, too, there were symptoms of similar revolt against the established ordinances of the church, as shown in a book published at Cracow in 1504, “De Matrimonia Sacerdotum.”[1030]
* * * * *
The corruption of the church establishment, in fact, had reached a point which the dawning enlightenment of the age could not much longer endure. The power which had been intrusted to it, when it was the only representative of culture and progress, had been devoted to selfish purposes, and had become the instrument of unmitigated oppression in all the details of daily life. The immunity which had been necessary to its existence through centuries of anarchy had become the shield of unimaginable vices. The wealth, so freely lavished upon it by the veneration of Christendom, was wasted in the vilest excesses. All efforts at reformation from within had failed; all attempts at reformation from without had been successfully crushed and sternly punished. Intoxicated with centuries of domination, the muttered thunders of growing popular discontent were unheeded, and its claims to spiritual and temporal authority were asserted with increasing vehemence, while its corruptions were daily displayed before the people with more careless cynicism. There appeared to be no desire on the part of the great body of the clergy to make even a pretence of the virtue and piety on which were based their claims for reverence, while the laity were daily growing less reverent, were rising in intelligence, and were becoming more inclined to question where their fathers had been content to believe. Such a complication could have but one result.
XXV. THE REFORMATION IN GERMANY
The opening of the sixteenth century witnessed an ominous breaking down of the landmarks of thought. The revival of letters, which was fast rendering learning the privilege of all men in place of the special province of the legal and clerical professions; the discovery of America, which destroyed reverence for primæval tradition, and accustomed men’s minds to the idea that startling novelties might yet be truths; the invention of printing, which placed within the reach of all inquirers who had a tincture of education the sacred writings for investigation and interpretation and enabled the thinker and the innovator at once to command an audience and disseminate his views in remote regions; the European wars, commencing with the Neapolitan conquest of Charles VIII., which brought the nations into closer contact with each other, and carried the seeds of culture, civilization, and unbelief from Italy to the farthest Thule; all these causes, with others less notable, had been silently but effectually wearing out the remnants of that pious and unquestioning veneration which for ages had lain like a spell on the human mind.
In this bustling movement of politics and commerce, arts and arms, science and letters, religion could not expect to escape the spirit of universal inquiry. Even before opinion had advanced far enough to justify examination into doctrinal points and dogmas, there was a general readiness to regard the shortcomings of sacerdotalism, in the administration of its sacred trust, with a freedom of criticism which could not long fail to destroy the respect for claims of irrefragable authority. John of England and the Emperor Otho might gratify individual spite, in the intoxication of anticipated triumph, by insultingly defying the sacerdotal power. Philippe-le-Bel, a man far in advance of his age, might reduce the papacy to temporary subjection by means of rare instruments such as Guillaume de Nogaret. Philippe de Valois, with the aid of his civil lawyers, might essay to limit the extent of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Wickliffe, and Huss, and Savonarola might raise the standard of opposition to papal usurpation—but these were sporadic instances of rebellion, resulting either from the selfish ambition of rulers or the fanatical enthusiasm of individuals, unsupported by the concurrent opinion of the masses of the people, and their permanent results were rather remote than direct. At the period to which we have arrived, however, the disposition to criticise the abuses of the ecclesiastical system, to note its shortcomings, and to apply remedial measures was general, and savored little of the respect which an infallible church had for so many centuries inculcated as one of the first of Christian duties. Its past services were forgotten in present wrongs. Its pretensions had, at one time, enabled it to be the protector of the feeble, and the sole defence of the helpless; but that time had passed. Settled institutions were fast replacing anarchy throughout Europe, and its all-pervading authority would no longer have been in place, even if exercised for the common benefit. When it was notorious, however, that the powers and immunities claimed by the church were everywhere employed for the vilest ends, their anachronism became too palpable, and their destruction was only a question of time.
Signs of the coming storm were not wanting. In 1510 a series of complaints against the tyranny and extortion of Rome was solemnly presented to the emperor. The German churches, it was asserted, were confided by the successors of St. Peter to the care of those who were better fitted to be keepers of mules than pastors of men, and the pope was significantly told that he should act more tenderly and kindly to his children of Teutonic race, lest there might arise a persecution against the priesthood, or a general defection from the Holy See, after the manner of the Hussites.[1031] The emperor was warned, in his efforts to obtain the desired reform, not to incur the censures and enmity of the pope, in terms which show that only the political effects of excommunication were dreaded, and that its spiritual thunders had lost their terrors. He was further cautioned against the prelates in general, and the mendicant friars in particular, in a manner denoting how little reverence was left for them in the popular mind, and how thoroughly the whole ecclesiastical system had become a burden and reproach, a thing of the past, an excrescence on society, and no longer an integral part of every man’s life, and the great motive power of Christendom.[1032]
* * * * *
It was evident that the age was rapidly outstripping the church, and that the latter, to maintain its influence and position, must conform to the necessities of progress and enlightenment. On previous occasions it had done so, and had, with marvellous tact and readiness, adapted itself to the exigencies of the situation in the long series of vicissitudes which had ended by placing it supreme over Europe. But centuries of almost uninterrupted prosperity had hardened it. The corruption which attends upon wealth had rendered wealth a necessity, and that wealth could only be had by perpetuating and increasing the abuses which caused ominous murmurs of discontent in those nations not fortunate enough to be defended by Concordats or Pragmatic Sanctions. The church had lost its suppleness, and was immovable. A reform such as was demanded, while increasing its influence over the souls of men, would have deprived it of control over their purses; reform meant poverty. The sumpter-mule loaded with gold, wrung from the humble pittance of the Westphalian peasant, under pretext of prosecuting the war against the infidel, would no longer cross the Alps to stimulate with its treasure the mighty genius of Michael Angelo, or the fascinating tenderness of Raphael; to provide princely revenues for the bastards of a pope, or to pay mercenaries who were to win them cities and lordships; to fill the antechamber of a cardinal with parasites, and to deck his mistresses with the silks and jewels of Ind; to feed needy men of letters and scurrilous poets; to soothe the itching palms of the Rota, and to enable all Rome to live on the tribute so cunningly exacted of the barbarian.[1033] The wretched ending of the council of Bâle rendered any internal reformation impossible which did not derive its initiative and inspiration from Rome, as was shown by the failure of the council of Pisa. In Rome, it would have required the energy of Hildebrand, the stern self-reliance of Innocent, the unworldly asceticism of Celestin combined, to even essay a reform which threatened destruction so complete to all the interests accumulated by sacerdotalism around the Eternal City. Leo X. was neither Hildebrand, nor Innocent, nor Celestin. With his voluptuous nature, elegant culture, and easy temper, it is no wonder that he failed to read aright the signs of the times, and that he did not even recognize the necessity which should impose upon him a task so utterly beyond his powers. The fifth council of Lateran had no practical result. Blindly he plunged on; money must be had at any cost, until the salvation mongering of Tetzel, little if any worse than that of his predecessors, could no longer bear the critical spirit of the age, and Teutonic insubordination at length found a mouth-piece in the Monk of Wittenberg.
It would be a mistake to credit Luther with the Reformation. His bold spirit and masculine character gave to him the front place, and drew around him the less daring minds who were glad to have a leader to whom to refer their doubts, and on whom their responsibility might partly rest; yet Luther was but the exponent of a public sentiment which had long been gaining strength, and which in any case would not have lacked expression. In that great movement of the human mind he was not the cause, but the instrument. Had his great opponent Erasmus enjoyed the physical vigor and practical boldness of Luther, he would have been handed down as the heresiarch of the sixteenth century.[1034] He, too, had borne his full share in preparing the minds of men for what was to come. The whole structure of sacerdotalism felt the blows of his irreverential spirit, which boldly declared that the Scriptures alone contained what was necessary to salvation.[1035] Theological subtleties and priestly observances were alike useless or worse than useless. For the living, it was idle to attend mass; for the dead, it was folly to look to such a means for extrication from purgatory.[1036] The confessional was to be visited only as a formal prerequisite to partaking the Eucharist;[1037] pilgrimages and the veneration of relics were ridiculed with a reckless freedom which showed that the advance of enlightenment had utterly destroyed the reverence of the past.[1038] Nothing, indeed, can give us a more thorough conviction of the readiness of the public to welcome a radical change than the wealth of indignant bitterness which Erasmus, himself a canon regular and a priest, heaps upon all orders of the church, and the immense applause which everywhere greeted his attacks. His sarcastic humor, his biting satire, his exquisite ridicule, nowhere find a more congenial subject than the vices of the monks, the priests, the prelates, the cardinals, and even of the pope himself, until even Luther, as late as 1517, feels constrained to deplore that the evils which afflicted the church should be thus exposed to derision.[1039] It affords a curious illustration of the times to read those writings which a century earlier would have consigned him to the dungeon or the stake, and to reflect that he was not only the admiration of both the learned and the vulgar of Europe, but also the petted protégé of king and kaisar, the correspondent of popes, and finally the champion of the system which he had so ruthlessly reviled, and which he never ceased to deplore.[1040] The extraordinary favor with which his works were received by all classes shows how fully he was justified in the indignation which he so unsparingly lavished on clerical abuses, and how eagerly the public appreciated one who could so well express that which was felt by all. Equally significant was the popularity of the “Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum,” in which the learned wits of the new school poured forth upon the clergy a broad and homely ridicule which exactly suited the taste of the age;[1041] while Cornelius Agrippa more than rivalled Erasmus in the wealth of vigorous denunciation with which he lashed the vices of all the orders of ecclesiastics, from the pope to the béguine.[1042]
Not less indicative of the dangerous state of opinion was an address delivered in the Diet held at Augsburg in 1518, when the legates of Leo X. appealed to Germany for a tithe to assist in carrying on the war against the Turk. The orator who replied to them did not restrain his indignation at the deplorable condition of the church, which he attributed solely to the worldly ambition of the popes. Since they had united temporal with spiritual dominion—or, rather, since they had allowed temporal interests to divert them wholly from their spiritual duties—all had gone amiss. Christendom was despoiled from without, and filled with tumult within. Religion was openly contemned; Christ was daily bought and sold; the sheep were shorn, and the pastor took no care of them. He did not even hesitate to charge, with emphasis and at much detail, that the money extorted from Germany under pious pretexts was squandered in Italy on the private quarrels and for the aggrandizement of the papal houses, and those of the members of the sacred college.[1043] All other nations were protected from papal rapacity and tyranny by formal agreements. Germany alone was surrendered defenceless, and not only were her bishops plundered but even the smallest benefice could not be confirmed without the recipient running the gauntlet of a horde of officials whose exactions forced him to sell the very furniture of his church. As the rules of law and the dictates of justice were equally disregarded, the popular sentiment was becoming openly hostile to the church.[1044] A state of feeling which dictated and permitted such a declaration from the supreme representative body of the empire, when brought into collision with the pretensions of the Holy See, now more exaggerated than ever, could have but one result—Revolution.
With all this license Germany was still, by the force of circumstances, less independent of the papacy than any other Tramontane power. What was going on elsewhere in Europe may be guessed from the humiliating conditions exacted in 1517 of Silvester Darius, the papal collector, on his assuming the functions of his important office in England. He bound himself by oath not to execute any letters or mandates of the pope injurious to the king, the kingdom, or the laws; not to transmit from England to Rome, without a special royal license, any gold, or silver, or bills of exchange; not to leave the kingdom himself without a special license under the great seal; with other less notable restrictions, the practical effect of all being to place him and his duties wholly under the control of the king.[1045] The position of England had changed since the days of Innocent and John. Had the dissensions of Germany permitted equal progress, Luther might perhaps have only been known as an obscure but learned orthodox doctor, and the inevitable revolt of half of Christendom have been postponed for a century.
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It is not my province to follow in detail the vicissitudes of the Reformation, but only to indicate briefly its relations with sacerdotal asceticism. Luther, at first, like Wickliffe and Huss, paid no attention to the subject. In fact, when, on the 31st of October, 1217, he nailed on the church door of Wittenberg his celebrated ninety-five propositions, nothing was further from his expectations than to create a heresy, a schism, or even a general reform in the church. He had simply in view to vindicate his ideas on the subject of justification, derived from St. Augustin, against the Thomist doctrines which had been exaggerated into the monstrous abuses of Tetzel and his fellows.[1046] In the general movement of the human mind at that period so much had been said that was inimical to the received practices of the church, without calling forth the thunders of Rome, that men seemed to think the day of toleration had at last come. The hierarchy sat serenely upon their thrones and in the confidence of unassailable power appeared willing to allow any freedom of speculation which did not assail their temporal privileges. Yet amid the general agitation and opposition to Rome which pervaded society, it was impossible for a bold and self-reliant spirit such as Luther’s not to advance step by step in a career of which the ultimate goal was as little foreseen by himself as by others. Still his progress was wonderfully slow. Even in 1519 he still considered himself within the pale of the church, and held that no wrong committed by her could justify a separation or excuse any resistance to the commands of a pope;[1047] and in the same year, in a sermon on matrimony, he alluded not unfavorably to the life of virginity.[1048] Events soon after forced him to further and more dangerous innovations, yet when Leo X., in June, 1520, issued his celebrated bull, “Exsurge Domine” to crush the rising heresy, in the forty-one errors enumerated as taught by Luther, there is no allusion to any doctrine specially inimical to ascetic celibacy.[1049]
This condemnation, followed as it was by the public burning of his writings, aroused Luther to a more active and aggressive hostility than he had previously manifested, In his book “De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiæ” he attacked the sacrament of ordination, denied that it separated the priest from his fellows, and ridiculed the rule concerning digami, which excluded from the priesthood a man who had been the husband of any but a virgin, while another who had polluted himself with six hundred concubines was eligible to the episcopate or papacy.[1050] Finally on Dec. 10th, 1520, he proclaimed war to the knife by burning at Wittenberg the books of the canon law and justifying this act by a manifesto recapitulating the damnable doctrines contained in them. Among these he enumerates the prohibition of sacerdotal marriage, as the origin and cause of excessive vice and scandal.[1051] As he said himself, hitherto he had only been playing at controversy with the Pope, but this was the beginning of the tragedy.[1052] Soon after this, in a controversy with Ambrogio Catarino, he stigmatized the rule of celibacy as angelical in appearance, but devilish in reality, and invented by Satan as a fertile source of sin and perdition.[1053]
In the mighty movement which was agitating men’s minds, Luther had been anticipated in this. As early as 1518, a monk of Dantzic named James Knade, abandoned his order, married, and publicly preached resistance to Rome. It is evident that in this he had the support of the people, for though he was imprisoned and tried by the ecclesiastical authorities, the only punishment inflicted on him was banishment.[1054] In the multitude of other questions more interesting to the immediate disputants this point of discipline seems to have attracted but little attention until 1521, when during Luther’s enforced seclusion in Wartburg, Bartholomew Bernhardi, pastor of Kammerich, near Wittenberg, put the heresiarch’s views into action in the most practical way by obtaining the consent of his parish and celebrating his nuptials with all due solemnity. Albert, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, addressed to Frederic, Elector of Saxony, a demand for the rendition of the culprit, which that prudent patron of the Reformation skilfully eluded, and Bernhardi published a short defence or apology in which he denounced the rule of celibacy as a “frivolam traditiunculam.” He argued the matter, quoting the texts which since his time have been generally employed in support of sacerdotal marriage; he referred to Peter and Philip, Spiridon of Cyprus, and Hilary of Poitiers, as examples of married bishops, quoted the story of Paphnutius, and relied on the authority of the Greek church. This apparently did not satisfy the archbishop, for Bernhardi felt obliged to address a second apology to Frederic of Saxony, to whom he appealed for protection against the displeasure of his ecclesiastical superiors.[1055] In spite of molestation, he continued in the exercise of his priestly functions until death. Less fortunate were his immediate imitators. A priest of Mansfeld who took to himself a wife was thrown into prison at Halle by the Archbishop of Mainz, and Jacob Siedeler, pastor of Glashütten, in Misnia, who was guilty of the same crime, perished miserably in the dungeon of Stolpen, to which he was committed by Duke George of Saxony.[1056]
The enthusiastic Carlostadt, relieved for the time from the restraint of Luther’s cooler wisdom, threw himself with zeal into this new movement of reform, and lost no time in justifying it by a treatise in which he argued strenuously in favor of priestly marriage, and energetically denounced the monastic vows as idle and vain. Luther, however, in his retreat, seems not yet prepared to take any very decided position. In a letter of Jan. 17th, 1522, to Wolfgang Fabricius Capito, one of the officials of the Archbishop of Mainz, he takes the latter severely to task with respect to his action in a case of the kind—probably that of the priest of Mansfeld alluded to above. The man had been set at liberty, but forced to separate himself from his wife, and Capito had defended himself on the ground that the woman was a harlot. Luther asks him why he had been so earnest with a single strumpet, when he had taken no action with so many under his jurisdiction in Halberstadt, Mainz, and Magdeburg, and adds that when the priest had acknowledged the woman as his wife there should have been nothing further done. He proceeds to say, however, that he does not ask for the freedom of sacerdotal marriage, and that he is not prepared to take any general position concerning it, except that it is lawful under God.[1057] Either with or without his approbation, however, his friends lost no time in enforcing the new dogma which they proclaimed to the world in the most authoritative manner. During the same year Luther’s own Augustinian order held a provincial synod at Wittenberg, in which they formally threw open the doors of the monasteries, and permitted all who desired it to return to the world, declaring that in Christ there was no distinction between Jew and Greek, monk and layman, and that a vow in opposition to the gospel was no vow, but an impiety. Ceremonies, observances, and dress were pronounced futile; those who chose to abide by the established rule were free to do so, but their preferences were not to be a law to their fellows. Those who were fitted for preaching the word were advised to depart; those who remained were obliged to perform the manual labor which had been so prominent a portion of primæval Teutonic monasticism, and mendicancy was strictly forbidden. In a few short and simple canons a radical rebellion thus declared itself in the heart of an ancient and powerful order, and principles were promulgated which were totally at variance with sacerdotalism in all its protean forms.[1058]
This broad spirit of toleration did not suit the views of the more progressive reformers. In Luther’s own Augustinian convent at Wittenberg, one of his most zealous adherents, Gabriel Zwilling, preached against monachism in general, taking the ground that salvation required the renunciation of their vows by all who had been ensnared into assuming the cowl; and so great was his success that thirteen monks at once abandoned the convent. Yet even on Luther’s return to Wittenberg, he at first took no part in the movement. He retained his Augustinian habit, and continued his residence in the convent; but before the close of the year (1522) he put forth his work, “De Votis Monasticis,” in which he fully and finally adopted the views of his friends, and showed himself as an uncompromising enemy of monasticism.[1059] How difficult it was for him, however, to shake off the habitudes in which he had been trained is shown by the fact that, even at the end of 1523, he still sometimes preached in his cowl and sometimes without it.[1060]
Notwithstanding the zealous opposition of the orthodox ecclesiastical authorities, the doctrine and practice of Wittenberg were not long in finding earnest defenders and imitators. But few such marriages, it is true, are recorded in 1522, although Balthazar Sturmius, an Augustinian monk of Saxony, committed the bolder indiscretion of marrying a widow of Franconia. In that year, however, we find Franz von Sickingen, knight-errant and condottiero, who was then a power in the state, advocating the emancipation and marriage of the religious orders, in a letter to his father-in-law, Diedrich von Henthschuchsheym. Still more important was the movement inaugurated in Switzerland by Ulrich Zwingli, who, with ten other monks of Nôtre-Dame-des-Hermites, on the 2d of July, 1522, addressed to Hugo von Hohenlandemberg, Bishop of Constance, a petition requesting the privilege of marriage. The petitioners boldly argued the matter, citing the usual Scriptural authorities, and adjured the bishop in the most pressing terms to grant their request. They warned him that a refusal might entail ruinous disorders on the whole sacerdotal body, and that, unless he seized the opportunity to guide the movement, it might speedily assume a most disastrous shape. They asserted, indeed, that not only in Switzerland, but elsewhere, it was generally believed that a majority of ecclesiastics had already chosen their future wives, and that a return to the old order of things was beyond the power of man to accomplish.[1061]
In this assertion, Zwingli and his companions followed perhaps rather the dictates of their hopes than of their judgment, for the revolution was by no means as universal or immediate as their threats or warnings would indicate. Its progress, nevertheless, was rapid and decided. Luther, whom we have seen, in the earlier part of 1522, still giving but a qualified assent to the daring innovation of his followers, in February, 1523, wrote to Spalatin in favor of a married pastor who was seeking preferment at the hands of the Elector Frederic;[1062] and in April, 1523, he himself officiated and preached a sermon in favor of matrimony to a multitude of distinguished friends at the wedding of Wenceslas Link, vicar of the Augustinian order, one of his oldest and most valued supporters, who had stood unflinchingly by him when arraigned by Cardinal Caietano before the Emperor Maximilian at the Diet of Augsburg.[1063] Not less important was the countenance given to the innovation, two days later, by the Elector Frederic, who consented to act as sponsor at the baptism of the first-born of Franz Gunther, pastor of Loch;[1064] the ceremony being performed by the honest chronicler Spalatin himself.
It is curious to see in Spalatin’s diary how each successive marriage is recorded as a matter of the utmost interest, the hopes of the reformers being strengthened by every accession to the ranks of those who dared to defy the rules which had been deemed irreversible for centuries. Nor was it an act without danger, for no open rupture had as yet taken place between the temporal power of any state and the central authority at Rome. Even in Electoral Saxony, though Duke Frederic, by a cautious course of passive resistance, afforded protection to the heretics, yet he still considered himself a Catholic, and the ritual of his chapel was unaltered. Elsewhere the ecclesiastical power was bent on asserting its supremacy over the licentious apostates who ventured to sully their vows and prostitute the sacrament of marriage by their incestuous unions. The old charge of promiscuous intercourse was resorted to in their case, as it has been with almost every heresy in every age, for the purpose of exciting popular odium,[1065] and wherever the discipline of the church could be enforced, it was done unsparingly. The temper of these endeavors to repress the movement is well illustrated by the regulations promulgated under the authority of the Cardinal-legate Campeggi, when, in 1524, he succeeded in uniting a number of reactionary princes at the Assembly of Ratisbon. Deploring the sacrilege committed in the marriages of priests and monks, which were becoming extremely common, he granted permission to the secular powers to seize all such apostates and deliver them to the ecclesiastical officials, significantly restraining them, however, from inflicting torture. The officials were empowered to condemn the offenders to perpetual imprisonment, or to hand them over to the secular arm—a decent euphuism for a frightful death; and any negligence on the part of the ordinaries exposed those officers to the pains and penalties of heresy.[1066]
In spite of all this, however, the votaries of marriage had the support and sympathy of the great body of the people. It shows how widely diffused and strongly implanted was the conviction of the evils of celibacy, when those who four centuries earlier had so cruelly persecuted their pastors for not discarding their wives now urged them to marriage, and were ready to protect them from the consequences of the act. Thus, during the summer of 1524, Wolfgang Fabricius Capito, provost of St. Thomas and priest of the church of St. Peter at Strassburg, whom we have seen two years earlier prosecuting a married priest, took to himself a wife, by the request of his parishioners, and when the chapter of canons endeavored to interfere with him, the threatening aspect of the populace warned them to desist. Nor was this the only case, for Bishop William undertook to excommunicate all the married priests of Strassburg, when the senate of the city resolutely espoused their cause, and even the authority of the legate Campeggi could not reconcile the quarrel.[1067]
Even higher protection was sometimes not wanting. When Adrian II., in 1522, reproached the Diet of Nürnberg with the inobservance of the decree of Worms and the consequent growth of Lutheranism, and King Ferdinand, in the name of the German states, replied that a council for the reformation of the church was the only remedy, the question of married priests arose for discussion. The German princes alleged that they could find in the civil and municipal laws no provisions for the punishment of such transgressions, and that the canons of discipline could only be enforced by the ecclesiastical authorities themselves, who ought not to be interfered with in the discharge of their duty by the secular authorities.[1068] This was scant encouragement, but even this was often denied in practice. When, in 1523, Conrad von Tungen, Bishop of Wurzburg, threw into prison two of his canons, the doctors John Apel and Frederic Fischer, for the crime of marrying nuns, the Council of Regency at Nürnberg forced him to liberate them in a few weeks.[1069] This latter fact is the more remarkable, since, but a short time previous (March 6th, 1523), the Imperial Diet at Nürnberg, under the auspices of the same Regency, had expressed its desire to give every assistance to the ecclesiastical authority in enforcing the canons. In a decree on the subject of the religious disturbances, it adopted the canon law on celibacy as part of the civil law, pronouncing sentence of imprisonment and confiscation on all members of the clergy who should marry, and ordering the civil power in all cases to assist the ecclesiastical in its efforts to punish offenders.[1070]
The emancipation of nuns excited considerable public interest, and in many instances was effected by aid from without. A certain Leonhard Kopp, who was a determined enemy of monachism, rendered himself somewhat notorious by exploits of the kind. One of the earliest instances was that by which, on Easter eve, 1523, at considerable risk, he succeeded in carrying off from the convent of Nimptschen, in Misnia, eight young virgins of noble birth, all of whom were subsequently married, and one of whom was Catharine von Bora.[1071] The example was contagious. Before the month was out six nuns, all of noble blood, left the abbey of Sormitz, and soon after eight escaped from that of Peutwitz, at Weissenfels.[1072] Monks enfranchised themselves with still less trouble. At Nürnberg, in 1524, the Augustinians in a body threw off their cowls and proclaimed themselves citizens.[1073]
Finally, Luther gave the last and most unquestionable proof of his adhesion to the practice of sacerdotal marriage by espousing Catharine von Bora, whom we have seen escaping, two years before, from the convent of Nimptschen. Scandal, it would seem, had been busy with the intimacy between the pious doctor and the fair renegade, who had spent nearly the whole period of her liberty at Wittenberg, and Luther, with the practical decision of character which distinguished him, suddenly resolved to put the most effectual stop to rumors which his enemies doubtless were delighted to circulate. On the evening of June 13th, 1525, without consulting his friends, he invited to supper Pomeranius, Lucas Cranach, and Apellus, and had the marriage ceremony performed.[1074] It took his followers completely by surprise; many of them disapproved of it, and Justus Jonas, in communicating the fact to Spalatin, characterizes it as a startling event, and evidently feels that his correspondent will require the most incontrovertible evidence of the fact, when he declares that he himself had been present and had seen the bridegroom in the marriage bed.[1075] If the portraits after Lucas Cranach given in Mayer’s Dissertation on Catharine be faithful likenesses, it was scarcely the beauty of his bride that led Luther to take this step, for her features seem rather African than European.[1076]
When Luther had once decided for himself on the propriety of sacerdotal marriage, he was not likely to stop half-way. Some of the reformers were disposed to adopt the principles of the early church, and, while permitting married priests to officiate, denied to them the right to marry a second time or to espouse any but virgins, declaring all digami worthy of death and calling upon the people to drive them out. Against these Luther, in 1528, took up the cudgels vigorously, arguing the question in all its bearings and arriving at the conclusion that only bigamists were to be shunned or deemed unworthy of holy orders.[1077] Yet at the same time his thoroughly practical mind prevented him from losing sight of some of the evils inseparable from the revolution which he had wrought in an institution so deeply affecting daily life as monasticism. As late as 1543, in a letter to Spalatin, while congratulating him on the desire expressed by some nuns to leave their convent, he cautions them not to do so unless they have a certainty or, at least, a speedy prospect of marriage. He complains of the number of such cases in which he had been obliged to support the fugitives, and he concludes by declaring that old women who had no chance of finding husbands had much better remain in their cloisters.[1078]
It is not difficult to explain why there was so ready and general an acquiescence in the abrogation of a rule established by the veneration of so many centuries. Not only had the doctrines of the reformers taken a deep and firm hold of the popular heart throughout Germany, destroying the reverence for tradition and antiquity, and releasing the human mind from the crushing obligation of blind obedience, but there were other motives, natural, if not particularly creditable. The ecclesiastical foundations had long neglected the duties of charity, hospitality, and education, on which were grounded their claims to their broad lands and rich revenues. While, therefore, the temporal princes might be delighted with the opportunity of secularizing and seizing the church possessions, the people might reasonably hope that the increase of their rulers’ wealth would alleviate their own burdens, as well as release them from the direct oppression which many of them suffered from the religious establishments. Even more potential was the disgust everywhere felt for the flagrant immorality of the priesthood. The dread experienced by every husband and father lest wife and daughter might at any moment fall victims to the lust of those who had every opportunity for the gratification of unholy passions, led them to welcome the change, in the hope that it would result in restoring decency and virtue to a class which had long seemed to regard its sacred character as the shield and instrument of crime.
The moral character of the clergy, indeed, had not improved during the busy and eventful years which marked the first quarter of the sixteenth century. There is a curious little tract, printed in Cologne in 1505, with the approbation of the faculty, which is directed against concubinage in general, but particularly against that of the priests. Its laborious accumulation of authorities to prove that licentiousness is a sin is abundant evidence of the existing demoralization, while the practices which it combats, of guilty ecclesiastics granting absolution to each other and mutually dispensing themselves from confession, show how easily the safeguards with which the church had sought to surround her ministers were eluded.[1079] The degradation of the priesthood, indeed, can readily be measured when, in the little town of Hof, in the Vogtland, three priests could be found defiling the sacredness of Ash-Wednesday by fiercely fighting over a courtesan in a house of ill-fame;[1080] or when Leo X., in a feeble effort at reform, was obliged to argue that systematic licentiousness was not rendered excusable because its prevalence amounted to a custom, or because it was openly tolerated by those whose duty was to repress it.[1081] In fact, a clause in the Concordat with Francis I. in 1516, renewing and enhancing the former punishments for public concubinage, would almost justify the presumption that the principal result of the rule of celibacy was to afford to the officials a regular revenue derived from the sale of licenses to sin[1082]—the old abuse, which rises before us in every age from the time of Damiani and Hildebrand, and which, since John XXII. had framed the tariff of absolutions for crime known as the “Taxes of the Penitentiary,” had the authority of the papacy itself to justify it. In this curious document we find that a concubinary priest could procure absolution for less than a ducat “in spite of all provincial and synodal constitutions;” while half a ducat was sufficient to absolve for incest committed with a mother or a sister.[1083]
That no concealment was thought necessary, and that sensual indulgence was not deemed derogatory in any way to the character of a Christian prelate, may be reasonably deduced from the panegyric of Gerard of Nimeguen on Philip of Burgundy, granduncle of Charles V., a learned and accomplished man, who filled the important see of Utrecht from 1517 to 1524. Gerard alludes to the amorous propensities and promiscuous intrigues of his patron without reserve, and as his book was dedicated to the Archduchess Margaret, sister of Charles V., it is evident that he did not feel his remarks to be defamatory. The good prelate, too, no doubt represented the convictions of a large portion of his class, when he was wont to smile at those who urged the propriety of celibacy, and to declare his belief in the impossibility of chastity among men who, like the clergy, were pampered with high living and tempted by indolence. Those who professed to keep their vows inviolate he denounced as hypocrites of the worst description, and he deemed them far worse than their brethren who sought to avoid unnecessary scandal by decently keeping their concubines at home.[1084]
Even this reticence, however, was considered unnecessary by a large portion of the clergy. In 1512, the Bishop of Ratisbon issued a series of canons in which, after quoting the Basilian regulations, he adds that many of his ecclesiastics maintain their concubines so openly that it would appear as though they saw neither sin nor scandal in such conduct, and that their evil example was the efficient cause of corrupting the faithful.[1085] In Switzerland the same abuses were quite as prevalent, if we may believe a memorial presented, in 1533, by the citizens of Lausanne, complaining of the conduct of their clergy. They rebuked the incontinence of the priests, whose numerous children were accustomed to earn a living by beggary in the streets, but the canons were the subjects of their especial objurgation. The dean of the chapter had defied an excommunication launched at him for buying a house near the church in which to keep his mistress; others of the canons had taken to themselves the wives of citizens and refused to give them up; but the quaintest grievance of which they had been guilty was the injury which their competition inflicted on the public brothel of the town.[1086] What was the condition of clerical morality in Italy may be gathered from the stories of Bishop Bandello, who, as a Dominican and a prelate, may fairly be deemed to represent the tone of the thinking and educated classes of society. The cynical levity with which he narrates scandalous tales about monks and priests shows that in the public mind sacerdotal immorality was regarded almost as a matter of course.[1087]
The powerful influence of all this on the progress of the Reformation was freely admitted by the authorities of the church. When the legate Campeggi was sent to Germany to check the spread of heresy, in his reformatory edict issued at Ratisbon in 1524, he declared that the efforts of the Lutherans had no little justification in the detestable morals and lives of the clergy, and this is confirmed by his unsparing denunciation of their licentiousness, drunkenness, quarrels, and tavern-haunting; their traffic in absolution for enormous offences; their unclerical habits and hideous blasphemy; their indulgence in incantations and dabbling in witchcraft.[1088] Very significant is his declaration that the canonical punishments shall be inflicted on concubinary priests, in spite of all custom to the contrary or all connivance with the prelates.[1089]
How little, indeed, licentious ecclesiastics might reasonably dread the canonical punishments is illustrated in the report, by the celebrated jurisconsult Grillandus, of a case which came before him while he was auditor of the Papal Vicar in Rome. A Spanish priest and Doctor of Canon Law, residing in the Christian capital, became enamoured of several young nuns at once, and endeavored to seduce them by teaching them that, as they and he were alike spouses of Christ, carnal affection between them was their duty. Failing in this, he sought to compel the assistance of God in his designs, and, being a man of literary culture, he composed a number of prayers of singular obscenity, and bribed various ignorant priests to recite them amid the ineffable mysteries of the Mass, hoping thus to obtain the aid of heaven in overcoming the chastity of his intended victims. At length he chanced to offer one of these prayers to a priest of somewhat better character, who was sufficiently shocked by it to communicate with the authorities. Brought before Grillandus, the guilty Spaniard sought to justify himself by alleging various Scriptural texts, but, upon being warned that such a defence would subject him to a prosecution for heresy, he recanted and acknowledged his errors. For this complicated mingling of lust and sacrilege, his only punishment was a short banishment from Rome.[1090] When the papal court set such an example, what was to be expected of less enlightened regions?
How keenly these evils were felt by the people, and how instinctively they were referred to the rule of celibacy as to their proper origin, is shown by an incidental allusion in the formula of complaint laid before the pope by the imperial Diet held at Nürnberg early in 1522, before the heresy of priestly marriage had spread beyond the vicinity of Wittenberg. The Diet, in recounting the evils arising from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction which allowed clerical offenders to enjoy virtual immunity, adduced, among other grievances, the license afforded to those who, debarred by the canons from marriage, abandoned themselves night and day to attempts upon the virtue of the wives and daughters of the laity, sometimes gaining their ends by flattery and presents, and sometimes taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the confessional. It was not uncommon, indeed, for women to be openly carried off by their priests, while their husbands and fathers were threatened with vengeance if they should attempt to recover them. As regards the sale to ecclesiastics of licenses to indulge in habitual lust, the Diet declared it to be a regular and settled matter, reduced to the form of an annual tax, which in most dioceses was exacted of all the clergy without exception, so that when those who perchance lived chastely demurred at the payment, they were told that the bishop must have the money, and that after it was handed over they might take their choice whether to keep concubines or not.[1091] In the face of this condition of ecclesiastical morality, it required some obtuseness for Adrian VI. to compare Luther to Mahomet, the one seeking to attract to his party the carnal-minded by permitting marriage, even as the other had established polygamy,[1092] and, further, to abuse him for uniting the ministers of Christ with the vilest harlots.[1093]
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Among the diverse opinions of existing evils and their remedy, it is interesting to see what was the view of the subject taken by those ecclesiastics whose purity of life removed them from all temptation to indulgence, and who yet were not personally interested in upholding the gigantic but decaying structure of sacerdotalism. Of these men Erasmus may be taken as the representative. His opinion on all the questions of the day was too eagerly desired for him to escape the necessity of pronouncing his verdict on the innovation portended by the one or two marriages which took place near Wittenberg in 1521, and accordingly, in 1522, from his retreat at Bâle he issued a short dissertation on the subject, which, although addressed merely to Bishop Christopher of that city, was evidently intended for a European audience. In this essay, after sketching the rise of celibacy and attributing it to the purity and fervor of the early Christians, he proceeds to depict the altered condition of the church. Among the innumerable multitude of priests who crowd the monasteries, the chapters, and the parishes, he declares that there are few indeed whose lives are pure, even as respects open and avowed concubinage, without penetrating into the mysteries of secret intrigue. As, therefore, there is no Scriptural injunction of celibacy, he concludes that, however desirable it might be to have ministers free from the cares of marriage and devoting themselves solely to the service of God, yet, since it seems impossible to conquer the rebellious flesh, it would be better to allow those who cannot control themselves to have wives with whom they could live in virtuous peace, bringing up their children in the fear of God, and earning the respect of their flocks. No more startling evidence, indeed, of the demoralization of the period could be given than the cautious fear which Erasmus expresses lest such a change should be opposed by the episcopal officials, who would object to the diminution of their unhallowed gains levied on the concubines of the clergy.[1094]
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When such was the condition of ecclesiastical morality, and such were the opinions of all except those directly interested in upholding the old order of things, it is no wonder if the people were disposed to look with favor on the marriage of their pastors, and if the rejection of celibacy gave a fresh impetus to the cause of Lutheranism. In the early days of all sects, it is only those of ardent faith and pure zeal who are likely to embrace a new belief, with all the attendant risks of persecution and contumely. The laxity of life allowed to the Catholic clergy would attract to its ranks and retain those whose aim was sensual indulgence. Thus, necessarily, the reformers who married would present for contrast regular and chaste lives and well-ordered households, purified by the dread of the ever-impending troubles to which the accident of a day might at any time expose them. The comparison thus was in every way favorable to the new ideas, and they flourished accordingly.
Nor, perhaps, were the worldly inducements to which I have before alluded less powerful in their own way in advancing the cause. Shortly before Luther’s marriage, whatever influence was derivable from an aristocratic example was obtained when the Baron of Heydeck, a knight of the Teutonic order, renounced his vows and publicly espoused a nun of Ligny.[1095] This may possibly have encouraged his superior, Albert of Brandenburg, grand-master of the order, to execute his remarkably successful coup d’état in changing his religion and seizing the estates of the order, thus practically founding the state which chance and talent have exalted until it has been able to realize, at least for a time, the day-dream of a united Germany. The liberty of marriage which he thus assumed was soon turned to account in his advantageous alliance with Frederic, King of Denmark, whose daughter Dorothea he espoused, the Bishop of Szamland officiating as his proxy, and the actual marriage being celebrated June 14, 1526.[1096]
Luther may reasonably be held excusable for counselling and aiding a transaction which lent such incalculable strength to the struggling cause of the Reformation, and it is not to be wondered at if he endeavored to follow it up with another of a similar character. The nephew of the Duke of Prussia, also named Albert of Brandenburg, occupied the highest place in the Teutonic hierarchy, as Archbishop both of Mainz and Magdeburg, in the latter of which powerful sees the Lutheran heresies had taken deep root. Luther sought to induce the archbishop to follow his uncle’s example; to take possession in his own right of the Magdeburg territories, and to transmit them to the posterity with which heaven could not fail to bless his prospective marriage—a scheme which met the warm approbation of the leading nobles of the diocese. Albert thought seriously of the project, especially as the Peasants’ War then raging was directed particularly against the lands of the church, but he finally abandoned it, and his flock had to work out their reformation without his assistance.[1097]
Perhaps some plans of territorial aggrandizement may have stimulated the zeal of the Count of Embden, who boasted that he had assisted and encouraged the marriage of no less than five hundred monks and nuns;[1098] yet the process of secularizing the monastic foundations was in many places by no means sudden or violent. Thus, when the Abbot of Ilgenthal in Saxony died, in 1526, the Elector John simply forbade the election of a successor, and placed the abbey in charge of a prefect, while the remaining monks were liberally supplied until they one after another died out,[1099] and in 1529, when Philip, Count of Waldeck, took possession of the ancient monastery of Hainscheidt, he caused all the monks to be supported during life.[1100]
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Through all this period the hope had never been abandoned of such an arrangement as would prevent an irrevocable separation in the church. Moderate and temperate men on both sides were ready to make such concessions of form as would enable Christendom to remain united, as the great vital truths on which all were agreed so far outweighed the points of divergence. Whether these hopes were well or ill-founded was to be determined at the Diet of Augsburg, to which, in June, 1530, both parties were summoned for the purpose of submitting their differences to the emperor. Charles came to Germany in the full flush of his recent extraordinary triumphs, the most powerful prince since the days of Charlemagne. Europe was at length at peace, even the Turk only looming in the East as a probable, not as an existing, enemy. But Charles, newly crowned at Bologna, came ostensibly as the steadfast ally of the pope, and Clement VII. had not the slightest intention of renouncing the traditional and imprescriptible rights of the Holy See. The Catholic princes of Germany, too, had their grounds of private quarrel with their Protestant peers, and, holding an unquestioned majority, were not disposed to abandon their position. The Protestant princes, on the other hand, were firm in their new-found faith, and, however disposed to avert the threatened storm by the sacrifice of non-essentials, their convictions were too strong for them to retrace the steps which they had taken during so many long and weary years. It is evident that, with such materials on either side, no reunion was probable; and, even had an accommodation on points of doctrine been possible, there was one subject which scarcely seemed to admit of satisfactory compromise. In the states of the reform, the downfall of monachism had placed in the hands of the temporal powers large bodies of sequestrated abbey lands. To the Catholic it was sacrilege to leave these in the hands of the spoiler; the Protestant would not willingly give up the spoil.
The contest was opened by the Protestants submitting a statement of their belief, divided into two parts, the one devoted to points of faith, the other to matters of practice. Prepared principally by Melanchthon, it presents their tenets in the mildest and least objectionable form, and becoming the recognized standard of their creed, it has attained a world-wide renown under the name of the Confession of Augsburg. The questions of celibacy and monastic vows were ably and temperately argued; their post-scriptural origin was shown, and the reasons which induced the reformers to reject them were placed in a light as little offensive as possible.[1101] At first, a counter-statement was anticipated from the Catholics, and negotiations were expected to be carried on by a comparison of the two, but they took higher ground, and contented themselves with drawing up a refutation of the Confession. The emperor was firm. His aspirations for the universal monarchy, which ever eluded his grasp, did not comport with encouraging independence of thought and freedom of religious belief. In his theory, uniform subordination of religion was a necessary element of the political system which was to make him sovereign of Europe, and he would listen to no compromise. He was inclined to summary measures, but the Catholic princes were hardly prepared for the consequences of an immediate rupture, and, after a threatening interval, another effort was made to effect a reconciliation. Conferences between the leading theologians on both sides took place, and the Lutherans, warned of their danger, were more disposed than ever to make concessions and to accept such terms as the stronger party were willing to offer them. At length, on the 8th of September, the draft of a proposed plan of accord was laid before the Diet. In this the points in dispute were referred to that future œcumenic council which had so long been demanded as the panacea for all ecclesiastical ills, and which, after more than thirty years of continued expectation, was destined to fail so miserably in reconciling difficulties. Such monasteries as had not been destroyed were to be maintained in the exercise of the customary rites and observances of religion. Abbots and communities who had been ejected were to be allowed to return; and all religious houses which had been emptied of their occupants were to be placed in the hands of officers appointed by the emperor, who were to administer to their possessions until the future council should decide upon all the points relating to monachism; the Protestants thus relieving themselves of the accusation that they were actuated by motives of worldly gain. Similar proposals were made with regard to communion in the two elements and clerical marriage. These were left as open questions for the council to settle, while a phrase of doubtful import subjected them in the mean time to the governments of the several states.[1102] The concessions in this project, however, though they might suit the views of temperate doctors and princes in Germany, and though even the Roman curia might be willing to grant them in order to save its threatened temporal power over the Teutonic states, did not suit the policy of Charles, who regarded the church as simply one of the instruments with which he was to build up his universal empire.[1103] It was not difficult for him, therefore, to bring to naught all such schemes of conciliation. The restoration of all abbots and monks was ordered; restitution of church lands was commanded, or their delivery to the emperor to be held until the assembling of the future council; and when the Diet adjourned, Charles issued a decree enjoining on all married priests to abstain from their wives, to eject them, and to seek absolution from their ordinaries.[1104]
The threatening aspect of affairs warned the Protestant princes that no time was to be lost in making provision for mutual defence, and ere the year was out the famous League of Schmalkalden enabled them to present a united front to the powers which they had virtually defied. Into the political history of that eventful time it is not my province to enter. Suffice it to say that they were able to maintain their position, and in their own states to oppose the reactionary movement which at times seemed to be on the point of destroying all that had been accomplished.
In this their task was complicated by the extravagances of those whose enthusiasm, unbalanced by reason, carried them beyond restraint. If Luther had found it no easy task to break the chains which for so many ages had kept in check the spirit of free inquiry, he discovered that it was impossible to control that spirit once let loose; and the wild excesses of Anabaptism were at once the exaggeration and the opprobrium of Lutheranism. Originally earnest and self-denying, the primitive Anabaptists had captivated the fiery soul of Carlostadt, while Luther was in his Patmos of Wartburg, but the pure asceticism of Storck and Muncer gradually grew irksome to the followers who flocked to their standard, and, if we may believe contemporary writers, the unchaining of human passions in that lawless horde resulted in the igneum baptisma, or fiery baptism, by which at Munster John Mathison encouraged the most hideous licentiousness in the elect, to be followed up by his successor, John of Leyden, who, in imitation of the patriarchs, promulgated the law of polygamy.[1105]
Luther, however, was quite as resolute in setting limits to his movement as Rome had been in forbidding all progress, and the Anabaptists were to him enemies as detestable as Catholics. The Protestant princes, moreover, had too much worldly wisdom to imperil their dangerous career by any alliance with fanatics whose extravagances provoked abhorrence so general. The cause of the Reformation, therefore, although it suffered no little from so portentous an illustration of the dangers resulting from the destruction of the ancient barriers, escaped all contamination in itself, and its leaders pursued their course undeviatingly.
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Meanwhile the League of Schmalkalden accomplished its purpose. Henry VIII. and Francis I. were eager to seize the opportunity of encouraging dissension in the empire. The Turk became more menacing than ever. Charles, always ready to yield for a time when opposition was impolitic, gracefully abandoned the position assumed at Augsburg; and the negotiations of Schweinfurth and Nürnberg resulted in the decree of the Diet of Ratisbon in 1532, by which, until the assembling of the future council, all religious disturbances were prohibited, and the imperial chamber was commanded to undertake no prosecutions on account of heresy. Toleration was thus practically established for the moment, but the abbots and monks who had been ejected, and who had been anticipating their restoration, became naturally restive. Charles cunningly sent from Italy full powers to the chamber to decide as to what causes arose from religious disputes, and what were simply civil or criminal. Thus intrusted with the interpretation of the Ratisbon decree, the chamber assumed that claims on church lands were not included in the forbidden class, while old edicts prohibiting the observances of Lutheranism brought all religious questions within the scope of criminal law. The promised toleration was thus practically denied, but, fortunately for the Protestants, Ferdinand was anxiously negotiating for their recognition of his dignity as king of the Romans, and by the Transaction of Cadam in 1533 he purchased the coveted homage by accepting their construction of the edict of Ratisbon.
Still the Protestants complained of persecution and the Catholics of proselytism. The ensuing fifteen years were filled with a series of bootless negotiations, pretended settlements, quarrels, recriminations, and mutual encroachments which year after year occupied the successive Diets, and kept Germany constantly trembling on the verge of a desolating civil war. It would be useless to disturb the dust that covers these forgotten transactions, which can teach us nothing save that the Protestants still refused to recognize that the schism was past human power to heal; that Rome, recovering from her temporary hesitation, would not abate one jot of her pretensions to save her supremacy over half of Christendom;[1106] and that Charles, as a wily politician, was always ready in adversity to abandon with a good grace that which he had arrogantly seized in prosperity.[1107] How eager, indeed, were the Protestants to effect some compromise which should relieve them from their exceptional position is strikingly manifest in the Articles which Melanchthon and his friends, in 1535, submitted to Francis I., after the Sorbonne had refused to enter into a disputation or conference with them. In this document all non-essentials were abandoned; doctrinal dissidences were skilfully evaded, and stress only was laid upon such regulations as should remove the external corruption of the church. Melanchthon proposed that the monastic orders should be continued, but that the vows should not be perpetual, so that religion might not be disgraced by the excesses of those who had mistaken their vocation. So, as regards priestly celibacy, he proposed that, as human nature rendered it impossible to supply the multitude of parishes with men able to live in continence, those who could not preserve their purity should be allowed to marry; while, to prevent the dilapidation of church property, the higher positions should be reserved to men of mature age, who could lead a single life.[1108] The Sorbonne, in reply, condescended to no argument, but contented itself with asserting that the Protestants desired the subversion of all religion, while, on the other hand, Melanchthon had the satisfaction of being proclaimed a traitor by the Germans.
In all this the only point which possesses special interest for us is another authoritative attempt at reconciling the irreconcilable which occurred in 1541. After a conference between Melanchthon and Dr. Eck at Worms, Charles himself presented to the Diet of Ratisbon a statement of the questions in dispute, with propositions for mutual concession and compromise. In the course of this, he reviewed the practice of the church in various ages with regard to sacerdotal celibacy, admitting that the enforcement of it was not in accordance with the ancient canons, and indicating a willingness to see it abrogated.[1109] The Protestants, who were ready to make many sacrifices for peace, hailed this intimation with triumph, stoutly insisting on the repeal of the obnoxious rule, which they stigmatized as unjust and pernicious.[1110] So nearly did the parties at length approach each other, that there appeared every reason to anticipate a successful result to the effort, when Paul III. again interfered and pronounced all the proceedings null and void, as the church alone had power to regulate its internal affairs. The expectations excited by these negotiations naturally stimulated the desire of the people for a change in the discipline of the church, and the next year we find Paul III. obliged to exhort the Bishop of Merseburg to resist the clamors of his subjects, who demanded the abrogation of priestly celibacy and the use of the cup for the laity, under threats of ejecting him. The pope evidently considered the Germans unduly impatient, since they objected to await the assembling of the Council of Trent, which was called to decide upon these matters.[1111]
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Charles had long recognized that the perpetual menace of a powerful confederation such as the Schmalkaldic League, entertaining constant relations with the external enemies of the empire, was incompatible with the peace of Germany and with an imperial power such as he was resolved to wield. The time at last came for the development of his plans. The skill of Alva and the treachery of Maurice of Saxony were crowned with success. The battle of Muhlberg broke the power of the Protestants utterly, and laid them helpless at the feet of their bitterest foes. Yet the progress of the new ideas had already placed them beyond the control of even the triumphant Charles, though he had the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse in his dungeons. When, at the Diet of Augsburg, in 1548, he proposed the curious arrangement known as the Interim, by which he hoped to keep matters quiet until the final verdict of that œcumenic council which constantly vanished in the distance, he felt it necessary to permit all married priests to retain their wives until the question should be decided by the future council. A faint expression of a preference for celibacy, moreover, was significant both in what it said and what it left unsaid.[1112]
The Interim, of course, satisfied neither party. The Catholics regarded it as an unauthorized reformation, the Protestants as disguised popery. Charles, however, in the plenitude of his power, obliged many of the Lutheran states to accept it; while, as regards the Catholics, he was perhaps not sorry to show the pope that he, too, like Henry VIII., could regulate the consciences of his subjects, and prescribe their religious faith. He had broken with Paul III.; the council of Trent, against his wishes, had been removed to Bologna on a frivolous pretext; and a schism like that of England was apparently impending. At the least, Charles might not unreasonably desire to manifest that at last he was independent of that papal power with which mutual necessities had so long enforced the closest relations, and to prove that deference to his wishes was henceforth to be the price of his all-important support. He demanded that legates should be sent to Germany armed with extraordinary powers, among which was included authority to grant dispensations to married priests. Paul III. referred the request to the Sacred College and to the council then sitting at Bologna, and it was unanimously replied that it should be granted, with the limitations that monks should not be included, and that priests thus permitted to retain their wives should not exercise their functions or enjoy the fruits of their benefices.[1113] That Paul forthwith dispatched three nuncios entrusted with authority to do this shows not only the disposition which then existed to relax the rigor of the canons respecting celibacy, but also the importance which the question had assumed in the religious disputes of the time,[1114] though an absolute refusal was soon afterwards returned to the request of a German prince (supposed to be the Duke of Bavaria) requesting for his subjects the use of the cup, priestly marriage, and the relaxation of the obligation of fasting.[1115]
Temporary expedients and compromises such as these are interesting merely as they mark the progress of opinion. Paltry makeshifts to elude the decision of that which had to be decided, they exercised little real influence on the history of the time. It is true that when Charles, in 1551, at the Diet of Augsburg, issued a call for the reassembling of the council of Trent, he confirmed the Interim until that council should decide all unsettled questions,[1116] yet this confirmation was destined to be effective for a period ludicrously brief. A fresh treason of Maurice of Saxony undid all that his former plotting had accomplished; and, while Henry II. was winning at the expense of the empire the delusive title of Conqueror, Charles found himself reduced to the hard necessity of restoring all that his crooked policy had for so many years been devoted to extorting. The Transaction of Passau, signed August 2d, 1552, gave full liberty of conscience to the Lutheran states, until a national council or Diet should devise means of restoring the unity of the church; and in case such means could not be agreed upon, then the rights guaranteed by the Transaction were granted in perpetuity.[1117] If Charles was disposed to withdraw the concessions thus exacted of him, the miserable siege of Metz and the increasing desire for abdication prevented him from attempting it; and, at the Diet of Augsburg, in 1555, the states and cities of the Augsburg Confession were confirmed in their right to enjoy the practices of their religion in peace.[1118]
The long struggle thus was over. The public law of Germany at last recognized the legality of the transactions based upon the Reformation, and not the least in importance among those transactions were the marriages of the ministers of Christ.