Chapter VII: Part 7

When King Edgar made his peace with the church by consenting to the vicarious penitence of the priesthood, three rigid and austere monks were the ardent ministers of the royal determination. Of St. Dunstan, the primate of England, I have already spoken. St. Ethelwold, his pupil, Abbot of Abingdon, was elevated to the see of Winchester, and commenced the movement by expelling the occupants of the monastery there. A few who consented to take monastic vows were allowed to remain, and the remainder were replaced by monks; but even St. Ethelwold’s rigor had to bend to the depravity of the age, and he was forced to relax the rigidity of discipline in non-essentials in order to obtain recruits of a better class.[409] The difficulties he encountered are indicated by the legend which relates that he was poisoned in his wine and carried from table to his couch in excruciating torment, where he lay hopeless till, reproaching himself with want of faith, he repeated the text—“Et si mortiferum quid biberint, non eis nocebitur,” and was cured on the instant.[410] That his canons were quite capable of such an attempt may be assumed from the description given of them in the bull procured by Dunstan from John XIII., authorizing their ejection by the king. The pope does not hesitate to stigmatize them as vessels of the devil, hateful to all good Christians on account of their inveterate and ineradicable wickedness.[411]

The third member of the reforming triumvirate was St. Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, who undertook a similar transformation of the clergy occupying the monastery of St. Mary in his cathedral city. Many promises they made to conform to his wishes, and many times they eluded the performance, till, losing patience with the prolonged procrastination, he one day entered the chapel with a quantity of monkish habits as they were vigorously chanting “Servite Domino in timore,” when he made practical application of the text by forcing them to put on the garments and take the vows on the spot, under the alternative of instant expulsion.[412]

These proceedings met the unqualified approbation of Edgar, who in 964, by his “Charter of Oswalde’s Law,” confirmed the ejection of the recusants who refused to part with their wives, and transferred all their rights and possessions to the newcomers. In the same document he boasted that he had instituted forty-seven abbeys of monks and nuns, and that he hoped to increase the number to fifty.[413] The same year a similar summary process was carried out in the convents of Chertsey and Winchester;[414] and in 966 Edgar was able to boast of the numerous religious houses throughout England which he had purified by replacing lascivious clerks with pious monks.[415]

These efforts, however, tended only to restore the monastic foundations to their original position, and left the secular clergy untouched, except in so far as a few of them were deprived of the comfortable quarters which they had usurped in the abbeys. This immunity it was no part of Dunstan’s plan to permit, and accordingly Edgar issued a series of laws restoring the obsolete ecclesiastical discipline throughout his kingdom. By this code a lapse from virtue on the part of a priest or monk was visited with the same penalty as homicide, with a fast of ten years; for a deacon the period of penitence was seven years; for the lower grades, six years. The monk, priest, or deacon who maintained relations with his wife was subjected to the same punishment; but there is no mention of degradation or deprivation of benefice.[416]

The struggle was long, and at one time the three reformers seem to have grown wearied with the stubborn resistance which they met, while the zeal of King Edgar grew more fiery as, with the true spirit of the huntsman, he followed up the prey, his ardor increasing as the chase grew more difficult. In 969 he eloquently addressed Dunstan, Ethelwold, and Oswald, blaming their lukewarmness in the good cause, and promising them every support and assistance in removing this opprobrium from the church.[417] Stimulated by these reproaches, Dunstan summoned a council which adopted a canon depriving unchaste priests of their benefices.[418] Still the conflict continued, and a charter dated in 974, the last year of Edgar’s reign, shows that he persevered to the end with unabated zeal.[419]

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The contumacious clerks may have been silenced; they were not subdued, and they but waited their opportunity. It came in 975, with the early death of Edgar and with the dissensions caused by his widow, Elfritha, who endeavored to deprive of the succession his eldest son, the youthful Edward, fruit of a former marriage. During the confusion, the ejected priests banded together and bribed Elfhere, the powerful Ealdorman of Mercia, together with some other magnates, to espouse their cause. In many abbeys the regulars were expelled and the priests with their wives were reinstated. In East Anglia, however, the nobles took sides with the monks, and, rising in arms, valiantly defended the monasteries. At length, on the accession of Edward, a council was assembled to make final disposition of the question. The married priests were present, and promised amendment; their noble protectors pleaded earnestly for them; the boy-king was moved, and was about to pronounce in their favor, when a miracle preserved the purity of the church. The council was sitting in the refectory of the monastery of Hyde, the headquarters of the ascetic party; Edward and Dunstan were enthroned separately from the rest, with their backs to a wall on which, between them, hung a small crucifix. At the critical moment, just as the king was yielding, the crucifix spoke, in a low tone inaudible to all save Edward and the primate, “Let not this thing be done”—the mandate was imperative, and the married clergy lost their cause.[420]

Still the stubborn priests and their patrons held out, and another miracle was necessary—this time a more impressive one. A second council was called to discuss the matter, and was held at Calne in 978. During the heat of the argument the floor gave way, carrying with it the whole assembly, except St. Dunstan, who remained triumphantly and miraculously perched upon a joist, while his adversaries lay groaning below, in every variety of mutilation.[421] His triumph, however, was but short. The same year the pious child Edward perished through the intrigues of Elfritha, whose son, Ethelred the Unready, succeeded to the throne. The mixed political and religious character of these events is shown by the canonization of Edward, who, though yet a child, was regarded as a martyr by the ascetics, whose cause he had espoused.

As Elfritha had evidently sought the alliance of the secular clergy to strengthen her party, her success proved disastrous to the cause of reform. The respite of peace, too, which had blessed the island during the vigorous reigns of Athelstan the Magnificent and Edgar the Pacific, gave place to the ravages invited by the feeble and vacillating policy of Ethelred the Unready; the incursions of the pagan Danes became more and more frequent and terrible; and what little respect had been inculcated for the strictness of discipline was speedily forgotten in the anarchy which ensued.

The efforts of the reformers appear to have extended even to the British churches of Wales, which had followed Saxon example in abandoning celibacy. The Brut y Tywysogion relates that about the year 861 the priests were forbidden to marry without dispensation from the pope; but they did not submit, and the disturbances thus provoked rendered necessary the abandonment of the effort, so that sacerdotal marriage continued unchecked.[422] We shall see hereafter that in the Principality the custom remained in full vigor until the thirteenth century was well advanced.

How thoroughly the work of Dunstan and Edgar was undone in England is sufficiently indicated by the efforts made not long after, with the consent of Ethelred, to introduce some feeble restraints upon the prevailing immorality. About the year 1006 we find the chief monastery of England, Christ Church at Canterbury, in full possession of the secular clergy, whose irregularities were so flagrant that even Ethelred was forced to expel them, and to fill their places with monks.[423] What was the condition of discipline among the secular priests may be guessed from the reformatory efforts of St. Ælfric, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 995 to 1006. In his series of canons the first eight are devoted to inculcating the necessity of continence; after quoting the Nicene canon, he feels it to be so much at variance with the habits and customs of the age, that he actually deprecates the surprise of his clergy at hearing a rule so novel and so oppugnant to the received practice, “as though there was no danger in priests living as married men;” he anticipates the arguments which they will bring against him, and refutes them with more gravity than success.[424] There is also extant, under the name of St. Ælfric, a pastoral epistle, which is regarded as supposititious by some critics; but its passages on this subject are too similar in spirit to the canons of Ælfric to be reasonably rejected. They show how hopeless was the effort to maintain the purity desired by the ecclesiastical authorities, and that entreaties and exhortations were uttered merely from a sense of duty, and with hardly an expectation of commanding attention. “This, to you, priests, will seem grievous, because ye have your misdeeds in custom, so that it seems to yourselves that ye have no sin in so living in female intercourse as laymen; and say that Peter the Apostle had a wife and children.... Beloved, we cannot now forcibly compel you to chastity, but we admonish you, nevertheless, that ye observe chastity, so as Christ’s ministers ought, in good reputation, to the pleasure of God.”[425]

That these well-meant homilies effected little in reforming the hearts of so obdurate a generation becomes manifest by the proceedings of the council of Enham, held by King Ethelred in 1009. The priests are there entreated, by the obedience which they owe to God, to observe the chastity which they know to be due. Yet so great was the laxity prevailing that some are stated to have two or more wives, and many to be in the habit of changing their spouses at pleasure, in violation of all Christian law. The council was apparently, however, powerless to repress these scandals by an adequate punishment, and contented itself with promising to those who lived chastely the privileges and legal status of nobles, while the vicious were vaguely threatened with the loss of the grace of God and man.[426]

The injunctions of the council as regards the regular clergy, though not particularly specific in their nature, show that even the monks had not responded to the benefits conferred upon them by Edgar the Pacific, nor fulfilled the expectations of the pious Dunstan. An expression employed, indeed, leads the learned Spelman to suggest that there possibly were two orders of monks, the one married and the other unmarried; but this is probably without foundation.[427]

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Such was the condition of the church when the increasing assaults of the Northman finally culminated in overthrowing the house of Cerdic, and placing the hated Dane upon the throne of England. Cnut’s long and prosperous reign, and his earnest veneration for the church, as shown by his pilgrimage to Rome, may perhaps have succeeded in removing some of the grosser immoralities of the clergy, but that marriage was still openly and unrestrainedly practised by those in orders is evident. The ecclesiastical laws of Cnut exhort priests to chastity in precisely the same words, and with the same promises as the canons of the council of Enham, but do not allude to the habit of keeping a plurality of wives; while, in the same chapter, a warning to the whole people against unlawful concubinage would seem to indicate that clergy and laity were bound by rules identical in strictness.[428]

That the rule of celibacy was recognized as only binding on the regulars, or monks, and that the secular priesthood were at full liberty to marry is evident from the system of purgation enjoined on them by the same code. The priest who was also a monk (sacerdos regulariter vivens—sacerd þe regollice libbe), could clear himself from an accusation in a simple suit by merely saying mass, and taking the communion, while the secular priest (plebeius sacerdos—mæssepreorst þe regol-lif næbbe) is only equal to the deacon-monk (diaconus regularis—diacon þe regollice libbe), requiring two of his peers as compurgators.[429] The significance of the distinction thus drawn is rendered clear by the version of the passage in a curious Latin text of the code published by Kolderup-Rosenvinge. The chapter is divided into two, the first one with the rubric “De Sacerdotibus,” and commencing “Si contigerit presbyterum regulariter et caste viventem,” &c., while the second is headed “De vulgare sacerdote _non casto_,” the meaning of which is defined in the expression “Si vulgaris presbyter qui non regulariter vivit.”[430] It is thus evident that purity was expected from those only who had entered into the obligations of monastic life, and also that the reforms of Dunstan had caused the ministers of the altar to be frequently selected from among the monks.

To this period are also, in all probability, to be attributed the “Institutes of Polity, civil and ecclesiastical,” to which reference has been made in the preceding section as blaming priests for decorating their wives with the ornaments belonging to their churches. Unable to denounce efficient penalties for the prevention of such evil practices, the author is obliged to content himself with invoking future punishment from heaven, in vague and meaningless threats—“A priest’s wife is nothing but a snare of the devil, and he who is ensnared thereby on to his end, he will be seized fast by the devil.”[431]

From all this it is evident that the memory of the ancient canons was not forgotten, and that their observance was still urged by some ardent churchmen, but that the customs of the period had rendered them virtually obsolete, and that no sufficient means existed of enforcing obedience. If open scandals and shameless bigamy and concubinage could be restrained, the ecclesiastical authorities were evidently content. Celibacy could not be enjoined as a law, but was rendered attractive by surrounding it with privileges and immunities denied to him who yielded to the temptations of the flesh, and who thus in some degree assimilated his sacred character to that of the laity.

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The Saxon church thus was practically regardless of the rule of celibacy when Edward the Confessor ascended the throne. The ascetic piety of that prince and his Norman education alike led him to abhor the sensual indulgences in which he found his subjects plunged, and he attached himself almost exclusively to the horde of Norman monks who flocked to his court from across the Channel. Their influence was all-powerful, and though reasons of the highest state necessity forced him to ally himself in marriage with Edith, daughter of the puissant Duke Godwin, whom Edward hated with all the energy of his feeble nature, it was not difficult for his artful ghostly counsellors to persuade him that a vow of virginity, taken and kept amid the seductions of a throne, would insure his glory in this world and his salvation in the next. A minstrel historian describes at length the engagement of perpetual chastity entered into between Edward and Edith at their marriage, and though he mentions the popular derision to which this exposed the royal monk at the hands of a gross and brutal generation, he is firmly persuaded that the crown of martyrdom was worthily won and worn—

Par veinere charnel desir,
Bein deit estre clamez martir.
Ne sai cunter en nul estoire
Rei ki feist si grant victoire,
Sa char, diable e mund venqui,
Ki sont troi fort enimi.[432]

How little the royal pair expected this example to be followed and how relaxed were all the rules of monastic discipline is shown by an anecdote of the period. The austere Gervinus, Abbot of St. Riquier in Ponthieu was always welcomed by them when he visited England, and on one occasion Queen Edith offered to kiss him. The Abbot’s rigidity overcame his courtliness and he refused the royal salutation, to the great indignation of the Queen, who ordered certain gifts which she had set apart for him to be withdrawn. Edward, however, approved of the action of the monk, and after Edith had been made to understand his motives she not only joined in applauding him but demanded that a similar rule should be made imperative on all the monks of England.[433]

It cannot be doubted that Edward made efforts to effect a reform among his sensual and self-indulgent subjects, but his want of success is developed in the description of the Saxon clergy at the time of the Conquest. The Norman chroniclers speak of them as abandoned to sloth, ignorance, and the lusts of the flesh; even monastic institutions were matters rather of tradition than of actual existence, and the monks themselves were hardly distinguishable by their mode of life from the laity.[434] There doubtless may be some contemptuous exaggeration in this, and yet one author of the period, who is wholly Saxon in his feelings, does not hesitate to attribute the ruin of the Saxon monarchy and the devastation of the kingdom to the just wrath of God, provoked by the vices of the clergy.[435]

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The rule of the Normans removed England from her isolation. Brought into the commonwealth of Christendom and under the active supremacy of the Holy See, her history henceforth becomes more closely connected with the general ecclesiastical movement which received its irresistible impulsion about this period. That movement it is now our business to examine.

XII.

PETER DAMIANI.

In a previous section I have shown the laxity prevailing throughout Continental Europe at the commencement of the eleventh century. It is not to be supposed, however, that even where this was tacitly permitted, it was openly and unreservedly authorized. The perversity of a sinful generation might render impossible the enforcement of the ancient canons; they might even be forgotten by the worldly and unthinking; but they were still the law of the church, and their authority was still admitted by some ardent devotees who longed to restore the purity of earlier ages. Burckhardt, who was Bishop of Worms from the year 1000 to 1025, in his voluminous collection of canons, gives a fair selection from the councils and decretals prohibiting all female intercourse to the clergy.[436] Benedict VIII. and the Emperor St. Henry II.—whose admiration of virginity was evinced by the personal sacrifice to which reference has just been made—in 1022 endeavored in the most solemn manner to reform the universal laxity. At the synod of Pavia a series of canons was adopted pronouncing sentence of deposition upon all priests, deacons, and subdeacons having wives or concubines, and upon all bishops keeping women near them, while special stress was laid upon the continued servitude of the children of all such ecclesiastics as were serfs of the church.[437] These canons, signed by the pope and attendant bishops, were laid before the emperor, who indorsed them with his sanction, declared them to be municipal as well as ecclesiastical law, promised that their observance should be enforced by the civil magistrates, and thanked Benedict and his prelates for their vigilance in seeking a remedy for the incontinence of the clergy, the evils whereof swept like a storm over the face of Christendom.[438]

In France, the long reign of Robert the Pious seems to have been marked with almost entire indifference to the subject, but the accession of his son Henry I. was attended with a strenuous effort to effect a reform. The council of Bourges, held in November, 1031, but four months after the death of Robert, may perhaps have been assembled at the request of the dying monarch, desirous of redeeming his own sins with the vicarious penance of his subjects. It addressed itself vigorously to eradicating the evil by a comprehensive series of measures, admirably adapted to the end in view. Priests, deacons, and subdeacons were forbidden to have wives or concubines, and all such consorts were ordered to be dismissed at once and forever. Those who refused obedience were to be degraded to the rank of lectors or chanters, and in future no ecclesiastic was to be permitted to take either wife or concubine. A vow of chastity was commanded as a necessary prerequisite to assuming the subdiaconate, and no bishop was to ordain a candidate without exacting from him a promise to take neither wife nor concubine. Children of the clergy in orders, born during the ministry of their parents, were pronounced incapable of entering the church, in justification of which was cited the provision of the municipal law which incapacitated illegitimates from receiving inheritance or bearing witness in court; but those who were born after their fathers had been reduced to the condition of laymen were not to be considered as the children of ecclesiastics.[439]

Nothing could be more reasonable than all this, considered from the high-church stand-point, and nothing better adapted to effect the object in view. All that was wanting was the enforcement of the legislation—and laws, when opposed to the spirit of the age, are not apt to be enforced. How much was really gained by the united efforts of the pope, the emperor, and the Gallican hierarchy can readily be gathered from a few out of innumerable incidents afforded by the history of the period.

The able and energetic, though unscrupulous, Benedict VIII. was no more, and the great House of Tusculum, which ruled the Eternal City, had filled the chair of St. Peter with a worthless scion of their stock, as though to declare their contempt for the lofty pretensions of the Apostolic Episcopate. A fit descendant of the infamous Marozia and Alberic, Benedict IX., a child of ten years old at the time of his elevation in 1032, grew up in unrestrained license, and shocked even the dull sensibilities of a gross and barbarous age by the scandals of his daily life.[440] The popular appreciation of his character is shown by the legend of his appearing after death to a holy man, in the figure of a bear, with the ears and tail of an ass, and declaring that, as he had lived in bestiality, so he was destined to wear the form of a beast and to suffer fiery torments until the Day of Judgment, after which he was to be plunged, body and soul, into the fathomless pit of hell.[441] When the Vicegerent of God, the head of the Christian church, was thus utterly depraved, the prospect of reforming the corruption of the clergy was not promising, and the good work was not likely to be prosecuted with vigor.

Nor were the members of the hierarchy unworthy of their superior. We hear of Rainbaldo, Bishop of Fiesole, who, not contented with numerous concubines, had publicly married a wife, and whose children were established as a wide-spread and powerful family—and, what is perhaps more remarkable, this dissolute prelate was gifted with the power of working miracles.[442] The bishops, indeed, at this period, were still rather warrior nobles than Christian ministers. Bisantio, the good Bishop of Bari, is praised quite as much for his terrible prowess in battle as for his pious benevolence and munificence; and on his death, in 1035, his flock chose a military official as his successor.[443]

Descending in the scale, we may instance the priest Marino, who, though he lived openly with his wife, was a noted miracle-worker. Among quaint wonders wrought by him it is recorded that water rendered holy by his blessing, when sprinkled over the cornfields, had the power of driving away all caterpillars and other noxious insects. His child, Eleuchadio, was a most venerable man, who subsequently, as abbot of the monastery of the Virgin at Fiano, won the esteem and respect of even the stern Damiani himself.[444] In fact, the pious Desiderius, Abbot of Monte Casino, better known as pope under the name of Victor III., declares that throughout Italy, under the pontificate of Benedict, all orders, from bishops down, without shame or concealment, were publicly married and lived with their wives as laymen, leaving their children fully provided for in their wills; and what rendered the disgrace more poignant was the fact that the scandal was greatest in Rome itself, whence the light of religion and discipline had formerly illuminated the Christian world.[445] Another contemporary writer asserts that this laxity prevailed throughout the whole of Latin Christendom, sacerdotal marriage being everywhere so common that it was no longer punished as unlawful, and scarcely even reprehended.[446]

In becoming thus universal and tacitly permitted it was not incompatible with the most fervent piety; and though it may be an evidence of hierarchical disorganization, it can no longer be considered as indicating of itself a lowered standard of morals in the ministers of the church. This is forcibly illustrated in the case of St. Procopius, selected by Duke Ulric of Bohemia as the first abbot of the monastery of Zagow. He was regularly bred to the church under the care of Bishop Quirillus, and was noted for the rectitude of his deportment in the priesthood; yet we learn that he was married during this period, when we are told that, on being disgusted with the hollow vanities of the world, he abandoned wife and friends for the solitude of a hermit’s cave. Here an accidental meeting with Duke Ulric, while hunting, led to the foundation of Zagow and to the installation of Procopius as its head.[447]

Silently the church seemed to acquiesce in the violation of her canons, until, at length, she appeared content if her ministers would satisfy themselves with reputable marriage and avoid the grosser scandals. When Ulric, Abbot of Tegernsee, about 1041, deplored the evil influence of a priest who had two wives living, he seems to have felt that lawful marriage might be tolerated, but that polygamy was of evil example in a Christian pastor.[448] So when Albert the Magnificent, Archbishop of Hamburg, was accustomed to exhort his clergy to continence and to shun the pestiferous society of women, his worldly wisdom prompted him to add that, if they were unequal to the effort, they should at least keep unsullied the bonds of marriage and should live “si non caste, tamen caute.”[449]

If irregularities such as these existed, they are not justly imputable to the church itself. It can scarcely be a matter of wonder if the clergy, in assimilating themselves to the laity as regards the liberty of wedlock, should also have adopted the license which in that lawless age rendered the marriage-tie a slender protection for the weakness of woman. Though it was indissoluble according to the teachings of religion, yet the church, which at that time was the only protector of the feeble against the strong, had not acquired the commanding authority which subsequently enabled it to enforce its decrees everywhere and on all occasions. If, under a vigorous pope, the sentence of excommunication had been able to frighten a superstitious monarch like Robert the Pious, yet the pontiffs of the House of Tusculum were not men to trouble themselves, or to be successful had they made the attempt, to rectify the wrongs perpetrated in every obscure baronial castle or petty hamlet in Europe. The isolation and independence of the feudal system made every freeman, so to speak, the arbiter of his own actions. The wife whose charms ceased to gratify the senses of her husband, or whose temper threatened to disturb his equanimity, stood little chance of retaining her position, if an opportunity offered of replacing her to advantage, unless she was fortunate in having kindred able to resent the wrong which the church and the law were powerless to prevent or to punish.[450] If, then, the clergy occasionally indulged in similar practices, the evil is not attributable to the license of marriage which they had usurped. That license had, at all events, borne some fruits of good, for, during its existence, we hear somewhat less of the system of concubinage so prevalent before and after this period, and there is no authentic indication of the nameless horrors so suggestively intimated by the restrictions on the residence of relatives enjoined in the frequent canons promulgated at the close of the ninth century.

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It is not to be supposed, however, that the race of ascetics was extinct. Amid the license which prevailed in every class, there were still some men who, disgusted with the turbulent and dissolute world, despairing of salvation among the temptations and trials of active life or the sloth and luxury of the monastic establishments, sought the path to heaven in solitude and maceration. Such men could not but look with detestation on the worldly priests who divided their thoughts between their sacred calling and the cares of an increasing household, and who profaned the unutterable mysteries of the altar with hearts and hands not kept pure from the lusts of the flesh.

Prominent among these holy anchorites was S. Giovanni Gualberto, who fled from the snares of the world to the forests of Camaldoli, where his austerities, his holiness, and his miracles soon attracted crowds of disciples, who formed a numerous community of humble imitators of his virtues. Restoring in its strictness the neglected Rule of Benedict, his example and his teaching wrought conviction, and the order of monks which he founded and carried with him to the peaceful shades of Vallombrosa became renowned for its sanctity and purity. Thus withdrawn by the will of heaven from the selfish egotism of a hermit’s existence, he labored earnestly to reform the laxity of priestly life in general, and his success was most encouraging. Moved by his admonitions, self-indulgent clerks abandoned wives and mistresses, devoted themselves to the performance of their sacred functions, or sought in monastic seclusion to make atonement for their past excesses.[451]

Though it may well be supposed that Gualberto was not unassisted in his efforts, yet all such individual exertions, dependent upon persuasion alone, could be but limited in their influence and temporary in their results. Reform, to be universal and permanent, required to be authoritative in its character and to proceed from above downward. The papacy itself must cease to be a scandal to Christendom, and must be prepared to wield the awful force of its authority, seconded by the moral weight of its example, before disorders so firmly rooted could be attacked with any hope of success. In 1044, Benedict IX. was driven out of Rome by a faction of rebels or patriots, who elected Silvester III. as pontiff in his place. A sudden revolution sent Silvester into exile, and brought Benedict back, who, to complete the confusion, sold the papal dignity to a new aspirant, known as Gregory VI. The transaction was not one which could decently be recognized by the church, and Benedict was held incapable of thus transferring the allegiance of Christendom or of depriving himself of his position. There were thus three popes, whose conflicting claims to reverence threw all Europe into the doubt and danger of schism, nor could the knotty question be solved by the power of distracted Italy. A more potent judge was required, and the decision was referred, as a matter of course, to the sagacious and energetic Emperor, Henry the Black, whose success in repressing the turbulence of the empire, and whose sincere reverence for the church gave reasonable promise of a happy solution of the tangled problem.[452] His proceeding was summary. The three competitors were unceremoniously dismissed, and Henry filled the vacancy thus created by the appointment of Suidger, Bishop of Bamberg, who assumed the name of Clement II.

Henry III. was moved by a profound conviction that a thorough and searching reform was vitally necessary to the church. The conscientious severity of his character led him to have little toleration for the abuses and disorders which were everywhere so painfully apparent. How far his views were in advance of those generally entertained, even by ecclesiastical dignitaries, was clearly manifested as early as 1042, when Gebhardt, Bishop of Ratisbon, urged the claims of his favorite arch-priest Cuno for the vacant see of Eichstedt. Henry refused on the ground that Cuno was the son of a priest, and therefore by the established canons ineligible to the position. The reason, though unanswerable, was so novel that Gebhardt refused to accept it as the true one, and Henry, to pacify him, promised to nominate any other one of the Ratisbon clergy whom Gebhardt might select. The choice fell upon a young and unknown man, also named Gebhardt, whose abilities, brought into notice thus accidentally, rendered him afterwards more conspicuous as Pope Victor II.[453]

Henry did not neglect the opportunity now afforded him of carrying into effect his reformatory views, and in his selection of a pontiff he was apparently influenced by the conviction that the Italian clergy were too hopelessly corrupt for him to expect from them assistance in his plans. Clement exchanged with him promises of mutual support in the arduous undertaking. We have nothing to do with the most crying evil; the one first vigorously attacked, and the one which was productive of the greatest real detriment to the church—simony. That was everywhere open and avowed. From the blessing of the priest to the nomination for a primacy, every ecclesiastical act was the subject of bargain and sale, reduced in many places to a regular scale of prices.[454] To remove this scandal, Clement set vigorously to work, and soon found an united opposition which promised little for the success of the undertaking. He was doubtless sincere, but he was clearly alone in his struggle with the fierce Italian prelates, who were resolved not to abandon the emoluments and indulgences to which they had grown accustomed, and the result of his efforts did not fulfil the expectations of the more sanguine aspirants for the purification of the church. Even his patron the emperor appears to have doubted his earnestness in the cause, for we find Henry not only addressing him a letter urging him to fresh exertion, but intrusting it to Peter Damiani, with a command to present it in person, and to use all his powers of exhortation to stimulate the flagging zeal of the pope. Damiani refused to leave his hermitage even at the imperial mandate, but he enclosed the missive in one of his own, deploring the unhealed wounds of the church, recapitulating the shortcomings of Clement, and goading him to fresh efforts, in a style which savored little of the reverence due to the Vicegerent of God.[455] The pontifical crown was evidently not a wreath of roses. Clement sank under its weight, and died October 9th, 1047, in less than ten months after he had accepted the perilous dignity.

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St. Peter Damiani, who thus introduces himself to our notice, was one of the remarkable men of the epoch. Born about the year 988 at Ravenna, of a noble but decayed family, and the last of a numerous progeny, he owed his life to a woman of the very class to the extirpation of which he devoted all the energies of his prime. His mother, worn out in the struggle with poverty, regarded his birth with aversion, refused to suckle the infant saint, and neglected him until his forlorn and emaciated condition awoke the compassion of a female retainer, the wife of a priest, who remonstrated with the unfeeling parent until she succeeded in arousing the sense of duty and restored to existence the little sufferer, who was destined to bring unnumbered woes to all who were of her condition.[456] His early years are said to have been passed as a swineherd, till the opportunity for instruction offered itself, which he eagerly embraced. Retiring at length from the world, he joined the disciples of St. Romuald, who practised the strictest monastic life, either as monks or hermits, at Avellana, near Agubio. Immuring himself there in the desert, his austerities soon gained for him the reputation of preëminent sanctity, and led to his election as prior of the brotherhood. Gifted by nature with an intellect of unusual strength, informed with all the learning of the day, his stern asceticism, his dauntless spirit, and the uncompromising force of his zeal brought him into notice and marked him as a fitting instrument in the cause of reform. Occasionally, at the call of his superiors, he left his beloved retreat to do battle with the hosts of evil, returning with renewed zest to the charms of solitude, until, in 1057, Stephen IX. forced him to accept the cardinalate and bishopric of Ostia—the highest dignity in the Roman court. The duties of his episcopate, however, conflicted with his monastic fervor, and after a few years he rendered up the pastoral ring and staff and again returned to Avellana, where he died in 1072, full of years and honors. His position and authority can best be estimated from the terms employed by Alexander II., who, when sending him on an important mission to France, described him as next in influence to himself in the Roman church, and the chief support of the Holy See.[457]

With a nature ardent and combative, worked up to the highest pitch of ascetic intolerance by the introspective musings of his cell, it may readily be conceived that the corruptions of the church filled him with warm indignation and fierce desire to restore it to its pristine purity. To this holy cause he devoted the last half of his life, and was always ready, with tongue and pen, at the sacrifice of his dearly prized solitude, to further the great movement on which he felt that the future of Christianity depended. The brief hopes excited by the promises of Clement and Henry were speedily quenched by the untimely death of the German pontiff, and the most sanguine might well despair at seeing the odious Benedict IX. reinstated as pope. But the emperor was in earnest, and listened willingly to the cry of those who besought him not to leave his good work unfinished. Nine brief months saw Benedict again a wanderer, and another German prelate installed in his place. Poppo of Brixen, however, enjoyed his new dignity, as Damasus II., but twenty-one days, when he fell a martyr to the cause, perishing miserably, either through the insalubrious heats of a Roman summer, or the hidden vindictiveness of Italian party rage. It required some courage to accept the honorable but fatal post, and six months elapsed ere a worthy candidate could be found. Henry’s choice this time fell upon Bruno of Toul, a prelate to whom admiring biographers ascribe every virtue and every qualification. As Leo IX. he ascended the pontifical throne in February, 1049, and he soon gave ample evidence of the sincerity with which he intended to carry out the views of the puritans whom he represented.

It was significant that he took with him to Rome the monk Hildebrand, lately released from the service of his master Gregory VI., who had died in his German exile, restored by a miracle at his death to the honors of which he had been adjudged unworthy while living.[458] Still more significant was the fact that Leo entered Rome, not as pope, but as a barefooted pilgrim, and that he required the empty formality of an election within the city, as though the nomination of the emperor had given him no claim to his high office. Whether this was the result of a voice from heaven, as related by the papal historians,[459] or whether it was done at the suggestion of the high-churchman Hildebrand, it showed that the new pontiff magnified his office, and felt that the line of distinction between the clerk and the layman was to be sharply drawn and vigorously defended.

Damiani lost no time in stimulating the stranger to the duties expected of him by the party of reform. From the retreat of Avellana he addressed to Leo an essay, which is the saddest of all the sad monuments bequeathed to us by that age of desolation. With cynical boldness he develops the frightful excesses epidemically prevalent among the cloistered crowds of men, attributable to the unnatural restraints imposed upon the passions of those unfitted by nature or by training to control themselves; and his laborious efforts to demonstrate the propriety of punishing the guilty by degradation show how hideous was the laxity of morals which was disposed to regard such crimes with indulgence.[460] Like the nameless horrors of the Penitentials, it is the most convincing commentary on the system which sought to enforce an impossible exaltation of purity on the ministers of a religion whose outward formalism had absorbed its internal life.[461]

Leo IX. was not long in manifesting his intentions, and his first point of attack was chosen with some skill, the ecclesiastical rank of the victim and his want of power rendering him at once a striking example and an easy sacrifice. Dabralis, Archbishop of Salona (or Spalatro) in Dalmatia, was married and lived openly with his wife. Leo sent a legate to investigate and punish. Called before a synod, Dabralis could not or deigned not to deny his guilt, but boldly justified it, as the woman was his lawful wife, and he instanced the customs of the Greek church in his defence. This only aggravated his guilt, and he was promptly degraded forever.[462]

Leaving, for a time, the Italian church for subsequent efforts at reformation, Leo undertook a progress throughout Northern Europe, for the purpose of restoring the neglected discipline of those regions. Before the year of his installation had expired, in November, 1049, we find him presiding with the emperor at a council in Mainz, where the simony and marriage of the clergy were condemned under severe penalties.[463] That the influence thus brought to bear had some effect, at least in externals, is shown by the courtly Albert of Hamburg, who, on returning from the council to his see, revived a forgotten regulation of his predecessors, by virtue of which the women of ecclesiastics were ordered to live outside of the towns, in order to avoid public scandal.[464] A few weeks before, in France, Leo had presided over a national council at Rheims, where his vigorous action against simony caused numerous vacancies in the hierarchy. The records and canons of this council contain no allusions to the subject of marriage or concubinage, but it is altogether improbable that they escaped attention, for they were indulged in without concealment by all classes of ecclesiastics, and some subsequent writers assert that they were rigorously prohibited by the council, but that the injunctions promulgated were unavailing.[465]

Returning to the South, the Easter of 1051 beheld a council assembled at Rome for the purpose of restoring discipline. Apparently, the Italian prelates were disposed to exercise considerable caution in furthering the wishes of their chief, for they abstained from visiting their indignation on the guilty priests, and directed their penalties against the unfortunate females. In the city itself these were declared to be enslaved, and were bestowed on the cathedral church of the Lateran, while all bishops throughout Christendom were desired to apply the rule to their own dioceses, and to seize the offending women for the benefit of their churches.[466] The atrocity of this legislation against the wives of priests is all the more noteworthy when contrasted with the tenderness shown to worse crimes committed by men whose high position only rendered their guilt the more heinous. At this council, Gregory, Bishop of Vercelli, was convicted of what, by the rules of the church, was considered as incest—an amour with a widow betrothed to his uncle. For this aggravated offence he was merely excommunicated, and when, soon after, he presented himself in Rome, he was restored to communion on his simple promise to perform adequate penance.[467]

The reformatory zeal of Leo and of the monastic followers of Damiani was thus evidently not seconded by the Italian church. A still more striking proof of this was afforded by the attempt to hold a council at Mantua early in 1053. The prelates who dreaded the result conspired to break it up. A riot was provoked between their retainers and the papal domestics; the latter, taken unawares and speedily overpowered, fled to the council-chamber for safety, and Leo, rushing to the door to protect them, was in imminent danger from the arrows and stones which hurtled thickly around him.[468] The reckless plot succeeded, and the council dispersed in undignified haste. Whether Leo was disgusted with his want of success and convinced of the impracticability of the undertaking, or whether his attention was thenceforth absorbed by his unlucky military operations against the rapidly augmenting Norman power in Southern Italy, it is not easy now to ascertain: suffice it to say that no further indications remain of any endeavor to carry out the reforms so eagerly commenced in the first ardor of his pontificate. The consistent Damiani opposed the warlike aspirations of the pontiff, but Leo persisted in leading his armies himself. A lost battle threw Leo into the power of the hated Normans, when, after nine months, he returned to Rome to die, in April, 1054, and to be reverenced as a saint after death by those who had withstood him during life in every possible manner.[469]

It is not easy to repress a smile on seeing Leo, who had been so utterly unable to enforce the canons of the Latin church at home, seriously undertaking to procure their adoption in Constantinople. From his prison, in January, 1054, he sent Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida on a mission to convert the Greek church. There is extant a controversy between the legate and Nicetas Pectoratus, a learned Greek abbot, on the various points in dispute. I cannot profess to decide which of the antagonists had the advantage on the recondite questions of the use of unleavened bread, the Sabbath fasts, the calculation of Easter, &c., but the contrast between the urbanity of the Greek and the coarse vituperation of the Latin is strikingly suggestive as a tacit confession of defeat on the part of the latter. In view of the frightful immorality of the Italian clergy, there is something peculiarly ludicrous in the mingled anger, contempt, and abhorrence with which Humbert alludes to the marriage of the Greek clergy, which, as he declares, renders their church the synagogue of Satan and the brothel of Balaam and Jezebel, with other equally courteous and convincing arguments. Humbert attributes priestly marriage altogether to the heresy of the Nicolites, and lays down the law on the subject as inexorably as though it were at the time observed in his own church.[470]

After an interval of about a year, the line of German pontiffs was continued in the person of Gebhardt, Bishop of Eichstedt (Victor II.), whose appointment by the emperor was owing in no small degree to the influence of Hildebrand—an influence which was daily making itself more felt. Installed in the pontifical seat by Godfrey, Duke of Tuscany, his efforts to continue the reformation commenced by his predecessors aroused a stubborn resistance. There may be no foundation for the legend of his being saved by a miracle from a sacramental cup poisoned by a vengeful subdeacon, nor for the rumors that his early death was hastened by the recalcitrant clergy who sought to escape the severity of his discipline. There is some probability in the stories, however, for, during his short pontificate, interrupted by a lengthened stay in Germany and the perpetual vicissitudes of the Neapolitan troubles, he yet found time to hold a synod at Florence, where he degraded numerous prelates for simony and licentiousness; but, whether true or false, the existence of the reports attests at once the sincerity of his zeal and the difficulties of the task.[471]

His death in July, 1057, was followed after but a few days’ interval by the election of Frederic, Duke of Lorraine—the empire having passed in 1056 from the able hands of Henry III. to the feeble regency of his empress, Agnes, as guardian of the unfortunate infant Henry IV.—thus releasing the Roman clergy from the degrading dictation of a Teutonic potentate. That Frederic should have abandoned the temptations and ambitions of his lofty station to embrace the austerities of monastic life in the abbey of Monte Casino, is a sufficient voucher that he would not draw back from the work thus far hopelessly undertaken by his predecessors. Notwithstanding the severity of the canons promulgated during the previous decade, and the incessant attempts to enforce them, Rome was still full of married priests, and the battle had to be recommenced, as though nothing had yet been done. Immediately on his installation, as Stephen IX., he addressed himself unshrinkingly to the task. For four months, during the most unhealthy season, he remained in Rome, calling synod after synod, and laboring with both clergy and people to put an end to such unholy unions,[472] and he summarily expelled from the church all who had been guilty of incontinence since the prohibitions issued in the time of Leo.[473] One case is related of a contumacious priest whose sudden death gave him the opportunity of striking terror into the hearts of the reckless, for the mutilated funeral rites which deprived the hardened sinner of the consolation of a Christian burial it was hoped would prove an effectual warning to his fellows.[474] Feeling the necessity of support in these thankless labors, he forced Damiani to leave the retirement of the cloistered shades of Avellana, and to bear, as Bishop of Ostia, his share of the burden in the contest which he had done so much to provoke—but it was all in vain.

In little more than half a year Stephen found refuge from strife and turmoil in the tomb. The election of his successor, Gerard, Bishop of Florence, was the formal proclamation that the church was no longer subjected to the control of the secular authority. January 18th, 1058, saw the power of the emperor defied, and the gauntlet thrown for the quarrel which for three centuries was to plunge Central and Southern Europe in turmoil and bloodshed. Henry III. had labored conscientiously to rescue the papacy from the disgrace into which it had fallen. By removing it from the petty sphere of the counts of Tusculum and the barons of the Campagna, and by providing for it a series of highminded and energetic pontiffs, he had restored its forfeited position, and indeed had conferred upon it an amount of influence which it had never before possessed. His thorough disinterestedness and his labors for its improvement had disarmed all resistance to the exercise of his power, but when that power passed into the hands of an infant but five years old, it was natural that the church should seek to emancipate itself from subjection; and if almost the first use made of its new-found prerogatives was to crush the hand that had enabled it to obtain them, we must not tax with ingratitude those who were undoubtedly penetrated with the conviction that they were only vindicating the imprescriptible rights of the church, and that to them was confided the future of religion and civilization.

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