Chapter I: The Moral Condition of the Medieval Church

Although it has been said of human nature that the more it changes the more it is the same thing, it is yet true that at different epochs it is actuated by widely different ideas. The underlying passions are the same, but the forces evoking them vary so greatly that sometimes, as in considering the history of the Middle Ages, we seem to be concerned with beings from another planet. One of the most powerful of these forces is religion; and, though religion in the abstract is assumed to bring out all that is best in human nature, it has in the past only too frequently appealed to and stimulated its baser elements. The evil is due partly to erroneous religious teaching, but probably still more to the obstinate imperfection of the material on which religion has to work. The vast majority of human beings are even now incapable of appreciating and practising an absolutely pure religion, and probably no such religion has ever yet had a fair trial. Dogmatic systems there have been in abundance, but these are not to be identified with religion. It has been one of the most serious drawbacks to the claims of historic Christianity that, disregarding the spirit of its own moral precepts, it has treated religion as a mere system of belief and ceremonial observance, which has defeated the object it was intended to promote.

In two respects organized Christianity has been a huge mistake. It has misunderstood the nature of the salvation it proffered, representing it as rescue from endless physical torment in another state of existence instead of moral victory in this. It has made an assumed correctness of intellectual belief instead of right conduct the condition of this salvation, with the inevitable consequence that ceremony has usurped the place of virtue, and religion has become a matter of externals. And its claim to Divine inspiration and support led naturally to a demand for obedience so complete that no room was left for liberty of opinion and mental expansion. The claim to Divine inspiration involved the existence of a spiritual hierarchy with ever-growing demands and ever-increasing power. Refusal to obey these demands necessarily implied disbelief in the doctrines underlying them, of which doctrines the hierarchy was the sole expositor. Thus every opinion which deviated from the authorized view became heretical, and, heresy being an impious opposition to the Divine will and to all that was good and true, deserved the severest repression. From this dogmatic standard, which the ignorant were unable to question, arose that terrible system of religious persecution which has covered organized Christianity with indelible shame. The present inquiry is not concerned with the truth or falsehood of the Church’s theological basis, but only with its effects. The general conditions of the Middle Ages being what they were, those effects were in a sense inevitable, and the moral condemnation which must be visited upon the medieval Church applies less to individuals than to the system which produced them--a system which was incompatible not only with the rights of individuals, but with the progress of humanity in civilization and happiness.

What, then, was the moral condition during the Middle Ages of the organization which made these extravagant claims to supremacy? To us who live in the twentieth century it may appear very plain that priestly domination could not be favourable to improvement in morals or in knowledge. Prevent people from thinking, and you prevent them from improving. They lose the desire to improve; they become incapable of improvement; they neither know nor care for the pleasures of knowledge; they relapse into a state resembling that of animals. Can it be supposed that this has no effect upon their morals? And the class which puts forward the claims in question becomes equally debased. Selfishness, ignorance, and cruelty become as marked in the shepherds as in the flocks they are supposed to lead, with the additional vice of a tyrannical arrogance born of class privilege and the claim to superhuman authority.

The religious extortion that went on impoverished the people and demoralized the clergy. After King John’s surrender to the Pope, England was bled for the benefit of foreign ecclesiastics to the extent of thrice the income of the Crown. Throughout Europe the administration of justice was shockingly corrupt, and was not improved by the Papal practice of granting letters authorizing the exercise of judicial functions by any one who could pay the fees. Not only were these letters frequently forged, but it was easy for unprincipled persons to pretend that they possessed them, and such was the danger of raising objections that few of the victims dared to dispute their validity. In Rome itself there was a factory for the production of these interesting forgeries; but, though it was suppressed by Innocent III, the practice continued, and to the people the consequences were the same whether the letters were genuine or false. With such a system it is not surprising that the Bishops fleeced their own flocks with little scruple.

Excommunication was imposed for trifling offences; but, however unjustly, the victim had to pay for being reconciled to holy Church. The magnificent abbeys and cathedrals which are the glories of architecture were to some extent an expression of religious faith, but even more of the clerical pride which reared them with money exacted from the poor. Preaching was almost wholly neglected, and this was one of the reasons why heresy became formidable. Parish priests could not preach without special licence from the Bishops whose prerogative preaching was, and by whom it was neglected because they were engrossed with worldly cares and pleasures and warlike duties. The Lord Bishop was first and foremost a man of war, especially in the thirteenth century. A story is told about the Bishop of Beauvais, one of the most ruthless of these warriors for Christ, who, when captured by the English, complained to the Pope that his privileges as a Churchman had been violated. In reply to the remonstrance of His Holiness, Richard I sent him the coat of mail in which the Bishop had been captured, with the Scriptural inquiry: “Know whether it be thy son’s coat or no.” Benefices were openly sold, or bestowed upon children, seven years being the minimum age fixed by some Popes for the clerical function. The abuses that grew out of the system of pluralities, the exactions connected with tithes, confessions, absolutions, marriages, funerals, were endless, a large part of the Church’s wealth being derived from legacies which the fear of hell prompted the dying to leave at death or frequently to hand over during life.

In 1170 a Papal decree was issued that wills were invalid unless made in the presence of a parish priest, and notaries were sometimes excommunicated for failure to comply with this condition. Nor did the dead escape the clerical maw. It was customary to leave money to the Church for masses for the repose of the soul, and to present oblations at the funeral. The corpse was the property of the parish, but the priest was often deprived of his privileges by a neighbouring monastery having induced the dying man to bequeath to it his remains. Hence arose the most unseemly squabbles for possession of the body--a rivalry further complicated by the rise of the Mendicant Orders and their bitter struggles for fees.

Even greater social evils resulted from the immunities from secular law which the clergy succeeded in gaining. The first of these was that worthless men were attracted to the Church, and did as they pleased under the shelter of its privileges. Malefactors habitually pleaded clerical rights; the Church, in a spirit of comradeship worthy of a better cause, as regularly took up their defence. Crime flourished, and the community suffered. Innocent III reinstated a Bishop of exceptionally bad character who had been imprisoned for rebellion against the King of Denmark, and decided that priests could not be arrested by laymen and brought before the episcopal court even when detected in gross crime. Under these conditions it was almost impossible for laymen to obtain justice, whether in regard to offences against person or offences against property. And, the clergy being the only educated class, their opportunities for exploiting the popular ignorance were abundant and fully utilized.

Monasteries were the fruit of good intentions, but, in spite of occasional examples to the contrary, soon became degraded to an extraordinary degree. Rome could easily be bribed to grant exemption from the jurisdiction of the Bishops, and the liberty of monks and nuns degenerated into the foulest licence. The abodes of religion were feudal castles, in which the monks lived as riotously as the barons, and waged private war with equal ferocity. As for the nunneries, many of them were notoriously no better than brothels. With these varied attractions, it is not surprising that the lawless found in the monastic life a congenial refuge; and many a robber baron and many a criminal temporarily weary of crime discovered a safe and easy way of gratifying his untamed passions. So little were the obligations of honesty observed that within the monasteries themselves the inmates had to take special precautions against theft by their fellows, each monk having to keep a wary eye on his own spoons, dishes, and bedclothes. The holy tramps who wandered about selling false relics and working false miracles became so great a nuisance that they were sometimes killed without mercy when detected in their frequent crimes.

The system of indulgences so carefully worked out by the Church produced the most various results throughout Europe. A death-bed gift to the Church atoned for an evil life; trifling religious observances were thought to secure not only remission of the pangs of Purgatory, but forgiveness of all sins committed after baptism. In short, all sin was condoned on the most favourable terms, and eternal salvation purchased for the price of a pair of boots. The bones or the dead bodies of saints were held to protect believers from all ills, and to ensure prosperity; even a single glance at the image of St. Christopher preserving one from disease or sudden death for the rest of the day. Some of the beliefs connected with the worship of the sacred wafer reveal a credulity which only carefully-fostered ignorance could render possible. A specimen wafer placed in a beehive to check disease among the bees was so highly appreciated by those intelligent insects that they built a little chapel around it, with windows, roof, and bell-tower all complete, and an altar inside, on which they reverently placed the wafer. A woman who crumbled a wafer over her cabbages to protect them from caterpillars was at once punished by incurable paralysis.

_Simony._

The scandals connected with the sale of indulgences are too well known to need description, but the universal prevalence of simony is less generally realized. Simony is defined as “giving or receiving, or intending to give or receive, anything temporal for anything spiritual.”[1] The term is derived from Simon Magus, who is stated in _Acts_ viii, 18, 19, to have offered St. Peter money for the privilege of communicating the Holy Ghost. This abuse formed one of the great scandals in the Church, especially in the thirteenth century, and was so deeply rooted that the efforts of reforming Pontiffs like Gregory VII produced little result. Less conscientious Popes were such notorious offenders that the venality of the Papal court became a byword, and some vicars of Christ amassed enormous private fortunes by this dubious means.

Simony was a heresy which came under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, and could not long have flourished had that efficient body determined to stamp it out. There is no record that the Inquisition ever even undertook a prosecution for simony; it was too profitable to the Roman Curia. From the highest to the lowest the Church was infected with this vice: there was scarcely a church in Christendom free from it, and Pope John XXII drew up a regular scale of absolutions for the most moderate fees. In order to pay the expenses of his soldiers and of his building operations, Boniface XI once dismissed suddenly all the prelates at his Court and many others, and then sold their places to the highest bidders, with the result that some of the ejected Bishops wandered about in a state of starvation. Newly appointed prelates were bled freely, and if the demands were not met they became simple priests once more. Boniface appointed as Bishops the men who were willing to pay the most liberally, archbishoprics commanding the high figure of 60,000 to 80,000 florins. Yet one of the great questions debated in the thirteenth century was the question whether it was possible for the Pope to commit simony! Every one knew that many Popes actually did commit an offence of which the evil effects were far reaching. If the love of money is not the root of all evil, it is the root of much, and its effects in the sphere of religion are peculiarly deplorable. The Papal Court was filled with a swarm of ecclesiastics greedy for preferment by any means whatever. When they obtained it they at once set to work to recoup themselves for the time spent and the bribes they had to give, by extorting money from their flocks, to the complete neglect of their spiritual duties. In the administration of justice ecclesiastics acquitted the guilty for bribes, and trumped up charges against the innocent, which had to be compounded for cash. A bishop who resided in his diocese was the exception that proved the rule. Men preferred to live under the tyranny of the baron rather than under the dangerous protection of the Church.

Money being the real qualification for the ministry of the Gospel, the priests were generally as illiterate as they were immoral. “They haunt the taverns and brothels, consuming time and substance in eating, drinking, and gambling; they quarrel, fight, and blaspheme, and hasten to the altar from the embraces of their concubines.”[2] The higher clergy, who could readily purchase exemptions, considered themselves free to indulge in every kind of excess; the monks were licentious and unruly vagabonds, who carefully avoided keeping their vows; the mendicants, who pretended to greater strictness, gave themselves up to every kind of fleshly indulgence; the morals of nunneries were such that to join one was the same thing as becoming a public prostitute. A Jew is said to have become convinced that Christianity must be of God, since it continued to exist in spite of the wickedness of the clergy. The visions of St. Birgitta and the vehement warnings of St. Catherine of Siena were fruitless to stem the torrent of iniquity. Nearly the whole Church being in this condition, reform from within was hopeless, as indeed was stated in 1437 by a Dominican bishop. Exaggeration may be suspected, but that it was not easy to exaggerate the following incident will show. “In 1459 there died at Arras at the age of eighty Nicaise le Vasseur, canon and head of the Chapter of Arras. He not only had daughters and committed incest with them, but also with a granddaughter whom he had by one of them. Yet so blunted was the moral sense of Church and people that, as we are told, this monster officiated _très honorablement_ in Divine service on all feasts and holidays, and the only comment of the chronicler is that he did it most becomingly. When in 1474 news of the death of Sixtus IV was received in Rome with a pæan of joy, people commented not so much upon his selling benefices to the highest bidder and his other devices for extorting money as upon the manner in which he rewarded the boys who served his unnatural lusts by granting to them rich bishoprics and archbishoprics.”[3] When Pope Alexander VI was reproached with Papal connivance with crime, he is said to have made the cynical reply: “God does not desire the death of a sinner, but that he should pay, and live.”[4]

That the Church should have made its principal aim correctness of belief (or rather obedience to its authority), and purity of life a secondary consideration, involved the policy of religious persecution systematically followed by the Inquisition. Except as a source of revenue, crime was of little consequence. Virtuous heretics were exterminated, and the guilty orthodox absolved from the worst crimes, in the name of Christ. A Flemish chronicler relates in 1379 “that it would be impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries, blasphemies, adulteries, quarrels, brawls, murder, rapine, thieving, robbery, whoredom, debauchery, avarice, oppression of the poor, drunkenness, and similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with the fact that in the territory of Ghent within the space of ten months there occurred no less than 1,400 murders committed in bagnios, brothels, gambling houses, taverns, and other similar places.”[5] In the Italian Church there was no devotion, in the laity neither faith nor morals. Factions filled the streets with blood, the roads were closed by robbers, the seas swarmed with pirates. “Parents slew with rejoicing their children who chanced to be of the opposite faction.”[6] Æneas Sylvius wrote in 1453: “Whether I look upon the deeds of princes or of prelates I find that all have sunk, all are worthless.... Execration and falsehood and slaughter and theft and adultery are spread among you, and you add blood to blood..... There is no shame in crime, for you sin so openly and shamelessly that you seem to take delight in it.”[7]

The flagrant immorality of many of the Bishops, and the frequency with which they took part in war, were even in rude times deemed unbecoming to their profession; but the difficulty of getting them punished by any ecclesiastical court was so great that in most cases the offenders could continue to tread the primrose path of dalliance without fear of retribution. About the worst of these clerical rakes was the Archbishop of Besançon, who in 1198 was accused of perjury, simony, and incest. He was formally indicted by his Chapter, but the Pope, on the authority of the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery, charitably dismissed the charge with a caution. The hardened old sinner continued his gay career for sixteen years, but was at length driven from his see by the townspeople. It took ten years to get rid of another prelate, a Bishop of Toul, and a few years later he was killed by his uncle in revenge for a murder. This gentleman’s favourite mistress was a daughter of his own, the mother being a nun.

Whatever were the causes of this appalling state of things, it is difficult to reconcile it with the claim that the Christian Church is a Divine institution. Yet it would not be true to say that no virtue existed. Even in the Church there were good and sincere men who strove earnestly to check the tide of iniquity. And those whom the Church hounded to death far surpassed it in purity of life. The poor persecuted heretics were noted for their blameless conduct, their singular industry, their self-sacrifice and endurance, which formed a lesson to the orthodox. “Ignorant and toiling men and women--peasants, mechanics, and the like--dimly conscious that the system of society was wrong, that the commands of God were perverted or neglected, that humanity was capable of higher development if it could but find and follow the Divine Will; striving, each in his humble sphere, to solve the inscrutable and awful problems of existence, to secure in tribulation his own salvation, and to help his fellows in the arduous task--these forgotten martyrs of the truth drew from themselves alone the strength which enabled them to dare and to endure martyrdom.”[8] The earnest and devoted ministers of the Church, the virtuous and humble believers among the laity, were as drops in the ocean of evil; and it was popularly believed that Antichrist was ruling in the world, and that the awful Day of Judgment was at hand.

_Clerical Celibacy._

The great question whether priests should or should not be permitted to marry caused the deepest agitation in the Church for many hundreds of years. As early as the fourth and fifth centuries the Church decided it in the negative, but this and many later prohibitions were nullified by the liberty which it allowed in practice. The early Church had so great a horror of the matrimonial state that some theologians seriously doubted whether the salvation of married persons came within the possibilities of the Divine scheme.

During the eleventh century the Church succeeded, after long and violent struggles, in enforcing upon its priesthood at least a nominal celibacy, but it did not succeed in improving the ecclesiastical morals. As the celibate party were the more fanatical, and usually applied to priests’ wives the term “concubines,” it was not easy to distinguish lawful or _quasi_-lawful unions from illicit connections. Anyhow, when priests found they could not marry, they generally had no hesitation in taking to themselves concubines, or sometimes a succession of paramours--a custom so commonly recognized that a layman confessing an illicit amour was forbidden to name his erring partner because it would give the priest an opportunity to exploit her frailty. Thus illicit connections on the part of priests were winked at, while marriage was forbidden--an excellent example of straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. This eccentric notion of morality led to horrible abuses. Pope Alexander II declined, in 1064, to deprive of communion a priest who had committed adultery with the wife of his father, and a little later reduced the penance imposed on another priest found guilty of incestuous relations with his own mother. The institution of matrimony afforded to the priesthood perpetual opportunities for exacting money. The remotest degree of blood relationship was found to be perilous, but ingenuity and cash overcame the difficulty. Bishops did not scruple to receive a tribute known as the “cullagium,” which enabled a “celibate” priest to solace his holy duties with wife or concubine. The difficulty remained acute until the fifteenth century, human nature having proved as rebellious as ever. It was only in 1414 that it was finally settled by the Council of Constance, the rigid moralists who formed that conclave being accompanied by an army of prostitutes. The attempt to enforce clerical celibacy, or, rather, the rule which required its observance, was a chief contributing cause of the scandalous state of ecclesiastical morals in the Middle Ages, as, indeed, is expressly stated by Alain Chartier, a French chronicler of the early fifteenth century.

In those Anglo-Saxon times, in which romancers have discovered a wealth of simple virtue, clerical chastity had many chinks in its armour. A Saxon chronicler of the eleventh century attributes the ruin of the kingdom to the vices of the clergy having drawn upon it the wrath of God. It was a common practice for priests to put away their wives, and live in open adultery with other women. A century later no improvement was perceptible, many of the clergy having two wives, and changing them at pleasure. An instance is recorded of the Abbess of Avesbury, whose recklessness in having three children procured her a life-pension, but was surpassed by the laxity of her nuns, who were dismissed from their “abode of love.” Giraldus Cambrensis relates that nearly all parish priests in England and Wales had companions who were indifferently regarded as wives or concubines. In Ireland matters were equally bad, the chief blame being naturally visited on the less guilty women. The condition of Scotland may be imagined from a single instance in the sixteenth century. A certain Prior--afterwards Bishop of Moray--once had a pleasant conversation with his gentlemen regarding the number of their mistresses, and chuckled in glee over the fact that, though the youngest man present, he had outdone them all. He rejoiced in twelve mistresses, of whom seven were the wives of other men. His achievement paled before that of Cardinal Pier-Leone, who used to make his visitations as Papal Legate accompanied by a concubine and by his children--who were also his sister’s.

Horrors like these were, it may be hoped, exceptional, but there is a vast mass of evidence proving that society as a whole, and the clerical element in particular, was morally in a condition that can scarcely be matched in history. A French writer of the nineteenth century, Abbé Helsen, alludes to the “ordinary custom” that when a priest’s servant “becomes pregnant and cannot be saved by a prudent absence he dismisses her, and takes another, perhaps younger and more attractive.”[9] In many convents the nuns abandoned themselves “to the most hideous licentiousness--those who were good-looking prostituting themselves for hire; those who were not so fortunate hiring men to gratify their passions, while the older ones acted as procuresses.”[10] In Spain, according to Pelayo, a fourteenth-century writer, the illegitimate children of priests were almost as numerous as those of the laity. Of Avignon, Petrarch says that “chastity was a reproach and licentiousness a virtue.” The aged priests were fouler in their wickedness than the younger, while with the Pontiff the vilest crimes were pastimes. And Petrarch claims to tell only part of the truth. Of all European countries the same story is told. Details concerning the French clergy of the eighth century are “unfit for publication” in the twentieth. In nunneries infanticide was common, and priests had to be forbidden to have mothers, aunts, or sisters living in their houses. The Archdeacon of Salzburg in 1175 lamented bitterly his complete failure to reform the clergy or prevent the ordination of priests who continued to live in adultery with the wives of other men; while four centuries later the German prelates were vigorously assailed for allowing such foulness as still existed in the Church. They excused themselves by pointing to the example set by the Pope. A specially culpable Spanish priest was charged in 1535 with blasphemy, theft, cheating, seduction, brothel-haunting, and other offences. He did not go unpunished. He was fined two ducats, the costs of his trial, and thirty days’ seclusion! A protest was made by the Senate of Rome in 1538 against the reforming efforts of Pius V on the ground that the compulsory celibacy of priests would make it impossible for the citizens to preserve the virtue of their wives and daughters. Peter Cantor and others in the twelfth century deplored the moral superiority of the laity; the same thing had been said in England as far back as the times of St. Dunstan; and the Beggars’ Petition of 1535 showed that the anomaly still existed more than four hundred years later.

It has been hinted that the Church made earnest efforts to reform its own members. But this is true only so far as its reputable heads were concerned. Marriage at its best had a taint of sin; its violation was a trifle; but the fulfilment of religious vows and observances was an obligation to which everything else must yield. To St. Peter Damiani marriage was a “frivolous and unmeaning ceremony”; an irregular celebration of Mass was a “horrible crime.” Sexual licence was a necessary evil, of much less importance than an infraction of ecclesiastical laws. Virtue indeed was dangerous when women were occasionally burnt because they refused to become the victims of priestly lust.[11] So late as 1801 it was argued in a tract published at Warsaw that marriage is incestuous and schismatic, and therefore worse than simple licentiousness.[12] Six centuries earlier the German Church had been described by Pope Gregory as “abandoned to lasciviousness, gluttony, and all manner of filthy living,” the clergy “committing habitually wickedness which laymen would abhor.”[13]

But the Church did its utmost to stamp out the evil! It did nothing of the kind. Its attempts to reform its servants were occasional, mischievously lenient, and sometimes insincere. Priests, being human beings, were not naturally worse than other human beings. But they formed part of a system which heaped upon them every kind of privilege and exposed them to every variety of temptation. A Bishop of Lausanne who in the thirteenth century tried his hand at reform had to flee for his life; another Bishop in Rome was murdered. In fifteenth-century Germany the Bishop of Paderborn strove desperately for seven years to purify the monasteries. After various attempts had been made to poison him, he was compelled to give up a task which the example of the Vicar of Christ made hopeless. Similar efforts made by St. Charles Borromeo in Milan ended in his failure and narrow escape from martyrdom. In England Cardinal Wolsey’s attempt to enforce a reforming Bull from Rome was frustrated by the notoriety of his own vices. The clergy in the public estimation were given over to a reprobate mind; not only were they immoral, but they squeezed from the people the money which the Pope exacted from them. In 1529 a bill was passed in the House of Lords for the reformation of the clergy, who showed their appreciation of it by a determined opposition.

According to Dean Milman, clerical depravity was general in the thirteenth century throughout all the principal European countries. A remarkable number of ecclesiastics were accused at the visitation of the Archbishop of Rouen in 1248 and 1249, but the tenderness of the Church was satisfied with light punishments, or no punishment at all, for serious crimes, while the imaginary sins of the heretic were visited with the most painful of all forms of death. Nor did the Archbishop’s rigour extend to the worst offences of the lower clergy. Milman refers to the case of the Bishop of Liège, who at a public banquet boasted that in less than two years he had had fourteen children.[14] It is related that when it was decreed that priests should dismiss their concubines Pope Innocent ordered the command to be withdrawn, as there was no sin in doing what was done by all priests.[15] In the thirteenth century the Council of Ratisbon lamented the scarcity of priests who led good lives, and so late as 1832 the Archbishop of Malines found it necessary to make a similar complaint.[16]

Not only were the Church’s thunders ineffective because the higher clergy could escape them, but the reasons for them failed, even in the Middle Ages, to command universal assent. Sin was condemned rather because it violated an ordinance than because it broke a Divine law, or because it injured society. Some canons of 1476 protested against crimes, not because of their wickedness, but because they might deprive the clergy of the privilege of exemption from the Bishops’ jurisdiction. A scuffle between three priests over a harlot that took place in a house of ill-fame was reprehended, not because of its disgraceful nature, but because it occurred on Ash Wednesday. The solicitation by priests of female penitents was a serious matter for the holy men if committed during the actual confession, otherwise it was a trifle. It was more convenient to punish the women. As late as 1707 the Sorbonne decided that if a woman insisted on denouncing a guilty priest she committed a mortal sin. Usually the Church contended that the personal character of the priest had nothing to do with the sanctity of his office--a doctrine of which unscrupulous men took full advantage. Thus was evolved a standard of morality which bore no relation to moral truth, and readily lent itself to perversion.

For many hundreds of years the Church was an open sore, which made thought a crime, purity an eccentricity, and progress a dream. From this festering mass heresy was born, crucified, and rose again.