Chapter III — The Social Life and Structure
§ 1 The Clergy, Regular and Secular
In a world so completely under priestly rule, the character of the priest was in general the image of his influence. Whatever good organized Christianity did was in virtue of the personal work of good men in holy orders; and it is comforting to believe that in all countries and in all ages there were some such, after the fashion of the “parson” in Chaucer. To such men, the priestly status might give a special power for righteousness. But seeing that in the average man righteousness is in the ratio of reflection on knowledge, there is no escape from the conclusion that in the Middle Ages most priests were poor moral forces. For their general ignorance is beyond doubt. The number who in a given district at a given time were unable to read Latin may be a matter for dispute; but it is clear that what they did read was as a rule merely distilled ignorance. And if we turn to the records of ecclesiastical legislation, we find constant evidence, for many centuries, of the laxity of priestly life in all grades.
To say nothing of the perpetual scandal about concubinage—an artificial form of sin, in itself no more decisive against a priest’s character than celibacy in its favour—there is in the canons of the councils a most significant repetition of vetoes on various lines of conduct which stand for a lack of single-mindedness, and of serious interest in moral tasks. Century after century, the bishops are found forbidding the clergy to tell fortunes, to practise magic, to get drunk, to commit perjury, to take usury, to swear, and to haunt taverns, as well as to keep concubines. At the same time many of the bishops themselves had to be perpetually admonished. Under Justinian we hear of two eastern bishops convicted of unnatural vice, and—the law as usual exceeding the crime—punished by mutilation. Throughout the Middle Ages, as to-day, the normal complaints against bishops are on the score of avarice, luxury, and worldliness; but drunkenness is not unheard of; and whatever might be said in councils as to concubinage, it was certain that bishops took at least as much liberty of life as popes and presbyters. So far as moral example went, then, the social influence of the priesthood was mostly on the wrong side, since its normal concubinage was a perpetual lesson in hypocrisy.
On this side, doubtless, the priests were no worse than other men; the trouble was that they set up to be better, and that the hierarchy was always seeking to keep up the repute of clerical sanctity by a claim to asceticism rather than by social beneficence. Thus they put it in the power of the “average sensual man” to convict of moral imposture a priesthood which, if free to marry, would have been much less vulnerable; and by constantly stressing self-denial on a wrong line they missed promoting self-control on right lines. The primary social needs of the Middle Ages were peace, civism, and cleanliness; and for none of these things did clerical teaching in general avail. On the contrary, it was in effect hostile to all three, since it made virtue consist in a right relation to the other world rather than to this, made religion a special ground for warfare, and made uncleanliness a meritorious form of “self-mortification,” which in the Middle Ages was about the last thing that could be truly said of it.
It is not to be forgotten, indeed, that among the monks or other clerical scholars of the Dark Ages was to be found most of what learning and philosophy survived. The reason was that men and youths with the studious instinct, averse to the brawling life around them, turned to the monasteries and monastic schools as their one refuge. But sloth and impotence equally turned thither; and where the stronger spirits could find a peaceful and useful life without, the sluggards failed. Monasteries were thus always half filled with men to whom their vows were irksome; and as women were at the same time frequently sent to convents against their will, nothing but an iron discipline could keep the professed order. Given an easy abbot or abbess, they became centres of scandal; and in the average they were homes of fairly well-fed idleness. But the full fatality of the case is seen only when we realize that their very successes, their provision of a dim retreat for many men and women of refined and unworldly type, worsened society by leaving the reproduction of the race to the grosser and harder natures.
The ostensible merit of monasteries, in the medieval period, was their almsgiving. Without endorsing the mercantilist impeachment of all such action, we are forced to recognize that theirs demoralized as many as it relieved. Of a higher order than mere almsgiving, certainly, was the earlier self-sacrificing service of the mendicant orders of friars, whose rise is one of the great moral phenomena of the Middle Ages. For a time, in the thirteenth century, the order of St. Francis in particular not only organized but greatly stimulated human devotion of the kind that, happily, is always quietly present somewhere; and the contrast between the humble beneficence of the earlier friars and the sleek self-seeking of the average secular priest at once accredited the former and discredited the latter. But the history of the mendicant friars as of the previous orders is a crowning proof of the impossibility of bettering society on a mere religious impulse, without social science.
Credit for holiness brought large gifts and legacies from well-meaning but ill-judging laymen and women; and nothing could prevent the enrichment of orders which had begun under special vows of poverty. Francis had expressly ruled that his friars should not on any pretext hold property, and should not even be able to profit by it through trustees; but the latter provision was annulled, and ere long the order was as well provided for as any. The better the financial footing, the more self-seekers entered; and these overruled the more single-minded. This was the law of development of every “self-denying” order of the Dark and Middle Ages, from the Benedictine monks to the Knights Templars. One of the most rigorously planned monasteries of the Middle Ages, that of the lonely Chartreuse, founded by St. Bruno late in the eleventh century, at length relaxed its austerities, and came latterly to be known as a wholesale manufactory of a liqueur—the distinction by which most men now know also the name of the Benedictines. In the end, the orders of monks and friars did something for scholarship and education, after the institution of “lay brothers,” who did the menial work, left the domini in certain orders, especially the Benedictine, free to devote themselves to learning; but socially they achieved nothing. When once they had acquired “foundations” they became plunderers instead of helpers of the poor, exacting from them gifts, selling them post-mortem privileges, taking the widow’s mite and the orphan’s blanket for verbal blessings.
It is always to be remembered, here as before, that Christianity is not the efficient cause of the failures or the evils which happen under its auspices: we are not to suppose that had Osirianism or Judaism or Manichæism or Mithraism chanced to be the religion of Europe these failures and evils would have been averted. What we are to realize is, on the other hand, that the conventional view as to Christianity having been an abnormally efficient cause for good is a delusion. It is not Christianity that has civilized Europe, but Europe—the complex of political and culture forces—that has civilized Christianity. Byzantium and Abyssinia show what the religious system could amount to of itself. Western Europe surpassed these States in virtue of conditions more propitious to energy and to freedom: that was the difference. At the best, medieval Europe was a world of chronic strife, daily injustice, normal cruelty, abundant misery, and ever-present disease. To show that Christianity, that is, the holding of the Christian creed by the men of that world, made these evils less than they would have been in the same place under any other creed, is impossible. On the other hand, it is clear that the influence of Christian doctrine and tradition was on some sides conservative of evil and obstructive of good.
Those tendencies may indeed be regarded as operating in the intellectual life, which, though it is in reality only a side of the sociological whole, we shall conveniently consider apart. Under that head too we shall note the influence of the Church for culture on the side of art. But on the side of ordinary life the influence of the clergy as teachers had two specific tendencies which may here be noted. One was the disparagement of women; the other the encouragement of cruelty.
On the first head, as on so many others, the conventional view is a fallacy. That Christianity raised the status of women is still a general assumption; but exact research, even when made by an orthodox theologian, proves the contrary. Down to the nineteenth century, the solidest rights women possessed were those secured to them by ancient Roman law; and the tendency of Christian legislation was certainly to restrict rather than to expand such rights. At the same time the so-called “Manichæan” element in gospel Christianity, the tendency to regard the sexual instinct as something corrupt and unclean, gave to the ordinary language of the Fathers concerning women a tone of detraction and aversion. The one remedy for an overpoise of the sexual element in life, and for over-emphasis of female function on that side, is to secure the community of the sexes in the intellectual life; and organized Christianity, instead of inculcating this, minimized the intellectual life all round, thus making self-restraint a matter of morbid asceticism as against the excess inevitably following on disuse of mind. In particular, a priesthood nominally committed to celibacy, yet always practising in the confessional a morbid inquisition into sexual matters, was committed to treating women disparagingly as forces of “temptation” when it was not yielding thereto. Nothing could be more injurious to women’s real credit. It is true that the worship of the Virgin would in some measure counteract the discredit; but this held equally true of the worship of many pagan Goddesses; and there is nothing to show that the status of women was higher in medieval Christendom than in ancient Egypt. Among the Teutons, the moral status of women seems to have been greatly lowered by the introduction of Christianity.
As regards cruelty, the evidence is only too abundant. Mosheim admits that in the Crusades the Christians were more ferocious than the Saracens; and it is historically certain that the revival of the ancient practice of judicial torture was the work of the papacy, seeking to extirpate heresy in the thirteenth century. From the tribunals of the Inquisition it passed to the ordinary Church courts, and thence, more slowly, to the courts of justice. In time it became a daily usage. In the old burg of Nuremberg there is preserved a collection (sometimes exhibited elsewhere) of the instruments of torture in common use down to the age of the Reformation. It is an arsenal of horror. Such engines of atrocity were the normal punitive expedients of a world in which the image of the Saviour on the cross was supposed to move men to compassion and contrition; and in which that Saviour’s death was held to redeem men from the penalties of their sins. Here the practical teaching and example of the priesthood was all for cruelty. They presided or assisted when the heretic was racked or burned alive; and their whole conception of morals made for such methods. Holding the madman as possessed by a devil, they taught that he should be cruelly scourged; holding that the leper was stricken by God for sin, they taught that he should be shunned the more. Paganism was saner.
Nothing is more true in social psychology than the hard saying of Feuerbach, that “only where reason rules, does universal love rule: reason is itself nothing else than universal love. It was faith, not love, not reason, that invented Hell.” “Faith has within it a malignant principle.” Medieval Christendom is the demonstration. In that age the spirit of reason was but occasionally glimpsed. It is seen in the teaching of John Scotus, who, besides his concrete heresy on the eucharist, held the all-embracing heresy that authority is derivable solely from reason, and from his pantheism deduced the conviction that the doctrine of hell is but an allegory, the actuality of which would be the negation of divine goodness. But such teaching belonged rather to pagan philosophy than to Christian faith, and was anathematized accordingly. It never reached even the scholarly class in general; and specifically Christian teaching which aimed at softening the heart was spread abroad to little purpose.