by Will Durant
Apparently there were village atheists then as now. But village atheists leave few memorials behind them; and the literature that has come down from the Middle Ages was largely composed by churchmen, or was largely screened by ecclesiastical selection. We shall find “wandering scholars” composing irreverent poetry, rough burghers swearing the most blasphemous oaths; people sleeping and snoring,43 even dancing44 and whoring,45 in church; and “more lechery, gluttony, murder, and robbery in the Sunday” (said a friar) “than reigned all the week before.”46 Such items, suggesting a lack of real faith, might be multiplied by heaping up instances from a hundred countries and a thousand years on one page; they serve to warn us against exaggerating medieval piety; but the Middle Ages still convey to the student a pervasive atmosphere of religious practices and beliefs. Every European state took Christianity under its protection, and enforced submission to the Church by law. Nearly every king loaded the Church with gifts.
Nearly every event in history was interpreted in religious terms. Every incident in the Old Testament prefigured something in the New; in vetere testamento, said Augustine, novum latet, in novo vetus patet; e.g., said the great Bishop, David watching Bathsheba bathing symbolized Christ beholding His Church cleansing herself from the pollution of the world.47 Everything natural was a supernatural sign. Every part of a church, said Guillaume Durand (1237?-96), Bishop of Mende, has a religious meaning: the portal is Christ, through whom we enter heaven; the pillars are the bishops and doctors who uphold the Church; the sacristy, where the priest puts on his vestments, is the womb of Mary, where Christ put on human flesh.48 Every beast, to this mood, had a theological significance. “When a lioness gives birth to a cub,” says a typical medieval bestiary, “she brings it forth dead, and watches over it three days, until the father, coming on the third day, breathes upon its face and brings it to life. So the Father Almighty raised His Son Our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead.”49
The people welcomed, and for the most part generated, a hundred thousand tales of supernatural events, powers, and cures. An English urchin tried to steal some pigeon fledglings from a nest; his hand miraculously adhered to the stone upon which he tamed; only three days of prayer by the community released him.50 A child offered bread to the sculptured Infant of a Nativity shrine; the Christ Babe thanked it, and invited it to paradise; three days later the child died.51 A “certain lecherous priest wooed a woman. Unable to win her consent, he kept the most pure Body of the Lord in his mouth after Mass, hoping that if he thus kissed her she would be bent to his desire by the force of the Sacrament…. But when he would fain have gone forth from the church he seemed to himself to grow so huge that he struck his head against the ceiling.” He buried the wafer in a corner of the church; later he confessed to another priest; they dug up the wafer, and found it had turned into the blood-stained figure of a crucified man.52 A woman kept the sacred wafer in her mouth from church to home, and placed it in a hive to reduce mortality among the bees; these built “for their most sweet Guest, out of their sweetest honeycombs, a tiny chapel of marvelous workmanship.”53 Pope Gregory I filled his works with stories of this kind. Perhaps the people, or the literate among them, took such tales with a grain of salt, or as pleasant fiction no worse than the wondrous narratives wherewith our presidents and kings relax their burdened brains; credulity may have changed its field rather than its scope. There is a touching faith in many of these medieval legends: so, when the beloved Pope Leo IX returned to Italy from his tour of reform in France and Germany, the river Aniene divided like the Red Sea to let him pass.54
The power of Christianity lay in its offering to the people faith rather than knowledge, art rather than science, beauty rather than truth. Men preferred it so. They suspected that no one could answer their questions; it was prudent, they felt, to take on faith the replies given with such quieting authoritativeness by the Church; they would have lost confidence in her had she ever admitted her fallibility. Perhaps they distrusted knowledge as the bitter fruit of a wisely forbidden tree, a mirage that would lure man from the Eden of simplicity and an undoubting life. So the medieval mind, for the most part, surrendered itself to faith, trusted in God and the Church, as modern man trusts in science and the state. “You cannot perish,” said Philip Augustus to his sailors in a midnight storm, “for at this moment thousands of monks are rising from their beds, and will soon be praying for us.”55 Men believed that they were in the hands of a power greater than any human knowledge could give. In Christendom, as in Islam, they surrendered to God; and even amid profanity, violence, and lechery, they sought Him and salvation. It was a God-intoxicated age.
II. THE SACRAMENTS
Next to the determination of the faith, the greatest power of the Church lay in the administration of the sacraments—ceremonies symbolizing the conferment of divine grace. “In no religion,” said St. Augustine, “can men be held together unless they are united in some sort of fellowship through visible symbols or sacraments.”56 Sacramentum was applied in the fourth century to almost anything sacred—to baptism, the cross, prayer; in the fifth century Augustine applied it to the celebration of Easter; in the seventh century Isidore of Seville restricted it to baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist. In the twelfth century the sacraments were finally fixed at seven: baptism, confirmation, penance, the Eucharist, matrimony, holy orders, and extreme unction. Minor ceremonies conferring divine grace—like sprinkling with holy water, or the sign of the cross—were distinguished as “sacramentals.”
The most vital sacrament was baptism. It had two functions: to remove the stain of original sin, and, by this new birth, to formally receive the individual into the Christian fold. At this ceremony the parents were expected to give the child the name of a saint who was to be its patron, model, and protector; this was its “Christian name.” By the ninth century the early Christian method of baptism by total immersion had been gradually replaced by aspersion—sprinkling—as less dangerous to health in northern climes. Any priest—or, in emergency, any Christian—could confer baptism. The old custom of deferring baptism to the later years of life had now been replaced by infant baptism. In some congregations, especially in Italy, a special chapel, the baptistery, was constructed for this sacrament.
In the Eastern Church the sacraments of confirmation and Eucharist were conferred immediately after baptism; in the Western Church the age of confirmation was gradually postponed to the seventh year, in order that the child might learn the essentials of the Christian faith. It was administered only by a bishop, with a “laying on of hands,” a prayer that the Holy Ghost would enter the candidate, an anointing of the forehead with chrism, and a slight blow on the cheek; so, as in the dubbing of a knight, the young Christian was confirmed in his faith, and was sworn by implication into all the rights and duties of a Christian.
More important was the sacrament of penance. If the doctrines of the Church inculcated a sense of sin, she offered means of periodically cleansing the soul by confessing one’s sins to a priest and performing the assigned penances. According to the Gospel (Matt. xvi, 19; xviii, 18), Christ had forgiven sins, and had endowed the apostles with a similar power to “bind and loose.” This power, said the Church, had descended by apostolic succession from the apostles to the early bishops, from Peter to the popes; and in the twelfth century the “power of the keys” was extended by bishops to the priests. The public confession practiced in primitive Christianity had been replaced in the fourth century by private confession, to spare embarrassment to dignitaries, but public confession survived in some heretical sects, and a public penance might be imposed for such monstrous crimes as the massacre of Thessalonica or the murder of Becket. The Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215) made annual confession and communion a solemn obligation, whose neglect was to exclude the offender from church services and Christian burial. To encourage and protect the penitent a “seal” was placed upon every private confession: no priest was allowed to reveal what had been so confessed. From the eighth ce
ntury onward “Penitentials” were published, prescribing canonical (ecclesiastically authorized) penances for each sin-prayers, fasts, pilgrimage, almsgiving, or other works of piety or charity.
“This wondrous institution,” as Leibniz called the sacrament of penance,57 had many good effects. It gave the penitent relief from secret and neurotic broodings of remorse; it allowed the priest to improve by counsel and warnings the moral and physical health of his flock; it comforted the sinner with the hope of reform; it served, said the skeptical Voltaire, as a restraint upon crime;58 “auricular confession,” said Goethe, “should never have been taken from mankind.”59 There were some bad effects. Sometimes the institution was used for political purposes, as when priests refused absolution to those who sided with the emperors against the popes;60 occasionally it was used as a means of inquisition, as when St. Charles Borromeo (1538–84), Archbishop of Milan, instructed his priests to demand of penitents the names of any heretics or suspects known to them;61 and some simple souls mistook absolution as license to sin again. As the fervor of faith cooled, the severe canonical penances tempted penitents to lie, and priests were permitted to substitute lighter penalties, usually some charitable contribution to a cause approved by the Church. From these “commutations” grew indulgences.
An indulgence was not a license to commit sin, but a partial or plenary exemption, granted by the Church, from some or all of the purgatorial punishment merited by earthly sin. Absolution in confession removed from sin the guilt that would have condemned the sinner to hell, but it did not absolve him from the “temporal” punishment due to his sin. Only a small minority of Christians completely atoned on earth for their sins; the balance of atonement would be exacted in purgatory. The Church claimed the right to remit such punishments by transmitting to any Christian penitent who performed stipulated works of piety or charity a fraction of the rich treasury of grace earned by Christ’s sufferings and death, and by saints whose merits outweighed their sins. Indulgences had been granted as far back as the ninth century; some were given in the eleventh century to pilgrims visiting sacred shrines; the first plenary indulgence was that which Urban II offered in 1095 to those who would join the First Crusade. From these uses the custom arose of giving indulgences for repeating certain prayers, attending special religious services, building bridges, roads, churches, or hospitals, clearing forests or draining swamps, contributing to a crusade, to an ecclesiastical institution, to a Church jubilee, to a Christian war…. The system was put to many good uses, but it opened doors to human cupidity. The Church commissioned certain ecclesiastics, usually friars, as quaestiarii to raise funds by offering indulgences in return for gifts, repentance, and prayer. These solicitors—whom the English called “pardoners”—developed a competitive zeal that scandalized many Christians; they exhibited real or false relics to stimulate contributions; and they kept for themselves a due or undue part of their receipts. The Church made several efforts to reduce these abuses. The Fourth Lateran Council ordered bishops to warn the faithful against false relics and forged credentials; it ended the right of abbots, and limited that of bishops, to issue indulgences; and it called upon all ecclesiastics to exercise moderation in their zeal for the new device. In 1261 the Council of Mainz denounced many quaestiarii as wicked liars, who displayed the stray bones of men or beasts as those of saints, trained themselves to weep on order, and offered purgatorial bargains for a maximum of coin and a minimum of prayer.62 Similar condemnations were issued by church councils at Vienne (1311) and Ravenna (1317).63 The abuses continued.
Next to baptism the most vital sacrament was the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. The Church took literally the words ascribed to Christ at the Last Supper: of the bread, “this is my body”; and of the wine, “this is my blood.” The main feature of the Mass was the “transubstantiation” of wafers of bread and a chalice of wine into the body and blood of Christ by the miraculous power of the priest; and the original purpose of the Mass was to allow the faithful to partake of the “body and blood, soul and divinity,” of the Second Person of the Triune God by eating the consecrated Host and drinking the consecrated wine. As the drinking of the transubstantiated wine risked spilling the blood of Christ, the custom arose in the twelfth century of communicating through taking only the Host; and when some conservatives (whose views were later adopted by the Hussites of Bohemia) demanded communion in both forms to make sure that they received the blood as well as the body of the Lord, theologians explained that the blood of Christ was “concomitant” with His body in the bread, and His body was “concomitant” with His blood in the wine.64 A thousand marvels were told of the power of the consecrated Host to cast out devils, cure disease, stop fires, and detect perjury by choking liars.65 Every Christian was required to communicate at least once a year; and the First Communion of the young Christian was made an occasion of solemn pageantry and happy celebration.
The doctrine of the Real Presence developed slowly; its first official formulation was by the Council of Nicaea in 787. In 855 a French Benedictine monk, Ratramnus, taught that the consecrated bread and wine were only spiritually, not carnally, the body and blood of Christ. About 1045 Berengar, Archdeacon of Tours, questioned the reality of transubstantiation; he was excommunicated; and Lanfranc, Abbot of Bec, wrote a reply to him (1063), stating the orthodox doctrine:
We believe that the earthly substance … is, by the ineffable, incomprehensible … operation of heavenly power, converted into the essence of the Lord’s body, while the appearance, and certain other qualities, of the same realities remain behind, in order that men should be spared the shock of perceiving raw and bloody things, and that believers should receive the fuller rewards of faith. Yet at the same time the same body of the Lord is in heaven … inviolate, entire, without contamination or injury.66
The doctrine was proclaimed as an essential dogma of the Church by the Lateran Council of 1215; and the Council of Trent in 1560 added that every particle of the consecrated wafer, no matter how broken, contains the whole body, blood, and soul of Jesus Christ. Thus one of the oldest ceremonies of primitive religion—the eating of the god—is widely practiced and revered in European and American civilization today.
By making matrimony a sacrament, a sacred vow, the Church immensely raised the dignity and permanence of the marriage bond. In the sacrament of holy orders the bishop conferred upon the new priest some of the spiritual powers inherited from the apostles and presumably given to these by God Himself in the person of Christ. And in the final sacrament—extreme unction —the priest heard the confession of the dying Christian, gave him the absolution that saved him from hell, and anointed his members so that they might be cleansed of sin and fit for resurrection before his Judge. His survivors gave him Christian burial instead of pagan cremation, because the Church held that the body too would rise from the dead. They wrapped him in his shroud, placed a coin in his coffin as if for Charon’s ferriage,66a and bore him to his grave with solemn and costly ceremony. Mourners might be hired to weep and wail; the relatives put on black garments for a year; and no one could tell, from grief so long sustained, that a contrite heart and a ministering priest had won for the departed the pledge of paradise.
III. PRAYER
In every great religion ritual is as necessary as creed. It instructs, nourishes, and often begets, belief; it brings the believer into comforting contact with his god; it charms the senses and the soul with drama, poetry, and art; it binds individuals into fellowship and a community by persuading them to share in the same rites, the same songs, the same prayers, at last the same thoughts.
The oldest Christian prayers were the Pater noster and the Credo; toward the end of the twelfth century the tender and intimate Ave Maria began to take form; and there were poetic litanies of praise and supplication. Some medieval prayers verged on magic incantations to elicit miracles; some ran to an importunate iteration that desperately overruled Christ’s ban on “vain repetitions.”67 Monks and nuns, and later the laity,
from an Oriental custom brought in by Crusaders,68 gradually developed the rosary. As this was made popular by Dominican monks, so the Franciscans popularized the Via Crucis, or Way or Stations of the Cross, by which the worshiper recited prayers before each of fourteen pictures or tableaux representing stages in the Passion of Christ. Priests, monks, nuns, and some laymen sang or recited the “canonical hours”—prayers, readings, psalms, and hymns formulated by Benedict and others, and gathered into a breviarium by Alcuin and Gregory VII. Every day and night, at intervals of some three hours, and from a million chapels and hearths, these conspiring prayers besieged the sky. Pleasant must have been their music to homes within their hearing; dulcis cantilena divini cultus, said Ordericus. Vitalis, quae corda fidelium mitigat ac laetificat—“sweet is the song of the divine worship, which comforts the hearts of the faithful, and makes them glad.”69
The official prayers of the Church were often addressed to God the Father; a few appealed to the Holy Ghost; but the prayers of the people were addressed mostly to Jesus, Mary, and the saints. The Almighty was feared; He still carried, in popular conception, much of the severity that had come down from Yahveh; how could a simple sinner dare to take his prayer to so awful and distant a throne? Jesus was closer, but He too was God, and one hardly ventured to speak to Him face to face after so thoroughly ignoring His Beatitudes. It seemed wiser to lay one’s prayer before a saint certified by canonization to be in heaven, and to beg his or her intercession with Christ. All the poetic and popular polytheism of antiquity rose from the never dead past, and filled Christian worship with a heartening communion of spirits, a brotherly nearness of earth to heaven, redeeming the faith of its darker elements. Every nation, city, abbey, church, craft, soul, and crisis of life had its patron saint, as in pagan Rome it had had a god. England had St. George, France had St. Denis. St. Bartholomew was the protector of the tanners because he had been flayed alive; St. John was invoked by candlemakers because he had been plunged into a caldron of burning oil; St. Christopher was the patron of porters because he had carried Christ on his shoulders; Mary Magdalen received the petitions of perfumers because she had poured aromatic oils upon the Saviour’s feet. For every emergency or ill men had a friend in the skies. St. Sebastian and St. Roch were mighty in time of pestilence. St. Apollinia, whose jaw had been broken by the executioner, healed the toothache; St. Blaise cured sore throat. St. Corneille protected oxen, St. Gall chickens, St. Anthony pigs. St. Médard was for France the saint most frequently solicited for rain; if he failed to pour, his impatient worshipers, now and then, threw his statue into the water, perhaps as suggestive magic.70