The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  His successor, Benedict XI (1303–4), excommunicated Nogaret, Sciarra Colonna, and thirteen others whom he had seen breaking into the palace at Anagni. A month later Benedict died at Perugia, apparently poisoned by Italian Ghibellines.105 Philip agreed to support Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, for the papacy if he would adopt a conciliatory policy, absolve those who had been excommunicated for the attack upon Boniface, allow an annual income tax of ten per cent to be levied upon the French clergy for five years, restore the Colonnas to their offices and property, and condemn the memory of Boniface.106 We do not know how far Bertrand consented. He was chosen Pope, and took the name of Clement V (1305). The cardinals warned him that his life would be unsafe in Rome; and after some hesitation, and perhaps a pointed suggestion from Philip, Clement removed the papal seat to Avignon, on the east bank of the Rhone just outside the southeastern boundary of France (1309). So began the sixty-eight years of the “Babylonian Captivity” of the popes. The papacy had freed itself from Germany, and surrendered to France.

  Clement, against his weak will, became the humiliated tool of the insatiable Philip. He absolved the King, restored the Colonna family, withdrew the bull Clericis laicos, allowed the spoliation of the Templars, and finally (1310) consented to a post-mortem trial of Boniface by an ecclesiastical consistory at Groseau, near Avignon. In the preliminary examinations held before the Pope and his commissioners, six ecclesiastics testified to having heard Boniface, a year before his pontificate, remark that all supposedly divine laws were inventions of men to keep the common people in good behavior through fear of hell; that it was “fatuous” to believe that God was at once one and three, or that a virgin had borne a child, or that God had become a man, or that bread could be changed into the body of Christ, or that there was a future life. “So I believe and so I hold, as doth every educated man. The vulgar hold otherwise. We must speak as the vulgar do, and think and believe with the few.” So these six quoted Boniface, and three of them, later re-examined, repeated their testimony. The Prior of St. Giles at San Gemino reported that Boniface, as Cardinal Gaetani, had denied the resurrection of either body or soul; and several other ecclesiastics confirmed this testimony. One ecclesiastic quoted Boniface as saying, of the consecrated Host, “It is mere paste.” Men formerly belonging to the household of Boniface accused him of repeated sexual sins, natural and unnatural; others accused the supposed skeptic of attempting magical communication with the “powers of darkness.”107

  Before the actual trial could be held, Clement persuaded Philip to leave the question of Boniface’s guilt to the coming ecumenical Council of Vienne. When that Council met (1311), three cardinals appeared before it and testified to the orthodoxy and morality of the dead Pope; two knights, as challengers, threw down their gauntlets to maintain his innocence by wager of battle; no one accepted the challenge; and the Council declared the matter closed.

  VIII. RETROSPECT

  The testimony against Boniface, true or false, reveals the undercurrent of skepticism that was preparing to end the Age of Faith. Likewise the blow-physical or political—given Boniface VIII at Anagni marks in one sense the beginning of “modern times”: it was the victory of nationalism against supernationalism, of the state against the Church, of the power of the sword over the magic of the word. The papacy had been weakened by its struggle against the Hohenstaufens, and by the failure of the Crusades. France and England had been strengthened by the collapse of the Empire, and France had been enriched by acquiring Languedoc with the help of the Church. Perhaps the popular support given to Philip IV against Boniface VIII reflected public resentment of the excesses of the Inquisition and the Albigensian Crusade. Some of Nogaret’s ancestors, it was said, had been burned by the inquisitors.108 Boniface had not realized, in undertaking so many conflicts, that the weapons of the papacy had been blunted by overuse. Industry and commerce had generated a class less pious than the peasantry; life and thought were becoming secularized; the laity was coming into its own. For seventy years now the state would absorb the Church.

  Looking back over the panorama of Latin Christianity, we are impressed, above all, by the relative unanimity of religious faith among diverse peoples, and the overspreading hierarchy and power of the Roman Church, giving to Western Europe—non-Slavic, non-Byzantine Europe—a unity of mind and morals such as it has never known again. Nowhere else in history has an organization wielded so profound an influence over so many men for so long a time. The authority of the Roman Republic and Empire over its immense realm endured from Pompey to Alaric, 480 years; that of the Mongol Empire or the British Empire, some 200 years; but the Roman Catholic Church was the dominant force in Europe from the death of Charlemagne (814) to the death of Boniface VIII (1303) —489 years. Her organization and administration do not appear to have been as competent as that of the Roman Empire, nor was her personnel as capable or cultured as the men who governed the provinces and cities for the Caesars; but the Church inherited a barbarous bedlam, and had to find a laborious way back to order and education. Even so her clergy were the best instructed men of the age, and it was they who provided the only education available in Western Europe during the five centuries of her supremacy. Her courts offered the justest justice of their time. Her papal Curia, sometimes venal, sometimes incorruptible, constituted in some degree a world court for the arbitration of international disputes and the limitation of war; and though that court was always too Italian, the Italians were the best trained minds of those centuries, and any man could rise to membership in that court from any rank and nation in Latin Christendom.

  Despite the chicanery usually accompanying collective human power, it was good that above the states and kings of Europe there should be an authority that could call them to account and moderate their strife. If any world state was to be, what could seem fitter than that its seat should be the throne of Peter, whence men, however limited, could see with a continental eye and from the background of centuries? What decisions would be more peaceably accepted, or could be more easily enforced, than those of a pontiff revered as the Vicar of God by nearly all the population of Western Europe? When Louis IX left on crusade in 1248, Henry III of England made extreme demands upon France, and prepared to invade; Pope Innocent IV threatened England with interdict should Henry persist; and Henry refrained. The power of the Church, said the skeptical Hume, was a rampart of refuge against the tyranny and injustice of kings.109 The Church might have realized the high conception of Gregory VII—might have made her moral power supreme over the physical forces of the states—had she used her influence only for spiritual and moral purposes, and never for material ends. When Urban II united Christendom against the Turks the dream of Gregory was almost realized; but when Innocent III, Gregory IX, Alexander IV, and Boniface VIII gave the holy name of crusade to their wars against the Albigensians, Frederick II, and the Colonnas, the great ideal broke to pieces in papal hands stained with Christian blood.

  Where the Church was not threatened she responded with considerable tolerance for diverse, even heretical, views. We shall find an unexpected freedom of thought among the philosophers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even among professors at universities chartered and supervised by the Church. All that she asked was that such discussions should be confined and intelligible only to the educated, and should not take the form of revolutionary appeals to the people to abandon their creed or the Church.110 “The Church,” says her most industrious recent critic, “as it embraced the whole population, embraced also every type of mind, from the most superstitious to the most agnostic; and many of these unorthodox elements worked far more freely, under the cloak of outward conformity, than is generally supposed.”111

  All in all, the picture that we form of the medieval Latin Church is that of a complex organization doing its best, despite the human frailties of its adherents and its leaders, to establish moral and social order, and to spread an uplifting and consoling faith, amid the wreckage of an old civilization and the p
assions of an adolescent society. The sixth-century Church found Europe a flotsam of migratory barbarians, a babel of tongues and creeds, a chaos of unwritten and incalculable laws. She gave it a moral code buttressed with supernatural sanctions strong enough to check the unsocial impulses of violent men; she offered it monastic retreats for men, women, and classic manuscripts; she governed it with episcopal courts, educated it with schools and universities, and tamed the kings of the earth to moral responsibility and the tasks of peace. She brightened the lives of her children with poetry, drama, and song, and inspired them to raise the noblest works of art in history. Unable to establish a utopia of equality among unequally able men, she organized charity and hospitality, and in some measure protected the weak from the strong. She was, beyond question, the greatest civilizing force in medieval European history.

  CHAPTER XXX

  The Morals and Manners of Christendom

  700–1300

  I. THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC

  MAN in the jungle or hunting stage had to be greedy—to seek food eagerly and gorge himself zealously—because, when food came, he could not be sure when it would come again. He had to be sexually sensitive, often promiscuous, because a high death rate compelled a high birth rate; every woman had to be made a mother whenever possible, and the function of the male was to be always in heat. He had to be pugnacious, ever ready to fight for food or mate. Vices were once virtues, indispensable to survival.

  But when man found that the best means of survival, for individual as well as species, was social organization, he expanded the hunting pack into a system of social order in which the instincts once so useful in the hunting stage had to be checked at every turn to make society possible. Ethically every civilization is a balance and tension between the jungle instincts of men and the inhibitions of a moral code. The instincts without the inhibitions would end civilization; the inhibitions without the instincts would end life. The problem of morality is to adjust inhibitions to protect civilization without enfeebling life.

  In the task of moderating human violence, promiscuity, and greed, certain instincts, chiefly social, took the lead, and provided a biological basis for civilization. Parental love, in beast and man, created the natural social order of the family, with its educative discipline and mutual aid. Parental authority, half a pain of love and half a joy of tyranny, transmitted a life-saving code of social conduct to the individualistic child. The organized force wielded by chieftain, baron, city, or state circumscribed and largely circumvented the unorganized force of individuals. Love of approval bent the ego to the will of the group. Custom and imitation guided the adolescent, now and then, into ways sanctioned by the trial-and-error experience of the race. Law frightened instinct with the specter of punishment. Conscience tamed youth with the detritus of an endless stream of prohibitions.

  The Church believed that these natural or secular sources of morality could not suffice to control the impulses that preserve life in the jungle but destroy order in a society. Those impulses are too strong to be deterred by any human authority that cannot be everywhere at once with awesome police. A moral code bitterly uncongenial to the flesh must bear the seal of a supernatural origin if it is to be obeyed; it must carry a divine sanction and prestige that will be respected by the soul in the absence of any force, and in the most secret moments and coverts of life. Even parental authority, so vital to moral and social order, breaks down in the contest with primitive instincts unless it is buttressed by religious belief inculcated in the child. To serve and save a society, a religion must oppose to insistent instinct no disputable man-made directives, but the undebatable, categorical imperatives of God Himself. And those divine commandments (so sinful or savage is man) must be supported not only by praise and honor bestowed for obeying them, nor only by disgrace and penalties imposed for violating them, but also by the hope of heaven for unrequited virtue, and the fear of hell for unpunished sin. The commandments must come not from Moses but from God.

  The biological theory of primitive instincts unfitting man for civilization was symbolized in Christian theology by the doctrine of original sin. Like the Hindu conception of karma, this was an attempt to explain apparently unmerited suffering: the good endured evil here because of some ancestral sin. In Christian theory the whole human race had been tainted by the sin of Adam and Eve. Said Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1150), unofficially accepted by the Church as her teaching, “Every human being who is conceived by the coition of a man with a woman is born with original sin, subject to impiety and death, and therefore a child of wrath”;1 and only divine grace, and the atoning death of Christ, could save him from wickedness and damnation (only the gentle example of the martyred Christ could redeem man from violence, lust, and greed, and save him and his society from destruction). The preaching of this doctrine, combined with natural catastrophes that seemed unintelligible except as punishments for sin, gave many medieval Christians a sense of inborn impurity, depravity, and guilt, which colored much of their literature before 1200. Thereafter that sense of sin and fear of hell diminished till the Reformation, to reappear with fresh terror among the Puritans.

  Gregory I and later theologians spoke of seven deadly sins—pride, avarice, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth; and opposed to them the seven cardinal virtues: four “natural” or pagan virtues praised by Pythagoras and Plato-wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance; and three “theological” virtues —faith, hope, and charity. But though accepting the pagan virtues, Christianity never assimilated them. It preferred faith to knowledge, patience to courage, love and mercy to justice, abstention and purity to temperance. It exalted humility, and ranked pride (so prominent in Aristotle’s ideal man) as the deadliest of the Deadly Sins. It spoke occasionally of the rights of man, but it stressed rather the duties of man—to himself, his fellow man, his Church, and God. In preaching a “gentle Jesus meek and mild” the Church had no fear of making men effeminate; on the contrary, the men of medieval Latin Christendom were more masculine—because they met more hardships—than their modern beneficiaries and heirs. Theologies and philosophies, like men and states, are what they are because in their time and place they have to be.

  II. PREMARITAL MORALITY

  How far did medieval morality reflect or justify medieval ethical theory? Let us first look at the picture, with no thesis to prove.

  The first moral incident of the Christian life was baptism: the child was solemnly inducted into the community and the Church, and was vicariously subjected to their laws. Every child received a “Christian name”—that is, usually, the name of some Christian saint. Surnames (i.e., added names) were of motley origin, and could go back through generations to kinship, occupation, place, a feature of body or character, even a bit of church ritual: Cicely Wilkinsdoughter, James Smith, Margaret Ferrywoman, Matthew Paris, Agnes Redhead, John Merriman, Robert Litany, Robert Benedicite or Benedict.2

  Gregory the Great, like Rousseau, urged mothers to nurse their own infants;3 most poor women did, most upper-class women did not.4 Children were loved as now, but were beaten more. They were numerous, despite high infantile and adolescent mortality; they disciplined one another by their number, and became civilized by attrition. They learned a hundred arts of the country or the city from relatives and playmates, and grew rapidly in knowledge and wickedness. “Boys are taught evil as soon as they can babble,” said Thomas of Celano in the thirteenth century; “and as they grow up they become steadily worse until they are Christians only in name”5—but moralists are bad historians. Boys reached the age of work at twelve, and legal maturity at sixteen.

  Christian ethics followed, with adolescents, a policy of silence about sex: financial maturity—the ability to support a family—came later than biological maturity—the ability to reproduce; sexual education might aggravate the pains of continence in this interval; and the Church required premarital continence as an aid to conjugal fidelity, social order, and public health. Nevertheless, by the age of sixteen the medieval youth
had probably sampled a variety of sexual experiences. Pederasty, which Christianity had effectively attacked in late antiquity, reappeared with the Crusades, the influx of Oriental ideas, and the unisexual isolation of monks and nuns.6 In 1177 Henry, Abbot of Clairvaux, wrote of France that “ancient Sodom is springing up from her ashes.”7 Philip the Fair charged that homosexual practices were popular among the Templars. The Penitentials—ecclesiastical manuals prescribing penances for sins—mention the usual enormities, including bestiality; an astonishing variety of beasts received such attentions.8 Where amours of this sort were discovered they were punishable with the death of both participants; and the records of the English Parliament contain many cases of dogs, goats, cows, pigs, and geese being burned to death with their human paramours. Cases of incest were numerous.

  Premarital and extramarital relations were apparently as widespread as at any time between antiquity and the twentieth century; the promiscuous nature of man overflowed the dikes of secular ecclesiastical legislation; and some women felt that abdominal gaiety could be atoned for by hebdomadal piety. Rape was common9 despite the severest penalties. Knights who served highborn dames or damoiselles for a kiss or a touch of the hand might console themselves with the lady’s maids; some ladies could not sleep with a good conscience until they had arranged this courtesy.10 The Knight of La Tour-Landry mourned the prevalence of fornication among aristocratic youth; if we were to believe him, some men of his class fornicated in church, nay, “on the altar”; and he tells of “two queens which in Lent, on Holy Thursday … took their foul delight and pleasance within the church during divine service.”11 William of Malmesbury described the Norman nobility as “given over to gluttony and lechery,” and exchanging concubines with one another12 lest fidelity should dull the edge of husbandry. Illegitimate children littered Christendom, and gave a plot to a thousand tales. The heroes of several medieval sagas were bastards—Cuchulain, Arthur, Gawain, Roland, William the Conqueror, and many a knight in Froissart’s Chronicles.