The Triumph of Christianity (30 page)

Not only did the clergy resemble the laity in terms of ignorance; they also often led similarly dissolute lives as was noted in the preceding chapter. As Eamon Duffy reported: “Concubinage was widespread: impecunious clergy with a houseful of children, presiding over a half- coherent liturgy on Sundays... were common all over Europe.”
⁵³
Nor was dissolute living concentrated in the lower clergy. As is documented in chapter 17, there were many notorious popes, including Alexander VI (served 1492–1503), a member of the Borgia family, who flaunted his many mistresses, fathered nine illegitimate children by three women, and is widely believed to have poisoned a number of cardinals in order to seize their property.
⁵⁴
As for Rome itself, in 1490 more than 15 percent of its resident adult females were registered prostitutes, and the Venetian ambassador described it as the “sewer of the world.”
⁵⁵

However, “it is a mistake to suppose that the corruption of the clergy was worse in Rome than elsewhere,” according to Roman Catholic historian Ludwig Pastor (1854–1928). Pastor continued: “there is documentary evidence of the immorality of the priests in almost every town in the Italian peninsula.”
⁵⁶
Duffy reported an abbot in southern Italy who had a concubine and five children, who told his bishop he could not end the affair because “he was fond of the children, and his physician had prescribed sexual intercourse for his gallstones!”
⁵⁷
Humbert of Romans reported that many clergy “spent so much of their time in gaming, pleasure and ‘worse things,’ [that they] scarcely come to church.”
⁵⁸
As for Spain, consider that an examination of priests in the archdiocese of Braga found that an astounding seventeen hundred were the sons of priests!
⁵⁹
Early in the sixteenth century, Erasmus charged that “many convents of men and women differ little from public brothels.”
⁶⁰
In fact, after visiting the monasteries and convents in Tuscany, the pope’s representative Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1436) reported that one convent was openly a brothel.
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Meanwhile, in England, visitations from as early as the fourteenth century regularly reported local priests keeping mistresses (some of them more than one)
⁶²
while clerical drunkenness and absenteeism were widespread.
⁶³

Rural Neglect

I
F MOST MEDIEVAL
E
UROPEANS
did not attend church, a primary reason was that for many centuries only the nobility and those living in towns and cities had a local church to attend! Most churches in rural areas were not located in peasant villages, but were private chapels, each maintained by a local nobleman for his family and retainers, being only about the size of “a moderately large living room in a modern house.”
⁶⁴
Until the thirteenth century and later, most peasants could have contact with the church only by travelling a considerable distance for baptism or marriage, and by occasional visits by an itinerant friar. This was consistent with the antirural outlook of the early Christian movement which, in turn, reflected the urban snobbery of Rome—the term
pagan
comes from the Latin word for rustic or rural-dweller (
paganus
). As Richard Fletcher explained: “The peasantry of the countryside were beyond the pale”; hence urban Christians made little or no effort to evangelize them. Rather, for early Christians “the countryside did not exist as a zone for missionary enterprise. After all, there was nothing in the New Testament about spreading the Word to the beasts of the field.”
⁶⁵

Even when rural parishes did begin to appear, they suffered from neglect and most of them probably lacked a pastor, even an ignorant one, most of the time. Eamon Duffy has estimated that during the sixteenth century, for example, as many as 80 percent of the churches in the diocese of Geneva had no clergy. To make matters worse, even when there was an assigned pastor, “absenteeism was rife.”
⁶⁶
Thus the bishop’s visitation of 1520 found that of 192 parishes in Oxfordshire, 58 pastors were not in residence.
⁶⁷
The same was often reported in Italy—absent clergy, many villages with “no services at all.”
⁶⁸

How then could the peasants be expected to possess any Christian culture? Where should they have learned the Lord’s Prayer or who preached it, especially since even if they had a local priest, he probably didn’t know either? What seems most remarkable is that the rural populace even knew who Jesus was, at least to the extent that he was one of the divine beings who could be called upon for blessings.

Eventually, of course, subsequent to the Reformation, Protestants in northern Europe and Counter-Reformation Catholics in the south (and Anglicans in Britain) initiated vigorous campaigns to educate and activate the peasant masses and the rapidly expanding urban under-classes. Thus, Martin Luther had optimistically launched massive programs to inform and energize the Lutheran parishes in Germany. But before he died, he recognized that these efforts had failed, as demonstrated by the reports from Lutheran visitations mentioned earlier in this chapter.

Inappropriate Expectations

T
HE PRIMARY REASONS THAT
even vigorous efforts failed to reach the peasantry and urban lower classes was the failure by both Protestant and Catholic clerics to propose a Christian lifestyle that was appropriate and attractive to ordinary people,
⁶⁹
and their failure to present Christian doctrines in simple, direct language rather than as complex theology.

Even though many clergy were dissolute, the medieval church presented only one model of the proper Christian life, and that was the ascetic lifestyle followed by devout monks and nuns. There was no acknowledgement by the church that this was not an appropriate model for the laity; instead they were merely “exhorted to imitate clerical piety.”
⁷⁰
Hence, although the church fathers certainly knew that celibacy was not to be expected of the laity, they continued to present it as the
ideal
and to teach that sexual intercourse was always sinful even within marriage,
⁷¹
never mentioning Paul’s admonition to couples that they should “not refuse one another” (1 Cor. 7:5). In similar fashion, monastic commitments to fasting, to extensive prayer sessions, and even to poverty were prominent in the model of Christian life proposed by the church. But asceticism only appeals to those for whom it is a
choice
. Fasting has little appeal to those for whom hunger is an actual threat; hours of prayer presuppose having considerable leisure; and poor people never chose to increase their poverty. Hence, most medieval Europeans disdained the moral expectations of the church, thereby remaining alienated from sincere Christian commitment.

In contrast, early Christianity was attractive to the laity because it offered a model of Christian virtue that improved their quality of life by urging attractive family norms, a tangible love of neighbors, and feasible levels of sacrifice, along with a clear message of salvation. When these aspects of the early Christian faith were preached in medieval times, as they often were by various reform and dissident movements, they continued to appeal—at least to
some people
. Thus we encounter the most significant aspect of medieval Christianity, both heretical and conventional; its appeal was primarily to people of at least some privilege, to the burghers of the towns and cities as well as to the nobility. As Keith Thomas noted: “Preaching was popular with the educated classes, but aroused the irritation of the others.”
⁷²
Even so, most peasants seldom had contact with any form of Christianity, and what little contact they did have was with a Christianity that urged an unsuitably otherworldly lifestyle and the prompt payment of tithes.

As for the ignorance of the laity, it must be recognized that until the Reformation, church services (with the exception, sometimes, of brief homilies) were in Latin, a language that almost no one in the pews and many in the pulpit could understand. Not surprisingly, mass attendance was neither edifying nor educational. Thus, it was widely anticipated that Protestant preaching in the local vernaculars would end these centuries of ignorance. Not so! Why? Because when a well-trained clergy did emerge at this time, they so “often pitched their discourse far above the capacity of most of their listeners.”
⁷³

The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) noted that a preacher “may as well talk Arabic to a poor day-labourer as the notions”
⁷⁴
that the Anglican clergy preferred as the basis for their sermons. By the same token, Martin Luther’s efforts to provide religious education for the German peasants and urban lower classes failed so completely because the lessons were conceived by a university professor primarily far more concerned with intricate theological nuances than with basic themes. The heart of Lutheran religious education was Luther’s Catechism, which provides a very lengthy explication of basic Christian doctrines such as the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. Thus, it devotes many pages of convoluted text to interpreting each of the commandments. The local Lutheran clergy were supposed to preach from the Catechism every Sunday afternoon and hold classes for young people during the week. In most villages these sessions were never or rarely held because no one came.

Luther’s error was not unique. All across Europe, the established churches failed to convert and arouse the “masses,” by failing to recognize that it was a job for preachers, not professors. But the clergy seemed unable to grasp the point that sophisticated sermons on the mysteries of the Trinity neither informed nor converted. Thus the Oxford theologian William Pemble (1591–1623) reported on a man of sixty who had faithfully attended church twice on every Sunday and often on other days of the week, thus hearing as many as three thousand sermons in his lifetime, who when questioned on his deathbed as to “what he thought of God, he answers that he was a good old man; and what of Christ, that he was a towardly young youth; and of his soul, that it was a great bone in his body; and what should become of his soul after he was dead, that if he had done well he should be put into a pleasant green meadow.”
⁷⁵

As James Obelkevich explained, “what parishioners understood as Christianity was never preached from a pulpit or taught in Sunday school, and what they took from the clergy they took on their own terms.... Since the clergy were incapable of shaping a more popular version of the faith, villagers were left to do so themselves.”
⁷⁶

The People’s Religion

D
ESPITE THEIR IGNORANCE OF
Christianity and their alienation from the local clergy, Europe’s peasants and lower classes had a fulsome supply of religion of which they made constant use. As Gerald Strauss put it, they “practiced their own brand of religion, which was a rich compound of ancient rituals, time-bound customs, a sort of unreconstructable folk Catholicism, and a large portion of magic to help them in their daily struggle for survival.”
⁷⁷
Notice that Strauss did not include a list of popular divinities, neither pagan nor Christian. Although the people’s religion did often call upon God, Jesus, Mary, and various saints, as well as upon some pagan gods and goddesses (and even more frequently invoked minor spirits such as fairies, elves, and demons), it did so only to invoke their aid, having little interest in matters such as the meaning of life or the basis for salvation. Instead, the emphasis was on pressing, tangible, and mundane matters such as health, fertility, weather, sex, and good crops. Consequently, the centerpiece of the people’s religion was, as it had always been, magic.

Magic and Misfortune

The word
magic
initially identified the arts and powers of the magi,
⁷⁸
the Zoroastrian priests of Persia who were discussed in chapter 1. The magi were especially admired in the classical world for their command of astrology, but also for their repertoire of spells and occult ceremonies that claimed to
enlist or compel supernatural forces to provide some desired outcome,
that becoming the general definition of magic. The purpose of magic is the same as that of technology and science: to allow humans to control nature and events in a reality permeated with misfortune.

Like everyone else, medieval peasants felt most threatened by ill health, and hence medical magic was paramount. Indeed, the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder (23–79
CE
), claimed that magic “first arose from medicine.”
⁷⁹
In medieval times, medical magic coexisted with nonmagical remedies and treatments, and practitioners seldom distinguished between the two. Thus, the application of an herb thought to have medicinal properties was almost always accompanied by attempts to cast various spells and often by charms or amulets. The same was true of other “healing” efforts such as inserting a charm when binding up wounds, and “amulets of various kinds were used to aid in childbirth”
⁸⁰
by experienced midwives. Thus the success of a treatment confirmed both the magical and the nonmagical efforts. A particularly vital aspect of early medical magic was the widely held belief that evil supernatural forces such as demons were the cause of most medical problems and that a cure was to be obtained by driving them away, which generated an extensive catalogue of appeals and threats used to expel demons, many of them of pre-Christian origin. As will be seen, eventually this led to the witch hunts since in every hamlet and village there were “Wise Ones” whose treatments for illness and injury included the invocation of supernatural agencies.