Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  They were Hellenizing it, as they Hellenized other oriental cults (often amalgamating the results). Their ethics varied to taste: sometimes they were ultra-puritan, sometimes orgiastic. Thus some groups seized on Paul’s denunciation of the law to preach complete license. Paul fought hard against gnosticism, recognizing that it might cannibalize Christianity and destroy it. At Corinth he came across well-educated Christians who had reduced Jesus to myth. Among the Colossians he found Christians who worshipped intermediate spirits and angels. Gnosticism was hard to combat because it was hydra-headed and always changing. Of course all the sects had their own codes, and most hated each other. Some conflated the cosmogony of Plato with the story of Adam and Eve, and interpreted it in various ways: thus the Ophites worshipped serpents, arguing that the serpent had triumphed over God; so they cursed Jesus in their liturgy. Some accepted Christian redemption but ruled out Jesus as the redeemer: the Samaritans preferred Simon Magus, others Hercules. The most dangerous gnostics were those who had, intellectually, thought their way quite inside Christianity, and then produced a variation which wrecked the system. The Basilides group in Egypt, and the Valentinians in Rome, though they differed on other things, both rejected the incarnation and denied Jesus had ever been man: his body was semblance or dokesis. The Docetists had wide appeal among the Greek cultures because they effectively cut off Christianity from its Judaic origins, something which responded to a popular demand, especially among the well-to-do. Indeed, those of Greek culture found it hard to understand why Christianity should wish or need to maintain the Jewish connection. They found the Septuagint a monstrous document: barbarous and obscure or, when comprehensible, repugnant. Why should Christians lumber themselves with it? This line was all the more insidious in that it merely carried Paul’s logic a little further. There must have been times when Paul, for all his Jewishness, was tempted to drop the Septuagint himself. How much of it was authentic? Valentinus argued that a great deal had simply been inserted by Jewish elders and possessed no authority; and many other portions represented compromises with contemporary opinion, Moses being a prime culprit. As forms of Christianity spread and enveloped, or indeed produced, highly-educated men, the glaring blemishes of the scriptures were closely examined. By the early decades of the second century there were masses of Christian texts, too, which had no precise status and spoke with many tongues. Which were valid and which were not? The problem attracted the attention of a brilliant and wealthy Greek convert from Pontus, Marcion, who had come to Rome in the 120s or 130s to take an active part in propagating the faith. He was from the school of Paul, indeed his greatest theological follower. He represents two important and permanent strains in Christianity: the cool, rationalist approach to the examination of the Church’s documentary proofs, and a plain, unspectacular philosophy of love.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The pagan priests were paid state officials, who met once a week in conclave as an act of government; the vestal virgins travelled through the streets in veiled state carriages, and sat in an imperial box at the games. Constantine began the transfer of privileges to Christian clergy almost from the start, exempting them from compulsory public office (which was onerous and expensive) in the towns, and in non-urban areas from the payment of district taxes. This implied class status, the secular underwriting the spiritual. Indeed Constantine was the first to use the words ‘clerical’ and ‘clerics’ in this sense – and a generation later, the anti-Christian Julian was already using such terms in a pejorative sense. Of course the favour of the State enormously increased the value of clerical status, and the desirability of office, particularly higher ones. The council held at Sardica in the Balkans in 341, for instance, tried to prevent transfers of bishops from one see to another, as ‘a bad custom and a wicked source of corruption’. It noted severely: ‘We don’t find bishops wanting to transfer from a large see to a smaller one: all are aflame with the fires of greed, and are slaves of ambition.’ The historian Ammianus, a pagan but fair-minded as a rule towards Christianity, drew the connection between disputed episcopal elections and the revenues of the see. Thus after the election battle between Damasus and Ursinus for the bishopric of Rome in 366, Ammianus says that 137 bodies were found in a church – on the site of what is now St Maria Maggiore. Naturally, he adds, such things happened, since once in office, the bishops of Rome: ‘are free from money worries, enriched by offerings from married women, riding in carriages, dressing splendidly, feasting luxuriantly – their banquets are better than imperial ones. But they might be really happy if, despising the vastness of the city, in which they can hide their faults, they lived like provincial bishops, with harsh abstinence in eating and drinking, plain apparell, eyes cast to the ground – proclaiming themselves pure and reverent men to the everlasting deity and his true worshippers’. The Sardica canons also indicate that the rich and well-connected were making their way into the Church purely for material advancement. They lay down: ‘If a rich man, or lawyer, or state official be offered a bishopric, he should not be ordained unless he has previously acted as a reader, deacon or priest, and so rises to the highest rank, the episcopate, by progressive promotion . . . ordination should only be conferred on those whose whole life has been under review for a long period, and whose worth has been proved.’ This canon proved totally ineffective, to judge by the number of famous clerics who broke it, or had it broken on their behalf. It was common for the State or private interest groups to push their nominees into key Church posts, irrespective of their status.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Bishop Proterius of Alexandria so infuriated his flock by accepting the decision of Chalcedon that in the end they literally tore him to pieces. The phenomenon was not unknown in Rome: Pope Virgilius, 537–55 who travelled to a council at Constantinople and accepted an eastern formulation, was saved from repudiation only by his death on the voyage home. In general, however, mob theology was an eastern growth. It was not confined to the cities. We hear of ‘great mobs of rustics’ taking part in torchlight processions to hail ‘victories’ at councils. And rustics swarmed into Edessa to take part in the terrifying demonstrations which were organized against Bishop Ibas when he returned to the city in 449, having compromised on the ‘two natures’. We have a record of some of the slogans that were shouted: ‘To the gallows with the Iscariot’, ‘Ibas has corrupted the true doctrine of Cyril’, ‘Long live the Archbishop Dioscurus’, ‘The Christ-hater to the arena’, ‘Down with the Judophile’, ‘The works of Nestorius were found with Ibas’, and ‘Where has the church property gone?’ Mingled with the theology, then, we get acccusations of moral turpitude and overtones of anti-semitism. Among the wilder eastern mobs it was customary to classify the ‘two nature’ theory with Judaism. All kinds of powerful forces – localism, regionalism, patriotism, racism, class and commercial interest – were at work behind the theological facade. But it was religion which crystallized them and gave them open, even permissible expression. Thus Christianity had become a crude form of populist democracy and this was made possible by its universalism. Christians were taught that the games and the circus were wicked and to be avoided as serious sins. In the East at least, theology was a form of sport. Gregory of Nazianzus, Bishop of Constantinople, used to claim of its citizens: ‘If you ask a baker the price of a loaf, he will reply: “The Father is greater and the Son inferior”. And if you ask if your bath is ready, the servant will tell you: “The Son was made out of nothing”.’ But it was a sport which transcended class barriers. Or, to put it more soberly, by the fourth century Christianity had completely penetrated all classes. Historical writers of this period do not treat any belief as characteristic of the masses, the vulgar, the uneducated. Where doctrinal divisions arose, they cut across the social pyramid. Now this was in marked contrast to paganism. Any religion tends to be a combination of intellectual theorizing among the élite, and popular belief (or superstition). Roman paganism did not hang together and therefore was ultimately a failure because the intellectual élite could not transmit their theoretical justifications to the masses; and the reason why they failed was that they could not, in practice, share the beliefs of the masses. Cicero’s defence of the gods was that of a sceptic, a man of the world, a political conservative; it meant nothing to the man in the street.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In central Europe and the northern Balkans, Latin missionaries were in the field before the Greeks, and had early recognized the importance of being able to operate in the vulgar Slav tongue. During the first half of the ninth century, Frankish priests translated a few Christian texts from Latin into Slavonic, and transcribed them into Latin characters (the Slavs had no alphabet). These included formularies for baptism and confession, the creed and the Lord’s prayer. Missionaries, in fact, were keen on using the vernacular – as they were to be in a wider world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The papacy was, at first, ambivalent. Hadrian II issued a bull in 867–8 authorizing the use of the Slavonic liturgy. John VIII imposed a temporary ban on Slavonic in 880, but agreed, in a letter to the Moravians: ‘It is certainly not against faith and doctrine to sing the mass in the Slavonic language, or to read the Holy Gospel or the Divine Lessons in the New and Old Testaments well translated and interpreted, or to chant the other offices of the hours, for he who made the three principal languages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, also created all the others for his own praise and glory.’ Nevertheless, this was in fact the last papal pronouncement in favour of the vernacular. The Frankish governments, in their almost ideological quest for unity and standardization, were strong Latinists; they argued passionately that, while Hebrew and Greek might be permissible for divine service in the East, Latin alone was the liturgical and scriptural language of the West. This argument, urged by Rome’s political masters, also appealed strongly to the authoritarian element which was always present in papal thinking, and after John VIII all the Popes banned the use of local tongues. Thus the western Church locked itself into the world of Latin, from which it was only to emerge in the twentieth century. Once again, as with filioque, it was the Frankish ideologues, rather than the papacy itself, who made compromise impossible. The same school of thought existed on the Byzantine side. The Greeks were, in a cultural sense, far more arrogant than the Latins. Probably a majority of them strongly opposed the vernacular liturgy and scripture. Writers like Anna Comnena and Archbishop Theophylact of Ochrid felt it necessary to apologize to their readers for mentioning even proper names of ‘barbarian’ origin. Latin itself was termed (by the liberal Emperor Michael III) ‘a barbarian and Scythian tongue’. In the thirteenth century, the Metropolitan of Athens, Michael Choniates, said Latins would take longer to appreciate ‘the harmony and grace of the Greek language than asses to enjoy the lyre, or dung-beetles to savour perfume’. The existence of polemical literature indicates that, at this time and long afterwards, the issue was controversial, with conservatives sticking to the ‘three languages’ theory, and denouncing a Slavonic liturgy as heretical. The government, however, was much more inclined to be pragmatic.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In fact he was a scoundrel, and eventually, when the Staufen were smashed, he lost his usefulness: in 1273, Gregory X accused him of sleeping with abbesses and nuns, fathering fourteen bastards in twenty-two months, and providing all of them with benefices. Disgraced, he reverted to his natural bent, and became a brigand. Such men were exceptions. The trouble with most bishops, under the royal-papal carve-up, was that they were worldly and mediocre. Often they were absentees, on royal or papal business. But even if they were not officials, they were rarely active diocesans. This was not always their fault. Bishops were expected to move in great state. An episcopal visitation thus became a serious financial burden for the inferior clergy. Odo Rigaud, the Archbishop of Rouen 1247–76, was an exemplary prelate by the standards of his time. But he travelled with a mounted retinue of eighty, and in 1251 this led to a joint protest to the Pope from all the bishops of Normandy. William of Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, was another notorious offender on this score, though the chief complaint about him was the number of his hounds and hawks (hawks had a specially expensive diet). The visitations could be carried out by vicars-general or archdeacons; but they were liable to offend just as grievously. Innocent III was told the Archdeacon of Richmond took with him ninety-seven horses, twenty-one hounds and three hawks. Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, laid down a maximum scale: an archbishop could not have more than fifty men and horses; bishops thirty; archdeacons seven – and no hounds or hawks for any of them. The scale was never adhered to. Things were just as bad 200 years later. When Archbishop Kempe of York was criticized for visiting his diocese for only two or three weeks at a time, at intervals of ten to twelve years – this was in the mid fifteenth century – he replied that he tried to enter one archdeaconry, which none of his predecessors had visited for 150 years, but was told it was too poor – would he accept a composition instead? As a matter of fact, it is not at all clear that medieval man wanted a really devoted episcopate. The Carolingian idea that Church and State should combine to enforce Christian morals lingered on; attempts to bring it to life were not popular with any element in society. Strictly speaking, the bishop had the right to carry out episcopal visitations among the laity as well as the clergy. He could enter the house of a lord and hold court there about the owner’s morals; or subject an entire village to a sexual and financial inquisition. Robert Grosseteste, the devoted and courageous mid thirteenth-century Bishop of Lincoln – perhaps the most admirable of all the medieval diocesans – actually took the Christian society, and his duties to it, seriously. In 1246–8, he carried out a thorough visitation.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Their numbers declined; those that remained were mostly administrators and rent-collectors. The barriers they had erected against the luxuries which inevitably crept into the lives of monks who belonged to a well-endowed order were progressively dismantled. Wine was administered first to the sick; then to all on special feast-days; then on Sundays; then on Tuesdays and Thursday as well; then daily; then the ration was increased to a pint. And so on. The Cistercians were even more aristocratic than the Benedictines. Such ‘country’ orders were disliked by middle-class townsmen. But then the townsmen grew to view the urban orders, too, with suspicion. The Franciscans, in theory at least, clung to their vows of poverty. But the laymen in their ranks were soon eliminated. In 1239, the last lay general, Brother Elias, was deposed, accused of promoting laymen to positions of authority; three years later a new constitution was adopted which made the order a bastion of clericalism. The Dominicans, for their part, took over the routine conduct of the Church’s anti-heretical machinery, especially the inquisition. They also invaded the universities, which in the thirteenth century replaced monasteries as the centres of western culture. The Franciscans followed suit. Soon the two were bitter rivals for dominance of the university scene, supplying between ten and fifteen per cent of the total university population at Paris and Oxford, for instance. They changed the universities from training-grounds for lawyers and financial administrators into centres of theology and philosophy. Both the orders were prepared to finance the university careers of clever recruits. Hence many scholars found it convenient to abandon the clerical rat-race for benefices, and join the friars – the scientist Roger Bacon, and the theologian Alexander of Hales being cases in point. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries most of the great university names were friars – Albertus Magnus, Aquinas and Eckhart among the Dominicans, Bonaventura, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham among the Franciscans. None of this was relevant to the original purpose of the founders. But it cost a great deal of money. Hence both orders, but especially the Franciscans, acquired reputations for sharp-dealing. Friars were supposed to be quite unscrupulous in matters of wills and legacies and in persuading the gullible sons of the rich to join them. One might say that the late-medieval layman tended to regard monks as idle and friars as conmen. There were exceptions. The Brigittine nuns retained a high reputation. The Carthusians, one of the strictest enclosed orders, were rarely criticized for laxity. It is significant that such groups were the only ones to resist dissolution during the Protestant Reformation. The rest settled, often gratefully, for liberty and pensions. The truth is, the system of regular clergy had grown almost beyond reform, except of the most drastic nature. Far too many men and women took vows for non-spiritual reasons, or without forethought of the consequences. And vows, once taken, were extraordinarily difficult to get out of, unless one had high contacts or great wealth.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Among the questions he put to local panels was: ‘Whether any layman is notoriously proud or envious or avaricious or liable to the sin of slothful depression, or rancorous or gluttonous or lecherous.’ This seems to have been the most thoroughgoing effort to raise and enforce moral standards of which we have record; and so unusual as to seem intolerable. The reaction of the secular authorities was characteristic. In 1249 the bishop was summoned to appear in person before the king, to ‘show cause for his forcing unwilling men and women, under pain of excommunication, to come before him to give evidence on oath to the grievous prejudice of the crown’. The king complained that such gatherings interrupted the lawful activities of his subjects and prevented them from performing their duties. The bishop got no support from the Pope, who deplored his moral enthusiasm, and once had a dream in which Grosseteste upbraided him and ‘smote him a tremendous blow with his staff’. Most bishops would not soil their hands with lay visitations. For the enforcement of the moral law they developed the office of rural dean. He dealt with local cases of fornication, slander, non-payment of tithes, perjury, breach of faith, usury, witchcraft, heresy, proving of wills and blasphemy. The deans hated doing these jobs, which were unpaid. They hired apparitors or summoners to deliver episcopal warnings. These men were paid by results, but often engaged in blackmail and were generally hated. The bishops therefore turned to the churchwardens. In any case, it was really only the poor and humble who were in practice forced to conform to the Christian ideal, or rather punished when they did not. Powerful men would not have their morals controlled by bishops, let alone rural deans. When, around 1310, the Dean of Crewkerne served an episcopal admonition on Sir Alan Ploknet, he found himself seized by the throat and forced to eat the bishop’s letter, seal and all. The same principle applied to disciplining the clergy. The actual working clergy, living on stipends, were poor, and could be brought to book without too much trouble. Senior clergy, or pluralists – the two were often synonymous – who were more likely than most to break canon law or set a bad example, could fight the bishops in the courts. As the bishops had to pay the costs of such actions, which might well go to Rome, they left offenders alone. Thus the development of canon law, in theory designed to improve the morals of the clergy, in fact made improvement more difficult. The devaluation of the bishop was, for the clergy as a whole, perhaps the most baleful consequence of the reform programme of the papacy. From the late eleventh century onwards they lost their power and independence in such matters as the liturgy, canonization, inspection of abbeys and convents, and definitions of law and doctrine. They were merely lines of communication to the Pope.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  When, in the sixteenth century, relics were discredited and masses for the dead forbidden in northern Europe, the cathedrals lost much of their purpose; the radical reformers were puzzled what to do with them. No wonder; an analysis of the building, growth and functioning of the cathedrals explains many of the reasons why the Reformation occurred. ‘Mechanical Christianity’ as we may call it, was accordingly conducted, in the towns, primarily for the ‘respectable’ citizen, and more particularly for the well-to-do benefactor. What about the country? The overwhelming majority of parish churches, as such documents as Domesday Book indicate, were privately owned and expected to make a profit. Whether the peasantry were well served by priests depended very largely on the fertility of the soil and the general level of prosperity. Priests tended to concentrate in the towns or the wealthier country districts. In theory, every adult was expected to know the basic elements of the faith. An early Carolingian decree laid down: ‘Let all men be compelled to learn the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, or profession of faith.’ The sanctions for males were ‘to be beaten or abstain from all drink except water’, and for females ‘stripes or fasting’. These orders could not be carried out, since the trained clergy were lacking or unwilling to live in country districts. Most country priests were ignorant men themselves, though in theory they had to be literate. This is a ground of bitter complaint by visiting and other dignitaries in every country throughout the Middle Ages. In 1222, out of seventeen priests serving livings held by the dean and chapter at Salisbury, five could not construe the first sentence of the first collect of the canon. Such examples are endless. Guillaume le Maire, Bishop of Angers in the early fourteenth century, complained that his priests included ‘innumerable contemptible persons of abject life, utterly unworthy in learning and morals . . . from whose execrable lives and pernicious ignorance infinite scandals arise, the church sacraments are despised by the laity, and in many districts the layfolk hold the priests as viler and more despicable than Jews.’ This was a problem of poverty and education. The bishops might well complain: why did they not do anything? Selection and training of clergy was the bishop’s responsibility; yet not one built a seminary throughout the Middle Ages – there was no such thing until the sixteenth century. Nor did any bishop, so far as we know, institute diocesian funds to raise the stipends of the poorer priests and so improve their ‘abject life’ – though such equalization funds had been used in the earliest Church. The truth is that the Church tended to be hostile to the peasants. There were very few peasant saints. Medieval clerical writers emphasize the bestiality, violence and avarice of the peasant. We get few genuine glimpses of peasant life in the documents; most clerical critics dealt with popular stereotypes. Clericalism was increasingly an urban phenomenon in the later Middle Ages.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Indulgences were freely announced to procure aid for the building of churches, as in the case of York Cathedral, 1396, the erection of bridges, the filling up of muddy roads and for other public improvements. The clergy, though denied the right of participating in bowling and even in the pastime of checkers, took part in village festivities such as the Church-ale, a sort of mediaeval donation party, in which there was general merrymaking, ale was brewed, and the people drank freely to the health of the priest and for the benefit of the Church. As for the morals of the clergy, care must always be had not to base sweeping statements upon delinquencies which are apt to be emphasized out of proportion to their extent. It is certain, however, that celibacy was by no means universally enforced, and frequent notices occur of dispensations given to clergymen of illegitimate birth. Bishop Quevil of Exeter complained that priests with families invested their savings for the benefit of their marital partners and their children. In the next period, in 1452, De la Bere, bishop of St. David’s, by his own statement, drew 400 marks yearly from priests for the privilege of having concubines, a noble, equal in value to a mark, from each one.537 Glower, in his Vox clamantis, gave a dark picture of clerical habits, and charges the clergy with coarse vices such as now are scarcely dreamed of. The Church historian, Capes, concludes that "immorality and negligence were widely spread among the clergy."538 The decline of discipline among the friars, and their rude manners, a prominent feature of the times, came in for the strictures of Fitzralph of Armagh, severe condemnation at the hands of Wyclif and playful sarcasm from the pen of Chaucer. The zeal for learning which had characterized them on their first arrival in England, early in the 13th century, had given way to self-satisfied idleness. Fitzralph, who was fellow of Balliol, and probably chancellor of the University of Oxford, before being raised to the episcopate, incurred the hostility of the friars by a series of sermons against the Franciscan theory of evangelical poverty. He claimed it was not scriptural nor derived from the customs of the primitive Church. For his temerity he was compelled to answer at Avignon, where he seems to have died about the year 1360.539 Of the four orders of mendicants, the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites and Augustinians, Longland sang that they Preached the people for profit and themselve Glosed the Gospel as them good lyked, For covetis of copis construed it as they would.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The spirit of revolt against the Avignon regime was rising in upper Italy and, when the papal legate in Bologna, in a year of dearth, forbade the transportation of provisions to Florence, it broke out into war. At the invitation of the Florentines, Catherine visited the city, 1375 and, a year later, was sent as a delegate to Avignon to negotiate terms of peace. She was received with honor by the pope, but not without hesitancy. The other members of the delegation, when they arrived, refused to recognize her powers and approve her methods. The cardinals treated her coolly or with contempt, and women laid snares at her devotions to bring ridicule upon her. Such an attempt was made by the pope’s niece, Madame de Beaufort Turenne, who knelt at her side and ran a sharp knife into her foot so that she limped from the wound. The dyer’s daughter now turned her attention to the task of confirming the supreme pontiff in his purpose to return to Rome and counteract the machinations of the cardinals against its execution. Seeing her desire realized, she started back for Italy and, met by her mother at Leghorn, went on to Florence, carrying a commission from the pope. Her effort to induce the city to bow to the sentence of interdict, which had been laid upon it, was in a measure successful. Her reverence for the papal office demanded passive obedience. Gregory’s successor, Urban VI., lifted the ban. Catherine then returned to Siena where she dictated the Dialogue, a mystical treatise inculcating prayer, obedience, discretion and other virtues. Catherine declared that God alone had been her guide in its composition.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Even after a long bout of imperial persecution, inspired by Augustine, the Donatists were still able to produce nearly 300 bishops for the final attempt at compromise at Carthage in 411, Thereafter, in the course of the two decades before Vandals overran the littoral, the back of the Donatist church was broken by force. Its upper-class supporters joined the establishment. Many of its rank and file were driven into outlawry and brigandage. There were many cases of mass suicide. Augustine watched the process dry-eyed. Of course the times were horrific. The late empire was a totalitarian state, in some ways an oriental despotism. Antinomial elements were punished with massive force. State torture, supposedly used only in serious cases such as treason, was in fact employed whenever the State willed. Jerome describes horrible tortures inflicted on a woman accused of adultery. A vestal virgin who broke her vows might be flogged, then buried alive. The state prisons were equipped with the eculeus, or rack; and a variety of devices including unci, for laceration, red-hot plates and whips loaded with lead. Ammianus gives many instances. And the State, to enforce uniformity, employed a large and venal force of secret policemen dressed as civilians, and informers, or delators. Much of the terminology of the late-imperial police system passed into the language of European enforcement, through the Latin phrases of the Inquisition. Augustine was the conduit from the ancient world. Why not? he would ask. If the State used such methods for its own miserable purposes, was not the Church entitled to do the same and more for its own far greater ones? He not only accepted, he became the theorist of, persecution; and his defences were later to be those on which all defences of the Inquisition rested. We must not imagine that Augustine was necessarily a cruel man. Like many later inquisitors, he disliked unnecessary violence and refinements of torture. He thought heretics should be examined ‘not by stretching them on the rack, not by scorching them with flames or furrowing their flesh with iron claws, but by beating them with rods’. He deplored, too, the dishonesty of using paid informers and agents provocateurs. But he insisted that the use of force in the pursuit of Christian unity, and indeed total religious conformity, was necessary, efficacious, and wholly justified. He admitted he had changed his mind on this point. He wrote to a Donatist friend that he had seen his own town, originally Donatist, ‘brought over to the Catholic unity by fear of the imperial edicts’. That had convinced him. In fact heretics in their hearts welcomed persecution: they would say ‘fear made us become earnest to examine the truth. . . the stimulus of fear startled us from our negligence’. And then, this was Christ’s own way. Had not he, ‘by great violence’, ‘coerced’ Paul into Christianity? Was not this the meaning of the text from Luke, 14:23: ‘Compel them to come in’?

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  On the contrary: the first Christian monks of whom we hear, in the third century, were ascetics who took refuge in the desert in order to starve themselves into sanctity; they were almost certainly repeating an earlier, pre-Christian pattern. A great many primitive biographies of the earliest monks survive, but most of them are pure fiction. This is certainly true of the life of St Barlaam, who probably never existed; and the life of Joasaph is based on Buddha. The prototype monk, by Christian calculation, was St Paul of Thebes. He may have existed; and it is clear the first monks settled in the Egyptian deserts, not far from the Nile. St Jerome, who wrote a largely imaginary life of Paul, says he lived for a hundred and thirteen years near Thebes, wore palm-leaves and was fed for sixty years by a crow, which brought him half a loaf of bread each day. When he died in 347 two lions dug his grave and then greeted his successor, St Anthony. St Anthony, too, was a historical person, though a shadowy one; we are told he spent over ninety years as a solitary, having given away his possessions in youth, never learnt to read or write, never changed his clothes or washed his face, and died in 356 aged a hundred and five. From about this time we get primitive monkish communities in the desert. Anthony’s disciple, Ammon, persuaded over 5,000 to join him in the desert of Nitre, south-east of Alexandria. These monks were nearly all lower-class illiterates. They were bankrupts fleeing from taxes, conscripts from military service, brigands from justice, slaves who had broken their bonds. Some hoped to achieve a reputation for sanctity (and possibly even wealth) by eccentric behaviour: they had more in common with Hindu fakirs than monks as we understand them. Thus Makarios of Alexandria claimed he had not spat on the ground since his baptism. For seven years he ate only raw vegetables; had a bread-fast for three years; never slept for twenty nights; exposed himself for seven months to swamp-mosquitoes; and fasted for forty days, remaining in one corner of his cell without speaking or moving, and eating only raw cabbage on Sundays. He lived to be a hundred, having lost his teeth, and with only a few hairs to mark his beard. Makarios had many exotic or miraculous adventures with animals. So did all the successful eccentrics. St Gregory and St Malo saved the damned by pulling them out of hell. St Malo also changed a stone into a chalice of rock-crystal so he could celebrate mass. St Martila and St Frontus used St Peter’s staff to raise the dead, and St Hubert was converted by a ten-point stag he was pursuing – between its antlers was a cross. St Gildas commanded a dangerous monster to die, which it obligingly did; a similar tale was told of St Hilarion, at whose command a boa-constrictor roasted itself in the flames.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Bishop of Killala pointed out that this limited the value of ecclesiastical patronage, and he urged: ‘The only remedy to which is by giving extraordinary encouragements to persons of birth and interest whenever they seek preferment, which will encourage others of the same quality to come into the church and may thereby render ecclesiastical preferments of the same use to their Majesties with civil employments.’ It was not just votes in the Lords: cathedral chapters often turned the scales in borough elections, and clergymen were widely used to organize local opinion. The Duke of Newcastle’s election agent in Sussex was the Reverend James Baker; so keen was he to proselytize (on behalf of the Whigs, not Christianity) that he interrupted a cricket match at Lewes and was nearly mobbed by the spectators. Archbishop Seeker of Canterbury maintained that ‘the distinguishing mark of the present age’ was ‘an open and professed disregard of religion’ reflected in ‘dissoluteness and contempt of principle in the higher part of the world,’ and ‘profligate intemperance and fearlessness of committing crimes in the lower’. He claimed that ‘Christianity is now railed at and ridiculed with very little reserve, and its teaching without any at all.’ But who was Seeker to talk? His was a purely political appointment; Horace Walpole says he had earlier been an atheist. His fellow-metropolitan John Gilbert, promoted to York the year before (1757), was no better advertisement for the bench. ‘Gilbert,’ wrote Walpole, ‘was composed of that common mixture, ignorance, meanness and arrogance . . . On the news of [his] promotion, they rung the bells at York backwards, in detestation of him. He opened a great table there, and in six months they thought him the most Christian prelate that had ever sat in that see.’ Walpole sums up the age neatly: ‘There were no religious combustibles in the temper of the times. Popery and Protestantism seemed at a stand. The modes of Christianity were exhausted and could not furnish novelty enough to fix attention.’ In England the Establishment clergy virtually ceased to be a proselytizing or even an active force, though it remained a powerful social one. The many verbatim conversations recorded in James Boswell’s diaries reveal the better sort of clergyman as learned, rather than pious. They were, in fact, encouraged to take a polite interest in the arts and sciences to fill the time. In 1785, for instance, William Paley, Archdeacon of Carlisle, gave a Charge entitled ‘Amusements Suitable to the Clergy’, based on the premise that ‘the life of a clergyman . . . does not supply sufficient encouragements to the time and thoughts of an active mind.’ He recommended natural history, botany, electrical experiments, the use of a microscope, chemistry, the measurement of mountains, meteorology and, above all, astronomy, ‘the most proper of all recreations to a clergyman’.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Humanists were the natural enemies of the monks. For this they cannot be blamed. As a class, the monks hated learning, boasted of superior piety, made a display of their proud humility and yet were constantly quarrelling with each other. Boccaccio and the novelists would not have selected monks and nuns as heroes and heroines of their obscene tales if monastic life had not been in a degenerate state. Poggio, Filelfo, Valla, Bandello, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Aretino and Erasmus and the writers of the Epistolae virorum obscurorum chastised with caustic irony and satire the hypocrisy and vices of the monastic class, or turned its members into a butt of ridicule. To the charges of unchastity and general hypocrisy was added the imposition of false miracles upon the ignorant and credulous. It was common rumor that the nuns were the property of the monks.1039 The literature of the 15th century teems with such charges, and Savonarola was never more intense than when he attacked the clergy for their faithlessness and sins. Machiavelli openly declared "we Italians are of all most irreligious and corrupt," and he adds, "we are so because the representatives of the Church have shown us the worst example." Pastor has suggested that Humanists, who were themselves leading corrupt lives, were ill-fitted to sit in judgment upon the priesthood. This in a sense is true, and their representations, taken alone, would do no more than create an unfavorable presumption, but their statements are confirmed by the scandals of the papal court and the social conditions in Rome; and Rome was not worse than Venice, Florence and other Italian towns. The same distinguished historian seeks to parry the attacks of Humanistic writers and to offset the lives of the hierarchy by a long list of 89 saints of the calendar who lived 1400–1520.1040 The number is imposing, but outside of Bernardino da Siena, Fra Angelico, Jacopo della Marca and John of Capistrano, few of the names are known to general history, and the last two showed traits which the common judgment of mankind is not inclined to regard as saintly. Pastor also adduces the wills of the dying, in which provision was made for ecclesiastical objects, but these may indicate superstitious fear as well as intelligent piety. After all is said, it remains true that the responsibility and the guilt were with the clergy, who were rightly made the targets of the wits, satirists and philosophers of the time.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  By the middle of the third century, however, a much more critical period had opened. Christians were now far more numerous, better organized, and more homogenous in their views and practices. Once it had been possible to dismiss them for their lower-class credulity. The pagan propagandist Celsus, writing his True Word c. 180, claimed: ‘Some do not even want to give or receive a reason for what they believe, and simply say “Do not ask questions: just believe”, and “Thy faith will save thee”. They say: “The wisdom of the world is evil” and “Foolishness is a good thing”.’ Celsus illustrates a Christian line of argument: ‘Let no one wise, no one sensible, no one educated draw near. For we think these things are evils. But as for anyone ignorant, educated or stupid – anyone like a child – let him draw near.’ This was of course a caricature of genuine Christian attitudes which could be traced back to Jesus. But as a portrait of the Church as a whole, it was ceasing to be true even when Celsus wrote. The class and education barriers came down and Christianity penetrated deep into circles which shaped secular policy and imperial culture. The age of Origen, of a Christianity which had achieved intellectual maturity in terms of the ancient world, made a direct and final confrontation with the State inevitable. It was now a universalist alternative to the civil religion and a far more dynamic (and better organized) one; it had either to be exterminated or accepted. The Decian persecution, around 250, marked the attempt to apply the first policy, which was continued at intervals until Constantine switched to the second sixty years later. State hostility was exercised universally, persistently, and in due legal manner. There was no longer mass-hysteria, simply relentless bureaucracy. Everyone had to obtain certificates proving he had made sacrifice to the official gods. Some of these have been recovered from sites in Egypt. Thus: ‘To the commission appointed to supervise sacrifices at the village of Alexander’s Isle. From Aurelius Diogenes, son of Satabus, of the village of Alexander’s Isle, aged 72 years, with a scar on the right eyebrow. I have always sacrificed to the gods and now in your presence in accordance with the edict I have made sacrifice and poured a libation, and partaken of the sacred victuals. I request you to certify this below. Farewell: I, Aurelius Diogenes, have presented this petition.’ There is no doubt that this and later persecutions were extremely effective. The blood of the martyrs, as Tertullian had claimed, might be the seed of the faith; but the property of the Church was a temptation to compromise. By 250, for instance, the Church in Rome was rich enough to support a bishop, forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven sub-deacons, forty-two acolytes and fifty-two exorcists, readers and doorkeepers; it had a charity list of over 1,500.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Pelagius, a reformer anxious to help the Church, desperately concerned lest his efforts should be frustrated by accusations of heresy, went to the East, to the much freer intellectual climate of Palestine, where debate was still possible. Meanwhile, he provided assurances and confessions of faith to any council or synod which asked for one, and to the Bishop of Rome. Rome was inclined to accept Pelagius at his word; he had the backing of powerful families, and there is evidence they were able to influence, for a time, the imperial enforcement authorities. But the will of the Africans prevailed. They brought pressure successfully, first on the Bishop of Rome, then on the emperor. Finally, they resorted to direct bribery: eighty fine Numidian stallions, bred on episcopal estates in Africa, were shipped to Italy and distributed among the various imperial cavalry commanders whose squadrons, in the last resort, imposed Augustine’s theory of grace. To the imperial authorities, the Pelagians were represented as disturbers of the public peace, dangerous innovators, men anxious to dispossess the rich and redistribute property, no more acceptable to the orthodox of Church and State than the Donatists. Pelagian cells in Britain and Spain, Sicily, Rhodes and Palestine were identified and broken up. Some Pelagians hit back at Augustine. One young follower, Julian of Eclanum, engaged in spirited controversy with the angry old bishop. From their exchanges, fragmentary alas, Augustine emerges in an unpleasant light, a clever man stooping low for the purpose of vulgar appeal, remorselessly exploiting popular prejudice, an anti-intellectual, a hater of classical culture, a mob orator, and a sex-obsessive. In the infinitive wisdom of God, he noted, the genitals were appropriately made the instruments for the transmission of original sin: ‘Ecce unde! That’s the place! That’s the place from which the first sin is passed on!’ Adam had defied God – and for every man born, the shame at the uncontrollable stirring of the genitals was a reminder of, and a fitting punishment for, the original crime of disobedience. Did not every man, he asked his cringing congregation, feel shame at having a wet dream? Of course he did. By contrast, Julian’s line seems a straightforward deployment of elementary classical reason: ‘You ask me why I would not consent to the idea that there is a sin that is part of human nature. I answer: it is improbable. It is untrue. It is unjust and impious. It makes it seem as if the devil were the maker of men. It violates and destroys the freedom of the will . . . by saying that men are so incapable of virtue that in the very womb of their mothers they are filled with bygone sins . . .

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  But all the time the Church retained its old traditions of separate canonical legislation, dating back to the fourth century. The papacy had the oldest legal and administrative machine in western Europe. The essence of the Carolingian renaissance, and of the Ottonian empire which followed it, had been the identity of aim of Church and State, expressed in legal codes, and conciliar legislation, which dealt with both. Within this system the Church had always enjoyed a privileged position. Indeed, the laws had first been put in writing to provide specifically for the protection of clerks and their property. In England, for instance, clerks had never been thrown completely on the tender mercies of the secular courts. Though every kind of charge could be brought against them in the ordinary courts, special penalties were provided for clerical offenders; and, when accused of capital crimes, they were always judged by a bishop. Bishops often presided in the shire-courts; not until after the Norman Conquest were bishops and archdeacons forbidden to hear cases in the (lower) hundred courts. Moreover, royal legislation made ecclesiastical offences into secular offences; and canon law, as well as secular law, was admitted in the shire courts. Thus in Anglo-Saxon England the clergy were already, in a legal sense, a privileged class; the same was true, with variations, elsewhere in Europe. This system of privilege, however, was still under royal, that is secular, control. The effect of the mid-eleventh-century church reforms, and of the Gregorian revolution which followed, was to drive a wedge into the joint legal system, and split it into two distinct streams of law. In the 1050s, the papal administration underwent a formidable expansion. A primitive Parkinson’s Law began to operate. More clerks were available to do the Pope’s bidding: work, therefore, expanded to occupy the time available. More clerics were learned in canon law: compilations of canon law were made, therefore, and sent all over the Christian world; they were used locally, and appeals made to Rome; and canon law was added to by an increased use of clerical legislative machinery. As canon law expanded, and became more subtle and sophisticated, and as it evolved into a uniform international system, with the papacy as its supreme court of appeal, it was bound to diverge more and more from the national secular system. Different systems meant different courts; and if clerical courts tried ecclesiastical offences, should they not also deal with clerics who committed any offence whatever? The clerical affirmative was delivered with all the more conviction in that canon law was, in their eyes, clearly a superior system; it went back to Roman times, was, indeed, based on Roman principles of jurisprudence. Here the cultural snobbery came in again.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Disproof by events seems to have done nothing to shake men’s belief in prophecy; crucial years came and went – 1260, 1290, 1305, 1335, 1350, 1360, 1400, 1415, 1500, 1535; nothing happened as foretold, but still men believed. Many of these pretenders produced elaborate social manifestos, with an egalitarian or distributive object. Most began, or ended, in anti-clericalism. Religious hysteria expressed itself in almost every imaginable form of outrageous behaviour. Self-flagellation, for instance, had been a feature of certain sophisticated pagan sects absorbed into Christianity in the fourth century. We hear of it breaking out in eleventh-century Italy, then, on a huge scale, in the second half of the thirteenth century, after which it spread all over Europe and became endemic. The flagellants marched in procession, led by priests, with banners and candles, and moved from town to town, parading before the parish church, and lashing themselves for hours on end. The German flagellants, with their rituals, hymns and uniforms, were particularly ferocious: they used leather scourges with iron spikes; if a woman or a priest appeared, the ritual was spoiled and had to be started again; it culminated in the reading of a ‘heavenly letter’, after which spectators dipped pieces of cloth in the blood and treasured them as relics. The Church was ambivalent towards flagellants. In 1384 Clement VI had encouraged public flagellation in Avignon: hundreds of both sexes took part. And the pillar of Spanish orthodoxy, the Dominican anti-Semite and rabble-rouser, Saint Vincent Ferrer, led a party of flagellants through Spain, France and Italy, following the instructions of a vision in 1396. Thus there was orthodox flagellation, heretical flagellation, and apparently secret flagellation too. Generally speaking, if both sexes took part, it was permitted. Nearly all unofficial male flagellant movements ended in anti-clericalism, heresy or violence. Then the Inquisition was called in, and executions followed. Christianity also had its orthodox tradition of apostolic poverty, and its theory that the world, in its pristine state, was egalitarian and just, before the irruption of sin produced the rule of the strong and the degradation of the weak. In the later Middle Ages, many millenarian movements launched themselves on crazy careers from these propositions. They took two main forms, some combining both. The first group, usually termed ‘Free Spirits’, were antinomians, of a type St Paul had had to deal with in Greece. They believed themselves to be perfect and above moral norms.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  By the time Luther produced his own New Testament in 1522, there were fourteen different printed versions in German and four in Dutch; none contained a censor’s imprimatur or had been printed on a monastic press, but the attempt to forbid their circulation had been virtually abandoned. Erasmus not only welcomed this development but wished to extend the principle by bringing into existence a wholly literate laity with unrestricted access to all sacred writings: ‘Let us consider who were the hearers of Christ himself. Were they not a promiscuous multitude? . . . Is Christ offended that such should read him as he chose for his hearers? In my opinion the husbandman should read him, with the smith and the mason, and even prostitutes, bawds and Turks. If Christ refused not his voice to these, neither do I refuse his books.’ He thought it essential ‘each should hear the Gospel in his native and intelligible tongue’ instead of ‘muttering their psalms and paternoster in Latin, not understanding their own words’. For Erasmus, as for all reformers, the Bible then was at the centre of Christian understanding, when presented in its authentic form. And he was at one with them in rejecting mechanical Christianity virtually in toto: indulgences, pilgrimages, special privileges, masses for the dead, the whole business of winning salvation by ‘merit’ artificially acquired, usually by money. He wrote: ‘Perhaps thou believest that all thy sins are washed away with a little paper, a sealed parchment, with the gift of a little money or some wax image, with a little pilgrimage. Thou art utterly deceived.’ Who had done the deceiving? Chiefly the papacy. And no wonder: the papacy was corrupt and desperately in need of reform. His In Praise of Folly was the outcome of a visit to the Rome of the scandalous soldier-pope Julius II, who stormed fortresses in full armour. In Julius’s Rome, wrote Erasmus, ‘you can see a tired old man act with youthful energy and without regard to labour and expense simply in order to overturn laws, religion, peace and humane institutions.’ No man could hope to reach Heaven by using the machinery of the Church: ‘Without ceremonies, perhaps thou shalt not be a Christian; but they make thee not a Christian.’ Where, then, was the road to salvation? Erasmus agreed with the reformers that the Bible must be studied. He agreed with the practice of private devotion, especially prayer. Man saved himself through knowledge of God, obtained directly, not through the mediation of an institution. But it is at this point that his thought diverged from both the Lutherans and the later Calvinists. Erasmus, as a scholar and textual critic, had learnt to distrust theology, whose dogmatic conclusions were often based, as he had discovered, on faulty readings of the text.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Inquisition was set up in Rome, under the fanatical Neapolitan papalist Cardinal Caraffa (later Pope Paul IV), whose watchwords were: ‘No man is to abase himself by showing toleration towards any sort of heretic, least of all a Calvinist’; and ‘Even if my own father were a heretic, I would gather the wood to burn him.’ The new atmosphere in Rome was puritanical and intolerant, but not reformist. The Index of Forbidden Books was set up, and there were massive book-burnings; Jews were forced to wear the Yellow Star; Daniel of Volterra, ‘the Trouserer’, was employed to clothe the nudes of the Sistine Chapel; Protestants were burned and liberals silenced. Against this background a council finally met, at Trent, in 1545. By this time few took it seriously. It had been delayed twenty-five years, during which time forms of Protestantism had spread over a large part of Europe. The dying Luther remarked: ‘The remedy comes too late’. How could he negotiate and submit now? ‘This might have been done a quarter of a century ago.’ Its proceedings were ‘twaddle’. Bucer, far more ecumenically minded, nevertheless dismissed it as ‘a joke’. Catholics were scarcely less scathing. The Council began to assemble in March; but hardly anyone arrived on time. On the day appointed for the opening, it poured with rain and no one turned up for the ceremony. By April, only six bishops were actually in Trent. The opening, postponed from month to month, finally took place in December, with four cardinals, four archbishops, and only twenty-one bishops – including not a single ruling bishop from Germany. There seems to have been no sense of urgency or historical magnitude, no reforming spirit. A papal decree, ordering bishops actually to reside in their sees, a salient reforming issue, had been almost totally ignored, notably by most of the bishops present. Thus Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, Archbishop of Milan for twenty years (1520–50) never once visited the city. The ‘host’ bishop of Trent, Christoforo Madruzzo, was a symbol of the unreformed Church. He was handsome, well-born and well-connected, and always wore the red velvet dress of a secular prince – his scarlet biretta alone betrayed the fact he was a cleric. He had been given two parishes and a canonry in his teens, later three more canonries and a deanery, had been made a bishop at twenty-six and a cardinal at thirty. At the first banquet he gave to the council fathers, he served seventy-four different dishes and a famous Valtellina wine a hundred years old, while his private orchestra played. There were a good many ladies present. Madruzzo danced with them, and induced other clerics to do so; and, so few of the bishops having turned up, the ladies pushed their way into the chancel of the cathedral at the opening ceremony. Nor did the council substantially improve. No preparatory work had been done. Seripando, the Augustinian General, characterized its first session as ‘irresolution, ignorance, incredible stupidity’.