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

  Apostles’ Creed sufficient, and was willing to allow within this limit freedom for theological opinions. "Reduce the number of dogmas," he advised Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, "to a minimum; you can do it without injury to Christianity; on other points, leave every one free to believe what he pleases; then religion will take hold on life, and you can correct the abuses of which the world justly complains." He had a high opinion of the morality and piety of the nobler heathen, such as Socrates, Cicero, and Plutarch. "The Scriptures," he says in his Colloquies, "deserve, indeed, the highest authority; but I find also in the writings of the ancient heathen and in the poets so much that is pure, holy and divine, that I must believe that their hearts were divinely moved. The spirit of Christ is perhaps more widely diffused than we imagine, and many will appear among the saints who are not in our catalogue."520 Then, after quoting from Cicero and Socrates, he says, "I can often hardly restrain myself from exclaiming, ’Holy Socrates, pray for us.’ " The same liberal sentiments we find among the early Greek fathers (Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen), and in Zwingli. Bigoted Catholics hated and feared him, as much as the liberal admired and lauded him. "He laid the egg," they said, "which Luther hatched."521 They perverted his name into Errasmus because of his errors, Arasmus because he ploughed up old truths and traditions, Erasinus because he had made himself an ass by his writings. They even called him Behemoth and Antichrist. The Sorbonne condemned thirty-seven articles extracted from his writings in 1527. His books were burned in Spain, and long after his death placed on the Index in Rome. In his last word to his popish enemies who identified him with Luther to ruin both together, he writes: "For the future I despise them, and I wish I had always done so; for it is no pleasure to drown the croaking of frogs. Let them say, with their stout defiance of divine and human laws, ’We ought to obey God rather than men.’ That was well said by the Apostles, and even on their lips it is not without a certain propriety; only it is not the same God in the two cases. The God of the Apostles was the Maker of heaven and earth: their God is their belly. Fare ye well."522 His Works. The literary labors of Erasmus may be divided into three classes: — I. Works edited. Their number proves his marvellous industry and enterprise. He published the ancient Latin classics, Cicero, Terence, Seneca, Livy, Pliny; and the Greek classics with Latin translations, Euripides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Lucian. He edited the principal church fathers (some for the first time from MSS.); namely, Jerome (1516–1518; ed. ii., 1526; ed. iii., a year after his death), Cyprian (1520), Athanasius (in a Latin version, 1522), Hilarius (1523), Irenaeus (Latin, 1526, ed.

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

  186), ascribes the fragment to Pope Hildebrand. § 129. Berengar’s Theory of the Lord’s Supper. The chief source is Berengar’s second book against Lanfranc, already quoted. His first book is lost with the exception of a few fragments in Lanfranc’s reply. Berengar attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation, and used against it nearly every argument: it is not only above reason, but against reason and against the testimony of the senses; it involves a contradiction between subject and predicate, and between substance and its qualities, which are inseparable; it is inconsistent with the fact of Christ’s ascension and presence in heaven; it virtually assumes either a multiplication or an omnipresence of his body, which contradicts the necessary limitations of corporeality.740 There can be only one body of Christ, and only one sacrifice of Christ. The stories of the appearances of blood on the altar, be treated with scorn, from which some of his enemies inferred that he denied all miracles. He called the doctrine of transubstantiation an absurdity (ineptio) and an insane folly of the populace (vecordia vulgi). To this notion of a corporeal or material presence on the altar, he opposed the idea of a spiritual or dynamic presence and participation. His positive view

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  He himself appears to have been a sun-worshipper, one of a number of late-pagan cults which had observances in common with the Christians. Thus the followers of Isis adored a madonna nursing her holy child; the cult of Attis and Cybele celebrated a day of blood and fasting, followed by the Hilaria resurrection-feast, a day of joy, on 25 March; the elitist Mithraics, many of whom were senior army officers, ate a sacred meal. Constantine was almost certainly a Mithraic, and his triumphal arch, built after his ‘conversion’, testifies to the Sun-god, or ‘unconquered sun’. Many Christians did not make a clear distinction between this sun-cult and their own. They referred to Christ ‘driving his chariot across the sky’; they held their services on Sunday, knelt towards the East and had their nativity-feast on 25 December, the birthday of the sun at the winter solstice. During the later pagan revival under the Emperor Julian many Christians found it easy to apostatize because of this confusion; the Bishop of Troy told Julian he had always prayed secretly to the sun. Constantine never abandoned sun-worship and kept the sun on his coins. He made Sunday into a day of rest, closing the lawcourts and forbidding all work except agricultural labour. In his new city of Constantinople, he set up a statue of the sun-god, bearing his own features, in the Forum; and another of the mother-Goddess Cybele, though she was presented in a posture of Christian prayer. Constantine’s motives were probably confused. He was an exceptionally superstitious man, and he no doubt shared the view, popular among professional soldiers, that all religious cults should be respected, to appease their respective gods. He clearly underwent a strange experience at some time in his military career, in which his Christian troops played a part. He was a slave to signs and omens and had the Christian Chi-Rho sign on his shields and standards long before Milan. Superstition guided his decision to build a new capital, the choice of its site, and many other of his major acts of state. He was not baptized until his last illness. This was by no means unusual, since few Christians then believed in a second forgiveness of sins; sinful or worldly men, especially those with public duties seen as incompatible with Christian virtue, often delayed baptism till they were about to depart. But Eusebius’s account of Constantine’s late baptism is ambiguous; and it may be that the Church refused him the sacrament because of his manner of life. Certainly it was not his piety which made him a Christian. As a young man, he had the imperial look about him. He was tall, soldierly, athletic, with strongly marked features, heavy eyebrows, a powerful chin. But there were early reports of his violent temper and his cruelty in anger. He was much criticized for condemning prisoners of war to mortal combat with wild beasts at Trier and Colmar and for wholesale massacres in north Africa.

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

  Sixtus’ relatives became the leading figures in Rome, and in wealth and pomp they soon rivalled or eclipsed the old Roman families and the older members of the sacred college. Sixtus was blessed or burdened with 16 nephews and grandnephews. All that was in his power to do, he did, to give them a good time and to establish them in affluence and honor all their days. The Sienese had their day under Pius II., and now it was the turn of the Ligurians. The pontiff’s two brothers and three, if not four, sisters, as well as all their progeny, had to be taken care of. The excuse made for Calixtus III. cannot be made for this indulgent uncle, that he was approaching his dotage. Sixtus was only 56 when he reached the tiara. And desperate is the suggestion that the unfitness or unwillingness of the Roman nobility to give the pope proper support made it necessary for him to raise up another and a complacent aristocracy.761 Sixtus deemed no less than five of his nephews and a grandnephew deserving of the red hat, and sooner or later eight of them were introduced into the college of cardinals. Two nephews in succession were appointed prefects of Rome. The nephews who achieved the rank of cardinals were Pietro Riario at 25, and Julian della Rovere at 28, in 1471, both Franciscan monks; Jerome Basso and Christopher Rovere, in 1477; Dominico Rovere, Christopher’s brother, in 1478; and the pope’s grandnephew, Raphael Sansoni, at the age of 17, in 1477. The two nephews made prefects of Rome were Julian’s brother Lionardo, who died in 1475, and his brother Giovanni, d. 1501. Lionardo was married by his uncle to the illegitimate daughter of Ferrante, king of Naples.762 Upon Peter Riario and Julian Rovere he heaped benefice after benefice. Julian, a man of rare ability, afterwards made pope under the name of Julius II., was appointed archbishop of Avignon and then of Bologna, bishop of Lausanne, Constance, Viviers, Ostia and Velletri, and placed at the head of several abbeys. Riario, who, according to popular hearsay, was the pope’s own child, was bishop of Spoleto, Seville and Valencia, Patriarch of Constantinople, and recipient of other rich places, until his income amounted to 60,000 florins or about 2,500,000 francs. He went about with a retinue of 100 horsemen. His expenditures were lavish and his estate royal. His mistresses, whom he did not attempt to conceal, were dressed in elegant fabrics, and one of them wore slippers embroidered with pearls. Dominico received one after the other the bishoprics of Corneto, Tarentaise, Geneva and Turin.

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

  Julius now made a far-reaching stroke in securing the help of the Swiss, who had been fighting under the banners of France. The hardy mountaineers, who now find it profitable to entertain tourists from all over the world, then found it profitable to sell their services in war. With the aid of their vigorous countryman, Bishop Schinner of Sitten, afterwards made cardinal, the pope contracted for 6,000 Swiss mercenaries for five years. The localities sending them received 13,000 gulden a year, and each soldier 6 francs a month, and the officers, twice that sum. As chaplain of the Swiss troops, Zwingli went to Rome three times, a course of which his patriotism afterwards made him greatly ashamed. The descendants of these Swiss mercenaries defended Louis XVI., and their heroism is commemorated by Thorwaldsen’s lion, cut into the rock at Lucerne. Swiss guards, dressed in yellow suits, to this day patrol the approaches and halls of the Vatican.831 The French king, Louis XII. (1498–1515), sought to break Julius’ power by adding to the force of arms the weight of a religious assembly and, at his instance, the French bishops met in council at Tours, September, 1510, and declared that the pope had put aside the keys of St. Peter, which his predecessors had employed, and seized the sword of Paul. They took the ground that princes were justified in opposing him with force, even to withdrawing obedience and invading papal territory.832 As in the reign of Philip the Fair, so now moneys were forbidden transferred from France to Rome, and a call was made by 9 cardinals for a council to meet at Pisa on Sept. 1st, 1511. This council of Tours denounced Julius as "the new Goliath," and Louis had a coin struck off with the motto, I will destroy the name of Babylon—perdam Babylonis nomen. Calvin, in the year of his death, sent to Renée, duchess of Ferrara, one of these medals which in his letter, dated Jan. 8, 1564, he declared to be the finest present he had it in his power to make her. Renée was the daughter of Louis XII. Julius excommunicated Alfonso, duke of Ferrara, as a son of iniquity and a root of perdition. Thus we have the spectacle of the supreme priest of Christendom and the most Christian king, the First Son of the Church, again engaged in war with one another.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  In the last decades of the first century, the Spanish poet Martial, surviving at Rome as a literary client dependent on rich patrons, complained bitterly about such banquet humiliations in his Epigrams. “While the throng of invited guests looks on, you, Caecilianus, alone devour the mushrooms” (1.20), and again, “Why do I dine without you although, Ponticus, I am dining with you…let us eat the same fare” (3.60). His friend (and patron!) Pliny the Younger, who finally helped him back to Spain, found such patronal discrimination most inappropriate and tells this story in his Letters: Some very elegant dishes were served up to [the host] and few more of the company; while those which were placed before the rest were cheap and paltry. He had apportioned in small flagons three different sorts of wine…. One was for himself and me; the next for his friends of a lower order;…and the third for his own freedmen and mine. One who sat next to me took notice of this, and asked me if I approved of it. “Not at all,” I told him. “Pray, then,” said he, “what is your method on such occasions?” “Mine,” I returned, “is to give all my company the same fare; for when I make an invitation, it is to sup, not to be censoring. Every man whom I have placed on an equality with myself by admitting him to my table, I treat as an equal in all particulars.” “Even freedmen?” he asked. “Even them,” I said; “for on these occasions I regard them not as freedmen, but boon companions.” “This must put you to great expense,” says he. I assured him not at all; and on his asking how that could be, I said, “Why you must know my freedmen don’t drink the same wine I do—but I drink what they do.” (2.6) You will notice that last sentence, uttered, no doubt, with no narrative irony and full aristocratic complacency. The two options were patronal discrimination or patronal slumming. Not even Pliny considered the third option—give all alike the best wine. When, later, Paul wrote his letter to the Romans from Corinth, he added, “Gaius, who is host to me and to the whole church, greets you” (16:23). The problem that arose in 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 is exactly what would occur when Gaius or some other Corinthian Christian patron hosted all the assemblies for a eucharistic supper within the expected normalcies of Greco-Roman patronal banquets. In Christian churches today the Eucharist is a morsel of bread and a sip of wine as ritual memorial and sacramental participation in the Lord’s (Last) Supper. First-century Christian Eucharists, however, involved that latter function within the context of a full meal, supper, or banquet (deipnon). But Paul calls that real but special meal the kyriakon deipnon and distinguishes it from idion deipnon in 1 Corinthians 11:20–21.The “Lord’s-style supper” is not the same as “one’s own-style supper.” What made them different?

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  This Voltairian aperçu was the guiding principle behind Napoleon’s reconciliation with the papacy and the Catholic Church, marked by the new concordat of 1801. He claimed he had himself lost his faith at the age of eleven, when he learned that Caesar and Cato, ‘the most virtuous men of antiquity would burn in eternal flames for not having practised a religion of which they knew nothing.’ At seventeen he wrote an essay approving Rousseau’s contention that pure Christianity was a menace to the State. For him, Christianity was replaced by the cult of honour and the military ethic. Like others in the Directoire period, he leaned on patriotism, but eventually came to the conclusion that patriotism worked better when reinforced by religion, and that in France the religion had to be Catholicism – he saw no way of ending the guerilla war in the West otherwise. Thus he acted like Henri IV: if Paris was worth a mass, the Vendée was worth a concordat, which recognized officially that Catholicism was ‘the religion of the great majority of French people’. The statement was true in the sense that, throughout this period, most French children had continued to be educated by the clergy; and Napoleon’s decision to reopen the churches in 1802 was the most popular thing he ever did in France. His motives were entirely secular. ‘The people must have a religion, and this religion must be under the control of the government.’ Equality was unattainable, and belief in a future life helped the poor to accept their lot. Without a ‘respectable’ religion, people would turn to anything. ‘Religion is a sort of innoculation... which by satisfying our love of the marvellous, makes us immune to fakes and sorcerers.’ He was not sure what he believed in himself: he thought the soul was some kind of magnetic or electrical force. But he found that, in practice, foreign statesmen would not negotiate with him unless they thought he believed in God. So he set himself up as a sceptical Charlemagne, and went through an uneasy recreation of the papal coronation of 800, insisting (this time) on placing the crown on his head himself, with Pope Pius VII almost as a spectator. Napoleon’s coronation, which included an oath, wholly unacceptable to the papacy, to uphold ‘freedom of religious worship’, was seen at the time as a humiliation for the Pope. One of the Bourbon ministers remarked: ‘The sale of offices by Alexander VI is less revolting that this apostasy by his weak successor.’ In point of fact, the papacy was the one undoubted gainer of the whole Napoleonic period. In 1789 it was, as an institution, virtually on its last legs. The European crowns, and the states they represented, had been gaining ground at papal expense ever since the sixteenth century, and even in Italy. The papacy’s one instrument of international control, the Jesuits, had been tamely surrendered, and in all Catholic states the churches had become virtually independent.