IV. THE CHANGING ENVIRONMENT
But while the Church seemed to be growing again in grandeur and authority, Europe was undergoing economic, political, and intellectual changes that slowly undermined the structure of Latin Christianity.
Religion normally thrives in an agricultural regime, science in an industrial economy. Every harvest is a miracle of the earth and a whim of the sky; the humble peasant, subject to weather and consumed with toil, sees supernatural forces everywhere, prays for a propitious heaven, and accepts a feudal-religious system of graduated loyalties mounting through vassal, liege lord, and king to God. The city worker, the merchant, the manufacturer, the financier, live in a mathematical world of calculated quantities and processes, of material causes and regular effects; the machine and the counting table dispose them to see, over widening areas, the reign of “natural law.” The growth of industry, commerce, and finance in the fifteenth century, the passage of labor from the countryside to the town, the rise of the mercantile class, the expansion of local to national to international economy—all were of evil omen for a faith that had fitted in so well with feudalism and the somber vicissitudes of the fields. Businessmen repudiated ecclesiastical restraints as well as feudal tolls; the Church had to yield, by transparent theological jugglery, to the necessity of charging interest for loans if capital was to expand enterprise and industry; by 1500 the old prohibition of “usury” was universally ignored. Lawyers and businessmen more and more replaced churchmen and nobles in the administration of government. Law itself, triumphantly recapturing its Roman Imperial traditions and prestige, led the march of secularization and day by day encroached on the sphere of ecclesiastical regulation of life by canon law. Secular courts extended their jurisdiction; episcopal courts declined.
The adolescent monarchies, enriched by revenues from commerce and industry, freed themselves day by day from domination by the Church. The kings resented the residence, in their realms, of papal legates or nuncios who acknowledged no authority but the pope’s, and made each nation’s church a state within the state. In England the statutes of Provisors (1351) and Praemunire (1353) sharply restricted the economic and judicial powers of the clergy. In France the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges was theoretically abrogated in 1516, but the king retained the right to nominate archbishops, bishops, abbots, and priors.17 The Venetian Senate insisted on appointing to high ecclesiastical office in all Venetian dependencies. Ferdinand and Isabella overrode the popes in filling many ecclesiastical vacancies in Spain. In the Holy Roman Empire, where Gregory VII had maintained against Henry IV the papal right of investiture, Sixtus IV conceded to the emperors the right of nomination to 300 benefices and seven bishoprics. The kings often misused these powers by giving church offices to political favorites, who took the revenues—but ignored the responsibilities—of their abbacies and sees.18 Many ecclesiastical abuses were traceable to such secular appointees.
Meanwhile the intellectual environment of the Church was changing, to her peril. She still produced laborious and conscientious scholars; but the schools and universities that she had founded had raised up an educated minority whose thinking did not always please the saints. Hear St. Bernardino, toward 1420:
Very many folk, considering the wicked life of monks and friars, nuns and secular clergy, are shaken by this; nay, oftentimes, they fail in faith, and believe in nothing higher than the roofs of their houses, not esteeming those things to be true that have been written concerning our faith, but believing them to have been written by the cozening invention of men, and not by God’s inspiration.... They despise the sacraments .... and hold that the soul has no existence; neither do they... fear hell nor desire heaven, but cling with all their hearts to transitory things, and resolve that this world shall be their paradise.19
Probably the business class was the least pious; as wealth mounts, religion declines. Gower (1325?-1408) claimed that the merchants of England cared little about the hereafter, saying, “He who can get the sweetness of this life, and lets it go, would be a fool, for no man knoweth whither or by what way we go” after death.20 The failure of the Crusades had left a slowly fading wonder why the God of Christendom had permitted the victory of Islam, and the capture of Constantinople by the Turks refreshed these doubts. The work of Nicholas of Cusa (1432) and Lorenzo Valla (1439), in exposing the “Donation of Constantine” as a forgery, damaged the prestige of the Church and weakened her title to temporal power. The recovery and publication of classical texts nourished skepticism by revealing a world of learning and art that had flourished long before the birth of that Christian Church which, at the Fifth Council of the Lateran (1512–17), had denied the possibility of salvation outside her fold: nulla salus extra ecclesiam .21 The disco /ery of America, and the widening exploration of the East, revealed a hundred nations that with apparent impunity ignored or rejected Christ, and had faiths of their own as positive, and as morally efficacious, as Christianity. Travelers returning from “heathen” lands brought some rubbing of strange creeds and rituals with them; these alien cults touched elbows with Christian worship and belief, and rival dogmas suffered attrition in the market place and the port.
Philosophy, which in the thirteenth century had been the handmaid of theology, devoting itself to finding rational grounds for the orthodox faith, liberated itself in the fourteenth century with William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua, and in the sixteenth became boldly secular, flagrantly skeptical with Pomponazzi, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini. Some four years before Luther’s Theses Machiavelli wrote a startling prophecy:
Had the religion of Christianity been preserved according to the ordinances of the Founder, the state and commonwealth of Christendom would have been far more united and happy than they are. Nor can there be a greater proof of its decadence than the fact that the nearer people are to the Roman Church, the head of their religion, the less religious are they. And whoever examines the principles on which that religion is founded, and sees how widely different from those principles its present practice and application are, will judge that her ruin or chastisement is near at hand.22
V. THE CASE AGAINST THE CHURCH
Shall we recapitulate the charges made by loyal Catholics against the Church of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? The first and sorest was that she loved money, and had too much of it for her own good.* In the Centum Gravamina, or Hundred Grievances, listed against the Church by the Diet of Nuremberg (1522), it was alleged that she owned half the wealth of Germany.23 A Catholic historian reckoned the Church’s share as a third in Germany and a fifth in France;24 but a procurer-general of the Parlement calculated in 1502 that three quarters of all French wealth was ecclesiastical.25 No statistics are available to check these estimates. In Italy, of course, one third of the peninsula belonged to the Church as the Papal States, and she owned rich properties in the rest.†
Six factors served to accumulate lands in the possession of the Church. (1) Most of those who bequeathed property left something to her as “fire insurance”; and as the Church controlled the making and probating of wills, her agents were in a position to encourage such legacies. (2) Since ecclesiastical property was safer than other property from ravage by bandits, soldiers, or governments, some persons, for security, deeded their lands to the Church, held them as her vassals, and surrendered all right to them at death. Others willed part or all of their property to the Church on condition that she should provide for them in sickness or old age; in this way the Church offered disability insurance. (3) Crusaders had sold—or mortgaged and forfeited—lands to ecclesiastical bodies to raise cash for their venture. (4) Hundreds of thousands of acres had been earned for the Church by the reclamation work of monastic orders. (5) Land once acquired by the Church was inalienable—could not be sold or given away by any of her personnel except through discouragingly complex means. (6) Church property was normally free from taxation by the state; occasionally, however, kings reckless of damnation forced levies from the clergy, or found legal dodge
s to confiscate some portion of ecclesiastical wealth. The rulers of northern Europe might have grumbled less about the riches of the Church if the income therefrom, or the multifarious contributions of the faithful, had remained within the national boundaries; they fretted at the sight of northern gold flowing in a thousand streamlets to Rome.
The Church, however, looked upon herself as the chief agent in maintaining morality, social order, education, literature, scholarship, and art; the state relied upon her to fulfill these functions; to perform them she needed an extensive and expensive organization; to finance this she taxed and gathered fees; even a church could not be governed by paternosters. Many bishops were the civil as well as the ecclesiastical rulers of their regions; most of them were appointed by lay authorities, and came of patrician stock accustomed to easy morals and luxuries; they taxed and spent like princes; sometimes, in the performance of their multiple functions, they scandalized the saints by donning armor and lustily leading their troops in war. Cardinals were chosen rarely for their piety, usually for their wealth or political connections or administrative capacity; they looked upon themselves, not as monks burdened with vows, but as the senators and diplomats of a rich and powerful state; in many instances they were not priests; and they did not let their red hats impede their enjoyment of life.26 The Church forgot the poverty of the Apostles in the needs and expenses of power.
Being worldly, the servants of the Church were often as venal as the officials of contemporary governments. Corruption was in the mores of the time and in the nature of man; secular courts were notoriously amenable to the persuasiveness of money, and no papal election could rival in bribery the election of Charles V as emperor. This excepted, the fattest bribes in Europe were paid at the Roman court.27 Reasonable fees had been fixed for the services of the Curia, but the cupidity of the staff raised the actual cost to twenty times the legal sum.28 Dispensations could be had from almost any canonical impediment, almost any sin, provided the inducement was adequate. Aeneas Sylvius, before becoming pope, wrote that everything was for sale in Rome, and that nothing could be had there without money.29 A generation later the monk Savonarola, with the exaggeration of indignation, called the Church of Rome a “harlot” ready to sell her favors for coin.30 Another generation later, Erasmus remarked: “The shamelessness of the Roman Curia has reached its climax.” 31 Pastor writes:
A deep-rooted corruption had taken possession of nearly all the officials of the Curia.... . The inordinate number of gratuities and exactions passed all bounds. Moreover, on all sides deeds were dishonestly manipulated, and even falsified, by the officials. No wonder that there arose from all parts of Christendom the loudest complaints about the corruption and financial extortions of the papal officials.32
It was unusual for impecunious merit to mount in the Church of the fifteenth century. From the moderate fee charged for priestly ordination to the enormous sums that many cardinals paid for their elevation, nearly every appointment required the clandestine lubrication of superiors. A favorite papal device for raising funds was to sell ecclesiastical offices, or (as the popes saw the matter) to appoint to sinecures or honors, even to the cardinalate, persons who would make a substantial contribution to the expenses of the Church. Alexander VI created eighty new offices, and received 760 ducats ($19,000?) from each of the appointees. Julius II formed a “college” or bureau of 101 secretaries, who together paid him 74,000 ducats for the privilege. Leo X nominated sixty chamberlains and 141 squires to the papal household, and received from them 202,000 ducats.33 The salaries paid to such officials were looked upon, by giver and recipient, as endowment policy annuities; but to Luther they seemed the rankest simony.
In thousands of cases the appointee lived far away from the benefice—the parish or abbacy or episcopacy—whose revenues supported his labor or luxury; and one man might be the absentee beneficiary of several such posts. So the active Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (Alexander VI to be) received from a variety of benefices an income of 70,000 ducats ($1,750,000?) a year; and his furious foe, Cardinal della Rovere (later Julius II), held at one time the archbishopric of Avignon, the bishoprics of Bologna, Lausanne, Coutances, Viviers, Mende, Ostia, and Velletri, and the abbacies of Nonantola and Grottaferrata.34 By this “pluralism” the Church maintained her major executives, and, in many instances, scholars, poets, and scientists. So Petrarch, sharp critic of the Avignon popes, lived on the sinecures that they granted him; Erasmus, who satirized a hundred ecclesiastical follies, regularly received Church pensions; and Copernicus, who did most damage to medieval Christianity, lived for years on Church benefices involving a minimum of distraction from his scientific pursuits.35
A more serious charge than pluralism was laid against the personal morality of the clergy. “The morals of the clergy are corrupt,” said the Bishop of Torcello (1458); “they have become an offense to the laity.”36 Of the four orders of friars founded in the thirteenth century—Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Augustinians—all but the last had become scandalously lax in piety and discipline. The monastic rules formulated in the fervor of early devotion proved too rigorous for a human nature increasingly freed from supernatural fears. Absolved by their collective wealth from the necessity of manual labor, thousands of monks and friars neglected, religious services, wandered outside their walls, drank in taverns, and pursued amours.37 A fourteenth-century Dominican, John Bromyard, said of his fellow friars:
Those who should be the fathers of the poor... covet delicate food and enjoy morning sleep.... . Very few vouchsafe their presence at matins or Mass.... . They are consumed in gluttony and drunkenness... not to say in uncleanliness, so that now the assemblies of clerics are thought to be brothels of wanton folk and congregations of play-actors.38
Erasmus repeated the charge after a century: “Many convents of men and women differ little from public brothels.” 39 Petrarch drew a favorable picture of discipline and devotion in the Carthusian monastery where his brother lived, and several convents in Holland and Western Germany retained the spirit of study and piety that had formed the Brethren of the Common Life and produced The Imitation of Christ .40 Yet Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim (c. 1490), denounced the monks of this Rhenish Germany with violent hyperbole:
The three vows of religion... are as little heeded by these men as if they had never promised to keep them.... The whole day is spent in filthy talk; their whole time is given to play and gluttony.... . In open possession of private property... each dwells in his own private lodging.... They never fear nor love God; they have no thought of the life to come, preferring their fleshly lusts to the needs of the soul.... . They scorn the vow of poverty, know not that of chastity, revile that of obedience.... The smoke of their filth ascends all around.41
Guy Jouenneaux, a papal commissary sent to reform the Benedictine monasteries of France, turned in a gloomy report (1503): Many monks gamble, curse, haunt inns, carry swords, gather riches, fornicate, “live the life of Bacchanals,” and “are more worldly than the mere worldling.... . Were I minded to relate all those things that have come under my own eyes, I should make too long a tale of it.”42 In the growing disorder of the monasteries a great number of them neglected those admirable works of charity, hospitality, and education which had entitled them to public trust and support.43 Said Pope Leo X (1516): “The lack of rule in the monasteries of France and the immodest life of the monks have come to such a pitch that neither kings, princes, nor the faithful at large have any respect left for them.” 44 A recent Catholic historian sums up the matter, as of 1490, with possibly excessive severity:
Read the innumerable testimonies of this time—historical anecdotes, rebukes of moralists, satires of scholars and poets, papal bulls, synodal constitutions—what do they say? Always the same facts and the same complaints: the suppression of conventual life, of discipline, of morals.... . Prodigious is the number of monastic robbers and debauchees; to realize their disorders we must read the details revealed by judicial inquiry as to the
internal state of the majority of the great abbeys.... The abuses among the Carthusians were so great that the order was in ill repute almost everywhere.... Monastic life had disappeared from the nunneries.... All contributed to transform these asylums of prayer into centers of dissipation and disorder.45
The secular clergy, if we take a lenient attitude toward concubinage, present a better picture than the friars and monks. The chief sin of the simple parish priest was his ignorance,46 but he was too poorly paid and hard worked to have funds or time for study, and the piety of the people suggests that he was often respected and loved. Violations of the sacerdotal vow of chastity were frequent. In Norfolk, England, out of seventy-three accusations of incontinence filed in 1499, fifteen were against clergymen; in Ripon, out of 126, twenty-four; in Lambeth, out of fifty-eight, nine; i.e., clerical offenders numbered some 2 3 per cent of the total, though the clergy were probably less than 2 per cent of the population.47 Some confessors solicited sexual favors from female penitents.48 Thousands of priests had concubines; in Germany nearly all.49 In Rome it was assumed that priests kept concubines; and some reports estimated the prostitutes there at 6,000 in a population not exceeding 100,000.50 To quote again a Catholic historian: