THE AGE OF HILDEBRAND

 

INTRODUCTION THE RISE OF THE PAPAL SUPREMACY

 

F

HORA NOVISSIMA; TEMPORA PESSIMA

 

 

The reader must not suppose that this picture of papal wickedness and weakness has been overdrawn. That were impossible. On the other hand, it were unfair to imagine that every pope was either the sport of faction or a monster of depravity. There were some that had visions of higher things, and struggled, though vainly, against the flood of iniquity which threatened to submerge the Church. Especially was it reserved for two Germans, Gregory V and Sylvester II (999­1003), the latter to his contemporaries a marvel of piety and learning, to strive for a reform of the Papacy. At that time, however, it was beyond their power.

Not less awful than this abysm of papal degradation and pollution were the vices and wrongs within the Church itself. Here was an Augean stable in which adultery and theft were among the virtues of an age addicted to more abominable and unnatural crimes. The iniquities of that time must be concealed in Latin; society today would not tolerate their translation. Peter Damiani, the friend of Hildebrand, and one of the leaders of the reform party, has pictured the age for us in his work Gomorrhianus, the title of which is as suggestive as it is true. This book was published with the approval of Pope Leo IX. His successor judged, not without reason, that its faithful description of existing vices was too polluting to be given to the public. So he carried it off from its author and locked it up within a casket. But it was not possible to lock up the sins themselves. Their cry went up to heaven for vengeance. Drunkenness and debauchery were universal; the foulest crimes were commonly practised by priests of all ranks. We are told by a contemporary that in Rome in the year 1040 "it would have been very difficult to find a single priest who was not illiterate, simoniacal, or had not a concubine." When Hildebrand began his reforms, he found within St. Peter's sixty married laymen who were daily accustomed to delude foreigners and steal their offerings by reading mass in the vestments of cardinals. At night the cathedral was made the scene of incredible orgies. The house of prayer had become a den of thieves; the steps of the altars were constantly polluted by lust and murder. "They struggled together," adds another concerning the priests of Milan, "who should have the most sumptuous dresses, the most abundant tables, and the most beautiful mistresses." These followers of the apostles could only be "distinguished from the laity by their mode of shaving their beard." Almost without exception they bought and sold the gift of the Holy Ghost. The bishops bought their sees from the emperor or king. In their turn they sold the inferior offices and the parish benefices, oftentimes by open auction. In Italy there was a fixed tariff; for the bishopric of Florence the price was three thousand pounds. Damiani calls the bishops "heretical brigands"; he adds that it was easier to convert a Jew than to bring a prelate to repentance. On both sides of the Alps, "from the head of the Church to the porter at her gates,"—to use the words of Henry III,—simony was the one door into the Church. We need not wonder that they who entered in were chiefly thieves and robbers. When Hildebrand was the legate in Gaul of Victor II, the stern reformer deposed forty-five bishops who confessed that they had bought their sees. At a later date he wrote to Hugh of Clugny that it was hard to find in the Western Church any bishop legally appointed. Here and there were notable exceptions, for God is never without His seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal. When Otto the Great appointed the monk Gunther to the bishopric of Ratisbon, he asked him what he would give as payment. "Nothing but my shoes," was the answer. But Gunther stood almost alone, for the princes of the age either imposed on the Church the meanest of their creatures or sold the sees and abbeys to the highest bidders. At one time the Archbishop of Rheims was a child of five, while bishops under age were general.

In the monasteries matters were as bad, save where the Cluniacs strove to uphold the ancient discipline. Take, for instance, this picture from the celebrated imperial convent of Farfa. In 936 two of the monks murdered the abbot and seized the abbey. For years they ruled as joint heads, carrying on a perpetual struggle with each other, or squandering the convent's estates on their followers and soldiers. One of them was the father of seven daughters and three sons whom he ostentatiously brought up in princely luxury. Like abbots like monk; each had a mistress with whom he openly lived. That these women might not be without bravery, the consecrated vestments of rich brocade were turned into dresses, the altar vessels melted down into earrings and brooches. In spite of all attempts at reform by brethren from Clugny, this state of things went on for fifty years.

Obnoxious puritans were quietly removed by poison or strangled in their beds. Such instances of corruption might be multiplied. The above will suffice; in its depravity in no wise an exaggeration of the age. On all hands the invisible kingdom of Satan was displayed; he who would climb to honour in the Church must first worship its prince. "All men would have thought that Christ and His saints were asleep." The tables of the money-changers and they who trafficked in the souls of men stood unblushingly in His holy Temple.

A study of the condition of the outer world is needless. With the Church hopelessly sunk in every vice and weakness, the whole head sick and the whole heart faint, we must expect to find a secular life the misery and crime of which was appalling. Of its helpless evils we have now no means of measuring the magnitude. Dean Church has well pointed out that by the close of the tenth century "Christian teaching can hardly be said to have leavened society at all. Its influence on individuals, so vast and astonishing, was no measure of its influence on society at large. It acted upon it doubtless with enormous force, but it was an extraneous and foreign force, which destroys and shapes but does not mingle or renew." It could conquer an empire, it could put a bridle in the mouth of barbarians, and transform one by one sinners into saints, but the traditions of society at large were undiluted heathenism. The application of inward religion to the round of life in the shop and the castle, the home and the camp, was an ideal of which as yet the world had hardly begun to imagine the possibility. "Let a man throw himself into the society of the day, and he found himself in an atmosphere to which the religion of self-conquest and love was simply a thing alien or unmeaning, which no one imagined himself called to think on." In its conflict with the barbarians who had overwhelmed the degraded Latin civilization Christianity had conquered, yet at times it might seem as if the chief result were to make barbarism more superstitious and cruelty more ingenious. It were the easiest of tasks to find illustrations of vice, coupled generally with an astonishing religious scrupulosity, which would have brought a blush to the pagans of Rome. But such stirrings of cesspools would serve little purpose. They would only show, what we might otherwise expect, how gradual was the transformation of society, and how little fitted as yet were men either for liberty of thought or self-government.

We must remember also as another element in this dissolution of morals the fatal effect of the prevalent belief that the world was growing old and perishing, that with the year one thousand, or, at latest, with the anniversary of the Crucifixion, there would dawn the end of all things. "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," is ever the cry of a civilization that sees no future. Add to this that which was in some respects the cause of this demoralization, the lawless savagery of the barbarian conquerors. Danes and Normans, Saracens and Huns, successively ravaged the land. Like the locusts of Joel, nothing escaped them: the remnant that was left of one horde was devoured by the next. A vast anarchy swept down upon every country of Western Europe. It was an age of Egyptian darkness, of unclean spirits like frogs, of devils working miracles, and of a great hail out of heaven every stone about the weight of a talent. It was an age when men blasphemed God because of the plague, for the plague was exceeding great. It was an age in which religion itself was bound to be superstitious, for only the superstitious was awful, and only the awful could control men's passions. It was an age which, by its weakness, crime, and misery, made the reform of the Papacy and the dominion of Rome an unavoidable necessity. But for the centripetal influences of that absolute power, the centrifugal forces of the times would have resolved society and religion into a war of chaotic atoms. The countries of Europe would have become like England under the Octarchy. Every city was striving to be an independent government; every count was aspiring to be a sovereign. Not even "the truce of God" could have saved the world from a struggle for existence unredeemed by few elements even of chivalry. In that ferocious Armageddon the warfare, but for the Church, would have been without discharge; the fittest might have survived—at the expense of whatsoever things were beautiful and true and pure. On the back of the famous chair which tradition from the second century onward claims as the chair of Peter, we see today a row of ivory panels engraved with the labours of Hercules. A fitting symbol this of the task that amid such confused barbarism the Papacy was called upon to fulfil, nor is its significance lessened when we discover that some of the panels are so carelessly affixed that they are upside down.