Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (63 page)

The transformation in farming production changed the nature of the Western Church's ministry in society, making it pay more attention to the needs and obligations of the humble and the relatively poor. The backbone of the early medieval Church had been the select group of monarchs and nobility who financed the growth of Benedictine monasteries and had themselves generally directed Church affairs. Probably in reaction to the newly emerging settlement patterns, the Church now spread its pastoral care throughout Europe in a dense network of what it called
parochiae
: parishes. Each of the new villages was expected to have a church. The ideal of a parish was a territorial unit which could offer literally everyday pastoral care for a universally Christian population; its area should be such that a parish priest could walk to its boundaries in an hour or two at most. That was certainly easily possible in the little Suffolk parish in which I grew up in the 1960s, where my father was the successor to a line of priests which dated back at least to this revolution in the Church's life in the eleventh century. From the eleventh century to the twentieth, the second half of Christianity's existence so far, the parish was the unit in which most Christians experienced their devotional life. Only now has that ceased to be the case.

As parishes were organized, it became apparent that there were new sources of wealth for churchmen as well as for secular landlords. The parish system covering the countryside gave the Church the chance to tax the new farming resources of Europe by demanding from its farmer-parishioners a scriptural tenth of agricultural produce, the tithe. Tithe was provided by many more of the laity than the old aristocratic elite, and was another incentive for extending the Church's pastoral concern much more widely. This had a large number of consequences, not least in the Church's attitude to sin. It certainly did not denounce as sinful the movement to enserf a large section of the population, any more than it had challenged slavery in the ancient world; that was hardly surprising, since very often great monasteries like Cluny were in the forefront of imposing serfdom on their tenants. But the clergy also became more alert to the possibilities of sin which wealth produced, and sought to protect their people from the consequences. It was during the twelfth century that avarice and the taking of interest on money (usury) became major themes for churchmen's moralizing alongside the most basic of human sins, pride.
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As sins multiplied, so did the means of remedying sin. The great historian of medieval society Sir Richard Southern saw the extension of the clergy's pastoral care in the parishes as leading to a profound shift in the Western Church's theology of salvation and the afterlife.

The essence of Southern's argument is that in the earlier Benedictine era, the system of salvation had been geared to benefiting clergy and those wealthy enough to finance monks to pray for them and perform the very heavy penances demanded of the sinful, in order to avoid the pains of Hell. As the parish and tithe system developed, this older approach would not do: some other way must be devised to cope with the hopes and fears of a sinful population who could not afford such provision. This was where the idea of a middle state between Heaven and Hell, first envisaged in the theology of the Alexandrian theologians Clement and Origen at the turn of the second and third centuries, proved so useful and comforting. The instinct for justifying salvation by human effort, a constant thread from Origen through Evagrius and John Cassian, emerged once more to confront the 'grace alone' theology of Augustine. Few people can regard their drearily unspectacular sins as justifying hellfire, but most would agree with the Alexandrians that life on earth provides hardly enough time to remedy even those sins and enter Heaven without further purgation. Penance could be done in this middle state, which was time-limited, and which moreover had only one exit, not to Hell but to Paradise. By the 1170s, theologians observing this growth of popular theology of the afterlife had given it a name: Purgatory. Never a notion which gained currency in the Eastern world, despite its precedent in Greek-speaking theologians, Purgatory was to become one of the most important and in the end also one of the most contentious doctrines of the Western Latin Church.
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This was by no means the Church's only reaction to the new economy. One symptom of the reorganization of society's wealth was a great deal of local warfare as rival magnates competed to establish their positions and property rights, or used violence against humble people in order to squeeze revenue and labour obligations from them; this was the era in which a rash of castles began to appear across the continent, centres of military operations and refuges for noblemen. Churchmen in Francia reacted strongly in order to stop violence against their flocks (not to mention themselves and their own landed estates), appealing to the consciences of their communities to restore peace. They convened large gatherings, the first of which to be recorded was summoned by the Bishop of Le Puy in 975, in which the bishop threatened wrongdoers with excommunication and bullied those present into swearing an oath to keep the peace. The initiative was imitated by other bishops, who drew on their churches' collections of relics to reinforce their threats with the wrath of the saints.

So a 'Peace of God' movement was born throughout the Frankish dominions and beyond, east of the Rhine and south of the Pyrenees; eventually it even included a set of agreements about which days were legitimate for fighting. All sides benefited: thoughtful lords might be as relieved as the poor that the Church was providing an institutional setting where disputes could be resolved without the possibility of violence. It was striking that the Church was appealing to consciences right across the social spectrum, even if the net result was to confirm and strengthen the new order of society. It was an essential feature of the movement that crowds turned up to witness the proceedings; their numbers and their consent were as much part of the pressure put on recalcitrant magnates as the bones of the saints. Yet the notables spiritual and temporal were actors too. Odilo, most energetic of the abbots of Cluny, was among the Peace movement's leading advocates; soon kings and even the pope were involved in regulating these councils and agreements. The papacy's intervention was particularly significant for the future, because it pointed towards an inexorable conclusion: if a single problem occurred all over Europe, then it was best dealt with by a single authority.
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THE VICAR OF CHRIST: MARRIAGE, CELIBACY AND UNIVERSAL MONARCHY

The leadership of the Western Church was now doing its best to provide pastoral care in the everyday lives of its members, and part of the bargain was that it sought to hold everyone, rich and poor, to rigorous new standards of holiness. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries it did its best to gain more control over the most intimate part of human existence, sexual relationships and marriage; increasingly Church councils convened as part of the Peace movement began making orders which had nothing directly to do with peace, but regulated people's private lives.
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The Church successfully fought to have marriage regarded as a sacrament: Augustine of Hippo had thus described it, in what was then a rather vague use of the word 'sacrament', but now precision was brought to the idea. Marriage became seen as one of seven sacraments which had been instituted by Christ himself, all marked with a sacred ceremony in church. A 'church wedding' had certainly not been known in the first few centuries of Church life; the laity were much slower (by several centuries) to accept this idea as the norm, and the efforts of some extremist theologians completely failed to impose the doctrine that the priest performed the marriage, rather than witnessing a contract between two people.

This sacramental view of marriage meant that the Western Church saw a union blessed in Church as indissoluble; there was no possibility of divorce - again, not a common view in the first few centuries before Augustine - and the best one could hope for was a declaration that (on a variety of grounds) a marriage had never actually existed and could be declared null. This remains an axiom of marriage law in the Roman Catholic Church, and rather more untidily in the Church of England.
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At the same time, the Church much extended the number of relationships of affinity between relatives which could be considered incestuous and therefore a bar to marriage; churchmen took these well beyond what even contemporary theologians could have claimed were scriptural guidelines, so that in the end the great Council of the Church at the Lateran Palace in 1215 (see pp. 405-8) had to do some embarrassing backtracking to lessen the rigour.
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It is possible to be cynical and suggest that a principal motivation for this otherwise puzzling excess on affinity (a motivation, indeed, for the Church's general concern to regulate marriage) was a wish to see property left to churches rather than to a large range of possible heirs in the family. The more limits were placed on legal marriage, the more chance there was of there being no legal heir, so that land and wealth would be left to the Church, for the greater glory of God.
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Another and wider perspective on this new concern for marriage and its boundaries would be to see it as yet another response to the new arrangements which were emerging for land ownership in eleventh-century society. If landed estates were to survive as economic units, it was important that they were not broken up by the old custom of letting all members of the family take their share. A new custom of 'eldest takes all' (primogeniture) became widely established by the twelfth century, and now the nobility could see the Church and its concern for legitimate marriage as a helpful clarification to identify the true heir under the law of primogeniture. Most readers will agree that the Church's new approach was preferable to forcible male castration, which was employed with distressing frequency by certain European noblemen in the eleventh century as a means of neutralizing potential competing founders of landed dynasties.
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Certainly it is true that churchmen were deeply concerned about the loss of ecclesiastical estates to possession by families; that had a further effect on the Church's regulation of marriage. Very many clergy at that time who were not monks customarily married. Married clergy might well found dynasties, and might therefore be inclined to make Church lands into their hereditary property, just as secular lords were doing at the same time. The result was a long battle to forbid marriage for all clergy, not just monks: to make them compulsorily celibate. There had been occasional efforts to achieve this before, and the Western Church had from the fourth century generally prevented higher clergy from being married, but in 1139 a second council to be called at the pope's residence in Rome, the Lateran Palace, declared all clerical marriages not only unlawful but invalid.

There was not merely the issue of land at stake. Celibacy set up a barrier between the clergy and laity, becoming the badge of clerical status; at a time when everyone was being called to be holy, celibacy guaranteed that clerics still stole a march in holiness on laypeople. The struggle for universal and compulsory clerical celibacy was bitter, but even in countries like England, where married clergy put up fierce resistance, the fight was largely over by the thirteenth century. The issue was thrown open again in the sixteenth-century Reformation, but in the intervening period, any woman who was the partner of a priest was a concubine and all their children were bastards. One pitiless view of such children among Church lawyers in the wake of the reforming Council of Pavia in 1022 was that they were automatically serfs of the Church, though there is little evidence that anyone took this very seriously.
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More practically, during the next few centuries, bishops in some areas of the Church such as Switzerland were pleased to derive a substantial and reliable source of income from fining their parish clergy for keeping women as concubines.
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In many different ways, then, the clergy asserted their power to regulate the lives of the laity, as well as establish their distinction from laypeople, and they took major initiatives to seize and harness the profound changes in European society. They could only do this because, from the mid-eleventh century, a rather dim and occasionally deeply scandalous sequence of popes was replaced in Rome by successive capable and strong-willed reformers, inspired by what had been happening beyond the Alps. They drew on their predecessors' centuries of claims about their place in the Church, which had previously given the pope a position of great honour but not much real power. Popes had not appointed bishops; rulers like Charlemagne or the local bishops who were their creations had called councils to decide on Church law and policy, even contradicting papal opinions from time to time. When the Pope crowned Charlemagne in 800, it had been in practice if not in theory from a position of some weakness (see p. 349), and later Holy Roman Emperors had proved to have minds of their own. In fact it is a paradox, and an anticipation of the troubles which were now to afflict relations between pope and emperor, that the first pope who can be regarded as a reformer was a German imposed on Rome in 1046 as Clement II, after the Emperor Henry III had forcibly seen off the claims of three competing claimants to the papal title.
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However they arrived at their new situation, the reforming popes now constructed a view of their position which did not brook contradiction. The very name Clement was a manifesto, reminding the world that the first Clement had been a close successor of Peter. Pope Leo IX (reigned 1049-54) was in the final year of his pontificate responsible for the drastic step of excommunicating the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael Keroularios in his own cathedral in Constantinople. The immediate issue was a dispute about eucharistic bread. At some point after it had become apparent that East and West had begun drifting apart, in the years after Chalcedon, the Latin West had come to use unleavened bread (
azyma
in Greek) at the Eucharist.
Azyma
had the advantage of not dropping into crumbs when it was broken, a matter of some importance now that eucharistic bread was increasingly identified with the Body of the Lord - yet the Greeks (rightly) regarded this as yet another Western departure from early custom. Was such bread really bread at all?