Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (69 page)

Distressed at the failures of the Fifth Crusade in Egypt, in 1219 Francis travelled there to convert the Ayyubid sultan. The Muslims, familiar with unkempt holy men, though surprised at meeting a Latin Christian in this role, allowed him to move freely between the Christian and Egyptian military camps. Although he survived, his mission produced no results.
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This was not the only setback for his charismatic ministry: many of the followers who had flocked to his message were beginning to organize themselves into another religious order, demanding a structure and everyday leadership. Francis, having no taste for such developments, quickly handed over the task to someone else. In the last weeks of his life in 1226 he dictated a
Testament
expressing his fears that his commitment to poverty would be sidelined by the newly institutionalized 'Franciscans'. In particular he warned against their large-scale campaign of building convents for themselves.

Francis was justified in his worries. Within little more than a decade of his death, a grand and expensive basilica had been built over his tomb in Assisi, its foundation stone laid by a pope, its great bulk jutting out like a prow to the promontory on which sprawled the town of his birth. Its magnificence was a strange comment on Francis's life and work. Yet it was also a testimony to the impact of a man whom many saw as an
alter Christus,
a second Christ bearing the same
stigmata,
his preaching to the birds a sign that a human being could speak once more with the beasts of the wild, as Adam and Eve had done before their fall into sin in the Garden of Eden. Francis had created the Franciscan Order despite himself. Like the Dominicans, his followers did embrace apostolic poverty; their cheap, roughly dyed clothing earned them the English nickname Greyfriars, though the actual colour of their habit is brown. Francis's own unlovely tunic, and that of his female colleague Clare, foundress of parallel communities for women, are lovingly preserved and displayed by the nuns of St Clare in Assisi, so amid the stateliness and beauty of Clare's thirteenth-century basilica, there is a perpetual reminder of what it means to live like the destitute. And perhaps it would make Francis smile that the Italian town of his birth is now officially 'twinned' with a city in California named after him, which has made a speciality of its own joyous adventures in human possibilities: San Francisco.

It was probably inevitable that Franciscans should become a formal religious order, because the anarchy prevailing among Francis's early supporters could seem more of a threat than a help to the official Church. Francis and his followers survived because they won the sympathy of one of the most statesmanlike of medieval popes: Innocent III (Pope 1198-1216). In so many ways, Innocent represents the culmination of the age of reform which we have seen begin in Cluny. He was from a well-known Italian family, the Conti, which had already produced one pope (and after his death would produce more, over a period of four centuries). He was trained in Bologna and Paris, so he combined a knowledge of canon law and theology; his theological schooling in Paris took place in a circle with a lively concern to draw practical lessons for everyday life and the organization of society from the Bible, and it became his concern to apply the power built up by the centralized papacy to such a purpose. He spent much of his energy as pope in confronting secular rulers who undermined that power, or harnessing the piety of others to papal purposes. It was Innocent who rallied noblemen and the King of France to attack the Cathars, although he did in the end blanch at the indiscriminate violence which he had unleashed. There was indeed much more to Innocent's vision of his role in the world than the promotion of his office; this power must be put to a purpose. Few Christian leaders have had such a transforming effect on their world.

Although not himself a monk, Innocent sought to hold the monastic orders to the highest standards, which he regarded as set by the Cistercians, and he was much preoccupied by efforts to reform Benedictine monasticism. Yet he had the imagination to see that the new movements brought something different and valuable to the religious life, so he was prepared to listen benevolently to bishops who were friendly towards the various groups of evangelists, many previously regarded with suspicion.
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He saw the friars as one instrument of his newly reordered Church, as preachers and hearers of confessions. In 1215 he called a council to his Lateran Palace which represented a gathering of bishops unprecedented in number in the Western Church, although given his own view of his authority, the bishops were only there to discuss an agenda strictly set by the Pope and the Curia.
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This fourth Lateran Council embodied the Gregorian aim of imposing regulated holiness on the laity and ensuring uniformity in both belief and devotional practice. So the council ordered every Catholic Christian beyond early childhood to receive the eucharistic elements at Mass at least once a year (in practice usually only bread rather than both bread and wine), and prepare for that encounter through confession. There was nothing new in the council's stipulation that confession should be to one's own priest, or that both sides should preserve absolute secrecy in what was said, but what was new was the universality of the demand; it was an extraordinary attempt to get everyone to scrutinize their lives, with the aid of expert help. Priests were now expected as a matter of course to instruct as well as tend their flocks: manuals of instruction for pastoral care and preaching proliferated.

Crucial to this instruction was that the faithful should understand what they were doing when they received the Eucharist. The council therefore recommended one philosophical explanation for understanding the miracle of the Mass: it asserted that Christ's 'body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God's power, into his body and blood'.
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This was the doctrine generally known as 'transubstantiation', although notably the council asserted it rather than provided any detailed analysis, which meant that a good deal of latitude remained in eucharistic belief down to the Counter-Reformation. It is easy to confuse the doctrine of the 'Real Presence', the general devotional belief that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are to be identified with the body and blood of Christ, with the doctrine of transubstantiation, which is just one explanation of this miracle.

The council's recommended explanation is couched in terms borrowed from the philosopher Aristotle, whose abstractions of 'substance' and 'accidents', conceived without reference to the Semitic thought patterns of the Bible, are perhaps best illustrated with a concrete example. The substance of a sheep, which is its reality, its participation in the universal quality of being a sheep, is manifested in its gambolling on the hills, munching grass and baaing. Its accidents are things particular to any individual sheep: statistics of its weight, the curliness of its wool or the timbre of its baa. When the sheep dies, it ceases to gambol on the hills, munch grass and baa: its substance, its 'sheepiness', is instantly extinguished, and only the accidents remain - its corpse including its weight, curly wool or voice box - and they will gradually decay. They are not significant to its former sheepiness, which has ended with the extinguishing of its substance in death. It has ceased to be a sheep. So it is with transubstantiation from bread and wine into divine body and blood. Breadness and wineness have gone in substance, but something more, by divine providence, has happened: divine corporal substance has replaced them. Accidents of breadness and wineness remain, but they are mere accidents.

In making these momentous enactments, Innocent's council was not simply exercising clerical power by handing down arbitrary orders to layfolk; it was responding to and seeking to regulate a tide of devotion to the Eucharist which had already seized ordinary people. During the twelfth century (it is not clear originally where or when), a new liturgical custom became very common in the Mass. Clergy consecrating the eucharistic elements lifted high the bread and chalice of wine as they pronounced the Latin words which echoed what Jesus had said at the Last Supper,
Hoc est enim corpus meum,
'For this is my body'. This 'elevation of the host' became a focus for the longing of the Catholic faithful to gaze upon the body of Christ: the dramatic high point of the Western Latin Mass.

From this, there developed a new theme in the Western Church's devotional repertoire. Celibate women might have their own reasons for being attracted to the thought that the Eucharist gave them real bodily contact with their Saviour, and it was an Augustinian nun who inspired a movement which over the next two centuries swept through Western Europe. In 1208 Juliana of the nunnery of Mount-Cornillon near Liege first experienced a vision of Christ in which he urged her to seek the establishment of a feast entirely focused on his body and blood, the consecrated elements of the Eucharist - a celebration of the universal Christian celebration. After a good deal of lobbying led by the Dominicans, Juliana posthumously achieved the extraordinary accolade of a papal decree by Urban IV in 1264, establishing her feast throughout the Church. A pope had never previously used a decree in this fashion, and it was an innovation which subsequent popes and bishops were initially hesitant to follow up.

The new feast day was to fall on a Thursday, since this was the day on which the Last Supper took place, but it could only be on a Thursday which was not overshadowed by either the solemnity of Holy Week or the already festive atmosphere of Easter. The nearest Thursday after the date of the Last Supper therefore became the first available Thursday after Eastertide, a cheerful time of year in late spring. Already in Pope Urban's decree, the feast was called
Corpus Christi
('the body of Christ'): bread/body seemed to upstage wine/blood in this liturgical celebration, maybe because the laity were generally restricted in the West to taking bread and not wine when they received the Eucharist, but also because the eucharistic elevation of the host was associated with 'This is my body'. After a slow and patchy start, during the fourteenth century Corpus Christi became one of the most important feasts of the Church, and inspired many lay associations (gilds) devoted to promoting and maintaining it. The festival was popular because it provided a wonderful excuse to combine great services in church with public processions amid what was normally likely to be a season of good weather. It was a way to express pride in community life and of course simply to have fun. Cities, towns, villages, hamlets could expand the Church's central liturgical celebration until it embraced all their streets, markets and fields. There could be no better way of showing how the Church brought the love of Christ into every corner of Western life.
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There was another side to this universality of Catholic faith in Western Latin society. In order to ensure uniformity of belief among the faithful, the Lateran Council created procedures for inquisitions to try heretics. It is difficult for modern Westerners to feel any sort of empathy with the inquisitorial mind, but we need to understand that an inquisitor could see his role as an aspect of pastoral work. That was after all the central task for the Dominicans, who largely staffed the tribunals. The inquisitors' outlook has been likened to that of officials in the Cheka, early revolutionary Russia's secret police, where the aim was not merely to repress, but to change society for the better - there is often a fine line between idealism and sadism. A major part of an inquisition's task was always to impose penances, just as a priest did for a penitent in the confessional, though increasingly inquisitions developed prisons, in what was virtually forced religious enclosure, as a setting for those convicted to carry out their penances. When we leap from thinking of inquisitions to thinking of burnings at the stake, it is worth noting that the horrific level of burnings in the brutal atmosphere of the Albigensian Crusade was not sustained. In the period 1249-57, of 306 recorded penalties handed out by inquisitions, only twenty-one were burnings; secular courts were much more likely than inquisitors to impose death penalties.
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Pope Innocent's concern to discriminate between heretics and devotional organizations which might benefit the Church extended beyond the followers of Dominic and Francis. He carefully considered other evangelistic groups previously condemned, such as the Waldensians (see p. 397) or the similar Italian grouping called Humiliati ('the humbled'), whose origins he recognized as not dissimilar to those of the other mendicants. If their beliefs seemed compatible with official doctrine, he gave them recognition and a set of rules to create a manageable identity for them - the reconciled Waldensians were renamed 'Poor Catholics'. In fact for many Waldensians it was too late: they were by now too separate from the mainstream Church to wish to be assimilated, and they suffered centuries of persecution and clandestine existence before they found new sympathy and support (at the price of a good deal of rebranding, both of their past and their future) from sixteenth-century Protestants.
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During the previous century, in parallel with Waldensians or Humiliati, individual women had set themselves apart for a life of celibate service and prayer without joining a nunnery; in northern Europe they were called beguines, a word of uncertain derivation. Their irregular status attracted predictable worry from the authorities, and increasingly they gathered for respectability or companionship in societies which owned buildings for communal life, 'beguinages' - although their status was always open to question (see p. 422).

Other groups succeeded in taking on formal organization in an order similar to Dominicans or Franciscans. The most surprising were the Carmelites or Whitefriars.
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Carmelites started their existence as an informal group of hermits living on Mount Carmel in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, probably as refugees when Jerusalem was first recaptured by the Muslims in 1187. Conditions grew impossible for them when the whole kingdom collapsed, so they migrated westwards across the Mediterranean. After they reached Europe, they accounted for their odd history to a wary Church hierarchy by the drastically ingenious means of inventing an even more exotic origin, in the time of the Prophet Elijah, a much earlier enthusiast for Mount Carmel. Thus they became the only religious order ever to claim a pre-Christian past, as well as the only order of contemplative religious to take their origins among the Latin settlements of the East. Carmelite pseudo-history was ridiculed even at the time, particularly by the Dominicans. Although Dominican leaders had been involved in drawing up a rule for the new order which in 1247 turned the Carmelites into another grouping of friars, the Dominicans found themselves drawn into a number of turf wars with their proteges. They were particularly annoyed when the Carmelites proclaimed with renewed creativity that one of their number had a vision from Our Lady remarkably like a previous vision of her to a Dominican. She granted the Whitefriars identical powers to the Blackfriars, to bless a part of their friar's habit which draped over their shoulders and was known as the scapular; now laity could wear it and derive spiritual privileges from it. Dominicans were not slow to point out the coincidence.
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