The confusion which this attempted reformation caused in France was apparently not so aggravated as we have seen it in Germany, and yet it was sufficiently serious. Guibert de Nogent relates that in his youth commenced the persecution of the married priests by Rome, when a cousin of his, a layman of flagrant and excessive licentiousness, made himself conspicuous by his attacks on the failings of the clergy. The family were anxious to provide for young Guibert, who was destined to the church, and the cousin used his influence with the patron of a benefice to oust the married incumbent and bestow the preferment on Guibert. The priest thus forcibly ejected abandoned neither his wife nor his functions, but relieved his mind by excommunicating every day, in the Mass, Guibert’s mother and all her family, until the good woman’s fears were so excited that she abandoned the prebend which she had obtained with so much labor.[633] We can readily conceive this incident to be a type of what was occurring in every corner of the kingdom, when, in an age of brute force, the reverence which was the only defence of the priesthood was partially destroyed, and the people hardly knew whether they were to adore their pastors as representatives of God or to dread them as the powerful ministers of evil.
When the religious ardor of Europe rose to the wild excitement that culminated in the Crusades, and Pope Urban II. astutely availed himself of the movement to place the church in possession of a stronger influence over the minds of men than it had ever before enjoyed, it was to no purpose that the great council of Clermont, in 1095, took the opportunity to proclaim in the most solemn manner the necessity of perfect purity in ministers of the altar, to denounce irrevocable expulsion for contravention of the rule, and to forbid the children of ecclesiastics from entering the church except as monks or canons.[634] It was the weightiest exposition of church discipline, and was promulgated under circumstances to give it the widest publicity and the highest authority. Yet, within a few years, we find Gualo, Bishop of Paris, applying to Ivo of Chartres for advice as to what ought to be done with a canon of his church who had recently married, and Ivo in reply recommending as a safe course that the marriage be held valid, but that the offender be relieved of his stipend and functions.[635] His answer, moreover, is written in a singularly undecided tone, and an elaborate argument is presented as though the matter were still open to discussion, although Ivo’s laborious compilations of the canon law show that he was thoroughly familiar with the ancient discipline which the depravity of his generation had rendered obsolete.[636] Hardly less significant is another epistle in which Ivo calls the attention of Daimbert, Archbishop of Sens, to the conduct of one of his dignitaries who publicly maintained two concubines and was preparing to marry a third. He urges Daimbert to put an end to the scandal, and suggests that if he is unable to accomplish it single-handed, he should summon two or three of his suffragans to his assistance.[637] Either of these instances is a sufficient confession of the utter futility of the ceaseless exertions which for half a century the church had been making to enforce her discipline. Nor, perhaps, can her ill-success be wondered at when we consider how unworthy were the hands to which was frequently intrusted the administering of the law and the laxity of opinion which viewed the worst transgressions with indulgence. The archdeacons were the officials to whom was specially confided the supervision over sacerdotal morals, and yet, when a man occupying that responsible position, like Aldebert of Le Mans, publicly surrounded himself with a harem, and took no shame from the resulting crowd of offspring, so little did his conduct shock the sensibilities of the age that he was elevated to the episcopal chair, and only the stern voice of Ivo could be heard reproving the measureless scandal.[638]
Equal looseness pervaded the monastic establishments. Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans, made numerous fruitless attempts to restore discipline in the celebrated abbey of Euron, the monks of which indulged in the grossest licentiousness, and successfully defied his power until he was obliged to appeal to the papal legate for assistance.[639] Albero of Verdun, after fruitless attempts to reform the monastery of St. Paul, in his episcopal city, was obliged to turn out the monks by force and replace them with Premonstratensians, who were then in the full ardor of their new discipline.[640] The description which Ivo of Chartres gives of the convent of St. Fara shows a promiscuous and shameless prostitution, on the part of the nuns of that institution, even more degrading.[641] Instances like these could be almost indefinitely multiplied, such as that of St. Mary of Argentueil, reformed by Heloise, the great foundation of St. Denis, previous to the abbacy of Suger, and that of St. Gildas de Ruys in Britanny, as described by Abelard;[642] who, moreover, depicts the nuns of the period, in general terms, as abandoned to the most hideous licentiousness—those who were good-looking prostituting themselves for hire, those who were not so fortunate hiring men to gratify their passions, while the older ones, who had passed the age of lust, acted as procuresses.[643] Innocent III. may therefore be absolved from the charge of exaggeration when, in ordering the reform of the nuns of St. Agatha, he alludes to their convent as a brothel which infected with its evil reputation the whole country around it.[644] A contemporary chronicler records as a matter of special wonder that John of Salisbury, Bishop of Chartres, forced his canons to live in cloisters according to the Rule of St. Augustin; and he adds that, stimulated by this example, his uncle, John of Lisieux, and his successor, Geoffrey of Chartres, attempted the same reform, but without success.[645] It is true that some partial reform was effected by St. Bernard, but the austerities of the new orders founded by enthusiasts like him and St. Bruno, Robert d’Arbrissel and St. Norbert, did not cure the ineradicable vices of the older establishments.
With such examples before us, it is not difficult to believe the truth of the denunciations with which the celebrated Raoul of Poitiers, whose fiery zeal gained for him the distinctive appellation of Ardens, lashed the vices of his fellows; nor can we conclude that it was mere rhetorical amplification which led him to declare that the clergy, who should be models for their flocks, were more shameless and abandoned than those whose lives it was their duty to guide.[646] Peter Cantor, indeed, deplores the superiority of the laity to the clergy as the greatest injury that afflicted the church.[647]
The natural result of such a state of morals was the prevalence of the hereditary principle against which the church had so long and so perseveringly striven. How completely this came to be regarded as a matter of course, is shown by a contemporary charter to the ancient monastery of Bèze, by which a priest named Germain, on entering it bestowed upon it his holding, consisting of certain specified tithes. This deed of gift is careful to declare the assent of the sons of the donor, showing that the title of the monastery would not have been considered good as against the claims of Germain’s descendants had they not joined in the conveyance.[648] Even as late as 1202 we find Innocent III. endeavoring to put a stop to the hereditary transmission of benefices in the bishopric of Toul, where it was practised to an extent which showed how little impression had as yet been made by the unceasing efforts of the last hundred and fifty years.[649]
When in the presence of so stiff-necked and evil disposed a generation, all human efforts seemed unavailing to secure respect for the canons of councils and decretals of popes, we need scarcely wonder if recourse was had to the miraculous agencies which so often proved efficacious in subduing the minds of men. Wondrous stories, accordingly, were not wanting, to show how offended Heaven sometimes gave in this world a foretaste of the wrath to come, awaiting those who lived in habitual disregard of the teachings of the church. Thus Peter the Venerable relates with much unction how a priest, who had abandoned himself to carnal indulgences, died amid the horrors of anticipated hell-fire. Visible to him alone, the demons chuckling around his death-bed heated the frying-pan of burning fat in which he was incontinently to be plunged, while a drop flying from the sputtering mass seared him to the bone, as a dreadful material sign that his agony was not the distempered imagining of a tortured conscience. A miracle equally significant wrung a confession of his weakness from the Dean of Minden in 1167.[650]