In the first ages of the Church, the notion of the divinity of the “body and blood” of the communion meal was vague and undefined. The partakers certainly regarded the consecrated bread and wine as carrying some supernatural virtue, since they took away portions for medicinal use; but they thought of the meal very much as devout pagans thought of one of the some kind in their mysteries or temple ritual. When their ritual phraseology was challenged as giving colour to the charge of cannibalism, the Fathers seem always to have explained that the terms were purely figurative; and such was the doctrine laid down by Augustine. But when pagan culture had passed away, and there was none in the barbarized West to challenge the Church as such, the strange literalness of the original liturgy set up the stranger belief that what was eaten in the eucharist was by “transubstantiation” the actual flesh and blood of the God-Man. Where such a belief was possible, it was the special interest of the priesthood to make the affirmation. A stupendous miracle, they claimed, was worked every time the eucharist was administered; but it was worked through the priest. He and he only could bring it about; and thus the central mystery and prodigy of the faith, the command of its most essential ministry, was a clerical monopoly. The economic and spiritual centre of gravity of the entire system was fixed in the priestly order.
Under such a dominating conception, Christianity was for the majority a religion neither of faith nor of works: it was a religion of sacerdotal magic. Not he that believed, still less he that loved his neighbour, but he only that received the mystic rite at consecrated hands, was to be saved. Moral teaching there might be, but more than ever it was supererogatory. Already in the fourth century the sacerdotal quality of the rite was defined by the practice of solemnly “elevating” the wine and the hostia or sacrifice, as the bread was termed, before every distribution; and it had become common to administer it two or three times a week. Thus the missa or Mass, as it had come to be termed (traditionally from the formula of dismissal, Ite, missio est, corrupted into Missa est—another pagan detail), had passed from the status of a periodical solemnity to that of a frequent service; and the rite was developed by the addition of chants and responses till it became the special act of Christian worship. The “symbols” were thus already far on the way to be worshipped; and at the beginning of the seventh century Gregory the Great enacted that the slightest irregularities in their use should be atoned for by penances. Thus “if a drop from the cup should fall on the altar, the ministering priest must suck up the drop and do penance for three days; and the linen cloth which the drop touched must be washed three times over the cup, and the water in which it was washed be cast into the fire.”
In various other ways the traditional practice was modified. Originally a “supper,” it was frequently partaken of after the Agapæ or love feasts; but in the fourth century the irrepressible disorders of those assemblages led to their being officially discountenanced, and they gradually died out. Soon the Mass in the churches became a regular morning rite, and the eucharist was taken fasting. After Leo the Great, in the Roman services, it was even administered several times in the day. Finally, in or before the eleventh century, the priesthood, from motives either of economy or sobriety, began to withhold the winecup from communicants, and to reserve it for the priests—a practice which Leo the Great had denounced as heretical. The official argument seems to have been that “the body must include the blood,” and that the miracle which turned the bread into flesh created the divine blood therein. One of the most popular miracle stories was to the effect that when once a Jew stabbed a Host, it bled; and the Host in question was long on exhibition. Of older date, apparently, is the administration of the bread in the form of a wafer, this being admittedly an imitation either of the ancient pagan usage of consecrating and eating small round cakes in the worship of many deities, or of the Jewish unleavened bread of the Passover. It may, indeed, have come through Manichæism, which at this point followed Mazdean usage; and as the Manichæans also had the usage of bread without wine, it may be that both practices came from them in the medieval period. But as the priestly practice of turning round at the altar was taken direct from ancient paganism, with the practice of shaving the head, it is likely that the wafer was also.
The rite thus settled being a conditio sine qua non of Church membership and spiritual life, it became the basis of the temporal power of the Church. Without it there was no “religion”; and as the communicant in order to retain his rights must make confession to the priest at least once a year, the hold of the Church on the people was universal. Any one rejecting its authority could be excommunicated; and excommunication meant the cessation of all the offices of social life, each man being forced by fear for himself to stand aloof from the one condemned. The obligation to confess, in turn, was an evolution from the primitive practice of voluntary public confession of sin before the Church. When that went out of fashion, private confession to the priest took its place; and when the public reading of such confessions by the priest gave offence, Leo the Great directed that they should be regarded as secret. What was thus made for criminals an easy means to absolution became at length an obligation for all. In the East, indeed, it seems to have reached that stage in the fifth century, when a scandal caused the rule to be given up, leaving to the Western Church its full exploitation. Sacerdotal confession, thus instituted, was one more hint from the book of paganism, sagaciously developed. In the ancient Greek mysteries, priests had unobtrusively traded on the principle that the initiate must be pure, first inviting confession and then putting a scale of prices on ceremonial absolution; but in the pagan world the system had never gone far. It was left to Roman Christianity to made it coextensive with the Church, and thus to create a species of social and economic power over mankind which no other “civilized” religion ever attained.
But yet a third hold over fear and faith was wrought by the priesthood. Even as the priestly saying of Masses, bought at a price, was needed to keep the Christian safe in life, so the buying of Masses could hasten the release of his soul from purgatory after death. Purgatory was, to begin with, yet another pagan tenet, which in the first five centuries was regarded by the Church as heretical, though the text about “the spirits in prison” ([1 Peter iii, 19]; cp. [1 Cor. v, 5]) gave colour to it, and Origen had entertained it. In all the writings of Ambrose it is not mentioned; Augustine treats it as dubious in despite of the authority of Origen; and the Eastern Church has never accepted the tenet. But in the writings of Gregory the Great it is treated as an established principle, with the economic corollary that he who would save himself or his kindred from prolonged pains in purgatory must lay out money on atoning Masses. Thus the whole cycle of real and supposed human experience was under the Church’s sway, and at every stage on the course the pilgrim paid toll. The episodes of birth, marriage, and death were alike occasions for sacraments, each a source of clerical revenue; the fruits of the earth paid their annual tithe; and beyond death itself the Church sold privilege in the realm of shadows, winning by that traffic, perhaps, most wealth of all.
It was a general corollary from the whole system that the Church had the right to grant “indulgences” for sin. If the Church could release from penalties in purgatory, it might grant pardons at will on earth. Such a doctrine was of course only very gradually evolved. First of all, perhaps again following a Manichæan precedent, the bishops individually began to waive canonical penances in consideration of the donation by offenders of sums of money for religious purposes. The principle is expressly laid down by Gregory I. There was at the outset no thought of selling the permission to commit an offence; the bishop merely used the opportunity of committed offences to enrich his church, very much as the law in so many cases inflicts fines instead of imprisonment. The procedure, too, was local and independent, even as that of abbots and monks who sold the privilege of seeing and kissing holy relics, which they often carried round the country in procession for revenue purposes. Only after such means of income had long been in use did the papacy attempt to monopolize the former, in virtue of its prerogative of “the keys.” But step by step it absorbed the power to release from ordinary penances and to grant “plenary” remission from penances; and finally it undertook, what the bishops had never ventured on, to remit the penalties of purgatory in advance. Such enterprise was evoked only by a great occasion—the Crusades.
The earlier papal indulgences were remissions of penance, and were often given on such tolerable grounds as pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and loyal observance of the papal institution of a “Truce of God” on certain days of the week; indeed, one of the original motives may even have been that of controlling the mercenary proceedings of bishops. But when once the popes had proffered plenary indulgence to all crusaders, decency was at an end. It was obvious that the effect was demoralizing to the last degree; and still the practice continued. At the beginning of the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III offered absolution from all sins past and future, dispensation from the payment of interest on debts, and exemption from the jurisdiction of the ordinary law courts, to all who would serve for a given period in the crusade against the Albigensian and other heretics in the territory of the Count of Toulouse. Later, similar inducements were offered to all who would take up arms against the Moors in Spain. If the moral sense of Christendom were not thus wholly destroyed, it is because all social life necessitates some minimum of morality, which no system can uproot.
Thenceforth the practice went from bad to worse, despite many earnest protests from the better and saner sort of Churchmen, till it became possible for popes to allot the traffic in indulgences in given districts as kings allotted trading monopolies, and the enormity of the practices of the agents gave a sufficient ground for the decisive explosion of the Reformation. Before that explosion an attempt was made, on the lines of ancient Roman law, to give the practice plausibility by the formula that the indulgence was granted “out of the superfluous merits of Christ and the saints,” a treasure of spare sanctity which it lay with the pope to distribute. But this doctrine, which savoured so much of the counting-house, was contemporaneous with the worst abuse the principle ever underwent after the age of the Crusaders.