688. Asceticism in Islam. Islam, at the beginning, had an ascetic tendency, which it soon lost. Mohammed and his comrades practiced night watches with prayer.[2188] Jackson found in the modern Yezidi community a "sort of ascetic order of women," fakiriah, corresponding to fakirs amongst men.[2189] The dervishes are the technically religious Moslems, and in the history of Islam there have been frequent temporary appearances of sects and groups which regarded pain as meritorious.
689. Virginity. Virginity is negative and may be a renunciation. It then falls in with the ascetic way of thinking, and the notion that virginity, as renunciation, is meritorious is a prompt deduction. Christian ecclesiastics made this deduction and pushed it to great extremes. The renunciation was thought to be more meritorious if practiced in the face of opportunity and temptation. The ascetics therefore created opportunity in order to put themselves in the midst of the war of sense and duty.[2190]
690. Mediæval asceticism. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the ascetic temper underwent a revival which was like an intellectual storm. It was nourished by reading the church fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries. It entered into mediæval mores. It was in the popular taste, and the church encouraged and developed it. It was connected with demonism and fetichism which had taken possession of the Christian church in the ninth and tenth centuries. Relics were fetiches. The Holy Sepulcher and the Holy Land were fetiches; that is, they were thought to have magical power on account of the spirits of the great dead in them. Transubstantiation was the application of magic and fetich ideas to the ceremony of the mass. All the mediæval religiosity ran to forms of which asceticism and magic were the core. Cathedral building was a popular mania of ascetic religion. Pilgrimages had the same character. We may now regard it as ascertained fact that asceticism, cruelty to dissenters, fanaticism, and sex frenzy are so interlaced in the depths of human nature that they produce joint or interdependent phenomena. That an ascetic who despises pain, or even thinks it a good, should torture others is not hard to understand. That the same age should produce a wild outburst of sex passion and a mania of sex renunciation is only another case of contradictory products of the same cause of which human society offers many. That the same age should produce sensual worldlings and fanatical ecclesiastics is no paradox.
691. Asceticism in Christian mores. The ascetic standards and doctrines passed into the mores of Christianity and so into the mores of Christendom, both religious and civil. In the popular notion it was the taboos which constituted Christianity, and those were the best Christians who construed the taboos on wealth, luxury, pleasure, and sex most extremely, and observed them most strictly. Such persons were supposed to be able to perform miracles. In the Middle Ages the casuists and theologians seemed never to tire of multiplying distinctions and antitheses about sex.[2191] In fact their constant preoccupation with it was the worst departure from the reserve and dignity which are the first requirements in respect to it. A document of the extremest doctrine is Hali Meidenhad,[2192] of the thirteenth century. The aim of the book is to persuade women to renounce marriage. Marriage is servitude. God did not institute it. Adam and Eve introduced it by sin. Our flesh is our foe. Virginity is heaven on earth. Happy wedlock is rare. Motherhood is painful. Family life is full of trials and quarrels. Virginity is not God's command but his counsel. Marriage is only a concession (1 Cor. vii.). This was the orthodox doctrine of the time. Among the religious heroes of the age not a few were irresponsible from lack of food, lack of sleep, and the nervous exaltation which they forced upon themselves by ascetic practices.[2193]
692. Renunciation of property. Beggary. Those who did not practice asceticism accepted its standards and applied them. A special case and one of the most important was the admiration which was rendered in the thirteenth century to the renunciation of property and the consequent high merit attributed to beggary for the two following centuries. The social consequences were so great that this view of poverty and beggary is perhaps the most important consequence in the history of the mores which go with the ascetic philosophy of life.
693. Ascetic standards. All who were indifferent or hostile to the church and religion maintained the ascetic standards for ecclesiastics in their extremest form. All the literature of the Middle Ages contains scoffing at priests, monks, and friars. In part, they were scoffed at because they did not fulfill that measure of asceticism which the scoffers chose to require, and which the clerics taught and seemed bound to practice.
694. The mendicant friars. The notion that poverty is meritorious and a good in itself was widely entertained but unformulated at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Jacques de Vitry, who was in Italy in 1216, and who left a journal of his journey,[2194] met with an association in Lombardy, the Umiliati, who held the doctrines of the later Franciscans. The ideas which were current at that time about the primitive church were entirely fantastic. They had no foundation in fact. They were in fact deductions from ascetic ideals. The church of the thirteenth century was the opposite in all respects of what the primitive church was supposed to have been. Francis of Assisi and a few friends determined (1208) to live by the principles of the primitive church as they supposed that it had been. It is certain that they were only one group, which found favorable conditions of growth, but that there were many such groups at the time. De Vitry was filled with sadness by what he saw at the papal court. All were busy with secular affairs, kings and kingdoms, quarrels and lawsuits, so that it was almost impossible to speak about spiritual matters. He greatly admired the Franciscans, who were trying to live like the early Christians and to save souls, and who shamed the prelates, who were "dogs who do not bark." The strongest contrasts between the gospel ideals and the church of that time were presented by wealth and the hierarchy. Francis renounced all property. Poverty was idealized and allegorized. Since he would not produce or own things, he had to beg or borrow them from others who were therefore obliged to sin for him. The first corollary from the admiration of poverty was the glorification of beggary and its exaltation above productive labor.[2195] There is a rhapsody on poverty in the Roman de la Rose. If it is base and corrupting to admire wealth, it is insane to admire poverty. It never can be anything more than a pose or affectation. The count of Chiusi gave to Francis the mountain La Verna as a place of retirement and meditation. Armed men were necessary to take possession of this place on account of beasts and robbers.[2196] Here, then, we have all the crime, selfishness, and violence of "property." The legendary story of Francis is fabulous. It is a product of the popular notions of the time. He was said to perform miracles. Crowds flocked to him. His order spread with great rapidity and without much effort on his part. Evidently it just met the temper, longings, and ideals of the time. Its strength was that it suited the current mores. Unlimited money and property were given to it. Francis died in 1226 and was canonized in 1228. Dominic (1170-1221) aimed to found an order of preachers in order to oppose the Albigenses and other heretics. He wanted to found a learned and scholarly order which should be able to preach and teach. He made it a mendicant order in order to preserve it from the corruptions to which the conventual life was exposed. The two orders of friars became fierce enemies to each other and fought upon all occasions.[2197] In their theory and doctrines they exactly satisfied the notions of the time as to what the church ought to be, and "they restored to the church much of the popular veneration which had become almost hopelessly alienated from it."[2198] The age cherished ideals and phantasms on which it dwelt in thought, developing them. Suffering was esteemed as a good, and self-denial with suffering made saintliness. Francis and his comrades cherished all these ideals and had all these ways of thinking. Francis became the ideal man of his time.[2199]
695. The Franciscans. Other mendicant orders prove the dominant ideas of the time. These were the Augustinian hermits (1256), the Carmelites (1245), and the Servites, or Servants of Mary (c. 1275). The mendicants did not live up to their doctrine for a single generation. In the middle of the century Bonaventura had to reprove the Franciscans for their greed of property, their litigation and efforts to grasp legacies, and for the splendor and luxury of their buildings.[2200] The two great orders of friars became an available power by virtue of their hold on the tastes and faiths of the people. They became the militia of the pope and helped to establish papal absolutism. They "were perfectly adapted to the world conditions of the time."[2201] The doctrines of poverty were at war with the character, aims, and ambitions of the church. The Franciscans, in order to establish the primitive character of their system, asserted that Christ and his disciples lived by beggary in absolute renunciation of property. This was a Scriptural and historical doctrine and question of fact, on which fierce controversy arose. It divided the order into two schools, the conventuals and the spirituals. In 1275 the spirituals, who clung to the original ideals and rules of Francis, were treated as heretics and persecuted. They rated Francis as another Christ, and the rule as a new revelation. They always were liable to fall into sympathy with enthusiastic sects which were rated as heretical.[2202] The Franciscans also, in their origin, were somewhat independent of hierarchical authority and of established discipline. It was necessary that the order should be brought into the existing ecclesiastical system. The popes of the thirteenth century until Boniface VIII accepted the standards of the age and approved of the mendicant friars. In 1279, in the bull Exiit qui seminat, the Franciscan rule was ascribed to revelation by the Holy Ghost, and the renunciation of property was approved. The use of property was right, but the ownership was wrong.[2203] Boniface was of another school. He was a practical man who meant to increase the power of the hierarchy. Absurd as was the notion of non-property, it was at least germane to the doctrine of Christianity that Christians ought to renounce the pomps and vanities of wealth and the struggle for power, and to live in frugality, simplicity, and mutual service. The papal hierarchy was in pursuit of pomp and luxury and, above all, of power and dominion. Boniface ordered the spiritual Franciscans to conform to the rule of the conventuals. Some would not obey and became heretics and martyrs. Their zeal for the ideas and rule of Francis was so great that they welcomed martyrdom for their adherence.[2204] The most distinguished of the martyrs of the spirituals was Bernard Delicieux, who found himself at war with the Inquisition and the pope, and who, after a trial in which all the arts of browbeating and torture were exhausted, died a prisoner, in chains, on bread and water.[2205] The other party also had its martyrs, who were willing to die for the doctrine that Christ and his apostles did not live by beggary.[2206] Any doctrine that the apostles lived in poverty, by begging, was a criticism of the hierarchy as it then was. John XXII, another non-sentimental pope, declared that the doctrine that Christ and his apostles lived in negation of property was a heresy. Then Francis of Assisi and all who had held the same opinions as he became heretics.[2207] In 1368 the strict Franciscans split off and formed the order of the Observantines, and in 1487 the Recollects, another order of strict observers of the rule, was founded in Spain, with the authorization of Innocent VIII. The stricter orders were always more enthusiastically devoted to the service of the papacy.[2208]
696. Whether poverty is a good. The history of the mendicant orders is an almost incomprehensible story of wrongheadedness. That poverty is a good is an inversion of common sense. That men do not want what they must have to live is a denial of all philosophy. The mendicants did not invent these dogmas. They were in the mores, and they made the mendicants. That the mendicants at once became greedy, avaricious, and luxurious, emissaries of tyranny and executioners of cruelty, was only an instance of the extravagances of human nature.
697. Clerical celibacy. If according to Christian standards virginity was the sole right rule and marriage was only a concession, it might justly be argued that the clergy ought to live up to the real standard, not the conventional concession. This was the best argument for sacerdotal celibacy. It was well understood, and not disputed, that celibacy was a rule of the church, and not an ordinance of Christ or the Gospel. It was an ascetic practice which was enjoined and enforced on the clergy. They never obeyed it. The rule produced sin and vice, and introduced moral discord and turpitude into the lives of thousands of the best men of the Middle Ages. In the baser days of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the current practice was a recognized violation of professed duty and virtue, under money penalties or penances. Yet the notion of celibacy for the clergy had been so established by discipline in the usage of priests and the mores of Christendom that a married priest was a disgusting and intolerable idea. At the same time usage had familiarized everybody with the concubinage of priests and prelates, and all Christendom knew that popes had their bastards living with them in the Vatican, where they were married and dowered by their fathers as openly as might be done by princes in their palaces. The falsehood and hypocrisy caused deep moral corruption, aside from any judgment as to what constituted the error or its remedy. Pope Pius II was convinced that there were better reasons for revoking the celibacy of the clergy than there ever had been for imposing it,[2209] but he was not a man to put his convictions into effect. The effect on character of violation of an ascetic rule, acknowledged and professed, was the same as that of the violation of one of the Ten Commandments.