Marriage, Sex, and the Clergy in the Church Reform Period
Abolition of clerical marriage and suppression of all sexual activity among the clergy were major aims of the leaders of the eleventh-century reform. Reformers called for the “liberation” of the clergy from their wives and concubines as an essential precondition for the liberation of Church property from lay control.
Both aims, they believed, must be achieved in order to restore the Church to its rightful place in Christian society.[854]The campaign against clerical marriage and against clerical sexuality generally was based upon both doctrinal and practical considerations. The doctrinal underpinnings of the campaign rested upon the familiar notion that sex was both impure and sinful. The married cleric who engaged in the sordid delights of the bedchamber sullied himself and the sacred mysteries. Those who officiated at the altar, reformers believed, must avoid carnal joys. The cleric who succumbed to fleshly temptation, even with the wife to whom he was legitimately married, became impure and his impurity contaminated every liturgical action he performed, sullied the sacred vessels that he touched, and defiled the sacred words that he spoke.[855] The font and source of this impurity, the reform - ers asserted, was lust. Without lust there would be no sex, for the two were inseparable. Married priests betrayed their high calling and smirched their sacred dignity when they lived as married men, amid the reek and screams of snivelling brats, side by side with a smirking, randy wife, bedeviled by daily temptations to unclean thoughts, words, and deeds.[856] Peter Damian described this sordid scene; and the disgust at clerical marriage that pervades it became a central theme of reform propaganda.
Practical considerations, mainly economic, supported the drive for an unmarried clergy. Married clergy, the reformers declared, were expensive to maintain—married priests, after all, had to provide food, clothes, and housing for those bawling babies and slatternly wives, and the Church’s resources were thereby frittered away, not in the service of God, but in catering to the whims 1 of the wives and children of married clerics.
Even worse, married priests, bishops, and others would be tempted to treat their ecclesiastical offices as family property and to convert their sacred dignity into the family heritage. This last charge was close to the mark. Sacerdotal dynasties were common, almost the norm, in some regions of eleventh-century Europe, and had been commonplace for centuries.[857]Peter Damian was by far the most outspoken and most radical critic of clerical marriage. There can be little doubt that his vituperative remarks about clerical marriage were deeply rooted in his personal horror of sex. Damian stands as the principal eleventh-century advocate of the view that clerical marriage is heresy, a doctrine for which mainstream ecclesiastical thought furnished little support.205 Damian identified the heresy of clerical marriage with Nicolaitism, an obscure first-century sectarian movement among Christians in Ephesus and Pergamon. Damians writings popularized the use of this term to describe those who opposed the imposition of mandatory celibacy upon all Catholic clerics.206 The usage took hold and became part of the standard vocabulary of propaganda and invective during the late eleventh century, as did Damian’s use of such terms as “whore” and “harlot” to describe the wives of priests.
Extreme though Damian’s position was, the fervor of his beliefs and the violence of his rhetoric made a strong impression upon his contemporaries. Moderate advocates of Church reform ultimately adopted many of Damian’s ideas, but stripped them of the stinging rhetoric in which he dressed them.207 Damian’s attacks on clerical marriage and on all types of clerical sexuality found resonance in popular movements, notably the emergence in the mid-eleventh century at Milan of a politico-religious party known as the Patarines. This group rose up in arms against the married clergy of Milan and drove them out of their benefices and parishes.208
The attacks of Church reformers and the implementation of those attacks by popular movements, such as that of the Patarines, created something akin to a reign of terror among clerics and their families during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The frightened victims of the reformers’ attacks on clerical marriage not only included clergymen, who were liable to be stripped of their positions and livelihoods, but also their wives and children, who were often the most bullied and fearful victims of the campaign against Nicolaitism. Women who had married clerics in good faith, women who were often themselves the205Brooke, “Gregorian Reform in Action,” p. 3.
200The Nicholas from whom the sect took its name was identified (no doubt erroneously) with Nicholas of Antioch; see Acts 6:5 and Apoc. 2:6, 15. See also Lynch, “Marriage and Celibacy,” p. 190, n. 34; Martin Boelens, Die Klerikerehe in der Gesetzgebung der Kirche unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung der Strafe: Eine rechtsgeschichtliche Un- tersuchung von den Anfdngen der Kirche bis zum Jahre 1139 (Paderborn: F. Schbningh, 1968), p. 143; Gaudemet, “Celibat ecclesiastique,” pp. 7-8. Brooke, “Gregorian Reform in Action,” p. 3, credits Cardinal Humbert (d. 1061?) with the first use of the term “Nicolaitism” to describe all unmarried clerics, but the usage appears occasionally in much earlier texts; see e.g., Council 0fT0urs (567) c. 20(19) in CCL 148A:184.
207E.g., St. Anselm, De presbyteris Concubinariis, in PL 158:555-56; see also Schimmelpfennig, “Ex fornicatione nati,” p. 17.
208Christine Thouzellier, Heresie et heretiques: Vaudois, Cathares, Patarines, Al- bigeois, Storia e Ietteratura, no. 116 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Ietteratura, 1969), pp. 204-205. The term patarini was later applied during the twelfth century to heretical groups; Pope Alexander III was especially prone to label all Italian heretics “Patarines.” The original Patarine movement, however, began in 1056-57 as an uprising against married and Concubinous clerics and was supported by Bonizo of Sutri, among others. daughters or grandaughters of priests or bishops, found themselves shorn of social position, driven from their homes, their marriages denounced as immoral from the pulpits, their honor ruined, their families broken, and their commitment to husband and children denounced as scurrilous and sinful.
The children suffered a worse fate: their legitimacy was suspect, their capacity to inherit denied, their futures clouded, and their very existence deplored by public authorities and spiritual leaders. Reviled as the “cursed seed” of their fathers’ lust, they were the innocent victims of high-minded idealists such as Peter Damian, Pope Gregory VII, and other reform leaders.[858]As Ivo of Chartres was aware, clerical celibacy was a special ideal of the Western Church and had never been shared by Eastern Christians, who saw no problem in maintaining a married clergy.[859] The mingled traditions of the two churches in the canonical collections blunted for a time the thrust of the building attack upon clerical sexuality. Both Eastern and Western Churches had frequently forbidden clerics to live in the same household with women to whom they were not related, but this policy was directed primarily against those “spiritual marriages,” that Church authorities had long viewed with suspicion.[860] Western authorities, moreover, even at the height of the reform movement tolerated marriage among the lower ranks of the clergy, although they preferred that men in minor orders should also remain celibate if they could.[861] Older authorities, too, even in the West, had ruled that clerics in major orders who were already married at the time of ordination might continue to have sexual relations with their wives after ordination.[862] Pope Gregory I had explicitly forbidden priests and other clerics who looked forward to ordination to dismiss their wives, and the Council of Gangra in the fourth century had warned the faithful not to refuse the ministrations of married priests, under pain of anathema.[863]
But the older law was inconsistent on all these points. Eleventh-century canonists included in their collections citations from earlier authorities that confuted each of these propositions, authorities who held, for example, that if married men were ordained, they must thereafter cease all carnal relations with their wives,[864] that married priests and deacons who failed to do this should be deposed from office,[865] that all clerics above the rank of subdeacon were forbidden to marry,[866] and that clerical celibacy was mandatory for all men in major orders.[867]
Due to the confused state of earlier policy, the campaign against clerical marriage and clerical sexuality took shape slowly during the course of the century.
Gradually older rulings in favor of clerical celibacy began to be reinforced by a stream of new legislation. In 1022, the Synod of Pavia forbade any cleric thenceforth to live with either wife or concubine under pain of deposition. This prohibition and others like it were taken seriously by bishops even in distant Hamburg, where Bishop Libentius ordered the wives of all his canons to leave town. His reform failed to accomplish much, however, for the ladies promptly resettled in nearby villages, where their husbands continued to visit them periodically.[868] Similar canons were adopted in 1031 by the Synod of Bourges and in 1068 by the Synod of Gerona.[869] In 1049 the newly-chosen reform pope, Leo IX, reportedly decreed that the concubines of Roman clerics should not only be separated from their lovers, but should be forced into servitude as chattels of the Lateran Palace.[870] A decade later at the Synod of Rome, Pope Nicholas II took the extreme step of overruling the Council of Gangra by forbidding the laity to attend Masses said by priests who remained with their wives or concubines. It is significant that the celibacy decree of Nicholas II equated priests’ wives with concubines, for the pope thereby implicitly denied for the first time the validity of clerical marriage, although most canonists up to this point considered such marriages legally binding.[871] Pope Alexander II (1061-73) on three separate occasions declared celibacy mandatory for all clerics above the rank of subdeacon, and the Synod of Gerona in 1068 required the deposition of any cleric in major orders who took or kept a wife or concubine.[872] [873]The campaign against the married clergy, their wives, and children intensified further during the pontificate of Pope Gregory VII (1073-85). At his Roman synod during Lent of 1074, Gregory proposed a lengthy, rhetoric-laden canon that forbade unchaste clerics to officiate at the altar and prohibited sexual intercourse for married clerics.
Married clergymen who did not separate from their wives were to be deposed immediately.[874] The next year Gregory launched a vigorous effort to enforce these decrees. To this end he appealed for help not only from ecclesiastical officials, but also from German Dukes, the Countess of Flanders, and even, ironically enough, from the German Emperor, Henry IV, whom he was to excommunicate a year later.[875] In short order, local councils and synods followed up the Roman decree with supplemental legislation of their own, in an effort to publicize the new policy and to bring it forcibly home to the local clergy.[876] Gregorys successor, Urban II (1088-99), reinforced the celibacy policy when he met with groups of clergy in regional synods. Re-enactments of the celibacy decrees followed in the opening years of the twelfth century.[877] Pope Paschal II (1099-1118) slightly softened the harshness of earlier enactments, which had demanded the immediate, forcible separation of clerics from their wives and families. In a letter to the Bishop of Compostella, the pope declared that the sons of clerics who had married in the customary way before the promulgation of the recent celibacy decrees might be treated as legitimate and should not be denied the rights of lawfully born children, including the right to become candidates for ordination themselves, provided that they promise chastity, as was now required.[878]The war against clerical marriage reached its climax in two stages early in the twelfth century. Up to this point the reformers had continued to treat the marital unions of priests as valid but illicit marriages. Priests were not allowed to marry, according to this view; but if they did so, the law nonetheless recognized their marriages as binding. In 1123, the First Lateran Council changed this policy. The council declared that ordination to the three higher grades of holy orders (priesthood, diaconate, and subdiaconate) created a diriment impediment to marriage. This meant that clerics in major orders could no longer marry at all and their unions were stripped of legal status and the protection of the law. The council prohibited clerical concubinage as well.[879] Local councils and synods during the ensuing few years reinforced these prohibitions.[880] The Second Lateran Council renewed the attack on clerical marriage and concubinage in 1139. This council decreed that the marriages of priests should be broken up, that both parties must do penance, and that those who resisted should be deprived of their clerical positions and benefices. In addition, the council adopted the policy of Pope Nicholas II and forbade the faithful to attend Masses or other services conducted by married priests or those who lived with concubines.[881]
The Lateran decrees of 1123 and 1139 thus transformed clerical marriage from a legally tolerated institution into a canonical crime. Sexual relations by a cleric in major orders, whether with his wife or not, henceforth were classed as fornication; women who had married priests and other clerics found themselves reduced to the status of concubines at best or, as some declared, of prostitutes.[882] The children of married clerics fared even worse. The Lateran decrees, reinforced by supplemental legislation from local synods, stripped these children of legitimacy; henceforth they were ineligible to enter the clergy themselves or even, according to some authorities, to marry.[883]
The early twelfth-century Lateran decrees decisively changed the law. Changing the social realities proved more difficult, for that required cooperation both from local authorities and from the great mass of the clergy themselves. Understandably enough, many of the Western clergy were shocked and resentful at these changes, which threatened their families, their comforts, and a centuries-old social system. Most of the lesser clergy had always married quite routinely and many had passed on their clerical positions and preferments to their children. The reaction of the lesser clergy to the imposition of reform was vigorous, sometimes violent. When the Bishop of Paris told his priests that they must give up their wives and children, they drove him from the church with jeers and blows, and he found it necessary to take refuge with the royal family in order to escape the wrath of his outraged clerics.[884] Archbishop John of Rouen was stoned by his indignant clergy when he ordered them to abandon their concubines, while in northern Italy some bishops simply did not dare to publish the celibacy decrees for fear of their lives. Their misgivings were not unrealistic: in a letter to Bishop Josfried of Paris, Gregory VII reported in 1077 that a proponent of clerical celibacy had been burnt alive by the outraged clergy of Cambrai.[885]
Norwere protests limited to assaults, demonstrations, and riots. Bishop Ulric of Imola (1053-63) directed an eloquent protest against mandatory clerical celibacy to Pope Nicholas II. Ulric denounced the policy as improvident, un- canonical, and unjust.[886] The so-called Anonymous of York likewise vigorously defended the right of priests to marry and asserted that both natural justice and canon law required that the sons of priests be accorded the full protection of the law and all the rights of legitimacy.[887] Lambert of Hersfeld attacked the reformers’ celibacy program as madness and added that it ran counter to the Scriptures as well.[888] Other critics and opponents of mandatory celibacy included Gerald of Wales, Robert Courson, Thomas of Chobham, Giles of Cor- beil, and Raoul Ardent.[889] But these learned champions were unable to prevail against the determination of the reformers. The Rescript of Bishop Ulric was formally condemned by the Synod of Rome in 1079, and the arguments of other adversaries of the celibacy rule were either ignored or dismissed as irrelevant by the reforming party.[890] Critics of celibacy proved unable to organize an effective or coherent opposition group, while the policy’s advocates had long since secured control of the Church’s principal administrative positions.[891]
The eventual outcome was already clear to perceptive observers by the second decade of the twelfth century, even before the Latcran decrees were adopted. When Abelard and Heloise debated in 1118/19 whether they should marry or not, after their child had been born, Heloise found good canonical reasons for maintaining that if they married Abelard’s clerical career would be irretrievably ruined.[892] A poem of Matthew of Vendome vividly described the new state of affairs; Matthew depicted a cleric who pleads with the lady of his desire to fulfill his dreams by giving herself to him. The lady replies that she will do no such thing; she prefers to bestow her favors on a knight who will marry her, rather than on a cleric who cannot. “I don’t want to sleep around,’’ said she, “I want to get married.”[893] Matthew’s clear-eyed lady plainly realized that by this time a cleric could do the one, but not the other.
Although canon law had long penalized fornication by clerics and although the canonical collections of the reform period added little new to the existing regulations on clerical sex outside of marriage, the cumulative effect of the prohibition of clerical marriage and concubinage was to transform all sexual activity by clerics into fornication.[894] Since clergymen could no longer legally marry, they had no legitimate sexual outlet and every type of sexual union that they engaged in, no matter how stable or permanent, became both a sin and a canonical crime. Accordingly, the reform legislation on clerical marriage and concubinage greatly increased the scope of the criminal jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts and subjected every cleric who dallied with a woman to the threat of criminal sanctions.[895] In other respects, however, the canonical collections of the reform period added little that was new to existing law concerning clerical sexuality.[896]