Sexual Activities of the Clergy
The early medieval Church achieved only indifferent success in its efforts to restrict clerical sex. Councils denounced the practice of allowing women to live with bishops and priests or to dwell in monasteries of men and decreed that clerics who permitted this practice should lose their clerical positions and sufÂfer excommunication.
Charlemagne incorporated similar provisions in two capitularies.[596] A few clerics attempted to circumvent these prohibitions by adopting the women with whom they cohabited, a subterfuge that the Second Council of Braga (572) condemned.[597]No doubt some clerics who lived with female companions were involved in genuine spiritual marriages, in which carnal involvement was absent and in which the parties led a common life of prayer and asceticism. Nonetheless, there was a strong suspicion that cohabitation might lead to surreptitious sex. In many instances the women with whom clerics dwelt were their legitimate wives. Popes and councils strove to persuade married clerics to abstain from sex with their wives and imposed penances and punishments, including excomÂmunication, upon those who refused to do so.[598] These enactments appear to have been founded upon a belief that it was inappropriate for clergymen to rush from the fleshly passions of the marriage bed to officiate at the sacred rites. The theme of ritual defilement resulting from marital intercourse by clerics runs through many of these punitive enactments.[599] The evidence suggests, howÂever, that enforcement of this prohibition was neither uniform nor successful. Ecclesiastical dynasties in which the cure of a parish descended from father to son for generations seem to have been common, especially in rural areas.[600]
At least as common as the priest who kept a legitimate wife in his rectory was the priest who lived with a concubine to whom he was technically not married at all.
Clerical concubinage presented a legal impediment to promotion and constituted grounds for dismissal, but these penalties were rarely enforced. A letter ascribed to Pope Pelagius II (578-590) declared that in regions suffering a shortage of clergymen, it was lawful to ordain men who kept concubines.[601] St. Boniface complained in a letter to Pope Zacharias (741-752) that some priests and deacons disported themselves with four or five concubines at once. Despite this outrageous behavior, Boniface complained, these men nonetheless adÂvanced in clerical rank, and some of them even became bishops.[602] [603] The pope in his reply deplored these scandals and instructed Boniface that he should by no means believe any priest who claimed to have papal permission to carry on in this way.[604] Neither the pope nor the saint had much success in the campaign against clerical concubinage, however, and two years later Boniface complained again to Zacharias that fornicating clerics now persecuted him for attempting to reform them.[605]Local laymen sometimes took direct and forceful action against priests and their concubines. Public displays of displeasure might occur when the womans family felt humiliated by having one of its daughters flaunted as a priest’s conÂcubine. Gregory of Tours relates the story of a concubine’s family whose memÂbers laid hold of the priest, summarily imprisoned him, and redeemed family honor by burning his concubine alive.[606] But the issue in this tale, at least from the family’s point of view, was not that the relationship was sinful or unlawful, but rather that it humiliated a proud family to have one of its daughters paraded in such a demeaning situation.
Male clerics were not the only offenders against the prohibitions of clerical sex. Church authorities and secular rulers alike campaigned against nuns and other consecrated women who indulged in fornication.
But this battle, too, was only partly successful.[607] The Second Council of Aachen in 836 complained that certain convents were little better than brothels, a complaint repeated a cenÂtury later in a letter from the Bishop of Wurzburg to Rabanus Maurus.[608] A Frankish council hinted darkly that unchaste nuns might be subject to the same punishment that pagan Romans had imposed on Vestal Virgins who broke their vows, namely burial alive. But that savage reference was probably only a rheÂtorical flourish to show that the bishops took the matter seriously.[609] In any case there is little evidence that the situation greatly improved.Early medieval moralists believed that passion, especially sexual passion, posed a threat to the welfare of the individual and society. Since sexual passion impelled men and women to seek carnal satisfaction with almost anyone, at any time, in any way that they could contrive, Christian moralists and lawgivers, like their pagan counterparts, saw sex as a disruptive force in social life. Sexual urges, they believed, must be curbed and controlled; otherwise they were sure to result in irrational and frenzied couplings that would disrupt the orderly creation of families and the management of household resources.
Moralists of this era sought to adapt the views of the Church Fathers to the changed conditions of their own times. In the process they attempted to porÂtray their sexual teachings as logical conclusions from Christian doctrine. These conclusions, however, often seemed to bear little relationship to the reasons marshalled to support them.[610] These characteristics were even more proÂnounced in the penitential literature that began to become a major focus for discussions of sexual behavior in Christian literature from the mid-sixth cenÂtury onward.