The Historians' History of the World 08

Like his predecessors, like all the more high-minded churchmen, Hildebrand refused to see that simony was the inevitable consequence of the inordinate wealth of the clergy. It was a wild moral paradox to attempt to reconcile enormous temporal possessions and enormous temporal power with the extinction of all temporal motives for obtaining, all temptations to the misuse of these all-envied treasures. In the feudal system, which had been so long growing up throughout western Europe, bishops had become, in every respect, the equals of the secular nobles. In every city the bishop, if not the very first of men, was on a level with the first; without the city he was lord of the amplest domains. Archbishops almost equalled kings; for who would not have coveted the station and authority of a Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, rather than the sovereignty of the feeble Carlovingian monarch?

Charlemagne himself had set the example of advancing his natural sons to high ecclesiastical dignities. His feebler descendants, even the more pious, submitted to the same course from choice or necessity. The evil worked downwards. The bishop, who had bought his see, indemnified himself by selling the inferior prebends or cures. What was so intrinsically valuable began to have its money-price; it became an object of barter and sale. The layman who purchased holy orders bought usually peace, security of life, comparative ease. Those who aspired to higher dignities soon repaid themselves for the outlay, however large and extortionate. The highest bishops confessed their own guilt; the bishopric of Rome had too often been notoriously bought and sold.

According to the strict law, the clergy could receive everything, alienate nothing. But the frequent and bitter complaints of the violent usurpation, or the fraudulent alienation by the clergy themselves of what had been church property, show that neither party respected this sanctity when it was the interest of both to violate it. While, on the one hand, the clergy extorted from the dying prince or noble some important grant, immunity, or possession, the despoiled heir would scruple at no means of resuming his alienated rights or property. The careless, the profligate, the venal, the warlike bishop or abbot, would find means, if he found advantage, to elude the law; to surrender gradually and imperceptibly; to lease out the land so as to annihilate its value to the church; to grant in perpetuity for trifling compensations or for valueless service the coveted estate; and so to relax the inexorable grasp of the church. His own pomp and expenditure would reduce the ecclesiastic to the wants and subterfuges of debtors and of bankrupts; and so the estates would, directly or circuitously, return either to the original or to some new owner.

Celibacy of the Clergy

With this universal simony was connected, more closely than may at first appear, the other great vice of the age, as it was esteemed by Hildebrand and his school, the marriage of the clergy. The celibacy of the clergy was necessary to their existence, at the present period, as a separate caste. Hereditary succession and the degeneracy of the order were inseparable. Great as were the evils inevitable from the dominion of the priesthood, if it had become in any degree the privilege of certain families, that evil would have been enormously aggravated, the compensating advantages annulled. Family affections and interests would have been constantly struggling against those of the church. One universal nepotism, a nepotism not of kindred but of parentage, would have preyed upon the vital energies of the order. Every irreligious occupant would either have endeavoured to alienate to his lay descendants the property of the church, or bred up his still more degenerate descendants in the certainty of succession to their patrimonial benefice.

Celibacy may be maintained for a time by mutual control and awe; by severe discipline; by a strong corporate spirit in a monastic community. But in a low state of morals as to sexual intercourse, in an order recruited from all classes of society, not filled by men of tried and matured religion; in an order crowded by aspirants after its wealth, power, comparative ease, privileges, immunities, public estimation; in an order superior to, or dictating public opinion (if public opinion made itself heard); in a permanent order, in which the degeneracy of one age would go on increasing in the next, till it produced some stern reaction; in an order comparatively idle, without social duties or intellectual pursuits; in an order not secluded in the desert, but officially brought into the closest and most confidential relations as instructors and advisers of the other sex, it was impossible to maintain real celibacy; and the practical alternative lay between secret marriage, concubinage without the form of marriage, or a looser and more corrupting intercourse between the sexes.