By the end of the eleventh century the church had achieved the imposition of its ideals on society. Christianity was taken seriously by the landed classes; by the bourgeois; and even, on a much lower level of intelligence, by the peasants, into whose villages the Christian faith was at last being actually carried by the spread of the parish system. The problems of religion were ever-present realities to the people of western Europe, and since they took God seriously, they tried in various ways to conform to Christian ideals. Their search for the satisfactory expression of their devotion profoundly affected many facets of medieval civilization. The architecture, pictorial art, Latin poetry, and liturgical music of the twelfth century were monuments to this profound piety. But the channeling of religious feeling into controllable forms became more and more a cause of grave concern to the leaders of the late eleventh- and twelfth-century church. The expression of the new piety had been a relatively simple matter before 1050. Devout men and women who felt a strong call to live a regular religious life and who were able to dissociate themselves from their families became members of the ever-growing Benedictine community. Those who were not able to become monks assisted the Cluniacs and other Benedictines with various kinds of services and gifts. But after the middle of the eleventh century the forms of religious experience become much more varied. The Cluniac form of monasticism did not satisfy the ascetic impulses of many people who were inspired by the new piety, and they sought new institutional expressions for their ascetic impulses. The result was the tremendous proliferation of new monastic orders in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Many devout people who did not participate in this new wave of ascetic withdrawal from the world, especially among the urban population of western Europe, found satisfaction in an intense religious individualism whose doctrines were disseminated by popular preachers. By the end of the twelfth century ecclesiastical leaders were faced with the unprecedented and dismaying tasks of controlling the proliferation of new religious orders, of directing the ascetic impulse into the channels that would make it useful to the church and the society, of finding new ways to satisfy the spiritual yearnings of devout laymen, and of overcoming the schisms fomented by popular heresy.
Northern Italy at the end of the tenth century was the scene of the first stirrings of a profound revolution in western monasticism in which new ascetic concerns and eremetic tendencies came to the forefront of religious life. The hermit had never been as important a figure in Latin monasticism as he had been in the Greek Christian world. Extreme ascetic practices had not been a quality of Benedictine life in the original Rule, and were even less so in its Carolingian and Cluniac forms. The emergence of an urban civilization in northern Italy in the late tenth century, with the attendant opportunities for wealth and comfort, provided Europe with the first temptation of luxurious living against which the ascetic hermit could revolt. About the year 1000 hermit-saints made their appearance in northern Italy; they withdrew from the world to escape spiritual degradation attendant upon life in princely courts and wealthy cities, but they periodically returned to preach a moral and spiritual revival to the urban populace. These strongly ascetic and eremetic impulses and the ubiquitous hermit-saints were to be a central current in north Italian religiosity over the next three centuries.
By the middle of the eleventh century the new monasticism had assumed the character of a widespread spiritual movement in the area between Rome and the Alps, and some of these ascetics had formed monastic communities that strongly contrasted with the prevailing Benedictine life. The order of Camaldoli founded a monastic community of hermits who lived in individual cells. The monastery of the order of Vallombrosa, near Florence, consciously revolted against Cluniac life and aimed at the strict observance of the pristine Rule of St. Benedict. To fulfill this aim, Vallombrosa included within its community uneducated lay brothers, as well as clerics who could perform liturgical offices. This separation of the order into clerical and lay brothers, giving uneducated men from the lower ranks of society the opportunity to assume the monastic habit, was a radical departure that was to be imitated by several of the new religious orders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
North of the Alps a similar ascetic impulse appeared in the middle of the eleventh century, although it never went as far as Italian monasticism in accentuating the eremitic life. The first significant change appears to have been the founding in 1043 of “The House of God,” not far from Lyons, by a former Cluniac monk who was dissatisfied with the religious life in western Europe’s leading monastery. During the following half century, there were several such rejections of the Cluniac model in favor of a more rigorous religious life within monastic communities that were less involved with society and its attendant obligations and temptations than had been the case for several centuries. The spread of the internal colonization movement in Europe undoubtedly played a part in encouraging men of ascetic inclinations to establish little cells in frontier regions and to live entirely on their own resources. In the Rhineland and southern France the ominous figure of the itinerant saintly preacher also appeared before the end of the eleventh century, as is fully attested to by the history of the people’s crusade of 1095.
The vicissitudes of the Gregorian reform movement strongly contributed to the growth and influence of these new tendencies in western monasticism. The Gregorians had drawn their initial inspiration and all their leadership from the new ascetic impulses and movements of the eleventh century. In the Gregorian reform, asceticism adopted its puritanical form; it tried to create a world that would be a suitable environment for the undisturbed pilgrimage to the City of God. The reform movement’s failure showed clearly that asceticism could not hope to impose its ideals on society, to turn the world into a monastery with a universal abbot demanding obedience from all rulers. The Hildebrandine papacy had brought to the church not peace but a sword, not greater strength but deep divisions, confusions, and doubts. Hence, many of the best spirits of the first three decades of the twelfth century turned from the world and sought their peace with God in new communities and orders whose aimed was complete withdrawal from the world. Many of the older monasteries, even Cluny during the abbacy of Peter the Venerable in the second quarter of the twelfth century, were influenced to some extent by this new impetus toward withdrawal.
These critical changes within western monastic life were made possible by the decline of the regular clergy’s usefulness to society. In the late eleventh and first half of the twelfth centuries the services that the Benedictine monks had rendered to European civilization for centuries were no longer required. The first, and ultimately the most decisive, development along these lines was the monks’ loss of control over higher education. The monastic school had admirably served the compelling educational need of society before the eleventh century—the preservation of a basic literacy through the cultivation of the liberal arts and the biblical-patristic tradition. But the monastic school was too limited in its interests and too restricting in its organization to be a suitable haven for the new intellectual elite of the early twelfth century or to be the center for the tremendous achievements in speculative thought and in law during the following decades.
The monks’ loss of leadership in education contributed to the decline of their importance in political life. The municipal schools of northern Italy and the cathedral schools of northern France, which provided homes for the new higher learning, began to turn out shrewd, well-educated, and frequently ruthless secular clerks and civil lawyers who displaced monastic scholars as the literate servants of the European monarchies during the twelfth century. Simultaneously, with the decline of the monks’ importance in education and their displacement as royal ministers by a new kind of professional bureaucrat, the great religious houses were becoming less useful in another way to the more powerful monarchs. In the latter half of the eleventh century the Norman and German rulers’ dependence on the military resources of the monasteries declined markedly as these able and aggressive rulers found new sources of recruitment for their armies. The imposition of new knight service on the Norman monasteries ended by 1050 and stopped in England by 1080. Not only was the knight service from lay fiefs now available in sufficient amount, but the Norman rulers, using the proceeds from feudal taxation and later from scutage, extensively employed mercenaries. Similarly, the Salian kings relied heavily on their own ministeriales for military forces. By the second quarter of the twelfth century the main social obligation of the Benedictine monk was to act as an intercessor for lay society with Christ, the Virgin, and the saints. This obligation sufficed in the twelfth century to continue to make the Benedictines popular with laymen, although they were bitterly criticized by the cathedral clergy, who coveted the black monks’ centuries-old privileges and possessions. But even in the religious sphere the importance of the Benedictine community markedly declined. The cathedral and the parish church became more and more the centers for expressing the religious devotion of the populace in town and country, and the fervent admiration that the Benedictines had evoked in the early Middle Ages was accorded to the new religious orders in the twelfth century.
The increasing tendency after 1100 to dispense with the educational; political; military; and even, to some degree, religious services of the regular clergy to society gave impetus to the emergence of new religious orders that were devoted to ascetic withdrawal. Among the many obscure French monasteries founded in the late eleventh century was that of Cîteaux, whose leading spirit was a saintly Englishman named Stephen Harding. Cîteaux rapidly attracted outstanding young men of strongly ascetic leanings, among them Bernard, the greatest religious mind of the twelfth century. Cîteaux was soon able to establish daughter houses and to absorb independently founded communities. By the 1130s the Cistercians had become the major new monastic order, second in size only to the Benedictines. The Cistercian way of life was from the first consciously and stridently at variance with the prevailing Benedictine pattern, and this variance was signified by the wearing of a white, instead of black, habit. The Cistercians asked their secular patrons to grant them rights of settlement only in uninhabited regions because they were especially eager to avoid the privileges and obligations that had come to the great Benedictine houses from their possession of cultivated and settled domains. The white monks claimed that manorial estates worked by dependent serfs encouraged monastic avarice and luxury and precluded the apostolic poverty that was a necessary aspect of the true religious life. By the 1120s St. Bernard, the most eloquent spokesman for the new order, although by no means a typical Cistercian, was violently criticizing Cluny’s wealth, comforts, and even artistic beauty, and similar open attacks were made on the Benedictines by other leaders of the white monks. The harassed Benedictines replied in an equally bitter vein. They contended that it would be unjust to expect the faithful to endure the privations that the Apostles had suffered in the midst of heathen hostility and persecution now that the church had vanquished its enemies. They pointed out that the Cistercians, in their ostentatious self-righteousness, had not escaped the snares of pride, and they claimed that among the many white monks who had a genuine contempt for the world there were also “many hypocrites and seducing pretenders.”
Both the religious and social circumstances of the twelfth century favored the triumph of the Cistercians and the rapid expansion of their order. All over Europe devout and serious young men were concerned for the safety of their souls in a world that was steadily growing more urbanized and wealthy, and hence one that, in their eyes, was fraught with ever greater danger to the achievement of the spiritual life. The desire to assume the Cistercian habit was virtually a mass movement in the twelfth century, and after 1150 the order also established convents for women of similar calling. By the late thirteenth century there were no fewer than seven hundred Cistercian establishments in Europe. Landlords everywhere greeted the Cistercians with the greatest enthusiasm, and they were eager to allow the white monks to settle in previously uncultivated lands within their domains to open up these frontier areas for later settlement. All over Europe in the twelfth century the Cistercians acted as pioneers in the colonization movement. They were particularly active in this respect in eastern Germany, where they played an important part in developing the new method of working the land in large blocks instead of in strips. It was the twelfth-century Cistercian monasteries that developed sheep raising in the hitherto unproductive hilly wastelands of northern England. This innovation was immediately imitated by the secular landlords of Yorkshire, and it opened up this frontier region. In the thirteenth century the export of wool to the Flemish weaving cities was the staple of English foreign trade.
The enormous popularity that the Cistercians gained with all classes of twelfth-century society still left room for the creation of several smaller orders with similar aims and attitudes. The Carthusians were a small, highly selective, austere order that eventually won renown for two things: their order of Chartreuse never experienced the vicissitudes of other Catholic orders, so that the Carthusians were later able to claim that they never had needed to be reformed, and they played an important part in the invention of brandy, the first European hard liquor, during the thirteenth century. The order of Fontrevault, which had forty houses by 1200, was designed primarily for nuns, although it included an attached group of monks to perform religious service and to do hard physical labor. Fontrevault was sharply different from early medieval nunneries (which were high-toned aristocratic places) in that it accepted women from all classes and was a particular refuge for fallen women, destitute widows, and the like, of whom there were an inordinate number in medieval Europe. The emergence of these and other smaller orders alongside the Cistercians indicates the ubiquity of piety in twelfth-century Europe and the increasing tendency to organize religious movements into distinct corporate orders. The early medieval Benedictines had by no means been homogeneous in their outlook, but the varying groups among the black monks had not considered it necessary to constitute themselves into separate orders. Even the Cluniacs had not been, in a constitutional sense, a separate order. The legalistic spirit and organizing impulse of the twelfth century affected even monastic life and encouraged the proliferation of several distinct orders.
All the new ascetic orders were involved with romanticized and highly emotional forms of Christianity, particularly the Virgin Cult. The tendency of the new forms of monasticism was away from an intellectualized Christianity and toward an intensely personal kind of religious experience. This tendency further separated the new monastic orders from the achievements in philosophy and science that were being pursued by secular clerks in the universities. But it brought their religious attitudes into conformity with the main trends in lay piety and gained for the Cistercians and their imitators a still higher degree of social approval. Yet by 1200 it was becoming apparent that the Cistercians’ withdrawal from the world had not altogether succeeded, and the extravagant praise that the white monks had received in the first half century of their existence was frequently replaced by sardonic criticism, such as the black monks had already experienced.
The Benedictines steadily lost social approval during the second half of the twelfth century, and it is easy to see why. Ensconced behind the walls of their comfortable establishments and living off their vast income, they no longer contributed anything to society. They were simply there, and they continued to attract new members, but by no means many of the finer spiritual minds of the age. Their importance in liturgical prayer was on the decline, and they no longer had any other social functions. Here and there a Benedictine scriptorium would still produce a valuable illuminated manuscript, or a black monk would, as in times past, devote himself to writing the history of his times. But by and large, by the late twelfth century, the Benedictines were no longer making any contributions to European civilization, and in view of the fact that they did not attract the more devout religious, it is not surprising that many black monks were beset by the terrible sin of accidia—simple boredom. We have a graphic and detailed account of one of the largest, oldest, and wealthiest English Benedictine abbeys, Bury St. Edmunds, in the Chronicle of Jocelyn of Brakelond, the abbot’s secretary. Abbot Samson appears in Jocelyn’s description as a hard-working and sincere administrator, but one who completely lacked a real interest in the contemplative life. Jocelyn remarked that the abbot “commended good officials more than good monks.” Yet Jocelyn regards his abbot as an outstanding monastic leader!
The Cistercian order did not suffer as much from ossification as from corruption. The later history of the Cistercians is one of the most disillusioning themes in medieval history, and by 1200 contemporaries were well aware of it. The Cistercians seemed to have demonstrated the truth of the aphorism that nothing fails like success. They had taken the lead in the monastic withdrawal from the world, but the world followed, and they were unable to resist its temptations. The Cistercian monasteries had been established in uninhabited frontier regions. But by 1200 these areas were among the most flourishing in Europe. The Cistercians’ laborious improvement of their lands had made them prominent landlords. They technically abided by their vow not to use the labor of serfs, but they got around its spirit by leasing their estates to secular lords for high rents. Many Cistercian houses built up large amounts of capital, and their abbots used it to become moneylenders to the local nobility and less fortunate churchmen. By the early thirteenth century the Cistercians had become notorious for their business acumen and their similarity to Jewish usurers. The order of the white monks became sharply divided into a more zealous group, who wanted to return to the original ideals of Stephen Harding, and the more moderate majority, who were prepared to accept their prosperity as the grace of God. The later history of the white monks was marked by bitter internal controversies; in the seventeenth century the radical ascetic wing broke away and formed the Trappist order. The failure of the Cistercians to provide a satisfactory institutional form of piety was partly the result of inadequate government. The order grew far too fast and was too modest in its admission requirements. The abbot of Cîteaux was supposed to supervise carefully the affairs of the daughter houses, but this became a practical impossibility because of the vast number of Cistercian monasteries. This inadequate administration and lax discipline allowed the intrusion into the ranks of the white monks of men who betrayed the ascetic ideals of the founders of the order. In addition, the Cistercians had the misfortune of choosing a way of life that perfectly satisfied the economic needs of the twelfth century. They had been organized as a religious order that engaged in complete withdrawal from society, but the Cistercian program was such that they opened up the frontier regions, and society followed. The Cistercians had neither the organization, the experience, nor the leaders to deal with the situation in which they had become landlords and capitalists in what had once been their areas of ascetic retreat. The white monks had no traditions of either learning or worldly sophistication; they were anti-intellectuals who lacked the Benedictines’ familiarity with government and lordship. They were inevitably overwhelmed by their involvement with the world, and their withdrawal from society, which had been such a glorious chapter in twelfth-century religiosity, ended in a mixture of tragedy and paradox.
The failure of both puritanism in the eleventh century and monastic withdrawal in the twelfth century to achieve their aims encouraged the increasing prominence of a new kind of religious order that was a compromise between the two extreme variants of asceticism. This new institutionalized form of asceticism allowed its adherents both to undertake a regular religious life and the traditional vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience and to work in the world and to make a direct personal contribution to the welfare of society. Various experiments with this new kind of religious order provided the background for the emergence in the thirteenth century of the Franciscan and Dominican friars, which marked the most important stage in the development of the Catholic orders since the Rule of St. Benedict. These new orders eventually constituted the institutional means by which the ascetic impulse was used to meet the challenge of the intensive religiosity of the urban population of Europe.
The primary twelfth-century experiments with the new kind of religious order were undertaken by the regular canons and the military orders. The cathedral canons in the early Middle Ages had been notorious for their lack of devotion to their calling. The early twelfth-century development of the additional institution of the prebend, by which each cathedral official was given a fixed endowed income, only acerbated this situation. It made the cathedral canons financially independent of the bishop, and their offices particularly tempting for the younger sons of the nobility. The founding of the order of Prémontré in France in the 1120s was an attempt to remedy this situation. Its aim was to establish an order that was open to both men and women, who would take monastic vows but who would be free to work in the world, as did cathedral canons and other secular clergy—hence the designation of “regular canons.” In some ways the Premonstratensian order was inspired by the same ideal that influenced the early Cistercians. Prémontré, the original establishment of the order, was built in a desolate place that had been “shown out” by the Virgin. But whereas the white monks fled from the world, the regular canons were active in their philanthrophic, charitable, and hospital work and as parish clergy in the growing urban areas. In the twelfth century another group of monks working in the world, the Austin (Augustinian) canons, achieved prominence, particularly in England.
The regular canons foreshadowed, both in their institutional form and in their aims, the great orders of friars founded in the thirteenth century. But they did not have the impact that the Dominicans and Franciscans exercised on thirteenth-century civilization. The value of religious orders working in society, particularly in the urban areas, was not sufficiently perceived by the papacy until the beginning of the thirteenth century. The regular canons could have had much the same impact on twelfth-century Europe as the friars were to have a little later, but there were simply not enough of them for this purpose. The twelfth-century popes were able and sincere administrators, but they were remarkably insensitive to the currents of lay piety, and they offered no organized program to counter the more revolutionary implications of urban religiosity. The regular canons were forced to work with little assistance from the leaders of the church, and it was not until the pontificate of Innocent III in the first decade of the thirteenth century that the significance of their new institutionalized form of asceticism was fully perceived at Rome.
It would have been fortunate for the church and for European civilization in several respects if some of the energy and wealth that were given to supporting the crusading military orders in the twelfth century had been accorded instead to the regular canons. The military orders were the consequence of an attempt to apply the spirit and institutions of corporate monasticism to crusading ends. They are the most extreme expression of the militant stream in twelfth-century Christianity. It seemed to all kinds of people in the twelfth century in Europe that it was not only appropriate but desirable that men who had taken vows dedicating themselves to divine service should accomplish this aim by killing infidels. The military orders were particularly attractive to those members of the nobility who wanted to assume the monastic life but who wanted to continue to make use of their military skills. There had always been a psychological affinity between monastic and military discipline, and the regular clergy were commonly referred to as the soldiers of Christ. In the military orders this term took on a more than metaphorical significance.
The earliest crusading orders were initially founded as welfare agencies, to provide secondary services for crusaders and pilgrims, but they rapidly formed themselves into effective and powerful paramilitary organizations. The Knights Templars (the Poor Brothers of the Temple of Jerusalem) originated around 1120 in the efforts of a few French knights to protect pilgrims on the way to the Holy Land. St. Bernard formed these knights into a corporate religious order dedicated to fighting in the Holy Land. There was a threefold division within the ranks of the Templars: the aristocratic soldiers, the clergy, and the lay brothers of lower-class background who assisted the highborn knights as squires and grooms. The Knights Hospitalers (Order of St. John of Jerusalem) were the great rivals of the Templars. The original aim of the Hospitalers was to serve as the medical corps of the crusaders, but they rapidly became a military order and competed with the Templars for prestige and influence in the affairs of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The internecine feuds of the monastic soldiers contributed to the weakness of the crusading state in Palestine.
The later history of the Templars exhibits that same yielding to the temptations of Mammon that corrupted the Cistercian order. In the midst of the twelfth-century economic expansion, it was difficult for any effective corporate group not to make money, and if the corporation was also dedicated to divine service, it received endowments from all sides. As a result of the great success of their fund-raising drives, the Templars became involved with the techniques of the accumulation and transfer of capital, and by the thirteenth century they were the greatest bankers in Europe, with the papacy and the French kings as their clients. The thirteenth-century Templars did not kill many Moslems, but they were expert at increasing their capital, and they set up the headquarters of their bank in Paris. The popular attitude toward the Templars changed from fervent admiration to cynicism and jealousy, but the leaders of the order did not seem to mind. They insisted that their banking activities were ultimately in the service of God and pursued them with ascetic dedication. The history of the Templars constitutes one documented case of religion playing a part in the rise of capitalism.
If, in the case of the Templars, institutionalized asceticism ended in the creation of a bank, the Teutonic Knights, founded in 1190, provided what the nineteenth-century German nationalist historian Heinrich Treitschke called the origins of Prussianism. At the time of the third crusade some German lords formed a military order to fight in the Holy Land. But within thirty years they had transferred their area of operations from the Middle East to Germany’s eastern frontier, and they came to play a leading part in the Drang nach Osten, the eastward movement into the Slavic lands that had begun a century before. The original spiritual ideals of the order were subordinated to political ambitions. The Teutonic Knights indiscriminately attacked Christians and heathens in eastern Europe. They were fundamentally a state in the guise of a religious order. But their monastic form imbued them with corporate efficiency and fanatical zeal and greatly contributed to their long string of victories. They conquered Prussia from the Slavs and ruled it until the late fifteenth century. They pushed into Lithuania, Estonia, and Russia, where their advance was finally stopped shortly after 1400. In a sense the Teutonic Knights constituted one of the most successful variants of the institutionalized piety of the twelfth century. They remained dedicated to their vows and firm in their organization and were great soldiers and administrators for nearly three centuries after their founding.
By the late twelfth century, as a result of the work of the regular canons and the military orders, the idea of monks working in the world had become a familiar and popular one. In the last decades of the century there was, in fact, a proliferation of obscure orders based on the principle of serving society while pursuing the ascetic life. The Order of Bridgebuilders, for instance, was organized in France in 1189 to contribute to human welfare by improving communications. The Roman curia was disturbed by the dispersion of the ascetic impulse into so many distinct orders, and at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 it decreed that the licensing of new orders by the papacy should cease. But almost immediately the church found it necessary to constitute the new orders of friars to meet the challenges of urban piety and popular heresy. The original contribution of twelfth-century institutionalized asceticism was its compromise between the puritan and monastic extremes and its direction of spirituality toward service to Christian society. Out of this background emerged the religious orders that were to be indispensable in the church’s struggle to maintain its leadership in European civilization.
Anticlericalism and antisacerdotalism were the two modes of thought that threatened to undermine the traditional position of the church in medieval society in the second half of the twelfth century and forced the papacy, under Innocent III and his successors in the early decades of the thirteenth century, to undertake a desperate struggle for the reaffirmation of ecclesiastical leadership. Anticlericalism prepared the ground for the rise of antisacerdotalism, but they are distinct attitudes and doctrines. Anticlericalism is criticism of the clergy for not fulfilling the duties of their office and, as such, is not an error in the faith. Antisacerdotalism denies to the clergy the power of their office and claims that the sacraments that they administer have no efficacy. This view, of course, is the Donatist heresy and contradicts the fundamentals of Catholicism.
The common tendency of medieval thinkers to vulgarize St. Augustine’s conception of the City of God and to identify the heavenly community with the church provided an intellectual basis for the growth of antisacerdotalism. For if the church is the City of God, then assuredly its leaders are the most saintly men and the ministry of Christ ought to be founded on personal holiness, rather than on the impersonal, official authority of the priesthood.
Anticlericalism can, and in the twelfth century did, contribute to the growth of antisacerdotal movements. Constant and protracted criticisms of the personal qualities of the church hierarchy and the insistence upon a discrepancy between their ideals and their practices eventually raised doubts in the minds of some devout people whether the priests were the ministers of God in the first place. But it must be emphasized that criticism of the clergy as lazy and corrupt in and of itself does not constitute heresy. In fact, such criticism may be the necessary precondition for reforming and revitalizing the church. Thus it is possible to have two men speaking unfavorably about the clergy, but whose attitudes are fundamentally different. One wants the clergy to exercise the full powers of its office in accordance with the highest ideals of the church, while the other holds that the church hierarchy has no religious authority. The former represents an act of criticism, the latter of denial. The second half of the twelfth century was marked by a thunderous chorus of attacks on the clergy, and the papacy was faced with the difficult task of evaluating the merit of these criticisms and distinguishing between those who wanted a better Catholic hierarchy and those who wanted to destroy the Catholic church and substitute new kinds of sectarian religious communities.
With each passing decade of the twelfth century, criticism from all quarters of the conduct of the clergy became more intense. Some of the severest criticism came from within the church itself. Monks attacked the cathedral clergy as corrupt and materialistic, the canons claimed that the monks were useless and selfish, and competing religious orders made derogatory remarks about each other. St. Bernard and his disciples denounced the soft living of ecclesiastical princes in the severest terms, and Pope Innocent III castigated the higher clergy of southern France as “dumb dogs who can no longer bark.” In the later decades of the century it was fashionable for poets, university students, and courtly writers to produce clever satires depicting the clergy as greedy and corrupt. The circle of any king who was in trouble with Rome, such as the German Hohenstaufens, attributed the grossest motives to the pope and cardinals. The German minnesinger Walther von der Vogelweide supported his Hohenstaufen patron by denouncing the papacy as a ravenous wolf, and he did not refrain from dragging up old legends that Sylvester II had been a sorcerer. Since the twelfth century almost everyone who had lost a case in the Roman court was inclined to attribute this loss to the cardinals’ love of gold; the secretary of the angelic St. Anselm of Canterbury had made such a claim as early as 1095. Papal legates were fair game for all satirists and critics north of the Alps, since they were frequently alien Italians who interfered in the affairs of the territorial churches of northern Europe. The Italian legates were deemed to be devious, mendacious, and unprincipled; one English writer, for good measure, asserted that a cardinal legate had a penchant for consorting with prostitutes. The picture of the clergy as ignorant, stupid, and lecherous given in Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century stories can already be found in the bourgeois literature of the thirteenth century, which, in turn, reflects the impressions that many of the educated townsmen had of their bishops and priests before 1200.
From all this literary evidence it is possible to build up the blackest image of the late twelfth-century clergy, as was done in the 1920s in the work of the fiercely anti-Catholic historian G. G. Coulton, who indicted the medieval clergy for a sordid failure to live up to its profession. There is certainly plausible evidence for the truth of such an indictment, and the records of bishops’ inspections of their dioceses, which were required after 1215, provide documentation for almost every conceivable kind of wrong-doing by members of both the regular and secular clergy. On the other side of the case, however, is the fact of the magnificent achievements and vitality of the twelfth-century church and the hundreds of churchmen all over Europe, from bishop and abbot to the humblest monk and parish priest, whom we know to have been capable and zealous and even self-sacrificing in the fulfillment of their duties. In the assessment of the cause of the sharp rise in anticlericalism in the late twelfth century, the evidence points much more strongly to social and intellectual change than to a decline in the morality and quality of the clergy as the key to the problem.
In 1200 there were more dedicated members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy than ever before, but the standards the laity expected of their clergy became ever higher from the middle of the eleventh century, and the church simply did not have sufficient personnel to meet these demands. Particularly in urban areas, where there was an unprecedented degree of literacy and an intense piety among laymen, the church was pressed to provide clergy of the greatest learning and dedication, and a limited number of such men were available.
The twelfth-century merchant or craftsman necessarily had a strong sense of calling. He knew that if he did not fulfill the possibilities of the vocation he had chosen, he would be condemned to miserable poverty. This knowledge made him jealous of other groups in society who did not have to rely entirely on their own efforts—not only nobles, but the churchmen. The medieval bourgeois was obstreperous and intolerant, and he tended to judge other people by the criteria of his own way of life. He thought that every clergyman should work for a living and that the cleric should not enjoy the powers and privileges of ecclesiastical office unless he demonstrated by his personal life that he was truly a minister of Christ. The burgher should be a businessman and the priest a saint; everyone should fulfill the obligations of his calling in life. But when the burgher applied this iron standard of rationality to the world around him, he discovered that many clergymen were not doing a good job and were perhaps less worthy of their offices than the burgher himself would be. This discovery made him angry and disillusioned with the priesthood.
The fault of the twelfth-century papacy was not that it permitted monstrous scandals with impunity, but that it did not adjust with sufficient rapidity and energy to the consequences of far-reaching social change. The church at the end of the twelfth-century was still primarily organized for a rural society, and its attempts to satisfy the religious needs of the urbanized areas of Europe were halfhearted at best and perfunctory at worst. This situation left the bourgeois, particularly in the numerous and wealthy cities of northern Italy and southern France, to work out their own resolution of their religious problems. They wanted a faith that could provide an intense personal experience and involve them emotionally with Christ, the Virgin, and the saints. They had contributed to the building of magnificent municipal cathedrals all over Europe because they wanted a place to worship where they could feel a close association with the divine spirit. But a great many of the priests who worked in urban areas could not or would not pursue this intensely personal approach to the Christian faith. The old kind of cathedral cleric or parish priest believed that his function as a Christian minister should be confined to administering the sacraments, hearing confession, and performing the traditional liturgical offices. He was not prepared to give long and inspiring sermons, which were both the staple of the bourgeois’s religious diet and their chief source of diversion amid the ruthless, overregulated, and cramped life of the medieval cities.
The social and religious milieu of northern Italy, the Rhineland, and southern France had already in the eleventh century produced itinerant preachers of saintly reputation who offered to the bourgeois the sermons and other accoutrements of personal religious experience they could not find in ordinary church services. After 1150 this kind of popular spiritual leader began to exercise a greater and greater influence and to command formidable followings. The church was slow to perceive the dangers inherent in such an unfamiliar situation. The new preachers appeared to be merely perpetuating and disseminating the new piety as expressed by Damiani and Bernard. But with each passing decade it became more evident that many of these popular religious leaders were going beyond it. They were advocating antisacerdotal and antisacramental doctrines that the fourth-century church had condemned as the Donatist heresy and that, although revived momentarily by Cardinal Humbert in 1059, had been again anathematized by the church after 1080.
Bored and disappointed by their dull clergy, many of the townsmen had come to doubt the value and efficacy of the sacraments and offices of the church. They were eager to listen to the itinerant saints who claimed that holiness of life and personal devotion to God determined the members and leaders of the fellowship of Christ. This doctrine pleased the zealous burghers, many of whom felt superior in morality and intellect to their priests, while it gave the itinerant preachers the position of leadership over the new heretical communities. The Latin church had, of course, encountered heretical doctrines before in isolated instances, but since the Donatist heresy of the fourth century, it had not been troubled by any such doctrine that had a large popular following and that was associated with mass social and intellectual discontent. Before the end of the twelfth century the papacy did not discover how to deal with this grave threat to the unity of the church and the authority of the priesthood.
By the nature of its doctrine, antisacerdotalism implied a sectarian rather than an ecumenical religion. A number of sects were devoted to their saintly leaders, but there was little or no cooperation among them. The only one of the late twelfth-century antisacerdotal sects that took on the character of more than an isolated local movement was the Waldensians, who took their name from Peter Waldo, a saintly merchant of Lyons in southeastern France. Lyons and its environs had for a long time been distinguished by extremely ascetic religious leaders. Near Lyons in the 1040s was established the first anti-Cluniac monastery to be founded north of the Alps. The archbishop of Lyons in the 1080s and the 1090s was the most devoted disciple that Gregory VII had in northern Europe. Waldo and his disciples called themselves the Poor Men of Lyons. They preached not only antisacerdotal, antisacramental, and Donatist doctrines, but the corollary theory of the apostolic poverty of the church that influenced the policy of the radical Gregorian pope, Paschal II, in the second decade of the twelfth century. The church, as seen by the Waldensians, was not the prevailing Catholic institution, but the purely spiritual fellowship of saintly men and women who had experienced divine love and grace.
The Waldensian sect spread to the cities of northern Italy, where it had the greater part of its adherents by the later twelfth century. The followers of Peter Waldo were proto-Protestants, who, for the first time, clearly presented the doctrines to which the more radical Protestant sects of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries subscribed. And their doctrines contain the same combination of freedom and authoritarianism, of personal religious experience and the rule of the saints, that distinguished the sixteenth-century Anabaptists and the seventeenth-century English Puritan sects who were their ultimate disciples. Although later driven from the cities of northern Italy by the church, they survived in small numbers in Alpine valleys until the seventeenth century; they were the “slaughtered saints” of whom John Milton speaks in his famous sonnet.
The apocalyptic and eschatological tone of the antisacerdotal movements was given emphasis and greater content by the prolific speculations at the end of the twelfth century of a southern Italian abbot, Joachim of Flora, whose treatises received remarkably wide and rapid circulation. Following suggestions already made by St. Bernard, Joachim claimed that the world had entered the age of Antichrist, which immediately preceded the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. But whereas Bernard had satisfied himself with denouncing archbishops and bishops as the captives of the devil, Joachim identified the papacy itself with Antichrist. This revolutionary doctrine, which turned hierocratic theory on its head, proved to be enormously popular with all heretical movements up to and including the Protestant leaders of the sixteenth century. It made simpler the heretics’ denunciation of the church and allowed them to indulge in an unqualified hatred of the Catholic priesthood. Subscribers to this doctrine could dismiss even the most zealous and moral acts of the papacy as merely the treacherous wiles of Antichrist. Their eschatological convictions gave the adherents of Joachimism the strength to withstand any counterattack by the church. They alone were the true disciples of the Lord who would gain their triumph at His imminent coming. Men who held convictions such as these were not liable to be moved by appeals to tradition, reason, or common sense.
The dualism implicit in Joachim’s speculations comes out much stronger and in an absolute form in the heretical movement that won an enormous number of adherents in southern France: the religion of the Cathari (Pure Ones, Saints), or the Albigensian religion (after the town of Albi in Toulouse, where the heretics were particularly strong), or medieval Manicheanism, as it is sometimes called. At the end of the twelfth century the wealthy bourgeois and many of the nobility of Toulouse and Provence, and perhaps even the count of Toulouse and his family, were members of an heretical church whose doctrines closely resembled, and perhaps were the perpetuation of, that fourth-century Manicheanism to which St. Augustine had for a time subscribed and then, after he became a Christian, denounced in the severest terms. Many of the people of southern France who were not actually members of the Albigensian church seem nevertheless to have admired its saintly leaders; the count of Toulouse most likely fell into this category. Considering the wealth of this part of Europe and the vitality of its culture, its increasing defection from the Catholic church threatened a schism in the Christian world of the greatest significance. In the eyes of the papacy and other orthodox believers everywhere in 1200, the Albigensian domination of southern France constituted a cancer in the body of European civilization that had to be rooted out at all costs.
The origins of the Cathari movement are not known for certain. In the late eleventh century the movement made a dim appearance in the towns of both northern Italy and southern France. It mostly disappeared in the former but slowly gained adherents in the latter, and after 1150 it came out in the open and brazenly and successfully challenged the church. The clergy of southern France were notoriously incompetent and corrupt; this situation provided fertile ground for the growth of popular heresy and accounts for the initially perfunctory and inadequate efforts made to stop the steady expansion of the Albigensian church. The twelfth-century papacy may be regarded as ignoring too long the Albigensian threat and of being too conservative and timid in its remedy, which was simply to preach against the Cathari. A heretical movement that struck such deep roots in society was not likely to be destroyed by even the most eloquent homiletics and apologetics. Yet the appearance of a popular schismatic church on such a great scale was a new thing in Latin Christianity. The well-meaning lawyers who dominated papal government did not realize until after 1200 that novel and radical methods would be needed to destroy the Albigensian heresy.
Some historians see a direct line of transference of ideas stretching from the twelfth-century Cathari to the fourth-century Manichees. This view holds that although Manichean doctrines disappeared in the Latin world, they invaded the Byzantine empire from their place of origin in Persia and were carried into Bulgaria in the tenth and eleventh centuries. There was indeed a Manichean sect called the Bogomils in the Balkans, and it has been suggested that its doctrines were spread to western Europe along trade routes in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was possible, however, to derive the dualist theology, which is the heart of Manicheanism, from the neoplatonism that dominated early-medieval philosophy and theology. The Manichees believed that there are two gods, the god of good and the god of evil, of light and of darkness, who struggle for victory in the world. Man is a mixture of good spirit and evil matter. The Cathari believed they were the ascetic “perfects” who achieved a pure spirituality, and those who did not live the fully ascetic life might nevertheless assure themselves of salvation by recognizing their leadership. These “auditors” of the true faith received a sacrament on their deathbed that wiped away their previous sin and allowed the reunion of their souls with the Divine Spirit. Assuming that the possibility of receiving the grace of God through the ministry of the Catholic priesthood is denied, the Christian would have to conclude that catharsis is the only approach to God and would have to posit the mystic’s sharp antithesis of spirit and matter. The Albigensian theology, then, seems to have been the result of the combination of antisacerdotalism with neoplatonism, and even if some pristine Manichean ideas did filter into Europe from the Balkans or Byzantium, it was the strength of these two doctrines in twelfth-century Europe that prepared the ground for the eastern heresy and provided the intellectual stimulation for its growth.
The thirteenth-century persecutors of the Albigensian sect attributed to them several other beliefs aside from this basic dualist theology. It was claimed that they rejected the Incarnation of Christ because it involved the imprisonment of the deity in evil matter. And it was asserted that the Catharist conviction that matter was evil led to bizarre ideas and social mores. The Albigensians were said to be opposed to marriage, believing that marriage perpetuated the monstrosity of the human race in which the divine spirit was encased in the gross and evil body. They were said, however, to permit any kind of sexual promiscuity, presumably as long as procreation was avoided. They advocated as virtuous both racial and individual suicide. They were also accused of exposing babies (a not-uncommon postnatal abortion practice in overpopulated European society), of allowing their “perfect” saints to starve themselves to death, and of believing that whatever the auditors (laity of the Albigensian church) did before they received the final purifying sacrament was of no account. Consequently it was claimed that the Albigensian laity engaged in the most profligate and dissolute living, for no morality is necessary if the human body is innately evil and a sacrament suffices to free the spirit.
Much of this orthodox polemic sounds like old libels dredged up against any radical and separatist religion in premodern society. Charges of sexual promiscuity covered up by hypocrisy were leveled against Christians in the pagan Roman Empire. From what is known about the mass of Catharist laity, they were a quiet, devout, and hard-working group. While noble and bourgeois families provided leadership, the majority of Cathars appear to have been poor peasants. Family bonds were strong in Catharism, and the indoctrination of children into the faith was pursued with great care. If the center of Catholicism in southern France, says Malcom Lambert, was the church, the center of Catharism was the household. The determinism at the center of Catharist doctrine—an evil god creates evil—appealed to illiterate peasants, for whom the canonical Augustinian explanation of evil as the falling away from God was too difficult.
The Catharists’ central figure of the ascetic leader was common to all the popular heresies. Of course saints were the focus of popular belief in the Catholic church. The Catharist saints impressed because they were ready at hand, eager to communicate and help, always on call as it were. In peasant villages and the less salubrious streets of medieval cities such personal contact was important, as it still is today with respect to the impact of religious leaders.
Arno Borst, another prominent historian of Catharism, points to the peaceful dialogue between Catharists and Catholics in the closing decades of the twelfth century and regrets, as any liberal scholar would, the fury and the violence that was to follow after the turn of the century. Yet whatever the Catharists taught and no matter how pious and benign they were, they formed a counterchurch: They had withdrawn their presence and support from the Latin church. When Latin bishops and priests observed the thinning attendance of their churches and the decline of revenue from their flocks, whatever the theological niceties or ethical subtleties, they were afraid.
Fear leads to anxiety and, in certain contexts, to conflict and violence. That is the tragedy of what happened among the religious communities in southern France between 1180 and 1220. The story of Catharism is both an inspiring and heartbreaking one. Europe was not ready to tolerate separatist communities that were an apparent threat to the established church. Many centuries would pass before such toleration was practiced.
There is another side to the story—the Catharist connection with feminism and the Jews that inflamed bad feeling and fanaticism on the Catholic side. The more closely the Catharist movement is studied, and it has been intensely examined in recent decades, the more it appears, either for reasons of continuity or because of fortuitous coincidence, to resemble the doctrine of a powerful antiorthodox church group in the eastern Mediterranean in the late first and second centuries A.D. that has come to be referred to as Gnosticism (from its claims to Gnosis, true knowledge). The Gnostic church was heavily infected by dualistic ideas adapted from Persian Manicheanism. As Elaine Pagels stressed, Gnosticism aroused the ire of the Catholic bishops by another characteristic—its proclivity to give women positions of leadership in its community at a time when the mainline church was becoming ever more male dominated and prone to marginalizing women’s capacity to lead or even to speak in ecclesiastical assemblies. Southern French Catharism of the early thirteenth century appeared to be not only heretically dualistic in its theology but more inclined than the Roman church to find a place of prominence or at least easy participation for women, and the latter quality probably made it attractive to nobility of Languedoc, who were more equitable in their attitude toward women (of their own class) than were the nobility of the north.
We do not know whether Gnosticism was perpetuated all through the early Middle Ages in Europe as an underground movement in Latin Christianity. In southern France it is more likely that the Christians picked up Gnostic ideas from the wealthy Jewish community. The great authority on the history of medieval Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, identified a significant Gnostic strain in the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical culture that emerged in Provence in the early thirteenth century. Both the Catharists and the Kabbalists believed in metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls). Therefore from one perspective, the rise of Catharism is a consequence of cultural transference from the Jewish to the Christian world in southern France. This Judaizing background of Catharism helps to explain the fury with which the papacy struggled against it and the increased tempo of the condemnation of the Jews by Rome in the early thirteenth century.
Catharism came to arouse more fear and hate in the papacy and the church hierarchy than these authorities themselves could fully articulate and explain. It revived (or continued in a highly visible form) the specter of ancient Gnosticism, early Christianity’s gravest threat and most formidable enemy. And the Catharists gave off intimations of the feminizing and Judaizing of the traditional Catholic faith that the hierarchy eventually came to realize that they had to encounter with every conceivable means at their disposal. It was a struggle for the soul of Europe.