The Debauchery of the Medieval Church
And what it reveals about human nature
Panning the rivers of the past for nuggets of wisdom, we might discover the following choice morsel from the Middle Ages: that just as running water can find any pathway through seemingly impenetrable objects, so too is human nature quite irrepressible.
So much so that even the medieval Church — the arbiter of ethics, a component of the state, the lens through which history, culture and science was understood — was unable to keep a lid on it, even at the very core of its own ranks.
Indeed, particularly in the fourteenth century, there is no more deft exponent of all the weaknesses, passions and foibles of the human condition than the Church itself, the supposed upholder of Christian virtue.
We know, for example, that members of the Church could certainly be lustful, in spite of the vows of celibacy from many of its members. The lechery of the clergy was a favourite topic of contemporary satirists, and perhaps the fact that they seem to be such low-hanging fruit is proof enough of the proverb that ‘Many a truth is spoken in jest’.
In The Canterbury Tales, the pardoner speaks of a man’s wife, whereby ‘Two or three clergy had enjoyed her love’. The pardoner himself, a rather loathsome man who receives payment in return for granting pardon for sins — the same man who carries the pope’s seal and claims to be doing ‘Christ’s most holy work’ — proclaims unashamedly, ‘Let me drink the liquor of the grape and keep a jolly wench in every town’. Pardons, incidentally, could be granted for all kinds of sins, including legitimizing priests’ illicit children.
Another contemporary writer, Boccaccio, produced tales of friars going hunting with mistresses, and laying with knights’ wives. Indeed, so famous were the friars for seduction that popular poems were composed about them: ‘[The friar] came to our dame when the good man is from home.’ They were also known to have kept dogs and sold furs to better gain the attention of women.
We also know from Church court records that a priest might occasionally engage in dalliance with members of the laity; a favoured trick was to receive confession in a secluded place in the church, away from prying eyes, where said ‘confession’ could take place.
It was lamented how such holy men might save the souls of their flock if they were so far from holiness themselves. In any case, it is proof that an apparently private communion with God, the threat of internal damnation, excommunication, confiscation or indeed any other kinds of -ation (the only -ation that did move them was fornication) were insubordinate to the strength of their primal human desire. Perhaps they are not so alien in this sense.
Nor is lust the only thing which members of the medieval Church are guilty of. Similarly averse to Christian values and equally lampooned by contemporaries was the avarice of the Church. Again, this became particularly marked in the fourteenth century, crucially following the move of the papacy from Rome to Avignon and the corresponding decline in ‘political’ power.
This power decay was more than made up for by the outrageous money-making practices which the Church pursued from the top down.
First of all, everything was for sale. We have seen already how pardons were up for grabs, but so too were positions and benefices, with the result that the clergy was flooded with people who were not consecrated, had not passed the required Latin literacy test, or were not even of age; in Bohemia a seven-year-old boy was appointed to a parish.
The money flowed to Avignon. Here, Petrarch tells us, ‘The Poor Fishermen of Galilee were now loaded with gold and clad in purple’. The papal palace was festooned with paintings and finery, tapestries, gold and silver plate; indeed, the seat of the pope seemed more like a secular than a spiritual residence.
Nor was such infatuation with riches confined to the upper echelons of the Church; Boccaccio cuttingly describes how friars ‘Now have elegant and pontifical habits, in which they strut like peacocks through the churches and the city squares without compunction, just as though they were members of the laity showing off their robes’.
Equally, the same pardoner of Chaucer’s imagination brazenly proclaims, ‘I preach against the very vice I make a living out of — avarice’. He speaks for a general contempt of pardoners across Christendom.
Discoveries such as this offer a complex philosophical conundrum. On the one hand, some of the pursuits of the Church — the extortion and fearmongering amongst the laity, for one — are deplorable. For others the worst offence is incompetence and insincerity. The joke book A Hundred Merry Tales, for instance, describes a priest who falls asleep whilst receiving confession, apparently severely hungover from celebrating Shrove Tuesday the previous night.
Yet the point remains the same: that regardless of how pervasive the medieval Church was, how ostensibly pious and conservative its adherents were, the grubby, bodily presence of humanity always seethes visibly beneath the thin white layer of purity. It is a deduction that is at once comforting and cynical.
Comforting that the inexorable reach of the Church and its severe morals do not stop humans from being lazy, incompetent, from experiencing sexual urges, even from preening or indulging in life’s finer things. Not the ubiquitousness of its institutions, the threats of hell, of hanging by the tongue from trees of burning fire, nor the centuries of theological reasoning and formulation of ethics could deter people. And yet a cynical conclusion is that it does not stop the rampant wants and excesses of those who have both the means and lack of inhibitions to go about realising them.
The medieval Church proves that not even the most powerful moral institutions can keep a check on human nature, for better and for worse.
I have neglected to talk much about the ‘sins’ of the laity, although the same applies. They were just as fallible in committing transgressions, skipping masses, and in ‘sinning’. After all, who keeps the pardoner and the confessor in business?
Studying the medieval Church proves above all that with the quiet and natural tenacity of weeds reclaiming a pathway or an abandoned building, the human condition can find ways to coexist subversively.
