HIST 126: The Age of Reformations

Medieval Religion: Folk Piety

As we will discuss in class, when talking about the religious world of the Middle Ages we must take as our point of departure the fact that official Christian dogma existed side by side with pagan remnants and what we would call “ingrained” superstitions. This mix, which in the popular mind was not contradictory, was tolerated by the Church as necessary to the maintenance of the flock (remember: in the early process of Christianization in the West, the cooption of pagan dates, festivals, etc. was a common tool…). In order to understand the processes of the Reformation, we must therefore understand the basic assumptions of what is known as “folk piety,” or the common beliefs of the masses.

The six most salient assumptions of medieval/early modern folk piety were:

1. An “inner-worldly” basis of belief, that is, the belief that the supernatural was part of the natural.  That is, since much of the physical and moral effort of medieval peoples was directed simply at coping and surviving, it helped to believe that the supernatural was present within the material world.  The best example of this belief is the view of the human being as composed of body (material), spirit (intellect), and soul (immortal and super-natural).  We also discussed how this first issue serves as a basic explanation for the Medieval and Early Modern believe in sacramentalism (the fact that specific rituals has supernatural powers which made us closer to God) and magic (which worked under the same assumption but was clearly an “unofficial” version of this kind of spiritualism).

2. Related to the above, there is then the belief that the supernatural was more real and tangible than this world (because this world is corruptible and finite).   Some salient features of this “other world” are:
1. It had enormous potency – that is, it could either aid or harm.  Saints, of course, could aid you, but vengeful wandering spirits could take their despair out on you, making you sick, killing your stock, etc.
2. Encountering it could be dangerous.  For example, medieval folk believed in what are called “liminal areas”, which are areas/times of intersection between the other world and this one.  Doorways, for example, were believed to serve sometimes not only as the entrance to a dwelling or room, but to a different – usually invisible – world.  Likewise, days such as Halloween and All Souls Day were believed to be particularly open to spirits crossing from the beyond.  The worse-case scenario, of course, would be to encounter the Devil in disguise, for the ultimate cost was eternal damnation.  Another common belief, for example, was that the dead were particularly problematic, because they plagued the living.  The clearest example are the “revenant dead”, who in the immediate time following their death sought to take a companion with them to the afterlife (the most usual scenario was mothers who died during childbirth coming back for the child a short while later).
3. It was full of the terrors of the unknown.  A common attribute of views of the other world is that it was full of supernatural beings and monsters, demonstrating a confluence of Christian and pagan mythologies. 

3. Folk piety was a combination of “official” and “unofficial” elements of spiritualism.  As we discussed in class, the easiest way to understand this is to think of it as a dual process of appropriation.  For example, the Church would recognize local saints to whom villagers could relate, the liturgy came to be a commemoration both of the living and the dead (official recognition which would arguably appease wandering spirits), etc.  The official/unofficial line was not necessarily an elite/popular one, but there were some basic differences between the ways in which the upper and lower classes experienced belief:
1. the elite concentrated a lot more on the afterlife, as their daily survival was less tangibly and/or directly tied to the land, while the masses geared their energies more to the here-and-now
2. the elite sought reassurance against God’s punishment, while the popular masses were a lot more concerned with receiving reassurance that God would protect them from the rages of nature

4. Religious belief mirrored the social reality of the medieval world, particularly its highly stratified nature.  For example, religious practice mirrored the feudal contract (which exchanged homage and fidelity for protection), most obviously in the fact that God was the ‘lord’ to whom all men were vassals.  Another clear parallel between Christianity and society is the strict hierarchy which organized both.  From top to bottom: God, Angels, Saints, Clergy, Laity – King, Lords, Vassals, Serfs.  The hierarchical reality of the religious establishment was also made clear by the fact that most upper clergy were the sons of aristocrats, and the fact that most saints were bishops, kings, and other aristocratic males.  The one exception was aristocratic women, but they were still part of the upper social strata.  In fact, the Church’s practices of canonization can be said to legitimize the social status-quo.

5. The issue of female saints serves as a nice transition to the fifth issue, which is the confluence of gender and belief.  The simple fact is that the spiritual and religious experiences of males and females were different.  There was a greater proliferation of religious opportunities for female participation in spiritual matters, as there was a great number of convents and women-only quasi-monastic organizations (where women could dedicate their lives to God and helping others without taking the veil).  Moreover, the belief in women’s  greater emotional nature made them more likely to be accepted as mystics (someone who achieves physical communion with the divine).  Their perceived nurturing nature also made them more likely saints; 71% of lay saints in the medieval and early modern periods were women.

6. Finally, we need to talk about power and belief.  Religion was a way to power; there is no two ways about it.  The most obvious confluence of religion and power is the fact that supernatural power was always believed to be involved with secular power.  For example, kings were thought to have been chosen by God in order to facilitate an orderly society where Christianity could flourish; we know this as the “divine right of kings,” which argued that kings were above the rest of society because they had been chosen by God to lead civic society.

Above all, what you must remember about folk piety is:

1) the religious experiences of the European masses during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period were comprised of both official and unofficial beliefs and practices.  All members of society, including the clergy, held basic and/or crude superstitions (like the subscription to astrology, the belief in the occult, and the belief in monsters) that were an integral part of the overall picture, not “deviant” forms of thought;

2) religious experiences both shaped and mirrored social realities.  One could not be taken from the other. 

Part II: The Church on the Eve of the Reformation

I. Introduction

Traditional histories of the Reformation argue that the Reformations of the sixteenth century were inevitable; in fact, the argument forwards that the Church was corrupt and out of touch with its constituency.  While, as we will discuss below, these fact were indeed true, such an overarching argument ignores certain realities and/or strengths innate in the Church’s makeup.

Here, then, is a short exposition on the two major strengths of the medieval Church:

1. The Church was flexible

            As we talked about in class, the Church was willing to adopt “unofficial” piety and spirituality. Of       course, it then manipulated it into official belief.

2. The Church was a vital, inextricable part of people’s lives

            Most members of society were not alienated from the Church.  In fact, the opposite is true; more and more medieval people became involved in ritualized spirituality.  For example, the Middle Ages       is, without a doubt, one of the periods in the history of the Church in which the greatest numbers of      people belonged to confraternities, participated in processions, carried around relics, etc.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Church was vulnerable in particular ways, and opened itself up to criticism and challenge.

II. The Vulnerability of the Church

There were four major ways in which the Church was vulnerable, but all had one common basis: the Church is made up of individuals, most of who did not fit the idealized version of who and what the leaders of Christianity should be.

1. Conflicts of interest and of responsibilities

� The religious duties of the clergy were many and varied. 

� However, it was understood that the most important duty of priests was the care of their flock, that is, to direct believers in their attempt to gain Salvation. 

� There were three main, concrete ways in which different clergy could serve their flock: by being fully immersed in their pastoral duties (secular); by deliberately avoiding the world and directing their efforts towards the creation of a further “surplus of good” and the assurance of intersession from saints (regular); or by       something in between, in the style of the Franciscans, for example, whose monastic life included both prayer and preaching.

� The problem lay in the fact that there were many potential distractions from a life lived in the service of the Church and its flock.  In fact, it could be said that the clergy was over-extended in its duties.  Priest, as the bulk of the literate population, served not only as spiritual guides but also as administrators.  They not only ran the Church’s government and administered its vast lands and revenues, they also populated the bureaucracies of all the major and minor rulers of Europe. 

� A further complication was that the Church was continually growing, and therefore needed a continuous flow of administrators.  The question became one of finances; since it needed more administrators, the Church had to find a way to afford them.

2. Economic problems

� The revenues of the Church were tangled in a web of rights, because the Church’s monies came from more than one source.  In fact, there were two main sources of revenue:

a. spiritual income: monies collected for the performance of specific services (like the “offerings” that you “give” when you get married or baptize your child), and tithes (the mandatory tax – usually 10% - paid by all Church members).

b. temporal revenues: from Church lands and other possessions (mines, fisheries, etc) and from administrative positions which could be held by either clergy or lay people (secretariats, ambassadorial positions, etc. – remember, the clergy were the likeliest administrators).

� In theory, all these monies were supposed to be used for the administration of the Church, particularly local churches (that is, if you collect taxes in a particular diocese, then in theory that money should be used to improve conditions in that same diocese).  In practice, however, most of the revenue was diverted to other areas and for other purposes.  Here there were two main problems:

a. absenteeism: many of the administrators of local dioceses did not actually live in the area.  For example, you could have a bishop who actually held the title - and therefore the right to the revenues collected from – several different localities.  In theory, once again, that bishop was supposed to divvy up the revenues among all his dioceses.  However, in most cases those bishops used the revenues from all their areas to improve the quality of their lives and churches only within their diocese of residence.  Many never even set foot on their secondary dioceses!  As you can well imagine, their attitude and actions did not smack of “caring for the flock”.

b. appropriation of revenues for the upkeep of universities, nunneries, monasteries, etc:  Universities were the physical realm of Church intellectual pursuits and, as such, were seen by the Church as “musts”.  As is also the case today, universities usually do not produce enough revenue to run themselves, and need outside monies.  In the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, those monies came from the Church.  Monasteries and nunneries, although geared to self-sufficiency, ran into the same problem and, once again, the answer was the Church’s coffers.

� The overall fiscal problem was acquiring new revenues to cope with the increasing scope of Church activities, because, for one reason (actual growth) or another (corruption), tithes and fees were not cutting it.

3. Abuse of priestly status

� The clergy, both in their role as spiritual leaders and in their role as administrators, had a wide range of power and privileges.  Of course, they had the easiest access to money and influence, in that they were the tax collectors and, in many cases, the advisors of rulers at large.  Also, the Church wrote its own system of law, both in civic and spiritual terms.  This fact had two great implications for clergy-laity relations:

a. The clergy were exempt from the institutions of secular society.  For example, they did not pay taxes.  Also, they were not held accountable before secular courts.  That is, the clergy was responsible under the law, but the law to which they subscribed was a different one especially created for them.  If a priest committed a civic crime against a civilian (rape, sodomy, or whatever), he would not be taken to the town’s courts, but be tried by the ecclesiastical (Church) courts.  The issue here is that the clergy was seen as enjoying the best of civic society without having to pay any price a regular man would have to.

b. In spiritual terms, the clergy had the power of salvation over its flock.  Remember how, in order to gain salvation, one needed the sacraments?  Well, the Church reserved the right not to give them!  There were two main “weapons” in the Church’s spiritual arsenal of power: excommunication (exiling an individual from the Christian community) and the interdict (barring a whole community/town from access to the sacraments – that is, the Pope could decree that the sacraments were not to be given in a particular town.  This might not seem too bad – after all, you could go to a different town, right? – but remember, this is an age of very limited mobility, among other things because the roads were difficult to traverse and insecure; most people did not leave their towns at all!)

� These privileges could, and were, often abused.

4. Corruption, plain and simple

� The clergy had many shortcomings, many a product of the times themselves.

a. many priests were poorly educated (this applied above all to rural and small-parish priests), which in turn meant that they sometimes did not even have the necessary knowledge to undertake their duties effectively.  For example, it was not uncommon to have priests not know Latin, even in an age when the whole mass was given in that language!

b. many members of the clergy fell way short of the moral ideal for their calling.  For example, many were not celibate, had concubines, or even regularly cavorted with prostitutes.  Perhaps the best example I can give you is Pope Alexander VI (a pope, for crying out loud!): he had a longtime mistress, had three children by her, and sought to enlarge his family’s wealth at whatever cost.  Moreover, many in the clergy vied for secular power, making their personal aggrandizement the whole point of  their existence.  To use Alexander as an example again, he even made political alliances based on what he could gain for himself and his children, not for the Church (although you have to give him credit for being such a devoted father…). 

c. finally, most members of the upper clergy embraced decadence and luxury, even when a true Christian should have embraced, if not poverty, at least simplicity and sobriety.  In their bid for a luxurious lifestyle, many misappropriated the revenue from tithes and indulgences.

� All of the above led to a failure to care appropriately for their obligations to God and man.  Together with the issue of absenteeism and privilege, the above shortcomings led to a widespread sentiment of anticlericalism (that is, a visceral dislike of priests as individuals).

� To be fair, as historians, we should point out that many of these moral shortcomings can be explained by the fact that, as we mentioned in class, many priests did not feel “the calling”.  Rather, they were thrown into the clergy by a lack of other “jobs” which the aristocracy (defined in the Middle Ages by the very fact that they DID NOT work) could undertake without losing their social prestige as a class.  Moreover, we need to appreciate that, in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, the advancement of one’s family was one’s number one duty – therefore, the appropriation or redirection of funds, rights, and privileges for the improvement of the family would not seem particularly immoral.

Part III: Movements of Reform

The above weaknesses and the anticlericalism to which they led were not unknown to the Church and its officials.  On the contrary, many within the Church had attempted to “fix” the above problems in one way or another; the history of the Church from early on included a history of attempts at reform from within.

I. Ideas of reformatio and renovatio in the late Middle Ages

A. A near universal call

1. Let us start with definitions: to reform something is to improve it while it is still in existence; to renovate something is to revive it after it is defunct.

2. In the medieval mind, the above actions presupposed and complemented each other.

3. More importantly, the ideas of reformatio and renovatio were an almost universal call to change: from the cosmos to the human body, renewal was deemed necessary and desired.  Therefore, it was demanded.

B. Christian ideas of reform and their sources

      1.  Sources:

a. The New Testament, particularly the Pauline sections that call for a change in the makeup of communities to ones following the model of Christ and his disciples

b. Roman arguments about the need for and possibility of reformare, achieve moral restoration

c. Greek philosophies, particularly Ovid’s belief in metamorphosis, or the ability to change one’s essence

2. What do the above have in common?

a. the belief in the inevitability of corruption and deformation in nature and time

b. the belief in the possibility of change in the direction of return, restitution, or reparation

3. What does it all mean in Christian terms?

a. Christian thinkers were convinced that the corruption in the Church was a natural consequence of its human components; after all, though elected by God, the clergy was still human.

b. Yet, for all its corruption, the Church could be both reformed and renovated: it could be improved while still in existence, aiming to model it after the ancient Church created by Christ.

c. The most significant thing here is that, since the Church was seen both as the umbrella and the defining reality of not only the religious but also the secular community, corruption within the Church was seen as the root of ALL problems besetting Christiandom.  Therefore, a call to reform the Church as ultimately the crucial first step in the reformation and improvement of all life.

C.   How to reform the Church: the ideal and the execution

1. The ideal of Church reformation in the Middle Ages was to return it to its fundational purity, that is to its reality at the time of Christ.  The problem, of course, is discovering what God originally intended the Church to be.  In itself, this raises two questions for the modern historian: how are we (or they, for that matter) to know what the Church was truly meant to be, and was the Church purer at its inception?  Remember, we know and recognize today that the institutional Church was created much later than the time of Christ, by a council of bishops led by a pagan Emperor!  Of course, these two questions were not ones medieval thinkers posed themselves; they took it for granted that the Church had been designed specifically by God, and therefore pure at one time, prior to its natural degeneration.

2. Two basic issues regarding the execution of reform became central:

a. How was one to define the “form” or ideal to be pursued?

b. How was reform to be carried out in the tangle that was Church institutions (councils, ecclesiastical courts, universities?  Who was to have a say?