Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/494

service in the cure of souls.^[1] But always the cloister and the hermitage were looked upon as the abiding-places where one stood the best chance to save one's soul: the life of the layman merchant, usurer, knight was fraught with instant peril; that of the secular clergy was also perilous, especially when they held high office. Dread of ecclesiastical preferment might be well founded; the reluctance to be a bishop was often real. This sentiment, like all feelings in the Middle Ages, took the form of a story, with the usual vision to certify the moral of the tale:

"It is told of a certain prior of Clairvaux, Geoffrey by name, that when he had been elected Bishop of Tournai, and Pope Eugene as well as the blessed Bernard, his own abbot, was urging him to take the office, he cast himself down at the feet of the blessed Bernard and his clergy, and lay prone in the form of a cross, and said: 'An expelled monk I may be, if you drive me out; but I will never be a bishop.' At a later time, as this same prior lay breathing his last, a monk who loved him well adjured him in the name of God to bring him news of his state beyond the grave, if God would permit it. Some time after, as the monk was praying prostrate before the altar, his friend appeared and said that it was he. When the monk asked him how he was faring, 'Well,' he replied, 'by the grace of God. Yet verily it has been revealed to me by the blessed Trinity, that had I been in the number of bishops I should have been in the number of the reprobate and damned.'"^[2]

Through the Middle Ages, Church dignities everywhere were secularized through the vast possessions, and corresponding responsibilities, attaching to them. The clerical situation varied in different lands, yet with a like result. The Italian clergy were secularized through participation in civic and papal business, the German through their estates and principalities. In France clerical secularization was most typically mediaeval, because there the functions and fortunes of the higher clergy were most inextricably involved

1. It is quite true that in the earliest Christian times the marriage of priests was recognized, and continued to be at least connived at until, say, the time of Hildebrand. Yet the best thoughtfulness and piety from the Patristic period onward had disapproved of priestly marriages, which consequently tended to sink to the level of concubinage, until they were absolutely condemned by the Church.
2. Anecdotes, etc., d'Étienne de Bourbon, ed. by Lecoy de la Marche, p. 249 (Soc. de l'Histoire de France, t. 185, Paris, 1877). This story refers to the years 1166-1171.