474
THE MEDIAEVAL MIND
BOOK III
Invectives, satires, histories, and records, bear witness to the state of the clergy. All diatribes are to be taken with allowance. Whoever, for example, reads Peter Damiani's Liber Gomorrhianus against the foulness of the clergy, must bear in mind the writer's fiercely ascetic temper, the warfare which the stricter element in the Church was then waging against simony and priestly concubinage, and the monkish phraseology so common to ecclesiastical indictment of
frivolity and vice.
One cannot quote comfortably from the Gomorrhianus. St. Bernard furnishes more decorous denunciation:
"Woe unto this generation, for its leaven of the Pharisees which is hypocrisy!—if that should be called hypocrisy which cannot be hidden because of its abundance, and through impudence does not seek to hide! To-day, foul rottenness crawls through the whole body of the Church. If a heretic foe should arise openly, he would be cast out and withered; or if the enemy raged madly, the Church might hide herself from him. But now whom shall she cast out, or from whom hide herself? All are friends and all are foes; all necessary and all adverse; all of her own household and none pacific; all are her neighbours and all seek their own interest. Ministers of Christ, they serve Antichrist. They go clothed in the good things of the Lord and render Him no honour. Hence that
éclat of the courtesan which you daily see, that theatric garb, that regal state. Hence the gold-trapped reins and saddles and spurs—for the spurs shine brighter than the altars. Hence the splendid tables laden with food and goblets; hence the feastings and drunkenness, the guitars, the lyres and the flutes; hence the swollen wine-presses and the storehouses heaped and running over from this one into that, and the jars of perfumes, and the stuffed purses. 'Tis for such matters that they wish to be and are the over-seers of churches, deacons, archdeacons, bishops, and archbishops. For neither do these offices come by merit, but through that sort of business which walketh in darkness!"
[1]Such rhetoric gives glimpses of the times, but also springs from that temper which is always crying hora novissima, tempora pessima. Invectives of this nature have their deepest
- ↑ Sermo in Cantica, 33, par. 15 (Migne 183, col. 958-959). With this passage from St. Bernard, one may compare the far more detailed picture of the luxury and dissolute ways of the secular clergy in France given in the Apologia of Guido of Bazoches (latter part of the twelfth century). W. Wattenbach, "Die Apologie des Guido von Bazoches," Sitzungsberichte Preussichen Akad., 1893, (I), pp. 395-420.
