source in the religious sense of the ineradicable opposition between this world and the kingdom of heaven. Yet luxury did in fact pervade the Church of Bernard's time, and simony was as wide as western Europe. This crime was the offspring of the entire social state; it was part and parcel of the feudal system and the whole matter of lay investitures. One sees that simony was no extraneous stain to be washed off from the body ecclesiastic, but rather an element of its actual constitution. The eradication had to come through social and ecclesiastical evolution, rather than spasmodic reformation.
One may turn from the invectives of the great saint to forms of satire more frankly literary. The Latin poems "commonly attributed to Walter Mapes"[1] satirize with biting ridicule, through the mouth of "Bishop Golias," the avarice and venality, the gluttony and lubricity of the Church, secular and monastic. In a quite different kind of poem the satire directs itself against the rapacity of Rome. She, head of the Church and Caput Mundi, is shown to be like Scylla and Charybdis and the Sirens.[2] These powerful verses anticipate the denunciation of the Roman papacy by the good Germans Walther von der Vogelweide and Freidank,[3] and, a century later, in the Vision of Piers Ploughman.
In this outcry against papal rapacity France was not silent. Most extreme is the "Bible" of Guiot de Provens: it satirizes the entire age, "siècle puant et orrible." As it turns toward the papacy it cries:
"Ha! Rome, Rome,
Encor ociras tu maint home!"
The cardinals are stuffed with avarice and simony and evil living; without faith or religion, they sell God and His Mother, and betray us and their fathers. Rome sucks and devours us; Rome kills and destroys all. Guiot's voice is raised against the entire Church; neither the monks nor the seculars escape—bishops, priests, canons, the black monks
