To read certain introductory works on life in the middle ages, you might get the feeling that medieval Europe was a strong-armed theocracy, where Stepford kings and Stepford peasants droned “Yeeess, Biiishop” as they together marched with glazed eyes towards the few courageous free-thinkers who’d been ferreted out of hiding and gleefully prepared for execution. Here’s an excerpt from Medieval Life (Dorling Kindserly, 1996, Bridget Hopkinson, editor), from page 30, “The Church”:
“The Catholic Church was at the center of the medieval world . . . it governed almost every aspect of people’s lives . . . For many, life on Earth was hard and short, but the Church said that if they followed the teachings of Christ, they would be rewarded in heaven. This idea gave the Church great power over people’s hearts and minds.” [Elsewhere on the page you can see the illustration of heretics being burned, with corresponding explanation.]
In contrast, spend an afternoon poring through the old four-volume Butler’s Lives of Saints, and you get quite the opposite picture – a Europe that is only barely Christian, and constantly forgetting what little of the faith it has learned. However much bishops and abbots might be entirely mixed up in the affairs of state, they are no more ‘in control’ than their secular counterparts in the constant struggle for land and power. (Contrary to myth, this edition of Butler’s Lives does not indulge in romantic revisionism. Where it reports legend, it will tell you very plainly what is legend, what is verifiable fact, and what is educated guess. You may be able to find a book that will retell history as if medieval Europe were a glorious interlude of catholic-paradise-on-earth, but Butler’s Lives is not that book.)
A book that explores the importance and the limits of church influence in pre-conquest England and Normandy is Queen Emma and the Vikings. This is a biography of the woman who managed to be queen to both her first husband king Aethlered of England, and to the Danish king Cnut who overthrew him. In telling the story, Harriet O’Brien also shows the tension between the desire for approval from religious leaders that lends legitimacy to a conquering ruler, and the confidence that said approval does not require a strict adherence to the less convenient bits of church teaching.
It is a surprisingly persistent tension. Witness today the insistence with which Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden claim their catholic heritage, all the while publicly rejecting elements of church teaching. There is nothing preventing either one from saying, “As a faithful Episcopalian it is my belief that . . .”, and yet they and countless other catholics cannot quite bring themselves to shake their catholic heritage*.
There must be something to this. I wonder if there isn’t an inborn sense of a need for religious approval and belonging that transcends time and place and culture; an intuition so strong that rational agreement with the actual religion is no obstacle? Even when there is very little at stake — contemporary American society is hardly a place where membership in a particular denomination is a prerequisite for public office. Something to think about more.
Meanwhile, I’m reading 1215: The Year of the Magna Carta, a book for adults that I will review next week. One thing I am enjoying about the book is the exploration of the mixed-up situation of church and state, belief and practice, that characterizes the era in question. And here is an excerpt that illustrates that tension – the struggle of an ordinary sinner who is trying to find the way to keep to church teaching, but is all the same powerfully caught up in the values of the wider society to which he belongs. We read (p.17):
It was sign of status to be accompanied almost everywhere, even when in the bath or the privy. Even so, there were a few things that people preferred to do alone. According to the historian William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190’s, when the doctors advised a seriously ill archbishop of York that his only hope of recovery lay in having sex – many doctors believe in the restorative power of the sexual act – the archbishop took the young woman they provided for him into his private room (secretum). But when the doctors examined his urine the next morning they discovered he had not, after all, followed their advice. He explained to his friends that he could not break his vow of chastity – not even for medicinal purposes – and that he had pretended to do so in order not to hurt their feelings.
I can relate to the archbishop. And I think that ultimately when we talk about ‘the power of the church’ in any given time and place, we need to remember we are speaking of a church composed of millions of people, all of them in their own special spot on the scale of ability to follow church teaching – me and the troubled archbishop of York, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta and St. Thomas Aquinas, Nancy Pelosi and King Cnut. Pick any one of us and convince yourself we are representative of all the other catholics of our time and place, and it might make for a fun horror movie, but it doesn’t really tell us much about history.
*I am not, by the way, the sort of catholic who wishes the less-practicing would shape up or ship out. I do wish Pelosi and Biden would get on board with church teaching, but I’m not quite persuaded that sitting in Episcopalian pews will speed the conversion process. Then again, maybe so. A question for wiser minds than mine.
