This, then, was the era that the intellectual proponents of the “Enlightenment” described as a tragic decline into ignorance and superstition. Little wonder that many contemporary historians become incensed by use of the term
Dark
Ages
. As the distinguished medievalist Warren Hollister (1930–1997) put it in his presidential address to the Pacific Historical Association, “to my mind, anyone who believes that the era that witnessed the building of Chartres Cathedral and the invention of parliament and the university was ‘dark’ must be mentally retarded—or at best, deeply, deeply, ignorant.”
60
The Myth of the “Renaissance”
O
BVIOUSLY, IF THE
“D
ARK
Ages” are a ridiculous myth, so too must be the “Renaissance” since it proposes that Europe was saved from ignorance when intellectuals in various Northern Italian city-states broke sufficiently free from church control to allow the “rebirth” of classical knowledge. Had there really been a return to classical knowledge, it would have created an era of cultural decline since Christian Europe had long since surpassed classical antiquity in nearly every way. Unfortunately, many creators of the “Renaissance” myth had no knowledge of the immense progress of the “Dark Ages” and seem to have based their entire assessment on the extent to which scholars were familiar with Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and other stalwarts of classical learning and literature. But even this legacy of classical culture was fully restored long before the “Renaissance.” The key development was the translation of these writers into Latin, since Greek was no longer the intellectual language of Christendom. And these translations were not made during the “Renaissance,” but centuries earlier, by pious monastic scholars. Indeed, “between 1125 and 1200, a veritable flood of translations into Latin, made Greek... [writing] available, with more to come in the thirteenth century.”
61
This is fully supported by surviving monastery library catalogues from as far back as the twelfth century which reveal extensive holdings of classical authors.
62
As for the famous “Italian Renaissance,” it was not a rebirth of classical learning at all! It was a period of cultural emulation during which people of fashion copied the classical styles in manners, art, literature, and philosophy. Out of this passion for their own ancient days of glory, northern Italians recast history to stress “the achievements of modern Italy and their dislike and contempt for the barbarians of the north.”
63
Thus they imposed the “Dark Ages” between themselves and their past. But it wasn’t so. The Scholastics knew of, and often knew more than, the ancient Greek and Roman authors.
The Myth of Secular “Enlightenment”
T
HE SINGLE MOST REMARKABLE
and ironic thing about the “Enlightenment” is that those who proclaimed it made little or no contribution to the accomplishments they hailed as a revolution in human knowledge, while those responsible for these advances stressed continuity with the past. That is, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Hume, Gibbon, and the rest were literary men, while the primary revolution they hailed as the “Enlightenment” was scientific. Equally misleading is the fact that although the literary men who proclaimed the “Enlightenment” were irreligious, the central figures in the scientific achievements of the era were deeply religious.
64
So much then for the idea that suddenly in the sixteenth century, enlightened secular forces burst the chains of Christian thought and set the foundation for modern times. What the proponents of “Enlightenment” actually initiated was the tradition of angry secular attacks on religion in the name of science—attacks like those of their modern counterparts such as Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. Presented as the latest word in sophistication, rationalism, and reason, these assaults are remarkably naive and simplistic—both then and now.
65
In truth, the rise of science was inseparable from Christian theology, for the latter gave direction and confidence to the former, as will be seen in chapter 16.
Claims concerning the revolutionary character of the “Renaissance” and the “Enlightenment” have seemed plausible because remarkable progress was made in these eras. But rather than being a revolutionary break with the past, these achievements were simply an extension of the accelerating curve of progress that began soon after the fall of Rome. Thus, the historian’s task is not to explain why so much progress has been made since the fifteenth century—that focus is much too late. The fundamental question about the rise of the West is: What enabled Europeans to begin and maintain the extraordinary and enduring period of rapid progress that enabled them, by the end of the “Dark Ages,” to have far surpassed the rest of the world? Why was it that, although many civilizations have pursued alchemy, it led to chemistry only in Europe? Or, while many societies have made excellent observations of the heavens and have created sophisticated systems of astrology, why was this transformed into scientific astronomy only in Europe?
Several recent authors have discovered the secret to Western success in geography. But, that same geography long sustained European cultures that were well behind those of Asia. Others have traced the rise of the West to steel, or to guns and sailing ships, and still others have credited a more productive agriculture. The trouble is that these answers are part of what needs to be explained:
Why
did Europeans excel at metallurgy, ship-building, or farming? I have devoted a book to my answer: that the truly fundamental basis for the rise of the West was an extraordinary faith in
reason
and
progress
that was firmly rooted in Christian theology, in the belief that God is the rational creator of a rational universe.
66
Conclusion
W
HEN ONE EXAMINES THE
conventional outline of Western history one encounters some truly fabulous inventions of great historical eras that never really happened: the “Dark Ages,” the “Renaissance,” the “Enlightenment,” and the “Age of Reason.” We turn next to an equally fictitious era: the “Age of Faith.”
Chapter Fifteen
The People’s Religion
M
EDIEVAL TIMES HAVE FREQUENTLY BEEN
described as the “Age of Faith”
1
or the “Age of Belief ”
2
because in this era “everyone believed what religious authority told them to believe.”
3
In his bestseller
A World Lit Only by Fire,
the distinguished William Manchester (1922–2004) proclaimed that “there was no room in the medieval mind for doubt; the possibility of skepticism simply did not exist.”
4
It would be hard to discover a more glaring instance of historical bias and ignorance. As will be seen, the masses of medieval Europeans not only were remarkably skeptical, but very lacking in all aspects of Christian commitment—often militantly so! To attempt to explain why medieval Christianity had made so little headway among the peasants and lower classes, this chapter examines the local clergy, finding them almost universally ignorant, often lazy, and frequently dissolute. The discussion then turns to how the church long neglected the rural population in an era when nearly everyone was a peasant, and how both the Catholic and Protestant hierarchies, in contrast with the early church, failed to offer the general public an appealing model of Christian life. Finally, the chapter examines the actual religion pursued by most people in the Middle Ages and how it was misinterpreted by Christian theologians—with tragic results.
Popular Christian Commitment
T
HERE ARE VERY FEW
statistics on religious life in medieval times, but there are a surprising number of trustworthy reports from many times and places, and they are in amazing agreement that the great majority of ordinary people seldom if ever went to church. As Michael Walzer put it, “Medieval society was largely composed of nonparticipants [in the churches].”
5
Alexander Murray’s assessment of medieval Italian religious life is confirmed again and again: “Substantial sections of thirteenth-century society hardly attended church at all.”
6
The Dominican prior Humbert of Romans (1200–1277) admitted that people in Italy “rarely go to church.”
7
When the Blessed Giordano of Rivalto (1260–1311) arrived in Florence to preach, he suggested to a local woman that she take her daughter to church at least on feast days, only to be informed: “It is not the custom.”
8
In about 1430, St. Antonio noted that Tuscan peasants seldom attended mass, and that “very many of them do not confess once a year, and far fewer are those who take communion.”
9
St. Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) also reported that even the few parishioners who came to mass, usually were late and hastened out at the elevation of the Host, “as though they had seen not Christ, but the Devil.”
10
Meanwhile, in England the anonymous authors of
Dives and Pauper
(ca. 1410) complained that “the people these days... are loath to hear God’s Service. [And when they are forced to attend] they come late and leave early.”
11
According to G. G. Coulton (1858–1947), medieval church attendance was “still more irregular in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland than in England.”
12
Extraordinary reports on the lack of popular religious participation are available for Lutheran Germany based on the regular visitations by higher church officials to local communities, beginning in 1525. These have been extracted by the distinguished American historian Gerald Strauss who noted, “I have selected only such instances as could be multiplied a hundredfold.”
13
It is true that these German reports postdate the medieval era, but there is nothing whatever to suggest that they reveal a decline from earlier times—the factors responsible for low levels of popular support and participation had remained constant.
Strauss offered several of these reports of low attendance. In Saxony (1574): “You’ll find more of them out fishing than at service.... Those who do come walk out as soon as the pastor begins his sermon.”
14
In Seegrehna (1577): “A pastor testified that he often quits his church without preaching... because not a soul has turned up to hear him.”
15
In Barum (1572): “It is the greatest and most widespread complaint of all pastors hereabouts that people do not go to church on Sundays.... Nothing helps; they will not come... so that pastors face near-empty churches.”
16
In Braunschweig-Grubenhagen (1580s): “many churches are empty on Sundays.”
17
In Weilburg (1604): “Absenteeism from church on Sundays was so widespread that the synod debated whether the city gates should be barred on Sunday mornings to lock everyone inside. Evidence from elsewhere suggests that this expedient would not have helped.”
18
Nevertheless, it is not clear that having a large turnout at Sunday services would have been desirable. That’s because when people did come to church so many of them misbehaved! The eminent historian Keith Thomas combed the reports of English church courts and clerical diaries finding not only constant complaints that so few came to church, but that “the conduct of many church-goers left so much to be desired as to turn the service into a travesty of what was intended.... Members of the congregation jostled for pews, nudged their neighbors, hawked and spat, knitted, made course remarks, told jokes, fell asleep, and even left off guns.... A Cambridgeshire man was charged with indecent behaviour in church in 1598 after his ‘most loathsome farting, striking, and scoffing speeches’ had occasioned ‘the great offence of the good and the great rejoicing of the bad.’ ”
19
Visitation reports from Lutheran Germany abound in similar accounts of misbehavior. In Nassau (1594): “Those who come to service are usually drunk... and sleep through the whole sermon, except sometimes they fall off the benches, making a great clatter, or women drop their babies on the floor.”
20
In Wiesbaden (1619): “[during church] there is such snoring that I could not believe my ears when I heard it. The moment these people sit down, they put their heads on their arms and straight away they go to sleep.”
21
In addition, many bring their dogs inside the church, “barking and snarling so loudly that no one can hear the preacher.”
22
In Hamburg (1581): people make “indecent gestures at members of the congregation who wish to join in singing the hymns, even bringing dogs to church so that due to the loud barking the service is disturbed.”
23
In Leipzig (1579–1580): “they play cards while the pastor preaches, and often mock or mimic him cruelly to his face;... cursing and blaspheming, hooliganism, and fighting are common.... [T]hey enter church when the service is half over, go at once to sleep, and run out again before the blessing is given.... [N]obody joins in singing the hymn; it made my heart ache to hear the pastor and the sexton singing all by themselves.”
24
In addition, the locals often misused the church itself. In 1367, John Thoresby, the archbishop of York, fulminated against holding markets in churches, especially on Sunday. Indeed, between “1229 and 1367 there are eleven such episcopal injunctions recorded.... Bishop after bishop thundered in vain... against those who ‘turned the house of prayer into a den of thieves.’ ”
25
The same thing occurred again and again across the continent, as higher church officials complained against using churches, even cathedrals, for storing crops, sheltering livestock, and for indoor market days.
26
Given their attitudes and their lack of church attendance, it is hardly surprising that most medieval Europeans were completely ignorant of the most basic Christian teachings.
27
Interviews in Spain during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with persons so pious that they reported having had a religious vision (usually of Mary) revealed that most were ignorant of the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins. It was not merely that they could not recite them, but that they were entirely ignorant of their contents—some even failing to identify murder as a sin.
28
In Saxony (1577 and 1589): “In some villages one could not find a single person who knew the Ten Commandments.”
29
In Brandenburg (1583) “A random group of men was... asked how they understood each of the Ten Commandments, but we found many who could give no answer at all.... [N]one of them thought it a sin to get dead drunk and curse using the name of God.”
30
In Notenstein (1570): parishioners “including church elders, could remember none of the Ten Commandments.”
31
In Salzliebenhalle (1590): no one knows “who their redeemer and savior is.”
32
In Nuremberg (1626): many could not name Good Friday as the day of the year when Jesus died.
33
And from Catholic Salzburg (1607): according to the bishop, “the common man cannot even say the Lord’s Prayer or the Ave Maria with the right words and does not know the Apostles’ Creed, to say nothing of the Ten Commandments.”
34
And the pastor at Graim (1535) summed up: “Since they never go to church, most of them cannot even say their prayers.”
35
As for the English, the fourteenth-century preacher John Bromyard asked a shepherd if he knew who were the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He replied, “The father and son I know well for I tend their sheep, but I know not that third fellow; there is none of that name in our village.”
36
In 1606 Nicholas Bownd remarked that the stories in the Bible are “as strange to them [the public] as any news that you can tell them.”
37
Indeed, one English bishop lamented that not only did the people know nothing from the scriptures, but “they know not that there
are
any Scriptures.”
38
Perhaps not surprisingly, the lifestyles of ordinary people in this era seem exceedingly dissolute even by modern standards. The sources abound in charges of general misconduct, agreeing with the Margrave of Brandenburg, who in 1591 noted widespread “blaspheming, sorcery, adultery and whoring, excessive drinking and other vices, all practiced openly [by] the common man.”
39
This is entirely consistent with Pieter Breughel’s (1525–1569) paintings of Dutch peasant life, especially
The Wedding Dance
(1566), which shows that all the men dancing in the foreground have full erections pushing out their tights (albeit these protrusions are removed in the reproductions shown in most college textbooks). Breughel’s depiction of peasants was not unusual. In Dutch painting at this time “peasants are invariably associated... with base impulses,”
40
and are depicted as drunken, lustful, and obscene. Given that several generations of a family often lived crowded together in one small room with absolutely no privacy, it is little wonder that their lifestyle was crude and their sensibilities rather gross.
Defective Clergy
N
OT ONLY WAS THE
medieval public lacking in Christian commitment; the same was true of the rank-and-file clergy. In fact, given how ignorant the clergy were, it is no surprise that their parishioners knew so little.
In 730 the Venerable Bede advised the future bishop Egbert that because so few English priests and monks knew any Latin, “I have frequently offered translations of both the [Apostles’] Creed and the Lord’s Prayer into English.”
41
In 1222 the Council of Oxford described the parish clergy as “dumb dogs,”
42
and Archbishop Pecham wrote in 1287: “The ignorance of the priests casteth the people into a ditch.”
43
Subsequently, William Tyndale reported in 1530 that hardly any of the priests and curates in England knew the Lord’s Prayer. When the bishop of Gloucester systematically tested his diocesan clergy in 1551, of 311 pastors, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments, and 27 did not know the author of the Lord’s Prayer.
44
The next year, Bishop Hooper found “scores of parish clergy who could not tell who was the author of the Lord’s Prayer, or where it was to be found.”
45
At this same time, it was reported that in Wales “there were thousands of people who knew nothing of Christ—‘yea almost that never heard of him.’ ”
46
Matters were no better in Italy. In 1417, Bishop Niccolò Albergati of Bologna visited his diocese and discovered many priests who were “unable to identify the seven deadly sins.”
47
St. Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) observed a priest who “knew only the Hail Mary, and used it even at the elevation during mass.”
48
In France, St. Vincent de Paul discovered in 1617 that his local priest knew no Latin, not even the words of absolution, and simply mumbled nonsense syllables.
49
So too the Lutheran clergy. In Bockenem (1568): “not one of the fourteen pastors examined could name the [books] of the New Testament.”
50
In Kalenberg (1584): a pastor was asked, “Which person of the Trinity assumed human form?” and answered, “The Father.”
51
Keep in mind that there were “virtually no seminaries,” and that most priests picked up what little they knew as an apprentice to “a priest who had himself little or no training.”
52