Coulton, Oeorge Gordon, 1858-
Medieval studies ... no. 13,

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no. 13
Cl)e Plain man's Reliaion
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THE PLAIN MAN'S RELIGION IN
THE MIDDLE AGES.
G. G. COULTON.
Since all civilisation is a matter of comparison, and since
every criticism of the past is by implication a criticism of our
own age also, it is most important to make up our minds as
to the real place of the Middle Ages in human evolution. A
priori, all believers in human progress would expect the period
to be better than antiquity, and worse than our own time.
But we may not write history like this ; we must check a
priori considerations at every point by recorded facts; and,
while surviving records have led some men to conclude that
the Middle Ages were actually inferior to antiquity, others
again believe that they were, on the whojie, superior even to
modern times. Very few would care to go back to them,
but many argue, either explicitly or implicitly, that an age in
which religion dominated all society was necessarily a greater
age than this of ours ; and that, however much we may have
gained in many ways, we have lost, and are stUl losing, the
Pearl of Price. Newman was one of the few who have dared
to put this boldly and uncompromisingly; but very many
seem to reason implicitly froih some such premises, and still
more seem to halt between two opinions. For the study of
medieval history, therefore, one of the first requisites is to
face this question, and to decide it as far as possible for our
selves. Medieval Europe accepted one single creed and one
set of religious forms ; was it, so far, more developed or less
developed than we?

2 RELIGION IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Now, if we are to be quite frank here, we must begin by
being frank with ourselves. In religion, as in most other
things, are not we ourselves far more influenced by current
practice than by current theory ? Do we not too often pay
lip-homage to the ideal, and practical homage to the average
standard of life around us ? And which of us has not recog
nised his own human nature in those wild words of Adam
Lindsay Gordon, who had been trained under the Calvinism
still common fifty years ago, who had broken away from it,
and who summed up his future hopes in a single line : " The
chances are, I go where most men go." In most cases, it
may be said that ninety -nine points of our religion are matters
of heredity or environment, while only the hundredth point
is conscious and characteristic. But it is precisely the con
scious and the characteristic that is worth our study ; for, as
Professor William James has put it, though there may be
very little difference between one man and another, it is just
that little which is of paramount importance. And, though
the actual amount of difference has often been very much
exaggerated, there was something very characteristic about
medieval religion, as compared with classical times on the one
hand and the twentieth century on the other — about religion
as conceived in the mind of the average medieval man.
We can mark it best, perhaps, by going back a long way
first. Gibbon sneers at TertuUian's boast that a Christian
mechanic could give an answer to problems which had puzzled
the wisest heads of antiquity. But is not Gibbon's criticism
a rather dangerous half-truth ? From a wider point of view,
must we not count it a real step forward in civilisation that
the artisan should seriously attempt to answer these questions
at all ? Christianity certainly brought in this new spirit ; and
the spirit is all-important. The belief in a crucified carpenter
— the conviction that the highest triumph may be begotteii of
the completest earthly failure — did, as a matter of fact, take
more men out of themselves, and took them further out of
themselves, than anything else since the dawn of history. We

RELIGION IN THE MIDDLE AGES 3
may see this best by taking a really striking example of later
Pagan culture, Uke Marcus Aurelius. When Marcus Aurelius
quotes, "The Poet hath said, 'Dear city of Cecrops,' " and adds
to himself, " but wilt not thou say (rather), ' O dear City of
God I ' " we feel no surprise that those words should have been
written a century and a half after Christ. They might have
fallen in the most natural way in the world from the mouth
of TertuUian's artisan ; it is in a pagan book that they
come upon us with such startling force : so far, TertuUian's
boast is justified. Lord Chesterfield reminds us that the
first and foremost requisite for the art of pleasing is the
wish to please. Similarly many philosophers, from Socrates,
through Roger Bacon and Descartes down to Darwin, have
taught us that the first and foremost requisite for knowledge
is the wish to know ; that (to put it into very modern terms)
the mind is like a photographic camera, and even the enormous
variations of power or delicacy between one instrument and
another are secondary to the question whether the instru
ment is being turned in the actual direction of the object,
and is being steadily focussed upon that object. What the
medieval mind did was to focus itself in a practical spirit
upon inquiries which, hitherto, had been mainly academic.
Multitudes were now convinced that they had souls to save,
and that salvation was the most practical aim of every human
being; even the driest treatises of scholastic philosophy are
inspired by that final aim. Even those who think that the
Middle Ages went as far wrong here as they went in
alchemy and astrology, must still recognise this historical
fact in itself. And, one-sided as this mental impulse was,
it is difficult to imagine any other impulse Uving through
the barbarian invasions. The study of the mechanical and
physical sciences, which had attained to such an almost
modern development in Alexandria, proved quite unable to
survive. Salvation, then, was the one practical study of the
Middle Ages ; and different minds pursued it according
to their several bents. At the top of the scale, from

4 RELIGION IN THE MIDDLE AGES
St Augustine down to St Bernard and Nicholas of Cusa,
really great men strove to reconcile the intensest pursuit
of personal salvation with the highest altruism and the
widest human outlook. At the bottom of the scale, of
course, the jostle for salvation was gross and frankly immoral.
The vulgar caught inevitably at what was least defensible in
the official religion — not only its relic-worship, which became
as materialistic as any savage magic, but also the static idea of
salvation, the theory held even by the most spiritual Christians,
that the one thing of importance was the last moment before
death — that this^ for good or for evil, could outweigh a whole
life which had gone before it. Hence the frequent fights of
saints with devils on their very death-bed. In the Middle Ages,
as in later Puritanism, we find both extremes ; on the one hand,
a man going through life with the serene conviction that he
was earmarked by God's mercy for final salvation ; on the
other hand, an equally good or better man trembling for his
fate as long as he had physical strength left to think at all.
While the very best felt like this, the vulgar naturally feU into
grosser materialism, I do not think that mere callous in
humanity can account for one of the strangest phenomena of
the later Middle Ages^the systematic denial of the last church
rites to condemned criminals, against which great churchmen
often fulminated in vain. In modern Sicily, among the poorest
classes, an executed criminal is a saint. Pitre has noted that
men pray " in the name of the holy gaUows-birds." This is
perfectly logical. The crowd has seen a man pubUcly executed
after partaking of the holy wafer, which would not be given to
him unless he had just confessed and been absolved. His soul
is, at that moment, unquestionably on the right side of the
balance; next moment he is launched into eternity. By aU
ecclesiastical logic you are more certain of that man's final
salvation, after due purification in purgatory, than of the most
saintly liver whose last moments had been less convincing ;
therefore the Sicilian vulgar pray for help to the souls of the
holy gallows-birds. It is difficult not to read this backwards

RELIGION IN THE MIDDLE AGES 5
into the refusal of sacraments to the medieval gaUows-bird,
The thing is perfectly logical ; nothing could have saved the
population from it but faith — reasonable faith as distinguished
from credulity.
There never has been an age of faith, in this sense, and
there never wiU be. Reasonable faith implies the highest
tension of the human faculties — the determination on the one
hand neither to contradict nor to overlook anjiihing that reason
can decide for us ; and, on the other hand, the full stretch of
our imagination to anticipate reason, to find living significance
amidst the mass of what would otherwise be mere detached
observations. This will be exceptional in every age. The
Middle Ages were not Ages of Faith in the sense of holding
firmly to certain dograas with all their faculties ; in the sense
of proving all things and holding fast only to that which was
good. It is usual and convenient to call them the Ages of
Faith ; it would be more accurate to call them the Ages of
Acquiescence. This acquiescence was enormously facilitated, of course,
by the thoroughness with which Roman Catholicism had
adopted the idea and discipline of an imperial State religion.
The hierarchy was so exactly modeUed upon the imperial
bureaucracy that an ecclesiastical map of France before 1789
is^practicalTy a political map of Roman Gaul. There was
therefore an enormous concrete element in medieval religion,
and naturally the ordinary mind clings to the concrete. A
great many medieval religious ideas grew up from below, and
were only adopted and defended by the theologians after the
official church, having attempted in vain to eradicate them,
had determined to adopt them and make the best of_tbenftT~.^
The more abstract dogmas, inherited from the early ages of
Christian discussion — the Greek ages, tinged vidth Greek
philosophy, — these more abstract dogmas never seem to have
influenced the popular mind very much. We may say pJK
them, as Dr Johnson said of the free-wUl controversy, " All
theory is against freedom of the wUl, aU experience for it." In

6 RELIGION IN THE MIDDLE AGES
the Middle Ages, even more than now, the ordinary mind was
influenced infinitely less by current theory than by current
practice ; " the chances are, I go where most men go."
But the acquiescence was unquestionably enormously
greater than now ; and we can perhaps arrive at the clearest
idea by taking complete acquiescence as the general rule, and
noting the main exceptions, whether inteUectual or voluntary ;
whether because people misunderstood, or because they
knowingly rebelled.
At the lowest end of the scale come the coarse and glaring
exceptions ; the men who were temperamentally irreligious,
and in whom the current beliefs were only just strong enough
to lend point to their blasphemy. The case of William
Rufus is well-known ; his refusal to amend his ways after a
serious illness, and his answer to the remonstrances of Bishop
Gundulf of Rochester : " By the Holy Face of Lucca, God shall
never have me good for all the evil that He hath brought upon
me I " Medieval preachers, especially in Italy, bear frequent
testimony to the subtle and deliberate blasphemies which dis
appointed gamesters would excogitate from the distinctive
tenets of the Roman Catholic faith ; to their exquisite outrages
heaped upon the Virgin Mary; and to the fury with which
they would turn upon the statues of Christ or His saints,
breaking off a hand or a nose in revenge for their dis
appointment. Infidelity proper, however, was a great deal more common
in the Middle Ages than is generally supposed. We find it
just below the surface in the most unexpected places. Of
Perugino, whose pictures certainly are more refined and
spiritual than the average, Vasari tells us that he never could
get any belief in God into that hard head of his. We may
roughly divide medieval scepticism into three classes: (1)
Academic scepticism, the centre of which was at Paris. (2)
Political scepticism, the disbelief of men like the Emperor
Frederick IL, whose policy was anti-papal and anti-clerical,
and who therefore were under every temptation to attack the

RELIGION IN THE MIDDLE AGES  7
foundations of current orthodoxy. (3) There was also a great
deal of scepticism, generally more or less involuntary, among
clergy and laity. In the nature of the case, it would be
impossible to prove this exhaustively by documentary
evidence ; but frequently, and in the most unexpected places,
we come across scattered hints whose wider significance is
unmistakable. One of the best-known instances is in
Joinville (§ 46) ; still more iUuminating is an autobiographical
fragment from Johann Busch, a contemporary of Thomas a
Kempis and a member of the same religious Congregation.
Busch, who became a fairly learned man, and a monastic
reformer of remarkable tact and energy, thus describes his
own noviciate in the years 1418-19 (ed, K, Grube, p, 395).
He had come to the monastery from a model religious school
as a model scholar of seventeen ; and he writes : " How many
temptations I suffered in that noviciate, especiaUy concerning
the Catholic faith, is known only to God, to whom all things
are open. For God was so great and glorious in my heart,
that I could not believe Him to have put on our flesh and
to have walked upon this earth in such poverty and lowliness.
When therefore the Gospels were read in Refectory, I thought
within myself, ' the Evangelists do all they can to praise that
man,' and then my heart would cry out within me, 'Thou
knowest, it is not true that this Jesus is God.' Yet then I
said in my heart, ' I will die for the truth of Christ's divinity.'
Then would my heart cry again, 'Thou wilt die for it, yet
shalt thou see that it is a thing of naught.' And seeing that
our father St Augustine, and other doctors of the first four
centuries, wrote and preached that this Jesus was God, then
I thought within myself, 'how strange, that such wise men
should fall into such folly as to dare to assert of this man,
whom they never saw, that He is God ! ' Yet, notwithstanding
all these temptations, I was all the while a good and true
Catholic. But God Almighty suffered me thus to be tempted,
because my experience enabled me, in after times, to free many
others who were buffeted with the same temptations," Busch's

8 RELIGION IN THE MIDDLE AGES
contemporary, St Bernardino of Siena, who had perhaps heard
more confessions than any man then living, gives the same
report of his experience. He says, " There are very many who,
though leading exemplary lives, are grievously troubled con
cerning many articles of the Faith " {De. Ev. Aet, Opp. ed.
De La Haye, ii. 37). Other slighter indications entirely bear
out this testimony as to the wide diffusion of involuntary
scepticism. Moreover, in proportion as we draw nearer to
the sixteenth century we get increasing evidence of a more
voluntary popular scepticism. The author of Piers Plowman,
who had lived through the Black Death and the other terrible
visitations of the later fourteenth century, complains of the
frequency with which the dogmas of the Church were now
criticised by the man in the street (c, xii., 35 ff, and 101 ff,) : —
" Now is the manner at meat, when the minstrels are still.
The lewd against the learned of holy lore dispute.''
He gives detailed instances, and adds : —
" Such motives they move, these masters in their glory,
And maken men to misbelieve that muse upon their words."
Moreover, the author is himself an example of the spirit
whose excesses he deplores. He is one of several fourteenth-
century writers who try to escape from the hard saying of
the Church that all Pagans and Jews, even the best of them,
must be damned. This humanitarian (and, to that extent,
anti-dogmatic) leaven had long been working; kindly minds
among the common folk had long sought every possible
outlet from this terrible Calvinism of medieval doctrine.
More than a century earlier, the great Franciscan mission-
preacher, Berthold of Regensburg, shows us the efforts of
the popular mind in this direction. Some men insisted that
souls would become clinkered by perpetual roasting, so that
hell-fire would have no further hold upon them. Others
argued that God, in pity for his own handiwork, would
finally give the sinner a comfortable refuge even under
Satan's nose {Predigten, ed. Pfeiffer, i. 886). Dante, again,
shows traces of this revolt of human kindness, when he exalts

RELIGION IN THE MIDDLE AGES 9
Ripheus to heaven, and dares to put the excommunicated
Manfred in purgatory, adding "the priestly curse doth not^
so utterly destroy, but that a green shoot of hope may
spring up from the blasted trunk," And perhaps the most
interesting of all is that old woman whom Joinville's friend
Brother Yves met in the streets of Acre, bearing a chafing-
dish of live charcoal in her right hand, and a flask of water
in her left, and saying that she meant to burn up Paradise
with the one, and quench hell-fire with the other, so that
no man thenceforth might do right for the hope of heaven
or for the fear of hell, but only for the pure love of God,
who is so worthy and can do for us what is best (§ 445),
I need not further labour the point that much of medieval
faith was simply passive acquiescence, and that the attempt
to grasp at a living faith, to understand as weU as to beUeve,
was often unsettUng alike to the simple and to the learned
mind. We may find the reason for this general passivity in
the overwhelming pressure of a highly organised hierarchy —
the strongest organisation in all medieval society. There was
a tendency to forgive everything in the flock so long as it was
acquiescent, and therefore the mass of the flock tended more
and more to leave religion in the hands of the professionals,
and to restrict its own share to the narrowest and most
mechanical routine. The lajrfolk understood even less of the
Mass than an ordinary village congregation does in modem
France or Italy ; they often failed to follow the service even
in its vaguest outlines. The Burgomasters of Strasburg
regularly heard lawsuits in their official pew in the Cathedral
during daily mass ; and it was one of St Louis's titles to
sanctity that he very seldom suffered a minister to come and
talk with him at this time, "except occasionaUy after the
Gospel had been said," ^ During the sermon, as Berthold of
Regensburg and St, Bernardino show us, thera- was a running
fire of conversation, and even of definite interruptions. The
1 Dacheux, Geiler de Kaysersherg, p. 67 ; Acta Sanct. Bolland, Aug. V
Vita IL, c. iii. § 38.

10 RELIGION IN THE MIDDLE AGES
ignorance of the Bible text, not only on the part of the laity,
but also on that of the clergy, is difficult to exaggerate,^
And this dissociation of ceremony and spirit, this dualism,
was to an enormous extent encouraged by the hierarchy itself.
Those who wished to communicate too frequently were con
stantly discouraged by the clergy. Anything like weekly
communion was very rare indeed among the laity ; the few
who desired it could very rarely obtain it. Again, it is
significant that the word conversion, in the religious sense,
is almost entirely confined to monks. It is very rare indeed
to meet with it in Bunyan's or Baxter's sense. To enter a
monastery was to be " converted " ; this is the sense the word
bears even in Canon Law, The more personal devotions of
the later Middle Ages were intimately bound up with popular
mysticism ; they were to a large extent unsacerdotal, though
not antisacerdotal ; and here, as usually in the history of
religion, we find mysticism stimulating free thought. Popular
mysticism was one of the main currents in the stream which
led to the Reformation,
I have emphasised the routine character of most medieval
religion; but we must fairly remind ourselves how much of
all civilisation is routine. All progress seems to follow the
same rough formula: first, conscious effort, successful or un
successful ; then what seems most successful becomes habitual
and subconscious ; lastly, the subconscious becomes even
instinctive. The formalism of medieval religion must not
blind us to the fact (which seems to me almost indisputable)
that these forms were in general healthy and beneficent. The
most hypocritical sinner among the clergy testified by his
hypocrisy to what all clergy were supposed to be, and very
many really were. The laziest and most useless priest did
still form one link in a vast network of activities, and mainly
beneficent activities. The remotest parish or ecclesiastical
district was more or less directly Unked up with the Pope;
1 I have dealt in some detail with this subject in the seventh of my Medieval
Studies : " Religious Education before the Reformation."

RELIGION IN THE MIDDLE AGES 11
and the Papacy was not only by far the longest succession of
sovereigns, but also by far the most disinterested. With all
their faults, the Popes bore witness to an ideal which was
more altruistic, more universal, more modern, than that of the
temporal rulers of the Middle Ages. Moreover, amid all their
lapses and infidelities, the Popes did, on the whole, work for
that ideal more consistently than kings and princes worked for
theirs ; there was more continuity of policy in the Papacy than
in any other European state. We may look upon the gradual
submergence of this system by modern civilisation as a con
summation not only inevitable, but much to be desired ; yet
still we ought Aot to forget that many peaks now submerged
did, in the Middle Ages, stand high above the average level
of human thought and conduct.
Moreover, it is very difficult to see how the world could
have got on, after the break-up of the Roman Empire, without
some such routine. We can scarcely exaggerate the cumulative
effect of the unselfish thoughts and higher aspirations which
cUng round the very waUs of a church. The common, un
educated man who says Our Father there regularly, even
with only a small fragment of his mind, and without con
sciously counting up the myriads of the past with whom
those words put him into direct communion — the man who
regularly says those two words Our Father is, even by this
routine, made more conscious of the brotherhood of man than
by almost anything else in the very dull course of his life,
except, ho doubt, by the direct action of his family affections,
if he has a family. Even the many gross minds of the Middle
Ages to whom the Devil was almost a greater reality than
God, had at least advanced a little step beyond the aboriginal
savage who has little or no power of conceiving anything but
the tangible and the visible.
A French scientist, not without malice, recently took
home a little phial of holy water from the stoup of the nearest
church, and found in it, under the microscope, an extraordinary
number and variety of baciUi. But, after aU, an idea is as

12 RELIGION IN THE MIDDLE AGES
great a reality as a bacillus; civilisation has to count as
seriously with the one as with the other ; and both are almost
equally invisible to the uneducated multitude. Is it an
exaggeration to say that there are as many ideas hanging
about a church as there are bacilli ? that even the commonest
man may thus pick up one or two ideas which he probably
would never have picked up in any other way ? and, if this
is to some extent true even in our age of board-schools, is it
not a hundred times truer of the Middle Ages ?
However, with all that can be said for the value of routine,
historical fact compels us to place the religion of the ordinary
medieval man in just that intermediate position which in logic
we should have anticipated. It was an enormous advance to
take religion so seriously as the early Christians took it, and
to organise it so democratically as it was organised at first.
But the religious democracy, in self-defence, became more and
more of a despotism ; formulas stiffened until they lost a great
part of their meaning: the new became old, and this old
became the enemy of all other novelties ; over against the
thousand beneficent activities of the Church we must put
the thousand cases in which she forcibly suppressed other
beneficent activities: in short, the development of mankind
since the Reformation has not only been necessary — it is not
only a fact which we have to face — but it is part of a world -
process to which we must do homage. And we shall best and
most sympathetically study our ancestors of the Middle Ages
in the light of these facts and of this world-process. We shall
know them best if we regard them not as men who enjoyed
higher privileges which they were unable to transmit to us,
but as men who struggled hard to become what we (if only
we will) may be — who struggled hard and pathetically, and
were held back partly through fear of the Great Unknown,
but still more by positive physical obstacles, which have since
been swept away by printing and steam, G. G. COULTON.
Great Shelford^ Cambridge.

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