The Manly Priest. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux

      The monastic view of the male body was inherited from late antiquity, a time when some devout Christians lived lives of self-denial; monastic writers of the reform period likewise characterized the male body as one that required constant discipline and vigilance in order to transcend desires, not only sexual desire but all bodily appetites. But while the monastic body could not engage in sexual intercourse or masturbation, it was still a virile one through sexualized chastity, a set of performances that emphasized the fully intact body’s struggle against sexual desires. Peter Brown has noted that, in the late Roman period, men and women used performances of gender to define their identities, as part of a complex negotiation he called “identity politics.”² Similarly, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, religious writers, both monastic and clerical, used their notions of the body to create their gender identities and to highlight the deficiencies of others who did not conform to their models. Conflicts and defamation provide a means of expressing ideas of masculine identity. Priests, as secular clerics, operated in the world, living alongside laymen who defined manliness by their traditional cultural standards. As clerics resisted the manly celibate model, reformers continued to define and subject the priestly body to further standards of somatic control; by the thirteenth century, a priest’s sexual and nonsexual actions had become the subject of ecclesiastical legislation, all toward the greater goal of a religious male embodiment.

      Sacerdotal celibacy became a vital component of this religious male embodiment. In the late Roman era, Christian writers debated clerical celibacy and clerical marriage using scripture, commonly drawing a precedent back to the apostolic age. The Bible offers mixed and inconclusive messages on the issue of a celibate priesthood, providing no degree of certainty that Christ preferred celibate men over married men as his disciples; at times, the scriptures defend the marriage of ministers, but in other key passages encourage their sexual abstinence.³ In the promotion of a celibate priesthood, the Christian Church made ample use of these passages, particularly Paul’s famous injunction in his letter to the Corinthians, which stated, “It is well for a man not to touch a woman,” and “to the unmarried and widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.”⁴ The Hebrew model of priesthood was gradually adopted by the Christian Church during the fourth century, a model that required ritual abstinence because physical purity was necessary in order to offer sacrifices; however, the ritual abstinence required of Hebrew priests was temporary, and they were not barred from marriage or sexual intercourse, in general. Some vocal Christian advocates from the fourth century followed this custom, stressing the necessity for the physical purity of ministers but offered this practice as a permanent state: a life of chaste celibacy.⁵ Despite the contradictory evidence on clerical celibacy drawn from the Bible, it is clear that, in the late Roman era, Christians valued the ascetic life of self-denial, and much praise was bestowed on those who tamed their bodily desires.⁶

      Leaving aside the dispute over its apostolic origins, celibacy as a mandate appeared in the early church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries.⁷ During this formative period of the Church, the idea that an active sexuality and ministry were conflicting values became widespread, despite the reality that deacons, priests, and bishops could marry and often did.⁸ The rise of Christian asceticism and the increasingly negative position regarding human sexuality undoubtedly contributed to the emphasis on clerical chastity but, more importantly, the adoption of the Hebrew model of the priesthood, along with the increasing emphasis on the priest’s role in the Eucharist, prompted calls for clerical continence.⁹ After the third century, church officials increasingly adopted the position that ministers and their wives must abstain from sexual relations and live as siblings. This idea was further summarized in the fourth-century Council of Elvira (c. 305), which ordered that bishops, priests, and deacons must refrain from sex with their wives.¹⁰ Some historians view the Council of Elvira as the watershed moment of the clerical celibacy campaign because it was the first ecclesiastical council to mandate the sexual continence of the married clergy;¹¹ this may be presumptuous since it was a regional council, with little ability to enforce its decrees across the region, much less throughout all of Europe. Elvira had some influence, however, as later councils utilized its ideas to continue to legislate for clerical continence. The Council of Nicea (325) rejected the harsh restrictions of Elvira and instead ordered that no priest could marry after ordination.¹² The Council of Carthage (390) decreed that those ministering at the altar must avoid sex to protect the purity of the sacrament; a second council at Carthage in 401 deprived priests of their offices if they did not obey the vow of chastity.¹³ By the fifth century, the connection between the sexual purity of the priestly body and the purity of the sacrament had already been made and would continue to be emphasized by Carolingian reformers in the ninth and tenth centuries.¹⁴

      The pursuit of clerical celibacy by the reformist party in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was indeed part of a larger initiative to elevate and separate the clergy from the laity. The distinction between the laity and the clergy also was tied to issues of the priest’s role in the Eucharist, which became even more significant when transubstantiation developed into a firm, doctrinal component of this sacrament with Lateran IV (1215). In post-Conquest England and Normandy, those who pushed clerical celibacy were generally seen as radicals, promoters of a new form of religious life for the priesthood. Essentially, they took a crucial core value of monastic life, chastity, and promoted it as a strict requirement for the secular clergy. This program of moral reform, based on chastity as well as celibacy, was unsuccessful among the majority of the elite clergy largely due to the nature of the Anglo-Norman Church during the reform period. During the tenures of Lanfranc and Anselm, only a third of bishops in England were monastic. The overwhelming majority were former royal clerics, rewarded with elite ecclesiastical positions by the king. Many had been educated in Norman cathedral chapters and held a position of some kind in the same chapter. The political leadership in this region was not averse to appointing monks to episcopal positions, but generally the king/duke favored his loyal civil servants for such appointments, men who were also proven administrators. The Normans who received these bishoprics traditionally then selected their own Norman colleagues for installation into the English Church, resulting in what one historian called the “normannization” of the elite clergy. In particular, Normans were selected for archdeaconries, positions that would only increase in power and prestige over the course of the reform era.¹⁵ Royal administrators became bishops in great numbers. By 1122, fifteen of the eighteen bishops in England were former civil servants of the king, the highest since the Conquest; in Normandy, nearly all bishops between 1140 and 1230 were seculars who had some connection to royal/ducal authority or to powerful families in the region.¹⁶

      The composition of the clergy, drawn from an elite group of civil servants, does not necessarily suggest political cohesion. As Everett Crosby more recently has affirmed, England and Normandy existed in a “fragmented and decentralized regime.”¹⁷ Such states, without mechanisms of strong social control, tend to tolerate more fluid performances of gender and sexuality. Bishops in this regime, drawn from lay society and indebted to royal/ducal authority as well as to family prerogatives, could disseminate reform initiatives or prevent their promulgation; while Roman decrees were read aloud at councils in England and Normandy, enforcement was subject to the whims of the particular bishop or archbishop in office. The Church in Normandy, for example, routinely selected only certain papal canons to disseminate, often neglecting those laws prohibiting lay investiture.¹⁸ Historically, Normandy had a high percentage of lay patronage over parish churches, quite possibly the highest of all of continental Europe.¹⁹ While some scholars have presupposed that monastic patrons selected more morally suitable clerics for parish churches and lay patrons presented ones with more disciplinary problems, there is little evidence to support such arguments.²⁰ To be sure, the extraordinary lay control of parish churches, combined with the Norman practice of ecclesiastical nepotism, did offer a difficult landscape to navigate for those who wished to enforce the celibacy of the secular clergy; but even monastic patrons sometimes presented clerics who would later be accused of sexual misconduct. The reform bishops, like Lanfranc, initiated measures to enforce chastity among the clergy; but oddly enough, it was Lanfranc’s push for more diocesan control, making reform the responsibility of the bishop, that ran counter to his goals. Secular bishops were often supporters of married clerics