But this, again, is but one side of a scene too diverse and contradictory to be briefly described. In the cities many of the churches were left relatively empty of men then as now.1 As to the countryside hear Archbishop Antonino of Florence describing the peasants of his diocese about 1430:
In the churches themselves they sometimes dance and leap and sing with women. On holydays they spend little time on divine service or hearing the whole Mass, but most in games or taverns or contentions at the church doors. They blaspheme God and His saints on slender provocation. They are filled with lies and perjuries; they make no conscience of fornication, and of worse sins still. Very many of them do not confess even once a year; far fewer are those who take Communion…. They do little to instruct their families in the manner of faithful folk. They use enchantments for themselves and their beasts. Of God, or their own souls’ health, they think not at all…. Their parish priests, caring not for the flock committed to them, but only for its wool and milk, do not instruct them through preaching and the confessional, or by private admonitions, but walk in the same error as their flocks, following their corrupt ways.2
We may reasonably conclude, from the existence and natural deaths of such men as Pomponazzi and Machiavelli, that a large section of the educated classes in the Italy of 1500 had lost faith in Catholic Christianity; and we may more precariously assume that even among the letterless religion had lost some of its power to control the moral life. An increasing proportion of the population had ceased to believe in the divine origin of the moral code. Once the Commandments appeared to be man-made, and were shorn of their supernatural sanctions in heaven and hell, the code lost its terrors and its efficacy. Tabus fell away, and a calculus of expediency took their place. The sense of sin, the gloom of guilt, waned; conscience was left comparatively free; and each man did what seemed to him convenient, even if not traditionally right. Men no longer wished to be good, but to be strong; many private individuals took to themselves, long before Machiavelli, those privileges of force and fraud—that principle of the end justifying the means—which he conceded to the rulers of states; perhaps his ethic was an after-image of the morals he had seen around him. Platina attributed to Pius II the remark that “even if the Christian faith had not been confirmed by miracles, it ought to be received because of its morality.”3 But men did not reason so philosophically. They said, simply: If there is no hell or heaven, we must enjoy ourselves here, and we may indulge our appetites without fear of punishment after death. Only a strong and intelligent public opinion could have taken the place of the lost supernatural sanctions; but neither the clergy nor the humanists nor the universities rose to this task.
The humanists were as morally corrupt as the clergy they criticized. There were shining exceptions, scholars who found decency compatible with intellectual liberation—Ambrogio Traversari, Vittorino da Feltre, Marsilio Ficino, Aldus Manutius…. But an impressively large minority of the men who resurrected Greek and Roman literature lived like pagans who had never heard of Christianity. Their mobility deracinated them; they passed from city to city seeking laurels and fees, and sank no roots in stability. They were as fond of money as any moneylender or his wife. They were vain of their genius, their income, their features, their dress. They were coarse in their speech, ungenerous and disgraceful in their controversies, faithless in their friendships and transient in their loves. Ariosto, as we have noted, dared not trust his son to a humanist tutor for fear of moral contamination; probably he found it unnecessary to forbid the boy to read Orlando furioso, which was salted with melodious obscenity. Valla, Poggio, Beccadelli, Filelfo summarized in their loose lives one of the basic problems of ethics and civilization: must a moral code, to function effectively, have supernatural sanctions—the belief in another life, or in the divine origin of the moral code?
II. THE MORALS OF THE CLERGY
The Church might have sustained the supernatural sanctions provided by the Hebraic Scriptures and the Christian tradition, if her personnel had led lives of decency and devotion. But most of them accepted the bad as well as the good in the morals of the time, and reflected the antithetical facets of the laity. The parish priest was a simple ministrant, usually of slight education, but normally (pace the good Antonino) leading an exemplary life;4 ignored by the intelligentsia but welcomed by the people. Among the bishops and abbots there were some high livers, but many good men; and perhaps half the college of cardinals maintained a pious and Christian conduct that shamed the gay worldliness of their colleagues.5 All over Italy there were hospitals, orphan asylums, schools, almshouses, monti di pietà (loan offices), and other charitable institutions managed by the clergy. The Benedictine, Observantine, and Carthusian monks were honored for the relatively high moral level of their lives. Missionaries faced a thousand dangers to spread the faith in “heathen” lands and among the pagans of Christendom. Mystics hid themselves away from the violence of the times, and sought closer communion with God.
Amid this devotion there was so much laxity of morals among the clergy that a thousand testimonies could be adduced to prove it. The same Petrarch who remained faithful to Christianity to the end, and who drew a favorable picture of discipline and piety in the Carthusian monastery where his brother lived, repeatedly denounced the morals of the clergy in Avignon. From the novelle of Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, through those of Masuccio in the fifteenth, to those of Bandello in the sixteenth, the loose lives of the Italian clergy form a recurrent theme of Italian literature. Boccaccio speaks of “the lewd and filthy life of the clergy,” in sins “natural or sodomitical.”6 Masuccio described the monks and friars as “ministers of Satan,” addicted to fornication, homosexualism, avarice, simony, and impiety, and professed to have found a higher moral level in the army than in the clergy.7 Aretino, familiar with all filth, railed at the errors of printers as rivaling in number the sins of the clergy; “truly it would be easier to find Rome sober and chaste than a correct book.”8 Poggio almost exhausts his vocabulary of vituperation in exposing the immorality, hypocrisy, cupidity, ignorance, and arrogance of monks and priests;9 and Folengo’s Orlandino tells the same tale. Apparently the nuns, who today are angels and ministers of grace, shared in the revelry. They were especially lively in Venice, where monasteries and nunneries were sufficiently close to each other to allow their inmates, now and then, to share a bed; the archives of the Proveditori sopra monasteri contain twenty volumes of trials for the cohabitation of monks and nuns.10 Aretino speaks unquotably about the nuns of Venice.11 And Guicciardini, usually temperate, loses his poise in describing Rome: “Of the Court of Rome it is impossible to speak with sufficient severity, for it is a standing infamy, an example of all that is most vile and shameful in the world.”12