248 THIRD PEEIOD. A.D. 311-590.
should incapacitate for ordination, and that continuance in t]\6 married state after ordination should be punished «ith deposition.' And with this punishment he threatened not bishops only, but also })resbyters and deacons. Leo tlie Great subsequently extended the requirement of celibacy even to the subdiaconate. The most eminent Latin churcb fathers, Ambrose, Jerome, and even Augustine — though the last with more moderation — advocated the celibacy of priests. Augustijie, with Eusebius of Vercella before him (^570), united their clergy in a cloister life, and gave them a monastic stamp ; and Martin of Tours, who was a monk from tlie first, carried his monastic life into his episcopal office. The councils of Italy, Africa, Spain, and Gaul followed tbe lead of Kome. The synod of Clermont, for example (a. d. 535), declared in its twelfth canon : " No one ordained deacon or priest may continue matrimonial intercourse. He is become the brother of her who was his wife. But since some, inflamed with lust, have rejected the girdle of the warfare [of Christ], and returned to marriage intercourse, it is ordered that such must lose their office forever." Other councils, like that of Tours, 461, were content with forbidding clergymen, who begat children after ordination, to administer the sacrifice of the mass, and with confining the law of celibacy ad altiorem graduin'^
But the very fact of the frequent repetition of these enactments, and the necessity of mitigating the penalties of transgression, show the great difficulty of carrying this unnatural
* Epist. ad Himeriura Episc, Tarracouonsem (in Ilarduin, Acta Cone. i. 849-850), c V : "Hi vcro, qui illiciti privilegii cxcusationc nituntur, ut sibi asserant vctcri hoc lege conces3um : noverint ee ab omni ecclesiastico honore, quo indigne usi sunt, apostolicae sedis auctoritate dejectos. ... Si quilibet episeopu.'s, presbyter atque diaconus, quod non optamus, deinceps fuerit talis inventus, jam nunc sibi omnera per nos induige:itiae aditum intelligat obseratum : quia fcrro nccesse est excidantur vulnera, quae fonientorum non senseiint medicinam." The exegesis of Siricius is utterly arbitrai'y in limiting the demand of holiness (Lev. xx. V) to the priests and to absti- Bence from matrimonial intercourse, and in referring the words of Paul respecting walking in the flesh, Kom. viii. 8, 9, to the married life, as if marriage were thus incomi)auble with the idea of holiness. Cc.mp. also the striking remarks of Greenwood, Cathedi'a Petri, vol. i. p. 265 sq., and Milman, Hist, of Latin Christianity, L ,19 (Amer cd.), on Siricius.
» Comp. Hefele, ii. 568, and Gieseler, 1. c. (§ 97, note 1\
§ 50. MAEEIAGE AND CELIt , CY JF THE CLERGY, 249
restriction into general effect. In the British and Irisli church, isolated as it was from the Roman, the marriage of priests con tinned to prevail down to the Anglo-Saxon period.
But with the disappearance of legitimate marriage in the priesthood, the already prevalent vice of the cohabitation of unmarried ecclesiastics with pious widows and virgins " secretly brought in," ' became more and more common. This spiritual marriage, which had begun as a bold ascetic venture, ended only too often in the flesh, and prostituted the honor of the church.
The Nicene council of 325 met the abuse in its third canon with this decree : " The great council utterly forbids, and it shall not be allowed either to a bishop, or a priest, or a deacon, or any other clergyman, to have with him a a-vrelaaKro'i, unless she be his mother, or sister, or aunt, or some such person, wlio is beyond all suspicion." * This canon forms the basis of the whole subsequent legislation of the church de cohabitatione cleriGorum et wMlierum. It had to be repeatedly renewed and strengthened ; showing plainly that it was often disobeyed. The council of Toledo in Spain, a. d. 527 or 531, ordered in its third canon: "Ko clergyman, from the subdeacon upward, shall live with a female, be she free woman, freed woman, or slave. Only a mother, or a sister, or other near relative shall keep his house. If he have no near relative, his housekeeper must live in a separate house, and shall under no pretext entei his dwelling. AVhosoever acts contrary to this, shall not only be deprived of his spiritual office and have the doors of his church closed, but shall also be excluded from all fellowship of Catholics." The Concilium Agathense in South Gaul, a. d. 506, at which thirty -five bishops met, decreed in the tenth and eleventh canons : " A clergyman shall neither visit nor receive into his house females not of his kin ; only with his mother, or sister, or daughter, or niece may he live. Female slaves, also,
* The so-called sorores, or mulieres mbintroductce, or Trap^eVoi (Twiiffa'TOi Comp. jn the origin of this practice, vol. ii. § 107 (p. 40:2 sq.).
' By a misiuterprctation of the term vwiiffaKro's, the sense of which is fixed in the usage of the early church, Baronius and Bellarmine erroneously find in thie ^^non a universal law of celibacy, and accordingly deny the above-mentione I state meut respecting Paphnutius. Comp. Hefele, i. 364.